I love small town museums.  Years ago on my first trip out West I noted in my diary some of the artifacts we saw -- different types of barbed wire!  A dime once handled by Calamity Jane!  A gramophone which belonged to Susan B. Anthony's niece!  But I really became serious about small town museums in Roslyn, Washington, which was famous at the time for being the place where the tv show "Northern Exposure" was filmed.  We went into the museum thinking to kill 15 minutes and we came out 2 hours later.

Nevada is dotted with small towns and many of them, like Roslyn, are mining towns.  Mining towns are not your midwestern small town, settled by pioneers and immigrants looking for land.  Mining towns flare up and die out.  Some of them barely last a decade.  They were inspired by greed, particularly out here in Nevada, where the land looks so unpromising for any kind of life.  They were a deliberate effort by people to to pit themselves against nature, to take as much wealth as they could, no matter how, come what may.  The effort failed, of course.  Money was made, and spent, but it was spent elsewhere, and then the mines closed, and the towns were left behind, broken buildings on the sides of a mountain.

But while that effort at wealth went on, something else was happening, and that's what you see in museums like the one in Tonopah. High school graduation day, with everyone standing in front of the school.  Sunday school picnics, the priests long figures in black.  A open-air boxing match.  High school bands, Elks, Odd Fellows, Women's leagues.  Saturday night dances.

In towns like Tonopah, or Goldfield, or Austin, I try not to think, here is a place that failed.  I try to think, here, civilization was planted.

Early January always means upheaval in my life, and the name of that upheaval is basketball.  Middle-school basketball:  shoes squeaking on the floor, wild throws, the boys self-conscious in baggy shorts, the girls faster, taller, more aggressive.  Late dinners, homework not done, and driving across town to some brand-new middle school in an unfinished neighborhood.  UNLV games: sitting high in the upper balcony, watching the cheerleaders jump around, the lights dim, fireworks shoot up, the players run across a red carpet onto the floor and everyone shouts as if it isn't just another weeknight.

With me, basketball is definitely a childhood thing.  It's long dark winter nights, listening to Kentucky game on the radio, drawn into an unmapped, virtual world of reputation, gossip ("good squad this year") and rival schools ("after that the 'Cats'll be up in South Bend to face Notre Dame"), learning about working off the clock and drawing a charge and that'll be two from the charity strike.  (No one says "charity strike" -- a.k.a. free throw line -- anymore but it was a favorite of Cawood Ledford, the UK announcer.)

It's been said that baseball, because its not played on a clock, is a sport which stops time.  Basketball is nothing but clock.  It's a sport of the individual moment, the moment you're living in, the bobbing wave, to borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald's image, which always seems about to bring you forward, the moment when it seems everything can change.

Merry Christmas from the girls

Years ago when I lived in New York I found two sets of ornaments in an art supply store around the corner from where I worked in Midtown. One was Dickens' characters. The other -- and why this is Christmas-associated I don't know and don't care -- was Golden Age Hollywood actresses.



Alice Faye, Bette Davis, Hedy Lamarr



This is Sonja Henie, who made ice-skating movies and was also a three-time Olympic champion. (If you ever watched M*A*S*H, you may remember that Colonel Potter was a fan of her films.)

And I've completely forgotten who this is. My best guess is Irene Dunne.

When we first moved to the house I hung the girls up on the staircase as Christmas decorations and somehow I never took them down. This year I finally moved them back to the tree, to join Mr. Micawber, Tiny Tim, David Copperfield, Little Nell and....Mrs. Gamp?

Merry Christmas to all! Have a happy and healthy set of holidays!

End of the year reading

The end of the year is well-known as the time that all the big Oscar-type movies come out. There's kind of a similar effect in books, with blogs and publishing industry magazines talking up the big books and potential prize-winners. So here's my list. Probably not all prize winners but well worth seeking out and keeping in mind for that after-Christmas shopping.

Most recent read: The Returning. Published in Australia originally as Bloodflower (truthfully, I would probably never read a novel called Bloodflower, so this is one time the US title is an improvement.) The Returning is hard to characterize. It's set in a unnamed country whose culture is at times vaguely English, at other times vaguely feudal Japanese. A civil war has unsettled everything. The main character, Cam, returns to his village, but soon leaves again because of the resentment everyone bears him (he was the only one, of all the men who went, who returned.) The narrative follows Cam but also the other inhabitants of the village: an orphan boy, a refugee girl, Cam's sister, his former fiancee. It's at this point that I break off and say, just read the darn book. It's very well done, one of the most thoughtful and interesting books I've read on the YA side in a long time.

Potential Newbery(s): Bigger than a Bread Box. I don't read a lot of middle-grade or contemporary novels but I read this feeling I had fallen into the hands of a master. The plot works, the problems are realistic, and best of all, not only is there magic, but there are consequences to the magic. The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making. This is one of those books that winks at adults, and might even be aimed at them for all I know. (I did wonder, while I read it, how many children would really get into it, but then I remembered that at age 10 I read all the Oz books I could find, and they do much the same thing.)

Obligatory Mentions: Daughter of Smoke and Bone and Chime.

Overlooked: Fly Trap. Frances Hardinge in the only writer I can think of fit to inherit Diana Wynne-Jone's mantle. She just comes up with stuff that makes other YA fantasy seem pallid.

And one other mention, since I'm only 3/4 of the way through: Life: An Exploded Diagram. Love and the Cuban Missile Crisis and do I get the feeling that Mal Peet still doesn't quite know what kind of a writer he is? Yes, but worth reading.

Publication!

Awhile back Laurel Garver at Laurel's Leaves posted this piece on boosting writing credits by publishing in literary magazines. Specifically, she suggested using scenes or chapters which you have cut from an MS but which can stand alone as stories or flash fiction.

After I read this, I turned over, mentally, what I had that might fit her suggestion...fragments from an abandoned project that are still rather fragment-y...two short stories I wasn't sure what to do with. Then I remembered a prologue I had written for my current WIP. It takes place about 20 years before the main action and I wrote it out partly to give one of my characters a backstory. I liked it, but I wasn't sure how it fit in with the main narrative and finally one day I took a Joan Crawford-style vow of "No more prologues, ever!" and cut it entirely. It worked as a stand-alone story, however, and thanks to Laurel's piece I polished it, sent it out and and this week, as short story now called "The Feeb," I got an acceptance for it from The Waterhouse Review, an online literary magazine in Scotland.

(And they pay! OK - a token payment of 2 pounds -- but still!)

I'm really excited. It's kind of a smashing little story and I was always very proud of it but it's nice to know that other people see the same thing in it. And not for nothing is The Waterhouse Review known as a "personable" market. They've been great to deal with, honest and cheerful and so quick to respond!

I think I'm still a little in the is-it-all-a-dream phase...

I'll post a link when the story comes out in January. Big thanks again to Laurel for the idea. I had dipped my toe in the magazine market years ago when everything was print and response times were looooong and I never would have been motivated to do it again were it not for her post.

Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, I am cooking. No, I'm not shopping.

Heretical Thoughts on NaNoWriMo

Last week I saw this post on NaNoWriMo by Rebecca Ryals Russell who blogs at YA Authors You Never Heard Of. She addresses the fact that some writers just aren't interested in NaNoWriMo, and I read it because I've always included myself among them. I write every day, I have long-term plans for what I'm going to do and don't need outside stimulus, and word counts? Not only do I not do them, there are times when I actually want the word count to go down, not up. Most of the first two weeks of November looked like this: read six-sentence paragraph. Rewrite. Now an eight-sentence paragraph...(hold music plays, 45 minutes pass)...now a four sentence paragraph. Move to next paragraph...(more hold music)... At end of day, think how I have ruined the story. Next morning, read it over and decide it's not so bad.

I saw something similar at my critique group on Saturday. Someone suggested doing writing prompts or flash-fiction contests as part of the group. Several people perked up immediately, "I'll do that! Sounds like fun!" Two other people, as well as me, didn't want to. "I've done that, and it takes time away from what I'm supposed to be working on."

I think it comes down to the basic question, why do you write? Because it's fun? Because you like to tell stories? Yes, and yes, and yet...writing is Work. It's hard. It's sitting down every day to face the dragon of failure and fearing the day you won't be able to fight him to a draw anymore, because on that day life will hardly be worth living. And honestly, for all the community that exists in the writing world, you face that dragon alone. You have to, because your dragon is not like anyone else's. (OK, official end of dragon metaphor!)

What I'd like to know is not, does NaNoWriMo help you get started or help you write more easily, but, does it help you get serious about your writing? Does it help you improve? Does what you start turn into something finished?