Cheers!

This Washington Post article about Barbara Holland is both creepy and encouraging. Creepy because a smoker's hack isn't really all that cool. Encouraging because it's nice to think you can be a wild woman at any age. Some of us need something to look forward to.

Holland has written three children's books, according to this article. The titles I found were:

The Pony Problem

How's Business? (A joke book)

Creepy Mouse Coming To Get You I love the title. The card catalogue description at Amazon makes it sound like either a problem novel or a thriller. "A young boy finds that it is up to him to shield his sister and baby nephew from her quick-tempered husband, recently released from prison."

She also wrote the foreward to The Ugly Dachshund, another great sounding title.

While I'm Thinking Of It

Today is Thursday, people, and that means that publication day for A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat is only three weeks away. That also means the Monster Cat Giveaway is only three weeks away, too. Mark your calendars.

Of course, my copies of the books haven't arrived yet. But I'm not worried.

I'm Looking Forward To This

Mark Peter Hughes, author of Lemonade Mouth, recently had a commentary broadcast on NPR. He also recently quit his day job. He's also getting ready to take off on a cross-country tour.

I find the tour part, in particular, fascinating because, remember, I got lost in Worcester, Mass., which is only a couple of hours from home.

Mark will be setting up a blog relating to the tour. I'll be checking it out because I am both masochistic and into drama. If the tour is a big success, I want to know so I can suffer in comparison and feel miserable about myself. In addition, we're talking about a guy with a family to support who just walked away from a paying job to make a living writing. This is the kind of thing people build reality series around, folks.

High drama. I'm getting pumped.

8 Things Meme

I like being tagged for a meme because it means I'm part of a group. However, because I pretend this is a professional blog, if I take part in a meme, I have to connect it to writing or books. You've been warned.

Camille tagged me with the 8 Things Meme. So did MotherReader! I have never been so popular.

Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

(By the way, I'm sure I took part in a meme similar to this a couple of years ago, but I can't find it now. I hope I'm not repeating myself.)

1. We live in a town with poor water quality. Our well is a shaft directly to hell. Periodically, our water treatment system fails us. Thus, over the years I have spent a lot of time in Laundromats. I'm on a first name basis with the Laundromat ladies at my local fluff 'n' fold. I meet people I know there. A Laundromat is going to figure prominently in The Durand Cousins. I'm about to write a Laundromat chapter.

2. We have a friend who owns two self-storage complexes. This is a great source of fun for this guy because he knows I'm a use-it-or-lose-it type, meaning you don't rent space to store what you can't use, you get rid of it. I hear more about self-storage than I need to. So, of course, I've been planning to put a self-storage complex in The Durand Cousins because, as I just implied, I believe in using whatever you've got.

3. I've recently decided to drop the self-storage complex from The Durand Cousins because when writing you have to have a compelling reason for everything you put into a book. I didn't have a compelling reason for that self-storage complex, so I got rid of it. (Note: I got rid of it. I didn't rent space to store it.)

4. As I have mentioned here before, I have taken only one graduate course and the only thing I truly learned there was not to begin sentences, paragraphs, and complete works with the words "It was." I have become obsessed with this. I can barely control myself when I see those words at the beginning of a paragraph or a book or story. I've thought, He won X Award and he started this thing with 'It was?' What were the judges thinking? If "it was" in other peoples' writing was something I could fix, the way you can fix the pillows on other peoples' couches, I would be frantially erasing and reworking sentences all the time.

5. When I was younger, I was always writing stories about women's experiences, probably because of the influence of feminism. Feminism is not a bad thing. Evidently my stories about women's experiences were.

6. When I was in high school I wrote a story for the school paper that a reporter for the local city paper published over his by-line, word for word. My mother's response was that I should cut him a break (to paraphrase her) because he was an old man. Which was true. He was well enough known that we knew he was an old man, and he still stole a kid's article.

7. When I was in either college or soon thereafter, I saw an article in The New York Times Magazine on a bunch of writers named John--John Irving, John Updike, maybe John Cheever, definitely John Gardner. (He was very distinctive looking. Couldn't miss him, couldn't forget him.) This article was way, way over my head. I couldn't understand any of what these guys had to say. I was extremely discouraged. I didn't see how I could ever be a writer when I couldn't understand other writers.

8. I read Roald Dahl's short stories for adults before I read his books for children. I never cared for his books for children, but I liked his short stories a lot. I would call them an influence.

I tag:

Liz

Sheila

Leila

Gina

Linda

Chris

I'm coming up short of people to tag, but I'm guessing this thing will get all over the place, anyway.

Bless The Italians

I received a royalty check today. Though My Life Among the Aliens has been out-of-print for a couple of years now, I received some royalties on it this quarter because of the Italian edition.

Ah, Italy. The people there have good taste in food and literature.

The Power of Walking

I just start reading Chi Walking again, which I first began last fall. I was on a treadmill and stationary bike binge this past winter, and, since I read when I'm on those pieces of equipment, I really don't care about chi so I gave up the book. But the weather here in southern New England has been fantastic these past two weeks, and the road has been calling me. So I'm outdoors walking, which led me back to the walking book.

Now, if I'm understanding this chi walking thing correctly, it involves mindful walking and focusing your mind. And engaging your core. If I'm going to engage my core while walking, I'm going to have to focus my mind.

Here's the thing, though: walking is also good for creativity, for forcing breakout experiences. When you find yourself blocked with writing or some other kind of mind problem, if you can release your mind while doing some kind of automatic physical activity, you'll often BAM! have some kind of freaky epiphany that is, at least, the beginning of a solution if not a complete solution.

When I was writing A Year with Butch and Spike, I used to just get up and take off up the street in the middle of the day trying to force a breakout experience. Though I hadn't heard of the term at that point, I sure knew the experience.

So this afternoon I'm reading a bit of the chi book and worrying that if I'm walking along doing all this focusing, I'm never going to have breakout experiences, which I rather desperately need or I'd never finish writing anything. After dinner this evening, I went for a walk, focusing on keeping my core engaged, leading with the upper part of my body, and keeping the trunk of my body in the shape of a C. I got to the end of the street, noticed that that nasty little dog that was barking at me this morning wasn't out, and turned around to head home.

BAM! I had not one, but two breakout experiences (or perhaps we should just say thoughts) relating to The Durand Cousins. I was still quite a way from the house and worried sick that I was going to forget them. Which meant, of course, that I was no longer focusing on my core. But I got home and since we had three computers up and running most of the day, I was able to find a free one and make some notes.

The chi walking guy says that learning to focus on your walk will teach you to focus on other things in your life. God knows, I would love to see that happen. Of course, I've been hoping for something like that to happen with the taekwondo classes, and I've been doing that for nearly five years with no substantial decrease in the amount of time I waste on-line and playing solitaire each day.

Still, I'm a self-improvement junky. Nothing excites me like something new to try, even if it only relates to cleaning the shower or organizing the pantry. And with this new walking program, we're talking chi!

Talking About Books

The most recent issue of The Horn Book includes Roger Sutton's Gryphon Lecture, Problems, Paperbacks, and the Printz: Forty Years of YA Books. In it he describes talking about books when he was a teenager. "As mid-adolescents, my freinds and I wanted to grapple with big issues...I don't think I've ever again discussed books with such freedom and passion and unselfconsciousness..."

When I was a teenager, I got into an argument with someone over I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. I insisted it wasn't a true story because it was shelved with the fiction. If you follow this blog at all, you know I like things to be categorized and defined, and this story proves that that desire goes way, way back.

That Rose Garden argument is the only nonclassroom literary discussion I can remember having during my entire teenage years. Reading was something I did totally in isolation. I wasn't even aware of many other people reading. I figured they were all out dating.

So imagine my delight now that there are young people in my own family who read and like to talk about it.

BDT, of course, reads children's fiction and we discuss books we've read by e-mail. But we have another young man in the family who reads and, I swear, calls me up to talk about it. He becomes absolutely passionate about what he's read. Of course, what he reads is nonfiction relating to economics and business. The last call was to discuss an article on subprime lenders, a topic I barely knew existed. It's a little difficult for me to hold my own in these discussions, but it's exciting to hear his excitment. Well, he says it's not excitment, that what he reads often just makes him mad. But he is engaged. He reads and responds. To me, this is what you want to see readers doing.

And then there is The Third Man. The Third Man almost always disagrees with me when we (rarely) happen to have read the same work. Unfortunately, he also almost always has a good reason.

For example, somehow we got into a discussion of footnotes in fiction. I know The Third Man dislikes them, which is why I've given my Bartimeus books to BDT instead of him. Bartimeus uses marvelously witty footnotes.

But The Third Man says that footnotes are a nonfiction device. They don't belong in fiction. In fiction, you do the same thing with parenthetical devices--parentheses, for example, or dashes.

I thought, Okay. That's a good point. But being older and more flexible, I'm willing to see, and even enjoy seeing, "devices" jump from one type of writing to another.

And then The Third Man went on.

He said that people don't think in footnotes. If you have a piece of fiction that is written as if it is a nonfiction report (Oh, that would be interesting, wouldn't it?), then footnotes would be appropriate. But with a piece of fiction the reader is supposed to enter a mind or a world, is supposed to be immersed in that world to such an extent that he's not aware that this created world is any different from the one he really inhabits. And every time a footnote appears, the illusion that you are part of this book world is destroyed because that's not how a first-person narrator (who isn't aware he is writing a book) would think. Same with most true third-person narrators.

I always thought that if I ever had people to talk books with regularly they would always agree with me. Great minds meeting and all that. But when The Third Man explained his footnote argument, I wasn't disappointed. I was proud. Because, damn, that was a good one.

Catching Up On Interviews

I'm not even two weeks late reading Seven Imps' interview with Colleen Mondor, which for me is like not being late at all. Read the Seven Imps' lead-in and you'll discover that the name of Colleen's blog is seriously significant for those of us who were into Ray Bradbury when we were young. Read the interview, itself, and you'll learn that Colleen, she wrote song lyrics about French Canadian history, her.

What I like about Colleen's writing at her blog is that it seems to come from an independent mind. Perhaps it's because she's got that aviator thing going on.

Familiar Names At SCBWI Conference

I just received the announcement for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators summer conference. A number of familiar names appear on the faculty list: Kelly Herold, Gina Ruiz, and Cynthia Leitch Smith. In addition, Tamora Pierce and Tony Abbott, two authors whose work I read for the first time this past year, will be serving as faculty. And Ellen Wittlinger, who I heard speak at I'm a Reading Fool's library, will be there, too.

I Did It Again

Or, rather, I didn't do it again. The publication date (and book giveaway) for A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat is four weeks from yesterday, and I meant to remind everyone yesterday. You know, do a little countdown. For the second week in a row, I forgot the Thursday reminder.

Well, so, now you're reminded in a really awkward way.