Holly the Great

No, the firewood isn't here yet. Yes, it's going up to 80+ degrees so we are unlikely to need it tonight. But OfficeMouse and her Faithful Companion are leaving soon which means it will be BH and me on stacking duty. Maybe I should invite everyone in Blogland to come help. I could feed you all snap peas and jam.

Happy Birthday today to my friends Ashley Kauffmann, Tanya Lee Stone, and Ed Spicer!! Ed does terrific work with teen readers out in Michigan.

My good friend Elizabeth Partridge suggested that I alert all of you to Lois Lowery's blog. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Elizabeth has a blog, too.

I am starting to get early information about the CHAINS booktour this fall. I will be in these regions. (Most places I am slated to be around for two days somewhere from late October to late November. All details as soon as I get them, I promise!)

Minneapolis, MN
Denver, CO
Chicago, IL
Omaha, NE
Milwaukee, WI
Wilmington, DE (Delaware Book Festival)
McLean, VA
Ridgewood, NJ
Millbrook, NY (near Poughkeepsie)
Boston, MA
Rochester, NY
Atlanta, GA
Miami FL (Miami Book Festival)
New Orleans, LA
Oxford, MS
Jackson, MS
Bethlehem, PA (right, Stef?)
Oswego, NY


In addition, I'll be speaking at the New England Independent Bookseller's Association (Boston, MA), and the Great Lakes Booksellers Association (Dearborn, MI) tradeshows before the tour starts, and I'll be in San Antonio, TX for the NCTE/ALAN conference.

After the last event, I will go home, burn my suitcase, and turn off the telephone for a few weeks. But, really, I am extremely excited about this tour.

Booktours don't happen without writing, so let's focus on that!

WFMAD 25

Today's goal: Write 15 minutes. Be shocked at how fast the time flies.

Today's mindset: melancholy

Today's prompt: It's Friday so it's time to bathe in poetry. Do the exercises in poet Kate Clanchy's workshop today. Feel free to share your poem in the Comments section!

Scribblescribble....

jenlibrarian is gathering flowers for a virtual birthday bouquet. She asked for our favorite flowers. Well heck, here I am in the middle of planning my native garden, no flowers at all at the moment, and she wants me to pick just one? I can't I tell you, I just can't. 

California has so many beautiful native flowers that it really hard to just pick one to highlight. Consistently though my heart warms when I think of the sturdy yet stunning and dependable Ceanothus, the native California Liliac. 

 

the colors range from deep blue to lilac to white.

 

 

What I love about this plant is how I can ignore it and it rewards me with evergreen beauty and beautiful blossoms. Plant it in the fall, water it once a week the first year (in the summer), maybe once a month in the summer the second year, and after that, you can pretty much ignore it. The birds and the bees love it. 

The plant, the Ceanothus, and the more well-known Poppy, are the two plants that say California to me.

Happy birthday, Jen!

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Eirik

As I'm revising the first SCIENCE book (here comes draft three!), I'm paying a lot of attention to character, and I've been mentally going through all of the characters I love in fiction. Here are a couple of things I've noticed. First, most of my faves tend to be supporting characters, not the lead enchilada (Example: Harry Potter. Seriously, is ANYONE'S favorite HP character Harry?). Second, most of my favorite lead-character protagonists have very STRONG personalities- they're sassy and kick butt or they're brimming with imagination and melodrama (a la Anne Shirley). So I was wondering if any of you had favorites that DIDN'T fit this bill. I'm looking for female main characters who are very three dimensional and you just love them, but if you met them in person, they wouldn't necessarily come across as a force of nature.

I haven't been posting a lot, because I'm one of the judges for the young people's National Book Award this year, which means I have been reading several books a day, every day. It's been a lot of fun to have a reason to just read for hours and hours (and hours), but it has kept me from updating LJ.

But this past weekend, at ReaderCon, a discussion was had where we tried to identify the narrative function of werewolves and I thought maybe this would make you guys laugh.

We decided that the Narrative Function of the Werewolf is:

1. To have weird pack dynamics (sometimes really weird)
2. To be a metaphor for suppressed rage
3. To die and turn back into someone unexpected
4. To ravage the countryside
5. To lose in a love triangle with a vampire (why do they always lose? why?)

Got any more? How about the narrative function of the vampire?

I finally finished the possum-skull "voodoo" doll I've been working on for a couple of weeks now. It's the most detailed and, I think, nicest one I've ever made. However, maddeningly, it still isn't up for auction. While I like most things about my new all-in-one office machine (the Hewlett Packard OfficeJet 6310), its scanner leaves a lot to be desired. When I try to scan the drawings I do in copies of my books, the images often come out streaked with weird stripes of light that aren't present on the actual drawings. As for three-dimensional objects such as the doll, it cannot scan them at all. I know flatbed scanners aren't really meant to scan three-dimensional objects, but my old one did a pretty good job of it, e.g. this Little Blue Heron skull I found on our first post-K trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast:



Obviously, before I sell any more dolls or other hand-crafted items on eBay, I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and spring for a digital camera that can take decent closeups of small objects. My current antique -- a Vivitar Vivicam 3650 I bought in, I think, 2003 -- is remarkably forgiving of my poor photography skills when it comes to taking regular pictures, but its closeups are useless blurs. I know some of you have been waiting to see this doll, and I'm sorry about the delay. I'll try to upgrade my equipment soon.

I did manage to put up some regular book-type auctions: a copy of greygirlbeast's and my collection Wrong Things; a copy of the Gauntlet Press limited edition of The Lazarus Heart with an original ink drawing by me; a copy of the increasingly rare Con Party of Hotel California chapbook; and a copy of Plastic Jesus. As always, all items are signed and signatures can be personalized. I also added some inventory to my eBay store, including four copies of Alcool (the newly published French edition of Liquor). Please take a look and make a bid (or just buy a book) if you can -- thanks!

[ETA: Since many of you are probably at least as sick of this subject as I am, I'll just say that yes, I know all the comments are gone from the Best of New Orleans thread about Chris' departure, and I'm sure it happened because somebody got his widdle designer briefs in a wad and went crying to management. I don't think it matters one way or the other; as far as we and most of Chris' regular customers are concerned, the Delachaise is toast.]

May? I haven’t posted since May? How did that happen?

Well, I do have third novel news, but until the signature is on the dotted line, I’m not going to say anything specific. Still…I’m happy…Very, very happy.

Taught a class I called Speculative Fiction’s Homes at Solstice, which seemed to go well. After discussing worldbuilding and writing homes, I ended with a bit of a warning and advice. I spoke of ways the setting, the story’s home, can embody the story’s central theme…But when writers do this, we sometimes make the home too narrow. We write a story that over and over again, in every way, simply says one thing. To avoid this danger, we keep in mind that themes don’t only have one facet. They have many. And our depictions of the home may be one way of depicting these facets.

In Ursula LeGuin’s A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA, Ged becomes a hero by traveling throughout his world, but some of the most peaceful and happy people in the story are those who are settled. At the story’s climax, Vetch, or Estarriol, accompanies Ged across the water to face the shadow, but Estarriol has come from and might return to the island of Iffish and the small town of Ismay, where he is chief wizard. When Ged first sees Estarriol’s house, he says, “This is how a man should live.” And Estarriol replies: “Well, it’s one good way. There are others” (158).

Estarriol’s advice is advice I plan to keep in mind. Vividly described, unique, changeable, psychologically and metaphorically rich homes should be a way one should live. One way, but there are others.

So I just watched this documentary called "Helvetica." It's about the font. I loved it. It was fascinating to see how much work goes into designing a typeface. You know when you read a novel and at the end they have "A note about the type," and you think, well, that's silly; I didn't know people still designed fonts? They do. And graphic designers are very much pro- or anti-Helvetica.

I'm kind of anti-. I'm more of a serif-type person (serifs are the little tails and feet on letters, like in Courier and Times New Roman) because I like classic stuff and I really don't like modernism. Helvetica was born from the Swiss (hence the name, which means "Swiss" in Latin) during the height of the modernist art movement, and it was huge because it was so modern and unpretentious. Now I think modernism has become pretentious. It is cool that Helvetica is used by everyone, and I have no problem with it being on signs for the New York subway system. Yeah, it's a lot easier to read than a serif font. But when used artistically in graphic design, I tend not to like it. And a lot of the brands that are known (or not known, because the mark of a good font is that you don't notice it consciously) for using it are kind of prententious and trying to be interesting, and they're just generally not my style--American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, and Crate & Barrel are not my favorite places.

Modernism is kind of passe by now, anyway.

Whatever. You should still watch this movie. It's pretty interesting.

... and they smell like printshops. <3

You'd think I would have taken pictures yesterday -- even with my cell phone -- but I was so befuddled by the massive, churning, heaving crowds that I totally forgot about that. All those people! It's much worse than last year, and not as well organized. Today, however, is another day! Here's the panel I'm on:

1:45-2:45 Marvel: X-Men— The X-Men have a new home and a new direction in Manifest Destiny. Join this star-studded, must-attend panel with the writers of the X-Verse, including Ed Brubaker (Uncanny X-Men), Matt Fraction (Uncanny X-Men), Chris Yost (X-Force), Craig Kyle (X-Force), C.B. Cebulski (X-Men: Manifest Destiny), Daniel Way (Deadpool), Marjorie Liu (NYX), Axel Alonso (X-Men group editor), Nick Lowe (X-Men editor, and more as they lay out the plans for this bold new direction! Room 6B

Also, cool stuff going on tonight. Not going to talk about it, though, until I get the pictures. Stay tuned for more!

Notes on job one:
-Testing software is kind of boring sometimes.
-My work computer is eternally broken.
-I get way too excited if I find a weird software bug.

Notes on job two:
-Did you know that, in the state of Georgia, we aren't allowed to hold practice outdoors if it gets to 105 degrees?
-Did you know that it's almost always 105 degrees or hotter on a July afternoon, but if you can get into the shade it's usually only about 103?
-Did you know that the cure for spending an afternoon in 103 degree weather is going to The Loafing Leprechaun bar with your coworkers?

Notes on job three
-Yesterday, I had to write two "beautiful passages" for UNWRITTEN-- they're part of the books that Emmy secretly reads at the Library, not part of Emmy's story itself. As it turns out, it's kind of difficult to just pull a pretty passage out of thin air with no story backing it, especially when it needs an entirely different voice than the book you're actually working on. The only way I could do it was to create a scene in my head and stories to go with the characters in it, then write the lines.
-Sometimes, while working on UNWRITTEN, I find myself missing AS YOU WISH. Or SISTERS RED. I feel like I should send them a "thinking of you" card with a bear holding a heart or something. Or one of those "2 sweet 2 be 4gotten!" stickers.
-I've started kicking around SISTERS RED's companion books again (mostly during the one hour drive from job one to job two). They're still fairly flexible, but have a little more shape now.

Favorite t-shirts spotted this week:

Let the Wookie win.

I'm no longer with stupid.

EVERY TIME YOU POST WITH CAP LOCKS ON,
ee cummings kills a kitten.

Also, lots of people have asked about what's happening with the AGATB movie. So here's your answer: not so much yet.

The script is being hammered out. That's where things stand. So, just to clarify: There has been no casting, no production start date, no secret Hollywood cabal meetings (or none that I was invited to and asked to bring snacks). As soon as I hear anything more, I'll post it. Promise.

And now, back to BOVINE. Five more days of deadline. And I've promised myself if I work hard today, I will go see DARK KNIGHT as my reward and I will mix the M&M's into the popcorn.

The minor family emergency didn't escalate, thank heavens. My mother fell Tuesday night and we spent yesterday doing the rounds with doctors and the hospital and x-rays. She's home now, though I won't say she's exactly comfortable. She broke three ribs.

She's going to be fine; the fractures are uncomplicated and there were no other injuries. In a week, she'll feel much better. Normally I might ask for funny stories I can tell her, but laughing hurts too much right now, so if you have a kind thought or a prayer for comfort, those sure are appreciated.

J.L. Bell has another cool post about how an alleged John Adam's quote turned into historical "fact." This is a must-read for anyone thinking of writing historical fiction or non-fiction.

Today's goal: Write 15 minutes.

Today's mindset: sowing conflict.

Today's prompt: Take your favorite picture book or fairy tale and write what happens next, after the last page of the story. Add on a new challenge for the character; a new story arc of complications and solutions, and character growth. Hint, you'll probably need to introduce a bold conflict right away.

Scribblescribble....

Last night, Laura and I played the JL Sims.

( Scarlett, Oreo, and Rosma Go To China )

Holly! If you see this before we call you, we're going to call when we leave Lori's. Then it should be between two and three hours for us to get to your house. Because we have to stop and see a giant chicken. Don't ask. ;)

It's not loaded. Please don't sic PETA on my ass.

Frankie insisted on the grainy, B/W, assassin-in-the-newspaper filter. He also says his next victim is going to be a certain ferret-faced little social climber who co-owns a trendy Uptown bar and -- in the latest dramatic twist to this increasingly stupid story -- has been telling his wine guys to discourage other restaurants from hiring Chris because of Chris' alleged "unreliability" and "family problems." Of course, the wine guys just grin and nod as one tends to do in the presence of a loony, then call Chris to laugh about it.

Am back in the States. Wow. Three weeks traveling in Italy alone = best idea I've ever had in my life. Kind of exhausted now, but I have about 560 photos to upload (seriously), and maybe at some point I'll be able to make some sort of coherent post about all this. Maybe.

And now one day at the parents', and then Friday, I move to Washington DC, to start my new job on Monday. Onwards and upwards, my friends.

I also have a fair amount of fic to type up, although mostly not the fics I was planning to work on. *facepalm* Speaking of which, in a couple of days I'm going to be looking for a beta for a History Boys fic (no, I don't even KNOW, it just sort of happened), so if any of you are even vaguely aware of that fandom, heads up. That's the one fic I managed a complete draft of, though it'll get some revision in the transfer from notebook to laptop. I've also got some House fic in the works (Chase/Kutner, wtf, all andrealyn's fault) and am now about 3/4 finished with a Firefly multiverse crossover I'd been working on since Chicago. Plus fragments of other fics and the YA fantasy. Whew. Is good to be actively writing again, hopefully this will stick even though I'm no longer traveling.

Seriously, though, best trip ever.

Good morning, hostiles! I have to go buy a car. In the meantime, I leave you with the commentary; sorry it's so late.

http://www.friendlyhostility.com

Episode #601
( Click here to read the commentary. )

I'm in Chicago, and there are no delays! Beautiful weather! Life is good!

I hope I haven't just jinxed myself. Tonight's agenda includes dinner with a friend, Preview Night at the convention center, and long conversations with people I haven't seen in quite some time. I also need to try and get some writing done. HA! I have an hour left at O'Hare. Let's see if I can pull off a miracle.

Here's the view from where I'm sitting: