. . . for the Russian tweens, bringing more people to my site than any other weird search term.
If anybody out there's looking for a freelancer to do search engine optimization, a little keyword magic, I'm clearly ready. The more times I gratuitously use the phrase "Russian tweens" in my blog, the more people I can disappoint world-wide. Power of blogging, people.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Born on the 4th of July!
Endless congratulations to my friends, now parents to the girl born on the fourth of July!
They've worked to articulate why and how they want a child in their lives -- more than most couples who have babies of their own. The process takes patience, equanimity, and exhaustive self-reflection. The baby's room has been ready for months. Now it has an occupant.
And she has two amazing fathers.
They've worked to articulate why and how they want a child in their lives -- more than most couples who have babies of their own. The process takes patience, equanimity, and exhaustive self-reflection. The baby's room has been ready for months. Now it has an occupant.
And she has two amazing fathers.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Scribble scrabble
Despite the melancholy tenor of my last post, it's great to be back in Chicago, and back in That's Weird, Grandma! starting tomorrow.
If you come, I'll be your "mouse-like little Ghost Friend."
Also, distance can be fun . . .
Like when your friends come back in town and you get to celebrate them not expiring in a canyon.
Or when your super-talented classmate reads your entire messy manuscript and gives you some much-needed reassurance that you're not a complete fool, and that you can, and should, work it out.
Or when you play a real-time game of Scrabulous on Facebook with a friend in another state because you don't really feel like going out. I spent a good two or three hours chatting and scrabbling last night with a long-time-no-seen friend from college. I laughed to the point of spitting on myself. The sweet (and perhaps shameful) part is, we never had a conversation that lasted that long in person. I was surrounded by so many good people in school (and so unsettled in myself) that I didn't get to know half of them as well as I wish I had. But it's never too late.
Moving to and from LA, doing a low-residency grad program, and shuffling up my relationships, have all led to the most wired year of my life . . . a year in which, as I've mentioned before, I've made more new friends in a short time than I thought to be possible post-college -- many of whom I can only keep up with online. Internet communication has its limits, but they're neither as many nor as daunting as I used to think.
Thank you, friends!
Thank you for making me laugh.
Thank you for making me brave.
Thank you for not dying.
Currently reading: The Minister's Daughter by Julie Hearn
If you come, I'll be your "mouse-like little Ghost Friend."
Also, distance can be fun . . .
Like when your friends come back in town and you get to celebrate them not expiring in a canyon.
Or when your super-talented classmate reads your entire messy manuscript and gives you some much-needed reassurance that you're not a complete fool, and that you can, and should, work it out.
Or when you play a real-time game of Scrabulous on Facebook with a friend in another state because you don't really feel like going out. I spent a good two or three hours chatting and scrabbling last night with a long-time-no-seen friend from college. I laughed to the point of spitting on myself. The sweet (and perhaps shameful) part is, we never had a conversation that lasted that long in person. I was surrounded by so many good people in school (and so unsettled in myself) that I didn't get to know half of them as well as I wish I had. But it's never too late.
Moving to and from LA, doing a low-residency grad program, and shuffling up my relationships, have all led to the most wired year of my life . . . a year in which, as I've mentioned before, I've made more new friends in a short time than I thought to be possible post-college -- many of whom I can only keep up with online. Internet communication has its limits, but they're neither as many nor as daunting as I used to think.
Thank you, friends!
Thank you for making me laugh.
Thank you for making me brave.
Thank you for not dying.
Currently reading: The Minister's Daughter by Julie Hearn
Thursday, July 24, 2008
One moon
I'm having one of those nights where I'm painfully aware that many of the people I love are scattered all over the planet.
One moon, right? That's what they told us at summer camp.
One moon that happens to be just a tiny red sliver right now.
One moon over Alabama. One enormous moon hanging over Chicago, and New York, and Austin, and Ecuador. Louisville, Shanghai, and Santa Fe. Many moons over California. One over Jonathan and Sarah's moving van that I helped pack last night, over Roger and his family making their way, like the moving van, to Maine. One creeping slowly across the southern states, watching my friends make words sing.
One moon, right? That's what they told us at summer camp.
One moon that happens to be just a tiny red sliver right now.
One moon over Alabama. One enormous moon hanging over Chicago, and New York, and Austin, and Ecuador. Louisville, Shanghai, and Santa Fe. Many moons over California. One over Jonathan and Sarah's moving van that I helped pack last night, over Roger and his family making their way, like the moving van, to Maine. One creeping slowly across the southern states, watching my friends make words sing.
I eat books like moon pies
I'm midway through my third novel in two days. Today, I'm reading Godless by Pete Hautman, the National Book Award winner about teens who turn the town water tower into a god. Yesterday, I finished Where I Want to Be by Adele Griffin and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsberg, which I hadn't read since childhood.
It's funny to compare my memory of the book with the book itself. I hadn't remembered the positive resolution, only the disillusionment when the girls give up on witchcraft because I had been so on board with the fantasy and didn't want it to end.
Also, in my memory I'd given extra weight to the scene in which it's plainly stated for the first time that Jennifer is black. Her mother's come to see her in the Christmas pageant, and Elizabeth picks her out because she's the only black mother present. This is a book from 1967, and it's pretty cool that a cross-race friendship is handled in such a subtle way (in the edition I just read, Konigsberg's word, "Negro," has been changed to "Black," but the original gives a sense of how old this book really is).
Jennifer's illustrated as being black in the book, but I remember reading that scene as a child and still being surprised and attributing importance to it. In my memory, that scene occurred near the climax, which isn't the case at all.
Even though there's no suggestion of racism in the book, I felt worried for Jennifer. She's portrayed as an outcast, although no more so than Elizabeth, and she hides the fact that her father's a caretaker on a wealthy family's estate. Elizabeth's one of the only kids in town who lives in an apartment building. There are certainly hints of racism and class difference floating around, but they're super subtle.
The revelation that Jennifer was black probably affected me so much as a kid because there weren't any black students at my Alabama private school -- diversity meant the one Jewish kid, Elliot, whose mother always taught us how to play dreidel before winter break -- and I'd probably never read a book with a black character, or at least not one where race wasn't the central issue of the book. Go E.L. Konigsberg! Her subtlety, the space she leaves for the reader, is at least part of the reason this book stuck in my head as a kid, why I read it aloud to my little sister, and why I'm coming back to it now as a an adult.
The other funny thing I hadn't remembered about this 1967 book is how many references there are to cigarettes -- some of the kids at Elizabeth's school even dress up as cigarette boxes for Halloween. No big deal.
It's funny to compare my memory of the book with the book itself. I hadn't remembered the positive resolution, only the disillusionment when the girls give up on witchcraft because I had been so on board with the fantasy and didn't want it to end.
Also, in my memory I'd given extra weight to the scene in which it's plainly stated for the first time that Jennifer is black. Her mother's come to see her in the Christmas pageant, and Elizabeth picks her out because she's the only black mother present. This is a book from 1967, and it's pretty cool that a cross-race friendship is handled in such a subtle way (in the edition I just read, Konigsberg's word, "Negro," has been changed to "Black," but the original gives a sense of how old this book really is).
Jennifer's illustrated as being black in the book, but I remember reading that scene as a child and still being surprised and attributing importance to it. In my memory, that scene occurred near the climax, which isn't the case at all.
Even though there's no suggestion of racism in the book, I felt worried for Jennifer. She's portrayed as an outcast, although no more so than Elizabeth, and she hides the fact that her father's a caretaker on a wealthy family's estate. Elizabeth's one of the only kids in town who lives in an apartment building. There are certainly hints of racism and class difference floating around, but they're super subtle.
The revelation that Jennifer was black probably affected me so much as a kid because there weren't any black students at my Alabama private school -- diversity meant the one Jewish kid, Elliot, whose mother always taught us how to play dreidel before winter break -- and I'd probably never read a book with a black character, or at least not one where race wasn't the central issue of the book. Go E.L. Konigsberg! Her subtlety, the space she leaves for the reader, is at least part of the reason this book stuck in my head as a kid, why I read it aloud to my little sister, and why I'm coming back to it now as a an adult.
The other funny thing I hadn't remembered about this 1967 book is how many references there are to cigarettes -- some of the kids at Elizabeth's school even dress up as cigarette boxes for Halloween. No big deal.
Monday, July 21, 2008
On a jet plane
Sitting in the Birmingham Airport, on my way back to Chicago, there's no denying third semester's underway. I need a first draft of my critical thesis by August 11th.
Partly because of this, I'm thinking of suspending word counts for the time being, maybe indefinitely. I've liked posting them (especially when they're big), but I'm getting deep into revision territory even in my creative work, and I don't know that quantity's the best measure of my work right now.
For my thesis I'm looking at books in which middle-grade-aged protagonists use fantasy or imagination to empower themselves, along with the attitudes adults bring to writing about childhood imagination. So far, my reading list includes:
The Witches of Worm and nearly anything else by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
The Lord of the Flies
The Other Shepards
The White Darkness
I'd love book suggestions if you've got them!
During residency, I came to consider that I may have been writing two novels side by side, one with a 5th grade protagonist, and one 10th grade. I've been writing so much back-story and twisted chronology, and the story's gotten darker as I've been writing, so that I'm no longer convinced all the pieces belong together. I suspect that writing so much just opened the floodgates -- I've certainly got enough "issues" in my novel to warrant more than one. So, I hope to simplify.
Lucky me will be working on all of this with my new advisor, smart lady Uma Krishnaswami.
Partly because of this, I'm thinking of suspending word counts for the time being, maybe indefinitely. I've liked posting them (especially when they're big), but I'm getting deep into revision territory even in my creative work, and I don't know that quantity's the best measure of my work right now.
For my thesis I'm looking at books in which middle-grade-aged protagonists use fantasy or imagination to empower themselves, along with the attitudes adults bring to writing about childhood imagination. So far, my reading list includes:
The Witches of Worm and nearly anything else by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
The Lord of the Flies
The Other Shepards
The White Darkness
I'd love book suggestions if you've got them!
During residency, I came to consider that I may have been writing two novels side by side, one with a 5th grade protagonist, and one 10th grade. I've been writing so much back-story and twisted chronology, and the story's gotten darker as I've been writing, so that I'm no longer convinced all the pieces belong together. I suspect that writing so much just opened the floodgates -- I've certainly got enough "issues" in my novel to warrant more than one. So, I hope to simplify.
Lucky me will be working on all of this with my new advisor, smart lady Uma Krishnaswami.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
One more kitty
"I'm Y.A. and I'm O.K." by Margo Rabb in the NY Times, all about the blurred line between YA and adult fiction, condescension towards YA, and what's to be found in YA. Via Varian.
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