The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Blogospheric

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Blogospheric

I usually never want to participate in the "chain" kind of blog questions, but I do really like reading them. And you are probably thinking, "Well, yeah, we all like reading questions about our friends." That's right, but because I am slightly off center, I also read the answers to people I'll never meet in Australia or Singapore. So when I got tagged by Marcia Hoehne, I thought maybe people will want to read mine.

Also, you are supposed to tag eight other folks, and I'll start by tagging the romance writer Terri Rainier, the YA writers Brian Mandabach and A.S. King, and I'll add five others later on (because I'm not sure of their last names). Ok, so here are the questions:

What are your nicknames? My daughter occasionally calls me Wordgirl (after a show she watches on PBS) and my sons sometimes call me HER as in, Who said we can't hang out tonight? The answer: HER

What do you do before bedtime?
Feed the cats, put laundry on, set the coffeepot up for the morning

What was the first movie you bought in VHS or DVD?

I don't like movies. I've never bought any. My college roommate did give me a really neat copy of Gone With the Wind with George Cukor interviews which I've watched when I had the flu. I was obsessed with Gone With the Wind (the novel) for most of my adolescence.

What is your favorite scent?

Tie between leaves burning in the fall and ocean water, even when it's fishy.

What one place have you visited that you can't forget and want to go back to?

Bermuda. I went on a snorkeling honeymoon, and everything sappy they say about Bermuda is true. I was in the water the entire time. Well, you know, maybe not the entire time...

Do you trust easily?

Sorry, no. My kids have never slept over anyone else's house and they've never had a babysitter. (I know, I know). They've had lots of kids sleep here, and I've watched lots of other people's kids, and I have to say that I trusted people more easily before having kids. With my kids, I trust no one.

Do you generally think before you act, or act before you think?

I'm impulsive, and I am really impulsive when I write. I start writing novels at the drop of a hat, and I do things on whims. My husband takes six to seven minutes to decide which pair of socks to wear for the day, so we're an interesting pair.

Is there anything that has made you unhappy these days? I am living in a fool's paradise, I guess, since I am usually pretty happy despite having tons of stuff to do on any given day. Unhappy? Let's see - the possibility of going to war with another country makes me unhappy, but not really anything in my day to day life.

Do you have a good body image? Uh, yeah. I mean, have you seen me or what? It's just that when I moved closer to the water, the salt air shrunk the rear region of my pants, so that can't be helped.

What is your favorite fruit? I would have to say Elton John.

What websites do you visit daily? That's tough because I have Internet induced ADHD. It's more like, "Huh, I didn't know koala bears did that..." type of meandering. I can't say surfing because even then, there's a shoreline. I'm more like drifting around, think leaf caught in a windstorm. I look at freelance writing jobs sometimes; other times I read the NY Times online because I miss NYC.

What have you been seriously addicted to lately? I have been battling an addiction to really good, European chocolate for most of my adult life, and lately, the addiction is winning. I am curbing a minor addiction to footwear.

What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
Introspective, a big reader, Christian values, reliable, kind, really literate.

What's the last song that got stuck in your head? Pink Floyd's, "We're just two lost souls living in a fishbowl year after year -- How I wish, How I wish you were here..."

What's your favorite item of clothing?
I like clothing without seams of any kind: old maternity pants, washed out flannel shirts, real soft material that my kids keep telling me I should use only to dust.

Do you think Rice Krispies are yummy?

If they were dipped in chocolate, but otherwise, no thanks.

What would you do if you saw $100 lying on the ground?

Assuming I am alone, meaning there are no other people around who I could ask, I would probably buy books, read them, then donate the books to an inner city teen center. (I actually did find 20.00 at the beach and that's exactly what I did so this was a trick question).

What items could you not go without during the day? Pens and paper, number one. I still use old fashioned pen and paper to get down my writing ideas in the morning, before the kids and the dog and the husband are around (that was in no particular order btw, or maybe it was in the order that they need assistance from most to least)
So definitely writing utensils.

What should you be doing right now?

Proofreading my new YA manuscript before sending it to Andrew Karre at Flux, checking on my sons who are being suspiciously quiet in the next room, and making sure my daughter isn't watching the movie,Juno, in the living room with her little friend. Oh, and cleaning the house, but after all, that is one of the beauties of blogging --

4 comments:

Marcia said...: I enjoyed reading your answers, Anne!; Tuesday, 23 September, 2008
Anonymous said...: Elton John...lol; Tuesday, 23 September, 2008
TerriRainer said...: Geez, I feel bad cause I just saw this! I'll have to post and link back to you SOMETIME this week.

:) Terri; Monday, 29 September, 2008
A.S. King said...: Anne! I only saw this tag now. I will oblige in the coming week and thank you for the distraction from a WIP that is making me pull my hair out. :)

Amy; Saturday, 11 October, 2008

Post a Comment

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***