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

Monday, July 6, 2009

Kreativ Blogger Award

Bish was nice enough to nominate me for this award, and even though I am late, I will play. I am supposed to nominate other folks, but I think we are in something of a blogging clique here -- all female writers of children's literature. So we know pretty much the same people and I will be double tagging them. If you haven't been nominated, and you want to play along, send me an email and I will happily nominate you.

The other piece of this is to confess seven things about you that folks might find curious or that they didn't know. I have so much ample weirdness in my life that it was hard to narrow it down to seven. That's probably not good. Anyway, here goes:

1. I am constantly thinking about moving. We haven't exactly blended in the natives here who watch Nascar all day and carve decoys for the annual duck hunting decoy show. I look at real estate markets all over the East Coast. I am currently considering Virginia, Princeton and northern Manhattan. Of course, money plays no part in these fantasies.

2. I still haven't bought curtains for our windows. We have these sheets of linen tied at the bottom (I can't even cut fabric straight let alone sew). Every time I walk into one of those curtain shops and the domestic divas start discussing "window treatments" I get panicky and flee. Maybe installing window treatments would help imbue a greater sense of permanency to our house.

3. I think cats are connected to some kind of mystical energy that is invisible to humans. I won't say anything more about this belief or I will have to move to L.A. - or at least Oregon.

4. I write several pieces at once even though most other writers are baffled by this habit. I absolutely have to be in the mood for a certain character or I end up looking at seven bedroom homes in Alexandria. (Those virtual tours can be compelling)

5. I steam organic vegetables for dinner and when the kids are done, I sneak outside with half a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

6. I worry that I like to read blogs now more than talk to actual people. Bloggy people never ask me to bake or watch their kids, and I can think about what they wrote before writing anything back. They demand so little...

7. I can't decide whether I like or don't like the Internet. I really can't. It's probably the only area of my life where I don't lean a little more to the yes or no area. Sometimes I think it's wonderful and sometimes I feel lost when I'm online --like there's this big party that's been going on and I just arrived. It's exactly 50/50. In fact, the older I get, the less able I am to make decisions in general, but this one is the only one that's still completely yin/yang.

Those are the first seven that come to mind, but I'm sure if I dug a little, there's way deeper and stranger stuff. For now, I'll just let this stuff float out there.

12 comments:

Christy Raedeke said...: I love your list of seven. And re: #3, yes! I agree about the mystical cat thing and also agree you need to move to Oregon to fully explore the theory...; Monday, 06 July, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: Thinking of moving to a new place and going through virtual home tours are my mother's greatest joys. She's addicted to House Hunters too. Of course, she moves every two years (typically just across town). I definitely see the appeal too, although curtains do help anchor one to a particular house. :); Tuesday, 07 July, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Christy, hubster is a bike fanatic and keeps talking about going to school out in Oregon to learn how to run a bike shop. (I'm vaguely aware of gears) So we may be out there, at least for awhile.

K.C, I should form a group of real estate voyeur junkies. It can't just be me and your mom getting email alerts from Realty Trac.; Tuesday, 07 July, 2009
Christy Raedeke said...: Anne, could you be talking about the United Bicycle Institute in Ashland, about a mile from my house? That would be FAR too coincidental! Crazier than the red cat collar!; Tuesday, 07 July, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: UBI, unless there are two in Oregon,and I'm pretty sure he's not referring to an Upper Bowel Infection. That's what he calls it. He keeps telling me that Oregon is such great bike country. So yeah. And that IS weird.; Tuesday, 07 July, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; Tuesday, 07 July, 2009
Christy Raedeke said...: FREAKY! And cool. Hope you and your kids come out while he's attending. Come during play season - you can see 11 plays in a week! Check it out: www.osfashland.org

Seriously, though, please email me if you decide to come so I can steer you to great places to stay and eat and fun stuff to do. World class biking and white water rafting!

christy (at) christyraedeke.com; Tuesday, 07 July, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Thanks, Christy! UBI might be a few years away since that's his retirement fantasy. But I will definitely email you if it happens any time sooner.

And yeah, my kids come everywhere with me so we would be looking for stuff to do while he's taking classes.; Wednesday, 08 July, 2009
Adrienne said...: I love this post. I have no real window treatments and do not blend with my Nascar-loving neighbors. Every now and then (just last week, in fact) we tour model homes we can only dream of affording.
Too bad we're not neighbors - but then, maybe we'd be hitting each other up for baked goods or something...; Friday, 10 July, 2009
Katie Anderson said...: Nascar loving, duck carving neighbors sounds awesome! *cough

I am TOTALLY KIDDING!!!

Why don't you look at a little known town called Oxford? You'd love it!; Wednesday, 15 July, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: I don't do curtains either. I consider myself phenomenally lucky that two of my friends see curtain making as almost a raison d'etre. And I've always thought that cats had a lot going in the psychic department. Wish I knew where mine was now, in the great spirit world.

Now, how about two dozen carrot and apple muffins?; Thursday, 16 July, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I know guys: curtains. I know folks who change their window treatments seasonally and refer to things like "stitching up a valance."

Katie, I am not ruling anything out. I love warm weather, too, and I used to be obsessed with Gone With the Wind, so that qualifies me for life in the South.

Lol, Mary. Usually, I'm asked for 48 cupcakes with holiday spritzle thingies.

Spritzle?; Friday, 17 July, 2009

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.

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