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

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Awards, Awards

Since Sunday is Oscar day, I thought this would be a good time to pay attention to my blog awards. The Silver Lining Award is from Lisa over at Why A? So many thanks to Lisa.

I like the idea of a silver lining, especially since I'm thinking spring these days despite the record breaking snow in South Jersey.

And here's another award:

It's the Creative Liar Award by Bish. You are supposed to tell six outrageous lies (aren't most lies outrageous?) and one truth, put the award on your blog, thank and link to the person. So thanks to Bish, and here goes.

1. I am writing a novel involving a German shepherd, a teenager, a compass, an enchanted map, and a hidden, mystical land. I am about halfway done and not one, but two agents, are interested in repping it.

2. I only have one kidney. I lost the other to gestational diabetes when I was pregnant with my last baby.

3. I once told a NYC agent that I didn't want to be represented because I was never going to write novels. At the time he contacted me, I had just begun to write short stories, I had three kids under the age of six, and I couldn't imagine how he could "see" that I was going to become a novelist on the basis of a 1500 word short story. I explained how I could write a page or two a week. I thought he was nuts and stopped returning his phone calls.

4. At the age of 15, I rowed almost completely across New York Harbor alongide a ferry boat. I turned around when I saw a Harbor Patrol boat.

5. One of my best friends is Sam, is a transsexual who channels Anna Nicole.

6. My oldest son is joining the Navy in July, two weeks after high school graduation.

Can you spot the one true statement?

Now, onto the nominees. For both awards, I am going to nominate Mary, KC, Katie and Sarah Frances at PlotThis, Marcia and Shelley. They can play if they want; no pressure if they don't.

Let's see who can guess the truth...

6 comments:

Marcia said...: I think #6 is the true statement. Although since it's also the tamest, I may have just been had.; Thursday, 04 March, 2010
Katie Anderson said...: Wow! Thank you so much!!!!!!! I am so honored to receive these lovely (and fun!) awards!

And I think number 3 is true :-) I can't wait to see which one it is!; Thursday, 04 March, 2010
Mary Witzl said...: Yay, thank you! Marcia's nominated me for the liar award already, so I'll have to make mine good!

I was going to go for 6 too -- I know your son has been pining to join the Navy -- but I'm betting the real true one is 3. Because that is just SO weird!

(If it IS true, I'll really deserve the silver lining award.); Thursday, 04 March, 2010
Bish Denham said...: I WAS going to go with #6, but then I thought since you grew up on Staten Island that maybe, just maybe at 15 you were bold, brazen daring (and stupid?) enough to do something like row across New York Harbor.; Thursday, 04 March, 2010
K.C. Shaw said...: Ooh, thanks for the nomination! I've posted my lies on my blog: http://kcshaw.blogspot.com/2010/03/outrageous-lies.html

I'm going to guess that 4. is true, because almost rowing across the New York harbor is just so cool I want it to be true.; Thursday, 04 March, 2010
Anonymous said...: Congrats on the award. I think #6 is true.; Sunday, 07 March, 2010

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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.

***