The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": July 2010

Friday, July 30, 2010

Revisions

Right now, because I am almost entirely crazy, I promised all three of my kids that I would help them re-do their rooms - at the same time. In fairness to my sanity, when we moved here, it was a DIY job, with chairs and bureaus shoved into corners at 2 am so we could unearth the box storing the clean underwear. Things have sort of remained that way, and now the kids are pretty much due actual furniture that remotely matches and they can fit into.

Rooms are really important to teenagers. I'm trying to recall when writers show that emphasis, but I'm not coming up with any titles. They come home exclaiming how "cool" someone's room is, how amazing the colors/posters/speaker system/flat screen is and how much fun being in that kid's room was.

Chances are, you can remember your room as a teen. I know I spent a fair amount of time organizing it, finding spots to hide my diaries (I kept two; one my friends read at sleepovers and one that I wrote "the truth" in - )

I'm also working on revisions to a middle grade novel and what I'm finding is the prevailing sense that everything takes longer than I thought. And also the feeling that I am never going to finish anything. Here are a few notes from my recent undertakings:

Emma is doing her room in hot pumpkin, fuschia and zebra stripe. I kid you not.

She can't believe how beautiful this combination is. Her 'tween friends are all in OMG agreement that this is going to be THE room. No wonder they're a difficult age to write for...

Christopher believes that his fourth grade spelling folder, his last two hundred candy bar wrappers and his wet bathing suit create a force field around his bed that will keep the dark forces away. I can't think of any other explanation for some of the things I am finding as I strip his room down to the carpet and paint.

Philip can't part with a three foot high plastic penguin that blew onto our lawn during a snowstorm. It wears a Darth Vadar Halloween mask. Above that is a large, plastic hand puppet of Godzilla's head that Philip has given lip rings to and a few other piercings. Let's just say it's not a room Martha Stewart wants to die in.

I go back and forth between the mess of laundry baskets, bookshelves and paint cans and the mess of my WIP. In both revisions, I keep adding and deleting as I go along. The one wonderful aspect of revising a manuscript instead of a room is there is no one saying, "Mom, are you KIDDING? Why are you putting THAT into the donate pile? It's not like it has an odor..." I can sort of do what I want with the story which, at this point of the summer, is starting to look better and better.

After a few days of revising the kids' rooms, I've changed my mind that the rooms would be easier to tackle. If you had a choice, which would you prefer to strip down and redo - a room or a manuscript?

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Of Bums and Blogs

Many thanks to Tiffany J., who created a website for Light Beneath Ferns. She's a really talented, artistic teen who has much more patience and timeliness than I do - not to mention technical ability. More on Tiffany when she gets her own website up and going (sorry T.J.J. -just a slight push there)

And here's another kitten picture I really like. We should probably stop calling them "the kittens" at this point, since they just turned a year, but they may be stuck with that name in the way BabyCat is now two or three years old and still BabyCat. (She was feral so the shelter couldn't be exactly sure of her age)

I have been a total blog bum, sort of like the kitten picture, and a bum in many other ways for the past couple of weeks. I went down to Long Island for a few days and left Dad in charge of the kids. I left food in the fridge, the kind made with simmering and vegetables and seasonings, but they ordered pizza both nights.

The rest of the time I've been cleaning out a scarily crowded basement, working in the herb garden and figuring out what I want to write/work on next. I haven't been around the Internet at all, but I'm sort of back now in the way anyone can be back on a computer during nice weather.

I have to thank Jemi for the The Versatile Blogger Award which she awarded me back in...maybe June? It's been awhile. In any event, the rules are:

1. Thank the folks and link them
2. Share 7 things about yourself
3. Pass along to 15 bloggers
4. Comment on their blogs to tell them of the award

But since it's summer, and half of the bloggers I read regularly are on a temporary hiatus, if you read this blog, consider yourself nominated. That's the great thing about blogs; you can bend the rules into circles. Ok, so seven things about myself:

1. I almost never watch t.v. It makes me a total misfit (that's right, just that, and nothing else) I don't know anything about those sexual selection shows or any of the plots of the medical dramas. It just bores me.

2. When I do watch tv, the kids run from the room because I like to watch weirdomentraries like: The Boy With Three Ears or The Woman With the Ninety Pound Tumor. It's kind of a weapon: "Ew, Mom's watching TV!!!! It's another of those medical nightmares!"

3. I could be a bum. Very easily. I have no work ethic. Maybe that's why I like cats so much. Their occupation is preening between naps. That sounds pretty much ok to me. And a little bit, it describes a fair amount of my adolescence.

4. Speaking of cats, I get really scared when I think about the kids leaving and look around at the amount of books and cats I already have in my middle age. My fear is turning into one of those grotesques in Charles Dickens who lives with too much dust, too many memories and way, way too many cats. I mean, I'm sort of there now...

5. I can't stand writers who take themselves oh so seriously. You know, the kind who meet you and give you an autographed bookmark five seconds after saying their names and launch into a long explanation of their latest plot struggles. They seem so angsty and pained by writing it makes me wonder why they do it at all.

6. When I can't sleep, I look at real estate on the Internet. Not local real estate or anything I could buy. I go on tons of virtual tours. Last night, I was all over Rhode Island.

7. When I write, I have at least two full time stories going. I work on one or the other depending on my mood and my latest ideas. Other writers tell me this is a very, very strange way of getting anything done. So I never tell them that I often choose between three simultaneous stories. There have to be others who write like this.

And that's it, for now. If you've read this, you have my nomination to do one of these. Since mostly writerly types stop by here, I can vouch for their versatility.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Post Graduation

That's Coco, one of the kittens Emma got last year. She's a lot bigger now, but I still think she is one of the world's cutest cat sleepers. Maybe her posture is a metaphor for the end of the school year. Kids seem so exhausted by the end of June.

Christopher didn't get much of a chance to relax. He graduated and at eight o'clock the morning after his graduation, he began a college summer program. Remember I'm the mom who always told the kids they could sleep over OUR house; I never really let them sleep over or go to camp or do any of that normal stuff. So I just paid the price when I dropped him off.

He made me swear not to cry or embarrass him in any way in front of his new roommates, so I cried before and on the ride and in the parking lot. Then I was cool. Really cool. We organized his room and took a walk around campus and went to the orientation barbeque. Still cool. So what if it felt like someone was ripping my lungs out? I acted like Christopher was going for one of the sleepovers finally at someone else's house.

It was almost time to leave and the counselor suggested I show him the laundry room. I was explaining how to work the machines when he looked at me, then at his I Touch. He had been looking at that device all through the orientation and all through my advice lectures and all through the long, boring introductions to things like the bursar representative and the tutoring center hours. I finally said,

"Christopher, you have to pay attention. I'm not driving down here just so you can do wash."

He looked back at his I Touch and said, "I was just thinking how great it would be to have a Mom app on my phone." Okay, so corny. But it did me in. I got to that line, then I started crying. Fast forward: he's doing fine, and he brought home a huge load of dirty laundry. I have him until tomorrow, but I'll be cool when I drop him off this time, Mom apps and all.

And in other good news, one of Philip's friends is in the process of making a website for Light Beneath Ferns. I haven't seen it yet, but I will later on tonight and I'll post a link to it here. They may not want to learn how to do their own laundry, but teenagers come in handy in a lot of other ways.

It's a little harder to get to the computer with everyone home, so I'm a little more behind than usual, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Fourth!

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.

***