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

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Bloggy Stuff

Sometimes I feel like blogging is to the early 21st century as CB radio operators were to the 1970's -- I remember going on trips with my family (to exciting places like the Poconos) and we would look in the cars to see who had a CB radio. They were a way of communicating that was pretty much alien to us. "What could they be talking to each other about?" was the common catch phrase. CBers were highly identifiable nerds.

I'm pretty sure a lot of folks feel that way about bloggers. When my kids text, and text they do, friends who are not around teens constantly say: "Why are they texting so much? What could they be saying?" I think the common refrain here is: If I don't participate in it, how could anything that's transpiring there be important?

So the "organized mothers" talked about blogging the other day. This is my label for the women who are never late to anything, who have their Christmas cards out the day after Thanksgiving, and who can always locate all the papers necessary for the school trip the night before the school trip, and don't use the morning as an exercise in human stress capacity. I often say to my kids, "Hurry up, we'll be late and then I'll have to walk past all the organized mothers." This usually spurs them into action because I can't stand dealing with this group.

So the other day,at the spring concert, my daughter, a member of the fifth grade chorus, was hiding in the violin room because the chorus songs were "way, way too dorky to sing" -- I had to stand lookout for any stray school administrators while the fifth grade chorus sang without her. She didn't mind playing her violin in front of the school; it was the dorkiness of the songs that prompted her vanishing act.

It adds a new dimension to parenting when you are standing in front of a cluster of music stands stage whispering, "Emma, really, we'll get ice cream. McDonalds. Really. Just come out of there." To which she replied, "I'd rather be dead than sing those dorky songs."

Of course, while I was standing guard until the violins went on, a group of organized mothers were gathering (in an early and poised manner) right outside the violin room, right there alongside of me. They were talking about the Internet, and how the PTA needed a website.

They went from website chat to blogs, and they talked about how dumb blogs are, whose sister-in-law kept one, and how they are meaningless clutter on the Internet (my paraphrasing).

I like blogs. And it's not just because I have a semi-justifiable way of avoiding my real writing work by blog cruising. I like seeing what other writers are reading, what they are working on, and what they are thinking about books. I don't have the kind of life where I can call people very often; I don't have long periods of sustained time for conversation. And when I do, I have to use it to work. So blogs keep me connected with other folks, and mostly writing folks. I don't think I read any blogs of people who don't write. I am now a highly identifiable writing nerd connecting with other highly identifiable writing nerds.

All of this is a long way of saying that Flux, who is my publisher, has some great stuff going on over at its blog. It's got author interviews and streaming podcasts, and book giveaways -- I like to think if the organized mothers created a YA blog, it would be something comprehensive and appealing like this. Those organized moms are probably all right; they just don't speak my particular language.

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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