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

Friday, July 17, 2009

Losing Time

I haven't been around these past week or so due to dental surgery that I thought would be just annoying. I didn't realize it would be so extensive and that I would have to take pain pills that left me an insane person, living on the couch and jotting down outline notes like this:

birds, with the field, not within the scope, seven isotopes

At the time, I explained to anyone who stopped by my cushion how this was going to be an amazing novel, very similar to the writing of Bram Stoker.

Who?

He wrote Dracula which is the only horror book I ever read that I liked. I have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

I had to spend more time on the couch than I liked (which is none; I am kind of the opposite of a couch potato), but the kids were great. They made tortellini dinners with Ragu and I am now not sure if I can ever eat a Lean Pocket again. Ever.

I alos made some great discoveries about American tv -- I now know -thanks to late night infomercials - that there is a new science termed YOUTHOLOGY. Seriously.

By now, I'm down to one pill a day and a sore lower jaw, and my writing notes make a bit more sense. We've had some fun, though. Baby Cat (aka Cara) the one who went to live in a basket after the arrival of the kittens -

They are so cute; here's just one more:

Anyway, Baby Cat decided she had had enough of not being the baby any more, and she decided to make a break for it when one of the kids' friends opened the door. We all ran after her, and ended up on the lawn of the Squids.

The Squids are our neighbors, the ones in the scary house that is always dark (hence, like a cave) and Emma claims the tree in their front yard is shaped exactly like a squid. We've never actually SEEN the Squids, but Baby Cat ran onto and then under their porch and we all followed. I stood right in their yard and yelled over to the kids, "The Baby is under the Squids' porch." This sentence must have sounded very strange to anyone who heard it, and I would not have hollered that right there in their yard had I not been a little assisted in my loss of inhibitions. Maybe it was thinking about Dracula, and standing there under the moonlight that made me howl that. That, plus the narcotics.

After hearing this, Emma backed away from me without bothering to turn around and Philip ran very, very fast away from all of us. But Christopher ventured under there, coming out with a dried spider attached to the shoulder of his t shirt (this discovery caused Emma to shriek when he came back inside the light), but he did have Baby Cat in his arms.

And I wonder why the neighbors think we are odd.

I can't imagine how folks who dabble in pharmaceuticals get anything done. That sense of losing time makes me feel so defeated; how do you write under the influence of anything? But I'm back. I had a lot of help in recovering:

Philip's about 175 now. Guess I'm going to have to develop stronger leg muscles.

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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