Interrupted Interruptions

That is the Celtic symbol for chaos. It will all make sense to you in the end. Hopefully, that second sentence is true for most things.

In college, one of my professors told us how J R R Tolkien had several children, and he locked himself in a room and wrote for up to twenty hours at a time.

I was about nineteen at the time, and I remember imagining some kind of Mary Poppins in the background sailing paper boats with them on the banks of the Thames and feeding them porridge. I always imagined British kids sitting at the table eating grayish oatmealy things. It was probably from watching Oliver Twist one too many times. They were constantly eating gray, gloppy stuff out of bowls. I remember being absolutely fixated for a time on the word offal which I could not really believe anyone had or would ever consume.

I figured if I was going to have kids (and I was leaning toward the absolutely never side of that question back then), I would put them outside and go about my novel business. You can tell I didn't babysit much.

I am kind of interrupting myself here on purpose. Blogs are like little snapshots of what is going on with folks and I have been leading a life of non finishing. Here are some things I have learned in the past week or so:

1. When you sit down to work on your new middle grade, you can't believe you have an hour to work. It's a weekend morning. You actually lock the indignant cats out of the room so they can't walk across the keyboard. Five minutes into your manuscript, you hear an insistent "Moooommmmm" and you know, instantly, what is wrong.

2. Strep throat can transform itself into acute pharyngitis. This is when a kid's throat begins to close and fun activities like swallowing and breathing become difficult. You don't know this until you drive up to the ER and your kid is seen.

3. It's a very bad sign when the triage nurse in the ER says, "Aren't you Anne? I remember you..." You shouldn't know the employees of the local ER unless you work there.

4. A steroid shot in the butt can open the throat until the antibiotics take effect.

5. The next time you sit down, it is late on Thursday afternoon, after working most of the day on the non-writing job. The kids are, miraculously, quiet. You get almost a full paragraph written when the door opens, "Mom, I need a white dress shirt for the concert."

"Hmmm, when's the concert?"

"At six."

It is currently 5:10.

A white dress shirt is found in the back of a closet. Emma and I wash the cuffs and neck and use a blow dryer to dry it. You arrive one minute of six. You look up on stage and realize your dashing young man never put on the black dress shoes, but is up there in his dress clothes - and a very well worn pair of Nike sneakers. You decide this is fine because it's an arty, Andy Warhol kind of look.

6. Emma keeps introducing your Malaysian house guest to American music. Because she's 11, this spring's musical selection is Lady Gaga:

I wan you ugly/I wan you dizeese/I wan you ever ting/long as it free...

Eventually, I am going back to that middle grade. It's still waiting for me and it won't change unless I decide it will.

I wish the same were true for the kids.

Those Voices in Your Head

One of the main reasons teens dislike certain authors is, according to my entirely random survey, "They never sound like anyone I know." I think it's really difficult to get down authentic teenspeak; in fact, I think it's really difficult to get down any human dialogue that sounds authentic. But dialogue makes or breaks a story: if the writer lacks a good ear, it becomes dreary reading.

To some degree, you have to prune dialogue. I have this weird knack of remembering fairly long passages of conversation (and then forgetting to pick up ketchup two shopping trips in a row). Here is an actual dialogue that took place in my house on a Sunday morning:

Emma: "Mom, did you know that the juice of a dandelion root will remove moles?"

Mom: "How do you know that? And why would you want to?"

Emma: "I looked it up. It's right on Google."

Mom: "I'm beginning to think that you have too much free time. And you don't have moles."

Dad: "We have moles? Where? In the garden?"

Emma: "But I could get moles. You get moles when you get old. I never want moles."

Dad: "I haven't seen any moles and I was outside clearing brush."

Christopher: "Who ate the rest of that pizza?"

Emma: "You did. Duh."

Christopher: "I thought there was a piece left."

Emma: "You have to boil the dandelion root."

Mom: "Do you drink it or put it right on the moles?"

Dad: "Is that what moles eat? Dandelions?"

Christopher: "Are there any pizza rolls in the freezer?"

Dad: "You know moles are also spies..."

And so it went.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that a good story was "life, with the dull parts taken out."

I think the same applies to dialogue, maybe even more so.

Right now, I have changed the dialogue on a new YA no less than 17 times. I haven't written more than three pages in any one "voice", but none of them make me go, "Yeah, that's what she sounds like." I jot down different opening sentences that I think will fit this girl, but I think I'm having so much trouble because she's not really present in my mind. I'm going to put this idea away for a time, and wait for it to happen.

My guess is that writing good dialogue, dialogue that advances the plot and fleshes out the characters, rises from listening to those voices in your head of characters that don't exist - at least not yet.

I'm wondering how many centuries ago they would have burned you at the stake for admitting that.

Guest Post

I am blog hopping for the weekend.

I did a guest post over on Donna's blog at Bites. It's a great blog for YA writers with lots of book reviews and contests - hopefully you can stop over there and join the discussion on writing.

Breathless and A New Interview

I have been swamped these last two weeks or so, more swamped than I ever want to be again.

Ever.

We had some family illness, a good friend in a car accident, the end of the college semester with term papers and final exams, college entrance forms, prom preparations and a few other incredibly time-consuming situations that all added up to some of these behaviors:

1. Buying underwear at WalMart on my way home from the college so I could put off laundry one more day to grade papers.

2. Not one, not two, but three family sized packages of Lean Pockets and two giant bags of pre made salad as dinner two nights in a row.

3. I can now name all the items on the McDonald's value menu.

4. Ditto Walmart and sock buying.

5. Only using the computer to post grades and/or correspond with students.

I've been remiss in keeping a blog and in visiting other ones, but I'm back now, and hopefully with the end of the college semester, I will be stalking all my favorite blogs again.

Foreword magazine, which did a really nice review of Light Beneath Ferns, just posted this interview.

I've subscribed to them, and not just because they wrote a nice review of my book; they do a great job of reviewing a lot of independently published books.

I'll be back sooner than last time. Hope you enjoy the interview!

All Light Beneath Ferns Stuff

When I wrote Light Beneath Ferns, I didn't really think in terms of genre. I just wrote a story about a girl who was a loner and wanted to stay that way because she was going to move in a new direction. A strange direction, but a new one. When it came out, I got emails from people telling me it wasn't romantic enough for a paranormal romance. Or it wasn't scary enough. Most of these people were within ten years of my age, which puts them way, way out of the age range for this novel which is about 14.

But of course some folks got it. I got emails from young teens who read parts of this at sleepovers and were creeped out. That was pretty much the idea. Then there were a few adults who loved it and wrote to me. One of these adults is Donna, who wrote probably my favorite review so far of this story.

Now, onto teens. As you know, they infest my house, leave shoes everywhere, carefully place empty milk cartons in the fridge and hog the computers. They are forgiven however as they took pity on me as I tried to make a simple book trailer.
Listening to me complain, they came over to the computer and put together this book trailer which I think is amazing. It's not a polished, marching band kind of trailer, but what's cool about it is that it is made by teens-

I have to especially thank Tiffany J. for her patience - not with the trailer, but with me and my technical blankness. She is responsible for the effects, and essentially the trailer as I had given up, Emma picked out the music which I think is perfect, Philip did a cameo, and Christopher explained to me that not everyone is meant to be technically competent. At least Christopher was patient enough to get me started. I think they did a great job! If you want to see more book trailers, you can watch and vote on your fav here.

Girl Bullying

One thing I remember from the fifth and sixth grades was my closet. I kept all my "old" stuffed animals in the back, along with my Barbies and crayons. That way, if anyone stopped by, they would only see my perfume and lip glosses - all the stuff that everyone in my middle school owned. But I still locked the door and dragged out the crayons and Barbies when the coast was clear.

I distinctly remember why: I did not want to become Carol. Carol was the girl who openly talked about breast development, brought her ballerina sweatshirt on the field trip, and refused to wear a bra even on Tuesday, assembly day, when we had to wear white blouses. That meant we could easily inventory the girls who wore bras and those who didn't because the straps were visible.

Tween girl world is a treacherous place, with so many rules to follow that it seemed like a new world. Well, it was a new world, and one that I navigated only when I had to. I was glad we lived right by the beach, away from the housing developments where all my "friends" lived. I could still read on Saturdays, walk on the beach and revisit Barbie and her stewardess suit. I didn't have to worry about bras or pretending to like boys.

Carol was bullied. But not in the way boys were bullied: they punched each other in the nose, they shoved and hit. They were sent to the dean and suspended.

We were much more covert. We did something called relational bullying, or social bullying. We isolated Carol. She didn't attend sleepovers or get notes passed to her or go to the mall. When we had to work in groups, we moved our chairs tightly because no one wanted the teacher to say, "Let's see who has room for Carol." No one had room for Carol. No one spoke to her. Eventually, the teacher had her work with boys because we didn't pass the paper to her. I'm not sure how she survived sixth grade.

There is a tremendous amount of attention paid to bullying these days. PTA's are giving workshops on bullying, Dr. Phil is talking about it, and kids are dying, literally, as a result of bullying. There is the Internet now, and myspace which has replaced our passing of notes and "slam books" - stapled together looseleaf in which we wrote anonymous comments about each other. I never wrote in one. I used to move my pen across the top of the page and close it (while everyone watched) Then I passed it on to the next girl. I was terrified of that book, way too terrified to ever actually write in it.

I'm not sure if this type of girl bullying is recognized. It's not as obvious or direct as posting pictures or writing comments in cyberspace. The girl behind most of the bullying of Carol was popular and bright, a highly unlikely suspect. Researchers say that is the way it usually is. The social bullying increases that girl's social status while robbing the victim of any social status.

I used to wonder if the teachers knew what was going on; they seemed oblivious. Placing Carol with the boy group was pretty much the social death knell for Carol.

The problem with this kind of bullying is its subtle nature. It's might be difficult for adults to detect, but it's widespread: most women I talk to either remember or were the class Carol.

I've read about Carols in YA, but these protagonists were isolated in more of a Carrie situation: one of their parents was really, really odd or they did something highly unusual that weirded their classmates out. I don't see much attention being paid to this less visible kind of bullying, and I wonder if that's because you need to be in it, or have gone through it, to recognize it.

Last week, Emma cleaned her closet out (my kids clean their rooms when they are not under direct threat as often as Haley's Comet blazes past) because "Sandy" had worn one of the hoodies that Emma has. She had to go through all her clothes to make sure nothing she had was like "Sandy's" because, you know...she explained. I nodded. Sandy is the class Carol. I asked her what the teachers did to help Sandy. Emma looked at me, "Help her? They don't even know."

So little has changed.

Family Vacations

We took a family vacation over Easter break, and family vacations are important because it gives us an opportunity to argue as a family and not in smaller groups of two or three.

And I love my kids' sense of roughing it: you had to walk outside the door of the hotel room to access the microwave. They had a suite with a fridge for their drinks and ice cream, but that microwave...

Emma informed me that there are hotels that leave a chocolate on your pillow after they make your bed. At our hotel, housekeeping actually forgot to make up the room. Poor Emma.

Here are some pix from our trip, beginning with the patron saint of Philly:

That's actually at the entrance of the Franklin Institute (not far from the Franklin Parkway, and that's over the Franklin Bridge -- you start getting the idea as soon as you drive in)I liked this one, also from the Franklin Institute:

and an early aviation engine in a room that Christopher really enjoyed:

The city skyline of Philly looks like anywhere else to me:

But I think my fav is this one of Philip (yes, who else?) on the sky bike, an actual bike you can ride up near the ceiling of the Franklin Institute. He may be over six feet and 16 now, but he's still a kid:

We ended up at the Camden waterfront, at Emma's fav place in the world: an aquarium. She took a picture of this lovely pair:


I think they learn a lot more than they realize on these trips.

At one point, after walking most of the day and using the hotel pool (it was indoor and heated, just wonderful), my kids were, for once, as tired as I was at the end of the day. While the other families were playing friendly games of Scrabble and Boggle, we were lying (all five of us) on the king size bed arguing about points made in a documentary on the Shroud of Turin. Things got quiet until one of the narrators announced that the Resurrection was "the greatest paranormal event of all time" - that was an interesting argument.

Everyone is kind of staying to themselves after getting back. Pretty soon, we will have recovered from all that togetherness.