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

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Another Meme

Ok, so this is one of those meme things, but I like it because it forces you to think about writing. Bish tagged me, and if you are reading this blog, consider yourself tagged. There are a lot of questions, and I would love to see Mary and K.C. answer them, but it's also Christmas, so I won't hold my breath if they don't get to it. Here then are the questions for all literary divas:

What's the last thing you wrote? What's the first thing you wrote that you still have?

The last thing I wrote is the seventeenth opening page of my current novel. (And I am not exaggerating; I actually kept track) I still have my diary from the year I was thirteen. It's scary; I was very, very disturbed.

2) Write poetry?

Not anymore, though I did when I walked around thinking I was Sylvia Plath.

3) Angsty poetry?

There's another kind?

4) Favorite genre of writing?

YA, with a smattering of MG.

5) Most annoying character you've ever created?

My children. I think of them as one force, like a character.

6) Best plot you've ever created?

Hmmm, I think my stuff is character driven. Maybe that's yet to come.

7) Coolest plot twist you've ever created?

In a novel that was "recycled" (self rejected because I grew to hate it) five years ago. An arsonist turns out to be a girl's illegimate half brother.

8) How often do you get writer's block?

Never. I have more ideas than time.

9) Write fan fiction?

I have never heard of fan fiction. Seriously. I don't go on many boards or to writing conferences so maybe someone could define that for me.

10) Do you type or write by hand?

I write things like: she knows where/give key/never needs to see the river/who does not get the ticket in the middle of the night by hand. Then I type it into English, and yeah, I know what it all means.

11) Do you save everything you write?

God no.

12) Do you ever go back to an idea after you've abandoned it?

Nope.

13) What's your favorite thing you've ever written?

My first novel. (This answer is open to change)

14) What's everyone else's favorite story you've written?

It better be my first novel.

15) Ever written romance or angsty teen drama?

Umm, that's like what I DO.

16) What's your favorite setting for your characters?

Nature-y places: woods, beaches, rivers.

17) How many writing projects are you working on right now?

Two: a YA, a sequel for an MG, and a novel for adults. That's three -- but the last two I have like a page of notes for and nothing else, so I'm counting them as one. (I have my own mathematical system, kind of an inverse of Newton's world)

18) Have you ever won an award for your writing?

Wait - publishing isn't an award? I've been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, but they gave them to people like T.C. Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates.

19) What are your five favorite words?

moon, shimmer, sea, abandon, will

20) What character have you created that is most like yourself?

My daughter.

21) Where do you get your ideas for your characters?

They sort of talk to me and appear. In another century, I would either be highly esteemed or burned at the stake.

22) Do you ever write based on your dreams?

I wrote an entire MG novel about five years ago based on a dream. It was dreadful. Dream doesn't translate well, at least for me.

23) Do you favor happy endings?

Nah.

24) Are you concerned with spelling and grammar as you write?

Yes, compulsively so: I'm an English teacher.

25) Does music help you write?

It helps me when I'm out driving and I listen to U-2 or another favorite group, but no, when I'm writing, a car horn is irritating.

26) Quote something you've written.

"Elizah, sometimes it's good to leave the company of the dead." It's my favorite sentence from my second novel. I didn't realize I liked it that much until I read it over again during the proofing stage.

5 comments:

K.C. Shaw said...: Awesome answers! I love reading about how authors think/work. Everyone's surprisingly different.

Thanks for tagging me! I'm about to blog my answers.; Tuesday, 22 December, 2009
Bish Denham said...: Thanks for playing! You are SO funny. I love that your best characters are your kids.; Wednesday, 23 December, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Yay, I LOVE being tagged -- it makes me feel all special, like people remember me and want to include me. (So different from middle school...)

I'm going to quote you on a few of those answers; they are exactly what I mean to write, number 8 especially. I just wish I had more time so I could do more with my ideas. Instead, I'm tormented by trying to get bored kids to come up with ideas, then further tormented by trying to get them to write those hard-wrought ideas down.; Wednesday, 23 December, 2009
Anonymous said...: I usually don’t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful …; Saturday, 26 December, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I find it fascinating, too, k.c. I don't really get the process of writing in the same way as I get say the process of doing laundry so it intrigues me to read about how other writers write.

Yup, Bish, they are my best characters. It's shameful the way I freely swipe their lines when I am forging a YA character.

Mary, every once in a while, I used to sub at my sons' middle school. It was more to check on the who/what/where of their lives than for any higher purpose, but going back there made me wonder how any of us ever survived the anguish of those years.; Sunday, 27 December, 2009

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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.

***