The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Liar, Liar Reveal

Monday, March 8, 2010

Liar, Liar Reveal

It's time to reveal the truth and how well I fooled you guys - and I don't think I fooled you all that well, except there is some tiny truth to each of these statements. Really tiny in some, and in others, sort of true. But there still is only one true statement.

Here goes:

1. I am writing a novel involving a German shepherd, a teenager, a compass, an enchanted map, and a hidden, mystical land. I am about halfway done and not one, but two agents, are interested in repping it.

Let's see: I have a German shepherd and a couple of teenagers, but no agent or agents.

2. I only have one kidney. I lost the other to gestational diabetes when I was pregnant with my last baby.

I was on insulin during my pregnancies. After Philip was born, I mentioned to a doc that I thought my next baby would be a girl. His response was, "You better be happy with what you have unless you want to lose a kidney."

I changed docs, had Emma and still have both my kidneys.

3. I once told a NYC agent that I didn't want to be represented because I was never going to write novels. At the time he contacted me, I had just begun to write short stories, I had three kids under the age of six, and I couldn't imagine how he could "see" that I was going to become a novelist on the basis of a 1500 word short story. I explained how I could write a page or two a week. I thought he was nuts and stopped returning his phone calls.

This is sadly, 100% true. I did this -- I really did think he was nuts. Later, when I found out who he was, I felt like the biggest dork on the planet. How could I not know? Then again, who knew from agents? At that time, I didn't even know anyone else who wrote.

4. At the age of 15, I rowed almost completely across New York Harbor alongide a ferry boat. I turned around when I saw a Harbor Patrol boat.

This is sorta true. I attempted this, thinking I was the daughter of Poseidon and nothing could happen to me. Ok, so maybe I didn't think I was the daughter of Poseion: I thought more that I was Poseidon. I can say this: the New York City Harbor Patrol knew who I was that summer because I really, really wanted to get across. I got about 80% to Manhattan once. They were on the ball before the age of terrorism.

(And I am very glad my own kids don't read blogs...)

5. One of my best friends is Sam, a transsexual who channels Anna Nicole.

I met a "man" on the Atlantic City boardwalk who does this, but we had one brief, sparkling conversation and I never saw him again. If you are ever stuck for character ideas, I recommend a walk there around six or seven on a hot evening.

6. My oldest son is joining the Navy in July, two weeks after high school graduation.

I have a huge level of respect for people in the military, but a flat screen for his room and a few other incentives to at least try college first have worked so far. I think this is my current, primal fear rather than a true statement (realize that I'm the mom who still asks that his phone stay on while he walks the dog -- I know, I know)

So some truth to some of these, and unfortunately a lotta truth to #3. Then again, I think you have to be as ready for an agent and all that goes with publishing a novel in the same way you have to be ready for having kids. Or maybe I'm just hoping and that's not entirely true...

7 comments:

Bish Denham said...: To be so close to having an agent...wow. I did get part of one of your partial truths right! Trying to cross the harbor seemed so possible to me.; Monday, 08 March, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: It was crazy, but I did try to cross the harbor which is probably why I worry so much about my own kids now. I know their genetics. I never made it. Unfortunately, there are things like massive ferry boats and patrols.

And I think I would have ultimately disappointed that agent. Those were the days when I went two or three months without writing a word. I still don't use an agent. Maybe he'll call back?; Monday, 08 March, 2010
Jemi Fraser said...: Love your harbour swimming story. To be young again... :)

Yikes - can't believe the agent one is really true! Wow.; Monday, 08 March, 2010
storyqueen said...: I say call the agent back....you never know.

All he can say is no, and you won't know unless you try.

(Sounded motherly, no?)

Shelley; Monday, 08 March, 2010
Marcia said...: Y'know, I was drawn to #3, but I didn't want it to be the true one.; Tuesday, 09 March, 2010
Mary Witzl said...: Whoa on number 3! Just --- whoooooa.

When we were leaving for Turkey, I won first prize and £250 in a poetry competition. My daughter took the phone call for me and I thought it was a scam and for a horrible 3 seconds was nasty to the caller. That's the closest I've come to doing what you did and it's NOTHING like as amazing. (When I realized it was for real, I was slavishly, pathetically grateful. I believe I may even have wept.); Wednesday, 10 March, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: You got it right, Mary! I think you were the only one, but the other folks suspected...

Jemi, is young another word for risk-immune? It was for me. That's why I stalk my kids. I remember...

Idk, Shelley - now I have more time to write, but for all I know, he could be deceased. And yes, very motherly sounding.

You were suspicious, Marcia. See, I'm not such a good liar. That's probably a good thing.

But I'm sure everyone here gets the "writers are really professional liars" line from time to time.; Thursday, 11 March, 2010

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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