Back again!

Here's last week's excuse:

Gardening is under way, and not a minute too soon. Of course, all the hefting and hauling has wreaked havoc on my unhappy knee, which already had havoc wreaked upon it walking around England. Last week the orthopod pumped out a lot of fluid and pumped in corisone, but it still looks like one of those pale squashes with the protuberances. (See how cleverly I brought the topic back around to gardening?)

Other more joyful rites of spring:

1. Violets! I brought something like five plants up from my mother's garden in Massachusetts about 12 years ago, and now they're EVerywhere. I love the way they crept out under the step.

2. Boat launchings! This one took place Saturday morning. A friend of ours was building the boat in his garage for 13 years (his wife says 14) and it's stunning. I wish I'd taken a close-up of the woodwork, which is masterful. But I get self-conscious taking pictures at events like this because eveyone assumes I'm shooting for The Ellsworth American, which I hardly ever am these days. Bad excuse, I know.



3. Graduation! Possibly as a hand-me-down from the days when you assumed you might not bother making it though high school, elementary schools around here have elaborate graduation ceremonies for those leaving 8th grade and heading to high school. Our town's is particularly impressive because each graduate has to make a speech. This year's six graduates talked about individuality. One girl, who happens to be in my writers' group, spoke frankly and cheerfully about what she'd learned from being a social outcast. Hard to do without sounding bitter or self-pitying, but she pulled it off. Good for her.

The kids also hand out flowers to anyone who's helped along the way, mostly parents and teachers but also others in the audience. I got a white carnation from one of my writers, which was a big thrill.

While you're wandering about on-line, you might want to check out the latest 2k8 contest, which offers 2k8 books as prizes. (If I'd been smart, I would have directed you to my agent Kate Schafer Testerman's blog a week or so ago, when she was offering an advance reader's copy of The Unnameables as a prize. I'll be doing the same eventually, but first I want to establish a little more rythm to this blog. Like, more than one post every two weeks.)

Also, Daphne Grab, author of Alive and Well in Prague, New York, is the featured guest on the 2k8 blog. Go Daphne!

Rushing into Summer

It's been a hectic few days, mostly because of the Youth Corps, our little town's summer youth program, for which I'm board chairman. The program finds paid jobs for kids aged 14 to 17, with 13-year-olds as unpaid apprentice members. We just hired our coordinator and assistant coordinator for the summer, which is a huge relief. Now all we have to worry about is getting our hands on two rental vans (gah!) and getting t-shirts printed up and getting ready for the townwide barbecue the Youth Corps runs on the Fourth, and...and...and.

I'm also wrapping things up with the writers' group I run at the school, reading and critiquing the finished stories. So far, there's a crime story (the class trip money was stolen, but a teenage ace detective was all over it), a dystopian tale set in either the future or an alternate universe (all adopted children are being kidnapped by the government to keep population figures down), and the story of a girl whose father is jailed for a purse-snatch that netted $23 (in alternating voices, first person for the girl, third for the dad in jail).

All in all, pretty cool stories. What they have in common is that the authority figures--parents, police, governments--do not fare well. A good sign, right?

And then, of course, in the odd moments between things...there's what I do for a living. What was that again?

Where I've Been

OK, so this time it's been MORE than a month. I'm a bad, bad blogger.

But I spent three weeks of that time in England! By which I mean London, Devon, and Cornwall, mostly. Here's some of what I saw. (This will be a test as to whether I can figure out how to put more than one photo in a post without having them decide for themselves where they want to be.)

This is Rob (red sweater) and a couple from our little town who are temporarily living in London. We were in the theatre district trying to figure out how to head for Bloomsbury and a comparatively quiet pub. Rob and I spent five days in London, mostly looking at art except for seeing one play (a funny and sharp one by Jasmina Reza, "The God of Carnage," starring Ralph Fiennes.)

This is "Trafalgar Square, Shillady Departing." (Red sweater, back pack) He's not enthusiastic about cameras, so I took most of the trip in "Shillady Departing" mode. The building at left is the National Gallery, where we spent almost two full days, and the church straight ahead is St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where I went to Sunday services so I could hear church music in its intended setting.

From London we took a train to Brighton to pick up a car and drive across to Cornwall. We started in Brighton so we could go to Charleston Farmhouse, the highly decorated home of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Vanessa Bell was Virginia Woolf's sister, and I was on an informal, barely conscious Virginia Woolf pilgrimage. (Stayed in Bloomsbury, then Sussex where they all had country houses, then St. Ives, Cornwall, where V&V spent childhood summers). But the Big Excitement the first day out of London was this bluebell wood.

Then we spent four or five days driving this...



on lots of roads just like this...



so we could spend a week luxuriating here...


among lots of these--some of which I'm sorry to say we ate.



I did all the driving. Rob is much whiter of head now than he was when we left, mostly because he was the one who was inches from hedgerows and stone walls when I pulled over hastily in the face of rapidly oncoming traffic. He kept muttering, "These people are nuts." I found driving on the left to be less of a problem than getting used to zipping around a hedgerowed corner with no idea of what might be in your path.

I only almost killed us once, though.

And now we're home.

And I'm going to be a much, much better blogger now.

Oh Dear

Um. A month seems to have passed since my last post. How did that happen?

And I had news! I have a cover! I have maps! I have galleys! My Little Town had the world's most uneventful town meeting! There are crocuses! (And still patches of snow, but if you squint they look like blazing white sand in a tropical setting, so that's OK.)

Anyway, to start the catch-up, here's the gorgeous cover for The Unnameables, designed by Linda Lockowitz. I think Photoshop is involved, but I don't know where the elements came from. Anyway, it's very cool, and fits the book beautifully.

The galleys are an unnerving experience, as I knew they would be. They look lovely (again the work of Ms. Lockowitz, I assume) but reading something I've written set in type has always made me hypercritical. I'm second-guessing every damn comma, and sitting on my hands to keep from making 4,385 corrections.

Bad enough that there are real mistakes to be corrected. I can't believe, at this late date, that I'm still finding world-building inconsistancies. Found one yesterday that has been in the book since the first draft, and I only just realized how inconsistant it is.

But if you squint it looks like it could have been deliberate. So that's OK.

Daughters of the Stars

It's Elizabeth C. Bunce week over at the 2k8 blog, and since A Curse Dark as Gold is about a take-charge woman I thought I'd tell you about my all-time favorite kids' book, The Daughters of the Stars by Mary Crary. (Phew--that sentence wins the Link Award, for this blog anyway.)

A neighbor gave me Daughters for my ninth birthday on behalf of her dog, a basset hound named Gorgeous George. It (the book, not the dog) dated from 1939, and had a cover and two interior color plates by Eduard Dulac. It had only two plates, I found out years later, because it was published in wartime and the book was rushed into production before the paper ran out.

Where the Role of Women in Society is concerned, this is an hysterically subversive book. To capture the setting, think Thin Man movies or "My Man Godfrey," except all the bejeweled. begowned, black-tied sophisticates are up in the sky or under the sea.

It seems that all of nature (the progression of sun and stars across the sky, the workings of the sea, the rain, the thunder) is governed by a bureaucracy rivaling the British raj. Most of the cleverest bureaucrats are women, and the men in positions of power tend to be ruled from behind the throne by mothers, sisters, or wives. None of this is stated outright, you understand--it's just the norm.

A foreword by the author comments that few fairytales feature mothers--they're always dead or lost or otherwise absent, leaving the heroine to fend for herself. Depressed by this in childhood, Crary writes, she "made an early resolve to create a young heroine whose Mother should possess, besides beauty and rank, the additional and stupendous virtue of being alive."

That mother is Astrella, Daughter of the Stars and Luminary of Two Continents. In the first half of the book, she and her daughter, Perdita, must travel from the First Continent to the Second Continent so that Astrella can illuminate it properly. They follow a shining path through the sky, tangling en route with the evil Moon Queen and her minions. Astrella accepts help from a man at one point, but only the way Indiana Jones accepts help from some adoring damsel. Otherwise, she's perfectly capable of taking care of herself and her daughter, thank you.

In the second half, Perdita goes off on adventures of her own with a young sidekick (Noel, Prince of Two Planets) whose most useful attribute seems to be that he has pockets that button. Perdita rescues people all over the place and reunites her disgraced aunt with the rest of the family, all the time keeping her hair tidy, her hands clean, and her promise to learn French irregular verbs firmly in mind.

Here's a typical speech, when Astrella's father has attempted to forbid the restoration of his disgraced daughter.

"Very well," said his wife. "I hope I am not a disloyal woman when I say that this must and shall be. I have been your wife for nine hundred and twenty-one years, and although I disapprove of you in many ways, I am sincerely attached to you. But I am not to be commanded, nor will I permit you to come between me and either of my Daughters at any time. I am sorry to say this, but Mamma is now at a distance of only three thousand miles, and I am certainly going to send for her."

The Star's face lengthened considerably.

I remember reading somewhere that, back in the 50s and 60s, females in picture books and early readers seldom had hands. Little girls stood with their hands behind their backs and watched little boys play with trucks. Moms had their hands in their apron pockets.

I don't think Mary Crary would have approved.

Ender's Game

Here I am again, rushing to get a post done before an entire week has passed. (I will do better, I will do better, I will do better....) Part of the problem is that it's March and life is boring. Here's what I've done this week: Revise. Teach. Revise. Walk the dog. Revise. Play with my new DSL (at last! Jon Stewart clips! Because, yup, no cable or satellite). Revise.

Oh yeah, I did laundry. Want to hear about it? Didn't think so.

So all I have to write about is books. I did finish Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, a sci-fi about a bunch of children trained to save the world from an expected alien invasion. I loved it and have been pondering The Hero ever since. Usually, I like my heroes to be enough like me in the beginning that I can imagine myself performing the heroic feats they manage by the end--the Harry Potter model, or better yet Frodo Baggins, who doesn't even have wizard parents.

Ender is introduced right off the bat as spectacular in brain power and strategic ability. Card gets you on Ender's side because he's initially the target of bullies. And his response to the bullying starts him torturing himself about whether his extraordinary talents might be accompanied by an underdeveloped moral sense. It crosses your mind that he may be right, and that the bureaucracy that has trapped him may be banking on that fact. You have to keep reading to find out whether he keeps his soul.

I was further entranced by the quality of Card's thinking about his world, in this case a couple of academies on space stations. He devotes a lot of ink to the way one would fight in zero gravity, for instance, and his conclusions are pretty cool.

Also on the bedside table: Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, The Gollywhopper Games by Jody Feldman (2k8er!), The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones, and Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D. Nuttall. That last one's going to require a rainy Sunday, I'm afraid. It's too dense for bedtime reading, which is all I seem to do these days.

Procrastination Can Be Fun

OK, so I'm a bad blogger again. But it's because I had a pretty good writing week, so I get extra points for that. I wrote 15 pages worth of chapter headers from the point of view of my two main Filioli (small winged ladies and gentlemen, infesting a pub), figured out why a couple of characters aren't working and sort of fixed them. (Actually, the fix on one of them is going to be trouble--it may mean we have to see more of his parents and then we'll need more backstory on them...and it could go on that way forever.) And revised, revised, revised.

And hooked up DSL! My little town enters the 21st Century! (I personally am in the slow lane, but still...) And taught my writers group at the school.

And managed to fit in a touch of procrastination.

Back in the 1920s or so, Robert Benchley devoted one of his columns to a lesson on "how to get things done." I haven't read it for a while, but my recollection is that he'd make a list of things he MUST do, putting the least important at the top. Then he'd sneak off and work on the second thing in order to procrastinate on the first, then tackle the third thing while procrastinating on the second, and so on down the list until he got to the last item, which was the one that really needed doing and that actually got done.

So that's why I had such a good time writing this week. What I was supposed to do was organize all my tax stuff for the accountant. (I know...it's wimpy for a midget like me to have an accountant. But I'm a terrible form-filler-outer.)

Now it's 4 p.m. on Friday and I came in here after a walk vowing to get serious about the taxes once and for all.

Which is why I'm writing a blog entry.

See how that works?