Bad Blogger, Good Consumer

Hello. I can't even remember when I blogged last, but I have excellent excuses.

Excuse Number One: I have been buying a car to replace the late lamented Green Monster Impreza. For me, this is similar to stalking a tiger while reading up on the quality of his teeth and claws and transferring tiger bait from bank to bank all over the trackless jungle.

When Rob needs a car, he gets up one morning, yawns, scratches himself, decides to visit the dealer, drives a car, then pays his money and comes home with it that night. I am not like that. I consult Consumer Reports, Edmunds.com, the Kelley Bluebook, Cars.com, and 450,000 dealer web sites, plus everyone I know who has ever owned a car plus tea leaves and the innards of snakes.

I then test drive and dither and fret: Hybrid, or manual transmission? Hybrid, or All Wheel Drive? What about AWD but automatic transmission? Manual but front wheel drive with studded tires? If I buy a Prius, can I drive down a back-woods road without scraping hell out of the undercarriage? Do I HAVE to buy another Subaru Impreza, or would a Forester be OK?

The situation was exascerbated by the fact that, once I finally decided that I wouldn't be comfortable slinging a kayak on top of a Prius and driving it through the woods, it turned out that used Imprezas no longer exist, at least not hatchbacks with manual transmission and fewer than 50,000 miles on the odometer. I briefly considered ordering a new one and waiting three months while poking my depleted bank account to see if it was dead. But at last I decided on a 2006 Impreza Outback Sport with everything I wanted but too many miles on it. (The documented maintenance is beyond exemplary, so it could be worse.)

I bought the car yesterday. I am still hyperventilating. Fortunately, we have already tracked wood ashes into the interior (we've been burning all the trees that fell down and smashed perfectly innocent Green Monsters), so I am not subject to the usual waiting-for-the-first-ding-on-the-new-car terrors.

Excuse Number Two: I've been dealing with copy-edits on SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS. I don't even want to talk about this. I roped in my writer's group and my high school friend Shelly (copy editor to the stars) to help me make sure all was well. They are still speaking to me. I am grateful.

IN OTHER NEWS: The entire town of Brooklin is obsessed with Battlestar Gallactica. Yup, I know, old news to the rest of the world. But we don't get cable here, and many of us wouldn't buy it anyway and therefore do not have satellite dishes either. So when the library got the complete DVD set, the jostling began.

We're next on the list for discs 13 and 14. Today, Librarian Tracey called.

TRACEY: Disc 14 came in, but Disc 13 is still out. Shall I hold Disc 14 until Disc 13 comes in?

ELLEN: What if the guy who has 13 wants 14?

TRACEY: Maybe he's the one who watched them out of order, lemme check. Nope, he hasn't seen 14. But what if I take your name off it and somebody ELSE takes out 14?

ELLEN: Oh god. I don't know. *ponders for a minute.* OK, listen, just keep our names on 13 and we'll take our chances on 14. That's only fair.

TRACEY: I'll take your name off of 14 but I'll keep it here at the desk for a day or two.

Tracey and I have conversations like this a lot, because she's the Brooklin Interlibrary Loan guru. Over the past year she has helped me score books on the Cape Verde Islands, West African animism, and literacy in Elizabethan and Stuart England. She stalks books like tigers in a jungle. We get along very well.

March Book Review: WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON

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@Barrie Summy

The weather’s bad with a chance of awful around here, but yesterday there was a change of air, the hint of a smile on the face of the world. Spring is coming.

Nevertheless, the comfy chair with the good lamp beckons. If you’re a kid or appreciate books written for kids, you couldn’t do better than this tale of a plucky, kind-hearted girl and her friend the dragon. Full disclosure: Grace Lin is a fellow Inkie, I’ve written about her before, and I have no business reviewing her book. Sorry—the ghost of my younger self insists.

Don’t forget to click the icon above for more reviews. Oh, and FCC: I got this book in a swap at the Kid/YA Lit Tweetup during the ALA Midwinter meeting.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
By Grace Lin
Little, Brown BYR, 2009

WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON has won a Newbery Honor and a galaxy of starred reviews, but I happen to know it’s also won the highest honor in children’s literature: reports from parents that their children insist on reading it over and over and over.

One of those children would have been me.

It’s the whole package, you see. Lin is an illustrator as well as a writer, so her cozy, endearing story comes with cool chapter headers and spectacular full-page illustrations. The cover art, as you can see, is gorgeous. The book even handles well, with sturdy materials and supple binding. This would have been bedtime reading for me every night in elementary school, possibly beyond.

The book is fueled by Chinese folk tales, simple, often funny stories of greed and foolishness and hubris. As entertaining as they are, the original tales tend to rely on stock characters—crafty monks, corrupt bureaucrats, greedy merchants, foolish or kind or beleaguered peasants. It’s amazing what happens to them when you add real humans, as Lin has done.

Our heroine, Minli, is a farmer’s daughter in a mud-encrusted village under Fruitless Mountain. To her mother’s disgust, her father brings joy to her life by telling her stories of dragons and magic and the wisdom of the Old Man of the Moon. Her mother sighs, the sun burns, the mud clings, and finally Minli has had enough. She sets off on an epic journey to find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him how to change her family’s fortune.

Minli is a normal kid, not uncommonly smart or brave or virtuous. But she has the heart of a hero, and that’s what drives her to rescue a dragon, befriend a beggar and a king, overcome fear, and find help when she needs it.

She’d get nowhere without stories: the ones her father told her, and the ones she picks up from new acquaintances along her journey. The tales weave through the book, explaining the characters Minli meets, feeding her information she needs to complete her quest. They help her, and us, to understand the world a little better, adding richness and color.

Minli and others who open their hearts to stories have special powers: For them, stone lions come alive, and goldfish share their wisdom.

Guess that’s why we’re here, right?

Samson's Revenge

Yes, yes, it's been weeks since I blogged. There was this manuscript, see, and this stuff and that stuff. The manuscript has now returned in copy-edited form for me to read through again in a hurry and yet I am blogging, which makes me a saint.

Also, the power's been out for three days. Also, I am bereaved. Twice.

Thursday night, which featured winds in the 80 mph range, dropped trees all over the Blue Hill Peninsula, including on my now-probably-totaled 2002 Subaru Impreza.


I was happy to see the tree go, frankly, since it was one of the scraggly, sun-blocking ones that we wanted to cut down anyway. I objected only to its sense of direction. The damage doesn't look that bad in the photo, but the frame's badly bent and it's such an old car that I doubt the insurance company will want to repair it. Also, I'm not sure the frame isn't thoroughly compromised.

Speaking of sainthood, my car sacrificed itself that Rob's might live. His car was parked next to mine, and didn't get a scratch on it. Last night, our friend John Wilkinson commemorated the occasion with this cardboard tribute to automotive unselfishness.


Far worse, however, is the loss of Delilah's head.

When we were first clearing this land for our house, Rob cut down a key couple of trees and opened up a vista that looked to us like a cathedral of spruces. We made sure we sited windows in the house so we could admire the view. After we'd lived here a while the cathedral's two spires (photo below left) became known to us as Samson and Delilah, names that seemed even more appropriate when a northeast gale gave Samson a haircut. (His pointy top fell off but grew back even bushier--he's the one on the left. Delilah apparently had broken off once earlier in her life, and had become appropriately two-faced.)

We were up all night during the storm--Rob got called out as a firefighter and couldn't get in to town because the road was blocked, so he was going to drive around this side of the blockage all by himself checking for downed wires. I didn't like the idea of him running around alone when the world was coming to an end, so I went with him.

As a result, we were beat and bleary-eyed when Friday dawned and we got our first glimpse of the new Delilah, cut off at the tree line (photo at right.)

Instead of looking like a cathedral, the woods now look like they're flipping us the bird. Which they probably are.

February Book Review: WOLF HALL

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@Barrie Summy

We're getting lovely, unexpected snow today, and I'm in a great mood because I can take credit for it. I need to go to Bangor one afternoon this week, and it would be best for my revision schedule if I went today. But nobody expected the snow and nobody's plowed and now I have to go tomorrow. If you live in coastal Maine and you're a snow lover, you're welcome. If you live in coastal Maine and snow doesn't thrill you, how about a good book?

Don't forget to click the icon to find more of this month's Book Review Club entries. I understand we have a new member, a seventh grader! Welcome, Cassandra!

Wolf Hall
By Hilary Mantel
Henry Holt & Co., 2009

Up to now, most books and movies have portrayed Sir Thomas More as a saint (which he actually became, three centuries after his death) and Thomas Cromwell, his successor in Henry VIII’s esteem, as a scheming meany. Hilary Mantel’s WOLF HALL nearly reverses those portrayals—although “turns them inside out” would be a better way of putting it.

Winner of the United Kingdom’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2009, this is an entrancing, exquisitely written book, but odd. A blacksmith’s son who rises to be Henry’s closest counselor, Cromwell is, in fact, a schemer--and we’re so deep inside his head that we understand and applaud every maneuver. Mantel achieves this with a technical maneuver of her own that sidles back and forth between genius and gimmickry.

It’s all in a pronoun. Cromwell’s tale is written third person, but the narrator seldom uses his name. Cromwell is “he,” almost always, and the reader frequently has to stop and unravel which pronoun refers to which human.

Opening the book at random, one finds the following paragraph on page 214, when a lieutenant of Cardinal Woolsey’s is reporting to Cromwell on the prelate’s downfall: “Cavendish waits. He waits for him to erupt in fury? But he puts his fingers together, joined as if he were praying. He thinks, Anne arranged this, and it must have given her an intense and secret pleasure….” By this point, the reader is astute enough to know that the “he” with his fingers together is Cromwell, not Cavendish. Earlier in the book, the reader had to stop herself from throwing the blasted thing across the room.

The gimmick works. It probably will never work again for another character or another author, and good luck if you want to try it. I don’t have a firm grip on why it succeeds, but here’s my stab at a theory: If this were written first person, we’d be completely in Cromwell’s thrall, relaxed in the knowledge we were seeing everything and everyone through his eyes. Replacing the intimate pronoun “I” with this almost-intimate “he” throws us off balance—whose perspective is this, exactly? We are one with this guy, completely inside his head…so who’s narrating? Who’s “he” this time—better read that paragraph again.

We’re alive, nervous, on our toes…just as Cromwell had to be to survive in a Tudor court that Mantel seems to know as well as her back yard.

The book’s approach to time is uneasy, too. We meet Cromwell in childhood, recovering from yet another beating by his brutish father. We see him run away to the Continent and then, in the next chapter…boom, he’s an adult, with a wife and kids, Cardinal Woolsey’s right hand. He’s grown into a skilled politician, a bit of an idealist—how did that happen, and how come we didn’t get to see it? We feel gypped.

But we learn that time is fluid, as we follow Cromwell’s thoughts back and forth along the arc of his life, seldom with anything as cut-and-dried as a flashback.

As the pages turn, we begin to understand Cromwell’s genius and where it came from. We watch his idealism die with Woolsey, watch him become Henry’s right hand instead, a councilor admired by some, feared by many, respected by all. He moves like a snake, we see that, but he’s kind to his friends and family. He mourns his wife and daughters, loves his dog. He’s a man of wit and taste. Really, he deserves his own pronoun—it’s a shame he has to share that “he” with anyone else.

Oh, and Thomas More? He’s a prig and a miser, mean to his wife. He rather enjoys burning heretics. He engineers his own downfall and execution partly by acting on a strongly held principal, but also by being a jerk. In other words, a perfect saint.

Love Your Library

Ah, small town library love. I refer, of course, to Friend Memorial Public Library, my little town's beating heart. Katharine and E.B. White adopted it when they moved here in the late 1930s and turned it into a tiny gem that continues to gleam today.

Big doings the next couple of weeks, and even those reading From Away can participate.

In the photo, librarian/restaurateur Nancy Randall and Library Director Stephanie Atwater are making valentines for posting around the library honoring donors' loved ones. ($5 a pop. Cheaper than chocolate!)

But more to the point, there's a silent auction of all sorts of goodies, half of them available on line. The items up for bid are like a snapshot of what it's like to live around here, put into perspective here by auction co-chair Pat Fowler:

A good public library is one of the most basic elements of a good community. What is happening this month at Friend Memorial Library in the small town of Brooklin shows this clearly. It’s one of the most active libraries in the state for communities under 1,000 population, circulating more items than any other and offering a wide range of programs and services. But such a resource must be funded, and Friend Memorial Library depends on its community as it serves it. Some funding comes from the Town, some from the library’s endowment, some from annual donations. And about ten percent of the library’s budget comes from one annual event: the Love Your Library Celebration around Valentine’s Day.

Over the past couple of weeks donations have been pouring into the library, starting with personal donations of $5 or more, which are represented by handmade valentines hanging in the library all this month. Local people have also contributed more than 160 articles to the library’s two concurrent auctions—one online www.biddingforgood.com/friendml and the other a silent auction in the library itself. Bidding at both auctions will continue until February 13th.

In addition to a personal tour of the farm where Charlotte’s Web was written by E. B. White, there are day sails (with yummy foods) on such boats as the trawler Ellie Belle, the Concordia Starlight, and the motorsailer Burma. There is an exquisite doll created by Pamela Johnson, completely hand-made from delicate antique fabrics, wool from Pam’s sheep, tiny jet buttons, even including hand-knit mittens and stockings and a basket handwoven from dainty cranberry vines. Bidders can vie for a cocktail party with appetizers by Diane Bianco, or for barbecue treats with music supplied by the Brooklin Town Band—or a boules picnic with expert coach Andre Strong and a French picnic. There is elegant jewelry by local craftspeople: beadwork by Sihaya Hopkins at Blossom Studio and Julie Reed at The Big Sheep, handstrung gemstones from Elaine Daniels, an enameled pendant by Dottie Hayes, sterling earrings by Jeanette Ware. And wearable art: a felted hat by Sue Wright, a delicate hand knit shawl of silk and merino yarns, or a child’s 4th of July sweater (with blue sailboats on a red background) knit by Pam Steele. Prefer to do it yourself? Bid on hand-dyed yard from String Theory, knitting lessons from Sue Wright, a class in rug hooking with Ken Carpenter.

There are plenty of smaller, very practical items: an oil change at Affordable Performance Auto, 50 gallons of heating oil, a half cord of stovewood delivered to your door, 3 hours of housecleaning, a haircut at Verde, chair caning for the broken seat in that kitchen chair of your grandmother’s. Bidders can try for a day or a week of child care at Cheryl Roy’s, or a day of dog care at Creature Camp.

Is your garden your passion? Consider a dozen perennial plants, or a new bed of hostas or dalilies, or a consultation with Julie Wang of Blue Poppy Gardens, or 3 hours of garden work with Holbrook Williams, land management consultation by Cathy Rees at Arbutus Ecological Services, a certificate from Mainescape. Hungry? Bid on chocolates from Black Dinah, a cooking class with Terence Janericco, cheese platter from Bucks Harbor Market, blueberries and pork chops, homemade apple pies (or make the pie yourself using a polished stone pastry board from The Granite Shop), breads by Brooklin Bread Company, clams, oysters, lobsters, a share in Penobscot East Resource Center’s shrimp fishery.

Enjoy tickets to a production by the New Surry Theater, concerts at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Festival, or a meal at a local restaurant. Many local merchants have donated gift certificates: The Cave, Brooklin General Store, The Lookout, etc.

According to Library Director Stephanie Atwater, several dozen people are working on this event, 160 donated to the auction, and more than 200 so far donating money for valentines. “That’s pretty amazing for a town of about 800 people,” she said.

Revising Magic

I love revision. Really. I do.

This time around I'm revising in a bit of a deadline crunch, but it's still wonderful.

Here's the thing: Drafting a novel is fun, but scary. In order to make myself do it, I have to set a minimum daily word count--I can't eat lunch until I have a thousand words, and if I can keep going after lunch, so much the better. If I didn't set rules, I'd stop the minute it got difficult, which would be one minute after I stopped reading yesterday's words and began thinking up today's.

Revising, on the other hand, offers the fun of drafting with almost none of the terror. You know where the story's going, because you've been there, and now it's time to get in there and fix all the details you wanted to fix all along but didn't because you wanted to get the drafting OVER WITH FOR GOD'S SAKE. You can play with character and dialogue and descriptions and make jokes and giggle and generally have a great time.

So, a week and a half in (and a week and a half to go), I've augmented a character, clarified a relationship, begun to establish clearer motives, and actually made headway on the Logic of Magic. Now I'm ready to start at page one and mush my way through, tinkering. It'll be a hoot and a half, and I can hardly wait for tomorrow morning.

IN OTHER NEWS: Shhh. *whispers* My desktop computer's dying. Anybody have a recommendation for a new one? I'm not a gamer, but I hate sluggishness. Probably shouldn't be a Mac, since my laptop's a Dell. What do we all think about Windows 7? Is it true it sometimes swears at Microsoft Word, and loads photographs at random? I won't be doing serious research until I finish my revision, which may mean I finish it on the laptop. Good thing I have a back-up, or I'd be sweating bullets right now. As it is, I'm backing up every which way and several times over.

Which reminds me. Time to email myself today's revision. Losing a day's revising to the ether would make everything a lot less fun, wouldn't it?

ALA, or a Look Back in Time

During the mad rush to revision (more on that later), I've been taking advantage of the rare ski conditions by heading out into the woods just before dusk. Today I stood out there on my skis, listened to the silence, and thought, "At this moment, no one in the world knows exactly where I am." A comforting thought in this age of cell phones and twitter.

Last weekend, I was in the opposite situation, especially on Saturday when I joined many thousands of librarians--and those who sell things to them (including publishers)--at the American Library Association's midwinter meeting in Boston. The midwinter ALA meeting normally is a business meeting with little attraction for authors (except the awards hoopla at the end), but this year the authors started what amounted to a fringe festival.

So it was that I mushed down last Friday, the 15th, to stay with my friend Larry and go to a dessert party at the Somerville apartment of Grace Lin, a fellow Inkie who was to become a Newbery Honor recipient three days later. (Woot!) That's the party at left. I got a photo of Grace but it didn't do her justice so I stole one of her author photos, taken by Alexandre Ferron.

The next day, I met my editor, Kathy Dawson, at ALA, which was at Boston's new convention center in South Boston, right down the MTA Orange Line from Cambridge. Kathy and I wandered around the publishers' booths a bit, I met some people at Penguin/Dial and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who had been just names to me before, and I began indulging in the greedy insanity that is ARC-collecting. (Visitors leave book conventions looking like looters.) (ARC stands for Advance Review Copy--a paperback version of the hardcover.) Fortunately, having experienced this phenomenon at the New England Booksellers trade show, I brought two cloth bags with me. Also fortunately, I stopped once they were full, and declined give-away bags that would have fed the frenzy. (I feel extremely virtuous about this, although other loo...er, convention visitors clearly thought I was a wimp.)

I met several fellow Inkies and friends for lunch (Legal Test Kitchens, highly recommended), among them Marissa Doyle and Nandini Bajpai. That's them (Marissa on the left), framing a poster of Inkie Leah Cypess's new book, MISTWOOD.

My other photos made everyone in them look like yetis, but Nandini had better success (as well as the sense to ask somebody else to take the group shots) so here's a link to hers. You'll see that she also took photos at the day's big author event, theKid-lit Tweet Up organized by Mitali Perkins and Deb Sloan. Several hundred kids' book authors, all of them with Twitter accounts, showed up to hobnob and connect names with faces. It was very, very entertaining and instructive. All hail Mitali and Deb.

I'm out of time and this post is getting too long. So I'll write about revision (argh!) tomorrow, when I'm not in the snowy woods pretending I don't exist.

P.S. I suppose I should mention that THE UNNAMEABLES made the ALA/YALSA's final Best Books for Young Adults list. I'm pumped, and they even gave my name a much-needed extra consonant.