Nobody Here

1. I'm scared of spiders, large crowds, and calling strangers on the phone.
2. I'm not scared of snakes, flying, or small enclosed spaces.
3. I think Kubrick's The Shining is scary, but Stephen King's The Shining isn't.
4. Chapter 1 ("After the Flood") of Stephen King's It is the scariest thing I've ever read.
5. In movies and books, dark rooms and mean/evil ghosts are scary. Possessed peeps and serial killers are not.
6. Exception: Seven is scary.
7. I found The Silence of the Lambs more funny than scary. It's the way the guy talks. "It puts the lotion in the bahhhhsket or it gets the hooooooooose again." Come on. That's comedy.
8. I think The Blair Witch Project was the least scary movie I've ever seen.
9. I have vivid nightmares that scare me too much to go back to sleep afterward.
10. I'm scared of being in water if my feet can't touch the bottom.
11. And speaking of water, I don't care how fake I realize he looks now, that shark from Jaws is still scary.
12. I don't get why the peeps who do movie soundtracks think organ music is scary. I do get why they think piano music is scary.
13. I'm not talking about political/social/global issues that are scary. That's its own thirteen.

Picture book author extraordinaire Lynne Berry gets a starred review from Kirkus for her forthcoming The Curious Demise of a Contrary Cat, with glorious illustrations by Luke LaMarca (Coming this August from Simon and Schuster). You can conveniently preorder from Amazon here. As you are probably aware, a Kirkus starred review is a Very Big Deal.

If you simply cannot wait until August, you can get your copy of Duck Skates now, if you haven't already got one.

Congratulations, Lynne!

I was sick last week, some awful bug that sucked my mojo right on out, and I didn't write a thing. I'm on the 4th draft of Isaac, and I can see that I'll need 2 more. Two novels ago I wrote 3 drafts, the last one 4, now this one will be 6. You can see where this is going. I'm a lazy girl, and I don't like it one bit.

The real problem though is that if I don't get moving at a hummingbird's pace I won't have this ready to go in time to start a new one in November.

Of course there is only one answer. Who wants Diet Coke and cupcakes?

Do you ever get to the point where you start to like your story so well that you think, this poor thing deserves someone better than me to write it?

*Post title ripped off from The Barenaked Ladies' "Second Best"

I'm a fan of Emily Yoffe, and not just because she’s got a rescue beagle. But I think she lost it just a teenytiny bit when, after having taken over Slate’s advice column a while back, she responded to a woman who wrote asking how to tactfully answer people questioning her decision to remain child-free. First she suggested a few things the woman might say. Then she went on to question the woman's decision to remain child-free.

As a consequence of this, she evidently got a lot of mail.

So she wrote an article defending herself, which turned out to be more a defense of parenthood. She was once in a similar situation to the advice seeker, she says (sure, the born-agains are always the biggest thumpers). She reconsidered, and is glad she did. Parenting is more than changing diapers, parenting is fun, parenting is rewarding, yay parenting etc.

Then this:

"Many correspondents were past childbearing years and assured me they had no regrets. If I had stayed childless, I would also have felt I had dodged a sippy cup to the head. But the reason I wanted the still young-enough, happy woman who wrote to me to give another thought to the possibility of children is because I know you can thoroughly enjoy your childless years—and also be grateful every day for becoming a mother."

What she means, of course, is that she is grateful every day for becoming a mother. Good for her. Me too. So?

In her case, everything she says is defensible; one can hardly blame her for giving advice based in her own experience, what with that being her job and all. But it's a common tactic of the mommy evangelist: I didn't regret it, so neither will you.

Just who are we talking about, with all this talk of fun and rewards? Me? You? Everyone? What about the kid someone had because they were (pretty) sure they'd feel differently when the baby came, except then they didn't? Is it fun and rewarding for that kid, too?

Can we just for a second stop worrying about the personal fulfillment of middle-aged grownups who are presumably old enough to decide what they want for themselves, and consider how much it sucks to be the child of someone who does not want you or the lifestyle you impose, and resents you mightily?

Can anyone point me to any examples of well-done scenes of dialogue conducted in sign language?

I just put it in quotes, put "signed" where "said" would normally go, and tried to include all the appropriate body language. For the words themselves, what I put was not a direct sign-for-sign translation, but more what an interpreter would be saying out loud for those present who didn't sign, cause when I was working on a French-English translation for my last book Hope taught me all about how only a twit like me gets caught up in the words at the expense of translating the ideas. It should be noted that I in no way blame him for that book's not selling.

How would you do it?

Agent Kristin says if you can't write a good query letter, your fiction sucks too (she says it nicer). Miss Snark has often said that query letters almost always suck, and that doesn't necessarily mean anything one way or the other about the work itself.

I tend to be more in Miss Snark's corner on this one. After all, many a person who is good at business writing has written an atrocious novel, so why shouldn't the reverse be true? Believe me, I've taught business writing, and there are plenty of peeps who just have no natural aptitude for it. A person who can keep you up all night turning the pages of his thriller may not be able to get any quality groveling from the appliance company he's emailed six times to demand satisfaction over a faulty product. They're two different skills.

But the beauty of business writing is, you can learn to do it even without that natural aptitude. Sure, it's harder to pick up for some people than others. So is using chopsticks, but with enough practice, you can stop using that silly little rubber band. Business writing requires practice, attention to detail, and a certain amount of finesse, but it doesn't involve the same kind of either-you've-got-it-or-you-don't instinct that fiction does.

In other words, if I send out a sucky query, it's not because I couldn't learn to write a good one, it's because I didn't learn to write a good one. There's really no excuse for that.

Especially not when there's plenty of help out there. In the immortal words of M. C. Hammer, ring the bell. School's in.

*Post title ripped off from M. C. Hammer's "U Can't Touch This"

I totally hate it when you're doing research and at some point it becomes clear that you're just too, well, dumb to reallyreally understand the thing you're reading about, so, yeah, you can put it in your book, but if anyone who knows what they're talking about ever reads it, they're going to, like, laugh at you. Don't you hate that? What? That doesn't happen to you? Oh. Yeah! Me neither, I just meant I feel sorry for those dumb peeps it does happen to. Too bad for you, suckers!

*Post title ripped off from Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science"

I'm not actually calling you a fool, you understand, so much as including an Aretha Franklin reference for Archer's benefit. Some new links added over there.

Somebody landed on my blog after doing a Yahoo search for "How do I start a writer's blog." Never one to shy away from an opportunity to help, I give you

How To Start A Writer's Blog:

1. Get paid for writing, or, self-describe as writer
2. Start blog
3. Fill with thursday thirteens, nitwittery, tomfoolery, and ballyhoo so as to distract self from doing actual writing

You're welcome.

I got the arm band thingie for my iPod a couple of weeks ago, and do you know it totally works? No slippage at all. So for today's Thursday thirteen, the

Thirteen Best Songs To Play On Your iPod As It Stays Snugly And Not Slipping In Its Arm Band While You're Running, Although Maybe It Would Slip If You Were Running Really Fast, But You'll Never Know:

1. Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba. Hands down the best workout song ever.
2. Song 2, by Blur. Probably the second best workout song ever. But the rest of these are in no particular order.
3. Training Montage, from the Rocky IV soundtrack. I kid you not.
4. Tell Me Something Good, by Rufus
5. Here Comes The Hotstepper, by Ini Kamoze
6. Runnin' Down a Dream, by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
7. Right Now, by Van Halen
8. Get Up! by Technotronic. Yeah, I know.
9. Brick House, by the Commodores
10. AllStar, by Smashmouth
11. Holding Out for a Hero, by Bonnie Tyler
12. Life is a Highway, by Tom Cochrane
13. Sweet Child O' Mine, by Guns N' Roses

A while back I read this transcript of a speech Arthur Levine gave at a SCBWI event. In it he talks about the old adage "write what you know" and suggests this directive doesn't apply to the concrete aspects of story (plot, setting) so much as the less tangible (arc, journey, conflict, theme). J.K. Rowling (hey don't blame me this time, he brought her up) has presumably not been to a wizarding school, but she is a woman scarred by the loss of a parent writing about a boy who's been (literally and quite famously now) scarred by the loss of his parents. Throughout the talk, what Levine is saying is that writing what you know means writing what you know from the inside.

At the time, I dismissed this. I'm a shallow girl, and my personal truth mainly involves cupcakes and my beagle. I don't really see much of a market.

But last night as I was sprinting down the hall so the bug-thing hiding behind the lamp wouldn't get me (I'm nightmare prone) I realized something weird. Right around the time my daughter started walking, I responded to my new lack of physical control over her with a recurring nightmare I'd have several times a month or even a week. Without going into details that I totally don't want my daughter reading if she ever digs up this blog as a tool for mocking me in later years, the dream would start with me turning my back for a minute when I should've known better, and get worse from there.

After a few months of this I learned a little trick. When I woke up batty from one of these, I'd lie there and go through a little routine in my head, where I imagined myself catching up in time with the nutter from the dream, going all Trinity on him or her, and then bringing my kid safely home. Yeah, I know that's weird, but it would calm me down enough to get back to sleep.

What does this have to do with that talk of Arthur Levine's? I'm not writing a book about kidnappers or Trinity or shopping. But I am writing a book about some deeply terrified and powerless people who rise to the occasion and take back what's theirs.

And what I realized last night when I was done running away from the phantom of the moment was, I haven't had that nightmare since probably around the time I started the second draft.