What a horrible faithless blogger I've been. In my defense I was finishing a draft of my second book, and then immediately it was Christmas, and then immediately I had a wretched cold that lingered lovingly for weeks.
But I am awake and alive again! and just posted over on the Enchanted Inkpot about the question of fantasy and originality and why it seems so IMPOSSIBLE, but I think really isn't. Check it out.
This is not a proper post but I wanted to let you know that Penguin has posted a couple of MP3s of me reading excerpts from Summer and Bird on their website. These are just little informal recordings, nothing posh. But man I do love reading aloud, and reading my own book aloud is a much greater pleasure than I ever guessed.
I should have realized how much fun it would be based on the few times I've performed short plays I wrote myself. Any actor will tell you that being able to surprise a laugh out of an audience, or make them hold their breaths, is pretty much the best thing ever. But to be able to do that when you wrote the words--no, that is the ACTUAL best.
A couple of weeks ago I read aloud and talked with the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders at the Girls School of Austin. The students were delightful, warm and enthusiastic and thoughtful. And when I read the first line of chapter 6*, and the whole room GASPED? For a moment I could not believe that this is my actual job, because it is the most splendid job in the world.
Oh! That reminds me -- this is not a reading, but it's a great cause, and chock full of writers more famous than me. Here's a triple play where you can do good, meet writers, and knock out some holiday shopping all at once on Saturday, December 8 at the Humanities Texas Holiday Book Fair.
See you there? Say yes.
It's at the schmancy Byrne-Reed House downtown and: free parking! I won't be reading aloud, do not fear, but I will be signing, as will Austin icon Sarah Bird, Newbery honor winner Jacqueline Kelly (with her new telling-forward of The Wind in the Willows), Texas Monthly editor Jake Silverstein, novelists Stephen Harrigan and Oscar Casares, and more. And home baked pastries. So please come!
*"The Puppeteer was full of dead birds."
LOOK AT ALL THE PEOPLE. Photo credit Pete Minda.
I have kind and amazing friends, and BookPeople has a kind and amazing staff, and my book event Tuesday was a complete joy to me. Thank you, everyone.
And now it is now! The present! Past the big book event I could not see around for a while. The present has
And soon it will be: the future. What now swims before my eyes blocking out all else is the Texas Book Festival October 27-28. Besides stalking my favorite writers at various panels and parties, I will also be
So come stroll around the Capitol, bring kids, drop by the panel, or come to one of the booksignings--even if you don't need a book signed (you have to buy them there to get them signed there, FYI), come say hi, I will be glad to see you.
In: the FUTURE (cue theramin effect).
So Summer and Bird comes out in four days aiiiiiiyyyyyyeeeeeeeee.
NOT THAT I AM NERVOUS.
And a friend of mine has already bought a copy from some scofflaw bookshop in California, so it must be real. My own copies came as well:
In fact it's so real that I'm having a book launch in just over a week. If you're near Austin, please come join me at BookPeople at 7pm, Tuesday October 9 for a few tasties, some wine and champagne, silly bird decorations, a wee presentation and reading, a Q&A, and a book signing. I would love to see you there (and my event is the day after Rick Riordan's, so I need your help not to look too paltry in comparison).
(If you'd like to have a book signed at that event, it must be purchased at BookPeople, but you are welcome to come whether you're having something signed or not.)
In completely unrelated but also happy news, I've been nominated for a B. Iden Payne Award for my performance in boom this June. Sweet!
But lest you think my life is nothing but sugar-coated loveliness, I am still working on my second book, which gives me lots of opportunity for self-doubt and terror. Also, someone is playing the drums horribly badly very near my window, which is open for the first time in ages, because we are having a hint of fall (by "fall" I mean "it is under 80 degrees").
A hint of fall tips the balance -- my life IS all sugar-coated loveliness.
Notice the changes here in the creaky, windswept streets of my website. Mainly, I have added a whole page for Summer and Bird. And mainly I did that to have an excuse to share two nice bits:
Summer and Bird got a starred review from Kirkus, which called it "A haunting fable inflected with mythological and fairy-tale motifs . . . languorously beautiful."
I was named one of IndieBound's New Voices for Fall 2012. They said of Summer and Bird "Lyric in its language and layered in its complexity, this is a book like no other."
Two more bits of news: I wll be reading at the Southern Independent Booksellers Trade Show in Naples, Florida on September 7, which is exciting. I think I will now refer to ths trip as my Book Tour.
Finally, I will be having a book launch for Summer and Bird at the splendid BookPeople in Austin, Texas at 7pm October 9. Please come! Please come even if you live in Maine!
But all of that is just an excuse to post my favorite of all the lovely, lucky things that have come my way recently. My agent David Dunton's daughter, Hannah Dunton, first read Summer and Bird in manuscript when she was 9. She recently turned 11, and is still thinking about the book, as evidenced by this incredibly awesome manga-influenced drawing:
Image by Hannah Dunton.
The blonde is Summer -- she is holding a notebook (EXCELLENT detail) and thinking about a little red bird who is very important both to her and the story. Bird is the smaller one, with the browner hair and slyer smile. The creepy face on the upper left is the Puppeteer, also known as The Bird Mask, because we never see her face. The other images are an owl holding a key (oh that's right you're wondering why; well, get the book!) and the rebus-like "picture letter" that is all their mother left them when she disappeared.
This picture is my new favorite thing. Thank you, Hannah.
Been thinking about narrative voice again. I already wrote about how it's the make or break of a book for me. And the thing is, not to be over-obvious here, but every book has a voice. It's not always as in-your-face as, say, Lemony Snicket (oh how I love Lemony Snicket), but there's no such thing as a transparent narrator, unless you just avoid looking at/listening to the narrative voice, which I think maybe sometimes we do: about which more below.
First though: am re-reading 100 years of solitude right now, in translation, so of course I can't say anything precise about the music or diction. But in translation the narration's most distinct characteristic is the narrator's weird, outside-of-time perspective--its crazy temporal distance for the events it recounts. It's a much more 
genuinely God-like view than the traditional omniscient third person, because you are reminded over and over that the narrator can see all of time, all at once, and is not caught in time with the characters. He (oh let's call the voice 'he') lures you into sharing that view when he refers casually to events that will not happen for scores of years--what one character will think on his deathbed; how another will continue with some decision until she dies. You learn that 17 Aurelianos will be killed all in one night, and you think that's all you'll ever know of them. But then 100 pages later you begin to get to know the 17 Aurelianos, and it kills you, knowing what will happen to them.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you're just reading for the story or the characters of this book, you'll miss a lot of its pleasures, which is maybe why 100 years of solitude's SparkNotes has a slightly higher Goodreads rating than the book itself (H/T to my husband who pointed this out to me.).
Do I sound like your most spoilsporty, least-favorite English teacher? I feel like I sound like that, bah.
This all comes because I've been reading through excited pencil notes I took a few years ago from the book Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler's brilliant biography of the abstract painter Robert Irwin. That book broke my head open a few years ago--you know how sometimes you can acually feel the sledgehammer crash through and the light pour in.
In the book, Irwin talks a lot about the question of figure vs. ground. He talks about a painting,
one of those where [the artist has] made a line down the center, hard on one edge and soft on the other, across a large field of, say, red. If as a young artist you were to take that seriously as a purely aesthetic experience – how that line coursed through that space, what its relationship to that physical world was – then, given what I’m adding to it, it would be very difficult to understand how they could hang that painting on those two rods coming down from the ceiling: How were you supposed to separate the line in the painting from the rods on the wall?
[me again]. The voice of a narrative is not the same as the frame of a picture -- it's more akin to line or color, I guess. And yet a lot of readers seem able to set voice aside. I say that because holy smokes, some books with pretty stupid voices are awfully popular. And I would like to be the spoilsport who urges everyone to consider paying attention to the voice, after all, not to please me-as-snotty-English-teacher, but because the voice offers so much information and so much pleasure, and because arguably it's not good for us to shut out swaths of what we see because we've mentally declared them meaningless.
Irwin talks about how we can ignore that ground, that frame, everything around the painting, because we're assigning value and meaning to the painting, but not to the frame or the wall behind it. Which as a habit of mind is maybe a bit creepy:
[this is Irwin] . . . when you have a construct like that, that's how you go through the world. In other words, you don’t just do it when you're looking at painting. We’re talking about a mental construct to which the whole civilization has deeply committed itself. And what it says, simply, is that as I walk through the world, I bring into focus certain things which are meaningful, and others are by degrees less in focus, dependent upon their meaningfulness in terms of what I’m doing to the point where there are certain things that are totally out of focus and invisible.
Don't get me wrong: I love story and character and dialogue an all that. I guess I'm just putting in a plug for curiosity and open eyes and the more hidden pleasures of narrative.
Book Expo America is happening in New York right this second, and I'm stuck here in Austin doing a dumb old play.
(I'm kidding: it's a hilarious play that I am lucky to be in--boom, by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb--which you can see through June 23 30 [Ed. note: we extended!] at Hyde Park Theatre in Austin. Buy tickets right now at the Capitol T Theatre website; or, if you like, read a rave review in the Statesman first.)
But even though I am not at BEA, Summer and Bird is. ARCs are being handed out at the Dutton Children's booth, and my gorgeous cover is blown up all big right next to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, a book I loved to pieces and in tears:
So suddenly a few dozen people on Goodreads have the book marked to-read, which makes it feel very real and thrilling.
And on top of all that, the first review has been posted on the blog at Alamosa Books, a children's bookstore in Albuquerque. It's all way too exciting, and the book doesn't actually come out for almost four months, so I need to get off the nets and back into drafting mode for book #2.
But if I may summarize: yay.
I am rehearsing a play, drafting book #2, and am soon to tackle galleys for Summer and Bird. As I picture it, my life will be so much more spacious and free a month from now, when I'll have nothing to do but draft & draft. In reality I think Spacious Freedom is a state of mind I am not very good at achieving.
But meanwhile, that Writer's Room project described in my previous blog post has migrated to HuffPo, which is lovely.
Here's that photo from the project. by the excellent Leon Alesi:
Photo by Leon Alesi.
I will actually give you candy, too, just like the song (George Clooney's aunt! famous song! look it up).
So this weekend I am participating in the Writer's Room Home Studio Tour, part of the Fusebox Festival here in Austin. I am one of several local writers inviting people into our homes from 11am-3pm Sturday and Sunday. We'll each be doing short readings on the hour. If you come at any other time, you can wander around--various writers have planned various things, and my own home will be tarted up a bit to look more like the inside of my head--and, at my house, have tea and chocolate and possibly muffins (all three are critical components of my Process). Perhaps we can talk about writing, or whatever you like.
One wall of my writing room. Don't expect it all to be this fancy!I am not sure whether to be worried that no one will come, or that only my friends will come, or that lots of strangers will come. All those possibilities look scary! That said: please come! Here's a page with a couple of brief audio clips of me (interview and reading excerpts) related to this project, as well as an awesome photograph by Leon Alesi.
And don't just come to MY house. The other participating writers are all blazing stars: Annie La Ganga & Bill Cotter, Spike Gillespie, Robert Faires, Wayne Alan Brenner, and Amparo Garcia-Crow. And I've now been to most of their houses, which are wonderful. You can see photos and hear excerpts of them on that Writer's Room site.
See you this weekend, I hope (I think).
I did another Fusebox blog, this one about the fascinating Suzanne Bocanegra artist talk When a Priest Marries a Witch. The talk is performed by Paul Lazar, which is awfully cool. I'd like to get him to perform key moments in my life.