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Kavanah

I am finally beginning to feel the burn-out that dogged me all summer begin to fade away. This is officially a Good Thing. That balanced life of awareness, intention, hard work, and fun is on the horizon!

I am almost through the brainstorming draft of my new YA. This is the fast and dirty draft: very fast, very dirty. It’s about 35 pages long, with another 40 pages of notes in a different file. The actual writing of the first draft begins tomorrow morning. And that’s all I want to say about that.

I have now tagged all of my 2007 entries in my LiveJournal. I hope to get to 2006 and 2005 very soon. This will be useful for people who are looking for specific information (writing process, Twisted, Speak) or who just want to see all my pictures of Poland or snow. Do you use tags when looking for info?

BH and I ran in the Salmon River 5K last Saturday, despite the heat and humidity. Much to our surprise, we ran a decently fast race. (He could have run much faster, but he was a gentleman and ran with me the whole way.) Even more to our surprise, we each placed third in our age-groups and won a medal. That was very cool. Our knee trouble over the summer has prevented us from entering the half-marathon in Philly later this month, but we’ll be running in our hometown Mexico 5K Cider Run this Saturday. Come join us! You’ll support our local library and have a blast.

I had an Animal, Vegetable, Miracle moment (you must read that book) in the grocery store yesterday. I had this fancy-pants fish recipe I wanted to make that called for a salsa made for fresh oranges. The problem? Not only were the oranges four for three dollars, they had been imported from Peru. We have been making a real effort to reduce our carbon footprint and support local farmers. Oranges from Peru do not meet those goals. So I drove past an orchard on the way home, bought near ten pounds of peaches for nine dollars, and made peach salsa. And yes, I am feeling rather smug about this, thank you.

I have speeches to work on this afternoon, and thirty pounds of fresh green beans to blanche and freeze. And you don’t even want to know how many tomatoes are waiting in my kitchen. They snicker as I walk by. We’ll see who has the last laugh….

Happy Birthday, Penni! Happy Birthday, Alex!!!

Note to Danielle I’ll be emailing you within the next couple of days. Thank you so much for what you sent!

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Reader question about writing process

On my Facebook Wall, Robert W. from Michigan asked a great question: …But, especially with you working on your next novel, how is it you approach each book? What is your general approach to writing a book? Your novels always seem SO carefully pieced together, and I’ve never read endings better than the ones to your works, and I’m just curious what your process is for that.

First, thank you for the kind words about the structure of my books and their endings.I don’t know how my fellow authors do it, but I work long and hard on each novel.

I take one of two paths when I am working on a book; I either enter the story through character or I enter it through plot. When I start with character, I tend to meander around and write a lot of scenes that are eventually cut, but that help me understand the background and motivations of the people in the story. If I start with plot, the scenes are developed in a much more systematic fashion, but I keep a separate journal in which I develop my characters.

If you saw any of my first drafts, you would die laughing. They are truly pathetic. (For the record I would like to note that nobody ever gets to see my first drafts. It is the only way I can hang on to my dignity.) I don’t know that I am a good writer. I do believe I am a better than average reviser.

When I start a book, I usually have a sense of the character and at least one or two scenes have popped in my head. Examples: Speak – rape survivor who hasn’t told about the attack trying to get through her freshman year in high school. Twisted – average teen guy driven to the brink of suicide. Prom – working class girl figures out that the world is filled with possibilities. Catalyst – Brilliant, perfect girl finds out that straight As mean nothing in real life.

No book ever drops fully-formed into my head. It always takes months and months of writing, questioning, back-tracking, pondering, applying the principals of logic and human behavior and checking for spelling mistakes. And that is what I am going to go do right now – work on my new story. (Sorry I can’t be more specific about what I’m writing right now. The Muse would be horrified if I spilled the beans this early. Ask me again in six months.)

Happy Free Hugs Day!!

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Late Night Critter Adventures in the Forest

So yesterday was the worst allergy day of the year, hands down. I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed (terrifying the dog) and then my asthma flared up and I coughed and coughed and coughed (alarming my Beloved Husband). I sneezed and coughed so much that I messed up my back, and started walking around the house like a mummy whose bandages were coming loose. Not fun.

Somehow I made it to bedtime. I felt so crappy, I didn’t even care that the Colts were playing the Saints. I took enough medication to knock out an elephant and fell very deeply asleep.

Which explains why BH had a hard time waking me up at 3:30am.

Apparently, he spent at least five minutes doing the gentle-nudge-sweetie?sweetie? thing. Then he said, “Honey, you need to wake up, but don’t be afraid.”

My eyes snapped open. Adrenaline surged.

BH explained that we had another critter in the house. (Critters adore us so much, they are always trying to move in. But they never pay the rent on time and they hold loud parties and let their friends smoke, so we’ve had to adopt a firm “No Critter” rule.)

At first I thought he was saying the critter was somehow poised above my head, preparing to drop on me. Second adrenaline surge. But, no. This one was wedged between a window and the window screen. There was a hole in the screen, and BH couldn’t tell if the critter made the hole in order to escape out of the house, or in an attempt to break in.

In any event, BH couldn’t find the camera.

I was so grateful that nothing with claws was about to drop on my face, I staggered out of bed and found the camera. And then I fell back into my coma. BH took pictures of the critter.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic It was a flying squirrel.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic A flying squirrel is basically a small rat with a hot cape, a fear of owls, and a banzai attitude.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic But as far as rats go, flying squirrels are cuter than most. And I will forever love this one because it did not jump on my head. After taking the pictures, BH opened the window and the little guy sprung off into the darkness.

Now I am going to lay flat on the couch and moan about my back, all the while I try not to sneeze or cough. The snow cannot get here fast enough, I swear. Ragweed is the devil’s handmaiden.

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And the TWISTED teacher winner is…..

Julia Borgisi of Kenmore East High School in Tonawanda, NY!!!

::stands and applauds wildly::

Here are Julia’s correct answers:

What is the significance of the name of the game Tyler plays on his computer?

” Tophet, to summarize, means child sacrifice and/or hell. As Tyler is playing the game, he is living through his own personal hell as his “real” world crumbles around him. As he is conquering more levels (and advancing through hell) his personal life seems to get more and more convoluted. When he becomes stuck in the game, it seems to be at times where he is reevaluating his options in life (sacrificing himself through suicide being one very real choice). When he does “beat” the game at the end, he has also beaten the odds and survived his own twisted past; he is finally able to look beyond both the game and high school to see a real future.”
  
Which classic American play, often taught in high schools, helped inspire TWISTED?

“I think Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is a perfect match- I could easily see a significant connection here. Tyler’s dad can be compared to Willy Loman- a man who is slowly losing it all career-wise and demands nothing but perfection from his children (especially his eldest son). Mr. Miller sees Tyler as a major disappointment, and Tyler’s imperfections fuel Bill’s anger and resentment towards his family. In both works we have deaths, whether literal or figurative. Willy commits suicide, while Tyler contemplates it and almost does the deed. We have the death of dreams- Willy’s dream for a successful career again and a successful son, Tyler’s dream of a relationship with Bethany and enjoying popularity. However, at the end of TWISTED we see new doors opening for Tyler and the Miller family; Tyler and his dad are both able to take charge of their lives, thus creating the possibility of a new life for the family as a whole.”

Pretty much everyone who wrote in got the first question correct. It was the second one that threw so many of you off. Most teachers thought I was referring to Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. In fact, several wrote in with very convincing arguments about the connection between The Crucible and Twisted.

(Hold on to your red pencils, friends, we are about to have an interesting lit-crit moment.)

You see, I have never read The Crucible, nor have I have seen it performed. So while the parallels may be there, they are coincidental. Or maybe not so much, if you want to take the approach that both Miller and I concern ourselves with the emotional wasteland that lies behind the curtain called The American Dream, and the devastation visited upon families that lose their centers of love and integrity. (I offer that free of charge to anyone who is looking for a good thesis topic.)

I have, however, always been a huge fan of Death of a Salesman. When I saw it performed in New York with Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman, it left me so devastated that I sobbed for blocks and blocks as we walked uptown from the theater. My earliest thoughts about Tyler, the main character in TWISTED, were that he could have been the grandson of a man like Willy Loman. Tyler has to pay the price for the crushed, misshapen dreams of both his father and grandfather; men who thought that by earning a lot of money, they would be successful, and whose children paid the price for their ambition, confusion, and rage.

I hadn’t planned to do this, but one of the entries had such an amazing analysis of the Tophet question, I am awarding it an Honorable Mention and will be sending something off in the mail. The winner of the Surprise! Prize is Cheryl Maxian, of Fabius-Pompey High School.

Here is Cheryl’s explanation of the significance of Tyler’s computer game: “The significance of the game of Tophet is two fold: The main character describes the game as the player makes himself as powerful a demon as possible to survive the 66 levels of torment. Obviously our character Tyler has survived and is surviving all kinds of torment. At the beginning of the novel he’s at level 42 which would represent him already getting through 2/3 of his life’s goal (he has almost completed his community service and has become buff and stronger because of it). As the book comes to an end, Tyler completes the game and must choose his destiny – either that of good or evil. He has come so far and survived so much that it is clear that he will choose a path of good.

On a second level, Tophet is an ancient place where Phoenicians sacrificed their children to appease the gods. I think this is metaphorical for the various parents in the novel who “sacrifice” their children’s well-being by either ignoring them or by spoiling them, as they only pay attention to their own needs.”

Clearly, Cheryl has found her calling!

Any thoughts about these answers or anything else related to this? I heard from a number of you who want a contest for the brave souls studying to be English teachers. What would be a useful/fun prize?

In other news, the kids in our area went back to school today. I am SO GLAD I was not one of them.