Blog

Yay! It’s Banned Book Week and this is still a country where you can read what you want…. most of the time.

Why should you care about this?

Because these people are organized, well-funded, and trying to take over your school and library. And there are many more where they come from.

Are you going to let them?

My quick weekend update:
Saturday – ran the Mexico Cider Run 5k, in my best time of the year. Maybe I was especially motivated because the run is a fundraiser for our town’s library. I love the village of Mexico, NY. Our volunteer firefighters made sure we were safe was we ran up hill and down dale across town, and a bunch of high school and middle school kids volunteered to keep us hydrated and on course. I ran most of the race behind a little girl who cracked me up because, in addition to almost beating me, she deliberately jumped in every puddle we came across. I saw The Dog again, too. The Dog and his owner have been in almost every race I’ve run this summer. The Dog is a great animal, he’s really fun to watch. But I must admit, it irks me a little that he keeps beating me. My next running goal is to finish within a tail wag of The Dog. Oh, and the shirts that we got at race. Best. Shirts. Ever!!!

Then we watched NOS play soccer. BH played ball boy. I was the wiped out mom sprawled in a lawn chair on the sidelines.

Sunday I spent straining my eyes to read 18th-century newspapers on microfilm at the library of Syracuse University. And last night I had one of the most intense, most horrifying, absolutely freak-out quality nightmares I have ever had in my life. Woke up screaming. And no, I will NOT be writing a book about this one. If I tried, I’d wind up in a padded cell.

Drove into The Big City yesterday for lunch with an old friend and to have my photo taken. The lunch I was looking forward to. Having my picture taken… I’ll choose the root canal, please.

(Lunch was at Phoebe’s. Food was good, not great, but the atmosphere was wonderful. (Nota bene! They have a coffee shop, serve breakfast and have WiFi. Might be a good public writing space.)

After lunch and lots of good chat, it was off for the pain and torture sessions. Background: Syracuse was hatched a wonderful new magazine, Central New York, a few months ago. They don’t have a web presence yet, but it is very much along the lines of Philadelphia Magazine; articles about the region, interesting people, arts calender, etc. It has an outstanding design and extremely high production values and is enough to make a Central NYer proud.

So anyway, they let me write a small piece for it that will come out in November. Which made me very happy up until the moment they asked me to come down so they could take my picture. “You don’t have to do that,” I said, as the hives broke out. “I had a new PR photo taken in May. Really, it’s nice. It almost looks like me.”

It wasn’t good enough.

So that’s how I came to be standing in downtown Syracuse at 2:30 yesterday afternoon (across from the Post-Standard** building which is very cool), wearing a winter jacket and bright orange mittens, holding a bowl of salt potatoes that were nestled in a bed of dry ice (to make fake steam) contorting my face into bizarre expressions of salt potato lust. I’m just grateful that we didn’t cause any accidents.

Once I got over feeling really dumb, it was fun, so a big shout out to Linda, Tim, and Dave for showing me such a good time.

Salt potatoes really are a food of the gods, you know.

**Congrats to the Post-Standard staff for pulling down 29 Associated Press awards!

Short story author and Syracuse University professor George Saunders won a MacArthur “genius grant” yesterday. Yay George! Because Syracuse’s newspaper, the Post-Standard has not only a book critic, but a blog about books, I can alert you to an online piece Saunders wrote for the New Yorker. (Thanks for the link, Laura.)

George is one of many, many working writers in the region. I’ve mentioned them before, but it’s a topic near and dear to my heart. Who else can you run into at the library or coffee shop? Bruce Coville, for one. Tammy Pierce is moving up here (December?) and Suzan-Lori Parks. Who else has ties here? Tobias Wolf, Mary Karr, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Seybold, Jay McInerney, John Berendt, professor Gwyneth Bolton, poet and professor Bruce Smith, Raymond Carver, Steven Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, mystery writer John McDonald, and scholar Alison Lurie. Norma and Harry and Anne Fox Mazer. SCBWI maven Ellen Yeomans.

Who am I missing?

Central New York has a rich artistic and literary history and is a magnificent place to live. Maybe you should move up here. Now.

I have a question for you readers in the area – where is the best public space to write in Central New York?

If you don’t live around here – where do you like to write? Be specific, give addresses (but only if it is a public space).

This is an amazing story.

Make sure you look at the slideshow…. their beautiful faces…

Yeah, it’s here: Talk Like A Pirate Day. Savvy?

My mom’s doctor visit yesterday wound up taking way longer than either of us had planned because the doctor wanted a bunch of tests, blah, blah, blah. I think there is a rule that old people must have a specific number of annoying tests performed on their bodies a year, and Mom had fallen behind on her quota. The good part was in the middle of it all, we had a chance to go to Dunkin Donuts. There is something very soothing about hanging with my mom while she drinks coffee and eats a plain doughnut.

Like fantasy? Then hang with Firebird (LJ version or MySpace), the love child of my Editress Major, Sharyn.

Today’s writing job – figure out the still-snarled plot problem in chapters 10-12 of the The New Book. It’s raining, which makes work easier, and the distractions should be few. If I’m a really good girl and figure the problem out, I’m going to the gym early.

I would have loved to watch Eudora Welty eat a doughnut and drink coffee, too. I must read all of these!

Stay away from spinach, me buckos, and don’t let the scurvy sons of mothers get you down.