family – Page 9 – Laurie Halse Anderson

November 22, 2007

Final ALAN pics, thoughts & NYC observations

I would like to say for the record that I am not a workaholic. Even though I am posting this on Thanksgiving morning, I am not crazy. We celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday so that various offspring could climb over to other branches on the family tree today. BH and I and the kids were going to get up early to run in a Turkey Trot 5K, but it is sleeting and snowing and the fire is warm. We’ll run later, when it isn’t life-threatening.

So I am bloated on pie and mashed potatoes made with an alarming amount of butter and the only thing I am capable of is blogging.

A couple observations about Manhattan:
1. Some of the new signs indicating the bike path through Central Park have a helmet painted on the head of the stick figure. They made me giggle.

2. Every third person in Manhattan now owns a dog that is the size of a loaf of bread.

3. There are halal food vendors on the street. (God, I love this country.)

4. Pigeons make a great sound with that first swoooosh of their wings.

5. I had one celebrity sighting: Camille Paglia on 58th Street. At least, I am pretty sure it was Camille Paglia. When I was running in Central Park, I saw a woman who was Gilda Radner’s doppelganger. Obviously, it wasn’t Gilda, unless she has taken to haunting Central Park.

A number of other authors and teachers blogged about the festivities: Jen Robinson, Susane Colasanti, She Who Knows Most Everything Teri Lesesne (who has posted Powerpoint presentations with terrific book recommendations), Jo Knowles, David Lubar, Linda Sue Park, Cecil Castellucci, and Sara Ryan. (Did I miss anyone?)

Highlights of the trip for me:
1. Meeting hundreds of friendly, kind, generous teachers who took the time to tell me about their experiences sharing my books with their students. And seeing the many teachers and professors who have become my friends. I am so very thankful for all of them.

2. Listening to the performances of the incredibly talented poets from Urban Word NYC.

3. Learning to identify Garret Freymann-Weyr, Ann Angel, and Jo Knowles. I am really bummed that I didn’t get a chance to have coffee or wine or pastries with them. Maybe we should get together and have coffee and wine and pastries. I apologize for messing up their names in my earlier post.

4. Getting up to the podium to speak and not being wretchedly anxious for the first time ever.

5. Signing 90 quizzes about SPEAK for a new teacher named Dena from Long Island.

6. Savoring the outstanding coffee in my hotel.

7. Seeing the first sketches for the CHAINS cover.

The last few road photos

November 5, 2007

My adventure

Image and video hosting by TinyPic Yep. BH and I spent a long weekend at the 2007 World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY.

“But Laurie,” you say. “You don’t write fantasy. You don’t write science fiction. You write contemporary YA and dabble in historical fiction. What on earth were you doing there?”

For years, whenever teen audiences would ask what I read when I was in high school, I’d blush and confess that I wouldn’t touch realistic stories back then with a ten-foot pole. I would only read sci-fi and fantasy. I don’t know that I will ever write in those genres, but I love them, and I adore many of the practitioners of the art. So I decided to treat myself and attend a conference as a fan instead of a speaker, to sit in the audience, to be nameless and faceless and perfectly content.

It was a blast. We saw Sharyn November () who was nominated for the Anthology award, and Theo and Holly Black . I sat in on panels exploring ghost stories, fantasy worlds, Australian writers, female fantasy authors from the last two hundred years, archetypes, and then some more ghosts.

Plus I got to fangrrl over a few heroes, like Tamora Pierce (who gave a wonderful reading)

and Garth Nix.

We loved the city of Saratoga Springs. We ate (and drank) a lot at Saratoga Coffee Traders, chatted up Dale the Cheese/Meat Guy at Putnam Market, and barely escaped spending every last dime on yarn at Saratoga Needle Arts.

We stayed at a terrific B&B, The Mansion, outside of town.

They serve a killer breakfast there.

This lady stared at us while we slept. That was a little creepy, I admit.

We also took several trips out to the Saratoga National Battlefield. On Saturday we snuck in a run through a good portion of it. This is the view looking southeast from Bemis Heights. Definitely need to go back.

Before heading home, we wandered north into the Adirondacks to visit the graves of my grandparents and this, their last home. Shed some good tears, held them in my heart, and was very, very filled with happy memories.

Then I introduced my husband to Oscar’s Smokehouse, close to Grandpa’s. We stocked up on nitrate-laden fatty animal products and headed home.

For those who have heard one of my recent speeches, this was a weekend of well-filling. Will anything I saw or experienced turn up in a story? I dunno. That wasn’t the point. The point was to stretch myself, to do something new, to laugh and eat and have fun.

Mission accomplished. My muse is fat and happy and the well is filled to the brim.

October 27, 2007

Leopard Pounce

I have a confession to make.

Our family is Mixed.

Yep. Half of us (two out of four kids, my first husband and his wife) support the Dark Side.**

The rest of us (the other two kids, BH, & me) choose to live in The Light.

Two additional family members- my ex’s stepson Alex (who considers himself to be my nephew once or twice removed) and Steve (who is practically a son-in-law) – have been making bold steps out of the Darkness and into the Light of Macdom, the Light of Computers That Don’t Crash (hardly ever), the Light of Goodness.

Got that? (Yes, it is a complex family. We are thinking of having trading cards made up so we can keep us straight.)

Daughter Number Three, aka Meredith, aka adastraperasper is the Goddess of the Good. She’s a Mac tech at her college, and helps me out whenever I get confused. (Which is rare, because Macs rock.) All of this is to explain why Mer and Steve lined up in the King of Prussia mall last night to buy a family version (five licenses) for the new version of the Mac OS X operating system called Leopard.

Veeeery long line waiting for the launch.

Line continued in the store.

Happy Steve, almost 100% converted, at the after-party.

Leopard joins the family!

edited to add Meredith’s comments
“so yes, we did get tshirts! yay! a family license ends up, after tax, $210.

I did run into one, slightly major issue. I used file vault on os 10.4 (Tiger) to protect my files. It was a way of scrambling all of the files on my drive so the without passwords and such they could not crack my drive. I began using it to get in the habit for when I will be a teacher and dealing with confidential information. Anyway, I did not turn off file vault before I installed 10.5(Leopard), which meant that when Leopard was fully installed it was trying to read encrypted files created in a past OS. Well, this didn’t work so well. After some googling, I found out that many people were having this same issue. Luckily, I know a good bit about macs and how to find errors and fix them. So I started to poke around and eventually got to a point that I didn’t know what else to do. I was running into permissions errors everywhere. So I called up the wonderful people in Apple Care, and even though I had to be on the phone with them for awhile they eventually helped me. I ended up just backing up my most important files and deleting everything and installing a fresh OS. It is something that I had been wanting to do for awhile, because over the course of three years you end up with lots of little stuff that needs to be deleting. So the only downside to this is I am going to have to reinstall all of my applications, but in the end I have Leopard on my computer so it is totally worth it!!!”

** Despite their allegiance to Windows, we forgive the aforementioned relatives for their trespasses and honor their choices. All families need breathing room for diversity and tolerance.

We leave you with this classic Apple commercial from 1984. All hail the revolution. Enjoy.

October 25, 2007

on and on

My father-in-law is responding to the meds and is awake and aware. Grandmother Death seems to have given him a pass this week.

I am at the end of the revision of my historical – huzzah – and am looking forward to getting back to the new WIP.

Our problems with Time Warner Cable – messed up cable, internet and phone – continue to drive us crazy and make their technicians curse and kick the ground. This has been going on for a month now. I am about to cancel all of the services, permanently, and see this as the Universe’s way of giving me more time to write and read.

A couple of people have asked me what I think about J.K. Rowling’s announcement that Dumbledore was gay. I think she misses writing, that’s what I think. I suspect that now the pressure is off to finish the series, and the hoopla over the last book’s publication has died down, she finds herself thinking about her characters a lot. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s writing about them, but she doesn’t want to tell anybody until she’d finished.

What do you think?

October 24, 2007

Reality steps in

It really was a loverly day yesterday, even after it turned a little sad in the evening. Thank you so much to all of youse guys for the birthday wishes. It was fun reading through them. BH gave me the best birthday present ever: he made us a bed (we’ve been doing the grad student sleep-on-mattress-and-boxspring-on-the-floor since we were married) – and he made it for free, using old doors and wood he had laying around. He even made matching night tables. It is gorgeous. If I wasn’t already married to him, I’d be dragging him to the justice of the peace right now.

This birthday was better than most; I finally have a sense of who I am, I am surrounded by people I love, and I have the chance to do good work. Except for when I become a stupidhead and whine about the trivial stuff, life is amazing.

Life is also balanced by death. When we got in with the sushi last night, we had a phone call from the nursing home which sent us right back to the car. My 86-year-old father-in-law was in the ER. He made it through the night, and given that he is as tough as nails, he might well come through this crisis, too, but it’s looking like he’s going to be in the hospital for a while. This might sound weird, but it was really nice to have the chance to hold his hand and talk quietly to him for the hours until they admitted him. So even though you don’t want to be in an emergency room on your birthday, it was all good.

Sara Ryan sent along a link to an article about one of the reasons why teenagers have such a hard time getting through the day. It reminded her of Kate in CATALYST.

And Sharyn November gave me the heads-up on a fabulous shirts-off combo of social protest and performance art. When we were doing some school shopping with Number One Son in September, we both remarked on how A&F was beating males up with unattainable body images to make them feel bad and buy more. It’s nice to see somebody fight back.