Pithy Insights on How Writing Novel #2 is Working Out. Maybe.

(Just to give you some idea before you plunge in: This post used to be called “What if my next novel sucks?” until I had the blinding insight that this might be a poor way to present myself.)

In my first blog entry, I promised pithy insights about how writing novel #2 was working out.

I lied.

There is nothing pithy about this. There is nothing short and sweet. Except for all the fragments, which, while they certainly aren’t long, I would consider more truncated than short.

I’m not athletic, but metaphorically speaking, I think I’m in the part of the marathon where you develop tunnel vision, all you want in life is to finish and finish well, but before your endorphins kick in and propel you across the finish line. The part of the marathon where you really need all those motivational bottles of water (or, in my case, chocolate cupcakes) that are thrust at you from the sidelines (or, in my case, self-procured from the Viktor Benesh bakery counter).

This is not bitching. I am completely overjoyed to be doing this, I love doing this, this is what I always wanted to be doing and I think I appreciate it even more because it took me a very long time to get here. But it's hard.

Even though I sometimes see snippets of scenes in my head, even though I see the rooms and the houses and where in the parking lot the car parks and the posture of all the characters.

Even though I feel the atmosphere of the night of this book’s cataclysmic disaster (It would appear that everything I write has a cataclysmic disaster in there somewhere.), how foggy it was and how it started to rain and how the light from the streetlamps pooled and the eerie glow from the pink Malibu lights in the hotel garden.

Even though I’ve done this once before, I did fit it all together once before so presumably I can do it again, even though I am in love with the characters again.

Because the doubts are the same as before: What if it’s flat? What if it’s heavy-handed? What if it’s incoherent? What if it’s flat, heavy-handed, and incoherent? What if, even though, bless you Anne Lamott for green-lighting the shitty first draft, this is as good as it gets? What if it’s dull and stupid and I can’t even tell it’s dull and stupid and I submit it with a self-satisfied smile on my face?

This is what dogs are for.

My dog, having noticed that I’m huddled, racked with doubt, over a hot laptop, has taken advantage of the opportunity to steal some underwear from the hamper and frolic through the house with it. And as hard as this is, it’s not as impossible as catching a really fast dog with dirty underwear in his mouth.

Gotta try.

(Photo of dog cavorting with underwear in mouth to follow.)

31 Romanians -- Why Blogger, Why?

Okay, this isn't actually a blog post, this is an informative follow-up.

I just thought I should share that even though not a single Latvian ever came back (Forgive me, Lativians, if I was somehow culturally insensitive.), I am now besieged by Romanians. Thirty-one Romanians, to be exact.

And I find myself wondering, is it possible that this isn't another outcropping of my inexplicable popularity in Eastern Europe? Is it possible that I'm being hacked by a nefarious offshore hacker with an unhealthy interest in teen novels? And just when I was on the verge of international fame and vast numbers of pre-sales in Bucharest...(Don't look at me like that. It could happen. They have Amazon in Bucharest, and probably more bookstores -- remember bookstores?-- than we do.)

In any case, I would like to extend the same invitation to the thirty-one Romanians who showed up here 45 minutes ago as I did with their Latvian fellow travelers: Come back. Tell me who you are and how you got here? Are your friend or foe? Are you avid followers of English-language ARC's set in LA prep schools, or was your presence here a happy accident?

Spill, because I'm mystified.

My Life as a Writer Who Used to be Really Awful

I’ve written all my life, in the since-I-could-hold-a-pencil model of the single-minded writer. I remember being seven and printing “Chip and the Sea” in one of those wonderful, old fashioned notebooks with the marbled black-and-white covers, bound with ribbon along the spine. Almost too good for the climax, which read “You must be my long lost brother!”

I remember a poem that opened “When the misty, balmy, silver-clad dawn…” a time of day I had never actually been awake to experience, and I shudder to tell you what the dawn was doing, but suffice to say it involved a certain amount of scampering.

I remember a staggeringly horrible free-verse story about a rape, expressed entirely through nature metaphors, which was a good thing because I wrote it way before I’d ever actually seen a naked man.

And I remember angsty college poems that expressed my unyielding individuality by railing against houses that scarred mountainsides and plastic and Barbie dolls, except that, oh yeah, Malvina Reynolds and the entire women’s movement had kind of been there first.

I was too cool for school.

Indeed, I left high school before actually learning any math or serious science to attend the College of Creative Studies on the backs of all those scarred mountainsides and bad Barbies, attending poetry seminars I departed with the memory of (someone else’s) poem that read “suck, suck, suck” ad infinitum, filling the entire sheet of paper, except for the white space that spelled “fuck.” I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of this, and transferred, taking my creativity with me. At my next college, I came up with a stunning short story that more or less paraphrased a piece of “La Chute.” Only in English. I don’t remember much about it, except that it was profound.

Indeed, there is hardly a single chapter of my life as a writer that isn’t extremely easy to make fun of. (My first PB manuscript was entitled “Binky, the Very Rude Finger.” Not kidding.) Except that throughout all these misbegotten adventures in dreadful literature, I’ve been completely serious about what I was doing.

Even when I didn’t think that I was any good at it or could make a go of it and tried out a series of other (failed) career possibilities, I kept writing. I didn’t see it as a journey – indeed, I am loath to go into the journey, transcendent power of language, cosmically transformative whatchadinget aspect of it all, possibly because I really love what I’m doing and there’s just so much laughing at myself doing what I’m doing that I can take. I just kind of saw it as what I do.

Only now, doing exactly what I’ve always been doing although, one hopes, somewhat more skillfully, it would appear that I have arrived. Professionally speaking. My fifth picture book is showing up in March, the most explicitly religious folktale I’ve ever done, the plot of which turns on prayer and the value of an optimistic faith, the same month as Where It Began, a steamy YA novel full of sex and drugs and rock and roll.

I am officially a children’s book writer and YA novelist. (To authors who have written 20 prize-winning novels of extraordinary depth and power, I say, yeah, well I have an agent and a business-sized envelope with business receipts in it and a scary deadline.)

And while those who use their optimistic faith for more cosmically transformative ends might look askance at me for saying this, it really did take an optimistic faith to get here. Even when I could tell it was bad. Even when the misty, balmy, silver-clad dawn was breaking over Chip’s long lost brother. Even when my critical and satirical abilities outstripped my writing ability by maybe 27 to 1. I just kept doing it because I more or less had to and, as the hero of The Wooden Sword will tell anyone who reads it four months from now, everything has turned out just as it should.

And thank God for that – how embarrassing would it be if it hadn’t?

Greetings, Latvians!

The ways of the internet are strange and mysterious. Obsessed as I am with this blog and whether anyone is coming to visit, and if so, why, and if not, why not, you would think I would have picked up on this fact early on and be a lot calmer about it.

And I was a lot calmer. Until a few days ago, when I had 28 visitors from Latvia.



All right, for those of you with highly popular blogs that get hundreds of visitors from foreign lands traipsing through regularly, this probably wouldn’t be that big a deal. But suffice to say, on that particular day, the 28 Latvians were virtually the only people to come by.

What can I say?

Greeting Latvian blog visitors! I am absolutely delighted that you came over, but simply put, I don’t get it. I looked up your referring sites and I came up with something that appeared to be a search engine that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and I, not reading any languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, have no idea what you were searching for.

It could have been anything. A couple of weeks ago a visitor from the U.K. found me when he was searching for the image of a large, grey short-haired dog. Apparently my mother-in-law’s tiny brown and white Chihuahua, who appears sitting pertly on my mother-in-law’s chaise in my post #1, filled the bill. Hmmm.

But back to the Latvians. I ask, why now? And why 28 of you? Did every member of an unusually large book group dedicated to English language picture book folk tales all come looking for me simultaneously? Was it a weird coincidence that occurs with the frequency of Haley’s Comet sightings, but with less celestial inevitability? Was it some Eastern-European version of internet punking? Or was I having my 15 seconds of fame in absentia in the suburbs of Riga?

I may never know.

That is why I am posting with this simple message: Come back, Latvian blog visitors! Please. I am obsessed with you and until you tell me who you are and what in God’s name you were doing here, I will remain mystified, obsessed, and confused.