Asheville, Part 1: the Good...

Okay, y'all - considering it's been over a month since my Asheville writing retreat ended, I figured I better write about it, or I might never get to it.

It was super long, so I'll divide it up into three posts for your bite-size reading pleasure. :-P

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I have thought, more than a dozen times, that if Asheville was located on the coast, instead of in the mountains, it would be the perfect city for me to live in.

Technically, this is the Blue Ridge Parkway, but it's very close to Asheville. Feast your eyes on the prettiness!!

This definitely factored into my decision about where I would go write and try to finish this manuscript.

This is the Biltmore House. If you look up fancy in my brain's dictionary, this is what you would fine.

Maybe I've visited it one too many times at Christmas - to see the Biltmore House all lit up and sparkly, but to me, it feels like a Southern fairy tale world, like in a Sarah Addison Allen novel: old Victorian-era homes, small beautiful shops, an addiction to bookstores, and hill-like green mountains where small magics can happen, It's where living means pursuing passions and savoring happinesses. Bumper stickers proclaimed, Follow your bliss! and Don't postpone joy!

So, it's a happy place - happy in an artistic way, a mecca for creatives - full of coffee/teahouses, and vintage shops, and record places, and fun quirky restaurants, and art galleries, and stationary stores, and BOOKSTORES.

Malaprop's, indie bookstore of awesome, a.k.a. my new love.

I admit: the first and the last on this list were the ones I visited the most often.

I arrived at the end of August. I found a routine by the beginning of September:

-Wake at an hour that's not too ridiculous (ie. hopefully closer to 9AM than to 12PM)

-Head to Greenlife, the grocery store down the street, a.k.a. the breakfast land of delicious scones and cheap coffee.

-Write through two cups of coffee.

-Walk up the hill to the Downtown Asheville library, the next chapter's playlist pounding through my headphones.

This was the view from where I sat.

I know. It's a tough life. :-P

-Write until my finger hurts or my mind goes numb.

-Stop for lunch: at Bouchon's, a creperie tucked away in a courtyard off of Lexington Avenue. Or at Doc Chey's, a noodlehouse a few blocks away. Or Salsa's, if I was in the mood for something heavier. Or Malaprop's cafe, if all I wanted was a smoothie.

-Back to the library to write some more. The key at this point was WRITE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

-Head back, and maybe, depending on how much I had written and how much I felt like rewarding myself, stop for BOOKS.

It was almost impossible to NOT stop for books, by the way. Temptation #1: The library was having a half off book sale during the month of September, ie. basically the WHOLE TIME I WAS THERE. Temptation #2: Malaprops, Indie Bookstore of Indie Bookstores - literally less than a block away. Temptation #3: Downtown Books, the epicly well-stocked used bookstore on Lexington.

These are all the books I couldn't resist in Asheville. It doesn't even count what books I got on my LAST BORDERS RUN EVER. Sigh.

-OR I could stop at French Broad Chocolate Lounge and have cake before supper.

Quintessential Chocolate Cake - It's the Best Chocolate Cake I had ever had.
That is not an exaggeration.
(credit for photo goes here)

-OR head to the Dripolator for some delicious beverage to squeeze out a couple more pages and/or unwind.

-Dinner (sometimes at Greenlife, or sometimes leftovers)

-Reading of the recently acquired books, usually into the wee hours of the morning, which should account for why my wake-up times became more and more like a college student.

YOU GUYS, DOESN'T THIS SOUND IDYLLIC???

Because it WAS.

And then, like a switch had been flipped, something changed...

To Be Continued in Part II

Happy Halloween!!!

This was my pumpkin! Yes, those are gummi worms dangling from the nostrils. :-)
I found the design here.

I hope everyone's Halloween was awesome! Ours was: we ran out of candy three times and had to send out for reinforcements. We saw lots of green lanterns, one Harry & Ron duo, 4 smurfs (who sang), a lollipop fairy, a M&M bag, a shower, and one Freddy Kreuger who scared my three year old cousin into hiding behind the door.

And now...major sugar crash... :-P

Flyaway

Note: If you haven't taken a look at my Review policy, you can check it out here and also here.

Flyaway
by Lucy Christopher
Chicken House/Scholastic (October 2011)

Jo gave me a galley of this over the summer, and since I saw it in bookstores this week, I thought I better post my book report.

Btw, you need to check out the hardcover edition.

With all the specs and detail throughout the interior pages,
it's lovely lovely lovely.

Cover copy:

In a heartbeat, in a wingbeat, it happens. Isla's father falls. They're racing across the fields, following the swans flying in to winter at the lake like they do every year, when something goes wrong. And before she can even catch her breath, they're in the back of an ambulance, she's holding his hand.

At the hospital, upset and scared, Isla meets Harry. Unlike the boys at school, he doesn't laugh when she tells him about her love of birds. He listens. But what is he doing there?

As Isla struggles with her father's frailty and the new feelings she has for Harry, she's determined to help the only way she knows how. Outside the hospital windows, Isla watches a lone whooper swan struggling to fly. If only she could save the lost bird, would that somehow heal her dad, and cure Harry, and make everything good again?

By the author of the Printz Honor Book STOLEN, an uplifting story about "the thing with feathers" - hope.

Confession: I didn't recognize right away that "the thing with feathers" was an Emily Dickinson quote. In fact, I didn't realize I should recognize it until I saw the phrase on this:

click through for Etsy source

I present this as proof that cruising Etsy can be productive.

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I ADORED this one. I kept thinking about it and smiling for days afterwards.

It's rare that I remember the exact moment I fall in love with a book, but I do for this one.

The book started a touch slow for me - Christopher's portrayal of Isla's family life is so complex and layered that she needed quite a few chapters to set it up.

But then came Chapter 40. (I see you gasp out there in the blogosphere. SHORT chapters, people. Very short.) Isla takes a first, can't-back-out-now step in making a Da Vinci-style flying contraption. To tell you more would spoil the magic, but my heart rushed out to hug Isla in that moment and hasn't let her go since.

Remember Sharon Creech's early novels? The Newbery Medal-winning Walk Two Moons and my personal favorite Chasing Redbird? This novel reminds me of those, with a little Fly Away Home mixed in.

(Did you ever see that movie? With a young, brunette, pre-Sookie Anna Paquin? In middle school, that movie ranked right up there with Mulan, A Little Princess, and the Secret Garden on my list of Best Films of All Time. I watched it over and over.)

the movie in six minutes
Watch this, if only to giggle at the 90's outfits

Flyaway features swans, yes, but the way that Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light features dolphins. It's really about how terrible things can happen to a person and her family, and what you do to emotionally survive when you can't do anything to make the situation better (ie. to make a sick person well). It's about how brave you have to be just to endure a wait at hospital bedside when you might lose someone you love.

*Writer Tip Takeaway:

Lucy Christopher has mastered the hospital scene. Read her if you need to write one.

Because of the book's subject matter, there are many, but you know how almost all hospital scenes tend to feel the same? Namely: So-and-so is near death, and everyone is so sad? These aren't like that. Christopher uses the fact that the characters are in a hospital, surrounded by death, as kind of a dark shadow that throws Isla's regular thirteen-year-old girl dramas into brighter relief.

Example?

Cute boy named Harry. 'Nuff said. :-D

Friday Five - the My-Brain-Is-Sadly-Fried Edition

Hello, my dears!

I am still recovering from a Week of Doom and Stress and Deadlines and Weddings and then Dancing - both in chair and on dance floor (more information below). As a result, my brain is operating only at half capacity.

So, instead of writing a long post full of wisdom and structure, I'm going to cheat and do a Friday Five. I'm 95% sure that I can make a Friday Five make sense. :-P

But noting that 5% that says brain mush will win out - read at your own risk...

1. The Scariness (not related to Halloween):

You know what I don't recommend? Telling your agent that you'll get a new manuscript to her THE SAME WEEKEND you're going to be a bridesmaid in an out-of-town wedding.

I'm not sure what I was thinking. It's clear that these are both BIG, time-consuming activities. Sleep was sacrificed to the powers of Productivity. Since I came down with a sinus infection that same week, and one of my meds kept me up till the wee hours of the morn, I ended up sending Jo an incomplete manuscript at 4AM (ie. 13 hours before the wedding). From the floor of the hotel room closet, because I was concerned that my frantic, last-minute typing skills were bothering the other bridesmaid I was bunking with.

This has lead to Serious Thought on such topics as: Boundaries, the Value of Time, and Work-Life Balance.

Seriously Fuzzy-Brained Thought at the moment, however. Hence, this post is a Friday five rather than a discussion of those topics.

2. Happy Ending #1:

The Burton-Kasprak wedding was beautiful. The bride (now Mrs. Kasprak) is a dear friend I've known and loved since age 13 - the one childhood buddy who loves books as insanely as I do. She was gorgeous and poised and funny (during toast, not ceremony). I didn't embarrass her by tripping during the ceremony, or getting lipstick on my teeth, or fouling up the reading she asked me to do (Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" sonnet, a.k.a. the poem Kate Winslet recites in Sense & Sensibility).

Poem starts at 0:29, in case you're curious.

But I might have embarrassed her on the dance floor. The reception afterwards was awesome. Especially after I changed out of my heels into another pair of flats. :-P

3. Happy Ending #2:

The ms I sent Jo on Friday night was missing the final chapter. That one, I finished on Sunday night, partially in the airport, partially on the plane, and partially at my dining room table. Yes, my Powers of Extreme Concentration - honed during years of doing my homework on the schoolbus - have not deserted me.

Y'all, it's DONE. It's 150,000 words long, ie. 500 pages, ie. WAY too long, but still DONE. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I have enough clay now to mold it into something BOOK-shaped.

This is a VERY good thing.

4. New Deadline:

The manuscript is back with me. I have until Thanksgiving to make it pretty and book-shaped.

I have cuts and themes and rewrites in mind.

It will be EPIC. It may even be FUN.

5. Florence + the Machine:

Um, is anyone else SOOOOOO spectacularly EXCITED for their new album? (I LOVE Florence Welch. We share a birthday, you know. Month, date, AND year. This totally makes us besties by default, even if she has no idea I exist. We were born on the same day - OF COURSE, we're connected.)

November 1 can't come soon enough for me. I've already downloaded their new song and added it to EVERY SINGLE PLAYLIST I've listed to this week.

Yes, this includes my EA'S writing music. :-P

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Okay, peeps - please excuse all typos and lack of picturedom. I'm currently blogging by phone, and I'll fix after I get back to my laptop....

ETA: Videos! Better than pictures! (Perhaps they'll distract from the typos I didn't look for...)

Clay, or Strange Musings from a Sleep-Deprived Mind

Hello, friends!

I am no longer in Asheville. In fact, since I returned from Asheville a week and a half ago, I figured I should tell you about it.

I'll write a better post (with pictures! And other fun stuff!) later, but for now, here are the update-y things:

I have not finished my manuscript. I didn't expect for it to become so long, and I didn't expect to work so slow. A couple weeks ago, I had to contact poor Jo in a panic to work out a new deadline, which is now October 14. (One week away... *gulp*) I am now in Charlotte. The fall weather is nice. I see it through the windows when I type frantically at the library or in the dining room.

But I'm not actually in terrible shape. I do feel under the gun, because instead of just writing, I'm also preparing for a wedding next weekend and also another secret thing. In general, though, my mind is calmer than it was before I left Asheville.

This first draft has taken longer to write than any other draft I can remember, and for a while, I fretted over that. (I love the word fret, btw.) I mean, after all, completing the first draft of Of Giants and Ice didn't take too long. I worried that I was doing something wrong. I thought that by handling this one differently, I was messing it up. (Ooooh, I hope I didn't jinx myself by saying that. Considering that no one has seen it yet but me, I have no idea if I have messed it up or not.)

But one day, I had a very helpful thought:

You need to make the clay before you can shape it.

I don't know how I know this, or if maybe tons of people know it too, but many serious potters make their own clay. (This article has more information, although some people purchase powdered clay rather than just digging it up in their backyard.) You add water to the dry stuff; it looks like dirt soup for a while; and then after it sits for a while, it dries out enough for you to work with it.

But it's the same for a first draft. Here I was thinking that my first draft needed to look like the bowl that it would become - maybe not the prettiest bowl in the world, but you know, recognizable as a bowl. But I was skipping a step. I was asking too much from it. All that a first draft must do is exist. This draft is just the raw material that I can mold into a real novel. Before that happens, I first need enough of it - I need a beginning, a middle, and an end to work with.

And...well, maybe it's not like this for everyone, but for me, most times, it is more difficult to create something out of nothing than it is to shape something you already have.

I need to make the clay before I can shape it. That's the thought that is spurring me to the end of this draft.

Okay, people, I'm signing off. This is the last deep breath before I plunge into the end of the novel. Endings, I've noticed, tend to feel like a gallop to the finish line. But that's a post topic for another time. :-)

Tenth Anniversary: The Lit Edition

I might come across as a little self-centered as I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway.

This is what I thought when I saw this cover:

1. God, that's so sad. It would suck to lose your dad, and suck more for it to happen on a day everyone talks about.
   
   
2. "The Children of 9/11".... That sounds like a novel title - like the American version of Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie.
   
   
3. How old would that make them now? 9? Technically less than 9 and 9 months?
   
   
4. Those are middle grade readers. That's my age group. They might read my books!

I told you I might come across self-centered. But hear me out:

I don't mean this in an eager-beaver, everyone's-a-potential-reader kind of way. I mean, those kids weren't even alive when 9/11 happened. In fact, most of my target audience wasn't even born on September 11, 2001. Even the oldest kids in this age group weren't more than two years old - way too young to remember it.

So, they only have secondhand knowledge to compare it with. Which includes anything I might have to say or write about it.

Does anybody else think about stuff like this? (Am I the only one with this particular flavor of weird?)

I stole this straight off of Alex Bracken's Tumblr.

I do remember September 11, 2001.

I had just turned 15 - a sophomore in high school. Before second period, the principal called all students into the cafeteria, which set off little warning bells in our young minds: the last time he had done that, he'd announced that a kid in the class above me had died.

Before the principal got there, one of my friends - who is now married with a beautiful ten-month-old son - arrived at our table. She was crying. She said a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. She had seen it on the news in photography class. She said she was scared. I told her it was going to be okay, privately thinking that she must have misunderstood. I just couldn't see how that could happen.

But she was right.

My scope of reality had to grow a little bigger. Something impossible had happened, and it changed my world forever.

This is not an unusual story. It's just mine. People all across the country have their own.

But this about this for a second: if you're part of my generation, if you were in your teens or early twenties, think for a second how that affected you - how it changed you.

Not just the day, but everything that came afterwards.

Think about the word terror for a second. Whether you hear it in the word terrorist or in the phrase War on Terror, how many times have you heard terror in the past ten years?

Literally too many to count.

If you don't hear it in conversation, or in school debates, then it's on the news, or at the pulpit or in the paper (whether print or online). How many issues of the New York Times from September 12, 2001 to today have been printed without the word terror in it? (Someone should check that out. That's a senior year project for some college kid right there.)

Don't you think that shapes you? If you were in your teens or your twenties on 9/11/2001, then this last decade has been a major part of your development - the time when you're just figuring out who you are, and what your world is like, and how you feel about it, and how you can live in it. This chant of terror terror terror has defined a part of you in the same way the civil rights movement defined many of our parents, and WWII defined many of our grandparents.

Now think for a moment about this year's debut novelists - how many of them are in their twenties or thirties now? How many have become adults hearing the terror terror terror chant every single day?

Maybe it's just the circle of Twitter friends I hang around with, but I would say around half.

Our books are coming out now, and if you write MG or YA, you aren't speaking directly to your peers. Your words are aimed at the generation that comes after you, the "Children of 9/11," the kids who were a little too young to remember it for themselves.

Does anyone think about what we're saying about terror, about fear? It's a huge theme in ALL literature. Seriously, how many interesting conflicts can you create without fear?

This may be gross conjecture at this point, but if someone pointed a gun to my head and made me voice an opinion, I'd have to say: For the most part, today's emerging writers treat fear as a huge and overwhelming force - one that you have to confront and conquer on the personal level before the external ones. In other words, the fear inside you, the one trying to control you, is way more important than anything outside your own mind.

There are a lot of books out there. You can't apply this theory to every new YA or MG. But some definitely do. The book that comes to mind is the one I just finished (re-)reading:

Divergent, by agent sister Veronica Roth, who happens to be in her early twenties.

Now, I know that everyone in the world hasn't read this awesome, amazing, powerful book, so I'll try to keep this spoiler free:

In this dystopian novel, Beatrice/Tris (the MC) joins an organization called Dauntless, a group of people who prize bravery over everything else, but especially over every other human virtue. A large part of her initiation is spent conquering all of her fears - phobia by phobia.

Still not convinced my theory applies?

Take a look at some of these quotes from the book - in the context of a post-9/11 world:

"We [the Dauntless] believe that preparation eradicates cowardice, which we define as the failure to act in the midst of fear." (77)

"I ignore my fear. When I make decisions, I pretend it doesn't exist." (145)

"Becoming fearless isn't the point. That's impossible. It's learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, THAT'S the point." (239)

Terror isn't about politics or nations for most people. It's about how to live day-to-day life in a world with so much fear.

This is why I'm totally blown away when adult readers belittle MG or YA - when they call it unimportant, or silly, or not serious. Books for kids help them confront and cope with stuff their parents never had to face.

Let's take a thirteen-year-old reader, for example. She will confront completely different fears than her forty-something mother did at the same age. When her mom was a teen, she had to worry about getting an airplane, because the engine might fail and there were no parachutes. The teenage daughter has to worry about that, and as she takes off her shoes at airport security, she has to worry about someone taking over the plane and crashing it into a national monument.

The teen has to worry not just about getting cancer, but about a stranger releasing anthrax, or some other biological weapon, into the air at her school, her gym, her grocery store. The teen has to worry not just about learning to drive, but whether or not the planet will have enough gas to fill up her car.

We are growing up in a completely different world than our parents did. There is so much they can't teach us.

But books can.

Maybe they can't teach us how to fix everything, but they can teach us how to cope with tragedy and terror.

And coping, coming to terms with something so overwhelming...well, that's always the first step.

So, I'm in Asheville...

Yes, Asheville - the land of countless galleries, small green mountains, the Biltmore Estate, and Stephanie Perkins.

I know. I didn't give you any notice. I didn't even mention it on Twitter.

But don't feel left out. I didn't make a big fuss over it. In fact, I said just about the same thing to my family last Sunday.

Except I replaced "I'm in" with "I'm going to." Because you know, they would worry and stuff if I just disappeared.

It's kind of a writer retreat. Like this one and this one. Except this current one is a month long. :-D

I can hear what you're saying. Something like: "Dude, this girl goes on a lot of writer retreats."

Why, yes - yes, I do.

Because I HAVE A DEADLINE AND IT FRIGHTENS ME.

(There. I'm done. I promise I won't spend this whole post freaking out. Much.)

But because I need to figure out where I'm going to live next, I'm also going to try out new cities on a trial basis.*

Do you hear me, Asheville? You are on probation! Be on your best behavior, if you want to see more of me!!

But no, haha, so far (all four days of it), Asheville is treating me pretty well! In the half mile I walk to reach the library, where the majority of the writing gets done, I pass four or five coffeeshops and two bookstores! One of which is the glorious and much-lauded Malaprops!

This is my view when I'm walking away from the library,
where presumably, I've written many magnificent and brilliant pages.

(Which is dangerous, because if I buy the books, then I am tempted to read them INSTEAD OF WRITING. Noooooooooooo. But they have such a great selection - Even though I resisted with all my might, I bought two books from them! On two separate occasions. No, but yeeessssssssss. Cannot resist the lure of pretty book-type objects.)

Anyway. Ahem.

The only real complaint I have is that it reminds me of college, where basically everyone dresses cooler than me. So, if you spot someone who sports a look that can only be described as "Preppy McPrepsterson" among all the elegant earth goddesses and the bright-red-lipstick-wearing, messy glam hipsters..... well, that would be me.

But it's okay. In an effort to blend in and minimize blisters on my swollen feet,*** I purchased these super soft, almost loafer-like shoes****:

They are comfy. :-)

Also, I think my casual shoe stock is down to four pair - excluding flip-flops, boots, and heels (that would add another five. Wow, I have less than ten pairs of wearing shoes. That's just sad.)

But - and now I finally get to the main point of this post - I am away, and I've mentally reached the Land Where First Drafting Is The Most Important/ONLY Thing On My To Do List.

That means you won't see much of me online. I'm really REALLY trying to cut back on my internet time.

I've even taken email off my phone! And started checking it later in the day! Aren't you proud of my willpower/insanity??

But that includes blogging, and tweeting, and sometimes tumblring.

And if you do see me doing these things (especially the last two, which are more addicting), you have my permission to chase me away.

Like so:



(Muahahahaha. Now, I've made you want to rewatch Ferris Bueller's Day Off, haven't I??? :-P)

Last but not least:

HAPPY SEPTEMBER!!!

Footnotes:

*The initial plan was to fly out to San Fran for the first experiment, which I have been talking about FOREVER. But I need to be in North Carolina to get my adorable new car fixed. So, then there was Asheville.**

**Not that there's anything second-rate about Asheville. The biggest strike against it in my Book of Awesome Places I Might Live is its proximity to Charlotte. When they were my age, my parents moved over 1200 miles away from the town they grew up in. Living so close just would just feel so NOT grown up. On the other hand, I picked Asheville, because it was close enough to drive back if I forgot something/the parts came in to fix my MINI's bumper.

***SO not used to walking everywhere anymore. Bad, lazy, out-of-shape Shelby.

****On sale, because I am my mother's (bargain-shopping) daughter.