her blog

the knife of never letting go by patrick ness

bettie enthusiastically recommend this to me and i'm glad i listened. if you like dystopian thrillers, you'll love it. 

the sky is everywhere by jandy nelson

i'm sorry. (not really.) its another book about a grieving teenager. apparently sad young adult books were a big part of my coping mechanism this spring. lennie's sister passes away suddenly and she's left rudderless, trying navigate the world without her. she lives with her eccentric grandmother and pot smoking horticulturalist uncle. they're all a little lost but they have each other and they eventually figure it all out. i cried. a lot. still not really sorry.

the other typist by suzanne rindell

i sort of hated this book. i've put it here to solicit your opinions if you've read it. its gotten a ton of good reviews and i can't figure out if i'm missing something.

and here's the current library pile:

velleity. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it.

We have a mouse. Or rather, we had a mouse. This is the first time we've been petless in 18 years so of course we had a mouse. Of course. Springmaus.

We discovered the mouse two days ago. Shawn was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, talking to me in the living room. Mid-sentence he stopped speaking and got this look that I'd never seen but let me tell you I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd followed it up with man screams. He looked FREAKED. A mouse had run from the bedroom into the kitchen and disappeared. So we did some poking around and some cleaning. We set traps. We were jumpy. I was extra jumpy.

When I was in high school, I rolled my eyes at my stepfather who was terrified at the sight of his first mouse. "he's more afraid of you than you are of him," I said. Where was that girl? I wondered. I was opening the pantry door and thought, really, what are you really afraid of?

Then I thought of possibly the silliest thing ever. A silly thing that kept rattling around in my head until after we heard the trap snap.

He had to go but he left me with a really great idea for a short story. I haven't written one in about 12 years. I'm excited. Thanks, Springmaus Deadmaus. I'm sorry it had to end the way it had to end. We won't miss you.

i loved this book. the main character, wren, survives a car accident in which her boyfriend dies. she struggles with how to move on and retreats to her father's house deep in the woods of the northeast to try to get a grip. its a quiet book, much like the forest in winter, but packs a punch. 

occasionally, my inner 13 year old forces me to read a true crime novel. they are almost entirely unsatisfying. when i first read about people who eat darkness, i was certain this book was different. it was. a page turner from the introduction on, it tells the story of lucie blackman, a young woman who disappears in tokyo in 2000. i don't know that i can recommend it just because true crime really isn't for everyone but i definitely enjoyed it (but was glad when the book was over.)

flappers, the supernatural, speakeasies, murders, and the museum of creepy crawlies. i loved this book. kind of a lot.

i started this last night and stayed up way too late reading. 20 years after tara martin disappears, she knocks on her parents door on christmas day, looking barely a day older than when she left. those she left behind, particularly her brother and her ex-boyfriend, wrestle with her story that she rode off on a white horse and all the accompanying emotions her reappearance creates. i really can't wait to see how this ends.

my usual running route takes me past a house where a handsome, old yellow lab lives. he hangs out on the porch while someone in the house plays piano. when i first started running, i'd turn the corner that he lives at and greet him, sitting on the porch, watching the world. "hi, dog," i'd say as i ran by. his eyes followed me but he barely even raised his head. then one day he did. "hi, dog." soon after, he stood up. "hi, dog." a week later he stood up and wagged his tail. now, about 3 houses before i turn in front of his house, just as i start to hear the piano coming from inside the house, i see him amble toward the fence. once i reach his yard, he runs along side me. "bye, dog." 

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."
 - Dolly Parton
 

last night, i took kateri to back fence PDX. it was actually one of the best ones i've been to. there was a story that i'm pretty sure is going to haunt me for a bit. at intermission, i once again put my name in the pitcher for the audience lightning round. i was feeling pretty good about it - unlike last time. the theme was "breaking the rules" and i have a number of good stories i could tell. this is the one i would have told if i'd been picked:

"i cut a lot of class in high school. i mean a lot. i had a grown-up sounding voice and could easily call the attendance office and pretend to be my mom. then i'd call back and pretend to be my friends' moms. yeah. thank god caller id wasn't a thing. i once arrived at school, realized that no, that wasn't how i wanted to spend my day, and called myself out from the pay phone in front of the principal's office. my last report card came and i had straight A's and i had ended up graduating toward the top of my class. she was pleased but then looked at the attendance record. i had missed 33 days. 33. that's almost seven weeks. the school year is about 36 weeks long. so, yeah. how about that, mom? must have been a typo. yeah, yeah! a typo! a few years later she asked about it again. yeah, mom, no. not a typo."

things i'm reading both on and off the internet:

LOVED IT. next up: all the days and nights by william maxwell and what there Is to say we have said: the correspondence of eudora welty and william maxwell

the equals record - this was the first post i read from this site. i put it in my reader and have enjoyed the writing a lot.

stories about prince - its exactly what it sounds like and if you like prince at all, you'll love it!

the reconstructionists - all sorts of awesome.

valentine's day for under achievers

in 2002, we went to the anne frank house in amsterdam. it was heavy, as you'd expect. i climbed tiny staircase after tiny staircase and i felt like i'd be crushed by the weight of what i was feeling, or maybe i was just hopelessly out of shape. either way, i was having feelings and they were pouring out of my eyes, like feelings are sometimes prone to do. i cried silently as we moved from room to room and each time shawn looked at me, he held my hand just a bit tighter. at the end of the museum, there is a room with hundred of copies of anne frank on display, in every imaginable language and there was a quote on the wall that pushed me right over the edge. it was something about diary of a young girl being the most optimistic story of all humanity. i think it was octavio paz. i was too shaken to have the presence of mind to write it down. also, people were staring. i was sobbing, audibly and uncontrollably.  so many feelings - and not all of them bad. i believe those hours spent at the anne frank house changed me, the same way reading it did when i was much younger. i wanted to be better, to do better. 

on sunday, i started to read the fault in our stars by john green. i knew when i picked it up from the library that it was going to be a heartbreaker. i mean, come on, a young adult novel about teenagers with cancer. "cancer books suck." - it says so on page 48 of this cancer book. for a good time read ANYTHING ELSE, right? but no, that wasn't the case at all. this book was a fantastic time. i laughed, a lot. but i'm not going to lie - i also cried a lot.

there were so many great sentences in this book, like this one (which describes pretty much everyone i know): "You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecented you are."  or this one: "Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together again unless and until all living humans read the book."

its gotten under my skin in the best possible way. it reminded me i want to be better; DO BETTER.

i keep thinking about the book, about our trip to the anne frank house and about the Mary Oliver poem, The Summer Day:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

you kicked my ass. i'm not saying that i didn't deserve it but really, you kicked my ass. 3 shows. lots of etsy sales. and oh yeah, i wrote a book.

i set out to do a thing and i got it done. i looked my 15% crippling self doubt in the eye and told it to go to hell. and it was fun. sort of.

here's what i learned (or was reminded of) this month:

writing is exhausting. i actually fell asleep in the middle of the day, in the middle of typing a sentence more than once. every day when i finished writing, i wanted to nap. and that was without being to precious about word choice. nanowrimo is about getting the words out, not really using your back space key and just writing the thing. that's what i did. 

writing while i'm tipsy is unwise. it might work for some people but not for me. i only did it twice and i regretted it both times. those chapters are going to need some extra editing TLC. 

no matter how prepared i thought i was, how well i thought i had the story plotted out in my head, there were some stumbling block. the "men plan, god laughs" rule applies to writing too, i guess. 

writing violence is well, violent. it invaded my dreams; it caused me grief. writing violence is not to be taken lightly. so obvious yet it sucker punched me. 

i couldn't have done it without running. stupid running. 

writing every single day is important. i had to break for our trip to seattle and when we returned i had trouble finding my groove again.

writer's block can suck it.

i can be a time management wizard. those balls all stayed up in the air. i managed to cook, clean, make lots of things and do three shows without sending anyone the wrong order. or crying. 

i have awesome friends. i knew that already but the number of supportive texts, tweets, emails and postcards i received was incredible. thank you all.

my husband rocks. hard. 

50,000 words in a month? totally doable. 

the next couple weeks will be all about holiday shows and our etsy shops. i'll sit down and read the book in the next couple of weeks and begin the editing process. for now, i need some breathing room. i need to sleep without dreaming about my characters and the peril i've placed them in. i need to not worry about word counts and timing my day perfectly in order to meet them. i need to make things and ship orders and READ. i've barely read in the last month and i miss it. i miss writing here, too. i hope to return to my regularly scheduled blog this week. 

so, how was your november?