Kelsey just wrote to tell me of a review of HOUSE OF DANCE on her readingkeepsyousane site.
http://readingkeepsyousane.blogspot.com/2008/08/house-of-dance-by-beth-kephart.html
I am, truthfully, taken aback and grateful. It always helps to hear what readers really think. And, as I just noted to Kelsey, each book helps an author discover a way to shape the next.
Thank you, Kelsey.
Today is Laura Geringer's last day at Harper, and so I'm posting this, the first paragraph of our final book together, in honor of a memorable collaboration.
Nothing but Ghosts will be released next June.
I am experimenting with a new computer and with new software. This is raw, but this is fun.
To add to the glory of this day (overcast, pleasantly so), is the generosity of Charlotte, who had this to say about House of Dance. Thank you so much, Charlotte.
http://charlotteslibrary.blogspot.com/2008/08/house-of-dance-by-beth-kephart.html
I went outside, where I'd wanted to be all day. I could work there, I thought. I could split apart and reassemble a client story while breathing the real world of the air.
I had my head down. I heard a strangeness, a wild, unvoiced rustling in the trees. No calling, no mating, just the sound of wings in trees. I looked up, and all around me the branches had darkened with yellow-eyed, black-gilded birds. Unhappy-seeming birds. Aggressively unhappy. Birds on a hunt. Birds from a Hitchcock set.
There must have been hundreds. I'd say thousands, but you wouldn't believe me, so take the hundreds. There were at least that many.
I ran for my camera. I returned to the strange bird world, and the birds clapped off, rose up through the trees, chose new trees, scattered over neighbors' yards, and the sound was eerie, haunted, though the sun was shining, and I felt alone, though my husband was near, out in his studio, a window away. I wasn't in danger, but I didn't feel safe. Still the birds rose, fell, cluttered, scattered, refused my camera's eyes. I couldn't hold them. Not the look of them, not the sound of them.
But there was a mourning dove. A single one, perched on a wire. And even after all the black birds were gone, she stayed.
You and me both, I thought. You and me, on the edge.
Carol, the dear Bookluver, has posed this review of Undercover. She's an entirely sweet young lady, and I thank her.
http://bookluver-carol.blogspot.com/2008/08/undercover.html
"The challenge isn't to figure out how to write, I realized, but why."
Steve Lopez
The Soloist: A Lost Dream, An Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
(highly recommended)
You get lucky every once in a while in life; you meet the right people. When I won a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant back in 2005, I didn't just win time (thanks to a wholly generous appropriation), I won a chance encounter, at a Pew event, with a fellow grant winner named Jay Kirk. He was (and it took about two seconds to figure this out) the real writer in our conversation of two. The kind that treks around the globe, looking and finding. It's not that Jay is fearless; ask him, and he'll rate his fears for you on a sliding scale of ten. It's that Jay is alive, Jay wants to know, Jay has the whole flipping dictionary in his head, and he wants to put a few of those words—subluxation, anyone?—to good use.
I've read some Jay since then. A chapter from his book-in-the-making, Kingdom Under Glass, about the taxidermist Carl Akeley, that had me going apoplectic in my search for justice-doing praise. (I'm a writer; I'm supposed to praise eloquently; all I could think of was, Wow, man. Wow, like, Wow, Jay, that's great.) A couple of archived onliners here and there. His emails, which somehow manage to convey incredible tenderness (toward his wife, his child, his work, his students) while never being anything less than straight-up daggering (is daggering the right word in this context, Jay, tell me, I need more words) smart.
Get to the point, you say. The point is: Read Jay Kirk in this month's GQ. Read his story, "Hotels Rwanda." Because that's where Jay was, a while ago—in Rwanda, a country marked and bloodied by a terrifying genocide, a country whose hope for revival is now pinned to tourist dollars. Yes, you read that right. Tourism in Rwanda. Jay was there, he went traveling, he saw for the rest of us, and the story he's penned isn't just deeply moving and sometimes hilarious and often very sad. The story he penned is Jay, through and through: human and complex and not manipulative and good.
Here's one of my favorite passages, just to get you started:
"This experience has been checked off the list. It isn't just that it's over, but also because it no longer belongs to the exclusive realm of the imagination, and to be quite honest, I think my imagination will miss it."
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7404
I am going to be honest with you: I often do not know just what I’m doing.
I will grow obsessed, for example, with a single detail. The image of a fox leaving its paw prints in the snow. The statue of a girl sunk beneath the surface of a pond. The backlit windows of a dance studio. A persistent yellow finch. A dust storm.
Just those details, those saturated details, will walk around with me, demand attention. Are they stories? Certainly not. Are they persuasions, starting places, possibilities? Yes. I’ll write them down. I’ll allow their opinions. I’ll let them sit. Sit. Sit. Until finally I’m building a story for them, which is like building a house—foundation, frame, windows, roof.
I want my details to live, so I give them a story. I want to know what they mean, so I stay close.
Don’t even talk about outlines with me. Don’t imagine me beginning with plot. Or with message. Or with a marketing niche. I know that works beautifully for so many others, but not for me. I start with an image, and then I find that image words, and the sound of those words is the sound of my story and sound is voice, and voice yields story.
It doesn’t look purposeful, not at first. It feels most like riding a wave.
A huge thank you to Hilary Williamson and Lyn Seippel of BookLoons.com, for the review of HOUSE OF DANCE today.
http://www.bookloons.com/cgi-bin/Review.asp?bookid=10092
She appeared on my blog as a sprite—this charm-struck fairy in red, this voice of reason. Miss Erin. She'd wing in, then wing off: I never quite knew where she went.
Then I began to follow her blog. I began to understand that Miss Erin Marie is (now) a rising senior who reads widely and well, who aspires to a career on the stage, who loves poems so much she'll often post one (my kind of blogger, absolutely), and whose voice is so trusted that she was named the only teen reader on the esteemed Cybils Awards panel.
http://misserinmarie.blogspot.com/
I wanted to know even more about her. I asked her these questions:
As a widely respected teen reviewer, you were asked to join the Cybils Award panel for 2007. Go back to a time when you were just framing your presence on the web. What were your goals, and who did you hope would find you?
When I first started my blog, I didn't think anyone would ever read it other than a few friends and relatives. Once I realized there was a pretty amazing community of book lovers out there, I started focusing what I wrote to be a bit less random, and a bit more book-oriented.
Tell us about your blog: What it is meant to achieve and how you've crafted it.
The purpose of my blog is mainly to share with people - share my thoughts on books, share poetry (some is original, most isn't), share interviews with authors, articles - anything that I want to say.
You had a poem about fame on your blog not so long ago — a look at how your idea of what the word means has changed as your own presence in the world has expanded. What are your life aspirations? What is the ideal path for one such as you, who acts, dances, sings, loves Shakespeare, and reads and reads and reads?
What a big question...life aspirations. To be a good friend. To be a happy and content person in whatever I do. To act my heart out - whether it be in community theater or major motion pictures. To read, write, sing and travel. To get married. To find beauty in all that I see.
I have been delighted, but never surprised, by the caliber of young people who are out here making the web their own, and who are together shaping American culture. Sometimes I'm not entirely certain that adults are giving your generation all the credit it deserves. How would you define your own peers? Are they as engaged as you in literature and the arts? Do they understand and celebrate your passion?
YES! All of my friends love to read, and a good many of them enjoy writing. All of them love art - whether it be the kind that hangs in museums, or movies, or photography, or theatre, or music. And even if not quite all of them understand why acting is such a big deal to me, they all support it wholeheartedly!
I was dismayed, as I made clear in recent blogs, by a NYT article that suggested that female teen readers are primarily obsessed with brand names—that this is the stuff of daily conversation. Tell me, Miss E. Is it true?
Some girls probably are, but I doubt they're the majority. Fashion's one thing (I like fashion!), but I can't imagine having a conversation about brand names with my friends...we all agree that there's so many more important things in life than who's wearing what. Er, rather, who's wearing who.
You read Shakespeare. You also read Harry Potter. Do books need a YA label after all? When you pick up a book that is designated YA, what do you expect to find that you won't find in a so-called adult book?
A teen protagonist. That's really the only thing I expect differently - I still expect/hope for a good story, well-rounded characters, and good writing, no matter what type of book I pick up. As for whether books need a YA label...I don't have a problem with that, and I like that there's a section of books in a bookstore that I can go to for protagonists who are my age. What I have a problem with is when people look down at the YA label, and think less of a book because of where it's shelved. A good story is a good story. Period.
How will you craft your coming year?
Well, this'll be my senior year of high school, so I'll be focusing on the classes I need to graduate. I have one play lined up to act in after the one I'm in currently, and who knows, maybe there'll be another. I'd like to get my driver's license, and maybe a job. I want to spend a lot of time with friends. Travel a little, perhaps. Take some acting classes. We'll see what happens...I'm open for adventure.
Thank you, Beth!
We drove toward the blackening night, the brightened sky behind us, yet.
Someday, maybe soon, I will write an essay about these incredibly funny, charming, soulful creatures who populate my world these days—these bloggers who stop by, who tell stories, who remind me to buy drawer liners for my kid's dorm room, who explain how best to eat eggs, who commiserate about mind-of-its-own hair.
Someday I will.
For now, let me introduce you to a new friend. She calls herself Liviania. She's off to her sophomore year on Saturday.
You can find her on her blog today, talking about Undercover.
http://inbedwithbooks.blogspot.com/2008/08/undercover.html
I find myself spiraling in, deep.
A friend whose son is now off at college writes, so utterly impeccably: Along with declines in the rhythm, the hip, the hop, the jazz and the classical...we're predicting a reciprocal rise in the level of the blues.
The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle perched on top of a long-neglected reading pile over the weekend, and I've just now settled them back into my over-burdened shelves. Read, yes. Fully fathomed? I'm not so sure.
For while I have great admiration for both Andrew Sean Greer and David Wroblewski (and celebrate their success as literary authors with heart), I am left wondering about the emotive power that concept novels such as these can have. Tivoli is a freak of nature—one born with the appearance of an old man whose mind ages as his body yearly grows younger. Edgar is a mute growing up among dog breeders whose existence is patterned (uncomfortably closely) after Hamlet.
Reading each, I empathized with the authors who, having given themselves these tight, not exactly permissible outlines to work within, could not ever imagine past them. Wroblewski had, for example, to place before his poor Edgar the ghost of a murdered father. He had to manipulate the plot to accommodate poison. He had to decimate and devastate. Greer gave himself no choice but to write first to Tivoli's peculiar condition—explain it, hypothesize through it, sacrifice the messiness of real life to the restraining oddness of poor Max. The concepts had to rule, therefore, and with writers as verbally talented as these two writers indisputably are, one hopes (or at least this reader hopes) for the big, unexpected, unpredictable moments. The smudge lines that account for the greatness of great books.
It was, of course, a pleasure, just to sit and to read. To let the wind of others' words to blow through.
It seems most everyone I know has paused and allowed themselves to be transcended by these '08 Olympic games.
"We stay up all night to watch and sleep in late.... It's so nice," my novelist friend Jennie Nash writes. "It is constantly astounding to me to watch what the human body can do," writes a dear dancer-friend who herself has done the near impossible, soared and spun on national (presidential, even) stages. Our French friends were here on Friday night, speaking of Michael Phelps. My emails are full of did-you-see's? Last night a friend joined us for dinner and it wasn't the dinner that mattered so much as what happened afterward and who we got to see—the impeccably dignified (there is no underestimating her dignity) Shawn Johnson, the explosive 100 meter track-and-field women, the fearless Chinese divers. Dessert was the calm and good feeling of this shared odyssey, this honoring of the exceptional, the sacrificed for, the achieved.
Put a Michael Phelps into an Olympics game, give us Lezak magic or Nastia Liukin grace, give the diplomatic Aaron Piersol a moment to speak, and we become, through them, and just for an instant, somehow saved. We become believers in forces so much greater than ourselves, which is a balming brand of faith.
Chris Bohjalian has a tongue-in-cheeker in today's Washington Post titled "In which the author obsesses over potshots by amateur critics on Amazon.com." Describing himself as "hunched over a laptop, cringing at the customer reviews of my novels on Amazon.com and bn.com," Bohjalian then recounts some of the all-time worst zingers. This one, for example, was a stand out:
"I proceded to read it untill i got to chapter 7, and when i found that no plot has even erupted yet. The entire chapter was about a deer. How can a book be seven chapters in, and about 100 pages in, and still have expostition material. this book was terrible and would never suggest to anyone."
I read the piece with an empathetic smile, recalling the former hunched-over me who, heart racing, would check Amazon each morning, hoping for a sign from the world beyond: A book bought, perhaps; a line or two that resonated. I empathized with a man confronted by an accuser who did not, well, have all those accusing words stacked up quite right. True, I was often greeted by the kind of generosity one wants to throw one's arms around. A few memorable times I was not. Then one day I encountered one angry reader of a book who announced in no ironic, uncertain terms, that I was at least—actually, I don't recall the quantifier, but I believe it was in the range of 7 million years old. 7 million years old, maybe, or 700,000, 7,000, even, or... well, the point is, I stopped checking Amazon reviews some time after that.
The point is, I learned my lesson. One day I woke up and the habit was gone, disappeared, vanished, cured. My heart, a miracle, wasn't racing.
Readers invest their time in a book and often (unless they've borrowed from a friend or a library) their money, too. They have earned their right to their opinion, in other words, however they wish to express it (though there are merits to diplomacy, truly) and those of us who have put our work out there have a choice to make: either we will eavesdrop on Amazon or we will not.
I have discovered the wonders of not. The sun rises differently around here these days. The conversation I have about books—with bloggers, with Goodreaders, with good hearts—is rich, and real. Sure, there are still those who don't like what I write, or who wish for different endings, or for different characters, or for a different me, indeed. But we're talking to each other, one book lover to another. We're engaged in a human dialogue.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/14/AR2008081402498.html
Rachel Donadio (New York Times Book Review) has done it again—written a back-page essay that demands to be read first. This time her piece is called "He Blurbed, She Blurbed," and the opening graf contains the strange but apparently true tidbit that a new enterprise called Blurbings LLC has emerged. In this case, the name does say it all: By surrendering a mere $19.95 or up, clients (those would be the book-writing sorts, the ones who hope to someday capture some fraction of the book-buying market) can buy themselves a whopping ten book blurbs.
Oh. My.
Let me just say for the record that hoping for blurbs, which can sometimes mean scrounging for them, is one of the least attractive aspects of an author's entire existence. It's just not a situation most of us want to find ourselves in. When you ask another for a blurb, you are asking for their time, you are trading on their reputation, you are putting the ineffable at risk.
It isn't pretty.
But let me also say this, for this blogging record. Some of my most treasured friendships emerged from, or were succored by, that timid request for a blurb, when truly good souls like Katrina Kenison or Jennie Nash or Susan Straight or Kate Moses or Robb Forman Dew or Lauren Winner reached out and gave me the words—the hope—that I as a writer needed just then. Jayne Anne Phillips and Rosellen Brown, my first two teachers, gave me words to live on. Buzz Bissinger, a fellow Penn alum and extremely good all-around sort (don't let his sometimes-growl fool you—not ever), lent his ear and his thoughts to FLOW, and in that way made that book eternally alive for me.
We don't want to broker for blurbs, as authors, but we do care what our heroes and heroines in books think of the stories we have deigned to tell. Sometimes a blurb is the yield one writer passes on to another. The light turned on at the end of a long and harrowing process.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/books/review/Donadio-t.html?ref=books
When I saw her (sitting on a dock, the shrimp boats roped in behind her, a snowy egret up above), I had this thought:
A clown masquerading as a favorite book: all unexpected color and patterns, but quietly reflective, still.
One early morning it was just my father and me and a pair of bikes. He knew, he said, of a dock that no one ever visited, a place where we might go and see the bay. We wheeled by lagoons, by an old abandoned swing, by a pond where I'd seen an alligator chasing a fisherman's fish the day before.
There was a break in the trees. A few abandoned-seeming boats. This wooden extension toward a borrowed bit of sea.
Far away a man was high in the sky, on a pair of paraglider wings.
I went away with my boys to swim alongside the dolphins (it was nearly dusk, we were mostly alone, the dolphins came this close; I speak of the South Carolina coast, my father's home). Above us pelicans embroidered the sky with their beaks and made their laser dives for fish. A storm gathered on the horizon. I tried not to think, only to be.
Meanwhile, the world went on. Meanwhile, someone very kind out there nominated HOUSE OF DANCE for the ALA's Best Books for Young Readers list, so that HOUSE now joins UNDERCOVER on the same panel of considered books. Meanwhile, The Story Siren (have you seen her site? you must visit, if you haven't) posted a HOUSE contest, which is still running, if any of you would like a shot at a signed book.
http://www.thestorysiren.com/
We returned to a house, stilled. To one week more of being a family of three, until we become a family of three except that one of the three happens to be away at a most amazing college—the most amazing college for that one of three.
I'm not in the mood for much of anything, save to cheer our Michael Phelps on. Dolphins, be with him.
Bill says, When Jeremy leaves for college it will be like losing some of the soul of the house.
Yes.
There are those in this world who make us better people. Our children, who ask the truest questions and who watch to see who we actually are, what we actually believe in, what we actually do in times of tension or stress. Our friends (and agents, when we're so blessed) who insist on honesty. Our neighbors, with whom we share the news...and the sugar. That guy who teaches the samba and who says, after five weeks of struggle, "You are becoming a samba dancer, Beth. You are finally hearing the music."
For those of us who write, there are editors, and I'd have been nowhere fast without mine. My very first was an editorial board at the literary magazine, Iowa Woman, which gave me three chances to improve an essay I'd titled "Pearl," about a lost heirloom necklace. In books, Alane Mason at Norton helped draw essential, delineating lines in a collaboration that extended over the course of three memoirs and left me with a treasured real-world friendship. At New World Library, Georgia Hughes, a California editor, embraced Ghosts in the Garden, a book about a Pennsylvania garden (and garden walker), and helped elevate it to the universal. At Temple University Press, Micah Kleit took a chance on a whole new category of book, Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, and slyly (so slyly he might have thought I didn't notice) helped me relieve it of its extra weight. At Berrett-Kohler, Johanna Vondeling helped turn an inverted, fantastical fairytale called Zenobia into something a bit more straightforward (and therefore more meaningful).
So that I come now to Laura Geringer of HarperCollins Children's Books, who has had her own fabulously successful imprint there for the past 17 years and who sold an astonishing 50-million books plus during that time. Laura wrote me a letter a few years ago—reached out and made a suggestion that we work together on novels for teens. It took us more than a year to figure out just what we should be working on, and then it happened—a collaboration that for me was both joyous and rewarding and that resulted in Undercover, House of Dance, and the soon-to-come Nothing but Ghosts and The Heart is Not a Size. Laura lived those books from the inside; she helped me imagine them more fully. She said, "It's your book, and we'll publish it as you wish, but perhaps you'll consider...."
I always considered. And the books are so much better for her many provocations and long and always literary emails.
Yesterday I learned that Laura is leaving her imprint to pursue her own writing, to explore digital storytelling, and to work with a favorite charity, First Book. I felt sad, of course—no one wants a partnership to end. But who among us would ever stop a friend from living her dream?
A fond farewell to Laura then. Books on my shelf that I'm proud of, thanks to her.
A thank you to Jill Santopolo, for the conversation, and for all the glorious bridging she does, even as she edits her own authors and writes her own books. (I will go to dinner with you, Jill, but you can forget right here right now about the mojitos and my dancing on any tables.)
And a thank you to Lisa Bishop who has posted a piece I wrote on revising Heart at that fabulous myspace HarperTeen site.
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=72210576&blogID=422296192
She was rolling down a hill, and then she stopped. I was walking with my camera, and I stopped.
"Christina's World," I thought. The Wyeth painting. The essential transcendent pause.
I am thinking about the "So You Think You Can Dance" dancers today. Those finale four—Joshua, Twitch, Katee, Courtney. I am thinking about something Mandy Moore, the guest judge, said last night—that they danced the Mia Michaels choreography not with their physical selves, but with their souls.
We need to write our books that way.
We need to live inside out, authentic and forgiving.
It's when I'm taking a walk or cooking dinner or folding the laundry that I actually get some time to think, and often I'm thinking about what I'm grateful for. Yesterday, again, I was pondering all the really fine souls I've met in this blogging world, the tangle of friendships (to steal a book title from my past) that have erupted here for me. The funny emails about tomatoes from Liviana (inbedwithbooks), for example. The snatches of inside-book-launch-week from Melissa Walker (the Violet series). The sudden appearance of Lorie Ann Grover (readergirlz) and Charlotte, the ongoing companionship of Little Willow, the friendship with Grete, the greetings of Maude, the ballroom dance updates from Keris over at Trashionista, the gift from Sabrina, the unexpected notes from readers.
Goodness flows in, a balm.
Yesterday, Ambeen, a GoodReads friend, posted a guest blog over at her very fine blog house, and I'm grateful for that. The entirely dear Miss Em, meanwhile, sent along a story she thought I might be interested in. I was indeed. In fact, the quote of my day is lifted straight from that piece; Mitchard speaks for a lot of us here.
"I like teenagers because of their enormous passion and their peeled-back emotional quality, and I think you only feel that way during that window in your life. But it’s also the period at which people start to form the habit of being a reader for life.”
Jacquelyn Mitchard, quoted in Market Partners International Publishing Trends, August 2008
http://www.theravenousreaderreviews.blogspot.com/
http://www.emsbookshelf.blogspot.com/
You dream a silver fish big as a truck
on a highway, any highway, this could be Mexico,
this could be Guatemala, nevertheless
and regardless, it’s a damned big fish. You dream
the fish floating but upright, not exerting its gills,
not attempting to fly, eyes the color of pennies
and wide, and the highway you dream is
not a highway but a river in reversals,
running the wrong way toward the sky.
You tell me this in the morning, in winter, by the window
where the sun slides in between the branches of
the red bird’s tree, and you might as well
be speaking of the Apian Way, or the color white
in Mykonos, or that pool of light you photographed
in the cathedral despite the instructions
of the priest. For you had seen this fish, and it was
silver as a truck and big, coins for its eyes,
that cauterized quality of dignity, and you said
you thought you dreamed: This is my gift to you —
this fish, that river, their sky,
in the same way you once said,
Marry me on Samson Street, in winter.
It was cold then, too, I remember, and the road
was a thick slick of ice and the street
was as private as a room, and there was
nothing in your hands but my hand,
nothing in our pockets but time.
Undercover, my first novel for young adults, stars, among other things, an overgrown and abandoned estate pond that becomes a second home of sorts to a poet-in-training named Elisa. She finds her best similes by the water's edge. She teaches herself to skate on its surface, come winter.
Sunk deep into that pond is a mysterious statue, a figure Elisa begins to call The Drowning Girl, which is how I always referred to this gorgeous creature when I stood by her side at Chanticleer garden. I wrote of her in my memoir, Ghosts in the Garden. She returned to me again (as a muse) when I was writing the mystery-romance that will appear next June, Nothing but Ghosts. She was there, in my heart, the entire time I was writing Elisa's story—this always youthful, always silent underwater (I need this word) sylph.
I go to Chanticleer as often as my schedule allows, which this year (sadly) has been not nearly enough. I go for the surprise of new blooms and unexpected edges, the float of flowers on a water's cool skin. Always I take my camera. Sometimes, if the sun is right, I can capture a portrait of The Drowning Girl, and bring her home with me.
Yesterday the sun was right. I'd never seen her quite so clearly.
Whenever I feel that I am, perhaps, taking on too much (getting the ropes of my new novel entangled with the skeins of the last one; pounding at client white papers on the sort of obscure topics that render me useless at social functions; hurrying, seemingly heartlessly, past a garden that has yielded so much joy and only now, only quietly, calls out for a weed-invasion intervention), I stop and take a look at what the rest of the world is doing.
Whatever I, for example, have mercilessly (and, I tell myself, preposterously) tried to squeeze into a day pales—oh, so absolutely—with the self-imposed task taken on by one Ammon Shea, who decided to read the OED in, hmmm, a single year's time. That's 59 million words, according to Nicholson Baker's review in the New York Times. 59 million words, all with their own proud pedigrees, all sitting there one on top of the other, in 20 separate volumes.
Now that's ambition, if you ask me. That's dedication. That's a calling. That's, well, I don't know the word precisely, but Mr. Shea would have to. Mr. Shea now knows every word, and frankly, I am jealous. We write entire books to discover the few things we mean to say. We throw bridges out from ourselves to others: approximating, hoping.
So here's to Mr. Shea and his 20-volume set. Here's to Beth, who, ten books later and an embarrassing number of bad drafts under the expanding belt of very bad drafts (my, the first drafts are horrific; my, they are), is still hunting for that killer phrase, a word or two by which to be remembered.
A word or two to speak through.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html?ref=books
Two found gems this morning:
"And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente."
Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
And in another vein altogether, Libba Bray, that deservedly beloved young adult author, has one of the funniest, cleverest, truest descriptions of the writing process that I've ever read now posted on her livejournal. If any of you haven't seen it, I encourage you to take a good look. Now.
http://libba-bray.livejournal.com/36896.html
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