Sunset

I love it when the light begins to intensify as the sun goes down. Colors deepen, distances seem to compress. Then, when it is truly dusky, I can have a rush of feeling very melancholy. There is some pause, some loss in the air. I think there's some English or Scottish word for this. The gloaming?

But tonight as I was bringing in wood for the stove, the sky lit up and my melancholy disappeared in the blaze. To celebrate, I sat down and wrote for four hours.

How do you do this novel writing? Laurie Halse Anderson and Neil Gaiman

Now that I'm working on a novel, I'm racked with insecurities. Can I do it? How do you do it? How do other people do it?

I find other writers' blogs very comforting. Laurie Halse Anderson recently left a character writhing on the cutting room floor, and found her novel is better off for it.

Here's her answer to a query asking if it was hard:

"The different parts of the writing process feel like different countries to me. The etiquette and customs of one country is extremely different from the next. In the early drafts, I include everything that falls into my head and I love it all. I could never cut out a character at that stage. When I get to later drafts, that changes. The only thing that matters is what works best for the story. if I fall in love a character and she doesn't work in the story, she's gets cut. I can always send her flowers, take her to the movies, or go out for coffee with her. But if she isn't a vital thread in the fabric of the story, out she goes."

Neil Gaiman took a huge, anxious leap away from home to get a grip on his novel, then returned with something (pages? confidence?), to home and garden shed and family, and finished.

Here's a bit from a recent blog of his, answering the question of how he writes:

"The truth is, as the truth about so much is in writing, that there are no rules, and even a writer who normally does things one way doesn't have to be consistent. You do what produces pages. You keep moving forward. If I'm really stuck on a scene I'll sometimes skip to the next scene I DO know how to write, and often by the end, the solution to the one I was stuck on is obvious, or I can't even remember why it was a problem." Check out Neil Gaiman's blog for more.

Helpful. Comforting. How we all twitch around and get mental space for some parts of the writing and listen and imagine and then get ruthless and use a different part of our brain to rewrite and then send off what we've done to our trusty editors and sit on pins and needles till we hear what is good and what is rotten and we make the changes we can make and send it back again and try to forget all those wonderful characters we spent so much time with. We take to hanging out in cafes without a stricken look on our faces and go to yoga and see friends who probably though we'd died or been incarcerated and pay our ignored, overdue bills.

And then? Start the whole damn thing over again.

Curl up with The Gathering by Anne Enright and your heart will fly wide open

I just finished reading The Gathering after seeing a podcast of Anne Enright giving a talk at Barnes and Noble's New York store. She looked so.... normal, for lack of a better word. Kind. Thoughtful. Clearly smart. Poised.

Then I plunged into her book. It's the kind of book that lays you wide open. I spent the day yesterday reading in front of a hot fire while outside it stormed and rained and the wind blew in great, gasping, smoky breaths through the cracks around my windows and doors.

The Gathering is one of those books that ten people would have ten different takes on what it means, because it's so rich. For me, it was how to love and tolerate and truly see the family you're born into, as well as the one you make. It's about seeing them all clearly, and letting them be, and not flinching away from the truth of them all. And stepping truly and deeply into the life you've made for yourself.

Day before yesterday I went to the ophthalmologist. The woman who dilated my eyes was chatty. "Sure hope it doesn't rain this weekend!" she said. "My son's birthday. Everyone's coming over. We won't all fit in the house."

"Who's everyone?" I asked, trying not to squirm as the drops hit my eyes.

"My husband's one of twelve kids. The whole family's coming. 120 people."

I thought of her while I sat in front of my cozy fire and it stormed outside. I thought of her as I read about Veronica and Liam and their ten other brothers and sisters.

And I thought about my own life, and my ninety year old parents and my four brothers and sisters, and my husband and his five brothers and sisters. Once we all had open faces and ruddy cheeks and tangled hair and huge noisy birthday parties and unknown, promising futures. And how we've had some good luck and some bad luck and worked hard and had a few ruddy faced, tangled-hair kids ourselves. And I felt incredibly sad and grateful and joyful, all at the same time.

A good book will do that to you.

Sherman Alexie

Last summer and fall I had the privilege of heading the National Book Award for Young People. As I've posted before, we agonized once we got to about twenty titles: how to cut down further? We debated hard, cast secret ballots and eventually had our five finalists. I feel a special connection with those books, a kind of pride that we recognized how brilliant they all are.

We finally chose Sheman Alexie's book, The True Diary of a Part Time Indian as THE ONE. He's reaping the rewards of his deserved success with the book right now, on tour to high schools acorss the country. He's written a beautiful piece about his tour for Publisher's Weekly.

The guy can sure write.

Dorothea Lange at SF Library

Just back from doing the presentation at the SF library with my dad and sister. We had a blast. We had a great audience who turned out even in the cold drizzly weather. They were very enthusiastic. Meg showed her film on Dorothea, and then Meg, Ron and I did Q&A for about 30 minutes. Questions were pretty wide-ranging which was fun. Here's my dad and my sister Meg.


Before the presentation we went up to the 6th floor of the San Francisco Public Library to look at Dorothea's photos of Steep Ravine. They were presented beautifully -- in big cases at waist level. I really enjoyed looking at them like that. I had seen the show before at the Marin County Historical Society where it was up on the walls. For some reason, this gave me a different appreciation of them. They are beautiful portraits. If you go to the exhibit look for me -- I'm the skinny girl with long braids running around in a couple of the photos.

It reminded me how much I love that part of the world, poised between the cliffs and the sky and the vast ocean. The cabins are rentable for something like $30 night. Here's a recent article in Via Magazine about the area, and how to rent the cabins.

Just what do sales reps do, anyway?

I belong to a small on-line reading group. There are just four of us -- two authors and two illustrators. Our ostensible goal is to read books, mostly kids and YA with an occasional adult book, and figure out what makes them good or bad or popular or overlooked. We read. We pore over cool illustrations. We also talk about the publishing industry, juicy gossip (OK, there isn't THAT much in children's book publishing), and whine and laugh about tough work and family issues -- mostly raising kids and caring for elderly parents.

An agent suggested to one of the illustrators that she make something for the sales reps when her next book came out. It started us into a big discussion: what do sales reps do, anyway? What's a good sales rep? How do you know if they are saying lovely things about your book to the book store buyers?

I found lots of info on a recent Shelftalker post, Alison Morris' fantastic blog on Publisher's Weekly. It's a well-deserved love fest for reps, and if you scroll through the comments you'll see a couple from the reps, sharing the love back.

There are a bunch of really, really hardworking people out there, getting our books into the hands of readers. I join in the love fest: thank you reps and booksellers both!!

Dorothea Lange at the SF Library

There's a beautiful exhibition of Dorothea Lange's photographs at the San Francisco Public Library in the Skylight Gallery up on the sixth floor. It's photos of her cabin at Steep Ravine perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Terrific.

On Tuesday, Feb 19th, my sister Meg will be showing her film, Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, at 6 pm in the Koret Auditorium. My dad and I will be there with her to take Q and A after the film. My dad, Rondal Partridge, was her assistant when he was young. We all were folded into the family and used to spend sunny days and windy nights out at the cabin with the Taylor-Lange-Dixons.

snow and ice and blooming plum trees

I know most of you are freezing cold. Really, really cold. Snow in New York City. Laurie Halse Anderson's sweat is frozen to her post-jogging face. Neil Gaiman's in diamond dust snow in Minnesota. My son Will, also in MN, would probably be in diamond dust snow as well except that he's a lab rat and never gets out.

So I'll share with you two wonderful pictures by the amazing illustrator Katherine Tillotson. These are from her neighborhood in San Francisco. She says: "The street is brick paved and lined with blossoming plum trees on both sides. If I time my walks just right I can walk through drifting pink petals and hear the wind chimes in back yard. It is very magical."

Enjoy. Lift your face up and feel the rays. Smell the delicious flowery dusty smell.

Overheard conversations: a one-off, or a whole novel

I've got an overheard quote in Leah Garchik's funny column today on love. Funny as in laugh-out-loud, not funny as in odd, weird.

I'm one of those faithful readers who starts my day by opening the Datebook section of the Chronicle and reading Garchik's Public Eavesdropping of the day. And I always check to see if I know the person who sent it in. Just for fun.

And of course, I'm always listening for overheard bits of conversation. They can be much more fun than the whole, complicated story.

Or heart-wrenching. Walking to the library on UC campus recently I overheard a young, attractive blond woman saying to another: "I'm her birth mother. I just want to have a relationship with her."

That's the start of a whole novel, right there.

Arrrgh! Who did I loan that book to?

Did you ever have a book you loaned out to someone, and you wanted to read it again and you just couldn’t remember who you loaned it to? I’ve done it lots of times. I love it when I think of a good person-book match. I want to pass along the pleasure of a good book. And I love it when people loan me a book they think I’ll like. Just so you don’t think I’m a saint, I’ve got a couple of them sitting reproachfully on my shelves right now.

I went to get The Slaves of the Cool Mountains off my shelf. Gone. Loaned out. Because I’m writing a book partially set in Vietnam, I’ve read lots of books about Vietnam and the surrounding area. Slaves was calling out to me for a reread. I even tried ABE books to buy another copy, but being a very old and very English book (published in 1959), it was hugely expensive.

It came back to me, miraculously – my father gave me a bag of books after clearing off a bookshelf, and there it was. I’d loaned it to him.

It had been his book before mine, and before him, it had been owned by Felix Greene. He must have been the first owner, because the author, Alan Winnington, inscribed it to him. Both Englishmen, reporting on the changes being made by Communists in China.

Slaves is Winnington’s travels into the mountainous southwest corner of China where the Norsu people were forced to free their slaves. He goes into amazing detail about the social conditions and the changes people were trying to absorb. Fascinating reading about a culture long since gone. Great black and white photos.

Try a library search. I’d love to have you read it!

Jon Scieszka, literature ambassador

Children's Bookshelf has run a letter from Ambassador Scieszka. That would be Jon Scieszka, who writes books for kids (Stinky Cheese Man, Math Curse, True Story of the Three Little Pigs). He's hysterically funny and irreverent. Silly. Ingenious. Twisted. There's lots of interesting words to describe him.

He goes after kids who are having a hard time with reading. Especially boys. He's been appointed literature ambassador of children's books by the Library of Congress, and he's off to a flying start. You can read the whole letter, or here's a taste:

"But the best, the absolute best tribute so far was my reception at the La Jolla Country Day School. The room was packed with 200 pre-K through first graders. As I entered, they presented me with a red satin Ambassador sash, and the fifth/sixth grade music class played an original composition, "Ambassador Fanfare," on kettle drums, trombone, trumpet, and xylophone.

I liked it so much that I went out and came in three more times. And Dave Shannon was with me, so I had them play it for him as Vice-Ambassador—only half of it, and twice as fast."
Buried under all the humor is this:

"I'm also working on a plan to promote the best of every publisher's list for Reluctant Readers, deputizing teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents, kids, and anybody who's found a book that works. Details to be released soon."

There's a great interview with Scieszka on NPR.

And extra points if you can spell his name wtihout looking.

Kim Pope's Budapest photo

Just got an email from my neice Kim. No photos of her interviewing kids, but she did send this. It's a traveling tradition in her family to take these interesting ground shots.... with just their feet stuck in to prove They Were There.

Reminds me of those photos of Lemony Snicket... always from the back. Funny how much Snicket's back looks like Daniel Handler's big bearish back....

Davis Scholars Program and my awesome niece Kim Pope

I had a long conversation with my niece, the amazing Kim Pope last night. She's actually my niece-in-law, but I claim her straight up as niece, she's so cool. She works at Westminster School where her husband teaches. (He's totally cool too, but this is about her, not him.)

Her job? Davis Scholars Program Coordinator. They've got two pilot programs going on --—one domestic and one international—that award need-based scholarships to really motivated, smart kids from 1) America (first in family to attend college) and 2) anywhere in the world. Kim's recently gone to Budapest and Prague. Heads soon to Lakota reservation (where poverty is as bad as any third world nation), Ghana and Vietnam. She's looking for two kids for next year to come to their boarding school on a full scholarship. Kids who do well get supported through college.

This fills me up with hope. Lots of hope. I love to see people and programs that knit the world together instead of tearing it apart or blowing it up.

Thank you Kim, thank you Davis Scholars people. Hats off to you and your awesome work.

Sunlight and redwood trees, Chiura Obata

After days of stormy wet weather, woke up to sun today. Raindrops are shimmering on everything-- bare winter branches, grass, ferns, and huckleberry bushes. My favorite is seeing the morning sun lighting up one side of the redwood trees. Rusty red-brown bark, bare lower branches. All topped off by huge, leafy branches swaying gently in the wind.

Chiura Obata painted it so beautifully.
Life and Death, Porcupine Flat, High Sierra, California, 1930

Early morning rain, cozy

This morning I woke up early, just as the sky was getting light. Rain was clattering down on the roof. Under the covers I was warm and cozy, the air on my face crisp and cool. I drifted between dreams and listening to the rain, my world small and perfect, just for the moment.