Signs, Signs Everywhere!

OMG, I am writing in Starbucks, working on my book which is all about a girl growing up in a graveyard and selling graves and two dudes are sitting behind me talking, they're yammering on and on and I'm drowning them out but I just perked up when I heard the older of the two say, "Why is there an embalming charge here, but not here?" Holy crap, the younger guy was selling old guy a coffin and a grave. For his WIFE. Young Guy had to delicately explain why the embalming charge applied only if Old Guy was going to go for an open casket which, really? You need to explain that to a person? Apparently yes, because old guy was all, "Why do I need it for open but not closed?" Oh brother. Poor dude. First of all, what are the odds - my God! - of these guys, of this conversation - happening right beside me as I write my graveyard book? Amazingly slim, I haven't written in this Starbucks in over a year, and only for today, this morning, am I doing it! And B., are people really doing this now? Selling graves and caskets at Starbucks? Yikes. Would have made my life easier, I tell you what.

Oh my God I love writing. It is magical. Magical! Back to it!

What's The Deal With My Kitchen Sinking My Plots?!?

How many hours do people spend actively writing in one sitting? Typing? I can't go more than four at the most on a regular day, five if I'm desperately revising. I get all bleary-eyed and head achy. Do people sit there for eight hours? Is that even possible? Trying to finish my next book has made me feel so dumb lately. I've got all this crap in there that I love and someone needs to curb this bird's nest of a mess - uh, namely me. I've got the following items crammed in here: Antarctica, ballet, foster care, West Portal (a neighborhood in San Francisco I love) Marine biology and cooking shows. Also baking.

Also, off topic but I wish I had a life and non-litigious family I could write a memoir about because memoir - the non-famous person kind - is my very favorite thing to read. If I use fake names can I get away with it?

Write on, kids!

Starting With Place

I have realized every story I write begins not with a character or a plot, but always with place. (Which could be the problem with my meandering plots, but that's another post altogether.) I once read a quote (which of course I could never find again) that Daphne Du Maurier once said about how she was never as emotionally attached to people so much as she was to places. My daughter and husband excepted, I read that and immediately thought, "Ooooh, Daphne! Me, too!" I have visceral, emotional connections to certain towns and counties which yes, I'm sure everyone does for one reason or another - but it really shows up in my writing, which will always be of the actual current world we're all familiar with and never fantasy, I have absolutely no head for that. And truly, no person could ever make me yearn the way Sausalito does. The way Mendocino, California and Dingle, Ireland and Ashland, Oregon and Arcata, California do. Then there's my MFA classes in playwriting during which I spent three years trying desperately to never, ever write a living room play because apparently Chekhov covered that pretty well already. So I wrote plays set in Antarctica and in graveyards, and now I'm turning them into books. I think the best method for me, when I am starting a story from scratch, is that I'll find myself in a familiar or fascinating new place and then ask "Who the hell would live here? And what would they do - and why?" Lately I love Vendela Vida's books. They always take place somewhere not here - 'Here' meaning middle class white America - and never in a living room. Not that great things can't happen in a living room, but maybe my imagination doesn't have the balls Chekov's does to make what's going on in the character's lives interesting enough to surmount the sofa and soar beyond the coffee table. So maybe place is my crutch. But at least it helps my characters do and say things they wouldn't have occasion to if they were just hanging out at home.

Blog Reboot 2012

I'll get this thing going, I swear! For now I'll say I am overjoyed to announce my first book, AT NEED, will publish in 2014 by Random House Children's thanks to my amazing agent, Melissa Sarver of Elizabeth Kaplan Literary, and my fabulous editor, Suzy Capozzi.I love this book, I have loved it since the story first formed in spiral notebooks over the consecutive summers of 1982/83. I was ten, then eleven years old. I spent those summers with my grandparents mourning first the death of my 19 year old cousin who lived next door to my grandparents, then the following year mourned from a distance the death of a fifth grade classmate back home. That second summer, we returned home where my mother announced, "Your father bought a graveyard today. Keep your mouths shut about it or we'll get in trouble." Good times! The notebook journal became a play in grad school where I earned an MFA in playwriting, then became a novel five years later. I'll blog here about this book's ascent to publication, writing and reading, and hopefully I can meet fellow writers who love to read and write about the same. Because who doesn't love to read and write about reading and writing? Come on! At this very beginning of my experience with publishing I have learned the following things: 1. A good agent is worth EVERYTHING. 2. Editors desperately want to find books they love, books readers will love, but that will speak to the fact that publishing is, still, a business. 3. Publishing, as an industry, is so. slow. oh. my. lord. 4. A thick skin and compartmentalized ego are kind of essential. 5. Self doubt is natural but will sink you and your book if it takes over and makes you second guess too much - without #4, a writer will not survive. Write a good book and shut the hell up already!

If it were only that easy - yeah. So that's where I'm at now, hope you all will share your part in the making of these books we love. For now I am off to write!