Faster Than Kudzu

Sturm and *#)@^%|#|(^$)*^ Drang

I got a weird mail yesterday, weird in TONE, from a person with a gender neutral name, asking me why this blog almost NEVER has cussing in it, and when it does the entries title WARNS that bad language is about to ensue, and YET in gods in Alabama I felt a need to allow a TEEMING PLETHORA of double-plus naughty words to BREED and infest every chapter (I may be paraphrasing, rather than quoting here..) and yet the language in Between is only NAUGHTI-ESQUE, becoming FULL ON offensive only a couple of times, and then Person said he-or-she loved the books but wished I would eat soap and BY THE WAY, while Person was at it, decorum insisted that Person SHOULD pause to mention that especially considering the MILDER vocabulary, the SEX in Between was a wee bit on the GRAPHIC side, and did he-or-she-the-reader really need THAT level of detail about What Sometimes Happens Between Married People In The Bathroom? (Answer: Yes.)

Person and I back and forthed in email for a little, had a civil and very interesting talk, and I asked permission to blog about it. Person was fine with it. So.

I feel a blend of pleased and mildly exasperated. It’s as if a drive by shooter came and blasted away at a butt ugly flower pot that I had long been meaning to throw away and then sprayed an extra four bullets into my dead azalea bush before zooming off. Because, on the one hand, she (let’s make Person a she so I can quit with the hyphens) bought the books. Both of ‘em. Even after ONE had offended her, she found enough in there to love to buy the other. So. My first reaction is, ISN’T SHE PRETTY????? And then my second is, PERSON! THANK YOU, but if it bothers you that much, why are you READING it? I think I must feel…Pleasasperated?

I mean, far be it from me to discourage anyone from reading my books. I think EVERYONE IN AMERICA should read my books, and then buy gift copies for all their European friends. I don’t want to lose sight of that as I address her concerns here. PERSON BOUGHT MY BOOKS. I LOVE PERSON. FOREVER. THE END. But it’s VERY hard (impossible, actually, because here I am, saying it) to not say to her, “PERSON! When the first sentence of a book is, ‘There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniels, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.’don’t you think you should maybe feel a mild frisson of precognitive warning that this is not going to be a particularly sugar-mouthed narrator?” ESPECIALLY given that Person IS the sort of person who doesn’t like to look at the letters BEE EYE GEE TEE EYE TEE ESS in conjunction with each other?

As for me…cussing? I don’t believe in it. I mean, I do not believe there is ANY SUCH THING. A word is a word is a word. I do not think there are any words that should be taboo. I have a wide vocabulary that can alternately make my SAT coach from 11th grade or a drunk sailor on leave sit up a little straighter, clearly impressed.

And I don’t think cussing is the sign of a poor vocabulary. Knowing only one word for vomit, say, is a sign of a poor vocabulary. Or not knowing what a prestidigitator is, this is a sign. Knowing cusses is just knowing more words. More words = more nuances of meaning so you can more accurately shade a sentence to express a thought.

I don’t think any combination of letters can BE intrinsically BAD or GOOD. A word is either appropriate for the moment and the company, or not appropriate. Any word can be USED for good or ill (both Pol Pot and Ghandi frequently employed “and” for example) but the word itself is inert and blameless.

While I have NEVER been one to accept situational morality, I AM, I confess, a situational LINGUIST. If you are alone in your garage and you bang your thumb with a hammer, there is only ONE word that EXACTLY expresses the moment, and it starts with an SH and ends in a gender-neutral pronoun. If you bang your same thumb with same hammer in front of my five year old daughter, then you better suck it up and say, “OH! POO! OH! OH! BIG POO!”

The end.

I have WEIRD ideas about propriety, BUT I try to ERR on the side of MANNERS. If a word MIGHT offend someone present, I think you choose not to say it. Period. My right to use the Very Bad F Word with mad abandon ends where the hearing range of the rigorous Catholic ears of your delightful granny begins. I think you don’t tell someone to grow up and get over it. You respect their sensibilities, and you choose another bleeping word. If you don’t, then I think you are a boor.

Also, you don’t cuss in front of kids because people my daughter’s age are not yet capable of making decisions about WHEN it is appropriate to use particular words. As soon as she is capable of making those distinctions for a word, she can use that word. For example, the VERY bad Eff Word…if she thinks it is EVER even REMOTELY appropriate for it to come out of her cupid’s bow mouth in the range of MY hearing, she is not ready. Saying The Very Bad Eff Word in front of your own personal mother is poor choice and can only end in weeping, heartfelt repentance and a mouth full of Zest.

Right now, ten year old Sam and I are negotiating for use of the word “Crap.”

Sam: *drops his Yu-Gi-Oh cards* Crap.
Me: You can’t say crap.
Sam: Is it a bad word? Because you say it, Mom, alla time.
Me: Crap is not a “bad word.” You can say it secretly in your room alone NOW. You can say it in front of me when you are 13. Also, you can’t say WHAT THE---- and then stop. It doesn’t sound NICE. You can say What the heckee, if you like, or you can say Great Googley Moogley. Yes. Say that.
Sam: Mom. I am NOT going to say Great Googley Moogley.
Me: Fine. But you can’t say crap.
Sam: What does the word Sexy mean?
Me: HEY! LOOK! SOMETHING SHINY!

No, actually, I explained what SEXY means and we negotiated terms for when it is an appropriate word for him to say. I was going for “Sexy may be used by Sam when he is over 35, assuming he is married, and assuming he is speaking to his wife, and assuming his mother is dead.” He negotiated me down quite a bit from that stance, so that he is allowed to sing the RIGHT SAID FRED song, but NOT allowed to refer to GIRLS, even ANIME ones, as sexy. Because it is not appropriate. AND ALSO because he will be sued for sexual harassment.

NOW this is all SPOKEN word stuff.

In a book, I think I am free to use whatever word best suits the moment. My books have covers that you must exercise free will in order to open, and they are shelved with the adult books at your friendly neighborhood lit-vendor. I use whatever word is needed for the sentence to do its job. Arlene? She had a MOUTH on her ---- I’ve talked about that on this blog before, why it was important on several levels to let Arlene talk that way.

In Between, Nonny Jane had a HUGELY different vocab from Arlene. Not just on the level of CUSSING; Nonny was not as educated (or as sophisticated, or as jaded) as Arlene, and her word choices reflect that. THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING is written in directed third person, so there is LITTLE bad language in the text, but in the dialog everyone talks like they would talk. Some of the characters *cough* Thalia *cough* are not, shall we say, mouth-nuns.

Here on the net, I am more circumspect. I know there are people who come to this blog who would find the language in my books harsh and troubling, and since this is ME talking, not a character, I curb any tendency to be foul-mou----foul fingered?? or I warn you in the title that the vocab, she is going to get a leetle bit racy. Also, my OWN personal mother reads FTK, and remember the rule about F words and mothers? I don’t need any Zest and repentance today, thanks.

So what do you think I should say to my gentle-eared reader and others like her who ask me these things?

I am inclined toward something like this:

THANK YOU FOR BUYING MY BOOKS. I HEART YOU! LET’S BE BFF! PLEASE BUY THE NEXT ONE TOO, WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT IT MIGHT HAVE A SMALL BUCKET OF CUSS IN IT! ALSO A SMATTERING OF NAUGHTY MARRIED LOVE STUFF. XXOXOXOOX

And leave it at that.

But I would like to hear ya’lls opinions on wayward language. Are some words just BAD words? Should all words be useable in all places? Where are your lines? Is erring on the side of good manners prudent? Or merely prudish?

Seriously, I want to KNOW. I found your capitalist pig suggestions to be hugely helpful in deciding what avaricious acquisitions to give in to (TOWELS? Put on the Christmas list!!!! Elliptical---BUY IMMEDIATELY BEFORE MY BUTT INVADES FRANCE! Bedroom Furniture – tabled for further discussion! IPOD – Dude, I don’t like SONGS. What was I THINKING! Dyson? Watching Want Not for a link to a deal on a refurbished purple monster!) so I’d like to hear you chime in on this issue.

Drive by Blogging

HI! I am drafting.

I had a prologue and a first chapter but I have successfully whittled them down to only 2,000 words by throwing out all the bad sentences. *sigh*

I hate drafting.
I hate starting a new book.
I never remember how to WRITE books right at the front and so I usually begin them by calling my friends a lot and weeping that I have lost the knack for it and then I try to get them brainstorm with me about other jobs I might be good at and eventually we work it out that I am essentially useless in ALL OTHER WAYS.

“Unless you want an exciting career in the medical test subject industry,” they say, “You should hang up and go write a book.”

SOON I will have enough CRAPULANT DEVIL WORDS to where I can STOP drafting and revise. On that day, Best Beloveds, I shall be happy. Till then. I need regular infusions of Shiraz and cheese popcorn and kindness and to be left alone at night to watch 3 episodes of ALIAS on DVD in a row.

NOTE: I never watched Alias when it was on because I thought it was some serious actual SPY show full of politics and DEEP THOUGHTS. Um, no. It is essentially XENA, but with gadgets instead of magic. It has kitten-headed pretty boys who are in love with Jennifer Garner, AS WELL THEY SHOULD BE, and even better, it has REALLY a LOT of outfits. I HEART it. It makes all the hamsters on their million tiny wheels inside my brain GO AND SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP.

Anyway – here’s the drive-by and then I have to go back to staring musingly at this blank page and thinking up optional other careers and what friend I can call next to discuss in depth my potential as a stock trader or cowboy:

I was flipping though my usual Christian Pop stationswhich is almost all I listen to when the kids are in the car. When they are OUT I listen to audio books… It was all COMMERCIALS. So I flipped over to see what was happening on Dave FM.

Talking Heads.

Burning Down the House.

Ahhhhh the living sound of my misspent youth….

Me: Kids! Kids! Listen! This is the Talking Heads. They are THE AWESOME.
*we listen*
*song ends*
Sam: *musingly* I like that song. I wish we listened to Dave FM all the time. It seems like it might be ALL rock-n-roll and no education.

Hehehe. My kid likes his music LEARNING FREE, thanks.

Ready. Set. Help.

As my mental illness number approaches the little 8 tilted on its side, I have decided to ask you for help.

I've forgotten how to tell a story. I'm all bogged in sentences and carefully explaining things.
So. That. GENTLEREADER. Understands.
Screw that. I'd rather go watch television.

I have been working in a manner so unabated and insane that I've lost track of what I LIKE about this novel, which, I have realized WAY too early, is much too personal to ever let another soul read. I know, right? Just to be perfectly clear, this is not autobiographical. Just...personal. Big dif, but it doesn't FEEL all that different from where I am sitting now, in the middle of it. I'm so freaked that that I am messing up things I normally excel at, like motherhood (impatient with INTERRUPTING COW JOKES MUCH? Recently, yes.) And Public Speaking, which I usually enjoy, but is currently so terrifying I am turning down gigs I would normally LEAP at.

gods and Between are neither at all autobiographical but both SO personal and I didn't realize HOW personal they were until they were already out on the world and I was burying myself in a NEW novel to not notice how much of my inner Grendel I'd exposed. Now? I already am seeing terrible parallels and desperately trying not to learn valuable life lessons or come closer in some way to understanding myself. SO NOT INTERESTED. Because, really, my naval lint makes me cranky and exhausted. I'd MUCH rather watch television. And yet here my navel lint is. Pestering me to explain VERY CAREFULLY TO BELOVED FACELESS READER OF MY NOVELS what it all means, when really, it's just a damn good story.

Here's how I write: I get bored, and so I tell a story to myself. Then I tinker around with it because I want to know what happens next, and I want what happens next to be the right thing. Faceless Reader and Judgment comes later, and should be, to some extent, a surprise and completely disconnected from the initial process. NOW? I'm discombobulated and am vowing never no never not never notnot shall i ever do things out of order again. It's just a damn good story, I say to myself. It's just a damn good story..

Now all I have to do is remember how to TELL one of those.

SO, anyway, for the last two days I've been doing a lot of watching television. I love TV. TV shuts the brains off and the heart slows down and one approaches a state a being that is perfectly contained as itself and nothing more, like the platonic ideal of a sofa.

When my brains approach permanent hiatus and I begin to sneak up on flatline, I go watch the show at zefrank.com. Ze is sort of like television, only smaller. And low rez. And he has both more thinking and more poop jokes, so if he ran 24/7, always on tap, I think I would be a happier person. I would put in little earphones and project his GIANT TALKING FACE onto the inside lens of my glasses. Total escape into duckies and a vehement desire for peace and the 4 second cut away....Lint? What lint?

I haven't even been telling stories here, on FTK. I've been talking ABOUT stuff. I've lost my innate sense of Beginning. Middle. End. I've lost control of language.

Screw it. If you need me, I'll be watching television.

If you want me to TALK, I can talk ABOUT things. Mostly I can talk ABOUT TV, since watching it is what I do now:

1) Lorelei would NEVER have gone and slept with what's-his-bucket. That's just DUMB. DUMB way to end a season, DUMB hole to have to get out of in the final season.
2) SATAN has the reins at project runway --- VINCENT? BACK? Come ON! And you KNOW they will bring him back AGAIN at fashion week, right, like they did last season, as a HELPER. What kind of help is THAT? Couture glue bottle, anyone? It is Vincent without end, AMEN.
3) Super Password is the best rerun going on Game Show Network. Yes. Game Show Network. You know things are desperate here as I wait for the season premiers that aren't on Fox to kick in. I mean, DUDE when is MEDIUM coming back????
4) Except maybe Match Game. Because I think Gene Rayburn was crazy sexy. And I heart me some Fanny Flag.

I could go on like this for a very long time. Back to the novel I am not currently writing due to my full TV watching schedule....I dream these people. I swear to you this is the best novel I have ever not written and it is marching endlessly around in my head. I go to sleep with them. I wake up with them. Laurel and Thalia, Thalia and Laurel. I have a draft. It's currently in vivisected chunks on my floor because I had to tear out a whole wrongful section. NOW I have the missing pieces in my head...I see what should happen.I see the story, in my head. And there it stays.

There's a fundamental disconnect going on here. I HAVE the story now. I just can't tell it. People who love me are watching me snatch myself baldheaded and are telling me I need prozac or a trip to the mountains or to exercise more. Okay. I can try all that. But I suspect it's crap.

I look at FTK over the last few weeks, I sure have been talking ABOUT a lot of things. That's' the problem. I've forgotten how to tell a story. I've forgotten how to do the FUN parts. It's sort of like knowing how to be PREGNANT with all the attending vomiting and enormous butt-getting, and yet you go all Agnes of God and only see doves flapping if someone asks how the sex was, and THEN you NEVER ACTUALLY GET THE BABY.

So, I am taking the rest of the week off to watch some lovely television, and you, oh best beloveds, if you are kind and delightful and want to virtually pet my hair, are going to remind me how to tell a story.

No comments---let's do this via e-mail for the shy among you. Ask me a question. Tell me an anecote from your grandmother's life. Send me a link to a picture. Write me a Haiku. YES, I said HAIKU. These are desperate times, and I am willing to even try poetry. Send me ...Something. Give me a jumping off point. For the rest of the week, I will tell stories about the things you send me. Some will be true. Some will be foul lies. I just want to have FUN.

Writing has been work recently. If I wanted to WORK for a freakin' living, I would have become an environmentalist lawyer or a hooker. SO. Rest of the week is about PLAY. I'll blog here, and exercise more, and take a day trip to Stone Mountain. I'll even take my own homemade version of Prozac, which involves drinking Pomegranate martinis all day long on Saturday while watching a COMPLETE BACK TO BACK season of America's Next Top Model on VH1.

Ready? Set! Help.

The Mythological Life-Eating Spotted Hydrax Time-Disjunction Monkey

I have one. (If you are asking, "One what?" then see above.) I HAVE one, and it is sneaking around, mythologically (and craftily) EATING my life and disjuncting my relationship to time. Not that time and I were ever, like, really, really, really tight. But still. I have a metaphorical monkey on my back, and I think he stole my watch.

In Lee Child's Reacher novels, the main character has this uncanny ability to set an inner clock, and his military training and internal clockiness allow him to doze for, say, an exact hour and then wake up just in time to slaughter bad guys and make fierce rompy, dog-man love with one of Child's signature competant female characters who has already rescued herself, thanks, but now needs help to go back in and eviscerate evil. (I like those books a LOT, can you tell?) But I myself am the anti-Reacher. I have the uncanny ability to not realize it is March for WEEKS. Some years I don't realize it is Monday until long after a completely different Monday than the one I think it should be has rolled around, and I am now smack in the middle of the following Wednesday. (I'm also not like Reacher in that I don't know 56 ways to kill a man with my bare hands. I only know 9.)

I say all this to try to explain this freaky thing that's happening: I'm losing time.

Let me rephrase. I'm losing much more time than is normal for me. I VERY OFTEN lose a minuet to blank staring, or misplace an hour or two, forget a day maybe here or there, every now and I again I space out and drop a week. Now I am losing whole MONTHS. Seriously. Did you know it's June? Well, you are one up on me, buddy.

If you watch too many Law and Order reruns on USA and BRAVO (and I do, Lord KNOWS I do), you might begin to believe that the ONLY logical explanation is that I have Multiple Personality Disorder. I woke up feeling full this morning, which either means I ate too many baked Cheetos while watching the UNSTOPPABLE GRINDING DEATH METAL TRAIN WRECK that is the Janice Dickerson Modeling Agency Show on Lifetime or Oh! or some channel that REALLY ought to know better, OR, and this seems far more likely, the spooky serial killer personailty I keep stored in my occipital lobe (along with the frigid librarian and the innocent child and the promiscuous snakey man-ho) manifested at five am, and I spent a coupla hours next door, paddling about in a kiddy pool filled with blood and grilling myself of tasty steak-of-neighbor with family dog sauce.

When they come to arrest me, I hope they send Vincent Donofrio. Because, Yum.

ANYWAY, for those of you who are equally afflicted by Space-Time-Contumium-Disaffected-Disorder, I have a Newsflash: It's JUNE.

On the THIRD of the month that it now is, gods in Alabama came out in paperback. And I MISSED it. I did not go to my local bookstore to look at it. I did not even KNOW. I am still back in MAY, hoping it will do well when it comes out, hoping my launch into the word of having a paperback goes well. Yeah, well, already happened. I was in some sort of cosmic bathroom, powdering my nose for daysanddaysanddays. I missed the thrill of seeing the display on the first fresh day, but on the bright side, I also missed FOUR days of frantically pacing around, hoping my baby is faring well and, if not flying off the shelves, at the very least leaving them at a brisk trot.

PAPERBACK! OUT! NOW! GAHHHHHHHHHH! I'm going to go look this afternoon and buy a celebration Iced Caramel Coffee Drink. As for you, this would be a good time to go buy one for everyone you ever met.

THE LAUME INTERIEW! now with very few digressions, she says, digressing in the title....

To digress again, immediately, even before I start in on the actual interview, Oh My Best Beloveds, if you will please to CRANE your eyes THISAWAY
<-----------------------------
and then down a inch or two,
You will see the BIG! YELLOW! BUTTON! is back, now under a shiny small picture of BETWEEN, GEORGIA. Ah prepare for DEJA JA VU VU as I say.....
That button will take you to an ORDER FORM. This link will take you to my TOUR DATES and LOCATIONS. If you can't make it to an actual tour event ---and I hope you can, I promise you will have a good time, and I hate it when it is just me and the bookstore cat, blinking at each other---BUT if you cannot because you WILFULLY chose to prance off and live in MONTANA, even though YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU NOT TO, never fear. It doesn't mean you are destined to die alone on a rickety Montanian cot, weeping as you slip this mortal coil because you never got a signed, inscribed first edition hardback of BETWEEN, GEORGIA. You can thank The Alabama Booksmith, a fantastical indy, who has set up a VIRTUAL SIGNING that will take place on FRIDAY, JULY 14th.

Just order before that date (now is good, lest you FORGET!), and the form will let you order a copy that says practically anything. Just THINK of who has a birthday this year....why, everyone you know! May I humbly suggest you pre-get your favorite person's present? Think how HAPPY you will be on October 15 or whatever day they decided to appear into the world, when you HAVE their present all ready to go and signed and filled with charming felicitations I have penned per your instructions using the UNIBALL VISION ELITE pen I tote with me for just such an occasion. And get your mom one! And get you one! The books beg you to take one home with you as if they were the blinking bookstore cat's foundling kittens, except the book won't stromp great gaping holes into your sofa and mewl for you to clean out its litterbox.

NOW AT LAST, the LAUME Interview:

Laume: How much time do you spend actually writing? - that is, sitting at the computer or notepad writing the first draft or revising. Not answering e-mail or writing your blog or sending notes to your editor. The actual story.

Me: Not a lot. I write the way 9 year old boys pick at scabs---as if it's fascinating in a yicky, painful way. I feel compelled to do it. I write maybe 3 hours a week? Tops? I spend a good 10 - 15 concentrated hours a week REVISING the hideous crap I pumped out during the miserable hours I spent writing. I also spend an uncalculatable amount of minutes here and half hours there toying with sentences and paragraphs and pages and scenes. If I get fifteen minutes of quiet, I run to my computer and niggle and nudge some horrid sentences until they line up and do right. That's sheer pleasure, making the mess become pleasing language that furthers my story.

Laume: How much time do you spend working out your story that is not actual writing? For instance, working out plot issues while driving in the car, doing research on places or technical points, discussing your work with your writer's group.....

Me: I can't calclate that either. I think about it all the time. I write novels because I have SUCH a horror of being bored. That, to me, seems like the worst part of being buried alive. Yes, the terror and the oxygen slowly fading and the darkness and the aloneness and the possible bugs touching you is ALL VERY BAD. But when I think of being buried alive, it's the sensory deprivation that REALLY gets to me. If I ever DO get buried alive I hope my serial killer puts a penlight and some Flannery O'Connor in the box with me. Or buries me with a good conversationalist.

When Scott and I did our living wills a couple of years ago, I couldn't sign off until I had mapped out with him very carefully the sort of entertainment that would need to be provided continuously for my inert form. My lawyer was like, "You get that I am paid by the HOUR, right?" as I went over this witrh him in excrutiating detail. But we got it done, to whit: If I am ever in a coma, there MUST be TV or a book on tape on for me at all times. And I was terrified there would be some sort of letter-of-the-law MEAN nurse who likes to sit SOUR and BAKE in the quiet, and in my imagination she would PUT ON the TV as requested, but turn the sound down to ZERO. This fictional nurse really BUGGED me, a I HATED her, untilScott implemented a headphone clause and minimum volume requirements. I also specified that the TV could not be on CNN or, Lord help me, the DISCOVERY freakin' channel, and I didn't want to listen to books about WHO STOLE MY CHEESE or financial planning. My unresponsive braindead body would prefer to have PLOT with its iron lung. Crazy, huh?

SO. Yeah. All the time I am thinking about the book I am writing, or the book I want to write next...It probably pops into my brain with the same frequency that Psychology Today says adolescent boys think of sex.

Laume: Do you set daily goals or weekly goals?
Me: Not really. I have to turn in AT LEAST one or two new drafted chapter to my writing group every two weeks, but that could men 10 pages or 35. If it was always 35 pages, I woudl finish a book in 5.7 months, so CLEARLY there are many times when it is more like 12 or 15.

Laume: Despite your best intentions, do you end up having to do one or more marathon sittings away from the family to make things happen?
Me: Yes. And it's not IN SPITE of my best intentions. My intentions are to have these times scheduled from the get go. Scott takes my kids to some grandmother infested paradise in Alabama or Florida, and I grunt pump out 10 - 30K TERRIBLE words in a weekend. Then I spend the 1 - 3 months revising those words, and Then I kick Scott and the kids out again.

And I would like to point out to you, OH JADED SPOUSE OF A WRITER, yes, you, in the back, SNEERING at your spouse's "hobby"....that I always kicked my family out for weekends, even before I was publishing or making any money at all from my writing. Scott took my writing time as seriously as he took the time he spent on HIS job, and did his best to protect it and create it and be respecctful of it, and I wouldn't have finished my FIRST novel yet if he had not. SO. What do you say to THAT, OH Mr. or Mrs. WRITERSPOUSE?

Laume: And is shutting the office door really enough to allow you to work without wondering who's sitting on the cat or making that horrible screeching sound elsewhere in the house?
Me: No.

Of course not. Unless I have a sitter there, then yes, and I assume she will come get me if anyone is spurting arterial blood or is actually on fire If it's me and the kids, I can't draft. Especially since my cat is so huge that if he decided to sit on them back they would smother. I revise in spurts and dribbles during days when I have a kid or two in the house.

Conference Confidential

I was silent all weekend because I was at a conference in Monroeville, Alabama, which is pretty much Mecca for southern scribes. Harper Lee and Truman Capote grew up there, side by side. Harper Lee still lives in Monroeville in the winters. She is in New York right now which, on the one hand, I was sad because I have always secretly hoped that one day i would meet her. Not that I would have expected to see her at a literary conference, but I MIGHT have run into her while walking through Piggley Wiggley with someone from town who knew her. See? ALL CASUAL AND ACCIDENTAL, arranged and ordained by The Lord. But there was no chance of it. I took comfort in the idea that there was ALSO no chance I would hear anyone say, "Joshilyn, this is Nell Harper L----oh my. It's okay, the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser can take those stains right off," as I puked on her shoes out of sheer nerves. SO. How's THAT for a bright side?

The house Harper Lee grew up in is now a BURGER STAND called MEL's that sells DREAM CONES (!!!!). Alas, Karen and I did not ever stop and GET a DREAM CONE. I wonder what on earth it is? I bet it's just fancy talk for that puffy-airy styrofoam-infused ice cream like you get at DQ. I hope not, though. I hope it's something SHERBET-Y or creamsicle-ish, striped orange and white and chock full of opiates. I hope those who pause to eat of it are like Lotus People: They wake up three weeks later, having seen The Future and The Truth, but they are not quiiiiiiiiiiiite able to express how it was, exactly. You can ask, and one will say, "Well...THE FUTURE was like a great glowing metaphorical lynx, but made of prisms and refracting into a thousand points of rainbows, but not really, and then it diffused into bands that leapt out and touched my face so that my eyes caught fire, but I kinda liked it." And then the other says, "No, it was not. That was The Truth. The Future was that OTHER thing."

Yeah. I know. The actual DREAM CONE was bound to disappoint. We went past the place at least four times, but each time, I kept driving.

We got out of the car encrusted with the filth of a thousand miles (even though we had technically only driven 180 miles, Karen and I are so naturally VILE that we were ABLE to accumulate the ACTUAL FILTH of 1000 miles in 1/5th of the time it would have taken, say, some young mission workers.) Tom Franklin was sitting out in the lobby and he said HEY to me. I looked like the very wrath of God so I half waved and galloped past him. I dived into my hotel room, hoping to SCRAPE some filth off before having an actual conversation with a writer I admire. Then I kept realizing I had left invaluable filth-scraping materials like my SOAP and my HAIRBRUSH in the car. I headed back out, and I still looked like mucusy bile and he was still in the lobby. I was incapable of bringing everything I needed in. THREE TIMES I made the journey, each time half waving as if I thought he had leprosy, but really, I just didn't want him to look directly at me and go BLIND from horror. He was very nice about it, later, when I appeared coifed and smelling faintly of roses, and we both pretended like he had never seen me with threads of Processed Cheese Food entwined within the greasy locks of my Car Hair.

The first night, Karen and I stayed up until about 3 am drinking pomegranate martinis (because they are chock full of antioxidants and other highly nutritive goodnesses! The fact that they are 192 proof is not relevant.) The very talented Cathy Day was there, and she told us that MARASCHINO CHERRIES stay with you. EVERY maraschino cherry. They... ADHERE to your intestines? They CLING? They SEDENTATE? They...sew little intestine pockets for themselves and button themselves in? Something very permanent, so that you even now are carrying with you every maraschino cherry you ever plucked whole from your sunday's whipped cream or excavated from your cocktail ice. Can you IMAGINE how many they found when they autopsied Elvis?

I wish I could remember exactly how the cherries imbed themselves. It was very scientific when CATHY said it, I am sure, but remembered through the rosy haze of, um, antioxidants, I have lost some essential details, I feel certain. Like, where do the cherries get the buttons? Also, there was something about Maraschino Cherries being made OUTSIDE in huge vats and if birds fly over and poo in the vats (and they DO!) and if older birds fall dead and plummet out of the skies and LAND in the cherries (AND THEY DO!) or if intrepid possums are drawn to the sweet smell of preserving cherries and mount an expedition to CLIMB the cherry vats and LICK UP SYRUP with their long POSSUM-SUCK COVERED TONGUES (and you KNOW! You KNOW!!! they do!) then the cherry makers shrug and say, "So it goes," because I guess a little dead bird never hurt anyone, eh? A little possum suck adds protein. Why not.

We all listened to her very earnestly and then fished around in our martinis and pulled out the cherries and ate them, because as Karen pointed out, with an alcohol content as high as is oftentimes found in the drinks *I* make, the cherries had been thoroughly sterilized.

This was in Suzanne Hudson (who KILLED at her reading KILLED!) and Joe Formichella's hotel room, the default party room for both conferences I have been to where the Fairhope Posse was in attendance. Tom Franklin was there. Tom left the next day, EARLY, and Karen and I had not yet gotten our books signed! WAIL! He had to go get therapy though, I betcha, to recover from seeing us in all our glorious filth. And of course Sonny Brewer was there. And the awesome Rick Bass. And there we also met Warren St. John, the staff writer for The New York Times who wrote that story on Sonny I linked you to earlier. He's got a book out now called Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer which Jake at the Alabama BookSmith (a fave indie store of mine) has tried all his wiles to get me to buy---Jake swears by this book.

I avoided those wiles for a YEAR (not easy, Jake is a supah-charged-bookseller from the way back back and he haz vays of makink yew READ) because FIRST OF ALL it's non-fic (I rarely crack NF unless it's pretty dern PLOTTY, like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, say) AND I thought it was about football, and all I really know about football is that it is one o' them things the boys call "a sports." BUT After hearing Warren talk at the conference, I realized it was NOT actually about football. It's about FANDOM, and, speaking as a girl who is afraid to meet Harper Lee lest I puke on her shoes, that's something that interests me, so I got one that I SAID was a gift but I started reading it accidentally andd now I want to keep it. HEY! Did you know Bama fans SOAK maraschino cherries in PURE GRAIN alcohol for YEARS and eat them by the fistful. They are called BAMA BOMBS because they are RED like the TIDE. Dude. You have to kinda RESPECT that kind of fandom, you know? The kind that bravely says, "Sterilized possum suck shall not deter us, OH NO, we will eat the diseased bird carcass encrusted colors of our team and carry them with us, intestine-ly speaking, FOREVER...."

And that was only night one. Day two, which followed, was moderately painful, in that the SUN came up and TOUCHED MY EYES, but after twelve cups of coffee and a Vitamin B injection, I was good to go...MORE LATER. I have to tell you about the NALLS and getting to speak in the REALLY FOR TRUE Monroeville courthouse with Homer Hickam (!!!) (Like about 20 million other people on this planet, I love his work) and etc, unless I forget and it all settles down among the pink socks to breed itself into a hundred other stories that don't seem related, but are.

The Process of Being Mentally Ill, Part One

Have I told you the thing about how every time I write a novel (and this is the fifth time I have done this, so pernicious novel-writing is beginning to be a habitual thing with me) I have to have a complete nervous breakdown?

Yeah, about 1/3rd to 1/2 of the way in, I suddenly realize I am bad, and stupid, and evil, and as much as I love my characters I am too worthless to possibly get them to go sit on a page and LIVE and BE NIFTY they do in my head and WHAT IS UP with this PLOT because what I thought would happen has NOT happened and instead I let my mental people do haring off and perpetrate completely other ideas and so now that I am stuck they decide they to have no idea where they should go or what they should do, and I fume and flail around snarking for a couple of weeks, just stomp around suffer and suchlike, and then after 10 - 30 days of grinding out bad rewrites of a single bad scene, I culminate in a big huge screaming weep.

I call everyone I know and brainstorm for a new career path, and pule about how I am going to try out for Project Runway because even though I can't sew a LICK and I put outfits together by going to Ann Taylor and pointing at a mannequin that I think doesn't look too matchy-matchy and yet is still pretty and saying, "Give me that please" and then once it's in a bag I go to the SHOE STORE which is the only part of the whole process I care about anyway....BUT WHO CARES because Tim Gunn NEEDS me and fashion is CLEARLY my life and my calling and I know this because it dern well sure is NOT writing. Or I could be a zookeeper! Or a nun! Or a business woman in a power suit who ruthlessly downsizes weeping middle management!

Once everyone I know has patiently explained to me that these are not actually viable career paths for a disorganized married crazy fashion-sense-free mother who is actually kinda SCARED of lions, I lie on my bed and scream to the heavens and cry WHY WHY WHY and generally act like a 2 year old on crack, and a spoiled one at that. This part wastes another day or so. Then I get up and write the rest of the book.

Yeah, well, this time, here on book five, I decided to, you know, maybe not do that.

I quit writing right before I went to New York. Just....stopped. I thougth maybe I was not writing because I was out of town, but no. I quit. Hacked 10K out of the book, and left it there to bleed to death with one quarter of itself removed. When I got home it was dead as a congealed spill of paint to me, and I decided to not care. Decided I would put a new 10K back in when I was good and freakin' ready THANKS MUCH. Because EVEN THOUGH it was clearly time to have a nervous breakdown and make everyone who loved me miserable, and THIS TIME, I decided to opt out.

I remember when I was writing Between, Georgia, this point came about one third of the way into the book, outside a hospital room where my main character runs slap dab into her awful genetic legacy personified, and even then I knew it really OUGHT to be a turning point. The scene would have to rachet the tension up a good ten clicks and make several relationships in all their tangley ugliness become horrifyingly clear. And instead, I wrote FORTY PAGES of this one scene, over and over, read it to my writing group I think three times....it gave me HELL. And I went mental and quit writing and vowed I would be a world class aviatrix or some such twaddle and lay around and flopped and after the 14th TOTAL rewrite of this scene, I went into the final phase (full panic alert mode) and called my friend Lily.

ME: *WAIL* I CANNOT GO ON.
Her: Oh. Are we here now?
Me: *actually, shockingly listening* What? Where?
Her: The part 1/3rd to 1/2 of the way in where we have this conversation about how you can't go on an d it makes no sense and there is no way to resolve this this or that blah blah and we do this for a couple of hours and then you go write the book.
Me: I do that?
Her: Every book.
Me: Do you tell me I do this every book?
Her: Every book.
Me: SO not only have we had the conversation where I say I can't do this anymore, but we have ALSO had the conversation where you say I always say this?
Her: This is the fourth time, yes, and to make you do the math I will ask you, How many books have you written?
Me: This is the fourth.....And we really have these two conversations every time.
Her: Well the first time we didn;t have the conversation about how we have had the first conversation but otherwise yes.
Me: I have no memory of this.
Her: Mine is very very crystaline clear.
Me. Huh. Interesting.

SO this time, I decided to simply NOT. I went to New York. And then I came home. And I did not snark at my family or worry. I also did not, in fact, write. I have basically been playing World of Warcraft for a couple of weeks and really concentrating on important MISSIONS, like getting my foot skin looking supple and moisterized because sandal weather is coming and working out and cooking nutritious meals for a sit down family dinner every night and going around being quietly pleased instead of shaking with horror and screaming. I have lost 4 pounds of the eternal five I always gain and lose and the big THRILL moment for the last fortnight has been finding the perfect shade of hot pink toe polish to match my wedgie sandals with the daisies on the side. My life has been chewing its cud in a placid meadow. My life is a cow.

Then The Terrible Thing With A Snake happened. Which I will tell you about tomorrow, though it is very terrible, and you may not want to hear it. OUT OF TIME.

DO NOT FORGET that MIDNIGHT your time tonight is the deadline to enter BLOGGING FOR BOOKS!

Your special guest blogger this month is Autumn, a former B4B finalist who pens Perfection on a Curve. She will narrow the entries down to seven.

If you are one of the seven finalists, your entry will be read by author E. Lockhart, whose new YA book, Fly on the Wall : How One Girl Saw Everything tells the story of a girl named Gretchen who gets to BE a fly on thew wall...in the boys locker room. It's Kafkarriffic!

Ready, Set , BOOM!

Let me just say -- THANK YOU SO MUCH for linking to B4B. I appreciate it more than I can say...

Last night I did an internet chat with Writing to Publish, a web group of like-minded writers who are working hard both to hone their craft AND to pursue traditional publication. It's hard to break in, sohats off, dudes, and may your queries find the right agent on the right day. This is the talk I gave, and I thought I would post it here for the writers who hang out in the Kudzu....

One of my favorite playwrights, Anton Chekhov, once said, ""If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." Well, okay, but I think that if you've got a pistol hanging right there on the wall, you should probably rip that sucker down and start blasting away in scene one.

Actually Chekhov is being much deeper and smarter than I am pretending he is being---he's talking follow-through and that's vital. But you see my point---Don�t hold back, because in a first novel especially, you need an opening that hooks readers on page one in at LEAST two ways.

1) Establish voice. If it's first person or even a closely directed third, that means your character's voice. Voice is TONE and LANGUAGE and RHYTHM and STRUCTURE. Make her SOUND like who she is.

If it's a sliding or omniscient third, the voice you have to establish is YOURS. And if you are writing in first or directed third, you STILL have to do this, but UNDER your character's voice.

One way to know if you are writing in your own voice is to read EVERYTHING aloud. Mulitple times. Every draft. You are writing the book only you can write, so make sure you tell the story in your own voice, even if you layer a character voice on top of it.

No one can tell you how to write in your voice. You write until you find it. Trying to explain how it feels is like trying to describe an orgasm to a person who has never had one before and has no point of reference, "Sort of like sneezing, but lower. And um, better. And um, not at all like sneezing." When you are writing in your own voice, you know it. You recognize it.

I had so much trouble getting my second novel, BETWEEN, GEORGIA to be MINE that way. Nonny�s voice was so strong in my head she overpowered mine. I wouldn�t show the book to my editor until I had MY voice underneath hers, in every line. I knew I'd gotten it when my editor said, "This book is nothing like gods, the narrator is nothing like your narrator for gods, she doesn't talk, think, or act like her...and yet it's so obvious you wrote both the books. It�s YOU. How did you do that?"

The question was rhetorical, I;m sure, but I answered it. "Well," I said, "It's a little like sneezing...."

2) IMMEDIATE Conflict. Nothing boils people down to their essential selves as quickly. I think the best way to let the reader meet your characters is to put them all in a room and then light one of them on fire. When I see how all the characters react to the blazing person, I begin to know who they are and how they feel about each other. Start a big heap of trouble and then watch and see what your people DO.

If that's not possible, you have begun your book too early. Cut everything away, EVERYTHING, no matter how well it is written or how much you love it, until you begin this story where the main conflict begins. Be brutal with yourself so that agents and editors don't have to be.

Me, I am so interested in conflict that I tend to start books too LATE, which is also no good. The first thing I wrote when I started GODS IN ALABAMA ended up being Chapter 2. It was Arlene Fleet at 15, creeping up to the top of Lip Smack Hill to beat football hero Jim Beverly to death with a tequila bottle.

I realized later that I could NOT start 12 years in the past � GODS IN ALABAMA had to begin in the present with the 27 year old Arlene because her present goals were going to drive the story. So, I wrote an opening chapter, but the first lines of the book telegraph the central conflict. Here�s the opener:

"There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniels, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the Kudzu and left it to the roaches."
Arlene�s wry dark humor and smarts shows in that first line, and nothing says immediate conflict like dumping a dead body�

NOW! Go look in a mirror. If you see Pat Conroy looking back at you, feel free to begin with a description of landscape and, really, if you ARE Pat, you can natter on about it for pages and pages if you so desire. If you see a slightly less established writer, you need to cut that beautiful tree paragraph.

I'm being a little facetious, but just a little. ANY established author can take more liberties with an opening because they have a fan base. You pick up an established author's novel based on what that author has delivered in the past---good characters, interesting plots, satisfying resolutions� With a first book, you have to give a reader a TASTE for what you have to offer, and you have to do it in the first few sentences. GOOD LUCK!

A Golden Opportunity for You to Envy My Glamorous Life

I had a bad day yesterday. I bruised my hip and broke a glass, and then I missed my church's luncheon and ministry fair to go to a booksigning. I put on a cute skirt and fixed my hair, but when I showed up, I was about as welcome as an unwashed goat at a wedding. I walked up to the signing area and there was a store employee there putting out books for the signing and four other authors milling around.

SO... I stood there and stood there while they talked, a closed unit, and looked at me sideways as if wondering why I was standing on the edge waiting to introduce myself.
Employee: "Can I help you?" subtext: you crazy nut bag who is hanging around like a derelict.
Me: "Hi. I'm Joshilyn--I'm here for the signing."
Employee: OH! Great! Well, just a second, we are almost set up.

SO then the other four authors start trying to give me promotional material and asking me who I am there to see. I am confused. I don't get it. Then I notice that they have set up four chairs at the table and are setting out four books....none of the books are mine.
SO I think, maybe I am in the wrong place.

Me: Am I in the wrong place? I'm Joshilyn Jackson. Here for the booksigning?
Store Employee: Nope you are in the right place. This is the booksigning.

So I wait. The other four authors begin to look at me like I am a leper who is hanging around their table to gawk at them and not buy their books.
Author 1: Are you...missing something?
Me: Yes, I am missing my book.
They stare at me like I'm crazy, all clearly thinking that there is a table full of books right in front of me and any ONE of them could EASILY be mine, signed and everything, but right now I am just looming over the table and scaring the nice people away. I am beginning to think I AM crazy.

Just then the events planner who arranged for me to be there comes up and gently takes my arm and says "I need you to come with me." I am led away like a lunatic who is bothering the paying customers, my cheeks on fire. I don't think a single one of the four authors realized what was going on---it just looked like a manager came and mercifully took the weirdo off.

The events planner walks me away and gently explains that she was unable to order my book. See, it's three months before the paperback comes out, so the call for buy backs already happened, and it flummoxed her computer. She forgot to follow up with her Warner rep or, indeed, with me (I could have easily gotten them for her had I known), and then apparently forgot that I was coming at all, so subsequently she forgot to call and tell me that there was no reasons for me to be here AT ALL, primped up in my nice skirt, missing my fair, and looking like a whack-job.

I tried to be gracious about it but I think I failed. I was standing there, you know, kinda pole-axed. I wasn't sure what to do.
Note to self: I SHOULD HAVE JUST GRACIOUSLY SAID OH WELL OOPS IT HAPPENS AND LEFT.
Note to you: IF YOU ARE EVER IN THIS SITUATION, GRACIOUSLY SAY OH WELL OOPS IT HAPPENS AND LEAVE.
Because trust me, nothing that follows is going to get a even a tiny bit pleasanter. It's like gettign whacked with a hammer and then staying by the mad carpenter's toolbox, wondering if the screwdriver through the eye will feel better. Hint: it won't. But ALAS, I did NOT graciously say, oops well it happens, and leave. I was busy being flummoxed and standing like a cow with my mouth hanging open.

The computer said they had one copy of my book in, so the events lady (who was SO nice to me and apologetic, I have to say) went to find it so I could at least sign their one book's worth of store stock. I waited, thinking I would sign that one book and then do the gracious oops thing and leave.

A woman I think was the manager came up.
Her: We don't have your book in stock, huh?
Me: Nope. Paperback is coming out soon, so this happens.
Her: *condescending, slightly preachy tone* Maybe if you set it up in advance, we can have a signing for you here when the paperback comes out.
Me: *re-pole-axed* Um...what? Oh, um...okay.
Her: *clearly offended* Well, you don't sound very ENTHUSIASTIC about it...
Me: I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be ungracious, I just..It's no big deal, but I am missing my church function to come do this. I wish someone had called me, you know?

It becomes clear to me in the middle of this conversation, while the manager is looking at me like I am both a MORON and a JERK, that she has NO IDEA I have been INVITED. She thinks I have just WANDERED in during the middle of them trying to pull of a HUGE in store event with 4 LEGITIMATE authors and give-aways and drawings and balloons, and demanded to be included, and then gotten all shirty and hateful because they didn't HAPPEN to have twenty copies of my year old book on hand.

Just then the poor events manager creeps back to tell me that the one copy of my book they have has apparently been shelved wrong and she can't find it. We stood there looking at each other, perfectly in accord in our wish that the earth would open and eat us. Hell would have been a more comfortable environment at that point. I think I felt about three inches tall, if that. I think she felt about two inches tall.

The manager, meanwhile, still hasn't realized I was actually invited...

She asks the events planner: Did you call her? (She means Did you call her to INVITE her.)
The events planner says, sheepishly: No. I didn't. (She means, she forgot to call and CANCEL)

At that point, I cracked my hollow tooth, drank the lethal droplet inside it, and mercifully died. Or I straightened it out with the manager that I had been invited, agreed with the events planner that we would have to do better for Between, Georgia, said goodbyes all around, and walked out to my car feeling like my spine was on fire. I got the door shut and started the car, and I swear to you, the fact that I was two blocks away before I burst into tears is the one thing about all of yesterday that I can reasonably be proud of.

PS: Yes, Virginia, I DID just end a sentence with a preposition. I feel I EARNED it.

In Which I Am Repulsive...

Another blurb came in for Between, Georgia, and I have to tell you, it has made me COMPLETELY repulsive. I keep calling my editor and asking her to read it to me v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w.l.y.

LET'S LOOK AT IT, SHALL WE? Lord knows I haven't stopped looking at it since it arrived....

�BETWEEN, GEORGIA is a small miracle, and Nonny Frett is the most engaging woman who ever lived in the pages of a book. Joshilyn Jackson is an enormously talented writer.�
Anne Rivers Siddons, New York Times bestselling author of SWEETWATER CREEK

Can I tell you that when that arrived I burst into tears? I have been a full-on Anne Rivers Siddons fan for more than twenty years --- ever since I read Heartbreak Hotel.

The day the blurb arrived, I was FOUL! I got this SOCK PUPPET of my daughter's...he is named Socky, but I put it on and named it Mrs. Rivers Siddons and I kept asking it OBNOXIOUS questions.
Me: "WHAT ABOUT EMMA??? You know, JANE AUSTEN'S EMMA?"
Puppet: "HMMMMM...yes very engagaing...but.... I prefer Nonny!"
Me: Okay but---what about, say, Lily Bart? How could any fictional creature be more engaging than---
Scott: THIS IS THE POLICE. YOU ARE SURROUNDED. SET DOWN THE SOCK PUPPET AND BACK SLOWLY AWAY.

I have to tell you, READERS are quite simply the coolest part of this whole "being a novelist" thing I seem to be doing. I love hearing from total strangers in, say, DES MOINES who have read my stuff and it has in some way been meaningful and entertaining for them to the point that they feel compelled to take a minute to tell me about it. And even though asking for blurbs is nervewracking, having other novelists I have long read and admired read MY stuff and ACTUALLY LIKE IT... Oh my Lord. Think about it. Anne Rivers Siddons read MY LITTLE BOOK. Come on, how COOL is that? You can forgive me the sock puppet, can't you? I mean, COME ON! ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS REALLY LIKED MY BOOK!

In other news, sorry I have been silent this week, but reading the audiobook is kicking my butt. It makes me so SLEEPY! I have been fast asleep before nine every night this week. Weird, huh? I sit in a box for 7 hours, and then come home, eat a pork chop or some shrimps, and pass out.

Now that I am past the mortal terror, I have to tell you, it's SO FREAKIN' FUN. It's REALLY making me miss acting---I am currently reading some (very fine, very smart, very layered) Quinn Dalton short stories as I am too freakin' PHYSICALLY TIRED to keep up with a novel, and I find myself reading the shorts aloud, making acting choices, and enjoying the CRAP out of it. I hope the external product (the audiobook) makes me feel half as pleased as the internal process of reading it does...

And SPEAKING of internal processes, you will be pleased to know that IN SPITE of my foolishly ordering EXTREMELY spicy Cajun food for lunch, I have remained (gastro-intestinally speaking) blameless...although we did have to do some line rereads for stomach gurgling noises when we waited too long to order lunch. ONE MORE DAY and I will be out clean.

YES I KNOW THIS IS TMI, but 'fess up! You WERE wondering.

The Quality of Silence

They had to tape a minute of silence yesterday in the studio where I read the first 105 pages of Between. Why, I wanted to know. To fill in or create holes, they said. To put in pauses that are silent where right now you are putting in pauses where you breathe or pauses where you move or pauses where your stomach makes an odd gurgling noise that yes, we out here in the studio DO all hear, and PS thanks for not farting. You are least fartiest reader we have ever had.

But it has to be silence from that room? I asked.
Yes, they assured me. Silence is a fingerprint.

No other silence sounds like the silence in the small space I spent more than six hours yesterday. Any other silence, even silence from another studio, wouldn't sound like the silence in that one room in this small space of time.

Now, look, I've been doing this WRITING thing for quite some time, and I BETCHA that if
1) I had a soul and
2) if I wasn't gearing up for 6 - 7 more hours of sitting in box ASSIDUOUSLY NOT PASSING GAS, I could come up with a way to make that an interesting metaphor about, you know, life, and how the quality of silence being as individual as snowflakes and etc etc but Lordy, I am JUST not up for it. You make a metaphor for me, okay, and please let it be less cheesey than the sample one. I REALLY want to make one, but I'm too dern tired. This party is strictly BYOM.

For the record, I have not passed gas. EVEN ONCE. Furthermore, if I do? You will know by process of deductive reasoning. If, for example, you hear that I have driven off a cliff to my death tomorrow afternoon, you will know that I have failed in my objective. Why this matters to me so much, I have no clue. But I have weird ideas about propriety. I am violently uncomfortable right now telling you that I DID NOT pass gas, as it seems the WHOLE subject ought to be somehow taboo.

And yet I laugh like a crazed loon everytime a dog, in my presence, does the universal "pass gas and then turn their whole bodies to stare in a puzzled and accusing manner at their own back end" thing. I think it's the GAS IN GENERAL, GAS IN PERSONAL thing. Dog tooting or therotical fart-joke tooting is amusing. Someone's personal actual intestinal tract...their own individual private tooting, I feel they should keep that to themselves. I don't need details, and if I DO hear them, I get terrible sympathetic embarrassment and want to die FOR the tooter. So.

I sent Scott out two days before we began to buy both Beano and Gas-X to pre-emptively medicate myself to safety. He feels the cashier looked at him in a manner both pitying and snide. She is probably tellign all the other cashiers about Gas Guy. He came home sour and said, "You need me to go buy Midol? I'll go buy Midol. THIS was a bit much." Without missing a beat I said, "Can you run back out and get me some Depends?"

I. Am. So. Tired.

The producer said I am doing a very good job. I said REALLY? He said yes really. I said, NO BUT REALLY? He said, Yes. Really. And I said REALLYREALLYREALLYFORTRUEREALLY? And he said, No, I was lying to make you feel good, and I said, REALLY? and he said, NO. You are an excellent reader and I said REALLY and he said DEAR GOD YES YOU ARE DOING A GREAT JOB I NEVER EXPECTED TO BE THIS FAR INTO IT I LOVE THE CHARACTER CHOICES YOU ARE MAKING YOU HAVE GREAT ENERGY AND ARE LIVELY AND IT'S GOING EXTREMELY WELL, DAMMIT. I said...Really? And he picked up my own discarded shoe and beat me to death with it.

Except for that one beating to death part, he is a joy to work with and he has SWORN he will not let me read the character of Henry as if he were Elvis, which is the ONE thing I fear more that passing gas in that tiny box where Max, the sound board guy, had to adjust the mike so they wouldn't pick up MY HEART BEAT.

Henry is the problem. Because he is probably my favorite male character, and I get scared trying to make him be all I see in him. So far I have read two of Henry's lines, and one was "Me Neither" and one was "It's terrible to be robbed, of course." NOT LONG LINES. But I have read both those lines OVER AND OVER 15 times each with new Bobly instructions each time, telling me NOT sound like Elvis, to NOT sound like Dennis Quaid in the Big Easy, to NOT sound like a muppet on crack. I don't know what Henry sounds like, but at least he doesn't sound like THOSE things.

The producer said: Why is Henry so hard -- Jonno sounds great, so you can do men. Why are you balking at Henry?
Me: I don't know.
Bob: The uncle sounded good, this is just another man.
Me: I want to do him right.
Bob: So you are intimidated because you LIKE him.
Me: I MORE than like him. I want to have sex with him. And I want to read him so well that YOU want to have sex with him, too.
Long pause.
Bob: Well, we have a ways to go, then, don't we. Try the line again.
Me to Max: Um, were you taping when I said that 'I want to have sex with Henry' part?
Max: You betcha.
Me: (muttering) At least I haven't farted yet.
Max: PS, I am STILL rolling...

Good Sex (PG 16)

SORRY I have been a SUCKY BLOGGER this week. In my defense, I had a HUGE novel revelation, had to cut almost three entire chapters and then rewrote them and a bonus one, so it has been a grand week progress-wise with the new novel and I am as sleepy and pleased as a cream-filled cat.

Meanwhile, here on Kudzu, how do you like the TITLE of this entry? PING! PING! the pR0n seeking Googlers come a-rollin' on in! HEHEHEHE. Betcha my hit counter gives itself vertigo flipping around today....I should give every entry such a name. Alas! It would be gratuitous to give a long prattling spiel about, say, recipes a name like "Oh Baby, YES, WOO! WOO!," so I will have to wait until days when I actually AM writing about good sex. Like, say, today. As the by-the-hour hookers in Vegas say, "Let's get to it, shall we?"

Old School Kudzu Regular DAVID wrote in and asked, "Do you remember making a reference during a discussion with another author recently, wherein you (I think) referenced some book in which the love scene was said (by one of the conversants) to be " ...the most realistic and emotionally moving I've ever read." or some such? Title was short, maybe two or three words. Possibly it was a proper name. I'm hoping your memory is better than mine."

My answer: Um....no? A lot of things come out of my mouth. I don't generally LISTEN to them.... *grin*

DOES THIS RING A BELL WITH ANY OF YOU? I can't remember a specific book or find it in the archives. I read a LOT. If you know what David is referencing can you kindly leave it in the comments?

David is a fellow writer, so I suspect he is asking because he is probably struggling along through the miserable process of trying to WRITE a dern sex scene. I personally have bright red cheeks the whole time I am trying to draft or revise sex scenes....and I have spent a fair amount of time on it for the last two books because the images and language used in the sex scene have been, for both gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia, key in making some underlying (HA! Everything sounds so NAUGHTY when you talk about writing sex) thematic connections.

WARNING: If you have not read gods in Alabama yet, I have heard you CAN be sent to Hell for that. No, hehehehe KIDDING! You go to Purgatory. For several million years...NO NO, I meant to say, If you have not read gods yet, here are a few mild spoilers about who has sex with whom and how the sex WORKS thematically in that book to be found in the following paragraph. If you hate to be even MILDLY spoiled, = SKIP down to where it says SPOILERS OVER in big bold font, OR, better yet, trot out, buy a copy of gods, read it, and then come back and pick up HERE:

BEGIN MILD GODS IN ALABAMA SPOILERS!

I wanted Arlene to grow into an understanding of unconditional love and take the first step toward becoming a person who could have a good marriage in all ways, including a healthy, happy sex life. Given her, um, colorful past, that was a BIG FAT STEP. I knew there would have to be...sex. YARP! Now, I like to write BAD sex scenes. Bad sex can be horridly funny and train wreck un-look-a-way-able. BUT! I hate to write GOOD sex between people who love each other because I feel so EMBARRASSED. Like I owe my characters a closed door and an hour of alone time. Plus, the GOOD SEX scenes were almost impossible to write in gods because, given Arlene's past, there was NO WAY to have a from Here to Eternity type encounter with romantical imagery and purple vocabulary and have it be anything but laughable tripe. Can you even imagine Arlene trying to sell that???

"AND THEN! WE SPROUTED WINGS! AND ROCKETED TO SPACE! AND I SPOKE IN TONGUES! FRENCH MOSTLY BECAUSE IT CAN SOUND REALLY DIRTY! IN A GOOD WAY! IT WAS LIKE CHOCOLATE ONLY SWEATIER! NO! REALLY! THAT GOOD! TO INFINITY AND BEYOND, BABY, HE SAID AND I WAS SO ENRAPTURED NOT EVEN AN ANIMATED MOVIE REFERENCE COULD DISTURB ME FROM MY ROILING WAVES OF LAVA HOT BLISSFUL LOVE FEELINGS!"

Yeah, my butt, Arlene. If I read an actually well written version of that from ARLENE, of all people, I as a reader would assume she was lying...she does that sometimes. *grin* . At the same time, there had to be enough contrast between the earlier sex and sex with Burr to make it clear that huge progress is being made, that they will be able to to end up with a ROCKING married life... I chose to do it with language, with vocabulary, and excruciating DETAIL. SO. I braced myself and I allowed Arlene to be INCREDIBLY foul, frank, dismissive, droll, mocking, amused, graphic and above all clinical and dispassionate in the earlier sex scenes. Her somewhat brutal honesty probably cost me some readers and have forced me to open every speaking engagement by saying I PINKY SWEAR THIS BOOK IS NOT AT ALL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL!!!!!... But it was the right choice. Because then all I had to do in the sex scenes with Burr was to let her talk in a straightforward, nonpejorative, understated and loving way. Less was SO MUCH more because of how far I'd taken the earlier scenes. Of course, I had to go into therapy when the book sold and I realized my MOTHER would READ those earlier scenes, but it was the right choice and I stand by it, pink cheeked but DERNIT SO (artistically speaking) in the right.

SPOILERS OVER!

Anyway I think the KEY to making a sex scene work is to have the sex scene do MORE than just describe sex. I don't NEED a writer to describe sex for me. I have two kids, so it's a given I have had the experience myself at LEAST twice. AND I saw Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas in Original Sin, so I know possibly a little MORE about what sex LOOKS like than I strictly needed for scientific purposes. Or at least, I know what it looks like when two physically perfect specimens attempt to have it in an old fashioned wooden bathtub...

In a Romance novel where a hot sex scene is part of the point, or a Manly Gunplay book that I buy in the hopes that it WILL get a little bit deliciously gratuitous, you don't; have to justify your sex scenes. BUT! In literary fiction or book club commercial fiction, I think a sex scene needs to be doing at least two jobs or it should be cut. The first job is the job of EVERY scene, to move the book along from ONCE UPON A TIME to THE END. BUT, like every other sentence in the book, a sex scene should have at least one other job. Here are some possible jobs you can hire sex to do: 1) MAKE PLOT AKA the sex itself (not just the fact that they HAD sex) should move the plot forward in a real way. If the act itself moves the plot forward you can indicate they are about to have sex and then close the door. But if something happens DURING the sex that's key, by all means, leave that door cracked. 2) ENRICH CHARACTER, aka The sex should reveal something key about AT LEAST one of the people having it. 3) The imagery should connect to and enrich the book's theme.

If you can give sex four or five jobs and STILL have it evoke mood and not violate voice, then you are great, and I want to read your dirty, dirty book.

MEANWHILE, David is looking for GOOD SEX. In books, I mean. If you have read a book where the sex is doing a BUNCH of a jobs, PLEASE put the book's title (and author if you know it) in the comments for him. Not for ME, of course. I would MUCH prefer to read about lovely posies reproducing by pollen transfer or perhaps something pithy about deeply spiritual mystic men who sit alone on mountain tops and contemplate truth. That's more my bag than whatever sort of filth you try to induce David to poison his mind with. *glows with holy light*

If you, like David, want to read a good sex scene....Let me think. The best sex scene I have read recently is in a book I got in MS form to read for a blurb. It isn't out til May, dernit, but you can pre-order, and if you like the kind of fiction I try to write and the kind I spend most of my reading time devouring, then you should REALLY like this book. It was RIGHT up my alley: Plot heavy, twisty, and character driven enough to make excellent pleasure reading, but also the writing is fresh and interesting with an individual and unwavering voice, and the thematic layers are there if you want them. I think that's my favorite kind of read because I am such a rereader. I like a book to propel me along for the first go through, and then I like it to be layered enough to allow me to go back through and kinda soak in it. ANYWAY, this is book is ALL THAT, and as the bonus bag of chips, it has some heart-swellingly hot sex in it.

You can pre-order it from my friends at LOVELY POWELL'S and I am sure it will go up for Pre-order many other places any second now, just search for WATER FOR ELEHANTS at your fave online book buying spot. I'll remind you when it comes out for truly, in case you forget or your fave online store doesn't have it listed yet or you prefer to buy at a physical store.

I am right now, in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman reading IN COLD BLOOD, a brilliant book, but not exactly famous for it's white-hot scenes of unbridled French kissing...so I am depending on comments to help David find something that has a little something-something in it right now....READY! SET! GO!

A Weentzy Bit of Shameless Self Promotion

A blurb for BETWEEN, GEORGIA, has landed, and it's from a writer I quite admire (her debut made my top seven---yes, seven this year instead of ten due to attention span problems and memes) so, I'm excited.

�Funny, wrenching, and pitch-perfect, Joshilyn Jackson�s Between, Georgia explores the ways people belong to each other and how far they�ll go to keep what�s theirs. I�ll carry Nonny and her family�the whole tangled, fierce, devoted lot of them--around with me for a long, long time.�

Marisa de los Santos,
author of Love Walked In

AND LOOKIT---here is the UK cover, sort of based on the American one, but all different-like. I dig it. Can you dig it?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled medley of blather and panic.

Southern Voices

Oh Best Beloveds, I have returned from VACATION, sleepier and fatter and loaded with fine, fine baggages that are brimful of Christmas loots. Tomorrow, I return to WORK. I had a huge epiphany about my Novel-In-Progress while I was stuffing myself sick with ham, and now must rewrite the first five chapters, but I am beginning to get this growing, inescapable feeling that I am "experiencing growth as a novelist." I try NOT to experience growth of ANY KIND as a matter of course, but I am not sure I can help it with this book. This book is turning into a leap, faithwise, and I feel challenged and fairly buzzing with hope and light. Perhaps it is just post-Christmas afterglow, but I don't think so. I think this book....Ah well, I do not want to jinx it. I only hope I can carry it off as well as it deserves.

I am having a discussion on a list serve of mine about WHAT makes a novel Southern Lit, and since I am deeply engaged with WRITING SOME, I wanted to bring the discussion here...

I say: Southern Lit springs from Voice and a SERIOUS sense of place. Just ask Faulkner.
Period doesn't matter. Thematically, it's hard to get clean through SL without at least tapping Jesus or race or both as you go by.
Haven Kimmel, by the way, says she writes it. I accept that. Digression the first: I am having a t-shirt made for myself to work in that says "WHAT WOULD HAVEN KIMMEL DO." If you have read Kimmel's second novel, SOMETHING RISING (LIGHT AND SWIFT) it's an even better shirt.

There seem to be two kinds of Southern Writers; those who can't live here but cannot stop writing about it, and those who cannot live anywhere else and can't stop writing about it.
It has to do with Anger. Almost all Southern writers, are, I think, both angry with the South and in love with it. The ratio of Anger to Love determines which of the two kinds of Southern writer you will be. As I squat here in the Georgia cotton, picking my teeth with a weed, I think it is obvious that I am in camp B. I love it more than I am angry with it, but Lordy, if you think I am NOT mad, then you are buying my veneer. And who could blame you?

I am a southern woman. And NO ONE, not even those flat-faced corpse-eyed guys on WORLD POKER CHAMPIONS, can Veneer like a Southern woman. The problem is, you won't know if we are masking weakness or enough strength to remove you from the earth, yea, verily, you and all your get, down unto the seventh generation, until you get past that veneer. We tend to hide our strengths as if they WERE weaknesses, because to be strong is not... ladylike. It's one of the reasons I love the South, and ALSO one of the reasons I am SO dern mad at it.

And the other reason I am so mad at it is, of course, the racism. One bit of crit I got about gods was that the kind of racism I was dealing with was DEAD in the New South. I heard this from a couple of book clubs of URBAN Southern ladies with 125 dollar haircuts (not counting the highlights, just the CU|T, mind you), and I had to politely cover my mouth with a napkin to keep a loud BRAY of shock inside. They do not live in the same South I live in. (AND YES gods was set in the 80's and 90's and yes that makes a dif)

BUT! Just the other day, at an (educated) friend's (well paying, middle class) place of work, one of her co workers (who looked completely homogenized and American in her ubiquitous Gap sweater and khakis) said, of her engagement, "The only thing that worries us is that by the time we have babies, there won't be any PURE babies left for them to marry when they grow up." Allow me to say, YIKES. And this place of employment is SPITTING DISTANCE from Atlanta. But we are NOT Atlanta, or even a suburb (yet.) We are a small town, and it's like Palmolive, the racism is, Madge. We are soaking in it.

It is a weird and specific thing, Southern racism --- every place has racists, but ONLY in the south is it SUCH a black/white issue. The racists I met in Chicago freakin' loathed EVERYONE who wasn't their personal favorite race. Southern racists are for the most part either whites who hate blacks or vice versa, and then they have this ODD, slightly patronizing but accepting neutrality toward everything else. You almost don't count as a separate race if you aren't black or white, which is ALSO racism I suppose, but not the kind that will cost you a job or a house in the neighborhood or anything TANGIBLE. I'm not even sure it is RACE based -- you would get the same attitude from these people for being a lily-white Yankee as you would for being Japanese.

Digression the Second: We tend to call all Continental U.S. Dwellers who are not Southern, "Yankees." My friend Karen is from PHILLY and insists that means she is not a Yankee, but Oh Honey, oh CHILE, in Georgia she SHORE is. If you aren't SOUTHERN, and you aren't from from California, you are a Yankee. If you ARE from California, I believe the Southern Term for you is "Pot smoking Communist Nutbag."

Judaism is seen more as a religious ussue than a racial one to the Southern racist. The Jewish faith is mostly seen by Southern racists as a little STRANGE but certainly not OFFENSIVE --- kind of a PATRONIZING feel to it, as if to say, "Many nice folks are Jewish -- too bad they are so obviously hellbound. Like, say, the Catholics." But, you know, quite a few Church of Christ folks think the BAPTISTS are obviously Hellbound for believing ONCE SAVED ALWAYS SAVED, so it is not RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE exactly. It's more like religious prejudice's second cousin: You can be obviously hellbound and still be considered a good neighbor.

Here in my small town, we have a Methodist church, a Church of Christ, a Jehovah's Witness Temple, and about Nine Baptist churches. Almost EVERY church is all black or all white, or CLOSE to all back/ all white.The closest Episcopal church is 40 minutes away with no traffic. There is NO Catholic church or Temple within a half hour's drive.

There are also BLOOD racists in the south, creatures I have NEVER seen elsewhere, although they may exist somewhere. EXAMPLE: I have a cousin who adopted a mixed race child, and everyone ADORES that cousin and that child---that child is simply family. NO hint of racism in their love for and treatment of that child. I have another cousin who gave BIRTH to a mixed race child, and several of my relations (ones who LOVE the adopted child) will no longer speak to her and treat her baby like a disgusting, leprous worm. The rationale: The BIRTHING cousin has MIXED their personal blood with the blood of another race, and can't be forgiven.

Given all this, how can I NOT be angry? At the same time...how can I not love it? You have to love it, for the way we treat our lunatics, if for no other reason. If you don't know what I mean, read THE PRINCE OF TIDES. There's a chapter in there that sums up the best of us in a nutshell, and HOLY GOD but Pat Conroy understands the love/hate relationship Southern writers have for this chunk of land -- understands it better than most writers breathing.

Ah well, I have spent a lot of time on the worst of us here, but can't give equal time to the parts I love--I am out of time today... I do not read Southern Lit when drafting as it screws with MY voice, but I quit work for Christmas and so finally got to sit down with Paula Wall's THE ROCK ORCHARD. Go read WALL---She understands what is best about us, way down deep in her BONES she understands. I am her new big fan.

In Which I Successfully Become Stephen Hawking

Well---that title may be optimistic AND premature. I WILL become him, anyway. Any second. Not actually HIM, you know. More like a POOR man's Stephen Hawking. Very poor. Like, a destitute, starving, oxygen deprived, nearly dead, boil covered, prehistoric, low-browed, grunting man's Stephen Hawking. But still.

It's because I realized I have to have an understanding of Chaos Theory in order to write this book because the main male character is a pure-math geek turned engineer. And in order to understand Chaos, turns out, you have to understand PHYSICS. Which, allow me to say, "Yikes."

This is, seriously, the BEST THING that has ever happened to Scott. He is SO HAPPY. Remember how there are things he sometimes REALLY wants to tell me, but I REALLY do not want to be told? Like, say, allallall about Hoover Dam?

Well, CHAOS THEORY is another topic I have with malice of forethought actively and perniciously avoided learning about. I figured I heard enough about it from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park to last me the rest of my life. Plus, I got to look at Jeff Goldblum, which made it more palatable. Tall dark haired and geeky? Check! Why Dr. Livingston, I believe we have discovered MY TYPE. So I watched Jeff Goldblum explain the way a drop of water rolls and then not get eaten by dinosaurs, and really, that was about enough for me. My chaos pocket was full. I thought possibly forever.

But no. I had to pop a big fat mathematician in the middle of this novel, so he needs to sound like he has a vague idea what he is talking about. SO here I am, watching all the documentaries about Chaos and Quantum-ness that I SWEAR TO YOU my husband ALREADY HAD TAPED OFF THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL and kept SITTING IN THE BASEMENT betting against all odds that the frabjous day would come when I would look at him and say, "I really want to learn about CHAOS THEORY, and possibly also PHYSICS."

That day, ladies and gentlemen, was yesterday.

So he is trying to explain to me about how Schrodinger's cat goes in the box blah blah, and is it a dead cat or an alive cat or does it exist and somehow this is related to or he segued into the theory that the more you know about VELOCITY the less you can truly posit about LOCATION which seems counterintuitive but as he also told me, Physicists seem to think a point of light CAN be in two places at once, so they INVENTED counter intuitive, so okay, Velocity, smeared half dead or living cat in a box, yeah, blah blah, and I accidentally quit listening right then because I started thinking, "If I put MY cat in a box I could easily posit the alive-or-deadness or existence of him by the yowls of rage and the ripping foreclaws shredding the steel allowing pretty much the whole cat to come bursting out to treat me to multiple wounded one-eyed baleful looks, but at least this theory gives me an excuse to name the cat who appears in the novel "Schrodinger," which has HUGE appeal." I want to get a whole another really cat just so I can name him that.

In a bit of news COMPLETELY unrelated to physics (but related to pet names, so there's the only segue you are likely to get today. Enjoy!) my friend Lydia is getting a PUPPY for Christmas (or as soon as he is weaned) and they have already met him and named him. His name is -- brace yerself Bridge, really -- his name is:

Marzipan Go-Go.

Now, the PREVIOUS best pet name (which has been practically unchallenged until now) was a friend of a friend's African Hedgehog named, improbably, Pigling Bland. But the PUPPY name is giving P.B. a run for his sleepy, prickle-covered money. In fact, it is SUCH a great pet name I wish *I* was a pet just so I could be named Marzipan Go-Go, and also so I could be excused from trying to understand even the tiniest CORNER of Quantum Physics. Being a pet gets you out of a LOT, I would imagine: "Oh, sorry, I can't vacuum the house, or drive to Eckerd, apply Occam's Razor, or practice The Method in the local community theatre production of Our Town---did you not notice I am a Budgereega?"

Ah well, if you truly want to understand Schodinger's cat, you can go to someplace like MIT and spend nine years getting a slew of advanced degrees. BUT if you want to play an amusing interactive game that explains the cat in layman's terms AND gives you a SAVE THE CAT option should your dice roll the wrong way, then you can SKIP MIT and CLICK HERE.

In Which I Fail to Become Stephen Hawking

Last night I dreamed I was working, and I wrote this little slew of FRAGMENTS, and they were SO brilliant, I mean SO SO brilliant that I stopped and closed my file and typed them again in a separate window, where their succinct beauty and deep meaningfulness gobsmacked me into awe.

I realized the fragments said EVERYTHING! Everything worth saying, ever. EVER! EVER! My editor was there suddenly, the way people are in dreams, and she was wearing an extremely hot vintage Chanel suit and an up-do, and she asked me to print the fragments because, really, that was all she needed, thanks. And off she went with the sheet.

We weren't even going to title it. She was just going to print the fragments as my next book, and the cover would be a deep, cerulean blue and say something like, "EVERYTHING WORTH SAYING, EVER. I was SO relieved because I realized I could TAKE OFF the next day and get my TREE up instead of writing 2 or 3 thousand words this morning (DIGRESSION: of which, in reality, I have written ZERO so far and if I do not get my stinkin' Christmas tree up this week, my children will trade me in for that soft-bosomed brit from Super Nanny, but Chapter four is giving me fits...)

BUT, back to the dream, had this been a MERCIFUL dream, I would have woken up NOT remembering what the fragments were, just remembering that they had been BRILLIANT, and then I could have smugly lived out my life convinced that I am the universe's premier GENIUS but unfortunately only SUBCONCIOUSLY, and so the world would never get the full impact of my astonishing insight.

It was not, however, a merciful dream. I remember the fragments PERFECTLY, and brace yourself, Bridget, because I am about to share them with you. The fragments read thusly: "She monkeyed! Oh, Monkeyed! Monkeyed with pranceful conjoinings."

Yes. Really.

Oh, how I wish I was kidding. I don't even know what that MEANS. The dream interpretation machine is decidely unhelpful, only dealing with MONKEY as a noun, and saying it means deceitful people are surrounding me or maybe I am immature, which, SHUT. UP. Also, it has NO entry for the words "pranceful conjoinings." Imagine!

Although a literalist might say this is a dream which means, "If you were thinking of becoming the world's premier genius, perhaps you should not give up your day job just yet."

Snap, Crackle, Pop, Nice Neurons

If you read comments, you know Cornelia Read, right? She also writes for Warner, and her first novel, A FIELD OF DARKNESS is coming out next summer, and LORDY but it is good. SO anyway, for no reason, I have taken to calling her "Paris Hilton." Yes, to her face. She calls me Nic. It has been going on for so long now, I think I may have to go blonde. It has been going on for SO long now, I think Cornelia and I should get our own show. WE NEED TO HAVE A SHOW. It would have segments about books and segments about newts, and segments about stalking Joss Whedon that would lead to us having a puppet sidekick named "Mr. Eel" who would be made out of one of Joss Whedon's used tube socks.

And now YOU say, "Joshilyn, you are avoiding work by nattering on about Paris Hilton and socks and having a show. GO! Write Chapter 4."

And I do not answer, because I am sure I do not know what you are talking about....

ANYWAY I told Paris about my shameful behavior with the boots and the multiple BEERS (I don't even LIKE beers!!!) at the Myrtle Beach Writer's Conference, and SHE asked Lee Child (who was there drinking a suspiciously clear liquid out of an icy rocks glass) if I did any table top dancing or woke up in the sand with a mime and several trained dogs resting their heads on me as if I were a pillow or whatnot, and LEE CHILD, who is an internationally best selling author, BY THE WAY, said I behaved like a PERFECT LADY. Mostly. So, are you going to DISPUTE LEE CHILD'S GOOD WORD? No, of course not. Therefore, wipe away everything I told you about Myrtle Beach. I mostly sipped tea, pinky extended, and talked about my charitable works with The D.A.R..

And anyway, why are you bringing this back up? CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT I AM TRYING TO WRITE A BOOK HERE---I know it LOOKS like I am lying on my sofa in my work out togs (having not yet worked out) hooking back halloween Mini-Twixes and watching game show network, but NO! I AM A WRITING A BOOK. Secretly. In my head.

Also, I need a baby. Yesterday my baby said UTERUS and that makes her officially not a baby anymore. It happened in this way... She said, "God made me?" And I said, "Yup." And she said, "How did he make me?" And I said, "Mommies have a special place in their belly, called a uterus, and that's where babies grow. And I grew you in there, until you were all ready to come out and be Maisy, and then we went to the doctor and got you out." And she said, "Do I have a uterus?" And I said, "Yes, you sure do, because you are a girl." And she said, "One day I will make a little tiny baby in my uterus" and I said, "Oh that will be fun, but just first finish your masters degree and marry a nice man who really likes you." And she said, "Okay," so THAT'S all settled, thank God, but then I realized she had said Uterus and therefore she cannot be a BABY anymore AND I HAVE NO BABY AT ALL. Just CHILDREN. WAH!

And now YOU try to make some sort of noise about how I currently have no time to BREATHE and do I really want to have a ba---

And I say, SHUT UP, I DO TOO need a baby. And I can totally write a book and have a new baby. In FACT, I am writing a book RIGHT NOW. I am writing a book on the INSIDE. Where it counts.

And now you should probably offer me a cookie. Or a sedative. And send me back to bed.

PS. If you are someone who shouldn't be reading this, like, say, MY EDITOR, don't panic. I am not knocked up. And I AM writing a book. I totally am. I am writing a book IN MY HEART.

May I offer you a Mini-Twix?

1) Look! 2) Lizard! And 3) What Those Holes Are For

1) LOOK!

Okay, You know I have been dorkily excited ever since foreign rights started selling on gods because I wanted to see all the different covers? Yeah. Well. Double dern the eyes of Anne Twomey, but her cover design was SO good, every other country has been USING it because...how can you beat it? You can't. Look, here it is in SPAIN:

And you saw the UK one, which looks VERY like the Warner edition because British is a VERY similar language to American. Why, you can hardly tell those two editions apart.

Thank God for De Boekerij bv in Amsterdam! PEEP THIS:

They may not USE this cover on the finished book (The book is not out yet. That's just an image in the catalog, and that Anne Twomey cover is just. so. sexy. that they may use IT.) I like this one, and small wonder. My editor AND her assistant AND my husband took one look at this cover and said to me, "I bet you wish you owned those boots." And you know what? I am a little bit in passionate love with them. I would also like that skirt to go with them, and I have nothing against the moss green cardigan, either, while I am shopping off my cover. The title translates as THE THREE PROMISES OF ARLENE because I am not sure "What's new in Alabama" is a hot topic in the Netherlands.

In fact, the first time my editor at De Boekerij brought the book up at a staff meeting, the publisher said, "Alabama? Hrm. Do they still have that over there in America? Hrm, I think, NO." So she couldn't buy it. BUT! She brought it up the next month. And the next. And the next. And the NEXT, until it was clear that she was really passionate about it, and then they changed the title and now here's my book, all dressed up in a new cover with orange boots on. That's what a good editor does -- fights for your book in the house. I was so blessed and lucky that my book made its way to Xena-Warrior-Editors at Warner and Hodder in the UK, and now look, here is another one. I seriously want to mail her some chocolate or one of my children.

AND this edition has-never-before-seen blurbs! Martha O'Connor, author of The Bitch Posse, apparently said THIS: "Koop DE DRIE BELOFTES OF ARLENE! Je zult er green spijt van krijgen."

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS! Heck, I am not sure MARTHA knows what it means. But I sure like looking at it.

2) LIZARD!

Here on the home front, I am awaiting a special delivery of "pieces of lizard." I am not enthused.

What happened was, yesterday Sam said, MOM! LOOK! A HUMONGOUS LIZARD!

So I ran into the den just in time to see a TRULY HUMONGOUS garden lizard run under the sofa. This lizard was 4 or 4.5 inches long JUST IN HIS BODY with another 2+ inches of tail. When he stood up tall on his legs, he was a good two inches high. HUMONGOUS.

Now look. I LIKE lizards. Actively. I find them charming. I LIKE reptiles and amphibians of ALL sorts really. ANIMALS get a BIG TIME pass on my "Nature bores me" soul-deadness. I LOVE habitats and little alive things that creep about. Heck, my house is full of NEWTS. On PURPOSE. I can't tell you how often I have to stop here in our wooded, stream-filled neighborhood and get out of the car and carry some stupid turtle or another the rest of the way across the street before a less reptophilic driver mows it down. And we've had MANY snakes, both great and small, show up in the back garden, and my response has been to say OH! EDUCATIONAL! LET'S GO IDENTIFY IT! Except the one time it was a copperhead, and then I calmly separated the head part from the body part with a shovel. The end. So. Reptiles don't freak me out. A WHOLE lizard in the house, even a humungous one, sounds like a fun opportunity to play lizard rodeo and release him somewhere more appropriate.

I told Sam to watch him and went and got a broom (to chase him out from under the sofa) and a bowl (to catch him in) and prepped for Operation Rescue Humongous Lizard. Maisy followed me with worried eyebrows:

Maisy: That lizard is big.
Me: Yes. Humongous.
Maisy: Mommy, you catch him. Catch that big lizard, and put him in the trashcan.
Me: Lizards are nice! We don't put lizards in the trashcan.
Maisy: Okay. ... Mommy? Can you put him far from me?

So maybe reptiles aren't HER bag. But Sam and I, we like 'em FINE. Sam got so excited that he left his post to see what was keeping me. And when we got back with the Lizard Round-Up Equipage....there was no lizard. I have No idea how something so MASSIVE could vanish that fast. But it did.

And so now I am expecting "parts of lizard" to show up. Probably in my bed. Because my cat, Schubert, LOVES me, and he likes to bring me things. Or parts of things, anyway. His opportunities for gifting me so are limited as he is an indoor cat. But he has every now and again managed to escape to the great outdoors and play woodsman to my evil queen, bringing me back his version of Snow White's heart in a box. Except it usually the whole chest cavity, and he forgoes the box and places it directly on my pillow.

With a lizard this big, all I can think about is how MANY pieces it could be divvied up into for multiple gifting fun. A lizard that size could be vivisected into up to TEN large-enough-to-be-recognizable pieces. Maybe TWELVE. That's enough to ruin my pillow and a sheet set and the comforter and all my dern shams and mayube even the DUST RUFFLE if he works it right. I am, frankly, horrified. I am trying to keep the cat in the same room with me and monitor him until the lizard resurfaces. Wish me luck.

3) GAH! SO out of time. I will tell you WHAT THOSE HOLES ARE FOR tomorrow.

Think-Look-Consider Dance Remix

Think about this: I like quizzes, but this, courtesy of Lani Diane Rich over at Literary Chicks, is SICK.

Your 80s Heartthrob Is

Bill Gates

Scariest of all? Out of ALL THE POSSIBLE HEART THROBS, he is the one I think is cutest. So. Either the 80's needed Taye Diggs and Orlando Bloom to hop in a time machine or take massive doses of human growth hormone, OR...I have strange taste in men? Scott votes for A.

Look at this:

YAY! THE BETWEEN COVER HAPPENED! And they got Anne Twomey to design it. She did the cover for gods, and once again, she's used an image that never literally happens in the book, but it perfectly captures the book's mood and themes and, uh I hate to get gooey and say HEART. Instead let's say it captures the book's...um... um...DERNIT! HEART is the only word for it. So, fine. Heart. IT CAPTURES THE BOOK'S HEART, are you SATISFIED? No, I don't want to cuddle now. Even though I look at this cover and I get a big HAPPINESS BUBBLE growing in my body.

Consider this: Things are VERY idyllic --- practically pastoral --- in Newt-opia. We now have two fully mature Newts living on land, gill free, and either Fig is really Figinella or Spotty is really Spottina. Because under the Arc de Triumph (Scott made it out of yard rocks) are SIX, count them SIX gelatinous, transparent egg sacks, each with thirty or forty shiny egg specks suspended in the goo.

HEH.

WHAT SHOULD I DO? Hint: The answer is NOT " get 30 more aquariums and hand raise 187 newts" Here are the choices, as I see them.

a) Scoop them all out with a Dixie Cup and put them quietly down the toilet, thus deferring the "Where do baby newts come from" conversation with Maisy.
b) Scoop them all out with a Dixie Cup and release them theatrically back into the Newt Pond in the yard while explaining ecosystems in such a loud voice that my toddler can't ask me sex questions.
c) Scoop all but ONE out with Dixie Cup, put scooped sacks in the pond, give Maisy the POLLEN talk, and let my children experience the miracle of life, hoping to capture and release all 30 or 40 of the fetal newtlets later.
d) Pretend I didn't see the egg sacks, and hope that newts are cannibals. I could save a good 30 cents in Newt food if they are! Although Jill reminded me of the legend of the WENDIGO. Supposedly, if you are a pure cannibal for long enough, you turn into a constantly starving super-naturally gifted hunter, and you get a lot of bonus gifts, like excessive body hair and fangs and eternal life. She says, "And do you really want your Newts running around in the dark woods of Minnesota, killing people?"

Well, no, I don't. But wouldn't a newt Wendigo relentlessly hunt other NEWTS? I don't see why they would switch to people. Also, and I cannot overstate this, they are THREE INCHES LONG. Even if they became mighty Wendigo with the hair and fangs and eternal life and speedy quickness, how would they even GET to Minnesota. And once there, I think they would go for prey that didn't have TOES bigger than them. About the only way they could successfully off people would be simultaneously running up your nostrils and plogging up your breathing pipes. Heh. Now I've creeped myself out. And I am about to have 187 of these dern things if I don't get DECISIVE with the egg sacks...

In Which I Welcome You (in Your Guise of Ann Landers) to Newtopia and Virtue

THANK YOU, PRETTY INTERNETS. I took y'all's advice in the comments. That is to say, I called my production editor and begged for Clemency (the 6 hours of copy editing a day were making me want to lie on the sidewalk pressing a fork to my forehead and hoping a passing pedestrian-slash-aspiring-lobotomist would pause and kick it into my brain.) She gave me a week's extension. LET US NOW COMPOSE HYMNS IN HER HONOR. I got through the first read through and then threw the copy edits in a BOX to NOT THINK ABOUT for 48 hours.

(Digression: My copy editor, code name: Harold, would WHIP OUT THE PURPLE CRAYON and stab me with it, were she here! She would NEVER tolerate me getting THROUGH a read THROUGH and then THREW-ing. I love Harold.)

Then I hid the rest of my to do list from myself and sat down and had a big fun time writing me some BRAND NEW BOOK. I have an abysmal chapter one now, and the first ten pages of a putrescent chapter two. I already see that about 6/7ths of this draft must be destroyed before it poisons the land for mile around with its radioactive awfulness, BUT I can see the spine of something forming in the soupy and gellid bio-hazardous mass of words I have produced. I have learned (OH THANK YOU, THANK YOU, ANNE LAMOTT!) that most every good novel comes out of a crappy first draft.

Drafting, for me anyway, is an act of faith. Maybe not faith in myself---they were out of that at Kroger last time I checked---but faith in PROCESS. I assume that the bones of a good book will grow themselves themselves way down in the manure and mud I am writing now. But this will be my third novel (and the fifth I have written) and thus I have emperical evidence that if I keep generating crap and then digging out and tossing away the smelly parts, I will find the skeleton of my book, and then I can build a working animal around that frame.

It is a terribly inefficient way to write a novel, but it's the only way I know. I think a better process would be "Sit down and allow genius level prose of humbling beauty to drip langorously from my fingers as the rest of me writhes in uninhibited ecstacy to be in the presence of something so immediately perfect." That's kinda how I imagine Nabakov does it...

MEANWHILE, as a thank you for giving me commently encouragement to throw all my responsibilities out the window and do what I wanted to do anyway, I am going to give you a glimpse into....NEWTOPIA!

We cleaned out the tank, and Scott took a basic aquarium set up and, with the help of HIS CLEAR SIGHTED VISION FOR A BETTER NEWT-MERICA (and rocks dug out of the yard and a stick or two) made this newtly paradise with a big island and multiple climbing rocks and an arc de triumph and a log for getting under and basking places. He decided we needed more of a LAND MASS because Fig and Spotty have DROPPED their gills and become all LITHE and CREEPY. They now go STRAIGHT UP THE GLASS on their sticky little feet, even though I dearly wish they wouldn't. I have asked them very nicely not to, but they are strong-willed, or possibly non-native speakers. AND Sam and I took a field trip to the newt pond and after clever stalking caught ourselves a POSY FLOWER NEWT, a little Daisy Flower sized addition. Since Fig and Spotty are acting like MAMMALS (if mammals were hairless and slimey and could run straight GLASS UGH!) and barely deigning to stay damp, Sam worried Daisy would be lonely in the water.

In a totally unrelated tangent, lookit! This is my BEFORE picture. This is me and my mutants standing ready for church on Sunday. (Digression: Good grief but Sam is getting grown up and good lookin'!)

Notice how in that last pic I am cleverly hiding at LEAST half of my butt fat behind my charmign son. There's so much of it, I may have detached a wad and stashed it behind Maisy. Sure, that's probably child abuse, BUT if I stare into ALL of my butt fat at once, head on, I suspect I will GO BLIND. This is as much as I can take in.

OKAY, YES, THAT IS COWARDLY! Let us go back a few days in time to the QM2 and see a FUZZY picture of me speaking. Perhaps the BLURRY SOFT FOCUS caused by the relentless puke-making motion of the ocean will help me not go blind:

ARG! I am going to look and look and look at these very current pictures any time I want a COOKIE, because I am beginning 100 million years of virtue today. 20 days won't do it, so. In 100 million years, we will take an after picture, and AS GOD IS MY WITNESS you will all start begging me to come back to Milan and do runway. My after picture is going to look JUST like THIS:

Except I hope my skin won't be so GLOSSY. Why do fitness people always insist on OILING themselves? THEY ALL DO, and I am against it. Oiled people always look to me like THEY could run straight up the glass...But to get back on POINT. VIRTUE!!! DO YOU HEAR ME? I AM GETTING BACK IN SHAPE. VIRTUE AND THEN MORE VIRTUE FOR 100 MILLION YEARS! NO MORE with the buttered rolls.

So I have written it. So shall it be.

Meanwhile, Down in the Galley

Note: I wrote this at 7 am, but my blog has not let me post for 3 days now. Server issues? Spam bomb? No clue. It decided to let me, so I am rushing to slap this up while the slapping is good.

Hi! Remember Copy Editing? I sure do!

This is the working definition of NOT FUN. I call my copy editor Harold because she uses a purple pencil...and uses it...and uses it... I must just exhaust poor Harold. I need to send her a big bottle of Vodka and a coupon for some free therapy. I FEEL for her. I mean, if you read this blog at all, you have learned by now that I am NOT A GOOD PROOF READER. And I am also not a good TYPER---I type using one thumb and three fingers, and it's all about speediness---accuracy be damned. I am also not careful or consistent. I can spell a word right 9,000 times and then suddenly decide to switch out all its E's for A's and add a silent P, or sometimes my brain will cramp up and I will completely forget how to spell some average, work-a-day word. You know how you can be writing and then a regular word you use constantly (say, LITTLE, for a painfully personal example) will just LOOK wrong to you? Yeah. Me too. Only I never go to dictionary.com and check it, do I?

My CARELESS mistakes aside (and it would take a BULLDOZER to move all of them to the side), I have not given up my love affair with the word little. Many, many, many, many things in this book managed to be little --- hands, tables, smiles, gestures, bits, feet (and their correspondingly little shoes), caterpillars (like anyone has ever seen a nine inch caterpillar!), fingers, children, noses, lips, all just as little as little can be. I could have saved myself a world of trouble if I'd simply set the whole thing in Lilliput. Also? I have split SO many infinitives that infinitive marriage counsellors cite ME as the number three cause of infinitive divorce. (The first two are money and sex, um duh.)

AND! I got home on Friday and found my copy-edited pages waiting for me. They came shortly after I left, so they want them back FIVE DAYS after I returned. I have spent six solid hours Saturday and another six yesterday STET-ing a few especial pet grammatical errors that I feel are part of voice and OK-ing fixes to the THUNDEROUS AND HUGE PRE-PIONEER-BUFFALO-HERD sized ARMY of careless errors.

I got up at 5 am this morning and got my own colored pencil and went right back to it. And I am still only about halfway through the FIRST read through. I like to go through copy-edited proofs at LEAST twice because asking for changes in galleys feels like bad manners.
AND I HAVE STILL NOT ANSWERED THE 150 ANSWER NEEDING -MAILS that piled themselves up while I frittered away ten days on sybaritic pleasure cruising and the pernicious eating of buttered rolls.
And I have a crit to do for Liz (she won that auction and so I want to REALLY do a good job for her).
And I need to make worksheets up for a seminar I am going to teach on writing punchy openings.
And find an hour every day to get my sweat on so I can lose five pounds of buttered-roll-butt.
And I need to do my GCC interview with Natalie Collins because she is not only in the GCC with me but a FINE writer and a friend.
And then I need to mom-taxi my little dangling participles to karate and boy scouts and tap dance and choir and pre-school and etc etc.

AND I have this STORY pressing against the bones of my skull, wanting OUT. I am supposed to be on a break and begin this new novel in November, but this novel doesn't want to be begun in November. I am DREAMING about it, and almost driving off the road and into the gorse because I am thinking so hard about it, and RIGHT NOW this second, every time I BLINK, I see the long, snakey arms and stripey liquid eyeliner of Thalia, my narrator's sister. I can SEE her imprinted on the backs of my EYELIDS, and I so so so want to write about her NOW. Today.

The upshot is, I can never go on vacation again because I don't see how to dig my way out so I can get to the part where I get to write this burgeoning book. The book is like Pillsbury biscuit dough, confined and thwarted, wanting only to puff and hump and grow, and I am the cardboard cannister, longing to be cracked sharply against the counter.

Okay. That was too much. Did I just employ TURGID BISCUIT IMAGERY? Time to SHUT UP. Bah I really want to write today, BU|T NO. Instead I shall copy edit all the whole morning, virtuous as a carb-free nun, and THEN I shall go to tap class with Maisy and THEN answer AT LEAST 30 e-mails and THEN do some more copy editing and then get Natalie's interview ready for tomorrow before waving romantically at my husband in passing and dropping unconscious to the sheets. This is my solemn vow.

So Gentle Reader? The OTHER upshot is, I am not proofreading this blog at all. Embrace the typos, oh my best beloveds.
And Harold? Sadly? The OTHER other upshot is, I will FLIP you for the free therapy coupon, but I am DERN well keeping the Vodka.

Blogging for Books: The Winners!

The results are in! This month's Blogging for Books winners have been chosen by our lovely guest judge, Melanie Hauser. All three winners will be receiving signed copies of Melanie's novel, CONFESSIONS OF SUPER MOM.

Ready? Here's what Melanie had to say:

Thanks so much for inviting me to judge this month's Blogging for Books. I confess, I had no idea how fun - and difficult - it would be. I'm amazed at how differently everyone responded to the vague subject matter of "superheroes." I just love authors, and the things their crazy minds come up with! Sheesh! Enough of all the Serious Author Blather! Without further fanfare, I'm so happy to announce the winners of this month's Blogging for Books:

Third place goes to The Downside of Saving the World by Holley of Mean Teacher. This was so funny, and the twist at the end made me laugh out loud.

Coming in at a close second was Is the cape required? by Amy of Excrutiating Minutiae. This was a terrific view of superheroing from the most unsung superhero of all, Mom. (Something I know a little about!)

First place goes to A Hero of Sorts by Vicki of Outside In. I loved this entry! I loved the restraint, yet obvious compassion, that Vicki used in writing about her son. This moved me, yet never made me feel sorry for the subject, and that's a very hard thing to do. Congrats, Vicki!

I'd like to thank Joshilyn for hosting B4B, Mir for doing all the hard work, and Jay for coming up with this brilliant idea in the first place. And for all you superheroes out there, thank you, be careful of that cape (especially when entering and leaving revolving doors), and don't forget to floss!

Blogging for Books: The Finalists

At final tally, we had 21 entries for this month's Blogging for Books contest. I hope that folks will read all the entries, if they haven't done so already.

When I was asked to help pare the entries down to a list of seven finalists, I was flattered, and figured it would be fun and easy. Well. It was fun, reading everyone's entries. It was not easy. There were a lot of wonderful submissions and I now have a lot more empathy for Jay and our guest judges.

Anyway, this month's theme was SUPERHEROES. With that in mind, I tried to pick the entries that I felt were not only the "best" or "most entertaining," but that most fully embodied the theme. I would like to thank Joshilyn for taking over as contest host, and Melanie for her upcoming final judging. In addition, thank you to EVERYONE who submitted.

Without further ado... here are the top seven entries in random order:

1) Playing With Boys by f-i-n of sunshine state.
2) Is the cape required? by Amy of Excrutiating Minutiae.
3) Who Will Save Us Now? by Sleeping Mommy of Sleeping Mommy.
4) The Downside of Saving the World by Holley of Mean Teacher.
5)