today my daughter is seventeen

The year the Girlchild was born, the Berlin wall came down, students rushed tanks in Tiananmen Square, and the U.S. invaded Panama. The world was in high gear.

In 1994 (when this photo was taken), she was five and full of proverbial beans. It was hard to keep her out of trees. It was next to impossible to keep up with her questions. She composed impromtu operas which were staged at a run through the house, in which she played all parts in underpants and a floating silk cape, curls flying around her as she leaped up on the couch to launch into an aria.

So now she's seventeen. Once in a while we still see flashes of that wild and crazy five year old, but of course we are not always privy to the details. Sometimes snatches of conversation come to me. Two chickens, one with a neckband marked "1" and the other marked "3" set free in the school halls. Is this a fantasy, a plan, a fond memory? If I bide my time she will probably tell me. In a talkative mood she flings herself across our bed to rant about the death penalty, the woeful lack of junk food in the school vending machines, the latest social lunch time drama, Iraq.

Sometimes we are terrified, but we are always mindful of our good fortune. There's still a whole lot of shaking going on.

May 5, 2005
May 5, 2004

Posted on May 05, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (7) | TrackBack (0)

odd phrase

There's a phrase that goes something like, let the horse have his head. It means (I think) that you let the horse decide where to go and lay off on the hee and yaw and giddyup and all that hey-I'm-the-human superiority stuff from up there on your driver's seat.

I hope that's what it means. Otherwise the image that comes to mind is rather bloody, in a Godfatherish, Ichabod Crane kinda way.

So at any rate. This character of mine has been very cranky and wanting to go climb into somebody's bed. Mostly she was stopping herself by rationalizing the itch away as something not only inappropriate, but dangerous. Well, yesterday she got her way. It took two thousand words of letting her have her head, but things are moving.

Another example of how the subconscious rules the writing mind.

Posted on May 04, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (3) | TrackBack (0)

Garrison's button

Obviously, somebody or something pushed it. Garrison Keillor's latest essay at Salon is titled: Writers, stop whining.

Not that I disagree with his general premise. We are a whiny lot. For my part, I try not to, but sometimes it squeaks out of me anyway.

A good bit from a very grouchy essay:

The biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing stuff that's painful to read, and so they accumulate long résumés and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living don't complain about the difficulty of it. It does nothing for the reader to know you went through 14 drafts of a book, so why mention it?

The truth, young people, is that writing is no more difficult than building a house, and the only good reason to complain is to discourage younger and more talented writers from climbing on the gravy train and pushing you off.

Why does this make me feel guilty? Have I shoved somebody off a train lately? Maybe this is that well known cop-in-the-rearview-mirror syndrome. No matter how well you've been driving, a flush of panic. You are sure you've done something awful and just put it out of your head, but the cop will now wave the evidence in your face. Until she passes you and zips off into the sunset to scare the bejesus out of somebody else.

Garrison Keillor is in my rearview mirror just at this moment, and my palms are sweaty.

Posted on May 03, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (6) | TrackBack (0)

overheard

Sal Towse (who won the pile o' books) has a weblog, and on her weblog I found a link to In Passing, which is a collection of things overheard in public. I've mentioned before how useful it is to keep track of conversations you hear for story ideas. in Passing has archives going back about five years, and many of them are simply priceless.

Spend some time browsing over there the next time you need a story idea.

Posted on May 02, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (3) | TrackBack (0)

oh look, it's an annual thing

In the right hand column are links to posts made on this day last year and the year before. If you take a look you'll see that I'm usually feeling pretty low and pessimistic about my future as a writer about this time.

Why that should be? No clue.

Posted on May 02, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (1) | TrackBack (0)

spring

I love this time of year. Really, I do. Things growing and so much light. I love it, but it's not good for me.

/aside/ At age three the Girlchild was looking sad. I asked her what was wrong, and she said (and I quote): I'm thinking, and it's not good for me.

This is a great example of early childhood acquisition. She was experimenting with ellipses, or, more simply put: she was trying to figure out which prepositional phrases she could drop. In this case she miscalculated. She meant to say: I'm thinking about bubblegum, and it's not good for me. /aside/

Right now, as much as I love spring, it's not good for me because my mind won't settle down to work. However. Today progress will be made, if I have to close myself into a closet.

Posted on May 02, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (2) | TrackBack (0)

fanfic, copyright, plagarism, cha cha cha

All the hoopla about Opal Mehta has resulted in some really good discussions about the nature of storytelling. Over at Making Light, Teresa Nielson Hayden's comment (transmuted into a post) on fanfic gets to the heart of the matter:**

[...] In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.

I’m just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it’s barely readable, they’ll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they’re still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They’re not so different as all that.

Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote.

Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.

This really is a basic impulse.

Which brings me back to the discussion in the comments to my post Genre - Literature. I made some similar points regarding storytelling as a basic human impulse to de Rien, and now I'm thinking of A.S. Byatt's essays on this subject. I can't put my hands on the particular one that comes to mind, but I believe it's in Imagining Characters, which is an attempt to capture in print a discussion about literature between Byatt and Ignes Sodre, who is a psychoanalyst.

de Rien asked me if I was saying that storytelling as a cultural good was primarily a vehicle for educating children and less relevant for adults. That's a huge and really interesting question. My short answer: no, not just for children. A longer answer (or at least part of one) I'll try to put together today.
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Thanks to murgatroyd for the headsup.

Posted on April 27, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (4) | TrackBack (0)

wassup

I've been writing pretty well just recently, but I don't want to talk about that because I'm a superstitious Italian.

So here's what's new otherwise: tomorrow the first galley proof pass of Queen of Swords is supposed to land on my doorstep. With a large thump. I have until May 11 to get it back to them. This means the bound galleys (or ARCs, or advance reader copies) are just around the corner. Six weeks, maybe eight.

Today I drove two hours to get my eyes scanned. For a couple years now I've been thinking about laser surgery to correct my (deplorable) eyesight, and I was on the brink of actually doing it... but. My bottom line was this: only if I was eligible for the most advanced technology available, which right now is wavefront. And the only way to know if I was eligile was to get in the car and go all the way down to the surgical center, and then I spent ten minutes staring at lights while computers hummed, and after all that:

Nope. My corneas are too thin and my prescription too strong. And after I got my nerve up and everything.

Tomorrow I hope to have more great writing news not to tell you about. And by the way, it's FOUR MORE DAYS until the end of the pile o' books drawing. So get your rear in gear if you haven't already.

Posted on April 26, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (1) | TrackBack (0)

sloppy sloppy sloppy

Every once in a while plagarism raises its head outside of the classroom. This time the accused is a young woman whose a Harvard undergrad, whose first novel (How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life) apparently borrows pretty directly from Sloppy Firsts, a novel that came out a year or so ago.

The sad details, if you care to look, are here, along with a comparison of the contested passages.

I see the similarities, and because there are quite a few of them, my guess would be that the courts are likely to decide in McCafferty's favor. Which would mean considerable difficulties for Viswanathan, beyond legal and financial ones. Will she write another novel? Will she get it published?

What bothers me is how it all came to happen. This is obviously a bright kid, but then she was seventeen when she signed her first book contract. Seventeen. Seventeen is Mars. Seventeen is a universe all its own, no matter how smart you might be. And how does a seventeen year old working to get into Harvard even think about selling a novel? Where is the motivation? WHO is the motivation?

What I find really interesting about this is not so much the plagarism, but Viswanathan's backstory.

Posted on April 24, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (9) | TrackBack (0)

At Amazon

The Queen of Swords cover is up. I still love the art work, but on the whole it looks rather odd, I think, because the bands at the top and bottom will be in gold foil, but here they come across as kinda offensively tan/brown.

Posted on April 23, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (16) | TrackBack (0)