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October 6, 2006

party game, and the first chance to win QoS

There's a game called Probable Proverbs which is actually quite fun. The website where I first learned about this game (quite some time ago, now) provides lots of examples. You take a proverb:

You can't judge a book by its cover.

And arrive at an alternate that is alliterative. Examples, credited to their authors:


  • Rating a reading by its wrapping is rather reckless. --William Flis
  • Base book by binding? Blockhead. --J. L. Mandelson
  • Articulate authors aren't always appealing in appearance. --Kathy Shipley
  • Vying to validate a volume's verity via it's visage is a voided voyage. --Rex Stocklin

Note that it's the sound at the beginning of the word that's important rather than the way it's written, and there's lots of room for creative reinterpretation.

So on Monday I'm going to post a proverb, and anybody who is interested can play the game. I won't open comments until Wednesday, so you can go away and think about it for a while. As of Wednesday you'll be able to post your alternate in a comment.

Who decides on the winner? You guessed it: I'm the decider. That person will get a signed first edition first printing of Queen of Swords. I'll send it anywhere in the world, airmail, so it should arrive well before the official pub date.

Now, if you've got a proverb you think would lend itself to this game, drop me an email. Do NOT post it here.* You never know, I might use it. In which case, you'd get a signed copy, too.

*if you post proverbs in a comment to this thread, they are automatically disqualified and will be deleted.

Posted by at 6:09 PM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

short short

Rumaging around on my hard drive looking for something I always run into the oddest stuff. Such as this short short story I wrote what, maybe ten years ago, experimenting with form. It's called "Photo Reduced" and while it hasn't appeared in print anywhere, it's still all rights reserved, all wrongs avenged, blah blah blah.

The photo:1 Two little girls astride a stuffed bear in the middle of Lincoln Park Zoo.2 Ice cream rings3 around their mouths; smears of chocolate on matching short sets.4 The bigger one laughs5,6 at the photographer.7,8 The little one, puzzled, stares off in the other direction.9


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1. Chicago, 1961. When Lincoln Avenue was the whole world, and animals all lived in cages.


2. Where did this poor bear come from, and where did it go? It smelled of mildew and dust, and the glass eyes were clouded. The upper lip curled over yellow teeth. A back like a board, the fur like splinters.


3. Mondays and the restaurant closed: my father spent his free time feeding us. Ice cream and cotton candy and long paper strips with candy dots in precise rows. At home there was more food waiting: pasta fazul, minestrone, short ribs, fried bread, sausage and peppers, bruised bananas.


4. Imagine my mother at Sears, Montgomery Ward, Goldblatts, sorting through piles of little girl pinks and pale greens, polyester sticky to the touch. Imagine her there at the zoo in a sundress and sandals, cigarette between her fingers, nails painted the same blood red as her mouth. Imagine her someplace else entirely, dim and cool, smelling of beer.


5. See me: the smarter one, the clever one. The one who knew when to laugh.


6. See me: the one who will survive.


7. It is real laughter; I can see that much about my child self. But what was I laughing at? Surely not my pacing father. I see him in a short sleeved shirt and bow tie, his hands crossed behind his back. Surely not.


8. The photographer is not memory and declines to be imagined. His camera: a box that stood on three legs. In 1961, fathers and uncles and sons and strangers held the cameras, wound the film, flashed. Mothers and daughters and sisters learned how to hold their heads up, how to smile, when to laugh.


9. A baby still. Her cheeks round, her fine hair drifting around her face. Scowling, unsure, on the verge of tears. She rocks in place, at odds with the world, already and always.

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Posted by at 5:43 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

the girlchild's mother

Jessica had a question:

I have sort of a random question... Given that her mother is a Big Famous Author, what do your daughter's tastes in books run toward? (I know that that sentence is so badly worded, but I'm severely undercaffeinated this morning and can't think of an alternative.)

The girlchild doesn't read my books, which really, I understand. She most likely doesn't really want to know all the stuff I've got in my head. As far as having a novelist mother is concerned, I think she is alternately proud and mortified, but mostly mortified. Of course everything I do embarrasses her. I told her long ago about the conference phone call at three a.m. where all us mothers put our heads together to think up new ways to mortify teenagers. I've explained that I'm under a contractual obligation to cause her to wince every day at least ten times. Oddly, she isn't mollified by the knowledge that she's not the only one.

When I was a teenager I wouldn't cook when my father was around because well, he was a Cook. Arturo, the Cook, is how everybody thought of him. I baked instead, because he didn't bake and he was appreciative of baked goods. I did learn to cook from him, you understand, but not by cooking in front of him.

The girlchild is currently reading about five books at once, most of them about as different from my books as you can get. She loves Gregory Maguire's books (Wicked was one of her early book crushes), and she reads a lot of memoirs about people who have dealt with addiction. This topic is of interest because there's a history of alcoholism in my family that I've always talked to her about very openly, in the hope that she would think not twice, but twenty times before she started drinking. And then, because she's seventeen, she'll turn on a dime and go re-read the whole Little House series. She loves Harry Potter. Once in a while I suggest a book I think she'll like. My biggest success was Patchett's The Magician's Assistant, which she adored and we talked about for a long time.

In short, she's got her own aesthetic and interests which in large part down overlap with mine. Maybe as she gets older. I hope. I like talking to her about books.

Posted by at 10:41 AM | | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)