Cool Stuff Happening!

Sorry I skipped February-- too short of a month, even though it had 29 days this year. In February, we went with baby to a beautiful candlelit no-electricity beach in the Yucatan. I brought a stack of photocopied letters I was judging for the Letters About Literature competition and had fun going through them, underlining and starring parts I loved. (For those of you who don't know about this, it's a national competition open to elementary through high school. Students write letters to the author of a book that somehow changed their life or their outlook on life. If you're a teacher, encourage your students to do it! If you're a student, do it yourself!) Anyway, it was lovely and relaxing to hang out on the beach reading these letters amidst palm trees, with my friends and mom and dad around to watch baby.

Good news has been pouring in about RED GLASS. I'm hugely grateful that so many people are reading it and liking it. (Grateful to readers, to the universe, to the source of stories, just, in general, grateful...) It won the International Reading Association award for YA Fiction-- and Random House is sending me to Atlanta to receive the award! This is super-exciting for me-- several of the authors who will be there are heroes of mine, and I get to be in their midst. Wow.

RED GLASS was also recently selected as a VOYA Top Shelf Book, which is very cool-- and rumour has it RH will also be sending me to the ALA conference in California in June-- and again, I'll be surrounded by more writer heroes of mine (and librarian heroes, of course). You can check out the other awards and honors under the news section of my website.

I keep discovering how teachers and librarians and students are using my books in creative ways. (I love getting emails about creative ways you've used the books, so keep them coming!) WHAT THE MOON SAW is one of the books in the Intergenerational Book Club through the Center for Community Literacy here in Fort Collins. This means that lots of people got free copies of the book, and are reading and talking about it with friends, relatives, and classmates.

My good ESL teacher friend, Andrea Heyman (talk about award-winning-- she's the ultimate teacher of the year!), has been doing fun activities with her advanced ESL adult students at Front Range Community College. Every class she comes up with amazing games (usually fairly rowdy-- I hear them in the next classroom over) that involve vocab, grammar, visualization and verbalization, you name it. I'll try to post some pics of what her students did as one of their first activities.

I'm really excited that the paperbacks of WHAT THE MOON SAW are coming out on April 8. They're about a third of the price of the hardcovers-- only 6 bucks! And for school visits, Random House does a 40% discount, which makes it only about 4 bucks. This will make the book much more affordable. I'm hoping that more classes will be able to read it together, and more kids will be able to get the book at my school visits. (It'll be another year til RED GLASS comes out in paperback.)

I have a bunch of local events and conferences coming up, and I'll try to remember to take pictures to post on this blog-- the Colorado Teen Lit conference in Denver, the Arapahoe Community College Writers' Studio, a reading at The Readers' Cove with my writing group, and more (see the events section of my website for details).

What else can I say? Life is good. I love writing in my trailer. I love spring. I love my baby, who is walking now and does new cute things every day, like eating sunshine. (The other day, sunlight was shining through a wicker basket in front of the living room window. He saw the pattern of spotted light, and took his tiny pointer finger and rubbed it in a sunshine spot and licked it and said, mmmmm.)

That's all for now! Thanks for reading!

Laura

Post Bas Bleu Reading

Hi. It's about 9:30 p.m. and I just finished teaching my ESL class, which always leaves me a little wound up (in a good way). I'm drinking chamomile tea and eating oatmeal cookies to calm down
before I go to sleep. A number of good things have happened lately:

- I've gotten on a good writing schedule now that our part-time nanny has started hangin with Baby in the mornings.

- My mom was in town last week, which helped me have more writing time, too, and get caught up with my backlog of emails and phone calls. I reduced my to-do list by a few pages.

-My husband has finally finished a work project that was requiring him to work insanely long hours.

-I had a great time at the Bas Bleu Theater reading I did last night with Bill Tremblay. I love Bas Bleu theater. The set onstage for the current play is a dank prison cell, which was the backdrop to my reading-- very moody and atmospheric... I saw some good friends there and met some fascinating new people, including a French man who graciously put up with my rusty French.

Here's a pic of me and my friend/neighbor Chris on the left and my friend/neighbor/Nia (dance) teacher Erika on the right. The other pic is me and my mom-- it was her birthday yesterday.

My Writing Life with Baby So Far

Hi! I'm in my trailer with the heater pumping, keeping me toasty despite the chilliness outside. I'm so glad I have this trailer! It's a peaceful place where I can come with my dog Luli and forget everything else and just write. Back in August, in Loveland, when I was on a mini (mini) tour of this trailer, deciding whether or not to get it, the previous owner said off-handedly, "My wife says this trailer has a really good vibe."

And that was the deciding factor. (I've learned that my major decisions are usually made irrationally). This trailer DOES have a good vibe. I felt it then, on my mini-tour, and it was validating that his wife thought so, too. (It's old-- I love imagining all the adventures it's been on over the past half-century...)

So, every day for a few hours while either a babysitter or my husband is watching Baby (who I will tell you about in a moment), I come in here with my steaming teapot, light the heater, and settle in to write and drink lots of tea. First, I usually just sit a few moments and let myself sink into the oceanic sounds of the heater's breath, and then I write a little in my journal.

I've been choosing a few lines of Rumi poetry every day to muse about in my journal, which helps to center me and get me focused on the story at hand. (In the manuscript I'm working on, the main character's mom is a flighty hippie-chick who is always quoting Rumi...) I have a rough draft of the manuscript at this point, but I'm trying to deepen the characters and explore the subtleties of their relationships. I've been taking a character every day and writing heaps of details about her, about the facets of her life and mind and heart, exploring her memories and dreams. I think it's a good way to ease myself back into this manuscript after a month of practically no writing. Which brings me to... BABY!

(I'll call him Baby since my mother-in-law pointed out that maybe I shouldn't use his name on a public blog (on accounta all you crazy stalker types out there-- you know who you are...) And I noticed that other writers tend to not mention their kids' names on their blogs, so I figured I'd follow suit.)

So... Baby! He's almost ten months old now, and he's been with us for six action-packed weeks. The funniest thing he does is give long, slow zerberts (aka raspberries) to the leather sofa, which sound like extremely loud farts. Seeing how funny I find that, he tries to entertain me by zerberting other unexpected objects, like the wood floor. I can't figure out if some kind of five-second rule applies there. I don't want to be a hyper, overprotective mom (for those of you who've read Red Glass, I have a good dose of Sophie's germ-phobia in me, and I've sworn not to impose it upon my child...). But is he crossing a gross-ness line with the floor zerberts? That's something they don't specifically deal with in the What To Expect baby books. Hmmm... I'll ask my mom when she comes to help out next week.

The most inspiring thing about Baby, as relates to my writing (because after all, this is a Writer's blog, not a Gushing-New-Mom's blog) is how fascinated he is by the patterns he's begun to discover in this world. He takes delight in swinging the bathroom door open and closed, open and closed, mouth parted in rapt wonder. Or playing peek-a-boo. It's enthralling to him that when you pull a cloth over your face, and lift it up, your face is STILL THERE! It's worthy of smiling and laughing and clapping his hands in wild abandon.

In my writing, I want to approach life with this freshness, this joy over the simplest things. One of the best things about reading a good book, I think, is that it reminds you that the world is an endlessly fascinating place. It strips the jaded parts of you away, and makes you feel like everything is new and mesmerizing.

I'll end this post with some nice news about my books. Red Glass is one of 7 finalists in the Cybils Award! This is a Bloggers award in its second year. The more I learn about this award, the cooler I realize it is. It's a really big honor. And speaking of bloggers, there have been some lovely reviews of Red Glass by bloggers, which I've posted on my website. (Just click the link, then click Reviews, then scroll down to the Online Review section).

I have an hour of time left in this trailer before my baby-sitter leaves, so I'd better delve back into some book-writing now.

Thanks for reading, and have a joyful, adventurous new year!

P.S. These pics are from our trip to Guatemala to pick up Baby-- they were taken in the town of Antigua. There's a Bird of Paradise flower, which looks amazingly like a bird's silhouette, doesn't it? There's a white church with cacti growing out of the corner, which my husband and I thought was cool. There's a clay face pot with what I guess is a replica of ancient Mayan pots? There's a red house with plants either growing from the roof or perhaps sticking out from a hidden courtyard.

Baby's Arrival and More Event Pics

Hello! I'm sitting here in my dining room, peering out over piles of boxes of dusty books. Usually my desk is in my writing room, which is now full of baby stuff. We're in a transition state now-- the baby will be here in a few weeks, and we're making room for him-- sending bags of clothes to Goodwill, throwing out junk, recycling cartons of old paper (I finally let go of my three file cabinets full of grad school articles taking up space in the garage, and it felt GOOD!) (Hmm, I just reread that and it sounded like we're sticking our baby in the garage. Not so. All his material possessions will go in what was my writing room, and my writing room stuff will go in our dining room and my new old canned ham trailer.) The thing is, our previously plastic-free home is being inundated with plastic baby stuff, and we're making space for it all.

(One more thing about my baby-- a few confused people have come up to me at events, saying, wow, you don't look eight months pregnant! And I realized I mentioned the baby previously in this blog but neglected to mention that we're adopting him from Guatemala-- which explains my my lack of a basket-ball sized belly. He's extremely cute, incidentally, and happy and smart and playful...)

I've been trying to balance my writing time with my getting-ready-for-baby time, although lately the latter has been eclipsing everything. I do feel grumpy and overall yucky if I don't write regularly, though. It's a tricky balance. I've been spending lots of time thinking about how I can make sure I have several hours of writing time every day once he comes. (I keep calling him "he" not to be mysterious, but we're not 100% sure what his name will be yet.) I feel like this gigantic whirlwind is heading toward me and will swirl me up and transport me to another world... and how do you really, truly get ready for something phenomenally huge and life-changing like that?

In case you're wondering what I've been writing lately, mostly I've been finishing up a very rough draft of my next book (and like my baby, the name is still uncertain, so I'll be mysterious about the title.) The deadline in my contract is May 1, which scares me a bit. I've had many years to try to figure out how to be creative on demand, and while it's true that I've uncovered some strategies that work for me, still, creativity is such a mysterious and magical thing. For me it requires lowering to a deeper level of consciousness, to a place of images and symbols, and bringing those back up to the surface. This is not easy to do when you're up to your ears in getting-ready-for-baby-- or whatever life-changing event you happen to be in the midst of. But I think that at the heart of it, writing is, for me, a kind of meditation-- leaving the details of the everyday world for a period of time every day to clear a space inside for more timeless feelings to come. I think the times when I most need to access this timeless place are precisely in the midst of big, overwhelming life changes.

So, I figured I'd post a few more pics of the Maryland book tour and a few local events I've been doing. At the beginning of this entry is one of me and my good friend Todd Mitchell, author of The Traitor King (Read it! It's fantastic!) doing a reading at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver-- one of the biggest yet coziest independent bookstores I've had the pleasure of perusing. And here's another of that same reading, with my younger friend who is a brilliant, up-and-coming writer who I met while doing creative writing workshops at his school.

I had a great time one evening hanging out with several fun ladies in Greeley, who read Red Glass for their book club (see the pic of lovely women holding my book!) I've been to book club meetings for What the Moon Saw before, but this was the first one for Red Glass. It's such a treat for me to hear readers' responses to scenes that have existed in my mind for years... It's magical to hear how these scenes and characters touch people in surprising ways... how people connect with characters that have lived in my head with me for so long... and now they're let loose out in the big wide world bonding with perfect strangers!

I'll post a few more Maryland book tour pics, too. Here's one of me talking to my sixth grade reading teacher, Ms. Witt, who enthusiastically arranged my visit to my old stomping grounds, Dunloggin Middle School (see pic below). I had a fabulous time with the students there-- and I got to reconnect with a few old teachers -- and I finally got to see what goes on behind the closed door of the mysterious teachers' lounge (which I can't divulge due to the oath of secrecy I was forced to take...)

And above is another pic from the Maryland tour, from the Howard County Library creative writing workshop (see pic with brown brick wall background.)

Below is a pic of me and my good friend Maria. We did a presentation together as part of the library's Day of the Dead festivities on our book-in-progress (tentatively called The Queen of Water). For several years, we've been writing a book together, based on her girlhood and teenage years in the Ecuadorian Andes. At this point, we have a solid draft done, and are in the process of getting lots of great feedback from writers, and bilingual teachers and librarians. (Note that this is not the book with a deadline in May, so we have the luxury of more time to gather feedback.) Since Maria is headed back to Ecuador for a few months, we figured now would be a good time for a fun photo shoot. When people hear about or read her story, they're surprised at how young she is now. The events of her life are the kind of thing you'd expect would have taken place a couple centuries ago, when slavery was still officially in existence in the Americas. (Of course, her childhood fascination with Bugs Bunny and MacGyver gives away that no, this happened only 20 years ago.)

All right, that's all for now. I'm off to donate some old books to Matter Bookstore (which you should check out if you live in Fort Collins-- a great non-profit used bookstore and literary mag.)

I'll be in Arizona for a few days next week to accept the Arizona Young Adult Award-- which I'm super-excited about-- and then, probably a week or two later, we'll head down to Guatemala. I'll try to send an update in a few weeks from the midst of the whirlwind....

Colorado Book Award for WHAT THE MOON SAW...

So, last week my father-in-law and husband and I were in Denver for the Tattered Cover reading, and we passed the beautiful and enormous Denver Performing Arts Center-- a sparkly, oddly-angled silver-and-glass structure-- an ultra-modern fairy palace. I mentioned I'd never been in there before, but would welcome an excuse to go... then lo and behold, yesterday, as I was doing some last minute map-questing to figure out how to get to the Colorado Book Awards banquet, I discovered that it's held in that very building!

I was one of three finalists in the young adult category (the lovely Hilari Bel, author of the Farsala Trilogy, which I've just started reading-- it's wonderful so far, and T.A. Barron, who I've never met, but heard he's a great guy-- author of the Tree of Avalon books) were the others. The whole event was lots of fun-- Ian was there, of course, along with my writer friends Leslie Patterson (and her hubby Dave) and Teresa Funke and Karla Oceanak and Laura Pritchett came down from Fort Collins to celebrate. My friend Denise Vega, last year's winner, was there too, along with the fabulous women in her writing group.

The first winner announced-- in the picture book category-- was Kathleen Pelley, a delightful Scottish-born woman whose trilling, dancing voice you want to listen to forever... she wrote Inventor McGregor, which is a fantastic picture book for all ages-- a story about how the creative spirit blossoms best in cheery, higgledy-piggledy places. I'm going to reread her book whenever I need a snippet of a song or a whirl of a fling to get my creative juices flowing...

And next came the young adult category-- that's the category for What the Moon Saw. As the mc was announcing the winner, my heart was actually making an extremely loud boom-boom-boom sound, to the point where the booming was drowning out what she was saying, and when she said my name it sounded far away (seems like that kind of thing happens in books all the time, but once in a while it happens in real life, too...) So, I managed to make my feet move and walk to the stage without tripping, and meanwhile, Ian and the other folks at my table were cheering and whirling their napkins with abandon, which made me happy.

As the evening went on, I was extra-happy that my table-mates Ben Fogelberg and Steve Grinstead won in the non-fiction category for their book Walking Into Colorado's Past. Ian and I are already planning out which hikes we want to do this fall.

The whole evening made me very grateful to be in the community of Colorado writers-- they're a fun, generous, talented, friendly bunch of people. It was truly a huge honor being part of last night's festivities and surrounded by so much great energy and warmth.

Maryland Book Tour for RED GLASS

Just got back this morning from my mini-book-tour in my home state of Maryland. It was a fun ten days jam-packed with events and get-togethers with family and friends. The plane trip there was unbelievable horrendous-- a long string of mishaps including running into a bird (which required the plane to be checked before we could take off from the Pittsburg airport where we were forced to refuel after circling near Baltimore because of storms...) I could have traveled to Paris in the time it took to get to Baltimore. So, eventually, I got there.

The next day I headed down to St. Mary's, where I went to college-- a breath-takingly gorgeous campus on a peninsula in between the St Mary's River and the Chesapeake Bay. Here's a pic of Catherine Carter, another alumna, who wrote the lovely book of poems, Memory of Gills. To my right is my good old friend Peter, another alumnus and writer, and to the right of him is Michael Glaser, my creative writing teacher from way back when, and the Poet Laureate of Maryland... quite a fun crowd! Michael put me up in the alumni lodge, right on the water-- here's the view from just outside the back porch. The weather was deliciously perfect-- gentle sun, gentle breeze. After the workshop and reading, we went for a moonlit swim in the river-- something I loved to do when I went to college there.

Over the next week, I participated in a panel discussion at the Baltimore Book Festival with some great young adult authors-- Brad Barkley, Laura Bowers, and Melissa Marr. I went out to eat at a yummy Afgani restaurant afterward, with my favorite librarian ever, Ms. Selma Levi. She was my librarian (and heroine) when I was a kid in Baltimore City, and she's still a librarian (and oral storyteller-- a skill I want to learn), only she's downtown now and a big library star!

On Sunday, I did a reading at Borders and had the joy of seeing lots of friends and relatives who came from all over Maryland.


On Tuesday and Wednesday, I did school visits at my old stomping grounds, Dunloggin Middle School. Being in that school again didn't feel too weird-- it regularly appears in those anxiety dreams I STILL get where I forget my locker combo or I've forgotten to attend class for months and suddenly realize I have a giant test coming up... This was a purely delightful visit, though. I saw some old teachers-- Science and Industrial Arts and Reading-- and it seems they've hardly changed.

I did a workshop at the Howard County library on Tuesday night-- a small but super-creative crowd showed up and wrote some darn good stuff.

Thursday and Friday were my days to relax. I took a nice long walk around Centennial Park lake with my father-in-law... I worked there during a couple summers in high school, supposedly making myself available to save lives in the event of a man-overboard paddle boat situation, but mostly working on my tan, eating free crabcakes and peanut butter M-n-Ms from the concession stand next door, and reading lots of Milan Kundera.

On Saturday morning I went to the Americas Award Program (What the Moon Saw is an Honor book this year). The winning authors and illustrators gave fascinating talks-- the books are The Poet Slave of Cuba (told in verse-- powerful, beautiful language, deeply moving) and Josias, Hold the Book (a picture book set in Haiti-- great message about the value of books).

In the afternoon, I met another writer friend named Peter and felt decadent wandering around DC, having wine with lunch in the sculpture garden cafe, going to the Edward Hopper exhibition (I can't get over how the museums are all FREE!) I like his quote about wanting to paint sunlight on the side of a house. And that's what he did-- painted sunshine. I like that idea of not setting out to paint the house, but the SUNSHINE on the house.

That evening, I ate a scrumptious salmon dinner with my in-laws and got up at the crack of dawn the next morning (today). Everything went unbelievably smoothly with the flight this time-- we even got to Denver EARLY! (And this after I brought along a big sandwich and entire carton of emergency granola because I was determined not to be stuck with only a measly snackbox to eat like the last flight. ) And now I'm home and my husband is telling me it's bedtime... and it is.

I'll post more pics over the next few days, as my friends send them to me...

G'night!

RED GLASS Release Party!

Hi! I had my book release party for RED GLASS last night. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for all the people who came out to celebrate with me!

A good friend of mine, Gloria, did some amazing dancing and singing. She was raised in Mexico City, and her husband and father and many relatives are from a Mixtec village in rural Oaxaca. She sang a song in Mixteco called Yucu Ninu-- about a sacred mountain-- a hauntingly beautiful melody. Then she sang Paloma Negra, an old Mexican tune full of longing and passion. Then she did a lively, wild traditional Oaxacan dance, swirling her huge skirt all over the place. Her performances gave me goosebumps, they were so stunning.

Three of my brilliant writing group members-- Carrie and Sarah and Lauren-- pitched in to help with the food serving, along with Ian and his sister Stef and brother-in-law Brantley. It was a thrilling experience to have all my favorite people together in one place-- kid friends, grown-up (in theory) friends, students, neighbors, teachers, artists, writers, musicians, the odd computer scientist here and there...

On the big screen there was an ongoing loop of photos of my friends in Mexico who inspired characters in the book and who helped me with different stages of the writing process-- people I wish could have been here to celebrate with us.

I did the reading and managed not to trip over any cords or drop any papers or lose my place in the book... and people laughed at my jokes and asked questions afterward and everything-- what more could I ask for?