Slice of Life and CO Author's League Pics...

Hello friends,

Well, it's dusk and my man is putting Baby to bed. I'm here in my trailer, and by this time of day, my brain is too tired to do any more on this revision of my book (which is due to my editor on Monday.) I work best in the mornings, half-decently in the afternoons, and by nightfall I'm hopeless.

One nice thing about spring is that I can have fresh flowers next to me as I write. There's an iris by my side now, and I periodically smell it. And there are a whole slew of irises outside this window, in three distinct shades of purple: indigo, violet, and standard iris color.

In case you were wondering if I was affected by the recent tornadoes in Northern Colorado, I wasn't, except that my irises got a bit battered by hail from that storm.

So, maybe you're wondering how I structure my days. (If so, read on. If not, skim a few paragraphs...) I wake up around 6:45 to Baby's sounds in the next room. My hubbie brings him to me and he hangs out with me drinking milk for a while. (He can say milk in sign language-- it's basically the gesture of milking a cow, which is a little weird.)

Then he plays with my alarm clock for a while, which endlessly fascinates him. Then he gets antsy and whiny and does sign language for please, which is rubbing his chest, which means, please let's get the heck out of bed and start running around. Which is what we do next. Then I have tea and honey and milk and then change his diaper. His latest cute thing is "jumping" which is him squatting down like he's going to do a gigantic jump, and then, anticlimactically, not leaving the ground. But he thinks he's jumping, and he claps and laughs and so do I.

The jumping thing reminds me of dreams in which I'm flying, or trying to fly. I have these dreams fairly frequently-- I know I'm dreaming and decide to fly, but it takes a few moments before I remember how to leave the ground. It's like jumping, but just continuing to go up and up. Whenever Baby jumps and doesn't quite manage to leave the ground, I think of these dreams.

The reason I'm justifying writing about it here in my writing blog is that for me, writing is like flying. I'm lifting off from this world and entering a different one. It takes a lot of focus, but at the same time, it takes letting loose and being free, which in some ways seem contradictory. That's what's challenging about creating stories-- the simultaneous extreme concentration and extreme letting go. Meditation or flying are the best comparisons I have for it.

When I was twelve, I kept a dream journal. It was a blue spiral notebook and I probably still have it somewhere. I still write down the Big Dreams in my journals now-- the ones that feel extra important. A lot of the imagery in my books comes from my dreams-- both Helena's and Clara's spirit animals in What the Moon Saw were inspired by powerful dreams I had. Sophie's looking for underwater treasures in Red Glass is another re-occuring dream.

In college, I read lots of Carl Jung on my own... I haven't read his stuff lately, but I think I've internalized it and it's part of me now. I think that we all have our personal mythology, with our own symbols and myths and characters and journeys. I think that as a writer, it's important to honor whatever your mythology is and let it come out in our writing. That's what will give it real depth and resonance.

Baby is sleeping and my husband is talking to his mom on the phone in the backyard, and it's nearly dark. I love summer. I can't wait for it to start. Did you know I'll be in southern France this summer? I will! In Aix-en-Provence, where I lived for a year as a 20 year old. It was a magical place for me, full of mysteries that I will tell you about sometime, maybe. I have an 18th century apartment rented for a month on one of the narrow streets in the labyrinth downtown. I've been busy planning the trip in between polishing my current manuscript (which STILL has no definite name, though I'm coming close, I think...)

Okay, I'm going to make some chicken for dinner. Thanks for reading. These pics are of the Colorado Authors' League Award Banquet. (Red Glass won in the Middle Grade/Young Adult category!) In one pic I'm with my friend Gloria, who is a beautiful and talented Mexican writer, artist, dancer, and singer. In another, I'm with Liz, winning author of Curveball: When Life Throws You a Brain Tumor, who I met at our table over dinner. She's lovely and fascinating and smart! In another pic, I'm receiving my award from, yes, a bunny. This award was freshly named the Harvey Award, which has something to do with six foot tall bunnies...

You know, I realized I got side-tracked and never told you about the rest of my day. So. Baby's babysitter comes at 8:00 and I have time to change out of my PJs and throw on some clothes and grab some yogurt and come out here to my trailer. I either check email or jump right into writing. Ideally, I write a bit in my journal first, but that doesn't always happen.

I write and drink tea and write and drink more tea and have some yogurt and drink more tea. If I'm very very very tired I might rest my eyes a little on the futon in the back of my trailer. (It's no longer a secret... Sarah in my writing group let it slip at a reading we did...)

So then around noon the babysitter takes off, and if the weather's nice, Baby and I wander around Old Town for a few hours-- he plays on large bear and fish sculptures, runs up and down a ramp, hurls himself into puddles, sips milk and watches big trucks go by in front of Ardour Cafe, waves hello and goodbye to countless strangers.

In the evening I pop in a DVD of Six Feet Under or LOST or something similar and we play and I watch TV (a little guiltily, covering his ears at the cursing, and covering his eyes whenever anyone gets shot or has sex.) Then my hubbie comes home and feeds him and then we eat and talk and read and relax and listen to NPR, and perhaps, if I'm not feeling too lazy, I write in this blog...

G'night!

IRA Conference!

Hello all!

I just got back from the IRA (International Reading Association) conference in Atlanta, where I accepted the IRA Young Adult Fiction Award! At the awards luncheon, I sat at a table with some wonderful ladies (we’re almost all females at these events…) -- librarians, teachers, and professors of children's and YA literature. The keynote speaker was Suzanne Fisher Staples, who wrote Shabanu-- she was a fabulous speaker-- she gave a slide show about her travels in the Middle East, which inspired her books. The end of her speech gave me shivers, it was so powerful.

Let's see, highlights of the trip:

I got to meet my editor, Stephanie Lane, in person for the first time. She's an angel-- beautiful, brilliant, kind... now that I know her, I feel even more grateful and lucky that she's my editor. And the rest of the Random House women there were super-nice. It made me realize how many people at RH are passionately involved in my books behind the scenes.

I ate lots of tasty food at fancy places with great people-- authors, librarians, teachers... it was the ultimate wining-and-dining experience.

My room was on the 64th floor of one of the tallest buildings in sight! My ears popped going up and down the elevator. And even at top speeds, it took a good minute or so to get to my floor, enough time for me to take some pics (to prove to you that indeed, this hotel had over 70 floors...)

Those of you who've read RED GLASS might remember that Sophie has an elevator phobia... and I must admit that the fear-of-elevators thing is one of the more autobiographical parts of the book. I almost always take the stairs, even when there are ten floors. But 64 floors...well, I decided the stairs were not an option if I didn't want to arrive sweaty and completely out of breath to every event.

It actually wasn't too scary. Like Sophie in RED GLASS, I vividly ran through all the disasters that could occur and how hard it would be to save myself on the 64th floor... but the sheer novelty of being so incredibly high up outweighed the fear.

The pics are:

dizzying views from my hotel room window (the tall cylindrical building is the actual hotel-- some windows are busted from the gigantic storm earlier this spring.)

Stephanie (black dress) and me,

Adrienne (black suit) (RH Library/Educational Marketing) and me

Me and the ladies from my luncheon table, including Lisa, another lovely RH woman (publicity)

The elevator buttons

In other news, my spectacular agent, Erin Murphy, did an interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith.
It's definitely worth checking out-- not only is she an interesting, smart person, but you'll also learn a bit about what she does as an agent and how she got where she is. (Plus, she says some nice things about Red Glass! ;)

Sleeptime for me now... g'night!

Springtime, finally!

Hi all! I'm in my trailer with the windows and door open and the sunshine pouring in-- feels great.

I've been busy with events and school visits and conferences lately. I had a great time at my school visit to Heritage Middle School in Longmont a couple weeks ago.

Here are some pics of projects that the students did, inspired by WHAT THE MOON SAW. (Click on the pics to enlarge). The projects incorporated material from different subjects-- reading, writing, geography/environment, culture, art... I was very impressed!

I did workshops and a presentation and had a yummy burrito lunch with some teachers and students who had written winning essays. Most of the kids at Heritage speak Spanish, which made the visit extra-fun.

Last week I had another school visit-- this one to Cherry Creek High School. I wish I'd gone to a high school with a campus like that one. It felt more like a college campus, and the library (where I did my presentations) had one wall of windows-- pretty spectacular! The librarians and students were very cool. I'd been a little scared (not sure of what, exactly...), since I mostly do school visits with younger kids... but everyone seemed to have a good time and was very nice to me.

At the moment, I'm doing more rounds of revision on my next novel (which has yet to be named-- my writing group is a hard bunch to please-- but it will come out around Fall 2009). I'm also trying to arrange my France trip (where my next novel will hopefully be set)-- I'm pretty unpleasantly surprised at the cost of tix-- three times what I was expecting! Ack!

Baby's doing great-- toddling all over the place, saying "nana" (which means grandma and fruit), doing sign language (and inventing his own... hitting his head means "Take me outside!" and "Vvvvvvv" with a twirling hand motion means "Turn on the fan! Or else!"

Okay, that's all for now. Thanks for reading!

Laura

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....