I overnighted the workshop piece, the short story “erosion,” last Thursday morning with the promise of a 3 PM delivery on Friday. That’s what I paid for. So why didn’t it get one state over until Tuesday? Five frickin’ days for overnight delivery? I could have walked there in less time!

But the manuscript doesn’t look right. According to the lovely ladies in the program office it doesn’t look like it’s double-spaced. There are 26 lines per page instead of the average 22 that most manuscripts come in at. It either needs to be edited or submitted to workshop missing its ending.

Crap.

Can I blame Microsoft for a moment? Their 12 point fonts actually vary quite a bit from one another. Some seem to be measured across while others are measured vertically. And can I get technical? Their rendering of some fonts includes some extra play with the x-height and leading that wouldn’t pass muster in a type foundry. As a consequence not all double-spaced lines are created equal among fonts.

It shouldn’t matter to me, I dumped Microsoft long before I got the Mac. I’m a fan of open source and find my quality of life is quite high without being slave to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Except that the rest of the professional world can’t seem to handle non-conformity. My 20 manuscript pages of NeoOffice, when opened as a Word doc, suddenly balloons to 22 pages. Actually, once I corrected the margins for the conversion I ended up with nearly 25 pages. (If I’d gone Courier instead of Times Roman it would have come in at 28 pages!)

That’s nearly five pages out of the manuscript I had to cut.  That’s after the previous edits my advisor suggested.

This is beyond tweaking. I know it’s not a perfect manuscript, and once it goes through the workshop it might get completely overhauled, but what I originally sent had already been whittled down. I wasn’t condensing sentences, I was completely eliminating story details, bits that added humor or background. I fully expect some of these areas to show up as “I think you could insert something here” comments in July.

As I said when I submitted it last, running that razor’s edge between cutting and gutting.

So I downed the sweet tea, powered up, and went ruthless. I had to find those extra bits, average one sentence a page, hack out anything that didn’t speak directly to the story. Bit by bit, nearly 1000 words vanished into the electronic ether. In fighting trim, loose around the margins, it’s still 20 pages on my end but with enough wiggle room to conform to the damn Microsoft Word box comfortably.

I hope. So far I haven’t heard that it’s still too long.

It looks like this is going to be my workshop piece for the next semester. I thought the first draft as about five pages too long — about 2500 words — and my advisor thought it could drop down another 500 more. I don’t think in word count when I write, I usually don’t even check unless there’s a reason, but it did feel long-ish.

Because I threw in the kitchen sink. It’s a pretty broad piece of YA humor and I was interested to see what stuck. First major cuts included: the marijuana farm, the environmentalist conspiracy, wife cloning, the history of California wildfires, and the odd little one-liners that interrupted the tone.

The thing is still too long for workshopping. I need to play with margins a bit because the workshop pieces have a page maximum. It’s only a page and a half, so that’s a fraction of an inch all around. No sweat, I’ll make the page count.

Except…

I need to work on the motivation of the two main characters. That means adding words. Which means I’m going to have to go in and tighten paragraphs, shaving sentences her and there, maybe even a bit of over-cutting just to make the page count. I hate to work that way — things should be as long as they need to be — but perhaps I’ll feel differently once it’s sculpted into fighting trim.

I’ve got two days. That’s plenty of time. I like it the way it is, and it can’t really get any worse.

When is it safe to start thinking about shopping a story around? I only ask because I’m worried that once I get into the workshop it might feel like it’s impossibly bad. I’m looking to inoculate myself in advance by thinking positive.

If I hadn’t been stumped over an essay topic this past week I might not have made a similarly obvious discovery of my own.  I was thinking about some of the titles I’ve been reading lately, and their authors, while examining the use of voice.  It was a very simple conversation I was having with myself — first person, third person, narrative, and dialog — and then I made a list and started matching up titles, authors and voices.  Any time you start making lists you start to see things, patterns and trends.  What did this list say about my choice of reading this month?  What does it say about the characters I’m drawn to?

What does it say about popular versus literary?  Yeah, suddenly that’s staring me in the face.  Like I’m in third grade thinking I’m the first to ponder this brilliant thought.

I’m being a bit vague, but for a reason.  First, I haven’t really given this theory of mine a true stink test yet — it’s only a theory based on a random sampling of things that have interested me that I’ve read.  Second is a little more tricky.

See, I know this writer — well, “know” is relative, but just roll with it.  They’re a very respected writer, many books published, often cited to me by others who consider this person a sort of paragon of style and substance. (No, it’s not my advisor’s books either.)  I read their books and can see why they are recommended; every lesson in writing is clearly, plainly, perfectly laid out.  The story jumps from the first line, the dialog sparks, narrative flows and characters feel. It’s everything I’m supposed to aspire to as a writer.

It’s a book no kid would read without being forced, by a librarian or teacher, someone who would have to sell them on it.  It’s a book no kid would “discover” on his or her own, no word-of-mouth for this book exists.  Not only is this writer’s name never on the lips of any kid looking for a book, if I were to mention their name they would look at me as if I’d started speaking in Esperanto to them.

Daily you can see the giant holes on the shelves in bookstores and libraries where the popular books are normally kept.  These are the books that make the rounds, that are read and become part of the shared culture for generations of readers.  They are the series with characters, or the authors who know how to deliver what kids want.  No one would ever confuse these books for literature, yet somehow these books are considered lesser than those held up to aspiring writers as paragons of literary virtue.

Why is that?

I’ve got this book in my hand and all I can think while I’m reading it is “This is so well written, it’s no wonder it’s used as an example for writing students.”  At the same time, whenever I take a break to consider the craft of the book I think “Who the hell is this book written for?”  There should be no doubt who the intended audience is, but the fact that I ask sends up the tiny hairs on the back of my neck.  I can see the structure, the armature, the finer points of craft, but has the machinery made the book too sterile for a young reader?  Should this magnificent arrangement of character development, motivation, and feelings trump the enjoyment of reading?

I’ve always thought that my ideal audience, the person I’m writing for, is me.  Not the adult me but the me that would be the same age as the main character of my stories.  It isn’t purely a question of my younger self wanting all action and no emotion, but this sense that… all I can think of right now is a cooking analogy.  I would rather be a baker of cakes people loved to eat than a decorator of cakes that looked good, tasted too “clean,” and were prohibitively expensive.

This is it, isn’t it?  This is where the road diverges in the yellow wood. Or, as a more contemporary wordsmith once said, I’m standing in the middle of life with my pants behind me.

Yeah, it’s called biting off more than I can chew, or at least chew comfortably, but I’m not ready to cry uncle. Not yet at least.

The thing is there’s still seventeen days to deadline. That’s a lot of time. The thing is there’s only seventeen days to deadline and that’s not a lot of time. I lose five of those days to work, another couple taking a short vaca with the fam, so it’s really more like ten days.

TEN DAYS!

See, I should never look at a calendar. If I could just have this magical system that told me what I needed to do each day — without knowing the deadline — then I could just work on the daily goal without the deadline stress. Despite how much work I give myself, it’s all manageable as long as I don’t know what I’m up against.

All my classmates, and you wonderful occasional commenters, have been kind in their faith. Gwenda’s point a while back about learning what my process is turning out to ring more true that I imagined; I am learning which things I do that work and which don’t, and methods to keep myself focused. And my Suze wasn’t off the mark recently in pointing out how the residency probably serves as the vacation time we otherwise don’t get with our at-home, deadline-driven lives. I remember how charged up I felt after the last rez, I can totally see how that’s going to feel even better this time around. Like how good diner food tastes after you’ve spent a couple weeks living off granola and ramen in the mountains.

The diary entries, you would think that would be a snap. Ha! It isn’t like plunking down your thoughts in a blog, oh no, you have to crawl inside the character’s head and say “Look over there, at that playground — how does that make you feel?” Like going back in time and hunting down your younger self on the playground and poking that younger self with a stick saying “Why was this tether ball thing so important to you this week?” And the next thing you know the question “Why doesn’t the character have any sibling?” turns into an awkward moment between child and parent where the discussion of miscarriages gets brought up, only explained through the vocabulary of an 11 year old boy.

It’s as emotionally draining as if I were putting myself through therapy. Wait…

The picture book biography is another beast altogether. I’ve known this story for going on two decades now but I never conceived it as a book for kids. Why not? They’re the ones who would appreciate it better. That’s not the problem, the problem is that in telling the story I realized I had only worked from two sources, both mostly matched up but it would take a third to confirm various differences. Then there was the background details I wanted to nail. And in the twenty years since I first stumbled onto this story more and more resources have become available. Movies lost in archives spread all over the world are now available to watch on YouTube at all hours. The casual mention of a bit player in the story prompts another half hour of internet searching. There are easily five pages of documentation and bibliographic notes for every paragraph I’m going to end up with in the final draft. I feel beholden to get the story right the first time (a) to avoid the same pitfalls I’ve seen in other non-fiction for children concerning sloppy research and (b) so that mine enters the world as the definitive version, at least for a generation. You shoot for the moon and hope for a cloud.

I haven’t even got a clue about the essay yet, mostly because I’m not happy with the books so far. Usually having bad books, or at least deficient one, spurs the creative juices. But the reality is that I’m looking for clues and answers to my own problem in finding a character voice and I’m not getting any traction in the places where I should. I’m tired of every book I pick up needing to be read so closely that I can’t enjoy it on its own. I don’t want to have to pick apart the meat and bones in order to reconstruct the skeleton and show how adept I am at literary taxidermy. Yes, yes, I understand how this helps in my own work, but right now everything is working against each other — voice and essay are not in line with biography and research, neither of which is helping with feeling and motivation. In theory all this should be providing clarity but in reality it’s all siting like an oil slick on the top of a pond preventing the water hydra from getting any sunlight.

I just know a year from now I’m gonna stumble back onto this post and want to throttle my whiny self. Maybe I’ll be adept enough to have my 11 year old character visit me and we can swap places, maybe he can write my diary entries for me while I sit t/here trying to understand how to insert tab A into slot B.

I promised myself I wouldn’t spend more that 15 minutes complaining. Back to work.

The problem wasn’t a question of self-esteem, it was that the people I was being compared to and the things they produced didn’t resonate with what I wanted to do.  I had always felt that I wanted to do something with film, in motion pictures, something that had to do with sequential storytelling in a visual media, but by the time I trucked off to college I still didn’t have my definitive role model.  I held onto the “dream” and went along for the ride through college, coming out the other end only slightly less clueless.

It’s taken me nearly 30 years to figure it out, but today while reading a newspaper article about the band R.E.M. I realized why I’m not a filmmaker.

It’s because I wanted to be in a band.

I didn’t want to be in a rock band, or a blues band, or any kind of musical organization.  I wanted to be in a film band.  I wanted to join up with a bunch of like-minded people and pool our collective talents into filmmaking.  Like music, film is a collective medium, with individuals specializing and participating for the whole.  The problem is that filmmaking is generally consumed by people full of authorial ego and is collaborative in the most mercenary of ways.  You don’t see the bassists union making pay and lifestyle demands while the drummer’s union stipulates the length of a workday.  You don’t see lead singers with their agents holding off until contracts arrive stipulating their name above the title of the album.

Sure, there are film production companies that are formed by people who have gained enough clout to make the films they want.  But that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about a small crew of people who get together and jam out some ideas until a cohesive image comes together.  Not some cheesy collective, like some holdover from the hippie days, but a group artistic endeavor that expresses themselves visually the way musicians do aurally.

Oh, Hollywood tries to market their movies this way with “From the producer of” and “From the director of,” and historically you have director/star match-ups like Burton-Depp and Scorsese-DeNiro but these are hardly what I’m talking about.

Imagine you’re off to see a new film by The Seven Samurai, or Die Wenders Staat, or perhaps a little something from Un Petit Chat.  As with bands, over time would would come to know their strengths, could fairly compare them with their previous works, and have a better sense of the quality of the work going in.

Perhaps then, with bands as brands, we could address the ticket price issue.  A local band playing a local gig isn’t going to command the same door fee as a big ticket band commanding seven nights at the local arena.  A paperback doesn’t fetch the same prices as a hardcover.  So why does the low budget indie film get stuck helping foot the bill at the box office as a big budget box office failure?

But I digress.  The sad fact is that it’s taken me 30 years to see now what I wish I could have seen then.  Bands are for the young.  No forty-something dude is going to pick up a guitar and pull together his poker buddies and start making waves as The Midlife Crises.  Sure, you can age into the scene but you can’t capture the market, you can’t reach the hearts and minds of viewers and listeners open to your ideas.  Couch surfing and living in a van just isn’t conducive to folks in need of daily fiber and condroitin supplements.

In the off chance there’s a band of filmmakers out there looking for an elder member with a sense of history and humor; I’m totally into the French and German New Wave (Godard, Wenders, Herzog), early 80′s indie films (Cox, Syales), classic screwball comedies (Sturges is king), and any film that isn’t afraid to go longer than 45 seconds before cutting.

What am I talking about?  The Children’s Book Shop’s 30th Anniversary bash a little over a week and a half back, as reported here on Alison Morris’s PW blog ShelfTalker.  Seventh picture down, the guy in the black sweater waiting to get his copy of The Wall signed by Peter Sis.  Yup, that’s me between Terri and  Karen.

Plenty of shots follow, featuring my place of employment when I’m not at home bleeding my way through a major overhaul of my middle-grade-novel-in-progress.

Does this have anything to do with being a judge on the graphics novel panel for the Cybils this year? Yes and no. I think the parallel is there when it comes to trying to narrow down the selection of possibilities — graphic novels in this case — but as for working off a shortlist I think the analogy breaks down when you consider it was five people trying to agree on a choice. So then I guess it’s like being at a restaurant with a bunch of people trying to decide on which dessert they’re going to split. It might not be your favorite dessert, but why are you complaining? You get to eat dessert!

I’m going to break this down by category, and I’m only going to be discussing my personal thoughts in the matter. I will not name names (you can go to the Cybils site for that), I’m not going to comment directly about anyone’s choices, and I’m not going to reveal the secret handshake of the gn panel. There will be a peak into the process but only to illustrate my involvement. If you’re looking for dirt, sorry.

Middle Grade & Elementary — The Shortlist
Robot Dreams written and illustrated by Sara Varon
The Courageous Princess written and illustrated by Rod Espinosa
Yotsuba&! #4 written and illustrated by Kiyohiko Azuma
Artemis Fowl written by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin; illustrated by Giovanni Rigano and Paolo Lamanna
Babymouse #6: Camp Babymouse written and illustrated by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm

The Winner
Artemis Fowl

What was I thinking?
Looking at the list my first thought was that the category seemed awfully broad, which also made it seem unfair. You would have different expectations for a second grade early readers and a middle grade fiction meant for sixth graders, but in this category you’ve got a cute widdle baby mouse up against a heartless pre-pubescent evil genius. Still, there are those books where the quality would trump the reading level, so looking for the best qualities should yield the correct winner no matter what.

Here’s my first problem: the book I feel belongs here, and would want to win, isn’t here. It’s shortlisted, but in the teen/YA category. Its The Arrival. There was a bit of back-and-forth about this from my fellow judges once I brought up that while I felt it could be appreciated by an older audience I found it more appropriate for the middle grade set. The issues it covers — immigration, stranger-in-a-strange-land, government oppression — these are heavy topics but not outside the scope of the tween audience. Not everything in the book would be readily accessible, but I found its picture book formatting and its limited narrative more in keeping with a middle grade book: indeed, if you were to write the story’s narrative as it’s presented you would find it necessary to explain much of what it only hinted at between the panels.

While this does not make it bad, it makes it bad for a teen reader who is going to blow through the illustrations, glean the basic story, back-fill the missing parts with what they’ve already learned in elementary social studies, and not fully appreciate it at all. This is one of those books (like the picture books of Adam Rex, btw) which I almost feel are more for adults than kids. My total opinion, of course, and it doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t nominated for this category. So why am I even talking about it again? Oh yeah, that’s right. It would have been my first choice.

My pick was Robot Dreams. I believe I was the only one who wanted this as the winner. Another wordless tale like The Arrival, I felt there was actually a really good character arc and one that was totally age appropriate. There’s friendship and embarrassment and loneliness and abandonment and a whole lot of really great issues that middle grade readers would totally get and not feel preached to. I found its extended storyline to be the most complete and contained and the resolution satisfying without being predictable. Yea, Robot Dreams!

Last on my list? Artemis Fowl, an unimaginative comic book adaptation that, at times, bored me silly with its pacing and often slipped into the thing I hate the most about superhero comics — narratives over action panels explaining what a character is thinking or doing. It’s like voice-overs in movies, there’s good voice-over and there’s bad voice-over and then there’s voice-over that ruins everything else. This one is somewhere between bad and worse. In general I find adaptations troubling — whether book to movie, movie to book, book to graphic novel, comic to movie — because there’s always that problem of the two not syncing up. You can say ‘try not to think about the elephant in the room’ but you’ll find yourself thinking about the elephant in the room: in this case, the elephant is the original book, which I also didn’t think that much of.

But I was determined to take the comic graphic novel on its own and it still lost me. It took me a while to figure it out but it comes down to the character of Artemis himself. Here, with his big head (Manga inspired?) and his emotionless face he reminded me of nothing less than a pre-teen Ernst Stavro Blofeld. That’s right, the bald baddy from Bond movies. In those films Blofeld serves as the foil against which Bond reacts. Blofeld has no backstory, none that’s relevant at least, he merely wants to blow up the world, steal the gold, kill Bond, whatever the plot needs to keep Bond moving forward. He’s a 2-dimensional cutout and that’s all we need because he isn’t the star of the film. And that’s the problem, I don’t buy Artemis Fowl as anything more that a 2-d character and I don’t find the story compelling as a result. I don’t care if the faeries get him or kill him, I don’t care about his missing father or his demented mother, I don’t care… and that’s the point where you lose me.

But I was outvoted. C’est la Guerre.

Teen/YA — The Shortlist
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Flight #4 edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Laika written and illustrated by Nick Abadzis
The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert
The Plain Janes by written by Cecil Castellucci; illustrated by Jim Rugg

The Winner
The Professor’s Daughter

What was I thinking?
I work the other direction on this one, what I was thinking was yes! Actually, I had two first picks and would have been happy with either winning, The Professor’s Daughter and The Plain Janes. As different as they are to one another I felt they both had merit and would give them both the award if I could. When the majority went for The Professor’s Daughter I was happy to let it go at that.

Push-to-shove, The Plain Janes does have some clunky transitions at times, and I think it traffics in some visual stereotypes that could have (and should have) been avoided. The frumpy drama girl? Really? Please. The cop from casting central? I hear your donut calling. I’m also a little unsure of the transition from big city to small town but I forgive it these problems because it deals in teens dealing with teen problems in a graphic novel. I understand there’s a second Plain Janes book due out soon and I’m looking forward to it.

There are some I have spoken to outside the gn panel who didn’t “get” The Professor’s Daughter. I think I can pinpoint the problem in a single word: European. There are many who do not get certain picture books for the same reason, that there is a very different sensibility for the picture book in Europe, just as there is in graphic novels and sequential storytelling. Compare Tintin with any of his American contemporaries from the 1950s, say Will Eisner’s The Spirit. That’s the difference, and The Professor’s Daughter gets its strange rhythms from that tradition. And I liked that it as coming from a different place, a place almost more in keeping with a horror movie from the 1930s, one with a sense of humor and a strange sense of the fantastic. One thing I will say, I was never really sure where the story was headed… and I mean that in a good way!

So why, if I felt so strongly about The Arrival, didn’t I give it either my top two spots on this list? Simply, it canceled itself out. I didn’t feel it belonged in this category and couldn’t vote for it as a teen/YA winner. There was some brief discussion as to whether we, as judges, could move books between categories as we saw fit (I believe there was a question about the age appropriateness of Robot Dreams belonging in this category) but in the end even if I had voted The Arrival for teen/YA it didn’t have enough support for a win.

I need to make a side note here about Flight. This collection of stories by various artists is the graphic novel equivalent of a short story collection. As with most collections of this kind some stories are going to hit, some will flop, and a room full of people aren’t going to decide on which are better than others. Something I had pointed out to me recently, something I knew but never thought about long enough to articulate, was that generally the only collections that work are single-author collections. Where the stories may vary the connecting thread of a single author’s world view is always present somewhere, if only in the punctuation.

Another problem I had with Flight is that much of what it contained, while suitable for teens, would really only be appreciated by a true young adult, a person in their 20s questioning and considering and exploring their place in the world. The pieces in Flight are more mature and they benefit from a reader with a variety of experience. This is the second year in a row that one of the Flight volumes has been nominated and, like as much as I did, I just can’t see it ever winning.

So that’s that.  I hope I don’t need to remind anyone who has gotten this far that these are my opinions and, well, you can take them for what they’re worth.  I enjoyed my duties as a judge and hope I get the opportunity to participate in the Cybils in the future.

Y’all can start in with the brickbats now.

Overall I feel pretty good about this packet because I think I paced myself well.  That’s about the only concrete thing I can focus on right now because I don’t have enough of a sense of my own writing to know whether or not to be freaking out about that.  Not rationally at least.

I sound a little babbley.

Things should get a little less navel-gazey here at fomagrams in the next couple of weeks while things shift back to whatever I call normal.  In the meantime tomorrow the Cybils will be announced and then we’ll open the floor to questions concerning the graphic novel category, where the judging was interesting to say the least.  I’m okay with one of the final choices and not so much so with the other.  I’m going to have to think hard about what I want to say or even what I think I should say.  Whatever I decide to share, and it’s going to be personal as opposed to an expose, it’ll be on Friday so that the Cybils can bask in their own glory.

I really just want to listen to a lot of music and chill right now.  Preferably in Amsterdam.  Drinking one of those hot-chocolate-on-a-sticks at a cafe along a canal. Really, the best.

insecure storyteller
meandering artist
seeking audience

It should probably be noted that the six-word memoir isn’t necessarily a poetry assignment, but the need for economy tends to bend it that way. Ask me to do this again tomorrow and I’d probably come up with some other assessment or neuroses. Or something totally off-the-wall, like what I came up with for a similar assignment in a workshop 20 years ago:

then: swimming pool builder
now: boring

What you have to understand about that little bit of nonsense was (a) I was obviously more insecure then and (b) the assignment was to note what you thought you wanted to be when you grew up and contrast it with what you became. I can be hard on myself at times.

Right. On with the baby steps.

So I’m taking this break because I’ve — once again — finished the first section of my creative work for the month. It’s “once again” because I realized a few days ago that it needed a new first chapter. And I don’t mean I needed to rewrite the first chapter, I mean I had to add a totally new chapter.

Why?

Because I was four chapters in and you didn’t really know what the story was about, what the main character wanted. I knew I needed a better opening line and something a little more evocative. Then I realized I didn’t exactly have the main character articulate what he wanted. Now, I hate the whole message-in-a-bottle approach — that your character states flatly their concern or what they want or need — because I feel it’s a large part of talikng down to the reader, especially to kids. In my contrary moments, I actually prefer to see adults puzzled by where my stories are headed because if they don’t know then they’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Or so I hope.

Even so I realized that it’s a cheat to not at least hint at the central issue up front so I had to come up with something. So here’s a bit of the way my mind works.

The story is about two kids who are both new to the same school and become each other’s best friends. One has never really had a best friend before and the other has never stayed in one place long enough to have a best friend. So it’s a middle grade boy bonding story. The active story over which all this is played out is that the boys become popular through a mini publishing empire they start. Soon, though, there are a pair of girls who are grabbing their thunder and driving the boys crazy with a secret notebook they keep…

I’m going to stop there because I’m a little superstitious about these things. All of that just to set it up before I show you how the beginning has changed. As of this morning this is where the story started:

“Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you to school?”
My mom’s words were still echoing in my ears as I stood in the main office waiting for the principal, Miss Danika, to come and escort me to class. I didn’t want to be the only fifth grader showing up on my first day at a new school with his mother but it would have been a lot less embarrassing than walking to class holding the principal’s hand.

Okay, not too bad. I could live with that. But then I couldn’t. I needed to get the idea of friendship and abandonment and find some symbolic way to address it with a fifth grade boy. This is the beginning of the new first chapter:

There was an alien on my windowsill, dying. Propped up with toothpicks at the top of the peanut butter jar, it sat there with its fuzzy bloated tentacles hanging down inside the water and that one withered strand of hair drooping off to one side. The glow from our neighbors porch light made the murky water look a scuzzy pond brown. I wondered if the little particles floating around were parts of roots that broke off or some sort of living bacteria. I don’t know what made me think I could grow an avocado seed in the first place.
“Stupid plant,” I said, just in case it was still alive and could hear me.

Oh, yeah! Now my story sounds schizo! Trust me, that avocado pit comes around a couple of times, dragging the idea of withered friendships along with it.

Now be kind, everyone, this is a rough first draft and I haven’t even sat down to do any edits yet. It’s what a friend of mine (and probably others) used to call a vomit draft because I’m just throwing it up, hurling it, tossing it out there, and whatever other euphemistic term term you prefer that sticks. There is no way of knowing how much of either of these paragraphs will survive the various revisions. That’s part of the process. This is part of the documentation of the process. It’s all good.

Until I realize it isn’t all that good at all. We’ll see.

But the thing I’m looking for is that little highlight that isn’t there anymore. In my folder of blogs I call “personal” there’s one that no longer shows any new feeds.

Because my Suze stopped blogging a week ago. And I miss it.

What the hell? It isn’t like I need to read her blog to know what’s going on in the house. Half the time she was blogging while we were in the same room. Rarely (though it did happen) I would learn something about her day or her job or something about the girls that I didn’t previously know before the blog, more often I would see a shared moment for a unique perspective that wouldn’t have otherwise showed up in casual conversation. No examples, just every once in a while I’d see something and go ‘huh’ and gain a different perspective.

She came to the decision because she was burning out on it, she doesn’t have it in her anymore. I can dig it. It’s easy to start and conceive a blog as a place where you’re just going to jot things down to make sense of things and to commnicate something personal with the world at the same time, but when it starts to nag at you, when it feels like a chore or an obligation (as one of my previous blogs began to feel like for me) and your heart isn’t into it, well, time to put it down. She’s gone back to reading more, and the transition between school and work has finally settled out. Suze had her audience and things to say and now she’d rather not chronicle her days but find time to enjoy them. Or decompress. Or just enjoy a book and some wine. So be it.

But I still miss my favorite blogger.

What’s funny is that while we were first dating I used to keep a journal, and actual fill-in-the-pages-with-my-own-handwriting book. I made that book, repurposed an old 1960′s beginning reader (I learned me some bookbinding techniques when I was in college), and I really liked that book on so many levels. I liked it’s privacy (as opposed to a blog) and the tactile aspects of the pages (I bound many different kind of papers into it, as well as included bits and pieces of ephemera) and the fact that it felt more like an historical document than an exercise in bloggerrhea. One can add things to a physical journal — ticket stubs and photos and crazy bits of drawings made on napkins in a cafe — that on a blog have to be designed and uploaded and laid out in a way that makes them more self-conscious of their audience and less an act of personal expression.

Thinking about it now, I miss that sort of journal as well, but that journal ceased to be as important once Suze and I started dating. It was a sounding board, a place to speak and keep myself from going crazy, and once my life took on a different direction the book was no longer necessary.

On her last post Suze says she may yet return to her blog, that she might find she misses it and go back to dropping four posts a day about the girls, her job, how frustrating I can be. I keep thinking I might one day go back to my notebooks and my fountain pen and my crazy personal thoughts that wouldn’t make any sense on a public platform.

Or not. Life without regrets. Blogging without regrets, including the right not to blog.

Were I a younger man I would fret.  I would worry and have ulcers and generally be thinking of myself as a failure.  I would look at my pending deadline (February 13th) and be in a shear blinding panic.  And I would find all sorts of ways to push all my work off until the threat of deadline forced me to cough up some lukewarm product and I’d be resigned to it.

The difference is that I’ve learned to let things happen in their own time.  I learned this from not having a car and having to rely on public transit.  In my impatient days I would make it to the bus stop and furiously check my watch every twenty seconds wondering when the bus would come.  Once on the bus I would continuously check my watch to see if I would make it to work on time.  As I got to my stop I would try to calculate how much time I had to get to work (or how late I would be) and try to mentally prepare myself for it.

Then something funny happened.  I realized that the bus would come when it came and looking at my watch only created anxiety.  And once on the bus I couldn’t control it’s speed or the traffic and so I found it pointless to worry.  I would get to work when I did and I was resigned to the fact that once I left the confines and comfort of my house I was no longer in control of the universe.  I never had any control over the universe in my house, but I had the illusion that with proper preparation I could manage to get myself where I needed to be with a modicum of punctuality and a minimum of stress. I was rarely late, and when I was I wasn’t stressed — hey, the universe was in command that day.

These things, time and space, they become the illusions we agree to in order to give our lives form and function.  I’m not trying to be deep, I’m merely explaining how I came to stop wearing a watch most of the time, how I learned to accept the flow of the universe, and why I’m not panicking right now.

Okay, maybe a little, secretly, but it’s against my better judgment.  I know that if I don’t freak out and let things come in their own time then they’ll come without the anxiety.  In the end the amount of time I expend might not be any different than if I panicked myself into last-minute work but without the stress I’m more likely to get closer to what I want.

Before I left the rez I gave myself until tomorrow, Monday, to allow myself a comfort zone for reentry. I was going to get things organized, plan things out, make schedules, and generally rest up so I could attack this new phase of work fresh and strong. Earlier today I was feeling like maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, especially once I started seeing my fellow newbies already posting comments on the message board about the books they’ve finished and the pages they started. I was falling into that dangerous trap of thinking I had already fallen behind and was a useless loser.

There was also a comment from one of the guys that said he was having problems writing for the 12 year old boy in his head because now he felt like his faculty advisor was in there and he had to write for him instead. I laughed, because I tried a couple pages of a short story last night and had the same problem; all my phrasing, all my cadences, were an attempt to capture the voice of my advisor’s work.  I didn’t know why it wasn’t working until that moment but from here it all is plainly clear.

So I was right to wait.  I still have the fire and the energy I felt when I left the rez but I’m slowly allowing that need to capture fireflies in a bottle be replaced with the magic of being able to appreciate the fireflies as they are, wild and free.  Uh, what I mean is, I ain’t trying to force it and my brain is starting to figure out what comes next.

Next is a day of organization, calendaring the semester work so I stay on track, plotting the middle grade novel so I know both character and story arcs.  I can feel my brain at a simmer right now, ready to make the jump to full boil.  Beginnings jockeying for place.  The stress level is down but the nerves are still a bit on edge.  That’s good, can’t be too cool or complacent.

And no, this isn’t an attempt to talk myself out of a corner.

We attended the small graduation ceremony in the chapel and we, the first semesters, were given symbolic blank journals as tradition dictates to record out journey ahead. We took a silly group portrait afterward, two shots for every camera available. We attended the reception in the art gallery, eating guacamole and salsa clearly not made in the cafeteria. We ate from the largest cake ever seen, still partially frozen, the knife hacking away at chunks more than it cut. Champagne and apple juice flowed, conversations darted like slippery fish throughout the room, and almost as quickly as it began people began to drift away.

Farewells began as people leaving then or later in the evening returned to the dorm to pack their belongings, their cars, the memories. Pillow cases stuffed with linens piled up in the collection bins. Keys were dropped into their security box.

After ten days of being aware and connected to each other our focus shifts, we smile and make quick conversation in passing, but our concerns are on the mental checklist in our heads. Did I remember to pack this, do I know what time my flight leaves, am I forgetting something? Our community is pulling apart, we’re becoming the strangers we were only days ago.

Plans are made, hastily. Dinner downtown? Where? Are we meting in the front of the dorm? I hear the pizza there is bad. Did so-and-so already leave? Do you know what the others are doing? I can’t stay up late tonight, still need to pack, I can’t drink tonight.

At dinner the lulls in the conversation are filled with looks, exhausted looks, careful looks, an attempt to fix facial details and personal histories. July seems so far away. There’s so much work waiting for us, some of us staring down deadlines less than three weeks away. We double check each other’s plans, confirm each other’s advisors. We’re memorizing for a test we’re anticipating that will never really come, we’re thinking ahead to those days when we are on the bulletin board trying to link these invisible bonds we’re feeling.

We’re coming back, we know we’ll be back, it’s only temporary. Two years seems like the beginning of a marathon; at the end of two years, looking back, the marathon will have felt like a sprint. But we feel it now, this sense of already having lost something. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz we know when she says goodbye to her friends that she will always carry them with her in their hearts. It’s that weight of all these memories and people that makes our hearts heavy.

Heading back to our rooms we elect to say goodbye as a group, just in case we don’t see each other until July. We’re all still planning to head to the lounge and hang out until we can’t stand it anymore, then head back to our rooms again for a final night’s sleep on the not-our-beds.

Then morning, quick showers and quick breakfasts, moving with purpose to catch transportation connections as fixed as our lecture schedule was less than twenty-four hours earlier. In shared rides we’ll talk glib, make and remake promises to stay in touch, just like the ones we made at the end of high school. For now those promises are linked to our commitment to the program but in a few years it will need to come from within.

In assigned seats our focus will drift. Magazines, our first connection back to the outside world, will be unable to deliver on the promise of holding our attention. We’ll look out the car window, the plane window, the train window and think about each other. Are they thinking about me, we’ll wonder?

How silly, to be missing these people so soon, as if we had found soulmates who we didn’t know existed, who we didn’t realize we were looking for, who didn’t realize we had finally finished all the prerequisites for finally coming together.

Have we found our karass?

A group of people who, unbeknownst to them, are collectively doing God’s will in carrying out a specific, common, task. A karass is driven forward in time and space by tension within the karass.

Perhaps, perhaps…

more a dance
like a school dance

with decorations and snacks
and a dark room for dancing

not that i danced
not much at least

only a few hours
only until i stopped thinking

about what i looked like
dancing

all jangly, uncoordinated
like i did when i was fourteen

when i would only dance
when no one was home

lost to the music
eyes closed

sweaty and reeking
happy

then (and now) slipping
out the back with the boys

out to the parking lot
grown men

talking about women
still boys

still at the dance
still hoping for something more

than awkward glances
fractured conversations

masked smiles
hidden worlds

boys

sweaty hair freezing
into jagged points

kicking at lumps of snow
trying to decide

whether to hotbox it
before returning to the dance

to the music
the abandon

the bar
steeling our courage

with renamed cosmos
(“the cliffhanger,

one sip
and you’re over the edge”)

to the edge of the cosmos
long ago

when we took our first steps
into the ballroom

dressed in rented tuxes
dancing to a cover band

realizing we can dance
and enjoy it

and not be afraid
and not care

when our friends laughed
because we knew

we’d finally stepped out
from our own shadows

and into the world

walking back to the dorm
i stopped to listen

as new snow fell
wayward midnight flakes

the pat-a-pat against my face
a tissue breeze for the trees

the promotional exercise
getting out of my own way

stepping out from my own shadow
a different sort of dance

prom

I shouted out some key verses from the wings, but I log promised Suze that I wouldn’t sing for strangers if I haven’t sang for her.

So that’s that.

Because as much as I like to talk and write, I can’t bear the sound of my own singing voice. Besides, there wasn’t enough liquor in the entire town that could get me in front of people. So I didn’t drink at all.

I hope my fellow Freshmen peeps can find it in their hearts to forgive me.

Today is a big day of hurdles.  Hurdles for me, at least.  I just finished the first workshop where we were told that everyone had to have a chance to make a comment before it was opened to the floor.  Sheesh!  Way to let a guy ease into it by applying group pressure.  Actually, it went fine, I made some comments and didn’t feel like a total dingleberry.  It’s good, it didn’t kill me, so good.

 Next up I’ve got a reading tonight.  It’s only us newbies reading together in the privacy of each other but none of us are really excited about it.  There is much talk of social lubrication (booze, mostly wine. Kidlit writers are winos?) and we’ll see if that’s really necessary.  Later I’ll have a one-on-one with my GA to go over the pages I’ll have already read in public.

Man, the intestinal fortitude is having a hard time satying solid.

Recently I’ve made my case on how to foster a positive book environment for boys in a retail setting on a couple of posts over at Sara Holmes site, here and here. Those are some long-ass comments I left, I kinda think I probably should have written a post about them instead.

I may still, but not today. Today is all last-minute and getting-ready and trying-to-act-calm. And a couple of confessions.

I’m seeing signs in various corners of the kidlit world that are starting to reevaluate the boys and the way they read. It’s interesting to think that after living my life feeling like I was a bad reader as a boy I might have been more typical and might have done better in school if I understood my tastes and reading habits better.

For example, how I thought I was a bad reader because I was a slower reader than my friends. And how I felt out of step because everyone else loved the books we read as a class but there wasn’t any encouragement for dissent, which lead me to feel bad if I abandoned a book because it meant something was wrong with me.

I still feel bad that I can’t get beyond the first 4 pages or so of Moby Dick. I’m a grown up, I can do what I want, and people tell me that’s one book I shouldn’t feel bad about, so how did I manage to let this one book have so much power over me? Because I’m a boy, I’m not supposed to have feelings of inadequacy, certainly not over a book, and even if I did I’m not supposed to admit them.

Except I just did. It felt a little scary.

Oh, and I still can’t get into The Hobbit. That one goes back to fifth grade. I also confess that I pretended to have read, and cared about, Brian’s Song in junior high because that was the one sports book you were allowed to read and be emotional about as a guy. I never was into sports and didn’t want to read about sports or terminal cancer for that matter, not then at least, but it was easier to fake caring than to admit otherwise. And while I’m at it, I have some pretty conflicted emotions about Sounder as well.

I could probably dig up more but I’m already feeling overexposed as it is. The lyrics to Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” are running through my head:

This brother is free/I’ll be what I want to be…

Reading.

There are open periods during the Rez where people are “encouraged” to read from either their workshop pieces or from other writing we bring with us. We can also use these pieces for consultation with the graduate advisers. I have spent the morning opening various files, stories and fragments and read them out loud.

They all suck.

No, I’m being objective. I can’t believe I even think I can write.

I still have a few more things to look at and consider. There is a segment of a YA novel that isn’t as rough as other parts that I think could fill a five-minute time slot but I need to do a little work on it. So that and my workshop notes are now my priorities.

And figuring out what I need to ship ahead.

And

Remember to breathe…

I’m a home for the first part, but home looks more like the crappy post-war urban sprawl of Orange County.  Not The OC everyone sees on TV but the real OC filled with ranch style tract homes with cinder block walls and colored rock lawns.

I’m supposed to hand in a part of my manuscript equal to one-fifth of he final length but like Zeno’s Paradox the more I write the farther away the end of he chapter gets.  I can never get more that two-thirds of the way through. (It’s like a math anxiety dream as well, I can only get two-thirds of one-fifth, but the X in  my equation keeps shifting.) I’m writing furiously, even while standing and walking around.  I’m not even using a keyboard, I’m thinking up sentences and seeing them float in the air above me and physical pages magically appear in my hand.  I think there’s some connection to M.T. Anderson’s Feed going on but I’m not sure why.

Cut to a party.  It seems to be at school, in the cafeteria, a place unlike one I’ve ever seen before.  Everyone’s on a short break but the food’s not ready and probably won’t be before we have to get back to class.  While we’re waiting for the food a teacher is asking me to explain how the tempo of mariachi music has translated into the modern beat of hip-hop. While using an empty paper towel tube to beat out a rhythm against a counter the scene changes — it’s now the private home of YA author John Green.  Everyone is anxious because Led Zeppelin are going to come play but they don’t have a bass player.  Someone remembers that I played viola when I was in high school and that makes me the most qualified to be drafted into service.

It’s a party, everywhere people are drinking nog and piling plates full of food, but I’ll running around trying to find out what songs are on the set list and generally working myself into an ulcer because I’m sure I’m going to be exposed as a sham.  I ask for a bass to start practicing on but all John has around the house is a half-sized plastic electric cello made for video game Guitar Hero (I guess for those 90s indy rock songs?).  While I’m practicing in the kitchen everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves and worse they all have instruments and are taking turns playing songs around the house.  I’m recognizing Irish lullabies and folk songs and then I hear Led Zep in the next room tuning up.

I think it’s clear to everyone else that I cannot play but no one says anything; their silence and pretending I’m not there makes it apparent they are embarrassed for me.  Once I get around to learning some fingering on he cello — and John Green gives me a little encouragement here — the band have finished playing and packed up and left.  With that out of the way I ask around and find out that everyone has their writing ready to hand in the next day and they’ve had it ready for days if no weeks.  I ask around to try and get a sense of how long their manuscripts are, what they’re about, and everyone sort of chuckles and moves on without answering me.

And then I woke up.

The holidays more of less over I settled in to read the manuscript excepts for the upcoming Rez.  That’s what the old pros call the residency, the Rez.  Like some native creative sequestered to a colony of useless land away from the rest of civilized humanity.  Hmmm.

Anyway, I was only partly holding off on the reading because of the holidays. Another part of me was dreading the possibility that alongside the writing of my fellow students mine would suck gigantic turdmuffins. In the off chance that my fellow students are lurking out there and wondering if I’m going to name names or lob one-sided criticisms of their work, fear not.  But since I created this blog to chronicle my adventures through the process of school and becoming a published writer I’m going to have to talk about some things. I just will have to keep things… measured.

Being a guy and writing kidlit seems to make me a minority.  At least at school, because there’s a fairly even mix of male and female writers published out there.  But of the ten of us in my workshop group only three of us are guys.  This is only important in that one of the first things I noticed in giving the manuscripts a first careful read is that men and women write differently.  It isn’t a question of our main character’s gender, it’s about what I’m calling our objective.  Our stories deal with action our characters are moving, they’re sorting things out on the fly.

Like guys do.

The other stories, they deal with mood and feeling and thoughts and description.  I don’t say these are bad things.  I don’t mean to suggest the boys don’t include these things.  I’m just saying this is the first thing that struck me.

Another thing that struck me were the stories that were really strong. Strong like they were pulled out of an already published book.  Strong in voice, assured in step, and at least one story was super intense.  I know my little tale is nowhere near as strong, and certainly nowhere near as intense.  I have to keep reminding myself it’s a first draft, my way of preventing my brain from hyperventilating into insecurity. I have to push beyond the I-don’t-belong voice that keeps trying to derail me.

Then I get on the school bulletin board and poke around.  I’m checking out my fellow writers, the ones in my workshop.  I’m checking out ages, combing their posts for clues about the way they think and express themselves.  I haven’t gone hunting to see if they’re running their mouths off in bogs like I am.  Maybe I should.

While I’m there I’m catching little bits of inspiration, little sparks that shoot out of the collective bonfire and swirl around my head.  Do I want to take a stab at that pissed-off teenage vampire story?  Is it time to start hammering out an outline for the sci-fi adventure series? Should I go back to my other unfinished YA novel?  What about that new idea I had today about retelling The Trojan Women (or is it Lysistrata?) set in violent rival high schools?

It’s happening, the writing muse is coming out of hibernation.  This is a good thing, since I like to think of myself as a writer.

I’m feeling the need for a schedule, something to help keep me in focus.  What I think I could really use is a time clock, something where I can punch-in and -out and keep track of the time I’m spending.  Just until I get my routines established.  A taskmaster.  Yeah.

Down to brass tacks.

Why? All it contained were the ten excerpts from from everyone in my workshop, that can’t be too scary, could it? Actually, it could, because this the first round of seeing where my writing stands side-by-side with others in the same boat. As much as I tell myself this isn’t a competition or a popularity contest I can’t help thinking of all this work in comparison, me versus them, me and my words against the world.

I think it’s the classic struggle that somehow gets internalized, the writer fighting against the vast expanse of the blank page, to get published, to find an audience once and for all. I now have that audience but it’s a captive audience, an audience of peers, which is what makes it a little more tense.

But I can’t look at all this writing right now. I’m spending the week finishing my most recent set of reviews and getting ready for the holidays with family. Maybe next week I’ll settle in for a first read, a “reader’s read” just to get a sense of story and scope. Let that all sot for a while, read some more books on process and style, then hunker down for the serious workshop read-throughs in January.

New year, new me, new stories, new world.

The project has “potential” written all over it, not the least of which is the casting of Zoey Deschanel as “D.G.” the modern day Dorothy. The plot’s not worth rehashing, the point is that on the surface Zoey makes a cute canvas to any character; the problem is she cannot (or does not) act. After you’ve seen her in one film you know all her mannerisms, all her vocal tics and movements. She doesn’t act so much as show up, and for a while she stands out because there is something a little off-kilter about the way she presents. Then it wears off and you get the feeling she’s coasting.

Talking about it earlier with Suze I tossed out the idea that I think she works better as a character actor, a bit of quirky spice in the mix and not one to hold down the anchor for an entire movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I think the same of Bill Murry who, except for a couple of standout performances, works better when he can riff on a minor character. For Murry that would be the shyster strip mall lawyer in Wild Things. For Deschanel it would be the big sister in Almost Famous.

So now I’m thinking about the movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s biographical re-imagining of his own early teen years, and I’m remembering that Crowe married one of the Wilson sisters from the band Heart. Together they wrote some of the songs of the fictitious band in the film Stillwater, and didn’t I hear that they were eventually going to release the original music as a commercial compact disc?

Now I’m on Wikipedia doing research, and then I’m on Amazon. Yes, I use Amazon as a research site. Between their listings, reviews, and customer brown-nosing I can usually find what I need to know and then continue to buy, research or follow-up elsewhere. Why buy from Amazon when there’s an Internet out there full of proof that they aren’t all that and a bag of chips?

Anyway, I hit pay dirt: The director’s cut of Almost Famous — baring the film’s original title Untitled — contains a third disc that contains the unreleased Stillwater music. Well, I can now put that into my mental wish-list hopper and keep an eye out for it the next time I’m bored and trolling Half.com.

But what’s this? Here are two reviews, an Amazon review — which is, what, ever going to be critical and kill sales, or give you anything substantial? — and one from The New Yorker‘s David Denby who, despite being from New York, has slightly more cred when it comes to reviewing. I’m scanning the Denby review and it’s full of the usual hyphenates that are a critic’s shorthand for description — “stand-in,” “freckle-faced,” “real-life,” “mid-level,” “danger-morally”… huh, what? Oh, that last one was an editing error. One of those en-dash em-dash problems that I wouldn’t expect anyone “copy-editing” at Amazon (are there such people?) to catch.

Wait, what is Denby saying?

Much of the movie plays easily and well as a record of good times, but there’s no particular point to it. William is never put in enough danger-morally, spiritually, sexually, or any other way-to become a hero for us, and the music of Stillwater is not meant to be great. What’s at stake?

Ooo, so many places to take offense! Let’s keep it clear: Crowe couldn’t have made the film using the real names of bands and people because (a) he didn’t want to get sued (b) he didn’t want to hurt the feelings of friends and (c) occasionally, and especially outside of strict documentary, you need to condense information to fit a narrative flow; William/Crowe isn’t put through any unnecessary danger to support a false narrative structure, but for a fifteen-year-old traveling with drugged out 1970s bands he encounters probably more than Denby has ever seen in his life; William/Crowe isn’t supposed to be a hero, he’s a window (or a mirror) into the times he experienced, too young to fully comprehend the history surrounding him but undeniably a part of that history; Stillwater isn’t supposed to be a great band — the point of the movie is also it’s title ALMOST Famous — that the voyage is the destination, and that for all the greats surrounding them there are countless others struggling to make it anywhere among the Pantheon.

Why does this irk me so? Because it’s clear that either Denby has no kids, knows no kids, or at the very least doesn’t have a clue about young adult life. To that end I have to conclude that he’s never read a YA title and would presume that his knowledge of YA stories is limited to what gets adapted into Hollywood’s cinematic format, and by extrapolation, this film doesn’t work for him — “What’s at stake?” — because he can’t imagine that what’s at stake isn’t the kind of thing that is easily captured in a happy Hollywood ending. That Crowe is able to fashion a coherent narrative from his experiences that fits into a traditional movie format is not a feat to be taken lightly, though I do need to point out that the film is far from High Art.

I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen Almost Famous since it was released, since I have decided to write for a YA audience. I occurs to me that there might be more clues within this movie about the possibilities of YA storytelling than I ever previously considered. I might be totally off base, but I’ve been on the hunt for stories that include boys, would play to a general audience, and don’t necessarily feel the need to include gratuitous hero-making danger.

With that, our train has pulled into the depot.

No, it wasn’t insecurity, it was a question of calling. I was on my way home from the store today with a half tonne of groceries whose future included a mango salsa and guacamole. Yes, I know it’s December Eve and mangoes and avocados aren’t to be had without a price. Still, I make these things well, and seeing as we’re having a small army into our small apartment (I keep thinking it’s around 60 people but it’s probably closer to 25 or so) it fell to me to provide some of the edible entertainment. It’s the least I can do since I’ll have the girls out and about with me while Suze plays hostess.

It’s a long story. The parents of sixth graders are pulling together a support group to help us all get through the tween years, and perhaps beyond. The meeting places rotate and Suze volunteered when someone else fell through. Better to get our turn out of the way up front, I guess.

Fortunately others are bringing other food and drink because having to actually feed a large crowd a week after Thanksgiving seemed a bit daunting. But at Thanksgiving I was asked to make stuffing for a platoon of a family gathering, followed up the next night with a double-family sized portion of what is becoming my famed macaroni and five cheese.

It was while riding my bike home in the near-freeze that my brain actually tripped and wondered if I hadn’t missed my calling in a kitchen. Do I have a talent for it or just an affinity? I do enjoy food, and there’s something meditative about the process (when I have time), and I like hunting down the slightly unusual recipe. And because I’m a guy that makes me slightly unusual. And it makes me wonder if I should have considered a different path instead of writing.

And then I start in the kitchen and I think “I can do this on small scale, and on a larger scale every once in a while, but not every day; writing I could do every day.”

Still…

I’m talking about a lot of things here: my blog posting, my reading schedule, my YA novel manuscript, my life in general.  I’m not complaining that there’s too much, or too much to do, but that I don’t feel like I ever get anything over the top so that it starts running downhill on its own.

And school is starting up soon.  Soon enough.  I’ll have finished the first residency sixty days from now.  We’ll be staring down the first presidential primaries sixty days from now.  The holidays will be a glowing ember of a memory sixty days from now.  I’ll be trying to finalize my graphic novel selection for the Cybils sixty days from now.  That’s two surreal months away.  I tell myself “That’s excitement that’s gnawing away at ya!” so I don’t get it confused with blind panic.

I’m torn with what to read these days as well.  I have my review books, and the books I want to read, but I also have the recommended titles for school, I’ll have a couple hundred pages of fellow student samples to read as well, plus I’ve got people telling me that I need to get all my “adult” reading out of the way because once I’m at VC it’s all kidlit all the time.

*sigh*

I suppose there are worse things in life to be plagued by.

There were also a couple of reading lists.  Not really required reading although “100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know” makes it a hard list to ignore.  Everyone, not just students of children’s literature.  And can I take “should know” to mean the same thing it does in Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy books where a familiarity with a title or concept is good enough?

I did what probably hundreds more before me have done: I counted the number of titles I could safely say I have read and remembered.  That last part is essential because in cases like this in the past I have discovered that there are books I have forgotten but will suddenly remember by cover or by the first page.  One of the downsides of age, the deep memory archives grow to that point that you begin to feel you’re living the cliche of having forgotten more than you’ll ever remember.

46.  Almost half.  That’s not too bad.  They’re picture books, so I can pretty much pick up the remaining titles in short order. Then it’s on to “100 Books That Shaped the Century.”  Fortunately there’s some overlap between the lists.  Unfortunately these books tend to be longer.  Fortunately they’re only recommended.  Unfortunately that isn’t how my brain works.

Time to revise the TBR reading list.