FREE RAT

Coming in for a landing, I think.

After wrestling with the Free Rat story for...years...
I think I have the basic plotline now.
How did I finally manage it? The truest thing is this: I finally got out of the way.

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This is Nashville TN from 15,000 ft.

Obama

President Obama has asked us all to do our best.

Martin Luther King said that if your job was washing floors, to make sure that you were the best floorwasher.

My mother said self respect is earned, not given. That has always made sense to me.

Whatever you do, do it well. Whatever you use, use less of it. Don't waste half of it--or any of it. The world can't afford its citizens to be foolish or asleep any longer. There are too many of us, too many problems and too much work at hand. I am inspired and encouraged and ready to work.

WINGS

If you ever read Sacred Scars, these are the cliffs, and this what Hahp did, with a very different sort of wingsuit. And oh, yes, he will do it again. Who wouldn't?


http://vimeo.com/1778399


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Looking forward to Feb!!!

I will be in Milwaukee for the Wisconsin Reading Association event Feb.4-7th. I look forward to speaking to educators, librarians and readers there. And seeing friends. They have a gazillion authors coming...

February 26-28 I will be in Altlanta to keynote the SCBWI spring conference. Session titles: "Art, Craft and Filthy Commerce" and "Bricks, Mist, Voices, and Heart - Tools to try".

I include the titles, because I like them. The last two speaking gigs have had terrible titles, truly lame, I have no idea what happened to my brain. Maybe the '08 travel extravaganza? The Sacred Scars dash-to-deadline? Whatever. Embarrassing.

After these two events, I will be locked in my office until May, for BEA in NYC...then nothing else until August. I have a lot of projects in the works this year and have to stay home and write until the release of Sacred Scars.

bumbling stupid day...

I rarely have completely useless writing days, but this was the perfect one. I have five projects in motion and none of them went anywhere. I give, I am off to do anything but sit here and try to write. Tomorrow will be better...

I cleaned a corner of my office yesterday and came across the National Book Award finalist medal that was given to me (such an amazing gift) in 2007. I am not sure I can explain what it meant to me. More than anything, the gift was a feeling that I really am a writer--that I really can write pretty well.

I finished Sacred Scars today--the copyedits, I mean, I am now free. It is the second book in a trilogy. Perhaps these characters will hush for a while, now, and I can think about other projects.

This picture was taken at one of the NBA award events--an auditorium in the New School in NYC, full of YA kids from all over the city.

Sarah Zarr and I are talking beneath the radar of the tall people all around us...left to right: Brian Selznick, me, Sherman Alexie, Sara Zarr, Sindy Felin

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

May all good things come to you and your beloveds in 2009.

beautiful day

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A warm and lovely day. I am still cutting stuff down, trimming trees and chopping back things that grow over each other...

But only in short breaks. I am goingthrough the the copyedits for Sacred Scars. It's good. I think. I am pretty sure...The copy editor is brilliant and loves the book, so the comments are really helpful...


These are succulents. Cold rainy days (like all of last week) bring out more color in them for some reason.

Spiders were involved, yes...

.... but in a strange way.

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The leaf happened to float into two sharply angled web anchor strands. They had crossed in mid-air, each one leading to a spider's web 15-20 feet away--in opposite directions--from the accidental (Or maybe spiders plan these things) touch-and-stick juncture that the leaf happened to intersect as it fell. Such a sweet, unlikely coincidence. I just love things like this.

Gravity: there is a way around everything

...walking outside, I glanced up when a crow squanked, and saw this. A silk oak leaf, questioning, no, refuting gravity. On a still, breathless day, it hung, about 15 feet over my head, with nothing between it and the sky. I stared at it for five or six minutes before I went to get the camera. Click the pic to see it more clearly....

I figured it out, but it still seems impossible.

Guesses?

 These are bird of paradise blooms, starting to fade...


I remember the first time I saw one. I was 17, and had hitch-hiked to California from Colorado, where I grew up. I just stood in front of it and tried to square it with any other life form I had ever encountered, and couldn't.

They are as common as roses here. There's a giant variety, too, that blooms white. I have a few. The biggest is 25' tall. The seeds are fringed with an insane orange fuzz...They are African natives, but seem to like California weather well enough.  



I started thinking about them because of this night's work. A boy, raised in confinement, has found a way out. He is starting across the chaparral desert--and will soon see a bank covered with these blooms. And he is going to have to stand in front of them and try to believe that they are real. I hope he can. He is so damaged. So isolated and hurt. This might be the angriest story I have ever written.

My Parents

My parents in 1941.
They were part of the "greatest generation"--the incredibly hardworking people who pulled this country out of the depression and onward, through WWII.
My father was a young teen during the depression. My mother was a tween. She used the same 6 bobby pins for five years. She learned to sew her own clothing. Her family owned a dairy. My grandfather just kept delivering milk to the families who were not able to pay their bills until he went broke. They never recovered financially.
My father worked two after school jobs at 17. His father owned a grist mill and he worked there, too. So, three jobs, really. His two brothers worked just as hard and they all made it through The Colorado School of Mines in about six years, taking turns: two in, one out, working full time.
I keep thinking about them lately. How they managed.
One Christmas, when I am sure there was very little money, my mother bought a few small gifts and hid them all over the house. When we woke up Christmas morning, there was a green string for me--and a red one for my sister--each tied to a branch of the Christmas tree. We followed the string, winding it up as we went all over the house, out into the yard, the porch, the garage. Sometimes the string was overhead, or wound in a back and forth pattern around chair legs... it was a great Christmas. It took an hour or more of laughing and complaining and teasing and criss-crossing and untangling, to open two or three presents--none of which I remember at all.

I hate to explain this one.

So I think I won't.

I have sago palms--apparently both males. Because I have never seen anything like this one before. She lives in the gardens around the Alamo. Isn't she a beauty....in an odd, creature-from-the-Pleistocene kind of way.

WorldCab: Voices

For a long time, I have made a point of talking to cab drivers. I jot notes, or sometimes, now, I record them. The conversations are one person's take on whatever comes up. They don’t represent whole countries, accuracy, or the ultimate truth about anything.


In San Antonio, TX, at NCTE last week: A cab driver from Sudan told me he wishes people understood how big Sudan is, and that in many areas, things are all right, even good. He got tears in his eyes talking about Darfur, then said his brothers and a cousin are starting a building business in eastern Sudan, where he is from. He smiled and nodded in a perfect cadence, like he was listening to music I couldn't hear, while he outlined their business plan. He said they had found a good Kenyan source of building materials, cheap enough to get a good start. He has been in San Antonio for 10 years. His English and his Spanish are nearly fluent. He said there were over a hundred languages in his homeland, with most people speaking Arabic and English, at least a little. He is seriously considering going home. If he does, he says, he will figure out how to take a few years supply of Tex-Mex hot sauce. Saying that made him nod again, made him grin. He knows his brothers will like it, too...

This snowy tree is in Boston, behind the oldest church in America at the foot of a hill that bears the weight of hundreds of old, old, old, slate gravestones. It is

Gloomy.

Doomy.

Bookshelves of Doom has my interview up today. I am honored. 

Ah, the scream of the wind, the smell of the smoke...

None of the major fires are near me.
Yet.
The worst of the Santa Ana winds are north of here, too.
So far. It's early fire season.
We name fires here, usually by the local name for their location.

For those of you with friends and relatives in California, here are two websites to add to your ready-reach pile...

Cal Fire: http://www.fire.ca.gov/index_incidents_info.php

Calfire Google Map

There was a canyon fire in San Diego yesterday, put out before it could spread. We heart our firefighters. Mucho y siempre.



..

This is a self-contained, climate controlled, enclosure. It is the setting, with some alterations, for a project that is just sliding from concept to story now. So I will be writing the future, this year, sort of the future, anyway. I am really excited about this project. And the other new project, which takes time in the opposite direction--sort of the other direction, anyway.

..

Lost in translation

Shopping for a French-made kitchen tool, I came across this product description. It's a warning to us all that translation isn't easy...


MIU France Professional Stainless Steel Mandoline
Key features MIU France 18/10 Stainless steel twist. Dishwasher unharmed
Built in 2 mm, 10 mm julienne vegetable blades; adjustable square blades and adjustable waffle blades.

Convenient telephone dial adjusts widths and thicknesses; no more than swapping blades in and come out. Includes stocky storage caseful. Non-slip feet and palm. Stainless steel refuge bearer.
Complete statement by the hand put up be downloaded hither:

BUY
MIU France's Professional Stainless Steel Mandoline really is the flagship posture of the Mandoline run along. Instead of the removeable blades set in other models that feature to be swapped come out to exchange cuts, the Professional Stainless Steel edition is completely sef-contained. There's no talents to slack or stay fresh caterpillar tread of, and heaviness and breadth is go down by the leisurely to habituate telephone dial on the face of the mandoline. Just same homogeneous models that betray with respect to 2 to 3 epochs as a great deal, you tin apace shift betwixt julienne vegetable, square and waffle cuts every part of according to the twitch of a lever tumbler. The consummate hand-book put up be downloaded hither: http://www.miufrance.com/images/90797Manual.pdf . This Professional0 carries a unitary yr manufacturers warrant and storage caseful. This is a unitary clip appropriate force and quantities are modified.

Vote!

Adults:
Happy Election Day.
Be glad, be glad that you live in a country where you have a voice.
Use it, or stop complaining.

Young People:
Happy Election Day.
Be glad, be glad that you live in a country where you have a voice.
I hope you have been paying attention to the election, that you have some opinions, that you have decided who you would vote for, if you could. When you can vote, do. Demand good government. Insist on justice for all. Keep America free.