A Single Layer

In a few days, I'll be running off to the desert to housesit for some friends. Housesitting is always an interesting opportunity to devote yourself to projects that would otherwise take a back-burner to normal life. I'm working on a list of things to do - manuscripts to proof, books to read, Buffy to watch, that sort of thing. If you have any suggestions, let me know. We'll see how I do.

1. Favorite childhood book? The Golden Book of Fairy Tales (still a favorite)   2. What are you reading right now? Joseph and His Brothers, and 2012 manuscripts 3. What books do you have on request at the library? None. Though I requested so many books at my old library growing up, that I memorized my 13-digit library card number years before I knew my social security number. 4. Bad book habit? Using coffee table art books as food and drink trays or laptop desks in bed. Sorry, Impressionism. 5. What do you currently have checked out at the library? Nothing. I know. The mighty have fallen... 6. Do you have an e-reader? My iPhone does qualify as an e-reader. I have read a few paragraphs of free ebooks here and there, but that was about a year ago when it was a novelty. I have also used it for last minute Bible references, and on more than one occasion, have pulled up documents from my email. I am more likely to use my phone for emergency writing than reading. Th...

Everyone who has read Divergent has loved it, and for good reason. (If you are one of the nonexistent who disagree, just keep quiet.) Usually when I finish the first book in a good series, I can't wait for the second. Divergent is the kind of good that makes you get to the end and want to read it again. Most people in the Veronica Roth fandom are asking each other which faction they'd be in - or if they, too, are Divergent. This is an obvious question to arise from the book, as it explores a society split into four factions with essentially unique characteristics. But an equally obvious question would be about our fears. In the novel, Tris joins a faction bent on overcoming their fears to become - as their faction's name claims - dauntless . At one point, Tris undergoes a test in which she has to face each one of her fears in order to overcome them. In comparison with her other Dauntless friend, she has surprisingly few fears to combat - though that doesn't make ...

November is a month and a half away, but I'm already thinking about National Novel Writing Month and whether or not I will participate. I am thinking that maybe this will be the year I do it. Not that I remotely have time, but the whole point is to make a goal regardless of your commitments and find the time in the cracks and crannies of the usual crazy world. It helps, of course, if you know what you want to write about beforehand, and there are some significant things you can do to help yourself prepare without officially jumping the gun. For example, an outline, drafting character sketches, writing sample dialogues, reading similar works, collecting first and last names so you don't leave a bunch of these ___ scattered through the manuscript... that sort of thing. Figuring out the very mechanics of how you will write the thing (pen and paper? trusty laptop? occasional twitter posts?) may seem overly specific, but may be just the sort of initial decision-making that will se...

The other day as I was driving down the freeway, thinking about my perception of all the cars around me and the noise of their engines, I was struck by the similarity of light and sound in that they are both waves. Or rather, I was struck by their dissimilarity, because light and sound seem thoroughly disassociated from one another in our perception of them. And yet, atomically, or subatomically, they are these shivering waves coming at our senses. Bumping our neurons and sending the dendrites shuddering toward the brain. It seemed like such a phenomenal revelation, this wave business. It took my mind in a hundred different directions all at once, and I found myself rattling off these wonders of nature and perception that were all somehow tangentially related to the fact of the sensory wave, from modern art to the temptation in the Garden of Eden. It occurred to me that I was just as thrilled by these different ideas and their connections as I was by the fact of thinking of them at...

This is going to be one of those posts that reflects just how much I wish Pinterest had a blog feature. Not that that's remotely a good idea, as I wouldn't honestly be too interested in reading other Pinterest blogs, but... whatever. Here are some pictures for you: From the Boca Raton Museum of Art exhibit "The Magic of Realism," by Robert Vickrey You never know when you might need a flickr collage of ancient maps and such. The Bucephalus living sculpture by Robert Cannon. Just follow the link to the other "accidental mysteries" featured here. Tapping into my inner melodrama for this one. I really do love it, and no less with the knowledge that it will probably grace the cover of a teen paranormal romance novel some day. Found somewhere on the blog Blue Velvet Chair . Click through at your peril. From a collection of incredible book paintings by Mike Stilkey.

Many of my college friends are in Chicago this week for a wedding, which makes me a little sad that I don't live there. I have been thinking about living in Chicago for the last few days, since I stumbled across the pictures for HGTV 's upcoming giveaway. I won't win this one either, but I am trying really hard to figure out if there's a way to affordably DIY the Frank Lloyd Wright Tree of Life lightboxes from the living area. Looking at the photos of the view out the apartment's window has brought a flood of memories (though some of the memories, I realize, are actually scenes from Divergent playing in my head, others are real). Some of my most vivid memories of Chicago: When we accidentally gave a drug dealer a ride home from the Jazz Festival. When I got suckered into giving a guy $20 to help me walk my luggage to Ogilvie (a cab ride would have cost less than half as much). When I changed for the opera in a McDonald's bathroom, leaving Jenny to ca...

I have been editing a lot lately. I have read and reread at least 23 manuscripts since the beginning of the year. Let me type that out for emphasis: twenty-three! And there are about four more left for the month of August, so I'm not slowing down any time soon (except to blog a bit, I guess). I am learning a few things about editing as I go, the most important being that it is never a waste of time to read something again. There's a reason publishers object to digital books being priced lower than print books. They both cost exactly the same amount to make in terms of time and expertise - and since digital books have to be formatted in a number of different ways for various platforms, they arguable cost even more. I am finding the ideal number of read-throughs for a manuscript, after all content is ironed out and sentences are looking more or less as they ought, is three. This is why there are copyeditors, line editors, and proofreaders, and why each of them have a slightl...

Blueberry Lemon Ricotta Pancakes at the Beachcomber The view from our table Beginning the walk My mother, on the phone with my brother, bridging two coasts A map of seaweed   Thanks to Instagram, without which, I can't take pictures worth salt. Considering my proximity to the sea, that's really not worth much at all.

The big movie news (at least in my odd world) is the dual releases of Snow White adaptations happening next year. Universal is shooting one with Kristen Stewart, and Relativity is releasing one with Lily Collins. Take a look at the promotional images: Obviously the Kristen Stewart version looks cooler, but the problem with it is equally evident - they cast Kristen Stewart. The wicked stepmothers are also an interesting battle of the hotties, Julia Roberts for Relativity and Charlize Theron for Universal. The latter has a bigger budget, but the former (apart from not having casted an angsty mouthbreather in the lead role) has the greatest card in its favor: It's directed by my favorite film genius, Tarsem Singh. Take a look at a few of the images from The Fall, one of my favorite films of all time. Seriously, if Snow White has any measure of this kind of aesthetic quality, Bella doesn't stand a chance:      

Sometimes I write elaborate blog posts only to delete them moments before publishing. It's a good thing, both for you and for me. I was about to wax angry and uneloquent on all the fuss over Amy Winehouse when more tragic things have happened in the last twenty-four hours or so. But the fuss is understandable, and I have reminded myself to be sympathetic in all things. I will try. The difference lies in our choices. Amy Winehouse is a tragedy, because she is the portrait of Dorian Gray. She is a reminder of what our choices mean, what they look like when they are worn on our skin. A reminder that we are all one ugly decision away from that kind of living hell. When we look at her and read the verse "for the wages of sin is death," we begin to wonder if it's talking about punishment - or inevitable consequences. Norway is a different kind of tragedy. We are talking about a massacre of innocents. They're both tragedies, and I suppose the former is better suited...

I just read a post over at Publishers Weekly about a book group being vocally offended by a bookseller's reading suggestion. The bookseller, who is also the PW blogger, was baffled by their offense. Not just because they were so loud about their objections - which I might understand; after all, they should have known better than to keep reading if the material was offensive - but that they seemed reluctant to talk about the issue of sexuality. When I was working on my graduate degree, some of my fellow students invited me to watch a widely acclaimed art house film that was laced with sexually explicit scenes. When it was over, I told them how awful I thought it was, how inappropriate, disturbing and unnecessary it seemed. In turn, they were offended that I hadn't been able to see past my puritanical hang-ups to see the artistic quality of the film. I have remembered that post-movie conversation with them for years because it baffled me. I have still not been able to figure...

I have a lot of wonderful things to read this summer. I'm really excited about it, actually. Even so, my whole summer reading list is pretty much work-related. There are a few books I have sitting on my shelves that I kind of wish I was reading as well (not instead). I have been meaning to reread this since I first turned the last page. All you need to read is the first page to know you should read the whole thing . I freely admit, I want to read this for the cover alone. It has been too long since I last read anything by O'Connor. She is required reading for life.

Thanks to my brilliant sister, I finally have a link to my Pinterest boards up on this blog. Go ahead and click through the button on the left to view all the pretty pictures I've been collecting this year. Here's a sampling. You can find all their sources by clicking through the images on their respective boards:

Michael Blake, author of Dances With Wolves and The Holy Road (currently pictured in my sidebar), will be chatting on blogtalkradio this evening at 7PM, about his books, his ranch, and his life. Click on the link to listen in.

The cereus is blooming twice over tonight. We are huddled round the plant, which is some sort of cactus, watching the buds turn from tightly woven pods to starry trumpets and at last to beautiful white flowers. This plant has a special history. It was my grandmother's, and my mother inherited it upon her death some fifteen years ago. It bloomed for the first time only a year ago, and now has a miraculous six buds gracing its succulent stems. Two of them are opening right now, and we are watching the petals move before our eyes, ever so slowly, from cocoon to flower. It's a lesson from nature in waiting, perseverance, silence, patience, and doubtless a dozen other things the Puritans would better understand than I do.

I really didn't think I'd be writing another blog post on the YASaves issue, now so many weeks outdated, but I started drafting a comment to one of my favorite book bloggers, and it just got waaaay too long. So I am posting it here instead. Favorite Blogger was actually writing in response to a different article - an opinion piece in the Huffington Post - written in support of Gurdon's socially disastrous WSJ article and against the ensuing broo-ha-ha. If you can follow that at all, let me try a little better to summarize the issue. Gurdon says certain books aren't appropriate for teens because of their violence and sexuality and general too-much-like-the-underbelly-of-the-world nature. Teen writers and readers (some of them, mostly the ones with twitter accounts) unite in a social networking frenzy to say that Gurdon's attempt to ban books from their category is small-minded and quack. Huff-Po opinion piece says this isn't banning; it's good parenting. F...

I have waited to blog about this. I considered not mentioning it at all, but there's something about the hashtag YASaves that requires reasonably-minded people to stand up and say "Who made you God?" For those of you who haven't been following it, here's the short version of the most recent young adult literature internet squawk: 1. Meghan Cox Gurdon, a seasoned children's and young adult book reviewer, wrote an article criticizing the increasingly dark subject matter of YA literature. 2. YA authors protested her criticism on Twitter, grouping their comments under the subject heading #YASaves. I know. This sort of thing happens all the time. It's not really news. Except it bothers me. Plenty of people are in uproar about Gurdon's criticism, but few who object to the article have said anything very helpful, at least that I've noticed. Most, in fact, are more defensive about their own work than anything else. Because a large body of those p...

I don't have anything to say, really. Just wanted to give a little hello to you readers, to let you know I am grateful for you and have not forgotten you.