New Life for March

As I prepare to start an entire new life on March 1, tomorrow, this thought from my editor's yoga-teacher friend: this is a month that "literally comes in like one species and goes out like another."

The weather for tomorrow in Boulder is predicted to be warm and sunny, near 60; it may well be breezy, but I think that still qualifies as "coming in like a lamb." So that means that March will go out like a lion. I have one month, 31 days, to get my lion self prepared for roaring.

The best way for me to roar is always through writing. Looking back at February, it wasn't, frankly, the greatest month I ever had. The best thing about February was writing ten (short-ish) chapters on my novel, and writing a poem every day. I also saw my graduate student Jay defend a fabulous dissertation, knit my hat with the pompom, hosted my church dinner circle dinner, and bought my car, as well as getting encouraging "revise and resubmit" comments from the Children's Literature Association Quarterly on my paper about the "twin" series of 1950s popular author Rosamond DuJardin (Double Date, Double Feature, Double Wedding). Okay, now that I'm reviewing the month's high points, helpfully cataloged in my trusty little notebook under the heading "February: Nice Things and Accomplishments," the month doesn't look so bad. But trust me, it abounded in painful disappointments (helpfully NOT cataloged in my trusty little notebook), and the best thing in it, not counting the pompom, was writing.

So in March, I am going to get up extra early every morning - early rising really makes all the difference for writing productivity. I am going to have not only a complete draft of my novel done by the end of the month, but a GOOD complete draft. I am going to continue writing my poems, and at least one of them is going to be a truly wonderful poem. I am going to write, and write, and write, until I roar down on April. Yes!

Shout-out for a Great Conference

I'm posting today to give a big woohoo to the wonderful Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference coming up this June in Sandy, Utah. I'm one of the lucky people who will be serving as faculty for the conference. I think this is my fifth time doing this. It's a truly amazing week of intensive critique and chance to grow as a writer. The organizer, Carol Lynch Williams, is THE single funniest human being on the planet, and also one of the most amazing writers ever, and also an extraordinarily kind and generous person. This is the conference where I met both my agent, Stephen Fraser, and one of my editors, Nancy Hinkel. I owe so much to this conference.

So here's some information about it and a link to the conference website in case I can tempt any of you to come join me.

Registration is open for Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers!

This popular week-long conference offers 20 hours of classroom critique,
afternoon classes on craft, and plenary sessions by New York editors and agents.

This year's award-winning faculty includes:
Sharlee Glenn (Beginning Writer class)
Trudy Harris (Picture Book class)
Kristyn Crow (Picture Book class)
Kevin Hawkes (Illustration class)
Mike Knudson (Chapter Book class)
Claudia Mills (Middle Grade Novel class)
Emily Wing Smith (Beginning Young Adult Novel class)
Louise Plummer (Young Adult Novel class)
Holly Black (Fantasy Novel class)
Kathleen Duey (Advanced Novel class)
Martine Leavitt (Advanced Novel class)
A.E. Cannon (Boot Camp class)

Our amazing editors are:
Alyson Heller, Aladdin Books
Lisa Yoskowitz, Disney

Our talented agent is Mary Kole from Andrea Brown Literary Agency

This year's keynote is by New York Times Bestseller Ally Condie, author of
MATCHED.

Where: The Waterford School, Sandy UT
When: June 13-17, 2011

For more information, and to register, go to www.wifyr.com
For questions, email us at: writingforyoungreaders@gmail.com

Back to My Book

I left my book for a week or so, but finally returned to it today. Of course, I had to read the last few chapters over to remember what was happening before I plunged ahead. I just finished writing and typing Chapter 20. These are short chapters, so it isn't as impressive as it sounds. But I think I'm at the halfway point. I don't have a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline, so I don't know for sure. But I'm at the point where the story will keep following its own inexorable destiny. Even though my semester is so pleasant, I wish I could have a few weeks of undisturbed time just to finish up this first draft so I'd have it all down on paper. This is when I need to remember that my sister wrote a full draft of a longer novel than this during National Novel Writing Month last November while working at a much more demanding job than mine.

My main distraction these days isn't my job, anyway. It's poetry. It's all I want to do. I get up and spend the first, best hour of my day trying to craft sonnets about lost love. It's actually a good use of my time, all things considered. What better way to spend one's time than writing sonnets? I don't think anyone on her deathbed would regret time spent writing sonnets. Some of mine don't observe a formal rhyme scheme, but the one I wrote this morning did - it was a Petrarchian sonnet with the ABBA, CDDC, EFEFEF rhyme scheme. How I pored over those rhymes to get them right, even if the last line still doesn't please me completely.

AND I just signed up to give an hour-long poetry reading (!) at the Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Cafe, here in Boulder, one evening in late May. So I NEED to get busy writing more poems, correct?

So today I wrote a chapter and wrote a sonnet. I would call this a very good day.

Dinner Party Tonight

I'm part of a dinner circle at my church. There are six or seven families in my circle, and we take turns hosting a dinner party for the group, with a dinner every other month, or so, over the course of a year.

I was hoping the year would end before my turn came, just as I used to hope, back in high school P.E. class, that the softball game would end before I had my turn at bat. I am not good at entertaining, just as I am not good at sports. I wasn't brought up to entertain, and my house is TINY, and I'm a bad cook, to boot.

I am hosting the dinner circle tonight.

And now that I'm doing it, I'm excited. Yes, my house is tiny, compared to the large, beautiful, amazing houses of the others, but it's my sweet little house, and I'm proud of it and glad to be able to share it with the others, with the beloved members of my church family. There should be ten of us, or maybe eleven. I have room for six, or maybe seven, in a squeeze, around my kitchen table, and I've set up a card table next to it, to seat another four, and I've borrowed extra chairs from a friend, and extra dishes from the church kitchen. I've made lasagna, which is bound to be tasty, and the other guests will supply salad, bread, side dish, appetizer, and dessert.

It feels so good not to be ashamed of my house, or my entertaining skills, or my cooking prowess, but just to say, "Come! You are welcome to what I have." And I think it's good practice for not being ashamed of anything in my life, if I offer it with generous love. That's what poetry writing has become for me. I don't know if I'm a good poet, but I write my poems and email them to a few friends, or post them here on my blog, bidding the world welcome to them.

But I'm still not going to join any of the Philosophy Department sports teams!

Advice from Thomas Edison

The night before last, I decided to give up on looking for love. Too much rejection! Too much heartbreak! Too much beating my bloodied head against unbeatable odds! In a fit of despair I canceled my subscription to every dating website. I emailed every male person who had been a possibility and explained that I was no longer in any way, shape, or form interested in forming any sort of relationship. I told my friends that if the handsomest, smartest, funniest, kindest man in the world were to ask me out, I would say no.

But then on Facebook yesterday, someone posted this quote from Thomas Edison, which is apparently very well known because it turns out that you can buy T-shirts, mugs, totebags, onesies for infants, with this saying imprinted on them: "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time."

It's a great line, because it doesn't direct us to keep on trying endlessly, the old try, try again adage. Try just one more time. Of course, enough one-more-times add up to trying endlessly, but you don't have to think right now about a lifetime of endless endeavor. For now, try just one more time.

Still, there has to be something to be said as well on behalf of giving up. Authors hear stories of other authors who submitted their manuscripts dozens of times before the big, break-through acceptance, yes, but there are also manuscripts that get rejected because they are just plain bad. I've always been irked by children's books about kids who struggle with sports and doggedly keep on going and then finally earn some small success: why NOT quit an activity that isn't rewarding or fulfilling, especially if you're not very good at it? That is certainly my stance about most sports. And right now it's my stance about dating.

And yet. . . that line of Edison's repeats itself in my head. Try just one more time.

I'm not going to try today, though. Today I'm going to take my new car to get an emissions test, and to get a second key made, and to buy it some nice rubber floor mats. Today I'm going to clean and organize my very small house for the somewhat large dinner party I'm hosting tomorrow night. Today I'm going to write a chapter on my book, and write two book reviews, and read fifty pages of a dissertation.

But tomorrow - maybe - I'll think about trying just one more time.

My New Little Car

I surprised myself by going out and buying a car yesterday. I must have set something close to a record in the speed with which I bought it once the idea popped into my head. I looked on the Internet for about three minutes, saw a previously owned Chevy Aveo at the same dealer where I bought my previously owned Subaru Outback a couple of years ago, took the bus over there, and bought it. I'm glad I test-drove it at least, or otherwise I would have not realized until too late that it was completely baffling how to shift into reverse on this particular car (the kindly car salesman showed me and let me practice a few times under his training). Or that even starting the car in the first place is a challenge: apparently, you need to have your foot on the clutch in order to get the engine to fire up. I drove a stick shift for 18 years, but I guess I forgot a lot.

The biggest plus of this cute little blue car: it has windows that you roll up and down with an old-fashioned handle. I rented an Aveo once and loved it just for that reason.

Christopher and I have been sharing a car for the past many months, and he's been the one who has used it 95 percent of the time, driving to and from work and socializing with friends. I've managed quite well getting around Boulder with our wonderful buses and my wonderful CU bus pass that allows me to ride for free. But still, it's been challenging sometimes, and I'm going to need a car of my own when I'm at DePauw next year. And it's fun to be able to think of someplace I would like to go, and just go there.

So where WOULD I like to go?

One Way to Write Poetry

I'm two days behind on my poem-a-day commitment. Well, just one day really. I missed yesterday and haven't yet done today. But I almost didn't do my poem on Friday, which makes me feel that as far as poetry goes lately, I'm hanging on to it by my fingertips.

Then I found the perfect way to write a poem on Friday afternoon. I went to a colloquium talk by a philosopher who was one of our former grad students, now returning in glory. It was a very technical paper in an area in which I do not specialize. In fact, here is the abstract of the talk for your delectation:

ABSTRACT: "How is intelligent action possible? The present paper begins to develop an intellectualist answer to this Kantian ("how-possible") question. The paper is divided into seven sections. §1 introduces the general philosophical theory of intelligence and intelligent action, as introduced by Gilbert Ryle, and then explains how Ryle's regress argument is meant to show that Intelligent action is impossible, if an intellectualist view of the mind is correct. §2 contrasts an anti-intellectualist view (of intelligence and intelligent action and locates knowledge how as a hinge in the familiar debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. The remainder of the paper is an attempt to resolve this debate in favor of intellectualism by developing an account of knowledge how that satisfactorily dissolves the regress."

So I sat there during the talk, filling a chair to show support for our departmental colloquium series. But as I sat there, I didn't really, well, listen to the talk. Instead I wrote a poem. But you'll see that I put philosophy in the poem, so, heck, I figure that it counts. Here it is:

Eternal Recurrence

Herr Friedrich Nietzsche said it is not true
that we shall never pass this way but once.
He said instead that everything that was
shall be again, and then again, and then
again, repeating endlessly through all
of time. He has no proof, of course, but nor
can it be proved that everything must end;
philosophers' disputes rest unresolved.
If he is right, there'll be another day
when you and I will first make love, indeed
a thousand, thousand, thousand other days,
each one the first, forever first, but then
there'll be a thousand, thousand, thousand days
when you will turn and slowly walk away.