Like: AMAZING blurbs by awe-inspiring authors… Tamora Pierce and Lisa McMann.

Like: Getting an author profile on Goodreads that posts your blog RIGHT THERE ON THE PAGE. (If you’re reading this on Goodreads, then that’s very meta:)

Like: This incredible cover for Harbinger. When my editor, the phenomenal Stacey Barney, asked me what I imagined for the cover, I said that I’d love something that had a striking central image and continued to draw you into the story as you looked closer. But that I didn’t want to get too specific, because the artists could clearly dream up something much better than I ever could.

That was truer than I could have imagined. The artists and designers at Putnam made this stunning cover that takes my breath away every time I look at it.  And there’s still more to come. This is the cover that will be on all the Advanced Reader Copies… but on the final cover, the border will have line art specific to my story!

*sigh* I’m completely in love!

So thank you Stacey and everyone at Putnam that has made this an amazing publishing adventure so far. I feel incredibly fortunate.

As Dr. Who says… Allons-y!

Around the same time, I started working on a new book, replacing familiar characters with new ones. Then my computer died, taking some of my writing with it.

It wasn’t until my friend Edith, who I wrote with twice a week, announced she was moving that I recognized everything in my life was shifting. I was not impressed.

Change is hard. And it seems to come all at once, disrupting your schedule, switching the scenery, and upsetting the balance. This is just the way life works. To move forward, life must change. Sad or happy, it’s inevitable. And this is true with writing as well.

Except with writing, we’re inflicting the change on ourselves. We rearrange the furniture. Kill off characters. Add new ones. It’s the nature of revision, but at times I find myself hesitating. What if I mess it up? What if the things that are good about my story get lost?  Sometimes the story seems so close to being right, that it feels risky to change it.

But we have to.

If we want our stories to be everything we’ve imagined them to be in our heads… if I want the chance to share that story with the world… then we have no choice but to step forward. We have to take our story apart and put it back together again, trusting that what we rebuild will be stronger than before.

And the same is true with life. I will always miss my puppy. I will miss Edith and typing away next to her at the coffee shop. I will even miss my computer, bulky and covered with stickers. But as pieces of my life fall away, I have to believe that what is left, that what is coming next, will be strong and beautiful too.

What?

Oh. What I meant was how dare William Steig portray the police as pigs! That is outrageous.

And this poem… it just really gets under my skin.

Clearly, it’s teaching materialism by advocating shopping as an exciting activity.

What?

Oh. I meant that Shel Silverstein is teaching our children to be disrespectful and downright malicious! This is terrible.

And how about these cute penguins?? They really make my blood boil! Cause they’re cute and they look like they’re smiling and we all know that penguins don’t smile.

And… um… tell me again what was wrong with the cute penguins?

Oh right. I hate it when books show happy families that love each other. Especially when they’re based on true stories. Those are the WORST.

Clearly picture books are tearing apart the fabric of America, one penguin at a time.

Happy Banned Books Week!

Laptop Noir: Part Deux 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tools: Pliers, business card, hammer, screwdriver, drill.

Time: 2 Days, 2 fed-ex packages, and 1 trip to Home Depot.

Who: Previously mentioned Uber-Geek:Wizard of Ingenuity

*No dogs were harmed in the making of this film*

But hunches never lie.

I heard the noise before I saw the trouble.  A horrible gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk coming from my computer. Then I saw the screen. Frozen like a popsicle in the middle of winter.

Terror struck at my heart. Ice filled my veins. The truth cut at me with a horror so cliche that it would leave you all speechless.

I hadn’t backed up my new story.

“Help!” I screamed.

The door burst open and in strode my technically-adept husband, a man so geeky that Velociraptors mongoliensis run in fear. But it turns out, even the good guys have their kryptonite.

“Hard drives…” he gasped. “My only weakness.”

“Keep it together man!” I said, giving his handsome mug a smack.

He shook off the panic and glared down at that computer like it was a gunslinger a second after high noon. “Maybe I should teach it a lesson it won’t soon forget.”

And without flinching, he gave my computer a technical tap.

Wham!

Gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk.

My husband shook his head, turned his back on the sound, and ordered a new hard drive at the first stop off the information superhighway.

Sometimes the bad guys get thrown in the slammer. Sometimes the guy does get the girl. Sometimes the good guys do win the good fight.

But today wasn’t one of those days.

I sighed, slumped in my chair, and pulled out a pen. It was time to take matters into my own hands.

Through all this, the Mt. Wilson Observatory has been a focus, partly because, until yesterday, it had a webcam that updated every 2 minutes, giving you a kind of real time stop-motion animation of the fire. But while most people have been talking about the communication towers that are at risk on the mountain and what a fire might mean to television stations, radios, and cell phones, my mind keeps going back to a strange little exhibit I saw at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Now for those of you who have never been there, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of the weirdest place perhaps anywhere. Squeezed in between a run-down rug store and an office building is the museum’s ornately gated doorway with a little fountain decorating the wall. When you step inside, the line between reality and fantasy instantly blurs. Most of the museum has a slightly turn-of-the-century, occultish feel to it.  The exhibits, while factual in nature, are designed in a way that make you question the meaning and realness behind them.

For example, one exhibit chronicles, in detail, the life of two people who never met but who, at a  one pivotal moment in their lives, were at the same place at the same time. An operatic concert performed at the Igassu Falls in Argentina.

Another exhibit shows micromosaics by Henry Dalton, created entirely out of butterfly scales, which you can only view using a microscope.

But the exhibit I’m thinking of is in a small, closet-like room. Its walls are covered with letters sent to the Mt. Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. They are strange rambling notes from different people, all who had discovered the secrets of the universe and felt compelled to share them with the scientists at the observatory.

It sounds crazy, but there’s a conviction, and often a poetry, to the letters that makes them cling to your mind. For example, in one letter, a man, Edward, writes, “Etholeum – The base of all existance – it is One with Electricity and There is no place where It does not exist. It is the conduit of The Light between all of the planets and thru the telephone and the radio and without it There would be no Earth Because there would be No sound. to be transferred between”

In another letter, Mrs. Alice May Williams urgently writes, “I want to tell you I am not after money & I am not a fraud. I believe I have some knowledge which you gentlemen should have. If I die my knowledge may die with me, & no one may ever have the same knowledge again.”

The writer in me wants to know what this woman knew, who she was.

Did she hold some secret that is now gone forever? Is the world a lesser place without it? A lump of a sadness forms inside me for the possibilities that have been lost.

As the fire rages here in the hills outside of Los Angeles, consuming buildings and lives, that sadness becomes a tangible pall over the city. Ash drifts down on us and an amber moon holds vigil. Homes and forests and people are gone that should not be gone. And no one may ever have the same knowledge again.

Well, anyway. I was out jogging and a RAVEN (yes, that’s right, a giant, fat raven) landed on my head.

Out of friggin’ nowhere!

As you may guess, I shrieked like a little girl and batted at my head, though by then the raven (not crow or cuddly pigeon or anything) had already taken off.

Then he just sat there on a nearby fence, pretending like nothing’d happened. But I knew it and he knew and my poor head knew it. Their claws are very sharp, take my word for it.

Just in case it was the Angel of Really Bizarre Warnings or a trickster god in disguise, Tony and I turned around and jogged the other direction. You don’t want to mess around when there are foreboding avians on the loose! Maybe today’s a good day to go back to bed…

Today in the mail, I received the bane of a writer’s existence. “Your work was given careful consideration by one of our editors, and we are sorry to say that we do not feel like it is right for our list.” ARGGGGGGG!

The form letter has the power to derail you like nothing else. That’s because it is exactly that, nothing. You can’t fight back against it. You can’t rage against its harsh judgment. You can’t even scream ‘THEY’RE WRONG.” It’s pretty hard to argue against a non-opinion about your work.

And, of course as writers, we start imagining. Picturing the assistant editor’s assistant who looked at your pages. She sneered at them. She didn’t even bother getting to the second paragraph. She just cackled evilly to herself.

“I wouldn’t sully my pen by writing a single word on this manuscript. The ink would probably eat through those terrible metaphors anyway. How dare such filth be sent to this fine establishment! Ban the Sara-woman for life!”

I will not let the reality of my experiences and conversations with perfectly nice editors get in the way of my imagination either. The assistant is actually a dragon, sitting in her cave, surrounded by manuscripts instead of treasure. She roasts the truly despicable ones… I can even see the singe marks around the edges of my story now. Can’t you?

Whew. I’m actually feeling pretty lucky now. I’m sure the worst authors get kidnapped and skewered for dinner. At least, I escaped that fate.

Flap. Flap. Flap. Do you hear that strange noise?

AHHHHHHHHHHH!

Biodiesel.

The great misunderstood nectar.

A year and a half ago, Tony and I bought a 2003 Jetta Volkswagon so that we could run biodiesel. Luckily, in Califonia there are quite a few gas stations that sell B99. We’ve been running the car almost completely on biodiesel since, with the occasional emergency diesel fill-up.

It’s been great… until 2 weeks ago. Then our lovely Jetta, the glorious ‘Dr. Who,’ wouldn’t start. The problem probably has to do with the kind of diesel California used to sell before we bought the car having a argument with the kind of diesel California sells currently, being mediated, unsuccessfully, by the biodiesel. Love triangles always end in tragedy!

We talked a friend into helping us change the fuel filter (thanks Ryan!), but that was a no go. Then we towed it to the Volkswagon dealership. 2 days later they tell us, first that it might be a $2500 job, then that they won’t touch our car because it runs biodiesel. Yeehaw!

So we’re doing what we should’ve done in the first place. Taking it to an independent mechanic that has experience with biodiesel and no prejudices (or corporate lines).

Has any of this soured me on biodiesel? No.

With biodiesel, I can feel good about my choices. The fuel is usually reprocessed waste oil from vegetable products. When it burns, I’m returning the same oxygen and CO2 that was used by the plants in the first place. The crops used the gases from the atmosphere to grow, my car put the gases back into the atmosphere, and future crops will take it out again. Anyone else hear “The Circle of Life” playing in the background?

I’m functioning inside a closed system, instead of adding gases and pollutants from oil that has been in the ground for millions of years. Biodiesel’s not perfect, but it’s a start. And also, no one is invading Kansas in order to gain control of its soybean fields.

So. Hopefully, our clean vehicle will be back on the road soon and, even more hopefully, for less than $2500 dollars. Cross your fingers and eat your vegetables. Or at least let your car eat them.

*****

Ewwww! Slimy. Grimy.

Oooey. Gooey. Sink stacked full.

Think I’ll get take-out.

*****