Quote

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”   -Kurt Vonnegut

The "just one person" is me, usually... but with the children's book? The one person is Little Z. That seems, so far, to be working out just fine. I just ask her what she likes. Usually, she tells me what she likes. Sometimes, she just says, "We don't care about that." Meaning children. She does not care about where the words are placed on the page, so long as she can read the story. She does not like scary looking spiders, but she likes cute spiders, even if they have someone that looks like her tied up in a web. She does like giraffes in sunglasses. She likes crows in hats. 

It's easiest to write to one person. Vonnegut was right. 

The Unobserved Moment

I was in Norway. And Sweden. And Denmark. Lost, too, because my phone didn't work there and no one gives good directions anymore. But wonderfully lost.

You probably already figured it out. If I disappear, you can kind of figure I'm out of the country of these United States, and give it a fifty-fifty chance I'm in Sweden- because, let's face it, when you take the time to learn a language like Swedish, you're going back to Sweden. Often. I mean, no one else in the world speaks Swedish, so what's the point, otherwise?

People in Sweden don't even speak Swedish, half the time, but that's another story.

************

Time is different when you aren't writing about it. Or taking pictures and posting them on your blog. It's all different.

Something changes when you are making something into a story in your mind. I won't say it's a bad thing, necessarily, but something definitely changes. And then you race around writing and photographing and painting and creating and there's just a point when you have to take some time and just...

Be.

You know?

So that's why I haven't been writing of late. I feel refreshed.

***********

I did mean to write about it. I totally meant to keep a journal of my trip. I bought a really pretty journal. I wrote in it the first day. We went through Paris to get to Norway, and I wrote this:

A good beginning, I thought. Nothing special.

Incidentally, my Swedish friend, Stina, went to Paris three years ago. She was staying with a friend. She stepped outside for a moment. The garbage man was there, emptying the trash into his truck. He asked to have sex with her.

She declined, and then asked her friend whom she was visiting what the heck?

"You looked at him," said her French friend.

*************

My book was number three today in comedy give-aways, right behind What's French for WTF? I wish I had thought of that title. My next book has that as the main idea. Guess I'm not alone? I shouldn't get the book, though, because I might be keeping Gwen Ellery ahead of me (although she deserves it).


And yes the book is free again, still today and tomorrow and Sunday. Ja ja.

***************

It's good to be back home, though they sure make it difficult to get back into these United States. Their motto at customs is, "If you left the US willingly, you must be a traitor." They treat people accordingly. Still, God bless America, and all that. There's no place like home.

A guinea hen started living here while we were gone.

I know I wasn't supposed to write this until Tuesday. Forgive me. Förlåt. I couldn't wait.

An Ironically Poorly Writen Post About Writing

My dad is nagging me to write a book. Does he even realize that if I write a book, he's going to be in it?

Naw, seriously. He's only in half of it. Or three quarters of it, tops.

I haven't written the book yet, mind you. Just thinking about it gives me anxiety. You see, I have written books before. Terrible books. Fiction books. I sit down, and I say, "I am going to write a book," and I come up with the latest gimmick method (snowflake), and I have to win a Nobel Prize in literature, and get it published by a major publishign house, and everyone has to like it, and, and, and, and, and... nope. I write books not worth reading, actually even embarrassing- embarrassing to myself, not to other people, like this current book.

I have the *title for the new one, which is going to be the truth. And I have the cover art. It's not that I believe in starting at the beginning and proceeding until I reach the end; it just happened that way. I did something unrelated and realized it was perfect. And this time, I'm not going to use a method. It's just going to be you and me, folks. Just like here. And this time, everyone is going to hate it, which is fine. It's my punk rock magnum opus. Scream swear words at me, everyone. Scream them. It's all good.

When I first started writing the blog, I did not at all mean it to be funny. I meant it to be poignant, touching, meaningful, I was going to make you cry, goddamnit! And then this troll stopped by and left a comment once, "You think this shit is funny? This isn't funny!" And I thought, well, no, I didn't think it was funny. Who said it was funny? This random anonymous person just said it was not funny, which must mean it seems like it's actually really funny, because this person feels really bad about himself and puts people down for doing what they do best and then he says it's not funny, which must mean it really is funny, so maybe I should work on being funny and stuff?

I am always unintentionally funny. When I try to be funny, people hate me.

I've noticed something about writers: they happen in clumps. Look at the crowd in Paris in the 1920's. Consider the Dorothy Parker and the Viscous Circle in New York. Or how about Harper Lee and Truman Capote?

When I ran into Alex Bledsoe in the library the other day, which is incidentally where I met him a few years ago, his kid playing with my kid, I felt nervous in the presence of such greatness. I didn't used to feel that way at all, because I hadn't yet read The Hum and the Shiver when I used to feel normal around him. And now that I have read the Hum and the Shiver, I get nervous in his presence. I stuck my head in my tote bag. And then I thought, I really need to act like a normal person right now. So, I took my head out of my tote bag and talked to him like a semblance of a normal person. Alex Bledsoe did what anyone would do right then: he pretended I hadn't just stuck my head inside my tote bag like an ostrich.

Mr. Bledsoe was a guest speaker in one of my classes a long time ago, which was a huge favour, and I read his books the way you read the books of people you know. I felt a sense of duty, when I started. And then the vampire books were so sexual that I was shocked and amused. The fantasy books were fun. The Hum and the Shiver, though, was in a class of its own. It was a fantasy that you could believe to be completely real. And it was about the power of music. As the daughter of a musician, I sort of loved it. And later, when I saw the author, I stuck my head in a tote bag.

The next book in the The Hum and the Shiver series comes out this week.

What if, you just have to wonder, what if the next great place to be is right here and right now? This is Paris, this is New York, this is San Francisco when the beats were on top of the world... this is right now. This is where the there is. Me. You. This.

* The title is, Don't Mind Me; I'm Not Really Here Because, you know what, let's face it: I'm never where the there is!

Quote of the Day

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." -W. Somerset Maugham

Quote of the Day

"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." -William Strunk Jr.

[I think he could have left it at the first sentence.]