Author talks, Bloggangangers and little houses

May 12, 2009 by Wendy

Old post office

Alert! I’m doing an author talk at StoryStudio Chicago on Saturday, May 30th, along with Stephanie Kuehnert and Simone Elkeles, and we’ll be talking about living the literary life, Chicago-style (because that’s what the program says), which lately for me involves whole days spent indoors eating nothing but pitas from the Al-Khayyam bakery on Kedzie and watching all kinds of unspeakable stuff that I’ve Tivoed from the Hallmark Channel. (For research!) Anyway, both Stephanie and Simone write young adult novels, and seeing as how I write for an adult market and edit for a children’s one, it sort of balances out to YA, right?Â I think between the three of us we’ll be able to help you. And I promise that if you come to this it will way be better than if you’d just written me an email asking whatever it is you want to know about writing and publishing, because when you email me it puts off the completion and subsequent publication of my next book by at least forty-five minutes. I’m almost serious here. Really, just come to this thing on the 30th.

It’s great to be writing a book and working on it every day, and yet there are so many things I would rather be doing than writing a book. For instance I wish to high heaven that I could take part in this VC Andrews Reading Challenge (see also here!) because for the past two years or so Chris and I have been going through the books in the original Dollanganger series, wherein I read them aloud to Chris while we’re on long car trips (he drives, I read) and then we thoughtfully discuss the various motifs that appear throughout the series, such as The Lifestyles of the Rich and Dismal (Do the Foxworths always have to go with the heavy draperies and crystal goblets and extremely long dining tables? With all that money, couldn’t they could figure out how to be less creepy?) and Extreme Ballet (Cathy’s pirouette-and-slap fighting technique is unstoppable!).Â We are on Garden of Shadows now, which is way much better than the horribly-paced soapy fizzle of Seeds of Yesterday; so much better, in fact, that I’m pretty sure the ghostwriter studied the proto-feminist themes of Daphne du Maurier in grad school, because it is kind of loaded!Â I wish I had time to write a paper on it or something!Â But read this excellent recap of Flowers in the Attic instead. You will not be sorry.

Oh, and GUESS WHERE I WAS LAST WEEK.Â And I was here, too. That’s practically all I can tell you right now, but I will say that when I was in Missouri I met the awesome Catherine Pond, who saw some of the same stuff I did and became my friend. It made me very pleased to know that another writer could tell I was a writer, because, like I said, when you spend half the week at home eating pitas and rearranging sentences and being stuck for hours at a time in the chewy pita pocket of your own mind, you can kind of forget what you are, and sometimes you just need to get out and see little houses.

(Incidentally, I’m interested in hearing from people who have intriguing or hilarious anecdotes about visiting any of the Laura Ingalls Wilder sites, so drop me a line if you have something to share.)

Chris and I are off to New York this weekend, but more when I get back. See you on the 3oth, too.

How it was

April 2, 2009 by Wendy

Hall 30

People keep asking me if I’m jetlagged, but I’m pretty sure I’m not, at least not in the sense that my body thinks it’s 3 pm in the middle of the night. However it does seem like it’s reverted to some kind of Central Standard Tired As All Hell time zone, so who knows what it’s thinking right now. Spring forward, fall back, stumble around after being in flight for twelve hours. That’s how it goes, I guess.

I had a great time in Italy, even though the language barrier turned me into a bashful nitwit who responded to retail transactions by silently handing over the largest denomination of Euros currently available in my wallet. Kind of like a wealthy, awkward, gigantic Hello Kitty. It was a very good thing that my cousin Meg, who speaks Italian and lived there for years, was around to help me out, because even with a phrasebook I am really useless. I was stricken with this hideous shyness that made me want to just inconspicuously mutter all the grazies and buongiornos, only to discover that it’s actually exceedingly hard to mumble in Italian.Â So I went around with my purse full of change and only very occasionally sputtering something out loud, and I survived, and clearly I am not going to be writing the next Eat, Pray, Love anytime soon now, am I? Right!

I spent the first part of the week in Bologna attending the Children’s Book Fair for work and seeing how the rest of the world publishes kids’ books. The fair attracts hundreds of international illustrators who exhibit their work and show off their portfolios, and it was deeply mind-blowing to see it all, because European children’s books often look wildly different from American and British ones. In a nutshell: British and U.S. children’s picture books tend to show cuddly bunnies having birthday parties, whereas in European picture books you get to see dwarf clowns in bird masks playing mumblety-peg. (This is of course a broad generalization! I do not mean to favor one style over another! Though I can’t help but wonder if my childhood would have been maybe a little more awesome if I’d gotten to read a few more picture books about dream symphonies conducted by marionette puppets with insect heads. I’m just saying. And again, totally generalizing.) One of my favorite parts of the fair was seeing the walls on the illustrators’ posting room starting to fill up with tearsheets and samples and business cards on the first day of the fair; then coming back the second day to see that every inch of wall and some of the floor had been covered.Â Eveyone loves to talk about these fairs and expos just in terms of how the book business is doing and about how many companies showed up this year, and all that, but one look at that illustrators posting room makes you remember that no matter what happens, the art keeps coming; it can fill up all the space if you let it.

The photo at the top of this entry is from the wonderfully dystopian BolognaFiere complex where the fair was held.Â I loved this place. I sort of wish it had been in Florence because then I could have just gone there and looked at to cure my Stendhal Syndrome after spending all of Thursday morning staring at Renaissance cathedrals. The latter part of the week was in Florence, where I stayed at this Hotel Orchidea place where my cousin used to work (and you have to read this page about the history of the place, about how it’s in a tower where Dante’s wife lived, and how in the courtyard there’s a statue of a girl crying at the feet of a Sphinx while it gazes off and ignores her suffering! I’ve seen it and it really does just that!), and ate a lot of gelato, and little sandwiches, and fried olives. (Really, a surprising number of fried things, including some rice-and-meat balls that were delicious clods of cheesy, starchy joy, and if anyone knows what they’re called, please tell me.)

I’m glad I took so many photos. After the train from Florence back to Bologna and the two flights home, and a whole snowy weekend of napping and unpacking, I had to look everything up on Wikipediaâ€”all the basilicas and piazzas and palazzos and piazzales, all the saints and the sculptorsâ€”just so I could label my pictures on Flickr. But it was worth it to go back and carefully assemble it all again. After I’d hurtled there and back, it was good to catch up with it allâ€”with everything, and with myself, too.

A soddy excuse, indeed!

March 19, 2009 by Wendy

I would love for you to think that for the past month or so I’ve been dwelling in a sod dugout with no computer and only a kerosene-fueled Twitter feed, working on the book in pencil in my store-boughten notebooks with the orange covers. (I know that for some of you, that last sentence totally made sense, whereas the rest of you will think I have just lost my shit.)

But yes, I have been working on the book, and I forgot how hard it is to start a book, how completely daunting those first weeks are.Â I feel like the last time I was this overwhelmed was when we moved to our current apartment, and now that I think about it, I’m convinced that starting a book is a hell of a lot like those first few days and weeks, when the whole place is just empty rooms with boxes of your stuff and you don’t know which boxes to open first, which ones have the important stuff in them, so you just unpack everything and clutter the whole place up with extension cords and stacks of books and lampshades, and suddenly you’re strangely miserable about the placement of the couch, because even though that’s probably the best place for the couch, you understand all too well that putting it in that spot means that you can’t put it anywhere else, and you can always move it later, yes, but then that means for sure you’ve picked the wrong place, which means you’re probably getting other things wrong; plus then there’s all this new stuff that you need, and this other stuff that you love suddenly doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

That’s how it’s been inside my head for awhile now. But room by room, it’s starting to happen.

Oh, and believe it or not, I’m flying to Italy this weekend. Will any of you be attending the Bologna Children’s Book Fair? If so we should party and try to sell each other U.S. or foreign publication rights!Â It will be awesome!

That’s all I have to report right now: cluttered apartment book-brain, impending Italy trip, and exhaustion. Next time I post here I will probably be even more tired, but worldlier, too. Have a good weekend, North America! Catch you on the flip side!

No news is good news

January 18, 2009 by Wendy

Here it is nearly the end of January and I still haven’t talked about the Oprah article. You know, Oprah’s article in her magazine O: The Oprah Magazine, where the cover showed Oprah alongside her past Oprah self, who had appeared on a previous cover of O: The Oprah Magazine back when that Oprah was a skinnier Oprah? Yes, that Oprah article. And already I’ve gotten the Feburary copy of O: The Oprah Magazine, with another Oprah, meaning the Oprah of the future is now the Oprah of today, so I figured I really ought get around to discussing her whole weight gain thing, right?

Except then I realized I really don’t want to talk about the Oprah article. I mean I stared at the cover photo and at Oprah’s tidy purple sweatsuit of remorse and just felt tired. And you know, I like Oprah. I like her magazine because it has some very good books coverage, and I guess I’m at that age where I’ll read the Suze Orman column and nod yes, yes, and feel almost kind of tingly about having a Roth IRA. But you know what? I think Oprah should stop making her body news. That’s all.

As for me, you’ll noticed I haven’t been saying anything about my Progress or My Journey or This Thing I’m Doing at all, not for the past year, really, and maybe some people who’ve read I’m Not the New Me have been wondering what’s up. I don’t know: nothing. Or rather, the “problem” of being at this totally uninspiring and conventionally unacceptable purple-sweatsuit weight has become less and less of a preoccupation over the past few years as most of the crappy habits and shitty sorrows that used to be lumped in with The Problem have been taken on and managed.Â My instincts to go to the gym on a regular basis, eat vegetables, and not stifle my tears with fistfuls of cheese are in pretty good working order. Doing these things has not made me thin, and maybe that’s a mystery, but one that seems more trouble than it’s worth to solve right now. These days, The Problem is mostly about how sometimes I wince at photos of myself and don’t much like that number on the scale. And who else has that problem? Oh, everyone everywhere? Okay, then.

I’m not going to pretend I have it all figured out. I can read something on body acceptance and nod wisely and be completely convinced. Then two days later I’ll read about how all I need to do is to just write down everything I eat and track all my calories every day and simply say “no thank you” to slices of cake at parties, and I’ll nod yes, yes to all that, because that, too, seems perfectly reasonable. It all depends.Â But I don’t see why I should concern you guys with any of that, you know? Because it’s not news. In fact, it’s nothing new at all. But stick around, I’ll be here.

Holly Jolly

December 21, 2008 by Wendy

2896

If I weren’t travelling for the holidays this year I might have had time for another gingerbread project. In keeping with the neighborhood theme, I was really hoping to make Governor Blagojevich’s house, complete with a little gingerbread media circus lovingly made with gumdrop cameras, licorice cables, graham cracker TV vans, etc. But since I’m leaving for Michigan tomorrow morning and had to spend the past week in a shopping/working/gift-wrapping/working/driving through stupidly deep snow/working frenzy, I guess I have to give up on my little dream of making corrupt little cookie Blagojeviches (using half a jar of chocolate jimmies just on the hair) and just wish all of you a very Merry Christmas.

And stay warm. This afternoon we went out to see friends (yes, INSTEAD of making gingerbread spectacles, sorry) and the temperature was a degree. One degree, not plural!Â Though of course the windchill was negative plural multiple minus ABC-blackout googleplex degrees, so cold that the world ceases to make sense, and you travel backwards through time, and your fingers and toes hurt like hell because invisible dinosaurs are stomping on them, but it’s good that they hurt, right? It means something. Don’t ask me to explain because it’s cold. Too cold for sciencey thinking! So bundle up.

And, hey! If you’re anywhere near NYC in a couple of weeks, come see me and Attenberg read at Good World Bar on January 11th.

More in the new year, when I’ll get to tell you what else I’ve been up to these days. Happy everything!

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