Sunshine at Noon

It’s a beautiful morning, ahhh.
       Think I’ll go outside for awhile,
And just smile…

Happy Inauguration Day.

Andi at a wrung sponge has an interesting project for the 44th inaugural ceremony commemoration — a picture and a post — forty-four words long. Hers is — painful. But hopeful. The posts will be rounded up at the Peapods blog.

Sunday Silliness

The prompt today at Sunday Scribblings is “pilgrimage,” and that’s what I did this weekend.

Those of you who participate in the WBBT/SBBT know that sometimes you JUST LOVE an author, so the format of the Summer/Winter Blog Blast Tour enables you to ask them to talk to you — about their books, about their lives, what’s playing in their iPod, and what authors they’re reading. Barring MotherReader’s unfortunate restraining order1 for the Mo Willems incident(s), (*!!!*) most of us keep our fangirling and stalkerish tendencies under wraps. *cough* You’ll be gratified to hear that I have taken stalking to a whole new level! Wonderland had so much fun interviewing her for WBBT this past November that yesterday I stalked author Elizabeth Wein all the way to her change ringing rehearsal at an ancient cathedral, and then to her house! And she’s very, very funny!

Okay, it was supposed to be a short visit — as in, I’ll just hop a train early in the morning and bring her a few goodies from the United States. After all, those of us who live abroad have to keep each other in Hershey’s, right? But the short visit turned into two meals and a 12-hour tour of Perthshire, conversing on a whole wealth of topics that continued until literally minutes before the doors on our eight o’clock train closed.

Of course, there were the whole “Liz Is Trying To Kill Me” episodes, which included a dizzying spiral stairwell that was exactly as wide as my shoulders — and getting more narrow as it rose, a river so high she called it a “death trap” and wet rocks slicked with moss, but I bribed her with 20 pounds of candy to let me live, and so we went home. We will just draw a veil over how dorky I looked crawling up the rocks on my hands and knees. Yes. Drawing a veil. Now.

Ahem.

To conclude: real life authors are lovely people, and should you have a chance to meet one in his or her own home environment, they will often feed you, and let their children take blurry, close-up pictures of you. It’s a lot of fun. (Pictures to follow; Flickr is uploading at the speed of a wheezing asthmatic camel in a sand slide.)


Reminder via Children’s Writers & Illustrators Market newsletter:

It’s the 78th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition! Submit your children’s or young adult fiction! The reading fee is GRAND PRIZE: $3,000 cash and a trip to New York City to meet with editors or agents. Writer’s Digest will fly you and a guest to The Big Apple, where you’ll spend three days and two nights in the publishing capital of the world. While you’re there, a Writer’s Digest editor will escort you to meet and share your work with four editors or agents! Plus, you’ll receive a free Diamond Publishing Package from Outskirts Press.

Entry Deadline: May 15, 2009.

The most fun about this contest is that it’s open to everyone. Check out the small print at Writer’s Digest.


  1. We all know that’s a joke, right? RIGHT!?!?

Poetry Friday: Unnoticed and Necessary


Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite writers of all time. This poem has been passed around and I don’t know if it’s in one of her books I haven’t yet read, but it’s one I love.

She wrote another one, Variations on the Word Love which is also quite popular, but it’s this one that touches me, somehow. There’s such a vulnerability in sleep, and the way the poem draws one and immerses one into deeper and deeper layers reminds me of actually falling asleep, and in that depth, there is a vast intimacy. The final line clinches it for me — and it also brings up the question of whether or not I really would ever want to be that person — so necessary and unnoticed — and selfless enough to be unnoticed.

Could you?

“Variations On The Word ‘Sleep'”
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.


Poetry Friday today is hosted at The Blog With The Shockingly Clever Title. Keep a good thought for Karen today as she battles plumbing gremlins!

The Next Cool Thing for Today

I really love craftastic blogging chicas. Leila’s always doing something cool with literary bags, or t-shirts, Farida rocks the sewing and the dolls most awesomely, and everybody knows about Laini’s Ladies.

Wendi Gratz, one of the craftastic members of Gratz Industries (the other half of the industry produces some really awesome Horatio Wilkes Mysteries, two of which are IN MY HOUSE, whee!) has come up with THE cutest …definition dolls. That’s really the only way I can describe them.

I have to admit that I want a doll named Vigilante…

Two A Few New-to-You (New to me, anyway) Short Fiction Outlets

mental_floss is now publishing short fiction in conjunction with apt23.com. Check out the first of No Small Tales here. The editors of mental_floss put out an excellent magazine, and submitting a short story to apt23 is a really solidly good idea.

All genres of short fiction for young adults and children — fairytale rewrites, horror, romance, and the ubiquitous six word short-short story — are being sought by TBR Tallboy, deadline June 1st. Tallboy is a new zine that’s going to see the light of day March first, and will have wide distribution among bookish types. Though it’s not a paying market, like the mental_floss, it looks to be a good place to read great stories and get one’s name known; the ‘zine editor is a reviewer and blogger. And a librarian, incidentally.

EDITED TO ADD: Miranda Literary Magazine has put out their 2009 Submission Guidelines. This magazine publishes an online edition, and has a print audience as well.

Prick of the Spindle, a webzine of unique fiction (and weird fairytale retellings), has submission guidelines here.

Strange Horizons, my very favorite speculative fiction ezine pays $.50/word, with a minimum payment of $50 per story. They’re considered a professional market. Another ezine that has some great tales is Beneath Ceaseless Skies — it’s got a very old-school SF feel. Perhaps one of the weirdest and narrowest niche markets for science fiction, ever is … Space Westerns. Some odd but funny stories, and they only pay teensy amounts, but it’s good fun and something for the writing résumé/CV.

Back in the U.S.S…. no, wait. UK…



I’m baaaaack!

The most stressful wrangling with the UK embassy is over, and we made it back to Glasgow, just in time for the skies to open and drench us as we went out to get groceries. It was actually funny — when we landed, the sun was shining.

C’est la vie!

As Glasgow counts down to the 250th birthday of Robbie Burns (January 25th — it’s going to be a humdinger of a party), back home, people are counting down the days ’til the inauguration… and I am beginning to feel for the people in D.C.! According to speculation, it looks like there will be one bathroom for every 10,000 people. Oh, dear.

Via Jen Robinson’s Book Page, the International Reading Association reports on an African American Read-In. This is huge news to me, because a.) I’d never heard of any of the above and b.)this is an NCTE thing. To be counted as participants, people are asked to merely select books authored by African Americans; and report their results by submitting the 2009 African American Read-In Report Card. The suggested reading list is not intended to be exhaustive, but has plenty of favorite authors and a few new finds.

In more book news, Atlanta bookseller Doret of the HappyNappyBookseller blog, is guest blogging at White Readers Meet Black Authors about supporting authors of color. Says Doret: “I want people to understand the importance of buying minority authors if they want to continue to see the growth of diversity in children’s and teen lit.” Doret is planning a book giveaway to publicize this post, drop her a comment if you’d like to donate.

Speaking of donations, via Read, Write, Believe, Reading Is Fundamental is holding a book drive to celebrate the inauguration. Because Reading Is PRESIDENTIAL.

How cool is that?
More Coolness of 2009:
time lapse images of dancing lights in the sky. Check out the auroras! Too gorgeous.
And another “Duh” of 2009: The wife whose husband donated a kidney to her now wants it back, as they divorce… *sigh*

In the Swim

2009 has all the earmarks of being a year that will go swimmingly. Here’s just a few of the numerous reasons why:

Four Most Awesome
The most hip short thing of the year so far — Leila’s ‘zine. Or, TBR Tallboy, as we should really call it. I’ve often whined about my desire to include some of my short fiction in an anthology — and how hard it is to get into one of those without an editor being sure of your talent and your saleability — and how sad it is that there’s so little space for YA shorts in the publishing world. And now, there’s a place for the stories that I like to read! Check it out.

Four brilliant writers share their ways to shape the new year — two by encouraging people to actually, write, as with Hip Writer Mama’s 30 Day Challenge, and Robin’s challenge to aspiring authors — and the other two with objects. Justina’s vision boards, and Sara’s gifts which remind her to stay in the moment. All great ideas — and all sparking new ideas in me.

Also awesome: blowing bubbles in sub-freezing temps. Those frozen bubbles are gorgeous — and something to cheer up those people living in sleetland at this time. Via mental_floss’ morning cuppa.

And now — because it had to happen —
Harbingers of The Totally Stupid In Our Fair New Year:

Twilight. The fragrance. Via Librarily Blonde, and Burger King’s Flame, the cologne of virile males and …charred meat?

Sigh.
Well, we’re an innovative species, if nothing else.

Poetry Friday: Finnegan, Begin Again

One of those bizarre phrases my mother used to say to me when I was a kid was “Finnegan, begin again.” Generally she said it when I screwed up a math problem and had to start over.

Unfortunately, it’s also one of those weird things that welded itself to my own vocabulary, and I found myself saying it awhile ago, and realized I had no idea who Finnegan was, and why he had to begin again.

For this reason, there’s Google.

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He had whiskers on his chinnegan
They fell out and then grew in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan
Begin again.

Not necessarily the stuff of great poetry, more along the lines of “same song, second verse, a little bit louder, and a little bit worse,” but I kind of like the idea of teaching the very small that occasionally everyone has to “begin again.” One hopes it won’t come as such a bitter surprise later on in life. One hopes.

In honor of the New Year, I have dug out a “begin again” poem from the vaults of the fabulous Wesley McNair. If he’s a new poet to you, I beg you — go, delve. Like Billy Collins, he captures the leaping pulse of Americana and the Western World, and translates it to the page in dry, wry syllables. An older poet, he has a different slant on things that are familiar to us, and often sets the reader at a tilt, thinking.

This one is a little longer than what I usually choose, but is worth clicking through and reading all the way to the end.

The Future

On the afternoon talk shows of America
the guests have suffered life’s sorrows
long enough. All they require now
is the opportunity for closure,
to put the whole thing behind them

and get on with their lives. That their lives,
in fact, are getting on with them even
as they announce their requirement
is written on the faces of the younger ones
wrinkling their brows, and the skin
of their elders collecting just under their
set chins. It’s not easy to escape the past,
but who wouldn’t want to live in a future
where the worst has already happened

and Americans can finally relax after daring
to demand a different way? For the rest of us,
the future, barring variations, turns out
to be not so different from the present
where we have always lived—the same
struggle of wishes and losses, and hope,
that old lieutenant, picking us up
every so often to dust us off and adjust
our helmets. Adjustment, for that matter,

may be the one lesson hope has to give,
serving us best when we begin to find
what we didn’t know we wanted in what
the future brings.


Read the last three stanzas here.

“The Future” by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark. © David R. Godine, 1998.

More poetry by Mr. McNair, audio and print, can be found here. More Poetry Friday selections can be found at A Year of Reading.

You thought I would, but I didn’t!

At Sea,

— by Wendy Mnookin

At the end of the jetty.

Where the boats come in. Where the boats go out. At the pile of rocks
that swallows the sun at the end of the day.

At the turn of the trail. At the last dune.

In front of the hot-dog stand. At the door to the pub. By the shanty,

the shipbuilder’s yard, the discarded yellow boots, the smashed
clam shells.

You thought I’d give in to despair.

But today is today, everywhere I look. And I look everywhere.


Happy New Year. Don’t let the bastard(s) get you down!