Category: On Writing

In the Swim

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January 6, 2009

10:50 pm

2 Comments on In the Swim

Happenings, On Writing, Random Notes and Errata

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.

All content (unless otherwise attributed) is © Copyright Tanita S. Davis and may not be reproduced in any form.

Poetry Friday: Finnegan, Begin Again

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January 2, 2009

3:28 pm

9 Comments on Poetry Friday: Finnegan, Begin Again

On Writing, Poetry Friday

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.

All content (unless otherwise attributed) is © Copyright Tanita S. Davis and may not be reproduced in any form.

Happy 2009! Woot!

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January 2, 2009

5:29 am

3 Comments on Happy 2009! Woot!

On Writing, Random Notes and Errata


The LIST is out!

Once again, I’m *so glad* we chose last year to divide the Science Fiction/Fantasy nominations for the Cybils into MG and YA books — it’s so much easier that way to narrow down the great stuff. (Okay, maybe “so much easier” was an overly optimistic thing to say. Maybe just “more reasonable” is closer to the truth. Or something.) I offer my sincere and enthused congratulations to all the Cybils nomination teams, but especially the SFF — it’s a hard job, people, but you’re the ones who determine my reading choices for the rest of the year! Yay for you!

As a Cybils judge, it’s my joy to get to hunker down and do the REALLY tough work — narrowing down eleven fabulous books to …one in each category. Just one.

Oy.

Meanwhile, Charlotte’s posted the books she’s looking forward to reading in 2009. Re: Sacred Scars, the sequel to Skin Hunger — oh, MY yes. Cannot WAIT for that.

And speaking of Charlotte, just for commenting one day on her blog, I won a copy of Stowaway! By R.A. Salvatore and Geno Salvatore, The Stowaway: Stone of Tymora, Volume I (Mirrorstone 2008, 287 pp) is a MG adventure fantasy, which I’ve been looking forward to reading. What a great entrance to 2009! I’ve won something on the first day. And I used to never win anything.

Happy New Year!

All content (unless otherwise attributed) is © Copyright Tanita S. Davis and may not be reproduced in any form.

The View from my Window

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December 31, 2008

2:46 am

3 Comments on The View from my Window

On Writing, Random Notes and Errata

Yeah, yeah, still with the infection-sweating-fever thing, but THIS is the view I have from my window. This bird is a woodpecker, and I’d have to have a better view of him to identify him, since he wasn’t very cooperative. But isn’t his “hair” great?

Books like The Knife of Never Letting Go, according to the UK rag (and believe me, it’s considered inflamnatory Enquirer-like trash by most people with whom I’ve spoken) The Daily Mail are “so violent they need a health warning”, according to Dr Rona Tutt. Author snipes back, in The Guardian, and the fun continues.

The most fun is that I just got this in the mail (THANK YOU Colleen!!) and am going to sit down and read it. Sans health warnings. So there.

Ooh — THIS JUST IN!!! Are you a fan of Alan Gratz and the Something Rotten / Something Wicked Horatio books? Ally Carter (she of awesome spy book fame) is having a live chat with Mr. Gratz tonight at eight p.m., Eastern time and everyone is invited to come along and chat with.

Here’s the dirt: Ally Chat
Tuesday, December 30th
8:00 eastern/ 7:00 central

The chat room will be located here.

The password will be ROTTEN, and won’t work until a quarter ’til — and after the chat, the password is expired.

The glorious weather continues to taunt me. Robin’s going camping for New Year’s. I’m. So. Jealous. Hope everyone else has fun plans. *sob* I’ll just be here… coughing… on my bed of sickness…

All content (unless otherwise attributed) is © Copyright Tanita S. Davis and may not be reproduced in any form.

Sniffle! Hack!

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December 29, 2008

2:31 am

4 Comments on Sniffle! Hack!

On Writing, Random Notes and Errata

Oh, don’t mind me and my sinus infection, and my fuzzy brain. I’ll just lie here and cough. I WOULD be outside enjoying the sunshine, but NO, my body rebelled about sitting in a plane for ten hours.

dramatic sigh.

One of the things I learned during my MFA program — almost incidentally — is that YA and children’s literature rarely has “ripped from the headlines” books. Almost any garishly spotlighted, sensational murder trial has an immediate companion novel from the point of view of the lawyer, the jury, the victim’s sister — but blessedly, that trend hasn’t yet blighted children’s lit. We tend to stay, on average, ten years behind the curve. Think about the fuss over the penguin picture book. Alternative families are nothing new, by far, but perhaps they became more commonplace during the nineties? I find the whole thing intriguing, from a sociological standpoint.

Thus, it is with real interest that I find that the first Katrina books — which started to come out in 2005 — are gaining momentum. Nonfiction seems always to be the first treatment in children’s books about factual events — Katrina was a meteorological event, after all, and it’s always helpful to talk about weather and storms. The next explorations tend to be about animals — the tsunami animals come to mind as a story that spread and spread and eventually became a book.

What I’m not seeing much of yet are the books about the human side of the equation, about the fact that a city in one of our fifty states was allowed to treat its people like refuse washed up after a storm, allowed them to starve or drown or be abandoned to die. There are a couple of MG titles I’ve run across — 2007 was a good year for those — but YA seems to be silent.

Are there few or no books for young adults because the adults still aren’t sure how it could have happened?

Has anyone else noticed this trend — the lag behind actual events, and the lack of reading material for older readers? This is just something random that jumped into my mind.

Has anyone else seen Valentine’s decorations up in stores already? Anyone else moved to violence over it? Just me? Sigh. Blame the sinus infection…

PSST! Farida, the people have spoken, and the people want flower fairies. I can’t hide your identity for much longer…

All content (unless otherwise attributed) is © Copyright Tanita S. Davis and may not be reproduced in any form.

On, Dizzy, On, Dumpy! On, Groggy and Grumpy!

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December 24, 2008

6:18 am

2 Comments on On, Dizzy, On, Dumpy! On, Groggy and Grumpy!

On Writing, Random Notes and Errata

Did I just hear the Grinch’s reindeer?

The Festival of Festivus wheezes and moans its way into the world ‘o’ blogs today. Billed as the “holiday for the rest of us” it’s apparently a Seinfeld-esque day in which people tell each other how much they’ve disappointed each other throughout the year. And then they have contests of …strength?

Well, I can’t say I really ever “got” Seinfeld, but I do know this telling-family-members-how-disappointing-they-are sounds like a bad outing with certain family members, so while I’m visiting them, I’m going to have to suck up my Grinch-ing, and pass on talking about mi familia loca, or doing any gratuitous arm-wrestling. If *you,* however, have any gripes about your family or life or the season, (or if you live in Portland and aren’t Nordic) definitely get over there and join in the merriment. Misery loves company, after all, and maybe after you complain, you’ll be able to go back and be civil in company. Unless you work in retail…

Just one more day, and you’ll be able to kick back and relax. By doing what? Sara wants to know. I’d like to add to that question — how do you celebrate personal accomplishment? Do you invite over friends, or have a solo celebration on your own? Many people neither know how to relax or to celebrate… Something to ponder.

Publishers kind of hibernate this week ’til the second week of January, and writers …well, we’re spending our time realizing how much seventeen year old boys and a family of nine eat (how, how did I end up doing so much cooking? Was it the recipes in the novel???), and feel like they’re sitting around in a jet-lag induced haze, or feeding the five thousand, who seem to need snacks in between hands of canasta and to eat ’round the clock. More coherent posts will be on tap after the weekend, I’m sure, once I’ve shrugged off the KP duties and hidden in a back room with my laptop! (Happy Hols to all my fellow Violets who are hanging in along with. Courage!…)

Great gift ideas and book suggestions are still pouring in, for those of you who, like me, aren’t done shopping, and won’t be until the 12th Day of Christmas (which is after The Epiphany, which is the realization that Dec. 25 is an artificial deadline, and including post-Christmas shopping makes the fun last longer). Check out the usual suspects — Chasing Ray and Mother Reader. More anon!

All content (unless otherwise attributed) is © Copyright Tanita S. Davis and may not be reproduced in any form.