patschmatz

Oh no.

Kirkus Reviews is no more.

No more "crabby Kirkus," no more of that particular snark that I like to think of as discriminating taste...

And of course, I think that because Kirkus wasn't snarky to me at all - they gave really nice and very uncrabby reviews to both Mousetraps and Circle the Truth. Unlike the typically "nicer" review journal School Library Journal, which sent some snark my way, along with a few jabs of general dislike.

It's all so very subjective. I bought a couple of copies of Kate DiCamillo's THE MAGICIAN'S ELEPHANT yesterday, and told the bookseller it's my favorite of Kate's books. The bookseller said it's her least favorite, and she likes EDWARD TULANE best, which is my least favorite.

When we dip into the story soup, it's nice to have a variety of guides to flavor and texture. Whether or not you liked the tone or agreed with the value judgments, Kirkus gave solid information about the soup.

It's here. It came blasting in a few days ago while I was in Minneapolis. I came home to subzero windchill and lots of snow to move around, and the whole season seemed like a huge hassle. So this morning, I put on the snowshoes at dawn and stepped out to make friends with winter because if I don't, the season is way WAY too long.

Between the blaze of stars and the crescent moon and all-over white, everything had an eerie dark-light glow even before the sky started streaking red. I tromped around the lake - and even though I know it's frozen solid, the first time walking on that surface feels a bit dicey, like at any moment it's going to turn into cold black water and suck me down. When I left two weeks ago, it was still liquid. No more liquid now, not until April.

On Monday, my artist's retreat starts. Lizard Radio went curiously quiet while I was in the city, secretarying under flourescent lights and pinballing my way through faxes that wouldn't go and office politics and sending certified mail to the Department of Homeland Security. But since I've been home, the radio has been starting to play again, and by Monday when my retreat-buddy shows up, I hope to be immersed in that lizardly world.

Celebrating the season of cold and dark by stirring the story soup. Hasn't that been going on for a really long time?

A little help, please?

What is a good name for a U.S. political party of the future that is entirely focused on:

1. the nuclear family unit
2. SAFETY for children
3. Safety for everyone
4. Closed borders, no air travel
5. Very carefully regimented economic system so that everyone works and makes subsistence pay, but the true power/money is still in the hands of the elite.

I'm not saying they pull this stuff off - I'm saying it's their platform. And I'm looking for a good shorthand name for the party. For example, "Prolays" would be Proletariats.

Any ideas?

Get this book and read it.

I first get my books at the library, and then I buy the truly upper-tier ones. I'll buy this not only for myself, but for some parents and teens. This is a book to own and to give away.

I just finished it about ten minutes ago, so I'm still riding the wave of the story. So many things to like...

First of all, it takes place very vividly in San Francisco. If you love SF, have sat in the sun at Mission Dolores park, or have faced off with San Francisco police during a demonstration...if you've done some serious thinking to the rock and sway of BART, if you've strolled along Valencia or climbed steep sidewalks street by street, if you've eaten a burrito in the Mission or traveled on 101, you will feel at home in this book.

I like the protagonist. Marcus lives in the not-distant future in San Francisco, and he's a smart gamer who likes to mess with security systems. He puts pebbles in his shoes to foil gait-detectors, and he quotes the Declaration of Independence in class. He and his friends and parents and everyone else in the book are solid three-dimensional characters.

The plot is a page-turner. San Francisco gets bombed, Marcus gets arrested, and then he takes on the Department of Homeland Security. I couldn't guess where the book was going and I couldn't put it down. All the better, it's over 350 pages, so I had a long satisfying stretch of full fictive dream immersion.

Best of all to like, though, is the politics. Political history, political analysis, and underlying values woven all the way through - woven BY the plot itself, by the characters, so (like 1984) you emerge with a fresh vision and a fire to do, or at least see, differently.

And if that's not enough, the afterwords (one by security technologist Bruce Schneier and one by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, Xbox Hacker) are another jolt of awareness and another call to action.

Huang says:

Have the terrorists already won? Have we given in to fear, such that artists, hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing Harajuku Fun Madness could be so trivially implicated as terrorists? There is a term for this dysfunction - it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism's defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells.

Read the book. Doesn't matter if you don't understand the technology (I didn't), read it anyway. Think about it next time you're taking off your shoes and belt before you get on an airplane.

I grew up with fur trapping. My father trapped fox, beaver, muskrat, mink, and more, and I used to help him run his traplines and even had one of my own for a year or two. Somewhere in there, I gave an award-winning speech in the 4-H speech contest about why leg-hold traps are not cruel.

You know, anytime you have to come up with a list of justifications about why something is NOT cruel, it's worth reconsidering.

I noticed a few days back that someone has muskrat sets around the lake. So I took a canoe paddle around this morning and examined them all. Most, I left alone because they were so stupidly set they'll never catch anything. The couple that seemed like decent sets, I sprung, and figured I'd do that every day until the Bad Trapper gave up and went away.

Because really, the time for that is past. Who's buying fur these days anyway? A muskrat pelt can't be worth more than a dollar, and even if it was, I've come a long ways since my fifth grade 4-H speech. Although I can still hear my childhood values in my head strong enough that I felt a little guilty springing the traps...

But then, near the public access beach, I spotted a raccoon. Caught.

I went home and got my high boots and leather gloves and a screen to set between myself and the coon so I could spring the trap and let it go. But when I got close, I saw the poor thing had itself so tangled up in brush, there was no way I could spring the trap with the gear I have, unless I wanted to go wading into a storm of coon teeth and claws. The coon huddled in the bush, staring at me with its big brown eyes and quivering. I told it to just hang tight and please not go chewing off its paw or anything else rash. It had already dragged the trap and weight (SO badly set, the animal should NEVER be able to drag the trap around) all the way up out of the lake, across maybe 15 feet on land and into the brush.

Then I went home and called the game warden and reported it.

That's the kind of action that can make you enemies around here, where hunting/trapping/fishing are a total way of life. I probably wouldn't have done it just on the basis of the muskrat sets - they were legal, if badly done.

I told the warden this is an area where lots of people walk their dogs and kids play. While that's not precisely true, I'm hoping it's enough - along with that REALLY badly set trap - to make the Warden talk to Bad Trapper so he'll go away and find another sport. Deer season is coming soon, isn't that enough?

I've started recently on a new novel. Suddenly, I have no idea how to do this. The idea of taking what I have and turning it into an actual story, with beginning middle and end, that fills a couple of hundred pages and works out sequentially and emotionally and logistically and is interesting and says something...

huh?

I mean, how can I possibly do that?

How did I ever do it before?

Suddenly, the books that I have published seem like they have nothing to do with me. Like somehow they just sort of appeared in the world at one point. Surely they were never this foggy, open-ended, undefined...

The lake water is never darker than on a November morning, the sun rising over the last rattle of leaves. No sign of ice yet, just death and depth and dark, dark, dark.

But the swamp, just over the rise, has its first skim, locking in the swirl design of pollen and fuzz and leaves. I pick up a stick and throw it like a javelin and it dives point-first through the fragile ice layer, creating a shatter hole that holds it, standing upright.

Today the air is shirt-sleeve warm but winter is murmuring just across the lake, creeping through the woods. She's reaching her hands out across the water, across the dawn, and she'll be here soon.

So...what is evil? Does it exist? Is it different from bad or selfish behavior? Can it only exist in humans? Does it come and go? Does it sometimes stay? Is it a matter of popular opinion? Does it have meaning as an individual concept, or is it entirely collective/cultural?

The dictionary says: 1. Morally bad or wrong; wicked; malevolent; sinful. 2. Causing an undesirable condition, as ruin, injury or pain. There's plenty more, such as "characterized by anger or spite" - in fact, there's so much that it begins to lose meaning.

What about the kids who set another kid on fire with rubbing alcohol over being a snitch? Was that evil? What about the people who threw animal corpses at the home of the kids who set the kid on fire? Are they evil?

And what about when one person's evil is another's ultimate good? As in, heroism in war? Can such a thing as an evil enemy exist? Isn't it all perspective?

I am looking for any ideas on this I can find. Please - expound!

Omigod, I have not had so much Halloween fun in forever.

I started a couple of weeks ago with a face-covering mask from Goodwill.  It was so creepy I couldn't look at it, like Ramona the Pest who had to hide her "baddest witch in the world" mask under the couch cushions because it scared her.  Then I bought black paint, poured it on my truck tire, and ran back and forth over my clothes to make tire tracks.

I had a couple of friends strap padding around me under my shirt so I bulked up a little with a shoulder hump...wore total skin-covering gloves, bandana, hat...and walked with a foot-drag.  And went to a party out of town where I knew many people but nobody knew I was going to be there.


I stayed incognito for about an hour, and it was crazy-fun, but also unnerving, to have nobody know who I was.  To have people look at me sideways, cautiously, even a couple of times sort of in a hostile way.  I didn't talk.  I just wandered around, until the friend I came with pulled me outside said "you've got to unmask, you're creeping people out too much."

So I did, and that was a big fun surprise, and then I got to spend the rest of the night dancing and hanging and being a (known) zombie.  

Oh, and I went out to get my bags out of the car trunk of someone else's car - and tried the keys in the wrong car - twice - so then two neighbor guys followed me and said, "Hey Zombie, do you live here?"  Apparently they didnt' like me trying to break into every car on the street.  So I had to whip off my mask and say, "Um, I'm not really a zombie, I just have poor car recognition."

I loved being all StephenKing-MichaelJacksonthriller, and having good fun with girls from camp, beneath the full moon with fog machines and screaming bats and pervasive spider webs and yummy eyeball hors d'oeuvres... 

I just finished reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, for the first time.  I've never seen the film.

I was fascinated by Burgess's Introduction, A Clockwork Orange Resucked, to the 1986 edition, where he talks about the deletion of the 21st and final chapter from the original American edition and from Kubrick's film.  He says, "My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress.  What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it.  Let us have evil prancing on the page and up to the very last line..."

Despite the dancing evil, which made me flinchy, I liked the book very much and couldn't put it down.  The language rolls and gallops across the page with a such beautiful rhythm, I had to stop and read it out loud.  I especially liked how the sound of the description of violence was pleasant to the ear in a way that wouldn't be possible if he'd used regular English words.  The slang that I didn't understand, rather than yanking me out of the fictive dream, pulled me more deeply in, and pretty soon I was liking Alex (MC) and actually wanting his voice in my head.  I'm fascinated by how Burgess did that, when Alex symbolizes so much that I fear and abhor (anybody read about what happened at Richmond High School in Calif. last weekend?).

I'm in the midst of doodling ideas for a new book and I'm exploring the concept of evil.  In the midst of his evil prancing, Alex shows us evil goose-stepping under the guise of righteous good.  Better still, every single character lights up some aspect of evil in the spaces between the two obvious extremes.

Except maybe the cat lady. 

When I was a kid and took multiple choice tests, I would intentionally pick an answer that I knew wasn't The Correct One, but that could be argued as correct, and then argue it. 

Now I'm not a kid but I still hate multiple choice.  The practice grows in size and importance (thank you, NoChildLeftBehindStateStandardsSATACTGRE) and it gives me the creeping shivers.

Yesterday I was all kicked back and cozy on a rainy Saturday watching Dollhouse, and the phone rings.  It's an "independent research firm" calling to talk about my experience with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield.  Uh oh.

The guy starts off with multiple choice questions and I interrupted him to say, "No wait, that's the problem.  I can't give you a rating on my experience with the person I talked to - that's not the POINT.  The point is, the system is bad." 
"Oh, Unsatisfactory," he says. 
"No, no, not unsatisfactory, don't put that.  I talked to 3 different human beings and they were all perfectly polite and nice, they're just caught in a bad system.  They're trapped, it's not their fault."
"So, satisfactory courtesy, unsatisfactory problem-solving."
"No, they weren't allowed to solve my problem, it's not their fault.  It's exactly what you're doing that I have the problem with...no individualism, no room for answers or situations outside the lines, everything has to fit into a box, including the employees talking to me on the phone.  They were doing their jobs exactly as I'm sure they were instructed."

The poor guy kept on trying.  He tried True/False questions, which are even worse then multiple choice.  He tried to get me to give a letter grade to each person I spoke with.  He tried really, really hard, and was so nice and apologetic the whole time. 
Finally I said, "Look, I get it.  You're caught too, you have to stay with your script and I'm totally making this difficult for you, aren't I?"
He didn't say he agreed with me (that probably wasn't in his script) but we finally both agreed to give it up.  I really wonder what he did with my call.  Maybe he just tossed it.
  
They should have had an "essay answer" choice. 

I've spent hours dealing with a change to my health insurance.  That last premium increase was crazy.  At the same time, I'm 47.  Bouncing along with a $10k deductible is a bigger gamble every year.

I've talked to voice mails and mean people and nice people and filled out forms and gone in circles and faced up to the fact that admitting I see a chiropractor once every couple of months (hello, preventative health care?) means an increase of SEVENTY dollars a month to my premiums.   Seventy.  A chiro visit is only $32 fercrissakes.

I felt bad for everyone I talked to there.  I wanted to ask them what it does to their soul to work for Anthem Blue Cross.  I wanted to ask them what kind of health insurance THEY have.  I also didnt' want them to have any reason to hate me and mess me up, so I kept my mouth shut.

So now, in the end, I have a $5000 deductible, bigger copays than I had before (not that I ever go to a dr), and cough up $200/month for this, which I basically never use, unless something big happens.   Oh, and a headache.  I have a really twisty headache.

"...if they send the wolves, i'll join the wolves and i'll return some day with my teeth sharper and my blood hotter. i'll be the dog by your grave with a hanging tongue and a ribcage and a chewed-up tail, howling with my last exhale..."

These are lyrics from "An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail" by Lovers...(I think - it was a sort of scattered link from Google)

I love this.  This is exactly how I feel about revision.  All Eminem/8-Mile and Rocky Balboa.  And Whip It, for that matter (just saw it). 

I sent Bluefish off again last week. 

The summer I was 13, I ran out of books.  I was at camp, and my friend Amy Lane tossed me The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illustrated_Man.  I almost tossed it back because I didn't like science fiction and I didn't like short stories.  But I seriously had nothing to read.

Now I think maybe this book is to blame for my lack of tattoos.  That idea of pictures on skin, crawling around telling stories, has never left my head.  And the stories!  I reread most of them recently, and was caught all over again, and surprised by how many of those concepts have stayed with me throughout my life...the conversations and the images...
Bradbury's stories that have stuck with me:  
   The Long Rain (I seriously think of this EVERY time I'm working outdoors in the rain)
   The Highway  (my very favorite end-of-the-world story)
   Zero Hour  (my second very favorite end-of-the-world story)

Now, more than 30 years later, I keep looking around for a kid named Mink, and a flaming shooting star, and a stream of cars heading north, and those images mix with Elton John's Rocket Man lyrics - "zero hour, nine a.m." - and Levon turning balloons loose from his front porch, and those balloons are God speaking on an early September afternoon in rural Wisconsin with the buzz and spin of needles crawling across skin...  

And just like that, someone else's fictive dream mixes with someone else's and they roll around in my life and experience and psyche and I spit bits of those dreams out in my own writing, and it's a constant story-soup that goes on and on and on.

Do you believe in them?

Last night I went to another Book Festival event here in Madison, by a YA panel.  They read from their books and talked about courage (the theme of the Festival) and then fielded Q&A from a super-focused wiggly enthusiastic group of around 20 girls who I would guess were fourth- or fifth-graders.  Lots and lots of questions.

My favorite:  Do  you believe in ghosts?  That seemed like the most relevant question to ask at a talk about courage.  Two authors said no, and one said yes, in that sort of metaphorical philosophical dealing-with-your-personal-ghosts way.

My answer (though nobody asked me):  YES.  Totally.  100%.

You?

Last night I went to the Charlotte Zolotow lecture here in Madison.  The speaker was Gregory Maguire, http://www.gregorymaguire.com/about/ the author of WICKED, and also the author of a beautiful new book, Making Mischief, and Maurice Sendak Appreciation.    It's filled with Sendak's art and Maguire's comments and best of all, lots of references to and information about that old classic favorite, Where The Wild Things Are.

My favorite quote from the book (and lecture):  Dreams ... allow our private heroes to show up again and again, just when we need them most.  Nightmares allow the same of our enemies, alas, so it's good practice to identify our heroes if we can.  The act of identification alone promotes the chance of their healthy influence upon us.

This started me thinking about heroes...who mine are, why I don't have more, why I hesitate to allow anyone to move to heroic stature in my heart.  I do have a few though...Ponyboy Curtis and my Auntie Babbitt, Neville Longbottom and John Lennon and E.L. Konigsberg and Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Who are yours?

I'm using my week at Edenfred http://www.edenfred.org/ to learn about lizards.

I won a week here as part of the Council for Wisconsin Writers prize for Mousetraps, and let me tell you, this is one nice and swanky place, and outrageously conducive to writing.  Or, um, studying lizards.  Practicing the drawing of lizards.  Thinking about lizards.

Here are some of my fun new random facts:

Geckos are lizards.  So are skinks.  The Jesus Lizard is a basilisk (like in Harry Potter) and it can sprint on water without breaking the surface.  Geckos can see in the dark.  That's why the Japanese called their WWII Night Fighter aircraft "gekkoh."  Some lizards have an eye on top of their head.  It has a lens and retina and nerve feeding to the brain, but no muscles so it can't focus.  Nobody has figured out what it's for.

Komodo dragons are lizards that eat people.  Baron Rudolph from Switzerland went hiking on 1974 and he strayed away from his tourist group.  All they found was his glasses and camera (no telling pics on the camera). 

Some girl geckos can have babies with no boy geckos.  They produce exact clones of themselves.  Nobody takes care of baby lizards.  They're born and that's it, they are independent.

Lizard Radio comes in more clearly in Japan than it does in the United States. 

I just finished up the 3-day SCBWI conference in Madison. 

It's really hard to describe just how valuable a conference like this is to my writing life.  The first one I went to in Minneapolis, maybe 10 years ago, exploded the world of writing for children wide open for me.  I just didn't realize, before that, how much was available to help me.  I'd been slogging through on my own for maybe 12 years at that point, learning by trial and error, occasionally taking classes or workshops with people who were writing for adults.

This past weekend in Madison, I spent a lot of time looking around and appreciating the tone that is set (intentionally, I think) by this chapter.  It's one of inclusiveness and support, the idea that if one of us writes better, we all write better.  And the goal of writing better supersedes the goal of publication and fame and fortune (although that would be nice too, and we sure like it when one of us gets some of that!).

But most of all, I love the writer mojo that gets loose in the air at a gathering like that.  Fingers itch to pick up pens and laptops, words roll out, ideas pop, and magic happens.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have some writing to do...

Tomorrow I'm leading the workshop on the fictive dream at the SCBWI-Wisc fall conference.  This morning, in the dark rainy gloom of the autumn chaos winds sweeping in, I'm poring over John Gardner's book "On Becoming a Novelist," which is where I first learned about the fictive dream concept.

I'm thinking how lucky I am that I get to live there, in that dream.  It's my taste of magic.  A lot of writing is hard, focused work.  Tedious.  But those moments when the computer and the shape of the words slip away, and I'm living in a vivid continuous dream, where I can see the characters moving around, talking to one another, reacting, falling down, getting up, eating Poptarts, burping, smoking, yelling...and doing things that I couldn't have predicted five minutes ago and could never have invented all on my own - it's amazing.  It's the drug that keeps me writing. 

When I can't get there and can't find it, I pick up a favorite book, and relax into THAT writer's dream.  That both soothes and excites me, and makes me want to join in the play.  I become so engrossed in that dream, I'm in the dream-world, and stepping from that dream into an original dream of my own gets easier.

I hope I can manage, between now and tomorrow at 2pm, to collect my thoughts and ideas and passion about this enough to present a coherent workshop.  Everyone there will be a writer - we all share the desire to find and transmit that dream.  My hope is that, together, in that room, we can connect on the magic and inspire one another.   Sometimes that happens in writing workshops.

Or, at least, that I am able to stand without my knees shaking and put one sentence after another and not bore anyone. 

I think about this a lot.  The fictive dream.  The experience of falling into a story so completely that I forget I'm reading words on a page, or watching images on a screen.  I'm living the story, seamlessly, and I'm transported emotionally. 

Next weekend I'm leading a workshop on the fictive dream, so I'm thinking about it even more.  And, I'm working on (yet another) revision of Bluefish.  One thing about rewriting something a zillion times - I become so familiar with the characters and setting that half the time I walk around feeling like I AM them, there.  So that's the trick...first to dream the dream myself.  Then to transmit it through ink on paper in such a way that the reader has an uninterrupted flow through their own version of my dream. 

Then I get to thinking about someone else's version of my dream.  It's not the same as my dream, I'm pretty sure about that.  But the dreams are related via said ink on paper.  Then I wonder about our nighttime unconscious dreams, and how they do or don't relate or overlap or bleed into one another or morph in and out of daytime reality, and if they're fictive dreams too or if in fact the daytime reality is and...

then I have to do something like fill out the application to change my health insurance or balance my checkbook, and I wonder how any of us manage to do anything.

Has anyone read  The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo?      http://www.themagicianselephant.com/#book 
It's wonderful.  Talk about your fictive dreams.