What's Up Wednesday

What's Up Wednesday is a weekly meme, started by Jaime Morrow and Erin Funk, that helps readers and writers touch base with blog friends and let them know what's up. If you'd like to join in, you can find the link widget on Jaime's and Erin's blog posts. 

What I'm Reading

I've had to fit my reading in between the cracks lately, so I'm not reading anything very quickly, but at the moment I'm really enjoying the copy of The Fifth Wave I picked up at BEA. I'm also gradually slogging my way through A Clash Of Kings. I'd like to finish all the Ice & Fire books before the next season of the show starts, but holy LONG. It's kind of painful when you read and read and don't even advance 1% on the progress bar. I do have some binge reading time coming up because I'm leaving tomorrow for a 17-day vacation. I've got some fun ARCs, but I don't like to bring physical books on vacation with me, so I'll be hitting the backlog of awesomeness on my e-reader.

What I'm Writing

I'm racing for the finish line right now in the first draft of the sequel to THE LOST PLANET--hoping to get it done before take-off at 7pm tomorrow! I may treat myself to a little champagne on the flight if that happens, because writing a sequel on deadline is to writing the first book like motocross racing on a mudslide is to taking a two-week bike tour of Provence. This is a draft that's for my eyes only--I was figuring it out as I went, so right now the front end doesn't match the back end...at all. But at least the hard part's done!

What Else I'm Doing

As I mentioned, I'm leaving tomorrow for a vacation, aka the European wedding tour. We're going to an old friend's wedding in Bonn, Germany this weekend, and then joining a group from the wedding party to vacation in Israel for a week. I've never been to Israel before, and I'm so excited to see it! Afterwards we're flying up to Istanbul for the wedding of one of my husband's best childhood friends and to spend time with family--including my husband's brand new nephew! I love Istanbul so much and I can't wait for sunny, tea-filled mornings and warm Bosphorus evenings. (And don't worry, we'll be perfectly safe there.)

What Inspires Me Right Now

I can't listen to music while I'm writing, but I do keep a playlist of music for getting into the mood of each book. If you're curious about these kinds of things, here are two of the main songs from the playlist for the book I'm drafting:

(Note: Apparently you need to have Spotify installed for these buttons to work...blerg. Embedded YouTube videos of these songs don't play on Blogger, but if you really want to listen to these tunes, you can check them out on YouTube: Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, and Allegretto from Palladio.)

Words and Words

After the glut of middle grade I've been reading lately, I needed to change up the pace a little and went to my friendly neighborhood AbeBooks.com to hunt down an out-of-print copy of The Seventh Horse, a collection of short stories by Leonora Carrington. Ms. Carrington was a British surrealist painter who spent the majority of her working life in Mexico. Her art is less avant-garde than Man Ray, more digestible than Salvator Dali--to me it looks like the illustrations of crazy fairytales. I only learned about Leonora Carrington last summer, but I like her paintings a lot, and I was pretty excited to find out she was also a writer. I guess I was not expecting a surrealist's writing to be quite so...surreal.

Here is an excerpt from her short story, "The Skeleton's Holiday":

It happened one day that the skeleton drew some hazelnuts that walked about on little legs across mountains, that spit frogs out of mouth, eye, ear, nose and other openings and holes. The skeleton took fright like a skeleton meeting a skeleton in bright daylight. Quickly he had a pumpkin detector grow on the side of his head, with a day side like patchouli bread and a night side like the egg of Columbus, and set off, half-reassured, to see a fortune-teller.

What the what?? Was that just a well-played game of Mad Libs? That's the end of the story, by the way. Leonora Carrington was deeply interested in spiritualism, alchemy, and the occult, and apparently she used a lot of code words to dictate meaning to her art, so I will probably never know what meaning she hopefully intended with her writing. At least not without more research on the subject than I am willing to participate in.

But as crazy as they are, I'm actually kind of enjoying these surreal short stories. As readers, we're used to a predictable progression of words, building sentences with understandable meaning that form stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. Reading about a philosophical skeleton who likes to play dirty tricks for no discernible reason (and for what it's worth, the excerpt I posed was really the most extreme thing I saw--it's not all quite that nuts!) or a three hunters cursed so that all their trophies turn into sausages--well, they're not nearly as satisfying and it's certainly not for everyone, but as an occasional detour, I think they're worthwhile just for the marvelously bizarre imagery.

What do you read when you want to switch gears?

Self Portrait, 1937

Currently:

Stealing this from Jessica Love, who stole it from Kate Hart, who stole it from somewhere else. I do not have the time or brains to compose my own post today.

Loving: A quiet morning with a dozing kitten stretched out beside me. This is my very favorite time of day.

Reading: Neversink by the excellent Barry Wolverton. This will put me halfway through that stack of MG books I posted about. If I can finish Breadcrumbs before the week is through, I'll be happy. I never thought I'd make it through all those books in time anyway, and honestly I need to switch gears and read something else for a while. This will probably be high on my TBR list when it comes out.

Watching: The Alien movies! I'd never seen them before so husband is making me watch all of them. We watched Aliens this weekend, and destroyed the dvd in the process. Have you ever had a player just eat a dvd and make it unviewable? I didn't even know that was possible.

Thinking about: Veganism. I don't know if I can go 100% but I'm toying with the idea. Dairy seems to be a problem for me and my wretched sinuses, and I want to scale back on how often my husband and I eat meat, for health reasons. But I prefer moderation over hardcore, and I don't want to be that person who gets invited over to someone's house for dinner and eats the rice and side salad, so maybe I'll just be a social meat eater.

Anticipating: My trip home to the Upper Peninsula later this week. I haven't been home since I started this blog almost two years ago. I'll try to post some pictures this weekend.

Wishing: For a calm fall. This summer was so busy, I just want to hunker down at home for a while. The outlook for this: not favorable.

Making me happy: My two sweet cats who keep me company. My husband grinning at me during a 7 a.m. spin class this morning. The cheerful "good morning" I heard from everyone in the grocery store today. The fact that there will be a new Killers album out in a week!

Ear To Ear

First off, a huge THANK YOU! to everyone for the kind words left here and on Twitter about my good news. Having friends share in my excitement just makes everything that much better!

Now the party's over and it's time to get back to work. In the spare minutes of my day, not only am I trying to squeeze in my own writing and the (admittedly fun) task of critiquing for my CPs, but I've also set up a kind of ridiculous reading challenge for myself. In general, my book-buying rules are: cookbooks in book form, fiction in e-form. I've seen some of your pictures of overflowing bookshelves rooms, and I would be in the same boat if I didn't buy the majority of my reading as e-books. The only area I break this rule is for middle grade, because I when I'm done with those books I like to send them to my nephews.

Here is my current stack of unread middle grade:

Three of these I bought just last week in a fit of "I'll just make time!" delusion.

The challenge I'm facing is that I'm flying to Michigan in mid-September to visit my parents, and my brother is bringing his family to visit too. If I can read all these books by then, I can bring them with me and avoid shipping them. More importantly, I'll get to talk with my nephews about the books and tell them which ones were my favorites and ask what they've read lately. Right now they really love to read, and I'd like to keep encouraging that.

What do you think, can I read these six middle grade books in 22 days? I'm a fast reader so this sounds ridiculously doable to me, but the determining factor is free time, of which I have very little. How much time are you able to set aside for reading?

Jetlag Rambling And An Excellent Book

I've been up since 4:30 this morning, giving me about four hours of sleep out of the last 40, so please forgive me if I'm a little incoherent. My husband and I got back last night from our two-week jaunt abroad, and I nearly fell to the threshold and kissed the floor when we walked in. The cats are still alive, hooray, and the older one has been following me around the house with moonbeams in his eyes. So what I'm saying here is it's good to be back.

The trip was fun--a few days in Paris, and then we rented a car and drove down to the south of France, through Italy to Zurich, and up to Munich, spending three days in most of the places we stopped. We ate like hogs. The entire time we were accompanied by between two and six friends, and the itinerary didn't allow for much (any) downtime, so by the end my solitary soul was a little oversocialized and starved for some me-time.

Because of the busy agenda, I didn't get to do as much reading as I'd hoped. I finished Jellicoe Road on the flight over, and it was as wonderful as everyone promised. On the second week of the trip I read The Westing Game, mostly during an afternoon at the Deutsches Museum, which I've already been to and is way too technical for an exhausted Rachel to enjoy. And on the flight home, I read Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities. While I liked his last book, Ship Breaker, for its amazing world building and descriptions, this new one belongs to the slim collection of books that I find to be just about perfect. Here's the jacket description:

In a dark future America where violence, terror, and grief touch everyone, young refugees Mahlia and Mouse have managed to leave behind the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities by escaping into the jungle outskirts. But when they discover a wounded half-man--a bioengineered war beast named Tool--who is being hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers, their fragile existence quickly collapses. One is taken prisoner by merciless soldier boys, and the other is faced with an impossible decision: Risk everything to save a friend, or flee to a place where freedom might finally be possible.

The story was absolutely brutal, exciting and hopeful and sad and horrifying. I suppose it fits under the dystopian label, but it's not like most of the other dystopians I've read where the "dys-" element is based on something fairly fantastical happening to our DNA or moral code. The horrors in this book are rooted in current events and the possibility that the ever-worsening environment could drive our society into the kind of chaos you'd think could only happen in a third-world country. It's an extreme view, but it's thought-provoking and, most importantly, a really great story. Two thumbs up. 


I plan to dive into that thick stack of ARCs I got at ALA over the next few weeks, and then, o happy day, the Summer SCBWI Conference is upon us once again. Shout out if you're going--I'll be there!

Yet another gratuitous kitten photo

Favorite Writers: Poe Ballantine

When I lived in Munich, one of my favorite possessions was a copy of The Best American Short Stories 1998. Most of the time I read German literature, an attempt to improve my vocabulary, but when my brain was fried from too many 25-letter-long words or from looking up what Verfügbarkeit meant for the fifteenth time, I would pick up the slightly worn, lime green book (guest edited by Garrison Keillor), and read a short story.

The story I loved the most was a melancholy one about troubled kids born into dysfunctional lower class families, written in strange and wonderful imagery. This story has stuck with me over the years, popping into my mind at random times. It's called "The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue," by Poe Ballantine. The prose is straightforward, just simple enough to accommodate the quirky descriptions and observations. To my delight, I just found that this story is available online. I found it by searching for "poe ballantine wolf," because this is the image that sticks in my memory:

"My mother didn’t like my going over to the Sambeauxs’. There was something mysterious and menacing about that house: a bloodcurdling scream, a silhouette of a knife in the window, a wolf on its hind legs with a leather tail scuffling along behind the juniper trees."

Here is another one I like:

"His hair was short and fair, and he had the polite and unassuming stride of a farm boy. From a distance, the Sambeaux house must have appeared to him to be the place to make friends. There were children everywhere: peeping from windows, lounging against cars, hanging lemurlike from trees, barelegged, barefoot, the spirit of Peter Pan and Tobacco Road. There were paper clouds above the Sambeaux roof, pink pastel streaks painted across the sky, devils on the rooftop, monkeys on wires. A big cardboard vulture squealed over. Homer knocked on the door. Roland and Langston ushered him in."

Here's a great description of the narrator's mother:

"My mother cut sharp glances at me. She had the kind of vision that went right through you and saw into your future. She saw me taking LSD, or driving drunk off a cliff, or marrying a Filipino go-go dancer with a long scar across her abdomen. She saw weeds coming up in the garden of my innocence, and wormy, wild apples waving in the wind.."

Rereading this story now, I still love it just as much as I did back in 1998. I could post a hundred more excerpts--the writing is a dream, so elegant and controlled and interesting. Poe Ballantine is the kind of writer I aspire to be like. If you liked these excerpts, I highly recommend that you go read the full story here.

A Few Good Reads

So I just caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, whilst tossing more decongestant down my gullet, and what I saw made me pause. Sure, I've been sick the past four days (again? yes, again), and I've spent most of my time sleeping and sweating and not grooming, but I had some ridiculously big purple bags under my eyes. I wondered, Am I really that sick? I thought I was getting better?

And then I remembered that I finished reading The Fault in Our Stars this morning. Those swollen lids are little mementos of how hard I sobbed. Oh John Green, have you no care for your readers' delicate eyelid skin?

Of course it was an amazing book. Augustus Waters is up there with my all-time favorite characters. And I count myself lucky to have been able to get a ticket to John Green's book tour when he came through L.A. last week--if you think he and Hank would probably put on an awesome show together, you would be right.

I also recently attended Robin Mellom's release party for her debut, Ditched. She was absolutely lovely in person, and I won the raffle basket (put together by her parents!) which had all kinds of cool schwag (including but not limited to FUNYUNS!) and an ARC of her upcoming MG book, The Classroom. Yay me! I haven't read Ditched yet, but I'm looking forward to it--it looks like such a fun book.

Other books I have read recently: Chime by Frannie Billingsley (a little slow and very different, but by the end I really liked it), and Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley (unique and lovely, with a plot that comes together so neatly). Right now I'm working my way through A Game of Thrones, which I'm embarrassed to say my friend's husband lent me lo these many years ago (before the HBO series was even announced), and I only just now took interest in after watching said series and needing to know right now what happens next. The epic fantasy, she is not my first choice, but the storytelling here is excellent.

Anybody out there read epic fantasy? Is there anything else amazing that I'm missing?

Superlative Blogfest: Head of the Class, 2011

So when I started getting ready to compose my first entry for the YA Superlative Blogfest, I went to my Goodreads account to see how many 2011 YA books I read this year, and the answer was eight. What can I say, I've been catching up on a lot of older titles! To avoid having to put The Death Cure as my favorite comedy title of 2011, I will have to leave some categories off. Please feel free to leave me your favorite suggestions so I can add them to my TBR queue!

Favorite Dystopian: Divergent - Who didn't love this one? I'm sooo curious to see where she takes the story in the next book.
Favorite Science Fiction: Across the Universe - Spaceship stranded in the middle of the cosmos YES.
Favorite Fantasy: Daughter of Smoke & Bone - Is this fantasy? Paranormal? I'm not sure. I don't read a ton of high fantasy.
Favorite Action/Adventure: The Death Cure -  While I didn't love the way this trilogy played out, it was gripping enough to keep me coming back.
Favorite Mystery: Legend -  Er, I'm not sure if this book counts for this category, but don't most books have an element of mystery? I really liked it, so I'm going to say yes.
Favorite Romance: Daughter of Smoke & Bone - Slayed me. Loved it.

So as you can see, I need to beef up on my 2011 reading, especially in the areas of contemporary, historical, comedy, paranormal... If you've got a 2011 book you think absolutely must be read, please recommend it in the comments!

One From The Road

I'm on a business trip this week, hanging out at the company mothership for a global conference. I always like coming up to headquarters for a taste of the dynamic environment here, but this week is extra supercharged because of the rare convergence of my entire team. So, lots of discussions on quality and policy and those kinds of fun things.

This evening in my hotel room, I'll be working on wrapping up those pesky revisions, made peskier by a critique partner's comment that unlocked new ideas for tension in some of my final chapters. What I'll want to be doing is reading the rest of The Death Cure, which I started while stuck at LAX for three hours yesterday. I love it so far, but I'm hoping for LOTS OF ANSWERS by the end, because right now I have many, many questions. One thing I really like about this book--even though I'm totally confused about who is good and who is bad, I feel like I have a very good idea of the entire dystopian world that it's set in. I've read other dystopians lately where the immediate setting is well described, but the world it's set within, not so much.

And, because I haven't got much else of note to say today, here are the books I've got queued up to read on my Kindle. What are you reading?

Holes by Louis Sachar
Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak
The Curse of the Wendigo, and The Isle of Blood by Rick Yancey

In Which My Cat Tries To Maim My Landlord

Does this look like the face of evil?

So my sweet little cat is napping by the window--no, check that, he's coming over to curl up on my lap for a snuggle. And yet fifteen minutes ago, he was trying to find the highest vantage point in my living room so that he could leap onto my landlord, presumably to destroy her. He was making scary yowly cat noises and had already shredded her ankle. She said she was fine after I gave her some Neosporin, but to her I am now forever the tenant with the psycho cat. What gives, cat? Got a case of the Mondays?

After having it recommended to me multiple times, I finally read M.T. Anderson's Feed this weekend. I find it a little hard to get into books that have their own invented vocabulary like, "I didn't want to be null for the unettes on the moon, at the hotel, if any of them were youch." But after a chapter or so, you get inside Titus's head and get the rhythm of his dumb speech patterns: "I wanted to say something, like, something that would be, you know, something about how she was more right than he was." And then you realize that this book is extremely clever and thought-provoking, and you just enjoy the ride. My favorite excerpt:

"It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we could see the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from."

I can see this book being on future school reading lists--or is it already? It's a very successful addition to the Brave New World/1984 category of dystopian literature. Read anything great lately? Or are all you NaNo'ers on a one-month reading hiatus?

Road Trip: Best Book This Month

YA Highway's question of the week is a fun one: What's the best book you've read this August?

I already mentioned this book a few posts ago, but this gives me an opportunity to sing its praises again, because I thought Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke & Bone was absolutely spectacular. Here's the description:

(From Goodreads) Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages—not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers—beautiful, haunted Akiva—fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

I had already read Laini Taylor's National Book Award-nominated Lips Touch: Three Times and was impressed with her beautiful writing and the wild inventiveness of her stories, so I was pretty excited when my CP brought me an ARC of her new book. And boy, I was sucked in from the first page. Karou is strong and mysterious, and the author doles out her background in little tidbits that make you want to read on as quickly as possible. And the writing, as expected, is gorgeous. It make me want to go to Prague and eat goulash, to wander through Marrakesh and haggle with shopkeepers. The originality of the story blew my mind--I've never read anything like this before. And the pieces of her puzzle fit together beautifully in the end, which is when you gnash your teeth and say Why can't I have written this book???

Daughter of Smoke & Bone comes out on September 27th, and if you like things that are awesome, I highly recommend you pick this one up. I know I'll be buying copies for friends and family. Laini Taylor is an author to keep on your radar.