WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION

I’ve just arrived back from my summer vacation. I went away for five days to the Caribbean. I went because Oscar made me. That’s not a complaint, merely an explanation. Also, you should know that this is a very long post. Maybe you should get a drink before you continue.

See, I’m not very good at vacation. Please don’t mistake this for my being a really hard worker or anything. I’m FANTASTIC at slacking off. I am the QUEEN of the snow day. I’m breathtakingly good at coming up with things to do at the eleventh hour. And I travel all the time.

But vacationing seems to be an actual skill that some people have and I don’t. They like to go off and . . . errr . . . I’m not really sure. But I think you’re not supposed to bring your computer. Which I don’t get AT ALL.

But recent deadlines had taken their toll on me. Every task I did, however simple, seemed to defeat me. I had a draft that wouldn’t finish itself, 800 unanswered e-mails, and a bunch of papers scattered around that looked very important that I refused to read. This is not like me.

Oscar had been watching this gradual deterioration for weeks.

“You need a vacation,” he said. “You are broken.”

“Vacation?” I replied. “What for! I feel great!”

He pointed out that at the moment I was clutching a wastepaper basket on my lap, and had a post-it on my forehead that simply said, “make better. write faster. also, hamster.”

“Okay,” I said, conceding this. “But where will we go? To what end?”

“The beach,” he replied quickly. “An island. You can parasail.”

“Parasail?” I said. “PARASAIL? Parasailing is the grand, holy, mother of all doom cocktails in the Big Book of MJ. Let me see if I have this right . . . you get in a flimsy contraption and then a boat takes off without you, dragging you in its death wake, and the wind, which hates you, lifts you up a thousand feet above the teaming ocean, and then eventually the boat stops and you fall OUT OF THE SKY into the awaiting tentacles of jellyfish. Did I miss anything? Do the people on the boat shoot at you while you’re up there? Do you get chased by low-flying planes?”

He immediately realized his insanity and backtracked. I mean, we all speak without thinking sometimes.

“You can sit on the beach and read,” he said. “You like that.”

I considered. This is true. I DO like to sit on the beach and read. This sounded like paradise to me.

He went on and on about stuff he’d read about the human brain and the advantages of time off and how on vacation you don’t have to think and everyone does everything for you . . . and by the end, he had me convinced. A quick call was made, and the trip was arranged for right after I turned in Scarlett Fever.

“You won’t regret this,” he said. “You’ll write much better once you’ve relaxed.”

THE JOURNEY OUT

The first thing we didn’t realize is that our flight was international, so instead of leaving for the airport at a very reasonable 8 AM, we had to leave at 5:45. In a thunderstorm. We got to JFK 45 minutes later to find what looked like a reenactment of the fall of Saigon . . . screaming people, bags piled, confusion, and someone actually yelling, “MEDIC! We need a MEDIC over here!”

Now, I fly all the time. Oscar too. And we know when we have walked into a Bad Airport Day. The intake belt was clearly broken, so there was a wall of HUNDREDS of bags, tumbling and spilling all over, people climbing over them.

It took us about an hour to check in, because the self-service check-in computer crashed four times, and the regular check-in line caused blindness if you looked at it directly. I had tried to check-in at home, but the site was down . . . so it was kind of a Failure In All Directions moment. Once this was done, we stood around in confusion, squeezed into the crowd. For some reason, an airline employee started screaming my name. I made my way over as best as could, and she clawed the bag from my hand, slapped a tag on it, and shoved it into a pile with three dozen other bags. I was dismissed.

No one called for Oscar. He made his Englishy way up to the desk, where a different and much more confused-looking staff member took his bag and shoved it off in a different pile and sent us away through the scrum.

“What could go wrong?” I asked.

Our flight was delayed for several hours, because “the belt is down and they have to put all your bags on the plane by hand and we don’t want you going without your bags, even though they asked us to take off without them.” So we sat and we sat. Five hours after that, when we landed in Aruba, the pilot came on and said, “Um . . . ladies and gentlemen, the TSA has just informed us that not all of your bags actually made it on to the plane. We’re very sorry about this. It’s out of our hands.”

I turned to Oscar with a smile and said, “What do you want to bet that only one of the bags made it?”

He laughed. We both laughed. We thought that was funny. All the way to the baggage claim, we talked about the merry story we would tell about one bag being lost. My bag tumbled out almost instantly. We laughed again.

A half hour later, when the last bag was coughed up and Oscar was bagless, we laughed less. We were herded over to the lost luggage desk with about thirty other people. I have never lost a bag before, which is kind of a miracle and I shouldn’t even commit those words to print, but it’s true. So I gazed on in wonder at the proceedings. A man who looked and sounded like Tony Soprano tried to start a fight with two other men in line because one guy complained that he didn’t have a toothbrush now, and Fake Tony Soprano wanted him to shut up. I was standing about eight inches away from Fake Tony Soprano as this was happening, as he listed off the order in which he was going to “take care of these a@$holes outside.” Security was called. We left with a slip of paper saying that American Airlines would try very, very hard to find Oscar’s bag, honestly.

We got to the hotel hours after we were expected. By this point, we’d been traveling for about twelve hours and were starving and our priority had simply become: GET SOME FOOD. We had chosen a big, far-off resort that had promised to feed and water us and care for us like we were its very own children. We checked in and asked if we could please just be directed toward some food, immediately, because we were Very, Very Hungry and we had come through a storm and we were late and our bag was lost and ha ha, isn’t it all funny? And they agreed it was very funny. We could eat at once, as soon as we changed clothes, they said.

And we said, “Well, um. Oscar cannot change. His pants are all in a suitcase which is in New York, so . . .”

The woman behind the counter got a strange, faraway look, like we had just stumbled upon a great mystery of the universe that had been bothering her for some time, and that no human could really understand, and told us that she saw our problem but without pants it was No Food For Oscar unless we wanted to eat snacks at the beach party in three hours.

In three hours, I said, we would be dead. And she agreed that this was a bad thing. Perhaps Oscar could run into the gift shop and get some pants?

Oscar ran to the shop, which was closing for the day. He literally had to climb under the grate. He bought a pair of what I can only describe as “resort pants,” these loose, linen things with a drawstring, and a bathing suit, and a t-shirt that said ARUBA on it, because these were the only things available.

We were clawing at the restaurant door when it opened, and generally behaved like two people who have just been let out of the Home for the Hungry and Strange. We ate everything they put in front of us, and wandered outside afterwards in a haze and ended up in front of a Really Big Chess Set On The Beach. So we played that. In doing so, we attracted the attention of some awesome nerds, who had been clearly scoping out the Really Big Chess Set (and its companion, the Really Big Connect Four, which was not as cool) for any action.

I don’t remember the rest of the day.

THE NEXT MORNING

I whipped out my computer, saying, “Ah ha! You said I was a fool to bring my computer on vacation but now we can use it to track your bag! This will make everything quick and easy!”

I snatched the baggage tracking claim sheet from Oscar’s hand and went to the website and entered the code. The website greeted us warmly and thanked GINGERSNORT, OSCAR for flying American Airlines and his bag could “NOT BE LOCATED AT THIS TIME.”

We sat back and considered this message.

“What do they mean?” Oscar asked. “Is this like Where’s Waldo? Like my bag could be anywhere in the world?”

“Maybe it has gone on a quest,” I said. “Maybe it wants to find itself. Let us try not to worry about it. You have a swimsuit now, and the water outside is very, very beautiful.”

Now, I know what you are thinking! You are thinking that I was going nowhere near that water because I have a healthy and sensible fear of jellyfish. But THIS water was absolutely clear as crystal, and you could see out for a long way, and if any jellyfish tried to get to me I could see it coming for a mile off. (Also, I questioned the staff at length about jellyfish.) So I happily swam away and my brain started to feel much better. When I got back to the little grass hut thing where Oscar was reading, I found him looking very sad.

“I lost a sock,” he said.

It is very hard to get Oscar down, but this sock loss had clearly shaken him.

“Who cares!” I said, laughing. “You do not need socks here.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I LOST A SOCK. That was one of the last things I owned here and THEY DON’T SELL SOCKS. I am going to lose everything piece by piece until I have nothing.”

“Come,” I said, taking him by the hand. “We will look again. Surely the bag will have been found by now.”

The American Airlines website was very happy to have us back, and it still regretted that the bag of GINGERSNORT, OSCAR could not be located.

Oscar began to range around the room a bit.

“HOW MANY PLACES COULD IT BE?” he said.

“Come, come,” I said. “We will call people! I will use my powers as an American and complain!”

So I started to make a series of phone calls. No one was at the baggage desk in Aruba. I got trapped in a voice mail system for thirty minutes with the airline, finally lying my way to an operator in California who said that it was indeed a crying shame but the bag could not be located at this time and . . .

THE NEXT DAY

“I hate vacation,” Oscar said, sitting on the balcony in his well-worn ARUBA t-shirt. “I want to play tennis, but, oh right, my rackets are floating in the ocean somewhere and I only have one sock.”

“Come,” I said. “This will make you feel better. I have booked us on a snorkeling trip.”

“You’re going to snorkel?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said decisively. “I can snorkel very well, I will have you know. I did it once with some children in a shallow pool. You made me go on this stupid vacation and now I am going to show you that they are FUN!”

THREE HOURS LATER, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA, OVER A GERMAN SHIPWRECK IN CHOPPY, WINDBLOWN WATERS

“Cool,” Oscar said, looking off the side of the cheerful little reggae-playing sailboat that had dropped anchor in the middle of nowhere. I thought we were going ten feet from the shore to look at sand and rocks, but no. Oh, no.

I knocked a child out of the way to get a better grip on the wall.

“I don’t like shipwrecks,” I said.

“Yes you do,” Oscar said. “You wrote a whole book about them. You have a huge stack of books about them and you make me watch documentaries about them.”

“I like them IN THEORY,” I said. “I am scared of them in person.”

“Why? What do you think they’re going to do?”

“I don’t think they’re going to DO anything,” I replied. “They are just CREEPY. They suggest Ragnarok.”

The sailboat shook and churned.

“Also,” I said, looking over at the small, colorful fish the crew was feeding so that we could swim amongst them, “I am scared of small fish.”

But . . . I did it. I was last off the boat, and the heavy churn kept slamming me into the side of the boat, and I almost had a heart attack when I looked down, but I did do it. Then I had to sit on the deck and try not to throw up for a while. Oscar tells me I became “very pale and disoriented.”

The next stop was more like what I expected, and I got right off the boat and snorkeled for the entire time and got back on feeling like a Navy Seal because I Almost Touched a Fish. And when we got back, Oscar’s bag had mysteriously arrived.

“That was good,” I said, approvingly. “I think we should go on another adventure tomorrow.”

“You don’t approve of adventure,” Oscar said. “I thought you would sit on the beach and read.”

I held up of a brochure that said, “EXTREME ATV ADVENTURE,” pointed to the ATV, and said, “Want.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded. I was so sure.

THE NEXT DAY, AT THE ATV PLACE—A KIND OF DUSTY OUTPOST NEAR THE AIRPORT

The first thing they said to us when we arrived was, “Go in the storage unit and get a helmet.”

Any day that starts with climbing into one of those railroad-car like, rusted out bins is probably not a day you want to remember . . . I have watched enough murder mysteries to know that places like this are the hangouts of serial killers . . . but my rousing success in ten feet of water had convinced me that I could do and face anything.

As it happens, Oscar had left his driver’s license behind in England, so I was put in charge of a growling, hot, two-person ATV. We were surrounded by what looked like the cast of Dog the Bounty Hunter Meets Seinfeld . . . a weird group of lunatics and recent escapees who looked a little too eager for my tastes. We got a ten minute lesson, which I failed by flicking the throttle too much and running into a bush.

“We gonna go up that mountain over there,” our guide said. “It’s a bit rocky and we go down the way we go up, and it’s a bit steep, but you just lean forward and go slow and everybody gonna be fine. Let’s go! Two by two!”

And with that, I had to drive out onto the open road, side by side with the pack, Oscar gamely clinging to the back.

Turns out, this method helps you learn quite quickly, because your desire NOT TO DIE overrides all other concerns, and soon I was leaning over the handlebars, trying not to hit the goats. I managed not to be freaked out too much when we rode over the dusty beach area and was blinded and one of the other drivers cut in front of me and kicked up rocks in his wake. I tend to go from Fearful Person to Maniac pretty quickly.

When we stopped for water, Oscar said, “My god, look at the state of you.” He was joined in this sentiment by every single other person in the group, and the tour guide. I had managed to get dirtier than EVERYONE COMBINED. I was ENCRUSTED. I was A DIFFERENT COLOR.

But I was all, “I AM AN ADVENTURER AND I CAN TAKE IT!”

And then we started up the mountain.

I now understand the true meaning of “off-road” and “bumpy.” It’s both off the road and bumpy. And these, as it turns out, are BAD THINGS. At least if you are me, and the path is full of gulches that almost turn you over, and you keep going over rocks that almost send you and your English companion flying off the side of a mountain.


This was the nice bit.

Halfway up, I lost steering. I remember thinking that this was all going to end very, very badly, and the ATV was going VROOM, and how embarrassing the stories of my death on vacation would be, except I wouldn’t be reading them because I was dead . . . and the ATV just kind of went into this rocky incline, gurgled, growled, spun its tires, and stopped moving.

I turned and said to Oscar, “You drive.”

I clung on for dear life as we climbed to the top of the mountain, where everyone else took pictures as a huge raincloud descended on us.

“I hate vacation,” I said.

I was too shaken and defeated to drive down, and felt like a bit of a failure. I felt less so when one of the mad people from the group got too ambitious and actually rode his ATV right off the trail, rolling sideways down the slope. The only thing that prevented him from killing himself was the cactuses he landed in. Eight people had to pull the thing off him. I would have demanded to be airlifted out, but he was all, “I’m fine,” and we rode back down the mountain.

Oscar turned to me at the end, looking at my completely dirt-encrusted face, and asked, “What do you think of adventure now?”

“It is bad,” I said. “Let us never speak of this again.”



Me, at the end of the trail. I look happier than I actually am. the stuff that looks like tan is dirt. It took three washcloths and twenty minutes in the shower to scrub it all off.

THE RETURN HOME

When we got into our cab at JFK, I immediately reached to turn off the little TV screen in the backseat. Oscar seemed to be doing the same thing. To my surprise, though, he was reaching not to turn it off, but to turn it up.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Everyone HATES the little television?”

“I don’t ride in New York cabs as often as you do,” he explained. “The little television is kind of exciting to me.”

I acknowledged that that was perhaps an acceptable excuse, but felt the need to drone a bit.

“I hate television,” I pontificated on. “I’m sick of sitting in front of screens all the time. Isn’t that why we went away? Because too much input broke us? Why can’t we, as a society, just . . . oooooOOoOoOOooh! A 44 pound cat!”

And I immediately became engrossed in the saga of Princess Chunk, the massive tabby found in Voorhees, New Jersey, and blissfully watched her story as we sped home through the streets of New York. Someone else was driving, and we had some stuff, and there were no boats or mountains in sight.


I have seen adventure, and it is BAD.

I missed you all. My next entry will not be nearly as long, and will have to be something totally non-beach related. I will comb your comments for suggestions.

In my absence, my Official Magician made a trick named after me. All Serious Authors have Official Magicians, of course. I have taken much too long to get one. Here he is . . . . Magic Rob doing The MJ Jump.



Today’s random commenter winner is LEAHR. This Suite Scarlett summer giveway will be ending soon—and the next giveaway will be my blowout Cheertacular at the end of the year, so get those comments in! Also, if you haven’t entered the sweepstakes, do so now! Entries close on AUGUST 11th!

HOW TO GO TO SCHOOL

Friends, I am getting very bored of saying, “I told you so.” First ABBA, now this.

Today, four newspapers reported that many people were stung by jellyfish during the New York City Triathlon. Specifically, Lion’s Mane jellyfish, which can be up to eight feet in the body, and have been known to have tentacles 120 feet long.

Hold on. Let me look at my list of “last things I want to hear” and see where that is . . .

6. The Cloverfield monster is here to see you. And he’s brought flowers! Oh wait, those aren’t flowers. That’s a fistful of screaming, half-dead people. Nevermind.

5. I bought you a Vespa, but then I got hungry and I ate it.

4. Sir Ian McKellen has been cast as the lead in High School Musical 4 as Troy’s long-lost twin brother, Felix.*

Oh, here we go.

3. New York, your small island home, is surrounded by eight-foot-wide jellyfish.

I guess it’s not that much of a problem now because it’s not like I swim the East River very often, and by often, I mean ever in my life. But the jellyfish are getting closer. I think it is only a matter of time before they get Metrocards and start showing up on the subway, cleverly hidden behind copies of The New York Post or Twilight.

So, rather than dwell on that . . . let’s talk about going to school for writing. This came into my mind because I just looked higher up on this list and noticed this:

37. I am majoring in creative writing as my undergraduate degree!

I get a lot of notes asking me what I think of this, and I am happy to tell you.

I think it’s a bad idea.

Meg Cabot has been saying this for years, and just today, Justine Larbalestier wrote a great blog about this very subject, which says almost everything I am thinking. She talks about the importance of having a broad background with skills in several subjects, about the fact that most writers have some other job aside from writing, about the fact that many great writers never studied writing as a major. Let me EXPAND on this a bit, because I have A LOT of thoughts on this matter and it will keep me from thinking about THE COMING JELLYFISH INVASION.

“But Maureen!” some of you will say (clearly the people who have read my bio). “Weren’t you a writing major?”

I was, so I feel I can talk about this subject as someone who knows. I did not one, but TWO degrees in writing, one undergraduate, and one graduate. Neither was in “Creative Writing.”

My undergraduate degree is in technical writing and rhetoric. Rhetoric is a tough, sensible, ancient approach to making words work for you and figuring out WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. There were also additional classes in research technique, editing, layout . . .

“Creative writing,” as a term, makes me quake inside. I don’t know what it means. It’s like getting a handful of jello. I guess it’s workshops in writing fiction . . . but who knows? It could mean ANYTHING. Maybe it trains you to play Wordwang:



I think my big objection is the word “creative” in the name. I feel like I have the same problem with this as I do with muses . . . that there’s this idea that writing is all about traipsing around and being weird and “inspired” all the time, and that somehow the best training involves making word clouds and collages and listing fifty adjectives that describe the inner you.

That’s fun and fine and I am ALL FOR BEING WEIRD, just not as a class. Or, maybe one class. But not as a major. No one can teach you how to be creative.

Maybe this is just me. I am the byproduct of a Marine/engineer and a nursing professor, and there is something in me that demands A SYSTEM! RESULTS! LOGIC!

I guess one of my big fears is that you will end up in a department run by writers. I mean, that’s great if your teacher is, say, Nabokov, and less great if your teacher is, say, me. I don’t want to be a part of any department that would have me as a professor . . . unless it’s the Department of Swedish Disco or Fear Studies or something.

Another problem . . . when I have to write all the time, the last thing I want to do is write. This is true of almost every writer I know. We all love writing, but when someone makes you do it, it kind of sucks. However, I did loads of writing in trigonometry! If I had been a math major, I would have written about twelve books by the time I graduated. In retrospect, I see this is a GENIUS IDEA and encourage you all to think about it!

The question of a graduate degree in writing is a bit different, but not a lot. I speak as someone with an MFA in writing. I went to an Ivy League school, had amazing professors and classmates, got great feedback, and generally have nothing but good things to say about the experience, and I’m STILL not sure if it’s something I’d recommend.

Let’s face it . . . at least in the United States, an MFA is a costly thing, and it takes two or three years to complete. Know what you’re getting into. Don’t do it with the expectation that the degree itself is worth it, that those three letters will open any doors. They won’t. The MFA is entirely non-functional for any practical purpose.

If you’re getting an MFA in writing, do it to pump the most out of the experience as you possibly can. Go to a place you feel strongly about—a place with writers in the faculty you want to know and learn from. Do it only with the expectation that you hope to get a bit better, that you’re going to focus, that you mean business. Speaking of business . . . go to every single workshop the program offers about the business of writing. (Writing programs in New York will often bring in editors, agents, and other publishing professionals to talk about real-life experience. Go to these events and take notes!)

If you’re uncertain, if you don’t really care that much, if you’re in any way just doing it to go to grad school . . . take your $50,000, or $80,000, or $100,000, get a lot of books, and go to the beach and write for a year. That’s presuming you have $50,000, or $80,000, or $100,000. Most people don’t, and end up borrowing it from one of the Loan Giants who own too many of us already.

Many people wonder, does the MFA improve your chance of getting a book deal? It improves your chances if it makes your writing stronger. Otherwise, it makes zero difference. Editors don’t read your resume, they read your writing. They normally don’t know or care about your education, unless your education has some bearing on what you’re doing. For example, if you submit a book called How To Do Plastic Surgery At Home Using Simple Household Items Such As Corkscrews And Staplers . . . an editor might care to know that you are a board-certified plastic surgeon with a medical degree. They might also want to know if you are certifiably insane.

I have yet to meet an editor who cared ONE IOTA if I had an MFA or not. In fact, I think it would have been of much more interest if I had a degree in almost ANYTHING ELSE, since my bio reads like this: “Maureen studied writing, and then she studied more writing, and now she is writing. She spends most of her time sitting down.”

It would be so much better if my bio said something like: “Maureen is a former professional trampolinist who released three techno albums in Belgium before doing advanced work in science, specifically with little squishy cells that do totally awesome stuff, like wobble in time to music. She is currently at work searching for a new kind of triangle. She lives on a penguin farm.”**

Now, THAT’S an interesting author! No MFA in sight!

We idiots with the writing degrees have to dredge our backgrounds to pad out these stupid bios we have to write. We have to write bios because teachers make you write book reports. (Also, they won’t let me put my recipe for taco soup on the back flap of my books, under my photo.) It’s a good thing I worked in theater for so long, because I have a few stories about working with tigers and smoke machines and putting out fires to fill a paragraph or two. My Ivy League MFA is a footnote.

In any case, I’m not sure you should be taking academic advice from me. I wouldn’t. But those are my thoughts, if you wanted them. I guess the bottom line is that I think we just need more environmental scientists because this jellyfish thing is clearly getting out of hand. So please major in something like that because it is SERIOUSLY FREAKING ME OUT. (It doesn’t help that I am actually going away for a few days to a beach.)

Today’s random commenter Suite Scarlett winner is Haley!

In reading your comments, I saw many excellent questions and points, and I still have to talk to you about MAMMA MIA, which I have now seen. And yes, it was BEAUTIFUL. But clearly I needed to talk about this today . . . so if you could just let me know what I should discuss in my next post, that would be great. And, of course, there is another book to give away!




* actually, I think this is a misprint from my list of “things I totally want to hear”

**which I obviously am and have and did and am but let’s not get off the subject

GIMME GIMME GIMME A BOOK DEADLINE

Has it really been twelve days since I posted? Because it feels like ten minutes. That is because I have been working on Suite Scarlett 2, and when you are on deadline, time gets all funny. Weekday, weekend, day, night . . . it all gets blurry.

Have you noticed something on many YA author blogs recently? Many of us are on deadline. That is because it is book planting season! We are hard at work on the YA farm, making the books. Summer is for planting. Fall is for harvesting! That means fall is for FINAL DRAFTS, which are infinitely worse than first drafts.

To give you some idea of what it’s been like, here is a sample exchange between me and my beloved agent, Daphne Unfeasible. Note how things progress as we approach the deadline.

May, 2008

ME
Things are going really well with the book. I really have a grip on this one.

DAPHNE
I am glad to hear it. I assume you will be having your normal meltdown in a few weeks, though, when you get closer to the deadline.

ME
I’m not that predictable, you know.

DAPHNE
Yes you are. You always have it under control, and you always have the meltdown anyway. I look forward to your meltdown. It’s like the first snowfall of the season.

ME
I can’t believe you are saying this! I am not going to have a meltdown!

Late June, 2008

DAPHNE
How is the book coming, beloved client?

ME
Go away.

DAPHNE
What’s wrong?

ME
Everything. Nothing. Stop pressuring me.

DAPHNE
You were happy a few weeks ago. You said it was all under control, and I said you would have your normal meltdown.

ME
This is not a meltdown. Do I sound unreasonable? Do I sound crazy?

DAPHNE
No, but you sound a bit grouchy. This is how the meltdown always starts.

ME
Stop talking about this “meltdown”! Maybe that happened, like, once, with the first book.

DAPHNE
Would you like me to send some e-mails from the past? The 13 Little Blue Envelopes ones are among my favorites. But those 3AM phone calls from Devilish were also good.

ME
I don’t remember any of that. This book is different.

DAPHNE
I’m only telling you this so when the panic DOES hit, you’ll remember that you have done this before, and you always make it.

ME
Lies!

DAPHNE
You documented it!

ME
As a JOKE. My blog readers are so much smarter than that! They know that’s not true!


July 2nd

DAPHNE
How is the writing going today?

ME
Great! I went to the zoo!

DAPHNE
What? Why? Your book has nothing to do with the zoo.

ME
It’s all part of the process!

DAPHNE
I feel like you are stalling. The book is due in two weeks, you know.

ME
You understand NOTHING about writing. Writing is a super-magical process that only writers understand and no one else does and mine involves going to the zoo and seeing ALL THE MONKEYS. It’s where I meet my muse.

DAPHNE
I thought you were staunchly anti-muse. I thought you believed that writing is a craft that you learn through practice and devotion and it’s counterproductive and actually insulting to suggest that imaginary creatures have anything to do with it.

ME
Fine. I just need the monkeys.

DAPHNE
You’re sure you’re not just procrastinating because it’s getting hard?

ME
Leave me alone! You are destroying the aura I’ve created! YOU ARE MAKING THE MONKEYS ANGRY!


July 7th

ME
As my legal representative in all things literary on earth, I command you to come to my house and kill me with a brick.

DAPHNE
You know I love to oblige your every whim, but I fear I cannot help you. Looking forward to reading the book!

ME
YOU NEVER HELP ME WHEN I NEED YOU.

DAPHNE
There, there. Why don’t you Swifter around your desk for a little while? That usually relaxes you.

ME
I feel better. The book is not so bad.


July 9th

ME
I AM GOING TO GO INTO OUTER SPACE AND NEVER COME BACK.

DAPHNE
I’m not worried. You would never go into space. You won’t even wade into four feet of ocean. Finish your book.

ME
Untrue! Untrue! I once jumped off a boat and swam to an island! I am a very good swimmer!

DAPHNE
This is not a discussion about your swimming ability. It’s a discussion about your cowardice. You jumped off that boat because the man running it pulled out a net and said it was for catching jellyfish and that he already had a bunch of them in a bucket, and then he opened that bucket to show you, and you jumped off and swam to shore . . . which, if I remember correctly, you said was about thirty feet away.

Actually, this is a discussion about your writing. Finish your book.

ME
I really don’t think the distance from the shore makes any difference.

DAPHNE
You’re right. It doesn’t. Finish your book.


July 11th

ME
I am baking you a cake! It’s in the oven RIGHT NOW!

DAPHNE
Thank you for the cake. You are a very good baker, and I certainly appreciate it. But perhaps this week I can just go and buy myself a cake, and you and I can eat it when you FINISH YOUR BOOK.

ME
It’s not the same if it comes from a store. My cake is made with love.

DAPHNE
I know you love me. As you should. But if you really wanted to show it, you would give me a book.

ME
I don’t think you are showing me proper respect. I am an AUTHOR. I am THE TALENT. Why aren’t you GROVELING MORE? Maybe I will throw a huge tantrum and never show you my book! DO NOT MAKE THE TALENT GO ALL DIVA ON YOU!

DAPHNE
Yes, yes, little pineapple. Grovel, grovel.

ME
That was totally sarcastic and not at all groveling! You have it so easy! I could be throwing cell phones at staff members in airports and wandering around the streets in a drug-induced haze, you know. I could shave off all my hair in public and make videos where I talk to baby mice. I could make you bail me out of jail at four in the morning. You could have it a lot worse! You should count your lucky stars that I am so EASY TO DEAL WITH!

DAPHNE
I count them every day.


July 15th

ME
lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol

DAPHNE
What are you laughing at?

ME
A juicebox!



July 17th

ME
Here you go. Scarlett Fever.

DAPHNE
How are you?

ME
Fine. Why?

Yes! The first draft of the book is in! And did you see that? I just slipped the title in there. The second Scarlett book is called Scarlett Fever!

SCARLETT FEVER! There’s even a version of the cover all ready to go! (Sekrit. Cannot show you yet.) There’s still loads of work to do yet. This was just a first draft. But the book is coming your way soon, and it’s bigger and more insane than the first. Spencer, in particular, goes through the wringer in this one. I wish I could tell you all about it, but I cannot give spoilers. But there are BIG THINGS AFOOT!

Okay, one spoiler. There’s a dance number. And amazingly, many of you have been suggesting things about Spencer that you were probably joking about but actually happen! Think FOOD.

Now, MANY of you have been asking—not reasonably—if I am excited for the Mamma Mia movie.

Am I excited about the Mamma Mia movie. . . .

In my mind, it is NO CONICIDENCE that Mamma Mia is coming out JUST AS THE BOOK IS DUE. And I don’t want to be all “I told you so,” but I have been expounding the virtues of Abba forever, and now everyone is all Abba, Abba, Abba. I do not resent this. I am glad that everyone is catching on!

IN FACT . . . when I was at the Gay Pride Parade here in NYC a few weeks ago (when I was in the parade, riding at the top of the Google double-decker bus), the very first person I ran into walked up to me reached into a bag and said, “Would you like a Mamma Mia, Gimme Gimme Gimme A Man After Midnight fan to beat the heat?”

And I said, “Marry me.”

He said, “Alas, I cannot. I am gay. But I will do a dance with you.”

And we did a dance.



My Mamma Mia fan.

In fact, I am so excited to see Mamma Mia that I invite ALL OF YOU to come! I am going tomorrow night. Now, I know a lot of you are not in New York. That is upsetting. The quickest way to fix this is by hitting the banner just to the right and entering the Suite Scarlett Sweepstakes! Win that trip to NYC and we will meet and do ABBA DANCES together!

To get us all ready, here is the trailer!



Even better . . . here is Abba performing the title song! Notice the filming techniques taken right from fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman! Notice the dancing that even I can do!



You know what I am thinking, actually? I am thinking I should write to the people who run the Abba Museum or Her Serene Highness Princess Anni-Frid Reuss, Countess of Plauen to ask if I could be made the official Abba YA ambassador for the United States. (Which is something I just made up but think I would be very good at. If I did so, would you support me? What do you guys think?)

Okay, book time. The winner of today’s book is Chelsea! Also, the winner of the contest for guessing the title of the new book was cweed105. So both of you . . . drop me a line for your PRIZES!

I will be blogging MUCH MORE this week, so get those comments in, because I am still giving away books!

DEATH TO MUSES

I got a question the other day that needs an answer. I’ve gotten this question in many, many forms from many, many people—so clearly, YOU need to know.

Suvi said . . .
I'd love to write things like stories and novels, but every time I try, some sort of invisible force stops me. I simply can't write. I've tried simply ignoring that force and keep writing, but it never works. No matter how awesome idea I have, no matter how far I've planned the plot, I can't write about it. I've sometimes noticed that after writing fifteen pages to a notebook, still nothing has happened in my story, and that's not good. Do you have any advice for me? How can writing be rehearsed, if the invisible force keeps bullying you?

It’s a very good question, Suvi, and one I have been asking myself as I write the hard bits of Suite Scarlett 2. Don’t get me wrong . . . I love Suite Scarlett 2. I am very happy about writing it. But even the best books like to REPEATEDLY PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE while you are working on them. I believe the technical term for this is “work.”

Writing is fun. I love what I do, and I would do it no matter what, even if I had to scrawl my little stories on tiny slips of paper and leave them under your door at night. (I may do that anyway.) But it is ALSO work. If you are considering writing as a career (and bless you if you are), you should know this. Because I know that sometimes there is this misconception that writers spend most of their time picking olives out of the bottoms of martini glasses and waiting for the muse to strike.

I hate muses . . . I mean, with the obvious exception of Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu. This idea that all you have to do is sit around and a muse lands on your head, dances around your desk, and whispers in your ear and BANG! BOOK!

Forget that. Get yourself a can of anti-muse spray. The things are credit-stealing parasites.

I mean, if you opened your oven and found a loaf of homemade bread, you wouldn’t say, “THE BREAD FAIRY HAS COME!”* Because you would know that you spent the morning buying ingredients, kneading the dough, letting it rise, and baking it properly. You also took the time to learn how to bake, and probably burned a loaf or two in the effort.

When writing goes well, it feels magical . . . but there is no magic to it. Writing goes well because you have done some work. You have spent MANY MANY MANY HOURS sitting at your desk, written pages and pages and pages of useless crap, read piles of books, done a lot more wrong than you have right, questioned your sanity and talent . . . and just kept going. No muse involved.

I am getting to your question, Suvi. This is all relevant. Because I have two answers to your question—but first we have to dismiss the muse idea. The story idea may droppeth like a gentle rain from heaven, but the execution is all about work.

I say this as someone sitting here writing a book that I had ALL PLANNED OUT. All during the writing of Suite Scarlett, I was keeping a running file of book two. I never had so much at the start of writing before! I thought the book would write itself while I sewed sequins on my outfit for the ABBA museum opening. Nope.

Sooner or later, no matter how lucky and talented and wonderful you are (whoever YOU are in this particular case) . . . you are going to hit the Great Wall of Sucktitude. You’re just motoring along with your story, blue skies above you and clear roads ahead, so you step on the gas and . . . . BANG. The invisible force field.

You can’t see it. You don’t know why it’s there. You don’t know what it wants. But there it is . . . the thing that is keeping you from going forward and it’s all “none shall pass” for no particular reason except to GET IN YOUR WAY. The job now is to figure out how to get over/under/through/around/other prepositions this invisible barrier.

So what to do? Well, here are my two answers, finally. Oh wait . . . hold on. I have to finish eating this mango. (I am eating a mango.)

OK . . . here are my two answers.

ONE ANSWER

Okay, the truth is I don’t know what you should do in particular. I can only tell you that you certainly aren’t alone. Sometimes, just knowing that you are not the only person who has had a certain problem, and that other people have gotten through it . . . sometimes that is enough. This is the reason I went on and on about muses, because I think some people may have the idea in their heads that if they can’t immediately finish a book or story the very first time they try they should go and eat worms and die because they don’t have “it.” I just wanted to dispel that notion in a big way.

I have hit the wall more times than I could possibly count, and I am pretty sure it has flattened my face in the process. I have a small arsenal of tactics I employ in this situation, to varying degrees of success. They include:

- Sending long, rambling notes to friends, saying how I have failed completely (again) and am going die of writing mange (again) and how my brain is stalled never to restart (again). This is a pleasant time-waster. Also, my friends LOVE it!

- Going and doing some other, totally unconnected task, something I know I can complete. The book may not get done today—but the DISHES will! Turning off your brain and focusing on a completely automatic task seems to help. I once entirely repainted my apartment in a dizzying array of colors while “writing a book.”

- Physical activity works well too. I tend to find that while I am attempting some position in yoga class that I am certain will snap my spine in two . . . this is when I solve the problem that has been eating my brain for hours or days.

- Reading something in a style or with a tone and pace that I’d really like to emulate, to try to jumpstart the brain and crack the secret.

- Reading books about other writers and finding what they did when their brains died.

But the plainest, most annoying answer is . . . a lot of times you just have to sit there and keep throwing rocks at the problem. If you can master the art of just staying there, planted in front of the screen/notebook . . . then you’re getting somewhere.

You can also talk to your editor. Maybe you will have a conversation like this:



ANOTHER ANSWER, THIS TIME WITH SOME SCIENCE

In this particular case, it sounds like you might be lacking an inciting incident. I don’t know this for certain . . . it’s just a possibility as you say you are 15 pages in and nothing has happened.

Under every story, there is some kind of structure to get you from the starting point to the ending point.

Stories generally have a protagonist (main character) who faces a series of challenges in an attempt to achieve some sort of goal. The rising action takes the character to the climax, where he/she/it battles it out somehow and either wins or loses. Not every story has the same exact structure, but you can find many common elements at work. (This is not the same as being “formulaic.” No one would say to an architect, “You’re putting a ROOF on your building? HOW FORMULAIC!”)

The inciting incident is the moment in which the character really gets on the story path. Before the inciting incident, the character is presumably just noodling along, pressing flowers and updating his or her Facebook page, when all of a sudden life zooms in and takes him/her for a spin.

Let’s make up the opening of a story. Let’s say a girl . . . we’ll call her mj just to make things simple . . . is a poor orphan living with her hateful aunt and uncle, who force her to sleep in the space under the stairs. Her life is hopeless. Then one day, a sparkly letter arrives from HSH Princess Anni-Frid Reuss, Countess of Plauen, otherwise known as Anni-Frid, the dark-haired lead singer from ABBA . . . telling her that she has been admitted to Snogwarts, school of disco princessry. And then, in the next moment, Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters comes for her on a big silver Vespa to take her away.

The arrival of the letter marks a change of status for our little mj. She is not the poor orphan she has always thought she was—she is a disco princess. Her life has now changed course, and now she’s on the path.

So, Suvi, you may know where you want the character to end up (at Snogwarts, where she will do battle with P.K. Trowling, who is trying to steal the magic disco ball) but have no idea how to get her there.

Maybe take a moment and look over the openings of some of your favorite books. At what moment do things completely change for the main character? What sets the story in motion? What changes the conditions under which he/she/it is living? There are all kinds of tricks and devices authors use. A letter of invitation, moving to a new town, meeting a new person, a murder, a disappearance . . . something sets things off.

This incident could happen on page 2, or 15, or 20, or 40 (I’ve just noticed that Suite Scarlett’s is on page 40) . . . you may have to look around. It won’t be too far in.

If that fails, listen to “Dancing Queen” fifty times in a row and spin around a lot.

DEPARTMENT OF INDEPENDENCE

As I missed posting on July 4th, I thought I should make a gesture to show my patriotic spirit. I know that many of you are reading from places OTHER than the United States—but no matter where you are, have a little American History.

Here’s a little something about the 4th of July. It is a bit of a gross and biased oversimplification of an incredibly nuanced political situation, but what exactly do you want from a cartoon with a jaunty song? (And, despite the bias . . . the Continental Congress was full of mad geniuses, and signing the Declaration of Independence was a pretty bold act. We still love the British. Oh, and apparently it wasn't even signed on July 4th . . . but who cares? There is a lot of license taken with holidays anyway.)




And here is something about founding father Alexander Hamilton. (WARNING: there is a little profanity in this. Not a lot. There is also a lot of drunkenness. I wanted you to know. I consider it part of the service around here.)



DEPARTMENT OF GIVING OUT SUITE SCARLETT

You may or may not have noticed that I am running a tiny contest on the forum. A prize to anyone who can guess the title of SUITE SCARLETT 2. No one has gotten it yet. I will announce the title in the next post!

In the meantime, today’s book (signed by Spencer Martin) goes to Olivia. And, as ever, another book will go to another random commenter. What do YOU think the title of the next Scarlett is? What do YOU do when you can’t write? Would YOU like a mango?



* Unless you are a character in How To Ditch Your Fairy.