AUTUMN LITERARY ROUNDUP

There are so many exciting things happening in the next few weeks. Here's what I'm looking forward to:

Lola and the Boy Next Door Release Party

7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 24th at Malaprop's Bookstore in downtown Asheville, N.C.

My friend Stephanie Perkins's second book, Lola and the Boy Next Door, comes out this weekend! I love Stephanie's books. They're like sitting down to eat cookies with your hilarious best friend. All the early reviews have been fantastic, even the ones from Kirkus where, as I have mentioned before, they do not mess around. If you're outside the Asheville area, the wide release date is Sept. 29th, but you can order copies on Malaprop's web site. Come support an amazing author and an amazing independent book store, all at once.

More Fall Books!

I've actually started marking the release dates for the books I'm most excited about in my day planner. (What? You don't do that?) In addition to Lola, I'm waiting with barely contained fangirl enthusiasm for . . .

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor (Release date: Sept. 27)

Stephanie turned me on to Laini Taylor, and I can never thank her enough. Her story collection, Lips Touch Three Times, was truly amazing, despite having one of the worst and most misleading covers in the history of books. I heard some of the early buzz about Daughter of Smoke and Bone and was interested, but then I read Lips Touch, and this book automatically became a must-read. I don't know a lot about it beyond the fact that it's set in Prague and involves mysterious black handprints and supernatural beings with a desire for human teeth, but if that isn't enough to sell you on it, I don't know what is.

The Name of the Star, by Maureen Johnson (Release date: Sept. 29)

Maureen Johnson has been around the Y.A. market for years, but I've only just started reading her books. She was one of those authors I knew of, but hadn't read. Then I picked up Devilish a few weeks ago and fell in love with her. She did a great job of blending contemporary characters with supernatural elements and managed that strange alchemy that allows humor and suspense to exist side by side in Devilish, so I'm excited to see what she does with a modern mystery involving Jack the Ripper and a London boarding school.

The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater (Release date: Oct. 18)

Unlike the other two authors I've mentioned, I haven't read anything by Maggie Stiefvater before. However, the premise of The Scorpio Races -- a modern-day island nation captures and races the man-eating horse-like creatures that rise out of the surf -- intrigues me, and the book itself has gotten good reviews. I think it's definitely worth a look.

Then, of course, I have to wait even longer for Black Heart, by Holly Black, and Spell Bound, by Rachel Hawkins, both of which won't come out until next year. Gah! But at least I still have A Dance of Dragons and all of these other fabulous books to keep me busy until then, plus the oeuvres of Laini Taylor and Maureen Johnson to finish off. I think I'll be okay.

National Storytelling Festival

Oct. 7 through 9th in Jonesborough, TN

I've been to the National Storytelling Festival twice before, once as a child, and once three years ago. It's an amazing experience: acres of tents housing storytellers from every conceivable background, telling hilarious, sad, moving stories from all around the world. They tell all day long and into the night, cut only by the scream of the train that passes through the middle of the town around midday. If it weren't so expensive, I'd go all weekend this year. But, alas, a day pass is $105. And even though the rich variety of storytellers performing at the festival are completely worth that price, I don't have the money. I can, however, afford to go to the outdoor Ghost Story Concert, which profoundly affected me as a child and gave me a lifelong aversion to sloths (it's a long story), and the Midnight Cabaret.

Fall is going to be awesome!

A LOVE LETTER

Someone asked me this summer if my husband and I were still like newlyweds, meaning, I think, were we still madly in love? We've been a couple for 13 years now, and married for six of those years. (We were both misfit preacher's kids who fell in love in high school.) I guess for most people, being newlyweds means being smitten, being lost in an unearthly haze of love. But really, being newlyweds means getting used to living with someone else and their new, bizarre habit of never pushing down the shower stopper or their unreasonable hatred of tomatoes in all forms except ketchup. You both have to figure out how to alter your routine to accommodate the other person, and this invariably makes everyone cranky.

So, I said no, we were better than newlyweds. Because we've had time to figure out how to live with each other's weird habits and preferences. Those things that truly drove us crazy at the beginning don't bother us so much any more, and if they do, we know we can look at the other person and say, "Honey, you're driving me nuts right now," without sending them into paroxysms of guilt and fear that our relationship might be unraveling before their eyes. We both know we'll be there the next day.

In books and songs and movies, love is always this tremendous, often-tragic, overpowering force of attraction that binds two people together no matter what. It burns bright and hot, and usually culminates in deep tongue-kissing and pyrotechnics. And yes, falling in love is like that, but I feel lucky that I've gotten to explore what's beyond the explosions and cascading fireworks. I feel lucky that I've gotten to experience the slow, constant burn of a long relationship. I often find myself saying, "This is what true love must be," only to discover some new and deeper level to it, like a deep sea diver who keeps finding new and more marvelous rooms in an underwater cavern. Wonders within wonders.

Jeremy and I have never had a song that was "our song," and I had trouble picking out a poem to read at our wedding, but I thought I would share some things I've discovered since that describe this quiet kind of love that grows and deepens over time.  The first is "The Book of Love," by the Magnetic Fields

I love that, "You can read me anything." Maybe it's because I'm a book-lover or a history nerd, or because I once tried to read The Book of Good Love in college (and it's totally true -- it's long and boring), but this is one of those songs that makes me wish I could sing, because there's no other way to express what's in it.

One of my other favorites is the poem, "Missed Time," by Ha Jin.

My notebook has remained blank for months

thanks to the light you shower

around me. I have no use

for my pen, which lies

languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live

a storyless life that needs

no writing for meaning—

when I am gone, let others say

they lost a happy man,

though no one can tell how happy I was.

Sometimes when I lose myself in a project, I read this poem, and it brings me back to earth. It reminds me of what's truly important. I've lived a life with too much strife and plot and drama, and while I love those things in writing, I think I would prefer to live a storyless life. But I also love the paradox of it - writing about not needing to write. Because even while he's saying it's possible to live this life, it clearly isn't, at least for him. There will always be a part that writes, strife or no. Strife isn't necessary to spur creation.

PANDORA

Today is the ten-year anniversary of September 11, 2001. This morning, I heard this incredibly moving interview with a New York firefighter's widow on NPR.

I wasn't anywhere special on 9/11. I don't have any personal claim to the pain of it, the way the family members of those who died do, but one of the things we do to remember this day is to tell the story of where we were and how we remember what happened. So, this is what I remember.

I woke up to a phone call. I was less than a month into my first semester at college, and living away from home for the first time ever in a brick highrise dormitory. I didn't have any classes until the late morning, so I had slept in.

My dad was on the phone. "Alexa, turn on the TV."

"What is it?" I blinked and looked over at my roommate, fast asleep under her covers. "What's wrong?"

"Just turn on the TV, okay? Everything's going to be okay. Just turn on the TV." And then he hung up.

I climbed out of bed and raced barefoot down the hall to the student lounge, where we had a small TV mounted on the wall. Two other people were already awake, staring O-mouthed at the screen. I had just enough time to register an avalanche of black smoke pouring up into the sky, and then the second tower fell.

I know now that we all felt this sudden panic to do something, to somehow try to make the awful, irrevocable thing right. At the time, I hadn't ever felt that way before, though. All I knew was that my chest felt like bursting, and I couldn't think of anything else to do but go knock on the doors of all the other students on my hall and tell them to turn on the TV, so that's what I did.

The school had nearly emptied out by that afternoon. Most of the students went home, and I felt like a ghost wandering the hallways of the dorms and academic buildings, looking for that nebulous thing I could do to make things better. That night, I drank half a bottle of contraband wine at my desk and read the New York Times online. My friend, who was also knocking around the near-empty campus, told me he had spent all day trying to buy as many newspapers as he could, simply because that seemed like something concrete he could do.

The next day, we figured out we could give blood, so that was something. And then George Bush came on TV and told us to go spend money and stimulate the economy, which was worse than being told there wasn't anything you could do at all. 

My boyfriend at the time, now my husband, told me he was seriously considering enlisting in the army. I cried until there wasn't anything left in me, because I could tell even then that there was going to be a war as a result of this, and that it was going to be ugly. 

The first sign of ugliness showed up a week later. One of my classmates, a stunningly beautiful girl from Venezula with a mane of jet-black hair down to her lower back, returned from lunch at a fast food restaurant one afternoon and told all of us gathered around the bus stop about how some rednecks had thrown salt and pepper shakers at her and her friend, and yelled at them to get out of the country.

"I'm from Venezuela." She threw her hands up in the air as she told the story. "Idiots."

I had fallen in love with photography, and had been planning to follow a group of classmates on a trip to an IMF protest in Washington, D.C. in late September, with the idea that I could document the experience for the college newspaper.  I dropped my plans. I was scared. Who knew if another attack was coming? The world was different, if not falling apart altogether. We hadn't started to hear reports about the Muslim men detained after 9-11, but I was fairly sure attending an IMF protest a mere two weeks after a terrorist attack was asking to be arrested.

Then came Afghanistan, and Iraq. I went to protests with my camera and shot pictures of scruffy 20-somethings with trombones and banners, old women with black flags, and police with bunches of plastic riot cuffs attached to their belts. At one protest, someone in plain clothes stepped out of an unmarked black car and systematically took pictures of every person's face as we stood on a downtown sidewalk. My friends and I put together petitions asking for our senator not to back the bill supporting the war in Iraq, and stood outside the cafeteria pleading for signatures. Everyone was still afraid and uncertain about the right thing to do, and hardly anyone signed. We got a form letter from our senator in return. The war went ahead.

I heard someone argue on the radio today that, unless you had a loved one who died on 9/11 or entered military service as a consequence of it, the attack that day didn't truly affect you.  I don't think that's true. September 11th shook me. It made me evaluate my politics more deeply and taught me the awful, unavoidable confusion of living in a world where black and white swirl together, where victims can become perpetrators, where conviction is suddenly a landmine. It turned my peers into soldiers, and then into veterans. I think it changed most of us so deeply that we can't even recognize it.

This is my way of remembering, and of mourning for what was and what might have been.  I wish this attack had been the last of its like, that the whole world would have realized how horrible it was and called a ceasefire. I wish it had not happened again in Mumbai, in London, in Madrid, in Indonesia, and every day in Baghdad. But it did, and it does. September 11th isn't over. It happens again every year, and in some places, every day.

The only hope is that we - people - can still change that. Like Pandora and her box, people have loosed all the evil in the world. We can't put it back in the box, but after it has flown, we can still find hope glowing at the bottom. Every day the calendar rolls over, and we have another chance to stop hurt like this from spreading. We can still make art and give aid to our fellow creatures. We can staunch the flow of hate. Here's hoping we're up to the challenge.

Y.A. NOVEL CHALLENGE UPDATE 5 - DEBRIEFING

I know summer doesn't officially end until later this month, but summer as I define it -- school's out, pools are open, vacations are afoot -- is over. Labor Day is here and library school is back in session, which means the luxury of having my evenings and weekends free for writing is gone again, too. Not that that will stop me. I'll still be tapping away on my lunch breaks and probably neglecting my homework in favor of a writing project at some point, but now seems like a good point to declare an end to the Summer Y.A. Novel Writing Challenge and look back on how it went.

"DOOOOOOOOOMED!"

I set a goal for myself of finishing 45,000 words in three months, but more importantly, to stay sane and keep the joy of writing in my work. What's the point of driving yourself crazy writing 45,000 words you ultimately hate? I didn't hit my word count goal -- as of today I have 26,050 words -- and in the past, this would have been cause to beat myself up and mope around eating Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt, wallowing in the certain knowledge that I was doomed to never succeed at anything. But this summer, I managed to stay sane, and more importantly, maintain my enthusiasm for the project I've started. So what if my pacing is more deliberate? 26,000 words is a respectable start, and right now, I don't have any editors looking over my shoulder, except the ones in my own head. Why not enjoy the process or writing, rather than hounding myself over results?

Something to be proud of

The best part of this challenge, though, has been having the opportunity to meet with Nathan Ballingrud and Theodora Goss for critique exchanges. They are both wonderful critique partners, and I'm so excited to see what their current projects eventually turn out to be.

So, what's next? I'm definitely going to keep working on the novel I've started, but I'd like to intersperse it with other projects. I haven't finished a short story since this spring, and I'd like to have at least one more out there in the world by the end of this year. You'll notice that I've changed the SUMMER Y.A. NOVEL CHALLENGE tab on my blog to Y.A. NOVEL CHALLENGE, and I've changed the goal to 90,000 words. I'll still blog about it occasionally, but not as often as I have this summer. In short, I'm going to keep going. Wish me luck!