Science Fatigue

I have mentioned my screenplay before (many, many times), and tonight I’m going to mention it again. This is what I have been working on for the last few weeks.

It’s a great experience. I’m working with a producer in LA and collaborating, which I’ve never done before. So far it has been absolutely great. Collaborations can be wonderful but they can also be a nightmare; get two conflicting personalities, or one partner who doesn’t want to work, or conflicting ideas and inflexible people, and it’s a recipe for disaster. So it is really lucky that we’ve done so well.

It’s not done, but we’re really getting close. We have another draft or two to go—polishes, really, more than major rewrites. It is getting exciting. We turned it in to two competitions for grants, leading to my current stress. (My bedroom is a disaster. I did laundry on Saturday and still it sits, unfolded, in the bag. On my floor.) I have never outright won a competition before, but I’ve gotten to be a quarterfinalist, semifinalist, and an actual finalist. Anil, my producer, has actually won grants. I am hoping some of his awards karma rubs off onto me.

Meanwhile, the book blog tour continues. It has been wonderful. I will list the links to the various reviews shortly (not tonight; tonight is going to be short) so you can see for yourself how I’ve been all over the internet. Pretty wild. And it’s all been pretty heartening. It is true that not everyone loves it, but…not everything can be loved by everyone. (I always go back to the slapping down that The Lovely Bones received by the New York Review of Books. Horrible, awful, mean review, of a book that spent about a year as #1 on the bestseller lists and redefined the way I wrote fiction.) And enough people have, in fact, loved it that I am feeling pretty good. It’s really amazing to meet people all around the country and have them say that you’ve touched their lives in a small way. This is the best part of the whole experience.

More to come. Soon.

chupacabras!

Okay, it's a little bit squished (I have no idea why) but after all the fighting I've done to get this picture up at all, a little bit squished will have to do.

I was able to call a book group last night and discuss my book with them. There were 12 women from Herriman, Utah, who picked my book just off review sites etc and read it for this month's selection. I was super-excited to find out that they had picked it (thanks, Google Alerts!) and emailed the woman who'd blogged about it, Amanda Day (hi, Amanda!), to ask if I could participate by phone. (and how cool is it that my book cover occupies the same page as Stephenie Meyer's bestseller? Let's have some selling karma rub off onto me!) She said yes and last night I called and we had a *great* discussion. You always worry it's going to be a little weird, since you can't see faces and it's going to be a bit unnatural if you're just a phone presence, but it worked out really, really well. I was so happy to do it, and I think they hadn't had that experience before so it was great all around. (I did notice that I kept referring to September 11...a little too much. Maybe it's because of the anniversary coming up, and maybe because it really did have a strong impression on me and the writing of the book. Either way, I felt like Rudy Giuliani: a noun, a verb, and 9/11. Sorry!) I love getting insights that I hadn't thought of from readers; it's really a wonderful thing to gasp and say, "Yes, you're right!" And I had a couple of those moments last night. I think the best were when some of the women, mothers, told me that they wanted to hug their children a little more and appreciate their families more because of having read the book. That caused some serious warm-and-fuzzies. So thank you to all of you, especially Kristy Johnson (who hosted the group and emailed me--hi, Kristy!) and Amanda. Oh, and Rusti (I don't know your last name) who wrote an awesome blog entry today. Emily, who just left a comment on Rusti's blog, I'd love-love-love to call into your book group, too!!

They also asked to see a picture of chupacabras, so that's what's above. This is one that a young man from Costa Rica drew for me. His name is Edwin (the guy, not the chupacabra), and he was a lot of fun. At some point when I was in CR, in a little town called San Ramon, chupacabras started making headlines. I'm not sure exactly for what; I wasn't supposed to read or watch the news. All I knew was that suddenly a ton of little kids were asking me if I believed in chupacabras. The literal meaning of that word is "suck goat" -- they were supposed to be little noctural creatures that sucked the blood out of animals. "Do you believe in chupacabras?" Well, I'm sure I don't know. I asked Edwin what they were talking about, and he drew me the above picture (I've saved it all these years), which I describe as a mixture between an alien and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I can definitively say I do not believe in THAT.

Anyone who reads my book from now on, this is NOT what I am picturing when Henry talks about making chupacabra toys. Please don't let me spoil that for you.

Much to talk about! I have started a monthlong Virtual Book Tour on 11 different blogs. We've had our first stops already: The Friendly Book Nook and Booking Mama. I followed up Booking Mama with a guest post the next day, about angels in my life, and I will do the same with TFBN tomorrow (no link yet because...well, I haven't written it. That's next.) Both of these blogs are terrific and I have bookmarked them for future reading. This book tour is being put together by TLC Book Tours, founded by the lovely Trish and Lisa. Info on my book tour is here. (look at me and my links today!)

So that's that. I'm sure there's more to talk about, but there are more days in which to do it. Until soon...

Sunday Salon - The Sister

Time for another Sunday Salon! I'm feeling a bit more energetic and able to do thigns I've been meaning to do for a while, and that includes reviewing books. This is not one I have been reading for a month (I mentioned earlier that I'd been struggling to get through one, but it's one I decided not to review). I read this one in a week and am now going to write a review.

The Sister by Poppy Adams is a debut novel set in an eerie mansion in rural England. Ms. Adams does a great job of setting up a dark, creepy atmosphere for a story rife with mystery and puzzlement. Who is this woman, Virginia (the narrator)? Why has her sister Vivien not been home in fifty years? How did their parents die? Why is Ginny such a recluse? And what is going to happen as Vivi intrudes on Ginny's solitary existence, with her cheer and modern ways and little dog? Not one of these answers can be good.

I am fascinated by books with the "unreliable narrator." We as readers typically automatically trust the narrator unless things start happening to indicate we shouldn't. And they have to be pretty big things, really. I have tried to write "unreliable narrator" stories before, and often people don't get it if you're subtle. There have to be some grand signs.

Ginny gives a few signs, but a lot of them are stated. People avoid her. Kids in the town harass her occasionally because she's a hermit. She as an obsession with orderliness and clocks. But until Vivien starts telling her (and us) that there's something wrong with her, we aren't really going to get it. We do at the end, of course, when subtlety is thrown to the wind, but...somehow the ending seemed a little bit tacked on. It wasn't a crescendo or a climax; it was a novel building in one direction and then a very predictable-but-wanting-to-be-shocking ending.

There are some fascinating aspects to this book. I assume that Poppy Adams, a documentary filmmaker, has not studied lepidoptery (moths) but with the amount of detail in there, one would thinks she had a doctorate in it. In fact, there's a little too much. I kept thinking all the moths and details were going to be some kind of grand symbol, but it didn't work out that way. They were her obsession, but lots of people have obsessions. There are many people who actually obsess about bugs. I don't happen to like bugs, but the fact that they do doesn't make them crazy. So Ginny's entomology didn't really serve a bigger purpose. I know, I know, not everything in literature has to be a symbol or gateway to something deeper, but there was so much here about moths, I wanted it to do something.

I kept waiting for a big reveal about Ginny's condition. We get a big reveal about their parents, but while one of the central questions (why Vivien stayed away) is partly answered (unsatisfactorily, in my mind, since it didn't really involve Ginny, the protagonist), a bigger one (why she came back) remains forever a mystery.

There's a lot of good here. Ultimately, if you have spare time, I'd say read the book. Just don't break down any barriers to get to it.

A day late and a dollar short

The title accurately sums up my mental state lately. Why? That's a good question. And I don't have much of an answer. I made it through another draft, but the ending is just not coming together yet. So I'm working, going to the gym (and I've started taking a running class, which I am enjoying), editing some articles freelance, and that's about it. And yet I feel like I can't get a handle on my life. Why? Is watching the Olympics really that taxing? Keeping my bedroom clean? Curious. I did get sick again this weekend, though I think I managed to stave off something much worse by taking Friday off work, sleeping nearly the entire day (literally 7 hours BETWEEN 8 am and 6 pm, after having gotten an okay-even-if-interrupted-by-a-sore-throat night's sleep) and much of Saturday and Sunday. I didn't feel 100% Monday but had to come in because I was the only assistant on the floor that day. But boy, that only took four days. Why has the rest of my time felt so harried?

There are a few publicity plans in the works for the book, but I haven't thrown myself into them fully yet. There is an upcoming blog tour (excitement!) in September and a few other things I'm planning. I mentioned before that this is a mountain to climb (the explanation for the picture) and I had decided to have a picnic at the bottom in the shade before starting the ascent; well, now I've taken two steps up and decided to rest. But I remain committed to scaling this mountain. It is probably the closest thing I will ever have to a real mountain climb. Freezing cold temperatures and oxygen tanks don't appeal to me.

I am now trying to import the cover of "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer, the tale of an Everest expedition gone horribly wrong, culminating in frostbite, amputations, and death. Blogspot will only import into the top of this post, however, not right here, where I want it. So much for the rest of my metaphor.


Anyway. My solemn goals: 1) more running. That does seem to give me more energy. 2) More writing. At the very least, I need to do some writing ABOUT the screenplay ending...hopefully to wriggle and twist myself into some kind of good ending. 3) More editing to get more money for 4) more publicity efforts.


I'll let you know how I do.

a quick note...

Wow, things are still kind of happening. August 24 is the first anniversary of my publication date. As I've mentioned, I was told that I have to keep pushing the book for at least a year after publication in order to make it do anything. I had planned to do just that, though my plan dictated that (a) if zero was happening, I would reassess, and at the one year mark, (b) if things were still happening, I would keep going. So the big oh-one is approaching, and small things continue to happen. Nothing has propelled DIEA to the best-seller list yet, obviously, but the little things that occur are enough to tell me to keep going. Hmm.

I checked my Amazon ranking again this evening. As you may recall, I'm slightly obsessed with this number; it's really the only way to see if I'm selling anything. And I can't tell how many I sell, just whether or not it sells at all. The pattern lately has been that the number floats up to about 700,000 and then someone buys a copy and I go back into the one hundred thousands. I've never been higher than 800,000, happily. (I have seen books at the 3 million mark.) So I check once or twice a day, and the number floats: 150,000, 200, 250, 300, 500, 700, back to 150. Every time it goes to 150 (or thereabouts) I am relieved, knowing it's still floating. yesterday I was in the five hundred thousands, so imagine my surprise when I checked this morning and it was 76,000. Hmm. This is more than one copy selling. Okay. Then I checked this evening, just for the heck of it (right after determining that the Yankees game is on, so I can go to the gym and watch it, since I'm too cheap for cable and the Yes Network--yes, dear reader, I'm missing it right now FOR YOU!) and had to do a double-take: 28,634. Crazy! Besides my brief stint under 10,000 (8,698 if I remember correctly) this is the lowest I've been. Woo-hoo!

I ask again (regular readers can repeat it with me): a one-time thing, or are we starting to catch on?

I'm going to be doing a blog tour in September, arranged by the lovely and wonderful Trish Browning Collins. Trish, as you may recall, was my terrifically enthusiastic blogger/reviewer, and she is starting a business called TLC Book Tours, which is an answer to my prayers. I had been looking for the right people to arrange a blog tour for me, and it only makes sense that it be Trish (and her friend Lisa), with whom I just feel a bond and for whom I have such great affection--and I've never even met her! (It just warms my heart to find readers who really like what I wrote. It's a very primal thing!) I will gush more and further as we get closer to the blog tour, but meanwhile I needed to mention it to my faithful (tiny) group of readers. Check out their website here.

I will go -- the Yankees beckon -- but I just wanted to check in. My screenplay is demanding a whole lot more of my time and energy, and I'm wrestling with the ending like I haven't had to do in a very long time. I'm tired and working hard (and haven't even finished the book I've been reading for, oh, a MONTH for Sunday Salon), but things are good. And more yet to come!

Monday Salon

Now, in an effort not to be too terribly irresponsible (though I have copped to that trait, fully), I am hereby posting my first Sunday Salon review, a mere one day late. And might I say, yesterday was not a good day for doing much of anything. I failed to take my sleeping pill Saturday night and therefore woke after four hours of sleep, at five a.m. I decided to get up, rather than wait it out (because it usually takes two and a half hours to wait it out), and worked on my screenplay. I actually finished this draft, through to the end, although the end still needs to be fixed. (Just a dangling plot thread that I have to figure out how to weave in. I suspect I'm close.) And then it was ten a.m. and I was at that point where I knew, if I went back to bed, I would actually sleep for several hours. But it was also time to get ready for church. It wasn't an automatic decision, sadly, but I did decide to go to church. Then I got home at 3 p.m. and went straight to bed. I went to a farewell party for a friend at 6 p.m., and normally I would stay for a long time but I was exhausted. Even though I had brought gym clothes with me, I did not go to the gym; I went home and worked on my TiVo list. I wanted to do my Sunday Salon review then, but my roommate was home and on her computer, which has a much higher-speed connection than mine. (I don't bother upgrading because I have a great high-speed connection at work; also, having dial-up is great when I'm writing; I have no desire to flip over to the internet to surf. Instead I get up and wander around and eat.)

So anyway. Here is my Sunday/Monday Salon review for:

MUSIC FOR TORCHING by A.M. Homes.

A.M. Homes is an author I have only recently discovered. I had heard of her for years, because she's an alumna/sometimes teacher of my undergrad writing program. I remember when this book came out, and the fact that it got great reviews. I read her latest novel, THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE, and loved it. So, on my way to Virginia to visit the nephew, I decided to pick up another.

Interesting.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, there is a lot of dark comedy. I do like dark comedy--I can even veer toward twisted--but I had a hard time getting on board with this. I absolutely hated the two main characters, Paul and Elaine. They are self-involved in the worst way; they are mean; they are hateful. Was their marriage ever a good one? Have they always been such lousy schmucks? No idea. But they are now. The book begins when, almost on a whim, they try to burn their house down with their outdoor grill. Funny: they can't even do that. They see a flame snaking up the outside wall of the house and gather their two boys into the car and go for a long dinner, effectively leaving others to clean up the mess.

In a way, there's a long thread of cleaning up messes, and leaving others to do it for you. Their house, while not burned down, is rendered uninhabitable by the fire. They go stay with a neighbor couple, who take care of them (in all sorts of *interesting* ways). They farm their children out to two other families, and those families take care of the children in even *more* interesting ways, one leading to the novel's devastating conclusion. Their marriage, their lives, their foundations are all falling down around their ears, and rather than fixing anything, Paul and Elaine embrace that and drive if all farther down.

I hated Paul and Elaine. And since they are the core of this book, I have to say, I hated the book. And yet...

It is brilliant.

I mentioned the devastating conclusion earlier. In a way, it comes out of left field. And in a way, we've seen hints of it coming all along. No one deserves this kind of ending, but if anyone comes close to it, Paul and Elaine do. And Elaine's final words, the last line of the book, sum it all up in every possible way.

If you're easily offended, don't read this book. If you like dark humor, there's plenty to enjoy. If you don't mind being unsettled, and perhaps having extreme negative feelings for characters, check it out.

Call me irresponsible...

I'm adding a new item to my weekly "to-do" list: blogging for the Sunday Salon. Hopefully I will be able to do this with some kind of regularity, since I have become less and less responsible over the past year or so. However, I do love to read and several Sunday Salon bloggers have talked about my book, so it's a great community to join. They'd like you to review a book every Sunday, though they are flexible; they have enough members now that if you don't blog on a Sunday the world doesn't end. I doubt it ended before, but you know. I like to exaggerate.

So...the question is, where to start? I'm in the midst of a book now, but really I just started it and won't be done by Sunday, not if I want to get some writing done too. I've finished a couple of books over the past couple of weeks and I could blog about those. I have some favorites that I always enjoy talking about, so I could start with those. I also have a pile of to-be-read books surrounding my bed, some of which I've started and not yet gotten back to. This all is not a huge quandary, I know.

The Fourth of July was fun; I went to Virginia to see the baby nephew again. This child is precious. That's all I need to say, as much as I'd like to believe that he is unique and no other baby in the world is as wonderful as he is. Any of you with babies you love in your life, you know what I mean.

I've gotten the ball rolling with another publicity push. Well, a small ball. Bigger than a Superball, but not as big as a soccer ball. Maybe a soft ball. Many steps yet to go. You'll hear more about it in the coming days/weeks. Meanwhile I'm getting another ball rolling (this one perhaps the size of a big Playdoh ball, like three or four cans of it) with my new book. And the science screenplay is coming along quite nicely. That one I would classify as a snowball, because I hope it will quickly become bigger and bigger.

Yes, I can get obsessed with metaphors.

And it's a beautiful, non-humid summer day on which I get out of work early! Let's get THAT ball going, shall we??