Thanks to Traveling ARC Tours (I spelled ‘traveling’ right!  No, that’s not what I have to thank them for)–Nice and Mean has been getting some lovely reviews of late.  You might want to read some of these and check out the other informative reviews on the blogs:

My favorite observation from Tiffany’s Bookshelf:  “The tolerance taught in the book is more than just cultural.  It is tolerance of anyone different from you, which, let’s face it, to a middle school reader, that is everyone.”  I just think that is so pithy and hilarious.

The Bookshipper writes, “I read this book in one sitting – it was fun, deep in some spots and funny in others – a perfect blend – just like our two main characters.”

Thank you, Bookshipper!  I’m bedazzled to think of you reading the book in one sitting.  Although maybe that’s partly because I find it so hard to read some of my own writing without wanting a cheese sandwich.

I hope these reviews will translate into actual tweens getting their hands on the book!  One approach I’m going to undertake will be a giveaway to teachers or school librarians in August or September–free books and free Skype visits to the lucky winner!  If you are a teacher or school librarian, feel free to email me at jess@jessicaleader.com so I can be sure to include you when I spread the word.

Now, back to the woods!

Talk about stepping in the same river twice.  I did, a few weeks ago, with regard to my Vermont College MFA reunion (it was great, by the way.  None of my worries came to pass.  I am kind of a nudnik.)  I stepped in another familiar river this week when I went back to an old-but-not-dead piece of writing to revise it for its appearance in the Sunday paper.

Yes, you read that right!  The Louisville Courier-Journal, which (who?) featured Nice and Mean when it first came out, invited me to provide their August Sunday serial, so over the next four weeks, my friends and neighbors and anyone with the internet can read the first few chapters of what I hope will be my next middle-grade novel, NOT THAT GIRL, potentially with groovy art.  (At least, I think there might be some art.  Might have to check on this.)

There was so much craziness involved revisiting the story, including the fact that the request came while I was travelling [no–traveling; I always misspell that], and I had to ask my partner to brave my Extremely Messy, Filled with Deep-Dark Secret Documents that are Likely to Fall On You Shelf and extract my notes from when I workshopped this piece last summer, along with one of about a bijillion Clairefontaine notebooks.  (Do you use these?  Are they not a superior piece of notebookture?)  A side-note on this challenge is that she succeeded the first time around!  Go, A!

The biggest source of craziness, though, was how ridiculous some of the writing was.  The prose was spiffy enough; the characters, distinct; there’s a passage of dialogue whose punchline is “Where’s your butt?” that I enjoyed again, as though I hadn’t written it.   But what was sorely lacking was something that Grad School Advisor Margaret calls Emotional Residue.

Case in point: Not that Girl starts out with Jackie and Mel being shocked when their friend Zoe, previously uninterested in boys, unexpectedly brings an older guy to the movies with them.  Then, in the next chapter, I had a guy–an adorable one, unfortunately nicknamed Nathaniel the Spaniel, crossing Jackie’s path and Zoe and Mel strategizing about how Jackie can pursue him.  I had this line to the effect of, “I’ve been feeling a little weird about Zoe since the movies the other night, but I’m willing to listen to her advice.”

Um, really?  Just “a little weird”? So glad I chose to make that event the focus of your first chapter, Jackie, because I can see that it brought a lot of emotional residue to your subsequent interactions.

Why aren’t Jackie and Mel more upset?  Why don’t they talk about this–instead of nothing relevant–in the scene before Nathaniel comes along? Jackie’s feeling of being caught between Mel and Zoe should drive the emotion in the strategy session, because it becomes the heart of the story.

Thankfully, I fixed these things.  I’m still kind of appalled that it took me so long to see them, and I await with dread the missteps I will find when I go back to The Novel Formerly Known as The Book of the Dead, which I will do tomorrow or so (today is maintenance day, as you can see.)  I guess I can just hope that even if I face-plant in the river, I will have plenty of chances to cross it again, because that seems to be what writers do.

Things have been getting a little serious, what with this Stepping in the Same River business and Musings on Gurgi , so I’m going to add a little levity.  I was just reading the funny phrases on the back cover of my notebook, and I thought I’d share some of the faves. 

“I don’t know.   I’m not, like, a professional smellologist.”  — Dick Casablancas on Veronica Mars

“…and he doesn’t demand apologies from people who criticize him, because what is there to criticize?”  — Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! Host Peter Sagol, on Carl Kassel

(or is it Karl Cassel?  And am I going to be divorced for not knowing?)

“I had to be very mature and very tolerant, and those are not my usual qualities.”  — Someone Benedictus, on the experience of writing a new Winnie the Pooh Story

“Milkshakes!”  Ariana snapped to attention.  “Double back.  We need to get some milkshakes.”  — New York Times Article on driving the Oregon Fruit Loop, where you can get fresh cherries

“Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Thompkinson, who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious Creature!”

–From Emma Thompson’s Golden Globe acceptance speech, in the style of Jane Austen, for adapting Sense and Sensibility

I hope you enjoyed.  They certainly cheered me up!

Cano arma virumque, says Virgil–“I sing of arms and the man.”  But today, I sing of arms and The Gurg.

Did you read those Lloyd Alexander books growing up–The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The High King, and others?  I didn’t.  They emitted an ugly glow in my elementary-school library: high fantasy.  I liked Jane Langton, but I didn’t like the pictures of men on horses.  Moved on from that!

But a few years ago, I was in a friend’s apartment alone for a few hours, and I did what I usually do: browsed her children’s books shelf.  I think I had started the MFA at Vermont College by then (it’s the finest grad school in all the land) so I was into reading classics that I’d missed.  And what did you know?  The books weren’t so geeky after all.  In fact, they were kind of fun, although the fun was frequently interrupted by this really annoying creature sidekick named Gurgi. 

Gurgi.  Even his name is cloying.  I’ll quote The American Spectator’s obituary of Lloyd Alexander here:

“With a scent that has “the distressing odor of a wet wolfhound” — [he] is also a creature with a simple mind, prone to talking in silly rhymes such as “crunchings and munchings” for food and “seekings and peekings” for reconnaissance. Not only that, but Gurgi is first described [as]…”not a quarter as fierce as he should like to be, and more a nuisance than anything else.”

But when the wife picked up a copy of The High King in the used bookstore the other night, I remembered Gurgi with a kind of fondness, and I didn’t know why.  I don’t usually have that experience; when I first dislike something–a character, a joke, a TV show–I often continue to dislike it.  Was it just that, in retrospect, i liked his rhymes?  Or something more?  I got a little clue when she read me this passage from the final pages:

Fflewddur gave a low whistle.  “Who owns these secrets is truly master of Prydain.  Taran, old friend, the proudest cantrev lord will be at your beck and call, begging for anything you choose to grant him.”

“And Gurgi found it!” shouted Gurgi, springing into the air and whirling madly about.  “Yes, oh yes!  Bold, clever, faithful, valiant Gurgi always finds things!  Once he found a lost piggy and once he found evil black cauldron!  Now he finds mighty secrets for kindly master!”

Is Gurgi maybe the horrible, annoying part of one’s subconscious–maybe even the writer’s subconscious?  The stupid, over-emotional segment that eggs you on, saying, “This book I’m writing is awesome!  I should already have a star on the walk of fame!” and then the part that tears its hair out in despair saying, “I stink!  I only wrote a good book once, but it will never happen again.”  I’m sure Lloyd Alexander had something rather different in mind, but note that Gurgi found The Book in the end.  Maybe he felt some gratitude toward The Gurg–the id–after all.

And maybe I’m soo stretching. Maybe I just like the annoying rhymes.  In any case, I will try to bear in mind, as I struggle through revision, that even The Gurg can find The Book and may make you Master of Prydain. 

Gurg on!

1) Nice and Mean will be featured as New Moon Magazine’s September/October book of the month!  The issue’s theme is popularity, and I agree with the books editor that Nice and Mean could spark some useful discussions of that issue.  There will also be a video contest, since the book focuses on a video class, and if you win the contest, you win a copy of the book!  I can’t wait to see what the readers come up with here.

2) The Louisville-Courier Journal will feature a new story of mine, NOT THAT GIRL, in its August issue–in serial, no less!  The story is set in Kentucky during the back-to-school season, and I love the thought of knowing that readers will experience it during the appropriate season.  There’s just something about going back to school–or even back to work after summer–that makes you/one/me reevaluate priorities and open fresh wounds–and I like the thought of readers being in that mode when they read the story. 

(It’s also a little nerve-wracking to think of putting a story in print without the 20-month waiting period that Nice and Mean has gotten me accustomed to, but I guess I will just have to deal.)

3) My fantastic web designer, WebsyDaisy (aka Jenny Medford), reconfigured my “books” page to include reviews.  I love having all the reviews of Nice and Mean in one place, and if you want to see what people are saying, head on over and say hi.

4) The 3rd bit of good news I can’t really talk about at this moment because I haven’t made a decision about it, but I suspect it will be good news, so I throw it into the Yay pile here, too! 

Have a good weekend, everyone!  I’m writing this on Thursday, but when this reaches you, I will be stepping in that river (see yesterday’s post.)

Does everyone learn that quotation in high school?  Or college, maybe, as I did from Waterland, about stepping in the same river twice?  It was Heraclitus, and I’m sure his observations were more metaphysical than the context in which i learned them, but it’s basically another way of saying, You can’t go home again.  Any time you step in a river, it’s a different river than the last time you stepped there.

I’ve had a couple of fun recent river steppings with another on the horizon.  This past weekend, my partner and I went up to the B&B where we got married last year.  It was so wonderful–the smell of the breakfast nook!  The main building lit with fairy lights!  the falls, which we finally got to hike to–but there was also a sense of what had passed.  Walking from our little cottage up to the barn where we got married, my insides twisted a little that I couldn’t see the rest of our guests, hiking up their dresses in the mud, on the way up to the ceremony.  My whole life, I will wish that I could recapture the Saturday morning I walked into the breakfast nook and knew and loved every single person in there.  I even missed the unbelievable sloven that A. and I had accrued from a few days of staying in the lodge–half-drafted cards and wilting flowers, cake with melted frosting, tissue paper and wrappings…that, too, was one of my favorite images from our wedding.

Now I’m about to step into a different kind of river: a reunion.  Vermont College, the best grad school in all the land, has a mini-residency for its graduates, which I think is very smart–keeps us involved and feeds our minds.  Lest you think it’s all a big fest of NECI cookies (sorry, joke for insiders), the mini-rez features master classes by Jacqueline Woodson and talks on fantasy by superstars no less than Gregory Maguire and Holly Black!  I am not very knowledgeable in the world of fantasy writing, though I do like to read in that genre, and I can’t wait to see what I learn by going outside of my usual realm of knowledge.

But I’m also nervous.  If I live my live occasionally nostalgic for that Saturday morning last summer, I also live it in deep regret that I did not preserve for posterity a scrap of paper I found at my little sister’s bedside before she went off to summer camp for the first time.  In her uneven third-grade handwriting,  it said, “What will it be like?  Will it be fun?”

I can’t even tell you how many times those words have come to mind as I contemplated any of the big occasions life has set before me, and, I must admit, the extremely minor ones as well.  I’m pretty sure the weekend will be fun, but what will it be like, to have my position as an actual student displaced, with others running the roost?  Will the faculty remember me?  Care?  (Okay, I have pretty much no doubt that they’ll remember me, since it’s a small program, but still.)  What will it be like to talk with my former classmates about the real-world events in our lives, instead of the business of grad school that takes over your life when you are there?  I am grateful for the chance to step in the river again; not everyone can find time and money to go to the mini-rez, and not every program is thoughtful enough to provide alums with a river path.  But still: What will it be like?  Will it be fun?

I bought some Chacos this year for my honeymoon–excellent water shoes, better than Tevas, so comfortable.  With luck, I will have my metaphorical Chacos on, too.

Riverbound!

To SJJ

If there was some part of you that wanted to indulge in a pedicure in the next day or so

just know that I would be amenable to such a thing

I have a wedding to attend, after all

and you and I have a tradition of such things

and you might not be able to see your feet for too much longer, I am told

so think pink

(or maroon, really, as is your wont.)

Hello! Gosh, I feel like I’ve been a non-internet vacuum these last couple of days, even though I think I posted less than a week ago. I certainly am in a vacuum of sorts–I’m in New London, Connecticut. Not that New London is a vaccuum in and of itself (and maybe I just like saying vacuum, because I like those two u’s next to each other, and the way I pronounce it in my head as “VACK-you-um”)–I’m just in an, um, self-contained pouch.

My partner is working at the venerable Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and since I am about to attend–nay, participate in–my best friend’s wedding in New England this weekend (!!!), it made sense for us to come up here together.  (Thre is a much more ridiculous picture of O’Neill at the center itself, but I can’t find it online.)  Anyway, while A. has been faithfully attending to the play at hand, I’ve been hiding out at the lovely house they’ve let us stay in, working on a la novel.  Did I mention that I finished a draft?  Maybe I did, which is a huge accomplishment, at least a year in coming.  I also re-outlined and cut 90 pages just for starters!  I always laugh at how hard we writers try to nudge up our page counts and then how much we cackle when we’ve cut whole chunks.  It makes a certain amount of sense, but it’s still funny.  As a teacher, I never would have been like, “The students just learned twelve new vocabulary words and forgot five!  Bliss!”

In the midst of all this novelicious productivity (which is also, I might add, somewhat lonely, although the beach awaits at the end of the day)–are odd memories of New London.  I passed through here all the time on my AmTrak way to and from college, of course, but I think I only stopped here once, and not even on purpose.  It was the summer of 1996, and I was on my way back from visiting a friend, whom I’d formerly had a huge crush on.   I’d thought we’d had a good visit, including a nap for me on Saturday afternoon that was, no joke, The Best Nap I have Ever Taken, but then Sunday morning we got into a fight somehow.  It was strange, because we’d never fought, but I remembered her accusing me of not, I don’t know, supporting her relationship with her boyfriend, and I burst into tears.  “That’s so not true!” I blubbered.  “I always ask you about him and how things are going.”  Who knew which one of us was right, but I’m not the kind of person who bursts into tears during fights at all, so it obviously really upset me. 

We reconciled enough to go on a great bike ride and meet up with two other friends for Mexican food, and then I was on my merry way back on AmTrak–except that the train stopped in New London with a bomb threat.  Since this was in the late ’90s, it was way more of an eye-roll than the actual scare it might be a few short years later.  (Gosh, it’s kind of crazy how much things changed in such a relatively small amount of time.)  Anyway, we all had to unload off the train and of course there was hardly anywhere to go and I hadn’t eaten dinner, but we ended up at the bar across the way that must make a huge living from stranded travellers.  I don’t remember if I got anything in the way of enough to eat, but the great thing was that the Women’s Gymnastics Team Competition was up on the screen!  So not only did I get to see my beloved gymnastics (I’m sure readers of this blog will understan what that means to me)–but I also got to see Keri Strug do her amazing vault with a cracked ankle or whatever it was to victory!  I can be a bit of a wimp and I am sure that if I injured myself on a vault, I would have been like, “Sorry, Team USA; you may be the Magnificent Seven” (a reference I didn’t understand then and still relate to only hazily), but you’ve made your bed with your poor scores.  I can’t do anything for you at this point, so I think I’m going to sit it out for Vault #2.”  Not so for Keri Strug!  As I slurped Diet Coke at a New London bar, Keri Strug ran and flipped and landed on that injured ankle and brought the US GOLD.

Or at least, I think she did.  The crazy thing about memories of important events, as I learned ound September 11, 2001, is that they create–oh gosh, this is becoming eerily related–a sort of vacuum.  They suck nearby events into their orbit to the point where people who attended weddings in July or November of 2001 will say, “Yeah, that wedding was right around September 11th.”  I suppose the important event in my story, embarrassingly, might be the winning vault.  Maybe it didn’t occur that night as we waited for the train to be searched; maybe that was later, on my mom’s bed, with my cousin who was living with us for the summer.  I honestly don’t remember. 

What else to say?  I stopped being friends with the crush, although we did have a rather poetic re-meeting.  We didn’t correspond over the summer except for me to send her a postcard requesting that she return a library book I’d left behind, and apparently I’d said something like, “I’ll see you online at the bookstore,” because that was pretty much how you’d see everyone back on campus. 

I didn’t see her then, and I didn’t contact her, but a few weeks into school, my roommate and I were at Shaw’s (oh, that great Shaw’s–I still think of their Indulgences chocolates sometimes)–and there was the crush in the cereal aisle.  (Okay, I made that up–I have no idea what aisle it was.)  It was deep enough into the year that it was clear that our silence meant something, but I hadn’t known she cared until she said, “Well, I guess it’s not the bookstore after all.”

She may as well have been speaking Sanskrit.  “Um, what?” I asked.

“You know.”  She blinked.  “That thing you said in your postcard–how you’d see me at the bookstore.”

“Oh.  Yeah, I guess not.”

And we weren’t really friends after that.  Which in way was too bad, because I’d really enjoyed her when I’d thought she might like me back, but the things that had complicated the crush (including the fact that she turned out to be, you know, kind of straight) got in the way, and in some ways, at least at that time, she wasn’t such a good friend.  I will say, though, that that is the only time I ever remotely felt like I had the last laugh on anything, though if for some reason the crush is reading this (which I sincerely doubt), I hope she knows it does not reflect on her.

So au revior, bad crushes–I’d get a much better one several months before September 11th, 2001, who would become my wife–and hello to a less troubled New London; and hello wife herself, whom I am about to go off and meet, maybe for Mexican food, not at a bookstore.

I will post some soon!  They have been better than nice–pretty swell.  You can check out the ones on GoodReads, The Book Scout’s, or the one from Booklist once theypost it on their website (guys, it’s July 1st. Don’t you think you should maybe post the July 1st issue?)