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Revving the Prayer Engine
Meet my brother-in-law Zach: when he's not saving the world through acoustical engineering (please note, actually saving the actual world), or playing with his band and doing his Latin-jazz-style percussion thing that makes all the women in the audience get up and shake their hips, he's home being one of the best dads in the world with my sister and their two very young daughters.

Or at least, that's his usual set of projects. Right now, he's waiting for biopsy results.

His doctors say, hope it's lymphoma, at least they know how to treat lymphoma. Man, you know the other possible diagnoses suck when lymphoma is your best option. My sister says, hope it's all just a big mistake, hope it's a gallstone like they thought before the MRI showed the mass on his liver, hope the whole problem just goes away. I'm hoping for a complete recovery. I'm not picky about what Zach's malady turns out to be, I'm not picky about how the universe orchestrates his complete recovery, I just want it to happen.

I hate cancer. I want to beat cancer up with a brickbat. I would like a year to go by without anybody giving me yet another occasion to write the Please Quit Smoking Because I Love You All blog post. (And, by the way, quit smoking, you. Zach thought just a couple of cigarettes on nights the band played couldn't be that big a deal, since they didn't have gigs all that often--he had mostly quit smoking. Take care of yourself. Live a long time.)

Zach could use some prayers. Has invited them, the more the merrier, in any form and to any being. Always does better in a tight spot when he knows he's being prayed for. He may be a nice Catholic boy from a Nebraska ranching family, but he asked his wacky tattooed Wiccan priestess of a sister-in-law to be godmother to both of his kids, so he means it when he says all prayers are welcome. He's probably never been in a tighter spot than this one, so I'm asking you, if you are the praying kind, and including a stranger in your devotions is a thing you're comfortable with, think of Zach.

May the best possible thing happen, whatever that is.

Father's Day Blog Tour Post
This month's Drollerie Press blog tour topic is fathers, for Father's Day. My post, about my Dad's many peculiar ways of supporting my writing over the years, can be found here, at Angela Korra'ti's website. (You may know Angela as

annathepiper.)

Considering that we've been doing this blog tour thing for several months now, it's surprising that this is the first time we've had mass confusion about deadlines and destinations. I was supposed to host Jessica Howe's post this month, but that ended up getting emailed to Anna, too, so all I have to do is plug my own post and the blog tour as a whole.

Of course, now that my post is up, I'm wondering if I should have spared more time for fact checking. Was the edition of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that I remember really available in 1978, or do I have the year, and therefore the continent I was living on, wrong? Was it the twentieth anniversary edition of Playboy, or some other anniversary? If I weren't between two several-days-long trips out of state with only 48 hours turnaround time between rained-out camping and an airplane, I'd eat the time cost of checking. In any case, the story of it, the feeling of it, is absolute and faithful truth.

I have to be at an airport in seven hours. Off to bed with me.

Invitations for Seattle Area Folks
On Wednesday the 24th, we'll be going to Ristorante Tropea in Redmond for dinner from 6pm to at least 8pm, or later if our jet lag and toddler allow. Anybody who wants to catch up with us in the evening would be very welcome. No need to RSVP or reserve a table, just show up as you are able.

During the day on the 24th, we plan to be at Seattle Center doing touristy things at the speed of toddler. We don't know yet what time we'll be arriving, but anyone who'd like to play cell phone Marco Polo and catch up with us can call me at seven three two three zero nine six nine four three.

Sun Worship, Rain Year, Son Chasing
Going to the Solstice festival with a small child has to be about sharing the experience with the small child, or else you'll get very cranky thinking about the things you're no longer free to do. (And by you, of course, I mean me.) Dancing all night by the fire circle, going to concerts that start after the small child's bedtime, attending workshops to learn about other branches of Neo-Paganism so you can be on informed happy terms with your neighbors, assisting at the open ritual your own tradition hosts, even helping tend a merchant booth where your own books are for sale--all of these are possible only if you dump baby duty on your spouse, who would also like do something at festival other than chase a toddler or spend naptimes sitting on the cabin porch next to the baby monitor.

As my sister said of going to the zoo with toddlers, if you think of it as a leisurely stroll in the park with a picnic and maybe a couple of bonus animals if you're lucky, you'll have a fine time, whereas thinking of it as a trip to the zoo will only drive you crazy.

Gareth had a blast chasing the bigger kids around on the greensward, flirting with friends old and new, and learning new songs. Best of all, as far as he was concerned, there were lots of muddy puddles to stomp in. What could possibly be better than stomping in really deep, extra squishy puddles? Oh, and I learned that I can distract him from things I don't want him getting into (as long as they're not puddles), by offering to teach him a new word. Hey, it's more fun for all concerned than a time out. He demanded an explanation of why the pavilions we set up over our encampment's kitchen were pavilions, not umbrellas, and by the end of the conversation, he and I were both inordinately pleased with ourselves that he understood the difference.

It was a rain year at festival. Not the rainiest rain year we've ever had, but the alternating intense bouts of thunderstorm and clear blue were enough to set off my chronic pain. It's like having arthritis, only without the actual joint damage. Now I'm home with a dozen laundry loads' worth of damp things I need to save from moldering before I fly for Seattle in about 48 hours. I really, really do not want to ask my house sitters to take care of laundry while we're gone.

After this past week, I feel well prepared for a writing retreat in a rain forest.

Off To Solstice Festival
Wiggly toddler on lap, reaching for keyboard, so brief:

Gone to woods to worship Sun.
No internet in woods.
Cell phone okay, if need me.
Back Sunday.
Thank you, house sitters!

Sentences
Most of Gareth's utterances are still one-word or two-word exclamations that might add up to sentences, except that he waits for a response from his interlocutor and won't go on to the next concept until he has some sort of confirmation:
Dog!
Tail!
Wagging!
Arf arf!
Little Max!

Very occasionally, though, he concentrates really hard and gets the whole thing out at once, like when Dan was urging him to run in the sprinkler, and Gareth replied, "I am afraid of water," or this morning when he said, "Daddy, why are you have go to work?" These are clearly not the parroted-back sentences he was experimenting with just a couple of weeks ago.

A Question For Seattle Locals
If you wanted to take a car on the ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle on a Tuesday morning, how long a wait would it be wise to expect? Would it be folly to rely on that ferry to arrive on time at an airport?

We'll be at the Iron Springs Writing Retreat, and then we're taking a couple of extra days around Port Angeles to see the Olympic National Park before we need to make our flight out of SeaTac. One possible route has us driving all the way down the length of the Kitsap Peninsula and back up the other side of the sound to get to SeaTac, while the other would have us break the drive--and, more to the point, the time our toddler would have to spend strapped into his car seat--with a ferry ride from Bainbridge Island to Seattle and then down.

If we were to aim for the earlier of the two scheduled departures we're considering, and we actually made it onto the earlier ferry, we'd be able to give Gareth some running around time at Pike Place Market before having to stuff the poor little fellow back into his car seat's five point harness and finish our drive--a very desirable bit of freedom, considering that he'll be in that same five point harness for many hours on the airplane that afternoon and evening.

If we could reserve our space on the ferry, it would be an easy choice, even if it might take a little longer, but if ferry space for the car is first-come-first-serve, and the rush hour traffic still causes unpredictable or predictably awful waits around 10am on summer Tuesdays, we probably shouldn't take our chances. After all, we don't need to make reservations for the road, and the construction on the Hood Canal Bridge finished ahead of schedule.

Escalator! Avocado! Hallelujah!
Gareth has been collecting four-syllable words over the past two weeks, and expanding old four-syllable words he'd been contracting by adding the dropped phonemes back in.

Avocado used to be ataaahdo, and now I kind of miss feeding him ataaahdos. Dan and I have to entice our mysteriously underweight child to eat, which we have been known to do by praising avocados to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus. Avocado! Hallelujah! L is a late-arriving phoneme for most children, so Gareth used to drop the second syllable of that word, too. Hallelujah is not an important word to me, but I do miss calling Gareth honeybunny and having him respond with ha'bunny.

His pride at being able to say escalator was so vast--almost as vast as his wonder at riding an escalator for the first time.

Shiny! (?)
Well, I've rashly fired off the Big Book to an agent. I polished the synopsis until I didn't hate it, let it simmer a bit, then polished it some more until I thought it might have, as

jamesenge put it when he proposed that the synopsis is more a trick than a form, some shininess to it.

After a couple of hours working my way through the most convoluted set of submission instructions I've seen in a long time, I hit send before I could fall prey to my own perfectionism again.

If history is anything to go by, now all I have to do is wait several months for an enthusiastic preliminary response, so that I can then get strung along for a year before the usual rejection comes: We really liked your book, but have just discovered to our shock and horror that it's exactly as long as you told us it was in your cover letter in the first place. Why can't you write something short, for Pete's sake?

There's a name for the Buyer's Remorse people get right after they've bought a house. Is there a standard term for the analogous Submitter's Remorse people get right after they've submitted their manuscripts? There must be.

Nothing for it but to get back to work. I've been away from the Ria story long enough now to give it another big push.

Maybe I Finally Get It About The Synopsis
As far as I can tell, nobody actually likes the synopsis part of a book proposal. Authors hate writing synopses--just try compressing the 300 or 900 or however many pages you've just spent the last three years of your life writing down to four pages. Although editors and agents insist, quite persuasively, that the synopsis is necessary for sorting the slush pile, I've never heard anyone claim to enjoy reading it as a genre.

I'd been thinking of the synopsis as an especially evil form of book report, which wasn't getting me anywhere. I kept producing results that felt like lies about my own book. My mantra of complaint was, Compression is distortion. That's true, but not helpful. My strategy for dealing with having a synopsis I hated was...wait for it...to rely entirely on face-to-face pitch sessions, so that I'd never have to send a query or a proposal that would include a synopsis. It worked better than you'd think, but not quite well enough to get me any sort of contract for the Big Book.

About a month ago, I overheard one of my grad school friends advising another about how to write a dissertation proposal: Don't think of it as an explanation of your argument, think of it as a bureaucratic form filled out in complete sentences.

Aha! Aha? Well, maybe aha.

If editors and agents could use scan-tron sheets filled in with number 2 pencils to sort their slush piles, they would. True or False, check one for each of the following statements: My book has characters who are not just versions of me. My characters want things. My characters get out of bed and do things. Something happens in my book. The something that happens is believable without being boring. My book has a beginning, a middle, and an end. True on every count? Okay, bring on the manuscript.

Alas, everybody would always check true while evaluating their own manuscripts, so the bureaucratic form has to resemble real storytelling just enough for the gatekeepers to ascertain which writers can and can't honestly check true for every question.

Is my new guess actually any better than the Evil Book Report Theory? I'm not in a position to know, but I'm acting on the Bureaucratic Form Theory before the drive to do so slips away. How often does a fiction writer feel excited about revising a synopsis, after all?

Perfect Mothers, Perfect Writers, And Other Mythical Creatures
My essay on motherhood and the writing life is here at Heather Ingemar's blog. I'm happy with how it came out.

The other Drollerie Press posts for this month can be found by way of this post from the ringmistress of our blog tour circus, Angela Korra'ti.

The Drollerie Press Blog Tour Rolls Through Town Again, And Everybody's Talking About Mothers
We got to thinking about Mother's Day on the Drollerie Press authors listserv, and decided we'd all play with ideas about mothers and motherhood for this month's blog tour posts. I ended up writing an essay, soon to appear on Heather Ingemar's blog, about the impossible ideals of the Good Mother and the Good Writer. I'll post the link, and the links for the rest of the tour posts, later today.

This month I'm hosting my longtime critique partner David Sklar, whose livejournal blog you can find at

thunderpigeon. You can find his novel, Shadow of the Antlered Bird, at all the usual e-book outlets. He also has short pieces in the YA anthology StereoOpticon and the forthcoming anthology Needles and Bones, and other things in other places. I like to describe his novel as a dark fantasy road trip buddy movie in which one of the buddies is on the run from his own catastrophic error in sorcery. Delicious stuff.

After the delightful character interviews with Tam, the hero of Shadow of the Antlered Bird, that came out of the March blog tour (here and here), David and I thought it would be a hoot for me to try a conventional parenting-magazine-style interview with Tam's scary Never-Mess-With-a-Queen-of-Faerie mother. David got far enough into character that we began to wonder how I'd ever escape from the interview without getting turned into a toad. All I can say is, no wonder Tam is so desperate to escape his mother's tutelage.

( Read more... )

No, Seriously, A Rabid Skunk (We're Pretty Sure)
Last Garbage Day, not wanting to scare me in front of our toddler, Dan piled so many euphemisms into his warning about the rabid skunk that I thought he was telling me a funny anecdote, and as soon as he'd washed his hands and gone back on baby duty, I promptly went back to sleep.

Imagine my surprise when, hours later, I took Gareth out to see the garbage truck go by, and one of the neighbors ran down the street in a panic to warn me to get that baby inside right now and stay there until the Animal Control people arrived. Didn't I know the rabid skunk had last been seen in my yard, crawling under the bush right next to me?

The problem with Animal Control is that they don't actually want to find rabid animals. Well, would you? When they finally arrived, they drove one slow pass down our block, and when the rabid skunk wasn't in the open right where it had been reported to them three hours earlier, they drove off as if they were fleeing the scene of a crime. If they'd gotten out of their van, knocked on doors, and asked any of us, there was some risk we'd have told them where the skunk was, and then they'd have had to do something about it.

So I called the town to say the skunk was now under my porch, and we really needed Animal Control to come back and get it. "I've got a restless toddler who's begging to go outside," I said. "Explaining rabies to an 18-month-old is really hard. I don't know what I'll do if we're stuck in the house all day."

Here's the part that really blows my mind: On a 70 degree cloudy day with occasional moments of light drizzle, the town dispatcher's response to Animal Control's negligence was to say, "Well, I hope you're not letting a toddler outside to play on a day like today!"

My son is not made of spun sugar; light drizzle will not melt him. Keeping him locked up in the house all day would require television sooner or later. I'm pretty sure that wanting Animal Control to collect the rabid skunk from under my front porch does not make me a negligent parent.

Days later, what's still getting under my skin? Is it the fact that the rabid skunk had moved on by the time Animal Control got back, and it's never been found yet?

No, it's that some stranger on the phone impugned my motherly devotion.

How weird is that?

On Road Trips With Small Children
A trip that will require six to eight hours in the car is not necessarily impossible to do in one day with a toddler, as long as you are free to make as many stops as you need to, for as long as you need to, playing it by ear based on how your kid is acting.

But if you have, say, a ferry to catch, and it must be the one that leaves the mainland at 6pm, such that you have to press on without stopping, even while your 18-month-old is screaming, begging to nurse, that's something else altogether.

Or if you have, say, a tutoring client scheduled for the evening you get back, it's far better to cancel right up front than to have to press on, even while your 18-month-old is screaming, begging to get a well-deserved break from his car seat.

We ended up missing the ferry we had tickets for and going stand-by later that night, no harm done, so we might as well have made the trip easier on little G in the first place. We ended up getting stuck behind an accident on the way home and having to cancel the student appointment anyway, so...you get the picture.

Poor kid.

So now we know what was probably obvious to everyone else on earth: Don't set out on a long trip with a toddler and a same-day deadline, period. Ever. It turns out four hours is the absolute maximum driving time we can commit to getting through in a day with any prediction about when we'll arrive.

How people with more than one child ever get anywhere is a complete mystery to me.

We actually had a really good time, or rather, several bouts of really good time interspersed over our rainy weekend on Martha's Vineyard. When I've recovered from the ordeal of getting home, it may be possible to write a post about the fun parts.

I had one of the most productive writing sessions in recent months sitting in my car on a dark, cold night of heavy rain, after Dan and Gareth had gone to bed and the hotel lobby was locked up. Sitting in the driver's seat, running down the car battery to keep all the lights on, shivering in all my damp raingear and dripping on the legal pad propped on the steering wheel, I finally figured out how to fill the giant gaping plot hole in the Ria story. It wasn't fun, exactly, but it was a tremendous relief.

The E-Publishing Process Giveth And the E-Publishing Process Taketh Away
The good thing about e-publishing is that if there's a glaring problem with a book, it can be fixed even after it gets delivered to booksellers--like if, for instance, a glaring typo slipped into the first sentence in the layout process.

The bad thing about e-publishing is that it's a huge pain to format the book for the several different kinds of hardware and software that end-users will read it on, whereas with print publishing, there's only one version of the book at any given time, from manuscript to galley, to advance review copy, to bound volume. Once the book progresses to the next stage, that next stage is the only version that has to be searched for problems. Depending on the publisher's budget, the copyeditor may look the book over at more than one stage, and the author, if s/he is smart, looks the book over every chance s/he gets. Old errors get culled, and there are enough opportunities for vigilance (and checks and balances between the author and the copyeditor) to keep low the number of new errors that creep in.

In e-publishing, there's a point in the process where the single current version gives way to as many simultaneous versions as the publisher releases formats. A publisher that puts a high priority on making the book look good no matter what the end-user reads it on actually has to re-do the layout in every single format, which allows several opportunities for new errors to creep into a previously clean text. The author is very unlikely to have the hardware and software to read every single format the book is getting laid out for, which means the author can only check for new errors in formats she can read on her own equipment.

You see where all this is going.

Drollerie Press makes a priority of making all its e-books look as beautiful as the platforms allow, which means the formatting step and the layout step overlap a lot. Somehow, "altar" became "alter" right in the first sentence. I caught it in the .pdf version back in February, and fixing the error in the other affected formats was what delayed the release by over a month.

Only it seems the Kindle edition still has the error. Many thanks to

dthon for contacting me about it. Not having a Kindle, I had no idea. My editor, who is working herself to the bone getting the problem fixed while also juggling the release dates of dozens of other books, had no idea.

If we were doing this the old fashioned way, my books would be on the shelves in stores now, and none of us would have any recourse. "Altar" would be "alter" for as long as it took the print run to sell out, which might take a very long time if the first sentence made a bad first impression.

The e-publishing process giveth and the e-publishing process taketh away. If you ever need to explain irony to students who got confused by that Alanis Morissette song, you can send them to this post, in which things can get fixed for the same reason they went awry in the first place.

Up At Fictionwise And Amazon
Fictionwise has Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply for sale at last. Beautiful!

Amazon got their listing up a couple of days ago, but they've only just put the jacket copy in the "Product Description" field, and they still haven't got the cover art up yet. Considering everything else that's been going on for Amazon, I'm surprised they got to it this soon.

The book has been available for a while at Mobipocket, CyberRead, and Drollerie Press's bookshop.

If readers who liked the book were to post reviews saying so at any of those websites, that would be a Much Appreciated Thing.

laradionne posted a review at Drollerie Press's bookshop that kept Closing Arguments highlighted on the page of featured books long after its initial release (Thank you!). Apparently reader reviews really matter.

Ag Field Day Is Saturday
It's worth crossing a state line for. It's worth braving whatever weather the year brings. Ag Field Day is one of the best things about Rutgers University, about New Jersey, heck, one of the best things about spring.

I got one of my all-time favorite blog posts out of Ag Field Day. And now I'm really glad I chronicled it as it was, because it's about to change for the bigger.

Rutgers University used to be made up of a bunch of semi-autonomous colleges, and each one had its own festivities. The ag school and the women's college were right next to each other, so they had their big annual event on the same day. Ag Field Day and the New Jersey Folk Festival were so widely loved that they continued after the colleges that started them got swallowed by the university's central administration.

(Any fantasy writer who wants to learn about the power struggles between autocratic rulers and the fiefdoms within their realms need look no further than her nearest university.)

Now, in a fit of re-branding, the university is inaugurating Rutgers Day. Maybe it will be wonderful. It will certainly be large. One of the things we all loved about Ag Field Day was that it gathered so many people together into a space small enough for a real sense of one-day festival community to arise. Rutgers Day will involve buses to connect the several different campuses that sprawl through patches of three municipalities. I just keep telling myself, maybe it will be wonderful. Maybe.

But I'll be sticking to the Cook and Douglass campuses, where the Rutgers Day organizers say the traditional festivities will go on as they have for decades. This year, Gareth's old enough to enjoy seeing the baby animals in the barns, and to jump around to the live music.

If frolicking lambs, dulcimer-making workshops, and experimental ice cream from the Food Science department aren't enough to bring you out to a New Brunswick greensward on a day predicted to be sunny in the low 80s, try this: There are rumors that the famous Ramapo tomato variety that Rutgers is bringing back from near-extinction will be available from the New Jersey Master Gardeners' plant sale booth. If that rumor pans out, I can forgive Rutgers for Rutgers Day.

Introducing Rachel Olivier on Blog Tour Day, National Poetry Month
For April, the usual suspects on the Drollerie Press authors listserv conspired to write about poetry. This time around, I'm hosting Rachel Olivier, and she's hosting me. Her Drollerie Press manuscript is still in the production queue, but you can find her work in Electric Velocipede and Aoife's Kiss. She has a beautifully laid out and linked up list of her fiction and poetry publications here.

Rachel is impressively plugged in to the whole social networking phenomenon. I nearly fell over when she sent me the list of all the places where she had posted my essay. Her main blog is here. On livejournal, for your friends-listing convenience, she's

raeputtputt, and you can find my essay on her lj here.

One of the funny synchronicities is that both of our essays mention Dr. Seuss as an important poet. I really enjoyed reading the story of poetry's place in her life and writing.

( And Now, In Her Own Words, Rachel Olivier )

Wonderful Show, Problem Venue
Most nights we tell Gareth that his bedtime routine is winding to its conclusion by singing "Bed Bed Bed" by They Might Be Giants. Here Come the ABCs and Here Come the 123s have been on heavy rotation in my car for months, and the minute I find my copy of No!, that one will be back on heavy rotation, too. Gareth never tires of those songs. Thanks to my freakishly long attention span, I never tire of them, either.

So when

theunveiling proposed that we take our little guys to a TMBG concert for kids, I was all over that plan. The only problem: the McCarter Theatre claims to have a policy prohibiting children too young to walk into the venue under their own power and sit up in their own seats. No lap babies!

theunveiling and I were pretty sure this was just a ploy to force people to buy tickets for seats they wouldn't really need to use, and that the management could not possibly be serious. After all, if you don't want people bringing very small children, don't book a TMBG kids' concert at your venue.

But, being conscientious people, we phoned the McCarter Theatre for clarification. And they told us flat out that if we arrived with

theunveiling's pre-amublatory nine-month-old, she and her son would be turned away at the door, ticket or no ticket.

We believed them. We were grumpy about it, but we believed them.

So Dan and I went with Gareth, who is walking and able to sit in a folding theater seat, but without our friends. The show was fabulous beyond the telling of it. Gareth was a little overwhelmed, but he was fascinated by the proceedings on stage. He clung to Dan and me the whole time, his little eyebrows constantly in Concerned mode, while he assessed everything. Dan and I, who had fond memories of TMBG concerts on our respective college campuses, danced around like April fools and sang along with all the songs, checking every few minutes to make sure Gareth was still doing all right. It wasn't until the encore-begging round of applause that he freaked out, but he settled down pretty fast once the encore started.

On our way out, he gave his initial impressions, borrowed from the end-words of one of his rhyming books: "Loud! C(r)owd!" Yes, it was. And then, for the rest of the day, he prodded us to sing by cuing us with the little snippets of lyrics he could remember.

We had a great time. We'd have felt even better about our great time if it hadn't been for all families there who had brought their tiny babies. The policy I'd bothered to read, the one I'd taken seriously, the one my friend and I had phoned the management about, apparently only applies to conscientious people. As so often happens, scofflaws are rewarded for their heedlessness, and rule-followers are punished for following rules.

What I mind is not that a cultural institution whose mainstay is live theater finds it's necessary to charge for every seat it can get away with charging for. What I mind is not that the McCarter Theatre bars small children from most of their performances--nobody goes to an August Wilson play in hopes of sitting next to a chatty toddler. What I mind is that they refused to admit to being reasonable about admitting children to children's shows when we gave them a chance to tell us that they were reasonable.

I mind that their mildly anti-family policy turned into an inflexibly anti-my-friend's-family policy, precisely in response to our goodwill. Grr. Argh.

Houdini Never Used My Bag Of Tricks
Cheryl Kaye Tardif just posted her short interview with me on her blog. I ended up talking about the virtues of escapism, and why it's hard to write escapist fiction that works. Many thanks to Cheryl for having me!