squeetus

Random musings

• I recently learned the name of the Etruscan god of sky and wind--Ani. Cool, eh?
• Apparently in 2005, 17,650 new children's and young adult books were published in the US. New ones, not including the hundreds of thousands of previously published books. That number wows me and makes me feel so lucky to have any readers at all. You can certainly see how a bookstore can't possibly have a copy of every available book on its shelf. Wow. How cool that I get to be there at all.
• Sometimes in the evening, we like to watch TV together as a family, but finding a show that both adults and a 2 1/2-year-old would enjoy is a challenge. There are lots of great animated movies out there, but we don't want to have to watch an entire 90 minute show. Our solution? The Muppet Show! We bought the first season on DVD and it's GREAT. Each episode is only about 22 minutes, it's funny (both intentionally as well as the 70's wardrobes of the guest stars) and we all enjoy it.
• I'm reading austenland right now for perhaps the last time. I'm seeing the typeset pages and reading for errors and any last minute, low impact changes. And I'm enjoying it. That I'm not sick of it yet is a great sign, I think. And the (still top secret) cover is gorgeous. Very exciting.
• Thanks for all your comments about river secrets! You can't know how much it means to me after all the labor and stressing and bleeding that people have fallen in love with story. And with Razo. Isn't he cool?

A look back east

I really wanted to do a nice rundown of my two weeks touring in the midwest, but clearly I'm not finding the time, so let me do some highlights:

• Meeting the fine staff of Pooh's Corner in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a darling children's book store. A wonderful literacy specialist brought in several students to chat with me, and one darling fan gave me a bracelet she'd made.
• Treehouse Books in Holland, Michigan is yet another store to drool over. I'm pretty sure I spent more on books in every store I visited than I could've made from books I signed. Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis lived up to its phenomenal reputation. We had a great event there with all the wild animals that roam the store, Elvis the Chicken being my personal favorite. Halfway Down the Stairs was so great. I spent a fortune there, I think. So was Book Beat. And Valley Bookseller. And Red Balloon. So many amazing bookstores! It's very encouraging.
• On tour, besides doing stock signings or public signings in book stores, I do school visits. This is a real highlight for me. I visited several schools, but the one that sticks out the most was the last one, Carondelet Catholic School. Let me try to describe how cool they were--after I presented to the fifth grade, about ten students read to me selections from a writer's diary they'd been keeping. Then we played Jeopardy--me against two other students. Some of the categories were "Famous Minnesotans" and "Hale Tale." It was hysterical. They whooped me. Then we had cider and apple bread. It was a regular party. The kids were fantastic, and I couldn't believe how wonderful the teachers were to put it together.
• At several events or stock signings, some of you came out to say hi, which is always very cool. Something I’ve thought all along but has been confirmed—I have very smart, sassy fans. It makes me so proud to meet the people who come to my signings and discover that they’re bright and happy and original. What a huge compliment.
• Having dinner with Kelly Link (author of the fabulous Magic for Beginners) and Gavin Grant at the Twin Cities Book Festival. Book people tend to be so cool.

Just in case you might think book touring is all glamour, let me share with you a few moments:

• Presenting to about 100 8th graders, telling them things I think are funny and being greeted in return by silence and the muffled whispers of friends whispering to each other
• Sitting near the back of a plane in a middle seat, and being so pregnant that I can’t bend over and reach my laptop under the seat in front of me
• Sitting alone in my hotel room and flipping channels for over an hour—7 minutes of a Friends episode (a show I never watched so I had no idea what’s going on), 3 minutes of a History channel show about merchant ships, 10 minutes of the end of Father of the Bride 2, a few commercials, some CNN, some more History channel, a little bit of Legally Blonde, more commercials, and then a bit of a cooking show.
• As wonderful as school visits are, they're also incredibly exhausting. I don't know what it is about doing a 45 minute assembly that makes me want to curl up and sleep afterward. And being pregnant, this was especially a challenge. One day, we had to drive from one city to the next after a book signing in the evening, so I didn't get to bed until 1 am, and then the next morning we were up early to visit the fabulous Kingwood/Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It's an all girls middle school and the girls were fantastic. Afterward I signed a number of books, and by the end of it, I was literally shutting down. I couldn't see very well, I was misspelling words, my head seemed to be in a bubble and floating away, I could barely stand up. I've never felt exhaustion like I do when pregnant. It's like I have a limited amount of energy, and once it's spent, there's nothing left, no second wind. My body seems to shut down all secondary functions (like rational thought, sight, and limb movement) in order to keep pumping life support to the fetus. Weird.

And I'm home. Max had a hard time, especially during my second tour in Minneapolis. I won't be touring again without kids for some years to come, I think, so that means I won't be touring much at all. It's just too hard on the family. Michigan and Minnesota were so great! All my love to the warm folk I met out there.

Real beauty

I'm back, and I keep wanting to find the time to blog about my tour, but no time! Soon, maybe this weekend. In the meantime, check out this short film from Dove's campaign for real beauty. It's about 60 seconds long. Wait for the page to load then click "play film." I liked it. This ad about little girls is also a winner. Girls are so awesome.

And let me just say, Minnesota, that your honeycrisp apples are the BEST!

15 minutes a day

One question I get a lot in emails is (to paraphrase), "I want to write, but I can't find the time. I'll have three hours one Saturday and then no time for another few months. How do you make the time?"

This question most often comes from parents, and man, I totally comprehend the craziness of trying to find some quiet and space in a house of small children. But parents or not, I think my answer really will work for most anyone: Give yourself 15 minutes a day. If you write every day, the story and words will be fresh in your head, and the lucky moments when you do have a larger chunk of time will be much more productive. Also, by setting aside those minutes every day, you're taking a huge step. You're saying, I'm a writer. I write every day. I take this seriously. I am going to allow myself to do this!

Those 15 minutes can be whenever you want. Rise early before the kids do, grab that time right before you go to bed. Make it the same time every day, or if you need to vary, don't allow yourself to go to sleep until you've put in the 15. Okay, it would take years to finish several drafts of a novel only using 15 minutes a day, but the magic of this commitment is, once you make the sacrifice and put in that time, more time will start popping up. You'll find another 20 minutes another time of day and you'll have a fresh scene just waiting in your fingers to write down. The kids will sleep in one day and you'll have an hour. You'll be focused and eager to keep telling your story in any spare moment because it'll always be bubbling in your brain. But you have to stick with it!  And your kids will be glad that you did.

And I'm off to lovely Minnesota tomorrow. Hope to see some of you there. My poor, poor Max. I love to get out on the road, but I just can't stand leaving him! Ouch.

On commenting

I'm going to make a bold, sassy statement: This is my blog. It is not a democracy. I was speaking to Cecil Castellucci, a fellow writer and blogger, about my hesitancy to let my site administrator delete comments, because I don't like to censure. She heartily disagreed and said, "It's your blog, Shannon. Don't let people poop on your doorstep." So in the interest of avoiding doorstep poop, I will in the future allow my administrator to freely delete any comments that strike her as smarmy, condescending, rude, or critical of others. Disagreement is always allowed, but I think we all know the difference between disagreeing and attacking. There is no hierarchy here. All respectful opinions are valid.

A few things to consider: on this site, it is never appropriate to make fun of what others' have said, correct their grammar or spelling unless they ask for that feedback, call names, or assert you're right and everyone else is wrong. This blog world is still new and we're all still trying to find our way, so don't feel bad if you crossed some lines in the past. Let's just be nice going forward, shall we? For further reading, someone sent me this link to a list of blog commenting etiquette.

I hope you'll all stick around and keep commenting. And as this blog isn't a forum and isn't setup for ongoing discussion about a variety of topics, I think the new forum little red set up will be a great tool.

With that out of the way...I'm back from Michigan! I'll give tour details later when I have some photos to show. It was lovely, and I got to meet four of you squeeters out there, which was a real treat. I came home to a poor, sick toddler, so mostly we're snuggling. I fly to Minneapolis on Thursday, so back at it again!

P.S. Just got a sneak peek at the austenland cover and I LOVE it. I'll show you as soon as I can.