Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Novelist with an egg beater's LiveJournal:

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Friday, February 10th, 2012
12:54 pm	Thanks, however late Some of you know this, because I told people delightedly about it at New Years — this story was so good, I had to share it at soon as I read it with whoever I ran into — but I'm very late in posting it here. Since I missed New Year's, here it is for Valentine's Day: Galaxysoup wrote me the loveliest Yuletide story, a Haroun and the Sea of Stories prequel about Mudra the shadow warrior as a child. It's called "Parable," and you don't need to know Haroun to love it. What if librarians risked their lives? Thank you! And thanks, dizzy_fire, for giving me 14th century Pagan Lithuania as a world to play with! I wrote At the Spring. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 7th, 2011
8:26 am	Yuletide thanks I owe a lot of thanks, and I am late in offering it; things have gotten uexpectedly difficult this week, but I have been thinking the thanks I'm now writing since the holidays. Sandpipersummer, Land of Light — snow in the darkness, crossroads, lantern light, pastries hot out of the oven — holds all the grit and quiet going-out-into-the-storm and friendship and care that I think of as part of this time of the year. I read it just as I was finishing The Dark Is Rising again, and it has become part of the story for me. Thanks so much. And nextian, thank you for requesting Deeba Resham and Un Lun Dun fic, and giving me a chance to play with it! I wrote Rasa, in which Deeba meets Haroun from the Sea of Stories in the fading city of Encordoba (and Abd al Rahman, named for the first Caliph of the Umayyads, and Dinah, Amram's missing daughter from Gentlemen of the Road, and a large, furry, damp and obstinate Quorum...) Best of the new year to you all! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 22nd, 2010
1:53 pm	Dear Yulewriter, continued Thank you! I've already written you to shake hands and turn sommersaults and say how glad I am that we're in this together, hundreds of us trekking into the corners of stories. Now that assignments have gone out, let me say it again. Thank you for setting off into worlds I also like to walk in. About the story, write what moves you, and let the people taste and see and get muddy and know who and where they are. This time of year, for me, is about fire on cold nights, coming in tired and sweating after a long trip to see family, rubbing down your donkey before you go in to dinner... about risk and raw weather and stripped-down talk. It can have magic in it. I hope my requests will give you ground to stand on and ideas to play with. Let me tell you a litte more about each one, if only for the fun of it. ( 12th Century ) ( Deborah ) ( All the Old Ones ) ( 19th Century ) Be well! (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
12:24 pm	Dear Yulewriter Thank you! The idea of Yuletide continues to warm me, even on a clear, silver-grey November morning when I have a cold. Thank you for playing with my ideas and joining in this garrulous and open-hearted circle with me. The more time I've spent in Yuletide, the more I'm drawn to stories less often told than I want them to be, parts of the world I want to know more about and characters I want to hear speak. My requests this year touch on some possibly unexpected corners of their fandoms. In my first year of Yuletide, I wrote: "Write anything you're drawn to. I love the spirit of all this dazzling, paper rustling rushing about, and I care mostly that you get a lift from writing it. There's nothing like falling for a story while you're writing it. Beyond that, let people talk to each other, or just breathe alone together. Maybe you know Henlein's definition in Stranger in a Strange Land: "love is that condition wherein the happiness of another is integral to your own." If the people are enough themselves that when they hurt someone they care for, they know it, I'll be glad." I say so now, too. But if you are willing to follow me along some of the currents that draw me, I'll be thankful. I'll talk some about my requests soon. And whatever you do, please, be absorbed and delighted. Fall in head first. (P.S.: To save confusion, I'm Minyan on LJ and Taabe on DW and in the archive. My LJ has more in it, because I moved to DW more recently.) (Comment on this)
Friday, April 2nd, 2010
2:00 pm	My heart's on the page Kass writes: I challenge you to post something awesome in your LJ or DW. * When I brought a chair outside to have breakfast on the lawn this morning, I found a tiny purple and yellow primrose in my front flower bed. It's a new generation of primroses from a pot my mom gave me more than a year ago for my birthday. I kept them alive all winter and planted them in the spring, and they bloomed all last summer. * This weekend is Easter, and I will spend it at the farm with my family and friends who are skilled at scrabble and a barnyard full of kid goats. * All three of my potential interns have accepted the job if their schools cooperate * My sister has moved to a new apartment. My parents drove my grandfather's pickup truck through the city yesterday with her bedsprings strapped to the roof. I hear her new place has stained glass in the front door, wooden floors, and no appliances hooked up yet. * My old boss invited me to dinner on Tuesday, for Seder leftovers and conversation with her partner, who has expert knowledge useful to my book. We shared wine and kugel and tsimmes by candlelight, and they kindly talked local history and let me ask questions. * Draft 5 is done. As finished and polished as I know how to make it right now. I have no more words. I will, give it time — but not today. Happy spring! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
11:29 pm	All the running you can do ... At New Years, I was working on chapter 16 in the novel. Six weeks later, I'm finally up to ... chapter 16. The good news is, it's a different chapter 16. Chapters 14 and 15 are both new, and chapters 5 and 6 have expanded — now with heirloom tomatoes! It feels as though now that I have a framework I can see connections and character movements so obvious I don't know how I've made it this far without them. And I keep running into places where I can't go forward without first going back. Hamlet and Laertes can't have the great big sword fight until they've made it really clear that they hate each other's guts. Or whatever you want to call that tangle of fury and adolescent desperation and grief over Ophelia. And whatever it is, it has to be blaring enough that they're ready to skewer each other right now on this hot, headachey afternoon and smear sticky poison on the blades first. But once you have that in place, Hamlet and Ophelia can also take a walk in act one and go skinny dipping on the backside of the moat and end up smelling of wild rosemary. They can laugh in each other's arms about the nights when they used to sneak away from their parents on Hamlet's school holidays to drink illiciet 40s in a disused tower that smells of generations of pigeons and start bonfires that nearly set the stones on fire. And on the night his father dies, she can hold him when he's too raw to cry. It's amazing how many things you can fit into one book. Even before the fan writers get a hold of it. :-) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 20th, 2009
9:55 am	Yule thoughts In response to dhobikikutti, my original prompts looked like this (wiht antecedants clarified in the first one.) If a hypothetical person would like to know anything else, ask and I'll be glad to try to answer. Tom Stoppard - Indian Ink Nirad Das has a son, after the play ends. What happens in Nirad's life; how does he feel about his home when he walks the streets alone, or cooks dinner? Who does he love? What does he paint for himself alone? I would love to know more about his life. Martin Espada - Imagine the Angels of Bread They're narrative poems, and he reads them with an actor's presence. They are all condensed stories, and they make me realize how little I know. If you followed any of his people off the page, into cold apartments or tropical jungle or memorial grounds or baseball diamonds, where would they go? Mark Twain - The Diaries of Adam and Eve Eve caught my heart, and Twain's too, I think. She is so curious and so fearless and so lonely. I could watch her discovering the river delta for years, or wandering through the Old Testament talking with the writers of th song of songs. I wonder how she and Adam really got through to one another. Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden I have wondered for awhile what Mary Lennox would see if she returned to India after she learned how to see. And then this smmer I found Sylvia Townshend Warner's description of her mother, who grew up in India and came to England as a child -- with vivid memories she could not share, because in England she was too thin and too tan and always cold and not familiar with the English alphabet. And that contrast made me wonder still more. This story has another side, like 'Wide Sargasso Sea.' What grows in an Indian garden? Through any eyes you like, I'd like to feel that earth. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
8:33 pm	Dear Yulewriter Owing to work insanity, I'm a few days late in posting this — so here I am saying thank you. My Yule requests are scattered this year, but all I'm really asking is that you write a story you'll have fun with. If it makes you high, that's what Yuletide is for. I've suggested some worlds I don't know well and would like to visit, and some I know better and have found smaller than I thought ... worth expanding. They have in common a kind of simplicity, bareness, skin shivering in the wind — an awakening curiosity — wonder in the face of grief. Where I live, this season is candles in early darkness, family traveling long distances to hold each other when we're tired, a time that brings the people who matter close enough to touch. Last November, I went with friends to pick out their family Christmas tree. The kids ran from tree to tree, arguing amiably over the tallest and the roundest. They were getting one early, because their brother was coming back from basic training. Near the end, footsore and windblown, we had walked down to the lowest field in search of frazier fir trees, and a bluebird came skimming over the slumped grass. I'v never seen one before or since. That's the kind of mix I'm thinking of at the back of my mind. One last thing; looking over my requests, I saw that my pronouns in the first are ambiguous. I meant to ask about Nirad Das, but write what turns you on. If you're glad, I will be. Thank you and happy Thanksgiving! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
7:53 pm	Skipped a season... Hey guys, long time no see. Summer is receding; my magazine will settle into winter quarters in another week, and I'm sitting here, not at my office, with music playing and the heat lightly on, about to step into chapter one of draft five of the novel. This revision is more of a massage than a hatchet job, I think: filling out the new plot, slowing the pacing in a few places, letting people, here and there, bask. In the last week, I've taken some time to get out of the house too. On a sunny Thursday, I drove over the mountains listening to The Scarlet Pimpernel and grinning at the first turning sugar maples. It feels so good to be outside — as good as it feels to spend two hours pulling up late season beets and piling them into feed bags with three apprentices at a local farm, while they talk about song books and typewriters whose turn to make dinner. So a week ago I got to listen to Jonathan Coulton in concert with a pride of friends, and it was magnificent. Listening to a performer live makes me feel awake, a lot like talking comfortably in a field of arugula, but more immediately human. Music opens people, gets past self-consciousness to the place where you can walk straight up to someone and ask how they are and mean it. On the night, my friends sang the choruses around me and stamped their feet and programmed flames on their iphones — I laughed and I was moved. And I thought afterward, it's funny how many of his songs talk about not reaching people, about something as close as the front door or the next floor up that is out of reach because the singer won't grasp it. So, because I like arguing with Jonathan Coulton long-distance, I wrote a song in my head as I drove home and filled in the rest in a coffee shop later, before I pulled out my writing notebook. Thank God it's fall. Navigation When no one else needs rescuing, I like to fly at night. From here, the hills fit in my hands and all the city lights. I'll hit the streets faster than rain when I hear someone scream, but when they chose the X-men I didn't make the team Chorus: because I still ache when I land in the dirt and I remember my name without reading my shirt: I'll never be a sidekick — obviously — but on a warm summer evening will you fly with me? When lightening rods are humming, I feel alive and whole, and I want a living body to expand my soul. My walls may be stone but the windows open wide — why stay in a lab when you can chase a storm outside? Chorus: When I give my heart, it'll come with my head, and I can make a man without a needle and thread: I'll never be an Igor — rapturously — so on a warm summer evening will you fly with me? When I don't know anyone in the room I'll offer you a drink. We'll hang out in the kitchen blowing bubbles at the sink. I'll put my feet up on the table and my wine glass on the floor, and if you pull the cork maybe I won't spill when I pour. Chorus: So toast our bare feet and let's dance with the band. I won't take your order, but I'll take your hand: I'll never be a waiter — gloriously. On a warm summer evening, will you fly with me? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
1:09 pm	The oracle speaks To cheer me up as I consult other experts this morning, getting on with research, I asked the my favorite Magic 8 Ball a few questions... ( The itunes Guide to Finding a Literary Agent ) They're surprisingly coherent, when you think about it... (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
11:03 pm	IT'S HERE! I was passing by the bookstore this morning where I'd pre-ordered my copies of Spiral Hunt (one for me and one for everyone I promised one to at Christmas :-) and I stopped in just to see if by any chance... and there was a box just come from the publisher. Yay! Yay! And again Yay! Also shining points for my local independent bookstore for having the book in stock two days after it came out. And Yay! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
10:09 pm	Once in a lifetime A good friend has a book out today! And it's incredible. I've read it. Have you ever read a book and wanted to pull aside everyone you like and say read this, read it soon? I was lucky enough to read this book in draft, and I have been waiting ever since to get copies and pass them out. Pick it up and take a look. Please. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
3:41 pm	Inauguration - the act of telling the future I'm compiling a list of agents I've heard of or who have successfully gotten at least one book into print (meaning the novel I've read that thanks them on the acknowledgement page). So far, about one in five novels mention someone, and I've collected eight names. Now I just need to figure out what to do with 'em. On the upside, my advisor got in touch this week, and I've heard from one reader-of-the-book who didn't say she was terminally confused (yet). I walked on air for a whole day after that. Meantime... ;-) Bibliomancy? Book meme from caitirin 1. Grab the book nearest you. Right now. 2. Turn to page 56. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post that sentence along with these instructions in your LiveJournal. 5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST. With my right hand: Later I found a menu from the pizza shop folded in my coat. — Martin Espada, Imagine the Angels of Bread (which my aunt just gave me for my birthday, because she's that cool.) With my left hand: "That's right," said Nanny Ogg. "But only for the right religions, so you better watch your step!" — Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum. (The preceding sentence is "It's all right ... as witches we believe in religious toleration...." The recipient is an unhappy evangelical priest who has always had too much intelligence to believe in fundamentalist interpretations and is not sure now just what word he should be spreading — but who will visit an old woman when he hears she is ill, while her neighbors leave alone to be getting on with fighting her own illnesses...) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
12:23 pm	Handmade meme Found from caitirin. The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me. It will be about or tailored to those five lucky "victims." This offer does have some restrictions and limitations: - I make no guarantees that you will like what I make! - what I create will be just for you. - it'll be done this year - you have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a poem or story. I may make something all craft-y like. I may cook you something and mail it to you - though probably only if you live on this side of the globe. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure! - I reserve the right to do something extremely strange. The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well, if you expect me to do something for you! P.S. If I don't have your snail mail, you'll need to send it to me, so drop me an e-mail. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
10:59 pm	Yuletide and falling snow I'm late in recognizing my yulewriters here (New Years and my birthday intervened)... and yes, I did say yulewriters. I must be the luckiest person in Yuletide: I got not one story but four. deepad wrote my official pinch-hit, One Thousand and One and Counting. Read it, please. It is amazingly beautiful. She wrote it in answer to an Arabian Nights prompt, but you don't need to have read the Nights tales; these are contemporary Shahrazads, women facing arrogant men with humor and guts and sadness and a wry intelligent gift for words. And some of the men are likeable and some deadly — and some both. Her skill is formidable. The story is page-turning. It made me laugh, and it made me cry. And she made my week by telling me that she remembered my story from last year and had wanted to write this one for me. This is what Yuletide is about. But there's more. fresne gave me Of Nightengales and Other Things: Shahryar watching Shahrazad as she speaks and gestures and catches the light. Spondees sparkle, feathers transubstantiate. Her Shahrazad has power, her lamps glow, her sultan has flesh and blood, and the dilemna is real. rhyana gave me Twenty, a twilit drabble about love with a weak heart. I have been asking for Blue Castle fic since I found Yuletide; it's a little-known L.M. Montgomery story about a woman who believes she is dying and finds courage because of it. Here is the voice of the man she marries. I am moved by the way he talks of her illness as something that has become everyday because it has to. He holds her and counts her breaths, waiting for her pulse to steady. And I'm moved by the comment from someone who knows what that is really like. And karrenia_rune gave me My Kingdom for a Horse (of a Different Color), a Shahrazad steeling herself for the next night, the next story, with water running over her fingers. Thank you, all of you. I also wrote a One Thousand and One Nights story. It is not yet all I want it to be. I found myself wrestling with the Nights, because they're fairy tales. I wanted the characters to get real, to show more cause for their actions, or not to fall into obvious traps. (If she says on page one, 'don't kick the big rock or a djinn will appear and eat us both,' he'll kick the rock by page three, guaranteed. And the djinn will appear and kill her, but he'll escape somehow. Fairy tales are like that the world over. Two drunk Vizirs debate their hypothetical children's hypothetical marriage exactly like the kings in the Disney Sleeping Beauty.) But I loved writing it, and I'm going to keep on working at the Nights until I learn how to interpret their metaphors. In the meantime, I've checked most of the books on how to find a literary agent out of the local library. Most of them are enough out of date that... well, the one I read this morning told me that out of 120 agents polled, only one read email regularly. The book came out 10 years ago. But I'll bet there's an updated version of it. And today when I came home, (driven by a cabby who collects local vintage postcards and sells them on e-bay, and had a complete set of trolley wrecks once and a quadruple postcard of park square that could fold into a circle) I found a late birthday present from my brilliant, brilliant brother sitting on the doorstep. He sent me cinnamon rolls from the best cafe bakery in the world, the one we go to in Maine. You warm them up and serve. Anyone want to have breakfast with me? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
7:36 am	Dear Yulewriter I'm leaving town for Christmas today, and I'll be spending Christmas weekend at a farm with more hereford calves than computing power. If it takes me a day or two to respond to your story, please understand; I'm waiting with great curiosity! Everyone else, happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, a warm and restful and light beginning of winter to you — consider yourself hugged — catch you at new year's eve! (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
8:03 pm	Even my haikus are slashfic... Haiku2 for minyan who wasn't working harry wasn't and he knew by the soundless fall @ aboutmylife.netadvogato.orgblogger.comblogs.gnome.orgblogspot.comdeadjournal.comgreatestjournal.cominsanejournal.comlivejournal.commyspace.comspaces.msn.com Created by Grahame (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
9:28 pm	2008 in first lines (The first line of the first public post made each month of this year.) The 12 days of feasting are nearly over. When I packed up the apartment, the alarm clock my uncle gave me began going off at 9 a.m. It's maple brunch season — anyone up for mini muffins and maple butter? Frank Zappa — is his name familiar? Hey guys. I'm just back from three days in Maine with my brother and sister and friends — and I needed it. I was walking across the parking lot to my car, and the couple standing beside it on the median had a rooster on a leash. It's been a hard week already. But please don't take my editing away. Friday night, around 10, a man I'd never met knocked on my back door, the sliding glass one. My old friend G spent the weekend with me. My last stand-alone magazine hit the streets on Thursday, and I got to walk around the Shaker Village and jam with an interpreter in the kitchen about the 29 kinds of apples they grew. The 12 days of feasting are nearly over. August had no posts in it, so July got two lines. Tells you something about August. I like this meme, because I end up rereading and reliving the year in moments. Some of those posts were hard to read. Two I didn't read. Some made me glow. This year has been a lot of work — but good work. All in all, I'm happy. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
6:21 pm	It's done Draft 4 of the novel. 23 chapters. Neatly stacked up at my elbow. I've been a little high on it all week, knowing I was close, and now I don't know what to say. It has a plot and everything. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
12:27 am	Dear Yulewriter Thank you! Somewhere on my drive home from work, tonight became tomorrow morning (my job is like that sometimes), so I will write you again later in the week, when I can string two thoughts together. But I can string one now, bright as a prism: I'm so very glad you and I are both here, setting off into the same worlds and touching ferns and muddy branches as we go. Have fun, please. Write what turns you on. What I've written in my last two yuletides here still goes: let people touch each other and I'll be happy. Be well! (Comment on this)