Preorder Solitaire


 

Solitaire will be republished by Small Beer Press in January 2011.

Please go visit the marvelous bookpage they have set up: you will find this cover, the new author photo by the incredible Jennifer Durham, all kinds of nice quotes, and an opportunity to preorder the book either in printed version or in DRM-free PDF download.

You can also find Solitaire at Amazon.com, B&N.com or your favorite independent bookstore.

I’m so excited about this. I can’t imagine a better home for Solitaire than Small Beer Press, who value stories, are patient and kind to writers, love books and sell the hell out of them to anyone who will sit still. I am fortunate indeed to be with them (bows in the direction of Massachusetts). And I hope you’ll be excited for me too; you can show the love by preordering and making my publisher feel like he didn’t get a pig in a poke (smile).

If you’d like to support the relaunch of Solitaire and have ideas for events, marketing, reviewing, interviews, advertising, viral videos or anything else, please let Small Beer Press hear about them (info at smallbeerpress.com). Solitaire is a good book; I want it to make lots of new friends.

And please go look at the bookpage, and drop a comment over there if you’re inclined to let Gavin and the Small Beer crew know that they have done a cool thing by bringing Solitaire back to the party!

Impegnata! Ocupada!

Which means busy but honestly, most anything sounds so much better in Italian or Spanish. There’s a reason they call ’em Romance languages (okay, I know that’s not the reason, but really, don’t you think it should be?).

    Today I have:

  • Worked out
  • Done a week’s grocery shopping
  • Made breakfast and tidied up
  • Read the paper
  • Talked with my sweetie
  • Made split pea soup
  • Had a shower
  • Put in a load of laundry
  • Made the bed
  • Read the entire internet
  • Had some writing ideas
  • Done some nonprofit email business
  • Figured out how to FTP files to my new host server
  • And written this blog post….

And it’s only just 11:30. You should now imagine Austin Powers saying Productivity, baby! It’s amazing what I can do if I just get up early enough. And keep drinking tea…

I am off to do Many More Things. I leave you with some of the music I’ll be listening to today: this gorgeous song from the Italian group Madreblu. I do not have time to provide you the English translation (I’m on a schedule, you know!), and the ones I’ve found online don’t really capture the rhythm and metaphor of the song in my opinion, but I welcome any Italian-speakers who want to comment here. It’s a really beautiful song.

I wish you the perfect balance between busy and peaceful! Enjoy your day.
 

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Certamente
Madreblu

Certamente passera qui su di me
sicuramente non mi rimarra
quasi niente
tornero alla verita
ma latente la tua voce suonera…suonera

chiaramente poco tempo durera
e velocemente l’impazienza
prima o poi scomparira
nella mia mente tutto si cancellera
pero latente la tua voce…la tua voce giochera

aspetto qui, aspetto
il temporale aspetto
che questo caldo arrivi alla fine
non riesco a dormire
aspetto qui, aspetto
il temporale aspetto
che questo caldo arrivi alla fine
e mi faccia dormire

certamente passera qui su di me
immediatamente io mi scordero di te
completamente tornero alla realta
e lentamente la tua voce…la tua voce se ne andra

aspetto qui, aspetto
il temporale aspetto
che questo caldo arrivi alla fine
non riesco a dormire
aspetto qui, aspetto
il temporale aspetto
che questo caldo arrivi alla fine
e mi faccia dormire

Thankful for…

…so much that it is hard to find the perfect words and the graceful phrases.

I am blessed to have so much love in my life.

Between writing prose and essays and screenplays, and editing, and reading, and music and movies and television, and all the conversations with Nicola, I live my life immersed in story. I love that so much.

I love my family and friends. You all make me feel that the world is a bigger and better place because you are in it.

I am grateful for every single laugh, smile, kiss, hug, moment of excitement, beautiful view, birdsong, meal, hard workout at the gym and hot shower afterward. All the conversations, the beer and wine and tea and coffee. The small special moments that wouldn’t matter to anyone but me, and the moments that I share with others.

I am grateful to every person who has ever read anything I have written.

I’m grateful to every client who has trusted me with their work, and allowed me the privilege of helping.

I am grateful for all the help I’ve received — with writing, with life. I’ve learned a lot, and am thankful for the teachers who were patient with me when I did not learn gracefully.

I am so thankful for writing that even thinking about how to say so makes me want to burst into tears. I am thankful to Nicola for saying it so well.

And more, and more, and more. And none of this really says what I am feeling, which is that I am so glad to be alive and to be myself, and becoming more myself all the time. So many people, friends and strangers, have a part in that. You’re reading this, so you do too. I’m grateful to you all. Thank you.

Enjoy your day.

I don’t always want a rearview mirror

This is so creepy to me in so many ways that I’m not sure where to start: an NYU artist has had a camera surgically implanted in his head.

There’s a reason that the expression “eyes in the back of your head” is almost never on anyone’s “ten reasons I love you” list. In a metaphorical as well as literal sense, standing behind someone is sometimes the only privacy some of us have from each other in the moment. If you are not looking at me now, I don’t necessarily want you to see me later. Imagine how this man’s family and friends and colleagues now have to redefine their own sense of privacy.

And there’s a psychological piece of this for me, too. I’m not a big believer in living in the past. There are plenty of things that are large in my memory. I mine my own experience for writing, and to discover my own personal plot line, and as a way of sharing/showing myself to people whom I want to know me. But I do not live in my own rearview mirror. And I do not understand how this man will make art from his minute-by-minute “behind me” experience of a year. Perhaps that’s just my failure of imagination. But there are some things that I don’t want to see, and I think this might just be one of them.

I would certainly take him off my party list (raises internal eyebrow at the potential horror of “RearCam Guest”…)

Enjoy your day.

Seattle snowbrain

It’s snowing here. Excuse me while I just go off into a corner of the internet and bang my head. (Ow! Ow ow ow! Okay, not really, since the internet is only hard in metaphorical, logistical, political, moral, ethical and communication ways, but doesn’t actually have any walls, except that’s a whole new set of metaphors so let’s not go there right now…)

Okay, sorry. This unfortunate incident has been brought to you by The Snowbrain Drivers of Seattle, who do not get that snow is, like, water, you know? It’s slippery! And when you smush it into the road with your hot tires and then the cold wind blows, it turns into ice! (Oh my god! You should totally have stayed awake in science class!) And guess what? If you put your car on a patch of that ice and push your gas pedal, your tires will go round and round and round and make a funny noise, and your car will go sideways!

I went to the gym early this morning, when everything was cold and still and asphalt- and tree-colored, as the world should be. When I came out of my workout, everything was cold and blowy and white. That is not how I like my immediate environment to be. If I wanted a winter wonderland, I would live in Saskatchewan (*bows in respect to all of you who are Not Like Me*). And almost immediately, many people on the road decided that the best thing to do when driving in snow is to try to outrun it. So they went faster. They tailgated. They ran the yellow lights on a left turn. And their tires made funny noises, and their cars went sideways.

I went straight from the gym to the grocery store to do all the Thanksgiving shopping. I think there were maybe ten customers there, and we all had that focused, determined look of people who know that the last loaf of bread will be gone baby gone four hours from now. Because there are going to be three inches of snow and we will all starve in our homes!

I swear, I am not making any of this up. (Edited to add: And now I have proof!)

The turkey is in the refrigerator. The car is in the driveway. I am going to have some more tea and contemplate the joy of not being on the road right now.

Enjoy your day.

Taking readers apart

I am flat out delighted by this lovely review of Dangerous Space from Terry Weyna at Reading The Leaves. Apart from all the other nice things she says, I think she’s the first reviewer who has specifically called out what is, for me, the core of “Dangerous Space” — the artist’s creative process, and the role that other people sometimes play in it.

As for taking readers apart, well… yay (grin). There is no better praise for a writer than making people feel.

It’s true that I’m not doing as much writing as I’d like to be right now. And much of what I am doing, you don’t see — screenplay, story drafts, yadda yadda. I’m living in story all the time (even when I go to the grocery store) and that’s deep and rich and compelling for me. But it’s not enough. I want you to live in my stories too; I want them to live in you. It’s hard to explain all the thousand things I feel when a reader lets me know that’s happened. I suppose that is why I tell stories about it instead.

Enjoy your day.

The next step

You know I love music. It fuels my writing, my nights in the pub, my fireside conversations with friends. It makes moments in movies, and in life, more ecstatic or more bittersweet. The best music punches straight in, blows a goodbye kiss to my thinking brain and blasts into the bright hot murky cold stir-it-up places within me. Not all music is the ecstatic kind, but I’ve always been ecstatic on some level about it. I hear a song I like, I get excited, you know? It pleases me to hear myself sung back to me.

And this pleases me too: this Seattle Times profile of Seattle band The Head and the Heart, and their in-studio session at KEXP. Threshold experiences fascinate me: people standing in a doorway, or on a cliff, ready to step… Those moments of And so it begins.

Enjoy your day.

Overheard at the gym

I have talked before about the world of women (not ladies!) at my gym. If you have opinions about the niceness and demureness of sedate-looking women of a certain age, well, keep your jury out on that until you spent some time working out with them. Because a 70-something woman told this joke today…

Three old ladies are sitting on a park bench. A flasher stops in front of them and pulls his raincoat wide. So Mabel has a stroke. Then Louella has a stroke. But Bessie was too old; she couldn’t reach that far.

Enjoy your day.

The creative tango

In September, Slate Magazine ran a fascinating series of articles by Joshua Wolf Shenk examining the dynamics of creative relationships. I’ve been reading them over and over: they speak to me very deeply of my own experience with both Nicola and my screenwriting work. I have been having conversations in my head with Shenk and planning blog posts, but you know, I keep finding more internal paths to follow, more thinking to do, and so this is a long way of telling you I got nothin’ (big smile to everyone on the internet).

Or perhaps it’s better to say that I’ve got so much, so deep, that I am not sure what to share or where to start. There’s something in these ideas that feels so essential to me, so defining…. I have been, at times, one of the most solitary people I know. I value my singularity, my individuality, my autonomy, the particularity of my vision, all that precious me me me stuff that artists get to acknowledge publicly to an extent that other people aren’t always allowed. But I know that my writing — my core identity — would not be what it is without my creative relationships. Me you me you me me me…

If you’re interested, go take a look. Start here, and then follow the links through to Shenk’s analysis of the Lennon/McCartney relationship (both parts). Let me know what you think.

And enjoy your day. In spite of rain and the vagaries of life, I’m enjoying mine.