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Outings and Inlets
After a week of 90+ degree days, drenching humidity, and dire public health warnings about heat and air quality, I decided it was time to get my baby the hell out of New Jersey to someplace where I could take him outside without exposing him to deadly peril. A kid who's learning to walk shouldn't be stuck indoors all the time. Five hours' drive north and inland, everything's different. Everything's cool and green. And damp, but damp's much better at 74 degrees than at 94.

So here we are in Forestport, the Adirondack village where my father grew up--a place where the rapids on the Black River are the predominant sound. My mother, who is also in retreat from air quality advisories in D.C., is the only other relative staying at the old family homestead right now. On Fourth of July weekends every year, the place is just crawling with our fellow Averys. That's some delightful chaos, but this quiet is lovely, too.

It was too rainy for swimming, so we spent the day driving up into the big state park, past lakes and lakes and lakes, and over the Big Moose River, to a quilt supply shop in the tiny town of Inlet on the Fulton Chain. I've accompanied my mother to a lot of quilt supply shops, but the Black Bear Trading Post is the first one I've been to with a lake view. Take a look at the castle-shaped tote bag she's quilting for Gareth, and remember how magical it would have been to your pre-school-age self. Gareth's will have penants and a fire-breathing dragon. My mom is the best grandma ever.

She's also a model hermit-artist this summer. Since D.C. got too hot and smoggy for her lung condition, she's been up here in Forestport, quilting. "Sometimes five hours go by at the sewing machine before it occurs to me to look at my watch," she said when I asked if she'd been lonely. "I've been so happy, having no one else to please but myself most days." And every week or two, other Averys come around to breathe and swim for a couple of days, so she hasn't been totally alone. I envy her a little. The summer I came up alone for a few weeks to write was one of the happiest of my life. That's the kind of thing I won't be doing again for...I don't want to think about how many years. Parenthood is great fun, but it has its costs, and the costs are shifting all the time.

I had a crazy notion that I'd be able to hand Gareth off to my mother sometimes so that they could play together and I could get some writing done. You know how kids get separation anxiety when they're learning to walk, as a sort of evolutionary safety measure to keep them from wandering off? The closer Gareth gets to independent mobility, the more it freaks him out if I'm out of sight even for a moment. Ah, well. Writing time, here as at home, begins when everyone else has gone to bed.

It's still a big win to be here, in a house where nobody lives year round. Since it's not any one person or family branch's territory, all the kinfolk take care to leave it as neat as they found it. I clean up after myself and my kid, help my mom with the shared mess, and then I'm done. In my own house, everywhere I look there's a years-deep backlog of imagined repairs and improvements that I could be spending my time on, and there's clutter I could be tidying, so that even when I am writing after everyone's gone to bed, I have to put a lot of energy into walling off those distractions.

Here, as at home, it's hard to produce more than half a page a day of the Ria story. So frustrating. At least I'm getting that much consistently, now that the pneumonia's well and truly over. I just have to remind myself that that's the pace that finished the dissertation, and I'm having a lot more fun with half a page a day of Ria.

First Royalty Statement
Thirty-one dollars and seventy-two cents. It doesn't sound like a whole lot, but that's the first quarter's royalties for a book that was only available for sale for one month of the quarter in question, and that hasn't had much time to earn back the publisher's expenses from producing it. If I had sold a novel to a major print publisher, even a relatively successful novel, many quarters might have gone by before any royalties arrived. In its proper context, this number is excellent news.

Someday I might make enough from my fiction to support my Starbucks habit. A girl's gotta have a dream.

Finally Up On Amazon!
After seven weeks, at long last, Amazon is offering Closing Arguments. They don't have the cover image or the publisher's blurb up yet, and they'll only be selling it in Kindle format. That's okay. It took long enough, I'd begun to fret.

If anyone feels inspired to be the first to review it over there, I, um, certainly wouldn't object.

First Review: Two Thumbs Down
As bad reviews go, it could have been worse. "Cleverly conceived and executed--yet strangely unaffecting," with a villain evocative of Jack Nicholson...okay. Considering that she'd have liked to see more Nicholsonesque fisticuffs, I wonder if this wasn't just the wrong book for her. Or maybe I haven't improved my characterization as much since the first draft of the Big Book as I thought I had.

radiotelescope's comment on that long-ago first draft was, "I'd like all the characters to be about 15% more vivid," and he was absolutely right.

I'm still hoping someone among the dozens of reviewers I sent copies to will give me something I can put on a book jacket. Come 2009, I'm going to need some blurbs from the two e-books to sell the print volume.

The Gareth Report
I always hesitate to post about my son and my life as a mother. This, after all, is a blog about writing and teaching, and the part of me that read lots of John Gardner's books on the crafting of fiction says, You can't just change the authorial contract with your reader like that! Keep your motherhood out of it! What could I possibly have to say about being a parent that countless other parents have not already said? My love for Gareth is bigger than the earth, bigger than the all the visible stars, bigger than the thirteen-dimensional superstring that allegedly makes up the multiverse, bigger than whatever is bigger than the superstring that the string theorists haven't guessed at yet. And so is the love of just about every parent for just about every child. It's the most important part of my life. It's also completely unoriginal.

But if there's one thing I learned from the best of my poetry mentors, it's that separating the life from the art costs more than it gives, and mars the work. Alicia only really took off as a poet when she started writing about the other love that dare not speak its name--when she was willing to risk the charge of sentimentality and write about her life as a mother. It's time I reread The Mother/Child Papers. It's time everybody read The Mother/Child Papers.

Gareth's a speaking subject now, with four spoken words and an American Sign Language vocabulary that's suddenly growing so fast, we're not even sure how big it is. Just in the past two days, he's started combining words and signs into proto-sentences: "Daddy" and the sign for more when Dan was about to leave for the office, "Daddy, hi!" and the sign for phone just before the time of day when I usually call Dan on speaker phone so Gareth can hear his voice. Really, Gareth seems to be more interested in his father than in anything else on earth. Which makes perfect sense to me. I've been there.

Live Long And Marry
If you haven't already checked out this charity auction in support of same-sex marriage rights in California, you should go take a look. There are some pretty odd goods, services, and opportunities to commission works of art, high and low. Read the user info page for instructions if you want to bid or post an offer.

I've posted two offers, a CD of my e-book, Closing Arguments, and a copy of my long out-of-print poetry chapbook from Blast Press, Persephone in Washington.

The Secret Life Of The One-Sentence Pitch, or, Adventures in Hand-Selling
I knew I needed a good one-sentence pitch for any book I wanted to sell, and that any agent or editor I pitched to would be listening for an answer to the question, Will people pay to read that?

What I didn't know was that actual readers, face to face, would be asking for my one-sentence pitch in the moment of decision about whether to buy my book.

I'm really glad I went to the Totally Normal Event. I was there to sell books, and not a lot of books got sold, so mostly I learned stuff. The people who were there to have fun manifestly had a whole lot of it, so I'd say overall that it looked like a success for Jeff Mach and his event-planning crew.

The merchanting arrangements were unconventional. Instead of having one hucksters' room for all the merchants, there was a main merchanting area that had a stage off to the side, with live music and dancing, and then there were several smaller themed rooms on another floor that had various activities going on, with a couple of merchants whose wares were relevant to the themes. It was an interesting idea, and it might have worked, but for those of us who were selling books, it didn't pan out terribly well. On the other hand, trying to hand-sell books while competing for attention with heavily amplified Gothic/Industrial music might not have worked better.

So there David and I were, trying to sell e-books (which is already a hard sell because everyone prefers print), at our little table in merchanting Siberia. Our respective very patient spouses had come to help out and to tend our respective offspring, while the two of us spent nine (9) hours selling seven (7) e-books on CD. We didn't even come close to recouping our publisher's costs for the box of CD's (complete with glossy cover art labels!) that she'd sent us to sell, but considering that it was our first time out, and the weird conditions we had to work with, I'm glad we managed to sell any. That we did sell those seven was largely because we had our one-sentence pitches to fall back on when people asked us what our books were about.

Every year I went to the Writer's Weekend conference, I'd attend the panel on How To Pitch To Agents And Editors, just in case some new tidbit of information or advice slipped out that hadn't the year before. I'd spend the hours on the plane between Newark and Seattle, and then between Seattle and Newark, scribbling out variation after variation of the one-sentence pitch and the one-paragraph pitch. Between sessions during the conference, I'd pace around the hotel room, memorizing the pitches and playing around with the delivery. And each of those years, I'd have a few five-minute appointments in which to put those pitches to work with agents and editors.

I may not have persuaded any of those industry pros to take me on, but now I know I can get strangers to open their wallets and hand me cash on the basis of my pitch. That's got to be good for something.

Drive With Aloha
We're just back from five days in Hawai'i. We snorkeled in two different reefs, hiked a ridge above one of the wildest valleys on the Na Pali coast, eavesdropped on the nests of various pelagic birds at Kilauea Lighthouse, and celebrated the very excellent wedding of

garybart and

jaimesama, which was the first and best reason for the trip. We stayed in a remote part of Kaua'i, separated by seven tiny one-way bridges from the nearest tiny town, so we've been in a news, phone, and internet blackout all week. I've got a lot to catch up on.

Gareth handled air travel better than we could possibly have hoped, though he still hates car seats. He enjoyed riding out our hike from his vantage point in the baby backpack. Anini Beach's reef slows the waves down enough, we were able to introduce him to the Pacific Ocean. It looks like he's up for going anyplace Dan and I would want to go.

Poor kid, just when he's starting to talk, his mother gets fixated on pronouncing Hawai'ian words like humuhumunukunukuapua'a. (Use this word in a sentence: "Check out all the stripy humuhumunukunukuapua'a wriggling in the reef.") Hawai'ian trips me up. The vowels are pretty much the standard Latin vowels, so I keep putting the stress accents in place names where Latin would duration-accent them, and then I can't stop throwing in the tiny bit I remember of Greek pitch accent, and just when I start getting the hang of where the accents are supposed to go, my brain goes completely haywire. I try to say thank you (mahalo), and my synapses spit up the Korean equivalent (kamsa'hamnida). One of the other wedding guests, a friend from grad school, is now a high school French teacher by trade, so my high school French started coming back. Now that we're completely knackered from the 24 hours it took us to travel home, I can write okay (I think), but I can barely speak an intelligible English sentence.

Language shock aside, my only bout of culture shock was on the roads. The State of Hawai'i urges its people to "Drive with Aloha," and the locals seem to take that official exhortation seriously. I guess it makes sense to concentrate on love of your fellow beings while driving, since that's when you indisputably hold their lives in your hands. Driving with Aloha entails etiquette for handling all those narrow one-way bridges, and stopping to pick up any hitchhiking little old ladies who might be Pele in mortal disguise, and driving about ten miles an hour under the speed limit no matter what the road conditions. That last bit was the hardest to adapt to. After all, I'd done my homework on Pele. I knew to offer food to old women, and not ever ever to take a lava rock off the island, and besides, none of the hitchhikers we saw could have been a day over eighteen, so we never had to consider whether to offer Pele a lift. But driving ten miles an hour under the speed limit? That may be driving with Aloha, but here in New Jersey, we drive with Fuck You. It's not a principled position, just the custom of the country. Driving with Aloha around here would be a sure way to get ticketed. Too bad. I liked living a few days on island time, poky traffic and all.

Appearing Saturday As A Real Live Author At An Event (That May Be) Near You
I'll be at Jeff Mach's Totally Normal Event on Saturday in Whippany, NJ. Don't be deceived by the name--go see the website for the premise, which is kind of charming and may actually work. David Sklar and I will be personning (or perhaps alternately manning and womanning) a Drollerie Press table in the Talesenders' room. We'll have Closing Arguments and David's wonderful The Shadow of the Antlered Bird for sale in various electronic formats on CD, as well as some other Drollerie Press e-books. There may be readings. In the grand tradition of mystifying panel titles at cons, I find that I am to be on a panel called "Impossible Technologies." Maybe I'll talk about Madame Blavatsky's obsession with inventing a radio for communicating with the dead--anything might happen. Unlike most of the folks in New Jersey who read this blog, I've never been to one of Jeff Mach's events, but I hear they're a blast.

So now I have to figure out which excerpt from Closing Arguments to prepare in case a reading actually occurs. Any suggestions?

First Word
This morning, Gareth and the cat and I were sprawling on the bed. Gareth was practicing crawling, which so far he only does backward. I was doing some physical therapy exercises. Sonia was gazing at Gareth and purring. Typical start to my day.

Suddenly, Gareth took it into his head to pet Sonia. He concentrated all his intent on her and reached for her tail. "Keetay," he said.

"Did you just say kitty?" I asked.

"Dabdabdabdabdab," he replied. I decided to take that for a yes.

When I called Dan to tell him the Big News, he said, "Oh, yeah, he said that before you got up this morning, too. When I had him for the dawn shift, he was in his exersaucer in the kitchen, watching Sonia eat, and he said, 'Keetay.'"

So I called my mom to tell her the Big News. While I was talking to her, Sonia came and sprawled right in front of Gareth. He grabbed her tail, hanks of her fur, her feet. She just rolled around in cat bliss. Despite our attempts to cue him--"Is that your kitty, Gareth? Do you like your KITTY?"--he wouldn't say his new word for my mother. "Oh, well," said mom, "I guess I should start making dinner."

And the second after we got off the phone, what do you suppose Gareth said?

Ah, well. I'm satisfied, more than satisfied, that my seven and a half month old baby said an identifiable word in its correct context three times in one day. If he doesn't want an audience yet, that's his prerogative.

At Fictionwise
When they first got Closing Arguments up for sale, you could only find it by searching by publisher--title and author searches were to no avail. But at last the biggest purveyor of e-books has everything set up properly. I feel so legitimate! Now we're just waiting for Amazon.

My Geekiness Knows No Bounds. Good Thing I'll Be Allowed To Bring It On The Airplane.
Is it just me, or does the TSA's list of permitted and forbidden carry-on items read like the equipment chapter of a role-playing game handbook? It was when I got to the section that lists ice axes, swords, and sabers--none of which are permissible for your carry-on, but all of which could be checked in your suitcase--that I started having Dungeons & Dragons flashbacks. Maybe it would be easier to explain to the American public why they can't bring blasting caps in their luggage if the TSA told them the caps would cause, I don't know, 2D6 of damage?

If I were still in the Game Master business, I'd be inspired to run a one-shot or maybe three-session game set in an airport, in which players could only equip their characters with items from the TSA permitted and prohibited item list. What can you do to a shoggoth with a crochet needle, hair straightening gel, and a cricket bat? The GURPS combat system is a pain in the butt to run, but Call of Cthulhu would work just fine.

The First Guest-Blogger Interview Is Up (And We Survived Our Midsummer Festival)
Joyce Anthony is one of those generous people who invites guest bloggers to talk to her readers about books. You can find her interview with me at her Books and Authors blog. Thanks, Joyce!

In other news, Dan and Gareth and I have just returned from a short visit to a long festival. It went really well, despite the last lingering bit of pneumonia. Lots of people helped Dan take care of me, so I didn't lose out on rest. None of us got sunburned, bugbitten, or poison ivied. There was no property damage, no wear and tear--there weren't even any regrettable purchases. We took it easy, hanging out with the friends we only get to see at the Free Spirit Gathering, showing off our baby and catching up on the year's gossip.

I got to find out just how mellow my son's temperament really is. A big thunderstorm rolled through camp. Hours before the first edge of the rain came, we could hear the heat lightning coming. With Gareth buckled into the jogging stroller, I bustled down the big hill to reach the dining hall ahead of that first edge. Barely made it. So there we were on the tiny dining hall porch, huddled up with maybe fifty other people who'd had the same idea, when the storm broke right over us. It was Gareth's first prolonged outdoor chance to see and hear really heavy rain, his first summer thunderstorm, his first crammed-into-a-crowd experience. Lots of babies would have freaked out under those conditions. He knitted his little brows together a moment, clearly considering freaking out, but decided against. Being so close to the rain without actually being in it was fascinating, and he went with fascination instead of fear.

Because The Very Short Wire Service Articles Available So Far Won't Tell You
In case you're wondering what the 35 articles of impeachment are that Dennis Kucinich has introduced against President Bush, you can find the full text here, on Kucinich's site at www.house.gov.

But What Does His CV Say About Teaching Experience And Committee Service?
I've heard about some weird hiring decisions in academia, but hiring a Hindu deity to chair a business school takes the cake.

Thanks to my excellent writing critique partner David Sklar for the link.

EDIT: My mom thought I was being figurative, but no, the news story claims that a business school in India has made the monkey god Hanuman its chair. Professor Hanuman has his own office, his own computer, his own conference table, and daily offerings of incense. This is the point at which some folks would say, "You can't make this stuff up." Well, actually, I've made up some pretty wacky stuff in my time, but this one happens to come straight from Yahoo news.

Oh, That's Much Better!
Thank you all for your kind wishes.

My immune system seems to have befriended my antibiotic--a great relief, since I'm allergic to so many of them. My breath capacity is coming back. I have a little more energy, enough that I'm tempted to run around cleaning my house. Fortunately, my mom came up for a couple of days to make sure I got some rest, and now Dan is home for the weekend on rest-enforcement duty. At this rate, I'll be well enough to travel in time for

garybart and

jaimesama's wedding in Hawaii after all. I don't know, though, whether we'll still be able to drive down to the Free Spirit Gathering for a day next weekend. It'll depend on the temperature, since I'm not so good at temperature regulation right now. If we miss it, it'll be the first Midsummer festival we've missed in over a decade.

The trick is to keep recovering at this rate.

Meanwhile, I've been invited to do a little guest posting and interviewing on other people's blogs in connection with the book. Drollerie Press's intern has been tireless in her quest for promotion opportunities--thank you, Chris! I'll post more information as it develops.

..And One More Thing
Drollerie Press is holding a chat session to celebrate the releases of Closing Arguments and Imogen Howson's Fire and Shadow. You can find more details here. I meant to announce it last week, but, well, pneumonia... I'm very glad it's not a podcast interview, because I've still got major laryngitis. On the internet, no one can tell you've got a mouthful of lozenges.

It's On The Loose!
You know those final scenes in nature documentaries when the animal that's been raised in captivity gets released into the wild, and the music swells, and the voiceover narrator says something like, "The future remains uncertain for keystone predators like little Spiky," and you cheer the creature on--Go, Spiky, Go!--as the credits roll? Well, okay, maybe not everybody cheers the creature on, but I always do.

That's kind of how it feels to look for the first time at my novella for sale at the Drollerie Press Bookshop and Mobipocket.

My book has now been released into its new habitat, one of the habitats for which it evolved. Manuscripts shouldn't have to live in captivity, in proverbial trunks--they should roam wild in bookstores and readers' brains. Fortunately, Closing Arguments is not a keystone predator, or any other sort of beast that you can best help by keeping your distance. Walk right up and pet it. Take it home with you. It won't eat any of your other books, I promise.

jeneralist asked, "Where's the best place for your friends to buy it to help it go big?" It was a kind thing to ask. I think every place where it'll be on offer has some advantage. If you buy it directly from the publisher, that gets the middleman out of the way of my eventual royalties, but Mobipocket, Fictionwise, and Amazon have more reach, and good sales figures through a big bookseller seem to breed more good sales figures. (Closing Arguments will go up on Fictionwise sometime next week, and I'm not sure about Amazon's timing, but that'll be soon, too. They carry all the exotic formats, which apparently means they always have a lag.)

What would help at least as much as buying it would be rating or reviewing it. The three big online booksellers have their various ways for customers to give public feedback. If you enjoy Closing Arguments, please consider saying so on one of their webforms.

Lots of friends have said they've never bought an e-book before, and that the whole process seems very intimidating. If you want a user-friendly way to buy Closing Arguments, and you don't want to have to read it on a screen, your best bet is to go directly to Drollerie Press and buy it in Adobe PDF, which you can then print. It's 116 pages long, fairly easy on your printer. If you run into difficulty as a newcomer to the world of e-books, you can ask for help here or email me at first name dot last name at gmail dot com. If I don't know the answer, I'll find someone who does.

Thank you all so much for cheering me on in this process. Many of you have been doing your equivalent of Go, Spiky, Go! for years now. It's meant the world to me to have such great support.

Almost There!
My editor's in the final stages of getting Closing Arguments into place so that you can all rush out in a buying frenzy to get your copies. Sometime this evening, the book release will be complete. I'll put up a big celebratory post here whenever I get the good word.

Meanwhile, I've been added to the author pages on Drollerie Press's website, and there's a big juicy excerpt among their excerpt pages.

In Case Anyone Needs To Reach Me...
It seems I lost my cell phone at the emergency room on Monday while I was getting diagnosed with probably-pneumonia. I usually tell people the best way to reach me is by cell phone, but at the moment, the home phone's the better bet.

Given my inconclusive X-rays, the question of whether I actually have pneumonia seems to turn on which doctor is holding the stethoscope. Over the course of my two ER visits and a follow-up, some have said yes, some have said no. At least it's clear I'm on the mend.

I've decided to embrace the word pneumonia, because that word means the rules are different. If all I have is a cold, well, I soldier on. If I have a virus, I soldier on without antibiotics. Soldiering on is what landed me in the ER twice, so I need a new game plan, one that's compatible with what all the doctors agree on: my recovery will take weeks, maybe months.

Breva the Axe (the Barbarian Queen of Concision Revision) points out that it's not a good idea to soldier on through colds and viruses, either, and that she wishes I would stop attempting stoicism. She's right. She also made us chili. She's a Savage Editor and a mighty fine cook. She and

rianders and

sporos have provisioned us for the coming week, since my mom's heading home tomorrow. Praise them with great praise.