You are now connected

Blogging from the road has been better and worse than I expected. I blogged when I didn't think I'd be able to, and didn't blog even when I had access. Right now, I'm sitting in a car outside a public library, using their wireless network. Yeah, libraries!

Anyhow, this spottiness will continue all week, while I travel. In the meantime, in honor of the library that is supporting me right now, I want to call your attention to this eloquent plea from Anne Marie Pace for the library at Chincoteague. (Yes, it's the same town where MISTY OF CHINCOTEAGUE began. ) As Anne Marie says: "I have more children's books in my house than they have in their library." Go and see if there's one tiny thing you can do to join Anne Marie in offering more books to the kids who live there. UPDATE: Now you can buy music by Chincoteague musicians to support the library!

I'll sign off here shortly, but the wireless network inside the library will continue to broadcast. I think that's a mini-miracle, a great and wonderful invention, but it's nothing compared to the intimate, quiet pulse of a library book that finds me, alone and in need of sustenance, and steadily breathes life back into my pale form:

(The Guardian's review of: The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean)

Poetry Friday: 39 Reasons to Write

I was tagged to write 39 Reasons to Be Happy by jules. But instead I have:


39 reasons to write

You can't speak. No one listens.
You don't know. You do know.
Talk is cheap. Therapy costs.
Courage is sexy.

A circle is forming.
You can't hold your breath forever.
Everyone thinks they know you.
Candy dissolves.

There is already, without you, a moon.
There is never, without you, a revolution.
Laughing alone is not recommended.
The melody is strong.

You are dressed for it.
The pen fits, exactly.
Can you breathe otherwise?
Nothing satisfies like removing your gloves.

Why not? Brazen made the dictionary.
So did brine, bombast and brioche
Denouement is really a word.
Disobedience can be looked up.

Thousands of sparrows are counting on you.
Space can fold in on itself.
Reasons line the roads back, but not the way out.
Staring is required.

Besides, do you really think Truth hangs out in a bar?
Or that she would talk to you without her bodyguard?
Check out what marks her shoes make on the floor.
Wait for her at the sink.

Don't double-check my math.
There are no warriors without wounds.
Thirty-nine is as thirty-nine does.
Do you?

----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)


Poetry Friday is hosted this week at Big A, little a

SCBWI L.A. Conference: John Green

Me and John Green
Nerdfighters!

John gave a honest and funny speech to the entire conference, and then held a breakout session on Writing the Contemporary YA Novel, which I attended. My questions for him:

ME: Your vblog is a lot of fun. (HIM: Thank you ma'am. ME: Ma'am? Ma'am? God, I hope he meant that as humor...) ME, continuing on: But how has it affected you as a writer?

HIM: (mad paraphrasing) It's given me less time to write! But it's confirmed for me that the written word is important, that you can do things with text that video will never be able to do. (He, of course, said this all much more eloquently.)

ME: (after other people asked questions about the sexual tension and male POV in Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines) Do you find it's harder to write about spiritual questioning than sex?

HIM: God, what a great question! (or something lovely like that) YES. It's much harder. It's hard not to be cheesy. So I used an academic setting (the religion professor) to talk about it in a structured way. I wrote the scene (famous toothpaste tube scene) in ten minutes. The spiritual stuff took much longer. (Again, heavily paraphrased. I do him no justice at all.)

So, I walked away with even more admiration. Not only is he honest on the page, he's honest in person and great fun to listen to.