The morning sky is a pale blue full of promise So the sun came back here yesterday and while I always claim that the gloom here doesn’t affect me, once it arrived around noon, I was buzzing around here like a hummingbird. Cleaning up the spots on the living room carpet, dusting, scrubbing the dried carrot slime from a vegetable drawer, sweeping the patio, showing mercy to some of my plants that had been neglected, adding supports to the roses that I apparently didn’t cut back enough and dahlias that are finally showing some spunk, and practically whistling the whole time, except I don’t know how to whistle. Dashed over to New Seasons and bought strawberries and started thinking longing thoughts about more summer fruits. My flurry felt so good because I’ve been feeling ill and this burst of activity made me feel like me.

And speaking of birds, people who read my newsletter or other things I write, might think I’m sort of a nature girl. And it’s true, the sky in all its permutations and sounds and colors and the ocean and all the things I love in the Northwest factor into my mood and filter into my writing. But there is a pair of birds that have made a nest in some place above the eave and between the roof (actually, to confess, I’m not quite clear where the nest is because I cannot find it) outside my office, and I have no idea what kind of birds they are. They move fast, and whenever I spot them, flashing past, they’re whisking at about 89 m.p.h so I can barely discern their colors. And when they return, I swear, it’s even faster and they land with a soft thud. (To confuse matters there is a pair of bluebirds of about the same size that hang around and they’re noisy, but they live down the street—at least I think that’s where they live because they’re also buzzing past at amazing speeds)

Also, I often wear glasses (which, might I add, are usually smudged) for working at my computer long hours and these glasses aren’t good for far-away gazing at fast- moving feathered creatures. And, although I love birds and can recognize a fair number of species, and spend my days tuning into bird song, I’m a fat-assed lazy slacker when it comes to the hard work of avian identification. So I hear a bird and my heart soars and I make a mental note thinking—. I need to join the Audubon Society. I need to take a class. I need to buy a book. A CD. But so far, I have not and live in semi-ignorance tuning in as if I’m from some remote Russian steppe land and cannot understand English.

So these birds, larger than robins, with white breasts and grayish tops ( I know, I suck), tend to zip across the street in pairs and land in a three-story cedar, deserting their brood, and then after they hang out for about 30 seconds, one on the extreme peak of the tree, looking around in all directions, then take off on reconnaissance missions. I’m more apt to see them leave than return, and because it’s been cooler than a witch’s elbow around here lately, I haven’t been hearing any peeps from the nest region, but I’m going to try harder to listen now that the forecast is more promising and my window is open. And I might need to buy binoculars. Also, maybe I cannot hear the babes because my office radio is usually blaring. Shhh. Here comes David Bender---love his political assessment.

Update: I take back my last paragraphs. One of the bird parents returned and the feeding-greeting-hoopla or whatever was going on was heartily loud and chirpy (although not long-lasting. My eyes are peeled for parent # 2). More bird news to come.

And THANK GOD that the Supreme Court stood up for HABEUS CORPUS yesterday when they ruled that the prisoners at Guantanamo had rights! (Well, it was 5-4, so things aren’t entirely hopeful) Still, things are looking up, citizens, even though we are hanging on by the skimpiest of threads to the dear old Constitution. Long live the Magna Carta and Justice Kennedy. (the Magna Carta (going back to 1679)/habeus corpus (on which our 13 colonies were based) says that if your sorry ass is slammed in jail, you’ve got rights. It is the whole idea behind this republic. And this ruling serves notices that all powers in our government can be checked. This ruling, the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States is incredible, at least these days. It means George W. is not a king and we might someday be able to return to a semblance of governmental sanity. It means government is accountable and liberty matters. It means a lot of people see through the pretend tribunals. Remember next year six Supreme Court justices are over 70.

For more on this significant ruling check out Dahlia Lithwick (one of my favorite legal nerds) at slate.msn.com/ id/2193468/ The Enemy Within. Who are we more afraid of: enemy combatants or federal courts? It begins: The Supreme Court's decision Thursday in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States is—as all the big enemy-combatant cases have been—both enormously important and relatively insignificant. This is, after all, the third stinging setback and blistering rebuke the court has handed the Bush administration with respect to prisoner rights at Guantanamo. Yet you may have noticed that all of these setbacks and rebukes have mostly meant more hot days in orange jumpsuits, more solitary confinement, and ever more plus ça change for the detainees there. At his pretrial hearing in April, one of the detainees "lucky" enough to actually face a trial, Salim Hamdan, pointed out to the presiding judge that winning his own appeal at the Supreme Court in 2006 got him precisely nothing.”

Okay, just for balance: read the dissents. It was a narrow ruling and the dissents are freaky as all get out.

On to silliness: The annual Webby Film and Video Awards, which honor the Web’s best videos, for winners to accept their prize with a speech of five words or less. Here are some of the acceptance speeches:

”Five words is not enough,” Lorne Michaels
“Keyboards are full of germs,” Michel Gondry
“Contact me for voice work,” Tay Zonday
“Please don’t climb our building.” NYTimes.com
“Together, we’ll make reading obsolete.” The Onion News Network
“The revolution will be webcast.” - Getty Images
“Well, well, well, well, well.” My Damn Channel,
"Thank you very much. Good bye,” Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim

A list of all speeches — it’s fairly brief – can be found at: http://www.webbyawards.com/press/speeche s.php.

Has anyone out there joined novelaction.com? If so, I’m wondering if you can vouch for this site. After all, it sounds too good to be true. There slogan is “changing the way booklovers share books.” And the idea is that you can select any books you want from the site and send in an equal number of your books in exchange. According to their site “with $4.80 flat rate shipping for up to 6 lbs. of books, no transaction fees, and custom alerts for your favorite authors, books or genres, members save both time and money with Novel Action.”

Hhmmm. I just shipped a flat rate postal envelope yesterday and it cost $4.80 and it held 1 book. So I’m wondering about how much you can ship for $4.80. If they’re shipping media rate, that takes several weeks, not several days to arrive. Apparently they have a centralized warehouse of goodies….feedback welcome.

There is blue scattered among the clouds this morning. Last night I was in my office avoiding things. I had meant to attend a poetry reading but because I’d taken a nap, needed to stay in and get some work done and also get in a walk. So I was sort of tidying up my office when the sun broke through—the first time in days, revealing dust on everything. So I dusted furiously and then went out walking while blue patches were still showing in the sky and it as usual, there was just so much to see and enjoy. I’m remembering two yellow cats sitting in a front window, turned away from each other, like book ends. And then of course there were flowers everywhere and dogs and people, but mostly gardens and sky to look at.

Back to summer reading: Yesterday my pal in Eugene, Dale Sturdavant sent me a notice about Carl Hiaasen’s latest book, The Downhill Lie. It’s nonfiction and it’s about golf. It begins: “In the summer of 2005, I returned to golf after a much needed layoff of thirty-two years.Attempting a comeback in my fifties wouldn’t have been so absurd if Id been a decent player when I was young, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. At my best, Id shown occasional flashes of competence. At my worst, Id been a menace to all carbon-based life-forms on the golf course.” Hiaasen, as usual, sounds witty and wise and I would guess full of surprises. If you have a middle grade reader in your life, I recommend his books, Hoot and Flush—fast-paced, funny and filled with an environmental consciousness that never preaches.

I was also planning to buy a new novel that has struck my fancy and I thought might be perfect for some long summer evening or day at the beach when I finally have some free time. It’s called Daphne by Justine Picardie and it’s based on the life of Daphne du Maurier. It begins when the novelist is 50 and her marriage is failing. As in real life du Maurier is fascinated with Branwell Brontë. Hhmm that might explain some of her gothic tendencies. I’ve wondered about ol’ Daphne who has brought us such chillers as The Birds and Rebecca. The story has two protagonists, a grad student and an editor of the Brontës manuscripts. The first review I read said it all came together brilliantly in the end and it was THE book to read on vacation. However, then I read a review in the Sunday Times online (UK) by Peter Parker that was so scathing that I was tempted to send the author a sympathy note. According to Parker, “Forgery, theft, adultery, lesbianism, incest and suicide ought to provide plenty of scope for fiction, but this misconceived book never really comes to life.” He also mentions that the author has an unfortunate tendency to use ellipses (one of my pet peeves besides exclamation marks!) “Far too many sentences and paragraphs end with a row of dots. These don’t indicate interruptions or omissions, but are a crude typographical shorthand intended to add “significance” or “tension.” And those were two of the nicer sentences. If anyone has read it, please drop me a line.

Forgive me for sneaking in a bit of politics. I don’t have much time to watch TV, but all day yesterday as I worked and then took a nap because I’m (still) not feeling too great, I was hearing radio sound bites from John McCain’s chat with Matt Lauer on the Today Show. Among other things, he mentioned when we withdrew troops from Iraq it is "not too important," as long as U.S. casualties in the Middle East fall to levels comparable to those in Germany, Japan and South Korea, where U.S. forces have been stationed for decades.

It’s not too important? Now, just call me fact checker girl, but last time I looked, we weren’t OCCUPYING Germany, etc. and the citizens of these countries weren’t scattering bombs along their roads that are shattering the lives of our troops. Of course, once he made this gaffe and there was blow back, his camp claimed his remarks were taken out of context. (code for I got caught being stupid again). So he’s not only out of touch, but he’s denying reality such as with this YouTube clip of his performance, which you might say underlines reality. He also said it was insulting to our intelligence to set a goal for how long we are in Iraq. Would someone please explain to me what’s wrong with a timeline for withdrawal?

News reported from Media Bistro: Litopia Daily is the world's first daily podcast for writers just launched by Litopia Writers' Colony, the online writers community created by literary agent Peter Cox. The team behind Litopia Daily are particularly keen to solicit news and contributions from writers everywhere - especially from non-traditional sources.

You might want to check out a story in the New York Observer, 60 Months in the Red Zone. One segment reports, “As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq.

Chief among them is that even if you grab hold of a part of the truth, it has a way of becoming false. Second: If you manage to find a true story, don’t depend on anyone back home wanting to hear it.”

The story begins: “It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s confusion and exaggeration. The truth is the most elusive thing in war, particularly in an insurgency.”

Another fascinating observation is made by George Packer who suggests that books will be written in 5 or 6 years that will reveal truths that we cannot know now. www.observer.com/baghdad

Gray is smudged across the sky again although tomorrow the sun is supposed to return. Yesterday was a day of gray and sprinkles with snow falling in the Cascade and Blue mountains and in the passes with white-out conditions in eastern Oregon. The clever weather folks were calling it Junuary and a few weather folk tramped up to Mt. Hood to report on the new accumulations and stick a microphone in the faces of jocks who were trekking up to the mountain for bonus skiing and snowboarding. But tragedy also struck since a hiker died on Mt. Rainier and his companions have not been rescued yet. I always wonder why people climb when the weather is so volatile.

Have you been following Dennis Kucinich reading his 35-count indictment, Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush? {It took him almost 4 hours) You can find it on C-Span and a bunch of places on-line (rawstory.com, huffingtonpost.com, wonkette.com) especially since he’s read the articles twice. It seems to me that we need to keep in mind that this isn’t a political issue; this is a legal and constitutional issue.

"Resolved that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate. ...

"In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and to the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power..."

Don’t you wonder why the media isn’t covering it? They are barely yawning, and apparently have forgotten the Watergate scandals that pushed Nixon out of office. My memory isn’t as reliable as I wish it was, but I remember Watergate and how sometimes when people in high office commit crimes that they pay for it. Well, USA Today and The Village Voice made a brief note, but yesterday, nary a word from the Big Boys like The Washington Post (well, okay they ran something in their blog section) or The New York Times. Don’t you remember when they once covered the news? Not a word from NBC, ABC, or CBS. Nada. Makes me wonder why they didn’t cover his impeachment articles against Cheney either.

If you’re not worried about the state of modern newspapers and radio you should be. The Los Angeles Times was once one of the best papers in the country, known for their investigative journalism and top-notch writing. Since they were acquired by the Tribune, corporate think and downsizing has threatened to destroy this once venerable beauty. Now, things getting really ugly. This was reported yesterday in Revolving Door news:

Things keep going from bad to worse at the Los Angeles Times. The latest body blow? The publishing side has staged a coup at the paper's monthly magazine, replacing the entire editorial staff with new editors and designers answering to publisher David Hiller, not editor Russ Stanton. Stanton's bold countermove? He asked Hiller to change the magazine's name, so it wouldn't reflect badly on the actual newsgathering side of the operation. The new editor is Annie Gilbar, a Home Shopping Network host who worked for InStyle and has written advice books like Wedding Sanity Savers. The new creative director is Rip Georges, who held the same post at InStyle. (See where this is going?) Meanwhile, former LA Times op-ed chief and perennial gadfly Michael Kinsley weighs in on Tribune's insane plans to boost the productivity (and therefore profitability) of the paper: "If the average Los Angeles Times journalist produces 51 pages a year, as Michaels has calculated, this means that a 50-50 ratio will allow him to lay off 500 Los Angeles Times journalists, which is more than half of the current staff. Then, if he can persuade the remaining Los Angeles Times journalists to raise their productivity from 50 pages to 300 pages a year, he can dismiss five-sixths of the rest. That would leave something like 50 journalists to put out the Los Angeles Times every day. For now."

Meanwhile, Alt News is reporting that America's top 5 commercial radio station owners broadcast more than 2,570 hours of conservative news and talk every weekday. Yikes! In our age of Shameful Shock Jocks spewing hate talk be sure to check out the alternatives to these nut jobs. I especially recommend multi-published author and all-around smart guy Thom Hartmann and über brainy chick Rachel Maddow, both broadcasting with Air America. And if you want to hear a lefty radio guy who spews hate, there is always the crusty and enraged Mike Malloy these days broadcasting on Nova FM.

Even if you don’t belong to PNWA (Pacific Northwest Writer Association) you might want to check out their on-line magazine, Author

Today one story they’re featuring is A Day in the Life of a
New York Editor by Erin Brown

“7:15 am, 20 feet below Fifth Avenue: I hold tightly to the grimy subway pole with one hand, while flipping the pages of a particularly colossal manuscript with the other. As I struggle to retain the yoga-like triangular balance pose that I have mastered after a decade of riding trains in the City, the smell of the shower-challenged man next to me overwhelms the aroma of my café-mocha-latte-chino.

In an instant, the train lurches to a halt and the car goes black. I stand in the dark, feeling the pages of the manuscript flutter to the ground, where they await retrieval amongst unidentifiable—and sticky—substances on the subway floor. Shower-Challenged inches closer to me…. More at www.authormagazine.org

The sky is smudged in silvery grays. Do you remember how after the September 11 attacks everyone kept announcing that we now lived in a “new normal” and that we all need to be afraid, very afraid, that is, when we weren’t shopping to help the economy? Well, one of the areas that was supposed to suffer was the book publishing industry and it was speculated that people wouldn’t buy or read books in our not-so brave new world.

Well, besides a spectacular rise in POD titles the Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Flat in 2007 that book publishing is on the rise: “Novels are clearly back in vogue, though, with 50,071 published in the US, up 17% from 2006. That is double the number published as recently as six years ago. And if you're worried about what sort of novels these were, rest assured there were literary ones in there. There was a 19% increase in "literature" titles to 9796, which is on top of a 31% increase the previous year.”

That tidbit bears repeating: there was twice as much fiction published in 2007 as in 2002 (and that doesn't include the POD publications). So good news for writers and readers.

Yesterday, June 9, at Salon.com they weighed in on memoirs for summer reading saying “these memoirs will whisk you away.” One which particularly interests me because a friend and I have been tossing around the idea of hiking the Pacific Crest trail (or at least a modest portion therein) is called The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost my Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail by Dan White. Then, the always witty and surprising David Sedaris has a new book out (if he comes to your town on his tour, see him in person) When You are Engulfed in Flames which I cannot wait to read as I giggle out loud. The Importance of Music to Girls by Lavinia Greenlaw is a coming-of-age memoir and Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Defner sounds like a few people I know…..Then Drunkard: A Hard Drinking Life by Neil Steinberg also sounds fascinating since Steinberg was a journalist when he landed in rehab. Happy reading, happy writing and if summer ever comes to the Pacific Northwest I’ll let you know.

The sky is a sullen mix of charcoal with blue peeking through and it promises to be a fine day. So here I am up way too early on a Sunday morning with several projects I need to work on. This past week I had a weird case of the flu and spent time shivering because even my bones felt frozen under a pile of quilts and blankets only to emerge pale and feeling a bit doomed. So having shaken off the flu I am even further behind in things and I’m fretting that I have a farmer’s market to visit, friends to catch up with, and I still haven’t seen the Sex and the City movie.

Yesterday spent the day in Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast ostensibly to see the annual sandcastle competition. However, there weren’t many, uhm, castles or structures in the competition. Still it was a good excuse for not working and instead strolling along the beach, gazing at Haystack Rock perched incongruously amid the surf and at the castles that were built in the sand and wondering how the makers created archways made from sand, since I have problems with staircases when I make sandcastles. Later there was the savoring of the first picnic of the season under a dusky sky that seemed to threaten a shower but didn’t deliver.

Still following Election 2008 with rabid interest and mulling over the happenings of the past week and wondering how the, gentlemanly, tough, and complex Obama is going to swim in the deeper waters against the frail, nutty, and rudderless McCain. Take this to the bank: there is something seriously wrong with McCain’s brain. Did you notice how much trouble he’s having with teleprompters and his memory and throwing words together these days? (Two words: Reagan. Dementia.) He’s the oldest 70-something on our political landscape. Really.

And hello, last Tuesday wasn’t it painful enough that we had to first listen to Terri McCullough (please file his name under über sore loser) introduce Hillary Clinton as “the next president of the United States” but then suffer through Hillary’s graceless “What does Hillary Want Speech”? It was snarky and tasteless that she refused to acknowledge Obama’s victory, and freaky when she started referring to herself in the third person and then begged her supporters to go to her web site so she can pay off Mark Penn and Harold let’s-take-the-fight-to-the-convention-so-we-can-really-screw-the-party-Ickes. Ugh.

And can I just say again how ungracious she’s been for many months now, but especially this week when it really counted? Another ugh. So her performance pretty much sucked ass and focused the media spotlight on her and not where it belonged and then we were all forced to hang around all week to hear Hillary speak again on Saturday to her devoted supporters.

Note to Hillary for her future politic profile: three words to add to your vocabulary—I was wrong. And as long as I’m on a rant, three more words: leave the stage. (If you wonder why Al Gore left politics and will never run against the Clintons, watch her Tuesday-it-was-supposed-to-be-a-concession-speech-but-wasn’t-speech again)

Now on a much kinder note: Thank you Hillary Clinton for opening the door wider for other women in politics. I know that you have many fine attributes and could serve in many places in our government where you could do a lot of good, just not as the Commander in Chief. So I wish you well in the Senate and (maybe Supreme Court) I hope that your steel spine and equally steely will along with your sharp intellect might be harnessed to help and protect the millions in this country who need a champion. So go Hillary, but go.

I cannot help but return to this past Tuesday because it was one of the strangest days in politics we’ve all seen in a long time---to make matters even weirder, McCain, who ALSO needs a course in political manners ALSO delivered a speech an hour before Obama gathered thousands in St. Paul for his victory speech. (by the way as opposed to 30,000 at Obama’s gig there were hundreds at McCain’s gathering and McCain’s handlers might need to start hiring homeless people or out-of-work actors or people who just cannot afford gas and groceries any more and need a few bucks to fill in the crowds….I can see a business in the making for McCain appearance extras…I wish I had time to launch it.)

Anyway, I digress….. I believe that when McCain won enough delegates to become the presumptive Republican nominee Obama phoned him with congratulations. He didn’t deliver a prime time speech in an attempt to usurp him. Tsk tsk. And another word to McCain’s handlers: never, never let this man appear in front of a green background again. He looks 82, not 72, or is it 71? and like he’s trying to insert a catheter and talk at the same time.

And I love that Obama is surrounded by Chicago operatives. I wish they were dirty enough to show film clips of McCain and Bush in Arizona eating birthday cake while people in the Katrina aftermath in New Orleans were begging for help from their rooftops and drowning in the streets. Now there’s a political commercial I’d like to see air about a thousand times. Instead, watch for a relentless campaign about how naïve and unskilled Obama is and how successful Bush and McCain are in Iraq. Now that’s fiction I wish I could sell because I need the money. Can we cue clips of the latest demonstration in Iraq demanding that the U.S. troops leave now? Oh I forgot, the Iraqi demonstrations are never aired by the US media.

Okay, enough politics, I told myself I was going to try to be a uniter, so let’s unite and say no to more Karl Rove tactics and Republican criminals destroying our country, our constitution, our economy, and our sanity. Happy Sunday to all and even though it’s almost summer, slip in some writing among the fine green times we live in. After all, we cannot afford to drive any place any more because all our money has been spent in Iraq. And come to think of it, the Iraqis cannot afford to drive anywhere either.

Note to my imaginary audience (I just saw one of you the other day in my favorite Portland coffee shop): as the election stuff heats up I will probably need to say less and less about how incredibly pissed off I am about what has happened to this country I scarcely recognize any more or the media that I once loved and now can barely stomach…with a few exceptions (Bill Moyer). The good news is that I have a book tour coming up so maybe I’ll meet so many fascinating writers in my travels so that I can talk about writing instead of politics, which is usually what I write about….

The morning sky is pale, blue grey. My interview with Diana Gabaldon is appearing in the July edition of The Writer. I culled through pages of notes to trim the interview and the editor at The Writer trimmed it further. Here are some segments that were left out of final draft.

I heard that you started in the comic book industry writing for Disney. How does that translate into writing complicated novels like the Outlander stories? Or doesn’t it?

There is definitely a relationship here. The front page of a comic book is set up as a large single panel, plus four small panels. The main character has to show up in that first panel. If it’s a Donald Duck story, Donald Duck is there in some situation that has to do with the premise of the story. It can be about Donald Duck being in conflict with his nephews about their bee-raising project. So it will show Donald reading a newspaper and suddenly seeing a bee fly across his line of sight.

Then the first three of the four panels underneath can be used to explain background or setup. But by the final panel on the page the characters must be up and about on their adventure. Which is a really good way of telling people how to start a book. Writers often have the problem of wanting to tell how the character got to the point where you start. This eliminates all the backstory that you don’t need.

And this continues, you just provide an explanation as you need it in a comic book. You keep the story moving. There is constant action. You can do rich background, but you just keep explanation moving along with the action. You can redeem a paragraph of static explanation if it just has one line of action in it.

Could you comment on switching from science to fiction? It seems like a giant leap or is the common ground that both require a great deal of analysis?

Both good science and good art rest on the ability to perceive patterns. When you do science, you set the limits of your study in terms of physical parameters: such as nest site selection by Pinyon Jays, say (the subject of my doctoral dissertation). Anyway, what you're looking at is all the chaos that falls within the limits you've set. You then proceed to make observations, gather preliminary data, and form a hypothesis, on the basis of what patterns you think you're seeing. You then devise a means of testing this hypothesis, to see whether the patterns might in fact be there or not.
Okay, when you write a novel, you also limit the chaos. You choose at a setting, and characters but you're entitled to use not only the factual chaos that pertains to your setting and the imaginary chaos that your character inhabits, but also your own internal chaos. It's boring and inaccurate to assume that writers can only write about their own lives. But it is true that writers use themselves; their emotions, their experiences, their perceptions of the world—all those form part of the experiential chaos that you use as raw material. But then, you look for the patterns—the thematic material of the novel is your hypothesis, and the novel itself is the experiment. When you release a novel to the world and it finds its readers, you see whether or not your hypothesis is supported.

What is your best advice for writers, especially those interested in writing historical fiction?

The basic advice for any writer is to keep doing it. My basic rules are: read, write, and don’t stop. As far historical fiction, you shouldn’t write historical fiction unless you have a taste for research and are fascinated by the past. It’s a lot of work and a labor of love. If you just want to write a book there are a lot easier kinds of ways to approach a novel than doing historical research. I also advise that you have a taste for accuracy.

What is the most difficult part of writing and how do you overcome it?
Beginning, every day. The fact that I knew how to do this yesterday does not mean I have any idea how to do it today. How do I overcome it? Sit down and start anyway.

J.K. Rowling is famous for knowing how her Harry Potter series was going to end as she wrote it. Do you have that same knowledge about your ending?

I know a few things. But because I concentrate on the story to such an extent and because I do such a lot of research, the patterns become evident to me. I’ll have these little lightning revelations. So I know just these little bits, but I never know how they’re going to happen, or where they’re going to happen, or what their prominence will be in the story.

To use another metaphor it’s like looking out over this trackless sea, and you see a little volcano coming up with lava rolling down the sides. And over here there is another one popping up spraying sparks and steam. If you get three or four of these popping up, and as the lava rolls down hissing into the water, these mountains begin to rise. And as you look, you begin to see that the slope of one mountain goes down here; the slope of the other mountain goes down there. You can see where they’re going have to intersect even though that part is still below the water. Well, essentially what you’re doing when you’re writing is raising this continent by adding this scene and so on and so forth. As the continent rises you get these mountains, you see the foothills and finally, when you have the whole thing brought up, you still have low-lying water forming the streams and lakes and so forth in your landscape. That water is the remaining ambiguity in your story and if the reader gets close enough and looks into the water, he should see his own face looking back.

Soot-colored sky this morning and rain continues. I woke in the middle of the night to a downpour drumming against the world. Unable to get back to sleep, I got up and read political columnists and bloggers and caught up on the news about BEA.

Yesterday afternoon I received an email from a friend in Canada. Her closest friend, Jeanette who has become my friend also is in the midst of a crisis. Her 18-year old granddaughter Liza was in a car accident in which the car went over a cliff and she was flung from the car. All her bones broken and a possible C2 fracture or break. She’s in an induced coma and everyone is frightened and grief-stricken.

After this news I was out walking in the mist last night, looking at gardens, especially the roses that are so profuse in this lovely town. And I was hoping for Liza, praying for a miracle. I was also thinking of my friend Jim, recovering from his third brain surgery, Senator Kennedy’s brain surgery, and how one of my heroes, 90-year-old Senator James Byrd, who these days is on the Senate floor speaking from a wheel chair, is ill too and now hospitalized. When I returned home I wrote for a while and one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare came to mind: “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.”

When I’m scared, worried, or feeling thin as a playing card to quote Joyce Carol Oates, writing is my solace, my way out, my means to grope my way back toward hope. Like most people I have various means to cope with stress and sadness, but I know of few activities that are so healing and quieting.

Between 1998 and 2001 I taught writers on-line at iVillage.com. During those years I taught in live chat rooms and once a month invited a guest author into the chat room with me. I’d interview him or her and thus met Louise de Salvo and her book, Writing as a Way of Healing. She also introduced me to the research work of James Pennebaker of the University of Texas. He and his students are exploring the links between traumatic experiences, writing, and physical and mental health. His studies find that physical health and work performance can improve by simple writing and/or talking exercises. The point is that emotions must be translated into language

In his book Opening Up, Pennebaker says "Writing about emotional upheavals has been found to improve the physical and mental health of grade-school children and nursing home residents, arthritis sufferers, medical school students, maximum security prisoners, new mothers, and rape victims. Not only are there benefits to health, but writing about emotional topics has been found to reduce anxiety and depression, improve grades, and…aid people in securing new jobs."

The sky is pale gray and NPR has reported that now half the world's population lives in cities and Senator Kennedy is undergoing brain surgery. My weekend was an emotional roller coaster, overshadowed by friend’s surgery. He suffered two aneurysms in March and after being lucky to survive, a week ago he needed a second brain surgery, then Saturday he needed a third one. Problem was that he was frail and lost ten pounds last week and was unable to talk when he came out of surgery. On Sunday morning came news that he was doing better and so a lot of people are feeling relieved and hopeful.

I was at a birthday party last night where most of the guests and the birthday boy (34) were classical musicians or singers, some still in their formal attire from an afternoon gig. So the happy birthday chorus was an amazing rendition of harmony and the whole party was sparked by energy as if a group of five year olds were celebrating. Then I came home and started watching Masterpiece Theater’s rebroadcast of a Sherlock Holmes case but fell asleep on the couch before it ended. Before I fell asleep (and awoke with a kink in my neck) I was captivated by this version of Holmes and Victorian world in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking. The sexy, brooding Rupert Everett plays Holmes and Watson is played by Ian Hart. The casting is brilliant, and the story takes place in 1903 when Holmes is semi retired, and it begins with the great detective just returning from an opium den. At the pbs website you can find a suggested list of books under Holmes Lives! written by other authors such as Laurie King and Michael Chabon about the enduring sleuth.

Salon.com is weighing in with more summer reads: “In this second installment, we spotlight four novels that loosely fall under the category of chick lit. They range from a black-humored romp about a spurned MBA student seeking romantic revenge to the saga of New England belles living it up in a gothic manse on the Maine coast to a single city girl who sets off on a round-the-world adventure to a funny mother-daughter duo in need of some serious bonding -- and a good bat mitzvah dress.”

The books they’re suggesting are: This Is How It Happened (Not a Love Story) by Jo Barrett, Off Season by Anne Rivers Siddons, How to Be Single by Liz Tuccillo, Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner. Now, I confess if a book cover is pink and the woman on the cover is wearing red heels, I usually avoid these types unless one of my clients has written it. I think I never quite recovered from the trauma of reading Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada —the movie was cute, but the book was about as badly written as just about anything in print. Well, maybe not Bridges of Madison County, but I know how to hold a grudge.

The morning sky is so dramatic looking I wouldn’t be surprised if Carleton Heston would appear in a chariot. Yesterday turned into a day as balmy and sweet as a baby’s smile. I was running errands midday and talked the cashier at Trader Joes into juggling my oranges. He says the trick to juggling is “softening the eyes.” I keep thinking that might be an analogy to writing. Then I went on to New Seasons for more supplies and was telling the cashier about the juggling act and he told me a joke. Question: Why wasn’t the lifeguard able to save the hippie? Answer: Because he was too far out. Then I came home to an editing job and reality.

So maybe this summer with the price of gas you might not be able to afford a trip to the beach, but you might be able to still buy books or borrow them from the library. With longer days ahead, let’s round up more summer reads. Each June I buy the latest Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum mystery and spend an evening sipping chilled Viognier or a wine suited to summer on my patio and reading Plum’s latest hijinks, giggling from time to time. But these days I’m reading mostly mainstream and am now reading Richard Russo’s latest novel, Bridge of Sighs.

So here are more picks from the Wall Street Journal Robert J Hughes: “The summer will also see books by many first-time authors, including the short-story collections "One More Year" by Ukrainian-American Sana Krasikov and "Say You're One of Them" by Uwem Akpan, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria. "One of the things that makes American literature so vital at this point is that we have input from so many different cultures and linguistic backgrounds," says Paul Yamazaki, coordinating buyer at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.

Since it's an election year, there's a surge of political books. Among them: a still-untitled work from Ron Suskind on national security, "Your Government Failed You" by Richard A. Clarke and "What Happened" by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

The $28 billion book industry faces challenges in a sluggish economy. Bookstore sales in the first quarter totaled $4.46 billion, a 5.1% increase over the comparable period in 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But this week Barnes & Noble lowered its sales forecast for the year. "There are people who believe that books are recession-proof," says Stan Hynds, head buyer for Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vt. "We're going to find out."

His choices are Nonfiction: When You are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris; Nixonland, Rick Perlstein; American Nerd, Ben Nugent; One Minute to Midnight, Michael Dobbs; The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi; Rome: 1960, David Mariniss

Historical Fiction: City of Thieves, David Benioff; The Garden of Last Days, Andre du Bus III; Berlin Book Two: City of Smoke, Jason Lutes; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows; World/Contemporary: My Sister, My Love, Joyce Carol Oates; Beijing Coma, Ma Jian; Pharmakon, Dirk Wittenborn; Fearless Fourteen, Janet Evanovich

More info can be found at http://online.wsj.com

Blue peeking through the cloud cover this morning and the day is supposed to be dry and in the 70s. Last night I went with a friend to listen to Phillip Margolin talk about how to write a novel in your spare time. Margolin is a local author and has written 13 best-selling thrillers. His latest book is called Executive Privilege and he was modest, funny, and charming.

I was attending the talk for several reasons, but mostly because last weekend one of my friends was here for dinner and she kept bemoaning the fact that she works so much she has no time to write. She’s a talented writer but her job as a private investigator trying to save people sentenced to death, involves a lot of travel and long hours. After our dinner party I called her to talk about this and mentioned that I’d interviewed Diana Gabaldon and we’d talked about how she managed her writing time. My interview with Gabaldon is now out in the July issue of The Writer. Since much of what we talked about didn’t appear in this article, I’ll post more of our conversation here.

Anyway, Gabaldon’s books run about 1,000 pages each, so her manuscripts must be ginormous. She first began writing when she was working two jobs and raising three young children. Her children are grown now but she has a lot of demands for her time because of her success. She does the bulk of her writing between about midnight and four in the morning.

Margolin has tried a number of death penalty cases and has argued before the Supreme Court. He retired from law in 1996 but wrote his first five books while still practicing. And this is the truth of most writers’ lives: you will write your first books while raising a family, or working full time, or both. So back when Margolin was still working he spent his weekend mornings about-- 8 hours total-- writing.

He begins with an idea that grabs him and doesn’t begin writing a book until he knows the ending. He also spends one to three months writing a detailed outline of 25-60 pages. He explained that in the early years of writing sometimes he’d be involved in a death penalty case that required so many hours of work that he wouldn’t be able to write on weekends. So when he resumed writing after a break, he could reread the last ten pages of his manuscript and consult his outline to resume work.

Margolin also stressed the importance of mulling over a story and getting to know it before you start writing. He first conceived the idea for Executive Privilege in 1994. He also begins his outline with answering the who, what, when, where and why of the story.

Sky is dusty looking. Last night I returned from viewing the new Indiana Jones film and was puttering around my office, cleaning off my desk which somehow is always piled high with books and paper. (In my opinion the latest Indy film is a dud—bad dialogue and a sort of flatness and lack of suspense, although it does contain a few great chase scenes.) I was listening to the NPR show On the Media because they were discussing the state of book publishing.

When I talk to writers at conferences I try to make the point that these days writers must be extra-creative, professional, and polished in order to break in because the publishing industry has changed so drastically in the past twenty five years. So let’s talk about some of these factors and what writers are up against.

Here is how the show began: “The new media are thriving. The old media are dying. That seems to be the theme of our program from week to week to week. But, of course, it's much more complicated than that because increasingly the old and new are merging into one another. This week, we're devoting the program to the oldest of old media – books.”

The hosts went on to list statistics: 60 percent of all books are not bought in brick-and-mortar bookstores; they're purchased at airports or checkout counters, Wal-Mart or Costco, or Williams-Sonoma, or online. 11 percent are purchased from Amazon.com. The rest are bought at bookstores, but mostly the big chains. The membership of the American Booksellers Association, which serves independent bookstores, has dropped from more than 5,000 to roughly 1,700 in the last decade.

Add to the state of affairs are that most publishers have merged in mega-conglomerates, many of them foreign owned. Most of these companies are publicly owned so the stock holders demand huge profits. Thus they have incentives to focus on best sellers and publish lots of books, rather than lovingly nurture a small number of great books. These days depending on if you count self publishing, 200-300,000 books are published each year. This means publishers are pressured to push out book faster with few editorial changes; it’s difficult to publicize and market all these titles; and a lot of books that are published are crap. Along with these factors book sections in newspapers are shrinking or disappearing. On the show, it was estimated that about 2,000 authors do well under the current system. Do the math on what happens to most authors. Then start building your platform.

The sky is sooty and although the day is young, it has a quiet feel with a single bird song interrupting at regular intervals. I’ve been trying to remember what we did on Memorial Day when I was a girl. I remember elderly veterans standing outside grocery stores selling red poppies. Thinking back, these men must have veterans of the World War I, and when I recall the day, it’s linked with crepey skin and shaking hands. No one in my family ever died in the service although one of my uncles served as did my brother and cousin.

Yesterday I drove past a nearby pioneer cemetery and noticed that it was being spruced up for visitors and it was dotted with fresh bouquets. I talked with my cousin yesterday who stills lives in the small town where I grew up and some family members are going to the cemetery to visit my grandmother’s grave.

And now on NPR they’re running a brief story about Les Fleurs de la Memoire, or Flowers of Memory. This is a group of French citizens who have adopted the graves of American soldiers killed during the D Day operation. The cemetery contains the remains of 10,000 soldiers and every time I’ve seen photographs of this place, the crosses and Stars of David that mark each grave seem to stretch forever.

Living far from most of my family, I have no graves to visit, but I’ve been thinking about all the young lives that ended in battle. Thinking about how all these men and women had plans and dreams and a destiny that were erased. And I wonder what constituted the first war, the first battle in the history of humankind. Was it a skirmish over a hunting ground or a kidnapping?

When I think back it seems that Memorial Day was often the first picnic of the summer and that it marked the end of spring and the emergence of summer. Back then school was usually over around Memorial Day so it always represented the freedom of summer days stretching ahead, full of promise.

These days besides remembering the dead from war, this weekend also signifies summer reading. At the NPR website you can find a list of books recommended by independent bookseller and you can also read excerpts from the books. The link is: http://www.npr.orghttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90478802

And the books are: City of Thieves, by David Benioff, Now You See Him, by Eli Gottlieb, The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry, Trauma, by Patrick McGrath, Wrack & Ruin, by Don Lee, America America, by Ethan Canin, What Happened to Anna K., by Irina Reyn, The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenide, Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, Today: 101 Ghazals, by Suzanne Gardinier, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida, The Story of a Marriage, by Andrew Sean Greer

At salon.com you can also find their Summer Reads article with suggestions for thrillers: Hold Tight by Harlan Coben, The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber, Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, Obedience by Will Lavender, Losing You by Nicci French

Sky looks like the backdrop for a monster movie. Speaking of a scare, who doesn’t love a mystery? If you’re living in the Portland, Oregon area you’re probably aware of the Murder by the Book store located on Southeast Hawthorne. In June the store will be celebrating it’s 25^th anniversary—that’s a lot of customers trying to nail a lot of murdering fiends…..

This Saturday, one of my editing clients, Jess Lourey will be signing books, including her latest August Moon at Murder by the Book along with Dana Fredsti signing The Peruvian Pigeon. I’ve worked on all four of Lourey’s books, chuckling along the way. They’re about a Battle Lake, a small town in northern Minnesota and a librarian and writer named Mira who runs into more dead bodies than the average chick. Jess is great to work with and I’m looking forward to her next manuscript, a historical—so join me there.

This is what the MBTB website says about the event: Sat. 5/24, 11 am - 1 pm: JESS LOUREY & DANA FREDSTI entertaining all comers * Fedsti is a self-described ex-B movie actress who has written a humorous cozy, The Peruvian Pigeon ($12.95); Lourey is the author of the lively Murder by Month series, the newest of which, August Moon will be hot off the press for her visit, and the last of which Knee High by the Fourth of July featured the disappearance of an organic gardener (see #20). Win a free copy of Dana's book with any purchase over $25 between 11 and 1. Their website is at http://mbtb.com/. Jess’ website is: www.JessLourey.com and Dana’s website is www.danafredsti.com

I woke late ( 7 a.m.) to the familiar sound of rain dripping from pale skies. Since I’ve such a wuss when it comes to heat I’m happy for the reprieve, to slip back into our world of damp.

Last night I went for a walk with a friend, another writer, in the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden that is about five miles from here. The rhodies are still blooming along with azaleas and the whole was washed in a sweet spring palette of pinks, purples, white, and shades of green. I’d been writing in the morning but had spent most of day working on taxes and paperwork since I’m behind in things and have lost some papers. So I’m trying to clean up the piles of paper that are surrounding me and have been tossing out and filing, the task in life I most dislike.

So by the evening I was feeling a little frazzled, but within minutes of walking around, my nerves were calmed, and my life started to slip back into manageable components. There is a spring-fed lake that surrounds much of the garden, charming bridges, waterfalls, and paths that wind through it all. There were also ducks and geese and several new hatches of wood ducks swimming and waddling around the place, oblivious to the visitors. When I used to live in Wisconsin I would often travel to the northern part of the state to hike among the lakes and forests. Living in Portland, there are magnificent gardens and an old growth forest within the city limits, and the Columbia River Gorge just outside the city limits, so I don’t need to travel far to find that lovely calm that comes from walking in the woods, smelling ferns and trees and water.

The best way I know to offset the hours spent at a computer, and the easiest means to access your creativity is by walking. Especially when you amble along paying attention to the world, letting your thoughts roam free. It so simple really, walking helps trigger the right brain and writing comes from the body and mind. Brenda Ueland first wrote about this in her book If You Want to Write, penned in the 1930s. She notes: "My explanation of it, is that when I walk in a carefree way, without straining to get to my destination, then I am living in the present. And it is only then that the creative power flourishes."

She also writes: “These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas.... But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”

And this precious bit of advice: “And so now you will begin to work at your writing. Remember these things. Work with all your intelligence and love. Work freely and rollickingly as though they were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.”

Here is the link to the garden: http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/finder/index.cfm?PropertyID=27&action=ViewPark

The sky is etched with pinks and purples and a single bird is calling outside my office window, his song at once sorrowful and arresting. Yesterday it was in the 90s again here and the world felt blistering. With the heat came quick snow melt and now avalanches and avalanche danger. I was out running errands for part of the day and each time I needed to leave the world within my air conditioned car, moving into the heat became more jarring

I’m working on a grab bag chapter in my new book about all the small things that drive an editor crazy—it runs from autobiographical fiction (always deadly) to coincidences to wimpy verbs. If there are certain elements in fiction that drive YOU crazy, drop me a line.

Meanwhile, I’ve finished reading Kate Christensen’s The Great Man and found that the characters are still lingering in my imagination as if I’ve met them at an all-day party or weekend in the country. Also, it really is refreshing to find a writer willing to write about older characters with such accuracy and vividness. Growing old scares me and I’ve been thinking a lot about this fear lately. In her characters she boldly shows all the yearning and loneliness and aches of the older experience. Let’s hear it for more biddy lit.

The sky is still pale but the sun is rising in a blaze of pinks and lavenders splashed across the eastern sky. Summer moved in yesterday with temperatures in the 90s and it was a bit difficult to cope with, coming on so suddenly.

I was just skimming my email before settling down to writing and noticed that Bill Moyers has posted an excerpt of his book, Moyers on Democracy at http://www.alternet.org/democracy/8551. In part he says, “Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is "better" than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, "The system works."

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country -- a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as "believing the dogma of 'democracy' on a superficial public level but not believing it privately." We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.”

I’m hoping that Moyers is wrong about the mass resignation he mentions and the huge numbers of new voters registering to vote in the Democratic primary is proof of that….

I received an email from a woman who attended my Writing a Book That Makes a Difference workshop at the Oregon coast in April. She said that after the workshop she was energized, but now her enthusiasm for writing a big project has diminished and she’s not sure why. This seems to go to the heart of being a writer. For most of us there are periods when the jazzy juiced up writing highs diminish and you show up for the page bleary and empty. Since I’m working on my fifth book for writers I’m facing those feelings myself.

Yesterday I woke not feeling particularly inspired to dive into my book, so I spent most of my writing session organizing my chapters since I’ve decided to combine some chapters, researching, and working on handouts for upcoming workshops. By the time I finished at about noon it felt like a productive session. Then I took a nap and after waking, ate a late lunch. After lunch I ran errands and bought myself two charming wicker chairs for my patio and another fan. Today I feel much more like writing away.

So if you face a lull of writing inspiration, find another approach. Research. Abandon perfectionism. Comb through your writer’s notebooks. Read books and magazines on craft. Send out a query. Write short pieces. Revise something already written. Clean your office. Use writing prompts. Try out a new format. Organize a long project into chapters. Create a scene list. Write character bios. Organize a project bible to keep track of details on a large project. Watch movies. Be gentle with yourself.

But maybe the best way to prepare for lulls in your writing energy is to expect them and prepare for them. I keep a list of projects I want to write on a closet door in my office and usually there’s always at least one project on that list that will tempt me. I try to outline ideas when I’m full of juice so that I have a running start. I also try not to work solely on one project at a time, so if my enthusiasms wanes for one project, I shift to a second, smaller project.

The sky is sooty and a big heat up is on the way. Yesterday afternoon we slipped from spring into summer.

Yesterday I also finished a chapter for my new book, She Said Winsomely and other Dialogue Disasters. The chapter focuses on dialogue, or rather the dialogue problems I most often spot in manuscripts. These include “as you know Bob” dialogue, or when the writer has characters talk about something they both know to drop information or backstory into the story.

Another problem is chit chat—when characters talk about nothing much for the sake of making things realistic. Problem is that chit chat is dull as dishwasher and it’s not the road to realism.

Then there are drama queens—characters who are overwrought, over dramatic, over the top every time they open their mouths. A little goes a long way.

“On the nose” dialogue is another problem for many writers. This means that characters say exactly what they mean. Trouble is, as in real life, people need to talk in circles, avoid the truth, or hint at truths.

Then there are speeches and rants when the characters espouse the writer’s beliefs or opinions, especially about hot-button issues. Don’t do this.

I also identified the “expert witness” problem when a character’s expertise is needed in the story, but it bogs down with overly long exchanges, especially when it’s loaded with jargon. The solution is to cut to the chase and use experts who are fascinating or quirky.

Then there is name dropping—when the writer constantly refers to the speakers’ names in dialogue, as in:

“Mary, I need to talk with you about something important.”

“Sure Stephanie, I’ll be right there—I’m all ears.”

“Thanks Mary, I knew I could count on you.”

This habit also makes the exchange stilted and inauthentic.

Finally, I warned writers to take care with speech tags—the he said, she said parts of dialogue that identifies the speaker. The trick is to make them invisible and to avoid describing the quality or volume of the voice.

You see, dialogue is never a copy of real life speech—it’s like conversation’s greatest hits. It’s always crisper, punchier, and embedded with subtext—the sea of emotions that runs beneath a scene but is never spoken out loud. Good dialogue is spontaneous and natural, but it leaves out the boring parts of life and is often a power struggle or power exchange. We use dialogue because it shows instead of tells

Another terrific resource for writing dialogue is found in Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages. Lukeman says, “Dialogue is a powerful too, to be used sparingly, effectively and at the right moment. Dialogue is to the writer what the veto is to the president: it gives you great power and authority. If you overuse it, people will have to submit, but they resent you for it; if you use it wisely, they will applaud your control, your will power.”

The morning sky is the color of smoke and this morning I kept having the same dream over and over, sort of like the film Ground Hog’s Day. In the dream I was teaching a class of women and asked them to stand in the center of the room. I then asked them to each make one promise to themselves to change a behavior that stands in the way of their writing. Then they were supposed to sit down and write about 3 actions they can take to write more. In the dream it was like herding cats and new students who hadn’t registered for the class kept showing up and the whole thing was chaos. I woke up wondering about the larger meaning. But the question is a good one, what one thing can you change so you write more?

People sometimes ask me to list my favorite novels and I always mention Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River in my Top Five. If you write fiction or just enjoy reading fiction that is a rich mix of unforgettable characters, drama, adventure, and tragedy, you need to read it. But you also read Enger for voice, because rarely does fiction have such a rich and poignant voice and magical prose. So imagine my surprise when I walked into Powells a few days ago and spotted Enger’s new book, So Brave, Young, And Handsome.

I finished reading it yesterday and read it with my notebook open because I kept noting specific words for my word list and phrases that caught my eye such as when he described a character as having “a voice like a kazoo.”Enger has written another adventure full of twists and oddballs and heroes—it’s an altogether delicious story. 

But what really tickled me was the story within the story. The narrator Monte Becket explains:

“Here’s how I came to this sorry pass. In the fall of 1910 I published a short novel called Martin Bligh, which became so popular I quit being a postman and started calling myself an author. Who knows how these things happen? The book was an adventure tale. Nothing ambitious. I only wrote it for entertainment and to gratify as sort of wishful ache—Martin Bligh was a postman too, though as a Pony Express rider he had a better shot at glory and peril than I in my tinctured cell at the Northfield P.O. It was a story to make a boy learn forward; it had Indians and great ships and the buried gold of Coronado and two separate duels, including one with sabers. I also added a black-haired senorita, because my own Susannah loves a romance, yet Bligh was reviewed in a Chicago newspaper as “disturbingly real,” no doubt because some of the Indians adorned their pintos with bloody blond scalps. That the haggard and venerated Buffalo Bill Cody read my story and praised it in newspaper interviews did not hurt the book at all, though it hardly explains why the first printing of three thousand copies disappeared in two weeks. …”

 

Trouble is, Monte cannot manage to write a follow-up to this book and meanwhile he meets and an outlaw Glendon Hale who has been dreaming about the woman he left behind when he was young. You’ll especially enjoy the bad guy in this story, an ex-Pinkerton agent named Charlie Siringo and how Enger has captured the syntax of the era. Maybe Monte cannot write another stirring tale, but Enger’s new offering is a stunning successor to Peace Like a River and Enger is the real deal.

Gray, gray and more roiling gray out my window…Oops I just spotted a patch of blue so disregard first sentence.

Just to prove that I’m not all snark and criticism, I want to urge everyone to see The Visitor—one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It was written and directed by Tom McCarthy who also directed The Station Agent—a film I also highly recommend. It shines a light on our government’s treatment of illegal aliens, particularly those from the Middle East in these post-911 days, but it’s not shrill, it’s not a manifesto. Mostly it’s a tender story of people bumping together in New York City and how friendship can bring out buried feelings and hope in all.

It’s the story of 60-something college professor, Walter Vale, played by Richard Jenkins who is sleep-walking through his days after the death of his wife. In the inciting incident Vale is forced to leave his safety zone in Connecticut to travel to New York City to present a paper at a conference. Which is when he steps into his apartment to find two strangers staying there, Zainab (Danai Gurira), from Senegal. Zainab and her boyfriend Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian musician. But they aren’t squatters, they’ve been paying rent to a scam artist.

Gradually their association begins large and small changes in Walter. But even as the movie is tackling difficult subjects like our immigration policy, it never shouts. Instead, the smallest gesture or comment speaks volumes or whispers and the whole makes you remember each scene long after the film is over. More information is at www.thevisitorfilm.com

Happy Mother’s Day to all.