Giant Limb

Ok, I am taking a huge risk here because no one might answer and then I will feel silly but who is reading the plum bean? I think I will just periodically throw this question out there and see if anyone responds. I think that is called scattering your risk?

I have gotten lovely, encouraging messages from everyone from: wonderful lower/middle/highschool friends to college friends to London friends to Hawaii friends to vagina friends (Vagina Monologues and VDAY, just to be clear) to family friends to my brother and sister's incredible supportive friends to my super students but it is all in my email and facebook or on the phone and not here. And then I signed up for a sitemeter thing and it told me in no uncertain terms that no one, ever, has been to the plum bean. of course i might have set it up wrong and i have definitely lost the password...

I totally understand the read but do not comment thing as I have left a grand total of three comments on the blogs of other writers (even though my New Year's resolution was to leave comments on the blogs of other writers). Those were three hard won comments as well, each with an average of four false starts.

Nathan Bransford has a super helpful, informative blog that covers everything from how to write a query letter to the current landscape of publishing. It has saved my bacon on a number of occasions and I have recommended his marvelous blog to everyone, and yet I cannot work up the oomph to leave a note and thank him. I will let you know as soon as I locate the oomph to thank him.

But I am just curious... who is out there?

How I Read

I am reading the most fantastic translation of Anna Karenina. It is brutal and lucid and utterly unlike the prissy, clean, Victorian version I remember. I have read Anna Karenina at least three times since I first plowed through it in tenth grade (with most of it sailing several miles above my geeky, little head) and this is not the same book. It is heavy, messy and I take it with me everywhere.

Living on an island--an island with a Borders Books that is desperately low on books this year--can be tough for someone who consumes books the way I do. I love the idea of the library but after reading a book I just do not want to give it back. I am just not that good a person. A book is thoroughly mine when I am done with it. I write in the margins, inside the front cover, over the text, under the text, around the text and all sorts of other prepositions too. I tear out bits of paper to give notes to other people. I never just put a number in my phone but scribble it in my book only to most likely forget which book it is in later.

I stuff my book with: movie stubs, receipts, phone numbers, doodles, random bits of scribbled on paper, shopping lists, rail tickets, plane tickets, photos, business cards and anything else from the life I was living while I was reading that book. Anna is currently sporting a baggage claim stub, a plane ticket, notes on Frost's "Out, Out" (for my 12th grade student that I wrote while waiting in line at CVS), two Twilight: New Moon movie tickets (I convinced Noah to see it on his birthday no less), receipts from Chipotle (super veggie burritos for only 3$), six phone numbers and reminders to call the six people, eleven words I love, receipts from the Kilauea Shell Station, beach sand, a written out copy of W.H. Auden's "The Fall of Rome" that I wrote in line at Whole Foods, two dollars, and a bit of sticky candy cane. Priya was definitely here.

As a result the book gets fat, distorted, unwieldy and liable to come apart and spill its very personal contents all over the floors of very public places--not good. Yesterday just this happened at the Starbucks at the top of the Barnes and Noble here in Hollywood where there is never anywhere to sit. The skinny jeans, black trendy plastic glasses, expensively spikey haired young man next to me gave me a pityingly condescending "you shouldn't do that to books" sort of look. The plastic tagged Barnes and Noble man at the information desk gave me the "I really hope you paid for that and are not just trying to make it look like that is your book" kind of look. (Although I might have imagined that one as I have an abject paranoia of being called out as a shoplifter when I walk into a bookstore with my own book.)

To make matters worse I teach my students to write, underline, annotate and generally think out loud inside their books. I love the messy, personal and utterly undignified result.

The Manuscript

It arrived! Over the ocean and through the woods in a UPS truck it came! A rectangular, battered, brown envelope waited on the porch when I returned from an emergency trip to town. I had dropped my phone into the pool and then had to fish it out with my feet like some sort of primate as the pool had just been chlorinated and I did not want my recently bleached hair to turn green. Michelle and Peanut were highly amused watching this display of dexterity. The valiant little phone--not her first swim in the pool--gasped her last breath and blew bubbles over the screen. I am making friends with my new phone and feeling quite disloyal.

But when one stops watching the kettle... the UPS truck arrives! We sat, the brown envelope and I, over a dinner of cantaloupe and saimin and discussed the possibilities: A) We open it alone and panic alone. B) We call in reinforcements to open it with us but then most likely wish whoever it was would go away so we could be left in peace to panic. We went with B, the brown envelope and I. B plus talking to my mother on the phone for support.

And it was marvelous! (Funny 'marvelous' is spelled with one 'l' here and two 'l's' in the UK. I occasionally get out of step with words and nothing looks right--'organis/ze' and 'fork' are terribly tricky.)

The editorial letter was effusive, warm and generous. So happy! My lovely editor's comments were constructive and very, very kind. And I agree with them! Throughout there have been a few patches that felt, not bad but like they could not quite carry their own weight and needed to be tent-poled by stand out lines. Now they are going to get renovated! There is a high drama section where the life of the character plays second fiddle to the extraordinary history of the time (plague and fire of 1665-1666). Not ok! I have to weave her life through the history rather than the reverse. Regardless of the enormity of public events personal lives remain at the forefront for they provide the lens.

Excited to work!