Archive for July, 2005

July 22, 2005

maine writing project

Last week I spoke to the Maine Writing Project Summer Institute at the University of Maine. This is a group of teachers who spend their summer learning how to improve the teaching and learning of writing across the curriculum, and the director of the project, my friend Rich Kent, invited me to speak to the teachers about romance writing as a sort of fun workshop for them, over lunch.

I wasn’t sure what to speak about, originally. I mean these guys are outstanding teachers who have given up their vacation to learn how to be even better. What could I possibly tell them about?

I asked Rich. He asked them. They all replied, “SEX!”

So I went ready to talk about sex. A lovely lady called Maureen (who’s sitting next to me in the photo below) got in lots of food and decorated the classroom to create a romantic ambience. She put red hearts on all the desks, made bookmarks, and taped feather quills to the pens. I was bowled over! And the teachers were a riot. They were full of interesting questions and they were so much fun to work with.

None of them were romance readers (well, a few of them admitted to reading the odd Harlequin) but they jumped right into the work I set them, even though it wasn’t really for the squeamish. (Superman’s sexual fantasies, anyone?) Great teachers, great students, and seriously nice people.

I was so pleased to have been invited and I had a blast. Here are some photos to prove it…(with thanks to Kay Hyatt at U Maine)

“And it’s THIS BIG!!” says Julie, describing one of her heroes

Getting inspiration from Hugh Jackman’s chest

a day to remember

I’m going to Maryland tomorrow and then to Reno so I’m going to post twice–once for my personal stuff and once about a professional thing I did last week.

Today was a wonderful day. My brother Matt and his wife Reetu and their sons Jaiden (3) and Rishi (1) came up from Philadelphia and spent the day at the camp with us. It was the first time the kids had ever been to Maine.

My mom went and got my grandmother, too, so it was all of us together for the first time in a very long time. We played with the kids in the lake and I sat with my grandmother, who can’t do much, but she did sit and watch and smile like crazy. My grandparents bought this camp in 1941 and Grammy told me about their first summer here, with an infant daughter and no electricity and only a wood stove. I took tons of pictures and relaxed and ate too much for dinner.

What a great day.

July 19, 2005

tra la la

Sat on the screened-in front porch overlooking the lake and worked straight from 10 to 7 today, through oppressive heat and two thunderstorms, and finished all the edits on DELICIOUS. I just need to finish up a synopsis and then it’ll wing its way to my editor. And I can relax for real.

Of course, my next book has started to haunt me now…but that can wait for a little while.

I’ve got my interview for the Maine paper tomorrow. My grandmother, who is, bless her, a little bit confused these days, is convinced that I am being interviewed by Barbara Walters. (BW is a very famous tele-journalist, for my British friends.) I’m not, obviously. But I can bask in the glory of knowing that my grandmother thinks I am the most famous person in the world. That’s okay with me.

I’m also going to wander around Portland and visit some of the places I mentioned in my first two books, and see if any of them strike me as locations for my next one. I think that some of it will be set in western rather than coastal Maine, but we’ll see what my subconscious decides.

And I’ll do some shopping too. Clothes are so cheap in this country! Hurrah!
And I’ve heard I must party in Reno!

July 18, 2005

this is so, so true

Thanks to Kris.

Why does he jump through the cake? How does
Stephanie Seymour die? We are given
insufficient hints. She is the only guest to
have eaten the cake before its destruction–
perhaps the cake was poisoned? Or: she was
standing by the cake when our unidentified
protagonist hurled himself through it; perhaps
she was crushed by falling confection. None of
this matters. You are a distortion, a mutation
in the universe, a hint of the divine. Years
after you pass, those who have witnessed you
will scratch their chins dumbly, wondering how
to put into words what they have seen.
“Who was that man?” they will seem to
say, or “why was he jumping through a
wedding cake?” You reveal nothing,
perfect in your completion. Your facets
quietly glint in the sun, unaware of the
confused chaos you have caused.

which clip from a Guns ‘N Roses video are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

July 15, 2005

smiled on by lady fortune

Yesterday was a great day.

Dad has bought a new picnic table. This might not sound like a big deal but we haven’t had a picnic table since the old one which my grandfather built collapsed. I used to sit at the old picnic table and look out over the lake and write stories. I finished my first (150-page, incredibly melodramatic) novel on that picnic table aged about 12, and I had carved my name into it one day when my friends and I were playing Dungeons and Dragons.

He bought a new picnic table because my brother Matt is bringing his two sons (aged 3 and 1) up to the lake for the first time and he wants us to all sit around the picnic table having lunch like we used to do. It’s an excellent plan.

There are the bugs to consider, however. I don’t know how many bugs I’ve eaten while running this week. They just fly into your mouth.

Anyway I sat at the new picnic table (which is bigger and sturdier than the old one and doesn’t have my name carved on it–yet) and read in the sun until a reporter from the Portland Press Herald called me wanting an interview. This is particularly cool because my first two books FEATURED ATTRACTION and BEING A BAD GIRL are both set in Portland and the first one even has a reporter from that paper in it. So I’m going to meet her Tuesday.

Then I drove to Auburn (saw a moose on the way in the bog) and took my grandmother out for lunch at The Chickadee, which is famous in the Lewiston/Auburn area for its fried seafood. She had lobster stew and I had fried clams. I love fried clams. These were good, not quite Zen, but close. Then I took my grandmother home and I BEAT HER AT LIVERPOOL RUMMY.

This is a more astounding thing than you can imagine. My grandmother is a consummate card player, a wizard at bridge. She used to whip my ass on a regular basis at cards. I got amazingly, spectacularly lucky. Kept on getting two wild cards in my hand. I felt smiled on by Lady Fortune.

Then logged on and saw 13 messages from friends on my blog wishing me well. Thank you, friends.

Today we’re going to the coast to go sailing for the weekend. Catch you all Monday!

July 12, 2005

bliss

After finishing my first draft on Monday and going to the RNA conference all weekend, I swore I would spend my first day in Maine doing nothing but relaxing.

So far, I’ve slept till 11, spent the rest of the morning on the beach reading (wearing a bikini and my dad’s old cotton hat to keep the sun off my considerable nose), went for a swim, had lunch, spent a lot more time on the beach reading, have found an extract to read aloud to the writing group I’m talking to at the University of Maine tomorrow, and am just about to go for a run.

The beach is sand and smooth circular grey rocks that glint with mica. Today has been clear and still and the lake is sheened with ripples and sparkles. Every now and then a fish jumps. When I went swimming, I could hear the sound of a “Marco Polo” game from a group of kids on the main beach which lies around the curve of the lake, and soft weeds brushed my stomach and knees as I paddled. When I was a kid I used to hate the feeling of weeds touching me; they used to feel like fingers of monsters, or the soft tip of Jaws’s tail. Today they felt like tickling weeds in the pond that I love.

The road where I go running curves into the woods past camps and farmhouses and is a bright ribbon in a dark green forest. It leads, eventually, to a graveyard that is one of my favourite places in the world, where we used to go for picnics and feel safe among the 19th-century epitaphs.

I’m happy to be home.

July 7, 2005

ok

Just to let my U.S. friends know that following the London terrorist attacks I’m fine and so are all of my friends, as far as I know. We’ve spent most of the day praying for others who are not.

I’m off to the RNA conference tomorrow and then to the U.S…will be back blogging next week, so come back and check around Thursday!

July 4, 2005

everything shaken upward

I have to add some stuff to the last page, and edit the epilogue so that it doesn’t suck, but mostly, I am done with the first draft of this book. This means, at last, that I can rest.

To celebrate I’m posting the thrice-translated lyrics to a song, as Kate had on her blog. You put the lyrics into babelfish and translate from English to French, from French to German, from German back to English, and try to guess the original.

See what you think.

The pit segnen my soul, which with me is wrong? I itching as a man on a smeared tree. My friends say that I am acted each space bar that bogue is I in love, I everything shaken upward.

Well my hands shake, and my Knee is weak, I can not seem to hold me on my cleanly two feet. Who thanks you, if you have such a luck, I are in love I are everything shaken upward.

Well please do not ask me, over that which on my spirit it is I am upward mixed, but I feel finely. If I meet a girl, whom I like better, my knocking so the heart frightens me him at death.

It concerned my hand, which cold weather I received. Its lips are as a volcano, which is hot. I am to be said proudly that it is my buttercup, I am in love I am everything shaken upward.

My language keeps fastened, if I try to speak, my inside it shake as a sheet over a tree. There is only one treatment for this body meins, this must have this in such a way a goal girl and its love love.

It concerned my hand, which cold weather I received. Its lips are as a volcano, which is hot. I am to be said proudly that it is my buttercup. I am in love I am everything shaken upward.

happy 4th of july!

Although I’ve lived 66% of my life there, I am apparently–

You Are 40% American

America: You don’t love it or want to leave it. But you wouldn’t mind giving it an extreme make over. On the 4th of July, you’ll fly a freak flag instead… And give Uncle Sam a sucker punch!

July 3, 2005

a new love

I love my hero, Angus, so much I feel like running around telling strangers about him. And I am going to do my best to finish this book in the next two days. I have one scene left to write, and an epilogue to revise. The scene is long, though, and balances several threads and lots of emotion. The second saddest ending I’ve ever written.

I’ve just had fab help from Biddy and Anna, and I’m possessed by this story right now.

At its best, writing is so, so much like falling in love.

an old love

I used to be SO IN LOVE with Paul McCartney. With that fervour you only get when you are a young teenager, like every fibre of your body and mind wants this guy you’ve never met so badly that you will obsess over their music, their films, their interviews, collect photographs as if somehow that made you closer to this person you will never meet. I liked him best in 1964 or so, about the time of Hard Day’s Night; as I didn’t know him really, I could easily pretend he was that person in my living room on my VCR.

Many years later. I watched him on TV tonight in the Live8 concert. He looks good for a guy older than my dad. I was disappointed he only did Beatles songs, and that old “let’s get everyone in the world onstage for ‘Hey Jude’ and sing it forever” trick. I’m not in love with him any more.

Funny thing is, my crush on Paul McCartney is as real in my memory as my actual boyfriends in high school. Not to insult my boyfriends; just to say that I felt as intensely for this imaginary person as I did for the reality. Maybe even more, because he never said the wrong thing or didn’t call me back when I expected him to, and I never had to worry about introducing him to my friends. As a matter of fact, I made lots of friends because of my crush on Paul McCartney. I found other Beatles fans at my school and spent time with people I might never have known, otherwise. I was known as “That Mad Beatles Fan”–especially as most of my school was listening to Ozzy and Bon Jovi.

Fandom is weird.

Anyway, I’m listening to Back to the Egg now. I know all the lyrics, though I haven’t listened to it in years.

July 2, 2005

one chapter left!

Well…that says it all, doesn’t it?