Ember Goforth-Shook, who in a brief five weeks will tell you BODY OF WATER if you let her, worries a lot. She gets that from me, but not twelve-year-old me. I didn't start worrying till a year or so later, older and not quite as wise.

In the campground, what was to worry about? Morning was like this: Weak, early, seven o'clock sun peeking up over the mountain, shadows spilling down the grass. The sun not touching till halfway out to the swim line, so the water out there was lit up orange, still and silent but tossing the sun back up into the sky. Quiet water and quiet minnows and quiet sand, as yet untouched by feet. Except for ours. Special, privileged. The first humans each day to touch the water.

And night was like this: Sun smoking on down toward the mountain, fires springing up, twirling sparks into the sky like stars with every log tossed on. And logs were free. Every family that left, left firewood and we were gatherers. And hunters. We hunted ghost stories along the edges of the friendly woods. We hunted secrets in the warm, soft mud. Found treasures like, literally, a silver spoon -- dug up out of the mud with our toes, the irony was not lost on us. Campfire evening leaned down into cozy-tent night with the crickets and the tree frogs singing, and all at once, shushing each other so we could hear the water lapping, soft, and the rumble of distant thunder.

What wasn't to love?

I mean, there was stuff in the middle. Daytime stuff, like seventh grade and house-hunting and grocery stores. But that isn't the stuff that sticks. For Ember, either, that isn't the stuff that sticks, because, as her time in the campground draws to a close, she stares out across the lake and she starts to feel homesick.

Homesick before you've even left. This makes more sense than you maybe realize, unless you're like us, and you've moved and moved. Unless you've ever stood and wished yourself backward in time, so you could smell the woodsmoke once more, feel the sand and the mud on your feet, grip lost silver with your toes and cup your hands around fireflies.

I don't always drift so far away, but today I am distant like the thunder, spinning toward the sky like the sparks. On this warm September evening in my grown-up town, I am looking back at twelve and it is shining like sun on the water, halfway out to freedom.

Swimming at daybreak,
we had special privileges.
Forget walls and doors.


Water is warmest
when the air is cool with rain
or with September.


Sand deep and shifting,
We mocked stability, we
Tripped over driftwood.

We are on day two of a cold, soaking September rain, the kind that stirs the earliest dead leaves to scatter on the sidewalk, the kind that stirs the earliest embers of autumn and of story. I am close to writing something new. I know because I am vibrating with energy that has nowhere to go, so I am dropping coffee cups and walking into storm doors. I am distracted, half-lost in impatience and anticipation and the hope that the story gets here soon, before I start forgetting to eat and to go to work in the mornings.

Seven weeks from BODY OF WATER, rain makes me think of my red blanket, which is not mentioned in the book but which is pictured in my head. September 1993 was warm enough, from what I remember. But I know it rained. Any time it did, we had to pull our belongings to the center of the tent, to keep them off the nylon walls that would let the water through if we touched them. There was a scramble to close the “skylight” – the removable cover that hid the mesh roof of our dome-shaped bedrooms – and then we would pull in, blankets and tennis shoes and roller skates and dirty clothes pile and ever-shrinking clean clothes pile, gathered to the center as if it were all a part of one big turtle hiding in its shell. Me, I always sat cross-legged on the middle of the pile, ratty red blanket draped over my shoulders. It was my beach towel on warm days and my shawl on cool days. In rain, it was my shelter.

Sitting in the middle of a dome-shaped tent, on top of all your earthly belongings, imagining yourself as a giant turtle while the rain pounds away outside, you can’t help but giggle. And if you’ve ever had, or been, a sister, you know that one sister can’t laugh for no reason without the other sisters joining in. So there we were, three blue and gray tents, giggling in the rain.

The next morning at sunrise, me and Heather went walking, looping the familiar streets of home. The storm-weakened sun was barely up in the sky and was nothing but a faded red ball, so dim we could look straight at it without hurting our eyes.

“It looks like one of those dots,” I said.

And, remarkably, she got it. “On a library book!”

We kept walking, cooking up a whole story about how we were nothing but characters in a library book, and the sun was only red-orange here because we were in the middle grade section, but characters in other books, in other sections, saw their suns in different colors. And maybe one day we would look up and the sun would be a different color and we would know we had been reshelved, and we could spin a whole adventure about trying to get back to our own familiar section.

Every word we thought as children scrawled itself across the pages in our minds. Everything was story. As long as the sun stayed its own familiar color, we could trust, more or less, that we were where we were supposed to be. We could relax and let the story write itself. We could dream up other worlds with different-colored suns, and secretly wonder if the other sections were as fun to write, and live, as ours.

Then the sun rose and yellowed and burned into full daylight, and we ran off to other settings, scaring up new plots and building our own characters.

In eight fleeting weeks, BODY OF WATER, which is mostly fiction, will stroll out into the world, and a few of my secrets might seep out. Like, I have washed my hair with apple-scented hand soap and lied to teachers about where I did my homework. Like, I am not above eating fried bologna off a stick. And I sort of have an obsession with fuzzy pajamas.

Want to know what’s crazy? I recently met someone who lived in a tent for six months. Six! We didn’t quite make it to three. She was a little older during her camping time – ninth grade, not seventh – and we are the same age, so it’s easy for me to think back on her camping year.

We were at Herold Court that year, a second-floor apartment where the walls sweated in summer and my best friend wasn’t allowed to visit at first because my parents didn’t quite think about how the “I Heart Herbs” sticker on the car window could be taken if you didn’t know my mother gathered mullen for congestion and burdock for arthritis. The year my friend slept under the twinkle of cricket chatter, I was drenched in the humid hush of the box fan in the window. In winter we went sledding down the yellow line of Kentucky Road until we tumbled, laughing, into snow-filled ditches. I hope my friend was under roof by then. I don’t know which months she camped because she didn’t want to talk about it much.

Some days I feel frivolous, like I don’t understand even the things I’ve done. Like it’s not okay for me to write a book about living in a tent, because, even though I’ve lived in a tent, I was me at the time and not a regular person, and I didn’t get the same things out of it that a regular person would. And then I think, what do I mean by regular person? A person who has never lived in a tent? A person who has only ever washed their hair with shampoo? A person who doesn’t heart herbs and who takes fuzzy PJs for granted?

The kid in me would say there is no regular, everybody is different (because she thought she was pretty deep). But even that seventh-grader who was free of congestion and smelled faintly of apples -- who night after night went to bed wearing something other than fuzzy pajamas -- even that girl wanted to be like other people sometimes.

Which is why I am grateful to my new friend for sharing a touch of her story, even if she didn't want to talk about it much. I can't guess her story, wouldn't dream of trying. I was me, not her, my camping year. But some things -- some things she doesn't have to say. Some things I think I might know.

It's hard to believe school's already back in. Summer crashes into fall without regard for anything. Maybe there hasn't been time for vacation, or maybe you don't have your school clothes out, or maybe you're not quite back under roof just yet, but here it is fall, deceptively subtle with only a yellow leaf or two to show for it.

School bus didn't come out to the campground, so Dad drove us in and I showed up to seventh grade smelling like cigarette smoke and campfire smoke and the early red maple leaves I'd crunched under bare feet the evening before. It was tough to reconcile school breakfast, syrupy French Toast sticks, with the previous day's dinner of hot dogs on actual sticks, blackened till they blistered. It was tough to reconcile school company -- girls with neat hair, teased bangs, and purposely-ripped-up jeans -- with my evening company of sisters in swimsuits and tangles.

My pre-algebra homework was half-finished because other things seemed much more important the evening before. I missed the lake, more than half drained now because of a drought downriver. I missed elementary school, with its neat math problems I understood, printed on wide-ruled paper. I sensed change, something deeper than autumn.

I spent days gazing out of classroom windows, unaccustomed to being indoors. I spent nights under the stars, hazy through the campfire smoke, thinking of better things than math. I was a lucky girl, luckier than my squeaky-clean classmates stuck under ceilings. I knew just enough to know that this couldn't last forever.

My little Livvie Owen has been out in the world for one year today. In her honor, I will ask you a question.

What would your dream home look like? Feel like? Smell like? Is it a house? A cabin? A mansion? How many rooms? How many people to fill those rooms? How did you come by it and how long will you live there? These are the questions Livvie would ask you if she met you. She wouldn't quite look at you and she wouldn't quite be sure how to word them, but these are the things she would want to know.

Ten weeks now till BODY OF WATER.

Let me tell you about the first week in the campground.

It was only an adventure, only another chapter in our fictional lives. We were raised to believe we were characters in books, taught that adversity was fodder for plot, that conflict kept the pages turning. Most chapters had a happy ending. My parents were still the authors and we kids were in charge of the dialogue and a few of the illustrations. We didn’t have to worry much. My parents would find a way to wrap up this chapter neatly.

That summer must have been so hard for them. There are days I can’t write characters through hardship and my parents had to write three real-life girls through it. But if it was hard, they never let on. If they were scared, they never let on. We were on a camping trip, which we’d never been on before. Tents and campground passes were a luxury we could only afford if we weren’t frittering our money away on silly things like rent. This was a treat, this camping trip. This was a once-in-a-lifetime plot twist.

The first week, everything was new and we couldn’t stop giggling. We walked barefoot on hot pavement. We held our breaths past the big blue dumpsters you could smell for half a city block. We were careful of glass. We swam on the campground side of the lake, not the beach side, just to prove we weren’t afraid of the sucking mud and the hidden marine life. We had splash fights. We ate from the vending machines. We sat on the warm dryers in the laundry room come evening and we watched other campers bed down in their little family groups around their campfires and we scoffed at the ones who brought RVs and televisions. After the first few nights, we felt like old pros compared to the people checking in.

And never mind the people checking out. We didn’t have to worry about that.

They made us switch campsites every two weeks. It was a rule presumably put in place to prevent people like us from living in the campground long term. They had to know. The caretakers of the place, they had to notice that we never left. They had to notice that after the first couple of site changes, we stopped taking the tents down and simply transported them fully-assembled, one at a time on the back of the truck. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed of our brown Nissan, clutching the roll bar with one arm and my tent with the other. We moved from Site One to Site Thirty. Site … 42, perhaps? And 14. I can’t remember them all. And the caretakers of the place, they had to see. But they never said a word, only smiled at us and went on their way.

I wish I knew where those people are now. I would send them copies of BODY OF WATER. And something chocolate. Would S'mores be too much?

I’m supposed to be talking about the first week in the campground, but it’s hard to talk about a single week when the whole summer feels like one sunny blur. I know that the first week, we were still fairly clean and crisp from the luxury of living indoors. We did not miss living indoors. We did not miss beds and chairs and tables. We maybe missed TV a little, but we hadn’t watched that much of it before, and the people at the campground were way more interesting to watch. And maybe, when dusk fell and the sun was still bright enough to dim the campfires and I knew it would be dark soon, it’s possible I missed the nightlight I was embarrassed I had still been using.

But outside dark isn’t scary like inside dark. I slept sound and woke rested, ready for adventure.

Eleven weeks seems like a strange amount of time to mark, unless that's how long you lived in a dome-shaped tent in the summer of '93. For eleven weeks, my sisters and I roamed Battle Run Campground, swimming, and storytelling, and roasting whatever would fit on the end of a stick.

Little bits and pieces of those eleven weeks are always with me. Of course there is the obvious, the crackle of fire and the green splash of lake water, but there's other stuff, too. Like when I unzip my duffel at the Writer's Conference, the noise is exactly like my bedroom door at the campground. Like any time I see initials carved into wood, I think of the names kids carved into the campground's climbing tower, which they tore down years ago. When I wrote my name there, in blue ink from the pen I always carried, I thought it would stay there forever.

In a way, it has.

Eleven weeks from today, BODY OF WATER will be released, and a kid named Ember will tell you about her summer in the campground, so different from mine – but I hope, just as permanent. Once we get there, if you would, take just a second and turn around and look back to this spot right here, and think about how much time that actually is to live in a campground. By the time we left, the tents were worn through and the fires burned low to embers. We were taller and tanner, older and wiser, and we knew how to make a place home.

It's a skill I've used plenty more times over the years. But that's a story for another novel.

Funny what makes it in, what stays out. Every little animal I've ever kept has made it, or will make it, into a book. Henry's there already, in the form of Orange Cat in LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE.



You can meet Lola this October when BODY OF WATER is released – she plays the role of Widdershins, at least in my head.



And in my third book, which you will hopefully get to read at some point, my sister-in-law's mean and hateful little poodle, Chewbacca, makes an appearance.

I sort of hate that dog. He broke Lola's nose once, but that occurrence did not make it into either novel.

Sorry, I don't have a picture of Chewbacca. If you really want to know, he looks like a dirty cottonball. With fangs.

Buddy Sunshine, my oversized Rottie mix, did make it into a middle grade novel that has never seen the light of day.



And in my most recent novel, there is a cat named Stella who is a lot like my Sage-cat. Actually, Sagey-Boo was also in LIVVIE, in the form of Gray Cat (although she is clearly not gray).



You know who, quite conspicuously, has never made it into a novel of mine?

These guys:





That first one is Stuff, my very first horse. And the second is my current horse, Magnum.

As a kid, all I ever read were horse stories. When I wasn't reading horse stories, I was visiting a neighbor's horse, or cleaning stalls to pay for riding lessons, or, after I managed to get a horse of my own, out playing in the pasture with him. Sometimes I read horse stories and played in the pastur

I started seventh grade from a campground. Battle Run Campground in Summersville, West Virginia, to be exact. It's a beautiful place, tree-shaded, lakeside. In fact, it's made up of a sort of sprawling peninsula, surrounded on three sides by shimmery dark-green lake water.

It is the perfect place to vacation.

Up until school started, it was the perfect place to live.

Let me tell you about school nights and school mornings in a campground. Campgrounds are not built for school days. They are built for hazy summer memories of campfires and marshmallows and bathing suits and bicycles.

And, apparently, beer and country music. At least according to the campers at Site 16 next door to me. The campers there stayed up well into the night, blasting Alan Jackson's newly-released "Chattahoochee" over and over.

I'm sure it was shocking to those drunken campers when, at one in the morning, a disgruntled twelve-year-old stuck her head out of her tent and screeched, "Don't you people know it's a school night?"

But it wasn't their fault I couldn't sleep. It was not because of the song.

Up until now, it had been summer. Summer was when you're supposed to stay in a campground, but now it was school time and school time is fall and fall is when you're supposed to rake leaves into neat piles on the flat lawn of your three-bedroom brick ranch-style house with the chain link fence and the one-lane street.

Well, we had the one-lane street. It looped and spun among progressively-empty campsites as September came.

I don't remember being nervous about school, but I do remember being cold. Five-thirty a.m., walking barefoot to the shower house and waiting longer each day for the water to get warm, I cursed the hour and the lack of sun. Why did school have to start so early, anyway? Why didn't they leave time for a swim first?

After school, I came home to the campground and unleashed my stress in the form of a swim, or a gallop on foot around the campground, or a bike ride. It wasn't till darkness gathered, an inch earlier every day, that I remembered about homework. Me and my sisters would stroll down to the shower house, most always empty these days, and set up shop in the laundry room, scribbing in notebooks and watching the storms come, occasionally remembering to do a math problem or to study a spelling word.

It was awesome.

Waking up, and coming home, in a place like Battle Run, well, that was blissful. It was the middle part of the day that stank. Seventh grade was a shock because it was different from anything I had known. People I knew -- a lot of people, since I had attended four elementary schools, two of them twice -- were suddenly taller and meaner. The pressure to conform, to fit in, to be like everybody else was immense, which was a challenge for a very literal kid, since no two people in that school were alike. Everybody had their own problems, their own situations, their own rude comments and their own little hang-ups.

As far as I knew, none of them lived in a campground.

For the first time, I wondered if maybe I wasn't supposed to like where I lived. But I still did.

A while back, I wrote a book about a kid living in a campground. For a lot of reasons, she doesn't love it as much as I did, but a big part of her loves it very much. Which is how most homes are. The book is called BODY OF WATER and it will start seventh grade -- I mean, it will be released -- October 25.

God, I hope it doesn't fit in.

This morning, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I managed to post a whole blog that was nothing but the letter C.

Then, just now, while attempting to type "while attempting to type," I typed "tpyed."

Then, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I typed, "NanOwrImo."

Then, while attempting to type, "while attempting to type 'while attempting to type'", I typed "tuyped."

And then at some point -- I'm so lost now that I really don't know WHAT I was trying to type, except it included the word "typed" -- I typed "typied."

Maybe I should NaNo in longhand.

At any rate, it's that time. You in?

http://campnanowrimo.org

Every time the bus driver slams on his brakes at a stop sign – I don't understand, he drives this route ten times a day, does he not remember where the stop signs are? Do they sneak up on him? Are they camouflaged until the last second, whipping off their branchy costumes and leaping into the street? – my broken computer hinge gives way and the screen falls backward onto my knees so the computer is lying flat, looking up at the WIC ads and stroller guidelines and rate increase announcements on the ceiling.

There are a LOT of stop signs on this route.

So I'm writing and it goes like this:



I don't know what makes Monday different from every other sweat-in-your-butt-crack just-this-side-of-committing-murder-for-a-cold-drink early August day in Delbarton. Maybe it's the heat, which

*thud*

"Crap."

is holding in the nineties even hours after the sun's gone down. Or it could be Hyacinth's ear infection, which has caused her to scream for three straight nights while I have lain awake on top of the sheets, studying the dead bodies of moths in the light cover. Maybe it's the fact that I am

*thud*

"Crap."

halfway through an ice-cold jug bath, pouring gas station water out of a gallon milk container and shocking my system into full alertness, when I remember our water service was turned back on yesterday and I could be taking a piping hot shower.

Maybe it's Lock Rawley

*thud*

"Crap!"

dying.



And this is about the time I remember that I'm on the 6:45 to Barboursville, which is about as crowded as a bus can get, not counting the inbound Walnut Hills coming back from Wal-Mart. I've got headphones in, so I can't hear the repeating litany of thud-crap, thud-crap all the way out Route 60.

Odd, nobody else this morning is wearing headphones. Except for the lady who is asleep against the window with her purse slowly spilling off her lap into the aisle, and the woman with a cell phone pressed to one ear and her palm pressed to the other – presumably to block out the noise of my computer being shaken to pieces -- everybody can hear everything I'm doing.

So now I'm making a conscious effort not to throw a minor hissy fit every time the bus skids to a halt, and it seems to me like the bus driver is making a conscious effort to come to a sudden stop at least once per mile. I think his goal is for my computer screen to detach completely and fly up the length of the bus and shatter on the “Passengers Must Remain Behind The Yellow Line” sign.

I think it is safe to say I'm not going to get much writing done this morning.

This office sucks.

Things I found in my duffel bag while unpacking from West Virginia Writers Conference:

-Six new pens, three new pencils, and 14 bookmarks advertising every type of book, from romance to murder mystery to picture book

-One of my dress shoes. If anyone at Cedar Lakes comes across a high heel, I ... don't need it back, actually. I had to ditch them halfway to the dining hall anyway. Who wears high heels to a lakeside conference that feels so very much like a dreamy summer campground from childhood?

-My room key, about which the conference center was very gracious in allowing me to mail back to them instead of charging me $10. I thought I'd locked the key in the room. Turns out I had, for reasons that escaped me, neatly packed it next to my toothbrush. (Seven hours sleep all weekend, folks. This is what happens.)

-An unpopped bag of popcorn Julee gave me (thanks, Julee!) at two in the morning when I realized I hadn't brought snacks and I was hungry, but then I fell asleep before I managed to locate the microwave

-Hand-outs from some excellent workshops and classes

-Scribbled messages in notebook margins: "Remember chicken poem." "Open with exercise?" "B-fast 7:30." "Change 'second' to 'last' in final poem in FV." (Which I forgot to do.) And my favorite: "Casualties: 111111111" -- I kept track of all the times somebody likened deleting passages from your book to murder. Twice it was me and I don't even like that metaphor.

-One dirty sock. Seriously, between the shoe and the sock, I feel like I ought to check and make sure I came back with both feet!

-A bunch of beads that fell off my flip-flop. But for every bead I managed to find and bring home, I'm sure I left at least four in my room at the lodge.

-So much relaxation, inspiration, and excitement it didn't fit in the duffel bag and I had to carry it in my feet that won't stop skipping and my lips that won't stop smiling and, most importantly, in my pen that won't stop moving.

I can't wait until next summer!

How many minutes in my life have I spent staring through golden mist on a morning highway? I remember it being the most romantic, intoxicating feeling. At six years old, chocolate milk in one hand and crayon in the other. At ten, Coca Cola and a pencil. Sixteen, coffee and a Bic. Scratching out the story with every mile: where I was going. Or where I wished I was.

When I was a kid, I thought every highway would go exactly where I wanted it to. I thought the mist would always be golden.

This time last year I had a foot on each end of the highway. Sold the house, moved three hours away, two weeks before school let out, and commuted to finish out my contract. Every morning I was in the car by four, driving down and down on roads that crumbled and steepened the further south I went.

This morning, children woke up there, in houses next to the crumbling highway, where the mountains are so tall the sun doesn't rise till eight. The highways run in circles. The mist is gray. I spent a year trying to get those kids to tell me their stories, to dream big, to tell me where they wanted their highway to lead.

They didn't understand the question.

Ten months I taught them and they never understood the question.

It has taken me a year to even be able to look back on those months in the coalfields. My anxiety level ratchets up several notches and my mind tries to change the subject, tries to find something else to dwell on before I have to remember each specific face, so adult, so tired and old, so tragic on a seven-year-old. How I hated that look in their eyes. How I hated that year, trying to teach my kids something that can't be taught. Hope and dreaming and a little bit of peace. How to be a damn kid for a minute.

Some days – every day – I wish I could have another shot. Do better by those children. But this time last year, I couldn't force myself to stay. I put in my resignation and the nightmares stopped. I put a For Sale sign in the swampy yard of the house with messed-up plumbing and locked windows. I jumped on the highway at the first opportunity, drove up and up until the mist turned gold.

Left those kids behind.

The novel I'm working on now is written partially in verse. More specifically, in incorrect verse. Sasha takes poetry forms and bends them just enough to fit what she needs to say.


HUSH
Here in the darkness,
crickets call and night birds sing.
I know to keep still.


DEAR MR. STONE
If you really tried,
you could be a little more
totally clueless.


TODAY
Window panes rattled
with anger and thunder, till
the sun went away.


JUNIOR'S VISIT
“Sasha, why don't you
talk no more?” he wants to know.
Wish I could tell him.


I don't know much about writing poetry, and neither does Sasha, but I'm having fun learning along with her!

The prompt (from Writer's Toolkit):
Write about something you did that you didn't want to do.

My response:
I love moving day, and I hate it.

I mean, I know, right? Everybody hates moving day. Everybody hates filling out change of address forms and saying goodbye to the good neighbors. Everybody hates boxing up the big things.

But the little things are worse. The things that are lost until the big things are gone. All these things end up in a box that is impossible to label:

This box contains a half-empty shampoo bottle, five socks with no mates, a plastic horse with a broken leg, four playing cards, and seventeen filthy pennies.

I've moved. I've moved again. Some years it seemed like there was nothing but the moving.

So I know all about the pennies in the carpet after the boxes are gone. I know about things that are impossible to label.

My mother woke us early every moving day, but she didn't have to. We were up. We were going over and over it in our heads: What's going to be next? Will this one have a nice kid next door? Will this one be furnished? Will there finally be a sofa? Which stray cat will find us this time? How will we bear to leave him when it's time to move on?

Then the sun rises, and mom comes in, and we spend the next hour piling a truck's worth of belongings into the car. Deciding what to leave. What to take.

Saying goodbye to this neighborhood's stray cat.

We never think there will be tears. We're six, eight, and ten. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen. Seven, nine, eleven. This never was our cat.

Still, there are tears.

It takes a mile for our eyes to dry, but then we get to the fun part. Moving day is about packing and it is about unpacking, but my favorite is the part in between. The reprieve. The drive, which may be long or short, which may be fast or slow, but which is inevitably full of promise.

The hope is always the same: This place will be different. This place will be perfect. We will have our own bedrooms. We will each have a best friend. We will unpack and unpack and there will still be space. We will finally open the door, bring the cat inside, because this time, we will stay. The cat will be permanent and we will be permanent.

We giggle, on that drive. We make jokes. Even Dad, creased with tension over roads and rent and security deposits, will smile.

I love the drive.

I love the drive so much, I hate arriving.

Arriving to basement apartments with no windows, rooms too small to fill with dancing. Kids who won't be as nice as we hoped. Another stray cat we will love and lose.

1. "Customers who visited this page ultimately ended up buying ..."




2. "In Gorillas. Edit categories."

Because my computer isn't working -- and neither is my car -- I've gotten into the habit of waiting for the bus at the local university library, where I can use a computer to work on my writing stuff. I only live a few blocks from the university, so it works out pretty well.

Today, just as I was leaving my apartment, I thought of a perfect conversation for two of my characters to have. My hands were full, and it was snowing, so I didn't stop to write it down. I just repeated it to myself over and over so I wouldn't forget it before I got to the library.

Let me back up. Walking across town, I was carrying:

-a shoulder bag with writing stuff in it -- pages with my editor's handwriting in the margins, pens that rarely get used but often get lost, notes to self on the back of McDonald's receipts -- and random stuff I need for the day, like a hairbrush and Tylenol and half of yesterday's lunch because I forgot to clean out my shoulder bag.

-Another shoulder bag full of school stuff -- data sheets, random sight word cards, a plastic rhinoceros that I think might have come out of a borrowed testing kit that I've already given back, and pre-test materials for a germ unit (which is annoyingly well-timed, since I'm fighting a head cold).

-a plastic bag with my breakfast and lunch in it (today's).

I was bundled up because it's not a long walk from home to campus, but it's a windy one, and I had these bags draped over me like Christmas tree tinsel. I was taking huge gulp of hot coffee every two or three steps, because, did I mention it's windy and also very cold?

And I was talking to myself. Animatedly. With dialogue. Using at least two different people's names. Saying the same thing over and over.

I don't know why people think writers are eccentric. This all makes perfect sense to me.

I lived in a rural county and there was a blizzard on. Most of my days were spent in the office with the orange walls and blue gauzy curtains. The view out the window was of the preacher's house, giant metal star above the door, trampoline laden with snow in the back yard. No children ever played there. Stray dogs crisscrossed the highway over and over until they were killed. My fingers stayed on the keyboard, but my mind refused to go someplace else. I was stuck there, frozen like the neighbor's purple asters.

Sometimes I feel like I will never completely leave that room.

But I have.

Blizzard of 09

bony dog chained by the tracks
ached for comfort
we threw her a bone
behind us in the window
the christmas tree twinkled
rickety and frail
one bulb blew and the whole thing went dark
off in the distance the train moved slow
whistles and lights before anything else
fading in through a blizzard
pushing snow off the tracks
I broke the ice on the trash pile
to search an empty box
for a spare christmas bulb
I knew wasn't there.
I didn't have a whistle
and I didn't have a light
I was uncoupled cars and impenetrable drifts
frozen to metal
trying to gain traction

Tell me how I'm supposed to get any writing done?



I'm 33,000 words into my NaNoWriMo novel, and because I started it eight days early, I'm supposed to finish it by tomorrow.

It's okay that I'm not going to make it. My definition of a successful NaNo has changed over the years. I now consider the month a success if I manage to NOT change plots 17 times, and if I end up with something I'm actually going to use. This unfinished 33,000-word novel? I am smitten! This, I'll use. Most of it, anyway -- I might cut the part where I went off on an accidental rant about corn.

So how is November treating you?

1. I spelled "revision checklist" wrong. First item on the revision checklist: Revise the spelling of revision checklist.

2. You know how sometimes if you're at the lake, you can watch a storm come across the water, and you can literally see the line on the water where the rain starts, and that line is moving closer to you? Well, I just described that in my book. I said it was like "a deadline moving closer." Whoops, the author is showing.

3. Question. Can my Pagan character feel rapturous?

4. Let's go with euphoric.

5. You know, my editor has a very fair point. If my main character had really written this paragraph on the wall of a bathroom stall, she'd have run out of space in the ladies' room and had to duck across the hall to the men's room. Maybe I should buy her some paper. I'm the author, I can give the kid paper. Be mean not to.

6. Yeah, she's not getting paper. She's just writing something shorter.

7. My editor's penciled note: "No one got hungry?" has me stumped. I've been over and over and over this chapter and I just can't find a way to feed these people. Can this be one of those places where teachers have their students write a missing scene later? "Now, class, you'll notice that the characters didn't eat in this chapter. The author probably did that on purpose to give you a chance to write a missing scene about how the characters find food ..."

8. I, on the other hand, am having no trouble finding food, and eating lots of it, from revision stress.

9. I don't understand. How can my editor write "great" at the end of a paragraph that's more pencil marks than original text?

10. I've been sitting at McDonald's, which was the only place I could find open to sit and work on revisions after dropping my husband off at work at 4 a.m. But now my computer's almost dead and the only outlet here is at an uncomfortable-looking table near the counter, which is like sitting next to the teacher's desk. It's later now. I'm going to go find something else that's open. Something with better coffee and less beeping.

11. If I revise my own setting, does that count as revision progress?

I drove Jake to work at 4 a.m. Could have gone home after, but the air was sharp with autumn, and out in the world, there was internet and coffee.

I've got everything I need: a coffee, a laptop, revision notes.

Not doing much, except dreaming.

Revisions. That's what Jake and I have made to our lives. I mean, it sounds cheesy. Obvious, and a little painful, that a writer would draw parallels from revision notes to life. But it's almost six and the number of cups of coffee I've had has now outpaced the number of hours of sleep I got. So it makes sense to me at the moment.

Six years ago, when Jake and I started our life together, there was no wise editor to pencil notes in the margins. Of course we had parents and siblings and friends, but they each had separate chapters. Nobody could step back and look at the plot arc, make sense of the characters and warn us of the plot holes.

Six years ago, just as fall began, we stood on a balcony in our small city and looked down on leaves and people.

But this morning feels more like five years ago, the end of our first year together. Already we'd survived two moves, two kittens, one broken-down truck and the public bus system. But now it was autumn again and we lived in a trailer on a hill. The nearest bus stop was a mile away, but a mile and a half if you walked the long way, the graveyard way, which wasn't as scary as the other way. Better silent gravestones than shadows not quite silent enough, following us through the darkness of the bad neighborhood down by the interstate. Better we walk an extra half mile and make it to our destination.

Jake worked at a pretzel place then. And the fall was long, but the winter was longer. We walked the cemetery way in the pitch-black, frosty mornings, me accompanying him because he didn't like me staying in our trailer alone, and I didn't like him walking by himself.

We were punchy, giggly, a little nuts with cold and tired. He had bronchitis and I had a foul mouth and we stood by the road waiting for the bus to top the hill, hoping the driver could see us in the dark. Christmas lights and balloon Santas decorated the path to work. All morning, he made breakfast for people while his stomach growled, while I sat in the aisle eating the free pretzels he snuck me and scraping up change for coffee, writing on the backs of already-filled pages and hoping this writing thing would take us places someday.

Pages turned a little quicker once spring came. And chapter after chapter went by.

The changes came slowly. Something added here. Deleted there. A few changes of a character's name, a few shifts in setting, a few unexpected plot twists. The notes in the margins weren't the guide for the change, but the record of it. A scribbled year on the back of a photo, a crumpled notebook page scattered with pencil marks and pretzel salt. And the taste of autumn air that can always take me back to the opening paragraph.

I've got to admit, this is a convoluted tale. The plot arc doesn't make much sense and the character motivations haven't always been believable. But I love the suspense, and a lot of the prose. And sometimes, on fall mornings, I like to re-read Chapter One.

"Emmett, I'm filming you!" my husband sing-songed, joking around with our four-year-old nephew.

"No you're not!" Emmett giggled ... before promptly flipping backward over the arm of his chair and crashing to the floor.

This was only one of the many exciting events that took place during the LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE launch party!

Taylor Books in Charleston, WV, is a wonderful, cozy bookstore. Yesterday, it was packed with people ready to celebrate the release of my new novel. I was touched by how many people came. High school friends. Writing group members. Family, of course. But the coolest thing was when strangers walked up, wanting to talk about, and buy, and read, the book I wrote!



In addition to reading a chapter of LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE and signing the books that were purchased, I also collected books for Hanover Public Library in southern West Virginia. They lost much of their children's section in a flood in June. It was wonderful to see people buying cherished children's books for kids I used to teach. I hope to collect many more books for this library, and I'm really grateful to everyone who already donated.

Oh, and don't worry. After his fall, Emmett bounced back up, ready to take on the world. His plan?

"When I'm a grown-up guy, I'm gonna be a 'offer' like you! I'm going to write a scary story about scary pirates! It'll be scary!"

I can't wait until THAT launch party!

LIVVIE is out there now. :)