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Thank you so much for the supportive, encouraging, you-can-do-it mail this past ten days regarding this post about starting over with book two of the Sixties Trilogy.

I have wrestled mightily this past ten days, over and up and under and out and down and through with this new story, and as I have, I have realized some truths about myself, the way I work, my resistance to killing my darlings, as well as a huge truth about the original novel for book two.

Long and short, I am going back to the original draft. But not entirely. I am going back to it in the way that I made lunch today, pictured (in part) below. Let me explain. 

I am still rewriting the entire original novel. So much so, that it may as well be brand new. I am using Sunny -- my new narrator -- as my main character. I am tossing so much about the original draft that I can hardly see it as the original story. But here's the thing:

I am using the spine of the original novel as my plot for the new novel, and we are staying in 1966. If you followed my twitter stream last week, you'll know that, at one point, I was convinced that we needed to move the entire novel to 1964 and create a new plot from the ground up.

I called my friend Diane Ross at the McCain Library Civil Rights Archive at the University of Southern Mississippi and told her I needed her to pull together every oral history she had from Freedom Summer volunteers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so I could visit in the next few weeks and sit in the reading room with all those primary sources, in order to find my story.

I pulled off my bookshelves my dear-to-me books about Freedom Summer, about personalities I one day want to write about -- maybe I could include them in this novel! Yes! I was on the right track! Excited, I ordered Bob Zellner's book about his participation in the civil rights movement -- Zellner was the first white field secretary for SNCC, has a terrific story to tell about Freedom Summer, and is the subject of a new film by Spike Lee. Oh, was I ever on the right track.

In fact, my first published book was a picture book, Freedom Summer. That book is going into its 14th printing! Still going strong. I did so much research for that book, read so much, internalized so much, that I feel I could bring 1964 alive in a heartbeat. Yes, 1964. Freedom Summer. We'd be further away from the protests of the Vietnam War, and firmly entrenched in the civil rights movement. That was the way to go.

At the same time I was feverishly gathering my forces last week, my good writer friend Deborah Hopkinson sent me the new biography of Pearl Buck -- many of you wrote to me last week suggesting it as well, and I hadn't known about it; I had only known that my Sunny begins her story (as you read in that same previous blog post) by saying, "I am reading The Good Earth, and I am suffocating."

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Hey! I've been meaning to post links to fabulous Countdown reviews, and will do that as soon as I can breathe a bit -- this entire week is a race to the finish, with Jim's band playing in the Callanwolde Jazz in June series -- picnic dinner and jazz on the lawn in a beautiful setting, this Friday, June 25 -- come hang with us, Hotlanta peeps! -- I'm bringing the sweet tea and 'mater sammiches.

-- and then, I am flying off to ALA at 6am on Saturday morning -- and there's so much to get done before that.

I DID meet  my Monday deadline for a draft of book two of the sixties trilogy -- it's definitely a draft, and will need a lot of work. But it's a draft -- that's huge. More on THIS, later, too --

AND -- big news! -- Countdown has been featured on Good Morning America as one of a host of fabulous books for kids' summer reading. I loved watching the feature as much for the banter in this segment as the actual books featured, which are stellar... to see Countdown among them is unbelievably humbling, and -- dare I say it? -- exciting.

Thank you, thank you, to all of you out there who are reaching out to this little book with such enthusiasm and devotion, who blog about it, review it, put it into the hands of young readers everywhere -- I am so thankful.

And now, to turn attentions to Friday's jazzy event, and Saturday's departure for ALA.  If you're coming to ALA, come see me! I'm reading at the Scholastic Literary Brunch at the Westin on Sunday (June 27) at 10:30, and I'm signing at the Scholastic booth, #1520, at the D.C. Convention Center at 1pm.

AND -- if you are not going to the conference but live in the D.C. area, come see me at the Smithsonian's American History Museum on Saturday from 1-3. I'll be signing at the giftshop. (See? I'm right here, on the events page, along with Dorothy's ruby slippers!)

Hope to clap eyes on a bunch of you this coming weekend -- or at Shenandoah University's Children's Literature Conference (look at the line-up!)  on Wed., June 30, in Winchester, Va.

On the road again! xo

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1. Put on suit, grab sheet music, and play steady Sunday morning church gig in Dunwoody.

2.  Come home and toss sweet potatoes in the oven, dress in Marlon Brando outfit ("Stella!"), right down to a well-loved old tee-shirt (don't tell me you don't know and love someone who won't throw out a beloved, comfortable shirt even when it's a rag??) and sprawl on the couch to read while potatoes cook and wife taps away on 1966 novel in pink chair nearby.

3.  Be wished a loving, ebullient, full-frontal Happy Father's Day! by grand-dog you are babysitting.

4.  Love that dog!

 Ha! After a run outdoors, they settled down happily together, Elvis the poodle and Jim the musician, waiting for the sweet potatoes, and maybe even a little something more... a little brown rice to go under the stir fry of summer vegetables.
 Happy Father's Day, all. I often say "We are one another's mothers." Are we also one another's fathers? Dunno. I have never been a man, or a husband, but in my research for this 1966 book, I'm reading a lot about the women's movement of the sixties, and I stumbled across this fabulous short essay by Judy Syfers called "Why I Want a Wife."

Whoo! It makes me laugh! It makes me sit up and take notice! And rethink this Father's Day thing,

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I owe a draft to my editor on Monday, so I've been sunk into the mire and amazement of 1966. I'll be tweeting, and on facebook, for brief updates. In the meantime -- here's how I start HANG THE MOON, book two of The Sixties Trilogy:



Oh, my!! Look at the SUIT! And look how composed he is, for a song that was so JOYFUL! Here are a couple more listens (love this one, that is so obviously overdubbed, but so FUN, even though Crispian seems to be at a loss just how to deal with all those screaming girls, not to mention a conga line!) that are a bit more animated, but still -- is it being a Brit, or is it just Crispian St. Peters? No matter, I LOVED this song. And I love being able to FINALLY write about the British Invasion, which had not happened yet in Countdown, in 1962.

Crispian, born Robert Peter Smith, died earlier this year after suffering a stroke. He was 71. In this song, he will always, always be a young, mop-headed Brit of 27 who was totally surprised by the fame that snuck up on him.

I listened to this song, as a 45rpm on my blue record player, over and over, as a 13-year-old kid. My kids in HANG THE MOON are 13. They are listening to not only this song in 1966, but also to The Rolling Stones singing "Satisfaction," and Barry Sadler singing "The Ballad of the Green Berets" -- number ONE in 1966.

WHOA. I have my work cut out for me -- wish me luck.

xoxo

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Quickly from me: I'm writing away this week on book two of the Sixties Trilogy, before I head off on the weekend to Charleston, for Jim's mother's birthday, and Spoletto. Spoletto! I'm bringing my camera... I always have fun shooting in Charleston.

This just in: Countdown is IndieBound! and is part of the Summer 2010 Kid's IndieNext List -- Yahoo! Thank you, indie booksellers! Wish I could be at BEA right now, to thank you in person. What good company I am in -- what a thrill.

 Next, Countdown is reviewed at Bloomberg.com. It's a fabulous review, and look at me, sandwiched between John Grisham and Louis Sachar. Fun! Humbling. And wonderful.

Back to work this afternoon. I've got my girls runnin' for a train. They're about to meet Partheny, who is 101 years old in 1966, which means she was born a slave, just as the Civil War was ending in 1865.

It interests me that kids in the schools I visit almost never understand that there were 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the end of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Here is a character to span that time. She is wise. She is no-nonsense. And she is full of mystery. I love her.

Back to it.

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"Portulaca in pie pans was what they set along the front porch. And the mirror on the front of the house: I told you. In the yard, not a snap of grass -- an old auto tire with verbena growing inside of it ninety to nothing, all red. And a tin roof you could just imagine the chinaberries falling on -- ping! And now the hot rays of the sun."

From The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty.

This, my friends, is voice.

Every year, I plant portulaca in pie pans, on the front porch, in honor of Eudora Welty and this wonderful story of generous, rich and lonely Uncle Daniel Ponder, his brand-new -- surprise! -- 17-year-old wife Bonnie Dee Peacock (a little thing from the country who looked as though a good gust of wind could carry her off), and the crazy Peacock family, not to mention our narrator, Edna Earle Ponder, bless her little know-it-all heart.

The book was published in 1954, when I was a year old. I found a paperback copy of it in a used book store in Front Royal, Virginia, when I was in my thirties and trying to write for children. The book was pubished for adults, but I found this copy in the children's section -- lucky me.

I have read this book so many times, I have broken the spine. I have underlined passages and just about memorized stretches of this story. I took it apart, and learned from it, as I tried to write stories of my own. "How does she do that?"

Today, I am convinced that the June family, the family I have created in Hang The Moon, the second book in The Sixties Trilogy, owes a lot to the Peacock family in The Ponder Heart. They aren't the same, not by a long shot, but... they are, in their crazy southern way. I hear echoes today, and I recognize a legacy being passed down because Eudora Welty wrote and published this book, and I reached out and said yes, I love this, I want this, I want to learn; teach me.

I didn't see this as I wrote the draft, which I started in the mid-nineties. But I see it today. What an influence Welty has been on my work.

Influences. Do you know yours? Who and/or what are they? Can you see them in your work, whatever kind of work you do? Name them out loud today. It will give strength to your sword arm.

And maybe, portulaca in pie pans.  (I know; it's a cake pan. I revised. :>)

I'm headed to Knoxville, this minute. Tomorrow I work at the Knoxville Children's Festival of Reading at World's Fair Park. I speak at 11:30 and again at 2:00. Come see me! I'll be talking about influences, for sure, as I introduce Countdown to a brand-new audience in Tennessee.

I am doing the same thing Welty did, in my own way: I am releasing my book, my tender story, into the wide world, not knowing who may need it now, or who might, years after I am gone, come across a dusty old paperback in a used bookstore one day, and say... yes.

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It takes a mighty big incentive to get me to leave home this time of year. A working writer who wants to make her living in the arts -- that's a big incentive. So is the promise of good work, the certainty of learning, and the likelihood of making new friends. And always, there are stories...

Wait for me, Spring! Don't finish blooming before I'm back! I'm home Wed. night, back out again Friday. I've got my 1966 girls with me.

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If you look carefully, you will see the date on the top of this notebook page is February 20, 2005. What you don't see is that I have other notebooks with dates from 1995 on them, and they are all part of my working-out of Hang The Moon, which is a working title for the 1966 novel.
I had finished Each Little Bird That Sings when I was writing in this notebook. It was on the cusp of being published. I had turned my attentions to Hang The Moon, but I was still having trouble getting a grip on it.

On the surface, the novel -- which takes place in 1966 -- is about two girls, cousins, and their trip from Mississippi to Memphis to find Elvis Presley, whom one of them is convinced (with reasonable proof) is her father.

But when I scratch beneath the surface, which I'm compelled to do every time I sit down to write it, I find that this book is just... enormous. It has overwhelmed me for years.

Under that surface story is more than I have been able to capably write about. This story has been asking for expression, and I have been trying to hear it. For fifteen years, ghosts have been whispering to me, revealing the deeper story to me, and I have been saying "not yet, not yet. I can't go there yet."
But it's time to go there now. There comes a point when it's worse not to go there than it is to say yes, and to step up to the plate. Below the surface of this 1966 story, running underneath how much Birdie loves Elvis and Margaret loves the Beatles, is a book about cosmic ideas, deeply-rooted beliefs, and love. There is pain and suffering. And deep, abiding joy as well.I'll be talking about the writing process (well, mine, anyway) tonight at 7pm at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, at the Center for Children's and Young Adult Literature. If you're nearby, I hope you'll come out and tell me what you know about love and hope and courage. I need all these things now, as I navigate this revision of Hang The Moon. I am so looking forward to seeing your faces, hearing your stories, and gathering some of your strength for the days ahead.

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Ain't it the truth. After three days of splashing with this story, too scared to plunge in, trying to be content with dabbling, wading, and finally letting the water lap at my hips, I think finally I'm ready to dive in.
Why are we so scared of starting? What is it that keeps us from snapping on that bathing cap, flinging off the bathrobe that covers our snazzy new suit, and stepping onto the high dive, deep breath, shoulders back, and head held high?

Perhaps we realize how mighty is the pen, how powerful is our story, and know, at least subconsciously, how it will transform us as we commit to put it to paper. Or song. Or canvas. Or dance.
Every book in the Aurora County trilogy was cathartic for me to write. I didn't know they would be, when I wrote them. I just wrote a story and later discovered that Love, Ruby Lavender helped me get in touch with my childhood Mississippi summers and the sense of loss I felt as I left childhood behind.

Each Little Bird That Sings helped me come to terms with a time of great grief and loss in my adult life, and begin to laugh again. The Aurora County All-Stars allowed me to explore the idea that everything is connected, that we are all part of one another, and it gave me a chance to write about civil rights in a way that felt safe to me (Oy, a writer should be safe? This is a topic for another time!), and in doing so it served as a precursor to The Sixties Trilogy, which is decidedly not "safe" territory.
Then, I began Fallout, book one of The Sixties Trilogy. I was unprepared for how autobiographical this book would be. I didn't try to make it biographical, but the story had a mind of its own, and it mapped my interior in such a way that I felt naked writing it and, often, wrung inside out.

The story itself -- the outside story -- is total fiction. But who Franny is, and how she sees herself and the world, and what happens to her heart and mind during the course of the book -- that is an autobiography of my childhood years.

It took such courage (or idiocy) for me to stay at the page as I wrote Fallout, for I could see how mighty is the pen, and how being as honest as I could be with my writing laid me open and raw and vulnerable. But I was compelled to tell this story -- I kept going. And, just as I did with Little Bird, eventually I began laughing. And understanding.
Writing this story made me stronger. So much stronger. I am just beginning to get a glimpse of this. Just as Little Bird healed my broken heart, Fallout has given me compassionate ways to look at my childhood self, to be gentle with her, to laugh with her, and to understand... sometimes in ways I don't want to understand, but still.

It's complicated, and hard to put into words. Mostly, I just wrote a story. Really. ("Just.") The subconscious stuff that happens is just that -- subconscious. I don't really know what's going on there until I can stand back, take a breath, and take a look.

It has been hard to approach 1966, book two, with the knowledge I have of how book one turned me inside out. So I have been tip-toeing in the water, digging my toes into the sand, holding on as the tiny ripples from the big waves wash over my feet on the shore.

Soon I will wade out deeper. This first five days of October has been for paying attention and getting started. How have I gotten started?
I've revisited my first long-ago draft, and have begun to type it into a new document, revising as I go, getting insights as I go, making notes about these insights (using track changes this time -- I am in total mad love with track changes -- what a change, eh?).

I'm also tweaking a family tree. I created it almost fifteen years ago. My understanding of this family has grown in that time, so a good amount of my writing time each day has been devoted to visiting with my very large cast of characters for this book -- the largest cast I've ever assembled -- and remembering who they are and how they serve (and might come to serve) this story. This is the only book I have created a family tree for, and I may never do it again, but for this book it is perfect.
I have also downloaded a play list for the novel. With Fallout, I put together the playlist last, although I listened to songs from the late fifties and early sixties (none after 1962) as I revised. I will make an official playlist for HTM when I'm done with this novel, but I wanted the songs from 1966 to be playing in my head as I wrote, so I listen to them as I do dishes and other tasks around the house (is this writing? :>)

It also helps me, when I'm doing intense emotional work (which writing often is for me) to get out of the house and go somewhere else for even an hour. I've been walking every day. Then, yesterday Jim and I drove into the North Carolina mountains looking for inspiration.

We found it at the John C. Campbell Folk School's Fall Festival in Brasstown, N.C. We were surrounded by stories all day long and into the evening, as we met up with friends for supper at their home in the mountains.
For an entire day, the noise of 1966 and book two of The Sixties Trilogy took a distant seat in my conscious mind and instead of tending it, I basked in the beauty of a fall Georgia mountain day, my beautiful husband, our beautiful friends, and the beauty of having stories told TO me, instead of BY me.

Stories in song, dance, weaving, painting, potting, smithing, caning... there was even a beans and cornbread story yesterday. And a sousaphone! You knew I'd have to bring you a sousaphone story. That's a pretty battered sousaphone, above, eh? Wonder what's its story?
Today is for writing again. Time to wade in... maybe to my shoulders. Oh how mighty is the pen, the story. Indeed.

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Fall 1995. Frederick Community College, Frederick, Maryland. I sat at the long rectangular table with 12 other students and our teacher, a poet from Washington, D.C. named Nancy Johnson. I had been writing and submitting picture book manuscripts for years, and I had the rejection slips to prove it. This class was full of those wanting to write fiction for adults. I wanted to write for children.
"Story is story," said Nancy Johnson. So I signed up and stayed, and in this class HANG THE MOON was born. It started as an assignment Nancy gave us to list (and you wonder why I love listing so) -- list places we had lived, people we had known in those places, and I don't remember the third thing anymore.

Three columns. Then, circle one thing in each column and write a story that ties them together, a made-up story. As I did my listing, a place called to me -- Mississippi -- and a girl jumped out at me... a woman, actually, who was angry. She had a friend who was a self-proclaimed psychic living in an Airstream trailer by the side of the road. She had a boyfriend who did her wrong. She had recently pulled his sorry butt out of the lake and saved him from drowning. She thinks she may be sorry she did this.

What captivated me about this story was two things. First, its voice -- I had no idea who this young woman was, but she had my full attention. She was amazing! The things that came out of her mouth! She was unlike anyone I'd ever invented -- she had pizazz and life and needs and faults. She pushed. She lied. She took my breath away and I loved her with all my heart.

The second thing I loved was Story. This piece was my first glimpse into writing a real story. I still had no idea, really, about plot. I had setting knocked -- WHEN I WAS YOUNG IN THE MOUNTAINS was my go-to book for setting and I had written so many stories (all rejected, although some came close) with that feeling of place. "Quiet books," I learned to call them.

But this! This new exciting thing had the makings of a story, a real story, and I could tell it did. I just had no idea what to do with it next. I had no idea how to frame a story with beginning-middle-end, and what was all that stuff in between supposed to be?

I tucked this little story away -- it was a character sketch, really. But this girl would not shut up. She was insistent. She wanted her story told. I'd wake up thinking about her, I'd fall asleep thinking about her.. and so I got out my notebook and began searching for her.

I wrote page after page of who she might be, all the while working on nice, pretty, slice-of-life stories for children that got rejected and rejected by publishers. Eventually, as I took another class from Nancy (this one a poetry class that birthed what would become LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER), as I read and read children's literature and discovered that my heroine in my Mississippi story would fit right into the world of children's literature if I could only figure out how to help her do it, I began to write her story.

And that's what I'm about to go back to, on October 1. I could write a book on where this story has been and what happened to my feisty heroine. I made her thirteen. I named her Birdie. I gave her a cousin named Margaret. I gave her a mother named Lily Pearl who lives in an Airstream trailer on the side of the road and calls herself Madame Pearls of Wisdom. I gave her an entire family of eccentrics that I also fell in love with. I built a world for Birdie and her thirteen-year-old cousin Margaret to inhabit -- the rich, full, amazing world of 1966 Mississippi.

And then I got stuck. I'm going to detail how I got stuck, unstuck, stuck again, and the convolutions of publishing and bringing this story to life, as I begin again to write for publication what has now become Book Two of the Sixties Trilogy.

My most fervent hope is that I am writer enough to take this story in hand today and tell it. It was larger than my talent -- and my skills -- when I discovered it. Birdie came screaming off the page in 1995, running for me full tilt. She steamrolled right over me. I ran behind her for years and years. Now, in 2009 -- fourteen years later -- maybe I am running right alongside her. I hope so.

So. This morning I made my customary oatmeal -- I haven't eaten breakfast in a long time, and I need to call in all my good living and writing habits. I am doing a read-through of the novel in its various incarnations ("various" is an understatement). I've hauled out the notebooks I've kept over the years that detail this story. I'm going back in time -- my time, and Birdie's.

Years ago, writer friends and I had a running discussion about just whose story this was -- Birdie's or Margaret's. And you know... I don't know. I'll talk about that, too. I'll talk about how the story peters off before it's half through. I'll detail my progress, or lack thereof.

Putting it all here will help me keep going... that's what I hope. And I hope you'll be working on your work-in-progress as well. I hope you'll comment, if you are (or aren't). I'm looking forward to the dialogue about the creative process and just-plain-skill we're hoping to hone as we work forward.

Each book creates its own challenges, its own questions, and its own solutions. Each project demands its own time. I have learned this. I hope, for HANG THE MOON, its time is now.

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