Spring arrives with a crash

Pre-collision skiing at Scottish Lakes

Happy spring!

A lot has happened since my last post, including smashing into a tree while skiing at one of my favorite places, Scottish Lakes High Camp. Luckily I walked away with only a minor knee sprain. It hurt like h*ll when it happened but it could have been a whole lot worse. So while I feel dumb (Hello! why did I not steer away from that stupid tree?) I also feel lucky.

Meanwhile, things have been going a little more smoothly in the writing world. Here's the latest:

*Two articles that I wrote came out in the spring issue of Harbors Magazine. Check out my Portfolio page to see them, or better yet, read the article about kayaking the southern Gulf Islands right now!

*Also I'm excited to announce that my essay, Once More to Wire Lake, is going to be published in Literary Mama's Father's Day Issue. I have literally been trying to write this essay since I was about 12 years old. This is my fourth version of it and I finally got it right. It's all about my family's adventures in the high Sierras when I was a wee lass, focusing particularly on my dad's motivation for bringing us there.

*For National Poetry Month, I recited one of my favorite poems for Richard Hugo House, which is posting a poem a day on YouTube for the month of April. The best part of it is that Snuffy, my oh-so-literary pug was part of the proceedings. Check out my video now, or look at Joe Lambert's Hugo House blog to see all of them!

*I'm hard at work on my novel for middle readers, and though it's going slowly (what else is new?) it is going!

*My spring Hugo House class, Roughing It: Write a Draft of Your Book in Six Weeks, is filled to the brim with eager writers ready for the masochistic challenge of writing a book-length manuscript in just over a month. I will be encouraging them with wine and chocolate. Thanks to student, and writer in his own right, Evan Peterson for the shout-out in his blog, Poemocracy.

March Madness

My niece has clearly inherited my sense of style

Hello darlings. Hope you are weathering the weather out there.

Bad weather is always conducive to creativity for me, and I've been particularly productive during these late winter months. Here are a few things brewing.

First and foremost, my spring class at Richard Hugo House is now open for registration and it's already half full! Find out more on my classes page or go directly to the Hugo House class catalog and sign up for it there. It's called "Roughing It: Write a Draft of Your Book in Just Six Weeks."

I hope to be speaking again this fall at the Write on the Sound conference on the topic of blogging, this time with an all-star panel. Stay tuned!

I've really enjoyed the Novel Revision class I'm taking at Hugo House and highly recommend Joni Sensel as a teacher.

I've added a new element to my writing routine: doing fifteen minutes of free-writing every day in my notebook by hand. Author and writing teacher Priscilla Long convinced me of the importance of this in her great book, The Writer's Portable Mentor, and now it's a habit I can't live without.

I was thrilled recently to receive two comments on my blog that talked about how much my book had meant to people. Here they are:

"In January a friend and I took a trip to Chicago after my boyfriend of nearly 3 years broke up with me and in a used book store. I wasn't looking for anything in particular but stumbled upon breakup babe and read it in about a week. I couldn't put it down! Being that when I started to notice distance in my relationship I attempted to start a blog about it your book really hit a nerve with me! I loved it and it gave me so much hope for my future in dating and life in general. It made me laugh, made me cry, but most of all made me hopeful that what everyone is saying is true, time heals!! Thank you for your wonderful writing and sharing your story of love, loss, and being single." - posted by Sammie on 2/13

"I stumbled across your book in my public library and am so happy I did. I could not put it down as I could relate to it on many levels. So yes, four years later, it is still helping to mend broken hearts and put some things into perspective. Thank you for sharing and putting it out there. It is nice to know one is not alone in troubled times." - posted by A New Fan on 10/18

Thanks so much for your comments Sammie and "A New Fan!"

Funtastic February News

Happy February all! Here are a few things that are shaking in my literary world lately:

• Saw poet extraordinaire Kate Lebo read at Mary Schile's world-famous pie party
• Am taking a class called Novel Revision from Joni Sensel at Richard Hugo House
• Have two travel articles coming out in the spring issue of "Harbors" Magazine (the new inflight air magazine for Kenmore Air)
• Am teaching a reprise of my popular class "Roughing It: Write a Draft of Your Book in Just Six Weeks" class at Hugo House this spring. It hasn't been formally announced yet but the class will be on Thursday nights starting on April 7.
• Coached a writer on her suspensful entry for the Ninth Annual Speculative Fiction Contest (good luck, Karyn!)
• Have been reading my friend and colleague Waverly Fitzgerald's book "Slow Time" and finding it both intriguing and practical.

Happy New Year and Happy New Blog!

Yo peeps! I got a new blog! Undoubtedly every writer who uses Blogger is using this bookish template, but whatevs.

It's a new year, time for a new blog. Notice I've imported all the entries from SparklySparkly (RIP) for posterity. I still need to flesh this baby out with all the gadgets and whatnot but here it is for now.

*NEWS* *NEWS* *NEWS*
Uh, let's see.

In travel news, I  made it back alive from Costa Rica. Had a lovely trip, complete with monkeys, toucans, sloths, poison dart frogs, and lingering stomach ailment. Went whitewater rafting, strolled through the rainforest canopy on suspension bridges strung hundreds of feet over rushing rivers, swam at the foot of waterfalls, and was awakened at dawn by howler monkeys starting their day.

Also ate lots of "casado," the typical Costa Rican dish of rice, beans, plantains, salad, and some protein or other. Drank lots of "Imperial" - one of five (or so) beers made in Costa Rica. We suffered through some torrential rain on the Carribbean coast but got in one very sunny day there which Dave and I spent strolling through the lovely Parque Nacional de Cahuita.


Photo courtesy of El Viajero Contento


 It not only featured stunning white sand beaches but monkeys and sloths at close range plus lots of magnificent blue morpho butterflies.

Perhaps I'll write more about the trip shortly. Meanwhile, in writing news, I have a class coming up this spring at Hugo House - the ever-popular Roughing It: Write a Rough Draft of Your Book in Six Weeks. So stay tuned for details about that!

I also recently submitted an essay for a travel-writing contest at Wanderlust and Lipstick, a fun travel website geared towards the ladies. I dusted off an essay I'd started three years ago about my family's trips to the Sierras when I was a kid, in particular our annual backpacking trip to a place called Wire Lake. Here's how it begins:

It is half an hour into our first ever family backpacking trip and things are not going well. My little sister, age six, is crying. On top of her pack, her decrepit stuffed elephant Freddie bobs around with a little stuffing poking out of his pink, earless head.

“What’s the matter?” says my father, as if it isn’t obvious. Since leaving the trailhead, we have been hiking upwards at a suicidally steep angle with heavy packs on our shoulders. It is hot. It is dusty. On a normal Saturday, Erica and I would be living the high life: roller-skating, reading books, or watching Brady Bunch reruns. Now, inexplicably, we are being tortured...

A New YouTube Sensation is Discovered!

I am getting ready to unveil a new blog.

Yes, I know, you are quivering with anticipating right about now! It's not really that exciting. I'm just going to rid of my "professional" Wordpress site and merge it with my personal blog. There's really not much difference between them except the professional site is BOORING.

Anyway, with me the personal is the professional. Whatever that means.

Now, on to news. There is none, really. Except that I "YouTubed" myself for the first time the other day and found something exciting. ("YouTubed" meaning I typed my own named into YouTube to see what came up).

It's a video showing the March 2009 installment of Cheap Wine and Poetry at Richard Hugo House (now Cheap Beer and Prose) during which yours truly gives a dyno-mite appearance! The whole video is worth watching if you're interested in Seattle's literary scene, but if you really must just see MY part the fast-forward to minute 3:32 to hear me being introduced; minute 3:56 if you must hear me right away!)



You don't get to hear much of my talk  but you do get to see all the parts where people laughed the most! in this video I'm reading from BreakupBabe: A Novel, but I also read from two of my  sixth grade novels that night, entitled "A Life to Love" and "Roxana's World." Maybe those will be on YouTube someday too!

Anyway, I just realized I am late for a pedicure. More soon.

xo

BreakupBabe lives on



BreakupBabe at Half-Price Books

 On a busy intersection in lower Queen Anne just now, around the corner from my condo, stood a guy in a hooded sweatshirt. Slung around his chest was tennis racket that he was "playing" like a guitar. "Air tennis racket" you might call it.

He had headphones on, and besides playing air tennis racket, he was also playing air flute, air drums, and other associated air-instruments.He was doing all this in the pouring rain.

I see this guy around Queen Anne all the time. At coffeshops, hanging out on benches, almost always listening to his headphones. Always puffing on a cigarette. Always alone.

He looks normal enough--even handsome in a shaggy, graying way, kind of like my arrogant old writing teacher Leonard Michaels (RIP Lenny, I wrote a novel IN SPITE OF YOU!) - but after seeing him a few times I realized that this guy was maybe just a little bit off.

Not that he ever did anything too strange or acted crazy, except for maybe muttering to himself on occasion. (I realized, at some point, that he lived in subsidized housing a couple blocks away from me.)

So when I saw him acting fully delusional today my heart broke. I thought: he's been holding it together and now he's lost it. He's not taking his meds. He took too many meds. But what do I know? Absolutely nothing, that's what.

On the other hand, on this gray, dreary, wet day part of me felt a little happy for him that he was so happy. Because he was. He looked blissed out and oblivious to anything else except the music he was pretending to make.

Still. What happens when the music ends?

In happier news, GalPal #3 and her husband "Henry" spotted - at their daughters' gymnastics meet - a woman hungrily devouring a novel called BreakupBabe. They fell upon her, regaling her with tales of how they are prominently featured in the book and how the novel was started in their house!

They didn't go so far as to offer their autographs but they might as well have for all the bragging they did. She told them she worked at "Empire Corporation" (ahem) and was going through a divorce, and a friend told her she knew just the book for her.

Now isn't that dandy that at four years old, BreakupBabe is still helping hearts mend? Why look, I even found a copy on the shelf at Half Price Books last week!

Snow in the Cascades, Sun in the Gulf Islands

Fall colors in the forest

Fall made its shivery entrance into my bones this weekend by visiting SNOW upon me during my much-anticipated three-day backpacking trip to Horsehoe Basin in the Pasayten Wilderness.

No amount of layers or meditation ("You are lying on a sunny beach in Zihuatenejo, Mexico; it is 90 degrees. You are lying on a..etc etc".) could keep me warm in my super high-tech but NOT WARM ENOUGH, DAMN IT Big Agnes sleeping bag.

Dave and I both squeezed into my sleeping bag a couple times, which warmed me up but was ultimately unsustainable as a way to actually sleep. So he heroically let me sleep in his bag at six in the morning, and after I added a layer of rain pants on top of my soft-shell pants and long underwear; after I added another shirt underneath my polypro top, my fleece jacket, and my down jacket, then, and only then, did I warm up enough to fall asleep for two hours. (Let's not forget the two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, and two hats I was also wearing).

In Horseshoe Basin

So I hightailed it out of there after only one night - even though the trip was planned for three, and it's a five-hour drive to get there (well, seven hours if you take bad advice on which way to go, which I did on the way there!) But at least I did get to see the desolately beautiful Horseshoe Basin, high and mighty at 7000 feet, especially rugged as snow and wind alternated with sun.

Before that I had a nice bit of summer on Gabriola Island (in British Columbia), and then sea kayaking in the Gulf Islands with Gabriola Sea Kayaking. Naturally the weather was beautiful until the morning we were supposed to set off in our kayaks, when pouring rain and gale force winds delayed our launch. But then it cleared up nicely. I'll write a little more about that trip soon, when the sensations have fully returned to my limbs. For now, here is a photo or two.

Blackberry Point, Valdez Island