The Furious Spinner

It is raining here. Rain, rain, rain. And rain again. I slept ten hours last night! Yeah! This has been a bizarro week. I finished the first draft of My Little Angel. I did an outline of it. I finally got some sleep. But I feel as though I've been waiting on people all week. Waiting for my agent to read The Blue Tail. Waiting for him to read the first 50 pages of My Little Angel. Waiting for some kind of word on Church of the Old Mermaids. Waiting for word on Blue Honey Clan. Waiting to see the mockups of my new website.

I am not a patient person.

I know: Live in the now, baby.

All right. I'll try. Right now it is raining out. I'm drowsy. Too much sleep—I'm not complaining—and too many dreams. Yesterday we got the first mockups of the new website. We didn't like anything about them. Clearly we did not communicate as well with our web designer as we thought we did. We are now deciding whether we go on or not. We've already put a lot of money into it, but there's no sense throwing good money after bad. We had so many cool things planned for the launch. I guess we could still do the cool things; we'd just do them here. When we interviewed the web designer, I told her that I was quite passionate and very up front about my opinions. It's interesting that when we gave our opinions of the mockups, she said she had never had such an emotional response. I think maybe she couldn't hear what we had to say because she perceived our criticisms as emotional. I'm not really sure what that means, but it comes up often in my life. I give my opinion and people say I'm too emotional. She did not say I was too emotional. I think it must have been difficult for them to hear that we didn't like anything about what they had done. That's gotta be hard. All I could think of was, "oh my god, we did all this work and spent all this money and there's nothing to show for it." These people are brilliant designers, so I hope we can work something out.

Not a tragedy. We'll either go ahead with it or we won't. I wish I could just do design myself. I'm a changin' happenin' gal. Maybe I'll just go and learn html, etc. I know what I want but I don't have the skills to make it happen.

I'm listening to Sheryl Crow singing Stephen McQueen. "I gotta fly. Like Steve McQueen, All I need is a fast machine. I'm gonna make it all right."

Do you remember Bullitt? Did you see it at the theater? Do you remember the chase scene? Of course you do. If you saw it at the theater, you remember the chase scene. Remember how your stomach lurched as he went over those San Francisco hills? Man, that was something. Never seen anything like it before or since.

He was such a beautiful man.

Of course speed killed him. (His cancer may have been caused by exposure to asbestos from his racing suits.)

I like nothing better than getting into a car and just driving. I've always loved it. That sense of freedom. The American dream. One of them. Not the best thing for the planet. Wonder what we're all trying to get away from? Get to?

Do you ever get tired of trying to succeed? Tired of doing? As Will Shetterly pointed out, writing is not as difficult as digging ditches. However, it is not the easiest way to try to make a living. You know what, I don't want to make a living. I want to live. Do you ever wonder about the whole set up of our world? Why are people working, working, working just so they can have money to buy food, shelter, etc? All this commerce. All this capitalism. And everything counts on it.

This week, I was part of a blog festival for one of my publishers. It's a great idea, having teens ask writers questions and then we answer them. Bravo! Each of the writers has her own page on the blog fest website too. Imagine my surprise when I went to my page and discovered a cosmetics ad. I thought, "oh shit." So I wrote to the organizer and said I didn't remember agreeing to have an ad on my page. I could see if they were advertising our books. That's cool. But an ad for cosmetics, no less, with some made-up woman batting her fake eyelashes at the teens? Anyway, he removed the ad from my page but he couldn't remove it from the homepage because this cosmetics company is one of the sponsors.

I hate, hate, hate, hate the corporatization of the world.

I'm a freakin' Dona Quixote, aren't I?

Okay, what else can I do for a living? Not that I'm doing writing for a living. I've never made a living from writing. One year maybe. I just want to tell my stories. Write my stories. Can't someone leave my meals on the table (and it was still hot) and give me a place to live? Can't everyone have that, please? In Gaia Websters, that's the life Gloria lived. Her community provided her with housing, out in the desert, and made her meals for her. She had the life, her and Cosmo, the coyote who hung out with her. One of my FAQs is who is my favorite character? I think Gloria is probably it. I would be her in a heartbeat. Probably. Except for one little thing which I won't tell you about in case you haven't read it yet—I don't want to spoil that part of it.

Gloria is so cool. She can do practically anything. For one thing, she is a healer. And she is completely and utterly herself. She is not sentimental but she loves deeply. (She has a great sex life, too, by the way, something a friend of mine criticized me about. "Why do your women always have such great sex lives? It's not realistic." I said, "Maybe not for you..." And then I added, "My characters go through a lot of crap. Why should I give them a lousy sex life on top of all that?") I was in love with her lover, Benjamin. As my mother used to say, he could put his shoes under my bed any time. (Unfortunately, Gloria falls in love with someone else, much to my annoyance.) I asked Mario once which one of my characters was most like me and he said Gloria, except for that one little thing I'm not telling you about. I thought that was a great compliment. Even though I don't see it.

Where was I going with this? I don't remember. Fantasizing about my perfect life?

I am so fortunate in so many ways. I just wish the world were a little different. Ain't asking much.

Now I've got to figure out what I'm writing next. I need to get back to work on I, Assassin, which is the book I went to D.C. to research. I'm 150 pages into it. I think I'll be throwing all those pages out and starting from scratch. It'll be a difficult book to write and I'm not sure I'm up to it now. Then there's a novel without a title about a healer in training and the young man who goes along to protect her. (All healers get a protector, whether they're a male healer or female healer.) The book doesn't have a title so you know I can't start writing it until I have one. Then there's The Lady Unleashed, my werewolf book. If any of you read and loved Mark of the Beast (by me), it'll be along those lines except it's from the view point of "the lady."

Then there's the story that came to me in the car a couple of days ago. The main character just appeared to me, an image of her, a feeling of her, so clear it was almost as though I was her. I don't know her name for sure but I think it might be Coconut. Coco for short. (Yes, she might have a sister called Ginger or a brother called Macaroon, Mac for short.) She's probably 15 or 16 years old. She is crazy about cookies. All kinds of cookies. She and her mom used to make cookies together before her mom got depressed. And now she makes them herself. She knows the lore of cookiedom. She decides to start a cookie club at school. The image that came to me was of her sitting alone in a classroom after school. She's holding one of those metal dome lunchboxes, only it's red and it's filled with cookies. She's waiting for other kids to come to her club. She announced the time and place and put up posters around the school. She's cute. She wears pointy black-framed glasses. Her dress it short, but not too short. Maybe plaid. Her straight black hair sticks out here and there where she's got it pinned and pulled away from her face. She holds the lunch box close to her as she waits. She's not nervous, maybe a little excited. No one shows up. After a while, Coco opens the lid of the lunch box, pulls out one cookie, and looks at it. Then she sits there and slowly eats it and enjoys it throughly. That one's called The Cookie Club.

Mario's home. Gotta get me some afternoon hugs.

Later, my gators. 2 comments

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

First Chapter of My Little Angel