MY SUPER-SWEET SIXTEENTH CENTURY!!

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE A TO Z BLOGGER CHALLENGE!

                                                           BRING IT ON!


 Last April I successfully completed the A to Z Challenge, and it was exhausting but also a lot of fun, and so this April I'm going to go for it again.  The Challenge is a month-long commitment to post a theme-related blog a day, all the way though the alphabet, every day except Sunday, and to meet and support other bloggers who are doing the same.  You ask, Why? and I reply, Why not?  It's a chance to be part of a blogging community and to spend a month diving deep into an obsession of my choice.
     Last year my theme was My Favorite Things, and so I was thinking that this year I should round it all out by choosing Things I Hate, but frankly I was feeling uninspired.  The things I hate are, after all, the same things that everyone hates: telemarketers.  Rubbernecking delays.  I was just getting started thinking up some of the posts and I was already boring myself to death.
     But then this week I was talking with Yvonne Ventresca (who was the one who told me about this Challenge in the first place), and somehow the subject of the 16th century came up, and I was telling her about how I'll read almost anything about that era that I can get my hands on, and she came up with the brilliant idea of making that my A to Z Challenge theme.  And I immediately got so energized that in the few days since then, I've come up with the subject matter for each one of my 26 themed posts, and I've even got the name for my themed challenge.  I'm calling it (as you already know from the title of this post):

      MY SUPER-SWEET 16TH CENTURY
   

  
     It's not that I wish I'd lived then.  God, no.  I would have been poor, as all my ancestors have undoubtedly been, and I would have been female, because it's hard enough to imagine all that time travel without tacking on gender-switching, and that combination would have ensured that I had a life expectancy of less than 30 years (yes, really) and probably would have died painfully during or just after childbirth, when the infections set in.  Go read a biography of any man of the 1500's who wasn't a royal (the royals had state-of-the-art medical care, although that didn't save poor Jane Seymour).  Chances are that your chosen commoner married at least twice, and more likely three times, after his (much younger) wives died.  Repeatedly giving birth in those days was a more hazardous occupation than the daily physical work engaged in by any peasant, male or female.
     So what is it about that century that so fascinates me?  I think of it as the time when the collective human brain began to yawn, stretch, and fully rouse itself; to tentatively recognize that experience and observation could trump the accepted wisdom of centuries, or even millennia, gone by.  How do we know that the human body is controlled by the four humors?  What if it isn't?  How do we know that the earth is the center of the universe?  What if it isn't?  How do we know that witchcraft can cause plagues and crop failures?  What if it can't?  Maybe, just maybe, there's a way we can find out.  It was the dawn of what we now call scientific thought.  And it led to the 17th-century Enlightenment - also known as the Age of Reason - and, eventually, to space travel, the Internet, and - best of all - this very blog you're reading.
     I've decided to focus each of my 26 April blog posts on a different 16th-century person.  Some of them are people I knew of before I started researching for this Challenge, but most of them aren't.  To keep things interesting, I've come up with a few rules:
     1.  No European monarchs.  No Henry VIII, no Elizabeth I, none of those folks.
     2.  No incredibly famous people that everyone already knows something about.  No Michelangelo, no Leonardo da Vinci, no Galileo, no Shakespeare. 
     3.  No conquistadors of any nationality, because I'm too conflicted about them.  No Hernan Cortez.
     4.  No religious leaders, for much the same reasons.  No Martin Luther.  I make only one exception, and it's for someone no one has ever heard of, but you'll have to wait until I get to U for the details.
     5.  As many women as I could reasonably include, which isn't easy when you're excluding royals, because not that many nonroyal women made it into the pages of history books.  But there were some, and I'm going to offer a sampling of six of them.

     So there you have it.  That's what this blog will consist of for the month of April, and I hope it will be as entertaining as it is informative.  So, would you like to join me in the Challenge?  I wish you would!  You don't even need to have a theme if you don't want to, although I think it makes it more fun and will probably bring you more followers.  C'mon!  It'll be a blast!!

FISH GOTTA SWIM, BIRDS GOTTA FLY...

     ...and sooner or later even the most avoidant bloggers (hi there!) have to overcome their resistance

and get back to blogging.  And let me say this about that.  I really, really loathe sitting around waiting to hear back from a literary agent.  I also really, really loathe bitterly cold weather that requires fortitude to even venture out into.  And what have I got to look forward to over the next couple of weeks?  BINGO!!  A two-for-one special!  So why would I want to inflict my misery on a wonderful person like yourself, when you've done nothing wrong beyond innocently stumbling across my blog?  I mean, even I have some standards of decency.
     I do have a couple of things to look forward to during the remainder of the godforsaken month of February, and believe me, I'm hoarding those things like gold.  A small dinner party tomorrow night.  Tickets to a play next weekend.  Lunch with one friend on a weekday.  Maybe breakfast with another.  And I even have a fabulous piece of news.  My son - this guy -

- who is somehow going to graduate law school in May and be released on the unsuspecting world - this very same son has gotten the post-graduation, post-bar exam job he most wanted, and he got it solely because he worked very hard and earned it.  And I don't really see how it could be possible for any parent to be prouder.
     But after all, it's all about ME, not about him, and as for ME, it looks like the rest of this month is going to really suck, so, yeah.  Don't even bother reading my blog until March rolls around.  Word to the wise.  Just leave me alone.  You won't regret it.

     See this woman?  Well, just picture her bundled up in fifteen sweaters, gloves, a hat, and a down jacket with a hood, and voila!  You're lookin' at me.

p.s.  Eureka!  I just learned that there is reason to hope that I and others from my planet may someday be able to communicate with earthlings!  Looky here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/13/introji-emojis-for-introverts_n_6678960.html?  Noncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067.  Now, that's something to celebrate!
 

NEWS FROM THE PAST 24 HOURS

     Last night the Superbowl was played, although you probably missed it because it never gets much hype.  Today, though, you just couldn't get away from the Children's Book Awards announcements, am I right?  I mean, I love children's books as much as the next guy, but doesn't there have to be a limit somewhere?
     Anyway.  Tonight for my own amusement, and possibly even for yours, I drew up my own handy little compare/contrast chart for these two notable events and their respective fields of endeavor:

1. FOOTBALL: Everyone in America knows who won the Superbowl last night. 
    CBA: People in the industry know who won the CBAs today.                    

2. FOOTBALL: Football players have uniforms.
    CBA: CB authors have sweatpants for the formal occasions when they need to change out of their pajamas.                     

3. FOOTBALL: Celebrities in other fields don't get to play on NFL teams just because they
think it would be fun to try their hands at pro football.
   CBA: Enough said.

4. FOOTBALL: Physical strength and agility tend to carry the day.
    CBA: Physical strength and agility tend to arouse suspicion.                        

 5. FOOTBALL: There is an off-season.
     CBA: [hysterical laughter]                           

6. FOOTBALL: football players work really hard.                
    CBA: CB authors work really hard.

7. FOOTBALL: Professional players and coaches earn millions of dollars a year.
    CBA: Except for a tiny fraction of the most successful, professional CB authors don't earn enough
  money to live on.

8. FOOTBALL: Women exist solely as decorative objects.
    CBA: In CB writing and publishing, women exist at the top of every category.

9. FOOTBALL: People from every walk of life identify with their hometown teams.                    
    CBA:  Non-authors don't identify with authors, no  matter where they live. But sometimes magic
 occurs, and readers identify with characters who don't live anywhere except within the pages of
 a book.  And that makes it all worth it.

A SHORT PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

    



If you're like me, you read a lot, which means you know a lot of words - what they mean, how they're spelled - but don't necessarily know how to pronounce them all, which means that you're embarrassed to use them in conversation.  Well, if you're one of those people, then I'm about to change your life as mine was just changed yesterday. Because yesterday, my friends, I stumbled across the most amazing website ever created.  Are you ready?  Then go to www.howjsay.com.  Now type in a word... any word, as long as it's one that would be found in the dictionary.  And lastly, feast your ears on the cultured, slightly British, disembodied voice pronouncing it for you!!!  Is that the most awesome thing you've ever experienced?  It certainly was for me.  I started with cochineal, which is the subject of the book I'm reading and which led me to the site in the first place, but then I went on to immediately plow through nascent, reconnoiter, insouciant, and a host of others.  Not that those words come up in every conversation, but you never known when the situation might arise, and isn't it always best to be prepared?
     You're very, very welcome for this incredibly useful snippet.  Let's all pronounce our words correctly from now on, shall we?  Oh, and that reminds me of s a story.
     It was 1998.  My daughter was two years old, and my son was nine, and HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE had just been released by Scholastic in the United States.  My son had read it and loved it, and somehow I learned that J.K. Rowling herself was going to be signing copies of the book at my local Borders bookstore.  For some reason I can't now recall, my son couldn't go, and my husband couldn't go, and I could go to try to get the book signed for Nathan, but I had to bring the baby with me.  Which was fine, really, because even though I knew there would be a tremendously long line outside the store, it was warm and sunny out, and I went equipped with all of my Mommy Stuff: crayons and drawing pads (yes, my daughter was a budding artist even then) and snacks and books and who knows what else.  Well, the line was even longer than I had anticipated, and after waiting for two or three hours in the parking lot we were turned away before even getting close to the store itself.  And all of that would have actually been okay, if it weren't for the man on line directly behind me.
     Oh, he seemed nice enough, and he had brought his three school-aged children, and they all seemed to be having a great time together, and so on and so forth.  But then.  Then he took out his copy of the book we were all waiting to have signed, and he proceeded to read aloud from it to his kids.  AND HE THOUGHT THAT "HERMIONE" WAS PRONOUNCED HER-ME-OWN.
     I can listen to someone say HER-ME-OWN once, twice, perhaps ten times.  But it was relentless.  I tried to ignore it, but he was reading very loudly, as if pleased with his prowess.  Thank God, my daughter was being extremely well-behaved, which helped, but not enough.  My neighbor read on and on and on, and it began to feel to me as if every other word he read was Hermione's name, and no matter how I braced myself, each time it felt like fingernails scraping on a blackboard.  HER-ME-OWN.  HER-ME-OWN.  I could think of no way to correct him without (1) embarrassing him in front of his children and (2) screaming like a lunatic, so I just stood there for several eternities, confining the screaming to my own head, until finally we all got sent home.
     You see the lesson here?  Don't be that guy on line saying HER-ME-OWN.  Whenever you come across a word in a book that you don't know how to pronounce, what do you do?  That's right.  You go directly to www.howjsay.com and look it up.  And someday, someone standing on a line behind you will thank you. 

I DID IT!!

     Well, I did some of it, anyway.  Here are some things I actually did yesterday morning:

     1. Completed revisions to my manuscript.
     2. Composed a short email to the agent who asked to see them.
     3. Attached the manuscript to the email.
     4. Spent about ten minutes in utter dysfunctional panic.
     5. Hit "send."

Now here are some of the things I've done since then, but only in the privacy of my own little head:

     1. Received The Call from the agent, who is so overcome by the sheer brilliance of my book that she can barely stammer out her list of superlatives to describe it. I wait patiently as she attempts to regain some measure of self-control. I can afford to be generous.
     2. Watched with interest as the bidding war swirled around me, yet somehow retained my humility. (How rare is that?)
     3. Spent my handsome advance on long-neglected home improvement projects.
     4. Considered whom I might ask to write cover blurbs.
     5. Worked - just a little - on the book club and school study guides.
     6. Announced to friends and family, who have been hearing for twenty years that I've been writing books but have given up on anything ever coming of it, that I have a book that will actually be published soon, thank you very much.
     7. Prepped my presentation, entitled "YA's Own Grandma Moses," for next summer's annual New Jersey SCBWI conference.
     8. Been nominated for the Newbery. Okay, fine. Won.

     It's been a heck of a weekend!

A.S. KING'S GLORY O'BRIEN'S HISTORY OF THE FUTURE: REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

     Some novelists serve you the literary equivalent of comfort food.  They tread familiar territory, create characters that aren't that different from everyone you know.  During the course of the story they'll shake things up a little bit, because that's what novelists are required to do, but in the end they focus on reassuring you that the world is pretty much the place you always thought it was, and that everything is going to turn out okay.
     A.S. King is not that kind of novelist.  Is there such a thing as discomfort food?  Because if there is, that's her specialty.  All your go-to dishes are off the menu at this restaurant.  In fact, there is no menu.  You just walk in, sit down, and assume that whatever food you've never even considered trying is what the waiter is going to bring you.  And that once you've swallowed your squeamishness, you're going to eat every bite on your plate and then lick off all the sauce that remains.

    
     Glory is mere days away from her high school graduation, and has made no plans beyond that event: no college, no job, no waiting period, no nothing.  Since Glory's mother committed suicide 13 years earlier, Glory has been stuck in the present tense, as has her father.  Both of them seem to believe that by having allowed Darla O'Brien to slip away from them, they have both forfeited the right to a personal future.
     Glory's friend/not friend Ellie isn't in a great situation either.  Her mother, who has never been known to take no for an answer, decided years ago that Ellie would be homeschooled by her, but now doesn't seem interested in declaring Ellie ready to graduate.  So Glory and Ellie do what any teenagers would do under similar circumstances.  They mix  mummified bat powder into beer and drink it.  I wish they would have talked to me first, because every time I've done that, strange things have happened, but teenagers are just so impulsive, aren't they?  So next thing Glory and Ellie know, when they look at someone (a stranger, a classmate, anyone) they can see (sometimes) that person's past, and (sometimes) that person's future.  Except that, oddly, they don't seem to see the same kinds of scenarios as each other.  The things Ellie sees mostly involve the sex life of the person she's looking at, while the things Glory sees mostly involve war.  She sees past wars through the eyes of long-dead participants in them,  but increasingly, she sees glimpses from what she gradually comes to understand is a very specific future war- a second American Civil War, fifty years in the future, waged by men against women and set off by a backlash against increasing progress in women's rights.  And ironically, it's her ability to foresee this nationwide catastrophe that will furnish Glory, at last, with a future all her own.
     This is not my favorite A.S. King novel, in part because her focus here seems so intensely single-minded: all women in the United States are in danger from some men, and woe to us if those men are able to seize more power than they already have.
     The statistics about sexual assault against women in this country are appalling.  Colleges routinely protect assaulters rather than victims, lest the truth get out and hurt their application numbers.  A young woman walking down the street in New York for 10 hours dressed casually in jeans and T-shirt receives more than 100 unprovoked leers, catcalls, and angry comments when she ignores the men who are crudely trying to get her attention.  And over the course of several decades, how many men knowingly covered up Bill Cosby's hobby of drugging and then raping women?
     And yet...  there is a rule of law in this country.  It's terribly flawed, but it's there.  As opposed to, say, El Salvador, where a poor, uneducated woman can get sentenced to prison for 30 years if she has a miscarriage and cannot disprove that it was the result of an attempted (illegal) abortion.  Or Afghanistan, where marriages to much older men are commonly forced on barely-pubescent girls who are beaten, or worse, if they try to escape.
     I don't think America's second civil war will be fought over the rights of women.  I think if it comes, it will be about race, much as the first one was, because in the past 150 years we just haven't  evolved enough to understand the consequences of continuous mass oppression.
     Not that the merits of this book depend on my views of whether the scenario it depicts is likely to occur.  I do feel, though, that King gives some of her characters and their development unchar-acteristically short shrift as she lets herself veer toward didacticism.
     Still, A.S. King remains A.S. King: wildly inventive, entirely original, with no speck of sentimentality but oceans of big, generous heart.  Every word she writes is worth reading.
     So.  I would like to pass my copy of GLORY O'BRIEN on to someone who has just read my description of it and now desperately wants to read it.  I'm doing this by way of a contest, and to enter, all you have to do is leave a comment telling me why.  What about this story speaks to you?  What do you hope to find in it?  I'm not going to post a deadline; that's going to depend on the quantity and quality of responses I get.  But I will say that once I declare the contest over, if I choose your answer over all others, I'll send you my copy of the book no matter where you live.  Do you see any down side to this?  No, you don't, because there isn't any.  I can't wait to read your comments.

GIFTED

     Yesterday a co-worker walked into my office, handed me a sealed manila envelope, and announced that it was a belated holiday gift for me from Bill.  When I remarked on the packaging, my colleague said, "You didn't think he would have wrapped it, did you?"
     Well, no, I guess I didn't, now that you mention it.  I'd worked with Bill (not his real name) for about 18 years, the last three as his supervisor, until he retired last spring. Bill was my nerd-friend, but I haven't stayed in touch with him, partly because he's not easy to stay in touch with since his retirement: he does not possess a cell phone, and up until very recently, did not possess a home computer or email account.  Bill turned 60 last year, and has never lived anywhere but the house in which he grew up; his parents died many years ago, and he remains there alone.  He is an active member of his local Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe societies, and he celebrates both of their birthdays.  He travels frequently to New York to visit museums, libraries, and certain select bars, at which he claims to be a favorite of all the barmaids.  He also occasionally travels to other countries, accompanied by his aunt. He haunts used bookstores, where he snatches up anything he can find about his particular interests: General George C. Custer and certain segments of classical Roman history.  Bill's sexuality is undeclared and perhaps unknown, even to him.  He prides himself on his ancient British lineage, his legendary stinginess, and his vast knowledge of esoteric subjects like the Battle of Hastings.
     In light of all the above, you probably can understand why I approached this gift with a little trepidation.  But I bravely opened the envelope, and found a pair of socks.  In fact, this pair of socks:

    Yes, previously unbeknownst to me, there evidently exists a House of Hotsox (hotsox.com, in case you want to look it up) that produces a "Famous Artist Series."  Bill knows that Vermeer is my favorite painter.  I'm sure that's why he bought me these socks; perhaps he thought they were beautiful.  One never knows with Bill.  But to me, these socks are truly disturbing.  That's a reproduction of Vermeer's "Girl With Pearl Earring," by the way,

and I don't know whether you can see it in the photo, but the sock actually does contain a small 3-D "pearl" - it's that spot of light to the right of her jaw, just above the center of her collar.  I don't want to impugn Bill's generosity by suggesting that it might not be a genuine  pearl, but I do have my doubts. The price tag, which Bill neglected to remove, says $8.00, and I haven't priced pearls lately but that does seem on the low side for one, let alone two (yep, one on each sock.  I just checked to make sure.)   In any event, though, this sock-girl to me represents not so much Girl With a Pearl Earring as Undead Girl With a Pearl Earring.  Can you see the ghastly colors, the sickly pallor of her skin, the blood-red of her lips?  What, or whom, has she been eating to produce that garish hue?  Even her turban is red instead of blue, as if to enhance the zombie motif.  And instead of directly meeting the eyes of the viewer, as the original Girl does, the sock-girl has a fixed, unfocused look in her eyes, as if piercing the veil that separates this world from the next.
     Do I dare wear these?  Reader: would you?  Or would you fear looking down sometime around midday and seeing blood seeping out of your shoes?  Tearing the shoes off only to find you have a smaller complement of toes than you started the day with?
     Maybe for now I'll just leave them in my sock drawer.  And keep it very tightly closed.

p.s.  A few updates 2 weeks later:  I obtained Bill's newly established email address so I could write and thank him for the socks.  From his response, I now know that: 1. He LIKED the socks.  He said he wanted to get a pair for himself too, but they didn't have them in men's sizes.  2.  His British lineage dates back way before I thought it did.  He can trace his first patrilineal ancestor, the one who came from France to England, to the Domesday Book record of 1086.  This information, and much more like it, was not solicited by me in any way.  Evidently, knowing a thousand years of one's own family history tends to leave one slightly unhinged.  Duh.