Maggie Stiefvater's Blog: Maggie Stiefvater, page 377

The Dream Thieves Video! And lots of fiddly stuff

This is a post full of pictures and videos and things about The Dream Thieves. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, this post is going to be, like, a millionty words long. I shall make a bulleted list.

1. I have made a video for The Dream Thieves. Every year I make a video for my books, and generally it is an animated trailer of some sort. This year it is . . . well, I will just call it a video and you can tell me what it is. I swear that it has bearing on the novel. Here it is.

 

2. The music for the trailer, as always, is available for free download here on the website.

3. The first wallpaper for the book is also on the site in the same place:


4. I swear the book is not about cars, mostly. It is magic and kissing and darker things after dark. It really is my favorite thing of all, even including The Scorpio Races, and that is saying a lot.

5. As always, if you pre-order the book from the Fountain Bookstore, I will be signing and doodling in your copy. This applies to every copy of The Dream Thieves ordered up until its release date, Sept. 17. They ship worldwide, and all of the orders are being handled personally by the owner this year. This is what I will be doing inside each of them:


5b. Except I have been thinking of changing my signature to something more legible from now on. So it might be a new one I have designed. You see, I have been practicing.


6. I know that overseas shipping is a pain, so for the first year ever, I'm pairing up with a UK bookstore. Chepstow Books will be putting signed Raven Cycle bookplates in their pre-orders. Here is their link (I think they are working on an ordering page, as well).

7. I will also be touring in the U.S. this fall, starting in September. I don't have the finalized places/ dates yet, but I can promise that at least one of them is Austin Teen Book Festival.

8. There are more surprising things to come in this department, but I can't tell you yet. 2013 shall be the awesomest.

Red = Rage. Ocean = Longing. Literary =

Every so often I have this conversation at a school visit.  

THE CAST:
STUDENT
ENGLISH TEACHER
ME  
THE SCENE:
After my presentation, a student drags a beleaguered English teacher to my side.  

THE CONVERSATION:
STUDENT (always with a rather mocking tone): So, Maggie, when you put red curtains in a scene, does that mean that the characters are angry and stuff?
ENGLISH TEACHER: That's not quite—
STUDENT: —Because we are supposed to analyze all of these books and I don't think any of the writers actually put in an ocean in the scene just so that two hundred years later we could read it and think the ocean stands for longing.
ENGLISH TEACHER: Sometimes a literary device—
STUDENT: I think we're just looking for stuff that isn't there. The writer just put in an ocean because the book TAKES PLACE BY THE BEACH. And the rest was invented by evil English teachers.
ENGLISH TEACHER: If I were evil, I'd—
STUDENT: —So, you're the writer: do red curtains mean anger?
ME: Curtains do make me angry.

And then I was at LeakyCon, sitting in on a panel called "Is YA Literature?" to find out if I was writing literature, and this (summarized) conversation happened:
  
THE CAST:
A SMART YA WRITER
A SMART ADULT WRITER
ANOTHER SMART YA WRITER

THE SCENE:
The panelists have just been asked to define what is meant by literary fiction.  

THE CONVERSATION:
SMART ADULT WRITER: All I know is, I know literary fiction when I see it.
SMART YA WRITER: I got a look at the guidelines for assigned school reading and they suggested it be a book with enough content to be analyzed. Enough depth to support multiple interpretations.
ANOTHER SMART YA WRITER: I think literary is a ridiculous term and value is assigned by our readers, right here, right now: do they like it or not? There's no such thing as a good book or a bad book. There's a book that matters to a reader.

I think you can talk in endless circles about what constitutes "literary" fiction and whether it's good or bad or has no value or can be traded for a gallon of milk. And I also think you can talk in endless circles about whether or not there are "good" books and "bad" books and who gets to decide which is which. And if you do ever find an end to these circles, you can finish up with a indefatigable dessert course of the literary writing versus commercial writing debate.

So I'm instead going to talk about the one thing that interests me about fiction: getting into your head and moving stuff around. I am in the business of changing people's moods and making them see scenes the way that I see them and feel things the way I want them to be felt. You may consider me Very Interested in learning everything I can about doing all that more effectively.

Sometimes, dear reader, this is going to mean making the curtains red.

Please know that I'm not much for literary writing for the sake of literary writing. I enjoy a nice turn of the phrase, sure. I do enjoy picking apart novels to see what makes them tick. But my academic pleasure runs out very quickly (now there is the least sexy sentence I've ever written). As a writer, I am delighted to be given literary prizes, but they aren't on my list of goals. I'm chiefly interested literary devices insofar as they allow me to more effectively get inside your head and move around the furniture.

 And they do. Allow me to demonstrate.

Here are two paragraphs from one of my favorite sequences from The Dream Thieves*:

 *these are not spoilery, although they are from the middle of the book, so if you want to be totally uninformed on the action of Book 2, I suggest you wander to another corner of the Internet.





Oh, I had such plans for this party scene. I wanted the reader to see it just like I did. The all-encompassing luxury, warm and old and unquestioned. The complexity of the political world, the beauty of wealth, and the stagnation and corruption of old, unchallenged value systems. Adam, as my point-of-view character, is feeling and thinking about all of these things, and I wanted the reader to experience it with him.

I could have told the reader all of those things. Point blank. I could have gone with a barebones description of the driveway: The circular driveway was packed with so many elegant vehicles that the valets had to turn cars away.

And then just had Adam muse in italics about his feelings on being there. But then you would only know it. You wouldn't have experienced it. I wouldn't really be getting into your head and moving things around unannounced. I'd be walking in, hanging up a mirror, then pointing and saying "there's a mirror. It's yours now."

 Here's another snippet from later:




Okay, the curtains aren't red. But the runner is purple. How noble!

Man, I was working hard in this little section. In reality, the hallway of the house is lush and content and established. But inside our two protagonists, trouble brews — you can see it in the mirror. The side table, on the outside of the glass, is docile. But the mirror-image of the tidy hallway is crazed and twisted and rakish.

Again, I could've just told you: on the outside, the boys look foxy and orderly in suits, but on the inside, they are hot messes.

But I don't want you to know. I want you to feel. And our old friends, those countless literary devices of simile, metaphor, allusion, figurative language . . . that's the way in. It's not about fancy literary prizes. It's not about seeming impenetrable or smart or high fallutin. I'm not trying to impress anyone. I am trying to make you feel a story, that's all. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't believe in the literary/ commercial divide. And I don't believe that literary is good or bad. I believe that good novel makes readers feel, and the more readers I can make feel, the more successful I will consider that book.

I also believe that sometimes that means making the curtains red.    

Maggie Stiefvater's Top 10 Tips for Teen Drivers

On Tumblr, I got asked this question:

   
 Why, yes. Yes, I do.

1. Get a car with a spoiler. It will not add stability or otherwise do anything useful, but if you are in a fender bender, you will look cooler.

2. Learn to drive a stick shift. They might be less common in the States, but you’ll thank me when you’re over in Europe and that’s all you can rent. Plus, once you learn how to listen attentively to your engine to shift gears correctly, you’ll be a much better driver in an automatic as well. Plus, you can look lofty every time you tell someone, “what, you can’t drive a stick?"

 3. I suggest a car in a bright color. It’s a safety feature. They don’t make life vests in champagne or burnished silver, do they? When you pull over by the side of the road to hyperventilate over being unable to operate this stick shift you just purchased, you’ll want to be highly visible.

4. Go to a driving school. No, no, no. Not the Carl Q. Barkley’s Safe Driver Clinic. Take a two day rally school or drifting school or racing school at your local track — usually you can find one that lets you use their vehicles. Once you’ve learned how to toss a car around sideways on purpose, you’ll no longer be fazed if it happens to you by accident on the interstate.

5. You don’t get to drive fast until you know what the hell you’re doing.

6. If you’re driving slow because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, for the love of ponies and Honda Civics and the angels overhead, stay in the right lane.

7. If your mother or father cannot sit quietly in the passenger seat looking like a pool of endless serenity, she or he must not enter your car. Find another licensed driver to be your wingman. Here, I’ll do it. I have no sense of fear.

8. Check your tires. They should be treadful. Check your brakes. They should be stoppingness. Check your phone. It should be in the trunk or someplace where you aren’t even thinking about it. So should that Eminem tape that came in the car when you bought it. And all of your stupid friends that can’t stop giggling over Eminem. People, it stopped being funny, like, five years ago. Eyes on the road, maggot.

9. If you can’t find a driving school that is awesome, find a field and a rental car. Go wild. What you want to do is to feel how the car responds to everything you do. It should feel predictable, by the end. The goal is to be able to control the car as you’re rocketing around hillocks. I know that you’re thinking: what about lines and other cars and laws and stuff! But they’re just details. Once you can control the car, other cars won’t rock you. Nor will bumps, debris in the road, aliens, or Michael Bay movies.

10. Have fun, but always respect other drivers’ safety first. They didn’t get into their cars today just so that you could ruin their day or life. And remember that driving is so much like coloring. In the beginning, it really works best if you stay between the lines.

No, I Am Here. I HAVE Been Here

And by here, I mean on the Internet.

I know it might seem like the blog has been a bit dark lately, but it is not because I am not on the Internet. I'm working on a secret project, WhitePantsNovel, that I'll be able to tell you about soon, but it's been eating my large blocks of time*. So I've been snatching little posts here and there instead of full blog posts. In particular, a lot of my off-the-cuff stuff is over on Tumblr these days: http://maggie-stiefvater.tumblr.com/.

And I'm also on Twitter and Facebook.

I TOTALLY AM HERE.

*I cannot wait to tell you about this. Cannot. Wait.

Oh, while I have you, though, here is a brief run down of things:

- The Raven Boys audiobook is available for free, no-strings-attached download from SYNC for one week beginning on June 13th.

- I am giving away an advanced review copy of The Dream Thieves on my Tumblr. It's an art contest. Details here.

- My critique partner, Tessa Gratton, has a very excellent novel coming out on the 25th, called The Lost Sun . It's set in an alternative U.S. where Norse religion is the norm, and it's great.

- I will be at LeakyCon in Portland at the end of this month.

I Sneak Into Your Brain And Make You Think My Thoughts

As I was driving two days ago, I had the most piercing and true realization that has ever been had about humans and American society. It was a dazzling thought-culmination of all of the thoughts I had had up to that point in my life. I had to reorganize everything in my mind to fall into line with this epiphany.*

*and I'm not going to tell you

Right after I had this flash of insight, I immediately had another one: that none of my characters could have an insight that I hadn't already had myself. Dazzled and revolted by this appearance of writerly limitation, I had three more realizations before I got back to my driveway:

1. I can't ever write a character who's more clever than I am!

2. I can't ever write a character who's funnier than I am!

3. I was supposed to be buying paper towels!

I know this is a bit of an oversimplification. On the surface, it also seems inherently at odds with my certainty that a good author doesn't only write characters who are versions of themselves. I still think that's true. I can take the most basic emotions — anger, jealousy, happiness, etc. — and use my experience of them to create infinite permutations and exaggerations and variations of those emotions. A never-ending cauldron of characters, right there. But unlike emotion*, humor and intelligence are not inherent in everyone.

And I really do think that being funny or smart are two of the very few things that you can't just extrapolate from other experiences. I can write a fearless character even if I am not fearless, for instance, or a fearful character, even if I am not fearful. But I cannot invent humorous situations if I don't have a sense of humor. And I cannot write an internal, brilliant philosophical observation for a character if I have not had it for myself.

*barring sociopaths

I suppose one could simply copy a joke into a character's dialog to make them funny. Research a subject and blast facts out on the page for a smart character. Or just have everyone around them laugh at their jokes and be awed by their cleverness. And fake it the rest of the time. But as a reader, I despise being told a character is funny or smart when clearly they are neither.

I'm a massive proponent of indirect characterization. A reader can experience characters and settings in a novel in two ways: she can know them, and she can feel them. Knowing is technically all a reader needs in order to get the meat of a story. In the simplest sort of story, a fairy tale or fable, that's all there is. But feeling is what gets a story into your bones. It is how you infect a reader with your world.

Should we do a for instance? Let's do a for instance.

For instance, in The Dream Thieves, I could have written:

Niall Lynch had three sons. The oldest, Declan, was a political creature, slimy and disingenuous. The youngest, Matthew, was incredibly delightful and everyone liked him without any effort on his part. And the sarcastic middle son, Ronan, was always belligerent. Their father was far more of an influence on all of them than their mother.

The reader would know everything I needed them to know about this family. It would be a perfectly fine basis for a story, I suppose. But I don't think it would get under anyone's skin. For that, I must be indirect. This is where that silly adage "Show, don't tell" comes from. Really what it means is that you do everything you possibly can to make the reader understand the truth of the situation before you spell it out for them.

Here is how I actually wrote that paragraph about the three Lynch siblings:



Here's a grand article Cheryl Klein wrote about Harry Potter a few years ago. In it, she points out that Rowling did tell you how a character felt, but only after she showed it to you first. So the telling served as a thesis statement, a topic sentence. Quite cleverly, she made sure that the reader both knew and felt the facts.

So: about characters being cleverer and funnier than the writer. Possibly one could get around this by direct telling. But I think that you'd rob yourself of emotional resonance if you did. Is the trade off worth it? Maybe. Are the writers of Sherlock as clever as him? Maybe I'm just not a good enough writer yet to think of a solution to this problem. Maybe it isn't even really a problem, because there are millions of character possibilities within my current mediocre level of brain power and humor.

I still need paper towels. Maybe I should go for a drive and think about all this some more.

Deadlines and the Working Girl

I'm writing this post under the assumption that my editor doesn't read my blog. He works hard, and he likes me, and I'd hate to do anything to possibly damage that relationship. But as he doesn't read my blog, I'll tell you guys: I'll do pretty much anything to keep from meeting my deadlines.

Deadlines, deadlines. For any given novel, there are usually deadlines for the rough draft, the first edit, the final edit, the copyedit, the first page proofs, and the final page proofs. I tend to write two books a year, so double that. I also do the book trailers for my books, so that means there is a deadline for writing the song for the trailer and a deadline for getting the animation done. There are also various interviews and article type things that come up throughout the year. They come with deadlines too. Baby deadlines, though. Infantile deadlines. Nascent deadlines. When I trample over them, I don't even feel them stick on the bottom of my boot.

I have devised all sorts of ways to avoid making a deadline. My most traditional method of missing one deadline is to work on another legitimate project. Yesterday, someone asked me on Facebook:

"I'm curious how you spend your days, you seem to get so much done! Write, draw, write, read, create...can you give us a glimpse into a typical day for Miss Maggie? Plz n thnku"

I spend ninety percent of my work day working on things that have absolutely nothing to do with the most pressing deadline. For an example, here is a photograph of my desk as of this morning:



I know what you're thinking. You are thinking: This is a girl who is Gets Things Done.

However, as sad as I am to disabuse you of this belief, I must report that absolutely nothing on that desk pertains to my most pressing deadline, the edits for Spirit Animals 2. Everything the light touches, Simba, are things that avoid my current deadline. From left to right:

• a keyboard I killed by spilling a glass of water on it
• The hair dryer I used to try to revive the dead keyboard and then on a piece of plastic to see if it would melt in a cool way.
• A roll of scotch tape because I need scotch tape for . . . something.
• A single corncob handle because I was making a birthday cake for Lover and needed only one.  
• A copy of Forever, which I was reading because . . . because.  
• A copy of The Rook which I was reading because it was delightful.  
• An advanced review copy of The Dream Thieves because I need to open it every so often to admire my own animal cunning.
• A video camera to record buzzards circling over my front yard because . . . because.
• Some of my colored pencils, which I organize according to color and value whenever I feel like I'm in danger of meeting a deadline.  
• Turpenoid, paint brush, pencil, and sketches for the Dream Thieves book trailer, which is not due until August which makes it more urgent than my Monday deadline.

 
• the remains of cookies, milk, pecans, and a honey sandwich.  • A washcloth to mop up various spilled drinks and any tears from visitors sad about my missed deadlines.
I know it's pathological, but the more urgent something is, the more I want to do anything else. Is it work avoidance if you will do work to avoid doing work?

Because I've been like this since well before college, one would think I would have found a way to short-circuit my bad habits by now. And, you know, it's not like I don't try. Last week, I had a studio appointment to lay down the track for The Dream Thieves audiobook and trailer. The day before, I decided I despised the song I had written and threw it all away. As I had only twelve hours before studio-time, I knew I should spend my evening writing a new song.

But all I could think about was how I was going to drive my car two hours to the studio the next morning. And it was dirty. Covered with pollen. Very, very unsexy.

I had two choices. Write the song for the recording in twelve hours. Wash my car so that it looked sexier for the drive.

It's sexy enough, I told myself firmly. No one but you cares. It's not important. What is important is this song. You have a very little time to write a song that will be heard my thousands. You need to focus on your priorities. You — 

 
OH the things I do to avoid deadlines. The more aware I am of the problem, the more devious and desperate to miss them I seem to become. As the dates press in more urgently, I watch four episodes of Sherlock in a row. I google all of the bands in my music library. I draw pictures of my author friends' characters. I make increasingly complicated food items, culminating in Indian feasts of curry, naan bread, hummus and rice finished with shaved apple muffins with cream cheese frosting. I clean the espresso machine, although I have resorted to popping caffeine pills and no longer remember where I put my coffee beans. I take energetic naps. I cultivate lethargic street races. I alphabetize my book collection. I write screenplays for movies that having nothing to do with anything but vintage arcade games. I take up rally driving. I walk the goats. I bounce on a yoga ball while listening to songs iTunes says I will like. I design fake covers and real covers and title books that I will write some day but not this day. Once, memorably, I broke up a wedding rather than meeting a deadline.

The problem with me is that I get bored very easily. The thing that seems interesting and excellent for distracting me from deadlines this week often won't work the next. Once I've done something, what's the point of doing it again? It means I must devise new and tricky ways of keeping myself entertained. For instance, I took up a new, obscure musical instrument and signed up for lessons from a teacher three hours away, but I must be careful to take a different route to the teacher every time I go because I know that otherwise I will get bored. I had to give up rallying because I could not convince myself that it was entertaining enough to break cars and go sideways when there were so many rules that made you always break them and go sideways the same way each time. What a trial it is to be unable to sit still and work quietly on things. What a trial it is to not sit still. What a . . .

I'm lying. I cannot imagine anything less entertaining that sitting still.

I reckon you are wondering how I ever get my books done. Eventually, I run out of things that are not my book, and I run out of time, and in that crushing moment of time constraint and personal crisis, I write them. It is not really that I don't work on them during the rest of the time. I do pick and tap and work at them. It's just that I can't really finish them without that moment of intense fire. I've written 30,000 words in a night, so long as it is the night before my deadline. I really do have work ethic, I swear, it's just that I have put pieces of it in so many different horcuxes that sometimes it's hard to prioritize them properly.

So, this question: "I'm curious how you spend your days, you seem to get so much done! Write, draw, write, read, create...can you give us a glimpse into a typical day for Miss Maggie? Plz n thnku"

I guess what I'm saying that there isn't a typical day. I know what I should reply. I should say, "I work for 8 hours on my current deadline and then I frolic for the remainder of the time."

But since my editor doesn't read my blog, I can tell you guys the truth, right?

 

This Post Has Proof I Can Actually Be Delightful

And control my swearing, mayhem, and general whatever-it-is-that-makes-booming-sounds.

This weekend, Lover and I got into a giant fight because I told him I wanted to give his father a taxidermy possum for his birthday/ retirement party.

ME: What else do you get the man who has everything?

LOVER: *extremely heavy look* Would you like to be given a stuffed possum?

ME: I'd put it in the game room.

LOVER: Dad doesn't have a game room.

ME: The foyer, then.

Things grew more heated then, as discussions over in-laws and parties and aging often do, and finally I said:

ME: I was joking! Did you really think I would give him a stuffed possum?

LOVER: You were not joking. I know you and I know your face and you were going to give my father a dead possum to celebrate his freedom from the workforce.

ME: *stares heavily*

Apparently now I have to think of something else. Lover's mother didn't care for the alpaca hand puppet I got her for Christmas, so obviously that is out as well. There is practically nothing left in the world to give away.

LOVER: You are not appropriate for most public functions.

But that is not true! I can be delightful! I can control my swearing, mayhem, and general whatever-it-is-that-makes-booming-sounds. And the proof of that is that Scholastic asked me if I would write an entry in their new middle grade series, Spirit Animals. Would they have possibly trusted me with that if they thought I couldn't be delightful? NO WAY.

Here is an actual editorial note from the manuscript, by the way. 

I learned a valuable lesson from this section of editing, by the way. It turns out it's very unseemly for middle grade heroes to perform unprovoked violence, even if there are weasels in the scene. It turns out you have to work a lot harder to support a character maiming someone in middle grade.

Anyway, I'm pleased to be able to share the cover (i.e. ACTUAL EVIDENCE) of my entry in the series. It comes out early next year. The first one comes out in September. Here are people who can be trusted talking about the series. And here is the actual evidence that I can be delightful and charming and not swear. At least for 180 pages or so.


Now if you excuse me. I am going to go see if I can find a chandelier made of chili pepper lights or something else equally festive and gift-like.

Terrible Writing & the Prologue of The Dream Thieves!

I used to write terrible books all the time.

I've talked about this before, my terribleness. I have even posted some of my terribleness on the internet. By the time I went to college, I had over thirty manuscripts in various stages of finishedness laying around my house and ancient computers and word processors.

Terrible manuscripts.

I wrote novels about talking dogs, missing unicorns, IRA men with hearts of gold, enchanters with hearts of gold, missing dogs, missing IRA men, kids in suburbia who were secretly kings and queens, fairies who were secretly kids in suburbia, missing kids and fairies in suburbia . . .

Terrible. They were all terrible.

But like I said. I've talked about all of this before. I wrote a lot of terrible books. Today, however, in honor of Entertainment Weekly sharing the prologue of The Dream Thieves, I am going to share with you a very particular terrible book from my teens.

The Dream Thieves.

Well, it wasn't called that, back then. It was called The Llewellyn Society. And Gansey was an old man. And Ronan was named Sean. And Noah was named Adam. But it was the same. Mostly. Sort of. Except that I wrote this version longhand. Oh, and it was terrible.


 
 
Here are some more terrible bits that sort of stayed the same in the real version, only I made them less terrible.







And a typed version from a few months later:




And like I said. Here is the prologue of the real version, and an interview, over at Entertainment Weekly.

I hope you find it not terrible.

(And as a reminder, you can pre-order a signed and painted in version of it over at Fountain Bookstore)

(and here is what I am painting in each of them: )

A Letter To My Mother, With No Swearing (Just As She Prefers It)

I suppose this post could be for mothers of creative, strange children everywhere, but mostly, it’s for my mom. My original plan was to write this note for her on a piece of stationery, but then I looked around my office. Somehow it didn’t seem very meaningful to give her something jotted in Sharpie on a Scorpio Races postcard or the corner of a Shiver bookmark or on the back of a Raven Boys bookplate or in the blank part of an index card that already has fourteen plot points scribbled on it.

Then I thought, no, my blog is my finest stationery. A thank you note on Mother’s Day is nice. A thank you note on Mother’s Day that is searchable in Google results is even better.

So here it is.

Hi, Mom,

I decided to write you a note for Mother’s Day. I’m sure this seems out of character, as I normally eschew all holidays that don’t involve cake or trees. But this year I looked at the jug of fancy conditioner I had bought you for your Mother’s Day present, and I thought: one day, this conditioner will be all gone. And then you will not remember my affection for you. This fancy conditioner won’t last for a year. It’ll last for a month. Then you’ll have eleven months of wondering if your middle daughter truly appreciates you.

Conditioner is transient. And once it has passed from this world, it’s just . . . gone.

So I tried to think of something more permanent. I considered artwork and furniture and knicks and knacks. However, I know that our idea of interior design differs. You have nice prints and wreathes on the walls. I have rusty metal scissors and twisted license plates hanging on mine.

And what is more permanent than the written word? Nothing.*

*with the possible exception of Gangnam Style

Here we go.

I know I haven’t been the easiest daughter to have. I remember well that I was a small, cranky, sullen, black-hearted, violent child. I pinched my siblings and punched my classmates. I didn’t really eat food. Mostly I ate the same four or five items for weeks on end and then, just as you had stocked the house with these a backlog of these items, I would remove them vocally from my diet. I’m still sorry about that letter the school sent home in third grade. Hey, at least I knew you weren’t starving me, right?

I was not very huggable. I liked things my way. I was a bad child and a worse teen. I had a very particular plan for my life and when I became interested in something, I would obsessively pursue it to the absence of all other things. I cut off all my hair because I knew you didn’t want me to. I swore because you frowned when I did. I street raced so often and got so many speeding tickets that I came within a hair of losing my license. And at no point was I sorry. Also I wore black all the time.

I was just terrible.

But despite my terribleness, I wanted to tell you that I think you did an amazing job. Especially now that I have my own children**. I guess I took it for granted how you always had an art project or a book for me to read or a piano lesson all ready. Until I had Thing 1 and Thing 2, I didn’t realize how much time and consideration it took to prepare something like that every single afternoon. You took all of us to the library nearly every week and let us browse in the stacks for hours. As a kid, I didn’t even think about how you might have other ways you wanted to spend your Saturday. And even though you were allergic to dogs and cats, we had about a billion of them growing up. I remember thinking you were being unfair by drawing the line at rodents. No doubt you said this with the traditional tissue you kept in your pocket — for when the dander of six or seven dogs or cats finally got to you. How crushed we were! HOW ABOUT A LIZARD, MOM? A KOMODO DRAGON?

**At first, I typed “my own kids” there and then I thought . . . no, now that I have goats, that is too unspecific.

I grew up surrounded by all sorts of different art stuffs and books and scratch paper and musical instruments and I just thought that’s how everybody lived.

Man, it takes a billionty hours a week for me to pull off even a quarter of what you did with me and four other siblings. I still don’t really know how you did it. But I didn’t want you to think I didn’t notice. Maybe I didn’t at the time, but I do now. Better late than never, right?

Here’s the most important thing: you never told me I couldn’t be a writer or an artist or a composer. You always made sure I had the tools to learn how to be the best writer and artist and musician I could be. We had our bumps along the way, but really, you were there at every step making sure that I could pursue that dream. Whether it was taking me to the library or setting me up with clay or hurriedly packing my stuff into a car so I could switch to a college with a Music Composition degree two weeks before the semester began . . . and then helping me switch colleges again when I left town after my morning classes six weeks later.

At the time, I thought, of course.

Now . . . well, I would have killed me. Or at the very least sent me to a distant boarding school with padded walls.

Thanks for making me who I am, Mom.

Love, Maggie

P.S. I will bring your conditioner out next time I’m at the house. It’s just great stuff.

Inside of My Sketchbook (and by extension, my black heart)

On Facebook, I shared a warm-sketch I did this morning while brainstorming about the look I want for The Dream Thieves' animated book trailer. It is this:


Someone asked me if I would give a "tour" of my sketchbook. I actually have a few laying around at any given time, but this is one of my oldest. If you want to see the contents of my black heart, you can click on the image below to see the full set.


As you can see, I used to take it with me on tour a lot, so there are a lot of doodles of people sitting in airports and restaurants. You can also sort of tell which novel I was writing at any given time, based upon the drawings. And some of them are sketches for finished drawings. For instance, the first sketch on the third row became this:


And the second sketch on the last row became this:


My hands smell like turpenoid.



(oh, and also, on Twitter, someone asked me if I could teach them to draw. Here is my biggest piece of advice for every artist — and writer — out there: draw what you SEE, not what you know is there.)