Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 115

deciphering dreams

I wasn't present when my father passed away, and lately I've been having really strange dreams in which my father starts out healthy and robust then suddenly experiences a health crisis.  The dream ends just as I'm coming to his aid, of course.  A couple of nights ago I dreamt that my father was a kind of cyborg—he had wires and nozzles on his body that otherwise looked fit and whole.  We were in a house full of people, and as my father slid into crisis mode—one of his wires got caught on...

embarrassment & riches

It's supposed to read, "an embarrassment OF riches," of course, but I need to combine the two in order to sum up my experience at the Book Blogger Convention yesterday.  First of all, hats off to the ladies who organized the one-day event—I was very impressed with the afternoon panels that I attended: lots of smart people talking about content and marketing and ethics, every panel had the chance to take questions from the audience, and everyone stayed within the allotted time.  Plus we each l...

a taste of BEA

I think The Rejectionist summed it up best, but BEA is hard on an HSP (highly sensitive person) like myself.  Shmoozing and mingling and networking aren't my strengths, so I only lasted an hour at yesterday's Book Blogger reception.  I did get to meet some nice people, including author Melanie Hope Greenberg and author/blogger/radio host Lesley Etheridge-Gist.  I'll be on Lesley's show next weekend, and it was great to also meet Christopher Herz since we'd only talked via email and on...

tongue-tied

This morning I woke up thinking about Lilith and Homer, the primary black female characters in Marlon James' novel, The Book of Night Women.  I'd heard some grumbling about this book and likely wouldn't have picked it up on my own, but a former student from Jamaica sent it to me and I was craving a strong story in which I could lose myself.  I actually had three books on the go yesterday, which is highly unusual for me—I prefer to focus on one narrative at a time, but Book #1 was taking too l...

take two

Ok, so I'm still figuring out how to film people and I'm realizing that trying to squeeze everything into a ten-minute You Tube segment doesn't always work.  I also sometimes act as though "we" all know one another—if you read my blog, then you know certain authors' work, and if I call them by their first name you know who I'm talking about…but that's not a fair assumption to make.  So I'm reposting the interviews I did yesterday, restoring the bits that got cut for the sake of time.  And I a...

Re-Imagining the Past

This morning was our panel at the NYPL; train trouble made me a little late, but once we got started, everything went really well…we had a great group of 6th-graders who had lots of questions and were avid readers and writers.  Of course, I brought my Flip camera along so I could record the interesting answers my fellow panelists gave—what an honor to sit beside such smart, creative women! (l-r: Kekla Magoon, Tonya Cherie Hegamin, Rita Williams-Garcia, & me—and special thanks to Latria for...

mitts

Am way too tired to write about this long day, but just wanted to share this photo of the mittens my grandmother knit for me and my sister when we were babies…I'm not good in social situations, and my mother's anxiety was off the charts today as well—not a great combination.  We got off to a rocky start, but the wedding was lovely, and afterward we had dinner with my sister.  Then when we finally got home, my mother called me into her room and randomly asked if I wanted any of these pairs of ...

sleep

You know I love birds, but the ones near my mother's house wake up BEFORE 4AM!  So night #1 in Toronto was not so great…had a headache, woke at 4, and couldn't fall back to sleep.  Insomnia makes the night feel endless…around 6am I did work out a scene for my novel, however, which is great.  Erzulie Dantor…

The tests yesterday morning took more than 2 hours, but I'm glad I decided to participate in the study.  I do have a slight head and hand tremor, but the doctor thinks that, right now...

are writers born or made?

I'm in Toronto right now, and my mother and I just watched a really interesting show on Bravo—it's called Writers' Confessions, and it featured a diverse group of authors talking about what it means to be a writer.  One question asked was whether an author is born or made…I found myself agreeing with a number of folks who expressed the idea that some writers have an innate gift, and some writers don't, but work really hard at their craft; incredibly talented artists sometimes lack the...

time warp

I yelled at a man in the street yesterday.  That in and of itself is unusual, but what was really strange was my sudden Caribbean accent: "Yuh can see the light is RED?"  I shamed that male driver who nearly ran me down, and crossed the street with my own cheeks burning…raising my voice at men in the street was not part of my home training; generally I ignore whatever's being said or done, or suck my teeth at most.  But I've been reading Marina Budhos' The Professor of Light, and at times...