Jane Yolen's Blog, page 32

November 26-27, 2009:

Thanksgiving and the day after–since Heidi was doing all the cooking–afforded me some writing time. That meant I did two poems for the 30 Days gig, worked a bit on Girl's Bible, did some research for the GB, managed to fiddle with a lot of pieces of paper littering my house (bills, filing stuff, etc.), spoke to both the boys and got caught up on their family stuff. The usual.

And then we got down to the serious business of eating.

Heidi's Thanksgiving consisted of Maddison and Glendon and me...

November 22-25, 2009:

In these four days, I finished my go-round on the entire BUG manuscript (the golem book) including filing things down, adding a new song, a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms.

I wrote four poems for the "30 days 30 poems" challenge.

Answered lots of email. Lots of catching up on back stuff.

Saw a movie with Bob Marstall, my movie buddy–"Men Who Stared Down Goats" which was both amusing and serious. An anti-war movie artfully disguised as bizarre comedy. Reminded me of a movie I saw years ago, ...

November 18-21:

A busy and fraught few days,

Wednesday: tarting up my talk for NCTE and the Lee Bennett Hopkins roast, getting everything ready for an early morning plane on Thursday, paying bills, banking, cleaners, etc. To bed by 8.

Thursday I was out of the house before 5 a.m., plane to Philadelphia landing at 8:35 a.m., and in my hotel and ready to party by 9:30 in the morning. Of course I had nothing on the docket until evening, so I used the time to write. I did some poetry, some organizing for...

Interstitial Moment:

Someone on one of my online lists just asked the authors to comment on the Solitary Genius theory of writing. This is what I said, and I thought it might be interesting enough for my journal readers to re-post it here, though I have tarted it up a bit more:

I know hardly any PUBLISHED (not self-published) author who subscribes to the Solitary Genius theory. It's a truly damaging myth. I place it alongside the Genuine Artist in the Garret

To begin with, no writer can be alone with all...

November 17, 2009:

This was a day to think about books more than a day to write them. I did manage another poem, this one about seeing the Leonids early in the morning.

Tag End of the Leonids

5:15 a.m.

In my nightgown, heavy bedsocks,
sweat pants, and jacket—
don't forget the mittens—
I go out onto the porch and wait.
The air is still, but I am stiller.
The walnut trees' thrusting fingers
for once do not move
in their arthritic contractions,
but form a nest for the brilliant stars.
I see a bit of movement in the night...

November 15-16, 2009:

Sunday I spent the day in lovely vegetating mode. Read more of Shiver, gathered stories for a collection. Lay in bed thinking and came up with another collection idea, watched tv. That sort of day. The kind most people have on a weekend but writers and artists and freelancers rarely do.

Monday began early with a consultation with a handyman, a go-get-'em sweet guy about the age of my kids who is eager to get to work on a lot of the small and then larger projects this old house needs.

Then off t...

November 14, 2009:

Pouring out, bucketing down, and off I went to Greenfield, Mass, 20 minutes north, to the World Eye Bookstore to do a group book signing. Heidi was meeting me there (she had teens to drop off first in Amherst). As always, I arrived first  (next came Jesse Haas and husband, Norton Juster, Margot Apple) so I did some re-holiday shopping. I hate doing last minute run on the stores.

They'd already sold out of  Heidi's and my Sleep, Black Bear, Sleep before the signing becaue of a lovely article...

November 12-13, 2009:

So since I am not writing much right now, or even doing much of anything, I went for a spa massage, remembering how much I have loved them in the past. Of course, given my strangely easy-to-bruise skin, I can still (two days later) feel the masseusse's hand print on my back!

Wrote two poems, and a bit of an Introduction to the reissue of Brian Froud and Alan Lee's FAIRIES, a book which blew my mind back thirty year ago when it was first published. Am referencing Bauer, Rackham, Tenggren...

November 11, 2009:

Business day but not a writing day. It began with a new poem for the 30 Poems for 30 Days, and then a Skype call from a school testing whether their Skype and mine were compatible. We could on-and-off hear one another, but they'd been having some problems. So we will probably need to test it again.

Then Heidi and I looked through my shelf of Interesting Books That Might Someday Give Me An Idea For A Project, and we came up with six or seven book ideas to do together, all of them with...

November 9-10, 2009:

Since I seem to be in a writing funk (ie little writing is going on) this seems as good a time as any to remind us all that writing is not just sitting with one's fingers on the keyboard. It happens when a writer reads the newspaper (an angry father holds a school principal hostage), looks out the kitchen window (a gray squirrel saucily scolds a blue jay who scolds right back, a kind of creature stand-off), watches a tv show (plain bride buys a sexy wedding dress and becomes a beauty in a...