we're all crazy!
First off, let me apologize for the lameness of my photo-taking. I am so bad when I travel these days and I come home with three photos and I'm like, how did that happen? I took so many photos. Yeah. Via someone else's camera. I managed to download some from FB so I'm not totally lame, but I'm pretty lame.
Anyhow, hi! How is everyone? I'm good. I have slept straight through the last three nights, or when I've been woken up by the inevitable child yelling because her blanket came off, I've gone right back to sleep. Which means I'm feeling relaxed. The book is out. I am back from Austin. It's school vacation here so I can't even work. I'm sneaking this blog post in while I cook breakfast. I'm such a multitasker (chocolate-chip pancakes and turkey bacon, if you must know. The pancakes are re-heats from an older batch.) And yes, we take Passover very seriously here.
I went to Austin last week, to the Texas Library Association's Annual Conference, and I think I must attribute some of my calm to that conference. I had SUCH an amazing time. And the conference did something important for me. Aside from hook me up with all kinds of cool librarians. By the way, Texas Librarians+Fashion=Awesomeness. I melt into a puddle when I see the dress with cowboy boots look. I was very puddly. But I digress. Here is me and a librarian. She did not have boots but she was still super-cool. Her name is Jane. She had a Britishy accent, but she's still Texan!
Aside from hook me up with cool bloggers with whom I've had a relationship for months/years, even if we haven't actually met—and Girls in the Stacks, pictured here, will have to stand in for The Mundie Moms and all the the other cool bloggers I met at the conference. Also, does Shannan (on my right, from left it's Nancy and Stacy) not look like Lorelai from The Gilmore Girls?
Aside even from the weather, which was so incredibly perfect, mid 80s, but a soft breeze blowing. I went for a run by the lake. It looked like this, except no tandem cyclists, which would've somehow detracted.
Aside, even from having WHERE SHE WENT hit the NYT Bestseller list while I was there. I found out as I ran up to my room from an interview, with aforementioned Girls In The Stacks. We squealed and hugged. And then I just forgot about it. There was something nice in not thinking about it.
What made the conference so amazing was the writers. All the other writers. I hung with so many cool writers: David Levithan, Rebecca Stead, Margo Rabb, Melissa Kantor, Lauren Oliver, Elizabeth Scott, Ally Condie, Robert Paul Weston, Tim Wynn-Jones, Lauren Myracle and so many more. And I am here to tell you that these writers we all love. They are crazy. And I mean that in the best of ways.
That's Rebecca Stead and Margo Rabb posing next to a WHERE SHE WENT display at Book People. They are both crazy. Seriously. In lovely writerly neurotic ways that makes me love them and their books even more. I don't mean to single them out in their craziness. They are not extra-crazy. I just have a photo of them.
This here is Ally Condie and me (holding someone else's beer) and Lauren Myracle (holding her own beer). Nicest people on the planet? Oh, yeah. Crazy? Bet on it.
Before I go on, slandering my fellow authors, allow me to define crazy. Crazy for writers means doing things like writing whole books and throwing them away. Chopping wood or taking a shower or pulling hair out to get through that "spongy middle" of a novel. It means writing a book on a Blackberry on the subway because that's when you have time to get the story out. It means being slave to voices in your head but also celebrating a happy face from your editor. It means not being able to even have a book you've written in the house once you've finished it. It means worrying when your book lands on the bestseller list that it's not high enough to please your publisher. It means talking to yourself. It means waking up at four in the morning to listen to your characters. It means looking at cans of tuna fish and letting that be the catalyst for a huge what-if idea. Tuna fish? It means neglecting your family even as you're sitting with them, because your head is really somewhere else.
Tolstoy once wrote that Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. You could adapt that to writers and say that sane writers are all alike but insane writers are all crazy in their own way. Except it would be backwards. Because there are no sane writers, as I so gleefully discovered. And we are all cra-cra in such similar ways. Which, somehow, makes us one big happy family.
