Hello out there in internetland! Apologies for my week of absence. Relocation has successfully been completed (unpacking, less successfully begun). The husband and I are now located in scenic Arlington, Virginia. Pictures of our new abode to come when I’m not drowning in cardboard boxes.

I have both some work and some interviews lined up, but not for a bit. I’m hoping that at least a few week’s respite will be good for my writing–I’m so close to finishing SEAS RUN DRY that I can taste it. This week’s teaser, though, is from a different project–from THE STONE SORTER, last year’s NaNoWriMo novel, a longer excerpt of which you can find on my professional website. I queried with it in March, got some requests, but no real interest. I stopped at just under thirty queries before I decided to proceed with other projects. It’s not that I don’t believe in this manuscript individually–but it’s part of a longer series that I decided I’m not really all that interested in writing. These things work out for the best, I think.

Anyway, I’ve always liked the following bit, which is from the beginning of the novel, before our heroine, Miranda, learns that she has fairy blood and is shipped off to a school in another world. At this point, she believes the school she’s setting off for is in Oregon. This scene largely explores her family dynamic, and the fallout of her decision to attend an alternative school.

It’s also probably the most Jewish thing I’ve ever written. Go figure.

“A free school? Really, Miranda, what will you do all day?”

It had been three weeks since my interview in the city, and my mother still hadn’t let it go. It was April; all the trees lining I-78 west were blossoming, and the wind was sweet through the open window of her SUV. The sky had just begun to turn gilded at the edges. We were going to my grandparents’ house for Passover. I ignored her, squinting into the breeze as it whipped my hair over my eyes. But then my mother closed my window.

“Miranda!” she said. In the rear view mirror, I saw the sharp edge of her gaze. But I still didn’t answer, only rolling my eyes away.

“My cousin went to one of those schools in the seventies,” my father offered, chuckling. “He said they played board games all day. Didn’t learn to read until he was nearly twelve.”

“Dad, I know how to read,” I snapped, maybe a little too harshly. Abashed, my father looked out his window. It was my mother who defended him.

“Thanks to your teachers,” she said. “And with what we’re paying in property taxes . . .”

“It’s not like this will cost you anything extra,” I said. Before she could respond, my mom’s phone rang. She fumbled to flip the receiver open, fishtailing between the lanes. My dad reached over and took the steering wheel for her. As he did, he looked back over to me, his gaze level, considering.

“Going away to this school―it’ll make you happy, Miranda?”

I looked at him. His brow was all knitted up, the wrinkles at the bridge of his nose even deeper than normal.

“Yes, Daddy,” I softly replied. He nodded. A gentle smile curled his lips. He turned back to the road.

They ignored me the rest of the way, as my mother’s SUV tilted and swayed, winding its way up through the mountains

The sun had started to set. The roads grayed, and then darkened to nearly black as we moved through them under the cover of heavy-branched trees. From the main road, my grandparents’ house always reminded me of a forest bungalow, with its faux-log-cabin siding and wide porch shrouded by overhanging branches. The car bobbed as it moved from the paved surface to the gravel. My grandmother was waiting for us on the porch, waving under a net of string lights, like she always did. And my mother made the same sound she always did at the sight of her―a sibilant tch, her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

“Bubelah!” my grandmother gushed as I closed the car door behind me. She came at me with her big arms raised, the knit shawl that she wore over her shoulders hanging down like a pair of mauve batwings. She buried me in a hug.

“Hey, Gram,” I said, laughing. As I pulled away, I saw my mother come close, her arms folded over herself.

“Hi, Mom,” she said quickly. My grandmother pressed a wet kiss into her cheek, lips smacking. Then she turned back to me.

“So tell me, Miranda,” she said, as she began to walk me back to the house, “All about this new school you’ll be going to next year.” We walked up the creaking front steps together.

“Well,” I said, “It’s in Oregon―”

“Oregon!” My mother exclaimed. We walked into my grandmother’s dim, warm living room. There were dozens of scented candles burning away in the fireplace, but the bright forest of flames didn’t do much to disguise the smell of roast chicken and onions and dill. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell my friends when they ask about her.”

“You’ll tell them,” Gram began; though she spoke to my mother, she looked at me, holding me at arm’s length, winking, “That your daughter is a teenager, not a status symbol.”

“Well, of course, Mom,” my mother said, dropping her purse by the front door. There was a clatter of keys. “But what will she do all day?”

“Why, whatever she wants to do, Marcia. That’s the point.” My grandmother finally turned away from me and towards my mother. I left them to argue. My grandfather was waiting in the kitchen, silently leaning against the counter, hands deep in the pockets of his jeans.

“Hi Miranda,” he said. I went and kissed his scratchy cheek.

“Hi Pops. Staying out of the fray?”

“You know me,” he agreed, smiling. My grandfather always avoided getting between Gram and Mom. I think it had something to do with his being mom’s step-father and not her birth dad. Her real father had died when my mother was little. They’d been two peas in a pod, Gram always said, and then would add “Capricorns, both!” as if that explained it. He’d been a businessman, an odd match for my free-spirited grandmother. Pops was more like her, with a long, silver ponytail snaking its way down his back.

“Can I help?” I asked, going to the massive pot of matzo ball soup and stirring it with a ladle. Pops stood straight, suddenly pulled out of wherever it was he went when his wife and step-daughter fought.

“Sure,” he said, getting the sea salt and the pepper grinder down from the cabinet. “You can season it.”

I turned the handle of the pepper grinder, then tasted, then offered the ladle to Pops. “More salt,” he said. We worked quietly, peacefully―until my mother and my grandmother came rattling into the kitchen.

“I’m sure she’ll just sit on the computer all day. I don’t see why she needs to go to some . . . hippie nursery school for teenagers for that!” My mother wasn’t shouting, not quite, but her voice was strained. My shoulders tensed involuntarily at the sound.

“Because, if she wants to sit on the computer all day, then that’s perfectly fine.” Gram sounded like the mother now, and my mom the kid. But that didn’t make it any more bearable. “Don’t you think, Miranda?”

I stopped stirring the soup and turned. “I think,” I began, slowly, “that we should eat.”

It was Pops who answered that. He laughed, and put an arm around my shoulder. “Good idea!” he said. Then he began to pull me from the kitchen. “Let’s find you a kippah.”

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

You can’t blame me for having high expectations for Jay Asher’s debut, Thirteen Reasons Why. Even if it hadn’t been hyped all over the blogosphere, its very pretty* cover tells the story of its accolades: a New York Times bestseller, a Kirkus starred review–why, it even bears a cover blurb by Sherman Alexie! It would have to be a rare book to rise to such lofty expectations. Unfortunately, Thirteen Reasons Why did not prove to be that book. Instead of the “brilliant and mesmerizing” story of the suicide of a teenage girl, it proved to be little more than tragedy porn. While I might not be able to conjure thirteen reasons why Asher’s debut fell flat for me, I can at least offer a solid handful.

Persistent problems with voice. If industry experts–publishers and agents–are to be believed, the most pressing concern for any writer writing for and about contemporary teenagers is voice. We should, they tell us, write honestly and accurately, capturing the speech and thoughts of today’s teens.

Unfortunately, I found the voice Asher uses not only inauthentic, but fairly distracting from what’s a unique concept and should be an enveloping read. Thirteen Reasons Why is, in fact, narrated by two parties–the first narrator, bookish nerd Clay, is mourning the suicide of the second, popular girl Hannah Baker, who narrates via a series of cassette tapes that form a long-form suicide note. But you’ll note that I said that Ashes uses a “voice” here, not “voices.” Because it’s true–save for the fact that Hannah’s narration is set in italics, it’s indistinguishable in style and tone from Clay’s.

It’s a voice that’s far more appropriate than for Clay than Hannah, stilted and overly formal and frankly kind of awkward. Asher’s word choices are odd–once, he refers to a store that has “all the best candies” rather than “all the best candy.” And it’s filled with clunky repetition that doesn’t quite manage to ascend to poetry, stuff like: “It was never a lost poem, Ryan. And you never found it, so it did not belong in your collection. But in your collection is exactly where other people found it. That’s where teachers stumbled across it right before their lectures on poetry. That’s where classrooms full of students cut up my poem.”

In small doses, such repetitions might have been an effective device, but it’s constant here, distracting and not altogether artful. And the conflation of Clay’s and Hannah’s voices have me convinced that this wasn’t entirely intentional on Asher’s part–that it represents a lack of control rather than a deliberate artistic choice.

A bizarre preoccupation with the sexuality of its female lead. Mind, I have no problem with sexual content generally or the sexuality of teenage girls specifically–in fact, I think that all young adult authors have an obligation to talk honestly of the real lives of their target demographic, which includes sex. But in Asher’s case, it’s not only Hannah’s sex life that’s held up to scrutiny but instead her purity. Ten of thirteen of her “reasons” for committing suicide concern either her reputation or the reputations of other teenage girls. And, while my own experiences and the experiences of women I love have taught me that non-consensual sexual exchanges are all too common, the way that Asher discusses forced sexual interactions has a certain flatness–it lacks the guilt, the fear, the confusion, the complexity with which teenage girls actually regarded these experiences.

Bottom line, when Hannah says “I think that’s the reason, in my dreams, my first kiss took place at the rocket ship. It reminded me of innocence. And I wanted my first kiss to be just that. Innocent,” and “I’ve had my butt grabbed before–no big deal–but this time it was grabbed because someone wrote my name on a list,” I just didn’t believe that this was the reaction of a teenage girl. Instead, it sounds like the reaction of an older man–a dad, maybe–and the type of propriety-obsessed reaction he’d like her to have to both her budding sexuality and to complicated and sometimes unsavory sexual encounters. It felt male gazey, a suspicion that only deepened during a scene where Hannah and a female friend mime a porny massage for the benefit of a Peeping Tom, a scene that was a major WTF for me.

A story that keeps the reader at arms’ length. Many of Hannah’s “reasons” seem trifling–and it’s not entirely clear whether Asher meant this as intentional or not. More troubling, though, is the implication that there are deeper reasons that go unexplored–more compelling and potentially more emotionally affecting. For example, it’s implied that Hannah’s parents own a failing business, but the impact of this on Hannah’s life is hardly mentioned, and her parents aren’t even described. Further, hazy references to Hannah going on successful dates are made, but we never see these interactions, either. And most importantly, we never get to hear the conversations she has with Clay, either during their tenure as coworkers at a movie theater, or during a party near the novel’s climax. This makes it difficult to believe that these characters have any genuine chemistry with one another. Clay tells us that he loves Hannah, but we’re only told and never shown any evidence for this. Instead, we got cheesy and frankly unbelievable anecdotes about student poetry disseminated by teachers for public ridicule, about Peeping Toms, about car crashes. This distance, on all levels, meant that I just never quite believed that the story could possibly happen as told. Though the premise was innovative, and the hype quite loud, and for all the promise of Asher’s premise, I didn’t buy it.

*Pretty, but like everything about this novel, flawed. I mean, what teenage girl swings in white pumps and ruffled leg warmers. Who does that?

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It was a rainy day when we first arrived in Gainesville, only that’s an understatement, as “rainy” is always an understatement for August in Florida–just miles before we crossed the state line from Georgia into Gainesville the air seemed to shift, becoming heady, humid, and then it started falling in silver sheets. August 7th, 2007. We turned onto Gainesville’s only cobblestone street and slowed to a stop in front of a house I’d never seen before and we ran out, cat carrier in one hand, into the soaking storm to sit on the porch and wait for the landlady to let us in.

A summer later, my first living alone in a second-story apartment that I called my “tree house,” I began writing fiction. The story wormed its way into my head on my walks home from my summer classes, and then it germinated during afternoon naps and then I’d pull myself from sleep-sticky sheets to write while the world outside turned pale and shivery with the force of wind and rainfall.

This is what I’ll miss best about Gainesville: the August storms, the feeling of tension in the air, the thunderheads mounting in the sky above. I won’t miss the heat that comes on minutes after the storm ends. I won’t miss the humidity, thick as the air in a foggy bathroom. Or the bugs or the way all my spices turned into solid lumps in the cabinets. I won’t miss sunburn or two showers a day or the zits and heat rashes that I get here and nowhere else. But I’ll miss this about Gainesville summers: I’ll miss the rain.

And the restaurants, and the greenness, and how in spring I’d be sure, sometimes, that I lived in paradise. The bluepink sky overhead. The interminable clouds. The lizards fucking in the fronds. The graffiti and the overgrown lawns–the unexpected, wild places.

This was the setting where I grew from a girl to a woman. This was where I missed Jordan for two years, a world of painful goodbyes, like my heart was being squeezed out through my throat. This was where I changed from a sparkler–slight, fleeting, trembling–to a signal flare, searing up into the star-splattered sky, leaving white-gray smoke in my wake. This was where I wrote hundreds of poems, a handful of stories, uncountable letters, and four novels. This was where I learned the value of female friendships, of coffee talk. This is where I learned that my heart still was tender. This was where I was first, truly married. This was the hard, strange, beautiful place where I became harder, stranger, and more beautiful. This was the last place I’ll ever pull myself into a closet to cry.

On Wednesday morning, our belongings packed into a Budget van, we’ll leave. For new places, new adventures. In August of 2007, I wrote in my journal that leaving New Jersey was like being skinned alive. Gainesville taught me that we have nothing to fear of new beginnings. Before coming here, I had some vague philosophy that everything works out in the end. Gainesville is where I learned that this was true.

Thank you, my pretty, little city. And farewell.

The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Warning: this review might make me sound like an old person.

I couldn’t help but read The Cat Ate My Gymsuit with a bit of wistfulness. Though the characters, voice, and situations likely still remain true to life, I suspect that there just isn’t a place for books like Danziger’s in the current world of children’s and young adult writing.

It’s the story of Marcy, a fat middle schooler whose horizons are opened up by her new hippie teacher, Ms. Finney. Ms. Finney encourages her students to be in touch with their feelings–a radical concept for many of these small town kids who grew up in a world without Mister Rogers. When the teacher’s radical politics and teaching style get her fired, Marcy and her friends decide to try some “radical” (for the time) tactics of their own.

But what’s notable about this book isn’t necessarily the central driving plot, which is undeniably dated and is unlikely to resonate with modern teenagers. What’s notable is Marcy, and her family. The misunderstood oldest child of a cowed house wife and verbally abusive father, Marcy relates her home life in a way that feels incredibly true-to-life. Interchanges between Marcy and her younger brother, and Marcy and her mother (particularly conversations about her mother’s budding feminism) are really truly touching.

Unfortunately, I just think that the niche for this sort of book has been supplanted. Marcy and her friends are undeniably teenagers, and deal tangentially with teen issues (peer pressure around drinking, first dates), but the voice–while well-rendered–is incredibly simplistic, as is the plot. The length and development are more akin to a modern low middle grade book than something that teenagers would want to read. For all its strengths, I couldn’t help but close the cover and think “Who would read this?” Sadly, the only answer I could conjure was “nostalgic adults.”

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I’m getting close to the end of my first draft of SEAS RUN DRY. I’m a little unsure as to how to proceed from here with teasers–there’s a lot of material I could share that would be dangerously spoileriffic. I might start teasing other projects, or maybe a trunked short story or two (any preferences, Gentle Readers?). This week, though, we’re good. This week I’m going to give you some pure, unadulterated, merman ish.

The water rushed against the rocks and lapped up around her hips, but other than that, Irene heard nothing. As she let herself float deeper in, her eyes searched the waves for any sign of life—for that shadow of black curls. But all she saw were knotted fistfuls of pine-dark seaweed and strange, translucent circles—jelly fish bodies, dead and weightless—floating on top of the surf.

She was treading water, her toes hardly touching the ice-cold sand at the bottom, when he came up behind her.

“Irene,” he said. She was surprised to hear how thick and how deep his voice had become as he wrapped his arms around her, drawing her close. He kissed the slope of her neck. At first she was torn between her own lust and a sudden, irrational stab of fear. Under water, her toes danced away from his lower body, avoiding it. But as her limbs circled, keeping her afloat, she couldn’t keep her feet from gracing the preternaturally smooth skin that covered his long trunk of a tail. She shivered at the frigid contact, at the alien hairlessness and strange form.

“Loril,” she replied, taking in a briny mouthful of water as she wrested her body away. She tried to make her movements gentle, but it wasn’t easy—not with the pull of the undertow beneath her and the looming waves cresting overhead. “I’m sorry, I—”

And then she looked at him. He was still as an anchor, his weight shifting easily despite the sea’s loping rhythm. Those fierce blue eyes seemed unperturbed by the distance she’d put between them. Instead, very calmly, he reached out his white hand.

“It’s okay,” he said. Then, his brows tensing slightly, he added, “Swim with me, please, while we still can.”

Irene looked down, her eyelashes dotted with salt water, and wondered what he meant by that. Did he mean that they should swim together before he went back to his pod, or before he made his choice . . . and became a man? But his voice had cracked when he spoke, and the way his baritone broke made her heart twist in her chest. So she took his hand and let him pull her close again. This time she wrapped her arms over his muscular shoulders, cradling her body against his torso. She tucked her face against his chest, feeling his slow, steady breathing. If she didn’t look down, it was like they were normal—just a girl and a boy swimming together, their arms entangled.

But maybe, she thought, it wasn’t fair to him to ignore what he was. This was his body—just as much a part of him as his eyes or his laughter. And she loved him for that, didn’t she? Looking at him, at the serene expression he wore as his tail moved with the surf, she knew it was true. Agape, she told herself, willing her mind to open to him, willing her fears to subside. So she let her body relax against his, resting her hip against his silver-enveloped hip.

He held her even tighter in his strong arms. “Hold your breath,” he said, smiling faintly. Irene hardly had time enough to draw in a mouthful of humid air before he ducked under a high-breaking wave, pulling both of their bodies through the brackish water.

The ocean streamed by, feeling like cold silk around Irene’s near-naked body. She tried to glance down through the murky depths, to get an idea of how Loril’s tail and muscles and bones all worked to propel them so quickly through the surf, but she couldn’t grasp more than a vague impression of it: he was strong and fast, and everything else was just a blur. Just as her supply of air thinned, he crested on a ripple and surfaced, saltwater streaming around both of their bodies. They were far from the shore now, where the waves were slight. She looked down into the black depths and wondered how deep it was. Shivering at the thought, she held on tight.

“I’ve got you,” he reassured her, laughing. Irene laughed too, but it was a breathless, exhilarated laugh.

“That was amazing!” she said, tossing her head back, looking up into the wide sky above, laughing more. Then she grinned, turning back to Loril. In the sunlight that twinkled off the water, she noticed that a rash of pink had worked its way over his face and ears and throat. Even his stomach looked ruddy. She pressed her fingers to his chest. It was burning hot, and when she lifted her fingers away, there was a gap of white left in the wake of their pressure.

“Are you okay?” she said, suddenly serious. But he wasn’t serious at all. His eyes, flooded onyx by his pupils, smiled at her.

“I’m amazing,” he said. “You’re amazing.”

And with that, he kissed her, slowly and deeply, while the tide rushed in around them.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I still can’t believe how well Stephen King does women.

Or in this case, a girl. As someone only a handful of years older than Trisha McFarland, the deliciously spunky, undoubtedly strong heroine of King’s novella The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I can speak with some degree of confidence about the uncanny quality of her character. And, as this story is utterly character-based, I can only call it a triumph–though I fear that King fans in search of a tightly-plotted volume redolent with King’s usual supernatural shenanigans will have to look elsewhere.

The year is 1998, and Trisha is a nine year old girl whose family–mom, dad, and petulant teenage brother–has been recently shattered by divorce. In an attempt at creating some semblance of togetherness, Trisha’s mom Quilla drags her kids on one family-friendly field trip after another: to the auto museum, on a ski trip, and finally on a fateful summer hike through the Maine wilderness. Trisha only leaves the trail for a moment to pop a squat, but somewhat, she loses sight of her mother and brother–and so begins her nine-day-long harrowing trip through the wilderness.

Trisha is a tomboy, the kind, I admit, I always aspired to be as a little girl. She’s a daddy’s girl–she and her father share a love of baseball and of Red Sox player Tom Gordon–but her mother’s imbibed her with enough just enough wilderness knowledge (which berries are safe, how to pee without getting your jeans wet) to keep her afloat. As Trisha stumbles through the forest, we become increasingly aware of the tensions of her age. She and her girlfriend Pepsi are just beginning to explore pop music, and sexuality (they beg their moms to let them dress up as the Spice Girls for Halloween), but still memorize Double Dutch rhymes. Though Trisha’s speech is peppered with her father’s aphorisms (the kind of King-speech that just barely missed setting my teeth on edge in Lisey’s Story, but is put to much better use here), she’s also been growing increasingly aware lately of his predilection for beer. Though her character arc may be slight, this is a coming-of-age story, and that’s no better evident than when Trisha muses that, after this experience, she’ll quit quoting her father and her grandmother and start penning sayings of her own.

It’s good that King is so focused on Trisha’s growth and character, because this truly is a character study, and not much besides eating berries and gathering nuts and following streams happens in this slim volume. There are hints of the supernatural, but they’re never explained and could easily be hallucinatory, and the pacing flags a bit by the beginning of the “Bottom of the Seventh.” But the book’s short length and brisk structure saves it from being tiresome, and, like King’s other meditations on claustrophobia (Gerald’s Game, Misery) it’s appropriately focused and realistically rendered. In a way, it recalls a book from my own youth–a story of a pair of snowbound teenagers called Snowbound!. But in that book, the relationship between the characters and nascent hints of romance were the focus. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is truly a story of survival, and Trisha’s success rests squarely on her own shoulders, lending this book a feminist tint. Hell, never before have I felt so elated at the simple account of a girl catching a fish.

There are a few problems here, but they’re slight: a post-script that feels a bit saccharine for all that’s come before it, a bottom-heavy structure. But frankly? Trisha herself is just so awesome that I hardly cared. I wish I’d read this when I was younger–closer to Trisha’s age–and could have more directly drawn inspiration from it. As it is, all I can do is remind myself that sometimes a girl’s moxy and smarts really can save the day.

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Good morning, internet. Please excuse the fact that I have had no coffee yet, but I had to post this post haste: the amazing writers over at the amazing YA Highway gave me the opportunity to write a guest post about critical reviewing. The blog post, called “In Praise of Harsh Words went live this morning. I’m excited! And nervous! And other emotions that can only be expressed with the addendum of exclamation points!

Because I have a tendency to be long winded, there were a few bullet points that didn’t make the cut. Since they’re relevant, I figured I’d post them here (in no particular, and in particularly scattered, order):

• Peer reviewing is all over the place in other disciplines–and even other genres. If you’re a scientist, your work won’t even be published if it doesn’t pass muster with other scientists. In this case, your peers aren’t only your critics but also your publishers. Scary! But it’s understandable. Who can better speak to the quality of work in a discipline but those also working in a discipline? As for other genres, when I proofread reviews over at Strange Horizons, I always give the authors’ notes a once-over. These reviews, sometimes critical, always somehow qualified, are often written by other writers. “So-and-so has short fiction appearing in many magazines” or “So-and-so is working on a novel.” It’s incredibly common, but, for whatever reason (probably warm fuzziness), that same critical exchange doesn’t happen in YA–and I think that’s a bit of a shame.
• James Joyce is just one of many examples of writers who have been given near-immortality through criticism. I’ve seen people object even to quasi-academic analysis of YA works. This ignores the fact that academic critics are our friends. When scholars raise objections, perhaps, to its failures as a feminist text, or talk about what is, or isn’t Marxist about a book, they look at it exceedingly closely. They buy copies of it. They give it depth that may or may not have been present previously, and invite others to look at a work deeply, too. I keep thinking back to my Joyce & Cultural Studies class in graduate school, where the professor told us that the big issue at that moment in Joyce studies was the interpretation of a single metaphor in Ulysses. I think that we should all be as lucky as Joyce to have scholars so engaged in our work! And a century after writing it, too. Zombie Joyce, you know?
• Something along the lines of: “Critics aren’t our enemies, boy. You know who we should fear? Censors.” Poorly paraphrased. I first read a line something like that in Katie Waitman’s phenomenal The Merro Tree when I was about 15, and it’s stuck in my mind ever since. Don’t be scared of critics who want to talk about your book–be scared of the people who want to keep it off the shelves.
• With all that said, I know that some writers will always hate critics. I’ve seen it first-hand: Franz Wright has paid my blog a visit because of a mere mention of my former teacher, William Logan. Logan’s known as “the most hated man in American poetry” thanks to his reviews, and has received death threats. So there’s that. But I still think William is genuine about his opinions–his reviews are fair assessments of his tastes (even if mine are wildly different from his). For me, these risks feel worth it (though I’m not as big or as important as Logan, and I’m just starting out in my career so maybe I’m wrong so who the heck knows?) in exchange for being honest, for being fair and balanced in my reviews, for the sake of being able to talk as both a reader and a writer.

So there you go. Thanks again to the wonderful Kirsten Hubbard (who I “met” through reviews, donchaknow? See, they’re already good for something!) and all of the ladies over at YAHighway for the opportunity.

Oh my god, guys! I’ve been so busy! So busy that I half-started a post on Wednesday’s YA Highway Roadtrip Wednesday Topic (because, as someone about to give away all of her furniture, move, and get new stuff–including a new desk; I can’t wait!–I have a lot to say about it!). But alas, it’s been sitting here, half-finished, for two days now. And probably will remain that way.

No loss, I assure you. When it comes down to it, all I was going to say was that I want to get an expedit desk from ikea.

It doesn’t help matters that I’ve decided to go ahead and finally give twitter a whirl. Poor timing, you know? I’ve resisted for years now–seeing the service as redundant in a world of real blogging, facebook, and google buzz (which I love–but no one uses!). But aaall the writing peeps seem to use it, so, since I have a guest post forthcoming on YA Highway, I figured it was time to jump in. My first foray looked promising. And last night, for the first time in a decade, I ended up in what was essentially a chat room with a bunch of real, live, working (and some publishing) writers. Sure, I still think it’s silly to essentially reverse engineer an AOL chatroom–but, damn, I’d forgotten how much I’d loved real-time chat back in the day. It was really exhilarating. I lost 30 minutes of writing time, but ended up feeling pretty inspired and pushing myself to 56,000 words last night, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I also got to hear about how Maggie Stiefvater was dancing around her living room to her own audio book. Adorable!

Anyway, Cindy Pon tweeted about an article she wrote over at Supernatural Underground about upcoming trends. The first trend there was “mermaids”–and I wanted to comment and be like, “Yes! Mermaids! Everyone should want to read about those!”

I hesitated, though, because I couldn’t help but think, “Damn, I’m trendy.”

It’s not like I don’t know that I’m writing to an up-and-coming trend. I’ll come right out and say it: I never would have started writing SEAS RUN DRY were it not for an agent’s tweets about how much she wants mermaid manuscripts. But I also never imagined that I’d be the type of person who writes to trends (and here I have to wonder–do any writers see themselves that way at all?). But what Ginger Clark’s tweets did was spark inspiration in me–or not even precisely inspiration, but rather memory. Because I thought, “Man, what the hell kind of story could I write that features mermaids?”

And then I remembered that, at fifteen, I’d started writing one.

I was never a big mermaid person generally. That was my sister, who collected them. They were all over her room when we were kids. Mermaid toys. Statuettes. Pictures. Books. Her mermaid love was so well-known in our family that our aunt bought her a toy mermaid as a get well gift when, at sixteen, my sister got mono–despite the fact that she was far too old and too cool for such things.

In contrast, I was a bit of a tomboy. I liked The Little Mermaid well enough, and even had an Ariel Barbie. But I didn’t play with her all that much. I did play with her tail, though, which was fabric and removable. I had this boy doll, the prince from the LadyLovelyLocks line, and I’d put the tail on him and make him a merman. He’d swim around underwater and have adventures.

Years later, when I was in high school, I stumbled upon a book of short stories about mermaids that had survived on my sister’s bookshelf through the Great Mermaid Purge of 1995. The stories there were pretty dark, and vivid, and sparked an idea in me. You see, we’d been reading The Odyssey in high school, and I felt for Telemachus. As a kid who had lost her own father pretty young, I saw his journey as the more significant one: how he believes, against all hope, that his father is alive, and how he journeys out to find him. I wanted to write my own Telemachus story. So I started writing this Telemachus/mermaidmerman mash-up about a half-human merman who tries to find his human father.

Like most of my writing projects back then, I didn’t get very far with it. But the idea stayed embedded in my mind for years. The merman, named Loril, was a surprisingly vital character. And so when I heard that people actually, you know, wanted to read about mermaids, I initially giggled–but only for a moment. Because then Loril came back to me, fully formed.

The story’s evolved since its incipience, of course. Because back when I was fifteen, I was pretty cheesy. In fact, I recently found the old version of this story buried in the netherlands of my harddrive. And . . . well, here; I’ll share my (unedited, with authentic ninth grade grammar intact) notes with you. They speak for themselves:

Loril Walker: Dead at Seventeen
I. Introduction
A.Loril Walker, age seventeen, is alone in New York City
1. He is hungry.
2. He is alone.
3. He believes his journey to the city is a mistake.
4. He is bitter and angsty.
5. He throws out his copy of “The Odyssey”
6. He is searching for his father.
7. He is different.
a. Emotionally-feels old, tired, weary of life.
b. Physically-has webbed fingers, bright emerald eyes, dark hair. Possible reference to breathing underwater or gilled legs.
8. He wishes to return to the sea.
B. Mazai births a human boy.
1. Mazai is a “creature of the sea” (don’t use mermaid)
2. Her people warned her against this.
3. The other women come to see the new child after his first breath. They are horrified.
4. She further offends her people by naming him Loril. a. Loril-”Song bringer”
b. From an ancient poem- “The moon rose in darkness above the waves and over the golden foam/Young Loril’s song spun red knots into the hearts of old/He took his shell and trumpeted, notes rising to the starry sky/The Gods lie dead in the seaweed, but their spirits would never die.
c. Loril was a hero akin to Moses. He led his people to off the coast of Florida, wrote their laws, and established their civilization as a major sea power. According to myth, he was a musician of the highest ranking whose songs could soothe the sea during a storm. He was brought to the monarch for a minor matter, but when disease struck down all at court accept for him, he took it apon himself to relocate his people.
5. She refuses to give him up. The women warn her that she’ll have to live with the consequences of being the mother of a “legger.”

Oof.

I have no idea what the title was all about, since I’m pretty sure the character was never going to die. And I have no idea what was up with all the angst in the first half (and it’s now set at the Jersey shore, which is a much better choice. Mermen in NYC? Unlikely!) The second half of the outline isn’t that far from some stuff that’s made it into the actual book, though; Loril is still named after a mythic character, and I still rarely use the term “mermaid.”

I’ve also since learned to spell “upon.”

Anyway, I still can’t deny that I’m writing to a trend. If I hadn’t heard that the subject might potentially be a popular one, I wouldn’t have thought of Loril or his story. It would have remained buried in my memory, latent. But so many people buck against the idea of writing trendy stuff. “I don’t write about vampires!” they say, “I write about paranormal romance about rabid foxes! FROM SPACE!” or “I’ve heard the next idea they’re pushing is mermaids–HA! AMIRITE?”*

All I can say is, and I’m sure it’s true of many people writing things they hope will sell someday, even if trendiness was the incipient motivation for writing SEAS RUN DRY, my story is no less important to me for it. Even if it never sells, I’ll be glad that I finally went ahead and wrote it down. After all, I’m not writing about a merman for those big merman bucks (sand dollars?)–I’m writing about a merman because he’s real to me, because he breathes (possibly underwater), and because I thought his story was worth telling.

*I’ll admit it–I laugh too! Snort! Mermen! Redonkulous!