storyfires

I know I've been pretty silent on the blog lately. I have excuses. I do. I've been...busy. Well, I've been writing. That's my job, after all. It's also November, which means *Birthdays: three within 10 days of each other in my family. Fun, but exhausting. And expensive. Who decided that all the birthdays should be the month before Christmas? Was that my fault? Somebody needs to do some explaining. Sidenote: I got a camera for my birthday. When I figure out how to work it, maybe I'll start posting photos once in awhile. *A race: my first trialthon. Yes, I lived through it. Didn't quite freeze to death (the weather decided to be unseasonably beautiful). Didn't win. Ha, ha. Ha. Ha. I even had fun. My sister-in-law actually did win. Congrats, Sara! (She wins so often it's not even exciting for her anymore. I, on the other hand, was excited just to finish). I might even do another. I have yet to attempt an open-water swim, which gives me panic attack...

Slacking on the blog means lots of novel-writing, so I'm sorry, but not. Updates: Holy cow--I'm on page 64 of my teen poetry novel . It's taken me up and run away with my brain. I wasn't going to work on this yet. And I thought I only liked fantasy, but I find I'm dealing with stuff like depression and rejection and physical abuse and it feels like a perfectly natural seque from fantasy-writing. Who knew? The worst part: sending this one out will be like walking onto a swimming pool deck in nothing but my flip-flops. We'll see if I can do it. Hepzibah revisions --up to page 157. Going quickly, but I keep getting distracted by the novel in verse. Luckily, I'm not sure where I'm going next with that, so I'm back into revisions full time again.

I'm on a fiction-writing roll--haven't left my house for three days--but I haven't posted for two weeks, so today you get...my own awesome recipe for hot fudge sauce, invented by me. Perfect on Breyers vanilla icecream. Chocolate makes everything better. Makes you write better. Makes you well when you're sick. Maybe. That's not a scientifically-proven statement. But I stand by it anyway. Homemade Hot Fudge Sauce 1/2 C. real butter (no margarine) 1/2 C. slavery-free fair-trade cocoa powder (Dean's Beans is my favorite--you can buy online at http://globalexchange.org/ ) 1/2 C. milk 1 1/2 C. sugar Melt butter in covered glass bowl in microwave. Whisk in cocoa until combined. Then whisk in milk thoroughly. Then whisk in sugar. (Don't try to dump them all in at once or it won't work). Microwave on high 2 minutes. Take out and stir. Mike another minute; stir. One more minute, then stir again. Continue until mixture is thick and begins to foam up. ...

America believes in fast: fast cars, fast food, fast writing. Look at Stephanie Meyer. She wrote Twilight in, what, two months? Wow, that blows my mind. We love speed. I know a lot of people who read fast. I've heard rumors that JFK read some ridiculous number of words a minute--7,000, or something, though I have no legitimate source on that. I took a speed-reading course in college, even taught speed-reading mini-classes as part of my job at the reading/writing center where I worked. I know HOW to read fast. But I don't do it. Not that I didn't understand all that speed-reading stuff. I just didn't like it. I never could make myself practice. I like reading slowly. Not that there's anything wrong with reading fast. I admire those people who can read 2 or 3,000 words a minute. Or even 700. How nice to be so efficient. It has to be good for school. But I read slowly. I mean, really slowly, as in read-aloud-slow, like Charlie Brown's Snoopy from the ...

In honor of intellectual freedom and ALA Banned Books Week (Sept. 26-Oct 3), I'm making a plug for reading a banned book this week. You'd be astounded at some of the books on the ALA's banned list: Where the Wild Things Are , Speak , Harry Potter , Golden Compass , To Kill a Mockingbird , Bridge to Terabithia , Farenheit 451 , Lord of the Flies , A Separate Peace , and the Gutenberg Bible, to name a few. Some of my favorite books have landed their authors in jail, including the wonderful Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. Call of the Wild was burned in Nazi bonfires. I'm admittedly conservative about the books I'd personally hand to a young child; I believe, like Corrie Ten Boom's father (the Hiding Place), that some subjects are too heavy to ask young children to carry, just as a large suitcase might be. But that's a decision for individual caretakers to make for their own children, not for other people's. And I get angry when others try to make that...