Life gets in the way

It's been a pretty good year... I moved back to new york. I found an apartment with a TERRACE. I started working at an amazing school. I sold a book. I stuck to a workout schedule. I played on a beach in mexico. I became an aunt. I started another book. I had all this TIME. Not being a teacher meant I had all this TIME. I came home and I wrote and I slept in late and I had long brunches with friends and then wandered 5th avenue boutiques without worrying about the piles of grading I had waiting for me at home. I read novels, many of them.

As summer dawns hot and a little bit sticky, all of the sudden the walls are creeping in on this time. Things are changing, in all good ways of course, and I need to remember being busy. I need to stick to schedules and do laundry. I need to not let my writing suffer because most of all, in the empty spaces in the lists and plans I'm making, I'm afraid that TINE is going to get lost. Remind me about it here and there, will you?

I spent the morning making a few last changes on This Is What I Want to Tell You. I have such a strange relationship with this book-- like I'm deeply in love with it but the romance is gone. So we are going to take a little break and get the romance back.

The week of July 7th I am teaching a workshop for these guys. I miss teaching writing so intensely that I just cannot wait. But refining the curriculum on this beautiful summer day. What do we want to write about in the summer versus during the school year. Don't we approach the craft differently when its hot and bright and free outside? These are the things I'm thinking...

Something to Think About

“We come back to the same people to learn something about how we have changed. We want to be assured that we have changed—that we are different and better and older and thinner and wiser and cooler. We want the maps of ourselves to paint different.”

This is something I wrote almost exactly two years ago. It began as something very true, and then it became a scene in my novel. Which then became something quite different.

Recently some YA writers have been posting first lines. The first line of the first draft of a novel and then, the final first line. This had me thinking about the places where stories begin. For me PERMANENT INK started as another story altogether. And then one day I was thinking too much. And I wrote the lines at the top of this entry. And a new character came to life. And he belonged in this old story. And suddenly, then, it had this brand new breath and fury. The first line for me is sometimes at the end or in the stomach of the story. It’s never the actual first line. It’s the line I write that makes me go, oh, that’s it. I’ve got it. And then I can’t stop writing.

My Gypsy Soul is not being rocked.

I have lived a lot of places.


It all started here where I was born. Evanston, Illinois, home to Northwestern University. I always thought I'd go there but I didn't have very good SAT scores...


Then we moved here. This is lovely downtown Middlebury, Vermont. This, I suppose, is where I am from. My mom still lives here.


This is where dad lives. I spent summers here, a lot of Christmases and even other vacations. I got addicted to airports flying down here. The south Carolina coast. I have some beach in me, and some mountains.


This is my other home. This is where I went to boarding school. I lived here for four years and I have five zillion stories yet to write about this place. Seriously.


This is the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. I did not live ON the bridge. But I lived all over the other side of the river while I went to Bard College. I lived in an old gymnasium and you could see the foul line peeking out from under my couch. I lived in the dorms. I lived in what some might even call a double wide trailer. It had a swingset.


I lived here for six months. Home to the most inspiring library in the world.


I really did live here. For almost three years. One day I'll tell you about how I secretly miss LA sometimes.


This was a weird kind of moving "home" for a while. But I did have a really sweet little place on the third floor of a brownstone that looked like the west village even though it felt waaaaay upstate.


Roma Roma Roma. Even after two years my Italian is laughably bad. But O. Roma.


And finally here we are. (this is actually my second time living in NYC but, well, I'm here now...). Homehomehome. My favorite thing is the 59th street bridge at night. Which isn't even my bridge anymore. But you're going home and you're anonymous and alive all at once. And its New York. And its all what you dreamed about.

But MAN my gypsy soul cannot sit still. She is feeling a little nutty.