Just got back from a fantastic visit to Fairfax Villa Elementary School here in northern Virginia; tomorrow we head for home.  Thanks again to all the students and educators who made this week possible!

Now, without further ado, your Friday SECOND SPY photo clue:

Ray Bradbury died yesterday.  The thought of him being gone followed me throughout the day, turning the whole world a different, darker color.   I never met him in person, but his work had such a profound impact on my life that I’m not sure I could separate it from myself now, from the way I think, the way I write, the way I look around me.

There’s the powerhouse that is Fahrenheit 451, of course, and the gorgeous nightmare of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the classic Martian Chronicles.  “A Sound of Thunder” is still one of the most memorable short stories I’ve ever read, and “Zen in the Art of Writing” is packed with inspiration and wise advice.  But it was Dandelion Wine, which I first read when I was twelve, that turned me upside down.  The way it depicts the inner and outer worlds of a child growing up in a small Midwestern town (just like I was), and makes those worlds so rich with magic and danger and romance and wildness, was a revelation.  It showed me that everything–a new pair of running shoes, a jar of fireflies, an unusual flavor of ice cream, playing shadow tag, even mowing the lawn–was layered with life and meaning and possibility.  I reread it every summer, and when I’m done, I look around with brand new eyes.

Thank you for this, Mr. Bradbury.

I’m currently in the middle of week of school visits in Fairfax County, just south of Washington D.C.  (Eagle View and Laurel Hill: Thank you!  Union Mill and Fairfax Villa: I’ll see you soon!)  This means I get to visit with wonderful relatives and wander the city in between book events.  Here I am on the National Mall…

…and at the Hirshhorn Museum, about to be eaten by one of Ai Weiwei’s Zodiac Heads.

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign their in-stock copies of The Shadows and Spellbound.  If you’re in the D.C. area looking for a signed book of your own, this is the place to find them (and you should stop in even if you don’t want my books, because the store is absolutely amazing).  While you’re there, you could pre-order The Second Spy.  Just 28 days to go…

Voila.

Readers may already know what this is, but it will be important again, in a whole new way.   (I know you can’t see me, but I’m smiling with knowing smugness.)

I’ve just finished my most grueling revision yet (mostly grueling due to time constraints, not to the actual work involved, although there was PLENTY of that, too), and THE BOOKS OF ELSEWHERE, VOLUME FOUR is back with the amazing editor.  This means that I get to return to my other work-in-progress.  I spent yesterday afternoon and most of this morning rereading the entire thing, and I’ve just started scribbling my way into new territory.  Moving to a completely different project at this point feels delightful.  It’s like I’ve been eating nothing but pineapple for the last eight weeks–and I love pineapple–but now I’m finally getting to eat raspberries instead.  And raspberries have never tasted better.

Red Wing’s own Soapbox Players has also just finished the run of Alan Ayckburn’s “How the Other Half Loves,” a 1970’s comedy with the trickiest blocking I’ve ever had to master, and it was a blast getting to work with such a passionate group of theatre-folk.   Tonight we strike the set, which always feels rather sad.  Here’s the cast, in all our tacky 70’s glory:

(Please note the fondue pot.)

In a bit of delightful ELSEWHERE news, I just learned that THE SHADOWS has been nominated for the 2013 Grand Canyon Reader Award, which means that young readers in Arizona can vote for it to win the prize. It’s in amazing company, and I am thrilled.  Thanks to all the educators and organizers who make programs like this possible.

As of yesterday, SPELLBOUND is available in paperback for your purchasing pleasure!  You can order it here via IndieBound , or you can find it/ask for it at your local bookstore, or of course you can find it on Amazon.  Yippee!

I let out an even louder ‘yippee’ when this arrived at my house yesterday: My sample copy of THE SECOND SPY, in hardcover.  The photo does not do justice to how shiny and wondrous it is in person.

Just 41 days to go!

And, because it’s Friday, here’s the Friday photo clue:

(This is called “Museum Cat,” and it’s by an artist named Jimmie Trotter.  But you all know who it really is…)

In general, I try not to rely on a thesaurus while I’m writing.  I’ve found that, unless you already have a very clear idea of the type of word you need, staring at a list of not-always-exact synonyms with all their sneaky connotations and roots and sounds will only lead you astray.  However, I do love the thesaurus for those moments when you know there’s a word that starts with “m” and it means something like fake or cheap, but your brain is refusing to give up the goods.

So, the other day, I fell down a thesaurus hole (and I would guess that thesauri would dig rather large holes) while I was on just such a quest, and I found a list of synonyms for “surprised” that were so strange I was sure that some of them must be fake.  Someone must have hacked into the online thesaurus and added these words, I thought to myself, like I saw my high school students do with Wikipedia. (The town where I taught was famous for being the home of several of my 11th graders.)  But it turns out that these wonderful words were real.  The first–anoetic–which actually means ‘unthinkable’ (and which isn’t recognized by WordPress’s spell check, apparently), sounded familiar.  The next, blutterbunged, had that too-perfect-to-be-true sound to it, and it’s an antiquated adjective that means exactly what it should mean.  A ferly is a Scottish adjective or noun meaning something strange and amazing and unexpected.  Best of all was gloppened–which is a form of the verb gloppen, meaning to surprise or frighten someone.  You can be a gloppener.  You can do something gloppeningly.  You can have said something gloppenedly.

For some reason, this makes me ridiculously happy.

And just for fun, here’s Brom on the porch, disemboweling a new toy.

Here’s the next visual clue to the contents of THE SECOND SPY…

(It will make sense if you read the book, I promise.)

Lots of other good news to share:

First, my twisted little story, “Miss Pipperman’s Parrot,” has just been accepted by The School Magazine, the oldest children’s publication in Australia!  No word yet on when it will appear, but I’ll be thrilled whenever it does.

Second, I received word that my poetry chapbook, Cherma, was selected as a finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Award.

Third, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble Galleria in Edina, MN for Concord Elementary’s book fair tomorrow — that’s Saturday, May 19 – at 11:00 a.m., to read, sign, and chat.

Now I’m off to water some lettuce seedlings.

I am a failure at this daily blogging thing.  However, my failure is making this countdown to THE SECOND SPY go a lot faster.  (Only 51 days left? It seems like just one entry ago there were 55…)

Today’s F.A.Q.: How old were you when you started writing?

This is my very first rejection letter.  It came from Highlights Magazine, and I just rediscovered it last fall, glued into my oldest scrapbook amid a lot of My Little Pony and Care Bears birthday cards.  Of course, Highlights handles submissions from kids very kindly, so it wasn’t so much a rejection as a “Don’t call us; we’ll call you” sort of letter, but the outcome was the same.  I’d sent them some little four-line rhyming poem–I think there were cows in it–and I was trying to write something that the magazine would like, not that I liked. 

You can see the date, typewritten at the top: December 30, 1987.   The day after my eighth birthday.

The poem I sent to Highlights is the first poem that I can recall putting on paper outside of school, on my own, just because I wanted to.  I started writing my first “book” not too long afterward: It was a lavish mess about a rebellious princess who ran away from her kingdom and ended up in a valley full of unicorns (as one does, if one is a rebellious princess).  I didn’t show that story to anyone.  And I didn’t show anyone my next story (which was probably also about unicorns), or my next poem, or the story after that, or the poem after that.  And I didn’t submit my writing to any kind of publication for another eight years.

By then I had written dozens of poems and stories.  And I had gotten a little bit better at it.

The wait time is dwindling…

And here is the first visual clue of what to expect within THE SECOND SPY.

Today’s accomplishments: Typing and cleaning up more than 4,000 words of the current version of Volume Four, and smacking a wasp that had gotten into the house before Brom could eat it.

Today’s frequently-asked question: How many books have you written?

If the questioner means, ‘How many books have you written that have been published, the answer is: 2, with #3 coming soon (or #4, if you count my chapbook of poetry.)

If the questioner means, ‘How many books have you written, published or not, the answer is: I couldn’t possibly count them.  I’m currently revising two books, and I have two more waiting in the wings with their early chapters and notes.  And, back in my practicing days, I wrote an adult novel, a series of graphic novels, and dozens–perhaps hundreds–of novels that end at Chapter 3, where the writing started to get hard, and I gave up.

Here’s a picture that I sometimes show at schools:

All of those binders and notebooks are full of my writing: hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, and many novels — some finished, and some that never will be finished. There is another row of binders that can’t be seen on the shelf up above, and another stack of currently-in-use books and folders sits on my desk.  I’ve never counted to see when and where I reached a million words (Ray Bradbury once said, “If you want to be a writer, write a million words,” which I think is pretty good advice) but I’m sure that most of those first million are here, in these folders.  And I’m grateful that no one will ever get to read most of them.