Julia interviewed two librarians at the Monroe County Public Library (which is also my local and much beloved library since Julia and I live in the same town – Bloomington, Indiana). I especially love this comment by Chris Hosler, Teen Programmer/Reference Librarian:

It’s amazing that there’s a job like this out there for people like me, who love to learn for learning’s sake and to meet all sorts of people each day. It’s that curiosity about life and the people we share it with that I think draws many librarians to the profession. I guess I just want people to know that, and to please come talk to us when you’re in the library – we do this job because we love it and love to help folks access the information they need, and yes, the crotchety librarian is a cruel stereotype, so don’t be afraid to ask us for help!

Julia is also donating $1 to everyone who comments on her blog today (April 12), so go over there and comment and make her pay up!  Her blog is also a great resource for writing news and advice and she updates it very regularly (unlike some people we know…ahem) (that would be me), so I highly recommend checking it out.

And come back here soon, because I hope to announce the details of the Best Birthday Present EVER sometime this week!

But while things were relatively quiet, I went places!  Specifically east, south and north!  Places such as…

1.) New York City!  Where apparently they sit around in folding chairs in Times Square?

I didn’t quite understand what was going on, but it seemed cool.

My favorite part of the trip was Coney Island…I am a total sucker for decaying amusement parks and rickety wooden roller coasters and, of course, Ferris wheels.

Wonder Wheel!

2.)  Then I went south to Kentucky to go on the Bourbon Trail where, incidentally, you don’t really drink a whole lot of bourbon.  It was mostly about the pretty rolling scenery and the gift shops.  Well, and getting locked in the stocks.  There was that.

Me: Guys, you’re going to come back and let me out, right?  Guys?  Hey, where are you going?

SIGH.

3.) Then I headed up north to the Keweenaw Peninsula (where last year I saw a BEAR.  In the WATER.)  This year was slightly less exciting in the wildlife department but the weather was near perfect and my favorite lighthouse was as lovely as always.

Purty.

And now I am home and ready to get back to work.  This is going to be an exciting year…Albatross is coming out next spring (I get to post the BEAUTIFUL cover later this week!), I’m hard at work on something new, and maybe I’ll get to plan a trip out west to cover all my cardinal directions.  Fingers crossed!

See?

(Disclaimer: They are slightly cuter in this video then they are in real life. That one dude’s voice is just as lovely live, though.)

One guy, the blond in the video, played like every instrument there is and some that are not (a radio tuned to white noise?).  The venue was nice and relaxed and the music was good and I started thinking over this plot of a cool new story and decided Grizzly Bear would be the soundtrack and everything was going great…

…except we just so happened to sit behind the biggest Grizzly Bear SUPER! FAN! in all of Bloomington, Indiana.  Seriously, this girl was excited.  She screamed during the silences and yelled out requests at inappropriate times and she flailed…literally.  She actually got in a fight with her boyfriend, right there in front of us, because she hit his head so many times with her flailing arms that he asked her to stop so she started yelling at him because telling a SUPER! FAN! to calm down is always a mistake.  High drama.

There wasn’t anything else for to do except make her a character in this new story, silly barrettes and all.

So I figured I need to express gratitude toward the computer programs that made this possible…(sadly, all for only for Macs).

1.) Scrivener.  I heard about it first on Justine Larbalestier’s excellent blog and, I’m not gonna lie, it helped tipped the scale toward switching over to a Mac last summer.  I wrote almost all of Albatross on Scrivener and cannot fathom how I lived without it.  It just made organizing my brain and formulating plots about a hundred time easier, and an organized brain is kind of nice for novel writing.  Seriously, enthusiastically and highly recommended.

2.) Freedom.  This program, quite simply, breaks the internet on your computer for as long as you ask that it be broken (I can usually only stand an hour at a time or else I get twitchy).  For people like me who have, um, a kind of hard time not being distracted by the internet (IT’S SO SHINY) Freedom could not be more aptly named.  I don’t think I could have finished Albatross in a timely manner if it weren’t for all the internet breaking that I did in those last few weeks.  Recommended!

Oh, one more!

3.) MacJournal.  One of my oldest friends (from elementary school on) began working on this program when we were in college and won some big student design award for it and now he’s like computer software hotshot out in California but he totally deserves it because this journaling program rocks.  I’ve found it incredibly handy for keeping a writer’s journal, jotting down ideas, doing free-writing, further brain organization, etc.  And it has a ton of other features, too…so very, very recommended.

Freedom is free, and Scrivener and MacJournal are both under $40.  Worthy investments, all.

This girl.

I even talked my Michigan fan snowman ornament into joining the party.

Or maybe I’m just addicted to adding creepy button eyes to all my pictures.

1.) Band Geeked Out revisions! I chained myself to the computer and finished up a round, mostly working on various inconsistencies with the timeline. It turns out that I’m very good at creating strange and convoluted inconsistencies with timelines, which makes me very glad that I have editors.

Sprucing the story up made me even more excited about it…I can’t believe Band Geeked Out will be out in April!

2.) Theater! The writing-a-play-in-a-night thing went surprisingly well, despite the fact that one of the rules was that I had to incorporate a ferret tube as a prop. A ferret tube, if you don’t know, is like a very long, plastic-covered slinky. And very long, plastic-covered slinkies are not props that are commonly found in plays. Fortunately, I managed to find a use for it (obviously ferret tubes are alien communication devices) and came up with a funny play that did not totally suck. Hooray!

3.) Perusing the LIFE magazine online photo archive. I get hopelessly lost in it at least every other day. And it’s pretty hard to find your way out of an online photo archive of that extent, let me tell you. You think you might see an exit, but it turns out to be twelve pages of cowboy pictures. So you double back and go the other way, and run right into 200 photos of drive-in theaters. It never ends.

4.) Decorating my apartment for the holidays, which included putting up my tree and my most favorite new ornament:

The Michigan fan snowman does not wish to speak of football.

Please do not bring it up. He will just get upset.

5.) Twittering…I’m a little bit obsessed. I usually update once or more a day over there, since the micro-blogging thing is a bit less intimidating than trying to figure out what to say here. Plus it requires much less focus. Follow me! I talk about fascinating things like…um…pumpkin scones and my issues with annoying neighbors!

In addition to the fact I just plain adore her books, Meg is also one of my writerly inspirations.  I first met her at a Queen of Babble signing in Chicago exactly three days before I sat down and began to write Band Geek Love, which I am fairly convinced is not a coincidence.  So to hang out with Meg, years later, and be able to tell her in person that she’s part of the reason I’m a writer was just…awesome.  I feel very lucky!

So, that’s probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to me since I last wrote here, but I’ve also been crazy busy with non-hanging-out-with-heroes business. There was the election, of course (WOOT!), and I had a great visit at Edgewood High School in nearby Ellettsville, Indiana, where one reader informed me that I had obviously “scanned her brain” to write Band Geek Love (my response: “Dang, I was hoping you wouldn’t figure it out!”).

I’ve also been doing lots of theater stuff, including getting ready for this big event on Friday which involves me writing a whole play IN ONE NIGHT.  Yeah, I’m not sure what I think I’m doing either.  But I’ve been told that it’s fun!  Like a 12 hour playwriting version of NaNoWriMo, I suppose.  (Except I don’t get to quietly shut it in a drawer for future revision when I’m finished…the play will be performed on Saturday night!)

And soon I’ll be diving headfirst into the final Band Geeked Out revisions, and writing the next book, and and and.  More soon!

And if there’s one thing that I know about Ellie Snow, it’s that she needs to do a lot more veering spectacularly off-script. Which certainly happens in Band Geeked Out.

You can pre-order it already and everything!

If I ever want to introduce more veering off-script into future stories, I can always consult my comment spam queue for ideas.  Seriously.  The spambots have gotten strangely wordy, and I’ve noticed a definite downtick in helpful links to what the Supreme Court would call “prurient interests” and a whole lot more random, G-rated story telling.

And the stories almost make sense!  Like my spam queue is trying to tell me something in code!

“Custard knows was fading pontoon pedal boat death wasn’t what’s never odd or even eyed confidence bet resentful,” my spam queue says.

“Oh really?” I reply.  “Please tell me more.”

“Traveler away john deere 650 hay rake our day dropped money at a gas station known she fruit punch orange sherbet seven up companion,” it says, I imagine with a knowing look.

“That sounds important!” I say.  “I wish I knew what you meant!”

“Vampires stands between baccarat wheels wholesale had three dog has low red blood count ticking!”

“WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME?” I demand.

“Tears glittered does either paulsen 500 poker chip set his car overgrown,” the spam queue sighs.

“That’s it, you’re getting deleted.”

But that threat doesn’t seem to bother it much.  We both know it’ll be back with 50 comments tomorrow.

It’s a blog of high-definition vintage photographs from the beginning of photography through the 1950’s and I think it’s pretty awesome. There are all sorts of shots of people, places and things from every era during that period, and it’s always like a history lesson in a picture.

I especially love the site because it allows me to indulge in my recently acquired obsession: old photographs of women who look familiar and/or like they could be related to me. I’m not sure where this obsession came from, because it’s not like I don’t have access to old photographs of people who actually ARE familiar and/or related to me (my all-time favorite vintage picture is of my great grandmother giving a tea party when she was four). But if I find myself in a thrift shop, I can’t help but search. Randomly finding a picture of someone who might be a long lost family member is just too good of a story to pass up.

Probably related to me.

I’ve only found a few such photos so far, plus received a set as a gift from an indulgent friend. But I’ve put them up on my wall and given them all names and histories.

This, for example, is my pretend Great Aunt Dora. She had a very fabulous life. I’m not sure how she ended up in an antique store in Florida, though.

You can buy prints of the photos on Shorpy, which is almost impossible for me to resist (I especially love this one, though I guess I can’t tell if she looks familiar because you can’t see her face!). I’ve already found at least five that would qualify for my obsession.

Take a look! Maybe you’ll see someone familiar!

This sort of feels like when I was keeping a journal as a kid, and I’d forget to write for a couple of days and then feel guilty, and more time would pass and I’d feel guiltier. And all the stuff that had happened in my life that I would normally file away on a journal page would end up piled in my brain until I couldn’t take it anymore and I’d spend hours writing a big long summary just to get some peace in my head.

Get out of my head, Stuff!

1.) My signing at Schuler Books and visit to Haslett High School up in Michigan went very well. I wasn’t even that nervous because everyone was so nice and reassuring! I just said “I’m very nervous about this” and they all said “Oh, don’t be, it’s going to be fine” and I believed them and it really was fine.

It was so awesome to meet some readers (many of whom were band geeks!) and hear what they thought about the book and how they identified with Ellie and the story. I put faces to the teenagers who I write for, and that was very cool.

Here is a bad camera phone picture proving it happened -

Missing: One snifter of brandy.

2.) My new editor put up a funny post about Band I Mean Banned books…

3.) I was cast in a new set of plays, one of which I wrote!, that will be performed right around the election. I am somewhat of a political junkie (it was my major in college, after all) especially around elections, (YA for Obama!), so to combine three of my favorite hobbies (writing plays, politics and acting) has been a total blast.

I recommend combining favorite hobbies whenever possible, unless your favorite hobbies happen to be sleeping, downhill skiing and archery. Or cooking, knitting and base jumping. Or…well, you get it.

4.) I accidentally ended up in an entire building full of alpacas! They are, seriously, the most adorably unlikely animals this side of a platypus. They are cute and furry and you just want to squeeze them, but alpacas are very suspicious and don’t especially like it when you look at them, let alone touch them. Convincing an alpaca to eat some treats out of my hand was a major victory.

I would like an entire alpaca herd, please. Except I’d spend all my time trying to befriend them and wouldn’t get any writing done.

Alpaca: “Why are you looking at me? Please stop.”

And…well, that’s pretty much it. Busy busy but I shall try and be a better blogger from here on out!