... is not something I would ever wish on my worst enemy. I touch type; have touch typed since they taught us how to do it in fourth grade. Consequently, it is difficult for me to hunt and peck with only my left hand, because all of a sudden, the right hand is typing too!

I have about one week to two more weeks of dictating... expect blog posts to be scarce around here until then. You would think I would love talking all the time, but between answering e-mail and attempting to complexly format contract by voice, I'm worn out. :-) I keep reminding myself that at least I have all my limbs.

I wrote this two weeks ago, just before I left for Denver. Enjoy! :-)

Suite 101 Guest Blog

Hello, LIT SOUP readers! It just took me five minutes to figure out how to get it to capitalize LIT SOUPIn the prior sentence.

As some of you may know, especially those that met me in Colorado, I've been wearing a brace on my wrist. At first, I thought this was my rheumatoid arthritis acting up, but then not only was my wrist swollen, but the palm of my hand started to swell. I am very dominantly righthanded, and this caused me a great deal of trouble as it is my right hand that is messed up. To make a long story short: I saw the doctor today, found out I have tendonitis, and received a very painful shot.

The tendonitis will heal, but in the meantime I am now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to type pretty much everything. By the way, the program recognizes "Dragon NaturallySpeaking", but has trouble tendonitis. I am overjoyed , however, that I get to type at all.

To celebrate, I'm going tell you about CATCHING FIRE by Suzanne Collins, which I read last night. I literally devoured the bookin about four hours, from when I bought it at the bookstore. It was interesting to me, not only as a reader, but as a writer. Ms. Collins does some really amazing things with plot. She probably did the same things in THE HUNGER GAMES, but I hadn't been to Odyssey when I read it, so I'm pretty sure I missed a bunch ofwhat she did. Apologies for all the mistakes but I'm still having trouble getting Dragon to recognize everything I'm saying.

Anyway, CATCHING FIRE is really great in that it does stuff with plot turns. At Odyssey, we learned that when you end the scene you need one of three things: your character must realize anticipation, realization,or have a turn. A turn is easily defined with a physical turn. A physical turn is something like a horror movieplot sequence--the hero and his girlfriend are running from the zombies, the zombies get girlfriend, instead of just running anymore, the hero literally turns around and goes back to fight. The really hard part about plotting, at least for me, is figuring out how to get all of this into a story or novel. If your scenes, and I mean every scene, don't have one of these three things, then they are doing nothing to propel the story forward.

And what Ms. Collins does is make sure that every single scene in CATCHING FIRE does that. it makes for not only a suspenseful novel, but one that shoves the story forward, while not sacrificing character development. I loved the book, and although I think I know who Katniss will end up with, I'm not willing to bet on it, and I can't wait for the third book.

Bedtime now for me as this is absolutely exhausting to dictate. :-)

This is what I remember:

I am seven years old and my friend, Valeria, is seven and a half years old in the summer of 1988. Dirty Dancing has aired on HBO, at least once, and someone's parents have taped it for us. We are sitting on the tile floor of her playroom, watching the movie over and over again. We love the dancing. We are fascinated by the fact that the two main characters have sex during the day--we didn't know people did that. We love Jennifer Gray. We love Patrick Swayze. We are two young girls who are fascinated by this movie and we are able to recite lines of dialogue verbatim by the end of the summer.

Winter comes and they play "The Time of Your Life" at the Old Bridge Ice Skating rink, where Valeria and I both take lessons. I skate around and around the rink to it, so much so that it's the one song I always associate with ice skating, despite the many songs they played. I skate and I sing as I skate, and I am pretty much the proverbial dorky little kid as I practice my crossovers.

And now I am twenty-eight years old, and Valeria and I have fallen out of touch, although our mothers are still good friends. I find out that Patrick Swayze is dead from Twitter, and I run downstairs to tell my husband who is making dinner. He gives me a hug and tells me he understands, although he really doesn't--I remain firmly convinced that little boys in the 80s did not experience the movie in the same way as little girls.

I no longer ice skate regularly and that long-ago video tape has been missing for years. But I have Netflix and I have this:

I am stunned and pleased to announce that a flash story I submitted to Knitty has now been published!

Please click through to read "The Sock Thief", wherein I immortalize John Joseph Adams, my friend and client.

And now to get in touch with the Knitty people, because you know, it would have been nice to be told about the story being accepted, and I'd like to get paid. =)

ETA: I am indeed getting paid and the Knitty people are lovely. Yay! =)

But still, overwhelmed, very pleased, and uber-excited!

I seem to be in total conference blogging mode this year, so look, another post!

Everyone in Colorado is lovely.

I did an agent panel with six other agents, and we were so crammed on the stage that we could have toppled people off like dominoes. We were good and behaved though. =) I then went and did a three hour long critique session of people's manuscripts, where I got to do mini-lectures on writing craft, which was a total blast.

I socialized and talked to a prospective client, then joined Janet Reid and Kaitlin Heller of Del Rey, along with a group of other lovely people, where we dissected the intricacies of novels involving ex-nuns who were also Miss America winners and brilliant physicists. Then, dinner! I ate dinner! I talked to more interesting people.

And now, in a stunning event, I'm going to call my husband and then go to bed by 8:30pm. The world may end, be prepared...

....there are pitch sessions starting at 8:30 am and I MUST be caffeinated...

Well, not really my idols... more like smart and sassy professional women who I haven't gotten the chance to meet in person yet.

I'm at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference, and it's my pleasure to tell you that I've finally gotten a chance to have a good long talk with Janet Reid (she's sneaky!) and Emmanuelle Alspaugh (who I knew before and is not as sneaky...yet). I also got to briefly say hello to Kristen Nelson, who I intend to corner later during the con to get to know her better in person.

I've also met a bunch of writers, showed up at the Twitter cupcake party, and went to the initial opening party for the agent/editor/writer guests. Surprisingly, I also got to hang out with my brother who was magically in Denver on business too! It was a wonderful surprise--especially since neither of us knew the other one would be here until our parents called us. We had yummy, yummy Italian food and walked around downtown Denver. =)

And now, off to save the wrist for more client e-mail that must be answered.

Because John Joseph Adams is nominated for a World Fantasy Award, I'll be trekking out to San Jose, CA in October. I'll have a bunch of sightseeing time, so if there's something you think I NEED to see in the Bay Area/Napa/somewhere else within reasonable driving distance, leave a note here.

As some or all of you may be aware, I'm one of those lucky people who manage to get rheumatoid arthritis in their twenties. It's usually controlled by medications, but due to a number of reasons, I can't take most of them right now. Which means that the RA, which is everywhere in my body, has been coming at my hands and feet with a vengeance lately.

At the moment, my right wrist is fairly shot, and I'm even slower answering email because of a wrist brace on it. Client and editor e-mail must, must come first right now; everyone else, I have your email, but you must wait on a reply for a bit. I'm really sorry, but there's only so much typing I can do before I want to scream in pain.

I'm off to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference tomorrow, but when I get back I think it will be time to bite the bullet and shell out the $200+ for Dragon Naturally Speaking software so I can get more work done.

If it's urgent and you need to reach me, call the number on the agency website.

I don't know how I missed this yesterday, but I chalk it up to distraction. =)

Paul Goat Allen of Barnes and Noble has some really nice things to say about my client, John Joseph Adams. Especially the parts where he compares John to Willy Wonka.

David Barr Kirtley has made an interesting illustration to go along with it...

And all of you should hop over to John's blog or Twitter and wish him well--his mom just had an emergency triple bypass!

Ok, so you know that article I linked to in the blog post before this one?

It's apparently started going haywire out there and people left and right are posting things.

Meg Cabot says this.

Candy at Smart Bitches says this.

And as for me, I think I fall solidly in the middle of them. "Classics" are good, but reading freedom is even better. To understand my point of view, I think I need to give you the short history of my experience with reading.

I have very smart parents. They are educated and well-read, and one of the first things they did was talk to me. They talked to me a lot. I could recite my vowels before I could say any words. I spoke at four months, and was speaking in full sentences by eleven months. I was an advanced child.

And my parents read to me, too. Lots and lots of stories, of every kind. I could recite my favorite fairy tale, "Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse" when I was a year and a half old, my mother tells me. My parents fostered this in me, and my mother taught me to read when I was three and a half. I haven't stopped since.

But here's the important part of this story: they never told me what I could or couldn't read. They very, very rarely removed books out of my reach. I can think of a handful of examples, including several Harlequin novels that my mom wouldn't let me read when I was eleven. But other than that, they never yelled at me about what I was reading. They told me about books they liked, and they sometimes read to me still, even when I was much older. We talked about things I liked, a lot. And we talked about the books I hated.

They never, ever told me that I had to read a certain book because it was important and it would tell me something.

As a result, I always, always read above age level. I've said before that I read JANE EYRE when I was ten. I read HAWAII by James Michener when I was eleven (at my mother's recommendation). I plowed through most of the YA section before I entered middle school, and was firmly into adult books by that point.

And then I encountered English teachers. Granted, I had a few good ones, but most of them were terrible. Lest you think this was a problem that started with middle school and above, I'd like to point to the example of my sixth grade teacher:

We read THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE in our gifted and talented sixth grade class. We were all smart kids. I had read the book literally years before. I love that book. And my teacher WOULD NOT LET ME SPEAK ABOUT THE BOOK BECAUSE THE OTHER KIDS MIGHT NOT HAVE READ IT YET. I wanted to talk about it, to discuss it, to engage in it and explore the allegory and the writing. I wasn't allowed. It was infuriating.

The pattern continued in later years, although I was allowed to talk about the books or plays at least. We read A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM in seventh grade, ROMEO AND JULIET in ninth grade, JULIUS CAESAR in tenth grade, MACBETH in eleventh grade, and HAMLET in twelfth grade. I like them all, even JULIUS CAESAR. But you have to understand that I was bored to tears in all those English classes because I had plowed through a good portion of Shakespeare when I was about eight years old. (I particularly liked THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR at that age, although I'm not sure why.)

And then we had to read the required books, which continued to bore me. Things like A SCARLET LETTER, OF MICE AND MEN, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and JUDE THE OBSCURE. I was so bored in my AP English class in twelfth grade that I downloaded the list of "recommended books" from the AP website and started reading through it alphabetically.

Which all adds up to the fact that there are certain authors and certain books that I despise because school tainted them for me. I have no suggestions how to get rid of this dislike, nor do I suggest trying to dissuade me from my dislike of the following authors and books.

Classics That I Love To Hate:

Charles Dickens (except for A CHRISTMAS CAROL)
John Steinbeck
Ernest Hemingway
A SCARLET LETTER
THE CRUCIBLE
TUCK EVERLASTING
Herman Melville
NECTAR IN A SIEVE
JUDE THE OBSCURE and everything else by Thomas Hardy
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and everything else by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I'm sure there are others, but those are the classics that I love to hate. I have classics that I love, but I'd like to point out that I read all of these before we touched them in school, and many of them we never, ever encountered in an English classroom.

A short, non-inclusive list of Classics That I Love:

Anything by Ibsen, but especially "Hedda Gabler" and "A Doll's House"
"Miss Julie" by August Strindberg
Anything by Shakespeare
Anything by Jane Austen
Anything by Louisa May Alcott
JANE EYRE by Charlotte Bronte
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston
Anything by J. D. Salinger, but particularly CATCHER IN THE RYE
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
THE GODS THEMSELVES by Isaac Asimov
THE SECRET GARDEN and A LITTLE PRINCESS by Frances Hodgson Burnett
THE CANTERBURY TALES by Geoffrey Chaucer
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
1984 by George Orwell
THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand

If it hadn't been for my parents' influence, I wouldn't have known how much fun books were and searched for the classics that I love.

If it hadn't been for my English teachers, I wouldn't have had to read the classics that I love to hate.

I think there are arguments that can be made for either side, but I strongly prefer the principles by which my parents raised me. You can say that puts me more on Meg Cabot's side, but you also have to remember that my parents had these books in their home. They had read some or all of them, when they were students. I read Shakespeare at my aunt's house, in a giant volume she had of all the plays. I was exposed to classic books as naturally as I was exposed to any other book.

But what about kids who don't have parents like me? What about kids who weren't exposed to books, both high-brow and low-brow? Should they have mandatory reading in school still? Should the goal be to introduce them to books and have them discuss them altogether? Or is the new method in the article the way that reading should be taught? Or is any required reading just a way of forming even more Classics We Love To Hate?

Thoughts are welcome!