A few things I am thinking about lately:

In the early 1900s, L. Frank Baum was releasing one Oz book every year. (So was Beatrix Potter, for that matter.) I wonder if that was a bit like the Harry Potter books today? Did tiny 1907 children dress up like Dorothy and stand in line at their bookstore for the latest Oz book?

I need a costume book. I write a lot of historical fiction, and when it comes to imagining a character’s physicality, it really helps to have a sense of how they dressed. I need a book that goes into underwear and day wear and evening clothes for both rich and poor people. Unfortunately, all the costume books I have found are very expensive, but it is something I should buy some day.

Flashbacks in fiction are tricky to achieve without creating a third-person narrator voice: “The story of Bob and Ginny went like this,” for example. Keeping a flashback in the character’s head brings up a questions about how we remember things–memory is often emotional, and narrative is didactic. How do you balance the emotions of a memory with the information necessary to let the reader know what is going on? I am paying attention to how other writers do flashbacks right now.

I really want to read My Sister, My Love, Joyce Carol Oates’s new book on the JonBenet Ramsay murder. Unfortunately, I’m judging a book contest and then have to review a different book, so I won’t have time until at least late August. Annoying!

Why are there so few books on subjects I want to know about? Corporate robber barons circa 1901! Daily life for women in San Francisco during the Civil War! Different poem structures and how exactly they are achieved by poets! Where are these books? (Doesn’t really matter because I don’t have time to read them right now, but still.)

I want to carry on a old-fashioned letter correspondence with someone, preferably another writer who will write to me long philosophical diatribes on pretty stationery. Kind of like Betty Hester to Flannery O’Connor, only I would rather we both be Flannery O’Connor in this scenario.

Oooh juicy: How bad was JM Barrie?

I got Jane Austen-ish spam in my e-mail box this morning:

Lady Amanda Williams.
52 Oxford Street, England.

Here writes Lady Amanda Williams, suffering from cancerous ailment. I was married to Sir Richard Williamsan Englishman who is dead. My husband was into private practice all his life before his death.Our life together as man and wife lasted for three decades without child, My husband and I made a vow to uplift the down-trodden and the less-privileged individuals as he had passion for persons who can not help themselves due to physical disability or financial predicament.When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of £20 Million which were derived from his vast estates and investment in capital market with his bank here in UK. Presently, this money is still with the bank. Recently, my doctor told me that I have limited days to live due to the cancerous problems I am suffering from. Though what bothers me most is the stroke that I have in addition to the cancer. With this hard reality that has befallen my family and me I have decided to donate this fund to you and want you to use this gift to fund the upkeep of widowers, orphans, the down-trodden, and persons who prove to be genuinely handicapped financially.

I took this decision because I do not have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are bourgeois and very wealthy persons and I do not want my husband’s hard earned money to be misused or invested into ill perceived ventures. I do not need any telephone communication in this regard due to my deteriorating health. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank in UK. I will also issue you a Letter of Authority that will empower you as the original beneficiary of this money. Please assure me that you will act just as I have stated herein, You can contact me through my personalemail address: [removed]

Lady Amanda Williams.

I can just picture Lady Amanda Williams wandering the moors of London, clutching her chest from all the cancer and strokes and worry. Whatever will she do? If only some kind, benevolent benefactor would allow her to give them her money, to protect it from her evil relatives and to help widowers, orphans, and the down-trodden. Can’t you help her out?

Funny little video making fun of promoting your book in today’s Twitter/Facebook/YouTube world, while simultaneously promoting this guy’s book in that world. Clever! I tell you, it’s hard to be a writer now when you have to waste time with all this stuff (, she blogs). Whatever… what are you gonna do? (Via)

This has been an insane week. I am glad it’s almost over. A lot of things happened this week, many of them cool. I got to:

• Interview the novelist Anne Lamott
• See poet Billy Collins read at the Marin Academy
• Eat tapas in San Rafael with Kyle
• Interview the playwrights who are adapting Lamott’s book for stage
• Take Kyle to the airport for his stint at Penguicon
• Watch Kyle tech-edit a chapter for a new publisher
• Write a book review for the San Francisco Chronicle
• Pay my taxes (not fun!)
• Have the Word Pirates over to plan our upcoming reading for May 15
• Celebrate the Word Pirates’ second birthday
• Re-edit an article that an editor had some questions on (also not fun)
• Interview people about the upcoming Marin Poet Laureate
• Write a couple of articles
• Get a ride in Marcia’s new car
• Make a bedspread for my guest room (pictures coming)

Next week looks a little saner. I have two articles due and am having dinner with friends. And that’s it. Whew.

Ladies and Gentlemen Writers (Writers and Writeresses?), introducing the Gender Guesser. (More from me about this application after the link.)

This week I’m reading through my novel before starting a new draft. I have filled a notebook with notes of things to change and I haven’t even gotten to the end yet.

Overall, I’m feeling better about the book this time through, but I am still amazed by my tendency to repeat myself. Although I don’t repeat major events or metaphors without meaning to, I do repeat small things within the scene. Thus, I have learned that my characters:

Love to smile. Oh how they smile. They beam. They grin. They smile slowly. Their smiles fall off their faces. Their smiles bloom. Their smiles turn their faces from plain to beautiful. They smile deliberately, with calculation. It is a book filled with smiles, and it will make you smile when you read it.

Cry easily. Yes, as much as my characters love to smile, they also love to cry. Fortunately, they do not cry as easily as they smile–that would be quite a rollercoaster!–but they sure do burst into tears when provoked. In my characters’ defense, most of the crying is manipulative or after a great tragedy, so it is somewhat understandable.

Look people up and down. You might think that with all these emotional outbursts, my characters lack analytical skills, but you would be wrong. They are good at sizing people up. They look along people’s bodies, sometimes suspiciously, sometimes sexually. Nothing gets past them, boy howdy.

Are well-dressed. At least, that’s the best I can figure what with all the description of clothes in this novel. There are entire wardrobes of clothes in this novel. Very little of it is relevant to the plot, but it helps you to know that the main character is wearing a pink dress, right?

In light of this, I am considering the possible title: All Smiles: The Story of Crying, Well-Dressed People Who Will Look You Up and Down by Joy Lanzendorfer.

I’m really feeling this poem today:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

–Emily Dickinson

Applies today more than ever, don’t you think?

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Doris Lessing’s reaction to learning she won the Nobel Prize for Golden Notebook? “Oh Christ …”

This made me laugh out loud. Later in the interview, she says, rather sarcastically, “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, and I’m delighted to with them all. It’s a whole lot, okay? It’s a royal flush.”

I love it. I love when people don’t care about these major (and political) honors that everyone else drools over. And I love salty old ladies who say what they think.

UPDATE: An interesting follow-up article in the Guardian.

“There were lots of people who have wanted me to have it for a long time, so it is very nice that I have. I’m exhausted. To celebrate I’d have to go and buy champagne. I’m going to bed.”

ETA: I wrote this after reading a swath of self-published books, which inflamed a long-term pet-peeve of mine in writing:

Think about it. When have you seen eyes flash? I mean, with emotion, not because they are reflecting light. Can’t think of it happening, can you? And yet, in book after book, people have flashing eyes. They flash in anger. They flash in desire. Sometimes they flash with impish glee. Always with the flashing and the eyes.

And for that matter, eyes do not twinkle. Nor do they smolder or blaze. In fact, what does that even mean, blazing eyes? That somebody’s eyes are on fire? Also, eyes most certainly do not darken dangerously. Never in the history of the world has eye color changed from someone being angry.

And while we’re at it, eyes are rarely emerald green, okay? Unless the person is wearing colored contacts, it just doesn’t happen. So if all your characters have ivory skin and emerald green eyes, you might want to re-think that. Ditto ice-blue eyes, although I suppose that happens in nature more often than emerald-green eyes do. But really, the vast majority of people have brown eyes. Yup, plain brown, completely lacking the drama or specialness of violet or black or teal eyes. And yet, I’ve heard people say that brown eyes are actually quite lovely sometimes. Give them a chance.

Here is how eyes portray emotions: we have hundreds of muscles in our face. When we have an emotion, some of those muscles move to suggest the feeling. This can be difficult to pin down. What would shift in a face to suggest that a character is angry? Would his eyes narrow? Would he tighten his mouth slightly as he stared straight ahead? Deciding on these details will make your description vivid and grounded in reality. It will also keep you from using so many clichés.

So please, writers-of-books-Joy-is-reading, stop with the bad eye descriptions. When you’re using eyes in creative writing, make them brown or hazel or blue or non-emerald green, and make them move like human eyes actually move. Your description will be better off for it. And I, in turn, will no longer have to visualize lightning bolts shooting across your characters’ irises every time they lose their tempers.