Thursday, April 28, 2011

Baby Love



I'm glad you enjoyed yesterday's surprise coffee-cup elephant silliness! This morning, as I got ready to leave the house, I actually witnessed a certain little someone out of the corner of my eye, quick as a flash, grab my cup off the couch and race to the dollhouse to make her stowaway mischief! First time I've seen it happen, and glad I did, because I got to give hugs and smooches and say thank you for sending elephant company with me! 

I keep thinking I'll write a post about crazy child-love and child-fascination, but where do you begin? It's the hugest thing, the way your life reorients around this new center. Weird to think, how you cease to be the center of your own life, and it's not only okay, it's endless delight, constant heart fireworks. Clementine is talking up a storm these days, new words every second, and she's such a silly that she has "tones" and "voices" for different occasions, and does mimicry, and sings and sings, making up nonsense language, kind of like Cocteau Twins or Sigur Ros (by the way, when she requests to listen to Sigur Ros on itunes for her bedtime dance, she refers to them as "jaybirds" for obvious reasons :-) She loves Radiohead and the White Stripes and Tokyo Police Club and Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, requests them all by name, and her favorite song right now is Stay Up Late by the Talking Heads, to which she knows ALL THE WORDS (20 months! She's 20 months!). She says, "Oh yeeahhhhh," like a blues singer, and "So awesome" like a beach girl. She's getting into the dressing-herself phase, which is fun-beyond-fun. I can't wait for her to put together insane little girl mismatch outfits. 

In short, it's more fun than we ever knew, but it's so beyond fun, beyond any expectation. I've never been a big one for babies. When they were put into my arms, I'd go through the motions, you know, and I could recognize cuteness and all, but I didn't get melty and want to sniff heads or anything. But I trusted what people said that when it's your own baby, it's different. And that is true, but it doesn't even begin to say it. 

I remember an episode of Scrubs (did you ever watch that?) where Carla wanted to have a baby and Turk was unconvinced until someone told him it was like "having a dog that slowly learns to talk." And he lit up and said, "Awesome!" and then he was on board. Ha ha. As dog people, Jim and I laughed, so in love with our canine babies at the time, and it is like that. And knowing that the amazingness of this growing brain of hers is only beginning, and it isn't going to hit a plateau any time soon. Clementine is just going to keep blowing our minds every second for the rest of our lives, and in bigger and bigger ways.

I always knew I wanted children, but I knew it in this kind of dispassionate way, like ... I saw our future with a family rather than without, because that seemed better than getting old without younger people around to change the high light bulbs, ha ha. (No, seriously, I had a very happy childhood, and I love childhood, and wanted more of it in our lives! And big family Christmases, and beach holidays things like that. That was my vision of having kids, really: the trimmings, the memories, not the day-to-day.) But Jim and I always said, if it doesn't work out that's fine too, we'll be totally happy and fulfilled either way. And I think that's true too. We would have no basis for comparison. We would never know the dimensions of life that open up when you have a child, so we wouldn't miss them. But now that we do know, it's like this: It's like there's a door in your brain you walked past a million times without even noticing it, and when you open it, there is a whole WORLD there with new languages, new feelings, new colors. Not all of them are good, sure, but by far most of them are, and so good that they make you want to invent new words for good.

So, in a quick pre-writing scribble, that is a small piece of how I feel about being a parent. And I do not want to suggest for a second that one's life is lacking if you do not have kids, or that it is for everybody. This is just me, and my still-full-of-hormones personal feelings. AND ... I get why a lot of professional women and creative women opt to remain the center of their own lives -- it is not easy to balance it all, even when it is the best of all possible worlds. Truly it is not easy.

It has just hit me, seeing a preliminary calendar of my travel this year to promote Daughter of Smoke and Bone, that my writing dreams are coming true in such amazing ways ... but maybe not at the very best time! And my brain squints shut from shame to even think something so ungrateful at such an amazing time, but here it is. I will have to be away from Jim and Clementine a lot this year. I cannot say enough how I am getting what I have always wanted professionally and SO MUCH MORE, and I have what I have always wanted personally and SO MUCH MORE, and I believe I am the luckiest person in the entire world to have my dream career and wonderful family, but ... how to balance them in the coming months? 

How to relish my great good fortune with this book and the road ahead (I have always always ALWAYS wanted book tours and I am SO EXCITED!!!), and square it all with my mommy-self who dreads the thought of a single missed bedtime (you should see the absurdly tall stacks of books Clementine picks out each night to be read) or a single missed new word or new song? And it won't be a single bedtime or word or song, but many

It's so weird how joy and dread can inhabit the same space. I imagine them all cuddled up, a little joy-dread duo so tangled you can't tell which arms and legs belong to who. They're lovers, an "almost animal," as from this amazing poem that for some reason just popped into my head, from my long-ago bookstore employee days when the poet himself (later to serve as US Poet Laureate) would come from across the bay to read. But I digress.

All right. All right. To work with me. To writing. 

(Incidentally, I am taking a couple of days from the novel-in-progress to finish a short story I am doing for an anthology, and I am having So. Much. Fun. If you are in the writing doldrums and can't seem to summon a memory of why you even wanted to write in the first place, stop what you are doing and write a short story. Let it go where it wants, however strange. Just trail along behind it going, wait, what are you eating, and huh, you sure you want to roll in that? Okay, go ahead ... Joy bliss joy bliss. Writing love!)



Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Writing with Naked Elephants

A couple of weeks ago, Clementine brought me my coffee cup at the door as I was leaving for the cafe to write, as is the routine every morning. I was walking that day, and a block or two from home, I noticed my cup was rattling. Taking off the lid to peer inside, I saw that I had a hitchhiker :-)




This morning, I actually reached the cafe and went up to the counter before I noticed a little companion had made its way into my cup. 




He has clothes on this time, which is kind of a relief. Less to explain, you know? I mean, it's one thing to take an elephant with you to the cafe. Quite another to take a naked elephant. What will people say?

Thank you, sweet Clementine.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

More British Publisher Awesomeness!



So I caught the below tweets a couple of weeks ago (from a children's bookseller in the UK) ...

 Midnight Reader
Last week I was sent white feathers, a black mustache and a gold bead necklace all in different black envelops on different days [cont]

 Midnight Reader
[cont] Then by the end of the week I had a copy of Daughter of Smoke and bone by @! Awesome!!!

... and I emitted a great silent squee that was probably felt by all the neighborhood cats and raccoons as a seismic event.

My UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton didn't just send out ARCs -- first they mailed a trio of mysterious black envelopes which arrived one by one with no explanation, just the strange contents, and only after that, the ARC itself, also in a black envelope. Is that cool, or is that COOL?

Midnight Reader was kind enough to post a photo of the items:




Hee hee hee! So fun!!! Thank you Hodder!

And then, of course, the ARC itself, which I thought looked very beautiful in Midnight's photo:




By the way, a few people have asked how to order the UK special edition, and I will definitely let you know once it becomes available! I can't wait! The other night I finished signing the tip-in plates (it's a signed limited print run of 1,500 copies) that I hadn't finished while in London, and while I was doing this, I decide to embrace Englishness and finally watch Downton Abbey, which I've been dying to see. I'm through the first three episodes and it's SO GOOD!!! Delicious! Now if only I had more busy work to do so I could justify watching the rest! Alas, I don't, but I will have to make the time. It's SO GOOD!

(Did I mention, SO GOOD?)

Also, I'm onto A Clash Of Kings, the second in George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. It continues to be fabulous. Think you might try?

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Lovely Day!



A lovely day of eggs and flowers and sweets and bunnies!






These are all at my parents' beautiful house, where we celebrated today.






















Bubbles were bubbled, and bunnies were ... bunnied.










XO

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Happy Easter!

So Jim and I may have overdone it a bit on handmade plush guys today. Ahem.




In the pursuit of Easter basket awesomeness, we made a pilgrimage to the home of our friends, the amazing Portland artist-crafters behind these two etsy shops, Chet & Dot and Plants & Animals. They do all their work in their home, which is like a cuteness museum, and today seemed even more overwhelming with cute than usual! I really intended to buy two critters. Two. Ha.





Hi!






If you celebrate Easter, I hope you have a lovely one! If not, then a nice Sunday :)


Thursday, April 21, 2011

Eye Candy Breakfast - photographer Tim Walker



I'm in love.




Is this a fantasy world or what?








































All images by the astonishing Tim Walker, who has a book available:




Wish list. 

WISH LIST!!!
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