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July 15th, 2010
12:15 pm - Me & My Books
Hi. My name is Emily Horner and I'm one of the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) 10_ers -- my debut YA novel, A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, will be out June 10, 2010.
You can get more info on my books at my official author page. I use my livejournal mostly for personal stuff, so go there unless you're really interested in my Rock Band exploits and what I'm annoyed about today!
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November 19th, 2009
01:05 pm - KafkaEx
This is a story with a happy ending. Since I have to go to work in 15 minutes, I'll be brief: Yes, my ARCs have arrived!
To recap from last time: FedEx sent my ARCs to my old address. I saw the door tag and tried to track the package down that way, but FedEx had put the wrong door tag on the door, though they fiercely denied this and insisted it must have been someone I know pranking me. The next two weeks were spent in a limbo of I Don't Want To Bother My Editor, after which I decided I'd better bother my editor anyway. She got the address corrected, FedEx attempted delivery to my house when I wasn't home, and since the door tag said "final attempt" I thought I'd better take things into my own hands. I called FedEx, they told me to call the next day just to make sure the package was available at their Maspeth location.
( The saga continues... )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/angry.gif) enraged
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November 16th, 2009
11:30 pm - A scene
I'm on the train coming home, knitting the heel of a sock. Across from me are two young women sitting together. They might be seventeen or eighteen. One of them is holding knitting needles very awkwardly and trying to remember how to cast on. I debate going over and offering some assistance, but I decide against it; the space next to her is occupied, and it doesn't seem wise to try to teach someone to knit on a moving train when I'm getting off in just a few stops. By the time the person next to her gets up, she's figured it out; she casts on stitches awkwardly, one by one, not always sure which way to wrap the yarn around the needles. But we grin at each other when she gets that first stitch right; for a moment we are members of the same sorority.
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November 11th, 2009
12:30 am - Resolution
In 2010, I will give myself permission to tune out any conversation once someone starts going on about how bleak and boring literary fiction is.
Heck. I'll start now.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/sad.gif) tired
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November 10th, 2009
12:09 am
I had to play around with my roommate's Windows 7 a little bit while re-setting up our wireless connection. (Her laptop has a CD drive and ethernet port; mine doesn't.)
NEVER LEAVE ME AGAIN, LINUX AND/OR MAC.
I know 7 is supposed to be an "improvement" over Vista, but everything looks weird and I can't figure out how things work. I know that's just the nature of switching to a different operating system, and Ubuntu's different just because it looks so much like WinXP straight out of the box, and if I were using Win7 on a daily basis I might grow to like and/or tolerate it. (We still have XP at work. I secretly kind of like XP.) But it should not have been that hard to figure out that the wireless connection was rejecting me because the password was wrong. Mac tells me. Ubuntu tells me. Tell me, Windows, instead of shrugging your figurative shoulders because you don't know what's wrong with the connection!
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November 6th, 2009
02:54 pm
Buying new T-shirts for Wiscon is Very Serious Business.
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November 5th, 2009
05:04 pm
I was catching up on previous days of work and only just got around to doing the YA display for November.
"Hmm," I thought. "I wonder what happens in November. November must be a national month for..."
Oh. Duh.
And now we have a NaNoWriMo flyer and a nice little display of writing books up.
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November 4th, 2009
08:41 pm
I have my keyboard out again. (I don't know if the damage from the movers is fixable. I dropped the ball on getting in touch with Yamaha but I'll see what I can do. But either way I can live without that last octave.) And I'm reading some Nodame Cantabile.
I like reading about musicians. Media depictions of writers tend towards this idea that writers are eccentric, and have to wait for lightning flashes of inspiration, or else simply transcribe their traumatic childhoods. But musicians--even if they're child prodigies, there's a sense that being really great takes problem solving and practicality and a great deal of constant effort. The bit in Fujimi Orchestra that I remember the best, more than the romantic stuff, is where Yuuki is angsting about going beyond mere technical proficiency to find a sound that's really his own. Nodame Cantabile is really silly and over-the-top, but I think it does capture some of that. (I find it kind of great that they sell scores of music from Nodame, and sell volumes of manga with accompanying CDs... I didn't spring for those. I just listen to the music on YouTube.)
I like it when books take practice and effort seriously. Sports manga, or music manga, or cooking manga. I like it when they speak to the worthwhileness of persevering to get better at things, and taking pride in what you can do, and being diligent and careful in craftsmanship. And finding joy in all of that.
I think that sometimes we pursue fun because we're too tired to pursue joy, or we don't believe the joy is there to be pursued, or we don't know where or how we could pursue it. That's not a bad thing. Nobody can be on all the time. But it's worth remembering, sometimes, how big a world it is, and what a lot of remarkable things it has in it.
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October 25th, 2009
01:26 pm
I am semi-moved!
(Still have to:
Get a router
Set up wireless
Get odds and ends from apartment
Clean up nail holes and such in apartment
Buy bookcase and computer desk
Unpack nearly everything
Figure out storage solution for kitchen stuff
AND
Wait around for landlord who is supposed to give me the correct key this time.)
I think I've used up all my moving-related bad luck forever. FOREVER.
But I have survived that and I am feeling pretty good where I am.
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October 23rd, 2009
10:28 am
Packing is done except for fiddly bits and clothes and dishes. I keep thinking "But I'll NEED it LATER" on the clothes even if I really only need a day or two of clothes. I'll do the dishes once I get some newspaper to wrap them in. Fiddly bits take longest, of course. Oh, and computer. Must pack computer.
I keep thinking I should've decided to ditch everything and live minimalistically. But books. And knitting. And cooking. Even if one tries to get things from the library, one does tend to accumulate some things. After all, I don't have a big yarn stash--it's two or three full balls, plus odds and ends, plus supplies. And I don't have a food processor or a stand mixer or, you know, a cherry pitter.
This is horribly entitled, I guess, but I feel like I'm at that point in my life where I should be able to start nesting a little bit and making adorable embroidered linens like the ones in Japanese housewares magazines.
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October 22nd, 2009
03:22 pm
From the files of "That's not a job listing, that's a kick in the head":
Library branch head, 25 hrs/week, no benefits.
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October 18th, 2009
01:50 pm
I just finished my draft of Sparks and Ashes, at 61669 words.
I have an ending that I like. An ending that I like can compensate for a multitude of problems.
I am thinking about cupcakes. Theoretically, I'm not supposed to be buying books when I'm about to move, but you know how that works out.
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October 12th, 2009
11:39 pm
I have missed two straight days of writing, which I have not done since I started this draft, and it was worth it. I hung out at my sister's place for a while and watched her play around with Flash, and ate Mexican food, and watched Food Network, and went to Book-Off, and went to Asahiya for long enough to find out they're closing!, and filled three or four boxes with books, and watched some TV, and made a vegetable curry. And I really needed that break -- but also -- I need to give myself permission to say, if it is noisy and I can't concentrate, there's no point in being mad at myself for not being able to concentrate. I can reduce the noise level or I can go somewhere else. Being annoyed is just a waste of time.
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02:36 pm
Moving is overwhelming.
The book is overwhelming.
It is getting to the point where I am too nervous about both of them to be able to concentrate on either.
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October 4th, 2009
11:30 pm
Ever since I read Stephen King's book on writing I've been thinking that so many books are about, in some tiny way, the process of writing the book itself.
Sparks & Ashes has long stretches of the protagonist doing research in a language she's barely literate in.
My subconscious is hilarious.
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October 1st, 2009
09:38 pm - A really terrible novelette
I am not sure what 100 pages of a Japanese paperback is, but I'm going to say novelette.
Okay, so as I posted earlier, this is about Akane. Akane is in second grade and her home life is terrible: her mother and father live in a cheap little apartment, her father gets drunk and plays pachinko and beats her, her mother gets drunk and cries and beats her. And her classmates ignore her.
She likes to go down to the zombie ghetto, because all the zombies are friendly (in their own brainless way) and they get along with each other. She imagines that if she were a zombie, and if she could turn her mother and father into zombies, they would be happy again--
--Like that one day when they went for a drive together, and Akane went to the dog petting theme park, and ate a huge strawberry parfait. They were happy then.
( Read more... )
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September 30th, 2009
09:53 am
Dear Ron Paul,
I find it very interesting that you claim we came closest to your ideal of personal liberty during the early years of the United States, particularly in having respect for personal property.
You might ask the personal property how much personal liberty they had.
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September 29th, 2009
11:02 pm
Recent reading:
Novelette(?) about a young girl whose father gets drunk and beats her mother, and her mother works in a hostess club, and they always fight, and they don't have any money, and she's ostracized by her classmates. And she wants the zombies to bite her and turn her into one of them because then her family would all get along and be happy. I am not making this up. Oh, Japan. Overwrought family melodrama with zombies in it is still overwrought family melodrama.
Book about contemporary Japanese novels reminds me why I love Tawara Machi:
「嫁さんになれ」だなんてカンチューハイ二本で言ってしまっていいの
"Be my wife" -- can you really say that, after two cans of Chuhai?
(Chuhai being a Japanese alcoholic beverage, distilled liquor mixed with carbonated water and fruit-flavored. I have little experience with it, having left Japan a month after turning 20, but if I had two cans I'd probably be asking everybody to marry me.)
That's a tanka. That's a very traditional Japanese poetry form. And I still get a little frisson when I see Tawara kind of storming the gates of tanka with something so conversational and so everyday, but which is also a great poem in its own right--it captures a very precise moment of emotional realization. It's hearing what you want to hear, and realizing it will never mean what you want it to mean. All that in 31 syllabes. The book quotes an Asahi Shinbun column:
"It's huge to discover that you can write poems this way, but a great discovery alone doesn't make for a good poem. What's special about this poet is that she can capture so clearly, in 31 syllables, what people can't find the words to say, but want to say anyway."
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03:47 pm
Accomplished:
Sent e-mail to editor.
Sent e-mail to agent.
Paid rent.
Bought groceries.
Had a headache.
Vanquished headache.
Did not, notably, manage to get a single thing written yet, on top of a really lousy lack of accomplishment yesterday, and too many things to accomplish tomorrow and the day after that. Am trying not to panic about whether I have enough time to fix this book.
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10:18 am - Race, realism, problem novels, escapism
Two recent articles from the Horn Book website: Lelac Almagor's And Stay Out Of Trouble: Narratives For Black Urban Children and Sharon Flake's response.
I read one, and said, "Well, yes," and I read the other and said, "Well, yes, that too."
The interior lives of children are enormously complicated. We have the stereotype of the Mary Sue who has lavender eyes and a pet unicorn, but wish-fulfilment isn't the only possible kind of fantasy. I have never seen any scholarly research on the immense popularity of the book "A Child Called It," especially with the lower-income teens at my library, and when I try to talk about it with readers they're often embarrassed that they like to read about abuse, but it's not really so strange to have daydreams about life being much harder than it actually is: so that you can Triumph Heroically over it, so that you can garner pity from those around you...
As an adolescent I had a very strong prejudice against problem novels, and mostly I wanted to read about dragons. It's hard for me not to project that self onto other people and assume that they want to read for escapism, but I have had to keep reminding myself how self-centered and parochial that really is.
I do think that readers will gravitate toward what they need. But first, the books that they need have to be out there, and there is still a really narrow range of roles available for black characters in middle grade and YA literature. You can ask: If you try to provide good role models, do you risk going too far and presenting an unrealistic picture? If you try to be realistic, do you risk being bleak and depressing? And the answer to that isn't "yes" or "no," but "more." More books, so that you don't place the burden of doing everything onto just a few.
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