Me and my summer cold are getting on a plane real soon now and heading to Chicago to attend the American Library Association conference.

On the librarian side, I will attend many fascinating meetings and programs and peruse the exhibits with an eye to the book collection at our Juvenile Detention Hall, which I’m now responsible for maintaining. Librarian friends who work with incarcerated teens, find me and tell me about titles that have gone over well with your folks! (And/or comment here…)

On the writer side, on Sunday July 12, from 8:30am-10am, Marriott Chicago, Chicago A-D, I’ll be part of YALSA’s Morris Award Presentation & YA Author Coffee Klatch, where I will talk very fast to many people about the project I can’t really talk about yet (it will be a neat trick!), and hand out some Rules stickers if I can hunt up any.

Hopefully by Sunday only my enthusiasm will be infectious.

And may I beseech y’all once again to head over to Chasing Ray, read What A Girl Wants #3 — yeah, it’s a long post, we all have a lot to say! — and add your thoughts in the comments, and also to Significant Objects to read, comment, and bid!

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

…and how they got that way.

From the site, curated by Josh Glenn and Rob Walker:

THE IDEA

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

A whole bunch of writers, including but not limited to Luc Sante, Kurt Andersen, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Stewart O’Nan, Jenny Davidson, Michelle Tea, Curtis Sittenfeld, and me, have written stories about a wide variety of unlikely objects. Said objects — the actual, tangible, physical objects — will be auctioned on eBay. If you win the bidding for an object, you’ll get the object AND a printout of the story.

SPECIAL BONUS: My object’s accompanying story — and I’ll alert y’all again when it’s live on the site — is a sort of prequel to my next project, which I Cannot Yet Talk About With Specificity, but about which I am extremely excited.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

So, someone messaged me and asked for tips on how to write a sex scene.

After a taken-aback moment, it struck me as a reasonable question.

Unless you’re actually trying to write pornography — which I doubt anyone writing for teens is attempting, the opinions of censors notwithstanding — when you say “a sex scene,” you could mean many different things, from a hookup between relative strangers, to a fraught First Time between people who have different agendas for the event, to an intensely sensual connection between people who are deeply in love, and anything and everything in between.

I think what you need to know, above and beyond any logistical details you choose to relate about Tab A fitting, or not, into Slot B, is how the people you’re writing about actually feel about each other.

When I write this kind of scene, I tend to rely to a large extent on the reader’s imagination. I don’t think you need a lot of details –just a few, well-chosen. What the reader brings to the scene will be much more, uh, relevant? — than anything I consciously try to evoke.

Other thoughts?

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

When I read A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, one of the many things that struck me was that Olive Wellwood, her novelist character who writes the children’s books alluded to in the title, was almost constantly either shaping narratives in her head or actually writing. One obvious and important reason for this was economic necessity, since the proceeds from her books were supporting a large family. But Wellwood’s ability to compulsively construct story out of the raw materials of experience and imagination verged on an inability to live her life without spinning it into fiction.

It got me thinking about what I’m calling the writing commute: the psychological distance between a writer and their writing. Some writers, I think, have a really short commute. Like Wellwood, they’re never far away, workaholics who never leave their offices mentally even when they’re elsewhere physically. Others — and I count myself in this category — have farther to travel to get to the place where writing happens, and sometimes the traffic’s backed up.

The length of your writing commute can certainly shift; getting longer when you need to spend significant time on other priorities, shorter when an idea compels you to follow it. Right now, for instance, I’m writing at this ungodly hour on a holiday weekend because I woke up knowing I had to write about this notion before I could get back to sleep. And when I’m really focused on a novel, I’ll often find myself waking up in the middle of the night, digging in my bag for a pen when I’m stopped at a stoplight. At those times, my writing commute is almost nonexistent. I am there, and it’s hard to be anywhere else.

But it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a longer writing commute. The space between you and writing can be a kind of breathing room. And being consciously aware that you have the commute to make — knowing you need to travel that distance — can be a reminder that you’re choosing to write, and making that choice over and over.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

Saw this on one of the doors of the Armory Theater.

All I could think of? How many shows the prohibitions would make it difficult to produce.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

Here’s what I said in response to Colleen’s What A Girl Wants question about whether we still need to care about the girl detective (and I strongly recommend reading the whole post with everyone else’s responses as well):

*****

“Why aren’t we friends any more?” “When did everyone else stop wearing this brand of jeans, and why didn’t anyone tell me?” “Are anyone else’s parents like mine?” “He asked what I got for question five, does that mean he likes me?” “I’m tongue-tied and I can’t stop looking, does that mean I like her?” Girls, or at least the sort of girl I was in junior high, are trying to simultaneously construct their own identities and decode everyone else’s around them. They are endlessly engaged in largely futile attempts to solve the mysteries of their own lives. Enter the girl detective, focusing her analytical skills on deducing who stole the jewels, rather than on why the necklace she got from The Limited failed to bestow popularity. Though honestly, I read and loved girl detective books well before my teens. By junior high, I was much more a fan of Agatha Christie. By then, I didn’t require my detectives to be girls, but I needed them to tie up all loose ends by the last page. I did not want ambiguity. I wanted resolution. I liked thinking that there was an answer to be found and that the detective was capable of finding it.

What do we lose when we lose the girl detective? Most importantly, we lose that sense of a girl using her intelligence to solve problems outside the realms of romance, family, and her place in the social hierarchy.

But I think the place of the girl detective may be taken by the girl spy. Exchange detection for espionage, and your clear (and reductionist) solutions and straightforward good versus evil framework are replaced by a world of ever-shifting motives and allegiances, with the constant possibility that you’re being double-crossed. It’s a less immediately comforting narrative frame, but a girl spy can have some of the same admirable characteristics as a girl detective: intellect, action, independence. And perhaps the moral greyness of spying more accurately reflects our times — not to mention junior high and high school.

*****

…So I kinda derailed the comment thread on that post by talking about The Wire. Those of you who know me in real life (and/or who are longtime readers of this site) will not be surprised that I could not restrain myself. In my own defense, I can only say that it was relevant in context. We were talking about whether it would be possible to create a “girl detective” type of character who would operate credibly in a contemporary high-crime, gang-affected neighborhood — and by extension, whether it’s possible to write a YA mystery in the sort of setting that, in real life, presents significant threats to its residents. Zetta Elliott said, “I don’t want to insert teenage girls into grim scenarios where they already figure as the victim.” I brought up the show because I wanted to highlight what a fine job the writers did (not to mention the actors, the directors, the set designers, etc.) showing the incredibly limited options kids have in those kinds of neighborhoods. It would be a huge challenge to create a girl detective who could live past her first investigation — but the idea of such a character (Laurel Snyder immediately and memorably christened her “Hope Jones”) is really compelling.

But in my next response, I’ll try to keep in mind where I’m posting, and talk about a few more YA books! I have a feeling each of my responses will be longer than the previous one, and perhaps after the next post (which will be up in early July) I’ll do a summary rather than a remix.

Of course, this post and the other one I did haven’t really, technically, been remixes either. I’m using that phrase the way some friends and I used to, to refer to any longish discussion that followed up on a previously raised subject. Which was most of our discussions, come to think of it.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

• I have been reading Paul Maliszewski’s fascinating book Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders, and learning about, among other things, The Great War of the Californias and its heroes, including this lady:

“Known for her persistence and ability to embrace difficult characters, Lt. Cmmdr. Rebbeca Jordan used speed and pugnaciousness in leading her Smog Town troops in the Battle for Interstate 5 while still maintaining professional poise and a ready supply of head shots.”

• Latest entry in the sub-optimal feline storage series:



• I just bought this ring. It has a bug in it:

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

at Chasing Ray: The Girl Detective Edition.

Go, read, comment! I might do another remix, too.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

So Father’s Day, for me, is a day to think about how much I miss my dad.

I have lots of days like that, only rarely underscored by national celebrations, and on those days, I often read Dad’s writing. Sometimes, like today, I choose to share it with the Internet.

Here he is at 27, fourteen years before he’d become a father, writing in his fanzine Bandwagon about his irritation with holidays manufactured by special interest groups:

happy momsday
There’s this little pamphlet put out as a public service — well no, as a private service actually, you probably never saw one unless you’re in retailing — and it contains some clever humor, though I doubt the publishers think so. Some months ago I wouldn’t have thought it funny at all; disgusting, rather. But time brings all things, including perspective. And from this distance I want to mention a few of the morsels from “Special Days, Weeks, and Months in 1957″, published by the Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.

There is both a chronological and an alphabetical list of these special occasions, and the alphabetical list gives the sponsoring organization and the purpose of the event. The wording of these purposes is interesting. For instance, the purpose of National Education Week is “To create awareness…of the important role of education…” National Family Week is meant to “…emphasize the contribution of religion to the family…” Kids’ Day: “To focus attention on youth.” National Salvation Army Day: “To acquaint the American people with the work of the Salvation Army.” Purposes of other observances are “To enhance…public appreciation of”, “To further public interest in”, “To emphasize”, “To inculcate”, “To Stimulate”, “create”, “acquaint”. Get it?

Here are these hundreds of organizations like the Popcorn Institute and the Swim for Health Association and the Mayonnaise and Salad Dressing Manufacturers Association. They’re all promoting their own pet project, like National Ladder Month and Save the Horse Week and Old Maids’ Day, flooding the media with literature and pictures and material and presumably working like crazy to engineer public consent. Are they a Menace? Are they practising another form of brain-washing? Or are they just a bunch of noisy but harmless little insects whom it is best to ignore?

I dunno. But I think I’m going to start my own special observance. It’ll be called Stop Tinkering With My Brains Year, and when it’s over I’ll declare it again. If anyone wants advice and material on setting up this observance in his own locality don’t write me. You’ll only get nasty remarks about people who don’t want to do their own thinking.

Now I must go sneer at some TV commercials. Take it away, Vance Packard.

– Richard Ryan, Bandwagon, autumn-winter 1957, number 4

Links to the descendants of the organizations & celebrations Dad mentions added by me, of course.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

Aspiring thieves: Summer is an excellent time to launch your career! Look for houses with open ground-floor windows. Even if the window is a considerable distance off the ground, all you’ll need is a simple stepladder. Pop out the screen and push the window up far enough to get yourself in. Wear gloves if you’re feeling extra cautious, but if you don’t have gloves, don’t worry. Since the window’s already partway open, pushing it up the rest of the way won’t make you break a sweat — and as long as you don’t sweat, it’s much less likely that the cops will be able to pick up your prints! Once you’re in, go straight to the master bedroom, put the laptops in your backpack, and get out. Done!

Writers, artists, and others who do a lot of work digitally: You already know you’re supposed to be backing up your work. But maybe you don’t have a regular schedule for doing it, and maybe you don’t back up every byte on your hard drive. When my laptop was stolen a couple of days ago, I didn’t lose my works in progress, because I’d been religiously emailing them to myself every time I edited or added to them. Some things I did lose: notes for future Flytrap stories, interviews with circus performers, transcribed overheard conversations, notes for other projects I was thinking about. It hadn’t occurred to me to back that stuff up, because, you know, I wasn’t actively working on it. Why, yes, I know that was foolish. But it’s not hard to be foolish, and complacent, and just not be thinking about the possibility of loss. My laptop wouldn’t have had to be stolen for me to lose that data; it could have crashed.

Once I have a new laptop, I will:

• Install Undercover so that if I’m unlucky enough to have another machine stolen, technological retribution will be swift
• Duh, back up absolutely everything, in at least two places: an external hard drive, and someplace online in the cloud. Recommendations?

I’m not waiting til I have a new laptop to close the damn ground-floor windows.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

I don’t tend to dwell on the negative. I said once in an interview that I write toward the world I’d like to see. I have a cynical side, sure, but most often, I assume best intentions. Look for the good. Come on, it’s half full if you squint.

And Casey Parks shares some good things in this well-written multimedia article, Life as a Portland gay teen better, but not all rainbows. Identity. Community. The feeling that Portland is a good place to be queer. Mr. and Ms. Junior Gay Pride. Boys demonstrating proper snap technique. Girls giggling about how straight one of them used to be, til the night she was like hey, that girl looks good!

You take all that, and you set it next to the fact that Caitlin Bernardi, aka Rainbow,  got kicked in the head for saying yes when a stranger asked if she was gay. In 2009. In Portland. Outside the all-ages gay club.

Stay with me, because this is going to feel like a big subject shift.

A friend who works for the New York Public Library sent along some videos he wanted me to share. I’d be happy to, I told him, but I held onto them for a little while, not sure exactly how I wanted to post about them. (Well, that, and the fact that I got sick and wasn’t especially coherent for a couple of days.)

Now I know. The NYPL, as my friend writes:

worked with 6 high school students, who are all aspiring fashion designers, and brought them into the library to explore some of the fashion and design related collections, and to give them different perspective on past fashion trends. They then did some sketches and brought them back to the library to show Tim Gunn, who then provided personal advice to each aspiring designer, and answered any questions they had about fashion, the industry, or the project.

The teens’ designs will be showcased at the 5^th Annual Anti-Prom, which this year is themed Vam-Prom. The Anti-Prom, organized by NYPL’s Young Adult Programs, provides an alternative, safe space for all teens who may not feel welcome at official school proms or dances because of their sexual orientation, the way they dress, or any other reason.

Watch, and be inspired:

I’m not saying that the existence of events like Anti-Prom in New York, or Mr. and Ms. Junior Gay Pride here in Portland, means that violent bigots will vanish from the earth. (I do have that cynical side.) But having the events, and talking about them, and making sure everyone knows how incredibly cool they are — that’s one way to create change.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

Thank goodness I had the forethought to record a couple segments of this in advance. In advance, that is, of the cold that has poleaxed me this weekend and, among other symptoms, is making me sound like an eighty year old, three unfiltered packs a day kind of lady. Granted, it might be amusing for you all to hear a podcast recorded in this condition, but my voice is also sometimes going away altogether. 

Anyway, here for your downloading pleasure is The Rules for Hearts, part five, specially prerecorded before The Sickness.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

In case anyone was harboring any doubts about the depth and breadth of my nerdiness, I present to you Exhibit A: The Binder I Had In Seventh Grade. I threw this out the last time I visited my mom, but felt strangely compelled to create a digital archive.

Annotations, from above left:

I remember being very excited to find the heart sticker with my name in it. Despite the fact that now I know approximately a million Saras, in the eighties, it was rare to encounter any name-related ephemera spelled sans H.

Lord of the Rings sticker. I was in a fan club. There were newsletters. This was — okay, it wasn’t before Orlando Bloom was born, but it was, you know, years before Peter Jackson even made Meet the Feebles.

Sandra Boynton elephant. Did you know she has designed over four thousand greeting cards? I didn’t either.

Why, yes, WHYT was a Top 40 station, why do you ask? It would be ninth grade before I discovered WCBN.

Gandalf for President. Edited to add, in proto-anarchism (that would come in ninth grade, too): “Or Nobody.”

Cheshire Cat sticker.

Giant Ghostbusters sticker.

Great American Smokeout sticker. They gave these out at school. I think we were supposed to go home with them and tell our parents to stop smoking, since in seventh grade, very few of us had taken it up.

Powdermilk Biscuits postcard. Sigh. I would listen to the show sometimes with my dad.

Shiny foil musical note rainbow sticker. Because it was very important to reinforce one’s essential musicality with representations of musical notes.

Shiny foil rainbow unicorn sticker. (What was it with shiny foil stickers? I do not know, except that they were shiny, and also foil.)

There are some traces of yet other stickers, the nature of which are lost to memory.

Tell me something about your seventh grade year? Or Year Seven, as the case may be.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

The first What A Girl Wants post is up, and, as I suspected, I’m moved to comment over here at greater length. Colleen asked us about the titles we remembered from our teen years. Go over and read everyone’s answers, and then come back.

Here’s what I said there: I can’t choose a single title, so I’ll pick three ways I wanted to feel, and one or two books that fit each feeling.

1. That there was weight and resonance in seemingly random events, that I might be part of a larger, more meaningful story: Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, the way Will Stanton discovers his part in the struggle between the Dark and the Light.

2. That I was connected to friends: my whole circle, for reasons that now escape me, read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and delighted in quoting “Leper outcast unclean!” at each other.

3. Like I was getting away with something, learning things I wasn’t supposed to know: Mary Renault’s novels of ancient Greece and the fascinating gay couples that populated them; and in an entirely different mode, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Some expansions on these feelings and other books that fit them:

1. Much of my fantasy reading fits here — the Anne McCaffrey Pern books, Madeleine L’Engle. And like Laurel Snyder, I was enraptured by (and have previously blogged about) The Egypt Game; that sense of magic — and menace — being present in the everyday.

2. I read a lot of books that I’m not inclined to reread now because my friends were reading them. I loved the books then — see also, for instance, David Eddings — but what I loved, I see now, wasn’t so much the plots or the prose but the shared reading experience. I remember almost nothing about what happened in these books — what I remember is the excited conversations about them, and the ways we’d use the books to shape the role-playing games that also occupied a lot of our time.

3. I need to say more about Mary Renault. At a point in my life where crushes on girls coexisted with the casual, thoughtless homophobia that led to using the word “faggy” as a term of disappropation, Mary Renault’s books provided an intricately detailed look at a society where men being lovers with men was part of what constituted the norm. I didn’t discover books with lesbian content until later — although I also remember being very struck by the fraught vampiric “relationship” between Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla and her victim.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

For various reasons, I couldn’t wait for the U.S. edition of A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, so I bought the British edition, with this gorgeous cover. I have just started to read it. You can listen to an audio interview with Byatt about The Children’s Book on Australia’s The Book Show, a new favorite source of literary listening for me. And here’s a bit that struck me:

She didn’t like to be talked about. Equally, she didn’t like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people’s feelings, and had only just begun to realise that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

I know, I know, resist the lure of presumed autobiography. But that paragraph felt very familiar, and it made me wonder if she was like this character, Dorothy, at eleven. I know I was.

Speaking of being eleven, don’t forget that What A Girl Wants launches tomorrow at Chasing Ray!

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

While I read James Kennedy’s The Order of Odd-Fish, I thought of the following authors: Norton Juster, T.H. White (especially King Pellinore and the Questing Beast in The Sword in the Stone), Daniel Pinkwater, and James Thurber. It also brought to mind Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and Quentin Crisp, who would have made a fabulous Sefino.

Here’s a short excerpt to give you a bit of the flavor:

“…the Appendix isn’t known for its accuracy,” said Aunt Lily. “Accuracy isn’t the point.”

“‘It is an Appendix of dubious facts, rumors, and myths,’” recited Colonel Korsakov. “‘A repository of questionable knowledge, and an opportunity to dither about.’ That’s from our charter,” he said to Jo. “The bit about dithering is the most important. We are a society of ditherers.”

“Dithering?” said Jo.

“You know — fiddling about, puttering, loafing. The Order of Odd-Fish has a long and distinguished history of dithering. Sir Oliver is the world’s foremost authority.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that!” protested Sir Oliver.

“He wrote a six-hundred-thousand page dissertation on dithering,” said Aunt Lily. “Puttering, Muddling, and Mucking About: An Inquiry into Idleness. Quite well known in the field.”

“I make no claims,” said Sir Oliver. (p. 85-6)

And here’s a paragraph from Kennedy’s excellent essay, “How To Be Irrelevant”:

The ability to get distracted is an easily misunderstood talent. Irresponsibility might be a secret virtue. Throughout grade school I left many stories unfinished; in high school I half-programmed a lot of computer games; in college I co-wrote a musical, but even though we got a cast together and rehearsed it, it was never properly performed. Yet I learned a lot by being undisciplined. Someone once wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Yes – and I’d add that if something is worth doing, it is also worth doing halfway and then quitting. It’s also worth brooding over, and making lots of plans, and then going off and doing something else. Having many little interests, amateur enthusiasms, and failed ambitions creates a rich stew out of which you can boil fresh ideas.

I recommend The Order of Odd-Fish to members of secret societies and others, and am eager to see what Mr. Kennedy will come up with next.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

Download Act II, scenes i-ii.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

I am thrilled to be participating in the latest awesomeness from Colleen Mondor, “What A Girl Wants.” Here’s part of Colleen’s introduction to the project:

I’ve been a bit bothered for awhile now about the kind of books being published for teen girls. As anyone who reads YA titles knows, there are a lot more books for girls out there than boys. We formed Guys Lit Wire partly to address this discrepancy - and to recommend titles for boys that are older or might have been overlooked. But for girls, I can’t help but think that while there are a lot of books with female protagonists, there are not a lot of books with diverse female protags. You have romances - where the girl is usually chasing a boy or passively pining for one; you have problem novels where the girl is depressed and grieving, depressed and overweight, depressed and sick or depressed and dying; and then urban fantasy where the girl is running for her life from vamps, werewolves, evil fairies or other fantastical creatures - unless she is falling madly in love with them. There is also the huge contingent of rich white girl novels which are all about being rich and white and occasionally snarky. I see dozens and dozens and dozens of these types of books and honestly, it’s getting kind of old.

Click the link above to find out more about the project and the excellent company I’m in!

As What A Girl Wants gets underway, I’ll link when there are new posts, and I might even expand on my answers here, if I’m feeling long-winded. I’m honored and excited to be part of the conversation.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

Featuring my neighborhood, chalk, and a broken machine.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

I always meant to keep going with it, you know. Thanks to those of you who emailed wanting more! It’s been so long since the last episode that I’m not sure I remembered how to code it properly to show up in iTunes, but you can download an mp3 of me reading Act I, scene iii of The Rules for Hearts here.

And hey, if it doesn’t show up in iTunes within the next day or so, let me know…especially if you can help me make sure it does!

Edited to add: In case you missed the first two episodes, you can download them, too:

The Rules for Hearts, part one
The Rules for Hearts, part two

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.