Empress of the World

I was thinking about all the books with the premise of the protagonists suddenly getting famous, and the impact of fame upon their lives, and the following sentence popped into my brain:

“Celebrities are hot right now.”

…four hours til the wake-up call, six til my flight home.

I think the above must have been part of someone’s New Year’s Eve outfit. Now they suggest that, given the right weather pattern or incantation, the telephone pole will take flight.

One of the fine baristas at one of my favorite coffeeshops told me: “I have trouble with contemporary fiction. I need some floppy hats or pirates or something.”

It was a fine reminder that people are looking for all kinds of things in books. The people who are looking for anything in books, that is.

…I keep wondering about what to do online.

I have only so much attention, and online, there are so many places to pay it. My Gmail chat status message was always “continuous partial attention;” then I gave up on Gchat entirely. I check Facebook a few times a week, but I don’t facebook, per se; I’m not a zombie, I’ve thrown no snowballs, sent no Hotness points, declared none of my many creative friends to be Most Creative. On MySpace, I log on infrequently enough to have gotten my password phished. I remain stubbornly loyal to LiveJournal for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think the issue is that I don’t want to be always-on. I comment, but I rarely instant message. I’m asynchronous, not synchronous. Now you see me, now you don’t. That’s my comfort zone. But I worry that it’s not enough, that not IMing much or Twittering at all means that I’m out of it in some essential way. And there’ll be new places to be — I’m sure some of you are already there, wherever ‘there’ is — and I’ll have to decide if I want to be there too. How do you all decide where to have online presences?

…for the particular feeling you get when you’re back home after a substantial time away: simultaneously as though you were gone even longer than you actually were, and as though you never really left.

Is there?

1. Overheard in an elevator. Business casual woman: “Is this a Sci Fi Con?” Dealer wearing innocuous t-shirt and jeans: “No, comics.” Business casual woman: “Oh, comics…well, I just love the outfits!”

2. Speaking of elevators: there weren’t enough of them. After waiting for one for twenty minutes, at which point we took the stairs up to our room. On the seventeenth floor.

3. Man taking a doggie sticker: “That’s my lucky dog!”

I informed him that he was correct.

4. Woman taking a gun sticker: “That’s what my heart looks like.”

5. Best outfit on anyone during the whole show: the three-year-old girl in a Spiderman muscle costume. I’m sorry I don’t have a photo.

6. Sean’s latest genius object: Smokin’ Zombies!

7. Useful Tip: When there is a bottle of fancy water on the table at the hotel restaurant, do not assume that it is on the table because that is the only kind of water they serve. Assume that if you open it, it will cost you more than eight dollars.

7.5. Conversely, do not assume that just because a restaurant has a dumb name, that it will not be a good restaurant.

8. Admonition from a gentleman passing by the table: “Don’t let the loonies get you!” He paused. “Unless…they already have!”

9. Ninety five percent of the announcements made over the PA system, I completely could not understand, what with the noise in the room, the distortion, et cetera. Fortunately, the one that I did was about a gentleman who had lost a fanny pack containing pain medications. I’d been wondering whose fanny pack was underneath our table.

10. When you come to the end of an intense convention weekend, it’s great to have a task to accomplish.

It was a good thing we decided to check the tires while we were still in the parking lot.

I call it the Rockwell Deviance Quotient.

It measures how much one’s holiday experiences diverge from the media ideal.

I haven’t quite figured out the actual numerical part, but it might be like when you’re using a level and you assess how many bubbles off plumb something (or someone) is. So your holidays could be, say, four Rockwells off.

Like mine.

In other news: Steve and I are now in Columbus for the Mid-Ohio-Con, and we’ve already met some lovely people who totally know some of my friends at the Ann Arbor District Library, because as Steve says, all towns are small when you deal only with the literate.

Here at the Undisclosed Location (a.k.a. my parents’ house in Ohio), catching up on email, deleting comment spam (Why, why are the spammers so deeply attracted to the post about Rules being a Junior Library Guild selection? It’s harder hit than any other post, by far…) preparing for another small, low-key Thanksgiving, it’s hard to believe that I was at ALAN just a few days ago.

The theme of the workshop was about finding a sense of self and place in young adult literature. Our panel was about place in different genres within YA, and I’m still thinking about it. We each had about five minutes, and I’ll give you a tiny snippet of  what we said. Cecil Castellucci talked about how a scene (punk, movie monster-making, etc.) can be a place, how a city can be a character, how art itself is a safe place for a lot of us. Holly Black talked about how description in fantasy needs to suggest, even before any fantastic elements come into the story, that the reader is someplace unexpected, where anything might happen. Garret Freymann-Weyr discussed how inextricable place is from memory. I talked about how in Rules, Battle adjusts very quickly to Portland, and the very ease of that adjustment to a new place underscores how hard it is for her to connect with and understand her brother. (I also told everyone about the anxiety dream I had the night before, appropriate for a conference full of English teachers: that all of us had to relate our own work to the Great Gatsby.) Jo Knowles talked about how an abuser can make every place feel unsafe, but also how places can, eventually, be reclaimed. And Ann Angel did a search for all the places mentioned in the anthology she edited, Such A Pretty Face, and saw that the places mentioned most often — bathrooms, locker rooms, bedrooms — were all locuses of anxiety about where the characters fit in the world.

I was so glad to have the chance to be part of the conference.

More soon, but right now, it’s sunny and I’m going for a walk.

Today I woke up at 3 am, convinced that I had booked my flight to New York for the wrong day.

I hadn’t, but I couldn’t get back to sleep, either.

So it was a good thing I had an audiobook. A LONG audiobook. I’m currently listening to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, in part to see how someone who’s incredibly vicious to his characters does it. I’m really glad I’m enjoying it, because it means that I’ll have listening material for months to come.

Now I have three suitcases of differing sizes laid out on the bed, and I am torn between the desire to be fancy and the desire not to take so damn much luggage for once.

Also I am seized with the irrational fear that if I pack my favorite fancy clothes in the giant suitcase,  it will get lost and I will never see said clothes again. Maybe I’ll just take a few fancy items and stuff them into the little carryon.

In sum, Internet, I am very excited about going to NCTE/ALAN (it will be my first time!) but also, I am preoccupied with the trivial.

From his October ‘07 column in The Believer:

“I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal.”

I would like to send this man a copy of Rules. Wonder how I could get one to him?

This year I went as myself.

In 1992.

Annotations: One button says “I Color Outside The Lines,” the other is Hothead Paisan’s cat Chicken saying “Oh Purr.” The T-shirt is from Clarion 1991, and it reads: “Nobody noticed the whistling man with the chainsaw. They were all looking at the transvestite with the flamethrower,” a genuine sentence from a genuine critique session, as some readers of this site can attest. The rest of the outfit consists of fatigue shorts and beat-up combat boots. If I could’ve, I would’ve carried a boom box playing nothing but Concrete Blonde, Tori Amos, and the Indigo Girls…

(Note that I don’t dress entirely unlike this now. But I am slightly less prone to wear ludicrously oversized flannel shirts.)

If you were going to dress as a past (or future) version of yourself, what would it look like?

I put in enough hours earlier this week that I was going to have to take today off, anyway, to avoid going into overtime. And of course, since this week has been really busy (and fantastic) and exhausting (and awesome), I got sick.

Now, I’m sufficiently fueled by guilt that when I take a sick day, I typically get freaked out about even leaving the house to buy chicken soup and rent some movies. Because clearly, if I’m well enough to do that, why the hell am I not at the office? The great thing about already having the day off is that I could leave the house without fear. (Do others share this paranoia?)

Anyway, I picked up the first several episodes of the first season of Rome. I am an enormous fan of Mary Renault (though admittedly she is more about the Greeks) and I, Claudius, and I’m hoping this will sound some of the same notes.