Month: July 2009

Who were you at six?

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Mark comes home tomorrow after being in Frankfurt for a few weeks. It will be so good to have him back home for a thousand different reasons. I don’t mind the short hops across the pond, but this long one was really long: filled with running around and things to do, sick kids, summer programs, Conclave submissions, house packing, house hunting, and so on. I feel as if a month was squeezed into these weeks.

In the meantime, Maya had her week-long Aspiring Vets summer class, and she *loved* it. I’ve never seen her so happy to come out of school or an activity. My firstborn has been fascinated with animals since she was a baby and has always insisted that she wants to be a veterinarian. Now I certainly don’t expect a 6-year-old to decide her future, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did grow up to be a vet.

This got me thinking about the children we once were.

How much of the 6-year-old child self exists in your grown up persona? What have you held on to and why? What do you long for, or wish you had been able to hold onto?

Time to go and see the presentation of my little aspiring vet.

Have a lovely day.

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks

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I’m takinga break from reviewing submissions for Conclave: A Journal of Character to update my marketing/author promotional materials for my agent.

Last update from Agent Man was that five publishers have my manuscript, The Silence of Trees and are waiting to see my bio and marketing strategy.

(Of course, I hadn’t intended to stay up until 3:30am putting these materials together. Tomorrow I have lunch and dinner plans with friends. Coffee will definitely be a part of both dining experiences.)

Night.

Notes on Character and Conclave on NewPages

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NewPages Blog recently listed an entry about the editorials in Conclave: A Journal of Character and American Short Fiction:

Some Notes on Character

“I ran across a couple of great editorials in the most recent issues of American Short Fiction and Conclave. Both speak the the nature of character in writing as well as, for Conclave, in photography. Below are some excerpted portions which create a kind of conversation between them.

From Editor Stacey Swann of American Short Fiction (44, Summer 2009):

Like most writers, I grew up reading books—loving the characters and their stories. But I also loved learning about the world. While I understood that Narnia was not a real place or Tom Sawyer a real person, I still invested a great deal of authority in authors: the way they viewed the world was correct on a fundamental level. This explains why studying John Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in high school remains a vivid memory for me. It was the first time I strongly disagreed with what an author was espousing. No matter what Keats thought, no matter what my English teacher echoed, I was certain that beauty was not truth and truth was not beauty. It wasn’t just that many fundamental truths about the world were ugly; beauty wasn’t important enough to equate with truth.”

Click here to read more.

(To read the complete Foreword and Introduction, as well as other works from our inaugural issue, go to the Conclave: A Journal of Character website.)