Indy Author Fair

If you're reading this on Friday, the Indy Author Fair is tomorrow, Oct. 25, and I'll be leading a session on Blogging for Writers, which is a thing I'm doing right now, blogging, though only for a moment. We're closing on two houses and moving this weekend and life is all about boxes.

I dream of boxes. These are, admittedly, boring dreams, but it's an adrenaline rush to score free ones. To retail and grocery stores I go, asking and asking. Sometimes they want to keep the boxes for themselves, which is understandable. I mean, maybe they are moving. Or hoarding magazines, as I've apparently been doing, unintentionally, over the last ten years. Bye bye, magazines. Thanks for hanging out in the basement for a decade.

 

If you're reading this on Saturday, perhaps you're already at the event at the gorgeous Central Library, a place I haven't visited in awhile. Remember the last Author Fair I attended? Let's hope for better health this year. Maybe you're even in my session, 1:45-3:15 p.m., and we're in the middle of talking about why writers might want to blog, what sort of platform to choose, how to connect with others, finding your material, audience, and scads of other things.

Scads: that's a word you don't hear every day. When I am unpacked, I'm going to hunt down the etymology of that word. Beyond Wikipedia, I mean. Like Oxford English Dictionary cross referencing. I love being a word nerd.

Maybe you're reading this on Sunday, or beyond, and the event is over. Where are you? What are you doing? I imagine that I am surrounded by boxes just like now except in a different house. At the old place, the dust bunnies have been swept and the doors have been locked and the keys handed over. The walls are bare of the art we spent years arranging and rearranging, taken down in an hour.

The empty house would echo if anyone were inside. But it won't be us. We'll be walking through a different door.

Pod(cast) People

New to the world of recording podcasts, I showed up to the Indiana Writers Center last Thursday with a bottle of water, a notebook, and little else. Brad King, of The Geeky Press and The Downtown Writers Jam, took care of the rest. Microphones upon microphones. A sound board that lit up like Christmas whenever we spoke. I'm a stereo geek, so this was super cool to me.

In the podcast, we spend more than an hour chatting about books we loved growing up, what shapes us as writers, and much, much more. He asks great questions about my novel, TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES, out in early 2015. As usual, I bring up other writers and mangle a quote or two and laugh about being a mangler. We also talk about fakers -- mayhaps I had a tendency to be a faker as a child -- and being an authentic person in an age of online representation. One of my fave topics. Pixels and all that. 

Listen to our conversation here.

Were I savvy like Brad, I would embed the podcast. Alas, I am not savvy like Brad. But perhaps someday he will teach me. I think he's read this blog. See the part of the podcast in which we joke about light stalking, which is one element of the novel and also something most humans engage in, while online.

Late last night (Sunday night, it should be noted), my editor, Victoria Barrett, sent me the galley for TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES. She has long told me that looking at the copyright page is when the novel really feels official. She's right.

Seven lines in seven minutes

1. My oldest son turned four yesterday, and his birthday party was the last big event we'll have in the house where we have lived for ten years.

2. We listen to music in the morning, and he and his younger brother have three favorite tracks on the new Counting Crows album, "Somewhere Under Wonderland": Earthquake Driver, Scarecrow, and Elvis Went to Hollywood.

3. "Is Elvis a he or a she?" asked the older boy.

4. On Mondays, I miss them the most.

5. On rainy Mondays, daycare dropoff is dreary; I am reminded that Tuesday is almost always better, no matter the weather.

6.  When my husband and I bought this house, we thought it was a little small but still workable for the two of us.

7. Now there are four of us, and we're moving to a bigger space; I will always remember how cozy we are in this little bungalow, and how I can hear them calling, from any room in the house, "Mom?"