Summer Reads: Trip Through Your Wires and The Girl on the Train

Some very kind readers of Trip Through Your Wires have compared the book to this summer's bestseller, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

The last one isn't about TGOTT, but does make a train reference I like. What can I say? It's all Thomas and Chuggington up in my house. Trains are the best. Except when Brother knocks them all off the table, which totally just happened. Other Brother was very cross, to use the parlance of Thomas. 

Many thanks to those who have read and reviewed TTYW on Goodreads. I haven't read The Girl on the Train yet; I'm on the IMCPL hold list, which looks like this:

I am now up to number 288 of 477 on the list, because I am a vee eye pee. I am patient, is the real answer. Sometimes.

Library patrons and math whizzes alike will note that Trip Through Your Wires has a much shorter wait time. You could be No. 7 on the list if you place your hold today. Librarians are standing by:

It's thrilling to me to see my book listed -- with holds! -- in my library system. If your local library doesn't have it, you can request it, either in person or online, depending on the place. I would love to see my novel in more libraries, & to increase access to readers. Libraries are among my favorite places on earth. Today I got to be an Art Monster (see: Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation) and sat at a library table, researching and piling up books to read and movies to watch. Letting my curiosity guide me. Writing, and researching, and writing some more. Summer is restorative that way. 

Can't wait to read TGOTT, once my hold comes in. May your summer reads arrive speedily.

Missed Connections: Retail

It's getting late and the kids are going to be up early. My eyes are itchy from too much pollen and too much screen time today. A little while ago, searching for a dresser and a new double stroller on Craigslist, I fell down a rabbit hole of garage sales and missed connections. Let's call it a chipmunk hole.

A Chipmunk Died in Our Double Stroller and Now I Want to Set it on Fire.

— Sarah Layden (@calmoots) May 5, 2015

I wanted to start a missed connections for a shirt I was going to buy in March, but it was really too cold for such a shirt in Indiana in March, and I was traveling to cold-weather climes for TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES book events -- Toronto, Syracuse, Buffalo -- and the AWP conference in April, in Minneapolis, where it snowed. There was a two-story Target where one could take refuge, and one did. Also went to NYC, a whole other post, where it was warmer but not quite sleeveless tunic warm. It was sell-a-book-to-a-stranger-named-Scott-in-Central-Park warm, if that gives you an idea. So the shirt. I went back for it today. It had been on my mind. The weather's warming up. Not just a shirt but a tunic, and it screamed CUTE TOP. It was also $80, and I am many things, but I am not a person who will spend $80 on a cute top. Even if it is a tunic, with the word "romantic" in its description. I am not really a wearer of "romantic" garments, typically. But this tunic was different. I figured that by now it was on sale, but it was not locatable in the store. I hunted high and low. The saleswoman was busy spreading out five dresses on the counter - they were all the same dress, black and white, and she was really scrutinizing them - and the salesman was ordering Jimmy John's on the phone and giving out his credit card number so kind of scurrying to the back room to not be heard, and became flustered that I was blocking his way in front of the racks. I'd had Jimmy John's for lunch today, coincidentally. The Turkey Tom, always and forever.

Maybe I could find the top online, I decided. And I did. In a size 0. Look. I am not a size 0; I have never been a size 0, senator. This is not a point of pride or shame, merely a fact. Now, on the March hunt for a cute top, I found a more weather-appropriate alternative, and the saleslady talked me into a smaller size. She was quite insistent. "It looks supergood! You look superfabulous!" And I was swayed. And then this happened.

Cute top bought for readings has ripped in not one but four places. I AM BOOKISH INCREDIBLE HULK. Cannot be contained by poly/silk mix.

— Sarah Layden (@calmoots) April 19, 2015

So you might understand why I'd re-fixate on the tunic. The flowy, pretty, comfy item -- you were almost mine, had I not been so cheap, and so cold all the damn time. But now, warmer! And more events! (To Cleveland on Memorial Day, 1 p.m. at Chagrin Blvd. Barnes & Noble, and Chicago on June 10 at City Lit Books with James Tadd Adcox.) Of course the shirt was no longer available. That was March, This is Now. That's what retailers say when they're trying to be real tough, like S.E. Hinton characters. Clothes don't just wait two months until you're back from book touring and done with the semester grading and all the gardenhousefamily needs (not in that order, that's outside-in, not inside-out.) Which reminds me:



I've been listening to this song a lot lately, traveling. I'm reminded of the R.E.M. song Turn You Inside-Out - words only, not music. Thinking about how crazy the past year has been, with moving and book and the kids and a full-time job, finally, and home home home. And boy was this a welcome sight to come home to.

I have long known where any book of mine would go in a bookstore, in this case the Barnes & Noble in IUPUI's Campus Center. I have visited shelves and traveled to the Ls. Many times. Oh D.H. Lawrence. Oh John le Carré. You two have no idea, you really don't.

In Which My Mother Blurbs TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES via text message

What I love about this endorsement:

1.) That it is from my mother.

2.) That she would like to keep reading but must pause. Because chores.

3.) That Mom is reppin' that Midwestern work ethic.

4.) That this took place on my birthday.

5.) That the conversation quickly and necessarily shifts to pizza.

Finished paperbacks!

This is what the "finished paperback" of TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES looks like. The official release date is March 17, St. Patrick's Day. Events surrounding the book can be found at my website.

Photo op: I'd set it on the dining room table for better lighting, and saw our Mexico map placemat was nearby. Perfect. The capital city of Guanajuato on the left, and "United States Citizens Visiting Mexico" at the top: I've begun to think of my characters as actual U.S. citizens and Mexican citizens. They feel real to me. 

The little spot of spaghetti sauce on the bottom margin of the map lends an air of authenticity to the semi-controlled chaos of our house.

Reading @ The Vonnegut Library tonight

This is my second month in a row reading at The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in downtown Indy. Going to angle to become their cabaret reader. Maybe the others in tonight's lineup -- James Figy, Georgia Arnett, David Blomenberg, and Justin Heckert -- would be willing to join me. December's wide open, once the papers get graded and gifts get bought and fruitcakes get baked. Does one bake a fruitcake? I've never known.

The reading happens at 6 p.m. It's called Beyond Words. Planned and coordinated by UIndy students, who clearly rock the house. They made this poster:

A moment from my last reading at the Vonnegut, a gorgeous space:

Not part of the Twitter caption: "...points with her freakishly long finger..." It's like a Swiffer duster extender and twice as crooked. #VballMiddleBlocker4Lyfe

I'm planning to read from my debut novel, TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES, out in February from Engine Books. The advance review copies are out, so for the first time, I'll be reading from an actual book instead of manuscript pages.

If you're a reviewer and would like an ARC, by the way, you can contact me or Victoria Barrett at Engine Books. Here are the books from another angle:

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?"

Writer Night with Second Story

 Saturday, 9/13, 7 p.m. Looking forward to reading with the crew pictured above. Free snacks! Beer & wine for sale. Proceeds/donations go to Second Story, a great organization in Indy.

You will want to go. I will see you there. 1043 Virginia Ave., Fountain Square, which is home to the duckpin bowling alley where I celebrated my 16th birthday and my wedding rehearsal after-party. (Many years apart, should it need to be said.)

My Writing Process blog tour

Thanks so much to the wonderful Sarah Yaw, who asked me to be part of the My Writing Process blog tour. Her debut novel, YOU ARE FREE TO GO, will be released by Engine Books* in September. Sarah lives in Central New York, where I lived for a decade. Over email, we discovered that we have a CNY friend in common. His name is Greg. If you're reading this, Greg, Hello!  
It's great to have an excuse to think about the writing process. I struggle with mine often, and I appreciate reading about how others go about their own work. And reflecting on process, as I so often tell my students, can be a means of understanding the work in a new way. Time to practice what I preach. 

Up next week are Andrew Scott and Barbara Shoup (see below for their bios). If you're a participant in this blog tour, I'm happy to link to your post here or in the comments. 

Away we go...

1) What are you working on? 

I'm in a waiting period on two projects: the release of my first novel, TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES, by Engine Books in Feb. 2015, and I've been querying agents for my YA novel, LAST SEASON. So in the interim, I've been revisiting short stories, working on revising them to put together as a collection. I've been writing very short pieces of fiction and some poetry, practicing compactness. (And, to be honest, the form appeals because I'm working within short stretches of time.) My back-burner project is a new novel; I've completed a first draft and plan to work on the second draft in the fall. I'm probably another full draft away from talking much about it. (See Question 4.)  

2) How does your work differ from others of its genre? 

It took me awhile to learn that my writing shouldn't necessarily fit into a category -- literary, commercial, mystery, or fill-in-the-blank. If it does, fine. But when I try to write toward a particular genre, then I'm not being true to the story and where it leads me. TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES could be thought of as literary, commercial, a mystery. But it's not truly a mystery novel -- only a mystery in that we can think that we know a person, when in fact they are a mystery to us. Often, we are a mystery to ourselves. Those are the kinds of books I like and strive to write: ones that may defy conventions, even as they pay close attention to language and character.     

3) Why do you write what you do? 

I write about what sticks in my mind and doesn't easily fade. The things I wonder about and want to know more about. Big questions or little ones that I don't have answers to -- I write toward those answers, even if I never find them. Sometimes I write because an image lurks in my consciousness and my subconsciousness needs to process it. I've always been fascinated by reading stories, and as I've gotten older, I've become fascinated about why we tell stories in the first place. It's such a common act of humanity, the kind of thing that truly binds us together. The need to understand our own experiences by describing what those experiences are like. And only we can tell others what the view is like through our particular windshield, as it were. I want to share my view. And when I read I want to look through other windshields.  

4) How does your writing process work?

Slow-fast-slow, alone-collaborate-alone. I start in semi-isolation, feeling out a story by taking notes, jotting ideas, writing lines and sketches and scenes. Then I write in big bursts and get the thing down relatively quickly. Then I revise, slowly, sometimes over the course of years. I tend not to talk about what I'm working on until I have a pretty solid draft finished. Keeping the story's energy close to me in the initial drafts has been useful, though I always want and need feedback later. But early on, letting the story sink in and grow and become whatever it's supposed to be is a necessary part of my process. I think it's possible to get too much input too soon, and instead of listening to the story, you're listening to feedback that could potentially derail it. I'm talking early-early. Once I'm a couple drafts in, I find it almost impossible to revise without feedback from trusted readers. Other people can see your work objectively, whereas you cannot. I say you, but I mean I. And you. We two.  

Coming up next week, these wonderful Indianapolis-based writers:  

Andrew Scott is the author of Naked Summer, a story collection, and the editor of 24 Bar Blues: Two Dozen Tales of Bars, Booze, and the Blues. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, The Writer’s Chronicle, and other outlets. He is an editor at Engine Books and Lacewing Books.

Barbara Shoup is the author seven novels, including four for young adults, and the co-author of Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process and Story Matters. She is the Executive Director of the Indiana Writers Center. A new YA novel, Looking for Jack Kerouac, is forthcoming from Lacewing Books in August, 2014.

*Engine Books seeks support for its Big Dream. Love literature? Want to see more great books in the world? Check it out and consider donating.