Storky!

I finally read D.L. Garfinkle’s Storky: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl, and I love, love, love this book. It’s the kind of book you can’t put down, even though you don’t want to get to the end and have to leave the main character and his world. It’s the kind of book that, once you do get to the end, you first close the book and hold it tight to your chest for a moment because you can’t let it go, then you run and out tell everyone you know that they must read it.

Storky is the hilarious and heartfelt story of Michael Pomerantz, nicknamed Storky, a smart, funny, but dorky kid who is trying to survive his first year of high school and convince his long-time buddy (and secret crush) Gina to see him as more than a friend. And if that’s not enough, he must also deal with his hugely popular older sister, his divorced parents—law-student Mom and ladies’-man Dad—and their respective dating partners. Garfinkle totally nails the pain and heartache of high school, but shows it with humor and and lot of spunk. Michael is the kind of kid I would’ve wanted to hang out with in high school. Heck, he’s the kind of kid I did hang out with in high school. I love this character.

And did I mention I love this book?

Library Workshop

This Saturday, September 9, I’ll be speaking at the Kansas Association of School Librarians District I Workshop in Tonganoxie. It should be a great day because it involves three of my favorite pasttimes: hanging out with librarians, talking about books, and eating Chinese buffet for lunch.

Labor Day Escape

Just as on Memorial Day, I celebrated Labor Day by running away from home. Actually, I spent Labor Day doing some actual labor—sitting-in-a-chair kind of labor. Once again I took my laptop and settled into one of the cushy chairs in the middle of the mall to work on my novel. And once again I was able to focus for hours and get an amazing amount of writing done as the retail world swirled around me.

If the mall weren’t a 45-minute drive away and I didn’t have to figure out what to do about the kids, I’d go there every day to write.

Library Thoughts

When I was a kid, I’d ride my bike downtown to our public library, an ancient building with an equally ancient collection of books, stuffed in shelves from floor to ceiling. Usually it was just me and Mrs. Turner, the book-loving, kid-loving librarian (who must’ve been at least a hundred years old at the time, and still seemed the same age when she retired a few years ago) roaming the creaky-floored aisles, digging for books I hadn’t yet read. I’d make my choices (difficult, since I was limited to three checkouts at a time, although sometimes Mrs. Turner would make an exception), she’d stamp the due dates, and I’d head off on my bike, so eager to plunge into new vicarious adventures that I often couldn’t wait till I got home, instead careening recklessly down the sidewalk as I balanced an open book between my handlebars. (NOTE: Reading while riding a bicycle is possible, but rarely successful.)

Fast forward thirty years, and I’m still roaming the aisles of the public library. Same town, many of the same books, shiny new building—which is dedicated to Mrs. Turner, and rightly so. But now I’m hardly the only patron. The place is fairly rocking every time I go in. And these days, besides the head librarian, there are at least three or four other library employees checking out or reshelving books at any given time. The floors are even and the shelves easier to reach (which is progress and probably a good thing, although I miss the creaks, squeaks, and rickety library ladder; I also kinda miss the musty smell, although if I crack open one of the older books, I can still get a good whiff of it). My heart swells when I see so many people making use of one of my very favorite places.

Still, I can’t help noticing the crowd is mostly concentrated around the computers rather than the books.

Writing Coach

My friend Suzanne Lieurance is a writer with a ton of credits and nearly twenty years experience. She has also been a teacher in a variety of interesting and challenging settings, including a reservation in South Dakota and an alternative high school in Kansas City. She has recently combined these two talents—writing and teaching—to become a writing coach. To learn more about her Working Writer’s Coaching Program, visit:

• New Coaching Program
• Working Writer’s Coach

Kansas Notable Books

I finally found the complete list of Kansas Notable Books (thanks, Jerri!). Wow. Airball is in great company.

2006 Kansas Notable Books

• Airball: My Life in Briefs by L.D. Harkrader
• Capote in Kansas: A Drawn Novel Ande Parks
• The Darkest Dawn: Lincoln, Booth, and the Great American Tragedy by Thomas Goodrich
• Deputy Harvey and the Ant Cow Caper by Brad Sneed
• The Great Blues by Steve Semken
• A Hungry Heart: A Memoir by Gordon Parks
• In the Small, Small Night by Jane Kurtz
• The Kansas Guidebook for Explorers by Marci Penner
• Maggie Rose and Sass by Eunice Boeve
• The Moon Butter Route by Max Yoho
• Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea by Michael J. Everhart
• Ordinary Genius by Thomas Fox Averill
• Wildflowers and Grasses of Kansas: A Field Guide by Michael John Haddock
• The Youngest Brother: On a Kansas Wheat Farm During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression by C. Hugh Snyder

Fifteen-Minute Salvation

Last week I talked to my editor about the first few chapters of my novel-in-progress. She was enthusiastic, encouraging me to enlarge my vision of the story, making it bigger and bolder, using the art (because I’d included illustrations in the chapters I sent her) more broadly and as more of a storytelling element.

Which was all very exciting. But also frightening. What if I couldn’t enlarge my vision enough? What if that enlarged vision was still too mundane? What if the story never lived up to its potential? Nothing paralyzes me quite like fear, and for the past week I’ve been living in this weird state of excitement, fright, and depression.

But I’ve stumbled onto a cure, or at least a temporary cure. I’ve been forcing myself to sit down for fifteen minutes at a time to write. I’m not writing actual manuscript pages, although bits of dialogue and story creep in; I’m only taking notes, brainstorming, letting my mind wander over characters, relationships, settings, plot. And once I start, I can’t stop till the fifteen minutes are up, no matter how badly it seems to be going. At first I tend to write inane and useless things like:

Okay, I have to write for fifteen minutes about Griffin and his problems. What do I want to say? Where do I want him to go? What scenes jump out at me? I can’t stop now. I’ve still got fourteen and half minutes to go.

But as I push on through my allotted time period, my subconscious starts doing its thing, and before I finish (which is usually at some point past the fifteen-minute mark because once the ideas roll in I have to follow them) I’ve not only come up with new ideas for the story, I’ve shaken off the paralysis and am excited once more about digging into the story.

This isn’t a permanent remedy. The doubts creep back in the next day, sometimes later the same day, and I have to do my fifteen-minute cure again. But it’s nice to have a weapon in my battle against fear and paralysis that, so far, hasn’t misfired.

Meeting Up

This afternoon I’m going to a Writers Meetup at a Borders coffee shop. My friend Suzanne set it up (she’s much more energetic and outgoing about these things than I am), and so far 30+ area writers of all stripes have RSVPed. If they all show up, Borders will be bursting at the seams.

One thing Suzanne wants to find out from this first meetup is what kind of group these 30+ writers would like to form—critiquing, schmoozing, networking, promoting, whatever. A group I’d love to be part of would be one that meets, say, once a week at a coffee shop or bookstore (or mall or auction barn—see previous posts), laptops and lattes in hand, to write. Not to write something together, as a group, but to write individually in the company of other writers for several hours, then have time at the end to read what each of us wrote or bounce ideas off each other or even just to comment on how well or dismally our writing went that day.

I actually know of a group like that nearby, and if I didn’t have kids and a host of other responsibilities, I’d join them in a flash. Maybe one day, when I’m old(er) and the kids have flown...

Hooray for Laptops

I spent most of the last week at the county fair, where my son was showing his steer. This is his first year in 4-H, his first year to show at the fair, and I’m very proud of him. Friday night was the livestock auction, and to combat the sheer mind-numbing boredom of sitting in the auction arena for many, many (i.e. four) hours, waiting for the five minutes near the end (after they’d finished with the goats, sheep, and hogs) when my son would bring his steer into the auction pen, I brought along my laptop and fired it up to work on an article for Children’s Writer I’d blocked in earlier in the week.

I’ve talked before about how much writing I can accomplish while sitting in busy, crowded places, such as the mall, but I really wondered whether I’d be able to write much at the auction. A comfy chair in an air-conditioned mall, with an espresso bar a short escalator ride away, is one thing. A stuffy cow barn on a hot August night is quite another. But I sat there on my hard metal chair Friday night, laptop propped on my knees, the auctioneer yammering and bidders calling out all around me, and finished the entire first draft of the article, writing so quickly, in fact, that when I reached the end of the article, I still had an hour’s wait before it was my son’s turn to auction his steer.

When I write in a public place like this, the hubbub of the crowd becomes white noise that sort of insulates me, and I’m able to focus without any distractions. Seems strange, I know, when potential distractions are bubbling all around. But they aren’t the same distractions that usually derail me: email, snack breaks, dirty laundry, remote control. I wish I could figure out a way to maintain that same focus in the comfort of my own home. I can’t imagine how much writing I would get done.

And a note about the cow image above: No, it’s not my son’s steer. It’s a clip art photo that came with my Word software, which I thought was fun and have been looking for an excuse to use. My son’s steer is a shiny black Angus/Brangus cross, while this cow appears to be a Hereford.

Thorpe Menn Nominees

I’ve ferreted out the titles of the other two books nominated for this year’s Thorpe Menn Award. The three nominees are:

• Airball: My Life in Briefs (my book), Roaring Brook Press
• Deadlocked by Joel Goldman (a real Kansas City attorney who writes terrific mystery/thrillers about a fictional Kansas City attorney), Pinnacle Books
• Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy by Felicia Hardison Londré (Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri—Kansas City), Southern Illinois University Press

I’m looking forward to meeting Joel and Felicia at the awards luncheon.