Good morning, all! I still have a few free books to give away, so if you’re interested, drop me a line via the contact page, reply to this post, or post something on Need To Read, and you’ll be entered to win.

Have a great week!

I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I forgot to blog again. I guess it was just having those three weeks off. I have something BIG and EXCITING and TIME CONSUMING going on in my life right now, which is great, but I’m easily distracted. It might be that I blog sort of sporadically for the next three months. And yes, if you’re the “general public” or even a regular reader who I don’t “know” (an imaginary friend as my writer friend, Eileen Cook, calls online pals), I guess you’ll have to be kept in the dark because I’m way into that whole internet safety thing and I don’t post about my personal life except in general terms. After all, this is a professional writer’s website, not People magazine! Haha!

So, since Fridays are generally about other authors, I’ll give you a list of whose work I’m loving lately.

J.K. Rowling has got my heart. Maybe you think she’s a good writer, maybe a great writer, maybe just a good writer but a great storyteller, but whatever you want to say about her, she’s got me in her hands. I haven’t read anything since racing through the Hallows and I don’t intend to until I’ve got the British edition in my hands and I can read it once more, slowly.

Frank Cottrell Boyce – that guy can write

I’m anxiously awaiting the sequel to I’D TELL YOU I LOVE YOU BUT THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU, just because I loved the first one. The author is Ally Carter.

What are you reading?

This link will take you to a rather long piece I wrote two years ago about the birds here in Tennessee and how I’ve come to love them. It’s not funny, but it’s kind of sweet. I did what I usually do with nonfiction, try one or two markets and then just forget to send it out. Maybe someday I’ll come across the right market and someone will want to publish it, but for now, it’s here for you if you want to read it.

Bird Watching For My Soul

“Cardinals! Cardinals! Cardinals!” I call out quietly but distinctly enough for my husband to hear me inside the house. He creeps slowly to the porch to admire the pair, laughing gently at my child-like enthusiasm. Until I moved to Tennessee I was more familiar with the baseball team than I was with a real cardinal. I’d seen the baseball team play. I had never seen a live redbird.

Wrapped in a blanket on the porch glider, I watch fall creeping around the edges of late summer, threatening to send me back indoors for the winter. I’ve spent nearly two years here staring at the lake and I’ve done a lot less writing than I meant to, but my peace and joy have grown tenfold, and the writing I have done is much better.

This is not a wilderness lake and the sounds of internal combustion engines form rings around my thoughts many hours of the day. The retired men who worked for decades up north have not grasped the joy of simply being still. They must mow, trim, fertilize and sculpt their lawns until they look as perfect as a Marine colonel’s buzz-cut. Some days the continual humming annoys me but I try instead to be grateful for their reliable and constant activity which diverts the wildlife to our overgrown yard.

Word has gotten around that all are welcome here. Canada geese will not be beaned by flying marbles wielded from slingshots at our place. No one cares if they poop on our weedy grass. We have left our towering pines standing instead of opting for an unobstructed view of the lake. Come and build your nests in our branches, the oaks call to passers-by. A pair of Eastern bluebirds answered by building their home outside our bedroom window. Dozens of swallows responded to the “free rent” sign posted on our boathouse and hummingbirds ignore our feeder and hover over purple flowers potted on the porch steps.

We didn’t do anything to create a place for the birds. It’s more what we didn’t do. Our grass usually needs cutting, the hedges are wild, and we lazily watch the abundance come to play and eat instead of weeding, gardening, and planting.

If my enthusiasm outweighs that of my nine-year-old friend, Olivia, it’s because she’s grown up with this colorful plumage surrounding her. Birds are brown or black in Portland, Oregon with blue jays or red-breasted robins adding the only color. Here they are yellow, red, blue, purple, white, black, green, brown, spotted, striped and everything in between.

Not long ago I was a city girl. Pigeons, starlings, crows, and robins are all I remember seeing, but I’m anxious to revisit Portland because I have the distinct feeling that I just wasn’t paying attention. It took the splash of color to draw me in here, but it was sitting and being still that brought to me the gift of the birds.

The names still baffle me. On one of our ritual walks my husband nearly died laughing because I was jumping up and down yelling, “One of those yellow-gold-American-thingies! Golden finch? Is that right???” and “The purple one that looks like it’s dunked in ink is here again!” has become a regular cry from the breakfast table.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him prouder than the day we heard a bird calling and I said, “Oh, that’s a cardinal. Or else it’s a mockingbird.” We found it in the bushes and it was a mockingbird. The idea of me being able to identify a cardinal’s call was only slightly less impressive than the fact that it had occurred to me it could be a mockingbird.

I moved here in the winter and had never experienced gosling season but once the “Goslings! Goslings! Goslings!” began traipsing across our grass, their stubby little wings flapping at their sides, I was a goner. I watched the families tootle through our yard so often that I began to know which ones were which, how many babies each family had, who had gotten an early start and who were like me – late bloomers. When an injured gander hobbled by one evening I quickly counted their goslings to discover one was missing. It made me cry. Natural order be damned.

When wildlife and people mix, heartbreak is often the result. Every year a goose builds her nest in our overgrown, unplanted garden, lays six or seven eggs, and sits idly there, protecting them for thirty days or so. She’s done this far longer than I’ve been here. My husband tells me she has been coming for ten years or more.

Because we live in a regulated community, there is a property owner’s association and they answer to the residents. Very few people, it seems, are as thrilled with the geese as we are. Just a week or so before the goslings were to hatch the property owner’s association called in Tennessee Wildlife Resources to destroy the eggs by addling them and replacing the damaged eggs back into the nest. They did this by boat, when we were not home, without contacting us first.

I have never seen my peaceful husband so angry. I have never felt such a tug on my heart, as I did day after day when I watched the goose sit on her nest, preening and wondering. She stayed on her nest for forty-two days past when they should’ve hatched. The eggs rotted beneath her.

We wrote letters, raised hell, and have in writing a statement that no one from Tennessee Wildlife Resources will ever come on our property again without knocking on our door for permission. But the thing I had trouble fathoming was the outright hostility the people in our neighborhood displayed toward us for loving the geese. The reaction was as if no one had ever considered that perhaps at least some of the residents had moved here not for the golf courses, beaches, fishing and boating, but for peace, wildlife, birding, and sunsets.

As the summer wore on and the surviving goslings grew up (two geese had managed to hide their nests well enough) the pain waned. At least until I wrote this. I am not so single minded that I don’t understand other’s points of view. The geese here have no natural predators so their numbers grow quickly. They foul the beaches, golf courses, and yards of the residents, which raises sanitary issues. But had any of those people who verbally attacked me in the newspaper had to sit on their porch for forty-two days and watch a mother’s heart break, they might have strived harder for a more humane solution. But maybe there isn’t one. And that’s another thing I’ve learned. You can’t have everything.

The families have gone south now and only transient Canada geese pass through these days but every time I hear their honking I find myself holding my breath in wonder as I watch them water-ski to a skidding stop, disrupting the lake’s glassy surface.

There’s still a lot going on too. The lone blue heron of years past found a mate this year and they produced a “Baby heron! Baby heron!” who struts along our retaining wall just like his parents. The pair of beavers who live in some mysteriously hidden part of the lake float and swim twenty feet out every night at sunset, diving and disappearing if we get too close to the water.

The other day even my husband was jumping up and down because three Pileated woodpeckers landed in the oak tree and one of them was clearly a junior. There are Carolina nut hatches, hummingbirds, redheaded woodpeckers, Eastern bluebirds, robins, crows, doves, mockingbirds, kingfishers, common flickers, whippoorwills, ducks, coots, Brewer’s blackbirds and many others I can’t yet identify that visit us daily.

Even after two years I learn new things about birds every day. Yesterday I spotted a crow chasing a giant rust-colored hawk while other crows screamed encouragement from the treetops. Near as I can tell, they were protecting a young one. Later, a dove pretended to be injured to lure my neighbor away from her fallen baby when he got too close with his lawnmower, something all birds do, but I never knew.

Birdsong carries over the leaf blowers and motorboats and reminds me to listen as well as look. Some mornings their voices are a cacophony of first graders singing Christmas carols at the tops of their lungs. Other days, one lone twitter will be the only sound.

Two years ago I was a city girl and I could name all the species of birds I’d ever seen on one hand. Two years ago I couldn’t even tell you what a robin’s song sounded like even though they are abundant where I grew up. Two years ago, I didn’t care, but here, on this lake, I have been given gifts in abundance. Stillness. Peace. Birds. Balance. And yes, even heartbreak. But mostly, I have been given joy.

As autumn reaches out and transforms the green leafy havens into golden blazes, more will fly south but others will come. It won’t be long before I’m yelling “Buffleheads! Buffleheads!” on a cold wintry morning.

I’m a bit slow out of the starting gate as it’s already almost 6pm on Wednesday! I have an excuse though. Today was my husband’s last day performing in the play, Smoke On The Mountain Homecoming which he’s been doing since February and I went to see it. He’s been working as an actor and music director at The Cumberland County Playhouse. The show was wonderful and my husband was fabulous. I’m very proud of him, especially since he’s just taken up this acting thing in the last few years. He’s got a lot of natural talent and he was wonderful (and while it’s true that I’m naturally biased, the audience loved him too).

The truth is that I don’t have much to say about writing today anyway because…well…I haven’t been. I’ve been on a break. One thing that did happen while I was away is that my critique group read my latest young adult novel and they liked it! That’s good news. It’s funny, but one character kept bugging me, both while I was writing and afterwards, but he’s a very small part of the story and I just didn’t know how to make him more interesting. No one in my group seemed to have a problem with him, but after reading Donald Maass’ WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL, I wasn’t content to have such a passive character, even a minor one. Finally, just as I was finishing up my break and had been mulling it over off and on for three weeks, the solution struck me. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but I will say this, never accept something as “good enough” if you know it’s not, and make sure and take the breaks because they help you work things like this out.

How long do you let a manuscript sit after you’ve finished it?

Walden Pond – Buy this print here

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. – Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), Walden: Reading, 1854

If you’re a reader, what else is there to talk about this week besides Harry Potter? I was reading about a twenty year old young woman and how she’d begun reading HP with the first one and followed them through to the end. Now, I’ve enjoyed them, but how cool would it be to have grown up on them? They will always have a special place in your heart, won’t they (assuming you like them) if they were part of your childhood and/or coming of age. The books will remind you of times in your life when certain things were happening.

I can’t think of a series that was being written while I was growing up, but I do remember certain books. I even remember some of their titles. I love series though. There’s something so fun about being able to read more about the characters you’ve grown to love. My favorite is, of course, BETSY-TACY. I also loved (as a kid, and now as an adult) The Melendy Quartet by Enright, The Children of Green Knowe, and Trixie Belden. What series kept you reading?

Hi, All. Did you miss me? Well, I’m back this week. I had a nice break and the kitchen cabinets look fabulous. Still work to do, but I’ve handed it all off to installation people. I may be making some adjustments to my daily posts as I’ve given away most of the books I planned to give away. The freebies may be a monthly thing rather than a weekly thing, but we’ll see. If I do that, I’ll have to come up with something else to post on Mondays. The clipart today represents me getting back to work. I don’t plan to actually plow anything, except through the papers piled on my desk and then through a revision of my new novel.

Having a good summer?

Got it. Read it. Loved it. I’ll probably read it again as I scarfed it down in 11 hours over two days.

I found another Princess Diaries book. I think I’ve read them all now. This was quite a detailed book about how holidays are celebrated around the world. I thought it was not only hilarious, but fascinating. It reminded me why I think Meg Cabot is a good writer. All her secondary and supporting characters are so well done. I know that’s Writing 101, but it’s also one of the easiest things to forget about when you’re writing.

Well, the break is almost over, but I couldn’t help writing today since I had an interesting animal story to add to my Thursday Humor column. Although, it’s not what you would call funny, just a cool story. And it didn’t happen to me, I read about it, although I wish I could’ve been there.

On an island in British Columbia, Canada, there is a group of volunteers who answer calls when someone sees an animal in distress. Last week the group got a call that there was an eagle in the water and it couldn’t seem to get lift off. The caller thought it must be caught in a fishing net. When the rescue team got there, they stood on the beach watching the eagle flap its wings, but it couldn’t get out of the water, just like the caller had said. While they were determining how best to handle the situation, the eagle suddenly began to use its giant wings as oars and paddled itself to shore! When it got to the beach, it heaved itself out and dragged an enormous fish onto the rocks. The reason it couldn’t fly was because the fish it had caught was too heavy! The eagle was then joined by its mate and after they feasted, an otter and her pub climbed up onto the rocks to finish off the fish. Amazing. Never give up.

Haha! I found one more that I hadn’t read. It is a mini-book, a novela, a great way to cash in if you’re Meg Cabot. It is Volume IV and a quarter. It’s about three chapters worth of writing, designed to satisfy the reader during the gap between full books. No offense to Ms. Cabot (I’ve said I like her writing a lot), but while enjoyable, I can’t help thinking these are just money makers. Not that a writer shouldn’t take any and all opportunities like this if they present themselves, it just seems a bit hard on the libraries who have to buy them in order to complete their Princess collection. Maybe if I’m ever in this enviable position, I’ll sell my mini-books to the public and give them to the library. Or use them as a fundraiser for charity.

I do have one bone to pick with Ms. Cabot though, and since it’s not like I can actually get an email through to her, I’ll do it here on my website. If Princess Mia is such an environmentalist, why does she ride around in a limo? There are all kinds of alternatives and I think Mia taking a stand against the limo would provide some good drama for say…book fifty…just an idea, in case Ms. Cabot is dropping by my website looking for more things to write about.

I love, love, love this book. This is a FANTASTIC book. Stop what you’re doing and go get a copy right now. It is witty and clever and the author has such an amazing grasp of language that she plays with it in ways you rarely get to experience. You get the feeling that if you had a conversation with her, you’d never be able to keep up. This is one story that had me thinking about it whenever I wasn’t reading it (in other words, when I was painting the kitchen cabinets like I should be doing now). This book makes you so uncomfortable for the main character you squirm in your chair (not in a dark or scary way). You want to shake the book and yell at Patty (the character) to stand up for herself! I won’t tell you any more about it though since you’ll probably be reading it soon.

One thing did bug me…this appears to be the author’s first book, and yet, I know her name. Someone tell me why? I had two guesses…one was she’s a friend of someone who blogs and so I’ve seen her mentioned there and the other was wrong (I thought maybe she was repped by one of the agents I queried).  Help?

I’m not trying to be mean, but the author is infinitely more interesting than this book. The book is nonfiction and is about giant redwoods and the scientists who discover and climb them. The thing is…it’s boring in an oddly fascinating way. I had to get the large print version (because after everyone saw the author on Stephen Colbert, they too, put the book on hold) and so my copy has 406 pages. I’ve read 330 of them and I just don’t think I can go on. On the other hand, why did I read so much? Well, it’s kind of interesting. I’ve started looking at trees a whole lot differently since I began reading this book. For one thing, I look up. Also, a lot of this book takes place in Oregon and that’s where I’m from, so it’s got that local draw to it. Still…I think the biggest problem with it is that it appears to be written for third graders. I kid you not. The topic should be fascinating, but the writing is very repetitive (not to mention there are a lot of short sentences reminiscent of Go, Spot go.). Now, those of you who read this blog are all thinking to yourself, “Has Joelle gone hard on us? She usually only writes about books she likes. She never criticizes people’s writing.”. The answer to that is that this is nonfiction. I think that fiction writers deserve a little bit of tender handling because their hearts are all wrapped up in their books. And while this is probably true of nonfiction, I think if you’re gonna write nonfiction, you better do it well, or I’m going to call you on it. That said, if I didn’t think that some of you would be interested in this, I wouldn’t mention it at all. It’s oddly enticing. I do have a thing about trees though, so it may just be me that doesn’t mind ploughing through this muddle. I do think that a tiny bit of what has kept me reading is that the author was so charming and funny and genuine on the Colbert Report. I guess I’m rooting for him.

Oh, and just for the record, Preston doesn’t need my endorsement. He has great quotes for some of his other work from The Chicago Tribune, People, and Los Angeles Times Book Review, so what do I know?

P.S. I took a day off and read some other stuff and then I finished the book today. Some of the ending was pretty good. Still, it was more a matter of finishing something I started. I do feel more complete now that I finished.

Say what you will, I love the Princess Diaries books. The only thing I don’t like about them is I read them so fast and then just as I’m getting into it, it’s over and I have to wait a year or whatever for the next one. Yeah, they’re all the same…but Cabot is quite entertaining as well as great at sticking in lots of political stuff without being preachy. So there you go…I read it, I loved it, I’m all caught up…when’s the next one coming out?

By the way, just as a point of interest, I think her Mediator series kicks ass and is better writing.

By mini-break I do not mean a weekend getaway like Bridget Jones takes in her books…I mean I have washed enough of the paint off my hands from remodeling my kitchen to type a rant.

Here is my rant…

Yahoo now has a spell check feature. Like Word, it underlines any words that you might have spelled incorrectly. Other websites are using this feature too. What burns me up is that apparently the correct spelling for the word “okay” is now OK. Even Wordpress (the program I’m using to type this) agrees. While I’ll give you OK as an acceptable spelling, it does not make okay incorrect. Check the friggin dictionary (it doesn’t like friggin either).

Tonite is not how you spell tonight, although, so far “tonight” is still okay. There are more, but my break is over.

Check out Need to Read later. I have some good stuff to post.

cheers,

Joelle