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St. Elmo’s Fire

I boarded the Kings’ ship; now in the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement; sometime I’d divide
And burn in many places; on the topmast
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly
Then meet and join.

—The Tempest (Act I, Scene 2)
William Shakespeare

I just saw the coolest thing ever. 

It was stormy again on Lake Champlain, so even though I should have been working on my new MG historical after the kids went to bed tonight, I was out on my sun porch trying to take pictures of lightning.

About two minutes after I took this picture (in which I caught the cool purple glow but missed the bolt), a distinct glow appeared at the top of the mast of my neighbor’s sailboat.  About two seconds later, a huge, zig-zaggity bolt of lightning came down and, if it didn’t hit the sailboat directly, came awfully close.

The glow was what sailors used to call St. Elmo’s Fire.  It was plasma — gas whose molecules were ripped apart by high voltage to create a glowing soup of protons and electrons.  It’s basically the same thing that happens inside the tube of a neon sign to make it light up.  But tonight, it happened at the tip of my neighbor’s sailboat mast.  While I was sitting on the porch watching. 

I’ve seen this phenomenon before at the Boston Museum of Science Lightning Show.  They have a Van de Graaff generator there that produces an indoor lightning storm, and sure enough, we saw that static-like, sparky glow before the lightning zapped in the Hall of Electricity. 

To see it in the museum was fascinating and thought-provoking. 

To see it in nature was awesome and humbling. 

And just so darn cool.

Ah…summer…

Today, J and his friend raided the recycling bin and made boats out of milk jugs, water bottles, aluminum cans, fan parts, batteries, paper sails, wooden dowels, small motors removed from broken remote control vehicles, and duct tape.  Lots of duct tape.  They took them down to the lake to race.

E and I perched on the big rock on our beach and pretended to be mermaids and sirens.  We sang songs to lure the boats onto the rocks to be dashed to pieces.  One of them did, in fact, end up dashed to pieces, but I’m not sure it had anything to do with us.  Do you think Homer’s sirens sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow?”

Then we had s’mores. 

I love s’mores.  I love recycled, duct tape boats. I love being a mermaid (though it was tough holding my legs still and together for so long) and being a mom. 

Signing off now, to go wash the marshmallow out of my hair….

Things that don’t last~

It was one of those rainy, sunny, rainy, cloudy, sunny, rainy-again days on Lake Champlain.  Which means perfect weather for this:

I love rainbow pictures.  I’ve rushed into the house for my camera so many times that I have a permanent bruise where my shin always slams into the last step on the deck.  We have a little gallery of lake-rainbow pictures in the front hallway. 

And I have a thing for lightning, too.  If you’ve never tried to photograph lightning with a regular, pretty cheap digital camera, you should know that it’s not easy.  I’ll sit through an entire storm on the sun porch with my trigger finger on the camera, just waiting for that bolt that lasts a split second longer than the rest. 

Here’s a shot from a couple weeks ago…

I mentioned my penchant for photographing lovely, intangible things to my very funny and very wicked friend Nancy at an English teachers’ lunch, and she smirked at me.

 “What will you be photographing next week?  Hope?  Serendipity?  Nuance, perhaps?’ 

And that’s when I figured it out.  Capturing things that don’t last,  things that hang in the air but can’t be touched, is the reason so many of us write.  It’s a way to make hope and prisms and jagged flashes of light last forever,  a way to share them and take them home.

New York City

I love New York City in small doses. 48 hours this weekend was just enough time for a taste of city before we headed home to Lake Champlain. I checked out the Museum of the American Indian to do some research for my new MG historical. It’s a lovely museum, but I was disappointed that only a few galleries were open because of renovations.

We saw JERSEY BOYS (loved it) and XANADU (loved it in a different, fun, silly kind of way). The kids made pilgrimages to the American Girl and Toys R Us stores, and I made a small pilgrimage of my own:

This is the NY Public Library’s Donnell Central Branch, home of Children’s Literature Blogger-Goddess Elizabeth Bird, better known as Fuse #8. I read her blog religiously and wanted to stop by on the off-chance she might be working a Saturday. (Forgot about ALA, though!) That’s okay, because we got a chance to visit some other important friends who live at the Donnell Central Children’s Room…

These are the original stuffed animals that A.A. Milne gave Christopher Robin Milne — the REAL Pooh, Eeyore, Kanga, Piglet, and Tigger. They look so loved, don’t they?

It was a great city weekend, but with a high of 95 degrees today, I’m so happy to be back on the lake today. Heading off to the deck now with my raspberry-chocolate coffee and Catherine Murdock’s DAIRY QUEEN. Life is good.

Happy Friday Things

Guess what?

Today was the LAST day of school, and tomorrow, we’re going to New York City to meet my Mom and Dad for the weekend, and we’re going to see JERSEY BOYS, and I just finished another round of revisions on my MG WIP, and now that school’s out I’ll have more time to research my new MG historical, and I just found this new, really great flavor of ice cream called espresso-something with chocolate covered almonds, and I ate it while I was reading the end of Carrie Jones’ YA novel TIPS ON HAVING A GAY (EX) BOYFRIEND which is an amazing, funny, touching book  (I got a little ice cream on it…sorry, Carrie…but at least it’s really good ice cream. I think you’d like it.), and…and…and….

I’m so excited for summer!

Journal in the Woods – Part 3

Two more miles through the woods…seven more mosquito bites…and Mystery Writer remains a mystery. 

The boys were off getting haircuts this weekend, so E and I decided to take the little black nature journal on another hike.  This time, we checked out Silver Lake Bog, a beautiful trail that starts with a half-mile boardwalk stroll before climbing through the woods to a bluff overlooking Silver Lake.

For a couple weeks now, we’ve been trying to track down the owner of a beautifully sketched and written nature journal that a student’s father found by the side of  a hiking trail.  It chronicles seven years of Adirondack hikes and includes the names of every bird and wildflower spotted along the trails, but no name of an owner.  Last week, we checked the log book at Poke-o-Moonshine mountain to see if we could figure out who hiked there on the date noted in the journal, but the log book didn’t go back that far.  We ran into the same problem at Silver Lake Bog this weekend.  The first entry in the book is from just over a month ago.

We didn’t find our Mystery Writer, but here’s what we did find:

Many, many lovely bunchberry plants,

A pitcher plant (Did you know that this is a meat-eating plant?  Doesn’t it look alien?)

A White Admiral butterfly,

A friendly toad, and a tiny garter snake, no bigger than a Number 2 pencil, who slithered under a log before we could snap his picture.

We enjoyed some writing time up on the bluff, so close to all the things Mystery Writer loved, but no closer to knowing her name.

We’ll hike again next week, but I’m afraid we’ll run into the same problem — log books that have been replaced since Mystery Writer’s last visit.  Where are the old ones?? 

This afternoon, I called DEC headquarters, where a woman told me that I should check with Chris.  Chris might have them, over in Lands and Forests.  She transferred me to his voice mail.  He’s out of the office until June 25th. 

Part of me is glad.  I am loving the sunshine, the warm rocks, the leaves under my feet.  Besides, nothing ruins a good mystery like having it solved too soon.

“…all these books that were for me…”

If you write for young people, consider this LJ post a big, fat thank you note (virtual chocolates and ice cream, too). I just finished reading my 7th graders’ final exams. I ask them to write an essay reflecting on how they’ve grown as readers, writers, and human beings this year. Here’s a quote from K…

“In the beginning of the year, I didn’t like to read at all. But then my teacher showed me all these books that were for me, and I couldn’t stop reading.”

Books that were for her.  Written just for her.  Or at least it felt that way.  She went on to talk about Sonya Sones, Sarah Dessen, Deb Caletti, and Nancy Werlin — voices that spoke to her over the past ten months. 

And K wasn’t the only one who named names as she reflected on books that made a difference this year.  My kids talked about finding themselves in the characters of Pete Hautman, Janet Tashjian, Jack Gantos, Laurie Halse Anderson, Lisa Yee, Sharon Creech, Jerry Spinelli, Wendelin Van Draanen, David Lubar, Cynthia Kadohata, Mal Peet, and Walter Dean Myers.  They wrote about being challenged by M.T. Anderson, Richard Preston, and Markus Zusak.  They wrote fondly about escaping into the worlds of Margaret Peterson Haddix, Christopher Paolini, and JK Rowling.  And they reflected on walking a mile in someone else’s shoes as they read Gene Luen Yang, Cynthia Lord, Will Hobbs, Jennifer Roy, and Joseph Bruchac.

I write for kids.  I know that some days, it feels like you’re alone with your computer, and even your computer doesn’t  like you very much. So I thought I’d share K’s reflection on her year of reading.  We all need to realize when we write, we’re writing for someone important.  Someone like K, who’s waiting for a book that’s just for her, just for him.  

If you write for kids, that’s the work you’re doing every day.  You may never get to read the end-of-the-year essays, but you should know that you make a difference, and you’re appreciated.

Shrunken manuscript

This was fun!  I’ve read several times about the “Shrunken Manuscript” technique

[info]darcypattison

recommends at her novel revision workshops. 

[info]cynthialord

blogged about trying it on her latest manuscript at the NE SCBWI Conference, so I decided to give it a try with my contemporary MG to check some issues with minor characters and story arc.  I shrunk my 35,000-word, 120-page manuscript down to 29 pages of 8-point font so I could lay out the whole thing in my sun room.  Here’s what it looked like.

The pink post-it notes are major plot points.  The green are hints of my MC’s crush. The blue ones show where a minor friend character shows up.  The orange are funny bits with the little brother.  The yellow are opportunities for a new little thread I want to introduce.  I went through and marked all the things that already exist and learned a lot.  (I also found a gaping black hole with no pink post-its for almost four pages — yikes!).  Then I went through and added more color-coded post-its for things I want to add in my next revision pass. 

I loved this technique.  I’m a visual person, so seeing it all laid out like this helped me visualize the story arc in a much more tangible way and helped me see how I need to fix it.  (Plus, I have a fixation with Post-It notes anyway, and this was a good excuse to use large quantities of them. )

Horns on the roof…still…

It’s been a while, so I thought I’d post an update on the cow horns that are on my roof.  If you’re a new LJ friend and don’t understand why someone would do this, you can read all about it in my earlier post.  (Then you can quietly un-friend me if you decide I’m just too strange to hang out with, after all.)

I checked on the horns tonight, and the small critters eating away the gunky stuff between the horn and the bone in the middle of it have made some progress.  Not much, but a little.  In one horn, you can now see a tiny gap between horn and bone, where the fleshy stuff is gone.  At this rate, however, SPITFIRE will be published, read, and out of print before these things are ready to show anyone at a presentation. They also smell bad.

What I really need, I’ve decided, is something that works more quickly.  Blog karma brought me the answer when I checked out Unabridged — the Charlesbridge blog and heard about what some of their editors saw on a tour of the American Museum of Natural History during a break from BEA. 

Check out these guys…

Turns out you can order them online, too, but they’re expensive (and kind of scary, frankly).  Let’s hope the critters on my roof get to work soon.

Journal in the Woods – Part 2

Marjie and I loaded up the kids to hike Poke-o-Moonshine on Saturday, in the hopes of finding a clue in the mystery of the anonymous nature journal.  Mystery Writer was there on September 7, 2006 and wrote about seeing ravens, hawks, and birch trees along the trail.  

Unfortunately,  the DEC log book at the trailhead only went back as far as January 30, 2007.  What happened to the book for last September??  The worker at the ranger station told us to try calling the DEC in Ray Brook next week to see if they still have it. He’s not sure if they keep the old ones or throw them out.

The trip wasn’t wasted, though.  It was a beautiful hiking day. 

Visibility was fantastic, so the view of the Adirondacks was spectacular.

We found a patch of lady slippers tucked in the woods alongside the trail.

The fire tower wasn’t open, but we climbed part of the way up to enjoy the view.

We brought Mystery Writer’s journal to the summit for inspiration while we did a little writing and sketching of our own.

We stopped  to rescue an Eastern newt from the middle of the busy trail on our way down.

We got back to the car with tired legs but healthier souls, true to Mystery Writer’s promise, and I’m convinced her journal was happy to see an Adirondack summit again after those months under the snow. 

Next stop on the Nancy Drew Adirondack Mystery tour?   Probably Silver Lake Bog or Coon Mountain, both beautiful hikes with log books we can check out.  Stay tuned!