This Is Jim Hageman

I don't know Jim Hageman.

I know his lovely wife, Tia, teaches kindergarten at my kids' elementary school.

I know they have a happy baby together.

Jim is 30-ish. He teaches PE at Dominic's middle school.

But I want to know him more.

Because yesterday when I picked up Dominic from track, there was Mr. Hageman, dressed in black sweats and a black cap, at 4:40 on the valley floor between the Cascade Mountains and Grizzly Peak, showing one kid how to throw a discus.

It was late. It was cold. Jim had been throwing and dunking and running and batting since 8 AM.

And yet, he was still working. He was still teaching.

Jim Hageman. I don't know much about him, but what I do know is really impressive.

After the Intro

Well, I'm 9,000 words into revising, now! I'm on page 25, which doesn't seem very far, but I'm happy about where the book is going.

I overhauled the whole beginning.

"Did the agent ask you to do that?" my husband asked.

"No," I told him. But I can't redo the end without changing the intro.

And it's better: stronger, with more layers and conflict, and character development. More wanting. More mystery.

I even changed how the character dresses. And how she talks. She is softer, more fragile, mistrusting.

There's so much to do. I remember Editor Nancy Lamb saying at a conference: "If it doesn't move the plot forward, it goes."

And as I use description, setting, I'm wondering how much of that moves the plot forward.

My book, DRAIN, is a literary paranormal. A WHAT? I know, right? A literary paranormal? The seeing element is minimal, though, to my character's conflict. It interferes with what she wants, and how to get (or keep) it.

I'm a skinny writer. Not at all skinny in the physiological sense, but skinny in that my manuscripts flush out around 52,000 words.

For this voice, I'm sticking with something hollow. It's often sad and empty, like wind through a tunnel.

But today, I go back to school. For two Critical Thinking classes. And there's a stack of manuscripts I need to give feedback on in the next couple of weeks. And there's kids and laundry. But I'll get it done, DRAIN. I totally see the end, and I'm super excited to get there.

Stand Off! Tightroper Walker VS The Woman in the Yellow Dress

My friend Leslie turned 44 a couple of weeks ago. She shared her celebration with John Javna, author of Uncle John's Bathroom Readers.

The party was at ScienceWorks; Leslie's husband, Alan, and a few other hands had put together an amazing circus spread, with dart throwing, aerial silk spinners, and Cracker Jacks.

I had called Alan an hour before the party and asked if we were to dress nicely, or dress up, or what. Alan told me that everyone would be dressed as circus folk. So I wore a black suit with a red boa, some gloves, fake eyelashes, and a nice big feather. Like...a tightrope walker. Or something.

It turned out, Alan (the ringmaster) and I were the only ones in costume. After a half-hour of people thinking I was a party performer (embarrassingly, I was more dressed up than even the silk spinners), I shed some of my bling in the car, and looked, for the most part, normal.

A couple hundred of Ashland's upper tier, the now 60 year-olds who came to Ashland from Berkeley, etc., tossed rings at milk bottles, gawked at jugglers on unicycles, and filled and re-filled their wine glasses.

I visited the fortune teller, who foresaw right away what I was there for (without giving it all away, I can say it has to do with an agent and a certain MS I've scribbled). While I heartily accepted my cards that told of my lovely marriage, true friends, a happy home, I tried to defy the card I picked from the stack second-to-last, the one with the woman in the yellow dress: "He Commeth Not."

After some lemon cake and sultry singing by Javna's high school daughter, I went to my happy home to my lovely marriage, and my solid, loyal husband said that the paper woman in the yellow-dress could kiss my red-feathered ass.

Delivery or Short-Change?

The other day, Dave and I were finishing up "The Boys Are Back," a film about Clive Owen's character trying to survive the death of his wife. This was based on the life and novel The Boys Are Back In Town, by former sportswriter Simon Carr.

It took us a couple days to finish the movie because 1) I had that flu, and 2) the movie was really slow.

I thought about how YA books don't have the luxury of being slow. How they have to please with plot, and right away.

On the other hand, for a film, being visually stimulating is often enough. There might be no dialogue, no narration, for minutes on end, but music and movement and scene still happen.

All that takes pages and pages of scriptwriting (words) to create.This reminds me of an NPR story I heard years ago on the ginormous (6- or 700-page) screenplay of "Brokeback Mountain," in which, besides the famous "I wish I knew how to quit you," had minimal dialogue. But every time a cowboy brushed his hand across a horse, that was probably 10 pages of script right there. So oodles more words were added to the original short story by E. Annie Proulx.

Okay, where is all this going? Well, with the slow films, it's not going anywhere, at least anytime soon.

But with YA literature, this just isn't the case. There's no more allowance for sinking into a story through scene, through description. It's all action, right from The Hook.

Which makes me wonder: what is the fate of The YA Introduction's evolution? Is it reflective of today's young readers? Have authors pinned themselves into a corner by delivering what's demanded? What is lost by having a hook? What is gained? And where, in terms of beginnings, will we be 20 years from now?

Tourettes Meets Jacques Cousteau

Our "baby," almost nine, is a reincarnation of sorts of my brother, Steven, who's 26. They are so the same brain we call them both "Rees-ven." (This is them in Cabo last fall.)

One summer in Tahoe, the two came to dinner dressed head-to-toe in the same digs. They wore camouflaged bandannas, yellow polo shirts, khakis, huarache sandals, with some crazy rag tied around their wrists.

When I'm going under from Rees' getting into stuff, and breaking things, and being hungry, and asking questions (the height of which is August, I've realized), I call Steven, crying, to ask him how our mom made it.

Both of them are brilliantly inquisitive. Steven asked me recently if memory is proof of intelligence, and when I thought about that for a few months and gave him an answer, he asked me another question about art and religion. And the other day when I begged Rees to let me just drive and listen to the "Glee" soundtrack, he said, "Okay. Just one more thing. Where does wind come from?"

Both these boys have good intentions. They are sensitive, creative, funny, and they like skeletons, Legoes, and singing Sublime songs. They make a wicked pirate team.

At Rees' school conference last week, Steven was Number One on his "All About Me" family page. His teacher relayed that Rees has lots and lots of friends, and that he's a good friend who'll keep those people his whole life. Like Steven has.

But nothing proves Rees' likeness to Steven more than last night. I was griping about my flu into Dave's side at the kitchen table, and Rees walked by. "The female cries into the arm of the male," he narrated, without stopping.

R.I.P., W-I-P

I'm dying to revise my MS for an awesome agent. But I'm also dying of the flu.

Somehow I caught this wicked sickness.

I can't think about introduction; it hurts my frontal lobe.

The agent gave me great feedback for revising. I agree with it all. It shouldn't take super long, she told me. But this whole week is slipping away!

Okay, enough whining.

I'll get to it, I know I will. Just not today, and probably not tomorrow.

Minus One Whole Day

Today I had the flu. Not The Flu (I had that one in the fall). But just enough tummy trauma to keep me in bed all day.

It was a bummer.

Because today was also my kids' first day of spring break.

From my bed, I could hear them giggling over puppet shows, trading Legoes, reading to each other.

I wanted in!

But it was a no-go. My legs and hips wouldn't cooperate. So the fun went on without me.

Hopefully, in a few years, I won't remember this day as lost. But the memory of Reesie jumping on me at 8 AM and shoving a Starbucks Frappachino to "make sure I was alive" is probably unforgettable.

That, and Dominic and Daney offering me a huge helping of hot-off-the stove ground Italian sausage. After I just, well, you know...