In my world it is forever the Long Winter and I am still twisting the proverbial haysticks needed to burn through to the end of this blasted book, this bloody blanged bucking book!  BUT. I am now an occasional contributor to the Beyond Little House blog, where I have written about Miss Virginia Kirkus and have recapped two of my favorite Long Winter chapters, so you can stop by my little shanty over on that virtual homestead and say hello if you wish.

AND. I will be introducing the enchanting Jami Attenberg, reading from her book The Melting Season (read about it!) at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square this Thursday night at 7:00. And I know this is just a hurried blog post but it all kind of fits together, doesn’t it? Winter and burning and melting and haysticks and book covers with wheat on them. THERE IS A THEME TO EVERYTHING. That is how my mind goes these days.

See you in the spring!

Like Frosty says, I’ll be back again someday.

Not blogging has its advantages.  I don’t have to wonder whether the people who send me their blog-related press releases and promotion requests actually read my site. When someone emails me suggesting that I plug their $20 PDF book (!) in my next post, I know right away that they’ve never laid eyes on this page because surely they would have noticed the tumbleweeds and packs of feral dogs roaming around, yes?  If my blog was a mall, nothing would be open except a Hallmark store and a Chinese buffet.  It won’t always be like that, but until this draft of the new book is done I can only offer you egg rolls and Precious Moments.

The disadvantage to not blogging, of course, is that I miss it. I miss putting words out here in the internet world (which is all bright and colorful and blinky) instead of being stuck inside a long messy MS Word document (which is lots of monochrome sadness). Don’t get me wrong, I also love the book work, making paragraphs stick together, or whatever it is I have been doing nearly every day for nearly a year.  After a while it doesn’t feel like writing.  My chapters tend to start with all these scattered bits—notes, and quotes transcribed from books, and scraps left over from other chapters, and putting them all together and tidying up the page feels more like playing some kind of really texty Tetris. Except slower. A lot slower.

Somehow amidst all this, the apartment got clean (OK, I paid someone to clean it) and we put up our little tree and hauled out the Christmas records (our new favorite this year is this one, because I mean, LOOK AT IT, but also it’s really a jam), and got ready for the end of the year (almost, we’re almost there), and the writing will continue to happen somewhere in between (I swear), until sometime around the end of the week when I’ll get to relax, and everything will stand still. And that will be good.

I wish my methodical Tetris-brain was quick enough tonight to tell you more about the past year, which was amazing and strange and both incredibly trying and deeply satisfying.  All I’ll say is that it’s a good thing I took notes. Anyway, Merry Christmas!

To celebrate the release of Love is a Four-Letter Word, Michael Taeckens, our esteemed anthology editor, is the Guest Blogger over at the Penguin Blog this week, and today I was the Guest Blogger Guest with my post about the bizarre side effects of writing about past boyfriends. Go ye forth and read as I do Michael’s bloggy bidding.*

And then read D.E. Rasso’s post from yesterday (yes HER, from here! and now she’s back!) and then for the rest of the week read the posts that Said Sayrafiezadeh and Dave White and Maud Newton are going to write! And then buy the book and read the book but I already told you that, right? Or come to one of the reading, like the one I already told you about on Wednesday night, or this one on Thursday or one of the other eight or nine readings. See how we are trying to make it as easy as possible for you to comply, just like with the digital TV conversion?

*Doing stuff for Michael Taeckens is just like when he and I were in college in Iowa City and he worked at the Haunted Bookshop and he was CONSTANTLY asking me to go get him food from the  New Pioneer Co-Op deli next door because he was too lazy to ever make his own lunch. The guy can get Kate Christensen and Junot Diaz and Gary Shteyngart and Linda Barry and my girl Jami to be in his book,  but he could not get his shit together to bring a sandwich EVER and in fact I’m pretty sure the only reason why I got to be in this book is because I never said bitch, get your own turkey avocado with extra sprouts. Not to his face at least. But of course the moral of the story is to just do what he says.

Okay, heading out to NYC in the morning, and then on Friday making a trip upstate to see La Casa de Farmer Boy.  I’ll try to save you some pancakes!!!!

Hey, remember when I used to write about other things besides sunbonnets?  This week Nerve is running an excerpt from my Love Is A Four-Letter Word essay and you can read it here. 100% Laura-free content hot and fresh.

Also, if you must know, the other day I went to the lady-doctor (yes, I’m being euphemistic; I strongly support euphemasia under certain circumstances, particularly anything involving the old whatchamahoo), and I was sitting and waiting in a little room right across from the Pill Closet. You know, the place where they keep all the free samples of birth control, so your doctor can give you three or four packs to help offset the stupidly extravagant cost of your prescription. (Sometimes it almost makes me want to birth something huge and expensive just to spite my health insurance. Hey, Blue Cross, I’m all pregnant with conjoined octuplet baby pandas! Cover this, jackasses! )

Anyway, I was eyeing the Pill Closet and staring sort of longingly at the boxes of my pills, my brand, and wondering if there was a security camera anywhere. And then, as if on cue, this woman comes down the hall carrying a giant tote bag. A bag printed with the logo of my pills, and it was filled with even more boxes of pills. She was one of those perky cute twenty-something pharmaceutical reps, and as I watched, she went up to the Pill Closet and started stocking the shelf. With my pills! She was Birth Control Santa! I started talking to her.

“Do your friends always try to hit you up for pills?” I asked her. I was trying to sound sympathetic but was also secretly hoping that she was perhaps a spontanenous, free-spirited kind of pharmaceutical rep, the kind who tosses boxes of Loestrin to strangers like candy in a parade.

“Oh my God, it’s like my friends think I’m an OB-GYN,” she said. “They’re always telling me this stuff that’s wrong with them. And I’m like, ‘uh, I do not know what to do, okay?’”

“But then you just give them the pills, right?” I asked.

Actually I didn’t ask her that. I just nodded and tried to be an understanding listener, for all the good it did me.

The reason I was at the doctor in the first place was to get my annual ultrasound, which is one of the things I have to do now that my family history includes ovarian cancer.  Plus it seems my insides are an exciting treasure trove of small fibroids and benign cysts and pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, all of which are harmless as long as you keep an eye on them. Usually the doctors just look at the ovaries, but this time they wanted to see some of my other stuff on ultrasound, which apparently is a more complicated affair.

So as they were trying to explain what they had to do, the ultrasound tech said, “Basically, the uterus is like a cheese sandwich.”  Did you know that?!  Most of the time it just lies there in flat layers! It’s only round when there’s a baby inside it, like ham in a calzone, or else when your doctor does something goofy that allows it to be seen on ultrasound. It turns out I had to have the goofy thing done, and it wasn’t fun at all, but it didn’t take long and I didn’t even really mind all that much because I was still amazed and stuck on the uterus is like a cheese sandwich. Anyway, the whole upshot is that now I have a clean bill of lady-health, and we all know what kind of sandwich the uterus is like.

In other news, Chris and I are going a date to see this movie tomorrow at the Siskel. Because he and I have a deal in which he’ll go with me to see Laura Ingalls Wilder pageants, and I’ll go with him to see terrifying documentaries about Norwegian black metal. And if that’s not a Love Is… cartoon right there, I don’t know what is.

We made it home from the Great American Prairie Odyssey Extravaganza on Tuesday night. I think I’m still recovering from all the car time, road food, and prolonged exposure to the random whims of Midwestern “oldies” stations (like playing Russian Roulette, where the bullet is something like “St. Elmos’s Fire”), but here is a brief compendium of our travels:

• Miles driven: about 1400
• Covered wagons viewed, replica or otherwise: 7
• One-room schoolhouses: 6
• Replica sod dugouts: 4
• Haysticks used for purely decorative purposes: 3
• Number of times an exhibit guide or sign purported to explain the origins of the phrase “sleep tight”: 3
• Number of times an exhibit sign refuted commonly explained origins of the phrase “sleep tight”: 1
• Sunbonnets purchased: 4 (YES I KNOW)
• Old iron stoves: at least 12
• Outhouses: 4
• Nineteenth-century parlor organs: 6
• Live pageants: 2
• Live cows: 3
• Girls in sunbonnets: 600 (estimate)
• Miniature horses: 2
• Leeches encountered in Plum Creek: 0
• Times we heard “Afternoon Delight” on the radio: 2

I’ve been putting up pictures and more are forthcoming. Remind me also to tell you about the night we thought lightning would zap us and our covered wagon/camper thing into oblivion.  Oh right, I guess I’ll just put that in the book. Anyway, it was an amazing trip.  Sometimes it was grueling, but sometimes the stars were singing.

I’ll be making one more trip this month, to NYC, where I’ll be reading at the launch party for Love is a Four-Letter Word on July 29th at 7pm, along with Maud Newton, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Amanda Stern, and Dan Kennedy. If you’re in town, come by and say hello, and if you’re elsewhere, check out the book. Even though I have forsaken the glamorous big-city publishing world to roam the prairie and collect commemorative plates, it is still totally exciting to read Susan Toepfer’s piece about it in True/Slant and the reviews in WSJ and the Paper Cuts blog at The New York Times. It has been a weird, occasionally isolating summer, with all this writing and long drives through cornfields, and so it’s nice to experience a little taste of that jumpy happy post-publication stuff.

If you are reading this on Poundy.com and not through one of those fancy newfangled feed-reader thingies, you will notice that things look different today.  That is because I finally updated my Wordpress software and the new version rejected my old customized theme like a bad kidney.  I just installed the same theme that I have on my other site and slapped up a new banner today. It’s a quickie resdesign and I’m still tweaking things, but I actually sort of like it. My plan is to eventually incorporate poundy.com into wendymcclure.net—just move the rss feed and all the archives over and have the URL refer to the newer site (which can be done, right? I don’t always know how these things work!)—but for now this is just a step in that direction.

In some ways, that’s been the most exasperating thing about working on this book: having to take so many small steps, whether it’s writing a couple hundred words in a night, or doing just enough laundry, and keeping it all going, wherein “all” is several dozen tiny wheels that squeak along and take forever.  But I’m getting somewhere, yes?  When will it feel that way? 200 pages?  You’d think that since we drove over a thousand miles last week that I’d have a sense of how it all adds up in time, but no, I don’t.  Well, never mind, I’ll get there somehow.

Tomorrow Almanzo Chris and I are heading out to hang out on the banks of Plum Creek and by the shores of Silver Lake (which, sadly, is no longer a lake) and in the little town on the prairie! We will bring back some horehound candy for you if you’re good. Oh, oh, I am so very excited to be going.

In other news, that book I’m in has a website now. And I updated my other website, too.

No, I’m not going to BlogHer this year, even though it’s in Chicago. I would probably consider going to something called BlogHa! though, given my paltry online output these days. Someone else just needs to organize it and I will be there!  Panel topics could include What To Write When We’re Trying Not to Talk About Working On Our Books and so on. And instead of exchanging business cards and weeping about stretch marks, we’ll just drink wine. Does that sound like a plan? Okay then!

See you on the other side of the Big Slough!

I was away for half the weekend, but I got back in time to catch a little of this weird and totally-awkward-to-watch author meltdown on Twitter yesterday.  I can’t say I know what Alice Hoffman was thinking (did she just not get that people read Twitter?), but I feel bad for her, that whatever kind of writerly wretchedness she was experiencing happened to be broadcast all over the internet. Oh well, when all the newspaper book reviews go away, maybe she’ll want advice for dealing with crappy online reviews, and then perhaps she can read this Buzz, Balls, & Hype blog post that Jami and I contributed to back in January (and somehow I never managed to link to it before now) about how not to let Amazon reviews get to you.  I don’t know, I guess writers had somewhat different coping skills before the internet, back when you didn’t get to see reviews in other city newspapers until your publisher found them and clipped them and sent them to you via stagecoach* mail delivery. Now it’s all so much more immediate, and the immediacy goes both ways.

(*Can you tell I’m watching a lot of Little House on the Prairie lately? Remember when Laura won some big writing contest and went to Minneapolis and her publisher wanted her to completely rewrite her books, so they stuck her in a hotel and made her work there because FedEx hadn’t been invented yet?  That’s totally how publishing worked in those days! And then authors were sent off to live in sod shanties for three months while the reviews came out so that they couldn’t recklessly telegraph their vitriolic responses! Really.)

As long as we’re talking about books, you should check out my friend Dave Reidy’s story collection, Captive Audience, which is his first book, and he is just now embarking on a grueling schedule of readings and Quimby’s karaoke parties and no doubt would love any support you can give (i.e., buying the book, coming to the reading, signing up to sing “9 to 5,” etc.).

I can’t believe it’s the middle of summer already. Because of all the work I have to do in my home office this summer, I broke down and got an air conditioner for that room. I tend to hate window air conditioners for the way they make noise, ruin a perfectly good view outside, and just sit there on the windowsill threatening to tip out and kill pedestrians on the sidewalk below. But somehow this year I really love this damn thing; I love that slightly musty air-conditioner scent that it has, because it comes with all kinds of sense memories of grade-school summer vacation. Basically my home office smells like NO SCHOOL FOR THREE MONTHS. I don’t know how that’s going to affect my work ethic, but I am digging it.

Finally, I’m totally late to the elegy party, but here’s how I’ve been breaking my own heart for the past four days…

…by watching all of Michael Jackson’s early low-tech videos. Like the one above and this one.  There’s no John Landis, no gazillion-dollar budget, no fourteen-minute prologue, but holy Jacko, look how exuberant he looks. And look at how funky his moves were! I know everyone loved his moonwalk, but I’m pretty wistful for this era when he was decidedly more earthbound.

Write sixty gazillion pages for book project.

Email about five hundred people to interview for the book.

Find a maxi dress that doesn’t make me look like an nightgown-wearing loony lady.

Write BUST column.

Plan road trip to Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota to see Laura Ingalls Wilder homesites in July.

Order Walnut Grove Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant tickets.

Plan trip to New York City to read in July .

Plan trip to upstate New York to see the Farmer Boy house in July.

Outline sixty gazillion thirty gazillion more pages for book project in July.

Build fancy and slightly twatty author site at wendymcclure.net.

Install air conditioners.

Upgrade Wordpress software on Poundy.com.

Find new blog template for Poundy.com because upgrade will probably make modified layout go wonky.

Tell people that I have a children’s book out.

Put hilarious Emily Flake flash animation on wendymcclure.net to promote new anthology.

Go to Kiddieland before it shuts down for good.

Write a real entry sometime.

Alert! I’m doing an author talk at StoryStudio Chicago on Saturday, May 30th, along with Stephanie Kuehnert and Simone Elkeles, and we’ll be talking about living the literary life, Chicago-style (because that’s what the program says), which lately for me involves whole days spent indoors eating nothing but pitas from the Al-Khayyam bakery on Kedzie and watching all kinds of unspeakable stuff that I’ve Tivoed from the Hallmark Channel. (For research!) Anyway, both Stephanie and Simone write young adult novels, and seeing as how I write for an adult market and edit for a children’s one, it sort of balances out to YA, right?  I think between the three of us we’ll be able to help you. And I promise that if you come to this it will way be better than if you’d just written me an email asking whatever it is you want to know about writing and publishing, because when you email me it puts off the completion and subsequent publication of my next book by at least forty-five minutes. I’m almost serious here. Really, just come to this thing on the 30th.

It’s great to be writing a book and working on it every day, and yet there are so many things I would rather be doing than writing a book. For instance I wish to high heaven that I could take part in this VC Andrews Reading Challenge (see also here!) because for the past two years or so Chris and I have been going through the books in the original Dollanganger series, wherein I read them aloud to Chris while we’re on long car trips (he drives, I read) and then we thoughtfully discuss the various motifs that appear throughout the series, such as The Lifestyles of the Rich and Dismal (Do the Foxworths always have to go with the heavy draperies and crystal goblets and extremely long dining tables? With all that money, couldn’t they could figure out how to be less creepy?) and Extreme Ballet (Cathy’s pirouette-and-slap fighting technique is unstoppable!).  We are on Garden of Shadows now, which is way much better than the horribly-paced soapy fizzle of Seeds of Yesterday; so much better, in fact, that I’m pretty sure the ghostwriter studied the proto-feminist themes of Daphne du Maurier in grad school, because it is kind of loaded!  I wish I had time to write a paper on it or something!  But read this excellent recap of Flowers in the Attic instead. You will not be sorry.

Oh, and GUESS WHERE I WAS LAST WEEK.  And I was here, too. That’s practically all I can tell you right now, but I will say that when I was in Missouri I met the awesome Catherine Pond, who saw some of the same stuff I did and became my friend. It made me very pleased to know that another writer could tell I was a writer, because, like I said, when you spend half the week at home eating pitas and rearranging sentences and being stuck for hours at a time in the chewy pita pocket of your own mind, you can kind of forget what you are, and sometimes you just need to get out and see little houses.

(Incidentally, I’m interested in hearing from people who have intriguing or hilarious anecdotes about visiting any of the Laura Ingalls Wilder sites, so drop me a line if you have something to share.)

Chris and I are off to New York this weekend, but more when I get back. See you on the 3oth, too.

People keep asking me if I’m jetlagged, but I’m pretty sure I’m not, at least not in the sense that my body thinks it’s 3 pm in the middle of the night. However it does seem like it’s reverted to some kind of Central Standard Tired As All Hell time zone, so who knows what it’s thinking right now. Spring forward, fall back, stumble around after being in flight for twelve hours. That’s how it goes, I guess.

I had a great time in Italy, even though the language barrier turned me into a bashful nitwit who responded to retail transactions by silently handing over the largest denomination of Euros currently available in my wallet. Kind of like a wealthy, awkward, gigantic Hello Kitty. It was a very good thing that my cousin Meg, who speaks Italian and lived there for years, was around to help me out, because even with a phrasebook I am really useless. I was stricken with this hideous shyness that made me want to just inconspicuously mutter all the grazies and buongiornos, only to discover that it’s actually exceedingly hard to mumble in Italian.  So I went around with my purse full of change and only very occasionally sputtering something out loud, and I survived, and clearly I am not going to be writing the next Eat, Pray, Love anytime soon now, am I? Right!

I spent the first part of the week in Bologna attending the Children’s Book Fair for work and seeing how the rest of the world publishes kids’ books. The fair attracts hundreds of international illustrators who exhibit their work and show off their portfolios, and it was deeply mind-blowing to see it all, because European children’s books often look wildly different from American and British ones. In a nutshell: British and U.S. children’s picture books tend to show cuddly bunnies having birthday parties, whereas in European picture books you get to see dwarf clowns in bird masks playing mumblety-peg. (This is of course a broad generalization! I do not mean to favor one style over another! Though I can’t help but wonder if my childhood would have been maybe a little more awesome if I’d gotten to read a few more picture books about dream symphonies conducted by marionette puppets with insect heads. I’m just saying. And again, totally generalizing.) One of my favorite parts of the fair was seeing the walls on the illustrators’ posting room starting to fill up with tearsheets and samples and business cards on the first day of the fair; then coming back the second day to see that every inch of wall and some of the floor had been covered.  Eveyone loves to talk about these fairs and expos just in terms of how the book business is doing and about how many companies showed up this year, and all that, but one look at that illustrators posting room makes you remember that no matter what happens, the art keeps coming; it can fill up all the space if you let it.

The photo at the top of this entry is from the wonderfully dystopian BolognaFiere complex where the fair was held.  I loved this place. I sort of wish it had been in Florence because then I could have just gone there and looked at to cure my Stendhal Syndrome after spending all of Thursday morning staring at Renaissance cathedrals. The latter part of the week was in Florence, where I stayed at this Hotel Orchidea place where my cousin used to work (and you have to read this page about the history of the place, about how it’s in a tower where Dante’s wife lived, and how in the courtyard there’s a statue of a girl crying at the feet of a Sphinx while it gazes off and ignores her suffering! I’ve seen it and it really does just that!), and ate a lot of gelato, and little sandwiches, and fried olives. (Really, a surprising number of fried things, including some rice-and-meat balls that were delicious clods of cheesy, starchy joy, and if anyone knows what they’re called, please tell me.)

I’m glad I took so many photos. After the train from Florence back to Bologna and the two flights home, and a whole snowy weekend of napping and unpacking, I had to look everything up on Wikipedia—all the basilicas and piazzas and palazzos and piazzales, all the saints and the sculptors—just so I could label my pictures on Flickr. But it was worth it to go back and carefully assemble it all again. After I’d hurtled there and back, it was good to catch up with it all—with everything, and with myself, too.