Watching Rhonda Honey

My agent asked me to write a summary of my new novel and here it is:

Watching Rhonda Honey is about a woman who, as a foster child, saw her hopes of becoming part of a family crushed by her would-be sister’s lies. Years later, an accidental encounter offers her a chance for revenge, but only if she’s willing to risk her own chance for love. It's a psychological novel and love story.

true for me, too

Yolanda forgot to return her library books, so she couldn't check out the one on polar bears. "I'm sorry," I called after her.  Her friend, turned to me. "Don't worry. In a minute she'll start thinking of something else and then she'll be happy again."

on the other hand

Cold and rainy, cold and rainy.
But in my front yard the plum tree blooms.

Pabla and the agate

Someone objected to my statement that I have been fired, when really I'm only being moved out of my school and into a different one. Okay, fine. I am overly dramatic. 

I am sad about leaving the school where I've worked for 13 years. Today ten year old Pabla gave me an agate and a note that said, Happy St. Patrick's Day, and then she skipped away with her long black braid flying out behind her. I remember when her big sister was a baby. I knew her family before she was born. Her big brother loved my dinosaur books.

schools

Chuck says I can't blog about sex or drugs, even if it's from thirty year old material, because I work at a school and they'll fire me. I'm not sure that's true. 

diary 1980 vegetarian in Antigua

In 1980 Chuck went to Antigua to help members of the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement set up a printing press, after the right wing government destroyed the one they were using. We were in Antigua for three months.

February  1980  

Antigua

Saturday is market day and the day we go to JP Market, crowded with people from the countryside. In some of the towns men will set up a table to sell a newly slaughtered cow or pig by the side of the road. On the tables are piles of red flesh. chop chop chop goes the cleaver. The intestines are hung in a string from a nearby tree. Last Saturday the pig's head sat on the table, its ears sticking out. 

1980 Seashell Beach

January 28, 1980

(from St. Barts)

The beach is an ideal setting for lsd: restful and rhythmic and safe. Blue water white sand.  We played in the water nearly all day turning red in the Caribbean sun. Our friend from Dominica, Mantoo, came by to visit. Annalise from Vermont and Leif from Sweden stopped to talk. The French children have gym class yards from our tent. We explore sea life and social life in the cosmopolitan setting that is our living room. 

diary 1980

Today I found a book I created for Chuck, using excerpts from diaries I've written over the years. 

August 10, 1980

Dear Diary, 

Why am I compelled to keep journals and write compulsively about myself?

what happens when you have a small house

I'm at a coffee house here in Corvallis, writing, because my house is 750 square feet and Chuck is home.  I am trying to write a chapter in which my character, Tree, foreshadows the arrival of Jimmy while she and Mavis drink coffee (hey, where did I get that idea?) beside the Salmon Street water fountain in Portland, but mostly I am spying on other customers. Not that they are that interesting, but I can't help it. 

suzy joins the sex club

The Sun magazine just published an anthology, The Mysterious Life of the Heart, and one of my stories is in it. My story is called Suzy Joins the Sex Club, written before I realized that sometimes people actually read what I write.

bourgeois rule about money

You're not supposed to say how much money you make, but why not? The bosses don't want us to know. The people with the big paychecks don't want us to know. It is some kind of bourgeois rule. My new insurance premiums kicked in and my last paycheck was $527. For one month, 30 hours a week. Less than $5 an hour. I work in a school library, as an "assistant," although, functionally, I'm the librarian. Yikes!

Aid Worker Diary

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7802295.stm

Gaza on a Sunday

I'm writing the end of a Young Adut novel, a ghost/mystery/Tarot story. A break from my regular writing. Fun! I'm sitting on my red couch in front of a big window. Every now and then, I google Gaza, to try to find out what's happening. 

Musee des Beaux Arts

~W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

from Gaza

http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com

the deadline

I decide that I want my protagonist's wrapping paper to be designed with some detail from the Fool card in the Tarot. I google Fool card and get an image of the card. I mess around with the image, trying to make the little circles on the fool's shirt bigger. They would make a good design for wrapping paper: circles, with something inside them. But what is inside them? Are those stars? I decide maybe Wikipedia will tell me if they are stars.
But when I google Wikipedia, I see an article saying that the Wikipedia guy's appeal for money has worked. Wikipedia has been raking in donations. I read the reader's comments about the donation article. I get pissed off because some asshole complains about Wikipedia's entry concerning global warming. I start to get my debit card out to make a donation. Wait! First I should write a comment, telling the guy to stop being a jerk. Oh, a lot of people have already done that for me. I read through their comments. Most them agree. Shut up. Wikipedia is cool. We love it. Our kids love it.

Stop! I'm on a deadline. The first draft of the novel needs to be finished by Monday. Four days. My protagonist is still standing in the doorway with her present. I think they are little stars, little stars set inside circles. Just make the wrapping paper yellow and get on with it.

But first I want to go blog about all the things that pull at us, when really we just want to write a little scene.

easy to be mean

I just finished reading Anne Lamott's book about grace. I've resisted reading her  books because everyone I know says they are great and I will love them, and I hate people telling me what I will love. I finished it last night and went to Good Reads to write a little review, now that I am such a big Anne Lamott fan and want to be her best friend, and I was stunned by the shitty reviews people gave her book. Shitty and mean spirited. Yes, it is much easier to be clever and funny when you are being mean. This is not fair, but it is true. It's something we need to understand and to resist.

I was tempted to begin a new blog which would consist only of the most ignorant online book reviews I can find— but I already have one website and THREE blogs (this blog, a library lesson plan blog, and a pit bull blog.) I'm like the character in The Golden Notebook who keeps many notebooks, one for each aspect of herself, until finally she combines all the notebooks into one, the golden notebook, and that means she's integrated. I'm not going to combine my library and dog blogs with this one, but I will include this Good Reads review (by Robin) of Catcher in the Rye. 

"Is there a theme to this book at all? Is there any point to the story?" 

For crying out loud! (My editorial comment.)

Jane Eyre

I just finished reading Jane Eyre. The version illustrated by Dame Darcy. Yes, I have lived all my life and somehow never read Jane Eyre before now. This is what I thought: What a modern character! What contemporary concerns! (except for the part about not being able to divorce the wife, which was hard to fathom) What complex and intelligent writing! My next thought: Are we becoming dumber?

Also, regarding Dame Darcy's occasional illustrations—just a few days ago, Chuck was telling me that books will be replaced by Kindles before we know it. I showed him this book to prove, if he needed proof, that, aside from their function, books are wonderful in their physicality. If that's a word. 

Blanca

Blanca has come to the library almost every morning this week asking for me to give her tag board from the supply room. She is in 3rd grade. Her teacher is new and she must not realize we aren't supposed to give a child tag board every day, but I don't care. Blanca is a girl who always knows what she is doing. One day she needed it for picture she wanted to draw. The second day it was Saul's birthday and she wanted to make a birthday card. On the third day, she asked me if I had heard about the woman at Winco who got arrested because she didn't have her papers. Blanca needed tag board to make a sign. I asked what she was going to write on her sign, and she said, Stop discrimination, or something like that.

close but not quite

Today in the library, a 3rd grade boy named Brock Green was having an argument with some of the other boys. He was saying that Barrack Obama's name is Brock Obama, but the other boys were saying, No.

drown them in a bathtub

We are happy, happy, happy about Obama. We can hardly believe it's true. We are not used to an election that allows our side to win. Are those neo-cons small enough yet to be drowned in a bathtub?