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Through the snows of March, the crows
seem sharper, their black gloss limned
against the wet newspaper
of the sky. Three times I saw one sweep by
Carrying brightness, with flight feathers spread
like an infant's fingers - gold in the beak
like a bit of fairy tale, like a fox's smile.
Bread? Cheese? On the fourth glide I realized it was only grass.
Last year's grass, dried to flaxen. They were nesting, merely,
routine as some old sorrow.
Sometimes you think the world loves you.
But no.

softer
than cherry blossom
April snow

I am going to try to put up new work regularly — ideally daily — for poetry month. I spend a lot of time these days with fiction, mostly because it’s so gosh darn long, but poetry is my first love and I still like to both read and write it.

Here’s a poem-in-draft from a new sequence of short poems called (collectively) “definitions.” They owe something to Anne Carson’s first book of poetry, Short Talks, which I recommend every chance I get. Go watch Anne read from Short Talks, people.

Religion

When a strange frost killed his beloved orchids
English eccentric Edward James
built his garden again
in concrete, upright and immune
to ice. Eventually, though,
the vines grew over it.

Look what came, everyone! It’s Kate Somente, Plain Kate in Portuguese, fresh out from Editora Rocco in Rio de Janeiro. Rejoice, Brazil!

The one thing I always check is the name of the three kittens, who in English are Raggle, Taggle, and Bone. In this edition, they are Brique, Braque, and Craque. (According to the ever-helpful Google translate, this means Brique, Braque, and Crack. Thanks, Google translate.) But thanks truly to the real translator, Waldéa Bracellos, who seems also to have translated the Silmarillion, and therefore should have no trouble with the odd objarka.

I’ve been sitting on this for way too long. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the official Sorrow’s Knot cover! Isn’t it gorgeous?

I also have an official release date: November 2013 — this November! — from Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic. Let’s start a countdown. And look! Flap copy!

At the very edge of the world live the Shadowed People. And with them live the dead.

Suspenseful, eerie, and beautifully imagined.

Glory, in the dictionary: the open mouth
of the glass furnace. A radiant shadow
cast onto mist. Think of Icarus:
his shadow huge and haloed
on the backs of the clouds.
The higher he went, the larger
it loomed. To go into glory, then,
is to walk into fire.
And the angels begin as they always do:
Don't be afraid.

He makes a small living these days
impersonating himself. He isn't good at it, they tell him.
It's age, as much as anything. 70 something now -
he's forgotten the exactly - and it feels like the edge
of something, like drawing the draft number,
or, more: like that day at Fort Hood when they cut
his famous hair. Still, they tell him, he's got -
something. The voice, maybe, a good voice, a sense
of rhythm. And something in the eyes. Not Elvis,
not that smoldering innocence, but something,
they tell him. He's let his hair go white.
At night he noodles on an old National:
plays Hound Dog, old hymns. Walks up
Stairway to Heaven like it's a new song.

So, in the grand tradition of authors being really excited about other authors, this is going around the internet. It’s a questionnaire about our next books, which we get to pass on to the other people we want to hear from.

I was tagged by Elizabeth Wein, author (most recently) of the utterly awesome Code Name Verity, which I reviewed here. I’d like to hear from my hubby James Bow, because I want everyone to know about Icarus Down. I am also tagging RJ Anderson, Zoe Marriott, and Kate Milford.

RJ wrote Ultraviolet, about a girl named Allison who ends up in a mental hospital after confessing to the murder of the most popular girl in town — specifically, disintegrating Ms. Popular with the power of her mind. But that couldn’t be real — could it? But if it isn’t, what really happened to the missing girl? What’s really happening to Allison? Is she crazy, or is there more to it? (Spoiler: there’s more to it.)

Zoe Marriott wrote Shadows on the Moon, which I reviewed here. The high-concept line is “a Japanese Cinderella,” but that doesn’t do it justice. This “Cinderella” sets out deliberately to seduce the prince — and she has good reason to want that kind of power.

Kate Milford wrote the spooky and baroque The Boneshaker, a depression-era “devil comes down to Kansas” story with automata, travelling circuses, snake oil salesmen, and an abandoned town that is Not What It Seems. James read it to me and it’s a gorgeous read-aloud. He reviewed it here.

These are authors that I’ll read anything from — and I’m looking forward to hearing what they’ve got cooking. And here’s what I’m up to:

What’s the working title for your book?

Sorrow’s Knot

A short synopsis?

Sorrow’s Knot is about a young woman named Otter, who inherits her mother’s power and responsibility to bind the dead with ritual knots so that they will not return to prey on the living. Otter is proud of her power and certain of her future - until her adopted grandmother dies and her mother’s power starts to go wrong.

Where did the idea for this book come from?

The image came to me of a proud, powerful, lovely-but-awkward girl with her hands bound in a red cat’s cradle. I knew her name, too: Otter.

My stories always seem to start like this, with the compelling glimpse of the lead character and a bit of what I call original equipment — something that’s a bit less than a premise. In this one, I knew about women who had power over knots, and used them to protect their people from the restless dead. I knew that Otter’s mother, Willow, was one of these binders, and that she’d become so strong that she was dangerous. I knew about the dead, and the forest that they lived in.

For a long time, that was all I knew.

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s a fantasy for young adults

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh, gosh. I never get out to the movies - I’ve got mom-of-little-kids syndrome — so I don’t know young actors well. And I can think of even fewer who aren’t white! So I’m having trouble casting Otter and her best friend Kestrel. The dancer Gus Carr can play Cricket.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I am represented by Emily van Beek at Folio. The novel is already sold to Arthur A. Levine books at Scholastic, and we’re doing the last line edits right now! It will probably be out next fall, but there’s no release date yet.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I started it back 2002 or 2003. I didn’t get very far - the novel stalled out early. I wrote three books and had two kids before restarting in the spring of 2009. I finished it at Christmas 2010. (I am a slow writer, though I am speeding up.)

BUT! I got my editorial letter nine months later - clearly it was a doozy of a letter, taking a while to write - and in the end I fixed the book by throwing out the first first draft and starting it again. The second first draft took me seven months.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I asked my husband James this and he said: “It’s Ursula K. LeGuin meets The Forest of Hands and Teeth.” We laughed and he said: “No, but seriously. It’s Earthsea with zombies.”

I argued that the Ones with White Hands aren’t properly zombies, but James says they can be for the pitch. I usually try to sum up my writing as Garth Nix (for the creep) meets Philip Pullman (for the literary approach) - but I might switch to James’s version. LeGuin’s a god.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Can I talk about a where?

In 2003 and 2004, the story wandered around Fantasyland, picking up rangers and monsters and swords, and never really came together. I had only that girl, Otter, with the red cords between her hands, and the feel of the haunted, holy forest that surrounded her.

And then I found the forest: the Black Hills in South Dakota. The Black Hills today are trying to be all Deadwood and Rushmore - Americana High Tourist Kitsch - but they are not that. They are holy, they are the center of the world. A casino town? White presidents carved into the very body of the mountain? They should not be there. If you go there, you can feel it: that the land is holy, and that is being used wrongly.

After I found the forest, the rest of the story seemed to come into focus. It was as if I’d found Otter’s whole world - and I had.

I will note that I haven’t tried to create a faithful version of any indigenous culture. For one thing, very few of them are plagued by zombies, or feature magical powers that pass mother to daughter. For those more magical aspects I took inspiration from the Celtic, and the Japanese, and I flat-out made stuff up. But still - in that day in the forest, climbing the little devil’s tower above a high mountain lake, I found Otter’s world. When I get stuck I go back there, and the world is still waiting for me: all holiness and beauty and unease.

What else about the book might pique a reader’s interest?

How bout a sample?

It was louder under the trees: the branches rustled and murmured above as if talking to each other. Otter had lived all her life in sight of this forest, but she had not stood in it before, not in a trackless place, not alone, not like this. The thick light shifted and coiled as the high branches moved. The trees spoke. And the dead: Otter’s bracelets stirred and twisted.

Otter pulled the yarns free and cast a cradle star between her fingers: a knot to detect and repel. The loops burrowed like leeches toward the soft places between her fingers. The crossed strings pulsed and tugged. But there was no direction to that tug. It was as if something was — everywhere.

She lifted the cradle-star as if it were a torch.

There was nothing near enough to see.

But the pulsing strings, her prickling skin, told her differently. If the cradle had been a torch, it would have cast a circle of light. And right outside that circle, the cords told her, there would be something watching.

So, the other day, my google alerts brought me not a review or another false positive about Duchess Catherine, but this:

Can you read it? It’s a student doing a project on PLAIN KATE asking the internet generally what message the author was trying to get across. She has an assignment due soon.

I get a handful of questions from students in my e-mail box: they trickle in about one a month. I never know quite what to do with them. I’m torn between being glad to hear from readers and feeling awkward because someone seems to want to copy my homework, as in the days of yore. (And lo, those days were a long, long yore ago.) I haven’t worked out a standard response to student assignment questions yet. But something about this kid touched me, so I wrote to her. But I’m still not quite sure that I did the right thing.

Here is my answer.

I’m the author of PLAIN KATE. I hope it’s okay that I’m answering you. Is it weird? I feel a little as if I’m stalking you, but I’m not: I am seeing your post because Google tells me when someone uses the phrase “Plain Kate” together with things like “book” or “author.”

Your teacher (I suppose it was your teacher) has given you a hard assignment. I wrote the book and I’m not sure what message I was trying to get across. It was more that I had these characters - at first it was just Kate, Linay, and Taggle - who seemed very real to me. So I followed them around until they did something interesting. I like stories, not messages. I imagine most authors are the same.

If I were you I’d think not about what the message is, but about what the characters want. Taggle’s a cat, so he (at first) just wants sausages and tummy rubs, but Kate and Linay have both lost things that are big. It left holes in them, and they want to fill them, badly. But how? What are those holes? How to live with them or fill them up? I’m sure if you’ve ever had a hole in you - and here is a secret, everyone has — you know what that’s like.

Maybe if I want to do anything, it’s give this book to you. Maybe there’s a wee hole somewhere where you could put it?

Good luck with your assignment. Erin Bow

Okay, Internet. Discuss:

I came across this quote on the internet the other day: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” ―George Orwell

I agree that the urge to write is inexplicable and usually unprofitable. But am I the only one who finds the actual writing exciting, even joyful?

Not all the time, of course. I have days (or weeks, or even months) when I’m stuck and despise myself as useless. I have the who-do-you-think-you are gene. I have day when I can write but not well, and end up hoping that my office will catch on fire overnight and erase any evidence of those words. When I have to write something hard — when I, say, kill a character I love (which is any of them, really) I spend days building up to a nervous breakdown and then days weeping and feeling guilty. In sum: I have issues and writing is a brilliant way of both feeding them and throwing them into sharp relief.

Even so. I don’t think I default to “What demon makes me do this?” I think that about publishing, sometimes. But not writing. Because writing is also my best and most persistant joy. It gives me the pure happiness of having created something. Sometimes, yes, it’s the happiness of a carpenter with a true-hanging door. Sometimes it’s the happiness of a woman who has just given birth. Usually it’s somewhere in between. But — happiness. I write because I like writing. If I didn’t like writing, I wouldn’t write.

That seems simple to me. So simple I think it must be universal — but I know it’s not. I quoted Orwell on facebook and asked what others thought. There were some of admitted to hating writing. There were others who took the trope apart:

Lara Owen, author of Growing your Inner Light and Her Blood is Gold, wrote: I think it’s an old paradigm — writer as tormented man with whisky bottle in hand, chain-smoking. For me writing is joyous and illuminating and all about awareness and a bright and receptive state of being — it’s the publishing lark that can be painful!

Poet Marta Ferguson said: I think it’s a patriarchy problem. Admitting joy or delight just isn’t in that lexicon if it’s not tied to triumph, power, or possession, mightiness of some kind. For me? If I didn’t love the process, I wouldn’t do it. Not that everything’s always joyful, but like cooking or physical training—there’s something intrinsically satisfying that keeps me coming back. I need that especially with big projects where the end is too far off to feed any joy-of-completion needs.

The running analogy seemed a good one to me, a new runner. It hurts and it sucks and it’s WONDERFUL.

I’ll give the last word to author/illustrator Jeremy Tankard, creator of Grumpy Bird and Me Hungry. He has a get-over-your-specialness take on the matter: I don’t always love the process, but I seldom find it so horrible either. The longer I do this the more I have come to realize that it is like any job: some days are incredibly rewarding and fly past and others are difficult and crawl by. but the “big picture ” is what keeps me doing it — the possibility that at the end of the day i might have a little piece of magic sitting on my drafting table.