Here is a list of reasons why books make the best gifts. (This is not self-serving. I don't mean my books. I mean books in general.)

1) They are long lasting. It takes on the order of, say, ten or fifteen hours to read a book during which whole time your loved one is thinking in the back of her head how much you must love her for getting her such a lovely gift. Then, after she's finished, it will sit on her shelf in her living room or her bedroom and remind her of you.

2) They are personal, intimate even. When you get your loved one a book he really loves, he not only enjoys the book, he feels full of warm, fuzzy feelings that you picked it for him, that you knew him so well you knew how much he'd like it, that you think so highly of him you matched him up with this really great book.

3) Don't know how to pick the book that will result in #2 above? Books have a solution to that problem too. Walk into, say, the Gap and describe your loved one's personality and interests to the people working there, and they will not be able to pick out a sweater well suited to your loved one. Walk into a bookstore and do the same, and the people there absolutely will. Today, as part of Small Business Saturday, authors will be visiting local independent bookstores across the country to help you pick the perfect book for your loved one. (Find one near you with this handymap and/or google your favorite bookstore to see what they have going on today.) They aren't selling their own books, you understand; they are going to meet you, listen to you talk about your loved one, and offer the perfect book. (Authors tend to be very well and widely read, and this is our superpower. We are like Santa in this way.) That way you get to say to your loved one not only have I given you this great book but it was picked out personally for you by [insert name of fabulous author here]. 

4) Even if -- perhaps, especially if -- your loved one owns some kind of e-reader, a book still makes the perfect gift. Now it's retro and nostalgic (sort of like the holidays themselves, especially for those of you still eating Chex Mix)(which should be everyone because Chex Mix is awesome). Now books stand out. Now your loved one will say, fondly, "Oh, I remember reading real books. How lovely." Personally, I like to go back and forth -- one ebook, one paper, one e, one paper. Your loved one will love having an actual object to unwrap and hold and smell and flip through and examine the cover of and then, finally, read and reread and look at and remember.

5) As regular readers will recall, books make great Christmas trees. Here's ours from last year. You can't do this with an ebook, my friends. 

As I have discussed -- here? elsewhere? mostly in my own brain? -- the beginning stages of novel-writing look a lot like wandering around the house aimlessly. Followed by writing. Followed by revision. Followed, only then, by obsessing about language. Novel-writing is long -- for me, in the early stages, language-matters are indulgences that interfere with the work that must be done: research, writing, revision, and wandering around the house.

But that obsession with language is hard to let go of. During early-stage novel writing, it comes out in other ways.
​
Example from some crackers I was eating this weekend: "Natural Flavor with other natural flavor."

Natural flavor with other natural flavor? Look, I hate to be a graduate student about this, but:
​
a) Can I get an S? Natural flavorS with other natural flavorS.
b) Or articles? A natural flavor with another natural flavor might also work.
c) What does this even mean? Are we talking about flavor or ingredients? Flavor means taste. Is their point that these crackers taste like two things? Crackers and sweet onions? Sweet potatoes (their main ingredient which is why I bought them. I am a sucker for sweet potatoes) and rice? Salt and crunchy? Bananas and bologna? Flavor and flavor?
d) Or do they mean ingredients? Because flavor does not mean ingredients. But that does seem to be what's implied here. I chose these, in fact, because their ingredient list was short, recognizable, and non-chemical. These crackers contained actual foods on their ingredient list, foods such as sweet potatoes and rice. But then you'd think the copy might read: Sweet potatoes with rice. Instead of natural flavor with other natural flavor.
e) Flavor means taste. All flavors are natural. Their cause might well be artificial, but their taste on the tongue is natural. And natural.
f) There are only two reasons makers of crackers put copy on their boxes: to make me buy them or to make sure I don't sue them for having done so. I honestly can't imagine which this is.

And then check this out:

This sign is in the women's locker room where my kid takes swim lessons. I can only assume this is vandalism, a joke, but if so it's awfully well done -- I couldn't see any scratched out or scraped off letters. It is, in any case, someone's intention, be it the makers and hangers of the sign or someone with a pretty good sense of humor. So I ask you:
a) Is the final word here meant to be gender? Because at the very least they probably mean sex.
Unless b) they mean gender in which case bravo and more power to 'em though I'm not sure that requires signage at that point. Maybe this is too long: "Children six years [of??] age and older must use the locker room which best aligns with their gender performance always acknowledging that that performance is culturally imposed and interpreted, subject to change, and may lie outside the two (falsely dichotomous) locker room options herein presented."
c) Or maybe it's literal where end=genitalia. Which I love.
d) Or maybe it bespeaks everyone's eventual demise. We don't want to think about it in very young children, but by six, you're old enough to consider that someday we must all shuffle off this mortal coil. Another too long sign: "Those whose off-shuffling will be in a car, a body of water, a hospital room, a mountain slope, or a dog park must use the women's locker room. Those for whom it will be a bedroom or other room in a private home, a yoga studio, a glacier crevasse, a boat, a ballpark, or a movie theater must use the men's locker room. We know you don't know, but guess."

I am totally fascinated/horrified by translation. It puzzles me completely. It is maybe one of the most American things about me that I speak only a little bit of one language besides my own -- and not well. I wish for other languages. I long for them. For the usual reasons -- they would make me a better citizen of the world; they would make me a better and more welcome traveler -- as well as the literary ones: I want to read Anna Karenina in Russian,Inferno in Italian, One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish. 

The world is such a small place and growing smaller and closer every day. Barriers tumble down. Technology brings us all closer together. So much of our experience of the world happens beyond language anyway. Blah blah blah. I don't buy it. Translation seems impossible to me. Miraculous, impressive as hell, and impossible.

Let's talk about Dante's Inferno. It's a poem. In Italian, it rhymes. When you translate it, do you translate it literally word for word so that you get the exact plot and images and individual words Dante chose? Or do you translate it so that it rhymes at the sacrifice, sometimes, of much of the above? Before you answer, consider that much of Italian rhymes, much more than English does. So rhyming poetry sounds different and means differently to Italian ears than it does to English speaking ones. This kills me.

​Cursing is a translation problem even in one's own language. I'm a curser. I curse. I curse at home. I curse in print. To my ears, it does not sound crude or dirty or especially edgy. I grew up with cursing. My father was a curser before me. He was a precurser. (You see how complicated language is?) I curse because I really can't see denying myself any of the language available to me. I want it all. But if you're offended by cursing, it sounds different to you, it means something different to you, than it does to me. Simply, you need a translation, just like someone who doesn't read English. What I mean by -- and not just literal meaning but everything that goes with it: sense, feeling, emotion, reference, character development, setting, local color -- "damn" or "shit" or whatever is simply not what you hear when you read those words. It's a disconnect. It's a translation problem. I don't intend to indicate that this character is crude or course or morally bankrupt or religiously doomed because to me cursing=normal.

And in fact, in deference to those who would be offended, there's not a lot of cursing in my books. There's not a lot to begin with, and then I take a lot of it out in editing. Each time I come across a "bad word" (as if words could be bad), I consider whether someone out there might be offended and whether or not I could successfully change it to "crap" or some such. My first editor actually asked me to increase the cursing because she thought these were characters who would say "shit" rather than "crap." She was right.

Ironically, I hate yelling. All yelling. I hate being yelled at. I hate being yelled near. I can't abide people who yell at one another, at their kids, even at tv screens. When people yell near me, I leave. Or cry. Or both. Cursing is not about anger. And I certainly never ever ever say it to or at anyone.

​The French translation of Goodbye For Now is also special because it's the only one I understand even a little bit. I don't read any of the other 25-plus languages into which it's been translated. But I read a little French. I understand the very lovely French edition mostly because I know what it says. But it's also a wonder to read my own words unfamiliarly, to make new to me something I not only made up but have read dozens of times. It's as close as I come to the experience of being a real reader of my own book. Kind of cool. 

​It's a baseball chip and dip plate. 

None of which however, I would argue, is quite as off or wrong as it seems. 

Passover is a holiday celebrating, among other things, the coming of spring again and all that means: renewal, warming, hope, trying again/anew/some more. That is what the start of baseball season is about too so a baseball chip and dip plate fits right in. Spring itself comes not on schedule -- here in Seattle we had our first (and hopefully only) snow flakes of the the year on the first day of spring. So scheduling these things give or take a week seems appropriate too.

Passover is a holiday celebrating, among other things, storytelling. This is my kind of holiday. What's important is the telling and retelling of a story which is at once ancient, timely, and timeless. So being off calendar by a couple weeks seems small potatoes.

Passover is a holiday celebrating, among other things, homecoming. Some years that's more of a process than others. The years, such as this one, when that process is most protracted are the years it is both hardest and most important to do a seder, however belatedly. When I was in college, we used to schedule Passover for whenever I was home for spring break. I still don't feel quite moved in, quite home or at home, but this helps.

Passover is a holiday celebrating, among other things, symbolism. Again, this is something I can get behind. Except for the shank bone. Not eating meat makes procuring a shank bone a challenge. Also, it is gross. Careful observers will note the dog treat -- the only bone-shaped or bone-inclusive item we had on hand -- in place of a shank bone on the baseball seder plate. Dogs celebrate homecoming and spring-coming too you know.

​Our new fridge. Well, our old fridge, newly painted. Anyone else out there have a purple fridge? Or think to yourself whilst gazing on your fridge, "I think I shall paint that purple."? Hmm, probably not. That is the difference between you and us. What does this have to do with Passover? Three things: food, painting-related delays, and storytelling.

Sometime soon, I will write a blog post about Ruth Ozeki, who, ages before we met, changed my life in nearly all the important ways it has been changed. It's a pretty remarkable story, so stay tuned for that. Her new book, A Tale For The Time Being, has the greatest title ever and comes out in March, and really you'd think I'd have read an advanced copy by now because honestly I'm just not sure my patience can hold out much longer. Meanwhile, long after she changed my life in all those important ways, we met and became friends, and I'm very honored to be tagged by her in this bloggy-internet-y game of, well, tag. One author answers a list of questions on his/her blog, tagging at the end a handful of other authors who answer the same questions on their blogs, tagging a handful of authors in turn. 

In her toss to me, Ruth mentioned that she hoped I'd talk about Goodbye For Now, even though the questions here are really about one's brand new or forthcoming or in progress work, and I shall. For several reasons. One, she asked me to. Two, my new, in progress work is just barely either one and not ready for discussion yet except by people married to me. Three, though I've answered these and similar sorts of questions on lots of other people's blogs, I haven't done so on my own blog. So here's theGoodbye For Now overview right where it belongs.

• What's the title of your book (or story)?

It's called Goodbye For Now. I'd titled it Dead Mail, but my publisher didn't think putting the word "dead" in the title held much wide appeal.

• What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

It's a love story about a software engineer who invents a way for people to email -- and eventually even video chat -- with their dead loved ones.

• What genre does your book fall under?

It's fiction. Literary fiction I guess. At first I thought it was going to be sci-fi or at least speculative fiction, but in the end, the technology in the book just isn't that much of a stretch of the technology we have now and the uses it's being put to.

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

Represented by an agency and publisher, here and around the world. Here, it's Doubleday/Random House.

• Where did the idea come from for the book?

At the beginning, it was frustration with Facebook and all the time we all spend online these days. I kept having the sense that the time and energy I was spending keeping in virtual touch with people I didn't even know was time and energy I was taking away from keeping in actual touch with my close friends and family. That's not what Goodbye For Now is about, but that is where the idea came from. Crankiness. Crankiness and Connectivity. (Hey, that would have been a good title too.)

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

Film rights have been optioned. Very exciting. The folks working on the movie are just amazing. It's great talking to them. The best part of the movie is it has almost nothing to do with me. Watching someone else take this project on -- including the casting -- is just incredible. I, for instance, have no idea who should play Sam and Meredith, so I'm delighted to leave that in the capable hands of the filmmakers. I have, however, been casting my fantasy version of the film with dead actors -- since Goodbye For Nowis all about virtually recreating the dead -- and I think Jimmy Stewart as Sam, Natalie Wood as Meredith, and Cary Grant as Dash would be lovely. Plus then Natalie could tell us what really happened.

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

This is always a harder question to answer than it seems. Four months. It took me four months. Plus the summer before during which I wrote about one hundred pages that had to be more or less thrown out. Plus years and years worth of ruminating, scheming, dreaming, planning, reading, and figuring. And then four months.

• Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My grandmother and I were very close, and we emailed each other a lot. When she died, I had this idea that a good programmer could write software that could fake emails from her. I sat with that idea for years, convinced it was a great idea for a product, before I realized that I'm not a software engineer nor an inventor nor a developer, and that this was a good idea, not in real life, but for a novel. And luckily, I am a novelist.

Right, so tagging. Remember freeze tag? Remember TV tag? Man I sucked at TV tag. Anyway...

My friend and mentor, Jennie Shortridge, has her fifth (!) novel coming out this April, Love, Water, Memory. Great title, great book, great person all around. She blogs here.

My new friend Tara Conklin's debut novel, The House Girl, releases next month. I've read it, and it's wonderful. She blogs here.

​Like everyone in the world with a small child this week, I am looking at mine a little differently, through red-rimmed eyes and yammering "there but for"s and a mountain of questions about how to proceed in life given the warning shots, given the status quos, given all the unacceptable impossible things which turn out to be unacceptable, yes, but in fact horrifically possible. 

How we proceeded was to get on an airplane to come back east for the holidays. Seattle is at its rainiest, darkest, coldest, and wettest. It might get rainier, wetter, and colder, but because this is in fact as dark as it will get -- dark by 4:30 and until 8:30 the next morning with full rain clouds all the time -- it's the nadir emotionally. My parents live in Maryland where when I was a child winters were freezing and miserable, but now, with new and improved global warming, it was sunny and nearly 60 today. Perfect bike riding weather.

D's bike at home has training wheels. And she hasn't ridden it in months (see above re: rain, wet, wind, cold, dark). My folks got a bike-for-grandchildren on Craigslist but it doesn't have training wheels. Here's how this went...

D: I want to ride bikes.
Me: It doesn't have training wheels. You are only four. You don't know how to ride a two-wheeler.
D: Yuh huh.
Me: Nuh uh.
D: Help me get on it.
Me: Can you ask nicely?
D: Help me get on it please.

Then I held the back of the bike. She got on it. I let go. She rode away.

Now listen, I learned to ride a bike myself once upon a time. Post-training wheels it was hard, scary, painful, and time consuming. I remember my sister learning to ride a two-wheeler. Years passed. She cried, screamed, tore her hair, rent her clothes, threw things, and refused to go near the bike again roughly 40 billion times. I thought my parents were going to have to give her away. (She is now a triathlete, so it worked out eventually.) 

I have also watched movies, television, and commercials and therefore know that running along bent double while holding onto the back of child's bike seat then letting go, watching her fall, kissing her scraped knees, and wiping her nose then helping her up to try again and again and again until finally she wobbles a few teetering feet on her own before collapsing in a fit of giggles, giddy relief, and a return to my arms is a) a metaphor for letting her go which I must do, however much it scares me and b) a metaphor for her finding her way in the world without me, though it be painful for her and sometimes bloody and c) a right of passage we will both experience as a mixture of triumph, release, pain, excitement, possibilities, and doors both closed and open. 

​But no, my kid gets the hang of it right away with no coaching, no drama, and no emotions, metaphor free, just glad to be able to go outside and get some exercise.

But here's the rub: there's no such thing as metaphor free. Not in my universe. It's a sign of something. I just have absolutely really no idea what.

I want love stories. This is what I want. I want books I read to be love stories. I want my movies and TV to be love stories. I want plays I go see to be love stories. If I played video games, I'd want them to be love stories. 

My own story is a love story.

Which is maybe what I have found so can't-look-away miraculous and wonderful about all the photos of gay weddings this week in Seattle. 

Marriage licenses became available to all last Wednesday night at midnight. Did Seattle open the offices where one procures marriage licenses at midnight? Of course they did. ​

​There is a three day waiting period to get married in Washington after one has a license. Did Seattle open the courthouse at midnight Saturday night, and did judges come in all day Sunday, their day of rest and freedom, to perform gay weddings all day and all night? Again, yes they did. As same-sex marriage becomes slowly legal all across the country, there are going to be places like Seattle -- a very gay, very liberal city -- where most people are going to be enthusiastic and delighted. 

And then there are going to be places where the celebrations will be less public, more muted, and more closeted. There will be people applying for marriage licenses from authorities who don't want to give them to them. There will be people getting married in towns where they have little public support, where however legal it is, they will still face prejudice and opposition. ​

​I am very glad to see same sex marriage legalized in Washington. Because it's fair and right and time. Because the more families we acknowledge as such, the better the world is for everyone. But mostly because of the love. 

And what I wonder is this: whether these pictures might be changing hearts and minds. This fight has not exactly been a fair one. The counterarguments have not always been truthful. Scare tactics have been employed. And I wonder whether people who are anti same-sex marriage, some of them, looked at these pictures this week and thought: Oh. No goats. No people trying to wed their pets. No lewdness. It doesn't, in fact, look like porn. It doesn't look anti child or anti family. ​

​It's hard to look at these pictures and think they look unnatural. It's hard to look at these pictures and find them threatening. If you backburner the politics and the what a long time this has been coming, mostly it just looks like people getting married. 

​They look really happy. They smile a lot. They look at each other like love. They have families and friends in tow. They look a little uncomfortable because they're more dressed up than usual. They look a little uncomfortable because there are all these people looking at them. They look older than a lot of wedding photo couples because they've had to wait so long. They often have their children with them -- same reason. But overwhelmingly, more than anything, they just look normal. Like a love story -- extraordinary from the inside, typical from the outside. And seriously, who in their right mind objects to more love? It's not just what the world needs now. It's what the world needs always. Obviously. 

​And that was just day one.

Pictures are here, here, here, and here. In case you want to spend the next hour or so feeling weepy and moved. And full of love.

I spent last week at the first kind of retreat -- the kind in the woods with writing, reading, reflecting, and time and room of my own. It was my very first retreat of the non-running-away kind, and it was pretty of amazing.Hedgebrook is a retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island, WA. One can apply for residency and stay for between a couple of weeks and a couple of months. One can pay to attend workshops and salons. Or one can come teach, as I did. I'd have done so with joy and delight just for the pleasure of doing it and of working with and meeting such talented, committed writers, but when payment turns out to be a cabin to myself for four days with all meals gloriously prepared (and delicious)...I actually lack words to sufficiently describe this experience. The best one I have is generous.

It was also a week left to the imagination. There's no phone. Cell reception was essentially non-existent. No wifi in the cabins. So alone felt really alone, disconnected, isolated. Good for the imagination certainly, but good for the imagination is not itself always good for the soul. Hedgebrook is a safety-first sort of place. They warned me that the fire alarm in the cabin rings the fire department directly, so don't burn toast. There's a fire extinguisher, a total ban on candles, a battery-powered lantern, a panic button for instant police signaling, and air horns on both floors. But the provided flashlight is one of those small emergency crank things that sheds a tiny amount of light on only the half square foot immediately in front of you. The way back from dinner is woodsy, windy, and wet, branches blowing, rain spattering, noises noising...let's just say it was a long quarter-mile every night. It is perfectly, perfectly safe, but I imagine things for a living...and imagine I did. 

My friend Tara, of the lovely blog Tea and Cookies, points out that being in a city is much more dangerous than being in the woods on a rural island. True enough. She says there is much more to fear from people than animals. But I was not worried about being attacked by a bear. I was worried about being attacked by a zombie.

​Freaking Joss Whedon. I get it. I do. Really. But one wants to see a film and then move on with one's life whereas the memory of Cabin in the Woods prevented me from achieving the proper zen retreat state. I thought too much about the other kind of retreating -- the kind where you have to run away from a redneck zombie torture family who might be lurking just outside the beam (a charitable term in this case) of your so-called flashlight waiting to cut you open with a rusty saw. Thankfully, this did not harsh on my productivity -- only on my mellow and my willingness to leave my cabin for really any reason at all. Except food. Oh the food. There are times in one's life where someone else cooking is like the greatest thing you can imagine -- besides zombie survival -- and I am at one of those times apparently. Meantime, novel #3=underway. Not very underway. But underway nonetheless.