Enough about ME, let's talk about YOU.

Really.  I mean it.

I mean, come on.

THIS IS ME:

Posing me

THIS IS ME: 

Swimming me



THIS IS ME: 

Idiotic Monkey Hat me

THIS IS ME:  http://childrenspublishing.blogspot.com/2011/03/wow-wednesday-gae-polisner-on-alchemy.html,

                                                  THIS IS ME: http://gaepolisner.com/html/ya.html,

THIS IS ME: http://www.classof2k11.com/?page_id=101,                  

And, good lord yes,   THIS. IS. ME: https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=208569519157839&oid=166649123380617&comments

                                 

Honestly, still two months to go, and I AM SO VERY SICK OF ME!!!

Seriously.

So, I can only imagine how all of you feel.

And already today, my inbox is full of requests for more me (the "YA Universe" is an interesting and fabulous place, but one UNTO ITSELF, with a nearly insatiable appetite for new information about YA authors that the rest of the world don't give two shits about). And yet, there's the need to be out there in it, to keep up, to get my name and my book out there. And, I'm grateful for it. Truly.

But I'm also so very sick of me.

So, do me a favor. Tell me something neat about you. Something I might not know but want to. Your favorite book, a great movie you saw, the best thing that's happened to you this year. What frustrated you yesterday. A link to something you really, really want me to read.

Enough about me, I want to hear about you. Honestly. But, in one neat place where I know where to find it, here.

I'm waiting. So go ahead. 

- gae

Of Bats and Beards

My lovely husband.

I have been married for hmmmmn-teen years now, and at times it has been great, and at times, um, maybe not so great. Through it all we have maintained a sense of humor (mostly) toward ourselves and each other and admired one another for our strengths and good qualities (truly), even if the lesser bad qualities were not doing it for us at the moment.

We've always said that the thing that has held our marriage together are our shared values and sense of humor. And if you asked me what I admired most about my husband, I would tell you that it is his humor, intellect, loyalty, and  quiet gentleness that move me.

Which is why it has me laughing for more than a week now, that when I conjure affection for him, I keep returning to the image of him leaving our house last week like The Terminator, a baseball bat gripped in each hand, on a day that he thought I needed some protection.

And, don't be fooled by his sweet face; he looked like he knew how to use them.

And it doesn't hurt that my usually clean-shaven man is now sporting a scruffy beard.

*swoons.*

Foolish of me? Perhaps. But, true, nonetheless. So, I confess.

Of course, I still admire him for his humor, intellect, gentleness and our shared values.

But, oh, the bats and the beard.

- gae

Reading is Exce(r)ptional

photo credit: Rick Kopstein

Oy, what a stretch that title was.

(Consider that for you, Mike Wood).

So, fine, sue me. I'm overdue for a blog post here.

I've been lavishing the attention on my YA-friendly blog lately because, well, because that's the only type of book I've sold so far. *waves two womens' fiction manuscripts wildly through the air.*

At any rate.

As usual, I've been reading three books at once, all too slowly: one classic (The Great Gatsby -- would have finished it sooner but I (ahem) lost it for a week and only re-found it last night in one of those "Alzheimery" places which we will not discuss), one YA (The Miles Between -- because I write it, I need to read it too, not to mention I like it) and one contemporary fiction (Tinkers by Paul Harding, which happened to win the Pultizer this year.) I'm not very far into it, but already I see hints of why it might have won, and decided to share an excerpt that I wish I wrote with you. There is nothing after it, because I feel it deserves to stand on its own.

At the outset of Tinkers, we meet George Washington Crosby who is dying in a hospital bed in the middle of his living room, and is seemingly in the hallucinatory throes of his final days:

     "Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept."

- gae