The Mosquito, Pre- Book Release, Anything-but Coast

Me, low tech as always,
on the morning of the NY Times Interview

<--------- This is me. My days are flying by. I am caught in the whirlwind of pre-debut book release chaos. I try not to be, but the fact is, I never feel as if I'm doing enough.

Let me introduce myself, yadda, yadda, yadda. Some of it has really paid off. I have had librarians as far as Hawaii say they viewed my trailer and will order in the book. I have had some major academic organizations say they are interested in TPoG for their purposes. I have connected with terrific teachers, principals, librarians, and, yes, even some reporters, across our country. Better yet, I've connected with some truly awesome teens.

Frances, on the right,
with author Barbara O'Connor

And, yes, I even somehow got myself a New York Times profile, allegedly to run in the May 1 Metro section of the NY Times. The reporter spoke to my editor yesterday (the fantabulous Frances Foster). Apparently, in addition to asking Frances what she loved about my book, the reporter talked about my "persistence." Knowing Frances, she likely smiled amusedly and answered, "yes, yes, I'm familiar with that as well."

I guess we'll see what she really said on May 1st. ;)

In the meantime, let's hope that my unique style of "persistence" is a good thing, and not akin to a mosquito on a hot summer's night, buzzing loudly in your ear. And, better yet, lets hope all these hours and connections (and persistence) amount to book sales. Because, lord knows, in all those hours, I could have written an entire other manuscript instead.

To those of you following my journey, posting interviews, reviews, and generally propping me up with your humor and good wishes, not to mention ordering the book, do not underestimate my appreciation. From the bottom of my slightly-exhausted heart.

- gae

Dream Five

This is Lori Landau.
She is working on a book of
dream poems and illustrations.

This is my friend Lori Landau. She and I have been friends for a long (long) time. Among many things, Lori is a columnist at Technorati (Lifestyle: Social Goodness) and shows and sells her photography and jewlrey at the Open Center, NYC.

As teens Lori and I wrote endless poetry together, but she has continued to work on her craft and grow as a poet, while I have veered in other directions (she has also forked and veered, but has taken her poetry with her).

And, the truth is, few other's poems move me the way Lori's do.

So, when, I found a poem of hers -- Dream Five -- in my email box the other day like a small gift, I did what I always do: I coveted it.
Her poems make me want to eat them, drink them in. I have tried once or twice to suck them up through the computer screen but the glass intervenes.

So this morning, I did the next best thing. I sat down in front of my computer, turned my webcam on and read the words aloud, hoping by doing so, I could somehow send them into the universe in just the way I heard them in my head and have you understand.

I sent the vlog to Lori and asked if I might post my reading of Dream Five here and she said yes. First I will post the written version below.

-gae

Mixed media dream dog by Lori Landau.

Dream Five

The plane has already taken off but I am unseated. The rows are full of travelers, settling in, gazing out windows, opening books, leaning back, eyes closed, to listen to iPods. I pass by them on my way to the doorway that separates coach from a part of the plane I never knew existed but enter anyway. The thrust of the plane overcomes the drag and the plane is pushed up through the bright air. I am in some type cargo space, stripped clean of carpet and seating and storage. The floor is whitewashed, with blackened steel planks, held down by rivets and antique fasteners. It is the type of place that in another time might have housed sturdy parts: landing gears, propellers, spare luggage bins, but as of now, it is empty, save for two seats that are anchored to raw metal and facing me from across a divide. They are slatted chairs like you’d find at a movie theater or a ballgame, attached at the legs and bolted to the floor with antique studs. No safety belts, just old-fashioned straps made to wind around knees and waists like a harness, clumsily buckled, like arms that are poised to grab hold. The whole thing feels like a throwback to the 40s, like some kind of old military jet, it hums with the purgatory air of a waiting room. By the force of motion, I know we’re ascending. The plane shifts then stabilizes, and I eye the two empty seats, deciding whether or not they will hold me to gravity, when I see that my two long-dead dogs, Annie and Gypsy, who are very much alive, are here, just a few steps from the sealed exit door. To see a dog in your dream symbolizes intuition, loyalty, protection, two must be doubly so. I know this as well as I know that I am dreaming. I am overjoyed to see them, but I am aware that in waking life they are still dead. I realize that they are here to tell me something I’ve forgotten, some important information that has slumbered long within me. I look out the windows of the plane to see what direction we are going in, to assess the likelihood of turbulance, to see if the plane is trailing some message, skywriting symbols that will decipher why I am here, and where I am going, and I see through the cold glass what has been there all along, the altitude of blue sky and everything beyond, and I am flying through it, carried like Dorothy hurtling toward Oz ,holding on by my feet, rooted to the unseen, to that which has come before and all that is yet to come, soaring toward the unknown without a safety net, flying far over the articulation of earth, away from the bent elbows of women squatting long over muddy water, over corrugated fences and bitter branches weighed down by leaves and birdsong, over the long slow trains that run past crumbling walls etched with graffiti, lifting over the hinge of the horizon, on my way to waking.

Pineapples

Judging by the date of my last entry here,
and despite the title of this blog,
I am apparently not actually staying afloat.

Bite me.

Okay, fine, don't.

Where water metaphors are concerned, though, I should not be sinking.


If there's one thing I do know how to do, it is swim.

See? This is me, swimming.

And, yet. . . 

In fairness to me, these last 8-week-(gulp)-throes of trying to market my own book -- yes, unless we are JK Rowling or Stephanie Meyer, these days we mostly do it all on our own -- are starting to weigh me down. Everything from booking my own events (and those of Class of 2K11) and arranging the "food and entertainment" there, to my release party, to designing my own bookmarks and "swag" (with the help of my dear friend and fab graphic designer [you should use him if you need graphics designed...] Jeff Fielder), to writing endless blog posts, tweeting and fb'ing, to mailing out packages of swag . . . well, you get the gist. Add to it, my part-time real paid work and my kids whose spring sports and school lives are heating up, and really are the thrill of my life but demanding of my motherly attention. . . well, there's only so many hours in a day.

Which leaves me with this:

the last few times I've signed onto facebook (oh, love of my life, you facebook!) or Twitter (ringing silence), the only thing I want to type is the word pineapple.

Pineapple.

Pineapples. (Sure, the plural works nicely).

I mean, sometimes, a single word like that seems to sum things up nicely, right?

Pineapple. 

see?

Gae Polisner is pineapple.

That tells you everything you need to know.

- gae

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

Wistful

Life is hard, but, then, tell you something you don't know.

And, yet, we still want it to go slower. We want to hold on to the good parts, savor them, make them stick in our minds. And, oh, how we cannot.

The first draft is just the beginning.
Today I made it through 40 pages that look like this. I had
hoped to make it through 100.

I spent the day in Barnes & Noble today, my mind a mishmash of manic thoughts. In a few months, my book will be there. Or, should be there, but may not be. I may need you to beg for it to be.

Still, on the B&N shelves or not, it will be out there in the world for sale. It took me a decade to get here - to being a published author. To having a book come out. And all I want to do is be grateful. But the publishing world has changed so much in the past five years, or maybe I just know too much now. What I understand now, is not only how bumpy the road to getting here is, but that getting here doesn't mean staying.

Still, ten years ago, I would have given almost anything to get here.

While I was sitting in B&N drinking my coffee and working on revisions for my hopefully-next book, a woman sat across from me with her small daughter. They read books, and chatted and shared cookies. Something I did weekly with my two boys, year after year, and it was one of my favorite things. And as I did those things with my sons, I tried to savor every moment, to not ever wish to be anywhere but right there with them as I was. Moreso, I tried to store images of them like snapshots in my brain, so I wouldn't forget a thing. But, still, it was elusive, and watching that woman with her young child, was suddenly almost too much to bear.

Even now, just typing this, eviscerates me.

I want those moments back. I want a hundred more years with my sons. I want to hold them, and play with them, and read to them, and have them look up at me with their big, brown intelligent eyes and promise me we have a lifetime still ahead of us together.

But we don't. They are 13 and 15, and they are almost gone.

So, here I am with my book coming out.
And I am grateful.
But ten years have flown by like a minute. Even though life is unbearably hard.

And I'd give almost anything to go back there.

-gae

Borrowed (Coveted) Poem

This is Lori. She is a poem.

In my email box this Sunday morning was a note from my dear friend Lori with a poem attached.

Lori and I have known each other since our teens, and we wrote together way back when. Her note this morning simply said she was in a winter-freeze funk and was sharing some writing in the hopes I would somehow offer some warmth and inspiration. What I got instead, was inspiration of my own.

As I read her words I was blown away, as I so often am, by the way she is able to balance the fluid with the succinct, the flowery with the direct, the ethereal with the solid -- and create a magnificent sense of angst and flight, hope and longing, that always seems to shine through her poetry.

I asked her if I might share the poem on my blog and she agreed. The artwork below that goes with it is also hers. Yeah, don't get me started. . .

Btw, you may also find her blog here, at ConsciousCreativity.

Lori made this; I want it. What else is new?*

Dream 4/dream for

Prelude to a dream:

Lens retracted, aerial view of snow gridded squares, boundaries etched in ink, black & white topography seen from glass iris of the camera. Land cut like fruit reveals a starry eye:

Dream 4:
is crowded. Friends from long ago roam the rooms of my past, bearing gifts and conversation. Someone gives me a straw hat stiched with knowledge, it hovers at the lip of the driveway. There is some kind of gathering. People spill inside: an old therapist, a friend from Herondale, a woman who Dream tells me is my spirit sister. Clinking of glasses, movement, open doorways. Details from my childhood float overhead like filmy ghosts: blue shag rug, crystal candlesticks. The air is palpable. Somewhere upstairs, we have packed up my son’s room. Nothing is left but the books in the shelves, and I turn to ask him what he wants to do with them and am sucked into a mysterious errand. Steep hill to climb to get there, but Starbucks is a beacon up top, inviting, its glass walls fogged golden with light and warmth, and I seem to know the way. It is snowing. Slushy streets below. No car can take this climb, so I run up the tilted face of the mountain. Arrive in time to kiss my father and three friends, who are arranged around him in triangular formation. Triangle: sacred symbol of the all-seeing eye, of alchemy, angels and anarchy. There’s a buzz here too, another gathering, but Dream tells me I need to get back to my kids who wait for me to take them to school. As if I’d been there before, I sense the hill isn’t the way back down. Zig-zag through side streets that unfold like a pop-up book into a toy-like town. Stores fling open glass doors displaying candly-like distractions: aromatic packages of coffee, bright sheer scarves that float on shelves like gossamer. Mid-dream, the phone rings in the dark room, urgently, dream flickers, recedes.
Dream Redux: light scatters and blurs. I am lying on a wood floor, dreaming a question about my son. Bear appears immediately upon inquiry, nodding his shaggy head yes, yes he’s sure, yes I am welcome. Somewhere in Dream I know it’s winter and Bear should be hibernating, but I have summoned him and he has come. Spirit guide of my son, he is Andarta and Artio, fierce defender of art, blender of intuition with instinct. Symbol of truth. autonomy. We have raised my son fiercely. Encouraged him to find his own way, then flinched when he faltered. “You cannot know what is true unless you know what isn’t true.” Bear tells me this with a human voice just before I wake to see the snow flowering everything to white


-lori landau

*if you click on the photo you can see her work in all its gorgeous detail.

Parenting by Example, Not for the Faint-Hearted

me, right side up, the way a mother belongs

To my friends and family who love me, I am known as a passer-outer. I'm not proud of it. It is, as they say, what it is. I faint when I get scared because I breath-hold or over-breathe and end up with what's known as a vasovagal response. (I know it's wikipedia, but trust me, it's close enough).

I know it's a mind over matter thing, and for a short while in my late teens, I was able to let my mind win out, but little since then, so I've mostly learned to deal with it. I bury my pride and ask to lie down when I have my eyes "touched" by anything that they shouldn't be touched by (IMHO this includes pretty much anything and everything except my own finger/contact lenses), or when I have blood drawn or any major medical work done. The fear isn't in my rational mind, but obviously it's there somewhere. I also get lightheaded if I think my family is in danger or there's a health scare.

I seriously couldn't even *look* at the photos
of real ears with needles sticking out. Oy.

Which leads me to yesterday and my son's appointment with an accupuncturist. And the part where I tried to demonstrate how simple and easy it was to get acupuncture by letting the guy stick needles in my ears first.

It wasn't just the needles, however, it was his lack of gentle delivery when he saw an "issue with your uterus" that I may have wanted to "get checked out."

Son watching. Mind racing to the "C" word, to the specialists I would have to see, to the teary videos I would leave for my children in an effort to say a proper farewell. And, of course, NEEDLES being poked in my EARS.*

Suffice it to say, it wasn't my best parenting moment, but we've learned that my son is very good in the face of an emergency which includes watching his mother turn an inhuman shade of green-white, as her eyes roll back in her head and her normal self disappears from conscious view.

Also suffice it to say, No, he did NOT choose to get acupuncture himself after that.

- gae

*and, yes, everything is fine, as far as I know, with my uterus. Turns out the dude was merely being awkward about asking if perhaps I was pregnant (no!) and/or had my period (bingo -- and kind of impressive that he could tell that from my ear).