I am so excited that I finally get to talk about my newest book project. Here’s the announcement from Publisher’s Marketplace on 1/28/14.
Amber Keyser’s THE V-WORD, a collection of personal essays by women about losing their virginity that captures the complexity of this important life changing decision and reflects diverse, real-world experiences, to Lindsay Brown at Beyond Words, in a nice deal, for publication in Spring 2016, by Fiona Kenshole at Transatlantic Literary Agency (World).
We’re going to be doing some amazing things with this book. I can’t wait to tell you more about how it came to be, who the contributors are, and why it matters, but for now, I’m flying high and am happy to share the buzz with you.
Earlier in the month I blogged about a forth-coming book called RECLAIMING CONVERSATION by Sherry Turkle, the author of ALONE TOGETHER. I resolved to focus on meaningful conversations in my life rather than the social media version via “likes” and “shares.”
While having tea with a friend the other day, we got to talking about conversation itself and the different kinds of conversations we have with the people closest to us versus with colleagues and acquaintances.
When we first meet people, we do a lot of story-telling. We share experiences. We try to present ourselves in a way appropriate to the situation. It’s kind of tacky to say we are “on message,” but it’s the truth. We are trying to be professional with colleagues or be scintillating with someone we might be attracted to. It’s not that we aren’t honest, but we don’t bare everything.
With family and close friends, we don’t have the same kinds of conversation. We already know the stories. We often talk less because there’s more subtext. We get each other’s reference both humorous and snide. We know the things that are likely to provoke or upset. When we’re being kind, we avoid those things. When we’re tweaked, not so much.
Our conversations hold more of the mundane but can get deep and emotional much faster. Maintaining intimacy and connection with family takes effort. We have to be more intentional about our conversations. I think the tendency is to avoid the ones that are hard because we are entrenched in the way things are.
It’s scary to muck about in the system we’ve got working within our family even if it’s not working very well. But the mucking about could be an opportunity, too. A chance to deepen our relationships and step beyond the day-to-day that so frequently dominates our interactions.
I loved a scene from a recent episode of Modern Family. Cam and Mitchell go out to a romantic meal but agree not to talk about their upcoming wedding or their daughter, Lily. Their conversation is stilted and uncomfortable until suddenly it goes deep, way deep, when the couple at the table near them implodes. By the end, Cam and Mitchell are in a better place.
“What?” you say, cocking an eyebrow. “You’re a writer. Words are your thing.”
Yes. I am a writer. I write pretty much every weekday, rolling around in words like a puppy in a laundry pile. I struggle to find the right words to build worlds my readers can believe in. In each book, whether fiction or nonfiction, I strive to tell “true” stories.
In my “happy place”
It’s a perfect job for an introvert like me, defined, as Susan Cain does in QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING, as a person who prefers low stimulation environments. Give me a park over a mall, a dinner with friends over a kegger. My happy place is unplugged, in the wilderness, with people I love.
So why is it that time and time again during my writing day, I turn to Twitter and Facebook for that uniquely extroverted cacophony that is social media?
But I also turn to Twitter and Facebook for connection. Sometimes real conversations ensue (like a recent one with Olivia Croom on what constitutes a “challenging” read for adults), and I’ve built genuine friendships that started on Twitter and extended into real life. What would I do without @kiersi,@quickmissive, @heidi_schulz, and @teribrownwrites?
Sometimes though, I log into social media feeling a little desperate, wanting someone, anyone to reach out to me. That rushing stream of over-stimulating snippets washes over me, and I’m left feeling like I did at 16 flipping through a copy of Vogue Magazine, lumpy, unfashionable, and definitely left out of the conversation.
In short, overwhelmed.
“Oh, you introvert you!”
Exactly! But the article (which of course I found on my Twitter feed) that really spurred this blog post is by Luke O’Neil and came out on Esquire.com. Click through and read THE YEAR WE BROKE THE INTERNET: AN EXPLANATION, AN APOLOGY, A PLEA. O’Neil’s thesis is that what he calls “Big Viral” is killing journalism.
As our information gathering moves online, we have to swim in this great, gushing mess. The “news” portals that dominate are the ones that generate the most click-throughs. These new media outlets need their headlines to go viral. As O’Neil, a journalist guilty himself of feeding this beast, points out:
“You don’t need to write anymore–just write a good headline and point. If what you’re pointing at turns out to be a steaming turd, well, then repackage the steam and sell it back to us.”
He illustrates this point with the “news” stories that went viral and turned out to be bogus (e.g. snow on the Sphinx, Samsung paying Apple $1 billion in nickels, etc).
“Uh, Amber?” you say. “Where are you going with this?”
I read this this article and thought Oh, shit, I’m part of the problem. I’ve clicked on those links to celebrity side boobs. I’ve wandered in the morass of BuzzFeed and UpWorthy. I’ve “shared” and “liked” in a millisecond.
I don’t want to be part of the problem. I want my words to matter, and I want them to further connections with real humans.
Last night, my family was eating out at one of our favorite restaurants (The Rendezvous Grill in Welches, btw), and I was telling them about an interview I’d read by Megan Garber with Sherry Turkle, an MIT psychologist, who has written ALONE TOGETHER: WHY WE EXPECT MORE FROM TECHNOLOGY AND LESS FROM EACH OTHER and is working on a follow-up book called RECLAIMING CONVERSATION. My son pointed out a couple across the room sitting together and staring into their iPhones. Alone together.
In the article, Garber writes:
“The conclusion [Turkle has] arrived at while researching her new book is not, technically, that we’re not talking to each other. We’re talking all the time, in person as well as in texts, in emails, over the phone, on Facebook and Twitter. The world is more talkative now, in many ways, than it’s ever been. The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.”
“So what are you going to do about?”
I’m not planning on turning into a rogue, anti-technology hermit, but I am resolving not to be part of the problem. No more side boob links. No more sharing things from viral sites. Instead, I’ll take time to think before I “share.” I will continue to post and tweet good reporting and spread the word about opportunities that will help my fellow creatives, and perhaps most importantly, I’m going to focus on online interactions that build connections and could help us to “reclaim conversation.”
My sweet friend, Heidi, has this thing about giraffes. You’ll have to ask her therapist for the details but her tall-necked aversion means that every single time I see a giraffe, I think of Heidi.
On Wednesday, I stumbled across a paper mache giraffe collapsed in the back of a truck. (Yeah, these kinds of things really do happen in Portland.) I pulled over, parked the car, and ran back to snap a picture for her.
When I was younger I was a ballet dancer. For every birthday, I got ballet-themed gifts–earrings, t-shirts, books, teddy bears wearing tutus. It was my thing.
Now I got sick of the pink satin shoes, and Heidi probably gets sick of the giraffe references (especially since she thinks they’re creepy), but I realize that obsessions are good for writers.
These are the quirky things that find their way into our work. They are the topics we sink our teeth into and just can’t let go. I love documentaries about people’s obsessions–competitive scrabble, beauty pageants, Dr. Bronner’s magic soap. Our obsessions go hand in hand with our creativity. They help us get our weird on and that is what leads to authentic voice.
Don’t listen to the foolish unbelievers
who say forget.
Take up your armful of roses and
remember them
the flower and the fragrance.
When you go home to do your sitting
in the corner by the clock
and sip your rosethorn tea
It will warm your face and fingers
and burn the bottom of your belly.
But as her gone-ness piles in white,
crystal drifts,
It will be the blossom of her moment
the warmth on your belly,
the tiny fingers unfolding,
the new face you’ve always known,
That has changed you.
Take her moment, and hold it
As every mother does.
She will always be
your daughter
And when the sitting is done you’ll find
bitter grief could never poison
the sweetness of her time.
Today we said goodbye to Bones, our four-year-old gerbil. He was good dude. He loved it when he got a new house. He cruised on his wheel. All he needed to be happy was a toilet paper tube and some black oil sunflower seeds. Bones mastered the simple life.
And though I know he was only a gerbil, I also know his death accumulates like falling snow upon the drift I carry with me. His passing is but a whisper of bigger storms yet it brings the greater blizzards back full force. It reminds me that loss accumulates, the weight of layer upon layer of snow builds. It does not melt. It births a glacier.
Glaciers sculpt the land and spawn rivers. Loss is a force of nature, shaping me.
Sometimes a day starts with sunshine and coffee and tears. Not chest wracking sobs, but the tears that spill from fullness. From a night spent with friends who let you talk about your lost daughter. From the day ahead, which will bring a novel—a work of time and grief and healing— to fruition. From the way cottonwood seeds fall like snow but also rise on invisible thermals like tiny hawks. Sometimes it is enough to love the ones who can not love you back. To inhabit your body with its catalog of pains and pleasures. To be on land that brings forth food. And to remember.
I have this spectacularly epical (thanks MB for coining the best word ever) critique group called Viva Scriva and each and every member is someone I want to hug tightly and feed cookies for ever and ever. Today, however, I must call out Scriva Liz for straight talk.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to find my way back into a manuscript about a teen boy and an eleven-year-old girl thrown together by tragedy. The lovely Kiersi B. calls it THE FAULT IN OUT STARS meets INTO THE WILD–an apt pitch. Anyway, I worked hard on it during the winter and had made it to about 50K words. The first two parts were in decent shape. The last part was a hodge-podge of disconnected scenes and gaping holes.
As I re-read those 50K words, there was no glimmer or spark. I felt flat and worried that it was crap. I complained to Scriva Liz (who has read early pieces of it) about how unenthused I was to work on it (even though my agent wants me to finish it right away). I wondered aloud if my poor response to it was because it wasn’t good or didn’t have the legs to carry a novel-length story. She looked at me and restrained herself from a dope slap (I’m extemporizing here) and said, “You feel that way because it’s such a hard book to write.”
Face palm.
Yeah.
This book draws heavily on my own grief following the death of my first daughter, Esther. It’s not a fun one to write. No swash-buckling. No make-outs. Lots of pain, and I hope, lots of heart. But it is a story I need to tell, and thanks to Liz, I got to work. I’m making great progress. I’m in the zone, and I’m even glad to be writing it.
What does this have to do with kayaks, you ask? Well, also thanks to Liz, I jammed through my writing goal early this morning (1300+ words, thank you very much) and played hooky for the rest of the day. We kayaked from Hayden Island up to a floating restaurant, drank margaritas, and gabbed. It was 80 degrees and we were feeling the love.
As I send you off into the weekend, I hope you have a good one, and I hope you have a Scriva Liz!
This now is it.
Your deepest need and desire is satisfied by this moment’s energy here in your hand.
-Rumi
I know I’ve written about the marvelous book FLOW by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi before, but as I sit here on Sunday morning, dazed by sleep-deprivation thanks to a daughter’s sleepover gone wrong, this quote by Rumi is bouncing in my brain.
THIS NOW IS IT.
I know flow–the state of being so focused and absorbed in an activity that everything else fades away. I have known it while writing (best thing ever) and kneading bread dough and being in my garden and while running and while braiding my daughter’s hair…
I’m good at hard work and I’m good at focus. What I suck at is contentment. The part of flow that eludes me is accepting all the things that circumnavigate my life. Many things–all out of my control–slam against my consciously constructed life.
This morning, I remind myself THIS NOW IS IT and slip into the flow (yawning).
Transmedia storytelling refers to the delivery of story through a variety of media. These forms can include film, graphic novels, traditional books, flash fiction, gaming, iPhone/iPad delivery of content, and various forms of audio. Typically, story lines are interwoven and connected but not strictly repetitive. Often, fan engagement and participation in the creative process are facilitated by social media.
Increasingly, all media forms—books, movies, games and TV shows—are looking for transmedia opportunities. During this session, Amber will introduce transmedia storytelling and show how the Angel Punk team (www.angelpunk.co) delivers story via novel, feature film, comic books, and an interactive fan site with an emphasis on the creative process.
