An Easy, Yummy, Low-Calorie Summer Dessert

I had somehow never heard of this before the July 2012 O, the Oprah Magazine, but boy, is it easy and delicious:

1.  Peel and cut a banana up into one- or two-inch chunks. (You'll want at least one banana for each of the people as you plan to serve, and maybe two for yourself.)

2. Put the chunks in the freezer for at least three hours.

3. Place the frozen banana in a food processor and process it until it's smooth, thick, and creamy.  (It will take several minutes.)

Voila! All-banana ice cream! You can mix in chocolate chips, chocolate sauce, nuts, frozen strawberries . . . I bet a little milk or vanilla yogurt would make it even creamier. And the article says this also works fabulously with mango.

A Common Sense Constitutional Argument for the Legality of Same-Sex Marriage in the United States

Most of this is pretty obvious (and/or was established by the Prop 8 decision in California), but I decided I wanted to write it all out for the next time I argue about it with someone from high school on Facebook. I am not a lawyer, clearly, and if someone with more expertise in civil law than I have can disprove these statements legally, please, don't spend your time leaving a comment:  The pro-Prop 8 lawyers need you, and you should get in touch with them instead.

1. The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

2. Because we do not have any officially established religion, whether Christianity or Hinduism or Islam or Shintoism or Wicca, our government's laws are not and should not be dictated by any religious laws or prohibitions.

2A. We have a civil government and not a religious one.  

Opinion: This is right and good for everyone, including religious people, because it enables multiple religions the freedom and protection to flourish, and also frees people to choose not to practice any religion at all. Certainly each religion may believe it is the only right and true one; but it must win influence through speaking to the hearts and minds of individuals, not through imposing its will upon everyone.

Opinion II: Do not bust out that the "Founding Fathers were Christian" stuff. Many of the Founding Fathers were Deists at most; all of them were well aware of the corrosive influence of religious and denominational wars in Europe (because, indeed, many of their ancestors came to America to escape those religious conflicts or persecution altogether); and if they did intend the United States to be governed by Christian law, for some reason they did not write it into the Constitution, which means it's not part of our law now:  "no law respecting an establishment of religion" is.

Opinion III: As I understand it, the Judeo-Christianist opposition to homosexuality arises almost entirely out of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, which declares "men lying with men as they do with women" "detestable" or "an abomination." While the exact translation of these verses is much debated, I think it's perfectly fair for Christianists and their fellow fundamentalists to use them to judge others' behavior . . . so long as they hold to that same ancient Leviticus standard in their own behavior, meaning they should not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (19:19) or cut their sidelocks or beards (19:27), and women should be considered unclean and isolate themselves during their periods (15:19-33). [Ideally in this scenario, adulterers would be put to death (20:10), but our civil law prevents that.] Otherwise, these fundamentalists are being inconsistent in their application of the law. I do not see many non-Hasidic people, and especially many Christianists, abiding by these standards. 

3. While a marriage may be conducted under or ratified by a religious body, it has civil and legal ramifications regarding rights, property, and responsibilities.

3A. Therefore it can and should be regulated by civil law (and indeed, for heterosexuals, it already is). 

4. The Fourteenth Amendment reads, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" (emphasis mine).

5.  Right now, our federal civil law grants only heterosexuals the right to marry the people they love.

6. This means that gays and lesbians are being denied that equal protection of the law, and having their privileges abridged.

N.B. Two LGBT people who wish to be married love each other with the same strong romantic feelings as two heterosexual people who wish to be married. (Opinion:  I include this because the Biblical focus on sex often means that people opposed to this appear to ignore the love; and they should consider what it might feel like to have the government prevent them from legally uniting with the person of the opposite gender whom they love, and thereby gaining all the rights that marriage grants.)

7. As this is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, same-sex civil marriage should be legal.

8. No heterosexual person's rights will be infringed or marriage will be diminished or damaged by this.

9. As per the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, the government cannot and should not force religious bodies to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies. 

That is all. 

All-Blogging August (Plus Ask Me Anything)

This year has been a whirlwind where I've flown somewhere every single month, edited a bunch of books, ran a half-marathon, spoke at five writing conferences, attended three weddings, and started planning my own. It's been a lot of fun, but my dear and beloved blog has definitely been a casualty of this busyness, as I've barely been able to keep up with one post a month, much less the one a week I aim for. And that "dear and beloved" isn't sarcasm; I subscribe to E. M. Forster's doctrine that "I know what I think when I see what I say," and I've missed my opportunity to think out loud here.

But I am going to be home in New York for all of August! So I'm trying something slightly crazy for me:  posting every single day of the month. I want to catch up on writing about some great new books that came out this year, explain the specification experiment from June, talk about repetitions, do some Quote Files, recipes, and poetry, fulminate, ruminate, extrapolate. If you have any questions you'd like to see me answer about writing or publishing (or heck, anything else), please leave them in the comments or send them along via e-mail to chavela_que at yahoo dot com. . . . I can't promise I'll respond to everything, but I appreciate the prompts. 

Here is the best thing I saw today, just outside my building on my way to work:

A young man rides his bike on the sidewalk toward me and an older lady.
Older Lady: You should NOT ride your BIKE on the SIDEWALK! You're supposed to be on the STREET! Our traffic laws give you your own lanes -- on the STREET! 
Young Man, as he rides by: Okay, Officer!
Older Lady:  I'm not an officer, I'm a concerned citizen! SCOFFLAW!

In honor of this awesome lady with the admirable vocabulary, I challenge you to use "scofflaw" in a sentence.

Book of the Moment: GOLD MEDAL SUMMER by Donna Freitas

As I write this, five teenage American girls just spun, leapt, flipped, backflipped, somersaulted,  cartwheeled, rounded off, back layovered, front walkovered, kipped, pirouetted, cried, hugged, and stuck the landings on their way to a gold medal. It was extremely awesome. And I felt like I knew a little bit more about what they were going through on the inside, thanks to this book:

Gold Medal Summer is the story of Joey Jordan, a fourteen-year-old gymnast who's struggling to focus in the midst of a welter of distractions:  a coach who doesn't appreciate her style; a best friend who's thinking of quitting; a cute new boy who's just moved to town; an older sister who's a past National Champion (comparisons much?); and parents who aren't exactly Aly Raisman's. But even with all of this, Joey loves her sport and works hard at getting better at it, as she dreams of having her gold medal summer.

Donna competed in gymnastics herself until she was fifteen, and thus it's filled with true-life descriptions of what it's like to do a kip on the bar or tumble through a floor routine in a minute flat. It's also got a wonderful emotional heart about learning to stand up for yourself, even when it's scary, and believing you can accomplish what you want to do. It is exactly the book I would have wanted to read when I was ten years old and daydreaming about gymnastics -- all about friends, doing flips on the beach, and waving from that podium at the end of the day:  so spirited and fun and sweet, it can't help but leave a smile on your face. If you have the chance to pick it up this Olympics, I hope you enjoy it!

More acclaim:

• Rebecca Stead said of it, "This book is like a perfect cartwheel--immensely fun and satisfying."
• And (fellow former gymnast) Linda Sue Park said, "I loved the gymnastics in Gold Medal Summer, but I was even more impressed with the relationships."
• Donna blogged about the book and the Olympics for the Scholastic blog and did a great Q&A with NYMetroParents.
• And it was seen on the Today Show last week!
• You can hear a sample of the audiobook here.

 Buy it from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound

A Second Specification Experiment

Longtime readers of the blog may remember this Silly Specification Experiment -- later discussed in Second Sight -- where I asked you all to watch a short video and then write a sentence or two describing what I was doing, with the results later analyzed here. Now I'm interested in doing that again, this time with a still:

The assignment:  Without looking at anyone else's entry, spending no more than ten minutes and 250ish words, and writing in your natural voice, describe this accumulation of objects, and leave your answer in the comments. I know the picture is dark, so I'll list the items included here (in no particular order) in case identification is useful:  a pepper shaker; a container of sugar and fake sugar packets; a doily; a glass votive with a lit candle; a mechanical pencil; a salt shaker; and a vase with a rose in it. How you describe, arrange, and elaborate on those objects in prose is entirely up to you.

As with the previous experiment, the hypothesis and rationale will be given at a near-future date; in the meantime, again rest assured there are no wrong answers here. And thank you to all who participate!

Two Programs that Keep the Internet from Eating Your Soul + Giveaway Winners!

"Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet." -- Zadie Smith's rules for writers

I worship Ms. Smith in all things (and she has a new novel coming this autumn -- hooray!), and I would gladly take her advice here. But I also need the Internet frequently for things that are still related to my job:  title and author research, fact-checking, Thesaurus.com. So while I can't disconnect my computer completely, there are two programs that I've found incredibly effective in helping me get away from the Internet and stay focused while I'm working; and I thought I'd write a little about them here, just in case you haven't discovered them yet.

1) Freedom. Download this and you can lock yourself out of the Internet completely for a set number of minutes. If you need to get on the Internet before the set time expires, you'll have to restart your computer. As the site observes, its effect is as much psychological as it is practical; you know you cannot be distracted by Twitter, say, and therefore it's easier to concentrate on the offline work to be done, because Twitter (and all of the Internet) is simply not an option. (The same software designer also has a program called Antisocial that will lock you out of social networking sites, but still access the Internet for research. It is Mac-only, however.) My author Lisa Yee is a proud user of Freedom, and she did a great interview with its creator last year.

2) Leechblock. Rather than being a standalone program like Freedom, this is a plugin for Firefox, which allows you to establish set periods of time during which you cannot access certain favorite sites. It's fairly easy to override your own blocks, though, unless you use the advanced lockdown, at which point it will actually kick you OFF these sites at the set time and then keep you from accessing the override. For instance, I have it set that I can't use Twitter after 10 a.m. on weekdays, so if I'm typing a tweet at 9:59 and the clock ticks over to 10, BOOM -- Twitter is done for me till 12:15 (I let myself look at it again on my lunch break). The fact that it imposes the discipline on me makes it even more useful than Freedom, which requires my active thought and will to quit surfing.

Someday, we will all be Zen monks of writing and time and thought management and not need programs like these. (And writers, if there are any other programs your fellow procrastinators should know about, please leave them in the comments.) Until then, I am grateful to the software purveyors for making these programs available, and I wish all of us the best with our work.

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The winners of the giveaway from my last post are Eliza T, GraceAnne, Clifton, Diane, Darshana, Pat Zietlow Miller, Jen, and Tina Radcliffe. (They were selected randomly by my fiance, after I ordered him to give me eight numbers between one and twenty-eight and he obeyed. We still don't know where we're going on vacation.) Winners:  Please e-mail me at chavela_que at yahoo dot com with your addresses and any title preferences you might have, and I'll try to get the galleys out this week.

And you know what? I never picked a winner for this giveaway back in February! James just picked the winner here too, and it's DustySE. Dusty, send my your address likewise, and I'll send you a real book. Thanks to all for participating!

The Scholastic Fall 2012 Librarian Preview + Giveaway

Now live and in your computer! It's your chance to see me and many of my Scholastic colleagues talking about the books we're publishing and love. Here's the whole thing, just under an hour long:



Or you can go to the preview page to view the preview by age range or formats. My books are, in the middle-grade section:

• Stealing Air by Trent Reedy (with a special appearance by Trent himself!)
• The Encyclopedia of Me by Karen Rivers (a book that came to me as a SQUID!)
• The Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda (presented jointly with Arthur, who represents Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities by Mike Jung)

And in YA, Amber House, by Kelly Moore, Tucker Reed, and Larkin Reed, a very smart mother-and-daughter team.

I'll give away two galleys of each of them, to eight commenters chosen at random. Your task, commenters: Tell my fiance & me where we should go on vacation this summer. We can't decide.

Diversity in Children's Publishing: Some Conversations

For the past couple of years, I've had the privilege of being involved with an amazing group of editors discussing issues of diversity in children's literature. This group became an official Children's Book Council committee last fall, and this spring, we've had a series of events to mark our official debut. You can read more about the history and goals of the committee in this great Publishers Weekly article, and better still, you can hop over to the www.cbcdiversity.com website, and read the words of the committee and our guest bloggers there. This past week was an especially interesting one, with a series of posts entitled "It's Complicated!", from:

• A writer: Cynthia Leitich Smith, offering an impassioned plea for writers to recognize the need for diversity in their books
• An agent:  Stefanie von Borstel, who writes about her search for diverse authors to represent, with a couple of success stories
• An editor:  Me, talking a little (and eventually at length) about parts of my acquisition processes and issues of believability
• A reviewer:  Debbie Reese, whose posts on child_lit and her American Indians in Children's Literature blog are consistently thought-provoking.

If you hop on over there, as I hope you will, do please also check out the archives, where the members of the committee write about the paths that got them into publishing, and the conversations in the comments -- on this week's posts especially.

My Two Favorite Writing Things This Month

I was talking with a writer a few weeks ago, and she noted that one of her favorite writing lessons had come from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park and The Book of Mormon, among many other imaginative and foul-mouthed productions. After she described the principle, I went and looked up Messrs. Parker and Stone talking about it, and found this fantastic video from MTVu:


I like their advice on moving on at 2:40 -- when you stop learning from a project, it's probably time to stop fiddling with it and try something else. But I love, love, LOVE what they say around 3:58 about "Therefore," "But," and "And Then." As I wrote it out for my recent Plot Master Class (giving full credit to the gentlemen):

So much as it is possible in a manuscript, every scene should be followed by another scene that dramatizes either a “Therefore” or a “But,” not an “And Then.” So if, in one scene, a girl has intimate eye contact with a beautiful male vampire, the next scene should either dramatize the consequences of that eye contact, which will likely raise the stakes or escalate the emotion—THEREFORE she kisses him; or introduce a complication/obstacle—BUT she remembers she hates vampires, so she drives a stake through his heart. If they continue to stare into each other's eyes, or maybe they just get some tea, that’s an AND THEN—nothing new is happening, because it’s at the same level of emotion as the previous action, and so while movement is occurring in the plot, it isn't necessarily dramatic action. And action is ultimately what keeps readers reading:  change, challenge, consequence, growth, for a character in whom they're invested.
 
(There is one other category here, which is "Meanwhile": If, MEANWHILE, the girl’s werewolf best friend was running shirtless through the woods, and came upon a rabbit and ate it, that’s an acceptable followup scene to the eye contact, because you're following a different plotline. But the rabbit scene would then need its own BUT or THEREFORE, and I would hope to heaven that you ended the eye-contact scene in an interesting place, so that readers will be excited to switch back to that plotline and find out what happens there.)

My other Favorite Writing Thing of late is DAVID MAMET'S MEMO TO THE WRITERS OF "THE UNIT," which I put in all caps because by God, this is an all-caps document. This applies more to TV writers than to novelists, who do not have the camera to convey information. But every scene in either medium should involve a character's desire, for certain, for an object or something emotional from another person or an answer to the internal question that he's trying to work through; and it's very useful to identify that desire when you're going back to revise a scene, and then show how the character has that desire satisfied, changed, or denied through the course of the scene's action.

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While I'm here, a little conference stuff:

I will make a guest appearance at the Highlights Revision Retreat and Critique Group Recharge at the end of May. Spots are still available if you'd like to join for the week!

Since I was not a winner in the New York City Marathon lottery, alas, and hence will not be running three-plus hours on the weekends in the autumn (though why I feel "alas" about this, I'm not sure), I have an opening in my schedule this fall, and would be up for a conference or my Plot Master Class in either September or November, should anyone still be looking for an speaker.

And I'm also on the faculty for the pretty damn amazing-looking Speakeasy Literary Society Retreat next April in Lake Tahoe, California.

Egomaniacal Link & News Roundup

Because it's all about me and my books; because I haven't posted in forever; and because ... I'm sorry, my creative/essay/thoughtful-blog-post-writing muscle seems to be taking some time off for the time being. This may have to do with the fact that I've been exercising all my other muscles a lot -- training for some long runs -- and also writing a lot of editorial correspondence; and also sharing a lot of my immediate thoughts on Twitter (meaning, if you follow me there, this post might be quite boring for you. But I'll throw in a joke to make it worth your time). Thank you for stopping by as ever.

(The physical training paid off, I must say:  This morning I ran my fastest 10K ever, in 57:57! I give all credit to Rihanna and this extremely earwormy song.)

Erin Saldin's wonderful The Girls of No Return is reviewed in the New York Times today! Elissa Schappell calls it "A smart, absorbing story about damaged girls realizing how hard it is to connect with other people when you don’t trust anyone," and damn straight. It's racked up another starred review, too, from the BCCB.

Trent Reedy and I recently talked about writing across cultures (and editing books written across cultures, like his Words in the Dust) for the website Women on Writing. Words in the Dust also recently won both the Christopher Award and a Golden Kite Honor Award, and I know I speak for Trent when I say how much we appreciate his hard work being recognized. (The lovely Uma Krishnaswami also did a terrific in-depth interview with Trent on the subject of writing across cultures last summer: Part 1 and Part 2.)

This checklist of Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books for Racism & Sexism is another great resource if you're trying to write or read books outside your culture. And Teju Cole's thoughts on sentimentality and "The White Savior Industrial Complex" are worth keeping in mind as well.

Guus Kuijer won the Astrid Lindgren Award! His The Book of Everything is a wonder -- one of those books people still discover and then write to thank us for publishing it -- and an adaptation of it will open on Broadway later this month.

This Tor.com review of Above, by Leah Bobet, made me do a fist-pump on the street, because it fully appreciates the magnitude of what Leah accomplishes in that book, and that is an exceedingly rare thing for a review to do, sadly (sometimes because of space issues, sometimes because of reviewer-book chemistry). (Beware major spoilers, though.) It also got a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which called it "a dark, dazzling tale." When my thoughtful-blog-post-writing muscle comes back, I'm looking forward to talking more about this novel, which you should check out in stores now. 

Vicky Alvear Shecter shares a deleted scene from Cleopatra's Moon and a little bit of the editorial/authorial thinking that went into it being deleted. I'd add to what she says that it's not just about tone, it's also about pacing, and this scene came very early in the book, when the young Selene was just starting to become aware of the conflict between Rome & Egypt that will shape the rest of her life (and the novel). And it felt more important to me as a reader/editor to get into that conflict quickly than to have what is definitely a very sweet moment. If the scene had come later in the book, at a moment when the action was already humming along nicely, we might have kept it there.

My alma mater, Carleton College, interviewed me and fellow alum Kathleen Odean about the Meghan Cox Gurdon foofaraw last summer. (Or was it a kerfuffle? Both, I think.)

And the super-interesting and smart blog The Whole Megillah asked me some insightful questions about Second Sight, writing, and revision. Which I then answered.

The joke: What do you call a dyslexic agnostic insomniac? A person who stays up all night wondering if there is a dog.

I recently received copies of the second printing of Second Sight -- yay! -- and the book was mentioned by commenters on Jennifer Crusie's website as a recommended writing book -- double yay! (And many thanks, Robena, if you're out there.) Jennifer Crusie is one of my very favorite writers, so it was a thrill to see my book on her site. ("My name and book title went through her brain!" I think. "Even if it was just in cutting and pasting the title in! Wow!") 

Here's a non-me link: If you're looking for a writing skills tune-up, I bet Ms. Crusie's forthcoming series of online writing workshops, The Writewell Academy for Wayward Authors, will be pretty amazing.

And another one, if you need inspiration:  Dear Sugar/Cheryl Strayed's excellent advice to "Write Like a Mofo." I'm reading her memoir Wild now, and it is terrific.

Other things I've been loving:  the return of Mad Men; this recipe for spaghetti with Brussels sprouts; 21 Jump Street -- an unexpected delight; this list of "Lines from The Princess Bride That Double as Comments on Freshman Composition Papers" (or Manuscripts); string cheese.

There, now it is no longer about me. Go forth and write like mofos.