Livvie turns one!

My little Livvie Owen has been out in the world for one year today. In her honor, I will ask you a question.

What would your dream home look like? Feel like? Smell like? Is it a house? A cabin? A mansion? How many rooms? How many people to fill those rooms? How did you come by it and how long will you live there? These are the questions Livvie would ask you if she met you. She wouldn't quite look at you and she wouldn't quite be sure how to word them, but these are the things she would want to know.

Ten Weeks

Ten weeks now till BODY OF WATER.

Let me tell you about the first week in the campground.

It was only an adventure, only another chapter in our fictional lives. We were raised to believe we were characters in books, taught that adversity was fodder for plot, that conflict kept the pages turning. Most chapters had a happy ending. My parents were still the authors and we kids were in charge of the dialogue and a few of the illustrations. We didn’t have to worry much. My parents would find a way to wrap up this chapter neatly.

That summer must have been so hard for them. There are days I can’t write characters through hardship and my parents had to write three real-life girls through it. But if it was hard, they never let on. If they were scared, they never let on. We were on a camping trip, which we’d never been on before. Tents and campground passes were a luxury we could only afford if we weren’t frittering our money away on silly things like rent. This was a treat, this camping trip. This was a once-in-a-lifetime plot twist.

The first week, everything was new and we couldn’t stop giggling. We walked barefoot on hot pavement. We held our breaths past the big blue dumpsters you could smell for half a city block. We were careful of glass. We swam on the campground side of the lake, not the beach side, just to prove we weren’t afraid of the sucking mud and the hidden marine life. We had splash fights. We ate from the vending machines. We sat on the warm dryers in the laundry room come evening and we watched other campers bed down in their little family groups around their campfires and we scoffed at the ones who brought RVs and televisions. After the first few nights, we felt like old pros compared to the people checking in.

And never mind the people checking out. We didn’t have to worry about that.

They made us switch campsites every two weeks. It was a rule presumably put in place to prevent people like us from living in the campground long term. They had to know. The caretakers of the place, they had to notice that we never left. They had to notice that after the first couple of site changes, we stopped taking the tents down and simply transported them fully-assembled, one at a time on the back of the truck. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed of our brown Nissan, clutching the roll bar with one arm and my tent with the other. We moved from Site One to Site Thirty. Site … 42, perhaps? And 14. I can’t remember them all. And the caretakers of the place, they had to see. But they never said a word, only smiled at us and went on their way.

I wish I knew where those people are now. I would send them copies of BODY OF WATER. And something chocolate. Would S'mores be too much?

I’m supposed to be talking about the first week in the campground, but it’s hard to talk about a single week when the whole summer feels like one sunny blur. I know that the first week, we were still fairly clean and crisp from the luxury of living indoors. We did not miss living indoors. We did not miss beds and chairs and tables. We maybe missed TV a little, but we hadn’t watched that much of it before, and the people at the campground were way more interesting to watch. And maybe, when dusk fell and the sun was still bright enough to dim the campfires and I knew it would be dark soon, it’s possible I missed the nightlight I was embarrassed I had still been using.

But outside dark isn’t scary like inside dark. I slept sound and woke rested, ready for adventure.

Eleven Weeks

Eleven weeks seems like a strange amount of time to mark, unless that's how long you lived in a dome-shaped tent in the summer of '93. For eleven weeks, my sisters and I roamed Battle Run Campground, swimming, and storytelling, and roasting whatever would fit on the end of a stick.

Little bits and pieces of those eleven weeks are always with me. Of course there is the obvious, the crackle of fire and the green splash of lake water, but there's other stuff, too. Like when I unzip my duffel at the Writer's Conference, the noise is exactly like my bedroom door at the campground. Like any time I see initials carved into wood, I think of the names kids carved into the campground's climbing tower, which they tore down years ago. When I wrote my name there, in blue ink from the pen I always carried, I thought it would stay there forever.

In a way, it has.

Eleven weeks from today, BODY OF WATER will be released, and a kid named Ember will tell you about her summer in the campground, so different from mine – but I hope, just as permanent. Once we get there, if you would, take just a second and turn around and look back to this spot right here, and think about how much time that actually is to live in a campground. By the time we left, the tents were worn through and the fires burned low to embers. We were taller and tanner, older and wiser, and we knew how to make a place home.

It's a skill I've used plenty more times over the years. But that's a story for another novel.

My Not-So-Fictional Characters

Funny what makes it in, what stays out. Every little animal I've ever kept has made it, or will make it, into a book. Henry's there already, in the form of Orange Cat in LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE.



You can meet Lola this October when BODY OF WATER is released – she plays the role of Widdershins, at least in my head.



And in my third book, which you will hopefully get to read at some point, my sister-in-law's mean and hateful little poodle, Chewbacca, makes an appearance.

I sort of hate that dog. He broke Lola's nose once, but that occurrence did not make it into either novel.

Sorry, I don't have a picture of Chewbacca. If you really want to know, he looks like a dirty cottonball. With fangs.

Buddy Sunshine, my oversized Rottie mix, did make it into a middle grade novel that has never seen the light of day.



And in my most recent novel, there is a cat named Stella who is a lot like my Sage-cat. Actually, Sagey-Boo was also in LIVVIE, in the form of Gray Cat (although she is clearly not gray).



You know who, quite conspicuously, has never made it into a novel of mine?

These guys:





That first one is Stuff, my very first horse. And the second is my current horse, Magnum.

As a kid, all I ever read were horse stories. When I wasn't reading horse stories, I was visiting a neighbor's horse, or cleaning stalls to pay for riding lessons, or, after I managed to get a horse of my own, out playing in the pasture with him. Sometimes I read horse stories and played in the pasture at the same time:




So guess what? For Camp NaNoWriMo, I am finally writing a horse story! Maybe someday some horse-crazy kid can lie on their horse's back and read it. That's the dream. I am super-serious about this. As serious as Magnum:



Also, eventually, my husband's new pup, Oscar, will have to make it into a novel. Because, OMG, cute.



So how's your Camp NaNo coming?

Milestones

I started seventh grade from a campground. Battle Run Campground in Summersville, West Virginia, to be exact. It's a beautiful place, tree-shaded, lakeside. In fact, it's made up of a sort of sprawling peninsula, surrounded on three sides by shimmery dark-green lake water.

It is the perfect place to vacation.

Up until school started, it was the perfect place to live.

Let me tell you about school nights and school mornings in a campground. Campgrounds are not built for school days. They are built for hazy summer memories of campfires and marshmallows and bathing suits and bicycles.

And, apparently, beer and country music. At least according to the campers at Site 16 next door to me. The campers there stayed up well into the night, blasting Alan Jackson's newly-released "Chattahoochee" over and over.

I'm sure it was shocking to those drunken campers when, at one in the morning, a disgruntled twelve-year-old stuck her head out of her tent and screeched, "Don't you people know it's a school night?"

But it wasn't their fault I couldn't sleep. It was not because of the song.

Up until now, it had been summer. Summer was when you're supposed to stay in a campground, but now it was school time and school time is fall and fall is when you're supposed to rake leaves into neat piles on the flat lawn of your three-bedroom brick ranch-style house with the chain link fence and the one-lane street.

Well, we had the one-lane street. It looped and spun among progressively-empty campsites as September came.

I don't remember being nervous about school, but I do remember being cold. Five-thirty a.m., walking barefoot to the shower house and waiting longer each day for the water to get warm, I cursed the hour and the lack of sun. Why did school have to start so early, anyway? Why didn't they leave time for a swim first?

After school, I came home to the campground and unleashed my stress in the form of a swim, or a gallop on foot around the campground, or a bike ride. It wasn't till darkness gathered, an inch earlier every day, that I remembered about homework. Me and my sisters would stroll down to the shower house, most always empty these days, and set up shop in the laundry room, scribbing in notebooks and watching the storms come, occasionally remembering to do a math problem or to study a spelling word.

It was awesome.

Waking up, and coming home, in a place like Battle Run, well, that was blissful. It was the middle part of the day that stank. Seventh grade was a shock because it was different from anything I had known. People I knew -- a lot of people, since I had attended four elementary schools, two of them twice -- were suddenly taller and meaner. The pressure to conform, to fit in, to be like everybody else was immense, which was a challenge for a very literal kid, since no two people in that school were alike. Everybody had their own problems, their own situations, their own rude comments and their own little hang-ups.

As far as I knew, none of them lived in a campground.

For the first time, I wondered if maybe I wasn't supposed to like where I lived. But I still did.

A while back, I wrote a book about a kid living in a campground. For a lot of reasons, she doesn't love it as much as I did, but a big part of her loves it very much. Which is how most homes are. The book is called BODY OF WATER and it will start seventh grade -- I mean, it will be released -- October 25.

God, I hope it doesn't fit in.

Camp NaNoWriMo!

This morning, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I managed to post a whole blog that was nothing but the letter C.

Then, just now, while attempting to type "while attempting to type," I typed "tpyed."

Then, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I typed, "NanOwrImo."

Then, while attempting to type, "while attempting to type 'while attempting to type'", I typed "tuyped."

And then at some point -- I'm so lost now that I really don't know WHAT I was trying to type, except it included the word "typed" -- I typed "typied."

Maybe I should NaNo in longhand.

At any rate, it's that time. You in?

http://campnanowrimo.org

Stopping and Starting

Every time the bus driver slams on his brakes at a stop sign – I don't understand, he drives this route ten times a day, does he not remember where the stop signs are? Do they sneak up on him? Are they camouflaged until the last second, whipping off their branchy costumes and leaping into the street? – my broken computer hinge gives way and the screen falls backward onto my knees so the computer is lying flat, looking up at the WIC ads and stroller guidelines and rate increase announcements on the ceiling.

There are a LOT of stop signs on this route.

So I'm writing and it goes like this:



I don't know what makes Monday different from every other sweat-in-your-butt-crack just-this-side-of-committing-murder-for-a-cold-drink early August day in Delbarton. Maybe it's the heat, which

*thud*

"Crap."

is holding in the nineties even hours after the sun's gone down. Or it could be Hyacinth's ear infection, which has caused her to scream for three straight nights while I have lain awake on top of the sheets, studying the dead bodies of moths in the light cover. Maybe it's the fact that I am

*thud*

"Crap."

halfway through an ice-cold jug bath, pouring gas station water out of a gallon milk container and shocking my system into full alertness, when I remember our water service was turned back on yesterday and I could be taking a piping hot shower.

Maybe it's Lock Rawley

*thud*

"Crap!"

dying.



And this is about the time I remember that I'm on the 6:45 to Barboursville, which is about as crowded as a bus can get, not counting the inbound Walnut Hills coming back from Wal-Mart. I've got headphones in, so I can't hear the repeating litany of thud-crap, thud-crap all the way out Route 60.

Odd, nobody else this morning is wearing headphones. Except for the lady who is asleep against the window with her purse slowly spilling off her lap into the aisle, and the woman with a cell phone pressed to one ear and her palm pressed to the other – presumably to block out the noise of my computer being shaken to pieces -- everybody can hear everything I'm doing.

So now I'm making a conscious effort not to throw a minor hissy fit every time the bus skids to a halt, and it seems to me like the bus driver is making a conscious effort to come to a sudden stop at least once per mile. I think his goal is for my computer screen to detach completely and fly up the length of the bus and shatter on the “Passengers Must Remain Behind The Yellow Line” sign.

I think it is safe to say I'm not going to get much writing done this morning.

This office sucks.