Blogfest 2009

*In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the end of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.*

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when my dad read me those lines for the very first time, but I still remember the magic of them, and the way they filled me up with wonder. I was only four or five, but from the moment I heard those first lines of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I was a fantasy fan for life. I could *see* that hobbit hole, I could understand the everyday life of the hobbits inside it, and I knew for the first time that magic was real.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that The Hobbit is a really funny book, full of fabulously real characters, whether they’re powerful wizards or treasure-hunting dwarves, who get irritated at each other for utterly ordinary reasons and get grumpy when they’re hungry or it’s raining. That combination of real people and dazzling magic captured my imagination for life. I read The Hobbit and all three of the Lord of the Rings books over and over again, and from there I went on to read and love hundreds of other wonderful fantasy adventures, from CS Lewis’s Narnia books to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld comedy-adventures and, more recently, Sarah Prineas’s Magic Thief books. If a book had humor and truth and magic all mixed in together, I was a fan, and I still am.

But that wasn’t the only kind of book I fell in love with. A few years later, my parents pulled a double whammy: my mom gave me a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and my dad read me Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And I fell in love, hopelessly and forever. From that moment on, my very favorite fantasy setting was a real place and time: nineteenth-century England, and especially Jane Austen’s Regency era. I devoured every Regency romantic comedy I could find, and every Gothic romance, too. (In my book A Most Improper Magick, my heroine teases her proper oldest sister for having a secret love of Gothic romances. Guess what? I share that love, times a zillion. Some of them are so, so silly, and yet…yeah. Sigh. I just can’t help it.) Just like my favorite fantasy adventures, Regency romances took place in a world very different from my own, filled with wonderful characters and lots of humor – and they added a dollop of romance to make me even happier. They were only missing one thing: magic. And as I grew up loving the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer (especially The Talisman Ring and The Reluctant Widow) and Clare Darcy (Eliza!), I kept thinking, *if only they could do magic, too….*

So I guess it makes sense that, as an adult writer, I’m writing exactly the books I always wanted to read: Regency romantic comedies filled with magic and adventure.

What about you guys? If you could combine two different kinds of books, which kinds would they be? And what are your favorite books?

Here are some things people who know me have told me in the past:
‘Don’t be so afraid to speak your mind!’
‘You have to be more assertive!’
‘If you would only say what you really wanted…’

Now here are some things people might say about Kat, the heroine of my new trilogy:
‘Isn’t there anything she won’t do?’
‘OMG, she’ll say ANYTHING!’
‘She breaks all the rules!’

So I guess it makes sense that people who know me might think that Kat is my total opposite. But guess what? Kat is totally me. Of course, she’s growing up in totally different circumstances, and we are different people in lots of ways – but when I’m writing Kat, I am filled with pure happiness, because I can let myself loose through her in a way that I never can in real life. Kat is recklessly brave, she is utterly confident, and she’s ready to do ANYTHING to protect her family, whether it’s chopping off her hair and disguising herself as a boy, punching an attacker in the face, or even turning highwayman to win what’s most important.

Here’s something else: when I was writing the first book in Kat’s trilogy, I was sick. Really sick, so sick that I couldn’t even get up off the couch. Sometimes, even turning my head made me feel like throwing up. It was awful. I couldn’t do any of the things I used to do, like going on big hikes with my dog or even going to work at my job. I was terrified, especially after I was diagnosed with ME/CFS, a disease without a cure. I didn’t know if I would ever get better, or if I’d ever be able to move easily again.

So getting to write Kat, who is fearlessly physical? I can’t even express how happy that made me. While I was stuck on that couch, balancing my laptop on my stomach, Kat was jumping on horses and tripping over snooty ladies’ skirts. While I was worrying about whether I would ever be active again, Kat was throwing herself with all her heart into saving her oldest sister from a terrible, murderous marriage, and learning all about her own untapped magical powers.

Now it’s been almost two years since I finished writing Kat’s first book, and I’m just starting to write Book 3. I’ve been amazingly lucky with my illness – it’s gone into partial remission, which means I can go on half-hour walks again, I can move around with ease, and I can play with my baby and my dog. But every time I sit down to write Kat, I’m filled with that same feeling of wonderful freedom – that sense that, through her, I can do *anything*. And that feels just as miraculous as ever.

OK, here’s a question. Imagine that you’re walking into your house on a normal weekday evening. Everyone in the family is home. Is the house: (a) serenely peaceful, with only the quiet hum of a single radio to break the silence? Or is it: (b) filled with the competing sounds of two different CDs or radios being played loudly from different rooms, while someone else is watching TV in another room, and voices are raised in noisy debate in the kitchen? Oh, and three different animals are all trying to get you to pet them?

If the answer was (b), then you’re growing up in a house a lot like mine when I was growing up. Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with family life. I grew up in a big, noisy, loving, close-knit family. Even when we were furious at each other (or at any of our extended relations, most of whom were extremely involved in our lives), none of us would ever have questioned that family was the most important thing in anybody’s life.

I grew up with two younger brothers who participated in or observed (and commented on!) all of my most important adventures. I grew up with parents who were caring and aware of just about everything we got up to, good or bad, and who were determined to keep us safe as well as challenging us to grow.

I grew up with the stories of my ancestors from all over the world – from my great-grandfather Moshe, whose family fled to America after a *pogrom* burnt down their house in the Ukraine, to my great-grandmother Katerina, who made the brave choice to follow her childhood sweetheart all the way from Croatia to America, even though it might mean never seeing her home again. All of those ancestors made decisions that caused me to be born. Without those choices, I wouldn’t be alive now.

Sometimes I’ve thought that I had to go away to college to understand who I really was, separate from my family. But the truth is, without my family, I would be a completely different person – and a much, much less happy one. My brothers and parents and I might all live in different cities, now, but they’ll always be one of the most important and beloved parts of my life no matter where I live. Whenever I’m with them, no matter where we are, I’m home.

So it’s not surprising that almost everything I write, from short stories to novels, is somehow about the concept of family: how our families shape and define us for better or worse, how they can cage us in with fear or give us the strength we need to go forward, how we can define ourselves within them, and how we can protect them when they need us. Whether we love our families or curse them, I honestly think we can never truly escape them – and personally, I’m thankful for that.

As I sit down to write this blog entry, it’s a hot, sunny, beautiful day outside. (Even in England we get hot days sometimes! Not very often, though…) My husband just invited me to go out with him and our baby son on a family date to our local Yorkshire pub for thick-cut French fries (my favorite!) and fresh, cold apple juice. It sounds like so much fun! The only problem? I hadn’t done my writing yet for the day.

So…I gritted my teeth and I said no. Now here I am in our cramped office/bedroom, sitting on the bed surrounded by baby blocks and trying to force myself back into my heroine’s mindset instead of just thinking wistfully about hot French fries and a fun afternoon out.

The truth is, that happens a lot. It’s the downside of writing professionally–I have to say “no” a lot. To my husband (who, luckily, understands, since he’s a writer himself); to my friends when they call up wanting to talk in the middle of my writing time; to myself when I just want to take it easy and surf the internet/watch a movie/lie down on the grass outside and soak in the rare English sunshine.

It’s the reason why my husband and I don’t own a television. Having a TV on hand made it too easy to say no to the writing–to say “just one more show first…” and then get to the end of the day without having done our writing first. So we sacrificed the TV. There are things that are genuinely more important than writing–the most important priority in my life, hands-down, is my baby’s health and happiness–and there are things that are less important, like getting to zone out in front of a TV show while my baby sleeps. The biggest way writing has affected my daily life? It’s forced me to figure out my priorities, and to ruthlessly protect them.

So here I am again, sitting on the bed with my laptop instead of sitting in the pub with my French fries, and today, like many days, I found it difficult to say no to the temptation to give up my writing time and have fun instead. But do I honestly regret giving up our TV and choosing a lifestyle where writing gets precedence over relaxation? No way. When writing is going well, it’s SO much more fun than watching TV, it’s like the difference between bright sunshine and the glow from a tiny lightbulb. Even when the writing is hard–even on the days when I struggle to focus and it takes forever to write just 200 measly words–I always, always feel better for having done it. When I get to the end of the day, and I’ve done my writing, I feel satisfied in the same way that athletes feel after exercise–wrung-out and happy and tingling with anticipation. I can’t wait to do it again.

And I wouldn’t give that up for anything.

Have you ever had a Defining Moment? One of those moments in life that you *know* is important, even as it’s happening – a moment that changes you forever?

I still remember my first. I was seven years old, riding in the car with my mom and my younger brother, when it hit me.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom! I have something to tell you.”

“Mm?” my mom said, her eyes on the road. “What’s that, sweetheart?”

“I like something *even more* than reading!” I said.

This was an important announcement. My brother was only 4 at the time, but even he was astonished by it. As everyone in my family knew, I loved reading more than anything else in life.

“I like writing even better,” I said, and I felt everything shift into place inside me. “That’s what I’m going to be,” I said. “I’m going to be a writer.”

My mom and brother may no longer remember that conversation, but I’ll never forget it. It was my first Defining Moment, and it’s stayed true for my entire life. Before then, I’d had all sorts of ideas for what I might be as an adult – an astronomer? an astronaut? a paleontologist? But from that moment onward, I was a girl with a mission: I was going to be a professional writer.

I tried all sorts of different angles. First, because I thought short stories were too hard, I decided to write poetry. Well. I can’t say that worked out too well. I did have one uplifting success – I sold a poem to a kids’ magazine and was thrown into bliss (and excitement – I was going to be paid *$14.00*!) – but then the magazine went out of business without publishing my poem or even paying me. *Sigh*. Luckily, by then I was beginning to realize that I wasn’t a very good poet anyway…and as wonderful as good poetry is, it’s never been my favorite thing to read.

So I turned back to fiction, which was what had sucked me into writing in the first place, and I realized the truth: writing stories *is* hard…but it’s also magic. I fell in love with books when I was tiny, fell in love with the amazement of getting to lie down on the grass next to the lilac bushes in my own back yard and be transplanted to a whole different world, anywhere the author wanted to take me. But writing – well, my seven-year-old self was right: writing really is even better. When I write, I get to write the books that I wish were on the shelves already: the books I most want to read. And that’s the most magical experience of all.

What about you guys? Have you ever had one of those Defining Moments, when you had a major, life-changing realization? And has it still stayed true for you?