Reservations Advised

Hi everyone -- thanks so much for all the support on Dead Girl, Live Boy! You guys rock! Here's a little bit about the experience of writing it.

I've been working on Dead Girl, Live Boy for a long time. A very long time. As a child, I loved Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews, a book about money, secrets, and consensual brother/sister incest among other things. I finally convinced my mother to buy it for me when I was starting the fifth grade. I read it many times, mostly for the sex scenes which provided my early sex education which explains way more than I want it to explain. But most importantly, I could relate to the claustrophobic environment that V.C. Andrews described and to the necessary element in any good book, the strangeness and familiarity of it.

I tricked myself into writing something longer than my usual short stories with Dead Girl, Live Boy. I told myself each was worked alone. Of course, they don't but I didn't need to know that fact. It kind of reminds me of the way I learned to swim --by someone edging farther and farther away from me until I could make it from one end of the pool to the other without realizing it. And I didn't set out to write anything I could imagine as remotely marketable. It was in all way the proverbial labor of love, a weird term to apply to such a dark book, but even so. I wrote about characters I loved and a city I love. I remember finishing it one winter Sunday afternoon in late February, reaching the edge of the pool before I even knew it was there.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them." ~A.A. Milne

Cocktail Hour
Weeds Season Six out on dvd today!

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!