photo (c) Timothy Hursley and taken from the Salt Lake City Public Library’s site

I just wanted to draw your attention to the Events page and remind you about next Wednesday’s event at the Salt Lake City Public Library. It’s on August 17th (so just a week away!) and will run from 6-9 p.m. They have lots of fun Matched-based activities beginning at 6:00 and then I’ll speak at 7:00 and sign books afterwards. This event is going to be AWESOME, you guys. They have a scavenger hunt planned, Grandfather’s last meal, etc., etc. all in store for you. And the library is gorgeous. And…

…thanks to the lovely Marie at Penguin, I have two ARCs of CROSSED to give away at the end of the evening! We’ll likely have some kind of drawing and you must be present to win. So I very much hope to see you there!

The questions were great! More than I expected! I thought I’d do some of the ones that required shorter answers first and then the longer ones next week/the week after/until they’re done. Just FYI, if you don’t see your question answered here or in a future post, it’s because I’ve already addressed it either in the FAQ or in one of the posts about writing I’ve done previously (you can find those listed in the categories under “writing” or “a conversation on” or ” q & a” in the sidebar). Or it might be because you posted your question too far after the deadline listed. But don’t worry, we’ll do this again someday!

And here we go…

Leigh said: I was just wondering if you wrote any books before MATCHED that were not published.

The answer to that is no, kind of. I have lots of partial manuscripts that have never been published, but at the time that I wrote MATCHED I had never written a full novel that hadn’t been published. However, after I wrote MATCHED I wrote a book that has never been published. For more info on that, see the next question…

Jenna asked: I have a question–after you finished with Matched and you were looking for your agent, what did you do in terms of your writing schedule? As in, did you start writing the sequel to Matched, or work on a different project, or just focus on the query process?

After I finished writing MATCHED I started right into writing a book for my first publisher. My writing schedule was exactly the same–several hours a day during the week and a full day on Saturdays. I was fairly aggressive with querying (I’d send out about 10 queries per week) but I knew that I wanted to get the next book for my first publisher written. Back then, I had no idea what–if anything–would happen with MATCHED so I wanted to keep going on the other project.

That book has never been published. When everything happened with MATCHED, my first publisher and I talked. I knew I couldn’t write for both (not enough time to do it all well) and they were lovely about wishing me the best and telling me I could come back if I ever wanted to do so. It was hard leaving after all those years together–but it honestly could not have gone better. That book still sits in a file, unfinished. It’s drafted but very messy. I wonder sometimes if I’ll pull it out and look at it again someday.

Both Reading_Life and Ashley R. asked: Can you tell us the title to Book 3?

I’m afraid that I can’t, because we are still talking about it right now. But this blog/twitter will be the first place I post it when the time comes.

Blue asked: Is there a setting in your blog that would enable you to show the dates of your posts?

Probably. But I don’t know how to find it. This makes me crazy too. So if anyone fluent in wordpress can let me know, that would be awesome.

HD asks: What is your favorite part about Cassia’s world in the Society?

The organization. I would love for things in my life to be more organized. Also, not having to cook would be pretty great.

Jenny asks: When you imagined Cassia’s world, what factors of our modern society helped you imagine hers?

Lots of factors–but one of my faves that I mention a lot when I talk about the book is the way that our society is losing the ability to write by hand.

Shannon Hale asked: Why are you so cool?

And I am not cool, but that question pretty much made my day.

I am so excited! On Monday, August 8th, at 8 p.m. EST (6:00 p.m. for those of you who live in MST like I do), I’ll be announcing my tour dates/locations on twitter and facebook. My publisher came up with the very fun idea to announce one date/location every ten minutes for that hour, so we’ll be letting you know one new place every ten minutes. And then, when it’s all over, I’ll post the full tour info on the Events page here on the site.

WOO HOO! I’m so excited about this tour!! I can’t wait to see (hopefully!) many of you!

In the past twelve months, I’ve traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Nashville, Philadelphia, Boston, Orlando, New York City, Minneapolis, Denver, Raleigh, Oxford (Mississippi), Austin, New York again, and maybe someplace I’ve forgotten. I’ve also traveled quite a bit in state (Cedar City, Logan, Tooele) in addition to local events in Provo, Orem, and Salt Lake City. And I’ll be traveling to Portland and Rhode Island and the six cities on this tour and likely some more places in addition to that!

So please, please don’t be mad at me if I’m not coming to your city. There are three reasons for this:

1. My publisher (of course!) gets to decide where I go, and they send me to cities based on interest/sales, etc.
2. I have little kids at home. My parents are saints and come into town (they live three hours away and both have jobs of their own) to take care of my kids while my husband is at work and I’m on tour. I need to be respectful of their schedules/lives, and also of my own children, who do need to have their mom at home most of the time.
3. I also have to be able to have time to write more books.

But, signed copies are always available for purchase at The King’s English (our beautiful and wonderful indie bookstore) and if you order them before the November 1 launch event, I will be able to sign them.

So, I promise, I’m doing the best I can to get as many places as possible!

See you on Monday!!

I’m not going anywhere. I’m still writing every day. But I’m going to take blogging off this week and work like crazy and drink a lot of the minty lemonade my husband likes to concoct. It’s going to be excellent. Then I’ll be back next week for the last few posts about writing/reading.

Is there anything you would like me to write about in those posts? Feel free to leave a comment on this post by Friday, August 5th, 2011 and I’ll do my best to address it next week.

I am reading this:

because in two weeks I get to go here:

and see the play live at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, a Tony-award winning theater company located in my very own hometown of Cedar City, Utah. (Also, if you are a fan of the show Modern Family, click here and look at the picture on the right. Guess who was Oberon in a previous production of MIDSUMMER? My sister alerted me to this particular piece of fantasticness.)

I love, love, love the Festival. I used to work summers at the gift shop(pe). My grandfather was the president at the college at the Festival’s inception. The longtime director, Fred Adams, was in my ward (church congregation) growing up and has come out of retirement to direct this play, which by all accounts is just gorgeous. He is a wonderful, gregarious artist.

When I was little, we used to go to the free greenshow before the play and watch the performers sing and dance. I remember being delighted when my dad was called out of the audience to play the handsome prince in one of the little plays in the greenshow. He was mortified but went along with it. (If you know my dad, you have an idea of how excruciating this kind of thing would have been for him.) I remember my parents buying me lemon tarts from the ladies who carried them in baskets wrapper in clean white linen.

When I was a little older, my grandmother started taking me to a play each summer. She was an usher at the Festival for many years and I thought her blue and gold Shakespearean gown was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She would let me look over the list of the plays that were happening that season and choose which one I’d like to see. Then she’d read through the play with me before we went so that I knew what was happening. I simply cannot think of anything more gorgeous than going to Shakespeare on a summer evening in red rock country. It’s been years since I’ve had the chance and I can’t wait. (Many thanks to my good friend Krista Bulloch for making it all happen and organizing the tickets, etc.!)

My favorite Shakespeare play to teach is MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. My favorite to read might be KING LEAR, and I’m not entirely sure why. It just feels so atmospheric and depressing. Which, apparently, I like.

I also have a soft spot for CYMBELINE, which was the first play my grandmother took me to see. The costumes were so beautiful and I was up so late, with the night peeking in above us in the open-air theater.

I wish my grandmother could come with us. She’s almost ninety-five now and not quite up to a play. But she is the one who first took me to the theater on a summer night so I could watch as dreams and stories came to life under the stars.

A poor-quality picture of my writing corner. Can you find:

1. My computer from 2006 (still ticking! knock on wood).
2. Not one but two water glasses because it’s a pain to have to refill.
3. The copy of Everything is Fine that I still need to mail to the winner of the giveaway (it’s coming! I promise!).
4. Post it notes for my WIP that used to be color coded but are not anymore.
5. A teeny tiny little copy of my Tennyson poetry book.
6. A printer that I hate but use anyway.
7. A plastic tupperware container that I use as a foot rest.

I spend a lot of time in this little corner. It’s in the guest room in the basement and we’ve tried lots of different spots for my desk to be and this is the best one, even though I get kicked out when company comes. It’s air conditioned. It’s far enough removed that I’m not in the middle of everything when I’m trying to write. But it’s also near the laundry room so that when I get stuck I have the ever-present threat of folding socks to keep me going.

I’m not a naturally gifted writer, one who sits down and writes and beautiful things happen. I wrote seven books before I wrote MATCHED. It took me a long time to get better.

People e-mail me and ask me if I have any writing tips for them. This is my biggest one, and I think they feel like it’s a letdown or just something I say. But I’ve never been good at anything automatically. I knew when I started writing that it would take a lot of time. I’ve been writing daily since 2003 (except for Sundays, and I take a few months off when I have a baby, because when I have a new little one I can’t concentrate on anything else).

Putting in the time looks different for different writers. For me, it looks like this–a desk in a corner where I go every day and try to get better.

What does it look like for you?

I am seriously addicted to teeny tiny poetry books. I only have four. But I would love to have the entire Everyman library. They’re so small! They fit so well in a purse or pocket! And they have lovely little ribbon bookmarks attached.

Right now I’m reading this one:

And also the Dylan Thomas (now out of print, but I found one), and also this one:

My grandmother gave me my first little book of Everyman poetry years ago and I love the little inscription on the inside:

“Everyman,
I will go with thee
and be thy guide
in thy most need to go by thy side.”

A little secret: I like to take the jackets off books before I buy them (scandalous) and see what they look like underneath. These are beautiful without their jackets too. And really affordable. I have other bigger books of poetry but these are the one I seem to carry around the most.

What poetry books do you like/have you been reading lately?

On Sunday night, my oldest came into the house in a panic. “There’s a bird outside,” he said. “I think it’s really hurt.”

It was, the worst kind of hurt. It was dead. It had gotten its foot stuck in one of our cheap plastic outside chairs and couldn’t get out and, I suppose, starved to death.

When my son found out the bird was dead, he was inconsolable. The tears were real and he had so many regrets. “Why didn’t I go outside and hear the bird chirping before it died? Why couldn’t the bird get its foot out when it was able to get it in?”

He wanted to go back in time. Because he knew that he could have saved the bird, if he’d just known. There was a time when all could be made right, but now the little bird fell into the category of gone, lost, past help or repair.

The two of us hugged and cried for a while, while my husband took care of the little body and put the chair into the trash so it could never hurt another bird. And I knew that my son was crying for the bird, and I was crying for that and for other things. For his pain and for the fact that I couldn’t fix this for him. For the year that we have had, which, while fantastic professionally, has been a hard one personally for reasons quite outside of all of our control. As a parent it is the hardest thing of all to see your child suffer and know that you are powerless to take it away. You can ease and help and be present. But I can’t bring birds back to life. I can’t take away some of the things that have happened and will continue to happen in my boys’ lives.

This morning, as I took a deep breath and opened up the document that is my work in progress, I thought that this was one of the reasons that I like writing. Because in writing, sometimes you can fix things. A scene is a mess? Rewrite it.

A story is hard, painful, difficult to tell? Leave it and write something else.

Or don’t.

Because some of the best writing is about the things that cannot be fixed. Perhaps that is the real catharsis, the true reason I love writing.

My son believes the bird went to heaven.

I believe, sometimes in spite of myself, in grace and better things to come and a time when we will all be whole.

All the kids are home for the summer, which is very fun, and also a bit crazy. I guess only one of them is actually in school all day normally, so in a lot of ways it’s not much different. But summertime just FEELS more laid-back. My agent couldn’t believe it when she found out that my kids are here all the time when school’s out. “Don’t they go away to camp?” she asked. But that seems to be an East Coast thing (correct me if I’m wrong) and, at least in our neighborhood, the kids are just running rampant all the time all over the street. I kind of love it. It’s like our neighborhood truly comes alive in the summer, especially in the evenings and things get cool, and the kids are all this big gang that runs from yard to yard to yard with bare feet and popsicle stains on their faces. Summer evenings are my favorite time of the year.

Summer afternoons can get a little long though–I won’t deny it. Around 4:00 p.m. we often run out of steam. So I’ve started flopping on the floor or bed closest to the air conditioning and reading this book, just a chapter a day, to the kids. I’m sure a lot of it goes over my toddler’s head but he loves to do whatever his brothers are doing. It’s such a beautifully written little book. We’re all excited to keep going and find out what happens at the end.

What summer kid reads are you enjoying/have you enjoyed in the past?

Just a little plug: I will be on KUTV’S Fresh Living show today (Wednesday, July 13th). I’m told the show will be on air at 1 p.m. So if you feel like tuning in, please do!