Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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November!

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Two things I need for you to do:

1.) If you dug The Wilder Life and are on Goodreads (or would like to be on Goodreads), you have until Sunday the 20th to vote for it in the first rounds of the Goodreads Choice Awards, where it is a nominee in the Memoir/Autobiography category. I don’t think I actually win anything and I know having to choose between me and Nikki Sixx puts you in a tough spot, but I hope you’ll vote this week.

2.) My last book-related event of 2011 (out of nearly twenty!) will be a benefit for Literacy Works Chicago on Monday, December 5th, at the Hopleaf. We’re going for a Little House Christmas (for grown-ups) theme, and it’ll be much more festive than a book-signing. If you’re in Chicago, this is a great opportunity to hang out in that upstairs room at the Hopleaf for a good cause. So, come if you can! (Downloadable PDF with all the info here.)

Five things I’ve been doing since my last blog entry:

1.) Reading your young adult novel manuscript: Well, maybe not YOUR young adult novel manuscript, but there are a lot of people out there whose agents have sent me YA manuscripts, and I’m reading the hell out of them. (The rest of you ought to be working on YAnovel manuscripts this month, right?)

2.) Getting hitched. See below:

Yeah, that was fun. The September weather was perfect, and my brooch bouquet did not fall apart, though it weighed a ton (and no, I did not toss it). Every day, for nearly two months now, I consider two incontrovertible facts: First, that the wedding was wonderful and it went far beyond our expectations and second, we do not have to plan it anymore. Chris and I are SO FREAKING GLAD.

3.) Traveling for the next three weekends after the wedding and subsequently recovering from all the travel. What were we thinking? Although one of the weekends was a stay at a Lake Geneva resort, where about sixteen other weddings were taking place on the grounds around us and it happily reminded us that WE WERE DONE WITH OUR WEDDING and could sit around in comfy clothes reading novels (published ones, not manuscripts).

4.) Writing an adventure story for This American Life. Hot zig! I have always wanted to be a contributor and I got the chance to do it last month. The episode is here, and my piece is in Act Two. (My piece was inspired by children’s time-travel stories, like this insane serial in a 1960s Boys’ Life magazine.)

5.) Preparing for winter: I keep hearing that the coming season is going to be a massive snowmageddon winterpocalypse of coldastrophic proportions. There aren’t any muskrat houses in my neighborhood that I can check, but I suspect that the regular, non-musk rats around here are scurrying more and building bigger garbage nests in anticipation. At any rate, I’m getting kind of excited/paranoid and wanting to TAKE ACTION about this. I’ve replaced the tires and battery on the car (okay, which I needed to do anyway, but I feel better and even a little righteous about spending the money, knowing that the car will be in much better shape to face the coming of the SnowAntiChrist), bought a new parka, and am looking for new snow boots (recommendations, please!), and racking my brain for more things Chris and I can do or buy to give us the smug satisfaction of being ready when the time comes and the Evil Snow Empire descends. Shouldn’t we get batteries? Candles? DVDs of stylish 50s melodramas? Yes, yes, and yes.

Snapshots from a Little House life

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1968: According to the caption in our family photo album, this is OUR HOMESTEAD. Not long after they got married (and before I was born), my parents bought a parcel of land near Belen, New Mexico (south of  Albuquerque, where they met). They bought it at as an investment, with maybe the vague idea that they’d build on it some day if it was worth something.

(Note that the mountain is not included.)

 

 

 

Of course, when I was a kid in Chicago I always imagined that we’d wind up here and build a shanty or something. My parents did end up moving back to New Mexico in 2006, but they bought a place with running water and electricity and a hot tub in the backyard, because they’re no fun at all.

Apparently my dad still owns the land, and it still looks exactly like this.

 

 

1979: Our very own Long Winter in Oak Park, Illinois. I’m pretty sure the Blizzard of ’79 coincided with my Little House reading years. The snow in Chicago was so heavy that garage roofs began to collapse around the city.  One night my dad had to go out on the roof of the front porch and shovel off those snowdrifts—a feat that seemed at least as thrillingly treacherous as Cap and Almanzo’s seed wheat rescue.

I remember being disappointed that I couldn’t look out my bedroom window and see the snow at eye level the way Laura could.

 

1980 (?): You may have already read about how I was in a community theater production of A Christmas Carol and got to wear a bonnet. And a long dress. And a crocheted shawl.

This was pretty much the high point of my life, I think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1981 (?): Here I am at my own version of Plum Creek, at a campground west of Chicago that we’d visit two or three times a year, mostly on holiday weekends. I fished (badly), waded, caught crayfish (or at least watched people catch them), and tragically lost swim toys to the current. If I could have done all of it while wearing a calico dress, I would have.

I also tried my damnedest to grow my hair long enough to braid.  You might have been able to wrench a couple of pathetic pigtails out of that mess, but just barely. That’s the longest I’ve ever been able to grow it.

 

2009: But who needs good hair when you have a BONNET? I bought at this one the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Kansas and preened in the mirror of my motel room in Springfield, Missouri. The first of many bonnets I would buy, and many, many more dorky photos.

 

Speaking of pictures, I’m in the process of putting up more photos of my Little House trips and shenanigans on The Wilder Life’s Flickr page as well as the Facebook page, so stay tuned.

Also! Book review blogger extraordinaire The Girl from the Ghetto has posted a truly EPIC review and giveaway of The Wilder Life today, so if you want another chance to win a copy of the book before it officially launches a week from Thursday, GO ENTER.

IT CAN’T BEAT US*

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The Long Winter of 1979
Me during the Blizzard of '79. I still miss that blue plush coat.

*I have this idea that for the rest of the winter I could name blog entries after chapter titles in The Long Winter. Need to find some reason to have a blog post called “ANTELOPE!”

Coming home early on Tuesday afternoon and watching the blizzard begin was an exquisitely giddy experience. I just sat by the big window by my desk and watched the snow come in careening gusts of wind.

No, I didn’t try to make this snowstorm one of my Little House reenactment projects, though I did have lots of Long Winter thoughts, and they swirled around in my head with all my modern neuroses. Like I was thinking that if the power went out I could use my quaint, adorable oil lamp, and then I remembered that my laptop’s battery function was broken, which of course freaked me out because THEN I’d have to make a tiny little generator with the old-fashioned coffee grinder and spend every morning hand-cranking a meager little serving of wireless while Chris twisted Chicago mayoral campaign junk mail into bundles of fuel.

But that didn’t happen. Our power stayed on, though the wind blew so hard I could feel our building shake, and there was lightning and thunder (which in a snowstorm looks and sounds really insane, like the earth is going to break open and fling up Superman’s Fortress of Solitude or something), and we were fine. Our car was stuck in the garage for three days until Chris was finally able to shovel out a narrow passage allowing the car to just barely squeeze through the waist-high snowbanks; the first time we pulled out the snow squeaked, like giant styrofoam wedges.  And if I were to describe the blizzard experience overall, I would say it was almost fun, thanks to this improbably comfy world we live in, with all this home insulation and central heat and horseless-carriage-plows.

And “almost fun” except for the free-floating sensation that’s been lingering these few days after the storm, when everything seems to stand still and sometimes it’s all I can do to complete the simplest tasks, even when the weather has kept me at home and opened up new vistas of spare time. But I guess it’s no coincidence that Laura feels “stupid” so many times during The Long Winter. (And I love that Google Books lets me look that up.) I have so much to do in the next few months between work and the book coming out, but maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself when I find myself wanting to just sit around and stare at the stove fire (or, really, Season 3 of Jersey Shore).

Hope you all are doing okay with your own Long Winters.

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Wedding Planning Question Corner (which will perhaps be an occasionally recurring feature this year): What do you have to do to get to talk to a caterer? We’re still looking for one and I seem to be sending a lot of emails and voicemails into the void lately.

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Book release stuff: my event schedule is being finalized right now, so if you’re in or near Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Iowa City, or Kansas City, I’ll have news for you soon…

Your questions answered, plus ME IN A BONNET

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To answer the three most frequently asked questions I’ve gotten from people since we got engaged last weekend:

1.) Chris and I haven’t set a date yet, but are planning for sometime in the fall.

2.) No, we are NOT having a Little-House themed wedding. I will not wear a poke bonnet, walk down the aisle to fiddle music, and ride off on a covered wagon. It’s sort of cool that Laura Ingalls Wilder wore black for her wedding, but I seriously doubt I could pull off that look without looking like Louise Fletcher in Flowers in the Attic.  (And no, we are not having a V.C. Andrews-themed wedding either, though if another couple ever decides to go that route, PLEASE SEND PICTURES.)

3.) Also, Chris did not propose on a buggy ride while driving his team of Morgan horses. How did Almanzo manage to slip the ring onto Laura’s finger with one hand while he held the reins with the other? He had some slick moves, that Manly. Chris made me get out of the car. (And then walk with him to the pop-the-question spot.) I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We just barely got the tree up this season, I haven’t baked any cookies or made any gingerbread creations (sorry), and I totally missed seeing the Santa Train, but this is turning out to be one of the best holidays ever.

Speaking of Christmas and wearing bonnets: as much as I loved the Little House books as a kid, I never had my own sunbonnet or any other kind of prairie girl getup. You’d think this would’ve bothered me, but somehow it didn’t, and now I remember why. It’s because for two Christmas seasons, right around the peak of my Little House adoration, I got to dress up all 19th-century for a community theater adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.”

It was a musical production at the Village Players theater in Oak Park and it was called, I kid you not, Ebenezer! I was in the children’s chorus. The first year I performed (1980 I think?) I got to wear a long red velvet dress, a bonnet, and a shawl. The second year my costume had a fur muff.  I knew from reading On the Banks of Plum Creek that muffs were the It Accessory of the 1870s, and I about lost my mind when the wardrobe lady gave me one to wear.

Here I am in my red dress, delivering my one line, which I can still remember: “I got new skates! They’re made out of real steel!”

Maybe I wasn’t convincing enough, because in the following year’s production my line was simply, “Oh, there’s Tim.” But whatever, I had the MUFF that year.  If you look in the picture below, I think the girl in the white cape in the front row had it.

Why the heck weren’t we wearing gloves if it was supposed to be December in London? We look way too happy and warm to be Dickensian urchins. Also the kid in black on the left is supposed to be Tiny Tim. That’s right: the tallest kid in the group. But never mind, it was Christmas. God bless us, everyone!  And God help us this next year.  Merry Christmas!

On bookselling and non-book blogging

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I am back from my grand tour of midwestern hotels: one night in St. Paul for a bookseller trade show (MBA!), two nights in Grand Forks for a children’s book conference, then the following weekend a night in Dearborn for another bookseller trade show (GLIBA!).  It is a very small-time kind of jet-setting: short little flights where the flight attendant puts a beverage in your hand and then two seconds later takes it away because the plane’s landing. I both love and hate that.

All for books—for these two jobs in my life that involve bookselling. Because even if your job is to write books, or edit books, or buy other people’s books to edit (I do that, too), at some point or another you have to Sell Books by talking about them to complete strangers and somehow you have to do it without coming off like some kind of feverish Mary Kay lady with a big pink case full of crazy.  Though when it comes to this new book I already sound insane just from talking about my butter churns,* which lets me off the sanity hook and thus gives me sort of an advantage.

(*Yes, churns with an s, as in PLURAL churns, because I recently bought another one with the vague idea that when the book comes out next spring I would have a little mini travel churn and put on some kind of jolly one-woman pioneer dairy show. Except I misjudged the size of the new one from the auction listing, and it turns out it’s pretty huge. I mean, not massive, but too big to hide and too ugly to pass as shabby chic. Crap! I need to stay the hell off eBay if I don’t want the apartment to turn into Cracker Barrel.)

Anyway, the trips were good, and I’m told I didn’t sound too kooky, and other authors talked about their books, and they sounded perfectly normal, which gives me hope that even with my churn-hoard I might come off okay.  I met the guy with the amazing-sounding inter-generational fire memoir and the girl with the werewolf YA novel that’s getting a lot of buzz (or growls?) and the Not That Kind of Girl girl (whose book I am DYING to read) and also this woman who I realized I’ve been following on Twitter for months, and you’re clicking on all these links, right?

Now it’s good to be home. And finally the weather is Octoberlike and not that creepy slow-bake psuedo-summer business. It took only a few short weeks from the end of reasonable sandal weather (early September) for my pedicure to completely devolve and my feet to shift to winter mode and become sad gnarled Shetland-pony-hoof appendages, so when the weather makes everyone break out the flip-flops again this late in the season, I highly resent it. Now everything is cool and crisp and soon I will be swaddled in a safe cocoon of knits from which I’ll occasionally stick out a bare hand just to grab a mug of hot cider, and all will be well.

You know, as long as I am talking about seasons: now that the book is finished, I have some time to blog again (and eventually the poundy.com blog and feed will be redirected to wendymcclure.net, so I’ll be blogging in one place). But The Wilder Life doesn’t come out for another five months. While it’s a big part of my life, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to talk about it in the new year, so until then, this blog doesn’t have to be—and perhaps shouldn’t be—All Little House Shenanigans, All The Time. (Though before the fall is over I really ought to post about the green pumpkin pie I baked a few weeks ago, just like Ma in The Long Winter).  But in the meantime, I’m curious to know what you’d like to read about on this site. Should I write about the writing life, exploring my weird little interests, the sadness of hotel rooms, what?

But I should add that I haven’t really been compelled to write about fat and body image these days. Maybe it’s just the years passing, but the things that used to get me worked up just don’t anymore, and I’m afraid that with work and writing I haven’t been keeping up with the new stuff, which means I don’t know that TV one show with the fat people, or that other show with the other fat people, or that thing that Beth Ditto did that was cool. This is not to say that I’m “done” with the subject, but if there are peaks and valleys, I’m definitely in a valley. It’s like with Chris and metal. He doesn’t feel the need to keep up with the latest  Iron Maiden or Electric Wizard or Bone Awl like he used to, though he’ll still promise to check out a new album if someone else tells him it totally rules hell.

Look, I even a made a tacky web poll where you can vote! I’m just curious.

Finally, a reminder: next Friday night—Jen Lancaster! Claire Zulkey! Stacey Ballis! Me! At the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, being Witty Women Writers wittingly weading our work! Come say hello.

Breeze

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The wind blows like crazy against my office window whenever the seasons are in transition or the temperature changes quickly. Wind Of Change, why must you be so literal as you rattle the stupid windows?

But I guess there is a corresponding truth, because stuff is starting to happen, especially with the book. For the past twenty months The Wilder Life’s life has progressed at the glacial pace of my writing, so it’s a little stunning to have things going so quickly now over the past few weeks: copyedits, design, page proofs, the metadata going out into the universe and getting sucked up into the pneumatic tubes of all the retail websites. And even though I spend every day at work bringing books into existence, this whole process still feels mystifying from the other end. Like I’ve found myself looking at the line on the Amazon page that says “Shipping Weight: 1 pounds” and wonder how anyone could know that at this point. Even when I know perfectly well how it’s possible, because I know there are production managers and purchase orders and specs and templates and cartons and I have to sit in meetings about this stuff every day, but never mind, it’s still sort of magic when it’s your book.

So now there it is—the book writing part was so huge and lonely, it’s hard to get used to the way things are now, with the book stuff just bubbling along on its own in one corner of my life.  Between now and the pub date in April things will be intermittently frenzied: for two weekends in October I’ll be flying out to bookseller trade shows where I’ll meet a whole lot of indie bookstore folks at these speed-date-type dinner events. I still can’t believe that I get to think about other things.

Such as: remember how Chris and I decided that in exchange for his accompanying me to LauraPalooza I would go with him to see all the movies in the Cremaster Cycle? I mean I knew I would do it, but I guess I was counting on being able to make a funny-cute joke about the whole thing for a while before the films showed up at an art house somewhere. But ha, only six weeks after our return from Mankato, there they were at the Music Box! It turns out it’s really hard to casually describe the Cremaster films to people. You tell them that it’s an eight-hour conceptual epic made by Björk’s husband, and it’s about Masons and Mormons and Houdini and the Chrysler Building and bees, and that it has Norman Mailer and opera and the drummer from Slayer and a lot of things made from Vaseline in it, but when you get started trying to explain nobody really wants to meet you halfway. But for three nights straight we went to the theater, and it was fun (in its way). It was also by far the least Laura-Ingalls-Wilder thing I’ve ever done.

But you probably want to see another picture of me with a Little House on the Prairie TV show cast member, don’t you? Well, here you go:

That is none other than Alison Arngrim, aka NELLIE OLESON!!!, who did her one-woman show, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, at Davenport’s last weekend. And if it wasn’t obvious from this review I wrote, I thought her book was great even by non-celebrity-memoir standards.  Her show was full of anecdotes about playing Nellie but also about growing up in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s. The audience was invited to write questions on index cards for her to answer at the end, and SOMEONE, I’m not saying who, asked her if the guy who played Doc Baker was as sexy in real life as he was on the small screen. (Answer: yes, but apparently a lot more people are still hot for Albert after all these years.) Anyway, If she comes to LauraPalooza 2012 they’ll really need to leave room in the schedule for her to discuss things like Dance Fever and Eartha Kitt. Also, she was very cool in person, and I hope that after all those camera flashes she didn’t wind up like Mary Ingalls.

While I do not have awesome stories about Deney Terrio, I will nonetheless be reading funny stuff here in Chicago next week, at Funny Ha-Ha at the Hideout on the 28th, and next month, at Witty Women Writers at the Book Cellar on October 29th. I’ll probably be trying out some stuff from the book, but hey, if you have any requests, let me know. (As long as you come to the show, too.)

Happy first day of fall! When will it be corduroy weather? Come on!

(cross-posted at wendymcclure.net, just to be redundant.)

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