The Lipstick Chronicles

Where in the World are the Tarts?

Brunonia Barry
I've been on the paperback book tour for The Map of True Places. Or rather, I should call it the culinary tour of Connecticut and Vermont. Great stores, great people, and great food and wine at about nine PM every night. I tried, Weight Watchers, I really tried! But it's just not hospitable to refuse these local favorites. Local Vermont Cheeses and maple cured sausages? Okay, so maybe that was breakfast, but you get the idea. I'm back home for a few days, hitting the treadmill and the bike and eating my five point Think Thin bars. More tour to come, but I'm determined. Thank God I'm not going south this time. On my last tour, I went to Charleston and New Orleans. Weight Watchers didn't stand a chance.

 

Elaine Viets    
I'm spending this weekend in my hometown, St. Louis, at the Missouri Writers' Guild Conference, where I'll get to see Nancy Pickard, another featured speaker. I hope I didn't disgrace myself giving the keynote speech at the banquet last night. I promised the conference organizers my talk would be mercifully short. Sunday morning, I teach a three-hour master's class on creating characters. Then I fly home to Fort Lauderdale on Southwest Airlines. That's the airline that had a plane with a huge hole in the fuselage. Don assures me the flight will be perfectly safe. I told him if I die in a plane crash, I will haunt him for the rest of his days. At night, he will hear me whispering "I told you so."

 

Barbara O’Neal
I am cooking for zillions, cleaning my house because it hasn't really been cleaned since I went underground to finish the current book two months ago.  (It is not finished, BTW.) There is a wedding this week.  My son and his smart, tough, beautiful fiance, whose mother referred to her as "ours."  Doesn't get any better than this, I promise you.   Next week, I'll get back to finishing the book.  Now, if you will excuse me, I have some bacon jam that needs to go in the crockpot.....

 

Sarah Strohmeyer
I am on deadline for my YA book Smart Girls Get Everything!

[Yet she had time to look up the recipe for Barbara’s Bacon Jam to post on Facebook.][Sarah's link broke, but this is another recipe.]

 

Margaret Maron
I'm hunkered down with the windows closed, praying for rain, waiting out pine pollen season. Another week should do it. These pine trees are way oversexed. No wonder they're the first trees to grow in a barren field.
Tomorrow, I'm off to a week-long retreat with some of my writer friends, so I'm packing the car with computer, notebooks, bedlinens, a 12-pack of Pepsis,a bottle of bourbon and a frozen casserole for the night when it's my turn to cook supper. (No Cheetos though. Gave them up for Lent.) I hope to come home with 5000 more words on my 2012 book and a good sense of where the book's going.

 

[When I asked the Tarts to write these, I sent a reply to Margaret that I had problems with alder tree pollen and had in Washington State, Vermont and California. To which Diane chimed in…]

 

Diane Chamberlain
No no, Holly, you don't understand what Margaret is talking about. The pine pollen isn't the make-you-sneeze type. it's the takes-over-the-entire-world type. I made the mistake of opening my office window yesterday and by evening a layer of yellow dust was on every sheet of paper and piece of equipment and ME in my office. I’d covered all the porch furniture with green sheets that are now completely yellow. I've lived lots of places but never experienced anything like this till moving to NC. So this time of year, when you long to open the windows, you must fight the urge and keep them closed.

So that's what I'm up to, along with being chained to my desk, 2 weeks from deadline with the book from hell (oh wait...they all are) that still has no title. It's this deadline that's preventing me from going away with Margaret and the gang for a week of writing and balderdash. :(

 

Harley Jane Kozak
I'm rehearsing this week for the Romantic Times Convention -- I'm the M.C./Joan Rivers-type person for the Mr. Romance Contest (male cover models), as well as singing, dancing and performing Shakespeare at the Vampire Ball, in a show entitled "Zombie Dancers from Planet 9."

 

Kathy Reschini Sweeney
Today, I am in shock.  My baby boy is 16.  He was a bit of a surprise - one that has turned out to be the greatest delight of my life.  But don't tell him I said that.  He already gets away with too much. How did all these years go by?  I need cake.  Stat.

 

Joshilyn Jackson
Today my husband and I are engaged in an EPIC SCRABBLE BATTLE. The loser must give Mentally Ill Grudge-Holding Cat his Kitty-Prozac all month. Mentally-Ill Grudge-Holding Cat needs his meds, but he hates to be touched only slightly less than he hates to be pilled. The person who loses this battle gains Mentally Ill Grudge-Holding Cat’s considerable, baleful, and long-memoried  ire. OH, this cat. You shouldn’t make him angry. You wouldn’t LIKE him when he is angry. And since I work from home, I am available to be ired at all hours of the day. So.  I am not going to lose. I have a pocket full of blank tiles and a fistful of illegal tranqs. I LOVE my husband, but if first skill and then luck and finally cheating all fail me, I will have no choice but to roofie my beloved and swear up and down I was victorious.
PS Margaret! I read this and immediately thought
Margaret are you grieving over all your pines unleaving?
 But pines don’t have leaves. And un-needling does not rhyme.
Margaret are you feeding, needing, bleeding, pleading, BAH!
 I actually get a grant from the state of Georgia to NOT write poetry.

Yes yes it is a SPECIAL pollen bowl kind. We have it. For a month the purple car is yellow and the orange car is yellow and my cream trimmed rosey-bricked house is yellow and the green grass is yellow and THE VERY FREAKING AIR IS GOT’DAMNABLY YELLOW.

 

Nancy Martin
I'm hitting the campaign trail to sell Sticky Fingers.  (In the Philadelphia area?  Come to the Borders store in Springfield on Friday, April 15th at 6pm or at the Philadelphia Book Fest on Saturday from 11am to 1pm.)  I'm also finishing up the 8th Blackbird book--which should be published early in 2012.  And . . . my iPad arrived!  Now I have to learn how to use it.  Any suggestions for good apps?

 

Nancy Pickard
I’m busy distracting myself from my book that keeps saying it doesn’t care if I need to make a living, it still has percolating to do.  Have I ever mentioned that I think commerce and art are TERRIBLE bedfellows?  Of course, that’s not what my favorite Kansas playwright thought about it.  William Inge, who wrote Picnic, Splendor in the Grass, Bus Stop, Come Back Little Sheba, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,  (wow, right?) said that forcing art through the commerce sieve and vice versa was hunky-dory.  His actual quote is:  “Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.” I agree, but only when my book actually gets finished and then published and I get paid.  Until those moments, the bedfellows continue to kick each other and bellow and be total nightmares. And let’s not overlook the fact that Bill Inge killed himself.  Damn, I just made myself feel like sitting in this coffee shop and crying. He was so brilliant, and he suffered so from depression and from hiding his sexuality from the pigs and bigots of his day.  Well, you’d never know it from what I just wrote here, but I’m actually feeling happy and springy, in spite of sieves and stubborn books and tragic playwrights.  Here, everybody, have a double latte and a chocolate truffle.

Hank Phillippi Ryan

The ducks are back! But you know that..Flo and Eddy have been baffled by the ice on their backyard pond, but other than that, it's a sure sign it's spring. My tulips and crocuses are pushing their way out of the still-frozen earth, and I saw a whole flock of robins in our neighbor's yard. (It was almost scary, you know? Cue Tippi Hendren.)  Right now I am somewhere in the air between Boston and Indianapolis,  gave a speech in Indy to a wonderful group who wanted to know all about e-publishing.  (Gee, I wish I knew. Don't we all?)  Yes, there's a new book (cross fingers please, everyone) which I am editing now. (It's easier to cut than add, right?)  Looking forward to the MWA symposium in two weeks, then the gala Malice Domestic convention where DRIVE TIME is up for an Agatha for Best Mystery of 2010. (Yes, our NancyP is up for one, too, sigh, but she's sold more books than I have, I bet, so don't I need the teapot?)  Is it time to send my winter clothes to the dry cleaners? Ah, I'll think about that later. 

The Vortex Gene

by Joshilyn Jackson 

Today was the day I was going to REALLY go by the office of the nutritionist I paid to see and then rescheduled and didn’t see and rescheduled and so forth to the tenth power of etcetera.

DIGRESSION: I am having some post-op trouble getting my body back into ANY of my clothes. Been a year since the surgery now. I am doing all the right stuffs and nothing is moving, so it’s time for outside help.)

So I have paid all this money to get this special program with the tests and the thyroid check and the monitoring and the complimentary boob refluffment surgery; NOW I just have to GO BY and give them blood and drop off my paperwork.

Digression: I could just mail the paperwork, but they acted like I was a weirdo when I asked if I could also just mail the blood.

Digression 2: I don’t really get complimentary boob refluffment surgery with this package, alas. I just threw that in to tantalize Sarah.

Anyway I have to take by the paperwork and give them blood for a cholesterol check and who knows what all other repulsive bodily whatnots they want to sample...

Digression: MY mind immediately went to, “MAYYYBE they want a piece of hair from my arch-nemesis to make a nutritive-fat-vampire spell? I would pick Donald Trump. He would be a great arch-nemesis. And the way the spell would work is, I would eat things, and the excess calories would go on HIS hips. But how would I get a slice of his hair? His hair is so FAMOUS. That’s like the world’s most famous comb-over. I bet it is insured by Lloyd’s of London.”

So today, like every other day for the last two weeks, I was REALLY going to actually go by, instead of just planning to go by and then spending ten hours flipping my screen back and forth between copy edits and spider solitaire and not going.

Announcement: If anyone at my publishing house is reading this, it was probably 90% copy edits and only 10% spider solitaire. *truthful nodding* ANYWAY.

I did not go. Because I could not find my keys.  I am an amazing key loser. AMAZING. World class.

Scott is---perhaps luckily, perhaps simply as a result of the practice afforded him over the last 17 years---- an Olympic-level key finder. He has found my keys in the yard beneath an azalea (on a day when I had no clear memory of going outside), IN MY PURSE (which is where they ACTUALLY GO, so I had not thought to look there, and in my heaviest winter coat (it was June), and once in the meat-n-cheese drawer of the fridge.

Today he found them in my car, which was sitting in the driveway with the passenger door open. The keys were the slot for keys. The car was running. I had this vague memory of GOING to the car, then realizing I needed a cup of coffee, going back in to GET the coffee, and then not being able to find my keys.

SO I did not make it to the nutritionist today.

There is only one clear conclusion: God wants me to buy A LOT of really cute jeans. One size larger. Preferably made by 7 for All Mankind.

No?

Scott says this is definitely not the message. He says messages from the Divine generally tell wives to go buy jeans from Kohls or Target.

Okay, how about this: The real message has nothing to do with commerce. The message of the keys is...

I cannot murder my son for losing his $200 pair of super-special-corrective glasses today because the only reason he lost them was that I have genetically poisoned him.

Now THAT is sadly true.The kid is as absentminded as me, and it’s hard to justifiably slaughter him for an offense I perpetrate as egregiously with 30 years more practice at life than he has had. I also think the message has a PS, which is Scott has to go to the middle school and FIND the glasses, which are probably tucked neatly in the spoon receptacle at the front of the lunch line, or resting sweetly in the square tank of a toilet in the second floor boy’s bathroom, third stall from the left.

What genetic “gifts” were you given that you wish your parents had damn well kept? And for my fellow parents---what horrors or wonders have your genes perpetrated upon your hapless little children?

Provence, by our guest, Bridget Asher

Joshilyn says: My friend, prolific and bestselling novelist Julianna Baggott (who writes under her own name for poetry and lit fic, Bridget Asher for her women's fic, and N E Bode for a popular
series of YA novels) is blogging with the Tarts today. She's a witty and charming blogger, and even KIRKUS liked her great book:

"Unabashedly romantic and unafraid of melancholy, Asher's book is a real
charmer about a Provencal house that casts spells over the lovelorn."
-Kirkus Reviews

France is (Demandingly) Romantic

 

Before I fell in love with France, I fell in love with a Frenchman. This is how it goes down sometimes with the French.

“Every good love story has another love hiding within it.” When I wrote that line in the first draft of my new novel THE PROVENCE CURE FOR THE BROKENHEARTED, I knew it was true for my main character, Heidi, and that it is true for me as a novelist. Each of my novels has some version of my own love stories hiding within it. So … this is the love story that made me fall in love with France, return, and, in a second love story, write a novel set there.

I was twenty when I lived in Paris, wearing my leather bolero jacket with its multitude of zippers, heavy on the eyeliner and requisite brooding. I had no spending money and had to take three metros to get student dining which offered unlimited bread. I learned to bulk up on bread. (I actually gained ten pounds in bread alone.) I lived in a house with a host family that didn’t care for guests. My room was at the end of a bent hallway. I was told not to use too much hot water. Their son, Alban, was a twenty-three-year-old who dressed as some kind of mascot for store displays. I never quite figured that out. My French was sketchy.

In fact, I didn’t go to classes much. Why learn French in a classroom when I called learn it everywhere I went.  And so my French was mostly learned in the places where I went – namely bars. (My French gets bawdy before I even know it.)

I met said Frenchman in one of these bars. We were crazy about each other.  The romance was perfect because he was about to be shipped off for mandatory military service in, get this, Antarctica. It’s true. Better yet, we could only barely understand each other. Communication is key – and a lack of communication can be blissful. We gazed, sad and forlorn. In fact, we felt star-crossed.

Later, I went back to college, surrounded by un-brooding, non-star-crossed American boys, and I’d get the Frenchman’s letters (which only came in a huge bundle once things had thawed – it was pretty seasonal. This was – gasp – pre-Internet). And they were romantic (and dark – people losing appendages due to frostbite and all).

By the time his service was up, I’d graduated. I told my friends that I’d know immediately once I saw him if we were right for each other -- within four minutes.

I did and we weren’t.

But neither were things right with any American boys. I wanted someone who’d gaze but who also understood me -- a fellow-brooder who got my pop culture references. I wanted someone who thought we had the potential to be star-crossed but who was actually right there by my side. And, a few years later, there he was. I married him.

A gajillion years later, we went to France together to do research for THE PROVENCE CURE FOR THE BROKENHEARTED – with five kids in tow (our four and a niece).

It was a messy, loud accumulation of a big obnoxious rowdy life we’d built together. I remembered what it was like to be foreign. I ate food and truly tasted it. (This is one damn foodie novel – recipes in the back and all.)  I smelled lilac – and it wasn’t scented candles. I looked closely at the small white blooms on the roadside flowers and found they were actually small white snail shells, imprinted with delicate swirls.

And because the foreign world around me had awoken my senses, I got to look at my husband anew too. Once the senses are awake, it’s hard not to see this person you love with fresh eyes. (And, let me add, there’s nothing like living with five kids in an ancient house in a tiny village in the South of France to make you feel star-crossed while under the same roof.)

France allows you to be romantic – in fact, it demands it.

And so the novel swelled all around me. I collected details madly, and when I got home, I wrote madly. The novel is about grief – but how grief is a love story told backwards – and about love – the stories we tell and the real love we come to rely on.   

Julianna Baggott is the author of seventeen books, most recently THE PROVENCE CURE FOR THE BROKENHEARTED under her pen name Bridget Asher, as well as THE PRETEND WIFE and MY HUSBAND’S SWEETHEARTS. She’s the bestselling author of GIRL TALK and, as N.E. Bode, THE ANYBODIES TRILOGY for younger readers. Her essays have appeared widely in such publications as The New York Times Modern Love column, Washington Post, NPR.org, and Real Simple. You can visit her blog at http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/ and her website at www.juliannabaggott.com. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=650103952#!/profile.php?id=650103952

 

 

Please Check One

By Joshilyn Jackson

Oh Facebook! You invasive wormlike addictive awful thing! You keep finding new ways to torment me and make me insane, and yet, and yet, I keep coming back to you. 

In the springtime of my love affair with Facebook, I wanted to take it everywhere.So---I cleverly put it on my Blackberry. (Here the italics indicate that a heavy-handed ironic tone is spreading and dripping in a thick, sludgy gloss all OVER that word.) I then found that I never WENT anymore, because Lordy, but D J Cracky B has a small screen. (Yes, I DID name my blackberry. You didn’t?)

And the DJ is SLOW to load web content. I also stopped posting to Facebook, because I am not 14 and therefore can't thumbtype at the speed of sound. So instead of more Facebook at convenient times, like when I am boredly waiting for my oil to be changed and the only reading material available is a copy of People magazine SO old it believes Jennifer Anniston and Brad Pitt are the It Couple, I went to almost NO Facebook.

I took Facebook off of the DJ, thinking it would revert back to sending me email updates to draw me to it. Now I get no updates on the DJ or my comp, so a thousand vital things I need to know to be a fully realized and content human slide by EVERY DAY. (Okay, I could pass on the “Jen got a really good parking spot! YAY!” stuff, but things HAPPEN on the FB....like Mir could post a gluten free muffin recipe that actually tastes like muffins, and I sincerely need that before I have to take snack down to Maisy’s school next week.)

The ALMOST worst part? Around the same time that Facebook stopped telling me things I want it to tell me, it started telling OTHER people things about me I don’t necessarily want broadcast. It found my Barnes & Noble account. It found my Netflix account. I think it is worming around the internet SEEKING my email address and linking that address to my Facebook account, all without me knowing.

I suspect that Facebook is letting people SEE my Netflix??? Is FACEBOOK telling you that I recently watched a fetal Tom Cruise peering out from under his shaggy bangs and pretending to a woodsprite man while Tim Curry sprounced about in hooved shoes and big horns, bellowing out peels of demonic laughter?

If Facebook is telling you that I watched LEGEND, dude, no, that wasn’t me. That was the kids. Or the dog. Or, um, maybe people broke into my house and tied me up and watched that and left.

OKAY FINE IT WAS ME BUT I HAD THE FLU AND IT WAS COMFORTINGLY NOSTALGIC STOP JUDGING ME.

Even worse?

Facebook has suddenly put LIKE buttons by all my BOOKS on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Look at this—here is the upcoming paperback for Backseat Saints and if you have a facebook account and if facebook has wormed around and linked them up, you will see the book now has a LIKE button by it.

No one likes it yet. This is making me INSANE. I want a little NUMBER. I am SO tempted to click it, myself! If I click the thing and say *I* like it, facebook will tell you, and how sad will THAT be, that *I* "like" my own books.

Well, okay, no, it isn’t sad, because I DO like my own books. But it WILL be sad if...I am the ONLY one. HA!

That like button? By every book I wrote and/or will write on more and more sites every day?

Lord, it feels like publishing books has put me back into Workman Middle School...Each book on each page with a LIKE button is a separate sad, shy girl’s note to THE WHOLE WORLD with a little box to check. I do not need, trust me, another way to obnoxiously navel gaze, nor do I need another way to find myself wanting.

Has Facebook found YOU and outed you on your Big Business info-tainment accounts? Do you want it to? Can you see my films? WILL you think less of me if you discover that, FINE, OKAY, I have Happy Gilmore in my Q?

Is this invasive or just how life is and I should shut up, and by the way? While I am asking questions? I just want to say that I like you, and ask, do you like me? Pls check one ___ Yes ____No ____Kinda, but not enough to say so if Facebook is just going to TELL everyone, sheesh.

Word of the Day Year

By Joshilyn Jackson

I had to get my oil changed, and when I went into the waiting room Random Person I Was Pretty Sure I Did Not Know From Adam’s Off-Ox was already there. I picked up an ancient People Magazine, prepping to waste half an hour flipping through candids of all the hottest celebrity couples from 2007, when Random Person I Was Pretty Sure I Did Not Know From Adam’s Off-Ox leapt up, grinning, and ran over and hugged me.

Person: *delighted* Oh HI! HI! My goodness HI!

Me: *panicking, trying to sound delighted* Oh, HI! How are YOU!

Person: Can’t complain. Lord, I have not seen you in a dog’s age.

Me: That certainly seems true. So! What have you been UP to?

(I was desperately hoping Random Person I Was Pretty Sure I Did Not Know From Adam’s Off-Ox might answer this question by saying something revelatory, like, “Oh my life is just wall to wall pap smears, the usual,” and then I would remember that this was my gynecologist. Which would make sense because I almost never see my gynecologist from the angle at which I was currently viewing Random Person I Was Pretty Sure I Did Not Know From Adam’s Off-Ox. But no. She said...)

Person: Not much.

Me: Really? Nothing? Nothing super specific you want to tell me about?

Person: Nope. What about you, how’s your family?

Me: GOOD!

(I didn't ask about her family because I had this sudden yawping fear that she was single and childless and orphaned and her best friend had just moved to Philly to be with some guy she met on the internet and now Person was having these recurring dreams where she died alone and her cats ate her while she was still warm. Not that I ever think about this happening to me when Scott is out of town and I wake up and the awful orange kitten is staring at me with his empty Dexter Morgan eyes, heh.

So I just said, “Good! Good!” A couple more times, grinning like a robot, and she grinned back at me and I grinned back at her, all the while hunting about desperately for a topic that might lead me to some inkling of who Random Person I Was Pretty Sure I Did Not Know From Adam’s Off-Ox was without giving away that I had NO CLUE.)

 Me: SO! Are you going to make New Year’s Resolutions this year?

Person: ...It’s February.

Me: Right. Right. So it is.

(Here’s the thing that’s super irritating about me. One of them. If you invite me dinner at 6:30, I will show up at 6:30 and you will be naked with wet hair because no one actually means 6:30 and I can’t internalize this. I mean, I know it with my mind. I just SAID it. But the heart does not hear, and at 6:29 and 57 seconds, I will be on your step in my Company shoes thrusting a hostess gift at you. At the same time, I never know what month it is.

SO basically if you are going to feed me something nice I come 45 minutes before everyone else and you have to make small talk with me while struggling out of your towel and into the pants you haven’t ironed yet, and I will get two drinks ahead of EVERY other guest and be telling the really obnoxious sexually explicit joke about the badger that needs THREE drinks to be funny when every other guest is on drink one, but EXCEPT for dinner parties, I am two months behind, always.

Person: I don’t do resolutions anymore, anyway. This year, I am trying to do more of a theme. Like, I am going to pick a word to be my theme for this year, and I am going to try to live into that word.

Me: *interested* Ooooh. That’s interesting. What did you pick?

Person: I picked Patience.

(Gentle reader, I can tell you, immediately: I am not picking that. )

We talked for another ten minutes about good words one could pick, and I realized that whoever she was, she was pretty cool. Then her car was ready and I was left to decide what word I want to be this year’s theme word. Since it is February, it is probably not going to be PUNCTUALITY.

  I called my husband, and his immediate response was: You can’t pick chocolate. SO the year is already bound to suck, right there.

I am trying to decide if it should be some sort of NOBLE word, like JUSTICE, but that seems very tiring and lofty, and I already KNOW I will have failed that word by the fourth day of spring break, when I holler down into the basement at my children, “I DO NOT CARE IF IT IS FAIR, OR WHO MESSED UP HOW MUCH OF WHAT! YOU WILL BOTH CLEAN THAT PLAYROOM OUT NOW. NOW. BECAUSE I AM THE MOM AND I SAY SO.”

Or I could pick a FUN word, like spontaneity, but the downside on that is, I think I would then have to actually attempt to be spontaneous. It’s sort of...implied. But not having a definitive plan of action gives me stress hives.

I think a realistic word for the year might actually BE Stress Hives, as we novelists wait to see WTH is going to happen with the publishing industry, but Scott says Stress Hives is technically TWO words, and anyway he is pretty sure I used up Stress Hives as a theme last year.

If I don’t choose soon, my word will become, by default, PROCRASTINATION. SO. I am going to pick in the next 24 hours. What should I pick? What would YOU pick? Are you going to pick? Or do you refuse to pre-define your year in a single word. I am going to define mine though, and not ONLY because it means I can tell people I am doing that instead of resolutions and therefore maybe get out of bettering myself in ANY WAY AT ALL entirely for the whole of 2011....