We long to prove how much we love our kids, to voice how proud we are of their work and studies over the last four years.  We need to stand together among strangers with equal love and pride, for this common moment, this intersection where a ceremony can mark a completion, a transition.  We want to witness the step through the portal, and feel the proof.  We can never go back in time, not any of us.  We only go forward.

To all of you graduates unpacking the boxes and laundry baskets you hauled home from your dorms yesterday, I wish you well.  Congratulations.  Remember, as you sort your laundry alone, far from your former suitemates and confidantes, your families love you.  We believe in you.  We will be there for you always, even when you no longer need us.  Especially then.

The problem is, I like where the trilogy ends with Promised, and I fear that tacking on an extra story would dilute it.  I agonized over the ending for months, actually, and I was aware that I was taking a significant risk including certain events.  I’ve paid for my choice, too, if the mix of strong reactions is anything to go by, but I’m still convinced it was the right ending, and I’m continually grateful that I’ve had the support of the MacKids team behind me.  They’re not afraid of the unconventional.

Creating a whole new novel for Birthmarked 4 would involve turning my mind back to old, beloved characters and spinning them forward into new problems.  It could be a rich experience, but I’m not ready to do it.  I’m no longer the same writer I was a year ago when I finished the Birthmarked trilogy, and I don’t yet have the perspective to see Gaia and her world with fresh eyes.  Put simply, I’m both too far away from them already, and too close still.

Our world has changed in the last year, too.  We’ve had Newtown and the Boston Marathon bombs since then, and they’ve changed my sense of urgency about safety, childhood, and imagination.  I feel a need to write different stories now, and they are pulling me deep into new paths.  I want to go forward, exploring where I am now, the way I did when I first wrote Birthmarked.

So, for now, Gaia’s story ends where it ends.

This weekend, I’ll be at the Teen Book Con in Houston, Texas.  If you’re there and you’d like to meet me, please come say hello.  I especially want to encourage you if you’re normally shy.  It should be a great, inspiring day!

My prayers go out to the families of Boston.

Pienza, Italy

It felt not only that I was far away, physically, but far into another time, too; not past or future, but alternate. It was tempting, everywhere, to store up impressions and perspectives to include in my writing, but even more, it was sweet to live in the moment.

My arrival back home means a return to familiarity and routine, but everything feels new again, pure and angled, if that makes sense.  On the down side, my neglected social media include several stinging responses to my novels.  That’s reality, too. My re-entry into my life from far away reminds me I should actively choose my actions, and not fall into patterns just because they’re convenient.  After all, I’m not the same girl who left a week ago.

Book 3 in Germany comes out April 1, 2013.

Naturally, I’m thrilled about this.  Oliver Plaschka has doubtless done a fantastic job with the translation, though regrettably I can’t tell for myself since I know only the most paltry German.  (“Wo ist der bus für Igles?”) I find it very cool that Oliver is the same translator for Chbosky’s Das also ist mein Leben (The Perks of Being A Wallflower), which I’ve admired for ages.  Oliver is also the author of the newly released Das Licht hinter den Wolken: Lied des Zwei-Ringe-Lands, which I would love to read if it becomes available in English.  Thank you again, Oliver!

I’m reasonably certain that this is the description of Der Weg der gefallenen Sterne from Heyne, my German publisher:

Der große Höhepunkt von Caragh O’Briens dystopischer Jugendbuchsaga

Die junge Gaia Stone ist Hebamme. Doch in einer zerstörten Welt kann auch sie den verlorenen Kindern nicht mehr helfen, und so trifft Gaia eine schwere Entscheidung. Gemeinsam mit einer Gruppe junger Siedler verlässt sie das Ödland, um zur Stadt hinter der Mauer zurückzukehren und um Hilfe zu bitten. Werden sie die gefährliche Reise überstehen? Und wird sich Gaias Hoffnung auf eine bessere Zukunft endlich erfüllen?

Gerade hat Gaia in der Siedlung Sylum eine neue Heimat gefunden, da steht sie schon wieder vor großen Veränderungen. Denn die Menschen von Sylum leiden an einer sonderbaren Krankheit: Sie können den Ort nur um wenige Meilen verlassen, bevor sie lebensgefährliche Schwächeanfälle erleiden. Ein Hinweis in den Aufzeichnungen ihrer Großmutter zeigt Gaia jedoch, wie sie dieser großen Gefahr entfliehen können. Und so begibt sie sich mit einer Gruppe Siedler auf die gefährliche Reise zurück zu dem Ort, dem sie einst entflohen ist – der Enklave, der Stadt hinter der Mauer. Weder die junge Gaia noch ihre Gefährten wissen, was sie dort erwartet …

The Birthmarked trilogy in Germany

For a video on where it all began:



Glückliche dunklen Lesen!  (Happy dark reading!)

Smurf

Oh, my gosh.  Do you remember how much of life used to be devoted to combating silliness?  I can still hear the multitude of grownups minding us to sit still, quit that giggling, mind yer manners, or cut that out, and in every case I nearly keeled over from laughing inside.  School, church, the dinner table, grocery store aisles, and the back of the car were all prime for silliness and the squelching of it.

Then I had kids of my own, and silliness abounded again.  I was not good at stifling it, needless to say.  Even now, I just have to look at a kid and I want to start laughing.  That’s why I knew I’d never be any good as an elementary school teacher.  Whenever I went in as a volunteer parent or substitute aide, I just wanted to laugh with everybody or give them hugs, which was so not allowed for boundary reasons.  I was better off teaching in the high school, where I expect I seemed sort of batty and quaint with my little toys all around the upper edges of the room.  I loved that I could laugh really hard several times a day.

Now I don’t have any little kids around, except when I visit my long-distance nieces and nephews, who are experts in silliness.  This is sort of a problem, but not really, because for some of us, silliness can transcend age.  My older kids like to read joke books aloud and play games like foosball, Settlers of Catan, and Rummikub with the family.  If we’re feeling like lazy, lie-down bums, we push the coffee table aside and play the games on the floor.  Once we start laughing, it’s easy to roll, and then that’s funny, too.  Lately, my kids have been randomly echoing a Doppler shift humming noise I happened to make during a game of Solarquest, and each time it cracks us up again.

They say people in offices are more creative when they laugh more.  I think laughing helps me write better, too.  It loosens up ideas and quirky connections so that my mind feels more playful.  Then it works the other way, too, because when my writing’s going well, it brings me joy.

Legend has it that “The Rose of Tralee” was a song my grandfather Walsh sang by campfire light in the evenings when he worked for the railroad.  Other workers would throw him a few coins, which he saved up and sent back to his mother, asking her to keep them for him.  Instead, his mother used the money to send his brother to college, and when my grandfather returned, he had nothing.  Even so, he put himself through law school and passed the bar.  He served in the Great War, where he suffered from mustard gas poisoning, and later, when my mother was ten, he died of heart trouble, leaving my Nonna with six children.

That summer, at camp, my mother stood up in the talent show to sing “The Rose of Tralee,” in honor of her father who had just died, and if you can picture an angelic, soulful girl singing bravely to a lodge full of other girls, you can glimpse her sorrow, and how special the song was to her when she eventually taught it to her own seven children.

We sang it often growing up, along with other songs on car rides and around the fire at the cabin, and I’ve since taught it to my own kids.  A more plaintive and romantic melody would be hard to find, and it feels especially rich because it has come to me via generations.  My favorite line, by far, is “It was not her beauty alone that won me,” and in case you’re not familiar with the tune, here it is.

Others march in parades, drink green beer, and wave shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day.  We made stew and grasshopper ice cream pie here, and as I was cleaning up afterwards and puttering around the kitchen, I sang my hand-me-down versions of “Danny Boy,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and my favorite, “The Rose of Tralee.”

For a long time, I’ve felt like there was no real difference in people inside and outside the club.  We’re really all just writers, all equally deserving of respect, all doing what we love.  But a few things lately have made me wonder if there is a difference after all.  It isn’t that crossing a publishing threshold magically changes a writer.  It’s more that experiences start adding up, and there’s a different, deeper understanding of how things work.  I can look, now, at a friend’s query letter and see pretty quickly the tip-offs of a novice, but beyond that, I see more clearly, at least for myself, the complicated relationship between creativity and business.

A key thing is my relationship with my agent, Kirby Kim at WME.  Unpublished writers, wary about what agents even do, ask questions like, Do I need an agent?  That question would never occur to me.  These days, my agent and I talk about specific book concepts, the merits of building on the base of my Birthmarked novels when I work on next projects, the trade-off of writing in multiple genres vs. writing rarer books where each is an event, the unspoken etiquette around option clauses, the risks and importance of emotional honesty in business dealings, and the value of having people you like to work with.  These issues are a reality for me, with subtleties and complexities I wouldn’t perceive on my own.  My agent and I are a team, and I depend on his advice and expertise from the perspective of looking back and forward for years.

Another element that matters is my relationship with my fellow writers.  I’m part of private, online group of about twenty published writers who check in once a week to see where we all are, and that is a vital source of support for me.  By talking about the challenges we’re facing, our victories, families, and other jobs, I see that other writers are finding their own ways through some complicated times.  Similarities abound.  I don’t know why it makes such a difference to know someone is experiencing the same thing, but it does.  I also have a handful of ongoing email correspondences with other full-time writers where we talk about the slowness of receiving contracts and money, how option clauses impact when a next project can be submitted, expectations of our editors and agents, how publishers are fulfilling marketing promises, cover problems, waiting for approvals of novel outlines, travel envy and burn out, tax issues, and deadline extensions.  My friendships help me learn what questions to ask, especially when I see how others assert themselves, and they give me a clearer sense of how the system works for more than just me.

I was Skyping with a school book club yesterday, (Hello, Bookaneers!), and one of the readers asked me about what I was writing next.  I started explaining this interesting situation about my new projects and my editor’s maternity leave and the publishing timeline that projects out to 2014, and I ended up saying that what I do is keep writing.  My job is to keep working, developing projects, completing first drafts, revising, and pushing myself to explore new ideas deeply.  That’s what I try to do.  Where and if the projects will fall in a publishing schedule is, to a degree, outside my control, but the writing is always mine.  The writing is my responsibility.  I think that’s something I’ve learned by being in the secret club, but it’s suspiciously like what drove me before I entered it.

In the end, the writing is the writing.