Julie Anne Long

Miracles, appliances, velvety cats, etc.

Einstein once said something along the lines of: "There are two ways to live. One is as if nothing is  a miracle. The other is as if everything is." I've always been firmly in the second camp. I  think everything is a miracle. Specifically, I believe it will be a bloody miracle if I remember to bring everything I need to bring to the conference.  Actually, this isn't entirely true, as I've certainly made quite a few lists of things to bring over the past several days, and my lists are broken out into categories ( e.g. toiletries, appliances, etc.) , and God knows if you have lists,  nothing can go awry, right?

You're wondering about the appliances, aren't you?

Since I'm busy packing, I've left Domenic, my newly balded cat, to do my revisions for THE SECRET TO SEDUCTION, and over there to the left is the requisite inaugural  blurry camera phone shot of him reviewing his workload. He looks perfectly normal from the front; from the sides, he's pure low-pile velvet. (You can kind of see it in this photo.) Everyone should get their cat shaved. He feels quite nice. (I'm just kidding. Everyone put your razors down.) It's really rather an inexplicable haircut, but as a friend of mine said today, perhaps once the groomer got started it was hard to stop. Like trimming a hedge.

Anyway...today was a long, busy day of packing and errand running. But I am getting excited about the conference. Among the things I'm looking forward to is the Literacy Signing, because I get to meet and talk to readers from all over the country, many of whom I've exchanged numerous emails with. I'm also looking forward to poking around the hotel room bathroom, because I love how hotel bathrooms are so much more pristine than mine will ever be. I love seeing author friends I haven't seen in ages. And TO LOVE A THIEF is up for two awards (gulp!)—the Rita for best Short Historical and the Bookseller's Best award for Short Historical—so cross your fingers for me. I'm going to spend a good portion of the conference purely nervous, which will prevent me from eating much, which will help me fit into my Rita skirt, so it all works out beautifully. Another miracle!

I'll try to blog once or twice from the conference, and perhaps include a few of-the-moment blurry camera phone photos, so the three million of you who read this blog (hee! I'm estimating, mind you) can stay informed.

Oh: the appliances? A flatiron. My cell phone. My laptop. A blender.  (<--just kidding. The party won't be in my room this year. )

Wish me luck and happy trails, kittens!

Conquering the cell phone netherworld; do my feet look like little hooves?

         When I’m not busy fending off the amorous advances of San Francisco’s very handsome mayor (I mean, really, Gavin—I’ve told you before, but I just don’t have time to play. You have a city to run, and I have to roll skirts into tubes in preparation for the RWA conference), life is pretty mundane. Or as mundane as it can ever get in San Francisco, and around me, because I tend to be a magnet for all things odd. But today was quite pleasant and productive, because I’d been floundering around for a while in this cell phone contract netherworld—my phone was broken, but my contract wasn’t up until October, and buying a new one was too expensive, yadda yadda, and I just didn’t know what to do and all the bloody rigamarole surrounding cell phone contracts makes me irritable. It offends my sense of the practical.

          I entertained a number of options, but I finally caved and went to Cingular and they were very nice and thorough and accommodating (the cute salesman was, at least), and though I thought I only wanted a basic phone, I of course ended up with a sleek little black Razor flip phone that takes photos and videos (most of which will star my newly bald cat, probably), and a new contract that will expire long after I do. I jest, but you get the picture. That’s the price I pay for having the nerve to own a broken phone while still under contract. I wanted the pink phone, because pink would give me half a chance of finding it when I go fumbling about in the deep, dark bowels of my purse for a ringing phone, but they were out of pink. The black one will blend in with everything else I own and hide cunningly in the shadows of my purse, eluding my fumbling hand, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time I leave it somewhere, pour water on it, sit on it or accidentally drop it out of the window of a speeding vehicle, because such is the fate of cell phones.

          I should just get walkie talkies. That way I can have a code name, too, and I've always wanted one of those.

         I confess I'm very pleased with my new phone, though. Now I need some ringtones that aren't lame. Any suggestions? What kind of phones do you guys have?

            And while I was out buying a phone, I also bought a pair of shoes that are either quite stylish, or make my feet look like little hooves. I haven’t decided yet. These are for the conference.

           (Actually, what do you call the wife of a mayor? A Mayoress? A Mayonnaise? I like Mayonnaise.)

           Anyway, never fear: work on revisions continues, the conference countdown continues, and the sunny San Francisco weather continues, which is a little unnerving. It's been downright warm here, which is making everyone both cheerful and wary, because sun in the middle of July is just wrong. But it feels and looks marvelous, and I might just have tan shins within a few days. Life is good.

My Rastafarian cat; my post-review glow

          Little does my cat know, but he’s going to the groomer today. On his chart at the vet it says he’s a “Domestic Medium Hair” cat, but he turns into a Rastafarian cat about once a year. His hair is really fine and silky, like a bunny’s, and he gets petted kind of a lot (that’s the whole point of cats, really, isn’t it?), plus he likes to roll around in the dirt in the garden, and he’s a little on the fat side, so he can’t groom every bit of himself. All of which has contributed to the fact that he’s now sporting orange dreadlocks. He wiggles ceaselessly when I try to brush him, but his personality almost completely vacates his body when he goes to the vet—he goes limp as a sock from the sheer horror of it all—and it’s the same at the groomer, so he’s easy for the groomer to untangle. He won’t like it one bit, but he’ll come home fragrant and probably a little balder than he was before, and he’ll forgive me in time for his dinner.

          Domenic (my cat), on the whole, likes to participate. When I run on my trampoline at night, he barrels enthusiastically up and down the hall the whole time and banks off the trampoline en route—I’m guessing because he doesn’t want to be left out. And when I do crunches on the carpet in front of the television, he climbs into his boot box next to the television (I bought a pair of boots some time ago and in the manner of cats, he co-opted the box) and he rolls around in it with his catnip eggplant. (It’s an eggplant. Made of flannel. Stuffed with catnip.). I imagine that’s what he thinks I’m doing down there on the carpet: rolling around with catnip. So since I’ve embarked on my own sort of groom-athon in preparation for the RWA conference, far be it for me to leave him out.

          In addition to getting the cat shampooed and shaved, also on the agenda today: tan my shins, answer emails, work on revisions, scrub the shower. Among other things. Not necessarily in that order. Some simultaneously. (I’ll let you guess which.)

          And I wanted to share with you all an early, wonderfully enthusiastic review of WAYS TO BE WICKED: Check out the very cool blog, Where’s My Hero? I have to tell you, I started my week with a little glow when I read it. :) I meant to update my website with a WTBW excerpt this month, but now it looks like the beginning of August is more likely. After all the conference festivities.

On rolling things into tubes, and other essential author strategies

          There’s so much more to being an author than simply writing. A good deal of strategizing is involved. For instance, there’s my packing strategy for my five days or so in Atlanta at the RWA conference, which will take place in just another week or so.  I’m determined to bring only one carry-on in addition to the big bag I sling over my shoulder, in which I stuff things essential to my survival (dark chocolate, tea, and my laptop.)  And yes, you might be thinking I’ve set a perverse little challenge for myself for no reason other than to make myself crazy, but I don’t plan to pack a hoop skirt, a corset or anything with a bustle, so I think it might just be possible. (My Rita outfit might require complicated body smoothing underwear involving mesh and girders, but I’ll try it on one more time and decide then). So I’ve decided skirts are the way to go, because I can roll most of them up into tubes and unfurl them when I arrive. Little tops (also rollable into tubes), some tidy little sweaters to go over the tops, jammies, a couple of pairs of shoes, a bag stuffed full of little baby-sized deodorants, toothpastes, wetting solution, etc. (I think travel-sized things are adorable), et voila! If I win a Rita, I’ll just have to buy it its own seat on the airplane on the way home.

         I hear it’s hot in Atlanta. Like, capital “H” hot. In the summertime, in San Francisco, the average temp is about 63 degrees. Needless to say, we don’t have air conditioners in our houses, and don’t really know how to work them. I imagine the hotel will be refrigerated, and during the conference all the authors will remain as preserved as that prom corsage I stored in the freezer so long ago. Air conditioning actually kind of bewilders me, because I never know how cool I want it in the room, and when I visit very warm places, I always end up thrashing around in the hotel bed, adding covers and kicking them off resentfully and adding them back again throughout the night.

         But sound the trumpets: I have a Rita outfit! In a fit of originality, I’ll be the one wearing black. I found a skirt that I’ve owned for about twelve years—long, black, slit to the thigh and God help me, to my utter shock, it fits—and I have this black jersey-and-satin halter top number that I bought a while ago for a reason that eludes me now, since I've never worn it. Who knew the two were just waiting for each other?? I love how I only had to go shopping in my own closet. It makes me feel clever.  Now all I need to do is get waxed within an inch of my life and somehow acquire a tan.

         And just for laughs, that image to the left is the bookmark I just finished designing for WAYS TO BE WICKED, and I'll be spraying those babies around like confetti at the conference. Well, actually, no I won't. But I'll have them at the Literacy Signing, and I'll put some in the goody room, and if you want one, you can march right up to me and ask for one. :) I'll probably be wearing a skirt.

On watching your fingers

Once upon a time in my wild(ish) youth, I loved music so much that I wanted to be it—that's really the only way I can describe it. I wanted to breathe it, wear it, live it. So I taught myself to play guitar, because making music seemed as close as I was ever going to get to becoming one with it, so to speak. Plus, my ultimate goal was to be Bono or at the very least Natalie Merchant, and wear things with fringe or waifish skirts and twirl rhapsodically around the stage while long-haired boys played instruments around me and gazed rapturously at me from the audience.

And so I approached learning to play guitar the way I approach most things—by diving right into the middle and hoping I would never need to swim back to shore (so to speak) to learn all that tedious beginning stuff: Music theory, the names of chords, stuff like that. So I learned the names of the strings; I watched my brother play, and saw how he made shapes over the fretboard with his fingers to make chords—diagonals, triangles, a sort of rectangle (those would be bar chords) and I copied him. I knew how to play piano a bit, so I at least understood some music basics, like scales.

That was enough, I decided. I was off: I starting writing songs.  And I don't think I'd ever felt quite so powerful—imagine, music was spilling out of me (well...sort of). And they weren't half bad, those very first songs.  They were a little odd, granted. And short. In a burst of enthusiasm, wrote a lot of very short songs. LOL. And of course I eventually needed to swim back to shore for things like the whole concept behind bar chords, which I learned from my friend Dave's drunk uncle, who was sleeping off a bender in Dave's garage while Dave and I were out there with our guitars stumbling over a song by The Jam. (Dave didn't know the names of chords, either.) His uncle rolled off a garage shelf, startling us (we didn't know he was out there), grabbed Dave's guitar from him, and snarled, "It's like this, you idjits. Like a scale.  F follows E, F# follows F..." his hands traveled up the guitar fretboard, demonstrating. Then he handed the guitar back to Dave, climbed back up on the shelf and went back to sleep.

It was perhaps the most useful thing anyone has ever taught me about guitar. 

So that was a milestone in my career as a guitar player. And another one, an earlier one, was learning to play without watching my fingers, because that's when you're finally free to express the music, to interpret it, rather than just play it. And there comes a point when playing is so automatic that looking down at your fingers while you play can completely throw you off, will cause you to lose your place in a song. Your fingers know the song; they don't need to be watched.

I was just pondering these things, because I was mulling the vast vocabulary, the jargon, that surrounds writing, which is in some ways similar to music theory. I never knew any of it until after I'd sold THE RUNAWAY DUKE and met other romance authors who knew this language.  I didn't know what "H&H" meant; I didn't know what a "dark moment" was; I didn't know what an "arc" was. None of that stuff. I just wrote the book.  I imagine, like musicians, that some authors feel more comfortable arming themselves with theory before they embark on writing; others throw themselves in.  I remember a guy I knew in college who was a theory genius—I could splay my fingers in any imaginable way over the fretboard of a guitar, and he could name the chord ("C minor suspended fourth inverted etc. etc."—" but he never once wrote a song. I, in fact, can barely recall seeing him play guitar. I think he thought he needed to know every rule there was before he could allow himself the pleasures of playing.

Some musicians use theory to help them craft masterpieces; others are like Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits, who says, "I’ve always rebelled against theory. Guitar playing for me is a compulsive activity. I'm not against learning technique, however, and I'm certainly not against acquiring new knowledge. I don't have any favorite keys that I play in. To me, different keys have different colors, different qualities, so I like playing in lots of them."

I guess I'm kind of like Mark Knopfler as a writer. :) As I wrote more books, I acquired writing jargon cautiously and judiciously, and I'm still deciding how and if it serves me as a writer. Some of it has helped, but I still think I go at storytelling rather instinctively. And of course it's awfully useful to know what an arc is, etc., but for me it might be best not to, metaphorically speaking, watch my fingers too much as I write, because too much examination might just throw me right out of the story, the way watching your fingers can throw you out of a song.  Mostly I trust that once I get rolling, my fingers will (usually!) know the story.

Speaking of getting rolling...ahem. Revisions are singing their siren song to me. :) Have a fabulous weekend, kittens. And if you're a writer reading this, tell me a little about your writing process if you feel like it. :)

Typepad naps, the earth tilts, Julie hopes elves will do her revisions for her

          So the Typepad service took a loooong nap yesterday, which meant that zillions of bloggers were denied access to their blogs, which meant that zillions of Very Important Blogs like this one weren't updated yesterday, and I think—I'm not positive, but I think—the earth tilted on its axis as a result. Thank God Typepad is back up, because now I can tell everyone that my search for a dress for the Ritas continues fruitlessly, and that my hairstylist recently whispered three little words in my ear: "Macy's Junior Department." She says if you look very, very carefully, really put your back into the looking, that is, you can find great bargains.

          I'm afraid of the Juniors Department. I'm always afraid I'll be detected. I'm afraid that if I creep toward it, sirens will go off and searchlights will go flailing back and forth like they do on Star Trek or Hogan's Heroes, and someone with a bullhorn will shout: "YOU! YOU with the FULLY FORMED BREASTS. Step AWAY from the camis. You're tooooo OLD. I repeat: TOOOOOO OLD." I'm also afraid of the music they play in the Macy's Juniors Department. I have nothing against loud music per se, having perpetrated my share of loud music in my lifetime, but that ceaseless thumpety-thumpety house music crap abrades my nerves, which are already tender and irritated from the need to shop. (My apologies to anyone who enjoys thumpety thumpety house music crap.) I might have a more fulfilling shopping experience if they play Guns n' Roses, or Vivaldi. Almost anything else.

          And since it's 1:30 a.m., and since foghorns are lowing appealingly in the distance here in SF and making me very sleepy, and I've discovered the hard way that Typepad is still acting wacky (this post has disappeared a couple of times as I've tried to save it and I can't insert images), I'm off to see the Sandman, and I'll be back tomorrow. Maybe magical and talented elves will appear and complete my revisions for THE SECRET TO SEDUCTION while I'm sleeping.
         But first I'll say: KimW! You won a signed book! You guessed the love scene locations correctly from Location blog. Atta girl! :) Send me an email with the subject line "BLOG WIN!" so I can find it in my sea of email, include your mailing address, and I'll send you a signed copy of BATS. :) (As evidence of Typepad's wackiness, your comment disappeared. But you did guess correctly. Feel free to hop on and comment again.)

Location, location, location

See that image to the left? That's what color the sky was all day long yesterday.  That's the color it is right now. That's foggy summers for you. Is it 8 a.m. and time for breakfast? It it 6 p.m. and time for dinner?  Who can say?? White, white, white, all day long—there's no gradation in color as the day progresses, because no sun really penetrates the fog. And then suddenly it's night, which is dark, as per usual. Sometimes we get days and days and days of this, and it's a wee bit like being in a padded cell. (Not that I have any first hand experience with that, mind you. )

What's funny is that often you can take a ten minute train ride from where I live through a short tunnel to the other side of the hill, to another neighborhood, to find the sun shining, the sky a brilliant blue. It's like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy opens the door to her flying house after it lands and suddenly everything goes from black and white to vivid color. If we get too many more days of white skies, I may need to visit Oz. Do they give the weather report by neighborhood in other cities? They do here.

Anyway, I’m working on revisions for THE SECRET TO SEDUCTION, and in a marvel of synchronicity, this week on the old British comedy series As Time Goes By (Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer, shown on PBS), the very dry-witted Lionel Hardcastle (played by G. Palmer) is working on the revisions to his monumentally dull (and he knows it’s dull) book, My Life in Kenya. The book is about—wait for it—his life in Kenya. As a coffee planter. He’s already revised the book once, but his hyper “boy publisher” (this is what Lionel calls him) Alistair Deacon has more revisions in mind, and their conversation goes like this:

ALISTAIR (exuberantly): “We LOVE the book, Li. LOVE it. But the manuscript wants something. [tilts head back musingly]. What’s the word, what’s the word…?

LIONEL: Burning?

Cracked me up.

Fortunately, I'm having a lovely time revising THE SECRET TO SEDUCTION. Seriously. Lovely. It's wall to wall sex! Just kidding. Don't mind me. A wee bit punchy after a late night working on revisions. (There are walls in the book, and there is sex, and the two might just work in tandem in a particular scene, but that's all the hint I'm going to give at the moment.)

As I'm working on revisions and various other things, the story of my next book is playing softly in the background of  my mind, and one of the things I think I'm fairly certain of is where the first love scene will take place. Not where in the story arc...but where as in location. The surrounding environs. And I don't know if it's quirk or not, but so far, in every book I've written, I invariably write the love scenes first (it's the "dessert first" method of writing), because, as I blogged about yesterday, scenes often pop fully formed into my head, and the love scenes are among them. And as they're the most important scenes in the story, I want to give them my freshest energy.

But first I coax them into existence by asking myself where I want the couple to be, and I wait for some sort of image to shimmer into being in my mind. On a pier?  A hunting box?  A garden? A gallery of statues?  A tiny attic room, with stairs creaking as the heroine begins her tentative climb toward our hero? What feels delicious, evocative, appropriate, sensual? What can I immerse myself in as I write? Something invariably comes to mind, and somehow it fits the story. (I once a told a dinner companion about my locational approach to love scenes, and he nearly choked on his prime rib from laughing, for some reason.)

Someday I'll write more about my overall process, because I have metaphors galore for it, and they're all just dying to be used. But for now—what's your idea of a good Regency-set love scene location?? :) [And see if you can guess which of my books, current and forthcoming, feature the above-mentioned love scene locations . LOL. I'll send a signed book to the first commenter who gets it right].

Heroes in the Mist...

          So I was sitting out in the garden channeling my next book, and—

          Well, OK. Not really. That is, I wasn’t precisely channeling anything. But I had a conversation with another author recently about How We Begin Writing Books, and I found myself admitting that mine always start with the hero (they do), and that once I start to really feel him, I know I can begin writing the book.

          Feel him?

          Apart from the fact that I wouldn’t mind actually feeling a hero right about now (::: twitches cigar like Groucho ::: ), I never thought I would be one of those authors who goes around saying things like that—things like, “My characters just talk to me. I’m just a helpless vehicle for the muse,” in a drifting yet earnest voice. And etc. You know what I mean. I would hear that stuff and think, “Oh, puhlease.”

          But the thing is…this is how it works. And I do need to “feel” my hero. (And how.) A  humbling little realization.

          I think I know why my books have so far started with the hero. Because when we read a romance, we read in part to fall in love with the hero of the story. And if I’m going to sacrifice sleep, television and grooming for weeks on end in order to finish writing a book, I want to do it for a man worthy of said sacrifice.  A man I look forward to spending time with each day, who amuses and challenges me, someone I can continue to discover as the pages fill with words. Because I love men in all their strength and vulnerabilities, the hero is the impetus for me. And once I find him, it’s easy enough (or easier, anyhow—any writers reading this will bark slightly hysterical laughs at the word "easy") to find a woman, a heroine, worthy of him.

          And how do I go about feeling him enough to start writing him? Sometimes it’s a bit like scrying (for those of you who haven’t read THE MISTS OF AVALON and the like a million times, scrying is like gazing into a crystal ball. You can scry, supposedly, with any number of things—a mirror, or a pan of water, for instance—to see the future, or tap into current events far away). Anyway, sometimes I use scenes to scry with. What I mean is…so far I don’t really write a story in a completely linear fashion (I’ll blog about that someday), but I’ll usually set out with a few scenes in mind— they just pop into my mind fully formed, and I can’t shake them, so I just know that they absolutely belong in the book. I often don’t know where they belong in the story until I start writing it, I just know that they do.

          For example, in BEAUTY AND THE SPY, I knew I had to use a scene where Kit finds an intruder in his room at night (I won’t say too much about this scene, in case you haven’t yet read the book). I heard the dialogue, I felt the heat of the room, the texture of his sheets, saw the shadows of his furniture in the dark…I just didn’t know why the intruder was in the room. But I knew the scene belonged. (This scene turned out to be integral to a pivotal plot twist.)

          So I sat with the scene, and sort of entered into it. There’s really no other way to describe it. Lay there on the bed with the hero, as the hero, in that dark room, waiting to feel what he was feeling. And then it happened. Little by little, like Mr. Darcy appearing from the morning mist backlit by the rising sun, shirt fetchingly open a few buttons, in that scene in the latest Pride and Prejudice  (Ha! I wish! ), my hero,  Kit, began to come into view as a person. I began to know him.

         And once I know a hero, I can begin to really feel him, and then I can begin to write the bloody book.

          I've been thinking about all of this because I feel another hero coming on. He'll be part of my next project. :) Nothing juicier than dreaming up new heroes.

          And I have no questions for you today, kittens, but talk to me if you feel like it. :)

Laurence, Vivien and Love among the pigeons

          I’m a little worried. You know that urban myth about pigeons? About how you never see any baby ones? That they must therefore spring spontaneously, fully formed, from sidewalks and buildings, or perhaps split like amoebas to make more pigeons?

          Well, I found a pigeon nest.

          I was taking my cat out to the backyard for his morning roll (he leads me down the back stairs, through the garage, out to the yard, where he rolls all over the patio like a walrus, sniffs the roses, burrows through the lavender bush, bites at a few long tickly weeds, and then we go back inside). This morning for some reason instead of taking a left down the wooden stairs he bolted straight up to my neighbor’s back porch, and two pigeons immediately flew away in a loud snap of wings. I followed my cat up there.

          And that’s when I saw it. I blinked. If it wasn’t for the one teeny, poignant little egg in the middle of it, I would never have known it was a nest. They're clearly not avian architects, pigeons. It looks like someone smashed a garden hat down and laid an egg on it, or like a haphazard pile of hay sweepings. But this pair chose a pretty good spot for an urban nest, I suppose: it’s kind of a pigeon condo, in a way, right on my upstairs neighbors back porch tucked behind some potted plants.

          I snagged my cat by the scruff, startling him, and we went back downstairs, tip-toeing the whole way.

          I think I might have witnessed the whole courtship that led to the egg. In my neighborhood, houses are built very close together and fences are pretty low, and from my kitchen window I can see a patchwork of backyards stretching uphill. Right outside my kitchen window is my next-door neighbor’s tiny backyard, which is wild and messy in a nice way: masses of climbing, bright orange nasturtiums, a few roses, some shiny-leafed bushes, a scattering of feathery weeds, the kind my cat likes to bite. There’s also some kind of citrus tree that really needs watering and a few terra cotta pots. A white bathroom sink appeared for a time right smack in the middle of it all, which lent the yard a pleasantly surreal air, and then it disappeared again.

          I don’t see pigeons very often in my own yard, but pigeons seem to love this particular messy yard for some reason. Nearly every time I do the dishes I see a few of them there, amorously chasing each other around and around like that last scene in every Benny Hill episode (I amuse myself by imagining the theme music.) Every now and then one of the pigeons would allow itself to get caught and I would be treated to a birds-eye view of unabashed pigeon lovemaking. Sometimes I could hear them at it, too, when I was in other parts of the house, because they were LOUD. Coo…coo….COOOOOO!! Pretty funny, and sometimes a little embarrassing if I had company, because it sounded urgent and downright enthusiastic.

          And a week or so ago, as I was doing dishes, I saw a pigeon fly by with a long straw in its mouth toward my neighbor’s back porch. I wondered then. And now I know.

          I of course Googled pigeons, and I learned that the dad pigeon brings straws and twigs to the mom pigeon to build a nest, and they take turns sitting on the egg, dad during the day, mom at night. And I couldn’t help but think about it. How did they go about deciding where to build the nest? Was it a mutual decision? Did she perhaps prefer something in the ritzier Russian Hill area of San Francisco, but he thought the fog belt was a better place to raise a family? How did he go about choosing just the right straws and twigs? How do they know when a nest is done?

          Given that dad sits on the nest during the day, I know now that the male pigeon is gray and iridescent green, and the female pigeon is cream-colored and speckled. I’ve gone and given them names, (Laurence and Vivien) damn it, which means now I’m going to worry about them and the baby pigeon inside the egg. We have crows, BIG honkin’ Jurassic crows about a foot tall (I exaggerate not) around here, and I bet they would love to eat a pigeon egg.  I’m not worried about my cat. He only goes out escorted by me, and he’s never caught and eaten anything bigger than a fly, which usually comes right back up. But the happy pigeon couple did in general find a pretty clever spot in terms of shelter.

          I have a friend, a farm boy from Wisconsin, who makes fun of me because I get all excited about such things, and by watching birds in Golden Gate Park.  (I once heard a ruckus in the bushes at the park, and then two squirrels and a Bluejay came dashing out, and they were all carrying French fries. I wondered who got mugged for their fries. It was like they were working as a gang.) And it’s not like we didn’t have birds galore around when I was growing up in the suburbs. And I realize many people would argue that there’s no shortage of pigeons in San Francisco, and that they're the flies of the bird world, etc. Still, there’s something indomitable and sweet about that little egg, and this little pigeon world within a world. In eighteen days (I learned that part by Googling), with luck, there will be a new pigeon.
          Anybody else have a good bird story? What birds frequent your backyard? What do you see out your kitchen window?? :)

         

I've been thinking about men

I’ve been thinking about men.

Actually, at any given moment of any given day that sentence might conceivably be the answer to the question: “So, Julie, what have you been thinking about?”  Every day, certain musings cycle predictably through my mind, much like those announcements that scroll overhead on screens at bus and train stations, and men (the dears) invariably make an appearance (or two or three or four or…) in my daily thought parade.

What I was thinking was this: A friend of mine thinks Brad Pitt is hot. I, on the other hand, think Brad Pitt is strangely puffy, with very small lips, and he has…what is that? Is it a lisp? It’s something like that. He’s more interesting to me now than years ago, what with his globtetrotting humanitarian streak and all, but still…he’s never been my cup of bouillon.

I suppose, once upon a time, long ago, I had a “type” (as in, Q: “what’s your type?” A: Not Brad Pitt.) I would have said my type was tall, lean, dark haired, dark eyed. Quirky, perhaps. Daniel Day Lewis. :) Oddly enough, I have never once, for any length of time, dated anyone like this. It was just how things worked out over the years, I suppose. And now I no longer really have a physical type at all. And I suppose it’s because…well, when I write, I take great visceral pleasure in describing men and their beautiful bodies, and then I try to give them multidimensional personalities worthy of a reader’s attention for a whole book, but in real life I suspect it isn’t beauty, or looks in and of themselves that trigger that sharp, sweet “I want” in us. And I suspect the first things we notice, respond to, love about men are as singular as we are.

For instance…. maybe it’s because I’m a geek. Or a Virgo. (actually, “geeky Virgo” might be redundant. Except for Cameron Diaz and Raquel Welch. But then there’s Elvis Costello. The ultimate geeky Virgo.). But I find it downright erotic when a man can, say, do math really fast in his head. I get all tingly when a man whips out his…vocabulary. (ha!) I love a smartypants. But there’s more to it, of course.

       As an example, some years ago there was this one guy I fell really hard and pretty instantly for. He was tall. Really tall. I was eye-level with his collar button, and as I’m tall(ish ), this meant I got to feel dainty for a change. He wasn’t exactly buff, or built like a linebacker. He was built like…well, he was built like a guy who sits in front of a computer most of the day, probably because he was basically a guy who sat in front of his computer most of the day.  A bit squishy. His hair was that color that could be considered either brown or blond—it was very short—and it always stuck determinedly up a little in the back. He wore glasses. He had blue-green eyes and the world’s longest eyelashes.

       And his looks were pleasing enough—I certainly liked them—but his looks had very little to do with the “falling hard” part. Two things I remember most clearly about my first impression of him: his voice, and his laugh. I loved his voice. It’s hard to describe, but he had this very low, confident way of speaking, and a timbre that seemed…well, dramatic as it sounds, I’ll use the word “enveloping.” And he had a great laugh, hearty and unselfconscious, and he used it a lot. He was bloody quick: a fast talker, a fast walker, a fast thinker, and very funny.  During our first conversation, I made a lame joke—something about Napoleon’s army shooting the nose off the Sphinx, I think it was (as you can see, I really have no idea how to flirt. I mean honestly, I’m hopeless. Who flirts by talking about Sphinx noses??)—he actually knew what the hell I meant, laughed at the joke…and then, in a non-arrogant way, corrected me on a finer point of history.

       Boom, down I went, felled by the lumberjack of love. LOL.

       Paul Bunyan (ha!) and I parted ways some time ago for various very good reasons, but those kinds of things—the voice, the laugh—are what I mean. I have a friend who loves short, burly men. She melts around them. She really dates no other type. I remember in RACHEL’S HOLIDAY, a great Marian Keyes book, the heroine mentioning how she loves it when a man’s legs are a little too short for his body, which I thought was pretty funny. I have another friend who instantly notices teeth. Teeth are very important to her. Another friend loves a really hairy guy. LOL. But many of us have been surprised over the years by who we’ve actually fallen for, and the things that matter, or stop mattering, when it comes to attraction.

       So what about anybody reading today? Do you have a “type?” And does your sweetie or hubby (present or former) synch up with your type, or is he different? What were some of the first little things you noticed about him, or notice about any man?

(A quick little side note: a number of you have asked if you can post comments without using your email address, and you can, indeed. :) You can just fill in the name portion of the comment, if you like, and go ahead and post, if you're shy about using your email address.)