A couple of weeks ago I blogged that I was experiencing separation anxiety at the thought of putting my work-in-progress novel aside to focus on My Beating Teenage Heart copy-edits. How I feel now shouldn't come as a surprise because it's what always happens to me when I'm away from one of my books for more than a couple days, but anyway, this Keane song sums it up exactly:



Yes, Book XI and I have become strangers...

“I don't know your thoughts these days
We're strangers in an empty space
I don't understand your heart
It's easier to be apart ”

With the copy-editing for My Beating Teenage Heart behind me (at least for the moment!), I hope we can remedy that unhappy situation soon and I'm going to put all my efforts into getting back to where we were, which means I'll be in Internet-lite mode again for at least the next few weeks.


But during that time I'm also on a blog tour with The Teen {Book} Scene so if you want to catch up with me (or some of the characters from my books), here are the details:

Monday, November 22:
Michelle at See Michelle Read
(Character Interview - Mason from Lighter Side)

Tuesday, November 23: Kelsey at The Book Scout
(Review: Light Side of Life and Death)

Wednesday, November 24: Christie at The Fiction Enthusiast
(Author Interview)

Thursday, November 25: Jessica at A Fanatic's Book Blog
(Review: I Know It's Over)

Friday, November 26: Lindsay at Just Another Book Addict
(Character Interview - Finn from One Lonely Degree)

Monday, November 29:
Kate at I Just Wanna Sit Here and Read
(Character Interview - Nick from I Know It's Over)

Tuesday, November 30: Kari at A Good Addiction
(Review: One Lonely Degree)

Wednesday, December 1: Corrine at Lost for Words
(Author Interview)

Thursday, December 2: Corrine at Lost For Words
(Review: Lighter Side of Life and Death)

Friday, December 3: Faye at Ramblings of a Teenage Bookworm
(Character Interview - Jersy from One Lonely Degree)

Many thanks to Kari and Kelsey for putting this tour together!
You know the way you can get tired of even your favourite food, if you've had it too often within a certain timeframe? Like, it's wonderful at dinner and you'd be supremely happy for the leftovers the next day at lunch but if you had to face the same meal yet again for dinner on that second day (and then the third and so on...) your enthusiasm would seriously wane?

Well, that's sort of what copy-editing feels like after awhile. To me anyway. No matter how much I love My Beating Teenage Heart I was at the point yesterday where I was immune to all its charms and equally as blind to any of its faults. Like, someone could have inserted an alien invasion into one of the paragraphs and I wouldn't have even noticed because I couldn't force my attention to stick with the words on the page.

So here are some things I did yesterday when I should've been poring over my manuscript but couldn't face it anymore:

1) Watched The Way We Were reunion on Oprah. My heart ached for Hubbell and Katie all over again. The following quote reveals, in a nutshell, why it could never work for them:
Hubbell Gardner: People are more important than their principles.

Katie Morosky Gardner: People are their principles.


Just hearing the song is always enough to make me want to sob!

Cheetos2) Munched on Cheetos with unbridled enthusiasm. Since Cheetos make an appearance in My Beating Teenage Heart I suppose I could make a case for my Cheetos consumption being related to the copy-editing process but constructing that argument sounds like too much work.

3) Watched multiple episodes of In Treatment. I've been addicted to the show since the beginning. Though we cancelled the movie network/HBO cable package only last spring, I had to reorder it this October because there was absolutely no way I was going to miss season three of In Treatment! Watching the show makes me want to go into therapy with Paul (Gabriel Byrne). I met Gabriel Byrne once in a Dublin bookshop when he was doing a reading & signing of his autobiography and he was so lovely and genuine. Lovely, I tell you!

Gabriel Byrne turns in a stellar, nuanced performance as Dr. Paul Weston (a talented but troubled therapist) on each and every episode of In Treatment. So far this season my favourite patient is the Debra Winger character—she almost had me in tears yesterday when she was talking about her mother. Amy Ryan (of The Office, Jack Goes Boating and Gone Baby Gone) is equally amazing as Adele, Paul's own therapist. If you're interested in character driven TV, In Treatment is the show for you.

Before I change the subject, let's enjoy a snippet from Gabriel's Byrne classic performance in the terrific Coen brothers flick, Miller's Crossing:

 

4) Watched Adventureland for the second and third time but the second doesn't really count because it was really only acting as background noise and I basically missed the entire plot. I'm not sure you can tell what a cool movie Aventureland is from this trailer but Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are great in it and so is the amusement park/80's setting.



5) This sounds like a hell of lot of entertainment viewing, I realize, so lest you think I sat idly in front of the screen all day I'll point out my other big activity yesterday, which was renovating my website and blog. If you suspected something looked a little different around here, you're right—I put a fresh coat of paint on the place and changed up some of the graphics. Periodically, I tend to get bored of the website's appearence and then feel compelled to freshen things up. Hope you like the new look and I'm also hoping that I'll be able to post a sample chapter from My Beating Teenage Heart soon!
So I've been keeping my head down these last couple of weeks, concentrating on writing a new YA book, and though I'm still really only at the beginning I've been making some good progress on it.

Here's a snippet from Chapter One:
“When I wake up I have a pounding headache behind my eyes just like I've had every morning lately. At first my eyelids refuse to open fully and when they do the weak winter light wafting through my window burns my retinas.”
No matter how excited I am about getting started on a new book, I always find it difficult to move past the note taking and research stage and jump in. Facing a blank page (or blank screen) is pretty daunting and when I start typing the novel, for all I've thought about it, the book is sort of a stranger at that point—an unformed stranger.

Anyway, the new novel and I definitely aren't strangers anymore but I'm not entirely sure where we stand either. It's an interesting time and I'm extremely curious to see what's going to happen next but copy-editing for My Beating Teenage Heart arrived yesterday (with a fairly short deadline attached to it) which means that I'll have to set Book XI aside for the moment.

I was surprised at how much separation anxiety that involves. I seriously didn't want to stop writing! However, it's all about the copy-editing for now and so I'm continuing in Internet-lite mode for the foreseeable future, first to wrestle a bit more with My Beating Teenage Heart and then to dive immediately back into Book XI.

Internet Lite mode ahead

Completely off-topic but I just saw the trailer for Jane Eyre on the Women and Hollywood blog and am giddily awaiting its release. I've been an enormous fan of Mia Wasikowska ever since seeing her star as a troubled young gymnast in season one of In Treatment and Michael Fassbender was such a startlingly powerful presence in Fish Tank and Hunger that I'm certain this pairing is going to be dynamite!

Head over to Women and Hollywood to check out the trailer if you want to get giddy about this latest adaptation of Jane Eyre too.

Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre
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