Where The Mountain Meets The Moon

Guest Blogger: Olivia Sonnichsen

Eight-year-old Olivia is an avid reader. She enjoys any kind of chapter book she can get her hands on. Her favorite part of the day is coming home from school. If it's not a school day, Olivia's favorite thing to do is play outside.

Today Olivia will be reviewing the book WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON by Grace Lin.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

This book is about a girl named Minli who goes on a mission with her friend that is a dragon. They are going to see the man on the moon. On the way she meets a buffalo boy, the goddess of weaving, the king, Da-Fu and A-Fu, and their family. She wants to go see the man on the moon because she wants to ask him how to change their fortune. Her family had bad fortune and Minli wanted them to have good fortune instead.

My favorite part of the book is when Minli knows that she didn't have to ask for good fortune and she has good fortune just by asking a question her friend needed. She learned to be selfless, not selfish.

I love her pictures. I think Grace Lin did them all by herself.

I like the book because it is based on China, because I was born in China and we just moved from China.

This book 279 pages and it took me three days to read it. I give this book a BLUE rating because BLUE is my favorite color.

***
Olivia's Book Rating System:

BLUE : GREAT! I LOVED IT!!
PURPLE : PRETTY GOOD. I LIKED IT.
GREEN: It was okay.
RED : Yuck. I hated this.

***

Another Baby Step

I had a pleasant surprise this evening.

I was scanning my long-neglected Google reader tonight, when I came across a post by kt literary super agent Kate Testerman. It's one of her About My Query installments, in which she critiques query letters sent from her blog readers.

I rashly sent my V-Day query to her a couple weeks ago, but I wasn't expecting to see it critiqued for several months. I figured the slush pile in her inbox was pretty high.

So wasn't I surprised and shocked to see that it was MY query she critiqued last Friday? And even more surprised and shocked to see that, overall, she LIKED it?

And as glaze on the Bailey's Irish cream cake (my favorite cake in the world), I also got some constructive feedback from some of her blog readers. Yay!

If you'd be interested in reading my query, just click here. And please feel free to leave a critique of your own. The more feedback, the better.

Okay, I have to go do one more tango of joy around the living room now.

Stripped and Primed

I've moved on from stripping wallpaper now. I've graduated to slopping primer around.

I stripped wall paper for so long, I considered becoming a professional stripper.

Available evenings and weekends.

Ha. Ha.

But now I'm onto primer. Primer on the ceilings, primer on the walls. Everywhere that was textured now needs another coat of primer.

I'm typing with primer-splattered hands even now.

Will I ever blog about anything but house renovations again? Will I ever wear anything but these paint-splattered jeans and this holey WSU sweatshirt? Hmm.

I guess there has to be a correlation between priming walls and life. At least priming walls and writing the next great American novel.

I've had a lot of time to think about it as I listened to the slurp of the roller along the wall ... And here it is, my deep, exhausted thought of the day:

Both take practice.

You learn to paint by painting. A lot.

You learn to write by writing. A lot.

Any other deep thoughts from my readers out there?

Home Is Where The Putty Knife Is

Several people have asked to see pictures of our new home.
Here are some outside shots the day we closed on the house. The previous owners were still in the process of moving out.

I'll post some pictures of the inside of our house later with before and after pictures of the renovations.

All right ... back to priming walls.

Rush

Sorry for the long silence.

I've been

talking on the phone non-stop,

standing on a ladder ripping off three different patterns of pink wallpaper,

coordinating contractor, plumber, electricians, texturers, and wallpaperers,

using a pressure sprayer to soak the underlying brown paper on my master bedroom walls,

using a putty knife to carve glue and soggy brown paper off the master bedroom walls,

quietly cursing whichever lazy person it was who stuck this pink wallpaper directly to the dry wall in the first place!!!!!

Basically, we have about seven walls and two bathrooms where 1980's wallpaper was stuck directly to the dry wall. On at least two of the walls and in one of the bathrooms, the wallpaper has bonded so it cannot be removed without ripping into the drywall (growl). So, we're looking into other options there.

I've got my painting crew of friends and relatives hard at work up there most of the time. My mother-in-law and I switch off watching the kids. She paints for awhile and then I go up and peel off goopy wallpaper. This is our life for the next couple weeks.

Meanwhile, the trees are changing color and shedding their leaves. Driving down from our new house I look over the valley. Today it was bathed fresh after raining all morning. Reds, golds and dark greens. The fields are yellow, the gray clouds rolling away over the valley, the blue sky peeking through like a polished spot on a silver plate.

I almost burst into tears.

Better

You're not going to believe this. Or maybe you will.

Olivia woke up this morning just fine. Fever gone. Energy returned. Doing cartwheels around the living room.

Prayer works.

Oink flu, be gone!

And here she is at her much-anticipated cheer camp performance tonight:


(And we got the keys to our new house today, too.)

Oink

I was planning a lengthy, insightful post for tonight with deep insights into American culture.

However, my eight-year-old has apparently come down with Swine flu. She spent the afternoon stretched out on the sofa.

Olivia is not usually a stretch-out-on-the-sofa type of girl. She's usually in motion. Or reading a book. Tonight she needed us to read to her. And then she drifted off to sleep.

Poor baby. She has a high fever and a bad cough.

It looks like she'll be sick for her vacation day tomorrow. And for mini cheer camp, which takes place tomorrow afternoon.

The saddest part is that this mini cheer camp is the first thing since we've been back that Olivia's been truly excited about. She came home with the flier a month or so ago and has been talking about it non-stop ever since.

The high school cheerleaders are going to do all the campers' hair and nails. They're eating pizza and cookies for dinner. Olivia's comment about that was: "And we don't even need to eat any vegetables!"

Then, they're all going together to the football game and will perform a halftime dance.

I think I'm just as disappointed as she is!

So, we'll save the eloquence for another night. I'm heading to bed so I can keep up my strength. I'll need it if this one sweeps through our entire household.

And we're painting our new house next week. God help us. Seriously.

FitG Update: Just Listen

Just Listen was my first Sarah Dessen book.

I don't know how I feel about it, so bear with me.

Sarah Dessen is a very celebrated writer, a best seller in YA.

I liked a lot about this book. The dialogue was real. I liked the character Owen. I liked the way Dessen built the story. (The climax was a bit of a let down after all the careful build up, but, that's okay. We'll all live.) I could relate to Annabel, the main character, but I'm not sure if I could relate for the right reasons.

And here's why I'm not sure how I felt about the book. It seemed to me that Dessen broke all the rules with this book. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but, when you're reading agent blogs about what they're looking for and what the main pitfalls of many first-time writers are, and then you pick up a book by a bestselling YA author who falls into all of those pits and still has a best selling career ... it just makes you wonder.

Here are some rules that Dessen broke.

(1) Back story. The whole beginning of the book seemed to be back story. I almost didn't read the whole thing because I got bored waiting for something to happen.

(2) Narrative. What happened to the writing golden rule: show, don't tell? Main character Annabel tells us everything we want to know about her. She doesn't show us much.

(3) Passive main character. I can relate to Annabel because I'm a passive person, too. Passive people usually aren't very interesting. Annabel, unfortunately, wasn't very interesting. There were other interesting characters, but the mc wasn't one of them.

It just goes to show you that once you get 5-10 best sellers under your belt, people are buying your name and the rules can go out the window.

That should be encouraging ... I guess.

Overall, I didn't hate this book. I wasn't crazy about it, either. I'll probably read another Sarah Dessen as part of my YA education, but I think I'll go for something on the best seller list to see what got her there in the first place.

WIP Wednesday: Entertaining the Brain

I haven't written one of these posts in awhile, so for those of you who are new to this blog, WIP stands for Work In Progress and basically this "weekly" post's purpose is for me to fill you in on what's happening in my writing life.

So, what is happening in my writing life?

Well, not a lot, to be honest. Usually I squeeze in at least a couple hours on Sunday afternoons to write, but the rest of the week is hit or miss.

I'm about 5000 words into my newest WIP, titled Back. I love this book already. The only problem is that I'm having a hard time hammering out an outline, and I don't want to get too far into it without a good idea of where the plot's going. Otherwise, I'll be buried in revisions and rewrites. Not that I probably won't have to rewrite most of the book anyway, but being fairly confident in your plot saves a lot of work down the road.

My finished WIP, V-Day (previously titled Any Day But) is in its sixth draft and is right now in the hands of another one of my wonderful writing buddies, Christine. After she finishes reading it and I make the changes she recommends I may be brave enough to start querying it to agents. It's crazy how quickly this book has gone compared with my first one.

Speaking of my first novel, Up Lantau Running, which I shelved a couple months ago ... I know I said it was shelved, but I am considering entering it in the Delacorte Press Contest for a First Young Adult Novel. Read more about the contest (if you'd like to enter too!) here.

Okay, my baby just woke up and I have to start dinner. Boy, I sound positively domestic, don't I? I am a housewife, after all. I guess my novel-writing habit keeps my mind entertained enough so that I don't get tempted to turn on the TV and watch soaps. So, even though I'm not bringing in any money with it, I guess it's good for something.

Committed

Today I ran around town like a dachshund in a bright red, googly-eyed lobster costume. (Wish I had a video of that one, but you'll just have to trust me: that dachshund RAN. Fast. And often in circles.)

I was so busy because today was Escrow day: the day we signed our papers for our new house. Signed our lives away, as I've heard some people say.

And I can see what they mean. We've attached ourselves to the ball and chain of a monthly mortgage payment for at least the next fifteen years.

It's distressing when I say it that way. But on the other hand, we're actually about to OWN something substantial. We will have a permanent address. That should count for something, shouldn't it?

I did feel excited as I signed all those papers. More than the excitement, though, I felt the gravity of the situation, the reality of the commitment.

And self doubt. How can I be old enough to own a house? Will I be responsible enough to take care of it? Will I be able to maintain a certain standard of cleanliness? Will I be able to keep the plants in the garden alive? Will I be able to keep my toddler from falling down the laundry chute?

I was busy today, not only getting all our finances organized so we could make our down-payment, but lining up contractors for the remodeling that starts Saturday. We close on the house on Friday, and the next day Aaron is heading up to the new house to start ripping out the floors.

Before we move, we're putting in all new floors and doing a modest remodel of the kitchen, which means moving some appliances around and replacing all the cabinets and countertops. We're also painting all the inside walls different shades of golden beige with one blue accent wall in the living room.

I'm trying to decide if I have enough energy for all this, but I guess it's too late to start second-guessing. We're officially wading into the pit of insanity and there's no turning back. The papers are signed.

We're committed.

American Dirt

Yesterday proved to be a weird day.

The sky clouded over and the wind picked up, blowing brown dust from the recently-harvested fields EVERYWHERE.

The stop signs shook in the gale. The large tree in the elementary school playground blew over.

When we walked outside, the horizon was a dull brown, distorted with dust clouds.

I've seen this kind of thing before, but it wasn't here. It was in Tianjin, Fall of 2001. Red dust blew in then. Looking out the window, you felt like you were on Mars.

Aaron says he's never seen dust like this in Prosser.

Today is a beautiful clear-blue day, but the dust still coats everything outside. When Anna ran through the backyard grass ahead of me this afternoon, her feet kicked up clouds of gray-brown. Dust coats the rims and sills of doors and windows.

I almost feel like I'm back in China. If people here want to know what I mean by things being dirty there, they just have to step outside anywhere in Prosser today.

In fact, it makes me a little "home" sick. Just a little.

Yum ... and an Albino Turkey

Today at the Central Washington State Fair I ate:

An elephant ear,

A hot dog,

Curly fries,

A BBQ beef sandwich from the Young Life booth,

Baked beans, also from the Young Life booth,

A Bavarian funnel cake,

and cotton candy.

It was a very, very good day.

I also attended the rodeo for the first time in my life. If anyone is surprised, they should read this post.

We also saw goats, cows, draft horses, and an albino turkey.

Awesome.

Discontent

There is a pea-green house a couple blocks from Papa and Nai Nai's home that has one big draw for our kids:

A treehouse in the backyard.

Whenever we walk or drive by that house, one of my children comments on it. "Ohhh, look at that tree house" or "Why don't we have a tree house?"

The pea-green house actually went on sale a couple months ago. The only problem was that the house itself is probably about 1000 square feet and the reason the tree house was so apparent from the road is because the yard has absolutely no privacy.

Still, my children commented on it whenever we passed the house and they saw the For Sale sign in the yard. "Why don't we buy this house?"

When the house sold and the new family -- apparently with two young children -- moved in, my children remained envious.

Last night we walked by and Gabe said, "Lucky kids. They get a treehouse and a play set."

I want to tell them to be patient. We close on our new house in one week. Our new house is almost three times the size of the pea-green house, we'll be on a private road, we'll have a beautiful view of the valley. And it's not pea-green.

But my kids are grieving the absence of a giant tree in which to construct a tree house.

I've told them we'll buy them a play set with a clubhouse in it for Christmas, and they're excited about that prospect, but still. It's not the same as a real tree house. And they've told me so.

Even today as I walked by the pea-green house I heard Anna say, "Lucky kids."

Really, children, I have your best interests in mind. Really I do.

We're funny humans, sometimes, aren't we? Even if we're getting more and better than we could ever imagine, we still find ways to be discontent.

Mischief

I don't know what came over me.

There I was, standing at the entrance to Keene Riverview Elementary school as all the children filed in. I was holding the door open when I saw them.

Two little black-haired girls, about the same height, walking shoulder to shoulder, their heads bent in toward one another. They were talking.

As they got closer, I heard their voices. They were speaking Cantonese.

I took a deep breath and smiled my widest, friendliest smile. "Leigh- ho!" (That's "hello" in Cantonese.)

Their heads jerked up. They stared at me, then they exchanged glances.

"Leigh-ho!" I said again, just to make sure they didn't later think that my speaking Chinese had been a figment of their imaginations ... or a bad dream.

They passed through the door I was holding open and looked with wide eyes at me over their shoulders. I let the door close and walked away, giggling to myself.

So, that was me, reduced to mischief-making in Smalltown, USA. Reduced to startling two first grade girls who probably wondered why this big American woman was speaking to them in Cantonese.

Oh, the weird things you do for fun when you're candy corn.