A MADNESS SO DISCREET Wins the Edgar & Also I Put On Makeup & A Dress

This past week I was at the Edgar Allan Poe awards in NYC, which was an amazing experience. So many talented published and aspiring authors in one room kind of made my head spin. The champagne may have contributed to that.

Wednesday night I had a panel at Books of Wonder, along with the other 10 nominees in the categories of Middle Grade and Young Adult. My librarian ears were perking as the others read from their books, and I made a few purchases on the plane home as a result. I also managed to get a whopper of a migraine right in the middle of the panel, so if you were there and saw me constantly massaging the back of my own head, it's not because I have an itchy scalp.

The boyfriend and I walked back to the hotel from BoW, while I stifled a deep urge to vomit. He told me to just do it on the street. "We're in NYC," he reminded me. "Nobody will really care. If you did it at home it would be a story for years."

He's not exaggerating. I hit a skunk with my car when I was 17 and the car smelled for weeks afterward and it still comes up in conversation occasionally... and that was 20 years ago.

I felt better the next day - thank goodness. I had my hair and face done, accidentally walked through a movie shoot (that doesn't happen at home), and ate a tuna melt that put all other tuna melts to shame. And... it was time to go.

I had to take a quick shot of the dress and shoes because I had no idea how to answer anyone who asked me about my dress other thank to say, "it's black." That is the true extent of my fashion sensibilities.

This is Edgar, and my awesome editor Mr. Ben Rosenthal. Also my boyfriend's uneaten cheesecake. You can see my wine glass is empty.

And then I ended up in a room with lots and lots of famous, talented people, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which was completely unexpected. I found my awesome editor, Ben Rosenthal, and my equally awesome agent-lady Adriann Ranta, using Kareem as a reference point in the room. Then we all ate dinner and the boyfriend shared his story about a guy in front of Grand Central Station who had decided he just didn't like my boyfriend. Seriously I have no idea what that was about. He called him a scumbag, and then remembered him when we walked past later and said, "Hey, I called you a scumbag earlier."

I told boyfriend to be flattered that apparently he stands out in a sea of New Yorkers.

And, because I think it's important to destroy any mystique I may have garnered, here is a picture of me in my element at home, courtesy of the boyfriend.

And then, long story short, I won the Edgar. Kind of crazy. The lovely and talented Lyndsey Faye read my name out of the envelope and I went into a little bit of shock and touched my nose for a few seconds (this is how I center myself) before getting up. So basically I came to New York and touched parts of my own skull at major public events.

The Wide, Wide, World of Reality

People often ask me what it's like inside my head.

The honest answer is that it's the Beetlejuice soundtrack in there, and it's easy to get lost.

I'm an outdoors person, and an athlete. I try to run, or get my daily dose of sunshine in (even when it's cloudy, those rays get through!) regardless of the workload. It helps keep me connected with the real world, to humanity in general, keeps depression at bay, and also keeps my ass at a manageable size.

The boyfriend is an outdoors-y guy as well as a creative, (I've said before- think a Thoreau/Daryl Dixon mashup with a photography degree), and his view of the world always amazes me. I can make up shit in my head all day long and sell it to you, convince you to care about things that never happened to people that don't exist. But he can look at something mundane and see the amazing, capture the magical qualities of a corn stubble field in the snow that I never knew existed.

I've lived around cornfields my whole life, and yes, I've always known there was something a little eerie about the stalks - green or dry - rubbing against each other in the wind. They have their own special sounds, they can slice your skin like paper, and if you wander more than four rows in you WILL get lost. Sometimes for a good long while.

But I've never thought about the stubble, the mowed off, unproductive sentinels that simply wait six months to get plowed under. They're distinctly unmusical. A remnant. Until my boyfriend went out yesterday and took some shots that make them look like a tiny invading alien army wading through the snow to come kill us.

I think as writers we sometimes spend too much time in our heads, neglecting the world around us, and the amazing qualities even the most mundane objects can hold if we change our perspective. So think about it today as you go about your routine - oh, yes, the routine, that will make you blind to everything except the task in front of you.

Make your desk chair a little higher, or a little lower. Take a pen and put yourself on eye level with it and really look at it for second. Find something you see every single day, and look at it a different way.

You'll see something new.

The Beautiful Dichotomy Of My Life

As you may know, A MADNESS SO DISCREET was recently nominated for an Edgar award in the YA category. I was still in a little bit of shock from that announcement when I received my invitation to the ceremony, which is a black tie event in NYC.

I'm good with black tie. I'll have to shave and wash my hair and find some non-expired makeup, but I can pull it off in a pinch. But I've got a +1 on that invitation, and the boyfriend is something of a mix between Thoreau and Daryl Dixon. So if you can imagine trying to get either one of those guys in a tux and into NYC you see my dilemma.

I broached the subject while we were splitting wood this weekend. Yes, we heat the house with wood that we cut ourselves - that's how we roll. So I explained about the nomination and the ceremony while yelling over the wood splitter. And in between losing my breath from hauling logs as thick as my waist I added the bit about it all being black tie.

So we're pretty filthy, sweaty as hell, and wearing Carhartts when the boyfriend said sure, he'd put on a tux and come to NYC with me.

And... now I need a dress.