New Justin video!

Celebrating the paperback release of the second JUSTIN book,
JUSTIN CASE: Shells, Smells, and the Horrible Flip-Flops of Doom!

More fun stuff to come soon -- but for now I hope you'll enjoy this short trailer...

Love,
Rachel Vail

Poems for your pocket

It's Poem in You Pocket Day. Do you have one? Feel free to take these, if you want them -- and leave some for me, here.


This first one I found posted outside the office of a wonderful Shakespeare professor, while visiting my son's future college these past few days:

            The Revised Versions

Even Samuel Johnson found that ending

unbearable, and for over a hundred years

Lear was allowed to live, along with Cordelia

who marries Edgar, who tried so hard

to do the right thing. Don’t they deserve

some happiness, after all that suffering?

So Antony keeps his temper, takes Cleaopatra

aside to say: no more games, dear,

we need to talk this through. And Hamlet?

Send him back to school to learn

no one ever really pleases his father.

And while he’s reading he’ll remember

how pretty Ophelia was, how much

she admired his poems. It’s not easy

being king, having to worry every day

about the ambitions of your friends.

Who needs a bigger castle?

Let’s sleep on it, Macbeth might tell his wife,

wait and see what comes along.

And Othello should have a friend to explain

it’s natural for newlyweds to quarrel,

especially if the bride is so much younger.

Why not make what you can of love?

It’s what we want for ourselves,

anxious to avoid another scene, and wary

of starting a fight, having suffered

through too many funerals and heard

how eloquently the dead are praised,

who threw their lives away.

                        - Lawrence Raab

And this one is one I wrote a year or three ago:

     NEED

I just spent an hour

and two hundred dollars

in the grocery store

I came home with bananas 

and no milk which is what I needed

but with a memory

that a friend once spent 

two hundred dollars

on a car

true, it had no floor 

and no brakes

but he was young and it was a car

and he had places to go

and no need yet for a floor

or milk, or brakes

Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) had some good advice re poetry for writers: 

Write a verse a day. Not to send to publishers but to throw in wastebaskets. It will help your prose. It will give it swing.

I think reading them is pretty useful, too. And having one in your pocket seems just plain prudent. Like having a tissue, or a mint, maybe some floss. Because what if you need one?

So -- got a poem to share, your own or a favorite by someone else?

Love,

Rachel Vail

sometimes it goes like this

I've been in a weird shaky mood all day after waking up this morning from a very vivid and shaming dream partially about being dumped by my friends. I was literally shaking much of the day, my guts in a twist like saltwater taffy on a stick which made working on my book impossible, which made me feel even worse about myself. Only just now after forcing myself to at least write down the dream in detail (in hopes of getting it out of my system so I could start WRITING) and seeing that I'd called myself a nickname I never used for myself before did I realize the dream belonged to one of my characters; it was her life and her abandonment/shunning/shame I'd been seeing in my mind's eye -- and now here I sit crying her tears, reeling from her pain, not yet able to feel relieved that maybe I just found my book.

YA Sisterhood!

It's YA Sisterhood's 2nd Blogoversary! Enter their 1st giveaway to win If We Kiss & Kiss Me Again by @rachelvailbooks http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2013/02/book-spotlight-and-blogoversary.html …

All Day

Today I spent all day sneaking up on my book.

I read the entire internet and made popcorn and worked on a picture book and did the crossword puzzle. Because I have been writing books for more than 20 years, I recognize that this certainty of failure is not only not fatal to me personally, but not even a mortal injury to the current book. That doesn't make it any less terrifying or paralyzing. Nor do the long years of our acquaintance make me and this pit of I don't have a clue how to do this friendly. We hate each other. We're a married couple in a terrible Tennessee Williams play, or maybe Edward Albee.

And it's not just that I don't have a clue how to write THIS book. I don't know how to write ANY book. Or even a coherent sentence.

Muffins. I could make banana muffins. I often make banana muffins on days like this. And in fact I have four bananas that are pretty much shouting at me from across the room to PLEASE peel them and throw them with some sugar and butter and flour into the stand mixer.

I resisted. All day I resisted the siren song of those four bananas. Banana muffins would be capitulating to the beast of CAN'T WRITE THIS FRIGGING BOOK.

And now, just 40 minutes ago, I made a small dent, a change of a sentence from close past to further away, moving the event described in that sentence from earlier today to two months ago... and there it is. The way forward (and back) from here is suddenly clear, or clearer.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find myself again at the bottom of that deep hole. I'll probably make the muffins -- the bananas' destiny calls, after all -- but right now it's just before 7PM and though to any objective observer I accomplished a rounding error from ZERO today, I feel relieved. Maybe even proud.

It was a good writing day.

How was yours?

Love,
Rachel Vail

Look at this Real Life PIGGY BUNNY

How adorable is she?

Dear Teen Me

I was invited recently to write a letter to my teenage self.

Here it is.

Love,
Rachel Vail

PS also just got big news -- Flabbersmashed won a Charlotte Zolotow Honor Award! More on this tomorrow.