The Friday of AWP is always the best day. The nervous energy of Thursday has dissipated, and the inevitable Saturday flu epidemic has not yet emerged. I woke early to respond to student stories and breakfasted on a leftover Cuban sandwich, wondering if it would make me barf later. Reader, it did not! A fortifying start.Alan Sincic, the fantastic Orlando-based writer who was The Furnace's Writer-in-Residence, was on a 9 am panel on the lyric sentence. I'm a fan of Sincic's prose *and* mad presentation skills, so the early start was well worth it. The moderator, Pearl Abraham, kicked off the discussion with this advice: "If the voice doesn't work, write better sentences." Then Sincic woke up the crowd with a call-and-response activity, that gradually built up to us chanting together: "I am an individual and will not surrender my voice to the crowd." He said, "A sentence is less like the beam of a house and more like the branch of a tree," that a sentence has ghost limbs lost in the editing process. He proceeded to take apart this Mark Twain sentence, examining each word choice and its placement as a way of generating suspense and delight: "Is a tail absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog?"Baylea Jones analyzed a sentence from Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, graphing sounds and letters, including patterns of consonant use, and internal rhymes: "Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Wow! I had fun retyping that.I ducked out early to get to my book signing at the Lanternfish Press table, where I got to hang out with my editor Christine Neulieb and publisher Amanda Thomas,  and connect with new readers and old friends, including Julia Mascoli, who was in my Tin House workshop in 2013 and who is Deputy Director of Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop doing great work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in Washington, D.C. (Seattle-area folks, you can donate books to prisons and other under-served communities via Seattle7Writers Pocket Libraries program.)Later, I chilled at the Cambridge Writer's Workshop table, celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, which includes my "Summer-Inspired Writing Prompts." Co-editor Rita Banerjee was there with her mythic poetry collection Echo in Four Beats, as was Maya Sonenberg, whose new chapbook After the Death of Shostakovich Père is out from PANK Books.That night, the celebration continued at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, a beautiful old mansion a mile away from the convention center. There were many, many readings. One was from Women in the Literary Landscape; crowds whooped in appreciation for Anne Bradstreet, Virginia Kirkus, and the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. (I am a rube for not remember which biographer was mentioned, so here are five of them!)  Nell Painter, author of A History of White People, read from her forthcoming memoir Old in Art School, Diana Norma Szokolayi read her poem "Sarajevo," Sonenberg read an anti-plot manifesto, and I read an excerpt from Daughters of the Air in which Pluta has committed arson in Brooklyn and found refuge in an abandoned Times Square theater. Fun! There is so much more to write...! I'll wrap things up in one more post. Sneak preview: there will be blood.

Oh boy, oh boy! Things are getting real. My debut novel, Daughters of the Air (formerly known as Dirty), will be released on December 5, 2017. You can pre-order it starting today: from your local independent bookstore (like Elliott Bay Book Company) via IndieBound, directly from Lanternfish Press, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.Why are pre-orders important? Well, they show booksellers there's enthusiasm for the book, which means they order more books, and they all count towards the first week of sales--so the accumulation of pre-orders gives books a shot at the bestseller list in the first week it's out.This has been such a long time in the making; the seedlings were planted as far back as 2001, when I spent a month at the National Institutes of Health, recovering from surgery. In fact, I have a very personal essay about that time, and how I decided to seriously pursue writing, in Catapult today. You can read "Art Therapy Before Surgery" here. Then, come see all the incredibly kind things people are saying about the book here.I love the cover art by Nichole DeMent, a piece called "Bird Moon" that was originally mixed media encaustic. I can't stop staring at it. Nichole's work is super dreamy, and I've coveted it for my novel since coming across it in 2013. Over on Lanternfish Press's blog, I shared more thoughts on Nichole's work and how my writing process draws from visual art. I've been hugging my advanced review copy since it arrived in August and have been so grateful for editorial director Christine Neulieb's championing of the book as well as all the good, hard work going on at Lanternfish Press.If you're in Seattle, please come to the launch party at the Hotel Sorrento, hosted by Hugo House, on the night of the release, December 5, at 7:30 pm!Want to stay in the loop about other events and related hooplah? Subscribe to my short & sweet monthly newsletter here. Thank you for your support!