The Maps of Cassaforte

Back in November, I had to spend a couple of painful days coming up with a map of the invented city that is the setting of my April book, The Glass Maker's Daughter. It was painful because although I knew in my head the basic shape of the city, and how it was supposed to look, the process of having to draw it out, with proportions and distances, just sounded like torture.

I also had an editor whose sharp eyes could spot every inconsistency possible. There's a gondola chase late in the book, for example, that had our heroes paddling to freedom in directions that were inconsistent with the preliminary map I'd drawn, so the text had to be fixed. And then there was some weirdness about bridges and their directions that had to be adjusted. A scene early in the book that had taken place on a side street, suddenly got moved to a main thoroughfare. Eventually, however, my abysmal-looking map and the book were in sync, and I pitied whatever artist had been handed the job of trying to translate my utter lack of artistic ability into something decent looking.

Here's my terrible attempt.

And here's the artist's final, glorious rendering.

I actually got teary when I saw it. It's so beautiful. Look at my little flags for the seven cazas of Cassaforte, all with their little logos, just like I'd suggested! Look at the river gates, done so well! It's just so perfect. I want to live there. Plus I want to take the artist out for dinner.

And no, Cassaforte doesn't have a giant white gulf running down its middle. The map is split so it can fit on two pages.

Fred: Then and Now

A year ago, when she was all of three pounds, it was kind of cute.



Now that she's twelve pounds, and we thought she'd be calmer and we could put ornaments on the tree without worry? Not so much.

The Glass Maker's Daughter

I finally saw the back cover copy for The Glass Maker’s Daughter yesterday for the first time.

From enchanted champagne flutes to rituals that hold the city together, magic lies at heart of Cassaforte. Bearing a striking resemblance to Venice, this medieval city of canals is the home of Risa Divetri, whose future is about to be decided.

Risa has led the sheltered life of a nobleman's daughter, but now she's on the brink of adulthood. Soon she will leave home to study the family craft—creating and enchanting glass objects. The gods will choose which school is best for her. But then the impossible happens: Risa remains unchosen. The gods don't need her? The rejection sends Risa into a spiral of shame, anger, and confusion. If she's not meant to be a glass maker, what will she do?

An answer is found when Cassaforte's age-old magic begins to unravel and corruption threatens their kingdom. As she battles against dark forces, Risa's fiery spirit and untapped powers rise to the surface—leading her toward her true fate.

I would totally buy this book!

S.O.S.

Back in the dark days of the late nineteen-seventies, when I was in middle and early high school, my church had something called Youth Club. Youth Club existed before most of us in Richmond had cable television or video games or computers, and we youth had little to do save wander aimlessly about, sad and listless and unaware that we were among the last, lost generations of teens who could never post drunken photos of ourselves to our MySpace pages.

Well, thank goodness for the church and its highly-structured Wednesday evenings, or else we never would have had anything to do. Youth Club started after school let out, and consisted of choir rehearsal, then a worship service that well-meaning adults tried to make relevant to us kids by filling it with strummed acoustic guitars and songs from Godspell, all sung in a style so earnest and sunny that it has induced in me a permanent antipathy for any religious service involving folk guitar and the songs of Stephen Schwartz. Afterwards we had dinner, which usually consisted of boiled hot dogs and one of those glorious Southern church casseroles that are constructed from such unlikely bed mates as asparagus, a can of Campbell’s soup, and crushed potato chips. And then, after a cross-grade recreational period, we older kids would head off to our crafts sessions.

Ah, the crafts sessions. How I hated them. By the time it rolled around, I’d been at the church for over four hours and was ready to go home. I also disliked that the two available craft classes tended to divide up by gender; one would be a traditional, ‘girly’ craft like decoupage, where the girls would cut pictures from magazines and shellac them onto flower pots. Another semester, the ‘girly’ craft might be the construction of endless amounts of god’s eyes, using popsicle sticks and brightly-colored yarn. The boys, on the other hand, tended to gravitate toward the manlier choice. One year it was woodworking, where I managed to produce a handsome and only slightly lopsided birdhouse, and a chess board that was absolutely sunning so long as you regarded it from four feet away, squinting all the while, and ignoring the globs of wood filler and glue that I’d required to fill in the major gaps between the inlaid squares.

Another semester the boys opted for car repair. I went right along, afraid that giving in to my utter lack of interest in the combustion engine and a vague preference to be sitting with the girls making pot holders from stretchy loops might brand me as a sissy. So I suffered for three long months as the group’s leader, a deadly-dull adult church member, would point to the scale model of a car engine, remove a part, hold it up before the six of us assembled in a semi-circle, and intone, “This is a carburetor. A carburetor injects fuel with air. Air passes through the barrel of the carburetor, thusly. Gasoline meets the air stream through a small hole in the shaft of the carburetor.” For twenty minutes he’d drone on about the carburetor. Once he was certain we should have absorbed that information, he would set the plastic part on the table and move on to the next. I think the goal was that by the end of the semester, when he had gone through a theory of every part of the engine, we would be able to put it back together with a confidence born of twenty hours of his lectures, but I don’t think he actually ever got us down to the very inside of his sorry little plastic model.

Of all the crafts classes I disliked—and I disliked them all—the one that caused the most suffering was on learning Morse code. Now, I’m not even sure how Morse code qualifies as a craft; it certainly doesn’t produce anything that one’s parents can display on their mantels or refrigerators for a week before quietly losing them into the trash can where they belong. It’s not soothing or restful. But the church had someone—Mr. Dunwoody, an elderly gentleman in his late sixties or early seventies who deserved better than a half dozen boys sitting sullenly in an airless upstairs Sunday School room, staring at him with resentment because we were all too proud to admit we’d rather be with the chattering girls snipping pictures from old copies of Good Housekeeping—who was willing to teach Morse code, so Morse code it was.

Every Morse code class began the same way. “This,” Mr. Dunwoody would say, pressing the little buzzer that served as his teaching tool, “Is A.” He would let off a short beep followed immediately by a longer one. “And this,” he would add, impressed with himself, “Is B.” He’d tap out a dash followed by three dots. On he’d work through the alphabet until we’d reviewed all the letters. “Did we memorize all that?” he’d ask. We boys would look at each other, arms crossed, not saying anything. “Good. Now let’s try a simple message.” Tap, tappety-tap, tappety-tap-tap-tap, he’d pulse out at a medium speed for what seemed like hours. “Did we get that? Anyone?” Our faces would remain unmoving as he looked around the room. “Why, it was a popular Bible verse that any of you young men should know. Anyone?” Eventually he would grow frustrated with our stony faces and simply tell us what the verse had been, and then, unfazed, would tappety-tap out another.

What Mr. Dunwoody didn’t really understand is that Morse code had absolutely no relevance to any of us whatsoever. I don’t think there was a single one of us who had ever seen an actual telegram. None of us had parents old enough to remember the wars where Morse code might have played an important role. Even at that age, a young person has a good sense of when he’s being taught something that he will never, ever be asked again in his entire life to call upon, and knows that even the learning of it won’t be a good exercise. The notion that we should actually invest time in memorizing the Morse code with its seemingly random assignment of dots and dashes to individual letters, when we knew that come spring we’d never be seeing Mr. Dunwoody and his mechanical buzzer again, was absolutely ludicrous.

Then Mr. Dunwoody made the fatal mistake of bringing in buzzers for everyone.

He paired us off and sat us across the table, our little charts of code and a pad of paper at our sides. “Try some short phrases,” he suggested. My partner and I glared at each other. “Something that you can pick up easily.” I consulted my chart. Slowly and laboriously, sweat almost dripping from my juvenile brow, I managed to tap out, over the course of five minutes and with a lot of pauses, K-I-S-S-M-Y-A-S-S.

My partner sneered at me and tapped back, over as equally long a time period, B-I-T-E-M-I. Either I made a transcription error, or else his finger got a little twitchy toward the end, there. “Are we having fun?” asked Mr. Dunwoody.

“Yes,” we agreed without any sincerity whatsoever.

The next week, the buzzers were back again. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Anything, anything would be better than having to sit there tapping out little messages of disdain to each other. Even homework. “Let’s try to up the speed a little this week,” Mr. Dunwoody suggested. “You should have that code good and memorized by now!”

Fine. He wanted the speed increased? I’d increase the speed. “Ready?” I asked my partner. He shrugged. My finger paused over the buzzer button, then began to tap out dots and dashes in rapid succession, outpacing even Mr. Dunwoody at his plodding best. Tappety-tap-bada-ba-bappedy-beep-beeepety-beepety-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! It was all nonsense, of course, but my staccato pulses sounded more urgent than anything the Titanic sent out on the last night of its voyage. For a second my partner looked suspicious. Then he drew his mouth into an expression of outright scorn, ready to denounce me.

“Well, what are we doing here?” Mr. Dunwoody looked decidedly unimpressed as he walked over to our portion of the table.

“But Mr. Dunwoody,” I said, trying to seem innocent. “It was a popular Bible verse that everyone should recognize.”

“Yeah,” said my partner unexpectedly, swallowing the insult he’d been ready to hurl. “I got everything he tapped. Didn’t you, Mr. Dunwoody?”

Mr. Dunwoody looked startled. “Why—no. I didn’t.”

“Let me try it this time!” My partner sat up, excited for the first time since class had started the month before. His finger rapped at the buzzer excitedly, producing spurts of sound that exceeded mine in speed. The index finger of his free hand glided over the Morse code chart, as if he were idly looking up the odd letter here and there. After the better portion of a minute, he finally stopped. “Did you get it?”

By this time, other kids in the class had stopped their glum stabs at their buzzers and were watching, highly entertained. “I got it,” one of them said from the far end of the table, followed rapidly by assents from the others. “That was easy!” said one young wag.

“But I didn’t. . . .” Poor Mr. Dunwoody shook his head, looking from face to face as he tried to confirm his worst fear, that we’d outstripped him without warning. “That was too fast. I didn’t. . . .”

It was too late by then, of course. The genie had been released from the bottle. Everyone around the table began punching their buttons with random dots and dashes, all at so high a speed that it was a marvel we didn’t sound like one annoying, high-pitched buzz. Mr. Dunwoody’s head snapped from side to side, trying to take it all in. His mouth twitched in a way that Edvard Munch’s model must have, trying to get into character before posing for The Scream.

“Gee, Mr. Dunwoody,” said another of the kids in his Beaver Cleaver voice. “This is fun!”

Mr. Dunwoody took one stricken look at us, gulped, and fled the room.

My parents always said that the decoupaged flowerpots I brought home the rest of that semester were some of the ugliest things they’d ever seen.

The Lifeguard

It's been too long since we had a dose of Fred:



Ever since the first week we adopted her, Fred’s appointed herself my guardian in the upstairs bathroom. None of the other cats were doing it, she seemed to notice, and since I obviously couldn’t be trusted to myself in that room of death and torture, she’s made sure to keep a cautious eye out.

She’s particularly concerned whenever I take a shower. I’ll twist the appropriate knobs to start the water running, and she’ll extend her neck and take on a certain expression of worry once she sees the shower head start to spray. Sometimes she’ll run to the edge of the tub to make sure for me there’s nothing lurking inside. Like a shark, perhaps, or a less solicitous, alien feline from another household ready to claw my naive and unsuspecting shins.

Once I’m in the shower and the sliding door’s shut behind me, she’ll sit on the sink and fret. If I peek above the enclosure, she’ll range her head up and meow at me in her high-pitched voice, cross-eyed and agitated. The longer I stay—god forbid I should condition my hair—the more shrill she’ll get, until finally she’s calling out to me repeatedly over the water, insisting I get out.

When I do, she complains, loudly wondering over and over again why I’d subject myself to the nasty water. Usually she howls so loudly and with such distress that the Mont can hear it on the floor below. When I’m done, she’ll immediately run over to the tub again, braving the soap-scented wisps of steam billowing out so she can give the shower another once-over. Once her duty’s taken care of, she’ll cast me sympathetic glances while I towel off, then move on to other timely matters. Like monitoring the squirrel population on the back deck.

Now, Fred never, ever repeats this behavior when the Mont showers. I think she recognizes his competence; there’s apparently no question that he can withstand a good dunking. It’s only me that she frets over. Obviously it’s because she feels I’m too feeble and dim-witted to cope with threats to life and limb like water, and shampoo.

Adventures in the Coconut Mall

A friend of ours this weekend held a small and slightly early party to help celebrate the Mont's centennial birthday (I know! One hundred years old this very day and looking forward to his birthday shout-out on The Today Show!). A couple of his guests, whom we’d never met before but who were playing around on our host’s Wii, looked up as I walked into the room and waved in preparation of introducing myself.

“Oh my gosh,” said one before I could get a word out. She blinked at me. “You’re Vance. You look exactly like your Mii!”

“I know!” I replied. Because it’s true. I do look like my Mii.



I’m used to seeing friends of mine on my Wii. There’s sometimes a giant statue of my friend Lonnie looming over one of Mario Kart tracks. Our sidekick Ford Girl is almost always backing her car in and out of a parking space and being obtrusive when I’m trying to make a mad dash through the Coconut Mall. (Which is odd, since that describes her driving in real life, too, if you throw in excessive cell phone use.) And when I’m exercising, and are forever tossing hula hoops at me. Usually, however, I have to think a little before I associate the little Miis with the people they’re supposed to represent; it takes me a few moments before I recognize that the silvery hair and big eyes and smile are supposed to be the Mont, or that the reason that Lonnie’s Mii looks like Lonnie and not like Matty is that Matty is the one wearing the hat. As cute and customizable as Miis can be, they don’t, for the most part, often resemble the person they’re supposed to represent.

To walk into a room and be recognized because of your digital avatar is, frankly, a little weird, even for the digital age. Does that imply I have a shiny, egg-shaped head?

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N

The Mont and I made a quick overnight trip to Saugatuck on Michigan’s western coast last week. Quick, but lovely. We drove out there Thursday morning. In the afternoon, I read a book outdoors while he practiced at the tiny, musty church where his recital was taking place. Then we roamed up and down the streets of the town, had dinner, and spent the evening walking the beach and watching the sun gradually lower itself to the lake’s horizon. Then we went out to a local bar—for karaoke, of course. By the time we hit our beds, late at night, we both instantly fell into heavy and uninterrupted slumber.

It wasn’t until the next morning, though, when we were in our room chomping down cold bagels from the motel’s so-called continental breakfast, that I realized something about my vacations. I can eat out as much as I want, or dig my feet into sand up to the calves, or visit all the shops selling jams and jellies or impossible knick-knacks or gourmet spices and olive oils that I want, but nothing is going to have that real vacation feeling until that inevitable moment when I’m lounging around on messy sheets, mid-morning, and watching Jerry Springer on TV.

Now, I could lounge around at home, most mid-mornings. Although I like to call it ‘working,’ I think most people would call it ‘lounging around with a laptop.’ I prefer the den sofa to my bed, but it’s still pretty relaxed. I suppose I could also watch Jerry Springer and Maury Povich if I cared to, but I never, ever have. On vacation, however, there seems to be an unheard imperative to leave on the television after The Today Show is over and to let the circus begin.

Jerry and Maury always seem to have the same episodes playing when I watch—or at least they’ve refined their niches so well that I’m unable to discern the exact shades of difference between them. I think on Friday morning Jerry’s topic of the day was YOUR MOM’S A DRUNK!!!, though I didn’t actually see any moms in any of the family tableaux, in which warriors of Wal-Mart glared, shouted so many obscenities that there were minute-long stretches of nothing but bleeps, and then lunged at each other, prompting Jerry’s impressive squadron of ropy-armed bodyguards to leap in and restrain them from punching each other . . . sort of.

Maury was doing the same thing I’ve only ever seen him do, which was to read the results of paternity tests. It goes a little something like this: the mother of the child tearfully confides to Maury that she was seduced by a bounder who made her pregnant and then abandoned her for some cheap whore. Maury tsks, shakes his head, and then asks the woman if she wants them to bring the alleged father onto the set. “Bring him out!” she screams. “Bring him out!”

The father walks onto the stage, cocksure and proud, dismissing the jeers and boos of the audience with sneers and claims of “Nah! That ain’t my baby, y’all.” He then reveals to Maury that the poor victimized mother is nothing but a ho’ who’s after his money. A fight erupts, and Maury’s bodyguards (fewer in number and not as hot as Jerry’s, I’m sorry to say) step in to keep the pair from ripping out each other’s hair by the roots . . . sort of.

Finally the moment arrives. “Michelle,” Maury says. “We have the paternity test results of baby Darnell and they show without a doubt that Jamal. . . .” A long and pregnant (so to speak) pause follows. “. . . Is not the father.”

Jamal leaps up and makes victory punches in the air. Michelle bursts instantly into tears and runs off the set into a holding room, where both the cameras and the crowd’s jeers follow her. After a cut to commercial, another tearful mother is trotted out and the entire process is repeated. It always seems as if the mother turns out to be wrong, too, and it makes the enduring litany of sympathetic coos for her story and the boos for the supposed sire all the more curious; you’d think the audience would catch on to the show’s chauvinist slant eventually.

I don’t know what it is about fist fights, baby mama drama, and sensationalized misogyny that spells v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n-! to me, but whenever I’m in a bed and they bring out the bald bodyguards, I’m the one feeling great about being away from home.