Claire LaZebnik

And by us, I mean me and my husband Rob, a writer for The Simpsons.  Here’s why it’s worth watching:

1.  We haven’t had time to do a test run so there are bound to be some embarrassing technological glitches which will result in my wailing “Oh, Rooooobbbbb!” exactly like Laura Petrie in the The Dick Van Dyke Show.  And maybe we’ll do a little Christmas number like this one.  (Seriously, watch it–it’s adorable.)

2. You’ll learn how two writers in one family help each other–and drive each other crazy.  (Go ahead and ask Rob about when I was writing my first novel and he was working on a TV script at the same time.  Apparently I was typing a little faster than he appreciated as he tried to think of jokes in the next room . . .)

3. Differing family holiday traditions are bound to come up as a topic and nothing leads to a husband/wife tiff faster than that.  Come see us quarrel!  And then laugh and pretend we’re just joking!  See right through our pained smiles!  Try to guess which sofa Rob’s going to be sleeping on tonight!

4.  If you’re on east coast time and really tired, we promise to speak in low monotones at the end so you can drift right off immediately after.

5. You can ask us anything you want, about our lives, Rob’s time on The Simpsons, my adult fiction, my YA novel, my books about autism, our family . . .  just, please, I’m begging you–don’t bring up shower caps.             

Click here to join us in the chat tonight, 8 pm PST, 11 pm EST.  And if that’s just too late for you, you can always watch the chat tomorrow–you just can’t participate.  But if it would improve the experience, you can pretend you’re typing in questions and we’re just ignoring you.  We’re like that, you know.

This was fun.  As I explained in a previous post, I was wildly tired the night we had this chat (I’ve had bad insomnia lately–it’s still going on–I think I’m even more tired today than I was then, if that’s possible), but instead of making me stupid and incoherent, the exhaustion just kind of mellowed me out.  Plus there were brownies baking in the kitchen (I was at my sister’s house) and you can’t be too down when you smell brownies.   It’s the happiest smell on earth.  Well, that and a baby’s forehead.  Anyway, if you missed it, click on the link below, and TUNE IN THIS THURSDAY NIGHT AT 8 PM PST (11 EST) to see me and my husband (a writer/producer for The Simpsons) fight publicly discuss family traditions and how a sense of humor is a survival technique during the holidays.

Book Candy TV interview

Of course you did!  How can you not?  I’d want to see me make a fool of myself if I weren’t me!

Well, here’s your chance.

Tonight I’ll be video chatting live on Book Candy TV, at 8 pm CST, 11 pm EST.  Those who joined my last video chat with author W. Bruce Cameron know that the situation is rife with possible embarrassing moments.  In that one, I remained thirty to forty-five seconds behind Bruce and the moderator, so I spent the time either interrupting them or ignoring their questions.  Turns out the wifi in my house has all the power of a pencil sharpener–the manual kind–which is why I kept getting left behind.  That won’t happen tonight because I’m going to my sister’s to do the chat.  She has GOOD wifi.

Even so, I really think the potential for embarrassment is even greater this time.

You see, I haven’t been sleeping well: in over three weeks, I haven’t slept through the night once.  I saw my doctor this week and she prescribed something to help me with the insomnia.

Now here’s where I prove my brilliance: I decided to try out this brand-new drug the night before I have to do this video chat.

And guess what?

It revved me up.  I mean, I was WIDE awake after taking it.  Like I’d had ten cups of coffee.  Except my eyes couldn’t focus when I tried to read so I couldn’t do anything but lie in bed and try to keep myself entertained with thoughts about how awful the next day was going to be on no sleep.  That turned out to be less fun than I’d hoped.

Eventually I reverted back to a sleep aid I’ve used before, which I don’t like to use because it leaves me feeling tired the next day, but at four a.m. I just wanted to stop being awake.  Unfortunately, it proved no match against the energizing effects of the stuff I’d taken earlier.  I got maybe three hours of sleep, all told, and finally got up feeling  . .   well . . . a little stoned, frankly.  I’m staying off the roads.  And I’ve vowed to go all natural from now on–if I’m awake, I’m awake.  No more pharmaceuticals.

But I am wondering how tonight’s video chat will play out.

So here’s the deal: click on the link to the video chat at 8 pm tonight (or 11 if you’re on the east coast) and ask me something embarrassingly personal.  I will be so out of it, so exhausted, so lightheaded and groggy, that I’m pretty sure I’ll let something slip that I shouldn’t.  It would also be a good time to ask me to pledge donations to your favorite charity, to do my (non-existent) John Wayne impression, and to chug all the juice from a pickle jar.  Just take advantage of me any way you want.

Of course, if you have a heart, you could just show up and ask me about my books.  That would be very kind of you.  Just remind me what they’re about . . .

Info:

Join American novelist/author Claire LaZebnik as she shares holiday insights around the importance of using humor in writing as the key to unlocking matters of family conflict and of the heart.

THIS WEEK! Live On Camera – Claire LaZebnik!

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Writing keeps me sane.

So I think I’ve figured out this whole entertaining thing.  This week we hosted nineteen people for Thanksgiving and two nights later had another family over for dinner.  We didn’t have any help of any kind–did all the cooking and serving and cleaning up ourselves (with some help from our guests)–and both evenings were totally mellow and easy.

Now, nothing was perfect and nothing was particularly elegant.  If you want perfect and elegant, stop reading this stupid little blog post and go pick up a copy of Martha Stewart’s magazine.

Say hi to Martha for me.

Okay, now that it’s just us mellow folk here, I’ll share with you MY ten secrets for entertaining frequently, easily, and happily (and, admittedly, sloppily).  I am, of course, an expert on the subject.  (You know I’m an expert on entertaining because I have a blog about writing.)  Anyway, listen and learn:

1.  Say yes to any guest’s offer to bring something.  The answer to, “Would you like us to bring a dessert?” should always be, “Sure!”  And the answer to “What can we bring?” should always be, “What would you like to bring?”  I never ASK guests to bring something, by the way.  I’m fine if they don’t.  But if they offer, I’m going to say yes.

2.  Same things goes for any offer of help from anyone who happens to wander into your house while you’re prepping for a meal.  A friend dropped by to visit my son on Thanksgiving; I got them to chop all of the celery for the stuffing while they were chatting.

3.  Don’t worry about impressing people by making something exotic and restaurant-worthy.  Food needs to taste good and there needs to be enough of it.  Period.

4.  Don’t stress about how your house looks.  So long as it’s not disgustingly filthy, who cares if books are piled up everywhere?  (Actually, my husband cares, so he cleans up before guests come, which is fine with me.  But I wouldn’t care all that much if he didn’t.)

5.  Put on good music while you’re cooking.

6.  If time runs out and you haven’t set the table, throw out a big pile of plates and stick some silverware in a jar.  I promise you, people can figure it all out.  They’ve eaten before.

7.  Make brownies.  The house will smell great and no one leaves a meal unhappy when it ends with brownies.  If you want to be more adult about it, make a flourless chocolate cake, which is essentially a large round brownie that discards the one ingredient no one actually cares about.

8.  Serve family style whenever possible.  People can eat more of what they like and avoid what they don’t like and go back for seconds without having to ask.  Plus you get the food to the table faster.  Plus you don’t have to stand at the counter serving everyone.  Plus you can pick the good stuff out of the salad bowl and nibble on it all night long without getting up from your seat.

9.  Spend time with your guests.  Make food that will be all done by the time you’re sitting down to dinner, or, even better, by the time your guests arrive.  They’re there because they want to hang out with you. If they wanted someone slaving in the kitchen to make them a perfect meal, they’d have gone to a restaurant.

10.  Only invite people you actually like, people who won’t turn their noses up at chipped plates and mismatched glasses.  People like my friend who, when I apologized for serving hot dogs, said, “Are you kidding?  We love hot dogs.  And that means we don’t have to do anything fancy the next time you come over to our house.”  Those are the kind of friends you want to have over.

But if for some reason you have to invite people who might be picky and/or rude (like, say, relatives), and you see them raising their eyebrows at your casual, inelegant meal, then just turn your back on them and pour yourself another glass of wine.  Sneak an extra brownie too, while you’re at it.  Why should they ruin your fun?

I was brought up on the east coast by two people who weren’t of real Yankee stock, but certainly COULD have been, to judge by how buttoned-up and unsentimental they were. They didn’t cry when we kids trotted off for our first day of kindergarten and they didn’t cry when we graduated from high school and they didn’t cry when we said, “I do.”  And they certainly didn’t sit around the Thanksgiving table blah-blahing about what they were grateful for.

I’m sure my parents were grateful they had enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and five healthy kids (the “healthy” part still astounds me.  How the hell did they manage to beat the odds with that one?  Five kids and not a single diagnosis among us?).  They just weren’t the kind of people who felt the need to sit around talking about it.

I’m definitely their child.  Oh, I’ve pushed the sentimental stuff a bit more than they ever would have.  I cried so hard at my son’s high school graduation I almost ruptured something and then I cried even harder when we said goodbye to him on his first day of college, and I’m in tears almost daily thinking about how my second oldest son will also be leaving come the fall.   And yet . . .  I still find myself slightly turned-off by people’s public declarations of gratitude on Facebook.

This seems to be a big thing this year: you start listing all the stuff you’re grateful for in status after status, and you do it without a trace of irony or a punchline.

Now, first of all, I don’t do anything without a trace of irony and/or a punchline, up to and including talking to my kids about sex and to my father about death.  So that’s a problem for me right there.  Even more importantly, I can’t shake the feeling that expressing gratitude for the good things that life has given you is a private matter, like flossing your teeth or doing those doggy-at-the-hydrant leglifts–worthwhile activities, both of them, but not anything you need to do in public.  It’s probably my “keep it to yourself” upbringing, but public expressions of gratitude feel kind of like bragging to me.

Private ones are nice though.  Every TDay, we throw a tablecloth over a coffee table and toss a bunch of Sharpies on top.  Over the course of the day, family and guests drift over and write a little note (if they want to) about what they feel especially grateful for that year.  And sometimes at the dinner table, we go around and say what we’re grateful for.  Irony and punchlines are allowed, of course.

And I’m all in favor of telling someone you love that you’re grateful he or she’s around.  In fact, I encourage anyone reading this to do exactly that: grab a person you’re pretty fond of and let him know that YOU know that your life would suck without him (to paraphrase poet laureate Kelly Clarkson).

But resist the urge to go tweet about it afterwards.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, you’ll see one of my books on a bookshelf in tonight’s episode.  Nepotism at work!  Let me know if you spot it . . .

There are two kinds of people in the world.

(What a stupid, uninspired way to start something.  I promise never to begin another blog post this way.  Of course, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep their promises and those who don’t.)

Anyway, back to my first point.  There are two kinds of people in the world: those who eat the almost-spoiled fruit first, and those who eat the fresh, perfectly ripe fruit first. 

I want to be in the latter category.  I want to be the kind of person who grabs that perfectly yellow banana because it looks good and who stuffs it in her mouth with abandon.

But I’m not.  I’m the kind of person who thinks, “If I take the good banana, the almost-bad banana will become completely bad and will have to be thrown out and that’s such a waste.  So I’ll eat the almost-spoiled one now and I’ll eat the good one later.”

Once you set down that path, there’s no getting off of it.  Something is always on the verge of spoiling.

My friend Dawn once described avocados as being “sneaky little things” who are hard as a rock one day and turn to brown mush the second you turn your back on them.  She exaggerates: there’s a day or two in the middle when avocados are perfect: mellow and smooth and buttery.  Not that you’d know in our house where I always grab the overly ripe, blotchy avocado first, in the hopes of “salvaging at least a part of it” before it becomes completely unusable.  Of course that means that the next time I reach for an avocado, the perfect one I didn’t use before is now overly ripe.  Time waits for no man.

There might be a metaphor in this whole spoiled fruit thing.  Something about fear making you choose the less good thing or about how life is what you make of it or maybe just a “carpe diem” kind of thing.

Or . . . you know . . . not.

I don’t know how much overlap there is between my readers and fans of the animated Fox television show The Simpsons (now that I have a YA book out, probably more than there used to be), but for those who like both, look for one of my novels to appear in this Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons!  DVR it because you’ll probably have to freeze the picture to see it clearly (I think it’s in a pan shot of a bookshelf).  I feel like I’ve finally made it into pop culture history.  And for you trivia fans, see if you can spot the title of another novel by a Simpsons’ writer’s wife . . .

Let me know if you spot either/both!

A friend this weekend was talking about a book she loved and she said enthusiastically, “It was SO sad.  I sobbed and sobbed!  It was great!”

And I said, “I don’t like sad books.”

And she said, “I LOVE sad books.”

And I said, “I only like happy endings.”

She just shook her head at me, and we fell silent.

It’s true.  Call me shallow and juvenile, but I won’t seek out a book that makes me feel sad.  That doesn’t mean that bad things can’t happen in the course of a book, just that I want the story to end happily for the characters I most care about.

I wasn’t always like this.  There was a time when I could read deeply depressing stuff.

Part of the problem is that I DID read deeply depressing stuff when I was younger, and I discovered, over time, that the rough parts stayed with me for way too long.  Like SOPHIE’S CHOICE.  I can never unread that or forget the central, indelible moment of horror and loss.

The other problem is that I became an adult.  My life is good.  I’m one of the lucky ones.  Even so . . . bad things happen. Some years are hard. So when I pick up a book to read, I want it to escape into it. I want to snuggle down into the pillows and get lost in the characters and when I finish it, I want to be smiling.  I want my burdens to feel lighter, not heavier.

Of course, there are books that are so fascinating and entrancing that they don’t have to have an overtly happy conclusion–just reading them delights me (like Jennifer Egan’s VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, for example, which is so entertaining and bounces around so beguilingly that even the sadder parts didn’t tear me apart).  But a book that’s telling a tragic tale from beginning to end, or one that people warn me is “rough going,” or one that’s set during a genocide or a war . . .  yeah, that’s going to be a hard sell for me.

But I know tons of readers who don’t need or even like the gloss of a happy ending, and I also know plenty of writers who don’t think that a happy ending is believable and have no interest in writing one.

How do you feel about it?

Almost every day–I mean, really, literally, almost every day–I get an email or a comment or an FB post from a reader asking me to please write a sequel to EPIC FAIL.  I’ve gotten requests for sequels to most of my other novels, but never to this extent.  

I’m flattered.  Obviously if readers want MORE, that’s a good thing for a writer.  But I’m also curious about what people look for in a sequel.

Some authors deliberately write books that can be continued.  Sometimes they start out knowing their book will be a trilogy or even longer and even if some part of the story gets wrapped up at the end of the first novel, there are threads deliberately left unfinished.  Sometimes they don’t even bother to wrap up any part of the story, just leave it as a cliffhanger (which drives me and my kids crazy because you often have to wait a year for the next book to be published and that’s just too long to see how a story comes out).  And sometimes there’s an episodic feeling to an author’s books–mysteries are a lot like that, where there are always new cases to be solved.

But my books aren’t like that.  They’re usually pretty neatly resolved.  There’s always a romance and no matter what goes wrong during the course of the book, the right people end up together.  Which makes me uncertain how to approach a sequel: do you split those people up again so they have to find their way back?  (Isn’t that annoying, though?)  Or do they realize they’re NOT right for each other and find other people?  (Isn’t that even more annoying?)  Or do they just have adventures together?

What do you think?  Do you like sequels to books, even if the characters are in a good place when the first one ends?  And, if so, what do you like to see happen in them?

(PS: there’s a tiny difference between the cover in this photo and the actual published cover.  Can you spot it?  It’s very subtle . . .)