(The Heart is a Compass; Victoria Moran's Main Street Vegan Academy.)

I'm in New York City this week for Main Street Vegan Academy, which began with a glorious dinner (chickpea and green bean curry, lemon broccoli, lovely fresh salad with shitake mushrooms, raw chocolate cake and non-dairy ice cream) and a very informative lecture by Dr. Robert Ostfeld of Montefiore Medical Center.

But before that, I got to have lunch at Pure Food and Wine with my lovely agent and my new editor at St. Martin's! We shared a plate of guacamole and a celebratory bottle of white wine. Such a treat. I also found out that they sold the rights in Italy, so Bones & All will be translated into my ancestral tongue. My grandpa would be proud.


Portabella and hemp seed burger. Sprouted manna bread, caraway kraut, lapsang souchong tea smoked cashew cheese, house made mustard, pickled pink onions. The "cheese" was my favorite part. More filling than it looks!

Plenty more MSVA-related posts coming up! I'm already having a ball, and I can't wait to share it all with you.

First night of @victoria_moran's Main Street #Vegan Academy = AMAZING. Amazing food, amazing presentation by @drostfeld. So jazzed!

-- Camille DeAngelis (@PettyMagic) June 19, 2013

"Bones and All is a fantastically terrifying escape from reality.  I was enthralled from the opening scene and clung to every page of Maren's turbulent journey to find her father--and herself. This is a powerful story of a young woman learning to embrace her deepest secrets, and her darkest needs."

How exciting is this? The book won't be out for another year!!

I'm even more excited about making my own clothing since I went vegan. Yes, phasing out wool has been a bit of a challenge, but challenges are FUN! Here's some yarn and fabric I have plans for this summer:


Shibui Linen for a Xia blouse (Ravelry link). Treated myself at Gather Here after my book deal!


Cute vintage-y cotton lawn from Mood Fabrics, destined to become a Violet blouse. (It's almost finished!)

Making button loops using this tutorial from @colettepatterns: http://t.co/w603zGNBTp #sewing (So excited for my new blouse!)

-- Camille DeAngelis (@PettyMagic) June 13, 2013

Vintage rayon from this Etsy shop and Italian shirting from Mood Fabrics. Both for dresses, one of which will have some pretty nifty bias action.


I had a plan for this Bamboo laceweight from Webs, but oftentimes when you order online what comes in the mail isn't quite what you expected. I think I'll make one of these instead. (Puffed sleeves! I can't resist!)


Ailbhe gave me these adorable buttons a few years ago. They belong on a vintage jumper, just not sure yet which pattern.

I also finished a Miette cardigan a few weeks ago, which I'll blog about soon. Still need to take some photos!

(Ciudad Perdida, part 1.)



It's going on a year and a half since our trip to Colombia. I don't know why it's taken me so long to post these photos! We're going to Uganda in August (it's the good old crew--Kate, Elliot, Jill and Spencer), so I figured I'd better finish this up before we leave.

I've been thinking a lot about Colombia lately because I've made a new friend (yes, Sarah, THAT kind of friend--ha!) who just spent two weeks in Bogota, Medellin, and Cartagena. I've enjoyed looking through his photos from Bogota especially, since he saw completely different street art than Kate and I did. Makes me wonder if they regularly paint them over.

"Use your brain or the zombies will," haha! RT @nomadicotravel: #colombian #streetart twitter.com/NomadicoTravel...

-- Camille DeAngelis (@PettyMagic) May 23, 2013

Anywho, here are the rest of our photos from the Ciudad Perdida trek. If I can give you one piece of advice, it's this: if you have to do this hike in four days (instead of the standard five--we were short on time), be prepared to be exhausted. We arrived at the ruins quite late in the day, and fumbled our way home in the dark. It was dangerous (although more guides came back for us with flashlights, bless them!), and I was spent, and I had a meltdown. It wasn't my finest moment by any stretch, but that's another great thing about traveling with your sister. No matter what goes down, you're still going to love each other at the end of it. She's stuck with me!

  
Don't get me wrong, though. I LOVED this part of our trip. I just wish we'd done it in five days so we could have enjoyed a more leisurely pace.


Spending the night in a hammock is way more comfortable than you might think. You just need to put a blanket under you so your bottom doesn't get cold!


We stood by a stream in the darkness, watching the frogs get frisky.


The hiking route takes you past several indigenous villages.


The upside of arriving so late in the day: we had the site all to ourselves! It was really misty up there, and we felt like explorers stumbling upon the ruins for the first time.


With our honorary sister, Alecia.
 

They were building this suspension bridge when we first passed, and it was finished by the time we were on our way back!

I've still got photos from Cartagena, Bucaramanga, San Gil, and Villa de Leyva to share with you. Hopefully it won't take me another year and a half to post them!

I just had the juiciest conversation with a really smart new friend, who was nice enough to let me pick his brain over lunch. Like I said, this new novel has been marinating for a long time, but now that it's officially under contract everything seems to be drawing together in an eerily deliberate way. I think, "I need to know X because that's what my character cares about," and a few days later there it is, on the shelf at the library or on the lips of a friend or stranger. It might be the detail I need, or the way to the detail, but in either case I get really, really excited and can't wait to dig in. (Two and a half glasses of iced coffee enhance the effect, no doubt. I'll probably be up 'til four again.)

Iced coffee for lunch + incredibly good news tonight = wide awake at 3:30am. Early morning yoga class = not happening.

— Camille DeAngelis (@PettyMagic) May 21, 2013

As I said to my friend, writing a novel is like sitting down to work on a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle when there are only half that many pieces in the box. Those other five thousand pieces I have to collect in my travels, or in "chance" conversations like the one I had today. The trick is to recognize a piece when I see it, which of course is why I always keep my journal handy.

There's really not much of a "trick," though, come to think of it. It's usually more of a PING, loud and unmistakable. That's my intuition at work.

In the future I want to write more (and more consistently) about the mysteries of the creative process (and, like I said, how veganism has allowed me to enjoy that process much more fully). The nuts-and-bolts topics too, of course--I still have a list of FAQs from my time at St. Lawrence back in October 2011 to get through! The first two are about choosing a point of view and switching sexes (i.e., a male writer writing a female narrator or vice versa), and I'm hoping to have those entries finished and posted in the next couple of weeks. Anything else you'd like me to write about here, do please tweet to me or leave a Facebook comment. (I'll be able to switch the blog comments back on once my new website goes up later on this summer.)