Some Mad Hope (my author blog)

Burning Questions

2012-02-01T13:04:00.001-05:00

I'll admit that a small part of me liked Pacific's MFA program because the website promised bonfires on the beach. While I joke that this is the main reason I chose it, the fact that the program is ranked #4 in low-res programs in the U.S., has amazing faculty, is exactly the kind of curriculum and semester requirements I'd hoped for, and didn't require a foreign language proficiency to apply all ranked higher in practical reasons I chose it.

But the bonfire might have ranked highest on my emotional levels.

Really, is there anything more literarily romantic than a bonfire on a beach with a bunch of writers standing around talking shop? That just might be might idea of a tiny slice of heaven.

The funny thing is that it never once crossed my mind how ironic it is that a bunch of writers aspire to stand on a beach around a bonfire, considering the history of literature and how many books have been thrown in just such a bonfire.

This was on my mind this morning, though, when I spent breakfast talking to my two middle-school-age kids about profanity in required reading at school. This weekend my son told me his reading group at school (8th grade) is getting ready to read The Book Thief, which happened to also be on my semester reading list. In anticipation, I moved it up on my to-read list and began last night. In the first 40 pages, there is a not-inconsequential amount of profanity.

My son's been choosing a lot of adult fiction to read on his own lately: Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Tim LaHaye to name a few. Grisham and LaHaye have been pretty safe, but Crichton he's had to sift through. On his own choice, he puts back the ones that have profanity, because he just doesn't want to read it. I admire him for that.

But now he's heading into a book required by his teacher that he doesn't have a choice in.

In our breakfast conversation, my daughter, who is currently in 6th grade, informed me that last year her class had to read a book with profanity in it as well. And they read much of it out loud. She said when one girl had to read a page to the class that had a word she wasn't allowed to say (by her parents or, according to the Code of Behavior, by the school), the teacher told her to go ahead and read it, because it was part of the curriculum. The teacher himself read much of it out loud, and my daughter said the class giggled because their teacher was "swearing" in class. She told me she never laughed because she didn't think it was funny.

Call me what you want - a prude, a fundamentalist, a head-in-the-sand parent - but this disturbs me.

I've never used profanity. I didn't growing up, and I don't now. I don't wear that as some point of pride, anymore than I would be proud that I've never worn stilettos or eaten foie gras. I just haven't. It's a choice I've made for my life. I don't make it for yours; you are free to talk however you wish. And when my kids are adults, they can choose to talk however they wish. But while they are in our house, they are not allowed to use profanity - or scream, or hit one another, or throw things, or eat dessert without finishing their vegetable. The thing is, I've had to teach them not to scream or hit or throw, but I've never had to teach them not to swear. Because they know instinctively that, like screaming and hitting and throwing, words like that are meant to hurt or shock.

My kids know it's out there. Sure, they hear it in the stores and on the street and even, sadly, at DisneyWorld. It's everywhere. It's true. I can't shield them from life.

But I wonder why public school choose books with language in them that the kids aren't allowed to speak in the hallways.

Don't get me wrong: I think a lot of these books are great books. The Book Thief is outstanding. I don't want to throw books onto the proverbial bonfire. I'm not saying kids shouldn't be allowed to read them. I'm just saying, shouldn't they have a choice? Shouldn't books in lower education be put to the same standard as the kids themselves? Should kids who are nine and ten be made to read books with language that would, if it were a movie, be rated PG-13?

So my son will read The Book Thief, and we will talk about it together, which is a good thing, and something I'm unable to do with every book my kids read. But that doesn't make the exposure go away. And while some might say that exposure is going to come anyway, that doesn't make it beneficial.

There is, hopefully, an awful lot of life left for my kids to hear these words... to decide for themselves if they want to use them, to read them. Is it a crime to want them to have a few more years without them?

(And don't think I haven't missed the irony that The Book Thief contains a crucial scene of book burning in Nazi Germany... which brings us back around to the irony of the beginning photo... )

Submerged

2012-01-30T13:02:00.000-05:00

Letting myself off the hook for this blog and diving into my writing and reading with every ounce of my energy has been good for me this past two weeks.

I've read four books, finished several drafts of my essay for the semester (analyzing the way backstory can be used successfully to propel a plot rather than stall it out), and heavily revised a short story I wrote last May.

It's been emotionally and mentally exhausting though, which is something I didn't expect. By completely throwing myself in to my short story this past week - six to eight hours a day of it - I felt like I'd dived headfirst into a dark lake and lost sight and breath. I don't know if writing is like that for most writers, and when I write sporadically, juggling life along with it, I seem to bob at the surface more. But when I write, really, obsessively write, I get lost. My heart and head are somewhere else, and that place is usually not a pretty place.

When I left school two weeks ago, I'd lost a good part of my confidence in writing. I lost confidence in my ability to tell what I'd done well and what I hadn't. I'm not saying it's not okay to write stinky stuff. You should. We should all write stuff that's terrible once in a while - stretch out wings, try out new things, attempt something greater than our talents. The thing is... you have to know, when you've finished, that it stinks. And I couldn't.

One thing that's critical as a writer, at least if you want to get better, is to be able to see what you're doing wrong... and know how to fix it.

I can't say that over the last two weeks I've conquered that part. But one thing I've learned about me is that I write for a reason. I usually have something to say... a point to make, a lesson to learn. A theme. Something I want people to think about and mull over. And that.... is no way to write a story.

A story has to be about the characters. It has to be their story, and not yours. Not even the story you want them to tell. It has to develop without a point to make, or some agenda. Not that, in the end, it can't have a point. But the writing towards that point is the death of a story. It feels heavy handed. It feels preachy. It feels like the characters are being corralled like cattle into a place they may not want to be, and along with them, the reader.

So I rewrote a story I'd written last spring, one which started as an idea rather than as a character with a problem. This time I focused on the character and not the idea.

I like the story I wrote, but I don't trust it. I don't know if it works, and I don't trust myself to know if it's any good. Not yet.

But I figured out one thing I was doing wrong, and that's a start.

Back from Residency

2012-01-17T10:04:00.000-05:00

I meant to write while I was in Oregon, but the hours got away from me, and the times I had to write I realized I couldn't put into words what I wanted to say.

I feel that way now. That there really aren't the words to explain what happened there.

I'm half-way through this program, but not nearly where I want to be. My writing lacks focus, lacks beautiful words and startling language. Lacks great ideas and simple significance. I make all the mistakes I know not to, and then can't even see that I've made them. I've read 48 books, but it never seems like enough.

The craft talks send my mind spinning. I can see all the possible ways to implement ideas into my writing, but then can't seem to actually do it, or at least not do it well.

I feel like I need to work harder. Work longer. Produce more work. Make that work better.

It's good, sometimes, to have that fire lit underneath you. To be surrounded with people better than you. One of my workshop leaders, Laura Hendrie, told us to to immerse ourselves in excellence. "Read good works so you know what good writing is. If you read things better than you are, you set the bar higher than where you are."

So that's where I am heading into my essay semester, the prelude to my thesis semester. I am, for the moment, putting my novel as my side project and concurrently working on new material. I am working with Pete Fromm this semester, and beyond thrilled about that. Before beginning this program, his novels were the first I read, and I fell in love with both the stories and the writing. I had the pleasure at residency to read more of his work, and it's the kind of writing you just want to sit inside and absorb. He has the reputation of being a tough advisor – not brutal, but honest and demanding – and I really want that at this point. I anticipate the next months being difficult, but in that growing, stretching, learning kind of way I'm craving.

In all the years I've been at this blog, I've never taken an official blog break, but over the past year my posts have definitely thinned. I wish I could be here more often, be at your blogs, emailing all of you dear friends and encouraging you. But for the next months, I will probably be tucking in, head down, trying to find my way to that place I want to be. I'll be thinking of you, and hoping you find your way there yourselves.

The Next Door Boys...Loving a book is rarely this easy!

2011-12-30T10:24:00.000-05:00

(I will preface this by saying I'm really getting sick of seeing my own mug on this blog. For years I didn't post any picture of me and lately... well, ugh. But I have this thing about books by people I know. It's important to show I have the book, I own it... I'm so excited to hold THEIR book in MY hand. It's become tradition. So here I am again.)

The Next Door Boys by Jolene Perry.

I'll tell you a true story. I've read 48 books this year, all literary fiction and memoir, and felt buried under the weighty stuff of school for the better part of the last 12 months. People recommend fun books, I put them on my Goodreads list and make a mental note to come back to them in another year. But there's no time for just fun stuff now. If it's not on my reading list, it pretty much doesn't get read.

Until I was chatting with Jolene late, late one night (I live in Virginia and she in Alaska, so it was probably not that late for her), and we got talking about her books. I am a huge fan of Jolene's blog - she makes me laugh like crazy - and her emails crack me up. I am a huge fan of Jolene. But I'd never read any of her writing, and she offered to send me one of the manuscripts her agent was shopping.

I told her sure, send it on, and I'll try to read it at the end of the semester, when all my other books were finished. I absolutely could not read it right now...

So she sent it with the words "whenever you get to it is fine," and I opened the document just to peek at it - to make sure it came in readable format and all that - and then I caught the first sentence... and couldn't stop. I finally finished it around three in the morning, bleary-eyed and surrounded by tear-filled kleenex. I wrote her back and said, "You HAVE to get this published!! There are people I NEED to give this to!!"

It was, and remains, one of my favorite books I've read this year. Sadly for you, that book is not available yet. :(

Luckily for you - her first book IS! And it is equally hard to put down!

The Next Door Boys is about a girl named Leigh who, coming off a year of cancer and the resulting treatments, escapes her parents' overly protective home to attend college and find her independence again.

Leigh struggles with the same things we all did at that age: finding our own self, transitioning from child to adult, learning that as much as we want to stand on our own, it's okay to need others. But she does it with the perspective of someone who has touched death, giving this book a sense of depth unlike so many other young adult books I've read.

Jolene does a fabulous job with characters. They feel entirely real and fully dimensional... there's not a flat cardboard character in this book, which is chock full of characters. especially Leigh, who wants her independence and normal life back so much that she puts her own health in peril. There are a lot of nice people in this book, which is, frankly, refreshing. The fact is, nice people can add complexities to a situation as well, and Jolene's cast of characters bring their own well-intentioned but nevertheless frustrating roadblocks to Leigh's desire for a normal life. Besides her own housemates, Leigh has to contend with the "next door boys": her watchful older brother, a handful of boys with crushes on her, and a tattoo-laden guy with a past and the secrets that go with it.

I liked that faith was also an integral part of Leigh's story. I think faith is important to a lot more people than books tend to show, and Jolene manages to make Leigh's faith so seamlessly a part of this story that it doesn't feel like an added element, but rather one the story could never have been written without. In fact, the importance of family in the LDS church plays a huge role in how Leigh sees herself and her future, knowing the cancer has robbed her of the ability to have children.

This book is both fun and heart-wrenching, and impossible to put down. While I would say it was an easy read in the fact that I fairly flew through the pages, it was also definitely thought provoking, and the kind of book that stays with you long after you finish. And as a young adult book, I was thrilled it had no language or sexual content that would keep me from giving this to my kids to read.

I highly recommend this book, and any other book Jolene writes. I, for one, will be the first in line for the next one!

The Workshop Letters Are In! (and other things)

2011-12-21T10:06:00.001-05:00

You know you've found the right grad program when you literally leap for joy when you get homework.

We wrapped up last semester in mid-November, and since then I've transitioned - at least activity-wise - to holiday mode. I've gone to Christmas parties with my husband at the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum:

I've gone to Christmas concerts with my mom in Williamsburg:

I've spent an incredible weekend in DC with friends, walking around downtown and going to the Army/Navy football game:

I've attended band and choir concerts of my kids:

I've baked dozens and dozens of cookies, two batches of fudge, five batches of Chex Mix. I've decorated and cleaned and shopped and wrapped.

What I have not done is read or write. Which isn't to say I haven't been thinking about those things... and missing them.

So last week, when emails starting flurrying around that the administration had organized our workshop groups for January residency, I was a little more than distracted. I think it's possible I hit "refresh" on my inbox more than when I was waiting for query responses.

And this week it finally came. And I couldn't be more thrilled.

For one, I know almost everyone in my workshop, which is pretty darn cool. It means I'm not so much a newbie anymore. And the writers in my group are phenomenal. Which leads me to hyperventilate and worry about my own submission a bit, but I try to ignore that part. I'm just glad I get to be with such talented people... that can only be good for my own writing.

And the workshop leaders are AMAZING. Pete Fromm, for one... whose book How All This Started blew me away when I read it a little over a year ago, and was one of my top books of the year until I read his next book, As Cool As I Am. I'm not one to fawn over writers, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I get a little speechless around him.

And Katherine Dunn, my other workshop leaders. She wrote Geek Love, a National Book Award finalist that I've been mulling over for a year or two. It's dense and disturbing and utterly unique... a masterpiece. The fact that I get to even sit in the same room as her is astounding to me.

In two weeks I will be winging my way to Oregon again, to my own little oasis of writerly heaven. Before then, I need to read and critique my seven new workshop pieces, finish reading a book, revise a chapter in my novel that's been bugging me. And, oh yeah, celebrate Christmas.

Life is good.

Something Both Literary and Festive, and the Contest Winner!

2011-12-20T09:46:00.000-05:00

I saw a picture on the internet of something like this and loved it so much, I thought I'd try it myself. It works better if you can build from the floor up, and have a lot of room, but I used my MFA reading list, a stack of Shakespeare books, and a desk. It's not that elegant, but I LOVE it! What's more festive than a Christmas tree made out of books?

As for the My Memories Suite digital scrapbooking contest, the contestants were thin, but worthy! I am so proud to announce the winner of the software as Lynn, from "Connecting Stories" and her photography blog, "LPS Designs." Lynn is both a fabulous story teller and an incredible photographer, so she is the perfect person to have won this, and I am so excited to see what she will do with it! Congratulations!!

Interpreting Facebook:What Do Those Cryptic Updates Mean?

2011-12-16T09:55:00.000-05:00

Facebook is such an individual thing. Everyone uses it differently, which is, when not annoying, pretty cool. For some, it's their political soapbox. For some, it's the place to show off cute cat YouTube videos. Others use it to brag about their kids or to crack inside jokes no one will get other than that one tagged friend.

And some are personal.

Sometimes, frankly, too personal. I'm all about expressing your individuality, but when you need to detail the progression of your diarhea, I'm hiding you for a few days. No offense, it's not that I don't like you... I just don't want to hear the amount of trips to the bathroom you're taking, and what your poop looks like.

And no, I'm not making that up.

But hey, if you feel the need to detail that, I'm not going to criticize you for it. It's your page. Write what you want.

Some people feel the need to post every move they make, every action they take. "Went to the thrift store and dropped off my old computer monitor and then went to Target and bought a red ribbon for my mailbox, a box of diapers because my four year old won't sleep through the night without wetting the bed (still!), a pack of two 9-volt batteries for my smoke detectors, and nail files because my thumb nail is all ragged. Then I came home and took a two hour and ten minute nap."

I'm not making that up, either.

I'm less.... specific. It's not that I don't want you to know me. I just don't think you care about all of that.

But if you do, here is the translation to a couple of my recent posts... just so you can know what I really meant when I wrote them.

Update: They should call Chex mix what it really is: puppy crack-cocaine.

Translation: I am making Chex mix because my daughter promised her teacher I'd make it for their party, and the puppy decided it was really his, knocked the bowl over, and now I have Chex mix all over the floor and have to go out to the store to buy more cereal because I used the last of the Wheat Chex. Also, the puppy is deliriously happy about this development and is frantically running around licking at the floor, his tail knocking over the plant in the corner. Now I also have to vacuum. And repot a plant.

Update: The best part of having to go out in the cold-enough-to-snow night? Bun warmers. Have I mentioned how much I love bun warmers?

Translation: I am running errands after dark. This sucks. I should be at home with my family, eating dinner, watching The Grinch That Stole Christmas, but instead I am freezing my tail off running my kids back and forth to music practice that is more indicative of a professional Nutcracker performance than a church sing-a-long. But I have bun-warmers in the car. So don't say I don't find the silver lining when I need to.

Update: Went outside to walk the pup and wondered why I could hear the sounds of the ocean. It's the creek in our backyard. It totally sounds like the beach. Which is both cool.... and scary.

Translation: It's been raining freakin' 48 hours straight. I get it. I need to build an ark. And up our flood insurance. I'm rethinking the fact that we bought a house with a meandering creek behind it. That creek is now a raging rapids. And also, I'm walking the dog in the freakin' rain. So I am cold and wet, and rethinking having a dog.

Update: We have coyotes in our yard.

Update: I caught three snakes in the house.

Update: We trapped five mice in the basement in two hours.

Update: A bear was sighted in our neighborhood!

Translation: I may live in the woods and work by myself from home, but don't think I don't have reinforcements if you show up on my door trying to rob me.

Transition

(Translation: I have no idea how to end this post, and I have one more thing to share that is semi-related but I can't find a way to make it sound like a natural follow up)

Here's a Christmas Facebook video I love. Maybe you've seen it, but I thought it was good enough to share.

Have a great weekend!

A Christmas Giveaway: My Memories Suite Digital Scrapbooking Software!!

2011-12-13T14:00:00.001-05:00

I don't do giveaways very often on this blog. Not that I don't love y'all, but it's just not my thing. For one, I'm terrible at mailing stuff. It requires showering, putting on makeup, wearing decent clothes, getting in my car, driving 20 minutes to the post office... and all that is only if I manage to get whatever I am giving away in an envelope, address it, and stamp it.

Yeah. Not likely.

But when My Memories asked if I wanted to offer my blog readers a digital download of their scrapbooking software, I thought, heck yeah!

I did a lot of scrapbooking years ago, but I admit that in the last five years or so I've done almost none of it because I don't have room or time to drag all the papers, scissors, stamps, embellishments, templates, brads, markers, ink, etc, out. I'd start a project and the dining room table would be a mess for the better part of a month or two before I'd have to put it all away unfinished so we could eat again.

Also, all my photos are digital, and getting them all uploaded to some photo site and printed was not happening. Not when I take 1300 photos at Disney, 600 at the beach, 300 on Christmas day.

A few years ago, I got a digital software program for doing scrapbooks on the computer. I thought the idea was brilliant. No more having to print up all of my photos! No more having to figure out how to make a 4x6 print fit a 5x7 space, or a 3x3 space. No more dining room messes. No more buying expensive papers and embellishments. Perfect!

Except it didn't work with my Mac and I rarely got on the desktop we keep in the basement. Also, my pictures were on my Mac, not the desktop. It just didn't happen.

So when My Memories Suite contacted me, I decided to try theirs out. It works on a PC or a Mac, comes with tons of pre-made templates that can be used exactly as is or completely customizable, works with any free papers and frames and embellishments I download off the internet, and can be used for any size project - both in height and width, and in pages.

Here's a few things I played around with:

(a quick note - I took screenshots of them rather than upload the full-sized pages, and so some have the dimensions in the corners. Obviously this is not what shows up in a real album!)

This is from their pre-made template. I just plugged in my own photos.

On the second one, I added the quote - their program lets you choose from any size and any font on your computer, any color, any layout you want, including adjusting the space between the lines - and I changed the photos to black and white. It was so easy peasy. This album is pages and pages of this same look - the red and white and simple block photos. I just picked two to give you an example of how easy and beautiful it is.

Here's another set:

In this first one, I just chose a classic layout that worked with the photos I wanted to put in. The two smaller photos were bigger than the template, so I changed the size of them to fit. The snowflakes were something I'd found for free off the internet.

In the second one I thought I'd add background paper. I chose a textured blue one, but it was a little dark for me, so I changed the opacity on it to 50% to lighten it up.

This is another example of creating my own page:

There are infinite kinds of background papers. You can choose any of their pretty good free selections that come with the program, buy more (they have a TON of great kits), find ones you like from online (there are thousands of free and for-sale ones), or just choose a color (any color at all). You can change the opacity of any of the above, so it can be as bold or as subtle as you want.

I made of collage of some of my cherry blossom photos - something that would have been very hard to do with prints, because I would have needed lots of different sizes.

As you can see, I like things pretty clean and simple. I like straight lines and not a lot of fluff. But that's just my style. You can certainly bring your own style to it. Like this:

The above is one of their templates. I plugged a photo in and saved. Less than ten seconds. The one below is made with a free packet off the internet that I found. There isn't a template here - I just mashed a bunch of things together.

The program is really easy to figure out, too. It didn't take much time for me to be zooming around in it. The layout looks like this:

It's not just for scrapbooking, though. You can make photo books, cards, videos, add music, etc. I initially hoped I could make blog headers and banners with it, but I couldn't figure out how to do it, although it would be simple enough to make an entire blog template. I have a feeling there are a lot of things you can do, though, that I just haven't had time to figure out.

Here's the great thing: My Memories has offered a $10 off code through this blog, so if you want to buy the software, you can do it at a steal of a price by clicking on the banner below and using the code STMMMS14934 in the checkout.

OR.... You could win it!

I am offering one person a FREE DOWNLOAD of the entire digital scrapbook software - a $39.97 value. Just click on the My Memories banner below, browse the kits and leave a comment in this post telling me which you like best.

For extra entries:

tweet about it (1 entry)
post on facebook (1 entry)
+1 this on Google+ (1 entry)
or all of the above!

You can do all of these by just clicking the buttons at the bottom of this post.

Make sure to put all of your entries in the comment section!

Next Monday (December 19, 2011) I'll post one winner. If I don't already have your email, make sure you leave that as well, so I can get back to you!

Good luck!

Fragile

2011-12-07T14:41:00.000-05:00

"My happiness is so great at this moment I wish I could die...because in the midst of happiness grows a seeds of unhappiness. Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It can't burn forever; sooner or later it must die. And that knowledge destroys the joy for me, right at its peak."

from A Dream Play by August Strindberg

When I first read this play in college, I thought it was so depressing... and yet so wise. Or maybe just insightful, because the older I get, the more this is how I subconsciously think. When I am the most happiest, I am the most aware of how happy I am - of how grateful I am for the people and things in my life, of how blessed I am - but also the most aware I am of how fragile those things are, and how quickly they can be taken away.

It's been three years this month that my friend died suddenly, brutally. This week, I got news that a dear man who has greatly influenced our oldest daughter, died Sunday morning. Another beautiful, amazing woman who taught my youngest daughter in pre-school and attended Bible study with me was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer. Another mother I adore got word that her daughter has not long to live.

It was a rough weekend.

And in their pain I am acutely aware of my own happiness - of my family, my kids that are my whole world and my husband who is the love of my life, the every breath I take. My parents who make aging look easy and graceful. My friends who stick by me through everything, who encourage me and love me. My opportunity to go to school, to write. The feeling of being healthy and pain-free. The pile of presents under the Christmas tree.

In the store today I saw an elderly couple shopping together, lovingly bickering over cuts of meat and loaves of bread, and my heart broke for the incredible woman who just lost her husband this Sunday and now faces a future that does not involve growing old with him. And the thought of the possibility of not growing old with my own husband makes my heart clench.

There is a part of me that thinks this is ridiculous of me - to spoil joy with sorrow that isn't even real. And yet, another part of me thinks this is how it should be - how it must be. To not be aware of how every day is not a given, every tomorrow is not destined, is to not fully appreciate how miraculous life is. It's not really that I am letting loss taint my happiness, so much as great happiness comes at the price of acknowledging the possibility of loss.

That's my philosophizing for the week. This is the kind of thing my mind rumbles around when I stop writing. Too much living in the real world and not enough in the imaginary one, I suppose.

The Birth of a Story

2011-11-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

I always love hearing how writers come up with the things they write. Some people seem to have endless ideas gurgling in their heads and not enough time to write them all, and others seems to have one really necessary story to tell, and then must work to come up with more. I admit I've felt like both ends of that spectrum.

Currently I have a folder of ideas on my computer with more books than I will probably ever have time to write. But those ideas are all novel ideas. Stories that are too big to be told in a few pages. And this past month I needed to write a short story for school.

Enter the joint brainstorming of my husband and I while sitting in traffic one day.

Me: I need to write a short story but I still have no idea what to write about. I want it to be fun to write though. My current novel is bumming me out.

Him:

Me: Once, in a writing class in college, the professor said in order to get a great conflict throw a few very unlike characters into a place where they can't easily get out and make them interact. You know, like Speed where all the people are stuck in a bus. Which was pretty smart of him, because that was before Speed even came out.

Him:

(You might be noticing that my conversations are sometimes a bit one-sided.)

Me: Where could I trap people? A bus was already done, and for that matter, the cruise ship thing in Speed 2 also.

(Can I take an aside here to say that while writing this conversation I've just come up with FOUR more story ideas?? Trap them in a mine! A carpool lane with an accident blocking the road! The line for a bathroom in a mall! A city tour!)

Me: Also, the people would have to be fun to write. What kind of great characters could I throw together?

Him:

Me: And I'd need a really catchy title. A fun one.

Him: How about So a Priest, A Rabbi and a Prostitute Walk into a Bar?

(See???? He may be a man of few words, but he is BRILLIANT!!! Who would NOT want to read that story???)

Me: That is BRILLIANT!! So why are they there? I mean, why would those people end up in a bar, and why can't they get out?

Him:

Me: What if they are escaping something? Something terrible is going on outside the bar and they use the bar as a place of refuge from it.

Him:

Me: What do you think about the Occupy movement? Maybe the characters are all downtown for different reasons - some protesting, others not, and then they are thrown together when the police come in and the protests end up in violence and chaos!

Him: That sounds like something you'd write.

Me: I could tell it from the four different points of view!

Him: The four?

Me: Yeah - the priest, the rabbi, the prostitute, and the bar. Okay, the bartender.

Him: Or a beer's.

Me: I think I'll stick with the bartender.

Him:

Me: But I don't know much about rabbis, so that might be a really hard voice to capture.

My Son: (yelling from the back of the van) What's the title Dad came up with that you're laughing so hard about?

Me: ummmm...

Him: Maybe you should change the title.

Me: Nooooo! The title is the best part!

Me: Hey, if the rabbi comes into the bar unconscious because he got hit with something in the protests, I wouldn't have to have him talking. That would solve that problem.

Him: So the others carry him into the bar to get him out of danger?

Me: YES!

And that, my blogging friends, is how "A Preacher, a Rabbi and a Prostitute Walk into a Bar" was born.

I broke the story into four points of view, each person's story picking up where the one before let off, so there is a general story arc as well as four sub-stories. Of course, I ended up still having to do the rabbi, even though he was unconscious the entire time.

I have no idea how the story will be taken at school, but I'm proud of it. Not in the "I'm sending this to a magazine to get published right away because it's so brilliant" kind of way. More in the, "I wrote and revised (five times) a short story in less than a week" kind of way. And also, because I did what I set out to do: have fun writing it.

While I never loved short stories before, and would much rather write novels, I can say it's so fun to try something new and risky, to branch out and do something I'd never spend a whole year and 350 pages doing. I got to incorporate a bunch of techniques I've learned through school that weren't applicable to my novel. And did I mention how fun it was?

So all the credit goes to my husband, who came up with the title that made the story fun.

Have you tried anything risky lately? Come up with any good ideas in weird ways? And do you have any more ideas of how we can trap characters in a small space with no way out??

When Good Enough Takes Time

2011-11-16T09:57:00.000-05:00

I've been writing this novel of mine for nearly two years now, and there are days when that seems like 18 months too long. Writing friends have finished two or three, even more, books in that time. And yet I still struggle along.

Patience has never been my virtue. There have been several times I've decided, this is it. This book is done. I've tinkered with it long enough and it will never get better than this.

And then it does.

So I keep tweaking and deleting and rewriting and reorganizing and polishing. And then I do all that again. And again.

I was heartened my first semester when my then-advisor told me he'd revised his award-winning novel 17 times. I was heartened again when I had a discussion with my now-advisor about prologues, and how she'd initially written a prologue for her book, then changed it, then scattered parts of it through the book, and then eventually did away with it altogether.

And then last week I read Edgar Sawetelle, by David Wroblewski. This is the pedigree for Edgar Sawtelle:

David Wroblewski is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle, a 2008 Oprah Book Club pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the 2008 Colorado Book Award, Indie Choice Best Author Discovery award, and the Midwest Bookseller Association's Choice award. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle was selected as one of the best books of 2008 by numerous magazines and newspapers around the country, and has been translated into over 25 languages.

Not too shabby, eh? I'm not typically a fan of Oprah-endorsed books. Clearly she and I have very different tastes. But this book was everything the awards say it is. Sublime, lovely, gorgeous, haunting.

But what I love love loved about my copy of the book was that it had an extensive author interview. I love author interviews!! (And as an aside, I totally fell for David in it. Despite all the acclaim and publicity he's gotten, he seems very humble and down to earth and somebody I'd utterly love conversing with over a cup of coffee.)

What impressed me most in the interview was a question about putting some of the chapters from a dog's point of view. David's answer was inspirational to me, not because it gave me some great insight into point of view, but because it revealed that he'd worked on this book for years. Years, people!! Two years in his MFA program, and then years after that, when he finished it, changed it, revised it, altered the entire point of view (which originally had been first person but ended up being mostly third).

It makes me realize that sometimes, the really good stuff only comes with time.

I don't think taking longer on my debut book would have helped. I still think that book was ready to go after nine months, and although it may not be the book I'd write now, it's the book it needed to be.

But this book - this current work in progress - needs time. I won't be rushed, because I don't want to throw it out there until it's really ready. Something I can be truly proud of. Right now it's not. And I'm okay with that, mostly because the more I work on it, the exponentially better it gets. (Which isn't to say it's great, mind you. It started out pretty stinky...)

What about you? How long do you think you'd be willing to work on something - not just writing but anything - before saying, "That's enough. What I have now is going to have to be good enough"?

It's Not What You Think It Is

2011-11-14T09:57:00.000-05:00

Twenty years ago I got a harsh lesson in writing: an author is not in control once the writing has left her hands.

I was in a poetry class in college at the time, and had been doing very well. The professor loved me. The class took to my poems well. Until one of the last assignments, when I turned in a poem about a relationship with my then-boyfriend, written as an analogy to a carousel ride. The poem was metaphorical, to be sure, but not cryptic. There were lines that made very clear - or so I thought - that this was about a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship about to end.

And the professor and half the class thought it was about sexual abuse of a young girl by a father.

Even as I write this, I am laughing, because that idea was so preposterous it left my head spinning. They sat in class for 30 minutes discussing this poem and the deeper meaning to it, when I could find NOTHING within the poem itself to lead someone to believe that was what it was about. When, at the end, I told them it was not about that at all, they STILL didn't believe me.

I got an A+ on that poem, and resolved never to write poetry again.

One could hope fiction stories are different. Most are not cryptic, nor do they lend themselves to requiring people to seek deeper meaning in them. But if I've discovered anything in the last year, other than the fact that I write pathetically slowly, it is that a book is not the sum of the words on a page: its meaning lies, to a great extent, in a combination of what the author brings to the page, and what the reader brings.

This is a hard truth for writers.

We want to be in control of what people are reading, of what they are thinking as they read. Mystery writers especially try to control the thought process - throwing in hints here and clues there while all the while also writing glaring neon arrows to lead the reader down the wrong path in hopes of surprising them.

But most writing does this to some extent. Water for Elephants, for example, deliberately sets the reader up to expect one ending and then delivers another. Authors like Suzanne Collins and Chris Cleave set out to write books with a message on war or immigration or the harshness of life.

But no one book is ever read the same, because no two people come to that book with the same experiences and perspectives. What resonates with me in The Things We Carry may mean nothing to you. What grabs my interest in The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time might not carry any significance for you. I read and love Mennonite in a Little Black Dress for probably very different reasons than my Mennonite friend will.

And what I've learned is that this is okay. It is okay to write a story and let that story take on a life of its own. How great is it that people can read my words, and find themselves in it?

I am currently working on a short story for my residency in January, and it contains four different characters with radically different political points of view. It is just a story to me. I wanted to write something that stretched me, that put some controversy between characters, creating conflict. I remembered a teacher once telling me long ago that the most interesting stories often are where very different people are trapped together and have to deal with each other. So that's what I did. I threw four radically different people into a room with violence ensuing outside while a person lay dying inside, threw a little politics and religion in the mix ... and waited to see what would happen.

I expect some of the critiquers in workshop will be able to see this as merely a story and not a political statement. It is just a story to me. I really am not making any point at all in it. But some, I suspect, will focus on just one point of view that supports or attacks their own point of view and take issue with that. Some will see themselves on one side, some will see their own angry debates with friends or family, some will identify with the hopelessness, some with the rage, some with the loneliness, some with the compassion. Some will make rash judgements about me and what I believe.

For once, I'm not just begrudgingly accepting this. I'm embracing it. I'm writing for it. "Come, read," I want to say, "and find yourself in here somewhere."

As long as they don't think it's about child molestation, I'm okay.

MFA Monday: Books!!!

2011-11-07T09:38:00.000-05:00

My reading for the semester is done. Here's what I read:

1. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Tom Franklin)
2. Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
3. A Separate Peace (John Knowles)
4. Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)
5. State of Wonder (Ann Patchett)
6. Heartsongs and Other Stories (E. Annie Prouxl)
7. Too Much Happiness (Alice Munro)
8. Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen)
9. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (Jamie Ford)
10. The Pleasure of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs)
11. The Optimist’s Daughter (Eudora Welty)
12. Abide With Me (Elizabeth Strout)
13. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
14. The Murderer’s Daughter (Randy Susan Meyers)
15. Little Bee (Chris Cleave)
16. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Rhoda Janzen)
17. Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski)
18. Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (Tom Hazuka)
19. That Old Cape Magic (Richard Russo)
20. The Modern Library’s Writer’s Workshop (Stephen Koch)

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I LOVE that Pacific University allows us to make our own reading list. There is a certain amount of responsibility that comes with this. I assume if I peppered my reading list with genre fiction (which I'm not writing) my advisors would nix the list. But I work hard creating a good list - books I both want to read and books I think I should read. I gathered a long list of titles, most of which were suggested to me by people I respect (like YOU all), went to amazon and read the synopsis and first pages to see if I liked them, went to goodreads and read the reviews, and then chose the ones I liked the best.

Also, I tried not to weigh my list with books that were 800 pages.

Let's face it, if I have to read these books and not put them down and move on if I hate them, I might as well pick ones I'll like, and ones I'm not stressed I'll finish on time.

Of course, some of these I loved more than others. I was not at all a fan of Love in the Time of Cholera. The reviews are great, but the book seemed slow and sluggish, and to take me forever to read. And I was unsure why I was supposed to connect with a main character who declared he'd had 600 affairs, some with girls as young as 11, some married, but declared he was really a virgin because he didn't love any of them and had "saved himself" for the one girl he did love (saved himself from what, I'm not sure).

But all of the others I thoroughly enjoyed.

I put a lot of short stories on this list because I wasn't as familiar with short stories as I feel like I should be. Most people in this program write short stories, and it's been ages since I'd done that. What I learned is that I still am not a huge fan of reading collections of short stories. Not that I don't enjoy them. Olive Kitteridge was fantastic, and Interpreter of Maladies was superbly written. But it's much too easy for me to put a short story collection down and not feel compelled to pick it up, because each story is self-contained. There's nothing calling me back to the book because if I've finished one story, that's the end of that character's journey.

Of all the books on this list, the ones I most highly recommend, ones that I absolutely loved, are State of Wonder (ironically a retelling of Heart of Darkness, which is the bane of my existence), Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (a book I just didn't want to end, and whose end was immensely satisfying), and Little Bee, which I wrote about here.

I also love the Writer's Workshop book. When I first read it, it seemed to lack the kind of practical advice and organization I crave, but it was so full of wisdom I couldn't help but underline half of it. I've continued to go back to that book over and over this semester. One of the best parts of it is where Koch talks about "climbing Mount Probability." Meaning, essentially, it doesn't matter if what you write is possible (or realistic), only that you can make your readers believe that it is. This is a whole post unto itself!

Now I've got two weeks to come up with a new reading list for next semester. I have 16 books so far, and need 4 more really great ones. So I come to you, again, asking for help.

What should I read next semester? What have you read and loved?

What The Heck Does One Do with an MFA?

2011-11-02T10:57:00.001-04:00

I get asked this all the time. In various forms. Sometimes it's just as simple as, "What are you going to do when you get your degree?"

The answer is, I have no idea.

The obvious path is writing and publication, but while this program has definitely made me a better writer, we all know a writing career isn't as simple as just writing well. There's a little luck, a little timing, a little connections, a ton of perseverance, some creative magic.... it's just much more complicated than writing a book, even if the words on the page are good ones.

I could teach, of course. That seems to be the other obvious way to go. I think people assume that the only good any liberal artsy masters does is open the opportunity to teach at the college level. And I've considered this. A lot. I taught for years before having kids, and always thought teaching college would be a great challenge that I'd like. But I don't know that teaching positions open up that often, and within commuting distance of where I live, and in writing specifically. It might be easier if I got that degree in English, and then I'd be qualified to teach Chaucer and American Lit and all those classes that are considered English but not creative writing. But I didn't. Because I don't love that. I love writing.

I could edit for a publisher or a magazine. I could tutor.

After that, I start coming up with ideas like Walmart Greeter and McDonald Fry Technician.

And actually, I do know people who got their MFA in writing and kept working at Walmart or kept driving public transit... because they said those jobs offered not only a decent reliable salary and benefits, but also gave them tons of material to write about at night. Maybe the best jobs for writers put us in contact with real people who are characters.

I don't know what I'm going to do once I move my tassel from one side to the other. I hope I'll write. Preferably books. And get paid to do that. Isn't that the dream?

But if a great book deal doesn't fall in my lap (ya know - after lots of blood sweat and queries) and pay off student loans for the next ten years, I'm okay with working a different job, even if that something else isn't related to my degree.

I will keep writing, because I can't imagine not writing. I hope I keep getting better. I will never regret the two years and pocket full of money I spent on this degree. I have loved every minute of it. I am a better writer and a better person for it. I am blessed to have had this opportunity to do it.

But my happiness doesn't depend on following a certain path. Whatever God has planned for me, wherever he places me, I will find peace and joy in knowing I am where he wants me. Right now, that's in grad school. In two years, who knows?

For now I'm content to take one day at a time and cherish it.

It's Friday: It's A Good Thing - People Taking Care of People

2011-10-28T11:53:00.001-04:00

I used to do a gratitude thing every Friday and I've gotten myself off blog habits lately. Maybe it's just been enough trying to write every now and then so you don't think I've completely disappeared. But I always loved doing these posts, and especially now when all the political drama in this country is focused on what we don't have, it's good to remember the good things.

And in the spirit of "It isn't all about me," this post isn't about what I have that I'm grateful for, although indirectly, it does shed light on that as well.

Last week, our local ACTS food pantry, a non-profit charity organization in our community that provides food for about 4,000 individuals a month who otherwise would not have food, shut down for the first time in years. Their shelves were bare.

This is the picture from the video they took when they sent out the announcement that they were shutting their doors for two weeks, hoping to acquire enough food in that time to reopen.

ACTS stands for Action in the Community Through Service. And that is what happened.

In a flurry of social media, word spread. Within hours, businesses like local appliance stores and organizations like kid swim teams and churches began collection sites for food. Before school let out for the day I received calls from my kids' elementary and middle schools asking for donations. You could literally sit and watch facebook or twitter and see the action taking place.

In less than three days, over $60,000 and 12,000 pounds of food had arrived at their doorstep. So much that they didn't have room for it all and had to use an empty tractor trailer to hold the extra.

The outpouring of relief came so fast and furiously, ACTS had to put out another plea for help: volunteers to help stock the shelves and bag food for needy families. And that, like the money and food, came all too willingly as well.

In less than a week, the pantry re-opened with $120,000 and 30,000 pounds of food donations.

Did the government do that? No. The people of this community did that. Individuals and small businesses. Kids. The elderly. Students. People with a lot to spare. And people with just a box of macaroni. People who couldn't spare food, but could spare their time.

Today, in my community, people are eating who otherwise would be hungry.

I'm overwhelmed by this. But not surprised. Because I think most people are really generous at heart, really do want to help people, but often don't know how. I think, when no government will step in, the people do.

(As an aside, my husband, who works for the government, dryly commented that if it were up to the government to fill the food bank, it would have taken six months of red tape and bureaucratic wrangling to make it happen.)

I could make a political statement out of this, but I'll leave it at this:

Last week, the shelves were empty.

This week, because of the generosity of hundreds of people like you and me, they are not.

Because one person gave one box of mac and cheese, one child will not go to bed hungry tonight.

And the person who gave that food had benefited in ways that will never show up in a checkbook.

Sometimes You Have to Fight For What You Want

2011-10-19T11:57:00.000-04:00

More Ways to SAVE time by Wasting It!

2011-10-18T11:21:00.000-04:00

I'm not always the first to jump on a bandwagon, or the first to even hear there is a bandwagon, but I like to pretend I'm a tiny bit tech savy. You know, for a liberal arts person.

So I'm a bit embarrassed that I only JUST TODAY found out you can get apps for your web browser.

FOR YOUR WEB BROWSER!!

Who knew?? (And if you did, don't rub it in my face!)

Just like on your smart phone or your itouch, you can download apps (many for free) for your computer. And, like the phone apps (sometimes EXACTLY like the phone apps), they can be helpful or just fun.

Like Angry Birds. You can wile away hours and hours on your computer hitting pigs by hurdling birds at them. While you write. (Up til now I've only done it in the car waiting at the bus stop.) (Which brings me to think I'm not that smart because if I wanted to hurl birds at pigs, my phone is completely portable which means I could take it to where I'm at my computer and play it there.) (Although then there is the question of why I'm on the computer at all, if all I want to do is play with birds and pigs and I can do that on my phone.)

I found this out by stumbling on this website: Ten Google Chrome Apps That Will Make You A Better Writer. (You wouldn't be wrong if you guessed Angry Birds is not one of those.)

Aside from the fun ones, there are some interesting apps that could be useful, some of which require you to be using Google Chrome, but others of which also are on Firefox apps (Yes, Firefox also has apps, which I found out about 15 seconds after finding out Chrome has apps). (I have no idea about Safari or other browsers, but I'm guessing they do too).

The most promising ones are the White Noise App, which is much better for blocking sounds than plugging my ipod in my ears and listening to music which tends to then drive the mood of my story rather than the mood coming from the story itself.

There is a "Stay Focused" one that cuts off your time-wasting webpage browsing when you are supposed to be working. Ouch! I'll waiting for the "Hand that comes out of your screen and slaps you" app.

There are a few writing apps that black out your screen so all that is there is a black background and your writing, so you can write without distractions. (Check out Write Space; it works off line and saves with every keystroke, so you don't lose anything!) That's pretty cool in theory. Now if only it could also black out the room, the dog, the kids, the pile o' laundry, the dishes, and the bowl of popcorn.

The top ten list doesn't highlight all the good ones though. There's a timer one I like, which also could be pretty cool for managing how much time I spend on blogs or facebook or emails. You can set it for any amount of time and then the buzzer goes off. I can see using that to focus my writing (20 minutes of pure writing and then I get to check emails...) or facebook (10 minutes of facebook and then it's BACK TO WORK for you young lady!!) (That is totally what the buzzer should sound like, by the way.)

There's Quicknote, too, which is like the old yellow legal pads I love so much. You can type notes and add pictures and such on it. I love that idea as opposed to taking notes in Word, because... well, it's a legal pad. I love legal pads. They are so yellow. And lined. And remind me of college (although in college I used lavender and sky blue legal pads, which are much cooler but harder to find). Also, it's easy to tell the difference between my notes and my actual writing that way. It also allows you to save them online so you can access them from anywhere you have internet - like when you are at the bus stop playing angry birds on your phone and suddenly think of a great idea for chapter four.

In relation to my love of legal pads, there is also a sticky note app. Who doesn't love a good sticky note? And this one lets your choose your color, and they don't accidentally fall off when you aren't looking and then you can't find it when you really need to remember that outstanding idea you had for your elevator pitch that would have agents crying and begging for your manuscript right this instant. Ah yes... if I had this app years ago I'd be a female James Patterson by now.

I could go on and on, but if you are interested, just head over to "the store" and browse around. But get the timer first, otherwise you might be there all day!

Ha Ha Ha H ---Hey... Wait a minute!

2011-10-12T21:47:00.000-04:00

I saw one of these on Facebook two days ago. Yesterday I saw the other one. Now there's an equal opportunist cartoonist!

MFA Monday: Blast to the Past (Incorporating flashbacks without your agent hating you)

2011-10-10T10:19:00.000-04:00

If you're a writer and you've been around the block a while, you've probably heard the advice to nix the backstory in your stories. Flashbacks stop the forward movement of the narrative, slowing down the reader and bringing the action to a screeching halt. It's considered bad writing, and I've heard agents go so far as to say they won't read more of a manuscript if it has backstory in those first pages.

But rules are meant to be broken, right? The trick is to learn to do it well.

A few years after I started writing in earnest, a friend game me The Friday Night Knitting Club, and as I read it I felt like banging my head on the wall. This whole book is a series of flashbacks! How did she get published?? I screamed in my head.

This semester I've read a number of other books that rely heavily on flashbacks as well. Russo's That Old Cape Magic is a story where the real story is in the character's past, one he distills through his present. Cleave's Little Bee is another where the important events of the past unfold in the present. In Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, the characters' history are far more important than their present. All of these books have at the heart of their plot and structure personal history influencing a character's modern life.

Two weeks ago I read Elizabeth Strout's novel Abide with Me, and although the story itself takes place in the character's present, Strout used extensive flashbacks to fill in the details of how the characters had arrived at this place in their lives.

So I did what I've been doing lately in my program and stopped to figure out how Strout, along with all these other authors, was breaking the rules so successfully. If everyone seems to be saying we shouldn't include backstory, why do we do it anyway, and how can we do it well?

So in short, this is what I've come up with.

First off, what's the difference between backstory and flashback?

A flashback is an interjected scene that takes the reader back in time to a point before where the current story is taking place.

Backstory is the history of characters or elements that underlie the situation that currently exists.

Sound confusing? Look at it this way: backstory is like telling, where flashbacks are like showing. A flashback will give you the backstory by putting it in a specific context through actions or dialogue.

When should you use flashbacks and backstory?

Backstory should be included when it adds historical and emotional context or develops character, enlivens the narrative with specificity, and knowingly controls the pace (by slowing it down), but it is most interestingly doled out through flashbacks - scenes or mini-scenes. Those flashback mini-scenes can be as short as just a line of dialogue, or as long as a chapter.

In the book Abide with Me, the story is about a pastor whose wife has died about a year before the story starts. The dead wife is as much a character as her husband, but as she's dead, the only way to know her is through flashbacks. One very early one is when the pastor looks down and notices the frayed cuffs of his dress shirt - a detail that brings out how neglectful he is of himself now that she is gone. In noticing them, though, he reflects that they "had reached the point where his wife would have taken it for herself, cutting the sleeves off midway and wearing it with her bright pink ballet tights that had not feet." A mini mini scene! This is one of our first glimpses of his wife, and in just that short memory we get a feel for the kind of free-spirit she was.

How do you include flashbacks without jolting the reader?

The most seamless way I've seen it done is by association. In the above example of the shirt cuffs, Strout used one physical object in the present (the frayed cuffs) to bring to mind a memory of another (his wife wearing his shirts with ballet tights). If you read that chapter, you'd find that flashback continues for several pages, describing a confrontation he had with her once about how her wearing his shirt reflected on her as a pastor’s wife, and how she had hated the restrictions that imposed. Then, just as easily, Strout slips the narrative back into the present day as Tyler asks his housecleaner what he should do about the cuffs.

My brilliant advisor also taught me something she calls "the secret of once." By using the word "once," - or a variation on that which shows a specific time period - the writer can slip mini-scenes in without hardly slowing the narrative down at all.

In one of my own recent chapters, my character Kat was standing watching her brother fall apart after the death of their parents. It was the perfect opportunity to reveal some of her backstory:

Kat leaned against the wall watching her brother. She wanted him to turn the sound on, let the monotonous roar of the game drown out the silence that filled the house – and her – but instead, the quiet grew.

Once, just a week after he was born, she’d done this same thing, leaning against the door jam to his nursery and watching his tiny chest rise and fall, the room smelling like baby powder and Dreft. Her mom had found her there and shooed her off. “If you wake him, you’re the one holding him until he goes back to sleep,” she’d said crossly. Gladly she’d have held him, if anyone had let her.

She took a step towards him and waited to see him turn and acknowledge her, but his eyes never left the screen.

Orient your reader with the words. Indicate the time shift by verb tense. If you are writing in the present, flashbacks will be in the past, but if you are already writing in the past tense, indicate the flashbacks by use of the past perfect form of the verb (had found, had worn). If it's a longer scene, just use the past perfect very at the beginning and end of the flashback, kind of like parenthesis cordoning off the passage as something from the past.

Flashbacks are not evil. They are such a powerful tool to enrich your character's lives and add depth to a story. They can even become the story. The trick, like all writing, is to do it well.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Love What You Do.

2011-10-06T09:56:00.000-04:00

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ... Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

-- Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.

I never felt like I knew Steve Jobs. He wasn't family, or even someone whose face I saw often. He wasn't a movie star or recording artist I saw or heard on a daily basis like an old friend.

And yet I did let him into my life, in a greater way than any celebrity.

Every day, I wake up and turn on my iphone before I get out of bed, check the weather on it to see what to tell the kids to wear to school, peruse emails quickly to see if I missed something important in the night. I kick on the ipod to listen to music as I shower and get dressed and fix the kids' breakfasts and pack their lunches. Once they are out the door, the rest of the day I sit with my MacBook attached to my lap.

I have written three entire novels on my mac laptops, and uncounted partial novels, flash fiction and short stories. I have sent tens of thousands of emails. The first laptop I wore all of the letters off the keyboard. Literally, it's now like typing on it blind. You better know where your fingers go, because there's nothing there to guide you. And yet, nearly eight years later, that ibook still runs fine, hums without a care in the world, no viruses, no popups, no sudden freezing. I love that computer more than I should love an inanimate object.

When I sit at Starbucks with a friend who tells me about a new great song that she loves, I can download it right there and listen to it. I can find the carbohydrates in the coffees and pastries with my carb app that allows me to keep my blood sugar even. When I am waiting in the car at the bus stop for my kids, I can play angry birds and scramble and Sudoku. I can read a book on the phone. When I am lost or trying to find a restaurant, my phone will help me get there. When my children were babies - before my youngest was even born - Pixar changed the way we watched movies as a family. It gave us something to watch that my husband and I could love as much as the kids. Toy Story and Finding Nemo shaped our language.

How Steve Jobs has changed our lives cannot be overstated.

In 1980, when our phones were still tethered to the walls and envelopes with stamps were the only way to write friends, he imagined taking the hulking computers out of universities and businesses and putting them in the home, in a package small enough to put on a desk. He visualized every one being connected by that computer, in ways that hardly any one at that time could wrap their heads around.

Steve Jobs did not follow the trends, he set them.

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

How true is this of writing? If we are constantly running after the trends, we will be missing them. There was not a wizard trend before Rowling. There were few sparkling teen vampires before Meyers.

I don't know a lot about Steve Jobs as a person. I never met him or saw him live. I haven't read a book about him. I only know his products, and his work ethic, and the values he talks about in speeches. I know that his products are dependable. I know he was passionate about what he did, and that love showed in what he made. I know he was occasionally humble, even when he shouldn't have been. I know that, even though he made a lot of money, money didn't drive him. I know that he worked hard and loved what he did, and was grateful every day for being able to live that kind of life. I know that he wanted to make a difference.

I know that his work wasn't always easy. He didn't find immediate success. He didn't stay successful, but he didn't give up. He was compared to other CEOs, his products and company compared to other products and companies, sometimes favorably but often not. People laughed at his vision.

But he kept at it. A lesson for us writers, and parents, and artists, and business people.

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

The road is not always easy, but I am always so thankful to be on it.

Am I Confusing You?

2011-10-04T09:56:00.000-04:00

I don't get around to blogs as nearly as I want to anymore. If I hit them all once a week I'm doing well these days, but I had to check out Patti Nielson's post today entitled "The Phone Call." And while it wasn't a phone call from an agent, it was a great blog post posing the question, how much information is necessary to dole out to a reader right away? If you want to know how that relates to a phone call, go read the post!

I've been thinking about this lately because in one of the packets I sent to my advisor this semester, I included a prologue to my book. I know that prologues are not in vogue with agents these days, but they do always say, "Figure out where your story really starts and begin there," and my story really starts ten years before my character comes back to her home town. And also, I wanted to avoid the opening scene being a girl driving back into town reminiscing.

So I started the prologue by dropping the reader into a scene, just like I've seen agents say readers want. There is immediate conflict, immediate action, immediate drama. I liked it.

I sent it off to my advisor with the question: Does this work as a beginning to my story?

Her answer, because she is just this wise, was "I can't tell you that." And then she proceeded to ask me all sorts of questions to help me answer my question myself. It's a Socrates thing, I guess. Which is totally working for her, because the things she ask teach me - not just about this particular book (which is what would have happened if she just said, "Yes. By all means make this your prologue!"), but she's made me think about beginning any book, and what needs to happen in those opening pages.

While she does say the scene absolutely needs to be in the books, she also pointed out that it didn't necessarily need to go first, even though that's where it fits chronologically. (I'm learning a lot about this from her... how to fit all my character's history in with vivid scenes that don't feel like backstory.)

But also, you not only have to hook a reader in the opening pages, you also need to not lose them.

Don't introduce too many characters we can't keep track of.

Release information on a need-to-know basis. Only include what is necessary to know; don't clutter the scene with information the reader might think is important that actually isn't.

On the flip side, if the reader needs to know something, give it to them! Don't drop them so suddenly into a scene that they don't know where they are or what is happening. Not that you should take away the suspense factor, but you shouldn't leave them confused either.

This is what she said:

"You want your prologue [or first chapter] to pull the reader in by raising questions that we really want to get answered....What you don’t want it to do is leave us wondering, sentence by sentence, what is going on here? In other words, you should be in control of what questions will arise in the reader’s mind."

I think for me the only way I can check if I'm doing this right is asking someone else to read the pages for me, and then asking them, "What do you think is going to be important here? What do you wish you knew? Were you confused by anything you wish I'd clarify?"

It's a delicate balance, I think, between giving the reader enough information that they aren't confused, but little enough to entice them to read more.

As a reader, how much lack-of-information are you willing to tolerate at the beginning of a book, and how long will you read before you need the blanks filled in?

It All Started with a Closet

2011-09-28T00:02:00.000-04:00

Our closet is small. I admit, we almost did not buy this house when we saw the closet. I also admit that we are spoiled, because even my first apartment, which was about 600 square feet, had a nice walk-in closet. The first house my husband and I bought had two huge walk-in closets, as did every other house we've bought since. Until this one.

This one has one closet in the master bedroom, and while it is technically a walk-in, meaning you have to walk through the door to get the clothes, there is no room for you and the clothes both when you get there. I have to choose my clothes before doing hair, because once I walk in, my hair is a lost cause. I've given up keeping my shoes in there, because I can't bend down to get them without knocking off a row of hangers.

So this past weekend we finally - after years of talking about this - went to look at closet organizers. We found some we thought would be perfect, and once I started actually getting excited that I'd have room to both keep my clothes hung up and find them, my husband says, "We should change the flooring first. If we're going to replace the carpets we need to do that before putting in the organizers."

Which means... never.

Or at least a very long time away.

But as we were leaving, me wondering why in the world we were even shopping if it wasn't a possibility to fix yet, we saw a dresser. A beautiful white perfect girlie dresser... for my youngest.

My youngest is currently using the dresser we bought before her brother was born 13 years ago. It is a diaper changing dresser. It has enough room for a small batch of baby clothes. She is eight. The bottom of two of the three drawers have fallen out and been nailed back in repeatedly, so that often she can't close the drawers. There isn't enough room in them so she also has several rubbermaid bins for less-used clothes. (I swear we are not poor! It's embarrassing admitting this, although in our defense, my daughter is totally emotionally attached to that dresser and does not want another one, even one that easily opens and closes and holds all her pajamas and sweaters.)

So we might not be able to fix our clothing situation, but we could fix hers! Hurray!

Until we started sizing it and realized it was about twice as big as the baby dresser, which would mean rearranging her room, which would mean taking some things out and putting them in our storage area.

Except our storage area is tiny, and it packed to the gills - floor to ceiling - with boxes. Boxes of baby clothes and toys I can't get rid of, of teaching materials I used ten years ago, of files and mementos and holiday decorations. There is no room for anything else. Frankly, like our closet, there is no room for me to even get in to find the stuff I need.

So off we trudged to the shelving department, where we found shelves to organize the storage room.

And that is what I've been doing for the last four days. Pulling every single box out, going through it to determine what needs to stay, what needs to be tossed, and what needs to be donated. I am determined not to be the next desperate case on the TV show Hoarders, so I am tossing with great abandon. The house looks like a cardboard explosion has taken place. The trash can has been packed every night. The car has been loaded and deliveries made more than once. There have been several trips to the store to get more Sterlite containers. There have been more than a few trips down memory lane.

And that is where I am now. In the middle of a mess that is bigger than it was to start with, with no closet organizer for my own room and no dresser for my youngest. And trying to keep up with school work, which involved a big packet due yesterday.

This is not unlike my writing. The last set of revisions I sent my advisor followed this same path. I'd see one thing that needed to be changed - just a small thing - something totally fixable. And then I'd spend four hour tweaking the following pages to accommodate those changes. It's crazy how taking out one stinking line can cause three hours of head-banging repairs. The idea of cleaning up one awkward piece of dialogue suddenly entails dragging all the characters and plots out into the open, laying them out and asking, "What here is necessary to keep, and what now do I toss?" One thing leads to another, and before you know it... I am buried.

So that's where I am, where I've been when I've not been blogging the past week. I apologize for not getting to all of your blogs. I miss you. I'll be back, I promise.

Once I find my way out from all this stuff.

What You Can Do With a Book (besides read it)

2011-09-20T09:50:00.001-04:00

Someone passed this on to me and I was so in awe, I thought I'd pass it on to you.

Someone out there is making sculptures out of books. They are then left, anonymously, at libraries as a gift.

They are left with beautiful tags that say things like,

It started with your name @byleaveswelive and became a tree.… ... We know that a library is so much more than a building full of books… a book is so much more than pages full of words.… This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas….. a gesture (poetic maybe?)

And there's this one:

There are lots more. A veritable literary/artistic mystery. My favorite is the tea cup with the tea bag and cupcake.

Go see them here. Be touched. Be awed.

Do this! Or.. Not!

2011-09-14T10:04:00.000-04:00

It's less than two minutes of your life you won't regret spending. And I won't even clutter it up with more writing you have to read.

Your welcome.

There Are Two Sides to a Story...

2011-09-12T11:52:00.000-04:00

I have a confession. I sometimes annoy the heck out of my husband.

It's true.

The first time was early in our dating relationship, when we entered a tourist store on the Santa Monica pier. We had a question about some piece of artwork and the salesman was RUDE. Downright, undeniably rude. Dismissive of us, snippy, ignoring. We walked out without buying a single thing, and my husband was riled up.

I casually mentioned maybe the clerk was having an especially bad day. Maybe he'd gotten in trouble with his boss. Or his wife just left him. Or he'd been diagnosed with cancer that day. Or had his car stolen.

My husband turned on me and said, "Are you seriously taking HIS side?"

Of course, I wasn't taking anyone's side. I was just trying to SEE all the sides. All the possibilities. Would any of those excuses make it okay that the man was rude to us? No; but it might make me feel less upset about it.

One of the things I like about writing is that I can see life from all kinds of perspectives. I can be the woman who steals a husband from his wife. Be the mom who becomes addicted to drugs or abuses her kids. I can be the the person who forgives, or holds a grudge. I can, for a time, climb inside someone else's head and see life from their point of view.

Good fiction will help us as readers do that, too.

I recently picked up Randy Susan Meyer's The Murderer's Daughters. I don't remember where I'd heard about it, but the title alone caught my eye, and the description of the book hooked me.

Two young girls witness the murder of their mother by their father, and then, essentially orphaned by his imprisonment, they spend the rest of their childhood being shuffled from one unloving home to another.

The book follows them for thirty years, each girl dealing with the murder in drastically different ways, one acting as though her father doesn't exist while the other keeps him close. Both live in fear of the day he will make parole.

There are a couple reasons this intrigued me, the first being it's about girls who go through life with the identification of being the murderer's daughter. It's a powerful name, and one which haunts them each in different ways.

The second reason I wanted to read the book, and the thing which ended up being the reason I think this book is so fantastic, is that it is told by the two sisters in their own point of view. Switching POV in alternating chapters, the reader gets to be inside the heads of both the girls, who, having witnessed the same event, take it to heart in entirely different ways.

I read this book for school, so as I was sitting at my laptop writing the reading commentary for it, I had to ask myself, could this book have been written in just one point of view? The answer to that is both yes and no. Yes, of course one could write a book about a girl who watches her father murder her mother. But no, that book would then not be this book. Because this book is far more than that.

This book is about how two different people can come from the same place, be in the same circumstance, and see it in entirely different ways.

I love that the sisters don't get each other. Lulu can't wrap her head around the idea that Merry visits their father in prison, that she brings photos of his grandchild and keeps his letters. Merry can't understand why Lulu has essentially disowned their only living parent, or remember the good time they had with him. Lulu desperately wants to be out on her own, while Merry desperately wants a family to love her. There ends up being irony in that, but you'll have to read the book to find out why.

Because the point of view switches, the reader gets a chance to see things from the eyes of each of the sisters, to walk in their shoes, so to speak. It is like reading two versions of the same story.

On the surface this book is just a good read. It's fast-paced, engaging, unique. But more than that, it's a lesson that goes beyond the story of two girls living in the shadow of their criminal father: it's the story of how people can see life through different eyes, and both be right.

Going Back or Moving Forward

2011-09-09T11:08:00.000-04:00

This weekend is the 10th anniversary of 9-11, and for months much ado has been made about it. There is a new memorial - including a park and a new World Trade Tower being dedicated in New York, and here in D.C. it's hard to get away from it, too.

This past weekend I took my kids to two museums in the city. On Friday we headed into the American History museum, because that's what they wanted to do with their last day off of summer vacation. There was a new exhibit open, a 9-11 room in which items recovered from all three crash sites were recovered. Pieces of airplanes, cell phones, dolls, clocks that had been knocked off walls and frozen in time, doors from crushed first-responder fire trucks. It was sobering to see the pieces of people's lives - the casual, everyday things that belonged to people that most likely were no longer alive.

At the end of the exhibit was a table with paper and pens so that people could write down their reflections and post them on a huge wall covered in corkboard. We didn't stop to read many of them, but one caught my eye as I passed. It read, "I miss the days after 9-11 when this country was united. We all knew we were on the same side, and proud to be there. Now all we do is fight amongst ourselves."

Wow. How sobering that sentiment is, because it is so true.

On Monday our family went to the Newseum, one of my favorite museums in D.C. There are six floors to the building, and on each floor there was at least one 9-11 related exhibits. A wall of newspapers from every country and state the day after. The cell tower off World Trade 1. The engine off one of the flights that crashed into the towers. A video biography of a photo journalist that died in the falling of the towers, leaving his camera as a record of the last moments of his life.

The terrace on the sixth floor overlooked the Canadian Embassy, which was cloaked in a huge banner saying, "Canada Remembers."

In an article in Entertainment Weekly this week, a quote was highlighted on the page: "The question [we] asked then – 'Why do they hate us?' – is a reminder of how naive we were."

I laughed at that - not in the funny way but in the "are you kidding me" way. Why do they hate us?? Look at our country - we hate ourselves! We hate each other. We hate our politicians that we elect. We hate our media that we continue to watch as though it has the answers to all our questions. We cannot hold a civil debate on facebook among our own friends.

On the news this morning a reporter stood outside the Pentagon asking an official if all this memorializing each year was good for the survivors and victim's families, or whether it just continued to rip the scab off their wounds. He said it was both. It's important to remember, but it sometimes keeps them from moving forward.

How do we do that, though? Remember but move forward?

I tend to think the answer lies in the note tacked on the museum wall. "I miss the days after 9-11..." I don't miss 9-11, but I do miss 9-12. I miss the flags and the patriotism and the feeling that we all really wanted the same things: a safe place for our kids to grow up, to pursue their dreams. I miss thinking that despite all the differences of opinions we have, and the problems with our political system, we still have each others' backs. That humanity is more important than politics. That behind each bumper sticker is a real person who is not that different than us, and deserves respect, a friendly wave, a smile.

I miss the days when bumper stickers were not so antogonistic.

Some people will argue that 9-11 changed us forever. Maybe. But maybe not so much. Maybe it just changed the way we live. Security is more intrusive. Fear and distrust is more prevalent. More flags are sold. More people are active in politics. But internally, there is still all the hatred and anger and "I'm right and you're not" attitude there always has been. We don't need terrorists; we are destroying ourselves from the inside.

I'll watch some of the 9-11 events this weekend. I'll remember, not because I want to remember the terrorism but because I want to remember the hope we felt the days after, the fleeting unity of Americans, and indeed the world, that we as human beings are not enemies of each other but partners in this journey we call life.

Is Publishing Changing for Everyone, or Just the Established?

2011-09-01T13:12:00.000-04:00

I read this article today by Bob Mayer called The Changing Landscape of Publishing for Writers. If you have time, you should pop over and read it. It's a great overview of how one established author is revamping his idea of good career moves in publishing.

In short, though, Mayer explains how the e-book business is making him rethink his strategies for publishing, the idea being that an author makes much more money selling an e-book himself than through a publisher, and how, although he's hit many best seller lists with his traditionally published books, he has established his own publishing business for his own books (which essentially is self-publishing) and is, in part, eschewing the old route and doing quite well.

Also, he points out that those who most vehemently argue against this progress are those who stand the most to lose: agents, publishers, editors, etc.

I don't doubt that all he says is true. I've heard of several big-name authors - mostly those who write genre fiction - heading out on their own and finding they can make much more money selling the ebooks themselves and then lauding this as the future.

My question is this: as an author who is basically doing most of my own publicity (as the majority of authors do), and who is struggling with that even with a reputable small press behind me, does this new model espoused by already established authors work for everyone? Is the landscape of publishing changing for ALL authors - or just for those who already have a following and therefore can cut out the middlemen who have already put their time and effort and money into building the author a brand?

Certainly being able to publish one's books one's self on Amazon Kindle has opened the field for many authors who otherwise might not get published. It also has muddied the field and made it even more difficult to find quality writing in that arena, although there certainly are quality writers in there.

But with the stigma that comes from self-publishing, and with the swarms of novels now available in Kindle and epub formats, can a no-name author rise to the top of the pack and make a name for her or himself and make the kind of money offered in traditional presses (which, granted, is probably not a lot)?

What do you think? Will the traditional presses still be the best way to published in two, four, or six years, or will they merely be the stepping stone for authors? Or will they, eventually, become just another but equal option for prospective writers?

MFA Monday: Sentence Structure as Plot Device

2011-08-29T11:40:00.004-04:00

I admit that before going back to school, I never really thought about how I wrote. I worried about elements such as plots and characters and setting, all those good things you learn in middle school and high school, and I learned somewhere along the way that it's best to choose stronger verbs than relying on the lazy "was" verb to show action.

But when it came to stringing words together, I think I leaned heavily on instinct. Does it sound right? Does it flow? It's not that the pattern of writing was unconscious, but that I didn't know why I should choose one way of writing over another.

"Vary sentence length" I'd been taught. And so I did. Not for any reason but that I thought sentences needed to be different lengths.

I was partly oblivious to the importance of sentence structure. I knew not to start every sentence with a noun and verb, especially the pronouns "I" or "she" or "he," to vary the first words with gerunds and participles and phrases, but that was only because I thought it would bore the reader to have every sentence the same, not because I thought it had any real impact on the story.

About halfway through editing Some Kind of Normal, my editor wrote me an email saying, "I don't know why I didn't notice before, but you use a lot of simple compound sentences." I didn't notice it either, but when I went through the chapters I realized I'd done that because, to my ear, that's how my narrator sounded. It was her "cadence" of talking, and though I didn't do it on purpose, I secretly patted myself on the back for "hearing" Babs' voice. (Although I'm not sure a pat on the back is what my editor had in mind when she pointed this fact out!)

But one thing I've learned lately is that sentence structure IS important. Even if your reader will never notice you doing it, the way a sentence is laid out on a page, the way it is put together, the way multiple sentences are strung together, impact the telling of a story. They impact the mood, the tension, the pacing.

In the latest chapter I sent to a friend, he pointed out that when the tension should have been going through the roof, I'd slowed it down by writing in long sentences with lots of phrases and clauses. At the climax of the scene he wrote in the margins:

I’d still suggest trimming back on the length of the sentences as the action drives ahead—too much comma-comma-comma makes me lose the heart-pounding edge to the scene. What if each motion was its own sentence here? “She took a step. Billy didn’t notice. Chastity did; her eyes locked onto Katie at once. The young girl yelped. Billy turned.” You’d do a better job of it, but do you see what I mean?

Indeed I did see what he meant! In fact, one of the faculty had given a talk in the residency about that very thing, but without context for me to put it into, I hadn't personalized what she was saying. But now I see!

Longer sentences slow down the exposition. They are for places when you want the reader to slow down. To keep them from getting to a place faster, to let them sit and linger, to draw out the tension.

Short, choppy sentences add to the tension. They quicken the pace of reading. The bring your reader into a sprint with you. They are like the rapid beating of a heart when the adreneline kicks in.

When a girl is facing her abusive father with a knife in her hand, drunk and high and hating him with everything she has in her, does it serve the narrative to write in long, lingering sentences? The answer was a resounding no.

I took my friend's advice and looked not just at that section but the entire chapter. When the main character is getting high and hanging around a bar parking lot with a guy she doesn't know, the sentences are now longer, wandering, like her thoughts. When she is following her dad, unseen, there is a mix of short and long, the actions and her thoughts mixed. When she is facing her dad, when the tension is the highest, when the reader wants to know, is she going to use the knife, the sentences turn choppy, short, incomplete, breathless.

It's amazing how much those little edits changed the pacing and tension of the entire chapter. I changed very few words. Without punctuation, the chapter would read almost identically. But with the newer punctuation, it morphed into something so much better. The sentence structure now mimics the plot.

What about you? Do you think about how long or short your sentences are? Do you consider whether putting lots of phrases and clauses in- or cutting them out of - a sentence works for or against the plot? Or do you, like me, tend to work off instinct?

The "Eyes" Have It

2011-08-26T10:36:00.000-04:00

It's Friday and a hurricane is headed our way even as we are ducking very minor aftershocks that everyone is either freaking out over or angry that they didn't feel. I have a feeling the hurricane will be harder to miss.

It's the mark of a writer, I suppose, that I am less worried about making sure the fridge is stocked and the batteries in the flashlight are fresh and that we have a portable radio than that my laptop is fully charged so that I can write if the power goes off.

Writing is going pretty well.

Which is not to say the writing itself is good. I have no idea about that anymore.

It's great having a writing group that has been together for years. I love them. I know I can depend on them. I know they love me, but that they will also be totally and brutally honest if I write crap. Over the years, I've learned so much from them that I can now see, while writing, what they would say needs changing. Sometimes I leave it in to see if I'm right. I almost always am. I smile when I see "You need to cut this line" right next to the line I knew they'd hate.

The problem with having a writing group that's been together for years is that we have settled into a comfortable way of critiquing. We all tend to focus on the same things we've always focused on, the things we are acutely aware of.

This past week I sent a few pages to a fellow MFA student. I don't usually do that, even though they offer all the time, because I know how overloaded they all are themselves. But I needed fresh eyes. Someone who had never read any of my new book, who didn't come to the pages with any kind of preconceived notion of what the book was about. I thought I knew the kind of response I'd get. I was wrong.

I was stunned to see the critique come back with completely different types of critiques than I was used to. He pointed things out to me I would never have thought of, something that I don't think any of my fellow writing group members would ever think to point out. It was a bit mind-blowing, in the best kind of way.

Let me be clear that it wasn't necessarily better, it was just different. And different was exactly what I needed in these pages.

And some of his comments had broader application, things I will think of and apply not just in these pages but in the entire book, and in all of my writing going forward.

We writers tend to be solitary people, but writing should not be a solitary act, even though it feels that way when we sit with just the computer or pen to keep us company. The best of work needs fresh eyes. Only others can see the weaknesses we can't. Others can teach us things we don't know that they've learned.

And in the best of circumstances, as with my long-held critique group as well as with my fellow MFAers, we learn from those critiques, and they make us better writers in the long haul.

Do you have a critique group or a special beta reader? What is the best thing about having them for you?

Everyone's Got A Story; And Where I Was When I Wasn't Here

2011-08-24T12:12:00.000-04:00

I've been gone for a while. Apologies on that! Maybe I should have posted that I was taking a blog break, but I really did think I'd get around to writing! Instead of writing, though, last week I was here:

Yeah, hate me all you want. Six days of blissfully warm, breezy Florida air, the sound of waves crashing at my feet, my toes dug in the velvet-soft sand, three great books.

The family got up every morning and swam laps in the pool, ate a leisurely lunch at a great hamburger place, then headed out to the beach where we surfed, swam, and read great books. I managed to polish off three novels while looking at this scene; not a bad way to both relax AND do school work! After showers, we sat on a wide deck watching the sunset, listening to live music, and eating dinner.

Did I say BLISS??

After a summer of trying to balance cramming in my school work with enjoying time with the kiddos, it was great to be a part of this:

My oldest and youngest got attacked by sharks...

My daughter ran into trouble with a swordfish...

We saw lots of pelicans hunting for food...

And my awesome husband wrote me messages in the sand...

I didn't realize how stressed I was until I was there, no laundry to do, no dishes to clean, no decisions to make other than what to order off the menu. I could stay up late, sleep in late, have no agenda.

It's not the way I could live forever - I like a scheduled life - but for a week, it was exactly what I needed. I came back eager to dive back into writing.

Before we barely got settled in at home, though...

EARTHQUAKE!!!!

I know, this is old news by now, and most of you have heard about this and a lot of you felt it too. We live not very far from the epicenter, though, and as it was my kids' first memory of an earthquake, it made the day quite exciting.

We felt the initial 5.9 quake as well as all the aftershocks (which so far total four), none of which were dramatic beyond "Hey, the house is shaking!" I do admit I laughed a bit at all the people running OUT of the buildings (you aren't supposed to run outside in an earthquake, people) and screaming (What is this, war of the worlds??). When you've lived in California long enough, you realize this kind of earthquake is not a panic-inducing moment.

But most people here have never been in an earthquake, and everyone wants to talk about it. Where they were. What they were doing. What they thought it was. Everyone. The news is full of them. Twitter and facebook are full of them. The store clerks, the doctors, the people in the parking lots.

Everyone has a story, and everyone wants to tell it.

Which I love. Aren't we all, to some extent, born storytellers? How cool is it, then, to be able to make your living doing just that! I think we writers are the luckiest people on earth!

Little Bee: A Book and A Memory

2011-08-12T11:20:00.000-04:00

Last week I felt like I was drowning in housework. Well, truthfully, I feel that all the time, but last week I was stressed about it, wondering how in the world I could get all the laundry done and the floors vacuumed and still get my homework finished when I couldn't put two thoughts together without my kids interrupting me.

I finally decided if I wasn't going to be productive, at least I could be a good mom and take them to the pool, where, if I was lucky, they would swim for hours thinking how great a mom I was while I sat on the side and caught up on my reading for school. Win win, right?

The book I took with me was Little Bee, and in just the first few pages, my entire perspective on my day - and maybe my life - changed.

If you haven't heard of Chris Cleave's Little Bee, it is a book that comes with a big statement on the cover: We can't really tell you what this book is about. It's a secret. And if you read it, don't tell others either.

Nice, huh? Personally, this type of blurb tends to put me off. That's a pretty big claim, and one which I don't think the book really lives up to. It's a book, with a story, that develops, and things happen you didn't know would happen, and you find out things. You know... a book.

But I won't go spoiling anyone's fun here. Let me tell you what it's deemed okay to tell you:

This is a book about two women - one from London and another from a small village in Nigeria. At one point, before the story begins, they meet under extreme circumstances on a beach in Nigeria, where events happen that change their lives. Years later, the Nigerian girl ends up in London and comes looking for the other woman, who, because of their past, is unable to turn her away.

The book is told from two points of view, switching between Little Bee (the Nigerian) and Sarah, the British journalist she met on a beach. While both POVs are done very well, and I'd say necessary to the unfolding of the story, the most interesting part for me was Little Bee, who begins the story in a Immigration Detention Camp in extremely ugly circumstances. But Little Bee, who would probably have loved to have my washing machine to do her clothes, or for that matter, all the clothes I have to wash, as she has nothing but what she is wearing and was given to her through and aid donation box, is the more interesting of the two. It is she, with her traumatic past, who gives the reader perspective if one is willing to take it.

It is Little Bee's thoughts, her writing, that makes the book come alive, and makes you want to read it with a highlighter in hand.

There are passages like this that will take your breath away:

On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty, too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar mean, I survived.

And also this:

In your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a horror film. Afterward, you can go out of the cinema into the night and for a little while there is horror in everything. Perhaps there are murderes lying wait for you at home. You think this because there is a light on in your house that you are certain you did not leave on... For one hour you are haunted, and you do not trust anybody, and then the feeling fades away. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it...

For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it...the film in your memory you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

For some ridiculous reason, the marketer of this book has billed it as funny - hilarious even. But it is not. Not even in the slightest. It is sad, and thought-provoking, and wistful. Little Bee has hope, which you think throughout she should not have. She is thankful for little things - things you and I take for granted every day - like safety and a warm house and food. She is in awe of it.

And so, sitting by the pool with my laundry piling up and the dog hair still lying on the carpet, I was thankful that I had so much to do... so much to take care of. Thankful for the country I live in, grateful that I am surrounded by a family that I love that loves me. Humbled by my fortune and my opportunities.

Reviewers complain loudly about the end of this book, and I agree that the end seemed wrong, somehow. Maybe incomplete, or like it had continued two pages too far. Unsatisfying.

But Little Bee isn't meant to be satisfying, because like her life, the book is not about the end, it's about the journey.

I highly recommend this book. The writing is beautiful, the story unique, and while it isn't the easiest of topics, it isn't hard to read, either. While it might not change your life, it might just change your perspective for a day or two.

Is Entertaining Enough?

2011-08-10T10:51:00.000-04:00

I'm belaboring my revisions this morning, and it's going well, but very slowly.

And as I'm working through my sixth month of good, solid revising, I see people around me - in blogs, on facebook, through twitter - who are churning out books at lightening speed. Who write a book in a month, do quick revisions of the checking-for-typos variety, and then send out or self-publish. I've seen people who talk about how long revisions take and then are done within two weeks.

I know we are not all the same. I know we do not all write at the same speed, or end up with first drafts that need the same amount of time and attention in the revising process, and I know that I would be working faster were I doing it on my own and not revising with an advisor through school.

But I can't help but know that some of these people - many of them - are not writing books that are really well-written. (You, dear readers, are excluded from this, because I know what YOU write is amazing, because I get to read a lot of it!). The books they write may be entertaining, but not necessarily "well written" in the terms that a writing class might define it.

Which brings me to the question I posed on Google+ this morning:

I watch people churning out books in a month, revising in a week, and I labor over a sentence for hours, revising a chapter a month in painstaking fashion. And I wonder, does "good writing" matter, or if you have an entertaining story do readers not care if you have tons of extra words, unspecific details and bland verbs, repetitive sentences, and too many flashbacks? Does good writing matter, or only a good story?

What say you, dear bloggers? There's no right or wrong answer here. I'm just interested. And do you consider yourself one of those that labors, or flies through the writing/revising stages?

When a Bar Is Not Just a Bar

2011-08-04T10:49:00.001-04:00

In the name of research I went out last night with a bunch of friends I haven't seen in years. Most of them 23 years, to be specific. High school friends that were in town for a week set up a get-together at a local waterfront restaurant to catch up. Okay - so it wasn't really in the name of research, but while I was there, why not do a little careful listening?

In the short story I've been tweaking the last month, the main character that has just left the military for civilian life meets up with some soldier friends at a bar. My advisor advised me that the dialogue was too pointed - too about what the story was about, when really dialogue in real life skirts what we want to say. At a bar, the soldiers wouldn't be talking about the details of war and what they regret, they would be doing everything BUT talking about it, while thinking about it, as if they could escape the reality if they just kept off-topic.

So last night, as I sat with friends around the table on the deck of Madigan's, I listened to the way people talked, the way the conversations flowed with those of us who had no seen each other in over two decades. And you know what? My advisor was right. We all talked about things that essentially didn't matter in the larger scheme of life. There were, at any time, three or four conversations going, about traffic on the highway, the teachers we remembered we loved and hated, the humidity, the DJ who seemed to want to be our new best friend, the song options for karaoke, and a hundred other things I don't even remember.

But all the while, I was thinking of my friend Jean who died a few years ago - who no doubt would have been sitting at that table with us, who would have sung karaoke. The song the first guys chose to sing was one Jean and I sang loud and often on car trips, one which brought back a wave of emotions that were surprisingly more sweet than sad.

The thing is, real life conversations at a bar are interesting to those in them, at that moment in time, but they make for a boring story. So how to mix the two - the important conversation they want to have, and are having in their head, about the dead they saw, the attacks and brutality, the comraderie that comes with those kind of circumstances and the loss of that when you come home - and the conversations which happens out loud. How to intertwine them in such a way that the surface dialogue conveys the inner turmoil they are hiding.

I wonder sometimes if I'm writing more complex stories now, or if because of school I'm letting my stories become more complex.

I remember the days when sitting down to write a story was just about writing the story. And going to a bar with some friends was just a conversation among friends. But I would't change a thing about either.

It's My Party and I'll Invite if I Want To...

2011-07-28T10:18:00.000-04:00

Heaven knows I don't need more social media. I love facebook, but it can suck the time right off my clock. I do it because I love connecting with people there. I write something, they write something back. Also, it is great for news. I find out what celebrity died within minutes of them dying, what books are climbing the Amazon bestseller list for mysteries (my friends Stephen Parrish and Deborah Reed, thank you very much), and also what recent naked burglar was caught in my hometown.

And twitter I just don't get, because it's got the attention span of a flea. Seriously. I read somewhere that a tweet has the life of something like seven minutes. Seven minutes after you hit the enter key, it's not likely to be read. Ever. By anyone. Writing something on there for me is like throwing a thought into the universe knowing that the only one to hear it will be God.

Then there's blogging. And despite how little I write nowadays, I hope y'all know the affection I have for you. True, heart-swelling affection. I loves you.

But now there is something new, and I admit (and not even ashamedly) that I am on the bandwagon.

Google+ is here.

Okay - so the party is a little empty right now. For a while one had to be "invited" by someone on the new site to get in, so there aren't a lot of people yet. Also, social media users want to know why they should add it to their already full media line-up.

This is how I think it's different: it allows you to put your contacts into circles, an artistic way of saying groups, and then post your thoughts to just that group. In other words, I can post all my writing stuff and not bore my church friends with it. Also, I can post my thoughts on faith without offending my writing friends. I can post family stuff for my family without fear of people I don't know seeing it.

It's something between facebook and twitter - where you can have a broad spectrum of contacts without it being too hard to keep up, and can write more than 140 characters but less than a blog post.

This is where I'm going with this ... I think it has the amazing possibility to turn into a great writing forum - a sort of online writing group. Twitter moves too fast and requires a brevity that doesn't lend itself to this. Facebook feels very broad to accomplish this. Blogs are time hogs. (I love you, blog, but you know you are!)

But Google+ sets up the perfect scenario for conversations about writing.... ones that are much briefer than blogging.

We can bat back and forth quick questions for everyone to chime in on: What's the hardest thing about writing for you? Have you tried writing in a different genre? Are you having a good writing day today or a hard one?

We can bat tips back and forth: Cut as many adverbs as possible. Write the first draft without self-editing and let it be okay for it to be utter poo.

We can post inspiring quotes. (Okay, I know people who do this on twitter, but then how often do you comment on those, or how often are they more than 140 characters?)

We can encourage each other.

And all in much less time than blogging. (I'm not disparaging blogging. I LOVE y'all, remember?? But it does take a time commitment if you want to read or write more than a sentence or two)

Anyone interested to give it a try? If you want an invitation, let me know (with your email address) and I'll send one. (a shout out to new blogging buddy Jade who sent me mine). No obligation necessary.

And if you're on Google+ and you aren't in one of my circles, why not?? Let me know and I'd love to add you.

After all, a party of one is just sad.

Even in summer, life goes on. Unless you are a frog.

2011-07-20T11:07:00.001-04:00

I feel scattered these days, running one child to music camp and another to dance team practice and reading and writing and revising and synopsizing and attacking school work due on Monday in the middle of fixing meals and carpooling and laundry (will the laundry NEVER stop????) and cleaning hair from the pooch who is shedding like a mad dog in this hundred plus heat.

If I didn't have ADD before, I have it now. I can't concentrate on any one thing long enough to get it accomplished.

This bad for writing. I've read a lot of blogs lately about how writers are struggling with writing. It's the heat. The summer with kids home. The waiting on hearing about queries and submissions. The just plain feeling that their writing is not what it should be.

I just go from blog to blog writing, "YEAH! ME TOO!"

It's more than just activities, though. It's become a fear of opening my project and realizing I have nothing worthwhile to write. I can't write poetically like Marisa de los Santos. (Oh how I wish I could!!) I can't write imaginatively like J.K. Rowling. I can't write break-neck-paced adventures or mysteries or love stories. I find myself comparing myself constantly and coming up short.

And the one thing that makes me put that fear and depression aside is the fact that, at residency, nearly all of the faculty admitted to the same thing. Best-sellers, critically acclaimed and highly awarded authors all feel this way. Well, not all of them, but many of them.

So I just do it. Like Nike says. I just put my butt in the chair and open the document and stop worrying about how good the words are and just write.

I love this quote by Tom Wolfe:

Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in half an hour. I find that can be done. I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired.

So stop lollygagging around on my blog and go write.

BUT WAIT!!!

First I'll show you why I'm coming to call my home Marlin Perkin's Wild Kingdom.

In the past two months I have caught, in the house, a lizard, a frog, and six mice. Caught in the door frame of the basement I have found two copperhead snakeskins. One was mostly outside with the head of the skin in the frame. The other was found inside the basement, caught by the tail in the frame. I killed one copperhead hiding by the doghouse, but that was before the snakeskins appeared. I have stepped on too many frogs to count on my way out with the puppy. The cicadas are so loud at night I can't hear my own whistle, and the owls wake me up at three in the morning.

But this beats them all.

Yes, that is a snake eating a frog. And yes, there was much screaming and wailing and panicking about how to save the frog, and then we just settled on the idea that it was the circle of life and the snake needed to eat, and so we stood around taking pictures.

That's just how we roll here in the wild kingdom.

MFA Monday: Motives. What Does Your Character Want?

2011-07-18T06:00:00.000-04:00

I am juggling two pieces of writing right now: my current novel revisions and a short story I'm revising from school. In both I'm wrestling with the same question. What does my character want?

Kurt Vonnegut once said: "...make [your] characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time."

It's true that even in the shortest pieces, a character needs motivation. Motivation is what leads to conflict.

I never stopped to think about what my characters want. I know inherently they want something. I sometimes even think I know what it is they want; but when I stop to name it, to define what it is my characters are working towards or secretly desiring, I realize that what I think it is is not always what the story is driving.

For example, the short story I'm working on is about a woman recently discharged from the Army trying to find her way in the civilian world. What I think she wants is to be back in the Army. What the story has showed her wanting is to be back in the war she just left.

While the two wants may seem interchangeable, they are absolutely two different wants, and if she just wants the security and family of the Army, that makes her an entirely different person than if she wants to be in war.

So I either need to change the character's personality or I need to change the focus of the plot.

In my novel, the overall want is easier. She wants a family, and a place to belong. But since it's a longer piece of work, there is the need in each scene to have her wanting something - the desire to go unseen, the desire to get out of the restaurant and the sticky conversation, the desire to connect with her brother at some level. Each time I open a scene, I'm asking myself now, "What does she want here?"

Ray Bradbury says, "My characters write my stories for me. They tell me what they want, and I tell them to go get it, and I follow as they run, working at my typing as they rush to their destiny."

Stephen Koch says, "There's a story inside every motive, because wanting something invariably has a result, some sort of outcome. That result may be nothing more than pure frustration - but then frustration will have some outcome. In any case, the wish will lead to a result, and therein lies, always, some sort of tale, a path to narrative, and a route to the end."

What is it your character want, and is the action motivated by that?

MFA Monday: Stop Your Crying

2011-07-11T11:25:00.000-04:00

"No character should cry more than once in a book," more than one of the faculty advisors said this past residency.

Having written a book in which the character cries probably four or five times - and all, I'd say, with really good reason - this made me stop and think. Is it cliche to have a character cry? Or worse, is it lazy on my part?

What is the more creative way to show emotion? How can we surprise our readers?

By showing them trying NOT to do it, Ellen Bass says. Show your characters trying NOT to be undone by their feelings - trying NOT to cry, trying NOT to get angry. THIS is the interesting emotion!

And above all, not resorting to cliche bodily function to tell us how a character is feeling.

How many times have you read (or written) that someone's heart was pounding? That their hands were sweaty? That they cried? If you're like me, probably a lot. And does that make my own heart pound, feel nervous and anxious or scared or excited? No. It makes me know that the character feels that way, but it doesn't make me as a reader feel that way.

And isn't that what we want from a reader? Their participation in the story? For them to feel as though they are right there with our character?

Replace those cliche bodily functions with gestures, Bass suggested to us. Observe yourself and others. What do we do when we are nervous or scared or excited? What do we do when we are crying, or better yet, trying not to cry?

I think, even here, it is tricky not to fall in cliches. Biting nails, twisting hair around a finger, biting the lip. These are all so common they can become as emotionally desaturated as a heart pounding.

I read a chapter of a friend's WIP last week that was riddled with this kind of cliched telling. I felt completely detached watching the scene, and I know that was the opposite of what she wanted. When she went back to re-write it, she replaced much of the telling me how the character's body was acting (crying, clenched stomach) with much more interesting gestures (closed eyes, brow furrowed, reaching out but then dropping his hand before he touched her) and some dialogue that told me more about how the characters were feeling that narrative ever could, even though (or because) the characters never really SAID how they were feeling.

For me, this is the hard work of writing: finding a way to say my story in a way no one has before. Using images and gestures that are unique to my characters that will bring the reader in rather than leave them on the outside observing. It's something I'm struggling with right now, and yet so excited about as well. It's one thing, I think, that can truly make good writing great. I'm certainly not there yet!

How about you? Do you find your character crying too much? Do you tend to lean on tried-and-true (but often cliche) gestures or feelings, and does it work for you?

Is There a Draft in Here?

2011-07-08T11:42:00.000-04:00

It seems like it's been forever since I've been here on the blog - and worse yet, on yours. Although I certainly loved school and all the busyness of being secluded for ten days doing nothing but learning about writing, and while I love have mini-vacations with my family where we dance off to the pool in the early morning hours and come home a teensy bit sunburned and full of watermelon, I do miss this.

I am still in revision mode on my second novel, and though I convinced my saintly advisor this semester to not only review my revisions but also to look at some new short stories (this is just extra work for her, so I am sooooo thankful she's behind me in my need to write some fresh material too), the novel still takes precedence.

And so revisions continue.

I know many people who call this revision hell. I can understand that terminology, especially if one is more are writer than reviser, but I happen to love revisions. I adore them. There is nothing I like more than writing on a page that isn't blank.

But it does seem to never end. It's more like revision purgatory. I'm stuck here until some day far in the future when I decide I've done as much as I can do, and some editor agrees.

I was relieved when my last advisor told me he'd done 18 revisions on his latest novel. That makes my 8 look pretty piddly. The thing that I love about this MFA program is that no one is in a rush to get published. They all want to get published, don't get me wrong, but I haven't met a person yet who is champing at the bit to send off a piece before it's absolutely ready. And every one of them is willing to keep working until it is.

I read a great book on writing this past week called Modern Library Writer's Workshop. It's chock full of very interesting tips, ideas, encouragement, examples, and quotes that I frantically highlighted.

In it, the author talks about drafts and the process of revision that I found obvious but enlightening.

According to the author, there are three draft phases (each phase of which may contain several drafts).

Draft 1: Get the story down. This is what Stephen King calls a "closed door draft," because no one should see it. The point is to get the words on the page and figure out what the story is. The point is to finish it. To have characters and a semblance of plot. When it's done, the author says, feel good. Have a glass of champagne. Celebrate. And then give it a rest. At least a week, but no more than two months.

Then read the entire thing, all the way through.

Don't judge the book; it isn't ready to be judged. It's ready to be revised. But don't revise yet. Just read, and makes notes of places where you get lost in the story (those are the good passages!) and places where you start skimming (maybe this part needs cutting or trimming or rewriting).

Draft 2: This is not a polishing phase. This is not where you sit down and make line-by-line changes as you go along. This is where you take charge of the story. Find the characters that need fleshing out. Find the plot holes.

First off, revise for structure. Solve the problem of sequence.

Secondly, develop the underdeveloped. Nearly everything you write will need to be more vivid, more coherent, and more powerful.

Thirdly, revise for plot. Get the details and mechanics of the plot under control.

Fourthly, revise for clarity. Even if you know what you meant, does the reader?

Lastly, cut. Cut everything by 10%. If the story is 10 pages, make it 9. If the novel is 300 pages, make it 270. I don't remember who it was, but some famous author said, "When I write, I try not to write the stuff readers skip over." I love that line!

The author says, "Cut. But don't cut out your heart... Your job in revision is to capture that first excitement and know it again, no longer as a promise but as a promise redeemed."

Draft 3: Finishing and polishing it. This is where you can further tighten language and look at sentence structure and check spelling, punctuation, and grammar. This drafting should be relatively quick.

I'm somewhere in the midst of drafting phase 2. Hopefully near the end of it, but I won't know until I finish the writing and read through it all in one sitting.

So my question for you: do you do all of it, or do you tend to skip phase 2? And where are you right now?

"Lovin' the Language" blogfest...Yes, I'm still writing.

2011-06-27T22:38:00.000-04:00

Jolene Perry over at Been Writing is hosting a blogfest today, and though I was one of the early ones to sign up, I'm one of the last, I'll bet, to post. Blame it on jet lag. Blame it on residency brain leakage. Blame it on birthday business today. But here I am, with an hour and 45 minutes to go, so I think I'm doing okay. :)

The challenge is to pick five lines or five short exerpts from a WIP and share them here. So here I go.

This is from a short story I recently wrote about an army officer recently discharged and trying to make it in the civilian world. I submitted this to workshop at school and got some great responses. If I have time, I'd like to fix it up some more and submit to a lit magazine somewhere. We'll see how it goes.

Anyhow - here are my five sentences.

The check printing plant is grey and drab, with low ceilings that feel claustrophobic. Fluorescent lights cast an unnatural glow over the line workers, creating the illusion of moving corpses, fitting for a dying industry. A few look up at me, vaguely interested, then bow back over their jobs, the printing room a bubble of loud machinery and humming conveyor belts. Every few seconds a machine in the corner lets a guillotine-like blade fall, whacking a stack of paper into smaller stacks of checks.

He finally leaves me alone in a padded cubicle the color of cobwebs with no windows and a stack of manuals to read and memorize; I want to close the door and lay my head on the desk and cry, but there is no door.

If you have time, you should pop over to Jolene's blog and read her fantastic exerpt, and check out the links of other participants. And if you're really brave, maybe you'll put one or two of your favorite lines in the comment section here. I'd love to be inspired by you.

MFA Residency, Day ??? or I Did Not Fall Off the Face of the Earth

2011-06-24T01:23:00.001-04:00

I sat at this funky little bakery/coffeeshop this morning, eating a ginormous cinnamon bun and drinking coffee and giving one last go-over of the last of the workshop stories, basking in the first early hours I've had off since I've arrived. It's been a crazy time here at residency, in all the best ways, except that there's been no time for writing; not creatively, not bloggingly. And so I apologize for my absence.

The residency is already winding down, and my brain is full. Although the schedule is much the same as the January residency, everything seems different. We are at a college campus, for one, and instead of staying at a hotel we live in dorms; instead of one to a room, we are four to an apartment. It is sunny instead of rainy, cool instead of cold. I know the schedule and the people instead of being a stranger who is just trying not to be lost. I feel like I belong, in all the best possible ways.

My roommates are amazing. I was fortunate to pick who I wanted to room with, and they picked me, and so much of the time I spent free on my own last January is spent with good friends this time, and a lot of laughing ensues, and long late nights talking about books and writing. Occasionally wine is involved. It's a bit of literary heaven.

I walk around with my nametag all the time. I sit at home in the dorm with it on, as though I might forget who I am. I am not always here who I am back at home. I am outgoing in a way I never am somewhere else. I walk up to strangers and say hi. I stride boldly across campus as though I belong here in this world where 18-year-olds regularly reside. Here I am nobody's mother. I do not kiss boo-boos or make dinner or clean other's dishes. There are no errands to run, no milk to buy, no one's homework to check but my own. I have given out the occasional band-aid, but I'm not in charge of cleaning the wounds. I laugh a lot, which I think I mentioned, but I also, somehow, make others laugh. I speak up in class, I read my writing from a podium, I do not hyperventilate, although I think my blood pressure goes up. It's conditioned to do so in such circumstances, I suspect.

Every day I attend three to four classes and a two hour workshop in which ten of us students and two advisors (faculty members) sit around and talk about each other's work. We eat together, and in the evenings we go to faculty readings, attend winery readings (oh the hardships!) and literary magazine-hosted events. In the late evenings there are student readings. It's amazing, and overwhelming, mind-boggling, and thought-provoking. It is, in short, everything you could possibly want from graduate school.

The classes have titles such as, "How To Be a Writer Every Day," and "When the Action is Hot, Write Cool," "Do I Dare Put this on the Page?" "First, Do No Harm: Thoughts on Characters and Redemption," "Thrilling, Death-Defying Adventures in Point of View," "The Secret of Once," and "The Body Never Lies."

Brilliant faculty members say things like:

"Fiction that counts is about people." (Jack Driscoll)

"We write to speak to what it feels like to be human and alive in the world." (Jack Driscoll)

"You don't have to be brilliant to write. You just have to work really, really hard... You can write books and stories that are smarter than you are." (Bonnie Jo Campbell)

"A good novel tells us the truth of the character, but a bad novel reveals more about the author." (Marvin Bell)

"We spend a lot of time talking about who is talking in a piece, but shouldn't we spend our time asking who is listening to it?" (Jess Walter)

"Read and steal, read and steal, until you find your own voice." (Jess Walter)

I have much to tell you, but no time here to do so. Hopefully all this information won't seep out of my brain once I'm back home. Hopefully I will remember. When I'm no longer here:

MFA Monday: The Last Word... on Dialogue

2011-06-13T05:00:00.000-04:00

In three more days I'll be boarding a plane and heading off to my second residency program. A year ago, I was barely thinking seriously about going back to get my MFA, and now here I am, one semester under my belt and not completely sucking at it.

I think my writing has gotten better. I hope I've gotten a lot better. Of course, if that was true, I probably wouldn't be using the word "gotten." :) Still, I can tell a big difference in both what I write, and how I revise.

Along the way I hoped to share some of what I've learned, but I'm not sure I've done that well. Part of that is that it's hard to put into words what I'm learning. The residencies provide hours and hours of teaching - very practical put-into-words kind of learning, but the rest of the semester, where I'm working on my own with my advisor, what I learn isn't as easily quantifiable or definable.

But here's a tidbit I learned about dialogue that I passed on to one of my critique partners this week that might help you:

Dialogue has two purposes: to show character, and to propel the plot.

It should not be used to dispense information that the narrative could give.

Simple, and yet such wise advice. If you look at dialogue in a book that just doesn't work for you, or that seems hokey, it's likely it's because it's trying to give the reader information needed for the story that the narration really should be telling. Or it's a conversation in which nothing happens. I know real people have those conversations all the time, but in a book, stick to what's important.

So that's my last words of MFA wisdom for the semester. I'll be on a plane on Thursday, and I'll try to update as often as possible from Oregon.

There is sure to be pictures. None of the ocean this time, since I will be at the Pacific University campus instead of the beach, but since the sun is scheduled to shine for the first few days at least, there will be pictures! :)

Beyond that... You tell me - if you happen to come back to this blog over the next two weeks, what would you rather read about? What I'm learning in class, or what I'm doing?

I Need a Beach with Sand and Water and Nothing around for Miles

2011-06-09T10:30:00.001-04:00

My brain is mush.

We are wrapping up the school year for my kids here, and all that comes with it. In the last seven days we have attended my son's induction into the National Junior Honor Society, a birthday party for my father, my youngest daughter's baptism, my son's band concert, and my kids' piano recital. We also squeezed in a baseball game on Monday night - our only free night - because it was dollar night at the National's and we haven't been to a game yet this season, which is practically criminal. And the pool opened so we managed a few short hours there on Saturday, between morning and evening obligations.

In between, I've been running like crazy to buy my son a tie for the induction (he needed one, and his old ones were all way too small, which begs the question: What kind of Baptists are we that my son does not have a tie that fits???). At the induction we realized he'd also grown out of his pants, which I just bought in December, so back to the store for those before the concert. Also, teachers need end of year gifts. And also flowers for the piano teacher. And I need a raincoat for Oregon in a week. And there are residual doctor appointments from my surgery two weeks ago.

And somewhere in the last week I received the ten short stories from my workshop group that I need to read and critique before I get on a plane in seven days.

I need sleep. Or caffeine.

I was joking with a friend that I need to raid a kid's Ritalin stash - I'd be more focused, more awake, and possibly skinnier. Shouldn't life come with a prescription like that?

For now, I'll just rely on coffee and the excitement running through our house. I can sleep all summer when the kids are out of school, right?

Oh yeah - that's when my semester starts...

Maybe in a few years...

OH HAPPY DAY!!!!

2011-06-03T15:28:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Jen Blom's debut middle grade novel was released. I couldn't have been more excited if it was my own book.

Even though I've seen the cover, it took my breath away holding it in my hand. I found myself saying, "It's a real book!"... Funny enough, the exact same words my writing group said to me when my book arrived at their homes.

It's something. Holding a book written by someone you know.

This book feels personal to me, too. You see, Jen and I started on the publication process about the same time. We'd both finished our first novels and were querying them when we met, and both commiserated thought the early query waters. We formed a writing group together with a few other lovely ladies, and she and I decided about the same time to begin new books.

It was Jen who, three years ago this summer, who challenged me to write 50,000 words in five weeks. At the time, that seemed monumental, but she was doing it, and if she could, so could I, I thought.

And thus I began my own journey with writing Some Kind of Normal. By August, I had finished the first draft of my novel, and Jen had finished Possum Summer.

Our paths in the process went in different direction at that point. I took a few more months to revise, and eventually went with an independent publishing house that took less than six months from acceptance to publication.

Jen queried, got an agent, went through the submission process, got an editor, spent lengthy time in a much bigger publishing house before her book finally made it to print. But seeing the book - holding it in my hands - brought back that summer in vivid form.

It is proof that dreams come true.

Jen writes more than anyone I know. Since writing that one book and querying it, I can think of six other books she has written, at least one of which is currently under contract, and the others in a holding pattern for a different publisher. She is amazing.

If you want to say congrats, you can stop by her blog here. I know it would mean the world to her - even if you don't buy the book. Really - we're all in this together - each step of the way - and every success by one of us should be celebrated.

And Jen - though I've said it so often to you, I want to say it here, too. I am so proud of you. You inspire me and challenge me. And I'm so happy for you that this day is finally here. May there be many, many more release days in your future!

What's Up With the Texas Bashing? (and other setting related questions)

2011-05-31T14:26:00.001-04:00

Lately I've noticed a lot of Texas bashing going on - some of it hidden behind backhanded compliments that seem both idiotic and narrow-minded. In just the last week I've seen nearly a dozen people on facebook post articles, videos, or updates expressing their amazement that Texans can be anything but right-wing religious fanatics that hate everyone else.

I've read people's comments that they can't believe how hospitable and friendly Texans were when they visited, because how could their actions be in such direct opposition to their politics?

I've read how shocked people are that, when posed with a gay-bashing waitress (in a set-up for the Dateline show What Would You Do?), that Texans would actually stand up against the verbal abuse.

There seems to be some feeling out there that Texas is just one big Westboro Baptist Church (which I might add is NOT in Texas, is not affiliated with any Baptist association, and can hardly be called a church in either its mission, beliefs, or organization).

To say I'm flabbergasted is hardly the right word.

Let's just put aside the fact that Texas is the second largest state in the United States, and it would be highly unlikely that every single individual in that state conforms to some state-wide religious or political belief system.

Let's start with the fact that people out there believe that because someone is of a certain political party (in this case, Republican, but it certainly goes both ways), that that person is of some lesser moral character. That there are people out there who believe that if you have voted for a certain political candidate, you are unable to be a compassionate, kind, or intelligent human being. That there are people out there who believe that if another person disagrees with an issue, such as gay marriage, they will think that degradation and humiliation of those who believe in that issue is acceptable, and even participate in it.

We have ceased to be individuals to each other and have become nothing more than caricatures, and evil ones at that. We like to slap labels on each other and then define an entire person's worth, personality, humanity, religion, values with that label.

If you are for socialist medicine, you must be lazy and want the government to do everything for you because you don't want to work for it yourself.

If you are against socialist medicine, you must be elitist and think only the wealthy deserve good medical care and not care at all about the poor who can't afford good health care.

Oh how easy to slap that label.

It's gotten enough for me to stop checking facebook so often, because people I know - real friends who I know love and care for me as a person, who genuinely think I am compassionate and kind and intelligent - will go online bashing an entire political party I belong to, or the entire Christian church, or even an entire state in which I was born and in which I lived several adult years. And in their bashing, they will lump every single person who agrees with the politics or faith or even music choice of that group, into a single curse word.

People will take the worse example of a person associated with their anti-beliefs and try to say everyone on that side of the divide stands hand in hand with that example. If a pastor turns out to be an adulterer, all Christians are hypocrites. If a senator turns out to be morally corrupt, all members of that party are corrupt. If a political candidate spews untruths, all people in that party - whether or not they support that candidate - are idiots and liars.

I get so tired of it all. And honestly, sometimes I'm hurt by their words.

I could stop here. I could rant on. But as the bashing this week seemed centered on Texas, it made me think about Texas, and about living there, and about why I chose to place my debut novel there. And the truth of the matter is that I needed readers to bring those stereotypes to the story.

When I set up the plot of Some Kind of Normal, I knew I needed a family fighting not just science, but fighting a community that put faith above science, and the deep south was perfect for that. I chose Texas because I've lived there, and I'm familiar with the culture and the lingo and the food and the churches and the landscape. I could have probably placed the book in any number of states, but Texas was what I knew.

But what I also knew was that, despite what everyone's perception of Texas was, the individuals in Texas are just like people everywhere else: people who care about others, who are fierce about their ideals and values and opinions, but just as fierce about their family and loved ones, even if there are differences. I wanted the characters to be more than stereotypes. I wanted them to first seem to fit the reader's pre-conceived notion of southern baptists, but then break from that into a collection of individual characters who are flawed in many ways, and loveable in many ways, and somehow - despite the fact that the reader may be opposed to their religion, or politics, or birthplace - people that the reader might relate to.

What about you? What do you think of the judging of people based on a label tacked on by a political, religious, or geographical association? Should books embrace that stereotyping, or seek to dispel it?

What You Remember May Not Be True...

2011-05-27T06:00:00.001-04:00

After writing yesterday about sometimes confusing what is real with what I write, I found this absolutely fascinating article about research that's showed that sometimes our most vivid memories are not actually things that have been experienced, but things that we only think have happened because somewhere along the way, the image was put into our heads by someone else (advertising, in the case of the article, but I think it could work for reading and writing as well, or anything we immerse ourselves in).

It's crazy. And scary. But mostly wildly interesting.

The article is here.

Go read. I'll see you on Monday!

Have a great weekend - and a great holiday for my fellow American friends!

The Realness of Our Imaginary Worlds

2011-05-26T06:00:00.000-04:00

Last year I sat with a group of people who were talking about those they knew with cancer. One spoke up that a good friend of hers had a son just diagnosed with leukemia and they were getting medical treatment at Johns Hopkins University.

Without thinking, I nearly jumped into the conversation with: "I know a fantastic doctor there."

Then I realized, Oh yeah. I made him up. He only exists in my head, in my book.

The thing is, this wasn't the last time that's happened to me. There have been other conversations where I've told someone how great Johns Hopkins is, as if I personally had experience with the doctors and treatment there. I have nearly told people that there is a cure for diabetes with adult stem cells that is in stage two trials.

Perhaps it's normal, after spending so much time researching and writing, to feel that what we have created is in fact real instead of imaginary. I have walked parts of the Johns Hopkins campus, but I have never been in or around their medical facilities. I do not know anyone who has gone through diabetes treatment trials of any kind. I do not know a boy with a turquoise Mohawk.

And yet, I feel like I do.

There are moments when I channel the bitterness of my newest protagonist, as though I have taken on her abusive history and angry persona. I wake up thinking I might start the day with coffee from the coffee-shop one of my characters owns before I realize that it, too, is just part of my imagination.

But I can tell you the color of the wood of the round tables, the pattern of the overstuffed chairs, the smell of coffee and mocha and baking bread all blended into a perfect atmosphere. Those details aren't even in my book, but I know them.

The short story I most recently wrote is the closest I've ever gotten to real life. The characters are blends of people I actually know, the situation one similar to one I saw a friend go through. Though the story is fictional, I have blurred the lines enough that even I have to stop and think about what is true and what is not. The characters are as real to me as the people that live in the real world on whom they were based.

Am I alone in this... this momentary forgetfulness of what is true and what is made up? I like to think that if it feels that real to me, it will feel that real to readers. One can hope, right? :) Or should I just be waiting for the crazy train to pick me up?

2011-05-23T23:46:00.000-04:00

Every year on this weekend, the military hosts a joint service air show at Andrews Air Force Base, near where I live. We've gone the past few years to enjoy the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels and other show and stunt planes and jets, but this year, there was an even bigger draw. The Memphis Belle was there.

I was in college in the Navy ROTC when the movie Memphis Belle came out. In case you don't know the story, it's based on the true story about a young crew's - kids, really - last bombing mission in World War II on the B-17 bomber, Memphis Belle. They received fame by being the first crew to complete 25 missions intact - before the 25th mission was flown.

That movie came out the same year we went to Iraq for the Gulf War. It brought war to life for me.

One thing I'll never forget in it is the ball turret gunner - a guy who sits in a small plexigalss bubble that hangs below the plane and rotates for better aim of the guns.

Here is the real one:

In the movie, the airman who sits here is well aware that he is encapsulated in a space that might as well have a target on him. He is young and fearful, and rightfully so.

I don't remember if it's in the movie or not, but I know this movie in some way introduced me to the Randall Jarrell poem, Death of a Ball Turret Gunner:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

I don't always understand poetry, but I love the feel of it in my heart, and when it resonates by making some personal connection, even more so. Seeing the plane firsthand makes it all the more real.

The ball turret is very much like a womb in the belly of the bomber; the only way in to drop into it through a hole. No way to move, no way to communicate on the long flight to the mission. How easy it must be to fall asleep there, lulled by the hum of the engines and the vibration of the movement.

And then to awaken, in the middle of the war, the opposing guns aimed at you.

Sometimes we write to help others understand. And sometimes, it's the real things that make the writing come to life.

In Which I Get to the Book About the Drag Queen with Goldfish Boobs

2011-05-20T10:22:00.000-04:00

I don't think of myself as a non-fiction junkie. Really. I write fiction. I think I read fiction. I think this is mostly all I read until I look at my reading list from last semester to sum it up for my advisor, and realize that nearly HALF my reading list was memoir. HALF!!!

Let's just admit it: I have a memoir problem.

And now that my reading for the semester is done and I have three weeks stretching in front of me to read whatever I want, you know what is on my nightstand? Three memoirs. Sigh.

The thing is, it isn't even about reading the truth, because I don't believe most of what's in these books anyway. When people - anyone and not just authors - look back at their lives, they see it through a filter. A lens of emotions and perspective and information that came later. They make up dialogue - some of which may have happened in some form but not exactly that way, and some of which is what they wanted to say or have said to them. Authors have to create plots and story arcs and timelines that work for readers, making interesting things of what might be dull, leaving out the seemingly meaningless.

But people - especially nearly real people - are interesting.

Take my newest book... one that, if you've read this blog for a few months you might recognize:

I Am Not Myself These Days... the story of the seven-foot-tall New York Drag Queen who sashays around the city with goldfish in his clear bubble bra.

I honestly laughed about this book for days after blindly buying it without having any idea what it was about. If you knew me in person, you'd know this is completely NOT what I'd pick up, even if it was memoir.

But now that I'm nearly done with it, I can say it is not funny, and I am not laughing. Which is not to say it isn't a good read, or that I can easily put it down at midnight when my eyelids are drooping, because I can't. Despite the amount of R-rated language, which tends to turn me off, the story itself is riveting. But depressing and sad, because under the makeup and fun costumes and active nightlife, this writer is an alcoholic and possibly a drug addict, in a brutal and unhappy relationship, with a job he can barely get sober long enough to do.

But, and this is a pretty big but, I don't believe half of it is real. I just don't. The author writes about a period of time in his life where he pretty much is drunk nearly all the time. He's drinking 3-4 glasses of vodka (which sounds like "glasses" rather than "shots") an hour for nine hours at a time. He blacks out often, sometimes on park benches, sometimes in subway trains, sometimes in stranger's houses whom he can't remember. And yet, he can remember details of the nightlife when he's 18-glasses of vodka to the wind, conversations, impressions, emotions. He can describe vividly the crowd and the music even as he describes himself as unable to stand upright without a wall and slurring his words so badly he can't be understood.

There are also lines of coke and the occasional crack and meth. He's beat senselessly at least once, being kicked in the face and head so brutally he passes out. He survives weeks on end with less than an hour of sleep a night. And yet he recalls it all with a sober clarity that defies explanation.

In fact, the fact that this guy can survive at all is a mystery.

There are other things in the book I question as well - aspects of a seedy underground where people pay thousands of dollars to be tied up naked and belittled and beaten to escape their CEO-lifestyle, for one. Not that I don't think some of this exists, and I do realize I lead a very clean, sheltered life, but the levels at which some of this occur - and the rate at which they reoccur - feel exaggerated for effect. And trust me, when you're a seven-foot-tall drag queen with goldfish in your boobs, there's not a lot of need to exaggerate other things.

The thing about this book is that it would have been fascinating as a novel. As a memoir, I don't buy it all, and I can't even identify with the parts I might believe. So the genre label here doesn't really help for me.

The funny thing is this: last night, while winding up the book and reading the "Author's Path to Publication" in the back, his mentor and first reader was James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces that I wrote about yesterday. Irony? Maybe. And maybe he should be glad Oprah never came calling at his door.

(I can't say I'd unequivocally recommend this book. Clearly the subject matter - and often the accompanying language - is not for everyone. I would have said it was not for me. But it is well-written and easy to get lost in and despite my wariness about it, I do have to say it was an interesting read.)

A Million Little Pieces: Frey's Interview with Oprah

2011-05-18T10:35:00.001-04:00

On Monday, Oprah interviewed James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, and previous guest whom she'd once put on a pedestal (and her book club) and then later shamed and belittled.

Although I don't normally watch Oprah, I recorded this one and sat mesmerized through it, at first just wondering why James Frey would show up here, a third time, after such a humiliating second round, and then coming to a point of not only feeling empathy for him but feeling as if his situation could very well have happened to many of us writers.

For those who might not know, A Million Little Pieces was published under the genre of memoir, a supposed true recounting of a drug addict's road to recovery. After selling millions of copies, The Smoking Gun uncovered evidence that much of the book was fabricated, and eventually James Frey admitted he'd made most of it up.

What many people didn't know was that Frey never intended to write this as an autobiography. When he signed with an agent, they marketed the book to publishers as a novel, but no one would bite. Saying the events were true, however, proved to be the catnip needed to lure bids in.

What the publisher said to the agent and what the agent said to Frey may never be clearly known, but what is clear - and should be to most of us writers - is that Frey wanted his book published and trusted the people around him - professionals in the business. Though he takes responsibility now for marketing the book as truth, I can't help wonder if more blame lies on the shoulders of the the people with authority who convinced him the book was autobiographical enough to sell as memoir, who capitalized on his dream to be published.

In his interview, this is what he said:

From 22 to 31 I was trying to teach myself how to write a book. I didn’t go to graduate school, I didn’t ever have a writing teacher. I just sat in a room alone for years trying to write a book, trying to figure out how to write a book. Trying to figure out if I could do it. What book did I want to write? How did I want to write it? It was a lot of years of work. And then I wrote a book. I wrote a book and I had a chance to publish it. It wasn’t necessarily how I imagined it, but I wanted it published, I wanted it out in the world. And I said yes.

The books reviews and ratings plummeted after the revelation, which I find interesting because it shows how a label means more than the story. If the book is a good story, should it not be a good story no matter whether it is true or not? Is it entertaining if true, but not if the facts are altered? Is a story only inspirational if the events and people are faithful to history?

I get it that people felt duped. They bought into the idea that this man endured root canal without anesthesia, that he fell in love with another addict that died, that he himself managed to get clean on his own. Readers want drama and triumph, and Frey gave it to them. For some, that wasn't enough.

But, as Frey points out in his interview (humbly, I must add), memoir is a murky genre to begin with. Writers manipulate events all the time to create a more cohesive book that flows better. So much so that since Frey's book was first published, an entirely new genre has popped up: the creative non-fiction.

Would that label have saved Frey's reputation? Who knows. The fact is that the book more closely resembles a novel than non-fiction, and though Frey knew that, the deeper he got into marketing the book, the less he felt he could make that public. But, unlike Greg Mortenson's book Three Cups of Tea, Frey was not raising money for a non-profit organization with his book. Frey was merely selling books - the same thing fiction authors do every day.

What I found fascinating in the interview was Frey's explanation of the writing - of why he wrote the book the way he did.

When I sat down to write the book, I didn’t think of it as a memoir. I didn’t think of it as a novel even... I wrote the book without any respect for what is fact or what is fiction, what category it should be placed in…I was trying to create a work of art…I’m more influenced by artists than writers. When you look at a Picasso self portrait, let’s say, you look at a cubist self portrait that Picasso has made, it doesn’t look anything like Picasso, or if it does, in ways that might only make sense to him. So when I was writing the book, I was thinking about it like that.

I don't want to come across as justifying the actions of Frey or his agent and publisher. I'm just saying, I'm a lot closer to understanding how easily something like this can happen.

What I Learned from Disney About Writing

2011-05-16T12:53:00.000-04:00

So last week I truly took off. No computer. No internet. No emails, texts, facebooks, or tweets. For seven days I went cold turkey.

Of course, it didn't hurt that I spent the week here:

Yeah. My family and I took off for warmer climates to thaw out from the winter and get to know each other again. And ride a few rides. And eat... a lot.

It was an amazing time to just spend with the kids without books and computers and deadlines and homework - theirs and mine. We talked a ton, laughed even more, and though I thought being off-line would possibly kill me, I loved it.

But there's no getting away from writing when you're a writer, even if it's only in your head. Looking around at Disney World is a education in vision and persistence, and what Walt Disney did with his small kingdom could be a lesson for us writers too.

So here's what I learned:

Cleanliness is important, whether it's total lack of trash in the streets or spelling errors in a manuscript. People will judge you on it.
Pick at least one thing (a setting, a character, a subplot - or a castle or tree in the middle of the park) and make it extraordinary.
Market yourself wherever you have the opportunity. There was a joke on the jungle cruise, as we headed into a dark tunnel: "You never know where this will lead. Of course, it's Disney so it'll probably end in a gift store."
Details make a difference, even in the places you think few people will notice.
Don't be afraid to keep revising something if it has a kink in it.
Be passionate about what you are doing.

I'm sure I'll think of more later, but my brain is sunburned. :) I missed you all last week. I'll try to catch up in the next days.

It is FInished

2011-05-05T22:32:00.000-04:00

I did it.... I finally finished my first semester of my MFA program.

21 books read, 12 craft analysis papers, 1 short story written and revised 5 times, 110 pages of my novel extensively revised, including over 5,000 words cuts and nearly half that amount added back in in new scenes.

It's been exhausting, crazy, amazing, unbelievable, and fun. I've grown in ways I never imagined and absolutely LOVED my faculty advisor (who is Craig Lesley, and if you are interested in some great and unique literary fiction, check out his books here).

I have a month off and then it's back to residency in Oregon, which I can't wait for! For the next week, though, I'm taking some time off. I've got some cleaning to catch up on of course, but mostly I have family to get to know again. I'm getting off the computer - off blogs, facebook, twitter, and email - voluntarily - and spending some good time with my family and my camera.

When I come back, hopefully I'll have stories to tell, and pictures to share. :)

See ya in a week!

The Road to Rejection is Paved With Good Intentions

2011-05-02T11:31:00.000-04:00

I've been working on a novel for over a year now. In fact, the first draft was finished nearly a year ago. In the meantime, I've been revising. And revising. And revising.

It's been eye-opening... but sometimes painful.

Over the course of revisions I have several people read sections of it, many of whom read the first chapter. Several of these are my very talented writing group. One of those people is a published author. One of those is a critically acclaimed author and writing teacher who is my phenomenal advisor this semester at Pacific University. Everyone has seemed to indicate I've got that first chapter down.

Then, this weekend, I was browsing a website of a major publisher. Perhaps I should mention I was browsing this website because I had just read a book published by them and was certain they could not have been a reputable publisher because this book was SO poorly written. Agonizingly poorly. And yet - turns out the publisher is a real, valid, traditional publisher with a pretty big name in the industry.

Anyhoo - on that website there were submission guidelines and helpful hints for writers, one of the top of which was this:

DO start your story with action or dialogue; DO NOT start with your character driving in a car back into town musing over why they left and why they're coming back.

Seriously.

Do you know how my book starts? A girl driving back into her hometown.

*Facepalm*

So now, even though I've had so many people tell me this first chapter is a great opening and develops the character well and sets up the tension nearly immediately, I feel my stomach bunching up.

If I send the opening pages for submission, will it automatically get rejected because it starts this way? Not that I would ever send it to that publisher above, but just the fact that they mention this as their top pet-peeve and thing NOT to do in a submission, am I setting myself up for failure?

I'm just not sure I have the heart to go back now and rewrite that first chapter yet again. At least not right now. I'm going to keep plowing ahead and finish this eighth or ninth set of revisions, and then maybe I'll have the courage to re-evaluate. But I don't feel better knowing I did the one thing they say not to do.

If I am STILL doing all the wrong things, am I hopeless??

A Child's view of Royalty

2011-04-29T09:26:00.000-04:00

In case you hadn't heard, there was a wedding today. A royal one. Which brought to mind a discussion between two of my kids this week I thought I'd share, just for the fun of it.

My youngest was sorting through our Disney princess movies, which shockingly she's not seen in her memorable lifetime due to the fact that she has an older brother that can always talk her into watching something else. But as we're soon heading to DisneyWorld, I wanted her to have that exposure - every little girl should at least know about Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.

So we are going through the movies, and my youngest comments, "All the princes look the same. The princesses look different, but it looks like they just used the same prince in every movie."

To which my son, in all his wisdom, tells her, "That's because its never about the prince."

How early boys learn! :)

I have my own celebration this weekend: the 17th anniversary of my own wedding, one which was much less grand, but just as joyous.

Have a very happy weekend!

Books Make A Difference

2011-04-27T11:32:00.000-04:00

Three weeks ago I read Mortenson's bestselling non-fiction book (co-authored – although most likely fully-authored – by David Oliver Relin) Three Cups of Tea. I'd put the book on my semester reading list because I'd bought the book some time ago with the idea that it was a book I should read, but had never gotten around to actually cracking open.

Two weeks ago I sent to my advisor my final reading commentary, a paper I'd written about this book, and specifically about the real-life character of Mortenson. While so many criticisms of the book online focused on how Mortenson came off in the book as some idealized hero with superhuman abilities, a person who was too good to be true, I wrote my paper on Mortenson's flaws, which, if you read the book closely enough, are glaring. The fact is that these flaws – his lack of ability to manage finances, his somewhat haphazard planning skills, his scant understanding of the way the Middle East culture works, his tendency towards depression and withdrawal – all serve to make his accomplishments even greater. Who among the best of us could take off for a land where we don't know the language and customs and determine to build schools for children there? A deeply flawed hero is the kind we truly root for, because we want to believe we ourselves have the capacity for heroism, despite our shortcomings.

(If you are interested in more of what I wrote about flawed characters, you can read about it here on the 4Corners blog.)

But even as I wrote the paper, I wondered how Mortenson could continue to be successful. Although some of the stories in the book raised my eyebrows in a James-Frey-has-struck-again way, my biggest question was how Mortenson has managed to keep this operation going, and how he will continue to do so. It's clear in the book that he doesn't keep good track of the money he spends, a huge problem if he wants to keep his company non-profit. He seems to build often with only sketchy plans, adapting as he goes, even if that means gathering all the supplies to build and then realizing there is no road to get those supplies to the intended town.

The fact is, the warning signs are in his own book.

So it didn't surprise me that a week ago – only two weeks after my own reading – Jon Krakauer countered Mortenson's book with one of his own. In it, he lays out the very clear and convincing evidence that some of Mortenson's book is flat out lies, and much of the rest of it is half-truths. The most damning part of his expose, though, is in the chapters where he questions how Mortenson's charity is run, and where the money is going.

If you are interested in reading Krakauer's book, I highly recommend it. It's short - only about 77 pages - and I read the entirety of it during my daughter's swim team practice. It's well-written, well-organized, and easy to follow. You can download a copy here.

Some people have come out against Krakauer for writing this, calling it everything from sour grapes to worse. But the fact is, Krakauer had a moral and ethical obligation to bring to light what he'd discovered. Why? Because the book was not just a book; it's a money making machine.

The world cried foul when James Frey admitted making up parts of his memoir, and that was really no skin off anyone's nose other than a hurt ego for believing him. Mortenson's book, on the other hand, has spawned a money-eliciting empire. He is pulling in millions of dollars for his charity, money that donators are told will be going to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, when in reality, much of it is not. My children have contributed from their own piggy banks in his "Pennies for Peace" campaign in the schools, and that money is abused and misused. There is little accountability for the dollars that come in to the Central Asia Institute.

There is both good and bad news here. The good is that books really do make a difference. They can make someone see the world in a new light. Feel hope. Feel called to action. Believe they can play a part in changing the world for the better.

But there is an accountability that comes with that, too. One that can't be taken too lightly.

Life... Crazy Life

2011-04-22T16:00:00.000-04:00

Monday afternoon my internet went out. I know there are many worse fates, but I have to admit I panicked a little. By Tuesday, I was panicking a lot. It was three days before it came back on. One might ask, what in the world does a person like me do without internet????

This:

washed, dried, and folded five loads of laundry
revised 25 more pages of my novel
hard-boiled and dyed three dozen eggs
went to an actual bowling alley and bowled with the kids
drove kids into D.C. for a few hours in the Air and Space Museum
read a book (Three Cups of Deceit by Jon Kraukauer)
worked my way through about 50 more pages of my writing text book
made about 25 shrinky-dinks with my youngest
watched about six Disney movies with the kids
watched the entire Kennedy Miniseries
went shopping and bought my daughters Easter dresses and the rest of their summer wardrobe
walked the puppy about 2 miles every day
baked a cheesecake
baked chocolate chip cookies
put together a 1,000 piece puzzle with my son
beat my son's Wii record in wakeboarding
deadheaded my hydrangeas

What I did not do:

read emails
read blogs
upload pictures
update any facebook or twitter statuses
reply to any emails comment on any blogs
read any news articles

Weighing one against the other, maybe I should get Verizon to cut off my internet more often. I'm certainly not going to voluntarily go cold-turkey! I'm not that disciplined. :)

Still - if I'm behind on blogs and emails, I apologize. I'm trying to catch up now, but it may take awhile.

As for the rest of the weekend - it is Easter weekend, so the family and I will be off celebrating. He is Risen!!

Have a great weekend and I'll catch you next week.

This Isn't Moral High Ground

2011-04-18T21:11:00.000-04:00

My kids are huge fans of fruit. Just about any kind, any time. But given all the choices of the farmer's market, my son would always pick watermelon first. My youngest would pick strawberries. My oldest girl would choose kiwi. I go for the peaches - those great, fresh, sweet ones that only show up for about a month during the year.

None of those choices are wrong; they're just different.

I've been thinking about the whole publishing industry a lot lately. It seems I can't click on a blog without reading someone's particular take on whether or not ebooks are destroying publishing as we know it, whether or not traditional is better than self-publishing, or whether or not entrepeneurial authors who sell their ebooks at 99 cents a copy and become millionaires are of lesser value, as if there is a moral or ethical shortcut that's been taken. Seriously, are we shaming them for not having an agent?

I get really angry when I read authors slamming other authors for being successful, but not doing it the "right" way, as if there is only one valid way to publish. Heck, if someone can write a book, put it on Amazon themselves and market it and make a million bucks, that's not a short cut - that's a lot of hard work. Ebooks - especially those written by unknown authors - don't just sell themselves.

My own book was published by a traditional publisher, but without an agent. Was that a risk? Absolutely. Is that the right route for everyone? Absolutely not. But it was right for me. I know, because it was my book, my queries, my interactions with agents, my interaction with the publisher, my prayers, my list of pros and cons and long discussions with people I love and trust. It might not be the best route for you. It might not even be the best route for my next book. But it was right for this one.

I wanted to write a long rant, because I am completely in the camp that says there is no one way to get your book published. There might be a right way for you, but that doesn't mean it's the only right way for everyone else. Like fruit at a farmer's market, it's a good thing that there are choices.

I understand that agents and editors want to land on the side that traditional publishing might not be the only way but is the BEST way to get published. And so I was pleasantly surprised to read this blog post by agent Jenny Bent. I had the privilege of hearing Jenny speak at the AWP conference here in D.C. this winter, but it is this post that won me, especially the last paragraph. If you have time to read it, you should. But if you don't, this is what I loved so much:

Here's the whole point of it: to say, hooray for you writers out there who believe in yourselves enough to get your work out there by whatever means necessary. Hooray for your successes, hooray for your bravery, and hooray for the fact that every book you sell means you may be touching that reader's life in a powerful way. For isn't that why we're all in it?

Why write a rant of my own, when I couldn't have said it more beautifully than this?

What Really TICKS Me Off...

2011-04-15T11:00:00.002-04:00

I finished my fourth packet for school this week and sent it off, and decided that the fact that I am now ahead in both writing and reading for the semester, as well as the gorgeous 70+ degree spring weather, deserved some celebrating. And what better way to celebrate than to grab a great friend and go on a photo shoot to a brand new and much talked about wildlife park?

Oh yeah! Photo therapy!!

You'd think.

See, when I take chances and go places I've never been, my odds of things turning out well are pretty much 50/50. And, as my friend pointed out once we got there... you can't believe everything on the internet.

So this park - called Merrimac Farms - is not that far from my house, and this week is hosting a Virginia Bluebell Festival. I didn't even know Virginia had bluebells, and the pictures were so reminiscent of Texas Bluebonnets, which I get homesick for every spring, I decided I HAD to go get pictures. The website says the park looks like this every April:

The quality of the photo leaves something to be desired, but you get the idea, right? Fields of gorgeous flowers amid a nationally protected forest. They also have posters that show tons of pretty and unique birds, and they advertise a big pond where you can fish all kinds of fish.

So we trek off and this is what we find.

The trees are so old and bare and scraggly, despite the fact that just outside the park, all the VA trees are blooming and full of spring-green leaves. And do you see any flowers? Any at all?? Nope. Me either.

We drove to where the "parking lot" was, which was basically the end of the road, where there was enough room for one vehicle to park. I was thankful (although I should have been suspicious) that we were the only ones needing a parking spot.

At the "parking lot" there was this sign:

Apparently the path to the pond is very steep. And people have to walk sideways.

That is... if there were a path. Which there wasn't. There was just ugly scraggly trees. We'd landed in the middle of nowhere.

Debating and trekking for a few feet through the bare woods, we decided to try the other parking lot.

Which had exactly the same space and no discernible path, but did have a very small orange sign showing us the way to the pond. So off we hiked.

We did find a very old, old barn, which was cool to take pics of:

See the path that leads right up to it? Yeah, me neither.

Eventually a path opened up, and we followed it alongside a person's private horse farm.

Isn't that pretty? Yeah - well, I had to climb through scraggly tree branches and barbed wire to get this shot - to even see it actually. Heaven forbid we should see something pretty ON the wildlife trail.

Then the path diverged in a wood and I... was confused.

Because - you probably can't see this - in the tree in the very center of these two paths is the orange "sign" showing the way to the pond. Seriously??

So, being all poetic, we chose the path less traveled. Which, as it turns out is less traveled for a reason. It ends right past the view of this picture in a field that looks like elephants have come through and trampled it (that's what my friend said, anyway, and it was an apt description).

So we backtracked and went down the path more traveled, and finally found the pond.

I do have to say this is one of the best pictures I took all day, and makes this pond look much bigger and prettier than it was. It's a swamp. Shallow, mostly muddy water swarming with algae and mosquitoes.

And also, no flowers.

We finally gave up and turned to go back. What a bust the picture taking had been. But the day was beautiful, the friendship great, so it was worth it, right?

We drive back down the road home and suddenly I stop! LOOK!! It's a bluebell!!

I drew a black arrow to show you in case you can't see it. There, in the mud. A single flower. It's much prettier close up:

Well, sort of. It's no bluebonnet, and it lacks something all on it's own, but it was the only color we got, so we took it.

You'd think this is the end of the story, right? Except I have gotten to the title of this post.

On the way home, I looked over and saw a TICK on my shoulder!! I freaked a little, tossed him out the window, and ran my fingers through my hair, thinking, "I should have worn a baseball cap." Two seconds later, there was a tick crawling on my finger.

I screamed. And tossed him out the window.

I felt a tickle at the base of my ponytail and reached up and pulled another off.

Can you say meltdown in the car?

I was barely home and out of the car before I was stripping off my books and socks and running upstairs to shower. Under my long sleeved shirt I found three more. On my legs I found two more. There was one crawling on the inside of my jeans.

Totally. Freaking. Out.

I feel like I'm in an episode of Infested. I pull my hair out of the ponytail and start scratching at my scalp, yanking my hands through my hair, head tossed over the sink waiting for them to rain down.

I turn on the shower as hot as it will go and hop in, and scrub my hair so hard I think my scalp is going to peel off. I shampooed three times. I find two more ticks, which result in hilarious jumping, screaming, water spewing all over the bathroom antics. I shampoo again, and have to condition twice to get all the tangles I've caused out of my hair.

In all, there were 11 ticks. ELEVEN!!

I've lived in a house in the middle of the woods for eight years and haven't gotten a single tick.

So the verdict? Ugly trees, no paths, no flowers, no color, and a welcome gift of tick infestation.

Yeah - I won't be going back there again!

MFA Monday: When the Scene Is Too Long

2011-04-11T10:30:00.000-04:00

One of the great things about being back in a writing program is the one-on-one I get with my advisor - a fabulous writer and teacher. Every three weeks I send him work and he writes all over it and sends it back with a letter about everything he thinks I did really well, and what I still should tweak in the chapters to make them more powerful.

Although I have a tremendous critique group, fresh eyes from a professional in the business of both writing and teaching writing has had a huge impact on my writing.

In the last packet I sent, he pointed out I have a tendency towards long scenes. It's absolutely true that I do: my scenes tend to run 10-12 pages, sometimes even longer. I've looked at how other authors combat scenes in which much must happen, and I've found this: if you write in third person and can follow several story lines, you can flip between them back and forth, even cutting scenes off in the middle to shift focus for a page or two, and then return to the other scene - much like TV does.

The problem for me has been that, in my first book, I wrote in first person present tense so that the story followed just one person's point of view. The story unfolded as she experienced it. There was no option to switch scenes in the middle of another.

The novel I'm revising now is in third person POV, but it still follows just one person closely, and so the problem is the same as before.

When my advisor read through my latest submission - a lengthy but critical scene in which an entire past and relationship unfold - he advised me to find a way to chop it up.

This is how:

1. You can cut. Brutally. Anything that isn't absolutely necessary for the scene, any stray words or superfluous actions - cut. Anything you can put somewhere else in the story, cut.

This didn't work well for me, because everything in this scene was critical. It is really the foundation for the conflict and resolution in the rest of the book. I was able to cut some, but not enough.

2. You can sum up parts of the dialog in narrative.

I did a lot of this, although it took a while to figure out how to do that, because the point of the dialog was to reveal things from one character to another. I had to look at each line and ask myself: "Is this said because the other character needed to hear it, or because the reader did?" If it was mainly for the reader, I either summed it up in narrative, or cut it to put elsewhere in the book.

3. You can break the scene by moving the characters somewhere else, or interrupting it.

This is what I ended up doing that helped the most. In this scene, the mother and daughter are in a conversation in which secrets about their past come out. It's important for this scene to all take place now, because in a few hours, the mother is dead and that opportunity is gone.

So in the middle of the conversation, I had the daughter receive a phone call that takes her out of the scene. That phone call created a whole new conflict that I was trying to figure out how to work in anyway, and then the fact that the daughter left allowed more tension between her and her mother. Instead of rejoining the mom, the daughter walks away. She ends up in another place altogether where the narrative is able to divert the scene for a few paragraphs. The mother has to then find her, and the discussion can then continue.

Interestingly, the scene is still 12 pages, but it's broken into smaller segments - places at which I can make section or chapter breaks to keep the reader engaged.

I think my inability to write short scenes is something I need to work on. I like reading books in which the scenes are short - it keeps me reading, turning pages. I always have too much to say, though, which is pretty indicative of me as a person, too. I don't have short conversations, I'm unable to figure out anything worthwhile to tweet in 140 characters or less. I can't write short blog posts, although I desperately want to. Even my comments on other people's blog posts run long. I wonder how anyone manages to write such short, pithy comments when mine practically run novel-length.

Anyhow, so this is what I'm working on now. Are long scenes ever a problem for you, or am I the only one?

A Book and a Memory, and Another Word About Authenticity

2011-04-07T10:28:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking lately (and blogging) about authenticity in writing fiction and just how much of ourselves should go into a book of fiction. The answer is, I think, as much or as little as you want.

I just read a book review about Francisco Goldman's novel, Say Her Name. The book is essentially a memoir - the story of his wife Aura, her childhood and their marriage and her way-too-early death – and yet it is categorized as fiction. This is what the critic said:

Why call it fiction then? At several point Goldman writes about competing narratives, the ways memories conflict and different stories can grow out of the same fact. Maybe Goldman, a former journalist, just could bear the pressure of "the truth," of worrying about anyone's take on Aura but his own.

It's an interesting gesture, to take something that is nearly all truth and instead of calling it memoir, or creative non-fiction, to label it fiction, as if saying The truth is relative.

This week we celebrated my youngest's birthday, and I took the time to hold her on my lap and tell her one of my favorite stories of my life with her. So much my favorite, that it made its way into my debut novel.

When Some Kind of Normal first came out, I had family and friends rushing through it, seeing if they could find me somewhere in it. They guessed a lot. "Is this scene real?" "Is this the way you think?" "Are you really Babs?"

If you know anything about me, you know I am nothing like Babs. She came as a gift, a person walking through my head fully formed and opinionated and somewhat offensive to me at first.

And yet, there is some of me in there. It's inevitable, because no matter how out there our subject may be - sci-fi, dystopian, historic romance even - we write what we know. How can we not? We write about music that we know, or the kind of potato chips that we see in the store, or the emotions we have felt. We can't write about what we don't know - food we've never even heard of or culture we have never read or experienced.

And as a mom, it was inevitable pieces of my experiences as a mom would make it in the book. Tiny, incremental pieces, but pieces nonetheless.

So here is my admission: this paragraph from Some Kind of Normal is true. The names have been changed, but otherwise... it's me. It's my daughter. It's one of my most precious memories.

Ashley was born screaming. I think she came out with her mouth open, her eyes scrunched into tearless cries which no amount of bundling could soften until the nurses put her on my chest and I said, “Hi there, baby girl.” And just like that, she stopped crying. She looked up at me with wide blue eyes, not even blinking, like she knew my voice from all those months inside me. The moment they took her away she cried again, until they brought her back.

So happy birthday to my little girl. You give me plenty of material! :)

Now that the birthday celebrations are over, it's time to get myself back to work!

April Fools: The Proposal Story

2011-04-01T07:00:00.002-04:00

(I've posted this exact post twice before. If you've read it, accept my apologies and indulge me once more. It's just, well, it's April Fools and I can't go without sharing one of my favorite memories again.)

Today is April Fool's Day. I love this day. Not because of the fool part of it (I am way too gullible to enjoy that part of the day). I love it because eighteen years ago today, my then boyfriend proposed.

Yes. I got engaged on April Fool's Day.

My husband likes to say that he asked on April's Fools so that if I said no, he could say, "I was just kidding anyway."

So every April first I get to revisit one of my favorite stories: the engagement story.

He'd been asking me to marry him almost as long as I'd known him. It was a joke between us, every time he asked, that I would say, "How am I going to know when you are serious?" He'd always answer, "You'll know because I'll come riding up on a white horse." He was in the army when we met, just back from the gulf war, and the visual image stuck.

So eighteen years ago today, we both arranged to take the day off work and spend the afternoon together. He'd been working in New York as a broker for a few months after leaving the military and had been back in Austin for a few weeks, feet to the grindstone, so to speak, and we'd barely seen each other since before Christmas.

He didn't tell me where we were going, but packed a picnic for us and picked me up midmorning. We drove out into the hill country to a horse ranch where he had arranged a day of riding for us.

The hilarious thing is he'd spent a month combing the Texas countryside for white horses, and couldn't find any. Not one. Seriously. There are no white horses in central Texas. (My friend Heidi says it's because Texas is quarter horse country, and quarter horses aren't usually white.)

Anyhoo - finally he finds this place and goes to visit ahead of time to pick out the horses, the picnic spot, and ask the owners to spray for ants (how thoughtful can a guy get???). So he sees this white horse way out in the field. He's not being ridden by anyone, or in the stables with the rest of the horses, but the owner's assure him that "Wild Thing" is good for at least a few more rides.

Let me set the scene here. I am five-three. At the time, I weighed about as much as a few feathers. My husband is six foot four. And he has really broad shoulders.

When we arrive, they bring out my horse: a huge brown stallion that I literally use a step-ladder to get on. My feet are a good three feet off the ground.

Then they bring out Wild Thing.

Wild Thing is two days away from a glue factory. He is no bigger than a mule. He is sway backed, severely. My husband can throw his leg over his back without his other foot even leaving the ground. He looks like a thirteen year old on a toddler's bike. His knees are in his chin. When we go up the rocky trail, he almost has to get off and carry Wild Thing up the hills.

I turned around and pointed at Wild Thing, totally clueless about this set up, and say, "Hey, look! A white horse!" I think my husband laughed, although it might have been a choking sound. I wonder the entire ride why I get the huge horse and my boyfriend is on the one that clearly should be retired.

The rest is simply romantic. A picnic by a babbling brook, bluebonnets in the fields, not an ant in sight; a gorgeous ring in a Cracker Jack box; a poem he read on one knee. The usual.

But now, everytime we pass a white horse, I make sure to point it out. Especially the big, strong ones. Look at all these white horses! And you're telling me you hunted and hunted and the best you could come up with was Wild Thing? And he always rolls his eyes and says, "Yeah. Wild Thing looked like that from a distance too."

Maybe. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure I knew he'd keep his promises, even if he had to ride a 100 year old horse to do it.

And who could say no to that?

Sarah's Key: A Book and a Memory

2011-03-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

When I was very young, my family lived in Germany and visited the Dachau concentration camp. I don't remember that trip, but I know that all during my growing up years, it was etched in my brain that I had been there, like some scar on my heart that I couldn't see but was quite aware of.

In September of 2001, I had the opportunity to travel to Austria with my husband. I was in the midst of reading a series of World War II historical novels by Bodie Thoene, and, having learned so much about that time period in high school and college, thought this might be my one chance to see a piece of it. The Berlin Wall had fallen long ago by this time, and most vestiges of the war are gone. But a few of the concentration camps still exist, like a grim warning, and so I asked at the concierge desk about how I might get to Mauthausen, the camp where Anne Frank's friend Peter died.

I got a blank look.

I knew his English was good, but perhaps in Austrian they don't call them "concentration camps." I tried other words. Extermination camps. Labor Camps. Work camps. Places where they held Jewish prisoners of war.

Still a blank look.

I tried to explain it. He shook his head. I asked a few others that worked in the hotel, and got the same response. A non-response.

I finally found one person who acknowledged that he knew what I was talking about, but told me the Austrian's didn't like to talk about that anymore, and it was better to put it behind them. That was part of occupied Austria, and not who they really are.

I tried to show my profuse agreement. Indeed! I did not think they were proud of these actions and places! I knew it was a horrible scourge on their nation!

"So why do you want to see this place?" he asked.

"Because it's important to remember," I said. "If we keep the memory close to our hearts, perhaps it will never happen again."

He shrugged and slipped back into German. "I don't know where the place is. Very far north. You can't get there from here." And that is all I could find out.

Last summer, my family traveled to Germany. My niece, having just finished studying about World War II and having heard about our trip to Dachau from my sister, who was older and still have vivid memories of it, asked if we could visit there again.

Our tour guide tried to dissuade us. "It is a terrible place," he said. "It is a terrbible way for you to end your visit to Germany. We don't want that to be the last image you take home with you of our great country."

But in the end, he agreed, and he could not have been a more impacting tour guide for us. He was so solemn, so sad; he cried several times as we walked though the gates in the above picture and on through the camp. He told us beautiful stories about the people in the town, the people who survived, the overwhelming feeling of the Germans that they could not stop the avalanche of evil around them.

When I put Sarah's Key on my reading list for this semester, I knew little about it. I knew it took place in 1942 - but in occupied France, which I knew little about. It also balanced that with a narrator in the present day, which was not particularly interesting to me. So I went into the book with few expectations and no real enthusiasm.

This story, however, touched me profoundly, and brought back these memories. The book, if you haven't read it, is the story of a girl in German-occupied Paris during the war, who is rounded up in a French police raid that captured thousands of Jews and eventually sent them all to Auschwitz to die. When the police come, she locks her little brother in a hidden cabinet in their house, promising to come back for him that day, not knowing that she is being taken away to her death. This is all interspersed with a story in the present about a woman journalist who researches this round-up for the 60th anniversary of the event. Of course, their stories come together at some point.

What struck me so authentically in this story was how hard it was for the journalist to get information on the raid. No one wanted to talk. Places that were part of the horror of that event were leveled and built over with apartments. Books about the event were out of print and impossible to find. People who were witnesses did not want to talk about it.

I know this to be true. As though in erasing the memory, you can erase the reality.

We Americans are so different than that. We remember everything. We do it loudly. We talk and write and practice a sort of cathartic vomiting of emotion. We keep the feelings raw and close to the surface until the wounds scab over and eventually heal. While we are constantly paving over and tearing down everything that is past its prime, we keep sacred those places where terrible things have happened. "Beware," they say in their little memorial signs. "You are not so different today that this could not happen again if you aren't careful to keep it from happening."

Anyway - that's what the book has made me think about. It's a great book. If you haven't read it, you should. I wasn't excited about it before I opened the pages, but I read the entire thing in two days and didn't want to put it down. It might make you think. It might make you remember. But in the end, it really is about how healing takes time. A lesson we all can learn.

MFA Monday: Authenticity

2011-03-28T09:25:00.000-04:00

“All writing is part memory and part imaginary. To know only one of these is to know the world only by half.” ~ Jack Driscoll, poet and fiction writer

What role do our own experiences and memories play in the writing of a piece of fiction? According to Driscoll, a great amount. Our memories define for us what is important and what is not; they are the map and blueprint for who we are. And yet, they are more than the event and date on a calendar. They are fluid and changing, colored by the passing of time.

As a writer, it’s often easy to begin at an autobiographical place in which whole scenes of fiction might be written so as to be true to a memory. But Driscoll showed that a story may start in that place, or may start from a place of only imagination, but eventually, in the process, should become part both. We as writers are to bring ourselves and our memories to the story with us, venturing from the truth in order to make it more honest.

Over at our group blog, Heidi Bailey wrote an interesting post today on how similar characters in our books can be to us. What do you think? Is it bad to have too much of yourself in your fiction, or does that make it more authentic?

I Finally Took The Dive

2011-03-23T10:17:00.000-04:00

It has officially been a year since I started PRODIGAL. The book I now refer to as "the novel that will not end."

Not that I haven't finished it. I finished it last June. Then I took a few weeks off to let it sit and gel, and then started revisions. One revision led to another, to another, to another until in November I decided, "Enough is enough."

Until January when I decided "enough" does not necessarily mean "good enough" and began revising again.

I can honestly say I'm loving the revisions. I can't even believe sometimes that the chapters now are the same chapters I wrote last year. They are, I hope, dramatically better. I credit great critiques, my MFA program, and my super-star advisor for that.

But still, because I'm doing it through school and sending only 20-25 pages every three weeks, I hate to get too ahead in case I get feedback that will throw it all on its head again. That, and reading two books a week and writing another paper a week and there really just isn't that much time to zoom ahead.

It is starting to feel like it's dragging on forever. While I love revising, I'm starting to miss creating. I'm getting the teensiest tired of these old characters and ready for something new.

So I decided to do what I swore going into the MFA program I wouldn't (because it never even crossed my mind to think about doing it or not doing it before the program): I decided to write a short story.

You'd think that would be easier than writing a novel, right? Not so much.

First off, I was scared of it. It's been 20 years since I wrote short fiction, and I had no idea how to do it anymore.

Also, I have no idea how to do it anymore. Did I just say that? Well, it bears repeating, because a short story is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT beast than a novel.

I've been stewing about it for a while now, gestating a few ideas. I even sat and wrote a brilliant first five pages and then stalled out, having no idea where the story was going to go from there. I knew the technique I wanted to use, but not the content. So I let it stew some more.

Yesterday as soon as the kids were on the bus, I sat down and started hashing it out. Let me tell you, for people who think writing isn't work, it IS! It hurt my brain. I struggled. I wrestled. I wrote and deleted, researched, talked it out, batted ideas around and then dismissed them. Tried outlining and gave up. And then wrote some more.

And wrote. And wrote. I took a break for dinner, because that apparently is what families - especially kids - expect, and went back to writing. Obsessively. Until midnight I wrote. And I finished.

12 pages.

And I LOVE it!

Well, it's probably not the best short story in the world. It needs serious revisions probably. It's not life altering or anything.

But oh how good it felt to write something new, and to like it!

And, still on a high at 6:30 this morning, I got a call from someone who heard from someone else that they'd read my book, Some Kind of Normal. Her friend had recently lost a daughter to complications of type 1 diabetes, and she'd found my book, bought two copies for her other children who were having a hard time coping with the death. My book is healing their family, she said. It's allowing them to talk. To not feel so alone.

It's that kind of thing that makes me keep going.

The best 50 cents I've spent

2011-03-17T11:19:00.001-04:00

Much to the dismay and confusion of my husband, I love reality TV. Not all of it, of course, but I can get sucked into an awful lot of it. I know it's not actually real. I know even the realest of them are somewhat contrived, but I like people watching. I find people fascinating. And face it, most of the people who make it onto these reality TV shows are not like us... they are bigger than life, wilder, less inhibited, with less scruples and lacking a filter between their mouths and brains.

I think it's this same thing that draws me to memoirs. I love memoirs. So much so that for a fleeting few days at residency I considered changing my major, or taking a semester at least to try out the non-fiction. Until I realized that I have absolutely nothing of interest to write about myself. (This blog stands as testament to that.)

Still, I managed to convince my advisor to let me put quite a few memoirs on my reading list this semester, and they have been some of my favorite books so far.

All this to say, yesterday I convinced a friend, in celebration of getting my third packet of homework off in the mail, to grab Starbucks and head to my favorite local used book store. It's not that I need new books. I still have five books left on my semester reading list that I need to read before I get to anything else, and then an entire shelf of other books I've bought that I want to find time to squeeze in.

But next semester will come soon enough, and I need to start building my reading list, and so this was my excuse for a little lit-buying therapy. And what's more fun than dragging a friend all over a bookstore yelling, "Oh - You HAVE to buy this!!" and piling it in her helpless hands.

O joyous time! A big bookstore, a cup o' joe, and ridiculously priced books.

I tried to keep to the "modern classic" aisle, where I managed to find 11 dignified books that I'd heard of and wanted to read. After two hours, we began the winding trek back to the register, making a detour through the evil and tempting "memoir" section.

"Let's just look," I said. "I have too many sitting at home to buy more, but let's just look."

Famous last words.

I pulled out a couple, put them back.

And then I found this:

Is that not the cutest cover you have EVER seen?? The blue concentric circle! The adorable goldfish! The title coming out of his mouth!! Even the spine is adorable... the same blue and white stripes, the goldfish with the title coming out of his mouth.

And that title: I am not myself these days.

Well, who couldn't say that every now and then?? My friend and I laughed about how that was exactly how we felt most of the time.

The cover was even full of reviews:

"brilliantly witty"

"I laughed, I cried, I laughed again."

"Very entertaining"

"Especially good at dialogue, and, as in Coward's best plays, under the comedy lies the sad truth that even at our best we are all weak, fallible fools."

"His prose is graced with such insight and wit that the laughter is revelatory - and the tears - and there are tears to be shed along this extraordinary journey - are shed for people in whom everybody will find something of themselves."

Glowing, eh? Doesn't it make YOU want to read it?? Even though there is no actual synopsis, even though the word "tawdry" is conveniently hidden behind the price tag. Raves about dialogue and prose - certainly I could pass this off as a book for my reading list!

And that goldfish.. isn't that just the best??

And better yet - the book was FIFTY CENTS!!!

You bet your bubble-blowing fish-friend I'm buying! I pop it in my basket and check out, excited with my find.

Then I get home and look it up and nearly spit my water all over the keyboard, because THIS is what the book is about:

By day, Josh Kilmer-Purcell was a successful advertising executive; by night, he was a seven-foot-tall drag queen named Aquadisiac who sashayed around Manhattan's gay clubs in wig and heels, sporting giant transparent bubble breasts containing live goldfish.

Boobs with goldfish in them!! Drag queens sashaying!! Don't you think this might be the kind of thing they should at least HINT at on the cover??

I haven't stopped laughing since yesterday. I put the rest of the books on the bookshelf, but this one is still sitting on my kitchen counter because it makes me laugh every time I pass by it.

You know what the kicker is? On Goodreads it got higher reviews than all of the other "modern classic" award-winners I bought. Go figure.

It's killing me to wait to read it. Frankly, Three Cups of Tea is looking pretty boring about now, but I won't hold it against the author. After all, how can changing the world by building schools in terrorist countries possibly compare with boobs with goldfish in them?

I've Been Excerpted in a Magazine!

2011-03-15T09:11:00.000-04:00

A few months ago, A Sweet Life, an amazing online magazine for diabetics, contacted me. They'd heard of my book and wanted to know if I'd be interested in writing a few articles for them and having a chapter from Some Kind of Normal published.

Heck yeah!

So yesterday it shows up as their feature article on the home page, and you can read the excerpt of the chapter (from the middle of the book) here.

If you get a chance, stop by and see it. And if you're really feeling generous, you can leave a comment there. :)

The Day Your Heart Breaks

2011-03-14T08:00:00.001-04:00

There is something I want to admit: I bought into it. Hook, line, and sinker, although I knew better, and should have been the rational person I've always been. But something about small pink booties and pastel plaid blankets in the softest cotton and the smell of baby powder and skin like heaven.

I bought into it, even though I was proof it was a lie. That's the power of parenthood, I think, that when you are holding the tiniest person ever, this creature that lived in you, that grew inside you and who came out with your eyes and a future wider than the world, you want to believe. You want to believe so badly that any other option isn't even fathomable.

Your child can do anything. They can be anything. Anything they set their heart to is possible. We live in that kind of world, right? We live in a place where opportunity is endless; where determination and motivation are all it takes to be what you want to be.

You can do anything.

If we are lucky - the luckiest - we believe this. We've been taught this from the time we could understand, that the world is our oyster and limits are something we set on ourselves. We can be anything we can imagine.

Somewhere along the way, we learn this isn't true. For whatever reason - for economics or intelligence or personality or opportunity or people around us, but eventually the world presses into us that this is a lie.

When I was young I wanted to be a brain surgeon. I'd been told all my life I could be anything I set my heart on - that I could work hard enough to make any dream come true. But my lack of skill in chemistry and my interminably shaky hands and my need for sleep spoke otherwise. I remember the moment I realized this - that I could not do this. Even though it was a vague dream, one I'd rarely spoken of and one I'd invested little in - this was a shock. I could not do anything I wanted do. I could not be anything I wanted to be.

This was a lie.

But it is one thing to know this yourself. I found other loves, other dreams. I found enough. I was enough.

And then I had kids. And I believed again that anything was possible. Anything they wanted to do, they could. Whatever dreams they kept were possible. I - well, I had been less than perfect. My limits were not theirs, and their lives were new and sparkly and wide as the sky. They came into the world with a blank slate waiting to be filled. They were possibility personified.

I have to stop here. I reach for a kleenex and wonder if this day ever came for my own parents. If it did, they sure didn't tell me. I don't remember them leaning over the dinner table one night saying, "Honey, I love you and all, but you can't carry a tune to save your life. Give up the idea of singing and find something more practical, more aligned with the gifts you have instead of a pipe dream that will never come true." Or something along those lines.

But there is a day, and I can't help but think all parents get to this realization, where we know suddenly the world is a much smaller place for our kids than we hoped. That there are limits for our children. Gifts they are given, and gifts they are not. Dreams they may dream that we know will never be, because something critical is missing.

Yesterday - heart surgeon, concert violinist, Olympic swimmer, veterinarian, astronaut.

Today - maybe not.

And maybe the thing that breaks my heart is not that they can't do it - because I know there will be other dreams, other careers, other wonderful amazing things they will accomplish and be in life - but that I see the walls in front of them, and they do not. Because they still believe: "I can do anything. I can be anything." And yet I know that not to be true.

And oh, today, how I wish I didn't know that not to be true.

The Things We Carry (A Book and a Memory)

2011-03-09T11:57:00.000-05:00

In the winter of 1990-91, I was a senior in college, getting ready to graduate, and in love with a soldier. It had been an on-again, off-again relationship that began again in the fall, shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait and the United States declared war. Like so many other military intelligence officers, he was deployed overseas in the first real war of my life.

I remember that time in the way one tucks something in their heart so deeply that it becomes not a faded memory but remains as alive and emotional each day as it was then.

There were months that fall of letters, envelopes numbered so we would know which came first, as the mail between us seemed to always come in small floods with droughts in between. I went on with school, my classes and activities changed only by the small on-campus protests and heated discussions about war over oil.

He, on the other hand, sat in the desert, waiting. Months of waiting that walked the line between intense boredom and the looming fear of imminent fighting. They waited, our troops, in the sand for months for the right time to attack. For the time when negotiations wore out. For the equipment to arrive, to fail as the sand crept into its crevices, and then be cleaned to working order again. His letters and tapes were filled with stories of funny things he and his buddies did to keep busy, to entertain themselves, but underscored by the idea that it was likely a great many of them would not make it back.

That was before the war, when no one knew. When Vietnam rose like a shadow over them as the model of what war had become. When the Iraqi troops yelled loudly and waved threats wildly, and we believed them all.

And then, one cold January day, the waiting ended.

Before texting and smartphones and wireless and seemingly instantaneous information access, the word about the first attacks came by word of mouth. It spread like a wildfire, at first, loud cries of the bombs and missiles falling, but soon settled into something like a hush as we all gathered where we could, in the dark of dorm or fraternity TV lounges and the student union and local bars. In darkened room filled past-standing-room-only, we watched as every station played the live news feed of the air strikes. The dark of the sky, the wail of the sirens, the fireworks of anti-aircraft ammunition screaming through the sky at our planes.

It was days that we sat like this, huddled together, classes forgotten, watching the war unfold in front of our eyes as it happened. The letters stopped for a while - I had no idea where my soldier was, not even in which of the three countries that our military was spread over. Secrecy kept them safe.

Eventually, we drifted back into the too-bright sunlight, back to class and activities and life because we had to, a little less than normal, still wondering how many men and women would make it home, and how many would come in body bags.

When I sat this week to read my newest book, The Things They Carried (by Tim O'Brien), this is the scene I kept sweeping back to. Different war, and yet so much the same. It is not just that O'Brien writes with something akin to poetry in his memoir, or that his writing makes me want to stop and underline and dog-ear and commit to memory pieces of thoughts and stories he shares. It is that, deep inside, it feels much like a story I lived - not exactly in the story but alongside of. It is, what I think agents and editors call, Resonance.

There's a beauty in the title that probably first drew me to this book, even before I knew what it was. O'Brien doesn't disappoint. His first chapter, titled like the book, begins this way:

"First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack."

I love that O'Brien continues in this vein, the mundane objects and philosophical things they carried laid out in their separate sections:

"The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water."

And then this:

"They carried the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infection. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts... They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery... They carried the land itself."

The book itself, like war, is not neatly laid out. It is not a clean, beginning-to end tale, but more a cathartic release for the writer. I identified so personally when he stopped in the middle of describing one incident to say this:

"I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I'm still writing war stories... I should forget. But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present... as a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come to you. That's the real obsession. All those stories."

and then later this:

"Forty-three years and the war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

and also this:

"In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way."

I don't know if this book resonates so deeply with me because I feel a connection with it - both as one who came close enough to reach out and touch war, and as a writer. The language itself and the stories he tells, the characters that seem so well delineated, the pieces of his own heart that he reveals, are enough, I think, to make any reader fall in love with this book.

MFA Monday: The Evil of Adverbs

2011-03-07T10:25:00.001-05:00

Before I write, two quick links...

I redesigned my website to be cleaner and leaner - like my writing, I hope. :) As my publisher decided not to go ahead with publishing a book club edition of my book right now, I've included the book club questions for discussion on the website that are easily accessed and printed off. If you know anyone who wants to use Some Kind of Normal for a book club (I know a few already that have, which is SO exciting!!), let them know about the questions page.

Also, over at my Four Corners Critique Group blog we've been a little lax in posting lately, especially me, so I've decided to start posting parts of my reading commentaries over there. This last week I posted a few pages about The Importance of Plot as seen in The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein. There's a few spoilers in it, but hopefully it's interesting. Luckily, my advisor likes my commentaries to be in my own voice and not some higher academic-sounding psuedo-intellectual voice.

Okay - on to today...

The evils of adverbs....

This is what I heard somewhere down the line while learning from books and blogs about how to write. Adverbs are evil. Cut them out.

How refreshing then, to show up to a lecture at residency and hear one of the great writers/faculty say this:

"Adverbs are necessary for a writer. They contextualize things in time and space. If you take them out, you've lost something important."

Amen!!

While I know that in practicing the art of removing adverbs makes you choose stronger verbs, sometimes it just isn't enough. Maybe what's giving adverbs a bad name is the repetitious use of the "-ly" words.

My crit partner pointed out that in the span of a page, I used three "-ly" adverbs and they began to stick out. My main character ate silently, said carefully, chewed deliberately.

Maybe it sounds like lazy writing because I relied on the easy words, but I couldn't just get rid of them. Each of those adverbs displays a necessary mental picture - informs the reader about something by showing instead of telling, and I needed them.

What, then, is a writer to do? According to my professor, use adverbial phrases. Instead of relying on the easy "-ly" word, replace it with an adverbial phrase or clause that says the same thing, only better.

Here's how it's changed:

Original: "They ate silently for a few minutes before Alicia put her spoon down..."

Change: "They ate, unspoken words building in the silence until Alicia put down her spoon..."

Original: "'I'm still upset with the way you left,' Alicia said carefully."

Change: "'I'm still upset with the way you left,' Alicia said, measuring each word with an equal balance of honesty and trepidation.

If you are guilty of peppering your first drafts with -ly words, don't cut them all. Go back and see if you can replace them with adverb phrases instead. It will not only get rid of the repetitious and somewhat lazy feeling of the writing, it will give you the chance to write something even better.

Help!

2011-03-04T10:23:00.001-05:00

Okay - not me. You don't need to help me (you can breath a big sigh of relief right here). Although, if you have an extra hour or two to spare, you can send that my way, because I sure could use that!!

No, this isn't about that kind of help. It's about this Help. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, to be specific.

I haven't been as thorough as I'd like to be about writing what I'm reading. Fact is, I'm reading more than I can write about, which is pretty darn cool when you think about it. Books that I don't have much to say about, I'm just putting to the side, but this book I have to RAVE about. RAVE I tell you.

Am I the last one in the world to read it? I know it just came out last year, but everyone and their kitchen sink has recommended it, so I feel like I'm the last one on the bandwagon here, but that's okay. I'm on it now. And if you haven't read this book, you absolutely should. Join our bandwagon. It's a heck of a ride.

When I told a friend she needed to read this book, she asked what it was about. I kinda scrunched up my nose and said, "Well, if I tell you what's it's about, it won't sound that interesting. It's much better than it sounds." Because this is the vague synopsis:

The Help is about three women from unlikely backgrounds that band together to make a difference during the 1960s civil rights movement in Jackson, Mississippi.

I suppose if you are a civil rights fanatic, or if you love historical fiction from that era, you might be salivating at that, but personally, I wasn't. I picked this book up because everyone said I needed to. And because someone who has impeccable taste in books and from whom every suggestion I've taken I've loved recommended it. And because she said the southern voice in the book reminded her of Babs' voice in my own debut novel.

(which, I must digress for a moment, is the hugest compliment I've ever gotten, but which is probably overly generous, because reading this book made me want to hide anything I've ever written in shame)

As I've been writing my commentary for school, though, I've come to realize this about the book:

It's about secrets.

Oh yeah, baby, a TON of secrets. Women hiding things from their friends, from their husbands, from the readers. There is the tension through the entire book that if even one of these secrets is spilled, the universe will shift on it's axis, lives will be lost, people will be maimed, love will be killed, worlds will be changed.

They are secrets, TONS of secrets, that come with dire consequences. One character does something in the beginning that is afterwards only referred to as "the Terrible. Awful." Tell me if that isn't attention grabbing.

And these women - these amazing characters - are so real, and alive, strong and full of gumption, that you will WISH you were their friends, wish you were in on their secrets.

I can't say this about very many books, but I was hooked from the very first page. The first paragraph. The voices (there are three of them) are so engaging and unique and well done, you will be sucked in immediately.

This book is 451 pages, including the acknowledgment and the author's notes at the end, all of which I read. I began and ended this book in one day. It is that good.

(I don't know what the cover is supposed to mean though. I'm guessing the three birds represent the three main characters, and the two black maids are the two together and the one white gal is the one on the other side, but ...um...yeah. That's all I've got. There are no birds in the book, so I'm at a loss for what it means. It's beautiful though.)

MFA Monday: Surprise Me

2011-02-28T10:17:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite quotes from the residency was from writer and faculty member Claire Davis, who said in her lecture on revision: "There is nothing a writer likes better than a page that is not blank."

I laughed out loud at that, because that is so true for me most of the time. Staring at a blank page, even if the previous ones are full, is sometimes crippling. I can stare at a page for hours and write next to nothing, or write paragraphs that I write over and over, just to erase and start again. Getting something down on the page that is good enough to then scrub and scour and tweak is hard for me.

That's why I love revisions. The story is there. The words are there. All I have to do is make them better.

One of the things I'm working on is creating surprising language. I admit I'm not very good at it yet. More than one faculty member pointed out in their classes that great writing should surprise the reader. Ask yourself how often a reader can guess what you're about to write. If you cover the first half of a sentence, can the reader fill in the rest? If they read the first half of a scene, can they guess the rest?

Think about all the descriptions we use that we think are beautiful but are really cliche:

crisp Autumn leaves
creaky stairs
fluffy clouds
the ground littered with...
the ground blanketed by...
filled the nostrils with the heady scent of....
twinkle in his eyes
the wrinkled lines of his face

I've been helping a friend edit her new YA novel, and on one page I found the following phrases:

The curtains billowed...
Her mother bustled around the kitchen...
The smell of turkey bacon wafted...

Billowed, bustled, and wafted are great words. They are crisp, specific, and not overly-used words. And maybe if she'd used only one on a page, I wouldn't have noticed. But by the second paragraph, I had to note that these were all cliche phrases. If you'd asked me what curtains do in the wind, I would have said billowed. If you'd asked how a smell moves from downstairs to upstairs, I would have said wafted. The words themselves are not the problem; the problem is that they are used in a way a reader has come to expect.

On the next page, though, my friend was back to her brilliant writing, and blew me away with a phrase that mingled words together I'd never have expected. THAT is what every line should be like.

It's a lot easier for me to pick these things out of someone else's writing than to see it in my own. And harder, still, for me to create unique and surprising phrases and scenes. In truth, I think even the end of my novel is predictable from the start. To some extent, there are only two real choices, and the reader is going to know this pretty early on.

Which makes it all the more important for me to create a reading experience that isn't predictable.

Just this morning I was revising and came across in my WIP:

Kat's heart...

What do you think I finished it with?

Originally I had "skipped a beat." I think somewhere else in the book I have her heart fluttering. I probably have it beating wildly, too. All cliche.

After a few minutes of thinking, I decided on "Kat's heart stumbled over its next beat." It's not beautiful, but its more unique. I'll probably keep working on it. Funny how long I can spend thinking about one sentence, one visual image, one word.

The next phrase I'm working on is her description of the city. Loud? Crowded? Busy? I have all these things, but I think they sound too common. Time to think of a good replacement.

Think about this as you write this week:

How often in your writing could a reader guess what you are going to say?
How often do you pair words that have never been paired before?
How often will a reader find a statement that startles them?

And have you ever come across a sentence in a book that stopped you in your reading just to enjoy the surprise of language?

Thank You and Your Welcome

2011-02-25T09:21:00.001-05:00

I’m full of appreciation and warmth today. Not the “I have a fever” warmth either. The real “I have some amazing friends” warmth.

The chaos of the week isn’t over by a long shot, but it’s starting to feel manageable. For the first time in a week, my daughter’s fever came down with Advil. That’s good progress for us, and I feel better just seeing her smile again.

My kids have stepped up in a big way. My 12-year-old son has made dinner twice this week so I could run out on an errand; my oldest daughter has been uber-flexible in her own busy schedule, cheerfully.

My husband took the day off today so I could take the car in to get it serviced before heading to Richmond this afternoon and mail my grad school work that should have been on its way to my advisor on Tuesday.

I had a rush of affection this morning for the two people who made sure that my daughter could go to All-State choir, who made sure she was on the registration list, who got her music and made a CD of the rehearsal tracks when she was sick in January and couldn’t attend the first rehearsal. They went out of their way for her, and as we count down the hours now to leaving for this highlight of her year, I’m so thankful for them.

I’m so grateful for all of you – my blogging friends – who have become real friends to me. Who email me on the side, who say encouraging words, who read my blogs, who have bought my book and said amazing things about it, who have passed it on and bought it for others and spread the word. Who make me laugh, make me think, make me feel less lonely when I am isolated behind my computer screen. You are incredible people, and I am so thankful to have gotten to know you.

I was given a blog award this week by someone I didn’t even know. How cool is that? And ironically, just last week I took off all the blog awards at the bottom of this blog.

So Lisa over at the Porch Swing Chronicles awarded me the Stylish Blog Award, which I'm hoping has to do with something other than the snowflakes and snowmen that I'm about ready to get rid of on this page. :)

I am supposed to write 7 things about myself and then pass the award on to 10-15 other blogs. That will all have to wait until next week, but I've already discovered several other cool blogs (and bloggers!!) through her awards, as well as getting to meet Lisa, who is most definitely cool. So thank you, Lisa!

As a thank you for being so good to me, I'm passing on two of my favorite new finds this month, in hopes that you as readers or writers will find them as wonderful as I did.

1. A word counter/phrase counter. Agent Steve Laube posted this on his blog last week, and already I've used it several times. You can paste in any amount of words (your entire novel if you want) and it will tell you the amount of times you've used every word in your document and what phrases are repeated. It's great for sussing out cliches and overused words, and for discovering what words you abuse that you don't even know you abuse.

The link for the phrase frequency counter is here.

The link for the word frequency counter is here.

2. Better World Books. A friend from school turned me on to this site. It's a lot like Amazon, with a good twist. It started off as a group of college students gathering used textbooks and books that the campus library was throwing away, and selling them online. It has turned into a huge online bookstore where they sell both new and "rescued" books (many of which were heading for pulping or the local dump) where a large percentage of the profits go to literacy. It's what they call "Environmental and social impact all in the same story."

They have free shipping on all books, and they have a bargain bin you can buy from where the more you buy, the more you save. 3 books for $10. 4 books for $12. I found some great books I was looking for on my semester reading list.

I bought a mix of used and new books. One used book looked used, but the others arrived in mint condition, and I would never have known they were used. I found one writing book that Amazon was selling for $69 that I picked up on Better World Books for $4.95. My first order was for seven books. I paid $25 for the total.

The bad thing is that it took about two weeks to get the books, so if you need them fast, this isn't your place. But otherwise, I absolutely loved shopping there.

So there you go. My Friday gifts to you. I hope you are heading into a good and fun weekend! I'll catch you on the other side.

All Is (Not) Well

2011-02-23T10:56:00.000-05:00

I have friends whose son recently fell off a 50 foot waterfall. They watched as he fell from one slippery rock to another, landing on his head near the bottom, battered and nearly unconscious. Over the next few months, they went through weeks of coma, not knowing if he'd ever wake again. They went through weeks of him being awake, but unable to move or speak or communicate. They've gone through months of rehabilitation, each small step a huge victory as their son learned to sit up, to stand, to walk, to say words, to do simple things like throw a ball and recognize letters. Essentially, their son had to live his entire first fourteen years over again, re-training his brain to do all the things it had already once learned.

Through it all, they kept a blog, a letter to all the concerned family and friends, detailing each day's struggles and successes. At the end of each day, they signed off, "We are well."

I think about that signature often, and wonder how, in the face of all that was wrong, they could say, "We are well." How, when I so often find myself thinking "All is NOT well today."

All has not been well in a while. I broke my foot and ruptured all the ligaments that hold my ankle together. I got the flu. The flu developed into a nasty sinus infection. That sinus infection developed into asthma. My oldest daughter got a cold. It turned into a sinus infection. My youngest daughter caught an awful cold. The first daughter then picked up a great case of strep at school. My youngest daughter countered that with the flu.

I haven't seen the outside world in nearly a month. We are out of milk. The car needs maintenance. I have a graduate school packet I need to get in the mail that I can't get to the post office to mail. I'm behind on my reading, writing, and blogging. In two days I'm supposed to drive my oldest daughter to Richmond to chaperone a weekend of All-State Choir, as long as she stays well and I don't catch the flu again, and my youngest is better. In four days we have company coming. All is not well.

I've had discussions recently with friends who wonder how everyone around them seems to be doing more than them. The admiration for others always starts with "It's all I can do just to ___" Fill in that blank with whatever it is you do. Because whatever it is you do, it's not as much as someone else. Isn't that what most of us think?

But the fact is that all of only have 24 hours a day, and most of us fill it with however much we can. Some keep cleaner houses. Some make more gourmet meals for their families. Some entertain. Some write 10,000 words a day (you know who you are!). Some go to school full time. Some work full time. Some are juggling the schedules of six kids (and those of you who do that are probably not reading blogs). Some read. Some are exercise and fitness enthusiasts. Some run businesses. Some homeschool. Some take the moniker of stay-at-home-mom to new heights.

And by doing whatever it is we do, other things slide. It's the rule of time. There is always more to do than time to do it, and I'm convinced most people I know really do the best with the time they have. How do I write and go to grad school and run a family of five? I have laundry that sits in the dryer until another load kicks it out. Then sometimes it sits in a hamper waiting another week to be folded. I cook things that only take less than 30 minutes to throw together. I have cobwebs in the light fixtures. I don't spend nearly the time I used to playing with my kids. I skip meals. I quit the gym. I don't read or write blogs regularly anymore. I shop a lot less and if I forget something at the store, we do without until the next week when I go back. Others in the house are having to do more.

Sometimes I am sinking. Sometimes I'm falling. Sometimes I'm treading water, keeping my nose just barely above the surface.

But in the end, what needs to be done gets done. And I realize a lot of things don't really need to be done. And maybe that's what my friends have taught me. When a crisis narrows your life to a hospital room and your son's future is dubious, maybe you can really see what matters.

Am I alive today? Are my loved ones alive today?

Then maybe all is well after all.

What's the Point of Reading Classics?

2011-02-16T10:15:00.002-05:00

This week I read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and it nearly killed me. Four days, ninety pages... torture.

I know this is considered classic literature and I should treat it with deference, but really? Seriously? Someone thought this was great writing?

I know the story itself is supposed to be revelatory. I know this because I couldn't understand a single sentence in the first 20 pages and resorted to reading summaries and analysis online to give me some sort of bearing. It is an expose on the cruelty of colonization and the ivory trade, a revelation that was, in its time, a picture of a world most people didn't get to see. It was The Jungle of its day. [The Jungle by Upton Sinclair focused on the evils in the meat packing industry, and the uproar raised by the book inspired labor and agriculture reform. That book I loved.]

I get that there's a place for books that, at the time of publication, were life-view-altering, whether or not the writing itself was well done. I wrote about that when I read Ten Days In A Madhouse last year. But I wonder now, in the age of live news broadcast from around the world, of thorough history lessons complete with old newsreel footage or faded photos, of horror films in which each tries to trump the disgust factor of the last, is Heart of Darkness so shocking anymore? Is the fact that a man might get so greedy for ivory that he would shoot the natives to keep them complicit, that he would - cast alone into this very foreign land - lose himself and eventually turn to cannibalism - so shocking anymore? Am I totally callous for feeling like this is what I hear every day on the nightly news?

Over time, the things that Conrad reveals in his book - horrific in their time - have become just another chapter in the history books that kids read in school. True, it doesn't make them less awful (and shouldn't), but the commonness of the tale now should mean for something to stand the test of time, it must also be beautifully or strikingly written.

So is the value in the story itself, in its place as ground-breaking, or in its true literary worth?

The writing itself drove me mad. Conrad needed to read Strunk and White, is my opinion. Would it hurt to break the paragraphs into smaller paragraphs? Would it hurt to indent each time a new character talked, so that the dialog looked like dialog on the page and not just a jumble of quotation marks?

The sentences themselves seemed determined to be as long as possible to say as little as possible, in as confusing a way as possible. If I hadn't looked up the synopsis ahead of time, I probably wouldn't have understood the first part of the book, which may not say much about my ability to read. Still, should a book only be written for the literary brilliant?

It is a story within a story within a story - a metaphor where the trip deep into the darkest parts of the jungle is the same as going deep into the darkest parts of man. And that drove me crazy. Some nameless narrator was telling the story about someone telling the story of going down the Congo and running into someone else who told the story about Kurtz, who'd gone insane in the jungle and given himself over to the darkest side of himself. There were very few scenes; it was narration, as if someone sat in your kitchen telling a story about a story they'd heard from someone else who'd told it to them.

It reminds me why I loved the Pacific University program so much - because we get to create our own reading lists and not be forced to read what some academic thought was classic, important literature. If I had to read two years worth of stuff like this, I'd never make it.

I don't want to downplay the importance of classics. I put this book on my list because it seemed like a book I should read. And as much as I hated reading it, I have to admit that I'm glad I did, if only not to feel like an ignoramus when this comes up in discussion. I've been on the receiving end of the "What? You call yourself an author and you've never read that??" before. It's not fun.

Although, one could also say there are far too many books - even if you want to limit to classical literature - for any one person to read them all. I've read quite a few of Shakespeare's plays, but not all. I've read much of the Bronte and Austin books, but not all. I've read a lot of Flannery O'Connor, a smattering of Faulkner and Hemingway, but none of Chaucer or Ayn Rand.

I read three of the Best of 2010 list, but I didn't read Franzen's Freedom (which, trust me, in certain circles puts me distinctly on the outside). I will read over 80 books in the next two years, and I will still end up on blogs and in conferences and at book clubs where I will feel I didn't read the right things, or read enough.

So why bother?

I went to summer arts program when I was in high school with other students from all over the state of Virginia. One day, in lecture class, we all got talking about why we have to read certain classics. And one person said (this was 25 years ago, so you can tell what an impression it made on me): "We are all from different high schools, spread out over a huge area. And yet, when we showed up today, every one of us has read Romeo and Juliet and The Red Badge of Courage. We all have that in common. And now we have a place from which to start a discussion."

Is this why we continue to read books that fell off the bestseller list a hundred years ago?

Tell me - do you read books that are considered classics, and why or why not? And have you read the Heart of Darkness and thoroughly disagree with me about its worth?

MFA Monday: Fowl Wisdom

2011-02-14T10:23:00.000-05:00

"Readers are like baby ducks at the beginning of the story – they will adhere to whatever they see first (The mommy syndrome). Writers have a tendency to throw too many mothers at the beginning, and the readers don’t know what to stick to."

Speak With Authority. Ya Know?

2011-02-10T08:00:00.003-05:00

A friend posted this on facebook and it was too good to not pass on. To my facebook friends who've already seen it, I apologize.

If I could write poetry, I'd want it to sound like this.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Books of the Week: Life of Pi, The Art of Racing in the Rain, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

2011-02-09T10:01:00.000-05:00

In the last two weeks I managed to read three entirely different books that all involved animals in some crucial way. Totally not planned, but there it is.

Interestingly, each week that I review my two books, they seem eerily alike in some fashion, although completely different in story, plot, style, character, theme, or even genre. I theorize that you can take any two random books and find something alike in them!

So onto this week...

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Summary: The peripatetic Pi (ne the much-taunted Piscine) Patel spends a beguiling boyhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper. Growing up beside the wild beasts, Pi gathers an encyclopedic knowledge of the animal world. His curious mind also makes the leap from his native Hinduism to Christianity and Islam, all three of which he practices with joyous abandon. In his 16th year, Pi sets sail with his family and some of their menagerie to start a new life in Canada. Halfway to Midway Island, the ship sinks into the Pacific, leaving Pi stranded on a life raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After the beast dispatches the others, Pi is left to survive for 227 days with his large feline companion on the 26-foot-long raft, using all his knowledge, wits and faith to keep himself alive. (From Publishers Weekly)

My Impression: I added this to my reading list because it was on several college lists as modern classic literature. I found it in the classic section of my local bookstore. So I was surprised to find out it was published in 2002.

This book is broken into three parts. The first part is a meandering musing from the point of view of the main character on animals and religion. It' s by no means fast paced, and there were times I wondered what the point of it was, and yet I loved the use of language. It was the first book in a long time that I wanted to read with a highlighter in the my hand. I think I muttered the word "profound" more than once, and tortured my husband reading "just one more" passage.

The second part is the longest, and the majority of the book. It's about his trip across the ocean in a lifeboat with the tiger names Richard Parker. Although you know from the start that Pi makes it alive, it is still fraught with tension and suspense. There are certainly some strange parts in the story: he goes blind temporarily and, while floating adrift in the ocean (the ocean!!) he happens to bump his liferaft into another temporarily blind man also adrift from some other sunken boat. Also, there is the much-talked about island that seemed at first to be idyllic, and then turns out to be full of carnivorous trees. Creative for sure.

The third part is after he has made land and explains his story to the officials who come to find out how the ship he was on sank. I won't go into this part other than to say that in the span of a few pages, you realize that perhaps everything you just read was not entirely the way it was. It was a gut-punch moment, frankly, that made the book for me.

That all said, I found myself most of the time wishing I was reading one of my other real-life on-the-sea survival books that I love so much. In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbreck for one. Or Albatross by Deborah Scaling Kiley. I suppose I have long loved the real survival stories, and so this one, while well written, left me a little empty just for the loss of knowing it wasn't true.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Summary: Enzo is a lab terrier mix plucked from a farm outside Seattle to ride shotgun with race car driver Denny Swift as he pursues success on the track and off. Denny meets and marries Eve, has a daughter, Zoë, and risks his savings and his life to make it on the professional racing circuit. Enzo, frustrated by his inability to speak and his lack of opposable thumbs, watches Denny's old racing videos, coins koanlike aphorisms that apply to both driving and life, and hopes for the day when his life as a dog will be over and he can be reborn a man. (From Publishers Weekly)

My Impression: I was hooked from the first line, dragged through the book with the inability to put it aside, all the while weeping embarrassingly on the crowded metro and laughing out loud in my empty house.

Enzo the dog is entirely lovable, and his personality and voice are the clear stand-outs in this book. But the book is really not about Enzo, as much as everyone else would like to declare it is. Enzo is the unique narrator who is, nonetheless, telling a story that is as much about someone else as is it him. Because he's a dog, he really has no pull or push on the plot. He's an observer, and as such, the story itself is really about his family, specifically his owner Denny. And what a story that is.

I don't want to spoil too much. I didn't know very much about this book when I began it, and I think that was a plus. Each page is filled with conflict, something else going horribly wrong in Denny's life, and there were characters I wanted to hate with a passion, and others I wanted to take into my arms. It was an emotional book. A fast read, and one that, at the end, makes you feel good... and want to go rub the belly of a puppy.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Summary: Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbors--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (Summary written by Jack Illingworth)

My Impressions: I seem to have gotten into a string of books with unique narrators. Like Room, which is a five-year-old boy and The Art of Racing In the Rain, told by a dog, this narrator gives the book an entirely different voice than if it were told by a common third person. The narrator of the book is a 15-year-old autistic boy who doesn't eat brown or yellow foods, does complicated math in his head to calm the terrors he feels, flies off the handle when others touch him, and would not for the life of him understand the phrase "flies off the handle" as anything other than exactly what the words mean - that someone is literally flying off the handle of something.

This book was fast and easy to read, full of illustrations and examples done by Christopher, and with a simple but heart-breaking plot. This dead dog that Christopher finds begins not just a detective job but ends up unraveling his whole life. Secrets about his family are exposed, and Christopher, sure he is not safe, takes off on his own in a journey that is even less safe give his inability to deal with his surroundings.

The book itself is very good. I'd definitely recommend it. That said, the choice of an autistic narrator has its quirks. For one, because autistic people often have a hard time connecting with others, I had a hard time connecting with this narrator. I wanted to love him, feel protective of him, and yet I felt always held at arm's length from him. I think this is truly a triumph of the author, but I wonder if the cost is worth it.

What about you? Read any great books lately?

MFA Monday: Cutting the Fat

2011-02-07T11:21:00.000-05:00

"Is your book 100 page book, or is it a 50 page book wearing a fat suit?"

This is the way one of the faculty opened his lecture on editing, one that continues to ring in my ears each time I open my project. I love that statement. As someone who thought I always wrote pretty skinny first drafts, I realized my drafts were thin because I was leaving out the meaningful details, but I still had much to cut.

Here are a few easy and simple ways he suggested "cutting the fat" from your writing:

Qualifiers can almost always be cut (very, almost, kind of, rather, a little, a bit, maybe). Trust the meaning of your main words; qualify only if the distinction is necessary

Simplify Verb Forms Have, had, or had can usually be eliminated from the verb without changing the meaning. Keep only if necessary to qualify the time something happened. Watch out for the word "can" as well. Only use it when it's important to show the ability to do something.

Don't state the obvious. Shrugging (her shoulders). Blinked (her eyes). Yawned (sleepily). Look of surprise (on her face). We don't need the words in parenthesis; those are understood.

Cut the words "that" or "which" if the sentence makes sense without it.

Eliminate things a reader would already know. Not all details are equal. Writers have a tendency to move a character through every action; don't. For instance, we know when a person wakes up, they turn off the alarm, get out of bed, go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, get dressed. Unless this information is in some way critical, leave such detail out.

Control the pacing of the scene by what you leave in and what you take out. Less details lead to a faster pace. Adding them slows it down.

It's amazing to me how innate these mistakes are. Even when I go through my work in an effort to cut, unless I'm specifically looking for one of these, I tend to miss them. But when I find and revise, it's also amazing how much tighter and leaner the writing is, more focused. It forces you as a writer to find the better words, to come back to the nouns and verbs that make writing focused and deliberate. A reader may not be able to put their finger on why a novel feels fluffy or deliberate, but they'll notice it nonetheless. Make each word count.

BLOG TOUR: Interview with Jen Blom, author of POSSUM SUMMER

2011-02-03T04:00:00.003-05:00

(My note: Jen Blom was one of the first writers I met on the blogosphere, and it's been three years since we decided to band together and create a critique group with several other wonderful writers. Since then, I've watched her write, query, get a fantastic agent, go through the painful process of submissions which ended inevitably perfectly for her, listened to her as she went through the process of edits and now, waiting with baited breath for her Middle Grade Novel POSSUM SUMMER to come out.

Jen is an amazing writer, with more stories in her than just about anyone I know. I've had the privilege of reading this one, and several others that will be published in the coming years, and am just so excited to have her here on this blog. I'm also honored to host her main character, P, for a few interesting questions as well. So, off we go...)

Welcome to the POSSUMS ARE AWESOME blog tour for the middle-grade book, POSSUM SUMMER, coming out in March! (Have you preordered yet?)

Today I'm taking over Heidi's blog today to post a couple awesome questions she asked me, and in return, P asked her a couple! And you won't believe what happened next...but you have to wait until the end of this little interview for that!

First off, about the book:

a lonely kid.

an orphaned baby possum.

a dad that says no way.

how do you keep that kind of secret?

and what happens when you’re found out?

So! On we go with the Thrilling Three questions!

HW: Jen, do you know the endings of your stories before you write them?

JKB: Sometimes. With P, I thought I did, but we actually cut the entire last chapter during copy-edits, which thankfully made the book just that much stronger! My editor is amazing for even considering it, but we both agreed it was the best thing to do and I'll love her forever for it.

HW: What makes you so attached to possums?

JKB: I had a possum when I was P's age. (And many other animals, but that's a story for another day.) And the first chapter was exactly the sequence of events that brought me my little possum friend - except there were TWO dogs that wouldn't listen to me, not just one!

HW: What surprised you most about the story as you wrote or revised it?

JKB: Just how much stronger it could be after continuous revisions. When I first got my edit letter, I almost had a heart attack! But my lovely editor was right on with every question she asked, and I could not believe I could cut so many words and still have a story! It was an excellent lesson to learn!

Princess: MY TURN!

JKB: Shuddap kid. I'm having an interview here!

P: No, I'm innerviewing this lady right now! Hi, Miss Heidi! First question *JKB IS PUZZLED* is What's your favrite food?

HW: Well, it's Mexican! Fish tacos, pulled pork burritoes, rice and black beans, tamales ... is it any wonder I set all my books in Texas?

P: You like fish tacos? Gross! What's your favrite activities? *JKB reaches for the spellcheck* *P bats her away* Stop it! You're not the boss of me! *JKB tries to chill*

HW: Reading. And skiing, but I don't get to do that nearly as often as I'd like.

P: I like reading too! But my teacher says I got problems with my silent consonants, which is why I'm doing this. NEXT: What's yer most inneresting body part about yourself?

HW: I have pretty big green eyes when I smile.

P: Ok! You smile great, I've just seen your picture! I've looked through all the Oklahoma animals I have a list of, and I borowed Jen's ency-ensyc-big information book and I've picked who you'd be as an Oklahoma animal and I drawed you! I hope you like it!

P: You're just like a deer! Get it? You've got big eyes, and Jen said you broke your foot recent, and I --

JKB: -- thanks so much for letting me hang out with you at your lovely blog, Heidi! *muscles P into submission* I'll be going now!

Jen K. Blom writes about animals, the land, and kids, not necessarily in that order. Her debut, POSSUM SUMMER, is available March 2011. Just the thing to give to a kid to start their summer of reading off right! (Available from your local indie, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Book Depository!)