The Musing Reader

Three Ways of Reading

2012-02-02T09:13:00.000-06:00

When I'm reading a novel, what I'm really doing is reading three different ways. What I ultimately think about the book comes from some ratio of those three readings. The latest book I read, The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood, is a good example of how complicated that ratio can be.

The first way I read something, of course, is for the story. Is it entertaining? Do I care about the characters? Am I caught up in what happens? The best stories are so engrossing that, for a little while at least, my real life becomes secondary. I read a good portion of The Shakespeare Stealer while cooking supper the other night. The story has a good premise: an orphaned boy who's never known any life other than that of an abused apprentice is sent to steal Shakespeare's Hamlet so his new master can put on the play. As he is trying to get his hands on the script, he makes friends and finds the family he's never had. While the characters in this book are not among my all-time favorites, they were likeable enough, and the action of the story moved along quickly. (I have to admit, maybe there were some other reasons I devoured this book. First, it is a middle-grade novel, so it was EASY reading, and second, I was just coming off a six-week stint of reading an academic, non-fiction book, so quite frankly, I was starved for fiction!)

However, The Shakespeare Stealer didn't fare quite as well in my second way of reading.
Honestly, since I've been doing my own writing, I can't read a novel now without having an eye on the way it is written. And this little book had some things that I consider to be definite problems. The first thing was the entire first chapter. All the advice that's out there now about beginning a story says to start with the action. Put the reader right into the place where the plot starts. Avoid at all costs "introducing" your story with long description of backstory; instead, work in the important backstory elements as you are moving the characters through that first segment of the plot. The Shakespeare Stealer spends its entire first chapter describing for us the maincharacter’s early life in an orphanage, his first apprenticeship, and anincident in which he ends up doing something unethical because of his master.There are two lines of dialogue in the whole chapter. It’s not until thesecond chapter that we see what is going to be the central problem of the story.

"Great voice" is one of the things agents always say they are looking for, and I suppose that's true of me as a reader as well. There's lots of "telling" in this book, including a few times when it is downright preachy. I also have a problem with the narrator’s voice. When Widge(the main character) is speaking, he uses a country dialect that, to be honest,is annoyingly hard to decipher (“Oh, gis. Will ’a ha’ me dismissed, do youwis?”). But when Widge the first-person narrator is speaking, he uses wordslike “sumptuous” and “countenance” and “veritable.” That inconsistency is pretty jarring, to me,anyway.

My writing has also made me very aware of the value of good editing. I've pruned nearly two-thirds of the original words and scenes out of my own book, and just the other day I had a (difficult) realization that there was another scene (that has always been one of my favorites) that really has no direct connection to the plot. It's got to go and much as I hate to do it, I'm writing it out. Maybe that makes me a little less tolerant of seeing places where other writers have refused to do the same. I honestly was annoyed by the way Blackwood used the character of Shakespeare in this novel. Yeah, yeah, the title of the book is The Shakespeare Stealer -- a lot of the action takes place in the Globe theater -- you HAVE to have Shakespeare in there, right???? Well, not this way. Maybe because I'm still under the spell of Shakespeare in Love (ha ha), in which Shakespeare was such a fascinating character, I found the use of Shakespeare in this book to be unnecessary, even gratuitous. Other than being the author of the play Widge is sent to steal, he has nothing to do with the plot. He has a few lines of dialogue, but nothing interesting or important. The oddest example of GUS (Gratuitous Use of Shakespeare) is a scene when the apprentices have taken a day to go out into the country for some relaxation and fresh air. For some inexplicable reason, Shakespeare walks by. Widge asks the others if they should speak to him, but they say, no, Mr. Shakespeare is moody. Then they give a few textbook-worthy facts about Shakespeare's family and personal life, and .... that's that. No connection to the plot whatsoever, no value in building the personalities of the main characters, no point at all, really.

Finally, the third way I read a novel is in the hope that I will learn something or think about something in a way I never have before. The Shakespeare Stealer didn't disappoint in this area, for the overt plot of the book ties in so well with the recent controversy over PIPA and SOPA and the issue of intellectual property rights. The story talks about the piracy of plays in the 16^thcentury and how that piracy deprived Shakespeare and the players of their ability to make money from their work (hmmmm, come to think of it, I wonder how accurate that part of the story is. I may need to do some investigation into that history). As a teacher of writing and a writer myself, it's an issue of great interest to me. What are the boundaries of intellectual property? EvenShakespeare himself borrowed heavily from other people's works as the basis for someof his plays. Of course, he put his unique stamp on the material, and I guess that’sthe difference. The character of Simon Bass in this novel and the internetpirates of today simply lift something wholesale and use it as their own.

So, getting back to the three ways of reading -- I enjoyed The Shakespeare Stealer well enough as a story and it gave me something interesting to think about beyond the story, but I saw what I consider to be some serious flaws with the writing. My overall evaluation? Worth the read, but not going on my mental shelf of "great books."

A Day of Joy and Sorrow

2012-01-26T22:39:00.003-06:00

Maybe the title is a bit melodramatic; I'll leave that for you to decide!

My parents gave me some money for Christmas, so last week I decided to spend some of it on books (what else?). The order came yesterday while I was at work, and the result was both joyful and sorrowful.

First, the joy. For a while, I've been considering buying Liza Picard's Restoration London, a research resource with information about just about every facet of life during the late 17th-century London. I finally decided to go ahead and do it. After browsing through it last night, I'm glad I did! I saw information about dental health (people's teeth were apparently not as bad as I thought, thanks to fewer sugary foods leading to cavities), and about what women wore, and about the spread of the "pox" (syphilis) from the New World to Italy to France and beyond (the book muses that the "pox" was a fair exchange for the smallpox from the Old World that decimated the native populations of the Americas). Anyway, I'm really pleased to have this addition to my writer's resource bookshelf. I don't know that I will ever write any story based in that time period, but I just find it interesting to know how people lived.

Now for the sorrow. Some of the classes I teach are basic (definitely basic) introductions to some of the Adobe software, namely Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Several times students have requested that we add a class in Adobe Flash. I decided I would pick up the Flash volume of The Missing Manual series and see if I could teach myself enough to teach the basics to students. I debated on whether to buy it in paper or for Kindle; the Kindle version is cheaper, but it's pretty hard to flip around to different sections on the Kindle. I decided paper would be easier to learn with, so I ordered a copy.

When I pulled into the driveway yesterday afternoon, I saw a new pile of white and brown trash in the yard, and I knew at once what had happened. The mail carrier delivered the book, it was too big for the mailbox, he left it in the garage---and Dobby struck again. Yes, that @&%%#^ dog completely demolished my Flash textbook. He tore through the cardboard box and chewed the covers off. As if that's not bad enough, he had to drag it out into the yard on the day when we got three inches of rain. So not only is the book torn up, it is soaked. 700+ pages of tissue-thin paper glued together by rainwater and mud.

I'll admit, I lost it and yelled very unkind things at Dobby (and alarmed poor old Tracy) and wished him dead -- aloud. But in the end, none of that changes anything. I set the book over a vent in hopes it will dry out and I can gently pry those 700+ pages apart and still be able to teach myself some Flash. Or should I just admit defeat and buy it again (the Kindle version this time, which will not have to go through the garage, and thus will be safe from the Atomic Bomb of Dogs)? You don't know how that possibility hurts a cheapskate like me! Or maybe I'll just give up on learning Flash for the time being....

All's Well that Ends Well

2012-01-13T12:35:00.001-06:00

Forgive me a second post on Shakespeare in Love. I watched the bonus materials the other day, and when I saw the deleted scene that would have been the ending of the movie, I knew I had to do a post about why the director made exactly the right choice by deleting that scene and using the one that actually ended up in the film.

First, a brief synopsis of each scene.

Deleted Ending: We see Will alone in the theatre, and Viola comes in to bring him the money he won in the bet with Lord Wessex. From across the room, she says, "The Queen bids me say goodbye," and tells him the queen also wants his next play to be a comedy, to which he replies, "I'm done with comedy." She then crosses the room and they have their brief, tearful goodbye kiss. She leaves and he starts after her, but Burbage stops him with a meaningful look. Burbage then looks at the money bag and says, "A hired player no longer. Welcome to the Chamberlain's Men" (which had been Shakespeare's goal at the beginning of the movie). Will looks after Viola, but then smiles ruefully at Burbage (as a sign he's accepted his fate, I suppose). The next scene shows the two of them walking down the street with Burbage telling Will the Queen wants a comedy for Twelfth Night, and then the scene changes to Will beginning the script for Twelfth Night, leading into the final scene in which Viola is walking across a beach (which is also in the final version of the movie in slightly shortened form).

Final Version of the Ending: The first thing I noticed is that the camera shots are closer and the lighting is more intimate, which immediately sets a different mood. Viola brings the money to the backstage area, and Will says, "My Lady Wessex," both as a greeting and a question. She acknowledges it without a word, then gives him the money and says, "A hired player no longer." They reflect a little on what happened between them, she encourages him to keep writing, and she tells him the Queen wants a comedy. He replies, "A comedy? What would my hero be? The saddest wretch in all the kingdom, sick with love?" She says, "It's a beginning," and then together they begin to lay the foundation for a plot. She uses Henslowe's running gag from the movie ("It's a mystery...") and then they have their tearful goodbye. She pulls away and says, "Write me well." The scene then picks up the same basic ending as the deleted scene, to have Viola on the beach.

As a viewer of the movie, I know the second scene was infinitely more satisfying as a way to end the story. As a writer, I can look at the two scenes and see why. The version that made it into the movie allowed for the emotional threads to all be pulled together; the deleted scene, on the other hand, was a bit detached. Hey, you should find yourself tearing up at the end of the relationship between these two characters we've come to know and love. Introducing Burbage into the final scene takes us away from that.

I also thought the scene that was kept contributed to the development of these characters. What, at the end of the movie??? You wouldn't think there's anything else we need to know about them, especially since their story is over. But the scene added even more strength of character to Viola. She's now stuck with this pompous jerk of a husband, stuck going to an uncivilized country half a world away, and yet in the scene, she's not bitter or despairing. Will actually seems more bitter and torn up about it. Viola reassures him, "all ends well," even though she doesn't know how. And she understands (and helps him understand) that even though their relationship is now ended physically, through the power of his writing, they can always be who they were, together forever.

Wow. The first scene brings the plot to a close; the one they kept brings a depth that really helps elevate this movie above being just another movie with a love affair and lots of kissing. Even at the end the characters are growing. The scene gives the story (which is pretty sad, basically) that element of hope that I believe is so important.

(And I love the fact that even in that scene, when he is an actor and a lover first, we can still see the inkstains on Shakespeare's fingers. He is always a writer.)

I couldn't find the entire scene as one piece, but here is the last part.

Getting My (Literature) Nerd On

2012-01-09T17:28:00.000-06:00

I'm one of those annoying people who can't just sit still and watch TV. Normally, I'm doing something else at the same time - catching up on my blog reading, or checking Twitter, or (confession time here) grading papers. Today I sat down to watch Shakespeare in Love with intentions of working on the syllabi for my spring classes, which start next week (yikes!). But I didn't get a thing done. For two hours I sat and was completely entranced by this movie.

This movie has some of the same glaring errors as Elizabeth (which I watched last week, see previous post), most notably disregard for historical fact when it got in the way of the story. The biggest error was having tobacco plantations in Virginia as a major point in the plot. The movie is set in 1594; I know from our family's vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina this past summer that the English were struggling to get a colony established in the New World at that time. Actually, 1594 would be only a few years after John White found the English colony at Roanoke deserted. It would be another 10 years before the Jamestown colony was established. So the threat of having the heroine of the story about to be married off and shipped to Viriginia was completely bogus.

But I don't care. I also don't care that the whole "Shakespeare was inspired by love to write Romeo and Juliet" plot was made up. (For the record, the notes on Romeo and Juliet in my good old Complete Works of William Shakespeare text from college say that the play was based on a poem written by Arthur Brooke called The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, printed in 1562.) I liked the story. I know from my own writing how events that have happened to me find their way into my story, so it was fun to see the "what if": how events from the life around the play could have, in Shakespeare's fertile imagination, found their way into the play. I'm going to have to go back and look for them specifically - the main one I can think of right now is the balcony scene when Shakespeare first meets Viola. I'm sure there are plenty of others. (But I can't watch this movie when the kids are home; there were a couple of scenes with Richard Burbage and his mistress that were bawdy in a Shakespeare-worthy manner, ha ha.)

I also liked having flesh put on Shakespeare and his times. All the years I studied literature, I had a mental image of Shakespeare based on the famous portrait to the left. The association was with someone rather formal and "artsy," an untouchable genius who should be the object of the literary equivalent of worship. When I was young and reading Shakespeare, I didn't appreciate it much; I guess I got so bogged down in the unfamiliar language and the large casts of characters with strange, difficult-to-pronounce names and by the need to find "Important Themes" such as "nature vs. nurture" or "order vs. chaos" that I forgot Shakespeare was a living person who made his livelihood in the entertainment business.

And Will Shakespeare is definitely a living person in the movie. The character is a playwright arrogantly assured of his brilliance yet insecure because writer's block is keeping him from starting on the plays he's promised to two different theater owners (I was amused by that financial part, by the way). He's jealous of fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, yet he sponges ideas off Marlowe. He is a rake who is looking for a soulmate to inspire him - even though he's got a wife and family 100 miles away. He can't seem to help himself from going into speaking in passages of poetic language, like he's always trying out bits for his plays. The picture is of a passionate, flawed, gifted man - which is probably closer to the truth than my former mental image. A person would have to be passionate and gifted to write Shakespeare's plays.

Here's where the really nerdy part comes in. My favorite scene in the movie? When Shakespeare has gone into a writing frenzy. The scene shows him making his quills and scratching the play out word by word. I loved the extreme close-up shots of the tip of the quill that also include his thumbnail and finger, stained with ink (you can barely see what I'm talking about in the picture). I don't know why. I'm just weird, I guess.

I'm not totally weird. I did like the love story, too. I'm not a huge Gwyneth Paltrow fan, but I thought she played the role well - she seemed "natural," if that makes any sense. I also enjoyed seeing the difference in Joseph Fiennes between this movie and Elizabeth (in which he didn't seem to get to do much); he is what really put the flesh on the bones the writers gave Shakespeare. And I liked Ben Affleck's role in this movie. In some ways, it was the perfect role for him - the big star coming in to play the big star, ha ha.

But I keep going back to that image of the ink-stained fingers. To be perfectly honest, this movie had me from the moment it did the visual sweep of the theater. Sure, I've read descriptions of the Globe Theater, but there's just something about seeing it in wood, with its dirt floor for the commoners, that makes it live for me. This movie did that throughout for me, like the scene when Geoffrey Rush was walking through the streets of London and someone poured a yellow liquid (bet we know what that was!) from the upper story of a building just before he walked by, and he didn't bat an eye. I like being able to get that view of what life in late 16th-century London must have been like, before sanitation and 32-inch LCD TVs and word processors. I wouldn't want to live there, but this movie made for a fun visit.

"Body Natural" and "Body Politic," or, What I Thought about While Watching a Movie

2012-01-05T18:20:00.000-06:00

One of the pleasures of these days when the family has gone back to school and I haven't yet is that I have control of the TV remote. A few days ago, I found the movie Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett, and today I got the chance to watch it. I wasn't completely thrilled with it, but I enjoyed the historical "spectacle" with all those great costumes, I learned something about British history (from going to read stuff after watching the movie), and I discovered Joseph Fiennes is a beautiful man, ha ha.

The movie seemed to jump around from one genre to another. Sometimes it was historical epic, sometimes it was spy flick, sometimes it was love story, sometimes it was philosophical drama.

As history, it's clear the movie took some license with events to improve the story, and especially that the timeline for events was collapsed. The broad strokes are accurate enough; the struggle between Mary I and Elizabeth over the succession to the throne was real, as was the constant pressure on Elizabeth to choose a marriage with political benefits. I admire the filmmakers for finding a way to make Elizabeth's efforts to create religious compromise interesting as a plot device, and I liked their portrayal of her initial ineptitude as a ruler, taking advice that led to a disastrous invasion of Scotland. On other important points, though, the movie definitely distorts history; there's no evidence Mary of Guise was assassinated, and Robert Dudley most certainly was not involved in a plot to remove Elizabeth from the throne. Dudley apparently remained as one of Elizabeth's favorites for the rest of his life.

Speaking of the treasonous plot - honestly, I was confused at times about who was allied with whom and with how Elizabeth and Walsingham knew who was involved. I got that there were two separate but intertwined plots perpetrated by the French and the Spanish, with involvement by key English figures high in the government. But wait...there's really nothing historically accurate about the plot (or plots) as portrayed in the movie. The fictional plot pulled together pieces of several actual events and made a mash-up that, while it was narratively tidy and entertaining, did violence to the historical facts of the reputations for several men, including Norfolk (who seems to be the instigator of the whole thing), Walsingham (who comes off as a completely Machiavellian character except for his loyalty to Elizabeth), and of course, Dudley.

Speaking of Dudley - There was something poignant (intentionally, of course) about the love story between Elizabeth and her favorite, Robert Dudley. I find the truth even more poignant, in a way. Dudley married young (at 18 or 17, depending on which birthdate you use), then became embroiled in his father's efforts to create a queen of Robert's sister-in-law, Lady Jane Grey. The scheme was ultimately foiled, and Robert was sentenced to death and imprisoned in the Tower of London - at the same time as Elizabeth. Once Elizabeth became queen, Dudley was appointed as Master of the Horse, which put him in frequent, close contact with the queen. From that point on, he saw his wife very little and was constantly at court with the queen. The gossip of the day (even the political wisdom that passed between officials) was that Elizabeth would marry Dudley if he were free, and she kept him close and guarded his friendship and attention jealously. However, when Dudley's wife did die within a couple of years (from a fall down a short set of stairs), the resulting scandal tainted him as a uncaught murderer (although he was not with her at the time, rumor was he arranged her death), which made him even more unsuitable as a husband for the queen. It was clear that Elizabeth, being the shrewd politician, would never marry him, and yet for the next 18 years, he was in limbo - he couldn't marry Elizabeth, but she was so jealous of his attention he didn't dare marry anyone else (although he did have a longstanding affair with Lady Douglas Sheffield, ha ha). When he finally did marry Lettice Knollys, he kept it a secret from Elizabeth - she found out from some of his enemies at court. Although he kept his position as a favorite, his decision to marry was not without a cost; Elizabeth publicly humiliated him frequently, and she was openly unfriendly to his wife.

That brings me to the thing I found most interesting about the movie: the divide between the "body natural" and the "body politic." This contrast was brought out most sharply through the love story as it was portrayed in the movie. Although Elizabeth clearly loves Robert, she is constantly bombarded with offers of marriage to foreign princes, offers that would have political consequences. From the moment she becomes queen, she is continually harassed by her advisors that she needs to "marry and produce an heir." For someone in Elizabeth's position, consideration of what her "body natural" wants always has to come second to what her "body politic" must do to hold on to power. I believe that principle extends to Robert (the real one) as well; his desire to stay in the queen's favor (or maybe I should say, his desire to avoid the queen's wrath) clearly took precedence over the desire for his own home and family - at least for 18 years. (I should also remember, though, that he didn't deny himself totally; there was that long-term affair that produced a son...)

That theme came to its crescendo at the end of the film when Elizabeth is physically shedding all remnants of her "body natural"; her hair is chopped off, her face is painted white, and she becomes the embodiment of the "body politic." While the movie no doubt makes this more dramatic than it really was, I also have no doubt that Elizabeth made that transformation - but she kept stringing Dudley along, just to have a connection to that "body natural" she once had.

2011 - Not a Stellar Year, Actually

2011-12-31T11:10:00.000-06:00

Last night I sat down to do my annual year-end review of my reading accomplishments, and the first thing that popped into my head was, "Wow, this was kind of a 'blah' year." I didn't read as much as I did the year before, for one thing, and for another, much of what I read didn't really give me much satisfaction. Having made that cheery assessment, here are my picks for my selected categories.

Best Discoveries - In some ways, this was a non-fiction year for me. I read three non-fiction books (well, ok, I'm not finished with one yet), which is more than usual. Two of those nonfiction books - actually, the first book I read during the year and this last one - are what I am considering to be the best books I just "happened onto" this year: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs , and The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum.

Saddest Disappointment - The Serpent Never Sleeps by Scott O'Dell. I had such high hopes this was going to be great historical fiction, but honestly, it just felt flat to me.

Favorite Classic - One of the high points of my reading year was going back and re-reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. For years, I've been telling myself it's one of my absolute favorites, but I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe I was falling prey to "books were better in the good ol' days when I was a teen" thinking - but, nope. It really is one of my absolute favorites.

Favorite Love Story - That would have to be The Witch of Blackbird Pond, too. I read a couple of other romantic novels (The Chataine's Guardian by Robin Hardy, and Harper's Bride by Alexis Harrington), but neither one really made my heart go flutter.

Favorite Historical Fiction - Same song, third verse. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Although...the real winner of this category is actually Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. It's the only book I read all year that I couldn't put down.

Greatest Reading Accomplishment - I finally read The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnon Rawlings! I don't know why I got so bogged down in it. I also feel that making it all the way through Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott was a real show of perseverance (or stubbornness....).

Biggest Failure - Blood Reaction by D.L. Atha. I'm just a scaredy-cat.

Favorite Re-Read - I bet you're thinking The Witch.... nope, this one was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. I kind of skipped around in it some, but I eventually pieced it all together, so I'm counting it.

Once Is Enough (Books I Probably Won't Ever Read Again) - That could be several on this year's list, but the one that would top the list, I guess, is Page from a Tennessee Journal by Francine Thomas Howard.

Books I Thought Would Be Amazing But Were Just So-So - I really enjoyed The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner, so I expected the sequel, The Silver Blade, would also be a good read. It was all right, but just all right.

Books I Thought Wouldn't Be Much But Were Actually Good Stuff - I was pleasantly surprised by two books this year. First, The Year of Living Biblically had more depth than I had expected (I thought it would be a collection of cheap jokes about religion), and secondly, I actually enjoyed The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (although I had to take a HUGE dose of suspension of disbelief with it).

Books I Plan to Read - I didn't read ANY of the books I planned to read in 2011. Total failure. I'm not even making a list this year. I have a box of books I gave myself for Christmas (ha) that I hope I will get to read in the coming year, but who knows? I just hope to have a better year with my reading, both in terms of doing more of it, and in terms of reading more books that will excite and inspire me. I need it.

I Do Love a Good Academic Study

2011-12-30T10:01:00.001-06:00

One of the scenes in my book takes place at a Christmas party, and I always felt a little unsure that I had portrayed the scene in historically correct fashion. I knew from a basic Google search that Christmas as we know it didn't really start to take shape until the 1820s, which is the time frame for my story. However, those changes started in the big northeastern cities, so I'm sure it would have taken awhile for them to filter down to the South (specifically Nashville). So...what was Christmas like in the South in 1823?

To help me in my research, I found a book called The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum. I found what I needed for my story relatively quickly (and I'm not going to go into what that was in this post - you'll just have to wait and read the book someday, ha ha), but I became fascinated by the book and decided to read the whole thing.

What I find intriguing about this book is that it shows how an institution we take so much for granted -- Christmas -- was once completely different, and in fact, was created to be the way it is now, for specific purposes to benefit the higher classes in society. Nissenbaum makes a pretty convincing argument for his thesis, that Christmas was overhauled to go from the "season of misrule" to being a home-centered, child-centered, commercial holiday to reduce the threat of harm to property and the annoyance of the ways the lower classes celebrated the season. Most of what we think of as time-honored Christmas traditions apparently came about as part of this campaign.

I love to think about how different our world was only 200 years ago. At the turn of the 19th century, people were apparently quite rowdy! Celebrations of Christmas had for centuries been more like our Halloween, in which groups of people (usually young men, apparently, and specifically, servants or working class people) came to the homes of the landowners and demanded (through wassail songs) food and drink, with a veiled threat if none was forthcoming. ("Now bring us a figgy pudding," anyone?) Nissenbaum recounts some examples of how the tradition carried over into the "New Country." As the economics of American society changed and people were no longer "attached" to specific landowners, Christmas wassailing evolved into a tradition of bands of young, lower-class men roaming the streets, drinking and making as much noise as possible. Of course, "respectable" middle-class/upper-class people like Clement Clark Moore and John Pintard saw this as a threat, and thus began the move to re-invent Christmas.

I won't detail everything I've learned from Nissenbaum's book, but let me just say every night as I'm reading I have an "ah-ha!" moment. One of the most entertaining has to do with the reason my husband and I (both of us teachers) are getting a Christmas break. Apparently, young scholars (male, of course, since girls didn't go to school) had a practice of "barring out" the schoolmaster during the Christmas season - yes, they literally nailed themselves into the schoolroom and kept the schoolmaster out so they could have a period of several days in which they partied in the schoolhouse. Nissenbaum doesn't say that's why we have Christmas vacations from school, but it doesn't take a huge leap of speculation to say someone, somewhere, decided "Why fight it? Let's just suspend school for a couple of weeks during the Christmas season."

I love that kind of stuff!

My Best Christmas Gifts

2011-12-26T10:58:00.001-06:00

(Has it really been nearly a month since my last post? December has whizzed past in a blur of papers to grade, gifts to find and wrap, concerts and parties to attend, food to cook - finally, Christmas is over and I have time to sit and catch my breath.)

I guess it's not easy to find gifts for me. When asked what I wanted for Christmas, all I could think of that I really wanted was a little stainless steel pot to warm the milk for my faux coffee (oh, and a gift card to get books for my Kindle, ha ha). But my husband didn't think that would be quite enough. I did get my little saucepan, but he also gave me two other items that are tops on my list of "favorite gifts" - an 8G flash drive and a laptop fan/chiller. Why do I think these are such great gifts? Because it means he's encouraging me to keep writing.

When I opened the flash drive, he said, "You can use it for just your books - don't put anything else on it, just your books." What's great about that is that at this point, I only have ONE book to put on it. There is a substantial bit of a first draft for another, and ideas and bits and pieces of others, but I've never really organized them. By giving me this flash drive, he's telling me to get professional about this writing thing.

He couldn't know this, of course, but his gift came at the perfect time. I've decided to forget about querying my "non-commercial" novel at this point. Instead, I'm going to focus on writing more, and when I have three or four that are ready to go, I'm going to publish them myself. Ann Turnbull sent me a link to a blog by writer Catherine Czerkawska, which had a post entitled, "Some Thoughts About Literary Agents" that was quite enlightening and encouraging (as were the comments to the post). As one of the commenters (Linda Gillard) said,

What I learned from that experience (which threw me out into the professional wilderness for years) was that the book was/is my property. It had its own identity and integrity and it still had that, even if no one wanted to publish it (and no one did.)

It's a little frightening to think of walking out on the tightrope without the security of someone to "validate" the integrity of my story, but it's also exciting and empowering. Now I can get back to why I like to write in the first place - discovering the characters, playing with plot, doing the research - instead of worrying those first 10 pages and the query letter to death in hopes they'll stand out of the slushpile. I'm going to go back and fix the first scene of my finished novel so it suits me. I had tickered with it, trying to follow the advice of agent blogs to make it "grab" readers right away, and I felt that I was trying to cram a foot into a pointy-toed pump when it really belonged in a moccasin. No more of that. I will trust myself.As another commenter said,

I say, the hell with fear. Let's just take a deep breath and dive in. Let's create the change we want to see.

A good way to end one year, and start another, don't you think?

This Is So Cool!

2011-11-29T21:21:00.001-06:00

Apparently, my daughter has been studying the US Civil War at school this quarter. Tonight the school put on a "literacy night" in which all the activities related to some aspect of the war. We looked at dioramas and she tried "shooting" with a rubber band, and we ate real hardtack one of the classes had baked. The evening wrapped up with the girls' choir singing a medley of Civil War-era songs. Overall, it was a pleasant evening.

The cool part came on the way home, though. Somehow, she got started telling me about a writing assignment she had (or was it maybe just something she's doing on her own?). She is writing a story about Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy. The story is action-packed. My daughter detailed what she has written up to now (with dialogue and everything), and then she outlined where she plans to take the story. She talked about trying to be historically accurate, and we decided handcuffs wouldn't work since Belle is going to use a soldier's sword to cut her bonds and be able to escape.

It was fun to listen to her. I already think she has a real talent for creating voice and mood (she takes great pride in her ability to write description). Tonight, though, she seemed to have a better concept of plot than ever before. And her Belle Boyd character is really a go-getter! : )

Maybe she'll be published some day....

A Quick Study in Creating Empathy

2011-11-19T14:30:00.001-06:00

I was thinking some more about my post of the other day, and I wondered if perhaps I wasn't over-reacting a bit in thinking I was so disappointed by the ending of Page from a Tennessee Journal. I decided to do some examination of the area that seemed to be the major problem: my lack of investment in the characters' emotional lives. To do this, I thought it would be most appropriate to compare a scene from Page to a scene in a book with characters I did care about. I chose Ann Turnbull's Alice in Love and War, comparing Alice Newcombe and Page's Eula Mae McNaughton. There is a scene in each book in which each woman suspects that the man she loves and has devoted herself to may be less than faithful. Of course, it's not a perfect comparison; Eula Mae is the wife who is being wronged, while Alice is the "other woman." But I thought it would be as close as anything I could find, and I want to be fair.

Warning: This is going to be a LONG post because I need to quote some passages from the books to make the comparison.

First, I'll post the section from Page. To set the context, Eula Mae is at a prayer dinner to mark the beginning of the tobacco planting season, and she's working with her sisters-in-law to get the dinner ready. One of them has dropped a pretty heavy hint that Eula Mae's husband may be the father of a sharecropper's unborn baby. This section gives Eula's reaction.

“I don’t believe that hired man was there long enough togive anybody a baby, do you, Eula Mae?” Belle swept past her.

Eula tried to make her feet move. There had to be somemistake. The woman…what was her name…couldn’t be pregnant, not if her husbandhadn’t come home. Every imaginable thought poured into her head, but only onestuck to the inside of her brain like honey to a hive. She had to get homeright now.

As she clicked the harness moving her horse faster, Eula’sbuckboard bounced on a rut in the lane. She could barely remember how she hadgotten this far. She recalled stumbling out of Fedora’s kitchen and mumblingsomething about forgetting her corn bread and she had to return homeimmediately to retrieve it. As she passed the stand of trees near her barn, shepeered at the sky. The sun, a shade past its peak, told her it must be halfpast one. She had just missed the onslaught of men coming out of the fields andinto the Thornton yard to begin the prayer dinner. She thought she spotted ReverendHawkins as she made her hasty retreat, but she really couldn’t be sure. Shepulled the buckboard in front of the barn. Without unharnessing the animal,Eula led him to the horse trough filled with water and ran into her ownkitchen. Frantically, she reached for her journal.

(skip 5 paragraphs)

The wooziness increased, and Eula felt the bile rise to herthroat. The grandfather clocked in her parlor bonged two. She had never laiddown in the middle of the afternoon because of sickness in all of her marriedyears, not even when she was racked with the fever. But maybe, just this once,getting off her feet might help her put that imagination of hers to rest. Herfather had always told her that imagination in a woman was not only unnecessarybut a dangerous thing. Eula eased herself on top of the coverlet, not caringthat her shoes carried the dirt and dust of Ben Roy’s backyard on them. The roomfelt warm though the window was opened wide to let in the mild,new-rose-scented May afternoon. She put her hands to the side of her head topush out the thoughts that no decent woman should carry. If she was really agood wife to her husband, she should be able to come up with the real reasonfor the short supplies, the missing money, and Alex’s peculiar behavior overthe planting.

(skip 2 more paragraphs)

Maybe if she closed her eyes for just a moment, these devil-placed thoughtsmight fade away and make room for the true answer. Somehow she knew that everReverend Hawkins couldn’t help cleanse her mind. She had to pray directly tothe Lord for forgiveness for thinking the unbelievable.

Next, let's look at a section from Alice in Love and War. Alice has run away from home to follow a soldier who is in the king's army. She's been with him for several months, but the fighting is about to be suspended for winter, and Alice is unsure of what's going to happen now.

But he didn’t seem eager to go up, as he usually would be. He lit his pipe, and they stayed in theparlor, surrounded by damp, steaming clothes, slopped beer and loud drunkenvoices until Alice was so weary she could no longer stand, but sagged againsthim. Even then he merely searched out a stool for her, and continued to standand puff and his pipe and occasionally frown or stare into the distance. Alicefelt unable to reach him.

At last the parlor began to empty. Most of the men werebilleted in surrounding cottages and farms, and went out.

“I need to rest—to sleep,” Alice pleaded.

Robin nodded then, knocked out his pipe on the fireplace and– almost reluctantly, she felt – led her up two flights of narrow stairs to theattics. There were others sleeping there, but Robin had found them a space in alittle side room where they could be alone. It was warm from the rising heat ofthe fire downstairs, and with their layered blankets and outer clothes overthem they were cosy enough.

“This is good,” she said, snuggling close to him. “Youalways find good places for us.”

She knew it was because of his way with women – even busyinnkeepers’ wives, or frosty women like her aunt.

He kissed her forehead. “Yes. You’ll be safe here."

“I’ll be safe?” She searched his eyes in the darkness,suddenly afraid, as she’d been at Tor Farm when he said the army was moving on.

He rolled away from her and lay on his back. “I’m goinghome, Alice. I’ve been given leave—“

“Home?” Her breath came short. “When?”

“Tomorrow. I meant to tell—“

“But – when will you be back?”

There was a silence – and she knew. She knew he would bethere for the entire winter and would not return until the army was on the moveagain.

(skip 6 paragraphs of dialogue)

It’s all planned, she thought. He’s been planning thisawhile, and never told me. Why won’t he take me to his home? And where is his home? He had never told her thename of the place where he lived, only that it was near Oxford.

(skip 10 paragraphs of dialogue)

She wanted to believe him. And when he began to kiss andcuddle her, his touch was so gentle, and the smell and feel of him so familiar,that she thought he must love her; it must be true. And yet she lay awake forhours afterward, thinking, and worrying, and wishing she had Nia to turn to foradvice. She suspected that Robin was also awake, but he gave no sign. Tomorrow,she thought, I’ll insist he gives me an address to send to if I should needhim. I’ll make him write in in myfather’s book. The decision comforted her, and at last she fell asleep.

So...the first thing I notice is that Alice uses dialogue to communicate much of what is happening, while Page uses narrated action. Of course, Alice has Robin to interact with, and Eula is alone. But that dialogue/narration difference carries over to the way the characters' thoughts are communicated, too. We don't see Eula's thoughts, only that they aren't acceptable to her. "Every imaginable thought poured into her head, but only one stuck to the inside of her brain like honey to a hive. She had to get home.” – “But maybe, just this once, getting off her feet might help her put that imagination of hers to rest.” – “She put her hands to the side of her head to push out the thoughts that no decent woman should carry.”

What, exactly, are those thoughts that poured into her head? What are the "thoughts that no decent woman should carry"? I can guess what they are, but I don't know, really. Compare that to Alice's thoughts:

“It’s all planned, she thought. He’s been planning this awhile, and never told me. Why won’t he take me to his home? And where is his home?” – “Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll insist he gives me an address to send to if I should need him. I’ll make him write in in my father’s book.”

We hear the specific content of Alice's thoughts, which lets us get to know her as a person. We can see exactly what she's concerned about. It makes Alice more real to me.

I guess it is related to something from interpersonal communication class. Research shows that we tend to like people who self-disclose. I suppose that is because the person is saying, "I trust you enough to tell you something personal about myself," and we reciprocate that trust by liking the person. Throughout the quoted passage, Alice lets us know how vulnerable she feels. She doesn't come out and say, "I feel vulnerable," but we can tell by the way she is so sensitive to Robin's lack of attention to her that she fears he will leave her. For me, at least, that makes me feel truly sorry for her, because I've been there and I know how it feels. Poor girl.

Eula, on the other hand, keeps us at a distance. She doesn't want us to know what she's thinking - she doesn't even want to know, herself, what's she's thinking. I feel sorry for her, sure, but in a very external way. It's the difference between watching someone on TV who is suffering from some disease and watching your friend suffer from that disease.

Oops, here we are again - I'm ranting about "telling" vs. "showing," aren't I? But it matters. It matters a lot.

If you are still with me at this point, bless you!

I Feel Ripped Off

2011-11-18T21:47:00.001-06:00

Reading is an act of investment. The reader puts his/her time and mental/emotional resources into a story, hoping in the end to get something - insight into life, historical knowledge, emotional satisfaction, maybe just simple entertainment and escape. When the payoff doesn't seem worth the investment, the result is disappointment. Trust me--it happened to me tonight. I finished Page from a Tennessee Journal by Francine Thomas Howard and my immediate reaction was, "Really?? I spent all those evenings reading this book and putting up with its flaws, and THAT'S how the story ends????"

(There will be multiple spoilers in this discussion, so if you don't want to know them, don't read any further.)

First, a quick summary. The story is set in Tennessee in 1913, when white farmers "hired" black sharecroppers to raise and harvest the tobacco crop. The story is told from the viewpoints of four characters -- Annalaura Welles and her husband, John (the sharecroppers), and Alex McNaughton (the farmer) and his wife, Eula May. When the story begins, John Welles has, by all appearances, abandoned Annalaura and their four children (he's actually gone to Nashville to try to earn enough money to buy their own land so they can get out of the sharecropping system). Annalaura is having a difficult time feeding the family, and she doesn't know how she and the children (all under the age of 12) are going to get in the tobacco crop. One day when Alex McNaughton is making his rounds to check on the sharecroppers, he sees Annalaura with her skirt hiked up as she works in the field, and he is overcome with lust for her. Eventually, she agrees to become his mistress in exchange for food (and, as it turns out, other items like shoes and toys) for her children. Annalaura quickly becomes pregnant, and near the end of her pregnancy, her husband John suddenly returns, setting off a crisis. John is determined to kill Alex, Alex is determined to either run John out of town or kill him, Annalaura delivers the baby prematurely, and it is too white to pass as the child of a black man. Alex, who is delighted to have a baby, gets Annalaura to promise to move in to his house as a hired girl, but when John comes to take her and his family away from Tennessee, she goes with him instead on a train headed to Chicago. In the last chapter of the book, John gives her a choice -- she can go to Chicago, where chances are pretty good that Alex can find her, or the family can get off the train in a town before they get to Chicago and start over. He will forgive her infidelity and raise Alex's baby as his own. He goes back to his seat to allow her to make her decision. And here's how the book ends:

Her hand began a slow slide down the page. A raised place in the paper stopped her. She eased her eyes open and stared down at the letters on the smoothed-out sheet [which is the train schedule]. Her answer had lain there all along. The pain in her heart eased. Choose, said John. Choose me, Alex had said. But she had a choice neither man had given her. Annalaura stroked Lottie's arm and settled into sleep, her mind at peace. All of her tomorrows belonged in only one set of hands -- her own.

SO WHAT DID SHE DECIDE? Is she going to Chicago? Is she getting off the train early? Is she going to accept John back in her life or is she going to hope Alex comes for her? Or...is she going to dump both men and start over on her own? I can't tell. I don't think I'm too dense to get it. Or am I? Do you get it? If you do, please fill me in.

The thing is, this was a book that required quite an investment from me. I'm not going to go into everything that drove me nuts about it, but I will say there were several things that bothered me. For one thing, sometimes the story just didn't pass the "really?" test. Characters do things that are inconsistent. For example, Alex finds out John is back. He goes to try to talk his brother-in-law and some other men into running John Welles out of town, but the brother-in-law tells him the white men aren't going to do anything to rile up the sharecroppers at the beginning of tobacco season. Basically, he tells Alex the affair is over and he needs to go home to his wife. So Alex does, and he makes passionate love to her, and I thought he was going to let his obsession go. The next chapter, he's at the cabin Annalaura has gone to for refuge, and he helps her deliver their baby. It's the same night. To me, that didn't pass the test of reality. For one thing, how would he have found her in the middle of the night? It seemed like the author just want to have this "romantic" scene in which Alex gets to be the only one present at the birth of the baby.

Another example of the inconsistency is Annalaura's response to Alex. At the beginning of the book, she can't stand for him to touch her. When she finds out she's pregnant, she is distraught because she knows what it means in a racist society. But by the end of the book, the author wants us to believe Annalaura loves Alex. He's been gentle to her, etc., etc. I don't buy it, I'm sorry. I think if a powerful man took advantage of a woman the way Alex took advantage of Annalaura, she's not going to quickly come to love him. What he did to her was despicable--even if he did bring her a fancy coat.

Maybe you've already guessed the biggest problem I had with this novel. I didn't like any of the characters. I didn't sympathize with any of them. I didn't feel like I really connected with any of them. Part of that is because of the writing. I don't want to go into a lot of detail because this blog post is already long enough, but despite all the emotional trauma that these characters went through, the description of that trauma didn't draw me in and make me feel anything for the characters. Maybe that's a function of telling the story from the viewpoint of four different characters.

There was also just some clumsy writing, the kind of stuff that drives me nuts. For example, at the beginning of the book, there was an inordinate amount of description of the position of Annalaura's eye contact while she was in Alex's presence. I get the idea -- the author wanted to show that blacks had to be careful to "stay in their place." But I don't have to be hit over the head with an iron skillet to get it! Another example comes in the first scene when Annalaura's aunt is introduced; the text kept jumping back and forth between calling her "Becky" and "Rebecca." Please! Choose one and stick with it. Switching between the two names takes me out of the story for just the split second to say, "Oh, yeah, right--that's the aunt." Any time the narrative is broken, that's a bad thing, in my opinion.

Ok, so the book brought to light an ugly part of the South's history (the exploitation of black women by white men), and that's a story that should be told. But I wish the telling had been different.

I Can Handle the Truth! (or can I?)

2011-11-08T21:43:00.001-06:00

Last week, I entered a query contest sponsored by a literary agent, mainly because she promised to respond to every query with her honest reaction (hence the name of the contest and of this blog post). I thought it would be a good opportunity to get some feedback, especially since she promised to respond to them all (which is quite rare, in my experience with querying). So today I got her response, and she said she would pass on my book. I can't say I was surprised, and I wasn't upset. Actually, I was rather encouraged, because her reason for rejecting my query didn't have anything to do with the writing.

But I do become discouraged when I think about what was her reason. Here it is in her own words:

I'm not sure how commercial a historical with a western feel will be for YA.

In other words, she doesn't think my story would sell enough copies that publishers would think it is worth the financial investment to publish it. If publishers are going to sell historical, it's probably going to be about royalty (think Tudors) or some high-profile historical event (like the Salem witch trials). She's not saying my book about early pioneers wouldn't sell at all, just that it wouldn't make enough money. So she's not going to waste her time trying to pitch it to editors (and getting no money for her effort) when she could be pitching another paranormal series of some kind for teens, which would be more likely to earn her 15 percent cut. Can't blame her for that, and I'm not bitter about it (really).

I'm not bitter, but I'm saddened a bit, as a reader as much as a writer. There's a piece of advice for writers that I see quoted frequently that says something to the effect of "write the book you would like to read. If you like it, there will be someone else who does." So that's what I've done - I wrote exactly the kind of thing I love to read. And now I hear from an agent that the kind of story I love to read isn't "commercial" enough, which means there will be less and less of it in the future.

With the end of the year coming up, I was thinking the other day about my year-end review of the books I've read in 2011. It struck me that there haven't been that many I've truly enjoyed. Let's see, off the top of my head I can think of three that I really got caught up in - The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, and The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner. Some of the others (including the one I'm reading right now, unfortunately) have been a real struggle to get through. I'm probably not going to make any friends here, but several of those I've struggled with (including the one I'm reading right now) have been self-published books. The problems I've come across are often things about the writing style that could have been taken care of with a good, tough editor - like the "sun-streaked hair" mentioned dozens of times in the romance novel I read last summer, or the sort of weird obsession with eye position in the book I'm currently reading (I'll talk about that another time). But self-published work usually doesn't get a pass through a good, tough editor. It's just too expensive to hire a freelance editor when you're probably going to barely make back enough to cover your basic costs (really, it is quite expensive - I've looked).

I guess my point is, if mainstream publishers aren't going to take a chance on historical fiction that falls outside of certain narrow parameters because it is too "niche," does that mean I'm going to be stuck reading work that is two or three drafts away from polished? That doesn't make me look forward to my future reading, to be perfectly honest. It also discourages me even more when I think that teens won't have choices to read good historical fiction. It's sort of like shopping for clothes when you are a "woman"; do women older than me really like those pantsuits with the big, gaudy, beaded flowers on the top, or do they buy them just because that's all that's available in their size? Do the majority of teens really want only vampire stories, or is that what they buy because it's what is in the bookstore? I don't know.

I guess I can comfort myself by remembering Ann Turnbull's next book in the Quaker series is supposed to be coming out next spring (I hope that's right), Nancy Dane has the last book in her Civil War series set to come out in 2012, and I haven't yet read the sequel to Chains. Those are things to look forward to. And I suppose I should quit being so picky and critical about everything I read. (But that sounds like settling.....)

NaSSMo for Me!

2011-11-01T18:11:00.001-05:00

Today marks the beginning of National Novel-Writing Month, in which people will attempt to write a 50,000-word novel. Because of my day job, I never really think seriously about trying, although every November 1, I rather longingly read through the posts of friends who are giving it a go. This year, though, I decided I am actually going to try to completely write something in this month - my chapter for the university's self-study report.

To me, this is an undertaking as massive as a 50,000-word novel, mainly because it's not going to be nearly as fun as getting to create characters and plot. Another intimidating factor is the sheer amount of research that has to go into creating this document - some of which I've been doing, some of which I am depending on other people to do. This chapter has to collate and, more importantly, evaluate where the university stands in terms of its support of the "acquisition, discovery, and application of knowledge."

Ugh. But you know what? I'd really (1000x) prefer to ruin this month by writing this report than be stuck doing it during my Christmas break. So.....NaSSMo, here I go! Tonight, I will review my outline and see if there is at least one small section I can get started on without my research notes here at hand.

Maybe I should offer myself an incentive for getting the draft finished by Nov. 30. Any ideas?

A Halloween Treat

2011-10-31T22:49:00.000-05:00

You are probably expecting something chocolate or something pumpkin, not what I ended up making for supper tonight. It was the ultimate of comfort food - Chicken a la King.

This is the result of a recipe "train of thought." It started when I pulled a bag of pumpkin out of the freezer over the weekend and began looking for a recipe to make some kind of muffin or coffee cake I could have with my faux coffee (I found a REALLY good one, btw). In the same magazine (actually on the same page), I found a recipe for potato scones, and the description said the scones would be good "with creamed dishes," which led me to remember I had once seen the recipe for Chicken a la King in my old Betty Crocker cookbook and thought, "I ought to make that sometime." It was good. The whole family approved. And it's really easy, which is definitely a plus.

But the real star of the evening was those potato scones. I know, sounds weird. The recipe calls for one cup of leftover mashed potatoes. I just happened to have one cup of leftover mashed potatoes in the refrigerator which I needed to use up before they started growing fuzzy green spots.

Again, the recipe was an easy one, actually no harder than making biscuits. And they were so good! They were light and yet had body. They were moist, not dry like biscuits. They made a perfect base for the Chicken a la King, and yet I believe they will also be quite tasty in the morning with a dab of homemade strawberry jam. Yum...that will make a nice side for the faux coffee...

It's Not You, It's Me

2011-10-28T10:46:00.001-05:00

I read something not long ago that suggested writers should read something outside their preferred genre once in a while, as a tool to help hone their eye for techniques such as characterization and plot development. That advice came at a time when I was open to hearing it, for one of my husband's former students (D.L. Atha) had written a novel, and although the novel is in a genre (horror/paranormal) that is totally not my thing, I wanted to support her. So I bought the novel, Blood Reaction, for my Kindle and intended to pick it up as soon as I finished Ivanhoe.

The story is about a woman who battles a vampire to save her life and the life of her daughter. I have to admit, I really felt some apprehension when I thought about reading it. For one thing, the reviews I saw said the vampire in Atha's book is a departure from the current mold of vampires and harks back to the evil roots of the creatures. For another, Atha is a doctor, and the promotional materials also pointed out that she used her knowledge of the body and medicine to create the protagonist's way to overcome the vampire. A bit squeamish, I am. A few years ago, I quit reading Allen Eckert's The Frontiersmen--even though I'm really into that genre and time period--when I got to the part describing the torture the Indians inflicted on their captives. The little bit I read of that description still bothers me, as does a student speech I heard YEARS ago about various means of torture people have used throughout history.

Not only am I squeamish, I also have quite an active imagination and am rather easily spooked. Yes, I'm one of those people who checks behind the shower curtain if I come home and find I've accidentally left the door unlocked. Heck, I got spooked the other night just listening to my son tell about the movie Insidious. My friends in college took great advantage of this, including the time I (because of social pressure) went to see Poltergeist with a group of friends. My roommate Beth hid under the bunk beds after we got back and grabbed my ankle as I walked past--let's just say it's a good thing I was returning from the bathroom, not on my way to the bathroom!

So I started Blood Reaction last night. Although I have a three-chapter rule (I give a book three chapters to capture me before I give up on it), I think I'm going to make an exception this time. The book starts with Annalice, the protagonist, preparing to spend a week totally alone in her big, old, two-story house in the middle of nowhere, eight miles down a one-lane country road. Her daughter has gone to spend the week with Annalice's mother, and Annalice takes advantage of her alone time to go for a horse ride in the woods. But she loses track of time, and it gets dark before she gets back home. And she can't shake the feeling someone is watching her....Then when she is finally inside and "safe," she hears thumps upstairs. No one is there, but one window is unlocked....

Shivers!!! I kept telling myself not to let my mind go too deeply into it because I really didn't want to start thinking about Annalice's situation when I woke up at 2:00 a.m. So, while I do want to be supportive of Atha's book, I just don't want to have her scary, evil vampire roaming around in the cocktail party going on in my brain (see this post to understand that analogy). Maybe someone reading this blog is braver than I am, and maybe that someone will give the book a read. I'll put a link to the Amazon page below. If you are one of those people who like to be scared (and apparently there are plenty of you, given the earnings of horror movies!), here's your chance to discover a new author. To help you decide, here are a couple of reviews:

A review from Fabulosity Nouveau
Review by Bunnycates

As for me, I think I'll find something nice and definitely non-scary to read - maybe it's time to revisit Winnie-the-Pooh! : )

Amazon page for Blood Reaction (Kindle version)

May I Have a Word with You, Sir Walter Scott?

2011-10-26T23:07:00.000-05:00

Dear Sir Walter Scott,

For the past several months I've been reading your Robin Hood/Richard the Lion-Hearted adventure, Ivanhoe. I read it when I was in high school and had positive memories, so since it was a free classic for Kindle, I thought I'd check it out again. It was still a fun adventure story, but I have a few points of contention to discuss with you.

First, for a book named Ivanhoe, the character of Ivanhoe certainly wasn't in the story very much. I first noticed this when he was injured in the tournament at Ashby. There was the dramatic moment in which he fainted from his wounds at Rowena's feet, and then.....he disappeared for a great many chapters. The same thing happened again later, when the castle at Torquilstone was captured and burned. Ivanhoe was rescued by the Black Knight, and then.....he disappeared again for several chapters. This was disappointing to me, because I liked Ivanhoe (just as you wanted me to). He had a very interesting conflict - he has (in the past) turned his back on his Saxon heritage to fight with King Richard and now he's back. Will he be reconciled to his father? Then there is also the love triangle with Ivanhoe, Rowena, and Rebecca. Will Ivanhoe marry his long-time but forbidden love interest Rowena, or will he fall in love with the beautiful, talented, kind, and brave--but most definitely forbidden--Jewess Rebecca? Those are questions packed with dramatic possibility, and while they are answered in the story, they don't get the play they could have, because so much of the story is taken up by the story of Locksley/Robin Hood and by the treachery of Prince John and his coterie of knight conspirators. That's too bad, because Ivanhoe is a very (potentially) appealing character who should have been a much bigger part of this whole story.

Second, you certainly took the long way around in your descriptions of the action at times. Including the lyrics to the death song of Ulrica? Was that really necessary? There were several times you interrupted the story to give the lyrics of some song a character was singing. OK, I know you were writing in the nineteenth century and there was no such thing as television and the internet, so people needed a different kind of entertainment than we have today. I suppose there was a great deal more patience for such departures from the plot in your day. But I have to confess -- it made me have irritated feelings toward your book by the time Rowena was singing the death song for Athelstane....

But perhaps my biggest point of contention is your total sell-out at the climax of the novel. Brian de Bois-Gilbert was a fascinating character; although he is despicable early on, at some point I found myself actually feeling some sympathy for him. I suppose that happened when he was trying to convince Rebecca to accept him after he had kidnapped her and brought her to Torquilstone. Granted, that's a pretty dastardly thing to do; so why did I end up sort of liking him? (Or does that just make me weird?) When he visited Rebecca after sentence had been pronounced on her, I felt great sympathy for the conflict he found himself in - does he give up ambition and power to save the woman he loves, or does he keep quiet and watch her burn as a witch? Wow, what a struggle! While it appears he's choosing ambition, even at the point of no return, so to speak, he's still battling himself. When he rides up to Rebecca as she's sitting by the stake where they plan to burn her and proposes that she jump on the back of his horse and ride away with him, I found myself almost hoping she would do it.

But then, how does all this great conflict end? (Spoiler alert, if you care) He has a heart attack and dies while he's riding against the still-wounded and weak Ivanhoe, who has come forward to be Rebecca's champion. A heart attack????? Really, that is just too coincidental. It's not even satisfying. I mean, sure, he's dead and Ivanhoe won and Rebecca is vindicated and free, but.....a heart attack? It was just a real letdown.

I'm not sorry I went back and re-read your book, but I must say I'm glad to be finished.

It's a Keeper

2011-10-22T11:47:00.002-05:00

We had our first frost/freeze this week. This time, I took the weatherman's warnings to heart and went out to strip the tomatoes off the only garden plant that survived the difficult summer -- a grape tomato plant that had been an "extra" and went in a large flower pot beside the swimming pool. The plant grew to be HUGE and was covered with tomatoes about the size of my thumb or smaller. Unfortunately, most of those tomatoes were green. I say "unfortunately" because the only things I knew to do with green tomatoes are make relish (which my family just doesn't eat) or fry them (which I've never had success doing). But unwilling to let them go to waste, I picked them all and got two 5-quart buckets full of a mix of ripe, nearly ripe, and green tomatoes.

Then I consulted "The Google" (as my sister calls it) and found a recipe for green tomato soup. Now, allow me a little side story here. We all have those days when we're tired of our jobs and fantasize about what else we might be doing, right? Unlikely as it might seem, my husband and I have a fantasy that we could run a restaurant that specializes in soup. I can see it in my head - we would buy an old house with "character" and fill it with flea market furniture so it has an eclectic atmosphere. The menu would be nothing but soup and the stuff one might like to eat with soup - cornbread, breadsticks, crackers. Maybe very simple sandwiches and cookies. And coffee drinks (although neither of us drinks real coffee - but this is a fantasy, right! Ha ha). There would be some soups that would be staples of the menu, but one of the attractions of this restaurant would be the "daily special" - some kind of soup that is different. So I'm always on the lookout for recipes I could use in my fantasy soup kitchen someday.

Enough of that. I tried the green tomato soup recipe with a little apprehension as to whether the family would like it - I mean, green tomatoes? Soup? But it turned out to be excellent! It was also very simple to make. It has ham, a mix of green and red tomatoes, and a jalapeno pepper, and that's about it. (The red stripes in the picture are skins from the red grape tomatoes - I probably should have peeled them, although they didn't detract from the flavor or texture of the soup, and hey, they add that fiber we all need....) It was just perfect with a big chunk of fresh cornbread crumbled in. Even my daughter declared the recipe to be a "keeper." So this weekend I'm going to chop and freeze all the additional green tomatoes so we can have another batch (or three) this winter.

Maybe someday you can stop by the fantasy soup kitchen and have yourself a big bowl of hot green tomato soup!

An Update on Dobby

2011-10-11T07:10:00.002-05:00

Here's the scene I found Saturday evening a week ago:

Two complete wash loads of jeans had been pulled off the line, and I knew immediately who was to blame -- Dobby. Fortunately, none of the jeans were damaged; he apparently didn't chew on them, he just pulled them off the line. I guess he couldn't resist the legs that were gently kicking in the breeze. At least he was appropriately contrite.

Last Saturday, I tried again. I mean, the weather is perfect right now for drying stuff on the clothesline, and why should I have to use the electricity and spend the money to run the jeans through the dryer because of a dog? So I hung out the first load and then went in the house, determined to keep an eye on them and to teach Dobby a lesson if he pulled them down.

I was opening a window to let in the wonderful fresh air when I saw Dobby coming toward the clothesline, and I knew by the look on his face he was getting ready to have some fun. So I yelled at him out the window, in one of those horribly threatening "Mom" voices. Of course, there was nothing I could do - I was in the house and he was outside; if he wanted to jerk the jeans down, he could have done it before I got out there.

But he didn't. He gave me a guilty look, then went off in the other direction. And he hasn't touched anything on the clothesline since. He may be an annoying puppy, but he's not dumb!

By the way, some of you may be wondering why I call this "The Musing Reader," and then talk about nothing but dogs and food instead of books. I am reading, just not what I would prefer to read. I'm on the committee that is preparing the accreditation self-study report for my school, and that means I'm looking at all kinds of annual reports and such. Bleah. I'm also teaching News Writing this semester, and wow, what a lot of grading if it's going to be done right. By the time I get in bed to read, it's either too late or I'm too tired. I am trying to plow through Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. I don't mean to imply that Ivanhoe is dull. I'm enjoying it. But it certainly is different to read something in nineteenth-century prose (which has LOTS of telling) than to read the fast-paced prose of the 21st century. I'm about 70% finished, according to my Kindle, and I'm really anxious to move on to a couple of books I've acquired in the past month. But it may take me the rest of the year to get through this one book....

This Dog Story May Not End Well

2011-09-26T22:37:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, I put up a couple of posts about our good old dog, Tracy, who disappeared and then mysteriously reappeared. At the end of the post telling about her return, I noted that there seemed to be a new dog hanging around that someone must have dumped on us. Well, it was true. We've become the owners of a big, active puppy - willing or not.

Obviously, this dog had been abused, because any time we raised our hand or our voice, he would cower. He also had a really strange mark on his side; it looked like someone had cut or branded an "X" about the size of a dime into his hide. He was so pitiful, he made me think of Dobby the house-elf from Harry Potter, in his dirty pillowcase, so that's what we named him - Dobby.

Dobby quickly got over his fear of abuse. Like his namesake, he has become almost obnoxious in his friendliness (remember, Dobby the house-elf nearly killed Harry several times before actually saving him!). When we get home, Dobby is there waiting, ready to flail us with his bullwhip of a tail. It's gratifying, in a way, to see what a difference a tiny bit of positive attention has made in him.

However....Dobby likes to chew. In the picture above, Dobby is posing with some of his early handiwork - a chair cushion he got from the tree house and absolutely shredded. Since that time, he has gone on to loftier missions.....

like chewing up one of our daughter's barn boots....

frequently scattering the trash...

and worst of all, TOTALLY annihilating a cardboard box and its contents that had been sitting in the garage for YEARS.

What gets me about Dobby's destruction is that it is so complete. He's like the atomic bomb of dogs. All that's left of the box is small bits approximately 2x3 inches (he did more damage after this picture was taken because we simply didn't have time to clean it up that week; it IS football season, after all).

I try to remind myself he's a puppy and puppies chew. Tracy was a chewer. She once tore a hole in a quilt hanging on the clothesline, and so far Dobby hasn't touched any of the laundry. (So far.....) But we're older people now, and we were used to a nice, calm, old dog....AARRRGGGGHHHH!

It brings to mind the beginning of Old Yeller, when the dog first shows up and gets in the smokehouse and goes swimming in the drinking water with Little Arliss. Old Yeller turned out to be worth the trouble; I can only hope the same will be true of Dobby -- and that we have the patience to wait for it to happen!

(By the way, PLEASE spay or neuter your pet!!!! This makes the fifth dog we've had dumped on us over the 14 years we've lived in this house. If a person isn't going to be responsible enough to take care of the offspring, he/she ought to be responsible enough to prevent any offspring. It's not fair to stick other people with a responsibility they didn't choose.....)

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Here's a Switch...

2011-09-20T21:57:00.000-05:00

In my last post about "Try It Out Tuesday," I said my husband likes just about anything I cook, and that I hadn't yet found something my daughter would eat. Well, tonight turned all that on its head!

I found a recipe for Three Cheese Stuffed Shells in an older Taste of Home magazine. This is the first time I've ever cooked with ricotta cheese, and it was sort of fun to make the filling and stuff the little limp pasta shells. I might have put in too much spaghetti sauce, but I thought it came out looking pretty well:

It was really, really rich! Two shells was almost more than I wanted. That might be one reason the hubby didn't like it - he spooned three shells out to start with. He said he doesn't like the texture of the ricotta.

The kids, however, did clear their plates, and when I asked if this was a recipe to keep, my daughter said, "Well, I don't want to have it every night." But she agreed it would be something we could put in the menu rotation.

The last thing I would say is, don't laugh at my fancy garlic bread! : )

A Case Study in "Feeling"

2011-09-17T10:52:00.000-05:00

Agent Mary Kole had an interesting post over at Kidlit.com this week in which she talked about a writer's number one objective: To make your reader feel. Her post made me think of a song I'm really liking right now exactly because I think it does such a good job of conveying feelings without hammering us over the head and telling us how the song's persona feels. We have to fill in the gaps - to feel it ourselves.

The song is Nothing by The Script, and I think it is the best song at portraying misery that I've heard in a long time - maybe ever. (Of course, The Script is an Irish band, and I joke that no one knows how to be miserable like the Irish.) (That is a joke - I love you, Irish!) Here's the video for the song:

The gist of the song is that a guy has broken up with his girlfriend (or been dumped, more likely) and his friends decide to "help" him by taking him out for drinks. After one too many, he decides he will call her and say he still loves her, which will solve everything, right? Except...all he hears on the other end of the line is nothing.

Cool enough as a setup for a song. But since I am excessively high in need for cognition (that's a joke for my Persuasion Theory students, should any of them be happening to read this), I couldn't leave it at that.

What makes the experience of the song richer than my little summary there is that we get to feel the misery this guy feels right along with him. Now, he never says in the song, "I am miserable." Instead, what we get are three types of evidence that help us draw the conclusion ourselves.

Number 1 - We get to listen to his thoughts. The very first words of the song set us up to see this state of mind: "Am I better off dead? Am I better off a quitter?" Someone who is thinking things like that obviously is not in a happy place, ha ha. Other lines show us how he's hoping against hope, that although reality tells him one thing, maybe something he can do this time will change it. Lines like "I know that I'm drunk, but I'll say the words, and she'll listen this time..." or "I know if I faced her face, she'll come to her senses," or "If she sees how much I'm hurting, she'll take me back for sure..." give us a sense of just how much this guy is deluding himself. And at the end of the song, he repeats the little refrain "I got nothing" several times. Gosh, I feel bad for the guy.

Number 2 - The physical things he's doing support the thought process. We are getting to hear his thoughts, but there's also physical evidence that this guy is miserable. Early in the song, before he's drunk, we see a contrast between the outer persona and his thoughts: "I'm smiling, but I'm dying, trying not to drag my feet." As the drinks take hold, though, his physical behavior starts to underscore his thinking: "I'm shouting your name all over town" (for just one example). We don't see everything he's doing, but only those things that contribute to the overall message: He's miserable.

Number 3 - We get to see the contrast between what other people are saying/doing and what's going on in his head. Throughout the song, there are several "They say" lines: "They say I'm better off now than I ever was with her"; "They say a few drinks will help me to forget her, but after one too many I know that I'll never"; "They all think it's crazy but to me it's perfect sense." That contrast helps to set up the fact that he's not seeing the world the same way as everyone else. We also see this in the way his friends are reacting to him: "My mates are all there, trying to calm me down...." And maybe most importantly, we are seeing how the former girlfriend reacts: "She said nothing. I wanted words but all I heard was nothing."
Taken as a package, those three elements all add up to give us a vivid picture of just what's going on in this guy's life, much more than simply saying, "He's miserable." That's a lesson I hope to take to my own writing.

(Of course, I know that much of the poignancy of a song has to do with the music and with the performance, both of which really underscore the message in this song. But I like words, and this song does a great job with its words.)

A Sense of Intimidation

2011-09-08T22:13:00.000-05:00

After finishing the final draft of Book One (which is called Dancing in the Checkered Shade, by the way), I was forced by the day job to take a couple of days off. Today I started reading the first draft of the followup, most of which was written while I was on sabbatical from the day job, from January-May 2010. I haven't allowed myself to look at that draft since that time, although I've thought about it quite a bit. As I remembered it, I had done a pretty darn good job, if I do say so myself.

Well....let's say there are some pretty darn good spots mixed in with some pretty mediocre spots. One thing I noticed immediately is the amount of "telling" -- yes! After all my grumping about that writing style on this blog! Fortunately, this is a first draft and I can fix that problem. But, wow, that will take some thinking and some real writing work. I also never completely finished the story, so I have to write the first draft of the last few chapters.

Overall, I am pleased with it as a beginning. It's really sort of funny - there are so many differences to DitCS (see, I even have an acronym!). For one thing, it was a lengthy struggle to cut DitCS down to a reasonable length; so far, this second book has 15 chapters (of probably 18) and fewer than 50,000 words. That's too short, really. I hope the conversion from "telling" to "showing" will help. I know it's going to be some work, but as one friend put it, it's "lovely" work.

To be honest, there is something else that intimidates me. The same friend asked me, "So what's next for DitCS?" Well....I don't know...... This friend has self-published two books, and she has encouraged me to do the same. That route does have some appeal, although I know I don't have the time to do the promotion needed to give the book a decent chance in the world. And a little part of me still would like to have an agent think it's good enough to request the full manuscript to read (although the mainstream publishing world has some disadvantages, like a short window of opportunity to "make it," that don't appeal to me at all). I don't know....I don't want to be famous, and I don't want to quit my day job (at least not today!). But...it would be kind of cool to have people reading about these characters and loving them as much as I love Will and Susanna, Kit and Nat, Laura and Almanzo, Hannah and Tice.....

A Sense of Accomplishment

2011-09-06T22:13:00.000-05:00

I may have mentioned at some point that I've been writing a novel. : ) This past Saturday morning, my husband and daughter went spelunking with a friend, and my son was sleeping in after a hard week of high school. So I decided to forego the work I brought home from school to spoil myself by a day of working on the edits for my book instead. Well, I became consumed with the task and ended up spending the entire Labor Day weekend editing (I did go to church, do laundry, and keep the family fed!). Last night around 10:00, I finally typed "The End" and closed the file with a sense that the book was finally finished

It's been a long process. I first had the idea for these characters about 25 years ago, but it wasn't until about seven years ago that I actually started writing. My first draft was 169,000 words, which is down to about 92,000 in the final draft. For a while I was stuck in the middle of the story, unable to explain why some of the scenes were included. But after "killing a few babies" (as the agent blogs call it), I feel satisfied that everything finally ties together into a tight plot package. For the first time, there's nothing I think I need to change.

Of course, I've heard authors say there is always something to change, even after the book is published. But at this moment, I feel pretty happy. And excited, because now I'm going to dive right back in to the first draft of the sequel to this book. That will be fun!

A quick update on "Try It Out Tuesday": We didn't try anything new for the main dish tonight because the kids had a practice meet for their cross country teams and weren't going to be home to eat. But I did try a new cookie recipe. It's called Orange Chocolate Drops. The story of how I got this recipe is kind of funny. You may remember I said I was going to let my daughter pick the new dish for this week since she didn't like the dishes the other two weeks. So Thursday evening of last week I mentioned to her that she needed to pick something out so I could get the ingredients needed. On Friday, she went to the school library and checked out a big, old cookbook. Then she and one of her friends looked through the book and picked out four recipes, including Five-Cheese Pasta (FIVE cheeses!!!????) made from scratch, not from a jar. This is a cookbook for REAL cooks. Yikes....

One of the four recipes was this cookie recipe. I'm not sure I like it much. I haven't eaten one of them yet (don't want to eat too close to bedtime), but they are sort of small and there weren't really very many (only 2 1/2 dozen) and they seem like they may be sort of dry. My son did try one, and he announced they are "not poisoned" (family joke - someone always has to try the cookies fresh out of the oven to be sure they are safe for everyone else). I'm not sure if that was an endorsement, ha ha.

"Try It Out Tuesday"

2011-08-30T22:04:00.000-05:00

This has absolutely nothing to do with reading or with writing, but my family is engaging on a little adventure, and I thought it might be fun to write about it. With school starting up, I made my annual resolution to make a menu since knowing what to cook for supper each night really helps to eliminate stress (and also cuts down on the grocery bill, and cuts down on the amount of food growing fuzzy white or black or green stuff in my refrigerator!). While I was writing out the first menu, I seemed to be planning for the same stuff as always. I was looking through a cookbook for a recipe and saw a picture of a Crab Louis Salad. "That looks good," I thought, then, "Why don't I make that?" And thus was born the idea for "Try It Out Tuesday."

Every Tuesday night this school year, we are going to try some entirely new recipe that we've never eaten before. My hope is to get some things I can add to the menu rotation -- and to experience some interesting new tastes. Last week, I did make the Crab Louis Salad (with imitation crab, of course - this IS Arkansas, after all). The guys in the family liked it really well; I was only so-so about it, but would eat it again. My daughter didn't eat hers at all.

Tonight we tried Irish Tacos, a recipe I found from an app on my phone (All Recipes Dinner Spinner). It was really simple to make, which is nice after a day at school. Basically, the taco is made of corned beef, coleslaw, and a simple yogurt sauce on a warmed tortilla. I used thin-sliced corned beef sandwich meat (I didn't want to invest in the $20 corned beef roast in case we didn't like it), which I cut into thin strips and warmed. The yogurt sauce called for fresh cilantro, which I think I would have liked in the dish, but I no longer have a cilantro plant thanks to the drought this summer. The sauce has a pretty aggressive taste on its own, and I was afraid at first that it would overpower the taco. However, when the three tastes were layered in the taco, they blended together nicely so that nothing was overpowering.

My husband and I both liked the tacos (of course, my husband is very easy to please; he claims it comes from growing up in a family of 12 children, lol). My son pronounced them "too sour"; my daughter took two bites and quit. I'm 0-for-2 with her on "Try It Out" night so far! Maybe I should have her pick next week's recipe....

Facing the "Ick" Factor

2011-08-24T22:57:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, I read an interesting blog post on Frances Hunter's American Heroes Blog that talked about William Clark and his two wives (sequential, not concurrent, by the way). Clark met the girls who became his wives when they were tweens (11 and 14, to be specific) and he was "just past 30," according to the blog. He eventually married the younger of the girls, Julia Hancock, when he was 37 and she was 16. As the blog author said, "...we may recoil with a certain ick factor today...."

The book I just finished had a similar "ick factor."

The book was The Chataine's Guardian by Robin Hardy, which is about a young princess whose father assigns a soldier as her guardian. The Chataine (Deidre) is 10 when the soldier (Roman) takes up his duty; he's 22. Over the course of the book, they fall in love and eventually marry. The first time in the story that there is an indication that Deidre and Roman will have a romantic relationship, I believe she was 12, which would have made him 24. I definitely felt the "ick" of the moment, even though I think Roman is an admirable character and an appealing romantic hero. I mean, that's like my daughter dating one of my students - ICK!

Today we would call a 28-year-old who dates a 16-year-old a pedophile (hey, I watch enough Law & Order: SVU to know, lol!). But as the blog post about William Clark points out, such marriages were nothing out of the ordinary throughout history. I also read Karen Cushman's novel Catherine Called Birdy, about a young girl who wants nothing to do with the marriage her father is arranging for her to a 40-year-old man for financial reasons. I suppose young wives would be preferred because they might have a longer time to produce an heir and because women had a shorter lifespan. It's not that far back into history when these May-December marriages were happening, either; William Clark married a woman 21 years younger only about 200 years ago. I wonder when the shift happened to having a man and woman be close to the same age when they marry. It would be interesting to find out. I bet it has something to do with economic conditions.

One reason I guess this issue caught my eye is because the relationship in my story borders on "ick." The main female character is 15, and the main male character is 21. Six years is not that much difference, but there have still been times when I thought, "He could go to jail if he did that today!"

Oh, The Irony!

2011-08-15T21:47:00.000-05:00

One thing I forgot while I was writing my sad little post about our missing dog last night - not all dog stories have sad endings! I should have remembered Lassie Come-Home, since I read (and loved) it when I was a kid. Tracy pulled a Lassie today, reappearing in the yard just as mysteriously as she disappeared. She's limping a little, and she really went after the food in her bowl, but otherwise, she seems absolutely normal.

How I wish she would pull a Martha (from Martha Speaks) so she could fill us in on where she's been! Did she follow our neighbor when he came to fix his fence Friday and get lost, spending the last three days wandering in the bottomlands along the creek? Was she dog-napped and only now managed to escape? Was she abducted by aliens and released after their examination of this earthly life form was complete? Was she being a drama queen who got jealous of our attention to the cats and ran away from home for a couple of days? Did she just need a little time alone? She's not saying, so I guess it will always be a mystery.

The biggest irony is, my daughter reported there's a new dog hanging around the place, and my husband said he saw a strange truck pass very slowly earlier in the evening. Probably someone has dumped an unwanted dog on us (again). So we are going to go from having no dog on the farm to having two (although maybe this dog will take up with one of our neighbors, hope, hope.....).

If There's a Dog on the Cover, It Ends Sad

2011-08-14T22:12:00.000-05:00

The title of this post is "advice" my son has given my daughter before about books. He is, of course, referring to books like Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows that just tear your heart out when the dog dies at the end. Well, this weekend, we had our own sad ending for our faithful dog of 13 years, Tracy.

When a dog gets to be that old, you know you won't have much more time with them. What's weird is that Tracy wasn't sick. She just disappeared Friday. She went for a walk with me Friday morning, but when we came home from a long day at band practice and uniform fittings, she wasn't there to greet us by trying to climb into the vehicle, as she normally does. We haven't seen her since. Because Tracy wasn't the type of dog to run around the neighborhood, we're pretty sure something has happened to her.

But what? As I said, she stayed around the yard most of the time. We checked the ditches up and down our country road, in case she might have wandered out to the road and been hit by a car - nothing. We looked in the horse pasture, because she had recently decided it's great fun to bark at the horse, who usually bucks and kicks in response. We thought maybe she was foolish enough to bark at him within kicking distance, but there was no sign of her. We wondered if maybe she went visiting our neighbor's little dog (who comes by pretty regularly), but he showed up today briefly, looking for her, I guess. She hadn't been sick, just a little arthritic in one hip. I guess it will always be a mystery. The sad thing is, we lost another dog last summer in almost the same fashion - she just disappeared.

So, in the best "dog story" fashion, here are a few words about Tracy. She came to us as a puppy from the local shelter, the only pet we've chosen for ourselves (all the other dogs we've had over the years were dumped off along our country road and chose us). As a puppy, she was a chewer - I remember she pulled a quilt off the clothesline once and tore a hole in it that I had to mend. When we got a second dog, she quit chewing on things and chewed on him instead. She was always curious, getting up from her comfortable "cool" spot even on these dreadfully hot days this summer to come with me to the clothesline or the barn. Many dogs get grumpy as they get older; Tracy seemed to get sweeter and more loving. She would "talk" to us by whining, especially to my husband, who I think was her favorite.

Several times already today, I've looked for her when I went outside. It's going to be lonely around here without her.

Ok, I'll Play

2011-08-03T18:32:00.000-05:00

There's a trending topic on Twitter today (I know, the second Twitter-inspired post in as many days) that is #bookswithalettermissing. The idea is to remove one letter from a book title and then give a one-sentence blurb of the reimagined work. There have been some funny ones. I can't resist! I love words and word games, so I went to my own book shelf and came up with the following:

The Itch of Blackbird Pond - An outbreak of hives cripples a small community

No Shame, No Ear - an unauthorized biography of Vincent Van Gogh

Lice in Love and War - a treatise on the impact of parasites in human history

The Log Winter - Tales from a lumber camp

Ever 1793 - Science-fiction time warp tale

Where the Lilies Loom - Another science-fiction tale set in a valley of overgrown vegetation

The First for Years - The romantic tale of a woman's return to dating

Ok, ok, I'll restrain myself! Can you come up with some?

My Trouble with "Romance"

2011-08-02T22:42:00.000-05:00

This tweet appeared in my Twitter feed today:

editrixanica Anica Mrose Rissi Do you repeatedly mention the color of a character's eyes, or oft remind us of a signature hairstyle or defining feature? Well, stop it.

I laughed when I read it, because it reminded me of something I kept thinking while I was reading a book at the beginning of July.

I'm not going to identify the book or the author, because I don't want to be mean (and bring grief on myself!). The book was a romance novel, and if I had a dime for every time the author mentioned the hero's "sun-streaked hair," I could have paid for the book (to be fair, it was a Kindle book that cost only $2.99, but still...).

Here's the comment that could bring me grief. I love a good love story, but most romance novels drive me nuts for a variety of reasons. One thing is definitely the constant (and cliched) physical description of the hero. The "sun-streaked hair" wasn't the only phrase in the book I read that was repeated multiple times. There was also the guy's "chiseled" features, his green eyes, his flat belly. It was like the author wanted to make sure I had a specific mental image of the guy's physical appearance every time he was on the "stage." I don't have a problem with the author having a really specific idea of what the hero looks like, but when the physical details are thrown in during a tense, dramatic moment, it seems sort of....well, ridiculous. If I were being threatened by a drunken former husband, I seriously doubt I would be noticing how my hero's hair is catching streaks of sunlight and falling back from his face.

Another thing that bugged me was the constant changing of viewpoint character. I've seen books which switch viewpoints from one chapter to another, but this book would hop from the head of the heroine to the head of the hero within a page. I guess the author was choosing the character whose viewpoint would be most "dramatic" in the scene. To me, though, that seems a little like cheating. Staying inside one character's head takes discipline and really thinking through how to show what's going on with the scene from what that one character can observe and interpret. I think the Harry Potter series does a great job of that. Except for a few stage-setting scenes, all the action is viewed from Harry's perspective. Several times, he interprets things in the wrong way, which makes the conclusion of the series all the more powerful. The reader gets the experience of figuring out the story along with the character instead of having sort of a detached, godlike view of what's going on with everyone.

The plot in this particular romance novel centered around a woman whose husband sold her to another man to pay off his debt. Although the buyer didn't intend to keep the woman around, of course they end up together. Because of the head-hopping, we get to see both characters' thoughts about the other one and there's really no suspense. Wouldn't it have been more exciting to have only the woman's thoughts, so we don't already know the man is beginning to change his mind? Instead, there are many passages where the author has to tell us the characters don't realize what's going on between them - otherwise, the whole plot would wrap up in a couple of chapters. Some of the plot events just seemed contrived to me, like the whole reason the scene was in there was to keep the resolution from happening just yet so the story could meet its word count.

As I said, I love a good love story, and I like a "happily ever after" ending as much as any romance reader. But every time I read something in the "romance" genre, I come away from it feeling frustrated. Now, don't hate on me, romance readers!

A Good Reader is Hard to Find (Apparently)

2011-07-16T10:01:00.000-05:00

Over the past couple of years, I've followed a set of blogs written by literary agents and authors to get perspective and advice on writing well and on submitting work to agents in a way that will give it the best chance of being published. One of the blogs I had bookmarked was by a very popular agent who recently published a children's book. As the publication date for the book neared, the blog began to have more and more posts about the book, still with the slant of "here's my experience, it might be the same for you." Since publication, there have been several blog posts that were outright efforts to sell the book, including one that included related merchandise.

This morning when I checked the blog, I was a little surprised to find the author was having a PBS-style pledge drive. Briefly, the author was saying, "I put all this good content out there for free, so you ought to support me by buying my book." To be perfectly honest, I was rather turned off by that approach. I suppose that says something unpleasant about me, that I like the content but am not willing to pay for it.

The good/bad news is, I'm not alone in that sentiment. How many times have I seen groups spring up on Facebook which are protesting "We won't pay $9.95 a month for Facebook!"? I discovered (and briefly followed) a discussion thread on Amazon in which customers recommended "bargain" books for each other (with "bargain" often being defined as "free"). We look for extras or bonus features on our DVD purchases; we want hidden, bonus tracks on the albums we download.

When I was on my sabbatical a year ago, one of the webinars I attended was about 10 trends to be aware of/10 things to do to be successful in the new PR environment. I'd have to look at my notes to get the exact wording of what was said, but the gist of one point was, "People will expect to get something free. Give away something of value as a way to build loyalty and a relationship that will lead people to come to you when they are ready to buy."

The problem with that, as the blog author discovered, is people don't always feel a need to reciprocate. Just because he's giving good content about the publishing business, I don't feel obligated to plunk down $12+ for a book for kids younger than my own and in a genre I really don't like to read when I could spend that same $12 on something my kids and I would like to read. That's probably the case for a number of people who are readers of the blog; we aren't the target audience for his book, so he's not depending on true interest to spark book sales, he's relying on guilt. And in the internet age, it's pretty easy to avoid things that make you feel guilty (just hit "delete bookmark").

On the other hand, I recently found Royalty Free Fictionary, a blog devoted to allowing authors of historical fiction to post a description of their book - as long as it's not about royalty. Now that's interesting to me. That's a freebie that may actually lead to the purchase of a book, because it provides something that is both of value to me and related to a product I would want.

That's the risk of the new PR; not everyone you give something away to will become a customer. Actually, it makes me think of the people who sit at the commercial booths at our county fair, giving away balloons and nail files and brochures and business cards. There is probably a small percentage of the people who pick up those items who convert into customers. Business requires an investment; either you can pay money for the balloons and brochures, or you can pay time in writing a great blog.

I seem to have wandered away from the purpose of my title. The first thought that came to my mind when I read the pledge blog this morning was, "I guess it's tough to sell a book, no matter who you are." I have a friend who has self-published two books, and she occasionally (frequently?) is discouraged by how slow sales are. You would think the author of the pledge blog would not have the same trouble; after all, he's got the advantage of being in the business. But I suppose ultimately, it doesn't matter who you are.* The book has to find its own readers.

*After I had written this line, it occurred to me that Snooki and Bristol Palin sell books. I don't think it's because the books are riveting reads....

To Re-Read, or Not

2011-07-13T23:06:00.000-05:00

Unless you've been on an extended space walk, I imagine you know Friday is opening day for the final installment of the Harry Potter movies. To prepare, the kids and I have been watching the earlier movies. I also thought I might brush up on the books, because when they first came out, I read them so fast (to find out what happened) that now I don't really remember some of the details. For the last book, actually, my memory of the major plot events is pretty sketchy.

I started re-reading the first book in the series, but I haven't made much progress over the first couple of days. It's not because I don't like the book; Sorcerer's Stone is actually a book that gives me a lot of pleasure; I think it is so well-edited and so imaginative. The problem is that I keep having this nagging feeling that I ought to be spending my sparse reading time on something new that I've never read before. There are all kinds of books on the shelves in this house that I've not read yet; shouldn't I reduce that TBR pile instead of going back to the same story I already know?

This is something I nag my daughter about all the time. I can't tell you how many times that child has read Princess Academy by Shannon Hale or the Warriors books by Erin Hunter. I'm glad she has favorite books, but I keep telling her she needs to expand her reading horizons. There are so many classics out there and so many good new books that she will miss out on if she just keeps reading the same thing over and over. I don't seem to be having much success with this campaign, by the way.

Another acquaintance once said she never re-reads a book. She said there are too many books in the world to spend time going back. I agree with her on the point that there are many worthwhile stories I'd like to read, but I also see the appeal of revisiting a book. It's the tension between getting back in touch with good old friends or meeting someone new. Both have value and can add pleasure to our lives.

I guess one thing that is bogging me down this time is the knowledge that Sorcerer's Stone is the first of a lengthy series. If I start on it now, it's likely to take me the rest of the year to finish (given what I have waiting for me this fall when school starts again - ugh). That means no chances to meet interesting new friends - and I had interest in "dates" with several characters. As much as I love Harry Potter, I don't want to miss out on meeting Mr. Darcy for the first time.

My compromise for the time being is to read the last three books in the series. They are the most complicated in the series and the ones I tend to confuse. And maybe I can finish with enough time to get to Mr. Darcy.

What do you think? Do you re-read or stick to books that are new to you?

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

2011-07-12T23:34:00.000-05:00

I recently finished reading Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. It's the story of a slave girl (Isabel) during the British occupation of New York City in the Revolutionary War. While I learned something about that historical event, the main thing I'm taking away from this book is an increased appreciation for the injustice of slavery.

The story indirectly described the suffering the rebels experienced during the occupation (I say indirectly because Isabel's owners were British sympathizers and therefore were given preference when it came to getting food. They are even able to have some elaborate parties.). Isabel also ends up taking food scraps to the American prisoners of war, and the description of the conditions in the prison is almost uncomfortably vivid. It's not the first time I've read about those kinds of conditions (The Heretic's Daughter and Forged in the Fire, for example, had pretty vivid prison scenes). What makes it different this time is that the main characters in Chains are slaves, and that adds a whole new dimension to their suffering.

Isabel and her younger sister Ruth are sold early in the book to a selfish, cruel woman and her husband, who take the sisters to New York City. Throughout the book, Isabel is trying to find a way to get away from Madaam. On top of all the work Isabel is expected to do, Madaam hits Isabel with a riding crop, constantly insults her, separates her from her sister, and even has her branded with an "I" for "insolence." That's all bad enough, but what really brought the injustice home to me was that Madaam wouldn't even allow Isabel her identity. Shortly after arriving in New York, Madaam renames Isabel "Sal," even though that's not who Isabel wanted to be. I don't know why that bothered me more than the branding. (spoiler) Actually, I decided as soon as she was branded that the "I" should stand for "Isabel" instead of "insolence"; it took Isabel nearly to the end of the book to come to that conclusion herself.

The fact that all this cruelty is set against the struggle for the patriots to free themselves from British "oppression" is ironic. At least a couple of times, Isabel appeals to people who are engaged in this struggle for freedom and they refuse to help her; freedom is not for the slaves. There's also a sad reality in the way Curzon (Isabel's friend) is treated in the prison. He was captured fighting for the rebels and taken as a prisoner of war along with all the free white men. However, even though he was actively fighting for their cause, the other prisoners still place Curzon in a lower position. They steal his blanket and they take the lion's share of the food - even when Isabel has brought it for him.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, which means there will probably be a lot of discussions about slavery. Sometimes I think it's easy to intellectualize what slavery was about. Chains takes slavery out of the intellectual realm and makes the reader see and feel what it must have been like to be owned, body and soul, by another person and how hard it would be to escape that situation.

Let's add Laurie Halse Anderson to that list of people I want to study to be a better writer....

"Pantsing" the Family Vacation

2011-07-02T12:33:00.000-05:00

One of the questions I see fairly often on blogs about writing is "Are you a plotter or a pantser?" By that, the questioner is asking whether the writer plans every detail of what will happen in his/her story or if he/she goes "by the seat of the pants" and lets the story go where it will. The same question could be asked of traveling style. Normally, my husband and I are "plotters" when it comes to planning the family vacation, but this year we decided to try "pantsing" it.

We knew we wanted to go to the East Coast since we had a window of only two weeks. We had settled on going to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and our son had requested going back to Washington, DC. We planned to leave immediately after our daughter's concert for band camp (the flute came on the trip with us!) on June 18 and we had to be home by July 1 so our son could get his driver's license. We planned to stay in hotels for most of the trip, but we also wanted to do a couple of nights of tent camping. With those parameters in mind, we stuffed the back of our vehicle with tents, sleeping bags, two suitcases, and numerous duffel bags and headed east.

The first opportunity for spontaneity came when we hit Memphis at suppertime.

We headed to Beale Street to BB King's Blues Club, where we had horrendously fattening and wonderfully delicious Southern fare and were treated to live music by a blues band whose guitarist most certainly wasn't born yet when Elvis died (but who could play the guitar, for sure). The spirit of the spontaneous slid into my husband and me, who mortified our daughter by pretending to dance at the table. Pantsing is fun!

We saw the downside of pantsing a couple of hours later, when we stopped in Jackson, TN, for the night. No rooms were available in our first choice of hotels - seems the Miss Tennessee pageant and a Little League baseball tournament were both in town. We did find a room, however, without too much trouble.

Our next stop was Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We've been there several times, and we've passed by the sign for Laurel Falls several times but never stopped. This time we decided to stop and do the hike. What we didn't know is that it was a 1.3-mile uphill hike! When we were nearly to the falls, someone coming back down told us there was a bear and cub on the trail. By the time we got to the spot, there was no cub, but there was the adult bear, sitting in the path. This was really cool to us since we've been to the Smokies several times and to Yellowstone and never saw a bear in the wild. Pantsing has pleasant surprises!

One of the things we did this time that we hadn't done before was go to some places just because we saw them on the map and thought they sounded interesting. The first of those was the Mountain Farm Museum at the North Carolina entrance to GSM park.

It ended up being one of my favorite stops on the trip, partly because there were so many things that reminded me of my great-grandparents' farm (like the corn-sheller) and partly because it was THE setting for my novel. Several times I had little moments of daydreaming in which I could almost see my characters leaning against the rail fence or carrying wood from the pile under the woodshed. This visit also pointed out to me, though, how far removed my kids are from the way I grew up - my daughter helped feed the two young pigs with one hand pinching her nose shut because of the smell!

Another jewel that we visited just because we found it on the map was Chippokes Plantation State Park in Virginia. We got a private tour of a plantation home circa 1854 (well, ok, no one was there besides our family) and to visit a museum of farm equipment and implements. We also stopped at Seneca Rocks in West Virginia because we would be passing it on the way home, and that was neat. The Seneca Rocks themselves are a huge, impressive outcropping of rocks, but again, the cool part to me was a homestead site that had the home and some gardens with vegetables and herbs people of the 19th century would have grown. Both of those sites are things we would have missed if we had chosen to take the interstates rather than pantsing our way on side roads.

There were some interesting stops that crossed our path quite by accident. While in Asheville, North Carolina, we ate at the most impressive McDonald's restaurant I've ever seen.

Since that is the location of the Biltmore estate (which we didn't visit because it was too expensive for our budget), the McDonald's had a "Biltmore" theme, complete with a tapestry over a faux fireplace, a waterfall wall sculpture, and a player baby grand piano.

Another time, we were driving toward Washington, DC, and we saw a big spire sticking up above the trees.

"What's that?" Jeff asked, and we exited to find out. It was the National Museum of the Marine Corps, which was a great museum with LOTS of history (although it was, of course, oriented toward military history and specifically the Marines' role in that history). When we got to Washington, we visited Arlington National Cemetery - just in time to see a wreath-laying ceremony with the Prince of Belgium. Wow. What dumb luck! Finally, we got to see first-hand what Jeff called an example of political "pork." We drove for several miles on a beautiful 4-lane interstate in West Virginia that began outside a very small town and suddenly dumped us off in what seemed like the middle of nowhere (miles from the next town of any size). That was a weird experience that took us pretty far off the path we had planned, led nowhere, and forced us to find an alternative route back to where we wanted to be. I guess that happens sometimes with pantsing.

As it turns out, we didn't take quite the route we had thought we might take - no swinging up into Delaware and Baltimore. But we got to do all the things we really wanted to do on the trip - play in the ocean and go on a fishing boat (Jeff and the kids did that - I discovered I'm really not a fan of deep water, boats, and long, long bridges, ha ha!), visit Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, see all the relatives in that part of the country, and camp a couple of times. There were some stressful moments, but seems like maybe there weren't as many as when we've had to push to get to a certain location by a certain time (or at least a different kind of stress). After the first night, we had no trouble finding a place to stay. Taking the vehicle off the interstates and on the backroads let us see something of the countryside and the way people live, which I think is just as valuable as any museum. The verdict? I like pantsing some of a vacation and hope we'll do it again sometime. Just as with a story idea, we can take the basic framework, get started, and see where it takes us!

June or JK?

2011-06-12T22:31:00.000-05:00

Somehow today, the family conversation turned to my writing. (Honest, I wasn't the one who brought it up!) My husband and daughter wanted to hear the synopsis for a middle-grade novel idea that I've mentioned in the past. My husband thinks (and I agree) that it is an idea that is quite possibly marketable, much more likely to be published than the novel I've been working on for the past seven (!) years. He said I ought to start working on it, and that if I could get interest in it, then I might be more likely to get the first one published too.

The problem is, it's going to take a LOT of research before I can start any writing. This idea is another historical, and as you probably would guess from previous posts, I am a hard-liner about historical accuracy. Plus, this story involves actual historical figures quite prominently, which means it's even more important to be accurate. I love doing the research, but....it takes a LOT of time. A lot.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. When I brought up the amount of time needed to do the research and then the writing and the revision and how hard it is to find any time to write, my husband said, "You can't be June Cleaver and Gilbert Parks and JK Rowling all at once." (Gilbert Parks is one of my teaching colleagues who has been teaching for nearly 50 - yes, you read that right - years. For all his years in the business, he is still one of the most energetic and involved teachers I've ever known.) I understood what he was saying - a person can do one thing really well, or a person can stress over trying to do everything well.

I posted his advice on my Facebook page, and very quickly a number of my friends jumped on to say things like "Yes you can!" and "Why not?" I guess they think Jeff is being a male chauvinist, but realistically, he's right. People who are really successful at something tend to devote the lion's share of their time and energy to that one thing. As just one example, how many hours a day did Michael Phelps spend in the swimming pool?

I think my friends are still buying in to the "Superwoman" concept when they say it's possible to be the perfect wife/mother, the perfect employee, the uber-successful writer at the same time. I guess it depends on what your standard for "perfect" is, but in my life, there's just not enough time in the day to be "perfect" in all those roles. This past school year has been super-stressful -- and all I found time to do was be an employee and a mother/housewife, and I was definitely less than "perfect"! Writing fell by the wayside completely. I did some substantial revision when I chaperoned my son on a trip to Chicago in early March; the next time I was able to do any work on my book was late May. I had to go back and re-read the whole thing just so I could remember who the characters are!

What this boils down to, I guess, is that I really appreciate that my husband understands single-minded pursuit of "perfection" and has given me permission, no, encouraged me to go for it. Now whether he still buys into it when there are no clean socks in the drawers.....ha, ha. The two things I always manage to do are keep the family fed and in clean underwear. Dust bunnies off the floor....well.....they'll just have to wait. I have some research to do....

Rules

2011-06-09T17:39:00.000-05:00

(guest post by my daughter - she read this book in about 24 hours)

The book Rules by Cynthia Lord is a really great read that pulls at the heart strings. This book was made for the young adult reading group. The main character is a twelve-year-old girl named Catherine. Catherine's problems keep mounting up; her best friend is in California with her father, her little brother has autism, and her old neighbor is moving away. Then a new problem comes -- she meets a boy who can't talk. Suddenly she finds herself trying to figure out what does normal mean? Will she get a new best friend? Can she help herself to not feel weird around her brother? Find out and read this book. Oh, and don't forget the rules!

I Want to Write Like Her!!!

2011-06-07T23:20:00.000-05:00

Because I've so many times held Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond up as a model work of fiction, I decided it might be good if I actually went back and read it instead of relying on my memory. Sometimes, you know, memory isn't completely reliable. But in this case, it was, and re-reading Witch has reinforced my hero-worship of Elizabeth George Speare!

I read differently this time than I did as a teen, having studied the art of fiction writing over the years (I had never heard of "show, don't tell" back then!). One of the things I found myself appreciating this time around was the way Speare developed the romantic relationship between Kit and Nat (oops, sorry for the spoiler if there's actually anyone out there who hasn't read this book). Not until the last chapter, like four pages from the end of the book, does Kit realize what she feels for Nat is love. The reader is aware of how good they are for each other long before Kit is. And maybe it's just me, but there's something so satisfying about watching it develop instead of being told it is developing. For example, I found this section amusing:

"She expected that when they reached South Road Nat would turn back, but to her consternation he strode along beside her, and even when she hesitated at Broad Street he did not take the hint. The happy mood of the afternoon was rapidly dissolving in apprehension. Why on earth had Nat persisted in coming too?"

Well, we know why!

Later, in what would I suppose be the climax of the story (when Kit is at a hearing to determined if she should be tried as a witch), I got the same thrill reading the following passage that I had the first time I read it:

"Every voice was suddenly stilled. Almost paralyzed with dread, Kit turned slowly to face a new accuser. On the threshold of the room stood Nat Eaton, slim, straight-shouldered, without a trace of mockery in his level blue eyes"...(skip a couple of pages)..."In the warm rush of pride that well up in her, Kit forgot her fear. For the first time she dared to look back at Nat Eaton where he stood near the door. Across the room their eyes met, and suddenly it was as though he had thrown a line straight into her reaching hands. She could feel the pull of it, and over its taut span strength flowed into her, warm and sustaining."

She doesn't call it love yet, but as a reader, I'm saying "Yes!" It's just right, in every way.

That's the reaction I want to bring my readers to. They say a person ought to write what he/she would like to read. In that case, I think I need to spend less time on agent blogs and more time really studying what Speare has done, and Janice Holt Giles, and Ann Turnbull, and Lisa Klein. Those are the literary footsteps I want to follow. If I can come close, I'll be happy, even if my work is never published.

(And Ann, if you read this, I'm not sucking up - I mean it!)

A Favorite Summer Memory

2011-06-02T22:29:00.000-05:00

It's the first day of summer vacation, and already my daughter has complained - tearfully, even - that no one will do anything with her, and that she doesn't have anyone to play with. "You had sisters to play with," she said. After reminding her she will be going to band camp in about a week and a half, I said, "It's not my responsibility to keep you occupied all day, every day of summer vacation."

That got me to thinking about summer vacations when I was growing up. One of the things we had that Lily doesn't was the library's bookmobile. Once a month (I think), one of the area libraries would send out a truck sort of vehicle to the rural communities, stocked with all kinds of books. We could check out (I think) five books, which wasn't a lot to last a month, but back then, the twelve miles to town for the library is a lot longer than it is now, so we were pleased to have something different to read.

I can still remember some of the books from the bookmobile and even where in the bookmobile they were located. There was the little book called Let's Make Doll Furniture, which told how to use matchboxes, spools, and contact paper to make doll furniture that I thought was really cool. I checked out that book several times, and I think it was in the non-fiction section in the end of the truck above the checkout desk. I think the bookmobile was also my first exposure to Pioneer Breed, which was influential enough that I remembered it and hunted it down 25 years later. It was in the adult fiction section along one of the walls. Finally, the children's books were near the floor, including over the wheel well, which made a great place to sit while trying to make a decision about what books should be included in the five.

One of the other reasons we so enjoyed going to the bookmobile, possibly, was that sometimes we would stop at the local general store for a yellow, banana-flavored popscicle. They cost six cents at the time. Those are still my favorite frozen treat!

Maybe I'll load the kids up tomorrow morning and take them to the library in town. It's not the same as the bookmobile, but maybe Lily can find some literary "friends" to hang out with for a while. And maybe we'll stop at the store for a banana popscicle - they still have them, although they aren't six cents anymore...

A Question of Case

2011-05-26T22:34:00.000-05:00

I'm reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond right now (which is as fresh and enjoyable to me now as it was when I read it as a teen), and last night I came across something that raised a question in my mind. Kit (the main character) met Hannah Tupper, an old Quaker woman who lives in the meadow isolated from the rest of the community. Here are a couple of examples of Hannah's dialogue:

"Thee must be hungry," she said, more briskly. "Come, and I'll give thee a bit to eat."

"The answer is in thy heart," she said softly. "Thee can always hear it if thee listens for it."

What I wondered is whether the pronouns have been used properly in this dialogue. (Forgive me some grammar geekiness here...) I always thought "thee" was the objective case for the pronoun, "thou" was the subjective case, and "thy" was the possessive. If that's true, then a sentence might read something like this:

"Thou must be hungry...I'll give thee a bit to put in thy stomach."

In an earlier draft of my novel, I had the protagonist's sister-in-law be Quaker because I thought it would contribute to a subplot about slavery that was in the story at that time (Quakers were leaders in the abolition movement). I tried to be very careful to get the dialogue right, because I thought that would be the type of mistake that would take the reader out of the story. But I never felt entirely confident that it was done correctly, and I also had the problem of trying to figure out what verb should go with "thou." ("Thou have"? "Thou has?" "Thou do"? "Thou does"? ARRRGGGH!!!)

Eventually, I decided it wasn't urgent to the plot that the character be a Quaker. That was an easy way to solve my problem, but I still wonder about it. Just what is the right way to have a Quaker character use pronouns? Just in case it is urgent to have a character be Quaker in some future story!

Once Again, It's the Little Things

2011-05-10T22:22:00.000-05:00

When I teach Introduction to Rhetoric and Social Influence, one of the exercises I always do with the class is about censorship of books. I put together a collection of books that have been challenged, find a part that relates to the reason for the challenge, and then have students read that section and say whether or not they would support the challenge. Every time I gather books for the exercise, I find a new book I want to read. This year, it was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

What interested me about the book was the conflict the main character, Junior (Arnold) Spirit, faced. Junior is a Spokane Indian living on a reservation, but one of his teachers at the reservation school tells Junior he should go to the public school in a town off the reservation. Junior decides to take the risk, even though it means his best friend now hates him for "deserting" the tribe. Junior faces discrimination at the town school, but eventually he makes friends with several of the white students. Throughout the story, though, Junior struggles with being a "border dweller" (another term from Intro to Rhetoric class!) who lives between two cultures. I liked that entire storyline. While I was saddened by the portrayal of the hopelessness and alcoholism of the Indian culture, I liked the way Alexie portrayed the sense of community of the Indians.

But...once again, there were some little things that seemed sloppy to me and took me out of the story several times. One thing happened right in the first chapter. Junior is introducing himself, and he's got all kinds of physical problems, like being born with hydrocephalus and having seizures and being very awkward with big hands and feet. Then he goes on to tell about playing basketball and in fact, becoming a starter on the town school's varsity team and even hitting the shot that leads to his school team destroying the reservation team. That seems unrealistic to me. I've had a couple of students in the past with those kinds of physical problems, and those problems don't just go away in time for a kid to become a star basketball player. Strike one.

Another thing I thought was unrealistic was Junior saying how many times he ended up walking the 22 miles from the school to the reservation because his dad forgot to come pick him up (or was too drunk to do it). I'm not arguing with the fact that a kid could have to find his own way home from school; what seems unrealistic to me is the distance. How long would it take to walk 22 miles? When my husband and I used to do backpacking, the best we accomplished was something like 11 miles in an 8-hour day. Of course, that was carrying a pack, but wouldn't a school kid have a backpack full of books? You should see what my daughter hauls back and forth every day. I don't buy it. Strike two.

The thing that bothered me most, though, came when Junior's grandmother died. Of course, she died in some bizarre way. At her memorial service, a rich guy steps up to return a ceremonial dance dress that he said belongs to Grandmother Spirit. Then Junior's mother steps up to say, "I'm her daughter....." Wait...I thought she was Grandmother Spirit, related to Arnold Spirit. If Indian surnames follow the same rules as Anglo names, that means it would be his father who was related to Grandmother Spirit, not his mother. Maybe the rules are different for Indian marriages, but there's nothing in the book to say that. It reads like a mistake to me. Strike three.

Those three strikes, combined with what I thought was an overdone "voice" for Junior's character, soured me a little on the book. I don't know that this is what was in Sherman Alexie's mind, but no author should take for granted that readers will, without question, overlook sloppy detail work if the issues in the story are "important" enough. It especially bothers me when that happens in a young adult book. YA readers are still forming their perceptions of the world - they may not have the critical thinking skills to ferret out the mistakes and correct them. In my opinion, we do those readers a disservice when we are less than accurate - even with minor details.

Another Negative Review - And I Hate That

2011-04-28T22:24:00.000-05:00

You may think, from reading my posts on this blog for the past months, that I am a negative and difficult-to-please reader. I hope that is not the case, and if it is true, it's not something I've been trying to cultivate. It just seems that several of the books I've read lately have some pretty significant problems in terms of what I've come to view as "good" writing, a view that is learned not only from my years as an English major but through following several blogs by successful literary agents and editors over the past few years. And believe me, I'm disappointed, not satisfied, to be noticing these issues.

My latest disappointment is especially sharp, because it comes from a writer with a top-notch reputation. Scott O'Dell is a HUGE figure in historical fiction, the writer of 20 or more books, the winner of the Hans Christian Anderson Award and the Newberry Award. Heck, he even has an award named after him - the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, for the best work of historical fiction for young adults in a given year. I was downright tickled to find a copy of his book The Serpent Never Sleeps at my favorite used bookstore. Colonial America! Jamestown! Pocahontas! What could be better?!

Well....to be honest...this book could be better. The story follows a young woman named Serena Lynn who leaves England to go to the Jamestown settlement with the young man she's madly in love with (even though he has murdered a man and is running from the king). They suffer through a terrible hurricane and spend a very long time stranded on an island in Bermuda before actually making it to Jamestown. Well, Serena makes it - her crushee is lost at sea. Once in Jamestown, Serena takes it on herself to find Pocahontas, since she's the only one who can save the starving colony by convincing her father to give the settlers corn and hold off his attacks. She befriends Pocahontas, survives an attack by unfriendly Indians, and finally marries one of the settlers and stays in the new colony.

Although I might have changed a few things, I'm not arguing with the plot. The story is fine. But the telling of the story seems simply soul-less to me. I honestly didn't care about any of the characters (which I believe to be one of the most fatal flaws a book can make). I found certain plot points (like Serena's first meeting with Pocahontas) to be a little too hard to swallow - the "willing suspension of disbelief" was strained just a bit too far. Even though I finished the book about a day ago and have been mulling it over ever since, I can't identify any overarching theme - the universal truth the readers should be able to take away from the story.

And you know why I think some of these problems plague this book? Once again, it's a matter of "telling" versus "showing." (Yep, here I go again on that!) Here's an example:

(the king's guard has just come on the ship to arrest the man she loves, Anthony Foxcroft) "Anthony and I were standing at the rail, close to the Great Cabin, but someone shut the door and we heard nothing else. It was a terrible moment. If Admiral Somers decided to turn back, Anthony would be given over to the captain of the guards and taken off the ship. Anthony always carried a dagger. He had his hand on it now. But what could he do with it? If the ship turned back, it would be of no use to him. There was no way he could ever withstand a dozen armed guards."

First of all, Anthony Foxcroft has to be the most underdeveloped character in this book. I can't for the life of me understand why Serena is attracted to him. He's a spoiled brat who quarrels with one of the king's favorite young gentlemen and who murders a servant in a fit of rage. There's nothing that explains the attraction Serena feels for him that makes her willing to run away from home and risk a scandal and take on the challenges of an unknown, dangerous life. (Maybe he's just really hot...)

Secondly, don't tell us "It was a terrible moment." Give us details that will make us say, "Gosh, that's a terrible moment" in the back of our minds as we are reading. Now, I don't pretend to be a Newberry-Award-winning writer of prose, but think how much more engaging that scene would be if it had gone something like this:

Anthony edged along the rail toward the Great Cabin, and I followed, keeping my hand on the back of his arm as if he might be pulled away from me just by getting closer to the captain of the guards. Just as we came close enough to hear their raised voices, someone shut the door, and I could no longer make out words, only the sounds of argument. I pressed closer to Anthony. My heart was pounding.

"If Admiral Somers agrees to turn back, you'll be given to the captain of the guard," I whispered. "They'll take you off the ship."

I felt his arm stiffen and saw his hand move toward his belt, where I knew he always kept his dagger.

"I'll not go," he said. "They'll not take me."

That could be improved with editing, I'm sure, but already I think it's more interesting and builds a sense of character and of what's at stake for those characters better than the original does. Why? Because it shows details that let us surmise what's going on in the characters' heads instead of taking all the fun away by simply telling us.

Some arrogance, eh, rewriting for a Newberry winner? Sometimes lately I've thought I'd like to do that with several of these books that have disappointed me - take the plot line and the basic framework of characters and rewrite the book to show instead of tell. I first had that thought about Pioneer Breed. Now it's this one. You can't copyright ideas, right, only the expression of ideas. So what if I wrote my own book showing the way a girl who runs away to follow her lover to Jamestown is changed by the experience......

Sequels Are Hard, I Guess

2011-04-26T22:34:00.000-05:00

A lot of times when I'm reading a book with likable characters, I want the story to keep going. And a lot of times an author will oblige me (and other readers) with a sequel. That's the case with Sally Gardner's pair of books The Red Necklace and The Silver Blade. Recently I finished reading The Silver Blade, and unfortunately, I didn't like it as well as I liked The Red Necklace.

The Silver Blade picks up when the Revolution in France has lost its idealism and gone full into the Terror. Yann is using his powers to help people escape death at the guillotine; Sido is living in London with her aunt, who is none too happy about the love letters Yann and Sido are sending to each other across the English Channel. Because Yann is a Gypsy, Sido's aunt believes he would not make a suitable husband for the young heiress. So far, so good.

But then Gardner treks away from historical fiction into the deeply paranormal, by bringing back Count Kalliovski, the villain of the first book who blackmailed Sido's presumed father into signing an agreement that will give Sido - and her considerable inheritance - to Kalliovski. In The Silver Blade, Kalliovski has been rescued from death by the devil and now lives a cursed half-life in a catacomb under the city, able to come above ground only at night. He is determined to obtain Yann's powers for his own, to make himself ultimately powerful. To do that, he has to find and lure Yann to the catacombs where he can kill him and take his powers. Sido now has a new attraction for Kalliovski; she's going to be the bait to get Yann to the catacombs.

I said before, I'm not a huge fan of paranormal stories. However, I can enjoy it at times. But this was not one of those times. Kalliovski's quest for the threads of light seemed awfully familiar, as in Star Wars familiar. The whole "I am your father" bit seemed kind of overdone to me, especially Yann's reaction and the moment that brought him back from his despairing journey. Yann's mother (a ghost) also plays a big role in saving Sido.

Another thing I didn't especially care for was the introduction of a whole slew of new characters. Honestly, it was a little hard to keep up with them all. And I didn't find any of the characters who were introduced to be that compelling. I really didn't like the character of Anselm. I know I wasn't supposed to like him. But I didn't even like him as a villain. I thought he was just tiresome.

I didn't even get much of a thrill out of the romance between Yann and Sido. It had some of the problems I felt afflicted the whole book - a cliche' approach that could have been improved with a bit of revision and re-writing. In some ways, I felt the sequel was rushed to publication before it was really ready.

Different people have different tastes, I know. It's quite likely that someone who's more of a fan of paranormal stories will like Gardner's story. It's just a little let-down to me that the follow-up to a book I really enjoyed turned out to be something I really didn't enjoy that much.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2011-04-06T22:28:00.000-05:00

(Guest post by my daughter)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a great piece of fiction of a teenage boy. This is the seventh story of seven,and I've read it about three times. This book was written by famed writer J.K. Rowling, who is a great writer. Harry was one year old when some thing terrible happened,and he is now on the hunt to find the horcruxes to sever every strand Voldemort has to the world. Can he keep his two friends close, or will an unexpected fight take the whole mission down? In it is a snitch from the past, a weird symbol, a children's book, and a sword. I think you should read this because it is an inviting book of survival, and life and death.

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

2011-03-22T22:24:00.000-05:00

After finishing The Yearling, I was determined that I would read something very light and fluffy, the mental equivalent of bolting down a bag of potato chips. I even bought a historical romance on my Kindle for that specific purpose. However, since we live in the boondocks where Amazon's Whispernet can't whisper, I wasn't able to actually download the book to the Kindle when I was ready to start reading (I'll have to take the Kindle to town to be able to do that).

As an alternative, I started a YA book I had downloaded once after seeing a review on the Teen Lit Review blog, The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner. It's historical fiction about the French Revolution, and both my daughter and I liked the sample chapters from Amazon.

I've read about five chapters now, and last night as I finished the reading for the evening, I had that unreasonably anxious feeling I get when I know the main characters are going to get into trouble. It's the feeling I had several times while reading the Harry Potter series. I want to just shake the characters and say, "Don't do that! Can't you predict that's going to cause problems down the road?"

What brought on that feeling last night is that Yann, the young boy who is the hero of the story, stole a red necklace from the story's villain when the villain didn't pay Yann and his friends for a theatrical performance. (Actually, the villain did worse than stiff them on the payment; he murdered one of the friends in an "accident.") Even as Yann is picking up the necklace and putting it in his pocket, I'm thinking, "sure, like this incredibly sharp and incredibly vile villain is not going to notice a necklace of red jewels is gone! Come on, Yann!"

OK. I know suspense is one of the things that many people enjoy while reading. But honestly, it seems to lessen my pleasure in a story if I have to constantly be looking around the corner for the characters, waiting for something bad to jump out of the dark. I think it must be a personality thing!

Mission Accomplished - Finally!

2011-03-17T07:31:00.000-05:00

Last night I finally finished reading The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnon Rawlings. I'm sort of ashamed to admit it, but it took me about six weeks, mostly because I've just been so busy that I go to bed too late to read (if I plan to be up and alert the next day!).

I'm glad to have read it, but after finishing it, I had the same kind of reaction that I had after reading Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins: "what a bleak book." It's not that Jody had to kill his pet (though I'll admit I knew it was coming and wasn't looking forward to reading it); it's the attitude that ends the book. Basically, Jody has learned, "Life stinks, but if you're a man, you just go on."

Now that's a valuable lesson, truly. But as with Katniss in Mockingjay, Jody doesn't have any sense of hope at the end of the book. Since I wrote at length about that when I finished Mockingjay, I won't rehash it here. Maybe Jody's hopelessness stems from the fact that he's sort of emotionally bruised at that point, and maybe he'll find some hope after a while. But the book ends with the line, "...a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever." That's a downer!

Part of me argues back that more of our kids need to be exposed to that kind of reality so they understand life is not all cherries. Last week, I went to Chicago with my son as his chaperone for a national choir event. It just so happened that we were there while Chicago was having its St. Patrick's Day parade, so my family made me promise to get some pictures. Despite my inherent dislike of large crowds, I went and stood in the mass of people to catch tiny glimpses of the parade through the gaps between people's heads. Anyway, the point of saying that is to say this: for the hour or so that I was standing in that crowd, I was stuck next to this group of 25-ish people who were talking quite loudly and freely the entire time. Listening to them complain about the rude people they encountered in line at Starbucks and about how fast tickets were selling out for Charlie Sheen's show in Chicago, I decided they are totally unprepared to face real problems in life. It's not just that they were complaining; I'm doing that myself right here, ha ha. It was the way they were doing it that told me these people haven't learned the lesson Jody learned in The Yearling. That group of 20-somethings* is still frolicking along in life, playing with their "yearlings." I just wonder what would happen to them if they faced "Ol' Starvation" (or even "Ol Go Without Starbucks for a Day").

Enough of that. Now I get the pleasure of deciding what to read next. I think I'm going to go for something on my Kindle. For one reason or another, I've had the Kindle for nearly 8 months now and have read only one complete book on it. I've got a couple I've downloaded and I think it's time to pick up one of them.

*In all fairness, I'm not saying this about those "darn young people." I know there are people my own age who also have the same outlook.

Guest Post: The Witch Of Blackbird Pond

2011-02-26T20:59:00.000-06:00

This is a good book that really gets you where it counts. The story is about Kit, who lost every thing she had back in Barbados, her home island. She finds it's hard to live in America. She wants to find someone like her who loves the sea; instead she gets a jealous cousin, a creepy boy, and an old friend who broke plenty of laws of the town. All she can hope for is a miracle. This book's time period was the Salem witch trials time.

(written by my 12-year-old daughter, Lily)

An Experiment

2011-02-26T13:53:00.000-06:00

One of the biggest challenges I've noticed since getting my Kindle has been wading through the hundreds of thousands of books that are available through the Kindle store to find books that might actually interest me. At one point, I thought it would be useful to have some kind of sorting service that was a little more specific than Amazon's broad categories. Nan Hawthorne has such a service for books about the Middle Ages at Medieval Novels.com, and I thought it might be interesting and fun to create a similar listing for my favorite historical fiction. Mostly that will be stories about U.S. history, although I will also have categories for other time periods and cultures, as well.

I've started with one page, which you can see listed just below the banner for this site. This page focuses on historical fiction about the U.S. Revolutionary War (since Johnny Tremain holds such a cherished place in my heart, ha ha), as well as stories about the colonial period and the antebellum period. That's a wide-ranging time period, and I may later need to break it up, but Blogger only allows me 10 pages, so I must be sparing until I settle in on a format for this list. My plan is to list the books alphabetically and in sections for the different time periods. I hope that will make them easy enough to find.

One of the main things I've wished I had to help me sort through the many, many books available on Amazon was some sort of filtering device, so I've attempted to provide one of those in this list. Besides being grouped according to time period, I've included a brief summary of the history covered in the book, a synopsis of the story, and a reading level for each book. Then, because I'm a rhetorical critic and can't help myself, I've given my evaluation of the book (very briefly). I'm not rating the books, but if I think there is something I wish someone had told me going into this book, I'm going to include it as sort of a "warning label."

I will add books to the list as time permits. The semester is in full swing, so my time for pursuits like this is pretty limited. But I think it's going to be fun, and maybe it can help someone find some good historical fiction to read.

This Was Cool...

2011-02-24T20:37:00.000-06:00

I'm slowly, slowly working my way through The Yearling. Last night, I read the chapter in which the Baxters face an eight-day deluge of rain. Shortly after I finished and turned out the light, a little thunderstorm came through in real life. It was sort of a surreal moment, with the description of the story still in my head and the sound of rain pouring down outside my window. It made me extra thankful for my soft pillow, fluffy comforter, and warm husband to snuggle to!

Mind Your Mother!

2011-01-27T21:13:00.000-06:00

For years, my mother has been recommending that I read The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings. I don't really know why I've never done it; the book sounds like the kind of story I would like (except for the sad "pet animal dying" part, ha ha). It has just never seemed to happen.

Well, it's going to happen now. I finished The Year of Living Biblically last night, and today when I was in the library (trying to work up the nerve to ask one of the librarians to be on a HUGE committee I've been asked to chair), I took a little detour over to the juvenile section and pulled The Yearling off the shelf.

So now dishes are done, assignment sheet is made for first class tomorrow, Facebook is checked - time to go read.

If You're Going to Write Something Historical, Study Some History!

2011-01-22T22:48:00.000-06:00

My family has been off at a day-long retreat today, so I had the television to myself. That means I hunted up movies with some sort of historical link. I ended up watching Brothers of the Frontier and part of Two Mules for Sister Sara. In each case, I found myself questioning some of the history in the movies and getting rather irritated.

I was actually not so much irritated as questioning when the French pulled out what appeared to be a Gatling gun in Two Mules for Sister Sara. I remembered from a trip to the Museum of Arkansas Heritage (where they had a firearms exhibit up) that the Gatling gun was invented during the American Civil War. A quick trip to the internet told me the French invaded Mexico during roughly that same time period, so at least the gun existed to lend at least a shred of truth to the story. However, further reading convinced me that there wouldn't have been a Gatling gun in that French stronghold in Mexico; the U.S. Army didn't actually adopt the gun until 1866, meaning it probably wouldn't have made it into the hands of foreign armies just yet by the time the French were defeated in Mexico. So while it's plausible, it's just not very likely. I don't care that a Gatling gun made for really dramatic battle scenes; it is historically inaccurate and shouldn't have been in the movie.

At least the Gatling gun in Two Mules for Sister Sara was plausible. There were so many things in the Brothers of the Frontier movie that were just plain wrong. In a nutshell, the story is about a family that is driven away from their home when a greedy, proud neighbor falsely accuses their oldest son of theft. The family leaves for the West and gets separated on the way, leaving the three sons alone in the wilderness. This story was supposed to have taken place in the Alleghenies of the 1700s. But let me tell you, whoever wrote this movie and whoever did props and costumes apparently made no effort whatsoever to find out what people wore in the 1700s. The mother had on the standard form-fitting "pioneer woman" costume with what looked like Battenburg lace on the collar. Battenburg lace???? Are you kidding me? The Alleghenies were still frontier territory during the 1700s - this woman would have been lucky to have a very simple linsey-woolsey dress.

I also caught them using the term "OK" throughout the movie. I know from research for my own writing project that "OK" didn't come into common usage until the 1820's. And their dog! It was one of those fluffy little white "Benji" types of dogs. No self-respecting pioneer family would have a cutesy dog like that! They would have a hound or some kind of terrier that could pull its weight, not just be a pet.

Well, I could go on, but the family just got home and it's bedtime. For my two cents, these movies are just wrong...if you're going to write historical stories, get the history right!

What Does It Take to Get a Young Reader's Attention?

2011-01-15T22:40:00.000-06:00

My daughter and I went to a bookstore today, and we had it in our heads walking in that we were going to buy a book (or three, as it turned out). We had some disagreement, though, over what we should buy. I found Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson, and since I've been wanting to read one of Ibbotson's books, and since it would count as Lily's historical fiction requirement for this quarter at school, I decided it was my choice. Her choice? A copy of one of the books in the Warriors series by Erin Hunter.

Now, I don't have anything against the Warriors books (although I tried to read one once and couldn't keep up with all the different cat characters). The reason I didn't want her to get it was because she's read it multiple times. As I told her, variety helps your mind grow, just like variety in food helps your body grow.

In the end, I got the book for her (it was a bargain book) and I made a deal with her - she should read the first two pages of Ibbotson's book and see if it caught her curiosity. She read it aloud to me in the car. I thought it sounded pretty interesting - a young girl attends a boarding school, but her life is about to change, since her guardian pulled up in a car outside the school.

As soon as she had hit the end of the second page, though, Lily quit. I said, "Didn't it make you curious about how her life is going to change?" She said that it sorta did, which I guess means it sorta didn't. So I asked what would have made it more interesting to her.

The book starts off with a couple of paragraphs that establish the setting and background of the school the girl attends. I didn't think it lasted all that long. Lily, however, said it would have been more interesting to skip that part and start when the car drove up with her guardian. In other words, Lily wants to start right at a point of action.

I've read other articles that advocate the same thing. Start in the middle of the action, they say. Immerse the character in some sort of conflict from the first paragraph. I guess what Lily says confirms that advice.

I wonder why. Is it because kids are so immersed in a "vivid" culture? Video games and cartoons don't spend an extended time on world-building. I guess you sort of have to slip it in on young readers the way you have to hide a pill in a biscuit before a dog will take it. There has to be something - conflict, drama, characters - that appeals to them immediately, or they are going to dismiss the book as "boring" before they finish the first chapter.

I told Lily I have a three-chapter rule, that I promise myself to read three chapters of a book before deciding if it's worth finishing. She seemed to think that was a little extreme. I'm afraid we're raising a generation of impatient readers who want to get to the point. I know my own reading preferences have changed to be sort of impatient with books that take a circuitous route to get anywhere. But how much is Lily going to miss out on if she's not willing to invest some attention if the "good part" doesn't show up in the first words?

A Recommendation from My Son

2011-01-04T21:47:00.000-06:00

My 15-year-old son has been a voracious reader since he first learned to read at the end of kindergarten. He went through a phase when he wouldn't read anything except fantasy (mainly Harry Potter), but lately he's been branching out in all kinds of directions. Recently he was talking about a book he had checked out from the public library, The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. He made it sound so intriguing that I decided to borrow it from him until it has to go back to the library.

The subtitle of the book is, "One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible." Jacobs starts as an agnostic, secular Jew who decides to experiment with living exactly by the rules of the Bible, 8 months by the Old Testament and 4 by the New Testament. I thought it would probably be a sort of cynical approach that would be finding the weirdest stuff possible in the Bible and exploiting it for laughs. There are plenty of laughs in what I've read so far, but far from being cynical, the book seems to be a genuine and respectful effort to learn more about the Bible.

A couple of nuggets I pulled out just last night:

"...coveting means that you are overly desirous of the Jaguar, you are distracted by material goods, you have veered from the path of being thankful for what God provides. You have, no doubt, fallen victim to advertising, the Tenth Commendment's arch-nemesis."

"...a lot of religion is about surrendering control and being open to radical change."

The book is definitely a radical change from my usual reading fare, but I suppose it's good for a person to read something different once in a while. Plus, it is a "Y" book, which gives me an idea - I'll go through the alphabet backward this year!

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

2011-01-01T22:53:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to write this post for a couple of days now, but we've not had internet access for two days; apparently I'm going to have to get a new wireless router.

That's only the latest excuse, though. I've had at least two other ideas for posts in mind after reading Speak, but never had (or never took) the time to sit down and write. Now the time for those posts is past; I can't even remember what it was I wanted to say, and it will never be said.

Since this is the time for resolutions, here's one: I don't want to let that happen again. This year, when I get an idea for a post, I intend to sit down THAT day - not "tomorrow" - and get it written. That's why I'm here right now instead of finishing washing the dishes (that big pot needs to soak a few minutes, anyway, ha ha).

I failed to get all the way through my A to Z reading challenge this year, but I'm pretty happy anyway. I read 24 books this year (and part of two others). I know that's not so much when I look at how many other people read. But it's more than I've done for a long time, so I feel good about it. I'm going to post a list in a sidebar, if anyone is interested in what the 24 were.

In the interest of creating a tradition, I'm going to go through the same review that I did last year at this time.

Best Discoveries
The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins - These were the only books this year that had me neglecting my family so I could finish.

Saddest Disppointment
Mockingjay from Collins' series - It was so bleak.

Favorite Classic
Hamlet by William Shakespeare! I really got into reading it, more so than when it was required in college.

Favorite Love Story
Looking at my list, I really didn't read that many "love stories" this year. Ann Turnbull's Alice in Love and War was the best of the few I did read. I also enjoyed Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix (if it counts as a love story).

Favorite Historical Fiction
Alice in Love and War tops this category, too, although The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent was also a favorite.

Greatest Reading Accomplishment
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende - I had tried reading it before, but couldn't get past the first chapter. This time I made it all the way through.

Biggest Failure
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart - I know it's popular, but it never caught me. Maybe some other year....

Favorite Re-read
Hamlet

Once Is Enough - Books I Probably Won't Ever Read Again
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
Jellicoe Road by Mellina Marcheta
The Lace Dowry by Andrea Chang
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly (I was really disappointed by this one)

Books I Thought Would Be Amazing But Were Just So-So
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink
Pioneer Breed by Glenn Vernam

Books I Thought Wouldn't Be Much But Were Actually Good Stuff
Just Ella - Honestly, I thought it would be pretty shallow
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson - It's not my type of book, but I bought another of Anderson's "teen issue/problem" books the other day. I guess that says something.

5 Books I Plan to Read in 2011
I liked the A to Z challenge; it seemed to give me a focus and to keep me on track. I might do it again and see if I can get further this year. Also, last night I was talking to someone at a party and sort of realized there are a lot of books people would expect a former English major to have read that I haven't read. I guess it's time to catch up. Therefore, in 2011 I plan to read
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (I'll admit, this one scares me - it's so long - I may spend most of my year chipping away at it!)
Beloved by Toni Morrison

We'll see how it goes - I hope to report in more often this year!

I Think This Was a Mistake.....

2010-12-06T13:36:00.000-06:00

This is the last week of classes, and most of my students are working on their final assignments. In my advanced public speaking class, for example, the students are preparing for a debate over an issue of current public interest. Today, I had them meet in the university library so they could do research with their partners for the debate. I have some papers to grade, so I brought them along to work on while I sit here to be a resource if the students have any questions.

But I've made two mistakes.

First, I'm sitting by the big windows that look out over the campus mall. It's a beautiful winter day (as long as you are inside, ha ha) with a perfectly clear blue sky. I keep catching myself staring out at that blue sky or idly watching students walk from one building to another.

I also went to the juvenile fiction section of the library and checked out Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. I'm nearly to the "S" book on my A to Z challenge, and I've seen a lot of buzz about this book. I flipped it open and saw that it is written in short paragraphs with an easy-to-read voice; I know it's not going to take long to read it. How I would love to just curl into one of those fat, print chairs over there in front of the biggest window and just read for the rest of the afternoon.....

But, NO! Must....finish.....grading......

The Problem of Description

2010-12-04T12:05:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I think reading blogs by agents and authors has ruined me as a reader. I really began to wonder about this as I was reading Nancy Dane's latest book, A Long Way to Go, and I kept being distracted by her use of description.

I've read in numerous agent blogs that novels need to be trimmed so that nothing unnecessary to the plot is included. For example, agent Mary Kole gives the following things that should be cut from a manuscript:

Anything that does not advance our understanding of a character
Anything that does not advance the plot or raise tension
Anything that doesn't reveal something new
Things that are just witty and clever, with no other purpose.

As I was reading Dane's book, I kept finding instances of things Mary Kole would have told her to take out of the manuscript. A lot of what I zeroed in on was description, like this one:

"Hidden in dusty-blue shadows, Elijah sat beneath a fragrant pine, watching a doe drink at the river's lapping edge. Fat-bellied with unborn fawn, she gazed warily around in the twilight and then dipped her muzzle into the water. He stared at the sunset and thought how much Cindy would enjoy the beauty of the sky awash with coral reflected on the rippling water."

Or this:

(this comes when they've broken the news to Granny that her son has been killed by Yankee bushwhackers) "Granny took two steps forward. Her voice shook. 'I kept shut fer Caleb's sake. But he's gone now. And thank God you can't hurt him no more!' Ned took her arm as she turned and sat back down. The bedroom door slammed when Viola rushed from the room. Into the silence came the distant hoot of an owl. (my emphasis) 'I'm fine, Ned,' assured Granny through tight lips."

It seems to me in both of those cases, the description has nothing to do with accomplishing any of those things Mary Kole outlined. In fact, the hoot of the owl is almost comical thrown into such a dramatically tense moment (actually, there's another one I can't find now that made me laugh out loud because it was so incongruous).

That's not to say every piece of description is meaningless. For example, this description helps establish the desperation of the situation when Cindy discovers her baby has been kidnapped:

"Cindy's heart pounded. She called and called. When she stopped to listen, a drumming woodpecker was the only sound echoing from the hills."

So, based on what I've learned by reading the blogs, most description should be left out of a book, unless it is directly contributing to plot or character. But then I argue back with myself that my husband says he likes books that have a lot of description so he can picture the world where the story is taking place. He gives the example of the Shanara books by Terry Brooks (which I haven't read); he jokingly says the first two pages of the first Shanara book is all description.

I know that's what Nancy Dane is doing, trying to establish for readers the character of the world her characters live in. It's a beautiful part of the world, too, and I understand wanting to capture some of that beauty and work it into the story. But it doesn't help with character, and it doesn't help with plot. Does "world-building" give enough justification to put so much in there?

That phrase, "world-building," made me think of Harry Potter, in which Rowling definitely built an alternative world to the one we are so familiar with. So I decided to check out what she did with Harry's first introduction to Hogwarts. Here's her first description of the castle:

"And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was a smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead. It towered over them as they sailed nearer and nearer to the cliff on which it stood."

That's all. She doesn't tell us if the castle is covered with moss, or if it has ten turrets, or if the stones are gray or brown. In the next chapter, she gives us a little more detail:

"She pulled the door wide. The entrance hall was so big you could have fit the whole of the Dursleys' house in it. The stone walls were lit with flaming torches like the ones at Gringotts, the ceiling was too high to make out, and a magnificent marble staircase facing them led to the upper floors."

More detail, but still accomplished in two sentences. Three pages later is the longest descriptive passage:

"Harry had never even imagined such a strange and splendid place. It was lit by thousands and thousands of candles that were floating in midair over four long tables, where the rest of the students were sitting. These tables were laid with glittering golden plates and goblets. At the top of the hall was another long table where the teachers were sitting....The hundreds of faces staring at them looked like pale lanterns in the flickering candlelight. Dotted here and there among the students, the ghosts shone misty silver. Mainly to avoid all the staring eyes, Harry looked upward and saw a velvety black ceiling dotted with stars...It was hard to believe there was a ceiling there at all, and that the Great Hall didn't simply open on to the heavens."

To me, that feels right. So how's an aspiring writer to know how much description is too much? I like a couple of lines from Kole's post.

"Some things have very little happen in them but they're readable. That's okay, I guess. In the same way that elevator muzak technically counts as a composition. "Readability' is not what we're striving for, though...fill [your manuscript] with important, varied, nuanced and truthful stuff! Because if what you're writing isn't any of that...those are dead words anyway."

What do you think? How much description should a book have? Do you like description in books?

How Long Until July?

2010-11-29T22:08:00.000-06:00

If nothing else, the Harry Potter series has forced on us the virtue of patience. We would anxiously anticipate the release of a new book, devour the book in a day or less, and then have to wait another year (or more) for the release of the next one. The same is true of the movies based on the books, although I think the wait between Deathly Hallows parts 1 and 2 is going to be the most agonizing yet.

I've said before that I thought the first movie stuck a little too devotedly to its book, while others (like The Half-Blood Prince) seemed to wander a bit far from the original (not that I'm necessarily opposed to that, unlike my husband and son). This latest movie stayed fairly close to the material in the book, and in some ways, I think it did an even better job with the storytelling than the book did. I'm thinking specifically about the chapters in which Harry, Ron, and Hermione were wandering around the countryside trying to figure out how to find horcruxes. In the book, those chapters (honestly) seemed to drag a little; in the movie, a handful of establishing shots (of some very different and very beautiful landscapes) accomplished what took lots of words in the books. That allowed for more emphasis to fall on the characters, and I must say I am greatly impressed with the way these young actors brought out emotions. I had never much liked Ron's character, in either the books or the movies, but Rupert Grint sort of changed my mind about Ron in this movie by giving him some depth I'd never considered.

Of course, I absolutely love Hermione, and this movie made me doubly appreciate just how invaluable she was to Harry during his mission (I want that beaded purse!). Emma Watson plays the character with a combination of a sort of grim understanding of what she's gotten into and a certain vulnerability that really shows what she's giving up to help Harry. I guess that's what I liked best about this installment of the series. In the other movies, the actors are portraying what's on the page; in this movie, the actors are enriching what's on the page. My husband has commented a couple of times on how well Jason Isaacs portrays a Lucius Malfoy who is fresh out of Azkaban; Lucius has lost a whole lot of his swagger, and Isaacs actually gives Lucius a slight tremble that really captures the essence of how his world, personal and public, has been turned upside down. That's not an exception, either; David Yates seems to have pulled good performances out of everyone.

The action sequences were sufficiently thrilling, and the scary scenes were delightfully creepy. But I think what I enjoyed most (being the English major geek I am) was watching these young characters take on the mantle of adulthood in a situation in which the stakes are impossibly high. Story arc, you know.

The movie ends in just the right place, too. When the credits started to roll, I wanted to stand and say, NO!!!! NOT YET!!!!! July is so far away!

A Good Role Model, in a Way I Didn't Expect

2010-11-23T16:45:00.000-06:00

Our family hasn't yet been to see the new Harry Potter movie, believe it or not. We're planning to go tonight, but to settle my curiosity until then, I've been reading a few related articles.

I read one today that was an interview with Emma Watson, the lovely girl who grew up before our eyes as Hermione. The article was talking about how she has continued her education, unlike most of the other young stars of the series. One of the comments on the story pointed out that Miss Watson and Hermione were good role models for girls because they both value education, which the commentor pointed out was a major departure from how most girl main characters are portrayed in children's television (just watch some Disney channel shows if you don't believe it).

I thought that was a good point. But last night as I was watching the Half-Blood Prince on DVD with my daughter (to get ready, you know) I saw another good message Hermione sends - a girl can be friends with a guy without having a romantic thing with him. (I'm talking Harry, not Ron, here.)

One morning not long ago, the DJs on the radio station I listen to on my way to work where trying to decide if men and women can actually be just friends. It surprised me how many people said no. I suppose it shouldn't have. In a lot of books and shows, if there is a man and a woman, they eventually will end up in a romantic relationship. This is not only true of stories for adult viewers, but also for teens. One of the shows my kids used to love to watch was Ned's Declassified, about a trio of middle school students, two boys and a girl. At first Ned and Mose (the girl) were just best friends, but as the kids (and the show) got older, eventually they ended up dating each other. I could probably think of other examples, but I'm lazy (and it's getting close to time to head to the movie!).

I'll admit I always wanted the same thing to happen with Harry and Hermione. Alas, JK Rowling had other plans. And yet, watching the movie last night, I decided it was a good thing for those two characters to not be romantic with each other. They can be close and share their problems and secrets without the baggage that comes with "being in love" with each other. It's nice to see that. And one of the reviews I saw about the new movie says the friendship between the two characters comes across well. Even though their relationship is not romantic, they love each other. Nice.

Can't wait to see it....

This is not the Taylor Swift Fan Club, Really

2010-11-09T22:25:00.000-06:00

I feel rather self-conscious about writing another post about Taylor Swift, but I discovered her latest song, "Mine," last week (it's only been #1 for nine weeks now, ha ha), and I just really admire the writing in that song. In the course of two verses, three choruses, and a bridge, Swift manages to tell an entire story that conveys plot, backstory, character, and theme. Oh, and it's pretty catchy to sing along to.

In terms of plot, there's nothing especially original about the song - girl meets boy, girl gets boy, girl nearly loses boy, girl keeps boy. But there's an economy to what Swift includes in the story that keeps only the details needed to move the story along to its conclusion. Although she doesn't specifically say what the demons in the backstory are, she gives us enough that we can guess ("Brace myself for the goodbye, cause it's all I've ever known") what are her "parents' mistakes."

Ok, maybe the main reason I like the song is the line in the chorus, "You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter." I just think that phrase is put together so well. It has the antithesis thing going for it, but it also seems to me to capture a real sense of the character who is narrating the story. And there's nothing wasted in it - every word contributes.

If only I could write that well....

It's Bad, but It's Good

2010-11-05T17:57:00.000-05:00

My Kindle died yesterday, unexpectedly. I had plugged it in to recharge the battery, and when I went back to get it, the screen was completely dark, like it had been burned out or something. The image looks like a negative and it's actually hard to read anything at all on it, even to tell if it's on or off.

Thank goodness it has a one-year warranty instead of 90 days like a lot of electronics (it is like five days over that 90-day period). I dreaded trying to call Amazon and try to talk them into repairing or replacing it, but today after work I made myself do it. I was pleasantly surprised. I explained the problem, and there was no conversation trying to find a way to say I did something wrong to mess up the device. The guy simply confirmed my address and then said a new one should arrive Nov. 8. I'm still a little shell-shocked, and I'm halfway convinced I didn't hear him right - I tend to have trouble hearing stuff on the phone, especially if the person talks softly or has much of an accent (and this person had both those characteristics).

I guess we'll see on Monday. But if there's a new Kindle on my porch that afternoon, you can bet I'll leave some positive feedback somewhere on the Amazon site.

November's Just Around the Corner.....

2010-10-29T23:05:00.000-05:00

For some of my friends, November means one thing - NaNoWriMo (for those of you who never heard of it, that's National Novel Writing Month). I've always thought it might be kind of fun to join them in trying to crank out a 50,000 word novel in just a month, but realistically, that's not going to happen while I'm teaching. I've been toying with the idea of trying to finish the last two chapters of my second WiP during the month, but .... inertia is hard to overcome!

Today, though, I came across a link to a different project for November - NaNoReaMo. YA author Natalie Whipple is going to read 3 books a week for a total of 12 during November. Depending on what the books are, that could be just as unrealistic for me as trying to write a novel during the month. I was doing really well on my A-to-Z reading challenge until school started, but now I've stalled. I just finished the "P" book, which leaves me only two months to try to get through 10 books (one of which was supposed to be Undaunted Courage - yikes!).

To write or to read???

No Wonder She's So Popular

2010-10-19T21:54:00.000-05:00

As I was washing the dishes tonight and listening to the mp3 player, Taylor Swift's song Fifteen came around in the shuffle. Listening to the lyrics, I thought, "Now THERE'S someone who understands her target audience!" Even though it's been many, many years since I was fifteen, I can still remember the awkward mix of uncertainty and bravado that she sings about. Granted, she's not that far removed from that age, but to be able to verbalize the feelings the way she did is, I think, pretty remarkable. How does a writer go back and remember what was important back then? I wish now I hadn't been so zealous about destroying all the evidence of my teen-aged dorkiness once I got into my twenties - it might have come in handy now that I'd like to write for young adults, ha ha.

How Far Should Realism Go?

2010-10-16T17:01:00.000-05:00

Mary Kole had a thought-provoking post and discussion in the comments on her blog at Kidlit.com this week about sex in YA novels. I was especially interested in it for a couple of reasons: first, because the feedback that accompanied an agent's rejection of my full manuscript included the comment, "You can put sex in YA novels" (which I hadn't); and second, because I missed sex in my most recent read, Glenn Vernam's Pioneer Breed. (Gosh, I hate to keep being critical of that book since I liked it so much when I was a kid....)

Before I explain the above remarks, let me clarify my thoughts on sex in novels. Most of the time, I cringe when I read explicit scenes, because they seem to be handled in one of two ways. There are those that are sort of clinical in their descriptions, and those just seem creepy - I feel like I'm some kind of peeping tom spying on people when I shouldn't be. There was a scene from A Northern Light that left me feeling that way. A couple of months later, I'm still repelled by that scene (and maybe that was Donnelly's intention, but that's what pops into my mind first when I think of that book, and I really wish that wasn't true). The second approach to sex scenes seems to be to use euphemisms for everything and to make everything seem so highly passionate. Honestly, I am more embarrassed reading those scenes than the first kind. I never made it completely through a category romance novel because I just felt ridiculous.

I'm not trying to say there shouldn't be any sex scenes in books, even YA books. But for me, those scenes ought to play a key part in the plot. A good example of a sex scene that was needed in a book comes from Alice in Love and War. Sure, Turnbull could have chosen to skip over that part and say "Alice gave herself to Robin," but seeing Alice's feelings as she does it is crucial to understanding why she acts the way she does later in the book. A sex scene that I think wasn't important at all to the plot was in Jellicoe Road, when the two main characters sleep together after going to try to find the girl's mother (sad - I can't remember her name). Readers know the two of them are attracted to each other, but having them have sex adds nothing to that subplot, in my humble opinion. It's sort of like the author shrugged and said, "well, you know it would happen, so I'll stick it in there to be realistic." That's not a good enough justification for me.

That thought brings me back to Pioneer Breed. I've summarized the plot before, but to save you the trouble of hunting up those posts, here's a quick synopsis: 17-year-old Rance has been orphaned by Indians and is trying to live alone on his parents' farm. One day while he's out hunting, he finds a 15-year-old girl (Tenny) who has been orphaned by an Indian attack, and he takes her to his house, where he nurses her through illness and gives her a place to live during the harsh Oregon winter. He realizes he's going to have to take her to town when spring comes, and he's concerned that people may treat her badly because she's been living alone with him all winter. He ends up solving the problem by deciding to marry her, a decision that comes as a huge revelation to him.

Until he decides to marry Tenny, Rance has shown no sexual awareness of her at all, not even when he was doctoring her with poultices on her chest and back. Granted, he tried to be decent about it, which I guess shows some awareness of her as a woman. But it's never framed in those terms; instead it is just an example of the decency any young man who had been raised right in the mid-nineteenth century would exercise. But I'm pretty sure males were the same then as they are now and as they were when David spied Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop. I'm not saying I wanted lasciviousness to run rampant in Rance's thoughts throughout the book - not at all. But realistically, there would have been some struggle in the mind of even a decent young man, especially as the two of them begin to enjoy each other's company so much and to feel so cozy in the cabin together. In my humble opinion, the thought that he could marry Tenny and be with her in every way would have occurred to him much sooner, realistically.

One of the points that kept coming up again and again in the blog post was that teens expect realism. As Mary said,

Truth and authenticity are important in all children’s books, but in YA especially. No matter what you do, make sure it rings true to real life.

Teens are masters at sniffing out things that don't ring true. And they tend to be unforgiving of anything they label as "phony." I think Vernam's book would get that label today, unfortunately. I don't believe it was his intention to be preachy; I think he was just writing a "clean" book, and that meant leaving sex out completely. My question is, can a book be "clean" and still realistically portray the sexuality that all human beings possess, in its great variety of expressions?

That's not just a rhetorical question. It's one I've struggled with in writing my own novel. As the agent noted, there were no explicit sex scenes in my book, even though the main characters are married and it would be morally OK. Yet there are enough references to sex in the book - anything from feeling desire to "fading to black" just before the characters do the deed - to make me wonder if what I've written would be considered "clean." I hope so, but if not, I hope it is at least realistic. Actually, I guess it's more important to me to be realistic than to be squeaky "clean."

Another Reason I Love My Kindle

2010-10-13T22:54:00.000-05:00

I'm stuck in a seemingly non-ending cycle of grading papers and prepping for classes (with an occasional meeting thrown into the mix), which leaves me no time to work on my own writing. One day I had the brainstorm that I could use the text-to-speech feature of my Kindle to read my book to me during the only time when I'm not doing something else - on the drive back and forth to work, or when I'm on the road to pick up the kids from school or to go to a football game.

I had already taken advantage of the ability to have Amazon convert my Word file so I could put the most recent draft of my manuscript on my Kindle (which is cool enough in and of itself). Listening to it on text-to-speech is a good tool, since I'm noticing some phrases I use too frequently that I never picked up on while reading. It also seems to be helping me think through some continuity problems I thought I might have.

There are some humorous moments, too. For instance, I noticed the robotic female voice referring to one character as what sounded like "Stupid." I listened more closely and realized that was the closest approximation the computer could come up with for the character's real name - "Stewpot." The funniest thing, though, is when the computer encounters a sentence that ends with the word "Pa." Every time, it reads that as "Pennsylvania." It makes for some pretty amusing passages, believe me!

Concept vs. Execution

2010-10-08T22:51:00.000-05:00

I first read Pioneer Breed by Glenn Vernam when I was a teenager. Although I couldn't remember the details of the story all these years later, I did remember it was about a young guy who rescued a girl from an Indian raid on her family and ended up marrying her. (I didn't even bother with a spoiler alert, because I figure no one's going to read this book anymore). When I was going through one of my "hungry for pioneer fiction" stages a while back, I thought of this book and hunted down a used copy.

Reading it these past few weeks has been a bit of a disappointment. But I came to realize it was not the story that I was disappointed in; it was the way the story was told.

First, the dialect drove me absolutely up the wall.

"That's a notion worth yokin' some thought to," he said. "Such a thing plumb got past me. But now't you mention it, I kin see how another winda would work to lighten up the whole place. And it would be no big chore to chop a hole in the bedroom wall. And fixin' up a clo'es rack for dryin' would be easy, too; skin some willa saplin's to put up atween a post an' them two big trees. Yes, sir, that's a prime idea."

Now, I live in a rural area in the South, and I've heard real people talk pretty close to that. But writing all of Rance's conversation (and a lot of his thoughts, too) in that hicky dialect at some point began to get in the way of understanding what he was saying. It was a distraction rather than a character-building attribute (which I'm sure is what the author intended). In my own novel, I also wrote dialogue in the uneducated vernacular. After reading this book and seeing how annoying the dialect was, I'm going back and removing every single "ain't" from the manuscript. Sure, maybe the dialect is accurate, but when it gets in the way and takes the reader out of the story, it's not working.

A second thing that disappointed me was such heavy reliance on "telling" rather than "showing." For example,

The ensuing weeks brought a growing sense of well-being to both of them. Returning health found Tenny ever more eager to be of help. Gone, she said, were the old days of drying dishes or preparing vegetables while swaddled up in the cherrywood rocker. Rance was forced to lay aside his anxious protestations as he watched her go on to more active things without harming herself. Almost before either of them fully realized it, their lives had settled into an unplanned division of labor. It was a comfortable feeling, needing no words of explanation. Tenny accepted her position as might a shipwrecked sailor washed ashore on some verdant isle. Yesterday was dead; tomorrow a blank. She could only accept today's blessings of life and security with a deep sense of obligation which time might help her to repay.

Again, I understand why the writer did this. He needed for some time to pass in the story. However, it's really lifeless. I read over those words without caring about Tenny at all. I can't help thinking how much more emotionally affecting that passage would have been had the writer showed us howTenny's new life affected her, rather than just telling us. I guess this new emphasis on "showing" is a change in writing style since the 1970's, when this book was written, and I definitely believe it is a change for the better.

One last thing - there was some clumsy characterization going on here. I thought if I read one more time about Rance pulling on his "straw-colored forelock" or having O, Susanna "come to his lips," I'd go nuts. We got it the first time or two; those are meant to be quirky little character habits. We don't have to be reminded over and over and over throughout the book!

It's a shame, really. I still like the premise of the story. I wish it could be written in a more up-to-date, more engaging style. Hey, since you can't copyright ideas, only the expression of ideas, maybe I'll do it myself some day, ha ha.

This is How It's Supposed to Work

2010-09-23T21:53:00.000-05:00

My daughter is very close to finishing the Hunger Games series. When I saw her bring the first book home from school (at the suggestion of her language arts teacher), I wasn't so sure it was such a good idea for her to read it. I mean, she's only 11 (well, nearly 12), and those books have some pretty mature themes and some pretty graphic violence. But I know making a big deal out of censoring something makes that something even more attractive, so I didn't tell her she couldn't read it. Instead, we've been talking about it some.

She's about to finish Mockingjay now (whipped through that series FAST!); in fact, she just read the part where (spoiler alert!) Prim is killed by the two-phase bomb that Gale came up with. As we were making pizzas for supper, we ended up having a conversation about war and how sometimes people who have nothing to do with the reasons for the war end up being the ones who suffer most. She kept saying, "But why bomb children?" Not in an "I don't understand" way, but in a "I do understand, but I don't get it" kind of way - the same kind of reaction I have.

It was a good opportunity to talk about something that probably never would have come up if not for her reading the book. Granted, it's not a very happy thing to talk to an 11-year-old about, but the world's not a very happy place sometimes. Maybe talking about it now can help innoculate her to the nastiness later so she can deal with it.

It seems that being prepared makes a huge difference in how she responds to something. I was really worried about how she would take Prim's death - they are basically the same age, you know, they both love cats.....Well, one day her brother (jokingly) said something about Prim dying (he hasn't even read the book), and I confirmed it, thinking someone had told him. They both looked at me in shock. Then they wanted to know how it happened, but I wouldn't tell them. I don't regret spilling the beans. I thought maybe if she knew it was going to happen, she could build the necessary defenses it would take to keep from being devastated by the death of her most beloved character. It seems to have worked. She wasn't bawling over it.

Anyway, I guess I'm glad she's read the book. But I'm more glad that I've read it so we could talk about the parts that bother her, and so I can put my own spin on those parts in helping to shape her ethical development.

Quality, Not Quantity

2010-09-19T14:12:00.000-05:00

While wasting some time trying to avoid starting to grade speeches, I discovered that Elizabeth George Speare, one of my writing idols, apparently published only four books: Calico Captive, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Bronze Bow, and The Sign of the Beaver. Of those four, two were Newberry Award winners and another one was a Newberry Honor book and won the Scott O'Dell award for historical fiction. Wouldn't it be fantastic to be so good that nearly everything you wrote was considered worthy of a major award?

Ok, enough procrastination - speeches await.

I Think We Need the "Golden Mean" Here

2010-09-16T22:46:00.000-05:00

In the previous post, I was complaining because Katniss in Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay was so overwhelmed by her PTSD following two trips to the Hunger Games arena and playing a major role in a revolution. Well, the book I'm reading now -- Pioneer Breed by Glenn Vernam -- swings too far in the opposite direction.

Pioneer Breed begins with the deaths of the main character's (Rance) parents at the hands of a group of rogue Indians. Rance was an only child, so he has to deal with their deaths and with carrying on the life on their farm by himself. Later, he comes across another massacre scene while he's out hunting, and he finds the only survivor, a teen girl he calls Tenny. He takes her home and nurses her back to health.

While Katniss was wallowing in self-pity and emptiness, Rance seems unphased by the horrific events of his life. There are a couple of mentions of him being lonely and having a lump in his throat at the thought of his parents, but generally, he's pretty happy, especially once Tenny is around (more about that in a different post). Here's about as depressed as Rance gets:

"No more did he have to work himself into drugged insensibility in order to find a sleep that was free of tortured misery; no more were his working days haunted by the double grave below the spring; no more was stark loneliness a grim specter staring over his shoulder. He need only think of Tenny to feel himself surrounded by comforting care and cheerful friendship, all the horrible emptiness of the past mercifully shunted aside."

Part of what is at issue here is "telling, not showing" as a writing style, and I'll have more to say about that in a later post. It may also be that since this book was published in 1972, there was not such an emphasis on realism. Stories seem to have a much more intimate approach now, putting readers right into the heads of the characters and letting us feel their emotions. I guess since I'm so used to that style now, this book just seems to gloss over the ugliness to the point of being almost funny.

There's got to be a middle ground between being numb with pain following trauma and being oblivious to the pain.....

How Should a Girl Deal with It All?

2010-09-08T22:39:00.000-05:00

I whipped through Mockingjay in two days (including time to feed the family, although I'll admit, I wasn't doing a very good job of that at the end). For the past couple of days now, I've been trying to decide what I think about it. I don't think I liked it that much, and I'm trying to understand why. Today while listening to a student's speech, I think I might have found the answer.

The student was talking about having strength in the face of difficult circumstances. She said she has found that hiding is not the answer, that problems have to be faced. It occurred to me that Katniss was always hiding. I know she was suffering PTSD, and it's no wonder. No doubt, she's been through some horrifying experiences. But as a literary character, I'd like to see her fight her way through the pain to salvage some sense of hope. (Spoiler!) In the epilogue to this series, Katniss has what could be labeled a happy life with Peeta, but she still seems detached from it and unable to fully trust in it and even to appreciate it. I don't expect that the character would suddenly "get over" all the awful things that happened, but it would be nice to see evidence that she's healing. That evidence wasn't there, at least not to me.

Am I being unfair? I thought of some other characters who have faced terrible circumstances and how they've come out of it. Most recently, Ophelia. I reckon having your father murdered by your secret husband, thinking you've been cast off by that husband, having to fake your own death to escape the threat of a poison-happy, evil king, and then learning your husband and your brother have killed each other would be about as traumatic as what Katniss went through. The interesting thing is that Ophelia did the same thing as Katniss - she hid and sank into depression. For Ophelia, this happened in the convent, and she was finally brought out of it by the friendship of Isabel and by finding a purpose in working as a healer for the nuns. When Horatio shows up, she's well on her way to being able to put the events of her past behind her and face her life with hope.

I also thought about Sarah in The Heretic's Daughter. Being imprisoned in a 17th-century jail for months and having your mother be hanged as a witch is pretty traumatic, I'd think. Yet at the end of the book, Sarah has found a degree of hope in preserving her family's story so it's not lost to the future generations. I even remembered Patty from Summer of My German Soldier - physically, verbally, and psychologically abused by her parents, suffering the loss of her friend Anton, under suspicion of spying for being friends with Anton, sent to a detention center - still, that book ends with a note of hope.

Mockingjay didn't seem to have any hope at the end, just a weary, distrustful sense of acceptance. Maybe I'm naive or weak to want hope at the end of the stories I read; after all, not everything in life has a hopeful ending. But I would argue that books are not life. They are stories that can help readers, among other things, find the silver lining in the gloomiest cloud. That doesn't mean I want a "Pollyanna" ending. I know I've used the quote from Elizabeth George Speare before, so I'll just paraphrase very loosely here, but at the end of a book I want to feel that the main character can stand up to his/her life and will be ok. Maybe he or she is not ok just yet, but he/she is on the road to being ok. The book can have a "sad" ending, but still have that little glimmer of hope that keeps the ending from being "bleak." Mockingjay was bleak.

(There's a really excellent one-star review on Amazon by a reader named Suzanne G, and the follow-up comments are good, too. The review does a more in-depth critique of Katniss' character and the failings in her relationships with the other characters.)

It's About Time....

2010-09-04T22:17:00.000-05:00

Would you believe I've had my Kindle a month and haven't yet read a complete book on it? That's in part a function of going back to school and being dead dog tired when I go to bed (which is when I usually read). So far, I've used my Kindle in church (though I'm considering switching back to my old Bible since it's so hard to flip from place to place in the Kindle), I've used it to download a couple of books that I skimmed to help me prepare for classes (I'll read them later, really), and I've read part of a sample of a novel that a friend recommended (might get back to that one some day).

Well, that's about to change. Since I finished Ophelia last night, I'm going to make my next book be something on the Kindle. I plan to download Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. I considered buying the hardback to complete the set for my son, but I think I won't at this point. I really want to see how the Kindle reading experience is for real reading, not passage-flipping or skimming. I think it's about time.

It's Hard to Follow the Original

2010-09-03T23:27:00.000-05:00

I just finished Ophelia by Lisa Klein. I liked it well enough, but as I was reading, it struck me how hard it must be to try to write something that's based on someone else's work. Or even to write something based on historical fact, as A Northern Light was loosely based on the murder of Grace Brown (which was also the basis of Drieser's An American Tragedy).

Klein did well, in my opinion, of taking the sketchy character of Ophelia from Shakespeare's play and putting credible flesh on her. Ophelia's tale blended reasonably well with Hamlet's tale, although at times I found myself thinking the timeline seemed sort of bizarre. Of course, it's hard to tell from Hamlet what amount of time expired between Hamlet's encounter with the ghost and the eventual gory fencing match. In re-reading the play, I thought it might have been a period of even weeks, which would be one reason Hamlet berates himself so for failing to carry out the revenge his father's ghost demands. In Klein's book, everything seems to happen in a matter of days, or at most, a couple of weeks. It strained my suspension of disbelief a little that all those events - from Shakespeare's original and from Klein's story - could have been compacted into such a brief time.

The thing that bothered me most, though, was the character of Hamlet in Klein's work. He was faithful to Shakespeare's conception of the character, no doubt. But it seemed to me that he was missing some soul. He just seemed sort of flat in Klein's re-telling. In Shakespeare's play, I found Hamlet quite appealing (does that make me weird?) - he's witty, with a sharp and wicked sense of sarcasm that depends on word play and nuance of language (I guess I am weird, if that's what I found appealing!). He's passionate, and yet he's detached; he's paralyzed by indecision, and yet he acts forcefully. He's disdainful of women, and yet that disdain seems to spring from a deep sense of being let down by a woman who mattered. I'm still not convinced he was mad; not to get into Shakespearan criticism here, but Hamlet seems to be the poster boy for what happens when one is re-active rather than proactive. Anyway, his character was very much alive and vital in the play, in every sense of that word.

In Klein's book, Ophelia naturally was the strongest character, since we're seeing the story from her viewpoint. I'm ok with that. I liked what Klein did with her. But I was disappointed in Klein's Hamlet. He just didn't seem exciting enough to inspire Ophelia to be so caught up in him. Maybe that's part of the point. Maybe Ophelia didn't really love Hamlet, but the idea of Hamlet - the handsome, witty prince who is forbidden to her. Lots of girls fall for the equivalent of Hamlet and overlook the Horatios who would be infinitely better for them. I suppose since Hamlet was going to be killed anyway - and we all knew THAT was going to happen - Klein didn't want to waste a lot of narrative energy on him. Or maybe she was hesistant to develop him too much beyond what we already knew from Shakespeare - the perils of using someone else's well-known character.

Another peril exists in trying to speculate beyond the bounds of the original story. Klein's method of having Ophelia escape was definitely in keeping with the spirit of Shakespeare's works. Once Ophelia was safely lodged in the nunnery, though, the story seemed to me to take a weird turn and sort of amble off on a side road filled with deep psychological and religious brambles that try to explicate the sources of all Ophelia's perceived failings at Elsinore. Although it turned out ok, it was just "ok."

To get back to my original premise, it must be hard to take someone else's work and expand it (as Klein did) or link to it in your own story (as Donnelly did with A Northern Light). On the one hand (Klein), there's a risk that audiences won't agree with your interpretations of the original events and characters, and that they won't like your additions. On the other hand (Donnelly), there's the possibility that the original story will seem sort of "tacked on" without enough relevance to the story at hand (I really felt Donnelly could have told the story of A Northern Light without trying to drag Grace Brown back in every few chapters - the link seemed really contrived to me). It must be much harder than trying to create an original story, where you have complete control over everything.

Guest Post - The Lightning Thief

2010-08-25T06:35:00.000-05:00

This post is written by Lily, my 11-year-old daughter:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a great series and I would recommend these books to everyone. In the first book Percy finds out that he is no normal mortal. He also finds his best friend isn’t human. Grover and Percy’s mother, Sally Jackson, lead Percy to a camp that is safe for him. At camp he meets his soon-to-be friend, Annabeth Chase. Soon after meeting her he gets a quest from the Oracle. In his quest he meets two gods, Ares and Hades. Read the book if you would like a story of friendship, fighting, mythology, and Grover.

Shakespeare Is Wasted on the Young

2010-08-19T18:08:00.000-05:00

That's not really what I think, but it made a catchy title. Well, maybe I did mean it a little, because I've been reading Hamlet recently and I'm finding that it is so much more enjoyable now than it was when I was reading it for my Shakespeare class in college. I seem to remember back then that I had to consult the footnotes every other line or so just to understand what was being said. That makes it a little difficult to follow the flow of the action - especially when one might be a little distracted by his/her own Hamlet, ha ha.

Now it's much easier to grasp the meaning, even if I'm reading the Elizabethean phrases. (I do still occasionally have to consult the footnotes.) I'm also able to maintain a sense of the flow from night to night, and I'm finding I really enjoy it, even those philosophical flights of poetry that annoyed me back in the day. That Hamlet - what a witty scoundrel! I love his word plays. And I can sympathize with his feelings of frustration with himself when he can't seem to bring himself to do what he needs to do (although what he wants to do is a LOT darker than anything I ever want to do!).

I'm not advocating that high school English teachers should abandon their efforts to teach Shakespeare to teens. I do hope that those efforts are positive enough that the kids will be willing to do as I've done and revisit the Bard when they're older. I really hope teens' experiences won't turn them off Shakespeare forever.

One more thing I've appreciated now is the difference between reading one of Shakespeare's plays and seeing it performed. There's so much meaning that is conveyed in the acting rather than just the words. This may motivate me to seek out a film version of the play; any suggestions as to which would be best? I've seen the Mel Gibson version long ago, but Mel has a little taint on him right now, and there might be better versions, anyway.

Yeah, I Read YA Fiction...and apparently a lot of other adults do, too

2010-08-13T20:33:00.000-05:00

One of the most (slightly) embarrassing moments of my life was when I was interviewing for a teaching assistantship for my master's degree program. I was sitting in the office of one of the professors, surrounded by high-level academic books. He leaned back in his chair, made one of those little tents with his hands, and asked, "What do you read?"

At that point, it would have been nice to be able to pull out the title of some high-level academic book or even one of the classic novels from my literature classes, but instead, I was honest and said, "Mainly children's books."

That answer didn't keep me from getting the assistantship, but I've always felt a little apologetic whenever I admit to my preference for young people's books. But I guess I have nothing to be ashamed of, according to a recent article in the New York Times. The article says 47% of women aged 18-24 and 20% of women aged 35-44 buy and read YA books. The article goes on to explain some of the appeal YA books have for older readers:

There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging.

Another of the experts quoted in the article says we middle-aged readers of YA books may be drawn to the "big type and short, plot-driven chapters" that make YA literature easier to read, since we are tired.

Ok, I'll admit it. I do like the fact that most YA books have shorter chapters and more focused plots and move along quickly. But I've decided that's not a sign of being intellectually shallow on my part. If I were reading Nancy Drew exclusively, maybe so. But one thing I have really enjoyed about YA (and children's) novels are the deep ideas that lurk beneath the seemingly simple surface. I've read about gender issues and race issues and death and love and rebellion, among other things. I agree that maybe it is intellectually shallow of me to want to avoid some of the issues in adult novels, like child molestation and psychological torture (although there are YA novels that also deal with these issues, and I generally avoid those, as well - why make myself miserable?).

I suppose that's another reason I prefer YA literature - there's a sort of an innocent hopefulness to YA stories, or maybe it's a hopeful innocence. Either way, I like it. I like coming away from something I've read with a feeling that there is hope for the world, even if things don't work out the way I hoped they would.

Kindle - Week One

2010-08-07T07:47:00.000-05:00

You may recall that I've been debating for over a year about whether I want to buy a Kindle. Well, the debate was resolved last week when my husband got me one as a combination birthday present/payment for picking so many blueberries (his idea, not mine - I don't need to be paid). After a week of owning one, I'm still debating the advantages of e-books.

Don't get me wrong; I can see a long-term love affair developing. It is so light! Forget the "experience" of holding a book. Holding the Kindle is so much more comfortable and natural. I like the notion of being able to have an entire library at my disposal in one neat little package. Reading off the screen is better than reading from a computer screen, and seems to be truly comparable to reading from a book. Of course, I haven't yet had the luxury of being able to spend hours at one sitting reading, so I can't say if I might get tired of reading from a screen.

One thing I love that I hadn't anticipated is the ability to upload personal documents. My boss sent a couple of articles faculty are supposed to read before our opening workshop in a week or two. One was a pdf - I just plugged the Kindle in to the computer and dragged the file over like I would for any flash drive. The other article was a Word document, so I had to email it to Amazon for conversion, but I used the free service to email back to my Yahoo account, then dragged the file over. Done within 10 minutes. Now, instead of being chained to my computer while reading these no-doubt thrilling documents or having to kill some trees to print them out, I can carry the documents with me and read bits of them while waiting for my daughter's orthodontic appointment or the Band Booster meeting. I'm wondering if this might be a tool I can use for grading papers.

Just as with any relationship, though, there are some little things that bother me. The first book I bought was the Bible, and I took the Kindle, not the physical Bible, to church this Sunday. Maybe it's just because I'm not yet used to the navigation of the Kindle, but I was so slow finding verses! In the book Bible, I could find a passage in seconds. With the Kindle, I miss being able to flip from passage to passage to inform what I'm reading at the time. The second problem is that the battery ran out during church Wednesday night, and I was stuck without a Bible. I guess I'm going to have to remember to treat the Kindle like my car - when the battery is down to a quarter-tank, refuel.

Another thing that nags at the back of my mind is how "selfish" Kindle is. If I buy a book on Kindle, it's available to only me, unless I am willing to share my sweet device, and I fear what would happen if I let my kids borrow it - I have found it to be very true that "You can't have anything nice if you have kids." The plus side of all those books on the shelf is that they are there, visible, inviting. Just yesterday, my daughter was loitering in the room where I was working on stuff for school, and she suddenly said, "Anne of Green Gables! We saw that movie at school. It was good! I think I'll read this when I'm finished with The Red Pyramid." How can that happen if my library is hidden on a Kindle?

Finally, something that is bothersome but has nothing, really, to do with Kindle is that their Whispernet service is sort of iffy where I live. I've been able to connect to the store, but a couple of times the download of a book was interrupted because of loss of signal, I guess. I finally had to download the book on the computer and transfer it over. One of the drawbacks of living in the boondocks.

Overall, I'm really pleased that my husband knocked me off the fence by getting me this gift. But I still haven't quite worked out how ebooks and paper books will interact in my world. I'm re-reading Hamlet to prepare me to read Ophelia by Lisa Klein, and rather than get a Kindle version of the play, I went to the shelf and pulled down my Complete Works of William Shakespeare from college days. You know, why buy a book I already have, blah, blah. The first night, I propped open the 3-inch spine of the Complete Works so I could read in bed. Bits of a dead flower that must have commemorated something in college fell onto my face. My elbows and biceps gradually sagged as I made my way through the first scene. Three nights in, my resolve is wavering. Does it really matter if I duplicate something in my library? For $.99, I can have Hamlet on my Kindle....

A Mixed Reaction

2010-08-03T09:21:00.000-05:00

(Sorry, this will have lots of spoilers.)

Somewhere along the way, A Northern Light and I parted ways. At first, I loved it. The main character, Mattie, reminded me in many ways of my teen self. She loved words and writing, but her day-to-day life made it difficult, if not nearly impossible, to see how she could follow her dreams of studying literature and writing her stories. I liked the dilemma she was facing (and wrote about it in an earlier post). I liked the supporting characters of Weaver and Royal and Miss Willcox and Mattie's family. I liked the slice-of-life glimpse into early 20th-century upstate New York, where the rich came to vacation in the mountains and the poor made a living by serving them.

But toward the end of the book, Jennifer Donnelly made several choices as a writer that I disagreed with and that left me with a bad taste in my mouth as far as this book is concerned. First, I think the turnaround of Emmie Hubbard was just too darn convenient. Emmie has been a -- well, I don't know what she has been. A victim? Royal's father has definitely been taking advantage of her for years. A prostitute? She's been accepting his "gifts" of the first, freshest milk, etc. for all those years. Whatever she is, she's definitely weak. I think Donnelly wants us to view her as a victim, but I can't see it entirely that way. But, I digress - her turnaround. At the end of the book, Weaver's mother has moved in with Emmie and, in the space of a week or so, has completely reformed Emmie, so that she is clean and respectable and able to provide for her children. I don't buy it. For one thing, if Weaver's mother has been living across the road from Emmie all these years (and it came as sort of a surprise to me when that was revealed at the end of the book), and if she's such a good influence, and if everyone in the area knew what was going on with Emmie and Royal's father, and if she thought Emmie was being wronged - then why didn't she do anything about it before???? I think it's because it ties in to something else that bothered me about the book - the way Donnelly wanted us to feel about Royal.

I'll admit I've changed my mind about having Mattie get together with Royal since my previous post. I really don't think they would be compatible. She is attracted to him because he's good-looking and because she thinks he is attracted to her, despite her plain and bookish self. She doesn't really care for him or have anything in common with him and isn't really interested in the things he cares about, so for them to marry would definitely be a mistake.

However, I think Donnelly wants to push all the blame for this failed relationship onto Royal. The reason he wants to marry Mattie is because he sees the opportunity to build a farm "empire." He doesn't love her or care about her interest in books. The two things that eventually make Mattie decide to dump him are that he is going to pay the back taxes on Emmie's land so he can have it (which means Emmie will be homeless) and that he brings Mattie a used cookbook for a birthday present. Although she doesn't say so, I imagine that Donnelly wants us to say, "The nerve of the guy!" and write him off as a jerk. Well, I refuse to do that.

What's wrong with Royal wanting to get Emmie's land? She hasn't been meeting her responsibilities for years, either for paying her taxes or for taking care of her kids (they regularly come to Mattie's family's house to eat). He wants to take the land and make it productive. Then add to that the fact that his father has been having a long-standing affair with Emmie, and Royal sees his chance to get her out of their lives. I totally understand his motivation, and don't see it as being particularly ignoble. Yet Donnelly wants us to see him as selfish and grasping, willing to turn a mother out on the streets. And she even has Weaver's mama step in and straighten Emmie out so Emmie's not a bad mother anymore. I just didn't like that whole bit.

Another thing I didn't like was making Royal into a jerk for giving Mattie the used cookbook for her birthday. When she sees the gift and knows it is a book, she gets her hopes up, only to have them dashed. The way it comes across in the story, that's the worst thing a guy can do - be so insensitive to his girl's feelings and so unaware of her desires. Like the "right" guy for a girl is going to be perfectly in tune with her and understand exactly what she wants. Come on. I bet most women out there have had a gift like the used cookbook. Maybe it's something you open and you think, "Why did he think I would like this??" Or maybe it is a useful and totally impersonal household appliance. Yet the husband or boyfriend who gave the lame gift has enough other, good qualities that you'll let it pass. At least Royal thought about Mattie enough to remember her birthday. He should get some points for that, instead of being turned into an insensitive lout. Let's face it - he's not the only problem in that relationship. Mattie didn't care about his dreams, either. She was thinking about Emily Dickinson instead of concentrating while he was talking about a new kind of corn.

As I said earlier, I don't have a problem with Mattie deciding she doesn't want to marry Royal, after all. That's actually a pretty good message for young women - don't marry the first guy who says you're pretty if you know you have nothing in common. What I didn't like was having Royal be villified for being that guy.

Finally, I didn't like having Mattie just leave at the end. All through the book, she's been so concerned about keeping the promise she made to her dying mother; at the end, she doesn't even think about that. She doesn't seem to care at all what will happen to her family, especially to Lou, the sister who seems to me to have some emotional problems following their mother's death. Mattie's teacher once told her, "You are many things, Mattie Gokey, but selfish is not one of them." I disagree.

What's a 21st-Century Feminist to Do?

2010-07-23T10:16:00.000-05:00

I'm really enjoying A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. Really, really enjoying it. I'm so glad I had that moment of weakness in the bookstore that led to buying it.

I'm about halfway through, and I find myself with a bit of a dilemma. I predict that the main character, Mattie, is going to have a choice to make at the end. She loves words and writing and wants to go to college, something that not many young women in the early 20th century managed to do. On the other hand, she is being courted by Royal Loomis, and she is liking it. However, I'm afraid those two paths for her future are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. As Mattie said,

Miss Wilcox had books but no family. Minnie had a family now, but those babies would keep her from reading for a good long time. Some people, like my aunt Josie and Alvah Dunning the hermit, had neither love nor books. Nobody I knew had both.

Maybe I'll be wrong, and Mattie will get to be the person who has both. But somehow I don't think the ending will be that easy. And that brings me to my dilemma: which do I think Mattie should choose, love or books?

I find myself really hoping she will get together with Royal. He offers her something she doesn't have in her own family - stability. Since Mattie's mother died, her family has really struggled financially, and her father is distant and angry all the time. Royal seems like a steady, hard working guy who would always provide for Mattie. Even as I write that, a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying, "But he doesn't respect her love of learning. They don't have enough in common to have a good relationship." Probably so. I keep falling into that same old trap girls have fallen into for centuries: "OK, so he's not perfect now, but he'll learn to respect the things that matter to her." Uh-huh.

So, she rejects Royal and finds a way to go to college. That would be the more 21st-century thing to do. Who says a woman needs a relationship to define who she is? Mattie can be true to her self and to her talents and not let anything stand between her and her dreams. Though giving up her chance with Royal might be hard in the short run, she will probably eventually find love with someone who is more in tune with her intellectually. If she married Royal, she would be stuck in a life of drudgery on his farm, and he shows some signs of being a little rigid in his attitudes. Why should she sacrifice her own dreams to live his dreams? I can't let the old romantic fairy tale of love cloud the reality of her life. She's better off without Royal.

Yet, the enlightened and liberated professional woman I like to pretend I am seems to be losing out at this point to the romantic reared on lots of "happily ever after" stories.

I don't know how it's going to turn out - and I am absolutely resisting the strong urge I feel to flip ahead and see!

A Sharp Tongue or a Soft Answer

2010-07-21T10:20:00.000-05:00

There's a saying on the marquee of a church that I pass frequently that reads, "A sharp tongue may cut your own throat." As I read The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, I couldn't help thinking of that saying, because apparently the main reason Martha Carrier was imprisoned and hanged as a witch was because she had a sharp tongue.

Everyone, from family members to neighbors, was a target for that tongue. Most people probably just let it roll off their backs, labeling Martha as an unpleasant person you shouldn't cross. However, there were some who took her comments more personally, and, in an atmosphere charged with suspicion and fear, they saw their chance to make Martha pay for that sharp tongue.

Am I saying that Martha was wrong to speak her mind? Not necessarily. Her sister, Mary, who is portrayed as being as gentle as Martha is harsh, was also arrested and spent months in jail (though she wasn't hanged). And I'll admit - there are times when something negative really ought to be said. "I'm not going to let you lie and trick my son into marriage." "Your writing is not up to standard." "You're not getting enough done." "Yes, that dress makes you look fat." The trick is, how can we say those things without creating enemies, as Martha did?

When I used to teach interpersonal communication, one of the concepts I liked and emphasized in class was rhetorical sensitivity. Put simply, rhetorical sensitivity is the ability to look at a situation and to shape a message to meet the needs of the speaker and the listener in a way that will meet those needs (as much as possible) and maintain a relationship. Martha's responses usually met her needs only. Maybe she didn't care about the relationship. I get that; there are a couple of people at work who really bug me, and I don't care if they like me or not. However, I understand that I'm going to have to live with these people. Even if I wish they would get another job, it's probably not going to happen. I have to work with them, and if I antagonize them, working with them is going to be all that much harder.

How much truer would that be in a frontier community? No one could be completely self-sufficient. Like it or not, Martha was part of a community, and when she refused to make herself a part, the community turned on her and her family.

It's sad. I don't think Martha was a bad person, and the characters she sparred with were pretty despicable. But the circumstances gave them power, and one thing despicable people in power will do is dispose of their enemies.

There's a lot of wisdom in Proverbs 15:1 - "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger." (KJV)

A Little Poetic License, I Suppose

2010-07-17T11:11:00.000-05:00

The other night the kids and I watched Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I have to admit, I'm not much of a movie watcher, and I got bored and wandered off to clean the dishes or something. Part of the problem may have been that it wasn't much like the Alice in Wonderland I remember from my youth. There were the basic characters, but the plot seemed entirely different. My son (who has read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) said the movie is Burton's take on what could have happened - in other words, a sequel that was never written.

This is not anything new. I remember hating Melissa Gilbert when I was a kid because of what that TV show did to the Little House book series, LOL. And as a student of literature and communication, I understand that a movie director is producing a different work than the original book, and that the director has a certain degree of poetic license to produce his/her work. A faithful adaptation of a novel doesn't always satisfy; the first Harry Potter movie seemed a little too self-conscious about sticking close to the book, in my opinion. With a long book, a director simply has to leave some things out - who wants to sit for more than three hours watching a movie? (Well, I take that back - my husband has been known to sit and watch all three of the Lord of the Rings movies in one sitting - the extended versions).

Sometimes, the director does a great job capturing the "soul" of the book, even if there are significant changes from the book. The Lord of the Rings series is the best example. Although Shelob was in the second book, it made narrative sense to put her in the third movie. My husband and son were upset because there was no funeral for Dumbledore at the end of the Half-Blood Prince movie. I'm suspending judgment on that, thinking that may be the place where the first half of the last Harry Potter movie will start. If so, I think that's a reasonable use of poetic license.

What I do have a problem with are movies that give only lip service to the original work. One clear example is Stuart Little. Ugh, I hate that movie! There's very little in that movie that comes from the book. In fact, it almost seems like the people who produced this movie weren't all that interested in the story in the book; all they wanted was the character, the mouse who lived with a human family. And even with that, they significantly changed Stuart's character from a dapper mouse in a tiny suit (see Garth Williams' rendition above) to a more casual "skater" mouse.

So what? So, my daughter sees no need to read Stuart Little; she's "seen the movie, Mom!"

We're going to nip that attitude in the bud...she saw an ad for the Beezus and Ramona movie and asked to go see it. I said, "You have to read the book first." Next thing I know, there she is, curled up on the couch reading it. Yes.....

My Kids Are So Delightful

2010-07-01T01:17:00.000-05:00

Last night, I noticed my daughter was once again reading The Two Princesses of Bamarre, for the third time (this year), and I made some typical motherly comment to the effect of she needs to expand her reading horizons instead of reading the same thing over and over. Her brother, ever eager to pile on when someone points out a flaw in his sister, immediately agreed. Before I knew what had happened, they had made a pact to create a reading list for each other - 10 books to be completed this summer.

The lists themselves are pretty telling as to the kids' personalities. Lily's list for Roger has The Two Princesses of Bamarre, of course, as well as Fairest, Princess Academy, Dealing with Dragons...you get the drift. Lots of princesses. Roger's list for Lily reads like a syllabus for a course in the epic adventure -- The Lightning Thief, The Hobbit, Eragon, Redwall, etc.

Lily started The Lightning Thief immediately, and it was such fun to hear her laughing out loud at some parts. She loves it. In fact, she's almost finished it tonight, and she asked Roger if she can suspend the reading list so she can read the rest of the series. So the project was a success.

Roger read Fairest last night and had started on The Two Princesses of Bamarre (that kid can devour books, let me tell you). This morning, he reported that neither book had a main character worthy of the title "protagonist," (not his words) because they are "weak" (his word). Of course I couldn't let that pass without comment. Come to find out, he considers them weak because they aren't like Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, or even Eoweyn (forgive the spelling - it's late, and I'm too lazy to go look it up). That provided the perfect opportunity for a little gender role discussion and to point out that men's ways of being strong aren't the only valid strengths. He at least pretended to listen, ha ha.

"Brave New World" for Readers, or More of the Same, Just Different?

2010-06-27T22:56:00.000-05:00

In perusing blogs this week, I came across a link to this article by Laura Miller in Salon in which she contends that once self-publishing really takes off, readers are going to find out how awful it is to have to read through the slush pile. She says, in part

You've either experienced slush or you haven't, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is....It seriously messes with your head to read slush....In other words, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it, and if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job will soon be yours.

Miller seemed to think that readers are going to have to start plowing through a lot of slush in order to find anything good to read. My question is, how is that any different, really, than what I'm doing now? (Note: I'm not going to lay the negative connotations on the word "slush" that she puts on it. In the remainder of this post, "slush" will simply mean a LOT of something.)

Let's say I'm searching for something new to read. First, I have options of where to look - my own bookshelves, the library, a bookstore, an online book seller. Then I have a huge number of books to go through in order to find THE one I'm going to read. Part of the process involves eliminating what I don't want to read. When I walk into a bookstore, I don't even bother walking through the sections that contain genres I don't care about. I go straight to those parts of the store that I believe will have books in my area of interest and my favorite genre. Then I start scanning covers and titles. Thinking about my trip a week or so ago (when I ended up buying the two books), I sorted the books in my mind without ever picking them up. If there was a vampire (or vampire-looking sort of being), or if the title seemed sort of trendy or angst-ridden, I didn't give it another glance. I zeroed in on those books that seemed to have some link to something historical. I'll admit I also looked more closely at books with titles that started with "N," "O," and "P," since I'm at that point in the A-Z reading challenge. My point is, going through the slush wasn't a time-consuming, mind-numbing process. I already have filters in place that help me wade through the slush, and I bet you do, too.

What happened when a title or cover art caught my eye and seemed to meet the conditions of my filters? I read the back cover blurb to get an idea of what the plot might be and who the characters are. It actually annoys me when the back cover is devoted to testimonials about the author's work; at that decision point, I don't want to know what someone else says about the author - I want to know about the story. If the blurb passed the test, I usually flipped the book open to a couple of different points in the middle and read a couple of sentences, or a paragraph, or even a full page or two. The more I read on those random drop-ins for the book, the more likely I was to buy the book. If the writing at some random point seems not so good, I assume there are going to be other problems, especially if the writing is not so good at multiple random points. On the other hand, if the voice catches me right away (as it did with Ophelia), it's a done deal - I'm buying the book.

I guess I don't understand why Miller thinks having more self-published books is going to change the way people choose their books. We all have our rubrics for making choices, and those rubrics are going to apply, regardless of the number of possible choices available. I prefer not to read science fiction, so it doesn't make any difference to me whether there are 5 new science fiction books out there or 50,000. I'm going to be looking at historical fiction. If there are 50,000 new historical fiction books, I will sort them by looking for books about a particular time period. I'm hoping the loosening of control on publishing will give me some more choice; I'm tired of having most of the limited few historical fiction books published each year focus on a limited range of historical time periods and famous figures (anyway, that's how it seems).

Unlike Miller, I'm not going to assume that anything published by some alternative to commercial publishing is "dreck." Sure, I agree that poor writing is painful to read. Believe me, I have suffered my share of pain through reading student papers!! I've also suffered some of that pain reading self-published novels. But I've read some self-published and small-press works that were pretty good and could have been really good with some more editing. I was willing to forgive their flaws because their characters were so likeable or because I got caught up in the story and wanted to know what happened. In the end, it's not who published the book; it's where the story takes me.

I say, bring on this brave new world! People won't give up and quit reading (as Miller seems to contend). Readers will continue to forge their way through the deluge of new work the way they always have - using whatever means have served them well in the past.

Not the Best for a Bedtime Read

2010-06-20T17:06:00.000-05:00

The only time of day I really have a chance to read is when I go to bed. Unless the book is dull or I'm unusually tired, this usually works well. However, I'm thinking as I read The Heretic's Daughter that I may need to change my habit temporarily.

Every night when I read some of this book, my sleep is what I would call "disturbed." My daughter asked if that meant I'm having bad dreams. No, not dreams. But not peaceful sleep either. I think the problem is that I am so aware that something bad is going to happen (I haven't read ahead yet, but let's face it - we all know the Salem witch trials don't turn out well....) that my mind is trying to work it all out, even as I'm sleeping.

It probably also has a lot to do with Kent's skill in evoking mood. At one point last night, I was reading about the clandestine trip Sarah and her baby sister make to an aunt's house to avoid the pox. As I read Kent's description of the cold night, I could picture it -- no, I could feel it. Kent seems to be very good at creating sort of a sense of doom through the narrator's voice. As much as I am enjoying the book, part of me also cringes away from it. I don't know that I'm going to enjoy reading about the cruelty humans can inflict on each other, especially from the victims' viewpoint. But reading is meant to stretch our worlds, right? Not just keep us comfortable.....

You Don't Take an Alcoholic to a Liquor Store, and You Don't Take Me to a Bookstore

2010-06-19T14:17:00.000-05:00

This was the week when I make the "sacrifice" to take my son to brass camp in another town (1.5 hrs away) so he can hang out with other brass players and get to work with a professional, touring tuba player. While he's doing that from 9-3, I'm hanging out at the big public library. Some sacrifice, huh?

This particular library has a little bookstore of used and discarded books, and I ended up buying a couple of books for my daughter to read. I'm trying to get her to move past the Warriors series. It's not that I think anything is wrong with that series, but when she starts re-reading the same books over and over, I'd like for her to discover some of the other wonderful characters and stories that are out there. The two books were Chasing Redbird by Sharon Creech and Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett. She has taken Chasing Vermeer to her bedroom, so maybe she's going to actually read it. If she does, I'm going to try to get her to be a guest blogger.

So, I could justify that little incident of addiction by saying I did it for my daughter. But what happened yesterday has no such easy justification - it was all for selfish reasons! After I picked up my son from his camp, we had three hours to kill before the camp's final concert. Eventually, we ended up at a chain bookstore (he suggested it! It's really not my fault, ha ha!). I meandered around for a while, waiting for him and idly looking at the science fiction and history for something that might make a good Father's Day gift for my husband. Somehow I ended up in the teen section, and that's when it happened - all my willpower and self-control broke down.

At first, I was bemoaning (as usual) the glut of vampires and dark magic books that make up the teen section, and then I began to idly look for an "N" book for my A-Z reading challenge (see how innocent temptation appears at first?!). My intention was to find a title and then look for it in the local library. But then I found A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. I was interested in the blurb, especially when I found that the book is set in 1906 and ties in with Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (one of those things I read a portion of as an English major years ago in college). But I was able to put it back on the shelf and move on.

Then I saw Ophelia by Lisa Klein, and I was doomed. I've been interested in Ophelia since I found it browsing in one of those other "killing time" sessions spent in a bookstore. This time, though, I opened it and read a little, and I was hooked. It's not in the local library. I could probably get it on interlibrary loan, but....here it was, so convenient.

There's probably a name for the psychological mechanism that worked on me. I probably could have resisted if there had been only one book. But to find TWO books that intrigued me, TWO books that didn't have any connections to vampires and do have some connection to history...let's face it, I didn't have a chance!

I have a wonderful summer of reading ahead of me!

Writing and Golf (or, What to Do, What to Do)

2010-06-16T22:34:00.000-05:00

(This should be read in a matter-of-fact, non-whiny voice. It is not a pity party.)

I am about this close to calling it quits with trying to get published. And probably not for the reasons you would anticipate. I've been reading some agent blogs lately, and yeah, the numbers are staggeringly discouraging. One agent said he gets about 15,000 queries per year and takes on 3-5 new clients. But that's not what has discouraged me. One agent answered my question about the future of historical fiction honestly by saying, "I won't lie. It's tough." I appreciate her straight answer, and although it's a discouraging answer for me, both as a writer and as a reader, that's not what has discouraged me.

Here's the discouraging part: I've been reading the comments left on those blogs, too, most of which are left by aspiring writers. And there are three attitudes that I'm picking up on that, if they are representative of "the game," just turn me off. First, some people are just rude. It makes me think of what I learned about life in elementary school - some people try to make themselves look good (or in the case of these comments, clever or "with it" or saavy about the world of publishing) by belittling others in replies to those others' comments. I don't know why I'm surprised by that; aspiring writers are a microcosm of the rest of society, and there's a percentage of people in any field who are that way.

Second, I don't like the constant self-promotion (or promotion of one's work, I guess). I know in this competitive environment it's really important to get the word out. And I know that if you don't toot your own horn, no one else is going to do it. But some commentors manage to work in a discussion of their plot or characters no matter what the original topic of the post is.

Finally, and this one bothers me most, no one seems to be listening to anyone else. There may be 100+ comments, but most of them are discrete responses to the original post. Only occasionally does something like a conversation get going. Maybe I misunderstand the purpose of comments and am thinking of something that is more like a forum or discussion board. But I sometimes think the internet has made it all too easy for each of us to have our say without paying any attention to what someone else is saying.

So....back to my original contention, that I think I might quit. I'm not a competitive person. I don't want to have to engage in those sorts of behaviors to "succeed." I don't want to be famous. The only reason I started writing was because I wanted to tell the story. Somewhere along the way, I began to think writing was only worthwhile if it "paid off." I felt too guilty about spending time at the computer instead of playing with my kids or washing dishes if there wasn't going to be a product that could bring in something as return on investment. But you know something? I bet there are millions of golfers who spend lots of time on the golf course but never expect to play professionally. They do it because it is relaxing and enjoyable. Why can't I feel the same way about my writing?

Maybe I should put my story on the Kindle store for 99 cents and be done with it!

(The thing that makes me reluctant to do that, though, is that I might lose the drive to improve the story. If I had put my book out there when I first finished it two/three years ago, it would have been flabby compared to what it is today, when I'm trying to edit it into a form strong enough to attract an agent's attention. But then again, maybe I'm editing the thing to death. I just know that when I go back after a couple of weeks and read the chapters I've trimmed 500 words out of, I realize those chapters are MUCH better than before. It's pretty amazing how virile the language can be when every word is forced to carry a major load!)

My First Failure of the Year

2010-06-13T07:45:00.000-05:00

I decided last night that I just can't do it. Read The Mysterious Benedict Society, that is. At least not now. I've read about four chapters and I just can't get into it, although my son assures me the pace picks up. But every night after about two pages, my eyes are rolling shut, the book is wobbling around, and I fear some night it's going to hit me in the face. This is a thick book. If I can only read two pages a night, it's going to take ALL summer! And this particular book is not what I want to spend all summer reading.

The fact that one of my good friends sent a copy of The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent surely couldn't have anything to do with my decision......

The Disappointment of Unfufilled Potential

2010-06-05T22:44:00.000-05:00

I'm still plugging along with my A-Z reading challenge. I had reached "L," which was supposed to be Twain's Life on the Mississippi. But a couple of weeks ago when I was at the library with my kids, I saw an "L" book on the shelf that intrigued me - The Lace Dowry by Andrea Cheng. The story is about a young Hungarian girl whose mother had decided to commission a handmade lace tablecloth as a dowry. According to the book cover, the conflict of the story centers around whether the mother and daughter who are working on the lace will be able to complete it, and the main character's attempts to help them be able to do it.

I was drawn to the idea of reading about a different culture that I don't know a lot about, and the book was set in 1933, which meant it is historical fiction. So, although I am actually eager to read Life on the Mississippi, I decided to suspend it in favor of The Lace Dowry. While I'm not going to say that decision was a mistake, I will admit I was disappointed in The Lace Dowry.

The main problem is that it was so sketchy. It started off all right, setting up the character of Juli as a girl more interested in reading and in science than in getting things lined up for an acceptable marriage. The conflict between Juli and her mother is also set up; her mother is going to force Juli to go along with the dowry idea and with taking dancing lessons. Finally, we get to meet Roza and her mother, who will be making the lace. We discover that lace-making is tedious and hard on the eyes, and that both Roza and her mother are suffering from eye strain.

All of that is a decent setup for a plot. But this book just doesn't deliver. (Spoilers ahead!) About halfway through the book, we are told that Roza's mother has gone blind and they aren't going to be able to finish the lace. At that point, Juli's mother sort of loses it. She gets a job and seems to be pulling away from Juli. Juli cooks up a plan to get jeweler's glasses that will help Roza and her mother be able to finish the lace. She lies to her parents and buys the glasses, but when she goes to Halas (the country town) alone to deliver them, no one is at Roza's house. So Juli takes the glasses and sticks them in a drawer. After talking to her father, Juli begins to see her mother in a different light and tries to make up with her. That seemed to have turned out to be the main plot - that Juli and her mother, though different, would come to peace with each other. But then in the last chapter, Roza suddenly shows up at Juli's door with the completed lace, Juli gives Roza the glasses, the end.

After reading that, you may be wondering what my problem is. Sounds reasonable as a storyline, right? But it has so many holes and things that come together by what seems to be very convenient circumstances. For one thing, if Juli's future is so important to her mother that she's willing to invest a lot of money is a very expensive dowry, why does she suddenly just give up on trying to "improve" Juli once the dowry is in jeopardy? Is Juli worth something only if she can make a good marriage? How did Roza (an uneducated country girl) find her way to Juli's apartment in Budapest? What happened about the lie Juli told her parents - they find out, they are mad, and then suddenly that's just dropped. But worst of all is the timing of the dowry showing up and the gift of the glasses.

My understanding of how a plot should work is that the main character should be the one who effects the key change that happens. That's not to say that other forces -- possibly very powerful forces -- aren't at work as well. But in order for the main character to be worthy of his/her status as the protagonist, he/she has to make some kind of decision that sets something in motion. If outside forces create all the circumstances that shape the character's life, then he/she is passive. We as readers are denied the satisfaction of believing actions DO make a difference and that people CAN influence what happens in their lives - and isn't that part of the reason we read, to escape from the stuff we can't control in our own lives? That's why we love Harry Potter - with everything against him, Harry still struggles on and manages to change his world for the better. I'm sure you can think of multitudes of other characters doing the same.

Given that theory, Juli should have been the one who made it possible for Roza and her mother to finish the lace. She should have had to make a real sacrifice to get the glasses (possibly the short-term sacrifice of having her parents be angry at her), and she should have delivered them at a point when the future of the lace was teetering on uncertainty. But as it turned out, Juli's efforts to get the glasses were for nothing. She lied to her parents and made a trip to Halas on her own, only to end up stuffing the glasses in a drawer. Roza finished the lace anyway, and then when Juli gives her the glasses, to me it felt like an afterthought: "Oh, yeah, I got these for you."

That's not the only thing I was disappointed about with the book (the writing style was rather stark and barren, I thought), but that's all I'm going to elaborate on since it's getting late and everyone else has gone to bed. I just think it's a shame that a story that could have been fulfilling ended up leaving me wanting so much more.

"Those Who Can, Do....

2010-06-04T22:48:00.000-05:00

and those who can't, teach."

I'm sure everyone's heard that little saying. As a teacher, I was always a little sensitive to it, but a recent experience has put a new spin on the saying.

For the past three weeks, I've been teaching an Introduction to Photoshop class for 13 college students. Some of the students had some previous experience with Photoshop, but there were also people who had no prior knowledge of the program. I taught the class by using a series of 11 worksheets that went from the really basic stuff (rotating and resizing images) to more advanced concepts (layer masks and color balance). The final assignment was a portfolio of 6 original images that had been manipulated in some "significant way" using Photoshop (meaning they couldn't just slap a single filter over the picture and be done with it). Today was the last day of class, with a showcase of their work.

I was simply blown away by how creative most of the students' work was. One student had what looked like a series of high-end fashion magazine covers. One student had a lovely picture of a guitar body surrounded by a soft fade of sheet music. One student had a complex collage with a shark swimming through it. One student had a black/white image with yellow spots on an umbrella that was stunning in its simplicity. One student took an image of the University's chapel and put it into a snow globe in an image that would make a fantastic Christmas card for campus. One student was showing me how she managed to artfully remove an unwanted bystander from a picture of her family. One student couldn't decide on only six pictures, so her display took up two tri-fold boards and had eight (or ten) images. And I could mention others, but you might be getting tired of this.

I had seen snatches of their work over their shoulders during the past week (except for the magazine covers - that was a total surprise). One day after I'd seen the guitar picture for the first time (made by a student who had never worked with Photoshop before), it occurred to me that this is what teaching is about. To be painfully honest, I am not very creative when it comes to design. I appreciate good design and I know it when I see it, but I can't produce it. However, my teaching gave these students who DO have the creativity and the imagination the tools they needed to produce such beautiful works. It makes me proud and yet humble at the same time. It's ok that I can't "do" - I can teach.

I have the best job in the world.

Nothing New under the Sun

2010-05-28T22:47:00.000-05:00

It's funny how sometimes what's going on in the real world and what's going on in my fictional world have something to say to each other. That just happened with the latest book I read, The King of Mulberry Street by Donna Jo Napoli.

King is the story of Beniamino, a nine-year-old Jewish boy living in Italy with his mother and extended family. Beniamino is illegitimate, which simply adds to the problems his mother faces as a Jew in trying to find work. The story begins when she has made a desperate decision - she gets Beniamino passage as a stowaway on a cargo ship heading to America. The catch? He's going alone (although he doesn't know it).

On the passage, Beniamino gets a new name, Dom, from the sailors. When he gets to Ellis Island, he manages to escape being taken to an orphanage - but the alternative is living on the streets alone, speaking no English. Fortunately, Dom is a clever boy, and through a combination of initiative and people skills, he forms a partnership with a couple of other street boys to start a business selling sandwiches. The business thrives and at the end, Dom realizes that although his mother may have been cruel by sending him off on his own, she at least tried to help him by sacrificing to buy him a pair of shoes that saved him several times by giving the impression that he was a "somebody."

This book made me interested in reading more about the immigrant experience. Dom lived on the streets, sleeping in a barrel (until it was taken away by trash collectors) and eating whatever he could get. Yet he had it much better than the boys who were slaves to the padrone system, whose parents had indentured them in exchange for the price of a ticket to America. The interesting thing about the story is that it apparently is based on the experiences of Napoli's grandfathers. Dom may have been a character in a novel, but how many real "Doms" came into this country?

I was reading this book while reaction to the new immigration law in Arizona was being covered in news reports, and I realized again "there's nothing new under the sun." Right now, this country is struggling with attitudes toward illegal Mexican immigrants. But this struggle is nothing new. In Dom's story, the Italians see themselves as oppressed by their Irish bosses - the Irish even get to sit upstairs in the Catholic church while the Italians sit in the basement. That's in 1892. But 50 years earlier, it was the Irish who were the "undesirables" as they came to the United States to escape the potato famine. And in the story, even though the Italians may be near the bottom of the social ladder, they still manage to find someone - the Chinese - to look down on as socially inferior. It seems to me that immigration has always been a hot button issue in this country. I read somewhere once that immigration to the United States happened in waves; first were the English and Scots and Germans, then the Irish, then southern Europeans, then eastern Europeans, then Russians (forgive me if I have the order wrong, please). Now it's the Mexicans. Each group came in to inital hostility and some degree of persecution. But eventually those groups assimiliated into the nation's culture (or the nation's culture expanded to include the group's identity) and they then became part of the establishment that looked with hostility on the next wave. It makes me wonder if the same thing won't be true of Mexicans in another 25-50 years.

I seriously would like to find some more stories about immigrants, and unlike the immigrants themselves, I have no prejudice about the national origin of the characters. Anybody have suggestions?

A Marketing Mystery (to me, anyway)

2010-05-24T23:10:00.000-05:00

Well, once again, we were killing time between the end of school and an after-school function. (It sort of stinks living 20+ miles away from the kids' school.) So once again, we spent that time in the local Hastings store. (I guess living 20+ miles from the kids' school doesn't stink that badly.) I was perusing the middle-grade aisle while my daughter was ooing and ahhing over the stuffed tiger in the little kids' area. What I saw was typical stuff, the Newberry winners and honor books sharing shelf space with the many fantasy series and the books about horses and girls who go to schools with horses. And then I saw it.

Robinson Crusoe.

I picked it up, thinking it might be one of those "abridged classics" reworked for children (although it was pretty thick). But no, it was the original work, in Defoe's antique English. I thought it seemed like an odd choice to have in the middle-grade aisle, but I know the placement was deliberate, because there were two copies. Oh, well, it's an adventure story, sort of like Treasure Island, which has long been read to and by children. So I guess the placement wasn't too strange.

I moved on down the aisle, and there I saw Wuthering Heights (again, two copies).

What is going on here???!!! Who in their right mind thinks enough kids my daughter's age (she's 11) are going to want to read classics like Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights that it warrants shelving those books in the middle-grade area? Even if they made it through the language style (which I sincerely doubt, because I had serious trouble at times keeping my mind from wandering while I was a college student majoring in English), you can't tell me 11-year-olds have the maturity to understand Wuthering Heights. I could see placing these titles in the young adult section at the front of the store, but I'm just mystified by the thought that pre-teens are expected to choose those books.

Although, come to think of it, one of my friends told me last night that her son (also 11) is reading Moby Dick. She said he told her he chose it because it's "thick." The kid is a reading machine, and I know he will have no problems understanding the words in the book. But I just have to wonder if the symbolism and themes that make Moby Dick an American classic are going to fly right over his head and the book will be nothing but a long fish story.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

2010-05-20T19:23:00.000-05:00

Last night while watching the severe weather reports to see if anything was coming our way, I happened on this entry on Nathan Bransford's blog. Nathan posed the question, "If you could pick one fictional world/setting/time period to live in, which one would it be?"

I pondered for a while what my response would be, and as I ran through my mental list of things I've read, I was overwhelmed all over again with what a wonderful thing reading is. Forget about the wonderful characters I've met through my reading -- my mental life has been greatly enriched by reading about places, real and imagined, and times past, present and future. I can't put an exhaustive list here, but how great is it to be able to drop in on post-WWII Germany (The Ark by Benary-Isbert), or the Musengezi River in Zimbabwe (A Girl Named Disaster by Farmer), or District 12 (The Hunger Games by Collins), or 17th-century London (I've been there several times with different guides), or Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century (my current trip - The King of Mulberry Street by Napoli), or, of course, Hogwarts Castle. I can visit Johnson County (where I really live) during the American Civil War (Nancy Dane's books).

I left a comment on Nathan's blog saying I would like to visit pre-electrical times, but there's another benefit of reading: I can visit those pre-electrical times while sitting in an air-conditioned house drinking tea with ice cubes in it. I can go to 17th-century London without worrying about contracting black death, or to revolutionary Lexington without being shot at.

Of course, sometimes I wish Hogwarts was real and I could go learn how to do that "scourgify" command.....

Sometimes I Wonder If I'm Out of Touch with the Rest of the World.....

2010-05-14T17:58:00.000-05:00

I finished reading Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta last night and was quite glad to be through with it, just to be honest. I was so tired of the "drama." I know it must be tough to have been abandoned by your mother. I know it's infuriating when everyone around you seems to know more about your history than you do, and no one's talking. But I thought if I saw one more line where Taylor said something to the effect of "I knew if I looked at it, a piece of me would die," I was going to go into a hysterical fit worthy of any high school drama queen.

Let me say first of all, that I'm separating the content of the message from the telling of the message. The story in and of itself was interesting (though it could have been told in about 250 pages instead of 419, imho). Who doesn't love a good mystery in which the pieces slowly come together? (although I'll admit I had the whole mystery figured out by a little past halfway through the book, and I swear this time I did not read ahead!)

I just find it really hard, though, to focus on the plot and themes when the main character was not someone I could empathize with. I just didn't like Taylor. There, I said it. I didn't like Jonah much, either. I didn't like Hannah much. I thought Raffy and Ben were sort of cliche' sidekick characters. Let me tell you, if there's going to be as much whining and drama as went on in this book, you've got to like somebody to be able to put up with it. I got very annoyed at Harry in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; but I already loved Harry, so I was able to bear up under his bout of self-pity and wait for him to come out of it. I'll admit that once Taylor found out what she wanted to know, she became more bearable, and I might have even learned to like her somewhat. Of course, that was the end of the book. She was just so mean and self-centered early on that I was repelled by her character.

However......what do I know? This book was the 2009 recipient of the Michael Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Other bloggers describe it as "lyrical" (I thought the writing was flabby), and as "so beautiful and powerful that everything else pales in comparison," and as "intricately told and well written." I guess I just don't "get it."

"It Won't Sell" Dissected

2010-05-10T19:06:00.000-05:00

A tidbit from the Rejectionist's blog that I thought was funny because it's probably so true:

The important thing to remember is that big publishing is owned by Satan, and what Satan cares about is money, and the prevailing sentiment in publishing is that short story collections/high fullutent literary fiction projects don't sell. (Is that even true? ... As with some other conversations we've been having about what "doesn't sell," often times "it won't sell" is shorthand in publishing for "we don't feel like trying very hard to market it/we have no idea but it seems scary/we would rather spend money giving a large advance to Lauren Conrad/people of color?!?!? WHAT!! THEY READ??!?!.")

A Word from the Target Audience

2010-05-06T21:58:00.000-05:00

My husband's car had a flat this morning, so since I'm on sabbatical with nothing else to do (uh-huh), I got to be the one who took it to be fixed. The mechanic was really busy, which meant I ended up at school (I always go to the mechanic who's just down the hill from the university) with nothing to do but wait around. I went to the library and found Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta. I had seen a glowing review on another site and thought it might be an interesting book to check out.

Well, it is interesting, and I'm probably going to read the whole thing since I made a pretty good start while waiting today, but what's with all these books that have some psychologically damaged, angry, rebellious teen who's been abandoned, abused, or otherwise let down by the adults in his/her life as the protagonist? I don't read a lot of "realistic" fiction, being so enamored with historical fiction, but it seems when I'm perusing the "new books for teens" emails that Amazon sends me, there is always at least one book with such a protagonist who's struggling with some major downer of an issue.

Is that what appeals to teens? I wonder. My husband is a high school band director, so I get to observe teens interacting on a fairly regular basis (tonight, for example - their last concert of the year). The kids in his band don't seem particularly angsty. Of course, the kids who have the biggest life problems generally don't seem to join band (although there have been some rather sad family stories in his 20 years of teaching). But overall, these teens seem happy and full of humor and to enjoy what they are doing and being around each other, and while they don't want to hang out with adults, they seem to accept that we are people, too.

On the way home, I just had to ask. So I turned to my son (my finger on the pulse of teen culture, ha ha) and asked him that question: Does that kind of book appeal to teens? His answer: he doesn't like them. He said he'll read them if the rest of the book is "awesome" (didn't exactly define what that meant), but that he gets tired of that kind of character. That led to a second question: What kind of books do you like? His answer: Rainbow 6 and Shogun. After reminding him those are books written for adults, I asked what he liked about them. He said he likes the "epicness" of them - the way the story develops over time.

Go figure. That flys in the face of other advice I've seen on blogs this week, that books for young adults should be no more than 80,000 words. I wonder if it's time for young adult publishers to do some new market research?

Love at First Sight (or, You Had Me at "Dang It")

2010-05-04T22:45:00.000-05:00

Within pages, I fell in love with the character of Jed Reston in Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix. It's sort of ironic, really, since a key theme of the book is how unreliable those "love at first sight" feelings are as the basis of a relationship. But as I was reading the chapter in which Jed is introduced into the story, I had this warm, happy, sort of giddy feeling - I just knew he was a character I would truly love.

That doesn't happen very often. That's not to say I don't love other characters, but usually it's more of a "come to love" type of reaction. The character will be introduced and then as the story develops, I learn more about his/her personality and grow to be fond, or even (mildly) obsessed, with him/her. This time, though, it was sort of instanteous. How did Haddix manage it? By showing Jed in action. He's careless in his appearance and clumsy, but when that's balanced with his self-deprecating comments, it comes off as charming rather than oafish. His dialogue is a mix of the formal "speak" of the nobility (with which he is obviously uncomfortable) and his sincere, honest observations. His interaction with Ella foreshadows what we will later learn is his honorable character. In none of this does Haddix give us a narrated description of Jed. It's a textbook case of why showing works better than telling. We are allowed to draw our own conclusions about him -- and I bet 95 percent of the people who read the book have a reaction similiar to mine. Well, maybe not the giddy part.

"About the faith--," Jed began.
I began giggling again and calmed myself only to start again. And again. I was a fountain of hilarity, shooting out bursts of laughter every time Jed tried to speak. At last he gave up and laughed too.

It's been a while since a chapter ending left me with a smile the way this one did.

That's It....

2010-04-30T21:55:00.001-05:00

More Scribblin' is no more.

The Trouble with Taglines

2010-04-30T21:53:00.000-05:00

(February 25, 2010)

I've been reading some blogs lately that have been talking about marketing your novel. The most recent one I read was about having a "tagline", which as I understand it, is sort of like an advertising slogan. I decided I really ought to get cracking and come up with something for my tagline.

The problem is, I am terrible at coming up with pithy sayings that express the heart of what I've written!

First of all, I'm really reluctant to use the word "romance" in a tagline, because in relation to novels, I think that word has become associated with things that simply aren't in my books, although there is definitely romance in them. So how do I tip people off that this is a love story without setting up expectations that won't be met?

Here are some of the ideas I've had and have shot down:

"Old-Fashioned Love Stories Never Go Out of Style" - well, there's a quick way to kill interest in the story! Yeah, label it as "old-fashioned".....
You know, it's good to use an "antithesis" approach, but "Regular people, unusual love" just brings up some pretty bad connotations, ha ha....
"Romance and History on the American Frontier" - ok, that works for the current projects (except I used that "romance" word), but the next project I have in mind is not a love story and isn't set on the frontier. I don't want to have to be coming up with a new tagline to "brand" myself with every new book (ugh)!
"Character-driven historical fiction" - yawn...
"Books you'll like, I promise!" - Ok, I think I'm getting desperate....