April Davila's Blog, page 13

Books by Alexa

I was reading this little zine of a book the other day. It’s called Chandelier, written by Mieko Kawakami (and translated by David Boyd) and I got it for free at my local bookstore on Indie Bookstore Day back in April. It’s a just a quick little 35-page story, bound in a pocket-sized cover, but I found it delicious. I finished it one sitting.

Anyway, since it’s translated, the dollar amounts are listed in yen and at one point I wanted to get a sense of how much money the narrator was talking about. I didn’t have my phone nearby, so I asked Alexa “how much is 36,250,000 yen in dollars?” She obligingly informed me that it’s about 268,554 and then asked me if I would like her to recommend a book.

Makes sense right? I mean, that’s a perfectly normal question to ask after I ask her about the yen/dollar conversion, right? She is totally not spying on me. (Gah! How does she know I just finished the novel I’d been reading and absolutely was trying to figure out what to read next?!?! That shit is creepy.)

Anyway, I was intrigued, so I said yes. Mostly I just wanted to see what she’d say. Top of her list? Where the Crawdads Sing. I’ve read it. I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Then she asked if I’d like another recommendation. Sure. Next up was The Four Winds, which I actually loved. I asked for more. She recommended two Rick Riordan books (I’m guessing because we have, as a family, downloaded a fair number of those for the kids). Then Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Then American Dirt. Then The Midnight Library. Then I got tired of the game and told her to stop.

I have to give Alexa credit for her taste/algorithmic accuracy. With the exception of her first title, I actually really liked everything she recommended. The thing that struck me was that she didn’t know I had already read all of her picks (though, truth be told, I never read Fantastic Beasts – I just saw the movie).

I can only assume it’s because I try not to buy books through Amazon if I can at all help it.

Bookshop.org, people. Buy your books from Bookshop.org and support your local bookstores. Okay, that’s my PSA for the day. I’m done.

Now, go ask Alexa what books she would recommend for you and share below. I’m super curious how your list compares to mine.

Happiness In Not Found In Pleasure

I was teaching at a lovely retreat last weekend when I overheard someone say something that has been bouncing around in my brain all week: Happiness is not found in pleasure. It’s found in acceptance.

Putting aside the fact that the man who said these words was sitting in the sun beside a pool eating organic vegan snacks while waiting for his scheduled massage, he’s right. And to be fair, it’s always easier to have these kinds of revelations when we’re sitting pretty. It’s harder to keep them in mind when times are tough.

Happiness is found in acceptance.

It’s the inverse of one of the main teachings of mindfulness, that desire is the source of suffering. When we can’t be happy with what we have, when we are constantly striving for “something else,” we ache. It’s the reason money doesn’t make us happy (though it certainly can make us more comfortable – just ask my friend by the pool there).

It has me thinking about being content in the moment. Right here, right now, my belly is full, I have a roof over my head and I’m writing. Life is good.

Story Holes Vs. Hunger

The other day, in a workshop I was leading, we got into a discussion of holes vs. hunger. An astute writer in the group, one who is working on a memoir, used the story holes/hunger distinction to describe how she feels when a manuscript leaves her wanting more.

Story Holes

Holes are pieces of missing information that make it difficult to understand the story that’s being told. The reader is left wanting more, but in a bad way, lacking vital information like where the story is set, or when. Who is the narrator? What’s at stake?

These are the kind of holes that readers can fall into and get lost forever. Story holes make reading difficult. They are likely to get a book put down.

Story Hunger

Hunger results when you leave out just enough to keep your reader wanting more. Consider this little bit of description from the first page of a piece submitted for a different workshop, wherein the writer is describing the setting:

A bedroom doorframe is precariously patched after yet another forced entry.

This is the first page. She doesn’t tell us why there was “another forced entry.” It doesn’t matter (yet). She immediately gets back to our main character and the main drama at hand, but that line lingers there like a little promise of a juicy story to come. That’s hunger.

Telling The Difference

The trick with story holes vs. hunger is knowing where to draw the line. It’s difficult sometimes, as the writer, to know if your prose will leave readers wanting more or leave them frustrated and put off.

The best thing you can do to make sure you’re landing firmly on the side of hunger is to get someone else to read your work and tell you where they’re confused or where they’re hooked. Second best is to leave your draft alone for a while, try to get a little distance from it, and then read it through with a fresh eye.

The main difference between story holes and story hunger is whether or not your reader can understand the story without the information that is being withheld. That said, too much hunger can also be discouraging. If you leave little bread crumbs to build hunger, there better be a sandwich at some point or once again, your reader is like to get frustrated and give up.

Happy writing, my friends, and may your readers always finish your stories with their metaphorical bellies full.

Books You Don’t Post on GoodReads

I had lunch with a writer friend the other day and, as we do, we started talking about books. She asked what I’d been reading. I told her I had just finished The Ship of Magic and was half way through Fun Home, then added, jokingly, that then there were a few others, the ones I don’t post on GoodReads.

She laughed at the designation and proceeded to tell me about a beach read that she didn’t post, afraid that it was too fluffy to admit to reading. It was there I had to stop her because I realized we had totally different ideas of what falls under the heading of: Books I Don’t Post on GoodReads.

I have actually never refrained from posting something because of it’s genre. As writers, it’s our job to read. A lot. Of everything. I read literary fiction, yes, but I also love romance, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, graphic novels, etc… You name it. I’ve read the Twilight series twice. That’s right. I said it. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures when it comes to books.

The books I don’t post on GoodReads are the ones whose titles tell the world too much about my personal life. Say, for instance, I was reading a book with a title like “Talking to Your Kids About Sex,” I kinda feel like it’s nobody’s business how I parent. That (hypothetical) book is one I would not post to GoodReads.

I also read a lot of books about how to teach meditation and how to be a better writing coach. I don’t post those out of pure vanity. I really would prefer my students/clients think I’m just magically good at what I do and that all the latest research on mindfulness just floats into my brain while I’m sleeping. Isn’t that a lovely image?

Anyway, I was curious – do you have books you don’t post to GoodReads? If so, what kind of book titles to do you keep to yourself?

Lower the Bar

People sometimes ask how I manage to keep working when life gets in the way and they laugh when I tell them, truly: lower the bar.

If you’re caring for a sick loved one, or you’re a new parent, or work is super busy right now, you might not have much time for your writing, but it doesn’t mean you should (ever) give up on it. Just lower the bar.

My daughter finished her school year last Friday and my son’s last day is tomorrow, and the camps I have them signed up for don’t start for a couple weeks, and if left to their own devices they’ll be lounging around all day, making lots of noise and spending way too much time on their screens. So I basically cleared my calendar. We’re going camping, we’ll take day trips to the beach, we will probably see a movie (or two). It’s not that I’m against them lazing around – we’ll make space for that too, but one of the reasons I built my life to be so flexible was precisely so that I CAN clear my calendar to do things with them.

The one non-negotiable is my fiction. My bar never drops so low that I’m not writing at all. That would be removing the bar. I don’t do that. I just lower it. For me, the lowest the bar goes is that I write for 45 minutes every weekday (with a day or two off for camping because I’m not bringing my laptop to the woods, that would be lame). Every weekday, at 9:30, I log on to A Very Important Meeting and write with the good folks there and I know that whatever else happens, I made a little progress on my story.

Once the kids start their camps I’ll make more progress on the novel, catch up on some blog posts (I have some good ones lined up – stay tuned) and start promoting my 6-Week Mindful Writers Challenge (I’ll be running three more sessions in the fall). Until then, I’m just enjoying my time with the kiddos.

A Brief For The Defense

I return to this poem by Jack Gilbert over and over. Today seems like a good day to share it.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Not Okay

A few years ago, I started getting these postcards printed with my congressman’s name and address on the back so I could easily send one out every day. I intentionally made them look like invitations, a little fancy, so that they might catch my representative’s attention, even if only for a moment. I did this for years. Then covid hit and there were (silver lining) no school shootings and I stopped sending them.

Today I’m dusting them off and putting a stack on my desk so I can start sending them again because I cannot sit by and watch kids get murdered. It’s not okay with me. And writing is about the only skill I have that I can apply to the problem.

If you are likewise fed up with gun violence in our country, I encourage you to do the same. Find some (peaceful) way of expressing your frustration and grief and anger – send a post card, or an email, or make an appointment with your representative to tell them that things need to change.

They work for us. Let’s let them know that we need them to do better.

The Best Time to Multitask

Confession: I’m not really that into sports.

Of course you’d never know it if you saw how I spend my weekends. Today I will spend 4+ hours sitting on sidelines, watching my kids play sports (girl=soccer, boy=baseball) and while I love that my kids play sports, and I love watching them play, one of the ways I’ve learned to embrace my spectator status is by listening to audiobooks.

I use just one earbud (on the side that isn’t visible from the field) and cover it with my hair, but honestly I don’t think I’m fooling anyone and I doubt my kids care. They know the fact that #idratherbereading is no commentary on how much I love them and how proud I am to see them out there playing their hearts out.

It’s really the only thing I ever advocate multitasking. It’s a win win. If you’re a book lover who also happens to be parent on the sidelines, embrace it. You can do both at once.

ReMarkable 2 Tablet

Two weeks ago, my husband got me a ReMarkable 2 tablet for my birthday and I’m LOVING it. It’s kind of like and ipad, but without all the apps, so every time I pick it up, I know I’m not going to get distracted. There’s no Twitter or Instagram or anything else for that matter. The surface is not backlit and so it looks more like paper, and the end of the “pen” is an eraser that works brilliantly.

I had put it on my wish list because I was looking for something that would replace the many (many) notebooks I have floating around in my life, full of notes that I can never find when I need them. Well, it definitely does that and I’m starting to see how it might eventually come to replace about half of my filing system.

I don’t know that I would actually write out a story on it… It does have a button that converts printed words to typed notes so you can email them to yourself or others, but I worry that it’s not accurate enough to make it worth while to try to do a whole manuscript that way. That said, I am already using it to hash out ideas. I love using different “pens” for different things. Sometimes I just doodle with it to keep my hands occupied while I’m on a call:

And then there’s this one that my son did in the car on the way home from wrestling practice:

I count that as legit art. I might have it framed.

So that’s my unofficial review of the ReMarkable 2 tablet. In short: two thumbs up.

Nature Thoughts

For Mother’s Day, I took my mom to the Rose Bowl Flea Market. You can find just about anything there. While my daughter ate crepes and my son tried to bargain a guy down on a vintage NES, my mom (being a fellow plant lover) found herself a Hoya Plant and I walked away with this little beauty of a book.

It’s a little beat up, which probably explains why, when I asked the guy how much he wanted for it, he just waved me away and said “take it.” I love the flea market. It was published in 1965 and is all of 61 pages long. I love the block print look of the illustrations.

In truth, I worry about my love of old books. Collecting them could easily become an expensive hobby. I love to hold them and think about all the people who have held them before me. I love the battered spine and the way you can see the stitching between the open pages. Oh, books…