Lacey Louwagie's Blog, page 19

Fairy Tale Book Review: Far, Far Away by Tom McNeal

Far Far Away by Tom McNeal


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn’t realize until I looked at the list of other books by Tom McNeal that I’ve actually read him before. I read his literary novel for adults, “Goodnight, Nebraska,” when I was in college. And I think remembering that tainted my experience of this novel somewhat, because I noticed that some of the same things that annoyed me there also annoyed me here.

There’s a certain tenuousness to McNeal’s sense of time and place in his writing. I remember my professor ranting about how annoying it was in Goodnight, Nebraska that the characters all had old-fashioned names even though it was supposed to be a modern story. In Far, Far Away, something about the interactions between characters, especially boys and girls, felt somewhat dated and out-of-touch. It was literally impossible for me to figure out the “when” of this story. We don’t see modern staples of teen life like cell phones and the Internet, and computers are only given a glancing mention, but at one point a kid talks about a drug to make you forget trauma that I’ve only heard of existing within the last 10 years. Also, I was halfway through the book before I knew how old these kids were supposed to be (15), which was so hard to pin down because of their somewhat stilted interactions.

Now a lot of that should have been able to work in a story like this, which draws on fairy tale archetypes and which, I think, attempts to draw on a certain sense of timelessness. Add to that the fact that it is narrated by the ghost of Jacob Grimm, who is unfamiliar with most current technology, and perhaps the nebulousness of time setting can be forgiven or even interpreted as intentional. Still, knowing McNeal had already pulled this in an earlier novel kept me from giving him the benefit of the doubt here.

Still, there is a lot to like here, as evidenced by my four stars. The story seems to start off somewhat slowly, and I found myself wondering whether teens would stick with it. It held my interest, though, because I really enjoyed all the references to Jacob Grimm’s life and the Grimm’s fairy tales. The characterization is also very good — you may not know what era these people live in, but it is not difficult to believe they truly live. From parents to kids to random neighbors, everyone in the town of Never Better seems to have a full story lurking beneath the surface, even if we’re only privy to a couple of them.

A little past the halfway point, the story takes a turn into darker territory, and the creepy factor is only increased by the way we’ve been lulled into a sense of “safety” with only the typical small-town conflicts to worry about, such as rumors and years-old animosities between families. In this sense, the slower build up feels totally appropriate, and those who stick with it have their reward in a thriller-like conclusion. Finally, the story uses the relationship between Jacob Grimm’s ghost and the only boy who can hear him, Jeremy, as a poignant memoir about isolation, loneliness, growing up, and letting go. Yes, I may have had tears in my eyes as I finished the final page.





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“New Adult” Literature and No-Good Writing Advice

Last week, I was reading “What’s New About New Adult?” in the January/February issue of Horn Book. The article is about the rise of “New Adult” literature, a sub-genre of Young Adult (or a sub-genre of adult) that focuses on characters in their late teens or early twenties. Many New Adult protagonists are college-age, and some of them are actually in college. Teens and adults are reading within this genre, although I’ve found little of interest in it, mainly because of its heavy focus on romantic plots.

Still, I attached a sticky note to the article that read, “I was told not to write about college-age characters when I was IN college!!!” (I got lots of new sticky notes for Christmas, so this sort of thing will happen a lot.) In the advent of New Adult, this advice seems to have been seriously misguided.

Short stories have never been my strong suit, and producing three short stories for my college creative writing class was a struggle. None of them were particularly good. But my favorite of all three, the one that felt like it might actually matter, took place in a college dorm, between two roommates who were at odds. I drew a lot on my own experiences (although I was fortunate to have a room-mate with whom I was never at odds, and who remains my best friend to this day).

I don’t remember much of the feedback about that story, except that everyone jumped on the bandwagon of claiming that it shouldn’t take place at college. College was too “safe,” they claimed. College wasn’t the “real world.”

I left feeling frustrated on several levels. First, the advice to “write what you know” was being chucked without good cause; I did not yet have personal experience with life beyond college, but that’s what I was supposed to be writing about. Second, my experience, and the experience of all college students, was being invalidated. Somehow, it was not real. Third, while college might be a somewhat protected environment, that does not necessarily make it “safe” — tell that to the 25% of college women who are sexually assaulted each year on campus. Or all those who are confronted with making real decisions about sex, drinking, time management, and trust for the first time. Or those who give up the religion they were raised with, or start practicing religion for the first time. Many adults will cite their college years as a catalyst for discovery and change, and as formative in who they ultimately became. If good fiction is about change, why has it traditionally ignored a setting that is so rich with new experiences and the capacity to change?

Still, after I graduated I went into a career that brought me into contact with a lot of young adult literature, much of which I read. And I wondered if my creative writing class was on to something. In about a decade of working closely with new YA lit, I only came across two books that took place on a college campus. Lots took place in high school. I wondered what it was that made high school somehow less “safe” than college.

Although I never had much desire to write about college once I was out, I wonder what the naysayers would say about the fact that New Adult has emerged as such a profitable genre, or about the fact that Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, which takes place in college, was the first runner up in the young adult category in the Goodreads Reader’s Choice Awards, with over 17,000 votes. The moral of the story?

Write what you want to write. Write what is REAL and daring and unsafe to you. No place setting or time of life is an “invalid” place from which to tell a story. I wish it hadn’t taken the emergence of a whole new genre for me to figure that out.

A Year in the Life, Week 36: Admonitions

This week’s A Year in the Life prompt asked me to reflect upon an admonition I remember hearing in my life.

From my mom:

“Don’t open the door for or go with anyone except Grandma, Amy, or Susan–even if they say I’m hurt or dead.”

This is the admonition I remember most vividly from my life, perhaps because I heard it so many times. I particularly remember Mom saying it before she left us home alone, or before she left us in the car while she ran into the store to grab something. I have an image of being in the old Buick, that red upholstery, in the Hy-Vee parking lot.

It’s not at all unusual that my mom warned us about “stranger danger”–what strikes me is the specificity of it. Her list of who we were “allowed” to trust was very, very short, and says something about who she most trusted in the world outside our immediate family. It also implies that she had some sort of plan–if there ever was an emergency and she couldn’t come to us, she would send her mother or one of her sisters. They were the only person in the world she would trust with her children–and by association, these were the people I was instructed to trust. When I remember my early childhood, I remember the blessing of knowing these trusted adults existed, that there were people besides our parents who loved us and would look after us. Grandma’s and Amy’s phone numbers were taped next to the phone, and Grandma’s was the first phone number I ever memorized. I still remember it. We used them, too–in particular, I remember calling Amy once when Jessica and I had a fight and sprayed perfume in each other’s eyes–she came over to take a look even though I think the damage was pretty mitigated by tears by the time she arrived. But what mattered was that she did arrive.

I can’t even count all the times Grandma came to the rescue, especially after Mom started working outside the home. She drove us to school the many times we missed the bus and never told on us to our mom. And she picked me up from school on an almost monthly basis when my cramps were too bad for me to stay.

In the time before cell phones, these networks were our fall-back plans. We couldn’t get a hold of Mom when she was away, so we tried our luck with others who might be at their homes–and thus, their phones, instead. I’m very grateful for all the time these “stand-by” parents came through for me, and I can see why Mom put her trust in them and them alone.

The other thing about the admonition that strikes me is the “even if …” part. It wasn’t “even if they offer you great candy,” or “even if they have a new My Little Pony.” It was like she knew we were better than to fall for something like that; she thought we were smart enough or good enough to resist the temptation of things. But she warned us against the panic of devastating news–that’s what she feared we’d fall for. In the midst of tragic news about our parents, that’s when she thought we’d be most vulnerable. And I guess she assumed that predators would think the same thing. But we were not to believe, because she had  plan if an emergency did occur–Grandma, Amy, or Susan.

I don’t remember being able to process all of this at the time. I only had the mental capacity to understand her instruction and obey it, not to fully comprehend its implications about her priorities and state of ind as a parent. I did get a hint, just a peek into the fact that some adults were deceptive, deceptive because they wanted to get little kids to go away with them. But to what end? That I didn’t really know, although I took the threat seriously enough. And when you’re five years old being left alone in the car for five minutes, that’s probably as much as you need to know. My mom didn’t make me overly frightened or distrustful of the world with these warnings, but I remember feeling slightly empowered simply by knowing such dangers existed, and that I had been prepared exactly for how to respond to them. Just as, apparently, had Grandma, Susan, and Amy.

Welcome to the Year of 100 Books … and the Best Reads of 2013

Well, I’m finally doing it: I’ve decided to set my 2014 reading goal at 100 books.

A few years ago, before I discovered the wonders of audiobooks, I would have thought such a goal impossible; I was averaging about 40 books a year back then. But last year I surpassed my goal of 75 books by about ten, so this year, I’ve decided to go all the way.

I’m always looking for ways to cram more books in my life, and I’ve decided that there is no shame in reading picture books from time to time, something I started to do in 2013 that I hadn’t done since about 2002. Mostly, though, I feel that 2014 might be the last full year I have without children, and God knows what a time suck those are (although I joked with Ivan today that maybe I COULD make a 100-book year after having a baby if I counted every board book I read aloud). But this year is a year of reading just for ME, and I look forward to seeing what it will bring.

Before moving into the future, though, it seems the thing to do to make a list of the best books of 2013. So, below is my list of the select few books I read that earned an elusive five-star review in 2013.

1. Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick – I wouldn’t have read this one as soon as I did without my Young at Heart Book Club, but I’m glad it got bumped to the top of my list. Read in the last days of 2013, it was also one of the best books I read in 2013. Full review to come.

2. The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey – Reminds me of Life as We Knew It … except with aliens. Also read for my book club — and interestingly enough, my mom and I were reading it at exactly the same time, without deciding to do so beforehand.

3. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed - Until I read this, I didn’t think writing about nature could be vivid enough to make me feel that I had actually seen these places. Really, I was just walking around my neighborhood when I listened to this book on audio, but in my memory of it, I was hiking the PCT.

4. If I Am Missing or Dead by Janine Latus - I was surprised when I looked over the year’s books and saw that I gave this one five stars. I may have been overly generous, but it was riveting.

5. Doll Bones by Holly Black - This is one of the only books I’ve bought new in years, promptly after I returned the library’s copy. It resonated with me for very personal reasons, but I guess I wasn’t the only one, since there are whispers about it being nominated for this year’s Newbery.

6. Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon – This book captured my imagination far more than I expected it would, and it has me setting my sights on Amherst as my next vacation destination. I’m keeping an eye out for Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Virginia Woolf, too.

7. Frozen Assets: Cook For a Day, Eat for a Month by Deborah Taylor-Hough – This book totally converted me to once-a-month-cooking. In fact, I just finished my 10th session of OAMC today. There’s no going back. (And btw, it’s a great “starter book” if you’re interested in the freezer cooking lifestyle, but it doesn’t have the yummiest recipes of all the freezer recipes I’ve tried. It’s rated highly for accessibility and enthusiasm, not yumminess.)

8. Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong – What a better world this would be if we all followed these steps — including me. A little heavy and dry, but worthwhile.

Honorable mentions that left more of an impression than most of the books I rated 4 stars in 2013: Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones, The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, and The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud.

 

The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games – What Makes a Strong Female Character?

This month, my book club discussed The Handmaid’s Tale. This is one of the books that has been formative in my life as both a reader and a writer. It was the first piece of dystopic literature I read beyond The Giver, and it awakened a taste for much, much more. It also had an understated emotional resonance that I strive to emulate in my own writing. Atwood’s narrator, Offred, is a keen observer of her life, although perhaps not as active an agent in it as we’ve come to expect from our book heroines.

The book group I read it with consists of adults who like to read young adult literature. Many members expressed frustration, anger, or even disgust that Offred did so little to change her situation and to “fight back” against the system. They accused her of being passive. Comparisons to Katniss arose. One woman pointed to a scene in which Offred’s commander asks her if there is anything she would like to have. She asks for hand lotion because she’s been making do with butter for her chapped skin. The book club member said, “Why didn’t she ask for a bow and arrow? Why didn’t she do SOMETHING when she was alone with the commander? There must have been something she could have used as a weapon in that study where they played Scrabble.”

I’ve continued to mull over this conversation in my head. I thought about my own writing, and the characters I create. I thought about my relationship as a reader to Katniss, and to Offred.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ve spent most of my working life in feminist media, and I love that the strong female character of Katniss has reached acclaim to rival Harry Potter’s. It’s pretty hard not to admire Katniss. She’s a survivor, yes, but she also, in many ways, has nothing left to lose. In both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, death in the arena seems almost a sure thing. It’s probably a bit easier to give a big ol’ FU to the authorities when they’re going to leave you to die, anyway.

But what about Katniss’s life back in District 12? Yes, she sneaked out to hunt, but that was more an act of survival than rebellion. From what we can see, she was strong before The Hunger Games, but she didn’t make much of a stir, or buck the system too hard. Only when the stakes got unimaginably high did she dare that — not cognizant of the fact that it would start her down a path that would be nearly impossible to walk away from.

Offred’s existence is more akin to Katniss’s before the games than after, and we see precious little of Katniss’s life before the games. Offred is living under a repressive regime, longing for her old life and freedoms, and never sure whom she can trust in a world where men hold all the power and women readily betray one another. Of course she wants to buck the system, but she also wants to survive, on the hope that maybe she’ll make it out to see her daughter again, or live to see the day when something changes. So she becomes a keen chronicler of her experience of oppression, bringing many of us to a place we don’t want to go, challenging us to examine how we might hold up under such sanctioned assaults upon our dignities.

I have a confession to make.

I’m an Offred, not a Katniss. Perhaps that’s why Offred captured my imagination in a way that Katniss just couldn’t. I admire them both — but I only relate to one of them.

Even though it’s much, much easier for people like Katniss to live in fiction, I’m grateful that people like her do exist in the real world. People who put it all on the line for the things they believe in. People who do the right thing, even when that might be personally disastrous. People who send a big FU up to “the system” even if they have very little power to change it. But when I read about Katniss or watch her on the screen, my thoughts run something along the lines of, I could never do that, and, I hope no one I love is ever that brave.

Because I don’t want anyone I love to take those kinds of risks. To live that dangerously. I’m honest enough with myself to know that I couldn’t.

But surviving, day by day, trying to find meaning in the disintegration of life as you know it, that, I understand. When I was an adolescent, I fell victim to bullies the way millions of kids do. I tried everything to make it stop, including standing up to the bullies and reporting it to the school principal. But at the end of the day, I had no power to change the situation, and the people who did have that power did not make themselves my allies. So I, too, fell into survival mode. I, too, went through my life doing the best I could to just lay low and get through it. Perhaps that’s why many of the characters I write show their strength in the same way — by making the decision, day after day, to just keep going. To just get through it. To look for hope and beauty in unexpected places and cherish it when it appears.

Most of the girls and women in the world live under some form of oppression, whether it’s a culture that discourages or forbids them from getting an education or one that expects them to attain unreasonable standards of beauty. Some girls are brave enough to take a stand against it. Malala Yousafzai comes to mind. But for most of them, it’s all they can do to survive and hope for the day when things will get better. And you know what? That is brave. Sometimes, that is enough.

There are many, many ways to be a strong girl or woman, in fiction and in real life. For many, myself included, acting like Katniss feels as unattainable as looking like Barbie.The characters we write and those we read and admire should reflect the fact that, sometimes, just getting through the day is brave enough.

 

 

The Handmaid’s Tale & Katniss – What Defines a Strong Female Character?

This month, my book club discussed The Handmaid’s Tale. This is one of the books that has been formative in my life as both a reader and a writer. It was the first piece of dystopic literature I read beyond The Giver, and it awakened a taste for much, much more. It also had an understated emotional resonance that I strive to emulate in my own writing. Atwood’s narrator, Offred, is a keen observer of her life, although perhaps not as active an agent in it as we’ve come to expect from our book heroines.

The book group I read it with consists of adults who like to read young adult literature. Many members expressed frustration, anger, or even disgust that Offred did so little to change her situation and to “fight back” against the system. They accused her of being passive. Comparisons to Katniss arose. One woman pointed to a scene in which Offred’s commander asks her if there is anything she would like to have. She asks for hand lotion because she’s been making do with butter for her chapped skin. The book club member said, “Why didn’t she ask for a bow and arrow? Why didn’t she do SOMETHING when she was alone with the commander? There must have been something she could have used as a weapon in that study where they played Scrabble.”

I’ve continued to mull over this conversation in my head. I thought about my own writing, and the characters I create. I thought about my relationship as a reader to Katniss, and to Offred.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ve spent most of my working life in feminist media, and I love that the strong female character of Katniss has reached acclaim to rival Harry Potter’s. It’s pretty hard not to admire Katniss. She’s a survivor, yes, but she also, in many ways, has nothing left to lose. In both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, death in the arena seems almost a sure thing. It’s probably a bit easier to give a big ol’ FU to the authorities when they’re going to leave you to die, anyway.

But what about Katniss’s life back in District 12? Yes, she sneaked out to hunt, but that was more an act of survival than rebellion. From what we can see, she was strong before The Hunger Games, but she didn’t make much of a stir, or buck the system too hard. Only when the stakes got unimaginably high did she dare that — not cognizant of the fact that it would start her down a path that would be nearly impossible to walk away from.

Offred’s existence is more akin to Katniss’s before the games than after, and we see precious little of Katniss’s life before the games. Offred is living under a repressive regime, longing for her old life and freedoms, and never sure whom she can trust in a world where men hold all the power and women readily betray one another. Of course she wants to buck the system, but she also wants to survive, on the hope that maybe she’ll make it out to see her daughter again, or live to see the day when something changes. So she becomes a keen chronicler of her experience of oppression, bringing many of us to a place we don’t want to go, challenging us to examine how we might hold up under such sanctioned assaults upon our dignities.

I have a confession to make.

I’m an Offred, not a Katniss. Perhaps that’s why Offred captured my imagination in a way that Katniss just couldn’t. I admire them both — but I only relate to one of them.

Even though it’s much, much easier for people like Katniss to live in fiction, I’m grateful that people like her do exist in the real world. People who put it all on the line for the things they believe in. People who do the right thing, even when that might be personally disastrous. People who send a big FU up to “the system” even if they have very little power to change it. But when I read about Katniss or watch her on the screen, my thoughts run something along the lines of, I could never do that, and, I hope no one I love is ever that brave.

Because I don’t want anyone I love to take those kinds of risks. To live that dangerously. I’m honest enough with myself to know that I couldn’t.

But surviving, day by day, trying to find meaning in the disintegration of life as you know it, that, I understand. When I was an adolescent, I fell victim to bullies the way millions of kids do. I tried everything to make it stop, including standing up to the bullies and reporting it to the school principal. But at the end of the day, I had no power to change the situation, and the people who did have that power did not make themselves my allies. So I, too, fell into survival mode. I, too, went through my life doing the best I could to just lay low and get through it. Perhaps that’s why many of the characters I write show their strength in the same way — by making the decision, day after day, to just keep going. To just get through it. To look for hope and beauty in unexpected places and cherish it when it appears.

Most of the girls and women in the world live under some form of oppression, whether it’s a culture that discourages or forbids them from getting an education or one that expects them to attain unreasonable standards of beauty. Some girls are brave enough to take a stand against it. Malala Yousafzai comes to mind. But for most of them, it’s all they can do to survive and hope for the day when things will get better. And you know what? That is brave. Sometimes, that is enough.

There are many, many ways to be a strong girl or woman, in fiction and in real life. For many, myself included, acting like Katniss feels as unattainable as looking like Barbie.The characters we write and those we read and admire should reflect the fact that, sometimes, just getting through the day is brave enough.

 

 

A Year in the Life, Week 35: To Thine Own Self Be True

This week’s A Year In the Life exercise asked me to write a question I received often, and to answer it in various ways. I was definitely a very late bloomer when it came to romance (first kiss? 28), and for a long time, people (relatives, mainly) were waiting with baited breath for something to happen. By the time it did, they were done asking. Despite a clear lack of “evidence,” my romantic life for all those years didn’t exactly feel dormant, and writing this brought up a lot of memories about just how complicated being single can be.

Do you have a boyfriend?

No, unless you count the ones in my head–but you probably shouldn’t because they’re not my boyfriends even in my head. And nothing I see out there in the real world seems capable of bringing me the same level of satisfaction that they do.

Image: © Nevit Dilmen found at Wikimedia commons

Do you have a boyfriend?

No, but I have a beautiful roommate who stays up with me late into the night. We watch old 80s cartoons and take walks together, do laundry and eat in the cafeteria. And I don’t believe in love at first sight or any of that, but somehow we were friends seemingly from the moment we met. And I thought it would be a boyfriend that made leaving home worth it, that would ease the pain of being away from that place of love and safety. But from the beginning to many years after, it was her.

Do you have a boyfriend?

It can be hard to say no to this question when your heart becomes so tied up with another person. First I loved him from afar, then stood beside him and wrote love letters I never sent, then wrote him one that I did send. He wrote back over a month later and reduced me to tears. We began writing then, exchanging loaded mixx tapes and IM chats. He was hundreds of miles away and much easier to love that way. For the first time, he went years without dating anyone. He said God would bring us together if it was meant to be. I sat on the floor of my dorm room and let him talk to me on the phone. I still remember how tight his hugs were and how I always wanted more from him. But no, he wasn’t my boyfriend.

Do you have a boyfriend?

I tried, became something of a one-date wonder. My dad’s younger friend who would work so I could write; “the Republican” who took me to see a musical but ruined it when he said he didn’t read much; the lawyer who pontificated and sat too close to me when we saw Batman: The Dark Knight and was too young to be so jaded; the shy, spiritually seeking, tea-drinking and book-loving boy that I wanted to love so, so much; the boy with blond hair who rode my city bus and read Alice in Wonderland–I can still remember my exact erotic thoughts about him, but not whether we ever spoke. And then there was the actor, the phone messages exchanged that never led to any real conversation; the 18-year-old boy who read the Patriot Act all the way through and who wasn’t nearly as afraid of an older woman as I was of a younger man (well, boy).

Do you have a boyfriend?

We haven’t even started on the girls yet, all those years of wearing rainbows and finally thinking there might be a reason for always feeling so out of place. There was the girl I wrote a dozen songs for, my fingers fumbling on the fretboard, my insecurity about it all–is this love? Is this a song? She was the first to really break through, but she was nothing compared to the one that came after–the one with ocean-blue eyes and crackly dry hands and the barest whisper of white in her long dark hair. She was the one I thought was the love of my life, and for so long the hardest part was having no word for her, for us, that would encompass the magnitude of what I felt. I used to wish we had dated and broken up so at least I’d have something the rest of the world could understand. Instead, when my heart was shattered, I didn’t even have a name for the emptiness that ached inside me for months, or the reason I didn’t love again for years.

Do you have a boyfriend?

I was still thinking of her the first time I could properly say yes to this question, and that’s how I knew something was wrong. I thought it was because he was a man. I knew it was because he wasn’t her. He didn’t like kissing but said I was beautiful in sunlight and water and he wanted to take pictures that would do me justice. We slept against each other on my floor, talked about fairy tales and folk singers, and one night, I listened to his heartbeat when I knew the future he spoke of wouldn’t be mine. I told him, Don’t turn anything down on my behalf. What I meant was, I would be relieved for an excuse to say goodbye. What I meant was, whether you go near or far, I won’t be going with you.

Do you have a boyfriend?

I’ve never forgotten the feel of her hands on my hips, and I still dream about her sometimes. She is the one love I can never admit to the world.

Do you have a boyfriend?

Only if someone I’ve never seen counts; he was the first one to ever write me a love letter on the last eve of 1999, just in case the world was about to end. I wanted to believe, but a part of me never could, not for all the digital artwork and Meatloaf music in the world.

Do you have a boyfriend?

The relatives had given up on this question by the time I met the man I would marry. But a coworker asked me out of the blue, two months into my relationship with him, and my face heated that cold winter day as, for the first time, I gave an uncomplicated, shy but giddy and joy-filled, yes.

Dark Crystal Author Quest – Done!

My goal was to get my Dark Crystal Authorquest submission turned in before Christmas, and I met that goal at 7:10 pm last night. It feels good to know that now it’s out of my hands.

When I got the confirmation message from the Jim Henson Company (and it’s very cool to have a message from the Jim Henson company in your inbox), I almost filed it in the “success!” folder in my email, even though I usually reserve that folder for clients obtained or pieces published. But no matter what happens now, I proved to myself that I could write fiction on assignment, so the learning experience was definitely a success. (But I ended up taking the conservative route and filing the confirmation message in my plain ol’ “submissions” folder instead.)

I’ve been meaning to write for a while about how I finally came up with the idea for my Dark Crystal story, which was definitely a challenge. I watched the movie twice in two days, as well as all the extra features on the DVD, taking notes as I went. I pored over www.darkcrystal.com. I got copies of the Creation Myths graphic novels and the TokyoPop graphic novels. I interlibrary loaned “The World of the Dark Crystal” four times. I made notes all along, but couldn’t find that seed I needed to start building a story. I knew that all I needed was one character, one question to explore, and that the rest would come to me as I wrote. But while I remained fascinated by the themes and the world of The Dark Crystal, possible characters and plot points stayed elusive.

Despite my attempts to immerse myself in Dark Crystal lore and research, my breakthrough came when I was reading a completely unrelated memoir–a memoir that I didn’t even enjoy all that much. But one characteristic of the author made me wonder: how would a situation like this play out in the world of the Dark Crystal?

It was that question seed that I needed, and I started to build my story around it. Characters and plot points expanded as I did so, as I knew they would. I was off. (After winners are selected, I’ll go into more detail about this question and how I explored it.)

People who are single and waiting to find “the one” are often told that “it happens when you stop looking.” It seems the same thing is true for writing. I “primed” my mind with all the Dark Crystal research I immersed myself in, but none of the Dark Crystal canon gave me that final push into story territory. It was only when I took a break from it–and not consciously–that that final piece fell into place.

 

Writing Book Reviews in the Age without Boundaries

As is my habit on Sunday nights, last night I got caught up on my book-review writing. My Goodreads account is connected to my Twitter, so this morning I found that M.D. Waters had “favorited” the tweet that linked back to my review of her book, Archetype.

The review was mixed, and even a little snarky in places. I got a copy of the book through Netgalley and found it to be average, so my review reflected that. Thus, when I saw that M.D. Waters had connected with the review directly, I had a few responses at once.

Admiration – I admired her for favoriting the review even though it wasn’t wholly positive, and not jumping in to defend the parts of it I didn’t like, and all-around, just taking it in stride.
Guilt – Should I have written a nicer review?

I don’t think I’m the only one who feels conflicted about this as the boundary between authors and readers disappears in the wake of the Internet. Once upon a time, I wrote my book reviews in a tiny, private journal. Then I wrote them in a community (though public) Livejournal and was astounded the first couple times authors came by to thank me for favorable reviews (and once, to diss a favorable review and tell me I ought to read his book instead. I didn’t.) Then along came Goodreads, where authors and readers all hang out in the same space, in much the same capacity, and in which you are forewarned with a little asterisk next to an author’s name if that particular individual is also a Goodreads member.

Those little asterisks used to make me very nervous when I wrote reviews. Could I say something negative about an author, knowing how likely it was that she would read the review? I discussed this at length with a friend and fellow user of the site. She said she used to feel “intimidated” by authors being present on the site, too, but that she got over it. This is a paraphrase, but she said something along the lines of, “They wrote a book and published it, and some people aren’t going to like it. They just have to deal.”

I agreed with her, and now barely register the “Goodreads author” indicator when I write a review. To water down a review because I’m afraid the author might read it feels disingenuous to me and, well, like lying. I’ve taken the same sensibility with me when it comes to reviewing books I received for free for the purpose of writing a review, and am upfront about that in my Netgalley profile, so that publishers who don’t want to risk a negative review can deny my requests for their work.

The truth is, I am not easy to please when it comes to books. I love books, but there are a lot of particular books that don’t impress me. I rate most of what I read as “average” (3 stars). I try to be fair in my reviews, and find something good to say even about the books I disliked, and something critical to say about the ones I liked. But sometimes my opinions can be strong, and sometimes, they can come out snarky. Is this appropriate in an environment where it’s increasingly likely that the person who dedicated weeks, months, or years of her life to a book will read your review — which took you all of 20 minutes to pound out? (Although, to be fair, it is a significant time investment to read most books, and you’ve earned your right to vent if you invested that time and don’t feel that it paid out.)

The recent debacle about authors being bullied on Goodreads has me rethinking my own reviews as well. Do any of them cross that line? I try not to personally attack an author, but the truth is that authors and their work are inexplicably intertwined.

I try to practice kindness on the Internet and not use it as an excuse to say nasty things to or about people that I’d never have the guts to say in a face-to-face conversation. I’ve often “walked away” if I “can’t say something nice” (or at least constructive). My book reviews may be an exception; I don’t think I could give a scathing review to an author if I had to look her in the face while I did it. So what does that mean for the reviews I write?

Although I am also a “Goodreads author,” I use the site more as a reader than as a writer. I was a long-time user years before I set up an author profile. Yet, as I plan to launch my first ebook, I often find myself afraid that I’ve built up a lot of “bad review” karma for all the harsh reviews I’ve doled out. I wonder whether I’ll have the courage to read bad reviews of my own work. And if I do, will I be big enough to share them?

And this is why M.D. Waters’ response to my tweet, while making me somewhat uncomfortable, also impressed me. By “favoriting” my tweet, she’s sharing a mixed review with a wider audience. So while I may have given the book a C, I give the author behavior an A.

A Year in the Life, Week 33: Shopping

Today’s prompt from A Year in the Life was to write about a store you went to as a child. I didn’t write much about a particular store, but about my memories of shopping with my mom. I wrote for probably an hour, which is about twice as long as I usually take for these exercises. It provided the kind of rich, reflective experience I hoped for when I started this project. All the extensions were great, too, although I’m no longer deluding myself about extensions. Still, I did flag them for potential use in my spiritual writing group. Interestingly, this entry about shopping comes on the eve before I plan to finish my Christmas shopping — just like the “recipes” entry fell on my cooking night. Strange how these things line up.

What I remember are the wooden carts at the Kandiyohi Mall, the way they rode so low and so smoothly, the metal “knockers” at the back of the baby seat, which were inserted and locked into the cart corral. It cost 75 cents to unlock the cart, but if you brought it back to the corral, you got 25 cents back.

I don’t remember ever sitting in the front of that cart. Instead, Mom laid my fuzzy bunny blanket down in the back, and it was such a cozy way to spend the day, the sound of those disc-like wheels humming over the smooth floors. What are mall floors made of, anyway? There was no textured tile like at the local mall, and there were ramps at various junctions for going up and down. The ramps were carpeted red.

This was before Krystl was born, so it was just me and my mom, and the memory fills me with such warmth. How I woke up in the morning and Mom said we were “going to Willmar,” and I couldn’t remember what far-off place that was, so she would always remind me about the wooden carts, and that’s how I placed it. It was an hour away, which seemed far, but I don’t remember anything about that car ride that took us there and back again.

I remember very little about the stores Mom went to, except that my space would get smaller as she draped potential or actual purchases in the cart. I remember the bright purple shag carpet that slowed the cart down in Deb’s. She was shopping for clothes, apparently, a pursuit that interests me as little now as it did then (confession: I still get most of my clothes from my mom, whether hand-me-downs or deals she couldn’t pass up.)

Mom would tell me throughout the day how “good” I was, and in retrospect it certainly seems I was–much more patient in that cart than I am at a shopping center today.

Perhaps there was something about those early trips, when I had my mom all to myself, that had me riding in shopping carts long after I was too old for it–once getting caught by a teacher who happened to be shopping away from home, too, and I was so mortified that I don’t think I ever rode in a cart again. It was about time, anyway!

If I was good all day, I usually got a treat before we went home–a toy or a coloring book.

I have more vivid memories after Krystl was born, of us both in the wooden carts with our My Little Ponies or paper dolls or coloring books. I can’t imagine how we both fit in one cart–I remember then I was big enough to get in and out on my own. Krystl was a toddler. And the ritual of getting “treats” if we were good all day continued every time we went on an out-of-town shopping trip. This was before the Internet, so we always found something that wasn’t available locally, that we’d never seen before. Often we’d be someplace as banal as K-Mart, but Marshall didn’t even have a K-Mart back then.

There were a few unspoken rules in this “if you’re good = treat” arrangement. One was that it was not spoken of by Krystl or me — to ask about how our behavior was or if we’d get a treat was taboo. Mom would have to be the one to broach the subject, usually about halfway through the shopping day: “You girls are being so good–maybe we’ll get you a treat before we go home.” And Krystl and I meeting eyes, thrilled every time even though we’d learned to expect it.

The second unspoken rule was that toys were always the last stop of the day. Since even Sioux Falls didn’t have a Toys R Us back then, I didn’t see a dedicated toy store till I was at least 10. So this meant the discount stores that had toy aisles were the last stop of the day. And we never knew what we would find there. I remember going home with coloring books, play-doh, and My Little Ponies, all on separate occasions. Then when we got home, we quickly hid the packaging at the bottom of the garbage can so Dad wouldn’t know–although I wonder how often he noticed and just didn’t bring it up. He always claimed we had “too many toys,” and he was quite right. Yet, Mom claimed it was fine because we actually played with all our toys, and she was also right. We weren’t the type of kids who needed new toys for a moment’s distraction, and we played with the same collections hundreds of times. I think that’s partially why Mom couldn’t resist buying them for us–she didn’t do it to “keep us satisfied” but because she took joy in our imaginations, because it awakened her imagination, because she was curious about how a new addition might enhance or shift our play lives. She liked it when we spread our toys all over in the living room or the kitchen, I think so she could eavesdrop on our storylines, and I imagine her projecting what we might do in her mind every time she considered getting us something new. Ah, this looks good on the shelf, but what will it become in my children’s hands?

Part of it was also to make up for her own childhood, for growing up too poor to have all the toys she longed for–a longing that I don’t think ever went away. I think that’s why she still loves shopping to this day, and why our family tends to go a little overboard with Christmas. I imagine that when I have my own children, I’ll try to swing back in the direction of simplicity, but not all the way to deprivation. We’re always seeking a balance, generation against generation.

The good shopping with my mom memories extend all the way into my teenage years, when going to Barnes & Noble was like going to heaven. Remember, no Internet! This was the only way we knew so many books existed. We each got to pick out one per visit, and I remember agonizing over which it would be, starting with a stack and then slowly whittling it down to one. A few books I remember acquiring on these trips:

The Pit Dragon Trilogy by Jane Yolen (I’ve read a lot of Yolen since then, but nothing I loved as much as this.)
The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley (I remember reading this one at the writing camp where I met my dear friend Ashley, who did my site design.)
Shadowdance by Robin Wayne Bailey (the first book I ever read from a gay perspective, which made me very uncomfortable at the time).
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (Krystl’s pick, and I think she lost it before either of us read it. We both got around to it many years later through audiobooks.)
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen (read this one while nannying over the summer. Have often meant to revisit it. I feel like it went a little over my head at the time.)
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (read this one after “The Handmaid’s Tale” when I was suffering my first dystopia withdrawal. It made an impact, but not as much as Margaret Atwood.)
Lady of the Forest by Jennifer Roberson (I STILL haven’t read this one.)
Juniper & Wise Child by Monica Furlong (everyone but me seems to love these books. I was disappointed.)
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (probably my favorite book ever)
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (took me five months to read, including many sessions backstage when I was in the school play and waiting till halftime in Pep Band.)
Merlin’s Harp by Anne Eliot Crompton (a lackluster book that dupes people into reading it b/c it mentions Mists of Avalon on the blurbs. I thought it was bad when I was 15, and my tastes weren’t exactly refined at that point.)
Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi (why!?!? OK, I know why, but I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say, not a choice I would make today.)
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (probably the most boring book I’ve ever read. I rejoiced when I lost it and was let “off the hook” of finishing it. Alas, I found it again, and I did finish it, but I remember very little.)

Yeah, I was pretty into fantasy. And I remember that whatever I was reading at the time, I always wanted to be done with it at once so I could crack open that shiny new book.

With all these wonderful memories, it’s strange that I grew up to be someone who almost despises shopping. The Internet lets me almost avoid it altogether — if I know just what I’m looking for, I can go straight to it, without seeing all the things I’m not looking for. Still, I think my main aversion to shopping is my aversion to spending money or getting bogged down with too much stuff. But show me a used booksale, and that old Barnes & Noble magic comes back, the thrill of the hunt to find that perfect book you did or didn’t know you were looking for.

Even better if you can do it with your mom.