Booking Through Thursday: Thankful

giving thanks

I am a day late with Booking Through Thursday, mainly because I had to think. This week’s prompt asks

What authors and books are you most thankful for?

Good question, and not too hard for me to answer. I am most thankful for J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series, the Brontë sisters and Wuthering Heights, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Austen, Judy Blume, Diana Gabaldon, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens (especially for A Christmas Carol), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, J.R.R. Tolkien, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Mark Twain, Neil Gaiman, Jasper Fforde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Plague of Doves, The Thorn Birds, The Mists of Avalon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Le Morte D’Arthur, Beowulf, Ahab’s Wife, The Poisonwood Bible, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Gone With the Wind. At the moment, I’m feeling extremely grateful for Irish and Welsh mythology, particularly the legend of Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Speaking of which, I fell behind with NaNoWriMo because I went on a conference and had little time to write. Now I feel quite a bit hopeless and defeated regarding finishing on time, but I am going to keep trying. I do like my story.

photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Reading Update: November 14, 2010

Autumn leaves

I drove around a bend on the Interstate yesterday and the beauty of the golden, orange, and red leaves on the trees near the road arrested me. I love fall.

I’m still plugging away on The Haunting of Hill House, and I might even finish it today. Not really enjoying it much. Such a short book, and I really had to push to finish it. I just don’t like any of the characters, and it can be hard for me to read books when I don’t like the characters. Wuthering Heights seems to be the lone exception. I think the trick there is that I actually do have a fascination for the characters even if I wouldn’t want to be friends with them. In addition to not liking the characters, if I’m honest, I’m a little unsure about what in the world is going on.

I had a bit of a freak out yesterday when my Kindle‘s battery had absolutely no charge, and I needed to reference a book on it. Then I remembered I do have the Kindle app on my iPhone (and my Mac, for that matter). I think I have mentioned this before, but my NaNoWriMo novel is speculative fiction of the Irish legend of Deirdre. It’s going well. I wrote so much yesterday that I could skip a day now with no detrimental effect on being able to finish on time, but I’m going to try not to do that.

Next week I’ll be seeing some of my English teacher friends in Orlando as I travel to the NCTE conference. I will be presenting a session on authentic assessment in teaching Shakespeare along with the Folger Shakespeare Library’s education department, and I’m finished with writing my presentation. I want to try to practice it and see how it goes.

I listened to Valerie Jackson’s interview of Ken Follett, and doesn’t he sound absolutely charming? I definitely want to read his Pillars of the Earth series.

Ken Follett on Betweeen the Lines

I also listened to her interview of Stacy Schiff about her new book Cleopatra: A Life, and it sounds very interesting.

Stacy Schiff on Between the Lines

Valerie Jackson is a great interviewer. I definitely recommend subscribing to her podcast. It’s a great way to learn about new books.

photo credit: MaxiuB

Mushrooms

Mushroom

If you’ve never read Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, you’ve also not likely read The Outlandish Companion, which was published following the fourth book in the series, The Drums of Autumn. It mostly serves as an encyclopedia and catch-all reference for the series, but Diana Gabaldon does discuss writing quite a bit, and one of my favorite parts of the book discusses characterization. I’ve never run across a better description of characters than Gabaldon’s. She classifies characters into three groups: onions, hard nuts, and mushrooms.

Onions are your main characters that must be built layer by layer and have depth. They’re purposeful and planned. Hard nuts are characters that need to exist for the sake of the plot, but are hard to write. They don’t cooperate. Their personalities are difficult to capture. They’re tough. Mushrooms are my favorites. They’re these characters that just pop into the story. They can threaten to take over if you’re not careful. Most of the time, they’re minor characters. The idea that fully formed characters could just walk into a story without the author knowing who they are or having planned for them was absolutely ludicrous to me—until I started writing.

I’ve written two novels and am working on a third for NaNoWriMo. In my first novel, A Question of Honor, these mushrooms walked into my story a few chapters in. They were traveling minstrels. One of them was a pretty important person, but he was hiding. They were totally awesome people, and I loved them. In my second novel, Quicksand, which hasn’t been published, my mushrooms were the first cousin and his son of my protagonist’s father. Up until today, I didn’t have any mushrooms in my current book, which remains without title for the moment. One showed up today. Her name is Laura, and I love her. I don’t know what role she’ll play later, but she just showed up, and I’ll be interested to see what she does.

I was wondering if you could think of any mushrooms in books you’ve read. If I had to guess, I’d say that Marion and Count Fosco from The Woman in White were mushrooms. I would also guess that Stephen Black from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was a mushroom. Shug Avery in The Color Purple seems to have a tinge of the mushroom about her, too. Though J.R.R. Tolkien doesn’t use the term mushroom to describe him, his character Aragorn seems to have a similar background: In a letter to W.H. Auden, Tolkien confessed that “Strider sitting in a corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than Frodo [did]” (Tolkien Online, The Return of the Shadow). Tolkien observed of his writing that

One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. (“How the Tale Grew in the Telling: The Unexpected Sprouting of The Lord of the Rings“)

Sort of like mushrooms.

photo credit: Matt Brittaine

Reading Update: November 7, 2010

Today was productive. Because of Daylight Saving Time ending, I woke up before 9:00 AM. On a Sunday. I was awake all by myself. I did some work on my instructional technology portfolio. I played around fruitlessly trying to manipulate an image to use as my placeholder “bookcover” for NaNoWriMo. I cooked French onion soup and fixed a Greek salad for supper. I read a little bit of my last issue of Newsweek. And I wrote about 2,000 words of my NaNo novel. You can keep up with my running total in the sidebar to the left (unless you’re in an RSS reader, in which case you can see it if you click over to the site). I have managed to meet or exceed my word count each day, but today’s writing was the hardest. I didn’t think it would be, but my main character went on her first real date with the guy she’s interested in, and they were wrong footed and awkward around each other. I didn’t realize they were going to be so difficult. Still the story is coming together. I am halfway interested in printing it at work tomorrow to see where I am, but I also don’t want to lose momentum.

I’m still reading The Haunting of Hill House. For a slim book, it sure is taking me a long time to finish. Probably because I’m also writing this month. I re-read the story of “The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu,” also known as “Deirdre of the Sorrows” in Early Irish Myths and Sagas yesterday. I downloaded that book on my Kindle because I don’t know where my paperback copy of the book is. Other than that, I haven’t read much this week.

The day has felt off all day because of the time change. I keep looking at the clock thinking it must be later than it is. When are we going to quit changing the time? Doesn’t make sense in our modern times to worry about extending daylight during the spring and summer. Does it? Or am I missing something?

photo credit: karina y

Writing Again

I told myself I shouldn’t participate in NaNoWriMo this year because I have last year’s novel sitting on my computer, still unedited and indeed even unread (by me, anyway—Steve has read some of it). Last year’s novel was a really personal book. It was a mutt—a conflation of several stories in my own family’s history combined with a little bit of Shakespeare. I want to return to it, but in some ways, writing it took a lot out of me, and I can’t tell if I’m afraid it’s bad or if I’m afraid it’s good or what. I know I need to look at it, though.

I really enjoyed NaNoWriMo last year. I enjoyed participating. I enjoyed reading other people’s forum posts and keeping up with my writing buddies’ progress. I enjoyed reading the #nanowrimo tweets of my friends, too. I have a few Twitter friends participating this year. Writing can feel kind of lonely, and it’s fun to do it as a community.

The story I’m writing this year is interesting to me. I took a course in Celtic literature in college. We spent about half the quarter—UGA used to be on a quarter system rather than a semester system—studying ancient Irish mythology, and then we switched to Welsh mythology. The stories are wonderful, and in my estimation, every bit as good as their more popular mythic cousins from Ancient Greece and Rome. We read stories from all four cycles: the Mythological Cycle, the Historical Cycle, the Ulster Cycle, and the Fenian Cycle. My favorites were from the Ulster Cycle—stories of Cú Chulainn. We read Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Taín Bó Cúailnge, which Kinsella titled simply The Tain. We also read stories collected in Early Irish Myths and Sagas, and I remember having to go to the library to read stories from a book our professor had on reserve in the library. I can’t recall anymore what that book was, but she had tried to order it for us to purchase in the bookstore, but the order never came through.

Other writers have found inspiration in these ancient myths. Morgan Llywelyn, for instance, has written several books about them. One idea I had was a straight historical fiction-type retelling of the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows, which is one of the most popular of the Ulster Cycle stories. However, it’s a pretty sad tale. It ends in the deaths of the lovers, and I didn’t really want a sad ending this time round. I don’t have anything against them, but the end of Deirdre is pretty bleak and sad, and I just wasn’t feeling all that dark this month, I guess. I also wanted a little bit of spookiness in the story. I think that’s the influence of the R.I.P. Challenge. I didn’t know if I wanted ghosts or some other kind of supernatural element, but I settled on that creepy sense of déjà vu that some folks attribute to prophecy and others say is due to reincarnation. I will state here that I don’t believe in reincarnation, but it makes a pretty fun literary device. I do think some strange things can be passed down the generations, maybe some kind of residual memory that serves as a connection to people. I think it’s why we respond to certain types of art more than others. I think we tend to like the kinds of things our family has always liked. I know that sounds weird, and maybe I’m not explaining it well. Anyway, Ireland has an amazing, rich mythological past that is begging to be adapted into speculative fiction.

So, my Deirdre Evans is a teenager living in modern day Londonderry, Massachusetts (which I don’t think exists), the grandchild of immigrants from Northern Ireland who came to America because of the Troubles. She is a junior at Ulster High School, and is being a little aggressively pursued by big man on campus and football player Connor, but she meets and falls in love with a boy name Nate, who goes to Alba High School and is a guitarist and singer for his band the Sons of Uselessness. I admit it is a little bit of a silly premise, but I’m having fun with it. As the book progresses, Deirdre comes to realize that she is reliving the tragic events of the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows, and this time, she needs to try to make sure it doesn’t end so tragically for everyone involved. Obviously, the trouble is that it’s so crazy on the surface that she’ll have a hard time convincing others that she’s right.

Anyway, the weird thing is how easily it’s coming out. I don’t know whether to just be happy about that or if I should be worried it’s really bad. The idea came to me in the eleventh hour. Literally. I was at a conference for Georgia independent school teachers in Atlanta, sitting in a session on using speculative fiction, when I came up with it. It was right about 2:00 P.M. or so on the day NaNoWriMo started that I finally had an idea I thought I could use. We’re on day 6, and I have managed to meet my word count each day—one day it took me an hour! I wrote some 1500 to 1600 words in an hour! I’ll start to second guess myself. For instance, my character Deirdre will look up something on Wikipedia or check out Facebook, and I’ll tell myself maybe I shouldn’t put that in there, but the fact is that I teach teenagers, and these are two extremely popular websites with them. So what if it dates the novel? Is that bad? Aren’t a lot of classics we read now really tied to the times in which they were written, but still somehow speak to us years later? Anyway, I became convinced that references to these types of websites would be interesting to teenagers. And I also decided that if I were to pursue publication, and my publishers didn’t agree, it could be edited pretty easily. Right now, what I need to focus on is telling the story I want to tell. Maybe it’s just something you get better at the longer you write. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have trouble later, so if it’s flowing now, I should just be happy about it and try to get ahead as much as I can to make up for down days. One thing I know it isn’t is classic literature. It is, however, a pretty decent story that I think would appeal to YA audiences.

photo credit: Flabber DeGasky

NaNoWriMo Participant

Reading (and NaNoWriMo) Update: October 31, 2010

NaNoWriMo ParticipantI’m participating in NaNoWriMo. I decided to just buckle down and make a decision. It should be interesting, as I really have no idea what I’ll be writing about. I have jotted down a few ideas for potential plots, but I haven’t committed to any yet. You can follow my progress here at my NaNo profile, or keep visiting me here to check my status meter.

I began reading The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson just in time for Halloween. I already love her descriptions and think I will continue to enjoy the book. I also had a change to begin listening to Jamaica Inn in the car yesterday. Du Maurier sure does write a good creep in Uncle Joss, doesn’t she?

Right now we’re putting the finishing touches on Halloween costumes. Maggie will be a black cat, and Dylan will be Harry Potter (again). However, since we only have the glasses and the wand, he’s going to be Harry on the run in Deathly Hallows rather than Hogwarts Harry.

And for Halloween, a fun poll:

What is your favorite Halloween candy?

  • Fun size Snickers (43%, 3 Votes)
  • Milk Duds (14%, 1 Votes)
  • Smarties (14%, 1 Votes)
  • Some other kind of chocolate bar (share in the comments if you like) (14%, 1 Votes)
  • Something else (share in the comments if you like) (14%, 1 Votes)
  • Candy Corn (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Sweet Tarts (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Nerds (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 7

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Happy Halloween, everyone!

jack o lanterns
photo credit: St0rmz

NaNoWriMo 2011

IMG_7617

I really want to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I really don’t have the time, and to be honest, I don’t even have the germ of an idea. Some of you know I’ve been in grad school for two years now, and I will be graduating in December. This November I will be wrapping up my work on my portfolio for grad school and preparing a presentation for a national English teachers’ conference. My friend Bud suggested I might spend the time revising my NaNo novel from last year, and my husband agreed with Bud. And they’re probably right. That is what I should do instead of grousing about not participating in NaNoWriMo this year. But I really wish I were participating. It was really fun to have the support of the rest of the NaNo writers. I felt a sense of camaraderie I don’t think I’ve ever felt as a writer. It gave me a thrill to enter my word counts each day, especially when I was ahead of my goals. I felt excited about what I was writing, too.

I have always been a writer mainly because no one ever told me I couldn’t. I can vividly recall making my own books when I was the same age as my youngest child—stapled pieces of notebook paper illustrated with my drawings. I pontificated on such subjects as healthy eating and bugs who live inside mushrooms. Then when I was older, I turned to poetry. I wrote a lot of awful poetry as a teenager. Finally about ten years ago, I wrote an entire novel. I never pursued publication vigorously. I admit to being completely clueless as to how one truly goes about finding agents and publishers. I finally published it myself on Lulu.

The NaNo novel I wrote last year languishes on my laptop. I haven’t tried to edit it. I haven’t even tried to read it. I can’t say why. I’m not scared it’s bad, necessarily. Well, I am, but that’s not why I haven’t read it. I think I am a bit scared of the time it would take to nurture it into print. If I am honest with myself, it is one of my most cherished dreams to become a real published writer with a book on the shelves that people actually want to read (and not just members of my family, who were so kind and supportive and bought my first book on Lulu). Bless all 18 people who have purchased a copy—as I said when I published it, that’s more people than would have read it on my computer. My mom’s cousin even told her it was good and she was proud to be related to the writer, which really puffed me up, and I’m being sincere. My dad even asked me to autograph it. But that’s not the kind of writer I really want to be. It reminds me too much of poor Emmeline Grangerford in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, spending all her time writing bad poetry that only her family admires, bless her heart, and then dropping dead and leaving that corpus of work behind her. *Shiver*

But I feel inspired. I feel inspired when I think of J.K. Rowling writing about her boy wizard in a café, feeling as low as she had ever felt in her life and living on government assistance. I feel inspired when I think of Stephen King typing Carrie in a trailer home, unable to afford a phone and receiving notification of his novel’s acceptance via telegram. I feel inspired when I read about the works of the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen, published at author expense and never really expected to do all that well. I don’t compare myself to any of these writers, but I know how they felt to want their writing to go out there into the world, and I also know how they felt to be afraid for that to happen. Obviously some people are going to hate it, and knowing that is like contemplating people hating your children. I mean, how could they?

I write all the time. But I don’t write creatively very much, and though I need for that to change if I am to be serious about writing, it’s hard to find the time. My high school English teacher is still a friend, and she occasionally chides me for going into teaching. She insists I should have pursued the writing with more gusto. I really want to. I really do. I really want to write something this month. I want to write alongside everyone else. I didn’t have any time to write last year either, I tell myself. Yet I did, and I actually finished—I wrote over 50,000 words. And Bud and my husband do have a point—I can and should work some more on that other novel. I really love my characters, Imogen and her father Jasper Medley. They are real to me. It’s strange what happens when you create characters and they take on life. I tell myself when I’m done with grad school, I’ll have time, but will I really? I mean, I didn’t write much for years, and grad school wasn’t the reason. Certainly being a mother takes up my time, but I was a mother when I wrote my other two novels.

I don’t have any grand conclusions. I am just throwing all of this out there. As I drove Sarah to see her dad today, I was thinking about all of this, and I knew I needed to wrestle with it in print, but I don’t know where to go from here. Do I sign up for NaNoWriMo in the 11th hour and see what happens? Do I take good advice and rip apart my novel so I could try to get it published? Do I do neither one? I don’t know.

photo credit: Clemson

Struggling with Books

I admit I’m struggling to finish a short book. It isn’t that I don’t like it. I just can’t get into it enough to want to pick it up. Worse, I keep thinking about other books I want to read, and then I tell myself I need to finish that one first. The end result is that I’m doing very little reading.

I think I’m going to set aside We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the time being. It’s too short not to finish at some point, but I’m just not that into it for right now. I’ve read too far to give it up completely.

I am contemplating revisiting Diana Gabaldon’s series. She has just published a new one, An Echo in the Bone. I discovered my new department chair at work is a fan of this series, too. She and I are becoming fast friends. We have so much in common from our interests to our philosophies of education. I am so grateful she has come to work with me. It was funny how we discovered we had the fact that we are Diana Gabaldon fans in common: she started to tell me about the books in order to recommend them. And I had to respond, “Oh, I’ve read them!” I would say any of the older fans of Twilight should check Gabaldon’s books out. You won’t be sorry.

On the other hand, I could also read something I haven’t read. I have two Jasper Fforde books on my shelf. I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll stare at the book shelf for a while until I figure it out. All I know is I’m finished with grad school for the semester, and NaNoWriMo is over (and I won!). My novel is called Quicksand. I actually need to tidy up the ending because I wrote more than 50,000 words, which is the requirement for winning NaNoWriMo, but I didn’t finish my book. I also decided to set it aside and revisit it with fresh eyes when its time to revise. However, it has now been a little over a week since NaNoWriMo ended, and I am finding I miss my characters. Some of them became very real to me, and I enjoyed seeing them every day when I came home.

Once finals begins (or ends), and I have a little more time, I should post some excerpts or podcasts about my book. I am really interested in trying to publish it, but I admit the prospect of trying to find an agent is daunting.

NaNoWriMo Update

I have tried on a couple of occasions to record a podcast about A Question of Honor, but I find myself embarrassingly forgetful of some details. I opened it up today, for instance, and I discovered that I had completely forgotten a character in the book. My reaction was “Oh, that’s right. Now I remember who that was.” Kind of embarrassing. I think I need to refresh my memory on some details before I record more podcasts about the process of writing that book.

My NaNoWriMo novel Quicksand is beginning to live up to its title. I am really happy with how it’s going. I had an idea today that meant I would need to do some substantial rewriting and revising, and that’s hard to do on a NaNo schedule. I wound up adding a chapter near the beginning and changing some details here and there, but in the end I think I fixed nearly everything I need to fix to make my new idea work. I think once I’m done, I’ll print out the book so I can see it in print and made revisions that way. It is hard for me to read something as lengthy as a book on the computer (which is one reason why my PDF of Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide has gone so long unread on my computer).

I am caught up on the word count despite taking a day off on Friday. I have 23,390 words written (the suggested word count for today is 23,333). I’m happy about how naturally the writing is coming. I didn’t make an outline, which I suspect will mean I will have some inconsistencies to clear up.

I wondered how long the average adult novel is, and I found a fairly good word count guide at Tristi Pinkston’s blog. The 50,000-word requirement for NaNoWriMo will yield a fairly short adult novel or long young adult novel. I think I read somewhere that it’s about 170 pages, but I assumed that count referred to word processor pages rather than typeset pages. If you figure 250 words per page, as Pinkston suggests, then I have written about 93.5 pages. I tried Pinkston’s trick with a Matthew Pearl book and estimate it might have between 92,500 and 111,000 words, depending on the number of words per page. I don’t want my book to be that long. I picked up a copy of Finn by Jon Clinch, which looks about as long as I want my book to be, and I estimate it at about 70,000 to 84,000 words using Pinkston’s method. Thus, 50,000 isn’t going be enough. I just need to get to 50,000 by November 30, but I think I’m going to need to keep writing if I want my book to be about the average length for an adult novel. I am going to shoot for about 75,000, and we’ll see. I was glad I found Pinkston’s post because word counts mystify me. Still, as Pinkston says, what you really need to focus on is how many words you need to tell the story. The way I figure it, if you’re talking word count, I’m almost at the point where Siddhartha ends, and I am not nearly done; yet, Siddhartha is a well-written, influential novel, and I have never heard anyone complain it’s too short to tell its story.

Dracula

While I didn’t finish Dracula in time to meet the deadline of the R.I.P. Challenge, I did finish it within days of the end of the novel’s action on November 6 of some indeterminate year. One of the things I’ve noticed about reading a book like Dracula, around which a cottage industry of adaptations, homages, and even an entire genre have sprung, is that the story in the actual book becomes altered to the point that the reader had different expectations. For instance, I had the idea that the character of Renfield had a much larger role and was a servant of Dracula’s. I didn’t realize the Count came to England, and I was surprised by Dracula’s small role in the actual novel.

The novel holds up well as a gothic tale. I wonder how it might have fared had Stoker chosen to tell it with a straight narrative rather than as a series of journals. He is constricted by what his characters are able to report. I don’t know enough about vampire tradition to know if Stoker originated some of the aspects we have come to associate with vampire narratives: the fear of garlic and Christian artifacts such as crosses, crucifixes, and the communion host; the inability to rise during the day and activity at night; and superhuman strength that grows more powerful over the ages. On the other hand, I was surprised to discover that sunlight didn’t necessarily seem to be harmful to the vampires in this novel. They avoided it, but when coffins were opened during the day to look on them, they didn’t disintegrate into dust as Anne Rice’s vampires do (and hers are not afraid of crucifixes).

I am glad I read Dracula. It is a great read for anyone interested in how the literary craving for vampires came to be, but you won’t find the seductive and charming Louis de Pointe du Lacs, Lestat de Lioncourts, or even Edward Cullens in this novel. Dracula is just a monster, and there’s nothing attractive or seductive about it.

I read Dracula with the iPhone app Classics. I usually have one book going in DailyLit, one paper book, and one iPhone book. I haven’t decided which book I’ll read next on the iPhone, but I haven’t finished Crime and Punishment on DailyLit, nor have I finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle in print.

A short update on NaNoWriMo: I am a little behind the wordcount. By the end of the day yesterday, I should have reached 11,667 words, and I am currently at 9,304. It might not seem bad to be behind by 2,363 words, especially compared with some folks who are working with larger discrepancies than that, but it also means that in order to be caught up by the end of the day today, I need to write 4,030 words. And that is a lot for one day. I’m not sure it’s going to happen, particularly as I have two grad school assignments due. But we shall see. The writing is not coming as quickly or easily as it did at first, I think because I really did sort of know how to start off. Cross your fingers for me that things pick up. I’d really like to win NaNo this year.