NaNoWriMo is officially over, which means nightmares of revision horors are crawling around in the heads of hundreds of writers right about now. Here’s some tips to help guide you through the revision process!
six impossible things
What I’ve Been Reading…
Since I switched my genre of study to Writing for Children and Young Adults last November, I’ve been enjoying the reading that comes with that category. Children’s books have a sweetness and a truth about them that isn’t usually there in fiction written for adults. So I love sharing them with other readers!
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is a YA novel about a girl with a horrible secret and no friends. Recommended for teenagers who feel misunderstood or who want to understand their friends better.
The Wednesday Wars by Gary Shmidt is an older, upper middle-grade book that brought me to tears. The Vietnam War, Shakespeare, and 8th grade can never again come together with so much beauty. Recommended for mature middle-grade readers who want a poignant story.
The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate tells the story of Ivan the silverback gorilla who was once on display in a shopping mall in Washington state. The story of how he was rescued from the mall and integrated into a zoo is a contributor to the larger story of the animal protections we have in place today. Recommended for animal lovers and activists.
Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani is the amazing epistolary story of two children who become pen palls and then best friends. One of them is an immigrant from India who lives in New York, and the other is a Kentuckian who is watching his beloved mountains destroyed by mountaintop removal mining. Recommended for everyone.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith is the classic tale of Francie Nolan’s childhood in Brooklyn, New York. It is a v e r y long book… but it is full of beauty. Recommended for anyone who wants a long read that is guaranteed to move them, some time or another (especially writers).
Blue Mountain by Martine Leavitt is about a heard of bighorn sheep who are crowded out of their mountain’s winter valley by a human settlement. Tuk and his bandmates set out to find the legendary blue mountain where the herd will graze in peace, and they meet, defeat, and are helped by many other animals along the way. Recommended for animal lovers and preservationists.
In addition to what I read for my MFA studies, I also read a lot of the children’s books that I order for the library where I work. Here are some of my favorites:
Shh! We Have a Plan by Chris Haughton is a super cute book. The story is pretty short, but young children will adore it.
Once Upon an Alphabet: Short Stories for All the Letters by Oliver Jeffers is not a short book, but it is lovely. Each letter of the alphabet gets it’s own mini story, just a few pages long. The fun is in finding out which stories are linked.
Home by Cason Ellis is a beautifully illustrated celebration of what a home can be in many different parts of the world, different time periods, and a few places that aren’t on earth at all.
Flare by Kallie George is an easy reader book about a young phoenix learning to be the best phoenix he can be. Companion to Spark, which is about a young dragon who is learning to control his fiery breath.
A Rock Can Be… by Laura Salas is a wonderful successor to Water Can Be… which I loved. Spectacular illustrations help children think outside the box by showing examples of the many, many things in our lives that a rock can be.
Sinful Simon or Peter, Redeemed
The practice of yoga tends to be a subject of some controversy among evangelicals due to it’s roots in eastern religion. When I took a class at a Baptist college on yoga (as exercise), we exclusively learned the poses involved. There was no chanting or mumbo jumbo, no meditation. The only possible thing that could be linked to the history of yoga was the word namaste. We ended each class by placing our palms together and nodding our heads to the instructor, who did the same to us, and we said namaste to each other.
According to our instructor, we were simply thanking her for the class, and she was thanking us for our participation. This is an accepted meaning for the term among those who practice yoga as an exercise or sport, but the translation of the Sanskrit word namaste into English is “the divine in me honors the divine in you.”
Conservative evangelicals often shy away even from this word, because of it’s meaning. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder – why don’t we adopt this greeting and use it in our churches?
C S Lewis, in his essay The Weight of Glory, famously pointed out that everyone we meet is someone who will be alive forever.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – there are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
– C S Lewis, The Weight of Glory
How often do we really think like this? It is certainly easy to forget that we are eternal ourselves, and much easier when it comes to those who irritate or harm us in some way. Perhaps if we kept a greeting with connotations of “my eternal self honors your eternal self” or, specifically among Christian communities, “my sanctified self honors your sanctified self” we could better remember that while we are still sinners, the same Christ saved us all, and we will be together with him – and each other – for eternity.
In a recent worship service, a preacher encouraged the congregation to recognize this in the example of Simon Peter. Jesus gave Simon, the sinner, a new name when he became a follower. That name was Peter, the Rock on which Christ built his church. This same person denied Christ three times on the eve of the crucifixion. Jesus, because he has covered this, chose to see Peter and love him, rather than to see Simon and punish the sin. The preacher encouraged us to do this ourselves, in conflict with others, to see the new person Christ has cleansed rather than the old person who was lost.
This is difficult to do even if we remember. But how often are we reminded, or do we remind ourselves? Perhaps it should be a little more often.
Namaste.
2014: A Big Year
Yes, this is a recap post. 🙂 2014 has been such a huge year for me, personally, academically, and in the world of literature. Instead of summarizing my summary, I’ll get right to it.
Winter
In January, I became Mrs. Vander Ark and moved all the way up to Southwest Michigan, during one of the snowiest winters they’d had in years! Our wedding was largely DIY, and it was a huge relief to be done planning for it.
Shortly after we moved into our cozy basement apartment, I received my first online publication (independent from my undergraduate school’s journal) from TWJMagazine.
In February I started working at the Bridgman Public Library, where I do children’s programming and order picture books through middle grade books – which increased the number of books I read quite a lot!
Notable Reads
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian – Sherman Alexie
- Fortunately, the Milk – Neil Gaiman
- Bats at the Library – Brian Lies
Spring
My MFA in creative writing at Spalding University began at the end of May, and the week I spend surrounded by other writers in Louisville, KY, was probably the most inspiring time of my life. It came just after the official closure of my undergraduate degree when we walked with our classmates in the early May graduation ceremony at University of the Cumberlands.
After Memorial Day, I also began writing for the Infusco Coffee Roasters blog… and spending a lot of time in the shop!
Caleb and I also tried our hand at raised-bed gardening for the first time and were far more successful than we anticipated.
Notable Reads
- Wonder – R. J. Palacio
- The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap – Wendy Welch
- Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers – Frank Walker
Summer
We bought a house! And proceeded to spend an entire month renovating. We refinished the floors, painted ceilings, walls, and cabinets, and moved in to our first house.
My CNF story “There Are No Buffalo Here” appeared in print via Garbanzo Literary Journal this summer. I couldn’t have picked a better place for it!
Notable Reads
- Norman, Speak! – Caroline Adderson
- Young House Love – the Petersiks
- This Moose Belongs to Me – Oliver Jeffers
Fall
As if we hadn’t been blessed enough by the rest of the year, September brought us our beloved beagle/foxhound puppy, Juliet. She is smart, loving, playful, and generally pleasant, and we love her to pieces.
We hosted our first Halloween Party and Thanksgiving dinner in our new home, and settled in for the rest of the holiday season.
I switched my concentration at Spalding from CNF to writing for children and young adults, and so far I’m loving it!
Notable Reads
- Landline – Rainbow Rowell
- Wild – Cheryl Strayed
- We Were Liars – E. Lockhart
If you’re interested, you can see everything that I read in 2014 (200+ books) through this link. If you’d rather just know which books I had a lot to say about, check here, here, here, or here.
Here’s to a great 2015! Anyone want to share your resolutions? Mine are to start running again, have a more successful garden, and read more than I did this year. 🙂
NaNoWriMo: The Power of Titles
As I’ve been away at residency in Louisville it’s become glaringly obvious to me that my NaNoWriMo project is stuck. When I arrived, I had 24,000 words (no, I haven’t added to that in a week) and no idea where my story was going, what it was about, or what I needed to write next.
This is not to imply that I’ve been uninspired. While here, I’ve drafted two picture books and a flash creative essay. Thanks to workshop, I’ve been more than successful in figuring out what last year’s project needs in it’s next revision, but I’ve made little progress as far as my current project is concerned.
Which leads me to a conversation about titles. Great titles are amazing. They’re like a muse that is always there to remind you what your story is about, and never fail to lead you back to the heart of the book when you’re floundering. Without a title for this project, I feel like I’m wandering around in the wilderness with no idea where I’m trying to go. So my new goal is: come up with a title. Even a placeholder, a throwaway, a horrible title that would never market.
Naming the thing makes me more powerful than the thing itself.
So that’s what I’ll try to do. Then I’ll try to write 25k+ in the next ten days. That can be done right?
Shh. I don’t want to know your answer.
NaNoWriMo: A Room of My Own
My whole life I’ve imagined what it would be like to have an entire room in a house that was dedicated to books, both their creation and consumption. In honor of NaNo, here’s what that looks like!
When we bought our three-bedroom cape cod in August, I knew exactly which room I wanted for this purpose. It’s on the main floor, not too far from the kitchen (caffeine access), gets great light in the morning, has a tiny closet for crafting and art supplies, and has a perfect view of our back yard. We painted the room a lovely, inspirational shade of green, put up some pretty curtains, and filled that sucker with books. Every writer is familiar with Virginia Woolf’s recommendation that each writer needs a “room of her own” to think, read, and write in. This is my room, and I love it to bits.
My desk and the matching chair were a craigslist find, and the items on this wall were gifts. The desk provides the perfect amount of space to work in, and it has a wonderful view.
When I write at this desk, I am surrounded by the whisperings of the hundreds of books that have influenced me with their pages. There are two more bookcases in other parts of the house, but this is the bulk. On the leftmost bookcase I have antique books, filled journals, writing reference, and to-read. Next is nonfiction with blank notebooks and school binders at the bottom. On the other side, young adult books get a shelf, with filled sketchbooks, art journals, and photo albums at the bottom, and lastly is the fiction shelf with magazines and oversize books at the bottom. This room is such a happy place for me!
Do you have a room of your own? I highly recommend it. 🙂
NaNoWriMo: Why “serious” writers should promote rather than dismiss
Many of you will shake your heads upon reading this. Or perhaps even roll your eyes. Maybe blow a raspberry, send a prayer heavenward.
I’m going to say it anyway.
NaNoWriMo season has arrived.
This year, more than usual, I’ve seen a number of posts by those lofty, unattainable beings who claim to be, above all else, serious writers. They scoff at the mention of month-long noveling, turn up their noses at the thought of it. Discourage whoever they can from participating. Wait patiently for that far off day (December 1st) when Twitter, tumbler, and the internet at large will return to it’s regularly scheduled programming.
And I am here to set the record straight, at the risk of sounding like a broken one.
Serious writer or first time participant, you absolutely should try National Novel Writing Month.
Let me tell you why.
NaNoWriMo is fun. It’s a month-long (distressingly, horrendously, terrifyingly hard) party, where we spend time with people who are working toward the same goal that we are. Whatever our methods, our means, our motivation, or our end result, we’ve all attempted (and hopefully achieved) the same result: a 50,000 word piece of crappy first draft fiction. Maybe that’s all you do. Then the next time you’re buying coffee at your favorite place or books at your favorite shop (please buy books from shops) or groceries at the supermarket, you can say, truthfully, without guilt, remorse, or modesty, “Yeah, I wrote a book once.” But maybe you go on and spend a long, long time doing the hard, hard work of revision that gets you, eventually, to final draft fiction. And maybe somebody somewhere likes that final draft, a lot, and your name gets to be on the cover of a book. And you become an author.
There are plenty of wildly successful, quality authors out there who cannot be described as serious. Just check out a few of their YouTube channels. Being a not-so-serious writer can be key to getting in touch with your audience, making friends, and (someday) selling books. Any aspiring writer who finds that one of their favorite authors thinks they should (attempt, try, stumble through the process of) write a novel will be inspired and pleased and instantly find a little more space to add to the box in their heart that belongs to that writer. An author who discourages (snubs, belittles, snickers at) this endeavor, however, might actually loose some of their holy-authorness in the eyes of readers.
Besides, any writer, serious or not, who says they aren’t pleased to tell people in coffee shops that they’re a writer and yes, they’ve written novels is lying.
A Note About Quality: Or, Mediation
To the Naysayers: anyone who has read Sara Gruen’s Water For Elephants cannot truthfully declare that NaNoWriMo is a worthless, awful feat. Don’t allow you negativity to discourage the next book that good from being written.
To the Wrimos: Water For Elephants was not the book that it is on December 1st. As described above, there was a long, long time and a lot of hard, hard work between then and publication. Don’t send you 2014 NaNovel out to agents or publishers until after January 1st, 2016 (no, I don’t mean 2015). And only then if you’ve given it everything you possibly have to give. And don’t self-publish it just because you can.
To the One Who is Just Considering: Try it. You’ll like it.
Okay, I rest my case. Here’s to NaNoWriMo 2014, my fifth (hopefully) completed NaNovel, and more crazy than any other time of year. Futher up and further in!
Beginning the End
It feels a little surreal to be back to writing and routine after the craziness of the past month. As I begin working on my fifth and final packet for this semester – and final packet in CNF for a while – it’s fun to look back at the work I’ve done since May. More than a dozen new essays in various stages of revision are now living happily in Google Drive folders on my laptop. I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo – which allowed me to use my school writing as my camp project – for the first time and met my self-appointed goal. I’ve “survived” my second Michigan summer, which involved spending a good deal of time on the beach, collecting glass and fossils and sand under my toenails. I’ve learned a lot about Michigan ecology – both land and lake – and reflected this in my writing. I’ve learned a LOT about home improvement – and not just by reading about it! And, bonus: I’ve learned a lot about coffee and the importance of the gathering place that a locally owned coffee shop like Infusco can provide.
It’s been a good semester. Here’s to finishing strong… assuming I can find more words to write!
Up next on the reading list:
A 1,000-Mile Walk on the Beach – Loreen Niewenhuis
A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson
You Have Given Me a Country – Neela Vaswani
Just Jules
Hi! My name is Juliet, but sometimes my parents call me Jules. My mom is letting me write her blog this week because she’s too busy playing with me to do her “very important work.” I am eight weeks old and mostly a beagle dog, but nobody knows who my dad was so they call me a “mix.” My mom and my brothers and sisters were all saved from a bad shelter in Hazard, Kentucky by the Animal Rescue Project of Kalamazoo, Michigan. My dad saw my picture online and fell in love with me, so he brought me home to surprise my mom! She was so happy to see me that she cried! They named me Juliet because the love me so much (and I have soft cheeks). There’s something called Shakespeare that this name is from, but my mom and dad really like a show called Psych, so they call me Jules because of Psych’s Juliet. (When Grandpa heard this he said he’ll call me Verene.) This is how I spend my days now that my parents brought me to their house to live with them! (I like our house, it looks really nice and kind of new.)
First I get up at seven and don’t go back to sleep, so mom snuggles on the couch with me until dad gets up for work.
Before my parents leave me alone, they take me outside! I love outside! Outside is the best!
Mom puts me in my crate before she leaves for the day, but dad comes home and feeds me lunch, and we go outside again! Outside is the best!
When mom gets home, we go outside AGAIN! And I play with leaves in the jungle grass.
Mom tries to get me to sleep on the couch again so she can work, but I mostly want to play.
Sometimes Grandpa comes over to do stuff in our walls and I watch to see what happens.
Then we go outside! These tall weeds are fun to chew on. You should try it.
Why does mom have this hard cold thing in her lap instead of me?
Guess I’ll watch a movie with dad instead!
Time for bed! I sleep a lot, but sometimes I wake up to make sure my parents are still there. They’re the best! (I’m house trained, but they don’t take any chances.)
I love my new home! You should come see me soon!
Shiny! (The floors, that is…)
Well, we did it! And I’m so glad we did. Hard work can pay off in a big way! Here are some photos of the living room, a bedroom, and the main hall way of our house as it looked when we did our walkthrough with the realtor. Note nasty, ugly, cat hairy carpets. (In the living room, they have a rug over the carpet. I guess it was too nasty even for them!)
We rented a drum sander and an edge sander from a nearby company and borrowed a shop vacuum and a hand sander from friends. Each room took six passes with a sander – edge sander with 20 grit paper, drum sander with 20 grit paper, then both with 80 grit paper, then both with 120 grit paper – and we vacuumed everything after teach pass. This was a long two-day process with a definite learning curve. Once we got the hang of it, it was super fun to see the quality of the floor improve before our eyes with each pass. Word to the wise, though – do not attempt to use an edge sander if you have a history of back problems. When all this sanding was finished, we vacuumed twice more and used a damp rag to wipe the floors down. (The vacuum misses so much!)
Minwax has a floor product called a sanding sealer which dies in two hours and takes the place of the first coat of polyurethane, so we opted for that as out first coat. This was followed by using a pole sander with 320 grit paper on all the floors (yes, sanding again) and vacuuming (again). Finally, we put down two coats (8 hours apart) of Minwax “super fast drying” polyurethane. The can says it “provides a traditional amber glow.” We used a roller to apply it all.
Finally, we are still waiting for these floor to be ready for everyday foot traffic, but they are super duper beautiful and totally worth all the hard work. I can’t wait to live in this house!
Next up: those walls, though…
ibelonginabook 