IWSG: Craft Books: Thinking ABOUT writing, or writing?

  

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking.

If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

August 4 question - What is your favorite writing craft book? Think of a book that every time you read it you learn something or you are inspired to write or try the new technique. And why?

The awesome co-hosts for the August 4 posting of the IWSG are PK Hrezo, Cathrina Constantine, PJ Colando, Kim Lajevardi, and Sandra Cox! Be sure to check out what they have to say, and visit other writers in the blog hop!

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I don't read a lot of craft books anymore, though once I did. They are a pleasure, and can be inspiring and encouraging, as well as instructive. 

But I don't read them very often anymore. 

It's not that I don't still feel like there's a lot to learn about writing life. I definitely do!…it's more a matter of time management and HOW I do my learning these days. 

Since my first novel was published in 2015, I've considered myself a professional writer. Currently, I stuff a full time writing life into part time hours, working 1-2 hours a day during the school year and 4-8 hours a day during summer hiatus, so that my day job (teaching middle school) can provide money, insurance, retirement plans and other staples of stability. 

It's not enough time for all the work of writing, rewriting, networking, marketing, etc., but it's what I can afford (literally, in the dollars in the bank, sense of "afford"). Plus, I'm finding there's something to be said for "hands-on" learning or "on the job" training. Theoretical consideration and hypothetical situations will only take you so far. 

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So, while I loved Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and Stephen King's On Writing and Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones when I was younger, it's been years since I read a book on the craft of writing, though there are plenty of them on my bookshelves still.  

That's not to say I'm not studying. I just tend to combine that with other tasks these days. When I get stuck, I read a few articles or posit a question to one of my writing communities to get real-time advice from others in the thick of the struggle themselves. I learn by doing and by talking to others who are doing. 

For Lamott, King, Goldberg and other giants of the field, my level of struggle is a memory. They no longer worry about building an audience, navigating the shark-infested waters of publishing, or balancing quality with quantity of output to keep a career from languishing. 

For others in The Writing Tribe, Works in Progress, or Area 42 (three of the writing communities I work with), that battle is being fought right now, and for that reason, the advice is very pragmatic. These groups linger less over the philosophy and ideals and concentrate more on the practice. 

If I let myself wander down those philosophical paths too long, I find I just stay there. I spend a lot of time thinking ABOUT writing instead of actual writing, and that might feed my practice in the long run, but it doesn't feed my career here in the short run. 

So, once again, I'm back to seeking a balance, this time between thinking and doing. 

How about you? Do you fall into research rabbit holes as easily as I do, and spend too much time thinking ABOUT what you want to do instead of doing it? Or have you found a better balance of learning and doing? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments! 

July Reading

 

I missed the end of July! Here we are already three days into August before I noticed it was August. 

To be fair, I WAS at a convention all weekend (Galaxy Con, Raleigh). I barely knew what time it was, let alone what day it was. 

Me with all my book babies at GalaxyCon

But I did want to tell you about what I read in July, because I read some excellent books :-) (as always, you can click on the link in the book's title to see my fuller review on Goodreads--I don't review on Amazon anymore because Amazon decided I was up to nefarious things and won't respond to my queries . . . apparently writers aren't allowed to also be readers?). 

I started off the month by finishing The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, which I began in June because I wanted to talk to play along with the #WeeklyLitChats #BuddyRead over on Twitter with Manuela Sonntag, DB Carter , and the rest of the regulars. It's one of those books that everybody knows in a sense, because it's so steeped in our culture, often adapted and parodied, but I had never read it. I found it a bit disorganized by contemporary standards, with plot lines dropped for a hundred pages and then picked back up, but the characters I knew and loved from popular culture sang on the page and it was well worth the read. 

After all that bro-mance, though, I was ready for something very different, so I picked up Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a book that had been in my TBR since its release. LOVED it. So much great Gothic atmosphere with extra layers of horror in the form of colonialism. 

Monster, She Wrote by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson was probably a dangerous choice in that it added a hundred or more books to my TBR. It's a historical overview of women in speculative fiction and there are so many more things I now need to read! 

Becky Chambers has become one of my automatic purchase authors. When I need a boost of optimism and hope, she's just the ticket. Her newest is a short book, A Psalm for the Wild Built, which takes place on a far-future, post-factory earth and chronicles a friendship between a human man and a robot. 

I finally finished Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit. I started it some months ago as an audiobook, and the narration was so flippant that I found it off-putting. While there is certainly some snark in Solnit's book, the narrator read it like it was a rom-com, so I put it down. When I came back to finish it on Kindle, I liked it much better, though I still it's a bit "feminism 101" for a woman like me, now over 50 and hardly new to the battlegrounds of feminism. Maybe better if you're a newb? Still, more power to Solnit for getting a whole book out of a single funny/sad incident at a party. 

I wasn't sure what I felt like reading after that, so I went to my Audible library, organized by "not yet read" and "by length" and picked something short: The Dispatcher by John Scalzi. I have enjoyed all of the Scalzi I have read, and this one was quite interesting, too. Noir-esque, but not so very gritty. Very interesting world/central concept. 

Then, I realized that Lucy Blue was about to release a new romantic mystery in her Stella Hart series. Lucy and I share a publisher, and I've been hearing such good things about her books, so I figured this was my moment to check them out. I read Guinivere's Revenge and The Passion of Miss Cuthbert back to back. They're short, fast-reading, and delightful. 

They're set in the early 20th century and combine mystery-romance-historical elements into witty and charming stories. I LOVE Stella and George, and appreciate romantic stories that aren't all about prolonging the chase, but instead let the romance progress. The third is next in my TBR, so tune in next month to hear about that one. 

After that, I was once again unsure what I wanted to read, so I went to short books already in my Audible library and found Nim's Island, a middle grades adventure story with shades of Pippi Longstocking and Swiss Family Robinson. I'd seen the movie some years ago, and enjoyed it, and I also quite enjoyed the book. Light and fun, whimsical. 

The last book I finished in July was Yo-Yo Ma's A Beginner's Mind, a short memoir combining recordings of his performances with anecdotes from his journey as an artist. It made me wish I could invite myself to Ma's house and just listen to him talk for a few days. He's such a kind-hearted, open person, with quiet grace and I was already a huge fan of his musical performances. His mini-concert videos on Facebook were part of what saw me through the pandemic. 

I tried and failed to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude for my First Monday Classics Book Club. Too free-wheeling and unmoored for my mindset right now, and I finished the month still in the middle of two books: The Wharton Gothics by Edith Wharton and Dr. Watson and the Ladies' Club Coven by Alexandra Christian. Tune in next month to see how those shook out for me (spoiler: I'm really enjoying both). 

What did you read in July? I'd love to hear about in the comments! 

Introducing: The Newest Bryants

Friends and followers might remember that we lost our boy-o, O'Neill, back in February. He'd been part of our family for twelve years before cancer got her claws into him, and we were broken-hearted to lose him. 

Since then, we've been talking about when we might feel ready to open our hearts to a dog again. The kid-still-at-home was all for adopting a new dog immediately and funneling grief into love for a new dog, Sweetman needed longer to heal, and I was somewhere in the middle. 

But we finally agreed that July was good timing, since the kid and I will be mostly at home for several more weeks yet (until school starts) and can devote time to training and acclimating our newest family members. 

So, let me introduce you to Pumpkin and Ghost!

In the car for the ride to our new home!

These boys are about three and one half years old, both rescued from the same home, where an elderly woman had become overwhelmed by the work of caring for too many dogs. Before CARA (Carolina Animal Rescue and Adoption) came into their lives, they had never seen a vet. They had also never been house trained, leash trained, or learned to respond to names. 

O'Neill had also been a rescue dog, found wandering in the woods with his brother. We sometimes wondered if it might have been better if we had also adopted his brother when we took him in, so he would have had his brother when we couldn't be with him, so we decided to look for a pair of dogs to adopt together this time, if possible. 

Neither Sweetman nor I have ever had a small dog. These guys are both Jack Russell Terrier mixes (mixed with what? I dunno . . . other dogs?). Ghost is around 17 pounds, and Pumpkin around 20, which means the two of them together is still less poundage of dog than O'Neill had been. It's a different ballgame, having small dogs and having two dogs. But I think I'm going to love playing. 

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They are quite playful and surprisingly comfortable with people overall, given their lack of previous socialization. They like women better than men so far, but I know Sweetman will win them over to full trust. They are also cuddly little guys, and it's definitely handy that I can just pick them up if I need to (without needing to visit the chiropractor afterwards). 

So, there they are: the two additions to our family. Wish us luck!

 

Flung Back Into the Universe

Wow! That was fast. I mean, after nearly eighteen months of hardly going anywhere and seeing only the people in my bubble, you'd think I'd be ready for some travel, some parties and gatherings, etc. But I feel like Wile E. Coyote just after the giant rubberband has snapped, realizing that I've got no control over my speed and trajectory: 

I know, I know. I'm in charge of me and I can say no, but it's not that easy to do. Can I really say no to all my family when they want to see the hubby and me and our kiddos in person at long last? Can I really turn down chances to get back out there at live-in-person author events building some momentum for my life's dream of living off my writing? 

I can . . . but I probably won't. 

That won't stop me from whining a little bit though. I was out of pocket 11 days in June and I'll be out another 9 in July by the end of things. Thankfully, the July stuff is a little more spread out and I'll get 13 days in a row of being close to home between things. 

The tricky bit for me is that I WANT to see all the people and take all the opportunities, but I also rely on time at home during these non-school months to make some serious progress on my writing goals during days with fewer commitments than school-year days. 

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I'm also finding that I'm seriously out of practice. I've always need a bit of introvert recovery time after a big get-together, but my recovery period is longer now, like my social muscles have atrophied. I had barely recovered from my mother's birthday party when it was time to hit the road again to welcome a new baby into my husband's family. 

Thank G-d for coffee. At least my drug of choice is legal. 

As always, I'm seeking balance, because the truth is that I want it ALL but there are only so many hours in each day and only so much Samantha to go around. 

So how are you guys managing the world opening back up? Is it a relief or a new kind of stress for you? 

I'd love to hear about how you're doing in the comments! 

Never Going to Give It Up!

 

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking.

If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

July 7 question - What would make you quit writing?

The awesome co-hosts for the July 7 posting of the IWSG are Pat Garcia, Victoria Marie Lees, and Louise – Fundy Blue! Be sure to check out what they have to say, and visit other writers in the blog hop!

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About the only thing that could make me quit writing would be loss of cognitive function. Meaning, I would quit writing if I found I actually could no longer do the mental and physical work of it. It's too important to me to ever just let go entirely. Sometimes I feel like I'm incapable of understanding the world around me except by processing it in writing. It's how I see. 

Now, quitting publishing, on the other hand…that's a different kettle of fish. Publishing is not nearly as fulfilling or fun as writing. It's time consuming, whether you're working with traditional publishers or taking on all the work yourself as an indie writer. It can drag you up and down emotional roller coasters and leave you feeling bruised and sick. 

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But I persist. Writing itself is the most important part for me, but I also want an audience for my work. I wouldn't be content to leave all my words unshared. So publishing is part of the writing life for me, even when it is less than fun or takes an ugly turn. 

I'm a stubborn sort, so I wouldn't give it up easily. I'm not going to be that person who rage quits over a bad review or publishing politics or anything like that. I read threads all the time about someone who just chucks the whole thing when things go badly and I can't imagine making that decision. I'd just seek another way. 

My professional writing life has been pretty short. I've only been at it for six years. But in those few years, I've had a range of experiences with publishing from the affirming and joyful to the disheartening and upsetting. I had a publisher fold on me, I've collected quite a little pile of rejections, I've had bad reviews. I've also been recognized with an award, received money for my creations, and made some great friends who really understand this part of me. 

So, I expect to always be a writer and to always seek publication for my work. The good outweighs the bad. I'll remain the Rick Astley of the writing world, refusing to give it up. 

June Reads: Short, but not Sweet

Here I am halfway through the year, and I've already nearly met my yearly reading challenge. I always plan to read 52 books: one per week. Generally, I read a bit more. This year I'm already at 41 books. 

I read nine books this month, though to be fair, they were mostly quite short. I found my attention scattered, what with end of school year burnout and a suddenly very crowded social calendar with family obligations and writer-life opportunities now that vaccination has re-opened some possibilities. I was out of pocket for 11 of June's 30 days which is quite a lot, especially after my homebody habits of pandemic life. 

I started with Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys, a choice by my neighborhood book club. I had previously read his Underground Railroad, and liked it overall, but was a bit put off by the intermixing of fact and fantasy. This story was much more succinct and tight and I think that's part of what kept me engaged a bit more. Now that I've had a little time to think it over, I think I prefer Nickel Boys which stuck closer to actual historical events and realistically likely events. But it was a heartbreaker. 

So after having my heart broken, I picked up Un-Girls by Lauren Beukes. At some point Audible had offered me this book and others in the Disorder series for free or at low cost (I don't remember), and since I already admired Beukes's Broken Monsters, I accepted the offer. I found both these works horrifying and creative, taking angles I'd not seen before. Her body horror is shudder inducing. 

Having peeked into the series, I became curious about the other five books in the Disorder series and quickly read the rest of them: the twisty and ever-changing The Beckoning Fair One by Dan Chaon, the fascinating but inconclusive Loam by Scott Heim, an Edgar Allen Poe retelling in Will Williams by Namwali Serpell, the all too realistic Anonymous by Uzodinma Iweala, and the deeply sad Best Girls by Min Jin Lee with its echoes of Thomas Hardy. I recommend the entire series. Each is 1-2 hours long and each takes on horror from an unusual angle. 

After that horror, I was ready for something lighter so I chose The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by RA Dick (the pseudonym of Irish author Josephine Leslie). I already knew and loved this story from the 1947 movie edition.

I was happy to find that much of what I loved about the movie was also present in the novel and was especially touched by the plight of "poor Lucy" who had to learn to stand against that most difficult of obstacles to an independent life: people who love you.  

Quite a charming and romantic story which also has a lot to say about the importance of taking charge of one's own life. 

I finished with Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, a story I knew from the 1983 movie, but had never read. It, too, was a relatively short work I had purchased some time earlier and found waiting in my Audible library when I sought short books to read. 

I have really enjoyed a lot of Bradbury's short stories over the years, though some of them can feel "quaint" these days in that they are less cynical and less concerned with startling and unpredictable plot twists. His mild paternalistic misogyny can be annoying, but like Asimov, he mostly avoids the problem by having very few female characters and never focusing on them if he does have female characters. 

In trying to describe this one, I said: 

"This book is a celebration of that cusp moment of childhood into adolescence (particularly for young boys--one of Bradbury's consistent failings is creation of meaningful female characters). It's a meditation on aging and regret. It's nostalgia brewed into a fine tea that, while faintly bitter, still pleases the senses."

I finished the month with Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, which I have not yet finished, so I'll have to tell you about it next month. So far, I'll say that it holds up quite well and that much of what you know and love about these characters from all the movie and television adaptations came directly from Dumas's pen. 

How about you? What did you read this month? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Flirting with Feminism, 1940s Style

Coincidentally, I picked two movies that premiered in 1942 for my watching this week: Now, Voyager with Bette Davis and Woman of the Year with Katherine Hepburn. Both are striking for their exploration of roles of women, and both left me frustrated by not quite being willing to go all the way. 

In Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays Charlotte Vale, a woman from a wealthy and respectable Boston family ("Oh, one of the *Boston* Vales"). When we meet her, she is thoroughly cowed by her overbearing mother and deeply unhappy, though her very frustration with her role points to a stronger spirit beneath than sometimes makes itself known. Her story is one of coming into herself. 

In contrast, Katherine Hepburn's Tess Harding in Woman of the Year is a woman very much in charge of her own life, sure of herself and cutting a wide swath in the world as an activist, columnist, and speaker on a variety of social and political issues. Her story is one of coming out of herself a bit. 

Both roles were well suited to these iconic actresses. Who better than Bette Davis to drown us in big, emotional eyes and delivery fiery lines with passion? Who better than Katherine Hepburn to hold tears in a tightly controlled face, resisting the revelations of self laying themselves before her? 

But neither story satisfied me. 

I am wary of stories that romanticize infidelity, due to my personal feelings about marital infidelity, so Now, Voyager had a hard row to hoe winning me over, since a central tenant of the story is the love between a married man and a woman who is not his wife. We're meant to sympathize with the man who made a bad match and is now "trapped" in a loveless marriage (though we never see that wife or marriage for ourselves). To his credit, he was never dishonest about the fact that he was married and had no intentions of abandoning his family and starting anew with our heroine. 

So, one could argue that our heroine knew what she was walking into. I found I had complex emotions, watching the way that they influenced each other while still maintaining separate lives: he returning to the work he loves with her encouragement, she finding confidence to stand up against her bullying mother with his support. Was he an obstacle to her finding happiness with someone else? Or was her own heart the true obstacle?

The story gives Charlotte the opportunity to marry someone else and she turns it down admitting to herself and her potential husband that she doesn't love him. 

What the story doesn't quite make clear is the line between self-sacrifice and self-determination. I could read her eventual care for her would-be-lover's daughter in either light. I've ordered the novel, hoping that I'll get a bit more of the interior life of the main character and understand better why she made the decisions she did. 

In the end, Charlotte made a life for herself that was truly independent, without a mother, husband, or even would-be-lover to tell her what to do, but she still seemed apologetic about it, and I guess I wanted her to embrace it fully. 

That ending line is a honey though, full of ambiguity and poetry.  

(And oh my, how sexy they make cigarettes. I wonder how much the tobacco industry paid for that placement). 

In Woman of the Year, I found myself wondering why two intelligent people like Tess Harding and Sam Craig could ever have believed a marriage partnership between them would work. Maybe it's intended as a lesson about how a sexual charge isn't enough to base a marriage on? (They do really sell that sexual charge, though): 

It's not as bad as Bringing Up Baby where I find myself screaming "Run!" at Cary Grant's Dr. Huxley, hoping he does not get eaten alive by Hepburn's manic pixie dream girl. 

But all the same, Spencer Tracy's Sam Craig seems to be a man who knows what he wants and all signs point clearly to danger! I don't buy that he didn't see it. 

Tess doesn't see him as an equal and shows him again and again that he is not first in her heart, or even second or third, but quite low down the list with things nice to have, but not truly necessary, like a pretty lamp or a pet poodle you pay someone else to walk for you because you don't have time. 

But he marries her anyway. And Hepburn gets her trademark self-realization moment, which she sells beautifully, but at the end I still don't really believe they're going to work as a couple. Honestly, the only thing that holds the romance together is the on-screen chemistry of Hepburn and Tracy, because it's not there in the story. 

While Tess is arguably a feminist character, having built an impressive brand as "Tess Harding," the story falls back on the old saw that ambitious women must feel the lack of love partnership in their lives. Certainly some women (me, for one) want both a husband and a career and manage to have both, but there's nothing in this movie to convince me that Tess ever felt the lack of a husband in her life or wanted to make significant changes to how she lives her life to make room for one. Other than possibly sexual spark, I never saw anything in the story to explain why she wanted him at all. 

One of the keys to traditional romance stories is that the reader/viewer should be cheering for the couple to get together, and I wasn't actually doing that in either of these films. Yet, I liked both main characters and hoped for their happiness. I guess they work for me as sort-of anti-romances. 

If you've seen these films, I'd love to hear what you think in the comments. Same if you have suggestions for other films of the 30-60s with strong female leads for me to check out!