On learning patience

I am by nature an impatient person.  So far I've never found this quality to be of any benefit to me, and it certainly isn't a good characteristic for a writer or a reader to have.  Right now I'm suffering from impatience because I just (as in ten minutes ago) finished Ally Condie's dystopian YA novel Matched, the first in a three book series.  That's right.  Part one of three.  And the second doesn't come out until November 2011.  Soooo, that means I have a long wait ahead of me.  And I am not good at waiting.  I want instant gratification.  I'm so happy I read the Twilight series after all the books were out. Otherwise, I might have been up for days wondering "Who will Bella choose?  Edward?  Jacob?  Mike?  Or that Tyler kid?  Will she become a vampire?  And will she and Edward ever just do it already?!"  ;-)  And I'm very thankful that I waited until last July to read The Hunger Games, so I only had a month to wait before the final book came out.  If I'd had to wait much longer the stress might have killed me.

I think, as a reader, it is sometimes difficult to remember how long it really takes to put a book together--not just the writing, and that alone can take years.  I'm a slow writer, so even on a good day I can usually only write about five pages.  Five pages that took five hours to write, and maybe another hour of research, and another hour or two of revision.  A full work day to compose five pages that the average reader will consume in ten minutes.  Today I read 200+ pages of Matched, a 366-page book.  Since Ally Condie also admits to being a slow writer and that the second Matched book, Crossed, has already taken fourteen months, I'm going to estimate that today I read what it took Condie ten months or so to write--and that's in addition to all of the editorial revisions she must have made and all of the hurdles of publication.

Sometimes when impatience sets in I must remind myself of how long and arduous the journey is from a single idea to a published book, that while one can receive almost instant gratification from reading a great novel or seeing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or listening to Brahms' First Symphony, years can go into their making.  Years, for just a few hours of individual joy.  But anything truly great takes time, commitment, the belief that the end result will be worth all the wait.  And so, as I begin the long wait until November for Crossed to be released into the world, I will also try to remember to be patient with my own writing, that writing isn't glossy book covers and acid-free pages and reviews in the Times--it's long hours staring at a computer monitor, rearranging words and sentences and pages and deleting them and adding them back and questioning whether any of it works and whether anyone should want to read it.  That it's work--hard work.  But that in the end, the result is so worth the wait.

Who could resist this fantastic cover!

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Publication News

I have to thank my friend Tawnysha Greene for her wonderfully honest and inspiring post yesterday over on her blog.  A lot of writers are open about their rejections, but Tawnysha took this kind of honesty to a new level by revealing exactly how many times each of her published works had been rejected.  The numbers were truly astounding.  While some pieces were accepted after just a few rejections or even accepted by the first place she submitted them, a couple of pieces were rejected well over a hundred times before finding a home!  I know how good a writer Tawnysha is, so there were two different ways I could have responded to such statistics--I could have been depressed that the publishing world is so competitive (and subjective) that talented writers like Tawnysha are overlooked, or I could have been inspired by her tenacity and determination.  I chose the latter.

After I read Tawnysha's post, I decided to dust off some old pieces that had been rejected and resubmit them.  I realized that by only submitting a story four or five times, I wasn't really giving it a fair shake.  I started with a story I discussed in another post last summer, a piece that I really love but that had been rejected four times.  Last semester I made a lot of excuses for not resubmitting the story--usually blaming comps, my (very weak) excuse for everything last semester--but yesterday I decided to stop making excuses and just do the damn thing.  So I submitted the story to seven places.  I've never sent a story to so many places at once before, but Tawnysha's post made me realize I needed to cast my net wider and deeper.  And this time I caught something.

This morning I received an email from The Citron Review--less than 24 hours after I submitted my story to them--asking to publish "Black & White" in their Spring 2011 issue in March.  Of course I then had to withdraw the story from six other places, but it was well worth it to see this story finally published.

So I have to give a special thanks to Tawnysha for writing such an honest and inspiring post.  It's thanks to her that today I have one more publishing cred to my name.

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2010: A Year in Review

It may seem strange to be reviewing 2010 four days into 2011, but 2010 was such a great year for me that I feel I must acknowledge it in some way.  For one thing, 2010 was the first year that I actually kept a resolution--to be ABD by the end of the year.  I've been absent from the blogosphere for several months, busy teaching and studying for comps, but I can now happily report that I passed my written and oral comps with flying colors and, as my dissertation director says, my life is now my own.  I am in the happy land of research and dissertation writing.

When I wasn't teaching or studying or taking classes last year, though, I did lots of other fun things:

• I presented at two eighteenth-century conferences (ASECS in Albuquerque and EC-ASECS in Pittsburgh).  
• I spent the summer teaching and writing in a tiny mountain town in Pennsylvania. 
• I spent a glorious four-day weekend in New York.  

Me with good ol' Hans Christian Anderson in Central Park.

• I read tons of amazing books.  (I typed 42 titles into my long-neglected GoodReads account this morning--and those were just the ones I could remember off the top of my head.)  Favorites include Jandy Nelson's The Sky Is Everywhere and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series (for YA), the Emily the Strange novels (for MG/YA), Kate Morton's The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden (contemporary/historical novels), Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth (short story collection), and Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (eighteenth-century epistolary novel).

One of the  most beautiful and moving books I read this year.

• I listened to a lot of great music.  My favorite albums of the year were Vampire Weekend's Contra, Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, The xx's XX, Mumford & Sons' Sigh No More, and Broken Bells' self-titled debut.  And I got to see She & Him, Silversun Pickups, and Muse in concert.  Seeing Muse was on my bucket list, and it was the most amazing concert I've ever seen.

Ohhh, Matt Bellamy, you can do no wrong in my eyes. ;-)

• I visited some of the greatest art museums in the world and saw some truly inspiring exhibits.  Favorites were "Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," Marina Abramovic's "The Artist is Present" at MoMA, "Caricature, Satire, and Comedy of Errors: Works on Paper from the 18th through 20th Centuries" at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and "Salvador Dali: The Late Works" at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Dali's Hallucinogenic Toreador--not part of the exhibit, but my favorite Dali painting nonetheless.

• I got to celebrate being ABD with a trip to Mexico, and I got to tour Chichen Itza (another bucket list item), climb to the top of Ek Balam, snorkel some amazing reefs, and try snuba for the first time.  I learned a lot about myself on that trip, and I'm sure it will be food for many stories (and maybe even a poem!) to come.

Itty-bitty me and El Castillo at Chichen Itza.

Some of the amazingly well-preserved carvings and statues at Ek Balam.

The gorgeous water at Xel-Ha.

Snorkeling in the reef near Puerto Morelos.

Some of my favorite fish friends at Xel-Ha.

My first (and perhaps last! lol) attempt at SNUBA

I didn't get to travel as much as usual this past year, but I did some calculations, and I spent more than one month living in hotel rooms in 2010.  Add that to the two months I lived in PA and the weeks that I spent visiting friends and family, and I probably only spent eight months in Auburn last year.  2011 promises to be even more eventful, with several trips in the works (Seattle/Vancouver in March, at least a month living in London this summer, and maybe trips to Amsterdam, Paris, and Italy), and I hope to write a little more, read a little more, and just enjoy life even more. :-)

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Weeks 4 & 5: Why Bhabha Isn't on My List

Just a few weeks into the semester, and I've already failed at my promise to blog once a week.  The past couple of weeks have been exhausting as I've struggled to get everything done, and I can already tell this will be another semester of very little sleep.  I've already settled into a (rather terrible) habit of sleeping just a few hours every night, then "treating" myself to a two hour nap on Friday afternoons, from which I inevitably wake up even more exhausted and disoriented.  I spend the weekend trying to study and catch up on sleep, and then restart the cycle of sleep deprivation on Sunday nights.  I have exactly six weeks left to finish reading all the books on my comp lists, so the cycle will no doubt continue until mid-November, when I will most assuredly crash and sleep off the rest of the semester like a bad hangover, rising only to tend to necessities (i.e. eating, teaching, grading).

The past two weeks I've been diligently reading for my travel writing and postcolonial exams.  I'm not sure why (okay, I know exactly why), but I've been putting far more energy into reading for my postcolonial exam than either of the other two, and it's by far the one I've read the most for.  I have just two novels and six theory books left to read on it.  Right now I'm reading Patrick Colm Hogan's Colonialism and Cultural Identity, which brings me to this week's list:

1)  Hogan's use of theory: or why Homi Bhabha isn't on my comp list.  When I was compiling my postcolonial list, I had a lot of difficult decisions to make, and I ended up making the list almost entirely on my own, with some help from standard PhD lists I found on the web.  I wanted to make the list fairly canonical and representative (Spivak, Said, Rushdie, etc.), but I also didn't want to read Bhabha.  I'm sorry, but apart from isolated moments of genius, his work is generally incomprehensible.  I assumed this was mostly a weakness on my part, even though in speaking with colleagues and other candidates I realized that I was far from alone in this estimation.  But this decision was justified today when I was reading Hogan's book, which is well-written, well-argued, and by far the most comprehensible theory book I've read from my list to date.  I've already killed one highlighter marking up his text because it is just full of genius. Seriously. If Toril Moi is my academic crush in feminist theory, Hogan is my new academic crush in postcolonial theory. (Or postcolonization theory, he would say. Seriously. Genius.)

So as I was drinking the Kool-Aid that is Colonialism and Cultural Identity (grape-flavored, natch), imagine my delight at coming to this line:  "On the whole, I find the writings of Bhabha and Spivak terminologically opaque, conceptually imprecise, and empirically lax" (25).  And this statement introduces an entire section in which he rips "Of Mimicry and Men" apart word by word and eventually concludes that what Bhabha has written is not theory.  All I want to say about this is, thank you, Patrick Colm Hogan.  Someone had to say it, and I'm glad that person was someone as articulate, accessible, and intelligent as you.

2)  Nadal wins the U.S. Open.  I realize that's quite a jump from postcolonization theory, but this is the real reason there wasn't a Week 4 post. I have a bit of an obsession with professional tennis and with Rafa in particular, so of course I devoted far more hours during Week 3 & 4 to watching the U.S. Open than I should have.

Seriously, is there another man alive who could pull off that shirt color?  I think not.

I watched every one of Rafa's matches during the two weeks. I'm not kidding.  And with Rafa being my top story during Week 4, I couldn't write my post until after the final.  The final between him and Novak Djokovic was supposed to be last Sunday afternoon, so I was fully expecting to post that night, but then it was delayed a day because of rain (and then several more hours because of more rain), so it was late Monday before I was finally able to celebrate Rafa's career Grand Slam, his first U.S. Open victory, and his third Major victory in a row.  I didn't fall on my knees or roll around on the ground, but I might have teared up a bit when he did.

There's just something about seeing young, hard-working people succeed at what they love that I find so inspirational.

3)  Emma Stone and Easy A.  This weekend I took breaks to see two movies--Easy A and Devil.  Devil was okay.  It was by far the M. Night Shyamalan movie that felt least like an M. Night Shyamalan movie to me, and considering how long it's been since I liked an M. Night Shyamalan movie, that's a very good thing. (This summer the Devil trailer played before a showing of Inception I went to, and the entire audience groaned and booed when M. Night's name appeared at the end of the trailer. I think that says it all.) Easy A was very likable, mostly because Emma Stone is an extremely likable person and plays a smart and sassy heroine. One of the greatest things about this movie is that Emma is intelligent and witty and (unlike Kady in Mean Girls) never compromises her intelligence.

This movie has been compared by some critics to other classic teen girl movies like Clueless and Mean Girls (both of which I've seen countless times and could easily see countless more), but it never quite achieved that level to me, so afterwards my brother and I tried to figure out what this movie was lacking.  We decided it was memorable secondary characters.  Amanda Bynes' Jesus-freak antagonist was just annoying (and was done so much better by Mandy Moore in Saved!), and Aly Michalka's best friend character was certainly no Dionne (but perhaps, unfortunately, more realistic).  As a love interest, Penn Badgley was sweet but lacking.  Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci were great as Stone's parents, however--adorable and irreverent.

Another reason this movie will probably never reach classic status, however, is exactly the reason it should--with the exception of the Jesus-freaks, it does not depend on the same sorts of stereotypes and cliques that so many other teen movies and TV shows (I'm looking at you Glee) do.  This high school felt much more...normal.  Like a real high school, like the one I went to, where people were not always so easily classified but they all still struggled to fit in anyway.  For that alone is the movie worth watching.

4)  "My Mirror Speaks"--Death Cab for Cutie.  Every week there's a song or album that helps me get through the week, that I end up playing over and over until I inevitably wear it out.  This week that song is "My Mirror Speaks," which you can listen to here.  Ben Gibbard has one of those rare talents for writing lyrics that are as much poetry as they are song.

So that's it--those are the four positive things I wanted to share with you that have been going on in my life the past couple of weeks.  I'll try to come back next week with more things to share, but since I'll have four sets of exams and two sets of essays to grade, I wouldn't count on it.

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Week 3: Let the Games Begin...

...Not the Hunger Games--that was last week.  I'm still obsessing at least once a day over the series' ending and my newest literary crush, Peeta Mellark, but the games I'm referring to in the title are currently far more terrifying to me.  Comps.

I've been putting off studying for them for far too long, and now I'm running out of time. This week I finalized my exam dates and submitted my final lists and justification, so now it's all too real. In a little more than two months I'm going to sit down and write those three exams, and I've never felt less prepared for anything.

This is my fault, of course. I spent my long, glorious, unencumbered summer writing fiction and reading YA and contemporary novels--not reading all that dreary travel writing and literary theory. And now I'm going to pay for it. Although there are a few journal deadlines and contests coming up that I may submit to, for the most part I've got to give up creative writing for the semester and focus on these exams. Just the thought of reading all these books makes me want to stick forks in my eyes, so I've come up with a few things that made reading last week just a little more...bearable.

1)  My newest musical crush, Ezra Koenig, and the fabulous music of Vampire Weekend. Their latest album, Contra, has been on constant rotation on my laptop and iPod this past week, mostly because I love Koenig's voice and their music is so upbeat I can't be unhappy (nor do I feel inclined to stick forks in my eyes) when I'm listening to it. Music is a big part of my creative process, whether I'm writing, decorating, or editing photos, and songs like the one below can make even my worst day seem just a little bit brighter.

2)  New Media.  Arcade Fire.  And Arcade Fire’s use of new media to create an interactive version of the music video.  This is the future, people!  Seriously, when Victoria shared this link on Facebook, I was MIND.  BLOWN. If Vampire Weekend makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, Arcade Fire makes me feel nostalgic and introspective. And this new video for their song "We Used to Wait" is seriously the most creative and inspirational thing I've seen in a long time.  I love mixing artistic mediums, and it really makes we wish I knew more about graphic art and computers.  If you haven't experienced this video yet, you must click on the above link immediately. Note: You have to have Google Chrome to watch it. (Which you should have anyway because Chrome is totes awesome.)  

My postcard to my younger self.

3)  My awesome support system.  I got to spend the weekend with those I love the most, including T and my family and my lovely cousins Britt and Jess, which is always refreshing.  I got absolutely no work done during the past three days, but it was good just to get away for awhile and recharge my batteries.  Oh, and eat yummy seafood in Destin and a fabulous steak at Meritage Cafe in Columbus, which everyone in the Columbus/Auburn/Opelika area should visit immediately.  

4)  Blogging writers.  Even if I'm not allowing myself to work on The Novel right now, that doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it all. the. time.  And a lot of what I'm thinking about is revision, even though I'm not finished with the first draft.  This is partly due to my terrible love/hate relationship (mostly hate) with outlines.  Sarah Frances Hardy and Katie Anderson have been running a series of posts on outlines this past week on their blog, and they have been tremendously helpful. If there's anyone out there writing a novel and struggling with outlines, I strongly suggest you check them out.

5)  Creative students.  This past week my literature students had to submit something I call the Encheiridion project (stolen from a similar project I did in undergrad)--a handbook on how to live a "good life" in the style of the Tao Te Ching, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and Epictetus's The Encheiridion.  The handbook was supposed to be grounded in philosophy and written for a 21st-century audience using 21st-century means.  I was amazed by how intelligent, creative, and original the results were. Along with scrolls, fortune cookies (freshly baked!), Facebook posts, handmade books, PowerPoints, a scrapbook, and a craigslist forum, several of my students made blogs or websites, and I wanted to share with you a few of my favorites:  Living Life.  Simply, Roadmap to a Successful Life, and For the Love of a Break.

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Week 2: In better writing news...

Week 2 of the semester proved to be far better than week 1--even though I got almost no comp reading done.  I finished Millennium Hall on Tuesday and have yet to pick up another comp book--mainly because I was far too busy reading something more interesting and inspirational.  Which brings me to my list for the week:

1)  Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series.  Is it strange to be thankful for another writer's books?  I don't think so.  Not if they're brilliant and remind you of why you wanted to be a writer in the first place.  We all need that kind of kick every once in awhile, the kind of read that makes you go, "This.  This is what I want to be doing.  Creating this."  Not that I want to write a book exactly like The Hunger Games, but I want people to feel something when they finish reading.  I want them to take that feeling with them, to reflect on it, to feel changed forever.  I finished Mockingjay, the third book, on Friday, and I'm still feeling its effects.  After I finished, I cried.  I actually cried twice, once while reading and once when finishing, and I honestly cannot say if I've ever cried when reading before.  I think I might have cried when Fred Weasley died, which would make sense, because reading this book was very much like reading Harry Potter 7 to me.  I finished both books in just one day (just as I finished both of the earlier Hunger Games books), but I had to take breathing breaks throughout because I was so stressed out.  The ending, to me, was perfect, and it left me breathless, and empty, and exhausted, and, as Chantel put it, heartsick.  My heart is still aching, even two days later.  After being immersed in that world for two solid days (I read Catching Fire on Thursday), it has been difficult pulling myself back out of it.  That's the kind of impact a great story can have.

2)  Overcoming writer's block.  Thanks to Mockingjay, I've been able to work through a few of the issues that have been nagging me in The Novel.  I actually opened the file yesterday for the first time since school began and read it straight through.  And you know what, I didn't hate it this time.  And I even figured out what to do.  So I made a few revisions, changed a few lines, and I'm back in the game.  And it feels SO GOOD to be working on it again.

3)  Publication!  Last week I blogged that I'd received four rejections.  This week I had no rejections and one acceptance, so that's a pretty successful week in my book.  On Thursday I received notice that my story "Skin Deep" will be published in the October issue of Blue Crow Magazine, an Australian journal that publishes fiction from around the world.

4)  Finishing my justification.  In one draft.  My dissertation director attributes this to my creative writing, and she's probably right.   The comprehensive exams justification is something my department makes PhD candidates write to "justify" their reading lists--why they've chosen these lists, these texts, these time periods, etc.  Basically you just make stuff up about how these texts will help with the dissertation, teaching, job placement, future course planning, etc.  I wrote mine Monday night and she approved it Tuesday, changing just one word.  I can definitely live with that.

5)  Living in a college town.  This is probably the first time I've ever admitted to liking living in a college town. I'm forever complaining that the town is too small, that there isn't enough to do.  BUT what we lack in recreation and entertainment, we more than make up for in our choice of international restaurants.  Seriously, it's amazing that a town this size has so much to choose from.  This weekend I've been to an Irish pub, a Greek restaurant, a Cuban restaurant, and had Chinese take-out.  I may never eat American food again.  (Oh, wait, I take that back, because on Friday Kellye and I had lunch at Nathan's Hot Dogs.  That's right--we have a Nathan's in the student center now.  Nathan's less than 500 feet from my office=awesomeness.)

6)  And finally, rain.  It's been raining off and on all weekend, and it's raining outside my study window even as I write this.  I love the rain--the way it smells, the way the air feels after a storm.  And how it makes me feel like curling up with a good book--or with my computer and doing a little writing of my own.

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Week 1 Review

It's been one of those weeks.  I started back to school this week, and as if that wasn't a big enough transition, I contracted shingles just days before classes began and got four rejection letters this week--one form, one personal, and two asking to see more work.  So all week I've felt lousy and tired, and my meds make me feel nauseous, and the rejections aren't doing a lot for my writing confidence right now, which is already pretty low considering the struggles I was having the week before with The Novel.

It's really easy to concentrate on the negative when you're tired and stressed and wondering how every semester seems to get harder than the previous one.  So instead of focusing solely on the negative, I decided this week to start trying to find one positive thing, or one thing I was thankful for, each and every day.  And it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

So here are a few things I'm thankful for this week:

1)  I'm teaching four good classes this semester.  We've only had two real discussion days, but so far they've been very responsive and willing to discuss, and there are some extremely bright students in there.  So even though I'm teaching four World Lit I classes, I think my students, if nothing else, will make this a fun and satisfying semester.

2)  The French reading proficiency class I'm taking this semester (a requirement for my PhD) is going to be so ridiculously easy--no real outside work the whole semester.  So one less thing to have to stress over as I study for comps.

3)  Gmail lets you know when you forget to add an attachment.  I might be the only person in the world who didn't know this, but after dealing with TigerMail for so long and having students send me email after email without the necessary attachments (which of course I've done before myself), this Gmail feature just made me giddy.  If you write in your email something along the lines of "please see attached" but don't actually attach anything, before you send the email Gmail will ask you if you wanted to attach something.

4)  Duotrope's Digest is a writer's best friend.  As is submishmash.  Sure I got four rejections this week.  But thanks to these websites/programs, just minutes or hours after receiving a rejection I was able to resubmit those stories.  No worrying about SASEs and postal fees.  I didn't have to visit thirty journal websites to find the one I thought would be the best fit.  (Okay, maybe I did that, but only because playing with Duotrope is so addictive.)  And I can check on almost all my submissions simultaneously.

So those are the things I'm thankful for this week.  Next week I'll be back with a new list and hopefully better writing news.

One of my all-time favorite images.

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A Room of My Own

It’s that time of year again—back-to-school week, when fun writing gets pushed aside to make room for course planning, syllabi writing, article revisions, and—alas!—that book review I’ve been putting off all summer.  The week before school is also when I do some Serious Cleaning.  Mopping, scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting—no surface goes untouched because cleaning is something I rarely have time for once the semester begins.

Yesterday I tackled my office, which of course is my favorite room in the house (maybe in the world!—I always find myself longing for it when I’m away).  Virginia Woolf was right—a woman (or man, for that matter) does need a room of her own in order to write, although all women define this space differently.  For some it might be a particular table at a particular coffee shop, or sitting in a certain chair, or being in a certain position (e.g. cross-legged on the ground, lying on the couch, sitting at the kitchen table).  What’s important is that when you find that special place, that space becomes sacred.  It isn’t that you can’t write anywhere else—for me, it’s that writing in that space feels more natural, and I associate that space with writing.  This association makes it easier to slide into the writing process and means that I’m less likely to get distracted.  (Emphasis on less.)

So here is a tour of my freshly cleaned office, my sacred writing space.  It isn’t much, but it’s mine, and I love it.

The room where I do almost all my writing, reading, studying, and researching (a.k.a. the place I spend 80% of my time).

My office bookshelves--which are mostly for work, not fun--now reorganized to hold comp books.  Notice Alice in Wonderland collection at top (including the awesome leaning chest of drawers I got in Costa Rica), and Andy, Pam, and Dwight bobbleheads.  Okay, so maybe there is some fun involved.  Oh, and that big gap on the top shelf--it's just waiting for me to make a library run for more comp books. :-/

Close-up of awesome drawers and Alice stuff, with Hopper's Nighthawks in the background.

A few fun books, photo albums, my writing journals, and boxes I keep writing research in.

A comfy place for reading, early morning writing...and the occasional nap.

The craft/supply closet.

And finally...

my favorite spot...

Where the magic happens (sometimes).  And occasionally Facebooking; blogging; and watching the neighbors, rain, lightning storm, or snow (twice!).    The bulletin board above is full of encouraging notes from my dissertation director, postcards of places I'm writing about, and...John Krasinski's autograph. :-)

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