A Letter to My Son on His Fourth Birthday

Dear Sirius,

Today, on the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year, you turn four years old.

I marvel at the boy you have become. I swear, just yesterday you were a little baby asleep in my arms.

And now you are so, so big.

There are so many things I love about you. One of the things that makes me proudest is that you are an exceptionally loving big brother. If this doesn’t say brotherly love, I don’t know what does.

I love that you love books and writing stories. I love that like your mama, you sometimes just can’t put a good book down.

I love that when you were three you learned to write your name. You know your letters, your phonics, your “ones” addition, and the planets. I wonder what you will learn while you are four?

You make an awesome superhero.

And our family feels complete because you’re a part of it.

For your birthday, I wish for you to always keep a part of the sensitive, silly boy you are now. The one who believes in magic and who is kind to everyone he meets. The boy who calls his brothers his best friends. You are a king, the brightest light, my shining star.

I love you. Happy birthday.

xoxo

Mama

 

 

20 Things I’d Tell Early 20s (writer) Me

This post over at the Crunk Feminist Collective really resonated with me ( by the way, if you don’t follow their blog, remedy that immediately). I realized most of what I want to tell young-me related to my writing:

1. You are not a loser for wanting to stay in on a Saturday night and read.
2. Alternatively, all that going out, drinking, and dancing you’re doing is not per se irresponsible. It will give you great material for your writing down the road.
3. As a matter of fact, live as much as you can. Travel, take chances, risk your heart. You can’t be a great writer if you’ve never experienced anything.
4. All that poetry you write? Even the bad stuff? That agonizing word by word, line by line, will pay off big time. Don’t stop writing it.
5. Don’t be scared to call yourself a writer.
6. Don’t be scared to share your work. Sign up for an open mic night or a critique group. Be brave.
7. Take some classes that relate to your writing.
8. In fact, don’t buy into the whole “you need a real degree” mentality – go for your MFA, if you want.
9. But if you don’t take those classes and you don’t get that MFA*, remember – as long as you keep writing, you’ll always be a writer.
10. Those novels you started that just kind of fizzled out? Those are important. You’re figuring stuff out about your writing, things that make you unique. And when you got the idea to take the Atlanta murder mystery and rewrite it in a dystopian setting? You had no idea how ahead of the curve you were.
11. Harry Potter only gets better. It will mean as much to you in 2011 as it did in 1999.
12. Never stop believing in magic.
13. Your humanist perspective and anti-racist attitude are so important to your voice as a writer. Do not lose them as you get older. They are part of what makes you able to tell a story no one else can tell.
14. That boy who broke your heart? He’s not nearly as important as you think he is. For serious. But, on the bright side, all that angst will really help with certain scenes in the first novel you actually complete.**
15. Love the time when your friends are your world. Cherish your best friend as your first reader. You will have families of your own much sooner than you realize, and things will inevitably change.
16. But don’t be scared of change, whether it’s in your life or in your writing (editing!)
17. If a guy doesn’t go crazy over your writing, he’s not the guy for you (hint: you will meet This Guy and This Guy will totally heal the heart-wound and ego-bruise guy-who-broke-your-heart gave you when he had no reaction to the poem you wrote for him. I promise better things are coming).
18. For the love of god, realize how much time you have. Use it. relish it. Take naps and take impromptu trips to write in coffee shops. Stay up until 3am writing because you can sleep in the next day. One day you will have more kids than you can comprehend*** and one of the things you will miss most (besides having a slamming body with no working out or diet required) is your time.
19. This has nothing to do with writing, but do you have any idea how beautiful you are? Believe it.
20. You are a writer already – never give up and you will be amazed how far determination can take you.

*Spoiler alert: you’re actual going to go to law school. Surprise!

**There is a difference between “first novel you actually complete” and “first novel you feel ready to publish.” That’s okay. Put it in a drawer and come back to it when you’re older and wiser.

***Four. Four boys.

Bulletin Board

While shopping at my local indie bookstore I found this postcard featuring a photo of Anne Rice in her San Francisco apartment in 1983. I love so much about this – the ginormous computer, the dictionary beside it, the fact every inch is filled with books and newspaper clips and pictures. But my favorite part is the idea of her daydreaming about Lestat with those big stuffed animals behind her.

Philosophy and Books

Some people are into philosophical discussions about important things like What does it mean to be a human versus what it means to be a person? or What is the meaning of life? or other deep and worldly things (my husband, who got his BA in philosophy, is one of those people). These conversations are interesting but usually end up giving me a headache because OH MY GOD THERE ARE NO ANSWERS TO THOSE QUESTIONS.

Not that I am completely a-philosophical (unphilospohical?). I have a book-buying philosophy.

The philosophical quandary goes like this: I love to read. In fact, reading is a crucial part of my craft because reading makes you a better writer. The problem is, however, that I cannot afford to buy all the books I would like to buy because
my children insist on petty luxuries like food, clothing, and shelter I’m a responsible adult.

Books are too precious to me (and my paycheck too tight) to just randomly go into a store and buy whatever suits my fancy. And perhaps because I hope to one day see my books on such shelves I firmly attach a person to every book I buy. I follow many authors on Twitter and when I look at the newest shiny, pretty cover I don’t just see a cover. I see Maggie Stiefvater contemplating how many tank tops one should pack for tour. Sarah Dressen planning her daughter’s birthday party. Richelle Mead welcoming a new baby boy. And then there are the agents, also affected by who buys what books. Michelle Wolfson just had to get a new nanny. Janet Reid needs a drink.

So, in the interest of supporting all the authors (and agents) I can (and building some good karma for when my books are on the shelves) I subscribe to the following philosophy of book buying:

Spread the love.

I try to buy books from all the authors I like. Sometimes this isn’t possible. This is when the philosophical quandary gets deep.

Have I already supported this author by buying his/her books? Is this a debut author?

Debut authors and authors I have yet to support get priority. So, for example, in October and November a ton of amazing books are coming out. Some of these I really REALLY want to read are The Scorpio Races (Maggie Stiefvater), The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (Michelle Hodkin), Silence (Rebecca Fitzpatrick) and Shatter Me (Tahereh Mafi). I can’t buy them all. So I will buy Shatter Me and Mara Dyer because these authors are brand spanking new and need a big debut. I also have already bought the Wolves of Mercy Falls Trilogy by Stiefvater and the first two Hush, Hush books by Fitzpatrick. Spread the love.

Let’s get wild and add another dimension to this moral quandary. A final aspect of book-buying philosophy for me personally is to support diversity in YA (all genres, really). This means when Rick Riordan’s Son of Neptune drops October 4th I will be buying two copies (one for me, one for my out of state stepson) not because he needs the money (he doesn’t – no offense Rick!) but because I adore him for giving my son a book to read with a Black boy who saves the world, interracial families, a Native American daughter of Aphrodite, and a Hispanic boy who holds the key to a prophecy (Kane Chronicle and Heroes of Olympus series). There simply aren’t enough characters of color in MG and YA books and I firmly believe in supporting books that include those whom are often excluded. Same goes for LGBTQ. I will also be buying Malinda Lo’s next book, whenever and whatever it is because I enjoy her writing and her books have non-white leads and lesbian retellings of fairy tales. Winning! (Are we still saying that?)

For the books I can’t afford to buy, I get them from the library. Sometimes there is a ridiculously long waiting list and I crack and buy just one more book that month (side note – I am FIRST for Scorpio Races. How cool is that?). But usually, my system works. The books I can’t buy I try to give good reviews on the internets and a recommendation via Twitter or to my friends.

And never, ever illegally download a book. That is some super bad karma right there.

Sign from above

It’s a really long drive to my mother in law’s home in Savannah from our home in Kentucky. Factor in four kids and it is nothing short of epic.

Something strange happened this time. I had an idea. A really exiting, bright shiny idea. It put together two ideas I’ve been playing with for awhile that just haven’t worked and made them perfect. Shiny.

One of the ideas involves fairies.

So we make it to  Savannah. We promptly leave kids with grandma and high tail it outta there. We are strolling down Bull Street and I am enjoying lattes and mossy trees and my new straw fedora when I see an antique shop.

We stop inside, and I find these nineteenth century prints, clear proof from the writing gods that I have my next project:

Bulletin Board

This is an amazing cover of Sula I found at my local library. I love the art, the bird around her neck, everything. Great cover for one of my all-time favorite writers, Toni Morrison.

#YASAVES – My Response to WSJ

Over the weekend twitter exploded when this article in the Wall Street Journal, written by Meghan Cox Gurdon, hit the internet. By now you’ve probably read it. If you haven’t, I encourage you to do so before continuing reading.

For this reader, the entire article was subject to disbelief based on the opening premise – a mother walked in a bookstore and couldn’t find any books to buy her daughter because the young adult section was full of exclusively “this dark, dark stuff.” (Note – the only book I’ve read that Gurdon goes on to cite is Hunger Games. I found her portrayal to be vastly distorted, which makes me question her representation of the other books).

I used to work in a bookstore, you know. And god how I hated customers like Meghan Gurdon and Amy Freeman. The type who could stand in a section and somehow not see the majority of the books surrounding them. The ones who saw a book about vampires and assumed it equaled darkness and depravity (Hello, Twilight! Hello, Vampire Academy! You dark, dark books. Give me a break). From my days at a bookstore – and it was a corporate one like the Barnes and Noble cited – I can tell you, without a doubt, there are plenty of books about, let’s say, teenagers, friends, and love. Sarah Dressen and Mag Cabot, both who have entire shelves of their titles, immediately come to mind. Or books like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. They are there, and they are probably face-outs.

The problem is, Gurdon didn’t care to see those books. She didn’t care to accurately portray their availability, because that would undermine the goal of her article – censorship and shame.

Oh yeah, I’m going there. Consider these petticoats grabbed.

By pretending that YA is riddled with only “dark, dark books” Gurdon is tacitly arguing for their censorship. She is saying “I see these books, and their mere existence upsets and frightens me. It upsets and frightens me so much that I will lie to other parents who rely on my reviews. I will say these are the only books so people will believe they are dangerous.”

When I read Judy Blume’s poignant and heartbreaking (I cried when she described being more or less forced to remove a scene from Deenie) comments on censorship shared in the wake of this article, her description of the censorship movement in the 1980s matched quite closely with the tactics I saw displayed in this article.

Then there is the issue of shame. Gurdon made one point loud and clear – if you are teenager facing abuse, drug addiction, sexual assault, or violence, you are not normal. In fact, you are so abnormal, these books written about experiences like yours are a grotesque description of a distorted reality. Unfortunately, Gurdon isn’t alone in her equating “normal” experiences with “normal” teenagers. To my dismay I saw people in my twitter stream ask questions such as “Why WOULD we let teenagers read books about rape?” or “I think these authors need therapy.”

We let teenagers read books about rape because teenagers are raped or otherwise sexually assaulted EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. And if they are not, someone they know is, and they need to learn ways of empathizing and understanding. Books can help both groups of teenagers. We let teenagers read books about violent assaults and bullying because teenagers face those things every single day. It was almost laughable that Gurdon used the example of a book in which a gay teenager is beaten and tied to a gas pump and left to die, as an example of a book that distorts reality. Ever heard of Matthew Sheppard? And people implying or outright stating authors who write about these topics need therapy proves that depression or other mental illness still carry a stigma – and don’t you dare put it in the light, where our children can read it.

Which lead me to wonder – what does Gurdon think our children should know? Perhaps we should make sure our history books are edited so they don’t reflect truths about slavery, or the genocide of the Native Americans (oh, wait, most of them already are). We do our children a great disservice when we hide the possibility of learning about the reality of the world from their eyes.

And, perhaps if Gurdon was a little more up on reality and history, the lack of these titles forty years ago wouldn’t be such a surprise (although that assertion is certainly not accurate – Hello, Lord of the Flies!). Forty years ago, things like protection for gay kids, legal protection for children abused by their parents, protection from rape by your husband or boyfriend, were often denied. Some of these things took a long time to be addressed by the legal system (law nerd coming out) because they were considered best left behind closed doors. Some of these issues carried such stigma – mental illness, sexual orientation differing from heterosexual – that they were persistently kept quiet.

At the end of the day I’m reminded of a poem Nikki Giovanni wrote for Tupac Shakur after his murder, All Eyez on U. Tupac was a writer who reached teenagers with his difficult topics – there is a book published of letters from fans stating how his music saved or helped them – but he came under considerable attack with the rest of rap music in the 1990s. The censors were after his ass. I will end with Nikki Giovanni’s words, because they fit this situation nicely:

it is as clear as a mountain stream as defining as a lightning strike
as terrifying as sun to vampires
there were those who called it dirty
gansta rap inciting there were those who never wanted to be
angry at conditions but angry at the messenger who reported:
your kitchen has roaches your toilet is over flowing you basement has so much water the rats are in the living room your house is in disorder 
and 2Pac told you about it

* * *

there are those who wanted to make him the problem
who wanted to believe if they silenced 2Pac all would be quiet on the ghetto
front there are those who testified that the problem wasn’t the conditions
but the people talking about them

Keep talking – and writing – brave writers. We need you.

Wish I Wrote It

My current work in progress takes place (at least partially) in a bookstore. So when I came to this passage in Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver I was, naturally, overcome with writer envy:

As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.

_ Maggie Steifvater, Shiver, p.8 (paperback version)

That, my fine friends, is perfection.

Bye, Bye Bookstore

As many of you have already heard, Borders is (reportedly) filing for bankruptcy this week and closing a third of their stores (about 200 stores).

This makes me really sad.

I’ve worked at a bookstore off and on for the past two years. The setting in my WIP (work in progress) is a bookstore. I work on my novel and research for my home office regularly at – you guessed it – a bookstore. I love bookstores and their cousins, libraries.

Given how abysmal the country is in terms of education and literacy, closing bookstores seems like a step in the wrong direction. Even worse, it seems the stores are closing not because of the public refusing to buy books, but largely because of mismanagement and greed (while they pay staff minimum wage, I’m sure CEO pay has not suffered during these difficult years).

And if Borders manages to stay around but cuts their lowest performing stores, what stores are most likely to be cut? Presumably ones in low-income neighborhoods.

And if the average Borders store employs 20 – 30 people, you can add a minimum of 4,000 people to the unemployment statistics.

And for authors such as myself, there goes another place the public can purchase your book.

Write What You Know . . . Or Don’t.

Every writer has been instructed at some point to only “write what you know.” According to The Portable MFA  in Creative Writing by the New York Writers Workshop, the rule is one of the tenants of traditional MFA programs.

In some ways, the advice makes sense. Even with genres like fantasy readers expect believability. Writing about first hand experiences makes your writing more authentic, a holy grail of writing goals.

An example: my current book (the one I started during NaNoWriMo) features a main character who lives and works in a bookstore. I have over a year experience working at a bookstore. There are details I know about running a bookstore and the interesting customers (everybody reads something) that give my story a credibility – and humor – it otherwise might lack.

But writing what you know is a pretty limiting thing. My life experiences are far fewer than the experiences I want to write about. And there are some things I know that I know so well, they are such an intrinsic part of me, that I can hardly write about them.

A good example of that is being a mother. While on my blog I write about being a mother-writer (occasionally a writer-mother) all the time, it might surprise people to know that mothers rarely make it into my novels. And I never feature a protagonist who is a parent. Why is that? I’m not sure, really. I live my motherhood everyday. The exquisite moments, the horrible moments, they are all a part of me, like my bones and skin. They are so personal, so much a part of who I am, that I have an extremely hard time putting my experiences as a mother into words. I try to capture the way it feels to nurse my son, knowing he is the last baby I will ever hold to my breast and sustain, and the words fall flat. I try to describe the way my heart both explodes with joy and breaks in half when I look into my son’s big brown eyes, and it sounds hollow. The thing I know the best is the thing I am mediocre at writing.

So I say write what you know, or don’t,  just write. If you want to write about something you don’t know much about, that’s what research is for. I think research will get you through a lot of topics. I wouldn’t recommend writing about something super technical or extremely complicated if you know nothing about it (I will probably never attempt a forensic mystery, for example) but don’t be afraid to write a story that, say, takes place in a different time or place.

The idea of writing what you know brings up another interesting topic – who you write. A woman writing a boy coming of age (J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter), a white man telling the story of  biracial siblings and their adventures (Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles), or a white woman telling the tale of Black maids in the segregated south (Kathryn Stockett’s The Help) are all examples of authors writing characters who are quite different from themselves. Some do a better job than others.

Now, my favorite characters in my own writing are extremely different from me. But when it comes to different races, religions, and backgrounds, should you also ‘write what you know?’ Can a white person get past their own privilege and write a nuanced character of color, or tell a story that isn’t just really about a white hero, or feel good race fiction?

I’ll be exploring those questions in several upcoming posts this month. Let me know your initial thoughts in the comments.