I was talking to Walter (the Giant Storyteller) Mayes at the Otter Dinner a few weeks ago, and for some reason he mentioned his Facebook profile. I remarked that I was also on Facebook. Walter practically hopped up and down. "Friend me! Friend me! Friend me!"
As in real life, I am a bit shy when it comes to "friending" on Facebook (I fear rejection, but even more, silent ridicule). However, with such an exuberant directive from Walter, I immediately looked him up and friended him the next time I was online.
Once we were friends, the first thing I did, naturally, was see who Walter's friends were. It wasn't a huge list, and I recognized many names and faces from our little universe of children's literature: publishers, writers, illustrators. Then I noticed someone named Marc Acito. Hey!
At that very moment, disk three of How I Paid for College by Marc Acito was sitting in my car's CD player. Out of all the BILLIONS of books in the world, I was listening to one by a Facebook friend of Walter's-- and it wasn't even a children's book, nor does Marc Acito live in California (which begs the question of how the two even know each other...). But think about it-- the odds are staggering! That was a library audiobook, for pete's sake!
OK, maybe this is just a really tiny little coincidence. But I don't know why, but these things floor me every time they happen to me. They're so fun and silly, they make me happy for weeks.
[By the way, I never did finish the book. I abandoned it somewhere on disk four and returned it to the library yesterday. Today I got an email from a librarian asking very kindly if I still had disk four, since it wasn't in the case. Gah! Anyway, the book wasn't bad, it just wasn't my thing. I couldn't really relate, and it was all a little too mad-cap for me. I hope Walter, or any of his friends, don't hold it against me.]
Obsession, Part IV (See Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here)
"And there is the pleasure of obsession itself, immersion in the world of esoteric detail in spite of (or maybe because of) the derision of the patzers who just don't understand what it is to lose yourself so completely in something, and who cares, finally, what that is?"
Obsession, Part III (See Part I here and Part II here)
On Stephenie Meyer’s website, she has posted the first chapter of Midnight Sun, a book she is working on that tells the Twilight story from Edward’s point of view (according to the web site, she intends to publish this after Breaking Dawn; this potential book, more than any other, makes me dizzy with anticipation).
In the excerpt, one idea snagged itself into my mind: Edward complaining how bored he was pretending to be a high school student for the umpteenth time.
This got me to thinking.
If you’re immortal, looking perpetually seventeen is a problem. You can go through high school and college only so many times before you wish you could shoot yourself. And don’t even hope for a career. A job, maybe, but you wouldn’t be able to keep it for long before people started to ask questions.
I began to wonder what I would do if I were immortal. Would I keep my job? I don’t think so. I can’t imagine it being fulfilling for all eternity. But what would I do? Is there anything that would stimulate me intellectually while sustaining my spirit for as long as I could conceive of time? What would I do to keep me going, and to keep me from going insane? Here, I envied Carlisle, the vampire doctor. He has just such a purpose in life that sustains him in the most important way. It seems like too much of a cliché, but on the other hand, I can’t imagine spending eternity worrying about my petty little selfish daily-grind issues.
(But look what I’ve done—I’ve just distilled a ridiculous musing about vampires into the age-old existential dilemma: What’s the point, anyway?)
After some thought, I came to the conclusion that if I were truly faced with the idea of forever stretching out in front of me, I would have to find something to do that was not only meaningful to me personally, but would make the world better too. I was surprised at the simplicity of this thought—was this the answer all along?
And then I had my epiphany.
Rather than living our lives, as the cliché suggests, as if each day were our last, we should be living our lives as if we were immortal.
If we were faced with everlasting life, I think we would quickly learn to separate the petty, inconsequential things from the important things. We would strive daily for the most satisfying and fulfilling lives on a deeper level, in order to combat the spiritual abyss of a meaningless eternity.
Daily decisions become easier. Don’t like your job? It’s never too late to change careers—you have all eternity to figure it out. Not in a fulfilling relationship? You have plenty of time to find a better partner, or work on the one you have. Put on a little weight? Well, think about it for a second. Do you really want to be a tad pudgy for all eternity? Always wanted to take up painting, or scuba diving, or beekeeping? Why not? You’ve got forever to learn.
Big decisions also become easier. You simply would stop caring about the majority of short-terms issues, and long-term goals and accomplishments begin to carry more weight. How your actions affect the people around you and the world at large gain more consideration.
I’m not saying that I’m suddenly going to quit my job, lose ten pounds, learn how to sail, and move to Africa to combat poverty. I’m just saying that maybe we should pay a little more mind to the big things that are important to us. Don’t be afraid of change; it’s never too late to do something meaningful. A little bit of immortality in our everyday lives wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Naturally, I have spent a lot of time at Stephenie Meyer’s website. Surfing author websites is another thing I never used to do, but given my obsession with the books and the actual amount of great content on her site, it’s easy to waste hours at a time there. I especially love how she so openly and generously shares her outtakes and brainstorms—sections of her manuscript that didn’t make the editorial cut or material she intended to write just for fun.
Stephenie Meyer also writes about herself and her writing process. Again, this is not something I usually seek out, but I am continually charmed and fascinated by all her anecdotes. I already love her writing voice, and outside of Twilight, she is more casual, self-deprecating, and funny.
Writing about the genesis of Twilight, she says that a scene from what became the middle of the book came to her fully formed in a dream one night. She felt compelled to write it down, and, over the next three months, wrote the rest of the story. The part that fascinates me is this: “All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up.”
I have often heard authors talk about their characters as if they were completely out of the writer’s control. I love this idea, of a character with a life, a history, and a personality totally separate from the author’s. Many times, writers will say that they were completely surprised to find that a character of theirs was really such-and-such, or that “it turned out” a character had this or that background. I love this idea of the fictional having so much control over their creators.
Stephenie Meyer’s story of how New Moon came about is filled with this sort of thing.
[A]s I began to sketch out New Moon, I went back to Bella's senior year of high school and asked my little cast of characters, ‘What happened?’ I swiftly regretted asking them for the story. Because they gave me a story I wasn't expecting. More specifically, Edward told me something I didn't want to hear.
I should probably mention here that I am not crazy (that I know of), it's just that I am a character writer. I write my stories because of my characters; they are the motivation and the reward. The difficulty with strong, defined characters, though, is that you can't make them do something that is out of character. They have to be who they are and, as a writer, they're often out of your control.
As I started plotting New Moon (untitled at that point), it became clear that Edward was Edward, and he would have to behave as only Edward would.
See? She even admits that what the characters do is out of her control. Sometimes I think that was separates the great storytellers from the rest of us. I, at least, may be too much of a control freak to write fiction. I mean, this would never happen to me:
Something happened then that I didn't expect. Jacob was my first experience with a character taking over—a minor character developing such roundness and life that I couldn't keep him locked inside a tiny role. (Since Jacob, this has reoccurred with several other meant-to-be-minor characters. I really love it when this happens, though it often destroys my outlines.)
A character taking over! Wrestling the plot from the author and taking it in a whole new direction without the author’s consent! It sounds like the stuff of fiction, right out of Inkheart or something, but that’s how it works. I bet this is how it works with most fiction writers, too. And while I have no experience at all with this, I love thinking that in any creative endeavor, there are things that are simply out of our control—that’s what makes it art.
I am thirty-something years old; I am self employed. I am married, and I own real estate. By all normal reckoning, I should be considered a mature adult. So it is with more than a little chagrin that I admit my full-fledged, heart-pounding, passionately-consuming, brain-melting, fanatic obsession with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.
Without going in to the entire history of how I came to check out the audiobook version of Twilight from the library, or how, during the two weeks of car rides it took to listen to the book, I walked around in a foggy daze, my mind completely absent from my own life here in sunny California (my brain deep in the lush, wet forest of Forks, Washington), I will simply relate one anecdote that will illustrate Twilight’s unnatural hold upon me.
[Those of you who know me well will find the following quite shocking. Those who don’t should read this.]
When the final disc of the audiobook came to an end, I sat in the silence for a moment, speeding down Interstate 680 heading home. I put the disc back into its case (I have become quite adept at doing this with one hand, blindly), thought for a moment, then stuck disc one back into the player.
I'll say that again. I stuck disc one back into the player.
And then, when I got home, I ordered the paperback from our retail distributor, so that it would arrive the next day. When it came, I read it again. It was like an alien had abducted Renee and replaced her with… a re-reader.
Now, I have read a good number of romance novels in my day—mostly in high school, when I was supposed to be reading YA novels—but not a single one of them seized me the way Edward and Bella’s story kicked me in the gut and turned my brain to puddly mush for two weeks. Maybe I was just in the right frame of mind at the right moment. Or maybe I should just come to terms with the fact that I have the mentality of a fifteen-year-old. Maybe I’m OK with that.
After all, as Sheryl Crow sings, if it makes you happy... it can’t be that bad.
I don't think I can stay away much longer. The voices inside my head are threatening mutiny if I don't let them out soon-- I never imagined that I'd miss blogging this much, or feel the loss as a physical pressure inside my skull pushing outward.
This time, I hope that the voices and I will get along better, or at least for a longer period of time. I'd like to shoot for a sustainable level of blogging, so I just need to set some new ground rules for them. For example, "Book of the Day," doesn't have to mean a book for every day, it could just mean book of the day-it-happens-to-be. Whenever I feel like it. And if I have more than one thing to say about a book, it can be a book of more-than-one-day. Whatever. More rules, fewer rules. My rules.
Stay tuned. Something's bound to show up here soon.
“An old man is teaching his grandson about life. ‘A fight is going on inside me,’ he said to the boy. ‘It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.’
“The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf will win?’
“The old man replied simply, ‘The one you feed.’
“Even as children, we have the power to create our own lives. We choose which wolf to feed, and this creates who we become, how we see the world, what we do with the brief amount of time allotted to us. From my 13th birthday forward, I basically grew up with a deadline over my head. I thought, what if this woman was right? If I only had 40 years, how many more times would I eat chocolate cake? (Turned out to be a LOT.) How many more times would I see a sunrise over a beach? Four or five? How many more times will I listen to jazz? Ten times? A hundred? How many more times will I hug my son good night?
“I made sure to pay attention to everything I was doing. To be fully in the moment. Because that’s all life is, really, a string of moments that you knot together and carry with you. Hopefully most of those moments are wonderful, but of course they won’t all be. The trick is to recognize an important one when it happens. Even if you share the moment with someone else, it is still yours. Your string is different from anyone else’s. It is something no one can ever take away from you. It will protect you and guide you, because it IS you.
“What matters is holding tight to that string, and not letting anyone tell us our goals aren’t big enough or our interests are silly. But the voices of others aren’t the only ones we need to worry about. We tend to be our own worst critics. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘Most of the shadows in this life are cause by our standing in our own sunshine.’ I found that quote on a scrap of paper stuck to the back of that mongo grandfather clock. (I wonder if your mother finally got rid of that thing as she always threatened!) Wisdom is found in the least expected places. Always keep your eyes open. Don’t block your own sunshine. Be filled with wonder.”
Well folks, things are winding down around here. Monday is my birthday, and it also marks the one year anniversary of Renee’s Book of the Day. When I began this blog, I told myself that I would stick with it for a year and see what happened. I had no idea what to expect out of either the blog or myself.
I have to say, I have been pleasantly surprised along the way by my own thoughts (every once in a while), the online community I discovered, and the serendipitous crossing of paths precipitated by posts on my blog. I met new friends, reconnected with old ones, and even had some authors pop in to say hello. It’s been a great journey.
At the same time, however, I never felt the love of blogging that others have written about. Many have said that they miss it when they’re away, or that it is a soothing and/or invigorating part of their daily rituals. To me, it was hard work. The payoff was great, but it still felt like a daily chore.
So June 4th will be the last official day of my blogging year. I have no idea what I’m going to do next. I may migrate my blog to another domain (I promise to keep you updated). I may try a broader approach to my blogging topics. I may stop blogging entirely. Who knows?
Though I’m sad to see Renee’s Book of the Day come to an end, I’m exciting at the possibilities for What to Do Next. Instead of blogging for a few hours each day, I might take a writing class. I may do some more music writing or volunteer somewhere. Maybe I’ll read more.
One thing is for sure, I’ll be hiking more over the next few months. We’re still training for Mt. Whitney in August, so we have hiking plans almost every weekend. We used 100 Classic Hikes in Northern California by John R. Soares and Marc J. Soares as a reference last weekend and found the most amazing area on the way to Lake Tahoe, where there are campgrounds, lakes, and trails up the alpine hillside. We live smack in the middle of the area this book covers, and every hike looks amazing. I can’t wait to try more.
I finished Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time by Lisa Yee on Sunday morning while waiting for customers to show up (none did until late afternoon). It was another fun read for a long weekend of sitting around, but I read it right on the heels of Dairy Queen, so it seemed pretty fluffy in comparison. That’s OK, though. Some books are meant to be light, and some aren’t.
School Library Journal again:
From birth, when his father named him for his alma mater, great things have been expected from Stanford Wong. When his lack of interest in academics causes him to fail sixth-grade English and lands him in summer school, his star status on his school's basketball team is endangered. It is a summer of turmoil and family tension. Stanford's father is working longer and longer hours to try for a promotion, and a host of other changes are occurring. Stanford must come to grips with missing out on basketball camp, grit his teeth through tutoring sessions with Millicent the genius, see his beloved grandmother moved to an assisted-living facility, and try to hide his summer-school attendance from his buddies. His observations on his overachieving father and sister can be hilarious, and the loving close-up of his grandmother's dementia is wonderfully drawn.
The funny story about this book is that I acquired it through Bookmooch. No, that’s not the funny part. It’s that I requested the book sometime in early March, and the kind bookmoocher who was offering it put it in the mail right away. Media Mail.
If anyone is familiar with Media Mail, it is the cheapest way to send books. Before last week’s postage hike, you could send a book for about two dollars, and you could send an entire box of books for about five. However, you can never really be sure how long it will take to reach its destination, or that it will reach it at all. But sometimes, it takes only a few days to get across the country. You just never know.
Four weeks after she sent Stanford Wong, the bookmoocher emailed me to see if I had received it. Nope. Four weeks is not a good sign for Media Mail. I was pretty sure the book was lost in the mail. And then one day, my friend EJ called me to ask whether I wanted to meet up before Lisa Yee’s appearance in Walnut Creek that evening. I had totally forgotten about that, and I had no book.
I was not about to buy another copy of the book at Barnes and Noble, because, dammit, I had one coming to me. Maybe.
So I don’t know if Lisa Yee noticed, but when I introduced myself that evening, I did not ask her to sign a book for me. I felt sort of bad about that.
Three weeks later, Stanford appeared in my mailbox. Sometimes I just hate the post office.
I was talking to Walter (the Giant Storyteller) Mayes at the Otter Dinner a few weeks ago, and for some reason he mentioned his Facebook profile. I remarked that I was also on Facebook. Walter practically hopped up and down. "Friend me! Friend me! Friend me!"
feed me