The Writer Reads: 22 Books in 2015

I started off January of 2015 fresh-faced and brimming full of optimistic hope at the prospect of the shiny, beautiful new goal I had set for myself: reading 36 books in 12 months.  3 books per month.  Piece of cake!

By the end of February, I was fully aware of how ridiculous my goal was for me.  Voracity does not necessarily equate speed.  Loving to read and wanting to read and reading in all of one's free time does not make one a fast reader.  I study the text, reread passages, and am overall a fairly slow reader.  The year's activities also came into play, filling up my calendar and sucking away my free time.  Books particularly tend to fall by the wayside when one is trying to write one's own novel.  I read whenever I could, but it just wasn't enough to allow for three books a month.

I amended my goal to 30 books in a year... and then 24... and finally, 20.  Each time I lowered the number meant pain and shame, but that's what happens when reality sets in and you have to be honest with yourself.  It was either fail or be open to change (both terrible choices for me).  20 turned out to be the most realistic number.  My mom advised me that instead of tweaking my goal, I should consider selecting shorter books to read-- advice I tried to heed towards the end.

I also had some specifications for my books: I wanted to read an equal amount of nonfiction, classics, and "other" books ("other" meaning young adult or just for fun).  This portion of the goal was meant to help me diversify my taste in literature and authors.  Now this, I did accomplish: 7 nonfiction, 7 classics, and 8 young adult/just for fun.  22 in total.

If I were smart about it, I would have written a short review AFTER reading each book, but alas, my foresight was limited.  There's no way I would be able to write a worthy review for each book now, so far after the fact, so without further ado, here, simply, is my list:

22 books: Nonfiction, YA or for fun, and a classic.

1.     Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
2.     The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
3.     This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4.     Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris
5.     Stardust by Neil Gaiman
6.     Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse Martin
7.     Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
8.     Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9.     The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
10. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
11. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh
12. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
13. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
14. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
15. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
16. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
17. The Stranger by Albert Camus
18. The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived by Lee Carroll & Jan Tober
19. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
20. Binge by Tyler Oakley
21. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
22. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher

Of those, I would have to say my top three favorites were Lolita; This Side of Paradise; and The Stranger.  My least favorite were The Night Circus; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; and The Indigo Children.  (As a note, I only read that last book as diligent but agonizing research for my NaNoWriMo project, "Indigo."  See a theme?)

I'm not setting a reading goal for 2016, nor will I even hold out hope for reading more than this year.  No more forcing myself to churn through book after book or picking a book over one I really want to read simply for the sake of the genre.  I'm happy to go back to reading for the joy of reading.  After all, writers read, and readers write.  May you all have a blessed and happy new year, full of the power of words, the peace of quiet, the excitement of adventure, and the knowledge of self.

Writing About Writing: NaNoWriMo, Yarn, & Dirty Dishes

Unintentionally, my last blog post was about NaNoWriMo (the 2012 edition!).  While I was writing it, I was mulling, contemplating committing to NaNoWriMo 2015.  And here I am on the other side of it.

To set up the purpose of this post, please enjoy this snippet about NaNo 2012 from the last post in September: "I went in without a plot, without a plan, and threw myself in wholeheartedly just for the fun of it, and emerged at the other end with the beginning of a book."

I planned for this round, this month of writing diligently and religiously.  I came up with a thorough and detailed plot.  I plotted said plot on notecards and numbered and ordered them.  I wrote a five-page long outline that would serve as my road map while writing the actual novel.  I figured out how many words I needed to write per day to be safe when I took my trip to New York over Thanksgiving, ensuring I would be a couple of days ahead of schedule so that I could enjoy my vacation.  I was prepared.  I was ready, and more importantly, I was excited.

About five days in, I was near tears and downright miserable.  It was agony to write this dredge of a story that my pathetic brain had at one point considered a good idea.  The first day went well enough, but it was all downhill from there.  I was not having fun.  And I knew how fun it was supposed to be.  I knew how much fun I had last time.  Why should I keep going if I wasn't having fun?  Wasn't that the point?

But I toiled on, some days barely making my word count, some days tossing my outline aside and just throwing the characters into random situations and seeing what they did, letting these nonsensical scenes carry my word count over.  The more fun I had, the more I wrote, as it should be.

When I explain how I write (specifically fiction, and extra specifically, lengthy fiction), I typically describe one of two images to indicate how my brain is working.  The first is yarn.  The story's already there-- it's just a big, tangled, ball of yarn.  I have one end, and the goal is to unravel everything and make the yarn into one nice, neat line, free of knots.  I hold onto that end and move forward slowly and carefully, picking through the problems and untangling the ugly mess until everything makes sense and the yarn is no longer knotted.

The second image is what I like to call my "why maze."  I go into the maze, and there's only way through, but it's deeply complicated and I see so many possibilities in the paths before me.  So I just start walking and asking why.  Sometimes I walk down what I think is truly the right path, but then I hit a dead end.  I have to either back up all the way to the beginning, or back up to my last turn, and choose the other path to a different corridor.  Sometimes that last turn wasn't the problem, and I have to go back further, but not as far as the beginning.  It's tricky to figure out the right path, but it's definitely there, and I just have to "why" my way through it.

Why, why, why?  Why does Character A do that?  Why can't Character B and Character C be present in this scene?  Why is Character A being stupid right now?  I walk and why and work it out.

Just over two weeks in to NaNo 2015, I couldn't answer any of my whys, even though I thought I had worked it all out beforehand.  Crazy to think that I, the meticulous planner, the one who needs to know all the details, Madame Type A herself, can't plan when it comes to writing.  I just need to sit down and write and not worry about having a road map.

As terrifying as it was, I completely left my outline behind and essentially started the story over.  Only the most basic details stayed, like the names and locations and the one key element that had been my original idea.  The antagonist turned neutral; the older brother became a twin.  I threw in a hitchhiking Elvis and a soap making business, and suddenly, everything started making sense.  I could answer all of my own questions.  I could ask why and turn confidently down the right path in the maze.  Before, I had been making the knots even worse in the yarn, but now, I was untying them.  And it turned fun again.

And so I was able to pull through and hit my 50,000 words by November 30.  Barely.  But I did it.

You can see where I started struggling around Day 4, where I started throwing my characters into random situations between Days 8-13, where I considered quitting around Days 13-14, and where I gave up on the original plan and forged ahead, plotless and planless, around Day 16.

I actually don't have a nice, neat way to wrap this post up, except to say that I'm pleased to have finished another NaNoWriMo, and I'm looking forward to actually finishing the story and starting the editing process again.  Hopefully it won't take me 3 years like last time, but if it does, it does.  I just want to keep having fun because it's what I love to do.

And I do need to take a moment to thank the greatest and most patient husband, Mmmmichael Tran, for putting up with me for the full 30 days (and every other day, tbh).  He did a really wonderful job of picking up the slack in housework while I was slumped over my laptop bemoaning my own stupidity and frustrations.  He never once complained about the amount of time I spent writing and rewriting (perhaps this was because Fallout 4 was also released in November?).  He made me so many grilled cheeses when I chose writing over cooking and constantly encouraged me when I was on par for word count and had no fear of telling me to get back to work when I was far under count for the day.

Now, on December 1st, it is true that my grace period was over, and I found a disturbingly large pile of dirty dishes in the sink, edging beyond its confines and to the surrounding counter, which I continued to let sit for a couple more days just to see if maybe they would wash themselves.  They did not.  So I spent over two hours just washing dirty dishes and putting them away, in gratitude for the full month of extra cleaning and extra support that Michael had just given me.  Was it payback?  Enh, I owed him.  That break was over.

But I'm still enjoying my break from the thirty solid days of intense writing, and that means that I don't have to rack my brain for that nice, neat blog post ending.  I'm relishing in the pleasure of not needing to make word count.  I have the luxury of just ending this, and so it shall be.

...It's about a girl who loses her brother and how she overcomes her sadness and herself.

Oh, my friends.  My wonderful and patient friends.  I have written so many drafts of this post.

A lot of you know that I have been doing my best to write a book for the last three years (actually, just two months shy).  This all started when, surprising even myself, I committed to NaNoWriMo in November 2012 during my last semester of college and pounded out 51,000+ words in thirty days.  It was a rush.  It was incredible.  I went in without a plot, without a plan, and threw myself in wholeheartedly just for the fun of it, and emerged at the other end with the beginning of a book.

Of course, once the rush of NaNoWriMo is over, it's difficult to stay on that high and ride it out to a successful end.  I did keep working, on and off, but I struggled to work consistently.  I wrote in bursts, reworked a lot of stuff, removed a lot of my original 51k, drowned in discouragement, floated in jubilation at the joy of writing, and floundered a lot in uncertainty.  I wrote an entirely new beginning, wrote the beginning of an end, came back to the middle, filled it in, and just kept going.  In August 2014, I finally wrote the last paragraph of a fully complete draft and was able to officially say I had a beginning, middle, and end-- and everything in between-- in the correct order-- as it should be.

Then the true editing started.  I just finished a fifth full edit and will be happily handing it over to my wonderful best friend, who works in the editing biz.  While I know she's not a fiction editor, and can't move my book along the lines or accept it at the publishing house where she works, I'm thrilled to have someone look at it with a professional eye and help me keep my dream afloat.

I always feel like I owe an apology to everyone, because while everyone KNOWS that this novel is a thing, a dream and goal of mine, I don't talk about it.  I don't like to talk about it.  It's this entire world that exists in my head; I and I alone live there, and I don't know how to communicate it to everyone outside of it.  My wonderful and patient friends ask me about it, they want to know how it's going, they want to know if they can read it, they want to encourage me, and I am always at a loss for words because I am so, so alone in this.  Everyone is around me; I am surrounded by love and support, and yet I can't feel anything but alone.  I don't even know how to communicate what I'm writing about because there is this terrible fear of not being taken seriously, of being just another one of those crazies who thinks they'll get published.

But someone has to get published.  I mean, look at a bookstore.  They're filled with the proof of people who got published.  Someone has to do it, so why not me?

I have been writing my whole life, though I have only been working on this particular project for three years.  And I will not quit.  If this isn't it, I'll try again.  I'll write another one.  I'll write as much as I can.  I'll send the manuscript out as many times as I need to.  I know that what I have right now, if it were to be accepted, may not be what actually gets published-- it could turn into an entirely new story by the time it gets through professional editing.  I don't know.  But I will not give up.

So thank you to everyone who has inquired about it.  To everyone who has seen my editing selfies and liked the pictures.  To everyone who has assured me they will read it when it's out.  I'm sorry I'm not better at talking about it.  I'm always so afraid of sounding self-involved and self-indulgent.  It's such an immense thing to say you're doing.  In my head, it sounds pretentious, pompous.  Before I even say it (and I avoid saying it as much as possible), I smell the judgment of others.

I will get there, as soon as I stop being afraid of myself.

Thank you all, my wonderful and patient friends.  Please know that I am grateful for it all.

Priez pour Lafayette

It's a terrible feeling to receive a text saying that there was a shooting in Lafayette.  It's terrible to immediately check Facebook for confirmation, to see it plastered down the length of your newsfeed, to see it as the top trending news story, to see it as the first article on Yahoo, to turn on the TV and see the same scenes played out over again under a caption of BREAKING NEWS.

I think about how there are people in this sweet and friendly city who simply went to see a movie and will not be returning home, and I feel sick.

I think about how Lafayette was nothing but kind to me for the three and a half years I called it home, even when I was miserable and wanted to be anywhere but there.  I think of all the familiar places that become standard from the mere act of living there, and of all the lovely nooks and crannies I got to explore with Michael as we geocached our way through the town and came to know it as well as I know my hometown.  I think of all the times I spent in that very movie theatre.  Tuesdays were student discount nights with your UL student ID card.

Shootings happen, but they happen elsewhere.  They don't happen so close to home.  They don't happen to people you know.  To be dealt the horrific crime against the beautiful Mickey Shunick and then to have the community at the mercy of a random shooter?  My heart aches for Lafayette, and yet I have seen the people rally before.  They will rally again.

At a difficult time in my life, I once asked a close friend if he thought people were inherently good or inherently self-serving.  I was surprised when he answered good.  And I have accepted that as my own belief.  I do believe that people are inherently good.  I have seen it time and time again; I have so much evidence of it, and that makes it all the more shocking when things like this happen.  People are inherently good, but I do so wish that it didn't take instances of the opposite to reveal that goodness.

Please, be kind to one another.  Be good to the people in your life and to those that you meet in passing.  Be careful.  And please, live out your inherent goodness day to day, not just when a tragedy begs for it to be seen.  Please let love be your guiding force that defines your actions so that we may all find peace.

A Brief Reflection in the Midst of Everything

Have you ever wanted something so intensely, so deeply and desperately, that it hurt?  Of course you have.  We all know that feeling, inherent and intrinsic, that stems from a goal, a wish, a desire.  A want that's almost a need.  Something you have worked towards, cried over, sweated and bled for, gave your heart to.

And then you don't get it.

You're passed over, rejected, turned away, denied.  Suddenly, everything inside of you that was striving towards that thing is gone, and you're left all hollowed out and empty, miserable.  You're adrift in the great sea of life.

I think about this often, and I worry about it even more.  For every goal I've achieved and every success I've accomplished, I still worry that the few things in life that I truly and enormously want will not be granted to me.  I worry about timing.  I stress about my own work ethic.  I contemplate every possible factor that may or may not happen.  I obsess over questions of free will and fate and choices and destiny and how much of our own hands shape the lives that God has planned.

I tell myself constantly, "Man plans; God laughs."  It's not much of a consolation.  I'm terrified that God has other plans for me than what I have for myself.

I think of how Louis Martin wanted to become a hermit, and how Zélie Guérin wanted to become a nun, and God said no to both, provided them with a marriage, and watched in turn as they married and gave birth to one of the most influential saints of modern times, Thérèse Martin of Lisieux.  And I think, how perfect.  How wonderful it is that God's plans are greater than ours.  We can't be trusted to know what we want.

And how much it must have hurt at the time for Louis to be turned away from the hermitage, and how pained Zélie must have been to be denied her habit.  How can we see beyond our hurt?  As parents, they gave birth to a saint, but what if, as a hermit and a nun, they could have become saints in their own right?

It seems we must empty ourselves, die to ourselves, die to our own wishes if that's not what God calls for.  We must content ourselves in His plan, whether we can see it or not at the time.  If I am to lose out on my goals, hopes, and dreams to give way to something greater, then I pray that I have the absolute courage and strength to do so.  I don't have it now, and it may be that I am not called to need it, but I hope that I would be able to find it if necessary.  And if I am to never know what purpose my life served until I am good and gone, then so be it.  I must trust.

May God take the plans I have made for myself into His hands and shape them into that which He wants, and may I have the humility to see them in their own time, and to accept them with grace.

Love, Love, Love

Let's do some math.

My family has been attending St. Jerome Catholic Church on Sundays for about 20 years now.  And there are 52 weeks (Sundays) in a year.  Let's make it 50, for easy mathing.  50 Sundays x 20 years is 1,000 Sundays.  Now, we go to other churches occasionally.  And I went to church in Lafayette for three years while in college.  But for every Sunday that I was at another church, I made up for it by being at St. Jerome for a myriad of other reasons: holy days of obligation, cleaning or decorating the church, attending CCD, teaching CCD, altar server training, etc., etc., etc.  I think it's safe to say that I have walked up and down the aisle of St. Jerome at least 1,000 times in my life.

1,000 trips down that aisle.  And not a single one of them compared to that phenomenal walk down that tiled aisle as I gripped my dad's arm and went step by step to meet my to-be husband.

I can tell you exactly what made that walk special.  Of course, the immediate answer is that Michael was waiting at the end of it for me, with the biggest, toothiest smile I've ever seen on him, an image I won't be likely to forget.  But what made that walk exceptionally special was the sheer amount of love that crowded the interior of the church.  I walked through the double doors to the opening notes of the only song I said over and over that I would never walk down the aisle to, and it was like a physical blast of agape love met me.  It was like walking out of the summer heat into an air conditioned store.  I walked straight into a room full of love.

I would later describe the sensation like walking in a tunnel.  On both sides, my friends and family pressed against the wooden pews, smiling at me, clicking cameras, blowing kisses, wiggling fingers in little waves, tilting heads, winking.  Even as an altar server, I had never walked down that aisle with every single eye in the room turned to me.  It was truly like being in a tunnel.  A wonderful tunnel.  Dare I say... the tunnel of love?  (Forgive me.  I couldn't pass up that opportunity.)

But really!  How else can I describe it?  Love all around me!  From the sides, from the front, from above-- a presence that made the air thicker and the atmosphere heavier, in a good way.  And when I got to the altar and hugged my dad and slipped my hand into Michael's, and everyone sat down, everything settled, and I no longer felt that unique weight.  That's not to say that the love fled the room-- I had simply shifted my focus to the individual love coming to me from Michael.

I write about this because it is one of my strongest, most vivid memories from the wedding day and also because I never really got to address it.

On Sunday, Michael and I will celebrate our first anniversary, and I'm thrilled.  A special day, just for the two of us, to celebrate how strong our bond has grown over this past year, to celebrate all that we've learned in the first year of marriage, about each other, about ourselves.  A day where we acknowledge the commitment that we make each new morning when we choose to love each other and revel in the joy of that work.

I am so grateful for my partner.  But as we approach that anniversary and I think back to the day when it all started, I realize how grateful I am for the people who surrounded us before, then, and now.

I wanted to thank everyone for their support and love.  I really meant to.  I don't know if I did, or if I did it well enough.  The rehearsal dinner is little more than a blur to me at this point; I know we rushed out some hasty thank yous, and I know we handed out heartfelt gifts, but while the people in that room were the closest to us, I still feel overwhelmingly grateful for all of the people in our life.  I am grateful to those who gave us an example of what a loving and respectful marriage should be like. I am grateful to those who laughed and joked with us along our journey, who kept me smiling when we were apart, who told me they'd been waiting for this day for years.  I am grateful to those who went out of their way to be with us on that day.  I am grateful to those who have shown me love in every sort of manner.

When I was a senior in high school, my religion teacher told our class that love is a choice, not a feeling.  Needless to say, the room of high school girls erupted in fury, arguing the opposite, and I sat there, thinking.  What did she mean?  Love wasn't a choice!  I didn't choose to feel the way I did about Michael.  I just did.  I loved him, plain and simple.  It took me years to realize that my teacher was probably right.  Now, I accept both.  I see passive love as a feeling-- that butterflies-in-the-belly, goofy-smile, kiss-me-in-the-rain kind of feeling you kind of can't help.  But I see active love as a choice-- through the arguments, through doing chores out of turn, to taking care of the other, to listening and understanding when you're wrong or right.  It's a choice to wake up every day and love on a level about which I'm still learning.  It's a choice to grab the other's hand and make it through the day, week, month, and most recently, year.  I am so honored to have that choice.

And so what I really want to say with this blog post is that I'm deeply grateful for all those who have chosen to love me.  I'm grateful to those who choose to love within their own lives.  I'm grateful to those who choose to do good, to be kind in all situations, to extend helping hands instead of pushing others down, to teach and to try and to believe and yes, once again, to love.  I am a big fan of love.

So, to everyone to whom I did not have the opportunity to say it after the wedding, thank you.  To everyone who was not at the wedding but lives a life of love, thank you.  I believe that we can change the world with this incredible power.  I love you all.