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.