Tag: Writing

Reading, Writing, and Swimming in July

In my last blog post, I mentioned that I wanted to try something new, more of a general life update than just a roundup of all the books I read that month. The monthly reading roundup posts were starting to feel tedious to me, and I was struggling to have energy to post other things. My hope is these posts will be more fun for me, and you, going forward and that they will give me more energy to write other things for this blog. So let’s give it a shot!

July was a pretty good month. Yes it was a million degrees in D.C. all the time, but I was able to wait to take walks with Neutron at least until the sun went down. It wasn’t much cooler then, but at least we weren’t being baked alive. I did a lot of outdoor barre classes, which was fun, and at the end of the month, the studio opened up for indoor classes, mask optional if you’re vaccinated (and they check, which makes me very happy). I also finished rewatching all of the Tangled series in Italian, and I’ve so far really been enjoying the adaptation for The Mysterious Benedict Society.

In mid-July, my friends and I went up to New Jersey for a long weekend. It was meant to be a writing retreat, and some of us got writing done, but mostly it was hours of playing a travesty of volleyball, with a beach ball, in the pool. We christened our game “sport,” because we writerly types are so creative. It was a great weekend all around. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in a really long time, and I went back to D.C. feeling much less stressed about the state of the world.

In other good news, one of my friends at this retreat had a cold (she tested negative for Covid, otherwise she wouldn’t have come), and I did not get sick. This was the first time I can definitively say I was exposed to germs since I found out I had lime disease at the start of the pandemic. Staying at home for a year and a half and wearing a mask whenever I go out has meant I haven’t been sick in all that time, which has been wonderful and such a welcome change from the constant illness I was dealing with all through my last year of law school, studying for the bar, and my first few months in D.C., but I had no idea if my lime had become chronic or if the antibiotics had worked. So this weekend I was away with my friends, I knew for sure I had been exposed to a cold, and I did not get sick. I am absolutely delighted, because I’m pretty sure this means the antibiotics worked and I don’t have chronic lime. I feel really lucky and so relieved.

I read fourteen books in July, bringing my total for the year up to 84 books. I finished the Princess Diaries series and for the most part really enjoyed the ending (though I wish we got to actually see the royal wedding). I also finished the Greystone Secrets trilogy by Margaret Peterson Haddix. I read the first two books last year and loved them, and I reread them this month before reading the third book. The third book, The Messengers, was a lot of fun, but honestly things got weird and it didn’t feel like it pulled the mysteries together for me. This month, I also discovered the Extraordinaries series by T. J. Klune and Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. The Extraordinaries was a lot of fun, I absolutely adore the voice and the characters, and I can’t wait to find out what happens in the third book. But a major caveat for me is I’m really not sure how the subplot with Nick’s father, who is a cop, and the issue of police brutality, is handled in these books. It felt forced and shallow to me, and this made me uncomfortable. I’m hoping it comes to something in the third book. Illuminae was cool because it started out as a typical YA romance type thing, except in space, and then about a third of the way through you realize that is not what this book is at all, and it was great. But then at about the two thirds mark, the book did something that made me think there were only two possible endings, and I didn’t like either of them, so I stopped caring. The ending is something totally different and it’s really cool and I can’t wait for the sequel, but that last bit where I didn’t care really put a damper on how I feel about the book.

My favorite book of July was Amari and the Night Brothers by B. B. Alston. This book was absolutely amazing! It’s a middle grade book about a young black girl, Amari, who joins the bureau of supernatural affairs to try to find her missing older brother. She confronts bullies, entrance trials, and evil magicians and she is awesome! She also has an illegal talent making her life a whole lot harder. This book is heartwarming and beautiful and so so powerful, and I cannot wait for the sequel! In the meantime, you should all go read it right now!

Unfortunately, I had a least favorite book of July as well, Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I read this because it was on the Hugo ballot, and I did not like it at all. I normally try to find something good in every book I read, even if it turns out that it wasn’t the right story for me, but I just couldn’t here. Not only were there so many problems with the writing and the story, but I found the ablest tropes it employed to be incredibly harmful and just all around gross. I have so much more to say on this book, and it has inspired me to work on another post on how to write blind characters without perpetuating harmful stereotypes, which I will hopefully have ready for you all next week, so stay tuned.

In happier news, I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s 2020 writing lectures at BYU on YouTube and binged them all in a week. A lot of the lessons were things I already knew because I’ve been writing a long time myself, but I definitely picked up some useful nuggets and new ways of looking at things that I think will improve my writing. I have since been listening to all of the archives of the Writing Excuses podcast too and really enjoying it. I’m very late to the party on this podcast, obviously, but in case you’re like me and haven’t listened to Writing Excuses before, I recommend it. Each episode is only fifteen minutes long, so it’s very digestible and I’ve learned a lot.

I’ve also been super productive with my writing this month. I finished a draft of my fantasy mystery project, the memory wiping Academy novel I’ve mentioned on here before. My writing group has been reading the final chapter this week and they’re giving me feedback tomorrow. The book needs a lot of work still, but I think this draft is definitely the closest I’ve been to the story I’m trying to tell.

I’ve also been hard at work on some final revisions to the middle grade space adventure novel. I’ve been trying to add more emotion and voice for each of my point of view characters. At first it was kind of a counterintuitive revision for me, because I tend to take “show don’t tell” to an extreme when it comes to character reactions and feelings, but this isn’t the best approach for middle grade, and once I got into it and adjusted my mindset, it’s actually been a really fun revision.

Finally, four years ago when I was at Seeing Eye, I had a free course on writing flash fiction, and I got about halfway through it before training with Neutron became too consuming for me to consider. I had the beginnings of seven connected flash fiction pieces set in my Phoenix Song universe, and I had middles for most of them, but I never finished, and whenever I’ve sat down to work on the project over the years something hasn’t felt right about it. This month, I had the idea to put the flash pieces together into one short story, and it worked beautifully, though my ending may still need some work. It made me really happy to finish this story and have another Phoenix story completed. Hopefully I’ll be able to share it with you soon.

When I write it all out like that, July was quite a month! I hope you’ve all been keeping safe and having fun. What have you all been up to this summer?

The Heart of Betrayal and Cliffhangers

Cover of The Heart of Betrayal by Mary E. PearsonAt the end of 2019, I read the Remnant Chronicles by Mary E. Pearson and absolutely loved them. In November and December of 2020, I reread the series, and I’m finally doing what I started to do in 2019 and never finished: raving to you all about them. A couple months ago, I wrote about the first book, The Kiss of Deception, and about how Mary E. Pearson pulls off a twist midway through the book that manages to be surprising without coming out of left field. You can read that post here. Now I’m back with another book review and writing topic post, and this time I’m talking about the second book in the series, The Heart of Betrayal, and what makes a good cliffhanger. Obviously, since I’m talking about the second book in a series, spoilers for The Kiss of Deception are unavoidable. If you think you might want to read the series, this probably isn’t the post for you. Also, since the writing topic I want to talk about is cliffhangers, there will also probably be some spoilers for the second book. I will make sure to flag them in the text, but as usual I will do a general spoiler-free review first before diving more deeply into my discussion of cliffhangers.

The Heart of Betrayal picks up right where The Kiss of Deception left off. Rafe has caught up with Kaden and Lia, and he’s lied to Kaden to accompany Lia into Venda. Rafe’s men are going to try and sneak into the city to help Rafe and Lia get out. But while Lia has nothing but revulsion and fear for the rulers of Venda, she cannot help but befriend the common people, and soon they are looking to her as more than just a prisoner princess. They believe, as Lia believes, that she is the one promised in the long ago prophecy Venda, founder of her namesake country, made before her husband pushed her off a wall. Lia is also growing closer to Kaden, much as she doesn’t want to. I feel like I’m doing an utterly terrible job of describing this book, but it’s really good. It’s full of political intrigue and secrets and the characters all have so much heart and resolve.

The Heart of Betrayal is certainly slower than the first book in the series. It’s more of a slow build with a lot of tension than the first book, which was pretty action-packed. We spend a lot of time getting to know Venda, and the characters all spend a lot of time getting to know each other, especially now that they all know each other’s true identities. But even though it is slower, Mary E. Pearson crafts such strong tension you can practically taste it, and it’s actually really important that we get to know Venda and the other characters so well, because that makes it real to the readers as well as Lia, and we can then fully understand her conflict as the book continues. And then of course we learn there are traitors in the court of Morrigan, Lia’s kingdom, and Venda is building an army to conquer Morrigan. And then the plans are laid, they go to escape, and all heck breaks loose.

The Heart of Betrayal works really well as both a sequel to the first book in The Remnant Chronicles and as a lead-in to the third book, which I will talk about soon. It is complex and intricate, but it is also easy to follow and full of wonderful feelings. And the ending is just fabulous

Which brings us to cliffhangers.

I think cliffhangers are something that are incredibly fun for a writer, because we live to torture our readers, but they can also be incredibly frustrating for a reader, especially if they have to wait a long time for the next book. There are a few ways to do a cliffhanger.

You could leave absolutely nothing resolved. Cassandra Clare does this at the end of the second Dark Artifices book. The book ends right as something absolutely terrible and tragic happens. Another good example of this is the ending of the third season of Castle, which ends right after someone is shot.

Another way to construct a cliffhanger is to leave the main character at a point where they have failed in their journey. This is similar to the first way, but often the author will also give the reader something else, a new element that gives the character the impetus to act, which they will do at the start of the next book. The Kiss of Deception actually does something similar to this. Lia has failed to escape, she has watched her brother die, she is surrounded by hostile soldiers and it is likely she will be killed anyway once they arrive in Venda. But then Rafe arrives, and even though he can’t overpower 500 soldiers to rescue Lia, they are now facing this together and there’s hope for an escape in the second book. The ending of Cinder by Marissa Meyer also does this quite well. Spoiler alert: Cinder is in prison, having failed to convince Kai not to marry Queen Levana and also having exposed herself as a Lunar. Queen Levana is going to take her back to the moon to execute her, but it’s this or war with Earth. Then Dr. Errland shows up with a new prosthetic hand and foot for Cinder and the news that she is the long-lost lunar princess and rightful heir to the throne, and we’re left with Cinder’s decision to break out of prison, which she does at the start of the next book. End spoilers.

The third kind of cliffhanger, and the kind I want to talk about today, is the kind of ending where almost everything is resolved except for one, maybe two things, and then there’s one final punch. The second Hunger Games book, Catching Fire, is a good example of this. Spoiler alert: Katniss has blown out the forcefield. She and several others have escaped the arena. But Peeta has been captured. And District 12 has been destroyed. End spoilers.

This might be my favorite kind of cliffhanger,. I tend to find the first kind, where we’re left in medias res, to be kind of jarring. And I’m generally frustrated by the second, though I did like the ending of Cinder. I just feel like the first and second options generally feel like the writer just hasn’t taken us all the way through the story. The third type, on the other hand, feels like we’ve reached the end of the story but the door is open for more and then we’re literally punched through that door. We the readers have taken a breath, we may even be relieved, and then something changes and it’s clear it’s not over.

I’m going to break this down in The Heart of Betrayal. Spoiler alert: The plan to escape goes awry. There’s a huge battle on the terrace. The Comizar has murdered the child Lia befriended, Aster. Lia has stabbed the Comizar. A huge battle ensues, and in the midst of it, Lia is proclaimed to the people to be the new comizar of Venda. Lia, Rafe, and Rafe’s men make a run for it. They jump onto their raft to get down the river (the only way to get across to freedom). They’re going to make it. They’re going to make it. And then bad guys show up and start shooting at them, and both Lia and Rafe fall off the raft into the river. Lia is shot, she can’t get her heavy dress off, and then she goes under. And then we switch to Rafe’s pov when he finds her on the riverbank. They are safely out of Venda, but as Rafe carries Lia on foot, we are left with him being unsure if she is going to survive. Spoilers over.

The ending of The Heart of Betrayal is wonderfully brutal. Just when we think they’re going to make it, things go wrong and we’re left unsure and dying for more. It’s everything that I personally love in a good cliffhanger.

If you’ve read The Heart of Betrayal, I’d love to know your thoughts on the whole book, particularly the ending. I would also love to know what kind of cliffhangers are your favorite and why. And of course if there’s a kind of cliffhanger I didn’t think of or if you would categorize them differently, I’d love to discuss. In the meantime, you should really give The Remnant Chronicles a read.

 

Another Short Story Publication

I am so excited to announce my short story “Noa and the Dragon” is going to be published in the anthology The Artificial Divide.

The Artificial Divide is an #OwnVoices anthology of stories by blind and visually impaired authors and about blind and visually impaired characters.

This isn’t the first story I’ve had published that’s about a blind person—my story “Polaris in the Dark” is also about a blind character—but “Noa and the Dragon” was the first story I ever wrote with a blind protagonist, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

I’ll share more details about the anthology as I learn them. In the meantime, if you’re a blind or visually impaired author, the call for submissions will be open until January 31.

The Kiss of Deception and Surprise

I spent a lot of time last year posting individual reviews of books. A little while after I started work at the FCC, I stopped doing full reviews of every book I read, because it just got to be too much. My plan was to write reviews of books that made me think about writing in some way. And then life got busy, and then Covid started, and I’m pretty sure the only one of these I actually wrote was about Midnight Sun, and that was only marginally about the writing topic. I actually wrote this post about a year ago, but never posted it.

So let’s try all this again. My goal is to keep doing these posts going forward. Think of them as a combination of book review and writing discussion. I will try to keep these posts spoiler-free, but depending on the writing topic I’m focusing on, that might not be possible. I will flag any spoilers before I say them, though, so if you think you might want to read this book and don’t want to be spoiled, you can skip over them. I did manage to stay spoiler-free on this post, so no worries here.

So without further ado, let’s talk about a runaway princess.

Last year, I read The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, and since I just reread it, I decided the time was ripe to talk about it. This is the first book in The Remnant Chronicles trilogy. I’m planning to discuss all three books over the next few weeks, because I have so much to say.

I talked about The Kiss of Deception a little bit in my October reading roundup last year, so apologies if this post is a little redundant with that, but I want to go into a lot more detail here.

Lia is the only princess of the kingdom of Morraghan. This means she’s the first daughter and should be blessed with the Gift, a supernatural awareness of events taking place in the present and near future. But Lia doesn’t have this magic, so she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham on another kingdom when they arrange her marriage to the prince based on the fact that she has the gift. Unwilling to be a pawn in the sham, and definitely unwilling to marry a stranger she is pretty sure is at least twice her age, Lia runs away. She and her attendant and friend, Pauline, settle in a distant village and get jobs at an inn. Then two strange young men come to stay at the inn, and Lia finds herself falling for both of them, unaware that one is the prince she left at the altar and the other is an assassin sent from the barbarian kingdom of Venda to kill her. And both the prince and the assassin are falling for her too.

Before you roll your eyes—and if I could have rolled my eyes I would have when I first started reading—this book is so much more than a runaway princess and a silly love triangle. I’m so glad I stuck with it, because by the end of the book I was hooked into this world and these characters. Yes, the first half of this book is a bit rough, mostly because Lia is pretty insufferable, and there’s not much plot beyond the kind of cringy love triangle, but face it, Lia is a runaway princess, and when everything goes sideways about halfway through the book, she gets so much better. I also really loved the world building in this book. The magic system feels fully fleshed out, even if we only see a little of it in this book. What we see of the political situation is also really well-done and intricate. Since I’ve now I read the book twice and finished the series once, I can say that it feels like Mary Pearson knew where she was going from the beginning.

Another thing that I really liked is that Mary Pearson pulled off multiple points of view—Lia’s, the prince’s, and the assassin’s—without frustrating me. So many times, when we have the villain’s point of view in a book, I get frustrated because knowing what the bad guy is up to takes out some of the tension. My prime example of this is Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series, especially the second book (I love it but it bugs me). Especially in cases where the main character is trying to figure out what the bad guy is up to, if we have the bad guy’s point of view and know what they’re up to, it takes the urgency out of the protagonist’s journey, or worse, makes the protagonist look stupid.

But it actually works to have the assassin’s point of view in this book. Part of the reason it works is that poor naive Lia is in no way suspicious of these two guys, so there’s still a lot of tension because we the readers know that she’s walking straight into a lot of trouble. But Pearson also keeps the mystery going for the reader too. We know the two guys are named Kaden and Rafe. We get chapters that are from their points of view, with chapter headings that tell us their names. But we don’t really get much of their motivations in these chapters. And Pearson is careful to phrase their thoughts so that they’re specific enough to not be frustrating but vague enough still that they could apply to either the assassin, or the prince. We also get chapters from the point of view of The Prince and The Assassin, where we get their motivations but no indication of who is who. So for the first half of the book, we know that Lia is walking straight into trouble probably, but we honestly don’t know whether she prefers the prince or the assassin, and we don’t know who is the prince and who is the assassin.

It was a ton of fun trying to fit all the pieces together and figure out who was who. And then about halfway through the book, the assassin reveals himself and kidnaps Lia, and the prince goes after her, and everything turns upside down.

I don’t want to say more because I’m doing my best to keep this spoiler-free, but the description of this book as a runaway princess gets involved in a love triangle with the prince she was supposed to marry and the assassin who is sent to kill her just doesn’t do this book justice. That’s the first half of the book, yes, but the second half, when Lia is a prisoner trying to escape, discovering her own power and magic and learning more about her world and how she came to be in this situation, is just so great, and in my opinion what this book is really about.

But my favorite part of the book is that it took me by surprise. The first time I read this book, I was positive I knew who was the prince and who was the assassin. And I was wrong.

In case you haven’t noticed, I read a lot. This was my ninety-first book of 2020. I also read a lot of YA fantasy. I’m really familiar with the tropes, and lately I’ve found myself able to predict a lot of what’s going to happen in books. Maybe not specifically, but very few things actually surprise me in books these days. But Mary Pearson totally surprised me, and I love it.

I’m not saying that the reveal of who was the assassin and who was the prince was unfounded. It wasn’t. When I looked back the first time I read this book, and as I was reading it for the second time, it makes total sense. So I really admire Pearson’s ability to both set up the true reveal so that it feels consistent with what’s happened so far and to steer her readers so effectively in the wrong direction. She weaves the details into the story so well it’s really incredible.

I want to note that I listened to the audiobook both times I read this, and it has different narrators for each of the point of view characters. The second time through this, I felt kind of stupid because the narrators for the prince and the assassin are the same for the corresponding named character, and that’s normally something I would pick up on. But I was so focused on picking apart the details that I got mixed up on the narrators and was actually convinced they swapped. I’m curious if there’s different fonts or something for each point of view in the print book, but I would also note that there are no different fonts in Braille, so if I had been reading in Braille I still would have been led down the wrong path.

When I was in college, I worked for the Kenyon Review as a first reader for submissions. One of the things the editors told us to look for when evaluating submissions was “surprise and delight.” I haven’t thought about that phrase in a long time, partly because I found that what surprised and delighted me typically wasn’t what surprised and delighted the KR editors—obviously surprise and delight is a pretty subjective metric. But as a reader, surprise and delight is still a really important factor in how I feel about books. If I find the book is predictable, then I just don’t like it as much. If I’m surprised by a book, and if that surprise is done well, that adds a lot to my enjoyment of the book. I was surprised and delighted by The Kiss of Deception, both because it managed to trick me and because it subverted a lot of typical tropes when it did so.

So while surprise and delight is definitely subjectile reader to reader, it also seems like something that us writers should shoot for. I’ve been thinking about ways to do this effectively since I first read The Kiss of Deception. It’s done so well in this book, and it’s also something that I was working on in my MG fantasy project around the same time I first read it.

So how can you surprise a reader?

This will depend on the kind of surprise you’re writing. If the surprise is crucial to the plot or part of the climax of the book, how you set that up will be more important than a surprise in a subplot, or even a surprise early on or midway through the book that changes the character’s direction. Obviously, when I say less important, that isn’t to say it isn’t important at all, and if you’re writing a surprise or a twist, you should definitely work to set it up well.

When it comes to a good surprise or twist, that the setup is key. You want to lay enough groundwork so that when the twist comes, the reader can feel like the twist makes sense and is earned in the story. At the same time, you want to slip those clues in among other details or events, because you want the reader to be, well, surprised. But the other things you use to distract from the important clues should also be important to the story, because red herrings that go nowhere feel like pointless distractors, and that’s no fun for anyone.

In the context of The Kiss of Deception, I think the way Mary Pearson set it up, with the chapters from Kaden and Rafe and The Prince and The Assassin, and separating the characters from their motivations the way she does, works really well for this book. We get the separate motivations of the prince and the assassin, but when we know we hearing from Kaden or Rafe, we are only given details of their motivations and opinions of Lia that could apply to both the assassin or the prince. At the same time, Kaden and Rafe are distinctive, well-fleshed out characters, so the intentional vagueness isn’t as frustrating as it might otherwise be.

Another point of interest in this setup is that it is very obvious it is a setup. By using chapter headings both with the characters’ names and with their titles, so to speak, Mary Pearson is all but inviting us to try to figure out who is who before it’s revealed. It would be a very different book if we had no idea that Kaden and Rafe were either prince or assassin. If we saw them from Lia’s point of view, as a trader and a farmhand come to stay at the inn where she’s working, the reveal that one is an assassin and one is a prince would come out of nowhere and feel unearned.

I would also like to point out that while this surprise is really important for this first book in the trilogy and is the surprise that got me thinking about surprises in the first place, it isn’t the only surprise in the book, and it isn’t actually that important to the series at large. Lia’s discoveries about her gift and what part she might have to play in the future of Venda are much more important to the series as a whole, yet the groundwork is laid just as thoroughly, from snippets of Lia’s facility with languages and the book she stole from the scholar, to the quotes at the end of some chapters, and so on. The clues are all there, but they are disguised as pieces of information to help build Lia’s character or to describe the world, and these little bits of information are overshadowed by the mystery of Rafe and Kaden for the reader, until hey, remember all this stuff we’ve been talking about all along, because it’s really important, have another twist. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t give more details than that.

There are a lot of ways you could pull off a compelling, convincing, and delightful surprise. The Kiss of Deception demonstrates at least two approaches. Like so many other things in writing, how you do it depends on the story you’re telling. The most concrete advice I can give here is to read a lot. Look at how authors you admire pull off twists. And just as important, look at books that don’t pull off twists effectively.

This probably should go without saying, but if you have a twist in your book, don’t just throw your story out into the world without getting some objective feedback from your trustee beta readers. Chances are, you’re way too close to your work to be able to tell if you’ve set up your twist effectively, and you have no way of knowing if it’s obvious to the readers or not. In my own work, I swung wildly back and forth between readers seeing the twist the first time certain character is introduced to readers not seeing it coming, not understanding it, and feeling it came out of nowhere before I found a balance that seems to work.

This is a topic I’m really interested in, and I’m pretty sure I’ve only scratched the surface here. If you have thoughts on how to successfully write twists and surprises into your work, I’d love to talk about them in the comments. I’d also love to know if you’ve read The Kiss of Deception and its sequels, because so far I haven’t found anyone else who’s read these books, and I am dying to talk to someone about them. Honestly, they may be the latest series that I go around yelling at people to read. I’ll be back soon with my whole reading roundup for October and then to talk about the next two books, along with talking about cliffhangers and strong female characters. But in the meantime, seriously, these books are great. You should read them. Go read them now!

A Valentine’s Fear Published by Every Day Fiction

Happy early Valentine’s Day everybody! I’m so excited to tell you that my little dystopian Valentine’s Day flash fiction story, “A Valentine’s Fear,” was published in Every Day Fiction today. It’s about the commercialization of feelings and brownies and feelings, and it’s only 250 words so it won’t even take up much of your time to read. You can check it out here. And once you’ve read it, if you’re curious about where the story came from, you can read the story behind “A Valentine’s Fear.” Hope you enjoy, and hope you have a good Valentine’s Day, whether you’re out to dinner with a special someone or happily snuggled up on the couch editing your novel which is definitely what I’ll be doing.

How to Revise a Novel While Studying for the Bar

I’ve been planning to write this post since August, but I’ve been stalling. First, because I didn’t actually finish revising my novel while studying for the bar, and I wanted to focus on that. Second, I didn’t want to end up in a situation where I talked about how to successfully revise a novel while studying for the bar and then find out that I failed the bar and have to come back here and say, “Just kidding. This obviously didn’t work. Don’t do this.” That would have been awkward.

But yes, I did pass. I found out yesterday morning, and it is the best feeling. Also, a few weeks ago, I put the finishing touches on my revisions and sent them off.

So since I can now say that I successfully revised a novel and studied for the bar this summer, let’s talk about how I did that.

To be clear, it was never my intention to be revising my book while studying for the bar. I got notes from my agent at the end of March—on the eve of a job interview, actually. I reviewed them, made decisions about revisions, and planned to complete those revisions before I graduated and had to start studying for the bar. I was moving right along through April, but two things happened. First, I underestimated the extent of the revisions in some places and did not account for the extra time I would need to work through some particularly snarly bits. Also finals. Finals happened. And despite professing all semester that I was done caring about law school, when finals hit it turned out I did care quite a lot. Then after finals I went apartment-hunting in D.C., and while I snuck in some revisions on the metro, it took me the whole week to do what I would have done in a couple uninterrupted hours at my desk. And before I knew it, graduation and bar prep was upon me, and I wasn’t done. Not even close.

Bar prep was incredibly intense and awful. I had to study eight subjects for the multiple choice section: civil procedure, constitutional law, contracts and sales, criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, real property, and torts. I also had to study these subjects for the essay portion of the exam, along with agency, conflict of laws, corporations, family law, secured transactions, trusts, and wills and estates. I’m not even going to talk about the multistate performance tests. Keep in mind that I’d barely taken a third of these courses in law school, and most of the courses I did take were in my first year. Plus, law on the bar is different from law in law school. In law school, you learn how to figure out what the law is.  When you’re studying for the bar, you actually learn the law. (If you’re wondering what I was doing for the last three years, join the club.) The point is, I was studying ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I was stressed beyond belief. I certainly didn’t think there was time to revise what still felt like a whole book.

But I also knew if I didn’t do some writing, I was going to crack up. I need writing the way most people need to breathe. (I feel like someone else said that better than me at some point.) Even if everything is going great, I need to write regularly or I get stressed and cranky. But I definitely need to write when things aren’t going great. Writing got me through losing my eye in 2013. Writing got me through my first year out of college, when I was living alone in Italy. Writing got me through 1L. Writing could get me through this.

I knew this about myself, but my bar prep course was also constantly reminding me to take time for myself. In particular, they said engaging in art helps you process the bar prep materials better because you’re switching the sides of your brain. Bar prep is a marathon, not a sprint.

So I decided to apply that to revising my book too. It was a marathon, not a sprint. It also had to be a secondary marathon to studying for the bar, too. I could take my time on these revisions, but if I failed the bar I would have to do all this studying all over again. (I don’t doubt I will have nightmares about having to retake the bar for years to come.)

The first thing I did was adjust my  expectations of myself. I was absolutely not going to revise a whole chapter every day. I wasn’t even going to try that.

So I took all the revisions I had to do, and I wrote them out in a step by step list. There were characters to cut, details and whole scenes to add, things to change and remember to adjust and keep straight later on in the book. Basically, I broke the book down by chapters, and then within each chapter, I had each task laid out in bite-sized pieces. Cutting a character from a chapter might be one bite, for example, maybe two (there was a reason we were cutting them). Changing a detail to keep things consistent with an earlier chapter would be one bite. Writing a new scene would probably be several bites, so on my list I wrote “add new scene in which X happens, then Y happens,  then Z happens.” X, Y, and Z would each be a bite. My goal would be to finish one bite every day. If I could manage more, that would be great, but it was neither necessary nor encouraged.

This process also really allowed me to free myself from doing my revisions in chronological order. I’m normally tied pretty closely to drafting in order, because I don’t really believe in skipping around to the parts you want to write and then filling in the gaps. What if I never filled in the gaps? I am a little more flexible when it comes to revisions, but this time, I was really flexible. Because I’d written out all my revisions in so much detail, I had a strong sense of the big picture of my book, so I was able to jump all over the place. What mattered to me right now was getting the revisions done and also maintaining my motivation to keep writing, because that was overall better for my mental health while I was studying for the bar. I also knew that once I was done all the revisions I had written down, I would read through it again from start to finish for a final polish before sending it off to my agent. So if one day I wanted to work on a specific scene in the climax instead of changing details to get rid of inconsistencies in my world’s climate, I did that. If the next day I wanted to go through the whole book and get rid of all references to mangoes—again the climate thing—I did that and knocked out a lot of bites while I was at it. If the next scene on my list wasn’t doing it for me that day, but I was really inspired by another scene later on, I skipped ahead. If I worked on what I was excited about working on that day, I ended up feeling more accomplished and less stressed, and I ultimately ended up doing more. This did leave me with one heck of a chapter to write after the bar, because I kept skipping it, but otherwise this system really worked for me, and after the bar I felt like I could conquer the world so this chapter didn’t take too long to finish up.

Generally, I wrote at the end of the day, after I’d completed all my bar prep tasks. Once, I tried to switch back and forth between studying and writing—complete one bar prep task, do one bite of revision, back to bar prep, back to revisions. It was great for the book, but I had a hard time focusing on the bar prep and fell behind, so I stopped that. Sometimes I would do a bite at lunchtime, when I was taking a study break anyway, and in the evening. But generally I did the bar prep stuff first, then wrote. I felt better about taking time to write if I’d finished studying for the day, and if I felt better about writing, I was more motivated, and I accomplished more. Are you noticing a pattern here?

I also wrote up my list of revision in hardcopy Braille with my Perkins Brailler. This allowed me to throw out whole pages of revision notes as soon as I finished with them, and this was so much more satisfying than deleting each bite from the list on my computer.

No, I didn’t finish all the revisions while I was studying for the bar. I think that would have been impossible. But I accomplished a ton. In between everything I had to do to move, set up my new apartment, and start my new job, I made sure to set aside large chunks of time—such a blessing—to writing. I finished up all the revisions that I’d planned by the end of August, then took my time going through and really cleaning it up and polishing everything that I could. While my bite-sized and all-over-the-place revision strategy kept me working through the bar, I won’t deny that my book had some sloppy edges. I somehow managed to write at least one scene more than once. I also overwrite, and so the new stuff I added had to be pared down significantly. A few weeks ago, I sat my butt in my chair when I got home from work, revised all weekend in a mad dash, and finished everything. it was great!

I’m not saying this is the best way to revise a novel while studying for the bar exam. I’m not even saying you need to or should revise a novel while studying for the bar exam. But if you find yourself in that position, whether because you have revisions to complete or because you have a project that could use some revising and you could use a break from studying, this is what worked for me: organize the revisions into manageable pieces, take them at your own speed and in your own order, and do whatever you need to do to keep yourself feeling both motivated and accomplished. And the whole way through, stay in touch with yourself and what you need as a writer, as a student and as a human.

I’m sure that working like this would also be helpful in other high-stress situations or at times when you have a lot going on but also want to get writing done. Next time I’m working on revisions, I’m definitely going to break everything down into individual bite-sized tasks again, though I might stick closer to the start to finish order of the book, because that pre-polish draft was a bit much.

Revising my novel obviously didn’t hurt my performance on the bar exam. It might have even helped, if that brain side switching thing applies to writing as well as visual art. I’m really happy with my revisions too, and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next in this exciting new book journey. It’s probably more revisions, but this time, there will be no bar.

March Reading Roundup

I know, I know, it’s not March anymore. I was all over posting this last week, but my computer seriously died, and that slowed me down a bit. But I’m back now with my March reads.

 

I didn’t read as much last month as I did in January and February. This is partly because I realized I was listening to audiobooks at almost double speed in January and February, and in March I decided to turn that back to normal speed. I also spent a week at home and my family and college friends who visited didn’t let me live constantly in my cave of books.

 

Still, I read fifteen books in March. Four of them were Braille books; the rest were audiobooks. One of them was nonfiction. I continued the series I’ve been reading and started a few new series. I also read a few stand-alone books. I’m now more than halfway to my goal of reading a hundred books this year.

 

Like my previous reading roundup posts, I’m grouping these books by series, for sake of clarity, and I’m trying to keep these thoughts as spoiler-free as possible.

 

First, I continued James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series with the fifth book, Max. At this point, I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm for the books. We seem to have lost a lot of character development and plot in favor of political messages about global warming. I understand that authors can and do send political messages in their books, but you can’t do it at the expense of, well, basically all the reasons I want to read a book in the first place. I feel like James Patterson tried to get things back on track with this book and fix some of the problems with the last book, because Max’s mom is kidnapped and the kids go off on a submarine to rescue her. But it didn’t work for me. So much of it just strained my willing suspension of disbelief—like the giant sea monsters and the characters gaining crazy new skills whenever it’s convenient for the plot—and it just made the book less fun to read. I’m a completionist, so I’ll keep going, but after book three this series has gone way downhill.

 

Next I read Inkheart, the first book in Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy. I read this book a long, long time ago, like middle school long ago, but all I remember is that I really liked it. I still really liked it now. It’s kind of a bookworm’s paradise. Meggie’s father can read characters out of books—and people into books. Ten years ago he read the villains out of the book Inkheart and read Meggie’s mother into the book—all accidentally of course. Now the villains are back, and they want Meggie’s father and the book that could be the only way to get her mother back. Reading the book now, I will say that I really wished that Meggie had more agency, because for a lot of it she’s just sort of along for the ride, but I still really enjoyed it and I can’t wait to get my hands on the next book.

 

Next, I read The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. This was a fabulously fun book. It’s the book that the movie Home is based on, but I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t compare them. I will say that I had so much fun reading the book. Gratuity—tip—has to write about what the alien invasion meant to her for school, and she has quite a story to tell. When the aliens invaded Earth, they abducted Tip’s mother and sent all the humans in North America to Florida. Tip decides to drive herself and her cat rather than taking the alien transportation. Along the way, she meets an alien who has gotten himself into trouble with his own people, and thus begins a great cross-country road trip in a flying car. This book was just a blast. The plot was strong. The characters were strong. The world-building was strong. The only thing that isn’t my favorite is the framing device of the school essay contest, but the rest of this book was so great that I don’t really care.

 

After that, I read the next towo books in Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters. Honestly I didn’t like Swiftly Tilting Planet too much, because it really just felt like watching a series of events throughout history, all with characters named the same thing, and our protagonists weren’t obviously doing anything to save the world and yet somehow the world was saved. I liked Many Waters better, partly because it’s one of the more coherent stories in the series and partly because it’s about the twins, who have so far been the normal side characters of the series. Yes, the religious aspect of the book is a little over-the-top for my tastes, but the twins take the time to learn the rules of the world where they have found themselves, and they use the rules to come up with a way to get home. Definitely an enjoyable installment in the series. And I’m looking forward to picking up the final book in the series.

 

Next, I continued the Sisters Grimm series by Michael Buckley. This month, I read books seven and eight in the series, The Everaf War and The Inside Story. These books were so intense, but they still maintained the fun adventure tone of the previous books in the series. Still, I was devistated by the big reveal in The Everaf War and the characters’ decisions in The Inside Story. I just got the final book in the series from the library, and I am so excited to read it, but also sad that this series is coming to an end because I have enjoyed it so much.

 

This month’s book club book was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. I listened to the audiobook, and I regret it, because the audiobook was really, really confusing, and based on what I gathered from the book club discussion, I may have actually enjoyed the book if I read it in Braille. It’s written like a play, sort of. It’s complicated. The audiobook had about a hundred and fifty narrators, and it only said the names of who was speaking the first time. The premise is that a bunch of ghosts, for lack of a better word, are trapped in the graveyard where they were buried, like a kind of purgatory. Then Willy Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son, comes along—because he dies. Children can’t stay in the graveyard, and if they do, terrible things happen to them, but Abraham Lincoln comes to the crypt and spends the night holding his son’s body, and Willy Lincoln hangs around, and the other ghosts have to try to get him to move on. Because I was so confused, I really didn’t like the book, but I could recognize how you might like it, if you read it instead of listening to the audiobook.

 

Next, I read War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars by Richard N. Haass. This was another book for my Negotiation and Diplomacy class. I was only assigned half of it, but I read the rest because it was so interesting. Richard Haass worked at the State Department during both Iraq wars. This isn’t a political book, but a comparison of the behind-the-scenes decisions in both wars. My AP American history class—the last history class I took—ended before the first Iraq war, so I admit that I didn’t know much about it. And even though I lived through the start of the second Iraq war, I didn’t really understand what was going on because I was eleven, and everything I did hear was filtered through people who disagreed with the war, so it was interesting to read about both wars and both presidential administrations. If you’re interested in the diplomacy—or lack thereof—during these times, this was an interesting read.

 

Next, I read Tempests and Slaughter by Tamora Pierce. This is the first book in Tamora Pierce’s new series, the Numair Chronicles, about the childhood of one of the main characters in her Immortals series. I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a long time, and I was not disappointed. It was really interesting to read about Numair’s early years, before he was even called Numair. I never thought I would like Ozorne, who we know will grow to be the evil emperror in the Immortals books. But I did like him in this book, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens to make him change so much. I do wish this book had a bit more of its own plot. As it is, it’s a bit meandering and feels like a lot of setup for what’s to come. But it’s definitely a promising start to a series, and I’m looking forward to the next book.

 

After Tempests and Slaughter, I got back to the Divergent series and reread Allegiant by Veronica Roth. This is every bit as much of a mess as I remember it being. Actually, this time through, it seemed like even more of a mess. The world-building, the plot, the characters, the ending, everything fell flat for me. I could rant on and on and on about this, but I’ll spare you. I will say that I appreciate what Veronica Roth is trying to do with this series—or at least what I think she was trying to do. It’s a really cool idea that with each book, we learn more and more about the world, like piecing a puzzle together. Unfortunately, I don’t think it worked as well as it could have. But I still really like the first and second books in this series, and Allegiant is just going to be one of those things—like the ending of How I Met Your Mother or all of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—that I’ll just pretend never happened.

 

Next, I read the third book in the Giver series, Messenger by Lois Lowry. I really liked Messenger. It pulled everything together from the first two books—The Giver and Gathering Blue. I liked the mystery and the build-up of suspense, and that ending was just heartbreaking and perfect. (Note that I do think it is possible to pull off this kind of ending and still have the book be meaningful, because Lois Lowry did it here, unlike another book I read this month, which I won’t name because of spoilers. If you’ve read both you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

 

Next, I reread The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Susanne Collins. I picked these up again because I was looking for something that had inspired me to write in the past, and rereading these books did in fact give me a little spark of inspiration, so at least I’m thinking about writing again. Now I have to actually write. But rereading these books was a lot of fun because I was able to remind myself just how much I love the first book in the series. The world is rich, the characters are well-developed, and the plot is fast and gut-punchy. And I just adore the ending of the first book—it lands so well. Catching Fire is pretty good too. It definitely has some pacing issues, but I think it deals well with Katniss’s actions at the end of The Hunger Games and also is does a great job creating a plot that is both similar and different from the first book.

 

Finally, I started rereading A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. I finished The Bad Beginning at 11:45 PM on March 31, just to give you a sense of how down-to-wire I was getting. I started rereading this series because a friend recommended that the second book might give me some ideas on ways to edit a chapter I seem to always be stuck on. Basically, in this chapter, the main character, who is an orphan and who has been passed from one abusive foster family to the other, is finally in a place where she thinks she might be able to be happy. The problem is, going from running for her life to sudden happiness is a huge drop in tension. So this friend recommended I reread The Reptile Room—book 2 of the series—because it might give me ideas on how to keep up tension while important happiness is taking place. And of course, because I’m me, I said well okay I’ll just reread the whole series. The new season is coming out on Netflix too so this seems like a great idea. I really enjoyed my reread of The Bad Beginning. It does a good job establishing all the characters and their talents. The tension ramps up appropriately. And it was fun. Looking forward to continuing with this series in April.

 

And that’s it for March. Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

How I Conquered the World in 2016 and Other Stories

I’m still having trouble believing it, but 2016 is drawing to a close, which means it’s time for my annual round-up of the year. And what a year it has been.

 

Twelve months ago, I was working at the New Hampshire Disabilities Rights Center. I’d only been home from Italy for a few months, and Mopsy and I were still working through our nerves about other drivers while walking around town. I’d just submitted my final law school appplication—and I’d already been admitted to several fine schools. Now, I have just completed my first grueling semester at Harvard Law School, and when we aren’t studying, which isn’t that often, Mopsy and I are cruising around Boston like pros.

 

The only goal I set for myself this year was to not be afraid. I think I was mostly successful, though it was hard to keep that in perspective when I first realized I was going to have to do a lot more cooking than I originally anticipated, or when I was exhausted from studying for seven days straight and terrified I was going to fail my civil procedure exam, or when I woke up from my recurring hospital nightmare this morning feeling like I couldn’t breathe. Or when the election happened.

 

But with my signature optimism, when I look back at all the things I did this year—so many of them brand new—I have to give myself credit.

 

Everything I did at the DRC was totally new to me, from attending hearings to investigating voter accessibility. After I finished my internship, I went on a road trip to visit all the law schools I was still considering. When we were in New York visiting Columbia and NYU, my mom and I also went on two tours of Alexander Hamilton’s New York—one of the financial district and one of Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, and Morningside Heights. They were fascinating. Then my Italian host parents, Stefania and Bruno, came to America for three weeks, and we visited Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, New York City, Boston, and of course New Hampshire with them. my older brother got married. I went to the National Convention of the National Federation of the Blind for the first time, where I tried ballroom dancing, swing, and 1Touch self-defense. Then I spent the summer learning my way around Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston.

 

And then I started at Harvard Law School, where every single thing I’ve done has been new. I’d never read a legal opinion before. Now I feel like I read nothing but legal opinions. I learned how to do legal research and how to write in legalese. I learned how to think in a completely new way that I’m still not used to and I can’t describe. For the first time, I took final exams with no indication of my grasp of the material—an experience I’d never like to have again but unfortunately I will have to repeat five more times. And right now I’m in the middle of my first ever job search, complete with cover letters. So many cover letters.

 

But I haven’t done only law stuff. I joined a book club with some of my amazing sectionmates. So far, we’ve read Kindred by Octavia Butler and Cinder by Marissa Meyer (the last one was my recommendation if you hadn’t guessed). Right now we’re reading The Dinner by Herman Koch (well, I haven’t started it yet). I also tried out for the law school a cappella group—I didn’t get in, but it was fun to try—and I also applied to write for the law school parody—didn’t make that either but it was both the first script and the first parody I’ve ever written.

 

I’ve also started becoming politically engaged this year. I’m not going to go into the election too much here, because it really isn’t what I want this blog to be about, but I have written about my feelings on the election,and of course you’ve seen my posts on Braille literacy and the Foundation Fighting Blindness’s #HowEyeSeeIt campaign. I was chosen as a section representative for HLS’s law and government program, and I’ve applied to volunteer for a 2017 gubernatorial campaign.

 

All along, I’ve kept writing. At the beginning of this year, I started queryingagents about my novel. I paused when law school hit, but I’m going to send out a new batch of queries in January.

 

My story “Dissonance” was published in Abyss and Apex in April. If you haven’t read it yet, you can read it right here. And over the summer, I wrote and revised three more stories in the Phoenix Song universe—what i’m calling the world where “Dissonance” is set. I also wrote a poem set in the same world, my first poem since tenth grade. With a lot of luck, you might see those some day ever.

 

Once law school started, while I did write less, I did keep writing. I made sure to find time to write at least a couple times a week, not only because I love it, but also because I’ve found if I don’t write, I become first cranky, then miserable, then practically nauseous. When I feel like I’m drowning in law, my stories keep me sane. I finally got back to revising my memory-wiping academy novel, and I succeeded at my summer writing goal of getting the number of projects I’m working on down to two. And in the last couple months, I’ve been trying new things with my writing too. I wrote my first ever 250-word flash fiction story. I usually have the problem that every short story I write turns into a novel, so I was convinced I wasn’t going to be able to do it, and I was pretty darn shocked when I actually did. And right now I’m almost finished with the first draft of my first ever science fiction story. This story was actually inspired by whatever happened with my left eye back in January when my vision went all dark and shimmery for a day. Funnily enough, that was the same incident that inspired my first blog post of the year, about my decision to be brave.

 

Finally, I added some new sections to the blog this year too. Now, in addition to links to my published short stories, you can also read the stories behind the stories to find out what I was thinking when I wrote the stories and why I made the choices I did, as well as other fun facts and even some of my own illustrations. I’ve also been having a ton of fun writing the posts from Mopsy’s point of view, and I hope you’ve had fun reading them, because there’s more to come.

 

And after I don’t know how many New Years resolutions, I finally learned to use Twitter. The secret was  linking my Twitter and Facebook accounts so I only had to worry about one. I also entered a couple Twitter pitch slams for my novel, which not only got me in touch with some agents but also got me into the habit of checking Twitter and tweeting—twelve hours of tweeting and constantly refreshing does that sometimes.

 

I didn’t really conquer the world in 2016. In fact, especially in the last few months, between the pressures of law school, the election results, and the feeling that I just wasn’t writing as much as I wanted to or moving forward with my writing career as fast as I thought I would, I’ve often felt like the world was doing a good job of trampling me into the dust. But looking back on all I’ve done and all the new things I’ve tried, I’d say all and all, 2016 was a reasonable success. Now that I have a handle on how law school works, I feel like I can balance things a little better second semester. We’ll see how well that actually goes, but after a few more good nights of sleep, I’m ready to hit the ground running in the new year.

 

So bring it on, 2017.

The Next Adventure

One year ago today, I graduated from Kenyon College. My time at Kenyon was spectacular—four years of fascinating classes and amazing friends—and when it was all over, I went out into the real world, totally confident that I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

 

Or so I thought.

 

My plan: I was going to go to Italy and teach for a year, and I was going to love it, and then I was going to go to graduate school for a Masters in Fine Arts in creative writing, and then I was going to teach creative writing—hopefully as a college professor—and of course, write. I might, if I decided I wanted to, get a Ph.D in comparative literature. Sounds perfect, right?

 

So I graduated, submitted all of my applications to MFA programs, and went off to Italy. And it didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t enjoy teaching. Sure, there were times when the lessons went great and everything was perfect, times when it felt like it clicked, but more often than not, I was battling exuberantly inattentive students or just plain bored . I have had some truly excellent teachers, and I have the utmost respect for them, and I really wanted to be like them. I tried to convince myself that things would get better. I’d just started teaching, after all. I was in a foreign country with students who didn’t speak English as their first language. I was working with high school students, and I’d always thought I would want to be a college professor. I was living far away from home, I wasn’t teaching the subject I thought I wanted to teach, and I was a teaching assistant, working with another teacher, instead of in my own classroom. But things didn’t improve, and by Christmas, I was positive that the problem wasn’t any of these things. The problem was I just didn’t want to be a teacher.

 

By this time, I’d also realized I didn’t want to be a full-time writer either. I’d always thought having the ability to write full-time would be the dream. I was only teaching in the mornings (school in Italy finishes at about 1:00 every day), and in the afternoons I was still too terrified of the crazy drivers to venture far from my apartment, so I spent all the time I wasn’t in school writing. It was as close to full-time writing as I’ve ever come. At first, it was great. I was so productive. But then it started to get a bit lonely, even for my inner introvert. And then, after I submitted all my revised short stories to the Dell Award, I was totally burnt out and didn’t know what to do with myself. I realized that, if all I’m doing is writing, I tend to write in giant bursts and then stop and not know what to do next and not have the energy to do anything even if I know what I want to do. But if I’m writing while doing something else, as I’ve been writing all my life while in school, I could write regularly and complete projects without burning out.

 

So, I didn’t want to teach. I didn’t want to write full-time (I still wanted to write, of course, just not full-time). Add to that the fact that being in Italy, which was my dream for years, was not what I’d expected, and I felt pretty awful. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and even if I figured that out, how could I trust myself that it was what I really wanted to do? Everything I had thought I wanted was a lie, after all.

 

I felt like this year was taking me apart, piece by piece, and putting me back together again all wrong. I felt like I would reach for something—an idea, a dream, a goal, my self-confidence or sense of humor—and it was not where I had left it.

 

I’m not one to wallow in confusion and misery—though it was very tempting this time. I would find something else I wanted to do, and I would try it, and if it didn’t work out, then I would try something else. Eventually I would figure it out. And I was starting to have another idea.

 

In November, I was invited to a dinner at the International Lions Club in Assisi. The Lions Club is an association promoting independence for the blind around the world. In Italy, they run a guide dog school, and they had heard that I was living independently in Assisi with a guide dog. At the dinner, I was very disturbed to learn that, due to financial constraints, their guide dog school could only match twenty to thirty blind people with dogs each year. The Seeing Eye, where I got Mopsy, matches at least two hundred guide dogs with blind handlers each year, and I know of at least five other guide dog schools in America. It is very expensive to train guide dogs, certainly. The Seeing Eye is funded by grants and donations, but as far as I could tell, the people at the dinner for this guide dog school were most interested in complaining about how hopeless the situation was. I understand I didn’t have a full picture of the situation, but to have a guide dog requires a certain level of independence on the part of the blind handler, so this was the first association I’d seen in Italy that was really promoting independence for the blind. And yet, when I cut up my own potatoes, my hosts broke into applause.

 

It was almost 2:00 in the morning when I got home that night, furious with the world, and while I was trying to calm down so I could get to sleep, I had the sudden thought, “You know, I could do something about this. I could work to make this sort of thing better.”

 

Since I stand by the fact that no idea at 2:00 in the morning is a good idea unless it still seems like a good idea in the light of day, I put that thought, and my frustration, to rest. But in the light of day, it did still seem like a good idea, and it kept growing. And after I was denied access to the Leaning Tower of Pisa with Mopsy—even though I called ahead to say I had a service dog and then presented my letter from the Fulbright Commission citing the Italian laws that allow service dogs access to all places open to the public without paying extra fees—I knew my idea was a good one.

 

It’s been a year since I left Kenyon, and it’s been a crazy year, filled with a whole lot of uncertainty and confusion and fear, but I know what I want to do, at least for now. It’s been a bumpy road, but I’m certain that every bump was important for getting me onto this path.

 

I have three more weeks of school here in Italy. Then I plan to visit Venice, Ancona, and other small towns around Umbria and Tuscany before I return to America. And I’ve decided that when I return to America, I will get a job and apply to law school so I can become a disabilities rights attorney. I have always had someone advocating for me—that’s how I got to where I am—and now that I’ve really had to advocate for myself, I’ve realized just how important it is. Plus, I like arguing. And I will always continue to write. I have some other projects planned as well. And I’ll see what happens. This feels right now, but you never know, and I’m okay with that. So I’m going to enjoy my last weeks in Italy, and then, let the next adventure begin.

New Years Resolutions

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post for the last couple of weeks.

 

Who am I kidding? I’ve been meaning to blog for the last six months, but senior year was getting underway, I was writing my thesis, generally doing fun things, and I had to have my right eye removed.  Yeah, that happened.  It basically exploded.  But that’s an entirely different story.  More on that later.  I promise.

 

So I finished first semester, finished a draft of my thesis (that’s the World War II Italy novella), had surgery and recovered from said surgery, and then I made a New Years resolution to resurrect this blog and try to blog on a semi-regular basis.  I maybe set an alarm to go off on my phone once a week to remind me.

 

The reason I’ve been struggling with this post in particular is that I keep going back and forth about what tone I want to take, and the truth is, it’s not just about this blog post.

 

See, blogging is only one of my New Years resolutions.  Actually going on Facebook and not just creepily lurking is another, and I’m doing pretty well with that.  But the big one is that by the end of 2014, I will have received 200 rejection letters.

 

Don’t get me wrong: I do not want 200 rejection letters.  If I get published before I reach 200, that’s great! Never mind! Mission accomplished!

 

The point is, over the past several months, I’ve been feeling pretty down about writing and submitting new stories.  I mean, there’s only so many times you can hear that it’s so close, but no thank you, before you start to wonder.  I’m watching my friends get published, and I’m glad for them—I really am. But I’m also hearing that everyone admires me so much for trying, but really, I’d rather be admired for succeeding.  So I set a goal that I will have 200 rejections by the end of the year in order to force myself to write more and submit and keep trying, because if I stop trying because I feel like I’m failing, I will definitely have failed.

 

So I’m sitting here, and I want to say “this is the year!” I want to say this is the year that things are going to happen.  I’m going to graduate, and I’m going to get a Fulbright and go to Italy or I’m going to get into graduate school.  I’m going to get published this year, or win a competition, or maybe even get into Clarion.  I’m going to read Lord of the Rings for the first time!

 

That’s what I want to say.

 

But at the same time, I’m sitting here, and I’m thinking about what my father has said about some of my brother’s musician friends: “You keep going up and up and up, but at some point, everybody stops.  Everybody hits a peak, and they don’t go any higher than that.”

 

And I can’t help wondering, what if I’ve hit my peak? All my life, I’ve succeeded at whatever I set my mind to, but what if this is it? What if I don’t get the Fulbright or get into graduate school? What if I can’t get a job? What if I don’t ever get published and can’t succeed at writing? What then?

 

The truth is, in a little less than four months, I’m going to graduate and leave Kenyon, and I have no idea what I’m doing after that.  I don’t even know what I want to do after that.

 

And that is terrifying.

 

And I’m not sure I know how to handle it.

 

All I can do is write about it, because right now, writing is just about the only thing I’m positive I can do.

 

Maybe I feel like this because it’s 12:30 in the morning and I just read a friend’s story about a girl who feels like a failure after graduation.  Maybe I’m feeling like this because in less than two weeks, I’m going to hear whether I’ve moved onto the next level in the Fulbright application.  Maybe it’s because I’ve never not had a plan.  Probably, it’s a little of everything.

 

This is one of those things that I’m not totally sure I want to put out there on the internet, but I also think it’s something that needs to be said.  Sometimes, we don’t know what we’re doing.  Sometimes, the world just seems really big, and we’re really small, and somehow, we have to move through it without getting lost, and sometimes, we have no idea how to do that.  Sometimes, optimistic gusto is just stupid, and we need to admit that we’re afraid.

 

And at the end of the day, even though I don’t know where I’m going, I still have to move forward.  Eventually, I know I’ll end up where I’m supposed to be.  Or at least I’ll end up somewhere.

 

And until then, I’m going to put one foot in front of the other, do my homework, have fun with my friends, enjoy my last semester at Kenyon.  I’m going to go to Midnight Breakfast and try a smoothy from the KAC.  I’m going to finish revising my thesis.  I’m going to read Lord of the Rings and watch the original Star Wars trilogy for the first time.  I’m going to write stories and submit them.  I’m going to go on Facebook, and I’m going to blog.  I’m going to play Pokemon on the big screen in the science quad.

 

I’m going to take things one day at a time, and I’m going to see what happens.  Something will, and who knows? Maybe 2014 will be the year.