Library Miscreant No More

Confession: I have been a very, very bad patron of the wonderful NYPL. I've been carrying an outstanding fine for, oh, about 3 years now. It's not even for that much; although, I did start to worry that somehow they would charge interest and the original $25.05 had mushroomed. After reading about how George Washington's overdue fine at the NY Society Library was adjusted to $300,000 with inflation, I got a little freaked out. I started to worry that Seinfeld's Detective Bookman would come after me. But I looked up my account online, and it's still just $25.05. Hilariously, if I tried to do anything else while logged in, like place a title on hold, I got a warning: "You must speak with a librarian first." Hmm, I wonder why? Anyway, tonight I'm stopping by my local branch after work, and I'm going to pay up. Why now? I'd like to say that I decided to be a good person and pay what I rightfully owe such a marvelous institution. Honestly, though, it's more selfish than that. I need to do some research for my next WIP and as much as I believe in supporting my industry by actually buying books from brick & mortar stores--I am not going to need tons of books on this topic,* and I'd rather figure out which ones are helpful before shelling out. So Det. Bookman can go back to tracking down that lost copy of Tropic of Capricorn or Cancer or whichever it actually was, because I'm turning the page on being a library fugitive. (Sorry, pun intended. I'm feeling punchy today.) [The second one not intentional] *My WIP is going to be fiction, but will feature a historical figure. But it's not historical fiction really. That's all I can say for now--I don't like to get into details of what I haven't yet written!** **Yeah, yeah, yeah: I'm not totally done with my revisions for Fumped. But I will be soon, I promise.

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Author Smackdown

From the Department of Oooh, Snap! comes: the 50 best author-author put-downs, as curated by Michelle Kerns at Examiner.com.

Nabokov on Hemingway: As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

Ouch.

Noel Coward on Oscar Wilde: Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

Don't hold anything back, Noel.

Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte going mano-a-mano: Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice'. . .than any of the Waverly novels? [I'm assuming now Bronte's talking behind Austen's back to Sir Walter Scott] I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

And my personal favorite (although I don't agree with him), Mark Twain on Jane Austen: I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Poor Jane! At least she still has devoted legions of readers to defend her work. I don't think The Mark Twain Book Club has been written nor turned into a movie, eh?

The Complete List

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Revisions Update: Week 4

Technically, I didn't really do any revising work this week; but that's because I finished working my way through Fumped on Sunday. Of course, it took me a few days to piece together the new stuff I'd written and input all my line edits. That's always the worst part of the process. Yay! I'm done! Oh, wait: now I have to make the document on the computer resemble this pile of marked-up pages. Crap.

But I bribed myself with ice cream and by Wednesday I finished inputting. The book grew to 258 pages/77K-ish words, but I swear I cut as much bleh stuff as I added good stuff. (I hope what I added was good.)

I also noticed what seemed like 1 million embarrassing typos, including a part where I repeatedly describe someone as feeling "strangely clam." Um, okay. Note to self: proofread more. It reminded me, though, of the famous anecdote about Melville's White Jacket, in which a printer misprinted the phrase "coiled fish of the sea" with "soiled fish of the sea," and everyone read into the unintended line as deeply symbolic instead of just a literal description of a dead eel.

Take F. O. Matthiessen, one of the great scholars and teachers of the twentieth century and a founder of American literary studies. Professor Matthiessen discovered the hard way that early American texts are no more reliable than early English ones. An expert on the fiction of Herman Melville, he once rhapsodized on the oxymoronic qualities of Herman Melville's image of the "soiled fish" in White Jacket: "Hardly anyone but Melville could have created the ... `soiled fish of the sea.' The discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical...." Matthiessen thought the twisted image of the soiled fish to be "peculiarly Melville's," inimitable.

But Matthiessen was unaware that the author actually wrote "coiled," not "soiled." Far from speaking in oxymorons, Melville was talking about a dead eel. It was not Melville, but the printer of Matthiessen's inaccurate edition of White Jacket, who "soiled" that dead, inert fish of the sea—producing a phrase that was aesthetically improved, perhaps, but mistaken—a printshop accident. If the printer had only made it a "boiled fish of the sea," Matthiessen would doubtless have spotted the misprint and saved himself a world of embarrassment. From this NY Times article

(Not to suggest that I am somehow like Melville or that describing someone as feeling "clam" even makes any sense.)

I've been taking a break since then, but I think I'll start reading through the new version today. I emailed a copy to my dearest Megan, who is brilliant and well-read and an awesome writer herself. Her opinion and advice will be really helpful and insightful, I know.

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The Prince of Mist

I loved Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. One reviewed described it as a 19th-century novel as told by Hollywood, and I can't think of a better way to describe it. It blended Gothic horror, romance, and intellectual aspects and was incredibly cinematic. (Not surprisingly, the author is also a screenwriter.)

So when an ARC of the new English translation (by Lucia Graves, who also translated Wind) of his first novel, The Prince of Mist, showed up on my desk, I was psyched.

In a letter penned by Ruiz Zafon that came along with the ARC, he said he could see how all his writing descended from this story. As a fan of his more recent stuff, it was fun to read his first work and see glimpses of the voice and mood of The Shadow of the Wind in this earlier work.

The Prince of Mist is a short 200 pages and the whole time I was reading, I wanted more, more, more. Within the first few pages, Ruiz Zafon created an incredibly creepy, Gothic mood. I don't scare easily (while reading, at least) but I caught myself getting a little freaked out on many occasions during the book.

I wish Mist was a little longer. I wanted more character development, and considering everything that happened in the story, I think there easily could have been another 100 pages (ha--easily for me, as the reader, to say). Especially as the mystery unfolded, I felt like clues were revealed a little too swiftly. I wanted more tension; although, wanting more is better than wanting less.

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It's Alive! Revising like Dr. Frankenstein

This is how I feel when I'm revising. I hate reading on the computer and I can't edit on the computer. Well, I can--but I really, strongly prefer not to. So for my revisions, I've been line-editing Fumped on a hard copy. Only there have been about a dozen places where I felt like I was going to make such major changes, or add a new scene, or cut so much, that it wasn't working to edit on the page. So I wrote fresh in MS Word, and just made a little note on the page to "insert patch X here" next to all the other chicken scratches. I finished this round of revisions on Sunday night. Yippee Hooray! I was really excited--until I realized that now I have to go back through the WHOLE THING and input all my changes and cut/copy/paste the dozen or so patches I have. Anticlimactic? Yes, slightly. Also a slow process. Oh yeah--the Frankenstein thing. With all the cutting and pasting and editing, I feel like I'm making a Frankenstein monster of a book. I'm sewing all these old and new passages together and hoping that when I'm done, I'll have a story that it seamless and not one that, well, is as pieced-together and weird-looking as Frankenstein (the monster, not the book. I love the book). It's also a little nervewracking to make such substantive changes. Yeah, I understood 100% that some things in Fumped weren't working for me or anyone else, but it was a finished product. Hopefully with all these revisions, I haven't created a monster.

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If it's good enough for Margaret Atwood,

then it's good enough for me.

Yes, despite vowing to never venture beyond Facebook (in terms of social media), I broke down and joined Twitter. FYI, joining the party this late is mildly terrifying! I have no idea how this thing works! Hash tags, RT, and those tiny urls . . . WTF. It's information overload. Time to Google how to do this stuff.

Anyway, I am twittering (tweeting? I have no freaking clue) as @rebeccabehrens. Creative, huh?

Protestations aside, I'd love it if you'd follow me! (That is what it's called, right?)

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Revisions Update: Week 3

Has it been a week already? Whoa. Time flies. I'm now up to p. 150/237 in my revisions. That's right--up 90 pages from last week. I swear I'm not manic! I just had a lot of time to work last weekend and weeknights this week and I took full advantage of it. I'm revising a ton and rewriting a lot and writing fresh a little--but I swear it's still gonna be the same book. Only better (I hope). I'd love to work my way through the whole thing by next weekend so I can take a little break, then read through Fumped 2.0 and see if my changes work. And then start editing that new version. I feel like I can't really tell right now if all these changes will stick because I'm not seeing the big picture. I feel good about the work I've been doing (despite how hard it is to kill my darlings), though, and that's important. TGIF everybody

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The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle features one of the best review-blurbs I have ever read: "On the eighth day, when God was handing out whining privileges, he came upon Jeannette Walls and said, 'For you, an unlimited lifetime supply.' Apparently, Walls declined His kind offer." --Chicago Tribune

And the Trib wasn't kidding. Walls's retelling of her childhood was equal parts heart-wrenching, hilarious, inspiring, sickening, and unbelievable. It reminded me so much of all the picaresque lit I read in grad school. Knowing it's a true story, it shouldn't have felt so entertaining to read.

If I have anything negative to say about the book--which is not to say that I disliked it--it is that as the book progresses, the bizarre and shocking details of her childhood become repetitive. No one can (re)tell the story, really, than Walls herself--so I don't want to get into specific scenes, but suffice it to say that there any many, many instances of negligence, abuse, and hunger. For such scenes in the first 100 pages, the reader is filled with shock and anger on behalf of the Walls kids, maybe sometimes bemusement. Her family's early years out West still seemed nomadic and unconventional and often kind of charming. The later scenes in Welch, WV, drag because the shock wears off. Their time in Welch just felt depressing and stagnant. It's not so funny anymore. Maybe that was intentional. As Walls plots her escape to NYC, I wanted to escape with her.

I mentioned before the relative lack of anger or grief carried across in Walls's writing. So many memoirists tell all, and their negative emotions seep through the pages. Any love toward family members is overshadowed by disappointment, sadness, or rage. The Walls family bonds are incredibly strong, despite all the dysfunction. There was something so incredibly touching and almost noble about how Walls described her very flawed parents. Thanks to that complexity, this never turned into a simplistic "story of my hard-knock life."

The Trib was right--this could have been a whine-fest, and instead it was incredibly engaging literature.

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Agatha Christie's "utterly deranged"* writing method

*Slate's description, not mine. I came across this fascinating article in my morning news/blog binge: The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks A new book by John Curran explore the "how" of Agatha Christie's 60 crime novels, 6 other novels, short stories, twenty+ plays, and poems. (Wow.) Curran was visiting Christie's grandson when he came across her stash of writing notebooks, and he was shocked to find out that the author of "perfectly tensioned structures [drew] from [the] formless mess" of a dozen notebooks, filled with overlapping, non-linear chicken-scratch notes. As he studied them, he even realized that when Christie started writing a mystery, often even she didn't know who the murderer (or other sort of villainous criminal) would be. 
Isn't that amazing? I never would have thought that she wrote any other way than with an anal-retentive, uber-detailed outline and probably stacks of tightly organized notes. It's fascinating and charming to imagine her working in a messy office, flipping through a half-dozen notebooks to find that note she jotted down 3 months ago about cyanide.

I'm neurotic about having a narrative, detailed outline before I start writing. I need to have a road map, to know where the story is going before I set out on writing it. I stray from my outlines a lot, but they always help me remember what I saw initially for the story and my characters, even if that ends up changing. Especially as a relatively inexperienced author, the outline is my coach and my safety net. Reading this makes me curious about what it would be like to experiment on a project without a conventional outline.

It just goes to show that the writing process is different for every author and doesn't necessarily correspond to the end product. I suppose there are infinite ways to make the same end product, i.e. a book.

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Happy Nat'l Poetry Month!

April is National Poetry Month! Poets.org has tons of cool stuff for it, like the Poem-a-Day email and iPhone apps.

I have to admit that poetry more than any other type of lit can befuddle me, but I still love it. Poetry is so efficient and accessible, in the sense that it evokes something in everyone (I like to consider confusion a valid response).

Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" is one of my favorite poems:

Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

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Revisions Update: Week 2

I got a respectable amount of work done of my revisions of Fumped this week; although, I always want to do more than I'm probably capable of. If I had my way, I'd finish writing a book in a month and revising it in a week (ha, ha). Or a cousin of the "magical thesis fairy" that I was always pining after in grad school would appear: the "magical revisions fairy." One wave of the revisions wand and all the crappy stuff I need to cut and tweak would be perfect.

Of course, that would take all the fun out of writing.

Anyway, I'm up to page 65 (of 237). That sounds kind of lame, except I have written probably about 20-25 pages of new content for the first quarter of the book. I'm feeling pretty good about the new stuff and I think some of the existing stuff that was, um, problematic (read: craptastic) is improving.

I'm going to post where I'm at every week so I feel like a loser if I've only revised, like, 10 pages in a week. Nothing like the desire to save face to get you motivated. :)

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The D.U.F.F.

Where was this book when I was in high school?!?!

Seriously, why was it not written then? Because The D.U.F.F. is amazing and should be required reading for every girl below the age of 20. Perhaps even for adult girls, too. It's that good.

D.U.F.F. is the acronym for this unfortunate moniker: Designated Ugly Fat Friend. As one character explains, "Scientists have proven that every group of friends has a weak link, a Duff." Bianca is horrified to discover that she is the Duff of her trio of friends as the story begins. And for the rest of the book, she grapples with that label as she also deals with her parents' marital issues, a family member's substance abuse, and the aftereffects of losing her first love.

Bianca is an incredible character and has an amazing voice. What I loved most about her was her anger. She's feisty and witty and self-deprecating and full of piss and rage most of the time. You know why anger is such an awesome emotion to read about? It's so active! Bianca is the anti-Bella, cynical and proactive. She makes stuff happen in her life. It's fascinating for the reader. Bianca is full of complicated teen emotions, but she's not a navel-gazer. She doesn't just sit around pining after a guy--she throws a coke in his face and later pounces on him. Despite her cynicism, she remains vulnerable and lovable. I seriously wanted to magically appear in a random chapter just to give her a huge hug. That sounds weird, but that's how affectionate I felt towards her.

The D.U.F.F. is definitely edgy for the language it uses and the many scenes of teen sex it contains, but it's kind of wonderful to see a teen girl having sex not to make people like her, or because she feels she has to, but for pleasure. (She has sex responsibly, of course, and I appreciated a few passages that stressed the importance of condoms and birth control.) Bonus points for not having her get knocked up the first time or get herpes or some other cliched "horrible repercussion" that you so often see in cautionary tales.

This book felt so incredibly authentic. That makes sense, because the wunderkind author, Kody Keplinger, is just 18 years old. (Isn't that impressive? I'm totally impressed. A little jealous, too.)

Oh, and major bonus points for working Wuthering Heights into the plot.

I'd tell you to go read it right now, but unless you can get your hot little hands on an ARC you'll have to wait until September. You can, however, preorder it on Amazon. If I were you, I would.

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This is what innovation in publishing looks like:

Warning: If you don't work in book publishing, this might be 87% less hysterical and wonderful to you

"Penguin State of Mind"

Let's hear it for Penguin, indeed.

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Return of the BSC

I completely forgot that a very important book was released on April 1, and no--it wasn't an April Fool's joke:

(N.B. You can't actually "click to LOOK INSIDE;" go to Amazon)

It's a brand-spanking new prequel to the original The Baby-sitters Club books, and the originals themselves are being re-released with some light updates!

Laura Vanderkam at the WSJ points out that entertainment value aside, the books do a service by reminding coddled kids and helicopter parents that one upon a time, tweens spent their free time not doing PSAT worksheets but watching other people's kids--and everyone turned out fine. Here's the link to her article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704586504574654581498942974.html

I was a huge BSC fan as a kid. If I'm remembering correctly, some friends and I even tried setting up our own club, which clearly went nowhere if I can't really recall it now. I loved the different personalities of the girls, envied their entrepreneurial success, and doggedly tried to find Stonybrook, CT on our Rand-McNally atlas so I could visit (when I accepted that it didn't exist, I lobbied unsuccessfully for a trip to Stamford).

Of course, I'm going to get my hands on a copy of the prequel ASAP.

Between this and the renewed interest in Sweet Valley High, it's been a good year for '80s/'90s YA series.

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The Daughters

Yesterday, I finished my ARC of The Daughters, Joanna Philbin's debut YA novel. It's actually the first in a series, with at least two more Daughters books in the works.

Few people are as qualified as Joanna, daughter of Regis Philbin, to write YA novels about the children of celebrities navigating their teen years amidst the media spotlight. I expected the book to be a cousin of Gossip Girl, especially because it's set largely on the UES and the characters attend a ritzy prep school and all come from privileged, mostly famous families. While there was plenty of name-dropping of tony shops, fashionistas, and clothing labels, I was pleasantly surprised that the message of the book was less about backstabbing/social-climbing and more about overcoming insecurities, embracing individuality, and the importance of friendship. The "unconventional-looking" protagonist, Lizzie, dips her toe into the world of modeling yet ends up rejecting the shallow opportunists she meets in the industry for an artistic photographer who encourages her to embrace the flaws that make her unique. How can you not like a book that's promoting the idea that beauty comes in a million different forms to teens?

The Daughters gives the reader a little of what they want (gossipy tales of the fictional rich and famous) and a lot of what they need (demystifying what celebrity life is really like and highlighting the problems it brings; encouraging readers to have a positive body image and showing them characters who stay true to themselves despite the temptations of fame).

What's up next on my bookshelf: Yesterday I got an ARC I was dying to read from my lovely agent--The D.U.F.F. I have a feeling I'm going to devour it. :)

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Renovations

Guess who discovered Blogger Draft (or whatever it's called) and got a spiffy new template? Me! Guess who also learned how to post images? Also Me! Just to prove it, here's a picture of an iguana I took:

Okay, I know it's really small but that's intentional.

Even semi-luddites can learn new tricks.

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