Thought Candy

The YA sci-fi/fantasy novel Red Rising was published on January 28 of this year (exactly four months ago to the day of this post). The author is 26 years old and this is his debut. His book currently has 618 reviews on Amazon, 459 of which are 5-stars. No small achievement, not at all.

I learned about the book because Colleen Oakes raved about this novel on her blog, and I thought, “Dang, I gotta read that.”

So I am. I started reading Red Rising two weeks ago.

I was prepared to love this book. I wanted to love this book. I wanted to be slammed into book awesomeness on the level of Daughter of Smoke and Bone and The Hunger Games. That’s what the hype about this book felt like.

But I. Am not. Enjoying this book. Whatsoever.

Ouch. This book is the mental equivalent of an ouch.

I wanted to stop reading after 10 pages. Then 20. Then 30. But I didn’t. I kept reading and reading, hoping the ouch would go away. Hoping the goodness would start. Hoping the awesomeness would start.

I’ve reached page 174. I’m almost halfway through, and it’s still ouch.

Why? Why can’t I just love this book, like so many other people? I wanted to love this book.

But I can’t. I just can’t. And I feel I need to explain this, because the disappointment, coupled with the frenzy and hype, feels so profound.

Let me start by sharing what some readers can tell right away, and what some readers can confirm for themselves in author interviews online: that this book was designed, consciously designed, to make money. This book began as a pitch: “What if I took The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and Ender’s Game, mixed those stories together and set the tale on Mars? Hunger Games on Mars! That would make a lot of money! That would make a great movie!”

That is what Red Rising is. It’s a product designed to cash in.

In the article, “Why Pierce Brown Might Be Fiction’s Next Superstar” (published Feb. 6, 2014), Pierce Brown shares the initial inspiration for Red Rising. He was on a climbing trip with friends after rereading Antigone, and he started thinking about how climbing would be easier on Mars, because it has one third of Earth’s gravity… and then he started brainstorming with his friends.

That sounds organic, yes? That sounds like something any writer would do.

Except, what’s left out of this article is the “brainstorming” part. The part that came after this Antigone-on-Mars combination.

Allow me to read between the lines as to what this brainstorming entailed: a lot of cold calculation, and borrowing, and taking elements from other bestselling books. And when he was done, Pierce Brown sold an unfinished novel– three unwritten novels– to a publisher at age 23. Brown had a 3-book deal with Del Rey/Random House before the first book was even written. The first draft of Red Rising then took him two months to write.

He’s “already written the screenplay, which sold to Universal Pictures for seven figures” before the first book was even available for sale.

That bears repeating: he wrote and sold the screenplay for a book that wasn’t even for sale yet.

This is Pierce Brown’s book jacket photo. I think the picture was taken after the deal with Universal Pictures went through (but that’s just a guess).

Red Rising is not a product of subconscious art. Red Rising is all calculation. It is paper-thin characters, it is stolen-and-recombined plot, it is violence with children engineered to sell, sell, sell.

And you know what? It is selling. It will sell. It will be a movie soon. And people can call it art because it’s a novel, and because it will be a film, and those things are art. Only an idiot would say otherwise.

So let me say something else. Red Rising is art. Oh, yes. It is art.

But it is not subconscious art. Red Rising is money art. Profit art. Copycat art. There is a difference. I think that difference is huge.

The Hunger Games is subconscious art. So is Daughter of Smoke and Bone. So is The Fault in Our Stars. Just typing those titles, I am overcome with emotion for those books. The sheer power of those novels. And I didn’t even type Harry Potter.

I mean, my God. Harry Potter.

Harry Potter. God. We live in a world with Harry Potter. Sometimes I feel so bad for all of the people who died before The Sorcerer’s Stone was published. Because they never had a chance to read those wonderful books.

Which makes me feel like this:

Bracing myself full of sadness for what those people missed. The ones who died before Harry Potter was born, who never got to meet Harry Potter. Which is, oddly, the same way I feel when people say, “Only Jesus saves,” and I wonder about all the people who died before 33 CE.

Some people might curse me for comparing the Son of God to Harry Potter. But you know what? I’m fine with that. Curse away.

Harry Potter is definitely subconscious art.

Some novels arise from deep places, and find their way to writers in love with their craft. Writers in touch with their surroundings on a deep level, and in touch with themselves. Writers with something to say. Themes to share. Fevered thoughts to pen. Profound feelings to express. Characters full of soul. Characters who feel so alive, it’s like we could stroll down the street and see them walking toward us, and instantly recognize them. “Oh my God, you’re Gus!” Or “Oh my God, you’re Akiva! Wow!!”

And I’m not talking about recognizing the actor who played them in the movie. I’m talking about them. The characters. The people who exist only as words on a page, and then as a distinct memory in your head, a memory as individual as your thumbprint, your DNA, and the energy that makes you you. That’s what a book character becomes. Words transformed into felt memory. A unique consciousness. An exquisitely beautiful idea, something seen, sure. But more than that, something deeply felt in your heart.

This is what is missing from Red Rising. I am not meant to feel these characters. I am meant to absorb a plot (caste system! lies! slavery!), and then be manipulated into feeling things by a sacrificial death that is very much a deus ex machina (and the obvious Antigone part of the plot): innocent child gives up her life! oppression is bad! rise up! live for more!

This is how the story begins. It also begins with a LOT of world-building vocabulary (so much vocab, so much mind-numbing vocab), backstory (family history as well as futuristic world history), and name-dropping (characters and more characters who are quickly dropped from the plot, as the story moves away from where it begins, or even where it jumps to, as the story jumps again and again, with lots of characters introduced each time).

I had to read the first 100 pages, and then go back and reread the first 20 pages again, before I felt like I had a grasp on “the world” I was reading, and didn’t feel so utterly confused. And even then, there were still paragraphs that felt like gibberish.

After the blunt manipulation of the opening chapters (we are oppressed! rise up! you have been lied to!), I am then meant to be horrified by violence (blood! gore! murder of children!), which is connected to a main character (a sixteen-year-old boy named Darrow) who has the same level of emotional depth as a stick figure drawn on paper, one made with a circle and 4 straight lines.

Take Darrow’s thoughts on page 141, as he’s reflecting on his murder of a teenage boy (and also reflects on an earlier murder he assisted in committing, while he was still a slave in the system):

“I hate myself. I know they made me do this, yet it still feels like a choice. Like when I pulled Eo’s legs and felt the snap of her small spine. My choice. But what other choice was there with her? With Julian? They do this to make us wear the guilt.”

Keep in mind that Darrow has been artificially enhanced– both physically and mentally– to be super smart as well as super strong by this point in the story. He has advanced understanding of history and philosophy, and has read the world’s great literature as well as information about killing and war.

And he still believes that guilt is forced upon him by the powers that be, and that he has no “other choice” but to kill.

These are his thoughts as he’s looking at the broken body of the young boy he has just brutally murdered. He feels he was “made” to do this. He doesn’t change his mind later. He doesn’t have further reflections on this supposed lack of choice and take responsibility for his agency in the boy’s murder.

No, this is where his thoughts stand, and the plot moves on to other scenes and other violence. Darrow was made to kill. Guilt is forced upon him by his oppressors.

Also keep in mind that this is YA. This book targets readers age 12-18 (as well as adults).

So let me just say, for Darrow to be the “super smart hero” of the book, artificially enhanced with all of humanity’s knowledge, a role model for teenagers, sharing deep insights with the reader– I call bullshit on this. Because murder is always a choice. Every action you consciously take in life is your choice. And guilt is not something forced on you. Guilt arises from within. It’s the story you tell or don’t tell about the actions you take. That’s it. No one can force guilt upon anyone else.

I’m not artificially enhanced to be super-anything, and I haven’t read a fraction of the material Darrow has read in this book– and it makes me sad that this author, Pierce Brown, is presenting Darrow’s ideas to the reader as truth. Because that’s what writers do, when they have the heroic figure talk to the reader in a book like this. They are sharing truth.

But Darrow’s truth is bullshit. And it makes me sad.

Pierce Brown’s debut novel reads like reductionist logic. Like everything in life can be understood in short, simple sentences that communicate Absolute Truth. There is no room for nuance. There is no room for complication and subtlety. The book reads much like his interview statements. Darrow and Pierce Brown are both young men who Know Truth, and can State That Truth matter-of-factly.

For example, here is Pierce Brown describing Red Rising (as quoted in the article about “Fiction’s Next Superstar” cited above):

“The entire story is about rejecting the limits that others put on you, and it’s about evil. And evil is simply greed. So it’s about combatting greed and combatting selfishness and evil. And also trying to rise above what society has told you that you have to be.”

Let’s take that one sentence Brown shared: evil is simply greed. Truth distilled as an absolute. Like there’s no room for evil to be anything else. Objective reality, as understood by Pierce Brown.

So let’s take this statement of his, reducing evil to greed, and examine that further. For the sake of simplicity, let’s define evil narrowly– let’s define evil as the killing of an innocent child. Because I think most people can agree that killing an innocent child can be classified as something evil.

Hitler killed children, soldiers have killed children, doctors have killed children, parents have killed children. Certainly, a lot of those killings can be labeled as being motivated by greed– or, to use a better word for this– desire. Wanting something we don’t yet have. Let’s start with the instance of a parent killing a child. For example, a post-partum mother in the grip of a paranoid delusion, a woman whose mind longs for peace but whose screaming child is exacerbating the voices in her head. So she takes a butcher knife and stabs her infant to death. This murder of a small child fits our criteria for “evil,” and we can even label this evil as being motivated by desire: the mother wanted peace of mind, saw her child as the person inhibiting that, and destroyed him. Evil as greed.

But it doesn’t feel quite right to do that, does it? Do we really think someone out of her mind is being motivated by greed? Maybe, maybe not.

Let’s take another example. What about the villages America bombed in Vietnam, villages populated with many small children. Let’s look at the motivation of the men who decided where to drop the bombs. Let’s say that those men were motivated by greed: those U.S. officials had a desire to win the war, and dropping those bombs helped them in their goal to win the war. Now we can link this evil (the killing of a small child by a U.S. bomb) with desire (the greed to win the war).

But what about a bomb that fell on a village full of small children with no enemy targets? A pilot made an accident behind the controls of the bomber, misread his map, and napalmed the wrong place. Fortunately, for the goal of winning the war, he had another bomb to drop on the correct target, so the village with enemies (and other small children) was also wiped out.

But let’s consider that first village he bombed.

When a man makes a mistake about where he drops a bomb, and napalms a village of people not even targeted to die– is this an evil motivated by greed?

Or can evil be caused by something as banal as mediocrity? As a simple mistake? And be nothing more than a consequence of not thinking carefully?

One more example. Let’s take a home in New York that is powered by electricity from a nuclear power plant. Inside this home, a small child plugs in a computer and plays a game. All is well with this child. At the nuclear power plant, unknown to anyone, waste is being leaked into the river, radioactive waste that another small child downriver drinks, develops cancer from, and dies at age nine.

Is that evil motivated by greed? Or something much closer to ignorance? Who is really to blame? The people running the nuclear power plant, or the people who wanted the power plant to begin with, or the people using the electricity made by the power plant? Is the small child using his computer culpable?

And what about the towns beside Hitler’s concentration camps, all those people who watched the ash falling down and claimed not to know those were children being cooked in the ovens. Were they motivated into silence and acceptance by greed? They weren’t trying to get something they didn’t already have– their towns had existed before the camps were built. I think they were actually trying to cling to something they knew was already gone. The concentration camp had been built. Jews and other victims were being taken in, and never coming out. Normal life was gone.

Can we say this evil was motivated by greed for normal life? A greed for the camp not to be there? Or was theirs a desire to not have to act, to not have to know, to not have to die to stop the children of strangers from being cooked in an oven? Is that the same thing as greed?

Is dread the same thing as greed?

Is denial the same thing as greed?

I don’t pretend to know.

But for myself, I cannot label evil as greed. Evil, I believe, is far too multifaceted for one label. I can’t even label evil as simply “fear” either. Or “ignorance.” Though I think “ignorance and fear” are a bit better descriptors of evil than “greed” by itself. I think fear is one of the underlying emotions of greed, but truly, any emotion can drive greed.

Or so I believe.

And here is something else I consider a truth.

All emotions contain good and bad, because there’s such a variety of expression that can arise from any emotion. Fear can keep you alive, or it can kill you. Love can motivate you to self-sacrifice, or it can motivate violent aggression. Desire can end an abhorrent system of slavery, or it can create those slaves to begin with.

The world, as I see it, is a place of infinite nuance– infinite complexity– a place where tragedy and grace are, and always will be, intertwined.

Which brings me back to Red Rising.

Darrow is a young man who is chasing a dream. Not the dream of his dead wife, or the dream of freeing his people from slavery. He dreams he is Katniss, or Ender, or Harry Potter, or Karou. Because the real dream was a movie contract. A 3-book deal. Money in the bank.

And it happened. He did it. Darrow is making money. He is the dream come true.

And people will love him for that. They already do.

I have been pretty obsessed with my third work in progress, Mark of the Pterren, this month. The book is divided into three parts, and my author-life has been consumed by writing and editing Part II. Which means I’ve also been obsessed with figuring out how the book ends, as an author can’t pen a great middle section without knowing what’s important to the plot.

You would think writers “kind of know” how a book ends, and maybe some writers do. Or maybe, some projects lend themselves better to outlines than others.

Because I have learned how to make outlines for my novels. I wrote one for my second book. I have one ready for my fourth book. Sometimes I daydream about the outline for my fifth book.

Mark of the Pterren just defies every outline I make for it, and I’ve made several. I keep them on dozens of loose sheets of notebook paper, in a stack on my bookshelf, but no matter how hard I work on these outlines, they end up only charting where I’ve been, not where I’m going. The story itself keeps racing ahead, in crazy directions, and I have to catch up. I feel like Jean-Luc Picard in some rickety little spacecraft, chasing a self-controlled U.S.S. Enterprise across the universe. Waving my fist in futility and shouting, “What are you doing? You are my ship! My ship! Where are you going?? Get back here!!”

Grrrrr…

This is like me being all menacing while I chase down my Enterprise.

Cause dang, yo. That thing is fast.

And lo and behold, I actually caught up to the Enterprise this month! Twice!! Once last weekend, and once this weekend. I have boarded my ship twice in a week’s time!

So take that, story! I’ll show you to run away like a psycho!

Which means I’m talking to my subconscious again. Like my subconscious gives a damn what I think or what I say. Like anyone’s subconscious does.

But it still feels good to catch a glimpse of the inside of the ship. Even if those glimpses are rare.

And fortunately, due to all of my chasing this month, and those glimpses I caught, I gained enough knowledge to write a 4-page synopsis, which tells the reader the entire plot and ending for the whole novel. This synopsis is for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Contest this year. The deadline is June 1. I have to submit the first twenty pages of the book (well, in this case, I’m submitting 18 pages, which is the entire first chapter when it’s put into Courier New font) along with the 4-page synopsis.

As I started working on this, I happened to read a blog post by an author who was bitterly complaining about how much work her 200,000-word manuscript was to write.

I started laughing so hard. Then I checked my word count for Pterren, which has 342,000 words. It’ll clock in at 425,000 words or so when it’s done. That’s the length of War and Peace.

But I condensed 425,000 (unfinished) words into 4 pages of synopsis for the contest this weekend. And it turned out awesome! Even more so because the most powerful antagonist in the story is introduced in Chapter One, something I didn’t even know until I caught up to the Enterprise this weekend. (!!!)

This is me now:

Because it doesn’t even matter to me anymore whether I win contests or not, whether I ever have a short story published in Glimmer Train or not, whether I even make any money on my work or not. When I visit inside of my brain, and take stock of my housekeeping duties up there in my cranium, author-me has two concerns:

1. Do you know what you are doing? (Answer: uhhhh, sometimes?)

2. Do the people who read this stuff even like it? (Answer: YES. There are people who actually like this book!)

I won’t have the money to publish Mark of the Pterren as a trilogy. I can already hear the haters who are gonna be all bent out of shape about that.

But I don’t even care. Awesome people are still gonna read this War and Peace book. And it’s gonna be epic. It’s gonna be the best book I have written. Better than Wolves, better than Love and Loans, Mark of the Pterren is a totally badass story. Even if it stresses me the F out so much. All those worthless outlines, all those hours upon hours of turmoil and racing after my ship through the galaxies. I still have faith and more faith that everything will be so worth it in the end. I have found my team and my team is Team Win and I am playing this game till it ends. Best game ever.

On Wednesday this week, I hosted a workshop meeting for the writers group in town I help run.

The group is called Writers and Scribblers, because I like the word scribblers and I like not taking myself too seriously. Being married to a man 26 years older than I am, I tend to be far more reserved than I would be if I’d married a man my own age. I think the balance in our marriage is that I make my husband younger and he makes me older– in behaviors and attitudes– which means I keep a lookout for ways to not be a conservative, uptight I-can’t-change-and-you-better-not-make-me kind of stick in the mud some oldsters turn into.

No offense to oldsters. But I think we all know a few sticks-in-the-mud. They’re certainly out there.

I think I’d rather hang out with anyone than a crab. Snap snap.

Though, to be fair, it can be fun to hear their life stories. The problem is, crabs don’t talk to you, they talk at you, which is no fun at all. I hate being talked at. It’s such an awful feeling. Old lonely people who are bitter and bitchy bother me a great deal. I want to be like, “Dude, you’ve lived how many years now? And you still can’t self-soothe? You can’t stop blaming people and complaining? For reals? I am so the F outta here.”

I never say that, of course. No one would say that to an oldster, cause it’s mean. So we just flee the scene, which makes them lonelier, and more bitter, and more crabby.

But that’s their thing. I have nothing to do with that.

I actually started this post so I could talk about my writing workshop.

Twelve people attended the meeting, and one more person arrived near the end. So 13 people total, but only 12 for the actual workshop.

The meeting was titled “Trigger Your Imagination: Writing Exercises to Improve Your Craft.”

First, I displayed a picture of a treehouse, and asked everyone to write a description of the treehouse doing four things: 1.) Use all five senses, 2.) Use specific language, 3.) Use (at least) one simile, and 4.) Use (at least) one metaphor.

Here was the treehouse the class voted to use:

I also brought this picture with me, but only 4 people voted for this one:

This house maybe looked a bit too Return of the Jedi for them.

After they had 10 minutes to write a description of the treehouse, I introduced a gender-switching exercise, read aloud a passage from this book (one of my favorite writing books, but definitely geared more for literary fiction than commercial):

“What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers” by Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays.

After reading the short intro on gender switching, I gave the participants the character description list from this book, and had everyone fill out the list as an opposite-gender character (men had to be women, and women had to be men).

Ten minutes for that activity.

Then I asked them to “take this character, put him or her in the treehouse, invent a problem, and write about this character in the treehouse with the problem.”

As I quickly discovered, the “invent a problem” thing was a step too far, too fast.

Like, game-over too far, too fast.

An activity that felt like a no-brainer to me was not a no-brainer. I jumped too many steps. “Inventing a problem” should have been its own exercise. The people brave enough to share their work admitted this was extremely challenging. One woman said that “inventing a problem” for a story was the one thing she always struggled with, the thing that held back her writing the most. “I can never think of a problem,” she said. “I just write characters, and they never have problems.”

So here is what I would do differently next time:

Only have 2 writing activities (not 3). Don’t jump any steps. Make each activity simple, straightforward (like my description activity was). Let people share after each activity, rather than waiting until the end.

In this case, I waited until the end for “share time” because I only had an hour for the workshop, and I tend to always be the person who tries to stuff seven pounds of sugar in a five-pound sack. I teach this way, I live this way. I want to do, do, do so much every day, I overdo rather than underdo– and neither one is good.

Later, after share time, I reflected on the activities with them, and then I also asked if anyone had suggestions for our July meeting topic. One man said, “How to Have a Bestseller in 3 Easy Steps.”

I smiled at that. I held a long moment of quiet, just smiling at that. I made a few light-hearted comments about “Yes, wouldn’t that be nice. If only, right?”

Then I brought up Goodreads. I recommended they all have a Goodreads account, “Because that is where your readers hang out. That is where your customers hang out.”

I mean, not all readers have Goodreads accounts, but the ones who have the power to spread word of mouth really quickly for a given book– they are on that site. Cause a lot of popular book bloggers/reviewers post their reviews on Goodreads, where more people can find them and follow their reviews.

But back to the topic of how to have a bestseller in 3 easy steps.

Here’s how I would have answered that question, if I’d had time to answer that question during the meeting. I couldn’t share this then, because the meeting wasn’t about hitting the bestseller list. But since that meeting is over, and this is my blog, I feel entitled to share.

How to Have a Bestseller in 3 Easy Steps:

1. Write an AMAZING BOOK. Write a book that sucks people in, that makes them care deeply about the characters. Write characters who make readers laugh, cry, fall in love, and feel emotions acutely. Make your book so good that people stay up into the wee hours of the night to keep reading. Make your book so good that people sob when an important character dies, or they bite their nails to the quick when your characters are in danger, or they feel like their hair is turning white because you freak them out so much, or they are so turned on by your characters that they can’t read fast enough. And if you’re writing literary fiction, make your prose the equivalent of poetry porn, and then do all these same things.

2. After you have published your AMAZING BOOK, find readers. Traditional publishers may or may not help with this. If you self-publish, or publish with a small press, you’re going to have to find readers on your own. You need to find them, and you need to make it easy for them to find you. This means having a decent webpage with all the important info easy to navigate, being present on social media (you can pick the ones that work for you, cause you don’t have to do them all, but Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads are the best bets), and you can also give away free copies of your book and visit book clubs and directly promote your book whenever you can. You can participate in blog hops and write articles for popular book sites, to help get your name out there, help direct traffic to your website and your work. You can have a book launch party if you have the money for one. You’re in charge of bringing in customers for a book launch in a store, so make sure you can plug the event and bring people in the door, if you do this.

3. After you have published your AMAZING BOOK and made an effort to find readers, write your next AMAZING BOOK. Try to publish an AMAZING BOOK as often as you can, depending upon how fast you would like to make the bestseller list. As you keep publishing books, make sure you keep actively looking for readers. And if a traditional publishing company comes along and says, “Hey, small-time author, have I got a deal for you,” make sure you know your legal stuff before you sign a contract. Make sure the traditional publisher can take away the time-consuming hours of marketing– that they have “ins” with publicity avenues to drive up visibility. If marketing isn’t part of the publishing plan, then you say “nope” and wait until something better comes along. Because if you are writing AMAZING BOOKS, then something better will eventually come along.

That’s it. How to Have a Bestseller in 3 Easy Steps.

There are plenty of strategies online about this that are very different from my ideas. One man wrote a detailed plan for how he organized 3,000 people to post an Amazon review on his book the first day it was published, which pushed his book onto a mega-deals sales page online, which therefore drove his (nonfiction) book about business onto the bestseller list.

If you want to research these strategies online, go for it. They’re out there. There’s plenty of them. I don’t have the social media savvy to organize 3,000 book reviews in one day. I’m not a person with that kind of reach. But if you can manage something like that: the bestseller list awaits!

And if you can’t manage 3,000 reviews in one day… well, maybe there’s another trick you can find online. Or maybe you can go back to work on your next AMAZING BOOK. I totally vote for that option.

I had the great pleasure of reading The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion (published 2013), this past Saturday, and I absolutely loved it!

This novel features a main character/first-person protagonist who is on the autism spectrum. The voice of the narrator, Professor Don Tillman, is so humorous and sweet and true, that this love story gave me that beautiful experience of being immersed in a world, and I fell in love with everyone in this book, especially Don and Rosie.

Especially Don. How I loved this main character.

*hearts hearts hearts*

The Rosie Project is a modern-day love story set in Australia, though part of the action takes place in New York City, which Don and Rosie visit together later in the book. The plot of the novel is quirky, genuine, and altogether lovely.

For anyone who read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon (2003)– and fell in love with the voice of that narrator, the autistic 15-year-old Christopher Boone, then say YES to The Rosie Project, because this book also has a distinctive voice, and is beautifully written. It doesn’t treat autism like it’s some kind of disease, but something that can be embraced as a strength, which is fantastic. There are a lot of people craving books like this, and I hope they find The Rosie Project.

Of course, it is easy to love Don– he is written to be very loveable– and I love that he is loveable. I love this whole book. I want more books like this. I say YES PLEASE to a whole library of adult fiction that is so easy and fun to read as The Rosie Project.

Toward the end of the novel, the reader learns that Rosie thinks Don looks like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Here is a picture of said hottie, in all his Atticus Finch gloriousness:

However, this was not how I pictured Don Tillman.

Because of the precise way that Don speaks, and because of the way his voice sounded in my head (“Corrrect”) I pictured him as a man with a beautiful, precise way of speaking.

Which means I pictured him as Benedict Cumberbatch.

Because yes please to Benedict Cumberbatch. That voice. omg. That voice. Plus, the man Can Act.

And act and act and ACT.

Wow, is he amazing on screen. And have I mentioned his voice? Here is a short interview with him, comparing his face to that of an otter (which he views as a blessing, that he is blessed to have “a weird face”).

He is self-deprecating and lovely, and I don’t think he looks like a cross between “an otter and something people find vaguely attractive.” Certainly not. He is way too gorgeous for that kind of talk. Though it’s cute he describes himself like that. Cute cute cute.

No, I haven’t seen Sherlock yet. But I did see him in 12 Years a Slave (which I loved) and in Star Trek Into Darkness (which I thought was a lame rip-off of Wrath of Khan, and did not love) and I still want to see The Fifth Estate (which received a lackluster NYT film review) and maybe hear him as the dragon in The Desolation of Smaug. Maybe. I didn’t see the first Hobbit film though, and have no desire to. I’m anxious about having to sit through movies that drag. Though most people said the second Hobbit film was a lot better than the first.

Having finished The Rosie Project, I am now reading Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (published 2007), which is the most horrifying, pain-inducing memoir I have ever read in my life.

I have owned this book since it was published (my copy is 7 years old now)– and maybe I delayed reading it so long because I just knew how painful and horrifying this book would be to read. A long, long nightmare through hell. Only it’s not an imagined hell, or any hell ever described in a religious text, but hell on earth, and the woman suffering through that hell penned the book.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was beaten a lot growing up.

A lot.

Tied down. Tied with her wrists and ankles together. And beaten for hours on end. By her mother and grandmother. And once, by a Muslim religious teacher, who smashed her head against the wall and broke her skull, which almost killed her.

I have read the passage describing her female genital mutilation (at age five) three times now– a procedure that was performed with a pair of old scissors, and no anesthesia, and involves cutting out the clitoris and inner labia, and then sewing the outer labia closed. That way, a girl cannot have sex, and her husband has to rip her labia open with his penis (or cut her open with a knife) the first time she has sex, so there is no doubt about her virginity.

I keep hoping the horror of this atrocity will diminish if I read the passage again, so it won’t show up in my nightmares– but so far, this strategy is not working. I am horrified and sickened anew, to an equal extent, each time I read those paragraphs.

I also went online and typed “female genital mutilation” into Google, just to see what images came up, and found pictures of a roomful of 3- and 4-year-old girls who had all just had their clitoris and inner labia cut out (with old scissors or rusty razors or glass shards or rusty knives), which means the girls are lying in the dirt with their legs spread open, blood everywhere.

I am in intense pain when I think about female genital mutilation– a pain that registers in my arms, shoulders, neck and head. There is nothing– nothing— more fucked up on the planet right now than FGM. Climate change, overpopulation, Fukushima, nuclear waste, civil war in Syria and Central African Republic– all of that is fucked up. But the number of women and girls who suffer cruelty, brutality, humiliation, and torture in the name of religion and cultural heritage– that is the most fucked up of all.

Sometimes I want SO much to be able to live in one of these places for a year, or two years, and start a writing program for a community that doesn’t yet have one. I know I could learn a new language to the extent that I could make this happen. Other people have done this, and I would like to do this, too– because journaling, writing, and sharing stories– sharing stories about the “shameful” garbage that people “are not supposed to talk about” (because, God forbid, you might “upset someone” with the truth)– that’s where healing takes place. I love Doctors without Borders. I’m so thankful that organization, and many others like it– exists.

But the world needs Writers without Borders, too. People who help make a safe space for local community members to speak up. For themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren.

Yes, I know I am white, and NO– this is not some kind of Great White Hope thing I’m talking about. This is not me thinking, “Wow, I could use some self-esteem, because I’m so white and privileged, why don’t I go to Africa and save the ignorant people who live there. Because I am the Only One who can save them. Because I am White and therefore Smarter and Have All the Answers.”

No, I certainly don’t have all the answers. They do though. And building a writing center, and bringing people together, introducing a new form of community sharing, a place where all are welcome and shaming the shit out of people gets checked at the door—

I’d really like to go to a place and say, hey, let’s try this.

Let’s build a room where people can meet in a place of openness and acceptance. Kind of like how I imagine church should be. Or a mosque, or a temple, or any other holy space. Except people are sharing their stories, rather than hearing a sermon. They might even organize a journal or newsletter to publish. They might build a library right next to the gathering space. They might have computers in the library, and free internet access.

They might share stories and heal.

Maybe, if we can help extract the pain of FGM from the women who’ve already suffered from it, and help them understand it’s okay to let go of that pain and not inflict it upon their daughters–

well, that is called excising a tumor. And FGM is definitely one fucking mother of all tumors.

So I’ll keep this hope alive, that I might have the opportunity to do this one day. I still want my little writer-in-residence cottage in my backyard. But I would really like to do this, too.

I have been very lucky this week. My first novel received two more reviews on Amazon (both excellent!) and two reviews on Goodreads (by two different reviewers, people who do not use Amazon, and don’t post reviews there).

One of the Amazon reviews was from the leader of my book club, Pat, so I’m super-relieved she enjoyed the book. Our book club focuses mostly on literary fiction, and as my work is commercial fiction, there was a possibility that my novel would be an epic fail. Fortunately, the elements that make the story run long (with a print copy page count of 629 pages) made the book palatable to Pat.

My personal tastes also run toward literary fiction, which is definitely why I broke the rules of writing “a short first novel,” and allowed the book to be as long as I felt it needed to be. In this case, long enough to develop all of my characters sufficient to the level of plot. When commercial fiction is all plot, and skimps on the character development… well, that is the commercial fiction that makes me want to burrow into my reader-equivalent of a hedgehog nest.

Behold: my chosen hidey-hole from commercial fiction that is full of blam-blam shoot ’em up run-fer-yer-life action, but with cardboard characters I can’t bring myself to care a whole hill of beans for. That kind of story works for some people. Just not for me.

Also, hedgehogs are one of the cutest animals ever.

I need to put a hedgehog in one of my books. Soon. Maybe my next book (the one after Mark of the Pterren), which will feature vampires. Maybe my vampire main character needs a pet hedgehog. I will have to ponder this.

To continue with book news: there might be a possibility another book club in Durango will read The Etiquette of Wolves. Dean, the owner of Four Leaves Winery, might be able to help me reach out to book club members who dine in his restaurant (which is very close to the train depot). My awesome friend Elizabeth Silverstein is helping me facilitate this Extremely Cool possibility.

Which brings me to the fact that I have to order more print copies of the novel (in order to have them to distribute to more readers)– because I have run out (I ordered 20 originally)– and thank goodness my state income tax return came in! (Well, this is Greg’s return, really, as I made only $78.00 last year in royalties. So I wouldn’t have been paying income taxes at all.) Greg received enough money back from the state that I can place another order for 20 copies of Wolves (which will cost $200.00) and I can also order 20 copies of Love and Student Loans and Other Big Problems when it’s available in print next month (again, another $200.00 for reader-distribution copies).

I feel very, very lucky that the income tax money came in at this crucial juncture. It would suck to have the possibility of getting readers (and more reviews!) but not have the ability to get the book out.

I meet a lot of writers in Durango who assume that books will just “magically sell” as soon as they’re published. If the book is penned by Stephen King or Janet Evanovich, by all means, this is the correct assumption to make. Their books sell, but not because of magic. Those authors meet a particular demand for their work, and consistently put out new product to meet that demand. That’s why they sell. There’s a lot of strategy and hard work involved.

The writers I meet who think they can avoid studying the craft of writing altogether, pen a memoir with their current skill set, and then make millions of dollars from said memoir (or from their just-finished thriller, or historical fiction book, or their memoir-novel– which is how I describe the many, many writers I meet who write a memoir, change a few names in the memoir, and then call their missing-facts-memoir “a novel”)–

Well, these are the writers who seem to be most concerned with “selling” and “striking it rich”– like writing stories is the new ’49 Gold Rush.

It’s not.

It’s a lot of strategy and hard work.

It’s a lot of Being Thankful that people are willing to Take the Time to read your work.

It’s a lot of Being Thankful that your closest friends are willing to buy the book, so you don’t have to provide free copies for everyone (which is what traditional publishers do– they provide free copies to booksellers– which is why I am doing that, too. I need readers. It’s the fastest way to get readers).

I don’t always have the best strategies– (I’m definitely the tortoise in that infamous race)– but I keep plodding along toward the finish line. My career isn’t a race, it is My Career, and I don’t mind being my meticulous plodding-self where my career is concerned. I didn’t commit myself to writing because I assumed this was easy. I assumed this would be A Lot of F-ing Work. And it is.

But I do dream. I dream and dream and dream. I would like to build a cottage for writers one day, and run a writer-in-residence program in this cottage (which will be in my big backyard). I would invite college students from my university to live in my writer-residence cottage.

I also have trips I would like to make, for books I would like to write.

So yes, of course I dream of what I could do with $300,000.00 (build my own cottage) or $90,000.00 (pay off the mortgage on my mother’s house) or $20,000.00 (live in Turkey for a year and write a book about Suleiman). Yes please, I would like those things.

But right now, the goal is much simpler: find readers. One by one, keep reaching out, keep looking, keep getting free books into skeptical hands.

And Thank My Lucky Stars I have friends who are helping me. I’m not in this alone.

But I continue to be surprised when I meet local writers who think they can pick up a pan, dip it in the closest river, and start scooping up gold nuggets the size of a baseball. Like they can’t understand that for every Gold Rusher in California who struck it rich, there were thousands and thousands who failed. Even the ones who struck it rich worked their butts off.

And yet, this idea of something-for-(basically)-nothing persists.

All successful businesses take massive work. Especially businesses in entertainment. If writers want a get-rich-quick scheme, I suggest marrying into the Russian oligarchy, who are disgusting and corrupt and will shower said writer with money he or she did not have to work for.

For the non-49-er writers: there’s a blank page on a Microsoft Word doc that needs your attention.

This was a very full, very busy week for me. On Monday, April 14, I met with my book club, Women Reading Women, and my book club will be reading my first novel for our meeting next month.

Here are the lovely women of my book club (minus Wendy, who is on vacation in Kauai, but will be back soon):

Pat, on the far left, is the leader and founder of this book club, and she turns 80 this year. She had a crone ceremony for her 70th birthday, and wrote an article about it that was published in a press in Minnesota. She read the article to us during the meeting on Monday. Suffice to say, Pat is one of my heroes, because I want to be giving myself a crone ceremony when I turn 70, and be reading books like crazy, as well as gardening and playing tennis and everything else when I am 80. (Except I don’t garden or play tennis, so for me, I’ll be hiking and hopefully taking trips to Fiji to lay on the beach).

I so admire aging well. Embracing age. Loving age. It’s not something our culture aspires to, but it’s something I want to do well.

Maybe some of you read about the fallout involving Kim Novak’s appearance at the Oscars this year. She chose to respond to the criticism over her plastic surgery, and called it “Oscar-bullying.” You can read a brief article about it here.

Kim Novak went from looking like this:

To this:

And Donald Trump said, “Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!” as Twitter lit up with comments.

My sister and I were both shocked by her appearance (I thought those deep lines in her cheeks make her look like the Joker, which I later discovered are a result of the fat injections she’s received). The image of Kim Novak’s face at the Oscars was another prime example of why I will NEVER receive plastic surgery (unless I’m in an accident and need the surgery for major deformity, in which case, I will be more than happy it’s available). But using plastic surgery as a fountain of youth? Um, no. I don’t think anyone looks better going under the knife, or the needle. I think our faces are best left alone.

On Tuesday this week, my sister came over to visit, and spent two and a half days devouring my work in progress, Mark of the Pterren. I’ve never seen my sister read, consume, and adore one of my stories this much. She read 715 pages. It was pretty amazing. Listening to her respond to the chapters, and seeing how intensely she felt the words on the page, I had one of those writer-moments where a voice in my head said, “This is as good as it gets.” That I wrote a book that someone I love could want to fall into, the way I want to fly to Fiji and fall into the warm ocean water there… the author-part of me said, “Good job.”

The author-part of me also said, “Why aren’t you done writing this book yet?”

Because my sister is also in love with my next two books– which I have outlines for, and a first chapter for one– but other than that, they only exist in my head, and the brief plot points I’ve shared. But my sister wants them, and so does a friend who loves vampires, and another friend who loves mermaids and anything with magic, and so did the two women I talked to at Laini Taylor’s book signing. By switching to fantasy (rather than contemporary, real-life stories), I’ve discovered that people are a lot more excited to talk about my stories. Maybe because it’s easier for me to talk about those stories.

Sometimes I hate to admit this, but I think all the criticism I originally received about my first novel– that the story was “ridiculous and fantastical, not grounded in the real world at all” or that it was “a cheap knock-off of Skull and Bones” or that I had no right to pen a novel “based on Yale, if you didn’t go to Yale”– I don’t know, there is just a LOT of that criticism that still swims through my head, and every time I yank the root of one comment out of my brain, another one appears to take its place.

Plus, I get sad that friends of mine read early drafts of chapters, decided my writing sucked (because it did, I’ll be honest, I am not a born genius with words, not a writerly incarnation of Beethoven here), and determined they would not read any more of my work. I don’t regret all their criticism, as only the negative feedback forces the story to truly grow, or forces me to grow as a writer. Positive comments fuel the enthusiasm to fix it (they give me the strength and ability to edit), but the negative comments tell me what to fix. They’re both essential.

I wanted to get all these reviews for my first novel on Amazon, and I thought, surely my friends, who I’ve helped in so many ways, and done so many things for– surely those people could do something nice for me now, and leave me a review.

But the truth is, that’s not the way life works. Life isn’t here to provide easy fixes. If I want reviews, I’ve got to go find people to read the book (because 87% of my friends don’t want anything to do with it)– and that means going up to strangers, or people I barely know, and selling myself and my work.

So I’ve been taking my book around, and passing out free copies… and it’s brutal and humiliating, but sometimes fun and exciting, but always, always nerve-racking and painful, so painful that this is the reason why authors want agents and publishers so badly: to relieve them of the intensity of this pain– the pain of selling your own work like you’re some impoverished hobo peddling hemp bracelets that smell like ass– because that’s what it feels like to self-market a novel.

But for as bad as it gets sometimes, as horrid and painful as self-marketing is– I never think of stopping, because I also receive pictures like this:

from friends who DO love my work, and DIDN’T give up on my writing (after reading lots of shitty chapters) and tell people, “Hey, read this book!” And they don’t say it’s a knock-off of Skull and Bones, or based on Yale, or anything else that the book most clearly is not. They are my 13% who are rooting for me, and would be disappointed if I said, “Well, fuck this, I’m getting a real job now.” They are my fans, and the amazing thing is, you can write without any fans, and you can write for five fans, or you can write for five hundred fans, or five million– the important thing is to Just Write, and after you publish, to Continue to Write for those fans, however many you happen to have. It’s not the number that matters, it’s just them.

When I describe The Etiquette of Wolves to strangers now, I say, “It’s about these badass women who track down a killer.” Which still doesn’t come very quickly. This is still something I struggle with– a lot– being able to say, in one sentence– in that sentence– what my first novel is about.

I have to get better at this. It’s a learning curve. It’s a hard learning curve. As hard as teaching myself to write.

There’s a certain joy to it though. A certain freedom. It’s about overcoming my own shit to do something brave. That’s always a good thing.

And when I do it well, someone snatches the book up. Says, “Oh my God, I’m reading this!” Then I get another Amazon review. And an email that says, “I loved your book! I bought your second one immediately! I can’t wait to read it!”

Life is always going to push us into places of pain. How we get through that pain determines everything. Including how many Amazon reviews we receive.

I had such a FANTASTIC time at Laini Taylor’s author event at Bookworks in Albuquerque on April 8 — and I didn’t embarrass myself — which is even better!!

This could be due to the fact that I wrote Laini a letter the night before the event, and I did buy her the chocolate truffles, even if she can’t eat food from a stranger:

I gushed and cried as I wrote this letter to her (seriously, I am that much of a freak, and yes, that is Hello Kitty stationary, circa 1999, because I just don’t write that many letters anymore)– but penning this letter meant that I didn’t babble incoherently or lapse into silence or cry when I talked to her — and I’ll count that as a victory any day!

Greg and I left Durango early Tuesday morning, and a man who needed a ride to Albuquerque rode with us. We’d never met the guy before, but he was nice enough, and I typed in the backseat while he chatted with Greg. Four hours later, after dropping him off in the north part of town, we drove straight to the bookshop, because I had to get my hands on Dreams of Gods and Monsters ASAP, and I wanted to know exactly where this event would be held, and just bask in the moment a bit.

Bookworks is such a cute store, in this really cool plaza next to a restaurant and jewelry shop, and here was the sign at the plaza that greeted us:

I made Greg take this picture of me with the sign because — oh godstars — is there anything cooler than reading a sign like that??? Uh, no.

After picking up my copy of Dreams of Gods and Monsters, surveying the store, and eating lunch at the adjoining restaurant, we checked into our hotel, and spent the next three hours walking around Old Town Albuquerque. The weather was warm, a lot of shops were open, Native Americans were sellling silver jewelry on blankets, and every time Greg strolled into an art gallery, I devoured more pages of the book.

And this book is good. SO good. So incredibly, awesomely, insanely good. I kept tearing up as I read. And I kept wishing I had time to finish the book and write another letter for Laini before the event.

But no. I can push myself to read fast — but I can’t push myself to read good books that fast. Especially not books as incredibly, awesomely, insanely good as Dreams of Gods and Monsters.

So my eve-of-the-talk letter would just have to be enough.

After walking around Old Town for hours, I did something really girly I usually only do once a day — I went back to the hotel, and combed my hair (cause it was pretty tangled and windblown). I also changed my tennis shoes (which have cushy soles for walking), and put on my flat shoes again, because I dislike towering over people, which is pretty much my fate in life. I was too giddy to eat dinner, but I thought Greg might be hungry, so at 5:30, we headed back to Bookworks.

By the way, here are the free bookmarks the store gave me with my copy of the book:

Pretty awesome, yes? Those owls!! So cute!!

Greg decided he didn’t want to eat dinner at the same restaurant again, so he strolled around the other shops. I went into the bookstore and claimed a front-row seat. There were only 30 chairs or so, and only 4 had cushions… so I did some rearranging, and gave Greg and myself cushion chairs in the front row. (Cause you can do stuff like that when no one else is there yet… one of the perks of arriving so early.)

Then I rearranged the first and second rows, and pulled them away from Laini’s author chair an extra two feet, cause I thought the first row was positioned way too close. The woman running the event was fine with this change, and even helped.

That woman’s name was Connie, and she had made a “smashbook” (aka “scrapbook”) as a thank-you to Laini for coming, which she asked me to sign, and I did, and then I passed this book around to other early-arrivals for them to sign, too.

These early-arrivals were… oh my gosh, they were like me in non-me shapes and sizes — voracious readers who freaking Adore the Hell out of Laini Taylor, read her blog like the fan-freaks we are, practically tattoo the words on our bodies when we drown in her prose — and spending the next hour talking and making friends like this — *dissolving in happiness now* — for real.

Eventually, it was 7:00, or 7:15-ish, or something like that (my phone was silenced, and then completely turned off, because I would die of shame if that thing made a peep while Laini was speaking) — and at this time, the room was Beyond Packed and crowded, and Connie took center stage.

She shared the story of how Laini came to be speaking in Albuquerque to debut the final novel in the Smoke and Bone trilogy, she had us all make weird animal noises so she could retrieve a giant feathered bird head and put it on display behind her, she had us play a Smoke and Bone trivia game (SO fun!! I loved this!) and when it came time to bring Laini out, she had us chant like we were yelling, “Rocky! Rocky!” and I started clapping my hands as I did this, so everyone else clapped too. It was awesome.

And then Laini was there, and Connie finished her introductions, and Laini asked if she should do a reading or just have a Q&A, and the audience responded with YES, do a reading– DO ALL THE THINGS.

So Laini did a reading, only she didn’t have a book with her– and everyone around me had books, but they were in bags, and mine wasn’t–

So I jumped up and gave her my book like the freaking groupie I am, and Laini read Chapter One from MY copy, and so my book is now like, a holy object:

She had on a black dress with cool stockings and those little ruffly-pants, and she also had a green jacket, which she took off, because the room was so warm (hello, crowd, so glad you could make it!) and she wore a necklace of feathers.

The first question she was asked: “When did you become so awesome?”

Yeah, seriously. Laini crackles with awesome like a sparkler– you can hear it in her voice, you can feel it when you’re near her. This woman is simply amazing.

I asked her at least three questions, toward the end. I asked her which three places have been her favorite to travel to (answer: Italy, France… and she also described her trip to Morroco, which she took as a gift to herself after Daughter of Smoke and Bone was published, as she’d never been there before). I asked her some writing questions about her blog, I asked her if she still puts stickers on her calendar (answer: yes!) and she even asked me where I had travelled, and when I told her I’d been to India twice, backpacking in the mountains, her eyes got all misty-happy and she said, “Oh, I’d love, love to see India one day!”

That was so cool– and I felt more than a bit crazy-happy that Laini had asked me a question (the raving lunatic fangirl who is like, barely keeping it together).

When the Q&A session ended, we folded the chairs and put them away, and Greg scored FIRST place in the book-signing line. (I hadn’t asked him to do that… but he understands my freakdom by this point.)

So my books now bear Laini’s gorgeous signature:

She has such a beautiful way of writing her name… *more fangirl gushing*!!

The thing about Laini Taylor is, she went to school for writing, and after graduation, she was trying to write literary fiction… and it was such a drag, that she grew to hate writing, and went to art school.

So she didn’t write for ten years.

And then the Harry Potter books came out, and she fell in love with them, along with other great books that were published around that time… and she fell in love with reading again, and this rekindled her love of writing… and she finished writing her first book when she was 35.

Even though my books were the first to be signed, I hung out till the end. I hung out in line with the fangirl friends I had made. I took pictures of them with Laini. I invited one to stay till the end with me, put on the Karou wig and the Madrigal horns, and get our pictures taken with Laini. Here’s mine:

I knelt down for this picture, so I wouldn’t tower over her, as I’ve learned that pictures look better when I’m not quite Jolly Green Giant-size. I wore a Fighting Illini shirt to this signing because it’s one of the few shirts I own long enough to tuck into my pants. I don’t watch college football (or basketball). But this shirt also has sparkles on it, which is cool.

And you can see Laini’s feather necklace. And books behind us. This is now one of my favorite pics ever.

Have I mentioned how Totally Freaking GOOD Dreams of Gods and Monsters is yet?

Oh my gosh. SO good. I’m up to page 400 or so… and must finish it today… so thanks for reading about my trip to hear Laini speak! And I hope you devour her books!!

I am sooooooo excited tonight! Because tomorrow, I’ll drive to Albuquerque, and listen to Young Adult author Laini Taylor talk shop at Bookworks!!!! (A book store I have never visited before– another cause for excitement!)

Here is Laini Taylor, the pink-haired author of one of my favorite books ever, Daughter of Smoke and Bone:

And here is the book that is debuting tomorrow, the third book in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy:

I LOVE that cover!! I think it’s the best cover of all three books! Days of Blood and Starlight (the second book in the trilogy) had a great cover, but this one is just so… so WOW. Karou looks so badass on this cover!! Like I-am-going-to-mess-you-up-and-eat-your-liver badass. It’s insanely awesome.

Laini Taylor is such an amazing writer. I can’t wait to meet her! I’m writing a letter to give her tonight, letting her know how awesome I think she is. I might also drive to Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, here on Main Street, to buy some dark chocolate truffles to gift her, along with this letter.

I know she probably won’t eat them (would you eat chocolate truffles from a stranger?) but I still want to give her something because her books are So Damn Inspiring. On a plot level, on a character level, on a sentence level. Daughter of Smoke and Bone is simply perfection, so I’d like to give Laini something to honor the fact that I Totally Adore Her Work.

I just have this problem with spazzing out when I meet authors I’m gaga for.

Like the time I met Michael Ondaatje.

He was in charge of selecting films for the Telluride Film Festival a few years ago, so I paid this crazy sum of money (like, $300.00 or something) for a Telluride Film Festival pass, just so I could see Michael Ondaatje.

Yeah, I know. That’s a bit psycho. Especially considering how he wasn’t giving a reading or anything, or talking books, he was there to select films and discuss High Film Culture. (Which I don’t even pretend to understand… though I adore reading film criticism… even if the stuff at the Telluride Film Festival is way over my head.)

But back to Michael Ondaatje:

I carried his Booker-prize winning novel, The English Patient, in my backpack the first time I went to India (in college), and that book was like, my Bible. Like something so sacred, I might as well have been carrying the ashes of Buddha or the necklace of Saint Peter in my bag. Holding that book, even now, feels sacred to me.

So what did I do when I finally met Michael Ondaatje?

Did I speak to him? Did I tell him how much I love his work?

No, of course not.

I did manage to approach him. I walked up to him after his film talk in the courthouse. I stood in front of him, I shook his hand. I think I managed to smile.

Then I fled the room… and started crying before I even made it out of the building. Not “tears of pain” crying– no, these were like, tears of joy, and too much emotion, and too much awe, and all of that embarrassing stuff. These were like, “I can’t believe I just TOUCHED Michael Ondaatje!” tears.

I have mad skills at embarrassing myself. Like crying because I touched someone. Seriously.

So God only knows what I’ll come up with when I meet Laini Taylor. I know I won’t cry (because I don’t carry her book around like the ashes of Buddha), but I really, really love her book, and that means I will probably babble and gush and nonsense will come out of my mouth.

But such is life. Really great writers and really great writing has the ability to reduce me to incoherent mush (or complete silence). So here’s hoping I don’t embarrass myself too badly! And maybe writing a letter first will help me not to babble so much!

I finished reading Catch-22 today (a week after starting it), and I must say, after reading a book that long and unenjoyable, I feel like I deserve a Medal of Honor. Reader Perseverance is so underrated sometimes.

I once heard a bestselling author at a book signing say, “Catch-22 is the greatest war novel ever written.”

Um, yeah. That is not my opinion. At all.

I read another 100 pages on the train ride home, and a girl next to me asked what I was reading, and what the book was about, and I said, “It’s like Mel Brooks doing World War II.”

She looked at me funny, like she didn’t understand. So I said, “Mel Brooks directed Blazing Saddles… so it’s like the Blazing Saddles version of World War II. Only without a real central character, like if every person in the movie had fifteen minutes dedicated to learning about them, with information that was completely separate from the plot. And racism isn’t a feature of the book. Though there is one very minor Native American character. But the main character doesn’t have a true friend or try to save anything, he’s a coward who’s terrified of being killed and keeps running around naked and acting like a crazy jerk so he’ll be sent home. All the women in the book are vapid sex objects, and most of them are referred to as ‘whores’ rather than by name. There’s a lot of misogyny in this book. It’s actually one of the biggest themes.”

“Oh my GOD!” the girl said. “I love Blazing Saddles! That book sounds wonderful!!”

“Blazing Saddles is a great buddy movie,” I agreed. “Only this book isn’t about buddies. It’s about the fear of death, and, to a lesser extent, the fear and hatred of women.”

The girl still seemed to think this book was amazing. I’d really sold her by comparing it to Blazing Saddles. That movie also features women as vapid sex objects, and the only woman with a speaking role is a prostitute– so I still think the similarity holds. And the general nonsensical craziness of a Mel Brooks movie. That’s very much Catch-22.

But take this passage from the novel, one of many examples I could use of the rampant misogyny in the book. Here (on p.277), a psychiatrist is trying to help Yossarian (the pseudo-main character) decipher a dream he’s been having:

“Do you ever have any good sex dreams?”

“My fish dream is a sex dream.”

“No, I mean real sex dreams– the kind where you grab some naked bitch by the neck and pinch her and punch her in the face until she’s all bloody and then throw yourself down to ravish her and burst into tears because you love her and hate her so much you don’t know what else to do. That’s the kind of sex dreams I like to talk about. Don’t you ever have sex dreams like that?”

You might think I’m being silly, not understanding the humor here, and that the psychiatrist’s words are meant to be completely absurd… but this is not the first time hitting/slapping/whipping/hurting women during sex has been mentioned in the book, including statements that one woman liked to be whipped during sex, but her husband was too lame to satisfy her in bed.

One of the most depressing lines of the novel comes toward the end (p.383), as Yossarian is wandering the war-torn streets of Rome, full of anger, resentment, and fear of death, full of his own cowardliness and hatred of life… and he takes in the sights around him, including random passers-by:

“On squishing straw sandals, a young woman materialized with her whole face disfigured by a God-awful pink and piebald burn that started on her neck and stretched in a raw, corrugated mass up both cheeks past her eyes! Yossarian could not bear to look, and shuddered. No one would ever love her.”

Because in Catch-22, women only exist to be sex objects (or are viewed as old women well past the age of serving that function), so a woman whose face is disfigured can no longer receive love.

As if the novel couldn’t get any more brutal. There’s no one heroic in the tale (male or female), nothing to root for… just absurdity coupled with observations like that.

That second passage reminds me of my friend Annie, who says, “A lot of older books, I just can’t bear to read. They’re too hurtful. The sentences those authors write… they hurt me too much. Their viewpoints are too… trapped in the past, too negative against women, and it’s too much. I can’t let those sentences into my mind.”

That was how I felt reading Catch-22. I would have rather not let this book into my mind. But I want to teach grad school one day… one day far away, like when I’m 60 or so… and I will need to have read this novel to be a good teacher. So I read it.

Now I want my Medal of Honor for Reader Perseverance. Because that was a long, agonizing book to read. Granted, the book is a comedy, and supposedly full of humor, but not the humor that makes me laugh or even crack a smile– though I read with due diligence, read for understanding, and finished.

Now I must dash off to the library. Because when I finish a book I haven’t enjoyed, my response is to get it away from me, as fast as I can, so those sentences don’t occupy space around my body anymore.

But I want to read The Rosie Project and Red Rising soon… looking forward to both of those books. Yay!!

You learn something new every day, and on this trip to California to visit my brother and his family, I learned that March 29 would have been my father’s birthday.

It seems bizarre to admit I am 33 years old and didn’t know that. But there’s no accounting for the random information I learn on these trips I’ve taken with my mother over the years.

She shared that factoid with me shortly after I convinced her to pose in this selfie with me:

My mother had never been in a selfie before, and I told her, don’t worry, I was in my first selfie just a few weeks ago, and they’re easy-peasy once you get over the whole narcissistic-taking-pictures-of-yourself thing.

I took like, twenty selfies of us right after we boarded the train. What can I say? My mom is very cute and I’ve always liked taking pictures of her. She has a sweet, fragile nature, and I always see this part of her in photos.

We boarded the train in Grand Junction, Colorado, and my mom wanted to spend the night playing a card game with me, wherein she selects a card and asks me the question printed on it, such as, “If you could pick any famous person to travel with, who would it be, and why?”

Me: “Does the question specify whether living or dead?”

Mom: “No. Either, I guess.”

Me: (thinking, thinking, thinking…) “Jon Stewart! Because he’s sweet and funny and I’d laugh the whole time.”

My mom chose Carl Sagan, who she remembered from guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson as “a short, fascinating guy, who always had interesting things to say.”

So our answers are kind of similar, as I’m pretty sure I’m at least six inches taller than Jon Stewart, but definitely think of him as “a fascinating guy, who always has interesting things to say.”

Sometimes I think any woman who loves The Daily Show has some kind of crush on Jon Stewart. Cause man, the sheer cuteness of being as smart as he is… Devastation Factor 11.

But alas, I didn’t want to play this travel-question card game all night. I wanted to read Catch-22 and Rainbow Rowell’s first published novel (an adult novel, published in 2011)– Attachments.

At first, I found both books equally agonizing to read. Attachments suffers from an unfortunate beginning, as neither one of the two main characters drew me in for a long, long time.

And Catch-22, after beginning with the enticing promise that I might get to read about gay love, dissolved into a scattered narrative illustrating the various absurdities of the world, from government ineptitude (especially as it concerns the military) to the nature of fear and brutality. Couple that with a misogynist tone (unavoidable, as the novel was written by a man and published in 1961) and the disappearance of that delightful chaplain Yossarian fell in love with at first sight, and the reading was hard work to plow through.

But I read on.

Attachments turned a corner and became more enjoyable. But Catch-22 just became more agonizing. The entire book is supposed to be humorous, but I am also someone who struggled to read Kafka’s The Trial, and Catch-22 is Joseph Heller’s Kafka-esque critique of the Korean War, which he set during WWII, and published during Vietnam.

So there’s a lot of mental juggling going on to read it. As well as the fact that a scattered, diffuse narrative isn’t exactly my thing, along with irony communicated in sentence reversals and meaning-negations, Catch-22 is not the breeziest novel to get through.

So I try to channel myself into the mindset of an 18-year-old boy circa 1968 (when the book was most popular), reading this novel in between protests on the Washington Mall, yelling those, “Hey, hey, LBJ!” invectives and holding up anti-war signs and projecting anger and disgust at the absurd Trip through Stupid that was the Vietnam War. (Though I would never spit at returning combat soldiers, or call them baby-killers, because that is just wrong.)

In Catch-22, Yossarian is a bombardier, which is the position Joseph Heller served in during WWII. And anyone who drops bombs from airplanes… there’s no telling who they have killed.

It’s a lot of horror to live with.

But the horror of war doesn’t really come across in the novel (at least, not in the first 100 pages I’ve read). Like I said, this story is focusing on the absurdity of war in a Kafka-esque manner, and written to be very humorous, very bitterly ironic. It’s not at all like reading The Things They Carried or A Long Way Gone.

And I don’t know if people compare Catch-22 to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass, but I can definitely say that Catch-22 reminds me of the versions of Alice in Wonderland I’ve seen on stage, with the constant absurdity and craziness going on.

So I finally took a break from Catch-22 and went back to reading Attachments.

By the mid-way point of Attachments, I was addicted. The book begins with three adults who are all passive losers: one is a married woman whose husband wants a baby (she does not want a child, but will have one anyway), one woman is in a long-term relationship with a self-absorbed musician who will never propose (and the woman desperately wants a husband and children), and one is a 28-year-old man living with his mother and still coping with getting dumped by his high school girlfriend.

All three of these principal characters seemed like they were in their mid- to late-thirties to me, not their twenties. At least, that was how they felt in the first half of the book. As I gradually warmed to the story, I tried harder to convince my brain that the characters were all in their twenties. I mostly succeeded.

By the midway point, the characters stop being so passive and start to express some agency in their lives, which was when I fell in love with Lincoln and Beth and their story. Rainbow Rowell’s amazing talents are here in this book, just not quite in the same abundance as Eleanor & Park and Fangirl. Rowell needed more time to build up steam with this novel, but I still found the story lovely and satisfying and beautiful.

I was so sad when I ran out of pages to read. Rowell had me so hooked by the end. I was total putty by then, unhappy doing anything else but reading more about Lincoln and Beth.

Then I had to return to reading Catch-22.

Erg.

I tried.

But I gave up and sat daydreaming, which is what I do best. Tiggers bounce, and I daydream.

And now I’ve been in Modesto, California for two and a half days, hanging out with this little bundle of giggles and smiles:

I also spent time with Elana’s parents…

I think I might have a picture of them somewhere…

amidst all the baby photos…

ah yes, here they are:

My handsome little bro, Dale, and his beautiful wife, Jessica. Here they are in front of the building where Dale works in Modesto.

But seriously– yawn, right? Cause how can they possibly compare with THIS–

Those cheeks! That lil face! All that CUTENESS!!!!!!!

It’s been a fun few days with the baby, especially watching her play and baby-talk with all her burbling cooing noises. Elana makes a lot of cute sounds. Dale and Jessica are truly amazing parents, so smart and super-loving that they really are a Very Big Deal, the kind of awesome parents I wish every child could grow up with.

In a few hours, I’ll be back on the train… with my copy of Catch-22… and no Elana…

Erg.