Happy New Year

Happy New Year 2015. I hope everyone has a great year ahead of fun, adventure, personal gains and accomplishment.

I am spending the holiday in Arkansas with my future in laws. It is 23 degrees here! My Florida bones don't handle that well.

My year will have lots of changes ahead. My fiance will be leaving the Army and moving to Florida. We will be moving from my apartment into a place of our own and getting into wedding planning mode for our spring 2016 wedding date.

I have also been challenged to a 2015 reading challenge we found on Pinterest. The wager for who finishes the challenge first is that the loser has to buy the winner any book they want from Barnes and Noble.

Needless to say, I am going for blood.

Have a great, safe holiday and head into 2015 with high hopes and realistic goals and it will make for a great year.

Write on. -T

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas 2014. I hope everyone is having a great holiday season and I look forward to a 2015 of writing,  updates and new projects.

There is still a spring release date planned for my first book so keep eyes open for that!

Thanks everyone for your continued interest.

With a New Set of Eyes: To Kill A Mockingbird

Most times I do not re-read books because there are so many that I still need to get to but I have found that the practice is very worthwhile in regards to the required readings of high school.

I took another look at The Great Gatsby as an adult and it truly changed everything for me. The book was so much more relevant and meaningful as an adult then it was when I was force fed it as a fifteen year old. The same holds true for To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Harper Lee classic was required summer reading the term before freshman year. At the time I had just turned fourteen. Fourteen! How can someone with such a small grasp of the real world even begin to appreciate the social hierarchy, racial tension, and literary breakthrough that this book is? They can't. The mastery that is 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was completely lost on me and every other high school student who has read accompanying notes instead of the book in an effort to not fail the test.

On one hand I understand that if some people aren’t required to read they will not....actually I don’t understand that but I digress. If in high school, when authority and fear of failing the tenth grade actually have some pull on students, the opportunity is wasted to introduce them to literary classics then those people may never in their life read them. However, the other hand shows the tale of a student who is forced to drudge through Shakespeare and literature that is not relevant to their lives and it turns them off of these stories forever. Who knows maybe later on they would have discovered them only to turn their nose down and remark 'ugh, I had to read that in high school, it's terrible.'

If this little blog does any good let it re-open your mind to considering revisiting some of these classics. To Kill a Mockingbird sheds a light on a time when racial inequality was considered necessity and protected in little Maycomb County Alabama. Atticus Finch, a literary power house of a character, takes on the defense case for a Negro man charged with the rape of a white woman. Precocious Scout Finch and her older brother Jem give us a look at racial tensions through the innocent eyes of children who are yet to be corrupted into thinking people are not equal. 

Layered in with the story of poor Tom Robinson and Atticus' defense is the mysterious recluse Boo Radley. Radley is such an intriguing character that in print hardly exists. We learn little about him but in his subtle way becomes a prominent character.

So many aspects of this story are ahead of its time, it is hard to highlight them all. The challenge of gender roles by Scout, the revolution that was a white man being defensive of a black man, the very mature life lessons learned by children showing that they are more than 'seen but not heards'. 

If classics have been on your list of things to read, or you buy those nice hard bound Dickens' and Austen's telling yourself that you will get to them, then add To Kill a Mockingbird back to your list. It will not drudge on, it will not fly over your head but it will make you appreciate the masterwork of Harper Lee and you will realize that literature, life lessons, and girl in overalls can all coexist and make you a better person.

To not read and appreciate this would be...well it would be like killing a mockingbird.

20%

On my way into work this morning the figure of 20% took on a very big, very new meaning for me. The report over the radio said that only 20% of men would read a book written by a woman. I am generally a cynical person and take the realistic view point but even I was shocked by this. As a writer, who happens to be woman, this discouraged me.

I tried to look up the source of this data but could not find one, so take it with a grain of salt but in the process of researching I came across another correlating article from NPR (link below) that says that men account for only 20% of the fiction market overall. There's that 20% figure again. The story says that men who do read lean toward works of non-fiction in overwhelming numbers.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14175229

The story goes into speculative reasons for why there is such a gap. One reason given is that women have a broader emotional range with more empathy so they gravitate toward fiction and find more enjoyment in stories. Another reason given is that in early childhood girls have a longer attention which allows them to grasp reading and comprehension earlier, thus leading to a lifelong love of reading targeted towards fiction. I'm not sure I personally believe all of what these theories say but there is no disputing the fact that men do not read fiction in anywhere close to the numbers that women do.

I think men read less overall and that has some weight on the imbalance but I also see how men are more concrete. They want hard facts that cannot be disputed. They don’t enjoy the nuances of emotional relationships and character tensions. They don't find value in love triangles, he said she saids, and whether or not the characters declare their secret undying love for one another at the end of the book. I am obviously generalizing here but I think overall the numbers and my observances prove true. 

Are we going to change natural male instincts now? No. But I think it's worth making a special effort with our young boys to inspire their imaginations and help them find the value in fiction. Without fiction boys would not have the role models of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. They wouldn’t have the adventures in the maze and the Hunger Games Arena and they wouldn’t be able to explore space with Ender. Fiction is just as applicable to boys as it is to girls and every child should know what it feels like to be swept out of reality and into an imaginary world.

Men value facts and hard bottom lines but they can also be taken back to their childhood envisioning themselves as the Roman hero or the British super spy. Fiction allows us all the change our circumstances. It gives us a place to go when we have to stay still. Fiction puts us in other peoples shoes and teaches us to accept, or at least appreciate, the value of another persons trials, tribulations, and triumphs.

I hope the next generation of our boys retains enough of the innocence and playfulness that will help them to become not only lifelong readers, but fiction readers at that. Everyone can benefit from a good story. In the darkest of times the words become a lantern; a lantern to safety, to healing and to acceptance. Who doesn't need that kind of light?

The Clock Has Struck Twelve

It is bewildering to me to look at the calendar and see December at the header. The cliché of 'where has the year gone' is smacking me right in the face and all I can do is offer the other cheek. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love December. I love the holidays, the parties, the endless list of opportunities for things to do, but it also brings along an end. Some years I welcome the end and approach it as a fresh start but more often than not I see another year passed, another year older, another year entrenched in some routine. 

This year December 1 has a new significance; it is the first day post NaNoWriMo2014. The month of November for me has been challenging but rich in lesson learned when it comes to writing and how I perceive myself as an author.

To recap  a bit; NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is a grass roots social event that aims to motivate writers all over the world to finally write those stories they say they have inside them. With a daily word goal of 1,667 and thirty days, come the 30th of the month you should have 50,000 words of a first draft on paper ready to progress with as you see fit.

This was my first year attempting NaNo and I fell short of the 50,000. As of this morning my draft has 31,025 words. Despite not meeting the 50k mark I am extremely proud of the results of the month's efforts. Here are some of the most important things I learned this past month:

-Writing is a job. 

If you want to write for a living that means it is a skill that you are paid to perform. It requires time, effort, talent, and rigidity. Living a writer's life is romanticized but make no mistake, it is difficult.

-Writing is pain.

I don’t mean the emotional kind, although this is a lot of that too, I mean physically. You will get calluses on your fingers, your neck with hurt, your eyes will burn, your butt will go numb. Of all of the ailments the fingers were the worst. Not only do I have to type consistently for my job but the added keystrokes of 1,667 words a day really took a toll.

-Consistency is damn near impossible.

NaNo expects that you write every day. The forces of the universe don’t give a crap about your regularly scheduled writing time. The Monday to Friday sessions weren’t too bad because it just naturally has a better routine about it but weekends and nights were tough. I missed several days just out of unexpected scheduling conflicts.

-My attention span is zero to none.

I have no idea how I make it through daily life. I swear when I am seated in front of task that needs doing I can find ANYTHING else to focus on. I would write a sentence or two and need to change the song on my iPod, another sentence and then I would see dog hair on my floor, a paragraph and the dishes magically needed to be cleaned that moment! The final count of 30k is evidence only to how involved I get in the writing once I get going. If things are on track I can ride the momentum for a bit before the inevitable distraction comes into play. This is the one area I can work on getting better at so my future projects progress more smoothly and efficiently.

-My writing space is not very inviting.

In my apartment I use my second bedroom as a library/office. Sounds like the perfect place to write doesn’t it? Surrounded by books and typewriters and dark wood? Ya, wrong. I found it very stale, uncomfortable and too formal. I did most of my writing on the couch or in coffee shops. I think the coffee shops allowed me to get out of my cave and make an event out of the session and the couch was more for comfort. The downside of both of these options is that it required me to use my laptop which is clunky and outdated. I have a beautiful iMac at my office desk but I did not want to sit in there. In moving forward on other projects I will need to decide what changes need to be made for the space to be used. I need to concentrate and commit but if I won't get in the room then I'm done before I even start.

                  On this December 1st I am glad that I took on the challenge of NaNoWriMo2014 as it has taught me invaluable lessons. I plan to take the month to read for pleasure and relax. The start of 2015 will bring the final edits of my first completed manuscript and will be spent getting the book into production and finalized! I have several other projects that are begging for my attention and when the time comes I will follow my momentum and make progress on the one that is drawing me most towards it.

              Will I go back to this first draft and continue on? I don’t know, I will leave the option open however. Although it was only 30 days worth of writing, the effort is there and perhaps it will surprise me with its potential at some point in the future.

NaNoWriMo2014 is at an end but a writer's life never stops.

Write On -T