When it’s 8:30 a.m. and your daughter is complaining she’s sick, ask yourself these questions:
1. Is she following you up and down stairs, while saying she’s too tired to move?
2. Did she walk downstairs (while reading) to blow her nose near you, before walking upstairs (while reading)?
3. Is she 24 hours into her first ever read of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?
If the answer to all of these questions is “yes,” then it’s reading fever, not real fever. You can send her to school.
I started the year with a rather long, bleak read. Afterwards, while I was lying on the bed in an oily puddle of depression and complaining to Min about the crushing nature of the book/month/season, he said, “there should be red warning stickers on sad books, so you can emotionally prepare.”
And then I showed him the red sticker on this book. Okay, it was a sticker saying the book had won an award. A big award. “Same thing, really,” I said (in my oily puddle voice). “They don’t give big awards to peaceful, happy, uplifting books.”
But they should.
And the shortlist should come out every January 2nd.
And then winter would seem just a tiny bit sunnier.
Min’s business partner treated us to a night at the Pan Pacific this weekend and oh my. Complimentary espresso? Why, yes please. Complimentary glass of wine before dinner? If you insist. Turndown service? Well, we’re sort of in the middle of watching the Miss America pageant*, but if you’d like to tuck us in personally…
It was lovely. (They didn’t really tuck us in. Maybe if we’d asked, though.)
The transition to real life yesterday afternoon was not so lovely. I had to do my own laundry, plan dinner, and care for my own children. How ridiculous. Plus, I’d been reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion all weekend and in that book, even the poor and ill-used Mrs. Smith still retains a personal nurse.
Sigh.
I’m afraid it’s back to work this morning, though I may have to wait a while for the Jane Austen to wear off before I can write anything. Or maybe I can weave “her cheerfulness and mental alacrity did not fail her; and while these prime supplies of good remained, she might have bid defiance even to greater accessions of worldly prosperity,” into my manuscript somehow. Would that be too noticeable?
You know the feeling, right? When someone passes you a rectangular gift, one with the perfect heft, and the dip along one side? And then you know there’s going to be good reading for the rest of the holidays.
This year, there were two books waiting for me under the tree, plus a loan on New Year’s Eve.
The first was 419 by Will Ferguson, winner of the 2012 Giller Prize. I’m guessing the book was chosen from the grown-up rack at Kidsbooks by my son, who has an eye for anything with an award sticker on it.
The second books was Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite writers. It’s possible I may have sent an e-mail to my husband before Christmas that read, “if anyone were to hypothetically be shopping for me, this would be a good choice.” Complete with cover image and link, of course.
And my New Year’s Eve loan was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which I’ve been wanting to read forever.
Overall, a promising start to my reading year!
I’ve been having my own private Structure and Plot 101 course around here lately, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on two newly purchased writing books.
Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat was published in 2005, but it’s new to me. Designed for screenwriters, it breaks plots into highly organized “beats,” and even dictates which beats should land on which pages of a 110-page script. Although I couldn’t make a full-length novel follow quite so rigid a formula, I did find the book enormously helpful. Along with the most thorough and achievable outlining strategy I’ve ever read, Snyder offers lots of silly but surprisingly helpful tips.
As a longtime fan of agent Mary Kole‘s blog, I had to buy her new book, Writing Irresistible Kidlit. This is a unique book. In scope, it’s designed for the beginner. It touches on absolutely everything you might need to produce a middle grade or young adult novel. And yet, there are plenty of pithy suggestions for more experience writers. Such as: ensure your character recommits to her goal at least three times, the stakes rising each time, culminating in a major recommitment immediately prior to the climax. (Have I mentioned that I love concrete advice? Step-by-step directions? Because I do.) This would be a great book to read with a completed first draft at your side. You could use it as a checklist, to ensure you’d fully developed your characters, included enough internal struggle, perfected your imagery, and so on.
Both books are well worth a read in the New Year, whether you’re starting a new project or struggling along with the old!
My daughter and I were deciding which book was next for bedtime read-alouds, and she settled on Little Women.
“Natalia loved it,” she said. “Beth is her favourite.”
What?? Back up the bus. Beth was her favourite? What kind of person picks Beth? I mean, she’s nice and all. Sweet. In a pathetic sort of way. Whereas Jo… well, Jo takes over the world.
I have agreed to read Little Women, but if my daughter decides Beth is best, I’m having genetic testing done immediately.
All of this got me thinking… There’s little Little Women. Emily of New Moon. What other portraits of the writer as a young woman exist out there? Suggestions welcome!
I think very little about my kids being brown, except when the cashier at the grocery store checks through my husband, my sister-in-law, and my children, and then asks if she can help me, separately. Or when my kids say their friends couldn’t believe they would actually eat cold fried rice and dried fish for lunch. Or when my daughter’s new friend looks at me and says, “THAT’s your mom? Are you ‘dopted?”
Really, I’ve only been mistaken for the babysitter a handful of times and I have to admit, my children look nothing like me. I have all recessive genes.
But when my daughter reads The Trouble with Dilly, by Rachna Gilmore, and says it’s the best, best, best book she’s ever, ever read, and then I read the first few pages and learn about the samosa shop, I have to wonder… is it fair that 99% of the books my daughter reads feature milky-white protagonists? At most, there’s a token brown-skinned sidekick.
I’m as at-fault for this as anyone. I don’t have any Burmese girl main characters to my name. It’s a sad state of affairs. After scanning through the Paper Tigers website yesterday, I’ve resolved to start stocking the house with more multiculturalism.
As for The Trouble with Dilly, it’s well worth a read no matter what shade your kids are. It’s a lovely book, in any colour.
I received a lovely prize package this week from Paper Tigers. I’m not sure how I became eligible for this prize, but I think it was through my immense talent for clicking “like” on Facebook pages. (I’m especially clever that way.)
Paper Tigers is an organization that fosters literacy and multi-cultural respect through books. They do many, many impressive things: run a website packed with reviews and recommendations for multicultural children’s titles; donate books to struggling schools and libraries all over the world; and work with small communities to ensure clean drinking water.
Needless to say, I’m feeling a little unworthy to receive this prize. I’ve donated the books to my children’s school, along with some Paper Tigers info. But we did read them first!
My personal favourite was Rain School, by James Rumford, about a little boy on his way to school for the first time, in Chad. He arrives to find that he will have to help build the school before he can attend, and then the year after… well, you’ll have to read the book for yourself to find out. Let’s just say my son was shocked, then amazed. You can scroll down here to find a student review, which might give some hints.
Thank you, Paper Tigers, and congratulations on your ten-year anniversary!
There’s a review of Seeing Red over at The Cozy Little Book Journal. Mary says “It’s creepy and gross and SO good.”
This reminded me that ’tis the season for all those gift-matching lists. Give I’ll Love You Forever with a decorative box of tissues, for example. I’m thinking that this year, I’ll promote “give Seeing Red, with a personalized scalpel set” or “Seeing Red, with a little box of blood jellies.”
Red’s a Christmas colour, after all.
Whenever I prove incapable of doing something simple — patching the hole left by the curtain rod which I incorrectly installed in the first place, for example — my dad (as he takes away my tools and heads off to fix the problem himself) mutters, “what the heck did I send you to university for?”
Well, let’s just acknowledge here and now that if I was supposed to learn fix-it skills at university, I flunked out.
But I apparently didn’t learn a thing about literature either, which I discover every time I take a quiz like this one.
Forty percent. Forty percent! And I (a) have an English degree, (b) am Canadian, and (c) supposedly devote my life to literature. You’d think I could pass a Canadian lit test.
What the heck did Dad send me to university for?!?
Probably to get me out of his house before I installed any curtain rods.