Baby Steps

"What has been spoiled through man's fault can be made good again through man's work."

I Ching

Few Things Get Me to Stand Up These Days

Do I break my moratorium on buying new books to get Mockingjay? I can't decide. But I could use a good Hunger Games reading-coma.

I'm not dead, by the way, just very, very pregnant.

It's available on Kindle, which may make all the difference.

I need a sign. Today, I'm looking for a boy named Gale, a bird singing a familiar tune, or a muttation.

From: To Kill a Mockingbird

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

Harper Lee

*Keep on fightin' the good fight, bloggees. I'm a bit overwhelmed by injustice these days, but I'll be back soon with regular updates.

Reunited: It should feel good.

"Don't edit your soul according to fashion."

Franz Kafka

I recently taught one of my friends a secret trick I learned a long time ago from a magazine. When you feel like a giant failure (my friend is particularly vulnerable to people who make her feel this way), imagine yourself when you were 10 years old. Envision 10-year-old you meeting now-you. What does she think of you? Would she want to grow up to be like you?

That's how you measure success.

Why Being Told You Suck is a Good Thing

Let me tell you something true about me:

I HATE disappointing people. Yet, sometimes at work, I screw up. People come down hard on me, but no one comes down on me harder than I do. Because I hate to hear people point out things I did wrong--especially when they are choices I stopped and questioned, and then did anyway.

Maybe that's why this section of The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch is loitering in my mind:

"Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn't he?" he said.

I could barely muster a "yeah."

"That's a good thing," the assistant told me.

"When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you."

...

You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you and want to make you better.

Remember, bloggees. People tell you your writing sucks because they believe you have the potential to do better. Prove 'em right.

Your Freudian Slip is Showing

I keep typing "write" when I mean "right." I imagine this is my creative brain giving me subtle hints. It reminds me of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, a lovely writing book that talks about a Zen approach to writing. One thing the author, Natalie Goldberg, suggests is being aware of your typos--don't just fix them; let them teach you first.

She's full of all kinds of good advice:

"Continue under all circumstances. Don't be rigid, though. If one day you have to take your kid to the dentist when it is your time to write, write in the dentist's office or don't write. Just stay in touch underneath with your commitment to this wild, silly, and wonderful writing practice. Always stay friendly toward it. It's easier to come back to a good friend than an enemy."

Are you fighting with writing? Make up. Try to remember why you two hooked up in the first place.

From: The Secret Year

"I want to call you. I just looked up your family's number. I'm pretty sure it's yours because the address is on the flats, near the Higgins Farm Bridge. Would you want me to call you? I feel so cut off from you. It seems crazy that I don't even know how you are. Sometimes I love the fact that nobody knows about us. We have this secret, so juicy I can feel my mouth dripping. Other times, like now, it seems stupid to hide this way.

It's later. I just talked to you. You didn't sound mad. Your voice felt good in my ear."

Jennifer R. Hubbard

"There will be time, there will be time"

"To lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

John Lubbock

And Now You May Commence

"Pinocchio went out into the world filled with good intentions, with vision, he went ready to do all the things he dreamed, but Pinocchio was pulled this way and that, he was distracted, he faltered, he made mistakes, but he kept on.... Pinocchio, in the end, became himself, because the little flame inside him, no matter what crap he went through, would not be extinguished."

Patti Smith by way of UnBeige

Found on the Local Weatherperson's Blog

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression in unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

Martha Graham

iBooknapped

Somebody knows how to market their blog!

Someone was linking to these 10 Golden Lessons from Steve Jobs all over Linked In yesterday, so of course I had to stop in and check them out. My fave:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma--which is living the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Think about WHAT YOU WANT FOR YOURSELF today.

From: Letters to a Young Artist

"As an artist you are a student of the human condition. There is no syllabus. You can go to school and seek some structures, some techniques, some advice. Ultimately you must make your own course description, you must discover your own book list, you must make your own regimen, your own discipline. You can work as hard as you like. Or not. You can use the time or not. You can use the world--as much or as little as you like."

Anna Deavere Smith

A Favorite of Mine

"I hate writing. I love having written."

Dorothy Parker

From: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

"I had once seen Ajax, Father's best dog, get into a fight with a hummingbird and lose. The hummingbird had dived at him and spooked him until he'd trotted back to the front porch, looking very embarrassed. (It is possible for a dog to look embarrassed, you know. He'd whipped around and started licking his nether parts, a sure sign a dog is trying to hide his true feelings.)

Jacqueline Kelly

From: "The Guitar Man"

"Night after night, who treats you right?
Baby, it's the guitar man....

Then you listen to the music, and you like to sing along.
You want to get the meaning out of each and every song.
Then you find yourself a message
and some words to call your own,
and take 'em home."

Bread & Cake

From: "Hard to Make a Stand"

"We've got loud guitars and big suspicions,
great big guns and small ambitions,
and we still argue over who is God."

Sheryl Crow

Booknapping Ain't Easy

I've been wondering how I'm going to do this.

Um, let's see. I've been working on this brand new project, and it takes A LOT of time.

It's not like my usual stuff. For one thing, if this project gets published, it won't be for 20 or so years. But I love it anyway, more than anything else I've ever attempted.

It zaps my energy, though, and leaves me capable of not much else.

Here's a picture of how far I've gotten:

So there you go.

Lately, I've been in that proverbial room where artists go to be flogged by their muse, where they can be alone with their project to create.

I've missed you bloggees, so I'm getting back on my blogging wagon. I've seen so many words that I've wanted to share. Like these ones:

"No man is ever rich enough to buy back his past."
Oscar Wilde

(Thanks for that, Liz. I never responded but it obviously meant a lot to me.)

Have you been sidetracked by Life lately? It happens. You're forgiven. Now write.

From: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

image by Gordon Parks

"My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Langston Hughes

From: Graceling

"It gave her some pleasure to knock him on the head with the hilt of her knife. She grabbed his hair, dragged him onto his back, and dropped a pill onto his tongue. They would all say, when they woke to headaches and their shame, that the culprit had been a Graceling boy, Graced with fighting, acting alone. They would assume she was a boy, because in her plain trousers and hood she looked like one, and because when people were attacked it never occurred to anyone that it might have been a girl."

Kristin Cashore

From: "Thumbing My Way"

"No matter how cold the winter,
there's a springtime ahead."

Pearl Jam

Dueling Ideas

Somebody, I don't remember who (booknapper's hazard), once said, "I never run out of ideas, just time to write."

Currently, I'm knee-deep in writing a YA novel. Yesterday morning, a random image got me thinking about something that happened when I was 13. It doesn't matter what it was. What matters is that I started thinking, "I wonder if kids still do that these days?" Then I started thinking...yadda, yadda, yadda...MG fiction idea--the kind that won't quit flicking little ideas across the brain. You know the kind of ideas: This could happen. Then this could happen. The whole story would show young readers that...

The details don't matter. What matters is that I am knee-deep in a YA novel. And when you're knee-deep, that's when it's hardest to keep going. I am not waist-deep, which would imply half-way. I am further from the end than from the beginning, and when I glance back at the shore where I started, what do I see?

This shiny, new idea that requires half the word count of a YA novel. Possibilities reflecting off of it in every direction. But is it a mirage (aka, procrastination)?

Bloggees, I can't be the only novelist with a short attention span. What do you do when your ideas duel? Do you take time off of your current project and give the other a chance? Or is the only way to finish to ignore those shiny, new ideas and stay faithful to one project at a time? Help a blogger out.

A Thought for Friday

"I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure.... Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence."

-Allen Ginsberg

(Thanks, yet again, Mode Room Press for today's Daily Literary Quote.)

From: "Her Majesty Loses Her Touch"

"Back in the days
when I was called Queen of Cherries
I used to write.
Not like this.
I'd lie in bed at night
composing bawdy lyrics,
a regal drifter through my private orchard
of no regrets.
Cherries simply rained
down on my head."

from A Working Girl Can't Win
by Deborah Garrison

A Booknapping from the Depths of Despair

Hey bloggees, I didn't die, but I thought I might. I've been really sick--sicker than I've been in a long time. I thought I might never write again. Have you ever been so busy, so sick, so something, that you started to become blind to the light at the end of the tunnel? (I just typoed "The Light at the End of the Title." Children's book idea!)

I know I'm dramatic, but that's how my mind works, peeps. For a few days, I could not foresee a time in my life when I would ever have the strength or time to work, write, have a social life, or blog. I felt like I was so behind, I would never catch up. Then, I bit the bullet and called the doctor.

Long story short: I'm feeling better, more than better. Feeling like you may never write again does wonders for your motivation. I have washed the accumulated dirty laundry, both literal and figurative, and my betas have nudged me with a gentle but firm request for new pages. I am truly blessed, yo.

While I was gone, I hardly even read. That's how sick I was! But I did manage to catch a lovely turn of phrase here and there, and one in particular kept me going:

"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings."

Victor Hugo

I am back bloggees, with a vengeance, and I feel the need to look back on my time in the trenches and offer a hand to the peeps who might be there right now, wondering if they will ever write again. So help a bloggee out, peeps. Have you been there? How did you escape the doldrums of your life and get back to being a doer?

From: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

So, Howard Zinn died a few weeks ago, and I realized I never gave him a proper booknapping. Today, I am making amends. Howard Zinn was an incredible teacher, writer, and historian. If you haven't read his seminal book People's History of the United States, you might be a little under-informed.

Here is a booknapping from his autobiography:

"The events of my life, growing up poor, working in a shipyard, being in a war, had nurtured an indignation against the bullies of the world, those who used wealth or military might or social status to keep others down. And now I was in the midst of a situation where human beings, by accident of birth, because of their skin color, were being treated as inferior beings. I knew it was wrong for me, a white teacher, to lead the way. But I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it."

People who stand up or speak up for the little guys and girls are my my favorite kind of people. What qualities do you look for in a hero?

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

Dr. Seuss

This is one of my all-time favorite quotes! It's magnetted to my fridge. What's your favorite Dr. Seuss line or book?

A Rare Saturday Post

I loved the Daily Literary Quote so much, I had to immediately Web-nap it:

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Mary Oliver

Enjoy your weekends, bloggees!

From: Real Life

"Winners forget they're in a race, they just love to run."

This was in my fortune cookie last night. I think this sentiment applies to writing too. What's the best fortune you ever got?

From: "Sugar, We're Going Down"

"I'm just a notch in your bedpost,
but you're just a line in a song."

Fall Out Boy

Houston, I Have a Problem.

So, I don't know if you pay attention to the Just Reading list over there, but I've been reading Jellicoe Road since 2009. I am in a reading slump, y'all. It's not Jellicoe Road's fault. The book is great, but it got lost in the Christmas shuffle and never managed to regain my attention. I keep meaning to finish it, but now every time I see the orange spine on my coffee table, it feels like work. I'm so sorry Melina Marchetta. It's not you. It's me.

Something won't let me give up on Jellicoe Road. There's a mystery that I'd still like to solve.

Bloggees, do you get into reading slumps? How do you handle them? Start something new? Read an old favorite? Got any recommendations of titles that will get my finger hovering above the next page button?

From: "Closer to the Heart"

"The men who hold high places
must be the ones who start
to mold a new reality
closer to the heart."

Rush

My husband ruled the radio all weekend, so my head's spinning through classic rock lyrics this morning. Sometimes I get so used to the words, I don't hear them anymore. This one struck me as so apt for the times, I stopped in my tracks and jotted.

From: Music for Chameleons

"I started writing when I was eight... not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation."

Truman Capote

Me loves this.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, --
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

From: The Paper

A motivational article by Dani Shapiro appeared in the LA Times a week or so ago. In the article, Shapiro ponders what makes great writers. My favorite quote of the article:

"Every single piece of writing I have ever completed -- whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review -- has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.

Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away."

I also love that she calls the publishing industry "the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media."

Read this article if you've ever wondered if your continuing to write in the face of all the doom and gloom of the industry is yet another manifestation of your subconscious need to harm yourself.

Short on time? It's nothing new.

"But when shall I paint my starry sky, that picture which preoccupies me continuously?"

Vincent van Gogh

Now Showing: My Indecisive Side

I poster-napped this one from a library supply company. Sometimes I contemplate going back to school for an MLS so I can live the crazy life of a librarian. I've also considered enrolling in med school (after I finished editing a book on Emergency Medical Services), or just being boring and getting a PhD in literature. Just wondering--if money and time were no issue, what crazy direction would you take your life in?

"I've survived a lot of things, and I'll probably survive this."

J.D. Salinger's passing bums me out, but this article about Salinger by Lillian Ross got me thinking about his utter awesome-ness.

I've probably read Catcher in the Rye more than 20 times, and loved it more each time, but I don't think it'd be half as wonderful without J.D. Salinger being a total punk in real life. He saw the connection between being a writer and being narcissistic, and he avoided ruin by isolating himself from people who wanted to lavish him with praise--something he considered damaging.

In the New Yorker article, Lillian Ross says:

"The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them: the destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation. ...He talked about how easily writers could become vain, complaining that they got puffed up by the same 'authorities' who approved putting monosodium glutamate in baby food."

Have you read The Catcher in the Rye? Should we have a group reading of the original YA novel? I'll lead the discussion. Let me know if you're in, or if you're just a crummy phony.

From: "What Do Women Want?"

"I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath..."

You can hear Kim Addonizio read this poem aloud by visiting the Academy of American Poets Web site.

Loves her. Don't want to infringe on copyright though, so go read the whole thing. Read more from her book Tell Me at her author's Web site.

You Say It's My Birthday?

Over the weekend, Booknapped turned 1 year old!

I reminisced by looking over my first few posts. It's sort of like scanning a first draft when you're a few hundred pages into your manuscript. I had an idea of what I wanted to do here at Booknapped, but I really wasn't sure. You can sense that I'm blogging blindly, screaming into a megaphone and hoping somebody hears, and more importantly, listens.

So reader peeps, thanks so, so much for listening. I hope you find a book, a poem, a song you never heard before and that you LOVE. I hope it latches onto your brain like an ear worm and hypnotizes you until you forge to your independent book store for an inspired purchase.

Also, if you've been thinking about blogging, but telling yourself you don't have time, creativity, or a host of other qualities you think you need, stop bitching and start a revolution.

This only seems like a digression. Really it's about writing.

Quit complaining. It used to be way harder.

According to research, interval training helps you burn three times the calories you burn during regular workouts. Those of us who are time-challenged and a tad bit rotund know interval training is the shiznit.

Interval training is short bursts of manic working out (speeding up the heart rate) combined with longer periods of regular working out (bringing the heart rate back to normal). Apparently we burn a lot of calories getting our heart rates back to normal. We burn tons getting our rate back to normal a bunch of times instead of just once.

Another reason interval training works: When you only have to give your all for short bursts of time (think 15 seconds!), you actually give your all for the whole 15 seconds.

You know what I mean. I've done some long stretches on the old treadmill--and honestly much of it is just going through the motions--not trying as much as being carried along on the relentless drone of the conveyor belt. If I can burn just as many calories through 20 minutes on the elliptical (with 15 15-second bursts that get my heart going like a Grateful Dead drum solo), I'm all for it.

In my quest for more time, I'm considering if interval writing might produce three times as much good writing. I tend to aim for large blocks of writing time. Here's what happens in large blocks of time: I think I have so much time that an email check here and there doesn't matter. I read a blog for inspiration, which links to another blog, and perhaps a stop at Go Fug Yourself and next thing I know, I've read the entire cache of Cheezburger sites and written under a page.

Large blocks of time are harder to find the older I get, but I can usually create a half hour out of thin air. With interval writing, I get in a couple 30-minute blocks of nose-to-the-grindstone writing per day interspersed throughout so I can get my writing heart rate back to normal in between. Absolutely no breaks during the interval writing block! A single break can take over the entire block if you're not careful.

If you're having a hard time getting anything written lately, try interval writing. You gotta have 30 minutes lying around somewhere--while the chops are in the oven, while you're waiting for Idol to start, while you're supposed to be paying attention in class. Write at a pace that raises your creative heart rate--no editing, no reading through, no emailing your writing group about whether your main character should be 17 or 18. Commit to straight-up cardiovascular writing. Let me know how it goes.

From: "Passer Mortuus Est"

"Death devours all lovely things...

After all my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished;
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?"

from "Passer Mortuus Est"
Edna St. Vincent Millay

It's Friday: Why not laugh so hard you cry ?

I don't know if you watch the world news or if you watched it last night, but this is my new favorite humor blog.

From: "Thirty-three"

Deep in thought, I forgive everyone
as the cluttered streets greet me once again...
Tomorrow's just an excuse away,
so I pull my collar up and face the cold
on my own.

...

For a moment, I lose myself
wrapped up in the pleasures of the world.
I've journeyed here and there and back again
but in the same old haunts I still find my friends.

Mysteries not ready to reveal,
sympathies I'm ready to return:

I'll make the effort.
Love can last forever...

"Thirty-three"
Smashing Pumpkins

From: Jesus' Son

"There were many moments in the Vine like that one--where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons."

Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson

If you haven't read Jesus' Son, you're missing the best novel/collection of short stories of all time (in my humble opinion). It's dark and makes you wonder. It also illustrates a definition of "desperation." Oh yeah, and it's my favorite book. What's yours?

Looking for: Time

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears... and your time-management secrets.

Is it just me, or is 2010 moving in fast forward? Hopefully, it's just January. Although, I have been contemplating the possibility that the speed of life moves in direct correlation with one's age, so that every year the speed of time increases. At the end it just seems like your life is flashing by. In reality, you've reached your personal mach 4.

Anyway...

Got any nifty time-management tips to share? I've already given up sleep, but in my real-time life, someone suggested more sleep would boost productivity in my waking hours. I can't wait to test this theory tonight. So seriously, be creative. How do you fit it all in?

From: "A Mood"

"A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness--
Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness..."

T.B. Aldrich

Found: A Reminder

"The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."

Maureen Dowd
Thanks yet again, Writer's Almanac

Access Denied, Stressballs

"Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let's Confer.

I went to an SCBWI conference last year, which resulted in the following:

• I made a writer friend
• I made a few more writer friends
• I decided to never pay for a 15-minute critique again
• I rewrote my first chapter based on a 15-minute critique
• I embarrassed myself in front of an entire table of children's book editors and agents
• I decided I probably wouldn't be going to any more writers' conferences.

So anyway, I'm going to the SCBWI conference in NYC this month. For the first time in the history of ever, I'll be meeting my beta girls in person. If I stop posting around the end of January, you can assume that one of them has been lying about her identity for more than a year and that she has killed me and stolen my writings.

Anyone else going to the SCBWI Conference in NYC? Got any conference plans this year? Experienced attendees, tell me which is better: the down home SCBWI conference in Middle-of-Nowhere, PA, or the big fancy SCWBI conference in NYC?

How to Read 20 Books for Free

I hope you've been surfing through January, keeping those resolutions in check, reading some books, writing some words.

January is a busy time for the booknapper. It's when she puts her haus in order--not her actual house, which seems orderless, but actually runs on an irregular routine that only she understands. I am paying bills (and organizing the post-Christmas evidence of a pre-Christmas spending spree). I'm revising my goals, my budget, and all of my ideas regarding the universe.

Next: that dastardly TBR pile--my, how we've grown in 2009.

My 2010 goals are based on the work/life blend principle, or "worlindiple" (wer-lyn-dipple), my made-up philosophy in which I attempt to feed two birds with one worm.

Goal #1: No buying books, movies, or CDs until I demolish the TBR pile.

I know. I know. It's going to be tough, but it's also going to be cheap and rewarding. You know what helps when you're doing something tough?

Having someone do it with you.

So who's in? Anyone else want to put a moratorium on pop culture spending until his or her TBR pile is no more? Make it public in the comments.

From: "The Dead"

"She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her...

Like the tender fire of stars, moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls' tender fire. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: "Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"

Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past. He longed to be alone with her. When the others had gone away, when he and she were in the room in the hotel, then they would be alone together. He would call her softly:

"Gretta!"

Perhaps she would not hear at once: she would be undressing. Then something in his voice would strike her. She would turn and look at him...."

from "The Dead", a story in Dubliners, a short-fiction collection by James Joyce who said "One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature."

From: "The Final Cut"

"...If I show you my dark side,
will you still hold me tonight?
And if I open my heart to you
and show you my weak side,
what would you do?

Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?
Would you take the children away and leave me alone?
And smile in reassurance as you whisper down the phone--

Would you send me packing?
Or would you take me home?"

"The Final Cut"
Roger Waters

(And now for a Wikipedia-napping within a Booknapping: "Q Magazine once compiled a top ten list of depressing records, and this [The Final Cut] was on it. Enough said, I think.")