The semester ended on Friday at CU, so I had my usual in-class parties for both my classes.
For my small Intro-to-Ethics freshmen class, which meets at 1:00, we had pizza and cupcakes. That course opens with our reading of The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy, which I present to them as the story of a life gone wrong: as he is dying, Ivan Ilyich keeps tormenting himself with the question, "Did I live as I ought?" And he keeps trying to reassure himself with the answer, "Yes, I did, because I lived as everyone else did." Only on the day that he is dying does he realize that that the answer is no, he did not live as he should have lived, and with that answer comes the relief of facing the truth and reorienting his life in his last hours toward what really matters. Then the rest of the course is structured as a series of books about how we SHOULD live our lives, with readings by Aristotle, Epictetus, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Trungpa (Shambhala). On the last day I have the students vote: if they could give only one of these books to a young Ivan Ilyich, which would they choose? This year, the winner was . . . Aristotle.
In my other class, Philosophy through Literature, which meets in the morning, we had donuts and orange juice for our party. This is the class where we read six books on utopia, each one with a different vision of a perfect society. I had the students vote on which was their favorite, which was the world in which they would most want to live. The default setting was our own world. And overwhelmingly, when they voted, our world won. Part of me felt disappointed that they had remained so conservative in their vote, so wedded to the familiar status quo. But part of me felt that it was a lovely thing, to survey all these visions of utopia and then decide that our own world, just as it is, was the most wonderful of all.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Groping
With my final Mason Dixon revision behind me, and the last of the in-term grading done for my two classes, and my signing off on my guest-editorship for the University of Maryland's Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly today (hooray, hooray), I am now officially in groping mode for a new book idea.
Some of my author friends don't need to grope for book ideas. They already have more ideas for books than they could write in a lifetime; their panic is never "What will I write next?" but "Will I live long enough to release these characters into the world who have taken up residence in my head?"
Some people just have very fertile and clever brains. Of all my writer friends, the one with the most fertile and clever brain is Utah picture-book author Rick Walton. I've heard Rick speak several times, and it's always amazing to behold how his brain works. Rick says that he writes - get this! - some two hundred picture books in a year. Two hundred. He says he might end up selling and publishing five or six of these, so he has a very low publication rate from his ideas. But because he has so many ideas, he ends up publishing a ton of books. And, I might add, a ton of delightfully creative books.
My brain doesn't work that way. I have to sit down and slowly, consciously, painstakingly create an idea out of nothing. I tend to create one idea at a time, usually no more than one or two ideas in a year. I lie on my couch with my clipboard, pad of paper, and pen, hour after hour, day after day, until I finally start to form my idea. But then when I have an idea, it usually gets published. I have a much higher publication rate for my ideas than Rick has for his. My brain isn't better or worse than Rick's brain. It's just different.
So now, as soon as I finish posting this, I'm going to put in a good hour of groping for a book idea. And another one tomorrow. And another one the day after that.
Some of my author friends don't need to grope for book ideas. They already have more ideas for books than they could write in a lifetime; their panic is never "What will I write next?" but "Will I live long enough to release these characters into the world who have taken up residence in my head?"
Some people just have very fertile and clever brains. Of all my writer friends, the one with the most fertile and clever brain is Utah picture-book author Rick Walton. I've heard Rick speak several times, and it's always amazing to behold how his brain works. Rick says that he writes - get this! - some two hundred picture books in a year. Two hundred. He says he might end up selling and publishing five or six of these, so he has a very low publication rate from his ideas. But because he has so many ideas, he ends up publishing a ton of books. And, I might add, a ton of delightfully creative books.
My brain doesn't work that way. I have to sit down and slowly, consciously, painstakingly create an idea out of nothing. I tend to create one idea at a time, usually no more than one or two ideas in a year. I lie on my couch with my clipboard, pad of paper, and pen, hour after hour, day after day, until I finally start to form my idea. But then when I have an idea, it usually gets published. I have a much higher publication rate for my ideas than Rick has for his. My brain isn't better or worse than Rick's brain. It's just different.
So now, as soon as I finish posting this, I'm going to put in a good hour of groping for a book idea. And another one tomorrow. And another one the day after that.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Mightier than the Sword
My revisions for Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters have been approved. Hooray! I was desperately in the mood for some nice news this week, so when I got the reassuring email from Nancy Hinkel on Monday, I sat in my office at CU playing a YouTube clip of "Put on Your Sunday Clothes, There's Lots of World Out There!" from Hello, Dolly over and over again. I can now say that I wrote and revised three 125-page books this year, more than I've ever done in one year before. This nice news makes up for a lot.
There's a wonderful scene in one of my beloved Betsy-Tacy books, Heaven to Betsy, in which Betsy, heartbroken in her crush on the Tall Dark Stranger, Tony Marcus, has a writing triumph of her own, when she reads aloud her amusing essay, "An Adventure on Puget Sound," to the uproarious applause of the high school.
"[Betsy] was happy. She was proud. Let Bonnie have Tony if she wanted him! 'The pen is mightier than the sword,' she thought. Sword wasn't the word, exactly. But it was the best she could find with the Deep Valley High School whistling and stamping its feet."
That's how I feel right now. I've had some disappointments in my personal life recently. But now I have a book revision that has been approved! The pen is indeed mightier than a lot of the other things that drag us down and make us disheartened. So right now I'm whistling and stamping my own two feet.
There's a wonderful scene in one of my beloved Betsy-Tacy books, Heaven to Betsy, in which Betsy, heartbroken in her crush on the Tall Dark Stranger, Tony Marcus, has a writing triumph of her own, when she reads aloud her amusing essay, "An Adventure on Puget Sound," to the uproarious applause of the high school.
"[Betsy] was happy. She was proud. Let Bonnie have Tony if she wanted him! 'The pen is mightier than the sword,' she thought. Sword wasn't the word, exactly. But it was the best she could find with the Deep Valley High School whistling and stamping its feet."
That's how I feel right now. I've had some disappointments in my personal life recently. But now I have a book revision that has been approved! The pen is indeed mightier than a lot of the other things that drag us down and make us disheartened. So right now I'm whistling and stamping my own two feet.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Back from Thanksgiving Break
Thanksgiving break is over; classes resume today at CU - two more weeks of classes before finals, and then winter break.
I have to admit that I dazzled myself with what I accomplished over the past nine days. My secret was that I had a traumatic upheaval in my personal life, and the only way to deal with it was to observe strict, life-saving discipline in my professional life.
In my most-favorite-ever book on writing, If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland, she talks about a hard-working friend who is a violinist and author. When her friend had a very bad head cold, Ueland recommended that she lie down, covered with a warm shawl, and drink hot lemonade (which actually sounds very appealing to me). Her friend replied, with horror: "Oh, that is no way to treat a cold!" Instead, she cured her cold by working harder than ever.
And I have found that the way to cure deep personal sadness is to work harder than ever. So I made a stern, extremely long to-do list. I required myself to cross off three things on this list every day during the break, with the exception of Thanksgiving Day, which I took off from work completely. So now, as a result of my toil, I accomplished: the revisions on Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters, laborious toil on the first-pass proofs for the issue of the Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly that I am guest-editing, an entire set of papers graded for my Philosophy through Literature class, a entire set of reading journals graded for this same class, a careful review of a hundred pages of writing from my mentee's novel, a review of nine submissions for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference, a preview of the final book I'm teaching in the Philosophy through Literature course, and more things that I won't even list here for fear of sounding even more braggy than I already do.
Plus, my broken heart feels tons better. It really does. My beloved philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote that "work is the only practical consolation for having been born." Amen to that, brother.
I have to admit that I dazzled myself with what I accomplished over the past nine days. My secret was that I had a traumatic upheaval in my personal life, and the only way to deal with it was to observe strict, life-saving discipline in my professional life.
In my most-favorite-ever book on writing, If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland, she talks about a hard-working friend who is a violinist and author. When her friend had a very bad head cold, Ueland recommended that she lie down, covered with a warm shawl, and drink hot lemonade (which actually sounds very appealing to me). Her friend replied, with horror: "Oh, that is no way to treat a cold!" Instead, she cured her cold by working harder than ever.
And I have found that the way to cure deep personal sadness is to work harder than ever. So I made a stern, extremely long to-do list. I required myself to cross off three things on this list every day during the break, with the exception of Thanksgiving Day, which I took off from work completely. So now, as a result of my toil, I accomplished: the revisions on Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters, laborious toil on the first-pass proofs for the issue of the Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly that I am guest-editing, an entire set of papers graded for my Philosophy through Literature class, a entire set of reading journals graded for this same class, a careful review of a hundred pages of writing from my mentee's novel, a review of nine submissions for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference, a preview of the final book I'm teaching in the Philosophy through Literature course, and more things that I won't even list here for fear of sounding even more braggy than I already do.
Plus, my broken heart feels tons better. It really does. My beloved philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote that "work is the only practical consolation for having been born." Amen to that, brother.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Why I Like Writing a Blog
Well, lots of reasons, actually. But the one that prompted me to write this is that when you put something out to the universe on a blog, sometimes it alerts the universe to send something back to you.
The other day I posted about my Thanksgiving week activities, which include going from shoe store to shoe store begging for empty shoeboxes to use for my church's Shoebox Gifts for the Homeless drive, which I coordinate every year. I have come to hate doing this, even though that didn't come through, I don't think, in my blog post. I'll call the stores, and they'll promise to hold the boxes for me, and then they'll forget, or give them to someone else, or they'll have boxes, all right, but without lids, or of weird sizes (humongous boxes for cowboy boots, teensy boxes for infant shoes), whereas I need boxes of a uniform, shoebox size. Of course, I could scavenge for boxes throughout the year, but something impels me to leave it to the last minute, which means that I go out on this miserable errand on Black Friday when all the parking lots are jammed, so if I do get a nice shoebox haul I have to stagger for miles to drag it back to my car.
I've thought about skipping the part of the drive where I hand out actual shoeboxes to people and just ask people to scrounge in their own garages for a shoebox that might work. But it's such a part of the drive to hand the boxes out in church. I sing a special song, to the tune of "Deck the Halls," and the congregation sings it with me:
Deck the halls with old shoeboxes. (Fa la la, etc.)
Fill the bottoms and the topses.
Fill with gifts to give the homeless.
Thus we share the joy of Christmas.
And then the children help me distribute the empty boxes, while we all sing. It wouldn't be the same with virtual boxes.
Okay. So I mentioned the shoeboxes in my blog. One of my readers, who is also a dear friend, emailed me privately to ask why I didn't just stock up on plastic shoeboxes from the Dollar Store or Big Lots. I am fainting with happiness at this idea! They will all be uniform in size! They will so nice for their recipients to have, people who need to cart their possessions from pillar to post. They will be so easy for me to get. They will look so much nicer stacked in the back of the sanctuary.
The rest of my life will be easy now, because of this new plan! Thank you, Kay!
This is one reason why I like writing a blog.
The other day I posted about my Thanksgiving week activities, which include going from shoe store to shoe store begging for empty shoeboxes to use for my church's Shoebox Gifts for the Homeless drive, which I coordinate every year. I have come to hate doing this, even though that didn't come through, I don't think, in my blog post. I'll call the stores, and they'll promise to hold the boxes for me, and then they'll forget, or give them to someone else, or they'll have boxes, all right, but without lids, or of weird sizes (humongous boxes for cowboy boots, teensy boxes for infant shoes), whereas I need boxes of a uniform, shoebox size. Of course, I could scavenge for boxes throughout the year, but something impels me to leave it to the last minute, which means that I go out on this miserable errand on Black Friday when all the parking lots are jammed, so if I do get a nice shoebox haul I have to stagger for miles to drag it back to my car.
I've thought about skipping the part of the drive where I hand out actual shoeboxes to people and just ask people to scrounge in their own garages for a shoebox that might work. But it's such a part of the drive to hand the boxes out in church. I sing a special song, to the tune of "Deck the Halls," and the congregation sings it with me:
Deck the halls with old shoeboxes. (Fa la la, etc.)
Fill the bottoms and the topses.
Fill with gifts to give the homeless.
Thus we share the joy of Christmas.
And then the children help me distribute the empty boxes, while we all sing. It wouldn't be the same with virtual boxes.
Okay. So I mentioned the shoeboxes in my blog. One of my readers, who is also a dear friend, emailed me privately to ask why I didn't just stock up on plastic shoeboxes from the Dollar Store or Big Lots. I am fainting with happiness at this idea! They will all be uniform in size! They will so nice for their recipients to have, people who need to cart their possessions from pillar to post. They will be so easy for me to get. They will look so much nicer stacked in the back of the sanctuary.
The rest of my life will be easy now, because of this new plan! Thank you, Kay!
This is one reason why I like writing a blog.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Revisions Done
I just finished my revisions for Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters and emailed them off to Nancy Hinkel at Knopf/Random House. As always happens, it took me VASTLY less time to do them than it did to dread doing them. When will I ever learn to replace dreading with doing?
Though I do think it might be simply part of the process to spend time in dread, dismal as that may sound. Before I can make revisions on a book, I have to get myself used to the idea of changing my original text, and sometimes even my original conception of how the story should go. Then apparently I have to spend time wondering if I should maybe just give up and throw the whole book away and start over entirely. Maybe that IS what I should be doing? Maybe that is what my editor thinks I should be doing? Maybe she's expecting at the very least a MAJOR overhaul of the book? The kind that should take months to do? But I don't have months to do it. So I just sit and do nothing.
Then time runs out for me. I have a deadline I have to meet. For better or worse, this book is going to be revised in days rather than years. No, in HOURS rather than years. Why don't I start with doing the few, small, specific things that my editor recommended? In this case, set up Mason's initial involvement with basketball so that it doesn't so clearly echo his initial involvement with pets in Mason Dixon: Pet Disasters, and with joining the school choir in Mason Dixon: Fourth Grade Disasters. That means rewriting the first chapter extensively - but not the whole book - and then checking to see that the changes in the first chapter reverberate appropriately through the rest of the book - but not in every single line. This also means rewriting the last chapter to add a new scene in which Nora, so unflappable in the previous two books, finally is flapped. And heightening some mentions of her unflappability previously so that her ultimate flapping carries more weight.
Friends, we are talking now about rewriting mere pages of a 130-page-long book, but in a way that will make a big difference in differentiating the story arc of this book from the story arc of its predecessors, while still keeping the familiar feel that readers seek in the third book in a series.
So it's done, and I've sent it off, and if Nancy Hinkel wants more changes, well, then, I'll make more changes. After sitting paralyzed with dread for a while first.
Though I do think it might be simply part of the process to spend time in dread, dismal as that may sound. Before I can make revisions on a book, I have to get myself used to the idea of changing my original text, and sometimes even my original conception of how the story should go. Then apparently I have to spend time wondering if I should maybe just give up and throw the whole book away and start over entirely. Maybe that IS what I should be doing? Maybe that is what my editor thinks I should be doing? Maybe she's expecting at the very least a MAJOR overhaul of the book? The kind that should take months to do? But I don't have months to do it. So I just sit and do nothing.
Then time runs out for me. I have a deadline I have to meet. For better or worse, this book is going to be revised in days rather than years. No, in HOURS rather than years. Why don't I start with doing the few, small, specific things that my editor recommended? In this case, set up Mason's initial involvement with basketball so that it doesn't so clearly echo his initial involvement with pets in Mason Dixon: Pet Disasters, and with joining the school choir in Mason Dixon: Fourth Grade Disasters. That means rewriting the first chapter extensively - but not the whole book - and then checking to see that the changes in the first chapter reverberate appropriately through the rest of the book - but not in every single line. This also means rewriting the last chapter to add a new scene in which Nora, so unflappable in the previous two books, finally is flapped. And heightening some mentions of her unflappability previously so that her ultimate flapping carries more weight.
Friends, we are talking now about rewriting mere pages of a 130-page-long book, but in a way that will make a big difference in differentiating the story arc of this book from the story arc of its predecessors, while still keeping the familiar feel that readers seek in the third book in a series.
So it's done, and I've sent it off, and if Nancy Hinkel wants more changes, well, then, I'll make more changes. After sitting paralyzed with dread for a while first.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Thanksgiving Break
For the fall semester at CU, we don't get a break until Thanksgiving week, two weeks before the end of the semester - terrible timing for those who yearn for a well-paced chance to catch one's breath. But this is when Thanksgiving falls, and so, for better or worse, this is when we catch our breath. At least we have all week to catch it.
I don't know how much breath-catching I'm going to be able to do, because I kindly - or foolishly - made the due dates for the second paper for both classes be right before the break, so that the students could relax during their family get-togethers, forgetting that this meant that I would have to spend MY family get-together grading, grading, grading. And I still have the revisions for Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters to do, revisions which should have already been done. I have a hundred pages of a mentee's manuscript to read, and I need to preview the book I'm teaching after the break, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, by Carl Elliott, to figure out which chapters to assign as required reading, given that it just now occurred to me that the book is simply too long for us to read all of it. And I have to drive around to local shoe stores collecting empty shoe boxes to use for our church's annual Christmas drive: Shoebox Gifts for the Homeless. At some point I'm also going to have to generate my share of the food for the Thanksgiving dinner, which we're having this year with the family of Gregory's girlfriend, Sierra.
But there will still be time for walks with Rowan, and watching a movie with Diane, and emailing old friends, and hanging out with the boys. There will still be plenty of time for catching my breath, and counting my blessings.
I don't know how much breath-catching I'm going to be able to do, because I kindly - or foolishly - made the due dates for the second paper for both classes be right before the break, so that the students could relax during their family get-togethers, forgetting that this meant that I would have to spend MY family get-together grading, grading, grading. And I still have the revisions for Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters to do, revisions which should have already been done. I have a hundred pages of a mentee's manuscript to read, and I need to preview the book I'm teaching after the break, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, by Carl Elliott, to figure out which chapters to assign as required reading, given that it just now occurred to me that the book is simply too long for us to read all of it. And I have to drive around to local shoe stores collecting empty shoe boxes to use for our church's annual Christmas drive: Shoebox Gifts for the Homeless. At some point I'm also going to have to generate my share of the food for the Thanksgiving dinner, which we're having this year with the family of Gregory's girlfriend, Sierra.
But there will still be time for walks with Rowan, and watching a movie with Diane, and emailing old friends, and hanging out with the boys. There will still be plenty of time for catching my breath, and counting my blessings.
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