The Healer’s Rune is Now Available for Pre-Order
My debut fantasy novel, The Healer’s Rune, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The name is wrong in Amazon’s description, but fear not, for it is the right book. Corrections are in process.
Go Set a Watchman
Initially, I was not going to purchase this book. I feared it was a gimmicky release published in order to capitalize on the popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird. However, as a high school English teacher, I knew people would ask my thoughts about it, so I capitulated and purchased Go Set a Watchman a few days after its release. I have waited so long to review it because I am still putting my thoughts about it in order.
The first thing I noticed about Watchman was the narrator’s style. As I read, I could hear Kim Stanley’s voice from the 1962 movie adaptation of Mockingbird. The tone and style of Watchman are consistent with those of Mockingbird, and I felt I was visiting an old friend.
A very old friend, as it turned out, who didn’t remember events the same way I remembered them…
In Watchman, when Jean Louise remembers the trial of Tom Robinson, there are some details that are wrong. In Mockingbird, Tom’s left arm was lame but entirely present, and Tom was found guilty at the trial. In Watchman, however, Tom’s left arm was missing, and Tom was acquitted.
One thing Harper Lee did with this book that was new at the time she wrote it was to experiment with stream-of-consciousness writing, a technique in which the author presents a character’s thoughts and reactions as a constant flow, replicating the thought processes as realistically as possible. This technique was well implemented many times, but there were a few times when Jean Louise’s thoughts wandered and never came back, leaving me confused.
I would have been able to overlook these things, however, if it were not for the message of the story.
Watchman is told from the perspective of an adult Jean Louise who has moved from New York but travels home once a year to visit for two weeks. When she arrives this time, she discovers that Atticus is involved in a communal group that opposes some recent Supreme Court decisions regarding segregation and the equality of blacks. While the exact issue was never addressed, because of the novel’s timeframe I received the impression that it was somehow tied into the desegregation of schools and equal rights. Jean Louise discovers that Atticus is involved in a community council opposed to these ideals and, while it is made clear that he is not against equal rights, Atticus does advocate a mindset that was very common to the cultural setting of the plot: one that views the agrarian South as a superior civilization in which the black man, while free, was not advanced enough to responsibly assume equal rights.
As with To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story in which the adult Jean Louise reaches a new level of maturity. However, Watchman addresses the disillusionment all adults experience when they realize the parents they idolize are mere humans, just like the rest of us. As in Mockingbird, the catalyst for maturity is the discovery of an ugly cultural mindset. However, while Scout’s new maturity is displayed in her ability to transcend the communal prejudices of Maycomb, in Watchman the development of Jean Louise is portrayed by her acceptance of them. While she doesn’t agree with Atticus, she does consent that he is right on some level.
For this reason, I cannot advocate this book.
It is bad enough that the editor let the book go to print with such glaring discrepancies as those mentioned above. These issues could have easily been addressed, especially since the original author is still alive. But the fact that Jean Louise, as a normative character, accepts the view that Maycomb puts forth entirely ruins the book. When I closed the back cover, I felt as if I was closing the door on a meeting with an old friend I just realized I never really knew.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Last summer, at the AP Lit. Conference in Austin, the teacher sitting next to me was reading this book. I have been searching for it ever since, and finally had my local mom-and-pop bookstore order it for me. It was so worth the trouble!
This contemporary novel falls under the genre of magical realism. It is a tightly structured, well told story about a computer programmer fan of fantasy fiction, people who love books, Google, and the quest for immortality. I can’t tell you anything else, or it will give everything away, but I can add this: the cover glows in the dark! That’s not just a marketing gimmick, either, but an excellent visual of one of the story’s major components. But wait… I’ve said too much.
This story was one of those that I’m still thinking about after I’ve put it down. It satisfied my longing for a story I could fall into and love, which is hard to do lately. I highly recommend this book.
Goals
“Keep a diary, but don’t just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and an end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It’s great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary” (John Berendt at Writer’s Write <www.writerswrite.co.za>).
I’ve tried writing every day many times, but each time I stop for two reasons: because my writing time is VERY limited, so I want to make very word count, and because these attempts consistently felt like the daily list mentioned above. However, I firmly believe that writing is like mining—you have to dig through a lot of dirt to find anything of value. I need a way to practice writing without consequence in order to mine the nuggets worthy of public notice, so I’m resolving to try again with practice on the level of the above quote. (Thank you John Berendt.)
With that in mind, I sat down to write about today and realized that I had no vignette, brief or otherwise. May 14, 2015 was just like every other day of walking half-asleep through my usual routine. I had no way of differentiating this day from most others.
Ruminating about how to approach this deficit of significance let me to thinking about writing scenes. Conventional wisdom states that each scene has to have a goal. If it doesn’t, how will you know what should happen or when the scene is over? If I’m going to write my day as a vignette, then shouldn’t I identify my goal first?
This question flowed into an examination of how I spent my day, which boiled down to proctoring finals for my high school literature classes. During the other 179 days of the school year, however, I am teaching. In order to plan what to teach, I have to begin by considering my objectives, or goals: What do I want students to learn or master in each particular lesson, and how will I know if my goal was achieved? My thoughts circled back on themselves at this point (a frustratingly common occurrence) to ask again what my goal for the day was.
That’s when I realized that I’ve lived each day mostly goal-less. I have overarching life-goals, of course: to live a peaceful life; to have a happy marriage; to be a good mom, a good writer, a good teacher. But what does that look like on a daily basis? If I don’t have small, micro-goals to achieve each day, then how do I know when I’ve attained my life-goals?
Henry David Thoreau wrote that he wished to live deliberately “and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived” (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods). This has been one of my driving desires since my high school years, but how will I know if I’ve achieved it. I’m beginning to think the answer lies in setting small goals.
What about you? Do you think that setting and keeping track of daily goals is important? Why or why not? If you do, what goals do you aspire to on a regular basis?
Photo Credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/98943100@N00/3082163605″>e1</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Oh, Happy Day!
Today I signed a contract with Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas to publish The Healer of Ennicy, the first novel in my Kirin Roh trilogy. Sooo excited!
You can view Lighthouse’s web page at this address: <http://lighthousepublishingofthecarolinas.com/>
Should I self-publish?
One of the questions I receive a lot is: Why not self-publish? Why subject myself to the rejections of editors who decline to publish my story on the mere basis that they didn’t “love” it? After all, writing is subjective, and what doesn’t appeal to one may appeal to another, so why not take my destiny into my own hands and publish my own story?
This is a fantastic question, and I have asked myself the same thing many times. My answer is this: Because that’s not what I want for my writing.
Allow me to explain…
I love to write, and I desire more than anything else to write WELL. This means I am constantly looking for ways to grow in my writing ability, and I have found that this is very hard to do alone. Possible, yes, but hard. I want a mentor, and I believe that an editor fills this position nicely. That’s also why I chose to be represented by an agent: with an agent AND an editor, I will have two mentors who believe in me and my stories enough to pour the kind of quality time and effort into my work that I will need to get better in my writing.
But, what has that got to do with you?
That depends on what you want from your writing, which is also my answer to the question of self-publishing. You are obviously devoted enough to your story that you believe the world needs to see it, and you’re right. The world needs more stories. How you go about getting your story to the world is as subjective as any agent’s decision to represent or editor’s choice to publish it: it all depends on what appeals to you.
Take the time to decide what you want from your writing. Commit to fully researching both self-publishing and traditional publishing, and find out exactly what each entails. Then make the decision that best gets you where you want to go.
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomasrousing/6897064987/”>Thomas Rousing</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>cc</a>