Because seven is a cooler number than eight.

Some people would have you believe there are no new stories to tell. Christopher Booker would have you believe there are only seven plots in all of existence (though he does allow for subplots under his comedy and tragedy headings, because (I can only assume) most people with a brain could tell you that “tragedy” is not, in and of itself, a plot). I admit I’ve never read his book, and I know better than to let TV Tropes suck me in while I’m trying to get anything done, so I’ll take a stab at those seven plots and say they’re something like this: Lord of the Rings, Oedipus (marrying your mom—is that comedy or tragedy?), Cinderella, Twilight (though I’ve never read it), Star Wars, Inception, and To the Lighthouse, though I still can’t tell you what happened in Inception, and something tells me Booker hasn’t read much Woolf if he thinks her plots would fall under a heading such as “The Monster.”

In grad school, we sometimes talked about someone (and, forgive me, I forget who, because I was almost completely uninterested in simplifying plot this far) who had said there were two: someone comes to town, someone leaves town (or, perhaps I’m mis-remembering because I just looked at Cory Doctorow’s page on Wikipedia; have you tried the random article feature? It’s as much of a time sink as TV Tropes). Read more »

Right now, I am in the middle of six books. The number jumps to fourteen, however, if you count books I’ve started and mean to finish but haven’t picked up in over a year. It goes up again to sixteen if you count the two books I’m reading (very slowly) in French. Seventeen if we include audio books. And I admit it: this is pretty normal for me. The number one reason I don’t finish books isn’t because I don’t like them but rather because I forget about them. I’m easily distracted by newer and shinier books, or at least by ones that I don’t have to walk all the way into the living room to retrieve.

Some people are one-book-at-a-time readers. It’s one and done for them, one and done. I don’t understand these people.

I like books to fit my mood. I like having books for all the many occasions that might arise. For instance, if I were to take a trip tomorrow, do I have a book that would (1) pack easily, (2) not earn me strange stares in public, and (3) engross me enough so that I don’t get bored in the backseat of the car, in the airport terminal. Then, there’s the book I read over meals or in the bathtub. This book is almost always a reread, something I can pick up and put down at a moment’s notice, something I could do without if I dropped it in the water and had to wait a few days to but a new copy. (True story: I dropped a first edition in the bathtub the other day; this was actually a poor bathtub choice.) Finally, there’s the book I think will impress my colleagues or my peers. Preferably, this book is also somewhat unknown so that I can recommend it to everyone I meet and it will be a new discovery for them. Read more »

As an early Christmas gift to myself, I ordered a copy of Of a Monstrous Child. It’s self-described as an anthology of writing relationships, with mentors* introducing the work of their mentees and vice versa (and it features Bark’s own Sam Ligon).

Three days ago, I finally started reading it.

I’m not very far yet—only through the first duo of introductions and stories, but this is largely because I spend most of my time with this book flipping through it. I glance through the introductions, looking for connections and observations, but then, when I start to read—really read—I let the book fall, let the pages close. Anthologies can be explored in any order, of course, but for this first read, I want to experience it in the way the editors thought best.

I met with a fellow faculty member yesterday to discuss a freelance writing course we may end up teaching together this summer, and our discussion eventually turned to the idea of mentorship. We talked about our experiences in our MFA programs (and before, in undergrad), talked about the ways the faculty helped us over stumbling blocks, the ways they saw and encouraged our strengths. We talked about times we hadn’t been challenged enough. Read more »

Probably my favorite book read this past year, though it's always hard to choose.

Here’s a quick recap of the book I read this past year, and those that I’m looking forward to reading this year. Only new reads listed (I’m a big rereader).

Top five favorite books of 2011 (in no particular order):

• Room, by Emma Donoghue
• My Happy Life, by Lydia Millet
• Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff
• Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
• You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon

Five most disappointing books of the year (not necessarily ones I disliked but rather ones that I expected more from)

• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender (loved it, but the ending disappointed)
• People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (great premise, but short on character development)
• Cathedral, by Raymond Carter (I struggled to get through this one, honestly)
• The Next Queen of Heaven, by Gregory Maguire (just not that much to say about it, and overly quirky)
• Inheritance, by Christopher Paolini (too much introduced, not dealt with, cliched characters and situations, etc.) Read more »

There’s a rock alongside a road on campus here, right next to the river, that was given to Michigan State University as the senior class gift back in 1873. On campus, it’s known as The Rock, proving either that simpler is better or that there’s a historical lack of creativity in naming things on campus. Almost every night, someone paints the rock. The tradition is that anyone can paint it, but if you don’t guard it all night, someone else can come along and paint over it.

I’ve painted it twice, though both times I was more of an accessory to the painting rather than the painter itself: once as part of a soccer team and once as a member of the marching band.

It’s rare for the same message to be left on The Rock two days running, and it’s become something of a campus tradition. Painting The Rock always makes the unofficial lists of the things you should do while at MSU, and there’s never a shortage of people willing to go, buy spray paint, then cover the rock with a new set of paint. (As an aside, there’s so much paint on that rock that no one knows how big it actually is.)

I teach a freshman writing course at MSU now, and I’ve focused my course on new media. I’m trying to get my students to understand that all forms of communication are valid and valuable, that Facebook posts and text messages should be just as thought out as formal texts, that it all matters. My students came in the first day not understanding themselves as creators of texts—that was what I did, what other writers did—and as they leave my class this week, this is the one lesson I want them to remember the most. It all counts. Read more »

Yes, this is a rant.

Back in July, my 3.5 year old Xbox died. Not wanting to shell out the money for a new one, I did what any normal person would do: I called customer support. I suppose we could label this mistake number one, though perhaps that was buying the Xbox in the first place.

“We’ll fix it for free,” they say. I double check. “Even though it’s out of warranty?” The guy practically interrupts me to assure that yes, it will be free. Well, except, of course, the money I have to spend for a box and packaging. (Hey, Microsoft, you should talk to Apple sometime about how they handle such situations. They send ME the box.)

Time passes, I’m finally contacted to ask, in more polite language than I’m using here, why the hell I’m trying to scam them by sending them an Xbox that isn’t in warranty. Oh, and that’ll be $150 they tell me.

Long story short (because trust me, you don’t want the long story), I’m out of luck. I have to buy a new one, which doesn’t work out of the box. So I haven’t to exchange it. The Xbox-approved method of transferring my saved games doesn’t work, I lose a ton of stuff (“We can’t imagine why that happened.”) and eight hours of my time (non-official support sites to the rescue!). By this point, I’m pretty pissed. I think I might have used the word damn once or twice. For me, that’s serious stuff. Read more »

A few days back, Kristina wrote a nice post about titles in which she says, “There’s a power in naming things.” I like this idea, especially as it pertains to written work (and perhaps it explains why I still struggle to work on my former-thesis manuscript; the title is dead awful). I used to read for Willow Springs and currently read for Hayden’s Ferry Review, and there are times, have been times, when I wished I could read the piece without noticing the title, because bad titles instantly put me in a bad mood toward the piece (for instance, I read a piece yesterday that had a word I didn’t recognize as the title, and when I looked it up in the dictionary and then on Google, I realized that it was a made up word).

So naming things is good. But on the other hand, I think it can sometimes be problematic, if not simply bad.

A few days ago, I met a writer friend of mine in a coffee shop near campus. We had decided to dodge the stress of Black Friday by writing together instead. Only, we didn’t end up doing much writing. It was so nice to be able to talk writing with someone else, that was all we ended up doing. It came out that he, like me, has a soft spot for genre writing—or for certain genres anyway—and has been given grief over the years for such a leaning. We both talked about writing classes where we weren’t allowed to write genre, and we talked about what that means.

You see, we distinguish different types of writing because bookstores like us to do so. But so many pieces don’t fit squarely into one genre or another. I think most writers agree that you can have literary work with genre elements (say, elements of magical realism, which is itself a problematic label to some), but less often do we recognize genre work with literary elements, which is what my friend feels like he is writing.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Matt Bell posted about it on Facebook the other day, too, wondering how we can apply the label of literary fiction to his work as well as to novels like The Help. The label here does us a disservice; it doesn’t actually tell us anything about a writer’s skills or a readers preferences.

My friend and I tried to define literary work, tossing parts of definitions back and forth for a few minutes before remembering that it’s a pointless discussion to have. “Character focused” some might say, but I’ve read genre work that focused on character development just as much as plot. It doesn’t help, not even to say that, like pornography, you know it when you see it, because, as Matt Bell pointed out, it depends on who is doing the looking.

Yesterday, my class president announced the date for my ten-year high school reunion. The event is still more than eight months away, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been thinking about it for some time.

What I miss about high school was, in many ways, the structure. Wake up, school, extra-curriculars, homework, bed—repeat for a total of five times. There were things we could do then that many of us have since lost: musical groups, sports practices, etc. For me, these things were band and, to a much larger extent, soccer. Our improvement in these activities was structured: time was scheduled for improvement. Now, we have to find that time ourselves, and we have become our own conductors and coaches.

What I don’t miss—what I think many people don’t miss—is the various personal and social aspects contained in the pre-college years. I don’t miss the social groups (though I found that they are just as present in college, and even graduate school, which makes me think we’ll never truly escape high school—or middle school). I don’t miss pressure put on you to be a certain something in others’ eyes, be it your friends or your classmates or your teachers or your friends or or or… Read more »

It’s recently come to my attention that many (?) writers have writing superstitions. According to a very quick and unscientific poll, that site found that 82% of their writers admit to having a writing superstition or ritual.

First, I think it should be mentioned that superstition and ritual are two very different things. It’s one thing to write at 6:30 every morning after having two pieces of toast (with grape jelly, of course), and something else entirely to, say, believe that your book will never sell if one of the chapters has 13 pages. In the first, I’m thinking that if said writer didn’t start writing until 7:15 one morning, all would still be right with the world (or if the grape jelly ran out and all that was left was strawberry preserves). In the second, I’m thinking that the odds are, in fact, against you even if your book has 12-page chapters, because hey, the number of people writing books far outweighs the number of those selling books.

Personally, I don’t have any writing-type quirks, either of the superstitious or ritual variety. I found that ritual kills my writing by giving me an excuse to say, “It’s 6:31, I guess that means I have to skip my writing today.” And superstition…well, I have enough other things to worry about. But I still think this merits an unofficial and highly unscientific Bark poll. Please click through and answer a quick four questions or leave your answers in the comments below. I’ll check in with the answers next week!

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Lansing-area NaNoWriMo kickoff party. I wasn’t sure I was going to go—mostly I just wanted to spend my Sunday afternoon relaxing on the couch—but this is the group I started back in 2005 and ran for two years.

Okay. I’ll be honest for a second. There’s another reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to go: I think of myself as more advanced than these other writers. I’ve got an MFA, I’m published, and I’m well networked in the literary world. I’m presenting at AWP, for heaven’s sake!

I’m a little ashamed to admit these feelings—especially since I blog regularly about making the writing world more inclusive, about not turning one’s nose up at non-literary work. These two thoughts don’t really go together. Read more »