Attached to Books

I think my posts have been getting a little too long on the blog. I am constantly trying to edit myself but, sometimes, I just run away with words...

Today I'll be brief. I promise.

I've been thinking about physical attachments to books. I may have mentioned once or one million times that I live in a small apartment. There is simply not enough room to keep a massive library (though I dream of one...like in Beauty and the Beast, where the ladders fly across the shelves and I can sing as I browse.)

I came to the conclusion that I would not have a problem donating almost all of the books in my library.

As I have come to know a few authors recently, I have several books that are signed specifically to me and I would most certainly keep those.

But other than that, I only have a few select books that I feel the need to have in my home. I'm not a re-reader. I just like the idea that those books are near me.

So tell me. Do you have a physical attachment to books? Are there books you need to carry with you always? Are there books you need to have in close proximity so that you can read them again or do you simply need to know they are there?

Today is the last day to enter my giveaway for a collection of Beth Kephart books. So click and enter if you haven't already. I will announce the winner tomorrow!

A Home For the Past

I took a long walk through my neighborhood today. Through, what some would identify as, Carroll Gardens proper. New Yorkers are in epic disagreement about neighborhood borders (it is an endless conversation at dinner parties) so I can't give you the cross streets. Only to say: you know Carroll Gardens when you see it.

Streets canopied with trees. Gardens that stretch from the front steps of each brownstone to the sidewalks. Young professionals with baby bjorns and strollers, toting canvas bags from a trip to the Sunday farmer's market, bicycle helmets clipped to their messenger bags.

But there are also old women sitting on their stoops. Steeples of Roman Catholic churches creeping up towards the sky. And if you really look, you'll see them: Italian social clubs where men sit on plastic folding chairs playing cards.

As I bought an armful of used books, as I rummaged through boxes of old photographs and sheet music, as I continued to walk and look, I realized that it is a neighborhood trapped in a constant state of remembrance.

One shop after the other, desperate to hold on to an old Brooklyn. There are coffee shops with boxes and boxes of vinyl records lining the walls. Hamburger places that aim to mimic old soda shops. A modern day pharmacy (now called the Farmacy) that sells egg creams, sundaes, and tuna sandwiches at it's counters.

And it is a neighborhood that fights hard to preserve it's history. Tirelessly working to restore the nearby Gowanus Canal and conserve the gardens for which it gets it's name.

Today, I walked past a storefront I'd never seen before. To be honest, it looked more like someone's old apartment. Though it was closed, I looked through the window to find a shop full of junk. Faded newspapers scattered everwhere. Dolls and books and clothes in heaps on the floor. There was no order, that I could see, no rhyme or reason to anything.

But the sign in the window said it all: I appreciate all your donations to my store but I am overstocked. Please don't leave any more items at my door. Thank you!

And on a day like today, when there is just not enough room to hold all of our memories, when we wonder where we will keep them, I thought: this is what I love about Carroll Gardens. It is a place where it doesn't seem right to throw away the old. A place where someone is always looking to find a new home for the past.

It Wasn't A Dream! It Was A Place!

I'm feeling random today so this is just a mashup.

Because you can never get enough Beth Kephart in your life (just a personal philosophy) you should check out this Treasure Hunt. Two lucky winners will get a signed copy of her latest book You Are My Only and a 2,000 word critique on a work in progress. Did you catch that? Did. You. Catch. That? Writers, I think you should jump on the opportunity.

And of course, you can still win a collection of Beth Kephart books from my blog because I want you to fall in love with her books, as I have.

I did two things on the blog this week that I rarely do. I posted my fiction. And I put together the aforementioned givewaway. The only reason I have held back on doing these things in the past is because of fear.

Maybe you understand the hesitancy to put my work out there. But I'm sure you're wondering who, in the world, would be frightened to give away books? Me. That's who. Every time I post something on this blog I wonder: who will care?

And I'm always amazed, absolutely floored, that all of you do. You think I would have figured it out by now with all the times you've been there...but let me have my Dorothy-wakes-up-from-Oz kind of moment. Oh, but it wasn't a dream! It was a place! And you - and you - and you - and you were there. But you couldn't have been, could you?

Could you? You were. You are. So thank you.

The Balancing Act

While tuned in to NPR as I drove between Alabama and Georgia on Sunday, I listened with great interest to an interview with Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT.

Among the many topics discussed, there was an in depth conversation about our attachment to technology and how being constantly connected can lead to a new kind of loneliness and a new found social anxiety.

I found myself nodding vigorously as the conversation progressed. Yes, I know how that feels, I thought, as the interviewer confessed a compulsion to check her e-mail constantly, to obsessively follow up on blog comments, to answer every e-mail in her inbox before it becomes unmanageable, to post facebook statuses that look as if she is witty but not trying too hard. And to do all of this while being fully present in real life.

I don't think this anxiety is news to anyone. I suffer from it: big time. I'm nervous that I'm not living my actual life to it's fullest because my finger is scrolling to find a new e-mail. I'm worried about not being conscientious enough with my responsibilities in the digital world ('she read my blog today, what happens if I don't read her blog today?')

What did surprise me is that this panic is widespread, that people are desperate to find the right balance, that, as a society, we are unhappy about not being able to find it. And Turkle is not some kind of luddite. She's not recommending we shut out the digital world entirely. Technology is her life's work. She's been advocating for it her entire career. Instead, she's ready to start a dialogue about it.

This conversation was eye-opening for me because I feel pretty good about most of the ways I balance my time on the internet. A lot of the 'inadequacies' I feel in the digital space, I've been able to accept. I can't get to everyone. I can't do everything.

Except for one thing: I am very worried about my obsession with checking my e-mail. I used to have a really great system. I only checked it once a day and answered all of my e-mails in the evening. I felt really good about that system.

Since getting a smart phone, however, my finger is constantly at the ready, desperately searching for the alert that someone e-mailed me. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that I check it at least 100 times a day and it distracts me from many other things. (As a side note: all of this started when I began querying agents last year.)

So, I've officially decided to leave my smart phone home during the day and go back to that system of checking and replying to my personal e-mail only in the evening. By the way, I don't want anyone to read this post and stop e-mailing me or something. Because it would make me cry if all I got were ads. (See. Anxiety.)

I'd love to know if you're worried about striking the right balance between your real life and your digital life? Does it freak you out that there is actually a distinction between the two? (It totally freaks me out.)

And a quick reminder about my giveaway to win a collection of Beth Kephart books. You do not want to miss this.

200 Words. A Challenge.

I took on the First Campaigner Challenge. A 200 word piece of fiction that must begin with the words "The door swung open..." It is inspired by an abandoned church I discovered in my travels.

I hate rules. Only because I am doomed to always follow them. But this begins as I was told to begin it. And I am proud to say it is exactly 200 words. It is #275 on the linky list.

The door swung open and my wrists fell limp at the keys, fingers caught in memory, the abrupt halt of a note half heard. I kept my back to her, legs stuck to the sturdy wooden piano bench.

“Keep playing.”

I shook my head. No. That was not why I had gone there. That was not why she had come.

In the darkness of the empty church, faded hymnals rested at a pulpit where no one stood, and I was there, breathing in the stale air, so that no one would hear. I was there because it was a place that had been forgotten.

I imagined her blackened feet against the wooden floor as she approached. “It’s outta tune, I bet.”

“I like it that way. That’s how I want to hear things.”

“But how’ll you know you got it right?”

“I don’t want to get it right.” I was too used to getting things wrong.

She sat beside me, her long hair dripping down her tiny shoulders like honey. And she leaned forward, tired, as if she were only resting her elbows on the kitchen counter, smashing into the keys, ripping apart the silence.

It sounded like a sigh.

A Giveaway in Anticipation of Beth Kephart's You Are My Only

I have mentioned Beth Kephart on this blog before, mainly to say that I love her blog (which you must visit) and her books (which you must read) but not much beyond that. Not because I haven't wanted to say more, only because I have tried to understand why I love her books and have found it very difficult.

The experience of reading her young adult books is deeply personal for me.

I know it's not enough to say that the 'why' can not be expressed. It can be. I just haven't tried until today.

When I read her books, I am in them. Truly inside of them. A very safe place to be. These main characters, these girls, I know them, even if their experiences are vastly different than my own.

They are girls who are searching, who are curious, who want to understand and know. They are girls who are on their way to becoming and no matter how old I get I am still that kind of girl, always searching for a better someone to be. I'm always aware of a kind of ache in Kephart's books. Like resting inside of a long sigh. And I know this ache. It is familiar to me.

Her latest book, You Are My Only (due out on October 25th and available for pre-order here) is also a book about a desperate search. Two quests, really. Emmy, a young mother, searching for her lost child. And Sophie, who begins to question her world, seeking the one thing she doesn't know to look for. All of it culminating to a discovery that left me with sweaty palms and a racing heart as I turned each page.

There is color and hope and life in this book. When I imagine it (and I always try to imagine how a book really, truly feels) I think of paint against canvas, technicolor film on a page, every image, feeling, and character bursting, so real and vivid and bright.

As I read, I was let in and out of each scene at just the right moments, enough to feel that I was there, but aware of something just out of reach. And that's the shadow. The contrast. A secret. It is also what keeps Emmy and Sophie restless and yearning. What keeps me reading Kephart's books and writing my own because I, too, am desperate to know what eludes these girls. Girls like me.

I consider a good book a gift. And the way I see it, Beth Kephart has given me many gifts: her blog (a wealth of inspiration, a treasure), her books, and her friendship. And we are all so lucky because she is an amazingly prolific writer, the gift that keeps on giving, if you will, with twelve books out there in the world, two more coming out soon, and more in progress than I would know what to do with. So, in anticipation of the release of You Are My Only (October 25th. I'll wait here for you to put it in your calendar), I want to give the gift of four of her young adult books to you.

All you have to do is comment on this post and I'll randomly draw a winner and you'll have a chance to win four of Beth Kephart's young adult books: Undercover, House of Dance, The Heart Is Not A Size, and Nothing But Ghosts.

So the rules:

Comment on this post before September 13th.
If you blog about this contest you get 2 extra entries: +2
If you tweet about this contest you get an extra entry: +1
If you follow my blog or you become a follower of my blog you get an extra entry: +1
You must add them up and put that in your comment because I don't do math.
:-)

Basement Thinking

Guess what? I managed to finish the first edit of my work in progress, Rabbit Island, which involved a lot of rewriting, reorganizing, and rearranging. Now that there is a decent framework, I realize that there are a lot of plot holes. There are new scenes to be written. There is a new storyline I wish to weave through it all.

On to what I'm calling Edit # 1.5 because it doesn't feel like an Edit #2 just yet.

I know I need these particular scenes and this new storyline. What I find so strange is that I don't know how all of it will unfold. It seems that so much of writing is thinking. And though I am a person who wants to do, do, do, write, write, write, I need days where I do not write at all.

I need to think.

But the kind of thinking I need to do is, what I call, basement thinking. The thinking that happens when I do other things. It's not like Rodin thinking where you sit in a garden and get in position to think. You don't pose for it. It happens in metaphorical darkness, in the basement level apartment of conscious thought, when you're not even aware.

Do you set aside time to think about your novel? Or do you do basement thinking?

Or are you the kind of person who always knows what you want to say? Sometimes, I wish I was that kind of person.