Quietly

I recently read Susan Cain’s new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I found it both validating and thought-provoking. One direction my thoughts went was toward John Keats (what creature is the epitome of Introvert, if not the Poet?), and a passage I had read (and underlined!) in one of his letters.

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity–he is continually in for–and filling some other Body–The Sun, the Moon, the Sea…It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature–how can it, when I have no nature?…But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself; but from some character in whose soul I now live.

My thoughts went back to this passage–first, because I found it so striking (and sympathetic) when I first read it; and second, because Cain discusses how introverts often “take on” an extrovert persona to get through certain aspects of life. (Vastly simplified–I highly recommend reading her book! And Keats!) How many faces do I have, and which one is the “real” me?

On another front, my husband is traveling for a few weeks, and I turn once again to My Dearest Friend, the letters of John and Abigail Adams to each other during their many and looooong separations. I can’t feel too sorry for myself, with my ability to telephone or email my beloved, when remembering how those two amazing people often went weeks or even months at a time without any word from each other.

Finally, to complete this little web of contemplation, Cain happens to mention that John Quincy Adams was in fact that rare creature, a U.S. President who was also an introvert.

Having survived the laundry

and spent a week back in the groove, I can now write about our post-Christmas trip and family reunion in Branson, MO. There were twenty-one of us—sisters, brother-in-law, nephews, mother, aunt and uncle, cousins— staying in three houses on the beautiful 40-acre wooded property of Tall Pines. The best new experience: relaxing in the outdoor hot tub with snow falling all around. The worst new experience: driving twisty mountain roads in dark fog.

In town, I picked up the 100th anniversary copy of Harold Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills, which is apparently quite famous and what stirred up people’s interest in developing the Branson area around the turn of the last century. At least that’s what the man at the Toy Museum told us. He also told us that this book inspired former President Ronald Reagan to become a Christian. Anyway. After wandering through case after case of model cars and Star Wars figures and toy guns and way too many familiar childhood toys that are now, apparently, antiques, we found the Harold Bell Wright part of the museum, which houses some of his old furniture and several manuscript copies of his books. Were it not for Princess Two tugging me along, I would have spent more time here. Along with the manuscripts were large cards with typed commentary from Wright himself, describing his writing process, as well as period advertisements for the published works. An interesting glimpse into the business of writing in days long gone by.

Part of our reunion involved a belated Christmas exchange of gifts, and I received two more books (my family knows me well): Reflections on the Psalms, by C. S. Lewis, and Joseph Plumb Martin’s A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. So now I have an even larger cozy stack of books to read by the fire.

Speaking of reading, I finished Margaret Frazer’s The Reeve’s Tale, and found it decent though not wow reading. I had trouble getting attached to any of the characters. But then I have been spoiled, as far as mysteries go, by Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers. Last night I started Robin Paige’s Death at Blenheim Palace, hoping…

Terrific #10 (updates)

Reading update:

I’m still suffering from too many books and too little time, in the middle of three nonfiction books of varying lengths. 1. I’ve followed Tony Horwitz and Captain Cook to Alaska, and we’re on the captain’s final, fateful voyage. 2. I’m learning a little French horn history and taking armchair lessons from author Jasper Rees and horn virtuoso Dave Lee. 3. Through an elementary-level biography, I’m developing a fascination for 19th-century scientist Michael Faraday. (The fact that he was a young man during the Napoleonic wars is, I believe, not coincidental to my fascination.)

The book I managed to finish reading is the Kay Winters/Larry Day picture book Colonial Voices: Hear Them Speak. This book introduces us to various denizens of Boston on the day of the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773. We meet people of different occupations and different loyalties through simple yet poetic language. Winters does a nice job of showing that many factors played into people’s feelings about the building Revolutionary fever; and that for some people, like the Native American basket trader and African-American slave, the colony’s taxation-without-representation grumblings were largely irrelevant. The book is rounded off with historical notes and a bibliography. The title of the book is a bit misleading, for the “colonial voices” are all from only one day in one colonial city; but I think we could easily extend the trades, feelings, personalities, and issues to the pre-Revolutionary era in general, especially for the northern colonies.

Writing update:

Unfortunately there is not too much going on here. I keep casting nets, but most of my ideas are either too slippery or too small, and escape back into the wider sea. My “inventors” project is starting to solidify, if ever so slightly. Patience, patience, patience. I also started drafting a short tale that will NOT EVER turn into anything longer. It is JUST FOR FUN.

Midweek updates #8

1. Reading update:

I’ve been enjoying Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. I’m a big fan of 18th century history in general, and blue-water sailing adventures in particular, which is why I chose this Horwitz volume over Confederates in the Attic, recommended by my good friend and book connoisseur Wendy. (I’m sure I’ll get to that one, too, someday. The American Civil War is maybe my third-favorite historical period.)

And speaking of 18th century, I picked up two books at the library this morning. First, The Adams Chronicles, by Jack Shepherd, about the clan of John Adams the American founding father and second U.S. President. Second, a newer picture book, Colonial Voices: Hear Them Speak, written by Kay Winters and illustrated by Larry Day. Both books are research material for a certain writing project (see #3).

Yes, I know I’m already in the midst of reading two other library books (Blue Latitudes and Robin McKinley’s Chalice), and there’s another I requested through interlibrary loan waiting for me (The Devil to Play: One Man’s Year-long Quest to Master the Orchestra’s Most Difficult Instrument [i.e., French horn], by Jasper Rees), and then there’s the pristine paperback of The Mabinogion Tetralogy, by Evangeline Walton. Oh, and a book called Me to We, by Alan Nelson, that I’m supposed to be reading for a church-team thing. This may be the literary equivalent of emotional overeating. Or indication of some other psychological disorder in which having piles of books all over the house makes me feel secure and happy.

2. Hubris update:

Speaking of too many books and not enough time, I received my Chronicles of Narnia piano-vocal-guitar books. I sat down at the keyboard and realized within ten seconds that there will be no “just sitting down to play these songs for fun.” I will have to work at them before they sound like anything, just as I am having to hack my way through the French horn part for Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (to be performed with our high school/community band in May).

3. Writing update:

Out of yesterday’s dreary gray sky, I had a glimmer of insight into a story I back-burnered sometime last summer. As I sat down to make follow-up notes this morning, it occurred to me that perchance I’d had the wrong character as protagonist all along. Does this sudden insight have anything to do with a discussion on optimism and unwatched kettles boiling that I’d had with itsybitsyblogsy via her blog? Hmm. Anyhow, as critique-group sister Kim would say, I intend to “follow the whisper.”

4. Mixed metaphor update:

My apologies for the preceding paragraph. It just came out like that. I can’t fix it right now because I have books to read and instruments to practice!

Midweek updates #7

OK, I just made up that number. I don’t know how many updates I’ve done before, but I thought I should start keeping track. Seven is a good number.

Reading update:

I actually finished reading two books in February, which beats my January record by 100%. The first is The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child, by Linda Dobson. This is related to a momentous, intimidating-liberating decision we’ve made about our children’s education. It’s a heartening overview of different homeschooling options, and I’ve dog-eared lots of pages for further investigation. Next up on this topic is Teaching Your Own, by John Holt.

The second book I finished is Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes, an intriguing history of the early days of electricity in America. I have never been a big fan of Gilded Age history, so there was plenty of unexplored territory here, especially regarding the scientific and business achievements of the inventors George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. The book kept bringing home to me how fundamentally different an electrified world is from what went before—so much we take for granted, when even the United States has been completely “electrified” for fewer than 100 years. Although Jonnes does not do much moralizing (and it’s an era ripe for moralizing), she does finish with these thought-provoking observations:

For all the immense gains and almost magical gifts that electricity bestowed, there were, of course, some small losses, felt only by a few. The world, now powered by machines, became far noisier…Natural sounds, just plain silence, were drowned out by man-made din…The American night sky, once truly black and blazing with billions of glistening stars, decade by decade became steadily more permeated by man-made electric light.

I began thinking, through the latter parts of the book, how the human generation and control of electricity—just one part of the scientific revealing and codifying of nature’s mysteries—has helped to quash our human sense of awe and wonder. Is it merely coincidence that the Romantics came after the Age of Enlightenment? There is only so much reason the human brain can take, before we begin longing for some wildness and beauty that we can’t quantify or dissect (or maybe that’s just me?). Jonnes quotes the following lines from Charles Dickens, from when he first saw the (pre-tourist age) Niagara Falls in the 1840s:

Great Heaven…what a Fall of bright-green water!…I felt how near to my Creator I was standing….Peace of Mind, tranquility, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness…

I suppose there are such regions of nature, heart, and spirit still open to us, but it seems they must grow harder and harder to find.

Writing update:

I have switched gears (O fickle muse!), and am once again working on the sequel (imaginatively called, in my header, “Sequel”) to TS. I was surprised to see that I had saved the file as recently as last November. I am trying VERY HARD to shut up that nasty critic who wants me to explain what the point of all this is. SHUT UP! I’m seeking Joy here, lady.

Otherwise, in my real life, I have promised Number-One Daughter’s sixth-grade teacher to work up some Fairy Tale/Mother Goose “commercial spots” to fit in with the spring play. Perhaps the Three Pigs advertising their homebuilding business, or Big Bad Wolf advertising his security company.

And yesterday, I drafted an 800-word devotion for an upcoming ladies-only church event. I’m afraid it may be a bit too dense for tea and crumpets. I’ll have to let it sit a few more days.

Updates, and piling it on

Reading update:

Finished Treasure Island! Yes, it was a shortish novel, but it felt good to finish anything at all in that horrid month of January. How did it compare with the Muppets film version? Plotwise, wildly divergent, as you might imagine (though incredibly, the part where Jim Hawkins sails the ship alone is actually in the book). No Miss Piggy or cannibal tribe on the island, only the half-baked Ben Gunn. More fighting, wounds, and actual death in the book. Interestingly, the Muppets nailed the character of Long John Silver, so much that I kept picturing and hearing Tim Curry as I read. A good adventure, though the end was a little anticlimactic. A writerly note: Stevenson used first-person narration; primarily Jim Hawkins, but switching to Dr. Livesey when he needed to convey action that Jim knew nothing about. Write up the alley of my current WIP.

Books-into-movies update:

We finally finished watching the HBO miniseries John Adams (based on the biography by David McCullough). We had many interruptions between the sixth and seventh parts, including Life, illness, the need to sleep, and a cracked Netflix DVD. But we persevered, and honestly, we could just have skipped the final installment. As my husband put it (before he drifted off), “too much personal drama.” The last part has Adams retired and at home, his children dying or being abandoned by their husbands, etc. Do I want to see, hear, or even imagine a woman suffering a mastectomy without anesthesia? No, thank you. Nor do I want to see old men dying in their beds, eyes staring, while their families weep around them. (Ah, Jefferson! Where are your elegant drawl, your satin waistcoats now?) I might just add here that I once saw a documentary on historic houses (with Bob Vila) that showed Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom, and the bed in which he died; and it looked nothing like the bedroom in the movie. The one saving grace (besides the stirring movie score), is that if you stick it out to the end, you hear an Adams quotation in voice-over: “Now posterity—it will never know how much it cost us to preserve your freedom. I hope that you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.” I think that’s pretty good.

Writing update:

I finished interviewing two main characters (six single-spaced pages for the first and maybe three for the second), and am now working on one of the “villains.” What I love about this process is discovering the little details and idiosyncrasies that might never show up in the story, but which make the characters who they are. Once, at a Teen Writers Workshop, one of the kids asked, “How can you say you don’t know everything about your character? Didn’t you make him up?” Yes, and no. It’s a little like getting to know any flesh-and-blood person. There are layers there that need to be explored.

Piling it on:

Went to two different libraries yesterday. The top two are books I had requested through interlibrary loan; the rest are books that just caught my attention as I browsed (alone! sans children!) the stacks. Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes, and Joplin’s Ghost, by Tananarive Due, are linked by a mysterious thread that will be revealed with the next edition of Lit for All. The Patriots is for novel research; the rest are for fun. I know, pretty ambitious for someone who finished reading a whopping one novel in all of January.

Updates

Weather update:

Snow again.

Reading update:

You’d think this kind of weather would give me more time to curl up with a good book, but alas, now that the holidays are over and school is back in session, the whole family is thrown back onto the dizzying wheel of activity. Fortunately, before all this back-to-real-life frenzy began, I did manage to finish reading one book: Philip Reeve’s Here Lies Arthur.

In a previous post, I expressed doubts and dismay after early forays into this book. Let me humbly say here that I stand (mostly) corrected. I have to credit Reeve with truly excellent writing and storytelling skills; notwithstanding the fact that only one of the characters appealed to me much at all (NOT the main character, but the “love interest,” if you will, young Peredur), I had a hard time putting the book down. Partly I wanted to see how Reeve would re-cast the classic Arthurian events, but also I simply wanted to know what happened next.

One of my initial questions was, What is Reeve trying to accomplish by turning the King Arthur story so rudely on its head? One answer I found was that the book is about how legends are made, a story about the power of stories. One little gripe: I did have some believability issues with the transformation of the central character Gwena/Gwen from girl to boy and back again (and back again). But perhaps this is Reeve furthering his metafictional theme: Just as Gwena and Myrddin persuade the people of Britain to believe that Arthur is a great hero, is Reeve winking at the reader as he tries to pull one over on us?

Books-into-movies update:

My husband and I have now watched half of the HBO miniseries John Adams (based on the biography by David McCullough). I offer some halfway-point observations. The film takes a whirlwind ride through the American Revolution and its aftermath, focusing more on personality (how the events impact Adams and his family and vice versa) than on the details of the conflict itself. On the plus side, this results in some fascinating insights into the politics of the Continental Congress instead of the well-trod battleground stuff. On the minus side, I did find it mystifying how eleven years of Revolutionary history passed without the Adams children aging one day. True, one child was added (initially predicted by Abigail’s burgeoning belly, appearing the next moment as a four-year-old boy), but otherwise the children looked exactly the same on the day Abigail learned of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown (1781) as they did the day of the Boston Massacre (1770).

Most humorous portrayal: Benjamin Franklin with his stringy gray hair and his aged French-nobility mistress. Most gratifying portrayal: Thomas Jefferson, with his nonchalant elegance, his soft-spoken and cultured intelligence, his gorgeous clothes (oh! the clothes!). In one favorite scene, he lounges at a desk while Franklin and Adams critique his work on the Declaration of Independence, his facial expression a combination of pain and affected indifference. When Franklin bluntly suggests they should use the word “self-evident” (as in, We hold these truths to be…) instead of Jefferson’s more grandiose phrase, Jefferson lifts his chin and says, “I assure you that I chose every word with care.” Priceless, and something any writer who shares his or her work can identify with. Which leads me to…

Writing update:

I sent the first section of Early First Draft of my current WIP off to my trusted critique buddies yesterday. I think I have a plot. I have 20-odd pages of text. Life is good.

Eleventh day of Christmas books

This gift came from my youngest sister. It is not actually a book, but got me thinking about them…

The Dread Pirate Game by Front Porch Classics. Anyone who knows me can guess the first “Dread Pirate” that came to my mind—the Dread Pirate Roberts from William Goldman’s brilliant book and book-into-movie, The Princess Bride.

From there I got to reminiscing about some of my other favorite books featuring pirates:

Tanith Lee’s young adult fantasy novels Piratica and Piratica II

Ian Toll’s history about the early U. S. Navy, Six Frigates, which includes some fascinating material on the Americans’ struggle with the Barbary pirates at the turn of the 19th century

Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, in which pirates pop up in various exotic waterways

I also realized the biggest omission in my trove of pirate literature is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which has been on my to-read list for far too long (though I recently watched the Muppets movie version).

Thanks, sis, for the fun pirate times, and Merry Christmas!

Eighth day of Christmas books

Due to my fascination with American Revolutionary history, my current WIP (though a fantasy) will have plenty of colonial and revolutionary elements. Now that I’ve decided it’s time to include a plot, I’m gearing myself up for some more research-reading.

On my bookshelves already:

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis (got this for Christmas last year, or the year before)
1776 by David McCullough
John, Paul, George & Ben by Lane Smith (for kids)
The American Revolution: A History by Gordon S. Wood

On my wish/to-be-read list:

Sea Raiders of the American Revolution: The Continental Navy in European Waters by E. Gordon Bowen-Hassell
The American Revolution: A History in Documents by Steven C. Bullock
Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold’s March to Quebec, 1775 by Thomas A. Desjardin
A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier by Joseph Plumb Martin
A Guide to the Battles of the American Revolution by Theodore P. Savas and J. David Dameron

Other great Revolutionary books I’ve read in the past few years:

His Excellency, George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis
John Adams by David McCullough (I have the DVDs waiting for me here at home, too)
I Was a Teenager in the American Revolution by Elizabeth Ryan Metz

I’m sure there are more books in all of these categories, but they escape my memory at the moment. (I should really keep a journal of these things.)

Fifth day of Christmas books

I gave this book as a Christmas gift to my girls…

The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz. OK, this is a copycat of the book I gave the boys (The Dangerous Book for Boys); but don’t the girls deserve something dangerous (or daring), too?

In addition to the very important aesthetic accomplishment of matching the boys’ book perfectly—right down to the cloth binding, foil title, and even marbled endpapers (just a different color), the scheme of contents is similar. Along with the how-tos (pressing flowers, jumping rope, making paper, making a whistle, being a spy, paddling a canoe…), the book includes history (ancient queens, Abigail and John Adams, women scientists and inventors, states and statehood…).

Number-One Daughter (age twelve) has been flipping through it, which is a good sign that we can use it for mother–daughter bonding. Princess Two turns five today; she is a little on the young end, but we will include her whenever possible (I think she’d be keen on learning the five karate moves, for example).