Tag friendship

July book report

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I love reading and discussing books, and I’ve decided to dedicate a blog post here and there to what’s been on my nightstand, in the van’s CD player, or loaded on my phone/Kindle. A monthly (or every other month, depending on how crazy life gets) book report of sorts – what I read, why I chose to read it, and what I thought about it. Feel free to offer suggestions in the comments and I’ll add the book to my always growing to-read list. My go-to genres are coming of age, memoirs, women’s fiction, YA contemporary, and historical fiction.

Books read in July:

The Witch of Painted Sorrows by MJ Rose
I don’t remember how this particular book landed on my to-read list. I’m currently about two years behind right now, and the date listed leads me to believe I added it during the PennWriters conference. Someone mentioned the title, I was on the lookout for good historical fiction, and there you have it. I don’t usually go for books that are heavy on romance, and it’s been a while since I’ve read anything supernatural, but I was hooked into this book early on, curious about what dark forces were at work in the main character. The author is prolific and I can see why. Her writing is crisp, her sex scenes steamy. A good book to escape into.

The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
Again, I’m so far behind on my to-read list, that I have no idea who recommended this book to me or why, but the timing was almost comical. Hubs and I finished the latest season of Orange is the New Black the same week I started to read this gritty, girls in juvie, Black Swan-esque book. And no surprise, I had a few jail related nightmares in the days that followed. It’s an intense read. The book is told in alternating POV’s, which I have been devouring lately in an effort to help with my revisions. It is dark, beautifully written, and reminded me of my good friend Kate Karyus Quinn’s book, (Don’t You) Forget About Me  A touch of paranormal subtly woven into a chilly narrative.

Books listened to in July:

Tell The Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
Between the road trip to North Carolina and camp drop-off/pick up, I’ve spent a lot of time in the car. Four books worth of time, to be exact. This book was recommended during book club, and it kept my attention all the way down south. I am a sucker for a good coming of age story, especially when the time period is the same as my own coming of age. The story deals with the AIDS epidemic of the 80’s and examines the fear of what we did not understand through the eyes of a young girl navigating her first love (a love that is not the traditional girl crushes on a boy in her class variety).

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
 Saw the preview for this movie and was intrigued, but not enough to add the book to my to-read list. But when I was looking for a hubs friendly, 10hr+ audio book that we could listen to on the way home, I saw it on the shelf and decided to give it a try. Eh. I enjoy a good, humanity driven dystopian, and was a big X-Files fan back in the day, but this book didn’t really do much for me. I found the main character a bit too vapid, and the plot not very believable.

Falling Into Place by Amy Zhang
 There are a lot of books about bullying and teen suicide, and there should be because it is an important topic to read about and discuss. This book approached it a bit differently, with the student doing the bullying feeling like she couldn’t go on. Lately I’ve been having a harder time with some YA novels, maybe because my son is rapidly approaching the age where he will make bad choices and take dangerous risks, and I want to reach into the pages of the book and knock some sense into these characters. Honestly, I had a tough time with this one – I didn’t connect with the main character and had very little sympathy for her and her friends, and the misogynistic, homophobic boys that permeated the school.

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
I listened to Grasshopper Jungle a few months ago; the main character mentions The Chocolate War and its controversial content. I’d read one other Cormier book before (The Rag and Bone Shop) and know this is a classic, so I decided to give it a listen. Strangely, I found it in the children’s section, not the YA section – it clearly deals with topics not appropriate for the under 12 set. The book was an interesting look at mob mentality, and Cormier portrayed the teenage boy with precision. I didn’t mind the self-pleasuring references, but there is a scene with terrible homophobic slang that made my skin crawl. It’s worth a read and would pair well with Lord of the Flies and my favorite Twilight Zone episode: The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.

Recent ARCS:

No Place Like Home by Dee Romito
Being in the writing community has its perks, and one of them is reading books before they’re released to the general public (known as ARCs or Advanced Reviewer Copies). My wonderful friend, Dee Romito, has two books coming out soon, and my 6th grade son and I read her middle grade novel, No Place Like Home. We loved it, especially when he found out she named a character after him! It is a sweet book about friendship, family, and fitting in and will be out on September 19. Read my full review here.

Happy Reading!

My Time at Camp

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The night before my early July road trip, a bunch of writer friends were texting and tweeting about Camp NaNoWriMo. For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It takes place every November and the idea is to write a novel (50k words) in a month. Camp NaNoWriMo takes place in April and July and is more laid back and flexible. You set your own word count or project goal and “win” if you reach it. Writers can opt to join a virtual cabin, full of people who make witty camp related puns and encourage one another throughout the month.

Sounds great, right? And I didn’t want to be left behind. So as I was busy trying to finish packing for my trip, and more and more of my friends were jumping on the camp bus (see, the puns are endless!), I decided to sign up. I need serious motivation to finish my current round of revisions and figured it would help to have a little online encouragement. When it came time to set my goal, I thought that sixty hours over the course of the month (roughly two hours a day) would work. Totally doable.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

As hubs kindly pointed out: I forgot about life. There were a few days where I buckled down and did two to three hours in one sitting, heck I even had an awesome stretch of four hours, thanks to sprints with my cabin mates and the family being otherwise occupied. But on a daily basis, between work, soccer, and general mom/homeowner/adult duties, it is extremely difficult to carve out two hours a day. And yes, I realize that anything I say in the next few sentences will sound like an excuse, but unfortunately writing often takes a back seat to everything else in my life. Especially when I’m trying to revise something that I have read and re-read so many times it makes me dizzy.

My office floor contains multi-colored post-its lined up in rows, surrounded by an edited copy of my manuscript and piles of notes. Several days this month I walked into the room, plopped down on the ground, and simply stared at everything. At one point I asked the cat (who likes to nap on the post-its because of course she does) if she had any suggestions. She didn’t. Revision is not easy, and I may have been foolish to think an online camp would be enough motivation to face the difficult task ahead.

Don’t get me wrong. Camp was great. I had fun exchanging cute gifs on twitter and loved our “craft tent”. When I can carve the time to do it, writing sprints are one of my favorite online tools (write/revise for thirty minutes, then break for ten and report your progress) and a few of my cabin mates joined in, which made me very happy. But it wasn’t enough.

Capture

Sad, right? It’s the last day of camp and I’m barely at 25%. On the positive side, I revised for 14 hours this month. One of my cabin mates hit her goal of 50k. A few others are close to reaching their goals. August is a bit less busy – no soccer, but two real world camping trips – and I’m hoping to start querying this project in September. In fact, I’m declaring that as my new goal: Query ready by labor day. And I’d like to have the outline of my next project ready for NaNoWriMo in November. Because we all need to keep stretching and challenging ourselves in order to grow.

Good luck to anyone pushing to the finish line today, and have a safe trip back home, campers. See you next year!

Research and Reconnection

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There’s a saying about people being in your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I’m not sure if I’m completely sold on that idea, but I do know there is a small handful of people who will be in my life forever, even if we only see each other once every few years. One of those people is my friend Sam (I’ve changed her name out of respect for her privacy). We met in high school on the bus to a soccer game. She was a sophomore, I was one of only three freshman on the team. While I can’t remember what we talked about that first day, I do remember that I knew right away we would be friends. She was funny and sweet, and she spoke her mind. My kind of person. Together we navigated the tumultuous teenage sea, had plenty of adventures and misadventures, and became die hard Monty Python fans.

Fast forward several years. Sam moved to North Carolina after college. We had remained friends, and I went down to visit her a few times. But then life happened. We kept in touch, but the time between phone calls stretched larger and larger, and I worried that she no longer considered me a friend. It was no one’s fault really, it happens to most of us. And now social media makes it easy to check the box of, “I posted on so and so’s wall for their birthday and commented on a picture of their kid – we’re caught up.” But there is something to be said about seeing a good friend in person. Giving them a hug. Seeing their space. Knowing that they will be in your life a little longer.

Sam’s brother lives in town, and last summer he told me that she was getting married. I knew I needed be there, no matter what. And I was. Plane tickets were too expensive, so I got in the car at 4am and drove twelve hours to see my friend. Totally worth it.

On the way down, I decided to take a quick detour to the 14th Quartermaster Detachment Memorial in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

Part of my current project was inspired by an Army Reserve unit that suffered the greatest causalities during Desert Storm. I wanted to see the memorial, for research purposes, and also to pay my respects to the soldiers who were killed or injured. I want so much from my writing, and one of the things I hope to accomplish is to give a voice to untold stories, to remember the sacrifices of not only the men and women who fight, but also the family and friends who love them. Sam’s dad was deployed during Desert Storm, and while he survived the war, he did not survive the cancer that followed. We cannot forget that war does not end on the battlefield, especially now when battlefields are not clearly defined.

I didn’t make it to his funeral. Work, life… excuses… and it is something I deeply regret. I wasn’t there for my friend when I should have been. Maybe that’s why I needed to go down for her wedding. But it’s more than that. Friendship isn’t easy for me. I can be insensitive without meaning to, and I don’t like to be vulnerable (translation: you need a lot of explosives to knock down my walls). There are a handful of people in this world that I truly, deeply love. That will be my friends for a lifetime. Time passes, but that feeling doesn’t change. So I’m taking some time this week to try and reach out to people who have shaped me, changed me, loved me back despite my myriad of faults. And I encourage you, my beautiful readers, to do the same.

Because in the end, we need people who know us. Truly know us. Who will be there in tragedy and celebration. But we should also continue to expand our circle, to reach out to someone who may be lonely or hurting, to ask for help if we’re the ones lonely or hurting. Let’s travel on this road together.