Category Archives: Narnia

Investments

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Random 5 Friday is a weekly meme over at A Rural Journal.

(By the way, I’ve started doing these Random 5 Fridays as a way for my blog readers to get to know me better.  Is it working?  So many of my other posts are about topics— and while you obviously learn my thoughts and opinions that way, you don’t always learn a lot about who I really am.  I hope this meme is helpful in doing just that.  If you have ideas for future Random 5 Fridays, please leave them in the comments!)

Today I want to tell you about the five items in my life I use almost every single day.

1. My bed.  Oh my gosh, my bed is incredible.  It’s this queen-size sleigh bed, and it has an incredible mattress and memory foam.  I spent most of my life sleeping on an absolutely ancient old twin (through which the wire coils occasionally poked), and then of course there were the college dormitory beds, followed by this junky little thing I got after undergrad.  But now.  Now, I tell you, I am like royalty.  (If only I could fall asleep and stay asleep … maybe it’s time for new meds.)

GE DIGITAL CAMERA2. Narnia on audio.  Without my Narnia discs, I couldn’t fall asleep at night.  I’ve listened to them so much over the years that they are starting to wear out.  I don’t know if I’ve ever worn out a CD before.

3. My laptop.  Sweet little Samsung.  (I refuse to buy Apple products.)  As a writer, I use my computer every day!

4. My TOMS.  This seems like such a silly thing to list, but I do find myself slipping into these ultra-comfy shoes nearly every day– and better yet, when I bought them, they donated a pair of shoes to a person in need.

5. My lap desk.  Nerd alert!  (As if the “Narnia on audio” didn’t already tip you off.)  Because of the time I spend on my laptop, I either need to be at a table or to use the lap desk that my beautiful mom got me for Christmas a couple years ago.  It too was falling apart at the seams, but nothing a little bottle of Super Glue couldn’t fix!

So, there you go.  I feel like a dork for even blogging about this.  You should probably give me some suggestions for future Fridays. 🙂

Foot in the Fire

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stars2FOOT IN THE FIRE

It shocks you, this moment,
when the priority of truth
flies over the chair and out the door,
trumped by purpose and wonder.

But the sky above is proof you get it all:
truth, reason, and the blazing sentinel stars.

 

My word isn’t law … but it should be.

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Someone recently asked me what order she should read The Chronicles of Narnia in.  C.S. Lewis didn’t originally plan for Narnia to be a series, and the order in which the books were written differs from the order in which they were published, and both of them differ from the chronological order of the story of Narnia.  So, which order is correct?

I argue for an entirely different order than any of the three.  As someone who reads a little Narnia almost every single day, I feel qualified to make a recommendation (ha!).  For maximum enjoyment of the series, here is my suggested sequence.

narniaorder  Agree?  Disagree?  Need me to lay out my argument? 🙂

Young at Heart

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childrensstoryDid you know that 55% of the people purchasing YA books are 18 and older?

I did.  I’m one of them. 🙂

Know what else?  I think I enjoy The Chronicles of Narnia more and more with each year I add to my age.

I write YA primarily for teenagers, but I hope to write in such a way that my stories will appeal to adults too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

I don’t understand people who don’t re-read.*

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rereadingTo me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.

I’d never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people.

* Please note that I’m not judging these people.  I just quite literally do not understand.

 

She thinks about Narnia too much.

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narnia

It’s probably true.

Look, I know I’m a nerd.  For goodness sakes, I have a perfectly good armoire sitting in my living room used not for storage but for a diorama.  And I’m 31.  There’s maybe something wrong with me.

narnia (4)

But I love C.S. Lewis’s fantasy world, and I love the lessons I have learned from those beloved books.  I love the characters, the stories, the victories.  It’s May 2nd, and so far in 2013, I have read the whole series once through, but also three additional times through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and one more time each for The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy.  Actually, right now I’m re-reading The Horse and His Boy for a third time.

I write poems about Susan and Edmund and Cair Paravel.  I have this strange need to sort out problems the books never solve.  I post quotes to my blog (left and right and up and down and front and back).  I collect songs I find about Narnia.  Narnia finds its way into my fiction.  It helps me process my thoughts on heaven and uncertainty.  I even dared to venture into straight-up fan fiction zone.

I guess when books change your life, you become an evangelical freak about them.

Or maybe that’s just me.

narnia art

 

Truth Tripline

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I’m one of those writers who doesn’t really know what she wants to say until she says it.  I don’t do a lot of planning before I start fiction projects.  I might have a vague idea of the ending, but I don’t know the steps it will take to get to that point, or even if that ending will be what I eventually land on.

Apparently, Jo Rowling planned Harry Potter for seven years before she started writing it.  It definitely worked for her.

For me, I make friends with a few characters and then I toss them into a situation together to see what they’ll do.

Listen, I know it’s kind of a trendy thing for authors to say that they are surprised by what their characters do, but I’ll be honest with you: it’s the truth.  I am sometimes shocked at what happens when I sit down at the laptop to write.  I won’t let my characters have the final say; I get that, as the author … but they usually know what they’re doing, and I’m usually humble enough to listen.

When I sat down to write my current work-in-progress, all I knew was that it featured three teenagers and one of them wasn’t sure if reality was really reality.  The first thing that happened when I started writing was that this blind, elderly man named Gordon suddenly started speaking.  I had no idea where he came from, had not planned or prepared for him … but there he was.  And he ended up being an important character in the story.

C.S. Lewis had the image of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood in his head.  He wrote, “At first I had very little idea how the story would go. Then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that I don’t know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there he pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.”

Likewise, Lewis said that the stories weren’t originally intended to be Christian allegory.  “At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.”

This happens to me while I write.  I won’t know what a character should do or say … and then I just write it.  My fingers just fly across the keyboard, and I, Jackie, at home on my couch, am marveling at this truth that I tripped over.

Where do these things come from?

I think I know.

Alice in Wonderland 2 by *Ashenebal on deviantART

Alice in Wonderland 2 by *Ashenebal on deviantART