Do I really want to start grad school in January?
Am I just scared, or is it not what I want?
If I start, I want to finish. But what about all the LIFE that happens in the course of two years that might tempt me to stop?
Do I have the time? (Maybe.) Do I have the money? (No.) Do I have the creativity? (I’m not sure.)
Do I have the drive? (I think.)
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme over at The Broke and the Bookish. Today’s topic is
TOP TEN AUTHORS WHO DESERVE MORE RECOGNITION.
10. Annie Dillard | The Writing Life will blow your mind. The Maytrees is incredible.
9. Luci Shaw | I deeply appreciate Shaw’s ability to write about Christianity without succumbing to over-sentimentality. Her poems are like truth: good, hard-hitting.
8. Patrick Ness | After reading A Monster Calls (and sobbing like a baby) and then his Chaos Walking trilogy, I am convinced Ness is a different breed of YA author. I love his depth.
7. Rainbow Rowell | She is definitely becoming more of a household name after the great success of Eleanor and Park— she deserves it!
6. Peter Beagle | I cannot say just how much I love The Last Unicorn, but I try to.
5. Erin Morgenstern | Morgenstern only has one book out so far– The Night Circus— but the book is so utterly masterful that I want the world to know about her!
4. Leif Enger | Peace Like a River is sheer brilliance.
3. Yann Martel | With the new Life of Pi movie out, Martel is becoming more well-known. But I am actually more intrigued by his other work: his novel Beatrice and Virgil and his short story “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.”
2. Jandy Nelson | Again, Nelson only has one book out so far– The Sky is Everywhere— but it’s gorgeous and has landed her on my auto-buy list.
1. Melina Marchetta | I have an evangelical zeal for spreading the name of this Aussie author. She is my favorite, and I won’t be satisfied until she has ALLTHERECOGNITION. There are a lot of reasons you NEED to read Marchetta’s work.
Your turn! Which authors do you think deserve more recognition?
As my faithful blog readers know, I love to share my creative jots and scribbles with you. I also love to read the creative work of others.
I’d like to introduce a new monthly feature on the Lights All Around blog: Opus on 1st!
What is it? Opus on 1st is a monthly meme hosted by Lights All Around. Creative writers are provided with a monthly theme that is open to the writers’ interpretation. On the 1st of the month, everyone will share their poetry or prose that all relates to the monthly theme.
So, what do I do? Check out the upcoming theme on the Opus tab. Prepare your opus– whether poetry, flash fiction, creative non-fiction– and post it on the 1st of the month, being sure to link back to Lights All Around. Writers will also post the links to their posts in the comments section on Lights All Around. In this way, we can all read each others (semi-) related work!
Who can participate? Anyone!
August’s theme is “yellow”– so get writing!
Related posts:
Weird Little Beast
Date a Girl Who Writes
A few months ago, I attended a local writing conference for authors in the children’s and YA genres. One of the classes I attended was centered around the road to publication, and I was actually quite pleased to see just how much I already knew about this (long) journey, of which I’m still so far from the finish line.
The thing that stuck with me the most from the class was the way that the instructor would pause after each step (which essentially amounted to rejection after rejection after rejection!) and say, “And now you need to decide: am I really in this for the long haul? Am I going to stick with this?” At one of the later stages of rejection, she said, “You have to accept the fact that you might never get published. Do you still want to keep going?”
From time to time, friends and acquaintances will tell me that they’d like to write a book. And since I’m a writer, they’d like to hear what advice I might have.
So here it is:
If you want to write a book because you want to write, then do it.
If you want to write a book because you want to be published, then probably don’t.
Know this: writing a book is hard– especially writing a good book. A lot of people pursue not only an undergraduate education in how to write but also a master’s degree. Are you willing to spend several years (and this might also cost you some relationships, as you’ll need to spend a lot of time on your craft … time that will take you away from friends and family), tons of time researching (even if you’re not writing, for example, an historical novel, you will still need to do research for your book– and you’ll need to put in lots of time researching agents as well), and massive amounts of your energy (and your wallet might even take a hit– classes, workshops, and editing assistance all cost money) on a book that might never get published?
It’s a lot to consider.
Writing is a joy– one of the truest joys I’ve known in my life– and that is why my answer to the above question is YES.
What’s yours?
Here are some related posts I’ve enjoyed on other sites:
7 Reasons Writing a Book Makes You a Badass by Brian Klems
Telling Your Personal Story by Rachelle Gardner
I don’t really think it’s wrong to plot! I just don’t usually do it. 🙂
Related posts:
Fiction: How I Start
Truth Tripline
My Writing Process
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.)
2. 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. 🙂
I love when my worlds collide. This quote from Anne Lamott’s brilliant book Bird by Bird can be seen through every lens of this blog: faith, OCD, creativity. Here’s the full quote:
“I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”
JACKIE LEA SOMMERS 