The rules are simple.  Write a caption of no more than 150 words for this photo.  It can be a beginning or a middle or a fleeting glimpse of the literary.  It must be based on the image and it must be your original work!

You may enter once each day.

This is open worldwide, but entries must be in English.  The query critique prize must be for a manuscript in English.

I will choose a selection of my favorites and utilize a panel of secret judges to help me choose the winner.  The winner gets a query critique from Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary (to be awarded in late June/early July.)

I’ll be looking over the entries and trying to desperately narrow them down to one winner next week!  I should announce a winner by next Friday, but remember you’ll have to wait a bit for the critique as Mollie is busy being fabulous and jetsetting to Greece soon!

You know the drill.  150 words or less inspired by this photo.  Winner gets a mid-summer query critique from my agent, Mollie Glick.  You can enter once each day.  There are more rules, but you can check earlier posts for them

The rules are simple. Write a caption of no more than 150 words for this photo. It can be a beginning or a middle or a fleeting glimpse of the literary. It must be based on the image and it must be your original work!

You may enter once each day/once each photo entry.

This is open worldwide, but entries must be in English. The query critique prize must be for a manuscript in English.

I will choose a selection of my favorites and utilize a panel of secret judges to help me choose the winner. The winner gets a query critique from Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary (to be awarded in late June/early July.)

You may enter once each day/once each photo entry.

This is open worldwide, but entries must be in English. The query critique prize must be for a manuscript in English.

I will choose a selection of my favorites and utilize a panel of secret judges to help me choose the winner. The winner gets a query critique from Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary (to be awarded in late June/early July.)

You may enter once each day.

This is open worldwide, but entries must be in English.  The query critique prize must be for a manuscript in English.

I will choose a selection of my favorites and utilize a panel of secret judges to help me choose the winner.  The winner gets a query critique from Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary (to be awarded in late June/early July.)

But let’s start at the beginning.  One year ago, the fantastic Mollie Glick flew to Kansas City to take me to lunch and talk about Crewel.  Last year at this time I was fielding agent phone calls and emails and trying to make a very important decision.  That’s right – it’s my agentversary!  Can you believe it’s already been a year, and that it’s only been a year?!  Cra-cra-crazy!  To celebrate I’m holding  a mini writing contest on the blog next week.  All you have to do is pop by Monday through Friday and write a few lines inspired by the photo I’ll post each morning!  Then I’ll choose my favorites and with the help of some secret writerly peeps, choose a winner.  The prize?  A query critique from Mollie!.  Now I’ve seen Mollie critique a query and believe me this is not an opportunity you want to miss.*

That’s not all, dear readers.  No, the fun is only just beginning.  As you may know Crewel is a BEA Buzz Pick, and I’ve chosen 5 bloggers to get a sneak peek.  From May 28-June 1st, they’ll be hosting a Pre-BEA Buzz Tour with interviews, sneak peeks, and giveaways.  You do not want to miss this!

So have a lovely weekend.  The fun starts on Monday!

*Due to scheduling, Mollie is offering the critique for late June/early July so she can give it her full attention.

All those words seem tame when I think of my reading experience thus far with this novel.  Leigh Bardugo’s debut novel sparkles with life and ferocity.  Here’s the official description:

Surrounded by enemies, the once-great nation of Ravka has been torn in two by the Shadow Fold, a swath of near impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh. Now its fate may rest on the shoulders of one lonely refugee.
Alina Starkov has never been good at anything. But when her regiment is attacked on the Fold and her best friend is brutally injured, Alina reveals a dormant power that saves his life—a power that could be the key to setting her war-ravaged country free. Wrenched from everything she knows, Alina is whisked away to the royal court to be trained as a member of the Grisha, the magical elite led by the mysterious Darkling.
Yet nothing in this lavish world is what it seems. With darkness looming and an entire kingdom depending on her untamed power, Alina will have to confront the secrets of the Grisha…and the secrets of her heart.

And I’m here to tell you it’s as good as it sounds.  I find myself at once desperate to read more and eager to linger in the world Bardugo has created.  The novel’s imagery is lush and I’m rather drawn to Alina’s dry wit.  The story is told from her perspective, and she’s a girl you can both relate to and root for.  My only complaint?  I’m going to have to wait a whole freaking year to read book two.

Shadow and Bone releases June 5, 2012 from Holt/Macmillan.  Now go add it to your goodreads shelf!

Disclaimer: I received an advanced copy courtesy of Macmillan on Netgalley.

Christine Fonseca  revels in TO RIDE A PUCA

Stasia Ward Kehoe gushes over GILT

Katy Upperman adores UNDER THE NEVER SKY

Tracy Banghart delights in THE DISENCHANTMENTS

Gennifer Albin  celebrates SHADOW AND BONE

Jessica Love is wowed by YOU’RE THE ONE THAT I WANT

All the stories shared something in common: despair.  Rampant, oppressive, paralyzing despair.  It’s every where these days – the lingering effect of an economic collapse and the product of an uncertain future.

I know all about despair.  I know how some nights you don’t sleep until your body physically shuts down from exhaustion, because you are stuck in a cycle of self-recrimination.  How you lie awake and try to pinpoint where it all went wrong, curse yourself for your mistakes and foolish choices, and wonder how you will ever crawl out of the hole you’re caught in.  I know what it’s like to wonder if your children would be better off with other parents.  To wonder if you will ever give them anything more than the love you can muster up when you are caught in the clutches of hopelessness.  I know what it’s like to wonder if you would be better off dead – to wish you were, believing it really is the only way out for yourself and your loved ones.

Two years ago I quietly asked my husband to apply for food stamps, because we just couldn’t feed our children anymore on our own.  It was one of the low points, and it sent me spiraling into despair.  I retreated into myself.  I stopped meeting the eyes of the cashier at the grocery store, because they knew what that card was, and because I felt inferior to everyone.  A little over a year ago my husband and I sat in front of a judge, declaring bankruptcy, after unsuccessfully trying to climb out of the crippling consumer debt that had tripled while he was unemployed.  I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t even tell my dear friend why I needed her to watch the kids that day.  I couldn’t tell her that we couldn’t make all our bills, even though she knew we were living on an hourly wage of $12.

One year ago I tearfully explained to a debt collector that no, not even McDonald’s was hiring when she suggested I suck up my pride and get to work.  And even though I knew I was applying for jobs and sewing baby items in a desperate attempt to make ends meet, her admonishment stung.  Mostly because, as many of you know, even if I landed a job, I was unlikely to be able to pay for childcare, and because there was the bitter edge of truth in her accusation.  Part of me could not accept that I, as a college graduate with advanced degrees, could be in this situation.

A year ago I decided to adopt a different spelling of my name in case I got published, because then my past sins wouldn’t follow me and condemn me to more failure.

But this story as a happy ending, as good stories are wont to do.

Not long after we applied for food stamps, I got a call from my mother-in-law that changed my life.  Not in an exaggerated, immediate way.  It changed my life in ripples so small and insignificant that I didn’t realize I was being carried away until it was much too late to chicken out or to punish myself.  She thought I should write a book, which was something I always talked about doing, but had not.  I thought she was crazy.  I had a new baby.  A beautiful girl that brought me so much joy, but left my heart aching, because I’d brought her into a life of poverty.  And a three year-old.  I did not have time to write a book.  I was doing other things.  I like to say the reason her demand worked was because she knew I’d have to prove I could do it, but honestly I think it played into my cycle of self-recrimination.  I already believed myself worthless and now a call from my mother-in-law proved she thought I was, too.  I know that’s not what she meant, but despair is a funny thing.  It warps everything like a funhouse mirror.

I would never own a home.

I would never pay off the student loans.  I couldn’t even hope to make a payment.

I would never have a car that had air conditioning or door handles.

I would never show my face at a reunion.

I would never call up an old friend.

I would never send my children to college.

I would never be certain if there would be a meal on the table.

But I thought perhaps she had a point, and since everyone told me I’d never make a living as a writer, I felt I had nothing to lose.

So I started to write a book, and, at the risk of sounding cliché, it saved me.  A lot of people think of me as a whirlwind success, but getting past myself and allowing myself to write was one of the longest and hardest experiences of my life.  When you are caught in despair, you are caught in the attitude that you deserve nothing.  Writing was entirely selfish, and I struggled for many months before I took up the challenge to write daily in November.  But a funny thing happened when I started to write, I got outside of myself.  I went other places, even if only in my mind.  That selfish thing reminded me that it was okay to need and want things.  Very slowly, a sense of worth bloomed, blossoming at long last into confidence.  The only proof of which was in a tiny, little things – chatting with the cashier at the store, making a friend, pitching my book.  By the time I sat at that bankruptcy meeting, I was thinking of a fledgling manuscript I was editing and wishing I had brought it to work on.

I pinned my hopes on writing.  Not just financial hopes, but the hope that I could still become the person I dreamed of being.  There’s a saying “it’s never too late to become what you might have been.”  And, dear readers, it isn’t.

If you are reading this, then you probably know that all those hopes culminated into something that changed my life.  An agent.  A book deal.  A career.  But really it’s more than that.  I sleep at night.  I still fuss over money and bills and budgeting, but I no longer wonder what I can sell to put food in my children’s mouths.  I’m no longer ashamed to run into an old friend or visit my alma mater.  I meet people’s eyes again.  I smile more.

Now that the cycle of despair is broken, I can see how much it paralyzed me with what-if’s and should-have’s and might-have-been’s, abating only long enough to allow me to punish myself emotionally and psychologically.  Now I look at my pen name and laugh a little at myself for being embarrassed and scared, but cherish it for reminding me who I am.  I finally understand that yesterday is gone and all I can do is live in the present and spend each day moving forward.  I still have moments of panic and fear, but I’m far enough away from despair that I can take stock of my life and see my reality.

Right now I’m watching someone else I like very much go through something similar, and other people I like very much have come out of the woodwork to lend more than well wishes – many of them have admitted they are facing similar issues.  I want to hug them all, and I want to whisper in their ears as they sleep so that it might stick in their unconscious: Keep moving forward.  It will get better.  Hope.  Hope.  Hope.

Sadly, that’s not possible, and it’s even a little creepy.

Mostly I want to send them hope, that tiny fledgling bird that asks so much help from you with no guarantee that something won’t break the fragile creature mid-flight.  I want to give them that thing that makes them come alive – that allows them to keep believing, but I cannot.  I can only offer an “I understand, and I’m here,” but know this, those of you facing despair, you can do this and it will be spectacular.

And in the meantime, trust the words of Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

* As much as I love this poem, I disagree with it a bit.  Hope does ask a lot of you, so much that it’s easier to despair.  But hope will always be the smarter investment.

In case you didn’t know, and really why would you, I have a fancy degree in English and Women’s Studies, so I like to think I have some valuable perspective on the subject.  But that does not mean that I do.  You have been warned.

I’ve recently read a few pieces that attack the concept of strong female characters.  One I felt drew a thought-provoking conclusion.   Another felt more like a rant.  But each took exception to how women respond and react in various novels and films.  The underlying theme of the pieces was in regard to women, or girls, existing within masculine cultures of violence, politics, and power.  In one it was claimed that Katniss Everdeen is not the “badass” heroine people proclaim her to be because she lacked agency.  In another Princess Leia came under attack because, although she can handle a gun, sometimes she gets saved and – while I can’t remember if the piece explicitly stated it – there’s the issue of the metal bikini.

The pieces set my mind on fire, to say the least.  Pardon the terrible metaphor, but I’ve been too consumed with my thoughts on the matter to come up with something better.  Is it a winning argument to say Katniss lacks agency because she does not kill?  The author of that article goes so far as to imply that because she avoids killing, she lacks agency.  Of course this set me off on a tirade about how on earth someone could argue that trying to avoid killing someone in a death match shows a lack of agency.  But what really got me going was that the author of the article went so far as to call it a fairy tale, and it’s clear from her* writing she loathes fairy tales, that shows women are settling for something the author deems as less than feminist.

Another writer chose Princess Leia to dissect, pointing out that giving a woman a gun was not enough to make her a strong female character.  She goes on to say that the problem is such damsel in distress characters, like Leia, failed because they were saved in the last act usually after being trapped and objectified by the villain.  In the end, Mlawski is arguing for more strong characters.  Women that have strengths and weaknesses and insecurities and eccentricities.  Basically, that we can’t just shove a gun in a girl’s hand and call her strong.  There has to be more than that, according to Mlawski.  I respect that, even if I had a really great argument brewing about mutually beneficial relationships across genders (aka why its okay when a guy saves a girl or a girl saves a guy) and how such symbiotic partnerships encourage mutual respect and progress.  Fine, I won’t go that route.

Back to the agency thing.

Disliking the actions a female character makes does not justify refuting the character’s agency.  It just means you think she should have acted differently, or that you believe you would have acted differently.  Indeed the greatest injustice we do to any character – male or female – occurs when we project our own belief system on them.  When we do this, we  believe we are more or less capable than the character rather than accepting the nature of the character.  We proclaim a character as weak or stupid, imagining we could do better, or, alternately, become enamored with a character, wishing we were the ones on the other end of Edward Cullen’s lips or racing across an arena.  The problem with either scenario is that we begin to remove agency from the character by rejecting their actions or by replacing them in our own fantasies.  As a reader I am guilty of such projection onto characters, but as a writer I am more cognizant of the actual nature of my characters.

Critics, and as a former academic I believe I can say this, are often guilty of committing the worst grievance of all – robbing a character of agency and then lambasting the author or novel as lacking.  That is not to say that all novels are perfect works of art, but when I start to see repeated references to author’s failure to provide realistic or strong female characters coupled with scathing criticism, I sometimes wonder if the critic is missing the point. Some novels are meant to divert.  In fact, the history of the novel lies within this.  A novel was merely that – novel.  Hence the name.  Don’t say I never taught you anything.  Some seek to enlighten or elucidate either through great answers or great questions.  Some do both.  Too often the fault in criticism is when we seek to place a novel that is trying to do one thing into the camp of the other and then the characters in a commercial romance become too trite and the plot of the literary novel too obtuse, and the poor novels attempting to do both generally fail miserably all around to the critic.

Further, the general aim of most academics, scholars, and critics is to find something new to say about that which everyone has already talked about.  Case in point, I started my graduate career studying Shakespeare but lost heart when I was repeatedly told there was just nothing new to say about his works.  This pushed me into 18th century studies, which was rapidly growing in popularity but still had plenty of books to dissect and topics on which to latch.   Let me tell you that when you found a new topic or a new angle you clung to it like a life preserver whether or not you truly believed it.  This is my cynical way of saying that a small part of me views many of the articles on books like The Hunger Games as attempts to jump on a hot topic from a new angle rather than really providing compelling, well-conceived discussion on the topic.  Is it thought-provoking to point out that Katniss never plots and carries out  murder (although I wonder if this scholar has read all three books – she might be surprised*)?  Perhaps. Unfortunately the article quickly digresses into rhetoric rather than analysis, and thereby loses much of its credibility with me.  In the need to remove Katniss’s “badass” status, the author overlooks much of her character arch over the course of the trilogy, focusing instead on the film and the marketing and hype surrounding it and then projecting her own concept of feminism onto what is largely background noise rather than the character herself.  I’m not terribly interested in a character who learns everything in the first book – where can she go from there save for total enlightenment?  But it’s not really about her growth in the books or in the movies or even how we perceive her.  No,perhaps ironically, it’s about our own agenda.

Again when a female character, or, hell, let’s just go there, a woman does something against our concept of what is right or best, intelligent or proactive, we begin to project what we would do in the situation.  Just as one might argue Bella Swan is too in love with Edward for it to be healthy, a friend might whisper to another friend “her husband is so abusive, and she’s too stupid to leave.”  This results in the worst kind of sexism, one which stems from projection and judgment, masquerading as feminism.

I planned to close this piece there, but when I went to link to the article I saw the author had reiterated her point and further illustrated what she saw as the problem.  It is not just that Katniss lacks agency but that everything “badass” she does is in relationship to male expectations, or lack thereof, of her.  The author’s entire grievance has now shifted to how this just teaches us that if we try hard “someday we might surprise a boy.”  Long tirade short, it ends in a cyclical argument that the story resonates with 15 year-old girls because they get sexist signals from 40 year-old women, and that everyone claiming to be a feminist is lying to themselves because we only perceive ourselves in relationship to men.  I’m not saying that’s not entirely without merit, but, unfortunately, the argument loses water with me, considering that in the last couple of months a state has repealed an equal wage act, increasingly invasive laws regarding female reproduction are being debated, and senators are equating women with cattle.  It seems the issue of women and men and inferiority is alive and well.

But what really bothers me about it is that it reeks of a something far more insidious – a prescriptive feminism that seeks to strictly define itself in narrow, unforgiving terms. One in which there is a right way to be a feminist, just like there is a right way to be a badass or a woman in general.  It harkens back to the concept of judgment and projection.  The feminist career woman who turns down her nose at the stay-at-home mom.  The stay-at-home mom who determines the career woman is unfulfilled and empty in corporate life.  The conservative woman who deems the stripper a crackwhore with daddy issues.  The stripper who assumes the wife of her best client is a prudish, old-fashioned woman.  Perhaps The Last Psychiatrist was right about one thing, it is women doing this to other women – all too often choosing to engage in judgment after projecting their own value system on another woman.  But the overall argument from the articles on The Hunger Games tastes too much of the politics of Second Wave Feminism to me.

What I would leave you with, dear readers, may not be what you expect.  It’s just this: empowerment is about choice.  Personal choice.  You cannot choose for another woman anymore than you can choose for a character.  If we’re to rise above the label os strong and weak, we must view choice in autonomous terms.  We must respect that another’s choices are not are own.  We must do more than tolerate it, and then deride it later.  We must affirm that within choice lies power and that our greatest duty to one another as feminists – as humanists – is to empower one another’s choice.

The choice of the girl who takes her sister’s place in a deadly arena.

The choice of a girl who marries her vampire sweetheart.

The choice of a girl who chooses a different faction.

The choice of a girl to defy her stepmother and go to the ball.

The choice of a girl who wants to lose herself in sex.

The choice of a girl to have the baby.

The choice of a girl not to have the baby.

The choice.  The choice.  The choice.

It is our only hope.

——————————————————————————————————————————

*My apologies to The Last Psychiatrist if I am engendering you incorrectly.  I can’t seem to find out much about who you are or what your credentials are from your website.

1. Go to the seventh or 77th page of our WIP (or latest book)

2. Count down 7 lines.

3. Copy the 7 sentences that follow and post them.

4. Tag 7 other authors.

So here goes from pg. 7 of Crewel:

“It’s an ordinary evening at our ordinary table, and apart from the overcooked pot roast—Mom’s specialty and a rare treat— not much is different, not for my family at least. The grand- father clock ticks in our hall, cicadas perform their summer crescendo, a motopact rumbles down the street, and outside the sky fades into dusky twilight, beckoning nightfall. It’s a day just like the hundreds that came before it, but tonight I won’t tiptoe from my bed to my parents’ room. ”

And tag:

1. A.G. Howard

2.  Bethany Hagen

3.  Tessa Elwood

4.  Jessica Khoury

5.  Kalen O’Donnell

6.  Robyn Lucas

7.   Katherine Ernst

There I participated.  Are you happy?  Can I go back to talking to myself in a corner now?