She was talented. We readers knew this because a famous artist came to her school and judged their exhibition. Her work was the only work he—in a blind viewing—could not tell was done by a woman. Her drawings looked like they were done by a man, and thus, she was good.

I am certain that is not the only time I got that message. Sadly, I am still getting that message.

Oprah’s choices have been suspect. Since 2005, 100% of the 13 books she’s chosen for her book club have been written by men. Since 2003, 17 of the 19 authors whose work she’s chosen have been men.

Publisher’s Weekly’s choice for top 10 books of 2009 were all written by men. Every week, Wendy calculates the percentage of women authors on the NYT Bestseller list as opposed to the percentage of women authors reviewed in the NYT Boo Review. Not pretty.

It’s a well-known fact that, in general, women will read both female and male leads, while men will mostly only read books with male leads. This starts at a young age: even J.K. Rowling was asked to use her initials instead of Joanne, in the hopes that more boys would read her story. I’ve heard tell of several middle-grade authors who were encouraged to make their MC a boy. The PW list, as She Writes points out, was dominated by male heroines.

Moonrat has a great post up, with some kick-ass recommendations I can’t wait to get my hands on. Why have I not seen or heard of these books?

Here’s another question: Are women encouraged by the publishing business to write to genre? Before the front tables became dominated by not-new fiction this year, I rarely saw a female author who wasn’t writing a particular genre, if you include women’s fiction. Is that label a problem?

Women will write what will sell, just as much as men will write what will sell. It’s the nature of art: no one has time to be great unless they can be supported by their art.

So what gives? How can we fix this? Were you given the same messages as a child as I was?

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But it’s a different culture here. I’m pretty close to the border, and I’d guess that there must be a big border crossing nearby, because I have seen one policeman in a week, and about fifty border patrol cars. I see a border patrol helicopter every day.

In fact, there is a border patrol car parked somewhere along my street 24/7. There are signs all over the clubhouse saying, “Illegal’s, call 1-800-USBP-HELP.” (Yes, illegal’s, not illegals.) There are billboards everywhere.

Immigration is complicated. I don’t believe in closed borders, but I do need to do some open-minded research before I start making public judgments about it. I’d be happy for you to help educate me.

In the meantime, I love this campground rule, not because it gives me indigestion, but because it’s so indicative of how humans can be so cruel and insensitive to each other: they dehumanize them.

I hate this sentence, because seriously? If a fellow human being shows up on my doorstep, dying of thirst and hunger, I’m supposed to show them no more respect or mercy than a stray cat? (And it would be incredibly difficult for me to not feed a stray cat, too.)

I am grateful I live in a gated campground, because I will never have to wrestle with breaking or not breaking the rules. I will obey the laws of my country, of course, but I will pray I am never in a position to have to test that obedience.

If everyone loved someone who was gay, saw them in love with someone else firsthand, I’d bet the votes for same-sex marriage would be closer to 95% to 5%, rather than hovering around 48% to 52%. I’ve talked with people who think gay love is disgusting. I’ve watched their lips curl as they mentally made homosexuals less than human. I’ve said before that all love is beautiful. It is, if only you look.

Likewise, if everyone loved someone who wanted to immigrate to the United States, we’d have open borders. It’s easy to vote against immigration, but how easy is it to vote against Karin Bachmeier, your cousin? Or Juan Garcia, the love of your sister’s life? Geeze, we’re only 200 years old. We’re all immigrants, save many Mexicans and Native Americans.

Did you know that they’ve done studies? Remember Gladiator? Do you know why there was a dog in the opening battle? Because we humans react more emotionally to dogs dying than to humans dying.

We make dogs more than human and humans less than dogs.

Why is it that when it comes to fellow humans, a large majority of us close ourselves off to others? We judge them instead of walk in their shoes. We think of them as no better than strays, rather than drum up some compassion and empathy.

Because, at the end of the day, it’s not that complicated. That person is your brother, your sister, your mother, your lover. Every human is someone with hopes, dreams, and fears. Every human laughs; every human cries. Every human is worthy of respect and love and dignity. Certainly of compassion and understanding.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

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You all know how badly I want to (finally!) write a story targeted for New York for NaNo. This is taking a whole new process, because usually I start with the romantic tension between two characters, their problems, and go from there.

I’m flying clueless and scared, here.

Worse, I’m also catching up on projects that I’d meant to be completed before NaNo began. I’ve also been writing past planned: the last novella was meant to be 52K, but it ended well over 60K. This one was supposed to end at 48K, but it’s still going steady at 52K. (I’ll probably have to split it in two parts to fit guidelines.) Plus I meant to squeeze in a 20K novella last week.

*sigh*

Anyway, I’m still determined to write a non-erotic novel targeted for New York. This month. But I still don’t “know” it. It’s not “ripe” yet.

One of the tips NaNo gives is, if you’re stuck, to write your hopes for the scene, or your hopes for the book. Not your hopes for getting an agent or getting published or getting a certain advance, but what emotions you hope your scene inspires in the reader, where you hope the scene will take the characters emotionally, how you hope the climax will play out.

What do you want your scene or your story to say? What kind of effect do you want it to have on the reader?

It loosens things up, for sure, especially if I haven’t done enough pre-writing imagining in my head, but I don’t have time to indulge in just waiting longer. I’m getting little glimmers of my story, but not yet enough to know where it begins.

So how do you knock things loose when you’re stalled? What are your hopes and dreams for your current story?

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It is a room full of people, and all the people are looking at a TV screen. The photographer captured the very moment when they received the good news: the whole room is caught mid-cheer, mid-jump. One woman, on the left side of the picture, has a fist raised high over her head, and her expression is ecstatic.

There are many people celebrating in this picture but the woman is the one who haunts me. She is so happy. In my whole life, I have never seen a woman this happy before. Ever. She is overjoyed, ecstatic, beyond thrilled. Even beyond the joy of a mother when she first holds her newborn baby.

Not even a thousand words can evoke the happiness on her face. 

Her face is even more joyous than this one:

Or this one:

Or even the child laughing in this one:

I have listened to many people this past year. I am trying to understand that woman, because the photograph captures the precise moment when the results were in for Prop 8.

I have listened, and what it always comes down to for those who are against same-sex marriage is “it’s not normal.”

That’s when I realized that two women walking hand-in-hand is normal to me. Two men kissing is sweet to me. When I see a same-sex couple publicly expressing love for each other, I am touched; I don’t feel the need to look away.

Love is always beautiful. Even “ugly” people are transformed when they are in love. It is why brides always look beautiful.

I guess this is because I know and have known gay people. In my world, it is just as normal to be gay as it is to be straight. I am surprised that this is not the case for the majority of Americans. I am surprised at how many people have not seen same-sex couples interact normally, on a day-to-day basis.

That’s when I think the only hope is for people to see same-sex couples loving each other. Again and again. That’s when I realize the power of television, or the power of movies. That’s when it also makes me sad that more brave men and women will have to risk their jobs and even their lives before the majority of Americans will see same-sex marriage as “normal.”

And about the children: The evidence is overwhelming that children of same-sex couples fare just as well as children of heterosexual couples.

I keep going back to the woman’s joy in the picture. I keep giving her a backstory. I imagine she is on the brink of divorce and she thinks her fight to “save” marriage will save her marriage. I give her kids. I sometimes give one of them cancer, whose survival is dependent on this woman remaining married to her husband who provides health insurance. I make her life worse and worse, because only then can I understand the sort of transference and scapegoating and delusion that has led her to be so joyous at depriving others of a very normal and a very it-harms-none happiness.

I close my eyes and see the woman in the photo and she looks like a hundred other mothers. She is probably a great mother. Probably she’s pleasant to be around. Probably she’s enthusiastic and charming. Probably she is energetic and charismatic. Probably I would like her if I didn’t know.

The worst of it is that certainly she believes she is making the world a better place. Certainly she feels safer. Certainly she is proud of what she has done, considers it one of the achievements of her life, her contribution to making the world a better place.

Most pictures of Prop 8 and similar supporters are serious. They pretend, at least, to be slightly regretful, as if they are doing this for the good of all. Those are schooled expressions, the expressions of people who have taught themselves to appear proper.

But this one woman, this one photograph, captured the raw truth.

That scares me. I have no idea how to explain to her that voting against same-sex marriage will not make her life better, will not make the world a safer place for her or her children, will not protect her from the evils in this world. I am sorry she is afraid, but this is not the cure.

I wish this picture would haunt her. I wish she would study it as deeply as I’ve studied hers. I wish she would try to relate with the people in these pictures as much as I’ve tried to relate with her.

Because when I recall the expression on her face, the only thing I can think is that the kind of joy she feels is just not normal. The pleasure she derives from preventing the sacred and holy union of others is just not normal.

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Yesterday, I was stunned by the sky in Oklahoma.

Probably someone from Oklahoma thinks nothing of the breadth of the sky. Probably someone who’d lived in Oklahoma all their life would come to Ohio and think the sky small. They’d think it tiny. Microscopic. A two-inch patch in a six-foot painting.

Paul Greci just wrote about perspective in Through Whose Eyes Do We See?

But today I am convinced that Chicken Little was from Texas. The sky is so huge, it’s oppressive. The sky is low to the ground. It makes me claustrophobic. I thought the sky went on forever yesterday, but that was nothing.

In Texas, you can reach up and touch the sky. You have to duck. The horizon is every where you look. You can stand and turn a full circle, and in every direction, the horizon never ends.

Also, there are Taco Buenos. I bit into a Cheesecake Chimichanga and almost died. (No, seriously, I had a big asthma attack from the dairy.) But I bit into it and all this cinnamon-y caramel gushed out next to this hot melted cheesecake and I orgasmed and it was so worth the almost-dying bit.

You think I’m kidding about the orgasm.

The American West is a beautiful place.

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To give you an idea of how neurotic I am, Glenn made a map to get to Arizona. He wanted to save it as “Arizona or Bust,” and I went beserk. Tears were shed. Voices were shrill. Because if you knew me, knew my life, it would be just my luck if it were bust. I told him to call it “Arizona: Mission Accomplished.”

Today, though, the Jeep went to get fixed, and the guy brought it back saying he can’t do it: it’s too rusted. It’s been rattling but chugging along for months and months, so Glenn thinks it will be fine.

The mechanic says it could be fine. At some point, it will break, and we will be dead in the road. That could happen a week from now or even six months from now.

As you know, I have been neurotic about the Jeep for months. I don’t know why. I just have this fear that it’s going to break down and we’re not going to get to Arizona.

Since I’m being so confessional about my neuroticism, may I point out how nerve-wracking it is to drive with your HOUSE down the highway? I mean, one slip of attention, one slip of anything, and you have no house.

I can’t wait to be in Arizona. It feels so far away…

Is this what cold feet is like? Or is this craziness?

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There are many types of learners, but one of the spectrums is quantity vs. focus. (I was going to say quantity vs. quality, but that implies that quantity learners don’t reach quality, and that just isn’t true.)

Focused Learning

Let’s take music. When teaching Sonatina form, there are two approaches (three if you count the more common in-between approach). One approach is to teach one Sonatina, work on it for a year, and dig into every corner and really understand it. The theory is that if you learn one Sonatina really well, you’ll be able to apply it to all Sonatinas.

This is great for some students. They flourish under this kind of work. They extract everything that can be learned about Sonatinas from a single Sonatina. (Not that they only one in their lifetime. Just an example.)

Quantity Learning

For other students, they will continue to play the same way they first learned the piece. They’ll reach a point, some more quickly than others, where they will learn nothing more with that piece, and all the months of work they continue to do on it will offer up little progress. And, in fact, continuing work on it will reinforce everything they’re doing wrong, making it more likely for them to get worse.

With those learners, it is best to learn five or seven or ten Sonatinas a year. The first ones will be sloppy and horrid. By the time they get to their tenth Sonatina, though, what they learn for you during the first week is pretty near performance ready.

Aren’t these sub-headings pretty?

In music, I’d say both types of learners make the same progress by the end of the year, although it seems that the quantity learners have a better foundation for a real career. That may be piano-specific.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to do something, as long as you do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a quantity or single-focused learner, as long as you learn.

What kind of writer are you? Where on the quantity spectrum do you work best? Have you tried both ways? In between?

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© Natasha Fondren for Natasha Fondren, 2009. | 38 comments

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To that question, Sex Scenes at Starbucks said it best:

I wholeheartedly agree that no one should discourage a writer to write. Who are we to make that call? But moreover, I liken this very conversation (sorry Nathan) to when my kids tattle.

I always ask them, "Who are you in charge of?"

"Just myself," they say.

Through the comments section, I kept reading the likes of, “But I hope a professional would tell me if I should throw in the towel and stop writing.”

To that I say there’s no magic indicator. No one can know such a thing. And that’s a question typically asked at the beginning of their journey, which makes it one thousand times more difficult to answer.

First, writing is a skill like any other and it takes, at the very, very least, 10,000 hours to get to mastery. There is no telling, by how much your first efforts suck or don’t suck, where you’ll be in twenty years. Even ten years down the road, there is no telling how much you’ll grow in another ten years.

Worse, even when you’re great, you’ll still write a clunker now and then. (Sometimes they’ll even be published!)

There’s no way for someone else to ever say, “You won’t ever make it.” Worst of all, in this business, there’s no way for someone to say, “You rock. There’s no way you won’t be published.” (I’ve thought and said that about so many people who haven’t been, which sucks.)

We are such a success-focused society. It’s crazy. It’s like some people think someone’s choice to write is only wise if they get published one day. Getting published is not a big deal. It’s an ego rush for five minutes (hopefully only five minutes, but sometimes they can get out of hand), you get a check (and getting a check may feel great, but in the long run, doing something for money is far less fun than doing something for fun), and the IRS says you’re a writer and asks you to hand over half your income (which sucks).

Of course, when the going gets tough, we ALL wish a fairy godmother would come from the future and say, “Someday, this will all be worth it.” But we are grown-ups, and we have to make our journey worth it, no matter what the whole world may think or judge, because somedays may or may not come.

What think you?

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Until this weekend. I wrote the first non-erotic story in my life, LOL. Silly, that. A bit of an experiment. My story is up at Lurker Monkey’s, whose monthly prompts for flash fiction are fun. From the comments, I’m suddenly curious to discover what people think it’s about.

G keeps asking what the point of NaNo is. There’s tons of reasons to enjoy NaNo, but one of my reasons, this year, is to use the word count and community to push me through all the insecurities and second-guesses I’ll face as I write something outside my normal genre.

I was just reading how Stephen King writes his first draft as fast as he can, trying to outrace his doubts. I get that, LOL.

Anyway, I’m going to try to write a couple more pieces of flash fiction before NaNo. My short story muscle is weak. I used to write 4 short stories a month like clockwork, but I don’t think I’ve written one in three or so years. (They got to feel a little formulaic, after awhile.)

(No, I don’t know what I’m writing for NaNo yet. I am trying not to panic. There have been ideas swirling up there. I’m still deciding.)

*UPDATE: I just found out that Travis Erwin WON Nathan Bransford’s first paragraph contest! I’m so happy for Travis, for so many reasons!

So what’re you doing to stretch your wings, push at your walls, and break yourself out of your current level of writing to get to the next level?

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© Natasha Fondren for Natasha Fondren, 2009. | 30 comments

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R.J. Keller suggested it was the Moxie. (The soda indigenous to Maine, not the wonderful word the pop inspired that means vigor, verve, pep, courage and aggressiveness.)

I was going to order a case, but Alexander Chee provided an interesting explanation in his essay, Annie Dillard and the Writing Life:

From the things Annie circled in my drafts, it was clear one answer to my problem really was, in a sense, Maine. From my mom’s family, I’d gotten the gift for the telling detail—Your Uncle Charles is so cheap he wouldn’t buy himself two hamburgers if he was hungry—but also a voice cluttered by the passive voice in common use in that of that part of the world—I was writing to ask if you were interested—a way of speaking that blunted all aggression, all direct inquiry, and certainly, all description. The degraded syntax of the Scottish settlers forced to Maine by their British lords, using indirect speech as they went and then after they stayed.

My favorite Maine writers write differently from all my other favorite writers—very differently. They are exceptional at telling details. They all tend to tell a story that will later be the detail for something else. They are all verbose. And while they don’t clutter their writing with passive voice, they do tend to flit back and forth in time when describing something or someone. They tend to put a thing in context of its history.

Those are generalizations, of course, so they are not true of every Maine writer. I’ve never been to Maine, so I couldn’t even begin to guess why Maine writers seem to be a particular set as opposed to American writers. (Maybe they just describe things by a story and in context of time in their everyday storytelling and conversation?) I don’t know.

I sometimes think of the U.S. as one culture, but it’s not. It’s not even the same culture in Southern Ohio as it is in Northern Ohio. I know generalizations are dangerous when they become stereotypes, but I miss Social Studies. I loved learning about and understanding other cultures, and there really is no other way to do that than to generalize. I hope that the understanding generalizations provide can help overcome the prejudice that stereotypes inspire, but who knows? I suppose people smarter than I have done studies on it, which is why you don’t see as many Social Studies classes anymore.

On a more useful-to-you note, Chee goes on to quote this explanation of telling vs. showing from Annie Dillard:

“If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.”

The essay has lots of gems in it, and well worth a read.

On a related note, John Irving’s latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, will be released on October 27. I can’t wait!

Have you found a region/culture/state whose writers particularly appeal to you?

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© Natasha Fondren for Natasha Fondren, 2009. | 15 comments

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