For such a short month, February sure packed a lot in this year.
February 9th, I received my first short story acceptance! My science fiction story “The Last Defense” will be appearing in the April edition of Empyreome Magazine
I started working on writing and submitting short stories this September, as the school year tends to make the long, sustained effort required for novels tricky. Along with being easier to produce in the midst of homeschooling a fourth-grader and second-grader, short stories have also been a good way to work on improving my writing, most especially to get away from my tendencies toward, uh, wordiness. Also my tendency to give too much explanation and bog the story down.
“No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.” -Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
So I am so pleased to have a story accepted, and hope that it leads to even more improved writing and more acceptances!
That same day, February 9th, Carl received an acceptance letter of his own: Cambridge University accepted his application for their PhD program. Whether we go or not is still dependent on funding, but it’s still pretty thrilling.
Dinner out to celebrate various acceptances
Joy is pretty proud of her dad!
Related to that, on the very last day of February, Tuesday the 28th, we bought two plane tickets for Carl and me to go to Cambridge this month to visit, meet people, and get a feel for what life might be like over there. We woke up in the morning with no thought of visiting, and went to bed with the tickets ordered, the girls set to go to Grandma’s while we’re gone, and our heads whirling with adventure. Neither of us have ever been to Britain–I’ve been dreaming of visiting or living there ever since I was a little kid reading the Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit and The Secret Garden and all the rest of those traditional English children’s books. I am thrilled.
I decided the day after ordering the plane tickets that the next Whitney & Davies book will have to be set in Cambridge! I have no plot yet, but at least the setting will be researched in person for a change.
In between all these happenings, we had snow, and we had seventy degree days, we suffered the usual February doldrums, the kids and I went to the MFA with some of our homeschool group, we rested during February break, the kids started taking piano lessons, and we looked forward to spring.
I finally had a chance to use my cross-country skis!
Loving the warmth! Welcome, spring!
And now it is March! Hello spring, last-of-winter storms, visit to England, and who knows what else!
Somehow the second half of January has seemed to last much longer than the first. I look at my last post and think, “wow, was that really only two weeks ago?” And yet … I’m not sure we really did that much. I think more it’s been interior stuff, lots of thinking and pondering and feeling. Life as an HSP can get exhausting sometimes, even when everything seems calm on the surface. Plus, all the turmoil in this country right now is draining. Trying to keep my candle glowing against the darkness gets harder some days than others.
We have had some lovely moments. Carl’s sister came and spent a weekend with us. She spent one afternoon playing games with the kids while he and I snuck off on a date, and the next afternoon the three of them made supper (from the kids’ cookbooks) while Carl and I went for (decaf) coffee. The rest of the time we just hung out and enjoyed being together. A lovely family time.
Wine tasting date! It was lovely. (The wine was good, too.)
We went to public skating this past Friday, and the kids did great and had a blast. Especially impressive considering Joy hasn’t been on the ice since we lived in Albany, and Grace hated (with a fiery passion) her skating lessons the first winter we lived here. They’ve come a long way. And then, as we were getting ready to leave, another mom and her daughter came to skate, and it took me a few minutes, but then I recognized her from my home club. Back in Canton, NY, when we were both teens. We both live here on the North Shore now and we didn’t even know it! It was great fun to reconnect, especially since it was so unexpected.
It was also fun going out for doughnuts and hot chocolate afterward. Skating is definitely going to be a weekly activity for the rest of the season. (doughnuts, maybe not every single week.) Even Carl is thinking about getting in on the action–for the first time ever he’s contemplating getting skates so we can do this as a whole-family activity! I am delighted.
I got very excited, as usual, over the US Figure Skating Championships. This year there was a little more to get excited about than usual–Nathan Chen made history by landing FIVE QUADS in the men’s free skate. And Karen Chen (no relation) was brilliant in the ladies’. Overall, figure skating looks stronger in the US than it has in at least ten years (except for ice dance, which has been strong all along and is merely continuing the tradition of greatness). In a country racked by division and suspicion, it’s beautiful to me to see the diversity, inclusivity, and joy represented by the world of figure skating.
We had our first Family Meeting this weekend, figuring out chore allotment and allowances and basically cementing the fact that we are so not in the little kid stage of life anymore. It was surprisingly fun.
I have been continuing with my French lessons on Duolingo, finding more things about the app that frustrate me no end, but at the same time I’m progressing and getting better, so it is working. I still would hate to have gone into this without at least some prior knowledge of the language, however far back in my past. And I AM getting a proper French grammar book at some point, because Duolingo never explains the rules. As my mother and any other teacher I ever had could tell you, I need explanations.
My fountain pen arrived and I promptly fell in love and never want to use any other kind of pen, and also want to write all my stories by hand again, like I did in the ancient times of my youth before computers were a thing. Even getting my grandmother’s old electric typewriter was a red-letter day when I was younger! But yes, this pen is a joy to write with, and now Carl wants one too.
Finished Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season and found it, as usual with her books, a blend of immensely frustrating and immensely uplifting and encouraging. One thing I will say, she always makes me think. Ultimately, it has helped me recognize some of my difficulties with having a still mind, and I was able to come up with a few strategies for minimizing the constant noise in my own head, so very worth it. I’m now in the middle of re-reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography (Christmas present from my in-laws), and finding that bracing, encouraging, laugh-out-loud funny, and just wonderful. My fiction reading has been less memorable. I dutifully recorded each book, but none of them are worthy of repeating here.
Oh, and I taught the kids to knit.
And now we see what February has in store. Fingers crossed it will bring some snow …
We are (almost) halfway through January! How is the month looking for everyone else?
Here, we’ve had:
Rearranged our living room and can’t figure out why we waited 3.5 years to set it up like this.
Trip to Grandma’s house to finish off our holiday traveling/festivities.
We had snow this past weekend, enough for sledding, and by Wednesday it had all vanished. No one in this household is particularly pleased about this. I want to use my cross-country skis; the kids want to play in the snow; Carl, believe it or not, wants to shovel. Plus we all just prefer winter to be winter. Hmph.
but the sledding was fun while it lasted. as was throwing snowballs at daddy.
Kids are enthusiastically participating in the Read-Aloud Revival 31 Days Challenge–they have only missed a few days of reading out loud for at least 15 minutes. Gracie, at least, usually goes longer. Joy is more these-are-the-rules-so-we-should-follow-them and so even if she’s at a really good place, she stops as soon as the timer beeps. It’s great for Gracie in building her confidence (she’s a fantastic reader but thinks she can only handle easy books) and for Joy in forcing her to slow down and process what she’s reading (she reads SO FAST that I’m certain she only takes in about 80% maximum of whatever she reads).
I finally passed the halfway point on my current draft of Magic in Disguise, the next Maia and Len book. Technically this is the first book in the Whitney & Davies series, as this is the one that really starts them off on their detecting careers together, but it is the second book about them–Magic Most Deadly, I’ve decided, really works best as a prequel when compared to how I want the rest of the series to go. Is that over-complicated? Sorry. At any rate, every step of the way with this book has been a slog, but the fog is starting to lift. I had it ready to send to my critique partner (which is when I consider a story done the same way a cake is done–all the editing and polishing I do after that is icing and decorating, but the heart of it is finished) last May, and ever since she sent it back to me I’ve been crawling on it. But I’m getting there, and it’s going to be ready for beta-ing by the end of the month, barring any unforeseen accidents like spraining an ankle or some such nonsense (rap wood).
We got back to Classical Conversations (the kids’ homeschool co-op) and back to school in general. We aren’t quite where I’d like to be yet–our morning time keeps getting started late, so we haven’t been able to work in our Shakespeare memorization this semester yet, and schoolwork keeps spilling into our free time in the afternoons–but we’re getting there. It’s always tricky settling back into our routine after winter break.
working on their nature journals. sunny but windy today!
I am taking a break from refined sugar and wheat for January, in an attempt to break my body of its dependency on both. I know from experience that a little is fine, a lot wrecks me, and thanks to the holidays, I’ve been having a LOT of both. I’ve also started exercising again, something that slid away when I sprained my ankle last May (see above) and never got picked back up. So far, I’m grumpy and sad because of the diet change, but the exercising is going well.
I’ve managed to catalog each of the books I’ve read so far this month in a book journal. Whether that means I’m reading more mindfully is still up in the air.
Getting prepared for the Bible Study I’m co-leading this semester for the women in our apartment building. We’re going to be going through Philippians this semester, which should be great. I’ve discovered somewhat to my surprise that I really enjoy teaching and leading a study, and thanks to Carl, I have commentaries a-plenty at my fingertips. And I can always ask him if there’s any particularly tricky translation issues!
The only other really interesting thing that’s happened this month is that Carl finally convinced me to give Duolingo a try, and I’m diving back into French. Parts of the app really frustrate me (like when you fail a lesson because they expect you to know something they haven’t yet taught you), but overall it’s been fun. I thoroughly enjoyed taking French back in college and have always wanted to get back to it, and so now I am! I’m already wondering what language I should tackle next after this, Russian or Welsh. I desperately wanted to learn both of them in high school, and now I have a chance!
Oh, and I also got to do an impromptu mini-presentation at CC this week–all the kids have to give an oral presentation each week, and this week they got to pick a topic out of a hat. One of the drawn topics was “why are books so important,” and the tutor laughed and asked me if I wanted to take that one, so I said sure. It wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as my library presentation last March, but it was a lot of fun and made me think how much I’d love to give a proper, adapted version of my “why stories matter” speech at a school or children’s library sometime. Add that one to my dream list!
And that is my mid-January report. Nothing tremendously spectacular, but I don’t want to look back in December and not remember anything about this month, so I’m writing it down even if it seems simple and small. It’s the little moments that add up to a life anyway.
I’m not breaking my heart over its departure. I hate the heat with a burning passion. When it gets 90°F or higher, when you can’t even open the windows at night for a fresh breeze, when the humidity is so high you feel like you are drinking the air instead of breathing it, that’s when I start thinking longingly of February. I don’t function well in heat. At least if I’m cold I can always throw on another layer (it is not unusual for me to be wandering around in a sweater, wool socks, fingerless mitts, a scarf, slippers, and sometimes even a hat, inside. And thinking longingly of knitting myself a shawl. Our apartment is VERY poorly insulated) and drink another cup of tea. When it’s hot I simply flop down and whimper pathetically. My southern-born husband cannot understand this.
So this evening, as I listen to rain (at last! On top of everything else, we had the worst drought I’ve ever seen in this part of the world this summer–the poor farmers) patter outside my window, wearing my cozy sweatshirt with a blanket over my legs, I am practically purring with contentment.
This halcyon state of being won’t last long, I know. The kids and I are already three weeks into school. Our homeschool co-op starts a week from tomorrow, and it is going to be INTENSE this year. This is our second year doing Classical Conversations, Joy is starting the Essentials class this year, and oh boy is it going to be wild. I’m not entirely sure how I’ll balance my Teaching from Rest philosophy with CC’s high intensity program, but we’ll see how it goes. Carl’s off-campus class started last week; the Greek class he’s TA-ing and his thesis start next week. Grace’s ballet begins on Wednesday, Joy’s a week from today. As soon as my darned ankle is fully healed I’ll be trying to get back on the ice once a week. Then of course there is all of the “eek this is our last year here” activities, between hiking and apple picking and spending time with friends and church family, and applications for PhD programs and visas and figuring out how to transfer ourselves to another country next year … Our life is suddenly PACKED.
And somehow or other I have to fit writing in there. One of the ladies who came to my library appearance last spring pulled me aside after church yesterday to ask when the next Whitney & Davies book was coming out. “I don’t want to be a nag,” she said, “I just really can’t wait.” Words to inspire any author to feats of greatness! Thankfully she’s also a homeschooling mom, though her kids are older, so she understood my nervous laughter and confession that I have NO idea when anything is going to happen. She also encouraged me AS a homeschooling mom to let not my own passions take too much of a backseat–it has to happen somewhat when one is in this season, but it does not do to neglect them (or your own needs) entirely. That’s the sort of thing I know in my head, but sometimes have a hard time remembering when I’m in the thick of things.
It was also a lovely reminder that my words and my stories are not simply dropping into the void, that there are people out there who care about my characters and my worlds and want to know what’s going to happen next, and that I do have a responsibility to them, as well, to not neglect those stories for too long. So I will squeeze in the writing when I can, waiting during ballet classes, occasionally letting the dirty dishes sit on the counter, sometimes giving the kids independent math work to do, five minutes here and ten minutes there, little by little, letting it add up.
So if you don’t see much of me here on this blog, or on Twitter or FB this fall, it’s not a bad thing–it means I’m spending my time wisely! (Conversely, if you DO see a lot of me on social media … well, that probably means I’m procrastinating with the things I ought to be doing.)
Happy autumn, friends. May your September be filled with blue skies, crisp days, rosy-cheeked apples fresh-picked off a tree, simmering soups, and plenty of hot tea, good friends, and good stories.
The older I get, the harder it is to keep dreaming.
Not daydreaming, that I’m sure I’ll be doing when I’m ninety … still fondly imagining myself soaring across the ice each night before going to sleep, still beguiling boring tasks by picturing myself off on a grand adventure through space and time, still wondering “what if” and sparking new stories each time.
But the, if I may call them this, practical dreams. The dreams that turn to schemes, dreams threaded through with the hope they may one day become reality. Those are getting harder.
When I was a teenager, it was easy to believe the world was laid at my feet and all I had to do was pick a dream and follow it for it to come true. These days … I’ve experienced enough to know that’s not always the case. In fact, it rarely is.
So when I came up with a new scheme for my writing career the other day, it was immediately tempered. I enjoyed it without letting myself think too deeply about it for only a few hours, not even a full day, because in the back of my mind I knew it would lose its shiny excitement and appeal as soon as I examined it more closely. And sure enough, it did. It turned from a dream into the reality that this new potential plan involves just as much work – as much slogging, as much sweat, as much time, and as much frustration – as anything.
That doesn’t mean I discarded it. I’m still mulling it over. I might even give it a go. I might not – there have been other career plans that I have concocted and discarded without even attempting in the past. This might join their ranks. Or it might end up in the pile of “things I tried that didn’t work.” Or maybe this one will fulfill its initial promise. At this point, there’s no way of knowing.
Because that’s the other thing about experience. Even though it’s harder work to dream these days, I know that the dreams that I do fight for, that I do pursue, that maybe don’t come true with glitter and pomp, but quietly, as the result of hard work and effort, are more worth the holding (publishing Magic Most Deadly, for example … there was no fantastic offer from a big publishing house, no six-figure deal, no huge sales skyrocketing me to fame and fortune … just a lot of hard work resulting in my longest-held dream coming quietly true and bringing me great joy in so doing).
So maybe I don’t grab recklessly at dreams anymore, but I do keep dreaming – and scheming, only with a tad more wisdom applied to the process. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how much cynicism tries to tell me to quit dreaming because it’ll never happen, no matter how discouragement tries to creep in when dream after dream fades to nothing, I won’t quit. I won’t settle. Maybe I’m not shooting for the stars at this point in my life … but I see no reason to stay in the valley when I can be climbing mountains.
I’m in a peculiar place right now, and I honestly can’t think of the last time I was here.
I have nothing to write.
Both Magic in Disguise and Rivers Wide are at their respective beta readers, waiting to be polished. I have no other projects on hand right now. For the first time in years, I am at a loss.
Oh, there are plenty of ideas. My lovely sci-fi story that’s been simmering in the back of my mind for several months now—except I’m not sure but that it needs more simmering before I start actually writing it. The next Whitney & Davies story—except I don’t have a plot for that yet. The sequel to Rivers Wide—except that is going to require a lot of research before I can actually write it. A possible sequel to From the Shadows—except I don’t know if I’m ready to return to that universe at this time. Something entirely new and different? Am I ready for that kind of commitment? Maybe some short stories? Except I’m kind of terrible at short stories?
I haven’t minded having a nice break, but my fingers are starting to itch. I’ve signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in July in hopes that having those requirements will force me to get started. (Also because July is pretty much the only Camp NaNo month that works with my schedule) In the meantime I’ll keep resting my sprained ankle (which had been healing nicely, thank you, even ahead of schedule, until I did a two-mile beach walk and got a truly dreadful sunburn all in one day this past weekend, leading it to swell up like a balloon on me again. Sigh), slathering aloe on my sunburn, enjoying time with my visiting family, getting ready for Joy’s ballet recital, and going to Maine for a few days, as well as finishing up the year’s schoolwork with the kids so we can start fresh in September.
It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do … but none of it is writing and boy do I get antsy when I go too long without that!
I have passed the halfway point on Magic in Disguise!
This book has been more exhausting than any I’ve ever worked on, published or unpublished. I started it immediately after publishing Magic Most Deadly, which was released September 2013. Since then, the plot has changed about five times, and I took a long break to work on From the Shadows instead, as well as starting Rivers Wide (which is currently in the beta-reading stage), and have discarded many, many drafts.
This one, though … this is the one that’s going to stick. The last draft was close, gave the skeleton of the story, and this one is making sense of it and filling it in. I think I had a couple femurs in place of humeri before and was missing a patella or two, but I’m getting them all sorted now.
How’s THAT for a metaphor of story-writing?
This book takes place in London 1925, when Maia has been apprenticed to Aunt Amelia for a little over three years. The London setting means we won’t see the return of certain characters such as Merry and Ellie or Julia and Dan (though we might get a cameo for one of them …), but never fear, Maia and Len and Becket are all present, as is the indomitable Aunt Amelia (for at least part of it). There will also be some new characters introduced, such as Helen Radcliffe, a young lady magician who has become good friends with Maia and gets caught up with great enthusiasm in their current investigation. The threat this time is more personal, with danger entering Aunt Amelia’s house and attacking Len, but the stakes are no less high for that. This book also delves a little bit deeper into the magic system itself, giving more spells, potions, and other ways of practicing magic while Maia learns how to control her ability and attempts to not blow too many things up in the process. And, of course, we get to see the relationship between Len and Maia grow and develop, but whether or not that includes romance I’m not telling!
It’s fun to write, even while it is exhausting, and I am getting to that point where I am eager to finish it so as to find if others will find it as enjoyable to read as it has been to create. We’ve got a long way to go still, but little by little, slowly but surely, it is coming.
The kids are on spring break this week. I was going to let them play outside every day while I wrote, and wrote, and WROTE, and finally made more than crawling progress on Magic in Disguise. I was going to serve the easiest possible meals, and forget about housework, and be antisocial. Carl is working on his final papers for the semester, so we could have been hermit writers together.
It’s Thursday. I have not written ONE WORD in the MS all week.
Sigh. And Alas.
But on Monday we did get to do this, so it’s not all bad.
Just, you know, not productive.
And now I’d better get back to all the chores that are calling my name and, inexplicably, must be taken care of instead of writing. Why DO dishes need to get washed and laundry done so frequently, anyway?
(Carl, needless to say, is almost finished with HIS paper.)
(Note: This is the first part of my presentation at the H-W Library, edited for this blog. The rest of the talk was on From the Shadows specifically, which may or may not make it into another post; we’ll see.)
I believe stories are immensely important—even essential—to us as human beings, because they convey truths we can’t get at in any other way. Which is a tricky point to attempt to elucidate, because as soon as you ask, “what sort of truths, Louise?” I say, “well, I can’t exactly explain them, that’s why we need stories,” and there we are. But I would like to try to delve at least a little bit into what I mean by that.
Truths we can’t get at in any other way: what does that mean, and how does it affect us? What sort of truths, and why do we need them? How can “mere” stories help us live fuller lives? We’d need far more than a blog post (or two) to fully cover this. But I think we can at least touch the edges of the concept.
There’s a moment in Tolkien’s Return of the King, toward the end, when Gandalf and the hobbits are nearing the Shire and realizing that there are problems there needing to be dealt with. Merry comments that they won’t have any difficulties there, because they have Gandalf with them. Gandalf’s reply is this: “I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for.” All their epic adventures—the greater story they got caught up in, as Sam mentions more than once—was preparation for living an everyday life. The great journey, the destruction of the Ring and overthrow of Sauron, the establishing of the true King, as great and important as those things were in and of themselves, they weren’t the end goal. They were giving the hobbits the tools they needed to live more deeply and more completely. They have returned to their own world, but not the same as how they left. “You are grown up now,” Gandalf continues to them. “Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.” And of course he is right. They overcome the trouble in the Shire with wisdom and wit, mixing mercy and justice with a shrewd hand, and restoring to right all the ills that had been done there.
In mulling over this point, I realized I had come up with a catchphrase for my own writing: carrying the epic into the everyday.
Something that is epic is, by its very nature, larger than life. Gods, magic, and heroes, as in The Iliad or Beowulf, which are two of the first stories that come to my mind when I hear the word “epic.” Stories that are meant to inspire, to carry us out of ourselves and into greater realms where a hobbit can be a hero and a schoolboy become a king. But we cannot live in that exalted realm, after all. We are not gods or monsters; we are human, living in a world of school and work, families, paychecks and taxes. We live in the everyday; we need the epic to help us make it a glorious adventure in and of itself.
This is what stories do: they sink into our hearts and give us the tools we need to live more fully, more richly, in the everyday world around us. As the hobbits found their grand adventure—their story—was giving them truths and tools they could then carry back to their world and use to live a fuller life, so we find the wondrous epics of story make us more fit for living in our world. The very best stories do far more than entertain or even enlighten us; they transform us into more than what we are, into the better version of ourselves, so to speak. One comes away from the best stories saying, “Yes, I may not be able to put it into words or even understand it completely, but something about this story makes me see things a little more clearly, love more deeply, speak more truly.” They show us truth about this world, about ourselves, about all possible worlds, in ways we never could have seen on our own. They can raise us up or humble us—sometimes both at the same time—encourage and exhort us.
But they are not instruction manuals thinly disguised as entertainment! Perish the thought! If you set out, in writing a story, to point a moral or teach people something, you have failed before you’ve even begun. No, one starts with the story—whether it be the characters, the plot, even the setting, whatever seed it is that each writer’s story grows from—and it shows one its own truths as it grows. That is the only way it can reach the reader. Otherwise there is no joy in it, no life, and no truth. That’s the miracle of the best stories: they start as one simple thing and grow to become more than themselves—which is just exactly what they do for their reader, as well. We can feel, after reading Return of the King, as ready to face the small troubles in our world as the hobbits were for theirs, because we have journeyed right along with them, to Rohan and Gondor and Mount Doom, and have grown up right along with them. Or take Narnia—when the children are told, at the end of various books, that they have gotten too old for Narnia, it is not a punishment or a statement that Fairyland is only for children. The point is that they have gained what they needed from Narnia, and now they must apply that to their real world. Narnia was their training, so to speak, and now the training is complete and they are ready to put it to use. And in The Last Battle we see that even the real world had its ending for them, that they had learned and grown and gleaned all they could from that and were now ready to move to yet deeper and truer adventures. How lucky are we as readers, that we are able to return as often as we need, to remind and refresh ourselves of those lessons and those truths!
I could list so many books to illustrate my point—Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence; Lloyd Alexander’s—well, everything he ever wrote, really, there’s a reason he is my favorite author, but especially his Prydain Chronicles; Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet, Diana Wynne Jones’ books … all of them able to delight and entertain us, as well as strengthen us. They give us a little piece of epic to tuck in our hearts and carry with us to strengthen us for the everyday. Are there other mediums that can do that as well? Yes, of course. Art, music, dance—I am a passionate lover of figure skating, which also has the ability to move and transport its viewers. But a story works more directly, and, I believe, is more universal. But I admit to being biased. After all, I AM an author. In any case, it doesn’t have to be a competition—one can appreciate and respect the nature of story without in the slightest diminishing any other artistic mediums.
You may have noticed, when I rattled off the authors I find inspirational, that they were all writers of speculative fiction—speculative fiction, for any who are not familiar with the term, is the catch-all phrase covering fantasy and science fiction. I mention them specifically not because I don’t think you can convey profound truths through everyday, realistic stories. You can. I love LM Montgomery, Maud Hart Lovelace, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens … and don’t get me started on my love for mysteries, which is a post for another time! I have enormous respect for those who can convey truth and beauty powerfully through realistic fiction. But I think the kind of truths I’m speaking of here, that epic in the everyday, are most easily conveyed through speculative fiction. As Neil Gaiman puts it so succinctly in his paraphrase of GK Chesterton: Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten. Speculative fiction allows us the best kind of symbolism, the kind that stands on its own at the same time it stands for something deeper. One can read Lord of the Rings as a fantastic adventure—because it is! But even reading it on the most surface level leaves one with a sense of satisfaction that evil can be beaten, that good can overcome due to the efforts of the smallest and most humble of all, and that everyone has a vital role to play in life, whether we can see it or not. And that’s only one level down beneath the obvious! One can go deeper, and deeper again—or, as Lewis puts it, “further up and further in.” There are always richer truths to be discovered behind the fantasy. I believe speculative fiction strikes chords within the human heart that other kinds of fiction cannot reach.
Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. -JRR Tolkien
This past Wednesday, I had my first-ever author appearance, a book reading and signing at the local library. The turnout was tiny (and all personal acquaintances), but I still had a great time. Before reading from my book, I talked a bit about how important stories are, and the deeper truths hidden within the heart of fantasy and science fiction. This is something I have come to feel more and more passionate about in the last year or so, and I was glad to have a chance to share it with even a small crowd. I plan to tighten it up a bit, and then I’ll post it here on the blog.
I had enormous fun signing books for all those who came, and had my two small helpers (who were so thrilled by the entire thing it made me feel about ten feet tall) give From the Shadows bookmarks to everyone on their way out. Even though the attendants were few, and all known to me outside my writing life (either neighbors, from the homeschool co-op, or from our church), I still felt more like a legitimate author than I ever have before. Aren’t we humans funny? The librarian said we’ll have to plan another event when I publish my next book, and I’m already looking forward to it. I gained enough confidence from this event to start thinking about other venues, as well – take advantage of a trip to my hometown this summer to do a reading at my old library or the local bookstore, perhaps, or even contact the independent bookstore in the next town over from here to see about a signing.
All in all, I had a great time, and picked up some tips on what worked and what maybe ought to be changed before my next event. And afterward, we went out and celebrated with some of our friends at the frozen yogurt place in town.
