Living the Fictional Dream

Howdy out there. Just a quick shout out to my friend Meng (also known as my sister’s boyfriend) — the episode of Jeopardy! that he taped this summer is airing today. Much excitement around our house today!

I tell you, I always wondered if I had the skills to be on a game show like that. I’ve always been somewhat of a game show junkie — at least when I’m home in the middle of the day. But, after helping Meng practice for his appearance (OK, well, my “help” basically consisted of letting him DVR episodes at my house and watching them with him), I figured out that I don’t have the trivia chops for it. At least not for Jeopardy! If they still made Win Ben Stein’s Money, I might have a chance there! But, yeah, my obscure trivia factoids are nowhere in his league.

Because of this Jeopardy! madness, I did have the chance to read Ken Jennings’ book, Brainiac. I really enjoyed it. If you like trivia and you like memoir, you’ll enjoy it, too.

So, yes, this post was mostly a break from or regularly scheduled content, but I thought the event was worth the topic shift. And I kinda saved it by talking about a book, right? **grins**

All Things Girl’s fall issue is out, and I loved this article about being a “book aunt” by our own Miss Meliss.

I never thought about it in quite these terms, but when I read the article, I realized that I totally am a book aunt, too. When my best friend had her daughter, I got into the habit of always buying her a book at the holidays (her birthday and Christmas are so close together, so, from me, she always gets one book and one toy). I carried on the tradition with my other friends’ twins (well, they’ve only had the one Christmas and birthday so far, but I intend to continue).

Currently, due to the young ages of the kids, we’re still into board books, but I find myself really looking forward to the days when I can buy them some of my favorites… especially the girls, as that is the type of children’s literature I was into as a kid. I would love it if I were able to give them their first copies of Little Women, A Little Princess, and all those other great books I talked about in my recent childhood reading post.

Reading can be a very subjective thing, but it can be something that’s really awesome to share, as well. My mom brought me up on reading. I never had a book aunt in the way Melissa talks about in her article, but I didn’t miss it because my mom always made reading as something special between the two of us. She read with my sister, too, but we each always got our own story every night — private time, just me and Mom. Those are memories I cherish.

Did you know that Bambi was a novel with some rather existentialist leanings before it became a cute Disney flick? Mom and I read it together. She read me Tarzan books, too. I also remember Tom Swift, Andre Norton’s Witchworld, classics like Charlotte’s Web, and more. I even remember reading Star Wars books about Han Solo and a great short story called “The Love Letter” (not that movie with Sandra Bullock, but a cool story about a man who bought an antique desk and exchanged love letters through time with a woman a century before).

There was the A Tree Growns in Brooklyn period (recommended to my mom by one of her friends) — that one was a bit of a mistake, as neither of us enjoyed it, but no matter what the book was, I loved the time we spent reading together. I was probably the oldest kid I knew still getting a “bedtime story,” but it was a tradition I wasn’t willing to let go of for a long time.

All this time spent reading was time that helped mold me into the book lover and voracious reader today. I also credit her with making me into a sci-fi/fantasy fan (how many other kids’ moms read them Andre Norton?), and I wouldn’t have it any other way. (The Y/A literature obsession, though, is totally my own thing!)

So, anyway, I’m going to take a minute now to say thank you to my mom for instilling in me such a love of reading and for spending all those nights putting up with my pleas for “just one more chapter.” Those are some of my favorite childhood memories, and I hope you know how much it meant to me.

I hope that a love of reading is something I can instill in the kids in my life, whether they be one of my honorary nieces or nephews or a blood relation. I’m proud to be a book aunt!

Stephen has equipped my blog with an analytical software. I can look at it and see how many visitors the site gets, where they’re from, and how they got here (e.g., came directly, clicked a link on another site, through a search engine, etc.).

The two most interesting things about these statistics are (1) the searches people run that bring them to my site (”Strange Horizons” and “Penderwicks” are two of the most recent) and (2) where visitors are located. Apparently sharing links and reviewing books are good ways to get yourself noticed on search engines.

The map feature is the one I really like, though. You can drill all the way down to the specific cities, and they seem fairly accurate. Though, there is no McGregor on the list — Waco and Woodway appear, but no McGregor. I’m sure those in McGregor have been folded into the Waco/Woodway tally. Perhaps McGregor is too small to have its own IP address tally or something? I don’t know how these things work.

Some locations, I know who the viewer must be. **waves hello to Deana in Arizona and Katie in Colorado** But others, I have no idea. The site has a significant number of hits from Minneapolis/St. Paul and Kansas, which was surprising. And there have been hits from New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vancouver, and the U.K., among others.

While all these particular statistics are probably interesting only to me, they got me thinking about what a small world the Internet has made. Today you can have a good friend who lives in Australia or S. Korea and keep up a good relationship through blogs, chat, and email. It’s not like when I was a kid and it was hard to keep up a friendship to someone who moved to another city in the same state or another state entirely. I remember waiting six weeks for mail from my friend when she went on a trip to France.

The last time I was at home, my dad told me that he’d run into a couple of my high school teachers and given them my blog’s URL. **waves hello to Mrs. G. and Mrs. H.** That’s another way that the Internet can bring us in touch with people, in this case, people from our past.

Part of it is word of mouth. Part of it is the magic of the Internet — search engines, referral links, etc. But the Internet really does bring is into contact with each other in ways that we weren’t before. And it’s through writing. Sometimes images, of course, but mostly writing. I write stuff on my blog, other people write stuff on their blogs, and then we read it. It’s kind of like creating that “vivid fictional dream,” but we’re creating it through writing about ourselves, writing about life.

My parents own land and a snug little cabin a few miles outside of the small town where I grew up. For Stephen and I, the cabin has become a great retreat. Being only a couple of hours away from home, it’s the perfect place for a weekend get-away. Holiday weekends, like this one, are even better, because we have two full days at the cabin instead of just one.

The cabin is quite cozy, as far as cabins go. When my mom first told me about it, I pictured a rustic shack with little in the way of amenities—something for guys to use on a hunting trip. Happily, that mental picture was completely wrong. The cabin has electricity, running water, air conditioning/heat, a fridge, a washer/dryer, and what has to be the biggest cabin bathroom on the planet (I think it’s bigger than our guest bathroom at home!). The property also has a shed for storage, a fire pit (great for cooking meat and roasting marshmallows over), two ponds, and plenty of hiking trails.

I love our weekends at the cabin, because I generally get a lot of writing done. Stephen and my dad go out on the property and work—chipping wood, trimming vines, mowing, etc.—while I stay inside (or out on the wrap-around porch, if it’s not too buggy) and type away. And because the cabin does not have the Internet or cable, I am much less likely to be distracted.

The cabin has popped up in several short stories I’ve written in the past year or so. It appeared fully formed in a short story I wrote about a pack of werecoyotes living in the Texas hill country (sadly, I haven’t place this story yet, but it’s gotten close a couple of times—I’m still waiting to hear from one market, so cross your fingers for me!). The cabin also appears, sans modern accoutrements, in the first scene of a story I wrote for my writing group’s 2007 short story collection (every year, we vote on a theme and all write a short story for that theme—several of our members have actually had their contributions published).

It’s funny how real life can creep into your writing. I think that it adds depth to a story if the writer knows the setting intimately. You can really create that vivid fictional dream for your reader by describing the setting with all five senses. Being able to describe the sounds and the smells, anything in addition to what the place looks like, really adds to the depth.

One of these days, I’m going to write a story set in a dentist’s office. My dad is a dentist, and I worked there part-time for several summers during high school and college. In one of my grad school fiction workshops, a classmate wrote a story about going to the dentist, and someone raved on the setting, saying that having the main character in the chair with the dentist’s hands in her mouth was a great hook. So, one of these days, perhaps I’ll put all that dental office experience into some fictional good use.

Of course, first I actually need to come up with a plot where that setting would be appropriate! And I have plenty of short stories in progress that actually have plots, so the dental office idea will stay on the back burner for now. Then again, that’s the thing about being a writer (at least in my experience)—there are always way more ideas than there are completed stories or time to write them.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone! I hope you all have a relaxing weekend, and I hope that all the writers out there are able to get extra time in on their works-in-progress this weekend!