RTW: The Alpine Path

Road Trip Wednesday is a 'Blog Carnival' where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.
This week's topic:
Share your most inspiring and/or motivational video, book, or quote on writing!

Since I'm not NaNoWriMoing because I'm mid-WIP, this inspiration is just to keep pushing through my You and I contemporary WIP, now at 50K. This post is also serving double duty as a Thanksgiving Blog hop post. Wheeeeee!

I picked up the top left "Emily of New Moon" on PEI because my original book is falling apart, but the 1980's covers will always be my favorites

I'm so thankful that the Emily series were the books that introduced me to LM Montgomery's writing. While a lot of people say Anne is their favorite, from the moment 10 year old me picked up these books, Emily captured my heart. We're so much alike, and her passion for writing spoke to the writer in me.

Everything about these books inspire me as a writer, but especially the passages where LMM captures the magic (and challenges) of being a writer. Passages like these, which sooooo perfectly echoed how I felt when I finished the first draft of my first manuscript:

"Again, it seized hold of her imagination and called forth all her creative impulse. She would write it out-- she would begin this very moment. Flinging on a dressing-gown over her white shoulders to protect them from the keen gulf air she sat down before her open window and began to write. Everything else was forgotten-- for a time at least-- in the subtle, all-embracinbg joy of creation. Teddy was nothing but a dim memory-- love was a blown-out candle. Nothing mattered but her story. The characters came to life under her hand and swarmed through her consciousness, vivid, alluring, compelling. Wit, tears, and laughter trickled from her pen. She lived and breathed in another world and came back to New Moon only at dawn to find her lamp burned out, and her table littered with manuscript-- the first four chapters of her book. Her book! What magic and delight and awe and incredulity in the thought."
...
"Emily finished her book in six weeks-- finished it at dawn one morning. She flung down her pen and went to her window, lifting her pale, weary, triumphant little face to the skies of morning...

"Finished-- complete! There it lay-- A Seller of Dreams-- her first book. Not a great book-- oh, no, but hers-- her very own. Something to which she had given birth, which would never have existed had she not brought it into being."
-Emily's Quest, LM Montgomery

Since these books are semi-autobiographical, there's magic in knowing that over 100 years ago my favorite author felt the same way that I feel today. She covered the joy and self-doubt of being a writer. She wrote about rejection and heartbreak and starting again. For a little while, (SPOILER) Emily just gives up. And she gave me a chance to be Emily holding the acceptance letter for her first book.

What greater inspiration could I possibly have?

How about you? What inspires you to write?

The Stone Girl Blog Tour: Mini Interview and Guest Post

I'd like to welcome Alyssa Sheinmel to my blog today and I'm really happy to share her book with you. Y'all know that I rarely (uhm... okay, really rarely) review books on here. When I do talk about books on this blog, it's because I really enjoyed them.

You'll see in a minute why I think this book should be a part of your library.

The Book:

Sethie Weiss is hungry, a mean, angry kind of hunger that feels like a piece of glass in her belly. She’s managed to get down to 111 pounds and knows that with a little more hard work—a few more meals skipped, a few more snacks vomited away—she can force the number on the scale even lower. She will work on her body the same way she worked to get her perfect grades, to finish her college applications early, to get her first kiss from Shaw, the boy she loves, the boy who isn’t quite her boyfriend.

Sethie will not allow herself one slip, not one bad day, not one break in concentration. Her body is there for her to work on when everything and everyone else—her best friend, her schoolwork, and Shaw—are gone. From critically acclaimed writer Alyssa B. Sheinmel comes an unflinching and unparalleled portrayal of one girl’s withdrawal, until she is sinking like a stone into her own illness, her own loneliness—her own self.
 (from Alyssa's website. You can read an excerpt and find out more about the book by clicking on this sentence!)

  







The Review: (Well, the part of this post where I gush about how much I liked this book)

When I was first approached by Random House to be a part of this tour... I'll be honest, I wasn't sure. Wintergirls was tough enough to read-- did I want to dive in to another book about body image and eating disorders so soon after all of the discussions I had been having with friends on and offline about my vlog post?

But then I opened Alyssa's book, read her foreword... and burst into tears. This was the book for girls like me and like many of my friends. Girls who didn't quite fit the mold when it came to textbook definitions of anorexia or bulemia. I won't write any spoilers, but there is a scene in the beginning of the book between Sethie and her friend Janey that gave me chills because one of my own friends had the same experience. Sethie is real and relateable and her story was hard to put down.

The (Mini) Interview: (Where Alyssa answers my LOOOONG questions)

1. When I received the book and read your introduction, I actually cried because you finally gave a voice to those of us who skirted the edge of the eating disorder cliff. There's so much stigma in society about body image and disordered eating as a "first world problem" and I have trouble talking about my experiences because I wasn't one of "those girls" who "really" had an eating disorder. Were there points while writing The Stone Girl where you had doubts about your story? Were these times when you thought about stopping?

Well first of all, thank you.  I wrote this book for many reasons, but one of them is certainly that I felt that there was a part of the story that is rarely, if ever, told; the girls who skate on the precipice of eating disorders – not quite sick, but certainly not well either.

And to answer your questions – Yes!  Repeatedly as I wrote the novel I doubted the story.  I wondered whether there was anything left to say about eating disorders that hadn’t been said already, and by people much more qualified than I am.  I wondered if anyone would care about Sethie’s story; the girl who skips or vomits only some of her meals, who doesn’t drop down to eighty pounds, who isn’t admitted to an eating-disorders clinic.  I stopped writing the book repeatedly, but something always kept me coming back.  Finally, I decided that I would write the book, but maybe I wouldn’t share it; maybe it was something I was writing for me, this eating disorders book that I just had to get out of my system.  But once I’d finished a draft, much to my surprise, I did want to share it.  And – also to my surprise – people seemed to believe in Sethie’s story.

 

2. The friends who opened up to me about their own experiences with body image issues and eating disorders/disordered eating have mentioned the amazing things in their lives that they wouldn't have experienced if they had continued down that path. For me, it's been skating and eating my way through a few countries. What are one or two things in your life that you have been able to enjoy because you were able to move past the need to be ultra-thin?

Oh my goodness, where do I start?  Of course, with the obvious – food.  The funny thing is, despite everything else, I’ve always been kind of an enormous foodie.  Going to new restaurants, taking trips just to try new restaurants in other cities, are some of my favorite things to do.  Thanksgiving is my single favorite day of the year, not least because it is an entire national holiday that completely revolves around a meal.  And being able to do those things I enjoy so much without the fear or guilt about food hovering over me is certainly something I would have missed out on had I not let go of my body-obsession.

 

But there is so much more, of course.  I don’t know exactly when or how I gave up my body-obsession, but I do know this: my life became infinitely better once body-obsession wasn’t a part of it.  I became better at my job, I made better friends, I began practicing yoga, I started dating the boy I would later marry, I got my wonderful, sweet, funny dog.  I can’t tell you exactly how it happened – Did I finally get to have these good things because I let go of my body-obsession and was able to concentrate on more important things?  Or was I able to let go of my body-obsession because my life was newly filled with these good things?  Or was it simply that these good things demanded the energy I used to spend on my body-obsession?  I honestly don’t know; what I do know is that the things I wanted most shifted.  There was a time when the thing I wanted most in the world was to be thinner.  Now, of course, I still have days when I feel fat, days when I wish I could change something about my body or myself.  But those thoughts are relatively fleeting.  Now, there are just so many other things that I want more.

The Guest Post:

A few weeks ago, I was sick – some kind of stomach bug or food poisoning.  I was out of town, and spent my vacation miserably holed up in my hotel room.  I pretty much couldn’t eat anything.  And here’s the thing – it was oddly familiar, walking into the market of the hotel, seeing foods that I loved and wanted to eat, and having to remind myself, No, you can’t eat those things.  It was a bizarre kind of flashback to the way that I used to live.  It only lasted a few days, but suddenly food was the stuff of longing, the stuff of bargaining, the stuff of promises.  What a strange thing, after all this time, to find myself promising that if I just made it through one more day of being “good” I could have whatever I wanted later.  Rationalizing that I could have one bite of the donuts from my favorite restaurant, but only one, even though I was hungry enough for two, or three, or four.  It made me sad for the girl I used to be, the one who spent so much of her energy thinking about food, feeling guilty about food, fearing food.  I was relieved when the vacation was over and I recovered, relieved when I could go back to normal.  I was so uncomfortable living like that for just a few days; I can’t imagine how I spent a few years that way.

Of course, even when my body-obsession was at its worst, I didn’t live like that every single day.  Sometimes, food was a source of joy or pleasure or simply nourishment, as it should be.  Sometimes, I could go weeks without trying to skip a meal, months without vomiting.  I never even dropped down to an unhealthy weight. 

Your questions got me thinking; with the publication of The Stone Girl fewer than two weeks away, I’ve been talking so much about the book, and about eating disorders lately.  I’ve written and spoken about my personal experiences with food and body-obsession quite a bit over the past few months, more than I had in years, more perhaps than I ever had.  I wrote this book thinking about those of us who – as you beautifully said – “skirted the edge of the eating disorder cliff,” and even now, I find that I check myself when I’m writing about my own life; I’ll delete the words eating disorder, anorexic or bulimic and replace them with the words body-obsession.  Even now, sometimes I still don’t believe I deserve to call whatever it was that I had an eating disorder. 

I don’t remember the last time I made myself throw up, the last meal I skipped in an effort to drop a few pounds.  It’s been, I think, fewer than ten years, but more than seven or eight.  I may still dance around the semantics of it, but this much is true: I was sick then, and I am better now.



Bonfires and Visions

(I'm late with my Midsummer post, mostly because mine was spent on a plane to Seattle for work. I still wanted to share a few Midsummer traditions on this blog without having to wait until next year, though, so... let's pretend this was written a week ago, okay?)

There's magic in the simple fountain* in my family's village. According to legend, if a girl drinks its water in the middle of the night on Midsummer's eve, she will dream of the man she is meant to marry.

If you believe in the old traditions, that is.

And if you believe in these traditions, you probably would have already jumped the midsummer bonfires, maybe while holding hands with the boy in town who had stolen your heart. Because, you know, jumping the bonfire means that you will stay together.  And, of course, you would also have devoted a few minutes to setting out a glass filled with water and an egg for another 'bout of pre-sunrise fortune telling.

Anything is possible on Midsummer.

A lot of this folklore is amazingly similar to Midsummer traditions throughout Europe. Generation upon generation of girls dreamed of the boys they would love. Will o' the wisps were chased through forests. Magic and wonder wove into the everyday for just one night a year.

These customs are dying out with my grandparents' generation as young people move overseas or to the city, or push away "silly old superstitions." Sadly, they stretch back centuries, back to before Christianity replaced "Midsummer" with the feast of St. John. I still think the magic is there, waiting. All you need to do is take a sip and believe.


*These aren't the jumping water kind-of fountains, but usually just spigots of continuously running spring water from the mountains or faucets connected to a communal well. Before modern water towers and plumbing, families who didn't have their own wells were dependent on the town fountain for their drinking/cleaning/bathing water. Many towns still test the water to make sure it's drinkable, and many fountains still run to this day.

Tense Enough Yet? (Another SCBWI Poconos Post)

Almost one month later and I'm finally, finally writing up the third "wrap up, what I learned" post from the SCBWI PA Poconos conference. Not the last-- I still have two more workshops and two/three more keynotes to go! I'll eventually post it all-- until then, y'all will have to be patient with me.


(I'm sorry things have been slow on this blog-- between long work hours, physical therapy sessions for my knee and family obligations, my free time is limited and blogging is low on the totem pole. I still love all of you, though!)

Look! A Mountain Laurel! Did that distract you from my foot-dragging blogginess?
(Pic taken in our yard in South Jersey-- I ♡ mountain laurels)

I'm really excited to write about tension today-- since the weekend ended up becoming all about character building for me, I love the tools that were given to us in this workshop. They promise to make my characters' stories interesting.
These notes are from "The Tension Headache", the workshop taught by Sara Sargent, Assistant Editor of YA and MG at Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins Children's Books (Follow her on Twitter here.) Like in my character workshop post, I'm not going to write everything I noted down-- I don't think it's fair to transcript someone's entire talk (which is basically what my notes ended up becoming due to all of the wonderful information that Sara gave us!!!), but I will write up the points that resonated most with me:

This quote was underlined in my notebook: "Your novel thrives on drama and tension."-- Drama may stink in everyday life (unless you're a drama queen and love that stuff), but a book without drama is... boring. And a boring book doesn't get picked up by readers (or agents. or editors.)

Sara then went on to describe the different types of dramatic tension that can be present in a novel. There are four ways in which we can torture our characters (My comments in purple, starting with "Mwahahaha"):

• Romantic tension (Please! The "will they, won't they" thing is eeevil, but the fireworks when the characters finally get together are awesome. But maybe that's just me and I like eeeevil *whistles innocently*)
• Environmental tension-(My MS really depends on this and romantic tension, so I listened HARD here)
• World building tension: (Since I'm currently reading Insurgent, I have to pop in here and say that Veronica Roth did a masterful job with world building tension in her books. I cannot wait for book 3!)
• Big ideas: tension revolving around concepts of love, freedom, etc. Sara's example here was 13 Reasons Why. (I think Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Wintergirls fit in perfectly under this type, as well.)

She suggested that we list out all of the plot points in our stories-- if we see a weakness, editors and readers will, too. The stakes need to be sufficiently high for the tension to be believable.

A lot of this talk really made me think a lot about how to tighten my writing. As someone who can be prone to LM Montgomery-esque purple prose (God, I love that woman, but I also know that I'm no LMM. She was able to get away with long paragraphs of description,) keeping the story moving is always foremost in my brain when I'm plotting and editing. This workshop also is helping me figure out how to drive the plot and interest in the still plotting, still outlining contemporary in my head (yup. Back to Phoebe's story. Always. Because contemporary doesn't have magic or surreal elements to make things easier-- at least, for me.) I like workshops that make me ask questions and that inspire me at the same time.

I'm not sure if these were Sara's exact words or a paraphrase in my notebook, but either way, they're the perfect way to sum up the entire workshop (and end this blog post):

"Up the stakes, threaten your character. Make everything matter. Never be safe."

Next SCBWI PA Poconos installment: How Laurie Halse Anderson made me cry. Sneak peek: "A loving God would not give you the passion to create without giving you the seeds to create. You need to nurture those seeds."

Walking Inside Fairytales

About a month ago, I blogged to give y'all a glimpse into the images and places that inspired The Desired. Today, I want to tell you about the legends and magic that surround one of the images-- the stone tombs on my great uncle's property.

In the middle of the woods, you can stumble right into the tombs if you're not looking

As I mentioned in my last post, these early medieval tombs littered the landscape...until practical farmers broke them up to use the stone for buildings and walls (and get it out of their way! What's a tomb doing in the middle of perfectly good farm- or wood- land, anyway, right?) The few tombs that survived did so out of luck, geography, superstition, or a sense of historical preservation.

But... an entire blog post about a tomb wouldn't have the same impact without a legend, a guardian, and a locale, right?

Let's start with locale: the foothills of the Serra da Estrela (Star Mountains), the hilly terrain filled with giant granite boulders, ferns, foxglove, blackberry brambles, briers, oak, and (a new transplant) eucalyptus. Twilight brings a fog that rolls over the land, concentrating over forgotten wells that litter the landscape. No city lights-- no lights at all-- exist to fade out the Milky Way that stretches across the sky. The stars are a touchable distance. And this tomb sits in a clearing, undisturbed by people or time.

And now, the guardian and the legend.

There are stories all over Portugal and the Galicia region of Spain that talk about the Moura Encantada, an enchanted maiden who guards castles and lakes and treasures. She can guard the mundane of this world or could be guarding the frontiers of fairyland (the Mourama.) Her tales stretch back from pre-history.

Even though some legends make her a Moorish princess, the name "Moura" doesn't come from "Moor"... but rather from the Latin word for death or the Celtic word for spirit.

She can seduce you, trap you, reward you. But only if you know how to help or free her.

And the tomb? Depending on who you ask, it's her bed (a cama da moura) or where she kneads her bread (a masseira.)

She is legend, woven into the very stone and walls of the land. She is in the songs and the soul of the place. Stories from the Beira region mountains also speak of witches, werewolves, and ghosts that wander the land in addition to these mouras. Is it any wonder that this place is so inspiring?

Side note: The name of my uncle's property where the tomb shown above is located and the name of another property that has been in my own family for centuries is Vale da Maceira, which is pronounced a lot like like "Masseira." "Valley of the Masseira." Interesting...

Is This What You Would Write?

"Blink and they'll all be ghosts. Blink and they'll all be gone."- LaCroix, Forever Knight

April was a difficult month for my family. I'm already written about my paternal grandmother passing away and two weeks before that, my mother's brother died of complications from an early onset Alzheimer's-like illness. Also, this month, my mother learned that her cousin has stage 4 cancer. It has been a stressful, sad month.

My manager hasn't had it much easier-- his father had to undergo surgery for a malignant tumor that they found in his intestine, his pregnant sister lost her baby at eight months, and while his sister was speaking with a 46 year old neighbor the other day, that neighbor dropped dead on the spot from a brain aneurysm.

All of this death and illness really forced me to look at my own mortality and choices. Truth: we're all dying. It's just that most of us don't know our expiration dates. Even if you do make it to old age, time moves by so fast that you barely have a chance to register it before it's gone. One day, you can wake up and suddenly you're ninety and wondering where all of the years went.

Death is scary. Realizing how short our time is on this planet can be motivating and inspirational.

If you only have a few more months (or years, depending on how fast you write/edit) to live, is what you are writing or editing the book that you would write? Are you writing the book that you were meant to write? Is this your swan song?

I'm not talking about writing the next War and Peace or Great American Novel... but about writing your great novel. Is what you are writing right now the last thing you ever want to write? Because if it's not, maybe you need to rethink that decision. At the conferences, they tell us not to write to trend, but rather to write for ourselves. Are you writing for yourself?

Because, if you're not, you could be missing your only chance.
As I re-revise my first MS (thanks to all that I learned in the Poconos), I keep asking myself these questions. I'm not the Great American Novel type. I'm a cute boys and magic kind-of girl. A place-as-character writer. The Desired is a love letter to the parts of Portugal and the fairytales and legends that I've loved since I was a little girl. And, while I tighten and cut and add, I find myself peppering that love and mystery throughout the story. Is this good enough to be my swan song? I don't know. But I love the story enough to try.

Don't blink. Write as if this is your last book, page, paragraph, sentence. We owe ourselves that much.

Inspiring, Leading, Guiding

Less than a month ago, I was asked by one of my coworkers to speak to her daughter's Brownie Girl Scout troop about being a female engineer. I was there to inspire them to think about non-traditional careers for women. Apparently, with my sparkly hair, "cool" clothes, and fun hobbies, I'm the epitome of awesomeness for the ten-to-eleven year old set.

The girls heard about my challenges. I was blunt about how sexism can still exist in male-dominated careers, but also told them that it's getting better. I told them about how the women in my workplace lean on each other to work though the unique challenges of just being us.  And I told them that, as women, their viewpoints are valid, unique, valuable, and important.

When I was done with my talk and mock brainstorming session, some of those girls were really energized and inspired by the idea of engineering. (in fact, one of the girls told her teacher and now I'm going to be speaking her class about engineering...) They didn't know how much creativity plays into product design.  As much fun and creativity, sometimes, as writing. (See? See how I brought this around? Mwahaha!)

When I spoke about my "hobbies" to the girls, especially writing, my talk planted a question in my head that's been bothering me ever since. I talk a good game about inspiring girls to think about traditionally "male" careers, but what do the moms in my stories do for a living? What do the girls dream about becoming when they're older?

Careers aren't the center of a story.  Sometimes,they're just tiny mentions... but mentions that can still carry an unconscious bias. When we write, we have a chance to subtly tell that girl who is interested in science "yes, you exist. And you can do amazing things."

Inspire. Lead. Guide. Don't forget the non-traditional as a career option. Make the mom an engineer, computer scientist, astronaut, mathematician. Let your female characters love science class. The subtle can be more important than we realize.