A Single Layer

Apparently I'm not writing a series for Advent, as the season is coming to its beautiful close. I'm alright with that. The not writing, I mean, not the end of the season. There's been a lot going on this month, and I haven't regretted any of my minutes. A couple weeks ago, several extended family members came into town to celebrate the life and honor the death of my grandfather. It was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with cousins I haven't seen in well over a decade and uncles I care rather much for. My Christmas will, as usual, span several days, beginning tomorrow with my sister and brother-in-law coming into town, and then on the 25th, flying to Arkansas to be with my brother in his brand new home. I'll be seeing old friends, handing out some presents, and generally just taking a breather from life-busy-life. There are a lot of things I want to say as the year wraps, especially about Christmas and Jesus and the Holy Parents. I want to say some things

Tomorrow is the beginning of Advent, which may or may not be the beginning of a series of Advent-related posts on my blog. Even if I don't end up writing my way through these holy days, I've tagged all my past Advent posts so you can find them easily. Most of them are other people's writings, which makes them all the more worthwhile. One good reason to get all your holiday shopping done on Black Friday and Small Business Saturday (this is a new one to me, but I like that the day also gets a name), is that you don't have to think of presents for the rest of the season. Here is where I shall make a subtle word distinction. It is good to get present shopping over with, but it is all the more good to make this a season of giving. I say that without the Hallmark cheesiness. I mean, rather than shopping frantically, it would be appropriate in these next weeks to think about generosity, about giving and receiving with a thankful heart, the way it ought to be done. Take a hia

Less than an hour after my last post, my grandfather passed away. Any meditation on the words of C. S. Lewis seems a worthy occupation in a time of great weight, but I confess that I wish I'd been quoting something from A Grief Observed or The Great Divorce  in my post - something with uncanny relevance. I like to look back and see uncanny relevancies, but there were none in the late morning of October 30th. I learned a few things that day, and they were mostly very human things, universal in a molecular rather than a spiritual way. Looking back in a not-uncanny way, I feel I understand the incarnation much better than I did before. Death shows us what a body is, what it means to be embodied, what it means when these bodies are done with themselves, when they say "it is finished." I have never been much bothered by death. I know that most people fear it, and that perhaps in some very ancient way, I fear it too, and that is why I jump at surprising noises and shake my

"The man who is contended to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. . . . "Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

"But I was frightened, and I tried to heal my fear with stories, stories which gave me courage, stories which affirmed that ultimately love is stronger than hate. If love is stronger than hate, then war is not all there is. I wrote, and I illustrated my stories. At bedtime my mother told me more stories. And so story helped me to learn to live. Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully."

"I am not, of course, as innocent as I look. I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a 'killing.' They are interested in being a writer, not in writing. They are interested in seeing their names at the top of something printed, it matters not what. And they seem to feel that this can be accomplished by learning certain things about working habits and about markets and about what subjects are currently acceptable. ". . . What interests the serious writer is not external habits but what Maritain calls, 'the habit of art'; and he explains that 'habit' in this sense means a certain quality or virtue of the mind. The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art."

Not to continually regurgitate my Pinterest finds onto the blog here, but I have been sorting through some of my collected office space ideas, and thought I'd share my favorites. If you want to take a look at the original sources, follow the link to the board, the board to the image, and the image to the link. Sounds like a circle, but it's really a spiral. Promise.

Speaking of Snow Whites, here are some photos from the upcoming film by Tarsem.

So I was driving along in LA today, passing the Hollywood sign on the hill and offramps with names like "Melrose" and "Universal" and such, and I noticed several very interesting billboards advertising what looked like the same upcoming television series with two different titles. On the one hand, there were these flashy images with the word ONCE (and yes, I wondered for a split second if it was some television version of the cult favorite featuring musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova ). I was able to make out the small print, "upon a time," which certainly cleared up the otherwise incongruous imagery of the billboard. Then there were those nearly identical adverts with the word GRIMM. I immediately (and illegally) punched both titles into my cell phone to look up when I got home. I don't usually have much hope for any series based on fairy tales, Arthurian legends, or Robin Hood, but with these two there are very significant indicators t

In a few days, I'll be running off to the desert to housesit for some friends. Housesitting is always an interesting opportunity to devote yourself to projects that would otherwise take a back-burner to normal life. I'm working on a list of things to do - manuscripts to proof, books to read, Buffy to watch, that sort of thing. If you have any suggestions, let me know. We'll see how I do.

1. Favorite childhood book? The Golden Book of Fairy Tales (still a favorite)   2. What are you reading right now? Joseph and His Brothers, and 2012 manuscripts 3. What books do you have on request at the library? None. Though I requested so many books at my old library growing up, that I memorized my 13-digit library card number years before I knew my social security number. 4. Bad book habit? Using coffee table art books as food and drink trays or laptop desks in bed. Sorry, Impressionism. 5. What do you currently have checked out at the library? Nothing. I know. The mighty have fallen... 6. Do you have an e-reader? My iPhone does qualify as an e-reader. I have read a few paragraphs of free ebooks here and there, but that was about a year ago when it was a novelty. I have also used it for last minute Bible references, and on more than one occasion, have pulled up documents from my email. I am more likely to use my phone for emergency writing than reading. The no

Everyone who has read Divergent has loved it, and for good reason. (If you are one of the nonexistent who disagree, just keep quiet.) Usually when I finish the first book in a good series, I can't wait for the second. Divergent is the kind of good that makes you get to the end and want to read it again. Most people in the Veronica Roth fandom are asking each other which faction they'd be in - or if they, too, are Divergent. This is an obvious question to arise from the book, as it explores a society split into four factions with essentially unique characteristics. But an equally obvious question would be about our fears. In the novel, Tris joins a faction bent on overcoming their fears to become - as their faction's name claims - dauntless . At one point, Tris undergoes a test in which she has to face each one of her fears in order to overcome them. In comparison with her other Dauntless friend, she has surprisingly few fears to combat - though that doesn't make

November is a month and a half away, but I'm already thinking about National Novel Writing Month and whether or not I will participate. I am thinking that maybe this will be the year I do it. Not that I remotely have time, but the whole point is to make a goal regardless of your commitments and find the time in the cracks and crannies of the usual crazy world. It helps, of course, if you know what you want to write about beforehand, and there are some significant things you can do to help yourself prepare without officially jumping the gun. For example, an outline, drafting character sketches, writing sample dialogues, reading similar works, collecting first and last names so you don't leave a bunch of these ___ scattered through the manuscript... that sort of thing. Figuring out the very mechanics of how you will write the thing (pen and paper? trusty laptop? occasional twitter posts?) may seem overly specific, but may be just the sort of initial decision-making that will se

The other day as I was driving down the freeway, thinking about my perception of all the cars around me and the noise of their engines, I was struck by the similarity of light and sound in that they are both waves. Or rather, I was struck by their dissimilarity, because light and sound seem thoroughly disassociated from one another in our perception of them. And yet, atomically, or subatomically, they are these shivering waves coming at our senses. Bumping our neurons and sending the dendrites shuddering toward the brain. It seemed like such a phenomenal revelation, this wave business. It took my mind in a hundred different directions all at once, and I found myself rattling off these wonders of nature and perception that were all somehow tangentially related to the fact of the sensory wave, from modern art to the temptation in the Garden of Eden. It occurred to me that I was just as thrilled by these different ideas and their connections as I was by the fact of thinking of them at

This is going to be one of those posts that reflects just how much I wish Pinterest had a blog feature. Not that that's remotely a good idea, as I wouldn't honestly be too interested in reading other Pinterest blogs, but... whatever. Here are some pictures for you: From the Boca Raton Museum of Art exhibit "The Magic of Realism," by Robert Vickrey You never know when you might need a flickr collage of ancient maps and such. The Bucephalus living sculpture by Robert Cannon. Just follow the link to the other "accidental mysteries" featured here. Tapping into my inner melodrama for this one. I really do love it, and no less with the knowledge that it will probably grace the cover of a teen paranormal romance novel some day. Found somewhere on the blog Blue Velvet Chair . Click through at your peril. From a collection of incredible book paintings by Mike Stilkey.

Many of my college friends are in Chicago this week for a wedding, which makes me a little sad that I don't live there. I have been thinking about living in Chicago for the last few days, since I stumbled across the pictures for HGTV 's upcoming giveaway. I won't win this one either, but I am trying really hard to figure out if there's a way to affordably DIY the Frank Lloyd Wright Tree of Life lightboxes from the living area. Looking at the photos of the view out the apartment's window has brought a flood of memories (though some of the memories, I realize, are actually scenes from Divergent playing in my head, others are real). Some of my most vivid memories of Chicago: When we accidentally gave a drug dealer a ride home from the Jazz Festival. When I got suckered into giving a guy $20 to help me walk my luggage to Ogilvie (a cab ride would have cost less than half as much). When I changed for the opera in a McDonald's bathroom, leaving Jenny to ca

I have been editing a lot lately. I have read and reread at least 23 manuscripts since the beginning of the year. Let me type that out for emphasis: twenty-three! And there are about four more left for the month of August, so I'm not slowing down any time soon (except to blog a bit, I guess). I am learning a few things about editing as I go, the most important being that it is never a waste of time to read something again. There's a reason publishers object to digital books being priced lower than print books. They both cost exactly the same amount to make in terms of time and expertise - and since digital books have to be formatted in a number of different ways for various platforms, they arguable cost even more. I am finding the ideal number of read-throughs for a manuscript, after all content is ironed out and sentences are looking more or less as they ought, is three. This is why there are copyeditors, line editors, and proofreaders, and why each of them have a slightl

Blueberry Lemon Ricotta Pancakes at the Beachcomber The view from our table Beginning the walk My mother, on the phone with my brother, bridging two coasts A map of seaweed   Thanks to Instagram, without which, I can't take pictures worth salt. Considering my proximity to the sea, that's really not worth much at all.

The big movie news (at least in my odd world) is the dual releases of Snow White adaptations happening next year. Universal is shooting one with Kristen Stewart, and Relativity is releasing one with Lily Collins. Take a look at the promotional images: Obviously the Kristen Stewart version looks cooler, but the problem with it is equally evident - they cast Kristen Stewart. The wicked stepmothers are also an interesting battle of the hotties, Julia Roberts for Relativity and Charlize Theron for Universal. The latter has a bigger budget, but the former (apart from not having casted an angsty mouthbreather in the lead role) has the greatest card in its favor: It's directed by my favorite film genius, Tarsem Singh. Take a look at a few of the images from The Fall, one of my favorite films of all time. Seriously, if Snow White has any measure of this kind of aesthetic quality, Bella doesn't stand a chance:      

Sometimes I write elaborate blog posts only to delete them moments before publishing. It's a good thing, both for you and for me. I was about to wax angry and uneloquent on all the fuss over Amy Winehouse when more tragic things have happened in the last twenty-four hours or so. But the fuss is understandable, and I have reminded myself to be sympathetic in all things. I will try. The difference lies in our choices. Amy Winehouse is a tragedy, because she is the portrait of Dorian Gray. She is a reminder of what our choices mean, what they look like when they are worn on our skin. A reminder that we are all one ugly decision away from that kind of living hell. When we look at her and read the verse "for the wages of sin is death," we begin to wonder if it's talking about punishment - or inevitable consequences. Norway is a different kind of tragedy. We are talking about a massacre of innocents. They're both tragedies, and I suppose the former is better suited

I just read a post over at Publishers Weekly about a book group being vocally offended by a bookseller's reading suggestion. The bookseller, who is also the PW blogger, was baffled by their offense. Not just because they were so loud about their objections - which I might understand; after all, they should have known better than to keep reading if the material was offensive - but that they seemed reluctant to talk about the issue of sexuality. When I was working on my graduate degree, some of my fellow students invited me to watch a widely acclaimed art house film that was laced with sexually explicit scenes. When it was over, I told them how awful I thought it was, how inappropriate, disturbing and unnecessary it seemed. In turn, they were offended that I hadn't been able to see past my puritanical hang-ups to see the artistic quality of the film. I have remembered that post-movie conversation with them for years because it baffled me. I have still not been able to figure

I have a lot of wonderful things to read this summer. I'm really excited about it, actually. Even so, my whole summer reading list is pretty much work-related. There are a few books I have sitting on my shelves that I kind of wish I was reading as well (not instead). I have been meaning to reread this since I first turned the last page. All you need to read is the first page to know you should read the whole thing . I freely admit, I want to read this for the cover alone. It has been too long since I last read anything by O'Connor. She is required reading for life.