Month: January 2014

this month I ...

January 2014

By on Friday, January 31, 2014

I read the following books:

Thoughts:

  • Bone and Bread: Ignoring the fact that I keep calling this book Bread and Bone, I feel angry about this book. Cheated. It’s so cluttered and so long that it obscures the potential for something so meaningful. It’s a beautiful two hundred page story somehow stretched out to five hundred. Uncertain, I guess. This book is uncertain as to how to shine brightly.

  • Kristin Lavrandatter: Discussed here.

  • Choose Me: Discussed here.

  • Night Film: Why did I read this? I didn’t particularly enjoy Special Topics in Calamity Physics and horror books/movies/etc. are almost always a letdown in the dénouement, and the italics, oh god the italics. But I read it because I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t be great and then when it wasn’t great, I felt dumb for wasting my Saturday afternoon in bed reading it.

  • The Hundred Foot Journey: One of those books with no conflict or antagonism, just going forward in a twee-like fashion. I don’t like books like that. Maybe it’s jealousy because nothing I write is warm or happy and the warm and happy books I do end up reading are always bestsellers being turned into a movie, whereas nothing I write will likely ever be turned into anything else.

  • How Should A Person Be: There is really only one thing worth taking away from this book, something I will remember to tell Tesfa when she is older (adjusted for sexual attraction if necessary), which is never be with a man who wants to teach you something. I did grow to care about the characters by the end, but basically, 90% of the time, I was just angry with this sort of shitty book.

Best book:

jacob22

I still love this book. It’s a pretty odd children’s book and dated, but my love for it is endless.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

1939601010.01._SX140_SY224_SCLZZZZZZZ_

Is it cheating if I put on a book I’ve already read? I read this book over and over again when I was about ten or eleven years old, but forgot what it was called. I spent a morning last week thinking about it, long and hard, searching through librarything and goodreads and amazon, cross-referencing with other memories of who could have written it (for a long time I thought Judy Blume), then remembering I had a copy of A Royal Pain on my bookshelf and that I had read all the Ellen Conford I could check out of the library after that. And it is – it is an Ellen Conford novel, not Judy Blume. The book isn’t in the New Brunswick Library System, and I am anti-buying things right now, but if I find it somewhere, in the used bookstore on Bridge Street or the Frenchy’s next time we go, I’m going to buy it.

I watched:

Thoughts:

  • The Station Agent: Why can I tolerate, even dare I say, enjoy heartwarming movies like this one, yet when faced with a heartwarming book, often chosen for my bookclub, I get disgusted at the thought and end up having to force myself to read it? A mystery meghan puzzle I suppose. Also, I think I’m a little bit in love with Bobby Cannavale now.

  • Despicable Me: Watched from (Canadian) Netflix while Tesfa was sick. I don’t know what I was expecting, except to say, I was expecting more. The movie isn’t bad, but it isn’t anything other than inoffensive, and even then, can I say that? What’s with the huge NBC product placements? Like for MSNBC – kids aren’t going to watch this movie and suddenly think Maybe I should be getting my news from a left-leaning all-news station like MSNBC, adults aren’t going to be like Well, if they’re advertising in the movie I brought my kid to see, I better go home and make sure to watch MSNBC all the time now. So I don’t understand. Tesfa slept through most of it too, so I can’t get her opinion to share either.

  • 30 Rock: There are many things I like about this show, the number one being the uptempo jazz music as Netflix subtitles call it of the opening and I like Liz Lemon has some of the laziness I recognize in myself. But I am weary of everyone constantly commenting on how unattractive and fat Liz Lemon is. There’s a scene in the last episode I watched where Tina Fey is facing the Jane Krakowski and Tina Fey actually seems far skinnier. I don’t like the constant product placement. And I don’t like how Frank is in the opening credits but not Twofer or Cerie. And I don’t like how the other female staff writer (the one with frizzy, dirty blonde hair) doesn’t even have a name. I don’t like how tokenistic the inclusions of race and feminism are, just enough that I’m supposed to feel, I guess, appeased. I don’t want to feel appeased. I want to feel intelligent and not just like Here’s the bare minimum so you don’t complain. But the upbeat jazzy music! How can I stop?

I wrote: Same as always – time split between Come From Away for my course and my faerie story for my sanity.

And I’ve been put up by a journal to win the Journey Prize. I don’t anticipate getting past the first round, since this is my first time, but I’m still tickled to be considered.

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books

shoutout to my favourite girl power kids website

By on Friday, January 24, 2014

So this is totally 100% unsolicited and because I love them so much: A Mighty Girl. Whenever I can’t think of a good book to read Tesfa, I go to their website and search around. We found Rosie Revere, Engineer from them. We found Franny K. Stein. We found Geoff’s new favourite kids book Zita the Spacegirl.

Sometimes in my small town, where even the school teachers engage in blatant gender essentialism, I feel alone in trying to find exciting and engaging media for Tesfa, who as I mentioned in the previous post, is having some issues with bravery and confidence. But this website makes me feel better and I greatly having books to read that I like reading between some of the books I am less enamored with but Tesfa likes a lot (i.e. Berenstain Bears).

And I have a warm and fuzzy feeling that the acquisitions librarian here also scans A Mighty Girl. While it takes months for new Can-lit to show up in the library system, they almost always have whatever book from A Mighty Girl I’m lusting after that day. Yay library! Yay A Mighty Girl! Yay books!

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fiction writing

yah!

By on Friday, January 24, 2014

I’ve been thinking about YA a lot recently. Looking at my 2013 charts, I see that I read a few YA novels last year (although can only really remember reading one right now, Eleanor & Park, which I actually found more frustrating than enjoyable). But while my adult story is going down, my faerie story seems to be in ascension and I keep thinking that maybe that’s okay. Maybe I’ll write short stories for adults and longer stories for people who were like me when I was younger, who liked reading and didn’t really understand the rest of the world. I suppose we can adjust the tense in the last sentence: I don’t really understand the rest of the world, no matter how many studies they put out saying reading fiction helps improve interpersonal skills because I read a lot of fiction and I’m still stumped, staring at my feet at the bus stop while the other waiting mums discuss their wedding and engagement rings and I can’t think of a way to join the conversation to say that Geoff and I bought an iPod instead.

So maybe I’ll keep my YA faerie story going and let my adult longer stories just rest for a while. I don’t know. It’s winter and my fingers swell in the cold and it makes me miserable and hard to focus on being happy. We have future worries with the fact that Geoff is likely to strike soon and Tesfa is having some difficulty with trying new things and the tantrums that come with that. But escaping into fiction can be nice. In my faerie story, the main character is off to buy an extension cord, which is maybe not as fictional as I would like, but it is happening and that’s okay too.

(and I always say Why-Eh as yah! in my brain)

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books fiction writing

things change

By on Tuesday, January 21, 2014

I’d like to think that it was in high school when I read Choose Me by Evelyn Lau, in my last year of high school, but the publication date inside says 1999, so it’s possible I was organized enough and that there was a book review so I learned about it (did The Ottawa Citizen used to do book reviews? I think so) and I put it on hold at the library or maybe it was just on the shelf already, but, at the same time, my last year of high school I was so pulled in all directions that I might have read this book the next year when I was in Ottawa on a co-op term (at which point I vowed never to work for the Government of Canada again, except I broke that promise ten years later only to realize that I should have stuck with my ban on working for the feds forever). But whenever I read it, I read it and wanted to be a writer after reading it.

There’s a story in it, Suburbia, where Belinda has left graduate school, and the first time I read that story I told myself I won’t be like that. I won’t just quit graduate school for dumb reasons, and I didn’t quit graduate school for dumb reasons, even though I probably should have left because I was unhappy (although, can one imagine the angst I would have had over doing that – I have enough angst regarding quitting academia/research). But, reading the story now, I’m sort of Belinda-esque, floating unmoored. So quitting graduate school or not has nothing to do with drift. Drift just comes.

I didn’t like this book as much as I did when I was either 19 or 20, the other time I read it. What I’d been thinking was that some of my stories were, in some way, theft from Lau’s here, but now I don’t see as much of a resemblance as I’ve built up in my head (and not theft as in plagiarism, but some sort of spiritual theft of feeling and emotion). I had a story I wrote much later that I was pretty sure was reworking of a story in Choose Me and when I got to that story, mine wasn’t like that at all other than it had a professor and a student, like so many of my stories because of the years and years I spent in school. Maybe I’ll rewrite my story then. I don’t have a copy of it anywhere, but I know what happened enough to recreate it. Or maybe I’ll just let it go. Drift some more.

I’d remembered these stories so much in my head and then they were different. Things change.

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books

Reading Around the World – Norway

By on Thursday, January 16, 2014

Norway: Kristin Lavrandatter by Sigrid Undset

Thoughts: So sometime in, I’ll say December, someone I know posted a link to a list of books about strong women to read your daughters (I don’t know why we can’t read books about strong women to our children but that’s a whole other rant), and I’d try to find it on his facebook feed, except he posts like 800 things a day. Maybe it was on mental floss, I can’t remember? So Kristin Lavrandatter and I thought to myself Hey, that sounds interesting, so I put it on hold at the library and a week later in it came and into the library went I and saw that it was an 1100 page book in small font and tissue-thin paper and I then thought to myself I just fucking finished War and Peace, but checked it out anyway, in part because I didn’t want the librarian to get annoyed at me for having brought the book in through the library-loan system only to have me not take it out, and then it sat on my book-and-chapstick table (what some people call a night stand, except mine is overflowing with books and chapstick) for two renewals, and then it had to go back to the library in a week and a half, so I took a deep breath, cracked open the very broken spine (the library’s copy is from the 1960s, it isn’t the nice new Penguin translation that came out a few years ago), and started to read.

Now, having finished the 1100 page book in ten days, I must say that Kristin Lavrandatter has some things going way more for it than War and Peace:

  1. the font is bigger than War and Peace so I didn’t get eyestrain and headaches from reading it;
  2. Kristin is only about 50% as silly as any of the female characters in War and Peace. She is still annoyingly silly, but it isn’t as bad;
  3. there is no Tolstoi spew. There is no Undset spew. Basically, stuff happens the whole time with no philosophical digressions. Sometimes the priests admonish someone (it is a very religious book), but it is usually only a paragraph here or there, not like the last 100 pages or anything where there are no characters and only Tolstoi telling you what he’s already said about sixteen times previously throughout the novel.

That being said, War and Peace is probably still a deeper book, but in terms of what I liked, I liked Kristin Lavrandatter so much more.

Cons: The middle section drags and drags. I had a hard time keeping the Norwegian/Swedish royalty straight in my mind. There are many people who have very similar names and having a few family trees in the front might have been helpful (perhaps this is included in the new Penguin edition).

But now I’m done and I have that book hangover one gets after finishing a long book with characters that one grows attached too. And now I have no excuse to go around talking like a character from the book, i.e. Ere ‘tie aught I trowed, yet liefer do I now suspect more. Or, I suppose, I still could. Considering it.

Rating: 4.5/5

Previous Readings Around the World.

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books fiction writing

she’s just a small town girl

By on Wednesday, January 15, 2014

I

Every few months I get a letter from my website hosting company with a coupon for google ads, and to make me feel that they really care about me as a person, they always personalize the letter with such information as they can find on my billing statement.

So every few months, I get a chipper letter saying Hey Meghan Rose (and I’ll stop you right there – no one calls me Meghan Rose anymore, even though I still sign my name like that, and the only reason I sign my name like that is that in high school, the registrar messed up and put my full name in the What you like to be called column and I discovered it was easier to just let teachers call me that rather than explain, every year, that some secretary had switched the two columns for me. So unless my high school Calculus teacher Mr Brown has since moved to Utah to run a webhosting service, I’m pretty sure that this is just robotic scanning of billing information).

But back to the letter: Hey Meghan Rose, Ever wonder how many people in NAME OF TOWN I LIVE IN* are searching for exactly what you have to offer?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can answer that for you. There are 5558 people in the town I live in according to StatsCan. And I’ll bet zero of them are looking for someone who writes literary short stories. But thanks for trying.

* I’m not actually going to say the town I live in, but I think I have before, so someone could probably figure it out if she were so inclined.

II

I went to the library yesterday. The librarian had locked himself out of his computer system, but said I could just take my books out anyway, which may be pretty awesome because now I have far too many library books out, but if some of the books I have out don’t go into the system, then I’ll have a longer time to read them.

I’m pretty sure though, if there were more than 5558 people in my town, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to just take books out of the library without actually taking them out.

And I’m also pretty sure the librarian knows me as the creepy girl who takes out too many books. But that’s okay, because that’s what I am.

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fiction writing

it’s great, except for the 80% we want you to cut

By on Tuesday, January 14, 2014

I got that acceptance letter this week – we love it but please resubmit it as 20% of its current length.

I’m pretty sure that to cut 80% of my story would pretty much leave us with very imperative sentences and not much else (He go. She eat. etc.) Maybe it’s worth trying as an intellectual exercise? But I can only imagine how frustrated I would get.

Back to the submission game.

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books

remember that time I threw my life away?

By on Thursday, January 9, 2014

Today I bought this book: Moving On: Essays on the Aftermath of Leaving Academia. A while ago, I saw the call to submit, but didn’t. I thought maybe I should, but I don’t know if I have anything meaningful to say. I don’t even know if I’ll manage to read the book, but bought it more out of solidarity, because here is my confession: I am still horribly ashamed that I left academia.

It doesn’t matter that I was ill-suited for a job as a professor or that I never really committed to being an academic. It doesn’t matter that I wrote papers and went to conferences, the entire time the inside of my palms cut to ribbons from digging my nails in so deep to keep from screaming. It doesn’t matter that all I really enjoyed about academia was having license to work quietly by myself and learn things, something that I can do now as a writer without all the additional stress of being in a university setting.

What does matter is that I hate the way people look at me when I say I have a PhD but no, I’m not working at the university in town. What matters is that I hate the way some of the other child-free academics talked down to me because if my husband has a PhD and I have a kid, then I couldn’t possibly be anything more than a child-minder. What matters is that I feel like I let my gender down because I was a woman in STEM and I quit and now my husband is the primary breadwinner, although the $100 I made from writing last year did cover the cost of two tanks of gas.

I made a mistake. I admitted it. I got out before I made more mistakes. And having a Phd in Mathematics is a pretty good fall-back option.

Still, why do I feel so ashamed about walking away from the academy?

I’ll let you all know if I ever manage to steel myself up to read the book.

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this month I ...

December 2013

By on Saturday, January 4, 2014

I read the following books:

Thoughts:

I’m not super chatty about the books I read in December.

Best book:

rotters

Considering I put it as my best book of the year, The Rotter’s Club by Jonathan Coe.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:
sugarbush

I have no memory of putting this book on my wishlist: The House On Sugarbush Road, so I’m thinking that it’s an inspired choice.

I watched:

Thoughts (and I’m far more chatty about movies and stuff than books this month):

  • Homeland: I’m sorry. This show is just plain dumb. Geoff and I watched until half-way through Season One and then looked at each other and said We have better things to do. Here’s an alternet article about the stupidity of Homeland to back me up.

  • 30 Rock: In my quest to find something to watch while eating lunch, I tried this. I guess it was funny, but I watched three episodes and haven’t gone back.

  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Tesfa is finally tiring of the episodes on Netflix. She hasn’t asked to watch in weeks.

  • How The Grinch Stole Christmas: TV special, not the movie.

  • Searching for Sugarman: Geoff: I just heard the craziest thing on the radio about this singer that no one knows here but is super huge in South Africa!

    Me: The Sugarman movie?

    Geoff: How’d you know about that already?

    Me: The radio is behind the times man! Behind the times!

    Somewhat relatedly, I have a huge, nonsensical hatred of the radio and anytime I can smack down radio, no matter how tenuous, I must do it.

  • Timecrimes: Me: I don’t know if the film was believable.

    Geoff: You mean the time-travel timelines?

    Me: No. I don’t care about that. I just don’t think Spain has enough money to run such an advanced research station. Especially with the Euro crisis.

    Geoff: Really? That is your problem with the movie.

    Me: I mean, it’s just not realistic.

  • The Music Man: Tesfa was really into the Flim and Flam episode of My Little Pony, so I thought she’d enjoy this movie. That was a mistake, not because she didn’t enjoy it, but because she sings the songs from the movie all the time now. I learned my lesson. No more musicals.

  • The Sopranos: My DVDs do not have subtitles on them and I am forced to listen. Also, the DVDs are like the first DVDs ever made and the menus and the screens and pretty much everything other than watching the actual show is embarrassing because clearly no one had any clue what do with a DVD menu back in 1999.

  • peg + cat: New Tesfa show, except there are only twelve episodes, and even if it is a girl and her cat solving math problems, I don’t know how long it is before I got peg + cat crazy. Also, this was a hassle to get and PBS really doesn’t like Canadians giving them money. That’s all I have to say about that.

  • From Up On Poppy Hill

  • How To Train Your Dragon: I wish there were more girls in this movie, but considering the book has zero, I guess having two or three in the movie is already supposed to be a win for equal rights *sarcasm*

  • Troll Hunter: Oh Netflix, you came and you gave me Trollhunter. That almost makes me feel okay about you again after trying to push Homeland on me.

I wrote: My big file of stories all put together. Come From Away revisions. Antrim Nec Time Travel Compliance Officer rough draft. Typed up some faerie story. Basically, exactly what I did last month.

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