Please note: My “Reading Reflections” are not reviews. They are simply my thoughts in response to certain passages.

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Truth be told, THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain is not the type of book I would have picked up on my own. A “biofic,” it might be called. But after seeing McLain at Books by the Banks last year, I wanted to know if her eloquence and enthusiasm translated to the page. (IMO, it did.) The story is told from the point of view of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest’s first wife, and focuses on their years together. As a woman in a committed relationship, I did connect with Hadley, but to my surprise, I found myself drawn more strongly to Ernest himself. Despite his boorish behavior at times, he was a writer, an artist above all else, and his absolute, uncompromising conviction stirred a lot of emotion in me.

(As did his insecurities. And Hadley’s.)

As I read, I wondered if Andy would identify with Hadley to some degree too. They’re both highly sensible, yet with enough of an artistic sensibility to connect with their creative partners, and they both have to deal with supporting — indirectly enduring? — the unstable, untraditional path of a writer. Granted, I don’t get drunk or fight bulls like Hemingway did… but still. I know it isn’t easy.

Anyway, I highlighted the HECK out of this book, and it was extremely hard to choose which quotes to feature here. I may end up having to do a couple short follow-up posts, actually, but these will do for now.

The whole time he talked fast about his plans, all the things he wanted for himself, the poems, stories, and sketches he was burning to write. I’d never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light. He never stopped moving — or thinking, or dreaming apparently. (15)

I remember showing my writing journals to Andy for the first time. How vulnerable and exposed I felt, because here were all my innermost ideas, laid bare to be read, possibly judged. Each hastily scribbled line was a seed; whether it would bloom or not, I had no idea. This was not a beautiful garden so much as a vast field that I tended and watched with tentative hope.

Fortunately Andy didn’t say much. He just flipped pages slowly, taking it all in, taking me in, with a kind of reverence that I noticed and appreciated.

His mood was pretty low during this time. He’d gotten several more rejections on stories he’d sent to magazines, and it hurt his pride. It was one thing when he was writing part-time and having no success. But now he was devoted to his craft, working every day, and still failing. What did that mean for the future? (67)

Oy, do I feel this. When you’ve put everything on the line — your reputation, your fortune, your heart — you can’t help but feel it. I am so lucky and thrilled that I could afford to quit my job and pursue writing full-time. But I’m terrified too.

In our circle, everyone believed things would hit for him, and that it was only a matter of time. “You’re making something new,” Pound told him one day in his studio. “Don’t forget that when it starts to hurt.”

“It only hurts to wait.”

“The waiting helps you boil it down. That’s essential, and the hurting helps everything along in its way.” (127)

Patience really is the hardest part. Thank god for the people who believe in you.

Now, switching from the writing focus to the relationship bits…

“Let’s always tell each other the truth. We can choose that, can’t we?” (47)

I feel like that’s a good motto in any relationship, but in a marriage especially. The truth may not always be easy or pretty, but it’s the only foundation you can build anything long-term on.

I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing. (92)

Do you ever play this game? I know I do. I speculate about couples at restaurants and on the bus, about celebrity couples, about couples I actually know. It’s as if I think figuring out their problems will help me solve — or avoid — my own.

But the truth is, we can’t compare our relationships to anyone else’s. There’s so much that goes on within each person’s heart, head, and home that we never see.

It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever. (100)

I felt that way about someone once. I don’t love him anymore, not in that way, but I still think of him from time to time, and wonder about him, and hope for him.

“Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,” I said. “And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.” (220)

Please note: My “Reading Reflections” are not reviews. They are simply my thoughts in response to certain passages.

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A couple weeks ago, I finished the book HALF THE SKY by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. They’re the first husband-wife duo to win a Pulitzer for their work, and their goal was to shine light on the troubles of women around the world (particularly India, Africa, and the Middle East). Now, we in the U.S. have plenty to be worried about in our own country, but even with my deep sadness and anger and frustration about certain issues, I can’t help thinking how privileged American women generally are compared to so many other places in the world.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. – Mark Twain

One point the book raises is that the term “women’s issues” can be problematic. Many men tune out as soon as they hear it, automatically assuming that whatever follows doesn’t affect them. But women’s issues are in fact universal, because hey, guess where you came from? That’s right: a woman.

Furthermore, studies have shown that investing in the women of any given area does more social and economic good than investing in the men. Women tend to spend on food, clothing, and education for their family and themselves, whereas men tend to spend on alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes.* (Sorry, guys, I’m just repeating the findings.) Yet men dominate business and government in most societies worldwide (including ours — let’s not deceive ourselves).

Part of the solution is training everyone to care about so-called “women’s issues.” We should all be concerned about the maternal mortality rate of women in Sierra Leone, and about the number of female village leaders in India, and about the education levels of girls in Pakistan. Not only out of compassion (though I wish that were enough) but also because those numbers have widespread effects on the growth and stability of those regions, which then have effects on politics and economies worldwide.

I’ll step off the soapbox now, but needless to say, “women’s issues” are important to me. You can see that threaded throughout my stories, even in the ones from childhood, and especially in the ones to come.

Yes, we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings. The economic advantages of empowering women are so vast as to persuade nations to move in that direction. Before long, we will consider sex slavery, honor killings, and acid attacks as unfathomable as foot-binding. The question is how long that transformation will take and how many girls will be kidnapped into brothels before it is complete — and whether each of us will be part of that historical movement, or a bystander. (251)

By coincidence, screenwriter John August blogged today about “citizenship.” Not belonging to a country, but understanding and participating in a community. Local, national, global. I’ve been thinking about that myself lately. About my citizenship. About what I can do to make a difference.

If you, like me, want to be part of the movement, here’s one way: join the micro-lending organization Kiva and take advantage of a free trial, meaning your first $25 loan is FREE (for a limited time). By doing so, you can help a young woman finish her college education, or a widower expand his village business. (*Obviously I’m not suggesting that we should lend only to women. All Kiva loanees have been vetted.) There are thousands of enterprising individuals around the world who have applied for these loans, for all sorts of ventures that will improve life for their families and/or their communities. You can support a budding artist, or a farmer, or a construction worker. All at low/no cost to yourself.

A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water.

“What are you doing, son?” the man asks. “You see how many starfish there are? You’ll never make a difference.”

The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean.

“It sure made a difference to that one,” he said. (Hawaiian parable)

Fellow blogger and writer Amanda Kendle has been micro-lending for some time and said she’s never not been paid back. Her reassurance about the whole process, along with John Green’s tweets about the free trials, encouraged me to take the plunge, which I’d been wanting to do for a while. Four of my friends joined shortly after.

Maybe we’re all just throwing starfish into the ocean. Maybe there are thousands we’ll never get to. But maybe some is better than none.

Wednesday. Thursday. I’m somewhere in between.

“Five Questions About Writing” by Stephen A. Watkins

3. What are your writings to you?
My writings are more than words on a page. They’re more than stories I tell to entertain myself and others. My writings are my still-beating heart. They are the blood in my veins. They are the breath in my lungs, flowing in and flowing out. They are the fire in my mind, the electricity of neurons and synapses connecting and evolving. They are strands of my DNA unzipping and recombining, new ideas born and new life formed.

When I look in a mirror I see my reflection, the outward image of who I am to the world. When I look at my stories, I see my true reflection – the reflection of who I am from the inside out, made bare to the world. My stories are me at my most vulnerable, and me at my strongest.

The words. Right out. Of my soul.

I do not believe there is a magic bullet, any single quality which, if present, enables one person to write and if absent prevents another from writing. Anyone can write a story, when it comes right down to it.  Doing so successfully could come down to any number of factors: perseverance, love of writing, talent, skill, desperation, desire, inspiration, hard work, and on and on.  I try to cultivate as many of these qualities in myself as I can.

“A Powerful Sort of Doubt” by Eugene Cross

… when we as writers doubt our own work, it’s because we realize that it is not yet where we want it to be. And so we keep trying, keep at it, over and over and over again. We collect our rejection slips. We revise the same sentence dozens of times. We read our work aloud and torture our thesauruses and slam our heads against the wall, until we get it right. Because we know we can. Because we know it can be better.

“25 Things I Want to Say to So-Called ‘Aspiring’ Writers” by Chuck Wendig

(Note: He does a lot of these lists, but I almost always find something fresh and valuable in them.)

Nobody respects writers, yet everybody wants to be one (probably because everybody wants to be one). Point is, you want to be a writer? Good for you. So does that guy. And that girl. And him. And her. And that old dude. And that young broad. And your neighbor. And your mailman. And that chihuahua. And that copy machine. Ahead of you is an ocean of wannabe ink-slaves and word-earners. I don’t say this to daunt you. Or to be dismissive. But you have to differentiate yourself and the way you do that is by doing rather than be pretending. You will climb higher than them on a ladder built from your wordsmithy.

Or as I often tell myself, “Less think, more do.”

I used to imagine pictures in my head and I’d try to paint them in watercolor and they’d end up looking like someone barfed up watery yogurt onto the canvas. I’d rail against this: WHY DON’T THEY LOOK BEAUTIFUL? Uhh, because you don’t know how to actually paint, dumb-fuck. You cannot exert your talent unless you first have the skill to bolster that talent.

For months I have been dying to be finished with my first draft. “Y’all are so lucky,” I said to my crit partners. “I would give anything to be editing right now.”

Oh, Kristan. Be careful what you wish for.

My original plan was to take a day off — yes, ONE DAY — and then dive right into edits. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Let’s just say that when you spend over a year drafting a book, you’ll probably need more than 24 hours to rest, let it sink in, figure out what and how to edit, and oh yeah, catch up on all the non-writing stuff you neglected in order to claw your way to “The End.”

So I ended up taking the entire month of February off. By “off” I mean that I did extra research, and some brainstorming and game planning, and a lot of thinking deeply about my characters and their story and the larger series I’d like it to be a part of. “Thinking deeply” probably sounds like hooey to most non-writers, but the truth is, it’s one of the most valuable and motivating parts of the process, at least for me. And now I’ve got a month’s worth of that inspiration and energy stored up inside me, ready to burst, ready to be channeled into the edits.

But there’s one more hurdle I wasn’t expecting.

The last step of preparation that I wanted to take was to read over my entire manuscript on my Kindle. No fixing typos, no deleting or rewriting. Just me experiencing the story as a reader, to see where it really stands and to wrap my mind around it as a whole.

But holy crap it’s weird!

So weird to read when I know what’s coming. And not just what happens, but the exact words that will be used to describe it. So weird that I can’t even get through the first chapter. Not because it’s bad (although it might be) but because it’s just so… weird. So very very very very weird.

For some reason rereading Twenty-Somewhere didn’t throw me the same way. Maybe because it was written for the web originally, and I approach online writing with a different mindset. Or maybe because it’s been two and a half years now since I wrote that “The End.”

Regardless, I’ll have to find some way to push through the weird, and through the edits, so I can finally move on to the next step: querying. Man, all you writers who are querying are so lucky. I would give anything to be querying right now.

I’ve had a bunch of notes in my Drafts folder for months now, snippets that I keep intending to turn into full posts. But at this point I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. So here are three “mini-posts,” somewhat related, somewhat not.

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Writers often hear the advice, “Kill your darlings.” Typically that means delete the bits of writing that you love the most, because odds are, they are self-indulgent. Beauty is not reason enough if the words don’t add to your story.

For me, the biggest darling is the internet, and killing the internet leads to an exponential increase in productivity. I always forget that, until I hit rock bottom and have to find a way to pull myself up out of it again.

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It’s “easier” for me to write at night, because there are fewer distractions even when I’m looking for them, and because by that point I’m so mad at myself for wasting the day that I finally buckle down. But I need to learn how to work under more normal and more positive conditions.

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“Every girl wants a bad boy that will be good just for her. Every guy wants a good girl who will be bad just for him.”

(Or as Usher and Ludacris so eloquently put it, “We want a lady in the streets but a freak in the bed.”)

I’ve seen variations of that quote all over. Twitter, Facebook, emails, songs. And I see versions of it over and over in romances. Everyone wants to be special, to be the exception. In Twilight, Bella’s mind is the only one Edward can’t read. In Knocked Up, Seth Rogan gets the girl, even though he’s a gross schlub. Even in the classics. Plain Jane (Eyre, that is) manages to captivate Rochester, and in turn she sees past his grouchy demeanor.

I can’t decide if this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, it sort of reflects reality, in a way. None of us are perfect, but we could seem perfect in a certain someone’s eyes. Through love, ordinary people become extraordinary.

But on the other hand, as Justin Long tells Ginnifer Goodwin in He’s Just Not That Into You, we can’t count on being the exception.