A lot of people say a blog should have focus. There are tech blogs, mommy blogs, fashion blogs, etc. So what does my blog fall under? Um… Yeah.

When I first started blogging 15 years ago — no, seriously, at age 9 I coded every post by hand in Notepad then uploaded the html file to my Geocities or AOL Members page — I was just venting. There was a lot pre-teen/teenage/college-age angst. Sometimes I tried to make it “poetic.” Mostly it was about boys. Of course.

When I graduated, I decided that having all that angst floating around The Interwebz was not a good idea, since I wanted to have a successful career in a semi-public arena. Amy Tan doesn’t get stalked like Kristen Stewart, but some writers do become celebrities of sorts, and I just wanted to be cautious. So I started this blog/site with the idea that it would be a combination of personal and professional, a record of my journey to becoming a published author.

However, two years have passed since I graduated college with my B.A. in creative writing, and so far, no publications.

So now I’m thinking about refocusing my blog: How NOT to Become a Professional Author.

I’m only half joking! I have a lot of bad habits, and personality traits that are not conducive to the solitary, self-driven lifestyle of an author. As I work through them, I figure it might be good for me and other aspiring writers to see what they are. After all, the first step to solving a problem is identifying it, right?

So, #1 on the list: Lie down on your couch to read a book, and end up falling asleep while cuddling your puppy. This is absolutely guaranteed NOT to help you become a professional author. Because you can’t write, edit, or query an agent with your eyes closed, your brain off, and your face full of fur.

You CAN, however, look quite restful and cute.

Note: Usually I reserve my book responses for iluv2read, but I may start cross-posting them here… Not sure yet.

The Kitchen God’s Wife was not my favorite Amy Tan book, but I did love it. More than any other, this focused on the mother’s story in China, and it was a wrenching one. (Usually there’s a pretty good balance between the mother and daughter generations.) Because of what I read in The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan’s memoir of sorts, I found myself thinking of this as her own mother’s true story, which may or may not be a fair assumption. And my heart broke for this woman and all that she endured, all her suffering, the lows and — thankfully — the eventual highs. It made me wonder about my own mother, how little I know, how much she might have to tell me. Will we wait until we think it’s almost too late to finally share all our secrets with one another? Will I have to reconstruct her life in a novel in order to understand her?

Anyway, good book. Check out my iluv2read post for favorite passages.

The book had been more difficult to write than she expected. The swirl of important ideas and powerful epiphanies seemed diminished on the page. They became fixed words and were no longer fresh internal debate. Still, she finished, and was excited and nervous to see what people would think, how her work might change their lives. It could have a ripple effect. She did not want to get her expectations up too high, yet writing about personal discovery could prove to be her calling.

And then she could not find a publisher. She kept sending out the manuscript and received only rejections or never heard back. It had been a waste of time to write the damn thing. She was going to throw it in the trash–it pained her to see it, this big lump of wasted time. But then she reconsidered. She was stronger than that. It wasn’t a failure. She simply had not come out of the jungle yet. She needed perspective. She needed to revise her life before she could revise her book.

No more excuses about obligations. No more thinking she was indispensable. She bought a ticket for Paris. On the plane, she conjugated verbs that would soon have real meaning: Je crie au monde. J’ai crié au monde. Je crierai pour que le monde m’entende. I will shout to the world to hear me.

- Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning, p 459

After recently reading The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan, I’ve come to the realization that she is without question one of my favorite authors. And given that I’ve only read one or maybe two books by the other people I’d put in that category, she’s probably got the most legit claim. Her and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Anyway, I really liked and identified with what she had to say (in an interview in the Sonoma Independent) about why she writes.

“I think that the other reason that I’ve become a storyteller is that I was raised with so many different conflicting ideas that it posed many questions for me in life, and those questions became a filter for looking at all my experiences and seeing them from different angles. That’s what I think that a storyteller does, and underneath the surface of the story is a question or a perspective or a nagging little emotion, and then it grows.”

My whole life I’ve been able to sympathize with both the black and white of life. If I were a politician, I’d probably be accused of “flip-flopping,” but I prefer to think of it as exercising my prerogative as a woman to change my mind, or attributing it to my halved nature (Chinese and American, Scorpio and Sagittarius). Only in the past five years or so have I come to the conclusion that the truth usually lies in the gray. But wherever something sits on the spectrum, I think that my compulsion to empathize is part of what fuels my interest in so many different characters and stories, and that my inability to let something go until I’ve resolved it is what keeps me working and writing.

More from Tan:

“Conflicts. Tragedies in life,” she concludes, beginning to list her own biography. “Difficulties. A mother who was depressed. A father and a brother who died. Being the only Chinese girl in a school. Moving every year. Graduating from a private school in Switzerland among rich people and not being rich.

“You know, those are the things that make you either psychotic or a fiction writer.”

Exactly! Well, not exactly. But in other words, just be glad I’m not crazy.

Yes, yes, I’m sure it was 1864. I remember now, because the year sounded very strange. Libby-ah, just listen to it: Yi-ba-liu-si. Miss Banner said it was like saying: Lose home, slide into death. And I said, No, it means: Take hope, the dead remain. Chinese words are good and bad this way, so many meanings, depending on what you hold in your heart. (p 32)

More from/about Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses at iluv2read.

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Andy and I are off to Disney World tomorrow morning. See ya next week!