Author / Educator / Activist
Today’s blog post on Perception and Intention can be found over at SMACK DAB IN THE MIDDLE – the first stop on my Book Four Blog Tour.
In this guest post you’ll find the usual writing exercise PLUS one more way to win a physical copy of Narine of Noe.
Next Blog Tour Stop:
Tuesday, Jan 12
Guest post on Roger Eschbacher Books
Hey . . . stuff!
Quick post to announce my official Narine of Noe blog tour kicks off this week and will run through February. I will post more dates/locations as they are announced. Please check out the blogs of these lovely book tour hosts. All of them are writers themselves who work hard and deserve recognition.
During the tour there will be multiple chances to win prizes (copies of Book Four or the Omnibus, other books and gift certificates. yay.).
Enter to win a copy of Narine of Noe on GoodReads (deadline Jan 10).
Enter to win various books by posting reviews (deadline Jan 31).
2016 Blog Tour Stops
Thursday, Jan 7
Guest post (and giveaway) on Smack Dab in the Middle
Tuesday, Jan 12
Guest post on Roger Eschbacher Books
Monday, Jan 18
Interview (and giveaway) on Kate Johnston’s 4 AM Writer
Thursday, Jan 21
Guest post on Laurisa White Reyes
Tuesday, Jan 26
Interview / Review on Everett Maroon’s Trans/plant/portation
Thursday, Feb 4
Interview / Book Exerpt on Kim Aippersbach’s Dead Houseplants
MORE TBA…
YOUR WORKOUT
If you’re anything like me, both the end of a long writing project and the end of a long year mark a slow down in writing time. Put those two things together and I’ve got an ennui sandwich. Downtime is perfectly understandable, so is taking time to enjoy the holidays. However, my spirit knows it’s time to start writing again, but my mind and body are sluggish in post holiday indulgence haze.
When I get like this I know that ANY writing is good. I know that if I carve out some time and get my pen to a notebook that the ideas, inspiration, motivation, and joy of writing will all come back to me. I know because I’ve been here before many times.
That’s when I pull out my timer and use a tried and true invention of two of my favourite writing mentors Jack Remick and Bob Ray: The story I want to write is about…
Today, though, I thought I’d add a little twist, which I brought to the exercise during one of my Surrey Writers’ Conference workshops.
1) Set your timer for 5-7 minutes. Using the start line below, write without stopping and without editing. If you get stuck, just write about being stuck (gosh, I’m stuck, my mind feels like a piece of cheese…) OR just keep writing the start line over with a different response each time.
Start line: The story that wants to be written is about . . .
2) Set your timer for 5-7 minutes. Using one of the start lines below, write without stopping and without editing.
Start line: I often get in my own way (of being the writer/person/friend I want to be) by . . .
OR
Start line: My protagonist often gets in his/her own way by . . .
3) Set your timer for 7-10 minutes. Using one of the start lines below, write without stopping and without editing.
Start line: Breaking open my cage of limitations would look like . . .
OR
Start line: Breaking open my protagonist’s cage of limitations would look like . . .
Happy writing and Happy New Year!
Launching a book from a cell phone isn’t easy! Trust me on that one. My computer went into the shop 4 days before my launch and won’t be ready until next week! Doh!
I’m keeping this short and sweet until I can get my magic box back.
Let’s call this the softest book launch in White Forest history!
Ladies and gentleman, small and large humans, Narine of Noe is officially available TODAY!
In celebration, the publisher has listed the ebook price at $4.99 (regularly $6.99) through the weekend. As well, BOOK ONE is on sale for .99 through the weekend.
All official book launch events and parties will be in the New Year. We needed to get the book out before the end of the year, though. So… looking for a holiday gift for a 10 year old or a 10 year old at heart? (nudge-nudge, hint-hint)
Thank you Tony Ollivier, Kate Fink-Jensen, Kelly and Karyn Hoskins, Kristi FitzGerald, and Yvette Dudley-Neuman for being my early readers! THANK YOU to Jennifer Munro – who may just be the best copy editor ever. Thank you Julie Fain and Chris Fink-Jensen for the lovely cover. And last, but not least, THANK YOU Tod McCoy for being such an awesomey publisher.
A few months ago I read Daring Greatly by Brene Brown and at one point she explains the difference between “shame” and “guilt.” We feel guilt when we do something “bad,” which one can apologize for and move on. But we feel shame when we think we are bad. When we feel that as people we are not worthy, not enough.
Brown says the shame armour begins to go on around the middle grades when we begin being shamed by others for who we are. We internalize it to mean: I shouldn’t be this way, if I am, I’m not enough. I’m too fat, too skinny, not cool enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough.
The armour is new and awkward at first. As we grow into it, we get better at hiding. But even at 40, 50, 60 years old, our shame can get triggered and we’re back in 7th grade in that cafeteria.
“Shame is so painful for children because it is inextricably linked to the fear of being unlovable. For young children who are still dependent on their parents for survival—for food, shelter, and safety—feeling unlovable is a threat to survival. It’s trauma. I’m convinced that the reason most of us revert back to feeling childlike and small when we’re in shame is because our brain stores our early shame experiences as trauma, and when it’s triggered we return to that place.” – Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
Brown also discovered in her research that shame triggers for men and women differ. For men, the overarching message was that any kind of weakness is shameful. There was a whole slough of contradictory expectations for women that if they didn’t meet, triggered shame. For example, women, even in this more enlightened age, still believe they need to be nice, thin, naturally pretty . . . oh, and perfect. Be a perfect mother, wife, daughter.
I am aware of my own triggers around being “nice.” I very much want to be perceived as a nice person. I hate being perceived as not being nice. I hate when my good intentions are misinterpreted.
Even to me the issue of “stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest” sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices. – Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
So, here’s one of my own junior high school moments. 7th grade. My friends and I were eating lunch in a circle and we started a very small food fight among us. Just a few harmless grapes and such. But then suddenly I turn and I’m staring at a pair of jeans. I look up and this girl I hardly know slaps me across the face. “Look at my jeans!” she yells down at me, pointing to a splotch of yoghurt on her pants. “You got yoghurt on my pants!”
There was indeed a small splotch of yoghurt on her pants, but it couldn’t have been mine. I wasn’t eating yoghurt. She had singled me out for some reason. Slapped me, yelled at me. I didn’t understand why. I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I can’t recall what happened next, I know she stood there for a while with that yoghurt splotch in my face. Maybe I handed her a napkin, maybe I wiped it off myself. What I do remember is holding my embarrassment and shame in, rolling my eyes with my friends, and everyone nervously continuing the conversation. No one mentioned the slap to me then or ever. And on my way back to class, I told them to go on, I had to use the restroom, and in the privacy of a stall, I allowed myself to cry.
Being slapped meant I was bad and had done something horribly wrong. Only bad children got slapped. Everyone must have thought I had done something wrong, that I was a terrible person. But I hadn’t done anything wrong. I couldn’t contain those two ideas… I was a nice girl.
Even writing this 35 years later, I can feel my eyes well up. Why?
Have you seen the movie Inside Out? I think for me that slap is a “core memory.” Or, in dramatic writing speak, it’s one of the wounds that shaped my life.
I never wanted to be slapped ever again, especially not in front of my friends, so for years I went out of my way to be nice to people, to not rock the boat, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. I hated for anyone to think I was mean-spirited, selfish, unfair, uncompassionate… and it was a stake in my heart when someone either misinterpreted my intentions, or called me out – because God forbid I did something that wasn’t nice to someone!
YOUR WORKOUT
Set your timer for 5 -10 minutes per start line (I recommend increasing the duration each time from 5 to 7 to 10 minutes as it encourages the work to go deeper each time)
When you start your timer write, don’t stop, don’t edit, don’t cross out. (just do it!)*
Start lines:
1) The WOUND that shaped my character’s life happened when . . .
2) The secret shame he/she feels around this incident manifests through . . .
3) My character fears that if this shame is revealed then . . .
4) The moment my character faces this fear and exposes his/her shame is . . .
Now write your next scene . . . 
*If you want to try various ways of writing try short sentences, long sentence release (no punctuation, just connect everything by conjunctions), or listing.
**Post posting note – I subscribe to my own blog via email to make sure the posts are going out. This morning I woke up to an email from myself with the subject line: Shame On You. I had an immediate physical reaction to seeing those words and was curious as to if anyone else had a reaction. I considered changing the title to be “nice” and spare people from feeling bad about themselves. lol.
Wow. Wow. Wow.
I haven’t posted in over four months. That’s the longest break I’ve taken since I started blogging ten years ago. And it’s not for lack of wanting to, it’s because life happened (moving, working, family stuff, etc) and I was in the middle of a crisis of faith with Faerie Tales from the White Forest Book Four.
Or really, I should say a crisis of trust.
Faith and trust are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Faith is known as the “substance of hope.” It’s very nature is that it requires no evidence, one just believes. Trust is based largely on evidence from previous knowledge/experience. For example, you might trust someone because they’ve never given you a reason to do otherwise. You generally trust your friends not to stab you in the back.
I did not like book four while I was writing it. I honestly thought it was a hot mess. At one point I called it the “suckiest piece of suck that ever sucked.” Half-way through my first rewrite I nearly called my publisher to tell him I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish the book, I couldn’t figure out how to deliver it from hot messness.
Instead, I called one of my author friends, the one I always call on because she entered the world of children’s literature a few years before I did, and she always tells me the thing I need to hear. She told me: Danika, you know how to do this. Trust the process.
Trust the process.
This is what I always tell my students. I proclaim to them that “creation is messy!” I’m a process junkie. I’m all about the journey. I usually find editing the most inspiring part of writing, my editing skills applied like wielding a wand. But this story was being a difficult child. It was too confusing, too convoluted, too complicated. There were too many continuity issues between Book 4 and the rest of the series, and I thought I could never address them all. I was totally overwhelmed.
I took a break from my rewrite and read the first three books over again. I took copious notes on continuity issues and typed them up. Every time I started a new chapter I read over those notes and pulled out the ones that applied to that section.
And one by one, each note was addressed (or dismissed) and crossed off. It took months. When I got the first draft to the copy editor, it didn’t feel real. And the day I reached the last sentence on the last draft before it went to the publisher, I burst into tears.
Somewhere during my final rewrite, I realized what the story was about. It was a story about trust. I was in my kitchen when I realized it and I stood there for a full minute reveling in the irony. The idea of trust appears over and over again throughout the story. Imagine that.
Launch date for Narine of Noe is Dec 5th.
Send a note to info@danikadinsmore.com if you’d like an ebook review copy. Please specify pdf, mobi, or epub format.
YOUR WORKOUT
Where is the moment in your story where your character loses trust in themselves or someone/something else? Is it a cheating lover? A friend who steals? A failed attempt at something? A writer who has written five novels who suddenly can’t see her way through her latest manuscript? Is the trust lost for irrational reasons? Over a misunderstanding? Over prejudice?
Set your timer for 5 -10 minutes per start line
When timer starts: write, don’t stop, don’t edit, don’t cross out.
(just do it!)*
Start lines:
1) My character has a hard time trusting (in general, self, or specific person) because . . .
2) My character’s trust is broken when . . .
3) The cage my character creates for her/himself due to his/her lack of trust looks like . . .
3) My character doesn’t/can’t learn to trust again until . . .
Now write your next scene . . .
*If you want to try various ways of writing try short sentences, long sentence release (no punctuation, just connect everything by conjunctions), or listing.
The other day I was listening to a campaign speech by Bernie Sanders. The one thing that struck me was the authenticity of his anger. Most politicians, at least to me, sound like politicians expressing anger in a glossed-over sound-bite kind of way. But with Sanders, I actually believed his anger. I could feel it, the way it would catch in his throat. It was the kind of anger that drives people to action.
It reminded me of a quote from Rick Jarow (of the truly fantastic “Ultimate Anti-Career Guide”) who said that sometimes people don’t make changes in their own lives until they get angry enough.
The other day I went on a rant on Facebook. I was feeling angry. In the past, I’ve not been much of a ranter. I’ve been more of a mediator, an empathetic ear, someone who consciously practiced uplift in the world. Ranting is too easy, especially on social media. Ranting makes you feel like you’re doing something, but really, you’re not. At most you’ll get self-righteous affirmations from other ranters.
When my anger still hadn’t cleared by the next morning, I starting designing a 2nd rant. Half-way through it I realized I was just going to trigger other people with it. But I still wanted to do something, so I turned my post into something more like a call for help and a call to action. I asked people to share ways they were consciously making changes in their lives to lower their carbon footprint so they could inspire others who were too overwhelmed to take a step. And the conversation started. And I learned some new things and got inspired.
I think anger is useful, but a lot of the time we don’t utilize it. Anger in the form of rants into the void (i.e. social media) usually just end up in name-calling and raising hackles and no one changing their views on anything. Anger in the form of self-righteousness is just as useless, because that creates not just a me vs. you mentality, but an “I’m better than you” mentality. Not productive. And believe me, I’ve danced in the self-righteous zone many times.
I think the cure for self-righteous anger is empathy, and that one way to turn anger into action is to tap into that empathy. Empathy is not inactive. It is not wimpy. It is not the same thing as condoning (anyone who’s read Amanda Palmer‘s book The Art of Asking has seen how many people often mistake empathy for condoning behaviour). It is just recognizing everyone as a human being. It is thinking in terms of uplifting all of us, so that none get left behind. We are created by our circumstances and our surroundings. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we are often scared by what we don’t know. We are not born hating, judging, mocking, condemning, etc, etc, etc. We learn that stuff.
YOUR WRITING WORKOUT
In your story, what fuels your protagonist’s anger? And where in your story does his/her self-righteous anger transition into an anger that finally calls him/her to action?
Set your timer for 5 -10 minutes per start line
When timer starts: write, don’t stop, don’t edit, don’t cross out.
(just do it!)*
Start lines:
1) The anger that burns inside my protagonist looks like . . .
2) The fallout from my protagonist’s anger destroys his/her . . .
3) When my protagonist can’t take it any more he/she . . .
Now write your next scene . . . 🙂
*If you want to try various ways of writing try short sentences, long sentence release (no punctuation, just connect everything by conjunctions), or listing.
up*lift
verb
1. to lift up; raise; elevate.2. to improve socially, morally, or the like.3. to exalt emotionally or spiritually.
4. to become uplifted.
noun5. an act of raising; elevation.6. the process or work of improving, as socially, intellectually, or morally.7. emotional or spiritual exaltation.
For the past few months I’ve been thinking about the ideas of UP and DOWN in terms of language, emotion, and physicality. When we are UP we are high, exalted (“closer to the heavens”), floating, light, standing tall, open. We love looking up – – to the sky, birds, clouds, sun, moon, future. When feeling liberated, joyous, elated we throw our arms up. We want to “reach for the stars” not “dig ourselves” anywhere.
When we are DOWN we are de-pressed (I picture a giant thumb pressing into me, squishing me like a bug), hiding, covered, bent, small. You’ve heard of the lowly worm.*
After my recent bout with depression (the extreme side of down), I decided that I didn’t want a giant thumb pressing into me and squishing me like a bug. I wanted a really powerful antidote for myself instead. I wanted to be uplifted.
The opposite of DOWN is UP!
I began to think about the small ways (especially habitual or subconscious) I sometimes de-pressed myself. And then I began to see that sometimes I de-pressed the people around me. Not because I’m mean, not because I’m malicious or vengeful, but because I’m human and sometimes I can’t see the light and sometimes I am afraid.
But what if, in the moment before I said something spiteful or petty or threw a piece of my pain back at someone, I practiced using uplifting words instead? What if I paused and thought of them as bright stars waiting to be released into the sky? And what if I kept coaxing those stars, inspiring those stars, championing those stars so that more and more and more were released and we lit up the entire sky?
I decided to try a little experiment. A few months ago, I inked the word UPLIFT on the inside of my cell phone cover, so that every time I opened the cover to make a call, text, email, tweet, or to use facebook it was a reminder to be impeccable with my word and to use language as a means of raising the spirits of the people around me.
It always makes me proud to love the world somehow –
hate’s so easy compared.~Jack Kerouac
I made it a rule (the cell cover a constant reminder) that I had to always act or speak from this idea of being uplifting. And as I did, it started to dissolve my own self-negativity. The act of consciously UPLIFTING others on a regular basis helped me to get out of my own ego. It helped me to choose being happy over the need to be right. It created a new kind of momentum that fed on itself (in a good way).
And if someone else was not in a space to be uplifted (as I wasn’t at the end of last year), I didn’t take it personally. It wasn’t my job to fix them. Being uplifting isn’t about providing the answer or giving advice.
Being uplifting isn’t just about saying nice things to people either. It’s about paying attention to others and their own fears, wants, and needs. It’s about being conscious in and of the world. It’s about giving people space and taking care of each other and being of service. It’s about affirmation. It’s about intention.
Now, as I go about my day, when I catch myself in a small moment of pettiness or jealousy, I envision myself being an agent of UPLIFT. I envision our communal star-ness, together in the bright sky.
*in defence of “lowly worms” – I love worms. I help them across the sidewalk. I relocate them when I’m weeding. I mourn them when they are squished.
YOUR WORKOUT
In our fiction, it’s necessary to be mean to our protagonists. I always tell my students, Don’t be nice to your characters! Turn up the heat! Give them painful challenges! Make life hard! Pile it on!
I rarely talk about the moments that shine a little light on them. But, at some point in the story, I think a little uplift is in order.
By uplift I don’t mean everything solved in a grand deus ex machina moment, but something beautiful and meaningful and a bit more subtle.
When your character is at their lowest, when they’ve failed and failed and failed some more, when they have been beaten by the blows of life (or even the physical blows of bullies) it’s time to allow something to give. And if done well, it will break your reader’s hearts just a little.
It could be a memory. It could be a small act of kindness. It could be embodied in an invaluable object they take with them along their journey. Imaging in the movie version of it, the music turns melancholy, and a sense of hope or determination pierces the gloom.
Write without too much thinking, without stopping, and without rereading & editing
Start with any of the lines below (or all!) and keep writing for 7-10 minutes.
The most precious object in my protagonist’s life is . . .
The voice in my protagonist’s head that gives him/her hope sounds like . . .
The kind gesture that comes when my protagonist least expects it happens when . . .
A wise friend of mine once observed:
Every action we take or don’t take is driven by one of two things:
Fear or Love.
I’ve been sifting through this idea for a few years now, wondering if this were actually true (being the “inward bound” workshop/personal development/human potential geek-junkie that I am – and yes, I am the kind of person satirized on shows like Portlandia). But I’ve discovered that whenever I break my actions or inactions down to the basic essence, my wise friend is right. I just have to be brave enough to tell the truth about it once in a while, especially when it comes to the fear end of things. I’m quite good at justifying my fears.
I also think that there are levels of fear, and I can always tell when I get to the fear behind the fear behind the fear (to that essence), because it just goes THUNK when it finally gets to that simple statement of belief I hold. You know, the one that isn’t really serving me.
For example: Even though I say I love to write and share and talk story and writing practice is INVALUABLE, I haven’t blogged for almost two months. I could easily tell myself I just haven’t had time. And I could list all the stuff that’s been going on in my life to enroll everyone in that story.
However, I didn’t really have to watch 3 episodes of Scott and Bailey in a row and then stay up until 2 AM playing Angry Birds feeling guilty and telling myself, Pulitzer Prize author Michael Chabon doesn’t stay up all night playing Angry Birds. (Although I certainly invite him to tell me otherwise.) He’s a real writer. He writes.
And I didn’t have to start at least 8 posts when an idea inspired me, only to finish none of them.
I know procrastination when I see it. And I know procrastination stems from fear. So when I finally broke it down, it went like this:
Why didn’t you finish those posts?
I was afraid I’d lost my momentum on the ideas and they wouldn’t be as good as I thought when I was inspired to start them. (first level of fear, logical enough that I could just brush it away)
But so what if they’re “not as good” as you thought they would be?
I’m afraid that if they’re not very good people will figure out that I’m really a fraud and I’ll lose readers.
First, you’re not a fraud. Second, so what if you lose readers?
I’m afraid if I lose readers I’ll look stupid and people will judge me for that.
So?
Then no one will like me. (I am now 9 years old)
THUNK!
Completely unannounced, Byron Katie’s voice barged in on my thought process and asked me: And WHO would you BE without that?
Who would I be without the fear of people not liking me? If that fear were simply gone from my life, what could I accomplish?
And what is the price to myself if I hold myself back because of this fear?
A few years ago at a SCBWI conference, author Laurie Halse Anderson said that one time when she’d been whining and complaining about some niggling thing to do with her writing, her husband told her: “You know what? You’re gonna die.”
He didn’t say it to be mean. She got it. The things that were holding her back weren’t worth paying attention to in this limited time on the planet we all have. Her fear of not doing those things became greater than her fear of doing them. And sometimes, that’s the place I also need to go to get my motivation back.
On the flip side, the love I feel for what I do when I’m actually doing it, and not trying to be too perfect or precious about it, is also life-fulfilling motivation. And even though fear (and anger) can be incredibly useful procrastination busters, I think “doing” from a space of love is where I’d much rather be.
YOUR WRITING WORKOUT
What is the fear (big or small) that holds your protagonist back? If you look deep enough, what is the essence of the fear? How does she justify her actions/inactions around this fear?
What price to herself for inaction? What will she lose if she does not act? Her freedom? A friendship? A position? A lover? Her self-worth?
And is there a moment when her fear of not having/doing something becomes greater than her fear of doing/having this thing?
TIMED WRITING GUIDELINES
Set your timer for 5 -10 minutes per start line
When timer starts: write, don’t stop, don’t edit, don’t cross out.
(just do it!)
Start lines:
The excuse my character gives him/herself looks like . . .
The fear behind all of my character’s fears tells her . . .
The price of my character’s inaction is . . .
The scene where my character breaks the bonds of this fear happens when . . .
Now write your next scene . . . 🙂
Moving Stats:
two cuts
six bruises
a round of kidney stones
two head/chest colds
an ear infection
one bookshelf dropped on head
~ ~ ~
Despite the physical ailments, the renters who flaked out on us TWO DAYS before we were to move, and the ferry schedule to get the Uhaul to the Sunshine Coast and back in one day, we have done it!
We have moved to a greener, slower, more remote location. And I already love it, even though it has been nothing but grey, and I am surrounded by unpacked boxes and unorganized kitchenware. I love the quiet growing of our surroundings. I love the nestiness of our new space.
It is much smaller, alas, so the Den of Destiny is no more, but I have found a fabulous new cafe that opens early. I have decided it is my new office:
I’m far too mind-fuddled to write a truly original post today. But wanted to share that I have a story on QuarterReads called “Second Lives” (which I suppose you could call a literary memoir or prose poem or poetic memoir) about my father’s passing.
Wait, you haven’t heard of QuarterReads?
It’s a very clever site. Writers submit stories for online publication and readers pay .25 to read them. Writers get 88% of earnings and 100% of “tips” – which readers give if they really like the piece and are feeling generous. I don’t think anyone’s getting rich through the site, but it’s a lovely way to get a story out there and make new fans.
And also…
… as a bonus, I wanted to share one of my favourite reads this week:
From Maria Popova’s fantastically engaging website Brain Pickings:
Audio version of Fernandez’s whole commencement address may be found here.
Our ideas regarding success should be our own, and I urge you to pursue it simultaneously from both the inside and the outside…
As artists, it will be especially difficult to measure these ideas of what success may be because you have chosen a practice that is entirely dependent on being willing to possibly fail, over and over again regardless of any successes that do come your way.
~Teresita Fernandez
I’ve been told before that “How you do one thing is how you do everything.” If packing to move were compared to my general flight path in life, I’d have to agree. What takes my far more focused husband a few hours, will take me days as I flit around and get distracted, inspired, or pulled into a side-project.
I started reading a fabulous book called THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo. In her book she advises to do all your discarding first before any organizing, and to do it by one of five categories, rather than by room. She even suggests the order in which you discard (from “easiest to hardest”) starting with clothes. I loved that part. Giving away clothes that weren’t “bringing me any joy” knowing that someone else might find a better use for them.
But next on her list is books. And she admits that books are very challenging for many people to let go of. That’s an understatement for someone who once held a good-bye ceremony for a box of poetry books and cried the whole time.
Of course, MOVING is not tidying up. Moving is picking up all your belongings and assembling them in what you hope will be a tidy and organized fashion on the other side. This time around, we’re temporarily downsizing in a new city. And as I’m not a big fan of long-term storage, I thought this book might help me to tidy first before we moved. Alas, the moving date is now a tidal wave and I’m still on the beach deciding which shells I want to keep.
Marie Kondo, I am sorry I did not follow your system of discarding books. I will be more disciplined next time.
I have moved 10 times in 20 years. I have made culling, packing, moving, unpacking, and reorganizing books an art form. I start early, knowing it will take weeks for the entire process. There will be drama and tears and at least one bookshelf landing on my head. (I currently have a tender bruise right above my “third eye.”)
I started with discarding the easy ones – I’ve read them, they don’t belong to a friend, and I’ll probably never read them again. I’ve been giving them away to anyone who stops by and on non-rainy days this box goes out in the yard:
Since we’ll be in a smaller space for a while, I next created a “NOW BOOKS” box – books I have been thinking about reading for a while and “might” be inspired to read in the next 6 months.
Then there’s the box of “Poetry books I probably won’t read in the next 6 months but are too precious for me to store anywhere,” my “Oz Books” box (yes, they have their own separate box), my “books I keep in my bedroom for some reason” box, and another box of all my “educational / teaching” books JUST IN CASE.
The rest I taped up and created a fortress of boxes called “I’m okay with us putting these books into storage for 6 months. I think.”
But then yesterday, I was reading this lovely article and suddenly realized I had no Henry Miller in my box of “NOW BOOKS” and that article must have been sent to me by a higher force! Henry Miller must have something to tell me about this phase of my life!
It only took reopening two boxes of books for me to find this:
~ ~ ~
Sometimes I look at my bookshelves and feel like a fraud. The majority of books on my shelves are of the “haven’t gotten around to reading” sort. And for some reason, when I see other people’s bookshelves I immediately assume they HAVE read all those books and all that juicy content is dancing around inside them. My friends assure me they, too, have neglected to read many of the books on their own shelves. So perhaps bookshelves are less of a trophy case after all and more of a to-do list.
In the past, when I packed up my books, I wavered from inspiration to melancholy to guilt. But this time, considering them an attractive to-do list, I thought instead, Why don’t I make this the Year of The Bookshelf List? The books are probably tired of sitting around getting dusty, only to get their hopes up when I reach for them for yet another move. It’s time to love some of them up and move them along.
So, in honour of this committment, I hereby dub this the
YEAR OF READING MY BOOKSHELVES
The deal I have made with myself is that for this entire year I will always be reading at least one book that has been on my “read someday” bookshelf list. And if it doesn’t bring joy (thanks Marie Kondo!), off it goes to bring it to someone else.
I just hope I put the right books in that “NOW BOOKS” box.
YOUR ASSIGNMENT:
Pick a book from your shelves that you’ve been meaning to read. Go ahead, open it right now.
What is it? How does it make you feel opening it up?
