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Forget what you’ve read and/or assume about Go Set a Watchman. It is not a “first draft” of To Kill a Mockingbird. And while it may not narrowly meet the definition of sequel, it sure reads like one: a new story, set decades later, with most of the same characters. Indeed, it really feels like the writer of this book assumes readers are familiar with the events and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird. Yes, there are inconsistencies, huge ones, which indicate it was not written after final edits to Mockingbird. But it mostly works as a sequel.

Also, Go Set a Watchman is not remotely, as NPR suggested (and many people suspected), “a mess.” It pleasurable reading, with Lee’s talent for dry humor and poetic description, and her unmatched ability to write perspicaciously about her own terrain. There are some uneven transitions, overlong conversations that could be trimmed (the mansplaining in this book!), and the aforementioned inconsistencies with Mockingbird, but it is not far from the polished sequel that might have been, if Lee had wanted to pursue it. I wonder how much of the decision not to publish this, as is, has more to do with anxiety over how the (white) reading public would receive it, than a judgment on its literary quality? And I wonder if Lee’s decision to abstain had more to do with roiling her community than feeling the manuscript was not up to snuff and beyond salvation?

Now to the touchy spot. The Atticus Finch in Go Set a Watchman is a continuation of the one we love from Mockingbird. It is not a different Atticus, or a different draft of Atticus. Sorry, folks. This is Atticus. Harper Lee goes out of her way to show us that the Atticus in Watchman is every inch the Atticus of Mockingbird. And, as you have probably read, in Wathman Atticus is a bigot.

Keep in mind that even the Mockingbird-era Atticus is a man of his time and place. His attitude toward black people is kind but paternalistic. He maintains his idealism in the courthouse, but the black people he has in his house are servants. He is a perfect example of the white moderate of good will, the kind Martin Luther King described as “the biggest stumbling block” to equality. This new Atticus does fit with that one; he may not fit with the one in your head but he fits with the one in the book.

Early reviewers dropped a “Snape kills Dumbledore” sized spoiler on the reading public, but the reviewers didn’t tell you this: it is supposed to be shocking. It is absolutely devastating to Jean Louise (aka Scout) when she finds out what her father has become. If we feel the soil give way beneath our feet, it’s because that’s exactly what Lee intended to do to us. I’m sorry you had to find out that way. I’m sorry I had to find out that way.

But it’s important for us to accept that this is our beloved Atticus Finch, and not some Bizarro world Atticus Finch, because racism is not just enacted by the uneducated, trashy Ewells of the world. It is also enacted by genteel and well-educated whites, even ones with lofty principles. Jean Louise discovers her father at his racist meeting among “men of substance and character, responsible men, good men. Men of all varieties and reputations.” She hides and listens to the filth spew from their mouths. None spews from her father’s mouth, at this meeting, but he doesn’t speak up. She thinks: “Did that make it less filthy? No, it condoned.”

This is a necessary message, and a necessary postscript to To Kill a Mockingbird. Racism is enacted by kind, polite people. Silence is sanction. If this is not the same Atticus, and if this is not a sequel, there is utterly no point to the book. The book is about Scout, now grown, coming to terms with the frailties of her own origins. Everywhere she goes, all of the people she meets, the people she loves, veer into racist diatribes. Is she of these people, she asks herself? Are these the people she loves? When she describes herself as color blind, it is not to hint that she doesn’t “see color,” in that late 20th Century trope, but that she has been blind to the true nature of her community. To be honest, even Jean Louise’s own New York-influenced high mindedness falls short of 2015 standards (but she’s getting there, her own ideas evolving even in the text.)

This book is a time capsule; perhaps its most glaring deficit in that regard is that Lee could not know how iconic Atticus and Scout would be decades later, how much we would want Atticus to remain a pillar of progressive ethics. Lee writes about him as if he were a mere human character. Perhaps the idealized Atticus Finch is another southern flag that needs to be lowered.

I won’t belabor this point, but I want to set the record straight on the book itself. Go Set a Watchman is not a mess, nor is it a sloppy draft. Read as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, it has powerful and necessary truths, even ones that make us uncomfortable. It deepens and complicates our understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird, and though it is imperfect, it is no stain on Lee’s legacy.

The Empathy Exams is an essay collection by Leslie Jamison. The title comes from the first essay, where she blurs her experience as a medical actor with her own real-life medical experiences. Other essays approach second-hand experience of pain from different angles: reality television (of the sort that focuses on shattered lives); tours through impoverished and violent neighborhoods in the U.S., Mexico, and elsewhere; grueling ultramarathons; medical delusions; imprisonment; addiction. Other pain is personal: an abortion, a break-up, an inexplicable attack in a street in Nicaragua. In some ways Jamison is within a trend of creative nonfiction that packages pain for pleasure, like memoirs of addiction and abuse or depictions of third-world poverty. I’ve heard the genre dismissively referred to as “mis lit.”

But Jamison is doing something else in these essays: she isn’t writing about misery so much as the communal experience of misery, the choice to feel what others must feel. There is a place between lurid entertainment and antipathy. She isn’t sure where it is, but it’s where she wants to be.

“What can a twenty-something writer tell grown-ups about empathy?” one friend asked on Facebook, after I joked that it was “irritating” for such a young author to be so successful (similar criticism, some of it less facetious, is all over goodreads). But now I think that youth and uncertainty give this book its vitality. Jamison isn’t sure of herself; yet she is idealistic and hopeful about the form of essay in itself. She doesn’t generally adopt that all-know authoritative “we” voice I complained about recently; she stays within herself. She is honest and thoughtful, yearning to have a deeper conversation about the role of creative nonfiction in reshaping the world, to “fill the lack or liquidate the misfortune.” (And for the record, she is at least thirty).

Jamison is interested in empathy, but she isn’t sure about its value. Maybe empathy is solipsism, she suggests in the first essay, a kind of vicarious self-pity. How does empathy enable delusions, she wonders later, or the addicted, she considers yet later. Hers is not a call for people to “be more empathetic,” like that too-neat video with the bear and the rabbit. The title takes on new meaning as she continually scrutinizes empathy, coming to at least tentative conclusions. “It might be hard to hear anything over the clattering machinery of your own guilt,” she reflects in one essay. “Try to listen anyway.”

Midway through the book is an essay about sentimentality and sweeteners. I suspect it was the first one written: Jamison overeagerly drops in literary references, as if she’s eager to prove she’s read the canon; she resorts to that prescient “we”; and she writes in almost giddy abstraction about “crashing into wonder” and “flinging [oneself] upon simplicity.” Here she takes a stance for art (even bad art) that “can carry someone across the gulf between his life and the lives of others.” If I’m right about it being an earlier essay, it seems to give her the direction that makes the rest possible. She pursues and finds a purpose for tours of pain. She finds inspiration in the James Agee’s writings about rural poverty, and in documentaries that have freed innocent men by garnering public attention.

In the final epic essay Jamison considers the pain of women, often self-inflicted, bringing in the experiences of other women among her own: cutting, anorexia, miscellaneous wounds; mixed in with allusions to Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, a brilliant one-page critique of Stephen King’s Carrie, lyrics from Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos, and too many other sources to list. She circles around women and pain, women writing about pain, the resentment and rejection of women writing about pain. She asserts explicitly what she is trying to do in the essay: to make it OK for women to write about pain, because even if it’s trite, the pain is real. “The wounded woman get’s called a stereotype, and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true.” It feels like she’s finally enacted a proof of concept she’s been shaping the whole time. She’s found her exact place as an essayist. She’s found her way across the gulf an into the lives of others.

I’ve resolved and failed to keep the promise to never write in the thinkpiece plural, the use of “we” that means either “most people, but certainly not me and other high-minded people,” or, conversely, “only people like me, as I kinda think there is nobody else.”

The first is generally used in social critiques, and conversations about conversations, of the sort:

“We call it _______ when _______ but when ______ we call it _______.”

This is married to the apophatic “nobody.”

“Nobody’s talking about ___________.”

If you’re like me you might find as many as a dozen posts in one Twitter stream talking about what purportedly nobody is talking about. It’s the non-set of the “we” that means “everybody else.”

I don’t understand this insistence on excusing oneself from the first person plural and from the human population. I am always a member of we, grammatically speaking. If I am doing something, then by definition somebody is doing it. But I’m sure I’ve lapsed into that think-piece language. I try to be aware of it and avoid it.

The other use of “we” is even more maddening, and I think I’m less likely to use it. This is the one where “we” is presumed to be everybody but is actually a quite small demographic of white, privileged people who probably have very good jobs and degrees from top tier schools. This is the “we” of magazine articles about helicopter parents and unrealized ambitions. It is the we of wanting yet more and feeling entitled to it — the woman who “sacrificed” a bigger family so she could buy a two million dollar home. Demographically I am sort of there — white, middle-aged, well-educated. But private preschools are not my concern; making do is. I am noncoastal. I am broke. My college degree is from a public university that doesn’t compete academically or athletically on a national stage.

I’m reminded, in these cases, of an overheard conversation between a knee-weakeningly gorgeous girl who sat behind me in chemistry class and said, to a friend, that “everybody” was at a particular party that weekend that obviously I was not at and knew nothing about.

I don’t write thinkpieces, but my mind is pretty much a 24/7 monotone of metacriticial noise. When I do venture to say a nonfictiony thing and make an observation, I try to keep out uses of “we” that doesn’t include me, or vaguely insinuates that everybody is in the same boat. The strongest writing I’ve seen is personal and openly autobiographical, it takes ownership of personal experience and presumes nothing about the reader. I think it makes you vulnerable, as a writer, to abandon the we, to stop blurring yourself into the background. It makes you take more ownership for your declarations, to be honest, to admit the limitations of your experience, perhaps even be embarrassed by your privilege.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of few authors by whom I’ve read everything, at least everything available, including his literary criticism. I was obsessed with him for a while, and in an alternative life where I get a Ph.D. in English Literature, I might well be writing academic papers on Poe (and Hawthorne, and Melville, and maybe Irving).

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is easy to pick as Poe’s biggest failure. It is his only attempt at a novel, and falls short even there, with a series of loosely connected episodes that lack continuity and a proper ending. The problems don’t end there. It is also Poe’s most damningly racist work. Though racist caricatures appear in his other tales, this is the one most informed by Poe’s pathological fear of non-whiteness. However, it also proves to be one of his most influential works, figuring explicitly into subsequent works by some of his biggest admirers, particularly Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft.

The hero of Mat Johnson’s Pym is an African American scholar obsessed with Poe, and especially with Pym. This singular obsession with white authors (and a refusal to serve on the diversity committee) disrupts his academic career, but a series of coincidences leads him on his own fantastic voyage that parallel Poe’s Pym, encountering much of the same…. experiences.

It is simultaneously a pastiche and a critique of Poe, but an effective satire of current American culture: academia, pop painting, junk food, you name it. In some ways it is an academic novel, wise and winking in literary references, casually name-dropping major pieces of the black canon including ones that white readers like me didn’t know about (Equiano, Webb) mixed in with the more obvious ones to the source material (one nod to Lovecraft made me laugh out loud). But it would work without one knowing literary history, purely as adventure/horror and humor. And of course it is book about race itself; a critical reflection about whiteness and blackness both literal and figurative.

I love everything about this book. It centers me in the black experience of America as effectively as Ralph Ellison, and gives me a fix of sharp satire that reminds me of being fourteen and discovering Kurt Vonnegut. It pushes my buttons as literary nerd, but is enjoyable purely as a great yarn.

The American literary canon is racist and sexist because our history is racist and sexist, but what do we do about it? Pointing out the problems is necessary, but doesn’t suggest where to go next. I’m not a big fan of expunging literary history; that itself becomes a kind of whitewashing. Besides, I think there is value in Poe, in Twain, even in Margaret Mitchell. I would rather read those books, then read these creative critiques–books like Johnson’s Pym, or Alice Randall’s The Wind Be Gone–that critique and re-create and re-center the narratives, that subsume and overtake the source material.

I think Johnson takes on a particularly problematic text to show just how brilliantly this can be done; it makes me grateful for Poe’s Pym because it makes Johnson’s possible.

For the last week I keep watching this video about a dung beetle trying to push a turd ball up a blazing hot sand dune. You think Sisyphus had a hard time of it? He has nothing on this uncomplaining scarab.

http://www.discovery.com/embed?page=68740

I’ve considered before the heroic efforts of the tiniest things, and more recently been particularly interested in these industrious recyclers. I am sure an idea is brewing but I don’t know what it is: nonfiction, perhaps, or a picture book, or a novel. “Watership Down with dung beetles!” I ventured yesterday on Facebook, to a rousing lack of enthusiasm.

I guess people think dung beetles are gross because dung, but… well, without them, things would be a lot grosser. They consume some feces and bury more, effectively aerating and fertilizing the land they use. I have come to appreciate nature more, in my middle-ages, and the wonderful integration of the world’s species to function as a whole. Imagine the prairie three hundred years ago: buffalo gobbling up the long hoary grass and leaving these tremendous buffets for the hordes of dung beetles that followed, who repurposed the poop and fed the small birds and prairie dogs, which in turn fed the ferrets and hawks and coyotes…. Without the beetles, none of it is possible. And dung beetles serve a similar role across the globe, in various ecosystems, and are rarely appreciated (though the ancient Egyptians wisely thought they were sacred).

Few people can claim what the dung beetle can, which is that their mere existence makes the world an unarguably better place.  Dung beetles are also the only animal besides humans known to observe the stars, and I think this single idea is what makes them especially fascinating to me. The humblest creature on earth will climb upon its dung ball, orient itself by the milky way, and — I like to believe — make a fervent wish before it continues on its journey.

I think this will fuel a book but I don’t know what it is yet. I hope you will give it, and its heroes, a chance, despite their diet.

Every night we play Go Fish before Byron goes to bed. It is our favorite family ritual. Our deck has 26 matches, each match featuring a letter of the alphabet and an animal. The cleverest part is, one half of each match has the adult animal and capital letter; the other has the baby animal and the lowercase letter.*

The deck has been around since before B. was born and is no longer available. Anyway, sometimes Byron gets a little kooky bananas at the end of the game and scatters the cards. One evening we realized Big Bear was missing. We played for weeks with one of the instructions cards subbing for mama bear. We looked everywhere for that card, and sometimes when I had half an hour I would go looking for it again: through the drawers and cupboards and bookshelves and baskets in the living room, in different rooms in case somebody had absentmindedly carried it off. After a month we gave up. It became almost a joke to suggest we look for it some more.

The other night my wife was out, so B. and I played alone. He started asking me knowingly every time if I had a bear card. It turns out he and A. had found the missing card earlier that day and restored it to the deck, and he had it in his hand, and he couldn’t wait to make the match so I could see that they’d found it. And as crazy as it sounds it kinda feels like with the big bear back where she belongs, everything is going to be all right.

*In case you’re curious: Alligator, Bear, Cow, Duck, Elephant, Frog, Goat, Horse, Iguana, Koala, Iguana, Jaguar, Koala, Lion, Mouse, Narwhal, Orangutan, Pig, Quail, Rhinoceros, Squirrel, Turtle, Umbrella Bird, Vulture, Walrus, foX, Yak, Zebra

P.S. I was thinking of writing an entire post about the movie Inside Out, but I don’t think I have a blog entry’s worth to write about it, especially avoiding spoilers. I’ll just say that I’m heartened that an ordinary kid can drive a major summer movie: no superpowers, no wizard scars. The gimmick behind it is genius, and I think it’s a good conceit for the turbulence of childhood. This might be the most “middle grade” movie ever made. And I see it as radical that a major summer movie can be a movie about a girl’s feelings.

Byron is with me now and I read him this entire entry. He wants me to add that the movie has a scary clown it. You have been warned!

Remind me never to take on another project that isn’t writing a novel or raising a child or teaching a class — e.g., nothing that commits me well into the future when there is no compensation and no obligation. I ventured into my goal of reading exclusively women of color in 2015 with the best of intentions, and launched into it early but still did not make it a year, let alone all of 2015.

I have to admit some of the piss was taken out of me by a spate of articles about men who’d done what I was doing. I read a few books I didn’t care for, and felt ashamed for not liking them. My motivation started to flag. My mind started to wander. I’ve always been a mercurial reader.

So this spring I read some of the much buzzed YA books of the year — Bone Gap, The Walls Around Us, and Read Between the Lines are all terrific, by women at the top of their game. I meant to blog about them all but failed there, too (and have nothing to add to the chorus of acclaim for them all). In a way, that was a refreshing vacation from my own taste. I don’t actually like YA, or claim not to, but these books refute the facile claims that YA is especially “dark” or “morally certain.” I think the only thing YA really claims to be is about the teen experience.

More recently, I became hooked on the novels of Mat Johnson, who is, well, a dude. While everybody talks about race and talks about how we need to talk about race, I find Johnson does so more deftly and with more wit and verve than anyone else, at least that I’ve read.

I made excuses to myself because at least all of the books I were reading were either by women or a person of color, but I also recently read some essays by Edward O. Wilson, who is a white dude scientist who studies ants. As I noted back when I began my journey, the worst representation of women of color is in nonfiction, particularly when you move into the sciences (memoir, social justice, and history have better selections). If you want to read about science, and are limited to women authors from non-European backgrounds, the pickings are very slim. I did come to this book through an interest in Wilson specifically, anyway, but holy cow, are all the science books by white people, and most of them men.

I expect somebody will comment that it doesn’t matter because an ant is an ant, regardless of writing about it, but I think about young people — whipping smart ones, with an interest in the natural world — walking into that section and feeling that they’re in the “wrong” section. It makes me wonder, with the call for children’s books by diverse authors, where is the call for quality nonfiction across the curriculum that tells all children, this entire world is yours to study?

Anyway, back to my reading… it is time to concede that I have wandered off the path and will continue to do so. I have to read The Empathy Exams for a class I’m teaching, and have a towering to-be-read pile with all kinds of books by all kinds of people. Many of them are people of color, many are women, and many are both, but I am hereby removing all rules and strictures from myself.

However, I think it was a good practice while it lasted. I’ve come to be less likely to go straight to the white/male books, but actively seek out other points of view. I’m sure my reading habits have been permanently changed from it.

I have become more aware of ways that representation is still a problem — it is one thing to scan a bookshelf for proof that books by women or people of color exist, quite another to have only those options. And there other things I now know. Books by African American authors have long wait lists at the library, apparently in high demand by readers who can’t afford to go buy the book, but also suggesting the library isn’t meeting demand because they underpurchase those books in the first place. The audiobook section is particularly thin and picked over when you’re looking for books by women of color; I think aside from Toni Morrison and a few other luminaries, few get the honor of an audiobook production. Even acclaimed books with glowing reviews in all the major publications might be picked up by only a few bookstores; books that I’m sure would be in end-cap displays if they had the same buzz and white authors on the back. And, as previously mentioned, nonfiction is an utter desert.

I would not be aware of any of this if I hadn’t forced myself to look only for books that meet those two criteria. I would have probably gestured at a few bestsellers and award winners by women of color as counter-proof that everything is hunky dory. “Look, Roxane Gay is here, and Claudia Rankine is there, so there must not be a problem!”

I have also come to regard books by privileged people with more healthy skepticism. I can still enjoy a literary tour de force, but have less patience with the art-for-arts-sake self-indulgence that used to be my primary pleasure. It’s not that there are two genres of literature, exclusively staffed by white men on the one count and women of color on the other, but I kinda think that maybe white male writers suffer from a pathological self-regard that leads to stylistic navel-gazing and expertise-on-all-things. And that in Danticat and Adichie, especially, I found a vital currency and immediacy, books about experience of living instead of the experience of reading a book, that made me feel their books were important, not just as books, but as historical artifacts. I don’t feel that way reading David Mitchell, however dazzling his artistry.

Anyway, I’m letting myself off the hook, but feel generally less stupid for having tried.

I’ve been thinking about this interview with a “friend” of Dylann Roof’s. (Not sure how close they were.)

“I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” he said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”

But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,” [his friend] added.

Children and teens, even college-aged people, have more power than adults to make their peers. Every decision and interaction has the power to nudge a person in a particular way, to set them on a path.

One benefit of age is seeing how those moments in the past helped shape you; seemingly tiny things that changed your trajectory. Certainly those moments include racist and sexist jokes, off-hand remarks that you can either react to or ignore.

In all honesty my own history is a mixed one: I’ve laughed at those jokes, I’ve let them slide, I’ve even made them. Other times I do react: hey, bruh, that ain’t cool. And I can recall times when the gentle admonishment of friends has changed me, or where the acceptance (even encouragement) of hateful remarks has nudged me the other way. Peer pressure is powerful.

Maybe Dylann could not have been nudged off his deadly path, but I feel like we are made of these moments of action or inaction, and I wonder if the friend is brooding now about what might be different if he had only responded differently. “Man, you sound really hateful.” “Are you sure you’re all right?” “Come one, don’t be a jerk.”

Later in the same story, another friend gives even more unsettling backstory.

Roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC News that Roof was “planning something like that for six months.”

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

What did the roommate do? Recoil in horror? Warn people? Call the police, even? How did he end up in a place where someone could unfold their homicidal fantasies and he shrugged it off? Is that where you nudge yourself by letting racist jokes slide, then crazy rants and fringe conspiracy theories, to where you gently accommodate terroristic plots?

One reason for “lone wolf” and “extremist” labeling of killers like these is that they distance them from ourselves, rather than accept responsibility for our silent consent.

This is one of those blog posts written in service to my profession.

I recently got a $200 Chromebook because my MacBook Air, though much beloved, has become commandeered by my child. Other writers might be looking at this relatively low-cost option and wonder if it’ll work. My answer: sure. Sort of. Depends.

First, for the uninitiated: the Chromebook itself is a very cheap device that’s not quite a laptop; it’s more like a portable web browser. It comes with some hard drive storage, but pretty much all the apps run within the Chrome web browser. A Chromebook is practical if you just want something for surfing the Web, doing the occasional video chat (in google, not Skype), and a little light writing, etc. You can’t do page layout, graphic design, movie editing, or anything like that. Anything you might do, ask yourself if you can do it now in a web browser. If no, then you can’t do it on Chromebook.

I will henceforth refer to it as a “device” for lack of a better word. It is technically a computer, but doesn’t do what most computers do. In some ways it’s a big phone. But it doesn’t make calls, so…. device.

So how do you write and edit? Well, about ten years ago when Google acquired a program called Writely, and since then it has had an Office-like suite of web-based tools that keep getting quietly better: a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, and a drawing application. Those apps are integrated seamlessly with Google drive, a cloud-based file storage that synchs with all of your devices. Decoded this means: you can write in your web browser using a Microsoft-word like program, and although your files are saved to your device, they’re also saved on Google servers so even if you drop your device down the sewer you can retrieve the documents.

But could using the web app replace Microsoft Word? Word has never been perfect but has been way more than adequate for the last fifteen-to-twenty years. Word handles large files well (ask me about my first novel, when it didn’t), it automatically backs up files, it has a very efficient spellchecker, a reliable word counter, and can even deliver lexile scores in a few minutes. Also, Word is industry standard. Many editors have now switched to Word annotations to deliver edits to writers. I think Winter of the Robots was seen from conception to first pass pages without a single hard copy.

You can open a document in a Web browser on a Chromebook and start hammering away, but can you do all of that? This is what I’m finding out.

This is what I’ve learned so far.

First, stick with the native functionality of Chrome/Google.

Having been a contented Dropbox user for ages, I immediately installed that app and opened it to see my current documents. I clicked one and it opened in Microsoft Word. OK, it opened in a limited version of Word that runs online, but I had no idea that Dropbox had been acquired by Microsoft and was now fully integrated with a free version of Microsoft Office 365. Hooray!

This was really cool for about five minutes, but then I found out stuff like, navigating the document is really hard, the app doesn’t keep up with my typing, and every few minutes I get an error message that the document needs to reconnect to sync. This is likely to improve with time but at present the Word Online tool is pretty clunky. I spent more time swearing at it than actually writing/revising.

I mean, you get what you pay for and it’s pretty cool to get Word-like functionality for free, even with those issues and the mysterious proliferation of page breaks and the inability to work offline and the lack of a “Save as” option and the…. never mind. The more I think about it, the more I realize I lost a week of my writing life there.

Second, convert to Google Docs. 

Wouldn’t you know it, but Google Apps can also open Word documents (in “Word Compatibility Mode”) without converting them, and even lets you edit them — but unless you want to do really light editing, it’s a pretty painful way to work. Like Word Online, it’s not terribly responsive to keyboard interactions, and it doesn’t automatically save, and you don’t have a “Save as…” option. In fact, there’s not even a “Find/Replace” option, or much in the way of paragraph formatting.

If you had a perfectly formatted document you’re about to send out on submission and had one or two minor edits, this would work, because it never changes the .docx format of the original. But you have more tools and an easier time using them if you convert to .gdoc format (Open the file in compatibility mode, then go to File: convert to Google Docs).

Third, install Table of Contents and Document Explorer

I am revising, which requires me to move nimbly between chapters. And for this, I am very reliant on the Document Map feature in Word. This doesn’t exist in Word Online, or in the “Compatibility Mode” of Google Apps that lets you edit a native Word doc. But it does exist upon conversion. Go to Add-Ons, Get Add Ons and look for each tool.

Table of Contents simply gives you a clickable sidebar based on your headings — which, sigh, you will have to manually redo even if you already have headers in a document you’ve converted. But only once.

Document Explorer has additional navigation options, the most useful for me being the search pane — I can do things like search for the word “just” so I can then click from usage to usage and delete it as needed. It is also handy to create an ad-hoc table of contents (using the search term “chapter”) so you can make them official headers in the Google Doc.

Fourth, download backups

You may think you have emergency back up files on your device because you see the .gdoc sitting in your offline folder, but in fact these are basically links to the real document which lives… somewhere… else. Only Google knows.

One thing I have a hard time adjusting to is, I used to make a copy of my document in progress every day, change the file name to include the current date, and begin editing. All those back ups made me happy. Google Docs (and these other options) have a revision history, so in theory you can recover any past version, but it’s just very all-eggs-in-one-baskety for one file to have the entire labors of the last two years, or even the last two weeks, so I now (try to remember to) save a download as Word every day, but work in one document named “Working Document.”

Fifth, Move everything to Google Drive

I save those backups to my offline folder, but I found this transition easier once I dropped Dropbox. I moved all my working files to Google Drive and cleaned up the mess that had gathered there since I created the Google account in 2007 (If anyone needs the agenda from a U of M ETF from that year, sorry, I deleted it).

I forget what Google’s drive limit is but it’s ample for simple word processing documents. I don’t even think Isaac Asimov could have used up all the space with his writing projects. If you use your drive space for something else, consider swapping that to Dropbox or one of the many other free-tier cloud services, because Chromebook thrives when you stay in the Googleverse.

Sixth, stay in Google Docs

I drove myself crazy trying to keep Word in the picture. Word is better, so I think, while I am on my Mac, why not use Word? But whatever option I use, I end up cleaning up formatting stuff that got screwy in transition, and I know I could ignore but everything. has. to. be. just. so. I’ve been more productive on actual revisions since weaning myself completely from Word and staying in the active gdoc.

Seventh, I am not ready to drop Word completely. 

Spellchecking is available in Google Docs but not reliable. See where it suggested I change “Not” to “Nort”? Um.

Professional formatting touches like page breaks before headings, widow/orphan control, marking language for passages, are also not available in Google Docs. So I will have to download as Word and spellcheck/touch up before it’s ready to submit.

Finally, I know I can theoretically download as Word, send to Ms. Agent or Ms. Futureditor, but receive back with their comments/annotations, and open again in Google Docs. How well this will work in practice, I dunno.  Maybe I’ll even find, in time, that the industry has shifted so that it’s normal for writers to “share” rather than “deliver” documents, which is more how this is supposed to work. But it may turn out that once I am in editing I will have to use Word solely.

Verdict:

Using an optimized writing app like Writer might prove an interesting way to fast draft, and I think ultimately writing  and editing a full-length novel in Google Docs will be no worse (maybe slightly better) than my earliest word processing adventures in the early 1990s. But for now I will still need occasional access to Word and I expect that the Google Doc approach will only see me through submission and I will have to resume Word in editing (which, knock on wood, will be something I find out soon).

If you spend any time reading about writing or going to writing conferences you know that, from time to time, people like to throw out “great first lines,” which often have yet unnamed heroes discovering severed heads in their glove compartment. The problem with such lessons is that they do you no good if your book isn’t about severed heads. Anyway, I find such first sentences wheeze of desperation, they are like the bespectacled kid in seventh grade who tries too hard to be your friend (I was that kid). And I can rarely think of “great first lines,” because I don’t think that way. I give a book a chance and don’t really need to be won over in the first sentence; I am won over gradually by character and plot and so forth. But next time the conversation does trend toward first lines, I want to remember this one, from Arnold Lobel’s Fables.

A crocodile became increasingly fond of the wallpaper in his bedroom.

This sentence does more than hook me. It promises to take me somewhere I have never been.

Of course to have a first line like this you must have a story that deserves it.

Way back in the back then I had a series of posts recommending public domain books available from Gutenberg.org. I’m bringing it back today to recommend the remarkable writing of Helen Keller. Of course we all know who she is, but get past the feral child played rather wonderfully by Patty Duke and the tasteless jokes and you find a remarkable thinker and activist with a gift for crisp writing.

Find her major works here. Of course you should read her autobiography, The Story of My Life, which is the best known and most familiar, but The World I Live In is well worth looking into for a more mature author who captures the experience of being deafblind; it is not about the pain of darkness and silence but the wonder of being so tuned to physical sensations. And see her long essay, Optimism, where she writes about “happiness as faith.”

In my mind there is a list of short books that can change your life: Hesse’s Siddhartha, Dillards’s The Writing Life, Wiesel’s Night, or Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.  Any of these three books could be on that list.

I do not know her writing process, perhaps finger-spelling to a transcriptionist, and later poring over drafts with the secretary finger-spelling her own words back into her palm. In any case, it could not have been easy work. Keller’s writing is wonderful and important without these considerations, but as a writer I have to think about and wonder at her resolve. Maybe the effort for every line led to the precision and power in her writing.

If you have a kid between three and seven and don’t have an utterly screenless existence, you probably know that the current rage is Paw Patrol, a TV show/toy franchise about a team of rescue pups who… well… let’s just say that whenever there is trouble around Adventure Bay, Ryder and his team of pups are there to save the day.

Our boy’s favorite non-Lego toys over the past few months have been Paw Patrol pups that come with badges and backpacks that open up and do stuff. One is Skye, the only girl in the original pup line-up of six (they’ve since added another to the show). We found that while the other pups weren’t too hard to find, Skye was nearly impossible to find. And the reason was obvious: Girls love Paw Patrol as much as boys. Girls want Skye.

But Byron also loves Skye. And he wanted use to round out the set. So for months we were regularly and fruitlessly checking the ransacked shelves at Target and Toys R Us, where, for reasons that can only be explained by recent news and public opinion, we would find only piles of unpurchased Chase toys (Chase is the police dog).

Byron also noted that most of the merchandise featuring all the pups never had Skye. She wasn’t on the shirts, or the party plates. He was confused, and the message must have started sinking in: Skye isn’t on my shirts because as a boy I’m not supposed to want her on my shirt. Skye isn’t on the paper plates because she is less important than the boy pups. And that’s where we have to intervene, affirming for Byron that it’s OK to like Skye and the companies are dumb for leaving her off.

Byron also likes Lego Friends and Lego Elves. He likes the unicorn girl minifigure almost as much as the alien trooper. He likes Shannon Hale’s Princess in Black and Bratz and some show about a fairy tale high school with mostly girl characters. But he isn’t a feminist superkid just yet. I can see the culture taking his toll, his occasional grimness when offered a book about a girl, especially if she’s not an animal. He will opt for the space robot action figure over the big-eyed kitty every time at McDonald’s, and the fact that eyes are on him and one is described by the cashier as a ‘boy toy’ certainly influences him. And he’s not even in school yet, where other boys will surely coach him on despising girls and things for girls.

The gender splitting I’ve complained about in books is extreme in toys and television, so appalling I really can’t believe how passively parents accept it. Why must any mixed-gender franchise be 5/6 boys? Why did all the superheroes from my childhood go on steroids? Why do all of the Lego girls come in slimmed down from the classic, sturdy, Lego minifig body? For that matter, why do you have to paint a six pack on the male figures, on top of their uniforms? I don’t mind that the girls in that fairy tale show talk about dating and dresses, but why can’t boy characters ever show a little vulnerability, be a little smitten, be a little concerned about how others perceive them?

There’s lots more I want to say here, so I’ll have to come back to it. Suffice to say that kids are sufficiently assaulted with gender role expectations before they reach Kindergarten, and it’s maddening. Books are the least of the problem. The bigger part of the problem is everything else: clothes, toys, movies, TV, even breakfast cereal boxes.

Incidentally, Byron did not want to be photographed with Skye, and seen playing with a girl toy, but his mother told him that it’s important for the world to see that boys can play with girl toys. That’s what convinced him. Good work, B.

Hello friends! The announcements came through the trades today–DISNEY JUST OPTIONED NIGHT GARDENER! From Variety:

Disney has bought the rights to Jonathan Auxier’s “The Night Gardener.”

It will be developed by Sean Bailey’s Disney live-action group with Auxier adapting the script. Jim Whitaker will produce.

The book is Auxier’s follow-up to his widely popular “Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes,” with this story following two orphan siblings who travel to work as servants at the creepy, crumbling Windsor estate, but neither the house nor its inhabitants are quite what they seem. Soon the children are confronted by a mysterious specter and an ancient curse that threatens their very lives.

Disney has had quite the success lately of remaking their animated classics such as “Cinderella,” which just passed the $500 million mark at the worldwide box office, and “Maleficent,” but this acquisition shows they are still interested in developing original IPs.

Obviously this is still very far from being an actual movie, but thrilling nonetheless!

A while back I blogged about an Ursula K. Le Guin story that injects ants with human consciousness and modern human values, and opined that I would like to see a story that didn’t see eusocialism as oppressive — I think we can learn from these little citizens. I have since (while doing immersion tasks on Duolingo) found exactly that story in the form of a fable by author Horacio Quiroga, which seems to be a testament to the responsibilities of an individual to her community above personal will. The ending seems dead serious, but the story seems to have an ironic bent, too, in its didacticism against intelligence (even as cleverness and learning saves the bee heroine).

This story is closer than the Le Guin, at least, to understanding the eusocial colony of insects. I particularly like the use of “sister” as greeting among bees in the hive, since they would be sisters, as well as carrying the flavor of fellow travelers in the early 20th Century, when the fable was written. I have not read enough Quiroga to know his intent but the era and the location make it more likely that he was sympathetic to socialism, having seen the hell foreign capitalists wrought on his continent.

It seems to be published as a picture book, in both Spanish and English, but minus it’s classic status I seriously doubt any publisher would do a children’s book with such a message against personal exceptionalism and individualism. Unwavering faith in these principles seem to cross all religious and political factions. The fable now would have to take the turn of Lionni’s Frederick, where the other bees come to love the lazy bee for her imaginative flights. For the record, I absolutely love Frederick and can barely read it without tearing up. But sometimes I feel only one side of the story is every told, and that such fables not only prevent us understanding the natural world, but from fully understanding ourselves.

What other fables about ants and bees (or other eusocial organisms) that seem to deal with the role of an individual in a society are out there?

Book clubs are terrific in many ways, most especially in that they buy and read books. I've sat in on a book club meeting that discussed one of my novels, and they were all intelligent and insightful--I had a good time, perhaps mostly because they liked the novel.

And that none of them were the women portrayed in a post I came across titled "The 7 People in Every Book Club." It's tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect there's a lot of truth in this.

I also think that some of these same people appear in writers' critique groups. What do you think?

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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© 2015 Ray Rhamey

I recently spent a few days in Kidepo Valley National Park, a remote reserve in the North of Uganda that borders South Sudan and Kenya.

I hadn’t been in the Valley long when I met the resident male lion, a handsome chap known as “Spartacus”. It was late in the afternoon and the light was getting good, but he was in long grass and I couldn’t get a clear shot. Over to my right was a beautiful kopje and I was thinking to myself it would be an incredible shot if he would just go and sit on top of it. Well he must have heard my thoughts because the next thing I knew, he was up and heading in that direction.

I willed him to keep going and I was pinching myself as he started to climb. He plonked himself down exactly where I had hoped and then looked at me with his regal gaze. I couldn’t believe my luck! It is so rare that a wild animal actually does what you want it to! In front of me was a scene that looked like it was straight out of the Lion King…

After I had the safe front-lit shot, I moved round to silhouette him as the sun went down behind the distant mountains. It was a thrilling welcome to the Kidepo Valley!

I didn’t see Spartacus again but I did have the opportunity to photograph this younger male with his kill at dusk. I used a slow shutter speed to expose the sky and horizon and a brief flash from an off-camera speedlight to expose the foreground.

At night, I set up a camera trap using my Camtraptions PIR Motion sensor and was able to photograph some of Kidepo’s nocturnal residents, including this side-striped jackal and a white-tailed mongoose.

I also enjoyed photographing some species that I haven’t come across elsewhere in Africa, including this beautiful Abyssinian Roller and Jackson’s Hartebeest.

Kidepo is a beautiful and quiet National Park with much to offer. It is one of those wonderful places that combines abundant wildlife with spectacular scenery. In my opinion, it is one of Africa’s best-kept secrets!

You can view more images from the region here: Kidepo. You can also view more of my lion images in my Lion collection.

I was inspired by one of my own characters to plant a “bee garden,” this spring, and today planted the better part of my wife’s little pocket of prairie with beardtongue, salvia, bee balm, black-eyed susans, coneflowers, thymus, verbena, coreopsis, asclepias, and yarrow. There’s an empty spot for milkweed we’re getting from a neighbor. The stuff in back is prairie grass that’s (mostly) been there for years.

It doesn’t look like much now, but by mid-summer most of these guys will be 2-4 feet high, in bloom, humming with bees and crawling with caterpillars. My wife even supports this venture though she doesn’t like butterflies, but it will be hard not to be taken in by the potential magic of watching, with our bug-loving boy, a monarch nudging its way out of a chrysalis one late summer morning. Thanks to a book by a local author, he is also expecting bison.

Next up on our tour of failure is Erin Dionne, another “niner” and excellent writer of middle grade novels.

“Do or do not, there is no try.” – Yoda

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”- Samuel Beckett

I fail every day. Multiple times, actually. My life consists of parenting two small kids, teaching full time at a small college, and writing.

And always, every day, failure.

Teaching that night class? Missing bedtime. Papers to grade? The writing time gets ditched. Invited to write a blog post about failure? Blew the deadline. Taking the kids out on a Saturday afternoon? Well, no failure there—but I fight “I should be working” guilt, nonetheless.

People talk about finding “balance,” or “managing the writing life”. I have looked for the elusive balance—it doesn’t exist (at least, not when your kids are three and six). I’ve put systems in place to manage my life (implementing a bullet journal, being really careful about how I spend my time), and something always comes up to smash my carefully constructed house of cards.

But I still go for it.

Yoda’s quote has been my mantra for years. Cheesy, I know, but the distance between “trying” and “doing” is important to me.

Merriam-Webster defines “try” as “to make an effort to do something: to attempt to accomplish or complete something,” and “do” as “to bring to pass.”

Attempting to do something doesn’t cut it for me. I need to bring that book to pass. I need to complete what I start (which is why, when I took up knitting, I wanted to finish that sweater/scarf/hat in one sitting. It was a terrible hobby for me.). But “bringing something to pass” isn’t always pretty, especially the first time around. Pinterest fails are proof of that.

This is also why I’m not all over Pinterest.

Like all writers, I put a lot of effort into my work. I struggle over drafts, agonize over revisions, and stress about reviews, sales, and what comes next. Over and over, I remind myself that as long as I keep doing something, I’m doing something—even if all I’m doing is moving forward in small steps. I eke out those hours—or minutes—to work on my novel. I set aside time to grade those papers. I play with my kids.

Most of the time, I feel like I am failing at all of it: the writing is crappy, I can’t ever get to the bottom of the grading pile, my kids watch too much TV. That’s when Beckett comes in:

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I first saw his quote on poet January Gill O’Neil’s blog. As much as Yoda encourages me to keep going and keep doing, Beckett gives me the permission to do so badly. I don’t have to succeed every single time I do, I just have to suck a little less next time. For someone like me, who holds herself to unreasonable standards and sleeps very little, this is freeing.

This manuscript stinks? I can make it better with revision.

This class discussion bombed? Next time I’ll approach the topic differently.

Fed the kids leftover mac n cheese and pizza for dinner? Tomorrow we’ll have veggies.

Have I made my peace with failure? Not exactly; because once you do make peace with failure, you slip into the realm of “trying.” Yet accepting the tenets of Beckett’s failure allows me to follow Yoda’s advice. As long as I keep failing better, I keep doing. And that’s success.

Tomorrow, I’ll fail again. Without trying.

Happy birthday to a living legend.

In celebration of the day, here is a recap of all my posts about Saint of Yamhill from last year, when I re-read many of her books.

A Realization

Homesick for Klickitat Street and A postscript

Spunky Girls (Ramona), Ramona, Relatability, and Serendipity, Henry Huggins

Mr. Henshaw

Hello friends! It’s been a while since my last update, and that’s because I’ve been busily finishing my next book! It’s a companion to my first novel, Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes. Here’s the amazing cover, drawn by Gilbert Ford:

The book comes out January 2016. It is without question the most monster-filled story I have ever written. Here’s the summary from the catalog:

A few weeks ago author Shannon Hale blogged about showing up for a school visit and learning that only the girls would be attending her lecture. The assumption that boys don’t want to see a “girl book” author is wrong in a million ways, but enough people have responded to this outrage, and I don’t need to add to the chorus.

I know Shannon Hale is popular with young readers, as her name always comes up when I poll groups of kids on their favorite books, but I’d fallen into the same benign sexism as the school: assuming that something that looks like this had no interest to me.

But in following this story, I read a synopsis of Princess Academy and was intrigued. It sounded far more interesting than I would have guessed from the title and cover. Now, after reading it, I know it a thoughtful critique of the “princess” ideal with a strong feminist theme. Its popularity with girls shows that they are quite ready for this message.

Hale’s way into this topic is intricate: girls competing against one another, tempted by materialism, made to feel ashamed and undeserving. Every element feels natural in the story but could lead to rich discussions about how own culture treats girls. It could even be assigned reading in a college class on women’s studies or gender issues. But the sociopolitical aspects are so well integrated with a good story, it doesn’t feel like the whole book is just a frame for a lecture. I’ve read few children’s books that are as deceptively simple on the outside and run as deep.

After a childhood of Disney princesses, girls really need books like Hale’s. I think boys should read it too: because it’s an enjoyable book, and to have an idea of what girls are going through. We know many men arrive at college belligerent and hostile to feminism; why not begin those discussions sooner?

Besides that, few quote/unquote “boy books” show heroes as reflective and conscientious as Miri. Boys steeped in the personal exceptionalism and power fantasies that often shape “their” stories will be ill-equipped for the real world; Miri is a much better role model for all children.

How do we make the leap to a world where boys can read a book called Princess Academy without fear of bullying and scoffing? Men need to read books by and about women, showing that it’s expected of men to care about women, and boys about girls. And schools need to encourage boys to see brilliant authors like Shannon Hale when they’re lucky enough to have her instead of keeping them in class.

I was led (via Twitter) by an educator named Debbie Reese, one of the people on the forefront of “We Need Diverse Books,” to a series of workshops on failure at an annual conference for game developers. As the article says:

[At a gaming conference] there is a strong success bias – you are not going to hear a lot of companies trumpet their failures. Failure, however, can be often be more instructive than success.

The same can be said of writing conferences. The keynotes are writers with “New York Times Bestelling Author” in front of their names, with awards and movie adaptations. We don’t see the worst-sellers speaking, but they have more wisdom — they know how to brace themselves for another disappointment, how to keep writing when you can’t make a living at it, and how to soldier on through a manuscript that might never find a single reader. They’ve weathered the storms and survived and can now tell us, like the wretched old man in that poem, about the albatross of regret.

Failure can mean lots of things in writing. A book that didn’t get published, a book that published and didn’t sell, a book that sold but got lambasted by reviewers, or even a book that did well on all accounts but still makes the writer cringe. There are PR disasters, author events where nobody shows, terrible interviews, and (for my crowd) school visits that make the author want to hit every bar on the way home.

But failures, mistakes, and bad experiences are learning experiences, and here is what I want to do: I want to destigmatize failure. I want writers to talk about their failures frankly, and what they learned from them.

I am going to make this a series, but won’t put an end point on it. One thing I’ve learned from past failures (remember the Mark Twain blog?) is to take these things slow.

But I’m going to put this idea out there now and solicit future interviewees or guest bloggers who can write about failure. It doesn’t even have to be about writing. Leave a comment or send me a message.

I am going to kick things off with my own story in a day or two.

The other day my son had some of those blocks out — you know the ones that have cylinders and triangles and little bridges? He wanted to build a city, and as we stacked them I thought, “that looks like a city from the future,” and then I felt sad, because I used to believe in cities of the future, and now I’m pretty sure we’re all doomed. We’re running of fresh water, running out of breathable air, running out of sea creatures, and running out of rain forest. Our “cities of the future” are small tribes of people trying to eke food and water out of a planet than can no longer sustain human life.

Maybe it won’t be THAT bad, but one thing we’ll never recover is the zeal of the early 20th Century, when we thought we would just keep innovating and progressing and create this uberworld of modernity.

All of this went through my head in a split second.

When the days are warm and the nights are cold, you find the morning puddles liquid and bubbly below a shield of ice. As a child you would walk flat across that ice and watch the trapped air slide around beneath your feet; you would feel the puddle’s skin sag slightly, not breaking, and you’d reach dry pavement before it gave way. In retrospect, it may have been one of life’s greatest pleasures: testing the ice, on those perfect spring mornings, before age and weight took over, and you began to crush everything with your heavier tread, when you suffered through a day with wet sneakers for trying, when you began to navigate around the puddles, first with a pang of loss, and then never noticing them anymore, at least not until your own child discovered them and did the same.

At times like these when everybody seems to be hurrying, their faces reflected in little black mirrors, and nobody sees the iced-over puddles or one another, I wish we could all be small again and play the ice game. Surely everybody else has also trod on thin ice, and known the immortal feeling of being slight, of being buoyed up by ice, of literally walking on air; and everybody, too, knows that growing up ruins everything; they’ve had cold wet feet and stopped wearing the wrong kinds of shoes and they’ve stopped seeing puddles. If we were all small again, we’d all play the ice game, and then we’d grab up the black bricks of ice-dirt that seem to remain in the gutters well into April, and rediscover the joy of heaving them to the sidewalk. We wouldn’t care about splashback or dirty hands; it’s worth it to see those bricks shatter before us, the back oozing away as the ice scatters into sparkling shards.

Fourteen months ago I started an ambitious writing project — ambitious because it would be set in a foreign country; one where I have not lived or even visited: The Dominican Republic.

It was supposed to be about an aspiring baseball player growing up on the streets of San Pedro de Macorís, “The Cradle of Shortstops.” It is still about him, but it is also about a sensitive American girl named Maya who takes an interest in the same player, years later when he is in the minor leagues and struggling. It is about a baseball blogger named Grace, and a Haitian girl named Bijou, and it’s about bees.

I’ve learned a lot from the writing. I’ve learned a bit of Spanish and a heck of a lot about the D.R. I’ve come to think of it with the same fondness and familiarity as places I’ve lived.

It’s really different from my other books. I was inspired by the likes of Beverly Cleary and Gary Paulsen to write with more emotional frankness, abandoning the masters-program-learned habit of using subtle hints at hidden feelings. I wrote in the third person instead of the first person, and there are two point-of-view characters instead of one. I let the characters and their decisions drive all the plot turns, and it makes for a less eventful book than the last few, with their marauding robots and invasive fungi, but there are still some twists and turns and reveals. And, for what it’s worth, there is not a single white boy in the story.

I don’t know if the rest of the world will love this book, but it’s I’m glad I wrote it and I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done and in any case I’m stuck with it now. I finished it last night.

(Photo from Living Learning on Flickr)