I’m still slogging through difficult rewrites with my back to an unmet deadline (how, how, how do other writers meet deadlines when they work full-time, how??).

I had run head-on into the dragon of writer self-doubt. It had been in hiding for some time - I was in love with my current novel, I thought it kicked my last novel’s ass, my characters felt deep and fully drawn, the writing light and lyrical. Then I hit a rough patch and suddenly, the same characters that felt so real to me that we could’ve sat down and had martinis together - those same characters started to feel unrealistic, unbelievable, wooden. Their troubles suddenly went from vivid to contrived. Plot fog overtook me. I was paralyzed.

Then, like a sign straight out of a Charlton Heston movie, I got a Google alert for this:

“All I can say is ‘WOW, what a book!!!‘

When I received this book in mail, my only intention was to scan the book, read a couple of pages and then keep it aside for future reading. I mean I do have a TBR pile and I would feel kind of guilty reading this book immediately. But honestly, once I read the first couple of pages I couldn’t stop. It was just that good.”

You can read the rest of the review here at VioletCrush.

How’s that for a kick in the behind? I thanked Violet for her lovely review (Violet’s blog by the way, is a great read in its own right with a well-attended community of readers. The Internet is fabulous for this - I never realized how FEW people I know actually read novels until I started writing myself. It’s lonely being a bookworm these days, so thanks to bloggers like Swapna and Violet for creating these communities)

Then, just days after that, fan mail started trickling in. It had been a while since I’d gotten any of that, and to be honest, Fashionably Late was so long ago for me that I feel completely removed from it. Until I got a a couple of lovely, heartfelt e-mails - one from a reader for whom a trip to the Dominican Republic had changed her life. For another reader, the magic had happened in Mexico.

In “On Writing” Stephen King says that writing is telepathy. It an intimate conversation that crosses the boundaries of time and space and convention. Let’s face it, if you happened to be introduced to a woman at a lounge one Saturday night and struck up a polite conversation, you might walk away from it twenty minutes later knowing a few basic facts about her: claims administrator at a medium-sized insurance firm, just got out of a committed relationship, last vacation was to Barcelona, likes dancing, loved Slumdog Millionaire.

You wouldn’t know that that trip to Barcelona changed her entire outlook on life, that things were never quite the same afterwards, or that while she complained about how boring her job was - like everyone does - that she wonders why she feels like she’s living life in the tedium of black and white instead of in vivd color. You won’t walk away from that conversation knowing that the two of you are profoundly connected - that you share the same struggle of trying to figure out your place in the world without the benefit of a guidebook to help you out. Without novels, chances are you would have never met that woman in the first place.

That’s what’s so wonderful about novels - they might not have the answer the you’re looking for, but they do show you that we’re all in it together.

A very interesting article in today’s NY Times exposes how kids are currently being taught only the nuts and bolts or reading, as opposed to reading as a means to make sense of the world. The article hit home for many reasons - I recently touched base with a old high school friend I hadn’t seen in years and she’d since become a French teacher. We reminisced over cappuccinos and croissants about the horribleness of some of the books we were made to read in junior high and how we grew up to love language in spite of our curriculum, not because of it. (I still have nightmares about Le Lion, a book I still wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, even as an adult)

The article cites the example of giving school kids a piece about “hiking in the Appalachians” and asking them to find the central idea. It then goes on to explain that if the kids don’t give a hoot about the Appalachians, don’t know much about hiking in that area, and moreover, are extremely unlikely to ever experience that activity, then they will naturally be less likely to be able to find the central idea, or answer any other questions about the piece.

The article inadvertently makes a commentary about how we expect kids to think (which is to say we don’t expect them to). Asking you to comment on something you have no prior knowledge of will not stretch your critical thinking muscles. It will not build “connectors” in your brain, or teach you to make associations and connect the dots between seemingly disparate subjects. If you studied WWII in history class and a blurb about WWII came up in English class and you were asked to process the information from a different angle, it would “stick” more, and you’ll be more likely to see how it fits into the big picture.

And isn’t that really the root of so many of our problems these days?… So many of us finding it so hard to see the big picture - connecting the dots between our declining health, our lifestyles, an economy gone berserk, the health of the planet, vested interests, the role of religion and politics in maintaining the status quo, etc, etc….?

I still don’t see the ”big picture” of Le Lion, though. Damn you, Le Lion!!! (shaking fist, angrily)