Refilling The Well

September 12, 2016 |

I’ve been having a hard time reading this year. I know my perception of “hard time reading” and “not reading much” differs from the average person — I did just finish my 70th book, so I’m clocking about two a week — but it’s weird when you’re used to reading more than 100 or 150 books at this point in the year and you’re just not.

But my reading this year has been so much more satisfying than in previous years. Not necessarily because the books are better. Rather, it’s because I’ve let myself refill the well over and over, and I’ve listened to my instinct far more on what I’m choosing to pick up and what I’m choosing to put down.

Last week, I went on vacation with my husband to one of our top dream places: Marfa, Texas. We’d lived in Texas for a few years, but we never made the 6.5 hour drive out to west Texas. This time, we made the intentional decision to do it; we’d fly into Austin, then make the drive out to the desert.

Earlier in the summer, the two of us took a half a week trip out to the Denver area to see some friends, so this was our second couple trip together in the last couple of months. And one thing I figured out pretty quickly in that first trip was something I applied to this one: I don’t read.

I used to love the whole process of picking my vacation reads. I’d spend days debating which books make the cut and which ones would stay behind. But the truth of it was, I rarely read on these trips. I’d pack 4 or 5 books, and then I’d pick at a couple of pages while waiting at the airport and quickly discard it in favor of pacing the airport itself. When I get on the plane, I’m one of those lucky people who falls asleep nearly instantly. Then when I reach the destination, I’m conscious of leaving everything behind and living right in the moment.

What I did pack for both trips was my Nook. Out in Colorado, I did read. I woke up before anyone else did, since I’m a morning person, and I’d use the time to read a few chapters. I finished Kali VanBaale’s The Good Divide during one of those morning reading sessions, and I updated my husband on the story when he’d wake up. I loved the book, and I loved the slow, deliberate reading sessions, knowing that I was being intentional of when I was reading and I was fully aware of the moment I was in while reading (on an air mattress, in the home of good friends). The story and the setting coalesced into a wonderful experience.

I loaded up my Nook before this trip, but I wasn’t particularly excited about any of the titles on there. A couple of books I’d wanted to read expired, and given that this was a Dream Trip, my excitement was a bit dispersed.

Then we hit travel snags, and I suddenly needed a book to read. Right now. Something that would distract me from hours and hours of sitting at an airport.

I hit the O’Hare bookstore (note, this wasn’t the airport we originally had tickets to fly out of) and hemmed and hawed about what book to read. I picked up and put down tons of them. I left without a book. Then I went back and picked up more options, then put them down. O’Hare’s bookstore had some of those beautiful classics, including a cover for The Metamorphosis I hadn’t seen before (I was tempted). I ended up choosing the mass market edition of The Girl on the Train, which I hadn’t yet read. I picked up Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars for my husband.

And then I didn’t read.

For many more hours, I wandered O’Hare. And then when the flight finally came to be, I fell asleep, my dreams peppered with images of bowls of queso and margaritas.

I was disappointed about the delays. The trip was to begin with grabbing lunch with Kimberly, who I haven’t seen in a few years. My disappointment meant my concentration wasn’t there. Which meant my reading mind wasn’t there. There was some comfort in buying a book, but there was no response in reading it.

The morning after our flight, my husband and I tag teamed the drive out to Marfa. When we drive, I do not read. We have an understanding that when we drive like this, neither of us gets to read or sleep — we’re the second set of eyes. With driving such a huge expanse of Texas, it was hard not to keep looking out. It was beautiful and breath taking and there was so much to take in about the beauty of the land around us.

It hit me on the drive I wanted nothing more than to read a book about living in west Texas. About homesteading. About how you don’t feel like an insignificant speck in a part of the country where there is one person per square mile (a nifty fact gleaned at a rest stop Google session — one of my favorite parts of driving, the looking up of the things you see and know nothing about).

Marfa is a tiny artist town close to the Mexican border. But they have a pretty nifty bookstore, and as we discovered on the first evening there, a beautiful library with a lovely note to the community on the outside. I didn’t get a chance to go in, but I loved the love letter to the town. We did hit up the bookstore, located inside one of the new hotels downtown (…most of Marfa is downtown, I guess). It was a lovely specialty shop, filled with books about the artists who played a huge role in the community, as well as an extensive selection of Cormac McCarthy books — No Country For Old Men was filmed in places around town. Nothing caught my eye or scratched the itch of the kind of book I needed to be reading.

I didn’t read while on the trip. Instead, I explored. I saw the mystery lights. My husband and I and the other people who were out there watching the show that evening shared stories and theories; we learned one guy brought his family to this space ten different times and this was the first time they’d ever seen the lights. We wandered the campsite we stayed at, pet the dogs of other people staying there, and we even ran into another Wisconsinite, with whom we shared stories of travel, of how unbelievable the sky out in this space was. Even when I grabbed my book to read in the hammocks around the campsite, I put it down and instead watched the vast sky around me, felt the breeze, listened to the utter quiet of being in the desert.

One of the best parts of the trip, though, was stopping into the visitor centered. The woman running it was wildly enthusiastic about Marfa, and she told us about all of the places we needed to see, as well as the stories behind them. Our immediate trip after that was to the Chinati Foundation, where we wandered out into the land to see the famous Judd concrete sculptures. The Foundation is built on decommissioned military land that served as a German POW camp during the second World War. The sculptures, as well as the surrounding buildings filled with art, were the response to getting the land and making it mean something completely different.

Between the trip through the concrete sculptures, as well as our drive out to see the Prada Marfa installation, my husband and I had stories and theories to tell one another, as well as things to look up and read to one another. What did these things mean? How did they change over time?

Our reading wasn’t books. It wasn’t what we picked up or packed. It was what we were living right then.

One of the last stops on our last night in Marfa was one of the big hotel gift shops, and it was here I found the book I was looking for: a story about a girl whose grandparents made a homestead out in west Texas in the 1950s and 60s and what it was like for them to live in such a desolate place: A Stake in West Texas by Rebecca D. Henderson.

It’s a book that scratches all of my itches, and it’s one I cannot wait to read for the story, as well as the story behind where I got it, what it means to me, and what the longing I had to learn about this place meant to me before and during the travels. It is, as I type this, lost in transit with our clothes, our toiletries, our toothbrushes, our shoes, jars of honey, bottles of beer, and a number of other things. I’m eager to be reunited.

When we got back to Austin, our first stop was Book People, my all-time favorite bookstore. It was a sanctuary for me for the time I was living in that city by myself. On Saturday mornings when I wasn’t working in someone’s garage archive, I’d hop on a bus, then another one, then spend a few hours wandering the two-story store.

Remember when I said I didn’t pack anything but my nook?

That was in part because I knew I’d pick up a few things at Book People. And $125 later, I’m pleased to say I bought myself two books — including one that had expired from my Nook — and one for my husband.

We flew back to Milwaukee and when I got on the plane, everything changed. I needed to unpack the trip, the stories we heard and the ones we told, and the best way for me to do that was to read.

I pulled The Girl on the Train out of my bag and flew through 300 pages as we were in the air. Then the moment we got home, I tore through the remainder of the book. It was precisely what I needed when I needed it: a quick thriller which made me keep turning pages and put me back into my own space and turf. As soon as I finished that, I picked up another book, which I’m elbow deep in now, less than 24 hours after returning home.

There is a weird pressure to keep reading, to pick up the next book, to do more, more, more, when you make your life about books. When you identify as A Reader. You feel guilt when you’re asked if you’ve read something and you say no, you haven’t. Or worse, when you’re told about a book and you’ve literally never heard of it (the friend we stayed with in Texas asked me about a book by a UT Alumna, wherein I had to look it up and add it to my to-read ASAP).

The truth is, though, reading and one’s reading life is entirely personal. And sometimes being a “reader” means that you’re listening to stories in ways that aren’t about printed or electronic pages. Sometimes, it’s about experiencing stories in the moment, of asking people to share their stories, of reading those plaques on the side of the road, of paging through art books in a tiny collection, of enjoying the beautiful libraries in the middle of the desert.

Those are moments of refilling the well. Of remembering why it is you love to read.

Taking this break and leaning into it, rather than pushing to fix it, meant stopping and pausing. It meant finding momentum again upon return. It meant finding the hunger and passion again for stories, no matter how they’re told.

____________________

All photos above are mine. I started taking photography classes earlier this year, and it’s been another piece of my refilling the well. The stories you can tell visually, through little more than the lens of your phone, continues to impress and inspire me.

Elements of A Novel That Work For Me

February 15, 2016 |

One of the things that I did as a librarian was reader’s advisory, and I’ve said it here and elsewhere repeatedly that it was one of my favorite aspects of the job. Being able to help someone find their next great read is awesome, but the real joy for me was digging into the actual ideas they were trying to express to me in words that didn’t always come out clearly. By that I mean, it’s hard to sometimes explain exactly why a particular book is one you love; you can mention that it’s the language, but what does that really mean? Are you there for literary, pretty prose? Are you there for unique use of language? Are you there for something cut-and-dry and straightforward?

Ferreting those things out for others is a skill that’s learned more as it’s practiced. It’s a marrying of knowledge of books, as well as knowledge of what it is that’s appealing to readers about those books.

Something I never put a whole lot of thought into until the last couple of years, though, was what the triggers were for me when it comes to the sort of books I know I’ll love or find enjoyable to read (because, of course, you can enjoy reading a book and walk away not really having liked it since sometimes the experiential nature of reading is really what you’re after). I know there are certain plot points that work for me — words like “juvenile detention” and “ballet” and “road trip” and “haunted house” are just a few descriptive phrases that ring my bells — but there are other things that really appeal to me in reading. Those are far less easy to have conveyed on jacket copy, and they’re even harder to tease out when looking at those books you’ve loved and are looking for similarities between sometimes very different types of books.

What I found as I did this wasn’t surprising to me, but the method in which I came about discovering the elements of a book I love was. Rather than looking for things I liked, I thought through what books didn’t work for me, what my criticisms were of those books, and looked for similarities among them; in some cases, thinking about the opposite element as the one I criticized opened up a path toward thinking about what I liked.

What’s neat about this, aside from really discovering what it is you like, is that it’s a great door to open toward helping you push past your normal reading comfort zone. Teasing out elements that appeal to you in this way allows you to see past genre or categories of book and instead focus on the very things you love in a reading experience, period.

Here are four elements of reading I love and am able to now put words to, thanks to trying out this exercise. I would love to hear what you find if you do something similar — and I’d love to know, too, what sort of methodology you used to arrive at a favorite element or two of books.

Humor, Especially Dark

I’m going to have to write at length about why we discredit and belittle funny at some point, since I think so often, we’re eager to look at books, discuss their critical merits through the lens of morality/lessons/elements to take away, and forget that what some readers want in a book is something that they enjoy the experience of reading. Being able to enjoy a book as a thing in and of itself is hugely important, and we undervalue that so much, especially with younger readers.

Perhaps this is why I love funny books. I want to laugh. I want to smile. I want to read something that is cute, even if it’s a bit over the top. The thing for me is that the humor has to be natural and voice-y; in other words, I don’t necessarily reach out for “funny” books; I find books that weave the humor into them to be what’s appealing. Amy Spalding is an excellent example of this, as her books sometimes leave me in tears with how funny her characters are, even though they aren’t trying to be.

My favorite horror movies are those which are darkly humorous, and this same appeal factor is one I love in my books. Give me something twistedly funny. I don’t want to read about hard topics that are made funny; rather, I want to be thrown into a bit of an absurd situation and be able to laugh my way through, always wondering if I am supposed to be laughing or not. Kate Alender’s books are a great example of this in YA.

Tight, Short Prose

I’m not wary of long books, but I know my sweet spot is in a book that makes tremendous impact with few words. The tighter the prose, the more interested I am. How can an author tell a power-packed story in 230 pages?

A great example of this is Stephanie Kuehn’s book. She’s able to do so much with her plot and her characters in very few words — Charm and Strange is 216 pages, believe it or not.

Complex Moralities and Characters

This is pretty fitting with the first two elements, in that I’ve found complex characters and moralities play out well with humor, especially the dark variety, and it’s through the tight, short prose that these particularly appeal-y elements stand out for me.

I don’t need happy endings. I don’t need likable characters. Rather, I want a book that makes me think, and I love books that make me question how I feel. I don’t care what it is I’m supposed to want from a book, but rather, I want to bring my own sensibilities, my own beliefs, and my own ideas to the page as much as I want ideas and characters presented to me in rich ways.

I’ve heard it said before that books are a conversation between the reader and the story, and that’s an image I quite like. You can’t divorce yourself from what you’re reading, however you’re reading it and for whatever reason you’re reading it, so in a lot of ways, complex moralities and characters speak to me because they fascinate me personally.

I note Kuehn here again as an excellent example. A few others include Emily Hainsworth (especially Take The Fall, which is so Twin Peaks-esque, it’s impossible not to think about the complexities the whole way through), Melina Marchetta, Louise O’Neill, Malinda Lo, and Nova Ren Suma.

Everyday Magic

Could this be filed under “magical realism?” Maybe. But I think magical realism is a genre in its own right, and what I call everyday magic extends beyond that a little bit. I love the sense of wonder there is in reading a book and questioning what is real as in real-in-our-world and what is real as in real-in-that-world-but-set-in-our-world. In other words, there are books that are set in a world we live in, that are essentially of the realistic fiction variety, but they have a little bit of magic to them.

Nova Ren Suma is an obvious example here, but I also include Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap, Samantha Mabry’s upcoming A Fierce and Subtle Poison, Sarah McCarry’s writing, Infandous by Elana K Arnold. There’s also a fabulous adult novel with great YA appeal by Silvia Moreno-Garcia called Signal to Noise which weaves this everyday magic into the story in a way that checked all of my boxes.

What’s neat is teasing these pieces out shows how much they’re interrelated, really. Everyday magic happens through short and tight prose because that world is our world, but through subtle differences, the magic emerges. It also provides the catalyst for complex characters and moralities.

It’s also worth noting when you look at the books that fall beneath the elements of a story you love, they aren’t always fluid nor are they great read alikes to one another. I’d never connect Kuehn’s work with Hainsworth’s or Lo’s, and yet, they all “fit” under the umbrella of complex characters and moralities. This is such a great way to see past my own edges of reading and understand that going beyond my preferred genres or categories of books really helps me discover voices that are doing the very things I love so much.

Tell me yours! I want to know what elements you love, what books fall beneath them, and if there was any special way you figured this out.

Intentional Reading

January 4, 2016 |

A few years ago, I wrote about how I dislike annual reading goals. The act of setting up a number or goal in reading as a yearly resolution feels to me like making reading work, rather than an activity worth enjoying. That’s not to say there’s not value in it — for many readers, there definitely is — but for me, being intentional in my reading brings meaning to my reading life.

Intentional reading is being selective with my reading. I’ve been doing the reading thing long enough now to know what phrases or descriptions ring my bells. I also have a good sense of where I can improve in my reading and I create strategies for getting better. Over the last few years, for example, I recognized how important reading more women and more people of color was; I set the intention of only spending my money on books written by women or people of color. By setting that intention, I work hard to seek out those books, many of which I may otherwise never have discovered, and I’m surrounded by them. If I need to read a book, I have so many fantastic options in my home.

Last fall, I made a decision about my reading life. It was something I needed to do. I’d sort of hinted at needing to change things up in the summer, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to go about it or what it was that I needed to do. When your reading life and your work life are so intimately and intricately tied, it’s hard to tease one of them apart from the other and separate the things you know you should be reading for work-related reasons from those you want to read for you and only you. I love talking about books intelligently and I love being able to be part of a conversation about books that are sparking discussion within the YA and broader book community. But I’m also not, nor have I ever been, a reader who needs to be up on the latest, greatest, or big-budget titles. I rely on reviews by others of those titles to help guide my decisions on them.

I was intrigued by Annika’s post about having only read books by women since 2013. I love when people suss out patterns in their reading and then they go at those things with full force. That’s an intention. But more, when the comments on Annika’s post turned really bothersome — and I moderated those comments for a few days, so I saw some of the worst of it — I decided that taking on a similar intention in my reading would be worthwhile. Why did a woman choosing to read only women make people so angry? What is so scary about choosing to read only women?

Leila answers that question about the challenge in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate while also offering more compelling reasons for taking part in the intentional reading of women’ stories:

And, as I watched that all play out, rather than scaring me off, all of the garbage levelled at that essay—and, of course, at the woman who wrote it—resulted in the realization that this year, every single book that I’ve read that I have connected on a kindred-spirit level has been a book written by a woman. It made me realize that lately, while I haven’t felt particularly welcome in a community that I used to consider welcoming, that I have felt embraced and affirmed and heard and challenged—in a positive way—by those same authors, in those same books.

It made me realize that at the moment, I want to surround myself with women’s voices. That I want to put my energy into listening to them, engaging with them, learning from them, and amplifying them.

I began reading only women in November. Knowing my bookshelves are packed with books by women and people of color, I’ve had so many outstanding options to choose from. Sure, I’ve already missed out on reading a few books I’d been looking forward to, and I know there are more books I’m going to miss out on reading in this coming year. I’ve felt my heart sink opening up packages and finding ARCs by favorite male authors, knowing that I wouldn’t be reading them this year. But the beauty of books and reading is when you set an intention like reading only women, books written by men do not disappear. I can pick up the books I’ve been eager to read in 2017. Or 2018. Or 2019. Or 2020. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t going to vanish into the abyss; they’ll be there when I am ready to pick them up. With the way technology works, even books that might not otherwise have a long shelf life can stick around infinitely thanks to eformats. Likewise, talking about good books never gets tiring and it’s never out of style. Backlist discussions matter as much as, if not even more than, talking about titles the weeks leading up to or immediately after their release dates.

By intentionally limiting the books I’m reading, I’m discovering how my reading is expanding. It seems counterintuitive, but now, rather than sticking to a certain type or genre of book, I’m reaching a little further. I’m excited to read more memoirs by women. I’ve always wanted to do that, but with the intention of reading only women, now I am permitting myself to reach for those books when I may have otherwise kept pushing them off in exchange for something else more timely or more related to what I feel like I should be talking about. I’m thinking about the connections between those books and my own life. Those books and the lives of other women I care about. Those books and teenagers, both those who may be intrigued by the book at hand or those who might find themselves connecting on a personal level to those stories in the future.

My reading has slowed down a bit, too. I’m marking more passages, thinking more critically, and asking more questions of the books I’m enjoying. I’m finding the act of asking questions to be fulfilling more than the desire to seek answers to them. My thinking and engagement in books opens up in a different way when I choose to settle for uncertainty, rather than demand closure. I’ve never needed closure in my reading, but I’m letting myself enjoy the discomfort of not knowing.

I didn’t participate in the Read Harder challenge at Book Riot last year. It felt too restrictive to me in the same way other reading challenges are. But this year, I’m embracing the challenge. I’m really excited to try reading books that I otherwise wouldn’t, especially with my intention of reading only women sitting on top of it. I know I’ll enjoy a wider range of reading while digging even more deeply into the works of women. Rather than expanding only outward, beyond my comfort zone, I’ll also be moving inward, further down the hole of the types of voices and stories I’m hungry to read.

If you aren’t a person who feels driven by goals or numbers, you’re not alone. And if you are a person who is motivated by that, that’s great, too. We’re all different in our approaches to reading. There’s no one-size-fits-all, and there never should be. Spending time thinking about your own needs and interests as a reader and digging into them, questioning them, and redefining them, only makes you better able to talk with or connect to other readers. This is especially true when you work with teen readers who have so little time in their lives for pleasure reading as it is.

I’m excited to see what this year in reading brings. Since embracing intentionality in my reading life and redefining what that means as I go along, rather than once a year, I’m able to walk away at the close of each year feeling like I’ve grown as a reader and as a thinker.

Do you have any reading intentions this year? I’d love to hear them or about any challenges you’re taking on.

Uncollected Reading and Book Buying Thoughts

May 7, 2015 |

Nothing really connects these ideas or pieces of my reading life together, but they’re things I’ve been thinking about and doing and couldn’t not put them into some sort of place. They’re uncollected. But they’re probably all really connected, too.

1. The weather here has really changed. It’s gotten so nice. After a long, cold winter inside, all I want to do is spend time outside. I’m not an outdoors person, so my speed of spending time outdoors is sitting on my front porch or in the backyard hammock with a book. Often the view looks something like this:

Sometimes it looks like this:

The bookmark in Hold Me Like A Breath is my all-time favorite bookmark. I’ve had it since 2008, when a professor I worked for at UT went to Tasmania. She knew how much I have a love for that place — because of a book, The Ghost With Trembling Wings by Scott Weidensaul, about lost species of animals and travel and nature and tasmanian devils — and she picked up the bookmark for me because it’s made of Tasmanian wood. It’s a Huon Pine, and to this day, many years later, it still smells good.

2. I’ve been buying books by the bucket loads. I went to three bookstores in three weekends. For someone who is quite a ways from any bookstore, this is a lot of driving to visit bookstores. It hasn’t just been purchases in store, though. I’ve done some online ordering, too. Mostly things that have been sitting on my “to read” list for a while that I don’t have access to via the library and can’t find in store.

I haven’t read any of these books. I haven’t started any of them yet, either. Most were from recommendations of others. It’s a mix of non-fiction and fiction. I’m really looking forward to digging into each of them, and I plan on getting to The Diary of a Teenager Girl soonest, probably. It’s an older backlist title, a mix of prose and graphic elements. It’s being rereleased this summer, as a movie’s being made from it. The preview in EW is where I heard about it and then I became determined to track down reviews before putting money down for it.

Headstrong, a book of short biographies of women in science, looks like it’ll be great research for my anthology.

I bought all of these books, too. Again, some were from a to-read list. Others were things people told me about or I had connections to somehow — I bought two romance novels, my first ever, because Kimberly has raved about Sarah MacLean. I really think she’s a neat person (and I’ll tell you more about why in the near future, I think), and I’m excited to dig into them.

The Last Life came to my awareness from this wonderful Reading Lives podcast with Nova Ren Suma. I picked up Astonish Me after talking in the Book Riot backchannel about my love for dance themed novels, and The Bluest Eye will be my first Morrison read, on deck for next month.

I adored Amy Spalding’s funny, feminist Kissing Ted Callahan when I read it earlier this year, and so I had to pick up a finished copy. The librarian in the story has a familiar name, too.

Selfish is a small literary magazine. Jenn Northington, who is the Director of Events and Programming, has a piece in it. This is the first issue, and it sounds fantastic.

3. It’s not just books I’ve been buying. I went on a bit of a comics binge buy, too.

After I heard there was going to be an Archie vs. Sharknado issue this summer, I decided it was high time to catch up on Archie I never read. I consulted a friend who is an Archie expert and decided on three mega collections. I then bought Afterlife with Archie because zombies.

Everywhere Antennas is one of the most beautifully drawn graphic novels I’ve ever read. It’s a story about a girl who never feels well and attributes it to living in a city, where there’s a lot of electricity. The wires and buzzing are hurting her and she chooses to move to rural Canada, where she can connect with the Earth, go off grid, and create. It’s a comic in translation — a thing I’ve really come to enjoy lately — and I can’t wait to revisit it. This is definitely the kind of comic you could consider “new adult,” if that were a thing comics could be. The main character is post-college, but she’s not entirely sure yet where her life will take her.

Both Ms. Marvel and Sex Criminals just released their second trade issues. I loved their respective first trades, so I had to pick them up.

Not pictured: Black Widow, Volume 1. You cannot find it anywhere. It’s backordered. I hope I get it some day. I’m waiting, still.

4. Of course, there have been review copies coming to my house, too. Fortunately, it’s been in lesser quantities than the purchased books. I think. I can’t always tell since books get put places around the house and I have become bad about knowing what is where. It’s somewhere. But not always easily accessible.

The covers of these are so great. There’s the new Blythe Woolston. The new Sarah Darer Littman. A horror novel — We’ll Never Be Apart — which has almost the same exact cover as After the Snow.

Todd Strasser’s The Beast of Cretacea was compared to Moby Dick, which is a dangerous catnip for me. I love Moby Dick. I’m tentative and a little hesitant about picking up Sugar because it’s about a fat girl. This could either go very well or very poorly. I want it to be great. I worry I might be let down. Reviews haven’t told me much either way. I’ll be getting to it sooner, probably, rather than later.

5. I’ve not been in the mood to write reviews lately. I’ve been in the mood to read and really think about my reading in a private, personal way. A lot of those thoughts end up coming out in bigger, more developed pieces, outside of reviews. I’ve found a short review on Goodreads works, along with talking up a great book on Twitter, is about my energy level for reviews.

But here’s a peek at recent reads, with a quick pitch/comparison.

Hold Me Like A Breath by Tiffany Schmidt comes out on the 19th. It’s a retelling of “The Princess and the Pea” with organ trafficking. It is as thrilling as it sounds. And there’s romance. And also, there’s a sequel forthcoming that I can’t wait to get my hands on. Satisfying, well-paced, and unique.

Scarlett Undercover by Jennifer Latham comes out later this month, too. It’s about a Muslim American girl who is, without question, as snarky, quick-witted, and smart as Veronica Mars. Very little romance in this one, though it is hovering in the background. Teens who want teen sleuths and who want a story where a Muslim girl’s identity plays a role in the story and in her character development will eat this up. I know I did.

Invincible by Amy Reed came out last week. Like all of Reed’s books, we have a broken main character and she’s broken because she has to be. This isn’t at all like TFIOS, which is the unfortunate comp it’s gotten from the publisher. It’s about a girl who learns she’s not on the death sentence with cancer she thought, and coming back into real life after that means she’s grieving everything: her entire life is now different. And so, she seeks out comfort with a boy who is not good for her, not even a little. If anything, maybe this is the kind of book you hand to readers who are over TFIOS. It’s not sentimental, and it’s not at all emotionally manipulative.

Kissing in America by Margo Rabb hits shelves later this month and if ever you wanted a Trish Doller read alike or a read alike to the also forthcoming, also outstanding A Sense of the Infinite by Hilary T. Smith, here you go. The title is, I think, unfortunate. There’s very little kissing in this book at all. It’s about friendship, about Eva seeking out some sort of life after the unexpected death of her father in a plane crash. It’s one of the most well-done grief books I’ve read, and it features a road trip and a series of realistic bad decisions at the hands of a 16-year-old girl. The writing is outstanding. I blew through this, as well as the Smith title, in no time.

I didn’t get a picture of A Sense of the Infinite, but it is without question one of my favorite reads this year. When it comes out later this month, pick it up. It’s about friendship, about family, about grief, about girls growing up. It’s a true coming-of-age story. I talked more in depth about why this book is so phenomenal over at Book Riot in our Best of the Month round-up.

Also not pictured — well, it is, at the very top of this post — is my reading of Jesmyn Ward’s outstanding, poignant, painful memoir Men We Reaped. It’s Ward’s reflection on losing five young black men in her life and where and how their stories and their deaths are connected. Read this. Especially if you care about black lives and stories. It’s not easy. It’s not pretty. But it’s important and powerful and so damn humanizing.

6. This isn’t a writing blog, nor will it turn into one. But I wanted to round this post out by talking briefly about my anthology.

It’s weird. I feel two things about it at once: I feel like I know exactly what I’m doing, in part because I feel like the work in putting together blog series, especially the “About the Girls” one, has taught me that giving other people freedom to explore the things they’re passionate about within a theme allows them to be at their best. On the other hand, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve not told anyone who else is involved, so it’s a big secret. Contributors know what they’re writing or creating (I have people creating things for my book — that feeling is unreal) but I don’t know how it’ll look in the end.

In thinking about the things I want to put in myself, I get a little overwhelmed. Then I get excited. But I float back and forth on the knowing/not knowing line.

The very last class I took in college for my English major was meant to be a capstone experience. The final project was about anthologies. We explored how they were put together. Why they were crafted as they were. What the editors’ choices meant in terms of their work and in terms of having an impact on those who read those anthologies. Our project for the course was to create a mock anthology and talk about why we made the choices we made. What those choices said about our biases and our knowledge.

My group made an anthology about censored children’s literature. It’s still online in bits and pieces, but since some of the copyright choices are questionable (we were young and so was the internet, honestly), I don’t link to it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that project, about the choices and conversations that went on, and I have definitely been influenced by that class in working on this project. I spend a lot of time thinking about each contributor I reach out to. About what I ask of them. About where their work will land in the greater conversation.

And I’ve been asked really good questions back. Some of them have led me to reconsider visions I had, but not in bad ways. While it’s my work in the editing, I cannot wait to see where my invisible work — those conversations, those decisions — ends up taking the creators.

I’m looking forward to when I can begin sharing who is a part of this project.

It’s a treat to work with some of my feminist heroes and heroines.

Getting Things Done with Bullet Journaling

April 30, 2015 |

Taking a day away from talking about books and reading to instead talk about the art and science behind how I get organized and stay productive. Part of it is being inspired by folks like Jane from Dear Author who talked about this at the start of the year, and part of it is that I’ve really taken to bullet journaling and have had a number of people talk about how they want to get into it and don’t understand how it works.

I’ve always been a list keeper. I have notebooks upon notebooks of to-do lists, stretching back to college and earlier. They’re still sitting in boxes and in closets around the house, in the event I need to do something like see where I was in wedding planning back in 2006. Just incase, I guess. I’ve kept a notebook of every book I’ve finished reading since 2000, which sits on the book case in my living room.

When I worked outside of the house, I kept numerous notebooks for lists. Some were for work. Some were for inspiration. Some were for random note taking. For a few years — recent ones — my list keeping and note taking got out of control. I not only had numerous notebooks going, but I also became an unabashed post-it note user. The great thing about post-its is how easy they are to move around, put into notebooks, rearrange, and, as it turns out, throw away. Where I cannot get rid of a notebook with lists, tossing a post-it of tasks I’ve completed away felt like an accomplishment. I enjoyed that.

The downside to throwing out post-its, though? Not being able to see at a glance what sorts of productivity I can achieve within a certain time frame. Am I getting ten things done a day? Three things done a week? What sort of long-term projects require weeks, instead of an hour? Quantifying productivity with post-its and numerous journals just doesn’t work for me.

Enter bullet journal.

If you’re not familiar with the bullet journal, take the three minutes to watch the video which gives an overview of the theory and system:

After watching this, I had more questions than answers. It felt overcomplicated for my own needs while also feeling too simple. Can I really keep numerous lists in one place? Why do I need multiple calendars within the journal? Do I need the journal AND a calendar? Will it make sense to mix up my work-related tasks with my personal tasks? Blog tasks? How will I make sense of all the little symbols and notations?

In short, I watched the video and felt like it was a lot to take in. But I wanted to try it anyway.

A little bit of backstory here: I noted being a journal and note book nerd, but I didn’t mention the level to which this exists. Back in the glory days of Livejournal, I was a member of numerous notebook and journaling communities, and even after, I connected with many folks who were into that, too. Is there something more nerdy than talking about how you journal or stay productive? About what kinds of pens you prefer? About where to score really great notebooks (…and yes, I have preferences on the note books I use and for what purpose)? I knew there’d be people out there showing off how they bullet journal, and while there are some great examples on Tumblr, I knew where the gold mine would be: Pinterest.

Here’s a quick and dirty set of search results for “bullet journal” on Pinterest. While many follow the formula of the original, many diverge. If you spend some time digging around through people’s posts, you’ll find so many variations on the standard bullet journal, and it was through a few hours of time, I was able to cobble together a system that absolutely, positively works for me.

Yes, I am 100% analog in my tasking and I foresee this being the case for a long time. I am better at remembering things when I write them down than I am keeping them in my head or on a digital calendar or document. I have no more post-it notes in my life, and I keep only two notebooks now. One is for almost everything I do (that’s the bullet journal), while the second is my notebook for keeping track of work scheduling of social media, meeting notes, and generally uncategorizeable note taking. I use a large Moleskine with a grid format for the journal, while I use a Chronicle journal for my note taking (this one right now). I am very, very committed and devoted to both of those products for those very specific reasons. It’s partially about size, portability, and quality. Likewise, they sit together neatly on a shelf when I am finished with them, which is important, since I refer back to many of the note-taking notebooks frequently.

This is how I organize my bullet journal, and as the year has progressed and my projects and work have shifted and grown, you’ll see my methods have evolved, too.

I began like the video does, by numbering my pages and creating an index at the front of the journal. This method lasted for approximately 15 pages and two days of January. I don’t care about being that organized. If I do, I can go back later and fill in those gaps. I did end up making a yearly calendar at the beginning of the journal, month by month, with key dates highlighted and marked. I haven’t referred back to this much since creating it, so it’s stayed blank. I’d probably ditch this in future iterations.

At the beginning of each month, I write out a rough events calendar:

This is nothing more than the dates of the month on the left, along with events or important things I ned to remember beside it. On dates with more than one event, I just separate them but put them all on the same line.

On the next page, I keep a single-page monthly task list. This is a list of things I need to do during the month that don’t necessarily have a due date or need to be done by a certain point. I refer back to this every day when I’m working on my daily task lists (getting there in a minute) in order to build those daily to-dos.

Following those pages, I like to make myself a place to track my monthly workouts. Some people do things like Fit Bit or Polar Vortex (which isn’t the real name, but that’s what I call my husband’s fancy tracker). I think I’ve made it clear I’m a paper person.

Following those three key pages, I then flip to the following page for a two-page spread which becomes a place where I keep track of two things during the month: blog post ideas, as well as books I’ve read and books I’d like to read that month. I don’t get to everything on the “to read” list, but that’s become a way for me to keep up with what I’ve been thinking about or wanting to read so when I do finish something and wonder what next, I have a place to turn.

After that, I give myself 3-5 pages which I’ve so creatively titled “miscellaneous.” This is where all of my monthly catch-all to-dos, lists, and other things I can’t forget or want to refer back to end up. Sometimes it’s literally a note about something I need to mention in an email or it’s an address. Something I don’t want to lose or misplace and would want to maybe refer back to at some point. I didn’t include pictures because all of those pages have personal stuff on them, but the important part for me is they exist and they’re there before the daily task lists.

One of the key features of bullet journaling per the video is that people can use a special key to track their events and tasks. This…does not work for me. Instead, I make a running agenda for every single day and mark things off as I go. For important things, like an appointment or call I have to attend to, I usually put a star to note that to myself. Otherwise, it’s a straight list, and I keep the daily task lists to half of a page. That’s all I can reasonably do in a day. Or rather, it’s all I expect myself to try to accomplish in a day that needs to get written down. Some things are so routine, I don’t need to mark them.

Generally, I write out a week of dates at a time. Sometimes I’ll go further. I don’t usually put the day of the week beside the date, but I have done that to keep track periodically. What’s been key for me here is this: I list things I need to do, or a memory cue for them (like “Pinterest” and “Goodreads,” which are things I do for Book Riot) and I mark them off as I accomplish them. When I see there are things being unmarked and unaccomplished, I move them to the next day.

Some people believe in very specific tasks being written. I alternate between specific tasks (“Write a Tumblr post for work about this event doing this”) and cues (“Goodreads,” which simply means do a few things on Goodreads that need to be done that day). It works for me because some things require specific information and other things do not.

If things don’t get done within a week or so — depending on what the task or memory cue is — I reevaluate the task. Do I need to do it? Will I do it? Or is it taking up unnecessary space in my life and it’s time to let go? If something isn’t on my monthly task list and has just been taking up space on my calendar, it’s time to either do the task (like go to the post office, which is a notorious one I hold over) or get rid of it and not think about it again.

By keeping my daily task lists to a week or so planned out, I force myself to make these decisions regularly. I don’t have time to waste writing things down again and again if I’m really not going to do them or if it’s a thing I just need to do and finish.

I keep all of my to-do list in one space. I do not separate out work tasks from personal tasks. I am very good at budgeting my time and energy during the day, so I know how to proceed with those multiple sides to my daily life. I practice energy management as opposed to time management, which I know is a touchy-feely way of getting things done, but it works for me. And since I work from home with an unconventional schedule, I find this method of taking care of things every day really works for me. Basically, I don’t plot things out in time chunks. I plot them out by energy. I know I am more likely to get certain things done in the morning and other things done mid-day. So I look at my lists every day and go from there. (This also tends to be why I am generally very fast at responding to emails or messages I get: as soon as I have the energy for it, I’m tackling it, rather than planning to go at it in one period of time.)

And that’s all.

I don’t do anything else with my bullet journal. I have no fancy secrets or knobs or gadgets. I use the same black ink Pilot pen on every single page. I reevaluate the monthly task lists as I go, and sometimes things get knocked off when they’re accomplished or I know it’s not going to happen.

I’m sold on this method of tracking my life because it’s analog and because I love having both the feeling of accomplishment that comes with marking things off and seeing how much can and cannot get done. More, I have a lot of opportunities to make choices with my time more regularly now that I see how my energy works with me, rather than against me. As a person who has to have control in her life, this is the biggest benefit. I know when and how I can get things done when I see it like this.

Keeping a record of books read, workouts finished, and blog post ideas keeps me motivated. I like seeing those pages full visually. And it’s always nice to know there’s a pile of blog post ideas sitting in line when I feel like I have nothing to work with when I sit down to write.

My bullet journaling came from trial and error, looking at what other people were doing and what would work for my own life. If it’s something that appeals to you but feels overwhelming, I cannot emphasize looking around at how others adapt them and then doing the same for yourself. I started with some idealistic notions on what I’d do with this, but then I let them die away as I realized the key component of bullet journaling for me, aside from organization, was decision making. Where do I invest my time and where do I let things go?

Other resources for getting started in bullet journaling:

Maureen wrote about her own personal methods of bullet journaling earlier this year. As you’ll see we all have methods that work for us. The beauty of bullet journaling is the adaptability of the format.

There’s also a Facebook group for bullet journaling. You can hop in and show off, ask questions, and get ideas for how other people use their journals here.

Bullet journal ideas and examples from Pinterest to get you started.