Favorite Christmas Books

Honestly, I have a lot of favorites, so here are just a few.

Classic story, love Jan Brett.

So this one's more wintery than Christmasy, but I still love it. I wrote more about this book and my love affair with snow in this post.

And even though I have certain feelings about the whole Santa Claus thing, I still like this book.

You?

Another dream/possible book

Recently, I had a dream that was so vivid that I woke up and remembered the entire storyline, which is a rarity. Here's the premise:

An older woman with a grown daughter adopted a baby (a cute little Asian baby girl, if you want to get specific) and later married a questionable man. When the woman died, the adopted 3-year-old daughter stayed with this man, but the woman's grown daughter thought the child should stay with her.

So she hired a killer to off her step-father.

Are you kidding me? (And no, I'm not kidding about using the word "off.") What made-for-TV movie had I been watching in order to have a dream like this? My dreams are almost NEVER this exciting.

So what do you say? It should totally be a book, right? This is said in jest, of course, because thrillers are not really my cup of tea. But someone should write it. Or at least write a screenplay and send it to Lifetime . . .

Writing gets harder

This quote from author Keith Ridgway (via Nathan Bransford) has been on my mind, lately:

I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

When I was finally finished with the first real draft of LITTLE SUN, this is pretty much how I felt.  The part about how a book is something "whittled down from hope," the part about how a book just happens, the part about feeling like you're emerging from a car crash—basically everything. He nailed it.

And knowing that Ridgway said this after he had written six books doesn't make me feel that much better, frankly, since I've only written 1.3 books. (A draft of a children's book + semi-begun plans for a middle grade novel = .3, by the way, in case you were unfamiliar with literary math.) So Book 1 was hard, but learning that it only gets harder? Awesome.

But for some reason, it's worth it. For some reason, I feel compelled, even driven, to continue to write books. I don't know all of the reasons why. I know some of them, but not all. Much of the whole thing still remains a mystery. And I guess that's one of the reasons that continue to drive me—a need to solve this mystery. So that I will do: continue.

Gullibility

The other night, I totally fell for it. In a Netflix series I had been watching, one of the characters died, and I totally took it seriously. I believed it and was seriously so sad. She was a vital part of the story, and I was totally baffled as to how the writers could possibly do such a thing. And the fact that I have used "totally" in nearly every sentence so far shows you how truly distressed I was. I avoided watching the show for the next few days because I was bothered. When I finally sat down and watched the next episode, it turned out that this character had just been in a deep coma or something and quit breathing, but she came back to life. Totally ridic—even for being set in a far simpler time, medically—but I'll admit I felt so much better.

And simultaneously so sheepish that I had fallen for it and let myself get so caught up in a silly show. It reminded me of how I was so sucked in to the beginning of the book Life of Pi that I actually thought it was a true story. (Read about it on the other blog here, but only if you want to mock me for being scared of a baby racoon—'cause that's what'll happen after you read this post.)

So while I was balancing feelings of both relief and chagrin, I started to chide myself for being so gullible. But then I thought, no. Maybe the getting sucked in and the believing is just the mark of good writing. I'd be thrilled if someone thought my book was a true story, at least sort of. Thrilled and then only slightly concerned. But maybe writers would consider it a compliment, so I'm not going to be embarrassed anymore. Just appreciative of the captivating and sometimes spellbinding fun and adventure literature (and Netflix) can bring to the world.