theonewhere-shewrites-blog

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Emily Wilson: On Gender and Being the First Woman to Translate Homer’s Odyssey into English

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I've been really interested in reference books on reading lately. So, I went a little happy at the #StAgnesBookSale. I saw this one, with its simple perfect cover. • Have you read any critical reading reference books that impacted you? • • • #reading #englishreference #reference #book #bookstagram #booksofinstagram #booksale #library #librarysale #criticalreading #books #booknerdigans #booknerd #weekend #photosofbooks #sundayfunday #petermendelsund #whatweseewhenweread (at New York, New York)

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I fangirled so much at the @canterburyclassics booth at Book Con that my friend bought it for me when I had no money left. That is what you call a true friend! 😂🤣 I picked it up because it was the last one I saw, and I was utterly determined to not put it down! • For obvious reasons, everyone thinks of the hit BBC show, Sherlock, these days. But I've loved Sherlock for a long time. I even have my godmother's Sherlock collection book from the 60's tucked away in a special place in my library. Sherlock certain holds one of the reasons for my deep Anglophile obsession as a child that led me to England last year. • What's your story that led you to Sherlock? • #canturburyclassics #classics #sherlock #sherlockholmes #bibliophile #bookcon2018 #bookstagram #booklr #bookish #book

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Look at that beautiful and realistic illustration for Promises and Primroses! 👀♥️ I have been determined to expand my genre reading, so at #BEA I picked up quite a few. This Josi S Kilpack novel is a romance from the Mayfield Family Series. • I have always been intrigued by governess love stories thanks to Jane Eyre - so this is going to be interesting! What romance novels would you suggest? • • • #ShadowMountain #PromisesandPrimroses #josikkilpack #BEA2018 #bookcon #bookcon2018 #booklr #bookstagram #bookish #bibliophile #romance #romancebooks #ARC

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I think the best writing advice I can give,, is to read books you want to write. You want to write fantasy? Read fantasy. You want to write first person, read first person. Want to write about disabled characters, read books with disabled characters. Learn how other people write them, improve on it, make it your own. It’s a form of research and research always helps.

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My review is out! #OneDayInDecember is a behemoth, and yet I flew right through it! I will admit when I picked it up at #BEA it was because it was set in London. I'm shameless in my love for that city! ♥️ • I certainly can say that I thought this book is perfect for those looking for an easy fluffy read that you can tackle pretty quickly. I was disappointed in all the ways it could have gone, the many themes that could have led to a much more meaningful story, but in all I had to take it as is. • ⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 • Did you ever find a book that you wished you got more from? • • • #bea #bea2018 #bookcon #bookcon2018 #josiesilver #arc #bookreview #booklr #bookstagram #bookish #bibliophile #book

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My #BookCon read is an #ARC of One Day in December. I'm 100 pages in after starting it last night, and I'm loving it so far. It's just right for a #breakupread thus far. • What's your best breakup read? • • • #BEA #Bookcon #bookcon2018 #onedayindecember #josiesilver #bookish #bookstagram #booklr (at Javits Center)

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Finally got the #ARC copy at #BEA ... 😍 • #dearevanhansen #musical #broadway #evanhansen #bookish #booklr #bookstagram

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Look who I get to see at #BookExpo #FeelTheBern #berniesanders (at Javits Center)

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"This is how I found myself attending In The Heights in the middle of Long Island, NY being produced by a white majority with an entirely white audience in an experience that left my insides twisted." ✍🏽: Rebecca YS Perez • It's been a long time since I've promoted my blog here, and I thought I should share the post I made back in April about my experience going to see In The Heights recently. It was a heartbreaking experience as a proud POC, and I think it raises a lot of questions of who has the control in producing the diverse arts that are now being shared. Have you had any experiences with diverse are in a mostly white place? • Check out my post on my blog. My website is in my description box. • • • #diversity #intheheights #linmanuelmiranda #broadway #weneeddiversity #brownfaceinawhiteplace #poc #musical

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"Once, feeling Lolita was progressing too slowly and perhaps worried that it would never find a publisher anyway, [Nabokov] carried the first draft out to the garden incinerator, only to be intercepted by his wife before it was too late." ✍🏽: Sarah Stodola • There is so much inspiration and motivation here in this one book. Do you have any author stories that give you motivation? • • • #process #sarahstodola #writinglives #writerlife #greatauthors #nabokov #book #bookstagram #bookish #booknerd #writingmotivation #booklr

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#SaveUptown (at Washington Heights, Manhattan)

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Honored to have been the opening poet at the Mother's Day event with some absolutely incredible people. Thanks to Assemblyman Michael A. Blake for hosting such a great event. (at Woodstock branch-New York Public Library)

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How Long Should you Book Be?

I just wanted to share an article I came across which had a bunch of great information on how long your novel should approximately be here. Of course, this is not something that I take credit for! I just wanted to share with you something I found! It’s got really great pictures and stuff, like this one:

which are great in terms of understanding quickly how much is too much or how little is too little. So check it out if you get the chance!

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At first, I almost scrolled past because I was mobile reading and I thought tl;dr ... but then after reading this, I realized this is important. Read this

When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.

I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.

You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.

Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”

I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”

I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”

After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.

The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.

Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.

And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.

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This is your casual reminder that yes, your wip is worth writing. You’re not wasting time. Creativity is never a waste.

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