Wednesday, April 09, 2008

on works (and people) in progress

Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky. -- Anais Nin

Perhaps a little repose may restore my regard for a pen. -- Jane Austen, in a letter

You know that phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees”?
Well, I can’t even see the trees. I get stuck on leaf stems.
Forest? What forest?

I know I’ve written a few times in this blog about my dreadful nearsightedness. And not what makes me wear contacts, but my tendency to stare at things--ideas, circumstances--from too narrow a distance. Once I squint and my eyes adjust, I see nothing else. And I don’t notice that anything’s wrong… I just run into things.

Well, it’s happened again.

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 04/09 at 02:01 PM
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Tuesday, April 01, 2008

love & purls

Knitting, he thought, was a comfort to the soul. It was regular. It was repetitious. And in the end, it amounted to something.—Jan Karon, At Home in Mitford


my current project: floor cushions! the brown panel will make the top, and the stripes will go on the sides, to make a wedding present for my younger sister and her fiancé

Two and a half years ago, when we pulled into the driveway of our rented vacation cabin, I didn’t pay much attention to the cabin next door--though I noticed it was “cute” and inviting. I can’t remember if I noticed that it was a yarn store, but I’m certain I didn’t know it would change my life.

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 04/01 at 10:31 PM
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Thursday, March 13, 2008

consider yourself warned: the top ten signs of the writing disease

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.—Logan Pearsall Smith

Letters! I believe he dreams in letters!—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

—“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.—“No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semi-colons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.—George Eliot, Middlemarch

I don’t know how you feel about writers, or even how many writers you know. We can be tricky people--we’re susceptible to all kinds of trouble, from mild social awkwardness to major addictions, genius complexes, and chronic poverty. (In which case, we will be coming to your door, asking for bread in exchange for sonnets.)

If this alarms you, you might want to be on the lookout for us. Most writers will try to shield you from the actual event: the commitment of words to paper. And so, I’ve thought about the writers I know, the writers I’ve heard of, and I’ve even analyzed my own--ahem!--harmless preoccupations. What follows are ten warning signs that your friend, roommate, or family member (hereafter called the “subject") may be slipping into writerly tendencies.

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 03/13 at 04:54 PM
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Monday, March 03, 2008

the habits of an addict

Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them. --Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

We are the Jasons; we have won the fleece. --Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

I’m beginning to wonder if I have a serious problem. The librarians certainly seem to think so.

I come to the library alone, half an hour before closing, and try to look innocent until I can duck out of sight, behind the kids’ stacks. And then, from my coat sleeve, I pull the handwritten list of the books I’m hoping to find. I move quickly, tucking books into my large red bag, muttering those three-letter call numbers over and over as I work down the aisles. (There’s a girl at the far end of one aisle who backs away when she sees me. Do I look too focused? I smile. But instead of looking reassured, she seems to change her mind about the value of visiting the library.)

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 03/03 at 06:27 PM
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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

swordfish

Apologies for the long delay on these posts! But due to technical difficulties and password troubles, I haven’t been able to blog in quite a while. Here’s what’s been happening in the meantime! -jl

Note: For as long as I can remember, “swordfish” has been my family’s catch-all password. I think it’s from an old Marx Brothers movie, though I can’t remember which… So if you ever ask a Langefeld What’s the password?, the answer will most likely come back: swordfish.

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 02/20 at 07:13 PM
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Thursday, February 14, 2008

not another red carnation

For every life situation there is a fitting quote from the hand of Shakespeare. --J.V. Hart

So speaking as I think, alas, I die. [She dies.] --the character Emilia, Othello, Shakespeare

My most memorable Valentine’s Day is not the one when I sent the three best valentines I could find to the three meanest boys in the third grade. (An attempt to turn them into nicer people, which failed miserably.) That’s a runner up, perhaps.

But my favorite Valentine’s Day weekend--for several reasons--was spent in England, during my sophomore year. It was the weekend that I learned to die: stabbed by an umbrella and croaking my last words in a southern accent. Is there a more out-of-the-box Valentine’s Day than that?

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 02/14 at 07:10 PM
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Friday, February 08, 2008

this end up (or: writing makes a fragile state of mind)

Let us have the luxury of silence. --Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
If you prick us, do we not bleed? --William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

THE SCENE: a bedroom/study, at a large black (altogether lovely) desk, computer humming, cursor blinking. A page of text, also blinking, at--

THE CAST: the writer. Who is four hours into her work day. Her jaw aches because she has a habit of clenching it as she writes. This explains her headaches. As does the glaring screen.

The screen also arches an eyebrow (is this common among computers?), because the writer has begun to doodle on scraps of paper. Curlicues turn into storm clouds, into a mountain range, into a chateau, into an abstract drawing of a person scowling.

At which point, she tosses the paper and begins to snip off the ends of her hair.

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 02/08 at 06:56 PM
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Monday, January 28, 2008

scratch that: thoughts on revision

We can all begin freely… --Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
He waxes desperate with imagination. --Shakespeare, Hamlet
How ill I have written. I begin to hate myself. --Jane Austen, in a letter

So here I am peering at the week and at revision with a quaking heart. I’ve been asked a lot recently about how the writing is going, and I say something bright about the first draft being done, and being in revision…

And then it dawns on me yet again how daunting I find this revision phase. It actually makes me nostalgic for drafting, if you can believe that. In retrospect, it looks so linear, so lighthearted, so free.

Ha.

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 01/28 at 06:50 PM
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Friday, January 11, 2008

still driving at night

I only want to write. And there’s no college for that except life. --Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. --E.L. Doctorow

So here I am, facing a new semester of my tailor-made “graduate school,” where the next class is: Rewriting Your First Novel.

It is exciting to sit with the bulky, edge-tattered manuscript on my lap, and say to my sister: Pick a spot, and I’ll start reading! It’s a familiar bulk, too. While I was editing manuscripts for Winepress and Zondervan, I always had at least one huge stack of pages, rubber-banded together, which makes this current stack a bit less daunting. (When I took my editing work to Barnes and Noble, I would sometimes take the manuscript out of my bag and walk it up and down the aisles, just to show it that it would, one day, be a real book, too.)

It’s a little trickier to believe that for my own manuscript. (Though maybe I should walk it through Borders one of these days? Couldn’t hurt...)

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 01/11 at 06:40 PM
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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

to every calendar (turn, turn, turn)

O, there has been much throwing about of brains.—Shakespeare

So I’m looking at the end of another year--another year! Hard to believe, since there were some days late in the year when I still wrote 2006 instead of 2007, and I’m sure to mess up 2008 for the first month or so.

December was a crammed-full month: three road trips to Nebraska to see my younger sister, and then a fourth trip to a wedding in Ohio. Lots of writing on the road this month! Sandwiched around rest stops and road food. And then the holidays came and went, and we had a very brown Christmas here, making me wish for a Grand Rapids snowfall.

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 01/02 at 04:38 PM
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Thursday, December 06, 2007

it’s a book!

Announcing the birth of a beautiful baby manuscript at 6:12 this evening.

The manuscript is one and a half inches tall, 138,514 words long, weighs 301 pages, and is--for the moment--sleeping peacefully.

(The printer is somewhat exhausted after the labor, and is thin on ink.) -jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 12/06 at 06:32 PM
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Tuesday, December 04, 2007

and thousands to go before I sleep

November was a busy month… So I didn’t do much blogging. Apologies!

It was a huge month for writing, though. As my draft meanders toward its end, it has been easier and easier to get to my writing desk. The action is speeding toward the climax, and my characters have been more vocal, demanding all my attention and even whispering to me at inopportune times. (I feel so furtive, scribbling notes during church. Yikes!) I hope to finish the draft by Saturday!

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 12/04 at 04:47 PM
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Thursday, November 22, 2007

thanks

I know that it’s been ages since I’ve posted anything--we’ve been swamped here, preparing for the holidays, reading and writing (I have a stack of twenty young adult books that I’m cruising through; and my own novel is at 81,369 words. Whew.), and hosting five authors for an Author Showcase (which I’ll be telling you all about, later).

But today, my family and I are just hanging out, making food and drinking coffee in our pajamas, slowly decorating the house--boxes of ornaments are behind me, but the stockings have been hung…

(I can smell the pumpkin pies we just stuck in the oven… yum.)

Outside it’s a perfect Novembery day, drawn in shades of grey and brown, red leaves scattered on our lawn.

Nearly anything I can think of to say about Thanksgiving will be cliché, as you’ve all heard it before. So I won’t say it. I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

(But I do feel very, very blessed.)

I hope you all have wonderful days, wherever you are, enjoying the food, the football, the family--doing whatever you do to celebrate. Happy Thanksgiving!! --jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 11/22 at 12:37 PM
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Wednesday, November 07, 2007

writing my arpeggios: how one discipline informs another

… This freed me up to write short stories instead. “Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano.”—Anne Lamott

There is no place for rubbish and slop in the highly modern world of today’s fiction. Every sentence must pay, must somehow thrill. Every one.—Frederick Barthelme

One of my best writing teachers was my piano instructor at Calvin. As I played a piece for her one morning, she stopped me midway through, pointing with her pen and saying, “You played this note as if you didn’t care about it.”

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 11/07 at 08:43 PM
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Monday, October 22, 2007

bookherding

When people ask me, “Do you collect books?” I always say, “No, books collect me.”—Nicholas Barker

[No one can be] an orthodox collector or a true bibliophile who had not at one time committed a great and foolish extravagance.—Daniel M. Tredwell

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.—Austin Phelps

Growing up, I didn’t think that there was any other way to live, than to be surrounded by books. Doesn’t everyone have books overflowing from shelves in every room of the house? Didn’t everyone grow up running their fingers along the countless spines of books in the basement? Books on psychology and math and history, novels and poems and essays?

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 10/22 at 08:04 PM
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