Category Archives: Recommended Reading

This writing thing can really knock you on your butt sometimes. Twice this year I got caught up in the maelstrom of negative thoughts, putting so much pressure on myself that I pushed myself to the brink of an abyss of anxiety.

Why does this happen? I suspect it’s different for every writer, but for me it’s because I get caught up in the myth that it’s somehow easy for other people, and if I just push through and push through, somehow it will become easy for me too. But the thing is that making art is hard, even if it doesn’t look it from the outside. But even that thought didn’t help as I was driving toward the abyss last month, because I’d just tell myself that it was hard but that I should somehow be able to just get over it all and do it anyway.

And then a newsletter arrived in my mailbox, from my friend Steph Lagana, a lighthouse in the world, and it told me exactly what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it:

“And this is really important, DON’T DO IT BEFORE IT FEELS RIGHT. It doesn’t need to feel easy. In fact it could be really simple and feel SUPER @#$%&*$ SCARY. See above. It also doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to feel RIGHT.”

Read the full post here – maybe you need Steph’s wisdom too

And I suddenly understood why everything felt wrong with the writing project I had been working on. Even though I loved the story, the characters, the premise, I was trying to do it at the wrong time. I had been trying to write with an empty pen.

Earlier this year, I reread an old favorite with my son, The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg. One of the characters, Noah, learns calligraphy, and one of the most important lessons he learns is this:

“Filling the pen is not what you do before you begin. It is the beginning.”

(My Sugar Quill people will appreciate the fact that this bit of wisdom appears on page 87.)

My head knew this; I even had several conversations about it with other authors back in October. Yet still I pushed myself, trying to force this book into existence. It wasn’t until I was at my wit’s end that I finally understood this with my heart and decided to take time off from writing altogether.

When I made that decision, it was like a weight had been lifted from my lungs. And I realized the utter ridiculousness of the fear that had been driving my push forward: I was afraid that if I really took a break from writing, somehow I would never be able to start again. This is ludicrous. I have finished six novel manuscripts and nine nonfiction manuscripts; I’ve done it before and I can do it again. And yet the fear persists, every single time. The irony is that there was no way I could find my way back to writing until I let go of it for awhile.

So now I am focusing on the things that inspire me, so that, when the time is right, I can go back to that work in progress with joy and vigor. Here are some of the things that have been filling my pen lately:

Disenchanted: The Trials of Cinderella by Megan Morrison

Whimsy with a conscience. I truly love this book.

The Hamilton Mixtape

The phrase “sheer brilliance” just about sums it up.

The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

Smart fantasy at its finest.

Winter Dreams for Christmas by R. Carlos Nakai and William Eaton

My very favorite Christmas album, with haunting, beautiful arrangements of classic songs for cedar flute and guitar.

Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy – audiobook narrated by Eileen Stevens

A funny, heartwarming book, with a terrific narrator.

Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum – audiobook narrated by Jorjeana Marie

An insanely compelling audio book that kept me in the driveway to find out what happened next!

Downton Abbey

Thanks to Tobie Easton getting me hooked on this, I have mainlined most of the series over the last three months.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling – audiobook narrated by Jim Dale

Because any list of what inspires me naturally has to include Harry Potter, and this is the one my son and I are currently listening to. On this listen, I am especially appreciating how well Narcissa Malfoy’s storyline is developed.

Fraggle Rock

Also a staple of my inspiration. You can’t be uncheered by Fraggle Rock. Here’s one of my very favorite clips. It always inspires me, so maybe it will inspire you too:

An Interview with Megan Morrison, Author of GROUNDED: THE ADVENTURES OF RAPUNZEL

May 6, 2015Authors You Should Know, Interviews, On Writing, Recommended ReadingMegan Morrison, Tymekathymacmillan

I recently had the enormous pleasure of interviewing my good friend, Megan Morrison, about her debut middle grade novel, GROUNDED: THE ADVENTURES OF RAPUNZEL, for the Sweet Sixteens’ debut author interview series, The Debut Club. This is an extended version of that interview, in which we learn more about Megan’s influences as a writer and friends from her past return to ask her tough questions.

Megan and I have been friends for almost fifteen years. We first met bonding over Hermione-centric Harry Potter fanfiction, and the intervening years have held lots of obsessing over fictional characters, matching tattoos (quills, if you must know), and writing – so, so much writing. I am so proud of Megan and what she has done with the Tyme series, and I can’t wait for everyone to read it!

More about Megan:

Megan Morrison spends her time having adventures with her husband and little boy, teaching drama and language arts to 7^th and 8^th graders, and writing fairy tales set in the world of Tyme, which she co-created with Ruth Virkus. When she’s not busy working on something or other, she enjoys obsessing over other people’s stories. She’s a huge, dress-up-in-costumes-and-scream-a-lot level fan of Harry Potter, Jane Austen, Star Wars, Firefly, and BioWare’s role-playing games. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she enjoys nature and coffee.

Find Megan on her website, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.

About GROUNDED: THE ADVENTURES OF RAPUNZEL

Published by Scholastic/Arthur Levine Books, April 2015

You know about the tower, the hair, and the witch. But in the world of Tyme, they’re only the beginning . . .

Rapunzel knows only her magical tower and her wonderful Witch, who guards her against evil princes far below. But when a peasant named Jack climbs into her life, Rapunzel learns that Witch is in terrible danger — and to keep her safe, she must leave her tower and journey with Jack on a quest far across Tyme. There she finds a world filled with even more peril than Witch promised . . . and more beauty, wonder, and adventure than she ever dreamed.

GROUNDED: THE ADVENTURES OF RAPUNZEL is the first book set in the land of Tyme — with many tales to come. It is available for purchase at Amazon, IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, and Powell’s.

And now, the interview!

Continue reading An Interview with Megan Morrison, Author of GROUNDED: THE ADVENTURES OF RAPUNZEL →

Betty May: Exploring the Struggles of Women Behind Bars

April 20, 2015Authors You Should Know, Recommended ReadingBetty May, criminal justice system, Faces, Onstage Productionskathymacmillan

When I was a child, I had the incredible good fortune to meet a woman who would shape the person I became, whose energy and belief in others helped me evolve from a shy little girl who cried in the bathroom to a singing and dancing young woman who went after her dreams. That was Betty May, director of Onstage Productions, the theater group I was involved with for over ten years.

To anyone who knew her, it was no surprise that Betty continued to use her theatrical gifts to reach out to others after our theater closed. She’s been a high school teacher, a circus coach, and a clown. She went to Central America and founded a children’s theater company in a Guatemalan squatters’ settlement. And then, in 2008, she responded to an invitation to work with female prisoners serving life sentences to create a play about their experiences.

Now, she has written a book about these women’s experiences: Faces: Imprisoned Women and Their Struggle with the Criminal Justice System (CreateSpace, 2014). The book also follows Betty’s own journey through the criminal justice system as she directed their original play warning young people about the consequences of bad choices. That work led to the Kennedy Center tapping Betty to write and direct a production featuring plays by prison inmates performed by professional actors.

Faces is an inspiring, eye-opening, and at times difficult and upsetting, read. Betty May invites us to examine our criminal justice system and the ways it often penalizes those it was designed to protect. She takes the reader along with her as she enters the prison gates and meets the real people behind the headlines.

Read the first chapter of Faces: Imprisoned Women and Their Struggle with the Criminal Justice System here.

Betty is a dynamic, passionate speaker and is available for speaking engagements at schools, libraries, and other community groups. Find out more at http://bettymayauthor.com/

New Favorite, Old Favorite: Just Like the Movies and The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman

August 21, 2014On Reading, Recommended Readingkathymacmillan

Not long ago I had the pleasure of reading Kelly Fiore’s Just Like the Movies, the story of two unlikely friends who set out to recreate scenes from their favorite romantic films in their own lives. Marijke and Lily are two girls with a plan…now if only the boys would fall into line.

(I should mention that I was reading this book while directing Deaf Camp, and that it kept me up for hours reading even after I had been corralling middle schoolers in the woods all day. That should tell you something about how engrossing it is!)

The heroines of this novel combine heartfelt yearning with a canny ability to analyze the tropes of the movies they adore so much – and that reminded me of an old favorite of mine, The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman by Louise Plummer. Though published way back in the dark ages of 1995, Plummer’s novel features a canny, smart heroine who would have been comfortable plotting alongside Marijke and Lily. (Though I guess she’d be quite a bit older now – so I will just imagine her as their English teacher, watching their antics from behind Tina Fey glasses.) Kate’s thing was romance novels, not romantic films, but her take on them was just as fresh and funny as Marijke holding an iPod dock blaring “In Your Eyes” in her boyfriend’s backyard. Despite the fact that Kate warns readers in the second sentence of the book that it’s “one of those romance novels. You know, that disgusting kind with kisses that last three paragraphs and make you want to put your finger down your throat to induce projectile vomiting,” her attempt to tell her tale as a romance novel (complete with revision notes) is involving and funny and something that is still in my mind almost twenty years later.

So do yourself a favor and get a hold of both books to meet Kate, Marijke, and Lily, three girls who discover that grand gestures don’t change a thing in real life, and that real love isn’t like a book or movie – it’s better.

Everyday Evil

March 18, 2014On Life, On Writing, Recommended Readingkathymacmillan

I recently finished The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (Random House, 2007).

This book was extremely hard to read.

So hard, in fact, that I actually used up all twenty renewals on the library copy I had, and had to return it and get a new copy. (That means it took me over a year to read the whole thing.) I would read a chapter or two, and then need to put it down. The descriptions of real-life evil acts conducted by ordinary people were just too intense to bear for long. Sometimes it was weeks before I could pick the book up again.

Zimbardo is best known as the head of the Stanford Prison Experiment, a seminal experiment in social psychology in which middle-class 1970s college students played the roles of prisoners and guards while researchers explored the powerful effects of situation in shaping behavior. The experiment was shut down prematurely when the situation drew out dehumanizing tendencies not only in guards, but in the researchers themselves, who played administrators in the false prison. Rattled by the personal and professional effects of the experiment, Zimbardo has made it his life’s work to pursue an understanding of how situational factors influence human behavior. In this book, he describes the experiment in sometimes painful detail and connects its lessons with other atrocities of aggression and omission, from the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to the murder of Kitty Genovese.

We Americans, in particular, tend to think of ourselves as unique individuals, deciding our own fates, but research shows that we all have “situated identities” – that is, we behave in different ways in different situations, and those ways are shockingly easy to predict. In fact, Zimbardo argues that it’s easy to predict your behavior based on your ethnicity, social class, education, religion, and where you live – with no knowledge of your social class at all.

If our identities are largely socially constructed, then it make sense that good people often fall prey to situational logic, where our involvement in a group may encourage us redefine our behavior as something better than it is, lose our sense of personal responsibility, or dehumanize others because the group demands it. Anyone who has experienced middle school knows that this is so – what disturbs me most is that the evidence shows that we don’t necessarily grow out of it.

We can’t be hermits, so we have to maintain our critical facilities at all times. Zimbardo says this best: “We must regularly assess the worth of our social involvements. The challenge for each of us is how best to oscillate between two poles, immersing fully and distancing appropriately.”

As fiction writers, we need to be keenly aware of the pull of situational factors on our characters. It’s not enough to know that a character is spunky, or passive, or riddled with self-doubt, or charismatic. Even more important to his or her behavior is the setting, the social expectations, the groups of which the character is a member.

Though The Lucifer Effect was a difficult read, I am glad I made it through. The book maintains unflinching allegiance to the truth, to the underlying belief that shines through even the darkest descriptions that, while evil is frighteningly banal, so is heroism. Because in the end, Zimbardo illuminates the fact that “we are all heroes in waiting”.