I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who asked of me some writing advice … so methinks to myself that I should share my five little juicy nuggets with all my friends. Ergo this:

1. Never ever let any one edit your content and/or your style. This is very different from letting them edit your spelling and grammar. Letting some one alter your content or style is essentially turning what should ultimately be YOUR (singular) voice into YOUR (plural) voice. Let me make that a little more clear. It changes what ultimately is MY voice into OUR voice (me & my content/style editor’s). And who in the world would ever want that? Unless you’re working collaboratively. I mean, right?

What’s that one thing that Tim Gunn says all the time on Project Runway? No, No. Not “make it work.” The other, and equally as important, one.

EDIT.

And if I can interject, what Tim Gunn implies here is – self editing. What I love about Tim Gunn as a mentor is that he never ever mentions his edits – what he would do. This is very important for the growth and development of the designer.

Joshua McKinley of Project Runway #9 is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. In the beginning, Josh was NOTORIOUS for including way too many design elements, and over working his ideas; but he learned how to self edit, and managed to get himself into the top four contestants that went on to show their designs at the famed Bryant Park during New York’s Fashion Week.

Could you imagine what would’ve happened if he’d allowed some one else’s perspective to aid in his editing? Or worse, what would’ve happened if Tim Gunn had offered any of his own edits? Josh would never have grown as a designer, but worst yet, the designs wouldn’t have been a Josh McKinley design, but a Josh McKinley / Tim Gunn design (for example).

Also,

2. The Lord loves a working man.

3. Don’t trust whitey.

4. See a doctor and get rid of it.

5. Never write for free.

Eleanor Brown’s debut novel, The Weird Sisters, is a wonderful story with big, beautifully crafted female characters. The Andreas family is a family of readers, encouraged by their eccentric father who peppers his speech with Shakespearean quotes and has even named his three daughters after characters from Shakespeare’s plays.

Even though The Weird Sisters makes a thousand allusions to Shakespeare, it’s no A Thousand Acres, no modern-day retelling of one of the Bard’s plays. Instead, Brown has created her own charming story about star-crossed siblings who just so happen to know the greatest English verse much better than they know themselves.

The sisters are complex characters whose failures make them deeply human, and what makes The Weird Sisters so compellingly readable is the relationships between the characters.

Anyone who has ever enjoyed (or not) a sibling relationship, but especially those with sisters of their own, will recognize the ambivalence, petty jealousies, and ultimately the love that binds them each to the other. Who among us does not revert instantly to our comfortable childhood behaviors/roles the moment we are all together again? That is exactly what happens when Cordy, Bean and Rose find themselves under the roof of their parent’s home, once again.

The pretense is that they’ve all come back to help care for their Mom who has been diagnosed with cancer, but clearly these three adult children are in a kind of psychological convalescence themselves, shocked by their lives’ crash landings, awed by the depth of their parents’ love for each other and convinced they’ll never find such a marriage themselves. How will they relearn to speak to one another, these smart, wounded women who’ve been trained to communicate their “deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years”?

Brown uses the plural first-person narration, a rarely used perspective that works marvelously here. The three sisters together tell the whole story, an impossible “we” that traces each one’s private anxieties and indiscretions. Although initially hard to get used to, I found myself appreciating this voice because although each character is an individual, it is their collective memories and relationships with each other which informs who they become.

Eleanor Brown is such a clever writer, and she’s written such an endearing story about sisterly affection and the possibilities of redemption. But one does not need to have shared one’s life with sisters to appreciate the skill of Brown’s writing. Her work is solid, heartfelt, and funny. Take Polonius’s good advice and “read on this book.”

To find out more, or to read other reviewers’ take on the novel, join me over at the BlogHer Book Club where we’ll be discussing Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters for the next month. Come join the conversation!

*Disclosure: I was remunerated for this review. All opinions are my own.

Fourteen days until the 2012 Sundance Film Festival!

I AM SO STOKED!

I’ll be working this year as media coordinator at the Filmmaker Lodge. (Read: The chances of me running into – crossing my fingers for literal meaning here – Bob are significantly huge. HUGE!)

This year’s festival promises to be amazing! Just check out the films – (totally multiple exclamation point worthy).

My schedule this year will be extremely different from last year’s (remember last year I was a mere bus stop attendant, working a short 4 hours a day which gave me ample time and opportunity to view the many films). I hope that I’ll be able to catch a few films this year. I’m looking forward to (in no particular order):

The Imposter
About Face
38-39〫C
About the Pink Sky
Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
Chasing Ice
The Comedy
The D Word: Understanding Dyslexia
Madrid, 1987
Wrong
Payback
Putin’s Kiss
Detropia
Finding North

I’m also looking forward to a couple of panels – one with the awesome Margaret Atwood and the other with the equally as awesome Tiffany Shlain.

I will be in Park City, Utah for the entire festival. This year I will be writing during the festival about the entire volunteer experience – from checking in and getting my credentials, Kenneth Cole jacket and room assignment, to the eating, the drinking, the merrymaking, and of course, the films.

Happy new year, my friends!

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and that your new year is starting out well. I know it has been awhile since I’ve written any thing worth reading lately. What I’ve finally realized is that I really like taking a break during the holidays. And when I say “during the holidays” I really mean from about November to the new year – a sort of holiday hiatus, if you will.

I first realized I was doing this holiday hiatus thing last year (2010), and felt extremely guilty about it. This year (2011), when I found myself doing it again, with the help of my loving and supportive husband (who has nice, big muscles), I felt very different about it. He was all, “Kim, this is exactly what you need. Why put additional stress on an already stressful holiday season?” And he was right. So I was able to feel good about it and let it go.

And there was really nothing better than getting to spend the holidays with my family and friends 100 percent present and in the moment!

Because really. Who dictates how much and when to write? We do. Right? Yet we always feel obligated to put stuff out there – the fear that “OH MY LORD, I’LL LOSE READERS IF I DON’T PUT STUFF OUT THERE” seems always to haunt us.

But I’ve got a new theory for my writing.

And my theory is more about doing what’s right for ME (selfish, I know) and less about how many people read my blog. According to my theory, the more I treat myself better, the better person I will be… which will not only be reflected in my everyday actions, but eventually in my writing as well. {smile}

However, now that I’ve got that all off my chest, I must admit that I did do something fairly rude…

I left you hanging.

Instead of telling y’all that I’d be somewhat non-existent for the holiday season, I just kinda didn’t show up. And for that I apologize. No more not showing up from now on.

Pinky promise.

***

Some of you may be thinking that that’s a really long hiatus. November through the new year? Really?

You’re right. It is really long.

But here’s why.

I use the entire month of November for reflection.

Well. I use the entire first half of November for reflection, then I use the next week for Thanksgiving menu planning, then I use the last part of November for feasting & holiday readying. But that’s beside the point.

I do this because I know, I KNOW, that I won’t have the proper time to do this before the new year once the holidays begin. And doing this sort of thing during the first days of the new year is just, in my mind, way too late. I want to get a head start on this thing. If I’m gonna make it a good year, I need to have focus going into it. But that’s just me.

I use those first several weeks in November to diligently sit down and write out all of my accomplishments over the year, and I throw a huge party (read: I drink a bottle of champers) for all my accomplishments. True story. (We should never ever let our accomplishments go unrecognized – especially by our own selves. Go ahead. Throw yourself a party. You deserve it!)

And then I write out all of the goals that I may have had for myself during the year that I didn’t get to accomplish. And I ask myself a couple of questions.

1) What were the reasons I didn’t accomplish the goal?
2) Is it still a goal? Or have I moved on?

Once I figure out the answers to those questions, I include it in my next year’s resolutions – or I don’t.

Then I sit down and write out all the new goals that I’d like to focus on in the new year and I work on a mind map.

Last year mine looked like this:

and this year, it looks like this:

I blurred them out because life goals are somewhat personal to me. There are plenty that I don’t mind sharing… but I really try to be extremely honest with myself when I do this, and to be perfectly honest with y’all there are just some goals that I don’t wish to share, for a multitude of reasons. I don’t think I’m weird for it… I think it’s only human nature to want to protect what is so ultimately ME.

I know mind mapping might sound a little silly for some of you, but it worked really well for me as a way to creatively sort out my thoughts, and to put them in perspective in an organized way in order to better achieve my goals. And I really feel 2011 was a hugely successful year for me. Probably even the best year I’ve ever had.

There’s several ways to mind map. With pen and paper, like this. You can get all creative and draw pictures, or you can just use words. I also found a couple of great mind mapping apps for the iphone:

iThoughts     $7.99

and Mindjet     $FREE

I know that every one has their very own way of getting ready to make the new year the best for them. I just thought I’d share what works for me.

Thank you all so much for stopping by here to read my ramblings – I really appreciate you. And I wish you the very best for 2012!

About a year ago I was re-introduced to the idea that our brain’s two hemispheres work contrasting elements of our being – the left hemisphere, the more linear & methodical, all about details; the right hemisphere, more about imagery, energy and all about the big picture.

At the time I was reading Leonard Shlain’s Alphabet Versus the Goddess and Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight. And through much of my reading and research, I learned that, (hopefully not overly) simplistically, the left hemisphere thinks in language and the right in pictures. I also learned that since the dawning of the age of language, the left hemisphere of our brain is the more dominant.

Which brings me to my point.

I decided not to join the I Will Provide Every Opportunity For My Kid To Get Ahead crowd in jumping off the My Kid Can Read At An (Insanely) Early Age bridge, much less the über competitive parent crowd that can’t resist relegating their child to a mere party trick every time we get together for a neighborhood BBQ, “but look at what my little Timmy can do now!”

Not that any of the above is bad.

I just decided that possibly, I could actually help my daughter exponentially by leaving the ABC’s and 123′s the hell alone.

The thought process being that she’d learn them soon enough in school, and that the more she’s in the stage where her brain functions in a more balanced way (because she hasn’t learned to read or write), the more it will carry into her adulthood, in hopes that she will mature to be the next Leonardo da Vinci. {smile}

So imagine my surprise when, last night, she busted out with this:

Disclosure: I realize now that with this post, I have inadvertently joined the ranks of the “über competitive parent crowd that can’t resist relegating their child to a mere party trick every time we get together for a neighborhood BBQ, she logs onto her blog, “but look at what my little Timmy can do now!” Booyah.

Family secrets and lies are the subjects of Kim Edwards‘s new book, The Lake of Dreams which follows a young woman as she tracks the life of an ancestor expunged from her family’s history.

Lucy Jarrett comes home to an upstate New York village in the finger lakes region called the Lake of Dreams after years working overseas. A decade ago, she left for college following her father’s death in a mysterious boating accident, blaming herself for refusing to go fishing with him that night. And she’s been traveling ever since, “from college to grad school, from good jobs to better ones and through a whole series of romances, leaving all that grief behind.”

When Lucy arrives, every thing is different. She finds herself lost in the progress of every one else’s lives.

Then Lucy discovers a stack of old papers in a room that’s been closed off since her father died. They include fliers from the early 20th-century feminist movement and a note from 1925, signed only with the initial R, that refers to a 14-year-old girl, Iris, being sent away from home.

Ultimately, Lucy immerses herself in ferreting out the awesome story of her lost ancestor. But unfortunately for the novel, Edwards crams all of the plot into a scant two-week time span filled with impossibly convenient and obvious discoveries, making it feel much too contrived. Lucy’s revelations are overly long anticipated and make it an absolute grind to read through ten pages of sentimental muck to arrive at the very conclusion that Edwards pointed to in the previous chapter.

However.

What I really enjoyed most about the book is the the story of Lucy’s lost ancestor, Rose and the moment she clicked and discovered her feminism and became involved in the feminist movement. Now that is a good story!

Confession: I’ve not read Edwards’s first novel, and best-seller, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter so I can’t tell you how The Lake of Dreams compares, but I can tell you that it is a look inside how circumstances can shape a life; and how altering one’s perspective (or truth) can change that life all over again. And that despite it’s ambition, the novel is beautifully written with lots of vivid imagery.

To find out more, or to read other reviewers’ take on the novel, join me over at the BlogHer Book Club where we’ll be discussing Kim Edwards’ The Lake of Dreams for the next month. Come join the conversation!

*Disclosure: I was remunerated for this review. All opinions are my own.

Rachel Simmons (@RachelJSimmons) on how culture affects girls:

Jennifer Seibel Newsom (@JenSeibelNewsom) on her film Miss Representation (@RepresentPledge)

Tiffany Shlain (@TiffanyShlain) on what it means to be Connected in the 21st Century:

Every year I fret over what to give my daughter’s teachers for the holidays. Last year, I started making their gifts and it was such a success that I’m doing it again this year.

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a local art stroll and sold these coasters. In fact, I sold several of them… which leads me to believe that Juniper’s teachers will like them too.

You will need:

Bathroom tile
Decorative paper (I used scrapbook paper and a map; here’s a link to my favorite paper store), cut into squares
Paper cutter
Mod Podge
Glue brush
Felt, cut into squares
Tacky Glue
Crystal Clear Acrylic Spray (Gloss)

First, wipe all the tiles with a damp cloth to remove any dust/debris. Then cut paper into squares (for my standard sized tiles, I cut into 3 3/4 squares).

Lightly brush Mod Podge over tiles and place paper square on top; work out any air bubbles. Then lightly brush more Mod Podge over the papered tile to ensure edges are secure down.

Let the glue dry. After they’re dry, flip them over and glue the felt squares to the bottoms.

Finally, take the tiles outdoors and spray a coat of clear acrylic over the tiles. This will put a nice glossy finish on them and make them waterproof.

Voilà!

I found this on my desk this morning:

{swoon}

It’s just one of the many reasons my husband still rocks my world after all these years!