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Reading:

- Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- The Children's Civil War by James Marten (gift shop at Chickamauga)
- The Boy of Chancellorsville and Other Civil War Stories (ed. James Marten)

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.” ― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928.

Piping good points above, Dill. We're in agreement, especially when you reference "retrospective outrage and recompense" (YES) and how many of those who want to ban Gone with the Wind own a BMW, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon... (YES). "Selective conscience" is right.

At work, we had a RAGING LIBERAL for a while. As in, one could hardly move without finding him in their path making speeches about things that did not personally touch his life at all, but about which he was outraged. He reeked of outraged as a means to be a hero, if you get what I mean. I'm sure he actually felt something about the causes he talked about, and I don't disagree that they should be discussed even if they don't personally affect you -- but he was arrogant to the point of being irritating. It's like he enjoyed being the one spreading the enflamed message to people who didn't actually disagree with him -- so he could feel like a rebel. He would pick fights with reasonable people who completely agreed with him!

One day, he started screaming about Black Lives Matter {they do, I agree wholeheartedly}, and my friend asked him how many black neighbors he had, and how often he volunteered to help them rather than merely talking about it. This friend {a conservative independent} knew the Liberal lived in an all-white neighborhood, while he {the conservative independent} actually lived in an area surrounded by black lives, helped them move, helped them with their cars, shook hands with them as he left his house, etc. There was a piece of prime real estate beside him -- a new house opened up. Possibly the Liberal would like to walk the talk and buy up that property so he could live within the world he so passionately defended? Well, that shut the guy up! He didn't want to live in that neighborhood. There's a disconnect there, somewhere.

On feminism? I've experienced a bit of unpleasant behavior personally, but not much. I was touring a museum recently, and the tour guide kept speaking to me like I was twelve. I have taken a few college classes on the ACW, read several books on the topic, visited battlefields and sites and multiple museums, and this guy spoke to me as if it was adorable I'd be holding a notebook capturing notes while there -- as if I was a kid with a school project. Meanwhile, I'm making fairly intelligent observations throughout, I think? At one point, when we were touring one of the bedrooms of the old plantation house, he bent down from across the room, fingers wriggling like they do when one is calling a dog, and he cooed, "Come here! Come here, honey. I have something to show you." My mother was a few paces away, and said the look on my face was priceless. I don't generally hold it in when I have an opinion, but I was visiting my aunt and uncle at the time. They were native to the area and extremely Southern, and I didn't want to embarrass them, so I walked forward to see what the guy wanted. He grabbed me by the shoulders and placed me on a platform that was apparently connected to a mirror the lady of the house would have used, then spun me around, like I was a prop, cooing things like "see, so pretty, look at that" and other remarkably asinine things.

I don't actually find that sort of behavior worthy of a rebellion though. In the moment I do. I was furious. But once I'm away from it, it just falls into perspective. After all, he was just one guy, quite obviously old-fashioned to the point of near insanity, who had been tucked away in an old plantation house under the Florida sun for who knows how many years. I assume anyone would go batty.

The great percentage of men I've met are intelligent, kind, respectful of my point of view, and in no way offensive. My feminism tends toward the archives, ha ha. History, literature, and how much of the female portion of both is winnowed out. I feel so strongly on that topic I want to get on a soap box and make speeches. My personal experience with the topic is literature classes about women in literature -- filled with only female students and taught by a female professor; a class on the female perspective in American history taught by a woman and filled with only female students; the history book I cite above, separated into tidy boxes with one paragraph devoted to females; the appalling reviews I've seen of Gone with the Wind, which claim that she clearly stole the story from Tolstoy or that because it was written by a woman, it isn't relevant; a recent conversation with a man who declared that he'd never allow his son to be assigned Little Women in school --

Actually, I will make a speech on that last point: This was at work (bookstore). Apparently he'd just helped a customer find a book on his son's syllabus. He didn't know what Little Women was, and when my peer handed him the book, the title, the cover {women}, the very idea of it put him into a rage. He said he'd never allow the teacher to force his son to read it. It was an outrage! My friend agreed, and reported this to me proudly because he apparently forgot I'm a thinking human..

I said, "So you wouldn't let your son read it either?" He was outraged! As in, his voice was still offended at the very idea a teacher might assign such a book to a boy. He said he would never allow his son to be assigned Little Women in school, and he wouldn't allow his daughter to be assigned Hemingway, because "she wouldn't get it."

I was stunned! I don't doubt that men/boys would find Little Women boring: tastes are tastes. But I find it appalling that so many would squirm about finding it on a syllabus. It's universally acceptable for a girl/woman to be assigned Huck Finn (or Hemingway, by the way) for an English class, but a similar novel through a female perspective is somehow "less than." Why? Because the book is filled with women? Because it's about the female lot? What? Meanwhile, domesticity was the life of half the population of the western world (and certainly the eastern, I assume!) in Alcott's era. If the book is assigned to a student who kicks and screams through reading it, fair enough: kids kick and scream through Shakespeare, too. It's understandable they might find the book out of their comfort zone. But to refuse to allow your child to READ IT? Because your child is male? This goes directly back to what we're talking about above: censorship! Picking and choosing the parts of history we'll value and remember.

Well, when I called the guy SLIGHTLY OLD-FASHIONED in his thinking, he flagged the male nearest him for confirmation, and the message was exactly the same: Hemingway is for men, Alcott is for women, and schools should not mix the subject matter. THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THIS PHILOSOPHY. I CANNOT EVEN BELIEVE IT REQUIRES SPELLING OUT.

(I know you've also talked about not wanting to read Little Women, by the way. I'm not talking about you, Dill. I realize you're responding to a personal disinclination to read a book you'd find overly moralistic, preachy, and boring. Like Tess I assume. Personal taste. We read what we want in our free time.)

I'm talking about actually institutionalizing, with children, the idea that some books are for girls, and others are too much for girls, of the SAME AGE, and passing over a literary history as valid as the one the world remembers {the male one}. The overly moral, preachy stuff of Little Women? That's what females lived, at least here in America: their lives were saturated with the idea that goodness, perfection, catching a husband, and serving their man was their lot. BOYS SHOULD KNOW THAT ABOUT HISTORY. Otherwise we're institutionalizing censorship! They should know what women were expected to write -- the style that was considered their only public platform. They HAD to write like that. That's important to history, the way the female voice was boxed in and then panned for being in that box.

That's what I'm talking about when I say that I want the forgotten women remembered {above}. Instead they are shoved to the side, STILL, as they were in the nineteenth century. In our literature and our history books. You don't get to just NOT READ the books for school you find boring! If it's boring, maybe it's a good idea to experience that, to see what history experienced? Get into those women's history classes, gentlemen! It should be as mandatory as the male historical perspective. Even more enlightening? Would be if men took those classes voluntarily. My professor actually had to fight to get the course on the syllabus at all.

Rant aside? I've always found you receptive and intelligent on this topic, Dill xx -- never anything but. I've never once felt you consider me less than you because I'm female. I've enjoyed extremely rich discussions with you on history and literature, whether the topic is war or the "women's perspective." I appreciate that, and love that you so often choose books by or about women without seeming to even notice you're doing it. I never get the sense you're reading a book by a woman to check it off your list; you read where you're pulled because you're naturally curious. Respect. x

Me too.

Hi Sherry! Here's my thinking: "he paused" isn't a long enough moment to actually create a pause for the reader. You're suggesting above that the mention of a pause creates tension; I'm thinking the experience of a pause creates tension.

An alternative - "I have terrible news," he said, gazing down at her shoes for so long she wanted to shake the words out of him or kick him for hoarding them. "Jonathan is dead," he said finally, and then she wanted to shove the words back into him.

In my example, the reader experiences the pause, as well as the character's internal reaction to it. In yours, the reader is told that there is a pause, in words that last the same length as "he said."

Neither option is the right one universally. I think it depends on the story. If you're writing a bare-bones story, "he paused" might be perfect. The author might not want us inside the character's head during that pause. And? Not giving us the character's response to the pause is the sort of unsaid that might amplify the silence.

But telling us how the listener FEELS during that pause might be exactly right for the story. For example, the tension in the scene might already be stretched taut, with the character at her limit, when that pause happens. And that pause is just long enough to drive her over the edge, and us with her, especially if we experience it alongside her. Also, of we experience the pause, we experience the tension of waiting for what comes next. We don't merely by being told there's a pause.

Honestly, I think a reader moves from one paragraph to the next because the story is good. The tension slowly rises, the stakes are real, the characters are honestly depicted. We know it's heading somewhere and we want to know where.

Beyond that though, at the micro-level? I'm not quite sure how to answer this, so possibly I am missing experience vital to the question. I would say you touch on it above, with your suggestion of "pause" rather than "said." Word choice is a vital component of voice, tone, tempo! Does it make a reader read on? No idea? But I can't imagine the last moment of The Great Gatsby written any other way, and I remember that novel for its last moment. So possibly the words are the most important part of a novel. The style, the strategy of it all. Does a wordy novel push you to read on?

I've noticed I can cut paragraphs of exposition and achieve a MUCH stronger effect by saying in a line or two what it took me pages to say. A concise delivery can create a sense of suddenness. Then there are times when the long, sprawling effect is exactly what the scene needs. A bit of exposition placed just right can offer a sense of time passing and a drawn-in breath -- the "pause" of above. Maybe I want the reader to sit back and relax before I rip the rug out. Choose the wrong word by accident and you lose control of the scene; choose the wrong one purposefully and you could strike just the right chord of dissonance, adding an undercurrent of irony to an otherwise straightforward scene. And then there's the unsaid: if you don't say something explicitly, it can scream implicitly.

I have no idea if that answers your question!

Thank you for sharing the link to the people who did your cover! Those prices look great. I agree with others that your cover looks really professional.

Are you self-publishing? I was just saying to someone the other day that I feel if one is going to go the self-pub route, they should invest in a really good cover. That's unfortunately what will attract buyers, I think. Bad cover, they assume the book's bad and move on without investigating. Yours looks really great! The website is also professional. Best of luck with the launch!

I don't know about the rest of the books on this list, but the one about Gone with the Wind is completely untrue.

Margaret Mitchell never submitted Gone with the Wind officially. She certainly never submitted it 38 times, and she was never rejected for it. She spontaneously presented it to an editor who had spent a couple days with her BEGGING her for a look at a novel she claimed {and had been claiming for years} she wasn't writing. If he hadn't been so persistent, and a friend hadn't made the mistake of daring her, we probably wouldn't have Gone with the Wind.

She had written most of it several years earlier {1926-1929} because she'd injured her ankle and had nothing to do while housebound. Accustomed to a fast-paced life as a reporter in Atlanta, she was suddenly reduced to sitting around all day staring at the walls. She tried reading, but eventually that bored her, and since she enjoyed writing, she decided to take on a novel. Before she finished the project, life overwhelmed her. She'd long since given it up as "lousy" {though she privately worked on it sporadically, too shy with it to truly believe it would ever be ready for publication} when Harold Latham of MacMillan Publishing Company came through Atlanta in the 1930s. He was on the hunt for a new Southern writer, & having received a tip from a mutual acquaintance that she was writing something and could write well, he set his sights on Mitchell. She was spending the day with him showing him around Atlanta as a favor for a writing friend. She told him repeatedly that day she had no novel, adamantly changing the topic whenever he brought it up. She met him again the following day at a luncheon, and again rejected his repeated questions about her novel. By now he'd spoken enough to her, and heard enough about her, to be truly intrigued.

That night, a writing acquaintance {who had often benefited from Mitchell's research and suggestions when it came to her own novel} commented that it was remarkable Mr. Latham had thought Margaret could write a whole book, for Mitchell didn't take life seriously enough to accomplish such a feat. Mitchell was driving at the time, having spent the last couple days ferrying Mr. Latham as well as several writing friends, who hoped to sell their work to him, all over Atlanta. She had to stop the car when she began laughing. Furious by the taunt {for she despised not be taken seriously}, she stormed home and scoured her apartment, collecting the frayed manila envelopes containing long-forgotten chapters from Gone with the Wind, which she had stuffed everywhere in prior years as she randomly wrote: in the bathroom, under the sofa, in the closet. Each envelope contained multiple chapter revisions. They were all out of order, and since she had written the scenes spontaneously over a period of years, she had no idea which chapters had been completed anymore, and which hadn't. She'd never written the opening of the book, and some chapters failed to tie together important details in the story. All of it was in her head, and it had been so long since she'd written it she could no longer remember where it was incomplete.

She presented this stack, wholly out of order, to an astonished Harold Latham as he was leaving his hotel for the train. She later recalled that she was "hatless, hair flying, dirt all over my face and arms and, worse luck, my hastily rolled up stocking coming down about my ankles" {Walker, 197}. The stack was as tall as she was. As she progressed through the lobby, she had to stop several times to retrieve random chapters that leapt from the pile. He was, she claimed, able to keep a straight face. She told him to just take it for goodness sake, before she changed her mind. He began to read from a random chapter on the train, and when she telegraphed just hours later begging to retract her impulsive submission, he begged her to let him refuse, claiming he was already hooked.

That is how Gone with the Wind was published. She submitted it once, on impulse, in the most unprofessional way imaginable, & it was snapped up immediately.

Sources:
Gone with the Wind Letters by Margaret Mitchell – posthumous (1976)
Letters From Margaret (ed. Julian Granberry) – 2001
Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell by Darden Asbury Pyron (1991)
Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone With the Wind by Marianne Walker (1993)
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey by Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr. (2011)

This whole list could be read as really bad foreplay:

Did you go to a signing? We are on the same wavelength! I JUST HAD that one out from the library, but my currently reading stack has accumulated into a tower again, so I chose The Last Tudor to go back & make room for other reads. If you read it soon, you'll have to tell me if you love it, so I can prioritize! I think you should break the spine.

I'm still on Alison Weir's Katherine of Aragon {EXCELLENT -- I wish she'd already written the rest of this series, but I'll have to wait until 2018 for the next book!}, & have just finished Norman Mclean's A River Runs Through It & Other Stories. I have an essay by Thoreau on tap next {"October, or Autumnal Tints"}. He's a favorite of mine. I will probably read it this afternoon, because I can smell autumn in the air for the first time today. <3

Because I just read a novel about Caroline Ingalls, I've begun Laura Ingalls Wilder's annotated autobiography Pioneer Girl, which I bought last year and never made time for. {The Ingalls family were American pioneers during and after the ACW. The novels were written for children; the autobiography was intended for adults but published posthumously. Laura was a little girl during the pioneer days. Caroline was her mother.}

In Gone with the Wind I'm just reaching the bazaar. I'm taking the reread slow so it lasts.

Did you like this one?

Oh, that's nice! Reduce it to a piece of meat. Just like a man!!

I'm not sure any organ in the human body reveals more courage and perseverance than the uterus.

No worries!! I was only joking! When you make a list like that you have to expect people to come up out of the woodwork to protest the omission of their name.

{Sorry to hear about your friend.}

Lovely story, Gacela. That made me grin.