STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel

A lot of post-apocalyptic novels are about stripping people down to their essence. Who are we without cars, phones, grocery stores... laws, prisons, consequences. What does it mean to be human, how do you stay human, when you're living like an animal--fighting for survival, one step ahead of hunger.

Most post-apocalyptics will tell you that we're still social, that friendships and trust matter more than ever, that some of us are still noble, that strength shines through in a way it couldn't without a backdrop of sheer desperation. But they'll also have you looking over your shoulder, dogged by the inescapable notion that we're one natural disaster away from being cavemen, that our sense of self is built on an artificial foundation.

STATION ELEVEN is the antidote to that attitude. It has the frame of a conventional post-apocalyptic novel--a motley assortment of companions brought together by necessity, living a hard-scrabble existence, who encounter a charismatic arch-nemesis--but it's about the drive to make art, to move beyond subsistence, to cultivate beauty.

The main characters of the post-apocalypse in STATION ELEVEN belong to the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors who travel in a circuit around the great lakes, performing for the small settlements they pass through. Their motto is "survival is insufficient" and they make their livelihood proving that to themselves and to their audiences.

As a sidenote: I tend to be wary of art about how important art is. The element of self-congratulation can get really tiresome, like watching an awards show. Congratulations to us! And to us again! STATION ELEVEN never crossed that line for me. Maybe because the characters are more pragmatic than pretentious? They scavenge in abandoned homes for costumes, perform whatever the audience wants to see. Something about STATION ELEVEN reminded me of ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard; the players create a sense of heightened reality or surreality, not a circle jerk.

The book alternates between chapters set in the pre-apocalypse, before the disease that wipes out most of humanity, and chapters set in the post-apocalypse. The alternating timelines evoke nostalgia instead of horror, wonder instead of pain. A sense of loss permeates the book, but also of hope. It's melancholy and beautiful.

Human beings make art. It's a defining characteristic of our species. Strip us down to nothing and art will still come back.

Anyway. I enjoyed the book. It's well-written, atmospheric, enjoyable. Worth a read.

Get It Together

Hello, fellow lovers of stationery. I guess we're all here to share tips and tools and maybe ogle some pretty stationery? That seems like a worthwhile endeavor. 

I'm going to walk you all through my writing process, but in the spirit of being useful/putting a dent in your wallet, will mostly focus on the various THINGS I use to get stuff done. 

Plotting

I do all my brainstorming, plotting, and general problem-solving longhand. I cracked open a few of the notebooks I've filled up with my scribbles and took a picture--that double-page half-sphere is pretty much the entire plot of THE SECRET HEART.

As you can see, I tend to break up the page with tables, drawings, nested lists, etc. So I tend to use graph paper or dot grid paper. Dot grid paper has... er, a grid of dots... instead of solid lines on it; the idea is to make the paper as blank as possible (so that your writing stands out, no interference) while also making it easy to write in straight lines, maintain an even border, etc.

I'm also a big fan of whitelines paper. This can be hard to obtain; I really like the Whitelines brand and Leuchtterm seems to be selling a whitelines notebook now. Whitelines puts white lines on a slightly greyed out background; same principle of a well-ruled sheet where the lines themselves fade into the background. 

Here are some pictures, in case my explanations aren't clear. 

If you're the kind of person who likes to DIY your journals, my favorite place for finding organizer inserts is My Life All In One Place.

If you're interested in the kind of notebooks that I buy, I'll get there. But my choice of notebooks is determined by my choice of pen. I mostly write with fountain pens and I especially like to write with pens that make a nice fat line so I can see the paper slowly fill up with pretty colors as I write. 

If this sounds silly to you... well, it probably is. But I have a theory that it keeps the wandering magpie part of my brain focused on the task at hand and actually improves my productivity. 

I'm a fan of anything that makes writing more of a pleasure, though. Fountain pens are beautiful and functional; I don't wear much jewelry, so fountain pens sort of fill that role for me. And I find they write better than disposable pens. Plus, they give me access to hundreds of amazing colors of ink. 

Here is a sampling of my pens and inks: 

Rather than turn this into a fountain pen tutorial, I'll just say that I usually recommend the LAMY Safari as a good starter pen (my green LAMY Safari is pictured above; I use it all the time) and, for people who want a step up or a piston filler (I mostly write with piston fillers), I like Pelikan and TWSBI. 

So I write with fountain pens and, if I have the choice, I prefer fountain pens that are incompatible with flimsy paper. They'll soak through flimsy paper and make it wrinkle, or the paper will be so thin that anything you write on one side of the sheet shows clearly on the other, so you can't write front and back. 

So that's my first requirement in a notebook: it has to be fountain-pen friendly. Usually, that means heavier paper & often treated so that ink won't feather (bleed little spider-webby lines everywhere).

Like a lot of stationery fanatics, my gateway notebook was a Moleskine. I used Moleskines for years and years. But Moleskine paper isn't great for fountain pens and I started to find the paper quality uneven.

So I branched out. I used different types of bound journals for a while. I tried the Quo Vadis Habana and the Rhodia Webbie, and they're both solid choices. Good quality paper, sturdy craftsmanship, portable. 

But then I got a bee in my bonnet about notebooks that won't lie flat. I wanted to be able to open up the notebook, turn to the right page, stare off into space for a few minutes, and then look down and still see the notebook open to the right page. And I don't want to be contorting myself so that I can write around a really rigid spine, or leaving huge borders around the spine because the bend in the paper makes it impossible to write on.

I was really happy with the Exacompta sketchbook that I bought, but after I filled it up, I couldn't find another anywhere. More recently, I've gone through a few Leuchtterm1917 notebooks. The thin, flexible notebooks are pretty affordable, they lie flat, and they also have blank index pages at the front. 

But these days, I mostly use 8 X 11 pads of paper, wirebound along the top by preference. Rhodia makes nice ones. 

I get a lot of my paper products from Goulet Pens. Also all my inks and some pens. 

Because I've taken to using pads of paper I can't fit in my purse, I've also started carrying around a Nock Hightower. I got mine when it was still a Kickstarter reward but there's a proper online shop now. I usually keep a little pocket-sized Field Notes notebook in there, a ball point pen, and then whatever fountain pen I happen to be using that day. 

But if I just want to jot down a line or two, or I have a bit of dialogue floating around in my head, I use Evernote. I have a (digital, not literal) notebook for plot ideas and a few notes... mostly it's a jumble because at the end of the day, I'll sit down at my computer and add the fragments or make the tweaks. 

Though I also use Evernote to catalogue my recipes and I find it really, really useful for that. For all-around planning, I use the Bullet Journal method. It works really well for me. 

Looking over this section, I feel like I should mention that the real source of all this organizing is that I'm by nature pretty forgetful and can tend toward laziness. If I don't have a system, I will fall behind on... almost everything. Which is probably why "make it fun" is almost always a part of my system. I have to trick myself a bit.

Writing

Alas, the actual writing of my books involves way less fun, pretty, colorful jewelry-adjacent stuff.

I do all my writing in Scrivener...

My favorite thing about Scrivener is the Snapshots feature. I'm not going to explain it any better than the official tutorial--the company puts out really great tutorials--so if you're interested, check it out: 

Word Count/Accountability

I found about the "calendar trick" from Vanessa Schwab--here's a link to the blog post she wrote about it. The basic idea is that you settle on a good day's word count--whatever the number is, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000--and then put a sticker for the day in your monthly your calendar each time you reach that wordcount. If you get double the wordcount, you get two stickers, etc. etc.

Stickers can be motivating.

I still use it to get a visual overview of my productivity over time, but I'm more excited about an app that I discovered recently, via Alison Atlee.

The Word Tracker App (though for some reason if you search for it in the iTunes app store, it's called Writing Journal) is everything I've ever wanted in a word count app. It works by timing your writing sessions. You click the timer on when you start writing, click the timer off when you finish, and then input the number of words that you wrote in the interim (Scrivener's project target function tracks this.)

Over time, you get a running tally of how long your sessions are, how your word count per hour varies, at what hours you're most productive and least productive... it's just great. 

In Conclusion

Wait, wait, before I finish I need to sneak something in here: the first book in my No Better Angels series, THE SECRET HEART, is free for the next two weeks. So if you think you might ever, at any point in time in the future, feel like reading THE SECRET HEART, go pick it up at Amazon or the iBookstore or Kobo or Barnes & Noble.

So. In conclusion. Those are all my little tools and accessories. Now I get to go check out all the other posts in the blog hop. 

Get It Together Master Post

Today's Posts: 

Jennifer Lohmann

Alexis Anne

Kelly Maher

Sandy Williams

Ophelia London

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

So I'm actually going to start this review with the description that made me buy the book. I was listening to my favorite podcast, WRITING EXCUSES (It's really good! Brian Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells talk about craft once a week!) and every episode they recommend a book.

Brian Sanderson picked Uprooted & here's what he had to say: "It's a dark fairytale retelling of a fairytale I've never heard before. Naomi may have made it up. I intend to ask her. It's Polish. The whole thing is themed very Poland. You never feel like... It never says we're in Poland, but the names, the setting, and everything, you're like, "Wow. I'm in Eastern Europe." It's really cool. It feels very authentic. What they're eating, what they're talking about. It's the story... It starts off with a woman talking about the wizard... Or the Dragon. I'm sorry. Who is actually a wizard. Dragon is his title. She's like, "Our Dragon doesn't eat people, but he does require a sacrifice now and then." Something like that. This young woman ends up being the sacrifice that's sent to his tower. Apparently the reason for that sacrifice is so he'll have someone to clean for him. So I'm sure she started with a story about a dragon eating people as a sacrifice and she turned it into Dragon as a title of a wizard. Every wizard has a ranking, this wizard requires the young woman as a sacrifice but instead she goes there and starts doing all this stuff. He has mysterious reasons for wanting her, but it turns out she starts learning magic from him unexpectedly both to him and to her. She has a very different style of magic than his own. The story is fantastic. It is... It doesn't go where I was expecting it from that opening. I had a blast reading it."

(quote taken from the 10:24 transcript here: http://wetranscripts.livejournal.com/103477.html)

So I went out and bought UPROOTED immediately, of course. Everything about that description is catnip to me. Wizard needs a sacrifice? The sacrifice is forced into drudgery and servitude but turns out to be a wizard herself? It's exactly the kind of shifting power relationship I like.

Also, the wizard is a TYPE I very much like: grumpy and irascible and solitary and fussy, an intellectual with poor social skills and a very scary side.

UPROOTED reminded me very much of a Robin McKinley book, both in the tone (really rich descriptions, maintains a high degree of emotional intensity throughout) and in some of its themes; i.e., a dark fairytale about a young woman who gains confidence and self-knowledge while battling monsters and maybe falling in love.

I don't want to say too much else--the initial premise really only lasts through the first few chapters, things go on from there, and it's nice to be surprised--but I devoured the book in a single sitting.

Recommended!

Flirting with Disaster by Victoria Dahl

I started this book on a layover on my way home from RWA. My flight from New York to DC went really smoothly; then I had about three hours stuck in the world's smallest terminal & the first one I've seen in a LONG time without a coffee shop.

So I was in a pretty bad mood. I wanted to Be Somewhere Else. Within about five minutes of starting FLIRTING WITH DISASTER, I forgot about the layover.

My plane finally boarded. Boarded... and then sat around for about three hours with the pilot popping onto the intercom now and again to explain the delays. This was a flight that actually only took an hour. So three hours on the tarmac really seemed excessive.

I finished FLIRTING WITH DISASTER right after we finally took off. And I tell you this story because it's one thing to say, "I gobbled up this book" or "It was a fun and engaging read" and another to say, "I had a caffeine headache and a half-tank of rage and for about five hours, it all just melted away."

The heroine is Isabelle, a reclusive artist who's assumed a false identity for her own protection. She lives in an out of the way mountain town, she does all of her work remotely, she keeps her head down and tries to stay out of trouble. She's prickly but exuberant, speaks her mind, not shy at all.

A US Marshall, Tom, ends up working a case that involves Isabelle's next door neighbor. He canvases the area as a matter of due diligence, meeting all the scattered inhabitants and warning them about heightened danger.

He knows that Isabelle isn't connected to the case he's working... but she sets his spidey senses to tingling. Plus, he's attracted to her. He struggles against a conflict of interest. She struggles against her attraction to a man who will surely blow her cover, if he learns much about her.

All their struggles are in vain, disaster ensues, but there's a happy ending. There's some angst, here, a few impulsive decisions, but mostly FLIRTING WITH DISASTER is a book about adults who act like adults. Sometimes, for Isabelle, that means letting loose with her friends & getting drunk. Sometimes, for Tom, that means lying to himself about his motivations and putting his job in danger.

But these are people who know who they are and what they want and roll with the punches. Pretty likable characters, and also pretty steamy.

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

Another book that I listened to on audio. I love travel narratives, I love adventurous women, and I really, really love Beryl Markham's WEST WITH THE NIGHT (it's hard to say which is more astonishing: the true-life events or the prose) as well as Isak Dinesen/Karin Blixen's OUT OF AFRICA. (I had a one day layover in Nairobi a while back & I used it to visit the Blixen plantation.)

I thought it could be really great to read a contemporary take on the colonial (actually post-colonial) scenario. Probably not more pleasant--systemic oppression and economic exploitation are much less fun to read about than flying single-engine planes or falling in love with a sexy, aristocratic pilot--but worthwhile.

Alexandra Fuller was not the woman to deliver a clear-eyed contemporary take on... in this case, Rhodesia. She mostly writes about her family, and mostly about her mother. Fuller mocks her mother for aping Markham and Blixen, using their lives as templates for her own and imitating their exploits.

Fuller is right when she insists that this is a doomed and rather pathetic endeavor. That era is over and a modern Markham/Blixen would move on to new adventures, not get stuck in the past.

But as much as she mocks her mother, she has no other subject. She doesn't look past the confines of her own family for inspiration, she takes no wider view. The book is mean-spirited, not wry or arch or any other word that might screen her nastiness.

I ended up really disliking this book. Do not recommend.