Jane Yolen's On-line Journal: An Appreciation

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Recently I noticed that I hadn't seen anything from Jane Yolen on Facebook in quite some time. Long enough to realize that that wasn't a good thing. So I wasn't surprised when her family announced that she died yesterday. The news made People Magazine, because she was, is, and will continue to be Jane Yolen, but the Locus obituary is much better.

Once upon a time, Jane Yolen kept an on-line journal. It hasn't been available for a while now, so you'll have to take my word for it that it once exited. At the end of July, 2004 I first wrote here about it. 

"I've noticed that Jane Yolen has started an on-line journal. It doesn't seem to be a traditional blog, but a traditional journal maintained on-line. I admire what she's doing, but I don't know if I'll be reading it much because...she does too much work. Her work habits are far better than mine, and I don't want to keep reminding myself.

On the other hand, maybe this is just what I need."

In just a couple of days, I was hooked.

"I believe I owe this surge of creativity and ambition to my personal writing coach, Jane Yolen. Though we have never met--though she, actually, has never even heard of me--her online journal with its descriptions of her superhuman work habits shames my "inner Jane" and makes her work harder.

Hey, Jane, there hasn't been an update in a couple of days. I'm going to crash and burn here if I don't hear from you soon."

 By September, I was obsessed. 

"My many, many, many fans know that I am somewhat obsessed with Jane Yolen's On-line Journal, mainly because Jane is a maniac for work and I, well, I'm not. I hoped that reading Jane's journal of her work life would inspire me to make a greater effort. If anything, it's made things worse. The time I should be spending working, I'm spending reading about Jane working."

I sometimes called her my "writing coach." I sometimes called her my "spiritual advisor." I sometimes called myself her "stalker." In 2005 I was worried about her husband's health. Over time, I was more than a little freaked out that in addition to, say, knocking off a few poems, receiving some rejections,  and meeting with her agent on the same day and having multiple books published in a year, she was able to have people over to eat or meet them at restaurants or go shopping and she was able to maintain a second home in another freaking country.

My obsession continued until the beginning of April, 2007. 

"I haven't been reading Jane Yolen's journal the way I used to. In the past, I found her impressive work ethic and output inspiring. Now reading about what she's doing just makes me feel like a layabout. A lazy, disorganized, self-centered, kept woman."

And then I went on for a couple of paragraphs about what I'd just read at Jane's journal about editing. 

Gail and Jane in the Real World

I did meet her briefly in the carbon-based world a few times.

 Soon after my first book was published in 1996, she gave a talk at the University of Connecticut, and I asked her a question about how she had managed writing when she had young children. She said she had two things going for her. 1. Her husband was a professor and was available to take on parenting tasks more frequently than other fathers might be. 2. She'd started publishing before she had children and thus thought of herself as a writer before she thought of herself as a mother.  She wasn't saying she put work first but that she didn't have to create a writer mindset or identity after she had created a mother mindset or identity. It was natural for her to fit her kids into her already established work life instead of having to fit work into an already established mother life. Believe me, I totally understood what she was saying. Being a mother while being a writer or being a writer while being a mother is still not natural for me. I got started in the wrong order.

I would see her at another event at the University of Massachusetts where I attended a program she was running. She began with an apology, because her husband was ill and she had been distracted when preparing her presentation. Then she proceeded to give what I felt was a fine college-level lecture, because that was what she was capable of when she wasn't at the top of her game.

Maybe sometime in the 2000s, the early teens, I actually shook her hand at some small gathering, again at UConn. I mentioned that we'd run into each other a couple of times over the years, and she looked at me intently and said something like, "I hope I was pleasant," which I thought was just lovely.

I am certain someone took a group picture of us at the end of that event. I know I had it, but I can't find it now or remember exactly when it was taken or why we were all where we were, which would help me to look for it. I am afraid I may have deleted it because I remember thinking it made my ass look big. I suspect Jane didn't give a damn about her ass, which left her with more time for all the things she did give a damn about.

I never read a great deal of Jane's work. It was Jane, herself, who drew me, the fact that she existed. In a nod to Michel de Montaigne, if you press me to say why I was obsessed with Jane Yolen, I can say no more than because she was she, and I, sadly, was only I.

The Reading History Project: History and Politics

In Writing the Trump Years Into History in The New Yorker (May 12), historian Jill Lepore writes about writing history. After calling upon Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (which I read as a teenager and now want to read again) and her experience writing These Truths: A History of the United States, she discusses the impact she's witnessed of recent executive orders and state laws on what history is taught in classrooms.

Unless you have a New Yorker subscription, you won't be able to read her article. So I'll give you a few high points. Lepore says:

"Make America Great Again" is a four-word argument about American history, and one of the movement's aims has always been to press the teaching and writing of American history into the service of that argument." Trump wishes "...to make American history great again by removing all evidence of anything that ever happened that wasn't so great..."

"In the Trump era, government censorship of American history has been used against not only classroom teachers but also against writers and publishers and librarians and booksellers..."

Gift shops at national parks and National Historic Sites are now supposed to review what they offer for sale for conforming to the "President's preferred account of American history."

Not so great things have happened in America. And everywhere else. Does pretending they didn't happen make it so? Will pretending these things didn't happen make life better now or in the future? 

History vs Politics

I've just started reading Lepore's The Story of America: Essays on Origins. In the Introduction (I read introductions these days) she says she wrote these essays "because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics." They are both interested in stories about the past, but

"Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationships between the past and the present."

"Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence."

But more on The Story of America after I've read beyond the Introduction. 

In the meantime, in Lepore's article Writing the Trump Years Into History she writes about how difficult it is to write historically about the very recent past, because you can't get much perspective on it. And writing a history of our recent past is complicated by what you might call the legal restrictions being placed on history. She brings up the issue of books purchased by Florida public schools, libraries, and universities requiring stickers that indicate the federal name for "Gulf of Mexico" is "Gulf of America," though the term "Gulf of Mexico" first appears in documents from the sixteenth century. 

Does the whole "Gulf of America" thing mean that governments today can change history? Yes, it's only a name, but it's a name that's been in use for four hundred years. 

"...sometimes," Lepore says, "the only thing to do is to fight. And the only way I know how to fight is to write."

Is Reading History a Political Act?

I am going to argue that those of us who don't write can also fight the political takeover of history. We can do it by reading.

No, don't just say "Those executive orders about history are ... " whatever outrageous term comes to mind. Don't just complain. Don't just make jokes about the President sleeping through history class. Jokes aren't doing anything these days.

You know what does do something? Educating ourselves.

Read history. Any history. Any group's history. Just by reading it, you're helping to preserve it. Support the historians you read by buying their work or by asking libraries for it or by reviewing it on-line. Spread your new-found knowledge any way you can.

My somewhat shallow knowledge of history suggests to me that someday we will come out the other side of what's happening now. Groups don't stay in power forever, and the kinds of groups in power now have not held on for long periods in the past. 

We are not powerless. We can retain historical knowledge for the future. Perhaps that is a political act.

Getting Serious About Humor: Hyperbole, the Risky Literary Device

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 "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." Mac Barnett, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature in Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children

If you are unfamiliar with what I think someone called crudgate earlier this month, congratulations! While you missed out on some serious discussions of how the above quote passed around on social media offended writers some of whom feared its impact on children's literature, you also missed out on seeing the following types of personal responses directed toward the author who wrote it: 

• I never cared for the guy.
• He's a snob. (Unclear why. Maybe because he namedrops people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Saunders in his book?)
• What a dick. (I saw more than one dick-related comment.)
• It's mainly white women defending him. 
• He is not part of our community.  (I saw a number of community-type comments and couldn't help reading the word "community" as "club." Now I will always wonder how a community is different from a club.)
• He should resign. He should be impeached. 
• Asshole.
• His publisher should pull his book. (The person who said this on an email digest also said she discussed with a librarian having a copy of Make Believe pulled from circulation. The librarian had to point out that that would be censorship.)

This was all coming very soon after Make Believe, a short book made up of three rambling, somewhat didactic essays romanticizing children and children's literature, was released in this country. Many of the people making these comments said they hadn't read it. Many said they wouldn't read it. 

In a statement to School Library Journal, Barnett said the following: 

"Thank you for the opportunity to respond. First of all, I want to acknowledge the passage I wrote is hurtful, especially to people who work hard making books for kids. I understand why people are upset and feel betrayed. In trying to make a point, I got hyperbolic and glib. I was wrong. I'm truly sorry."

Spoiler alert: Many people did not accept that apology and the controversy raged on. It is still raging on. People may write books about this someday. I would watch the movie.

But you know what? In all that was said about this issue, I didn't see anything about hyperbole, even though it comes up in Barnett's apology and is the literary device that got this ball rolling. So let's fix that. 

Let's talk hyperbole. 

Definition

Definitions are a clichéd addition to an essay, but here we go, anyway.

Hyperbole--The use of exaggeration, which the author does not expect to be believed, to create an effect, often involving humor. Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

When hyperbole is used for comedy, it is related to the incongruity theory of humor, which states that the clash of unrelated ideas is funny. What is exaggerated clashes with something, if only what it is exaggerating. Aristotle is supposed to have recognized incongruity as a type of humor. Corollary to the Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

I mention Aristotle in the corollary not to namedrop, since I haven't read him, myself, but to point out that I'm not making this crud up. Aristotle did. Blame him.

Personal Experience

Yes, personal experience is another cliché of essays these days, but that's not stopping me.

Back before 2008, when I still had a nice little mid-list, middle grade author thing going, a Booklist reviewer said of my book, A Year with Butch and Spike, "Gauthier demonstrates a real talent here for humorous hyperbole and episodic classroom comedy."

They made hyperbole sound like a good thing. At least, I thought so at the time.

Maybe thirty years later, I wrote a very hyperbolic piece called What We All Want to Say to That One Out-of-Touch Grandfather at the Playground that was published at Frazzled, a parent humor site on the Medium platform. The humor was developed around the idea that older men spent much of their adult lives in work situations that did not prepare them for the rigors of taking their grandchildren to the playground. Among the personal responses directed toward me in response to it:

• I was a bigoted anti-male feminist and should mind my "f***ing business." I believe this was the first comment I got.
• I was a sanctimonious shit sack.
• I sounded like an ass.
• I was smug, dumb, superior. 

It went on for days!

Hyperbole is risky. 

Barnett Also Has a History with Hyperbole

I've seen Mac Barnett described on BlueSky by fans of Make Believe as being funny or at least wry, which is like funny but tends to be more of an attitude. It's a form of humor that applies a twist to something for a subtle, comic effect. Having now read a few of his picture books and a middle grade novel he co-wrote with Jory John (I hadn't heard of Barnett before all this started), I would place him in the wry category.

The picture books were lost on me, but I am not a picture book person and can't address them in any meaningful way. Or at all. The middle grade novel, however, The Terrible Two, is definitely hyperbolic, filled with stuff about kids pulling over-the-top and unbelievable pranks. Reviewers found it funny and it was successful enough to lead to a sequel.

At that point, Barnett may have thought, like me in my middle-grade writer days, that hyperbole is a good thing.

The Major Problem with Hyperbole

Hyperbole is a form of situational humor. It is not your classic one-liner, which, by the way, would probably work very well as a pull quote. Instead, hyperbole comes out of a situation. You have to understand the situation--what is being exaggerated--to understand the exaggeration.

Sometimes what is being exaggerated will be understood by the audience because of the audience members' cultural knowledge. For instance, in The Terrible Two Barnett and Jory could assume their audience would understand the hyperbole behind an elementary school principal finding his car on the steps in front of the school, because child readers know that kids don't drive and wouldn't be able to get a car up steps, if they could. (The authors explain how it was done at the end of the story.)

But sometimes the exaggeration used with hyperbole requires a lot more build-up, which was the case with "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." That line got a lot of build-up in the book, but not in the pull quote. What's more, not only does the pull quote not include the build-up, it eliminated a section that would have tipped readers off that there was missing build-up.

What Barnett actually said was not

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

but 

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole. So I now offer Barnett's Addendum to Sturgeon's Law: Maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

This is still not funny as a pull quote. Readers still won't get the hyperbole Barnett was trying for. But they would have realized something was going on here. If they hadn't heard of it, they would have wondered what the hell is Sturgeon's Law?

What the Hell is Sturgeon's Law?

Anyone who read Make Believe would have had access to the page before the one the pull quote appears on. On it was an account of how science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon dealt with complaints about the quality of his genre back in the 1950s. Among the complaints? "...ninety percent of sf is crud." Sturgeon's response, "Ninety percent of everything is crud." 

That became Sturgeon's Law. It is so well-known in some circles that you can find it on memes and t-shirts. Usually on t-shirts "crud" is replaced with "crap."

After addressing Sturgeon's Law, Barnett begins his very next paragraph with a transitional sentence. "It's tempting, when explaining the abundance of bad kids' books, to just shout "Sturgeon's Law!" and move on." 

And then he goes on to what became the now infamous pull quote.

A Sort-of-Joke That Didn't Land

Some people who knew Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law questioned where Sturgeon got his ninety percent figure when he said "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Where's his evidence? I can't speak for the man, of course, but my wild guess is he was using hyperbole. 

Other readers wondered why, if Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law, he said ninety-four percent of children's lit is crud when Sturgeon said only ninety percent of everything is crud. Upping the number looks like hyperbole to me. More exaggeration. If ninety percent of everything is crud is funny, ninety-four percent will be even funnier!

Does knowing the build-up for this hyperbole now make this quote a knee-slapper? No. The best this was ever going to be was wry. It appears in an essay that argues that "lots of children's books are bad..." and ends with "...we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books." The twist on Sturgeon's Law may have been an attempt to lighten that message. Instead, it made it worse.

Hyperbole is Risky

Both Barnett and I had better luck using hyperbole in writing for children than for adults. Does that mean that children enjoy hyperbole and adults don't? Or do the adults who control every aspect of what children read (see Barnett on this) believe they do, so it gets into children's books and is well received  by the adults who review them no matter what kids think of it? 

Unlike child readers, adults do control every aspect of what we read. Additionally, we get to respond to what we read in a more direct way, on social media and in comments. As noted above, not all adults responded well to our use of hyperbole in writing for them.

For me, that didn't matter a whole lot. The main purpose of a humor piece is to be a humor piece. If there is some underlying idea being conveyed, it’s secondary to the humor, it supports the humor. Readers don't spend a lot of time on humor, whether they like it or not. "Ha-ha" or "boo," and then they move on.

For Barnett, his use of hyperbole mattered. The main purpose of an expository or persuasive essay is to explain or persuade, to make a point, as Barnett said himself in his apology, and not to be funny. If there’s humor, it’s secondary to the point, it supports the point. In an essay, everything needs to support the point.

I, myself, dropped the line "And they say serious literary criticism is dead!" in this essay that I originally used after the list of types of comments I saw Barnett receiving. I decided it didn't support what I wanted to be a meditation on hyperbole. The literary criticism line was about how we address those we don't agree with, and that's a totally different thing. Stay on task, Gail! 

Whether or not Barnett should have used Sturgeon's Law in his essay depends on what he was trying to do with it, how it supported the point he was trying to make. If he'd dropped it before publication, his argument that "lots of children's books are bad" might not have raised the same kind of ire that "94.7 percent of kids' books are crud" did. 

It probably wouldn't have made as attention-grabbing a pull-quote, either. 

Seeking Time: A Sort of Hiatus for Original Content

I'll be cutting back on blogging for probably the next six weeks while I help out a couple of family members. I have two blog posts in progress that I want to finish up and publish, because they are somewhat timely, and this cut back may lead to a Seeking Time post this summer, because what doesn't lead to a Seeking Time post? 

For the immediate future, though, I want to use what work time I have for nonblogging activity.

Looking forward to beginning here again.

The Reading History Project: What Are We Doing for Mother's Day? Mothers as Activists!

Mother's Day, in my humble opinion, can be fun if you have young children. Otherwise:

1. It's an opportunity for a lot of marketing.
2. It causes stress for moms over whether or not their kids will remember to observe the day for them and stress for kids, adult ones, anyway, over what they should do to observe it for mom.
3. It's a grieving time for many people who have lost their mothers or are in the process of doing so.
4. It's one more reminder for mothers who have lost children of what is gone from their lives. 

For some people, Mother's Day doesn't have a lot to recommend it.

The History of Mother's Day

Yesterday historian Heather Cox Richardson tipped her readers off to the fact that the originators of Mother's Day were interested in something else. She's supported by The History of Mother's Day: From Global Peace to Greeting Cards at The Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, responding to the American Civil War that had ended just a few years earlier and the Franco-Prussian War that was then being fought in Europe, tried to create an annual Mother's Day for peace. In the early twentieth century Anna Jarvis was successful in creating Mother's Day to honor her mother, Ann Jarvis, who just happened to have been involved with a mid-nineteenth century public health movement. She organized Mother's Work Days to, among other hygiene-related activities, collect trash. 

Mother's Day came out of reform movements.

Bringing Mother's Day Back to Activism?

Though a number of states allowed women to vote in local school elections in the nineteenth century, they couldn't vote on the national level. They had to find a different way to have a voice and did so by becoming involved with reform movements, the most prominent being abolition, suffrage, and temperance. 

I'm sort of over Mother's Day, myself. I feel it's a young woman's game. But this idea of Mother's Day and reform or activism brings a whole new level of interest for me. 

From now on, I actually will be thinking about doing something for Mother's Day. It may not be with any kids, though.

 

Seeking Time: The Unit System

Very early in my seeking time journey someone told me about an article in Poets & Writers by author Ellen Sussman in which she described something she called the unit system. 

She said she worked for 45 minutes of an hour, then spent 15minutes doing something that wasn't work-related. Then she'd go back to work for another 45 minutes. And repeat. The benefits, she said, were: 

1. During the 45 minutes that she worked, it was easier to stay on task when she knew she'd have a break in another X minutes
2. During those 15 minutes that she wasn't working, her "unconscious thought" could often continue working on a writing problem, which was helpful when she went back to work.

She had some science to support this work, research related to graduate students managing time for writing. 

Again, all you did was work for 45 minutes, break for 15 and then begin writing again for another 45 minutes. Later I would realize I am a minimalist. I love how minimal this work method is.

Like the Unit System

Over the years, I kept stumbling upon articles supporting working in what might be described as sprints or short units of time, like Sussman's plan.

• A study suggested recognizing "that you have a finite attentional window––and structure your workflow to be congruent with that capacity. This speaks to how we’ve talked about how work is a series of sprints––and to be our most productive and most creative, we need to unplug throughout our workdays." 
• Tony Scwartz recommends working in 90-minute blocks because at the end of ninety minutes, "we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level." Then we need to renew. At his blog, Schwartz referred to the work pattern he suggests--90 minutes of work, followed by a break--as "mental intervals." Like the unit system but different.
• The fairly well-known Pomodoro Technique recommends working in 25-minute units of time, taking a 5-minute break, then going back to work for 25 minutes. Like 45-minutes but different.

All the above involve simple strategies. 

The Value of Small Units of Time 

For years I used the unit system daily. I will admit, the 45-minutes on, 15-minutes off system has failed for me the last few years. I still embrace small work periods, though, even without following a work, break, work, break pattern, for two reasons.

First, the idea that we should work in 90-minute, 45-minute, or even 25-minute units means we have accepted that we can do something in small amounts of time. We don't need to have a summer to write. We don't need a formal retreat, a three-day weekend, a day.  

In The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer at Literary Hub Olivia Campbell quotes author Alison Stine:  

"You can't be precious about writing if you have kids. You can't be fastidious or fussy. You can't always write at the cool coffee shop. I applied for a NEA grant at Burger King: They had free wifi and an indoor children's playground...I wrote my most recent novel draft during my son's remote school Zoom meetings. My first novel, Road Out Of Water, I wrote at the local skatepark, where my son belonged to the skate club."

Stine recognized that she could adapt small units of time to use for writing. It's not unusual to read of mothers who write working like this.

Additionally, psychologist Kelly McGonigal has talked about the what-the-hell-effect, in which people give up on a project because they feel bad about their lack of success with it. As in "It's 2:30, and I haven't written yet. The day is shot. What the hell. I'll try again tomorrow." With the unit system, we don't have to feel bad about ourselves for not starting work yet, because we realize at 2:30 we have two and a half hours before dinner to work. Or we have an hour before the kids get home. Even a half an hour can be helpful.  

I like the psychological impact of the unit system. It isn't just a way of managing time. It's a way of thinking about it. The thinking aspect becomes part of our view of ourselves and how we work.

That's the part that's kept me using it and maybe even kept me writing.

 

Friday Done List May 8

 A good week. At least, it feels like a good week.

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Truly worked on a humor piece.
• Finished a blog post that is going to become an essay.
• Worked on an essay for a project.
• Took a workshop on literary submissions in preparation for submitting a new short story.
• Finished reading an excellent history book for The Reading History Project.
• Started reading another history book for The Reading History Project.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Published a blog post. Will publish another this weekend.
• Promoted said blog post. 
• Spent way too much time reading on social media about Mac Barnett, whom I hadn't heard of this time last week.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Received a rejection. Rejection means you're working!

The Story Behind the Story: Minimum Word Counts

Frontier Myth vs. Frontier Reality was published this weekend at Books Are Our Superpower after a request for editing because the publication has an 800-word minimum for its essays. I believe the essay I sent was originally in the low 600s or 700s. It's up over 900 words now.

As far as short nonfiction is concerned, I've become a bit of a minimalist writer. I like the traditional essay in which writers begin with a thesis statement and describe the support they'll be discussing for it later on. 

My impression is that the Medium platform, itself, favors longer writing. (You may not be able to read all that article. You'll have to trust me.) Up over a thousand words and more, which, actually, isn't outrageously long. However, a lot of medium writers are new to writing, and they may not be that knowledgeable about how to put an essay together. They take their time getting to the point and the more words they use, the longer they take. 

I'm also a minimalist reader. I like writers to get to the point sooner rather than later.

The point I'm getting to here, is that in spite of my being a minimalist writer, I feel the revision I did because the publication asked for more words was better than what I originally sent them. Why is that, Gail? Well, in order to add words, I:

• Added details that supported the point of one of the paragraphs.
• Included a thread relating to "our history" that wasn't originally there.

I felt both those changes enhanced the essay. So what I'll try to do in the future is consider whether I've gone so short on the word count that I haven't included important material

Friday Done List May 1

I read an article about a woman who tracked every hour she spent writing for six months. What she found out was that a lot of the time she wasn't writing, she was doing writing-related activities. My first response was, Oh, no, I am never tracking my writing. That is asking for misery. But now I'm thinking, wait. There is a lot of writing adjacent work that writers need to do. No judgement!

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• An essay submission I'd made last week came back requesting edits. Essentially, it was too short. So I did a rewrite that increased the word count. I think the essay was actually better afterward.
• The essay above has been approved for publication.
• I finished two blog posts that I plan to revise to submit as essays.
• I set up some files for the essays I plan to write from blog posts.
• I took a workshop yesterday that wasn't what I was expecting. However, I came away with some thoughts regarding the short story I recently finished and made a couple of changes to it today.
• I did just the tiniest bit of work on some humor pieces.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• I published a blog post last Saturday, which I also promoted.
• I wrote and published another blog post, which I also promoted.
• Read an article about AI and another about marketing books, for what good that will do me.

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Made some notes on this.

 

Seeking Time: Begin Again

I said recently that back during the fourteen years that I was writing about time regularly, "I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few." 

One of my favorite fews is begin again.

Yes, Begin Again Comes from Meditation, Not Time Management

Begin Again is a concept from meditation. In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics authors Dan Harris, Jeff Warren, and Carlyle Adler describe beginning again as the most important step in meditation. "The whole game is to notice when you're distracted, and begin again. And again. And again." Kelly McGonigal says In The Willpower Instinct that having to keep bringing your wandering mind back to your breath (beginning again) while meditating develops the brain. 

In my dabbling in meditation I have never seen begin again used as anything but a positive. 

That's Right. We've Done Nothing Wrong

I consider beginning again on a par with the writing advice to keep your butt-in-chair or write every day. The main difference is that beginning again doesn't involve guilt. Butt-in-chair and write every day carry with them a sense of othering. "Keeping your butt in a chair is what we writers do." "To be a writer, you have to write every day." 

But, remember, most of us are the kinds of writers who can't support ourselves with our writing. We've got a day job to keep us alive. For many of us, there are kids, sick relatives, moves to be made, newly diagnosed illness, depression over our lousy careers, existential dread...Those things are all going to happen and keep us, at least at times, from keeping those butts in chairs and writing every day. Kelly McGonigal has said (again In The Willpower Instinct) that self-criticism undermines motivation and self-control, leading us to give in, to give up. Feeling we are less than because we're being judged for not being able to live like writers are supposed to live is unlikely to be a positive for us.

Beginning again can be. We can get past those life issues or find a way to deal with them and then we can begin again.   

You Can Look Forward to Beginning Again

When we've done the begin again thing a few times, we find ourselves looking forward to it. Maybe it's because beginning again means whatever was standing in the way of our writing is over or we're managing it now. Maybe it's because we like sitting at our laptop in whatever passes as our workspace and know we'll enjoy getting back there again. Maybe it's because we're writers, and writers like nothing better than being able to begin writing again.

To paraphrase Dan Harris and company, "The whole game is to begin again. And again. And again." 

The Reading History Project: Yes, I Am Obsessed with Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner is a historian who could be said to have gone down in history pretty much for what amounts to an essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893.*   According to Colin Woodard in How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start in Smithsonian, Turner arranged to have Significance of the Frontier in American History published in the American History Association's annual report, taught his thesis to graduate history classes, and lectured about it, but he never wrote a book on the subject. Yet in Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of The American Frontier by Walter Nugent in The Athenaeum Review describes the essay's influence up until the 1970s and '80s.

I first heard of Turner's essay in high school. I got a totally wrong impression about what the thing was about that I carried with me for many years. So many years. This is my misinterpretation:

In The Closing of the American Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner said that the frontier served as a place for Easterners who didn't fit in where they were to move where there weren't so many social restrictions and they could get along better. Turner was concerned about what would happen when there was no longer an American frontier and society had no place to send these people.  

Let's be clear, Turner did not write anything called The Closing of the American Frontier. In the nine pages of excerpts that I read from the essay he did write, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, I found nothing about the frontier being used as a dumping ground for Easterners who didn't fit in in Boston and Hartford. 

Did I come up with this myself, as a result of watching too may Westerns on TV while growing up? I have to say, I'm wondering about my high school history teacher now. Was this some kind of Turner interpretation when he was at UVM back in the day? Is it a Turner spin he came up with himself, as a person who reads history?

Also, why did I remember this, particularly since it was wrong?

At any rate, Turner's actual essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, was embraced for generations. Though Turner didn't write a book about it, himself, he and Significance of the Frontier turn up in other historians' books to this very day.

What Jackson Really Said About the Frontier

In Significance of the Frontier, Turner argues that

 "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

This experience, happening over and over again as the people on the East coast moved West, settled, then moved further West "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people." 

He describes conflicts between East and West, saying, "The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it." Nonetheless, "Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World."

The frontier experience made all of America what it was, not just Western America.

Note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land." He mentions it more than once. And how does he define "frontier?" "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization."

I will also point out here that these days the word "colonization" carries some negative connotations involving oh, taking land from others, enslavement, destroying cultures, and other things of that nature.

What Others Have to Say about Turner

A Historian of His Times. In These Truths: A History of the United States Jill Lepore describes what was going on in the field of history in the late nineteenth century when Turner delivered his paper. History, like other fields then, was professionalizing. Turner was one of the first Americans to hold a doctorate in history. He read his paper at a meeting of The American Historical Association, which had only been founded in 1884. Lepore says: 

"...historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens."  

How does Turner begin The Significance of the Frontier in American History? With a quote from the 1890 Census. 

"Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports."

He was using a quantitative analysis of something from the present rather than something from the past in his material but by turning to something so scientific he was marking himself as being from and of his period. In fact, the AHA meeting where he presented his paper was held during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago where all kinds of new things were displayed. They had a Ferris wheel! 

A Historian Who Said Something People Liked.  Megan Kate Nelson writes about Turner in the recently published  The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. She's not the only writer to point out that Turner's reading of his essay didn't immediately take the academic world by storm. She says that pre-Turner most historians believed the United States became the United States because of European influence. In fact, Turner may be talking about that when he refers to "germs" in his paper. "Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment."

But according to Nelson popular perception of the "Great West" supported Turner. Novels featured Indian fighters saving white families, painters romanticized Western landscapes, and government policies (providing that free land Turner talks about) encouraged people in the East to go West. Turner was preaching to a choir that already believed in a frontier story they thought explained them even if they'd never been West of the Mississippi. Or West of anything. That's mythic.   

A Historian Whose Thesis Is Now Dated.  Remember I asked you to note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land" and defines "frontier" as "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization?" 

Well.

In Thinking About History Sarah Maza says,

"Turner's vision of early Americans marching into "free land" is today discredited by our awareness that in most cases the lands European pioneers trekked into and grabbed already had owners, namely indigenous peoples, and were not theirs to claim by right or destiny."

Nowadays we are also likely to recognize that areas described in the past by Europeans as "savage" and "uncivilized" did have civilizations, they were just not civilizations familiar to Europeans and therefore deemed savage. 

A Historian Who May Have Been Ready to Move on Even If American Culture Wasn't 

In How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start, Colin Woodard says that Frederick Jackson Turner eventually rethought his frontier theory. 

"...he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier's environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture..."

Turner is supposed to have spent years working on a project that didn't treat the frontier as some kind of unifying force but instead involved the differences among America's various sections. But, Woodard says, Turner was a procrastinator. The work was never completed.

Instead The Significance of the Frontier in American History continued to be taught for decades, promoting a belief in American characteristics involving individualism, democracy, and nationalism.  

______________________________________

*This link directs you to nine pages of excerpts, which is all I read.

Friday Done List April 24

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor  

• Some basic revision of the prose poem I began in a workshop last week.
• Made a submission!
• Revised a blog post I'd forgotten about into an essay for submission.
• Submitted the essay I just told you about.
• Wrote a blog post I hope will become part of a series/arc I'll publish directly at Medium. A case of using the blog for actual writing/first drafts.
• Wrote a draft of a blog post for the Reading History Project that I hope to revise to submit to a Medium publication.
• Finally got a little market research done. Swung this because I had to spend time in a waiting room while someone had a medical test. Got on the office's WIFI!

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• 
  
  Someone made a lovely comment on BlueSky about Happy Kid! Which I then reposted and wrote about on Facebook.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Made a submission!

 

Seeking Time: A 24-Hour Readathon? In My Day, We Did 48.

I learned of Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon, which is happening today, nine minutes before it started. For a hot second I considered being all impulsive, dropping everything, and taking part. Believe me, I have way more than 24-hours of reading to do. But in my search for time, I'm try to stay on-task, and the task this Saturday involves some invasive plants at the back of my yard and a wide array of additional activities both work- and personal-related. Taking a day off to read will have a bad impact on how I use my time next week.

But a community reading binge is very attractive. I know, because I've done them.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge

I believe I have a couple of readers still with me from back in the day when there was a children's lit blogger community. And for ten years that community took part in The 48-Hour Book Challenge. We didn't just read for 48-hours. We blogged about what we were reading. We were fierce.

Karen Yingling of Ms. Yingling Reads ran a #MGReadathon in 2022 that I took part in. I don't read many children's books these days, so I don't know if that's still happening. 

I think there are definite benefits to binge reading, and I've been trying to work what I think of as a targeted weekend reading retreat into my life for months. I'm struggling to find the time to do that.

Friday Done List April 17

 Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Started a new humor piece. Not one of the new humor pieces I've been thinking about starting for weeks, but a totally different humor piece.
• Took a workshop during which I started 3 prose poems, all variations of the same material. Which I think I might turn into a piece of flash fiction, my original idea, after all.
• Started a blog post that I am already thinking about revising to submit elsewhere.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Bratz v Anthropic blog post.
• Promoted the above blog post.
• Started another blog post, as mentioned under Goal 1.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Checked a couple of hours ago, and an agent I'm interested in submitting to has finally reopened. On next week's To Do List.

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Some thoughts. Some notes.

I Don't Think I've Written About Bartz v Anthropic. How Did I Miss That?

Pirated!

Bartz v Anthropic, or "the Anthropic case," as it's known at my house, was a big topic of discussion in my home for months last winter. Part of this is because I have a book involved and am thus a claimant in the class-action suit. Part of this is because we have a deceased family member who is also a
claimant. 

I see a lot of rage regarding the case and artificial intelligence in general on Facebook. On Medium, I see a lot of people writing about the glories of AI, even though Medium supposedly doesn't allow AI-generated writing. Or it hasn't in the past. Things are always changing there.

Bartz vs. Anthropic is confusing. I was confused about the two-part decision originally, but I think I've got it down now, and I have a couple of links to help explain what happened.

What Was Going On

Richard W. Stevens writes in Can AI Legally Be Trained Using All the Books in the World? | Mind Matters that Anthropic trained its chatbot, Claude, by creating a huge data base of copyrighted books. It got these books in two ways:

• It purchased hardcover books, tore them apart, and scanned them. According to Benj Edwards in Anthropic Destroyed Millions of Print Books to Build its AI Models these were used books. Anthropic was not going to its local independent bookseller or placing an order with publishers and paying full price.  
• It got digital books for free from pirate sites. They're called pirate sites, because they're full of stolen books.

In either case, the issue was whether copying these books for the use of training a computer program without the copyright holders' permission was copyright infringement.

Nobody Got a Full Win Here

The court found:

• Acceptable:  The court ruled that Anthropic using used books it purchased, copied, and trained its program on was fair use, because people can do what they want with a book after they purchase it.*  Also, evidently training a computer program is considered teaching, and teaching books, say in schools, is also fair use. This is the portion of the decision I didn't originally understand. It wasn't clear in early articles that Anthropic had paid something to somebody. There was a sense that they had just taken work directly from writers, possibly because the books were secondhand, therefore authors didn't gain anything from the Anthropic purchase. 
• Unacceptable: Anthropic taking digital books from pirate sites to do whatever it wants with was not acceptable. Presumably because pirate sites steal books, and Anthropic was knowingly accepting stolen goods. On TV that's always frowned on. I guess the people at Anthropic didn't watch the same shows I do.

As Stevens says at the end of his article "the decision tends to encourage AI systems that train on other people's written works, so long as those works are either paid for or in the public domain."

Why Do Writers Care About AI?

Well, I'll tell you this writer's main issues with AI in publishing: 

1. Flooding the market with books, producing more material than the reading public can possibly consume and thus making it even more difficult for writers to afford to write. It's already difficult. It's been difficult for a long time. 
2. Lowering the overall quality of work produced, because AI isn't particularly accurate or literate at this point, and it enables people without knowledge of writing to produce lesser quality work and overwhelm the marketplace with it.
3. And, yes, I have concerns about AI being created with the intellectual property of writers who didn't have the option of choosing to be part of the project, some of whom were actually robbed of their intellectual property.

I've been hearing about too many books being published for probably twenty years. I'm talking before self-publishing became big and produced three and a half million books last year compared to poor little trad publishing's 600,000 and change. 

What happens when you have that many books being produced? 

Consider Coral Hart (not her real name) who claims that using AI she was able to write and self-publish 200 romance novels on Amazon last year. She's supposed to have racked up total sales of around 50,000 books. Get your calculators out, folks. That means she sold around 250 copies per book. That's probably not bad, since this article claims many self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies in their lifetimes. 

But imagine a multitude of Coral Hart's writing and publishing 200 AI-generated books a year. She teaches classes on how to use AI to write books. Indirectly, she could be responsible for a lot more AI books. More and more and more books to buy and read. 

You know what we don't have, though? More and more and more people to buy those books and read them.

It's interesting that Hart's got the side job teaching, because I see many writers doing that sort of thing now. Traditionally writers have had day jobs as professors, teachers, librarians, and bookstore owners. Insurance executives. But now I see writers are coming up with income producing gigs like running writers' retreats or businesses as on-line writing coaches. Just recently I learned that a rather well-known writer is selling on-line writing products that I don't understand, but they cost anywhere from 4 to 14 dollars. 

Why? Presumably because they can't sell enough books to make a living. 

There are so many books out there. Who thought we needed computer programs to generate more?

Get Back to Bartz vs. Anthropic, Gail

Oh, yes. Well, my understanding is that Bartz vs. Anthropic wasn't originally a class action case, a judge ruled it one at some point, which is how my family member and I and many, many other people got involved. Anthropic has been hit with a $1.5 billion payout relating to the digital books it took from the pirate site. It's not going to mean a great deal to individual authors, though. Each book can get $3,000, but legal expenses have to be deducted first, and tradtionally published writers have to split what's left with our publishers. 

Not a great pay day, but I like to think that by filing my claim, I've made some paperwork headaches for someone at Anthropic.

Or maybe they've got Claude taking care of all this. Yeah, I bet that's it.

____________________________ 

*I was wrong to say people can do whatever they want with a book after they purchase it. They cannot, for instance, purchase a book and republish it with their name on it as the author. They cannot cut and paste material from the book into one of their own and claim it as their own work. That is not what is known as fair use. No one had purchased writers' work and then used it to train a computer program before. This court case was about whether or not that particular use was legal.

Friday Done List April 10

Well, this was a better week. Yes, I'm feeling better. 

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Made two submissions.
• Attended a Zoom workshop.
• Finished a short story, except I've got to do something about the last few lines.
• Am considering a new series of essays for Medium that I would publish myself, not through publications.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Did a blog post.
• Promoted the blog post.
• Have plans to increase writing about time here.
• Updated the What's New and Essays, Short Stories, and Humor sections of my website. That hadn't been done for a while. It took a couple of weeks for me to do my section of the job. Computer Guy did his in a couple of hours.

Seeking Time: A Rebrand

I have been writing about time management, specifically for writers, since January, 2012 as part of a feature I called Time Management Tuesday. That's more than fourteen years for those of you who don't like to do math. The month before I got started writing about time management I wrote here: 

"Organization and self-discipline are not things I learned at my mother's knee. Or at all. I have to make major efforts to manage my time so I can write. Always. It's not a linear process. It's more two steps forward and one step back, if I'm lucky and I haven't fallen over altogether, metaphorically speaking. Then I get started again. I'm always reading about better ways to manage time in all aspects of my life in order to isolate time to work. This has been going on for years. I won't even get into how many years."

I've tapered off with the time management writing, because, as I said last week, many random on-line people claim the expertise to write about time management, and I don't want to be another one of them. But, also as I said last week, in the time that I haven't been writing about time management my management of time has been spiraling. Back when I was writing about time, "I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few." 

Finding those occasional ways to get things done provided a sense of optimism that I'd enjoy feeling again. 

Seeking Time

Among the things I've learned these last fourteen years is that time cannot be controlled. There is always more to do than there is time to do it, and the more to do comes at you when it will, not when you want it. Knowing that, the old title, Time Management Tuesday, seems woefully inaccurate. It also gives the appearance of expertise that I can't claim. I am only a seeker, one who is willing to seek everywhere, not just in what might be called the field of traditional "time management." So, I'm changing the title of this feature to Seeking Time.  

Additionally, without the "Tuesday" in the title I eliminate the pressure to write and publish a time-related post every week and give myself the option to post any day. 

A positive impact on my time! I'm feeling optimistic already.