Five Reads Later...

So, I'm reading The Great Gatsby again. I guess this is going to be an annual series.

I think the first time I posted about Gatsby, I said I was starting to think the term "great" in the title was sarcastic. I don't remember what I wrote about last year, but the post title has the word "evanescence" in it, so it must've been something about the fleeting, ephemeral vibe of the book.

This year, I'm noticing the narrator, Nick, and coming away with a new perception of him.

Nick begins the book with a piece of advice from his father about not criticizing people because they might not have had the same opportunities he's had. "In consequence," Nick says, "I'm inclined to reserve all judgments."

Nick then proceeds to write a book that is nothing short of a collection of judgments.

Nick also says that he himself is "one of the few honest people [he's] ever known," but does things like "pretend to be surprised." He even says to another character that because he's thirty years old, he's "five years too old to lie to [himself] and call it honor." So, he used to lie, at least to himself? He used to justify dishonesty being calling it honorable?

Nick is the narrator. He's the only way we learn anything about the characters. We don't know what Tom or Daisy or Gatsby or Jordan really meant or thought or felt or even said; we only have Nick's version of it.

Nick who claims to reserve all judgments and to be honest, but who judges people constantly and apparently lies under certain conditions.

On several occasions, Nick is sarcastic.

"Do you want to hear about the Butler's nose?" Daisy whispers to him at dinner.
"That's why I cam over tonight," Nick says. Of course, he's not being serious.

"Oh, do you like Europe?" someone asks Nick later. "I just got back from Monte Carlo."

Nick replies, "Really." You can hear the flat, sarcastic tone Fitzgerald gives him. No question mark. Just a judgmental "Really."

Later, chapters after telling readers that Tom dislikes being labeled "the polo player," Nick asks after "Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?" in a voice, I imagine, loaded with irony.

When a woman has just been struck by a man at a small party, Nick leaves. He takes his hat from the chandelier and walks out the door, tired of the drama.

For a time, Nick has a "short affair with a girl who live[s] in Jersey City," but ghosts her when her brother starts giving Nick mean looks. This is while he is corresponding with a girl back home to whom he's loosely engaged. He's been writing her weekly letters and signing them "Love, Nick."

At one point, Gatsby tells Nick that their mutual friend Jordan has "kindly offered to speak to" Nick about a matter concerning Gatsby. Nick's reactions are as follows: he's annoyed because he doesn't want to spend his date with Jordan talking about Gatsby, he assumes Gatsby's request via Jordan will be "something utterly fantastic," and for a moment Nick wishes he'd never even met Gatsby if this is how things will go. Up to this point, Gatsby has been nothing but gracious and friendly to Nick, and yet Nick reacts with annoyance, judgment, and pettiness—even if it is just in his head.

Of course, Nick is there for Gatsby at the end. Nick applies himself like a true friend and is justifiably upset at the way humanity treats Gatsby. At the end, Nick is one of the only good, true people.

If we believe him.

Nick might be a very fair narrator. He might be showing us his ideals and his flaws because he is honest. He wants to paint a realistic picture of everyone, himself included, even when that makes him look bad.

Or he might be an unreliable narrator. We don't really have any way to know. We have no one else's account of the characters or events. Maybe he tries to paint himself in a good light, but the truth shines through the cracks.

Maybe no one should be allowed to read The Great Gatsby five times.

For what it's worth, I lean toward Nick being a perfectly reliable narrator who doesn't even realize that he might be coming off like an ass at times. I mean, it took me five reads and fifteen years to see it myself.

~ Stephanie

Tragedy and Teaching

I make a point not to take it personally whenever students don't appreciate a moving book or short story.

What do I feel? There's a kind of frustrated grief, a mild exasperation, but not at the students, at...just reality, I guess. The order of things. When you're young, you don't see how sad everything is. Deaths in books don't mean anything (unless it's the death of an animal). Personal sacrifices that are not enough and end in tragedy just seem like...stories that didn't have a point. The hero failed, if he or she can even be called a hero after failing.

Stories that are very sad seem sort of funny at best when you're young, and boring or pointless at worst. Sometimes a teacher will try to get you to think about the story more deeply, but even if you go through the motions to make her happy, the story still seems bad. Maybe you have some interesting conversations about it in class, but it doesn't touch you. The story wasn't good.

I don't think there's anything to be done about this. I've learned to brace myself for students' innocent apathy. They aren't being rude or heartless or stupid. They're just...not there yet, and that's as it should be. It's probably worse to be a teenager who has experienced enough tragedy to recognize its reflection in literature. If you "get it" when you're young, it's probably a bad sign.

But it's not like I've had any big tragedy in my life. I don't think you have to have tragedy to appreciate the deep, haunting, beautiful grief of sadness in literature. I guess you just have to have...experience? Even that sounds pretentious. I don't know what happens when you get older. Maybe it's whatever last development happens to the brain at age twenty-five, when you start to understand risk and death, that the risks you take could make you die.

It is difficult to talk about sad literature with students because I want them to feel it, know that they won't, and know that they shouldn't. I end up putting on my upbeat "let's talk about this" suit, and we do. I ask for overall thoughts ("Who liked it? Who didn't? Why?"), what the plot was ("Okay, so what all happened in the story?"), and try to draw attention to the themes ("Was that fair? Why did he do that? How did that affect the other characters? What do you think that means?") and any symbolism ("Where have we seen that before? What might that be a symbol for? What does that make us think? Remember when another character said...?").

We always have good conversations, but I leave them feeling like I didn't break through. The students still don't care. They still think the story was boring/pointless/bad/not to be recommended.

And that's okay. This post probably sounds like complaining, but I don't mean it that way—at all. I love talking with students. It is my absolute favorite part of teaching. The conversations I have with eighth graders, eleventh graders, are unlike conversations I have with any other group. I love hearing their thoughts, what they liked and disliked, similarities they see in other areas of life, weird and unsubstantiated opinions that will probably change in ten years, insights I never thought of before, things I never noticed.

I don't blame students for not "getting" sad stuff in literature, although it does make me feel farther away from them. Like we're standing on opposite banks of a river and I'm asking them to cross a bridge that's invisible to them. I make my voice welcoming and excited, describe the bridge in vivid detail, to the point that they could probably describe later it to someone else, but they can't actually see it, so they don't cross. Fair enough. I wouldn't cross an invisible bridge either*, and I appreciate their even listening to me describe it :)

Like most blog posts lately, I'm just thinking. There's no "point" to this post; I just want to get a little bit of the yearning out of my system. I yearn for students to see what I see in beautiful, sad stories.

Maybe one day some of them will be teachers too, and they'll read the same stories and be struck with how different they feel about them at age twenty-two, twenty-five, thirty. Maybe they'll call to other students across the river, voices full of eager promises, and settle for the students describing the bridge back to them.

Life is weird. Literature is weird. I love them both.

~Stephanie

* Okay, I would cross a literally invisible bridge—and most of my students probably would too—but that's not what we're talking about XD

Evanescence—But Not the Band

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

I'm reading The Great Gatsby again. When I began reading it the other day, I remembered a post I made last time I read it called "On My Third First Reading." I didn't reread the post, but I couldn't remember what I meant by that title. What was a "third first reading"? I'm sure I had thought it was very clever when I wrote it.

For days, that question bounced around slowly in the back of my mind like the DVD symbol screen saver. Today, as I read Chapter 3 of Gatsby, I frowned and sighed.

The book didn't feel the same. Instead of feeling ethereal and enchanting, Gatsby's parties felt...superficial and sarcastic and sad. I've been to many parties where there were "enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names," but while the deliberate evanescence of such parties felt fitting in college, now they feel...sort of spiteful and unsatisfying.

Maybe this poor impression was because a Gatsby-hating friend had recently put some disparaging ideas into my mind. Maybe it was because I've been pretty overwhelmed and depressed for a couple of weeks.

Maybe it just depends on how you're feeling when you read it, I thought dejectedly.  I guess I've never read the book feeling exactly the way I do right now.

And that's when it hit me again: that's what I meant two years ago. YOU can never read the same book twice. You can read the same BOOK twice, but YOU will always be different.

This is my fourth first reading: my first time reading The Great Gatsby at age twenty-nine, about to release four chapters of the Fire Faery Story to beta readers,  having just paid an unexpected $1800 for bloodwork, after surprise-starting my period two days early while wearing white pants at a coffee shop, with Nana in the hospital, since beginning therapy for the first time, with an undercut.

Part of me is desperate to recapture the inexhaustible joy I felt the first few times I read The Great Gatsby; but another part of me respects this "first reading" theory too much to wish away this next impression.

This won't be the last time I read The Great Gatsby. I hope it will come around again for me, but if it doesn't, well...

You can't repeat the past.

~Stephanie

I Wasn't Myself This Morning

Until this morning, I'd forgotten the extent to which books influenced me as a child.

When I was little, books weren't just a pastime for me, they were...bodily organs? When I was reading a Little House on the Prairie book, there was something fundamentally different about me as a human than when I was reading Beezus and Ramona or one of the Betsy-Tacy books. The kind of book I was reading temporarily reshaped my...something. My brain? My soul? I was still Me, but I was Me as if I were living in the late 1800s in the Dakotas/1950s Portland/Deep Valley around the turn of the century. The words of my thoughts would change; the plans I had for my days would change.

It was like inhabiting a different version of myself. It was inspiring and refreshing. It was nice to get a break from being Regular Me and become a Book Me—like the seasons changing. We're all a little excited when the seasons change because it's something different. We wear the clothes we haven't worn in a while, do the activities we remember from years past. It's just different. That was what being a Book Me felt like.

It also made me try out different ways of living. When I read some books, it made me set my alarm early and get my chores done right away. When I read other books, it made me a more responsible big sister—even a little tired of the childish antics I'd employed the day before.

The Book Mes that I became were always very...respectable, which is so surprising to realize because I never actually cared about being respectable. I was always more interested in thieves and rogue heroes. The characters I wrote stories about were never "respectable." However, when I would wake up as a Book Me, it was always a Book Me who got things done and held her head high and spoke clearly and wanted to be efficient and good.

I'm baffled. Somehow, counter to everything I think and have thought about myself, I must've found "good" characters the most compelling and worthy of being emulated.

Of course, that's exactly why we want children to read good literature. We want them to be inspired by the good and right. We want the good and right to be so compelling that it molds children into better people.

I guess I just never realized that it actually WORKS.

I was suddenly, vividly reminded of Book Mes today as I read an Agatha Christie novel over breakfast. I wanted to keep reading, but I had finished my food and thought, in a very Gudgeon-the-butler sort of tone, "Yes, well, one doesn't always get to do what one wants, does one?" and I got up and started clearing the table. It was pretty easy to make myself do it, and that's when I realized with a shock:

For the first time maybe in years, I'd become a Book Me again. I'd become a brisk, dutiful, mildly cheerful servant who knew what life entailed and had quite made peace with it. I felt like I could do my day, when just moments ago the tasks before me had felt a little dark and heavy. I had had the vague impression that maybe I was going to try to get out of as many things as I could.

But that impression wouldn't have occurred to the servants and noble people of the Agatha Christie novel, and so, when I became Book Me, the impression evaporated for me too.

I've read hundreds of books in the last 10+ years, but I can't remember the last time I became a Book Me. I can tell you for sure that none of the thriller mysteries I've read have transformed me. None of the YA fantasy I've read lately has transformed me. None of those books felt like a bodily organ inhabiting my person and triggering an alternate version of myself.

Even as an almost-thirty-year-old, it's still the old, classic literature that transforms me.

In the words of Ross Geller saying the wrong name again, "Gah, what IS that?"

Is it really that there's something enduring and magical about older, well-written books? Maybe it's the same kind of magic that inhabits the real Statue of David compared to the copy in the Duomo Square. You can feel that. The copy is not the same, and it's downright eerie.

Maybe classical educators really are onto something when they insist that children read old classics. If they could inspire a little wannabe villain like me to get up at 7:00 and sweep, they're capable of almost anything good.

I like the Book Mes so much. I'm going to see if I can hold onto this one, a least a little bit longer.

~Stephanie

Boundaries: The Laziness Breakthrough

(Honestly, I don't even know how I plan to make this a whole post, because it was literally one moment of thought, but here we go.)

I've blogged before about how in my childhood I internalized a lie about myself: that I am lazy.

Gabe, bless him, has been trying for years to convince me that I'm not, but that false belief about myself has been welded onto my soul. It didn't seem to matter how many times Gabe told me I wasn't lazy, or got other people to corroborate the fact that I wasn't, or had me say out loud that I am not lazy. All of it was just water off a duck's back. None of sank in.

That's a weird human quirk, isn't it? That we can know something isn't true, but still...believe it. Still not be able to shake it. It makes me feel kind of crazy. Why are there parts of my mind that I can't access? How can part of me be so independent of my thoughts and intentions? Therapy has been great, but even that hadn't managed to get a meeting with the part of my brain that "knew" I was lazy.

A few weeks ago, I read the book Boundaries. One of my favorite things about the book is that it gives a list of things that are within your boundaries. If you're going to draw boundaries to keep other people from encroaching on your business, that necessarily implies that some things are your business. I plan to blog specifically about that later, but today, it's that simple fact that I want to highlight.

Some things are not your responsibility; some things are. You decide what to say yes to. You decide how you want to spend your time and energy. You decide what you can take on in a healthy manner.

So. The laziness breakthrough.

I was watching a YouTube video, and the creator talked about turning your passions into a business.

"Although you can't do that," my brain grumbled at itself. "Because you're too lazy."

Out of nowhere, this neutral, unemotional head voice said, "You're not lazy. That's just not within your boundaries right now."

Dismissed. No anger. No judgment. No nothing, really, just a wave of a mental hand that said, "No. Not true" and left it there.

I physically froze.

There was no guilt. The crushing sense of judgement I usually feel when confronted with something I "could" (which my brain automatically translates to "should") do was utterly absent.

I felt no weight. It was a giant mental shrug. It was the acknowledgement that yes, I could turn my passions into a business—if I assessed my boundaries and decided that that was within my healthy limits. It currently wasn't, and that was perfectly fine.

I wasn't lazy. I'm NOT lazy. Some things are within my healthy boundaries right now, and some things aren't. As I grow and seasons change, I'll examine my boundaries and see if they should be shifted. There is no glory in doing something I can't do healthily.

And that's it. THAT'S the truth. THAT'S what truth feels like.

I'm not lazy. And do you know what's WILD?

It feels like part of me has known that all along, and it's smiling, glad that the rest of me has finally caught up. I'm gonna guess that that part of me is the Holy Spirit, who will not violate our boundaries, but allows us to do the good work that is ours to do.

(Would you look a that. I did make a post out of one moment of thought XD)

~ Stephanie

Boundaries: Intro

We've had the book Boundaries on our shelf for about six years now, purchased at the suggestion of a friend. However, until two weeks ago, neither Gabe nor I had read it.

I've been really struggling over the last year (to be honest, I feel like all I've done since about the fall of 2019 is "struggle"). The whole time, I knew that some of my struggles had to do with the concept of boundaries. On the way home from church a couple of weeks ago, Gabe threw out that maybe I should read that Boundaries book we had.

"I mean, I can," I said. "I can't imagine what it's going to say that I don't already know: having boundaries is healthy, even for Christians; other peoples' emotions aren't your responsibility; saying 'no' doesn't make you a bad person, et cetera."

But I must have been feeling especially open-hearted that day, because I actually started reading the book.

It said all of the things I knew it would, and honestly didn't have a TON of completely new ideas (though the "Boundaries and God" section was brand-new to me). But the nuances it presented and the practical steps and checklists opened my eyes in a way that felt like transforming a black-and-white knowledge into a full-color understanding. Just reading the book felt like breathing more easily and walking with less weight. The book gave me sanctioned, Christian, Bible-verse-backed permission to own my life. It gave me permission to do what I've been wanting to do, but thought was...wrong? Selfish? Hurtful to others?

It's wild that a book about boundaries—limits—can make you feel so free.

I'm going to be doing a lot of work on this for a while. I don't know exactly what's going to look like, but I know two things for sure:

1) I'm going to be saying No a lot for a while. "No" is going to be my default, until I heal enough to give a heartfelt "Yes." I don't know how long that will be, but probably longer than we would all like.

2) I'm going to be blogging about this, because writing is how I do my best thinking.

So far, these are the posts I plan to write.

Boundaries:
- Boundaries: The Laziness Breakthrough
- Boundaries: You Own Your Emotions
- Boundaries: Letting Your Yes Be Yes
- Boundaries: It Takes a Village
- Boundaries and Fe: A Match Made in Hell

I really hope you buy the buy the book (and don't wait six years to read it), which is why I've linked it in like three places already. I think it might be a game changer, and who doesn't want their game changed*?

~ Stephanie

* Wait, maybe there are people who don't want their game changed? *stares off into space thinking about that* Huh. Well, read the book anyway.

The YA Author Who Hates YA?

I'm confused.

This is about to be one of those posts where I'm not sure what I need to say, so I ramble until we figure it out together.

Sort of like the exact opposite of a good essay. Or a good novel.

Some of y'all know I'm trying to write a young adult fantasy novel. One of my editors, Chersti, reminded me that the best continuing education I can do is read current YA fantasy novels: see what's out there, what young adults are enjoying, how the characters and stories feel.

In the spring of 2021, I read An Ember in the Ashes and The Wicked Prince. I didn't particularly enjoy either (though I liked Wicked Prince more), for several reasons:

1) I read them quickly, mostly "to have read them," rather than to enjoy them. (I've recently learned that that's a very ENFJ thing to do.)

2) I was haunted by the fear that they'd somehow invalidate the Fire Faery Story, that they'd be too similar, or much better.

3) They were written in present tense, which I hate.

4) The characters and stories felt thin and pale.

5) I felt like I was too close to the book-writing process to enjoy them as literature, like a freshly graduated magician watching someone do tricks at a kid's birthday party. I saw all the fishing line hanging from the authors' props, all the ways they'd choreographed situations to tell the reader what the characters looked like, how old they were, what different world-building terms meant, what the characters' "story goals" were. Everything felt clumsy and contrived.

This weekend, I started reading The Stardust Thief. It is blessedly past tense, but that's my favorite thing about it so far. I'm still nearly paralyzed by the fear that something about this book will hurt the process of my own novel. I still see fishing line everywhere.

And what's worse is that the author is doing tons of things that I did or wanted to do in the Fire Faery Story, but was told "you can't do that" (e.g., italicized flashbacks in the middle of a chapter). It makes me angry and indignant. If this author can break "the rules," why can't I? Why was I hamstrung into writing something that felt forced and soulless when CLEARLY doing what I wanted to do would not have been the authorial suicide I was led to believe? I may be flattering myself, but I do not think Abdullah is doing it significantly "better" than I was.

As far as I can tell, reading current YA isn't working for me. I hate it. I hate the process, I hate the stories, I hate the characters, I hate the conflicts. (At least part of this isn't YA's fault; my current state of mind is partly to blame.) I hate that current YA feels different from the YA I knew and loved as a kid. What's changed? Is it really me, or are "kids these days" wanting something different than what I grew up reading?

I decided that maybe it would be better to reread some YA that I loved as a teenager. I Googled "YA fantasy books 2007–2014" and started skimming some titles. I remembered a lot of them. And you know what feeling welled up in me as I read probably 80% the titles I recognized?

Disdain.

WHAT?!

YA fantasy was my drug of CHOICE back in the day. YA fantasy is THE ONLY type of story I have ever wanted to write, or ever tried to write.

And yet, if memory is serving me as I scroll through titles, I disliked the majority of YA fantasy even as a young adult myself (looking at you, Wicked Lovely, Divergent, Maximum Ride, Dark Angel, Across the Universe, etc.)

I tried to think of the YA fantasy books that I remember loving: Inkheart, the Mortal Instruments trilogy, the Twilight saga (yes, I would be happy to have a conversation about that with you, thanks for asking), the Hunger Games trilogy, the Inheritance cycle (ONLY the first two) the Uglies series, the Farsala trilogy.

But like...that's it. Those are IT. Those are the sum total of the YA fantasy books that evoke good feelings off the top of my head.

That...is not a lot of books. That doesn't feel like a wide enough sample for me to have branded myself as a lover of YA fantasy for MY ENTIRE LIFE.

What does this mean?!

I just glanced over at my bookshelves and saw non-YA fantasy titles that I loved as a teenager: Homeless Bird, Angel on the Square, Homecoming, The Thief Lord, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, On to Oregon. Very few of those conform to the "rules" I'm told I need to follow if I'm going to be successful as a YA writer. In fact, by today's standards, many of those probably wouldn't fit into the YA genre at all.

So I'm left with lots of overwhelming questions, in no particular order:

1) Did I actually love "YA fantasy" as a kid, or did I just like well-written books?

2) Are kids these days THAT fundamentally different from kids who were fourteen in 2008?

3) If I follow my gut/heart and write the way I want, will my story actually flop, or will it just appeal to a narrower slice of the demographic (which might be the same thing to publishers)?

I'm so confused. I'm confused about what made me like certain books as a teen, and what to do with all these modern rules and standards and exceptions that make a YA fantasy book marketable. If Chelsea Abdullah can splice loosely-related italicized flashbacks into the middle of chapters in The Stardust Thief (published 2022), why the hell can't I? And if Angel on the Square (published 2001) had a time skip of four years, can I really not have a one-year time skip in my book?

I know writing books is both an art and a science, but I'm having trouble knowing when to break the rules and when to keep them. When is it wise to be the artist, and when is it wise to the the scientist?

I also know that this is probably what all first-time aspiring authors go through. I know this is what good editors will help me navigate. I know life is full of calculated risks. I know there's no way to know what will work until I just do it.

But it's really frustrating and confusing. I can do hard things, but this isn't just a hard thing, it's a...I don't even know what it is. I think that's what makes it so hard. It's not like trying to do a maze in the dark, it's like walking around in the dark not knowing if it's a maze, or someone's house, or the middle of a forest, or a different planet, or if everyone else has night vision, or if you're actually dead or—

It's just a lot.

~Stephanie

Jocosity and Other Words

I had a life-changing moment this morning. Or really, I guess it started on Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, my boss and I were talking, and she mentioned that Shakespeare's vocabulary is estimated to have been about 29,000 words. I just fell down a rabbit hole of statistics concerning Shakespeare's and modern Americans' vocabularies, but long story short: Shakespeare puts us all to shame.

That's been bumming me out lately. I consider myself to be well-educated, and I LOVE words. However, I encounter words I don't know pretty often, and I just sort of move on. I can usually guess what they mean from context, or my ignorance doesn't affect me—that I can tell.

I've wanted to develop my working vocabulary, but I haven't known what to do. Do I just get a Word-a-Day calendar and hope something sticks?

As I read my most recent Agatha Christie (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), I decided I would make a note of words I didn't know. I'd look them up and record them in a Note on my phone. I'd think about them during the day and recite their definitions so I could keep them in my head.

One of the words I've collected is "jocosely: playfully." This morning when I was doing a writing assignment for work, I paused and tried to think of a word. "Jocosity" came to mind. I wondered if that was a real form of "jocosely," and when I looked it up, it was. It meant exactly what I thought it meant, and it worked in the sentence I was writing. (Don't worry; I was doing an exercise that had me mimicking Jane Austen's style, not writing for YA at large.)

My jaw dropped a little.

It's working.

I know this is a small, silly thing, but it filled me with a happy hopefulness I haven't felt in a while. It's always exciting and a little unbelievable when I manage to make objective progress on myself. It's like lifting heavier at the gym. You don't feel any stronger, but suddenly you just are.

New Words So Far :)
1) Stentorian: strong, powerful
2) Unctuous: excessively flattering
3) Chary: cautiously or suspiciously reluctant
4) Jocosely: playfully
5) Numinous: having a strong spiritual quality

~Stephanie

On My Third First Reading

I may have read The Great Gatsby more than three times, but I remember three times distinctly. Each time, it felt like I was reading a slightly different book, when the truth is that it was just a slightly different person reading it.

The first time I read The Great Gatsby was in ninth grade when I was fourteen. It was the most breathtakingly beautiful book I had ever read. Gatsby himself was like something from a heavenly dream. The fact that there was adultery didn't stand out in my memory.

The second time I read The Great Gatsby was the fall of 2013. I was nineteen and doing very badly. I read a lot of the book on a good friend's suspicious couch (I think it had been taken from the road side) next to someone I'm glad I'm not close to anymore. I remember feeling, as Daisy describes herself, "pretty cynical about everything." What stuck out to me was how both beautiful and tainted everything about the book was, and how much that felt like life. (I hadn't even read The Beautiful and the Damned yet.)

I'm reading The Great Gatsby for at least the third time now. I'm twenty-seven. The book feels very, very different this time. It is still breathtakingly beautiful—I have to read some sentences two or three times just to enjoy them—but it's also...disappointing. It feels like disappointment. This is not a criticism of Fitzgerald; it's a praise.

This time, Jay Gatsby doesn't feel invincible and perfect the way I remember him from my two earlier readings. He feels insecure. He feels like a man who could be great—and isn't quite. For the first time I'm seeing that the title might be tongue in cheek, sarcastic.

Nick hits different in general too. I'm noticing more of his sarcasm and disapproval, even though he says he's "inclined to reserve all judgements." Is he? Should he be? Should we be? Should we be inclined to reserve ALL judgements, or are some things unwise, unkind, unacceptable, regardless of the advantages an actor might be lacking?

I'm not sure what I thought the message of The Great Gatsby was before. I think I understood that it was about being versus seeming, the hollowness of wealth, the carelessness of some people, but I don't know that I felt the message before. The book felt magical and full. This time, I can sense the ominous hollowness that Fitzgerald so artfully inserted between every letter.

I can't wait for my thirty-five-year-old self to read this book.

~Stephanie

P.S. I can't recommend this book more. The 2013 movie version is also one of my favorite movie adaptations of a book ever.

The Fire Fairy Story

It came on rather suddenly.

I was sitting on the couch, reading Mistborn (for the first time, and I'm still not done, and if you spoil anything about it for me, I will seriously not be your friend anymore), and it hit me, the same way it always used to:

I had to write.

I've said this other places before, but writing inspiration feels kind of like wetting your pants: sudden, urgent, and embarrassing, because I stop being able to human until I either 1) write, or 2) lose the inspiration, which is sad.

Luckily, when the inspiration hit, I was at home with Gabe, and he is excellent at not butting in on things. I got up, got my laptop, and started writing The Fire Fairy Story.

What is The Fire Fairy Story?
The Short Answer:
A story based on my friends and I that I started writing when I was twelve.

The Longer Answer:
It was July 6, 2006. Jesse had a sleepover birthday party and invited me, my sister Sarah, Ellie, a girl named Zoie, and a girl named H...Hailey? Haley? Hayley? I don't know how to spell it, but you get the idea.

We were all AVID imaginers and pretenders. Almost all we did when we got together was play pretend, whether that was with dollhouse or our actual bodies, most often the latter. This birthday party was no different.

I believe it started with the sparklers. As we played with them in Jesse's front yard, we began play fighting with them.

"When I say 'duck,' you duck, okay?"

"Okay."

*dance around, wave sparkler—*

"DUCK!"

*playmate ducks dramatically as the yeller whips her sparkler over the space previously occupied by the ducker*

Pretty soon, play fighting with sparklers led to being creatures who could produce fireballs with their hands. The creatures were fire fairies.

Four of us were also dancers, and really enjoyed playing—try not to judge us too hard—slaves, orphans, and spies. Without any effort at all, The Fire Fairy Story, which incorporated all of those elements, was born.

We served an evil Fire Lord. We were forced to dance for him. Jesse's older brother became a character who was the Fire Lord's most trusted spy.

We each came up with a fire fairy name for ourselves. Mine was Ember. (A dance class friend, Karlye, is the one who introduced me to "Ember" as a potential name.)

We needed a name for the fire fairies' city. We asked Jesse's mom what the French word for "fire" was. She said she wasn't sure, but that it might be furier (FYOR-ee-air). It turns out it's not; it's feu (fooh, kind of with the "oo" in "cook"), but the city is named Furier to this day.

I had a mood ring from The Greensboro Science Center gift shop that I wore ALL THE TIME. From this piece of jewelry came the idea of fire fairy eyes: they change color with the fairy's mood.

I started penning (well, penciling, with an orange mechanical pencil that had a blue eraser) The Fire Fairy Story, with TONS of help from these girls. Evenings, get-togethers, phone calls, any available moment.

I finished the story one night when I was the only kid who had tagged along with her parents to church band practice. I sat in the row of rough church chairs, feet on the back of the chair in front of me, and madly wrote the last scene. My eyes widened.

It was the first—and still only—story I'd ever finished.

What's Happened Since:
For the four best friends (me, Sarah, Ellie, Jesse), The FF Story became part of our identity. We know the world of Jeolotoe and its vocabulary in a way that can only take root in children.

October 2006: Sarah, Ellie, Jesse, and I fashioned fire fairy costumes out of Goodwill findings and poster-board wings and went as fire fairies to a fall festival.

2006–2007: I wrote three or four sequels/books of the series.

April 2007: My family went to Disney World for the first time and I got Ember engraved in a leather bracelet that I wore for years.

2008ish: My youth group did a series on making your dreams happen, so I slowly typed up The Fire Fairy Story (it ended up being maybe 60 pages) and gave it to a friend's mom who was in publishing. All she would say was that "it was very good," though in a tone that told me it was absolutely not and I had a long road ahead of me.

2009–2010: I left the story largely alone, though periodically rewrote it, reread it, started it again, changed things.

October 2011: We had a Fire Fairy Reunion (pictured below). We did another Goodwill trip for costumes and had a sleepover where we choreographed a dance, reminisced, and read over parts of the story (some in notebooks, some in thick, typed stacks held together with alligator clips).

November 2011: I "won" NaNoWriMo (wrote 50,000 words in the month of November) with The Fire Fairy Story.

2012–2019: I kept rewriting the story, rereading it, starting it again, changing things. There are probably 12–15 versions of Book 1 floating around in various notebooks, on various hard drives. This story will not leave me alone.

Today:
It sounds ridiculous, but I don't know how to explain the level of influence The FF Story has had on my life. I don't want to speak for the others, but my identity is inextricably bound to this story. When I posted my wedding photos just three years ago on another blog, I captioned the ones of Ellie and Jesse with "childhood best friend and fire fairy."

Ember isn't "me," but she's a deep part of me. If someone yelled "Ember!" across the room, I would turn. She's the bolder, braver, brasher part of me—and the me I might have stopped at if it weren't for Jesus and glowing up. (Recently took the Enneagram test for her, and she's an Eight too and that makes so much sense given her history.)

The Fire Fairy Story has never left me alone. For some reason, I guess I need to write this story.

So, I'm at it again*. I wrote 20k words in two weeks a little while ago. Then I read it over and was mildly appalled. It's not good. I'm not being down on myself, it's genuinely not there yet. But instead of feeling discouraged like I usually do, I'm feeling okay. So I only keep about 2,000 words of what I just wrote. (There are probably 200k words of the story I've written over the years that I'm not going to use.) If God wants me to write this story, it'll get written. If he doesn't, then I don't want to write it anyway.

Fun Facts For Ya:
A new neighborhood that my family eventually moved into matched the map of the world of Jeolotoe with forests, bodies of water, and appropriate houses/buildings in the exact places as the map drawn in my little red notebook of years before.

Two of the fire fairies' unconventional and unpredictable love stories have happened exactly as written in the story.

~Stephanie

* again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again.

Wife After God

At the recommendation of a good friend, I bought a devotional called Wife After God: Drawing Closer to God & Your Husband.

Cheesy title? Yes.

Cheesy book? Yes and no. Mostly no (and that's honest and coming from a chronically--hey, I just noticed the Greek etymology of kronos, meaning "time"--sarcastic individual)

I'm only halfway through,* but I feel like I'm getting a lot out of it.

First of all, I really like the way the chapters are set up. Each one contains Bible verses or short passages to read, a one- to two-page devotional, a suggested prayer, a challenge, and three insightful questions to ask yourself. The whole thing takes maybe fifteen minutes to complete.

However, right off the bat, the Enemy tried to take me out in two ways: 1) he accentuated the cheese factor, and 2) he highlighted every grammar mistake and typo the author made.

(Okay, the second one might've been mostly me. I'm assuaging it by allowing myself to mark up the book in pen. I may respectfully submit my suggested edits to the author when I'm done so that the errors don't get in the way of the content for other jerks like me.)

The Enemy almost won. But God checked me with a lesson I've been handed a thousand times: things are what you make them.

Is there cheese in a scripted prayer? Sure. Is there an element of trite-ness in some of the classic anecdotes? Yeah. Is there cringiness in a chapter on submission? You'd think so, but actually I thought the author handled that chapter particularly well.

But what if I decided to be bigger than that all that? What if I decided to get everything I could out of each chapter, to work with it instead of against it? I'm not "cool" because I'm incapable of learning from something that isn't my style. I'd actually be pretty shallow and unsophisticated.

(Honestly that rant was kind of a tangent, because the book ISN'T EVEN CHEESY, I just wanted to point out a way that the Enemy fought hard to deter me.)

I've been doing a Wife After God devotion almost every morning as I eat my breakfast and drink my tea. I read the prayer through once to get familiar with it, then I read it aloud and try to mean the words as I say them. If I get to a question that has an easy, "Sunday school answer," I will intentionally STOP and think harder, because clearly there's something present that Satan wants me to miss.

I don't know if I'm a better wife now than I was fifteen days ago, but I do feel more aware of my marriage and my interactions with Gabe. When I feel a sharp tone about to come out, I think I'm aware of it a split second earlier than I was, and sometimes I can temper it before it comes tearing out of my mouth. I'm trying to pass everything I say, think, and do through the filters of Respect Your Husband, How Can I Show Love in This Moment, and Is Maybe This Something I Can Just Let Go (#AdventuresInNotBeingPettyAF).

Please don't mistake my efforts for claiming success. I am not naturally a kind or patient person, and I'm not going to become one over night. But even just creating those three filters has awakened a new awareness in me. It can't be hurting.

Favorite Chapters So Far
"Day 4: Your Spouse is a Gift" - Such a lovely, fun, inspiring perspective! The challenge was to think of your husband as a gift and hug him the next time you saw him. I actually did "Day 4" while at my parents' house, sans Gabe, a few days before Sarah's wedding. When I finally saw him at the wedding rehearsal, I remembered the Challenge and felt such joy. He really is a gift to me :)

"Day 13: Coated in Pride" - I need all the lessons on pride that I can possibly get, and I know it and want to work on it. I did "Day 13" while we were on our anniversary trip, and tried to make an effort to let us do things Gabe's ways that day (and since, of course ;)). My ways are not the only ways. I do not always know best. And anyone who knows Gabe knows that he's incredibly considerate and humble. I don't need to fight to have my perspectives and preferences considered. It's my pride that tells me I do.

"Day 16: Submissiveness" - This chapter is handled so beautifully. It highlights the hierarchy that God has ordained, but reminds us that we submit--men and women alike--because Jesus submitted to God the Father. Submission is not weakness. It's peace, freedom, and strength.

I'm thinking that maybe I'll go through this devotional once a year and see what different insights and approaches I stumble upon as our marriage grows and changes.

Definitely would recommend to Christian wives.

~Stephanie

* I write these in advance, so I am actually done with the book now.