A Year to Improve, Day 1

This woman, Karen Cheng, learned to dance in a year. When I watched the time lapse video, she looked okay to me at the beginning, but she really does look like a pro at the end.

When you go to her website, it's not all about dancing. It is about achieving goals. She talks about setting milestones and reaching them. She talks about determination and practice. 

So it got me thinking: what would I like to learn or work to improve in a year? 

Dance? What kind? Aaron and I have talked about going to ballroom dancing classes. I would also love to learn hip hop. 

Musical instrument? I've always wanted to play the cello. But I would have to buy, or somehow get daily access to a cello. 

I'd like to work on creative writing. I used to write stories upon stories when I was younger, but at some point I decided I wasn't a creative writer and it was silly to keep doing it. Maybe I decided that, because making a living as a writer was unlikely, I had to stop all together? I don't know; I don't remember. But I'd like to try again. 

I like the idea of setting a goal to work on something, one thing I want to be better at, for an entire year. While I've always been a person who enjoys schedules, routines, and color-coded planners using different pens for work, fun, and whatever else, I've never been great at doing something every day, no matter what.

So I want to do it. I want to write every day. Every day. Maybe one day will be a paragraph about something I saw or a blog post. Maybe one day will be a great sentence or phrase that came to me, and another day will be an outline for a story. 

I don't have one concrete project in my head that I want to work on (other than my vague, naive dream of writing a YA novel). So for now, I will just write. Fiction, nonfiction, whatever. Just work on my writing skills and my discipline, and commit to working on every single day. I'd like, by the end of year, to have started (or be ready to start) a concrete project, to have a goal for year 2.

And my secondary goal is to read every day, something for pleasure. An article, a chapter in a book, a blog post--but I'm going to make sure I'm reading for fun outside of work a little bit every day. As Stephen King said (and has since been quoted a million times), 

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write."

Ready to start!

When I started this post, I was planning to write, "and I'll start this sometime in August after I've moved to Seattle and gotten settled." But isn't the whole point of this to commit and start immediately? Isn't the point to decide that you can find the time, that it's worth making the time, no matter how busy you are? So scratch my original plan. Today is day 1. July 20, 2013. I am going to write every day. And I'm going to tell people (obviously, this is the internet...) so that I'm held accountable. 

Today is day 1.

My Obsession with Young Adult Fiction

I love young adult fiction, I really do. I have always loved Harry Potter. (Does it count as young adult fiction? I mean, did the category even really exist when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was published?) I read, and did not love, all 4 Twilight books, and I have a bit of an obsession with The Hunger Games.

Two years ago, when my boss's wife brought us all lunch during a busy day, we were talking about books. I admitted to having stayed up very late the night before finishing Mockingjay. And then I explained that it was a YA book in a series about kids fighting to the death. They all looked at me with blank faces. I couldn't shake the feeling that my boss, a publisher and an author himself, was judging me for reading something so childish.

But lately, YA is getting more recognition as a genre, and it's less of a childish thing we old adults (ha! I called myself an adult) should be embarrassed by. Maybe my boss would still find these books silly, but plenty of people don't.

And thanks to Bitch magazine and its accompanying blogs, I've been discovering so many more YA books! Actually, I think I discovered The Hunger Games thanks to a Bitch article comparing the strong and independent Katniss Everdeen to the whining, lackluster Kristin Stewart, I mean, Bella Swan. Victoria Law has been writing a guest blog series for the Bitch site, Girls of Color in Dystopia, exploring YA books dealing with dystopic visions of the future. More mainstream books, like The Hunger Games, tend to be pretty much whitewashed (except for Rue, and I'm still recovering from her death); Law seeks out the books with a wider range of characters and experiences.

So far, I've read one and a half books that she discussed. I read, and loved, Cinder, a retelling of Cinderella in the future with cyborgs, alien threats, and, of course, handsome young princes. (Princes, apparently, will be sticking around, even as governments rise and fall and go to war and destroy each other. Princes are the cockroaches of fictionalized dystopic worlds.) I'm currently reading, and loving, Ash, another Cinderella re-telling, this one with a lesbian twist.

I was an English major and sometimes I do feel a little embarrassed for reading books with a target audience of 15-year-olds. Shouldn't I be reading literary novels? Shouldn't I be tackling that Gloria Steinem book like there's no tomorrow? Yes and no. I should, and do, read National Book Award-winning novels like Salvage the Bones (which I highly recommend) and I do read feminist nonfiction whenever I can. But since I've been out of college and working every day with no summer break like an old adult, I've started to understand why my mom has been reading trashy romance novels for so long, and why I'm craving YA books more often.

They're easy. They sweep you up in a story that you can move through quickly. They give you the good story and the drama with simpler language. And as YA is becoming more legit, the books are getting better. Recently, I had a very heated (and I do mean heated) debate about the merits of young adult fiction, specifically Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games. Some people thought it was ridiculous to count these books as literature, or even as legitimate. Some thought there was no purpose to books with "literary merit". (Some people also never explained how they might define "literary merit".)

The truth is, I don't care if these books qualify as literature. How do you qualify anyway? There are plenty of books, young adult or not, that are terrible, and plenty that are great. The fact that anyone could try to debate the quality of Harry Potter and Twilight in the same conversation is ridiculous: one is a brilliant series with a vast, detailed world, and one is...not. But The Hunger Games brings so many provocative topics to the young reader: government censorship and control, relationships, violence as entertainment. Cinder shows them the problems with discrimination and Ash asks them to think more broadly about sexuality. How is a book that gets more kids and teens to think and form opinions a bad thing? Why don't teens deserve that opportunity?

YA novels allow readers to explore big ideas in language they understand. They can get non-readers interested in reading. They can open the door to higher brow books, or to poetry, or to literary non-fiction. And they provide anyone and everyone with a story to get swept up in after a long day at work.

That's enough for me.