Category: Mormons and SpecFic

25 Questions Asked Upon Returning to Academic Writing After 13 Years

  1. What was the name of that awesome program I used to use to manage my research? Ah, there it is.
  2. Wait, now, what was that database that all the literary papers are in? EBSCO? No, JSTOR, that’s it.
  3. Woah, there are three whole journals basically devoted to CS Lewis? (Only a bit of an exaggeration.)
  4. Research is so fun! Why didn’t I go to grad school?
  5. Now how do I get access to these papers without membership in a university library? Oh, wow, this is way easier than it was in 2008.
  6. Why is the only academic thing I can find on Brandon Sanderson an undergraduate thesis? And I can’t access it. Oh well.
  7. Hmm, on reading these papers, none of this actually seems to be useful. Am I missing something?
  8. Should I buy these academic books on fantasy? What am I saying? Yes. The answer to buying books is always yes.
  9. How do I know when to stop researching and just starting writing? Maybe now?
  10. Uh, I don’t know how to start this. I guess, what better place to start than the middle?
  11. Actually, I need more sources to write this part. What if we move on to this later part?
  12. Now, how do I cite scripture in MLA?
  13. Writing is so awesome! Who’s the best writer ever?
  14. Why did I think starting in the middle was a good idea? Now I have two disconnected pieces.
  15. Why is this so hard? I remember being good at this once upon a time.
  16. Why do the Kindle versions of all the other books in this series have page numbers but this one doesn’t? I really don’t like having to cite chapter numbers for only this volume.
  17. What’s a better way to say “In this paper, I will show . . .”?
  18. Wait, do you italicize series titles in MLA?
  19. Is it ethical to just pull this quote from someone else’s paper and quote it as if I actually looked it up myself? Probably not. I’ll just buy the book. Mostly likely will use it again anyway.
  20. Who on my friend list do I trust to help me fix this paper?
  21. Am I a jerky friend for not asking sooner? It’s due in three days . . . .
  22. Oh my gosh, my friend is a genius. Why didn’t I see that?
  23. Should I save this paragraph somewhere before cutting it?
  24. Are there any more asterisks I haven’t replaced yet? Oh, there’s one.
  25. Okay, am I ready for this? Submit!

Springtime and Change

So, a lot has changed since my last post in September. To sum up:

sakura tree
Photo by Oleg Magni on Pexels.com
  • My husband and I moved our family from Washington to Utah! My husband’s job as a programmer went permanently remote, so as of January 2021, we can live anywhere in the US. I have always wanted to move back to my home state of Utah, and this seemed doubly important after the pandemic cut us off from visiting family. So we sold our home in Bellevue and are now under contract to buy a home in Highland, UT. It’s been a wild ride, but we’re in the home stretch and should be settled in our new place this summer.
  • Homeschooling is wonderful and horrible and ending soon. Being able to school the kids anywhere was a real blessing during our move but has also been an absolute drain on my creative energy. I’ve loved teaching about science and literature, but all the planning has really kept me from doing much else. The good news is: only 10 or weeks to go. I’m excited to have a break for the summer and send the kids back to public school in the fall.
  • I’ve decided to be more open about my interest in Mormon literature on this blog. At first, I was hesitant to include my religion in this blog at all. As someone once told McKay Coppins, “Mormons have no cultural cachet.” The religious right hates us because we’re not mainline Christians, the left sees us as bigoted conservatives. Obviously exceptions exist, but to admit you’re Mormon and to talk about Mormon books is to severely limit your audience in both directions. Even other Mormons often aren’t interested in Mormon lit. It would be so much easier to just focus on mainstream works. But the intersection of religion, and particularly Mormonism, and speculative fiction is kind of a big thing for me. I’ve had an abstract accepted for the SFRA Review special issue on Mormons and SF, and I haven’t been this excited to write something in a long time. I’m going to have to embrace this niche and hope someone appreciates it as much as I do.

I hope to come back to writing more frequently on this blog as my homeschool workload wraps up and the move finishes, so watch this space for more lit crit and writing process in action!

Reading Hard Books: Tips for Getting through Tough Prose

I’m currently reading two books that I’m struggling with. The first is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I was required to read The Grapes of Wrath back in high school; didn’t like it. It was slow and dusty and dry. Still the creepiest ending of all time. Never thought I’d pick up another book by him, but now a book club that I’m participating in with some college friends is reading for the next two months, so here I am reading Steinbeck again. I expected it to be a slog, and it is, but it’s a classic and it’s an experience to put back on my English major hat.

The other book is A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. I hadn’t expected this to be a slog, I have positive memories of the previous book, A Fire Upon the Deep, but now that I’m deep into this second one, I’m remembering that book was also a little dense. Something about Vinge’s writing style makes getting through the words hard, even though I like what’s going on. I think it’s maybe the world building style he has? I think he has an allergy to info dumps and therefore I feel very lost a lot of the time. Sometimes I’m five or ten minutes into a chapter before I figure out that we’ve switched characters and I don’t know where we are. Also, it turns out to be not a sequel but a prequel about one specific character, so I’m not getting more wolf aliens, which is a bummer.

Giving up on books that aren’t right for you (right now, or even ever) is a totally okay thing to do. I’ve been getting better at this. But what do you do when you have a book you really want to read but you’re struggling to make it through the words? I really want to finish both these books, so I’ve been working on ideas. A couple of tips I’m using:

* Discuss it with other people. The book club that’s reading East of Eden had a midway check-in last week. (I was only 1/3 in, but whatever.) I was so glad to find that there were other people in the group struggling with the book. We were able to pin down a few things that make it hard to read (lots of telling, not showing; difficult to believe/like characters), which is very cathartic. But we also talked about why we still wanted to keep going in spite of that. Did you know that East of Eden sold 50,000 copies last year? (How many of those were people assigned to read it? Not clear.) We talked about the symbolism behind the characters we struggled with, which made them a lot easier to understand. I left feeling encouraged to continue with the book. 

* If you don’t have someone to read it with in real life, try looking up critical conversations about the book. Even just reading the Wikipedia article about East of Eden helped me know what a big influence this book really has been on our culture and what Steinbeck was trying to accomplish. Some books might not be for you, but are important enough influences that you want to struggle through them anyway. Doing some research can help you decide whether continuing is worth it, and also help you know what to look for when you’re reading, which can make it more interesting.

* Play the percentages game. This is a trick I learned from long distance running. One of the main preoccupations that keeps me going on a 12 mile long slog is figuring out exactly how much distance I have left. I am constantly calculating what fraction of the way there I am, or exactly how much longer I have. Likewise, both these books are due back at the library soon, so I’ve calculated what percentage of the book I need to read each day to finish on time. I don’t always meet my reading goal for the day, but seeing that percentage on my Kindle or the hours on my audiobook tick slowly down gives me some of the satisfaction that I am not currently getting from the plot line.

Do you push through books that you don’t enjoy reading? Or do you just put them down? Theoretically, I’m in favor of reading difficult books, but I have a hard time actually doing it, especially when the difficulty is in the prose not the plot.

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In other news, yesterday I saw this call for papers on Mormonism and Science Fiction on Facebook and got super excited. I got even more excited when I scrolled through the resources and found my recent series of blog posts listed on there with Michael Colling’s stuff that I read back in college when I wrote the initial paper. This is what it looks like when the internet works! You send stuff out into the void on the tiny niche of things you love, and then you discover that there are other people out there who are interested in this thing. Anyway, I’m really excited to start developing some ideas for this call. In fact, I don’t know how I’m going to narrow down my ideas. (Now my problem is figuring out how I’m going to get back into the BYU library while I’m down there, since there’s a lot of this stuff that isn’t available online.)

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Also, is anyone else devastated that the original creators have left the Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action remake on Netflix? I just can’t imagine this going anywhere good, and Avatar deserves better. I’m also dying of curiosity to find out what the disagreement was about. Ah well.