Links and a mood check

Links, again.

• Roger Ebert’s memoir piece about his father touched me. I like when people write about families.
• Hilarious sketch about a glaring plot hole in Lord of the Rings, a plot hole that my husband and I have been kvetching over for years.
• Another sketch about that same plot hole in Lord of the Rings. Even more irreverent.
• An Open Letter to the Nurse Who Gave Me an Enema Bottle and Told Me To Do It Myself While I was High on Morphine by Kelly Oxford. I think the title explains itself.
• tshirts for writers. I especially like, “I’m writing you into my next novel. Your character will meet a painful, violent death. Have a nice day.”
• Andrew Whitacre told me about these apple cider donuts, lauded as amazing. I want. I could feed an entire novel off of these and reward myself a donut for everytime I finish, or finish revising, a chapter.
• New Yorker interview with Junot Díaz on writing / Yunior / “The Pura Principle”. I love Junot.
• Update 3/30: One of my favorite literary blogs, Editorial Ass, got its 500,000th hit today.

Facing the novel is difficult. It’s so difficult that I will often do a million other difficult and heartbreaking things before I’ll face my novel. Like teach. Being a teacher is teaching me that not everyone is cut out for academics, and not everyone will even have an ounce of love for the thing I love (reading and writing), and not everyone can be saved, but it’s my job to inspire anyway. Sometimes no one is following me because they don’t want to go where I’m going, so I have to go back and fetch them and usher them forward. Sometimes someone will say “I quit” and that’s possibly the worst feeling for both them and for me, and I will want to quit, too. But I have to continue to inspire.

Facing the novel is difficult. But I love it anyway. Making headway on my revision–very very slow headway. But making headway.