Too Many Books

I am now I journalist! I signed up with Examiner.com  and I have already published two articles. I am the "Louisville New Moms Examiner" and I get to write about whatever I choose, so long as it's pertinent to my local audience. Won't you take a look at what I've written. (Because, you know, I get paidspice for pageviews/ length of time you stay on the page/ etc.) Here's a link to my first article. And my second. Won't you support my Day Care Fund by reading one or both?! Also, if you are interested in becoming an examiner in your town... it's easy to apply! The cool thing is that the possibilities are pretty much endless. You could be a Book Exmainer, a Creative Writing Examiner, a Restaurants Examiner, a Cupcake Examiner (I'm talking to you, Sierra Godfrey !) or a Pocket Link Examiner. (Okay, maybe you couldn't be a Pocket Link Examiner. Though, if you did, I would totes read your work.) It's kind of like blogging, except...

In the 1999 article, Virtual Reality: The Perils of Seeking a Novelist's Facts in Her Fiction, Sue Miller -- one of my favorite authors -- discusses her perpetual annoyance with those who ask to what degree her novels are autobiographical. It's bothersome, she believes, because it is "a kind of potential diminishment" of her work, and implies that it is "possibly no more than the stringing together of episodes lifted directly from my life, or from the lives of fascinating characters I have known." Then, she has this to say: For the true writer, though, however close the events may be to his life, there is some distance, some remove, that allows for the shaping of the work. The shaping, after all, is what it's all about. Every reader can sense the difference between a writer who embodies meaning through the events he describes and the writer who seems simply mired in those events. It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape the tyra...