Don't get me wrong, I know we are very blessed to have the furniture we do considering it hasn't put us in debt and the pieces are functional. Sometimes I just get fits of aesthetic dissatisfaction that make me long for a day when we have a home with matching furniture tastefully arranged in relation to the available space. I suppose it's a good thing for me that Thanksgiving is next week so I can force myself to remember all the important things I have in my life and resist the urge to go into unnecessary debt in order to obtain an ideal that isn't important.
This is how I've been feeling in the mornings:
In all seriousness, though, our heater hardly ever turns on and it is still roasting in our apartment by the end of the day. Our downstairs neighbors must have their heat cranked and they're more than welcome to keep paying for our heat in my opinion.
It can still be more of a struggle to get out of bed in the winter so I bribed myself with 20 minutes at a library book sale before work to get up yesterday. Anyone who has ever been to such an event knows that there is very little organization involved so I was pretty pleased to snag a Calvin and Hobbes that we didn't have yet as well as the third book in the Hollow Kingdom trilogy. I even managed to enjoy the irony that that's now the one book I own of the three and it is my least favorite. Maybe I can convince Tim to buy the first and second for me for Christmas... I hate having an incomplete set.
I have long been aware of the high-brow/low-brow line drawn between literary fiction and genre fiction. It's an argument I completely disagree with the critics on and generally stay out of because the level of sheer snobbery that can come into those conversations is stifling. I'm comfortable with writing what I like and ignoring whether or not someone is going to think it's ground-breaking but I was recently made aware of an article that attacks [yes, I say attacks] Mormon writers specifically and claims that we as a group are incapable of writing "good" literature because we tend to write genre fiction. I was torn between disbelief and indignant anger by the end of the article for so many reasons that I can't coherently list. However, a friend wrote a wonderful post in response to this article that articulates my feelings almost exactly. You can read it, and get a link to the original article, here. I highly recommend it. The current trend of placing post-modern, literary fiction at the top of the writing totem pole isn't permanent, as none of the hierarchies before it have been permanent and I for one cannot wait until people figure out that genre fiction, as well as Mormon writers, have a lot more depth to offer than they're being credited for right now.
It frustrates me to think about the number of people who may never have tried to follow their writing dreams because someone told them they weren't "qualified" to be a writer. The idea that you have to have had an unhappy childhood in order to convey a true sense of pain, loss, suffering, and struggle as a writer is completely preposterous. The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that you don't have to have experienced everything your characters do yourself. If you did, imagination would be useless and unnecessary and it would be a sadder world for that. A true writer is not necessarily someone who has been abused and mistreated and embittered, but a person who has the capability of taking the emotions they have felt and building on them, extrapolating them out into different situations and contexts that they've never lived but are made to feel real because they are founded in real emotion. Everyone has felt the range of human emotions, we are all able to convey sadness and joy. Don't let anyone tell you differently.
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