Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

I get a few people emailing me every year to ask me how to become a comics editor. They seem to think that it’s a line of work that is “fun” or “rewarding” or “cool,” and they want in on the glorious words-and-pictures life. They also seem to think that there’s some secret to getting a comics job that is different from getting any other kind of job. But there’s not. If you want to be a comics editor you:

• Have skills that apply to that line of work, like experience reading comics, good instincts for storytelling, a good grasp on spelling and grammar, experience with graphics software, and the ability not to equate your self-worth with your salary.
• Send your resume to comics publishers.

That’s it.

You definitely don’t write to comics editors and ask for advice, get some, and then never even bother to say “thank you.” Because that shit’s just rude. This also applies if you ask for advice about an MFA program.

For the record, here’s my advice for getting into an MFA program:

• Write well. You get an MFA to write work on writing better.
• Submit an application to an MFA program. Don’t tell the professors on the acceptance committee, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer and this will teach me how” in your statement of purpose. Show them what kind of writer you are and why you will be an asset to the program, not just how the program will help you.

That’s it. I have no further words of wisdom.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been going through my grad school notes, deciding what to keep and what to dispose of. On many of my notes are little sketches of scenes in class that I would write when something struck me as interesting, absurd, or annoying. Here’s one I just found, written in November 2004 in my 18th-Century British Literature seminar:

So the man in my class, a middle-aged man with thinning hair who wears striped chambray shirts, jeans and brown shoes, says he is quitting the program because a company has made him an offer to take them public — an offer “too good to refuse,” he says, using those words. Others in the class are alarmed, trying to get him to consider continuing while he takes the company public, or putting off the IPO until the semester’s over.

“Obviously,” he says, the pomposity just before the surface, “none of you have taken a company public.” HE goes on — it is a task that consumes one’s life, he says. “You eat, sleep, and shit it,” he says.

And, my god, I try to shift my mind around to try to fathom this. What would make me quit the program? What is that important to me? Money? Surely not.

That last line makes me laugh. If money is important to you, you really don’t have much business getting an MFA in creative writing! It’s not a degree that you earn back in money. It’s one that gives you returns in experience and community — and that is only going to be valuable to you if other things are not more valuable.

I wonder what happened to that man. I don’t remember him very much at all now.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

I’m fascinated by the old “countries separated by a common language” aspect of British and American culture, the way we regard each other’s accents and usage. I admit I am fairly appalled every time I see or hear the British usage “different to.” That preposition doesn’t make any sense!

One activity I find fun (and this just goes to illustrate the roller coaster that is my life) is spotting the slip-ups when British authors write dialogue for American characters. These are a few very common ones (just as I am sure there are common slip-ups when Americans write dialogue for British characters, and I would love to hear about them) — when an American characters says:

• “meant to” instead of “supposed to”
• “garden” instead of “yard”
• “holiday” instead of “vacation”
• “clever” instead of “smart” in a context where the word is being used to mean “intelligent” (in the intellectual sense), not “quick-witted” or even “sneaky”
• “toilet” instead of “bathroom” or “rest room”

Most authors get that Americans don’t say “lift” for “elevator” or “boot” for “trunk,” that sort of thing, but I’ve seen these more than once and raised an eyebrow.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

Around this time of year, I always start wondering about the people who sell Christmas trees in lots, the folks who live in trailers or RVs from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. Sometimes there are families, sometimes just single young guys. Where do they come from? Do they mind not having their holidays at home?

I wonder about them, but not being someone who converses with strangers easily, I never ask them questions. I was talking about this with Brian, and lamenting that I’m not more like my mom or uncle, who can strike up conversations and find out all about people when they’re just waiting in line at the grocery store. I want to write a story about a Christmas tree salesperson, I said, but I’m too shy to find out about them.

Maybe, though, Brian said, that part of being a fiction writer — as opposed to a journalist — is not finding out too much about people you’re interested in. It creates preconceptions, when your mind should be free to invent. After all, a person selling Christmas trees can be like anybody. (Like Vincent van Rhyn, a Buddhist adventure traveler. Or Francis, a French-Canadian organic farmer who sells trees with his Chinese wife and Spanish friend.) You can just get the basics of their situation so your facts are straight, but the rest is up to you.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

I recently watched the BBC series Lost in Austen, about Amanda Price, a contemporary London woman in love with the world of Jane Austen, who discovers, as it happens, she has a magic door in her bathroom that opens into the world of Pride and Prejudice. She and Elizabeth Bennet switch places, and soon Amanda finds herself fouling up the plot of her favorite novel, as her unconventional appearance and manners intrigue or infuriate everyone around her.

It was a frothy, enjoyable syllabub of an entertainment, a bit of Mary Sue writing on the part of Guy Andrews, taken up with zest by the cast. It’s like the make-believe games I played when I was a kid, inserting myself into my favorite books or moments in history. (Like Amanda Price, my presence invariably altered the way things were supposed to go — I think I once was an assassin who took out Octavius before he became emperor, thus allowing Cleopatra and Antony to win the war with Rome.) What was fun about this series was the facility of the plot: Andrews needed his heroine to go to Jane Austen land.  A magic door to Jane Austen land appears in her bathroom. Why? Who knows. Turns out it doesn’t really matter.

It reminded me that I just need to push past the hardest part of plotting for me — getting the plot going. How will I set it all in motion? I ask myself. Will it be believable? I didn’t have qualms like that when I was nine years old and writing a story about my friends and I becoming invisible through the means of a batch of pancakes made from an improvised recipe. I can be a bit more sophisticated about it now, but what I need to remember is that the forward motion is what is important.

So now that I’ve finished the second revision of Sliver of Light, I’m going to try to plot out a graphic novel that has a premise that is a little unbelievable, just like Lost in Austen and the stories I wrote as a kid. I’ve been stuck, but I’ll get myself unstuck and just get on with it already.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

Recently, I went to a reading given by San Jose State University’s Center for Literary Arts of Early Days in the Range of Light: Encounters with Legendary Mountaineers by Daniel Arnold. Dan graduated the same semester I did from the university’s creative writing program, so I was really excited to see the success of my grad school colleague. I was fortunate enough to be able to read some of it in workshop, and I was certain then that Dan would be the first of the gang to get his book published.

Early Days is luminous, as the title implies it should be, but also down-to-earth and solid. It tells the stories of the men and women who were the first to climb the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, that formidable, often impassible, 400-mile-long mountain range between California’s Central Valley and East Basin. But Dan doesn’t just tell you the history — though he does do that, vividly, with original research that is a testament to his scholarship; he also walks in their shoes. He reproduced their climbs without any modern equipment — what he calls in the introduction “a mess of carabiners, cams, and pitons” –a testament to his physical and mental strength. He recounts his experiences sleeping in the open air without a tent and scaling cliffs without rope so vividly that I recall fearing for his safety, even as he was sitting across the room from me in workshop.

John Muir called the Sierra Nevada “the Range of Light,” and one of the chapters of Dan’s book that made a lasting impression on me when I read it in workshop was the one about that great naturalist’s scaling of Cathedral Peak. Other chapters are more dramatic, but this one in particular shows the deep meditation that can take place on a great spire of rock:

The landscape here is profoundly still. This is high alpine terrain and movement is limited to a few squawky Clark’s nutcrackers and butterflies and gusts of wind. The gnarled dwarf pines that dot the meadows and find toeholds on the mountainside do not change from decade to decade. In this stasis, time ebbs and stops. All around, bare crags and stony peaks cut the air, the raw stuff of the earth frozen in place after breaching the top layer. Though I can’t locate God, I do feel an absurd closeness to the stars, a sensation that comes from pressed up against a thinning and blueing sky.

Squeezed between the mountain and the stars, it is the age of this place that calls me back. The difference in age and size between the mountains and me is nearly infinite, a quantity that is hard to locate in cities. Here, the scale of the universe is more visual, more visceral, the human creature at its least significant. It is both invigorating and humiliating to ride the back of something so huge, to look up in a whirlpool so deep. Muir’s God lives here somewhere, in the cycles of rock and snow and woody growth that far predate man’s self-consciousness and need nothing from him for their continuation.

It was a fine reading, and I hope Dan’s book gets the attention it deserves. It’s a unique and important work.

On a less reverent note, here is a Kate Beaton comic strip about John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt:

Rosita Roca, late 1930s, originally uploaded by Jennifer dG.

My family is celebrating my Nana's ninetieth birthday next week. This is a picture of her in the late 1930s, before she married my grandfather.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

I was searching on Google for something regarding Little Kabul, the informal name for the part of Fremont, California where there are several Afghan businesses, and I came across this blog post from a Fremont resident, Tom Goette. Employing the popular “I’m not racist, but…” rhetorical device, the writer expresses his anxiety about “a bunch of transplanted cultures trying to co-exist with [mine] and relegating [mine] into utter obscurity” and attributes all kinds of bad behavior to people’s ethnicity.

I don’t know where he gets his assertion that “It was made clear in our most recent census that immigrants now comprise almost two-thirds of the citizens living in our town.” The census data indicates that in 2000 (which is the most recent census year that information is available for), 37% of the population is foreign-born, much lower than 67%, and it doesn’t mean that they are “recent immigrants.” My soon-to-be-90-year-old Nana is foreign-born, but she’s lived in California for upwards of 85 years. Whites are still the largest racial group, at nearly 48% of the population. This kind of hyperbole and inaccuracy is part of the writer’s obvious panic about “the Other” and resentment that his former position of privilege that he got merely by being white is no longer as privileged as it used to be.

The title of this post? “Hey, Andy, I Don’t Think We’re in Mayberry Anymore.”

Well, I have news for Goette: We never were in Mayberry. I have lived in Fremont all my life and my family has lived here since 1965. We are not recent immigrants, but we do look like some of the brown people in the pictures he peppers his blog post with. Growing up, I was friends with people of many ethnicities, some of whose first languages were not English. I think this enriched my life. Far from being threatened by people of many backgrounds, I think it they are part of the culture of the city.

I can see how people who can’t adjust are being left behind, though. Just today I was shopping at Trader Joe’s and an older man for some reason decided it was his place to tell a woman of South Asian ethnicity that she had too many vegetables in her shopping cart. (Yeah, what?) She countered that her salad was healthy.

“You need to eat a greasy cheeseburger,” the man told her. (At this point, this man was lucky he wasn’t talking to me because I would have told him that I didn’t think that my food was any of his business and I don’t see how it was his place to tell me what I need to eat, especially if he thought I need to eat unhealthily.)

“I’m a vegetarian,” the woman said pleasantly.

“I would starve in your house!” he answered. (Whereupon I hope I could have sputtered something like, “Well, it’s a good thing your manners have ensured I’ll never invite you over, sir!”)

The woman explained that her husband and children were not vegetarians, so she did cook meat for them — she just didn’t eat any herself. She was friendly and polite the whole time, when someone was putting his nose where it didn’t belong and criticizing her cultural practices. That’s the kind of cultural tension I most often see here, not the kind where the all-conquering brown people are rude, irrational, and destroying our very way of life. An older white man, bemused by the culture of his brown neighbor, tells a woman who very well may be vegetarian and, if not, very well may be a practicing Hindu, that she needs to eat a cheeseburger. It’s not the old man’s fault, really — he’s of a different generation and was most likely ignorant of what he was saying. (Though not minding your own business is a breach of manners no matter how old you are.) Who knows what kind of attitude were behind his statements.

But we don’t have to speculate what kind of attitude is behind Coette’s statements. It is plain to see. I just hope, for my city’s sake, that he’s right in a certain sense, and the kind of “culture” his blog post does represent is marginal and on the wane.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

When I went in to get the exciting four-month ultrasound, my doctor’s office forgot to tell me that I was supposed to fill my bladder to the point of bursting. That meant the fetus had plenty of room to maneuver when the technician was chasing it with the ultrasound wand, and maneuver it did — not so much that she couldn’t get images of everything necessary, but enough so that she couldn’t be certain what sex it is. I was disappointed at first, but now that I’m venturing into the wide world of baby-stuff-buying and gender-obsession, I’m glad I can tell people who might be buying me shower gifts, “We don’t know what it is for sure.”

Even before this baby is born, it is being assigned gender attributes. The first sign is in all the baby accoutrement — everything is already gender-divided, with boys’ stuff featuring trucks and footballs (and also adorable hedgehogs, which would be just as adorable on a girl, only the blue color palette signifies “boys only!”) and girls’ things almost invariably pink and dotted with flowers or lady bugs (I admit, if I knew I were having a girl, it would be lady bugs on everything — they were my favorite as a baby). Even the cut of the clothes is different, with newborn girls’ outfits featuring dress-like tops as opposed to the utilitarian lines of the boys’ clothes.  The second sign is how people judge the baby’s attributes, even before it is born. My mother, enchanted with the ultrasound pictures, declared that the fetus “looks like a boy.” Several people whom I’ve told that the baby moves a lot have said, “That’s because it’s a boy.”

There is a new book out called Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps — And What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot that points to several studies that perceived differences in girls and boys can lead to behavior on the part of parents and caretakers that lead to actual differences. An article at Newsweek writes about it:

…scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the “boys” (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the “girls” (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter’s physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture.

Who knows, at one time and in some societies there might have been a benefit to encouraging strong gender differences — perhaps it makes division of labor more straightforward and, thus, more efficient, for example. However, I see no reason to encourage such things in our society. When two-incomes are a necessity, when individualism and self-expression is valued, this means less parity and more individual frustration. But, most importantly, when exaggerated gender roles seem to play a role in sexism and violence against women, emphasizing the separation and differences between male and female seems downright irresponsible.

–

In my own gendered-interest world (oh, the irony — I enjoy being a girl!), I have to record that maternity jeans suck. Unless you want to dole out more than $100 for something you will wear for only a few months, the choices are limited — and frumpy. It’s like the clothing industry wants to force young women into mom jeans. I found a pair of light gray Liz Lange skinny jeans at Target, but their skinniness is not sufficient for me and when I was trying to stuff them into my boots this morning, I had to… yes, peg my pants. It was like being in sixth grade again! It’s like riding a bicycle, though. It comes back to you.

The boots, however, have three inch wedge heels, which is an inch higher than the pregnancy police would have you wear. I thought I would be defiant, but soon found that an altered center of gravity makes rules like that kind of reasonable. Tottering is not chic. So I did what I had to: I went and bought a new pair of boots. They are knee-high equestrian-style boots, so I can pretend to be a pregnant horsewoman, I guess. (I realized today that storytelling is essential when I buy boots. My wedge-heeled boots are for science fiction space adventures and my slouchy buckled boots are for swashbuckling on the the high seas.)

I just ordered a pair of skinny black maternity jeans from the Gap.  We’ll see how those work out.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

I am reading When the Elephants Dance by Tess Uriza Holthe, a novel set in the Japanese-occupied Philippines during World War II. I was interested in it when it came out, but I heard an interview with Holthe in which she describe One Hundred Years of Solitude as “boring” and it soured me on her. (Yes, I am irrational sometimes.) However, my uncle lent me the book, so I decided to put my silliness aside and read it.

I am enjoying the book, but aspects of it have me pondering something I’ll call “craft transparency.” Sometime ago, I disagreed with someone in a writing group about her belief that the best prose style is the kind that is completely invisible because writing is supposed to be in service to the story. I contended that, no, they were both important, and just because a prose style (or narrative structure or whatever craft aspect of a work)  is distinctive does not make it of inferior quality. My enjoyment of a work comes just as much from appreciating the hand of the artist as the art.

However, this means that I am tuned into where the artist’s hand falters. I appreciate when the fine craftsmanship comes through and it adds to my enjoyment of the story, but I when it falters, it often makes me set down the book for a while. The difference is the difference between “Ah, I see what you did there!” and “Oh. I see what you did there.”

So back to When the Elephants Dance. The prose style is clean and simple  and the structure is like The Decameron — a group of confined people who tell stories to pass the time. As far as the first goes, this may be unfair, since Holthe also said in that interview that she admires Hemingway, but I find it a bit too obvious and a bit too naive, a narrative style that’s often used in works set in the ancient world or non-Western countries. And as for the latter, I may be wrong, but it seems that Holthe had a collection of short stories when she needed to have a novel, and constructed the framing narrative in order to force the short stories into novel format.

The joining seams are most obvious in the transitions from the framing narrative into the stories the characters tell. The first story is told by the narrator’s father, a man whose longest chunk of dialogue, before he switches to “Now I am telling a story” mode, is “We cannot hide forever. We must find food. Domingo is right. We must band together and help the Amerikanos. It is our only hope.” But when he starts telling the story, he talks like this:

“Perhaps that particular story belongs to another church, in another town. Maybe not, maybe all of it is true. But if I am to tell the true story, you must know from the start that the church was merely incidental. A symptom. Shall we say, of deeper troubles. Few know what really happened. Most have forgotten and moved on with their lives. The church was never the crux of the story. There is an imbalance here, you see? More focus on the church when, really the heart of the story lies with Esmeralda Cortez and with her mysterious disappearance. The catalyst of her strange departure was a mere boy of seven, and that boy was me.”

When I read that, I actually said aloud, “Ooookay” and complained about the awkward change of dialogue style to Brian. And I set down the book. The story that followed was quite good, but I had to put aside what led to it before moving on to it.

Another moment of disconnection with the narrative came when the band of people fantasize about eating chicken adobo. A woman, speaking to two other women who, like any proper Filipina, know how to make chicken adobo, says, “First you chop the garlic, saute it, then you add the cup of vinegar, half a cup of soy sauce, and the chopped chicken. A little bay leaves, salt and pepper…. That is all. It does not take much.”

Very service-y! Once again, I paused and complained aloud. I take this bit of dialogue as either the author or her editor thinking that not enough people know what chicken adobo is and deciding it needed to be explained. And it comes across as an explanation rather than a natural part of the narrative. I contrasted this with a scene in The Gangster of Love by Jessica Hagedorn that showed a character making adobo, his action part of the conversation that was going on. It drew me in, and even made me say, “He forgot the bay leaves!” and delighted me when I turned the page and the character realized, “I forgot the bay leaves!”

That was a moment of “Ah, I see what you did there!”

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

Francine Prose has written a new book about Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, claiming her as a literary genius and exploring how she actively was revising her journal to prepare it for publication after the war. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Prose says something that made me smile: “teenaged girls are the most maligned, undervalued portion of the population, as though they’re all gossip girls. They can be very smart and attuned to the world.”

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

A comment showed up on my last post that I marked as spam: “It’s not so simple to do a good enough written essays, preferably if you are occupied. I consult you to define [essay mill] and to be spare from query that your work will be done by custom writing service”

All of that is [sic], of course. The writing really makes you think they’ll do good work for you, hunh? These kinds of pay-for-essay services, often called “essay mills,” are often outsourced to people in India or the Philippines who don’t realize they’re writing essays for cheating American students, and, as an AFP article — “In U.S., some students buy — not try — to excel in school” — recently pointed out, of horrific quality.

But that’s not really the point, is it? Even if the quality of writing and analysis were good, turning in an essay you did not write is cheating and violates the ethics standards any reputable university has. It could get you a failing grade or kicked out of school. Oh, and it makes you a marginal, reprehensible person who doesn’t belong in college in the first place.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

While I was endeavoring to give good advice to someone applying to San Jose State University’s MFA program, I managed to find my own statement of purpose. I thought I’d post it with the thoughts about why I wrote it the way I did.

Statement of Purpose:
The Shoulders of Giants
by Jennifer de Guzman

She has pondered the words “Statement of Purpose” for so long that the words have ceased to have real meaning; it is written on the paper in front of her, traced over three times, curlicues framing it, a sketch of her hand beside it and, beside that, the words “all the works and days of hands.” Her pen has rolled from the drafting table, for a curious cat to bat away. She has three more just like it in her bag; she pulls one out.

She does not want to write anything so simultaneously earnest and precious as “I feel it is my purpose in life to write fiction.” She writes it anyway, then crosses it out with a series of uneven lines. What she wants to write will tell who ever reads it how the years that she has spent studying literature have exalted her, exhausted her, fortified her and frustrated her. It will tell them how she has learned that in the quiet, cold hours of the morning, when she has studied too long and too hard, Proserpina is just another girl longing for independence and fearing it at the same time; how she has seen how the love of beauty and pleasure can transform into decadence, and how a writer might translate thought and feeling and perception into words. She will tell them how she has witnessed death in Venice, life among the ruins and love in the time of cholera.

And then she will show how she was writing all the while, finding in Proserpina the inspiration for a new telling of her abduction, finding in the love of excess in Swinburne and Wilde the basis of a society in which death and art converge; and in Woolf’s modern fiction the courage to depict life as a luminous halo, to cast off the trappings of the materialist writer, even if only for 2000 words. “Writing fiction is no different from science in this regard:” she writes, “just like Newton, we have seen as far as we have because we have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

But, she thinks, I’ve only been riding piggy-back. She smiles, and the pen that she had taken from her bag rolls to the floor. All this time she has been peeking over the shoulders of giants, gaining what knowledge she could and writing stories that grew from that knowledge and her imagination. And she realizes her true purpose for striving for admission into the creative writing master’s program. So she retrieves one of her pens from the floor, resettles herself in her chair and writes:

I want to stand on the shoulders of giants.

So, yes, it is a bit overwrought, but it got me in. I worked in a lot of literary allusions because I wanted to give the committee an idea of my literary tastes, but also because there’s nothing like a shared feeling of “Yeah, we’re learned!” to endear yourself to academics. I had a 4.0 GPA as an undergrad and had been working professionally as an editor for three years when I wrote this, but what I wanted to impress on them was not “I want to be a writer” but “I am a writer.” It was about show — I am showing you what kind of student I will be, how passionate I am, not telling you.

I have no idea if this statement of purpose (along with my academic creds) would have gotten me in to Iowa or Columbia. It shows that my taste is fairly old-fashioned; most of the literature I allude to is Victorian and high modernist. But, having come from the SJSU English department, I knew that the department’s focus isn’t so much on contemporary literature and strong theory, but on the kind of works I reference. (Though later the head of the department would say to me, when I expressed an interest in Swinburne, “Isn’t he kind of awful?”)

There’s something kind of embarrassingly effusive about this short essay, but I remember writing it (I probably still have the notebooks with my scribbling and doodling in them — I wasn’t making that up for narrative effect) in a heady, late-night session and feeling every word of it. So it’s authentic, if nothing else.

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

“If someone can talk you out of being a writer, you’re not a writer. If I can talk you out of being a writer, I’ve done you a favor, because now you’ll be free to pursue your real talent, whatever that may be. And, for the record, everybody has one. The lucky ones figure out what that is. The unlucky ones keep on writing shitty screenplays and asking me to read them.”

Josh Olson will not read your fucking script.

The description he gives of the synopsis someone asked him to read is very familiar — in feeling, if not in detail. I get synopses like that in submissions a lot, the kind that you finish reading and then say, “But what the hell is this about?”

It’s a common problem — framing a synopsis as a series of events rather than a summary of the plot. I’m still not so good at it myself. I can only say, start at the middle, your central conflict, and work out from there, if that makes any sense. Don’t start at the beginning and work your way to the end.