I try to be disciplined and blog every other Friday, but I skipped last week. I had a very good reason. Our family spent a couple of days in Las Vegas. My husband, sister-in-law, and I drove back on I-15 on Friday, my blog day. Just as we hit the El Cajon Pass, we got stuck in standstill traffic. Then we saw what had earlier appeared to be a dust storm rapidly growing into an obvious wildfire. As the smoke spread, we sat in our car and waited. Soon, drivers started to get out of their cars to survey the situation. We turned off the engine of our car and got out as well. The wind was strong, and we smelled smoke. I was nervous.

Then we saw cars driving on the shoulder of the highway but in the opposite direction of the traffic. One woman leaned out of a passenger window and warned us to flee because she had seen smoke ahead. We immediately turned our car around and used the shoulder of the road to escape. CHP officers directed us onto a dirt road. We could have proceeded from there to a street that would have headed back in the direction from which we had come, but, instead, we followed SIRI’s directions and continued on the bumpy dirt road for several miles to another highway that eventually led us home.

This was one of the most terrifying experiences I have ever had. I have never been that close to a wildfire. I’m proud to say that all of us kept our heads. None of the people we saw on the highway were crying, screaming, or hysterical, despite knowing that we were in a dangerous situation. It felt sort of like we were in a disaster movie, but the characters were calm. Later, we watched the news and were thankful that we had escaped the situation that some of the motorists found themselves in. Some cars burned, and motorists had to flee at the direction of firefighters.

Last week I had planned to blog about good vacation books I’ve read in the past. I will do so in my next blog. Sometimes, life is truly more exciting than fiction.

In my most recent blog I bellyached that my fiction reading adventures lately have been dull. Since then I decided to mix it up by reading a couple of non-fiction books. First I read The Phantom of Fifth Avenue by Meryl Gordon, and was pleasantly surprised at how it captured my interest. It is an intriguing tale of an heiress, Huguette Clark, who spent the final twenty years of her life in a hospital, avoiding contact with the outside world. She was surrounded by nurses, doctors, and other caregivers, who came to know her well and, in some cases, even grew to love her. But that didn’t stop some of them from taking advantage of her largesse and accepting checks to finance their children’s college educations or pay for a home renovation project. When she passed away, a battle for her estate ensued between the family that had not had contact with her in years–some were not even aware she was still alive–and the caregivers (her #1 nurse was due to inherit millions). On the one hand it’s a fascinating story of greed; on the other, it’s a sad tale of a woman’s fear of people and their motivations.

I am currently reading Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann. The title makes it sound like a cheap tabloid tale, but there is much more to this well-written and well-researched work. It focuses on the unsolved murder of Hollywood mogul William Desmond Taylor and the various suspects that surrounded him during his last days. While some of it is tedious–I couldn’t get too excited reading about Adolph Zukor and his greedy monopoly schemes–once the murder occurs, the story picks up. There is a cast of characters that would make this a great movie. In fact, there was a movie made in the fifties that was a knockoff of this true story, but probably didn’t do it justice. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m looking forward to the unveiling of the author’s chief suspect for the murder.

I know I’ll return to reading novels, but for now, truth is stranger than fiction, and, for the moment, more enjoyable.

Lately my reading adventures have been disappointing. I’m in the habit of posting reviews on Goodreads of the novels I read, and recently have given several three-star ratings, which signify average or mediocre. Is it me, or is it the books? Am I too picky, or am I reading books that are not right for me? I don’t think I’m too picky, and I tend to read novels that come with good recommendations from reviewers or are written by authors I’ve enjoyed in the past.

Whatever the reason, recent reads have fallen short of my expectations: Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places received strong reviews on Goodreads, but I found it a standard whodunit. Emily Gould’s Friendship (which I assigned two stars) received a good rating in Entertainment Weekly. I disliked its characters and weak plot. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Husband Habit is too preachy, a surprise since she’s an author I usually enjoy.

Maybe I’m analyzing the novels I read with a more critical eye because I’ve written a novel. I certainly don’t believe that my writing is superior, but perhaps I have become more aware of errors, plot holes, or inconsistencies that can plague a finished product. I want to return to reading a novel for sheer pleasure, but it seems that a book now has to have a thoroughly compelling plot or irresistible characters for me to lose myself in it (as I did with Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests). Or, maybe I’ve read too much in certain genres, and I need to expand my horizons? Or, maybe my interests have changed, and I need to branch out and sample authors who are new to me. Any suggestions?

I read a lot of fiction. Of course I do, or I wouldn’t have this blog. But I know people who read a lot more than I do, including a friend who once told me that she reads fifteen books per week. I don’t even come close to that, and doubt I could keep all the titles straight in my head if I did. I came across a couple of online articles recently that claim fiction readers are more empathetic than the average person because they learn to relate to different personalities through reading. I don’t know if that is true, but it’s nice to think that it might be. I always try to put myself in another person’s shoes if I’m trying to understand their behavior, but don’t always succeed. In novels, the narrator is there to explain characters’ actions or go inside their heads and reveal their thoughts. Too bad we can’t do that in real life . . . but then that might not be such a good thing. Maybe it would be best if each person we met came with a built-in caption that would tell us their personality type, their fears, desires, motivations, hang ups, personal traumas…a sort of mini-bio, perhaps on a flash drive. It might make life easier (we’d avoid getting involved with difficult people), but a lot more boring.

Yesterday I was privileged to speak to an extended learning class, sponsored by a local university, that is for adults seeking to learn the basics about writing and publishing a book. My goal was to provide information that would be useful to undertaking the writing and self-publishing of a novel or a work of nonfiction. I came out of that classroom feeling as if I’d learned something, too. I learned that I’d accomplished a lifelong dream without even formally setting out to do it. As a child, I’d dreamed of becoming a writer of novels. At a young age I read the classics: The Grapes of Wrath, War and Peace, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. I read those not because I had to but because I wanted to. Books were my adventures. As an adult, I set the goal of becoming a writer aside and pursued a career as a librarian instead. After my library career, I finally took on the challenge of writing a novel, and later, self-published it. After yesterday’s presentation, one of the class attendees told me that she enjoyed my story of attaining my lifelong dream. Yes, I know that I’ve accomplished my dream, but it is still sometimes hard to believe that I actually did it. To the students present yesterday, I hope I imparted to them that it’s never too late to pursue your dream of becoming a writer. I started writing my novel because I was tired of telling myself it couldn’t be done. How can you tell yourself that if you never try?