it's finally raining and my hair looks fantastic

I need to work on writing posts ahead of time when a holiday lands on Thursday. With a four-day weekend last week my whole schedule got thrown off but not entirely in a bad way. There were many explosions and enough sparklers to satisfy my inner child  : )

This last week I’ve been busy giving myself carpal tunnel re-writing scenes from my WIP because I’ve decided to switch from 3^rd person to 1^st. You’d think I’d learn to write only at tables or on a computer, haha. I’m really excited about it though. Changing POV means rewriting what I have as close to the original as I can but I’m spotting points all over the place where I can go back and develop character and plot and I’m psyched to do it.

A few weeks ago I found this site, Humans of New York. The photographer has posted pictures of every-day New Yorkers and included little captions from questions he asked them about themselves. There are shockingly tender and tear-jerking answers for a lot of them and the level of honesty is amazing.  It got me thinking that these little snap-shots into people’s lives could be a really good springboard for characters or a story all its own. The best of each stem from our experiences and people we know so this site has suddenly opened up the opportunity to know parts of a hundred peoples’ personalities! Whether you’re a writer looking for inspiration or not, I really recommend you check the site out. It looks like he’s putting up new pictures pretty consistently.

My voracious reading habit has continued over the past two weeks which has supplied me with entries into my libraries summer reading contest and more book reviews for you guys! [I’m seriously going to have to get a library card once I graduate] Unfortunately this latest read was another disappointment but I just started reading Death Cloud last night which is the first in a teen Sherlock Holmes series which, get this, is the FIRST series fully acknowledged and endorsed by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate! I’m only a few chapters in but thus far I’m enjoying it so I’m excited to tell you what I think at the end!

So, Towering by Alex Flinn is listed as a fairytale retelling of Rapunzel. The cover is somewhat misleading because it gives the impression that Rachel [our Rapunzel character] is the main character, and she is, she’s just not the only one. The book’s chapters alternate between Rachel, Wyatt – a NYC kid that’s moved up to a hicks-in-the-sticks town in the Adirondacks to finish high school after the death of his best friend [major baggage], and the diary of a girl who went missing almost two decades ago. Flinn has drawn on a lot of research to pull this fairy tale into the modern day, coming up with more modern reasons for why a mother would give up their child, etc. Some of these things work and some of them don’t. She has pulled from such a wide array of literary genres [fairy tales, mythology, realistic fiction, all of which she details out in a page at the end of the book] that a lot of things never got fully tied in or explained. Of these things my biggest complaint is that she repeatedly references prophecies but never tells the reader who gave them or when they were made. The book is set in 2013, the best I can tell, so if you’re going to have prophecies you need to explain why modern people believe them. I also struggled with the almost paranormal aspects of the novel. Rachel and Wyatt are able to sense each other and speak to each other when they’re apart. This connection ties them together instantly with a bond that neither can explain but neither questions. Again, for modern-day teenagers I feel like there should be more skepticism and questioning going on than does. The book has an interesting premise and I did appreciate the twists that Flinn threw into the traditional Rapunzel fairytale [though most of Rachel’s characterization sounded suspiciously like Tangeled to me] but overall I think she was grasping at straws, per say, to provide the rational for a modern version that allows for traditional elements like the literal tower in which Rachel is kept.