quiet

So I saw this today which really made me smile because lately I've realized just how much more of a home-body I am compared to a lot of people I know. We finished moving last week [woo-hoo!] which has left us with an apartment full of boxes that now need to be unpacked [less woo-hoo] and the whole thing has worn me out. I've been super tired this week and that's just increased my predisposition to hunker down at home with a movie or book. Tim, on the other hand, has been going a little stir-crazy. I totally understand wanting to go out and do things, I get in that mood on occasion where I just have to do something, but I don't feel the same need to be active that way.

I'm not depressed or sick or anything, I'm just content to sit. Some people see that as a bad thing and I wonder why. I get that humans are social creatures and, believe me, I have times where I crave human contact so bad that I think it might make me sick, but just because a person likes to be quiet or chill doesn't mean there's something wrong or even that they're incredibly shy or introverted. Sometimes the world is unnecessarily loud and crowded.

Do you prefer home over crowds? Does your character? Why? Or why not? There is always more than one explanation for a behavior or preference. Just a thought.

A big roadblock I've had ever since I thought up my WIP is needing a list of attributes/skills to pull from for different characters. Having a specific list is a necessity because I need to know the possibilities, even if I never mention enough characters to cover each of them. I've kind of been putting off making this list because I wasn't even sure how to go about finding a place to start aside from the dictionary and that would take the next two months to sift through. Yesterday, though, I buckled down and employed my internet searching skillz to find myself some resources and I'm happy to report that I did! In case anyone is interested, whether for individual character building or some other exercise, the sites I'm using to make my list are:

http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/Jobs/Communities.aspx

http://www.gurusoftware.com/GuruNet/Personal/Factors.htm

https://diy.org/skills

Having this list is going to be a massive help and finally allow me to pin down some crucial details that have been hindering my characters' development as well as decisions about where plot should go.

So today is our last day in our old apartment. We still have some moving to do and cleaning ahead of us tonight. Honestly, I can’t say I’m excited for that but it is nice to know that, one way or another, we will be done with that mess tonight.

I recently stumbled upon Ommwriter and thought I’d share it with you guys. For those who might not know, Ommwriter is a program that you can download for PC and Mac. Their objective is to create a distraction-free writing space. Now, I write out my rough drafts by hand because I prefer the aesthetic but also because typing original work is hard for me to do without getting distracted, even if it’s just by the buttons and options in the word processor program itself. [I can get hung up on formatting for ages] Ommwriter removes even those program distractions, having designed a space where the only thing you see is what you’re typing. You can adjust font, background, and ambient music to create your own work space in which to find your Zen [if you see mine let me know]. I could see this working really well for typing up school related things if you have a hard time focusing while on the computer. You can check out their website to learn more and see a demo video. My laptop is still out of commission but I might nudge my hubby a little harder to get it up and running again because I really want to try this. If any of you have experience with this program or decide to give it a test drive, please let me know what you think and how it works for you!

Every once in a while I get on a comic-book kick. I've had this desire for a while to become more familiar with American comics but it’s a bit of a struggle for me to find “original” story lines for popular series like X-Men and Spiderman and the like. Even trickier is navigating the waters in such a way that allows me to avoid the worst of the scandalous comics/issues that I really have no desire to read. Thankfully  I have some reliable ins into the comic world, one of which, when asked, suggested I try The Uncanny X-Men for a classic comic that’s clean and has characters and a universe I’d recognize. I have more experience with various manga so reading an American comic was a little weird for me. For one, the art style is completely different and, admittedly, I prefer the look of Japanese works in comparison but I do respect the skill involved in American designs. I did enjoy reading the issues of The Uncanny X-Men available in my library and I intend to find the next ones soon. The one thing that kept throwing me off though was the use of bolding in the text. There is a lot of it. I don’t know if that’s only true for this comic but bolded words were everywhere and the constant emphasis on 2-3 words per sentence was a bit tiring and didn't seem to make sense in some cases. Do most American comics have this kind of focus on grandiose, dramatic speech? If anyone is more familiar with this medium I’d love to hear your input and also if you have any recommendations for further reading. I’d love to get my hands on some Batman and Captain America comics sometime.

I promised you guys a review of Death Cloud and I am now prepared to deliver on that promise. To recap, Death Cloud is the first in a YA Sherlock Holmes series about teenage Sherlock himself. This series has been officially approved and endorsed by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate and I can see why. Death Cloud is a great read because you can see Doyle’s adult Sherlock in Lane’s teenage rendition. The intellect is there but clearly not as developed as it will be in later life. He has yet to pick up the violin and his social skills are a little bit less offensive. What I may love the most is how carefully Lane has crafted the context and characters that help to shape the Sherlock Holmes so many know and love. The Sherlock you meet in Death Cloud is anything but cold and unattached. As he is forced to spend the summer with relatives he doesn't know or particularly like you get his sense of homesickness and how much he misses and loves his family. The supporting characters that Lane has developed are wonderful. Sherlock has not yet developed his insanely keen sense of observation or understanding of city layouts, including information like where certain people live and what they do. The supporting characters, however, do possess much of this information for various reasons and it’s fun to watch as Sherlock learns the value of knowing such physical, real-world things like the schedule of a police watch or the characteristics of bees. I think everyone realizes that Sherlock Holmes can’t have always been the vast knowledge resource that he is in Doyle’s tales so it’s really cool to see Lane’s interpretation of how he accumulated that knowledge and I love that it comes from other people because it suggests that Sherlock is not as self-sufficient as he seems sometimes.

Overall, I found the story and the mystery to be engaging and age-appropriate for a 14 year-old Sherlock. The characterization is well written and believable and, for those interested, there’s even a touch of romance. I am eager to read the second book in the series to see how Lane follows up on his ambitious endeavor!

I’m a fan of Shannon Hale. Princess Academy was the first book by her that I ever read and owned so when I heard that she was publishing a sequel I had mixed feelings. For one, I really enjoy Princess Academy but I wasn't sure how I felt about a sequel since I thought the first was finished up nicely as a stand-alone novel. This is probably why it took me so long [relatively] to get my hands on Princess Academy: Palace of Stone and commit myself to read it but I’m glad I did. Palace of Stone is one of the most frustrating books I've read in a long time. Generally, I have a hard time putting a book down long enough to do other important things like chores and cooking but that wasn't the case here. I’d read a chapter or two and then throw it down [figuratively. no books were harmed in the making of this review] in frustration and walk away for a while. This probably sounds like a really negative thing but it’s actually a positive in my book. Granted, this process was exhausting but I was getting frustrated for good reasons, not because the writing was bad. Hale has a talent for developing conflicts and characters that just drive you up a wall.

The basis for the plot is that Miri and friends go to the capitol to visit Britta before her wedding. While there, they are exposed to a world they've never had access to which, in many cases, completely challenges their mountain way of life. Miri gets caught up in learning more than she ever dreamed there was to learn which includes the political upheaval threatening to destroy the kingdom. Miri must decide whose side she’s on which will also decide who, between Peder and a new young man, her heart will belong to. Hale does an excellent job of making Miri’s struggle realistic and her decisions believable, if infuriating at times. I do want to assure you that pushing through the grief is very worth it. I thought the resolution at the end of the book was completely satisfying and I was impressed because Hale went so far as to resolve the plot conflicts beyond the level that I think most authors would go, completely addressing latent conflicts that wouldn't have been solved with some simple band-aide resolution.

All in all, I’m really glad I read this. The characterization is wonderful and invests you in the characters and a story that is more than worth reading.

moving

We've been packing all week and slowly shuttling things over to our new apartment. Guys. I hate packing. And I haven't even started on the kitchen yet ><

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. 

melting

So this week we found and signed a contract for an apartment which I am rather stoked about. Our car also announced it's impending death which I'm not so excited for. Guys, being an adult kind of sucks sometimes. The temperature has also been steadily rising this week, topping out today around 98 and we're supposed to be over 100 all weekend, which basically means it will take great incentive to even get me out of the apartment. There's a long-lived debate about where summer is worst between Utah and New York and while NY has humidity at least it has these cool things called clouds and trees. I swear, there are no clouds in the summer here. Going outside is like being under a constant and inescapable heat lamp. My body is not equipped to handle this gracefully  : P

I found out today at work that our library is doing a summer reading program/competition with weekly prizes and a grand prize at the end of the summer. I cannot express the childish glee I felt when I was told that, yes, I could enter. You just have to report books you've read [they have to be over 100 pages] and I immediately reported the last 6 books I've read which is not cheating, by the way, because I finished them all within the last week. I have seriously missed reading this much.

One of the books I've inhaled recently is Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier and Anthea Bell [Anthea is the translator as the book was written in German]. Our heroine Gwyn suddenly discovers that she has inherited her family's time-traveling gene instead of her cousin who was expected to have the ability. Gwyn must now navigate the dangers of uncontrolled and, slightly better controlled time travel without the benefit of the life-long training her cousin received and, to top it off, she must do it in the company of a really obnoxious but, obligatorily good looking guy. All in all, I enjoyed this book for the most part. It has many of the usual pitfalls of a YA romance with fantastical powers thrown in. There's even a pretty intriguing mystery thrown in that Gwyn must get to the bottom of which makes her question the motives of the people she is being told to trust. I felt like I was able to see past the unnecessarily repetitious descriptions of Gwyn's extended family and the many ways in which they are annoying. I even managed to shove down my indignant disbelief when Gwyn puts off telling her mother about her sudden genetic revelation for two days based on really flimsy excuses. The one thing that really got to me and may well prevent me from reading farther into the series is the romance. The premise is classically predictable with Gwyn and her man loathing each other at first and then suddenly finding that they love each other passionately. If it's so average, what's so bad about it? This whole transformation occurs in the three days the first book covers. Three days. Now, if anyone's read farther into the series please feel free to insert delicate hints here about how Gideon's feelings might not be completely honest, with the potential of serious betrayal hiding in the wings. Such a hint would be redeeming as, at this point, the unrealistic turn around involved in this relationship is making me gag on my adolescence.

where do we go from here?

Spring term officially ended yesterday [meaning Summer starts on Monday. what?] with a written final in my sewing class and a pizza party for my writing class, as it should be. I honestly think all of the creative writing classes I've taken have had food parties at the end of the semester. Writers know how it's done.

My professor also used the time to talk to us about publishing, especially the inevitability of rejection because, let's be honest, it will happen. He told us about a friend he has who's decided that he has to be rejected at least 3-4 times before someone will accept his work for publication. This way, when he gets rejected it's not as soul-crushing as it could otherwise be. Instead, it's just a step in the right direction. I thought there was something profound in turning such a negative experience into something positive [also learning more about the various reasons you might receive a rejection that have nothing to do with your writing]. I'll try to keep that in mind in future, haha.

So that's it. My last [official] writing class. So where to from here? Well, I'm going to miss the work-shopping and the due dates enforced by other people but I am coming away with a short story that, with a little tweaking, is ready to venture forth on my first publishing adventure. Also, I have pretty well cleared up which POVs I'm most comfortable working in which calls for edits to most of what I've written on my WIP novel but I'm actually excited about that. I think it'll help me get closer to my MC which will fix a lot of the issues that have been making it clunky up to this point.

In other news, since getting out of Winter Semester, it appears that my reading addiction has come back in full swing. Basically, my mood is literally affected by whether or not I am currently in the midst of a story. This being said. I officially need more books. Badly. I love the ones I have dearly but I've read them all at least 3 times and a girl hungers for something new to sink her teeth into once in a while. Any suggestions?

goodness!

It's been a bit of a whirl-wind week that promises to carry over the weekend with finals coming up in the next couple of days. I've been working like a mad woman on my fourth project for my sewing class, an adorable poke-a-dot skirt that I was this close to finishing today but good heavens that skirt has a huge hem! To give you a rough idea, there is enough fabric gathered in the skirt to go around me more than twice if it was flat. I've also got major revisions to do on my second short story thanks to some really helpful questions and suggestions from my class during workshop on Wednesday.

On a side note, I think that Gorilla Glue should come up with some more easily accessible containers. I am, at this moment, trying to fix a flip-flop which would not be a difficult procedure if I could actually get at  the glue I'm trying to use!

I don't have many writing words this week since I've been spending more time sewing than writing, unfortunately. One thing keeps getting stuck in my mind though, something a classmate said during one of our workshop days a little while ago. We were going around and reading bits of what everyone had so far and most people had either been asked or just mentioned that their piece related at least a little bit to some real-life experience of theirs. This didn't seam unusual to me at all but a classmate had a different opinion. When we got to her turn to read she, very pointedly, said "my story doesn't come from personal experiences, just something I made up in my head. like most fiction." Can you feel the burn?

I think I understand what she meant, but I also wonder if she misunderstood what everyone else meant when they said they'd drawn, at least in small part, from real life. Sometimes people really do take an experience that happened to them and rework it to make a story. The stuff that genre fiction is known for, however, generally doesn't exist/occur in the real world [even though I would love to have a pet dragon]. But just because a writer may not work the first way doesn't mean that their life experience doesn't get written into their work. In fact, as I'm pretty sure I've said before, it's just the opposite. We can't help but incorporate our experiences, relationships, and feelings into what we write. If we didn't, if we really, honestly, just made everything up from scratch, I don't think our writing would feel real or relatable which would be a shame.

In other news, Tim and I finally saw Iron Man 3 on Wednesday night and I actually really enjoyed it. I mean, it could only improve from the 2nd one, right? But really. I was very impressed with RDJr's portrayal of anxiety attacks which were pretty much spot on. I've really enjoyed his character arc through all three movies and loved that they didn't totally ignore Avengers here [something I was kind of afraid they'd do]. It was an amazing follow for me because in Avengers Iron Man just blows the whole thing, including the almost-dying bit, off in typical fashion so it was great to see him actually struggling to cope with it in the aftermath. Overall, I thought the writing was fantastic and kept up with the witty tone we have come to expect from Iron Man. Also, can we just agree that Pepper in the suit is one of the most bad-a things we've ever seen? That all being said, there were a few parts and some characters that I felt were flat or didn't really get explained the way they should have but you're going to run into those problems with any movie, especially those concerning super heroes.

On that topic, has anyone seen the new Super Man movie? They have been pushing advanced ticket sales for that like crazy here in the last two months and while I've been somewhat intrigued by the story's approach [from what you can see in the trailer, anyway] I'm hesitant to even see it so if someone has any feedback on this new release please let me know!