A guy who finished a novel

I heard about this guy at work who writes.  He just finished a novel.  I don’t know the guy, haven’t read his work, but what I heard was that he managed by getting up earlier and devoting 15 minutes to his writing everyday.  I am impressed.  I can’t imagine however getting up earlier than 5 in the morning.  I tried it once to do yoga.  I got up at 4am.  I know some people who do that.  Anyway.  Getting up earlier than I do it’s not working.  So, I continue on the search of a 15 to 30 minute pocket when nothing requires my attention.

The Sculpture

I finished my Creative Writing class in December.  I had never written so much before.  I had never finished so many pieces before.  I finished a short story, a short play and about 25 poems.  I was very excited about my short story.  A horror idea that came up during conversations with my husband in our commutes to and back from work.  My teacher was also very encouraging and gave me really good feedback throughout the process.

I have set as a goal to write at least 12 short stories this year.  I am counting that as one.  Of course the idea is to sell them so I submitted my short story to a magazine.  I got a rejection a week later.  They said my story didn’t hold their interest as much as they would’ve liked.  It was disappointing, deep in my heart I had the hope that my story would be irresistible to buy.

But I got the hint.  Maybe my story needed to be read by  more people.  So, I joined this online group called Critters.  I’ve received about 25 crits on my story.  And yes, there’s fine tuning to do.  Such as:

* give a name to the main character
* logistical items such as sound coming out of the basement being consistent
* why would the reader care about the main character?

There are some more things to work on the story, and I’m excited about the prospect of sending up a story for crits, while working on another, fine tuning the critted story, sending it out to the world.  Get  a rhythm.

Right now through my head are passing all the things why getting into a writing rhythm is difficult, and I’m resisting putting them on writing.  Because, yes, they’re all there and what will matter at the end of the day is whether I worked on my stories or not.

So, 12 it is.

Twilight

I finally saw Twilight last night. It was a bit of a disappointment. I guess most movies based on a book will fall short of the book experience no matter how many millions are put into it.

Vampires are supposed to be perfect looking creatures. Marble skin, muscles in all the right places, beautiful to behold with or without clothes, and they’re supposed to exude sensuality and danger from every pore.

The vampires in Twilight try to get close, but the camera got too close in some instances betraying the makeup, and in others it was not gentle and their very human butts or wrinkles were displayed. I am club Edward and he is missing the muscles. Sigh. Oh, well.

The movie script focuses on the action and all the emotional connections are deep in the background, accessible only to those who’ve read the books. Out of nowhere Edward and this anguished teenager are deeply, madly in love. Maybe a teenager would make the connection, but for my age bracket I wonder if the book spelling out in more detail how they got from point A (I’ve never seen you before) to point B (I can’t live without you) 20 minutes into the movie, would be helpful. Now, I’ve read the books so I was able to fill in the big gaps between climbing up humongous trees, to fending off vampire attacks, to dancing on Edward’s feet. My husband didn’t read the books, so he ended up excusing himself to go play LOTRO.

I really enjoyed the blue, gray, dark colors and the cold atmosphere. Lots of rain, cloudy days, people wearing their parkas walking by a choppy shore. Cloudy days are much better for vampire makeup.

I really liked the James Dean portrayal of Edward and his accent. I will watch the sequels hoping that the makeup is better, the camera is smarter, and there is a better balance between pure action and helping people who have not read the books connect the dots. They’ve lost my husband as a potential watcher already.

I will have to get girlfriends to watch the sequels with me. Girls are a lot more forgiving when it comes to watching vampire movies.

Palimpsest

I have finished reading Palimpsest.  The premise is interesting.  There is this wonderful city in some other universe and the way to get to it is by having sex with someone who has a piece of the city map tatooed in their skin.  You are transported there in the throes of sex and remain there while you sleep.  When you wake up you are in your own universe once more.  The tatoo is not something you can go to a tatoo parlor and get.  If you don’t have a tatoo and you have sex with one of the people who do, when you wake up you will have a tatoo of your own.   The tatoo can appear anywhere on your skin and it is an irresistible mark for those who can see it.

Anyway, enough said or I’ll ruin the story for you.  I’m not sure I liked it.  It was a bit of a change of pace from The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice in that only 4 stories were intertwined in Palimpsest.  The narrative, however, was not sharp enough.  It was sweet, and old, and poetic, but lacked focus.  At some point it gets tiresome.  The ending of the story was not satisfying.  Can’t really point to what it was.  I guess the charachters were never big enough nor important enough.  The city was blurry.  The whole story lacked sharpness, definition.

It is an interesting premise though.

Children and the Dark Side of Human Experience

Children and the Dark Side of Human Experience talks about the journey the author has taken to answer some of the most horrific questions about what happens to children when rage falls upon them.  There is a lot of potential and knowledge in this book.  The topic is unnerving, scary and as such it draws you on to read, to find out.  The book doesn’t quite make it though.  The author somehow lost the track of what the purpose of his book was.  It stopped at points being distanced and analytic to being descriptive of the emotions of the author.  It stopped being case based to being generalities based.  It stopped being an analysis of a phenomenon to be a call to arms to stand against it.  It stopped being a book to being a recount of how deeply affected the author was by his experiences, but the experiences were never completely shared with the reader.  This book has potential and is built upon excellent knowledge, but it falls short for the reader as it never is one thing when it turns into another.

I would still recommend it though if you are interested in knowing why 6 month old babies have to face the beast of their parents on their own.

Lisey’s Story by Stephen King

I read Lisey’s Story over a weekend and a few evenings after work.  My husband says I like to be scared.  I say “sometimes”.   This book definitely did the job.  I try not to think about it as it brings to my mind the scary, scary scenes.  I was so scared that I wasn’t able to take a shower if the closet door was open.  I couldn’t be in our bedroom by myself with just  my lonely bedside lamp for company.  I felt as if something was going to come out and get me every time I turned off the light to leave a room.   That book got me spooked!  What about for you?

Baltimore

I read this book a couple of months ago.  I absolutely like it.  The story is believable and unpredictable.  The author does a good job of connecting threads and closing loops.  The technique the author uses to present the story is novel to me.  Even though Baltimore is the main and most important character in the story, he is hardly ever seen but through the memories of others, a letter and a journal.

There are just a few questions I have about the story and which I haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily.  If you haven’t read the book this might be a bit of a spoiler so feel free to stop reading now and skip to the next paragraph.  My questions are: why did the vampires remain satisfied by feeding on the bodies of soldiers left on the battle field? Why did Baltimore’s self-defense act against this single creature unleashed such an evil over earth?

Okay, semi-spoiler is over.  I really enjoyed this book.  If you like horror stories, the kind that you can comfortably read at night, in your bedroom, just with the company of one lonely lamp then I think you will enjoy this book.

Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire