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Tag: books
#218; out with the old
It’s summer time, and what’s better this time of year than a beach and a book? This year we see the end of some of the best, worst, most epic, least deserving, too-much-fun-to-handle series out there – Harry Potter‘s last stand opens tonight at midnight, Breaking Dawn arrives in November, last year’s I Am Number Four seems to have been turned down for a sequal, and after the release of the Gossip Girl prequal capping off that book series, it doesn’t seem like we’ll have any more gossip to get lost in. Yes, I love YA fiction,
particularly of the fantasy and science fiction varieties (though YA isn’t all I’m planning to read next, it’s just a delightful destraction from the real world of campaigns, office politics, and dishes to be washed). And so this summer I’m letting go of my old favorites (I admit to devouring the Twilight series when it came out. I also admit to laughing out loud at most of it, which feels incredibly good) and embracing some brand new (to me, at least) beach reading. With vacation next week, I thought it a good chance to look over what I’m hoping to read - leave me your favorites, guilty pleasures, and To Read piles in the comments!
First and foremost, I cannot wait to finish reading The Mortal Instruments series, including the just-released fourth installment. I’m nearly half way through the third (City of Glass) and despite its schmaltzy language, slightly twisted love triangle, and eye-roll inducing plot devises, I love it. Maybe I’ll look past just about anything if I like a story enough. Cassandra Clare comes from a writing background of Harry Potter fanfiction, so the lady certainly knows what fans want – pretty people, angst, intense, quick action, and the occassional swoon-worthy kiss. She even through in a clumsy, totally-doesn’t-think-she’s-pretty main character and a brooding, bad boy with a heart of gold love interest. It’s pure cheese. It’s morally questionable. It’s terribly written most of the time. But it’s fun, too, it’s captivating and full of bright colors and well-handled characters, and that’s what I look for in entertainment, so this is just my cup of tea (or maybe more my tall glass of strawberry daiquiri). Find more romance, history, and suspense below the jump!
#213; healing power of words
I’ve done it! I’ve tackled my writers block and come out on top. At least, so far. Thanks to a great start at my very first Camp Nanowrimo novel, Bipolar In Order.
I wrote 6,500+ words in two days, staying in line with the NaNoWriMo schedule despite starting two days late. I haven’t written in a burst like that in months, not once since I moved to Boston, and I can tell you it feels amazing. It feels like stress relief, emotional release. It’s physically tiring, even! I sleep better when I’m a writer, I breath more easily, I feel like myself.
The novel/short story collection is something different for me. I’m writing it as nearly 100% autobiography. This makes it more difficult than other pieces of prose or poetry to share (it’s so much easier when you change the names and claim fiction!), though I find it also makes it easier to write. Dealing with emotional scarred tissue is sluggish, even dreadful, but you also never have want for material. And so, I’ll be bringing you slightly censored excerpts and quotes throughuot the month (there will be even more at my tumblr, my dumping ground for all things shiny and interesting).
…with lips so full you wanted to chew on them and drink up their juice like you do with a plum, and they were nearly, naturally, that delicious dark red of plums…
It’s interesting to find yourself stopping in the middle of a thought – a story line – to remember the way a friend’s mouth curved the first time you saw them smile. Or how someone’s voice sounded when you were half asleep, smushed up against the ceiling of your dorm because you’re in a loft bed and the angle changes how you hear things. I love remembering quiet moments, personal moments, lonely moments, and I love writing about the crazier ones, too, the nights you can’t hardly remember and raging debates that leave your voice hoarse from shouting and laughter.
What do you think? The challenge of (completely) honest writing is difficult, and is draining, but it feels so worth the turmoil just be churning out words again. How do you bust the block? Are any of you out there hitting up July’s session of Camp Nanowrimo? (There’s another in August if you want to wait a couple more weeks!) Let’s get a real discussion going this month, all about writing, emotional literacy, intimacy with your audience, and of course, absolutely ridiculous online challenges that take over our brains and lives.
#208; writer’s block
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. — Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but I’ve been hit with a bit of writer’s block. Fiction isn’t coming easily, the words of others are easier to latch onto than my own, and I go days without attempting to write at all. Even the feel of pen to paper is exhausting to me. In times like this, there are certain personalities and inspirations I always look to. The music of Matthew Bellemy and 이루마 (in English: Yiruma, my favorite South Korean pianist of all time – possibly just plain my favorite pianist, actually); the character work of Billy Crudup, and the words of Vonnegut, Rilke, Rowling, or Rossetti.
I find that no matter how energetic or motivated I am, when my creative output is on the skids, my social energy goes right out the window along with it. I want nothing more than to stay at home indulging in epic-length fanfiction, listening to really loud music and cleaning the apartment in my pajamas, or worst of all giving up entirely and curling up in bed with reruns of Family Guy or The Vampire Diaries.
And so this weekend I’m trying everything I can to get myself writing again. Taking angry stabs at poetry (something I haven’t attempted since moving North – there’s just something about the hazy heat of the South that brings it out in me, I think); trying new versions of prose I’ve never taken too seriously before (yes, I wrote fanfiction this week for the fun of it for the first time since… college?); tasting new movies and old glamour (with a no-movie-made-after-1970 challenge spanning three cities to take place this summer). I am going to be social if it kills me and have been collecting the stories of others the characters that surround me like a greedy little Gollum wannabe.
I’m not sure how it will go, if I’m honest, but even this piece took me ages to put together and I’m now incredibly grateful to be meeting a friend for drinks immediately post-work. Writing… When you make feel like work, when it’s something you have to do because it’s become so much more than a hobby to you, when writing is as essential as breathing and perhaps far less enjoyable – it becomes a bit of a soul sucker. It soul sucking in a good way (like an all consuming love affair, in my mind), but a way that leaves you drained and wanting for more, too.
#207; friday I’m in love (with bloggers)
→ First things first, my new writer!crush? Julie Klausner. Because she wrote this book. And this article on Jezebel. “The larger issue is that it is a lot easier for men – or even guys or bros – to demean us, if we’re girls. It’s much harder to bring down a woman, or to call her a moron, when she’s not in pigtails and Ring Pops.” That is teaching self-respect.
→ Dakota Fanning showing young Hollywood how to do it right (then again, hasn’t she been doing that since she was, what, 7? Rock on, girl).
→ All things Boston, hockey, Massachusetts, championship-like, and black & gold.
→ Reading blogs like ThoughtCatalog feeling very, very grateful that I’m finally emerging from my quarter life crisis, comfortable in my own skin, settled into my own heart and mind, and no longer ‘too cool’ as a jaded hipster child trapped in an adult’s body. Granted, it’s still fun to read.
→ “I don’t know about you chaps, but I’m known by my face around here.” – Christopher Hitchens (with whom I don’t often agree), writing for Slate Magazine about the Anthony Weiner scandel & eventual resignation. Tells an awesome British anecdote.
→ And once again from the brilliance that is Jezebel, wonderful news coming from the military (for once!) – a bill has just been put forth that would open up insurance & abortion access to women who are either in the military or dependent upon it. Woohoo! Good luck to everyone fighting for its passage!
#201; why I love writers
“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.”
- Orhan Pamuk in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature
