The Writer's Journey

Nothing gets me hotter and more worked up than lists of books. If you've found this blog you must be the same way, so in order to titillate your senses today's post will be the lists of books I'm reading and the list of reading material that I acquired yesterday.

Maybe that will be a bigger part of this blog as I get it up and running again. I am a very prolific book buyer. I'm trying to cut back, but it never seems to work. It's just in my blood. I am a reader and a collector.

Books I'm reading this week:

The Writer's Journey - Christopher Volger - This is a classic, so I felt I must read it. It really focuses more or films than books, but still it should be an interesting read on how to tell a story.

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop - Stephen Koch - This is a little gem I found at the library. It is awesome. It's one of those literary books that tells you to go for it. Just write. Write in your own style and don't worry about being right or wrong. Find your voice and start yelling with it. I like this book. I'm not very deep into it, but I like the tone and I'll read the whole thing.

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - I'm going to give this a go. It's not technically on my reading list this month, but I keep seeing it referenced in all of my literary books and I just think it's time that I got this one under my belt.

Books I bought yesterday:

Half Broken Things - Morag Joss - Weird people living in an abandoned manor house.  You had me at manor house. Should be a good book.

People Are Unappealing - Sara Barron - This looks like one of my favorite kinds of books... kooky memoir of a young person.

Beowulf on the Beach - A book about books? Love it. It seems to have summaries of all the best books I've never read, but intend to read.

I got these three from the Buy 2 Get 1 Free table at Barnes and Noble.

Magazines I bought yesterday:

The Paris Review
O The Oprah Magazine
Writer's Digest
The Writer
Poets and Writers
Wallpaper
Fine Homebuilding Annual Houses Design Issue

I know I went on a bit of a magazine rampage yesterday. I know the lady that checks me out at Barnes and Noble is wondering when I find the time to read everything I buy from her. She seems to be rolling her eyes at me lately as I check out. She must know I am not going to be able to read The Brothers Karamazof, Oliver Twist,  and War and Peace before I come back and buy another arm load of books.

I'm going to try and stay out of the bookstore for the rest of the week. Hopefully there will be no more new purchases this week.

Ready, Get Set, GO!

So there has to be a time when I stop reading everything in site and actually start writing. I have all the abilities to start. I have all the abilities to finish. I love to revise and edit. Why am I not starting? Like right now. I'm not doing anything. I thinking about going to Target to pick up a few things, stop at the book store and look around, maybe hit the library too, but why don't I just write? Why don't I re-read what I've already started? The first step is to just sit down and start it. The next step is to open a file and start writing. Well I'm sitting down. I'm in front of the computer, but there are so many other things to do while sitting here. Do I really need a laptop to write? Do I need to research Mac's or use my Ipad or use my HP laptop I just bought for the boys? What to do? What to do?

It's  frustrating. It's such a huge undertaking and it starts with just one step just like anything else. Do I focus on writing magazine articles? or just jump right in to the novel? What is the best path? Is there anyway to really know?

No there isn't. That is the only thing that is true. There is no one way to find out what will work for me until I just start writing. I have all the tools. I don't need any new books or computers to write. All I really need is to have read a lot of books (check), a pencil and paper (or a computer) and I'm good to go. So Go already!

Agatha Christie

I read my very first Agatha Christie book this weekend while in Vegas. I was all settled in at the pool at the Monte Carlo and ready for a juicy read. I'd read all the hype on Agatha Christie, seen her referred to as one of the best mystery writers, and read that her formula was perfect in creating a mystery.

Boy was I disappointed. The book was horrible. It was so easy to put down that I would never call it a page turner. It was just a dry statement of facts. I felt no emotion for any of the characters. The victim was dead when the book started. Yes there was an interesting twist at the end of the book when the mystery is solved and the killer revealed, but I didn't buy it. It seems like the murderers went out of their way to make it unnecessarily complicated. I just didn't like it at all. It was all surface and no depth. There was no description, no feeling of time or place for me. I was so disappointed.

Of course when I went out shopping Friday afternoon to pick up my reading material for the weekend, I got 3 Agatha Christie books not knowing how crappy they would be. This story was a short one. I will hold my breath and try another one the next time I'm looking for a quick easy read. Maybe 'And Then There Were  None' will be better, but as it stands I am not impressed.

Literature vs. Fiction

I'm going to write, for reals this time, so I figured I should come back to this blog and get it going again.

I've been reading a lot of 'How to Write' books. I usually read a lot of these. There are a lot of crap books on how to write out there, but there are a few gems. They usually fall into two types of categories. One is the easy talking, don't worry about it, just write, conversational tone of book and the other is the scare the shit out of you, you will never format your query or manuscript correctly, get used to piles of rejection letters, and never misspell anything type of book.

Currently on my list of reading materials is the Portable MFA in Creative Writing, The Writer's Journey, and Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster. Now I love, love, love these types of books and not just because they all provide additional reading lists, but because I love to talk about writing and books. What I have noticed this past month in all my writing research is that the second type of these 'How to Write' books (the fancy, scary ones) use the same few books as examples of the best is literature. I'm tired of hearing about Tolstoy, Cheever, Henry Miller, and Homer. I'm not saying they aren't great (although I really don't like Cheever), but what about the really good books? Where are they in the study of how to write? Why don't they use examples of popular fiction? And isn't that the point? To write something that people want to read and not something that they are told to read?

I would love to see a book that talks about what Stephenie Meyer did in the Eclipse books, or how great Anne Rice is at telling a story, or lets talk about Ian McEwan's prose, or how Steven King creates suspense. That would be a really great how to book. Lets get in a little bit of study on Candace Bushnell, Ayn Rand, Colleen McCullough, or even Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

When I first started reading the 'How to Write' books I had to actually go to the library/bookstore and look up all the references and read them so that I would know what they were talking about. I am fairly well read, but I was starting at ground zero according the authors of those high-falluting books. Those who write the how to books are usually MFA grads and professors of writing and it seems like it's be beneath them to admit to reading popular fiction. Do they really read it and not admit it? Or are they scared to even open a novel that is on the best-seller list?

I'm trying to keep all of my reading middle of the road, somewhere between only NYT Best Sellers, classical timeless books, and today's artsy short stories and fiction. That is what educates me the most: reading a little bit of everything.

Here is my current to be read pile:

A Tale of Two Cities- Charles Dickens   (I've never read it and feel so guilty about that )
The Carrie Diaries - Candace Bushnell
The Chicago of Europe - Mark Twain
The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet - Reif Larsen  (The illustrations look gorgeous)
The Enchanted Castle - Edith Nesbit
The Body in the Library - Agatha Christie (Again I've never read any of her mysteries)
The Preservation of Historic Architecture - US Department of the Interior
Fanny - Erica Jong
Booklife - Jeff vandermeer

and that doesn't even include all the big fat novels that have been in the pile for a while. So far this year I've knocked out Atlas Shrugged and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but eventually I'd like to get to:

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Drood - Dan Simmons
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Soooo many books, soooo little time.

The Lord of the Rings

Holy crap I read the whole thing. It took me two weeks, but with all the snow days recently and the kids home I had nothing else to do but read.

I was skeptical to start off with, but I felt I had to read it just out of pure curiosity and just because I had to get it under my belt of classics that need to be read.

At times it was a bit much with so many names and people and mountains flying by right in the middle of a good story, but besides that, obviously it was rivetting. It would have to be or they wouldn't have been printing the thing for the last 50 years and spent millions of dollars in making the movies

I liked it so much I would even put it on a list of books I need to read again in my lifetime.

I remember guys in highschool talking about Gandalf and acting out scenes from the book (Yes I went to a highschool for gifted students. All the guys were nerds.... cute, but nerds none the less.) I finally understand why they were doing that. I understand jokes on TV now making fun of Frodo or Smeagol. It's like a whole new world has opened up to me.

I don't think I'll start reading fantasy as a genre, but if this is the book that started it all then I can see why it's such a thriving genre.

Italian For Beginners

Now technically this is just a little light chick-lit, but it was also a little bit of a Roman travelogue. Sicne I can't travel, I love the romance mixed with travel books. For some reason this one kept me hooked. The story wasn't as predictable as other chick-lit can be, so it kept me entertained the whole way through.

Cat leaves her ho-hum life to do something impulsive and different to try and spice up her life. Well whose life wouldn't be spiced up if they dropped everything and went to Rome for 4 weeks. Cat is 35 and single and spends most of her time in Rome taking pictures, trying to get over the death of her mother, and trying to figure out her relationships with men. I think there was a little too much deep introspection on Cat and her realtionship with her mother. I would have liked to see the love story developed more, but overall it was very readable. It made for a good light weekend read. It won't change your life, but will keep you entertained. Over all I would say it was a home run for chick-lit.

NaNoWriMo Story

Yes I'm doing it. I've even got more than 5000 words already. My reading is slacking and I just can't find anything really good to read. I've tried a few, but nothing has stuck. I did finish Finding Oz and it was awesome, but I'm not in the mood to write a formal review.
I tried Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice but it was so boring. I wasn't engrossed by page 150 so I figured it wasn't worth finishing.
So now I'm engrossed in getting in my 2500 words a day for NaNoWriMo. So far so good, but for me it's only day 3. I've done the math for this and if I do 2500 words a day on the weekdays, not including Thanksgiving Day I will meet the 50,000 mark just in time for the end of the month.

I had no plans when I started this story. I just sat down and waited to see what was going to come out. It started out as me, but now has kind of morphed into an Angelina Jolie bad ass mother kind of character and she will be duking it out with none other than Brad Pitt as the bad guy. I don't know how that happened, but when I visualize the characters I created, that is who they look like so I'm going to go with it.
I tried to think of something that could hold my attention and give me enought little scenes to write for a whole month and what I have come up with is:

From the soon to be released book jacket........ A mother leaves her family to take a job in Las Vegas for six weeks to try and save the family from financial ruin, but once she enters into the seedy underworld of Las Vegas she is unsure if she will ever be able to return to her family again.

Oh yeah. That's right. The "seedy underworld". I want it to be kind of like a combo of Jane Eyre... you know a stranger in a big new house with strange people, a new job, a myserious past, a hidden secret.
And then for the cliffhanger at the end the husband will come and save his wife, but he will do it on the newly finished Hoover Dam suspension bridge.
It is going to be freaking awesome.