4/7/10 - Books, Books, Books

After finishing my last book, I decided some brain candy was in order. My Dad pretty much only reads mysteries and since I have been meaning to increase my knowledge in the mystery realm, I jumped on the huge pile of books he had recommended this week. The weather has been lovely, so the kids have been running wild outside, leaving me more time than I’ve had in a long time to just read.

I started off easily with Robert B. Parker. I’ve read three of his book so far and they are pretty much the definition of brain candy. He’s the dictionary definition of formulaic, but his characters are still funny and witty even if the story itself is lacking a bit. His stories are really about the characters that he creates. What I found myself really liking about him was his dialogue. But I finished every book wanting more. More from the story, more from the characters.

So I delved into a Stuart Woods book next and promptly fell in love with it. There’s just so much more depth to everything about the book. It was centered on one character that my Dad has said he has a series with named Holly Barker. And she is a badass, incredibly smart woman. The story itself kept me guessing, had more of the dark and dirtier elements that I wanted and most importantly, it gave me a big payoff in the end. I’m definitely going to pick up more of Stuart Woods in the future.

Lastly was Michael Connelly. He had been recommended to me a while ago by friends when I was originally looking for mystery novels. Specifically his Harry Bosch books, so I picked up a couple of those to begin with. His stories are by far the darkest I’ve read so far. And I really like the main character. The one book of his that I read without Bosch in it I was not as impressed with. It was uneven and I never really cared about the main character much.

It’s been a fun foray into the mystery realm. And I’m excited to branch out and see what else is out there.

3/31/10 - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

I recently finished a new book entitled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It’s a memoir he wrote almost 10 years ago about the time surrounding the deaths of his parents (both from cancer and within 5 weeks of each other) and how he took on the job of raising his younger brother at a relatively young age himself (he was about 22 and his brother was 9). It was a Pulitzer runner up and I’d remembered hearing really good things about it when it originally came out. And given my current proximity to cancer, I thought it might prove a good read. And it was, but I was exhausted by the time I finished it.

It was almost 500 pages of stream of consciousness. Given the fact that I’ve cranked out at least that many pages over the last 16 months of writing this blog, I have a certain affinity for stream of consciousness writing. But this was as if he had, at some point, sat down and in one sitting written the whole thing based on recollection and how his various neuroses happened to color those memories and the people within them. It was beyond raw. It almost felt unedited.

There were definitely pieces that I related to right about now. And there were pieces that just made me roll my eyes. There were pieces that made me laugh out loud as well as tear up. There were even some point where I seriously considered giving up and putting the book down. The writing is lovely and smart. I alternately thought about wanting to have a beer sometime with this author (if for nothing else than to have a voice to put with the words) and wanting to send him a check for therapy.

Altogether, I’m not entirely sure what I think of the book on a whole. While I’m not sure I would ever read it again, I’m very glad that I read it. It was nice to know, once again, that I am not alone in this parental cancer journey. Also? It’s really good to know that I’m not alone in some of my more neurotic/dramatic/silly/morbid thought processes.

Chief Blahety of Blahsville

I’ve had a really lovely day. Starting off with coffee with sweet E and her even sweeter new baby L. We don’t get to see each other nearly enough for my tastes, so it’s always a treat to be able to get together. She had to leave before me to pick up her kiddos from school, so I just stayed at the coffee house and read. By myself. Without anyone interrupting me every other sentence to get them water or listen to this song or, or, or…it was glorious to just sit on a comfy couch with an almond latte and get into Neil Gaiman.

The Girl and I had a nice lunch at home that merged into a nice afternoon.

The only downside to today? I’ve had exactly no (read zip, zilch, zero) motivation to finish my story for the week. Like I sit and stare at the page with the little cursor eye blinking at me expectantly and it’s not that I’m blocked or frustrated or stuck. I’ve just so many other places to go in my head right now than to finish telling this story today. It pretty much boils down to, I don’t wanna. I just don’t want to write today. This post is going to be chief blahety of blahsville as well. Sorry about that. But I’m just sort of content today. The anger hasn’t really made a comeback. I’m not screaming or sobbing. I’m not all tweaked out over my story this week. I just sort of am. Content. Makes it hard to weave drama and interest into much of anything when you’re totally content to just sit and stare into space.

So I’m afraid that my story will be late this week. Because I’d rather it just be late than be crap because I forced it, and ultimately didn’t give a damn about it. So for any of you cross readers, sorry about that. I’m going to try my hardest to make the wait worthwhile.

And I’ve just about got our taxes done for the year, so we’ll soon know what we get to keep and what we don’t. Hhhmmm…maybe I do have some angst broiling after all…

Books and Writing

Alright, I finally finished the James Patterson book I was reading a couple of days ago and it wasn’t a moment too soon. My dad (who is a big mystery/thriller reader) and several friends have promised me that he has some really good books, but this obviously was not one of them. It was called Hide and Seek and the premise sounded interesting except he forgot to have any of the characters, you know, do much of anything. The whole book was build up to a big fat nothing. You knew what happened before it happened. Or if you didn’t then you weren’t actually paying attention. I thought the whole purpose of this genre was surprise and thrill. Yeah, this one missed the mark completely. I’ll give him another try with some that my dad is hand picking from his personal library, but that’s it. One more chance James Patterson!

The good news is that now I’m free to pick up Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, which I did last night. And it’s lovely. I mean I feel like I’m reading a fairy tale it’s so lovely. It’s definitely not a brain candy book, but the language he uses is just so gorgeous. And one of my favorite things about his writing so far is that he just doesn’t care if the metaphor he’s using actually makes sense. What he cares about is if the words match the feeling and how they feel in your brain as you roll over them and incorporate them into your own experience. It’s amazing. And not in the least bit nonsensical as it might become when you care more about emotion than the actual words you choose. It’s just an unabashed romp through childhood through an adult’s eyes. As if you were to go back through the wonders of your childhood with your grown up vocabulary and ability to put your actual motivation into words.

His writing has already drawn me a bit out of the suspenseful and into the summers I spent in Nebraska. So it will be interesting to see what kinds of stories I write while this panorama of nostalgia is imminent in my mind and memory.

New Books

The Girl and I went to the library on Friday as I was fast approaching the end of the last in the Dragons of Pern books that I had on-hand. I knew it would be closed on Monday and I wanted to make sure I had books through the weekend since it’s really the only time other than bedtime that I’m guaranteed to have any time to read. We even went to the big library downtown. Our library is much newer, but also much smaller. And I must say that I was a wee bit disappointed. I made a very specific list of books that I was looking for. Granted, several of those books are older, but I also know they were extremely popular so I didn’t think I’d have any trouble finding what I was looking for. Turns out I was pretty wrong.

The list I made had a pretty nice mix of sci-fi/fantasy and mystery/suspense; my thought being that I just swap back and forth as I made my way through to determine which authors I really liked and then I’d go back and get more of those authors. Except that I couldn’t the most of James Patterson’s Alex Cross series, pretty much only the newer ones. I couldn’t find any of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series; I couldn’t find any of Catherine Coulter’s FBI series. They only had two Ray Bradbury on the shelves. They only had a handful of Neil Gaiman. I was not happy. I was able to find Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, thank goodness. But I was still seriously disappointed by the lack of depth in these overwhelming popular and prolific authors.

Thankfully, my dad is a total mystery/suspense junky. So he said he’d go through his bookshelves and pull his favorites for me to get while the kids and I are there for their ridiculously long Spring Break. So I’ll have that to look forward to at least. Because I did find one James Patterson book that sounded fairly interesting. And I’m here to tell you that if the rest of his writing is this bad, I don’t want much to do with him.

Story Day!

It’s story day again! Yippee! No, seriously. This week wasn’t so bad. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do and then, crazy as it sounds, I actually did it. I decided to play with the microfiction format this week (stories with a word count of 300-500 words). I spent a good portion of the week thinking about story ideas, trying to figure out how to squeeze any of the ideas that bubbled to the top into that kind of word count. I mean, I am pretty good at writing down my thoughts in a concise manner, but I have no idea how to put a leash on a character. So, again, I focused on a very specific situation and decided to focus that down ever farther by really concentrating on trying to get the reader to feel something very specific. So the whole point of the story was more to make the reader feel with the character than to define the character or even really tell a story.

I know, I know. But the project is all about writing stories you say. And I agree with you. But I am discovering there are a lot of components to story writing. I have been trying to figure out how to work on all of those elements so that I can get stronger. The thought being that if I can strengthen my abilities with the separate elements, then my story as a whole will also get stronger and my abilities as a writer will continue to grow. At least that is the theory. But you’ll have to read this week’s story and tell me if you think I’ve succeeded (hint! hint!). Of course you could also read it and it could only serve to cement your thought that I’ve no business writing and should go back to my day job.

Yeah. Well, the jury is still out. So I’ll just keep plugging along, trying to push my own boundaries.

And I’m almost ready to move on to reading James Patterson or Tom Clancy although I’ll be sad to leave Pern, but I’m excited to see where my imagination takes me from here.

One of those Days

I wanted to do nothing but lie on the couch, read and eat cookies today. Alas and alack, that’s just not allowed when you have a 3 ½ year old dictator nipping at your heels constantly for food, drink and entertainment. I mean seriously, when is this pup ready to get her own damn juice?! There are just days that are harder than others to remain civil when The Girl asks for the umpteenth time for a snack or a different show or exclaims in her best Scarlett O’Hara impersonation that she is bored. Today was one of those days.

Today was one of those days that when The Boy’s school called mid-afternoon to tell me he had a fever and would I please come pick up my germ infested child and The Girl was dawdling in getting dressed that I found myself screaming at her to please just put on some pants already. How hard is it to just put on pants?! Because she had switched out her pretty princess nightgown for the infinitely more weather appropriate shorts and a t-shirt. In February. When the high the last week hasn’t been above 30 effing degrees. Today was one of those days when little things like that simply drive me over the edge.

Today was one of those days when I was resentful to have a sick kid. A day when I found myself fervently praying that his fever breaks tonight because if I have to keep him home tomorrow then I don’t get my alone time while The Girl is in school. And my sanity is demanding alone time. Plus I haven’t even really started this week’s story for 52 in 52. I have the general premise in my head, but no clue as to how I’m actually going to write the sucker.

Today is one of those days when I am crabby and find myself teary while reading a story to The Boy before bed. One of those days when I would have been happy to not have to talk or listen to anyone. One of those days when my best bet would’ve been to lie on the couch, read and eat cookies.

2/8/10 - Tearful Reading

I discovered a few new websites today that had me in a variety of tears as I waded through their archives; everything from tears of recognition and sisterhood to raucous laughter and hell yeahs.

The first website is www.theshapeofamother.com and its entire existence is dedicated to providing a space for women to tell their bodies’ stories as they grow, birth, feed and continue to take care of the children we carry for the rest of our lives. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful site full of heartfelt stories from women coming to grips with and developing immense gratitude for their bodies as they change along the process it takes to become a mother. They celebrate stretch marks as mementos of our bodies’ ability to conform to the needs of the babies we have had in our bellies. They laugh good naturedly about the march of gravity across our boobs, bellies and asses. They jump for joy when weight goals are met and are at the ready with encouragement when they’re not. And they do it all with pictures. Unabashedly displaying all of these things that we hide from even our husbands and definitely from ourselves because of the sheer pride of being able to participate in this group of women exclaiming at the top of their lungs what miracles their bodies are capable of. It’s lovely.

The second is Shapely Prose (www.kateharding.net) and she is awesome. She’s hilarious, witty, amazingly honest and I adore her writing for all of these things and the fact that she just doesn’t take herself very seriously which I have a deep appreciation for as that’s a personality trait I’m trying hard to adopt as of late.

The last is www.mamamia.com.au and apparently she’s a pretty well known author and commentator but I’ve never heard of her. I found her through The Shape of a Mother’s Facebook page and while her site has a more journalistic feel to it, she’s still lovely, funny and honest. She write scathingly about the media’s obsession with body image in a way that makes me want to jump up and down and yell hallelujah!

It was a good day immersing myself in new to me writing.

2/1/10 - Project Time!

So. My head is a mess. What am I doing about it? Diving head first into a project of course! I’ve decided that one of my biggest problems with writing lately is that I’m finding myself drawn to writing stories I don’t typically read, so I don’t really know how it’s done, so to speak. So I’m probing all of my friends for their best recommendations in the mystery/thriller/suspense and sci-fi/fantasy genres. And it turns out that I’m not nearly as well read as I once thought I was, which has put a decent sized dent in my ego, I’ll tell you what. I mean I knew I had pretty huge holes in the classics, but other than that I was really pretty sure that I was relatively well read. Yeah. Not so much. There are two entire genres that I’ve pretty much missed out on altogether.

Well, problem recognized and now on its way to be fully rectified. I have a new reading list easily 3 dozen books deep and I would love to just take a couple of weeks and do nothing but read. I’d love to just relish in the feeling that reading something new and wonderful gives and then have the time and mental space to do nothing but fully engage in the host of ideas these newly discovered stories bring with them. Unfortunately, I can’t quit my day job for two weeks of nothing but reading and writing. I think they call that child neglect. Ahem.

So I will just continue on with my research and read whenever I can, in amidst all of the other day to day stuff on my to do list, like making sure to feed my family occasionally. And not completely ignoring The Girl in her pleas to play and you know, make eye contact.

I’m really excited to delve into this new world. Although it will require me getting reacquainted with a little thing called the library, which I know the kids will love. I’m embarrassed to say it has been a while since I’ve actually used our local library.

So it’s newness all around, what better refuge from the mess in my head?