Author Archives: Janna G. Noelle

What’s in a (Blog) Name?

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If I were desperate, the internet is not without various resources.

If I were desperate, the internet is not without various resources.

I’ve been unhappy with the name of my blog for some time now.

Not that The Rules of Engagement is terrible as far as names in general go.  There have been at least two movies called that (one about the 1993 Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas no less; the other a military legal thriller starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson) as well as a sitcom that just concluded its seventh and final season last year.

And yet, The Rules of Engagement is indeed the name of two movies and a long-running sitcom.

Which is to say, it’s not particularly original.

Plus, I didn’t put any real thought into it when I chose it as the name for my blog.

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Necessity is the Mother of (Re)Invention – Blog Changes Ahead

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Art Gallery lion

Of all the various forms of social media out there, blogging is definitely my favourite.

The ability to blog is a wonderful privilege for someone like me, for I was always the kid everyone was trying to shut up.

At school, despite being a strong student, I was constantly criticized on report cards for talking too much – both in and out of turn – and in general disrupting the class with my compulsive need to share every last idea that came into my head.

Thankfully, my father, who was a huge proponent of self-expression, told my teachers he’d much rather I talk than not talk.

Yet for someone like me, blogging is the perfect pursuit, for I get to express my thoughts (and my thoughts are usually fairly detailed, which is why I do better on WordPress than Twitter), and those who care can read it while those that don’t can tune me out entirely.

And yet, I’m not really that good of a blogger.

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Failed New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Make You a Failure

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New Year's resolutions reality

Anyone who knows me well knows that my favourite of all the holidays in the year is New Years.

Christmas, I could really take or leave: it has an interminable, commercially-driven lead-up that starts the moment Halloween ends; holiday travel is utterly wretched, as I lamented in my last post, and I don’t much care for Christmas carols (for all that my one and only successful songwriting attempt resulted in a modern Christmas song).

But once all the hoopla and mayhem of December 25 is passed, the sixth day after the fact is one I look forward to with excitement.

Now, I’ve never been to a swanky New Year’s Eve bash….

I’ve never rung in January 1 with champagne, a sparkly gown, and a kiss from a charismatic stranger at midnight.

The one time visited I New York City to spend New Years in Time Square, I was so many streets back from the action, the TV back at my accommodations offered the best view of ball dropping.

And yet, sexy celebration or not, I still love New Year’s, for I love new beginnings.

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The Longest Shortened Day Ever – A holiday air-travel misadventure

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Lost luggage

It’s that time of year again.

Come tomorrow, as the song goes, I’ll be leaving on a jet plane – travelling from sea unto sea to Nova Scotia for my annual Christmas sojourn home.

Ugh!

It’s not that I don’t want to go home or see my family.  Rather, there’s just very little in this world I find more arduous than actually getting there.

I mean, to begin with: airline travel at Christmas.  Airline travel is bad enough during any other time of year, fraught with such indignities as,

  • Having to remove my belt (which, far from being just a fashion accessory, is actually necessary for keeping my pants up),
  • Having my hair patted down for concealed weapons, and,
  • The full-body “I-can-see-you-naked” X-ray scanner.

At Christmas, I get to enjoy all of the above and wait in a long-ass line for it at that, as if eagerly claiming a special prize.

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Should Authors Be Good Role Models?

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JK Rowling

I recently concluded that reading Young Adult dystopian isn’t for me.

Admittedly, having just celebrated my 35th birthday, it’s hardly a revelation that I’m the genre’s target audience.

However, my conclusion came even less recently than that; it happened about a month ago when I finished my sixth YA dystopian title this year after Suzanne Collins’s Mockingjay, Beth Revis’s Across the Universe trilogy, and Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season:

The uber-popular Divergent, by Veronica Roth (soon to be a movie in 2014).

In this book, all 16-year-olds – the main character, Tris, included – undergo often violent and competitive initiations in order to be inducted into one of four societal factions that go on the govern the rest of their lives (full plot summary here).

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Character Study: Raleigh Becket from Pacific Rim

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So, I finally saw Pacific Rim a couple weekends ago.

I opted to give this movie a pass when it came out in July, believing it to be just another dumb summer blockbuster involving robots, a la Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise.

(I loved the original 80s Transformers cartoon, yet there’s so much to hate about those movies.)

As a reader at heart, I tend not to like most movies I watch, especially those that come out in the summer.  If I watch a summer flick at all, it’s usually on video, and for the benefit of some mindless entertainment after a tough week at work.

But Pacific Rim surprisingly gave me a lot to think about, particularly with regards to its characters.

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On the Anniversary of the Day of My Birth

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Today is my birthday.

At around 2:00am this morning, I turned officially 35 years old, thus entering, as someone at work (helpfully!) pointed out, whole new age demographic on surveys.

In my mind, though, it actually happened about six months ago, back in June.

I always make the point of pre-aging myself.  This is both to smooth the transition from one year to the next and to prevent subsequently mis-aging my myself, similar to how people often continue to write the old year for months after New Year’s.

Today is also the day I’m supposed to have the draft of my novel-in-progress completed.

That, on the other hand, didn’t happen.

I’ve already decided to forgive myself for that.  It was a self-imposed deadline in any case, so the only person I’m really letting down is myself.  But I refuse to feel let down.

In writing, as in all aspects of life, one only gets out of it what s/he’s put in.  I can honestly say I’ve put a lot of effort and heart into my WIP, and have worked away on it, if not speedily, than with dogged consistency. I’ve been no slouch, so if it’s going to take me longer than I thought to get ‘er done, well, such is life.

The only truly downside is that I’d originally planned to share my novel’s opening on my birthday.

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On Suspense in Storytelling, pt. 2 – Unpredictable-Unputdownable

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Every story, by definition, contains suspense in one form or another.

The most common form is the Predictable-Yet-Still-Desirable (from pt. 1), wherein the reader/viewer already has a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen before it happens, but wants to see it anyway.

This may be either to feel the satisfaction of having been correct in his/her predictions, to see exactly how it happens, or to be already emotionally prepared to vicariously undergo a universal human experience.

Somewhat less common is a second form of suspense, which, ironically, is probably the form that more readily comes to mind when one hears the word “suspense”: the unpredictable-and-thus-unputdownable, which keeps the reader glued to the book, and still reading long after s/he should have gone to bed.

All stories by their very nature contain the precursors of this type of suspense.  How could they not?  Stories come to us described by blurbs designed to hint at the plot and its major turning points, but ultimately give nothing away.

They’re the very definition of suspense, for who knows what might happen between the lines of that enticing paragraph on the back of the book or DVD case?

Not all stories, however, retain that suspense.

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On Military Fiction and Other Stories About War – A Remembrance Day-inspired reflection

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Remembrance Day

When I was younger – perhaps being around 13 or 14 years old – I developed a fondness for military fiction.

I’m not entirely sure why this was.  Even though my father spent 30+ years in the military before retiring, his preferred genres at the time were westerns and historical fiction, so I wasn’t influenced by his reading preferences.

Nor nor was I by his specific profession, for he served in the Navy, yet I was reading primarily about the activities of the Army.

I remember picking up a novel about the Vietnam War at the library.  It had an eye-catching cover, and once I started reading, it wasn’t long before I was utterly absorbed.

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The First Syllable in “November” is “No”

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I kind of hate November.

First of all, Movember?  A very worthwhile cause, but moustaches are creepy.

And the end of Daylight Savings Time?  I despise Daylight Savings Time, both the start of it and the end of it, for I find mucking with the time twice a year very jarring to my circadian rhythm.

My birthday is in November, on the Scorpio-Sagittarius cusp.  I quite like my birthday  but resent having my birthday month tainted by icky ‘staches and disruptions to my sleep.

And then there’s NaNoWriMo….

Unlike my fully realized feelings on Movember, DST, and my birthday, I’ve yet to work out how I feel about National Novel Writing Month.

For one thing, I’ve never done it.  Nor am I doing it this year.  Nor am I even sure I want to someday.

Let me re-phrase that last thought: I feel like I do want to do it someday, but I’m not sure if that’s because I relish the challenge it offers or because I feel like I should want to since it’s such a renowned event in the writing community.

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