F**king Twitter!I love the concept of Twitter – of microblogging in general. I love the way those who are Twitter-savvy are able to use it to meet new people, remain connected to friends and fans, and obtain information that’s of value and of interest to them.
I just don’t seemed able to do any of those things myself.
To date, despite have been writing seriously for some six years, I’ve yet to complete anything novel-length that stands as a fully completed story – a fact that haunts me continuously.
I’d originally resolved to finish my WIP last year by my birthday, which is at the end of November.
I didn’t make that deadline, but consoled myself with the fact that I had an entire other novel to write to finish the story, my previously anticipated duology in fact being a trilogy.
But there’s still something about deadlines – something definitive and binding, which I suppose is the whole point. I almost never set deadlines. I really don’t like them, even though my “type” is supposed to thrive on them.
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.
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).
I’m no exception in this regard. To wit, I’ve been meaning to read the fantasy novel In the Eye of Heaven since its publication in 2007. Back then, fantasy was my genre of choice, and this book was blurbed by my favourite fantasy author, Jacqueline Carey.
As well, the book’s author – David Keck – is a fellow Canadian and was a debut author in the genre in which I’d hoped to someday be published.
I finally read this book this past May. It’s success in summiting my eight-years-long TBR pile has a lot to do with its subject matter, as well as my assertion in a previous post that sometimes research for one’s own novel is conducted via fictional sources.
Long Beach, California
I hate it more than being asked, “Are you still single?” (The answer to which, for the record, is yes. And when phrased that way, it almost makes me want to stay single out of spite.)
More than, “Did you ride your bike in the rain?”
(Answer: I live in Vancouver, BC. It rains about 300 days a year here. I love biking. I hate public transit. I own a good rain coat and shoe covers. And you see me do this every single day; this should no longer come as a shock.)
Even more than, “What’s your novel about?”
(Answer: Err, well, it’s a historical fiction…)
This question for which I hold so much disdain is none other than,
“What have you been up to?”
Cover and spine of my worse-for-wear copy of The Pillars of the Earth. Over the course of reading, it eventually became a contest to see which would occur first: me reaching the end or the back cover falling off. The cover won.
Not all of them have been nonfiction.
I suspect that conducting research via fiction is something numerous writers do, and not just those writing historicals.
I’m sure almost every writer has consciously studied existing novels to see how others have handled any number of elements of writing craft, from as broad as character development to as concrete as the number of pages per chapter.
So it was, therefore, that I came to Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. Reading this book fell under the purview of “research” for three reasons:
Cue delusion.
Although, it could happen. Anything could happen.
I digress.
(A/N: Mild spoilers for Beth Revis’s Across the Universe series)
Here’s a scenario for you:Imagine you had the opportunity to help colonize a new planet located hundreds of light-years away. This would involve saying goodbye forever to everyone and everything you know and love on Earth, being cryogenically frozen for centuries, and shipped off into the stars.
Would you go?*
This question is brought to you by a dystopian young adult sci-fi series dealing with this very subject: Beth Revis’s Across the Universe trilogy. This trilogy includes Across the Universe, A Million Suns, and the final book of the series – Shades of Earth – which I read back in February.
Page 200.
Except it’s not really my 200th page, for my story is a novel in two volumes (like how Lord of the Rings is actually a novel in three volumes rather than the trilogy it’s often erroneously termed). The first volume of the story in draft form is 377 pages.
That means I’m technically on page 577.
The past two months has seen me achieve a number of writing milestones: my current page number; my one-year blogging anniversary on February 20; my writer’s birthday (which I actually missed) on February 10.
I’m now a five-year-old writer.
Continued from part 1
More people are familiar with King John of England than probably realize.
This is not so much due to his own merits, but rather his frequent association with another, better-known individual from history:
Robin Hood.
(King John, just so you know, was a real historical personage. Robin Hood, meanwhile – not so much.)
My second half-book for 2013 – John, King of England by John T. Appleby – was an adventure to read because it was a reference book for my novel-in-progress that I had to continue if I wanted the “in progress” bit to remain true.
Yet is was also so dense with historical information, it took forever for me to get through it. No word of lie, I renewed this book from the library four times for three weeks at a time.
It was also the book that quite decisively taught me how not to go about writing a work of historical fiction, such as I currently am. But that’s the topic of a whoooole other blog post.
Despite how long it took to read John, King of England, it was very enjoyable. It was written in a dry, witty style typically attributed to British humour. For a long time, I assumed the author, John T. Appleby (who died in 1974), was British, only to discover that he was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, was a Harvard graduate, and at the time of the book’s publication (1959) lived in Washington, D.C.
In the book, I learned about King John’s many failings that made him such a suitable distant villain in the Robin Hood lore. A small selection:
Janna G. Noelle 