Almost There

I'm almost to the end of The Magic Mountain. Somewhere I must have missed a day of reading because I'm fifty pages behind my little schedule I made to get the book read by the end of the 2010. I can get that done tonight and be back on track, though.

I love the new year. There is always something refreshing about starting over. Even though it's a man-made construction (time) and, furthermore, thoroughly Western, and even though I've never quite understood why we chose the middle of winter to be the beginning of the new year, I'm always gung-ho for resolutions.

You know about my resolutions this year - two books a week and two pages written each day. I'm very optimistic. The first two books of the new year are extremely long, so I'm kind of hoping, if I can get them read on time, they will be like a trial by fire that will make the rest of the year a breeze as far as pacing myself. I can't wait to get to the Writers at Work series from The Paris Review. A friend of mine gave me the third in the series a few years ago and the interviews in it are just brilliant. There are nine in the series, so I'll be reading the other eight. One of them has interviews with Vladimir Nabokov AND Jorge Luis Borges. Holy shit.

Philosophy Is the Talk on the Cereal Box

Awesome lyrics from Paul Simon's wife.

What I've learned from reading The Magic Mountain is that I don't get most philosophical debate. My little mind can't wrap itself around abstract ideas when they are presented in paragraphs that go on for pages and never give any concrete examples.

At one point, the main character, Hans Castorp, has what is clearly a dream from the very onset of the scene (though I think we're supposed to think it's really happening for a time) and through the images and events of the dream I came to an understanding of how Hans Castorp felt about two other characters who were always arguing their beliefs in front of Hans Castorp (he is always referred to by his full name in the book). Two witches are ripping apart a blond-haired baby and eating him alive? I immediately understood this image (Hans Castorp is blond).

Following this scene, however, is about two - three pages of narrated explanation of how Hans Castorp feels. Maybe this is necessary for readers who can't make connections between images like I can. That's fine and I'm glad Thomas Mann was thinking of them. But what it turns into for me is a daydreaming session where I wander off into my own thoughts while simultaneously reading words that go nowhere for me.

Here's the kicker - if I didn't have the dream sequence I wouldn't know how Hans Castorp feels about the two men arguing around him. I would just be skimming a paragraph that goes over my head because it's too abstract and too grand for me to pay attention. Maybe Mann is a genius for including both so he leaves no reader behind.

C Grades

The widest category of all. I would conjecture seventy-or-so percent of all books fall into a 'C' category. And you know, it's not even really about mediocrity. I mean, it is, on one level, but it's also about 'c'ompare and 'c'ontrast.

'C'omparing one book to another is something one of my former professors hated. I guess he's right if you take the point of view of yet another professor (though I dropped the second's class after one appalling day) that no two authors can tell the same story unless they plagiarize. During college, I read for professor #1's class One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is very, very difficult not to 'c'ompare these two novels. They both deal with generations of a particular family in South America, and both are magical realism. The bad thing is, Garcia Marquez's book is a pioneer of the genre. Allende's book, while good at times itself, doesn't revolutionize the genre and, furthermore, didn't really wow me otherwise, either. Allende of course would cite Garcia Marquez as one of her influences, and sometimes it's hard to shake the ghost of that influence. I give Allende credit for telling the story only she could tell - but in the wake of Solitude it's just not that special.

'C'ontrasting, to me, is the heart of literary criticism. How does one book contrast to another? How, to follow the idea of professor #2, did each author bring his own aesthetic to his particular telling of the old story? According to Stephen King, there are something like nineteen archetypes for stories, and I believe there are others who would argue that down to about six. Maybe those archetypes correspond to the six major emotions: disgust (or hate), happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise (boy, four of those are terrible emotions and surprise is a coin toss - so we have a one-in-six chance of experiencing happiness in this world?). Anyway, how can a new novel make a reader respond with one of these emotions in a new way? This is how new novels 'c'ontrast to other novels.

And the unfortunate thing about Allende, for me, is that she didn't make me respond to these emotions in a new way. You know, thinking it through, I think the most important emotion may be surprise. I want to be surprised at how a book makes me feel. I think when I give a book a grade of 'C', it's because it failed to surprise me in any way, good or bad. Failing books surprise me in a bad way, by either confusing or insulting me. Passing books surprise me in a good way, by focusing on the subject in a way I wouldn't have previously thought to do so. 'C' or 'low-pass' books just make me go, "Oh, yeah, I guess."

One book that surprised me in a good way is Lauren Slater's Lying. It's a memoir. But guess what she does? She lies. The important part, though, is that she admits that for a long, long time, she believed everything she recounts to have been the truth and was shocked to learn it was all false. Because of my own obsession with false memories, I found this book to be a refreshing take on how we perceive the world, what 'the truth' means, and what makes us who we are. Abe Akira's short story Peaches does something similar, although many fiction anthologies include his story because the narrator isn't sure how to sort the truth from the fiction.

When I was in grad school, I had to take a memoir class and it ended up being incredibly enlightening. On one of the first days, our professor stood at the chalkboard and had us come up with categories memoirs often go in, i.e. stories of illness, stories of childhood trauma, stories of divorce, etc. What we discovered was there are very few original stories, even in real life. And even though each person's story, as tired as the subject matter is, should be riveting because it's so personal, it just plain isn't always that interesting.

I have a hard time giving 'C' grades to any story about the Holocaust. I know I should, but it just seems like such a monumental amount of anger, fear, and sadness it's hard to not be surprised at every turn. I'm also afraid of reinforcing what my students said about the events of the Holocaust not being all that bad. But, isn't every story of anger, fear, and sadness monumental? I don't know, but I'm able give 'C' grades out like 'c'andy as long as it's not about the Holocaust.

'C' is for 'C'ommonplace. How fast did I read it? How much did I remember? Why wasn't I more engaged? Who would I recommend this book to? If the answers are fast, because nothing was new, no one and everyone, then I know it's a 'C' book. It's a shrug-of-the-shoulders. It's a see-for-yourself. It's an I-could-do-better. I guess they're as good as any other way to pass the time.

2+

Last night I timed myself reading The Magic Mountain. I had no distractions and I read as fast as I could with total comprehension. It took me twenty-five minutes to read ten pages. The book is seven hundred pages long but each page is two pages in one, the print is so small and so densely packed. It's like reading fourteen hundred pages instead. At this rate, it will take me roughly thirty hours of straight reading to get through this book. That's four+ hours a day to get through it in a week. Not undoable, but tough nonetheless.

Don't yell at me if I can't get through it quickly. My goal with it is to read two other books this week while reading at least a chapter of Mountain each day. I've already read Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I've always been curious about this book but guess what? It was really, really boring. Which may have been why I was able to fly right through it. C-. Again.

I don't know what the other book will be yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I make a decision. Meanwhile, I also distract myself here and there with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which is brilliant, but also not a book easily consumed.

No, No, I'm Sticking with It

I'm NOT abandoning my multiple-books-a-week goal. My problem is procrastination and distraction. I CAN get through Mountain if I stop puttering around reading a page here and there. I'm making excuses - the big one being that I have to be on eggshells because I KNOW that every five minutes someone is going to want to ask something of me and I never have any real, true privacy.

My mother was very angry this morning when I tried to talk to her about it. This is just a silly example, but today I was watching a program and in the final five important, revealing minutes of the program two people called. Neither call was for me. Since then, we've received probably twenty phone calls, none of them for me. I tried to explain to my mother how frustrating it is to have to run to the phone every five minutes and she said, "How are they supposed to know they're interrupting you?" That's not the point. The point is there are so many people who live here that if there were three phone calls every day for each of us there would be eighteen phone calls every day. And, there are more than three phone calls for each of them, I'll tell you.

If I lived alone, I wouldn't have to answer the phone for the three friends who call within an hour for my older nephew. I wouldn't have to answer the phone for my sister who calls twice in ten minutes because of yet another school crisis with her child (wherein she blames everyone but the child). I wouldn't have to answer the phone for my mother when my brother calls, over and over and over again, to ask if my mother is home yet from the grocery store.

How can I concentrate? I really just want to curl up under the covers and sleep. I want to lock the door and pretend they aren't yelling up the stairs for me. I want to be able to take the few hours before I go to work to make breakfast, take a bath, and read a book. I just want to be able to READ a book. Who can read being constantly interrupted?

My brothers and sisters don't think it's fair that I don't have the responsibilities they have (i.e. children). But I made decisions to keep from having these responsibilities. It's amazing how jealous they are of me. At this point in my life I am seriously considering the life of a hermit. I am budgeting out my money and preparing for a day when my credit cards are paid off (March) and I can beginning dreaming of a studio apartment away from here. I know they'll still call me, every day, but it won't be everyone else in their lives calling me as well. I just want to be alone. I can't wait to be alone.

Just now they called up to me. I couldn't even get through writing this freaking blog entry.

Pinocchio

Because The Magic Mountain is not an easy read, I'm going to read some other books while pacing myself with it. Yo, the multiple-books-a-week goal might have to be revamped in order of structure because I've come to the realization that I don't read quickly unless I'm extremely engaged. Which doesn't mean I'm not engaged with Mountain, but it's just not an easy read.

So, the first book I read simultaneously was Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. Like Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, this book is repetitive and frustrating. It is NOT the Disneyfied version, I'll tell you. Pinocchio is an idiot, and one who can't learn his lesson no matter how many times he gets punished for his wicked ways. This bothers me immensely. I thought Quixote was basically the same story over and over and over until I just wanted to scream. Pinocchio is similar. C-.

I'm not sure how I'll work out two books a week, or if that will even still be the goal, with the new slower reading, but somehow, I need to change my approach.

Stories by English Authors: France

Ugh. C. Too much religious piety. And it started off so well with thugs and a murder. I won't be continuing the series on to :Germany.

Oops

I think I must have read Peter Straub's Film Noir in an issue of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror because I don't see it in The Story and Its Writer as I was just looking through it.

D Grades

Continuing in the analysis of why I give certain grades to books I read. This installment will concentrate on 'D' grades.

'D' is for 'D'amn I wasted my time. For the most part. You know, I think it's very hard for any story or novel to earn a 'D' or 'F' from me. Both grades basically mean the author failed at the very basics of storytelling. I think, as giving 'A' grades is, that failing grades are a good deal visceral. No, I take that back. 'F' grades are not visceral because I can usually pinpoint a reason why they fail outright. 'D' grades are different.

Well, I guess 'D' is for 'D'ifferent, then. A story I would give a 'D' grade to is John Barth's On with the Story. One reason is because I pretty much universally hate John Barth's writing. But there is a reason. It's a deeply personal reason, though, which is why it wouldn't get the grade of 'F.' Remember, I try to separate my emotions from my reasoning. The reason for Barth's failing is that he uses meta-fiction, but uses it in such a patronizing and atagonizing way that I feel insulted everytime his authorial voice interjects.

You see, Barth likes to tell readers how beneath his ability of thinking the readers must be. I mean that, literally. He will intereject to say things like, "I know you probably aren't following the story so I'll explain things again...." Except the characters are just talking on an airplane so what's so fucking complicated? If you wanted to make a statement about the world in general and were afraid your readers wouldn't get it through metaphor, why didn't you write an essay? Don't fucking give me an essay in the middle of the story.

I hate John Barth.

But the narration and story itself aren't unreadable. It's just so frustratingly condescending that I can barely force myself through it.

The opposite can be true, too, though. A novel could (and none come to mind) be so beautifully written but so confusingly subtle or disorganized that it becomes unreadable between the beautiful parts. This is a visceral reaction because I want to like it but just plain can't. Maybe The Sound and the Fury. I know, that's like blasphemy to say I hate that book, but nonetheless, I do. The idea is brilliant but I just...don't...have the patience for it. However, I love As I Lay Dying, which is equally as strange and disjointed but Addie's chapter in the middle just plain brings everything together in a way I don't remember Sound ever being able to do.

So 'F' grades are a colder "This just didn't work" than 'D' grades. 'D' grades are for that novel, the title of I can't remember, where these alien vampire things lived in a cave in, like, France or Germany or somewhere and all I really remember is the final shotgun scene because the writing was just so awful. It was like a fourth grader wrote it.

Let me explain something where I will sound condescending but tough luck. I can spot an amateur (read, a skilled writer) from a mile and many editors away. I make a distinction between skilled and talented and even gifted writers. I won't go into complete detail in this post but will someday. But just know that I really believe in a difference between writers who are good at employing a technique and writers who don't need techniques because they have style. In the novel above, the author kept trying to employ techniques like exposition in dialogue and suspenseful narration and descriptive setting. And what it came out sounding like was that kind of "Pow! Zing! Bam!" kind of writing and it wasn't done masterfully, like he was imitating a comic book. It was done because he thought those techniques were cool and how real writers write and he'd be a real writer the more he used them.

Well, no, not if it's obvious. I was, cruelly, laughing out loud and some of the awful writing. My visceral reaction was pity. In grad school, there weren't enough poetry, fiction, or non-fiction workshops for any student to concentrate in one area so we all crossed paths into different genres. I remember being so angry at some of my fellow students who were poets forced into fiction workshop. I wasn't angry they were in my genre but more that they were trying to write how they thought fiction sounded instead of just writing poetry in prose form. I was angry at myself for this very same thing when I was in non-fiction classes because I convinced myself non-fiction had to sound different than fiction. What came out in both instances was forced and unnatural-sounding writing because it wasn't the voice of the author on the page. Obviously. It was, instead, bad imitation.

I think that may be what earns most 'D' books/stories their grades. For the most part something about them is bad imitation. Barth's stories so badly want to imitate an essay but do it so poorly he comes off condescending. The vampire novel wanted to sound like a "serious" author but came off sounding like a child. I wanted to sound like a "true" story but came off sounding like I was lying to myself. And I was. And the vampire novelist was, and John Barth was. Lying to themselves, that is.

I guess, then, 'D' is for 'D'eception.

Death in Venice

I wanted to get a taste for Thomas Mann before I read The Magic Mountain so I downloaded this book on the Kindle (Mountain isn't available on the Kindle). The version I got only included the first story, the title story, but that's okay as I paid less than a dollar.

So, the praise: There are some fantastic passages in this story. It's dark and involves obsession and is poetically written.

The criticism: Too much philosophy. I found myself glazing over during huge chunks of the story. The ending was too abrupt. Sometimes paragraphs went on for pages. It's hard to concentrate when you lose your place over and over.

Grade: C.

Souvenirs of a Blown World

Once again, a book with much potential that falls a little flat. What this book was able to do that a book I read earlier this year wasn't able to do, One More Day Everywhere, was it told me a story by telling stories.

One of my biggest pet peeves in the world is having something over-explained to me. I think people in general indicate when they aren't following along, and so when they don't indicate confusion, stopping to over-explain only ends in frustration and even feeling insulted. One More Day Everywhere spent too much time telling me how I should feel about the whatever story it just told instead of letting the story speak for itself.

This book, Souvenirs of a Blown World is anecdotes from McDonald's life that tell a story about the 1960s. What he cleverly did (he passed away in 2008) was he just told each story from his own perspective and with nice detail and then ended the chapter. And it moved smoothly.

What I didn't get a sense of, and so why this book still only receives a "C" grade, is of some kind of chronology or big picture or structure. It seems random, which I'm sure it's not but still it seems. I feel like this is a bunch of essays thrown together because they have a common theme or common author. I'm going to leave it at that, because I don't feel like overanalyzing.

One extremely clever thing McDonald did, though, was to use phrases, sentences, quotes, etc. from previous chapters as epigraphs introducing the theme of the next chapter and it was usually a brilliant tie-in. Why this excites me: in grad school I used epigraphs at the beginning of my stories and my workshop class would tell me how tired that kind of technique is. Authors don't do that anymore, nor do they put thoughts in italics nor do they use quotation marks for speech (that was actually said in one of my undergraduate classes). And I'm like, who cares what other authors are doing now? This is what I like. But you know, most of them were only interested in copying what was going on now, not actually expressing themselves in a way that...expressed....themselves.

Anyway, high "C."

The Princess Bride

I just got done reading the abridged version of The Princess Bride and it was very very good. I want to say 'A'. I want to. Here's why I want to:

The abridger, William Goldman is hilarious and I'm fine with his asides. I don't need fifty pages on what the Queen packed when she was going to visit the other city.

The author, Simon Morgenstern, is equally hilarious. And fine with being anachronistic. So am I. I love that Westley was wearing blue jeans in medieval France. Love.

The characters are interesting. As you may or may not know, this is the most important aspect of any story for me. I wonder if it's why I have such a hard time getting into poems.

Anyway, why won't I give this an 'A' but am instead giving it a really high 'B+'?

I don't know. I enjoyed it immensely. I read it in one day. I ususally can only accomplish this if I am truly engaged with the novel. I was. So what's eating me?

I don't think I'll reread it. The novels I give an 'A' grade are ones I will return to, time and again. For this purpose, Stephen King's The Drawing of the Three, which is the second book of The Dark Tower Series, only receives a high 'B'. It's not my favorite and I don't reread it. I think the one thing, and I'll talk about this eventually on this blog, the one thing that earns any novel an 'A' has to be visceral and extremely personal. I would recommend this book to others, especially those who enjoy adventure books, but now that I'm done, I'm done. I don't want to go back and find the little details I feel like I overlooked the first time.

Goldman would of course give this book a 'A'. He responds to it on such an emotional level (boy does he) and I think that's beautiful, and if he had explained to me why he thought I should read it I would, just based on his explanation, and I don't think I would regret it even if I didn't enjoy it because I knew it brought someone else such pleasure. I don't regret it. I just won't be revisiting it.

I will however, forever revisit its greatest line:

"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

The Methods of Authors

A better book than the previous 'on writing' book. I really wanted to enjoy this book but it was poorly organized. What methods classic authors used when writing their masterpieces is fascinating and don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading the stories, but it jumped from person #1 in paragraph #1 to person #2 in paragraph #2, ad nauseum. Maybe I was spoiled by Once Again to Zelda which is beautifully organized so each chapter focuses on a particular writer. I was expecting that here, too. Or at least expecting that the authors would be organized by some sort of theme (ones who write in the morning, ones who can only write locked in their bedrooms, ones who write on napkins at 3:00 a.m.). I'd give this one a C. And I wanted it to at least be a B.

Grades - Beginning with 'F'

This is an explanation of why I give certian grades to the books I read. I give them grades on the classic academic scale, A - F. For the most part, the grades are purely visceral, as they should be for anyone building a bookshelf. We can't help what we like, what we respond to. But I do think a good number of us have some idea of why we like certain books and can explain why we would recommend them to others.

There are books I would recommend to everyone because I love them, unconditionally. There are books I would recommend to serious readers, because they seem to be representative of a certain genre, time period, or philosophy. There are books I would recommend only if it sounds like another person might enjoy it more than I did. Then there are books I wouldn't recommend at all. Those are split into the two failing categories (though in my day, a 'D' grade was passing at BGSU - I know this personally).

In the words of Heidi Klum, "Let's...start the show."


'F' Grades -

'F' is for 'Fucking Unreadable." There have been many books in my life I've abandoned because they were boring. In the past few years I have begun to force myself to try my damnedest to get through those books in which I can at least see value for other readers. Usually, if I can see that value, I propel myself through them as though I'm swimming against a raging river and feel an incredible sense of accomplishment when I make it to shore. What I end up giving those books is normally a 'C' because I can see the value of these books for others to read. It won't always be an uphill battle for every reader to get through Fahrenheit 451. Christ, was it ever for me.

'F' is for Film Noir by Peter Straub. About three years ago, I took a few months to read The Story and Its Writer: Fifth Edition. It contains about 120 short stories if I'm remembering correctly, and Straub's story is one of them. It's structure is based on the idea of an old film reel that has worn through in places. Sounds intriguing, right? You know, it could have been a really excellent idea. And Straub co-wrote one of my other favorie King novels, The Talisman. Damn I love that book...even before The Dark Tower that's the book that inspired my art. Had Film Noir been a little easier to follow I think it would have been brilliant. It could have been done - many authors write linear stories with giant gaps in time/narrative. Sometimes you don't need to know what went on in between, you know? But Film Noir is just a bunch of scenes that are loosely strung together and too confusing to follow. I hated it. I eventually stopped reading.

Novels or stories that outright fail in my opinion are those I think very, very few readers could enjoy. I count among my strengths the ability to follow a story and, more importantly, the ability to make leaps of logic. This is a talent, let me tell you. I don't have many talents but that's one of 'em (along with reading upside down, writing upside down, writing backward, being able to write legibly with my left hand, and writing in general). Anyway, if I can't even follow your story and I come to the point where I am no longer willing to try...you fail. Outright.

I would, however, give Brave New World a 'D'. Maybe even a 'C'. Here's the reasoning: I couldn't get through it but it was obviously because of my extreme bias against dystopian fiction. I despise dystopian fiction. The book itself is readable. I can see how it made it into print and even why others enjoy it. But it was threatening to suck my life away by being the kind of book I truly hate. I ran screaming from 1984 for the same reason. I'm just not a scientific elitist / government conspiracy type of gal (even when it turns out okay in the end).

'F' is also for The Grapes of 'F'ucking Wrath (copyright me). Except, not. I'd give it a 'D'. The theme and story are wonderful. But the narration...the narration, man! Keep 'f'ucking dialect out of narration. I felt like I was decoding the entire novel. You know what, no. 'F'. I can't read it. I got a migraine reading it (I am not lying at all). It just took forever to reread entire paragraphs where Tom Joad was puttin' a 'apostrophe' on the end of every effin' word and they were goin' and movin' and shakin' and let me tell you, it was worse than that. Oh...especially when there would be actual dialogue like: 'Momma said we was goin', Daddy,' a grinnin' Tom said (not an actual line). 'F'.

It's great when an author has an ear for dialogue and language. But if using authentic speech patterns makes it so difficult for even advanced readers to decipher your narrative, it's not worth said authenticity. Use it sparingly instead so it will actually make an impact. You can't show off when no one is looking.

So, an 'F' book isn't one that is simply boring or one that I, personally, don't care for. It's one I don't think anyone could care for. It would be too frustrating or too confusing for any reader. I can only think of two or three in my life I'd give this grade to, anyway.

The Writing Engine

Grade: D+. No, wait, C--.

That's a grade I received on one of my philosophy essays once. The professor had written D+ at the end, then crossed it out and wrote C-- (with two minus signs). He talked with his hands and had that hilarious trait where he backpedalled everything he said, so I could totally see him saying, "You get a D+. No, wait, no, make that a C. A C--."

This book, The Writing Engine by Luc Reid, was going to get a D+. Why? Because it isn't really a book, but instead a giant schill for his website. I won't advertise it here. I had a really hard time reading it, because I think it skips too much. Not skipping around, like jumping from one topic to the next, but like he didn't really care enough to go in-depth into each article, instead wrote a summary, then posted a link to the real article at his site. Well, I could have gone to your site for free, thanks.

In the beginning, I thougt he was funny, and having downloaded the sample I immediately wanted this book because he mentioned Inigo Montoya. Who wouldn't want to read more from someone who quotes The Princess Bride?

And he is funny. But it's not enough. From the book I don't think I got enough of a look at the exercises he would prescribe (and to which he subscribes) to feel like I learned something from him. I felt increasingly frustrated each time I saw the link to the website (on almost every page...of the Kindle). It felt more like a lecture series where you've only attended the introductory seminar - like I read his syllabus. I'll give him this...it's readable. That goes a long way in my book (the figurative one). I didn't feel like I was DRAGGING myself through it or anything. Grade D books are ones I had to force myself to complete, and F books are ones where I couldn't even crawl to the finish line.

Soon I'll post an explanation of the various grades and why I give what I give.

Good Point, Good Point

As I'm reading The Writing Engine, I can't help but be a bit disappointed. This is mainly because my personal favorite kind of "on writing" book is one where the author just tells about himself and what led to his writing habits/philosophy. The Writing Engine is more of a series of short blurbs linking to essays on the author's website. And each one of them backtracks like crazy with "but that doesn't mean this always works" or "this technique only works half the time." Well, yeah, obviously. There are no golden rules. Got it. Please just talk and talk thoroughly in the book, the one that I purchased, with money, that promised to be a book and not a series of links to the real article.

But there is one good point that I found out about today. It's about "Broken Ideas" and it's where something that irks you is on your mind and so you can't concentrate on anything else because even when you sit down to write, that other thought is still your brain's focus. I was a little stumped on where to go in my next scene so I thought I'd take a little break and surf the web for a few seconds. Well, stupid me, I read a little news flash that totally upset me (stupidly) and when I went back to reread the scene and see where to go with it, I wasn't really reading my writing but instead was thinking about the news. I'll have to reread that section of The Writing Engine to see how to solve this problem.

I'm Back

Yeah, I'm not too good sometimes with the goals and the not procrastinating. I have been reading and writing but I often get so immersed in other things I just can't bring myself at the end of it all to update a website sometimes. I'm trying, though. Slowly.

Writing Philosophy

While watching Project Runway, I was yelling at one of the designers about her supposed design philosophy. Suddenly, I realized that I have a teaching philosophy but no writing philosophy. My teaching philosophy is: "We communicate through personal experiences that contain universal truths." But what is my writing philosophy? I don't know. I'm going to think hard about it, though.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Ulysses by James Joyce. It will take all week, I think.

The Debate about Art

One man's trash is another man's treasure. All agreed that's an old expression? Any naysayers? Good. Now here's a question: what if it's another man's treasure but his use for it has been fulfilled. What if another man picks up said treasure and incorporates it into his own treasure?

One of my ideas for The Orchard Boy Series is to have one storyline in each novella revolving around a character who is continued from the end of another story. A famous story (or, usually, a not-so-famous story; let's say a published story instead). I just have reservations about this. Here are my reasons:

1. Is it considered plagiarism? It's not taking someone's words and making them my own, and it's not really taking someone's idea and making it my own, but it is taking someone's character and essentially making it my own. I know a lot of people have done this - most recently I can recall March by Geraldine Brooks, which takes up the story of what Mr. March from Little Women was doing during his youth and while he was away from his family. This book won the Pulitzer Prize.

2. A lot of people have been doing this lately, so will it be like jumping on a bandwagon? The idea came to me when I was thinking about an old short story I read long ago, and how the ending to that story was ambivalent, and imagining that ending and what happened to the characters, and then re-imagining that ending to have gone in a more fantastic direction.

3. The idea will also play off of another of my favorite series - The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King. In the first book, The Gunslinger, one of the characters dies (again) and says, as he dies, "There are other worlds than these." In a sense, he is saying he will live on in another world, in another fantasy. He can be brought back. Is it okay to play off of this idea? Maybe King would love that - the continuation of his idea. That he inspired someone's creativity.

I think it's hard to answer all of these questions, and at the same time, I think all of these questions have already been answered. Countless characters show up in other people's novels, and sometimes it turns out beautifully. I suppose it's true that there are about nineteen archetypes for a story and we just retell them, over and over, so it can't really matter anymore. There are only six real emotions (love, hate, fear, joy, grief, and surprise). It's how we decide to utilize those emotions, how we tell those stories, how we grow those characters that make them unique though they are really ubiquitous.

Welcome to TJC's House of Discipline

Which is way less kinky than it sounds. Basically, I'm lazy and need constant reminders of what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. It's not that I don't enjoy reading and writing - I do, I really, really like them. It's that I'm perpetually afraid of beginning something because I'm equally perpetually afraid of being criticized. Cowardly...lion. I need courage...huzzah.

My plan long ago was to read one book per week this year to accustom myself to a routine, then to introduce, each year, another book each week, then another, until I was reading during every free minute. It worked okay, I kept it up fairly well. I also wanted to document all of the books I read and that didn't work so well. My hope is to be caught being naughty when I don't report the new book or document it as having been read in the handy gadget at the bottom of the screen.

Meanwhile, I have a friggin' Master's degree in writing. And I...work at a clothing store. I'm a winner. I've been kicking around two ideas for stories for a long time - one serious novel (semi-autobiographical) and one novella series, with the possibility to truly be endless. Ya see, I have one true character who runs through my head but I've worried that I can't write every story about said character in fear of being called unimaginative, unrealistic, and unimportant. But then I realized that I shouldn't care. I realized that I...am going to write a soap opera. I'm going to
WRITE a SOAP OPERA. One little sleepy village is going to go through every major catastrophic event possible (from kidnapping to exorcism - I'm looking at YOU Days of Our Lives) and each character is going to survive fifty or so life-and-death situations. And it will be entertaining and fun, and suspenseful and gripping, magical and real.

Oh, yeah, and fantastic shit will happen right alongside realistic shit. Time periods will overlap and a world will be created. Deal.

I'll periodically post on how I liked each book and how I'm feeling about the written stories. I will not divulge details of the The Serious Novel. It has a name, but I will also squirrel even that away for now. It will be titled just as you have seen it: The Serious Novel.

I'm going to rotate every three weeks between The Serious Novel, The Orchard Boy Series, and writing a short story (a girl's gotta get her foot in the door). I will also rotate between library books and books read on the FACTICK (fucking-awesome-creation-that-is-called-Kindle). I'll also read other things as well, as sometimes a book doesn't take more than a day or two to read, but for now I'm interested in reaching these goals. Just know I'm not buggering off after I complete said goals.

Thanks for reading and or following. I think this routine will work for me, and I'm also confident that this time, I mean it.

P.S. How hard is it to grab five random books? The other day my sister was headed to the library and I told her to grab me five random books, and she said, "I don't know what you like." I said, "No, no, just go up to the shelf, close your eyes and pick five random books." She returns with these books and says, "It was really hard to find five random books. I kept having to put them back because they didn't look like what you read." Le sigh. Le piu.