Books

Bookish Remembrance

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Suddenly I remembered why I came here to begin with. A long time ago, before this site and before smart phones, I was enthralled with reading, and I even got one of my double majors in English literature because of this. I say before smart phones because I believe I lost some of my attention span with the advent of smart phones, as cliché as it sounds and as much as it ages me.

So I started this when I started reading again, and I also wanted to start writing more, because for me reading and writing go hand in hand. Shortly afterwards I forgot or got sidetracked, but last year, I joined a local book club to push me to read a little more and to commune with other readers. To be honest, the book club’s genres aren’t ones that I had ever explored before, and have never been terribly excited about, either: fantasy and science fiction. But it did teach me how to start reading again, without having to re-read a page over and over due to my wandering mind, and I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style of one of the books, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, even if I found it difficult to keep up with the story. He had me from the first line, though, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

To be completely honest, I also wanted to start reading again because I knew it would help my writing skills. My novel has been on pause for a few years (sitting at roughly 45,000 pages, though, so I would like to resurrect the thing) and deep inside I felt that I couldn’t pick it up again until I started reading again. This was my writer’s block.

And what better monument to reading and writing can there be than the Great Library of Alexandria? A constant reminder of what was lost tied to an endeavor that I personally wanted to find again. And what was lost, and edited for that matter, in that great Egyptian library? History tells us there were stories, poetry, science, math, and more. Maybe one of my next reads should be on the Library of Alexandria.

Recently I’ve also started driving more and have just subscribed to Audible.com for audiobooks, as well. I’m venturing into this world of listening without a syllabus and I decided to pick something lighter than a classic, something with an element of fun, and I want a work of fiction, but outside of the realm of fantasy and sci-fi. So this morning I’ve started with Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton, a story of family, as well as one of romance, and one steeped in Cuban culture, which interests me.

Now to run some weekend errands and get back to the story! ¡Chao pescao!

First Tomato and Roe v. Wade

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First Tomato

We have our first tomato coming in 💚

When my daughter was young, one of my favorite books to read to her was First Tomato: Voyage to the Bunny Planet by Rosemary Wells (and my blog subtitle is a little nod to this book). It’s about a bunny named Claire who is having a terrible wintry day, and finds solace when the bunny queen takes her to the bunny planet:

“Far beyond the moon and stars, 

Twenty light years south of Mars, 

Spins the gentle Bunny Planet.

And the Bunny Queen is Janet.”

On the bunny planet, Claire has “the day that should have been” and wanders through her mother’s wonderful earthy garden to pick the first tomato.

First Tomato by Rosemary Wells

We love this book and my daughter and I have read it together many, many times.

Now, our first tomato came on the heels of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which my daughter, now 22, discussed with me this weekend. I don’t get on Facebook much because I don’t really like the platform but I do have one because some of my family members like to keep in touch on there and for events and site-related things. I have some distant relatives who were celebrating the court decision, and even though my daughter hardly uses Facebook, she asked me why I didn’t unfriend them, saying “how can you be friends with someone who doesn’t think you should have rights?” As usual, she had a very good point.

In real life, now that I think about it, I don’t have friends who don’t think I should have rights (and it applies to more than this situation). How can they denigrate women so much that they don’t trust their instincts about what is best for their own bodies? How can they stake a claim on such a personal issue? Pregnancy choices are complex, deeply personal, and private issues that should not be violated. The reality is, people will still have abortions, only the rich will find safe means and more poor people will die because of this.

Strange that my first tomato came at this sad time, but I still hope for “the day that should have been,” a day when women will be respected, and a day where all of our rights cannot be dropped alarmingly with a snap of a finger.

A Peek of Joey Chou’s “I’m a Unicorn” (Little Golden Book)

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I’m a Unicorn (Little Golden Book)

Gone are the days when I had an excuse to buy Little Golden Books, now that my daughter is seventeen (and in fact, we spent today enjoying a college tour together), but this is too beautiful to resist!

Everything that Joey Chou does is pretty amazing in my opinion, so I was happy to see that his newest Little Golden Book is on Amazon for anyone who wants a preview.  He also did the artwork for the 2015 Little Golden Book I’m a Ballerina!

His work is heavily influenced by Disney artist Mary Blair, who also did illustrations for Little Golden Books.  Here is the cover of the 1953, and reissued 2003, Little Golden Book I Can Fly, illustrated by Mary Blair.

I Can Fly (Little Golden Book)

I’m a Unicorn will be released on January 9th, 2018.

Write a Novel This November with the Aid of NaNoWriMo

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“NaNoWriMo” stands for “National November Writing Month,” and it’s a call to authors to set time aside for one month to write a novel.  The actual goal is to write 50,000 words in a month, which is about the average novel size.  That means that writers are urged to produce 1,667 words a day to meet that goal.

It isn’t for everybody, but it’s a great tool for someone like me who enjoys the “event” feel of it, and admittedly, I would have never found the time to write as much as I did in years past without it.  Plus, they have a very active forum on their site, local writing groups to participate in, and fun little badges for each milestone you reach along the way. Once I decided that I was going to participate in the event, I found that during the mornings and evenings that I was completely wrapped up in my story, it opened up a joy for writing that I hadn’t known before.

At times it is incredibly difficult for me to crank out any number of words, but that forces me to look for new ways to overcome writer’s block, whereas I might otherwise just set my writing aside.  And it has been a great source of inspiration for thousands of people, including some best-selling authors whose books were born in NaNoWriMo, the most well-known being Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

There are several things that I have been doing to prepare for NaNoWriMo 2017.  For one, starting this blog was a way for me to get back into writing, since I haven’t done much at all lately.  The rest of my November preparations will revolve around a novel that I had started a couple of years ago but hadn’t finished.  It is sitting at 43,999 words right now, and I’m currently editing it, so anything that I add to that will go towards my 2017 word count.  I printed out a copy so that I could re-read it on paper and write notes in the margins.  So far I have discovered a major plot flaw that needs fixing and I’m finding areas that need help, like the dialogue – not my strong point!  Also, the entire last chapter that I wrote added too much story to it, so I’m going to remove it and take a different spin on it.  The plan is to have it reread and well-edited so that I will be completely ready to move forward with it when November 1st rolls around.

Wish me luck!

A Look at the Writing of Kazuo Ishiguro

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Kazuo Ishiguro 10/5/17. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Today Kazuo Ishiguro, most famous for his novel The Remains of the Day, won the 2017 Nobel Laureate in Literature.  As a writer who has maintained an elegant and highly refined writing style while crossing various fiction genres, including fantasy, drama, and touching on science fiction in Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro has proven to be an icon of his time.

As an amateur writer who took creative writing class eons ago and remembers the adage “write about what you know,” I was fascinated to read that in Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, he chose to write about unknown subject matter and it proved to be very successful for him in terms of creative energy.  Today’s Slate article on the writer commented on this subject:

When Ishiguro began his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, he’d planned to make it about a young underclass Cornish mother, the sort of person he met while working a social service job with the homeless in West London. (He also did a pre-collegiate stint as a grouse beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Estate in Scotland.) The writing only took wing when he reconceived his narrator as someone less familiar to him: a Japanese housewife. In the writing, he told the Paris Review, “I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.” He abandoned the shopworn writing-program mandate to write what you know.

I’m always looking for new writing exercises and the idea of finding some uncharted territory, or a completely foreign type of character, to write about really struck me as a great way to overcome writer’s block.

In an interview with the Swedish Academy, Ishiguro also commented on the award coming a year after Bob Dylan’s last year, saying “It’s great to come one year after Bob Dylan, who was my hero since the age of 13. He’s probably my biggest hero, I do a very good Bob Dylan impersonation, but I won’t do it for you right now.”