If you have any recommendations for boxes I haven’t crossed off yet, or any sort of “diverse” lit in general, tell me tell me TELL ME. Maybe by the end of the year, I’ll get all the boxes checked off.
Month: May 2014
Léonicka’s twitter feed linked to this outside one’s comfort zone bingo card:
Let’s see how I’m doing for 2014.
For comparison, here is my chart for all of 2013:
But back to 2014 so far, we can see I am pretty able-bodied, hetero-normative in my choices for books. I guess I’ll be working on that to try and get a bingo. And perhaps I’m cheating as some of the books are only partly their category, i.e. set in Asia and Africa, the books are split between places. But, here’s the list of books for 2014 thus far broken into categories:
Set in Asia:
Illustrated:
Writer of Colour:
POC MC:
Death/Sickness:
Mental Health:
Religion:
Diverse Non Fiction:
Bisexual MC:
Horror:
Set in Africa:
POC on cover:
Classic:
You know those Inspired by a true story provisos movies put at the beginning to say that they stole a little from someone’s life and then imagined the rest. I wrote myself an Inspired by a true story last week. I like the story I wrote. But I can’t do anything with it. How much can I do with a story inspired by true events, especially true events in the UK where the libel laws would like nothing more than to smack me down. Even though I don’t use any names or times and I change details grossly, I don’t think I can do anything with this story. Here, in Canada, the story gets no coverage. I can’t imagine a Canadian journal taking a chance on my stream-of-consciousness story about a forty year old Irish murder.
So what do I do? I guess I just put it aside as a study in writing I did. But that feels like a failure. Each story I write should be better than the last. I should be getting better the more I write. This, the newest story, by that measure, should be the best and I’m condemning it to rest forgotten on my hard drive. Until I write another story which then becomes the best. Then maybe I can look back at this one and realise, with disdain, how puerile it is.
When I was younger, I always wanted to write a story about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I don’t know why. But now I have. So at least there’s that.
In the most recent writing course I took (which I guess I dropped out of since I missed the final deadline and haven’t heard back from my mentor since and now it’s been two months so yeah, that) one of my mentor’s complaints was the unlikability of my characters, which I understand. They were bitter. I was bitter when I wrote most of that story, which has now died a death at the bottom of my drawer. I thought my faerie story was immune from such bitterness, but now I’m struggling to come up with an ending that isn’t utterly depressing. And my characters are veering into unlikable territory.
So I brainstorm. I have a roadmap to my next point; I just have to write it down and get there. But then, when I get there, I’m lost again. Everything is so sour. I’ve written my characters into places where the decisions they have to make are all awful, which is pretty much like life but not so much like an escapist YA story about faeries. Everything I try (in my head) just makes me pucker my lips like licking a lemon (which Geoff does – eats lemons by themselves because he is odd). I’m souring like bad white wine and writing inane metaphors here rather than fixing my own work.
I like writing much more when I’m doing awesome and getting strings of acceptance letters for journals than whatever it is I am doing right now.
Trying to be productive before the threat of summer.
Wrote a draft zero (in longhand in notebook) thinking about Jean McConville’s murder. Likely not a very convincing story, but I did it so it counts. Still have to type up last week’s schnitzel house story, as well as newest faerie chapter. The two stories are shorter, under 2500 words for those under 2500 words please submissions. Would be nice to write another 5000 word piece though, but the fan story wore me out. My focus is not that I can do 5000 words of anything any longer.
Maybe story six of my twelve stories of 2014 will be micro. Maybe I’ll give myself one hundred words and see what I can do.
I like reading short stories.
But then I always feel like I have to clarify. I like reading short stories, in a book, all by the same author. I do read anthologies and literary magazines. I’d be a hypocrite otherwise since they publish my little stories now and then. But I don’t enjoy those as much as a book of short stories all by the same person.
Except for focus. No matter how many books of short stories I read, it always feels like snacking. I’m never full at the end. I can’t remember ever getting book-hangover from finishing a book of short stories.
But snacks are good too. I do enjoy chocolate covered almonds for instance. I wouldn’t eat a bowl for dinner, but they are tasty.
Yesterday, after feeling bad about not getting anywhere with stories, I sat down (well, laid down actually, I was sleepy), and wrote a story that is not complicated and sort of just there for the sake of being there. Like technique exercises in piano. All plunky and wrist hurting (writing while lying on my back and holding the notebook up with my right hand and my pencil in my left was not too clever of me. Frida Kahlo painted in bed using a special easel. Perhaps I need a special bed-writing-desk.)
We went to Schnitzel Haus on Wednesday. So on Thursday, I wrote a story about people going to Schnitzel Haus. To make it not so autobiographical, I made the story people go to Schnitzel Haus on a Tuesday and not on a Wednesday; actually, the story isn’t autobiographical at all other than the characters in it have been to Schnitzel Haus and I have been to Schnitzel Haus and so has pretty much everyone who lives around here so maybe my story is about them and not me in any case.
I wanted to do one short story a month this year. I missed January because of my failed attempts at satisfying my mentor for my course. So I’m only one behind now. So far, I’ve written about an ad for a psychic in a newspaper, a lifeboat, yelling into a fan while it’s on, and now Schnitzel Haus. But it’s only May 9. Maybe I can fit two short stories in in May and catch up. If I can think of something new to write about now. I’m out of ideas, which I always say when I finish a story. I announce I will never write again, and then write a new story. So maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll write something new.
I promised a picture post, and it isn’t that much of one, and it isn’t even my picture (google image search from this flickr account), but it’s worth a thousand words nonetheless.
This was a book I used to read at my grandmother’s cottage. Debates have been had about what happened to it. My uncle says he gave it to me about fifteen years ago. I don’t think that happened. My mother thinks it did happen, but I put it in a box with some old textbooks and that box was thrown out during one of my parents’ renovations since they thought the box was my sister’s and my sister said to chuck it. I still don’t think any of this happened. My uncle did give me a puzzle he said I always used to do, which I’m pretty sure I’d never seen before in my life. That puzzle I have no clue where it ended up. I think that’s what everyone else is thinking about when they’re thinking about this book. Maybe one of my cousins has the book and is wondering whatever happened to the cat puzzle they liked.
Then I couldn’t remember what the book was called. I remembered the story (a Fin McCool one) and I remembered the publisher (Scholastic) but frustratingly didn’t remember the name. Then the nice people at librarything Name that Book forum helped me out, then a search of alibris, and blammo – I have my own copy again (and also twenty less dollars for a picture book that cost twenty cents or something to buy and I could have had for free if my family could come together and actually remember what happened to their copy in the first place).
And after all that – it only sort of holds up. Why doesn’t Fin’s wife have a name when she does all the thinking? Wikipedia tells me she actually has a name – Oona. Why doesn’t she have a name in the story? Why is she just referred to as Fin’s wife? It bothers me. But I read the story to Tesfa anyway because at least the wife is the smart one in the story and I liked the story when I was a kid.
So there’s a picture post for you. Sometimes books from the 1960s about Irish legends are not as awesome as we remember them to be.
Tomorrow I hope to have a picture post. But for today:
Why are none of my stories working out?
In the past few weeks, I’ve started two stories and they’ve just drifted away. I tried to work on my faerie story; again, drifting. I have plans to work on my faerie story again today but maybe not.
I’ve also had a string of rejections. Or a sting of rejections. The second sounds better. I’ve had a sting of rejections. I know something will find a home soon, and it doesn’t seem like rejections phase me when I get them, but I think they worm deep underneath and work to poison what little productivity I have.
I have beginnings, with no endings.
I have complicated stories I don’t know how to write.
I have uncomplicated stories I don’t want to write.
I have a story in PDF because in LaTeX I know how to reverse letters and I don’t know how to in Word, so I have to wait until some place allows me to submit PDF and not Word so I can use it.
Should I self-publish a small collection of short stories? Who would buy it? My family probably. Maybe I should just ask them each for ten dollars and save my time.
Why is my internet dial-up slow today?
Off to try and write.
I read:
- The Snow Child: This was a novel that could have been a novella, that maybe could have even been a short story. One of those books with too many words dragging it down. Not that it was bad, just wordy. I could get away with reading maybe three words per paragraph and still know what was going on.
- The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making: I read the first third of this book while on prescription pain medication and it was awesome. The it in the previous sentence is key. It might have just been awesome to be on prescription pain medication since I’m not one hundred percent sure I just didn’t make up what happened in the first one hundred-odd pages. For example: I put a marker in for a page with a wonderful quote, and now have read and re-read that page off medication and cannot find any quote there that really needs marking. And I didn’t enjoy the last two thirds at all. Morale: to enjoy fantasy, I need to get on drugs.
- A Marker to Measure Drift – This is one of those write the books you want to read; this is the book I want to write, the ability to write about monstrous happenings without exploiting or trivializing them and without using horrible events as a shortcut for emotional or character development (see my earlier complaints about Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us).
- Harriet the Spy: Discussed here.
- The Bear: The shtick of the five-year old narrator becomes grating around the fiftieth page. Then I got annoyed. Then I stopped enjoying it.
- Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore: This I enjoyed reluctantly since it was obviously google-porn. The google stuff was so aspiring to be Microserfs almost it was funny. Maybe I’ll dig up my copy of Microserfs and read it again. It’s much more interesting to read about a tech company with a critical and satirical eye rather than a fawning one (Seriously, does the the author of Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore work at google? Did they pay him or something?)
Now spoilers (highlight to read):
I’m not sold on the code being anything more than a simple substitution cipher, even if they try to present it as notches on the letters rather than the letters themselves. For instance, the example they give is that lower case X has four notches and four notches corresponds to something (say T). But then, if all lower case X’s have four notches, than that’s just the same as lower case X corresponding to T. They’ve just run it through an isomorphism. Even if, as they say there are some more complications, like certain double letters (example in book is ff) having notches corresponding to other letters, there are some really complicated code breaking techniques that can still account for things like that, even some not so complicated ones, like frequency analysis and doing it over things like single letters, pairs, triples, etc., that might catch things like that.Unless every single letter in the typeset was different each time, I don’t see how this isn’t anything other than a substitution cipher.
And that’s all my cryptanalytic complaints laid out in full.
- Tiger, Tiger: I continue to read more about pedophiles, this one a memoir.
- Plain Jane: Talked about here
- Hollow City: Another book, like The Bear, that had a shtick, but while the photos were sort of novelty in the prequel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, they seem forced here and overdone.
Best book:
I still love this book as much as when I was a kid. I read it to Tesfa. She thought it was all right.
Most promising book put on my wishlist:
And since I won a copy from goodreads, I’ll actually for once read my most promising book put on my wishlist promptly.
I watched:
- 30 Rock: I got to the end. It took me a week to get through the finale, which was the only reason I started watching the show because of a clip from the finale (Thank you, America, that’s our show. Not a lot of people watched it, but the joke’s on you, ’cause we got paid anyway, which I thought was kind of cheeky and piqued my interest). Even after all of the episodes, I feel nothing. I cried in the finale of The Office and I cried when Ben and Leslie kissed in the smallest park in Pawnee and I even felt a little bad when Ted got left at the altar, but 30 Rock made me feel no feelings at all.
- Parks and Recreation: I don’t know how they’re going to come back from the season finale. It seems so perfect for an ending. Maybe I’ll just end up hating the final season.
- Silicon Valley: Discussed here.
- Mad Men: Mad Men is like comfortable slippers that remind me of last year when Tesfa was still in Montessori and I was still a bit more hopeful than I am now.
I wrote: I worked on my post-modern story about a fan and some faerie work. Zero publishing news, unless rejections count.