Month: March 2015

this month I ...

March 2015

By on Tuesday, March 31, 2015

I read:

Thoughts:

  • Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald: Too frenetic a pace and too close to home to really enjoy it as much as I thought I would.

  • Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce: Finally finished!

  • I Am Malala (Young Readers Edition) by Malala Yousafzai: Slightly frustrating because it had American spellings (gray) but then British terms (nappies). Be consistent.

  • The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks: How jaded am I? Only one truly gicky part even though the guy I borrowed it from told me I’d be shocked, Shocked, SHOCKED!

  • Brueghel Moon by Tamaz Chiladze: Review here.

  • Under The Skin by Michel Faber: I actually like the movie better, but the movie is more restrained than the book, and less internal. I just didn’t really need to hear any of Isserly’s thoughts — they aren’t that interesting.

  • Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah: Reviewed here.

  • So Sexy, So Soon by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D. and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D.: Oh goody, yet another pitfall added to all the things I have to be wary of raising Tesfa. She’s so perfect and I don’t want to screw her up.

  • Great American Short Stories edited by Wallace and Mary Stegner: Last month I said that these were the stories that made you hate short stories. Yeah, I’m going to stick with that. But I’m keeping up with the idea of reading of a short story a day because why not? Geoff’s dad was saying one should savour short stories, read them slowly, bit by bit. So I’ll try that.

  • White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon: Reviewed earlier this month.

  • Up The Pier by Helen Cresswell: So end of the British empire feeling. People take trains that get in forty three minutes past the hour and people vacation in little houses by piers and the sea.

  • Nobody Cries at Bingo by Dawn Dumont: I wish I could write funny.

  • The Best Is Yet To Come by Anne Mazar: It’s really hard to want to continue reading a book to Tesfa when the “weird” family in the book does the things we do as a family (calls parents by first names, kids get to decide what to wear, no forcing of eating food – although I feel I should have a caveat here – we don’t force Tesfa to eat dinner, but if she doesn’t like what we’re eating, we don’t make her anything else.) And they make fun of a girl’s clothes. This book is mean.

  • The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank: I remember way back in the nineties when this book came out, all the comparisons to Bridget Jones. Why? This novel is nothing like Bridget Jones other than (a) written by a female and (b) female main character and her relationships. For some reason I also thought this book took place in Minnesota; don’t know why.

  • Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín: Reviewed here.

  • Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel: So someone cut out a bunch of pages (consecutive) from my library copy! What the hell is up with that? I really liked the book but I also had a hard time staying focused. I wish I loved it.

  • Uzumaki Volume Two by Junji Ito: So creepy, the snails chapter, ugggggg.

  • Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk: A hard book to convince yourself to pick up and a hard book to convince yourself to put down and get back to life.

  • The Juggler’s Children by Carolyn Abraham: I know that the idea of non-fiction lately includes personal stories and the vanishing of distance between the documentor and the subject, but I rarely feel in books like that (and like The Juggler’s Children) that I get as much out of it as I would if the bias was disguised better. Also, there were ghosts. FMRL (Fuck my reading life).

Favourite book of the month:

Oh, I liked this book. So funny.

Most promising book on the wishlist:

I’ve been trying to cut back my wishlisting. So I didn’t have a lot to chose from and am not super inspired this month. So nothing.




I watched:




I wrote:

A story about cutlery. Slushed it out. New story came out at Found Press. Feeling middling about writing as a whole. Had some nice compliments from a neighbour and from Geoff about my writing, so I’ll keep going for now.

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books short stories

a collection of stories

By on Monday, March 30, 2015

Probably it’s apt that I started this in March as the snow starts to melt and mix into the mud on the ground, because I’m going in the slush piles. That’s right — I’ve started sending out a collection of stories to agents and publishers.

And rather than the fist-pump-feeling that at least I’ve gotten this far, I just feel resigned. Like I’ve already had the months and months and months of radio silence that will ensue.

Still, it only takes one.

(Obviously, if you are a publisher or agent, I’d love to send my work to you if you’d like me to. Contact me please!)

So now what – by the end of the summer I hope to have a full Book One of The Faerie Story completed. I want to have written my Wolf Children rip-off short story. I should probably plot out Book Two of The Faerie Story while I’m at it. I don’t know what to do with my faerie story. It’s about an eleven year old, so teenagers won’t read it. I don’t know if it’s an appropriate middle-grade novel. And I think adults might be bored.

I did manage to put up the floating bookshelf Neil gave me three years ago yesterday. So, if nothing else, a book win there.

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fiction writing

hook

By on Wednesday, March 25, 2015

I am trying to think of a hook for my query letter. But all I can think of is a haiku that I wrote a long time ago when I had to run database extraction programs on an overloaded server:

Very slow server.

If my program does not run,

I will kill you all.

Obviously, a few edits to make it more appropriate to this situation can be made:

Hate query letters.

If my book is not published,

I will kill you all.

That is what I will be thinking about the next few days: how to describe my collection of short stories in a few intriguing and inspiring sentences so someone somewhere will take a chance on me.

Possibly, I might still kill you all :p

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books

Review of Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín

By on Sunday, March 22, 2015

Huh.

The back of my copy tells me that this is a character study. I guess so.

We have a protagonist who, in her head, presents herself as meek and mild, yet in interactions with others seems quite formidable.

She gets what she wants, almost all the time, with the exception of one thing: her husband dies before the beginning of the book.

So it’s a meditation on grief, I suppose.

Here in Canada, there are days that only really occur in November and February, days that could best be described as slush. I know some of you are nodding along right now; you know exactly what I mean. This novel is like the feeling of those slush days but bookified. Even the cover of my copy is that dull grey that dirty piles of snow get when they melt. If this book is to be taken as fact, Ireland in the 1970s was a whole decade (at least) of slush.

It’s so dour. Bits of hope and sunshine come through. But almost every conflict that arises is resolved within minutes by Nora, so her struggle towards normality doesn’t seem to have much agency. She doesn’t like her job, so she gets another. She needs a painter, so he comes. She needs someone to buy her cottage, so someone does. She needs to find her daughter, so she does. We could maybe call this book so she does.

The grief is quiet, but there. The conflicts are small, but there. But the book is a sustained note held, a low one, quiet, you have to strain to hear. The similar smallness and dullness of my own life makes me crave more excitement in my living-vicariously-through-reading life.

When bad things happen, life keeps going. The end.

Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín went on sale October 14, 2014.

I received a copy free from a goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review.

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fiction writing short stories

productivity on the plateau

By on Thursday, March 19, 2015

Continuation of here.

Even with a snow day on Monday and Wednesday, I finished my story-that-I-can-never-actually-publish-since-I-took-a-bunch-of-things-that-actually-happened-to-my-family-growing-up-and-storified-them. I even typed it up. Almost four thousand words in three days.

Don’t expect this pace to last. I keep getting distracted by horror films in Spanish on Netflix and meditation apps.

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books

picture books

By on Thursday, March 19, 2015

I have to admit I never got into picture books that much with Tesfa. I could do the nonsense Dr Seuss again and again (I am very good at reading Fox in Socks super quickly and there was a point where I had all of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish memorized) and a few one off books (I really liked Doggie in the Window by Elaine Arsenault, even though it is really sappy at the end). The same Robert Munsch I read when I was a kid (not so much the newer ones). And my favourite book that no one else ever seems to know Sometimes I like to curl up in a ball.

But I was ecstatic about two years ago when we made the jump to me reading chapter books to Tesfa. There are so many chapter books and I love chapter books.

But every now and then, I read posts like Pickle Me This’s and I think that maybe I should have spent more time on picture books with Tesfa and found some great ones. I guess it’s one of those things I’ll put in my time machine list, to go back and look harder in the picture book section of the library. Among other things I’m going to do with my time machine that is.

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short stories

plateau

By on Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Taking a break from rewriting, I am writing a brief short story about a cutlery drawer, that likely I can’t ever publish anywhere because it steals things that actually happened and makes them funnier (like I do with conversations I have with Geoff, which he complains about even though I almost always take his wittiness and Oscar Wilde-ify it so everyone can marvel at how clever he is). At first, I was all happy because I’m tired of fixing my old stories and I thought that writing new stories would cheer me up. Then I remembered that writing new stories is just as miserable as fixing old stories. In fact, writing is miserable. Especially when there’s still snow everywhere. Especially when I have to shovel it.

Winter. Awful.

But I can see, with this new story, where I’ve plateau’d. All I do is tell, when the whole point of fiction is to show. I used to show everything and people were confused. Now I tell too much and people are bored. I’m bored.

At a plateau, you’re supposed to keep going. It should even be easy because unlike going up, you’re just walking straight along. It’s not like I enjoy hiking up. In fact, any incline, no matter how small, I whine from top to bottom because I hate it so much. But, apparently, I don’t like walking straight along a path either. I’m a self-entitled child of the eighties and nineties: why can’t I be great at something instantaneously and without having to work at all?

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netgalley copy

Review of White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon

By on Sunday, March 15, 2015

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. — Toni Morrison

Hence the most important question facing any young writer may well be: How often should I masturbate and when? — David Gordon

Let’s get this out of the way first: David Gordon can write. Every scene, no matter how far-fetched or ridiculous or random, feels natural. Even cliché’d ones, like getting punched in the face by a big, burly, male relative of the girl he was hitting on, feel natural. Like these are stories your buddy would tell you at a bar, if you had the sort of buddy who frequently gets punched in the face (I don’t, but I assume other people do).

So Gordon can write. He is a good writer. He is a great writer. We can probably say he is a fucking amazing writer —

— who then writes a bunch of stories about how women sleep with him, some dreams (actual zzzz ones, not aspirations), some drug trips, and, as well, a vampire because really that’s just the sort of thing that keeps happening in the books I read lately (see here and here). So we can pretty much sum up my feeling on that with my review of 10:04 by Ben Lerner: Reading about white guys getting boinked, doing drugs, and futzing about bores me.

But Gordon can write, my mind reminds me. He writes so well.

And he’s clearly written the novel (well, short story collection) he wants to read, where lots and lots and lots of women want to have sex with him, and I’ll say him for while the stories aren’t all about David Gordon, there’s a similar tonality and voice that goes through all the stories, even in the ones when David is called Larry. And the sex is about as erotic as waiting around for an airplane to de-ice, my mind answers itself back.

Some people might find planes de-icing erotic.

I feel we’re missing the point. I have twenty-nine annotations I made in my kobo on White Tiger on Snow Mountain. Twenty-eight of them are about women improbably attracted to Gordon. One is about being a writer. I suppose two, if you take the quote above since that’s less about women being attracted to Gordon than just about sex. Also, I stopped making these annotations part way through, so there are likely more.

But Gordon can write. He writes so well, my mind says again.

So good writer writing a bunch of stuff I do not care about one tiny little minute epsilon bit. So do I rank this book on the writing (5/5) or the tedious content (1/5)?

David Gordon can write. Really fucking well. Let’s just leave it at that.

White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon went on sale November 28, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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