My story that has jersey cows in it is now live at Tracer Publishing.
To celebrate, a jersey cow:
Month: July 2015
All my filled up dollar store notebooks of stories once I’ve typed up anything of value in them? What do other writers do with theirs? Because I tossed all my old ones in the trash today but now I’m feeling like maybe there was a writers’ seminar where all the other writers were told what they’re supposed to do with used notebooks and I don’t know what I’m really supposed to do with mine.
Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, 88% done Day’s End by H. E. Bates (the preciseness of the percent via my kobo), I thought of an adjective that described the book perfectly. I leaned over towards my kobo, but then thought By the time I turn it on the kobo …. Then I kind of hit around to see if there was a pencil. There wasn’t. Now I don’t remember what the adjective was. I think it begin with an S.
This haziness with my adjectives actually ties back to the book. I’m pretty hazy on Day’s End. The book isn’t long, and it’s full of hodge-podge English pastoral where your mind goes to cozy country cottages with pink and lilac bushes out front and thatched roofs and rolling hills and then thinking of all these things, the stories themselves kind of fade away. Even calling them stories is rather generous; most are scenes detailing the small agonies of the underclass. A waitress being stood up on a date, a shepherd searches out a doctor to attend to his pregnant wife, a man with disabilities is mocked by children in church. It’s like a Vanitas painting (I had to look up the term): at first glance everything is bountiful and lively, but a second glance and it’s really a painting of fruit rotting and flowers drooping. Transient.
I’m not sure exactly why Day’s End‘s stories are collected together just now. The little blurb at the start of the book tells me that Bates died in 1974, so maybe the older stories have reached the public domain to be reissued perhaps? There’s no information as to when most of the stories were written, but a note is made that some come from the 1920s and 1930s. They don’t feel, in style, like the 1920s though, the way, for example, listening to Gershwin feels like the 1920s and 1930s. Maybe because there’s no slang. Maybe because adjectives and adverbs are used judiciously. Maybe because there’s a core of universality that runs through the stories. But even that can’t overcome the haziness. The stories feel like waves washing the seashore; they come and go and lulled me into drowsiness without making that much of an impression. The sea is still the sea. The sand is still the sand. Proust makes me feel that way too, so at least Bates is in good company.
These are stories for reading in a hammock on a lazy summer day.
Day’s End by H. E. Bates went on sale May 14, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I am totally rooting for Charlene Carr. An Ontario girl who moved East, a bunch of degrees, aspiring writer, so basically me except competent and has actually managed to write some novels. Plus, Beneath the Silence is the first time anyone has solicited me to review their book. W00t w00t; I’m moving up in the reviews-for-free-books world!
Beneath the Silence isn’t the sort of book I would normally pick up. I realized that after I started reading it. The writing style is more mainstream than what I usually pick and the characterizations a bit more YA-styled than I generally look for. But reading it made me feel like seventh grade again. I’m not going to lie: seventh grade me swooned a couple of times. I can imagine being totally in love with Gabe, the way I was totally in love with a picture in the copy of The Eyes of the Dragon I got at a middle-school book fair. I would have reveled in the teen anger and angst of Brooke. I would have thought the names, Brooke and River Lake, to be the epitome of cleveness. As an adult, I can’t say I found the same sort of magic, but it let me pretend. Sometimes pretending on a rainy summer’s day is perfect.
There’s a lot of good in the book: it surprised me. I complain constantly about figuring out plot points pages before they happen. I did figure out some (like about the car accident and Molly), but there were other little ones that I wasn’t expecting (like at the house party, which had train-wreck written all over it, but ended much differently). There’s a completely mortifying period story, which makes you want Carr to be one of your girlfriends because she can tell a story like that. The book is uplifting. I know normally when a book is uplifting, I’m usually really down on it, but I willingly accepted the life-affirmingness of the story. It’s spiritual without being cloying; in a way, the book is a meditation on forgiveness.
There’s also the, I don’t want to say bad because it isn’t really bad, the mediocre: I’m not sure whether I believe all of Molly’s story, with the clichés of a hooker with a heart of gold, a tumble-down the stairs miscarriage, a prince in the wings willing to wait for our heroine. Believe is the wrong word again (there’s a reason Carr has managed to write a book while I sit here with a thesaurus trying to figure out what exactly it is I am trying to say). There was something about Montréal that was too pat. It’s like a tiny lump in a bedspread. You could just slop down and ignore it or you could be, like me, annoyed to no end by it.
Plus the book taught me there was an IMAX theatre in Halifax. I did not know that. So learning new things while expanding the type of books I normally read. Entertainment and information!
Beneath the Silence by Charlene Carr went on sale July 9, 2015.
I kind of received a copy free from the author in exchange for an honest review.
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The other reimagined Unfortunate Events covers in the sidebar here.
I can completely imagine the paper and the ink and the smell of reading these as thin, old, orange Penguins. Stupid Internet making me want things that don’t even exist.
My new desktop background.
Yes, I am behind in my reviews. Waaaaaay behind. I’m trying to catch up. My goal is two reviews a week until the end of the summer, and then we’ll see whether I’m any better situated.
Is there currently a glut of seniors wandering off books right now? Granted, I can only think of three, including this one (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The 100 Year Old Man …), so glut might be a bit strong, but I can’t help thinking that we are currently obsessed with old people who simply get up and walk away, because, yes, in Etta and Otto and Russell and James, we have a senior, Etta, who gets up and walks away.
We’re in Canada, walking with Etta from Saskatchewan as she attempts to get to Halifax. She makes a coyote friend. The unrequited lover follows her. The husband waits. It’s three hundred pages but there is a lot of blank space. Negative space? Non-space? Amidst the blank lines, we have the beginning, a typical 1930s, 1940s prairie tale of one room schoolhouses and tractor accidents and dust and men going off to war and flat fields with red sunrises. It’s somewhat of a disservice to call this past-part a paint-by-numbers prairie novel, but it’s a paint-by-numbers prairie novel. Of course, that doesn’t mean the book isn’t genuinely affecting, but it’s sort of like a mild soap of a book. Unobjectionable. Less jaded people would use the word heartwarming.
Interspersed with then, the book has now, with Etta walking. She walks. I don’t know what else to say about that.
But the in-between is missing, obscured by the blank lines. There is the beginning, there is the end, but the middle? What happened between 1945 and now? Nothing Hooper felt worth noting as there is nary a mention of it. As I slide into middle age myself, I worry if that’s all I have to look forward to until I turn eighty? Just blankness, not even worth remembering? How sad.
There’s a metaphysical ending. Not a fan of those, but I know other people like the uncertainty, the non-requirement of closure. I think a lot of literary first novels, of which Etta and Otto and Russell and James is one, have endings like this. Maybe it’s writers still finding their way. I wished the ending was more solid and less ethereal though. And I wanted more about Owen, who was far more interesting than Otto ever was. Otto doesn’t even go after his wife. Sort of a lump.
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper went on sale January 20, 2015.
I kind of received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, in that they approved my request after the title was archived, so I couldn’t actually download it. Instead, I took a copy out of the library. I emailed Netgalley to ask what was up with that, but they never replied, so I don’t know.
Today I was made aware that some people view Roald Dahl’s Matilda as a brat.
Obviously these people are wrong. Matilda is exquisite.
Still, I am really, unbearably sad about this. It’s like someone bruised my heart. I am all those Rennaissance pictures of Saint Sebastien pierced by arrows through the heart, but without the choice saintliness.
Please keep your negative opinions about Matilda to yourself.
I should write down every single one of my books? I mean catalogue them. Just because the last time I decided to do something with my books and it seemed like a good idea when I started (and also had a low-grade fever which is likely why I thought it would be a good idea) and then I realized what a waste of time it was, doesn’t mean this will be too, yes?
I’ll let you know in two weeks, when I finish likely, how I could have better spent my time on Wolf Children.
Except for the fact that I’m now pretty sure I don’t know what to do with this, I put one of my Wolf Children characters in quarantine because she was annoying me. Or the story was annoying me. Or life was annoying me. Whatever.
Don’t really know what the point of my doing that was, story-wise, because now I’ve either got to backtrack and not put her in quarantine, or who knows. Stupid Wolf Children story. I keep trying to abandon it, but then I feel like I should at least finish one draft so I’ll stop having to think about it.