meghan rose

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the unhappiness of not really understanding wordpress

By on Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Today, after some clicking, I came to the conclusion that the permalinks on this blog, as they were set up, meant either:

Super. So I took the time budgeted for bringing over my Reading Around the World posts to mess around with permalinks and pagination and piles and piles of instructions in the wordpress codex I didn’t understand.

So I have a fix. It isn’t great in that all those nice wordy permalinks are replaced with random question marks and numbers assigned non-consecutively to different pages. But the links work. It is times like these that I am thankful I dated someone once who thought I should learn HTML.

Tomorrow: moving over the rest of Reading Around the World, writing about having merit, and the Wednesday word of the day. Preview for the word: it has to do with the only medically interesting thing about me.

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this month I ...

February 2013

By on Thursday, February 28, 2013

I read the following books:

  1. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
  2. Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee
  3. Mukiwa: A White Boy In Africa by Peter Godwin
  4. Breed by Chase Novak
  5. Lucky by Alice Sebold
  6. Fresh Girls and Other Stories by Evelyn Lau
  7. Two Caravans by Martina Lewycka
  8. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
  9. The Lightning Field by Heather Jessup

Best books: This Is How You Lose Her and The Lightning Field. Diaz has a schtick, but what a schtick. Jessup has no schtick at all. Polar opposites and interesting for my fiction brain since I read one right after the other.

I watched the following things:

  • Totoro
  • Ponyo
  • The Secret of Kells
  • Parks and Recreation – I am far too emotionally invested in the lives of Leslie and Ben. Creepily so. I spend my lunch hour each day watching the repeats on Netflix again and again and rooting for characters I know are going to get together. February is my obsession month for things like this. As an example, February 2003 I read Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason again and again. Get to the end, turn back to the beginning, start over. It’s something to do with the dull light and the fewer days.
  • The Wire, season four – I may also be loving this season a bit too much because of memories of Square One with Reg E. Cathey.
  • Community returned!

My writing:

  • Short story – something for Sarah Selecky’s Little Bird contest. Here’s an early draft.
  • Longer – The second draft of my longer piece (tentatively titled Come From Away) is going. I’ve typed up approximately 35 000 words, with the anticipated final length of 45 000. Still too short to be a novel, but maybe it’ll be a good novella. I keep reading articles (for the past ten years) that this year will be the return of the novella. Maybe.

    Overall, the month was: difficult. Lots of sickness. I felt really low for most of the month, but I have been feeling a bit better the last few days as the sun spends demonstrably more time above the horizon than it did last week.

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    books

    why oh why oh why

    By on Tuesday, February 26, 2013

    am reading along, everything going great, and then Boom dream sequence.

    I hate dream sequences (obvious exception being my awesomely current favourite movie The Science of Sleep), but why, why, why, why, why do authors put dream sequences in their stories? It seems to be happening more or more or I guess I am drawn to books in which it happens more and more. What is the purpose of a dream sequence? To demonstrate something in the character’s subconscious in a round-about-way? Couldn’t that be put into the text in a less oblique way? Am I just jealous as many of my dreams involve me getting up and brushing my teeth and getting ready to do something dull like mop the floors?

    If I ever write a dream sequence, remind me of this post, and then mock me mercilessly for being a hypocrite.

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    introduction

    Welcome

    By on Monday, February 25, 2013

    Welcome to my blog. Basically, this will be the place where I:

    1. talk about how my writing is going,
    2. give sneak peaks at my latest work,
    3. put book reviews,
    4. do my Wednesday word (I pick a word I like but probably in French since I like more words in French than I do in English, like rongonfler which actually isn’t really a French word at all, but I like saying it with a French accent.),
    5. and occasionally comment on feminism, parenting, mathematics, and media in general.

    On a previous blog, I had some short book reviews, which I will be moving over here over the next week or so. So this is the place I am going to be literary. It will be superlative.

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    books

    reading around the world – Spain

    By on Tuesday, February 19, 2013

    Spain: For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

    Thoughts: This book is barely Spain. It could be lifted and reset in lots of different conflicts. But it does take place in Spain so we’ll count it as such.

    This book is sparse. I like sparse. Every word is there for a reason and there can be no skimming because you can’t even sort of half-read and expect to understand what is happening two pages later.

    That being said, this is a two hundred page novel stretched out to five hundred pages. It is so long. It is so slow. It is so boring. Everything in this book is about white, male, savior who knows more than the locals and bullies and cajoles them into doing what he “knows” to be right. There is no subtly with any of the characters except the American. The Spaniards are no more than cardboard cutouts that each illustrate some one word trait like “broken” or “virginal” or “well-meaning”.

    The end, when they finally actually blow up the bridge, is good. But it takes four hundred dull pages to get there.

    Oh and the schtick of writing like they are speaking Spanish but in English (lots of thees and thous, etc.). Gets old quickly.

    Rating: 2.5/5

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