An update

I’m not dead and neither is the blog- it’s just up until rather recently my life hasn’t really been my own, primarily because of the demands of work. However, I recently switched jobs, with the result that I have a lot more time to write and read while being able to keep a roof over my head. Which is great- I read more books in November than I’d thought was possible for me to do ever again, and hopefully I can keep that pace up.

I’m going to be putting up a post on one of those books tomorrow. In the meantime I want to apologize to anyone who’s commented and never got an answer. I’d see the comments, be delighted and embarrassed that someone was still reading this thing, and then they’d get buried in my inbox without the chance for me to respond. At this point I’m going to just let them lie, largely out of shame, but going forward, I’m going to try to answer any comments I get — if blogs still get comments nowadays — more promptly.

In the meantime, enjoy my cat making reading even harder than it already is.

My Desert Island Library

One desert island. 10 books. Which ones do you bring?

(Still no sign of my reality TV contract. I can’t imagine what’s taking so long.)

Readathon update – the finish line

My bed is calling to me like a siren, but before I go, the tallies of the Readathon this time around:

Books read: 5

Books completed: 3 (1 in progress at the start of the readathon, 1 reread, 1 never-before-read)

Genre breakdown:
-1 nonfiction/history
-1 poetry collection
-1 YA/middle grade
-1 historical/horror/literary/thriller (whichever you’d want to call The Historian)
-1 mystery

Pages read: 1,122

I will hopefully be back later in the week with more detailed thoughts on The Sea Shall Embrace Them and The Historian, assuming real life hasn’t buried me alive first. But for now- to sleep, perchance to dream.

Readathon update – The Sea Shall Embrace Them

I have a decidedly morbid interest in maritime disasters. I don’t know where it comes from, particularly since I tend to flinch away from them after examining them for long stretches. There’s something viscerally horrifying about the power of the ocean, and perhaps it’s this terror that makes it so fascinating. There’s an awesomeness to it. Stories of the things that happen at sea almost always have to be considered in that context, and it was with that in mind that I picked up The Sea Shall Embrace Them, by David W. Shaw, as my third readathon book.

The sea’s awesomeness is an undeniable backdrop in the disaster of the steamship Arctic, but what makes the disaster of its collision with the Vesta so agonizing to read is how much of the loss of life might have been prevented if meeting scheduling hadn’t been such a pressure that the captain opted to churn at top speed through a thick fog by Newfoundland. If regulations had been more of a concern at the time. If the captain of the Arctic, Luce, had made the choice to try to aid the ship he rammed in defiance of the bad position his ship was in for honor’s sake (the Vesta, though it ironically looked done for at time of collision, ended up making it back to land and might have been able to help the passengers and crew of the Arctic had turned back. But with the Arctic itself floundering, it’s very hard to blame Luce for trying to keep his ship afloat as long as possible). If the crew had had more courage, enough to let the passengers off instead of opting to rush the lifeboats and save themselves.

All I can say is that the murder mystery I have planned to follow will come as an uplifting and sunny change.

Readathon update – The Thief Lord

My second readathon selection is a book that I read over and over again when I was a child- I wanted to see if it still had the magic and I wanted something that would be a relatively quick read. Given hockey playoffs, it did not turn out to be as quick as I was hoping, but the game ended well, and the book still has its power.

I think The Thief Lord, by Cornelia Funke, is the first book I read where I became acutely aware of the power of words as devices to move, to stir, to paint as vivid a picture as a photograph. I read it at some point between the ages of 12 and 13, probably closer to age 12, and the power that it had over me was a strange one. I was moving past the age of children’s books, but this one has a captivating power beyond most. And when I reread it for the readathon, there is so much that still resonates (and a lot that made me laugh, this book has some amazing lines and exchanges). As an older sister, Prosper’s situation as he tries desperately to care for his little brother hits even closer now that I know a little more about what is needed to watch over of people. Victor still makes me smile, and Ida Spavento remains a role model for me in terms of her generousness with the children and in the hints that she’s overcome and forgiven a painful past. The book captures the magic and the beauty of a new place, one of possibility and history, where legends can- just maybe- come to life.

Readathon update – The Historian

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen! If any of you follow me on Twitter, you will know I have signed up for Dewey’s 24 Readathon, a day devoted to book-reading. How faithfully I’m going to be able to follow this is open to question, given how much laundry I have to do, but I’m going to give it my best shot. Given how much of my life is spent reading anyway, I’m sure the hours I’m going to lose are already more than made up for.

Anyhow, I have finished my first book of the reading madness just at the end of the sixth hour and it was glorious. If you love history, reading, academia, legend, the preservation of history, travelogues, and Dracula, read “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova. It is magnificent- a twisty, wild book that juggles a labyrinth of storylines and showcases the wonder and the awe that knowledge, literature, and history have. It’s a testament to the power of the past, the power of stories, the hold of culture, the joy of travel. It reaches back into the centuries and shakes into the layers and layers of years covered in the story. The horror sprinkled throughout adds bits and pieces of terror, but what kept me turning the page was the searching for the bits of documents, the books, the legends, that every generation featured in the book undertakes in their search for the source of the Dracula story- Vlad Tepes. It’s a wild, almost ridiculous undertaking and premise, and it’s all the more magnificent for it. I cannot wait to give it a proper review, one that doesn’t involve my flailing.

Now to the other books in this pile:

 

An obituary for an electric kettle

Today I am taking a moment to mourn the passing of a treasured help and companion that saw me through three years of college and a year and a third of adult employment: my ~$20 electric kettle purchased from a humble CVS that passed away quietly on Sept. 8, in the year of Our Lord 2015. This kettle saw to the boiling of the water for tea that prevented me from freezing when walking to work during apocalyptic Chicago winters, kept me caffeinated during the multiple papers and midterm papers, saw me through the one all-nighter I pulled for academic reasons and the one all-nighter I pulled for reading in the 24-hour Readathon. I’d crank it up and hear the whir when I needed to curl and calm down from stress, and when I began adult employment, it became routine to stumble into the kitchen and blindly grope for the kettle. The rumble of the water beginning to bubble was the sound of my lifeboat approaching as I tried to get ready for work without either putting on a shirt inside or knocking over things in my sleep-dazed stumbles, and it became a part of my pre-bedtime routine to whip it for something herbal, ridiculously sweet, and decaffeinated as I tried to readjust from my customary night-owl habits to those of someone who had catch a train before 6 a.m.

It will be greatly missed, and I have no doubt I will mourn its passing for many days to come. Not least because it was my primary method of getting caffeine for the mornings and I am genuinely at a loss for what to do tomorrow (I’ll probably end up forking over for coffee).

ETA: Tweaking some cords and things seem to have brought it back at least for the moment. How long that’s going to last, I can’t say, but here’s hoping the zombie version will at least get me through the rest of this week for caffeine…

Your grave will be watered by the tears of the uncaffeinated. Or at the very least, your memory will live on in my complaining.

What I’ve been doing: SO MUCH STORY REWRITING. This is what happens when you give up writing for a year- you think you’ve gotten the hang of finishing something decent and then you open the document again and it’s all spiders and cobwebs and overgrown ivy, where things are constantly scratching, nibbling at or distracting you as you try to clear things out. Writers, if you write… just don’t stop, for the love of Heaven. Having taken hiatuses in both writing and exercise, I’m finding regaining the writing stamina infinitely more excruciating.

What I’ve been listening to: a lot of podcasts, notably Thinking Sideways and The Tolkien Professor

On the name change and what things will look like going forward

The rename was a long time in coming, but I think it suits the blog better for where I’d like to take it now that I am no longer a college student (which reminds me I have to update my ‘About’ page). But in keeping with the Monty Python theme, the phrase is derived from the Spanish Inquisition skit.

I promise the room is cleaner now

I’m still going to do book reviews- I think it’ll be the only way to get me through the massive stacks of books I have. On a recent organization of my room, I counted up 164 physical books, not counting the ones I have on my Kindle; about 30, give or take a few, hadn’t been read at all or had been opened so long ago that I may as well not have opened them (and I have no bookshelves. Make of this what you will). I will, however, try and stretch a bit and get some nonfiction reviews in, which should be an interesting endeavor.

I’m also hoping to get more of my own works up on the blog once I get a bit more settled and have some finished that I like.

For categories and formatting, I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to merge “Unsolicited Opinions” with “Essays” but for now I’m going to keep them separate.

When I have some free time (ha), I’ll probably go through some of my older posts and weed out the pictures I used when I was dumber about these things and thought Googling an image meant it was automatically fair game to use. I did consider taking down some of my older posts, as the writing and humor attempts of some are just painfully bad, but if I was dumb enough to think it worth posting online a few years ago, I should bear with that decision now. Not to mention the internet is forever, and it probably wouldn’t be too hard to find an archived version if I ended up removing anything.

As evidenced by the long absences between updates, I have a lot of blog posts to catch up on. If you guys want to recommend any of yours that I’ve missed, feel free to do so!

Currently listening to: The Interstellar soundtrack by Hans Zimmer.
Just finished reading: “Bannerless” by Carrie Vaughn. A rather nice take on what might happen after the end times, particularly for focusing on how people might live as opposed to the destruction of the world as we know it.

To write, perchance to read

The past ten months have included getting a job, graduating from college, moving to a new city, going to a live concert for a band I’ve wanted to see since high school, and developing the ability to write like a madwoman.

It’s been fun. And busy. Which meant that for these past ten-ish months, writing that wasn’t generating a paycheck got shelved.

As a result, I was hard-pressed to find reading time. When I did find time, it was often a chore in that the act of reading itself was all I could take. I didn’t have the energy to think beyond whether I’d enjoyed the book, much less talk about the reasons behind that with anything resembling coherence. I reread and poked around with newer stuff, but somehow the spark to talk about things never really stuck.

This isn’t even touching what a disaster my fiction writing schedule became as it slowly suffocated.

But like Desdemona in Othello, it wasn’t quite dead. Unlike Desdemona, I didn’t want to have to place the blame for its demise on myself.

The fiction writing came back more easily than the reading did, oddly enough. My day job is writing, a blessing that I’m truly delighted to have, but it’s writing in a style that is relentlessly factual. After a while, I realized I was losing my ability to put words together in a way that described and depicted, because I spent so much time using them to tell. For some reason, the first emotion this roused was irritation at myself for letting it get to that point. Apparently that’s a powerful motivator, as I ended up writing 53k-odd words for NaNoWriMo, figured out from there what was needed to make the plot work logistically, and sat down to do more thorough outlining.

Reading came when I realized I was compulsively buying $2 and $3 books on Kindle while the backlog of things I hadn’t read stretched back years. So starting in January, I started plowing through that backlog, got through roughly a dozen books, found a couple that were surprisingly enjoyable, and had one annoy me so much that I realized I wanted to complain about it somewhere, somehow. I found a different venting outlet than this blog, but it sparked the realization that I wanted to talk about books and storytelling again.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do. If there’s anyone reading, I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

Fictionwise: Aside from novel outlining, a short story that’s really rough quality and too much fun not to finish. It involves a city where powerful entities can make bargains with deities of different types for earthly advancement and focuses on a person who makes a living from finding out the details of those contracts for various interested parties. Whether it will go anywhere remains to be seen. Status- 3,048 words.

Music: Currently, the soundtrack for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

The Sound of Deadlines

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Told you that the blogging deadline was going to be hardest to meet, didn’t I?

The truth is, absolutely none of the goals I’ve set for April for my leisure writing have been met. I failed spectacularly on my “two blog posts a month” goal and the story goal is best not discussed, as I don’t think I could discuss it without much profanity and drinking. I’ve been barely meeting the obligations of real life and that’s with stretching the definition of “meeting.”

I’ve been stressed out for numerous reasons over the course of my college career, but right now the demands of the real world have gotten back to the agonizing level they were at in high school when I was applying for college. At that time I had to put in hours of work for an incredibly uncertain outcome while juggling the demands of being a student, working, and sports. There’s something paralyzing in hitting your outermost limit in terms of what you can handle and it begins to seep into everything else.

When I first conceived of writing this particular blog post, I was going to delve into some spiel about how the things I’m juggling have impacted my ability to write and how I wish there was some way to shake all this and how, with just a few more hours in the day or with eliminating the need for sleep, I could meet all my goals. While there’s a ton of merit, to my mind, to losing sleep as a necessary thing for health and sanity (it takes up way too much time in an already short day), the truth is, I have been writing.

I’ve been writing a lot, actually. This week has been packed with it. Better yet, it’s writing I’m actually being paid for. I’ve been busy the past month trying to work and while I truly wish that I could write more for myself and read more for myself, this overload of things I’ve been doing is still meaningful.

Hell, it’s been fun.

I tend to throw myself into my work in most cases, but there’s no denying that I take a lot more joy in interviewing someone and writing an article than I ever did in mixing drinks and ringing up hangers. The truth is, when the work is something that I like, I’ve found that I love being busy.

So as far as this blog goes, I have no intention of abandoning it. However the coming months are going to be transitional ones, and they are not going to be easy to handle. I’m going to have to devote a lot of my waking hours to making it out of college and into the work force in one piece and when it comes to be being busy, I have to make sure that it’s the work that will actually enable me to get food, shelter, and the books that I love to spend time with. I didn’t have to worry about that when I started this blog, because I’m lucky and spoiled enough to not have to worry about things like tuition and board.

But that time is rapidly coming to a close and I have to adjust accordingly. So the writing I do will be offline, at least for now. When I get to a point where I have settled and gotten my own things in order, I will be back. But for now, much as I love reading other people’s stories, I have to start figuring out my own so my life doesn’t end up resembling a scribbled mess.

I think that by July, the revisions should be complete enough that I can come back here regularly. But until then, I will leave all of you with a tremendous thank you for following me and reading my ramblings.

P.S.
If someone figures out how to get rid of sleep without bringing about insanity, do please let me know.