Thursday, February 25, 2016

The Penny Reviews #3: "A Monster Calls" by Patrick Ness

You know... every now and then a book comes along that surprises me. One that I don't think will add up to anything particularly significant before I read it, and maybe even as I'm reading it, until I reach the end and am changed by it.

This is one of those books. Welcome to the new Penny Review, presenting:


                                           
Image courtesy of http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61vTxJTnOsL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

A boy struggling to deal with his mother's illness and with life continuing on around it. A monster who "comes walking" at the beginning of a pivotal time. A tailspin of emotional chaos and nightmares at war with reality. This is "A Monster Calls" by Patrick Ness, illustrated by the incredibly talented Jim Kay.

Who's the Hero: Conor - a young school boy in the U.K. whose life and emotions have been thrown into turmoil by his mother's battle with cancer, leaving him isolated and struggling in the face of it all.

What's the Story: One night at just past midnight, after an un-described nightmare that has apparently been plaguing him for some time, Conor is visited by a monster that seems to be the yew tree which normally resides by the church graveyard near Conor's house. It quickly becomes apparent that, while outwardly menacing, the monster is there for more than typically monstrous things: rather than harm Conor, it wants to talk to him; it wants to tell him three tales and at the end, it says, Conor will tell the fourth tale. True to its word, the monster visits Conor again and again, telling him stories that never seem to end as they should, where those who seemed good became villains in the course of their actions, and those who seemed villainous in turn were the more honourable and/or right. As the stories progress, so does Conor's mother's cancer, appearing to be the worst it's ever been and making Conor steadily more desperate and angry. And as Conor's life and well-being get more and more unstable, the monster--claiming to be a tree of healing even as it encourages destruction of a sort--pushes all the harder towards that fourth tale, insisting that there is a truth that Conor holds which he must speak, and that it is that truth that brought the monster walking and that will decide how everything with Conor's mother will play out.

How's the Aftertaste: As I said before even the beginning of the review (heh, guess I spoiled it a bit there - sort of jumped right to the punchline, didn't I!), this book was one of those rare few that surprised me. At the beginning, I didn't think much of it, aside from instantly falling in love with the artist's style in his illustrations. But gradually I found myself taken in by Conor's struggle (certainly in part because I can unfortunately relate to it, through the illness of several close family members), and especially by the monster's presence. I don't want to spoil anything for those who might be interested in reading it, but their interactions and the build-up to the climax... and especially the climax ultimately took my breath away. And broke my heart a bit, but in a useful and moving way. The book addresses suffering and coping in a way that I haven't really seen anywhere else. Don't get me wrong, the text wasn't perfect (though the illustrations certainly were), but it hit its mark where it really counted.






So the Verdict Is...





~I would name my next goldfish "Conor". Or "Monster"... yep, definitely "Monster".~




Aside from the monster and that climax, the illustrations definitely were a big part of it being four pennies instead of three; seriously, if you're going to read this book, don't read the novel version - get the above-pictured illustrated edition (it takes it from a story, and makes it into an experience). 

As always, thanks for reading! And see you next time :) stay tuned for next week - maybe time for a murder-mystery or a comedy or something... we shall see. And don't forget, if there's a book you'd like to see me review, let me know in the comments. Cheers!


~\\//~

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

The A to Z Book Diary: "G" is for Getting in the Game

The last time this dear 'ol diary of mine left off a year ago, I had just finished the first draft of my first full-length novel, and I was so excited that, looking back on the post now, I seemed to be just about hyperventilating in typewritten form. SO many exclamation points. 

And since the book, in that finished form, didn't end up working out... heh, that reaction makes me a bit sheepish in hindsight. But I hold to it nonetheless; it was my first book after all - couldn't and wouldn't be helped! And I'm still proud that I made it through that one, even if it didn't turn out the way I'd hoped it would.

But now, as the title said, it's time to get back in the game and start over. "The Sentry" will sit on the shelf for a little while (pending a possible rewrite when I'm not sick to death of the sight of it any more), and in the meantime, I'll set my sights on a new project and get my writer's brain juices flowing again.

Which... man... this is really exciting again! A new beginning, a different track; new characters, conflicts and story lines to dive head-first into! A new book really does put the wind back in a writer's little sails, doesn't it? :)

But now... oh no... it's back to the trouble I was in before I really poured myself into "The Sentry": where do I start? Which story do I write?? So many ideas, and nowhere near the time to write them all at once here... hm.


Image courtesy of jscreationzs at FreeDigitalPhotos.net


Do I go with one of the kids' books about dragons hiding in a mountain over a village? Do I go with a YA drama about a teen who's a single father in a disintegrating small town? An adult comedy about an agoraphobic and a bank robber? A pre-teen comedy/horror romp about ghosts, Death and ouija boards? A YA adventure about time travel? 

GAH!! I want to write all of them - but which one can I REALLY invest myself in and get excited about for the present until the somewhat distant future? And I don't want to make the same mistake as I did with "The Sentry", where my main problem was that I had an idea for a story that I liked, but I stuffed it into a niche that I thought would sell, and it ended up hurting the story...

...Maybe if I switch gears completely? Yeah... what if I pursue a book that's well and truly a fresh start? Go for a different tone, different age group, different all-around execution? I think that's it - I need to write a story where I can just have fun with it, and learn to have fun with writing as a whole again. I was focussed for so long on just getting out a finished book that I lost sight of the fun I used to have just creating something. Who knows? Maybe that hurt my writing as much as trying to stuff it into a niche did.

So let's do this: I'll start small - go for short and sweet, and just plain fun. The kids' book about dragons. I'll start it today, and stop thinking so darn much - no over-thinking, just writing and having fun with it. 

I like this :) - off I go, let's see what happens!


~\\//~

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

The Penny Reviews #2: "The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower I)" by Stephen King

Aaaaaannnnd... The Penny Reviews are back! *Cue excitement - at least my own*

Remember my promise a year ago to do one of these per week? No? Well, maybe I didn't make it back then (or I did and just let it slide for so long that everyone, including me, has forgotten about it by now), but I'm making it now: every week, there will be one Writing Tip and one Penny Review posted here for your reading pleasure (or displeasure - I don't want to assume the best, after all; I'm an optimist, but a realistic one).

So anyway, on with the show!



                                          
Image courtesy of http://www.thebookdorks.com/?p=2669


An enigmatic stranger relentlessly pursuing his enemy across the desert, and beyond. A wasteland of horrors, and an innocent doomed boy caught up in the crossfire. The start of what, by all accounts and feedback, is going to be an epic quest to define epic quests. So begins "The Dark Tower" series by Stephen King.

This series is one that I've heard about since before I even knew the name Stephen King and before I was reading anything more intense than The Goosebumps books. One thing I never heard about however was just how tough it would be to genuinely enjoy it at the start. How does this first book stack up against all of the rave reviews of the series as a whole? Let's do this thing, and find out.

Who's the Hero: Rolland, a.k.a. the last gunslinger - a man of indeterminate age and questionable moral fibre who is out for revenge against the so-called "man in black" and to find the place known only as The Dark Tower.

What's the Story: From the novel's outset, Rolland is pursuing the man in black across a land apparently left crumbling in the wake of the downfall of a civilization (which we only really come to know through various lengthy flashbacks). He is barely surviving as he goes, but Rolland is blindly determined to catch and kill his foe for reasons of revenge (which are gradually revealed to the reader through those steady helpings of flashbacks). Eventually, Rolland comes across Jake, a young boy who has seemingly been leap-frogged to Rolland's world from a different dimension by the man in black, for reasons that are at first unclear. As the gunslinger and the boy travel together, the gunslinger's desire to protect him grows, leaving him eventually vulnerable to the man in black using Jake against him, with dire consequences. Because when all is said and done, The Dark Tower is the only thing that truly matters to the Last Gunslinger; everything else can be forfeit.

How's the Aftertaste: I'll admit that I am a latecomer to Stephen King, and as of yet have only read a small portion of his impressive body of work. In this, I've mostly read things from his mid-career onward. This being said... reading The Gunslinger left me, by and large, torn as to whether I loved it or I wanted to charbroil the thing and wash my hands of Rolland et all. Don't get me wrong, the writing and story hold all the hallmark talent of Stephen King, just... very clearly at a much earlier stage of that talent. There were parts where I couldn't stop reading, where I just had to know what would happen next; King has apparently always had that incredible knack in him. Other parts though... *gah*... the book was so bogged down by bloated, unnecessarily and excessively literary description and metaphor that it took me weeks of ignoring the book before I could bring myself to get back to it and slog on through to get to the other side. And by the end, there was a roughly five page existential rant that I ended up just skimming over, almost from start to finish. And I NEVER skim; it was just that painful, and I was just done. But at the root of it all... I still feel the need to know more, to see what comes of Rolland and the warnings of the man in black, and to find out, like Rolland, what The Dark Tower truly is... 

...Damnit, Stephen King is good at what he does.

It also helps that in the revised and expanded edition, which I read (and which is pictured above), King wrote in a new introduction where he actually apologizes for the pompous and convoluted bits, explains he did his best to polish it up to be less painful, and begs a bit of our indulgence to hang on through this first book, since the rest of the series improves on this first outing on a steep curve.




So The Verdict Is...





                            


~I'll hang on with you there, Mr. King. I'm trusting you!~



I know, I know - just three pennies for a Stephen King novel? Shame on me. But I'm holding firm to it; that book was great at its best, but its worst was no friggin' picnic.

Anyway, cheers to our second official review! And more to come next week :) stay tuned.


~\\//~

Monday, February 15, 2016

Writing Tip #7: If At First You Don't Succeed... Take a Break Before Your Brain Explodes.

This will be a short one, written while I'm waiting to get a ride back home, but this is possibly the most important lesson I've learned in the last year of stresses of "real life" getting dumped into a blender with my brain, my free time and my first failed attempt at a novel, and all of it getting puréed together, so I wanted to share it with you all: I'm here to talk about the paramount importance of taking a breather after you've written that first draft of a book.

I'm sure we've all grown up hearing the expression about "try, try again", and I won't argue that that's not an important part of success; you get your butt kicked the first time by something you really want/need to achieve, then you pick yourself up and tackle the thing full-on again. That's how you get the things really worth having.


Of course, tackling something hard more than once hurts. A lot. Especially if you're unprepared, and still getting your breath back from Round 1. 


Case in point: writing a book, then having that agravatingly clear hindsight inform you that all that effort didn't plop out that instant hit your were hoping for. 


Your stomach sinks. Round 1 kicks your confidence in the gut. But you're down, not out! So up you get, and back to it you go.


You want it to go like this: 



Image courtesy of jasadaphorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

But it ends up ending more like this:



Image courtesy of num_skyman at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

...with varying degrees of tears and tissues. Round 2 (and maybe 3, and 4... depending on how big of a glutton for punishment you are) leaves you in emotional traction.


Not good. And certainly bound to make you far exceed your allowable budget for whichever comforting deliciousness you subscribe to, to deal with feeling squashed by what used to be bright and sunny aspirations of awesomeness (e.g: pizza... wine... pizza with wine... lots of pizza with lots of wine... your weight in peanut M&Ms - not speaking from experience of course... sigh).


So this week's writing tip in a nutshell: pace yourself. Seriously. 


There may be those among you who write something and have no problem at all getting it polished and good to go. I commend you and envy you in equal parts! But then there are those (myself included) who pour a lot of time and energy into something that ends up not working, and the task of fixing it ends up being something they're not quite up to just yet. From my own experience and many fellow writing nerds I've spoken to about this, that second kind of writer is a lot more common than the first.


The important part is to cut yourself some slack, and give your brain room to figure it out. Finish writing what you're writing of course (no matter what you think of it), then go through it afterwards with a forgiving eye. If you find yourself wanting/needing to fix the poor sucker but at a loss as to where to start, take a few big steps back for as long as you need. Put it on a shelf, and start something else in the meantime. Come back to it later and try again - I guarantee the time away will have cleared your head enough for you to work your way through whether to scrap it, fix it, or rewrite it altogether, and it'll do it without leaving your delicate writer ego as a pile of quivering mush.


Be better than mush. You'll live longer, feel happier... and not have the local pizza place know your name and usual order off by heart.


Not that that happened to me... damnit.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

IT LIVES!!... Part 3 (or The [Not-So-]Fantastical Tale of an English-Degree Graduate in the "Real World")

So. Another almost-year gone by... and what does this absentee blogger have to say for herself this time?

Heh. I've been keeping busy! And have had my brain occupied and focused in so many different directions that blogging had to go on standby for the duration.


How to explain without giving all the boring details no one actually cares about... let's see... the last time we "spoke", I had just finished my very first novel (yay!), and had settled into the editing process (ugh), just in time for graduation (yay again!). Then... *cue dreadful realization music*... REAL LIFE showed up again.


Job hunting.


Bills with no income.


Sleepless nights spent imagining doing card tricks for coins on the sidewalk somewhere, and chewing on bits of my wallpaper for sustenance.


Then finding an income. But despising the job and leaving it.


Back to bills with no income.


And now settled into retail purgatory, but happily with a paycheck I can mostly live with.


And... oy... realizing after months of feverish editing and unsuccessful submissions to agents that the book that felt amazing and brilliant while I was writing it was... well... neither amazing nor brilliant. In fact, it kind of stunk. Although there are parts of it I'm still proud of. But hey, first novel! Practise for when I actually get around to being brilliant, right?? ...Heh. In theory :)


But the biggest news of all is the main thing I have focussed on building since leaving university, and what's kept me away the most from getting back to this blog: a business of my own! Well, co-owned with my sister, to be exact :)



Image courtesy of nuttakit at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I'm incredibly excited to announce the launch of The Violet Hour: Author Services and The Violet Hour: Literary Magazine, two branches of one business designed to help authors realize their publishing goals, as well as give them a way to showcase their work.


Working for the literary journal Existere for the three and a half years I was in university gave me such a taste for it all, so getting this going is incredibly exciting!


So now I've put my first novel comfortably in hibernation pending a gradual re-write (after I've stopped being mad at it), I've got a retail job that'll keep me at least mostly fed, and I've got a direction to channel my university degree into, and renewed creative juices to get back to reading, reviewing, blogging, and working on a new novel idea. And I know I've said it all before, but now I've got a business partner and burgeoning business to hold me to it: you'll be hearing a lot more from me from now on - stay tuned, and feel free to check out the links below to the websites that I built for each half of the new business!


The Violet Hour: Author Services


The Violet Hour: Literary Magazine