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Posts in "Long Posts"

7-Imp’s 7 Kicks #90

From Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

“As a reminder, our 7 Kicks posts are the weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you.”

Please, please, please go to their post and look at the beautiful illustrations by Jackie Morris. I adore the Story Dragon and the picture from The Guardian.

  1. This week I have been doing a lot of reading about how to be a better blogger, and it has really revitalized my attitude towards blogging and I hope within the next month or two will revitalize my actual blogging, too. I have at this point 5 blogs, 4 of which I’m going to treat as more personal journals and 1 of which I’m hoping to treat a bit more like a public forum.

  2. I have come up with an idea for a sixth blog that is really exciting to me.

  3. As a result of researching for that blog, I have discovered a local speaker/author/consultant who is exactly where I want to be when I am at his point in life. I’m working up the courage to drop him an email.

  4. The universe has been sending me the message that I need to stop waiting for things to be right before beginning anything new - that I should allow myself to be messy and to fail.

  5. My friend Sonja is a one woman tribute to the power of the internet, which is very exciting. She is a published romance writer thanks to the internet and also recently got a job by combining 15 second pitch and Twitter into a monster networking hybrid of Frankensteinian proportions. (Ok, there was maybe some hyperbole there.)

  6. This is not from this week - it’s actually a few months old - but I never mentioned it here at lectitans - back in August my boyfriend of 10 years asked me to marry him. It was pretty exciting, and I had to step away from wedding planning for a few weeks to get my head on straight, but I’m back into it now and thanks to our extreme low key style I think it is going to be a lot of fun.

  7. I love to make fruity quick breads, and this past week I made two loaves of pumpkin apple spice bread which were a big hit both at work and at home.

Don’t forget to post your own kicks!

Name Your Character Based on Her Personality

via Lifehacker:

What a Lovely Name is a new website that lets you select multiple tags for personality traits associated with a name, as well as a gender if you wish, and it will suggest names for you. I selected romantic, creative, wise with no gender and got 12 names, the most boring of which was Jacqueline. Highly recommended if you’re looking for character names and don’t want to do lots of searching of baby name sites by meaning.

Movies and Reading Habits

Looking at my list of books read and unreviewed, I find both The Golden Compass and Twilight.

I think it’s of interest that each of these is the first of a trilogy I haven’t finished, and each has a movie adaptation. I bought Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist when the movie came out and haven’t read it yet.

When I was reading The Lord of the Rings, I was careful to read each book not too long before the movie came out, so that I would have the book fresh in my mind when I saw the movie. I’m not a big re-reader; I have re-read only a few novels in my life (The Incarnations of Immortality series and the Harry Potter books). So it’s important to read a book-to-movie source close to the movie release.

It’s been a year since I read Twilight, which I enjoyed at the time but found flawed later. (I maintain that it is a good time, though, if you are looking for sickly sweet romance.) I donated my copy to a thrift shop. I hope it made someone very happy.

So the question is, do I go on and read the others now, or do I wait until New Moon the Movie is close to release, and so on? For His Dark Materials I will clearly have to go on and read them without waiting for more movies, because they aren’t happening. (Quick review of The Golden Compass movie: It was a very good book trailer.)

What do you do with big deal or popular books that are bound to be adapted to movies? Do you read them in the height of their popularity? Do you wait? Are you such a contrarian that you don’t read them at all?

NaNoWriMo

Hi there, friends! Once again, I have registered to participate in National Novel Writing Month. (If you want to be buddies, you can find me under the name KimberlyH.) I have tried plotting and I have tried pantsing, and I have gotten almost halfway to the 50,000 word finish line, but I have yet to complete a NaNovel. So I'm trying a few things differently this year.
 
 
1) I am neither pantsing nor plotting, but doing this bizarre thing where I have a vague notion and I have notes about ideas I want to use, but I have no idea where this thing is taking me.
 
 
2) I am treating this like a giant 50,000 word free write, which is what it's supposed to be anyway. I don't know why I have always felt like I needed to write a GOOD novel for NaNo. It's not really the point.
 
 
And the big one, number three:
 
 
3) I am soliciting you as members of my reading group. All this means is that as I write the novel, you will get installments emailed to you for you to read or delete at will. I do request that you offer no critique during the NaNo-ing period; we'll save that for NaNoEdMo. But reminders and proddings to send more story are perfectly acceptable.
 
 
If you would like to be part of my reading group, comment here or drop me an email at your preferred address for me or at lectitans at gmail dot com. You will get an invite to a Google Group called "The Theatre Fairy." I am the only person with posting access and I promise only to send out story bits. I will need your email address to invite you.
 
So if you'd care to join me for this crazy ride, let me know!

Books Read in 2008

  1. Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, Karen Kingston
    2. Craft, Inc., Meg Mateo Ilasco
    3. Indigara, Tanith Lee
    4. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
    5. Jessie’s Mountain, Kerry Madden
    6. Finding Serenity, Jane Espenson and Glenn Yeffeth, ed.
    7. Valiant, Holly Black [Audio CD]
    8. The Twelve Kingdoms - Volume 1: Sea of Shadow, Fuyumi Ono
    9. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
    10. Fearless, Tim Lott
    11. Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye, Kaza Kingsley
    12. Bronx Masquerade, Nikki Grimes
    13. Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
    14. It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, Peter Walsh
    15. The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Two: Ghost Roads, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
    16. Getting Things Done, David Allen
    17. Y: The Last Man - Unmanned, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
    18. Y: The Last Man - Cycles, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
    19. Y: The Last Man - One Small Step, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
    20. Y: The Last Man - Safeword, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
    21. Y: The Last Man - Ring of Truth, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
    22. Y: The Last Man - Girl on Girl, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
    23. The Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
    24. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd
    25. 300, Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
    26. Organizing from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern
    27. The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Three: Sons of Entropy, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
    28. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
    29. R.O.D.: Read or Dream, Volume 1 : Three Sisters–One Power, Hideyuki Kurata
    30. Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1, Terry Moore