January 4, 2011:
Finished "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. Though highly rated and recommended, I didn't like it. Two forms of deus ex machina; suspension of disbelief suffered from several things I just couldn't buy into even temporarily; lots of time wasted running circles around the main character's insecurities. Also, if I were betting on the games, I'd have good reason to claim fraud on the part of the game controllers.
January 6, 2011:
Finished "Survivor" by Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club). I'm still not sure what to make of this one. While the transformation of the main character was extreme, in some respects I might have better enjoyed the story of the main character's brother. On the other hand, filling in the blanks as the story unfolded was kindof interesting.
January 18, 2011:
Finished "Catching Fire" (The Hunger Games #2) by Suzanne Collins. The writing was better than The Hunger Games (better editor?). I hate when the main character is left to her own thoughts, devolving into irritating worst-case scenario self-loathing. Rarely do her thoughts come to pass, and as such, I tend to dismiss them out of hand. Plot-wise, I can only say, "It's about time."
January 30, 2011:
Finished "Food Rules" by Michael Pollan. This showed up in my mailbox randomly yesterday, sent to me by my employer (also the book's publisher). It was kindof like reading someone's blog posts on food. There were 64 rules, each just less than a page long. What they said made sense, mostly. Most annoying thing: referring to rules by number, particularly to ones that appear later in the book.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
End of 2010 reading
November 23, 2010:
Finished "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink. Starting as a 15-year-old boy and a 30-something woman's affair and leading through her trial years later as a nazi war criminal, it was interesting, though the main character was mostly spineless. The "secret" wasn't much of a secret. Whoever did the translation of this did an excellent job. This was a welcome contrast to Falling Awake's poor writing.
December 9, 2010:
Finished "Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette" by Sena Jeter Naslund. Poetically and patiently written from Marie's perspective from her entry into France until her beheading. A lot of research went into it. I was wondering how the author was going to tell the beheading part of the story given that it was written in more or less a diary format from Marie's perspective. I thought she handled it well.
Finished "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink. Starting as a 15-year-old boy and a 30-something woman's affair and leading through her trial years later as a nazi war criminal, it was interesting, though the main character was mostly spineless. The "secret" wasn't much of a secret. Whoever did the translation of this did an excellent job. This was a welcome contrast to Falling Awake's poor writing.
December 9, 2010:
Finished "Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette" by Sena Jeter Naslund. Poetically and patiently written from Marie's perspective from her entry into France until her beheading. A lot of research went into it. I was wondering how the author was going to tell the beheading part of the story given that it was written in more or less a diary format from Marie's perspective. I thought she handled it well.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
NaNoWriMo 2010 day 30
Today was the last day! According to the offical word counter on the NaNoWriMo.org web site, I have 63,750 words.
Though Open Office places the count a little higher than 64,000, I will go with the official number. I added around 4,000 words today and closed out the storyline. As usual, I don't like the level of detail in the last part, but it at least makes sense in light of the rest of the story to change gears like I did at the point where I did. Either that or I am just rationalizing my sprint across the finish line. Either way, it's done!
Here's my word count graph, showing that I was a total slacker around Thanksgiving (but you already knew that):
I'm going to do something else now... :-)
Though Open Office places the count a little higher than 64,000, I will go with the official number. I added around 4,000 words today and closed out the storyline. As usual, I don't like the level of detail in the last part, but it at least makes sense in light of the rest of the story to change gears like I did at the point where I did. Either that or I am just rationalizing my sprint across the finish line. Either way, it's done!
Here's my word count graph, showing that I was a total slacker around Thanksgiving (but you already knew that):
Monday, November 29, 2010
NaNoWriMo 2010 day 29
Today was a good day. I added 5,012 words to the story and broke 60k. I am now at 60,493 and I have somewhat of a direction to take the story next. The bad part is that I don't think I am going to get to the end of the story before the month ends unless I crank out about 10,000 words tomorrow. The last day looms!
The added character finally reappeared and started kicking ass.
The added character finally reappeared and started kicking ass.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
NaNoWriMo 2010 day 28
The "something" I wrote about in the post about yesterday's writing wanted to change today. I ended up adding 1,246 words to chapter one to make it feel a little more integrated. And here I thought I was done with chapter one. No such luck.
Chapter two eluded me for quite some time. I wrote out a list of future events that needed to be included, and tried to section them off, but the step between the end of chapter one and the first "next step" was a maddening empty space. I hammered on this for a little while and came up with what I think is a decent 300-word sketch of the chapter (these words don't count towards my total for the day). Now I have to write it out, so that I can get to the rest of the events.
At the end of the day, I added 2,215 words, with a little more than half of these going into chapter one. I'm not entirely happy with chapter two as it is right now, but at least it is something to bridge the gap. Current total word count: 55,481.
Chapter two eluded me for quite some time. I wrote out a list of future events that needed to be included, and tried to section them off, but the step between the end of chapter one and the first "next step" was a maddening empty space. I hammered on this for a little while and came up with what I think is a decent 300-word sketch of the chapter (these words don't count towards my total for the day). Now I have to write it out, so that I can get to the rest of the events.
At the end of the day, I added 2,215 words, with a little more than half of these going into chapter one. I'm not entirely happy with chapter two as it is right now, but at least it is something to bridge the gap. Current total word count: 55,481.
NaNoWriMo 2010 days 24-27
Over Thanksgiving, I cooked and played. I did not write. My word count from Nov 24 to Nov 26 was 0.
On November 27th, I added 2,014 words and finished Book III, Chapter 1. Total word count for this year is now 53,266 words.
Storywise, I went off on a small tangent. I say "small" only because my notes included "something" here, but it was very vague. The actual story I put in was a little different from what I expected, but still conformed to putting "something" in.
I am still a bit perplexed about what to do with the newer character, but I have an idea I would like to follow up on. She's been conspicuously absent ever since the attempt on her life.
On November 27th, I added 2,014 words and finished Book III, Chapter 1. Total word count for this year is now 53,266 words.
Storywise, I went off on a small tangent. I say "small" only because my notes included "something" here, but it was very vague. The actual story I put in was a little different from what I expected, but still conformed to putting "something" in.
I am still a bit perplexed about what to do with the newer character, but I have an idea I would like to follow up on. She's been conspicuously absent ever since the attempt on her life.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
NaNoWriMo 2010 day 23
Today went by much faster than I wanted it to. It started by me sleeping in until about 10:00, which was unusual enough. After that, we started to plan out the menu for Thanksgiving, and then went shopping at four different stores for the stuff we needed to cook. I didn't get to writing until after 10 PM at least.
I was able to sneak 1,467 new words in today before midnight (word count 51,053), and kept writing after midnight adding another couple hundred words after midnight. I have a bit of direction on the story in Book III, but it's not exactly "flowing" right now. I feel like I'm trying to push-start a car whose battery had gone dead. It's giving me signs that it wants to return to life, but hasn't started and run on its own just yet. I need to keep pushing until that spark catches.
In my favor, I passed 50,000 words and got my green bar. To my detriment, I should really have reached this milestone days ago, and from here, I have a long way to go before the story will be finished. I hope I don't have to do what I did last year, which was to essentially go into outline mode at the end of the story just to make it complete for fear of running out of time. I'm not sure that will be possible.
And I still don't know how this is actually going to end. I mean, it could follow my outline, or it could surprise me. We'll see....
As to what has happened in the story developing? Really, nothing. I hate to say it, but the bad guy is right back where he was at the end of Book II and is no longer in charge. After this? Well... it will hopefully lead somewhere. It has to, right?
I was able to sneak 1,467 new words in today before midnight (word count 51,053), and kept writing after midnight adding another couple hundred words after midnight. I have a bit of direction on the story in Book III, but it's not exactly "flowing" right now. I feel like I'm trying to push-start a car whose battery had gone dead. It's giving me signs that it wants to return to life, but hasn't started and run on its own just yet. I need to keep pushing until that spark catches.
In my favor, I passed 50,000 words and got my green bar. To my detriment, I should really have reached this milestone days ago, and from here, I have a long way to go before the story will be finished. I hope I don't have to do what I did last year, which was to essentially go into outline mode at the end of the story just to make it complete for fear of running out of time. I'm not sure that will be possible.
And I still don't know how this is actually going to end. I mean, it could follow my outline, or it could surprise me. We'll see....
As to what has happened in the story developing? Really, nothing. I hate to say it, but the bad guy is right back where he was at the end of Book II and is no longer in charge. After this? Well... it will hopefully lead somewhere. It has to, right?
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