Worderella Writes

Book: St. Ursula’s Girls Against the Atomic Bomb

So. This book is interesting. St Ursula’s Girls Against the Atomic Bomb by Valerie Hurley is about Raine Rassaby, a free-spirited high school girl who is determined to be a heroine and save the world from nuclear missiles and other dangerous horrible things like the military. Her mother is a concert violinist and her father is a famous astrologist; her late grandmother converted to Judaism so she thinks she’s Jewish even though both of her parents are Catholic. She’s in love with the Slovakian Jewish gardener, and her Catholic school guidance teacher, who has his own problems, lives next door. The book starts crazy, and it doesn’t seem to come to any sort of real resolution, in the way that a typical romance would, which is why I’ve labeled this book as simply fiction, it almost asks to be literary fiction.

Read more...

Book: A Hole in the Earth

A Hole in the Earth by Robert Bausch is a first-person narrative about “the summer” as described by Henry Porter, the narrator and main character. A middle school history teacher with a penchant for gambling, Porter is a divorce who has not seen his daughter Nicole in five years, which makes her about seventeen. The school year has just ended, and Porter is on his way out the door to the race track to make a couple bucks when Nicole shows up at his door with her friend, Sam. That same day, Porter’s girlfriend of three years Elizabeth begins to act strangely, and she soon reveals that she is pregnant. What starts out as a series of unexpected events leads to the inner-workings of a quiet man; Porter’s narrative tells us everything he cannot or does not say, and how that can make or break his relationships with the people around him.

Read more...

Suggested Reading

As a writer, I have an interesting position with my friends who consider me a writer: they ask for reading suggestions, as though I’ve read everything and therefore know what’s worth reading. Now, admittedly, I do read a lot. Usually more during my breaks than when school is in session. I’ve been known to knock out ten books in a couple weeks, if I have the time. But the fact of the matter is, sometimes I’m absolutely thrown for a loop when someone asks me what they should read next.

Read more...

Re-Writing Breakthrough

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.
- Stephen King

And so I conclude my finals week with ever-happy thoughts about my original work-in-progress, The Winslow Charade. It’s funny, seeing that title, considering I just use it because it’s there, and really has nothing to do with the story anymore. In any case, I had a breakthrough the other night while I was studying. I’ve been worried about the pacing of the book. It feels too slow, especially now that I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo. So, at 2 am in the morning, I decided that I was going to shift the beginning of the story forward approximately six months. Now everything is much more condensed, and the story will have to move faster because the characters have less time to make decisions–which means more conflict, which is always, but ALWAYS, good.

Read more...

Research: Text and Games

Getting stuck on finding the texts you need for your research? Believe me, I’ve been there. After reading one book, liking some of the information but wishing I could read the book that a certain chapter referenced, I then start the hunt. I look at my local library, I look in my university library. Given that my university is huge, when the book isn’t here, I begin to despair. I look at the bookstores, but all the chain stores around here have no imaginative texts at all. I look online, only to find the book is completely out of print, or, I could use my soul and some change as payment to get a mint condition version of the book from Amazon or eBay. If I’m lucky.

Read more...

Quote: Rewriting

The key idea to remember is that fixing a broken novel is liked organizing an overstuffed closet: things get messier before they get better.

Read more...

Apostrophes and Bibliophiles

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. - Scott Adams

Is it sad that I find literary posters amusing? Click [here] to see Bob the Angry Flower’s take on those dreaded apostrophe rules.

In other news, I printed my NaNoWriMo the other day at the computer lab that I work at (I print everything there because I practically have free printing, my quota is so large), and shock and awe! Somehow, I wrote 177 double-spaced pages in one month. It took me three years to write the prequel. Le sigh.

Read more...

Agents, Agents, and more Agents

Now that you have that first half of the novel under your belt, maybe from NaNoWriMo, maybe from working on your own, it’s time to start looking for that agent if you aren’t going the self-publishing route. Here’s a pretty extensive article that I found.

Read more...