I don’t think I ever counted Tennessee, Rhode Island, or Maryland. Also, I’ve now been to Kansas! And Missouri, when I went to Kansas City.
I feel like I’ve been better at this lately, and I think that time is a big factor: I’m not half as busy as I used to be, so I don’t feel like waiting around for people is necessarily a waste of my time. Hopefully I can carry this attitude with me when I return home for spring break, because I usually lose patience quickest when I’m around my family, even though I love them so much!
I’m a college student and right now I’m in a creative writitng class. We have 3 opportunities over the course of the term to submit writing to the rest of the class for workshop. I’ve used my workshops to test out the first 3 chapters of the novel I’m working on, and I’ve gotten really great feedback! My classmates and prof. enjoy reading it, and my prof. thinks it has a lot of potential to be a very appealing YA novel. This encouragement is so lovely, especially since this is a concept I’ve been working on for over two years now (!). It’s nice to hear that there’s a potential audience for this thing I’ve been slaving away over.
A Christmas Carol/Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth/Dickens, Fictions of Affliction/Holmes, Sula/Morrison, Late Victorian Gothic Tales/Lockhurst, and The Mill on the Floss/Eliot
I will be on a plane headed home from school. Until then, I will be up to my ears in English papers. Four of them, to be exact.
Current status:
Fualkner paper: rough draft
Fitzgerald paper: rough draft
Victorian Gothic Masculinity: rough draft in progress
Victorian Lit & Disability: planning
My goal is to have rough drafts of all four of these complete by this Sunday evening. Then I’ll have a week to do some leisurely revision and study for an exam I have. Onward!
Matilda (Dahl), As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), Libra (DeLillo), Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow).
Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald), James and the Giant Peach (Dahl), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), The Journey Through Wales/Description of Wales (Gerald of Wales), and The Hairy Ape (O’Neill).
Since my last entry, I’ve read Janet’s Repentence (George Eliot), Villette (Charlotte Bronte), Domination and Conquest (R.R. Davies), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl).
Well, being in two literature classes at university certainly helps!
Read most recently: Oliver Twist, The Custom of the Country, The Great Gatsby (again), A Disaffection, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
So obviously I’m not going to reach this goal. HOWEVER, I’m going to keep reading as much as I can for the rest of the year!
Since I’ve been traveling for the past week and a half, I’ve had lots of time to devour some good books.
Read since the last time I wrote an entry: The Hobbit, The Help, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I liked all 3 novels very much! I enjoyed The Help in particular.
The Writer’s Idea book by Jack Heffron
This was the last of the books that I found when perusing the stacks at school. I ended up sticky noting all of the prompts I found interesting (there were a lot!) and typing them up into a word document for later use. In hindsight, it probably would have been worth it to just buy the book.
I highly recommend this if you’re a writer of any level or persuasion. The prompts will help you generate ideas for a new project or breathe life and depth into a current project.
My summer break starts in just a few days. Mini goal: by the end of this summer, be at 30/50 books. Possible? Sure. Realistic? That remains to be seen.
I always want to leave something on my plate, unless the plate is full of salad or it’s a container of yogurt or something. But in general, if I’m eating a meal, I always feel compelled to eat it all. Unnecessary and unhealthy in the long run.
The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman
This is one of the better books on writing that I’ve read, though not all of the information is relevant to me as far as where I am in the writing process at this point in time. Though this is primarily about getting published, and Lukeman emphasizes just how difficult a feat that is, each chapter begins with a quotation or story about a now-famous author who overcame the many rejection letters. So there’s hope!
I’ll finish Arabic 3 (advanced beginner level) by the end of this فصل دراسي. I plan to continue to take Arabic next year and go on a study abroad program my junior year, though keeping up with my Arabic over the summer and through the fall while I’m studying in Scotland is going to be a challenge.
One great resource someone told me about today:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arabic/tvandradio/2011/01/000000_liveradio.shtml
Began Tuesday, 05/11/11.
To be honest, I don’t even do that much on facebook. It’s just become an automatic thing to type into the address bar and a terrible procrastination tool. It ends now.
a way to do this so that I can add new recipes/pages as I discover them. I feel as though right now I’m hesitant to jump into this project because I want to make sure I have “all the recipes” I’ll ever want to include. That is never going to happen. But I’d still perfer something bookish rather than a recipe box. Maybe I can make/find a cool notebook and copy the recipes into it?
Oh dear. Only 4 books so far? Looks like I should have set the 25-books-in-a-year goal…maybe I’ll have more time to read this summer? Slash when I’m taking three English classes in the fall, I’ll definitely do some reading.
But anyway. Naked Pueblo by Mark Jude Poirier is my most recent read. I stumbled upon it while browsing for books in the Stacks, and the title caught my eye. I pulled the book off the shelf, read the first page, and was still intrigued.
Thing is, since it’s a library book, it didn’t have the dust cover. So it wasn’t until I was fifty pages or so in that I realized it was not a novel, as I previously thought, but a book of short stories. I was wondering why the characters kept changing and each chapter seemed unrelated!
Once I got over that hurdle, I really enjoyed these stories. I like Poirier’s style of writing A LOT and would like to read more by him. The endings of his stories were all a little funky (not really endings, in my opinion), but his characters were so developed and vivid in such a short space of words.
The other two books I’ve read since my last entry are A Happy Childhood and The Search Party, both books of poetry by William Matthews. I read them for my creative writing class and really enjoyed them, especially “The Hummer.”
