When the Odds Are in Your Favor

Windows to the Imagination: What Reading Books Does for Me

When I read, for once the ticking clock is silent. With my head in a book, my anxiety about project due dates, and my peanut butter cookie craving, that itchy mosquito bite, and my sister calling me to come look at a hummingbird feeder all become background noise.

Books, good books, shows me life through different windows and dunk me in emotion. With their settings they take me places I may never go in real life. I see the glittering lights of fabulous parties, smell the stench on a crowded immigrant ship, feel cold Siberian snows on my bare feet—I bristle when my valet criticizes my fashion sense, and then I wonder how hilariously shallow I might be. When the enemy army begins to fire I wonder, weak-kneed, if I would run. Once I taste Turkish delight, I wonder what I am willing to do to eat another bite. I become the characters, the lovable ones, the hateable ones, and the in-between ones. Their experiences teach me of hardship and of comfort, of hate and of hope, of disillusionment and dreams, of lies and of selflessness. Reading shows me the me I am, the me’s that I could be, and the me’s I want to be. When I finally pull my head out of the water, dry my face, and come back to my own window with its old view, I have to stop wondering what I would do and choose which of those me’s will be.

I think this was the first year that the local shop, Chapel Books, had an essay contest. That meant there was a small pool of entries. That was good for me! I won out of maybe 4 other entries. In addition to a Oxford paperback classic of my choice, I received a $50 check, part of which I plan to use to book shop.

Happy writing!

New New New

     When we heard the campus bookstore was selling 501 French Verbs for a dollar, my English major friend (and fellow fashion blogger at rubyslippersfash.wordpress.com) and I zipped over to buy a copy.

     I ended up with a few more books than I intended to, but all six of them (brand new!) plus a wall calendar cost me less than $8. That's thriftiness right there.
      The Sense of an Ending, right in the middle of my pile, I've been wanting to read for a while now. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy--you might have seen the movie version in the theater. It sounds intriguing. Those Lovable Pets I plan to wrap up and send to my retired high school librarian, and squirrel seeks chipmunk I only hurriedly flipped through before I snatched it up, mostly because of the cute size and cute cover. I hope it's good.

     Flip-through, snatch-up. That sums up my flurry of a past two weeks. I have sacrificed a bit of sleep to get back into reading in the midst of everything. In the realm of Christian literature I'm working on Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. His style reminds me of C.S. Lewis, from his hard-to-wrap-your-head-around intellectualism to his dry, punny humor.
     Also on my bookshelf are "Sir Orfeo" (Brit Lit) and John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" (American Lit), and in my suppertime reading, I've journeyed as far as the Old Forest with Frodo & Co.

     I've had little time...I've made little time for writing, as I adjust to scheduling around a new weekday job. New. New job, new month, and really just the beginning of this new year (still crossing out 2013?). Time for a new post day. Welcome to Saturday afternoons at The Well!

     

Branching out Into Boronovia

     This semester, I think I'm going to be reading my eyeballs out over British, American, and Irish Women's literature, plus the reading for my marketing class. In Brit Lit we're starting out in medieval England with "Caedmon's Hymn" and "The Dream of the Rood."
    For my own pleasure I'm reading 1,000 Gifts by Ann Voskamp and re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring. Although, I suppose all the reading I'm doing should be pleasurable--I don't know what it is about being assigned reading that takes away the enjoyment.

Lurith

     Recently I'm writing a short story (and a bit of history) on the country of Boronovia, which covers almost the entire eastern coast of Lurith. The people are concentrated in the northern middle because of active volcanoes in the south and vicious Ice Bears in the North.        
Logline: In a land of bitter winters, boot-making Piyar...

Poetry: October

     Reading poetry in front of an audience was somehow different from making speeches in public speaking class. My hands almost didn't shake, and I actually enjoyed it. I felt like I was telling my poems they were at last really ready to go out into the world. Which is really providential, since it wasn't until six a.m. the morning of the literature conference that I finished writing 2 of the 3 poems I read.

      Interesting fact: I learned in American Lit II today that there is no such thing as silent reading. Even when your lips aren't moving, your larynx is vibrating.

       With that in mind...

As for NaNoWriMo, I decided I'd rather try and fail than not even try simply because I'm afraid I might fail. I'm not off to a great start, I'm at zero words right now, but I'm not going to freak out.  I created my writing space, I'm getting solid pre-writing done, and I have a Saturday on which to novelthon. Besides, nothing's impossible, is it?

Learning to Pretend

   

     The Patrol Tower

     Readers are supposed to suspend disbelief. They're supposed to pretend that the people and occurrences on the page are real. If they don't there's no point in reading.

      After all, I highly doubt J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit expecting people would clutch their bellies laughing, "Ha! Bilbo didn't talk to Smaug. Dragons don't talk. Even if they did, Biblo and Smaug don't even exist! They're just ink on a page!"

     It's pretty easy to pretend when you're reading someone else's writing. But sometimes I have trouble with my own. I'm the one writing them, and I'm the one who sees all the tangled fancies on the inside of my brain before they spill out onto the page.

     Two things I've found out that help me. The first is making bits of my story into drawings or models. My characters and settings feel more real when I can see them. The second thing that helps is detail, knowing everything about the world of my story, and knowing all about even secondary and tertiary characters.

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What helps you pretend?