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Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was assigned this book in my latest creative writing course. And, overall, it's a good read and a mostly helpful book. I admit some of it is redundant for anyone who has ever taken a previous course, or written anything of their own. But even when the subject being discussed was boring, the book often found a fresher take on it. We jumped around in the book, and didn't read the entire think in our 7.5 week course. I so liked what I read during the class that I went ahead and read the rest. Having done that, though, I can see why we skipped those parts. They didn't add much really. However, the parts we covered in class made up for that, I think, so I'm still giving this 4 stars. View all my reviews

I'm something of a compartmentalizer. I had a personal blog and a writing blog. I had a website to advertise my freelance writing and other marketable skills, and a separate site to talk about my fiction writing saga. I have a personal twitter and a writing twitter. I didn't want to "bother" people from one area of my life with stuff from another. Didn't want to bore personal friends with talk of writing, or posted poetry. Didn't want to offend fellow word-lovers with my politics, or bore them with monotonous check-ins to the same handful of places (I'd be depressingly easy to stalk if anyone were so inclined, lol). But I'm done with that. Maybe it's the New Year, or my new word. Maybe it's just my age showing - I am in my fuck-it-forties, after all. Maybe it was an article I read which said that having a website under a cutesy online pseudonym (like my qwertyKayt) is best if your 'brand' is talking about writing, while having a

I don't know what rock I've been living under, but this concept of having a guiding word for the year is brand new to me. I only know about it because of a vlogger I watch regularly: She's in Her Apron . But the idea is SO up my alley. I've never been a resolution-maker, but a word? I love words, obviously. I live for them, by them, and though them. To use one to define all my many intentions and goals for the year is one of those ideas where I'm mystified that I never thought of it! My word for 2018 is: RELEASE

When December started I was riding a wave of perceived accomplishment. And I imagined / assumed it would continue to flow. I had huge plans for the month. I was going to put the 40,000 words I managed for NaNoWriMo on the back burner for the month and write the first draft of a second, unrelated, novel. But something drowned my plans (ok, done with the water metaphor, I swear). It's happened the last few years, and it has been getting worse, but somehow the pattern escaped me. It's not the depression I'm familiar with - the one that arrives for no reason, at no particular time, and leaves only when the drugs drag it out the door kicking and screaming. It's not a weather-related case of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). First of all, I live in Arizona, our weather is only slightly more existent than my native California. We have only: lightweight sweater weather, 3 days of pleasant perfection, hot, hotter, and 'the armpit of hell' hot. Those of us who aren't

I had signed up for NaNoWriMo eons ago, and by eons I mean over a decade. And yet, despite the initial, and recurrent, desire to take part, I never did. First and foremost, it's taken me years to come to terms with the idea of sharing the odd goings on which call my head their home. Secondly, there has always seemed to be some perfectly convenient excuse, as there always is, for why it's not convenient to do it now . But despite the eternal headaches of holidays, schoolwork - and this year, actual final exams - coinciding with NaNoWriMo, I decided to shut up and just try it this year. Something about feeling that I had such lovely, and valid,  excuses built in for any possible failures, made it seem somehow less frightening to think of doing so. So what if I only hit 20,000 words, I thought, that's way more than I had, and I can always blame it on school. In the interest of honesty, I must admit, I started with about 4,000 words I'd previously written. But since I am a

Visceral reactions or existential angst? All the interviews and articles paint "Wild Tales" as being six separate short stories having a running theme of revenge. Ok, that’s true. Revenge does come up in every tale. And they are completely separate stories. They don’t have a single character weaving within them to tie them together, as in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Nor is there the bird flying above, or the narrating writer, that Szifron mentioned having considered adding to weave them into one. But I do see much more than just vengeance as a common theme. The most glaring component I noticed was the theme of power, or lack thereof, and the shifting of it. The rich are uniformly rude and entitled in every story, while the poor get used and pushed around until they usually reach a breaking point. In every story the powerless try to fight back, and the powerful try to stop them, but who really wins in the end is unresolved. There is a delicious vicarious pleasure from watching t

Trains that don’t go anywhere ... La Grande Belleza was hard for me. It’s the first film we’ve been assigned in my contemporary film class that I didn’t fall in love with on some level. My gut reaction to the film the first time around was that there was some profound stuff in it, but that is was achingly long and headache-inducingly convoluted. I just didn't 'get' it. I appreciate it more now, after considering the questions which were posed to us, and reading the articles, interviews, and reviews. There are now things I find interesting about it, and questions it left me, but I’m still not in love with it. The initial party scene instantly made my mind flashback to Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby party scenes. Though I admit the excess and debauchery were grittier and more palpable in this film. But the break-neck montages almost made me nauseous at times.  And after a certain point the cinematography felt like just another layer of distraction in a film so much about exactly that