Disorganized Thoughts and Opinions on A Storm of Swords
Please don’t read this post if you want to read George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords and you don’t want spoilers. Because this post is full of spoilers. All of my favorite characters survived this...
View ArticleThe Thursday Three #6
1. When the terms and definitions on Urban Dictionary aren’t disgusting, they can be insightful. “Hot takes” are discussed in this article, which laments the demise of long-form journalism. A “hot...
View ArticleNo More American Dream?
There’s a lot of talk about equality these days. Everyone wants to be equal until they want special treatment, and so on and so forth. But the inequality is real, especially in terms of the poor versus...
View ArticleFalse Advertising
Every now and then, my morbid side kicks in and I end up reading something about serial killers or Nazis. So I picked up Graeme (how do you pronounce that name?) Cameron’s Normal because I thought it...
View ArticleLoner or Introvert?
A couple of months ago, I went to a sit-down restaurant by myself. If I remember correctly, that was the first time I had ever done that. When I walked up to the hostess’ podium and she asked how many,...
View ArticleThe Thursday Three #8
I finished reading Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide last week (an overview of the NSA information leaks in 2013 — very interesting), and I noticed something odd: the book had no end notes or index,...
View ArticleMockingbird and Watchman
When I was a freshman in high school, our class was asked to read Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t remember much about the book, except a few lines that I liked enough to write down,...
View ArticleWould You Rather? Reading Edition
I stole borrowed this idea from Ravyn Whyt. It’s the good old “would you rather” game but online and related to reading. So here goes: Would you rather only read trilogies or only read standalones?...
View ArticleThe Thursday Three #9
This post on Anthony’s blog inspired me to start reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which starts off with Justine. It’s one of those lovely older novels that doesn’t get as much attention...
View ArticleImages of Characters, Part I
On the front covers of books, I often see images of people who supposedly represent the characters in the book. I don’t particularly care for that type of cover design because I want to picture the...
View ArticleImages of Characters, Part II
Following up on Sunday’s post, I realized that characters are often described (at least in amateur writing) by their hairstyle or hair color and eye color, but those two characteristics are so overused...
View ArticleImages of Characters, Part III
Continuing in the same vein as the first and second parts of this post… When writing, it’s easy to forget all your other senses in favor of sight, which is the main way most of us perceive the world....
View ArticleThe Thursday Three #10
The works of John O’Donohue were recommended to me by one of my blog readers, so I found Eternal Echoes (nonfiction) at the library. It’s about how our hearts are always restless and our human need to...
View ArticleShort, Sweet Synopsis
One of the biggest struggles I have (totally a first-world problem) is trying to sum up my unpublished novels in a short, sweet synopsis that will draw the reader in and make him or her want to read...
View ArticleThe Thursday Three #12
Work in progress update: STEPHEN is highly enjoyable to write because two of my characters work well together and constantly entertain me. So when I open the Word document, I’m not thinking, I hope I...
View ArticleNot Exactly a Spinster
I was interested to read Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, which is a half memoir, half history lesson about how the author chose to remain unmarried and pursue a writing-oriented...
View ArticleFeeling Tricked
Spoiler warning! Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was so ridiculously hyped up that I had to read it (three years after it was published, but I rarely read books as soon as they’re published). The book turned...
View ArticleThe Thursday Three #15
I’m reading Encountering Truth, a compilation of excerpts from Pope Francis’s homilies. One of them (actually several of them, but I can’t talk about them all in a short blog post) struck me because...
View ArticleLatest Reads
Spoiler alert! A couple weeks ago, I read Lexa Hillyer’s debut YA novel Proof of Forever, which is billed as this generation’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I found that proclamation not to be...
View ArticleThe Thursday Three #18
Let’s make everyone’s lives easier and advocate for clearer writing instead of bureaucratic language pumped full of useless words. This article has an interesting perspective. Isn’t the whole point of...
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