Quick Update, some shenanigans and all the rest

This makes me chuckle. (It came from some scary place online)

All right, all right. I skipped yesterday and today I'm coming on late. So sue me. It's a busy week and I'm grumpy (people who take too long to give me my coffee and then forget to ring up the cinnamon roll I wanted after making me wait in line for half an hour can be blamed). But anyway, I'm here now.

Update time:
The deadline for Leaves & Flowers, unfortunately, has to be moved up a bit to November 5. Due to some scheduling conflicts, I have to have the whole shebang finished by about the 8th-10th at the latest. However, that's still plenty of time for photographers, writers and other artists to send me stuff! The lovely Renda Dodge (about whose book I wrote last time) has already stepped up to the plate, as have Shelby Campbell and my mom (nepotism ftw). I have 10 or 11 others on my list, and I'm hoping to snag several more in the next week or two, so we'll see where this goes.

I'm still very excited and optimistic about the whole thing. :)

Book time:
Has anyone else heard about the whole "bloggers have to disclose when they receive books to review because it's considered compensation" snafu? It's causing quite a hullabaloo right now, and given the double standards that are present in the FTC's 'explanation' for it, I can see why. A book is considered compensation when it's sent to an individual blogger (who may or may not review it in a positive light) and yet not when it's sent to a newspaper/magazine to be reviewed. The guy interviewed says it's not a problem if the blogger discloses the compensation or sends the book back, but his logic and reasoning seem pretty flawed to me. It looks more like blogs and advertisers are being targeted, in some ways.

Thoughts?

Here's another ringing endorsement for my man Christopher Moore: I gave my copy of A Dirty Job (one of my favorite books) to Jonah, and he loves it. Now that I've said that, I'm not sure if it's more exciting because it confirms my opinion that ADJ is awesome, or because it just reinforces how cool my boyfriend is. Either way, high fives all around for ADJ!

As for my own writing, I've been drawing more than anything lately (which is weird, because an artist I am not) -however, that drawing almost inevitably leads me into some sort of creative writing thought process. It's working out nicely. I wrote a weird little narrative poem/story/thingie the other day that I might read at my writing group tomorrow night and, after it's been critiqued a bit, we'll see what I do with it. It's nothing I'd publish, so I might slap it up here and see what you all think.

There are only 24 days left until National Novel Writing Month, so when that hits, you'll all see me do some serious writing.

Who else is doing NaNo?


One last thing, just out of curiosity. What do you all think about the idea of rating books (click the link for more info on what that means)?

Leaves & Flowers

Hee hee

Woo! Sorry for the long absence -can't believe it's almost Wednesday already (my day off. Aka the day I spend writing and drinking too much coffee [just like every other day, I guess, except I don't go to classes]). That was a ridiculous sentence. Back onto my point -long absence, I'm back now, regular updates start TODAY.

Leaves & Flowers is the official (so far) name of the literary magazine I am creating. Tomorrow there will be a whole bunch of information on it available for your perusal. Please please please pass any and all information along to the creative types in your life (whether it's you, your mom or some hobo you meet on the corner wearing one of those apocalyptic sandwich boards). I will be including pretty much everything you need to know except the details of the submissions, which are only available upon contacting me, whether that's with an e-mail, a phone call, a Twitter follow or whatever -get in touch with me, and we'll be buddies.

For the first issue of L&F there will be no rejections. Revisions? You bet your ass I'll be asking for some, or at least permission to do weird things with the text, but I won't reject anything (unless it deserves it). I may someday be creating a website for all of this, too, so stay on board with it and we'll see where it goes. I am incredibly excited to be working on it, and getting other people interested is proving to be really fun.

BOOKS!

My awesome boyfriend Jonah let me borrow a copy of Clive Barker's book of three plays, called Incarnations. I am used to Barker's novelizations, and so the play "atmosphere," if you will, is very different -until you start paying close attention. Then you realize it's absolutely true of Clive Barker and his style and his oeuvre -that is to say, this book is rocking my socks off. And I'm only like 45 pages in. I love it.

I'm also reading (well, just finished reading) Frankenstein for the first time. Sad, really, that I'm 20 and have never read it, but I'm also glad that I hadn't read it before -going through it with Van Winkle as my teacher has been an incomparably fun reading experience. It's very hard to capture Dr. Van Winkle in words...he's a brilliant, exuberantly weird man, and being in his class is absurdly fun. I find myself laughing at all of his little comments, even if the rest of the group sort of sits there with a collectively glazed look on their eyes. I think his eccentricity is what makes the class so much fun, whereas a lot of other people are apparently weirded out by him (not that he isn't weird -I just think he happens to be a cool brand of weird).

What's everyone else reading these days?

New Moon, The White Queen and other nonsense

This picture of my tattoo (which is reversed) relates to CAKE! Read on for more details.

I write about a lot of "other nonsense" -probably because my life is filled with nonsense. Nonsense is not bad. In fact, it's quite wonderful a good deal of the time. It just doesn't fall under the heading of the Reading Corner.

For instance, Jonah baked me a belated birthday cake with my tattoo done in the icing -not only is that awesome, the cake was also chocolate/peanut butter/hazelnut flavored. Is he the best or what? Or, another example, my little sister got a part in a local production of Seussical the Musical (she's a jungle creature).

Other examples include: what I'm wearing (as much as I love my fashion blogs, I do not follow their examples -jeans and tank tops are about all you'll get out of me. I am comfortable this way, and nobody is interested in seeing me get gussied up every day. Well... some people might be, but I don't have time to make myself look like a million bucks every time I walk out my front door. I'm cute enough as is. :P ), what I've eaten (this and drinks can be filled with one word: COFFEE. If I could eat coffee as a meal every day, I would -chocolate covered espresso beans do not a good meal make, sadly), where I've gone (unless it's the bookstore/library) or what I'm watching (unless I can make it work).

Fortunately, I tell you about most of those things anyway! That's why I allow myself room to write "other nonsense." Because I am more than my face in a book. Not much more, perhaps, but it doesn't hurt to know that I have stuff going on outside writing. It reminds me of it, anyway. I have a lot of cool things going on in my life. :)

So! Books.

New Moon the movie, as you well know, is coming out in November. Holy Jesus am I not excited about this occurring. As a backlash against the ever rising tides of Twilight-related hysteria that I'm seeing with the imminent release of the movie (which I'm sure will suck as much as the original), I wrote a review of the book New Moon and analyzed it from the (accurate) Edward-abuses-Bella (who is an idiot)-standpoint. Fun times!

I also reviewed another book I haven't read (and don't care to) called The White Queen. If you're into historical fiction, this is totally going to be your thing. If you don't give a rat's ass about it, it's probably not. I'm not into historical fiction -the reason for me being that if I want to learn about history, I'll read a history book. Rewriting history and fleshing out characters who were actual people with actual lives to make them best-selling fiction is not something that interests or pleases me. I like my history factual. Why the rewriting? Why the fictionalization? Is it just to get people interested? My high school history teachers did a decent job of getting me interested in history. Which is made up of facts.

Perhaps the only fictionalized historical account I've ever enjoyed was Loving Frank. Mostly because a major portion of the book was comprised of actual letters and journal/diary entries, newspaper reports and other, similarly factual pieces of FACT.

I'm slowly edging onto my soapbox about this one. Can anyone defend historical fiction to me? I'm all for fiction writing, creative nonfiction (which includes some liberal amounts of truth-bending, believe you me) and what-have-you but historical fiction is a genre I just do not understand. Why take an actual story that other people lived a really long freaking time ago and add a bunch of fiction to it? Not only is it confusing and misleading, it seems to smack of intellectual laziness to me. If you're going to go to the trouble of researching a time period and specific individuals in order to write about them, why wouldn't you publish a nonfiction account of it? If the story is that super exciting, it shouldn't be much harder to sell copies.

I just don't like it. I'm not expressing it well, but the genre as a whole pisses me off a bit. I need coffee before I "accidentally" kick someone in the face.

In other news, I've been writing about Halloween. Have a significant other? Want to go to a Halloween party with them in a matching costume? This is the article for you. Want to not die while out trick or treating? This is the article for you.

I need to get something productive done. I haven't written yet today and my writer's guilt is kicking in. Or something.