Musings

Weekly Musing: Oh, Why Did I Read That?

DH Hanni

I don’t normally make New Year’s Resolutions just because it seems to me like an exercise in futility and a great way to end feeling guilty for not sticking to them. This year, though, I decided that if I did make any resolutions, they would be ones related to my new career. One of those was to read more and to actual log what I read because I often can’t remember if I’ve read a book or not. I have met my goal of reading at least 50 books this year and while there were many books I enjoyed, there were some I wasn’t enthralled with. So this week and next week I’m going to list my favorite and least favorite books I read this year.

I’d rather start with the ones I didn’t like because that means ending the year on a positive note. ‘Tis the season for sentimentality.

I’m excluding from my list books I didn’t finish because if I didn’t finish it, I didn’t like it enough to soldier through and it seems a bit unfair to list it. I’m also not counting books I only read parts of for research because that doesn’t seem fair, either.

So with a little drum roll , here is the list of my least favorite books I read this year. In no particular order they are:

Everflame by Dylan Peters: Really cool concept about a kingdom of talking bears (it’s a fantasy world, just roll with it) who adopt an orphaned human baby and raise him as one of their own. But the kingdom is threatened by evil, The Messenger, who is taking out The Ancients one by one. Evercloud (the human raised by bears) and his bear family and friends must find the evil and fight it. It’s the first book in a trilogy but I have no desire to read it further. The author has some really lovely descriptions and I do enjoy the world of the bears but things fell apart once the author shifted focus to telling the story of villain in the book called The Messenger (who is human). The Messenger’s origin story is violent and drags on for far too long. Cutting some of the back story would have helped the flow of the story. The characters are very black and white with only Evercloud showing any signs of potential for growth.

A Crowning Mercy by Bernard Cornwell and Susannah Kells: I love historical fiction and had heard Bernard Cornwell was a really good writer so I looked around his catalog to see what might appeal to me. I picked this book because it was set during a time period I’m not familiar with, mid-1600s England, and it sounded like it had an interesting female lead. I was wrong about the female lead. She was dull, boring, and irritatingly stupid but the authors seemed to blame that on her Puritanical upbringing which I think can only carry so far. Dorcas Slythe was orphaned at a young age and left in the care of relatives. Her mother was a Puritan who fell in love with a ship’s captain and ran off with him. They are strict Puritans and I hated the way they are portrayed. They were just over-the-top bad and plain greedy which seems to smack right in the face of what their religion believes. There’s some plot about a map and seals and whoever finds all the seals gets the map that leads to some treasure tucked up in the Netherlands. Of course Dorcas has one of those seals but doesn’t know it. Most of the book is her repeatedly trusting people whom she shouldn’t yet despite repeatedly getting burned, she continues to trust the same people. Oh and there’s some dopey romance buried in there. It reads as if two people wrote the book which if more than one author are going to collaborate on a book, their parts should flow seamlessly. It didn’t in this book.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Don’t fling things at me but I just felt this ‘classic’ was boring. I know it is supposed to be a reflection and commentary about the Jazz Age but I just wasn’t feeling it. I found it dull and I think for me, it is a case of if I lived during that time period, it would have worked have had more resonance. It was just meh and while the mystery around Jay Gatsby keeps you interested, it just doesn’t say much to me.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: I discovered Neil Gaiman this year and utterly enjoyed his other works. This book, however, just didn’t quite click. Gaiman has a wonderful imagination and a great dreamy, surreal quality to his writing but this one just dragged on too long for me. It’s hard to describe the plot of the book other than it is a flashback to the narrator’s childhood and a very special friend who lives with her mother and grandmother. There is evil afoot inhabiting various earthly and unearthly forms. His oddball friend, though, is there to protect him. While it is widely imaginative and well-written, it just didn’t grab like American Gods or Fragile Things.

A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn: This is a novel follow-up to the fun novella released earlier this called Far in the Wilds. While I really enjoyed the novella, I didn’t care for this one as much. This book, as well as Far in the Wilds, is set in Kenya in the 1920s, a departure from the Victorian time setting of Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey stories. The story centers around scandalous socialite Delilah Drummond sent to there by her equally scandalous mother who found even her own daughter’s exploits a bit much to handle. Delilah is the embodiment of the roaring ’20s: living life to excess by drinking, smoking, and sleeping with as many men as she wants to. She’s cheeky and fun which normally I like since I’m so not either of those but I found Delilah really dislikeable. She’s childish and immature and treats her much more prudish cousin, sent there to try to keep her out of trouble, with a lot of disrespect I found off putting and unwarranted. I finished the book because Raybourn’s descriptions are phenomenal. I felt like I was in Kenya and it was beautiful if dangerous. I’ve also noticed a trend with Raybourn with pulling some random plot twists toward the end of novels that aren’t foreshadowed at all (or they might be and I’m too slow to pick up on them) and don’t make sense in relation to the story.

Owain Glyn Dwr: The Last Prince of Wales by Peter Gordon Williams: When I bought this, I thought it was a nonfiction book and had it with the rest of my research materials. Then I looked at it again and noticed it was labeled as a novel. Okay, no big, shift it to a different bookcase. I read the book because I wanted to see what the author’s take was and so I wouldn’t try to repeat what someone else has already done. It’s not really a novel. It really should be classified as creative nonfiction because it is just a regurgitation of facts and dates with dialogue and descriptions of what people look like. The dialogue is wooden and is exposition with quotes around it. People come across as colossally stupid about what is going on around them. No character growth. Just lots and lots and lots of telling. At least I realized I was truly retaining what I had studied.

So there you have it. My list of the books I read this year I just didn’t care for. It is small which is a good sign I think. Thankfully there were a lot more books that I utterly enjoyed and having to narrow down my list to just a handful for next week’s post is going to be a fun challenge.

Musings

Weekly Musing: It’s a Wrap

DH Hanni

The final word on my first NaNoWriMo experience. It certainly had some bumps but it was a very valuable learning experience. I can’t really narrow it down to just one thing but several things I learned about writing a novel and about myself during November.

As my spouse pointed out to me the second day of NaNoWriMo, just concentrate on what it feels like to write a novel rather than focusing on if it makes complete sense. That was probably the biggest thing I learned during November. It was about understanding what my process is, discovering what it physically feels like (hello more callouses and wrist pain), and discipline. Don’t get me wrong, finishing the novel was a huge goal and one that I’m happy to say I accomplished even though I wound up adding to the ending a bit earlier this week.

Another thing I learned was it is more than okay to have a really, really terrible first draft. My draft is terrible and makes little sense to me. The characters are inconsistent and at one point I decided I wanted to age up the main character. Since my original plans for NaNo weren’t working out, I focused on writing a story completely from scratch. I truly tapped into the pantser way of thinking and I found it quite freeing. It also means chunks of what I wrote will be cut as it doesn’t make sense for the story. I got the feeling around the middle of the month that I had written myself into the story. All this means is that when I go to revise the novel sometime next year, it will be a lot more work than the draft.

This leads me to the next thing I’ve realized. I think of my NaNo draft as a bones draft. No, not Dr. McCoy (dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a writer). To me a bones draft is just getting down the basics. I got down a lot of dialogue with some actions and some setting descriptions but beyond that, there isn’t what I would consider a lot of ‘meat’ to it. I’m thinking my technique may be to flesh out the story in terms of setting and getting inside the characters in subsequent drafts before paring it down again to a concise story. I guess it’ll get fatter before getting down to a healthy weight.

I also learned to somehow keep that inner editor at bay. The phrase ‘I can fix this later’ was circulating through my head every day. I needed to constantly remind myself to just concentrate on getting the word count in and just getting thoughts down. Also that it is okay to run spell check but to ignore the grammar stuff, especially passive voice reminders, because again, it’s just a rough draft and the story itself will change significantly. The story became the guiding force.

Discipline was another biggie in November. I had been struggle all this year trying to figure out some kind of routine. It even got to the point that I created a time sheet for myself to help me stay on task. That didn’t work but telling myself I will write at least 3 hours each day, 5 if I can manage it, did the trick. Somehow I managed to commit myself to that schedule nearly every day despite the fact I was prepping for a major move. The only exception was when I was out of town yet that break was beneficial. It allowed my brain time to refresh and make the final push to the end. So if I can get 50,000 words in during all that imagine what more I could do when life isn’t so crazy?

Finally, I think I learned this past month was that each novel will probably have its own process. This one had none other than to just write anything down. But for novels that will have had more research, thought, and plot notes done, the process should be less seat of the pants. This novel was written linearly yet there are plenty of scenes that need to be added to it which means in the revision stage I’ll be writing out of sequence.

Overall I enjoyed my NaNo experience. I think I will definitely participate in 2014 and beyond. I’ve learned to be a bit gentler on myself and let that inner editor go far, far away. While I wasn’t as active on the forums on NaNoWriMo’s website as I intended to be, just looking around that international community of over 300,000 writers meant a lot of them were going through the same experiences at the same time. Somehow that worked for me psychologically more so than reading or listening to author interviews. I think that says a lot about the people behind NaNoWriMo and their approach to novel writing.

Musings

Weeking Musing: NaNo Check-in #5

DH Hanni

Last and final week of NaNoWriMo and it has been hectic not just for me, but probably all other NaNoers. Not sure that’s a word but it is now. I started off the week well behind in my writing due to being away from home for almost a week dealing with moving to the other side of the country. I took my writing with me, though, anticipating I would have plenty of opportunity to work on it while on planes and waiting to get on planes. I should have known better. My month long issue with insomnia and time zone changes resulted in me getting very little sleep. As a result, I spent a good portion of that time trying to catch up on sleep or being so out of it that whatever I did write wasn’t very good.

When I got back home, I decided the best way to get back into the groove was to do a 5 hour marathon. That really helped with my productivity and allowed me to get over that magical 50,000 word mark before the end of the month. Woo hoo!

While I’ve technically ‘won’ NaNo, the book is not done. One thing the several days I was away from writing seems to have done is allow my brain to come up with an ending. Or at least an ending that will work for now. This in turn reenergized my writing knowing that an end was in sight. What a concept! Have goal, will write.

I know I won’t be done by November 30th, in fact I think I won’t be done until the middle of next week. Finishing the manuscript is very important to me especially as I will be moving in 2 weeks and also because I want, I need that feeling of having completed a novel. Granted it’s a horrible draft that will need a lot of work in subsequent drafts, but at least I will be able to say ‘Yes, I wrote a book.’ Something many people talk about doing but never start while others start but never finish.

Next week will be the final entry in my first NaNo experience. I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned over the month as well as how finishing up the book went.