Month: August 2012

Posted in Books I Loved in Middle/High School, Reading

Books I Loved in Middle/High School, Part 5

Posted on by Amy McNulty

I apologize for neglecting my blog a bit lately; I’ve been on a roll creatively and am trying to get one of the WIPs’ first draft done within the next few weeks, if possible. But I thought I’d stop by and talk about a few more books I loved in high school.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

This was another required reading, I think for my AP English course. I remember that we strangely got to take TWO WEEKS out of regular class to watch the miniseries during school, too. (And that actually our history teacher of all people was vying to be allowed to show it in her class instead, but the English teacher won out since we could actually read and discuss the book…) It wasn’t this welcome break that made me love it, though, although I loved the Jeremy Irons adaptation for the most part; it was one of my first forays into period fiction (I didn’t grow to love Austen and the Brontes until college and post-college… Granted, those are much earlier periods, but still…), and I loved the characters, and the journey the protagonist goes on, although I remember not really being too happy with the ending for personal reasons. But not all books end the way you want them to.

The story follows Oxford student Charles Ryder first through his close (close, like really close!) relationship with a spoiled, haughty, carefree rich kid, Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian is a jerk, but his laissez-faire attitude is of course masking deeper problems, and Charles begins to see another side of his friend-maybe-lover. The two part, Sebastian off to drink himself into ruin, and Charles entering into an unhappy marriage. The latter half of the book features a middle aged Charles returning to Sebastian’s family home (which is named Brideshead, thus “revisited”…) and becoming closer friends with Sebastian’s sister Julia, who’s also in an unhappy marriage. The two become lovers on the cusp of World War II and hope to one day wed…

That’s just the bare bones of the plot. There’s also an important theme about faith that resonated with me and led to the aforementioned ending I wasn’t sure was what I expected or wanted for the character, but that’s just me. It’s still a great read.

X-Men: Mutant Empire Trilogy by Christopher Golden

Not every book I read and loved in high school could pass for required school reading, of course. When I was 11 or 12, my sister showed me the ’90s Fox X-Men cartoon and I joined in her in her obsession for that soap-opera-with-superpowers that is the X-Men franchise, which opened the gate to my overall love for superhero comics, movies and cartoons that’s still with me today. (An aside: The ’90s animated Batman is THE best version of The Dark Knight, I swear!) Part of the way I got my superhero fix between waiting for the latest issues and episodes was reading a bunch of Marvel superhero books coming out at the time. I loved a number of them, but the X-Men: Mutant Empire trilogy was my favorite, hands-down, and I’ve re-read them a few times since I first read them as a teen.

These books follow the X-Men at what was the height of the series to me, the Blue and Gold Teams in the ’90s. Cyclops’ Blue Team was off in space helping his father space-pirate Corsair deal with some intergalactic problems (meh, my least favorite part of the trilogy, but Cyclops has always bugged me…) and Storm’s Gold Team was dealing with Magneto’s takeover of Manhattan to serve as a home for mutants. Magneto managed to reconfigure Sentinel robots to attack humans instead of mutants, so only mutants could get in on the ground and take him out. This was a much more tangible kind of crisis against Magneto versus what I’d seen in the comics or cartoon, with the made-up island of Genosha or Asteroid M acting as Magneto’s havens.

By the way, I was reading these books when an English teacher asked what I was reading in my free time, to “prove” I was an avid reader… Which didn’t score me too many brownie points! She didn’t know what I was talking about, so I had to explain that I read a lot of franchise books like Star Wars books (at the time–haven’t touched those in over a decade)… At least she’d heard of that! Ah, well, read what you love, I say!

Posted in Writing, Writing: Help

Writing Through Writer’s Block

Posted on by Amy McNulty

Today I had… Perhaps not what I’d call “writer’s block,” but some sort of extra struggle with the blank screen. I think a little bit of burnout was to blame, or building my expectations for myself too high after a really good week of work on my WIP. Last week, I finally hit the “hump” in my YA WIP and was pumping out 1000-2000 words a day. (Nothing quite like the 5000-10,000 words per day I’ve managed when super inspired in the past, but much better than how I’d been doing before.) I didn’t have the whole thing plotted out–I usually get inspired as I write–but I felt like I was going somewhere. Meanwhile, I got hit with another idea for a new creative project and I “cheated” on my YA WIP to work on that a bit. I was on a creative roll, all while still juggling a fair amount of other things that required my attention!

Today, I had about six hours I could devote just to creative writing. A dream come true, right? I figured I could get so much done! But… I kept staring at the blank screen. I’d write a bit, and then just… Doubt that anything I’d written was worthwhile. Doubt I could pull off what I was trying to write. Doubt I could even come up with a full story. No ideas were coming to me! Even my favorite technique of skipping ahead a bit to write one scene I could vividly picture and then going back to fill in the gaps wasn’t really working. In the end, I got 1300 words done. Not shabby at all, except when you consider I spent six hours staring at the computer to produce it. (On a good day, I can average 1000 words in an hour.) I really don’t want to face another day like this one!

So here are a few things I want to remind myself and other writers who face a day that’s less than productive:

  • Just keep going. You need to finish things! (Despite hundreds of thousands of manuscript words under my belt, I’ve only actually finished one project.) I actually have three WIPs at the moment (one much smaller in scope than the others, at least), and I stopped focusing on my middle grade one a couple of months ago because I had a few days where I felt this way. I don’t want my YA one to fall by the wayside, too.
  • You can fix it later. Whatever you don’t like right now, you can fix later. Plus, when you’re in a negative mood, you’re not really viewing it objectively anyway. Maybe it’s not that bad.
  • Remember what you love about it! I love my protagonist’s voice, and I’m quite drawn to the overall conflict I’m trying to portray. It would be a shame to give up because I’m not loving the details.
  • Acknowledge how far you’ve come. Last week, I had about half of what I had this week!

What are your techniques for getting through a bad writing day?

Posted in Books I Loved in Middle/High School, Reading

Books I Loved in Middle/High School, Part 4

Posted on by Amy McNulty

This time I’m finally going to discuss a couple of books I liked in high school. During middle school, I read a lot of long-running series. In high school, I put many of those aside and gravitated toward one-shot books or books from short series.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

I read, discussed and wrote essays about this book for school not once, but twice, in high school and in college. It’s a good thing I fell hard for the book during my high school English class; seeing it on my college course syllabus was a welcome surprise, something I might not have felt about some other required reading books with which I never quite connected.

The plot involves a woman ostracized by society for “having relations” while unmarried to a French lieutenant who was passing through town. (Shades of The Scarlet Letter.) An engaged gentleman becomes fascinated with this mysterious woman, and he soon discovers that there is far more to her than meets the eye.

More compelling to me than the plot–which I did enjoy–was the narration. Fowles frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader about the craft of writing. He went on to write three different endings to the story! I never saw the movie, but I wonder if they filmed all three endings. I also want to know how they translated the narration, which was an essential part of the book to me. Maybe I should pick the film up.

Centennial by James A. Michener

This book wasn’t any part of my compulsory reading for school. What prompted me to pick up this massive tome (1000+ pages in my version) was the massive TV miniseries (21-ish hours total). This was a couple of decades after it first aired, but it was airing again on some cable network while I was in high school. My mom had liked it when it first aired and thought I might like it, too. She was right! I was so hooked, I even warned a friend who called me one of the days an episode was airing that I had to hang up when it started airing. And I did wind up literally hanging up (she was still talking). She called back to ask what happened, and I said, “My show is on!” and I hung up again. Ah, what a good friend I was… (She forgave me!)

I actually have minimal interest in Westerns, although I’ve watched a few. What compelled me to love this show was the unceasing drama, a saga of a fictional Colorado town that lasted generations. I found the same and more in the book, which my mom also had on hand. Luckily, I loved the show enough to make it through the first few chapters, though… Because they literally began with the formation of the earth that made up this town and continued through some pre-historic animals living there… If I’m not mistaken, it was at least 100 pages, if not more. (What was Michener’s editor thinking?! I’m guessing it was something he was known for.) I remember they pretty quickly brushed past that part in the TV series. In any case, once you get past (or skip) the pre-historic part, you get to the juicy drama, and it becomes a page-turner. I finished it pretty quickly.

I thought I might like more of Michener’s works, so I picked up a few more volumes. All of them had pre-historic first chapters… And not knowing for sure I’d love the drama within, I gave up on them. (I probably should have skipped those chapters, but I never do that!) Still, Centennial remains dear to me. I got the DVD set a few years ago, and I became hooked again and re-read the book. My well-worn copy from the 1970s will always remain on my bookshelf.