From "Cost" by Roxana Robinson

I just started reading Cost by Roxana Robinson, and am thoroughly enjoying the slower pace, after my recent bout of MG adventure books. It feels so luxurious to pay attention to whatever the author brings to the fore: the setting, (if you knew me as a reader and writer, you'd know I am not a big setting person) the ruminations and yes, even back story.

Anyway, I am only at the beginning and plan to take my time savoring the experience, but here is a sentence that I wish I'd written. It's from the point of view of Edward, an 80+ year-old man.

Hearing about other people's lives was either tedious or frustrating; they made so many mistakes.

Doesn't that just tell you a million things about his character?

Judge not, lest ye be judged

So, okay, I shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but can't I judge a person by the book she loves? Say, a full grown woman who swoons over a YA book featuring a luminous boy? I know, this says more about my being judgmental and snobbish than the other person's anything besides her tastes in books.

Do you? Judge people by the books they rave about?

And what books do you love that you're afraid to admit to? Or books you're supposed to like but don't?

Too much succulence

I just read Suzanne Collins's Gregor the Overlander books 3 and 4 back to back. Writing, characters, stories: all wonderful.

But now I feel as if I've eaten a bowl of shrimp scampi. I've enjoyed every last bite of these succulent delights but I need to wait a little before I eat more. Food this rich and yummy demands re-living. Or maybe I just need to cleanse my palate.

Time to find the equivalent of lime sorbet, followed by some Vietnamese noodle soup, or potatoes roasted in peanut oil, or pear tarts with a square of dark chocolate in the middle.

A trend in kids' movies?

Took the kids to see Up in 3D this afternoon. The second thought I had afterward, is that there seems to be a trend in making popular kids' books, particularly pictures books, into movies.

(All right, for you who are curious: the first question is why I paid extra $2.50 X 3 for a pair of dorky glasses that give me a headache for a story in which the 3D-ness isn't even important?)

The much heralded Where the Wild Things Are looks to be a big-budget undertaking, and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatball inserts a back-story and protagonist to explain why the weather brings food in Chewandswallow.

To make full-length, or even almost full-length movies from a picture book, the core story has to be padded with subplots or back story. In Night At the Museum, there is the whole divorced-family-with-kid plot line as well as the- disgruntled-employees-cooking-up-a-crime plot line. I mentioned the backstory in Cloudy and I can imagine what they can do with Max and the Wild Things.

But what will they do to Goodnight Moon?

Length of long-hand sessions?

Yesterday I found myself with another unexpected chunk of time "trapped" somewhere with a college-ruled notebook and a working pen. So I wrote. Seven pages later, my mind told me it was time to stop.

I wonder if there is such a thing as an optimum amount of writing I can do at one go, specifically for the writing of the initial draft, the kind of writing that is in equal parts putting into words what's in my mind and finding out how the story goes; that scary, delightful, surprising, hazy type of writing. My last two unexpected gifts of a couple of uninterrupted hours have both yielded seven pages.

Do you find any patterns in your writing time span? Does it change if you type or write?

Take two aspirins

...and work late into the night.

I am so close. I can feel it in my bone. But as always, the last little bit to polish a story takes big bits of energy and time. But because the end is near, I get an extra dose of adrenalin and motivation to push to the end.

Tonight, I'll be burning the candles at both ends, or as my mother likes to say in Cantonese, eating late-night congee, sic yeh jook.

Anyone joining me? I've cooked up extra congee.

Aspirin? I've got that as well.

The nature of the beast

Blogs are so wonderful. So much wisdom, so much passion, so much humor: stuff that enriches our lives. Yet blogposts are in the forefront for only a short time, and then they are archived and often forgotten.

Little ol' me may not have as big a slice of the readership pie as the popular bloggers, but I'd like to do my part to bring some posts to a wider audience; posts that have either touched me deeply or provoked me to think to a wider audience.

Here is one by my cyber-friend, Tanita Davis, who wrote so eloquently about a much respected professor, inter-racial marriages, malice, all tied in a nice big bow of Shakespeare's 130th sonnet.

I hope it touches you or inspires you, or both.

3rd person fly-on-the-wall

My current short-story is written in a third-person point of view, but not in the usual 3rd-person omniscient or 3rd-person limited. It's more like 3rd-person fly-on-the-wall. The narrator reports what she sees and hears in a scene, but nothing more. She doesn't get in anyone's head, she can only be at one place at one time, she reports objectively.

I chose this because I wanted to create distance between the reader and the story. I don't know if such a pov exists. And if doesn't, I wonder why. After all, writers are creative people who tend to challenge status quo.

So far in this story, it's working but not terribly well, but I sense sparkles and possibilities, which are very tempting. I think it may work if I keep experimenting and being sensitive to how the story comes across to a reader. I am not sure.

In the mean time, I decided to try a more common approach: a 3rd-person limited, told by three different characters in the story. I am enjoying the freedom it allows me to dwell inside a character's head and emotions. What I give up is the distance I wanted to create, but maybe distance isn't what's good for this story.

Strategy:

• Re-write the whole story in new pov.
• Put it aside (and maybe clean house again, drats!)
• Re-read both versions.
• Revise the better version.(Let's get into the argument of what constitutes "better" on a different day, shall we?)

(I sound so waffly! Any of you writers go through this whole I-think-A-but-maybe-I-should-do- B-although-A-seems-to-have-potential-but-I-don't-know-what-about-C process?)