The Right Places

Okay!

Who's Gonna Stop Me?

Happier than...

Happy

ABC I'm JK, LOL

I can say the alphabet as a word,
but you can't hear it because this is a blog.

"I once had an abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwyxz,
but it ran away and I cried."

                                                             Say it with me:
AB(like ab)-C(like k)-DEF(like deaf)-GHI(like gee)-JKL(like jekyll)-MNOP(like men-op)-QRS(like cris)-TUV(like toov)-WYX(like wicks)-Z(like zzzzz)

Art by Paul Thurlby

BBC's 100 Books

Colleen from http://andotheradventures.blogspot.com/ gave me a challenge. She asks:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Let's see if you are the book nerd that you claim to be.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - I've read some, but not all.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read many but not all
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hikers's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Not too shabby and now I have a list of books to read next!

The Cancer Day

Today is the day that my mom told me she has cancer. Cancer! Seriously? CANCER?!?! I didn't cry... at first. I was MAD. I'm still mad. How DARE this thing grow on my mother and make her sick. I'll teach it to mess with us. I want to take a cleaver to it, Lizzie Borden style, except mom says it doesn't hurt right now and that would most definitely hurt. No, she said no fighting yet, we just have to wait. WAIT?!?! Wait for her first appointment with the specialist. Wait for the specialist to decide what to do. Wait for them to cut off the offending tumor. Wait for the tests to tell us if the tumor has sent assassins into other parts of her body. Wait for them to give her the treatments that will sap her strength, take her beautiful hair and steal the fight from her. And then I'll give her all my fight. And will we fight. FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT! That thing will RUE the day it chose to grow on a Lee. And remission will be our triumph and a long, long, happy, healthy, LIFE. Did I mention LONG? I can't do without her. This is the only possible outcome. You higher powers better be listening. I'm not taking no for an answer.


P.S. I don't intend to fight fair.

Manifesto of Encouragement

I didn't write this, but it is giving me hope and I want to pass it on to my loved ones.
From: http://whitehottruth.com/white-hot/the-manifesto-of-encouragement/

Right now:

- There are Tibetan Buddhist monks in a temple in the Himalayas endlessly reciting mantras for the cessation of your suffering and for the flourishing of your happiness.

- Someone you haven't met yet is already dreaming of adoring you.

- Someone is writing a book that you will read in the next two years that will change how you look at life.

- Nuns in the Alps are in endless vigil, praying for the Holy Spirit to alight the hearts of all of God's children.

- A farmer is looking at his organic crops and whispering, "nourish them."

- Someone wants to kiss you, to hold you, to make tea for you. Someone is willing to lend you money, wants to know what your favourite food is, and treat you to a movie. Someone in your orbit has something immensely valuable to give you -- for free.

- Something is being invented this year that will change how your generation lives, communicates, heals and passes on.

- The next great song is being rehearsed.

- Thousands of people are in yoga classes right now intentionally sending light out from their heart chakras and wrapping it around the earth.

- Millions of children are assuming that everything is amazing and will always be that way.

- Someone is in profound pain, and a few months from now, they'll be thriving like never before. They just can't see it from where they're at.

- Someone who is craving to be partnered, to be acknowledged, to ARRIVE, will get precisely what they want -- and even more. And because that gift will be so fantastical in it's reach and sweetness, it will quite magically alter their memory of angsty longing and render it all "So worth the wait."

- Someone has recently cracked open their joyous, genuine nature because they did the hard work of hauling years of oppression off of their psyche -- this luminous juju is floating in the ether, and is accessible to you.

- Someone just this second wished for world peace, in earnest.

- Someone is fighting the fight so that you don't have to.

- Some civil servant is making sure that you get your mail, and your garbage is picked up, that the trains are running on time, and that you are generally safe. Someone is dedicating their days to protecting your civil liberties and clean drinking water.

- Someone is regaining their sanity. Someone is coming back from the dead. Someone is genuinely forgiving the seemingly unforgivable. Someone is curing the incurable.

You. Me. Some. One. Now.

Favorite Last Lines

Looking at great first lines made me want to research great last lines. Here are some classics. What are youre favorites?

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
"Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardoned, and some punished;
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

Favorite First Lines

REALSIMPLE magazine asked "What is your favorite first line of a novel" and here are some of the responses they received. What is your favorite first line?

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
"'Where's Papa going with that ax?,' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

The Secret Garden by Hodgson Burnett
"When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Verboten

It is a sad, sad thing, but my newest writing class teacher has asked that her students not blog during the 6 weeks that we are in her class. She wants all of our writing effort to go into our coursework. So...I'll see you in 6 weeks with new inspiration and new material.

Thank you for reading!!!

Class 2: Character

Last night was my second writing class through the CAPE program at SMU. We spent the majority of the class discussing each others homework assignments from the last class, the resurrection scene. We found that very few of us actually wrote a resurrection scene, but instead wrote the either the supreme ordeal or the elixir scene. I am still unsure where my scene will fit into my ultimate story, but our homework this week should help me figure it out. It is to write a 1000 word synopsis of the Hero's Journey of our hero/heroine. I'm nervous about committing completely to Evie and her story, but for the sake of this class, I have to choose a character to build and develop. She was my first idea, I think she deserves to come with me on this journey.

The Hero's Journey

Last night was the first night of my new writing class at SMU. It was a great first class and I am so pleased because 11 of the 15 students were together in our last class with Suzanne Frank, Intro to Creative Writing. We are already familiar with each other and so there was no shyness to get over; we jumped right in.

Our professor, Daniel J. Hale, began the course by discussing the typical basic form of fiction, a form called the Hero's Journey, championed by Christopher Vogler. Below is an outline of the Hero's Journey. Compare it to your favorite fiction story/novel and see how it fits.

1) Hero/ine is introduced in the Ordinary World, where...
2) S/he receives the Call to Adventure.
3) S/he is reluctant at first or Refuses the Call, but...
4) S/he is encouraged by a Mentor to...
5) Cross the First Threshhold and enter the Special World, where...
6) S/he encounters Tests, Allies, and Enemies.
7) S/he then will approach the Inmost Cave, crossing a second threshold...
8) Where s/he endures the Supreme Ordeal.
9) S/he takes possession of the Reward and...
10) Is pursued on the Road Back to the Ordinary World.
11) S/he crosses the third threshold, experiences a Resurrection and is transformed by the experience.
12) S/he then returns with the Elixir, a boon, treasure or lesson to benefit the Ordinary World.

My Heroine's Journey (I hope...)

After a review of the Hero's Journey format we went around the table and were asked to divulge our book idea. I, of course, haven't got one quite so firm in my mind as most of my classmates. I have some trouble commiting to a single idea, a single character and a single plot. After I said as much to the class, Dan (the professor) responded, "You're going to hate me when I give you your homework." (Fabulous!)

He waited until the last 15 seconds of class to tell us the assignment and then ran out of the room before we could throw pens at him. We are charged by next Tuesday at noon to write the Resurrection Scene of our novel. Step 11 in the Hero's Journey. For some, this will be a piece of cake, they already have the idea developed. For me, not so much.

We are not to build our characters, we are not to explain back plot, we are not to focus on anything but the ressurection scene of our main character. We are to write it as if we had turned to the page 220 in a 300 page book and copied out the contents.

So...I've decided to share with you, if there is anyone out there, my own heroine's journey. Throughout this 6 week course, I am going to post my homework and hopefully, as the time and assignments pass, a book idea will form. Bear with me. I'm new at this.

What is a Sevenling?

I have found a new poetic form to try. It's called a sevenling and is described by Roddy Lumsden of the American Poetry Journal.

The sevenling is a poem of seven lines inspired by the form of this much translated short verse by Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966).

He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.

He hated children crying,
And raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.

... And he married me.

tr. D M Thomas From Selected Poems (Penguin)

The rules of the sevenling are thus:

The first three lines should contain an element of three - three connected or contrasting statements, or a list of three details, names or possibilities. This can take up all of the three lines or be contained anywhere within them. Then, lines four to six should similarly contain an element of three, connected directly or indirectly or not at all. The seventh line should act as a narrative summary or punchline or as an unusual juxtaposition.

There are no set metrical rules, but being such as short form, some rhythm, metre or rhyme is desirable. To give the form a recognisable shape, it should be set out in two stanzas of three lines, with a solitary seventh, last line. Titles are not required.

What is a Haiku?

Haiku, according to Wikipedia, is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to parallel the three metrical phrases of Japanese haiku. I think that they are alot of fun to write. Just open up your mind, let the words come and count on your fingers as you write them down.

Choose Your Own Adventure - Just for Kids?

I have just completed a piece in a new format called "Delia Burch", posted below. I based the format on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that I loved as a child. I wanted to take the fun of that kind of interactive reading and apply it to a higher reading level.

This blog is proving not to be the best medium for this kind of story because it won't allow me to link the readers' choice directly to Delia's next step. So, instead, I have had to ask the reader to scroll through their chosen path guided by bolded fonts and numbers. This isn't ideal, but gets the idea across.

Please take a look and let me know if, under better reading circumstances, this is a kind of format that you would enjoy. I would very much like to know your first impressions. This may not be a kind of reading that adults appreciate, it may be too cumbersome, too much work, or too fragmented to hold interest. Or it could be refreshing, different and fun. Whatever your opinion, please feel free to comment. Your comments can help me become a better writer and direct my work toward you as my audience. THANK YOU!

Wiser Words Were Never Spoken

These are collections of words that I didn't string together myself but wish that I had. I will continue to update this page as I continue to find writing that fits into this category.

Toy-like people make me boy-like.
--- Massive Attack, Mezzanine
This is such a true statement about the way that interaction can affect the way that people relate. Immature actions breed immature responses.

This life is a thump-ripe melon--so sweet and such a mess.
--- Greg Brown, Rexroth's Daughter, Covenant
I love this line because it is so visceral, it takes its meaning and hits all the senses at once.

What then do we live for, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn.
--- Mr. Bennett, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
I love this line because it has been fundamentally true since humans noticed their neighbor as more than a means to the collective survival of the species. We are forever ready to laugh at and in turned be laughed at by those around us. People who take themselves too seriously are doomed to suffer because this will never change.

If the sun refused to shine,
I would still be loving you;
Mountains crumble to the sea,
There will still be you and me.
--- Robert Plant, Thank You, Led Zeppelin II
I love this refrain. The words are simple but so expressively placed and the sound of the word "you" is so powerful in this context. The last line rolls off the tongue, "there will still be you and me," in a way that oaths rarely do.

Costa Rica - 1999

In the spring of 1999, I lived as an exchange student in Heredia, Costa Rica. Excellent fodder for further writing in that experience...however, I found recently these two poems that I wrote while living there. It's strange to reach an age where you can look back at your former self and recognize your own growth and the experiences that expanded your mind, in a time when you thought you already knew everything.