I’ve been waiting to find another short story in the New Yorker that generated interest in doing some more writing analysis. After going back to some older issues as well as keeping up on the semi-regular delivery of new issues in the mail I finally found an interesting story to look at. Unfortunately, it’s a story by Alice Munro. I say “unfortunately” because it’s intimidating to select the master of […]
Writing analysis: “Axis”, by Alice Munro
Review: “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card”, the Ceiling of Mediocrity
I watch very little television these days. I do have a television in the bedroom though, and today I woke up an hour early and turned on the TV to see what was on. Between morning newscasts I found something intriguing on W Network. Googling it helped me to discover that the program is called “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card” and that it ran from 2003 to 2005 on Lifetime. What […]
Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Finally managed to watch this movie. Very nice. Does not fall into all the standard expected story tracks as it progresses. There were moments, like when Lisbeth Salander is forced to give her guardian a blow job, where I was hoping for a plot element like that she had a wire, but she didn’t. Then she goes back to him a third time with a video recorder. But this time […]
Writing analysis: Blue Roses, by Francis Hwang
Review of “Blue Roses” by Francis Hwang Published in “The New Yorker” November 1, 2010. SUMMARY: Chinese mother feels that her children don’t appreciate her and take from her without giving in return. She becomes angry with her closest daughter when the daughter is unwilling to invite the mother’s widowed friend to Christmas dinner. The mother refuses to go to the dinner, causing a crisis in the family. She admits […]
Analyzing writing
I was a music composition major in university and one of the things that my composition teacher required was score reading. Score reading means to take a bit of a string quartet or orchestral work and be able to play a reduction of it at the piano regardless whether you are a pianist or not. And in theory classes we analyzed music looking at the formal structure, root elements such […]
NaNoWriMo reflections
I want to take a few moments to reflect on this year’s NaNoWriMo event before I put it to bed for a while. I plan to come back and revise and edit, but I want some distance before I try. btw, the opening is published on Smashwords if you’re interested. This was much more difficult and time consuming than the first novel. I think that is a function of a […]
NaNoWriMo novel, done
Well, it’s done. I only hit just over 45,000 words, but it’s done. I’ve hit the story targets; the characters had their representative scenes, the plot had its required scenes, the story is told. There’s still 5 days left so the plan is to do some rewriting and editing and keep both the new and old versions as part of the word count. Other people have suggested writing additional scenes […]
End of writing class
As of last night I finished the beginner writing night course that I had been taking, and I feel a sense of relief. Where does the relief come from? From aspects of the course that I didn’t enjoy, like listening to, rather than reading things that other people in the class wrote and then trying to critique. I find that translation of hearing to imagined reading difficult and would much […]
NaNoWriMo at the half way point
This year has been tough. For my first NaNoWriMo I came up with a characteristic that I wanted to investigate (creativity), applied different versions to have three different characters (recombining, unorthodox, people skills) and then figured out a way that the three would have some connection to each other (famous artist returning to birth city, daughter of gallery owner, son of gallery owner) and then let my protagonist work her […]
NaNoWriMo
As of late my writing has been shaped by 1) the basic writing class that I’m taking, and 2) now the start of NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo takes priority. Two years ago I wrote a romance novel that has some good stuff in it; I still need to tie up some loose ends in the plot and also do a thorough editing for weak writing and errors, but at some point I […]