Apparently I write like Stephen King

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Which is ironic, since I pasted the first scene in my contemporary romance novel in to find out who I wrote like. ;) Oh well. Maybe there's something new in Stephen King's future. :D My critiquing buddy and I did have a bit of a running joke about my Jared turning out to be a zombie, so maybe I have more in common with King than I thought. And that reminds me of this b-grade horror movie I saw once, about a metal band that was made up of zombies. Or maybe the lead singer guy was the only zombie. I can't remember.

Speaking of Jared and co., though - today's word count is 109,183. Woo! So close to the 108,000s. Hehe.

Oh, I should update on ABNA - I am not a winner. Well, I am, but just not in ABNA's eyes. In my own eyes I am very full of win. :D

For Chrysalis this week, I wrote about a few characters, but one in particular I absolutely hated with every fibre of my being. Have you written characters that you really just want to reach out and strangle? I did this week.

P.S.

SUNDOWN
109,183 / 100,000
(109.2%)

30 years, and I had another think coming

I am currently reading TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD for the first time ever. I'm thirty. I never had to read it for school, so maybe that's how I escaped it so far. Not that escaping it is a good thing. I'm really enjoying the read, and loving Scout's innocent take on everything she sees. I can definitely see what made it a classic. But most importantly by far, I learned something I never knew before:

If you think that, you've got another think coming.

For all of my thirty years, I've said it like this:

If you think that, you've got another thing coming.

I just Googled this today, and found out there's a lively (and far from new) debate on which is correct. Honestly, I got confused the first time I read Harper Lee's use of think. The second time, I was like, Okay, I'm obviously missing something... And it's true. I was!

It makes far more sense for it to be think, not thing. I just find it amusing that for all of my life, I've escaped even hearing it said that way.

And now I am going to have to scour my writing for any instances where I've said thing, and think (no pun intended) about what I'm gonna do with them. :)

P.S. Speaking of reading - check my "Goals" page. I added a "books read in 2011" widget that I got from Goodreads. My new reading goal is 25 books in the year. I think I can do that easily, especially if I keep on with reading the shorter books on my shelves. Hehehe, I know that's kind of cheating. But anyway...5/25 so far! MOCKINGBIRD will be the 6th.

Classics

A comment I got from Bronwyn on my last blog entry made me reflect, once again, on how few of the "classics" (i.e. novels everyone thinks you should have read long ago, and gasps in horror when you tell them you haven't even read them recently) I have actually read.

I looked up a list of "classic" novels, and found this page: 1000 novels everyone must read: the definitive list.

I went through the entire list, and these are the ones I have indeed read:

1. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
2. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 - Sue Townsend
3. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
5. Emma - Jane Austen
6. Persuasion - Jane Austen
7. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
8. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
9. Neuromancer - William Gibson
10. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling
11. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
12. The Sword in the Stone - T.H. White
13. Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

And now the list of those books I know I've read at least some of, but can't remember actually finishing:

1. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
2. White Noise - Don DeLillo
3. Animal Farm - George Orwell

And those books I never got to the end of, in spite of writing English essays on them and getting excellent marks:

1. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

In other words, of 1000 supposedly classic novels that everyone should have read, I've read 13 for sure, and bits and pieces of another 4 (some of those I may have read completely, but I can't be sure). Wow. I've got some work to do if I want to be a well-adjusted human being. Hehe.

Incidentally, this list would have been a lot shorter if I hadn't made it a mission in 2009 to finally read some Jane Austen (and the Brontës).

I did find some other items in the list that I vaguely recall having read or maybe started reading, but my uncertainty made me leave them off the lists.

Query letter...reprise, and The Wheel of Time

Okay, so I was wrong in my last blog entry. I have a lot of work to do. :P Namely, finding the actual HEART of my MC's emotional problem. I definitely shouldn't have spoken too soon. Hehe.

Anyway...

I thought I would talk about the books I'm reading right now, in an effort to get my attention off my floundering query and stalled editing of novel for said query, and...yeah. That stuff. I've been reading the Wheel of Time series since I was about 14 or so. It's a series by Robert Jordan, but some may know that Mr. Jordan passed away in 2007. The series wasn't finished, but Jordan had planned everything out. And he'd even enlisted his wife to find a replacement author to complete the story after he was gone. Cue Brandon Sanderson.

But anyway, I want to stay at the beginning for now. Naturally I started with book 1, The Eye of the World, or tEotW as it's known in WoT circles. Hehe. At first I only got through a few chapters, then took it back to the school library. But later on I saw a fellow student reading a later book in the series, and decided to give book 1 another go. This time I was hooked, and never looked back.

Well, okay, I kind of looked back after reading book 10. It had been so long since I'd read the early books by this point that I was quite vague on the details of what had even happened in the series. I did remember stuff from the latest book a little better, but even then a lot had been forgotten. So...I gave up. Book 11 came out, and I bought it, but didn't read it. I knew I had to do a re-read before I could read it. I attempted a re-read at one point, and gave up after a chapter or so of re-reading book 1. Book 12 came out, everyone was raving, I learned some spoilers by accident. Damn it! And serious spoilers they were, too. I still put off my re-read. Then last year, in the lead-up to book 13's release, I finally decided to bite the bullet and started my re-read. I posted a thread for each book, commenting on that thread as I got through the book. The threads are all located here on the A'vron forums. Anyway...