You ever start reading a blog and think it's really awesome and it leads you to a couple of small press or indie books that turned out to be great but then it slowly devolves into posts that are just 1) circlejerks of self-congratulation and self-promotion, 2) hacks posting images with no worth outside their own mean-spirited (or lame) amusement, and 3) white boys who want to prove they're tough and cool by posting rap music videos from YouTube and the comments section which used to be a great avenue for discussion with so many linkable quotable things eventually turns into an echo of the blog's own self-congratulation and posturing and the guy who was the main reason you started reading doesn't post anymore and maybe one post a week is actually about writing or lit like the blog used to be?

Yeah.

And then you write a post in the style of their most annoying contributors as a means of complaining about how shitty they've become but then you read a post that's really good and you're all god damn it I can't quit you.

I started my version of a New Year's resolution a bit early this year, because I'm getting fed up with myself wanting to write but never doing it. I tend to either go overboard with the number of resolutions, or overly broad so that it's impossible to really measure what I managed to accomplish.

This year is different, and I started early because I didn't want to lose all the momentum I charged up over November with NaNo.

The goals:

• Write one poem per week, minimum
  • Try to get the salvageable ones edited by the end of the month if possible
• Write one short story per month, minimum
  • Try to get it edited by the end of the following month if possible

So far I have written three shitty poems, one good one, and a short story that upon consideration needs massive paring down. I'm fine with shitty poems, because even a shitty poem means I am moving myself from "I want to write" to "I am writing." Getting away from "I want to be a writer" to "I am a writer." The last couple of years haven't been terribly great for writing, and I'm glad to start getting away from that.

I wanted to share this because it's in the context of this blog post by Kevin Smith. The first part is kind of rambly and too much into the process of making films, and he takes a bit to get to the point, but it's a very good point for anybody who wants to be creative. And it isn't even his point -- it's his sister's.

Can I get a what what.

Please, can I?

 I like to write.

Sometimes it doesn't really show.

So I'm going to try harder.

Day 30 - What book are you reading right now?

I'm the kind of person who is in the middle of a million books at one time. Which is part of why it takes me forever to finish anything. So the ones I'm actively reading right now are:

- Ulysses (really taking my time with this one)
- Demian, by Hermann Hesse
- Introducing Modernism, by Chris Rodrigues and Chris Garratt
- The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham

If you only want to count books I haven't read before, then the only valid one is the last one. The other three are re-reads.

 Day 29 - Saddest character death OR best/most satisfying character death (or both!)

How about all of the pointless character deaths in Deathly Hallows? So many characters got fridged to either give someone else a motivation to fight harder or to jerk the audience around. Snape's death? Two words: cop out.

I wasn't emotionally invested in the book, but I did find those ones incredibly annoying. Otherwise, I think the best character death in literature is probably Mercutio. His death speech is awesome. But then so is most of the stuff he does in that play.

 I will blame the Giants game for making me miss yesterday.

Day 27 - If a book contains ______, you will always read it (and a book or books that contain it)!
Day 28 - First favorite book or series obsession
27 - I don't think there's any inherent quality that will make me always want to read a book containing it. I've been known to read books where Death the entity appears, and books with supernatural apocalypse/that draw from Revelation's symbolism. So for examples, um, Hogfather by Terry Pratchett is a good book where Death appears, and the entire Angel LINK series by Lyda Morehouse is a series with apocalyptic doo-dah.
28 - I have always been a fan of Alice in Wonderland, and one of the earliest books I remember checking out from the school library over and over was a collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. I am more likely to get obsessed with comic/manga series than I am book series, and the first one of those I ever got was for X.

 I should just give up if I can't keep up.

Day 25 - Any five books from your "to be read" stack
Day 26 - OMG WTF? OR most irritating/awful/annoying book ending

25 - The easiest one so far. In no particular order:

1. Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)
2. Live Without a Net (edited by Lou Anders)
3. Far-Seer (Robert J. Sawyer)
4. Three Novels (Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable in a single volume)
5. Poetry After Modernism (edited by Robert McDowell)

Given these books, you can perhaps see why many of the book meme questions have been difficult for me to answer.

26 - Tough call. I remember being confused and annoyed by the ending of Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, but I read that my junior year in high school and don't think I totally grasped the rest of the book, either. Anything written by Norman Maclean (The River Runs Through It, Young Men and Fire) is irritating/awful, so the endings of those books count too I suppose. Same with Watership Down.

For the record, though, I don't recall ever reading a book where the ending came so far out of nowhere that I found it awful or irritating. Usually it's been the logical conclusion of an already awful book, so despite the awful ending, the end of the book is actually a relief.

Wow, this last week was just too busy for me I guess, or just enough that I got absent-minded and forgot all about this thing. So:

Day 20 - Favorite kiss
Day 21 - Favorite romantic/sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)
Day 22 - Favorite non-sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)
Day 23 - Most annoying character ever
Day 24 - Best quote from a novel 

I didn't miss much I guess. So:

Day 20 - I, um, don't read books for the kisses, so I'm hard pressed to think of any, let alone one I would call my favorite.
Day 21 - Uh. Estella and Pip, I guess. From Great Expectations. Even though it's pretty much one-sided.
Day 22 - Uh. The antagonistic relationship between Ralph and Jack in Lord of the Flies is one I've always found interesting. Ralph is the more natural leader in that he isn't a total ass, whereas Jack leads by striking up fear in his followers. Each time they clash, things just get worse and worse.
Day 23 - Robert Langdon. Seriously, the guy didn't guess right away that the orb best associated with Newton is a fucking apple. You'd think he never heard of that old public TV show. You know: Newton's Apple.
Day 24 - "So it goes." Slaughterhouse-Five. It sums up so much about the human condition and how much control we have over the biggest things we all go through.

 Day 19 - Favorite book cover (bonus points for posting an image!)

I can't really think of a book cover I'm particularly fond of. So, I'll just post the cover to Dinosaur Fantastic, which I talked about in a previous post.



Man I wish that were me.