A.J. Maguire

Tag: Reading

  • John Carter

    I know that John Carter is the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I haven’t actually read the books.  I spotted them, but never picked them up.  I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing yet.  Because I loved the movie.  Normally, I hate the movie but love the book.  (Like Timeline by Michael Crichton — good heavens, if ever a book was murdered by a movie, it was that one.)

    I will read the books, but for right now I’m happily hoping that they resemble — at least in part — what the movie showed.  And this movie showed a strong, capable man whose major flaw was his compassion.  That compassion of his got him in more trouble than his mouth ever did, which was refreshing.  And he had a seriously tragic event lining his history that explained why he was desperately trying to kill off that compassion.

    But aside from the hero — who I fell in love with as a writer — I have to admit that I loved the monster dog creature, too.  And the aliens … I guess I can call them Martians since they live on Mars.

    I’m not going to give spoilers to the movie or anything, but I will say that I loved it and highly recommend it to any science fiction/ fantasy fans out there.  Ignore the science, suspend your disbelief, and watch the very human elements in the story.

  • Day 3 of Camp NaNoWriMo

    Alright, so it’ll get a little crowded up here if I post all of my word counts every day.  I’ll be putting that up over on the Camp NaNoWriMo page anyway, so there’s no need to be redundant.  However, I also want to spend most of my time trying to … you know … write the novel I’m trying to write for this thing … So I’ve decided that on Friday’s I will post a quick recap on what I’ve done for the week.

    This will be taking the place of my regularly scheduled blog posts.  But I figure the title of my blog is “Writing Mayhem” and what is more chaotic and resembling mayhem than the idea of trying to write 50k words in one month?

    Pfft!  Nothing!  Nothing at all, I tell you.  It’s craziness personified.

    So!  Here is my recap for the first (half)week of Camp NaNoWriMo ::

    I have been introduced to Ms. Johanna Rorry, otherwise known as Jorry or Jo, to her compatriots.  She is, as she has told me, a deserter from the military.  She and her best buddy Seach Barlow (don’t ask me, that’s what he said his name was) both ran away from the military after receiving a distressing call from Jo’s husband — Relo Bomani (I recognize that the names are weird, but in the spirit of NaNoWriMo anything goes) — that they needed to run for their lives.

    I don’t know what was threatening their lives just yet, but I imagine I’ll find out later.  Whatever it was has kept them in hiding for 80 years or so … and I explain the science behind their freakishly long lives within the book.  They are the futuristic equivalent of truckers, meaning they haul food, provisions, and fuel to each of the space stations peppering the galaxy (also explained in the book). This keeps them mobile and anonymous, which is exactly what two deserters from the military would want.

    But .. uh-oh … I have to upset their balance in Chapter One to keep the plot interesting.  So I threw a baby at them.  (Not their baby, they’re not romantically inclined, and I didn’t have it fly through the air, so calm down.)

    In any case, I am ending this week with a word count of 5,076.  Which is super-fabulous.

  • Camp NaNoWriMo

    For those who aren’t already aware of the pure awesomeness that is National Novel Writing Month I feel the need to inform you of what it is.  Basically, during the month of November, crazy people (like me) attempt to write 50,000 words in thirty days.  I’ve only won a handful of times — possibly less, I haven’t kept count since starting school — but I can tell you that my published book Witch-Born came out of NaNoWriMo 2008.

    If you’re familiar with that book then you know that it’s actually something like 104,000 words all together, but that’s hardly the point.  The point is that the first half of the book was done in a one month and the second half — which always takes longer for me given the need to tie all the plot lines together and that … ahem … I tend to have a lot of action — was done through the month of December.  After that, I took a year or so to edit it.  (That’s really not that long when you count the months where Alpha Readers had the manuscript and I was left in suspense until I heard back from them.)

    But why am I talking about National Novel Writing Month in August when it’s not official until November?

    Because the crazy people over there at the Letters of Light Foundation host multiple events throughout the year.  These events include Scriptfrenzy and — you guessed it — Camp NaNoWriMo!  This Camp starts TODAY!

    That’s right!  If you’re a glutton for punishment, or if you love words and want to string them together into some strange, convoluted plot where the antagonist becomes the protagonist and the maiden in distress turns out to be a troll in disguise … well then, head over to Camp NaNoWriMo and get started!  It’s free, it’s easy (relatively) and it’s fun.  Your domestic animals may get neglected for thirty days and you may forget to bathe once or twice, but it is otherwise harmless.

    Personally, I’m in summer school, I have a child, one cat, and a full-time job … but I signed up anyway.  I’ll likely lose (again) but my brain needs a break from the projects already on my plate and, quite frankly, I’ve had this science fiction novel simmering in the back of my mind for about six months now.

    So!  In the spirit of Camp NaNoWriMo, I have made a new page where I will post snippets of the work.  I warn that these will be grammatically terrible and might have strange last names like  JoHanna I-Don’t-Know-Yet, but there will be some form of accountability on my part.

  • Book Review : Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

    I’ve been a fan of Writing Excuses for a long time now.  I promised myself that I would start to read all of the books from the authors who put out Writing Excuses since they take the time out of their busy schedules to put out this podcast for free.  I started with Brandon Sanderson because he writes Fantasy and I love to read and write Fantasy, so that just made sense.  I read the Mistborn series, which I loved.

    And now I’ve read Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal — and she totally gets props for having a cool name.  (I mean, really, say her name three times fast.)

    Being a Jane Austen fan, I walked into this book with a small amount of trepidation.  (Of course I did, have you heard of the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?)  But as I realized that the author was handling the setting, the time period, the language, with the respect it deserved, I relaxed and truly enjoyed this story.  While I saw who the dastardly man was before he was revealed in the book, I was too busy trying to figure out which man Jane would end up with.

    I was cheering for two specific men, and since I don’t want to give it away for anyone I will refrain from any spoilers.  Still, the fact that I was guessing while halfway through the book says something about the writing.  One of the saddest moments for me when I’m reading a book is when I figure out the ending before I get there.  This book managed to keep me uncertain straight up until … well … I can’t say because then it would give it away.

    Basically, this is a classy book.  It’s a book that takes romance without running it through the hot-and-steamy-bath that everyone seems to want these days.  It’s refreshing and wonderful and I can’t wait to read the next book in the series.  (Mothers, you can totally let your daughters read this book.)

  • Short Stories

    This week my very first short story EVER came out in the Love and Darker Passions Anthology from Double Dragon Publishing.  The cover is creepy and I haven’t read everyone’s stories yet that are in it, but I’m totally proud of it.  The story is titled “The Man Who Loved Medusa” and it’s the very first story in the book.
          (I mean really, look at that cover.  It gives me the willies.)

    (Also note, if you go the Amazon page you can get a sneak peek at the first bit of Medusa’s story.)

    When I was invited to do a story for this anthology, my first worry was that I wouldn’t know how to write anything less than 90 thousand words.  But as it turned out, I was able to manage this story in under 5 thousand words.  During the process, however, I have to note that there were several differences between novel writing and short story format.

    Let’s face it, you just plain don’t have time to fill the reader in on all the aspects of the world, setting, characters, plot and what have you when you’re working with a short story.  Every time I wanted to go off on a tangent, I had to pull myself back and putt a 1″ picture frame around what I was trying to say.  (Thank you, Ann Lamont, for the 1″ picture frame analogy in your book Bird by Bird.)

    Using Lamont’s analogy here became extremely helpful in writing this short story.  It kept me focused on the who, what, why, and how of the story in front of me.  Note I left out the when and where of the situation.  I learned very quickly that everything — every word, description, and dialog line — had to serve multiple purposes.  The when and where came out within the framework of answering the who and what of the story.

    This was supremely tricky for me, but I’m very proud of the way it came out.  And in fact, I was invited into another anthology for next year dealing with folk tales, which brings me to the second portion of this post; I finished my second short story ever.

    This second short story I am calling, for right now, Fish Wish.  It’s just the rough draft so far, but I can tell you that I threw lunar bases, moon dust, space travel, near asphyxiation, divorce, the folk tale The Fisherman’s Wife, and the term nano-fishers into a big blender and pressed puree!  And that’s not even the best part.  The best part is that I managed to do it all in less than 2 thousand words.

    Bwahahaha!

    But really, the challenge of writing short stories has made a vast improvement on my novel writing as well.  While I can get away with a longer word count in a novel, the task of allowing setting, dialog, and every word to do more than one thing in respects to my storytelling is … well … wonderful.

  • Geeking Out

    These past few years have been wonderful for my Geekdom.  First there was Iron Man, then Iron Man 2, then Thor, then Captain America … and finally, Marvel Avengers.  Seriously.  I’ve been in heaven.

    But I did miss out watching X-Men First Class in the theaters.  Luckily for me, I was able to snag a copy of my own and watched it tonight.  I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation walking into another X-Men film.  Story-wise, the previous X-Men films were sound (and by that I mean the plots made sense and came to logical conclusions), they just weren’t … well … they just weren’t the X-Men I had grown up with.  Rogue, for example, was one of my all-time favorite characters and … yeah.  It just didn’t jive for me.

    Though I confess Hugh Jackman as Wolverine was brilliant.  (Never has a man looked so good with so much hair.)

    What drew me to X-Men : First Class — aside from the fact that it was the X-Men — was really James McAvoy.  I’ve loved that actor since Children of Dune.  I would faint if the man ever read one of my works for an audiobook production.  (Which, by the way, is a crap ton more work than you would imagine.  I’ve been running Deviation through practice runs just in case I do give it out on iTunes for free as a podiobook, and it’s a headache and a half.)

    Anyway, Mr. McAvoy has a very distinctive voice.  And when I saw him as Professor Charles Xavier, I got a little weak-kneed.  Professor X absolutely has to have a distinctive voice.  Why do you think they chose Patrick Stewart to play the role in the other films?  Now there’s a man with a voice you can’t forget!

    So, McAvoy lured me into this new X-Men movie and I loved it.  The tension between characters was wonderful, and I admit that I was rooting for Magneto in places where I probably oughtn’t to have been.  But then again, the really compelling part of the X-Men for me as a reader had always been the struggle with prejudice.  So even in the comics I was often rooting for Magneto … or at least rooting for a way that there might be a peaceful resolution for his character.

    But anyway, this is me geeking out.  I loved the movie.  And I loved the Avengers, too.  (I took my son to see it on opening weekend and it really is a riot.)

  • Moral Compasses

    One of the joys of writing a character whose moral compass goes askew is that you never know exactly what is going to happen.  For instance, blackmailing a woman into a marriage would be completely wrong in my book, but to my sordid character Faxon Mylonas it is business as usual.  (For those familiar with the Sedition universe, you might recognize that name from the first book as the pipe-smoking shady character who gave Prince Brenson a hand when it was needed.)

    Writing Faxon has been a challenge and a blessing.  I’m not one to say that my own moral compass has always pointed true North, but there are certain boundaries that I’ve stayed away from.  When exploring Faxon’s character, his thought process opens up a whole slew of possibilities that I would never consider.  A prime example is in the scene I just wrote for him this week, where he “stretched the truth” in order to get an extra few vials of blood from someone.  (Don’t ask, it’s a complicated mess of Blood Magic.)

    But he got me to thinking about all those characters who I love whose moral compasses go a little wonky from time to time.  They aren’t necessarily villains, because they are mostly-kinda-sorta on the right side of the story line to be considered a good guy.

    The first one that comes to mind is Dexter from … yeah … that creepy serial killer TV show called Dexter.  If there ever was a character who made my sense of morality sit back and cry, it is Dexter.  (For those unaware, Dexter is a serial killer who hunts serial killers.)  By the end of each episode I was in a bizarre state of moral shock, condemning myself for rooting for this guy.

    The second shady character I can think of is Jack Sparrow.  I mean, we all know he will eventually lean on the right side of things, but there are moments where you just don’t know.  I also have to note with good old Jack that his moment of redemption at the end of each of the movies is just plain wonderful.  (Thank you, Mr. Depp, for always keeping me guessing as to which way this character was going to fly at any given moment.)

    The third character on my list is John Cleaver from Dan Wells’ I Am Not A Serial Killer.

    And after reading my list again, I’ve decided that there are too many titles in my life with “serial killer” in them.  I’m going to go read The Chronicles of Narnia or something.

  • Books I Re-Read

    This morning was particularly dreary.  I woke up early because my son had crawled into bed with me at some point — he’s only four years old and he’s allowed to do that for a little while longer — but he managed to shove me off at 7:45AM.  I figured that was as good as it was going to get for sleep so I made my way to the living room, powered on my fake fireplace (Oh, how I love that little space heater) and rummaged through my bookshelves for a book.  

    I knew I should read one of my textbooks because … well … because I’m still in school and I’ll have to read them at some point, but it was 7:45AM and I simply was not going to exercise my brain like that before I’d even managed to have breakfast.  Now, normally at this point I’ve already re-arranged my bookshelves, dragging books out of storage to replace the ones that have been occupying shelf-space for the last six months — I do this twice a year and somehow still manage to surprise myself with a book I forgot I had.  However, it’s been nine months since the last purge/replace and I was a little bored with some of the titles I ran across.  

    But it got me thinking about the books that never go into storage.  These beloved volumes are the one’s I read and re-read and simply cannot go without.  As I was going through the shelves, I discovered that there are only eight of these books in my collection, and seven of them belong to a series.  They are the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, and Into the Wild, by Sara Donati.   

    These eight volumes are always on my shelves.  All the rest take their respective turns in storage each year.  As I started reading The Fiery Cross (one of the Gabaldon novels) I had to ask myself what it was about Gabaldon’s writing that had me coming back.  The story hasn’t changed.  The characters are the same.  Yet, there is a richness to the tales that beckons me back.  

    If you’ve never read any Gabaldon, I highly recommend that you do.  Her books are generally thick, so you’ll have to devote some time, but they are well worth it.  

    I was struck with the realization that many of the scenes I was reading today weren’t particularly necessary to the overall plot of the book.  As an author, I know that it has been pounded through my thick skull many times that if a scene doesn’t serve a purpose, you should cut it.  And yet, as I was reading, I couldn’t envision the book without that snippet, that detail, that moment.  

    In popular fiction today we’re taught to keep the writing tight, to let everything point toward that end goal or moment.  Gabaldon’s massive books seem to scoff in the face of that logic.  Maybe she’s found a niche or something.  Honestly, I’m just glad she wrote them in the first place.  There’s history, love, violence, and humanity written on every page and I absolutely love them. 

  • Jane Eyre

    I have fond memories of this book.  I read it while I was in advanced training in the Army.  I even remember a Drill Sergeant seeing it in my locker and asking me what in the world I was doing in the military when I read things like that.  (That’s not to say that today’s military doesn’t read, just that this particular kind of book falls out of the norm for someone you’d see in training.)

    When the movie came out last year I was so excited to see it … but didn’t.  You know, money, work, school, raising a child … oh, and writing … and I just couldn’t get out there to see it.  But I found it in the store yesterday and snatched it up.

    Needless to say my four-year-old wasn’t all that into it, but I figured I’d suffered through a gazillion hours of Cars 2 and Monster’s Inc. to deserve this little reprieve.

    And I loved it.

    I understand that they can’t fit everything in the book into a neatly packaged 2 hour film, but they did a really good job of putting the core elements of the story up there.  I’m not going to give any spoilers or anything like that, but I am going to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It’s a “big girl” story, showing us the restraint needed to respect ourselves and the hope of something better for when we do.

     

  • Goodreads Giveaway Starts in 1 Day!

     
    That’s right! This is my year of Giveaways — mainly because I won’t have anything new coming out this year since I’m hard at work with school and my writing is going a little slower than normal — but this is great news for some lucky winners out there. 

    The first Giveaway is for 2 copies of Sedition — my first book. 

    If you don’t win, don’t worry! I have two other completely different books that will be scheduled for Giveaway’s throughout the year. And! Somewhere, at some point, I’ll give away a package deal with both Sedition and Saboteur included. I’m not sure where — likely at Coffee Time Romance — but that won’t be until we’ve gotten through Witch-Born and Saboteur at Goodreads.