Laura's blog

When I was in high school, I was one of the most obsessed Eragon fangirls you can possibly think of. Why I fixated on this series in particular is a whole nother blog post, but the upshot of my obsession was that I wanted my brother to read it. Me: READ THIS BOOK YOU WILL LIKE IT IT HAS DRAGONS Brother: Ugh go away Me: READ IT YOU ANNOYING SIBLING-PERSON Brother: But I don't like to read thingssssss ME: FUCKING READ IT Brother: Oh fuck off already Me: fine then I'll read it to you Brother: GO. AWAY. ME: I'M GOING TO READ THIS FUCKING BOOK TO YOU AND YOU WILL FUCKING LIKE IT OR YOU WILL ANSWER TO ME DO YOU HEAR ME I WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE HELL Brother: FINE THEN So I read him the book. And he fucking liked it, as I'd told him he would. Sisters are always right about these things.  Then I read him the sequel, and he hated it just about as much as I did.  I'm amazed that I had the vocal stamina to read him this long-ass book, and amazed that he let me w...

The trilogy of verse plays, William Shakespeare's Star Wars , is one of my favorite things in this world.  The author, Ian Doescher, wrote them as part homage, part parody -- exploring the question of what would it be like if the famous Star Wars original trilogy was written in the style of William Shakespeare. Not only is the full trilogy in iambic pentameter -- the verse in which Shakespeare's plays are written -- but it also incorporates, reappropriates, and adapts a mishmash of lines from Shakespeare's plays. The majority of the verse is Shakespeare's words, reassigned and sometimes tweaked slightly for plurals and pronouns. Doescher supplements the Shakespeare with additions of his own, but keeps the plot firmly Star Wars.  The style feels strangely Shakespearean in more than just the language. Fans of Shakespeare will be reminded of the Henriad when the plot grows more chaotic -- with characters rushing on during brief transitional and battle scenes to deliv...

June and July have been nuts, and I've been largely absent from my usual online spaces as a result.  I'm finally getting around to seeing various doctors re: my visit to the ER, and so far things are looking better. I still have weird chronic pain, vision and hearing problems, and dizziness, but it's getting better. Or at least, it's not as bad as it was. I've also been writing a lot, but not on my typical projects. I've been doing a lot more freelancing lately -- translation, mostly, as well as some editing and (fingers crossed!) I may be hired later for a content-writing job, if they like the samples I sent. I'm also making a tentative foray into copywriting. I'll see how that goes.  What I really want to do is get back to writing reviews. I have to review Virtues of War (quite good), Inked (shaping up to be good), The Sorcery Code, and A Legacy of Light. Reviews just take longer than you'd think, probably because I obsess over every detail a...

As an actor, you're given a script and a character and told to go from there. You have to figure out why that character does what they do, and then you have to commit to that and sell it to an audience who will (hopefully) be engaged. And if they do not care about the character, they likely will not be engaged. This even goes for the school of thought that says audiences shouldn't be totally immersed and sympathetic -- but if they don't care about what they are seeing onstage, then why should they care enough to critique or think about what they are seeing? So: you get a script and a character, someone who is not you, whose motives and actions may be totally incomprehensible. And you have to figure out why.  Writing and revising are a bit like that.  I'm currently rehauling That Novel I Wrote In High School* (yes, it is about as bad as it sounds) (and technically I wrote it in high school, finished it in college, and wrote the second book in college) and it's ...

Things took an unexpected turn for the worse last Friday when a trip to the health clinic ended up with me in the emergency room. For a little under a week, I had been feeling dizziness, weakness, nausea, blurred or randomly unfocusing vision, difficulty concentrating and putting words together, and a laundry list of other weird symptoms that added together to make "I feel like crap and I can't blame it on my usual spaciness." When I had what I thought was a fever on Friday, I decided enough was enough and went to the clinic at the local Wal-mart. That's my litmus test for sickness: have a fever, see a doctor.  They listened to my symptoms, got very confused and concerned, took my vitals, and did some tests. While I had teeth-chattering chills, I didn't have a fever -- but my blood pressure was low enough to make them alarmed and my symptoms were bad enough that I didn't feel safe driving. They called me a taxi and sent me to the ER.  This experience fuc...

Once again, I've changed my blog. The look is decidedly "pink" this time. I wanted to use the same picture I use for my twitter account background (@Laura_the_Wise). I had been using one of the stock images provided by Blogger, and I didn't like it. The header text stands out better now (it helps if you tilt your screen a bit to get more contrast), and the image is a photo I took myself. After much torturous experimentation, I decided to leave the background white. I had waffled between pale yellow, green, or pink --  but backgrounds of any kind, even solid color backgrounds, distract me. So, white it is. I know that's hard on some people's eyes, but I've tried to make the post font fairly large and easy-to-read to compensate. Let me know if you like the new look (or not). I probably obsess way too much over what this blog looks like. It seems that, once again, I've created a blog that reads as far more "cutesy" than some of t...

I read this post at Janice Hardy's blog today, where the guest poster recommends meditation as a stress reduction and relaxation technique. The post was about establishing healthy writing and living habits. Some of it's not for me, but the meditation idea piqued my interest. I am an absent-minded, daydreaming sort of person. I'm no expert, but meditation seems a lot like directed daydreaming.  I've tried meditation before, and usually with pretty good results. I was first introduced to it in church. The pastor wanted us to pick a focus word and meditate on that. He gave some tips for focusing the mind (read: not getting bored out of one's mind) such as holding an image in your mind or watching a candle flame, or paying attention to your breathing. He gave the focus word for that particular time, and if I remember correctly, he probably recommended some more words for later practice.  My church also held all-night vigils and Tenebre services during Lent ...

If you look to your right, you will see Emperor of Thorns sitting on the sidebar of this blog under the label "Currently Reading." It's been there for a while. Why, you ask? (You didn't ask, but let's pretend you did.) Because not many other series have had as big an effect on me as The Broken Empire trilogy. And Emperor of Thorns is the last book. And once I finish reading it, it's over. And I don't really want it to be over because then it will be DONE. (And I'm pretty sure the main character will die in the last book, so there'll be no more reading about him after this, either.) These are really, really great books. What hooked me first was the "voice" -- writing voice, character voice, whatever. It's unique and compelling and one of the best examples of what people like to call "voice" out there. Voice can be tricky to define. If you read this series, you will immediately understand what voice is. The character...

I lived for part of my life in the greater Baltimore area, so the news of the recent riots had me worried for friends that live and work in and around the city. I don't really want to write a post about it, honestly, because I said some things on Facebook already, but something has been bugging me in particular. That "Mom of the Year" viral video. That -- or rather, the reactions to it -- has bothered me more than almost anything else to come out of the social media shitstorm the riots caused. I'm not linking to the video. You can find it yourself, if you haven't already seen it. The video shows an African American woman who, finding her son among the rioters, assaulted him in order to get him off the streets. If you look it up, you can see her screaming at him, hitting him, tugging at the mask he was wearing, and cussing him out as she yells at him to get home.  This video was picked up and retweeted by someone who dubbed her "Mom of the Year." ...

When I was a kid, I used to have a pet spider. I kept him/her/it in a little cardboard box -- a shoebox, I think -- and occasionally opened it to look at it. I fed it dead flies and drips of water, when I remembered. I was six and younger -- this before my terror of spiders began. My pet's name was Mr. Spidey. I caught this spider myself, but I'm not sure I remember the actual catching. (My older brain probably repressed it.) I'm actually pretty sure I went through several "Mr. Spidey's" because I didn't actually remember to feed him very often, and I kept him shut up in that shoebox all the time. You can't play with a spider very well. I'm not really sure what the point of Mr. Spidey as a pet was at all, really, but I do remember how it sounded and felt for my young voice to coo "Mr. Spidey" and get all excited at opening the box to look at him. I remember the immense feeling of satisfaction that, apparently, only comes with owning...

More than anything, writing is an art of persistence. There is a book I have been working on since I was 14. It is still as fresh in my mind as it was the day I made it up. I can still remember which characters I chose names for on that first day, which characters had been bouncing around in my head for years before then waiting for a story, and which ones I didn't add until this past year or are still changing names and genders and roles.  I have wondered several times whether I should lay this one to rest. The sunk cost fallacy refers to an error in thinking that says, "I have already invested so much time into this bad relationship/failing project/awful job/expensive fixer-upper that if I bail on it now, I will have wasted all that time" and then proceeds to waste even more time and energy on it. The wisdom of the sunk cost fallacy is that sometimes, quitting is a good decision. Yet while I entertained the idea, I never seriously considered quitting on this...

I've been struggling with writer's block lately. I think I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything I want to write, the impossibility of doing it all, not knowing what will happen next or having a plan for any of it -- and then just subconsciously rage-quitting and calling it "writer's block." There's a selfishness to it, too -- a desire to keep all these characters, scenarios, and worlds in my own private imagination where I can daydream anything and everything without having to commit to anything. Or share. Or hear criticism. But then I feel guilty about all the voices in my head characters that I like so much and want to write about. So I did another writing exercise -- again, making myself write SOMETHING -- and wrote a short letter to one of my favorite characters. Maybe a self-induced guilt trip will get me started writing more again. If you'd like to pick up the "Dear Character" post as a blog tag, feel free. :) - Dear Charac...

This post is excerpted from a free write session I did because I wanted to make myself write something, damn it. - Why don't I want to write creatively on any of my "stuff" anymore? Maybe it's my fear of commitment -- like once the words are there, I can't take them back. Maybe it's a matter of feeling lost in the story, spiraling off in the wrong direction and getting mired in the subplots...and then having to backtrack through all that crap and fix everything. Ugh. I know what it's like to go through 5+ edits of a WIP and know that that's only the beginning. Maybe I just don't have the stamina for that. Or I do -- I know I do, since I've done it before -- but I just do not want to undertake a project like that right now. Or maybe it's the fear of it being judged even if it were to become successful. I doubt that, but it's a thought. Maybe this stalling and difficulty getting out new material is because it is hard to invest tim...

What's up Wednesday is a weekly blog hop sponsored by Erin Funk and Jaime Morrow. What I'm reading: The sidebar says Emperor of Thorns, which is true as I haven't finished it. I don't really want to finish it because then it will be over, you know? I only want to finish it once I know that the author has published his sequel series. I also finished Clariel by Garth Nix recently, which was very good. I think Clariel is the first asexual character I've read before in YA. I had to put the book down and jump up with excitement because I had this overwhelming feeling of FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT JEEZ. In the meantime, I picked up 14 Books of Fantasy for $0.99, a fantasy anthology by a variety of authors. The first, Blades of Magic, is...meh. The writing tends to be a bit redundant and the main character is a totally unsympathetic, sociopathic, murderous brat. Her father was executed as a traitor, so she goes around murdering everyone who's ever insulted...