Grow Some Big Feet

Finally got around to watching "Where the Wild Things Are" a week or two ago. I loved it. Though, for a story about a boy playing around with monsters, it was really depressing. Everyone was so angry. It could have been a lot more fun. But as I said, I did love the film. The expressions on the Wild Things' faces were so real and, of course, the songs were awesome.

[ "Where the Wild Things Are" title cards made by Geoff McFetridge (first one and the second one) and movie stills (first and second); girls from lookbook.nu (in order: Capucine P.; Erika M.; Margarita M.; and Johanna M.) movie stills from "Ponyo" (first and second); a road made by a hobbit (discovered that photo awhile ago and it's still with me); Lyra and Iorek (sp?) from "The Golden Compass"; and a still from "The Jungle Book." I need to go on my own adventure.]

Material Girl

There's something about "A Pair of Silk Stockings", a short story by Kate Chopin, that I love. It's simple: Mrs. Sommers receives fifteen dollars and ponders for two days on how to spend the vast sum of money (my inflation calculator says it’s at least $300 today). It starts off promising; Mrs. Sommers decides that the money is best spent on clothes and hats for her children.
But as soon as Mrs. Sommers starts shopping, the plan changes. Mrs. Sommers, someone who was once well-off, finds a pile of silk stockings and purchases one of them. Soon after, Mrs. Sommers spends the rest of the day in a whimsical, semi-Cinderella fairytale. She buys boots and kid gloves and “high-priced magazines.” She eats and drinks wine at a high-end restaurant with “shining crystal” and waiters attending to pricey customers. The rest of the money is spent attending a matinee and taking the cable car back home. The story ends with “a poignant wish” by Mrs. Sommers for the cable car to continue forever.
It’s a story that a lot of us could relate to. We have to choose between paying for what we need to pay for or for paying for something that we want. I feel that the story ended the right way; if we were to learn about what happened to Mrs. Sommers once she returned to her former life, it would lose the magic. I get the sense that it wouldn't end like Cinderella, with a hot and wealthy prince. I'm trying to be deep about this story but find myself unable to.

[ vintage photo by star11950; Olivia L. from Lookbook; Montgomery ward vintage gloves; Bebe Z. from Lookbook; Vanity Fair and *Vogue covers; Kerry L. from Lookbook; A Bar at the Folies-Bergere; Sparkling champagne; A couple of Mary Cassat (love her!) paintings, One and Two; and a Casino de Paris poster

*I can't remember where that Vogue cover came from
**No progress report for Thursday 'cause there's nothing to report @.@

Progress Report Thursday

To keep my blog from becoming too inactive, I think I'll do a progress report (high school term!) every Thursday. Why Thursday? Because I've decided to do it today and today is Thursday and if I wait to do it tomorrow or some other day, then the procrastinator demon inside of me will make sure I won't do it at all.






See that, Invisible Reader(s)? 409 pages. 205,488 words (I know you're not supposed to start sentences with numbers written numerically but I really don't care at the moment). And I have at least fifteen more chapters to go. I think most writers just write their stories or something, without an outline. But I love outlines and keeping my chapters separate. Only a few days ago did I put them all in one file. I told myself that I wouldn't do this until I was finished. But I wanted to see now how long the story was going to be. My goal, as I've said before, is to whittle this manuscript down into a range of 90,000 to 100,000 words.

So, I'm not panicking.

Not yet.

But yes, progress is still going (hence this post). I think I can finish off another chapter today. And I think for once, by the end of the month I will finally have a completed draft of this damn story.

Review: Thirteen Reasons Why

I told myself that I wouldn't come back until I finished the first draft of The Poisoned Apple. Well, things change. I am making progress. Slow progress. But it's also because I've been editing the parts of the story I've already written. I need to save that for the next draft.

So, deadline #3 (or 4, 5, can't remember) is for the last day in February. Even though I'm back in school, I know I can finish it.

On to today's post. A couple of days ago, I checked out Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. I read it nonstop for the most part and finished it in a day. I haven't finished a book in one sitting for a long time. I loved the book, though I had a few problems with Hannah, the girl at the center of the story. Here's my review of the book posted from goodreads:

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Clay Jensen comes home from school one day and finds a package, the size of a shoebox, outside his door. It's addressed to him. Clay opens the package and finds seven audiotapes. Excited, he goes into the garage in search of his father's stereo. He pops the first tape in. He presses play. He listens.
The voice that comes up is Hannah Baker. A girl he crushed on. A girl he kissed. A girl that killed herself by taking pills.
Of course he's shocked to hear the voice that belongs to a dead girl. But the tape plays and we find out that Hannah has created thirteen stories of various people that both tormented her and tried to help her. There are only two rules: Listen to the tapes and pass them on to the next person on the list. If they do not follow these rules, copies of the seven tapes would be made public.
What follows is a sometimes suspenseful, mostly exhausting look into Hannah's reasons into committing suicide. Clay steals a Walkman from Tony, a friend, and ventures around his town that's void of life save a few stragglers; his caring mother, an outcast girl, and two boys attached to the tapes in various ways. At times Clay's following the map Hannah had slipped into his locker days before she died. He's visiting scenes in the tapes: Hannah's old house that was the site of an accident; a park; a couple of houses where parties were thrown; favorite hangout spots.
The tapes takes us through Hannah's first kiss, which ruins her reputation, to her last kiss that may have saved her life. We hear classmates' names pop up on the tapes, see Clay have one memory of them and have Hannah contradict it. At one point in the story, Clay wonders if anyone will be the same after these tapes. Of course they won't.
While reading the book, I felt like Clay. I'll read a little bit, he'll listen to a few more seconds of Hannah's stories. We'll stop, tell ourselves that we can't possibly finish this in one setting (we both did). Yet I'll go back to reading and the tapes start over again. When Clay stops the tapes so that he can "catch up" or when he says the he's tired, not physically but emotionally, I understand exactly what he means.
Clay can be like a moviegoer, screaming at the victim on the screen and warning them what everyone else knows what's going to happen. Hannah would narrate one event that happened in her life and Clay's thoughts and actions would cut into it. It's sometimes painful to read, especially at the end when Hannah's last attempts at having someone reach her fails. "It's not a question, Mr. Porter. Don't take it as one... Tell her you're going to help her." "Do not let her leave that room!"
At times I felt like I was reading Saw in prose, wondering, whenever a new tape was introduced, whom wronged Hannah this time. This tape can't possibly be any worse than the last one. But it is and Hannah narrates most of the tapes with a calm voice tinged with anger. And it's that voice that left me, for most of the novel, unattached to Hannah Baker.
Hannah is possibly the only weakness of this page-turning novel. She relates her reasons on the tapes in a virtually emotionless tone. It's odd that the tapes themselves made Hannah, in her own words and voice, just as manipulative as the ones that wronged her. She came across as a showman, taking her time in unraveling some stories. Prolonging the mentioning of someone's name to torment them. She involves people in the tapes that had nothing to do with her suicide- her own words -so that she can apologize to them. Arguably, she deserves the role of maestro giving what she went through.
However, I felt that Hannah's reasons why for committing suicide weren't emotional enough, which is an awful sentence to write. In researching suicide, I know that some reach that rode in both complicated and seemingly simplistic reasons. One of the last things you'd want to say to someone whom suffers depression is that their reasons for being suicidal are weak. Yet Hannah's didn't phase me. Yes, there was a snowball effect. A boyfriends spreads a false reputation about her. A girl uses her. A boy takes photos of her in her bedroom. Several boys feel her up, create lists- "Best Ass in the Freshmen Class". She's so broken that she doesn't prevent a passed-out girl from being raped and allows the same rapist to do the same to her. But her voice prevents me from feeling enough. Maybe it's also the format of the story I mentioned before; one horrible incident after another. Of course it's believable. People don't commit suicide for one act, it's a series of acts yet I felt little emotional pull towards Hannah.
But I did feel something. Later in the story, Hannah talks about one of her favorite classes, Peer Communications. Their teacher has the class decorate bags and hang them up. Classmates are to write anonymous and complimentary notes to other classmates, dropping them into the recipients' bags. The notes are simple- "Did you like his performance in the school play?" -but it's what Hannah needs. Unfortunately, a scorned boy steals her notes. Hannah, in an act of desperation, writes a note and slips it into the teacher's bag that's used for students to suggest a discussion. Hannah's is on suicide. "Suicide. It's something I've been thinking about." The note is read out loud in class. Now's the time for someone to reach Hannah. But, one by one, the students only make her feel worse. "It's like whoever wrote this note just wants attention," one girl says. The other classmates' suggestions are "tinged with annoyance." Reading this scene, I was in as much disbelief as Hannah. I also felt sympathy when Hannah started to think of the methods of suicide before settling on painless pills.
But most of my sympathy was reserved for Clay and another boy in the story. Hannah knew how it felt when others hurt her, so why would she cause the same pain to those she admittedly did nothing wrong? It makes me hate Hannah in a way.
But I think the author knew that. Is Thirteen Reasons Why about Hannah's suicide or is more about the people it affected. The last scene in the book shows Clay at school, after mailing off the tapes to the next person on the list. He doesn't want to go to his English class, the class he shared with Hannah, and walks the hallways. A girl passes him in the hall, whispering "Sorry" and he recognizes her as Skye, the outcast girl. A girl that wasn't like that before. Instead of letting her walk away, he runs after her and calls her name.




View all my reviews

Twenty-Two Day Challenge

Well, I'm not going to meet my self-imposed deadline for The Poisoned Apple. So, I'm extending it to December 31st. But I'm also going to see if I can finish it in twenty-two days, which means the other deadline is for December 9th. It honestly took me a little over a month to finish the last chapter. That's ridiculous. But I know I can write it. There's not much left.

And speaking of writing. I don't have anything for NaNoWriMo. I'm too lazy to upload anything. Maybe I should upload what I just finished writing. I think I will.

I really have nothing to say today. Hopefully, by the time of my next post, the first draft of The Poisoned Apple will be finished.

Tumbling Over NaNoWriMo and Poisoned Apples

My blog titles are really clever.

I have a tumblr now. Started it a few days ago. Really addicting the first day. I love that, unlike blogger, it's mainly about quick blogging. Like twitter yet more literate for some reason :) There I'll post random photos taken with my crappy camera. Like sunflowers. I have too many photos of sunflowers. And bubbles.

Also, a few days ago, Elizabeth May's blog reminded me of National Novel Writing Month coming up next month. My account is Dancing-Riceball. I actually joined back in 2007, via a blog post on TOKYOPOP. I thought it was a cool idea but didn't post anything. They deleted my account from being inactive so I rejoined last year. My story, called Graffiti, clocked in at a little over 50,000. It was and still is unfinished but I learned a lot from working on it. Stuff such as the word "graffiti" only doubles with the f's and not the t's or the i's. But I also learned about pacing or structure. I'm not sure, but I think that story only had three chapters. Which is just awful. It made me realize that either I have slow pacing or I'm too wordy (or both). I think for fun I'll re-read it.

One of the prizes for finishing NaNoWriMo is a free proof copy of your story via Amazon's Create Space thingamajig. I wanted one, but I was embarrassed at the idea of people reading over my shitty story. Which is funny because I don't think that they do proof-read when you go to self-publish. Anyways, I like NaNo and don't want them to delete my account so I'm going to upload some words from one of (many) unfinished manuscripts. I won't upload all of it because I don't want to cheat. November will be spent trying to finish up my current story, which I don't think that I'll meet the deadline.

But now that I think about it, I really want to do NaNo again. This is bad, I'm supposed to be working on The Poisoned Apple, not starting another story. But I love a challenge! But I need to focus. I'll think about it...

On the same note, I can't remember where but I heard about this website called "One Page Per Day" which is about... writing one page a day. I haven't tried it yet, but if I do start another story with NaNo- which I'm really, really, really, thinking about doing -I think I might use it.

Ciao.

Magazine Nostalgia

Well, I'll file this under "Things I've Done When I Should Have Been Writing." I was looking through my old magazines for photos to use as a project, when I came across my copies of Shojo Beat and Tokyopop magazines. There's three of them, and all of them were published in 2007. Shojo Beat I bought from Wal-Mart- more on that issue latter; look at that beautiful cover!


Back when I was obsessed with the TOKYOPOP website, I was subscribed to their free manga magazine. I probably received three or four of them; two I've kept. I have no idea if they're still sending them out, but I hope that they are. I love getting magazines just as I love buying books. It's going to sound crazy, but I started scanning the images from the magazines because I love the way they looked scanned.



The cover is of Raven from Vampire Kisses, the manga version by rem (I love her art!) What I love about the two issues of TOKYOPOP that I saved is that they both deal with Gothic Lolita fashion. This brief history of Gothic Lolita is from the same issue.


Here's another article on the history of Gothic Lolita fashion. This came from the spring of 2008 (not 2007). They break down the origins of Lolita fashion and give the different types of Gothic Lolita. I love the layout of these pages. All the illustrations were drawn by Aimme Steinberger (passive sentence!)





Going back to the issue of TOKYOPOP with Vampire Kisses on it, it was really interesting to read the manga sample inside. Because, two years later, Vampire Kisses- the book, not the comic -helped shape my protagonist from my book idea (that I should be working on). Here are the sample pages. The words in the speech bubbles have been intentionally blurred, whited-out, etc, 'cause I'm not offering scans of comics (though, I wonder if it's wrong to do it for articles?).









There's also an interview with Anike Hage author of Gothic Sports, a manga/comic I have wanted to read since I heard about the premise: a girl starts her own soccer team and to make them stand out, they wear Lolita-styled outfits. Awe. Some.



And one final thing from the issue. This ad for Beck, a Japanese manga about a group of boys forming an indie rock band, caught my eye. I fell in love with that manga two years ago and it got me into Nirvana, which then inspired a story of mine that branched out into other stories. It was just interesting to remember where it all came from.



I had somewhat of a thrill going through my copy of Shojo Beat- March, 2007. The reason for it was because, along with it being "the art issue", it was also an issue on vampires. I remember trying to read Twilight in 2007 but could never finish it and I wonder if the editors were aware of the book back then. Judging by this page highlights of famous vampires and vampire slayers, I would say that it hadn't reached the level on insanity quite yet.


It's just really strange that there was a time before Twilight. Anyways, the cover for this issue features the characters from Vampire Knight, a manga that is now more popular but one that I could not get into.






The one good thing I can say about Vampire Knight is the artwork. Matsuri Hino can draw her ass off. Seriously, the hair! Moving on, one vampire comic in the anthology that I liked was Millennium Snow by Bisco Hatori, best known for Ouran High School Host Club. I watched a few episodes of Ouran and loved it, though it had the habit of reminding me of Fruits Basket. A year later, though, I came up with a story whose main character was similar to Chiyuki from this comic but was inspired by a Nirvana song (re: the Beck ad.)




There are some more comics in the anthology but, with the exception of Millennium Snow and Vampire Knight, I hadn't read them. Technically, there was one that I read but not from the magazine. In 2007 or 2008 I became obsessed with Nana. The story was essentially the lives of two young women, both named Nana. Though the same age, one was more mature than the other, having came from a tough background; and the other is more naive, having been spoiled by her parents. I just love this story and love Ai Yazawa's art and fashion.









That lighter in the girl's, Layla/Reira, hand belongs to the boy, Shin. It's designed by Vivienne Westwood and I want one really, really bad. And I don't even smoke. I don't know how to get one. All I know is that they are rare and that they're pretty expensive. Back to Nana, the random thing that I loved about it was that each chapter either started or ended with "Hey, Nana." It makes me nostalgic for some reason.

I think that's enough blogging about magazines and comics.