Category: Blog

New Books & Novel Discoveries (Jan. 2018)

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As I said in a previous post, I want to start doing some general blogging about books — writing that isn’t formally reviewing books or sharing what I’ve been reading and plan to read next. I’m frequently acquiring and discovering new books (populating a To-Read list on Goodreads that I suspect will never deplete faster than titles are added) and thought it would be fun to give myself a platform to talk a bit about those.

I’ve also been mentally prepping myself more and more for making creative writing a regular exercise. I need to write stories, my state of mind is just weighing me down significantly. Once such writing gets going, I’d like to use posts like these to hold myself a little more accountable to making progress, as well as sharing some of the progress I’ve made. I’m hopeful I will have a better drive to make good on plans I declare more publicly, rather than something I privately think about doing.

Anyway, onto the books!Read More »

Renovations!

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Truth be told I’d been wanting to redo the theme of this site for a long time now, the problem was my tendency to procrastinate This was especially the case because my plans had me wanting to do more than just choose a new layout.

As it turns out I was perusing different themes Friday night and accidentally activated one that I didn’t even want to use, which I took as a done deal. My old layout was so stale that even WordPress advised a new one, as it had been “retired,” so with changes happening by accident anyway I decided to get started. I couldn’t just leave it as it was. I guess when you’re hesitant to jump in the pool sometimes it helps to slip and fall in.

The further changes I wanted included reworking the categories going back to day one so that all of my varied non-review posts could be sorted more neatly. Everything now has an organization I’m much happier with. I’ve also used tags to make my reviews accessible from a menu. Lastly, I updated/rewrote some of the pages on the site to freshen things up a bit.

I’m very pleased with the new look, as the old layout was something I settled for when I started and regrettably got too complacent with.  I hope you all enjoy the new look too.

One of my new categories is simply “Blog,” and I want to use it to write more off-the-cuff posts like this, maybe once a week or so. While they will occasionally be talking shop like I am here, I imagine, I’d like to use them to talk about books in ways outside of reviews or the WWW Wednesday posts; new books I’ve acquired, series and authors that have caught my attention, or more reflective/introspective ideas I may have about reading and writing.

A review for Universal Harvester by John Darnielle will be up soon, it has just been delayed by all the time I’ve put into reworking the site. I should have it finished and up either tomorrow or Tuesday. Until then, thank you for reading!

When I Overcame a Tough Book

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Growing up I did like reading a fair bit, though I honestly didn’t get an itch for it until early adulthood. I could be rather picky. While I was younger, I remember I read most of the Harry Potter books, a couple from A Series of Unfortunate Events, Goosebumps, The Hobbit, a random Boxcar Children novel, and a book about a kid raising a raccoon or something. The list I can recall feels rather small. There had to be some superficial element to it that drew me in. I can’t remember the plot to that Boxcar Children book at all, but it had a picture of a T-Rex skeleton on the cover, so I wanted to read it. The novels I had to read for school, especially as I got older, often served as a barrier to my comprehension. At the time, if a book challenged me I was unlikely to want to bother.Read More »

Story Hoarding

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I’ve been ill for the past week, and while that hasn’t stopped me from getting a couple hundred pages into The Dark Tower or from getting sucked into Breath of the Wild, my motivation to write has been a little shot. The sickness was so bad at one point it even stopped me from enjoying said anticipated video game. That being the case, this week’s post is more on the light side. I just wanted to make sure I wrote something. This is a bit of a continuation of a line of thought I had in a post I wrote months ago called “What We Get To,” although more lighthearted.Read More »

Trying to get Refocused

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Lately I’ve been taking in just how much I still need to get through, not just in terms of books, but all forms of art and storytelling that have been backlogged for years now. I think part of this has to do with coming into my own both as a reader/viewer/etc. and as someone with critical aspirations. When I was in university, the material I had to learn and write about was provided for me and occupied a lot of my time. Now, I have to be the author of my own progress. The problem is, despite progress I feel I have made as a writer, I’m terrible at managing what content I get through.Read More »

What We Get To

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Recently I read Found, a book of poetry by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Not to disparage this book in the slightest, but the content of this book specifically isn’t important. What matters right now is what it is to me, what is has been. I read her first collection of poems, Small Arguments, in 2008 for Critical Thinking about Poetry, a first year course I took during my time at the University of Toronto at Scarborough (UTSC). I can’t precisely remember when, but I bought Found in the UTSC bookstore shortly afterwards because it was there. I recognized the similar binding, that I’d read the poet already, and picked it up. I wasn’t even particularly partial to Thammavongsa’s work. I was just starting to collect books and I jumped on it.Read More »

A Beginner’s Advice: Reading the Good and the Bad

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Dark&Stormy

Today, I want to extend some advice I continually try to follow in my pursuit of writing fiction: that you should be reading as much as you can, as often as possible. This of course extends to other storytelling mediums as well, whichever you want to be writing in. While this is probably obvious, what I feel can be overlooked, however — which I too am guilty of — is that you should read, watch, play, etc. as much outside of the genre you’re interested in writing about as possible.Read More »

A Beginner’s Advice: Giving Characters Depth

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As a writer, I’m not sure I’ve given one particular thing more thought than character depth. I’m sure all writers think about this, especially other beginners brimming with the drive to create a character who can offer something captivating and unique to the reading audience. While I’m hardly an expert on crafting characters, there are some methods I’ve come up with that can help with the process. Writing, writing, and more writing is of course the best way to practice the craft, but it does help to discuss, and learn what you can from what you read, which is how I arrived at the line of thinking I’m going to share.Read More »