My Reading List

My reading list is insane.  It may actually drive me to insanity by the end of it.  That is, if I ever make it to the end.

I have my reading list on Microsoft Word as a color-coded, alphabetical list.  I'm not usually that organized.  Books yet to be purchased are in bold and those yet to be released are in italics.  I have a total of 27 adult books on my list (highlighted in red), 12 YA books (in yellow), 6 MG books (in blue), and 6 short stories/chapter books (in green).  I decided to read one book from each of the four categories at any given time.  Needless to say, I'll be reading for quite a while.  I'll break it down anyway.

I am currently on the second book of the Wheel of Time series, which will soon be fifteen books long.  Each of those books (save one) is at least 226,000 words.  That fills up a lot of my time reading books for adults.

My YA reading is stunted by Factotum, which while still very good, is a bit dry early on.  Once I finish it I should be okay for YA.

I should be okay with MG once I get into a better flow of reading it.  The Ranger's Apprentice series makes me cringe a bit when I read it because it seems very poorly-written, although John Flanagan can get away with it because it's MG.

My final category will be a breeze.  None of the five short stories are extremely long and I should be able to read each of them in a sitting or two.  The only chapter book is a light read, The House at Pooh Corner, read for such reading at a slow pace.

What's on your reading list?

Fifteen - Revelations

What began as a flash fiction piece turned into something longer and it's too late to start something new, so I'm going to do something I've always wanted to do.  This begins my first serial, Fifteen.  (Don't worry, the subsequent parts should be longer [and better])

The flames, set evenly apart like marble columns, flickered and died.  It was dark.  Even the hearth was out.  All was silent.

A golden spark flickered above the smoking candles.  A blue spark followed, then red, green, and purple.  Amelia squealed.

“I did it,” she said, smiling madly.  “I have the Strength.”

An elderly woman nodded above her.  “I didn’t think I’d live to see the next Olivier with the Strength.  I’m very proud of you, dear.”

Amelia threw her arms around the woman and shed a tear.  “I’ll make you even prouder, grandmother.  I’m going to be the first Olivier to pass the Teaching and become a professional sage.”

“I don’t doubt it, dearie.”

Her mother, chestnut hair illuminated now by a pewter-cased lamp, stroked Amelia’s braided locks.  “I guess I should fetch your thrice-great-grandmother’s staff.”

Amelia gaped.  “You still have it!”

Her mother nodded, maintaining gentle composure.  “A mage’s staff is special.  You cannot go casting one away.”

Amelia rose from her seat.  “Where is it?”

“Follow.”
        They walked past the other relations—a lot of them, as is usual for a fifteenth birthday party—all of which were slowly recovering from the shock.  The hearth-room bled into a long hallway with brown, undecorated walls.  Amelia found herself stopped at a small door of warped wood.

“You said that I’m never to enter this room,” she remarked.

Her mother laughed softly.  “You needn’t mind that now.  It’s quite for you alone, in truth.”

Amelia gasped and blundered through the door into a tiny alcove.  “A Strongroom,” she whispered.  A gnarled staff sat in one corner against a lone chair.  Another corner housed a desk with a dusty tome upon it.  The only light came from a lone torch.

“Who will teach me to wield the Strength?” Amelia asked her mother.

A voice, void of any expected flourishes, stated, “I will.”

Amelia scrambled, looking for the source.  The staff was missing from its corner.  In its place sat a misty-eyed man of thick mustache.

“I am both your teacher and your greatest asset, child.  We begin now, before dusk.”

Studio Ghibli

I watch a fairly high amount of movies.  I enjoy most of them, at least somewhat, but the studio from which I have the highest concentration of enjoyment-per-movie is definitely Studio Ghibli.  Studio Ghibli is an anime studio from Japan.  The art in their movies is breath-taking, the storylines, while not always their own, are incredible.

 

One of their movies, Spirited Away, won Best Animated Feature at the 2002 Academy Awards.  It out-grossed Titanic in Japan.  My favorites of theirs (also my favorite movies overall) are Whisper of the Heart (which is probably my new #1) and Kiki's Delivery Service.

Ways To Write

We're in a heavily media-based era.  Due to this, we as writers have several options as to what media we use to write.  Each type has advantages and disadvantages.

1. The Pencil

Advantages: 

• You can write as quickly as you can move your hands
• Minor mistakes can be erased
• Pencils and paper are inexpensive

Disadvantages: 

• Heavy revisions make your paper very sloppy
• You can't submit something that's written in pencil
• You're limited by your own penmanship

2. The Typewriter

Advantage: 

• Neat
• Helpful to a screen-writer

Disadvantages: 

• Tough to correct mistakes
• Slow
• Highly limited fonts

3. Dictation

 

Advantages: 

• Fast
• Convenient
• Efficient

Disadvantages: 

• Punctuation is tough to handle
• Background-noise is harmful
• Extra cost (program like Dragon) or time (writing from a recording)

4. The Computer

 

Advantages: 

• Fast
• Best for submissions
• Range of fonts
• Allows you to copy/paste to email submissions or to alpha/beta-readers

Disadvantage: 

• Initial cost is high
• Good writing programs have an extra cost

The Story of My W.I.P.

I recently realized that almost every blog post I read has at least one picture.  Then I realized that one out of my thirty-eight (thirty-nine by the time this is released) previous posts had a picture...  From now on, I'm going to start adding pictures to my blog.  I'm also going to try to actual have a solid topic in mind for my general posts.  So, today I'm going to post about my W.I.P., now-titled The Lost Mountains, and post a related picture.

I began writing The Lost Mountains a tad over three years ago.  My cousin and I were talking and decided that we would start novels together.  We began with the old "pick five random objects" method of story creation.  I have no clue what those five things were, and I'm pretty sure none of them have anything to do with my manuscript in its current form.  Anyway, I wrote fervently for a few days and meekly for the next few months, finally ending up with about 10,000 or so words.  The next two years added about 1,000 more and ten or so notebook pages worth of notes.  That was the first incarnation of my W.I.P.

The second incarnation of my W.I.P. began about mid-March of this year.  I wrote a prologue introducing a revamped plot at that time and have since put it through one round of editing (although it needs a lot more).  I've since gotten the first 793 words of chapter one, two sentences of chapter twenty-two, and 931 words of chapter twenty-three done.  I plan on finishing chapter twenty-three within the next few weeks (as you can tell, I'm very slow).  I have the order in which I will write the chapters (yeah, really out of order) in a separate file along with my basic outline.  I also have separate files for character profiles and my magic dictionary.  My plan is to have my first draft (some parts will probably have been edited somewhat already, as I like my writing to be as clean as possible) done by the end of the summer of 2014.

The Lost Mountains is epic fantasy inspired by the works of Emily Rodda, Garth Nix, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert Jordan.  The basic synopsis is that the creator, Gog (the name will probably change), created a world of balance.  Twelve men were transformed into dragons through magic (I have a magic system set up) and sheltered themselves in a mountain range that everyone has forgotten (hence the book's title).  Nearly two hundred years later, twelve particularly virtuous knights have entered their prime, leading the dragons to awaken.  Hopefully you can see that this caused some conflict.  The book is, of course, about dealing with that conflict.

Patrick Stahl