A laugh for today

Maybe some of you saw this list being posted here and there last week, but it made me laugh and I wanted to share in case you missed them:

8 New and Necessary Punctuation Marks 

We Desperately Need

It's hard to pick a favorite. The sarcastices are something that I've discussed at length with friends, how we need some kind of mark to show when we're being sarcastic so people don't get the wrong idea. The editor in me appreciates the hemi-demi-semi colon. The example on the Andorpersand made me chuckle, and the Morgan Freemark is just awesome. So pretty much I like them all. 

When the planets align

When I was finishing up the first draft of LITTLE SUN, I knew it still needed something. Since I had never written a book before, it took me a while to realize that, to begin with, I was a fairly bare-bones kind of writer. I wrote generally what happened and that was about it, kind of like a very thorough outline in prose form with some dialogue. I needed to add what often makes a book a book—the imagery. So one of my tasks was to go back through each chapter and flesh it out a little and describe this and that, sometimes what people were wearing, sometimes what they were doing, sometimes a look they had on their face. I don't like too much description, especially about the scenery or anything too flowery, but you need just enough so the picture you are painting is more easily imagined.

It was about this time that I started reading a book called The Garden by Elsie V. Aidinoff. It tells the story of Adam and Eve, God, and the serpent and all they go through in the garden, mostly from Eve's perspective and from a very different angle. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the story (one being how the serpent is Eve's mentor), but there were several elements I found fascinating. One in particular was how the author portrayed Eve's first experience with everything. The minute I opened the book, I felt caught up in the description and like I, along with Eve, was experiencing what it was like to feel and see and have a body for the first time.

“The Beginning” 

Something heavy on my center, smooth against my skin, shifting very slightly within itself, stretched and retracted, occasionally a tap to the side, always in the same spot. I breathed. Instantly the thing was still. I let out the air. Again I inhaled, deeply, and pushed against the heaviness as I filled my chest. The thing began to move. Slowly, stopping and starting, it wound back and forth across my thing, around my knee, down my leg. it slid over my ankle, passed gently by my heel, with a little touch to my instep along the way. There was a wish. Again, silence and dark. I felt light, unburdened, empty, as if I might float away. Soft things swept my face, my cheek, my ear, wafted across my nose. My hands rose from my sides and brushed them off. There was a tickle in my nose. I gasped, gasped again. A great noise burst from my mouth. My eyelids jerked open. And I saw. 

At first there was only blue, limpid and luminous, stretching wide above me. A white, fluffly mass appeared, scudded across the expanse, tumbled into pieces, and melted into the blue. I lifted my arms, spread my fingers. light came through them; the ends glowed pink. I curled a finger into my palm and felt it scratch the skin. On my arms fine hairs glimmered in the sunlight. Still lying flat, I turned my head to one side. Not far away several forms, tall and dark and topped with green fluff, stretched toward the sky. Scattered around me and floating through the air were weightless bits of pink, turned up around the edges: blossoms falling from trees; it was one of them that had tickled my nose.... 

That first day, of course, I didn’t not know it was the sky I saw, the wind that moved my hair, an apple tree that shed pink petals on my toe. Cloud, face, blossom: all were unknown. I had no knowledge, no words. Each time I turned my head and found, before my eyes, something I had not seen, the world expanded.  

From The Garden by Elsie V. Aidinoff

Anyway, the planets had aligned and it was perfect timing to read something with excellent imagery. Even though this kind of writing isn't really my style, it still helped me learn just when I needed it. Not only does reading something like this give you good ideas about new techniques and all that, but once you do it enough or become entrenched in it, it helps you start thinking that way, and the process comes easier and more natural. 

Kind of like how I felt like my humor reached new heights when I watched all 10 seasons of Friends back-to-back while nursing during Anna's first year. Maybe my time could have been more productively spent, maybe not.

Literary paradigm shifts

Now that I begin to type this post, I realize the title may be a bit misleading. There's really nothing too drastic I'm going to discuss here, but it sure sounds exciting, doesn't it? Anyway, I've recently been thinking about a few times when I saw film versions of books I had read, or vice versa, and realized I was pronouncing or imagining how words were spelled totally incorrectly. (And, interestingly, all of my examples are British. Maybe it's just an accent thing.)

We all remember Hermione from Harry Potter, don't we? I'm pretty sure I read the first few books pronouncing her name like "Her-mee-un," which was my own interpretation. Even after I read the book (Book 4? Book 5?) where it points out how to say it, it still took me a while to change over.

Then I read Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility a couple years ago, after having seen the movie numerous times. I thought one of the main characters' names was Edward Ferris because that's how they pronounced it in the movie. But when I read the book, I saw that his last name was Ferrars. I seriously read for a few chapters, trying to figure out where Edward Ferris had gone and who this Ferrars guy was.

And then I saw the recent production of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit. (If you haven't seen it, watch it now. Do it.) It's about a man who is in a debtor's prison, which they called the "marshalcy." That's how I saw it in my head, anyway. Because, you know, marshals have to do with the law and policing and stuff. But when I read about the story (because I haven't actually read the book), I saw that the name of the prison was called The Marshalsea. It was a total paradigm shift, for me, realizing that it was a proper noun.

It's weird when this happens. These weren't earth shattering experiences, but they definitely changed my views about things in these stories that seemed pretty cemented in my head. Has anything similar happened to you?

Unbroken: A Review

So I finally got on the boat (got on the bandwagon? caught the boat that I missed?) and opened the copy of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken that has been sitting on my shelf in my proverbial "to read" pile for many, many months. I don't know what took me so long. So many people recommended the book to me, but I also knew it was going to be a difficult read, content-wise, and I think maybe I just wasn't ready to jump right in to a long story of suffering, violence, and cruelty.

And I was right. It WAS a difficult read. Unbroken tells the story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who was a bombardier during WWII. His plane crashed in the Pacific and he lasted 47 days on the water, only to be captured by the Japanese and sent to several horrible, awful POW camps where he was starved and beaten and continually hunted by a certain maniacal Japanese guard.

It's a gripping story, but I also feel like I had to read it while keeping some distance—skimming over especially difficult parts, purposely not fully processing the extreme brutality of it all because I didn't think I could handle it. I couldn't believe real people acted the way they did and that kindness and compassion were so rarely seen. I had to keep telling myself that I know he survived because we have this book as proof, but I eyed the pages left with wariness, knowing that they meant the suffering continued.

So yes it was challenging, but I'm so glad I read it. Besides the cruelty and suffering, the name of the book tells the real story. Despite all he goes through, the main character survives and his spirit remains unbroken. I just read a passage that basically sums up the major theme of his time in the prison camps: "The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man's vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it." But even so, he survived. He survived unbelievable thirst and starvation and sharks and disease and cruelty.

There have been many beautiful parts, like when Louis is floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean for days on end with sharks constantly circling and, dying of thirst, he prays for the first time in his life and it rains. And he prays two more times, and it rains two more times. Or like when he and his fellow crew member enjoy a brilliant sunrise on the water that they know was a gift from a compassionate divine being. Or like rare kindnesses shown by a few compassionate guards. And many others, which I won't ruin here in case you haven't read the book yet, but I was grateful for the hope they offered. Though these experiences ravaged Zamperini and so many others, it is a wonder to read about what the human body and spirit can endure.

This story is especially touching because Anna's great-grandfather, who passed away last month, also flew on bombing missions in WWII and was the lone survivor when his plane crashed over Germany. He too was a prisoner of war and overcame incredible odds to escape and make it home. Reading Unbroken made me want to read the book about Grandpa Joe's experience again, which is called A Distant Prayer. It's pretty amazing, and he was an amazing man.