A Midsummer's Night Update

Have you ever looked back over an ongoing project and realized that, as you go on, you get less and less precise?

I have.

Now, don't get me wrong I love precision. I demand precision from my students (and myself, when it comes to academia). But, sometimes I start out very precise and then relax as I realize that the parameters of my precision were possibly a bit too tall of an order to fill, even for me.

Blah, blah, blah, you're saying. Get to the point already, you say.

Okay.

My blog is less precise. Instead of exact dates, I'm giving estimates in terms of hours, days, etc. Why? Because I'd like my reading to be recreational this summer, and when I try to keep track of dates and other such specifics it starts to feel a bit too much like a chore.

I hope you are all cool with that, because that's just the way it is.

The second point of this post is to give you all an update on what's coming up in the next several posts. The books I've read that I haven't yet posted about on here:

24. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larrson.
25. Save the Cat! Blake Snyder.
26. Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury.
27. Confessions of a Freelance Pen Monkey, Chuck Wendig.

Plus, you know, I'm hoping to reach the 30 mark before the month is over so that I can start the Bloglovin' Summer Readathon with a bang!

Book Twenty-Two: OUTLINING YOUR NOVEL: MAP YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS

Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success, by K.M. Weiland, 2011.

     

TTR: A day and a half.

Comments:

If you're a writer, this is most definitely worth a read. It helped me jumpstart my mystery novel (which I've been struggling with and rethinking for at least the past four years). I am now almost halfway through a fresh draft (and I only had three-thousand words when I read this at the beginning of June) and am looking forward to having a polished draft by the end of the year.

Yep.

Book One: THIS YEAR YOU WRITE YOUR NOVEL

This Year You Write Your Novel, by Walter Mosley. Little Brown and Company, 2009.

(Wow, feels weird not to be using MLA format, here. But for the sake of you nonacademic bookworms, I'll persevere).

Time To Read (TTR from here on): Started and finished on January 1st, 2013*.

Comments:

While this is a book for honest-to-goodness newbie writers, and I am certainly not that (I'm working on novel six, at the moment. They say you've got to write about 1,000,000 words before you break through, and I'm seriously close), it felt like time well spent. Why? Because it was the new year and I needed encouragement/confirmation, which I found. I also found a few gems of insight, which is a plus. I especially liked the section on revisions/rewrites.

Here's a link to the NPR review, too: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9620861

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*I am a crazy fast reader (I'm not necessarily bragging, sometimes this is a very bad thing. Just ask my overtaxed eyeballs**), but This Year You Write Your Novel is also really short.

On the topic of fast reading, I feel like--but have no experience to back me up on this--that my fast reading is akin to being a junkie. I recently read Jim Butcher's Cold Days, a 500+ page novel, cover to cover over five hours, without stopping for anything. I read my two-volume, gateway edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is about 1400 pages, in a week (and I was lagging, then).

**Actually, no, I do not wear nor do I require glasses. My eyeballs are resilient little boogers.