I'm looking for anything that help with plots, grammer, storying telling, character development, ect... Any thingt you think a great book on writing. This would be a big help...

I have been searching through a lot of book blogs lately and see that there is a slight lean to the female when it comes to book blogging. I am sort of interested to hear the guys view on books but seem to have issues finding book blogs written by men. Any that you all know of ?

My brisket just hit 170F internal after 6 hours at 225F. I took a small end piece to taste.

HOLY DAMN, THAT'S GOOD!!!

So now back in the oven for another 2 hours at 200F, covered tightly with foil and the potatoes and carrots and onions mixed in after boiling them in the pre-boiled marinade.

All we need now is more snow ;)

Cooks?

QUESTION: I have a pot full of leftover marinade that the meat (brisket) has been in for 24 hours in the fridge. Can I dilute it 2:1 with water and boil the potatoes in it for flavor? Or is that a bad idea?

Trying to identify a large bush. We're right outside of central North Carolina, if that helps. The bush can frequently be seen in commercial landscaping and at least once has been spotted, planted in a mass grouping, along the slope of an interstate, near an overpass. It looks like a fir(?), but I've never seen it in tree form. It's droopy, feathery in appearance and is stiff (not quite spikey) to the touch. Most of them that I've seen stand around two or three feet tall. It is more of a mound shape, never conical. The colors are very vibrant--top is a citrusy yellow and chartreuse with a bold emerald green beneath. Wasn't able to get a picture of it yet. Googled images with no luck. I'd really like to find a place to put it in our landscape because the texture and color is so great. Any ideas what this might be called? Haven't been to the nearest garden center to ask.

ETA: It's not an exact match, but the closet thing I've found is a Gold Mop Fake Cypress. The plant I'm looking for has two or three very distinct colors on each plant, with the lighter color/s cascading over the dark.

It is probably wrong to be as excited as I am about our possible garden/storage shed. We have looked at five places. Trooped through mucky fields in frigid weather to peruse outbuildings. Everything was very expensive or not quite what we had in mind.

For those that aren't familiar with our house, we recently bought a modest little ranch with neither a garage nor a carport. There is no exterior utility closet that we might be able to keep a mower, rake or ladder in. Since we plan on doing a fair amount of gardening and could use some extra storage, we settled on the idea of a shed. I fell in love with a cute multi-gabled victorian cottage style. D eschewed it, saying it was too girly, and reasoned that a huge barn-ish monstrosity would be better and more practical.

Yesterday, we found a 90 square foot saltbox rancher at Lowe's home improvement (a.k.a. our home away from home) that mirrors the look of our house. It has a single shuttered window and flowerbox, 2 large skylights, a cupola, pegboard, shelving and workbench inside and double-wide steel doors. It was something we could compromise on.



Best yet, the display was on sale. For $700 less than the original list price! Hooray! I've got to call the company that it belongs to and make sure it hasn't been snatched up yet. Oh, and should we get it and we need to paint it, we are going to try to match the color of our vinyl siding. The color we have is called Coastal Sage. Think leaden-sky, white-capped ocean, New England seaside...soft pewter with a definite green undertone. So, I'm looking at two paints. Both are Valspar. The one on the left (window is at bottom) is Gray Expose. The one on the right (window up top) is called Secret Moss. Horrible picture but there is thick mist this afternoon, obscuring any sun we might've had. Look at the entire swatch. Which do you think is a better match? Notice the keys in my hand? Yeah, I lock myself out frequently, so I carry them now just as a precaution.



ETA: Just called Heartland and because it's a display, it would come without it's usual five year warranty and no transport. She was able to give me the number of a local man who other customers have used and he charges a $150 flat fee to haul it, which would still be a $550 savings.

Mark Charan Newton seems to think so!

In his blog article, "Why Science Fiction is Dying & Fantasy Fiction Is The Future" on December 3rd, he explained his stance on the issue with the following four points:

1. More women than men read books. (you'd have to read the explanation of this one to see his point)

2. Culture has caught up with our imagination.

3. Literary fiction is eating up SF.

4. Modern Fantasy readers have grown up on the films of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

Of course, with such a bold stance, the article incensed a lot of people, although to their credit, were quite civil in voicing their disagreement. Many also agreed.

In response, Newton wrote a second article last week expanding on his earlier statement. One quote from reader (and author) Richard Morgan struck me as something to note:

The big zeitgeist shift that’s really coming into play here, as far as I can see, is the infantilisation of consumer society, and the death of challenge. There’s not enough space here to get into the many and massive ways in which modern consumer culture goes about this infantilisation, but suffice it to say that where the SF/F genre is concerned,the message has gone out, loud and clear, that in order to make successful artefacts of mass entertainment, you must not challenge your audience with anything that a 14 year old American mid-western teenager can’t instantly relate to. Exhibit A – the last Star Trek movie: the future and all it has to offer, crushed down in conceptual terms to fit inside the comprehension gap of a teenage boy from Iowa. What are the challenges facing this vast multi-species star-faring culture? Well, bullying from your class-mates, getting caught cheating on tests, sassy girls who won’t give it up, adults who doooooon’t understaaaaaand your teen pain, and big, stroppy guys with tattoos.

What are your thoughts on Newton's argument? Do you agree or disagree? Why? What about Richard Morgan's comment?

ETA: There are so many great comments here I can't keep up! Thank you everyone for contributing. Please keep the discussion going! :)

Title: How I Live Now
Auhor: Meg Rosoff
First line: My name is Elizabeth but no-one's ever called me that.

I had heard a lot about this book but had never really shown any interest in it until about a week ago; when I borrowed it from my library. The summary interested me greatly; a girl in England in the middle of a war; and she falls in love with her cousin. I loved the idea of it, but I really thought that it fell short for me. It was just... odd. It was one of the oddest books I have ever read. Even now, I don't know exactly how I feel about it.

One of the first things I noticed that annoyed me about it was that there were no quotation marks. Everything was simply "and then she said so and so and then i said so and so". It almost became too much to bear (I am a stickler for paragraphs and quotation marks) but I liked the sound of the book itself and so I persevered. I liked it a lot up until the children were taken away and separated. Then it became a blur of misery and just... again, oddness. The psychic powers were never truly explained and completely unprecedented.

One thing I did like, however, was that Rosoff mentioned only twice that she "should not be feeling this way about her cousin" and then when they fell in love she dropped it and it never became an issue again. I really liked that she never made some revelation about Edmond not actually being her cousin and she never apologised for it. That was one of the only aspects of the book that I really liked.

However, I must say, I did not like this book and I would not buy it or read it again. I am sorry because I think it had great potential; but I really did not like the way it was written.

Things you never thought you'd say in life: "Pippin, stop eating Jesus!"
Aka the joy of putting up Christmas decorations when you have overly curious felines in the room. (The other cat has currently made herself a nice comfy bed of bubble wrap.)

It was an excellent week reading wise this past week. I finished up the section of the Dark Tower that was last weeks moment. Started and finished book 15 of the Stephanie Plum series and then yesterday started and finished another section of the 5th Dark Tower book. Just one more very short section and I'll finally be done with it! It seems like I've been reading it forever and I sort of have really since I've been reading it since September but it seemed to work better then reading bigger chunks so I shall continue the same way with the remaining two books in the series.

This week brings us an Bill Bryson book. I love Bill Bryson and was really happy to find this book at Goodwill it's one of the older ones that I haven't read yet. It inspired my to put his two English language books onto my Christmas list for this year (the one dealing with the birth of the English language and the follow up dealing with America English) so hopefully I'll get at least one of them. This current book deals with travels in Europe which will probably make me smile and think of Hetalia based things the entire time I'm reading it which will only make me smile more I'm sure.

* * *
I remember on my first trip to Europe going alone to a movie in Copenhagen. In Denmark you are given a ticket for an assigned seat. I went into the theater and discovered that my ticked directed me to sit beside the only other people in the place, a young couple locked in the sort of passionate embrace associated with dockside reunions at the end of long wars. I could no more have sat beside them than I could have asked to join in -- it would have come to much the same thing -- so I took a place a few discreet seats away.

People came in the theater, consulted their tickets, and filled the seats around us. By the time the film started, there were about thirty of us sitting together in a tight pack in the middle of a vast and otherwise empty auditorium. Two minutes into the movie, a woman laden with shopping made her way with difficulty down my row, stopped beside my seat, and told me in a stern voice, full of glottals and indignation, that I was in her place. This caused much play of flashlights among the usherettes and fretful reexamining of tickets by everyone in the vicinity until word got around that I was an American tourist and therefore unable to follow simple seating instructions and was escorted in some shame back to my assigned place.

So we sat together and watched the movie, thirty people crowded together like refugees in an overloaded lifeboat, rubbing shoulders and sharing small noises, and it occurred to me then that there are certain things that some nations do better then everyone else and certain things that they do far worse, and I began to wonder why that should be.
* * *
Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe
Chapter Three: Oslo
Bill Bryson
Started: 12/13/09

Beneath the cut is a review for the book Tender Morsels. It's been suggested to me that the description of sexual abuse that the protagonist undergoes may be a little traumatic for people who have suffered similar trauma. Therefore, I'm putting it under a cut so people don't have to read it if it makes them uncomfortable or distressed.

( Read more... )

The Virgin Suicides

Rating: 5/5

Jeffrey Eugenides's hauntingly beautiful masterpiece deserves 5/5 stars. He tells the story of five boys obsessed with the five doomed Lisbon sisters, Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia, whose demise results in "the year of the suicides." Set in the mid-seventies, in Grosse Point, Michigan.

Cecilia's demise begins to break the family apart. But when school hunk Trip Fontaine and Lux Lisbon become interested in each other, it begins to change. Trip asks Lux to the homecoming dance, and her father and mother give in. The remaining 4 Lisbon sisters go to the dance. While on the football field, Trip and Lux make love, and after that Trip abandons her. Mrs. Lisbon takes the girls out of school because of Lux's failure to make curfew. Sightings than begin of Lux making love to random men and boys. The 4 Lisbon sisters make a Morse code to the 5 obsessed boys for them to come over. They discover their demise.

Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling story, a wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination.

Manitou Springs, Colorado
December 12, 2009

We live in an adorable Victorian town just west of Colorado Springs. Manitou Springs sits at the base of Pikes Peak and is filled with cute cafes and art galleries. Every year I look forward to Christmas shopping at the local artist co-ops. This time I brought a camera... why didn't I think to do that sooner?

All these photos were taken with my Canon 5DMkII and a Canon 35mm 1.4L that I rented for the holidays.

( More photos of Manitou )

The wonderful thing about Arthurian legends is they’re all so different. Some versions want to approach characters, that are by now well familiar to many of us, from a historical perspective, as if they really existed. The creative license to execute such a fiction is left to assembling their dialogue, their mannerisms and behaviors--the idea that Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, and Morgan le Fay need only the imaginative coaxing of an Author’s talent to be released once again into a world they inhabited long ago. Other versions take great advantage of the legend as a fairy tale, something that at one point may have been based in reality, but has now risen above the mundane and into the powerfully magical and fantastical.

I enjoy reading both types of Arthurian legends. Each side has something to offer, something new to share, some other perspective to explore, or some new twist to alter the way we may have thought about the turn of events or the roles we’ve come to expect of the characters. Anna Elliott’s Twilight of Avalon, the first in a new Twilight of Avalon Trilogy, is a book that takes its cue from the historical, and one might say cynical, perspective. Like every other author, Elliott shows us a new way to spell everyone’s names (although Arthur’s is woefully always the same): Mordred is Modred; Guinevere is Gwenyfar; Merlin, like most versions, is a title, the real name being Myrddin. This, though, is a novel about Trystan and Isolde. As we are reminded several times in the narrative, “Camlann was over. Arthur and Modred, Myrddin and Morgan and Gwynefar lingering now only as voices in the wind. One age is ended...And another, perhaps, begun.” (p. 425)

( Read the rest! )