The Big Desk

Ten Thousand Lovers by Edeet Ravel
Tel Aviv Trilogy #1
Review 2003
373 pages
Fiction


This was a random buy the other week; the author's new book caught my eye and since it was the third book in a sort-of trilogy, I picked up the first one, this one, and was interested enough to take it home with me. For some reason, it was just begging to be read, so it didn't have to wait the usual waiting period of books I take home (which is anywhere between five months and five years). However, now that it's time to write the review, I find myself stuck. Every time I try to summarise it, it just doesn't sound right. So I'm ditching my usual review structure and will just talk about the book, revealing necessary bits of the plot-light story as I go.

The premise, in brief, is about a young woman, Lily, studying linguistics and language at the university in Jerusalem who meets a man, Ami, who works as an interrogator for the army. It is a story of their love for one another, a story of horror and heartbreak in a war-torn country, of a people persecuted - and I'm not talking about the Jews here. It's a powerful story, set in the 70s, that is inherently relevant today.

( Read on... )

Current writing theme: Demon Hunter-The Tide Began to Rise


Warning: This chapter has not seen a beta read yet

Title: TOUCHED

Summary: Leah has always known she was different, it was hard not too when you see things that people normally don't. Not to mention, her family has a knack for disappearing...and ending up in the crazy house. When her mother disappeared from her locked bedroom on her ninth birthday, Leah knew whoever was after them meant business. After almost nine years of keeping her head down, one new student threatens her silence.

TOUCHED-12Down the Rabbit Hole

This was it.

This was the moment I’ve been waiting for since I was nine years old. A chance to get the answers to the questions that had haunted me night and day for more than half my life.

The moment that I had prepared for, had agonized over and had nightmares of.

Finally, almost to the day, I came face to face with someone that could answer all of my questions. And then some.

So I planted my feet, looked him in the eye…

…and hit him square in the face with everything I’ve got. And everything I've got was considerable.

This week's new members:

xshimmersx, thedomboss, chibikelzafox, sekali, erikas_ed3, gabcd86, hermionehp5972, tigerkitykat, cuddleykatie, elyselacroix, rueni, lessthen60



Welcome to Creative Writer!

This is your official welcome mat, an introduction to the fun which is our

community and an entreaty for you to join in.



How does it work?

Creative Writer is an online version of a writers' group. While writing

itself is usually a solitary occupation, what all writers need is contact

with other people who can give feedback, answer questions and, as with all

professions, provide guidance and a learning environment. While all artists

create their work, they can't create in a vacuum.

A writers group provides that environment. Here you are able to post

excerpts from your work and receive feedback, here you can learn from other

writers, here you can contribute to others, here is a safe place to grow

your talent.

So welcome to Creative Writer! Jump in, have some fun, any questions, feel

free to ask at any time.



( A little history )



( Community calendar )



( Rules for this community )



( How to make an LJ-cut )



-o-o-o-

Have fun and here's to great writing!

Windcharmer & Ayoub

(your local Creative Writer facilitators)

Hi guys.
What I'm going to ask, is perhaps today's most idiotic question, but I'll ask anyway.

I'm working at a bookstore (in Norway) and I'm wondering if anyone of you have any good tips on books that can be given as Christmas gifts? Mainly because I've got the feeling that "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown is going to be the Christmas hit this year and I want to give the costumers good recommendations except for the "regular" best selling books.

Thanks in advance.

Hello. Not sure if this is okay to post here. If not, let me know, and I will remove it.

I am selling a signed hardback copy of the book Impetus of Dreams by the artist Daniel Merriam. (I have it listed on Craigslist, but will pull it and deal with any serious buyer via Paypal.)



Thanks :)

Title: Resources for Writiers
Summary: A listing of my favorite software and books directed towards writers on the internet; click and see what you might find!

Down the Rabbit Hole, Alice

Every year at this time, there's the big Sculptural Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) show at Navy Pier. And every year, I don't go, because it's also the first weekend of the Humanities Festival and I can never squeeze out enough time to make it worth the price of a ticket, and the Thursday night preview is more than I want to pay. This year, however, I entered a contest at Time Out magazine, and won a VIP pass - admission to the VIP Opening Night and all weekend, and a free catalogue. Food & drink & art! What could be bad? There were some astonishingly beautiful pieces. I fell in love with a lot of stuff, including a hanging scroll by Lucy Arai, a glass and textile piece by Einav Mekori, this necklace by Pawel Kaczynski, and kimono by Tanya Lyons of glass and twigs and metal mesh. None of which I can really afford. I decided it would be nice to have a) a bottomless bank account with which to buy art, and, b) infinite space in which to display it!

The night before, I went to dinner and the Goodman with friends. There are usually four of us, but Peggy didn't come. The rest of us were at the restaurant waiting for her, and Margaret said it was odd that Peggy hadn't called her or returned her calls. I decided to call her cell, got her voice mail and left a message. A couple of minutes later she called back. "I'm in Washington!", she said. "I thought the play was next week!" She travels a lot on business and we generally check her schedule and change our tickets, but somehow it had slipped past her that she had the conflict.

In the event, she didn't miss much. The play was "High Holidays", by Alan Grossman. Set in 1963 in a Chicago suburb, it revolves around a boy preparing for his bar mitzvah (which is set for the "third Shabbos in November", cue foreshadowing music), his emotionally (and, at times, physically) abusive parents, and his hippy college drop-out older brother. The plot didn't hang together, the characters weren't particularly likeable, and there were some serious inconsistencies. Although the actors playing the parents were good, the actor playing the 13-year-old protagonist was not. I also think that if a playwright needs to have the main character come out at the end to address the audience and explain what happened next, it shows that he just didn't know how to write the ending. And nitpicky me whose parents dragged her and her sibs to Pete Seeger concerts from when we were old enough to walk will not believe that these middle-class Jewish parents didn't know who he was.

But dinner was good.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

# of queries read this week: 209
# of partials/manuscripts requested: 1
genre of partials/manuscripts requested: fantasy


Writers who take their approach to seeking traditional publication as seriously as writing the novel itself seem to do an awful lot of research. Not for them the rush to dash off a spurious query lacking in the information it should provide. They do everything possible to give their submission an advantage. But even the most dedicated sometimes misses something.

And then there are those just starting out. They hardly know where to look and are quickly overwhelmed by the myriad suggestions on agentquery.com or the many writer forums, or from their critique groups, etc. --- if they are even lucky enough to find such sources. Sometimes there are those that seem to come across agent contact information in mysterious ways (voodoo?) that give no hint or clue as to the best way to start.

The veterans were all new to it at one time, and eventually the new ones will become more experienced. If you could go back in time and share with yourself information about the query process -- What is the one thing you have learned that you wish someone had told you when you first began?

Today’s writing post is another oldie–from April 27, 2007. For various reasons, once I reread it this morning I started crying. I still believe, very strongly, that art saves lives. I have made it through two marriages now, and the Infamous Vampire Novel I refer to below has been sorta-published. But I still hold to everything I say here.

At my blog today I wrote about how deciding not to engage can save one’s life. Here, because I am feeling both introspective and ambitious, I want to talk about writing saving one’s life. Really, any art can save you, but writing’s what I know. So here goes.

I got my first intimation of the power of art while I was a teenager. I was dating a man seven years my senior, who had a taste for very young girls and using his fists on the same. Yes, I was stupid–but what fourteen-year-old isn’t? I had no means of measuring the threat this predator represented, and I had no other benchmark for affection other than abuse. As a matter of fact, the kid my own age I dated before that was so nice I got nervous and broke it off with him, because he didn’t hit me. It just didn’t feel right if someone wasn’t whaling on me.

So there I was, getting it from both ends, and I discovered alcohol. I’m sure I was drunk through most of my junior-high and high-school. I still pulled a respectable GPA–academics were, at that point, still a fun game for me and I have never lost my taste for learning. But I was desperate. There was literally nowhere I could turn. I had grown used to keeping secrets by then, and staying on top of this pile of things I couldn’t talk about was wearying, to say the least.

This was also the time I was reading (please don’t laugh) Uncanny X-Men. A LOT. Especially when Claremont was writing and Lee was drawing. The idea of being a mutant, with these fantastical powers and loneliness, was very appealing.

So I did what any redblooded junior writer would.

I started writing fanfic in spiral notebooks. Obsessively. I even cut back on the drinking so I had more time to write. It started out so innocently, a story about Wolverine and a mysterious assassin who seemed to heal just as fast as he did. Then there was the Colossus-Storm mix, because I thought Forge was a wimp and Ororo deserved someone nice. Then I started interjecting my own characters–Mary Sues and Gary Stus, to be sure, but they felt good at the time.

Things crept into my writing. Descriptions of punches I’d recorded in my diary, things I noticed about the world, snippets of conversation I’d heard. I cut back on the drinking even more to have more time to write. I wrote in the bathroom in the middle of the night, my heart in my mouth, sneaking out of my boyfriend’s parties to write on the porch, hiding my notebooks in my locker because my mother went through my diaries at home once or twice and administered a whuppin’ because of what she found.

The writing was always there. I could take almost anything because I was thinking, when I get by myself I’ll write about this. Fixing my attention on that was a disassociative trick to be sure, but it worked. It gave me a future to look forward to.

Eventually, the fanfic stories grew thin. I wanted other characters, I wanted other settings. I had this idea for a book…a fantasy book. And with my heart in my mouth, I tried writing it. Took me years. And I started not writing the X-Men stuff so much, and started writing other little slushy snippets of things. Here and there. Bit by bit.

I moved away from home and in with another boyfriend. That didn’t work out so well. I bounced around different homes, different relationships, writing all the while. An old friend died and I cried with my notebook in my lap, struggling to put the hurt into words so I could get some sort of handle on it–any handle would do, I just needed one.

I found it in the first few paragraphs of another novel–the infamous vampire novel, of course. Which, like the First Fantasy, will never see publication because it’s so sloppy and uneven. But my God, it felt good to write, and it felt good to bleed off some of the pressure of guilt and grief into the structure of a story.

I’ve gone through a marriage and a half since then, and the birth of two children. And several other life events. Writing has been there all the time–the friend that gives me strength to go on when I don’t think I can. The way of transforming the world to make it reasonable, or at least a little less scary.

A few Decembers ago I was in a bad car accident. (Twisty road, nighttime, a deer on its way home and me trying not to kill Bambi.) Hanging upside-down in the truck’s cab, one part of me was screaming in hysterical fear. The largest, Mommy-based part of me was calmly saying, first let’s get this seatbelt off and kick out a window.

Another part of me, the writer, was considering all of this and taking notes. So that’s what this feels like. Damn, it’s good material.

I was fairly calm, all things considered.

It all started with me and a notebook, the pen in my hand and my heart in my mouth, daring to do that most subversive of acts–tell my own story. To honestly and simply tell any story is an act of magic, an act of liberation. It is a lifering when you’re drowning, a way to scramble for higher ground when the water rises. It is sorcery, a way of remaking the world. I felt like a mutant when I was scribbling in those spiral-bound notebooks. Dangerous, lonely, and socially sneered-at–but with a secret power, a talent I could use for good or for evil, something I could do.

And each one of those words saved my life, over and over again. Each was a step up out of the abyss of believing myself worthless, a waste of skin and breath. Even today, each word, over and over, saves my life. It is a net when I’m falling, a rope when I’m drowning, a reminder to be calm when I’m in the middle of smashed metal and glass, smelling gasoline and so scared I can barely breathe.

I once received a fan letter from a woman who rescues elderly cocker spaniels. She said that some of my books had given her hope, that sometimes when she was feeling down about the plight of these poor dogs abandoned by their owners she could read them and forget, or read them and get a little bit of hope. Just a tiny sprinkle.

I cried.

Because if writing can save my own life, and if it can give someone else a little bit of hope, then I consider it one of the greatest acts of magic I’m capable of. Getting paid for it is nice, sure–I have kids to feed, after all. But if something that saved my life can also give someone else a little bit of hope…that’s damn precious. If even one person feels the world is a better place because of this story I’ve told as well as I’m able, I consider my time on earth well-spent.

And that’s really all this writer asks for.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Title: Making Clay
Genre: Writers on Writing
Summary: "...a great man once told me that writers write. Raw material won't come to you in a flash of inspiration and no-one will make it for you."

Down the Rabbit Hole, Alice

Title: The Streets
Author: Elyse LaCroix
Genre: Drama/Romance
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: References to Narcotics in this chapter
Critique: Yes, I love comments and critique
Summary: Alexis is a young woman living in New York City and her world gets turned completely upside down
( The Streets - Chapter One )

I started a new project a couple of years ago, but I never got very far with it. I wrote a few episodes/chapters (and I’ve lost one!!) and tried to plan the whole thing, but… I put the whole thing on ice, and turned to other projects, because I couldn’t figure out the details. I’m still thinking about it sometimes, though.
 

It’s a fantasy story. My problem is that I don’t have much of a plot, or "a bad guy"; in other words, not much action. But the vague contours of the story are something like this:
 

(Any opinion you could have would be much appreciated!)

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
( Read more... )

At the end of this post you’ll get a chance to win a signed copy of Betrayals. I’ll just tell you that up front.

My beautiful weekend suddenly sprouted Things To Do like a wet log in the forest sprouting mushrooms. Not even the good kind of mushrooms either–not edible or, ahem, fun ones. No, these mushrooms are slimy and gunky and poisonous and…oh, yeah, some of you may be trying to eat. Sorry about that.

Well, it’s better than knocking around the house bored. And after Friday I’ll be able to get back into the swing of yoga. That will help tremendously, I suspect. The deep breathing and stretching does wonders.

The Little Prince has fallen in love with, of all things, Mozart. He has a Mozart CD that must be played during schoolwork or at bedtime. If we can’t find the Mozart CD, it is a tragedy comparable to the sinking of the Titanic. Complete with tears, teeth-gnashing, the whole nine. Funny little guy.

And now, for your chance to win a copy of Betrayals! Don’t forget, you can also win a copy over at the Deadline Dames–the Readers on Deadline event ends Wednesday Nov 12th.

But here, it’s a little different. You know I’m doing this luck experiment, right? And it seems to be working. So I want to hear about the luckiest thing that ever happened to you, dear Reader. Put it right in the comments HERE. The contest closes Saturday the 7th at midnight, and I’ll use Random.org to pick a winner from the comment numbers. Please note that I can only send prizes to US addresses. (Please do not tell me what a horrible person I am for not being able to send stuff overseas, mmmmkay?) You will get a signed, personalized copy of Betrayals. And if that ain’t cool, I don’t know what is.

See you tomorrow–the Friday post will be late, because I’m due at the airport in the morning. (Don’t ask.) But I will be around.

Now, tell me about that lucky thing.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

via Teresa Wilde

Title: Fire Editor: Kristin Cashore Format: TC Available Formats: Kindle, Sony eBook, Audio Download, Audio CD Page Count: 461 Genre: Fantasy/Young Adult Publisher: Dial Pub. Date: October 5, 2009 ISBN-13: 9780803734616 Series: A novel in the Grace universe Rating: 10 of 10

Summary:
Fire gets her name from her hair. After all, the shade of her hair contributes to her terrible beauty. Fire is a monster and her unnatural beauty and coloring comes from that fact. Being a monster also ostracizes Fire from society. Of course, it doesn't help that her father was one of the most feared men in the kingdom, Cansrel. He had the ability to enter the minds of others and twist them to his own devices. So can Fire. But Fire does not want to be a second Cansrel...

TL;DR Version:
Anyone who loves unique, strong female protagonists must read this book. Both Graceling and Fire have raised Kristin Cashore up into my favorite authors because of her beautifully rendered protagonists (each unique from the other, both strong in their own way) and interesting world. Do not hesitate to read either book. Although, if pressed, I'd say Fire is a bit deeper than Graceling, I'd recommend reading in order all the same.

( Read the rest at Book Love Affair? )

There's been a lot of talk about why authors should or shouldn't use mature language, themes, or concepts in YA literature. So I did a video!



I'll give you a dollar is you link/repost this. Seriously. A whole dollar. Yep...going to get those dollars now...just keep reposting...

hello im new here i just wanted to introduce myself and also say happy to be part of your community and also can i post any kind of story  i have written on here?