The Big Desk

So I'm writing my first synopsis and it has my brain log jammed.  I don't know  what the heck I'm doing. I have searched for examples other than tips (i.e., first paragraph do this . . .).  I'm so visual in nature I need a concrete example to spring board my own ideas.  I have gone to Story Sensei and searched agent blogs, but have come up empty.  Help! Websites. Books.  I'm open.  Feed me Seymour!!!

X-POST:  book_worm, bookish, booksarelove, readplease & the reading rooms

Title:  The Separating Sickness, Mai Ho'oka'awale: Interviews with Exiled Leprosy Patients at Kalaupapa, Hawai'i
Author:  Ted Gugelyk, Milton Bloombaum
Genre:  Non-fiction, Hawaiiana, Hawaiian History
URL:  Amazon
Price:  US$ 15.95

Summary:  Interviews with Exiled Leprosy Patients at Kalaupapa, Hawaii. Patients tell about having bounties placed on them, being captured, quarantined and imprisoned for life as leprosy patients. Published for the Ma'i Ho'oka'awale Foundation. 16 pages of color photographs.


My Review:  This is an important work, not only because it helps convey what life was like at Kalaupapa on the island of Moloka'i for the "patients" interred there, but mostly because it records the feelings, stories, perseverance and strength of character of the residents of the one-time "leprosy settlement."

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Has anyone else read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle? What did you think of it? Have you applied anything to your life from the book? What changes have you noticed?

The coffee shop in which we had been sitting was a dimly lit kind of place with all kinds of pretentious art crap cluttering the walls. I’m sure that at any given moment, one could easily find a patron there who enjoys the kind of garbage I’m asking you to read. I can say with some certainty, however, that finding a Nicholas Sparks lover there would be very unusual. It was not the sort of place someone who reads Nicholas Sparks would sit and read Nicholas Sparks. That would be embarrassing in such a hip and intellectual place as the coffee shop.

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So, I have been writing an outline/ key scenes for a graphic novel. It is a sci fi adventure that takes place in 1930's dustbowl. I had some questions about research.

1.) How in depth do you all go into for research. I mean should I be a stickler or can I bend the rules a bit and make things not so historically accurate?

2.) what is a good resource about writing and letting your audience know it is in a certain time period without starting the first chapter, "It was a cold morning in the fall of 1932."

Thanks in advance!

Tally Youngblood’s sacrifice from Uglies has turned her into a beautiful, tall, fun-loving, disease-free, and anti-infection masterpiece. In short, she’s a Pretty. Like all pretties, she’s forgotten a lot of what most her life was like as an Ugly beyond the normal dumb “tricks” Uglies do for sport and, of course, being ugly. She drinks champagne, parties all night, stays up until the wee hours of the morning, and wakes up just in time to get ready for the next evening shindig. The only problem is Tally’s also forgotten why she became pretty. When a mysterious stranger arrives with a message from her past, Tally struggles to remember what brought her to New Pretty Town in the first place.

Who’s Croy and what does he have to do with David--a name and face that rises out of her past like a ghost--or, for that matter, with her new best friend, Shay, or boyfriend, Zane? What do the terrifying Specials want with her and why are she and her friends now being closely monitored?

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Torn Slippers: Chapter One

Rating: light R
Word Count: Total 58,120/ this chapter 4,738
Genre: Fairy tale retelling; drama; romance
Author: liadan14 

Summary:
"Do you trust me?" - "Well...no." - "So, you see? You can't be completely crazy yet."
A retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, originally written by the Brothers Grimm. Catherine DiConta is one of thirteen princesses who have a dangerous secret, a dead mother, an overbearing father, and far more trouble than they can deal with. She's faced with a few more fairies than she'd like, the complexities of spellwork, two men who like wearing the colour black, and, possibly worst of all, trying to figure out what on earth is going on in the first place.

Notes & Warnings: The whole thing is written and finished. If anyone wants, I'll gladly post the rest too, though not all at once. I hope someone out there likes it; this is the story that ate my brain. Contains some swearing and slash; also very mild descriptions of sex and violence.

Chapter One here

Title: Solace In Shadow
Rating: T
Wordcount: ~950
Warnings: Angst, Mental Illness
Summary: I remember him well.
Author's Note: Another short story with Cameron. She's really starting to grow on me.

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At that moment, Lee showed up.  I always thought that Lee looked more like a Tom than a Lee.  He was tall, his head was shaved, he was large—overweight I think, actually, although I would never say that because he’s so sensitive about things like that (although his nonchalance makes it seem like he isn’t)—and yet somehow looked like he was nine years old.  Maybe it was the way he dressed that made him look that way.  Anyway, he should have come off as intimidating, given his god-given bodily figure.  Instead, he came off as very nice and very sociable but somewhat insecure.  You could tell he was kind of insecure because of his humor, which was self-deprecating without being dark.  Sometimes he would make jokes about being ugly.

Personally, although I swear I don’t subscribe to any stupid universal-love-like beliefs, I find it easy to find things beautiful that are not, really, classically beautiful.  Even those things that someone like me might, every once in a while, in a conversation, forgetting for a moment that I can find beauty in everything, say is “the kind of ugly that just can’t be beautiful,” or “really profoundly mundane, so that it just can’t be beautiful,” or “like a scrap of white plastic, like, plastic all the way from the 70’s, sitting on a granite counter, and maybe from being beaten up it has a couple of grooves in it filled with dirt.  But the contrived contrast between the plastic and the granite makes it impossible for the situation to be beautiful.”  The reason I let you in on that fact about me is that I want to tell you that I didn’t find Lee ugly.  Lots of people would reassure him that he was not ugly, but I really meant it.  They didn’t.

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Title: Lost Time Can Never Be Recovered
Rating: R
Wordcount: ~1100
Warnings: Angst, Profanity, Violence, Mental Illness
Summary: Is this story true? If I can trust what I was told, then yeah, apparently it is. But I've learned that I can't trust her. I'd say this is probably only maybe true. I don't know. I don't remember.
Author's Note: Critique is totally welcome. Be as brutally honest as possible. I would eventually like to write Cameron in a novel that I could possibly eventually sell, and I'd like to know if it's a waste of time now. Praise is also welcome, of course. If you hate it, tell me why. That is all. Enjoy!

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Okay, I'm new to this, so...
Basically, this is a story that I'm working on, and it's not done yet. But, I thought I'd share it, because it's Christmas Eve and all that. So, I hope you like it!
The only thing that you have to watch out for is some minor swearing that only occurs once, but I just thought I'd let you know. :)
( Farquil )

XPOST:  booksarelove, book_worm, bookis, readplease, thereadingroom

Title: Mama Fish
Author: Rio Youers
Genre: Dark Fiction (horror/speculative)
URL: Amazon
Price: $7.99 (note that this is a novella length work at 92 pages)

Summary (from the publisher): At Harlequin High School In 1986, Kelvin Fish was the oddball, the weird kid that no one would talk to, except for Patrick Beauchamp who was determined to learn more. When Patrick's curiosity about Kelvin leads him into a bizarre and tragic series of events, Patrick gets much more than he bargained for.


My Review: Damn, Rio Youers can write.

Mama Fish is an interesting little novella and one that is hard to categorize. Part coming-of-age, part befriended misfits, part urban horror, and part speculative, this novella is most certainly a page-turner, keeping me engrossed the whole way.

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First chapter up! I apologize in advance - still in the un-beta'ed stage. Still looking for a beta-reader somewhere... As usual, critiques and comments are love :)

Happy holidays to everyone!

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Title: Bees
Rating: T
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Warnings: Bi-lingual swearing and spontaneous combustion

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année mon amis

http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2750337/3/

It’s lucky that we have another MaddAddam book to read, lucky because Atwood didn’t initially plan to write another book like Oryx and Crake, lucky that The Year of the Flood fleshes out her frightening dystopian world and gives us much more to hope for.

The Year of the Flood isn’t a sequel to Oryx and Crake. It works as a companion book, following the timeline of events leading up to and around our experience with Jimmy and Glenn (a.k.a. Crake). One of the biggest differences, aside from point of view, is the inclusion of religion in the text and the influential presence it has to the characters and their motivations. God’s Gardeners is a religious group formed out of a mutual dislike of the direction science and society has taken. Under their leader, Adam One, the Gardeners are strict vegetarians--when the situation allows this to be the healthiest outcome--and waste nothing. Their reversion to crafting, cooking, and hand-sewing clothes or recyclables is in reaction to society’s heavy dependence on technology. Coincidentally, it also becomes their saving grace when technology (more specifically, electricity) breaks down in the days, weeks, and months following the mysterious plague (this, too, is a technological terror) that wipes out most of civilization. Unlike other dystopian books where this pre-modern state is adopted out of necessity, the Gardeners have chosen this way of life as part of their religious doctrine. As a result, they’re tough survivors.

As the book opens, we’re given two narrators (three if we could Adam One’s proselytizing speeches; four if we count the religious songs of the Gardeners): Ren and Toby. Both were once Gardeners, but now find themselves alone in the middle of a ravaged city, teetering on the edge of total destruction, with quickly depleting food supplies and no idea of knowing if they’re the only ones left alive. Ren is trapped in an isolation suite above a dance studio--the kind of dancing done on the SeksMarket--with all the amenities of a small hotel at her disposal. Toby has taken up shelter at a women’s day spa with lots of organic moisturizers that double as semi-nutritious snacks. If the two are to survive another day, they need to venture outside to find other sources of calories, protein, and weapons to protect them from the vicious wolvogs (unnamed here, but prior knowledge having read Oryx and Crake helps) and scheming pigoons (explained finally as “pig balloons”).

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Jordan's been asleep since 10:00. Curled up on the couch like a stray dog wearing baggy sweats, she's the kind of stray dog you'd gladly take home from the parking lot at Wiggly Foods without a second thought. Or a first thought, even. It'd be take-home autopilot, something you'd respond to without thinking.

"Hop in, girl," you'd say, and let her ride shotgun in the cab of Gloria, nose wind-surfing out the half-down window of the rusting, '87 Ford F-150 you got when Uncle Leddy kicked the bucket for the third and final time.

"Gloria -- this is," you'd say in introduction, "... what's your name, again?" She'd look at you with those lonesome, winsome, distant-close, warm-you-to-the-bone eyes. "Take me home, Big Boy," her slow, blue eyes would say, "we don't need words to interact."

And you'd obey. You'd do whatever those eyes asked, as long as you could let this feeling linger on. Because, somehow, in the genus of her own, non-ape indie world, she made you species jump and feel human.

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20091223 11:07 Wed (658 words)

I would like to buy The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides as a gift but the person wants the original cover.

There are several covers available and I don't know which is the original.

Does anyone know?

Book Title: The Tiger's Child

Author: Torey Hayden

Category: Abuse, special needs

# of pages: 264

My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best].: A

Short description/summary of the book: This is the sequel to One Child. (See my post on that here: http://community.livejournal.com/books/1991849.html?mode=reply) Tiger's Child picks up with Sheila's life from when she turns 14.

My Thoughts: I liked this book a lot. I just had to keep reading in order to find out what was going to happen with Torey and Sheila's relationship and with them as individuals. These two books have made me want to meet Sheila and Torey, or at least write to them.

It's amazing to me to hear what a person, especially a child, can go through so much and come out not only alive but functional in life. These things include molestation from a family member, abandonment, an alcoholic and drug addicted father, foster care and simply not fitting in.

I think Torey Hayden's books are important for anyone in general and for anyone that is fighting with abuse, wants to work with special needs kids or someone that wants to read a hardship story.

Books read this year: 50\50 (WOOHOO!! I'm excited about that.)

Next read: Murphy's Boy by Torey Hayden