Nano, School Writing, and New Authors

It's Nano time again but I haven't decided whether I'll be participating or not. With my school schedule, I'm not sure I'll have the time or the writing energy to get 50,000 words in print in a month. I may just try to keep track of the friends I made last year and hope they'll let me attend a few of the write-ins even though I'll be writing school papers and not a novel.

I've been writing business papers lately. My head is full of ethics and social responsibility. I don't enjoy researching businesses and their practices and deciding whether they have a heightened sense of ethical conduct or not. Unfortunately, there are not many out there that actually do. I've noticed that many of them do good with one hand while hurting the environment with the other. It all seems to come down to money. I get so disgusted with this class.

The writing part has been good for me though. I'm also taking a professional writing class that is changing how I look at writing. When I was a member of The Writing Bridge, there was one person that I never quite understood. She is very good at taking all the emotion out of a piece and looking at it in a completely objective manner. Her critiques were that way and her writing was that way. This class explains it. She is a researcher and her writing professionally has to be objective, without emotion. You can't do that all day and not have it spill over into your writing. It all starts to make sense now. She was the hardest person for me to understand when she'd critique my work because I look at writing completely differently than she does. Now, I look at what she's written and I get what she's saying. So, thank you for the great critiques, Saoirse, even though the thanks is a bit late.

I've been reading two authors that are new to my library. The first one I finished was a period mystery piece called A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch. It was an Agatha Award nominee so I thought it should be pretty good. He did a decent job of constructing the mystery but I didn't feel pulled into the world he was trying to build. If you do a period piece, you have to know that time thoroughly in order to make it believable. While it was a quick read and fairly entertaining, it seemed a bit flat to me. The characters weren't as engrossing as I'd like them to be. The hero is a happy-go-lucky sort who doesn't have to work at all and solves mysteries because he's basically bored with his life. No problems there although a good dark side to his nature would have made him a bit more interesting. The mystery was pretty well laid out with some very nice red herrings although when you get to the end you've known who did it for a while. It was too obvious. Sometimes you just want to bonk the detective in the head with a board to get them to wake up. Mr. Finch has two other books published in this series and I'm hoping they'll be a bit better. It feels like his characters need to grow up a bit before they're really good characters you want to keep with you. Perhaps Mr. Finch will get better with time and practice. I hope so.

I'll let you know what I think of the second writer when I finish reading the book. It's all right so far but not as good as I was looking for it to be.

Just a quick side note. For anyone out there who is a Sherlock Holmes fan, try the series of books written by Laurie King. She writes of Holmes in his retirement after he got married. She constructs great mysteries and stays true to Doyle's vision of Holmes while adding her own touch with Holmes' wife. They are the best I've found for additions to the Holmes legacy.

The latest thoughts from the kids are: if you're speaking French, you're probably spitting on people and Zim rules. I know you couldn't possibly live without those two pieces of knowledge.