WRITE NOW NEWSLETTER – JANUARY 2012

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” – Mark Twain

Hi Writers:

I don’t typically make resolutions, but I do accept challenges. This year I have accepted the challenge to read 50 books and watch 50 movies. You too can join at http://www.fiftyfifty.me/ It will be a stretch. According to goodreads.com, I read 27 books last year. According to my increasingly shoddy memory, I watched about 12 movies. Time to crank up the volume.

The folks at fiftyfifty.me encourage us to create majors and minors by choosing lists of books in different categories. I chose two groups: books for fun and books to study for writing.

In the “books for fun” category, I began New Year’s Day by listening to part of The Night Circus on CD. It’s steampunk full of magical realism and not my usual fare, but it was written during National Novel Writing Month a few years ago and came highly recommended by some of my best writer friends. So far I’m enjoying it. With a second-person prologue, it can’t be all bad!

As the first book in the “books to study for writing” category, I chose The Leisure Seeker: A Novel which was recommended by a friend who’s a former editor. Zadoorian wrote the novel as a way to harness the material provided by watching his parents age. My friend, now a literary consultant, suggested that the book might give me some insight on how to distance myself when writing about similar experiences with my parents. Only 59 pages in, I can see how Zadoorian mined what he knew to shape the characters.

What about you? Any writing-related resolutions on your agenda for 2012? As always, I’d love to hear about them. If you would like, please leave a comment on my blog, BumGlue.

Nita Sweeney
(c)Nita Sweeney, 2012, all rights reserved
 

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