AW Blog Chain October 2011

So I decided to jump out of my hovel and write for the AbsoluteWrite blog chain this month. Maybe make some new friends. Of course, I've managed to sort of screw up posting twice, because you know, I picked a month when I was unpredictably busy, but I'll do better next month. This month's prompt was:

Choose a word from this list of Lovecraftian words or this list of obscure words (or one from both if you're feeling ambitious). Use your chosen word(s) to craft your post. It doesn't have to be Lovecraftian or even horror, but it should be dark, or unsettling, or scary, or Halloweenish in general.

NaNoWriMo is right around the corner, and I wanted to try out my protag's voice a bit (maybe not my protag, actually--I'm not sure if I'm going to write this book or not. Hey, there's still two days to decide, right?) So even though this book won't be fantasy or magical realism at all, I saw the word Necronomicon, and my brain ran off with me. Since I felt I was going to use the concept and not the word, I also worked with antediluvian, for fun. Enjoy, and visit the other entries and blogs of this month's participants at the end of the post.

Strict Pick: STEVE JOBS by Walter Isaacson

About a week ago, someone blogged the following quote from Neil Gaiman on tumblr:

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

Strict Pick: TWILIGHT, the Graphic Novel Vol II (and ARC winners!)

[My strict pick is late this week on account of my giving out a project in the course I'm teaching, which I then had to grade. Oy! I had no idea how long that would take me. Thanks for your patience, and back to the usual MO next week.]

So I was originally going to pick this as my strict pick for this week, but then I hemmed and hawed about it. See the thing is, Twilight has one hell of a reputation in the literary circles. People rail on it for being poorly written, too sensationalized, over-rated. But in some ways, it almost reminds me of Simon Cowell's response to Rebecca Black's "Friday:" "Anyone who can create this much controversy in a week, I want to meet."

Plus, honestly, I'm kind of fascinated by the whole thing. And the way they've been spun out into these graphic novels is well worth talking about. So this week's strict pick is the Twilight Graphic Novel, Volume 2. This one I had a chance to read cover to cover before its release, thanks to it arriving in the store two weeks early (and it being a short book). Graphic novel adaptations are fascinating, in my opinion. Until somewhat recently, it was relatively unlikely that a more mainstream book would be adapted into a graphic novel; that was reserved for the space operas and the superheroes. So perhaps a movie would be made, and that would be the extent of any visual representation of an author's words.  

Strict Pick: Liesl & Po (+ an ARC giveaway)

So I didn't get around to writing this on Tuesday, and here's why: I HAD to finish this book. Some people can write a review after having read only a portion of a title, and honestly, I could have done that. But with this title I wanted to finish. It's that lovely.

Now, I have a bit of a YA reader confession to make. Despite her being all the rage with her twin bestsellers Before I Fall and Delirium, I had yet to read anything by  Oliver when Liesl showed up on the lunchroom table at work. I snatched it up, intending to send it over to my friends at WhatchYAreading.net, but then I opened it and read the preface, and decided to keep this one for myself.