I started a new project a couple weeks ago & it's evolved into historical fiction.  This means research. Lots of it. I'm not sure I  like this so much. I DO love the way things just fall into place, though. When you have a history to base everything on, it's so much easier. It seems almost like cheating. One moment, huge plot hole, the next - the ( Read more... )

I finally bought Eyes Like Stars. I am looking forward to reading it, since I've been hearing about it for months. Sometimes, I hate the number of ARCs that filter out :P

I also picked up Skullduggery Pleasant as a part of my ongoing investigations into MG lit. Review so far: better than 95% of YA and 103% of Adult. (And that applies to both MG and ( Read more... )

Mango Shaped Space is the most creative, well written, brilliant, touching, enthralling, and all other shades of awesome YA book I have read in a long time. There seems to have been, as a brilliant friend of mine put it., a "mehpedemic" of late in YA literature. A very few things on the shelves now catch my attention, and even fewer of those turn ( Read more... )

I am trying to start posting. Yes, again. I need RL to chill out before I can really do this, I think, but I'm going to try anyway.

I was reading a book the other day. I'm not going to name it, because I don't have positive things to say. It was a book I bought from an indie store in a small, out of the way town in WI. I didn't really want anything ( Read more... )

Finishing Graceling left me with a great many questions about what makes a book "good", what makes me like a book - and more to the point, what makes me READ a book. Slightly disjointed pondering ensued...

I'm wondering what exactly it is that makes me pick up a book and read it, what that drive is. There are times I pick a book to escape this world ( Read more... )

Since I won the writing contest, I have a $100 gift card to B&N that needs spending. I know where about $50 of that is going, which leaves me with another $50 to spend. I could find titles from my list of want to reads, but I'm in the mood for something a little different. There's something anticlimactic about winning and buying only books I've ( Read more... )

So lately, I've decided my knoweldge of Greek mythology was pitiful, and so this month, I'm setting out to change that. One of the beauties of homeschooling; I get to pick my topics of study. This month, I've chosen ancient Greece- and along with that, the Greek pantheon.

And I've been absolutely fascinated by it. Yeah, they're great stories, ( Read more... )

Back from vacation.. just like everybody else, right?

A slight recap of highlights:

Vacationing with the extended family. Always a pleasure, right? Ahem. Grandfather left a paper bag full of hot coals leaning aginst the wooden house and sitting next to a gas tank. He put it outside  right before he went to bed. By the time Parental Authority the ( Read more... )

Vampire Academy by.. well, I actually dont remember the author and I'm too lazy to go get it & check. But it just came out, and it is an AWESOME book. No, really.  I read it last night, and the result was concentration issues in my writing session this morning. I kept flickering back to the book... great, really great. You should read it ( Read more... )

So the REAL highlight of my vacation gets its own post.  The North Shore is home to some of the best used bookstores I've ever been in. They have CHARACRTER, yanno? High, creaky shelved piled high with books in no rational order- old books, new books, fiction, fantasy, world history, folklore, secret societies, whaling- anything you can possibly ( Read more... )