Do you remember reading your first book?

I had this post scheduled to publish on 3/16.  I have no idea why it never did.  I'm sure it has something to do with my lack of HTML skills.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been thinking about reading my first real book ever.  It's probably no surprise that I don't remember since books make into the "dream" file.  That leaves me with only one option.  The books that I remember in the most interesting way.

The Encyclopedia Something or Other.  No, that's not the real title but my parents had a set of encyclopedias that also came with a book of nursery rhymes and another for fairy tales.  I read these often.  When I was older, I read all the mythology stuff repeatedly.

The first book I truly remember wearing down the spine and killing a book from near constant use was really a set of books.  Comic books, actually.  It was the entire Peanuts collection by Charles M. Schulz.  At the time, the collection wasn't that large but it was a seven or eight hardback box set my parents had bought me.  I read that set over and over and over and over.  I remember once asking my dad a question about it.  It went something like this:

Little Miss Brat:  "Dad, how do you pronounce this name?"
Dad: "Bay-toven."
LMB:  "Nuh uh!"
Dad:  "I'm serious.  That's how you say it."
LMB:  "Okay.  Thanks."  But I really don't believe you and I will continue to pronounce it Beeth-oven until I'm truly old enough to know better.

Mr. Schulz is responsible for my very deep love of comics and graphic novels.

"Bunnicula" by Deborah and James Howe.  I loved the vampire bunny so much that this book never made it to the dream file because I owned it for a very long time.  Maybe you can see my tastes developing with the above three choices.

As I got older, a book that I remember made an impact on me was "A Gift of Magic" by Lois Duncan.  I read it in probably the seventh grade.  It was my first experience with a fantasy book made me feel a connection between old world and modern world, today it would be filed under paranormal.  I checked it out from my school library, my favorite place in school.  After a few years, it hadn't gone into the dream file but I couldn't remember who wrote it or where to find it or anything else.  I didn't even remember the title. But I would always think about it every once in a while. Over the years, I had even tried to find it again and never did until just last year.  I knew the word gift was in it and knew that it maybe had the word magic in it.  By some strange chance, I stumbled upon something about Lois Duncan and saw a list of her books.  Voila.  There it was.  I bought it.

Then there's "A Wrinkle In Time" by Madeleine L'Engle, read just after "A Gift of Magic."  I had actually forgotten all about this book until I saw it in a book store many years later.  I got incredibly excited because even though I hadn't thought about it, I remembered it so vividly.  I bought it.  Just remembering reading it brings warm fuzzies.

Then there's "Cat's Cradle."  I can't tell you the author because I don't remember but I can tell you this much:  it was horror and it wasn't William W. Johnstone, as far as I know, his was published several years later.  I came to this after a bender on reading things like "North and South" by John Jakes and the VC Andrews books.  I wanted a change.  So I got into horror and Stephen King.  Here's what makes this book so special, though.  I read it, liked it and a few months later went to check it out from the library again.  I like to reread books.  I ended up with Kurt Vonnegut by mistake.  And now I love Kurt Vonnegut.

I can go on and on about books that made an impact on me in some way, shape or form but the list would get out of control.  All of these books were read at fifteen or under.  It's interesting to go back over them and think about how much they meant when I was a kid.  At the time, I didn't realize what they meant.  Hell, I probably still don't realize it.  If I had to make this list again tomorrow, it might look a little different.

And you thought zombies weren't real.

Time, y'all.  It's just a matter of time. Scientists are involved.  If you're using your handy-dandy once-was-fiction-but-not-anymore guides for zombie destruction (hint: double tap and aim for the brain), that's never good. The zombie apocalypse is nigh. Zombie-proof your homes, build your compounds and prepare to hunker down.  With lots of ammo.
Fungus Makes Zombie Ants Do All the Work
A tropical fungus has adapted to infect ants and force them to chomp, with surprising specificity, into perfectly located leaves before killing them and taking over their bodies

*Thanks to Confessions from Suite 500 for bringing this to my attention.

Red Cross fundraising for Japan relief efforts

The League of Reluctant Adults has an awesome fundraising auction going on!  They've split into two teams to auction off crits of the beginning of your ms and your synopsis, all ya gotta do is win.  And this isn't one crit.  It's everyone on the team reading and critting.  Holy smokes, if that ain't awesome.

Go bid, win a crit and help raise money!

Team Fang

Team Claw

If you haven't seen Margaret Atwood's Publishing Pie talk, check your internet connection, something's not getting through to you.  This awesome talk has spawned T-shirts!

Dream books?

Like most writers, I've read for as long as I can remember.  I started thinking about my first book, trying to find out if I could remember what it was.  Instead, I thought of the book that I thought was a dream.

I had a book when I was young, I can't tell you how young because I don't remember.  As I got older, the memory of this book (and a couple others) faded into the depths of my unconscious.  For a while, I remembered specifics.  Then I remembered bits and pieces.  Then I only remembered illustration.  Illustration morphed into a simple feeling the book gave me.  Until it finally got filed under dreams I must have had when I was a tiny kid.

I found out at *cough, cough, cough* years old that my dream that could've maybe possibly been a book that I once read really was a book.  Before I tell you the title, I must add my disclaimer.  I graduated through the ranks of reading fairly quick and I promise you that once I graduated, I didn't slum it in the younger ages anymore.  I was too well read to go back to kiddie books.  *snark*

My husband and I were in the bookstore (Borders, we're sad to see it go) searching for books to load up for our soon to be born child.  I squealed when I found THE BOOK (or rather, one of a couple).  Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen.  Now you might be snickering at me and wondering why I wouldn't remember a book like that.  Especially since I do remember Where The Wild Things Are.  WTWTA seems to be more visible than In The Night Kitchen.  Let me just refer you back to my disclaimer above.

I knew it when I saw it because the dream-like thing I always remembered was how cool the illustration was but I couldn't describe it, I could only know it when I saw it.  I remember something about a naked boy in a dough airplane flying around a huge jar of milk.  Now, this isn't something you go around asking people, "Hey, was there a book about a naked boy and an airplane?"  Go ahead, ask someone.  I dare you to try it and see what looks you get.  Come back to me afterwards so I can say I told you so.  Because that's precisely why I didn't ask anyone.

I have another book I hope to one day rediscover that has also entered into that "maybe it was a dream" file.  It was dark and scary and had super cool illustration but that really is all I remember about it.  I think it had something do with a couple mice making a deal with the devil.  I also remember a fallen tree.

The Lion, The Witch and Wardrobe (the cartoon, not the book) was like that for me for a couple years, too.  Only the cartoon got played often enough that I eventually rediscovered it much earlier.  I was a kid when I filed it in dreams and was still a kid when I rediscovered it.

Do you have anything like that or am I the only crazy lady in the house?  Have you read something so long ago that you start to think it was a dream when your memory gets all fuzzy and squirelly about it?  Something you think about and wonder if it was a dream or some kind of amalgamation of a book you read with a movie you saw and maybe some urban legend thrown in the mix?

I always think I'm the only person with those.  I'm hoping I'm not.

10k words by Sunday

Yup.  Busy mom, here, goes and decides to have a challenge in the crit group to write 10k words by Sunday.  I have about 2.5k.  I'm behind, as usual.  Today, the only thing I've written is a blog post.  I've been swamped today.  And the rest of the week isn't looking much better.

Late night for me!  Woo hoo!  Who's with me?

*crickets*

I do have a couple of things, though.  I find Write It Sideways to be a fantastic blog.  Lots of great and useful information.  I think I've plugged it before.  This post brought some interesting thoughts.

I'm not very good at writing a short story.  I tend to have too much to say and any story I want to be short ends up growing in plot and size because I can't keep help but add subplots and such.  In essence, I can't write short.  I can't throw away ideas just to keep within a word count.  I've tried, I've failed.  So I plan to look over the links in the post just to see what the hell I'm doing wrong.  I'm sure it's a lot.

On Stacia Kane's blog, there's a great post that not only tells you to not "kill your babies" - thank you, Stacia, I could kiss you, but also a good explanation on what it means to write what you know.  You've heard that said over and over.  I write UF.  I don't know how to fly.  If you don't know that there's a deeper meaning to "write what you know" then this would definitely be a good post to read.

And now I'm off to try to catch up on my word count.

What makes you put a book down?

Over on Nathan Bransford's blog, he's got a poll asking what type of reader you are - the kind to power through what you feel is a bad book or the kind to toss it as soon as you know you don't like it.

It got me thinking - what makes me put a book down?  Since I've generally always powered through even when I was less than thrilled, I never considered myself much of a stopper.  I'll usually put a book down for a while and pick them back up when I've run out of better options on my shelf.  But I have stopped.  And I found that in the last year, I stopped more books than I ever have before.  I stopped three books last year knowing I will never pick them back up.  Which is kind of unheard of for me.  My history has really been to only give up on maybe 1 book every few years.

So why did I put these three down with no desire to pick them back up?

Book 1:
I'm not a fan of first person.  I'm especially not a fan of first person/third person changes.  Even moreso, please don't go from first person present to third person past when switching to different POV characters.  It really bugs me and throws me out of the story.  But even then, I'll usually power on and see if the story will redeem the dislikes - there are plenty of first person stories that I adore even if it's not my favorite POV.

But then there were just things about the story I couldn't accept.  I can easily accept changes in mythology and someone putting a new twist into an old story.  But too much of a twist that just isn't easy for me to picture or get beyond the status quo of what it should be?  Not so much.   If I could handle sparkling vampres, I should've been able to handle this change but I couldn't.  It totally turned me off and coupled with the POV issues for me, it was a total goner.  If I'm too busy complaining about the mechanics, I can't look beyond them and follow where the writer wanted me to go.

Book 2:
It was YA that really should've been more middle grade.  It was simply too young for me and didn't have a good enough sense of wonder and enchantment.  It wasn't like Harry Potter where you could be whisked away without really thinking about the age of the characters.  When the mentality of the characters are that of a 7 year old when they are 16 or 17 and it's not balanced with something redeeming and more mature, its a no-go.  There really needed to be more character development.  I like a good plot but if it's attached to one dimensional characters, it turns a good plot into a bad series of convenient happenings with no depth.  Which may be fine for the actual genre and not really any reflection on whether or not the book was good given the intended audience - I may just be too old for it, after all.  I don't really know what publishers look for in YA and MG as far as maturity of the writing vs. audience expectations.

Book 3:
Oh my God.  There are certain things that the rest of the world might not feel the same way as I do and this might be one of them because when I say bad writing, I don't mean bad grammar or shallow story or flat characters.  I'm sure that less people will agree with me on this one but I can't help it.  It really affects how I view a story.  Here it is:  titles (personal titles, not book titles - things like Major or Captain) that are just dumb.  Whenever I see dumb titles I'm reminded of a movie to which I can't remember the title but here's what I do remember:  the MC was called GS-5 So-and-So.  Now, to most people, this might not matter one iota.  To me, it grated on my nerves absolutely every time it was said because I'm an Army brat and a GS-5 is never called that.  A GS-anything is never called that.  They are called Mr./Mrs./Ms. So-and-So.  It's a pay grade, not a title.  Not to mention that fact that the person you call in as some specialist to Vietnam to handle sensitive stuff, which I no longer remember (that should tell you how much I hate this type of thing - I remember exactly why I hated it but can't remember squat about the story) is not going to be a GS-5.  A GS-5, Step 1 makes about $27.5k today, but much less back when this movie came out.   It's not the paygrade of a badass, even for government standards.  And more importantly, it simply doesn't flow off the tongue.  So when I hear a title, even one that is fictional, it better flow.  This one did not.  It took the mythology the book was based on and turned types and jobs of the different players within the mythology into titles.  And it truly ruined the entire book for me since it was all over the first few chapters.  I put it down in disgust, that's how strongly I feel about crappy titles of people.

What about you?  What kinds of things made you put a book down forever?  We all know the basics.  Bad writing or bad story but what specifically turned you off?