Interesting little do-hicky we got here. It's too late to go research their calculation methods here, but the "readability" formulas I've seen/used generally do something like compare number of syllables/words/sentences in a set amount of text.

Movie Reviews

Ok, so I'm (really, we're) getting the granddaddy of all early Christmas presents next Wednesday. I need to prep for that and get this room back into thinking order. It's seriously damaging my calm and my ability to create.


And of course, the Halloween party is on the 25th. We absolutely positively have to have an immaculate house if we're really going to do up the theme "Alternate Universe".

Here's what I'm trying to work with now:



I'm challenging myself to see how far I can get with taming this mess. I've got an all day crop on Sunday and this mess is just frakking with my page-making-kit chi. More pictures to follow, hopefully showing an improved thinking atmosphere.

I'm about 30 pages of material in. Something Stephenie Meyer said, in an interview or some blog, maybe her website has been very freeing for me. She spoke of writing scenes she liked first. Wait...you mean I don't have to start at the beginning and end with the end?

I'm just writing about what these characters are dealing with. I'm jumping blythely through time and have avoided most self-defeating thoughts. I do notate a jump in scene with a couple of asterisks, just for my own good. I've also switched point of view to include a second character. It has taught me more about their world, writing in the third person. I always prefer to write in first person, and I wouldn't be surprised if I went back to it permanently at some point, but I had a ton of fun today and I even made myself cry a little while writing.

I feel like the writing process is completely different from what I tried to teach my kids. I have no deadline and I have no audience. I'm in the state of pure percolation - I thought about this story for nearly a week in between writing sessions and that was purposeful time, even if I was being a little bit lazy at the same time. I'm not worried about anything except like being too much like Twilight or too much like Harry Potter. Plot wise I think I'm good, but I do find myself stretching to express my self on the singular word level so I don't inadvertantly invoke some other story.

I may have a friend interested in reading Robin McKinley. My metaphoric fingers are crossed even as the real ones are poking at the books that have fallen under the bed, trying to find the two missing volumes that this friend actually asked for.

Oh yeah, one more thing:

I started writing a book these past ten days or so.  I've told no one about it, but I am having the time of my life.  I don't know if it was the new work space, the interviews with Stephenie Meyer, or what.

I've been writing about the general story for YEARS, always thinking to work in Short Story form.  Deciding to do a book length piece of work has been very freeing, as has been the knowledge that I was doing this just for my own pleasure.  My head is so filled with creative ideas again that I can barely walk for stumbling some times.

I also love having this little secret.  We talk about our days, we catch up with friends, and always there is this little sentence that I speak on the inside: I am writing a book.

It's been a good week.

Please bow your heads as I prepare to give thanks for a blessing we have received for the last 29 years:

Lynn Johnston has officially ended her comic strip, "For Better or Worse" after 29 years. Beginning tomorrow she will return to the story's beginning and start again.  While I look forward to picking up some of the story lines I missed (I was 3 when the strip started and did not start to follow it until middle school) I am definitely going to miss the new material as it would have unfolded. Michael and I are roughly the same age and I have appreciated looking into his life as a married adult in addition to seeing how his parents view mostly adult children.

I ran into gaps during my college years where I didn't have access to much TV or a regular newspaper.  I walked in on the last days of Farley quite by accident and actually sought papers out during that time. I missed Elizabeth's high school years and Michael's courtship of his wife.  I know the family was kind to several of Michael's friends as they wobbled out into the adult world and this will always earn my loyalty, but I know this mostly from wikipedia articles. I discovered one could read comic strips on yahoo and so have been following the strip daily again for the last several years.  Along with 9 Chickweed lane, which first caught my attention because it was originally set in NH, these are the only two comics I follow.  I drop in on Get Fuzzy, Close to Home (read Farside version 2.o), and Pearls B just on occasion.

Some of my favorite story lines of the last year were the love and respect shown to Jim after his most recent stroke.  Lynn Johnston ended her final "new" strip by giving us all a blurb about each character's life after the wedding.  I started getting the "uh oh moist eyes gonna start to choke up a little now" feeling as we learn that Jim lives to see Elizabeth's first child.  I'm glad to know what happens to this family - I like the little blurbs you get about character's at the end of TV shows and movies, although I don't always like getting this info in books. (Harry Potter was a particular disappointment as I had looked forward to wondering what followed the final battle at Hogwarts for the rest of my life, just as I will spend the rest of my life wondering about Will and Lyra.).

I am a bit ambivalent about Johnston's plans for the future, "If I could do it all over again...would I do some things differently?...I've been given the chance to find out."  Robin McKinley's Beauty was a perfect story to me.  Years later she published Rose Daughter, a re-visioning of Beauty. I think redoing a story is interesting more for the author and the readers who look at them analytically. The part of me that is not analytical, who is just the fan up to her elbows in a beloved story with cherished characters, usually doesn't enjoy the re-visioned work.  I will probably buy Midnight Sun, by Stephenie Meyer when it is published but since it is the first novel written from a different main character's point of view I am not as excited about it as I would be for new material.  My main interest will be curiosity of the analytical kind, particularly since I'm interested in seeing if the writing continues to mature.

I printed the final comic on my fancy new printer - it will go into a frame and onto the wall, for inspiration and as a momento. So much of my life paralleled the kid's lives it will serve as tribute to a fabulous storyteller but also as a sentimental artifact.  It has earned its place in my library right next to the McKinleys, Lackeys, Brysons, Marilliers, Nixes, Shinns, Rowlings, Pullmans, Harrises, Homers, and the countless other authors who might be represented by a single piece of work but have caught me with that single work.

One of my favorite rereads is also one of my favorite re-views.

I generally read Pride and Prejudice at least once a year - I enjoy it far above all the other Jane Austen books I've read. (I haven't read Northanger Abbey or Mansfield Park yet - I'm too afraid to read them and then have no more "new" Austen books to read.)

The Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth film version of Pride and Prejudice has also been one of my favorite things to watch - it wasn't uncommon for me to run it in the background back when I could see the TV from my table in the library. 

Now, I am NOT a Keira Knightly fan, by any stretch of the imagination. I enjoyed watching her in Domino and Bend it Like Beckham.  There's something about the way she stretches her mouth around her teeth when she talks and acts at us that annoys me to no end.  So you can imagine how thrilled I was to learn that not only was someone DARING to remake Pride and Prejudice, but they were further cheapening it by replacing an actress who could say everything with the way she looked at the person across from her with Keira Knightly.  My only hope was that Matthew McFayden, who I liked in MI-5, was playing Darcy.

I held out for a long time - much in the same way I refused to watch Stargate SG1 when Farscape was cancelled, I refused to watch this most recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. 

I did watch it, and I was truly and honestly horrified. I didn't think there was any chemistry between the two leads and I was annoyed that they glammed up the ending.

For the past couple months Pride and Prejudice has been playing nearly constantly on Oxygen and so I've begun to watch it in the background since it is easier to watch on cable than replace Max and Ruby, The Incredibles, Cars, and Thomas in the DVD player.

The first thing that won me over was the glammed up, made up ending where Elizabeth and Darcy are sitting half-clothed on some sort of balcony outside and they are discussing how Mr. Darcy should refer to Elizabeth.  It took a few viewings, but eventually the reverent "Mrs. Darcy. Mrs. Darcy. Mrs. Darcy." got to me.

Many, many viewings later - to the point where even my own Mr. Darcy noticed what I was watching, I happened to be truly watching during the Ball when Darcy and Elizabeth dance.  The first time I must have been so disappointed that I missed what the director had done - eventually you realize that Elizabeth and Darcy are dancing in an empty room instead of a crowded ballroom. I think even the color of the walls of the room were different.  They must have filmed the dance twice and woven the shots together.  It's the sort of thing that is one of the reasons to make a movie out of a fabulous book - the director actually found a way to show us more.  The impropriety of Elizabeth's mother and sisters is also more blatant here - you see them lounging over couches and then doing their best to hide crumb covered dishes and their mending when an unexpected guest is revealed. A tipsy Mrs. Bennett spills her desert on an innocent bystander at the ball.  We see her parents through windows and framed in the bedposts. We see the mud and the farm animals behind the Bennett house and the movie plays more upon the idea that Elizabeth notices her change of heart when faced with Pemberly's grandure, although I think Keira Knightly makes this fact less subject to censure when she gives that tiny little laugh at fate in general when she first sees the sculpture room.

And now I'm hooked.

I can love two things at the same time, I guess. I'll always love what lies between Jennifer Ehle's and Colin Firth's Elizabeth and Darcy.  I've come to love the spaces around the characters in this latest version.

I'm in that limbo stage again of needing to find something *new* to read.  Two of the series that have occupied my time for the last year or so have finished off.  I finished Kushiel's Mercy a week or two ago, with just enough time to reread through parts of it before Breaking Dawn was released last Saturday.  I finished Breaking Dawn very late Saturday night and while I'm still rereading specific chunks of it I am also trying to figure out where to go from here.  One of the things I like about Fantasy books is that they tend to be lengthy books with a number of sequels.  If you are a fast reader or a constant reader, or some sort of reader in between, single, stand-alone books of any genre can be a little disappointing.  I remember staring at the books in a new bookstore on Main Street in Marlborough when I was probably 11 years old.  At the time there were new Bobbsey Twin books out as well as the Cheerleader and Sweet Valley High books and all of them cost about $4 and were skinny, to boot. I actually chose not to spend my money on any book that day because I knew I would just be disapointed in the end.  I am happy for middle-school aged readers today because there is just so much more to choose from than there was 20 years ago.

I'm leaving for a short vacation in a few days and I'm trying to decide what to bring for reading material now. If I could find it I would bring Eat Pray Love but I seem destined to find and loose that book again and again. 

My trip to Barnes and Noble last night was a little frustrating - vampires are EVERYWHERE.  I liked the Stephenie Meyers vamps but the only other "traditional" vamp stories I can bear are the Southern Vampire books.   I've tried picking up some of the other vampire related books and I just can't stomach them.  I wouldn't want to read about the Southern Vampires if it weren't for Sookie, and I would be less inclined to like the SM's vamps were they not "vegetarian".   It feels like a pretty long wait until Robin McKinley's next book (which is not vamp related) comes out this fall and it is definitely a long while before we'll get the next Sookie Stackhouse book. 

I couldn't even find a good suduko book to take up north.  Starting to worry, over here.  

My current new read is the Bible.  I have managed to get past the first twenty pages or so, which is quite a feat as I have tried to read it a few times before.  There was a truly terrible made for TV movie from 2000 or 2001 about some key Bible figures on TV a week ago.  There were very many recognizable actors on it and it struck me how terrible a job they were doing.  They spoke their lines like they were reading the ingredient list off a soda bottle. I expected more feeling or passion than what I saw.  To me, a casual observer on the outside, I had always thought these stories were more moving and that they should engender more passion.

So I decided to read it for myself, and I have actually gotten through the part I saw on the movie and a little further.  I've been stuck reading about the red and purple stuff being made to house the golden ark (of the covenant?) and how many tabs should be on each side of each panel for the last few days. These explicit descriptions seem to get told to one person and then repeated. A lot.  For you Mosaic of Thought fans out there, my book to book connections for the Bible so far are:

I think they were talking about the dimensions of the ark and the curtains to go over it for about as long as Harry and Hermione were stuck in that damn tent in the woods and not quite as long as Imriel was tromping through the snow of Russia.

I am also getting a kick out of recognizing phrases from other books, like the use of the phrase 'Fat of the land'. I may get a two second flash of Lenny stroking a bunny each time I come across the phrase, but I do understand the influence of this work of literature on everything else, even if I have no familiarity with the original source material.  When you study English at school long enough you also get a half-way decent review of history since the two are so tied together. To a similar extent you get a smaller review of what is going on in the Bible, just from the sheer number of references made. 

I've had an interest in reading most of the basic religious texts from across the world for some time.  Jacqueline Carey's books have helped influence that as well, as has been my idle poking through the Unitarian websites.

I have to work to remind myself that though an interest in literature prompted this reading, it was not written as literature and therefore I have to deliberately choose not to be critical of execution of the story (as in the tendency for one person to get a description from God and then turn around and repeat everything to another person in entirety).

I've also been doing a lot of thinking about Neville Longbottom, but I do want to review a couple of chapters of HP7 before I write about it.