Hey, do you like free books? Do you like free coffee from Starbucks?  Do you have a nook or similar E-reading device?

Well Sure you do.

Both Barnes and Noble and Borders are giving away free e-books on their websites. And not just books in the free domain though those are there too.  I saw a few big name sellers like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and a James Patterson book.  Not really my thing but its there.  The weirdest one I saw was a short story.  I’m not quite sure what I feel about short stories being sold or given away without any other works attached to them quite yet.  (More on that later)

Anyways download a free book, take your device to a Starbucks in a Barnes and Nobles, show the kid behind the counter that you have downloaded the book using the BN E-reader, and then the kid will give you a free tall coffee.

The other night I was having a discussion with a friend about what movie to rent for our movie night.  I suggested we watch the new Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland.   He looked at me like I was nuts.  I know that not everyone is into the weirdness Tim Burton weaves into the stories he retells so I was prepared to leave it at that.  But then my friend said something I wasn’t prepared for, he asked if it bothered me that Tim Burton was bastardizing our childhood.  And then he went out on a rant about what a horrible thing Johnny Depp and Tim Burton had done to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ending with “proof” that Gene Wilder thought the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was just a money making scheme. Read more »

This week is the last week of classes.  Huzzah.  In preparation to say goodbye to my students, me and fellow Barker, Monsieur Fuller, have been running a writing workshop to help students talk out their thesis ideas and to explain to them one more time that I am sure a question mark cannot go in the middle of a sentence.  Overall, though, I must say I am pretty impressed with what I have seen so far.  I know I’ve complained about this class before on here but they are really stepping it up a notch.

On that note I had one young lady come in to a session really frustrated.   Then again she was also writing her paper on her IPod.  Anyways I asked her why she was so frustrated and she that she was a really good writer but she wrote fiction and writing academically was tough for her and she couldn’t understand why.  She also said she was “complete pathos with her writing.”

I had never heard a writer talk about their own work like that or even use that word in that way so I went and looked it up.  Dictionary.com says that pathos is the feeling of pity or suffering one gets when exposed to a work of art or an experience.  I guess I don’t really know what this girl meant when she said that her work was pathos but I think she was speaking to the goal of her fiction, to elicit a feeling of sympathy and caring for her characters.  I can buy that completely that is a goal of fiction.  What I have had a hard time with lately is how to do that without making the reader feel sad or pity for a character.   It’s true the best stories seem to depend on the reader having that yucky pity feeling but in a lot of ways that seems like a false way to represent the human experience, which I kind of think is the main goal of writing, art,  everything.  Read more »

I hope everyone out there is enjoying their long weekend with barbeques and camping trips.  Unfortunately Washington has had record cold temperatures all week and today finally has some sun.  I am so excited about my favorite activity associated with my lifestyle as a writer: to sit out in the sun with my computer and a glass of ice tea.  After this holiday weekend the market will be flooded with thousands of MFA grads all going for the same few jobs, the few same publishing contracts, and in reality, most of us will end-up waiting tables or answering phones or something like that.  It’s true.  There is no escaping it.  Everywhere I turn its, welcome to the one of the worst job markets ever.  It’s positively soul sucking. I think the only way to avoid a trip to the insane asylum is to focus on the things that make what we are all trying to do worth it.  So in that regards here is my top ten reasons why I love that I’m a writer. Read more »

So I came across this speech on ted.com given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (try saying that three times fast) about the danger of single story narratives.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with her work, she is Nigerian and educated in the United States.  Adichie is the author of The Thing Around Your Neck and Half of a Yellow Sun. In her talk she tells a story about her American roommate who asked to listen to some of Adichie’s music.  Adichie lends the roommate her Mariah Carrey CD and the roommate is disappointed that it wasn’t a collection of tribal chanting and is amazed that Adichie speaks English. Read more »

I haven’t read any of the new re-worked books from Quirk Classics but I want to see the movie.   (Dawn of the Dreadful trailor) How come we don’t make trailors like this for all books?  People would seriously read more if we had this kind of advertising.  In all seriousness I’m not quite sure how I feel about these books.  Not so much about the fact that they exist (I am a huge fan of zombies) but more so I am concerned with the language they use when talking about the author of the original work.  This is taken directly from the Quirk Classic website:  “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters coauthor Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina: an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a strange new world of robots, cyborgs, and interplanetary travel.”  Something about them calling Tolstoy the collaborator just feels wrong and unfair.  I know it’s a joke and maybe I’m being a stick in the mud but poor Tolstoy.  Some how I feel like we were able to raise Jane Austen from the dead, and assuming she didn’t come back as a zombie herself,  and she was able to give us her opinion on her being considered the collaborator for her own novels it wouldn’t bother her.  But I imagine Tolstoy would be very upset.  He didn’t even get a cool title.  Android Karenina just doesn’t have the same snap as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

I’d like to set the scene for you.   Me sitting on my couch eating my deliciously oversized, extra-sharp cheddar cheese omelet watching 50,000 people running by my window.  A high school garage band has been playing “Thriller” for two hours, police sirens are going off, and the only way out of my apartment is blocked by people drinking beer and banging on paint buckets.   So in order to keep myself and other Sunday morning procrastinators motivated I’d like to share a few poached tips from the Guardian’s book blog, which they poached from Elmore Leonard’s book 10 Rules of Writing. These are just a few of my favorite quirky tips.  Check out the website for more! http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

“Using adverbs is a mortal sin” –Elmore Leonard Read more »

Vampires are literally everywhere I look the last two weeks.  It started with those silly Twilight novels.  (Don’t get me wrong when I say silly, I’m totally for them even though I hope never to read them.  People read them and right now the fact that anybody is reading anything is just pure awesomeness) Then the second movie is making it to DVD so anytime I go anywhere/open a web page/open my eyes, people are talking about them.  Then, in this class I’ve kind of been teaching (sort of), we are reading Dracula.  If you haven’t been forced to read it yet, I highly suggest picking up a copy.  I am thoroughly enjoying my experience and it is a surprisingly quick read.

So anyways, the class is set up so that my fellow TAs and I mostly just run online discussion boards and then we get to have two “breakout sessions” where we actually get to talk to the students face to face.    Let me tell you, it was like pulling teeth to get anyone to say anything about the book.  Personally, I feel like I had this set-up pretty well.  I had the class arranged so we were sitting in a circle to encourage a Socratic discussion, I showed a video clip, and I had my discussion points laid out pretty well and pulled them from places like Spark Notes so I knew they weren’t too hard.  But when push came to shove no one would say anything except for few of the older women in class.  Finally, I had to do it, I asked them if they read the pages they were supposed to.  All of the eyes in the class immediately looked away from me.    I think only four people in a group of 19 read the mere 150 pages they had a week and a half to read.  So I asked if they were struggling with reading or if they were confused about something.  The only answer I got was reading was really stupid and they didn’t think they should have to read a book.  It was too much work.  It was terrifying.  Not to sound crotchety or anything, but what is with kids today? Is it laziness?  Is it that they really don’t know how to read?  Is it that no one has ever failed them?  There have been times in my life when I didn’t do my homework, sure, but when I screwed up I got a bad grade.  No one felt sorry for me.  I got what I deserved.

What really bothers me is that we are raising a generation of illiterate people and giving them a diploma because we want to say we have an educated workforce.  I used to think that the reason people weren’t reading anymore was because writers write stuff that only writers would like.  Now I think that as a society we are becoming illiterate and so books that are anything more than juvenile vampire literature is too much to handle.

When I say that I mean that I don’t really understand why people do evil things in literature or in the real world but evil senseless acts happen all the time.  Fortunately (and unfortunately), I haven’t met any Iago type villains in the real world.  I certainly haven’t met anyone who I know is a serial killer, though I have my doubts about a few people.  I’ve met plenty of people I don’t like, and people who are lazy, and people who are selfish, and people who are afraid so as a result they do things that I think are bad.  Most of the people I know who do selfish acts that look evil to me have been extremely hurt.  But, then again, everyone has been hurt in some horrible way because its not a matter of if bad things happening but when and where it will happen.

So that being said what is it about these pains and hurts that makes one person turn serial killer, versus a comedian, versus a saint or even a writer?  The simple answer is to look at life experiences that give people the coping skills or lack of coping skills and then justify that with their motivations and emotions. When I say it out-loud this sounds almost formulaic but I find myself almost never “buying” the conflicts in writing.  It usually seems phoned in and convenient.

I did read Junot Diaz’s Drown again this week and he is the master of complications and evil acts.  He can boil down a conflict and make it, all at once, be rooted in the global community, the local community, a family, cultural expectation and in the realm of the individual character.  Granted Diaz is playing on some easily identifiable tropes (especially the machismo and the American immigrant experience) and I feel like a good chunk of his characters come from his real life.  So if we are fortunate to come from a world where these problems aren’t a problem for us how do we do it too?

This week the best episode of South Park ever aired.  It starts out with the boys reading The Catcher in the Rye. Their teacher warns them about all of the controversy surrounding that book and of course that just makes the kids super-excited to read it.  “Whoa you are telling me this book is filthy and inappropriate and made the guy kill the king of hippies? Can we please read this now!?!” They go home and tear through the book and decide it wasn’t worth the controversy and write their own raunchy book which becomes a national phenomenon leading up to the assassinations of Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Kardashian.

It got me thinking about this book I read that I was really psyched about and it was flat out boring.  It was one of those books that I’ve heard all kinds of good things about it and how exciting it is supposed to be. It just did nothing for me for whatever reason.  I won’t go into details about which book it is because it really doesn’t matter.  People enjoy it and that’s great and I don’t see much reason to rain on their parade about it but it got me thinking about how sometimes the legends behind books and authors become just as intriguing (or sometimes more intriguing) than the writing.  We all love a crazy author story.  This book that I read was kind of like that.  I heard all of these crazy rumors about the author and while it got me to purchase a copy of the book, I felt kind of betrayed.  And I wonder if the book would have been more successful if I hadn’t come in with expectations and been able to take the book on its own terms.  Anyways while I won’t recommend the book to you I do suggest taking a look at this episode.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/267108