22 Nov
Okay SO MUCH TO SAY.
1. Apologies for not blogging in so long and dropping the ball on NaNo month. You can blame NaNoWriMo itself.
2. The CONTEST is being extended until Dec. 10th because… well… there is no real reason. I felt like it. So go enter and tell other people to enter and… stuff like that.
3. I WILL start blogging again once the nano is over. Seriously. Pinkie swear. I’ll finish the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants blogs and do more reviews and everything.
8 Nov
How many years have you done NaNo in the past? How many times have you won?
I have done it once. I only got to 10,000 if I’m remembering correctly.
What genre are you writing this year?
YA Fantasy
What’s your title/working title? Do you have one?
Pale Shadows
Can you tell us anything about your novel?
I hate writing my synopsis. It’s about faeries though, evil faeries.
What was the idea or inspiration behind this novel?
Um, I’ve always wanted to read a book where the MC and narrator was an evil fantastical creature. I couldn’t find one, so I had to take matters into my own hands.
Have you made any sort of playlist for your novel?
Nope. I can’t do that till it’s done. I listen to Emilie Autumn and Kerli a lot for inspiration though.
Where are you in the process of writing and being a writer?
Can I say published? Sigh. Wishful thinking. No, this is really just a hobby, though I hope to be published some day
You get to invent one magical thing to help you through NaNo – what is it? (Thanks to Mya for this question!)
A computer that just takes the ideas right out of my brain and puts them to paper.
Did you *cheated* by starting to write early?
*shifty eyes* Shhhhhh….yes.
Many NaNoers have made mock banners or book covers for their novel – have you?
Not yet.
3 Nov
Ahem.
I bring to you the best thread subject lines in the “NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul” forum.
Haha. So. Great. And there are plenty of “OMG FREAKING OUTTTT!!!!” threads. They’re making me feel better about the fact that half my cast hasn’t even been introduced to the story 6,000 words in.
2 Nov
Our first NaNo interview is my lovely friend and fellow blogger, Khy of Frenetic Reader.
How many years have you done NaNo in the past? How many times have you won (completed the entire 50k in the month of November)?
I’ve done it the last two years and won both times. Whoot!
What genre are you writing this year?
Realistic/contemporary YA kind of stuff.
What’s your title/working title? Do you have one?
HAHAHAHAHA. The novels from the last two years still don’t have titles. I fail at titles.
Can you tell us anything about your novel?
It’s about a girl named Jeanie and her mom who has cancer, basically.
What was the idea or inspiration behind this novel?
Middle school. *is vague*
But the MC is in high school. xD
Have you made any sort of playlist for your novel?
Other than the Spring Awakening station on Pandora? Nope.
Where are you in the process of writing and being a writer?
Unagented. Not that I have tried to get an agent or anything because my novels always FAIL.
You get to invent one magical thing to help you through NaNo – what is it? (Thanks to Mya for this question!)
The ability to make my homework finish itself. That would be nice.
Have you *cheated* by starting to write early?
Nope! I am a good little WriMo and start on November 1.
Many NaNoers have made mock banners or book covers for their novel – have you?
I have not, mostly because I have no title and because I’m too lazy to find a good picture. xD
Thank you, Khy, for being a part of NaNo month here on Ten Cent Notes!
1 Nov
Alright, beginning Book Two of the Traveling Pants series. It’s a great relief after suffering through nearly 300 pages of Breaking Dawn. Oy vey, you guys, OY VEY. (For the record, I am now Jewish nor do I speak Yiddish but I picked up that particular saying from my 9th grade English teacher who, I think, was Jewish.)
Anyway. Let’s dive in.
Book: The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
Pages: 1-128
Topics: The “Mother” Book, Lena & Kostos, Brian
The “Mother” Book:
Quite shockingly, I have no quote for this one but I just feel the need to say that I always remember Book Two as the book about the girls’ mothers. Bee goes to Alabama to learn more about her mom; Tibby makes a film about her mom (more on THAT in a later post); Lena finds out about a secret her mom is keeping, and Carmen’s mother borrows the pants, omg. So this is the book that, while it does advance the overall stories of the girls, delves deeper into the relationships they have with their mothers. Which I love. Because mother/daughter relationships are complex beasts.
Lena & Kostos:
“I tell myself your spirits were down the day you wrote. You’re fine and we’re fine. I hope it’s true.” (pg. 102)
Sometime between the first book and this second book, Lena breaks up with Kostos. The reasons for this are unclear. It’s not really about the fact that they live on separate continents. This is part of the problem I have with Lena and Kostos’ relationship – we go from their first kiss at the end of the first book to them being broken up (even though Lena is so completely still in love with him) in the second book. We skip the whole happy-together part, which might be part of the reason their relationship seems lacking in the rest of the series. (Question: Are we allowed to call the STP books a ’saga’? I know they’re not fantasy or scifi, but there ARE four of them and the span over several years.)
Brian:
Brian didn’t bother to hide his disappointment. He didn’t play any of those games where you try to act like you care less than you care. (pg. 103)
Oh, Brian. We love Brian over here at Ten Cent Notes. In the first book he’s the nerdy, video-game-playing guy that Bailey finds for Tibby to interview for her “suckumentary”. In the second book he’s still the same guy, but he’s become good friends with Tibby. I find the character development of him particularly interesting as he goes from a very minor character in the first book to someone pivotal to Tibby and the story starting in the second book. I think that’s really all I can say right now without giving things away.
More Quotes I Found:
The word friends doesn’t seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops. (pg. 4)
I absolutely adore this quote. The first time I read the books, many years ago, it instantly reminded me of me and my sister and cousins and the relationship we have. I think there are some friendships in life that the word “friends” just seems to fall flat for because that person (or those people) know you so well and care about you so much that it almost sounds lame to just call them “friends”.
Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness. (pg. 99)
Oh, Lena. The thing about Lena’s character, despite how much I love and relate to her in many ways, is that I don’t think this changes. She constantly operates in a state of, as she calls it, “passive dread”, and as I call it, “melancholy sadness”. The other characters really change by the end of the last book – they have huge revelations, meet people who change their lives, and work out some of the issues they have. And Lena does this too, I think, to a certain extent, but her ONE BIG THING – her sadness, is something that is still with her even at the very end, and from this I imagine that Ann Brashares thought of her as someone who might always be sad. And that makes me kind of sad.
She closed her eyes. A chill fluttered up her scalp. She felt like crying, and she had no idea why. (pg. 114)
If you read the entire scene that this quote comes from, it is one of the best, most raw descriptions of the feeling of love that I think I’ve ever come across. It makes it even more resonating that it’s not obviously romantic love.
Lena couldn’t help staring at Alice. She had the sense that Alice wasn’t being careful enough, that she didn’t care enough about other people’s secrets. (pg. 122)
This also struck me as very profound.
Questions for You: (answer one or ALL)
1. If you’ve read all four books, what’s your assessment of Lena? Personally I think happy pills would have done her some good. And I think she needed to be with someone happier, more outwardly happy, than Kostos was.
2. Are you careful with other people’s secrets?
3. Do you also remember this one as the ‘mother’ book?
31 Oct
On the off chance you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is yet, here’s the explanation straight from the website:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Yep, everything you’ve heard is true. Tons of people, established writers as well as complete amateurs, set out to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. Now, I attempted this thing once in the past, a couple years ago. My novel fell apart around the 10k mark when I realized it was more crap than anything else and I had no idea where I was going with it.
This year I’ve got a better plan. As in, I’ve actually planned (somewhat) and am really very exited and determined. We’ll see if this determination plans out, but anyway, as I was saying: I’M EXCITED! And part of this excitement involves me celebrating NaNoWriMo a bit on the blog. I’ve gathered a bunch of willing NaNoers and interviewed them about their novels and expectations – these interviews will be posted sporadically between now and the end of November.
If you’re also doing NaNoWriMo and would like to be my buddy, click here.
30 Oct
~~It’S gIvEaWaY tImE~~
Okay, so months and months ago I asked a bunch of the ‘09 Debs to help me out with a super and secret project I was putting together and, because they are all such fabulous people, they happily obliged.
The project? The Debs ‘09 Playlist Project.
I asked many of the debut authors of this year to share with me a few songs they relate strongly to their debuts. The results were fantastic! Sixteen songs. Fifteen books. Two playlist giveaways. (And that’s not including the big bunch of songs that they gave to me that didn’t end up on the giveaways, but that will be part of a larger playlist on 8tracks.com.)
I know. You’re excited. I’M EXCITED TOO!!!
What do you have to do to be entered in the contest? Here are DA RULEZ:
So, GET THEE TO THE COMMENTING! The songs have been chosen by such incredible authors as Courtney Summers, Sarah Ockler, JA Yang, and Hannah Moskovitz. They are great and the songs, which run the gamut from Fergie to Taylor Swift to Motion City Soundtrack to incredible songs and artists I hadn’t heard of before, are also incredible.
AND I’M SO EXCITED!! COMMENT!!
28 Oct
So Breaking Dawn has disappointed me. No, wait, that’s not the right word. Breaking Dawn has disappointed me so much that I don’t think I’m going to finish reading it. (There, that’s better.) So far it’s been boring, disgusting, revolting, ridiculous, disturbing, and also just horrible. It’s just not a good book. At all.
And, okay, I know that there are some whole leagues of you out there saying that Twilight has never been good, always been ridiculous and disturbing and not good, but that’s where I disagree.
You see, I think the first three books were actually quite good. Really good, actually. Sure, Meyer stepped into purple prose more than once and Edward’s OMGHAWTness was mentioned every three sentences (ugh – I hate Edward), but they were actually very good books. I like them. A lot. They are pretty win.
But Breaking Dawn is not.
I reached the part where Jacob (OH WAIT, ON THE OFF CHANCE YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK AND HAVEN’T HEARD WHAT HAPPENS YET – SPOILERS!!) imprints on Renesmee and that was when I put the book down for good (unless, you know, I decide to be incredibly masochistic and pick the book up again).
That far into the book, so many TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE things had happened. It truly boggles the mind.
You know how when this book first came out there were Twilight fans going to the store and returning it because it was so NOT GOOD and kind of completely deviated from the saga they thought they were buying into? At the time I thought wow, overreaction? But I feel ripped off and I only spent three dollars on it.
I just… wow… I try not to hate on books on here, because really nobody deserves that, but… this book did. This book did deserve it. I still think that the first three books are very good, I still really love them, and I am a little sorry to be so harsh, but… *shudders*.
I am astonished.
edit BUT OH WAIT I FORGOT TO TELL YOU WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THE BOOK. Leah. You know, the girl werewolf? Yeah, we really got to see her in this book and SHE IS PRETTY AWESOME. Like seriously kick-a. I don’t get why none of the other werewolves like her. I guess she’s kind of antagonistic, but whatever. She is win. Too bad she isn’t win enough to make up for all the epic failure in this book.
21 Oct
Ahhh, soon the first post on the SECOND BOOK will be up. I know you’re mucho, mucho excited.
Book: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Pages: 218-294
Topics: Lena in Love, Death, Lena & Kostos, Bridget’s Fall, Bailey, The End
Lena in Love:
She was sad about what had happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who’d lost nothing, was not. (pg. 221)
Lena is a very interesting character, and this is for many reasons, not least of which is how she approaches love. Which is to say that she avoids it. It stresses her out. Unlike the majority of people, she doesn’t really want to fall in love and she seems to go out of her way to sabotage her chances at happiness. (Love, of course = happiness. Why? Because love always = happiness.) Why does she do this? I don’t know, but I have theories, and I’m sure you want to hear them:
Theory #1: I forget which book it is (but I’m sure when I come across it, I’ll give you guys the quote), but at one point during the Traveling Pants saga, Lena says (or thinks, at least) that she is not good at being happy. She says that different people are good at different things; Effie is good at being happy while she is good at writing Thank You cards. (No, seriously, that’s what she’s good at.) So, you know, there is that, the simple fact that Lena is not good at being happy. Some people are incredibly good at this and others aren’t. (As for me personally, I fall somewhere in the middle. I’m usually good enough at being happy, but it’s a quieter, more reserved form of happiness than many people have and others often mistake it for, um, epic sadness and emotasticness.)
Theory #2: Although to me as a reader it is obvious that Lena understands herself quite well, especially for someone who in this first book is only fifteen years old, Lena herself sees one thing: the only thing anyone else sees is how pretty she looks. How messed up. For starters, Lena is a quiet, somewhat shy, definitely modest person. She’s probably not a huge fan of all the attention, especially as it gives people a view of her that isn’t really true. And added to that, it kind of sucks to be known by one thing. If you’ve ever been seen as the pretty one, the smart one, or the athletic one, (and most of us, at one point or another, have been), you know this. But that doesn’t last forever, really. In Lena’s case it does. She’s been Miss Gorgeous since she was a toddler practically, and I can only imagine that it gets pretty hard, after all that, to think someone might be interested in what’s beneath the surface.
Oh, and don’t you guys love how I’m discussing and psychoanalyzing these characters as if they are real people?
Lena & Kostos:
“You are in love with Kostos,” Effie accused.
“No I’m not.” If Lena hadn’t known she was in love with Kostos before, she did not. Because she knew what a lie felt like. (pg. 256)
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve never been a huge Lena/Kostos fan. I adore Lena, and I don’t not like Kostos, but I’ve never been a fan of their relationship. As I read the books this time I’m trying to keep an open mind and actually get into this relationship, but as of the end of the first book, it’s just not happening. Again, let me discuss why.
Reason #1: The relationship between Lena and Kostos is not a very solid or good one. We’re only in the first book, so let’s look at that: first, she doesn’t like him just because he’s a guy and guys have certain ideas about her based on the fact that she is gorgeous. Then, he accidentally sees her naked and because she’s too freaked out to tell her grandparents what happened, they get the idea that KOSTOS DID SOMETHING BAD and this leads to Lena’s bapi getting in a fist fight with Kostos’ bapi. Kostos doesn’t really want to see or talk to her after this, and then she realizes she’s in love with him. (Not to mention that she’s going back to the US and he lives in Greece.) Geez. Looking at that, I’m starting to have some empathy here – the situation surrounding Lena falling in love with this boy is definitely less than ideal. Way less than ideal, so I’m pardoning them, however…
Reason #2: They presumably have a happy relationship, but we never get to see it! In the first book all we see is their awkward interactions and Lena moping around because she’s in love with him. I mean seriously, Lena bears some resemblance to Bella (of Twilight). And I’m allowed to say that because, yeah, I’m a huge fan of Bella. Anyway, my point is that Lena and Kostos don’t have a lot of interaction in this book. You see why and how she falls in love with him (which I actually really like – she sees how he is around other people, the way he treats kids and old ladies and she really does fall in love with who he is, not just a physical lust or hurried infatuation), but there aren’t a whole lot of scenes with them together, so we don’t exactly see how they are together, as a couple.
Reason #3: This reason is very much related to the first two, but this relationship never seems to make Lena happy. She’s a very melancholy person to begin with and is constantly battling sadness and this relationship which is supposed to be so epic and amazing, only adds to her emotional battles. It makes me feel bad for her.
Bridget’s Fall:
Bridget wasn’t sure if she was too young for him, but she knew she was too young for what she had done with him. (pg. 264)
So Bridget has sex with Eric, the soccer coach, and then things sort of fall apart. Or, rather, she falls apart. It’s very emotional, very epic, and very much in line with her character, the depth of which always manages to surprise me no matter how many times I read the books. Bee is determined, stubborn, and goes at a pace that would put the Energizer Bunny to shame when she’s after something, but then after it’s achieved… she has to go back to herself, to her life, to the reality that it hasn’t really changed anything. However, in this case the thing she does is lose her virginity and it does change things, just not in the way she expects or wants.
I think that Bee’s story is one of the best in the first book (the other best is Tibby’s story) and sets up so much that is to come without giving away too much of what is to be revealed. It’s difficult, emotional, often comparable to a train wreck, but all in all pretty perfect as far as stubbornness and heartache goes.
Bailey:
“Do you really think anybody is going to care about me and my dad?”
Bailey shrugged. “If you do,” she said. (pg. 227)
She would just stay here holding Bailey’s hand for all time, so Bailey wouldn’t be afraid that there wasn’t enough of it. (pg. 251)
I can never choose just one quote for the parts about Bailey, and I’m just going to say it: Bailey is amazing. Her character, her story, her impact – everything. My words cannot do justice to it because Bailey’s story in this first book (especially the last third of the book) is so incredible. I teared up and who knows how many times I’ve read the book before. But what happens is this (on the off chance you haven’t read this book): Bailey dies.
Yep. She dies. She has cancer, she gets too sick for them to fight it, and she dies. We learn towards the end of the book that she was actually getting worse before Tibby even met her, that all the treatments they’d tried (and there had been many) only worked for a little while. We find out that throughout the entire book, she was dying, and her family (and presumably her) pretty much knew it. Read the book, if you haven’t yet, because it is amazing. Even though I’ve spoiled it for you, Bailey’s story is so emotional and so great that it’s worth it, and I love how this girl that comes into Tibby’s life for a few months one summer changes everything, from the way she reacts to things to the type of guys she likes. It’s incredible and I can’t even do much discussing because there’s nothing to say except: WOW.
The End:
Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens. (pg. 293)
So the book ends. The four girls come back together, have an end-of-the-summer ceremony with the pants. Lena has fallen in love; Tibby’s had someone very close to her die; Bee has lost her virginity and began to fall apart (yes, in that order); Carmen’s dad has gotten remarried and she’s ran away from his home. A lot has happened. Some good, some bad, and you get the feeling at the end of the book that you want more, because you need to know how it ends with these characters, how their stories continue. It’s so good that there’s a second (and third and fourth) book because the end of the first one, though definitely not a cliffhanger, does leave you wanting more.
More Quotes I Found:
But [he] wasn’t what she needed. Her need was as big as the stars, and he was down on the beach, so quiet she could hardly hear him. (pg. 265)
She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big. As big as she could. She promised Bailey she would keep playing. (pg. 288)
Maybe happiness didn’t have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. (pg. 282)
‘I wish you cared,’ Lena told him telepathically, and then wanted to take it back. (pg. 252)
Questions For You: (answer one or ALL)
1. What is your opinion of Lena’s and Kostos’ relationship?
2. Are you good at being happy? (In a related story: what ARE you good at?)
3. What’s your favorite quote that I’ve posted here?
4. Did you cry when Bailey died? Did you cry at anything else in this first book?
21 Oct
Okay, so I just made the first (I say first because I generally make many) playlist for my nanowrimo novel. This is pretty much going to be the ’soundtrack’ to the whole thing, and I thought I’d share it with you guys.
The novel doesn’t have a title yet. I’ll be working on ideas for that soon enough. For now I’ll just call it “the nano”, and I’ll probably be talking about it on the blog somewhat. Anyway. Here goesies:
