Tag: literature

A World Unaffected By Time

Leave a comment
Excerpt 001

The two brick labs glisten in the sun, unmuddled by age. The faintest smell of mortar still lingers. The other three structures sway with the breeze, their canvas sides riddled with tears and earth. Nevertheless, the tents feel more practical. The rift hasn’t grown, or shrunk, or otherwise fluctuated in 20 years, but permanence seems presumptuous in a world without the limitation of time.

I watch for a brief moment and have seen all 19 scientists busily shuffle in a pattern that makes them appear like a swarm. I don’t think they ever stop moving. A worker bee with long black hair suddenly freezes. Her white-gold eyes are piercing, even from here, but they are vacant. I wish I could ask her what she is seeing, but she is not from here. She is one of the scientists that they sent in from Nevada, most of them are. Only four of them are local, five once Logan finishes interning. Our parents are equally as thrilled about my younger brother joining the Ignis group as the higher ranking scientists are to be in Prestin.

Not a full 20 seconds pass and the woman buzzes back into stride and disappears behind one of the 2-story buildings between us, in the opposite direction of the records tent. Whatever it was it must not have been important.

I widen my gaze and watch the whole rift at once, without focusing on any one thing. The hill that grew our tree is the shortest of the half-dozen hills surrounding the valley, but it is so steep that my shoes slide and slip under me even when the grass is dry. It is 5 second agility test that I don’t often pass. But this hill and this tree are at the far end of the town, and to get here is worth the risk of accident or embarrassment. From here a person can peer between the rolling hills to nearly every street in the city, and if they would rather forget the city entirely for a moment it only takes a turn of the heels.

I am only tall enough to make out a thin blue line that is the Atlantic Ocean and the rest of my vision, peripherals and all, are taken up by a sea of trees. This is one of the last natural forests on the continent and the Pragredium is making it thrive.

I spin back to civilization and coast unsteadily into the valley.

Winter Goals

1 Comment

Good morning, happy winter!

I’ve never been good at new year’s resolutions, mainly because by July of whatever year I’ve made the goals I’ve already forgotten what they were. So I decided a while back that I was going to do seasonal goals. So here we go!

Winter Goals

Lose 15lbs and 7% body fat

No explanation required, we’re still doing a fitness thing here even if I have fallen behind. 175lbs & 29% are the numbers I’m aiming for.

 

Write the first draft of my novel

It’s been in the works for a very very long time and I think I have everything I need to write a complete draft, everything except the will power that is.

 

Stop biting my nails

Surely 3 months is long enough to kick that habit, right?

 

Read at least three books

I don’t do this enough.

 

Do at least two charcoal drawings

I have an art degree, but you’d never know by the amount of art I make.

 

I think seasonal goals will be great not only for mindset but also for practicality! These are all things that I want to do, of course, but I tailored these goals to be winter specific. I also want to walk our husky more often and kayak and hike, but if I decide on those goals in January when it’s 16 degrees and we’re buried in Kentucky ice, how will I get excited about those goals again in May?

I need to do things immediately or I lose interest.

The fact that I won’t be writing on my novel as soon as I close this blog will undoubtedly make me think twice about that goal when I do sit down to write. But no matter, they’re written in the blog and so they shall be.

Alrighty, that’s all!

If you have any goals that you don’t want to put off until the ball drops, tell me about them! Let’s make seasonal goals a thing. Can we do that? Is that legal?

img_20190630_142729

I really do.

Literary Comas / “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry”

Leave a comment

Does anyone else fall into literary comas?

When I finish a book (or even a short story for that matter) regardless of how the story treated me or my emotions, I have to give it the moment of my life to sink in before I move on. For me, my time to mull over the book after I’ve finished it is almost as important as reading it.

“The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” by Gabrielle Zevin has put me in my most recent coma.

Disclaimer: This is not a book review, but only because I do not know how to write a book review and I don’t want to be judged on my lack of proper things that appear in a book review. In all reality, I’ll be talking a lot about this book.

 

Even though I don’t think I understood a fraction of the literature references in this novel, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I caught a few nods to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Great Expectations” but I could feel the subtleties and intentionally askew passages going over my head. Zevin also did a wonderful thing where she crafted A.J. as a pretty snobby person from the very beginning (not that he is an unlikable character, surprisingly!) so it lightened the sting of the references that might have normally come off as condescending. Clearly Mr. Fikry is more well-read than I am, but Zevin was not patronizing me for it.

Back to the dilemma of my coma, I have never been so torn between needing to give “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” it’s time and feeling the intense need to dive into another book this very instant. This was a story clearly written by a book-lover, about book-lovers, for book-lovers, and it was the best book I could’ve read at this specific point in my life. If you want to fall back in love with reading, this is a nostalgically, charmingly, motivational book. To be 110% honest, the writing style wasn’t my favorite, it came off slightly dry with a lack of description and emotion in parts, but even that preferential disconnect between Zevin and myself did not overshadow my enjoyment of all the other elements of her story. She truly made me want to reread classics I’ve studied and discover everything on the “new-release” racks of my local bookshop.

And yet, I can’t commit to the investment in another work before my moment on Alice Island feels resolved. I say “moment” with ambiguity because sometimes I need just enough time to get a good cry in, (like finishing Divergent, not that it wasn’t WONDERFUL, but it required less of my brain power to comprehend and move on from than others) and other times I need to stare at a blank wall for a couple hours and be alone with my own mind for a couple days (which was truly how I felt when I finished “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. For literal days. Holy cow.)

That is one of the main points of this sporadic post, I suppose; to contrive resolution without having to wait for it to come naturally. That sounds silly, and this will sound even sillier, but I don’t want to cheat on a book that I have dedicated hours of my life to. But discussing it and writing about it has worked better than I even expected. Now that Mr. Fikry, and Maya, and Amy, and Lambaise, and Ismay have a concrete presence in my life, I think I am ready to let them all rest on the Island and move forward.

I think I will make this a regular occurrence.

Now what to start next?