Everything Me

Rewrites

Writing is never a challenge when you have then inspiration. Rewrites however, muy dificil!

Writers Block

Writers block is painful! I want to write really bad but nothing wants to come out. I think I need to stop reading others works and spend time with my own. My novel is at a stand still and I miss my characters. I think I will spend next Thursday in the quiet of the park just writing. What do you do to cure writers block?

Challenged

I’ve been writing a whole lot but not getting very far. I have someone who recently came into my life and took it by storm. My writing is changing like crazy. He has been challenging to be amazing. And I’m trying. It’s crazy that this semi-stranger (who’d I trust with my darkest secrets) is having this profound effect on me and my writing and my life. I feel “worth it” if that makes any sense. I want the best, I want to give my best, and I want to be the best.

I’m writing his blog to tell my followers that it’s time to get inspired. I am ready to be all the things that I want to be though I a still have to figure out what that is.

Yes, it is. book review for “Isn’t it Pretty to Think So?” by Nick Miller

This is a review of the debut novel, Isn’t it Pretty to Think So? by Nick Miller. If you have not read the novel please do not read this review as it is riddled with spoilers.

There is always a certain anticpation that comes from reading a new novel. An anticpation intensified when not only the novel is new but also the author. I went in this experience, yes experience, with one expectation. The expectation, not to have any expectations.

This books marks the end (or beginning, depending on how you look at it) of a journey  of an aspiring writer and a group of people who followed him on his journey. I remember reading excerpt for the novel and falling in love with the way in which Nick wrote. It was poetry.

I began the book a week after receiving it in the mail (I had to finish 2 books of a trilogy I had already committed to). I spent the first night in bed and melted into my sheets when I read the opening sentence, “Tatiana was a prostitute.” I assumed I was getting into the story of a young man and the relationshp he had with this prostitute, Tatiana. I was wrong and right at the same time.

The story is told by Jake Reed, a young adult on a search for answers after the death of his beloved grandmother. At 23 he leaves home in search of something, himself. The author introduces numerous secondary characters throughout novel; Liz, Jayson, Henry, Parker, and Andrew to name the most important. The characters are well written REAL people with lives completely separate of the hero Jake. Jake finds his way into their stories that are brilliantly weaved into his first person narrative. Nick Miller gives each character such significance to the point that you say to yourself later, “I wonder what became of…”. 

The middle chunk of the book delve heavily into the hard drug scene of LA. A portion of the book that had me in fear of the lives of both Jake and his house mates. A portion of the book that made me feel like I was being granted a private glimpse into something I am too niave to every have experienced myself. I felt like a fly on the wall watching Jake throw his life a way. Several times I put the book down and thought about Jake and why no one was rescuing him. I wanted to save him. But Jake had to want to save himself.

It wasn’t until Jake found friendship in the elderly but sharp Henry that I was able to smile again, I felt from that point that Jake was going to be okay. A then I learned something that struck fear in my heart, death does exist. As Jake experiences his third loss I think to myself “it is this moment from which he will nt recover”. And I wait with a heavy heart for the death of the hero. It didn’t come.

Instead Jake meets Tatiana, the prostitute and in her he find himself, his heart, and his ability to finally capture moments with words. As I scroll along and the pages left lessen I smile at the blooming trust and love between Tatiana and Jake and I feel indebted to her for saving Jake, for giving him all the things he hadn’t been able to find in the partying, coke, Molly, whiskey, whores, or even in the Moleskin notebooks he kept close by.

And then it’s all gone and I am struggling through the last couple of pages through teary eyes wondering where thing go from here.

I’m writing right now

Developing the story line and falling in love with these characters. Jada is a special woman, she really is. Back to it…

Sista. Sista.

Never in a million years would I have imagined we’d have this kind of relationship I would have with my sister. In 2001 she enlisted in the Air Force and left home. So there I was on my own at 13 my sited hundreds of miles away. But then, we weren’t close. As my sister I missed her. It wasn’t until 9/11 that I mourned her decision to enlist. It scarred me.

Years passed. We talked on the phone, she visited home but all in all we existed without eachother. I experienced everything without dyer watchful eye, without her mindful advice. I fell in love and out. Life happened for me. I graduated high school and started college. It wasn’t until 2006 that she’d come home for a while. And even then our bond was not very strong. After the birth of her daughter she went back home out of state.

So there I was existing again. I went on to get pregnant and have my daughter. We existed hundreds of miles apart doing this thing we would come to realize is so much easier together, rearing little girls. I began writing this watching our girls play. And today we aren’t doing it alone. Today we exist here just 15 minutes apart,though from our phone calls you’d swear we hadn’t seen eachother in ages.

Our bond is not what it was 10 years ago, it’s 100 times stronger. My sister is my best friend and I love her. So glad she’s back home.