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Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

Books and blogs

Comfortable on either end of the reading see-saw

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I have become quite technology heavy.  I use quite a bit of technology in the classroom just in the process of my teaching (i.e., two computers, one projector, one Mimeo, one iPad, scanner, digital cameras [still and video], and loads of advanced software. Don’t even ask what I have my students working on).  At home, well, minus the projector and add one e-reader, and a couple of more computers, and that will be close to how technology bound I am.  Of course, some of it is not new tech (I take real good care of my stuff), but it’s in active use.  Oops, forgot the phones.

My point is this. I have owned an e-reader for more than a year now and my mother-in-law wished to get one. We talked about mine and the ones she was considering (I took more than a year to make my decision, she took about the same).  Now we both have e-readers, different brands, and find we quite like reading e-books.  It doesn’t really matter which one you get as long as you can read the way you want to.  I have checked out quite a number of blogs on e-readers, and really if you want it to reduce the amount of books you have in your house (this was the main selling point that got my husband onto pushing me to buy an e-reader) than any crisp-screened reader will meet your needs.  The rest is just bells and whistles with attendant price tags.

This week my mother-in-law gave me her copy of The Help in paperback. She enjoyed it and thought I might like it. She bought it before she purchased her e-reader.  I felt much at home leaning back on the daybed in our computer room holding that book in my hands.  It felt good, so maybe holding a hardback or paperback has some pull yet with me, and it is an entertaining book, but she has never given away a book to me before. The Help is a big book, and it is going to take up space, which may be what prompted her to share.  I know she won’t be handing me her Kindle anytime soon, and I am not lending out my Sony either.  But I think I can shift back and forth between my pencil, pen, keyboard, tablet, paperbacks, e-books, transparencies, and projectors with comfort for some time to come, and there is probably a little space yet left on my bookcase in the hallway.

see-saw

Jasper Fford, Shades of Grey, What a world! What a world!

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I am reading Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey and after the opening pages, which were a bit slow, I found myself striding along with the Russetts, up-and-coming red-hue percepted individuals.  Now about 100 pages in, I am amazed how this world is created and wrapped about the perception of color, both true colors and artificial.  The art of world building is one I am still learning, but reading Shades of Grey as a resource alone is fun, though I am drawn by the story as well.

shades of red on grey

Fforde has built these characters who demonstrate the perception of color in every aspect of their behavior, desires, relationships, social status and careers.  Imagining the scope of his plan before he even began writing is daunting.  This is the first time I have read this book, and I doubt it will be the last. Usually as a reader, I just dive into the story head first, don’t even worry about finding nearby exit routes, confirming there are handrails, checking for a lifeguard or preparing snacks or making a quick visit to the restroom.  I won’t come up for air until my eyes won’t stay open, my stomach won’t stop growling even when I growl back at it or I am having to cross my legs.  I am a full on reader.  But Shades of Grey makes me, the writer, keep sitting back and wondering how he pulled this all together with just one brain.  That is not to say I am pulled out of the story, for I am not.  But this other side of me is pulled just as inextricably.

I started Shades of Grey a couple of months ago and found those first pages so sloggy that I turned to two other books and read them before returning to this one just a few days ago.  What is funny is that only a few pages later I was hooked.  It’s like when a person goes to the doctor for a pain she has been suffering through for weeks and finally just as she has has enough and is sitting in the doctor’s office, she starts feeling better.  That is how I feel: if I had only read five more pages, I would have been enthralled.

Now I don’t want to look at another book until I have finished this one
and then I may just read it again to let my writer self get a more focused
view of what Fforde did with this story.  It makes me want to quote the
witch of the west: What a world, what a world!  But with approbation
rather than frustration.

When your character is in trouble, or you need them to be

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Mad Scientist

There is a lovely little book called The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.  This book is great if you are looking for a problem for your character to handle or your character is in a predicament you are uncertain how to bring to a proper conclusion.  Chances are this book or its travel version, will have the perfect get out, get in, get them before they get him/her idea that will fit your plot handily.  Comedy or serious trouble, this book will provide.  Is your character being followed, lost in the woods, dealing with a volcanic eruption?  Check out this book.  Scam artist, runaway horse, mad scientist…..

Seeking simplicity in writing

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Simplicity of a flower

I have been reading Steve Jobs a biography by Walter Isaacson and have become enthralled with Jobs’ pursuit of simplicity.  His idea that as one simplifies there is a point when the object you seek to reduce to simplest terms becomes complicated again.  So one must search deeper for the release of a greater simplicity. And he did this by constant pursuit of epiphany, the moment of recognition that he had found “it.”  So as I am reading this book, I am thinking about how this applies to writing.  Simplicity and the reader reaching an epiphany together in the form of story.  Ezra Pound did this.  His production of the poem “In a Station at the Metro” is all about simplicity.  He started out with many images, and 30 lines of poetry.  Pound whittled down and streamlined his poem until only two lines remained of one intense image and all that the image carried to his reader. This is what I think of:  How to write with simplicity in mind?  How to come to that moment of epiphany, when the writer knows the story has been told.

Running out of ideas?

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Every writer needs a little help some time. So here is a book that might just help. A Writer’s Book of Days.  I purchased this from Writer’s Digest years ago, but it is still available, paperback and eBook format.  It offers so much to a writer. Besides supplying daily writing prompts, it offers insight into the minds of productive, imaginative authors along with the opportunity to gain a little insight about oneself as a writer.

It offers the following:

  • exercises to improve writing
  • 365 days of writing prompts
  • questions to consider about writing habits and desires
  • short quotes that encourage and motivate the writer
  • other writers’ experiences

It’s a handy little book that I have used privately and as a textbook for my creative writing students.  Each student knows to just turn to the page for the day’s date if a class day is missed, and the prompt is the same as his/her peers responded to that day.  I don’t use the other features daily in class, but some days, they are the perfect supplement to the day’s instruction.

Taking in the view at Missed Connections

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I just wandered around Blogspot and landed at this blog, Missed Connections, with wonderful e-versions of posters.  Each one told a story, and I thought what a great set of visual prompts.  One had a woman in a tribal print dress on a street corner.  The caption stated that the woman and another person, strangers to each other, started talking about the weather, awkwardly.  That moment could easily become the beginning of a story, poem, or prose essay.  So if you are stumped for something to write about, go to this blog and look at the pictures.  One, if not all, will get your creative juices going.  Of course, you are likely to look at all of them just for the joy of it.