Goodreads and Shelfari

Goodreads and  Shelfari are websites that readers can review books and recommends books from your reviews. 

It is super easy to sign up if you are on Facebook for Goddreads.  It is easy to find many of the books I have read and authors I like on there.  All you need your author's name, one of their character's names -I tried it out and it worked-, or the title.  It is super simple to rate books and from your ratings, you get book recommendations.  If I had a bookshelf on here on would call it, Flights of Fancy.  I usually read whatever takes my fancy. 

My teacher for Creative Writing II, Golda Fried, has written a book called Nellcott is My Darling, which it real awesome.  She is on Goodreads  right now and it having a book drawing.  Right now, 218 people are in the book drawing!  For my friends following me, here is the web address that Ms. Fried's book can be found at: http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/43319-nellcott-is-my-darling .

Shelfari is done by amazon.com and it seems to have just as a wide variety of books as Goodreads.  I would join the popular series book club just to see what others are reading and what other people are liking.  

I already have several friends on Goodreads.  I would recommend these two sites to friends who like to read.  I love to read and I like getting recommendations and I think others would like that also. 

Guess What Am I?

You can clip me, hold me, stick me, throw me, stab with me, and play with me.  I come in many colors of the spectrum and I can express myself in many colors and in many mediums too. 

I can be fat and bulky or slender and slim, but can still be gripped with thumb, fingers, and hands.  Some like to even use their toes or their mouth. It all depends on your preference on how I am held and used.

Some strangle me, some lightly grip me, but all use me to express themselves.  They list with me, draw with me, and scrawl and play with me.  I help them express everything from boredom, fear, pain, love, and happiness to all that in which is in between and beyond.  I am there to help express it all.

I have helped others go to war and others to bring peace.  I help give words of comfort.  I also give words of pain.  With my tip with in your grip, you guide me to what I tell.   I am a just tool for all.

Finally, you can buy me, sell me, borrow me, steal me, and accidentally take me.  You curse and stress when you need me or lose me.

What am I?

Cycle of Hope and Terror by Me

 

Dragging darkness too much to bear

Waging against skittering flight

Amidst fears and tears, there is cheer

Resounding fright for all to hear

Quaking with disgust at the sight

Dragging darkness too much to bear

Viewing at you is a mirror

Beckoning light to find the might

Amidst fears and tears, there is cheer

Flesh gives a cauterizing sear

Bloodless hands death grip burning bright

Dragging darkness too much to bear

A quick, languishing bloody tear

Plowing through obstacles to fight

Amidst fears and tears, there is cheer

A way becomes grotesquely clear

The source flashing, twittering light

Dragging darkness too much to bear

Amidst fears and tears, there is cheer

First Workshop for Creative Writing II

I was very nervous about our first workshop for Creative Writing II.  I was the first person to be critiqued on my writing.  I have been critiqued verbally and on paper before with a few people looking over my work, but not the whole class focused on my work giving me both verbal and written feedback.

Other workshops I have been a part of in the past upped my anxiety.  Past workshops I have had, people either yawned at my work -which mortified me more than everyone say hating it since, at least, they had an opinion one way or another than just apathy- or like/hated it, but did not really give me any suggestions to change.

The feedback that I received from my everyone was both gratifying and helpful.  Everyone was constructive by giving me suggestions and made me feel like I should keep writing.   I did not get the feeling from others as I have in the past of "Why are you writing?"

The best suggestions that I received that were echoed throughout the workshop is that I need to describe the world setting more, describe the era/the happenings in the world more, and physically describe my protagonist and setting more.  There were several other awesome suggestions, but that was the real base gist.  I am still going over my notes and the notes everyone gave me.

I was supposed to sit and listen to the feedback of my peers as they talk about my piece.  This was actually a helpful exercise because I could get other people’s feedback without my influence swaying them.  I was good with that, except for the very beginning when one of my peers was talking about one of my character’s saying, “Squee!”  I responded that the character had really said it and that influenced what he said after.  I felt real bad about that.  So sorry!  I should have been quiet.  

I wish to thank everyone who read my story and gave me feedback.  I loved listening to you all and I loved seeing your reactions to my story.  It made me smile and feel better about myself as a writer. 

Critique of "Emergency" by Denis Johnson

This short story was well written and used terms and speech common in the 1970’s that gives you a small slice of life during that time.  "Emergency" is aptly named because the protagonist and his friend, Georgie, work in an emergency room and are on a drug trip.   

The voice in this piece was an unreliable narrator where it was from the protagonist’s point of view that went through the events of how he saw and thought of them.  The meaning I took from "Emergency" was how the cycle of life, death, and rebirth affected these individuals and the contrasts of life.   

We start off with Georgie being on drugs and then the narrator taking drugs and then the high and lows of their journey and ending with the narrator questioning who he is.  Through this journey, the seasons change for the narrator emphasizing change and beginnings and endings.  The metaphors used in this story convey the contrasts of life with gritty and ugly versus beautiful imagery and the cycle and miracles of life.

Johnson gives numerous vivid and startling metaphors throughout that are both shocking and appropriate for the protagonist’s freely drug-induced state and the thoughts that the author wishes to convey.  One of my favorite metaphors occurs when “Georgie dropped his mop and bent over in a posture of a child soiling its diapers” (Johnson 14).  Another metaphor that strikes me with its imagery occurs when they “stopped the truck and the boy climbed slowly up out of the fields as out of the mouth of a volcano” (Johnson 20).  The one that made me cringe the most occurs when Georgie hits a jack rabbit with his car and goes out to skin it.  Road kill, Georgie skinning it, and accidentally killing the jack rabbit was not the shocking part to me.  I'm a country girl and I have seen it happen.  It is when he skins it that they found out the jackrabbit had been pregnant and its babies fully formed.  It flashes me back to Georgie mopping up the blood off the floor that only he could see and Terry’s miraculous survival of a knife to the eye.  Terry is a character who shows up early in the story in the narrator's and Georgie's emergency ward.  He was knifed by his wife for spying and ogling another woman.

With all the above being said, this story made me sigh and grimace because it was another druggie story.  I have heard them for most of my life and this story was like most I have heard.  The author either extensively studied people tripping or did LSD himself.  The story is well written and conveys Johnson’s thoughts beautifully, but this story is just not my cup of tea.

Work Cited

Johnson, Denis.  “Emergency.”  Method and Madness: The Making of a Story.  Ed. Alice

LaPlante.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. 13-21. Print.