Ballet Bragging

I can't keep this to myself. I went to see the Nutcracker twice this year. Before this year, I can't say I was a huge fan of the ballet. I wasn't raised going to the ballet or the opera. I only became interested in musical theater in high school. Before college, going to the theater meant the movies, and usually the $1 theater (back when they had those).

But we saw the Nutcracker twice. Why? My niece, who's 11, was Clara this year in Ballet Arizona's professional production. Each year, the ballet had children audition, and usually picks three Claras to split the performances up, but this year there were only 2, and one of them was my niece. And if that weren't enough to have my entire extended family bursting at the seams with pride, she was in one of the shows which the New York Times reviewer attended. And if THAT weren't enough, she gotten mentioned BY NAME in not one, but TWO articles—one on his blog, and one that was actually in print last week.

So I offer my congratulations to her and my bragging for your entertainment.

What surprises have you gotten this holiday season?

Writing Over the Holidays

Whew! Getting writing done over the holidays sure is hard, isn't it? I've been at my in-laws now close to two weeks, and have hardly opened my computer, much less Scrivener. Granted, I've been reading like a madwoman because, well, I can. But I haven't been writing.

This morning, my husband and I went and spent a few hours at a coffee shop. He wanted to get out of the house to get some work done, and I tagged along to do my own work. And MAN am I rusty. It's only been two weeks, and the words were NOT flowing. I tried editing my NaNo chapters, and realized I needed a new chapter 2.5. I tried working on a new project, and only wrote about 100 words.

The moral of the story: write every day!

Okay, now, that being said, I can't go back in time and write over the past 14 days. I need to get back into the swing of the writing, find the groove and the muse.

So, I ask you: What do you do to find your groove after a break, be it from the holidays or other reasons? Any tips?

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!

May you be surrounded by love and warmth today!

See you on Monday  :)

Review of No Place for Heroes

No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo

From Goodreads:
From one of the most accomplished writers to emerge from Latin America, No Place for Heroes is a darkly comic novel about a mother and son who return to Buenos Aires in search of her former lover, whom she met during Argentina’s Dirty War. During Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Lorenza and Ramon, two passionate militants opposing Videla’s dictatorship, met and fell in love. Now, Lorenza and her son, Mateo, have come to Buenos Aires to find Ramon, Mateo’s father. Holed up in the same hotel room, mother and son share a common goal, yet are worlds apart on how they perceive it. For Lorenza, who came of age in the political ferment of the ’60s, it is intertwined with her past ideological and emotional anchors (or were they illusions?), while her postmodernist son, a child of the ’90s who couldn’t care less about politics or ideology, is looking for his actual  father—not the idea of a father, but the Ramon of flesh and blood. Anything goes as this volatile pair battle it out: hilarious misunderstandings, unsettling cruelty, and even a temptation to murder. In the end, they begin to come to a more truthful understanding of each other and their human condition. No Place for Heroes is an addition to that long tradition of the eternal odd couple—in works ranging from Waiting for Godot to Kiss of the Spider Woman—waiting for their fortunes to change, written by one of the most talented and internationally celebrated authors at work today.



I am of two-minds about this book. This is probably due to the fact that there are three stories going on at once—the main story, and two main flashback-stories. The flashbacks are wonderfully crafted, as the narrator reflects on past events with the occasional dialogue interruption from the two MCs in the present. Not only that, but those story-lines are gripping, and things HAPPEN. Unfortunately, the "present" time of the story involves only reminiscing for about 98% of the time, and feels like a gimmick to reveal the flashback stories. The final 5 pages feel rushed, as if the author realized that something needed finally to happen in the "present" and threw together a quick, unsurprising ending. I'm giving this 3 stars on Goodreads because of how much I did enjoy the flashbacks, but that's all. 

Also, a note on translation. This book was originally written in Spanish, a language I can moderately read and understand. The translations feel like Spanish with English words, which simply make the English feel full of choppy or run-on sentences. I even noticed the occasional Spanish noun-adjective word order, which is only confusing when rendered in English. Finally, the translator changed all the swearing to some of the strongest of English, which I don't believe properly carry the meaning of the words in Spanish, and felt jarring in the prose. Don't get me wrong—I love a good swear word in my reading and my own writing, but only when it flows naturally from the characters or from the narrator. None of the swearing came across as natural, which I can only attribute to the lack of ability to really translate these words properly. 

This book would have been my ideal if 1) There had been no "present" time, because I truly loved the historical time and the parallels the author drew between the relationships in the story and the struggles against the Argentinean dictatorship; and 2) I had read it in Spanish. Perhaps I'll try that in the future.


Bottom Line: Read it in Spanish, if you read it at all, but I'm not gonna push it.

Review of Scrivener

For those of you who are writers, whether you are technologically savvy or not, I would like to recommend Scrivener, a program developed specifically with the novelist in mind. With all the hype surrounding different programs for NaNoWriMo, I decided to take a step away from my traditional Word and try something different, and Scrivener offered a NaNoWriMo trial version that lasted not 30 days, but until December 7. So I tried it. Now I will never go back.

Scrivener's design is user-friendly for the every-day operations. Each "page" is meant to be an individual scene. You can title it anything you want without it printing (though see below on my inability to make this work at first), which makes them easy to find. There's a list to the left of all of your scenes and chapters (in this list, folders are chapters, and when you Compile it, they are automatically numbered in chapters without your numbering them). You can see each "file" clearly, and drag them up and down to rearrange.

You can also rearrange your scenes easily on a "cork board".You simply drag the note card to where you'd rather it be. The entire "file" with all of your text automatically moves without the nastiness of cutting and pasting and hoping the clipboard's not too full already.

To the right, there are a number of helpful tools. The two I found most helpful were 1) the notes and 2) the links. You can leave yourself any amount of notes for the scene or chapter that will never be printed in your compile or counted in your word count. In Word, I would simply type these in for myself and highlight them or change the color of the text, but then I would get an inaccurate word count. This is ideal for those of you who are as forgetful as I am in terms of adding this action, or who want to give yourself ideals as you read through without heavily revising at any given moment. The links option is also great because it gives you direct access to your research from the same file.

Another great option in this program are the character and setting sketches. It's wonderful to have quick access to your characters without opening other files. You can even include a picture. None of the notes in these "files" are included in your word count (although you can have them included with a simple click of a check box), but are still right at your fingertips. You can even include pictures, which I LOVE.

For more detailed information on any of these features, Scrivener tutorial videos can be found here.

Bottom Line: If you write novels, this will spoil you to no end, and you won't be able to go back to Word ever again :)

Review of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone.

From Goodreads:

On a sunny day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight-year-old Becca Burke was struck by lightning. No one believed her - not her philandering father or her drunk, love-sick mother - not even when her watch kept losing time and a spooky halo of light appeared overhead in photographs. Becca was struck again when she was sixteen. She survived, but over time she would learn that outsmarting lightning was the least of her concerns.

In rural Arkansas, Buckley R. Pitank's world seemed plagued by disaster. Ashamed but protective of his obese mother, fearful of his scathing grandmother, and always running from bullies (including his pseudo-evangelical stepfather), he needed a miracle to set him free. At thirteen years old, Buckley witnessed a lightning strike that would change everything.

Now an art student in New York City, Becca Burke is a gifted but tortured painter who strives to recapture the intensity of her lightning-strike memories on canvas. On the night of her first gallery opening, a stranger appears and is captivated by her art. Who is this odd young man with whom she shares a mysterious connection?

When Buckley and Becca finally meet, neither is prepared for the charge of emotions - or for the perilous event that will bring them even closer to each other, and to the families they've been running from for as long as they can remember.



Young-Stone has an amazing gift of craft when it comes to both language and time. This book takes the reader on not one, but two adventures for over 300 pages until the stories finally converge. Maintaining interest in two protagonists for such a long time can be a difficult and daunting task, but Young-Stone has done a beautiful job. Each person is appropriately human, and the reader loves or hates them as if they had walked out of real life and settled on the page.


I was extremely lucky, because I won this book from Therese Walsh's 50+ book contest in August. I suspect I wouldn't have read The Handbook otherwise, as it's not within my personal realm of genre fiction. So, thank you to Theresa for holding the contest, and thank you so much to Michele for including her book and sending the copy to me.

Bottom line: Read this book. You won't regret it, unless it makes you more prone to lightning. I seem to be safe so far :)

A Note On Comments

Hey folks,
In case anyone's interested, I've been getting a lot of spam lately in my comments, so I decided to turn on the word verification. I know that many people find this feature irritating, and so I apologize. I don't plan on having it on forever, but just long enough to deter the spammers for a while.

Have a great week!

Rosie