Book Review: The Winter Prince

First published in 1993 (Was that really sixteen years ago???), The Winter Prince, by Elizabeth E. Wein, tells the story of Medraut, eldest—and illigetimate—son of Artos, high king of Britain, as he struggles to come to terms with his jealousy of his younger half-brother, heir to the throne.

This is a gripping, powerful book, at times disturbing and dark, but always beautiful and elegantly told. The story, the characters, the setting, the history—all are marvelously drawn. The writing itself is exquisite. We're talking Charlotte Bronte-level gorgeousness of prose, here:

We rode through a tangle of dripping trees, then burst into a cloudy brown clearing, silvered over with mist, to see the rusty deer bright bounding through the winter bracken.

Sentences like that make me my little INFP heart soar. Dripping trees! Cloudy brown clearing! Silvered mist! Rusty deer bright bounding through the winter bracken! I want to marry this sentence!

Um, at any rate, this is a beautiful story told by a fabulously talented writer, and I highly recommend it.

A Naming Conundrum

Okay, so I've a question regarding character names. Let me 'splain.

My yet-to-be-penned 2009 NaNoWriMo novel is a sort-of sequel to two earlier novels (written in 2005 and 2007, respectively), and has a few characters who carry over. One of these is a rockin' female named Roen, and although she isn't the main character, she's quite important and is present throughout most of the novel. I'm also introducing a new female character (she's not the MC, either, but is also important) who wants to be named Wren. Question is this: Roen and Wren are really similar-sounding names. Are they too much alike? Should I call Wren something else even though the name seems to fit her? Or is it enough that the names look different on the page? What do you think?

And on a related note, I still can't figure out my ending. ARGH!!!

And on an unrelated note, the greater Phoenix area totally got gypped in terms of a monsoon season this year. No rain for me. Just sun. Forever. And ever. And ever. And ever. And ever. And ever. And ever. And ever. And ever. And ever...

I Don't Know Half of You Half as Well as I'd Like...

Well, first off, a great big Happy Birthday to these guys:

(Yes, I'm one of those.)


Second off, my whale bag came yesterday!!! It's super cute, and today will be its first official outing:

And lastly, because, really, this post should have something to do with writing, I give you my Writing Goals for the Week:

1. Write as much as possible on Seraphine, and hopefully start edging towards the ending
2. Keep brainstorming for this year's NaNoWriMo novel, and hopefully figure out what exactly happens at the end!!
3. Keep editing The Rose Queen.
4. Try not to have a miniature heart attack every time I check my email. Er, I mean... Wait patiently to hear back from agents.

And there you have it. Hope everybody's week is off to a fabulous start! Don't forget to eat some cake for Bilbo and Frodo today! :-)

Update Friday

Okay, so thought I'd jot off a quick update.

First off (and most important ;-)), thanks for all your input about the Adorable Whale Bag of Adorableness! I decided, after much thought, to go with the messenger bag, with possible purchase of the pocketed one to follow at a later date. I can NOT wait for it to arrive!! Wa-hoooo!! :-) :-)

Both of my status queries garnered very very nice responses—one hoping to have an answer by the end of the month, the other hoping to have an answer soon. I'm not exactly sure what this means, beyond the simple fact that both agents are exceptionally nice people and I get to wait some more. :-P / :-)

Seraphine is up to 7,027 words, and I've definitely reached the middle because I feel like it's started to flounder a bit. Still, I think I can press through and wrangle this thing on to the end. I think. Next task is to make my characters fall in love, reveal pertinent backstory, and then zap 'em with my beautiful but tragic ending. Sounds easy, right?

Finished reading Skin Hunger the other night, and I liked it pretty well. One of those stories that sort of starts out quietly and slowly builds up to something profound, but is written well enough to keep your interest. Except...

Let's talk about trilogies for a minute. You know how in most trilogies, the individual volumes, although very intricately connected to each other, have their own story arc? Build-up, conflict, at least partial resolution to the conflict, leading to a semi (or perhaps full-blown) cliffhanger ending. Right? You know those?

Skin Hunger didn't follow this pattern. It was starting to get really, really interesting when it stopped. Just... stopped. No ending whatsoever. And I know it's part of a series and that the second book is out (and I've reserved it at the library), but it left me feeling a bit cheated, because it didn't really feel like a complete book. It didn't resolve anything. But then maybe that was the point. I don't know.

What do you think? Should books that are part of a series be able to—at least partly—stand alone?

I'll leave you with a link to book editor Cheryl Klein's thoughts on what makes writing good.

The Adorable Whale Bag of Adorableness

So, ever since I penned The Whale and the Tree, I've been irrevocably drawn to purchase adorable things with whales on them. So far, I have a t-shirt, and that's about it. And then, on two separate occasions, I saw people wandering around in public with the most fantastic whale tote bag that was an absolute must-have (if you're me). So I googled it, and found it, except there's a problem. There's more than one version.


The adorable tote with pockets:

 

The adorable messenger bag:

 

My problem? Which one do I want??? It's cruel to be forced to make this kind of decision.

What's your vote?


P. S.  Aren't they ADORABLE???

P. P. S. The bags are made by Bungalow360, and you can purchase them on Amazon if you really wanna nick my style! ;-)

P. P. P. S. What? Writing? Um, yeah, I'll get to that later. Promise.

Muse: The Resistance

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled bookish blogging to gush about Muse's new album The Resistance, released in the US September 15th.

So. Muse. First fell in love with them when I heard the song "Butterflies and Hurricanes" off the Absolution album. Mostly because there was a bloody PIANO CONCERTO in the middle of it. Can you say awesome??? I afterwards grew to love the rest of the album for the soaring melodies and strong, gorgeous chord structure that very much had it's roots in 19th-century romantic works. Plus they just plain know how to rock.

I bought their earlier album Origins of Symmetry as well as Black Holes and Revelations when it came out, both of which I liked a lot, though I was ever so slightly disappointed that they weren't quite as pianistically-driven as Absolution.

And then The Resistance happened.

Wow. Piano galore. One of the tracks (United States of Eurasia) actually features part of a Chopin nocturne, and many of them have lots of epic piano styling courtesy Matt Belamy. The first half of the album is good. The second half is phenomenal. Don't get me wrong—in amongst the lush orchestral harmonies, gut-wrenchingly beautiful chord progressions, and almost inhuman vocal prowess, there's a lot of good old-fashioned rocking out going on. Oh and at one point Matt sings in French. It's enough to give a girl a heart attack.

So, to sum up... THIS ALBUM IS BRILLIANT. Go buy it now.

Writing and Reading and Status Queries, oh my!!

So I just did the scariest thing ever: I sent out status queries for that partial and full, at eight and nine weeks respectively. *shudder* I thought initial queries were terrifying, but no. SQ's are much worse. Probably because there's the possibility of a response. At any rate, I'll keep you posted.

I'm sure you're all anxious to know how my elopement with Shiny Idea is progressing, and I'm happy to announce that it's going pretty well so far. This might be love. :-) I'm at 5,500 words exactly (end of a sentence, too!), and I think I'm at the beginning of the middle, so keeping this thing under 20k is looking good at this point.

Writing without an outline is generally a Very Bad Idea, and I have hit a few snags, but for the most part it's gone smoothly, even if the story's already turning out different than I'd initially imagined. But then, most things generally do—and that is by no means restricted to the writing part of my life! At any rate, the story's called Seraphine, and is about a guy named Demetri who gets tossed into a labyrinth (sans David Bowie :-) ) to get eaten by a monster. It has a vaugely Greek mythology-esque setting, and is kind of a backwards Beauty & the Beast. Yesterday this rad underground library even showed up.

So. That's that. We'll see if I can stick to my guns and write the tragic ending originally planned... I'm already kinda wanting it to end happily ever after instead. :-) But you'll have that.

Finished reading Catching Fire on Thursday, but can't really review it without completely spoiling The Hunger Games, so we'll just leave it at: I enjoyed it, though not quite as much as the first one, and I'm really anxious for book three because I need some closure, dang it!!

And there you have it.