WATCH or WASH: movie recommendations

Huh. Whaddaya know? It's June already. Which means half the year is done. Which means I am wayyyy past my self-imposed deadline to finish writing TMCRA...and I'm not freaking out. Why? Because I'm taking James Patterson's advice to heart and outlining the heck out of this book. And will not start writing again until I have said outline polished to a shine. 

So, in the meantime...as I can't very well outline a brilliant book without watching some brilliant movies...I've been binge watching stuff. Bottling inspiration. Spritzing it on myself and THE DOG all day long.

Here's a list of the last 5 movies I watched in no particular order:

PIKU

My take: It's so much more than shit-talk. I mean, Piku's shit-talk is smarter than some people's smart talk. Seriously, Peeps, watch this movie.

THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

My take: Superheroes, supervillains, superb star cast, super jokes, super gadgetries...what's not to love? Super super super entertaining. An evening well spent.

GABBAR

My take: the plot suspends disbelief to an extreme but I dig the theme, the message behind the movie. Must watch. 
(PS: DH has this thing where he calls strong willed women...mostly his mom and me...by this name and has for years. Sholay being his forever favorite movie. He's strange that way.)

THE FALL

My take: Scully and Mulder this is not! It's worse. It's so baaad that at one point I thought I really wouldn't mind being serial killed by Paul Spector...and that is just wrong on so many levels. It's that good. Go watch it. It's streaming on Netflix.

OUTLANDER

My take: I have loved the book/s for a decade now. Been obsessed with James Alexander Malcolm McKenzie Fraser like my teenage self was with Ronan Keating. Complete disclosure: I didn't love the TV series but that's because I think the book is ULTRA-MAG! Season 1 is finito, so go watch it before you read the book. 

And that's it for now. Flick off.

JUMP

Motivation.

With a jet-lagged brain, a sore throat and some fever, I haven't felt an urge to get back up on my writing horse. I'm hoping this bit of song and dance will pump up the blood and brainwaves.

What gets you moving?

THE WRITE WAY.

As a reader, I always wondered how an author penned a book. How did Jane Austen plot Pride and Prejudice. Did she imagine the story first and drew the characters second? Did she imagine Elizabeth first or Darcy? Was Wickham her inspiration? Did she draw on real people, real experiences? And if all characters are nothing but their author’s alter ego, then how could Lizzie and Emma and Catherine and Fanny and Anne all be different?

The truth is it’s both internal and external for an author. It’s observation and experience, research and imagination, plotting and deviating from the plot. Ask a hundred authors what inspires them or about their method of writing and you will get a hundred (times 10) different answers.

Some write in bursts, others every day. Some write while sober, others while intoxicated. There are depressed writers, happy authors, night writers and day writers. Some write epics in coffee shops and make the franchise famous, others from the comfort of their beds. Some write when inspiration hits while some just sit down and write. Some outline while others write by the seat of their pants. For some creativity is hard work and for others it’s second nature. A book whose author never went to school can do as sensationally as one whose author had a double PhD. I believe that a writer will write his story and that story will find a reader.

What I’m getting at is that there is no Write Way. There is only write and write and write every day.

For me personally, I tend to imagine my characters first. Who are they? What makes them tick? How do they look? What baggage do they carry? What do they want out of life? What might life teach them? I imagine the characters until they become my best friends and then I give them their story.

(pics and gifs: random search online)

THE BOOK THIEF

A masterpiece about human triumph by Marcus Zusak.

Every so often, a book comes into your hands that you don't want to let go of even if you've finished reading it. I've had the good fortune to have many such books make an impression on me and hope that many more will. But this post is about the Book Thief.

Set in Nazi Germany, the Book Thief's narrator is Death who in spite of his obviously busy and overworked schedule during that time can't help but examine the ordinary and yet extraordinary life of Liesel Meminger, a young Jew-loving German girl with a compulsion to steal books (among other things). Who has a best friend that emulates Jesse Owens and a foster father who harbors a Jew (Hans Hubermann will make you weep with joy and heartbreak) and a foster mother who can't say a sentence without adding the epithet, Saumensch (pig), to it. 

What we have in this book is the view from the inside. What is it like to be German in Nazi Germany? What was this confusion, this guilt, this utter shame you felt inside while on the outside you Heil Hitlered? 

This book is all about the power of words. Words that will lift you to the heavens, that may bring you to your knees, that tried to exterminate the human spirit.

For book lovers, the Book Thief is a no brainer. For humans, the Book Thief is your chance at redemption.

“I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.” 

End of quote. End of book.

MY MAGIC MOMENT

Where do novel ideas come from?

During a lecture at Yale, Stephen King said that if you read enough, there’s this magic moment which might come to you if you are meant to be a writer. It’s the moment when you put down some book and say: “This really sucks . . . I can do better than this . . . And this guy got published.” 

That pretty much sums up my magic moment. For as long as I can remember, I have always read and read and read...and spun stories (and no thats not a euphemism for pathological liar, although there were times I have spun really fab lies as well and I believe no one has caught me on those yet). So I read voraciously, mostly fiction and more often than not happy stories, and a few years ago I was enthralled by this book from its very first sentence.

I had everything a woman could want…

My husband, James. The house on the lake. Our perfect life. And then Alex came to visit. The first time I saw my husband’s best friend, I didn’t like him. Didn’t like how James changed when he was around, didn’t like how his penetrating eyes followed me everywhere. But that didn’t stop me from wanting him. And, surprisingly, James didn’t seem to mind.

It was meant to be fun. Something the three of us shared for those hot summer weeks Alex stayed with us. Nobody was supposed to fall in or out of love. I didn’t need another man, not even one who oozed sex like honey and knew all the secrets I didn’t know, the secrets my husband hadn’t shared. After all, we had a perfect life. And I loved my husband.

But I wasn’t the only one.

This book gripped my attention wholly and not only because it was one of the first erotic romances that I'd begun to read (EL James doesn't hold a candle to Megan Hart, IMHO). I totally believed that I knew how it was going to end, right at the beginning. Its a romance, right? Romances have happy endings, right? I was so wrong. The end of this book destroyed me. I couldn't stop thinking about it or talking about it. I just wouldn't accept why Hart would be so heartless. And that was my magic moment. Or rather, my magic scenario for you see I didn't just think about this book, I dreamed about it and visualized it. Dangerously, I might add. Once, I was driving down my town's main road, it was winter and it had just snowed and there I was driving along a stark wintry road with copious mountains of snow on either side of me and the trees bare and pretty when for a moment (or was it two or three or four...?) I didn't see the wintry road but a beach and clear blue waters of a lake and woman in a red day dress turning to look at me. I was...I don't know what I was (I still don't) when I realized that I'd flashed a scene from that book. I went home, called a friend and spilled my quivering guts out. At the end of that furious rant, I said offhandedly, that if I ever...ever wrote a book, this was one book I would rewrite and give it my end. That was the only way I'd get any kind of closure with it.

Of course, I did not actually get around to writing any kind of book until my mother sort of bullied me into doing more with my life than I was doing at that point. When I did become a writer and eventually a published writer, I always had my magic moment at the back of my head. I knew I had to write that story and end it my way. And so I am. I'll be starting my fourth novel in February (kind of fitting as thats when I'd had that scary flashy moment while driving) and Tempted is going to be its inspiration.

Magic moments aren't limited to writers obviously. Whats your magic moment? I'd love to know.

FORTY and COUNTING!

For this be the fortieth year of my reign. Thus I bring to thee words of inspiration from mine favorite quiller.

Anne Hathaway's House in Stratford Upon Avon.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, 

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,

Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now, 

Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held: 

Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies, 

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days, 

To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes, 

Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use, 

If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine 

Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,' 

Proving his beauty by succession thine! 

    This were to be new made when thou art old, 

    And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

-William Shakespeare.

This sonnet was written in praise of a friend of Will's and as encouragement to the friend to procreate. The only way to live forever, Will believed.