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David Nobbs:
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
The Return of Reginald Perrin
The Better World of Reginald Perrin
Dee Brown:
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
Martin Noble:
Private Schulz
I own Bury My Heart, but have never gotten around to reading it.
I am about 100 pages into The Unwilling and I like it so far. Characters took a minute to form in my head but only criticism so far.
It's beautifully written, Deejers, it takes me back to his older works and honestly, he had me at: "Great events turn on small hinges."
Mystery, suspense, thriller, gtabs you and stays with you.
What did you score at the B&N? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on The Unwilling. I'm holding out for Thriftbooks for that and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.
I just got a delivery from Thriftbooks: 2 new Michael Koryta books - So Cold the River & Last Words, I also got Storm of the Century DVD (I have never seen this and Srbo & skimom2 say it's fantastic). The books are huge.
I've been doing a lot of Kindle reading. Amazon Prime has an Amazon Original Stories selection- I've worked my way through them. Each collection has 5/6 or so stories based on a theme: Missing/Warmer/Exposure/Disorder and others. I love short stories, I love randomness of thought, so it's been a cave of wonders for me. I definitely recommend them. I can "borrow" 10 books from Amazon somehow. Is this just a Prime perk? I'm still learning my Kindle's secrets. I got it for Christmas and just recently started reading on it. I've been playing solitaire on it for months though.
Unwilling is excellent. Take your time and get to understand the characters.
We're all writers. Anyone who picks up a pen or types something on their computer are writers. But we aren't all storytellers in the writing sense. We can chat up a story, but creating one for the page is different.
I've tried to write stuff that would make a wonderful story that a group of someones would really enjoy reading. And while trying, I sometimes can have this beautiful sentence. This amazing sentence. And it's so good, I think, did I write that sentence? Does that belong to me? Or did I pick that up from someone else along the way? And it's great to know that, no, I wrote that sentence. I just can't string enough of them together to create storytelling.
Any story world I've ever tried to create has never been polished and finished. Everything is so rough draft. Horrible things that might have a seed of something, but I can't quite find it because of the ridiculous weeds I seem to plant around it.
But, I must say, I am enjoyng this Masterclass. And it might spur me on to do Margaret Atwood's class, David Sedaris, Joyce Carol Oates, David Baldacci.
Before I die, I would like to write something that I can be really proud of.
He says something in this class that I love. And we've all bought into it. We've all joked about it.
Like all authors, he is asked "where do you get your ideas?" And he said most authors sort of answer that making fun of the person who asked it. "Oh, I got it at the idea store" or whatever flippant answer they give.
He said, he doesn't do that anymore because he believes it is the MOST important question to be asked. Sometimes they know where they get an idea and sometimes they don't. And it's a valid question.
He also doesn't believe in the "show, don't tell" idea.
And did you know, in comic book writing, you never put a major plot point, or a big reveal on a right hand page?
He is a class act.