Resident Alien of Nano

Well, it was bound to happen – missed days of both blogging and of words and of Nanolomo. This is partly a function of the missing days being my work days (and a dance teaching evening as well) – but also partly laziness. The words I can feel… kind of ok about, because they don’t have to be an everyday thing, but I wonder how I could have better managed the posts and reviews. Planning and scheduling I think would have been the way. Since I can schedule posts after all, I could have done a few ahead of time and that way made the whole process easier.

Once I would have felt bad about not having perfectly completed the month, and just thrown in the towel, not have bothered with continuing to post for the rest of the month. These days, I figure perfection is a touch over-rated. So, back onto the wagon for me, and hopefully with more foreplanning for next week’s work days.

At any rate, the Nano website reckons I just need to write 1700 words daily anyway to hit the goal on time, but I’d still rather catch up tomorrow. Perhaps though I can manage just a double hit rather than a triple – 5100 words in a single day is a rather lot! Doable, but may be not sensible.

Am still enjoying the process of discovering the characters, new ones especially. I have a feeling I might have to add another fight into the final act, but I wonder if that might be contorting the plot into being something it isn’t. Well, still got some time before I get to that point.

So to back-track a bit on the planned meme (and really, I might just grab things from it as the mood takes me), and perhaps to save me a bit of typing, I’ll talk about one of my favourite quotes.

Wherever I am on this earth, I am and shall always be a resident alien.
- Quentin Crisp

Actually, sod talking about it, I’m just going to let it stand as it is.

Mirrored from jacquelinebrocker.esquinx.net.

Nanolomo: So You Want To be a Wizard by Diane Duane

This is another of those significant books published in the year of my birth. Though really it isn’t just the one book, but also Duane’s whole Young Wizards series.

The story: Nita Callahan, hiding out in the library from the local bullies, finds a book titled ‘So You Want To Be a Wizard.’ Intrigued, she takes it home, and quickly discovers it is in fact a manual for how to become a wizard. Her adventures lead her to a new friend and equally new wizard, Kit Rodriguez, an alien pinpoint of light (nicknamed Fred), and the introduction of the series villain, often known as the Lone Power.

This series has gotten to me in ways Harry Potter never really could have. I thoroughly enjoyed the Potter books, but for the most part the characters felt relatively safe. What I think Duane has down is the rather serious choices and decisions that wizards have to make. Wizardry doesn’t exist in a separate, parallel world, but rather wizards act as guardians of a sort to the places they occupy. There is a deep sense of connectedness with everything that goes on, not a new-age hippy kind of way, but a sense that choice and action has an affect and reaction. Duane touches on the spiritual as well; I just loved the idea that what wizardry is about is slowly down entropy (the physical as well as the metaphysical). The end will come, sure, but there is still time for good things in the universe too. My favourite of the series is probably the second, Deep Wizardry, where our protagonists had to make some pretty frightening choices. And the Lone Power makes also for a pretty compelling villain too. If you’re after thoughtful YA fantasy, the Young Wizards books are pretty bloody good.

PS – I had to do a bit of hunting to find this cover, and I wanted this one in particular because it was the one on the edition I first read.

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Mirrored from jacquelinebrocker.esquinx.net.