Hi-Liner Class of 2005 Family Histories

So I was looking around on the website of my alma mater, Valley City High School, and saw this interesting link to several essays written by Mrs. Wendel's English class on their families' personal histories. (Mrs. Wendel was my 7th Grade English teacher, this is an 11th grade class here).

Since they are public record and out on the web I don't feel any guilt in linking to them and maybe perhaps being inspired by them for other stories. There's a lot of North Dakota grit here just in the first few stories in the As.
I do notice that the habit of starting your essay with a question "Have you ever... " and then "Well I ..." is firmly entrenched in these kids.

Hi-Liner Histories

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

This book I picked up in the hallway at work, it had a "Free, take me" sign sticking up out of it, written on paper from the nearby print shop.

It's a story of Peekay, a young English boy growing up in South Africa, surviving initially in a boarding school where he is regularly beaten up by Afrikaaner boys who hate him because he is English and England sent many Afrikaaners to concentration camps during the First Boer War.
He eventually finds mentors when home for vacations, and spends most of the happy times of his childhood actually in a prison where his friend and mentor Doc has been imprisoned (mainly just for being German). He starts out coming to continue taking piano lessons from Doc but finds another passion in the boxing team at the prison and builds a lengthy successful boxing career which continues on to boarding school.

It's a very strong individualist, survivalist story, another reviewer on Amazon compared it to "The Kite Runner" and it is very similar but perhaps a bit more episodic and not as emotionally jarring as "The Kite Runner".

Game Developer's Conference, Pat, Ames, and Writing

Spent most of the afternoon on Friday with Pat walking around the Game Developer's Conference, apologies to Pat for this picture because I forgot to get a better one of her later on.
This is Pat listening/ talking to Ames and I after we sat down to have a beer after wandering around the show, and then Ames saw me and ran over to say hi.
This was such a fun conversation that I forgot to get my coat out of our company's booth before the booth was dismantled, and our studio head took it back in his car.

Pat and Ames found they share a love of wolf stories, which was quite cool! Ames and I were also inspired to write, especially to try writing in the morning although I meant to do that this morning (Saturday) but did not.
In riding home on light rail I found also that Pat and I have a similar attitude on the "adventure" of public transit: it's kind of a pain and a stress to get on and to the public transit, but once you're on it, you don't really get as stressed as you do when driving and you really feel when driving as if you could have controlled the situation if there's traffic, etc. But on transit, if it's late, it's late. Pat actually took BART to Caltrain, then Caltrain to light rail, to get to the show.

SunPath's early writing

I took a picture of this picture with my treo and there it is. It would probably look nicer if I used my other camera, but oh well.
I'm using the site "www.platial.com" to make a list of places I've lived, but don't have many pictures I've actually taken to put in there until getting to the California era.

This is my Treo wallpaper to inspire me to write more.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials (paperback trilogy): Buy on Amazon!

I first read these at least a year ago but reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell made me think of Philip Pullman.
Both have very believable worlds that incorporate magic, fantasy, and in His Dark Materials, almost a whole alternate version of our world.

The whole concept of daemons as being extensions of your personality and unique only to you - I read a quote from Philip Pullman where he said kids were writing to him saying that after reading this they felt that they have their own daemons, and he pointed out, we all do. (If you have not read the book, these daemons are not evil "demons" - they're more like very intelligent familars which are there to help each person, augment their strengths, etc).

I haven't read this recently so I can't go on and on about it but the characters of Lyra and Iorek Bjornson are probably my favorites.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: Buy on Amazon

'I have a bit of a problem now that the fairy roads are all open ... what do I do with them?'. - a quote from the author in a recent interview.

I got this book for my birthday about 2 weeks ago from my boyfriend, and am finally almost done with it. Of course this is to be expected to take even me this long, because it has 846 pages!

It is really its own world, an alternate "fantastic" (meaning not fantasy like dwarves and giants, or even magical magic as in Harry Potter with wands and such). The story is set in nineteenth century England, during the "Revival of English Magic" led by the two foremost magicians, Strange and Norrell.
They are actually commissioned to do magic - for example, Strange goes off to Portugal to help fight against the French with Lord Wellington. And there is a whole world of magical history which Clarke gives us a glimpse of, with very detailed footnotes regarding magical deeds and wizardry of the past, fairy stories, and more.

It is hard to describe, but I am loving it. I laughed out loud when hearing of how Strange moved the city of Lisbon temporarily to America to avoid being attacked by the French, but then has to send magical messages to the troops still in Portugal so they'll know where the troops are.
The birds around the armies are enchanted to sing in rhyme,
"Lord Wellington says.. blah blah" and that's how the message is conveyed (also by little cakes baked in the shape of letters by a baker who has no idea what they're spelling out).

Anyway, very very English. I remember being in England and how entertained we were by the wordiness everywhere.

"Way Out" instead of Exit.
The Construction Sites had about a paragraph of text: "This Road will be closed for this long because of this big project which is taking place for this reason and so on"
where in the US we might just say "Road Closed Due to Construction. "

Susanna Clarke talking about her influences on her site:
I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why — except that they know things other people don't and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.
In C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories there are only two magicians. One is weak and wicked, and the other barely gets two lines of dialogue.
But they both fascinated me. One (the weak one) has a tray of magic rings, green and yellow, as shiny and bright as sweets. They're magic, they're jewelry and they look like scrummy sweets. What's not to like? In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could. The closest model was Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea stories. While you're reading them, magic seems perfectly real. You feel it must exist and it must be just as Le Guin describes.

Y The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

This is a really great graphic novel series - recommended by a friend at work who used to work in a comic book store.

I've read the first 4 softcover collections from the list below, we are probably going to be getting issues 5 and 6 this weekend.

The question is, what would happen if some unexplained phenomenon caused all the men and male mammals in the world to die at the same time, except for one twenty-something guy and his male monkey?

Yorick Brown is the guy in question here, and has been so far, very faithful to his girlfriend in Australia, even though he has no idea whether or not she is still alive. The book is beautifully drawn and the story just sucks you in completely, with all kinds of secrets, missing characters (Yorick's sister, the similarly Shakespearean named Hero, for example).

Reading comics for me is like watching a movie or a TV show, or having a dream. I just inhale them, especially when they are good. And I have such an unending supply of them available from my boyfriend's collection.

1. Unmanned: Issues #1-5 - bought and read together with #2
   
2. Cycles: Issues #6-10 - see above
   
3. One Small Step: Issues #11-17 - bought and read last weekend with #4
   
4. Safeword: Issues #18-23 - see above
   
5. Ring Of Truth: Issues #24-31
6. Girl on Girl: Issues #32-36
7. Paper Dolls: Issues #37-42 (Outs May/17/06)

Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

I heard Ruthanne Lum McCunn speak at the Women on Writing conference on my birthday as well and read this book that weekend. I had just kind of vaguely heard of her but the book really intrigued me.
It's a fictional telling of a historical story - a Chinese girl is sold into slavery by her father (even though she is his precious "thousand pieces of gold).
She eventually ends up traveling to America and apparently pretty narrowly escaping having to work as a prostitute. One of the men in the small mining town where she ends up in Oregon befriends her, helps her start up her own boarding house business, and eventually they fall in love.
It was very sweet how their relationship is described, and I did really enjoy the story, but I was almost surprised that there was not more happening in the last half of the book.

It's also a bit horrible to think of but I was almost thinking that Polly's experiences before she met Charlie would be even worse than they were. I think maybe the writing even in the beginning lacks some drama, Polly is really going through some hard events but it doesn't hit me as viscerally as some other works.
I did enjoy the book though, it was a pretty relatively fast read and interesting to hear McCunn talk about the research she did to write the book.

The New Woman, by Jon Hassler

The New Woman: Buy on Amazon!
I was happy to see this book at Kepler's when I randomly decided to look to see what older Hassler books they had there, a few months ago.
A new book! Another visit back to the small Minnesota town of Staggerford, home to Agatha McGee, a retired Catholic teacher now in her eighties, who up until this book has lived happily in her own home.

Jon Hassler is one of my favorite writers and also my former "pen pal" when I was in high school, as he had responded to a letter asking him about his writing career initially, and then would send little postcards with updates about what he was working on, and what was going on with him.

That building on the book cover looks like it could be in Valley City, North Dakota, my hometown. I first met Agatha McGee in the pages of "Staggerford", Hassler's first novel, which spans a week in the life of Miles Pruit, Agatha's boarder.
The book is short but warm and comforting, and I don't have it in front of me right now to be more detailed, but it's like visiting an old friend from home to read it.

Hassler's impetus to write at 37: (from his web page linked above)

"I can trace my desire to be a writer back to the age of 5 when I was being read to by my parents and cousins and uncles and aunts. However, not until I was 37 did I, upon waking one morning in September 1970, hear a voice in my head saying, Half your life is over, Hassler, you'd better get started."

With a pen and notebook, he headed for the library at the Brainerd community college where he was teaching, and began "A Story Worth Hearing." He hasn't looked at it in years but doubts that the never-published story was worth hearing. It was, however, a start.

He took a sabbatical in 1975-76, moved into his nonwinterized cabin 75 miles northwest of Brainerd that October and started what became "Staggerford." It was based on diaries he had kept of his real-life teaching experiences. He had been haunted by a murder in the small northern Minnesota town of Clearbrook in the 1950s, and its echo is in the book.

Women on Writing Conference, Pat Murphy

I am really jazzed right now because I just went to a "Women on
Writing" conference today and got to meet one of my favorite authors,
Pat Murphy. I did also get many other books signed and heard Janice Mirikitani but I want to give her her own blog entry after I have actually read her book I bought.

Here's the blog spiel I wrote here about Pat Murphy's book The City Not Long After...
Here's her
biblio/awards page
She is awesome!

I had finally found a copy of this book (The City Not Long After) in a
used bookstore after looking for it hither and yon(I hear a paperback edition is coming
out this spring) and so I emailed her since she lives in the Bay Area
to see if she would be signing somewhere since I now finally have a book of my own to sign, and she told me she would be speaking
and signing books at the conference, so I decided to go, especially
since it was on my birthday.

It was very inspirational, I had told her it was my birthday so she
actually brought another one of her books for me as a present (although I didn't take it because it was the collection of short stories that Dave gave me initially that got me started reading her work.) The workshop that she led was also very productive, I actually have a little germ of a plot that I did not have yesterday, as she led us through the questions she asks herself when getting started on a new writing idea.

It was so nice to actually have an extended conversation instead of my
usual tongue-tied talking at book signings, where I usually say only:
"Thank you so much for coming... my name is Solveig - yes, pronounced
Sol-vay...yes it is a Norwegian name...I really like your work.
Bye..."

It also turns out there's an additional connection in that we have some common interests in the game industry . . .