Friday, December 19, 2008
There's still five more days of shopping! So whether your looking for the right novel for a Christmas present, or you'd like some book recommends to add to your reading list, here is our book picks:
Gina Holmes:
Wounded, by Claudia Mair Burney
Jessica Dotta:
My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier
Ane Mulligan:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shafer and Annie Barrows
Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Masterpiece, by Elise Broach
Jellicoe Road, by Melina Marchetta
Fantasy/Science Fiction:
The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary Pearson
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Gina Holmes:
Wounded, by Claudia Mair Burney
Jessica Dotta:
My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier
Ane Mulligan:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shafer and Annie Barrows
Elizabeth Ludwig:
Cozy in Kansas, by Nancy Mehl
Kelly Klepfer:
Havah: The Story of Eve, by Tosca Lee
Yvonne Anderson:
The City of Dreaming Books, by Albert Moers 
Noel De Vries:
Middle Grade:
The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, by Jeanne Birdsall
Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Masterpiece, by Elise Broach
Young Adult:
Trouble, by Gary Schmidt
Jellicoe Road, by Melina Marchetta
Fantasy/Science Fiction:
The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary Pearson
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Friday, December 12, 2008
This movie trailer caught me by surprise. Then it made me smile. Then I laughed and told my husband, I had a pretty good idea how the writers came up with that plot.
Has this happened to any of you guys? You’re writing something . . . and oddly, strangely enough, what you’re writing happens. Or at least from a skewed point of view . . . it happens.
Generally though, when I’ve heard writers talk about this happening, it isn’t gumballs falling out of the sky, but creepy stuff.
Here’s two semi-recent examples:
1.) Awhile back I was re-reading some of my chapters and I noticed one of my characters kept having reoccurring headaches and other health problems. After googling some of this character’s “symptoms,” I began to ponder with the idea of giving him a brain tumor. Then came the day when a doctor told my husband he had a growth growing between his ear and his brain—okay I know this is silly, but somewhere in my jumbled thoughts, I suddenly wished I hadn’t written that into my story. (Husband is fine BTW)
2.) A friend and I were joking on the phone about a “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” type of story we could co-write. Only as we mapped out this idea, we found a catch. Neither one of us was willing to work on it because plot called for writers to die in uncanny ways. Less than a week later, my husband and I noticed a strange smell in our house. We had a gas leak which we were lucky enough to catch five minutes before heading out the door to church. When I mentioned the incident to my friend, she laughed and said something to the effect of, “Now imagine what would have happened if we’d decided to write the story instead of just discussing it.”
Okay, so what about you guys? Have you had any eerie similarities between something you wrote that later happened?