Summer Quarter Begins!

It's been a bit of a busy week, summer classes just started at Clark and I've been frantically trying to get back into some sort of a routine. This always takes awhile, I haven't ever scheduled classes at this time of day before (mid afternoon) and so this has messed up my sleeping patterns a bit. This quarter I'm taking four classes, two online, Women's Studies and Intro to Humanities, and two on campus, Intro to Archaeology and Film Study.

Women's studies is definitely...interesting. I found myself reading the material and thinking that the authors were over-analyzing things but as my mother pointed out, I am from a generation that hasn't really had to worry about women's rights, at least not in the way hers did. I should count myself lucky, that I've never really been discriminated against for being a woman. Well I have in WoW but that's a different territory, they can tell me to "Go back to the kitchen" or "Make me a sandwich" but they can't make me do any of that, instead I'll simply tank better than they can or out dps them. This is a new experience and I've decided that while I find it odd, I'll probably be more grateful for what I have after taking this class.

The other class I want to talk about is my film studies class. It's absolutely fascinating, we just watched The Artist, which was a stunning film. Silent films are simply beautiful to me, I love seeing how well people can act without dialogue, it's all about movements, gestures and facial expressions. After watching that, I went and watched a film my teacher had talked about in class, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which was a bit odd but still very good. I won't reveal the ending here but I bet that back when it came out in 1919, everyone was surprised by it. Nowadays, that twist is used more often so I wasn't that phased by it. While watching this film I was amazed with the performance of the actor who played the somnambulist, Cesare. His name was Conrad Veidt and he was a German actor in the early 1900s. People will most likely remember him for this role in Casablanca, as Major Heinrich Strasser, but he was in a lot of other stuff too. I went and watched one of his other silent films, The Man Who Laughs, a film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel. That was a truely heartbreaking performance, it was a wonderful film and also starred the lovely Mary Philbin (known for the role of Christine Daae in the 1929 silent version of The Phantom of the Opera). The makeup that Conrad wore in the film would eventually be the inspiration for the comic book character, the Joker. I hope to see more of his films soon, along with more silent movies, they are classics for a reason, every time I watch one I'm blown away, they prove that you don't need big explosions and over the top sex scenes to make a good movie.

That's all for now, nothing to update on the summer reading list because I haven't had the time to really sit down and read. I sort of started James Herriot's Dog Stories but that's it. Hopefully once I get into a sort of routine, I'll have more time to do some serious reading.

Accomplished Writing! Woohoo!

Well, I sat down and did some research and worked more on one of my characters for my story. This may sound minor but it's very tricky nowadays to make an interesting character that isn't a Mary Sue or incredibly angsty or just plain boring. Ideally, I'd like this character to be interesting enough for people to want to keep reading and understand why they are the way they are. This got me confident enough to write three pages of the start of my story, the sort of introductory bit that happens right before the story begins. I can already tell that I need to go back and edit it later but still, this is a start! *does excited little dance*


On another note, I've begun reading "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card and I can already tell that this book is slightly dated since he talks a lot about getting stories published in magazines. It really saddens me that that isn't really done quite as much anymore, I mean there are still magazines that take submissions like that but not nearly as many, I used to work in a bookstore and when I put out new magazines, I'm sad to say that we didn't have very many writing ones. Still, I think this book will be a good resource, I'm glad I picked it up at Third Place Books when I was in Seattle.


Tangent real quick here, since I mentioned them. Third Place Books is a WONDERFUL little used and new bookstore on the outskirts of Seattle. It's a bit hard to find, tucked back a ways but it is well worth the effort. The staff was incredibly helpful and didn't give up until they found the book I was looking for. They have a nice selection of used and new books, similar to Powell's in downtown Portland, and as usually happens with me in bookstores, I walked out with a rather large stack of new reading material. On top of that, this store has a very nice vintage books section and a really nice sort of food court. If I ever move to Seattle, which I might for my master's degree, Third Place Books will surely become one of my favorite hang outs!


And on a closing note, I found a very useful quote while reading the Wow.insider posts, this one was about the state of female characters in the lore (which, in case you're wondering, is appalling). The writer of this piece, Anne Stickney said "Write a character. Give that character a really good backstory. Give the character a totally grounded reason for existing and something to be up to in the world. Give the character an interesting history, a believable background, and a purpose for existence. Make this the kind of badass character you love writing more than anything else in the world. Then make it female." 
I agree with this statement wholeheartedly and I'm going to try using thinking that way when creating my characters, female and male. Also, it's worth reading that article since she coins a wonderful phrase while applies to all-too-many female characters in literature: barnacle characters, which as she puts it "a character whose entire existence is dependent on and wrapped around the existence of another" (aka Bella Swan). For anyone interested in reading this article, here's the link to it. Women in Warcraft


Well, that's all for now, I may have rambled a bit but hey, I'm getting back into writing and this is part of it. Until next time!

Summer Reading and Writing Attempts

My "summer vacation" is going to be very short, seeing as how I had about two weeks between the end of spring quarter and the beginning of summer quarter. However, since it's summer I feel obliged to go online, find a good list of classics that I've always been meaning to read, check out a massive stack of these books and ultimately finish three or four of these by summer's end. It's not that I read slow, just with an 18 credit courseload, I'm not anticipating as much reading time as I'd like. My tentative list at the moment looks like this:

1. Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy
2. Possession, by Byatt
3. Dog Stories, by James Herriot
4. The Crystal Cave, by Stewart
5. Jane Eyre (reread simply because it's wonderful)
6. Emma, by Jane Austen

That's it for now, I'm hoping that's not overly ambitious. However, on top of all this I'm once again going to make a stab at working on a novel, this time a sort of science fiction story involving alternate universes. I've decided to try and start out by writing for 25 minutes a day, sort of inspired by something I heard on a podcast. Then maybe work up to working longer, but since I have a bit of a problem with concentrating this might take some time. I'll try and document these attempts here to keep track of them, as well as any interesting tid-bits I've looked up or read about writing. Here's to the summer reading and writing goals!