Romans and ruminations

I can't begin to describe to you how much more interesting the Romans are than the ancient Greeks...  Somehow time has flown by and I'm already at the end of the third Block (first Roman one) in Exploring the Classical World, but have covered so much!  I think it's the fact that there is so much more physical evidence for the Romans - the things they invented (in true "what have the Romans ever done for us?" style) that we still use today, the Roman alphabet letters that we use every day and so on, while the Greek legacy is more conceptual.  Democracy, for example.  I find it hard to get really interested in it because it's abstract - I can't physically see it like an aqueduct or an unbelievably long straight Roman road.  To me personally, even though I've learnt about their military exploits, building programmes and achievements, the Greeks still feel like a sort of mythical race that never actually existed (I know, it sounds stupid!), while the Romans seem so much more alive.  Maybe it's the fact that I've been to Rome, but never to Greece?  It's hard to put into words - all I know is that this one block with all its information on the political hierarchy, temples and tombs and so on has been a joy to study in comparison to the parts of the Greek blocks which were something of a slog. 

But anyway!  I'm off to see King Lear at the theatre with my dad this evening, so am squeezing in a bit of writing this afternoon, now that I'm all up to date with where I should be with the lovely Romans.  I'm writing this post before I start (so that I don't forget later) so rather than tell you what I have done, this is what I will do.  

After the huge success of interviewing my Crunch heroine last week, I plan this afternoon to look back at her answers and consider what sort of scenes I could use to work these facts about her into the story.  Not by dropping a deliberate speech about x, y or z into somewhere it doesn't sit right, more along the lines of 'what could happen that would make her react in a way that shows she feels x about y?'.  I already have the basic skeleton of the plot sketched out, so I see this as starting to put meat on those bones (ew - not the nicest metaphor, but it does sum up what I'm thinking most accurately!).  

So I'd better go and get on with it hadn't I?!  

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Booklog #14

Before I begin, I must offer the humblest of apologies for missing last Sunday's post.  It feels like an eternity ago already, but to look on the positive side, I now have lots to talk about today so every cloud has a silver lining! 

Since the last Booklog I've finished:

* White Fang ~ Jack London
This is one of those stories that I've always had a vague awareness of, but never known anything about, other than it's about a wolf - so when I saw it for free within the 'Aldiko' book reader app on my Android I thought I'd give it a try.  To be honest I was a little sceptical - how good can a story told from an animal's point of view really be?  Especially when White Fang doesn't actually have a 'voice' of his own (not even an internal one), it's all told as description of what he perceives through his sense and instincts. 

I felt that the start was a little slow for my liking - it concerns his mother, who lives with a pack of wolves despite being half domesticated dog and takes you from a time where she and the pack are facing starvation through to where she gives birth to White Fang and his siblings.  From this point it gets a lot more interesting as White Fang is a real character!  He's more fearless and feisty than the other cubs, and this gets him into quite a few scrapes from the off.  Even from such a young age his life is rather eventful, so I can't really say much more without giving away spoilers, however I will say that there is a significant amount of violence throughout.  If you're very sensitive to the thought of animals being harmed or harming each other then you might want to steer clear, as Jack London doesn't hold back with his description.  Despite this, it's a very well-told story with a lot of twists and turns, White Fang himself is very cleverly characterised and overall I really enjoyed it.  4/5

* Cleanskin ~ Val McDermid
One of the 'Quick Reads' shortish stories on Kindle.  Though I enjoy crime fiction, I've never tried any Val McDermid so I thought this might be a good place to start.  As you might expect from such a star of this genre, it's an intriguing tale of murder and mystery (and gore - there's been a lot of violence in my reading this last couple of weeks!), told, as usual, from the perspective of a detective with flaws and unresolved issues of his own.  The daughter of a well-known-but-never-able-to-pin-anything-on-him crime lord is murdered and soon after other members of the criminal fraternity start showing up in gruesome crime scenes.  But 'Mr Big' has disappeared - is he dead or is he out there getting revenge?  Our detective has to try and find out...  For such a short piece the characters are really well developed and there are a couple of huge and unexpected plot twists that really surprised me (I'm still shocked now, a week later!).  If you like crime dramas, you'll almost certainly enjoy this.  4/5

* The Middle Passage ~ Julia Golding
A nice bit of historical fiction now!  This is another short piece - a sort of after-story to a series which was set in the Caribbean.  Set in 1792, it follows a feisty young woman named Cat Royal as she journeys home to Britain, accompanied by one Billy Shepherd (who you might say is a bit of a rogue).  On the way they stop off at the Azores islands and get involved in a solving a mystery. 

I just checked the Amazon write-up to remind myself what year it was set in and was surprised to see that it is 'perfect for girls of 9 and above'...oh!  I  hadn't realised it was a children's story!  Which is testament to Julia Golding's writing I suppose - they do say that when writing for children you should never patronise or 'write down' to them and she certainly doesn't do that.  I thought it was just solid, descriptive, pacy writing.  The characters are brought to life very well - I would definitely like to read about their other adventures - and the mystery plot is built up steadily and resolved neatly.  All in all, an enjoyable novella-length read.  4/5

* The Crying Tree ~ Naseem Rakha
Last but not least for this week is the story of a teenage boy's murder and the after-effects it has on his family.  It explores some deep subjects - capital punishment, forgiveness, family bonds and hidden secrets - and though some of it makes for uncomfortable reading, it is all very compelling reading.  The crux of the plot is essentially 'will the murderer's execution go ahead or not', but the detail and all the emotion relates to how each member of the family - mother Irene, father Nate and daughter Bliss - deals with their grief.  They are very different characters and we journey with them over the twenty years that follow that fateful day, seeing them change and learn things they never knew about one another, as well as about the son that was lost.  Pulls on the heart-strings, but not in a twee way and really gets you thinking about subjects that aren't often discussed.  4.5/5

Since the last Booklog I've started:

* The Diviner's Tale ~ Bradford Morrow
* A Room With A View ~ E.M. Forster
* Manifesting Change ~ Mike Dooley

I'm still reading:

* Picture Perfect ~ Jodi Picoult
* Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett (60%)
* Murder on the Flying Scotsman ~ Carola Dunn (it's our final book club meeting about this one this week!)
* The Parthenon ~ Mary Beard

This puts me at 14/100 for the 100 Books In A Year Challenge. 

Phew!  Time for a lie down I think..! 
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Interview with my imagination

Firstly I must apologise to you dear readers - I wasn't able to post a Booklog on Sunday (I won't bore you as to the reasons why).  On the bright side, the next one will be extra long...  ;o)

Did you have a nice Valentine's Day?  Or if you think it's a overly-sentimental waste of time that's favoured only by florists and card shops, did you have a nice Monday?  Hubby and I always get each other cards but we held off on presents this year as a bit of a money-saver.  We also stayed home and cooked a meal (tarragon chicken, potatoes and beans) and watched a film (Troy) instead of going out - more money saved!  I don't like the overtly commercial side of the whole thing, but then Christmas, Easter and Halloween are exacly the same aren't they?  I guess it's just the way things are these days.  He and I know how we feel about one another and that's all that matters at the end of the day.  :o)

And so on to today.  My 'Romans' studying is ticking along nicely so I've been free to write - hurrah!  It always feels like a little oasis of time when these days come round, as though the rest of the week is the metaphorical slog through the desert.  I felt drawn back to Project Crunch and, inspired by this blog post I read over at Fear of Writing and also an article in Mslexia magazine, I decided that I would interview my leading lady.  Might sound a bit weird?  Surely I should be getting something down in the actual story to push up the word count?  Well yes, that's true - and the obsessive word-counter/graph-maker in me desperately wants to force the Crunch line in an upwards direction - but I wanted to follow up the character profiling that I did a couple of weeks ago.  I did that in bullet points as things occurred to me so it was a little haphazard, a cloud of random facts.  It didn't give me her voice. 

So I wrote down 'Tell me about yourself'.  And she did!  Tentatively at first, just the facts - height, build, age, that kind of thing - but as it went on, and more probing questions occurred to me, I found that she was gaining a voice of her own.  I asked her about her job and what she was aiming for, why that was important, how she met her fiance and what she felt when he proposed, all sorts of intimate details.  And she answered everything completely candidly...even questioning me back when she didn't like what I was implying!  It was a lot of fun and pretty revealing - I've learnt things about her that I had no idea of before, so she definitely feels more like a real person now.  And the best part is that although I did it most of the day, I didn't run out of questions, there is still more to find out! 

One interesting thing to note is that I did all this with pen and paper, not the laptop.  I read a while back on a blog (I forget what it was called, sorry!) that a study had been done comparing two groups of people - one writing and the other typing - to see how much time in a given period was spent writing, how much editing, what the end word counts were, that kind of thing.  The typing group spent a lot more time editing as they went along, while the pen group wrote more and did one edit at the end (I'm paraphrasing/summarising greatly here of course!).  I read that and thought 'ah, so that's the reason why I can't seem to stop myself self-editing as I go along - because I'm on the laptop and the ability to do is right there in front of me within a couple of clicks'.  It makes it much too easy to make changes. 

I hate crossing things out when I'm writing on paper (too much of a neat freak) and when I did this work today I found two things: 1) I chose my words more carefully, so as to minimise the likelihood of wanting to change them and 2) once I got into the magical zone where the right words were flowing and crossing out was not necessary, it really was as though I was just writing down what somebody was telling me.  The feel of pen on paper and the fact that I wasn't making the odd unavoidable keyboard typo meant it flowed better...though my wrist was aching a bit towards the end - it's been a long time since I did a lot of hand writing! 

I wrote 24 and a half A5 pages, so at about 110 words per page that's approximately 2695 words altogether.  Not bad at all!  Though I can't lift and drop it into the story as it is (that would definitely be a case of telling, not showing - a Very Bad Thing!), there will almost certainly be snippets that can be incorporated into conversations between the characters.  And the rest...well, I'll save that for an 'interview with our heroine' blog post once the book is published...  ;o)
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