Celebrate the Small Things 10-5-19

This post is part of Lexa Cain's bloghop, Celebrate the Small Things. Head on over there to join up!

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

I've had a tough week at work, so looking forward to a bit of R & R this weekend.  My partner is away on a little tour, so it's just me and the kids.  I plan to read a lot, maybe write a bit, but basically just relax.

I had some old friends over for dinner last night which was fun.  A little too much wine was drunk and the kitchen is something of a bomb site this morning, but it was great to catch up with people I haven't seen for a long time.

I haven't written a lot this week (in terms of my book - work writing, I've done a ton of), so I'm hoping to address that this weekend.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: Unclaimed Baggage

This was one of those weird books that felt kind of light and fluffy to read, but actually had some really serious stuff lurking under that candy-floss exterior.  I'm not entirely sure the whole thing worked, tonally, but I enjoyed reading this very much.  I also want to work in a store like Unclaimed Baggage!

When Nell moves to a new town in the South, she has a lot to acclimatize to.  She misses her boyfriend and the friends she left behind, hates the heat and can't figure out what there is to do in this place.  When she gets a job at Unclaimed Baggage, a store that sells the stuff in suitcases left behind in airports and never claimed, she meets Doris and finds her new best friend.

Grant has his own problems.  His drinking has pretty much decimated his role as star of the local football team and his relationship with his girlfriend, his parents and pretty much everyone else close to him.  To try and keep himself busy and not thinking about his next drink, Grant takes a job at Unclaimed Baggage and finds himself all but adopted by Doris and Nell.

Despite her outgoing exterior, Doris is harboring her own secrets.  A few years back, at a church outing, she was groped on a waterslide and when she was upset about the assault, the church leader dismissed her distress and blamed her for the incident.  Doris hasn't been to church (or on a waterslide) since.

Over the course of the book, all three of these very different people find themselves and ways to deal with their problems by leaning and relying on each other.

I enjoyed this book.  The characters were each distinctive and had their own quirks.  The depiction of small-town life was realistic and so well drawn I could feel the heat.  And while sometimes the flippant tone didn't match the events going on, I understand that sometimes the only way to deal with difficult subject matter is with humor.

So I'd recommend this one.  Even if it's just for the stuff these kids find in the left-behind suitcases!

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

In Jen Doll's young adult debut novel, Unclaimed Baggage, Doris--a lone liberal in a conservative small town--has mostly kept to herself since the terrible waterslide incident a few years ago. Nell had to leave behind her best friends, perfect life, and too-good-to-be-true boyfriend in Chicago to move to Alabama. Grant was the star quarterback and epitome of "Mr. Popular" whose drinking problem has all but destroyed his life. What do these three have in common? A summer job working in a store called Unclaimed Baggage cataloging and selling other people's lost luggage. Together they find that through friendship, they can unpack some of their own emotional baggage and move on into the future.

Weekly Goals 6-5-19

I didn't get quite as much writing done over the weekend as I had hoped to do, but I did manage to finish filling in most of the hole in the middle of the book.  I feel like I may need to flesh some of it out a bit more, but the bones are there.

So now I need to write the ending.  And I think I may have made my favorite character in the whole thing kind of unlikable in the last scene I wrote toward the ending.  I have an idea how to undo that, but I'm not entirely sure it's necessary.  He was acting realistically, even if it's not what the reader (or the protagonist) is going to want to hear from him.

I don't think it's going to be too long before I need some fresh eyes on this thing...

So this week's goal is to try and write an ending that's both satisfying and realistic.  Which is going to be challenging because what the MC wants all the way through the book he doesn't get to have.  I need to give him something else.  But what is that something?

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 3-5-19

This post is part of Lexa Cain's bloghop, Celebrate the Small Things. Head on over there to join up!

What am I celebrating this week?

As usual, the weekend!  After two short work weeks, doing a full five days felt rather challenging.  I'm glad to have a weekend now in which to catch my breath.

My quiz team won the quiz this week and we got the highest score we've ever managed.  So that was good.  Unfortunately one of our members (the only one who knows anything much about sports) is moving to Melbourne and next week will be his last week on the team.  There isn't a sports round every week, but often enough that we will definitely miss him and his knowledge.

I didn't get much writing done this week because almost every night was taken up with something else.  There was the quiz of course, but this week I also took part in a focus group for a research company about the new 'improved' bus service and went to the record release of a friend's new album (which my partner recorded and mixed).  So the weekend needs to be about writing so I can catch up a little.

What are you celebrating this week?

IWSG for May

It's the first Wednesday in May, so it's time for the IWSG monthly post.

This month's question is: What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

This is a good question.  I think I've always known that language had power. I learned to read to myself when I was three, but even before that I remember being swept away by stories my mother read me, being frightened with the characters or sad.

I think when I first learned I had power over language was when I was twelve.  We had a substitute teacher for several weeks and she asked us to write a story one day.  I wrote something based on a two-line summary of a movie I'd seen advertised somewhere and this teacher thought it was extraordinary.  She was genuinely moved by the plight of my characters and the relationships I developed over the three or four pages I scrawled.

I think that's really when I decided I wanted to be a writer.  I saw how my words had affected this teacher and it made me feel powerful.  I could evoke emotion, even in a teacher!

And since then, I've written.  And writing scenes that evoke strong emotions is something I try to do in every book because that's powerful writing.  If you can make the reader really feel something, then your job as a writer is done.

I think I may have done it a little too well last weekend though...  I made myself cry while I was writing and had to stop for a while.  That's never happened to me before!

Have you ever made yourself cry with a scene you wrote?