Jennifer Priester's Blog, page 8

Review of the “McGrowl” series by: Bob Balaban

McGrowl is one of my favorite book series. In total it spanned six books, all of which I loved. McGrowl is a fun and loyal bionic canine hero with the ability to communicate telepathically with the boy who will becomes his new owner in book one of the series. In book one, McGrowl was separated from his owner, at which time he develops his new powers. Like many superheroes, McGrowl doesn’t come by his abilities naturally, but he uses them well.

Short Stories and the Mortal Realm Witch Series

When you think of books that are comprised of short stories, usually what comes to mind are anthologies that collect many short stories about a specific subject or genre that is written by many different authors. Although related, they are separate stories, not one story is usually based on characters or events of another story in the book, except for those written by many different authors that is based around a specific storyline. The stories in these types of books can easily be read in any order without confusion.

Some of my books that I am currently working on feature short stories like mentioned above, such as one of my upcoming books: Tales of Familiars: The First Mortal Realm Witch series companion. Other books of mine which feature short stories are very different. This is the case with my first published book, Mortal Realm Witch: Learning About Magic and some of my other books in progress.

When thinking of my first book, Mortal Realm Witch: Learning About Magic, and other books like this, it is actually easiest and least confusing to think of this individual book as if it was a book series by itself. A series in which you can read each book or story out of order and still have an idea of what’s going on, but it is still easiest and best to read everything in order. For these books you could also think of them as you would those books in which some of the books in a series have been compiled into one.

This is what several of the books I write are like, but they are comprised of shorter length stories that follow a timeline.

Basically, for the Mortal Realm Witch series specifically, there are a few simple rules you can follow to ensure you get maximum enjoyment of the series. First, if the individual stories in the book are read out of order, you may be slightly confused but would still be able to understand what is going on and what is being talked about, although I do suggest reading them in order. Second, the series itself should be read in the order that will be presented on the Mortal Realm Witch website, but that doesn’t mean you can’t read the series out of order if you want to. There are multiple ways the series could read best. For instance, Book One in the series may set up events for the future books and is a good place to start in order to get to know the characters, themes, ideas, as well as for timeline order, but it also works well as a backstory if read after any other book in the series. The recommended order is only recommended due to the fact that there are a few spoilers, although limited, in following books of the series because how the books were written.

Review of “Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking” by: Philippe Coudray

This was one of the funniest books I have ever read, and is perfect for anyone that likes to read comic strips, graphic novels, and/or funny books!

Review of “Scruffy” by: Jack Stonely

This was one of my favorite books ever! It is the story of a stray dog with plenty of action and adventure to keep the reader interested without ever feeling unrealistic. Perfect for anyone who loves dogs.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Developing Characters

Developing characters for stories has both advantages and disadvantages. You don’t need to fully develop every character you write about, but if you do you will want to make sure they have their own personalities. It’s fine for several characters to have multiple things in common, but being exactly alike is not recommended.

If characters all had the same personalities, a story couldn’t last. Many stories evolve from personality conflicts and differences of opinion in characters. If they were all the same than if conflict arose it would be as if they were fighting with themselves, and if this were true what purpose would the other characters serve?

While it is possible to create stories based around characters that are all the same, unless you have the very rare skill to make a story like this work, chances are your story won’t keep readers interested.

So, what if you don’t want to define a characters personality? Well, you don’t have to. Really developing a character is about what you want the readers to know about them. Main characters should be fully developed or develop over the course of your story or series so the reader can get to know and identify with them. Often when readers don’t identify with the characters in a book they can’t get into it.

Many readers like to read about fully developed characters, including side ones, but there are reasons why you may not want to do this. One reason may be that they are only needed as fillers. Maybe this character is just a stray dog that a character passes, or a mailman making a delivery, or even one of many servants to a king. Characters that are used as fillers usually serve their purpose then just fade out of the story. The reader then easily forgets about them and feel no need to ask questions about them.

Another reason not to develop a character may be just to keep them from overshadowing other characters, after all you want the main characters to be the most noticeable don’t you? By developing side characters it can take attention away from the main ones. Have you ever noticed that sometimes side characters are just as popular or even more than the main ones? If this happened to you, you would need to try keeping your readers happy who fall in love with and want to know more about your side characters by giving them more adventures with this character. The more characters you develop the more writing you will have to do about them.

Review of “Tanglewreck” by: Jeanette Winterson

I found this book to be a really well written sci-fi novel. I am a fan of time travel and found the time facts very interested and well blended into this fictional tale.

I also found the subjects about gaining and losing time to be very relatable as this seems to happen to me all the time. I love how the author explains these things in the book.

I believe that those who like books about time travel or who often find themselves feeling as if they are often losing or gaining days will enjoy this book.

Carnival Won Fish Don’t Live…or do They?

 At over 10 years old and due to be 11 this October, you would never guess that my Goldfish, Pumpkin, was once a carnival prize.

Our life together began one October when I attended a Halloween carnival. Like many carnivals, this one had a game where you could win a Goldfish as a prize. As someone who looks for any excuse to add a new pet addition to the family, I decided to try to win this game. The rules were simple. If I threw the lightweight ball, and it landed in a fishbowl, I got to keep that fish.

With what was either good or bad aim, depending on how you look at it, my ball landed right on the fish! After winning her my mom said she probably wouldn’t last the night. There were multiple reasons why this was a strong possibility:

Carnivals purchase the cheap feeder fish meant to be fed to other pets and don’t have long life expectancy.
The bowl’s that carnival fish are kept in usually have no air pumps which are needed to keep fish alive for their maximum life spans.
I hit her with a ball!

Well, as you know, not only did Pumpkin live, but she continued to live through all sorts of things. She was a baby when I first got her, and before she was an adult many things happened to her, such as: multiple overfeeding’s, her tank often went uncleaned for extended periods of time, and more. In her lifetime she has also lived through a dog that liked to throw his toys around and often hit her tank, and other highly, or what should have been, highly stressful situations.

 For most of her life, Pumpkin lived in a small, three gallon tank, which only just had enough room for her to swim around in, but really wasn’t big enough for a fish that had grown to the size she had. Upon the death of the tropical fish a few years ago, Pumpkin got to move into the large tank. At first we all worried that moving a fish as old as she was to the big tank might be too stressful for her and our good intentions would kill her, but once again Pumpkin proved that she could handle it and continued living.

Currently Pumpkin has showed signs of ageing, such as: loss of color, taking lots of breaks from swimming, and strangely enough she has even developed wrinkles. But every time it looks as if it might be the end for her, Pumpkin continues to prove us wrong. This carnival won fish is definitely a survivor.

Pumpkin’s amazing tale and her full life story will be featured in my nonfiction book: My Pets and Their Lives.

Review of “Drover’s Secret Life” by: John R. Erickson

This is one of my favorite books in the Hank the Cowdog series, which I have read the full series up to date and have loved every book in it. I really like that it is told by Drover rather than Hank, and is about his life before living on the ranch. It is really funny and a very interesting look into Drover’s past. In my opinion this is the funniest book in the series.

Procrastination, How it Helps me Work

For those of you that know the definition of procrastination, you are probably thinking that the title I chose for this post makes no sense. After all, procrastination is usually the enemy of work. So how could procrastinating actually help me get work done?

To start off with I am a huge procrastinator. I will even procrastinate on doing fun things such as playing video games. It’s not the playing of the games I am putting off, just the getting up, turning on the game system, and inserting the disk that is the problem for me. I just don’t feel like doing the few simple things needed so I end up not playing any video games in the end.

When it comes to doing actual work, such as writing a story, which is something else I like doing, I can stare at my work material for hours doing nothing but thinking about working. Although it’s meaning is a little different, one of my favorite quotes is, “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours,” by Jerome K. Jerome, because it often feels true to me.

So far it doesn’t sound as if procrastination is doing any good, does it? This is where you would be wrong. When I procrastinate a time usually comes when my mind begins to wander, often leading into a daydream. Sometimes these daydreams later become stories, and others often help continue a story a am currently working on, depending on where the daydreams take me.

This is how procrastination actually can, and does, help me get work done. I was actually procrastinating on working on one of my books when I came up with the idea, and wrote out the draft of this blog post.

Review of “I, Jack” by: Patricia Finney

This book didn’t really work for me. I do like that the book is told from the dog’s point of view and feels like how some dog’s probably would talk in reality if they could. What I didn’t like was the dog’s constantly happy attitude and how often he said and repeated how happy he was. Although I do know many dog’s like Jack, I couldn’t help but find him a little annoying, I would have liked him more if he was presented as a little less enthusiastic, and maybe a little smarter as well. As far as t…more This book didn’t really work for me. I do like that the book is told from the dog’s point of view and feels like how some dog’s probably would talk in reality if they could. What I didn’t like was the dog’s constantly happy attitude and how often he said and repeated how happy he was. Although I do know many dog’s like Jack, I couldn’t help but find him a little annoying, I would have liked him more if he was presented as a little less enthusiastic, and maybe a little smarter as well. As far as the story itself, I often found it hard to follow and understand. While there are many sentences numbered throughout the book corresponding to numbers at the bottom of the page where the stories cats explain what Jack is talking about, I found it too distracting to keep having to look down at this then find my place in the story again. There were also several times where I missed the number completely as the numbers are easy to miss and found myself searching through the text I just read to figure out what the bottom sentences were talking about and even with these I couldn’t always understand the book. There are also some other things I didn’t particularly enjoy about the dog’s in the book, which I did not use in deciding what rating to give the book. One of the biggest things I did not like was that both Jack and the other dog were breeder gotten dog’s and neither dog was ever spayed or neutered, leading to Jack causing unwanted puppies.