Ann Benjamin's Blog, page 276

Line of the day.

With the book in its nearly final version, this seems like a good place to stop.

Future planning: The Queen of England series

I want to play around with some fonts, but I think I want to use something like these images for the trilogy.  The best part?  I’m not entirely sure, but I believe these are creative commons photos (i.e., I don’t have to pay for them!).

Now that I’ve finished Life After Joe (hallelujah!), I can start to focus on moving forward with these works.  Or, I can write another book, A.U.  I haven’t decided yet.

 

A semester of fail.

I’ve been feeling pretty crappy about myself this semester.  It feels like nothing is where it is supposed to be and I don’t know where I’m going.  As tempted as I am to say fuck it all to the real world, the reality is that I like the lifestyle I have – and that is made infinitely more possible by having a second income.  I like having money to spend on any number of things – including my writing projects (editors and cover images aren’t the cheapest items) and travel (to anywhere in the world – although Iceland, Romania and the Seychelles are currently featuring). The thing is, with a finite amount of time in the day I find myself unable to accomplish everything in the four sectors I internally judge myself on: exercise, work, writing, and adulting (which relates to anything and everything).

Over the past few months, I find myself only being able to hit two out of the four on any given day.  After work, I have nothing left over for any of the other things I want to do.  I don’t like feeling the way I do, but I can’t figure out how to address it.  I’ve recently started with a small change.  Last week, I started getting up earlier, so that I would at least be able to check off the ‘exercise’ task on my list.  This change has not led to more effort in the categories of writing or adulting, but I am hopeful. Am I being too hard on myself?  Probably.

Here’s a list by the numbers from January 2015.

1 = root canal

11,856 = Tumblr followers

5 years = amount of time I don’t have to worry about birth control (thanks Mirena!)

65,759 = number of words for the first draft of The Queen of England: Coronation

298 = number of pages (almost) edited for Life After Joe

IDK = number of faculty contracts, amendments, and other letters sent

IDK = number of books sold (but I can assure you it’s not as many as I would like)

7 days = number of vacation days (no wonder I’m exhausted!)

35 years = my age as of March 17

2 = new book ideas conceived

1 = month I went without soda (never to be repeated)

Related .gifs to this post

And what about you, dear reader?  Have you ever fought back against a time in your life that wasn’t where you thought you would be?  I’d love some suggestions!

The power of popular media.

I saw the below .gif on Tumblr and hearing it in my head as Phoebe’s voice, realized I’ve been using the catch phrase as part of my own vernacular for years a decade or more.

Do you have any sitcom moments that you’ve lived with for years?

Book review: The Magician’s Assistant

As I come close to finishing Life After Joe, I opted for one additional ‘widow’ read.  In this case, The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett popped up for a reduced price, and intrigued by the premise, bought it.  Here, some of the usual widow tropes were met straight away – with some twists on the genre.

Spoilers ahead.

The husband – is gay!  And no, he was not secretly cheating on his wife – the good widow Sabine married her husband knowing full well he was gay.  Best of all?  She lived with her husband and his partner.  Such dysfunction.  Much messed up.  So tragic.

In the reading of the will it becomes apparent that Parsifal (the husband/magician with a terrible name) has a secret family (not children, his actual family) that he never to told his beard wife about.  Being the good widow she is, Sabine connects with them.  I was on board until Sabine decides to journey back to Nebraska with them to learn other shocking things about her dead husband’s past.  Somehow entangling herself into her new ‘in laws’ lives, things go weird when she crushes (?) on Parsifal’s sister, disconnects completely with her parents and then the book simply ends.  While there is some pretty language, the story falls flat quickly and has almost no resolve.

From the perspective of the widow storyline, I liked the initial moments post death (not that I like people dying, more that it was very realistic).  I also thought the dream sequences were a nice vaguely supernatural touch.  The characters were fairly well developed, but I thought all of them could use a great deal more of some common sense.

Overall, I can’t say I would recommend this book.

And for the life of me I can’t understand why there are about five different covers for this book, most of which have a bunny on them.

The book needs more Rabbit.

Me writing romantic scenes.

Instant ticket to feeling better? Booking travel.

Although I’m feeling like this semester is a total failure (to be discussed in a later post), at least I can rely on a few things to perk me up.  With work winning out over writing, it’s good to put some of those hard earned dizzles towards one of my favorite activities – travel!  In this instance, I’m looking forward to the trip after my trip – Romania!  I’ll be going to meet up with an author friend, Elena.

I found the above .gif here: http://www.flight001.com/log/non-stop-travel/

Less than a month until my next vacation!

First cover looks for Life After Joe: Thoughts?

Although work is banana-pants-crazy-time (and will be until I leave for vacation on June 11th #serenitynow), I’m happy to see (finally!) some progress on the cover of Life After Joe.  Here are my two favorites…  These are not final, and I imagine there are a few more versions before I’m exactly where I want to be, however – progress! – a concept I’ve been lacking this semester.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Line of the day.

Actually, of yesterday, but I didn’t get to post it.  :)

Line of the day.