Two for one deal on Blogs!

Since it's been a while I'm giving you a short two for one blog. Yay!

Man, it’s been a while, I’ve grown so much as a writer, but I still have so far to go. As a new writer I had read some critiques of other writer’s work from literary agents. It seemed the thing they said most was the writer needs to read more, so instead of waiting to hear that myself I went on a binge of reading. I haven’t read so much in my life. I actually went from a couple books a year to well over a crap load this year. My most intriguing find was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Funny story, I was just going through my Kindle Reader App and found a free book called A Princess of Mars. The cover is what caught my interest and it was free so I downloaded it and began to read. Within the first couple pages I saw the name John Carter, yes of the movie John Carter. I’m sure Kindle put it up in the list because of the movie but I was pleasantly surprised with it, and began to read. I have not seen the movie yet, and I hear that it was changed drastically, but it doesn’t ruin my excitement. I just wish Disney would have done a better job promoting it. I saw like three commercials. Anyway, I loved the first book, even though it was written in a time (1913) where most people had to be told in detail what something looked like, because there’s wasn’t a plethora of movies in the day featuring stories of green aliens flying spaceships. Unlike now when I say, “A zombie attacked me,” everyone’s pretty sure what one would look like without me going into details. If you can get past the long descriptions, there’s a fun story to be told. The second book, The Gods of Mars is also a wonderfully creative story that any action, Sci-Fi fan would eat up. You can also see where people like George Lucas and James Cameron got a lot of ideas from.

Part 2: Write the way you want. I’ve been reading a lot of books, and one thing I found out was that format played an important role in my enjoyment of a book. Anyone can drudge through a 30 page chapter, but when it’s broken up into smaller bite sized chunks, it makes the reading (for me), more fun. I had read a James Patterson story (co-authored) and then read The Hobbit. The second book I read in the James Patterson series of Witch and Wizard was dismal, and lacked what its predecessor had to offer, but I was still able to read it, and do it rather quickly because of the short chapters. The Hobbit, which I did enjoy, was a bit of a chore for me, even though it was a shorter book, but the chapters were so long, I got in the habit of saying, “When will this chapter ever end?”  Not that I think it’s right or wrong to have long, short, or no chapters, but it really helps me enjoy a book when I get just get a couple pages in when I have a chance, and not feel like I have to read forever to get to another natural break point.