Sorry about the long silence. I have been amazingly busy. I’ve been writing a lot, and reading only a little. Right now, I’m reading Sonya Bateman‘s Master and Apprentice, and Cindy Spencer Pape‘s Steam and Sorcery. I recently finished Julie Moffett‘s No One to Trust, and it was hilarious, as usual. My new day job has been really busy as well, and then Google had to throw a major distraction at me with Google Plus. I invited a bunch of you regular commenters onto Google Plus; hope you didn’t mind the invitation. If anyone else wants an invitation, leave a comment!
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At this time, I am going to go ahead and admit publicly that my Cinderella story has been a real struggle. So much so, that I decided to work on the Snow White story, instead. I don’t like setting aside works, and I don’t do so easily. But I’ve been working on it far too long and it has taken too much time, and I am still not happy with it. My main problem is with the stakes. When comparing the Cinderella story to the Snow White story at it’s bare essentials, the Snow White story just has much better stakes. An innocent girl is victimized by another woman’s cruel jealousy. You can’t do much about another person being jealous of you, and I can do so much with that. With Cinderella, she is somewhat mistreated, to be sure, but at it’s heart, she is just pining to go to the ball. I’ve tried to find ways to make her going to the ball really matter, but it still doesn’t pass my rigorous “why should I give a damn” test.
Therefore, I will let it peculate while I turn the muse loose on Snow White. I will try to write a thousand words a night. Since I’m aiming for 25,000 words, I ought to have a first draft in a month.
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I rooted my Nook! Why did I do this? Well, I was hoping to be able to install Kindle on my Nook, but it turns out that this was a bit ambitious. My other reasons was to cure my Nook of some annoyances, which the rooted version of the Nook certainly does. I also now have complete control over my own hardware. Plus, I can still use my B&N ebooks and my DRM’d ebooks. I’ve lost nothing and gained some cool new tools. Apparently, B&N is going to have a major update of the Nook firmware in the fall (they do this about once a year, which is appallingly slow), and at that time I might de-root it and try out the update. I’ll decide then.
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UPDATE: I played with my website last night, but ultimately kept the same theme. I’m still looking for a theme, if you know of a good one. The basic things I want: the ability to have different sidebars on blogs and pages, comment link on the bottom, customizable header and uncluttered interface. Recommendations welcome!
Okay, I have to ask…what is rooting a Nook? And how do you do it?
It’s basically hacking it. There are some good instructions at nookdevs.com. And they also have instructions on de-rooting it.
The major benefit is you wrest control of the device from Barnes & Noble. Some other benefits is the UI is friendlier, and you can install additional applications. I have not done much of that yet, but I am very interested in installing the blog feed reader and hooking it up to my Google Reader account. The Nook would be a great place to read blogs. Commenting on blogs? Not so much …
I know what it’s like trying to see the heart of the story. It’ll come to you. A thought though on Cinderella: You probably know this but the original was a Chinese story and the reason her feet were small was because she was originally from a rich family and so her feet were bound. She has been “declasse” and removed from her class by her stepmother. So could it be possible that returning to the ball is a returning to her sense of what she has lost, who she believes she really is. Expectations of the ball and her place in society sort of thing. She has grown up and been treated poorly by her step-relatives and has been dealing with normal farm people as her equals. Is it possible that some of the people at the ball are a**holes? Is it possible that the Prince is the only one there who actually is honorable and disdains the whole class system? Just some thoughts.
Thanks for the update, though.
-C
“rigorous stake test” not to be undertaken by vampires. 🙂
You’re right that Snow White has high stakes built in with the whole attempted murder with combs and corsets before we even get to the apple. 🙂
I think the stake test is pretty important since it helps fight the temptation to just stick characters where they need to go. That’s something I’ve been having a little problem with lately, so I’m glad of the reminder to take a good look at my motivations. Thanks for that.
How are you liking Master and Apprentice? I’m hoping to look for it this coming weekend at Borders.
Btw, I really like Carole’s thoughts about stakes for Cinderella.