Tale Teller
"For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The g-spot is in the ears. he who looks for it below there is wasting his time."

~Isabel Allende, tale teller.

Labels: aphrodisiacs, daily quote, g-spot, Isabel Allende, tale teller, wild women, wild words, Wild words from wild women, women, words

  posted by Matildakay at 9:52 AM 0 comments

Lost and found in words…
Aspiring writers are always told they must read if they want to be good writers. I’ve read that advice in many articles, heard it at writing conferences, and I can’t tell you how many times N.L. has given me that same advice. “Read, read and read some more.” Its true. The more you read great writers, the more you learn about writing styles, plot and character development, good sentence structure and literary themes. And so now when I read I’m not just devouring the story for escapism or entertainment, I also pay attention to the writing.

Lately I’ve been reverting back to a favorite pastime, losing myself in books. I’m always reading, but I go through phases where I’m devouring words in massive volumes. At one point in my life I was drowning in words, reading up to five and six books a week. I would dive in and escape the real world of divorce in the stories I found within the pages. Eventually life settled down to a normal pace and so did my reading.

Something magical always happens to me when I’m reading. I get lost and found in the words. I can lose myself in the story and escape the mundane routine, the unrequited issues, and the emotional ups and downs. I open my imagination and become part of the story living through the characters. I take a fictional walk and get lost in the writing. But something else happens too. I find myself in the words. I find myself laughing or crying through the words. I find myself saying: “I know exactly what you mean or feel,” “I’ve been there,” “I’ve said that!” and “Oh my God, how did they know.” Screen writer/director Nancy Meyers must have a window into my soul for she seems to write my life almost word for word and I have the uncomfortable pleasure of watching beautiful actresses play out my life on the big screen. The bitch. If she doesn’t quit writing me, there won’t be anything left for me to write. But this magic is the moment when the writing is good and I get lost and found in the words the most. When the words transcend the page and touch my life and I carry them around with me like a secret.

In the large stack of books I’m currently reading, here are a few worth mentioning.

A Thousand and One Nights by Lara Tupper: As an active reader of chick-lit, I was given this book to read for Noveltown. Although after reading it, I hesitate to stereotype it as chick-lit. It doesn’t follow the typical chick-lit formula. What it is, is an original, well written adventure of a lounge singer set in exotic locations. I was touched most by the humor within the sadness of the story as the characters isolated by their foreign locations, must depend most upon the person they are growing apart from. I’ll be writing more about A Thousand and One Nights and interviewing Lara Tupper for the Noveltown blog.

The Marriage Diaries by Rebecca Campbell: I picked this book up expecting it to be a light, fun chick-lit read. It was a fun, witty read that had me laughing at times. But it had depth like most marriages do. The writing is brutally honest and dissects the marriage from two points of view, the wife and the husband’s. What would you do if you stumbled onto your husband’s private journal on the home computer hard drive and found out he was contemplating an affair? Campbell smartly takes the characters in a much different direction than I had expected.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold: Last year at the Yosemite Writers conference a panel of agents all agreed they were looking for the next “Lovely Bones” and that books like that were rare. The Lovely Bones. I wrote the name down in my notes and promised myself I’d read it. I finally read The Lovely Bones and now I know why the agents were all raving, it’s stunning. A literary masterpiece. I literally could not put the book down. Sebold weaves a riveting tale of the human experience uniquely told from the perspective of the murder victim as she watches her family, friends and her killer. From unspeakable tragedy and suspense Sebold gives hope and humor.

She writes:

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

The Lovely Bones is my new favorite book and a must read. If you read nothing else this year, read The Lovely Bones.

I have more books to dive into and get lost and found in the words…

Labels: found, Literary, lost, Noveltown, Reading, words, Writing

  posted by Matildakay at 11:45 PM 9 comments