Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

I don't believe in slumps when it comes to reading or writing in the 'I'm just blocked, I can't do it' sense, because I'm more of the belief that that's complete bullshit and you can if you actually tried, but I believe in a 'I don't know what to do' slump. This is more specifically writing-related, because this tends to hit me whenever I finish a draft of something. Especially my most recent project that I finished a draft of--it's a book that I worked on a lot in a relatively short period of time, and now that I've finished draft four (which I am now querying instead of going through again), I'm at a loss. Do I start (or... finish, I've already got one started) a new first draft? Do I continue working on a rewrite? Do I write a short story? Do I work on my for-fun project? I've been mostly working on my for-fun project, which is not very productive. My for-fun project is mostly just what I scribble on whenever I need to ...

I filmed a book haul today. It probably won't go up for another week and a half, but I filmed it today. I added 20+ books to my already huge TBR, and while the space in my room for books is shrinking, and while the current trend in the book community is downsizing, I... don't mind. I have had a huge TBR for the past couple of years, but this past year especially it's doubled in size. I'm talking hundreds of physical books crowding around my walls. Stacks blocking windows. This sounds like hoarder behavior when I talk about it this way. Sorry about that. The thing is, I don't feel constrained or pressured by my TBR. I know a lot of people are tending to downsize because they figure they won't read everything on their TBR... but I fully intend to read everything on my TBR, and I mean everything, from old westerns to children's books about hockey. My system of choosing my next book is completely random; I have a list of all of my TBR books and I go on a ran...

I picked up Beartown because I like hockey. I mean, I'd been meaning to pick up some Backman at some point. Everyone loves A Man Called Ove,  but to be honest, a book about an old dude just didn't interest me. But hockey does interest me, so I went with Beartown. If you've watched my latest June Weekly Wrap-Up , you know that this book is my favorite book that I've read so far this year. I cried for the last hundred and fifty pages. Just, sobbed, straight onto the page, which was kind of gross, because it's a library copy, but now I have my own copy to cry into so it's all good, it's all good. The funny thing about Beartown, though, is that a lot of people I've talked about have neglected to pick it up because it's about hockey. They've read his other books and enjoyed them, but they're just not into hockey, so they never picked up this one. Which is, first of all, how can you not be into hockey, pretty boys slamming into each other at ...

I recently finished the fourth draft of my current project, and this is it. This is the one that I start querying with--and I wrote up my query letter last night, so... this is it. This is not my first time querying and I know it won't be my last, but the anticipation of sending out a query letter is so much more than the anticipation of submitting short stories to magazines. Maybe it's because I've done so much more of the latter that it just seems like nothing now; I've only ever attempted to query one other manuscript, ever. So while this isn't one hundred percent new to me, it's not exactly a practiced art at this point. Finishing a draft is always exciting, though. The second draft is always the most exciting to me, because when I write, that's where it really starts to take shape. My first drafts are glorified outlines. My second drafts are where the meat really piles on; I completely rewrite, with an outline taken from my first draft as guideposts...

I read a lot, and a lot of books do surprise me with how much I like them--case in point, I recently read Illuminae  despite not liking science fiction, and ended up loving it--but there seems to be a type of book that always makes me interested. And it's not exactly a genre (though I have a giant soft spot for horror), it's a POV choice. I've found myself liking teenage male POVs a lot more than anything else. This isn't just true with YA--I've recently been reading  Beartown   and, while I picked it up because it's about hockey (and I love hockey so, so much), it really caught me when I started learning more about the boys that made up this junior hockey team. When I write, I tend to have a lot more male POVs than otherwise. Most of my main characters are male, and since I write YA, most of them are teenage boys. Which is.. a little bit of a weird preference of things to read about and write about but, okay, whatever. In addition to this, I always like a...

Huckleberry Finn is one of my favorite American characters. Maybe I'm just a stereotype, but I feel like Huck Finn is a serious American anti-hero, and for a country that seems to pride itself on being an anti-hero half of the time (the other half of the time it's a pride in the Golden Boy Steve Rogers Kind Of Hero), that's good. And why I think that is, and why I like him so much, is that there is only one thing that Huck Finn cares about. It's not money, or girls, or anything material. Boy's content to sleep in a barrel. No, the only thing that Huck Finn cares about is freedom. This is more evident in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn than Tom Sawyer, because Huck straight-up leaves a comfortable life because he can't stand having to 'wear clothes' and 'not swear' and 'go to school' (kid's like, thirteen, fourteen, tops). He greatly prefers living in his barrel or on a raft with an escaped (well, sort of) slave than in this house...

I haven't graduated college--yet. I've got one year left (and, to be honest, if I really wanted to, I could probably graduate this winter. If I'd tried harder, I could've graduated last year), and I will be graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English, minors in French, History, and Creative Writing. Basically, the most frequent questions I get are "Are you going to be a teacher?" and "What are you doing with that?" Until very recently, the answer has been "Maybe grad school..." or an awkward laugh and a joke about living in my car. At the moment, I have a job at my local library, which I do enjoy quite a bit. It's a really good job, especially for a college student, and I've been kind of resigned to living there forever, never leaving North Dakota, never leaving the county I've lived for most of my life. But fuck it, man, I'm moving to Frenchville . Okay, maybe not Frenchville, exactly, but now I do have a plan, an...

In my current writing project, which I'm pretty sure is the best thing I've ever written (because this time, instead of being incredibly plot-heavy, the characters actually make some decisions for themselves), I'm about forty pages away from the end of the current draft. Finishing a draft is exciting no matter what draft it is, but I'm pretty sure that this is the final draft of this one before I start querying it. I'm not a complete stranger to the query game; I did try to query an older project that I've since shoved on the backburner (I'm half-heartedly rewriting it every so often, but it's a project that I've pretty much accepted is either never going to be published or will take a while before it gets there), but it's been a while. And with this project, I'm almost more nervous... because while it's good, and there are aspects of it that I think people will really like, there are also aspects of it that... well... okay, my main cha...

I might be a little bit premature on writing this--as of right now, June 12, 2018, I am a month shy of being twenty-one years old. In the grand scheme of things, I'm still basically a child. I've only been paying taxes for a few years, I only have a high school diploma, and I can't legally get shitfaced yet. But I do have a job, and student loans, and a balanced checkbook. So I can reminisce if I want.  Lately, I want to say in the past five or six months, I've been enamored with things that were popular when I was younger. The band 3OH!3 crash-landed back into my life, and WANT is still my current car-CD. Recently I was just hit with how influential The Lonely Island was on 2009-era culture, and, man, did " Jizz in My Pants " give me seventh-grade flashbacks. Also now I'm in love with Andy Samburg. Not because of that song. Mostly because of Brooklyn-99.  but let's be real also the music. bin laden song is a thing of FUCKING beauty In add...

Yes, I realize that I am roughly fifteen years late on this one. I am someone who knows kind of a creepy amount about certain true crime things. I'm not one of those freaky Columbiners who wants to fuck Dylan Klebold, but I know a lot about Columbine. (I also know that Columbine is not the only school shooting ever to exist, but it is inarguably one of the most infamous so let me be.) I also knew, going into Degrassi, that at some point, that freak who put Terri in a coma comes along and paralyzes Drake. This was not something that completely blindsided me. But as an American in 2018, even though I am lucky enough to live in a state with relatively low gun violence, and virtually zero mass shootings on record (North Dakota is one of four; the other three are Wyoming, Hawaii, and New Hampshire), I am sure that I reacted to this episode a lot differently than Canadians in 2004. Even Americans in 2004--sure, Columbine was about five years ago, but Virginia Tech hadn't happen...

DISCLAIMER: this is based solely on the first two episodes. The Karate Kid is one of my childhood movies. I was like, in love with Ralph Macchio for a while there. The movie itself is still one of my favorites; it's a very, very eighties kind of movie with some parts that maybe wouldn't fly today, but I love it enough to completely ignore the fact that there was a Jaden Smith remake at one point. I did, of course, hear about the new series coming to YouTube Red. It was a vague kind of hear. It was a, huh, Cobra Kai, Karate Kid, cool. It was going to be something that I was just going to... ignore. So I watched the first two episodes and maybe it's just because it's basically been done by Ralph Macchio, the Karate Kid him self, but this is the best shit I've ever seen in my entire life. Interspersed with clips from the movie, actually starring Ralph Macchio and the dude who played Johnny (Google tells me William Zabka?), I was freaking out about two minutes in. B...

My younger sister is ten years old, and she's a smart kid--it's not like, weird that she's reading Young Adult novels now. I don't know when I started reading Young Adult--I do know that there was a weird point in time when I was twelve, thirteen, where I was reading Stephen King but also Warrior cat books--but one thing that's hit me is just how casual she is about accepting the diversity in the books she's been reading. As of now, she's read The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and most of Mockingjay before dropping it. She's read Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Moxie. Before I left to housesit for two weeks, she was working on Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda. While she was reading Aristotle & Dante, I went over to check up on her, see how she was doing, see how she was liking it, because it's a fantastic book and I wanted her to like it. She was maybe thirty pages in, and she looked up, and was like, "They e...

I was (re)reading Under the Dome by Stephen King recently, and I came across a certain scene. The scene is from the point of view of one of the antagonists, Junior Rennie (if you've read the book or seen the terrible, terrible TV adaptation, he's the kid who has migraines and kills people to get rid of them). Junior in the TV Series, as portrayed by Alexander Koch. Image from the Under the Dome Wiki. There's a scene in the book--I don't know if it's in the show, I stopped only a few episodes in, but hey it's on Amazon Prime, I might check it out again--where Junior and one of his friends the fellow new "cops" find a couple of abandoned kids. These kids haven't eaten in days. It's a nine year old girl and a five year old boy, and both of these characters, both of whom have, in the case of Junior, literally murdered and, in the case of Frank, literally sexually assaulted/physically assaulted others, they show their human side. And as a reade...