Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

I've been reading the first book in the Wheel of Time series lately--not entirely by choice, I happen to own the first three books (I don't know how--gift, maybe?) and my random number generator landed on it, and even though I don't really like fantasy and am not really extremely psyched about it, I'm not hating it as much as I thought I would. I thought that I'd be dragging my way through it, violently hating every page, violently hating the writing and the stupid clogged-up sentences. But it's like... it's fine? It's pretty much the same as every other fantasy series. And maybe this is just the perspective of someone who doesn't like fantasy, but to me, these books are no worse and no better than, say, a Brandon Sanderson book. I know Sanderson gets a lot of love (which I don't really agree with--sure, Mistborn was fun, I guess), and Robert Jordan gets a lot of hate, but they are exactly the same. My expectation going in was that I was going ...

Yesterday, I started off my senior year of college. I don't really have all that many classes left to take--mostly a couple of generals, plus a few French classes so that my minor can scrape through. I finished all of my major classes last semester. My history minor is done. I never actually declared a creative writing minor, but I'll graduate with one, so that's pretty cool. For my senior year, I'm living in a dorm that's full of mostly sophomores. This is because this dorm has single rooms, and that appealed to me, even though that does mean that I have to go back to communal bathrooms, which, let me tell you, a little bit to get used to after two years of not having to deal with it. But I don't mind. This is the first time I've had my own room since before my little sister was born, so like... twelve, thirteen years. And it is very nice, let me tell you. I've slept in it for three days and I really like having my own room. Mostly because I get up at...

Normally, my first drafts are glorified outlines. They're somewhere around twenty thousand words of fun scenes strung together with plot points in ALL CAPS BECAUSE I DONT HAVE TIME TO FIGURE THIS OUT NOW, normally with the end JUST  BUNCH OF ALL CAPS THINGS ENDING WITH THE END. This time around, with my current first draft, though, it's different. Granted, I'm only at about 22k right now. But I've still got like, two murders (okay, one attempted) thought up, and I have no real intention of skipping over the in-betweens. I know how it's going to end, but I don't know how it's going to get there. I don't know why it's happening yet. I know what's happening, but I went from my original idea of why to, as I put it in a tweet, 'slow-burn reverse children of the corn?' Is it religious? Is it cult-y? Oh shit, it might be cult-y. Just fixed it, it's a cult. Either way, though, this first draft is giving me ideas back to how I used to wr...

I was listening to The Last Podcast on the Left's  Dennis Nilsen episodes the other day, and they mentioned that he'd written this massive autobiography while in prison (Nilsen has since fucked off to death). The autobiography is, as of this point in time, unpublished, but it got me thinking. Carl Panzram, Minnesotan serial killer/arsonist/yacht thief/general terror of the early 20th century, also wrote an autobiography. Panzram's is published and it's something I've kind of lusted over for a while but keep just not buying. Panzram's, unlike what has been released of Nilsen's, is supposed to be surprisingly free of boastful exaggerations or falsified information. On another level, a man who was not a serial killer, Charles Manson had his book. Again, Manson's is supposed to be a little iffy on how true it actually is. Most of these people (again, apart from Panzram, because the dude gave zero fucks) exaggerate or make themselves out to be less implic...

I'm currently making my way through Michael Connelly's A Darkness More than Night,  a thriller from about 2000. It's part of a series, but it's one of those adult thriller series where you don't really have to read them in order. At least, that's what a forum from 2007 told me when I typed in if you had to read the Harry Bosch series in order. I'm about 100 pages in, and there have been a couple of true crime references that have been kind of exciting. Menendez Brothers & OJ. But even beyond the references, reading about the crime scenes gives me the sort of feeling of listening to a true crime podcast (albeit a less humorous one than I usually listen to), or like when I still had Netflix and would watch Criminal Minds for a 'true crime' fix, before I started listening to the Last Podcast on the Left. I've been ultra-true crime-y lately, and I realize this, but I go in phases. My last huge true crime phase was right after I watched the mo...

So, a couple of days ago, I started writing a new first draft. A new novel, new project--I just had to. This is like, the second time this has happened in the past couple of months (I don't actually want to go back and count how many first drafts I've written this year because I feel like the number is higher than it should be). And there's nothing wrong with writing first drafts. First drafts are my favorite kind of drafts. But Jesus Christ do I have so many first drafts to rewrite. I guess it says a lot about how I feel about my projects if I can be so easily swayed from them by first drafts, but some I'm holding off on rewriting because I've got to do a lot of research (lookin' at you, last NaNo project). And then there's the fact that no matter the project, there's never that high of a new story. There are new words (my first drafts are pretty much glorified outlines and I always end up completely rewriting them, bar maybe a couple lines of dialogu...

I've been listening to a lot of Last Podcast on the Left lately, mostly because when I'm scheduled over at our library that is currently going through renovations, that's seven hours of dusting books and so that is seven hours that Aurora can use to listen to her podcast. And despite the fact that my coworkers look at me kind of weird when I'm giggling in the fiction room and respond "Jonestown" when they ask me what I'm listening to, I am actually starting to look forward to those seven hour dusting days. I'm a fan of true crime, even without the humor injected in like an ill-advised dose of heroin. I've put a lot of research into things like Columbine (I do have an excuse for that one: writing project), and dabbled in Gacy and Dahmer. And it has been pretty cool to be able to learn more about either incidents that I knew some about but never the details (Jonestown) or serial killers that I'd just missed (Robert Hanson). I think that true...

Okay, backtrack. It's not that I dislike fantasy. There are fantasy authors/series that I do love, and fantasy is such a broad genre that you can't really say that you 'dislike' fantasy, because it encapsulates so much. It has so many subgenres that to say you dislike fantasy is, to be honest, to say that you dislike fiction. And there are people that dislike fiction, but not as many as who say they dislike fantasy. But 'why I don't like fantasy' was a quick, punchy title, so I went with it. I'm not a huge fan of high fantasy. I did read Game of Thrones (and the rest of the series; at least what's out), and I read way more Brandon Sanderson than I ever really wanted to, and some Joe Abercrombie, and Scott Lynch. Out of those four, the only one I would say I loved was Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series; sure, I liked ASOIAF, and the two books of Abercrombie's that I read, but they're not my favorites. And YA fantasy. Sarah J M...

Dear patron; I know that you don't mean any harm, and I know that you were looking forward to coming to the library. Maybe you wanted a book--which would be awesome, I love it when library patrons check out books--or maybe you wanted to check your e-mail or look up an address. Maybe you were so intent on your mission, you just didn't look at the signs on the door. And honestly, most of the time, signs on the door are about kid's programming or something like that--there's no real reason to look and check them out. So when the carpeters or the painters or the electricians left the door open so that they could get their stuff in and out without having to call in every time, you took that as, 'this library is open, and not closed for renovations', walking glibly past the seven signs that say STOP. DO NOT COME IN. WE ARE CLOSED. GO TO THE OTHER LIBRARY. WE ARE CLOSED. STOP. STOP. STOP. Big red stop sign and all, you just walked right in. And maybe you walked...