(22) Wed Dec 01 2004 18:56 PST A quick poll about some novel things: Thanks to all my lovely supporters. I am feeling much better and my room is amazingly a lot cleaner than it was all month. I went back to work today and am going again tomorrow, than off to LA where they have missed me sorely.

Some opinons are needed in the following:

I've got my novel up to just where they leave off on the retreat. Once the retreat (7 weeks of bad conditions) is over my love-birds are separated until the end of the war and near the end of the book, and, since it is from Emma's POV, it becomes a women-on-her-own type narrative. Who knows what path the book will take.

How long of a break I should take before I start up again?:

none at all! get cracking (or remain cracking, as the case may be)
a day, and pick it back up tomorrow
three or four days
a week

I think it's a wise idea to stop, type up what I have written, revising as I go, and filling in the things I left blank (names etc) and researching the comments and queries I wrote to myself in the margins. Then, I'll have a better idea of the novel in general, and I'll also be able to write a better, more detailed outline that will help with writing the last part. Should I do this:

Before I write the retreat (Pros: I'll have a much more clear idea of the overall picture and also the specifics ie in outline form--I've done a lot of research on this particular part already; it was, after all, the founding idea of the story.)
After I write the retreat and reach the official end of Part I (Pros: I'll still be in writewritewriteasfastasIcan mode)

I have another poll about which of Emma's close friends I should kill off, but I'll type that up later. And extra thanks to Becca who gave me the idea of having a poll.

Fri Dec 03 2004 13:04 PST In which Rachel is a genius: My phone has only a little bit of juice in it; I don't have my charger with me in LA. I thought "I'd better charge it while I'm in my car," only my car charger is in mom's car. Fab.

So yes. If you need me, don't call. Email.

(1) Tue Dec 07 2004 22:58 PST: Ho-hum. I just had a major re-organizing session with my papers--all I have to do is figure out loan consoldation and apply for grad school and I'll be set! Then I had a lovely Lush bath that left me and the tub all glittery (and I only used a fifth of the bath melt; imagine if I'd used the whole thing!), while reading No Plot No Problem which now has me inspired to writewritewrite.

The only other thing I can think of to write about is the USC v. UCLA game on Saturday. It's actually the first one of those that I've watched ever, ironically after I have already graduated, even if it was only over the telly. I was expecting UCLA to get totally clobbered, so it was quite a nice surprise when we only lost by 4 points, and put up a good fight! So, la.

Wed Dec 08 2004 20:16 PST A little late...: I finished No Plot No Problem.

(9) Fri Dec 10 2004 21:26 PST Ho-Hum: Why don't I have anything interesting to say? My life is filled with "Are you a member of the Book Club?" and ""Do you happen to know the author?" and occasionally Serbia, 1915. Progress on novel: minimal.

On the other hand, I'm famous. For today, at least.

Mon Dec 20 2004 17:53 PST On the bright side: On JKR's site we read the the 6th HP book is finished and a release date will be announced in 24 hours. And to think--I'd put my name down for a January release date announcement and thought I was being overly optimistic!

(1) Tue Dec 21 2004 13:53 PST No, not obsessed at all: July 16th is the big day! I was listening to HP5 audio on my way down to LA to get in le mood, but the only mood it got me in was depressive and tired (actually, it may have been more the traffic's fault. One hour spend on Sunset due to construction. I hope I remember to get off on Wilshire next time). Must listen to Pigwidgeon (iPod) to cheer & wake self up.

Off to Serbia once again. When I am finished with this summary I've got to do some sort of essay-ish thing so I can send it along with my grad school applications in Jan as an example of my brilliantosity.

Hopefully the comments work this time. I don't know why they didn't on that last entry; I checked the box a dozen times.

Blast, it's broken. Leonard, help!

(4) Wed Dec 22 2004 18:21 PST In celebration of banned books: A list of the top 110 banned books. Bold what you've read, italicize what you've read part of.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne 

#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire 
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) by Charles Baudelaire 
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais 
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau

#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius

#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu 
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

There are a lot of books that I've only read part of, but that is due to excerpts in classes, not just my short attention span. And I know there are a lot of basic, high school lit books I haven't read. Shame on me. (shame on Mrs Cribbs...)

(4) Sun Dec 26 2004 11:20 PST Happy day after Christmas: I spent the day reading Garrison Keillor's Homegrown Democrat and I came in 3rd in Scrabble. Leah, Shannon's new baby, is trres mignon. Everyone liked their presents from me, even Leonard who already had the book I gave him (but not signed by Wesley Clark!) and so it goes, another year.

The most surprising and exciting present was from Leonard--my very own book! that I have written! without even realising it! over the last two years! Yes, that's right my friends, La Vie En Rose is now available in non-serialised form. Whee.

Thu Dec 30 2004 17:16 PST *blinks*:

(1) Thu Dec 30 2004 17:16 PST *blinks*: I have discovered http://1914-1918.org/forum/

Also, I have just sent off the email containing the finals drafts of our entries to the editor of the encyclopedia. Hurrah!