Busy Busy

It's been a busy summer, which takes time away from writing.  At least the summer is winding down and I'm looking forward to school starting again.

Since writers should be readers as well, I've been reading Sadie Montgomery's Ghost Song.  Sadie is a self-published author who I think could have made it with traditional publishing.  She really does have a talent for writing.  At first, I thought she wasn't going to describe some of her characters, but she ended up describing them when a certain character meets them.  I thought that was a unique approach.  That's one thing that bothers me is when writers do not describe their characters.  As a reader, I at least like to know hair and eye color. 

Descriptive writing takes me back to my first writer's conference in elementary school.  I think I remember it so clearly because the speaker for descriptive writing was a horror writer and his stories freaked me out.  Of course he clarified that all the stories were true.  They consisted of a haunted grandfather clock, a haunted room (which turned out to be the heating system and old hardware) and a zombie under the bed.  It didn't help when he described the decayed hand that was reaching over the covers at the narrator . . . "Booo!"  I think I jumped about a foot off my seat!  I started sleeping with the lights on again after that.  But, he was the speaker that I remember most and that I learned the most from.  I wish I could remember his name or at least had a brochure of that conference. 

With the Olympics in full swing, I ended up watching a couple of movies.  (I know, I should have been writing!)  I saw The Lovely Bones, which is about a teenage girl who is murdered and she ends up in a place in-between the Earth and the afterlife.   I found I could relate to her, because she thought about the things that she didn't get to do in her young life, and I went through the same thing when I had cancer as a teen.  During the time of uncertainty, those were things that I thought of.

The second movie I saw was The Ghost Writer.  I found it interesting to learn a little more about ghost writing.  I think it would be very difficult to write a book for someone and to give them credit for it.  I wouldn't be able to make it as a ghost because it's my imagination that has led me to writing and I don't think I would enjoy writing another's memoirs.  It has a very interesting plot, so if you enjoy mysteries, I recommend this movie.  It was unpredictable for me.

Veronica