Showing posts with label library books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label library books. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

My favorites of the 29

Can you read a book, watch a movie or even hear a story and not immediately come up with "your favorite character", it may not even be the main character nor have some long ranging part but if you fall for him you fall for him. While yes many of us loved good ol Han Solo the dashing rogue in Star Wars is there not a huge fan club for Boba Fett(or the Fett as many of his disciples call him), I think he had maybe 8 scenes through both movies and yet people love Boba. While I love the Harry Potter stories, I would love the actor who plays Ron Weasley to be the first Ginger Doctor Who, why because I think he would be hilarious in the role somewhere between Matt Smith and David Tennant. Great Facial expression and wild flights with the dialogue, so with that said my favorite "Mistakes" from the 29 Most Common Writing Mistakes by Judy Delton and how I will in the future try much harder to avoid them.


1. Don't Procrastinate


Ouch, that one stings hard I am notorious for procrastination, or maybe I should call it spontaneous boredom. I might start something get halfway through and either forget where I was heading or else just let something else catch my attention. As many will probably see from my breaks in writing from time to time I go til I get tired of going and then I pop up again later. No it isn't because "Oh well it's the beginning of the month I better write something", it's more "hmm I wonder, meh well let me go head and put it other so I can think on it again later".

Basically I am trying to get myself to look at some blog somewhere and just write something. I don't care if its read by 2 people or 1000 just talk let my mind roam and allow any who wish to follow.

Watchmen the Graphic Novel

For those who have not noticed by now I am a comic book fan. I may not bore you with pictures of my not so grand anymore comic collection(one of the saddest things of my youth was that we moved so much that I always had to leave something behind, many times my comics were among them) or start posts talking about which character is so awesome and why this character is so lame(though there may have and may be in the future posts on lame villains, every hero has them). But I do like a good story and I am one of those types who if the movie peaks my interest I will go search out more on the characters to see what I missed out on, I have done that with Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Jason Bourne and now with Watchmen.

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is kind of interesting in one sense because the tone of the movie even with the updates in constumes, some of the rhetoric and the locales came threw as this sort of cynical world where heroes had enjoyed a good run and then tapered off into the distance. Things weren't all bright and cheery as they were in other comics they were sort of sad and disinterested, similar to our world but without some of the joy we take for granted. I wondered when I watched the movie in as much detail as the director and screen adapters had included what did they cut out. I mean I caught some nuances that normally would be left out just to slip in an extra special effect or else add more weight to the directors vision(*cough* Harry potter 4, 5, & 6 *cough*) and while I had watched the "extras" and heard all of the commentary about what they wanted to keep in and how they were trying to stay true to the comic, not to be rote but "I'd heard it all before". Usually that's what a director and crew say just so you rush to the theater and spend your hard earned money while they have treated your childhood memories as so many fire hydrants pestered during Fido's afternoon walk.

Monday, September 5, 2011

One more set of Library books

Motorola Backflip
Blackberry Bold












Last week I made an impromptu trip to the library because I was bored and I wanted to see if the book I had been looking for on my first trip was there(and if you observe the colorful blue book it was), also to see if there was anything else I could get from my local library. To compare it's selection to my old favorite haunt in Voorhees, Nj when I was in school doing the majority of my book reports, research, et al would be unfair because the Raleigh branch(while it has a better picture than the Voorhees Library) is possibly a third of the size.  I know it's hard to tell from that horrid forrest of a picture, I mean they are barely showing you the front door or the top of the atrium. As a favor to me IF you just so happen to live in New Jersey, in Camden county, AND happen to own a camera or digital phone could you please give the library next to the FORMER Echelon mall a better photo. The old girl may be camera shy after all these years but she looks way better than that overcropped, myopic nightmare that seemed to focus more on the flora around her than on the well worn beauty of that concrete dam of knowledge.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

I should be ashamed

I who read either ""Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix(870 pages) or ""Harry Potter and the half blood Prince(672 pages) in one night, a perfectly happy passenger in J.K. Rowlings latest installment of what was to be her 7 part epic(obviously it is over now, the final movie coming out within the next 30 days) took the better part of a week to finish The Elements of Style (95 pages including all introductions, forwards, prologues and acknowledgements).  Now some might say I deserve a little forgiveness because of course Elements is more of a text book than it is some sort of fanciful tale geared to grab my imagination, I say that is cold comfort. I selected the book, I checked it out, I read a few pages realizing it was more grammatically intense than it was comical lecture or humorous chiding and I still picked it up.


It was a case of not being able to get the book I wanted so I took a book it had recommended,  29 Common Writing Mistakes, I went into the library with hopes of borrowing the title so that I might finish it and do some of the exercises. Within the first 34 pages two titles stuck out at me the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (which my brother still owned a copy of from high school and it was readily available) and the previously mentioned Elements of style. As I would like to become a better writer I decided hey the first step in ANY journey is always the most important, if you would like to write better read about writing(granted writing at all would also help but I will chastise myself about that later). Anyone who knows me personally (especially my tumultuous time from 4th to 12th grade, my my my how many times was I stuck at the front of the class) knows how much I LOATHE HOMEWORK, to say I think it evil is somewhat overstated, I think it's unnecessary. I tend to learn things quickly or not at all so if in my initial reading of the textbook I didn't get everything I needed, I wasn't going to get anything. And as my test scores would often show, I tend to retain a lot I just can't stand repetitively doing it over and over and over, practice may make perfect but if you continuously stir the bowl you will either beat out all texture or else create so much gluten as to make it a chewy inedible mess. So for me to be basically signing up for *groan* homework would probably make some check the temperature in hell, hold on there bessy I'm not sitting here doing exercises I'm reading something I actually like to do.

Upon first blush it seems me and Elements are going to be at odds, it is a book built upon the foundation of BREVITY and me be brief, do I not extole on how I will say what I want for as long as I want and to the extent that I want? I warn people at least a few times a year about the fact that I will ramble on, randomisity train isn't this what I call my fine friend here. So to ask me to be brief, why I should put it down immediately shouldn't I and yet I was intrigued by the challenge. And to make matters worse why this book suggest I don't add words to the English language, THE UNMITIGATED NERVE. How dare some dusty tome from a bygone age tell me NOT to amend the English language as I see fit, though to be fair I don't do it as often as I would claim so honestly that one isn't that hard to go along with, brevity though yeah thats gonna stick in my craw. It also suggested breaking long sentences up into shorter ones and abstaining from heavy handed prose, now see that last bit I do need to work on. It suggested making sentences stronger by removing unnecessary qualifiers for example:why say something is LIKE a thing, if you feel it's a thing take a stand and call it a thing(you may have noticed that if I did a cloud of this blog over the last week or so the word LIKE is showing up a lot less). See I may be stubborn, bullheaded, and set in my ways but I don't mind a good well intentioned debate or discussion on a topic or technique. And like I said I always want to get better, being less timid in my language is actually something that I want to do, the fact that I have banned "Colorful Metaphors" from this blog means at times I have rambled on to say something that a quick two word sentence might have been employed for on wordpress or multiply.

Now of course this would not be a book on grammar or writing if punctuation did not rear it's vile head, what can I say I BARELY put my commas in the right place, and if I really wanted to be better I would let a more grammatically gifted friend edit me before I posted. That is what I wanted though: ideas, suggestions and directions upon which to better improve the quality of my writing and thus the presentation of my blog. And the Elements of Style while stern in its call for less digital diarrhea isn't so cruel as to say it's his way or the highway, just that when you look at a few well chosen examples isn't less more? Isn't being direct and forthright with your imagery and thoughts a better usage of your time and page space. I say yes, so while I will still write long and lengthy blogs they will be long not because I wasted 10 words to figure out how to say 5 but because I found the right  5 words to get my point across and expounded upon that thought in a more connected nature.






































o

Disqus for Primal's Ponderings

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Total Pageviews