This one is for redbeanpork's withdrawl symptoms.
I can't remember if I mentioned why I'm taking a break from writing, but it's because I want to start writing a book. To help transition from writing blog posts to writing longer-form style things, I've been writing long-short stories (novellas?), and I've been playing around with Scrivener to see if it suits my workflow. It's pretty cool, since it lets you write your story as a series of plot points, and then you can go back and flesh things out.
You can also re-organise chapters really easily. It's weird, because when I was doing English at school, I hated writing outlines, as I thought it was a waste of time. I just wanted to jump right into writing, and spending 15 minutes putting together an outline felt like it was eating into my writing time. Still, I did it because I could never disobey a teacher, and even though I haven't kept up the habit when writing blog posts, I found it really helpful when starting this story.
What I think is really cool is that you can export your story into a PDF in pretty novel format.
But we played a fun game called, "Guess whether this book is horror or romance?" based on the cover. The sad part is that even after reading the blurb, we still couldn't work out if it was horror or romance. Captain blames the Twilight series. We had no luck, and the cashier said they don't stock M&B novels. Though he did tell us that only the first three shelves have romance novels. So all the books we picked up were horror.
So we moved onto another bookstore, and there was a huge wall of romance novels. Funnily enough, it had a sign saying, "Please treat the books gently, as we are finding a lot of books with broken spines", which I'm taking to mean a lot of people will read the books and then put them back without buying them. Who wants to be see carrying a romance novel on the train, right?
Well, that inspired Captain, who challenged me to read one of these books shamelessly in the office. And so began the search for the perfect book to read. I should have taken a photo of the shelves, because it seemed like every book was a New York Times bestseller, or had a review by a NYT bestseller, so they could print the words "New York Times bestseller" somewhere on the cover. Of course, not all the books were bestsellers, some were just buy authors who were bestsellers. Anyway, Captain was dubious so he looked it up, and it seems NYT bestseller isn't really much to cry home about as there is a lot of criticism about which books make the list.
After much deliberation, and some advice from some random person who suggested I sample the first few pages, Captain and I settled on a book that looked like a romance book, but wasn't too seedy to read in the office (some of them had people making out on the cover). He then challenged me to look the cashier in the eyes with authority while buying the book. The cashier wouldn't make eye contact with me. SadFace.
It wasn't all that embarrassing reading the book. The cover isn't that conspicuous, and for the most part, it seems like a regular novel. Except every time there was a sex scene, or one of the characters was giving a physical description of one of the other characters, it felt like the only thing on the pages were four letters. Two on each page: CO-CK in giant letters, and everyone could see it and know what I was reading. I'm normally a fast reader, but I think while reading this book, my reading speed was twice what it normally is. Thankfully, I only spent one shameful lunch time with this book in my hands, as people were more interested in catching up after the break to ask me about the book I'm reading.
