9 posts from 2006

Ack!

Nov 9, 2006
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Archie is hijacking my novel, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Do I fight him (which I've been doing) or go with it?

So the original idea of the book was this: the story of Archie and Lily, starting when they meet and going through their courtship and marriage in a lineal fashion until the story ended with a pregnant Lily and her happy husband in the garden (with perhaps a foretelling of what is to come.) Lily was supposed to be the center of the story (thus the title, Lily's Garden.)

The writing's been a little slow, (I'm about a thousand words behind where I should be) but that's partially because I keep stopping to do research.

Here's where Archie is driving me nuts- he keeps popping into my head at random ages and demanding his story be told. I've got a couple thousand words already of backstory, and let me tell you he is such a sad little boy. The past couple of days, though, it's been post Secret Garden Archie that's been in my head. And this is a problem.

I'm not sure I want to go there. For one thing it's making my story a little darker then I intended for it to be. I wanted to keep it at about the same level as the original book, (despite the conversation that Kristen and I had about where Colin was conceived...) so that fans of Secret Garden could enjoy it. But if I go where Archie is trying to take me, it's going to involve more angst.

So any thoughts? Do I stick to the straight forward love story, or go for the more angst filled story told post SG (which would at least mention Mary, Colin, and Dickon) with major flashbacks? If you were in a bookstore, which would interest you more? if you were a parent, what would you think about the choice?

Characters

Oct 9, 2006
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I spent most of Saturday researching Victoria England and Colonial India. Did you know that a British officer had to wait until he was 30 to be married, had to be engaged for a year, and had to have the approval of his CO? And it wasn't until the 1880's that women gained the right to get custody of thier children. And it was about that time that it was decided that doctors were allowed to examine female patients. Weird.

It's funny, the difference between ready a book for pleasure and reading it more carefully. I spent most of Thursday and Friday nights reading Secret Garden in minute detail. I listen to the musical often, and i love the movies, and I've discovered that they had me totally mixed up about an important detail. Lily didn't have a sister who was Mary's mother. It was her brother who was Mary's father.

I was so pleased to figure this out. i was having trouble figuring out how the two sisters would relate. I've never been very fond of the mother, who never noticed her daughter and told the servents to keep Mary out of sight. But once I realized that Lily had a brother, that relationship fell into place. It also gave Lily a last name. Lennox, just like Mary.

Lilias "Lily" Lennox. She hates her first name, which is why she goes by Lily. (FH Burnett, what kind of name is Lilias Lennox?) She adores her older brother, and hates that he is so far away in India. He sends her little elephants carved out of ivory, and letters, quite often.

All the Main Characters-

Lilias "Lily" Lennox (who during the course of the novel will become Lily Craven.)

Archibald Craven

Minor characters mentioned in Secret Garden that I'm stealing

Ben Weatherstaff

Susan Sowerby (Martha and Dicken's mother)

Martha and Dicken (very young, Dicken not born until towards the end.)

Sarah Medlock (position?)

Lily's brother (Mary's father) - needs a first name.

Dr. Craven (also needs first name)

Minor characters not mentioned (and all in need of names)

Lily's mother

Lily's father

Lily's aunt/chaparon

Misc. villagers and other minor characters.

Amazon

Oct 6, 2006
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So I figured that before I start writing I should do some research. Not reasearch for the book itself. I've been doing that. But I wanted to check around and make sure that no one has already writen a similar book. Years ago I read a book that was supposed to be the sequel to SG. It was horrible. Not the writing so much as the plot. It took place ten years after the book. Mary married some guy and went to India, igoring the sickly baby she gave birth to in an almost identical storyline to her own childhood. After the baby died she came back to England. Despite the fact that she was in love with Dicken she married Colin (who she later caught having sex with one of his (male) army buddies.) The whole thing was terribly OC.

Good news. There are two sequels to the book but no prequels. There are 4 movies, a radio broadcast, many versions of the book, (ranging from the original unabridged to illastrated 'I can read it myself'). There is also the musical, in both the english and broadway versions. No one seems to have published anything like my idea though. Sweet.

It's funny the stuff that comes up when you type in secret garden. There's all the things I've mentioned. There are also CDs of the meditation variety. And erotica. Yup. I found a book called 'My Secret Garden' that is basically about self pleasure. Interesting. I so won't be titling my book My Secret Garden. Wouldn't want them to get mixed up.

My only problem so far is that the title I have been thinking of, Lily's Garden, is already used at Amazon. Twice actually. Oddly enough both books are children's picture books. Hmmm.

Insparation

Oct 5, 2006
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I loved the Secret Garden growing up. I connected with the isolation of Mary, and longed for a garden of my own. i wanted to be the one to bring it to life, to sit next to Dicken and learn, to get my hands dirty, to bring a book into the locked walls and spend hours with only myself for company. And now I've found a way. Kind of.

I'm really excited about writing in this world. When I was little not only was it one of my fav books, but I adored the Hallmark movie based on the book. It started out in the future, with Mary as a nurse, and told the story through flashbacks (it ended with Dicken arriving in the garden and they kiss.) I always thought Mark and Dicken would end up together.

I was listening to the musical recently. It has this great song at the end (in the Broadway version sung by Mandy Patankin) or rather 2 songs. Where in the World and How Could I Ever Know. The first song is Archie lammenting the fact that he is being haunted by Lily, and where can he go to get away from the memories. The second part is Lily's responce. She didn't know that she would have to leave him, but her wish is for him to take that love he feels for her and give it to their son.

I started thinking about that idea, and wanting to expand it. How did they meet? She must have loved gardens very much. I can see her mucking around in the dirt, and her mother getting exasperated. "Why can't you be a proper lady?" And she has a sisiter who moves to India and has a child. What was that relationship like? Were they good friends? Or did they just tolerate each other?

How did they meet? Was it love at first sight? And what about the other characters. Did Lily know Mrs. Medlock? Did she ever hold Dicken as a baby? Was she friends with Ben Witherstaff or Susan Sowerby? Was the robin that friended Mary the child or grandchild of a robin that was around when the garden was first built?

100 books I might have read

Oct 5, 2006
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Instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you might read in the future, cross out the ones you won't touch with a 10 foot pole, underline the ones on your book shelf, and do not do anything the ones you've never even heard of.

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)

2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

~~4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)~~

5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkein)

6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkein)

7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkein)

8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)

9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)

12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)

13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)

14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)

15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)

16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)

17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)

18. The Stand (Stephen King)

19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)

20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

21. The Hobbit (Tolkein)

22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)

24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)

29. ~~East of Eden (John Steinbeck)~~

30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)

31. ~~Dune (Frank Herbert)~~

32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)

33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

34. 1984 (Orwell)

35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)

38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)

39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)

40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Aurel)

42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)

~~44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)~~

45. Gift & Award Bible NIV (Various)

46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)

49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)

51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)

54. Great Expectations (Dickens)

55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)

57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)

58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)

59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)

60. The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)

64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)

65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)

66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brahares)

68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

69. Les Miserables (Hugo)

70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)

72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)

73.Shogun (James Clavell)

74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)

75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)

77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)

78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)

79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)

80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)

81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)

82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)

83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)

84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)

85. Emma (Jane Austen)

86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)

87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)

89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)

90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)

91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)

92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)

93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)

94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)

96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)

97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)

99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)

100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Summery

Oct 4, 2006
2 comments

There is a thread at NaNo composing of people's plot ideas summerized in a sigle line. Very amusing, some of them.

What? You want to know what mine is?

When we meet him in "The Secret Garden" Archibald Craven is a shadow of a man who has turned away from everything he once loved: it must have been an extrodinary love for Lily's death to have shattered him so completly.

Lily's Garden

Resources

Oct 2, 2006
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For my own research, and anyone who is interested...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ Awesome site for all things British history.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page Free e-books! Found a couple that haven't been published for years.

http://scholar.google.com/

http://www.refdesk.com/ RefDesk- like having your own librarian on call 24 hours a day

http://www.nationmaster.com./index.php A searchable database of random statistics

Nano sign-up

Oct 2, 2006
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it's official. I have signed up for NaNo. Anyone who wants to add me as a buddy, my name is the same there as it is everywhere else. Wiccagirl24.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/userinfo.php?t=1159812293&uid=125574 This is my profile. I really want it to be November already, becuase one of the fetures of the profile page is a chart that keeps track of your word count. For the next month it will be blank, and I really want to see what it looks like when there is info on it. Part of me is really nervous, though. 50,000 words over a period of 1 month. That's 1,667 words a day. I've never writen that much. Not daily. We'll see how it goes.

What to do with my new blog

Sep 19, 2006
2 comments

I have a blog. More then one, and mostly at Live Journal. There's my regular one, my fanfic one, and anonymous ranting one. So what should I be doing with this shny new Vox blog that I got today (thanks to Kay)? I got it soley for the reason that I am a sheep. My friends keep talking about Vox and I wanted to check it out.

The thing that intrigues me the most about Vox is the book/video/audio search. So here's what I'm thinking. I already have a place to talk about every day stuff and fandom stuff. I'm not going to post that stuff here, because I see no point in repeating myself. What I think I'll use Vox for is talking about liturature, both reading it and writing it. I'll pimp out my favorite books and vent/squee about my personal writing.

I want to be an author. Right now I write fanfic, but my dream is to write a novel. I think that I am going to try and at least start it this November, using the challenge of NaNo to give myself a goal. I've started doing research, since the novel I am planning to write is set at the end of the 19th century, in England. I may be using this space to save notes, or figure out plot points.

This may all change, but this is my current thought.

Ack!

Characters

Amazon

Insparation

100 books I might have read

Summery

Resources

Nano sign-up

What to do with my new blog

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9 posts from 2006

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