Seasonal Plume

There’s yet another book sale at Carrefour Suntec, near where I work, with books starting from S$5. The last time they had this sale, I went home with around a dozen or more books overall. It’s books of all kinds, and in all conditions. I got away with a couple good ones, although it can take a while to soft through the piles and piles of books.

What I like best about book sales like these is that because of the lower price tag, you’ll just go ahead and get a few somewhat interesting titles, or books you wouldn’t buy at the usual prices but you want copies of.

I didn’t go in, though; I have around 20+ books in my bookshelf that are on my to-read list :s and I really shouldn’t add to the stuff I’m going to need to pack up when I move at the end of this month. It’s only the first day; I really hope I’m able to last this one out.

After picking up Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia from a book sale a few months ago, I finally took it along on the way to Ikea last Sunday. And it affected me so much that I had to distract myself–I was in danger of crying right on the bus on the way home while reading.

I’m glad I finally picked up this book. Initially I was rather unsure about it–the start wasn’t entirely too good for me, although the writing style itself was interesting and kept me going. Sure enough, soon Jess, Leslie, and even May Belle gripped me and made me feel for them, and appreciate their simple adventures. You could feel the simple joys they had, mixed in with all those little “life and death” issues we always have as kids ;)

As a child who was (is!) interested in fantasy, and stories, and creating make-believe worlds and scenarios with various versions of myself, I could relate a lot to Leslie–or at least the Leslie that we are given a treat to see from Jess’s eyes. I could certainly relate to the two children, being a kind of wallflower when I was in grade school–a bit of a geek, but not even geeky enough to be notorious. How they interacted with the worlds mentioned in the book–Lewis’s Narnia, and Alexander’s Prydain–was similar in many ways to how the books affected me. Jess’s hunger for these worlds and Leslie’s transformation of her fantasy-enriched imagination to Terabithia struck familiar chords in me.

The next afternoon they called P.T. and headed for Terabithia. It had been more than a month since they had been there together, and as they neared the creek bed, they slowed down. Jass wasn’t sure he still remembered how to be a king.

“We’ve been away for many years,” Leslie was whispering. “How to you suppose the kingdom has fared in our absence?”

“Where’ve we been?”

“Conquering the hostile savages on our northern borders,” she answered. “But the lines of communication have been broken, and thus we do not have tidings of our beloved homeland for many a full moon.” How was that for regular queen talk? Jess wished he could match it. “You think anything bad has happened?”

“We must have courage, my king. It may indeed be so.”

I will have to find the movie to borrow somewhere and finally check it out–I’ve been wanting to watch for a while now, but have been holding off as I wanted to read the book first. :)

I’ve started a new habit: I wake up at 5:30 AM to write.

The alarm goes off at 5:25 AM, and then I drag myself out of the bed to fire up my computer, open StoryMill, hit Command-Shift-F for full-screen, and start typing away. I haven’t gone through the ones I’ve written yet, but they’re usually just a couple of paragraphs each, with typos all over the place (I hear Typinator going off about once every other minute, correcting my typos). That’s what happens when I type with sluggish hands and with my eyes closed.

Why am I doing this? Basically for two things:

1. to train my body to write creatively again, and
2. to find out which kind of writing I instinctively fall back on when most of myself is still not functioning properly.

I got this activity from Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. I seem to remember talking about this a long while ago, but as I can’t find that entry, I must be dreaming (I swear I’m fully awake now though). In chapter 5 of the book, she tells us that we “must teach the unconscious to flow into the channel of writing”.

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet…your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.

And so I write. I’ve actually “cheated”, and I think I know the answer to #2 (what writing type I fall back on) but we’ll see how this goes. In any case, I don’t see any pattern yet in my morning writing; it should come out in a month or so, I’m gauging.

The good thing? As early as now, I feel like I’m finding what my writing voice is. I already know, in a way, but I’ve written in the same “voice” at least thrice already (and I only started this week). Writing while my brain’s still muddled with sleep has its rewards, for all it’s difficult to get words in order sometimes. :D

One of the things that I like buying are bookmarks. I especially like pretty, unusual bookmarks, even though this sort usually means that the book will be taking a beating along the spine (and thus don’t get used too much). I have the ordinary sort, such as this one shown here, given by Caroline. They come in interesting designs and are great also for quickly marking where you are to get a bite to eat or something–I stick the bookmark just below the line I’m leaving, with the length perpendicular to the page, so that I can easily get back to reading after a few minutes.

The downside is that they’re usually made of thick paper or board, and sticking it into the spine isn’t usually going to be very good for the books in the long run. Of course, I have even thicker variety, such as this one of a poor pig becoming roadkill (how morbidly cute is that), given by my sister (click on the photo for a bigger image). I use it for my planner, as in the photo. It does eat into the space a bit, but people who see it while I’m using my planner as usually have a few words to say about it.

Another example is the portable ribbon sort, such as this one, which I bought myself (click on the photos to view bigger images). The bookmark itself is an elastic cord looped around itself, with a kind of tail for the “ribbon”. The book goes inside, as in the photo. This is even more saddening for the book, but for prayer planners like this one it’s good–it’s easy to find the right page in the morning when you’re still groggy ;)

On the up side, I don’t use bookmarks all that often — I can use random paper lying about (the most usual culprit are receipts), and more often I just remember the page number (or thereabouts), and I’m good to go. I usually read a few paragraphs to a page back to get my bearing again when picking up on reading anyway.

I wonder if bookmark usage is something I take for granted–that everyone else uses bookmarks the same way I do, or maybe there’s some technique in bookmark-fu that I haven’t yet found out. How do you use bookmarks?

Here is yet another revamp of Seasonal Plume, as I mentioned I was feeling rather disenchanted with my previous layout. This one is cleaner and more streamlined, with the focus back on the content. I’ve also finally upgraded WordPress, which was quite overdue! Some other changes include:

1. I’ve removed the Snippets and Quotes categories. They’re very rarely updated, and they only serve as noise, mostly. In that regard, there are no more aside entries.
2. Twitter! I’ve added my most recent three tweets to my sidebar.
3. All books in the library now lead to the Amazon product page. It was getting increasingly difficult customizing each template for the Now Reading plugin, so I did away with it.

There might be a few quirks in IE7 and IE6, especially the latter. I hope to get to work on them fairly soon — I don’t have a Windows machine or VM yet on my MacBook, hence it will have to wait for a bit. Feel free to let me know if you come across problems!