It is amazing how you can suddenly be hit by a moment of sheer genius. It has been over a year since I truly worked on the umpteenth revision of a historical novel that I wrote all the way back in 1998. Lacking true inspiration, and not to mention time, I have been left to simply jotting down a sentence here and a paragraph there in the margins of school notebooks and on napkins.
However, I have finally overcome my plaguy writer’s block! It was just last night that I wrote the perfect opening sentence that has correlations with the title and with the second protagonist. Twelve hours later, I have rewritten the entire first chapter and am currently working on the second. I expect this revision to be the second to the last, if not the least, revision for this novel.
This is a great personal achievement, as many of my friends will know. Now, my goal is to continue writing the remainder of the summer, and hopefully finish this revision by the ten-year anniversary of this novel being first written!
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Website Recommendation
If anyone is interested in children’s literature from the past the website Children’s Books Online: the Rosetta Project is the place to go. This website houses complete texts and illustrations of vintage children’s stories, poems, rhymes, chapter books and illustrations.
One of my favorite pieces of children’s lit. is found here: a 1902 copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses which contains poems such as “Bed in Summer,” “The Land of Counterpane,” and “Happy Thought.” Stevenson’s poems are from the point of view of a child, but they also have a sense of the “adult nostalgia for lost innocence and simplicity” (1840.) His work is absolutely wonderful and played an important role in children’s literature during the 19th century.
Damrosch, David, and Kevin Dettmar, eds. The Longman Anthology: British Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 2B. New York: Pearson Education, Inc, 2006. 1840.
One of my favorite pieces of children’s lit. is found here: a 1902 copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses which contains poems such as “Bed in Summer,” “The Land of Counterpane,” and “Happy Thought.” Stevenson’s poems are from the point of view of a child, but they also have a sense of the “adult nostalgia for lost innocence and simplicity” (1840.) His work is absolutely wonderful and played an important role in children’s literature during the 19th century.
Damrosch, David, and Kevin Dettmar, eds. The Longman Anthology: British Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 2B. New York: Pearson Education, Inc, 2006. 1840.
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