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Twenty sixteen

Elana — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 15:00:23 +0000

Good riddance.

Cutie pie

Elana — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 17:32:13 +0000

I’ll take my pun-nishment now…

-Love,

Elana

Books read in September

Elana — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 20:49:03 +0000

It is probably not considered unusual by this point that my monthly reading list contains only one book. Rather than letting this bother me, I will see it as an opportunity to spend a little more space on this little paperback.

Prepare yourself for lists of adjectives.

Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

“penumbra” – (n)

1. (technical) an area of shadow which is between fully dark and fully light
2. (astronomy) the shadow made by the earth or the moon during a partial eclipse

Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore has been on my to-read list for quite a while. It originally drew my attention just because the name sounds awesome, but then when checking out the plot it also sounded like nothing I’ve read before.
Mr Penumbra is a little bit of Dan Brown*, a little bit of Douglas Adams searching for the meaning to life the universe and everything, and a little bit of books-are-freakin-awesome.
It’s book about libraries, Millenials, Google, conspiracy theories, the Renaissance, research and technology. There’s a bit of longevity studies, a bit of the history of printing, a bit of Dungeons & Dragons, a bit of special effects and a bit of data processing.

*Disclaimer: I’ve never read a book by Dan Brown but I’m going with what I’ve heard from other people.

This book is many different things. I think it would have been easy for a book containing so many different topics to become disorganised and vague, but I didn’t experience that at all. Actually, I thought it was a very tight plot, with things only mentioned in the beginning later becoming very important.

So, the plot.
Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore is set in San Francisco in modern times. The main character, Clay, is an out-of-work graphic designer and marketer. He lost his job due to the bad economic circumstances (very relevant). Clay finally finds a job in the form of the late shift at Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore. This means he mans the bookstore through the night until dawn. Now, why would a bookshop need to be open at all hours for the day? Well, this is not your normal bookshop. It has hardly any of the normal books you would expect if you walked into a normal-hours bookshop. However, it has a huge lending-library from which an array of odd characters come borrow in the middle of the night. Urgently and excitedly, most of the time.
And is this even the weirdest thing that Clay will see in that shop…? Well, go read it to find out.

Don’t expect some grand philosophical leaps or life-changing revelations in Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. However, if you go read it, you can expect a sweet, nerdy mystery to entertain you on a rainy evening.

4/5

PS. Books are great. The internet is great. This book encompasses both.

PPS. I’m okay. I’m just struggling with the time to get back to social media. I miss it and I will try to find the time soon, but I’ve been adulting harder than usual and it’s honestly so exhausting. I’m trying to avoid burnout again by cutting back on the things that I do, rather than trying to do all the things and ending up hating all of it. Just taking care of myself first and trying to keep extra pressure off.

Library of the soul (book read in August)

Elana — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 20:48:36 +0000

We all have a story. Mine includes where I was born, how I spent a lot of holidays as a child on the road, when I went to school, how I spent the majority of weekends in the library…

You can find pieces of a person’s soul in their story.

For example, I will always be able to find a little piece of my soul on the open road and I probably lost a medium-ish piece in school. But then, the largest piece, that one lies in the library.

The specific library of my childhood isn’t there anymore, having been replaced by a mall and a theatre, but to a person’s soul it doesn’t matter where in space and time those pieces are lying because in memory they will always still be accessible. Pieces of me will always be locked the memories of the dirty-blue carpet that scratched your knees to bits if you knelt on it to access the bottom shelf, the characteristic smell of the reference section and the dark bay windows looking out into a back garden I was always too socially anxious to visit.

Fragments of who I had been in the past lie in specific books. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Merlin Conspiracy…

And The Wishsong of Shannara.

I’ve spoken about my mission to reread this whole series before. I’m still casually busy with that and at the moment seem to be reading them out of order. So when I picked this book off the shelf at the beginning of August, I thought I knew what fragments of my past it held.

It was the very first Shannara book I read. (Yes, I know it’s the third in the series. I wasn’t really aware of it then.) It was the gateway to what I’m essentially still busy with.
It was the book in my bag when I was on a roadtrip in Germany with my family when I was 15. I never really got a chance to read much but still. Wishsong was the book by my side when I was doing all of these things that I will probably never do ever again. It was new back then. Now it’s pretty battered.

And yet Wishsong held one more fragment of my past than I knew about. The other day when I opened the book, it revealed itself.

The light fell just right on the very first page and I could see the shadows of lines on the page. When I looked closer I could see that it was the impressions of a pencil pressing through a page and leaving dents on the paper below. And when I tried to make out what the lines formed, I could see it was words in my handwriting.

The first two are Taciturn and Kine.

The last word I can’t quite make out. I think it’s meant to be Effusive, but if it is I definitely spelled it wrong.

I’d completely forgotten that I used to do this.

When I was a teenager I went through a very intense period of language-learning and I used to keep a paper and pen by me to write down words I didn’t understand while I was reading. Later I would then go look up those words in the dictionary and in this way I would expand my vocabulary.

At the age of 15 I had no clue what career I wanted. However, if I’d known then what to look for maybe I could already have seen who I would become – a language editor. Of course my language-learning process is still ongoing and always will be. In fact, just the other day, I learned the word “bedeviled”. I had not known this was a real word until I looked it up, believing it was a typo. But I hardly ever have to look up a word while reading any more. I’ve passed beyond that stage and had nearly forgotten my old habit.

It was a lovely experience rediscovering that old fragment of my soul. It was the reminder that my career choices did not suddenly spring into existence at age 18. They’ve really been there all along.

Tell me in the comments, which books are part of your soul library?

Reminder

Elana — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 20:00:56 +0000

Writing prompt: tragedy

Elana — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 20:21:19 +0000

It’s finally time to write about tragedy.

Today’s writing prompt:

Write a scene that takes place immediately after a tragedy. Don’t mention the tragedy.

Source:

sarahselecky.com

It was now early evening and the streets had gone quiet. There were no more sirens, people screaming or loudspeaker announcements. Far beyond the skyscrapers, the smoke and the dust, the sun was slipping below the horizon.

The only movement outside came from a single cleaning crew, moving slowly but methodically. Under their skilled hands the smell of blood and death would be replaced with the smell of chemicals. They could wash away everything but the memories.

Slowly, the twilight deepened and the movement of the cleaners became harder to see.

Then the silence was broken by a pigeon starting to coo. It sat far above the ground on a balcony railing, a gutter rat oblivious of grief and destruction. Still, it rolled out its soothing tune until the sun fully set, and eased the weight of the dark.

Word count: 139

I wrote this little piece so long ago. Actually it was the first writing prompt that I completed when I started this series. But the time was just never right to publish it. 2016 has obviously had more than its fair share of tragedies and bloodshed, and every time I came close to publishing this piece something would happen. And then I replaced it with something else because I didn’t want to be seen as trivialising someone else’s pain.

If you use this writing prompt, leave me a comment. I’d love to see what you do with it!

As always, constructive criticism is very welcome.

The writing prompts series is based around shorter-form fiction. In this series, I take writing prompts from various sources and write short scenes inspired by those prompts.

Personally, I don’t enjoy writing short stories as I feel they don’t leave me enough space to achieve a goal. However, I recently discovered that I do very much enjoy writing an even shorter form of fiction: single scenes. Those single moments within a timeline just overflowing with events – those are where humanity really shines through. So that is my goal with writing these scenes. I want to express those little stand-out moments in a character’s life without using too many words.