UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS!

If any of you have bookmarked me at kristanhoffman.wordpress.com, it’s time to change those URLs!

I have now moved to my own web space and can be found ONLY at kristanhoffman.com.

I have moved all content from this site to my new web home and will no longer update here.

See you over there! ;)

Lots of reading

This past week has been chock-full of reading, and I’ve loved every minute of it. First I finished The Witch of Portobello, another wonderful Paulo Coelho book. I’ve realized that his style is essentially “fable meets self-help book,” and I like it. I don’t think it’s something I’d attempt to emulate within my own style, but imitating it might make a good exercise.

Last week I finished his book The Zahir, which is my favorite of his so far. The characters are very rich and engaging, and their plights are more “normal” than in the other two books. But The Witch of Portobello had a better (twist!) ending, like The Alchemist.

The rest of my reading consisted of excerpts from the 10 finalists for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.

Seize the… night?

Every day is a chance to make your dreams come true.

The thought occurred to me the other day, and I believe it. So I should be practicing it.

I did send pages 1-50 of The Good Daughters to Wilkes University’s James Jones First Novel Fellowship (contest). We’ll see how that goes…

In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can start pushing myself to stay up later writing. It’s probably going to be a painful adjustment, but at this point, it seems necessary.

Guess what this quote means about my writing

Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin. - Victor Kiam

Humor: the opposite of me

“The problem with being funny,” she said, “is that then no one thinks of you sexually. Unless you’re funny about sex. But personally, I’d rather sex be good than funny.”

I’m not sure whether I can work that into a story or not, but it came to me in the shower a few nights ago, so I thought I’d share. I guess it’s part of my attempt to learn how to be funny. I think I still have quite a way to go…

(Why is humor so difficult for me??)

In other news, I finished Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate on my business trip last week, and I was blown away. It had been sitting on my shelf for the past 4 years (I kid you not) and now I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time before experiencing it. I give it a 5 out of 5 stars (as reflected on both GoodReads and Amazon) and highly recommend it to anyone who

• likes Amy Tan
• has an Asian parent (or knows one decently well)
• has a motherAND/OR
• likes good books.

(quote)

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. - Edward Albee

The four obstacles

I just finished reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (in English, not the original Portuguese). I had a hard time getting into its style, which some people compare to that of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, but I think the big difference is… about 180 pages. You can get away with being crisp (in terms of sentence structure and character development) and overtly allegorical in a short work, but in a novel, it gets kind of weird. At least, it did for me.

That being said, I definitely appreciate the morals that Coelho presents. Particularly as a young, struggling writer, I found a lot to take away. Basically, Coelho says that following one’s dreams is a person’s only obligation in life, and that doing so contributes to the happiness and positivity of the world. However, not everyone has the courage to try. Why? Because of the four obstacles.

The Tenth Time (excerpt)

393 words (of 2,997 total)

Your mother was seventeen when she got her first boyfriend. Danny Spence. He was eighteen, also a senior, and he had a habit of answering every question in class correctly, although under his breath. Your mother — Kate — had known of Danny for years, through mutual courses and friends, but they didn’t really know each other. Being two attractive young people, they’d flirted a bit in that harmlessly love-hate sort of way, but mostly they’d stayed on the periphery of one another’s lives, faint blips in the outer ring of radar that weren’t really worth worrying about.

Then one day he showed up dead center.

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200!

I have been terrible these past couple weeks. It’s as if after finishing my novel I gave myself a free pass to slack! Well, the pass has been revoked. It’s time to get my butt in gear. I have about 40 days to whip my first 50 pages into shape for a certain contest, plus a couple short stories that have been sitting around waiting to be finished, plus another novel that won’t write itself!

And that’s only in my writing life. There’s also the full-time job, the potential side web project (probably a bad idea), and the boyfriend, the pup, the family, and the friends. Oh dear.

If only I didn’t get so tired…

The rules

From “Rough Draft,” the Cincinnati Writers’ Project newsletter:

There are precisely two cannots in the writing universe without caveats. 1) You cannot bore your reader, 2) You cannot piss off your editor.

It’s that simple.

I haven’t actually attended the group yet (that comes on Wednesday) but from their newsletter I can tell two things: they’re funny, and they know what they’re talking about. Both could be good for me.