The Woes of a Writer...

I had an idea.

I thought it was a pretty cool idea. I don't normally get a lot of ideas that are cool enough to write a book about.

Then I realized that there are no new ideas under the sun, and found this at Barnes and Noble today. 

"In the Society, Officials decide. Who you love. Where you work. When you die.

Cassia has always trusted their choices. It’s hardly any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one… until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now Cassia is faced with impossible choices: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she’s known and a path no one else has ever dared follow — between perfection and passion."

I need not tell you my idea, because this book is, in essence, the exact same thing. (Minus the cheesy love triangle...)

Oh, yeah. It's also a New York Times bestseller.

It ruined my day. There in my hands was the idea I got so excited over, already invested time in, had so many ideas for... and I wasn't the one who wrote it.

I wanted to look on the bright side and find differences between the author's ideas and mine, so I bought it. As we drove home, I scanned through the first few pages and concluded that my ideas were different, but not different enough to not look like I totally stole this lady's idea. I didn't have the heart to continue reading it, so I returned my buried hopes and dreams an hour later.

Now I'm writing this because I know that at least some of you have felt this terrible, sinking feeling of a stale idea. I've decided it's the writer's equivalent of dating some guy and finding out that he's married: After discovering that he belongs to someone else, continuing to think about him just feels wrong. :P

I was able to shake it off a little with some retail therapy, but every time I think of it I get that annoying sinking feeling of all my characters and their world dying off because they already live in some alternate universe... really, it sort of sounds like a Dr. Who episode or something.

I'm hoping that maybe someday I'll be able to write a book. If I do, God probably has a better idea out there for me somewhere deep in the creases of my imagination. It could take some heavy machinery to dig it out... :P

Book Vs. Movie: The Hunger Games

So I finally sat down and watched The Hunger Games. Let the comparisons begin (And may the odds be ever in their favor)! 

Description: "In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games," a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed." ~Amazon

Alrighty, let's take a look at the book. 

Book: 

Pros: For one thing, I blew through this book in two days. (I could've probably finished it in one, but I got it in the afternoon and had to eat/sleep at some point... ;) Although it starts out a bit slow, Suzanne Collins knows how to write. 

The character development was pretty good, too. (I had a couple problems later in the series, but that's for another time. haha) Suzanne Collins made the characters believable and the dialogue natural. 


The plot line was creative, and I think the author made it obvious who the enemies were, and that the Hunger Games were not seen in a positive light by the main characters. Suzanne Collins did a good job with portraying how corrupt the Hunger Games were, as well as the Capitol. It has the potential of being a really thought-provoking book. 


Cons: From a Christian standpoint, the one thing you might want to take note of is the obvious humanistic worldview. There is no God or religion in the post-apocalyptic world of Panem, and everyone just sort of follows their own moral code. (There was a point in the book where Gale was trying to convince Katniss that killing people in the arena shouldn't be much different than hunting game, assuming the idea that we're all animals and it's survival of the fittest). So, yeah. You just have to take the good and leave the bad. 


Although the Hunger Games are looked on with contempt, there's still a lot of violence in this book. So if you're really sensitive to things like that, you might want to steer clear.

Movie: 

Squeeeee! I was so excited I got to see the movie in the theater! I didn't get a chance to a few months ago, but I got to watch it in the rinky-dink theater by our house that plays movies a couple months after they premiere. :D  


Pros: This movie was so well-done in terms of making it exactly how the book played out in the minds of its readers. It was like I was watching my own imagination. 

Katniss was played by Jennifer Lawrence (first movie I've seen her in, but she did a great job)

Josh Hutcherson was Peeta. (Swoon). 

Gale was played by Liam Hemsworth (I don't think there's any way his name can sound more British, but he's actually Australian. haha) 

Effie Trinket was played by Elizabeth Banks. 

I could go on and on with the cast. They picked all the right people. 

Rue... :')

The movie also brought to mind things that I didn't really see in the book. Sure, it was easy to see how the Hunger Games affected the Tributes and families in most districts, but the movie also showed how they could make other Tributes (the Careers) see the Games as just that: a game. They touched on that in the book, but I guess I didn't imagine it like they had it in the movie, and it just continues to show how messed up the Capitol is. 

Cons: I found pretty much the same problems as I did in the book. 
I also noticed that they kind of made Peeta look more... stalker-ish... in the movie. "I followed you home from school every day... every day." O_O 

I wasn't *too* thrilled with the ending, but it wasn't really bad or anything. haha 


So which one wins this round of Book Vs. Movie? 

I'd say this one is a tie. 
The movie complimented the book perfectly. The book is still worth reading because there are things in the book that weren't in the movie, so I think they balanced each other out. :) 

Dreaming with open eyes...

I have an addiction. It's one that makes my mind drift somewhere else, and shuts the door of reality behind me. It's an escape, taking me worlds away from the world I live in, and everywhere in between.

(It's also totally legal. ;)

I forgot how much I love to READ! 

 I have many a fond memory cradling books in my hands, letting the summer light from the window pool onto its pages. I loved going to the library. I went through several books a month. I was a certifiable bookworm.

Then came high school. And along with high school came homework. Lots of it. And the reading assignments... so many post-traumatic flashbacks...

In the four years of high school I've hardly read anything for fun. It was mostly all school books and reading assignments. By the time I was finished with those, I was burnt out, and the computer or TV always sounded better. :P

This month, though, something wonderful and terrible happened: We need a new sensor bar for our Wii. Which means no Netflix. Which means no TV. Which means I've been picking up more books lately and remembering, "Oh my GOSH... this is awesome!" I can slowly feel my bookworminess worming its way back to the surface, and I've been going through pages like Pauly D goes through hair gel. :P

It's sort of proved itself as a new distraction, though. I'm still not finished with all the homework I need to burn through before I graduate. I have a lot of reading to do, and I'm spending it all in one place. Let me tell you, though, even though it's a bit of a distraction, at least it's an interactive one. Yes, it's fiction, but in a way I still feel like I'm learning. As a writer, I forgot how inspiring it is to not only write a lot, but to read a lot. It's opened my eyes to how many interesting and creative stories there are out there. I feel... EMPOWERED.

So... yes. With that said, what are you reading right now? What are some of your favorite books?

Book VS. Movie: The Notebook

So here's my new segment: Book VS. Movie! (That's your cue to cheer in overwhelming excitement.) ;) It probably won't be a regular segment, just one I'll write on a whim when I'm wanting to compare a book to its movie.

So with that, here we go.

Basic plot: "The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she choose Noah, the romantic rascal she left so many years ago?" ~ Amazon, on the book

"Behind every great love is a great story. Two teens from the opposite sides of the tracks fall in love during one summer together, but are tragically forced apart." ~ Amazon, on the movie

So, after watching the movie and reading the book, I have a few things to say about them.

The Movie:

Pros: Ok, so first off, we have a great cast.

Rachel McAdams (Ally)

Ryan Gosling (Noah)

(Surprisingly, I really didn't think Ryan Gosling was all that cute until I watched this movie... ;)

James Marsden (Lon)

The acting was great, and the cast made the characters real.

The relationship between Noah and Ally.

There are so many scenes with them that just make you go "awwwww." They're so cute together.

The relationship seems real because it has its flaws, but you can tell that they still truly love each other.

(^This scene and the Carnival scene are my two favorites)

This movie actually made me cry. It takes a lot for a movie to do that. I didn't bawl or anything... but still. It's got to count for something.

There are a lot of other things I love about this movie, but... SPOILERS. :P

Cons: There were still a few things I didn't like.

Content. Although the relationship between Ally and Noah was really sweet, I think they got a little too serious too fast. :P So, with that said, there are a couple steamy scenes you might want to fast forward.

Lon.

It's not that I didn't like Lon. Actually, I thought he was really sweet. What I didn't like was that Ally kind of broke his heart. Normally in movies where the heroine has to choose between the guy she's with and someone else, the guy she's with is normally a jerk. This one's sort of a tough situation, because Lon and Ally really were cute together, but they just weren't meant for each other. However, there were some things I think Ally could've done to make it easier on him, and, without spoiling anything, I think she could've made wiser decisions.

The Book:

Pros: Good storyline. I mean... we wouldn't have the movie without the book, right?

Cons: So I actually watched the movie before reading the book. In watching the movie, I had high hopes and expectations from the book. Well... those hopes deflated about halfway through the book, and I never finished it. Why? It was just boring. I really, really wanted to like it, but alas, it just wasn't that good. The writing style went a little like this:

"He walked to the house. Then he went inside the house. Then he ate dinner and went to bed."

That wasn't a direct quote, but you get the picture. That's what most of the book consisted of: A boring narrative of the characters' actions. It wasn't a natural narrative, and it rarely elaborated on the thoughts, feelings and histories of the characters; it was more like an itinerary. There really wasn't much depth to the characters, they were just basically the author's puppets. There were also a bunch of cliches.

The romance between Ally and Noah wasn't very believable, either. You sat there and wondered how on earth they were in love. There was no chemistry... just physical attraction.

The sequence of events seemed a bit disorganized and confusing, too. The author was somehow able to create a flashback within a flashback. It was just sort of sloppy and, again, unnatural; but maybe it was just the fact that I saw the movie first that threw me off a little.

Unless the book was able to miraculously redeem itself in the second half of the book, it was far from being my favorite, and closer to being one of the worst books I've read so far. :P

So... one story, two renditions: Hollywood's, and Christopher Sparks'. Which one told it better?

*Drumroll please*

I'd say the Movie wins this round. Hands down.

Heaven is for Real

So last night I read a pretty interesting book... (I'm pretty sure you've all heard of it; it's a best seller!)

It's called "Heaven is for Real."

My sister got it for Christmas, and I've heard some pretty cool things about it, so I picked it up at 9:30 last night.

I didn't put it down 'till 3:30 this morning. :P

If you don't know what the book is about, Todd Burpo, a small-town pastor, writes the account of his son, Colton's claims on going to heaven and back after having an emergency operation and almost dying. For months after the surgery, Colton reavealed amazing things about heaven, and knew about things nobody could've told him (his mother's miscarriage before he was born, and his grandpa who died before he was born).

I found the book pretty interesting. However, I'm almost not sure what to think about it. Amidst the array of interesting, confused, amazed and somewhat skeptical thoughts I had in my head, two rang out the loudest:

1. Burpo is a funny last name. haha, Burpo. Burpo, Burpo, Burpo. To be honest, it kind of grosses me out. It's like "BURP, oh!" :P

and

2. Is this made-up? There are so many accounts of people saying they've "gone to heaven and back." It's easy to be kind of skeptical about a claim like that. When we watch a magic trick, what's our first reaction? How did he DO that?! I think we sort of wind up doing the same thing when God performs miracles. We want to know if there are any smoke, mirrors or trap doors before we believe that God could've actually had any hand in it. :P

But, although I was a little skeptical, as I said, there was information that Colton knew that he couldn't have known. He was also able to tell his parents exactly where they were and what they were doing during his operation. All of his accounts on God, Jesus and heaven were all lined up with scripture (he wasn't saying anything that would give the book away as a made-up account).

Aside from the surrounding controvery of this book, it definitely makes you think. Sure, I've thought about heaven before, but not really in too much detail. It's hard to imagine how amazing any location is if you haven't been there. I've never been to Ireland, but people tell me it's beautiful. So, I guess as the title suggests, the book made heaven more real to me. I was able to imagine for a second how wonderful it must be (and how much more amazing it is compared to my human imagination)!

Have any of you read the book? If so, what are your thoughts?