Update: Goals and Challenges

Okay, who stole last week? No, I’m serious. It vanished without even the typical whooshing sound it makes when a week goes flying by me!

I think it is about time for a little update from me. As you know, I have issued a few challenges to myself in the last year. Here are the goods:

Good news first? You betcha!

My romance group critique partners and I issued each other a challenge–get a literary agent by Christmas. Well, guess what? 2 of the 3 of us have! I would be in that statistic–due to a humongous leg-up from Calista Taylor–she put a well-timed word in for me. The third partner is doing edits requested by an agent that could very well lead to representation. Wow! Can all three of us meet that goal? I think so!

PASS!

(So, yes. I am now ‘agented’ and have been working on my proposal for my nonfiction Kid’s Play project. We hope to have that out on submission soon. Cross your fingers for me!)

Other good news:

My WEbook Page to Fame submission (Humorous women’s fiction) got elevated to round 3! I haven’t submitted it yet, but will soon. (More on that as time goes by.)

PASS

And then I’ve been letting other things slide…

Remember my challenge to myself to read 5 banned/challenged books in one year? Well, I didn’t quite make it. I blame all those other good books in my life and how they’ve weasled their way ahead in the To Be Read lineup. I do still plan to read those banned/challenged books. And I will.

FAIL

As for my Read Around the World Challenge which is an ongoing project… well, I haven’t posted anything in months, but I have been keeping tabs on what I read. I’ve gotten to the point where it is typically the same three or four countries being read over and over again. But, I do have a little something from France that I will post (one of these days).

Er… FAIL? Er…PASS? You decide.

And lastly, there is my tidy up and organize my life New Year’s plan. Yes, I am still working on that one. Decluttering, etc. I have shredded and recycled a whole pile of old manuscripts–don’t worry, I still have copies! But I still haven’t cured the problem of the tumbling items on the top shelf of the back door closet yet. Working on it though. Well, mentally. (I might mention that in the New Year’s Plan post I also mentioned getting an agent and also relaxing a bit–I’ve done both.)

Er… PASS? Mostly.

That’s all from me at the moment, any news updates from you?

Read Around the World: Chile

Olá!

Welcome to Chile in the 1840s. Isabelle Allende’s Daughter of Fortune has the honour of representing Chile in my efforts to read around the world.

Plot Summary: Daughter of Fortune is set in Chile and San Francisco in the 1840s. Eliza is born in Chile where she is raised and meets a lover who leaves for the gold rush in California. Discovering she is pregnant, Eliza stows aboard a ship in an attempt to follow him. She finds herself in a foreign land discovering who she truly is in a time where there aren’t many options for single, independent women.

It is said that Allende (who has lived in both Chile and the US) took seven years to research this novel and it shows in the details that stay with the reader year after year, even after the rest of the story fades.

My progress:

Read Around the World: Columbia

Olá!

Welcome to Columbia where it is hot, the supernatural is a normal part of life, and everyone male is named Aureliano or Arcadio. Okay, maybe not everyone. Just 24 Aurelianos and 5 Arcadios.

The book: One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Plot Summary: This story rambles through time like a story passed down from generation to generation, covering the Buendia family over 100 years in the small, isolated town of Macondo.

While the story rambles with babies suddenly appearing, women living 120 years, and many people sharing the same name and the same traits, there are aspects of the story that sing, leading it to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. And although there are parts of the story that will cause you to pull your hair out, if you sit down and read this book in a short period of time and allow the story to wrap its way around you, it will dazzle you with its kind and gentle repetitions. The character traits that set the family apart as Buendias will make you smile and the ending will simply be the most perfect completion to a tale you will ever read. (Not to pin too high of hopes on it or anything.)

Tips: Do make notes on who is who. It gets confusing. Also realize that the style is such that if you don’t let yourself go, the story will frustrate and bore you. You also might want to be careful about saying things like, “I’ll turn off the light when I finish this paragraph.” or “I’ll turn off the oven when I’m done this paragraph.” as they are known to regularly go on for approximately 2 1/2 pages. In fact, there is one sentence that goes on for 70 lines! The beauty of it was, I didn’t even notice until I was about half way through. Oh, and if the book focuses on a character for more than a paragraph… they are probably going to die.

My progress:

Read Around the World: Saudi Arabia

Marhaba! Welcome to Saudi Arabia where the weather is hot and the women are ruled by the men in their lives.

Rajaa Alsanea, a woman, receives the honour of representing Saudi Arabia and, specifically, their women with her novel The Girls of Riyadh.

Plot Summary: One brave Saudi girl sends out emails using a list serve, revealing the lives of four of her friends as they struggle to find love while remaining within the confines of their religion and culture.

My progress:

Read Around the World: Portugal

Olá!
It’s time for a dip over to Europe with a stop in Portugal. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist will be representing Portugal in the United Nations of books.

Plot Summary: A young shepard in Spain (See? I’m breaking that live and write about the same country rule again.) dreams that he must follow omens to find his treasure near the pyramids.

My progress around the world:

Read Around the World: USA

Next up: The United States of America.

I’d say that about 80% of what I read is American. So, who gets to represent the USA? I’m going to choose John Steinbeck and his novel East of Eden even though it has been awhile since I’ve read him. In 1962 Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and I think he’s worthy of representing the USA.

Every time I read Steinbeck, he pleasantly surprises me and this novel was no exception.

A very brief plot summary: Basically, the story follows several families in the Californian Salinas Valley in the time before world war II. The Hamiltons have a large family and are trying to survive on infertile land and everyone struggles to find their place in the world and ‘make it’ in their own way.

Read Around the World Progress:

Read Around the World: Canada

First up: Canada.

Being Canadian, I’ve been reading Canadian literature all my life. But which book will I choose to represent Canada in my Read Around the World challenge to myself?

Oops. I just ran into a hitch. Shoot. Already. I said books written by an author in one country but set in another didn’t count. The problem is that the last two books written by Canadians (The Flying Troutmans and Divisadero) that I’ve read were set in the USA. Damn.

Now what? Do I skim through my mind’s reading archives until I come up against No Great Mischief or The Stone Angel? Something so quintessentially Canadian it couldn’t be anything else?

No. I play dirty. (You can’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The Flying Troutmans begins in Manitoba, and the characters are kooky Canadians. The story setting is a character in the novel, but it isn’t so major that it makes the story non-Canadian–if that makes any sense. So, The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews gets to represent Canada. Ta-da!!!

Plot summary: Main character comes back from France to place her sister to the psych ward and then take care of her niece and nephew. She decides she needs to find the children’s birth father and off they go in an aging minivan across the US, hoping to find a man nobody has seen in over a decade.

Reading Around the World Progress:

Read Around the World: Part 2

Okay, this is how my read around the world challenge/event/mission/thing is going to go down…

Each time I read a book from somewhere in the world, I’m going to brag about it, I mean post it on my blog to keep me accountable. That is, until I realize that this challenge is a grossly mislead idea and a stupid fit of inspiration that hit me way too late at night for my inner critic to do something about, and I sneak in and delete all my posts that contain even a whisper about me reading my way around the world. That’s right. I play dirty.

And because I play dirty, I am also going to come flying out of the gate on this challenge. You might want to stand back. I am going to go a little postal. I mean, a little post crazy. A small difference, yet a very important one. So… wait for it. It’s coming. Many posts today.

Alrighty then. Still with me?

Here goes: each post will have a short blurb about the book, a world map with the country of the book’s origin coloured in, as well as a lovely map marking my progress around the world. You can watch me colour in all 195 of the world’s freaking countries. And let me state for the record, if I am breathing down the neck of country 195 and some loony in charge decides to rearrange borders, rename the place, and generally piss me off by making this crazy challenge more difficult, I reserve the right to do whatever the heck I want in order to make things ‘right’ again. Cool?

We’re cool.

Am I missing anything?