Crystal Schubert

May I share something funny?

Blog Me Maybe Thursdays are for spotlighting other people, so May I tell you about someone else?

I didn’t find Jessica Darling until I was out of college and finally had time to read for pleasure (this is probably why New Adult is such a hard sell, you guys!). Megan McCafferty’s Jessica Darling series (SLOPPY FIRSTS, SECOND HELPINGS, CHARMED THIRDS, etc.) was published in the same time frame as my own high school experience, so I instantly related to all of the cultural references and how they impacted Jessica’s life.

Jessica [not-so] Darling is smart, brash, sarcastic, and her relationship with Marcus Flutie evolves in a wonderfully realistic way. I absolutely adore her. In fact, she was my first forray into YA lit, and her voice ignited my passion for the entire genre. Of course I knew that there were authors out in the world, doing their own creative things, but I was so caught up in literariness that I hadn’t ever read anything this vibrant and fun. I loved the colloquial style and the raw emotions. It was a lot closer to the kind of thing that I wanted to write but didn’t think I had permission to. Jessica Darling gave me that permission, and for that I will always always always thank her.

Here are some quotes from the series, to get you hooked on her voice:

“You can only be in a bad mood for so long before you have to face up to the fact that it isn’t a bad mood at all; it’s just your sucky personality.” - Sloppy Firsts

“Then a lightning bolt shot straight through my skivvies. Sha-ZAM!” – Sloppy Firsts

“But why would it matter? We aren’t … or…uh…weren’t …”
Which is it, Jess? “Aren’t” or “weren’t”? Present or past tense? Now or then?
“We haven’t been talking to each other.”
Past imperfect tense. How appropriate.”
- Second Helpings

“Then again maybe there’s something that I’ve been doing in the privacy of my own bedroom my whole life that I think is perfectly normal but is actually illegal in thirty-two states.” - Second Helpings

“It’s only when I come back home that I remember exactly why I left.” - Charmed Thirds

“He’s got a pointy bald head, and too much flesh hanging around his neck. The resulting combination gives him an unlikely yet striking resemblance to an uncircumcised penis. I secretly call him Rumpelforeskin.” – Fourth Comings

“It’s just Jessica and Marcus, oxymoronically alone together.” - Perfect Fifths

Have you read this series? If not, how soon are you going to read it so we can talk about it together? 

WIJFR, thanks to a giveaway hosted by Alison Miller

I’m a big fan of goals. I don’t always reach them, but I like to set them. This year I’ve set a reading goal of 100 books, which is either a lot or a little depending on who you are. For me, it’s enough to be a challenge, but not so much that it will interfere with my normal life. I may or may not be occasionally padding the numbers with a graphic novel here and there. Judge away.

So, in honor of Blog Me Maybe’s May I ask something about you? day: Do you have any reading goals for this year? Do you like goals, or are you the kind of rebel that just reads whenever you feel like it and thinks keeping count is crass?

For today’s Blog Me Maybe, May I tell you something about myself?

Basically, I am the Socially Awkward Penguin. Not just this one–all of them. That’s pretty much it for today.

Am I the only one who gets The Bangles song stuck in my head on Monday mornings? Six o’clock already, I was just in the middle of a dream. I was kissing Valentino by a crystal blue Italian stream… Except my dream last night was something about my husband helping the fire department by lining up to hold that massive hose thingy, and then somehow getting blown up by a bomb, but only losing his hearing as a result. I didn’t mind waking up from that.

So today for Blog Me Maybe: May I tell you something about writing?

Seeing as I don’t have an agent and I’m unpublished, I don’t have advice. Instead, here is some writing advice from Neil Gaiman (from this article in the Guardian):

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Number six feels especially timely for me. I’m constantly chasing that horizon, and sometimes it paralyzes me. Thanks for the tip, Neil!

One of my favorite places on the Internet is the Unnecessary Quotes blog. I could/have spent hours on that site. So IHO of Blog Me MAYbe: May I share something “funny?”

Yum! "Fish!"

This is not shady at all.

It's totally 10. No need to count.

Yeah, "plumber." Wink, wink.

May I tell you about someone else? Namely, my cat, Neville. Cat ladies FTW! 

We adopted Neville a c0uple months ago.  The Barnes & Noble near our house is connected to a Petsmart, and one weekend when we were out shopping for books I decided that I wanted to say hi to all of the kitties up for adoption.

He's pretty into Dr. Dre.

I had no solid plans of getting a second cat, but when I met Neville I fell for him. He was so sweet and loving. I ate it up, and we took him home immediately.

There was virtually NO adjustment period–we kept him in a bathroom so our current cat could get used to him, but Neville was sleeping in my lap from almost the moment we let him out.

Turns out he's a bit of a pyro.

Now that we’ve gotten to know him a bit more, his personality is coming out. He’s snuggly and farts a lot. He chases shadows, and his tail. He’s a very sore loser–whenever he’s tumbling with our other cat, Socks, they get along for half a second until Socks pins Neville, and then Neville whines and growls and just generally acts as though he is being murdered in cold blood.

It’s Wednesday, so–may I ask something about you?

Do you remember that movie Brewster’s Millions? (Not so fast! That’s not the question!) I think it was a remake, but the 1985 version with Richard Pryor and John Candy is the only one I’ve ever seen. In the movie, Brewster is a minor league baseball player whose obscenely rich relative dies and leaves him all kinds of money. But there’s a condition (isn’t there always?)! In order to receive his $300 million dollar inheritance, Brewster has to spend $30 million in 30 days.

Brewster has a bunch of rules, which makes for a funny movie, but isn’t as fun for a blog question. We’re only going to have two rules–you can only give 5% to charity, and you cannot own any property/assets at the end of the 30 days.

Here’s the question–how would you spend $30 million in 30 days? 

I have never really done a blogfest. At least, I don’t think I have. My memory doesn’t go back far enough. But anyway, I’m doing one now… this one:

Hosted by Sara McClung, and a bevvy of other awesome folks, it’s basically just a schedule for blogging for the month of May. I work much better with structure, which is why so many of my posts are really just responses to other posts (like YA Highway mostly). Here are the prompts for each day of the week, which I will try my best to follow:

Monday: May I tell you something about writing?

Tuesday: May I tell you something about myself?

Wednesday: May I ask something about you?

Thursday: May I tell you something about someone else?

Friday: May I share something funny?

You don’t have to follow all of the Blog Me Maybe-ers, but I already follow quite a few of them so obviously I win at life.

Go check out the blogfest here! 

Since today is a Tuesday–may I tell you something about myself? And because I decided to start this blogfest at the last moment, I’m totes stealing the survey that was posted by Jennifer Pickerell, Rebecca Behrens, and Alison Miller. Remember the thing about structure and me loving it? Yeah.

A is for age: More than mid-twenties. Less than thirty.

B is for breakfast today: Yogurt, banana, granola bar. I have to eat all three everyday because my vitamins make my stomach hurt if I eat anything less. Boo.

C is for currently craving: Something salty, but also sweet.

D is for dinner tonight: Green curry chicken, or Tikka Masala, it has to be one of those because today is the ‘best by’ date on my naan, and I don’t like to eat things past the ‘best by’ date.

E is for favorite type of exercise: Hiking.

F is for an irrational fear: Feeling trapped, communicable diseases (I will NOT watch that movie Contagion), being poisoned/drugged if my drink is out of my sight for too long. 

G is for gross food: I’m pretty open to foods, so I don’t know… sweet breads?

H is for hometown: Fredericksburg, VA.

I is for something important: My husband, my cats, sleeping, eating…

J is for current favorite jam: Strawberry (Or for jam as in music–I’ve been loving Frank Turner almost nonstop lately).

K is for kids: Do neices count? I have two of those, but no kids of my own yet.

L is for current location: In a sea of cubicles.

M is for the most recent way you spent money: Whole Foods salad bar yesterday

N is for something you need: Love!

O is for occupation: Officey stuff. I used to do freelance writing, but it got to be too stressful for me. See: my need for structure.

P is for pet peeve: Rude drivers, people that are in too much of a hurry, closed-minded people

Q is for a quote: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” – Anais Nin

R is for random fact about you: I love going to theater shows. They never fail to blow me away.

S is for favorite healthy snack: Seaweed. So so good!

T is for favorite treat: Chocolatey things.

U is for something that makes you unique: I’ve met some famous rockstars (if they’d even be considered famous anymore–this was back in the 90′s). My dad used to be a bouncer, so between 6th through 8th/9th grades I got to go backstage a lot and meet people. Some of them were real assholes, but some were awesome. I remember POE being my favorite, she gave me this whole pep talk about some boy I liked.

V is for favorite vegetable: Spinach or lima beans–are lima beans vegetables or beans?

W is for today’s workout: Hahahahahaa!

X is for X-rays you’ve had: Lots. My right arm at least three times, possibly more, ring finger, pinky toe, teeth, ribs, mammograms, CT scan and MRI of my brain. I used to break a lot. 

Y is for yesterday’s highlight: Yesterday was pretty boring actually… I guess the highlight was when my husband and I walked in and caught one of our cats cleaning the other one. They’ve been pretending to hate each other, but now we know the truth!

Z is for your time zone: Eastern

So, are you doing Blog Me MAYbe??

This month was a bit of a slower reading month, but there was one definite stand out:  THE DISENCHANTMENTS by Nina LaCour.

First of all, please look at that cover and be as impressed with it as I was. As much as I try not to judge books by their covers, I totally still do. Most of the time the judging is pretty accurate, so there.

Colby is all set for European adventures with his BFF (and crush) Bev–they just have to make it through ten days of touring the Pacific Northwest with her riot grrrl band The Disenchantments, first. It’s on that road trip that Bev reveals that she will NOT be jetting off to Europe with Colby, but will actually be heading off to RISD in the fall. That bitch!

Obviously Colby is a better person than I am, because I would have ditched that roadie gig so fast if I was hit with a brick like that. But he stays. Maybe that says as much about my character as it does about his. Let’s not read into it.

I loved that this was told from a boy’s perspective, which, now that I think about it, is sort of rare for contemporary YA.  Oh, and the minor characters and various concert scenes were incredibly fleshed out considering how simple the prose style seemed to be. While I didn’t really sympathize much with Bev, since she’s sort of obnoxious and “mysterious” throughout most of the book, I did feel for Colby. He was sweet and artsy and his yearning for Bev broke my heart.  

Have you read THE DISENCHANTMENTS? What’d you think? What was the best book you read in April?