Hanorah Words

Books have a disease that cannot be cured.  The disease grows every year.  It has ruined many books but some books rise above this disease and seem to take on a life of their own.  These books are obviously wonderful. What is this disease? Well, if you've read the title of the blog, you'll know it's adaptions, as in book-to-movie adaptions.  Now, this isn't a horrible, horrible disease.  As I've said, sometimes the book manages to rise above the adaption and remain a great book that people read.  Other books... fall by the wayside and are forgotten while the adaption lives on usually tainting the modern view of said book beyond repair. Today I saw an adaption of a book, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders .  Now, the book itself is pretty interesting because it was published when S.E. Hinton was fifteen which is an amazing accomplishment.  More amazing because very few people write anything worth publishing at fiften let alone something that become a classic for

Everyone who reads this blog has to know that I want to be a writer, right?  My big dream is to someday go to a bookstore or a library and see, not only my book on a shelf, but to see someone take it off it's spot on the shelf and start reading it.  I think that would be one of the proudest moments of my life. Today, we're going to talk about the life of a writer or published author as the official title turns out to be. Now, a lot of different types of people become published authors.  David Wong, author of John Dies at the End is an editor of the website cracked.com and started out as a guy working 80 hours a week doing data entry.  He never actually wanted to be an author.  He just got bored one day and that turned into John Dies at the End.  J.K. Rowling was a single mom who had previously worked as Amnesty International.  One day the idea of Harry Potter just popped into her head.  Stephanie Meyer (insert hissing and booing) was a stay-at-home mom who had considered b

As you know, if you've been keeping up with the blog is that I'm going to start a fictional blog... eventually.  I will be starting it possibly before summer ends (it hasn't officially begun yet), but definitely before 2013.  You know this because I've mentioned it in other posts, I did a poll for the title (Apartment Seven seems to be winning as I write this... glad the back door one isn't winning, that's a little dirty), and if you know me personally, I won't shut up about it. As it's on my mind, I'm going to tell you some information about it now, but nothing spoilerific because I'd rather you guys figured things out as Melissa does.  Yes, the main character is Melissa Ruth Miller.  She is sort of designed around the number seven, but not entirely.  Some of her and the people she already knows going into the blog are based on people I know or have known in real life.  Everyone has different names so if you think you're similar to a cha

Does anyone remember the 90s and Leo Mania?  All the girls with the "I Love Leo" books and magazines and other stuff that was really a waste of space?  I remember because I thought and still think he's good-looking too.  That little feminine elf-like person caused a lot of problems for girls in their childhood. What's really funny is, back then, it seemed like nobody ever saw him as a legitimate actor.  The poor guy had won an Academy Award and Golden Globe for What's Eating Gilbert Grape long before his hotness went super nova in the eyes of tweenage girls everywhere.  He couldn't have won that for good looks because most girls, while attracted to woobies, are so attracted to boy with mental developmental issues.  Then Romeo + Juliet and Titanic came along, he won more awards, but that really didn't count because Leo-Mania was in full swing and everyone wanted the little ball of cute, feminine hotness to just GO AWAY and make the girls STOP making

I have another confession to make to you, my dear blog readers.  I like fanfiction.  Namely Harry Potter Fanfiction, but I've delved into Pride and Prejudice fanfiction, Labyrinth fanfiction and some Avatar: the Last Airbender fanfiction. Really, it's just an extension of my love of reading and the fact that I do like fairytale and movie adaptions of books.  I mean, there is no one way to tell a fairytale anyone who's seen a Disney movie (like Sleeping Beauty) and then read the Perrault version and then read Sun, Moon, and Talia is bound to either get very angry or come to accept that there's more than one way to tell a tale... even if one tale involves a fairy riding in a chariot of fire pulled by dragons .  That's right, still not over it. Though, I think the moment when I first realized I had the ability was The Little Mermaid.  I saw the movie a lot.  I liked the idea of being a Mermaid and exploring the world beneath the waves when I was little.  So the

I am a big fan of miniseries on TV.  It all began when I was little and my mom... or uncle... or someone recorded the Scifi Channel miniseries, Frank Herbert's Dune .  I may have watched it when Scifi first aired it, but I don't remember.  I do know that I didn't completely fall in love with it immediately.  It was a slow-growing love. I had to see the 1980s version of Dune first and read the books years later before I really loved it.  However, what started the love wasn't the miniseries itself, but the sequel miniseries, Frank Herbert's Children of Dune .  Both are long (nearly 300 minutes), but Children of Dune sparked my imagination and appealed to issues I've gone through in an odd sort of way. See, in Children of Dune , Paul Atreides goes blind and leaves his twin children to go off into the desert and die.  Then, in Part Three, Leto finds his father and there's this really touching moment when Leto says to his father, " How many nights...

In a previous post, I wrote about the recent upswing in fairy tales in the media what with the movies and the books and such.  Not too long ago a movie came out called Sleeping Beauty which, from my knowledge of the film, had very little to do with the actual fairytale.  This post is not about that movie even though I'm sure it is as good as it can be.  I haven't seen that movie yet.  This post is about the actual fairytale of Sleeping Beauty. Now, most people don't know this, but they only know half of the story. I'll give you a moment to let that sink in. Now, first I want to go into the story behind the story of Sleeping Beauty. The fairy tale itself has changed a lot over the centuries since the basic premise was written and played with.  See, the story of Sleeping Beauty, in the form it is now known, was written by a man named Charles Perrault in 1697 and published in a book called Histoires ou contes du temps passe (Stories or Tales from Past Times with Mor

Today, I'd like to talk to you about the power of love and how it is over-used, under-used, and misused in general.  However, first, I need to explain to you a little something... I'm all for romantic love.  I think that if you can find that one person in the world that you want to be with for the rest of your days, more power to you.  I am a bit of a closet romantic at times, in fact.  My problem with romantic love comes from the fact that I know intellectually that in the 1100s romantic love was pretty much invented (then called "courtly love") when a woman by the name of Eleanor of Acquitaine took some of her father's and grandfather's ideas which later evolved into our current understanding of romantic love.  I have no doubt that people love each other in romantic ways.  There's no way my grandparents and some of my aunts and uncles would continue to put up with each other and each other's families if they didn't love each other in some roman

I would like to talk to you today about Jane Austen, Regency Romance, and Pride and Prejudice today.  First, I have a question for you:  Pride and Prejudice is: a.) A novel about two people who dislike each other and then realize that they are really each other's one true love and must marry immediately because they were completely mistaken about each other. b.) A romantic novel c.) A clever, comedic, satire of a novel. d.) A novel about two people who, due to their flaws, initially dislike each other, but through a series of events realize their flaws and work through them, ultimately finding solace and comfort in each other in the end. e.) All of the above. f.) Every answer except a.) If you answered a.), I want you to go get the book and reread it right now.  Yes, I want you to stop reading this blog and go get the book and read it RIGHT NOW.  I'll be patient.  After all, I'm just words on a computer screen. Have you finished you're assignment?  No?  W

Today is Mother's Day... Or maybe it was Mother's Day.  Mostly Mother's Day is a Hallmark Holliday where people buy flowers and candy and cards for their moms and think nothing else of it.  It's actually a pretty lame holiday in that respect.  Worse, the woman who invented the holiday spent the rest of her life trying to get rid of it.  That's pretty depressing, huh? But, with the holiday coming up, I realized something... there aren't that many moms in fiction.  I mean, they're there, but they're hardly main characters.  Heck, Disney hates moms so much; it kills them.  When Disney does sequels where the main characters are older, I'm pretty sure Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea is the closest of those sequels to having the mom as a main character and she has to play second fiddle to her daughter the whole time. Horror has a lot of moms, but not fantasy.  Horror has expecting mothers, new mothers, mothers of young children (between one and f

I'm a person who really enjoys characters.  I like getting to know the characters in books.  If I don't like a character, I will not read the book at all which led to me not wanting to read Nora Roberts when I was in my late teens and major romantic phase.  I also like creating characters.  I just have one problem: making characters is easy enough, I just hate when characters come out of the blue in my head.  I've had a few cases of this over the years.  Sometimes, it's a sudden inspiration.  Sometimes, I wake up in the morning and there's this new character entering a story I'm working on that I don't really remember putting there. No, I'm not on drugs, but I keep my computer by my bed.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and type or scribble a bit of something on a notepad and the idea is actually good .  (Hint: most of those ideas are CRAP.  I'm glad I'm not trying to turn them into book series; it'd be really embarrassing..

Previously in this blog, I admitted to being a Nightwish fan who doesn't care who the lead singer is so long as Tuomas Holopainen keeps writing his beautiful music and Marcus keeps growling into the microphone with the female singer at his side, singing with him so that you have that hard vocals/soft vocals mixture.  Then, I wrote about my interpretation of the first six songs of the album, Imaginaerum which has been turned into a movie to be released... whenever they get around to it. Arabesque is the seventh song on the album and purely instrumental.  It was actually written for the movie.  As in, a specific scene in the movie needed an instrumental song and here it is.  I like to imagine you (the listener) are running away from that nightmarish sideshow run by The Devil and Mother Gaia gone bad.  However, since the story now follows nightmare logic, you have to run through a number of stories and ideas, mostly represented by 1,001 Arabian Nights. You can imagine a completel