I would like to wish everyone a happy 4th. It is certainly a difficult time this year, but I hope we can all enjoy our holiday.
I’ve started on the idea for a new story and I find, as with everything I’ve written, that I have to start with a pad of paper and a pen. I’m sure the draft would move more swiftly if I could start at the keyboard, but that doesn’t seem to work. The brain seems to work only when connected to a pen and I see ink on the page. I wonder how many others still do their first drafts long-hand.
Read “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” by Suzanne Collins. This one was on my to-read list from the day I could pre-order it but it took forever to get to me. Somehow, it was forwarded halfway across the country and had to come back. Anyway, this is the story of Coriolanus Snow, the villain of the Hunger Games trilogy, as a young man struggling to find himself. I liked this book. A lot. Snow emerges as a complex figure; he feels real. The choices he makes, bad as they are (from my – and probably your – perspective) become understandable in light of who he is as a person. His relationship with Lucy Gray provides a good mirror for his problems and his struggle, although we do know how that is going to come out. Collins also provides a great deal of interesting backstory to the Hunger Games themselves and to how the relationship between the Capitol and the Districts evolved. The biggest problem with the book is that we do know how it comes out. Snow will survive his trials and tribulations and he will emerge corrupt and power-hungry because we have already seen him in the Hunger Games. There is no way around this. (I do wonder how it will be for future readers who, perhaps, read this first.) Still, I found the book a good read (enjoyable is a tough word when the main character is Snow). I do recommend it.