Bah Humbug, Guitar!

I want to be able to play the guitar, but I don't know how to learn it. It's obviously one of those things you can't teach yourself.

On a completely unrelated note, whenever I say "envelope" I pronounce it as "onvolope."

I wonder what I sound like to people from Europe or other continents.

I added the kitten for you, Katie. ;0)

Watch as I Babble About Things You Don't Care About

Yeah...so I haven't written here for a while. Might as well post something! So...what's gonna on?

Well, I was recently introduced to the card game Magic: The Gathering, and I have to say, it is so much better than Yu-Gi-Oh (or Duel Monsters, if you prefer to call it that).

I really like it, and I sort of want to teach more people how to play (such as my friends from school), since I have two decks now. Or maybe I'll find other nerds at school who play the game, and I'll have someone to play Magic with other than Heidi.

This is one of the reasons I'm anticipating the return of school. I'll get to see my friends, and I'll have new teachers and a new schedule! Well, maybe not completely new teachers. Some seventh grade teachers might be doubling up for eighth grade too, due to the recent budget cuts.

Ooh, not to mention my golden birthday. Yeah, it's way far away in October, but still. Two things I really want to put on my list: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster (a clever and very awesome book on literature and symbolism), and the Starship: A Starkid Production DVD, which can only be bought by ordering it off the Starkid website.

Starship is a sci-fi musical comedy by a theater group called Starkid, that started out in Michigan, but later moved to Chicago. The show performed in February, and then it was posted to Youtube in April. Starkid is also the same group of actors who did A Very Potter Musical/Sequel, which I have also taken a great liking to.

Starship is my favorite musical. Ever. The music and talent and musical talent and the creativity is just totally awesome. Basically, it's about a bug named Bug on a far-off planet, and he dreams of being a starship ranger, an elite group of humans that traverses the galaxy in search of strange new worlds.

Anyway, I've been listening to the soundtrack for that a lot. I'm also reading a bunch of books, including Eat Pray Love, which I like very much so far. Italy is just so interesting! My interest to learn Italian has been rekindled, after the last several months of not bothering to pick up Italian: Step-by-Step.

So, anyone reading any good books lately? Learn new games, watch new movies/musicals?

A writing structure I'm sure you're all familiar with: CLIFFHANGERS.

Recently, I finished a book called BoneMan's Daughters. This book was good. I have to say that Ted Dekker gets me everytime, even though sometimes there are lulls in his stories that are quite deadly when it comes to thriller writing. In my favorite thriller books, I find that there are two stories/two things happening at once, and the stories/character perspective switch of every other chapter.

Cliffhangers are awesome. But they can also be annoying, frustrating, nail-biting, suspenseful, or exciting.

This is a clever thing, because once you finish reading a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, you want to keep on reading to find out whether the other character is going to fall off that cliff or not, but first you have to read about what this other character is doing meanwhile. This technique is both good and bad in different ways. It builds suspense, but it makes a weaker reader set the book down because they don't particularily care about what Jane is doing at the moment. A stronger reader plows through the chapter, and finds out that Jane is dangling off an even higher cliff than John is!

(Oh, and if you haven't caught on yet, this is all hypothetical and John and Jane have nothing to do with BoneMan's Daughters.) So now you're back to John, who you were so worried about a chapter ago, and now you just want to get this chapter over with to see how Jane's doing. This is sometimes the case with a book, but other times it is not, and the whole book is just a whirlwind of events for a reader.

That's the best part- having your emotions flung all over the place, not sure whether you're going to implode any second from all the suspense and excitement the book is causing for you. BoneMan's Daughters was both of these for me - sometimes so exciting I was holding my breath, and sometimes so boring I wanted to fling the book across the room and pick it up again in a few days...maybe. I have been both the strong reader and the weak reader, sometimes setting the book aside and sometimes plowing through the chapters like a steam engine would through a valley of molasses. And with that being said, I need a new book. Any suggestions?

What books have you read that had this type of structure? Was it mindblowingly suspenseful, or so annoying you wanted to fling your book across the room?