Tanya's Journey

I receive Writer's Digest magazine and I completely adore it. It's a religion in itself, for me. The columns and articles always inspire me to write, and I owe the magazine so much. I just received the latest issue and I'm bothered by something I read. The author of particular article was giving advice on plot twists, and how to use misdirection to your advantage and her advice struck me as being as cliché as everything else out there. Like, in a book I just read, one character tells the other 'Oh, Tori loves Simon, so hands off him." And I rolled my eyes and figured the MC would of course end up with Simon. She didn't, and I love the author for that reason. She stepped away from cliché and obvious. Now, the author of the article was saying how you must (say in a thriller) make one character completely quirky and we'll all assume he/she is the killer. Why? Because it's been done and redone a million times and that's what we expect. I watched a movi...

I do believe this is my first book review. Boo-yah! I recently wrote about buying several books at a local bookstore and how giddy I was about that. I read the Darkest Powers series by Kelley Armstrong (amazing !!!!) and I just finished Evermore by Alyson Noël. Not so amazing. I mean, it might have been if not for Twilight. And the million other books out there. Seriously. Girl is beautiful but hides behind a 'wall' of hoodies, Ipod and sunglasses. Gorgeous new student walks in, wows everyone with his perfectness and zeroes in on hoodie-loser. She flees, he chases, they fall in love and voilà! Well, there's more to it than that but one chapter in, I knew how this book was going to end. If he said Black, I knew she was going to say White. And that's aside from the fact that the MC keeps mentioning how frickin perfect the dude in here is. I literally forced myself to finish this story because I was hoping it would inspire me. Inspire me to write something better, that is....

Every year in November I would go to a book convention in Montreal. You could meet authors, get their autographs and there were hundreds of booths with millions (!!!) of books. Obviously, I was in bookworm Heaven. Two years back, Kathy Reichs was going to be there for a book signing and I was THRILLED. I mean, I've read all her books, I love her writing style and following her characters' lives. I couldn't wait to meet and, and shake her hand and hope some of her talent would rub off on me. (I hadn't decided whether I'd ever wash my hand again either... But that's for another post). The signing was supposed to happen from 2 to 4 and when I showed up at 1, there was already a huge waiting line. So big that it circled booths everywhere. The employees started circulating with post-it notes, made us write our names and stick it on the book we were getting signed so that Kathy Reichs could sign and we could quickly move on. When she arrived (late), she sat, signed, s...

Like many people before me, I've read tons of books and searched endless web pages to find the perfect formula to writing a book. The one that will tell me "Take A, add B, and you will have C." Voilà! The book is written and I'm a writer. Oh. Yes. At one time, I was impossibly naive. I realise the error of my ways. But I still like reading those help books, because I get inspired, which is always a good thing. Two weeks ago, my sister and I went shopping in a HUGE bookstore. Now, this might not seem that impressive, unless you keep in mind that I live in Quebec, and everything in my area is French. So I got used to ordering online, because no English books could be found. And then... We found it. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I was so giddy, dancing around, laughing. Reading backs of books, trying to decide whether I really needed this book right now. (Turns out, I really needed a lot of them). I don't know how much time I spent in Teen Fiction but...