a. What is your favorite book from childhood? What is your current favorite book? Why?

When I was a child believe it or not I read a lot of book. My book selection mainly consisted of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Tikki Tikki Tembo, Corduroy, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Green Eggs and Ham. Unfortunately, none of these books were my favorite as a kid. My favorite book as a child was Guinness World Records. As a kid I was obsessed with records, and the fastest, biggest, and longest things that this world had to offer. I can remember in elementary school when I would get the scholastic book order my mother would end up spending almost 400 dollars on just books. No matter how many books I got my order would never feel complete unless I got the newest version of the Guinness World Record book.

As I grew up my taste in books began to get very picky. I no longer could just pick up a book and begin to read it, the book really had to catch my interest. When I was in 9^th grade I got a book from another scholastic book order called The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp. To this day that is still my favorite book because it used an extraordinary amount of imagination and really allowed me to visual the text. This book was a fictional book because personally I don’t prefer nonfictional books. This book combined the forces of evil with the sword Excalibur and a great Arthurian quest. The sequels of this book Alfred Kropp: The Seal of Solomon and Alfred Kropp: The Thirteenth Skull were just as entertaining if not more entertaining than the first book. The whole series was a mental joy ride and was just a great collection of books from start to finish.

What do you think good writing is? What do you think bad writing is?

I think that good writing is “telepathy” in the words of Stephen King. When I read something I want the writer to capture my attention. I want the writer to intrigue me, put me in a visual mental state so that I can picture his reading. I enjoy reading, but I have to say that I am very picky about the books that I read because if they don’t capture my interest within the first pages then I don’t read the book. The writer needs to capture the reader because that is going to determine whether or not the reader continues to read the book. I know you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge a book by its first page. So I believe that it is the writer’s obligation to give the reader something he can grab on to and jumpstart the imagination. That is what I consider good writing.

            I think that bad writing is a “dictionary” and a horrible storyline. And when I say dictionary I mean when the writer uses all the most sophisticated words he can find in the dictionary to make his/her writing seem more intellectual. I hate reading books that I can’t even comprehend because the writer decided to put 15-letter words in every sentence. Just because writers have that intellectual mind doesn’t mean they always have to show it off. There is nothing wrong with putting all the cookies on the bottom shelf and making the text easy and enjoyable for the reader. I also hate books that have horrible storylines; it is just a major turn off. If you are a professional writer you should have enough of an imagination to be able to tell an intriguing so a story with a horrible storyline is pretty much a testament to your laziness. For example, the book “The Iliad” was very difficult and uninteresting to read. 

Today Just Isn't My Day!!!

Today is just not my day; I couldn’t have schemed out a worse day for me. Let me tell you what happened. Today was the consequences of all the wear and tear I put on my body from the day before but I have never felt this bad before. So yesterday I to the rec center and worked out from 12:35 to 2:50 and I felt great even though I knew I had dance practice with Absolute Deviation later that night from 6 to 9. So in the meantime between 2:50 and 6, I decided to play video games because I needed to relax the mind a little. Tell me how I totally forgot to eat all and found myself trying to slip in a bowl of Apple Jacks before I went to practice. So I knew that not eating was going to screw me over in the end. So I went to practice and within the first hour I was exhausted and not to mention that my legs were still exhausted from the leg workout I had done earlier in the day. So, after practice I just went home and pasted out. So the next day (which happens to be the day that’s not my day), I wake up and get out of bed and my legs are more still than a jollyrancher and so I couldn’t necessarily walk that good and I had a class within the next hour so at the moment I was a cripple trying to rush. Then I finally commence to walking to my calculus class to find out that it is snowing outside and for some reason I thought that I would be fine with a white beater and a hoodie on, but obviously I didn’t get the memo that snow is cold. So then while I sit in calculus I felt as though my IQ was dropping as the minutes passed in that class because the longer the lecture went on the less I understood a word she was saying nor did I want to know a word she was saying because at the moment I could have cared less. So after that class I had my Psychology class, and I don’t know if it’s just me but why would you have a power-point presentation where all the words are in sky blue and your background is white. I felt like Stevie Wonder sitting at the back of this auditorium because I couldn’t see a thing she had on the presentation, and then what really made it bad it the she whispers during the whole lecture so even if you wanted to take verbal notes you can’t here a word she is saying, so I feel as though I am deaf-mute. Then I had to walk back to my dorms with my jollyrancher legs and I hit an ice patch on the way and nearly ended my life right there. So my day has been pretty messed up, and I really just need a good bowl of chili and a nice glass of kool-aid to ease the stress.