Moving to Live Journal

I've been on Blogger for years now but I think I'm going to make the hop to Live Journal for a while.

Go to http://l-nunnink.livejournal.com/ to keep reading.

So they found the gun stash. Suddenly my book has tuned into a corny action movie.

Happy 4th Everyone!

On weaponry

So far I've been avoiding the use of modern weaponry in my story. I don't have any good reason except I just can't picture my characters lugging around machine guns like Rambo. But the setting is Post-Apocalyptic so semi-automatics, grenades, and whatnot could feasibly be in the picture.

I'm thinking that my characters might discover a weapon stash, something like the scene in Terminator 2.

*Gag* I'm such a geek.

Obligatory personality survey

I don't know why these are so interesting. But they are.

Your Score: Jimmy Stewart

You scored 7% Tough, 9% Roguish, 80% Friendly, and 4% Charming!

You are the fun and friendly boy next door, the classic nice guy who still manages to get the girl most of the time. You're every nice girl's dreamboat, open and kind, nutty and charming, even a little mischievous at times, but always a real stand up guy. You're dependable and forthright, and women are drawn to your reliability, even as they're dazzled by your sense of adventure and fun. You try to be tough when you need to be, and will gladly stand up for any damsel in distress, but you'd rather catch a girl with a little bit of flair. Your leading ladies include Jean Arthur and Donna Reed, those sweet girl-next-door types.

Find out what kind of classic dame you'd make by taking the
Classic Dames Test.

Link: The Classic Leading Man Test written by gidgetgoes on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Jean Arthur? Donna Reed? OK by me.

Gut checks

After my forced hiatus I thought it was a good time to evaluate what was working with my current draft and what wasn't. Over the course of writing any story it's easy to loose focus and get bogged down in the mire of churning out paragraphs. Yeah, the paragraphs need to get out there but there's also got to be a destination. Here's where my draft stands in my latest estimation:

The Good

1. Plot

I've got this plot laid out very neatly in my head. A first for me. I've got the arc, the backstory, the destination, the conflict. It's all there. I know where my characters are going and how they get there.

2. Setting

Another first for me. My stories have always had vague setting at best. I think I always wrote this off as being "Postmodern". Yeah, right. But this time around I'm loving my setting. Working on it is a blast.

3. Prose

I think my prose is improving the more I write. I still don't have a very strong voice but I think this is just going to take time. Honestly I think "voice" can be overrated too. I'll settle for telling a story, not a Levi Nunnink Story.

The Somewhere-in-Between

1. Specific setting

I mentioned that I love my setting but I think my next draft is going to need to give the reader more clues as to the specifics. I can't just say "house". What kind of house? A hut, a farmhouse, a cottage? The good news for me is that I know the answer.

2. Dialogue

I feel like my dialogue is OK. But it's not exactly great ether. Could use some improvement but I'm not making it top priority.

Needs work

1. Characters

For me my characters are usually my strong point but this time around they aren't. I blame it all on trying to write two of my main character as angsty. Just for the record, I'm not an angsty person. Apparently that means I don't write angsty people well. I've had to go back and change a lot of my character development. Penelope used to be full of anger and bitterness; now she's in denial and emotionally distant. That's something I can relate to. The only exception to this is Lilith. She's a really strong character for me. Nothing about her is going to change.

So there we are. I need to work on my characters.

Climbing back into the saddle...

The above photo (minus the wry smile) pretty much describes my current state of existence over the past three weeks. In short: I'm exhausted, unkempt, and I have a big honkin' zit on my forehead. These three weeks have been some of the craziest of my life and (if anyone has been checking) my blog, not to mention my writing, has suffered.

I wish I could say that I've been curing cancer, hiking in Europe, or finally pursuing a career in the NBA -- but nope. The truth is much more boring. I took on too much work, my business parter took a vacation, we hired a new employee -- and I've been working 15 hour days just to keep up. I zombie home each night around midnight, only to begin again at the crack of dawn. This is the bad part of being a business owner. Over the past few weeks, I've harbored fantasies of quitting and going back to work for The Man. No one told me that the worst part of business would be when it was "good".

In other news, I love to write. Absence truly makes the heart grow fonder. Trust me, business is one thing but art, writing is another. I've lost all my love for 'business', the methods of making money. I could walk away from it and never look back if I didn't need to feed my family. But writing always is itching at the back of my mind. And never more than when I can't.

I finally have a free weekend coming up and my wife suggested that I take a day for just myself (either she's being really sweet or I've been really annoying lately) and after reviewing my options (skydiving, mountain climbing, running with bulls) it occurred to me that I just wanted to write. I enjoy telling this story. I need to finish it and I've been away too long.

So where was I...?

Currently Reading

So I've stopped with my Girly Book and for the past week I was looking for a new book. Saturday I took a trip to the bookstore and ended up purchasing The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. I'd read this book once when I was about ten years old and I remembered enjoying it.


George MacDonald

I'm something of a bibliophile. The smell of yellow pulp pages is better than a perfume to me. My favorite sorts of books are those with illustrations. (I'm going to do a post on that someday.) This edition of The Princess and the Goblin had very lovely illustrations.



I fished it the same day I bought it. It is truly a beautiful piece of fiction. Here's just a sampling of his lovely prose:

The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very fast. Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue. Those eyes you would have thought must have known they came from there, so often were they turned up in that direction.

After finishing The Princess and the Goblin I remembered that I owned another book by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.



In the first chapter, I found this gem of a description:

What was the most strange was that away from her head streamed out her black hair in every direction, so that the darkness in the hay-loft looked as if it were made of her, hair but as Diamond gazed at her in speechless amazement, mingled with confidence -- for the boy was entranced with her mighty beauty -- her hair began to gather itself out of the darkness, and fell down all about her again, till her face looked out of the midst of it like a moon out of a cloud.

George MacDonald himself, is a very interesting figure. He was a pastor for many years and many of his stories were written to instruct children in the scriptures and teach them Christian truths. However his stories never read as contrived moral parables and are always true to themseleves.

He was a great influence on C.S. Lewis, and in The Great Divorce Lewis went so far as to include him as a main character. Lewis wrote the following about MacDonald:

I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined. . . . In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.

One notable theme in MacDonald's stories is powerful, wise women. In The Princess and the Goblin the princess Irene is guided and delivered from danger by her Great-Great Grandmother, who, though very old, is also vividly described as possessing agless beauty and seems to possess great supernatural powers. In At the Back of the North Wind the North Wind (described in the quote above) is female and also powerful and beautiful. At the very least, MacDonald seemed to have a very high opinion of women.

As for me, I'm extremely excited to have discovered such a wonderful author and brother in Christ to inspire me. It's one thing to purchase a pretty book, it's another to find a true author. It's like making a friend.

As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God...the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.

~ George MacDonald

Weekend update

Me and the fam' went to the zoo this weekend. It was a lot of fun.

Jack is a huge Steve Irwin fan (we haven't broke the sad news to him) and he really wanted to see the crocodiles. So after him asking for almost an hour, I finally checked the map. I was hoping to see something like "Crocodile Pit" but no luck. I had break it to Jack that all the crocodiles went home. The last thing we visited was the reptile house, which is always like walking into a guided tour of my phobias. But towards the end I heard Jack's excited voice (if you know him, you know what I'm talking about) proclaiming that they did have crocodiles! Sure enough, he was right. There, behind a glass case, sat the creature, pit and all. Jack happily reminded me many times afterwards that all the crocodiles did not go home. I'm going to remember that for a long time.

Being a parent is a lot like having Stockholm Syndrome. Today was hot and I had to leg it around a park, chasing after tiny individuals who have the same outlook on life as Marie Antoinette. These people continue to devour my time and money and mostly treat me like I'm their butler. And yet, I've never loved anything like I love those wicked little kids.

I look at Jack and somewhere along the line he stopped being a toddler and now he's a boy. And before that he stopped being a baby. I want him to always go to the zoo with me and look for crocodiles no matter how hot it is, or how tired I am, or how much I actually hate reptiles. I love my captors. Stockholm Syndrome.


More zoo photos

Something I wrote:

When she woke, Lilith’s skull felt like it had been cracked with a hammer. She attempted to rise than fell back to the grass with a groan. She could banish the pain with a spell and she searched her rusty memory for the one that would do the job. Finally she muttered a string of words and, after a moment, rose to her feet. But everything was still wrong. The spell would not change that.