Activity

@corkybookworm Now that you say that, I think Shea’s biggest strength lies in the fact that her series are more than the sums of their parts. With her King Arthurs series, I found each book kind of ‘meh’ – fun and adventurous, but nothing to write home about – until the last half or so (and especially the last couple chapters) of the last book. She brought everything together in a way that completely blew me away.

Her Timeless Fairy Tales series is similar. I got Beauty and the Beast for free, enjoyed it enough to buy and enjoy others, but didn’t figure Shea would ever make my list of favorite authors. And then I started noticing some connecting threads in the series, little hints and revelations that reward readers for paying attention here and there in the other books, and I realized… She does nothing by accident. Well, she does, because she’s human, but a lot of stuff that looks like a throwaway line takes on entirely new meaning as you read the various standalone books and connect the dots she very deliberately made. I would love to learn how to implement such subtle, in-for-the-long-haul set-ups and satisfactory pay-offs. I’m still practicing set-ups and pay-offs within a single book. xD

On a different note, I didn’t read much, if any, nonfiction (at least, not by choice) until I started writing seriously. I love stories, so what am I going to do with a whole book of nothing but factual information? Pshaw! …Sigh, I was so young and ignorant. xD Nowadays, almost every time I’m browsing in a library or bookstore, I’ll go to the nonfiction section for fun, page through a variety of topics, and often borrow stuff like myths from religions around the world, a study of envy, so-and-so’s personal walk with Christ, etc. And I can absolutely testify that it has made my writing richer.

Ella Enchanted is such a precious story! I hadn’t read it in years, so I went back and read it this past month, and I have an even greater appreciation for it now! The friendship she and Char built throughout the book is something I’ve come to realize is important to me in the relationships of my own characters, and it’s really impressive how much of the story was wrapped up in Ella’s personal story. With a lot of fantasy books, there’s something dreadful happening in the world around them, and they need to win / prevent a war, rescue a loved one, kill / redeem the villain, etc., simultaneous to whatever inner conflict they’re wrestling with themselves over. But for Ella Enchanted, every single plot point got wrapped up in her curse (well, she did get a mini-vacation with the elves, but…). Literally everything was at stake in that climax, and Levine didn’t have too much clean-up to attend to after the climax ended. It seems so beautifully simple. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been getting the story to that point.