March 11, 2007

• 13,658
  
  That’s how many words I have in The King of Veritas now. Yeah! (Er, Yah! Yea! Peachy!) 
  
  Saturday, I was blessed by our ladies’ prayer time at church and then headed to breakfast with a friend. (We split a French Toast Grand Slam at Denny’s. It’s an insane amount of food!)  Next, I bought two mattresses and box springs on clearance for the girls.  After that, I headed to the library where I planted myself in a chair for over five hours to write.  (I did stand up every now and again to stretch.)  I truly understand why writing is a discipline of sitting and doing. It’s not hard to make the words come. It’s harder to find the time to sit!
  
  After the library closed at 5:00, I went across the street  and down two doors to have a hair trim and then directly across the street to have supper at Panera.  (State College is a convenient town.) While I ate, I read through what I had written and did a bit of editing.  I need to make King Christopher a bit wittier and the whole thing funnier. The Hunter was less enthusiastic about this installment than he was about the first, so I’ll have to attend to this “dull bit.”
  
  After a run to Wal-Mart, I closed the day by finishing Janet Alymer’s Darcy’s Story.  It, as you may have guessed, is Pride and Prejudice told from Darcy’s point of view.  Here’s a review!
  
  Some books can be captured with one word: stunning, daring, brilliant. This book can also be summed up with one-word epitaphs: boring, dull, repetitive.  Yes, Ms. Alymer (a pen-name for an Austen enthusiast from Bath, England) basically took the exact text of P&P, added, “Darcy looked at her”  or “Darcy wondered,” and had it published. In the parts where there is no P&P to propel the story, she has Darcy thinking about previous lines. And, when that gets dull, she has him think of those same lines again! 
  
  I found myself skimming huge sections of the book because they were verbatim from Austen’s novel.  Parts that Alymer could have expanded (like Darcy in London while Elizabeth is at home) are summed up with, “Darcy was in London for three weeks, but then he went back to Pemberley.”   Urgh.  
  
  The writing suffered from much repetition as well.  Beauties such as, “Darcy strongly favored his mother, and he had a strong personality…”  (Okay, not a direct quote, but the repetition of words and word forms in a sentence happened often.)  Where was this woman’s editor?  It wasn’t a self-published work. It was a Harper Collins book.
  
  If you haven’t read P&P in a long while, you may enjoy reading this book. However, I recommend Pamela Aidan’s three-book set which tells the story from Darcy’s view in an entertaining and original way.  This book, you might want to leave on the shelf. Definitely don’t cough up $10 to buy it from Amazon!
  
  What are you reading now? Do you recommend it? Do you have a favorite Pride and Prejudice sequel or spin-off? (Some were featured in World magazine this week.)

  • 9:52 pm
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