Duma Key

Holy Hell, what a book! I finished it about 2 days ago and I'm still creeped out. It's very good. I love long novels. My hubby got me into Stephen King last year. We were sitting outside an ice cream shoppe, under the awning while there was a summer rain all around us, eating our ice cream, and he read me one of King's short stories, Quitter's Inc. The pinkie finger!! I was hooked after that and have read many of his short stories since then; this was my first novel by him.

The tale of Duma Key is weaved around a middle-aged man named Edgar Freemantle who has a horrible accident involving a crane and loses his right arm and nearly his life. He's retelling the tale of how he got back to himself again. He becomes a very angry man after his accident, so for a fresh start, he moves from Minnesota to Florida to start his "other" life. He begins sketching and soon finds a whole new life as an artist, but his pictures have a supernatural quality to them you soon discover. The mystery unfolds through his pictures until the climax at the end that terrifies you. As you turn each page the anticipation of where the story will go just makes you wonder when something terrifying is going to jump out and scare the hell out of you. I would have all the lights on at 2 AM while nursing the baby and eventually I'd have to put it down and put some mindless tv on like Jersey Shore to get my pulse down again. If you like intrigue and mystery with some scare thrown in, this is a wonderful long read.

My Weekend

So I screwed off a little bit these past couple of days. I finished my school work, and now I only have one test left and I'll be done and totally finished. I will graduate by Labor Day if it kills me, and then I swear to you I will have a party and melt those CDs with the horrid assignments, that or I will rip them apart and create altered art pins.

So I didn't make my ATCs for my trade. They aren't due for quite a while, and I'm not really worried about finishing them. However, I've been pushing around my book idea for like a year. I finally took the plunge this week. In the past 2 days, I've already written 32 pages. I am so thrilled! And the weird thing is, it's taking on a life of it's own, and I like it. At first it kind of freaked me out because I've read about writers who say when they write it takes unexpected turns. I kept thinking, yeah right, how can you be writing something and it does its own thing. They were right. My book has its own life. I can't believe the things that are coming out of my brain into this book.

Now for my premise. This is a bit embarrassing, but it's based on series of dreams I had. You know John Mayer? I lusted after that man big time, even now I blush when I see him on television - how stupid is that, lol? But his little fling with Jessica Simpson kinda turned me off of him, but I do still like his music.

So anyway, back to the dreams. I used to have these dreams about him, and I would have these dreams all the time. We would meet in the most strangest places, and the entire dream was either him trying to get to me, or me to him. So one morning I'd woken up from an extremely wonderful dream (that I refuse to go into details about since my mother is a reader here, lol), and I got to thinking about what if 2 people could somehow have some accidental connection and fall in love in a dream and then meet in real life and they realize they've been dreaming of the other one. So I went looking to see if there was a phenomenon like that, where people were both in the same dream. I discovered it's a whole weird psychic thing called mutual dreaming, but as I kept thinking about it for days on end, I decided that would be a neat idea for a novel. I went looking for any fiction books with this type of theme, and I really couldn't find anything.

At first I was going with a more adult type of fiction, but then I felt it fit better with young adult fiction, so instead of the main character being in her 30s, she's now a teenager. She's going to have to run away on a whim to get to him, and I felt it was more feasible with a young girl than some 30-something mother of toddlers.

I'm just so excited, I have so much to weave into the story with clues on how to find each other.

I'm really trying to get my nerve up to post an excerpt on my blog, but I am the biggest chicken in the entire world, so I'm not sure when I'll get the guts up to do it.

Paper Dress

I signed up over at swap-bot for a paper dress swap. It looked like fun, but I had never made one before and was a bit worried it would end up hard to make, so I made a practice paper dress last night during a bout of insomnia to see how difficult this task would be, and it's so much fun! I even made a little wire hanger to put it on. I needed a thicker wire so it would be a bit sturdier, but all I had was 26 gauge, and its doing ok, but next time I'm using 20 or 22 gauge. This one was so much fun, I plan on making a few more and creating a little paper dress garland to hang above my corkboard to dress up my crafting studio.

If you haven't read any of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, you have to read it. I was skeptical over the whole vampire love story thing, especially since it was targeted for "young adult" because those kinda books usually just aren't my thing, even when I was the target age of young adult books, I had already moved to adult books, but this book is addictive, so addictive, I read 200 pages last night and forced myself to go to bed. If I didn't have children, I would have read the entire thing in one sitting, it was that good. It's a hard book to pull away from....so I plan to finish it tonight, and I already purchased the second book so I don't have to wait after finishing the first one. I am now dying to see the movie.

And I went to my jewerly making class yesterday. It was fun, and I finally learned how to do crimp beads. I made an awesome beaded bookmark and bought extra bookmarks to make even more, and I made a pretty bracelet. I'll post pictures later tonight or tomorrow after I finish my work.