SNOW DAY and Whippoorwill Critique!!

Though I did have some classes today, it is the perfect day to stay at home and snuggle with your computer and blog. For the story that we had to read Whippoorwill, like I kind of got into last time I didn't really enjoy. I guess I saw no real point in the story. The story didn't really have any plot or lead anywhere and neither character were really interesting or made me want to read more. Maybe it's me but I don't believe a stage fright trucker. Besides this there's no real conflict (besides some of his homophobic fears). Also the dialogue felt kind of fake. At points I felt maybe the trucker was a little unstable or slow but I never got a definite feeling about him. There was some good descriptions though. He definitely had some interesting word choices. Maybe if he added some suspense and a dramatic ending it would feel like the story actually went somewhere. It seems like he builds up a whole bunch of suspense and then nothing. To be fair, maybe it just wasn't my kind of story but I didn't enjoy it at all.

Thelma and Whippoorwill

In class, we wrote these descriptions of a name Thelma Dudley. The first thing I thought about was this gaudy, 50- year old trying to get rid of her white trash roots. It was weird. I decided to re-work it, like Professor Selgin said in class, so here it goes:

Thelma Dudley decided that a mid-life crisis was exactly what she needed. Fifty had hit her hard, but she thought she pulled it off with her tacky rhinestone jewelry and big blonde hair that any Davenport, Tennesse girl would of been proud of--not that she cared what anyone in Davenport really thought anyway. She had finally gotten all her five sons out of her house, two in unsteady marriages due to unexpected pregancies, and the other three succeeding (hopefully) in Conn. Community College. Her now sagging husband was interested more in the Mercedes in the garage and the Emily in his office; so she emersed herself in her new hobby:shopping. The more rhinestones and glitter the better. It was funny because growing up her mother never had the means to take her shopping, forget about rhinestones. She was forced to wear her two older brothers hand-me downs, which usually included a lot of flannel and defintely no glitter. The kids at Davenport Elementary made it their job to make fun of her out of date attire- it didn't help that she was overweight. Her mother had tried to understand her somewhat unruly youngest child but years of unknown men coming and going through their trailer and the smell of alcohol on her breath as she yelled at Thelma, made her lose all respect at an early age. It came to no surprise to anyone when the youngest Smith child decided to run away to Connecticut, the exact opposite of Davenport everyone thought, with Steven Dudley, the quiet computer nerd who always stood up for Thelma. Within a year she became Thelma Dudley.

I hope it's better :) I think I added a lot of details and made some things abstract and other things more concrete. The other part of the assignment I wasn't all that excited about. I didn't really enjoy Whippoorwill all that much. I'm interested to see what everyone else has to say about it.

First class

We had our first Fiction class last week and I just finished the homework ( I know I'm an extreme procrastinator). The story was pretty funny, in a kind of messed up way. I chose to write about a girl Marci and a run-in with a famous actor who robbed a bank. I hope it's not cliche, it took me awhile to think of it so I'm crossing my fingers. I think I'm going to learn a lot in this class so I'm pretty excited.