Seems I have been “bookworm tagged” by Julie Weathers.
“Bookworm Award” rules:
- Open the closest book — not a favorite or most intellectual book — but the book closest at the moment, to page 56
- Write out the fifth sentence, as well as two to five sentences following
- Tag five innocents [or more]
With the assumption that “book” means “published book, not your own manuscript, Mr. or Ms. Writer,” followed immediately by the thought that it would be interesting, in fact, to apply to writing friends’ manuscripts, Julie has added another step:
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for your own manuscript.
So, umm… okay.
I’m going to disregard tech-reference books, which are stacked over and around my computer. The closest other book I can put my hands on without getting up and looking around is a well-thumbed 1967 paperback edition of Catch-22, which is still on my desk from when I reviewed it for MoonRat’s “celebrate reading” series back in June.
In this passage, the protagonist, Yossarian, is talking with his friend Hungry Joe about nightmares. Hungry Joe is speaking sentence #5 on page 56, and the conversation continues:
“Everybody has nightmares.”
Yossarian thought he had him. “Every night?” he asked.
“Why not every night?” Hungry Joe demanded.
Suddenly it all made sense. Why not every night, indeed?
As for my own manuscript, I’ve got different drafts of two different books at hand. The one on top just happens to be the first draft (from 1992ish) of the manuscript with the working title Grail. This passage is in the first-person voice; the narrator here is one Al Castle:
I was still standing there facing the truck, looking down at my ruined clothes and trying to decide if I needed to go back to the office at all, when the door behind me creaked and a rough, gravelly voice said something like, “How’d you like it I dump a load of cans on that Rambler, buddy?”
I turned around, all hot-headed — no, seriously, I was really annoyed — prepared to give the fellow a good dressing-down, who’d he think he was, why didn’t he answer the door sooner, so on, but when I saw him I couldn’t say a word. Stopped me in my tracks.
He was wearing heavy grey work clothes, the long sleeves rolled up on his forearms, and he had this full-length rubberized sort of apron on over his clothes, with stains and burn-holes here and there. I remember what he was wearing because I never saw him wearing anything else. But regardless what he was wearing, it wouldn’t be what I’d remember about the way he looked, no sir.
What I’d remember and what stopped me in my smart-ass young tracks, sorry Bonnie, was his head.
I’m vaguely familiar with the notion of tagging as applied to blogging — one person starts it off with a topic or gimmick for a blog post, and then passes the idea to N (however many) other bloggers, who do the same thing, and so on. Sort of a chain letter, or one of those 20-questions quizzes which get passed around among emailers, each person erasing the previous person’s answers and supplying his or her own answers.
But I’m afraid I’m shamefully old-school about such things. Personally love the idea of my having a “free” topic to post on; but personally don’t like to single out other individuals and do the same to them. This is the first time I’ve been specifically tagged, which has enabled me to duck the issue for now.
So this is just an implicit tag, with its own context of, um, passivity I guess: You, reading this, consider yourself tagged with this Bookworm Tag thing. I’ll never know who you are. Maybe there will be 20 of you, maybe only one or two (or none). If you decide to accept the tag, and follow the above rules yourself, let me know in the comments.
Got that?
Good.
Go.
Kate Lord Brown says
Yeah – I’m with you on tagging John. Just laughing at my own desk – if you ignore the ‘Early Learning Centre’ pamphlet on face painting – which we were doing this afternoon (pirates) and ‘The Meon Valley Directory – free, local, topical’ booklet, cast aside the ’25 beautiful Christmas Homes’ (I wish) magazine my mother sent me .. you get to … the upturned page 115 of the third book, Counting down the (unedited lines) you get: ‘Her vision blurred as the pain returned. As she breathed through it, it felt like every atom of her body was contracting then expanding at lightning speed.’ No joke – kind of fitting for Christmas.
julie Weathers says
Ah, that was an interesting snippet. Well, they both were, but I have to admit I want to know what happened next in your scene. I guess that’s the point of writing. Leave the reader wanting more.
I don’t normally tag things, but this was too interesting not to pester other people.
moonrat says
dude. i tried this. page 56 is blank. boo.
julie Weathers says
Sorry, Moonie, but that made me laugh.
I think Paladin has some extra pages I can spare, about 100, I think. I’ll send them to you. No, it has nothing to do with what you’re writing, but you can pretend my pages are your first fifty.
John says
Kate: Oh, *funny*. I can actually see that (yes) on a page-a-day calendar of Christmas quotations.
Julie: I tried to be careful in phrasing it; it really doesn’t bother me at all to receive and act on a tag (he said, from the vast well of his tagging experience) — I’m just a neurotic pre-Web fogey about passing them further. Otoh, have participated w/out qualm in a couple of “blog parties” because the only initiative had to come from the host(ess). :)
I did have fun writing this post (though I winced at some things about my own excerpt). Thanks for the tag!
moonie: Hmm. So you’re saying NaNo took you only to page 55.
marta says
Okay. Page 56 from Moonlight & Vines by Charles de Lint–“She continued her pretense, as though she could see equally well in the light or dark and it made no difference to her is the lights were on or off. At least she had the book turned right-side up, John noted.”
From page 56 of my very rough NaNo novel The Girl Who Grew Books–“The curtain of beads in the doorway behind the counter parted and Lily poked her head through. She wore her nightdress, and her white hair was neatly brushed back. “Fancy this,” she said. “You folks looking for rooms?”
Ha. There you go!
John says
marta: Interesting the way the passage from de Lint’s book could almost be read as a lead-in to the one from yours!
(And you already know how much I envy you that title. It’s like a doorway to possible plotlines.)