Squills 10/29/2017 - 11/5/2017

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1. #PLANMO PROGRESS REPORT
2. TWO CENTS: CHAPTER REVIEW
3. FROM THE DESK OF A KNIGHT: CHAPTERS ARE LIT
4. SOCIETY PAGES
5. THE WORD OF THE WEEK: ANATHEMA
6. POETRY POPPER: SYLVIA PLATH
7. POP CULTURE CORNER: YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
8. SHAMELESS PLUGS
9. SUBSCRIBERS

#PLANMO PROGRESS REPORT

written by LadyLizzLovelace < PM: >

Thought you were done with this column, didn't ya? Well PlanMo isn't quite over yet so if you still have a bit of planning left to do, this is your chance. If you haven't utilized the club for the journaling challenges to help you along, still highly recommending it.

It's been a rough road so far but the adventure is just starting to begin, for those of you who have never experienced this before. And for the returning crowd, you're probably laughing at my deceiving and hopeful wording. Wherever the path takes you, just know the Green Room will be looking forward to seeing your results next year. That is very, very far down the road though.
For now, let's just focus on the present.

That being said, there is a final workshop going on if you really want to cram last minute or reflect on how well you've done in the challenges so far. Here's the link to the post with all the info . Among the activities going on will be some Word Wars, even though we can't write anything yet, but just for a bit of preparation for when the days of 1700 word counts come.
The previous workshop went over great and pretty sure everyone had a great time, while making a good bit of progress.

I don't have much more to say than good luck to all of the NaNoers in the crowd, and I'm grouping myself in there. Above all, you should try and have fun while writing this novel.

See you on the battlefield.

TWO CENTS: CHAPTER REVIEWwritten by Aley < PM: >

We are starting our engines for NaNoWriMo which begins next week on Wednesday, so this week I'd like to talk about strategies to review the chapters that are going to be flooding in. Just like RevMo, NaNo needs reviewers, and the primary thing to review will be chapters.

If we look at our resources, there are several good articles on how to review chapters. The first I would like to mention is all about Chain Reviews or reviewing chapter after chapter, and why it helps. @Tenyo wrote the article in 2014, and it is one of the more popular articles for reviewing at 22 likes. Here is some of the advice Tenyo gives on Plot and Character






This is good advice because one of the largest parts of reviewing is to share what you're thinking as a reader. Authors don't get reader feedback without people like us writing them reviews, and if they have their audience mindset wrong, then they need to know that.

Tenyo also mentions how to review chapters in the middle or at the end of a novel in their article Battle Tactics: Reviewing the Unreviewable . This is very valuable advice as we get later into November and run into later chapters in novels.






The second one I want to mention is an oldie but a goodie. Written back in 2008, @alwaysawriter gave some solid advice in Need Help Writing a Basic Review? . She goes over all of the different aspects of a story and some of the pitfalls writers may be falling into using questions you can ask about the novel you're jumping into. Here is her question set about characters for you to compare with Tenyo's advice on characters.






It's important to always explain yourself to the author in both of these tutorials on writing, and it's important in my opinion too. While you might not want to explain how to fix something in your opinion, it is important to let the author know why you think something is messed up so they can see their story through your eyes. After all, the value of an outside reader is really in perspectives. You are there to challenge the perspective of the author with new thinking, so if you don't explain your thoughts, your review comes up short.

This is even true with grammar and language nit-picks because while you might see an Oxford Comma as necessary, someone else might have never learned what an Oxford Comma was. If you explain it to them, and explain your reasoning for adding a comma, then they can learn from you, or, if you're wrong, you can learn from them.

I turned to uYWS on Discord in an attempt to get some hands on advice from people who review chapters, and @Castor offered some valuable and timely advice which goes right along with explaining yourself. Castor uses a tracking system that is pretty ingenious.






While we might not all have hours of time, I find that having a note document or something to copy quotes from the chapter and write notes as I read is also very helpful, and can save a lot of time.

For me, I read the whole thing taking notes with a notepad [I'm old, I don't have a bunch of fancy stuff I use], and then after I finish, I write my review with that as the body after spending some time reflecting on what I want to focus my review on. Sometimes I delete some of my comments because they don't go over with the theme of my review, and sometimes I go back and add more depth to what I'm saying as I explain and expand on my point.

For me, the hardest thing is to jump into the middle of a story and try to decide how the plot is going to be going, so I also asked Castor about that.






I have to admit that I too will jump around in a novel if I'm looking for something, or if I just want to see how the pace is going. For me, however, I know that by chapter 3 or 4, we should be starting the rising action if not deeply into it, anywhere beyond that should have some level of tension and develop a feeling of stressors between the characters, and if I see the end is posted, I can tell when things should be winding down.

As it stands, there is a wide variety of advice about writing chapter reviews, and you can find a lot of the different viewpoints through the YWS Reviewing Tips Index .

Do you have something you would like to add about how you review chapters? PM me, let me know! I'd love to interview you about reviewing chapters and if you send me a PM, I can do that.

Until next time!

FROM THE DESK OF A KNIGHT: CHAPTERS ARE LIT

written by LadyLizzLovelace < PM: >

I just love using word play, don't you? Today I've decided to include some material from the KotGR workshops, as well as quotes from the Knights, because it's always nice to have several different viewpoints.

Approaching a Lone Chapter in the Green Room

The two literary works that we see most often on YWS are poems and loose novel chapters. I use loose in this sense to refer to middle of the road chapters or middle chapters or chapters past number 5. Poems always get picked up easy because they are a single unit that you can quickly review, nice and short and compact. Novel parts are only approachable if they're on their prologue or first chapter, otherwise they're looked at as tainted goods. As your friendly neighborhood knight, I'm here to argue otherwise and give you some tips on reviewing them.

Our main challenge walking into a middle chapter is not knowing what happened before this point and who these characters are. When you walk through the Green Room, you know this series of questions comes with the territoty, but you should still be able to tell a bit from the entire work based on this one segment.

Points of attack to bring down the Beast

Pretty often I see people use the scapegoat of "I can't comment on plot and/or plot development, because I don't know the rest of it". However, you can use the common method of treating this as a stand alone story and seeing how the plot progresses. You can look at how these events link together and use your own judge to think if they go together or not. It doesn't take an extreme amount of years of practice or reviews under your belt, to notice something isn't fitting together right. And a lot of the time, the plot is just moving too quickly. This brings us into the subject of pacing.

If the writer is going from serene to apocalypse within a thousand words, it may be time to say something like "slow down". Pacing is something that goes from very simple to very complicated on the scale, so you can utilize it however you like.
For instance you possibly just comment on the speed overall. Or you can talk about how it goes selected parts and overall. Or you can take it a step further beyond the last two, and offer suggestions to the author on how to fix the issues.

And that's really an overall sort of message to gain from this little article, you can make your reviews as thorough as you like, as long as you hit the majority of the points. We've talked about two of them so far, so let's continue on.

If you're getting stuck jabbing at the plot, spend time looking at character, tone, and setting in depth too since you don't have the whole plot in front of you.

When a chapter opens up, most likely there will be some setting to give you a sense of where the event will be taking place and later assists with what the characters are doing. From here you can ask yourself questions about the work and the writing.

You may find that the setting and character interactions conflict, or that something just feels off. At first, you may see nothing visibly wrong with a work, but often if you look closer there will be little things that don't add up. They may not seem like much separately but together they create the larger problem of, drumroll please, plot holes. Plot hole are such infectious little things that will spread quickly across a novel if given the chance. If you catch them early on and talk about them in your review, the writer may be able to fix them.

Thoughts from the Crowd

In our chapter review workshop, I posed the question of "What do you think makes a good chapter review?" Here are the answers.

@alliyah says,






And here's the second question, included for a bit of variety.
As Knights of the Green Room, we often come across chapters that are all by themselves. How do you tackle reviewing only a single chapter and not the entire book?

@soundofmind, who is not yet a knight but we're working on getting her there, says,





@Wolfical, who supposedly just stopped by for the music, replied with,





Overall

It takes a bit of time and practice to find your reviewing groove, but once you get there, it'll be great. If you ever need review advice or want to hear some of the shop talk from the Knights, just stop on by the club. As a final note, read this advice and never forget it.

When targeting a chapter, often people bounce to nitpicking over grammar and spelling because they can't find anything else. Or they aren't willing to work towards finding anything else. Think back to the Critique Sandwich and how it's put together.
Nitpicks on grammar are great as a side to the sandwich but shouldn't be the main course. If you're focusing on these minimal parts, you're just acting as a spellchecker rather than a reviewer who looks at the overall story and message.

Good luck out there folks.

SOCIETY PAGESwritten by EternalRain < PM: >

It feels like it’s been a long while since society pages (it actually has been!), so let’s see what’s been going on!

These past two weeks, some recurring as well as new hashtags came around. One of them is the #favoritemusical hashtag! @RavenLord’s favorite old school musical is Phantom of the Opera, and @whatchamacallit’s favorite modern musical is the newer version of Annie.

Make sure to be following #songoftheday for fellow member’s song recommendations as well. You can join, as well, sharing a song for that day.

Other than that, hashtags have been a bit sparse but we’ve got a lot else going on!

With review day coming up, everyone is getting pretty excited! @marms is glad to be on team Witches because of her novel about witches (perfectly fitting!), @Amnesia wants a Naruto themed review day next month (why not?), and @Wolfical is excited they were sorted into the Werewolves team!

Halloween is also approaching, and we’ve got a [spooky] spooky [/spooky] font to use on wall posts and forums! Be sure to share with everyone your Halloween adventures, and maybe you can use that spooky font too!

With Halloween comes the second season of Stranger Things, the popular supernatural horror Netflix Original series. @Steggy is loving it so much, and others are getting ready to watch it.

Besides our big main events going on, we’ve got some other news from the lives of YWSers:

@snowmonkey9 got a High School Musical Wii singing game, @Eternity’s befriended two possums, @Love got a new piano keyboard, and @ChieRynn is making it through her tooth surgery.

A lot is coming up for next week, as well! We’ve got Halloween, and not to mention the start of NaNoWriMo. Share your experiences on your wall, and tune in for another society pages!

THE WORD OF THE WEEK: ANATHEMAwritten by megsug < PM: >
Pronunciation: uh-nath-uh-muh

Part of Language: Noun

Definition:1. A cursed individual or object.
2. A divine curse, possibly involving excommunication

Used in a Sentence: He became a demon when an anathema was brought upon his head.

Origin: The word originates from a Greek word meaning a thing accursed.

POETRY POPPER: SYLVIA PLATHwritten by Aley < PM: >

Hello everyone and welcome to a Poetry Popper. Today we'll be focusing on one of the famous horror poets of a more modern era. Sylvia Plath is loved among many for her dark, warped poetry. She is often taught in schools to show the 'death' side of the idea that all poems are about love or death. She's also closely related to Anne Saxton, and often people think of Plath and Poe among the same sort of themes, but Plath's poetry is much darker as Poe was mostly writing for money, and Plath was writing to get to the emotional content of the darker humor. She is one of the confessional poets, meaning she wrote about herself and her own experiences, which shows up in her work.

Background

Sylvia Plath suffered from severe depression and killed herself with an oven after many successful recoveries from her trying life. She was always involved in poetry throughout her life and loved it as a study, and a profession, not a hobby. She took her poetry very seriously and studied the forms of poetry, and all that entailed. She often used her darker style to create vivid and carving memories for her readers to hold throughout their lives.

Poems By:

One of her best-known pieces is called "Daddy" which she wrote about her father in some aspects as he was German, and her feelings regarding authority. She also was well known for "Ariel", "Mirror", and basically anything you pick up is bound to be dark and perfect for Halloween. Today, we'll be looking at her poem "Edge" to explore one of her lesser-known works.

Edge
The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

The Guardian.com

This poem explores death of the body talking about old traditions and the way it makes death appear peaceful while "odors bleed" in the narrative she tells us. If we delve beneath the wispy sound of the poem, we can imagine this is not a pretty sight, or something nice to smell.

That is one of the tricks with Plath's poetry. Sometimes she's overtly horrific, but oftentimes it is when you delve into the meaning of what she's saying that the darkness creeps through. After all, we're not talking about someone peacefully laying in death, but someone wearing the "illusion of Greek necessity" which means that this woman was buried as is necessary for her people, and the accomplishment is not real, it's an illusion.

If you like looking at the darker side of life, you'll really enjoy Plath's writing, and I would strongly recommend Anne Sexton as well. Happy Halloween!

Until next time!

POP CULTURE CORNER: YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

written by LadyLizzLovelace < PM: >

As far as horror movies go, this is by far my favorite one. Even though I do love the classic Universal flicks and I have a favorite out of those, Young Frankenstein tops everything else.
Spoof of five different Frankenstein movies combined?
Standard Mel Brooks plot-line and cast? .
Questionable scenes through-out and the ending doesn't exactly make sense?

Cast Line-Up

• Gene Wilder as Frederick Frankenstein
• Marty Feldman as Igor
• Peter Boyle as the Monster
• Madeline Kahn as Elizabeth
• Cloris Leachman as Frau Blücher
• Teri Garr as Inga
• Kenneth Mars as Inspector Kemp

Basis of the Plot

Of all the movies that are based around the Frankenstein story, this one manages to still present a good plot and be Mel Brooks through and through. For the most part, you can predict what happens, as it's more closely related to the 1939 flick Son of Frankenstein. There's the original Frankenstein and the monster that he created, but both of them sort of died, the monster not really. Now there comes up some sort of relation to the original scientist, who has tried to escape his family's history but is magically working in a similar field.

An estate lawyer comes to this man and tells him he has inherited a haunted castle in the middle of nowhere and also magically there is a cleaning staff that's been taking care of the grounds all this time. Not suspicious in the slightest. Now comes the beautiful lab assistant (Inga) and the scientist has conflicts because of the fiance back home (Madeline Kahn as Madeline Kahn).

Then we move onto Igor getting the wrong brain but the scene is obviously more comedic than before. Laboratory experiment doesn't work. Then it works. But it worked a bit too well. Monster gets loose and runs into the woods and meets the blind violinist and fire. So much fire. Little girl in town happens in there somewhere and the town goes on a witch hunt.

Basically it follows the rest of the plot up until the scene which I can't tell you about because it is spoiler territory and I also don't think it's appropriate for this forum.

Stand Out Moments

One of the most famous parts of this movie is when Wilder proves the Monster's skills, by having him sing and dance to "Putting on the Ritz". In my opinion, this why five hundred times better than Taco's version, but that's not what we're here to talk about today. I chose this scene to talk about because this is when you fully realize, this was Mel Brooks doing. Up until that point, it was funny but if I'm being honest, not that far off of its inspiration. Whereas Spaceballs was never really in that mode, it was always on the opposite side of the extremes.

Not to go overally serious or anything, but Young Frankenstein takes a certain taste over other Brooks films. Part of what I love about this one is how the laboratory set has a lot of the pieces from the original movies. Star Wars left open so many gaps for spoofs that to a certain point, it's not even funny. But the original Universal horror movies, were at the beginning of the new age and bringing sci-fi and fantasy to life. The plot that you see in Spaceballs makes fun of every element of its being where Young Frankenstein, reserves time to give the original the respect it deserves.

At least that's how I see it.

Opinions from the Angry Mob

As my media review thread failed, I turned to our trusty movie correspondent @Gringoamericano, who surprisingly has not seen this one but still managed to offer us an opinion.

GringoAmericano says,






For the rest of the angry mob about to storm the castle, the thread is still open for discussion, so head over that way.
Young Frankenstein Discussion

Next weeks article will most likely be interviews with whatever music buffs I can find on YWS, where they will be asked the ultimate question: if you could only have one favorite song, what would it be?

That's all I have for now. See you folks around and if you have a suggestion for what the column should cover, the link to heart aka my PMs, is above.

SHAMELESS PLUGS

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