Category Archives: Stories and Writing

What is a blog, after all, but a lot of stories? So these are stories about stories.

Kids Away From Home–why we love stories about boarding schools

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November approaches and with it, NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month. This year I have an idea for a middle-grade fantasy about a special boarding school. There are plenty of stories about magic boarding schools, but what if you’re a kid who can’t do magic in a world where almost everyone else can?

So far I’ve found one book about a non-magic school in a magical world. In Ordinary Magic, by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway, our protagonist is just getting ready to celebrate her twelfth birthday and her magical coming-of-age. After being evaluated for her level of magic, she can finally begin her magical education. Except… turns out she doesn’t have any magic. At all.

As a side note, have you noticed how many books start off with a testing or sorting of the main characters? From Harry Potter to Divergent, we can’t seem to get enough of putting people into groups. In our real lives, we have the much less exciting end-of-grade tests, SATs, and maybe some career counseling assessments. I think we are really fascinated by tests, especially those that could change the direction of our lives.

Going back to Ordinary Magic, I’m not going to say much about the story itself, except that the non-magic kids in Rubino-Bradway’s world face a much tougher time than I’m planning for mine. It’s a good book, and a nice twist on the magic boarding school idea.

So far, that’s the only book I’ve found about a boarding school for non-magic kids in a mostly magic world. By comparison, there are tons of books about magic boarding schools. I’m just going to mention one I read recently: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. It’s unlike most of the other magic boarding school books I’ve read in that there don’t seem to be any teachers, at least not any human ones. So all the characters are students, and they have to be very independent and resourceful in order to survive their school days.

Literally. The title says it all. This school has a very high fatality rate. And yet, despite the wide range of magical nasties they have to contend with, whether gloppy, spikey, tentacle-y, or toothy, the tone of the book was pleasantly wry and gently humorous. I don’t like horror as a rule, and while this book has a few gruesome moments, I didn’t find it grim. And I really liked the main character.

On to the more general question–why do we like books about boarding schools? One obvious answer is that it gets the parents out of the story. They aren’t there to protect their kids, keep them from doing reckless things, or interfere with their social lives. Kids in a fictional boarding school get to be independent to a much greater extent than most real kids get to be be, and this allows for some grand adventures.

(Parents in these stories don’t get to hover over their kids to get them to do their homework, either. The kids do it themselves or suffer the consequences. Parents, take note.)

The second appealing thing about these books is that school is a very familiar setting for kids, but at the same time, homework, teachers, and tests can be interestingly different in a magical world. Consider magical duels. How often do you get to face your classmates in combat as part of school? Spelling bees just aren’t the same thing.

Finally, the setting allows for kids to have adventures at all hours of the day. A boarding school encompasses a lot of different settings within it–the dorms, the classrooms, the dining hall, the library, some sort of outdoor area–and these are all accessible (more or less) all the time. The story doesn’t have to take a break while students go home to eat dinner and sleep. Instead, students can sneak out of bed and explore hidden passageways down in the kitchens or hold secret meetings with friends in the girls’ or boys’ bathroom.

The more I think about it, the more I’m looking forward to trying my hand at a (non) magic boarding school book. Only a month to go!

One Project Ends, Another Begins

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Today, after much reading and re-reading of online documentation and filling out a series of forms, I finally self-published my cozy mystery, Alibis and Aspidistras, on Amazon Kindle (under the pen name Samantha Cornwell.) It started as my 2019 National Novel Writing Month project, and I spent a lot of 2020 revising it while keeping in touch with my writing friends on Slack, since actually meeting in a cafe was temporarily (!) impossible.

Thumbnail of book Alibis and Aspidistras.
Click for a sample.

Then I spent the fall of 2020 and most of 2021 querying agents, as well as starting three other writing projects that I did not finish. Not yet. But now that I’m done with Alibis, it’s time to move to the next project: one of the three unfinished ones, currently titled Felonies and Fittonia.

I’ve signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I’ve got thirty days to write 50,000 words. I’ve got a notebook and a Scrivener file and a general account of what happens in the story, plus something like 15,00 words of a false start from last year. I’ve also got an idea–to make each chapter a kind of writing practice session. One chapter could emphasize description. One could emphasize dialogue. In another, I could work on showing emotions better.

Clearly the result wouldn’t be a particularly smooth draft. It would need a lot of reworking. But it would add an element of variety to the month, and maybe be a way of improving my writing. I think it’s worth giving it a try.

And remember, for NaNoWriMo, it’s quantity, not quality. Quality comes later.

Till next post.

Pruning My Library—every so often, some books have to go

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Going, going,…

I’ve been going through my overcrowded shelves of books recently and “pruning,” as my mother likes to put it. It’s difficult. At this point, I’ve gotten much better at getting rid of books I’m not really thrilled with shortly after I read them, which means most of the books I’m sorting through are 1) books I’ve had for years already and am sentimental about, 2) books I haven’t read yet, and 3) books I’ve loved, either recently or in the past.

The first category, books I’ve had for years, is composed of books that have already made it through many previous prunings,  one as recent as 2017. Clearly I have some sort of attachment to them. (See “Books, Nostalgia, and Death.”) Most of these titles will make it through this pass as well.

 Not all of them, though. For example, I’ve decided that while I enjoyed Noel Streatfield’s Gemma series, I’ve been keeping it all these years partly because I’m keeping her Ballet Shoes and A Vicarage Family, which is not a good enough reason for keeping Gemma. How much do I even remember about the series? I remember Gemma’s initial difficulties in a new school, the chair outside the headmistress’ office, something about a pink sweater, and a difficult decision between going back to acting or staying in school… but if I had to decide between rereading the Gemma books and reading a new middle-grade novel off my wish list, I would probably read the new one. That means it’s time to hand Gemma on to the library, and hopefully from there to some middle-grader who will enjoy reading about her for the first time.

The second category, unread books, probably numbers fifty titles at the moment. I bought them because they looked promising, and chances are they still do. The best way to decide is to compare each book to other shiny new options and ask myself, “Which would you rather give your time to?” Maybe I’m no longer quite as interested in art forgery as I used to be. Maybe I’ve already read enough books about dogs and their abilities. Maybe it’s time to move on. If not, at least by looking at it I’ve reminded myself that this book exists and that I want to read it someday.

Most of the third category, books I’ve loved,  gets an automatic pass. I still have enough shelf space for the books that filled my early life, even if I haven’t read them for years and possibly never will again. Will I reread the entire Dragons of Pern series? I read it many, many times as a teen and I can’t let go of it yet, even if I haven’t reread it for decades. The Deryni series? Dune? They can stay, for now.

The Little House books were a staple of my childhood and I still open them up now and again. The Far Side of Evil, the Prydain books, Heidi… those too can stay, though I’m suddenly wondering if I need to keep the copy of Heidi. Surely I can get it from a library if I really want to reread it.

No, it stays—for now.

Books I’ve read (or re-read) recently and loved are absolutely keepers. Howl’s Moving Castle isn’t going anywhere. (Haha.) Neither are The Two Princesses of Bamarre, or My Friend Flicka, or that interesting books about pigments, or that other interesting book about flavors. (I don’t just read fiction.) All my Louise Penny mysteries are staying, as well as the Rivers of London series.

In the process of pruning my library, I’ve realized there are some principles that help me make the decision to put a book—or any item—in the donation box. I discussed these before in an earlier post, “Decluttering: on the one hand and on the other”, but to remind myself, I’m going to write them down here as well.

First, space has value. While I’m not paying extra to house these books, the piles of books outside the bookcase take up work space, floor space, and mental space. Clutter is distracting. If I can reduce the volume to fit the shelves, I will breathe easier and have more space for working on craft projects and moving around.

Second, it’s easier to find the books I really want to read if those are the only books on my shelf. Why spend time on a so-so book when I have all these books I really enjoy?

Third, keeping all these books around is a waste of resources. The Gemma books have been sitting on my shelves for the past forty years, and it has probably been at least twenty or twenty-five years since I’ve re-read them. Other people could have been reading them during that time, if they had had the books. I should free them up for someone else to enjoy.

And so, onward with the book pruning. At this rate, I might get through it all by the end of the month. Oh wait, I forgot the books tucked away in the guest room…

Till next post.