10 pages in book review: On Writing

This review is a bit of a cheat on the 10-pages-in formula I set up for myself. I started reading Stephen King’s On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft on the bus on the way home on Friday, and I simply couldn’t stop reading. By the time I went to bed Friday night I was more than 50 pages in. It’s that good. I’m now 174 pages into it, much more than half way, and it was a struggle to decide whether to write about it or just curl up and enjoy it. Something that rivals blog for my attention must be good.

It’s quite strange, in fact, that I haven’t read this book before now. I’ve consumed voraciously almost everything else Stephen King has written. I clearly remember reading Firestarter when I was about ten years old, and I’ve been working my way through his oeuvre ever since. I don’t understand why people denigrate his work as populist, and I don’t understand why fiction has to be onerous to be well-written. I think he drifted away from his muse back in the 1980s and into the 1990s, but after reading Hearts in Atlantis and From a Buick 8, I can clearly see he’s back in form and scaring the hell out of me.

So even though I would easily list him in my top five favourite authors, and even though I am always hungry for advice on how to improve my writing, somehow I never connected these dots before. My loss, at least in time. I should have read this years ago!

But it’s not just a collection of writer’s tips, which is what I was more or less expecting. There are some side-splittingly funny anecdotes from his childhood, a few of which I tried to read out loud to Beloved on Friday night. I couldn’t get through them without gasping through my laughter, and we laughed so hard we even brought a previously bedded Tristan to the top of the stairs to see what his parents were going on about.

Aside from the memoirs, it’s got some great writing tips. He covers everything from knowing your tools (grammar, vocabulary, etc.), to using active voice, to avoiding adverbs in dialogue attribution. (He argues that adverbs in dialogue attribution are superfluous, and the reader should be able to tell from your context whether she shouted menacingly when you write ‘she shouted’.)

The section I’m reading right now covers my big questions: what to write about and how to find your muse. It’s heady stuff, and he presents it in a way that has you convinced all you need to do is set yourself up with a keyboard, a couple of hours a day and a half-baked idea with potential, and you’re on your way to your first best-seller.

So since I’m more than half way through, I’ll go out on a limb and assume this one is going to be golden all the way through. If I change my mind in the last 20 pages, I’ll be sure to drop back in and let you know.

(On that note, I’ve taken Troy’s excellent suggestion to heart, and after I finish the books I’ve talked about in my 10-pages-in reviews, I’ll go back and edit in a follow-up to see whether my final impressions matched my first ones. I’ve edited the review of Case Histories just now to add my final thoughts.)

Have you read On Writing? What did you think? Have you read any other ‘writers on writing’ books and would you recommend them?

Categories:

The problem with blog

There’s a problem with blog.

GASP! No, you cry, say it ain’t so. A problem? With BLOG?

You see, I’m running out of things to talk about. Not here, of course. Good god knows I’ll pass off just about anything as a post these days. Don’t think I don’t have that whole ‘grocery list’ thing floating around in the back of my head just in case times get lean.

But I’ve suckered so many of my family and friends into coming here on a regular basis that I’ve run out of things to tell them in person. For example, I was having coffee with friends the other day:

Me: You should hear Simon saying ‘please’ these days… (settles into anecdote mode).
Friends: We know, we read about it.

Me: Oh yeah.
(awkward silence)

Me: So I read this really terrific book called the Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s about this guy…
Friends (interrupting): We know.

Me: Right. Um…
(more awkward silence)

Me: So, did I tell you about this really amazing nap I had out on the glider for about an hour and a half yesterday?
Friends: Hey! That wasn’t you, that was Marla!

Me (sheepishly): Oh, hey, really? I, um, got a little mixed up I guess. Well, nice seeing you guys again. I gotta run, I think I left the kettle on. Bye! (slinking out the door)

So I either need to find some new friends, or I need all my old friends to stop dropping by blog. Anybody know where I can get some new friends? (Damn, and it was such a lot of hard work cultivating the first batch!)

On childhood bliss

A few years ago, I spent a while talking to a psychologist trying to untangle some of the knots my ex-husband left behind, and one day she told me that after hearing so much about my childhood and how I felt about growing up, one of the best things I could do with my life was to raise a couple of kids the way my parents raised me. Is that not the most amazing compliment you can ever imagine?

In response to my 101 things post, Cooper from Been There – which is a really good blog, BTW – said, “What did your parents do right and why did you love your childhood (outside of school) so much? I want to know this so I can do that for my kids. Tell me!”

I had to think about this for a while, but I think the answer is that I always felt secure. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was loved: by my parents, two sets of grandparents, even my pesty younger brother. Unconditional love builds a safety net so that you have the courage to stretch yourself out a little bit, to try new things, to be brave, knowing that if you don’t quite make it, there will be someone there to catch you, or at least pick you up and dust you off and work out some of the dents in your ego before sending you off to try again.

Also, my parents worked fairly hard at preserving my innocence. Ignorance truly is bliss. While I could tell you in graphic detail where babies came from for as long as I can remember, I had no idea that for the first years of my life my parents barely had two nickles to rub together. My granny used to buy clothes for me, because my folks just couldn’t afford it. I had no idea until I was much older. And while I was reading the newspaper daily starting when I was in elementary school, and we watched the news every night, somehow I managed to stay completely sheltered of the cruelties of the world for most of my childhood.

It helps, too, that my parents were very much in love, and I can’t recall a single instance of them fighting, truly fighting, in front of us. Conversely, I wonder if this is where my fear of conflict comes from (hey, make that 102 things about me – I don’t think I mentioned I have a deeply entrenched fear of conflict and hate fighting of any kind) and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to see that people can fight and resolve a situation rather than just not seeing the fighting in the first place.

One thing that makes me a little bit sad that my boys won’t have the freedom I had, because I have so many happy memories of just taking off and wandering around the neighbourhood when I was just five or six or seven years old, or playing hide and seek with the neighbourhood gang until it was too dark to see. It makes me a little sad that they will grow up in such a different kind of world than I did. I used to walk to school and back again every day by myself at the age of four – can you imagine that happening today?

What do you guys think? What makes for a happy childhood? What will you do that your parents did, or what will you desperately hope you will never do?

The zen art of pool skimming

We have one of those oversized inflatable kiddie pools in our backyard. It’s 12 feet across, and the water is maybe 26 inches deep. I got it last year at the end of July as a birthday present from my men, and I think the temperatures were nice enough to swim maybe four or five times the rest of that summer.

Through the winter, we debated on whether to put it up again this year. It was, frankly, a heck of a lot of bother and wasted space considering the amount of enjoyment we got out of it. One of the major impediments to my enjoyment was that my darling Tristan pooped in the pool around day five that we had it up, and no amount of chlorine ever convinced me the water was clean again.

We finally decided that putting the pool up again this year would be less work than filling in the 12′ crop circle in the back yard. I’m so glad we did! We’ve had an early summer heat wave for the last two weekends, and temperatures have topped out around 30 degrees before the humidity. Factor in the humidity and we’re warm enough to be our own sun. And sweaty enough to fill our own saltwater lake.

We’ve gotten more than our money’s worth so far this season. We’ve been in swimming each day on the weekends and on my Mondays off. A couple of days it was hot enough to go in twice. The only problem is, we’re a dirty lot. We’re sweaty, we’ve got sunscreen glommed on us, and we have to walk through the grass to get into the pool, grass which loves to go for a swim with us.

It probably doesn’t help that I got a great deal on a sand and water table at a garage sale last Saturday, and somehow we managed to buy the kind of sand that has a mind of its own and hides in cracks and crevices, using sunscreen as glue, only disengaging itself from the boys when they are in the middle of the living room — or in the pool.

You see, I’ve become a little bit obsessed about keeping the pool clean. I’ve never had a pool before, so this whole routine is new to me. I feel like a scientist with my little box of chemicals and test strips. I run the filter regularly, setting the oven timer so I don’t leave it on all night (or for an entire week, as happened last summer.) I even have a bunch of pool care Web sites bookmarked, where I learned the wonders of baking soda for Ph balance.

But what I really love to do is skim the pool. I could skim the pool for hours. There is something oddly satisfying about working my way down the flotsam chain from drowned wasps to grass blades to dandilion fuzz to sand grains to particles so small I have to squint to see them. There is a meditational zen in scudding my skimmer into a settled pile of sediment and scooping up the debris, sweeping it through the water and slapping it out onto the lawn. Move over two inches and repeat. Move over two inches and repeat. I could pass an entire afternoon ensuring the water is as clean and clear as anything that flows from a Swiss spring.

And this summer, I’ve realized that the optimum place to stand is not at the edge of the pool, but in the middle of the pool. The water only comes up to the middle of my thigh, a few inches under the cuff of my shorts, but it’s surprisingly refreshing. Bright sun, warm air and tepid poolwater – the summer trifecta.

Now if only I could get half as interested in picking up the avalanche of toys that are taking over my living room. Or de-crumming the kitchen. Or maybe even putting away the folded laundry. What is it about outdoor chores that makes them so much less tedious than indoor chores?

The idiocy of intelligent design

A while ago, I posted a rant about creationism versus evolution and the brilliant Project Steve.

Today, I was on my favourite astronomy blog reading Phil Plait’s most recent tirade on the same subject, and I think it’s important reading for anybody concerned about critical thinking and what we are teaching our kids. He says, “[Creationists] want to turn our classrooms in a theocratically-controlled anti-science breeding ground, and I’m not going to sit by and watch it happen.” There are a lot of comments on the post, but they are worth skimming through. Trust me on this one.

I read on the weekend that a stunning 55 per cent of Americans believe in creationism over evolution, a statistic stuns me and frankly makes me want to weep.

Please, take a minute to inform yourself about this, and do what you can to support the cause. Speak up, the time is now.

Pretty please with screeches on top

My adorable 16 and 1/2 month old Simon has developed a bit of an annoying quirk of late. He’s on the cusp of being verbal, but doesn’t have access to enough words to clearly communicate his desires. And the boy has a lot of desires, which he feels passionately about.

For a while, when he saw something he wanted, like a banana, his soother or my hairbrush, he’d grunt meaningfully and reach toward the object of his attention. Then he realized if he screeched while gesturing significantly toward something, we were much more highly motivated to satiate his needs. At first it was grunt-gesture-pause-screech, then he dropped the time-consuming and generally unsuccessful grunt-gesture-pause and instead jumped straight to the eardrum-splitting screech.

Apparently, we were very accomodating in responding to his glass-shattering screech, because he began to employ it as a regular communication tool. Tristan took my toy – SCREECH! Please pass me that sippy cup – SCREECH! Look, the dog has a tail – SCREECH! I’m sitting in my highchair and there’s no food in front of me – SCREECH! I’ve just stuffed the last scrap of food into my face and I’m still hungry oh my god will there never be food in my life again if only I could reach that plate full of food right there in front of mommy before I starve – SCREECH!!

You get the picture.

It was getting a little tiresome, I am not afraid to admit. I explained to Beloved that it was just a phase, that as soon as he had words he would use those to communicate. We just had to put up with it for a little while. Beloved regarded me suspiciously and asked if I had somehow mated with an eagle, since Simon’s screeches sound remarkably like the starving baby eaglets on the National Geographic channel.

But this weekend, my incredibly brilliant mother changed all that. She taught Simon to say “Please.” Every time he screeched for something, she would pick it up, show it to him and say, “Please.” Within minutes, Simon was saying the most adorable version of “Pless” to ever grace the English language.

Damn, mothers really are smart. Even when you’re a mother, you realize that there is a hierarchy of mothers, and you might as well not even try because you’ll never be as clever as your mother.

So now, Simon walks around the house gesculating and hollering “PLESS” at the top of his lungs. You’ve never heard the word please imbued with so much emotion. My favourite was Simon in his highchair yesterday at lunchtime, waiting impatiently for another serving of apples pieces to be cut up. He balled up his little fists and bellowed “PLESS!” so loud his eyeballs bulged.

Who knew please could be a four letter word?

WW kiss off

I tried, I really did. I wanted it to work out.

I’m sorry, weight watchers, but it’s just not working out between us.

It’s not you, it’s me. Much as I have suspected all my life, I’m just not a diet kind of girl.

Four weeks into the programme, and I’m still up a pound from my starting weight. Ironically, the only week I totally blew through the point ceiling, my first week, was the week I lost two pounds. Ever since, I’ve been gaining. Go figure. And that’s not even using the extra 5 points a day I am theoretically entitled to as a nursing mother. Nursing only once per day, mind you, but still.

Plus, I’ve ended up exactly where I never wanted to be – obsessing about food. That’s exactly the thing that I most wanted to avoid. When I found myself pouting in the kitchen one evening after dinner, miserable because I wanted to eat two oreos and a glass of milk but berating myself over the points, I knew I was in a place I didn’t want to be.

I’ve decided to see someone else. I’ve signed up for a gym membership, which is what I wanted to do in the first place. I used to work out all the time before the boys came along. So I looked at my schedule, at my life, and figured if I have room enough to read a 500 page book in seven days, I have 45 minutes two or three times a week to work out.

To all of you who have been so sweet and supportive and encouraging in the past month, thank you! I hope you will stick around and continue to offer cheers and moral support, because I still have 10 or 15 lbs to lose, and I’m still planning on using blog to keep myself accountable. I’m just not going to do it via dieting.

(And since you’ve been so sweet, here’s a little secret: if you send an e-mail to WW online and tell you are a nursing mother and you would like them to please adjust your points because you heard from a friend you are entitled to extra points, they will cancel your membership with a full refund within two hours, don’t call us we’ll call you. Oh gosh golly, what a shame. Man, they are terrified of nursing mothers. You’d think I’d told them I had the plague. Thanks to Kaykota for sharing your experience on this frontier!)

Cooper, I hope you have better luck than me with WW. Sharon, good luck to you too and keep up the good work! Anna and twinmom, thank you so much for your encouragement. And to my now TWO secret weight loss buddies, please feel free to show me up and do so much better with WW than I did. Did I miss anyone? I’m grateful to all of you…

101 things about me

I have been neglecting one of my bloggy duties. It’s been almost six months since blog was born, and I haven’t yet posted my “101 things about me.” Before I am in violation of the blogosphere TOS, here we go:

1. I believe in positive thinking, and have been called a PollyAnna on more than one occasion.

2. I am the oldest of two siblings.

3. I have only one first cousin, and have never met any of my second (or third, etc.) cousins.

4. I am fascinated by large families.

5. I am the only girl grandchild. (You can see where I get my diva complex).

6. I played the flute in my high school band.

7. I wasn’t very good.

8. I rarely practiced.

9. My father was a professional drummer when I was growing up.

10. I have absolutely no sense of rhythm.

11. Nor could I carry a tune even if I had a wheelbarrow to put it in.

12. I have dimples and love to be complimented on them.

13. I have two boys whom I adore beyond words.

14. I have been to five European countries and six American states, but only three Canadian provinces.

15. I think this is shameful.

16. I had my first ever club sandwich in February of this year. I don’t know why I waited so long. It was tasty!

17. I believe in karma inasmuch as what comes around goes around.

18. I am a recovering Catholic.

19. I envy people who have absolute (and quiet) faith in God.

20. My own lack of faith makes me a little sad.

21. I have no tolerance for zealots.

22. I believe in a higher power, but not to the exclusion of science.

23. I do not believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God.

24. My current “religion” is a crunchy mix of two significant childhood influences: Jesus Christ Superstar and Star Wars.

25. I am mildly concerned that two references to Jesus Christ in the same post will bring some interesting Google traffic. Whoops, make that three references.

26. I have more than my share of hang-ups about sex.

27. My husband is an extremely patient man.

28. I love guacamole, and it’s one of the few things I cook that people actually request.

29. I am afraid of the dark.

30. I went to four different elementary schools because my parents moved a lot. Since I was always the new kid, I learned to be extroverted enough to cover my shyness. Which may or may not have had anything to do with the fact that…

31. …. I was the kid everybody picked on in grade school. I was picked last for every team, had only one or two friends, and was beat up regularly in the sixth grade. I have nothing nice to say about the people I went to elementary school with, with the exception of two brothers whom I love to this day.

32. I am an attention whore.

33. I read the newspaper religiously and love to read items of interest out loud to whomever is within range.

34. I quit university to work full-time as a cashier at Zellers.

35. I went back four years later to a different university, studied part time while working full time and graduated magna cum laude.

36. I am ridiculously proud of this.

37. I have never coloured my hair.

38. I have been married twice. The first guy was a true loser, but it took me years to get enough self-esteem to figure it out. The summer before we divorced, he gave his best friend this marital advice: “Keep putting her down until she stops fighting back.” Nice, eh?

39. For the most part, I get along with guys much better than girls. Only since I have become a mother has this balance started to swing the other way.

40. I am a reality TV junkie, but I am particular. I turn my nose up at The Bachelor and The Swan, but have never missed an episode of Survivor or the Amazing Race.

41. I have a crush on Evan Farmer, the host of While You Were Out.

42. The only thing I ever wanted out of life was to be a mom. The rest is just a means to an end.

43. I am very, very happy with my life and try to remember every day how lucky I am.

44. I collect autographed Canadian literature. It’s a small collection, but I’m proud of it. I have Margaret Atwood, Mordechai Richler, Douglas Coupland and a few others. I would most like an autographed Alice Munro, and would also like to have Roch Carrier sign Tristan’s copy of The Hockey Sweater.

45. I also have a near-complete collection of 1971 Topps baseball cards. I need only 6 cards of 525 to complete the series.

46. I have a strong fear of wide open spaces, especially at night.

47. This is probably why it’s a good thing I’ve never been to the prairies.

48. The same fear makes my stomach tighten when I look at large satellite dishes. (The little ones for TV are okay, though.)

49. Combined with my fear of the dark, my fear of wide open spaces makes astronomy an odd lifelong passion of mine.

50. Most of my time devoted to astronomy has been spent theoretically with books, rather than practically looking at the stars.

51. I loved the sunroof of my 1998 Sunfire because I could look at the night sky while wearing a seatbelt, the only time I could truly relax while star gazing.

52. I get peeved when people confuse astronomy with astrology.

53. I am a Leo.

54. I have miscarried two babies, one at 13 weeks and the twin of my eldest son at nine weeks.

55. It took two years of trying, two unsuccessful intrauterine inseminations and one in vitro fertilization before Tristan was finally conceived.

56. Simon was a surprise.

57. I have a fear of deep water. When I see the very dark indigo areas on globes that indicate places like the Mariana Trench, my knees get wobbly.

58. I am fairly successful as a professional, but have a hard time seeing myself that way.

59. I have worked with the same government department for 15 years, and can retire with a full pension in 19 years on my 55th birthday.

60. A lot of the best things in my life seemed to happen serendipitously. After I do a lot of hard work.

61. My husband is the best man I have ever known.

62. I am addicted to sunshine, although I have learned over the years to wear sunscreen if not a hat.

63. I have inherited clear skin, great legs and bad teeth from my mother.

64. I have also inherited a lioness’s protectiveness of my loved ones from my mother.

65. I am a strong woman because of my mother.

66. I have inherited my father’s sense of humour.

67. I have also inherited my father’s need to be loved by everyone.

68. My childhood memories, outside of school, ooze bliss.

69. I hope I can give my kids as wonderful a childhood as my parents gave me.

70. I cannot conceptualize my boys as grown ups or even teenagers.

71. I have funny food issues and have been caught and teased mercilessly for picking shepherd’s pie into separate piles of potato, meat and corn before eating the components separately.

72. My brother is worse.

73. My favourite comfort food is canned Heinz spaghetti over French fries.

74. My husband is disgusted by this and refuses to eat it.

75. I met my husband in a bar and followed him home to his apartment when he invited me to see his drawings.

76. We didn’t sleep together on our first date.

77. I can clap with one hand.

78. I am vain about my hair and spend ridiculous amounts of money on haircuts.

79. I have been growing my bangs out for more than a year and they are still only to my chin.

80. This is the first time I’ve been without bangs since I was 12. (Told you I was obsessed with my hair.)

81. I get migraine headaches that tend to last for four days, but they are not nearly as severe as they were before I had kids.

82. I tend not to drink because a four-day hangover is rarely worth it.

83. Coming up with 101 things about me is a stretch even for a narcissistic attention-whore.

84. I am addicted to Coca Cola Classic and hate Diet Coke with a passion.

85. I hate Pepsi even more. Diet Pepsi does not even merit mention.

86. I love baseball, even though I am terrible at it.

87. I spent a lot of time teaching myself the history of baseball many years ago and used to have a fairly encyclopedic if not useless stash of anecdotal baseball trivia taking up space in my brain.

88. I believe we will find life in outer space, and think it is simply impossible that we are the only intelligent species.

89. I need food at regular intervals and eight hours of sleep in order to be a functioning human being. I am certifiably bitchy if I am lacking either food or sleep. My husband will confirm this.

90. I would really, really like a daughter some day.

91. We have one frozen embryo left over from our IVF.

92. I have no idea whether we’ll ever do anything with it.

93. Infertility led me to a wonderful group of women and lifelong friends.

94. I am a klutz of the highest order.

95. When I was little, I wanted to be a journalist.

96. Blog is as close as I’ve ever come to being a “real” writer.

97. In my secret heart, I’ve recently begun to believe that maybe it will happen some day.

98. I don’t think I’d ever write fiction.

99. I don’t feel I have much of an imagination, although I do acknowledge I’m a pretty good writer when I’m on a roll.

100. I am strangely fascinated by memes and 100 things-about-me lists. Mind you, I think I’d also be fascinated by other people’s grocery lists. I’m a bit of a voyeur that way.

101. I genuinely hope we get all the answers when we die, because I have a lot of questions.

Categories:

New feature: The ’10 pages in’ book review

I had an idea!

I feel like Archemides. I’m so excited! I had an idea, and I think it’s an original idea at that. (Feel free to disabuse me of that notion if you must.)

When I posted my review, if you could call it that, of The Time Traveler’s Wife, I was only about 1/10 of the way into it, which for me is actually a pretty good time to write a review because much like Marla, after I read the last page and close the cover I promptly forget almost all the details and nuances of the story.

And then I started reading the next book on my list, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories and I almost put it down after 15 pages because it just wasn’t floating my boat. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I think a lot of the problem was because it was transitional book after my love affair with Time Traveler’s Wife, and you know that transitional book never stands a chance.

So I got to thinking – don’t you find that early in a book there’s a tipping point where you decide whether a book is worth the effort? At 10 or 20 pages in, you can still comfortably walk away and not feel like you’ve invested too much to quit. Or, like with Time Traveler’s Wife, you know you’re so hooked that you start canceling playdates and dental appointments just to make more time to read.

And that, in no shortage of words, is how I came up with my new trick, the “ten-pages-in review.”

Aren’t I clever?

The review doesn’t necessarily have to come at exactly the 10-page point, but early in the book, before you lose your objectivity and are determined to finish a book more from stubbornness than enjoyment and anticipation. Besides, calling it the “57 pages-in book review” didn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way.

And I even figured out how to subvert Blogger’s lack of categories and keep a running list of my soon to be famous ’10-pages-in reviews’ in the sidebar. Sheesh, I don’t usually have this many synaptic successes in a month!

So I’ll post this first, and then I’ll post the second instalment of my new series, the 10 pages in review of Case Histories. Whaddaya think?

Categories:

10-pages-in book review: Case Histories

I’m about 40 pages into Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories.

I can’t remember where I read the recommendation for this book, and I wish I could. The person making a recommendation has a lot to do with my frame of mind when I start reading a book. I didn’t know a thing about it when I started reading, hadn’t even read the Amazon reviews.

(Sidebar: do you like to read a lot of reviews or talk to a lot of people who’ve read the book before you read it, or do you prefer a blank slate? Just curious.)

I almost put it down within the first two chapters. I just couldn’t see where it was going. More accurately, I wasn’t sure it was somewhere I wanted to go. But there’s just enough in it to make me curious. I think it’s going to be a series of linked short stories, and I’ve always been a fan of short stories. The tone is very sombre, though. Not nearly as uplifting as that other book I can’t stop thinking about.

One thing I do find quaint about this book is that the edition I’m reading hasn’t been edited to take out all the charming little British colloquialisms. You can feel the cadence of the British speech rhythms in the writing. (This is the same reason I liked Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone so much better than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.)

So I’ve decided to stick with it.

Hmmm, after getting all this down, I’m beginning to doubt just how clever my new little trick is. Not much meat, is there? Speak, bloggy friends: what say ye? Shall we give it one more try?

Edited 19 June to add this conclusion:

I was wrong. This is really quite a terrific book! I got so wrapped up in the quirky characters and their odd entanglements that I was sad when the book ended. I wanted to know more about them, their lives, and where it all ended up.

Definitely worth reading!

Categories: