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About This Author
I am SoCalScribe. This is my InkSpot.
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Blogocentric Formulations
Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics).
Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:
Thanks for stopping by! 
October 27, 2014 at 6:55pm October 27, 2014 at 6:55pm
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PROMPT: Are any recognizable authors from your hometown/current town? Have you read them?
Authors who were born and/or spent a considerable portion of their life growing up in Sacramento:
 Dale Brown
Joan Didion
 Nicholas Sparks
Cornel West
I've only read one of Nicholas Sparks' novels cover to cover:
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Amazon's Price: $ 10.97
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I have, however, either watched the movie adaptation of, or read part of the following:
The Notebook
Message in a Bottle
The Rescue
Nights in Rodanthe
Dear John
The Choice
The Lucky One
The Last Song
Safe Haven
I can pretty much sum up my feelings about Nicholas Sparks in four words... he's a terrible writer. If I were to make a list of authors whose work I enjoyed the least, it would include Stephenie Meyer and Nicholas Sparks at the very top. I'm not even going to get into a Twilight rant here and will keep this exclusively limited to Sparks, whose work I find to be unoriginal, blatantly exploitative in its melodrama, and written without much style or substance. I was thinking of a way to describe the fact that I feel like every Nicholas Sparks book is the same recycled plot with slightly different twists, but Cracked put it better than I ever could  .
I know everyone has their own personal tastes when it comes to books - and there are a great many Nicholas Sparks fans out there, my wife included - but it annoys me to no end when a writer essentially finds a successful formula and just repeats it over and over and over again in what I can only assume is an attempt to cash in. See also: Dan Brown and James Patterson. I fully recognize the fact that someone could probably choose an author I like and point out that they're the same way ... and I'm certainly not advocating that every piece of writing has to be highbrow "literature" ... but it's infuriating to see someone write pedestrian stories and receive wide acclaim for them, because I feel like it encourages what Terry Rossio so eloquently called the Crap-plus-One mentality, i.e. the opinion that, "Hey, if someone like that can get produced, then all I have to do is write something slightly better than that crap!"  There's a lot more to getting a book published or a movie made than writing "just a little better" than someone else, but when you read work like Sparks' and see his book sales, I definitely see where the temptation is for someone to try to imitate or only do slightly better than that and expect their own work to succeed wildly.
I might be extrapolating a little too much here, though. The honest truth is that (as evidenced from the list above), I keep trying Nicholas Sparks' books and other than A Walk to Remember, which was also a slog, I just couldn't get through any of his other books because they bored me. So thank goodness for Cornel West, 'cause I'm not particularly proud of the fact that Nicholas Sparks grew up in Sacramento. 
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October 27, 2014 at 5:50pm October 27, 2014 at 5:50pm
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PROMPT: Which children's author's work meant the most to you growing up?
There are a lot of authors I was tempted to use for this prompt. Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, and Judy Blume were all my picks for this prompt at one time or another, but I've instead chosen the person who first introduced me to poetry, long before I learned about Dickinson, Poe, Frost, or Hughes: Shel Silverstein was a poet, a singer/songwriter, a cartoonist, a screenwriter, and a children's book author. The books I remember most are his collections of poetry:
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I devoured these when I was a kid; it was really the first experience I had with poetic language and understanding that words could be crafted into shapes beyond just simple sentences. His poems range from the fun and silly to the deeper and more thought-provoking:
DIVING BOARD
You've been up on that diving board
Making sure that it's nice and straight.
You've made sure that it's not too slick.
You've made sure it can stand the weight.
You've made sure that the spring is tight.
You've made sure that the cloth won't slip.
You've made sure that it bounces right,
And that your toes can get a grip--
And you've been up there since half past five,
Doin' everything ... but DIVE.
His illustrations are sometimes wonderful highlights to the messages he's getting across, and at other times complement the poetry itself by providing information that adds new depth to the poetry, like this one:
And, of course, there's his classic and controversial picture book:
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Amazon's Price: $ 13.24
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What I love about this book is that it's so open to interpretation. There have been many a debate over what the book really means, and whether it's a beautiful story of a tree that gives up everything through its unconditional love for the boy, or whether it's a cautionary tale of the dangers of taking things for granted. Either way, and perhaps because you can argue both, I think it's an incredible work of art that means something to everyone, not just children.
Writing this blog post makes me really want to go back and re-read his poems. Along with Bill Watterson and his unparalleled Calvin & Hobbes, Silverstein remains one of the few authors that captivated me as a kid and still has a firm hold over me as an adult as well. Maybe that's because when I read their work, it makes me feel like a kid again.
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