Feature and Follow Friday #3

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. 

This week's question: Books are turned into movies all the time! Turn it around. What movie would make a great book?

Hmmm...this is a hard one. I'm a bit of a movie junkie, but I've never really thought about it before. Martin Socrecese's The Departed is one of my favourites, so I'll go with that one. It'd be cool with alternating perspectives, what with all the spying and undercover stuff going on. We'd get a whole different look into the characters' heads.

What do you guys think? Leave a comment so I can go check your posts out!

Feature and Follow Friday

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. 

This week's Question: Do you mind books with similar ideas to other books? Similar concepts, backgrounds, retellings or pulled-to-publish fanfic? 

Hmmm, this is a hard one. I'm one of those people that believes that there's not really anything new under the sun. But it's not really the basic idea that's important, it's what you do with it. Basically, I don't mind when an idea is similar to another, as long as it's spun in a different way. There were stories about magical boarding schools long before J.K. Rowling came along, what made her so awesome was that she managed to do something entirely unprecedented with the idea. Do something crazy, and new and completely awesome with an old idea and I won't hate you for it, in fact it might even make me love you all the more! As for retellings-- I love retellings, especially fairy tale ones (however, this may be in part due to my love of fairy tales in general. So bring me ALL THE FAIRY TALE RETELLINGS).

Published fanfic *sigh*. This is a complicated topic. I, quite adamantly, find nothing wrong with fanfiction. The fanfic writer isn't making any profit of another author's work, and so it doesn't negatively impact anyone in any way. And for that matter, there is a lot of beautifully written fanfiction out there (sometimes it's just a little hard to find). Now, when a fanfiction story is re-vamped and slated for publication, things get a little bit tricky. If the story is a completely different one, where there are similar themes or origins (like Cassandra Clare's Immortal Instrument series) that's fine. But when you get a story where basically only the names and some slight aesthetic details have been changed (like another story I won't name here), that's when you get into dangerous territory.

So, in short (even though this wasn't short at all), similar ideas are fine with me. As long as the authors do something cool with them.

What are your thoughts on the question? Leave a comment so I can go check out all your awesome posts!

Feature and Follow Friday

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. This week they're featuring two lovely blogs: Carmen Jenner and The YA Bookworm Blogger. Go follow them!

This week's Question: What writing device or trick most irritates you when reading a book? For example, if an author employs an omnipotent narrator that is sometimes considered bad form.

In my review of Blackwood I mention how I hate insta-love (thankfully that book was mercifully free of it). And I have come to a conclusion: It's not necessarily fast-moving relationships that bother me; it's when the love story is presented as the Truest Love That Ever Was. No one else comes close, these two characters are freaking Romeo and Juliet reborn, that's how magnificent their love is.

Gag me.

I think the problem is it's often used as an excuse to not write a real relationship. It's like the author thinks that if they tell me this is Deep Love, I'll believe it, and they won't need to spend the time developing a believable connection between the characters. But that plan always backfires. It makes me want to release a rabid ninja unicorn who will then stomp on the supposed True Love with its magic hooves until the True Love disappears and stops making me mad. Okay, rant is over.

So what's your FF? What annoys you in a book? Tell me in the comments so I can follow all of you totally awesome people! (Way to sound like a stalker, Hannah...)