Independence Day

Happy Independence Day! (Feel more like Independence Week around here. There hasn't been a night since Friday that someone hasn't set off fireworks.) Hope everyone has a great day and stays cool!


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Premise vs Plot

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Premise and plot. They're both essential to every story, but they're not the same thing. I've had books where I loved the premise, but didn't love the plot. I saw a TV commercial for the movie Ted that showed the premise, but not the plot, and started thinking about the difference.

Premise
This is the basic idea. For example, the premise of Harry Potter is a boy attending a school that teaches wizardry. The premise of Twilight is a girl meeting a family of vampires. It's the foundation that the plot of which book and the overarcing plot of the series is based on. 

Plot
This is the arc that drives the story. It's the escalating conflict and has an obvious beginning, middle, and end. Going back to the Harry Potter example, this would be Harry's fight against Voldemort across the series. In the Twilight example, the plot would be the girl falling in love with the vampire and wanting to become one herself.


Here's the commercial for Ted that brought about…
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Rejection Throughout History: Christopher Columbus

That was the best weekend I've had in a long, long time. But now it's over and today is Monday...

For my English class, I had to write an essay on lessons that can be learned from Christopher Columbus' life. One of the lessons I addressed was:

Don't let rejection stop you.

When Columbus conceived the idea to find a trading route by sailing west from Europe to Asia, he needed funding. So he went first to the king of Portugal, King John II. The king listened to Columbus' proposal and passed it on to a committee. They denied his request, citing that it was too expensive, Columbus was wrong in his estimates on the distances and measurements, and that his plan conflicted with Portugal's desire for a trade route that went around Africa.

Columbus could've given up there. But instead he picked up his young son and moved to Spain. There, the Spanish monarchs were too preoccupied with a war against the Moors to really listen to his proposal. Queen Isabella was fascinate…
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RTW: Movies over Books

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This Week's Topic: What movie have you seen that actually (gasp!) improved on the book?
I have movies where I loved the book and hated the movie (Eragon), loved the movie but knew the book was better (Harry Potter), and adaptations that I'm able to enjoy separately (Hunger Games, The Lightning Thief).

Then, every once in awhile, a movie comes along that I like more than the book. This is more common in situations where I fall in love with the movie long before reading the book or I read the book some time before. Prince Caspian is the first movie I know of that I felt like that with. Part of it was the greatness of the movie, part of it was Ben Barnes, and part of it was the fact that I hadn't read the book …
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