What Did You Like Most (or Least) About Oscars 2010?

Well, the night was … not very surprising, right?

What did you like most or least about last night’s show?

(I was reading our analysis last year, which was pretty entertaining — especially our commentary about Hugh Jackman!)

But this year … hmmm.

Did you like the hosts? Did you like any of the presenters specifically? Did any of the fashion choices stand out?

Who Will You Be Watching at the Oscars?

I realize that how much you enjoy any given Oscars show is in direct proportion to how many of the movies you’ve seen. And, since Chris and I have had kids, our movie-going has waned considerably (unless you count movies like “Doug,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and any Pixar film). However, I’ve always enjoyed the Oscars.

In college, I had a friend who would drag me to every single “Best Picture” movie throughout January and February so we’d be ready at Oscar night to cheer the right one. Those were high-movie-watching, high-Oscar-enjoyment years.

And at The Register, we used to print out the ballots from the paper and run a huge Oscar pool. Which meant that, despite the fact I’d rarely seen any of the movies in those years (since my kids were just babies, and babysitters were expensive), I still loved the Oscars because I had money riding on everything. That made it fun to watch even if I haven’t seen the movies — suddenly I reeeeeeally cared who won for Cinematography!

These days, Chris and I tend to see at least three or four of the movies nominated, and now I “work” the Oscars — which really means I just man the phone from home while my colleague Mari is on the red carpet. She’s our entertainment reporter at Lifescript, and covers all the big entertainment events with her press passes. And I’m the social media editor, so, together, we’re on the phone all night, while I help her tweet out her observations and get her pictures up on our Twitter stream, Facebook fan page and the Health Bistro blog. She’s a lot of fun, and she makes awards nights very entertaining. Continue reading

Whatcha Reading?

I updated my “currently reading” page, but I feel like I’m forgetting a book. … I’ll have to go back and look at my nightstand/Kindle purchases! 

And I’d like to start Nicholls’ “One Day” this week for the book club, but I’m woefully behind. Maybe I can do it.

What are you all reading these days? Anything keeping you up, turning pages into the night?

Writing the Dreaded Synopsis

 So this weekend I was able to steal a little time to force myself into a desk chair and write the synopsis for Adam and Simone’s story, Earning Wings. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t pretty. But it had to be done.

So what’s a synopsis? For my non-writer friends, a synopsis is a 5- to 10-page summary of your book, which you send to prospective editors and/or agents so they don’t have to read the whole thing. It describes the main characters, tells all the conflicts, how the conflicts are resolved, and explains how your book ends.

And it’s painful to write.

The reason it’s so hard to write is that you’ve just spent a year or two (or three!) wrestling with every single word of this 300-page story, so to write it again — in some kind of abbreviated format — is a little excruciating. Especially because you don’t know what to leave in or take out. You know you need to stick to “bare bones” to keep it to 10 pages or less, but you also wish you could include that great scene that has all the flavor of the book, and omg, I have to include the dialogue where they first fall in love, and what about that funny secondary character when he does xyz, etc., etc. … It’s killer. Continue reading

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