Can I Get a Side of Reality With That?

Busy busy busy

2012-01-25T12:08:00.003-06:00

I'm going to assume that everyone else's first of the year is just as busy as mine, if for no other reason than to excuse myself for not having posted the last few weeks. I've been buried under mountains of work, and will continue to be buried for the next couple of weeks. But I promise to return with all kinds of fun posts about stuff I haven't even thought of yet. That's how prepared I am.

Hope your January is going well!

This could be the last 2012 EVAR

2012-01-06T10:52:00.000-06:00

It's a new year, gentle readers, according to my calendar. I'm having a private detective follow up on these claims that it's January, as I'm highly suspicious, but until they come back with proof that October 2011 never actually happened (because SERIOUSLY), I have no choice but to believe it.

Mayan calendars aside, I'm looking forward to 2012. I learned some valuable lessons in 2011 about myself, my writing, and my amazing capacity for eating Mexican food. I plan to learn more, share more, explore more, and for sure eat more. I'm not really a New Year's Resolutions kind of girl, but I am a fresh starts kind of girl. So every January 1st is a chance at a fresh start, a renewed vigor for capturing the goals we set for ourselves the year before.

What are your goals for 2012? What are you proud of accomplishing in 2011? Do you also share my intense love of beans that have been fried TWICE!?!

I really just used this sentence

2011-12-16T08:30:00.000-06:00

"The egregious breaches of grammar protocol are fun!"

Happy Friday, gentle readers.

Dream a little dream

2011-12-14T08:30:00.000-06:00

Or conversely, The Importance of Being Dreamist. I should warn you, this is a long rambling post with lots of parenthetical statements (as I am wont to do), so maybe grab a cup of coffee before you start in on it.

I get a little soft-eyed around the holidays, with the weather turning grayer and the fireplace more inviting, and the end of yet another year looming fast. You really only get six days to think about the impending new year after Christmas, which isn't much time to pack in those end of year specials the networks love. So I start my own personal JEMiniscing (see what I did there?) a little early.

This year, I've discovered that trying to be an author is HARD. Plotting a book is hard, finding the right words to convey your story is hard, sharing that story with others is hard, editing is hard, querying is hard, and I'm sure it's just as hard to try and get that book published and loved by the general audience. I hope to find out some day. But the hardest part of all of this, at least for me, is keeping my spirits up during this whole process. When taken as a whole it seems an insurmountable task to actually write and publish a book that people will love. And standing at the beginning of a new story, starting all over, is kind of like trying to love again after a failed marriage. You're not even sure you're ready to trust someone new, and SNIs have a funny way of luring you in and then betraying you after 60,000 words.

I've run up against this mountain of a molehill a lot this year. I finished a manuscript that I hoped was ready for querying, and have spent the better part of this year editing, writing queries, revising said queries, sending my work out to everyone I could trust/bother to tell me how to make it better, and sending out queries. I didn't have a spare moment for any new stories, and when I tried writing them they floundered after a couple hundred words. I needed all of my energy for the book I wanted to query.

But I found out soon enough that the energy wasn't there. Every query felt like a hundred ton weight around my neck. The research, the personalizing, the endless editing, only to get a form rejection after 30 minutes (or never hearing back again). I knew this was part of the process, and I haven't given up, but it took a lot of the fun out of the story, and I found myself questioning every decision I ever made (should she really have eaten chicken soup?!?). I consider myself a pretty strong person, but I started questioning why I thought writing was the path for me in the first place.

I took a step back from the whole process a couple of weeks ago to collect myself and my thoughts and devise a new game plan. And what I discovered is that I need dreams. All day, all night, staring out the window type dreams. I need stories that fill my head with people who seem more real to me than my own best friends. Stories that whisk me away from gloomy days to even gloomier days with dark and stormy nights and tall handsome strangers. I need to be a princess, a warrior, a gypsy, a thief, maybe even a tramp. My poor little grinch heart feeds on dreams, and I was starving myself.

I started writing again. I started at page one, word one, and let myself dream. And now, even though the querying is still hard and the plotting trips me up (but how do I get them OUT of the cave?), I'm happy. I'm entertained, and I'm renewed in my efforts to fight for these characters to share their story somehow, some way. I've unstoppered the bottle and let the genie out, and he's running amok with my imagination. I think they're planning a timeshare in the Poconos.

So my advice to you, no matter where you are in the journey, is to keep dreaming. Dream all day, dream all night, ignore your emails and celebrity gossip sites and laundry and just dream. And if that doesn't work, just dance.

Overprotecting your characters

2011-12-05T08:30:00.000-06:00

I have a tendency to overprotect my MCs. They are my little cacti - I spend so much time nurturing them, pruning them into the perfect shape with just enough soil and a cute decorated pot, that I don't want to mess them up. I'm not going to put my delicate little cacti out in the desert, do you know what lives out there? Lizards and cow bones, if I believe every western movie I've ever seen. And it's hot, and animals eat their delicious buds. No no no, not for my little cacti.

The problem with that mentality is that cacti are supposed to live in the desert. They are supposed to survive the heat and get their little buds eaten and hang out with cow bones. And literary characters are supposed to get in trouble. They're supposed to struggle and fail and get threatened by evil villains. That's what makes them interesting to follow for 300+ pages.

But when we get so attached to our characters, we sometimes do them (and the story) a disservice by protecting them from bad things. My critique group recently discussed a YA piece in which the MC struggles with being in love with her best friend. She has such a history with the guy that it breaks her heart to see him go out with other girls. The problem with the story is that we didn't get any of that history, so as a reader I didn't understand how he was breaking her heart. I knew they had a history, but without seeing it I couldn't experience the MC's pain.

Turns out, my critique partner was so concerned with protecting her MC from that hurt that she didn't allow the MC to show us that pain. She shielded the MC from reliving the past hurts, which meant we as the readers didn't get to see them, either. The writer knew them perfectly, but didn't share. As a reader, I needed to live through those moments with the character, I needed to hurt with her. It was the only way I was going to feel as shaky and defensive against him in the present as the MC does.

I'm not innocent in this whole scenario, either. In one of my earlier manuscripts, a beta reader of mine gave me some of the most helpful feedback that I've ever received, and that I've tried to carry through my future work: he told me that he always knew my character was safe. Even when she was in the most dire of situations - and believe me, they were dire - he knew she would get free. Something about the way I wrote the scenes, the way I overempowered her, broke the tension of scene. Sure, she's trapped, but we know she's going to get free. There wasn't any urgency to it.

So now I fight that need to save my character. They're supposed to be in trouble, that's why I'm writing about them. And even if I am going to save them, it shouldn't be obvious how. And they might not escape without a few scrapes or a broken heart. Oooor, they might not escape at all...

Do you overprotect your characters? Or do you enjoy torturing them even more?

Confession session

2011-11-21T16:02:00.001-06:00

Okay, I can't beat Usher's confessions (she's got a what on the way?!), but still. I've got some things to get off my chest.

1) I see peanuts at the grocery store in the unsalted and lightly salted varieties and I want to know where the heavily salted option is. I like my legumes with a flavor of high blood pressure.

2) I like to collect random skillsets. I've worked as a barista learning coffee craftsmanship, I'm preparing for a black belt test in Taekwondo, I've flown a plane, I'm handy with ProTools recording software, and I can find my way around any subway system in the world. Next I've got my eye on glass blowing and archery.

3) Thank you, Facebook, for allowing me to spy on high school acquaintances without the awkward name tags and fruit punch of a reunion. Also, thanks for giving me enough info about my high school crushes to know how much I don't regret the past.

4) I love Disney movies. And I'm not talking about the classics - although I love those - I'm talking about Disney Channel movies. Avalon High, High School Musical, The Even Stephens Movie, Cadet Kelly - I've seen them, and I love them. And I also think I could do a better job of writing them. Which is probably a lie.

5) A coworker of mine brought in some satsumas for the entire office and I've eaten at least 70% of them. I also took a bag home with me. I should feel shame, but I don't.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sometimes we need a little backstory

2011-11-09T15:07:00.000-06:00

My book club is reading The Time Traveler's Wife this month. I read the book a few years ago for a previous book club, but I was interested to come back to it as an aspiring writer. It is, after all, a very popular book that has done really well on the bestseller lists. Thanks to having the memory retention of a fruit fly, I only vaguely remembered the plot points of the book - he traveled through time, he had a wife - so I was coming to the story with a relatively fresh set of eyes.

Lo and behold, this book was breaking rules all OVER the place! There was a prologue, for one (I thought only J.R.R. Tolkien could get away with that). And what was the prologue about, you ask?

BACKSTORY.

The insidious, not to be trusted, never to be included, BACKSTORY. Yeah, it's an all-caps kind of thing. The whole prologue basically establishes what happens when Henry, Mr. Time Traveler, time travels. Where he goes, how he ends up there, how he feels, what happens to him when he gets there, etc. It's not tied to a specific event in any way, it's really just to give the reader a basis for understanding what kind of time traveler he is. It's classic backstory info.

So why is it in there? How did it get past the keen eyes of beta readers, agents, and editors?

I obviously can't say for certain, but I can hazard a guess. Because while it is backstory, it's not an info dump. We're not getting his whole life history - in fact, we're not really getting a history at all - we're just getting enough information for us to understand the story that's coming up. They're details that are necessary to understand how the time travel affects his life, and rather than awkwardly integrating them into a scene, the author uses the opportunity to establish the character's personality and his relationship to the time travel. It's backstory, but it's character-building backstory, and it's intriguing enough to draw us into the rest of the story. It's an atypical time traveler scenario (she describes it as a disease), so the premise is set from the beginning, as is the conflict.

The lesson I took away from this book is that a little backstory never hurt anyone, SO LONG AS it helps the story. It should be accomplishing something else at the same time - establishing the conflict, introducing character personalities and habits, setting the hook of the story, etc. It's especially useful in cases like The Time Traveler's Wife, where we need to know the technical details of something but we don't want those details bogging down an actual scene.

I know BACKSTORY is a hotly debated topic, but it's still needed. Even if you only mention certain pieces of the story, we need that info before going into a scene so we as the reader are appropriately set up to understand the tension of the scene. The trick is knowing when to stop so you don't inundate your reader with unnecessary and tension-breaking info.

What about your thoughts on BACKSTORY? Do you agree, disagree, unagree, reagree? Weigh in!

Officially querying

2011-11-07T10:13:00.001-06:00

Hello gentle readers, and a "sorry it's Monday but Friday's only four days away" to you as well. While most of you are deep in the NaNo trenches, I am deep in the querying trenches. I officially started sending out query letters for my latest project last week, and have been busily updating my spreadsheet of agents as I receive responses back. It's taken me this long to determine whether or not I actually wanted to talk about querying, but it's not fight club, so Tyler Durden probably won't show up at my house in the middle of the night if I post this.

First, and most importantly, it's a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be. I knew there would be rejection, gentle readers (a word I'm growing to hate). I had prepared myself. I knew it was an uphill battle, that I would have to fight for agents to read my query, and fight harder for them to request additional materials, and fight even harder to find the agent who would be ~~crazy enough~~ willing to champion my work to an editor. And I knew the difficulties didn't end there, either. I had mentally prepared myself for all of this, to receive those form rejections, to obsess over a comma in an email, to read and read and re-read my work until I couldn't remember how to spell "the" anymore.

What I didn't anticipate - and what's been kicking me in the butt for the last week and half - is how it would feel to be rejected by agents on my carefully cultivated list of submissions. It wasn't just that an agent was passing on my material, it was that I'd spent hours/days/weeks pulling together a list of agents I thought were best suited to represent my work. They were the agents that work in my genre, that rep other authors with titles similar to mine, and if anyone was going to get my weird little story they would be the ones. So getting a pass from someone like that is almost like being rejected by the genre itself. It makes me question myself and my work, which is what I was trying to avoid all along.

But before you cry for me, Argentina, you should know I'm a fairly resilient person. Acknowledging the problem is the first step on the road to recovery, and my focus going forward is to keep honing my craft and keep cultivating my list. For the most part I don't know why they pass on my work, so I can't psych myself out with imagined reasons why they don't want to represent me. All I can control is my own effort, which is much better spent improving my writing and not crying over pints of Ben and Jerry's (who should totally make a Chardonnay flavor. Two birds, one stone).

Where are you in the writing process? Are you also querying your work? How do you handle your query journey?

Even on vacay I'm working

2011-10-27T11:58:00.002-05:00

Well, relatively speaking. I just got back from eight glorious days in New York where I ate too much Thai food, walked about a billion miles, smelled about a billion smells, and met a girl who met Anjelica Huston, which basically means I met Anjelica Huston. The weather was perfect, the coats were amazing, and Central Park was a dream.

But even amongst all this vacationing glory, gentle reader, my brain was working. How, you ask? Because my manuscript is set in New York, which means my trip wasn't just about vacation - it was reconnaissance. I stalked all the major locations, found nearby restaurants, made note of subway stops, and people watched the crap out of those places. I'd done my research beforehand - of course - but seeing it live in person was a whole new level of understanding. Instead of just imagining the jarring rides of the subway or the feel of a hundred miles of concrete under my boots, I was living those scenes. Now I have more than just Google street views of places, or second-hand knowledge from friends - I have my own memories to write against, which is a much richer experience.

Next book I write will be set in Greece. Or Italy. Oooo, or both. I'm off to plan.

Do you like to write about places you've never been, or do you stick close to home? Have you ever done your own reconnaissance on vacation?

Austin Teen Book Festival - part deux

2011-10-11T08:30:00.000-05:00

So, last I left you we had sat through a swoon-worthy I Heart Love Stories panel with Simone Elkeles, Jenny Han, Cristina Garcia, Stephanie Perkins, Jennifer Ziegler, and Christina Mandelski. After a quick stop by the book sellers tables to pick up my plundered goods, I moseyed over to the Alternaworlds panel for the final event of the day.

This crowd was ENORMOUS. It could have something to do with Scott Westerfeld's presence on the panel - the Festival had a steampunk theme in honor of Leviathan - but I think it was more that they consolidated panels for the last event so that we were the only panel on the first floor of the events center. I'm terrible with numbers, but I would guess there were at least two hundred people there, filling up the chairs and crowding the sides of the space for a chance to get closer to the stage. If I'd have been a teenager, I would have done the same thing. Authors rarely get the celebrity they deserve, so I was almost a bit giddy at the feeling of so many people (young people!) at a book event.

The Alternaworlds panel included Scott Westerfeld, Maureen Johnson, Jonathan Maberry, Brian Yansky, and Rosemary Clement-Moore. Whereas the Love Stories panel was focused on love stories as a genre, this panel was much more focused on the art and craft of writing, and the craft of world building. Once again there were a lot of young authors, so the audience asked great questions about the craft of writing and I shamelessly stole their answers to share with all of you:

Maureen Johnson talked about chasing down the "what ifs" and even threw out some Holly Black name dropping in the process. She said that Black was the queen of asking the right questions when developing a new story idea, and it basically consisted of a relentless string of questions. What if ghosts existed? How would they integrate with society? Could everyone see them? What could they physically do? What would the government do about them? The key to asking the right questions is to step back far enough to see the full scope of the picture, and then slowly drill down until you know all of the specifics.
Scott Westerfeld had the ultimate cure for writer's block: lock yourself in a room with nothing else to do for four hours. You'll get over that block real fast. For someone whose house suffers from enough shiny distractions to captivate a kitten, I can understand the advice.
Jonathan Maberry talked about being realistic within the fantastic. I've gone over the same concepts with my writing partners, so it was nice to get some backup from a successful published author. Even if your world includes zombies, like his, there still has to be a realistic structure to the world and how people function within it. The closer you stay to the real world - with fantastic twists - the more your readers can connect with the characters and believe the events that transpire.

Those were the highlights of the panel for me, mainly because I let two weeks go by without writing about it :). My overall feeling about the Festival, however, was that I've been missing out on prime opportunities to learn from these authors by not going to more author events in the past.

Austin Teen Book Festival - part un

2011-10-04T10:43:00.000-05:00

I had a lovely book-filled Saturday this weekend, kicked off by a book release party for one of my critique partners at Book People here in Austin. She is the illustrator of a new children's book, and it was so fun to see all of the children reacting to the story when she read aloud. It was a Halloween-themed book, so of course they had a costume contest. There was a girl that didn't even come up to my waist dressed as a witch, and she accidentally swept my feet with her straw broom at least twice. All in all, a successful morning.

Then we headed over to the Austin Teen Book Festival for the afternoon. I've actually never been to a book event outside of BEA (and that was for work, so it almost doesn't count), so I was curious to see how this one would go. I only heard about it through my critique partner, who only heard about it through a book reviewer friend of hers, so I was worried there wouldn't be much of a crowd to support the authors who would be speaking there. Scott Westerfeld was the keynote speaker, but we got there late in the afternoon so we missed the keynote. I was most excited to hear from Simone Elkeles, since I have a mad agent crush on her agent, and Jackson Pearce because I have a mad crush on anything she does.

I was happy about how many names I recognized on the panels - Simone Elkeles, Scott Westerfeld, Melissa Walker, David Levithan, Jackson Pearce, Stephanie Perkins, and a host of other fantastic authors and speakers (see them all here). The Festival also had a great idea to host all four of the panels at the same time, four times over the course of the day, so you didn't miss a panel if you wanted to see them all. We had time enough for two panels, so I picked the I Heart Love Stories panel and the Alternaworlds panel. I originally wanted the Supernatural Suspense for my Jackson Pearce lady crush, but because of sound issues they couldn't host that panel at the end of the day.

I Heart Love Stories included Cristina Garcia, Simone Elkeles, Jenny Han, Stephanie Perkins, Jennifer Ziegler, and Christina Mandelski. Simone and Stephanie were definitely the big names on the panel, and most of the questions were directed at them. I had heard of Anna and the French Kiss, but that's not typically my type of book. However, after seeing Stephanie on the panel I definitely want to pick up her books. She was cute, fashionable, young, and funny. And Simone was exactly what I expected her to be - funny, sassy, irreverent, and charming. I'd like to think she and I had a moment when I pretended that I might want a vampire boyfriend in space (don't ask).

The audience asked some great questions, so I got a lot of takeaways from this panel:

One girl asked how she could make her love story less predictable. Simone countered that love stories are predictable - in fact, in a romance novel it's what you rely on. You know they're going to get together. The tension comes from the obstacles they have to overcome to be together. It's about how much crap can you throw at them, how insurmountable can you make the odds? If they're good enough and believable enough, then even the expected ending is still satisfying.
Cristina Garcia said that typically romance novels have happy endings and love stories have tragic endings (apparently this is a standard knowledge thing of which I'm only just now aware). The panel discussed at large what this meant in their writing, and most of the women agreed that a good story has a healthy blending of both. Apparently Romeo and Juliet are NOT the standard in storytelling today (and thank goodness for that).
Another audience member asked about the reality of these overwhelming love stories. Both Stephanie and Simone said they met their husbands when they were teenagers, and that they wrote from a place of experience. I think Simone said it best: "Falling in love as a teenager was the best thing that ever happened to me. And the worst." (Cue the lady crush)
The panel overwhelmingly agreed that you can't write to the market. You have to write the story that you want to write, and then make a market for yourself.
There were A. LOT. of young writers there. Most of the questions came from young people - boys and girls - and were about stories they're writing. It was amazing to see hundreds of kids willing to spend a Saturday talking about books and writing. Warmed the cold, dead cockles of my heart.

The overall feeling of this panel was sweet and encouraging, and made me want to get out there and write about cute boys and school dances. The Alternaworlds panel also had some great advice, but I'll save that for another day.

What did you do this weekend? Anything fun and/or writing related?

Leaving a writing group

2011-09-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

I've been in a great local writing group for almost a year now, and these fellow critters have been essential in improving my writing, calling out my faults and lazy shortcomings, and encouraging me to continue on with my writing even when it feels like I've just word vomited on the page. I am a better writer because of them, and I can't imagine my writing life without their continued support and input.

So imagine my surprise when our founding member, the critter who brought the group together in the first place, emailed over the weekend to let us know he would be stepping out of the group. (Yeah, you thought it was going to be me, didn't you?) As the person who was the driving force behind the group for so many months, it was a shock to see him bow out now. It was (what I suspect are) the usual reasons for leaving a group - balancing family time and writing time. And I can hardly blame him for his reasons, since the closest thing I have to a kid is the partner-in-crime and our trusty sidekick, The Dog.

Still, it was a big disappointment for me. He'd brought us all together, weathered the storms of our growing pains while we figured out meeting times and submission deadlines and new member rules. As the only male in the group he gave invaluable feedback on the male characters and male voices in our pieces, and helped us determine what would appeal to boys in our writing. His own writing had grown by leaps and bounds in the group, and the last piece he submitted was so many miles above the first draft that we saw that I experienced a profound sense of pride in how far he'd come, and how much the group had helped him.

While I hope he continues to write and finds other outlets for his creativity, I worry. I worry because I know how lost I would be without their feedback. I worry because I know how much I would let my self-imposed deadlines slip if there were no one else to hold me accountable. I worry because writing is a lonely enough endeavor that if you don't have an outlet to discuss it you might find yourself wondering why you're pursuing it at all. I worry because I know how much my own life gets in the way of writing, and I don't even have kids to keep up with.

I worry because I can't help but feel like we've lost another writer in the world.

It's a hard pursuit, I know that, but I think it's worth it. The stories we tell, the joy we bring, for me it's worth the late nights and the early mornings and the longing looks outside when it's beautiful and you're stuck inside with a synopsis to write. It's worth the rejection and the wait and the agonizing edits and the overwhelming fear that you might get it wrong (or you might get it right). Because I still remember what it felt like to stay up until four in the morning hiding in the bathroom finishing a book because I Just. Couldn't. Put. It. Down. And if I can inspire just one person to such nocturnal fevers, it will be worth it.

Have you ever lost a critique partner? How did you feel when they left? Was there ever a partner you wished you could have talked out of their exit?

Movies vs. Books: the plot thickens

2011-09-20T08:30:00.000-05:00

I saw the movie Drive this weekend, starring Ryan Gosling and some other people I didn't pay attention to (fine, it had a good cast, but come on. RYAN. F-ING. GOSLING. Pretty sure that's his middle name). It was a very different film from what I expected given the trailer, which made me think of the concepts of storytelling and backstory. As in, how much do you know/need to know about your characters and story, and how much do you reveal in the story itself?

I read a review of the movie after having seen it and the review pointed out one major point that I completely missed while watching the film: Ryan Gosling's character has no name. Even in the credits, they simply refer to him as "Driver." This one caught me off guard, because I've had this very conversation in many of my crit groups, and I've heard it from more than one source - you need to have character names. It's how readers identify a character, and if they can't name a character - even the narrator - they get antsy about it after a while. I know I do. But in the film, I never even noticed that his character was never named. How could they get away with such a thing under my trained nose?

Because I had a face. Ryan Gosling's face. I didn't need to know his name because his face was what identified him on the big screen. For me, it was the equivalent of giving me a name, because it was an instantly recognizable feature of that character. You can get away with it on screen, since it's a visual aspect, but giving a character description every time in lieu of a name doesn't really work. So for movies, we have faces. For books, we have names.

The second thing I noticed (which I actually did notice) was a complete absence of backstory. Gosling's character has a very specific side job (no spoilers, I promise) that is an offshoot of his day job but certainly not in the same legal category. He's a young guy with an old world feel, and being the writer-type I am, my first question was "How did he come to this line of work?" It's not something people fall into, and the backstory would have helped tremendously in my efforts to believe the character and what he knew. But we're never given a hint of backstory.

This movie is actually based on a book, so I'm curious if the book goes into his past in more detail. I would hope it does, because it drove me crazy throughout the movie. I kept expecting the explanation to trickle out along the way, to give us more depth to the character and build the anticipation of what he would do. But we never even got acknowledgement from any of the other characters that this might be a question to ask. No one, anywhere along the way, ever asked him "Where did you learn how to do that?" It left me feeling unsatisfied at the end of the film.

I would argue that this isn't something you can get away with in a book. You certainly HAVE TO KNOW your character's backstory - and not just the main character, either. Even if we never hear it, even if we never get to know all the nitty gritty details, you as the writer need to know it in order to fully realize your characters. It can be annoying and tiresome to think through it on that level, but it's essential. And for me personally, as a reader I like to know the backstory, especially if it's relevant to the details of the story you're telling. I don't need to know everything, but I like to see it sprinkled in here and there to give me context for the character I'm following. It's not an area often visited by movies - frankly they don't have the time - but it's necessary in any good story.

Have you seen any movies lately that have highlighted some conventions of storytelling specific to the written word? Have you read any books lately that felt like movies and left you wanting more?

It's all about perception

2011-09-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

I had a funny encounter with one of my fellow critiquers last night that really brought home a big concept for me. One of the issues I struggle with during any critique is being able to look at the feedback objectively. Typically that involves setting my own biases aside to determine whether or not I think the feedback is valid.

We were discussing a character in my manuscript that had just gone through a scene of trying on clothes. In the scene, she complains because none of the clothes fit her right. The group debated what they thought she looked like - some people thought she was tall and lanky and wouldn't have felt fat, some thought she was heavier and would have, some people wanted more character description. All of that is fine and good, but as we continued the conversation one girl said something that shocked me.

"She could be curvy," she explained to the others. "Even if she were a size 8, she could still have nice curves."

Now, we're not supposed to talk during these things when we're being critiqued, but I couldn't help myself.

"I'm sorry," I interrrupted. "I have a question. Do you think size 8 is large?"

Her eyes got big. "Well, yeah."

This was a moment for me, gentle readers. Because I happen to be size 8, and I have never in my life heard anyone refer to size 8 as "large." It's pretty solidly average in my book, and I am pretty solidly average myself. I ran through all the logical scenarios I could think of in my head for a moment, and asked the first question that came to mind.

"How tall are you?"

"Five two."

Uh, yeah. Me? Not five two. Not even close to five foot two inches tall. And then it made sense, in a way. If I were about half a foot shorter and the same proportions, I would probably be considered a lot curvier than I am now. But having never been five foot two (well, at least not for a good fifteen years), it would have never occurred to me that my size could be considered large.

What's the lesson for me in this? That sometimes, no matter how much you edit or how many people weigh in on your manuscript, someone will have a bias that you'll never even think of. So as much as I'll continue to worry about making myself as clear as possible, I've also relaxed about capturing all of those butterflies with my net.

What about you? Have you run into issues of perception with beta readers? How did you choose to handle it in your manuscript?

Random thoughts on a...Wednesday? Really? Already?

2011-08-24T12:28:00.000-05:00

1) I'm going to need pictures of me to start better aligning with how I see myself in my head. Read: Natalie Portman.

2) I've been stood up on three client calls this week. We don't have waiters in my office, but I imagine the same look of pity and shame when my coworkers come into the room.

3) I know it's been a rough Texas summer when I'm almost jealous of the East Coast for having a hurricane.

4) I don't usually write to music since I find it too distracting (yeah, maybe I act out music videos in my head, judgment-free zone). But I started a Pandora station for Film Scores and it's actually an awesome station to write to. Plus I've already got the movie all planned out now.

5) There are some new fall/spring shows on the big networks that look really good. Like I can already feel my productivity running down the drain good. I'll call it "character research" when I watch, but that will be a lie.

6) I can't decide if I should stop reading about the economy because it's freaking me out or if I should keep reading so I'm an informed citizen. Mostly I've resolved this by playing games on my phone and reading celebrity gossip blogs.

7) Oh, ten is so not happening today.

What's your random thought for the day?

Picking and choosing

2011-08-17T10:04:00.000-05:00

Not to be confused with picky or choosy. Although I can be those sometimes as well.

When I first started receiving feedback on my writing, I thought that if someone said something it must be true. Which meant it must be changed. So if someone said, "This scene is dumb, take it out," I took it out. And if someone said "I don't like this character, give her blue hair," I gave her blue hair. That's what feedback is for, right? At some point our editorial vision turns myopic and we can't see the forest for the trees, so we ask others to read our work and tell us when we've jumped the shark (maybe literally).

As you might imagine, this eventually put me in a really frustrating cycle. I'd change something for one critique partner and another would say they hated the change. I'd change it back and a third reviewer would say I should go in an entirely new direction. I had so many voices in my head that I couldn't hear my own, and my story fell apart in revisions. I actually walked away from a manuscript - probably the best thing I've written to date - because I didn't even know what I wanted it to be anymore. I'd put it through too many critiques by too many people in too many rounds. My beautiful jello mould had melted into a glob of hot mess.

I took a very different approach with critiques on my current manuscript. I restricted the number of reviewers and made sure they were a diverse enough group to catch 90% of the plotting or characterization mistakes I made. I took notes on each round of critiques (we critique a few chapters at a time) and then let them sit for several weeks. I didn't make changes, I didn't read through the notes, I went and distracted myself in other ways. Then, when the little critiques started to add up to big picture changes for me, I went back and made the changes I wanted to make.

Yeah, read that again. I'll even bold it for you. I made the changes I wanted to make.

If I didn't like the feedback? I didn't change it.
If I didn't agree with the feedback? I didn't change it.
If I got conflicting feedback? I chose the one I agreed with and made the changes.
If I could understand the point of the feedback but wanted to take the story in a different direction? I didn't change it.

This is your story at the end of the day. You have to tell the story you want to tell, which means you get to pick and choose the changes you make. You own the story, so you're responsible for the choices it makes. You ask for feedback to point out what you can't see, but that doesn't mean everything they see is right for the story you are trying to tell.

A point of clarification: I draw a distinction between feedback that you don't like but is true and feedback that you don't like because it doesn't tell the story the way you want to tell it. I've received plenty of critiques that, given enough time, I see the error of my ways. But I've also received plenty of critiques that don't jibe with the story/character for me. Sometimes I can even see where they're coming from, I just disagree. Don't give yourself permission to ignore ALL feedback - after all, you're trying to make this the best story it can be - but do give yourself permission to ignore the feedback that doesn't feel right.

So be picky. Be choosy.

How do you know when you're overediting?

2011-08-04T08:30:00.002-05:00

Roni Loren had a great post the other day about how to avoid killing yourself or your work over critiques. My favorite piece of advice was to edit until you love the story, not until you think it's perfect. You don't hear much about the dangers of overediting, and frankly I thought you were supposed to edit until the thought of opening the same Word doc one more time made you throw up in your mouth a little. It never occurred to me that editing could go the opposite way - that you could spend so much time with your piece that you actually start editing in the wrong direction, and damage your story.

Some edits are obvious - as soon as you read a scene a second time, or out loud, or your critique group comments on it, you have a "duh" moment. Of course the giant spider wouldn't be friends with Harry Potter; he'd want to eat him! Some non-edits are just as obvious - you can see how/why your beta reader suggested the change, but that's not what you want to happen. You respect their opinion, but you don't make the change. It's your right as a writer.

The harder edits to make are the ones you're not sure about. I run into these most with character decision-making and subsequent actions. I may think the character would react one way, but my beta readers may say something different. Ideally I know my character best, but they can be fickle creatures, our made up characters, and sometimes they're not good at revealing their motivations. Emotional reactions are not like math - there isn't always one correct response. I don't always react the same way to the same situation, so I don't expect my characters to be so consistent. When a critique partner comments on a character's reaction, I'm not always sure if I think they would behave that way or not. And if multiple readers give me the same feedback, I have to re-evaluate that character's behavior.

But the hardest parts to edit are the ones you've read so many times you're bored with them. I think this is where the danger of overediting comes in. Think of it like decorating a room - when you first decorated your room at 16 you probably LOVED it. Pink is awesome! Backstreet Boys will be cool forever! I love Teen Beat! (I was a sad, sad child). At the time you thought it was the greatest room ever. But after a few weeks/months/years in it, you started to get sick of it. Maybe Backstreet isn't so cool. Pink is so girly. They don't even make Teen Beat anymore. All of that awesomeness starts to look like crapness.

Here's the trouble - to a 16 year old, that room is awesome. But to an 18 year old, it's super lame. And to a first time reader, your scene is awesome. To you who have seen it so many times you hate every single word because you're so tired of them, it's awesomely bad. So you change it, because it's stale and overdone to you and where you used to think it was funny you now think it's stupid.

STOP. Don't touch that scene. Walk away, take a deep breath, date other manuscripts. Whatever you do, stop thinking about that manuscript. Because you're going to break it. You're going to break it and everything that comes after it, and suddenly a story that started about a sweet girl on a picnic is now about a werepanther at a rave (seriously, Charlaine Harris?). It's not your scene anymore, and you're not telling the story you wanted to tell. Now you're just dissecting a rotisserie chicken carcass because you can.

How do you know when you've hit this point? For me, it's when I start trying to edit scenes no one's read yet. Scenes that never used to bother me before, but because I've fixed all the big stuff I'm turning on the specifics. That's not to say you should rely on someone else's opinion as fact, but the odds are if you have enough people read it and they don't tell you it's broken and you never thought it was broken before, it ain't broke. Trust yourself and your storytelling, and trust that you don't need to change every single word or every single plot thread in revision because you must have written a crap first draft.

How do YOU know when you're overediting? What do you do when you realize that you are?

Mixing real world and fiction

2011-08-01T12:37:00.000-05:00

I spent a large part of my weekend researching, gentle readers. My manuscript takes place in New York, a place I haven't visited (yet) or lived (maybe yet), so I was a bit vague on location descriptions and transportation methods in the first go round. This next pass at editing is focused on nailing down exact locations and weaving in the feel of neighborhoods and movements through the city. One of my fellow critters (who lived in NY for 15 years) was kind enough to give me the lowdown on neighborhoods and potential locations for the main settings in my story, and I've now got a concrete map of the story.

In my research this weekend, however, I ran up against an interesting dilemma - marrying the real world with a fictional world. Obviously New York exists, and pretty much every square inch of the city (at least Manhattan) is claimed, so inserting fictional locations into what is arguably the most well-known city in the world is tricky. Do you invent an address? Take over an existing building and make it your own? Modify the purpose of said existing building?

Yeah. Tricky.

I've run into this dilemma before with historical writing as well. As soon as you decide to write about a fictional character interacting with real people, you've got historical timeline to juggle. Do you make up a title for someone? Or choose a less well-known title and attach a made-up person to the title?

For me, it made the most sense to do a little bit of both. If I could get away with making up a location (like a warehouse or a coffee shop), I did. Where I couldn't (like dropping an entirely new building into a famous stretch of road), I used Google Street View to find the perfect building to "steal." And let me tell you, gentle readers, Google Maps and Google Street View were my best friends this weekend. I don't know how people wrote about places they'd never been before the internet. Or maybe they just didn't.

So my question goes out to all of you fiction writers today: How do you insert your characters and locations into the real world? Do you hijack existing locations for your own purposes? Or do you prefer to create new locations that don't exist on a map?

You might be a writer if:

2011-07-19T08:30:00.016-05:00

1) You harbor a love of caffeine that you've assured your family you can quit any time.
2) You list "blank pages" and "no autosave" as your mortal enemies.
3) You know seventeen different ways to say "He walked."
4) While other little boys and girls imagine their Oscar acceptance speeches, you formulate your blog post response to being named the Pulitzer Prize winner ("It was an honor just to be nominated.")
5) You can list taking a walk, hogging the shower for two hours, and reading as "work activities."
6) Your email account warns you that you've used your maximum number of page refreshes for the day.
7) Time is but a convention to defy.
8) You spend more time with imaginary people than you do with real people.
9) You measure days in word count.
10) You've been caught having imaginary conversations in your car, public bathrooms, the shower, and once in the break room at work when you didn't realize the next office over could hear you.

Share your "you might be a writer if" truth today!

Writing a query letter makes me cry blood

2011-07-14T12:17:00.000-05:00

Okay, fine, it's not that bad. But it's surprisingly hard. Different agents have different standards and preferences, and the purpose of the query is completely different from the manuscript itself. When you're writing a manuscript, you're telling the story. But when you're writing a query letter, you're selling the story. And yes, I do find myself quite clever.

So what are the differences?

I'm no query expert, but I think the biggest difference between the query letter and the actual manuscript is what trips up most writers. The query letter is a marketing piece for your book - it's like the back cover copy. It's meant to boil the plot down to the most essential and exciting elements, and leave just enough of a hook that the agent wants to know more. I think it's hard sometimes for us to separate ourselves from the story enough to step back and look at it in a business context, but if you're querying that's exactly what you have to do. It's not pleasure anymore, it's not personal fun, it's a business proposition. Your book will help people pay their mortgages, and not just your own, so you've got to learn how to sell the experience.

I've perused the archives of Query Shark, read sample queries of authors who have landed agents, read sample structured query letters, and I see the same things over and over. Writers giving too much backstory, writers trying to include too many storylines, writers not recognizing the hook in their own story. The query is not just about "here's the plot of my book." It's "here's enough interesting stuff about my book with good voice that you want to request more."

Think of it like a date - do you tell someone on a first date where you went to middle school and high school and how you have an uncle with diabetes and you once had an addiction to caffeine pills and here's every favorite album you've ever had? (Please say no) No, you tell them the interesting bits, just enough of the story to get to date number two. Once you're on date number two they're bought in and you can roll out the caffeine addiction.

What about you? Have you written a query letter? Did you also feel like you needed a cookie after the first (second, third, nine-hundredth) draft? Do you have a different take on queries?

My thought for the day

2011-07-12T09:52:00.002-05:00

The bottom of a Starbucks coffee cup is the saddest place in the world.

In the meantime, the in-between time

2011-07-06T10:05:00.000-05:00

So...I'm feeling a bit restless. I finished my current WIP and am currently putting it through its paces with the critique group, and while I have ideas swirling about my head none of them are strong enough to warrant spending the next six months and countless hours molding them into a passable shape. I've written a query letter, done some editing on it, identified some revisions I'll make when I do my next major revision, and dabbled around with the various story ideas.

Over the holiday weekend I made the mistake of picking up City of Bones, which had been on my bookshelf for a couple of months while I was deep in the throes of writing, and lost the rest of the weekend to City of Ashes and City of Glass. Clare is an incredible world-builder, and I was just another helpless victim who fell for Jace's charms. I know better than to pick up City of Fallen Angels right now (but don't think I won't soon, I can't resist such a pretty face for too long).

I'm so used to driving forward that I feel a little lost without any specific forward momentum. So I'd like to know: what do you do between major writings and revisions?

In which I deliver a little slice of reality

2011-06-14T08:30:00.000-05:00

I guess I should live up to my own blog name, huh? Last night I had a fabulous meeting with my critique group where we talked about our fears and concerns with writing, what we're struggling with currently, and our thoughts on pursuing publication. One of our group members began talking about her current experiences with querying agents (1 book to one agent, a different book to 2 agents). She recently heard back from the first agent on book 1 with a rejection. The agent's reason? She loved the book, though it was well-written and cute and funny, but she said rhyming picture books aren't selling. Because of this, my crit partner thought she shouldn't query anymore agents with that book.

Yeah. You read that right.

Let me be crystal clear: I don't know the agent she submitted to and I don't harbor any ill will toward her. She did exactly what a good business person should do - she evaluated the prospect and determined it wasn't a good one for her. It wasn't a personal attack, it wasn't mean-spirited or disrespectful, it was actually a very friendly rejection letter. And if you're reading this, you know the reality - we get rejected. A lot. It's like a speed dating exercise - you get one letter's worth of clever to convince someone to spend their time with you. It's difficult, and it's personal opinion, and it hurts.

But I was surprised that she would take one agent's opinion as fact. I've read about the tenacity of querying so many times that it's already ingrained in me, but watching my crit partner explain her reasonings I realized why all of those blog posts exist. I imparted all the wisdom I've gleaned from you, my wonderful bloggy readers - I told her she had to have enough faith in her work to feel confident that she would find the right agent for it. Only she can really know if she's ready - if her story is the best it will ever be - and a single agent's opinion of her odds in the marketplace can't be her reason for never sending out another query letter. She's a very talented writer - and I'm not just saying that to be nice, or because she's my crit partner and I don't have a choice, or because she bribed me to (although I do accept bribes, if you're offering). I say that because I would be heartbroken to see her give up the dream without putting everything she had into it.

So my slice of reality is this: you'll get rejected in life. Whether it's writing, dating, job interviews, a court case, your kid's concept of how cool you are, people will reject you. Life will reject you. Your own cells will sometimes reject you. That doesn't mean you stop loving what you do, or who you are, or where you're going. It means you learn that not everyone likes the same thing, and that's okay. Because someone will like what you do, just as much as you do, and that's the person you were meant to find all along.

That's my nice way of saying get over it and move on.

When the story tells itself

2011-06-01T12:34:00.001-05:00

I'm kind of a planner. I don't go so far as to outline (usually), but I like to know my story roadmap along the way. I imagine scenes, make notes of upcoming scenes, and plan out the order of events to know when and where to reveal key details that will be needed later. This usually sets me in good stead for developing the story arc of an entire piece, but every once in a while a story element sneaks up on me.

I've got two pivotal scenes remaining in my current WIP, and while "planning" out (read: daydreaming in my car on the way to work) who would be in the first of those two remaining scenes, an idea popped up. An idea to plant a character in that scene that had previously been referenced but had yet to make an appearance. And of course, my first thought was:

Why?

Why is this character here? What happens if this character is here?

And then it all unfurled like a great majestic cloak to finish out my story. Because as soon as I placed that character in the scene, I knew why they were there and, more importantly, what their presence would do to the rest of the story. It gave my villain motive, it set up future story ideas, and it closed out the story in a way that I never saw coming. As a planner, I was floored.

My story just told me what to do.

I've seen other writers reference the whole concept of letting your characters tell you where the story is going, but I'd honestly never put a lot of stock in it. To me, if I just let my characters roam across the page without any direction I'd end up with a few thousand words of witty banter, random descriptions, and not a whole lot of plot movement. My approach has always been to make things happen to my characters and see how they react. This is the first time I've ever really had a character tell me what they were going to do, and why. It was an amazing, bizarre experience that I hope to encounter again very soon.

How do you plot? Do you let the characters tell you what's going to happen, or do you make things happen and wait to see how they react? Do you grow your stories organically or are you a plotter? Have you experienced this moment yourself?

In which I admit an addiction

2011-05-16T11:56:00.000-05:00

I have a problem. I can admit this now, and I'm working on it.

I'm addicted to word count.

Yeah, I know, a pithy addiction amongst all the other possibilities, but it's kind of wrecking my writing life right now. Because I'm addicted to massive bumps in word count. I keep thinking "oh, if I can just get to 30K words I'll be happy." But then 30K becomes 40K becomes 50K becomes 60K and suddenly I've amassed 15K words in one day because I can't stop. In fairness, I'm pulling large chunks of this WIP from the previous version I wrote, so I'm able to pull together 15K words in one day without actually writing every single one of those words, but you'd think I'd be happy. You think I'd be amazed.

But I wanted more.

I've gotten to 52K words in two weeks, which is INSANE for me. I'm a slow writer, a slow plotter, and I don't always write every day. That many words would usually take me a couple of months, and a complete manuscript usually takes me about 6 months. But because I can pull entire scenes from the previous version of the WIP, I have seen massive bumps in my word count in just a couple of days. And I'm hooked now. Previously I would have been happy with 2K words in one day, but now I'm looking at 6K-8K each time I sit down and it feels. So. Good.

It doesn't help that I can see the word count right in the bottom of the screen. It's a constant reminder, a constant check, and even if I write a great scene I sometimes get ticked that it's only 200 words. In a way it's a good impetus to keep writing and finish out the first draft faster, but it sometimes overtakes the creativity of the process. In school we learned about two types of business models - quantity and quality. As writers we walk a line between shoveling out crap and polishing up the diamonds in that crap. Different writers take different approaches to that first shoveling out of crap. Me, I like to polish as I go along, which is why my word counts tend to be lower per day than some first draft writers. Upping the volume of words I produce can have a dangerous effect on this type of writing.

What about you? Are you addicted to checking word count? Does it drive you crazy like it drives me crazy (say yes and make me feel better)?

A tale of two journeys

2011-05-09T10:57:00.000-05:00

Ignoring the fact that I have been hiding out in a cave with Robin Hood for months now...I have an actual post today!

Sometimes I hate it when my critique partners are right. And by "hate" I mean "I can't believe I have to go back and think about this." In my pre-writerly days, storytelling just seemed so natural. Like events and characters and plots all just flowed together into one nice big river, and I was just flowing along with the current. The stories would magically unfurl in my head and flow out onto the page with the ease and grace of a ballerina. Surely if I just sat down and gave myself enough time, the story would tell itself, right?

I think we all know the answer to that one.

So when I met up with my fellow critters last week, the first thing one of them said about my latest chapter submission hit home with a dooming certainty. It was a simple question, really, but one with a great amount of import behind it. I'm finding that to be the case with most simple questions in adulthood.

What is the emotional journey of your character in this chapter?

There are two journeys that every story takes: the plot journey, and the emotional journey. These two journeys often intersect and affect each other, but they need to be considered separately to make sure you're moving both forward at all times. For me, sometimes the plot journey takes over my brain and I forget that my characters need to grow. They should be reacting to the action taking place, and making choices that define their character at every turn. Janet Fitch (who wrote the emotionally wrenching White Oleander) wrote a fantastic post about 10 rules that any writer can benefit from employing. Number nine on the list gets to the heart of the two journeys - write in scenes. As in, something needs to happen in a scene, both to advance the plot and advance the character. Each scene in your story must ratchet up the tension, or reveal a new piece of vital information. And emotionally, each scene should lead your character to a place from which they can't turn back. A tall order, for sure, but it makes for the best writing any of us can aspire to.

So for every chapter/scene you write, ask yourself these questions:
1) What new information have I learned from this scene?
2) How does this new information drive the story forward?
3) What has my character learned?
4) How does my character feel about this information?
5) How does this information change my character emotionally?

That's not to say that every scene you write needs to have some big soap opera reveal, or that your character is suddenly changed forever by each scene. That would be too unbelievable. But you should make sure that every scene you write, every piece of dialog, every description, is driving the story and the characters along the journey. It can be a little hop or a big leap, but you've got to keep the reader moving toward the (no doubt gripping) conclusion.

Wow, is it April?

2011-04-19T10:41:00.000-05:00

Time flies, my little honeybees, and with it flies the days between blog postings. I swear when I went to sleep last night it was March. Maybe even February.

I've had my head down and nose to the grindstone on many things lately, but I promise I haven't abandoned you. I'll be back soon (hopefully), but for now I want to know what YOU are up to. How are things? How's writing? How's spring (not so) cleaning? Any fun things to share?

In which I clean things (sort of)

2011-03-14T10:09:00.000-05:00

I've got a post planned on journeys later this week based on some revelations brought about in my critique group meeting last night, but today I've got a question for all my blogging buddies. I've been doing some "it's almost spring" cleaning and have accumulated an impressive stack of paper critiques from various stages of chapters on my current WIP. I'm torn on what to do with these critiques - do I keep them as reference points or mementos, or do I recycle them like a good little non-pack rat?

What do you do with your hard copies of critiques after you've addressed them?

Also, I squeed (sounds a lot grosser than it did in my head but I'm leaving it) when I saw this and this. Suffice it so say these were both on my list of bloggy accomplishments and I feel big and important now. Thanks, ladies :). (Yes, I'm a huge dork).

In defense of dialog tags

2011-03-09T10:20:00.000-06:00

I'm going to throw a couple of caveats out there before I even get into my discussion/diatribe (yes, it's THAT incendiary):

1) I am not an editor
2) I am not an agent
3) Despite two years slogging through the slush pile at a local independent publisher, I am not a publishing professional
4) I am a great lover of the word

Okies, now that we've gotten those out of the way I can begin. I read a lot of advice on writing - blogs, articles, blog links to articles, article links to blogs, sometimes words printed on paper (I'm surprised they still exist), etc. I know all about show don't tell, adverb abuse, dialog tags, how to choose a tense, passive voice, and the sneaky over adjectivization. I have, at one point or another, flagrantly broken all of those rules and been reprimanded in one way or another by critique partners. I've done my time, learned my lessons, and moved on to what I hope is a cleaner, leaner, meaner way of writing (this present post aside). But there's a thought niggling at the back of my mind that I'd like to give voice to today, gentle readers, and I hope you'll hear me out in the spirit of a love of the word.

I. Like. Dialog tags. THERE. I said it. It's out there, or at least it will be when I hit Publish Post. I like the diversity of descriptions and the adverbs and the accompanying actions on dialog. I know the rule - only ever use he said she said they said we said I said and never never NEVER say how they said it - but I don't like it. Because as a lover of the word, I enjoy a good adverb here and there. I enjoy knowing if a character whispered or shouted or grunted their lines.

Yes, I know the reason for the rule. There was widespread abuse among the greener of us, and every single line of dialog was weighted down with adverbs galore and a bizarre mesh of descriptive verbs ("Festivus is totally the best holiday," he proselytized.). I know it was a push toward cleaner writing that didn't fog up the window with unnecessary words and instead polished the glass to a high shine so the reader could look through the words without looking at them. It's about the actual dialog, not the description of how it's being said. I get it. Really.

But I've had it drilled into my head from so many places and people that my fingers tremble every time they they reach for the l and y keys. I gnaw my lip whenever I decide to let a character growl something instead of just saying it. And the truth is, I do it because I'm used to seeing it in other writing. I'm used to a more flowery approach to prose that may or may not come from years of reading romance novels. My fear is that this incessant push toward abolishing adverbs from published works will mean I'll never get to read about someone saying something quietly or politely. Like all things, I believe there's a time and a place for such descriptions.

So every once in a while, I let my characters say something glibly, or shoot back a witty remark. But only every once in a while. I promise.

What about you? How do you feel about excess description in dialog tags? Are you an abuser or a law upholder when it comes to dialog tags?

Tell me where I am

2011-03-02T10:44:00.000-06:00

Pretty sure I've written about this before, but I kind of hate writing scenery. I can either see the location in my head and don't want to waste time thinking up how to describe it, or I don't care about the location because it doesn't impact the scene at hand (especially in dialogue-heavy scenes). So I can't say I was surprised when a big part of the feedback I received in my class last semester was that people didn't know what time period they were in (it's a period piece) or what places looked like. They wanted more grounding in the scene. At the time I wanted to throw up at the thought of taking time away from the plot to describe things, but my professor gave me what has come to be an invaluable piece of advice:

Diagram the scene.

As in, draw it out. Where are the chairs, what does the carpet look like, how many levels does the house/building/spaceship have, what kind of doors are there, does it have a kitchen, are there windows, etc. Don't just think about it, draw it out. This might seem like overkill for some stories, but it was essential for mine, and a handy tip for anyone telling a story that exists in a physical location (yeah, I'm talking to you).

In diagramming you'll find yourself asking questions you never thought of before - now that I know where everything lives, what about decorations? Colors? Does it make sense to put a chair right in the middle of this room? Is the bed too large for the room? Could the character really open the window from there? It's also a lot easier to describe a room when you're looking at a physical picture of it, not just trying to hold images in your head. You'll have a blueprint that you can hold yourself accountable for in all the scenes in your book, and you won't have to bother trying to remember where you put that pesky bookshelf.

You don't need to diagram all the locations, just the most essential ones. Think about it like an episode of Saved By The Bell - how many places do they really go? There's the school hallway lined with lockers, usually a classroom or two that look mysterious alike, and The Max. If you've watched the show, you can clearly see these locations in your mind when thinking of pivotal scenes of the show. You want your readers to have the same instant recall about your own scenes. If you don't ground your readers in the scene they'll feel lost about where they are and what they're watching.

Have you ever diagrammed a location in your story before? Did it help?

Borders

2011-02-28T10:23:00.000-06:00

Unless you've been living under a writing rock (which, for the record, I have), you've heard about Borders filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I worked at a local publisher a few years ago and Borders was on the verge of bankruptcy back then, so I wasn't surprised when I heard the news. I was saddened, as I always am, about another blow to the publishing industry, but I think most professionals in the industry saw the writing on the wall long ago.

I found myself near a Borders this weekend as I was out shopping and decided to stop in and see if they had any good deals. To be honest I haven't shopped at a brick and mortar store for years because of the competitive prices on sites like Amazon, but I was right there. The discounts were still fairly low - 20-30% - so I didn't expect much movement at that point. Boy was I wrong. The store was like a madhouse, books strewn about and laying on the floor and unalphabetized (I take my alphabetization VERY seriously). I found sports books in the middle grade section, DVDs in Science Fiction/Fantasy, and random merchandise all over the shelves. I wandered up to the YA section for research purposes and was at first delighted to see so many books of blogs that I've been following for months now. It was almost like meeting up with new friends.

Which is why I think it hit me so emotionally to see the books so mistreated. I mean, don't get me wrong, no one was ripping out pages with their teeth or anything. It was just that everything was in such disarray, it was like seeing my friends disrespected. Having been on this journey for two years now, I know the time and energy and passion and long nights that go into every single book on those shelves, and to see them treated like bits of shiny paper at a cat convention was hard for me. I actually ended up leaving the store without buying anything because I was so upset. It was, in a way, heartbreaking for me to see the physicality of the decline.

How do you feel about Borders' announcement and the shifting landscape of the book market?

In which I get to the root of the problem

2011-02-18T11:17:00.000-06:00

My advanced creative writing class started last night (yes, I loved the first round so much I decided to indulge myself for another semester), and with it came crashing home a certain reality that I've been avoiding for a while. It's a niggling thought that had occurred to me on a previous WIP (R.I.P. WIP), but I had thought it was singular to that writing endeavor. I'd made all kinds of excuses for myself - it was too much story driven without enough character, I don't do the angst thing well (which is true), etc. etc. Surely this disease wouldn't infect the others.

Turns out, the bitch is airborne.

It wasn't new information to me. In fact, last night was mainly a review of the techniques we'd discussed last semester. The instructor passed out review copies of things we'd already been over - character background worksheets, plot pyramid dissections, and guidelines for different levels of children's books and their associated content. But it was the last sheet, cut into thirds for each class member to save paper, that dropped the bombshell. It only had five lines of text, and no more than 10 words per line. Some of the lines had less than 3. And they were all questions.

Who?
Wants what?
From whom?
Who/what stands in their way?
What are they willing to do to get it?

You should be able to answer these questions for ALL of your main characters. Really, you should be able to answer them for all of your characters, but certainly the main protags and antags. Why? Because it's the action that drives the story. Who wants what is the end goal you're trying to reach, and from whom and what stands in their way establishes the tension. What are they willing to do to get it is the fun part.

So what's wrong with my story? What can't I answer?

What does my main character want?

Please, childrens, don't judge. Don't point at the silly wannabe writer making rookie mistakes. It's unkind. The funny thing is, the story is still a good one. I've managed to fluff up the other parts of the story enough that it's enjoyable, and I distract people with flashy words and funny dialog, but the truth is there in black and white and bold. And as soon as I realized I couldn't answer the most basic of questions about my MAIN CHARACTER, the veil came off. I started analyzing other things I'd written (or tried to write) and found the same problem over and over. I had good, strong characters, but they weren't making their own decisions. They were being led around by the story and everyone else's whims. This is, as the kids like to say, a problem.

But a known problem is a solvable problem, and that's why I'm taking the class. I knew the problem existed, could feel it in my plotting and revising, but I didn't know what it was. And because I didn't know what it was, I didn't know how to solve it. I know it will be hard work to figure out the answers to this question and work it into the WIP, but it's like GI Joe says: knowing is half the battle.

What about you? What are your glaring (or not so glaring) issues? Can you answer these questions for your own characters (say no and make me feel better)?

I'm all out of words for you, chitlins

2011-02-09T09:32:00.000-06:00

I've used them up while trying to finish the first (second? third? I've lost track) draft of the current WIP. I've set myself a deadline of completing the manuscript before my second semester of creative writing starts (yay!), which is next week. So I have some self-butt-kicking to do, and let me tell you, that's not pretty.

So while I finish up this draft and try to form more cohesive sentences here than "me like coffee" or "how I type so good?" why don't you tell me where you're at with your writing.

How's it going? Are you in first draft finish out like me, or just starting a new idea? Are you polishing up for queries or already sending them out? Are you languishing away in the middle of the plot land like I was a few weeks ago, no light at the end of the tunnel? Are you in the flurried first few chapters stage where the world is yours and there's no possible way you could burn out on this story?

Come on, snow, why you gotta hate?

2011-02-03T09:58:00.000-06:00

So apparently the whole rest of the country is buried under mounds of snow, including the top half of my fair Lone Star state. And what do we get down here in Austin? All the blah of cold temperatures without the whee! of iced precipitation. Call it a holdover from my younger years but snow (we call it snow, don't judge) means skipping school and sliding around on the back deck and using a cardboard box as a temporary sled until it tears in half because your butt is too big. Fun!

But no. Snow sent out its Valentine's Day cards and turns out it doesn't choo-choo-choose us. We're the kids who are bundled up warm inside with our faces pressed against the glass watching everybody else make snow monsters and igloos and all the other fun stuff I assume people who get snow do. Like make snow cones and write their names in the snow with pee (maybe don't make snow cones out of the pee snow).

And don't try to talk me out of my fantasy snow day by saying cars and houses are damaged and businesses are losing money because people can't work or buy stuff and it's one of the worst storms anyone's ever seen. And I don't want to hear about how we had rolling blackouts all yesterday because the power grid couldn't handle all the electricity people in Dallas were sucking up because it's cold there or something. And don't complain to me that flights are grounded all over the country and people have been stuck in airports for hours without access to their luggage because it's been in a cargo hold for three days. You're only trying to make me feel better about snow not inviting us to its basement party while its parents are out of town.

All I'm asking, snow, is to show a little love. You don't even have to last all day, just long enough that I can't get out of my driveway because it's iced over so I have to stay home with a mug of hot cocoa and lament the fact that I'm not working. Is that too much to ask?

Did you get the invite to the snow party? Are you loving it (say no to make me feel better)? Does this weather inspire you to write?

Some truths on a Thursday

2011-01-27T11:10:00.000-06:00

What? It's a day that starts with T, give me a break. So I was all set to write about one of my new year's resolutions but instead I think I'll distract you with the shiny keys of randomness today. I'm busy, but I don't want to neglect my lovelies.

1) So this whole zodiac sign thing? Actually tripping me out. I mean, I don't read horoscopes, I don't follow the signs or anything like that, but apparently I still very much identify myself as a Taurus because I'm all weirded out that I'm supposed to be an Aries now. I kept this feeling to myself until I told the partner-in-crime (also a Taurus) about the changed signs. His reply? "Taurus for life!" I echo the sentiment.

2) Okay, Vampire Diaries has some cheesy acting and some cheesier dialogue, but I'm a squee bit addicted to it. Blame it on Ian Somerhalder's face.

3) I think The LiLa is on to something with this whole shiny new idea thing. You strike a balance between pushing yourself and beating a dead horse. Although I guess the trick is knowing when to put the defib paddles to the horse...

4) I'm not impressed by the iPad. THERE I SAID IT DON'T SEND THE APPLE MOB AFTER ME. I just think it's a giant iPhone. I was impressed with the touch screen awesomeness of the iPhone when it first came out, but now like any good technology follower it's already invoking a sense of ennui in my book. Give me five minutes to get used to it and I'll tell you I'm already bored. Le sigh.

5) I keep thinking I'm waiting to hit that magical moment when my "life" starts, but I'm starting to get worried that this is it and I'm missing it because I haven't had enough coffee. I also conveniently use this excuse when I want another cup of coffee.

What are your thoughts for today? And I promise I will post something useful one of these days? Oh, wait...look over here! Shiny!

Roni's got an awesome contest you should let me win

2011-01-24T09:28:00.000-06:00

So Roni over at Fiction Groupie is throwing a Mega-Awesome Query Contest in which she's giving away a whopping SEVEN query critiques this week. One of them even happens to be from Anita Mumm at Nelson Literary, and since I cyber-love Kristin Nelson that kind of has me fangirling out a bit.

Now I'm going to tell you to go over there and enter because this is an amazing opportunity and Roni's pretty much a staple of the writer's blogging community, but what I really mean is let me hoard all the contest entries and win them for myself because I probably need a critique worse than you (they can be three pages long and have at least two paragraphs about how much my mom loves it, right?)

So...go check it out. And tell them your name is JEM :).

Quantifying the suck

2011-01-21T08:40:00.000-06:00

It's easy as writers to get caught in the "this is so terrible, I'll never write like Suzanne Collins/Stephen King/Nora Ephron/Dr. Seuss" mindset. It's also easy to forget that you're reading the final spit-polished version of a story that everyone and their brother has weighed in on to make it the best book it can possibly be. We're emotional people, the creatives of the world, and it's as easy to send us into a tailspin of self-hating depression as saying two words: I suck.

And you know what? You do. I do. We all do. Are babies awesome at walking from the get go? Have you ever watched a baby giraffe (called a calf, which made me giggle) try to walk for the first time? Hijinks ensue, let me tell you. Every person and every thing in the world sucks when they first try something. Michael Phelps doesn't swim a gold medal run every time he trains; he trains to be able to swim that gold medal run when he needs to. We can't look at the final version of years of effort and assume our first draft WIP that's only half-way done sucks in comparison. Of course it sucks. It's supposed to suck. Our job as writers is to identify how it sucks.

Enter the quantification of the suck. It's not enough to say "this is terrible." You have to know why it's terrible. Are your characters falling flat? Are you not grounded in the scenery? Is the dialogue stilted or does it contain too much realistic speak that trips up the flow of the story? Have you shamefully abused your adjectives and adverbs? Does your piece not keep a consistent voice throughout? These are all questions you should be asking yourself during the revision process. If you hear a beeping sound in your house you don't stand around going "man that's annoying. I wish it would stop beeping." NO. You go FIND the source of the beeping. So go find the source of your suck.

Me? I le SUCK at setting descriptions. I can do them, sure, but it's like pulling teeth to get me to think of it and then give an interesting description of a building. It's a building, people. Can't you visualize that? Apparently not, according to my writing class, my crit group, the P-i-C, and anyone who's ever read my writing. Does it annoy me to holy heck that I have to go back in and describe all these things I don't care about? Yes. Will I ever be as good at it as L.M. Montgomery (that woman could go on about trees six ways till Sunday)? No. But will I eventually put in enough practice to make it good enough that it doesn't trip other people up while they get to the good parts of the story? I'd better.

Despair not, friends. Or at least know that I despair with you.

Tell the truth Tuesday

2011-01-18T11:14:00.000-06:00

1) I envy Lila and their cheating ways. Lately my creative brain (and, let's face it, the rest of it) feels like a piece of toast that's been left on the counter for three days. You can slather that baby with strawberry jam but it won't change the fact that it is DRIED. OUT. I'd love to be led astray by a shiny new idea.

2) I have Animal by Neon Trees stuck in my head on a definite loop. It's so flipping catchy. I didn't want to like it because the lead singer has crazy hair and I have strict rules about how my favorite bands should look, but it's infected my brain.

3) Somewhere along the way I've now allowed myself to have more than one cup of coffee a day and it is A SLIPPERY JITTERY SLOPE PEOPLES.

4) I am sorely tempted to drive past my exit for work and keep going just to see where I end up. It's the dreamer in me.

5) The actual desert is disappointing when compared to the Hollywood personification of it.

6) Yes, this list is random.

7) I'm disappointed in Shakira. She rocked in Spanish, and Donde Estan Los Ladrones is one of my favorite albums, but now she dances around in gold bikinis and animal cages and pretends like blonde hair doesn't make her look like every other singer in pop culture. For shames.

8) The partner-in-crime has gotten me into unnecessary and excessive pluralizations.

What's your truth todays?

Down the rabbit hole

2011-01-14T10:54:00.000-06:00

Okay, confession: I don't really know what that title means. And I'm not going to look it up. However, in the context of this blog post it means: imagination.

I find that adulthood has really put a crimp in my imaginative ways. I was a child lost in a dream world of my own making, so many stories and characters cropping up that I never minded being alone; in fact, I relished the opportunity to carry on with my stories. There was a lack of imagination (at least to my level) in most of my playmates, so I preferred to share my stories with the characters themselves. It helped that we lived on a street that dead-ended into a wild wood, and that my mom didn't seem to mind if I disappeared into the trees for a few hours. To this day I find myself lost in nostalgia when I pass a wooded area. I also used to lay at the end of my driveway for hours - at least until the ants got me (it is Texas, after all) - watching the stars and telling all my secrets to them. I thought if I could just live among them, dance their sparkling dance, I would discover my true self.

Now, outside of writing, I don't find much room for creativity. It seems to me the older I get and the more I interact with other adults, the passion for creativity has died out of a large part of our population. Things we indulged in so freely as children are now ridiculed or looked down on. What if I want to wear hot pink leggings under a flowery skirt? What if I want to break out in random dance on the street? What if I want to sing at the top of my lungs in my car? What if I want to make a living telling stories about stars and lost princesses and supernatural powers? Sure, I can do these things, but let's not pretend they won't earn me strange glances from the people around me. What's cute in children is considered crazy in adults.

But here's my question today: Why? Why why why? Why does being an adult mean putting away childish things? Why are children the only ones allowed to wander the world in wonder? Why can't I giggle and clap my hands with excitement when I watch a show at a planetarium? Why can't I be fascinated that volcanic stone floats on water (which I STILL am)? Why can't I pretend, if only for a moment, that I secretly hope I'm a fallen star or intergalactic battle hero? Why does imagination as an adult make us weird?

As an unpublished (but hoping to be some day) writer, I have this feeling that people consider you crazy until you reach success with your writing. Then you're a visionary; until then you're a little touched in the head. But the truth is, you've done all the hard work by the time you actually reach success. All of the work that went into your story, all of the imagination and playing that you (if you're like me right now) kept hidden from the rest of your "real world" peoples, all of that happened before the agent. Before the publisher. Before the sales. Before the success. Giving in to imagination has to happen before you can find that success.

So I don't know about you today, but I think I'll dance when I feel like it. Even if it's in the middle of an Outback Steakhouse bathroom (if you don't follow Lisa and Laura Write, you should).

Tell the truth Tuesday

2011-01-11T11:31:00.000-06:00

1) It took me a good hour this morning to figure out it was Tuesday. Yesterday was my anniversary with the P-i-C, which meant champagne, which meant I fell asleep on champagne's schedule and not my own, which meant I blissfully thought it was Saturday for a good hour this morning. Damn.

2) I am fast learning that I am a writer who needs ABSOLUTE SILENCE to write most effectively. Music? No way. The static hum of the television? Nope. the P-i-C lumbering about the house? Drives me crazy. Must work on this...

3) I'm getting dangerously addicted to multiple cups of coffee and eating out for lunch. It's not a habit, guys. I can quit any time. But you touch my coffee and suffer the consequences.

4) I think I'm good at multitasking. I'm not.

5) I am craving Long John Silver's right now. CRAVING it. I should not eat fried things. I probably will. And then regret it, but not after the sweet oily fried goodness of fast food quality fish (judgment free zone, people).

What's your truth today?

Just a thought...

2011-01-05T12:31:00.000-06:00

Gentle readers, I had a thought this morning as I looked in the mirror and found a slight crease in my forehead from excessive eyebrow raising:

A well preserved body is a sign of a life not lived.

What are your thoughts this happy hump day? (I normally eschew the term hump day, but it was too alliterative to resist).

2011: The Year of Realizing Dreams

2011-01-04T12:00:00.000-06:00

If you'll allow me to be cheesy for a moment (and you'll have to, since it's my blog), I find myself waxing philosophical at this time of year. I've had lots of conversations with the partner-in-crime about what I want 2011 to be; much of this comes out of a general feeling of frustration with 2010, but it also comes from a place of fresh beginnings and hope for a new year (however arbitrary the demarcation may be). Being the lover of words that I am, I've been compiling two and three word phrases to characterize my hopes for the new year, and I thought I would share. Because sharing is caring. Except when it comes to herpes.

I've organized it like a poem because it makes me feel better (what up, Shakespeare?).

2011: The Year
The year of chasing dreams
The year of taking risks
The year of daydreaming
The year of random dancing
The year of better eating
The year of more smiling
The year of appreciation
The year of realizing dreams

Your turn!
The year of ________ (this is where you fill in the blanks)

Happy New Year, gentle readers!

Going back to what inspires me

2010-12-29T11:12:00.000-06:00

As part of the writing process I've discovered a penchant for returning to books that inspired me to daydream and drove my own desire to create stories. The deeper into a writing block I get, the more I turn to classics from my childhood (classics to me, anyway) to rekindle the excitement and remind me what good writing looks like. And maybe to steal a little of that writing magic for myself. There are a few books that leap into my mind immediately when I think of amazing books from my childhood that inspired me and drove me.

Voice/Tone: A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle

I read everything by L'Engle I could get my hands on, but this book set the standard for me. I loved Vicky (the MC) and was super jealous that I couldn't go swimming around with hot boys and playful dolphins. But even beyond that, it was a perfect summer coming of age story, and I was forever disappointed by my lackluster summers watching The Andy Griffith Show and eating microwaveable hamburgers (let's not judge, people). L'Engle had a simplicity of language that felt fresh and clean, the way that looking back at youth should feel. Emotions were simple but felt complex, and her characters reached a maturity level I always hoped to find (still waiting for that to kick in). And I totally blame this book for making me want a summer beach house set high on a craggy bluff in New England.

Plot development: Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

This book made me laugh, broke my heart, and added chickabiddy to my list of affectionate nicknames. I kid you not I can't read the synopsis of this book without getting choked up even though I haven't read this book since middle school. I would never ruin this book for anyone (although the Amazon reviews and descriptions do a pretty good job of it), but I had NO CLUE what was coming when I got to the climax of the book. Creech perfectly maintained the mystery of Sal's mother's disappearance until the end, a feat that I appreciate on a whole new level now that I have my own mysteries to maintain.

Characterization: Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
I recently reread this favorite and found myself laughing out loud at the early descriptions of Anne's character. From the descriptions of her actions to the run on dialogue that reveals more about her hopes and dreams than just what's happening before her, Anne comes through from the very beginning. The quaint setting and mundane experiences are elevated to an entertaining level when filtered through the eyes of such an entertaining main character. I'm not usually a big fan of setting description, but Montgomery also does a beautiful job of painting Avonlea in vivid purples and luscious greens and snowy whites (see? I'm learning). She tells the story of a place I would almost hesitate to visit because it couldn't possibly measure up to imagination.

World building: The Belgariad series by David Eddings
This series instilled a love of fantasy (GOOD fantasy) in me from an early age. The complicated rules and interplay of wizardry were effortless and invisible. I never felt like I was being told what I needed to know to understand a scene; the information was woven into the storytelling to the point that when you did need to know something, you already learned it several chapters back. Eddings also juggled a large cast of characters but made them stand out on their own terms and I loved and knew every single one of them. This was the series that set me daydreaming about distant planets and unknown powers and epic battles and strong women who could still be feminine. I'm definitely looking forward to revisiting these again soon.

What about you? What inspired (or continues to inspire) you? What books have stuck with you all your life?

Tell the truth Tue...er, Wednesday

2010-12-22T07:45:00.000-06:00

1) I started this post yesterday.

2) I have some great ideas for blog posts but am so swamped by work/holidays/pesky need to sleep that I haven't had a chance to write any of them up (see 1 above). Here's hoping 2011 is a little more organized.

3) I'm risking this coming to fisticuffs, but I'm not a big Sinatra fan. I'll take Bing Crosby over old blue eyes any day.

4) Drinking coffee gives me what my boss calls "crack knee." I secretly like it because someone once told me it helps burn calories faster.

5) I'm kind of dreading the holidays this year. I've heaped the responsibility of a twelve-person dinner on myself and the partner-in-crime ungraciously told me I didn't buy enough food to feed twelve people. I have no way to know and now have nightmares of hungry family members glaring at me balefully.

6) When people ask what I want for Christmas my head says, "Ask for cash or socks or something practical" but my heart says, "Ponies! Dolls! Toys!"

7) Frank Sinatra came on while I was writing this post and I went to Pandora to thumbs down the song without realizing it was him. True story.

8) I don't feel compelled to get to 10 on this post.

9) I love the concept of fantasy and read a lot of it as a child, but I find most of it overwritten with a lot of confusing names and traditions that seem forced and unnecessary.

10) Damn.

This is probably the last time we'll chat before ~~my dinner failure~~ Christmas, so happy holidays everybody!

What I learned from learning

2010-12-14T11:05:00.000-06:00

Oooooh, deep, right? So I've completed my introduction to creative writing class for this semester, and while I wait for the advanced class to start I thought I'd share some of the wisdom I've culled from the class. Some of these I've written about previously, but you'll just have to deal with that, won't you?

How to take criticism
There's more to this topic than I could write in even a full blog post, but there was on overriding lesson I learned about this as part of the workshopping process: be quiet. Whether you're face to face with the person or reading their notes after the fact, just listen. Don't try to argue or explain or disagree or agree. You won't have the chance to do any of those things with any other readers, so just listen to what they're saying from the perspective of a reader. Your writing is the only chance you get to tell your story, and if you're not clearly conveying something your critique partners will let you know.

How to give criticism
I definitely struggled with this one. You guys gave great advice - lots of positives with a few specific improvement areas - but I still had a hard time coming up with some of those positives. I am a critical person by nature and not prone to sugar coating, so I wanted to focus on what they could do better. It was only after hearing the feedback on my own work - the good and the bad - that I realized how important it is to let people know that they're on the right track. Even if it wasn't my cup of tea, even if I thought the grammar was a hot mess, even if I had no idea what they were writing about, they needed the encouragement to go on. Most of us were fledgling writers, and for a lot of the participants this was their first time sharing their work with someone ever. I didn't want the burden of crushing someone's dreams on my conscience.

The basics MATTER
I've been a voracious reader since I was five years old, and I'd been writing seriously for about a year and a half when I first started the class, so I figured I knew what was up. I knew about conflict and plot and sparkly romance (not to be confused with romance between sparkly people). What I didn't realize was how vague my concepts of the basics were. I mean, I knew you had to have characters, but I didn't think about characterization. I knew that people needed to know the scene was taking place in a room, but I didn't think about actually describing that room. I knew that I liked the tone of some books better than others, but I never really thought about how to convey that tone consistently throughout an entire novel.
Deconstructing the basic elements of storytelling, examining them separately, and then putting them back together helped tremendously. Deconstructing the basic elements of your own story - plot, conflict, characterization, tone - and examining them as separate pieces of the puzzle will help identify those nagging areas that need improvement.

What have you learned from your writing journey?

My sweet little Frankenbaby

2010-12-10T09:00:00.001-06:00

This makes count number two of times I've talked about Frankenthings on this blog. If anyone's keeping track.

We finished our creative writing class last night and turned in our portfolios of work completed for the class. Part of the portfolio work was to revise the two pieces we workshopped during the semester. Let me tell you, revising the first two chapters of my WIP when I'm only seven chapters into the thing anyway was...bizarre. It messed with my mojo a little, but I think it was a necessary practice. It forced me to do research earlier than I would have, which has helped shape the plot of the rest of the story. It's also saved me a nightmare of revision work trying to incorporate those changes throughout an entire WIP (instead of just seven chapters of it).

Still, it felt a bit like I was turning in a Frankenbaby. I haven't yet extended my revisions through the other existing chapters, and I've cut up a lot, added a lot, moved a lot around, and changed a lot. In my head, as the manuscript creator, the story is a patchwork of plotlines that have evolved over time but haven't necessarily been updated. I've toyed around with revisions before, but I've never shared a revised work with anyone, and frankly I've given up on revisions more than once because I got so fed up with the process (JUDGEMENT FREE ZONE). So handing in something that felt that hacked up was...weird.

Still, the process taught me what is probably the most important lesson I've learned in writing so far: letting go of perfection. What I see/expect in my head and what actually comes out on the paper are two different things, but the reader doesn't know that. This can go both ways (another important lesson I learned) (also, don't be gross), but it can work in your favor - the reader only knows what's on the page. They don't know what you feel like you left out, or what you meant to do with the character but forgot about, or how you wished you could have more accurately captured the clothing descriptions. All they know is what you give them, and they don't know about all the Frankenbaby scars it took to get there.

Although when I think about it, it still sometimes seems like a lawn that someone's done one too many donuts on.

What about you? Does revising make you feel as if your story is falling apart? Do you struggle to keep up with all the loose ends? Or do you thrive on the thrill of the cut?

Beth Revis might be the awesomest person to throw a contest this December

2010-12-09T13:21:00.000-06:00

Unless you live under a rock (which, if you do, do you also eat grubs?), you've heard of Beth Revis around the hinterwebs. She's got a little book called Across the Universe coming out soon, and to help promote the release she's throwing an Epic Contest of Epic (and yes, I imagined an echo on that).

Check out these sweet and savory deets, I want one of those freaking watches:

67 Mini Swag Packs

Including:

Signed AtU Bookmark

Signed AtU Bookplate

Postcard

15 Button Swag Packs

Including:

Pin-button featuring AtU
Signed AtU Bookmark

Signed AtU Bookplate

Postcard

15 ARC Packs

Including:

Signed ARC

Set of three pin-buttons (1 large, 2 mini)

Set of Bookmarks featuring

fellow debut 2011 authors (many signed)

Signed AtU Bookmark

Signed AtU Bookplate

Postcard

2 ARC & Watch Packs

Including:

Signed ARC

A super-rare AtU Watch

Set of six pin-buttons (one of each design & size)

Set of Bookmarks featuring

fellow debut 2011 authors (many signed)

Signed AtU Bookmark

Signed AtU Bookplate

Postcard

Added into as many of the prize packs as I can stuff in them are collections of bookmarks from fellow debut 2011 authors, many of which are signed. The top three prizes are getting one of each; the rest are getting divvied up wherever I can squeeze them into the packaging. Pictured below are most, but there will be a few more surprises along the way...

To win any of the 99 above prizes, all you have to do is enter your address into the form below. I will pick a random 99 people (open internationally), pop their address on the envelope, and drop it in the mail. By the end of the month, you may open your mailbox and find a neat surprise waiting for you! I'll also be mailing out all the left-over postcards I have until I run out of postcards or funds for postage...

Now, a contest isn't a contest without a big-huge-amazing grand prize, is it?

The Big-Huge-Amazing Grand Prize

Including:

Signed Hard Cover, First Edition of AtU

A super-rare AtU Watch

Set of six pin-buttons (three designs, two sizes)

Set of Bookmarks featuring

fellow debut 2011 authors (many signed)

Giftbag of swag I'm planning on

giving out at my launch party in January

Signed AtU Bookmark

Signed AtU Bookplate

Postcard

This better make me smarter

2010-12-03T10:16:00.000-06:00

I made the grave mistake of doing a little "light" research on my current WIP yesterday. My creative writing class wraps up next week and we owe a portfolio as our final assignment in the class. The portfolio will include, among other things, revised copies of the two pieces we workshopped. One of the major feedback items I received as part of this process was that people wanted to see more setting and time period descriptions to give them a better idea of the environment (so demanding). I've written previously about not meaning this to be a period piece, but I'm coming to the begrudging realization that this probably is a period piece, of sorts.

So yesterday, in my naivete, I thought, "Oh, I'll just look up a couple of things, how the city looked and how people dressed, no biggie."

BIG biggie. MAJOR EPIC biggie.

First things first, there were books out there about what I was writing on. Non-fiction, too, which is even better. Real facts. Things I can build off. Secondly, I had no idea what I was talking about. No idea. I was playing at amateur hour. I thought I had a cute, clever story (I still do), but there was SO MUCH MORE THERE that I would have seen if I'd bothered to ever look up anything. Ever.

Yes, I'm lazy.

My little research foray has now rocked my world. Fifteen books in my Amazon queue later and I'm already reconstructing the story. For the better, of course. And now that I have the missing piece, I realize I knew I was missing it the whole time. I've felt all along that I'm on the edge of something potentially wonderful, but I didn't have the tools to bring it to life. This is what I was missing all along. Context.

BUT now I have to do something with it. Like, read about it and synthesize that into something usable in my story. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. All I have to say is all this research better make me smarter. Like maybe I'll actually learn (and remember) when the Civil War took place (THIS IS A JUDGEMENT FREE ZONE, PEOPLE).

Yes, this is a gratuitous post

2010-11-23T09:15:00.000-06:00

I have some great topics lined up for the blog, but apparently there's some kind of holiday type thing this week and it's sent my schedule into a tailspin, so you'll have to wait for the greatness.

In it's stead I bring you: damnyouautocorrect.com

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Decisions, decisions, decisions

2010-11-12T11:29:00.000-06:00

We had our last round of workshopping in class on Wednesday and let me tell you, there were some unexpecteds out of that round. For me personally they mostly pertain to my story, so I won't share specifics, but one thing has come out of all of this workshopping that I wasn't expecting that I can discuss: me vs. research. BATTLE ROYALE!

So my story happens to be set in a different time period, but that was never really my focus. It's more the way the characters and the plot panned out that it made more sense for that time period, but I figured I could take more of a steampunk approach and build my own world. And I thought that would come through in the writing, the dialogue, and the storyline. Instead, I've turned into a research hound. People (at least my writing class) are considering this a historical. Why do I italicize that, you ask? Because it means research. And JEM is allergic to research. I also never intended to make this a historical; I just wanted to tell a story set in a different time period. But now everyone's all like, "What did they wear? What were the buildings like? What kind of food did they eat? Did they really talk that way?" And I'm all like, "How the crap should I know? I didn't LIVE back then, sheesh."

And I've been struggling with the next chapter all week. Every time I want to go somewhere, say something, do something, I sign myself up for a minimum of an hour of research, combing the hinterwebs for an answer to one line of writing. A body can't live like that, gentle reader! It's put me in a paranoid state of fact checking when I should be creativising (creative improvising, literally just made that up. THAT'S creativising, my friends). I had to come to a decision, and that decision is me vs. the research. I have to decide what will be research to help build the setting and the tone of the time period, and what will be me sprinkling my own JEM dust over the thing. And the instructor made a really good point: when in doubt, especially in the first draft, go with "me." After all, this is my story to tell, and it's fiction. If I want an alien life form to land in Victorian England, AN ALIEN LIFE FORM WILL LAND IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND.

So how do you decide me vs. research? What sends you to the research stacks and what sends you to your own creative juices?

P.S. My story is not about aliens landing in Vicotorian England. MAYBE.

Impromptu writer's retreat

2010-11-09T09:26:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I'm not retreating anywhere, but the partner-in-crime has officially flown the coop for two weeks. He's got some international thieving to do, and I'm stuck here by my lonesome. I don't like staying by myself, never have, and now I have two loooooooooooong weeks to slog through before he shows up again to shower me with jewels and lost treasures.

So I decided to call the next two weeks my impromptu writer's retreat, or re-treat, since I'm not actually going anywhere. I'm curious to see how much writing I get done in the evenings with nothing but the TV and my faithful sidekick Scout to distract me (formidable foes, make no mistake). I have dreams that I'll have the current rewrite totally done by the time he gets back, but I'm realistic enough now to know that I can't actual bend the laws of time and space to my will (much as I try). I will, however, make a more concerted effort to set aside blocks of time I normally dedicate to family to writing. And who knows, I could have several chapters completed upon his return.

How's the hidey hole going for most of you? I know there are a lot of Nano and Nanorevmo workers out there, are you enjoying your own writer's retreat (by election or force)?

Bizzzzzy

2010-11-04T16:02:00.000-05:00

I'm writing to say I'm...not writing. I'm buried in work for work, creative writing, and sometimes eating and sleeping when I can fit it in. I've got lots of good posts about my writing class and what I've learned, though, so stay tuned for when I actually might be more coherent and less caffeinated (trust me, it's not actually a good thing no matter what I threaten the barista with in the morning).

Hope things are going well for everybody! Let me know what you've got going on, how NaNo is going if you're doing it, and if you (like me) have been treated for Halloween candy addiction (it's a serious thing, y'all).

It's Friday and I'm dressed like a ninja

2010-10-29T08:35:00.000-05:00

Or a cat burglar. I can't decide. You have to understand that I own nothing even remotely costume-ish. I haven't dressed up for Halloween since I was 12, but my boss is bringing caramel corn and said she would only share it with people who dressed up. So I'm a cat burgling ninja.

Anybody else dressing up for Halloween today? Happy Friday!

Workshopping: The Revenge of the Adverb

2010-10-28T10:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, this post has nothing to do with revenge or adverbs, but I've got movie franchises on the brain. Last night was my first round of workshopping my own piece with my creative writing class, and suffice it to say I was nervous. I had no idea if they would like it or understand it. It didn't help that I was the last one to receive feedback, either. Every once in awhile during the other critiques I felt that familiar pang of nerves in my stomach, knowing that every plot point discussed brought us closer to my own plot points.

The critiques seemed more in-depth and pointed last night, which actually made me happy. I'd been a little discouraged last week when everyone was so positive (I know, I'm masochistic that way); I was worried people were too afraid to give honest feedback, or that they didn't have a trained enough eye to spot problems in the stories. But it was a smaller crowd last night, which allowed for longer focus on each piece and more detailed feedback from each reader. I was really proud of everyone for their great insights, and I found myself nodding along to a lot of the critiques other classmates were sharing. I'd be happy to have any of them as critique partners along the way.

Of course we took a break right before discussing my piece. Just an extra ten minutes of torture for JEM. I got my listening ears on, ready for the piece to get ripped apart, hoping that they would like at least one or two parts of the story. Writing is like cutting your own hair without a mirror - you think you've got the back part right, but it falls right in your blind spot so you're really just hoping you didn't cut an entire chunk of your hair out without even realizing it. When we returned to class I did my best impression of someone who wasn't at all worried about the next thirty minutes of class, but I'm not sure everyone bought it.

The instructor had each person start by reading a piece of their story, and of course she chose a dialogue bit for me. Not to go too in depth on my story, but the dialogue is made up. As in, I'm not really sure how to read it out loud. I gave it my best shot, though, and chalked it up to preparation for all those millions of author events I'll do someday (right). Then I braced myself (I know, I'm building up tension, so sue me) (please don't actually sue me).

They loved it. They loved the characters, they loved the writing, they loved the story arc (or what little they saw of it). And what's more, the feedback they had was so awesome I couldn't even be mad about it. Many of them pointed out weaknesses I already knew I had - I don't describe scenery, I hadn't done enough research for the piece, etc. - and I found myself nodding along to several of the suggestions. Like as soon as they said it I realized how true it was. Although it was surreal to listen to a discussion about my own work and not be allowed to participate. Surreal and fun.

And the best part? They were disappointed when I said I'd be bringing in a different piece for the next round, and they asked that I bring in the next chapter of the story instead.

So last night brought me two great boons - a confirmation that I'm on the right path with my writing, and much needed feedback and insight into the mind of the reader. If you need me, I'll be on cloud nine.

When to listen to your gut

2010-10-26T09:04:00.000-05:00

I've had it set in my head since I started the current WIP that it would be 80,000 words. Don't ask me how I arrived at that number - it's very scientific, you writerly types wouldn't understand - but that's the word count I've been aiming for. And I was rocking right along until about four days ago, when I wrapped up a mini-plot and realized I'd hit a dead end. I had No. Where. To. Go.

I took a few days off to let some ideas roll around. I was pretty much waiting for that divine inspiration to strike me as I was grocery shopping/showering/eating a sandwich, but it never came. I even tried going back to the page and forcing myself to write, hoping a plotline would magically jump out of the bushes and ambush my brain (I'm pretty sure that's how creativity works). I had the end, I was about 55K words in, but I had noooooooothing to tie the two together.

And then it did hit me last night. This word count goal that I'd arbitrarily chosen (scientific arbitration, totally different) wasn't the right word count for the story. At least, not for this round. I was beating myself up trying to come up with a new storyline, when in reality that new storyline would only serve to slacken the tension and pacing. I'd set everything up to end well, it just so happens that it will end about 10K words earlier than expected.

Which, if we look at words like a budget, isn't half bad. And since I like money, I like looking at words like a budget. And the nice thing about a budget is that when you don't spend that money, it's there for the spending later. If I want to add a scene, or bulk up a scene, or add a new character, or flesh out a character, I've got the room. And the real odds are I left something unexplained, or I need more foreshadowing, or more description. Some people write too much; apparently I write too little.

Since I've let myself off the hook the words have been flying across the page, tumbling over each other to get to the end. I feel better, they feel better, you feel better (just go with me on this). I had to go with my gut that this story just wasn't meant to be 80K words, at least not on the first draft.

When have you had to go with your gut in a story? Are you glad you did? Do you wish you'd listened sooner? Are you grossed out with all this talk of guts?

Writing is my new wine

2010-10-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

So for various reasons rather too boring to explain, I've decided not to drink for a while. I feel good about it and it's really helped me to focus on priorities in life. I mean, I wasn't a slusher or anything before, and I'm not straight-edge now (hellooooo, holiday eggnog), but I'm making a conscious effort in my life to channel my energy in a different direction.

Cut to yesterday, which I'm convinced was a full moon day based on clients/family members/celebrities going CRAZY. And not the usual, everyday crazy, but full on foaming at the mouth and kicking babies crazy. And at the end of such craziness my coworker says, "I'm going home to drink half a bottle of wine."

Which made me think, what sweet comfort would I turn to now if not a fine glass of Moscato? But when I woke up this morning, too early to get ready for work and too late to get any significant sleep, I decided to get up and write. Coffee in hand and with the partner-in-crime and our trusty sidekick curled up beside me I snuggled under the covers and worked on my WIP. I only had about 30 minutes, but afterward I felt...relaxed. Happy. Content. And I had a wicked caffeine buzz.

All of which made me realize that writing has become my new retreat from the world, my place to go when I need to do something that makes me feel good. A place to drown my sorrows in similes and dialog tags. My new wine.

Although I guess that makes revisions my new hangover.

Author websites: what thinketh you?

2010-10-18T14:13:00.000-05:00

Beth Revis has an awesomely informational post today about what to look for in a web designer. In typical Beth fashion she gives helpful pre-publication and post-publication website tips, not that I was furiously scribbling notes or anything...

I toyed around with the idea of a website when I was doing local music a few years ago. I even had a friend design a site for me, but we didn't end up going live with it. I honestly hadn't even given thought to having a website at this stage, but she makes some pretty compelling arguments for reasons why you'd want a website as an unpublished writer, especially during querying. Plus, it's always a good idea to buy your name as a domain. You never know how many Gertrude Sniedelmeyers there are out there.

But I'm not sure about the timing of a website. When is a good time to start one? Some of you have websites in addition to your blog, some of you only have a blog, some of you might have already bought your domain name and are sitting on it waiting for the right time.

So weigh in and tell me, what thinketh you on the topic of author websites?

Workshopping Part Deux (The Sequel)

2010-10-15T10:06:00.000-05:00

Wednesday night we OFFICIALLY started workshopping in my creative writing class. Which means people passed out their pieces for the class to review over the next week and return flush with feedback next week. I was actually excited for this exercise; I'd been a beta reader for a couple of friends before this, but this is the first time I'll be involved in a structured feedback session. I curled up with a stack of excerpts last night and dug in, pen poised to give insightful and life changing advice. That's how this works, right?

Uh. So. Wow.

Let's start off by saying I don't want to sound like a total douche. I'm well aware of the limitations in my own writing (and well aware of when I'm NOT well aware of them), and I know I have things to work on. I expect people to rip my stuff apart, hand me the shreds, and say they don't know what I was trying to do but my story made them gag a little. I mean, hopefully not, but I'm prepared if they do. There's no way I can be objective about my own writing, which is precisely why I'm excited for this workshopping bidnizz.

I've known from the beginning that I was probably one of the more advanced students regarding technique. I completely chalk this up to all of the learning I've been doing on the blogs this past year as well as the heaps of writing I've done all throughout my life. A lot of the rookie mistakes I expect - overwriting, info dumping, a love of adverbial dialog tags that I can't seem to get rid of - have already been weeded out of my own writing. Or if they haven't, I'm at least aware of them when someone points them out. So I was fully expecting to see and comment on these things in one form or another in most of the writing. In fact, I was proud of my blog buddies and the information they've instilled in me (that's you guys!). I was only too happy to pass it on.

What I was less expecting, but got a whole heapful of, was a basic lack of proper mechanics. Incorrectly used words, wrong verb tenses, odd sentence structuring, a lack of comma usage. So much so that it frequently interfered with my actual reading. I was so caught up in trying to figure out what they were trying to say that I lost sight of the overall storyline. Eventually I had to put it out of my mind and ignore the grammatical flaws to focus on giving them character/plot/setting feedback. Several of the stories were actually good, but the mechanical issues were very surprising. These are all college level and beyond students, so I was floored that things like choosing the correct verb tense were an issue.

So for those of you out there with more experience than me in workshopping beginning writers' work, have you experienced this same thing? Do you often run into a basic lack of structuring? How do you address these issues with the writer? I'm not looking to act as their English teacher, but I don't want to do them a disservice by not addressing it. What do you do?

Workshopping

2010-10-07T11:40:00.000-05:00

We start workshopping in my creative writing class two weeks from now and I am STOKED. I've had limited feedback on my writing so far, and while it's been extremely helpful I'm looking forward to a very diverse group of opinions in a concentrated setting.

I'm in a bit of a quandry, however, as to what piece to submit. The class is concentrated on children's literature - picture books through YA - and the WIP I'm currently working on is an adult book. I don't want to pull my attention away from the WIP (I've got a daily word count to fulfill, peoples!), but I know the YA novel I wrote a few months ago isn't ready. I also know what's wrong with it and I don't know how helpful it will be to get feedback on it at this point. I know what I need to fix, I just don't know how to fix it yet.

So I'm left wondering: should I write a new piece and pull my attention away from the current WIP, or should I pull from previous manuscripts, dust them off a bit, and get some feedback on those? I want to do whatever's most helpful to me at this stage, but I'm not sure what that is. Blurg.

I'm also a little worried about giving feedback to others in the class. Based on responses from many of the class members, most people in there aren't at the same technical level as me (thanks to all of you guys and your awesome blogs!). I've addressed many of the issues in my writing they're only just now figuring out, so I'm a little worried about the basics. There seems to be a bevy of overwriting and punctuation issues, and I don't know if I even want to get into mechanical constructs. Plus, there are some hardcore fantasy lovers in that class, and while I would NEVER fault someone for their genre of choice, fantasy on that level is definitely not mine. Not sure how useful my feedback will be for those kids.

For those of you with workshopping experience (which is probably most of you), what are your tips for sharing work both ways? What do you wish someone had told you before you went into your first workshopping experience? How do you decide what criticism to share and what not to share? How do you keep from pissing people off with your critiques?

What happens when you reference Ke$ha in literature

2010-09-29T12:04:00.000-05:00

I mean besides the universe imploding in on itself because Tik Tok made it's way into fine literature.

Referencing current cultural phenoms is a habit of mine, probably from watching so much television (thanks a lot, P-i-C). Hollywood is so about the "now" that everything becomes five minutes ago. We're such a satisfy-me-now culture that we need to constantly be fed new entertainment. This has fed into our television shows, movies, and celebrity blogs in the form of ripped from the headlines stories. Jokes about Lindsay Lohan's ankle monitor abound (I may or may not have made a joke about that myself yesterday), TV shows like Law and Order televise episodes about the latest political scandal, and Saturday Night Live continues to amaze me by making skits about stuff I've never even heard of.

And all of that is fine for those mediums because they are instant. TV shows get scripted, revised, shot, and aired in a matter of months. Live shows like SNL happen every week. They can afford to reference the here and now, and in fact they have to if they want to stay current. And I'm as big a sucker as anyone else for a good Britney joke.

But literature doesn't work this way. Books can take several years to write, and several more to get published and out into the market. It doesn't matter if you're writing a YA novel, an adult contemporary, or even a graphic novel - keeping your work current means keeping current references out of it. Slang, celebrity references, and memes will date your work. Sometimes this works, like Brett Easton Ellis novels, but sometimes it doesn't. This is especially true in young adult writing, but it happens in all genres. Any references that tie your work to a specific time/place/decade may make it stale for future readers.

Even popular books suffer from this affliction. For instance, I bought How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie a few years ago. A timeless book, right? Well, not exactly. A note was included in the beginning of the book that many references to popular figures were updated for a current reading market. The book was written in the late 1930's and included examples of well-known businessmen of the time that are not so well-known now. They didn't foresee the success of the book at that time, so they didn't think to make it less referential.

So the key to keeping your book "classic" is to avoid timely references to events, unless that's the specific topic of your book. And if that's the case, you can make all the Britney jokes you want. Don't worry, I'll laugh right along with you. If they're funny.

Um, you dudes need to check this contest out

2010-09-28T13:43:00.000-05:00

Angela Ackerman at The Bookshelf Muse is hosting a super way awesome contest for reaching 1,000 followers. She's offering her MENTORSHIP for three months. As someone who doesn't yet have crit partners and would love some feedback on her writing, I am all over this bad boy. Check the deets below:

1,000 Followers Contest and Mentorship Contest
General Drawing:

5-First Page critiques
2-First Chapter critiques

Special Drawing Challenge

It's simple: SPREAD THE WORD about this contest! If you do, I will include you in a special drawing for a three month mentorship with me.

What the mentorship will entail:

--A three month partnership where I will help you in any manner I can toward stronger writing, publication, increasing your online platform and helping you with agenting questions/search

--I will help you build or improve your query (if needed)

--A full read of your manuscript, offering advice on improvements and helping to brainstorm solutions if desired.

--An in depth look at your web presence and suggestions to hone your blog, increase followings and make suggestions with other social media to strengthen your online exposure

--Emails to answer any questions you have about writing, blogging, getting an agent, leaving an agent or how the agent relationship works

--General support!

Horrible fortune cookies

2010-09-28T12:10:00.000-05:00

Because I'm feeling random and grouchy today.

I got a fortune cookie yesterday with this fortune: "Old dreams never die; they just get filed away."

What the crap is that? It's not inspirational, it's not prophetic, it's not even funny. It's mainly sad with a side of bittersauce. And for the universe to send such a fortune to someone who's trying to be a WRITER? Not cool, universe. Not cool.

So I thought I would take this side of bittersauce and turn it into a whiskey sour! That has bitters in it, right? Whatever, insert whatever drink has bitters in it there, then. I figured I could top that fortune with even more passive-aggressively negative messaging. Feel free to contribute your own in the comments, I know you peeps are hilars.

You will find great love in the wrong place.

A great fortune will befall you. The IRS will get half.

You will look better today than you did yesterday.

Through failure you will find more failure.

Write fortune here.

Sigh, I clearly missed my calling.

What are you worried about?

2010-09-27T11:53:00.000-05:00

It was so nice to hear everyone's check points on their WIPs on Friday! I find it encouraging to be in the trenches with all of you :).

Continuing that discussion, what are you worried about in your writing right now? It doesn't matter if you're just getting started, working on revisions, or looking to sub, there's always something niggling us in the back of our minds (or maybe that's just the voices in mine). What's bothering you, keeping you up at night?

For me, I'm worried about repetitive sentence structuring. I think I tend to use the same sentence constructs throughout my writing, but I'm not ready to go back and look at it in edit mode to figure out how to break those up, or if it's even noticeable.

Oh, and I'm worried about losing control of the plot line halfway through :). That's a small one, though. Who pays attention to plot anyway?

So what's weighing on your mind about your writing? Plot, characterization, sentence structure, word choice, genre, lay it on me!

WIP Update

2010-09-24T12:05:00.000-05:00

I passed 31K words today and going strong! Gotta love those early morning train rides. I've still been able to hold out against the siren call of sharing my work, too, so I think I've earned a piece of chocolate cake (don't friggin argue with me).

How are your WIPs or edits coming? What are you excited about? What do you dread? Do you wish you also had a piece of my chocolate cake (HANDS OFF)?

Muchos happy Fridays, everybody!

Must...control...impulses

2010-09-16T11:54:00.001-05:00

I'm 20K words deep into my current WIP and feeling good. Characters are talking to me, plotlines are coming together, jokes are keeping me entertained, I'm in the zone. I've fought a fourth of the battle and am looking forward to the next three fourths. Every time I read a joke for the third time and it's still funny, I'm happy.

But now I want to share. It's an impulse that's caught me before, and I've blogged about being careful when you send your work out to readers, but I'm talking about my alpha beta reader - the P-i-C. He's read along chapter by chapter with the last two WIPs and I desperately want to hand it over to him. I want to hear him laugh, have him ask questions, tell me how much he likes XYZ, all the things a good cheerleader does. I also want confirmation that I'm not spinning off into some bizarro world where I think everything is great and rocking along but I'm actually writing about bunnies and communism.

But I'm a little older and a little wiser after the last two WIPs. His encouragement was indispensable in getting over the mid-WIP-blues, but it also affected my vision. Any time he came back with a comment, good or bad, it changed the way I thought about the story. Which is good for improving a book, but not so good when you're still writing it. Different writers function different ways, but I'm experimenting with keeping it to myself until it's complete, even for my alpha beta reader.

To be honest, though, it's getting really difficult. I'm having to fight the idea of handing over a chapter, or just a snippet, or just a funny conversation. I occasionally give in and read an exchange out loud, but I've kept these outbursts to a minimum. Or tried to. But I've still got about 60K words to go. I don't know how long I can hold out.

How do you like to handle your first draft? Do you like to keep it to yourself until it's completely polished, or do you like to hand it over chapter by chapter?

Promise I'm not dead, Lola

2010-09-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

I love to see the effect the blogging community can have! Thanks for checking in on me, Lola. I've been meaning to write a blog post lately but my life exploded, and as I'm sure everyone knows when that happens enjoyable things like blogging fall by the wayside.

But I haven't been idle in other areas. I finished up round two of revisions on my last WIP and am letting it settle while I work on another one. I'm also taking a writing class at the local community college here (which is tonight), so both of those activities have been keeping me busy.

I promise to swing back by more often, and I'll be visiting everyone's blogs to catch up on the last couple of weeks. I've got some good stories from my writing adventures, and I hope to have some good advice gleaned from my writing class.

See you all soon!

My other passions

2010-08-16T10:20:00.000-05:00

I don't talk much about my other passions on this blog, but I had a momentous weekend that I want to share. And since it's my blog, I will.

I've been studying Tae Kwon Do for about four years now. I stumbled on it by random happenstance in college when the yoga class I wanted to take was full (which now that I know myself a little better, I laugh at the thought that I ever wanted to do yoga). My dad had studied Tae Kwon Do many years ago, so I thought I would take it to make him proud, and to have something to talk shop with him about. I didn't mean to fall in love.

But I did. Oh, I fell in love instantly. It's a sport suited for my personality, and one of the few exercises I can do that doesn't feel like exercise. It's become a way of life for me, and I can't imagine not having it in my life. I found a great school after college with an incredible community and, if I can brag, the best instructors in Texas. They pushed me, challenged me, wore me out, and taught me the true meaning of DON'T QUIT. I am the fighter I am because of everyone I work out with, and I might not have stuck with it if I didn't have such an incredible group around me every day.

Still, I was nervous for the test. Really. Really. Nervous. Like sick to my stomach couldn't eat well or sleep all week nervous. I'm an upper belt, inching closer to black, which means the tests get harder and harder, especially in the August heat of Texas. When I arrived at the dojang for the first part of the test Friday night my nerves had taken hold so strongly that my hands were shaking. I took a few moments to meditate, repeating my usual mantra of "I will be the strongest, fastest, and best fighter I can be" to myself, but the words weren't working. They were just strung together syllables with no meaning, and my stomach was threatening a mutiny.

But then I remembered an argument I'd made earlier that day, an argument I make to myself and the rest of the world on a daily basis: words matter. They mean something, I just hadn't found the right words for myself yet. So I searched in my mind for the right words to face my fears head on, and came up with the following:

I will be nervous, but I will get on the mat
I will sweat, but I will keep fighting
I will get tired, but I will throw one more kick
I will want to quit, but I will throw one more punch
I will mess up, but I will move on
I will be the strongest, fastest, and best fighter I can be

And you know what? It worked.

Waiting is the hardest part

2010-08-09T08:30:00.000-05:00

I know what you're thinking. This post is about waiting to hear back from agents, waiting to hear back from editors, waiting for your publication date.

But you're wrong.

This post is about the waiting that comes before that. The hardest waiting, I think.

Waiting to be a good enough writer that you can send your work out.

I remember when I was just going into junior high I went to summer camp for the last time. Several of the girls I made friends with were older than me, and they would all troop off to the showers as a group to shave their legs. So of course the first thing I did when I got home was demand (fine, ASK, I was a polite kid) that my mom take me to the store to get some razors because I needed to start shaving my legs. NEEDED. To which my mom said, "You have to wait six months, and if you still want to start shaving I will let you."

That was a looooooooooong six months. And each week I checked my legs, hairless as they were, and longed for a single or maybe even a double blade so I could join the club. Once my probationary period was over my mom took me to the store and got me my first razor. I started shaving that night, although I'm positive that it was nothing more than peach fuzz. But I was proud of myself; I was a big girl now.

That's how I feel about writing right now. I so desperately want to be a big girl, especially when there are all these shiny tempting contests going on around the blogosphere (ZOMG, have you SEEN the WriteOnCon contest?). But I'm not ready, and neither is my manuscript. I know this, I KNOW, but the waiting is so hard. I'm totally the person who will pull the brownie pan out ten minutes too early because it smells so friggin good. And it's alright until I get to the middle where it's half-baked and gooey and kind of nauseating. I mean, I'm all for brownie batter, but not some Frankenbrownie that can't decide if it wasn't to be goo or mush.

So that's where I'm at. Waiting for my manuscript to get to the point that I can smile proudly and hold it up in public maybe like the Ten Commandments and proclaim it THE GREATEST WORK EVER CREATED (BY ME). It's hard and frustrating and totally based on my own development. Which is sometimes the hardest part.

Where are you in your development? What are your hopes for your future writing?

Blogger might have taken over my life

2010-08-06T10:12:00.000-05:00

What does it say about me that I open Blogger before I open anything else, including my email?

We've got a good community going here, blog-o-buddies. I've laughed, I've cried, I've laughed until I cried, I've cried until I've laughed, I've learned, I've forgotten, I've been reminded. I've read posts about how to improve my writing, I've read posts about LOLcats, I've...

Woah, going off on a Dickens tangent. The point is, gentle readers, I appreciate the connections I've forged here, and it's thanks to all of you. So this Friday post is dedicated to you. Give yourself a pat on the back or a high five (but maybe not in public because you might be shunned or ridiculed). And thanks for making this the first site I sign into every morning :).

Happy Friday!

(Don't mind Rihanna's dead eyes, I'm sure she's just sleepy)

In which I, bleary-eyed, wax enthusiastic on you

2010-08-04T11:28:00.000-05:00

If I seem tetchy or incomprehensible (not always mutually exclusive), it is because of this, gentle readers:

Courtesy of Salemhigh.com

I gave myself 20 minutes to read last night. That's a chapter, maybe two. Four hours later I was reading the acknowledgements and wishing I worked for people who loved books as much as I do so that when I called to say I'd be in late because I stayed up all night reading a book they would TOTALLY understand.

I'm still processing this book. There were things I liked, things I didn't like, things I believed, things I didn't believe, plot lines that drove the story and plot lines that died halfway through, characters that seemed realistic and characters that didn't. It was not a book without flaws (find me one, I DARE YOU), but it was incredibly compelling. Obviously. I have grand plans to go back and dissect the book from a writer's perspective, but as a reader I enjoyed the story immensely. I'm not even sure if YA weren't so popular right now that this would be YA. I don't say that to take away from YA readers, but I'm not sure I would have understood a lot of the character observations if I were 16 or 17.

I highly recommend this book. As a reader, as a writer, as a lover of the word you'll be very gruntled to have read this.

And don't worry about me, I've started an IV drip of caffeine that should be kicking in aaaaany second now.

Oh, and if you've read this book and would like to discuss with me, say your piece in the comments! I'd love to know what other readers took away from this book.

Reasons why I haven't joined Twitter

2010-08-03T08:30:00.001-05:00

I'm on a list kick, I guess.

Although I should clarify that I do have a Twitter account, but only because someone many years ago made me feel like it was going to be the nextgreatawesomegmailthing and if I didn't get my name soon that I would have to be like JEMlovesvolleyballandgrillingandsometimessocks5489. So I made an account, but I don't actually use it. That would be uncouth.

Also: disclaimer. I have nothing against Twitter, nor against the people who use it. These are just my own personal feelings about my own potential Twitter usage. Tweet on, Twitter lovers!

1) I am totally not interesting enough to tweet things, even on a daily basis. Unless you want to know how often I get up at work to go pee or the amount of sandwiches I eat in a day.

2) I'm kind of like that old guy in Up about technology. Yes, I work with it for a living. Yes, I blog. Yes, I email. But I still sometimes get all "what's this newfangled tag thing?" and "why am I poking this person? it's obscene. in my day we asked a girl out to a nice steak dinner first."

3) I already ~~waste~~ spend countless hours perusing the lovely blogs I follow, I can't add Twitter accounts to that. Not if I ever want to sleep again.

4) The instant gratification of Twitter gives me way too much leeway to say something really stupid that will be forever immortalized in internet databases everywhere. I really shouldn't be allowed out in public, but certainly not a public where I can write exactly what I'm thinking without any filtering.

5) I can't be contained to 140 characters. I don't care if concise writing would make me a better writer. If I have something important enough to say to put it on the internet, it's going to be longer than 140 characters. Trust me.

Dudes, please don't enter this contest so I can have all the prizes!

2010-08-02T11:59:00.000-05:00

Somehow I don't think that will work, but here it is anyway:

Roni over at Fiction Groupie is hosting a contest with Julie Cross (sorry, Julie, but your blog title is way long and my fingers are LAZY). It's kind of awesomely epic, so definitely go check it out here, and the deets are below for your edification:

As a reminder, here are the fabulous prizes up for grabs this week:

Hannah Moskowitz's Break
Lisa Desrocher's Personal Demons (ARC)
A query or first five pages critique from Fine Print Lit's intern, Gemma Cooper
A query or first five pages critique from Janet Reid's assistant, Meredith Barnes
A query or first five pages critique from agent Suzie Townsend
A query or first five pages critique from editor Brendan Deneen

Entries will be accepted until midnight (central time) Sunday night August 8th. Six winners will be chosen. First place will get their choice of prizes, then second place will choose, and so on.

Some things that will make your book better

2010-08-02T11:16:00.000-05:00

A quick note: I've had some things come up over the weekend that are forcing me to put my super awesome contest on hold. I will hold a contest in the near future, though, and it will be so awesome it will blow your mind (maybe).

A Brief List of Things That Will Make Your Book Better
1) Put me in it (for reals, I've been FDA approved to increase your awesome by 37%)
2) Circus bears. Seriously. Circus bears.
3) Adverbs. Adverbs aren't used nearly enough in writing. Especially the word very. You should probably have at least one very per sentence, and in all dialogue tags.
4) Give all your characters similar names. Even better, give them the same name spelled differently. Catherine, Katherine, Cathryn, Kathrynn, the more creative the spelling the better (P'Cauthevyrn?)
5) Dialogue is so namby-pamby these days. You need to add more realistic ums and ahs and huhs and f-bombs. That's the only way editors will know that you really know what you're talking about. Voice of a generation, people.
6) You need to use bigger words to show off your academic prowess. My suggestion? Spatchcock (and oh PLEASE look up the definition).
7) Werewitchpires. They're all the rage in Germany right now.
8) Lists. Lots and lots of lists. (What? No, this is NOT a filler answer to get to 10, how DARE you accuse me of such things)
9) Extended paragraphs in which you expound on the deteriorating morals of a corrupt modern society and the need to overthrow the system. These work best in children's books. Especially with illustrations.

HELLO, Nobel Prize in literature.

Battling the fear demon

2010-07-30T14:03:00.000-05:00

I live a fearful life. I mean, I'm not being gunned down in the streets or anything (thank goodness, too, because I SUCK at lasertag), but I make fear-based decisions. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of ridicule, fear of insecurity, they all keep me on a specific path that I've struggled my entire life to break away from. I've gotten better at letting go, at taking risks, but that fear still follows me everywhere I go.

Putting a clothing item back on the rack because I don't think I can pull it off
Staying quiet at parties because I think I'll say something stupid (which, in all fairness, is usually true)
Not entering contests because I know I won't win
Not promoting myself as a writer/singer/lover of the arts because I think people won't want to read/listen/appreciate

At some point we have to let go of one trapeze to get to the other, and there's always that horrible airborne moment where you're not sure if you'll make it to the other one (the trapeze metaphor has always horrified me because I'm scared of heights). But we can't move forward in life unless we do let go and take a risk. Most successful people, whatever their calling, failed more times than they succeeded. After all, it only takes the one "yes."

So how do you battle the fear demon?

Oh, right, that contest thing

2010-07-29T11:55:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: ON HOLD

I've led you astray, kiddies. I've been out this week on a little vacay to see the most amazing show of my life. This lovely lady:

So that whole posting a contest thing on Monday did not happen, obvs. But it's happening NOW, so don't feel too bad. And now, without further ado:

JEM'S SUPER AWESOME CONTEST WITH SUPER AWESOME PRIZES ZOMG SO AWESOME!

The Rules:
1) You must be a follower. Old followers get +3, new followers get +1. That's right, I'm punishing you for being fashionably late to the party.
2) You must add a comment on this post. The contents of that comment, you ask?
3) You must list the top three reasons why you think you should win this contest over anyone else. Because I like lists, and much like Donald Trump, I like pitting people against each other.
4) Want more chances? If you blog about this contest you get +1, if you post it in your sidebar of contestness I'll give you +2. You can call me Santa. Show me in the comments that you did it because JEM does not operate on the honor system, being a dishonorable thief herself.
5) I will either pick someone based on how awesome their list is, or I will choose randomly. Or I will choose randomly from people with awesome lists. We'll see.

What the Frag Do I Win? (also known as The Prizes):
1) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Why? Because I am an obsessed fangirl, that's why.
2) The Fame by Lady Gaga. Again, super fangirl.
3) Maybe something else edible and awesome. IF I FEEL LIKE IT DON'T BE PUSHY.

How Long Do I Have to Enter This Awesomeness?
I'm leaving the contest open until midnight CST, 8/13/2010. Which for all you numbers challenged peeps is Friday after next, so you have no excuse for not entering because that is a friggin long time.

I think that's it. Is that it? This is my first contest, so if I've forgotten something just let me know. Have fun, kiddies!

Book Club! Or: how I learned to stop grumbling and love the book

2010-07-23T11:18:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I had book club last night for a book that I HATED. I was interested to see how the club would go, since the people in the club all work with books and can sometimes have loftier (*cough*pretentious*cough*) ambitions for their reading materials. It was one of those books that I would classify as "literary," so I knew I would be in the minority of people who didn't enjoy the book.

I went armed for battle, gentle readers, with my weapon store of reasons why I didn't enjoy the book: too many tangents that detracted from the main point, overwriting, no chapters (who DOES that!?! It was sheer madness! Oh, wait. Tangents), a somewhat unlikeable cast of characters, etc. All of these things I happily presented as my reasons for disliking the book. Some people agreed, some people disagreed, some people expounded on my reasoning, others refuted. Good points were made all around (as were dumb ones, you know who you were).

But my take home from the night was this: I enjoyed the book more than I thought I did. Once the discussion started swirling and others in the club made comments that brought new insight, I realized the author had put a great deal more depth into the storyline progression and the main character's motivations than I thought. And while it didn't increase my reading enjoyment (I was done by that time, obviously), it did help me appreciate the work that went into the book and how the author had accomplished what he had accomplished. Without the book club discussion, I wouldn't have achieved the insight and appreciation I have now. And as a writer myself, it's essential to recognize the impact a story has on its reader.

So book club had a positive outcome for me, and added a few more weapons to my writing arsenal. Plus we inevitably fell into talking about The Hunger Games, which made me squee like a fan girl, especially when I read this article this morning.

Is anyone else in a book club? Do you enjoy it? What books are you reading this month?

And as always: a muy happy Friday to the lot of you.

Crap. Now I have to have a contest

2010-07-23T09:41:00.000-05:00

I'm in the business of taking the free, gentle readers, have I not made that clear? I don't give the free, I take. Like a bad boyfriend or the IRS.

But then this happened. And you know what? It was AWESOME. FRAWESOME AWESOME. Like the Awesome Blossom, but instead of a half-cooked gooey onion in the middle you get BOOKS!

And I was happy, blog-o-buddies. I was dancing in the street! I was light-hearted and carefree! My weekend was made!

And then I started to feel bad. It's all Halie Joel Osment's fault, really, but now I know I have to pay it forward. I'll think real hard over the weekend to come up with something equally frawesome awesome and post my contest on Monday, but there are few things you can look forward to:

1) I will be grumpy about the giving away of the free
2) The free itself will not be impacted by my grump
3) I'll probably make you do something for it
4) It might involve lists
5) Crap, I don't have a five

Anyway, I'll post on book club later today, but start girding your loins now.

TAHAREH STOLE MY FUNNY

2010-07-22T11:38:00.000-05:00

Not because I had the same joke, no, that would be too cruel. But more because I read her post before thinking of a topic for my own and now all I can think is that I want my book to smell like Stephenie Meyer on a horse. So come back tomorrow, maybe I'll have regained my senses by then.

P.S. I have book club tonight and we're talking about a book I HATED (I won't say which one because I don't want to hurt any feelings but this book made me want to punch an old man in the jaw, so I'm interested to hear the discussion). I'll let you know how it goes. Oh, fun! Book club post tomorrow, natch.

P.P.S. Upon further reading that sounded like I wanted to punch a specific old man in the jaw. Not specific. So watch out, octogenarians of downtown Austin. I'M COMIN ATCHA!

P.P.P.S. No old men were harmed in the making of this post. YET.

Shaking the idea box

2010-07-21T10:29:00.002-05:00

I have no idea what that title means. I'm just now getting over a very nasty stomach virus, so I can't be held responsible for the things I write or say today. I'm like the Verve Pipe, only less 1996.

My question for everyone today: what do you do to keep track of your (no doubt brilliant) ideas?

Based on the effort it's taken to get ONE book up and running, I'm pretty sure I've got ideas to last me from here until kingdom come, so I'm not really worried about running out of ideas. I do worry, however, about losing good ideas or losing good scene ideas because I'm somewhere that I can't take good notes. I'd love to say I'm organized and have a neat little folder somewhere with all my brilliant story ideas along with character descriptions, scene ideas, and funny/clever lines. However, I think we all know where I'm going with this.

Let's say Martha wouldn't be proud. I have notes EVERYWHERE (and I mean EVERYWHERE): scribbled in random notebooks, saved as unsent emails, a billion word files across three or four different computers (and floppy disks, people, floppy disks), a few random notes on my phone notepad file. And those are just the ones I can remember. Every once in a while I run across an old song notebook or a file aptly titled "Story" and open them up to see a long forgotten story idea. Some of them are good, most of them are not, but they're hidden gems from my own past (does that make them hidden JEMs?). It's fun to find them and discover what I thought was interesting enough to write about at any given point.

I'd like to go back and write each and every one of these stories one day. The odds of that happening are about the same as me not eating this cookie (you can't see it because it's just crumbs now), but I still have high hopes. And suffice it to say my old boxes of stuff from middle school and high school are veritable treasure troves of JEMs.

So how do you keep track of all the brilliant?

Shaking the idea box

2010-07-21T10:29:00.000-05:00

We now return you to your regularly scheduled random

2010-07-16T09:59:00.000-05:00

1) When I swat a fly or a mosquito I feel like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building.

2) I miss my childhood. I don't think I appreciated it enough when I had it, but I want my boring summer days watching The Andy Griffith Show and eating microwaveable burgers. Those were the days.

3) I always get stuck next to the chatty people wherever I go. I think this is cosmic punishment for being so easily distracted.

4) Hallmark commercials make me cry.

5) Reading The Hunger Games has made me aware of how thoroughly I am unprepared for a nuclear apocalypse. Or a regular apocalypse.

6) I'm terrible at multitasking, but I keep trying it like I'll suddenly be a different person who can do it well.

7) When I finish a course in something I tend to think I know everything about that something. It's been long enough since I had a math class that I now think I know how to do all math. This is probably not true.

8) Number seven is definitely not true.

9) I find myself in the same numbers quandry as my last list.

10) Ten! Schmappy Friday, everyone.

Famous first lines, interpreted

2010-07-15T10:21:00.000-05:00

And if you don't like them, you can call me Ishmael.

Pride and Prejudice

Look, man, I’m about to lay some truth on you: a single brother P.I.M.P. who be ballin and rollin must be looking for some bitches.

A Tale of Two Cities

Brothers were rollin and brothers were fiendin, cats were making mad moves and cats were getting locked up, homies had faith in the system and homies were breaking the laws, it was black versus white, it was white versus black, it was an east coast/west coast thing.

Catcher in the Rye

You really want to know to know this shit? You probably want to know where I come from, what the streets did to me, how my parents rolled out before I was even kickin around and all that 50 Cent bullshit, but homie don’t play that, for real.

Slaughterhouse Five

This shit was for real.

Fahrenheit 451

Let me tell you, man, I loved blazing it up.

When slang goes awry

2010-07-13T08:30:00.000-05:00

I'm all about the slangination. I like shortening words, elongating words, adding "ness" and "tion" and "tor" to words and names. And I've written about this before, but my dog has learned to just respond to the sound of my voice because I call her so many nicknames she can't possibly keep up. So this comes from a place of love for the art.

A little language lesson. Saying "vaca" when you mean to say "vacay" is detrimental to your health and your odds of me not laughing at you.

Why?

Because "vaca" means cow in Spanish. Yeah. Cow.

So when you say "my vaca got approved" or "I'm headed out on my vaca" or My vaca is so awesome!" it mean something TOTALLY different to me. On the other hand, I'm glad you've got such cool livestock.

BACK! in the saddle

2010-07-12T10:26:00.000-05:00

It's been a rough couple of weeks, blog-o-buddies. Work, family, holidays, working on holidays, I've had my fill. But this weekend was the first weekend in a long time that I actually didn't have a whirlwind of plans to steal my time away. Which meant...oh, yes, that's right...WRITING TIME!

I'm in a weird writing place right now. I'm editing the current WIP, but doing some pretty major overhauls to the two MCs and their interactions with each other. I got excellent feedback from the P-i-C and my first beta reader, and I'm working to incorporate their suggestions into a bigger, even more awesome manuscript. Which means creating new scenes, completely scrapping the dialogue from existing scenes, and copying and pasting huge chunks of other scenes from one Word doc to another. Fun!

But it felt sooooo good to make some headway again. I even took the train this morning for the first time in two weeks and got a solid hour of uninterrupted writing/editing time. It's like I'm becoming a real girl, lovelies! Plus, if I want to avoid that sophomore syndrome, I better start shaping up my timelines!

What about you? What are you happy about on this blistering Monday morning?

STOP GIVING AWAY AWESOME STUFF WHEN I'M TOO BUSY TO ENTER!

2010-07-09T13:29:00.000-05:00

Dear Blog-o-buddies:

We've had good times together, I know we have. You've said some funny stuff, I've said some funny stuff, we've laughed, cried, cringed, eaten way more ice cream than the FDA recommends. We're buds, I believe that.

So I can be real with you. Life has been, in a word, CRAZY. Crizazy. Which unfortunately means I've been too busy to make the desired rounds of my favorite blogs. But I try to check in on the Google Reader and see who's saying what around the hinterwebs. And I'm noticing a disturbing trend.

You're having contents. Cool contests. With fun things like ARCs and pretty books and maybe a fun doodad or two. Okay, I get it. Contests are fun. Contests make people happy. Heck, contests make me happy.

But you know what doesn't make me happy, blog-o-buddies? When you have awesome contests that I can't enter because I'm too mother-fudging busy. It's like you all got together and decided to pass out all the fun books when I was out sick from class.

I'll kindly ask you to cease and desist with the awesomeness until I'm at a point where I can enter your fabulous contests again. I think this is a perfectly reasonable request, don't you, gentle readers?

Sincerely and with much love and hope of fun cool things coming her way,
JEM

P.S. ALL YOUR BOOKS ARE BELONG TO US.

Why statistics work 60% of the time, every time

2010-07-02T09:47:00.000-05:00

I read a great post on Maggie Stiefvater's blog yesterday about the odds of getting published in this industry. She makes the very good point that many of the submissions literary agents receive are unsuitable for public consumption, and while some of her younger admirers despair of ever being published in such an environment, she thinks the odds are greater than the numbers we're seeing.

I took a statistics course in college and learned all about distributions and average means and mean averages and margin of sampling error and all that somewhat math related stuff that makes my brain cry. I also studied marketing and market research, focus groups, etc., and so I'm inclined to agree with the great Maggie. The basic feeling about statistics is that you can make them say whatever you want.

With that in mind, I have some very useful Friday statistics:

1) I enjoy Fridays 100% of the time
2) 75% of people who don't work on Fridays are on my "to hate" list
3) 36.2% of this Friday will be spent slacking off
4) 100% of that last comment was a lie
5) Fine, 52.6% of this Friday will be spent slacking off

See? Math is fun!

Happy fun Fridays, everybody!

On baseball, writing, and life

2010-07-02T08:30:00.000-05:00

The partner-in-crime is borderline obsessed with baseball (the borderline is just my way of being nice, he's full on crazy), and while I lovingly tolerate the 70 some-odd games I'm subjected to during baseball season, my post last week about statistics got me thinking. I'm not sure how I feel about him loving a game that encourages under-achievement.

Take their batting averages, for instance. When someone says they have a "3-0-0" batting average, they're not talking about 300. They're talking about POINT three zero zero. Which, statistically, equals 30%. Which means they hit 30% of the balls that come their way. And that's a good batting average. You're getting into the A-Rod/Big Papi/Pujols range with that one.

But think about it. What other job on earth would reward 30% achievement?

"Scott, you found over 30% of the safety violations in our nuclear plant. We're giving you a promotion."
"Jane, you've landed 30% of your commercial flights successfully. We'd like to double your salary."
"Bob, 30% of your students passed this year, we're making you Teacher of the Year!"

This leads rather nicely into writing as a profession. Because as soon as I thought, "What kind of profession would reward such low achievement levels?" I had my answer. Writing. We're all crazy enough to keep at it even though the statistics are against us. And I'm not just talking about the statistics of getting an agent or getting published. I'm talking about the statistics of sell through, statistics on a second/third/tenth book, the statistics of making a living as a writer.

The bald truth is, the odds are MAJORLY against us. Spell check doesn't want to give me majorly, but it's clearly never seen Clueless. And yet, with the deck stacked against us, we're all here. Yeah, we know the odds. Yeah, we've seen the numbers. Yeah, we've gotten the rejection letters.

But we're Still. Here.

Which leads me to life. And more specifically, the human condition. Because let's face it, life ain't easy. The more we progress as a society the more existential our struggles become. It's not enough to have a roof over our heads, it has to be a nice one. It's not enough to have food on the table, it has to be organic and rare and maybe imported. We set the bar high, my friends. But it's helped us achieve great things as a species. And some of the best and most successful books have risen out of the ashes of an author decimated by struggles life threw at him or her.

Which is why, odds or no odds or against all odds, we keep trying. Baseball players keep stepping up to the plate and writers keep stepping up to the keyboard. We know the numbers, we know the odds, we know the likelihood, but we're all still here, typing and swinging away. Dreaming and hoping and revising and crying a little and triumphing. Because we all know what greatness can be achieved by beating life at it's own game.

Baseball, obviously.

Don't forget to register!

2010-07-01T09:18:00.000-05:00

For WriteOnCon, of course! Registration opens today, go here to join in the awesomeness with a side of awesomesauce.

If only someone had EXPLAINED beforehand...

2010-07-01T08:00:00.002-05:00

So, I don't know if many of you know this or not, but revisions are HARD. Like, WAY hard. To which I say: what the what, man? I did all the hard work of plotting, writing, replotting, rewriting, moving stuff around, holding imaginary conversations with myself in the shower. Isn't that enough, great write whale of a muse? Isn't that enough?!? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Apparently more character development and a stronger relationship between the two MCs. Siiiigh. Fine. But now I have to go back through ALL OF THOSE CHAPTERS again and tweak and add and delete and stand back and tilt my head to one side and then shake my head and erase everything and then throw my computer against a wall and have some vodka. I'm good at plotting, I'm good at moving a story forward, I'm good at adding in little mini-stories that keep the main story interesting. What I'm not so good at: character motivations and romantic interactions.

Don't get me wrong, I know what makes a guy hot (uh...sorry if you're reading this, Dad). But putting that down on paper...way harder than I thought. And what's even harder to guess is how other people will react to a character. Obviously you shouldn't write to please other people, but it helps if you want to sell any books. And figuring out how to get your story from "pretty good" to "holy crabcakes I couldn't put the durn thing down" is nigh upon impossible.

So I've been in kind of a revision funk. Not sure where to take my characters, not sure I'm doing enough, not sure I'm not doing too much, etc. If you're in revisions, how do you move yourself out of the rut?

Some things I still don't understand about life

2010-06-30T10:30:00.000-05:00

Thanks for all the supportive comments on Friday. Our friends are home from the hospital now and are taking a few days together to recuperate and start the healing process.

There is a concept that with age comes wisdom, and while I haven't reached an age ripe enough to give me total wisdom, I can't help feeling like I'm behind the eight ball on being smart about stuff. I'm not sure if technology is to blame because we're not all sitting around reading books to keep ourselves entertained (and therefore learning whether we like it or not), or if some people were always this dumb and we just don't remember or celebrate the dumb ones. But there are still some pretty basic things about life I think I should have a better grip on that I DEFINITELY don't.

1) How to address work frustrations. I'm not a confrontational person by nature, but I've been in the working world long enough that I should know how to tell someone to piss off without pissing them off. Instead I gripe about the person/situation/email/lack of fruit baskets to everyone but the offending party.

2) Paparazzi. I don't understand how to spell it, and I don't understand how they make a living out of what they do. You catch a picture of Brad Pitt frolicking on a beach with Angeline Jolie while he's still married to Jennifer Aniston? Sure, fine. You take a picture of Halle Berry in mom jeans at the supermarket and I'm supposed to pay you? Yeah. No.

3) Why people don't recycle. I'm not even going to get on my compostable soap box about this, but when it's readily available and it helps make the planet a little cleaner for your present or future kids, and you still don't do it? Now you're just spitting in Mother Nature's face.

4) The stock market. Period.

5) Why so many people choose the parking lot of a Wal-Mart to air their family drama. Usually after 10 p.m.

6) What I'm doing at a Wal-Mart after 10 p.m.

7) How this whole being a grown up thing works. I mean, really, I have to pay the SAME bills EVERY FRIGGIN MONTH?!? Do they understand how EXPENSIVE that is?

8) What was my teenage self so angry about all the time?

9) If cupcakes are so bad for me, why do they taste SO. DELICIOUSLY. GOOD? That seems like some kind of cruel trick.

10) Life.

When the universe sends you bad stories

2010-06-25T17:12:00.000-05:00

I've settled on a new mantra for myself: if you open your heart to the universe, it will fill your soul with stories. I shared this mantra with the P-i-C on our nightly casing of joints and he liked it.

"But what do you do when the universe sends you a bad story?" he asked.
"No such thing. You might have a bad telling, but there's no such thing as a bad story. Stories just are."

Well apparently I was wrong. Today we found out the unthinkable news: some good friends of ours lost their first baby girl in childbirth. For all of our shock and devastation, there was no possible way for me to think of this story as anything other than bad. Every time I told someone new and felt that awful pit of grief, I knew this story wasn't some emotionless, blameless thing. And the P-i-C's question came echoing back to me.

What do you do when the universe sends you a bad story?

My thought: you make it a good one. Because sweet baby girl was a fighter. She fought to spend a few precious moments in her parents' arms, to say hello to the world and let them know they were loved, that she knew they loved her, and that even if the universe saw fit to take her out of it, she was going on her terms. She would have been a joy to watch grow up, but I didn't have to see her whole life to know what kind of person she was. She showed us in the twelve minutes she was here.

I won't look on what could have been, I'll look on what was and know we were blessed.

Apparently I don't heed good advice

2010-06-24T10:05:00.000-05:00

One of my aunt's is a prolific writer (she's had more than 12 books published) and editor, and when I told her that I was writing a manuscript she gave me one piece of advice: don't let anyone else read it until YOU think it's perfect. They'll never be able to get that first version out of their minds, and their feedback won't be as helpful.

At the time I thought "yeah, sure, good. I'll make it perfect." And I set out with the best of intentions, childrens, I really did. I figured I'd write a rough draft, go through an edit or two, and then when I couldn't find anything wrong with it anymore, I'd turn it over to some beta readers. Right? Right.

There were things I wasn't prepared for, gentle readers. Things like TIME and IMPATIENCE and HOW MANY FRIGGIN TIMES DO I HAVE TO READ THIS CHAPTER type things. Or the THIS WHOLE BOOK IS CRAP I'M SCRAPPING IT thing. Don't act like you've never had that thing, I've seen your computer files. The manuscripts you'd rather burn than let someone else read. Some of them are there for a good reason, but some of them are there because you just got tired of looking at the same words over and over.

So I thought, ahhh, I'll let the P-i-C read them. He can give me constructive feedback and then I don't feel like I'm huddled in a corner scratching stories onto the wall for six months with no return. And so I handed some chapters over. And then some more. And then it was the whole book.

The whole first draft.

Let that sink in. I let someone read a first draft. Does he know that's a first draft? Sure. Does he know all the things I intend to fix later? No. Can he ignore them if I tell him to? No. It's like on TV, when lawyers will slip in some sentence they know they're not supposed to say so that the jury hears it even though it's stricken from the record (I'm pretty much a lawyer, so I know these things are true). A reader won't ignore something just because you tell them to.

So I finished the first draft of the current WIP and immediately went into character revisions. My two MCs weren't strong enough, and they didn't create enough of a spark together. So I SLAVE over a revised chapter one and swagger over to the P-i-C with lappy in hand.

"There you go, shiny new revised chapter one."

"Oh, cool." Pause for reading. "Wait, this is just the same thing."

"WHAT?!? This is TOTALLY different!"

"What's different?"

"There's...dialogue. And description. And I made her less whiny and I made him cooler. It's STREETS AHEAD of the original first chapter."

"Oh. Seems the same to me."

Frustrated tearing out of hair.

And that's when my aunt's words came echoing back to me. I couldn't take back what he'd already read. I couldn't take back that he already knew the plot line and so any added mystery was lost on him. I'd put words out there and now I couldn't take them back.

The truth is, I'll keep bugging the P-i-C to read my stuff. I need some kind of instant gratification that I'm headed on the right path, and I've pretty much corrupted him anyway. But I've learned a valuable lesson about when to hand over a piece of work to an outside audience: you better be darn sure you can't think of a SINGLE THING to fix anymore, because you can't take those words back.

Some things I've noticed

2010-06-22T09:00:00.001-05:00

1) There is an alarmingly high number of people who go mental right outside my office window. Usually toothless and/or homeless and shouting obscenities. Perhaps this is what I get for working next to the homeless shelter.

2) I will not find the concept of gazpacho alluring no matter how you try to spin it.

3) Coffee is better than a high five from Michael Phelps.

4) Sometimes the difference between the way I think I look and the reality that faces me in the mirror when I go to the bathroom is heart attack inducing. Especially after having watched a movie with a bunch of pretty people in it.

5) Women who look really good in monokinis have no soul. I've fact checked this one.

6) I thought all of my shows being over for the summer would free up more time for other things, but it turns out it just encourages me to watch previous seasons of random shows on Hulu and Netflix streaming.

7) This is hilarious. So is this.

8) Having now surpassed five, I feel compelled to carry on to ten.

9) The school zone light still blinks near my house even though school is out. This angers me. Twenty miles an hour is not a good speed to drive while angry. Highly dissatisfying.

10) I got to ten!

11) That last one was kind of lame, so you get a bonus one. I'm finding that being myself is both terrifying and rewarding. And involves lots of embarrassing pictures of me on people's iPhones.

Whoooooooooo are you? Who who? Who who?

2010-06-21T10:42:00.000-05:00

Kiddies, as soon as I get my brain on my straight and my veins properly caffeinated, I'll be signing up for a creative writing class here at the local community college.

One thing I'm really looking forward to working on is character development. I tend to let such things fall by the wayside, shoved off the road by the barreling carriage of a good storyline, but then my characters end up covered in muck and faceless (well, not faceless, but there's all that mud, you know, and...clearly haven't had the caffeine part yet). Flat characters are unrelatable characters and a sign of sloppy writing. And while I don't mind the occasional Sloppy Joe, I do mind the occasional sloppy writing.

So question for all you lovelies out there: what are your favorite character building exercises? Maybe if I have a few in my back pocket I won't look like such a greenie.

Confession time

2010-06-18T09:10:00.000-05:00

Oh, gentle readers, I got some great comments on the post about good writing in YA yesterday. Looks like most of you feel as I do - YA and poor writing don't have to be synonymous, but there are definitely some perpetrators out there. And while the post yesterday was about YA, I wanted to extend the conversation to all genres.

Because I have a confession to make.

Well, several confessions. About authors whose writing I hate.

GASPSHOCKHORROR! I know, childrens. I know. Am I even allowed to hate other writer's writing? Well, as a reader, sure. As a newbie writer, I hesitate to even say such things.

Why?

Because there are big names on this list, childrens. Celebrated authors. Timeless authors. Award-winning authors.

And yet...I can't stand to read them. Maybe Athena will strike me down for this, but it's Friday and I have to go into work early and I'm a little loopy, so I'm putting it out there.

The culprit: Cormac McCarthy
The crime: Gross negligence in regards to grammatical structuring.

The culprit: Charles Dickens
The crime: Overwriting. The best of overwriting, the worst of overwriting. The age of indulgence, the age of...you get the point.

The culprit: Edith Wharton
The crime: Boring the crap out of me, and creating unrelateable characters.

The culprit: Erich Maria Remarque (wrote All Quiet on the Western Front)
The crime: Whining.

So you see, childrens? These are MUY FAMOSO authors whose writing I can't stand to read. And did you notice anything? No? I'll wait...take a look...that's right, NONE of them are YA authors. Sure, I could fill my left shoe with a list of YA authors whose writing I don't like for one reason or another, but this list proves two things (well, three):

1) High school required reading lists scarred me
2) YA authors aren't the only ones out there bucking the rules
3) Writing quality and style are very much a matter of personal opinion

What has this post accomplished? I'm not sure. Do I feel better getting this off my chest? Maybe. But not as good as I'll feel once my caramel latte shows up. Nom nom nom...sorry, what was I saying?

A good story vs. a good book: DEBATE ON!

2010-06-17T09:38:00.000-05:00

I was grumbling last night about revisions making me feel like my WIP is very lackluster when the P-i-C said something that surprised me.

P-i-C: It's a good story.
JEM: Well, I hope so, but I just feel like the writing isn't there yet.
P-i-C: Who cares about the writing? You're not trying to write a great literary work or anything.
JEM: Well, no, I'm not trying to be Tolstoy, but that doesn't mean it can't be well-written.
P-i-C: (shrugs) It's YA. What does it matter?

Ouch, my friends. Ouch. But it occurs to me that many other casual readers have this same opinion of YA. Some of that reputation is deserved and some of it is not. To be honest, when I search my brain for YA books that could stand as adult books, only a few names come to mind - Suzanne Collins, Madeleine L'Engle, Sharon Creech (who is closer to middle grade, but I'm throwing her in there). There are a lot of YA books out there right now that have a high energy plot with clean writing, but no one's going to put those books up for the Pulitzer. Whatever the genre may have been before, it now seems to be about paranormal activities and romance (my own included, ahem). And I suppose it's hard to wax philosophical when you're fighting werewolves/vampires/ghosts/a zombie homecoming queen.

So my question to you, gentle readers, is this: do you think the YA genre has sacrificed good writing for a good storyline? Has it gotten so commercial that a good plot can cover up poor word choice? Or has it ushered in a new way of looking at writing, as a vehicle for the story?

This is what happens when you wear t-shirts

2010-06-16T11:35:00.000-05:00

Home
JEM: (stumbling around at 4 in the morning trying to get dressed to take her mother to eye surgery) Why would anyone wake up this early? These pants seem tiny...oh, these are underwear. Need shirt. Shirt! (puts on P-i-C's shirt and stumbles to car)

Hospital
Mom: That woman looks like she's staring at me.
Woman: (stares)
Mom: Do you think she knows me?
Woman: (to JEM) Did you go to Johns Hopkins?
JEM: (looks down at shirt, blushes) Uh, no, this is my husband's shirt.
Woman: Did your husband go to Johns Hopkins?
JEM: (more shameful blushing) Uh, no. I think he visited?
Woman: (look of disillusionment before turning away)
Mom: I guess she wasn't looking at me, then.

University education FAIL.

Holy sh...

2010-06-15T11:20:00.000-05:00

I got some GREAT comments on the post yesterday. In particular, Lola Sharp gave a very good (and very useful!) in-depth view of what's out there in YA and how kids are reacting. How does she know? Because she's got a 14 year old daughter.

Look, I'm not going to pull the whole "when I was your age we had to walk uphill two miles in the snow with bare feet" adult thing, but holy crap do these kids know everything. In high school, I knew kids who had not only been into drugs, but had already gotten out of them by the time freshman year rolled around. Sex was very commonplace, R-rated movies were no big deal, and I thought I knew everything.

BUT. I wasn't doing those things. I knew about them, they weren't taboo topics, but I wasn't doing them. So that whole high school experience is inauthentic to me. I walk a confusing line between wanting to be authentic to modern teenagers (now I do sound old, blah) and wanting to be authentic to the kids who I know are like me, and my own past.

Like drugs, for instance. I wasn't into drugs, I didn't hang out with people who were. I knew people, sure, but that wasn't my thing. And to be completely honest, I don't want to write about people who are into that kind of life. Those aren't really characters I want to explore. No judgement, but it's like writing about a marine biologist: how many of you really find them interesting? Yeah, that's how I feel about people who do drugs. Not my scene, not what I'm interested in learning about.

But do I nerd myself out of the market by not including it? That's hard to say. I'd guess some would say yes, some would say no. I also get on a weird church lady moral streak sometimes and don't want to promote that kind of life. I don't want kids to feel like they have to live that life to be "real." I'm not out to moralize the world (I cut people off on the highway way too much for that), but I do want to create MCs that I can admire.

Thanks, everyone, for the great comments yesterday. After going back through more of my WIP, I decided to stick mostly to damns, hells, and the occasional bitch. Siiiiiigh, I'm so saintly.

Dropping the F bomb

2010-06-14T10:51:00.000-05:00

After a grouchy week of bouncing around my head between new stories, old stories, and books, I'm officially into revising! To be honest I feel better getting my hands back in there, and after a week away (and reading a popular YA book that I thought was a little bit crap), I'm ready to take on the world. Of publishing.

So! Let's talk profanity. As I've mentioned before, I'm not a genre writer, but the current WIP is a YA. Which means...rules. More rules than I'm used to having previously written mainstream novels. Among the rules debated are: sex, drugs, ~~rock and roll~~, drinking, and cursing.

I'll tackle some of the other issues later this week, but I'd like to address profanity today primarily because the P-i-C told me to cut the curse words in my current WIP. I'm on the fence about this one because I can see both sides:

For profanity: Kids curse. Hell, I was cursing in middle school. To leave that out might feel inauthentic and too sugary to some readers.

Against profanity: It will bother parents, and it can pull the reader out of the actual story. And if you overdo it, it can also feel inauthentic. I've always felt that curse words carry so much more weight in print, and one f bomb on the page is worth ten in casual conversation.

So you see? Torn. The P-i-C (as he is wont to do) makes a good argument, but I don't want the book discounted because it doesn't connect with the reader. And if my characters feel too goody goody, it definitely won't connect with the reader. Even the goody goodies drop a damn once in a awhile. I also don't want to put off parents or teachers by filling the book with extraneous content that distracts from the really good story (I hope).

I put it out to the blogosphere: what are your rules for cursing (or not) in YA?

In which I'm feeling a bit...tetchy

2010-06-09T09:52:00.000-05:00

I've heeded the good advice dispensed on this blog and taken a break from revisions on my current WIP. I know I'm doing the right thing, and I'll thank myself for it later when I'm on revision six and just want to kill off all my characters so I don't ever have to write about them again, but...I can't figure out what else to do.

I tried working on a different story, but in the process I discovered an old outline I threw together of a story I came up with out of a dream, and I got sucked into that story. So now I've got two stories that are on COMPLETE OPPOSITE ends of the spectrum (for REALS), and my brain won't pick one to run with. They both have their allure, but I haven't been able to choose.

So I thought, "I'll read something." I perused the to read shelf (which grows by a stack of books each time I'm allowed into a bookstore), and picked a YA book I've been meaning to read for a long time but haven't gotten to yet. I won't say which one, but I got a few short chapters in and realized there was no way I could read it. I have really high hopes for this one and definitely plan to come back to it, but last night it just felt...stilted and overwritten.

And it doesn't help that my brain is still going "write! write! write!" and clapping its hands together like the monkey with the cymbals. I keep telling it I want to, and can it please choose an idea to stick to, but it's not interested in the semantics. It also keeps demanding bananas.

Add a busy work week and some family brouhaha to that, and you've got one tetchy blogger. Hello, hot cocoa coffee, feel free to work your magic.