1) Women love men who lean against things, especially indolently.
2) I now have a healthy suspicion of heaving busoms, broad expanses of chests, and features chiseled from stone.
3) Women in the old days used to get almost raped A LOT. We probably should have come up with pepper spray a hell of a lot sooner.
4) A good 80% of my French vocabulary comes from dress descriptions in period novels.
5) Fiesty women with freckles were very much not the norm.
6) The ultimate way to prove your love to a man is to get knocked up before you're married.
7) For every brooding, handsome, rich devil out there, there is a witty but smaller brother.
8) Women who go out with their hair uncovered are risque, but women who let their breasts hang out in evening gowns are not.
9) Everyone in the past had awesome colored eyes.
10) Aunts and uncles of girls with trust funds were greedy bastards.
What have YOU learned from your genre of choice?
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
My thought for the day
There is nothing quite so satisfying as determining the perfect word to express your intentions.
Back to the cave with me.
Back to the cave with me.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Giving your characters intimate moments
I have a tendency as a storyteller to focus on the story and not the characters. Sometimes this works out fine, because the characters are so clear to me that I don't really have to think about their backstory. It just kind of exists, and influences their behaviors without me analyzing it too much.
Oh to be so easy, right?
Well, that's not the case with my current WIP. The story is there, the action and twists and turns are all coming together quite nicely. And the characterization is there, but it's not always solid. My MC is the victim of the story, carried along by what she needs to do instead of what she would do. As my crit partner put it, "I can clearly see her now, but I can't see her how she was before this story started."
Part of this comes from having too much action without enough quiet moments. Quiet moments allow a reader to get familiar with a character outside of the story. Readers aren't distracted from learning new info or following action, they're just hanging out in a private moment with your character. And as we all know from our shower conversations with ourselves, private moments bring about unguarded actions that reveal us more than anything else.
Sometimes this comes in the form of quirks. Maybe your character talks to himself when he's alone, or sings show tunes, or cries when there's no one around to see him in a moment of weakness. Sometimes it's an action or behavior so ingrained they're not conscious of it, but it speaks volumes to the reader.
For example, the MC in my current WIP is an archer. In one scene, she's stuck between a rock and a hard place (literally) and needs a moment to plan. As she debates her decision, she strokes the fletching on her arrow. This services the scene on two levels: on the most immediate level, we see her nervousness in the habit. And the action speaks more about her nerves and internal prep than me as the author just saying "she was nervous and preparing for the next step."
But on the higher level, the reader sees it as a habit. It's a reminder: she's done this before. She knows to check the fletching for breaks, it's an action ingrained in her since she first learned how to shoot. She's probably done it hundreds of times before, in moments just like these, and suddenly we have an insight into her past. If she's been around arrows enough to pick this up as a nervous habit, then archery must be important to her life. It must have served a large role in her childhood, which naturally leads to more questions. Why? For how long? What else did it influence? And so on.
The moral of the story here is to give your character intimate moments with the reader. When you find those quiet scenes between actions, use them to build up the rapport between your character and your reader. These moments are insight into the MC's true personality, and allow you to share back story through their actions without info dumping on your reader.
How do you like to use your character's personal moments?
Oh to be so easy, right?
Well, that's not the case with my current WIP. The story is there, the action and twists and turns are all coming together quite nicely. And the characterization is there, but it's not always solid. My MC is the victim of the story, carried along by what she needs to do instead of what she would do. As my crit partner put it, "I can clearly see her now, but I can't see her how she was before this story started."
Part of this comes from having too much action without enough quiet moments. Quiet moments allow a reader to get familiar with a character outside of the story. Readers aren't distracted from learning new info or following action, they're just hanging out in a private moment with your character. And as we all know from our shower conversations with ourselves, private moments bring about unguarded actions that reveal us more than anything else.
Sometimes this comes in the form of quirks. Maybe your character talks to himself when he's alone, or sings show tunes, or cries when there's no one around to see him in a moment of weakness. Sometimes it's an action or behavior so ingrained they're not conscious of it, but it speaks volumes to the reader.
For example, the MC in my current WIP is an archer. In one scene, she's stuck between a rock and a hard place (literally) and needs a moment to plan. As she debates her decision, she strokes the fletching on her arrow. This services the scene on two levels: on the most immediate level, we see her nervousness in the habit. And the action speaks more about her nerves and internal prep than me as the author just saying "she was nervous and preparing for the next step."
But on the higher level, the reader sees it as a habit. It's a reminder: she's done this before. She knows to check the fletching for breaks, it's an action ingrained in her since she first learned how to shoot. She's probably done it hundreds of times before, in moments just like these, and suddenly we have an insight into her past. If she's been around arrows enough to pick this up as a nervous habit, then archery must be important to her life. It must have served a large role in her childhood, which naturally leads to more questions. Why? For how long? What else did it influence? And so on.
The moral of the story here is to give your character intimate moments with the reader. When you find those quiet scenes between actions, use them to build up the rapport between your character and your reader. These moments are insight into the MC's true personality, and allow you to share back story through their actions without info dumping on your reader.
How do you like to use your character's personal moments?
Monday, February 6, 2012
The benefits of spilling your secrets
I like to tell people I would do great in a zombie apocalypse because I have the hoarding mentality of the Great Depression. Maybe it's the fact I grew up poor, maybe it's the fact that I'm only slightly less selfish than a 2 year old with a My Little Pony collection, or maybe it's just part and parcel of my personality. I save new clothes for months before wearing them, I hide sugar packets in my desk in case we run out at work, and I hide my favorite foods in the cupboard so the partner-in-crime doesn't get to them before I do.
As a writer, this has translated to hoarding secrets. At first I thought I was saving the conflict for the climax. You know, Pedro can't find out Martha is really his daughter until 250 pages in. That big of a secret, you need to hoard it, right? Because if you give up all your good secrets at the beginning, you'll have no story left to end the damn thing.
What I really found out was that I was being lazy and protecting myself from actually having to work for something. Keeping that secret for 17 chapters meant nothing happened. People ate dinner, walked from one room to the other, but nothing really momentous occurred because I was waiting. As a result, my middles dragged and my climaxes were obvious from a dozen chapters off.
So this go round, I issued myself a challenge. When you have a secret, share it. Anytime something occurred to me - Martha is Pedro's DAUGHTER - I had to reveal it. Maybe not to the characters themselves, but to the reader. Because tension lies in the divide between the reader's knowledge and the character's knowledge. If the reader knows Martha is Pedro's daughter, but Pedro doesn't know it, we have tension.
And in the end, books are just secrets we're waiting to reveal. All stories are a string of revealed secrets, and we as the reader keep reading to find out what they are. What will happen when Pedro finds out? What does Martha want? Why didn't Pedro know Martha was his daughter in the first place? Secrets.
So my challenge to you: when you have a secret, spill it. You might be scared that you'll run out of secrets like I was, but what you'll find instead is that more secrets rise up through the cracks to answer the questions behind the secret you revealed before. And the climax you end up with is so much greater than what you started with, because you had to think harder to top yourself. And that's entertainment, my friends.
As a writer, this has translated to hoarding secrets. At first I thought I was saving the conflict for the climax. You know, Pedro can't find out Martha is really his daughter until 250 pages in. That big of a secret, you need to hoard it, right? Because if you give up all your good secrets at the beginning, you'll have no story left to end the damn thing.
What I really found out was that I was being lazy and protecting myself from actually having to work for something. Keeping that secret for 17 chapters meant nothing happened. People ate dinner, walked from one room to the other, but nothing really momentous occurred because I was waiting. As a result, my middles dragged and my climaxes were obvious from a dozen chapters off.
So this go round, I issued myself a challenge. When you have a secret, share it. Anytime something occurred to me - Martha is Pedro's DAUGHTER - I had to reveal it. Maybe not to the characters themselves, but to the reader. Because tension lies in the divide between the reader's knowledge and the character's knowledge. If the reader knows Martha is Pedro's daughter, but Pedro doesn't know it, we have tension.
And in the end, books are just secrets we're waiting to reveal. All stories are a string of revealed secrets, and we as the reader keep reading to find out what they are. What will happen when Pedro finds out? What does Martha want? Why didn't Pedro know Martha was his daughter in the first place? Secrets.
So my challenge to you: when you have a secret, spill it. You might be scared that you'll run out of secrets like I was, but what you'll find instead is that more secrets rise up through the cracks to answer the questions behind the secret you revealed before. And the climax you end up with is so much greater than what you started with, because you had to think harder to top yourself. And that's entertainment, my friends.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Busy busy busy
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!
Hope your January is going well!
Friday, January 6, 2012
This could be the last 2012 EVAR
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!?!
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!?!
Friday, December 16, 2011
I really just used this sentence
"The egregious breaches of grammar protocol are fun!"
Happy Friday, gentle readers.
Happy Friday, gentle readers.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Dream a little dream
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.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Overprotecting your characters
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?
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?
Monday, November 21, 2011
Confession session
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!
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!
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