Almost Famous

Last night at work one of the people working up at the front desk asks me, "Do you have cute feet?"

I mentally thank the stars I just painted my toenails, and said yes. I took my shoe and sock off to demonstrate. She agreed I had cute feet, and that I was also pale.

"What size do you wear?"

"Six to six and a half, depending on the shoe," I reply, wondering where this was going.

"Darn. A casting director just came in asking for girls with "pale, cute, size seven feet for a foot double in Shia Labouf's new movie, Wettest Country."


Apparently they are filming the movie in the area, and the actress doesn't want to show her feet on screen for some reason. And I was almost the foot double for her.

Alas, my tiny feet!

Once More Into the Breach, Dear Friends

I image this in a Mr. Smithers voice.

After three weeks of catching up on my reading, housework, and social life, I am ready to jump back into my writing. I realized that I was moderately burned out, and needed to recharge my batteries.

Consider the battery recharged.

I spent last week pondering what I should/wanted to work on next. I've decided to finish the novel I set aside in November, tentatively named REDEEMER, since the interest has come back, and I have ideas on how to fix the problems that made me set it aside in the first place. This story won't leave me alone; it refuses to be forgotten. So now I get to look through all my notes (another benefit of planning a novel--if you have to stop for a long period of time, you're not going to forget all the cool stuff you had in mind) and try to get back into the swing of things.

I had fun these last three weeks, but I am itching to be writing again. This time, however, I plan to balance out my time. Writers spend so much enery trying to carve out time for our writing, we forget to plan for other activities, like reading and socializing with our families. There will be times that a deadline will force you to eshew reading, spending time with friends, and housework, but I don't think it should be the default setting for writers. 

Maybe you guys have this figured out already, and I am just slow on the up take. I tend to go all in. I throw myself into a project and focus on it solely that until it's complete. I can multitask, but it's not my default setting. So when I am working on a book, everything else falls to the wayside, which isn't a good long term strategy, both for my creativity and for my personal life.

So from now on, I am going to budget time, not just for writing, but for reading, and housework and all the other things I need to take care of.

I spent the last three weeks quite busy, and I don't want to give up reading in favor of writing again. So I plan to reorganize my time more efficiently. 


And now, my accomplishments for the last few weeks:

*Several trips to the shopping center with my best friend, with many books bought. 
*Moving up to Medium on Guitar Hero. The learning curve is at a 45 degree angle, by the way.
*Started beta reading a book I've had since December. Sorry Joe. :D I should be done by the end of the week.
*Went to North Carolina this last weekend to meet my husband's extended family, and attended his great-grandmother's 90th birthday party.
*Caught up on housework and still in the middle of spring cleaning. I have too much stuff. 
*Started a role-playing campaign with my husband, twin brother and sister in law. I am the DM, or the dungeon master, which means I control the story. It's really interesting to tell a story and watch the audience/characters interact.
*Read a ton of books, and I have even more on the "To Read" pile.

Here is a list of what I have read:

The Iron Duke, by Meljean Brook
Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Steampunk'D Edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg
Sunset and Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale
Haunted by Chuck Palahnuik (unfinished)
John Dies at the End by David Wong
Lost Echos by Joe R. Lansdale

I am still working on Haunted, because...well...it's Chuck Palahnuik. There's a story in there that made me physically sick to my stomach (I didn't actually throw up, but it was a close call). I was just getting over a sinus infection, so I decided I would just set that aside. But if you've ever read Palahniuk, you know that he casts a spell on you while you read. The main character could be the worse person in the world, and you're still reading to find out what happens to him. 


Don't forget, I am having a blogfest on April Fool's Day! You should sign up!


How do you budget your time? Can you multitask well? What's on your current To Read list?

Books that Changed Your Life

I had an interesting discussion with my best friend Melissa the other day. We both love to read, so naturally the conversation turns to books whenever we spend more than five minutes around each other. 

We talked about books that changed our lives. I don't necessarily mean something as dramatic as "I had lupus-cancer-diabetes, and when I rubbed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone* all over my body I was cured!" 

Books that changed something inside you. That after you read them, you felt like you were a slightly (or majorly) different person. A few titles sprang to mind, and I thought I would share them with you.


Lord of the Flies by William Golding: Lots of you had to read this one in school, so the forced reading might ruin things for you. When I was younger I would simply grab books off the library shelf and check them out without really looking at the spine. It was an adventure.

One day I innocently picked up Lord of the Flies. I was thirteen. I read it in one sitting, and I was horrified. There are still images that book created in my mind that haunt me.


I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier: I cannot stress what an amazing author Robert Cormier is. I read everything I could get my hands on after stumbling across I Am the Cheese. It too scarred me for life when I got to the ending and discovered exactly what he meant by the title, taken from a nursery rhyme "The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone..."


She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb: I read this book as a teenager, and then promptly passed it around to my other friends. Every year I reread this book, and it still manages to captivate me. It's one of those books where it's really hard to describe what it's about. "There's this girl, and her life is really messed up, and the story describes her situations..." The characters are vivid and real, and it really challenges what we've been taught about how to structure a story. I have two other books by Wally Lamb that's on my stack of "To Read" and I can't wait.


American Gods by Neil Gaiman: Again, this book really challenged my ideas about people, and places, and how a story could be told. I love Gaiman's novels, but American Gods just stays with me. I think about certain scenes from time to time.

There are tons of other books that I've read and felt moved by. Heart Shaped Box, The Gargoyle, Hearts in Atlantis, and Shelter to name a few. Some of it I think it timing. Sometimes you need to read a book that will change your view on the world, that if you'd read even a year later it wouldn't have affected you in the same way. All I know is I felt like a different person after reading these books. The foundation of myself, if you will allow me a dramatic analogy, was forever shaken.

So what books left you feeling like a different person? What books changed you inside in ways you can't describe?

*Note: As far as I am aware, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has never cured someone of their ailment other than boredom and lack of awesome in their lives. I haven't tested the British version of the book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone**, so perhaps there's still hope.

**Further Note: My inferior American search system on Amazon did not pull up the UK edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, just the 10th Anniversary Edition and the Welsh translation. Go figure. So you're just going to have to take it from me there's a British version of The Sorcerer's Stone, and it's actually called the Philosopher's Stone, and for some reason they thought the American audiences wouldn't know what a Philosopher's Stone was, so they changed the title. Even though as a fantasy author, I already knew what a Philosopher's Stone was, and felt gypped that they changed the title. As since the author is British, you should know that when I say "British version" I really mean the original book.

50 Followers Blogfest!!

After a year of blogging, I have reached over fifty followers (52 at the time of this post). I cannot tell you how awesome or special that makes me feel. Over fifty people subscribe to my blog to read my ramblings. I have regular comments on my posts, and an awesome group of followers. 

This is slightly surreal to me, since I am not used to anyone outside of close friends and my Mom wanting to read what I've written. I cannot thank each and every one of my awesome followers enough for taking time out of their busy lives to read my posts. You guys rock!

So in honor of your awesomeness, I am hosting a blogfest! I thought it would be fun (and easy for those of you who are busy) if we posted an excerpt of our old work. It can be something from your diary when you were 12 or your last trunked manuscript. It could be a poem you wrote in fourth grade for your Mom, or a fanfiction you wrote as a teenager.

The beauty of this is you don't have to come up with something new. All you have to do is find something you wrote previously, and post it. This should be done in the spirit of fun and humor, and is not an excuse to berate yourself for your failings. I think we need some perspective sometimes on how far we've come as writers. It feels like we're not making progress. We write, produce a manuscript, query, rejection, and then the process starts over.

We feel like publication will be the validation that we are improving, we are getting better. Or if you're already published, you want a bigger advance. A prestigious award. We need some outward sign that we really are getting better.

And you are. By the simple process of continuing on through the doubt and insecurity your writing skills are getting better. It's just hard to see the forest for the trees sometimes. 

So! On April 1st (because really, why not?) we are all going to post an excerpt, short story, or poem, from an earlier work. Me personally, I plan to find the most awful piece of drek of mine that I can find. And that's going to be hard to top, considering my last offering for this sort of public humiliation. 


Sign up below and let the words fly!


50 Followers Blogfest!

In Which Neil Gaiman Says Something Meaningful and I Post It For the Eddification of All

The title pretty much sums this post up.

I finished reading "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett last night, and am left wondering why it took me so long to read it. I suppose the number of the people who haven't yet read this book is down in the single digits, and I urge the rest of you to go read it. 

At the end of the book Neil Gaiman talks about how he met Terry Pratchett and how they wrote the book together (as in, together. Not that one of them wrote one half and the other wrote the rest. They would sort of trade off, and write when they knew what happened next). 

I was struck by what Gaiman said about Terry Pratchett:

"He constructs novels like a guildmaster might build a cathedral arch. There is art, of course, but that's the result of building it well. What there is more of is the pleasure taken in constructing something that does what it's meant to do--to make people read the story, and laugh, and possibly even think."

For a long time I've thought about art versus craft. You hear people talk about the art of writing, the creative energy that goes into a novel. Depending on the person, and whether or not they have an MFA, really big words get thrown around that basically mean "Writing is as nebulous as the clouds, and real writers cannot predict the whims of the muse anymore than we can predict the whims of the weather."

Then there's the other camp, the "storytellers". You know the writers, the ones that claim, "I am not shooting for high art, I just want to tell a good story." They pay special attention to dialogue, and characters, and *gasp* might even plot out their novels in advance.

Obviously I am generalizing. I have met people with MFAs who were down to earth and people who consider themselves "storytellers" but refuse to change one word of their deathless prose.

And all the while I am left wondering, "Can't it be both? Can't a person write a really great genre novel and it still have literary merit?"

The answer, of course, is yes, and authors do it all the time. Gaiman and Pratchett are examples. So is Holly Lisle and Orson Scott Card. Sure, they want to tell a compelling story, but there's usually something deeper going on in the story if you care to think about it. 

It's just that I think we're trained to think of it as being only one way or another. Since I write genre novels, I am excluded from the Deep and Literary table. Likewise for literary authors, your books are treated like children who must eat your veggies: you won't enjoy the actual experience, but it's good for you. Builds characters (pun intended).

Gaiman's statement really hit home for me, because I think that's the key to merging literary merit with an awesome story. Art comes after a certain level of competence is acquired. If you can lay down a seamless structure (whether it's through plotting or pantsing and tidying up afterward) it becomes much easier to focus on excellence in characters, plot, and word choice. 

I think a cathedral arch is an excellent analogy:

Wikicommons allows me to illustrate my point.

See how beautiful the architecture is? There's a quite grace to a cathedral arch. But think about all of the planning that went into the design.

You can have both art and entertainment. It doesn't have to be one side or another. 


What do you think? Do you label yourself as an artist or a craftsman? Do you consciously try to merge literary merit with entertainment, and if so, how?

Lookit the Links!

For today I shall bring you links.


First one: Terribleminds. I really love Chuck Wendig's blog. A word of caution: he does use, erm, strong language. But it's never really...ummm...gratuitous. This man can make a swear into an adjective, and make you laugh in the process. He also has some fabulous writing advice. So check it out, but don't blame me for finding his irreverent humor funny. 


Janice Hardy posts a link on *her* blog about mistakes writers make. So I am posting a post that posts a link. Let's pray that I didn't create a hole in the time space continuum. Or that if I did, we get to see how cool the future will be (with us all published, naturally). 


Nathan Bransford poses an interesting question: How Much Do You Share About Your Idea?
Me personally, I tend to talk about the vague glimmering idea over with a few friends and tease the idea out of hiding. If the story has spoilers or major secrets to be revealed though, I usually keep mum so the beta readers can be surprised (hopefully). I am a little suspicious of telling the entire world every detail about my book, because I think it can kill the interest in a book, and because well...sometimes no one cares. Not in a mean way, but if every writer blogged about their books in great detail I think our eyes would just glaze over. We have no context for the book most of the time, so it's hard to care.


Joe Selby suffers from a common dilemma most of us do who are well informed, but unpublished, namely when aspiring writers receive the wrong information. 


And for something completely random! Go ahead, be brave! Click the link! I dare you!

Running Low

My brain feels like saltwater taffy right now.

I wish I could say it's because I've been really productive, like I just finished beta reading for Joe, editing my own book, and wrote another, but alas that's not the case. I have started beta reading, but I haven't even looked at my own work. In all fairness, I need about another week or so before I can realistically start editing. 

In the meantime, my brain has no story to think about. I've have the occasional idea come and go, but I can't really get pumped up over an idea until I have a plot to work on too. So the ideas start to loose a bit of their luster. But I really need this break. I didn't realize while I was writing my last book I was running on empty, much like that Jackson Browne song "Running on Empty". (P.S. I really like Jackson Browne. I love the sound of his voice. You might also like "Doctor My Eyes" by him as well. Why yes, my parents raised me on classic rock. Why do you ask?)

But after a few days of goofing off, getting the boring housework type stuff done, and reading, I realized I felt much better than I have in awhile (sinus infection notwithstanding). More clear headed, and far less panicky. I've spent far less time on the Internet reading blogs, and more time reading and spending time with my friends and family.

You know how writers talk about reconnecting with life after a book? I've come to realize that is a vital part of the writing process, at least for me. I wouldn't change anything that happened last year (like getting married) but it took it's toll on me.


Part of the problem was my own doing. I felt like I had to start querying by February. I figured I would finish writing the book in December, give it a few weeks to settle, edit, give it to betas, implement changes, and then I was off to the querying races.


Ummmm yeah. Best laid plans of mice and men, right? The problem was even when I knew I wouldn't be ready by February I still felt like a big fat failure. I still felt like I was behind. This is not a good feeling to try and write a book to. Stepping back from the Internet and the rest of the writing world for a while has helped me let go of some of that self imposed anxiety. It's good to have deadlines of course, but you also have to know how to adjust things accordingly. 

Free Digital Pictures for all your picturing needs!

Back to not having a story, my brain is rebelling. I am having these weird, crazy dreams about ice cream and wedding videos. I have trained myself to be creative every day since I was a teenager, and whenever I don't have a project I am actively working on, my brain gets a little crazy with itself. Sometimes I distract it with chocolate but that only works for so long.

But that's okay. It's a small price to pay to recharge my batteries. You just can't expect yourself to constantly put out quality creative material without taking some creativity in. I think in the future I am going to schedule down time more frequently, so I can keep up a steady pace. 


In the meantime, I get to decide what book I am going to work on next. I will probably finish my previous WIP, although I am considering changing the POV from first to third, and adding a POV to bring the book closer to what I had originally envisioned it to be. 


So what do you do to recharge your batteries? How do you prevent yourself from burning out?