Andy's Blog of Semi-Random Stuff

I'm E-Published!

2011-12-28T12:08:00.000-08:00

I have an officially released ebook! Yay!

I actually listed it on December 26th, which was my birthday, but then I spent yesterday getting the details perfect (at least according to epub check) and am still in the process of actually telling people.

And, yes, it did take me all day to get 100% compliance on the epub check, which one needs to get listed in the Apple Market. And, yes, it was annoying. So I hope Apple users appreciate it. :)

I don't have links to the Apple Market yet because Smashwords is still approving my file for distribution, but you can get an epub (or mobi, pdf, txt, etc) at Smashwords or an amz file at Amazon.

Of course, what I'm really exited about is the print version, which is still a few days away. I've ordered proofs from Createspace. Assuming they look like I want them to, I can approve the novel for sale this weekend. If they don't look right, though, I'll have to fix the problem, print new proofs, and wait to get those. I'll let you know how that goes.

And now... I have a disaster-area of a house, a serial in desperate need of an update, and a sequel to work on...

Kickstarted and pre-ordering

2011-12-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

So, I made my Kickstarter goal. Yay! And I'm hard at work finalizing some formatting details and helping my lovely cover artist get the cover completed. As soon as that happens, I'll be able to print books!

A few people have written me since the Kickstarter project ended asking how they can get the book, so I've added an Amazon checkout button to my website to allow people to pre-order. It's $15 to get a signed copy sent to the US or Canada, the same price it was on Kickstarter, except now you don't get a bonus ebook and there's no chance to get jewelry or bookmarks made. (Sorry. You can try begging me, but I'm really busy this month, so you'd have to try really hard.)

I'm not sure how long I'll have the button up after the book is actually released. I'm not really a fan of trips to the post office and I have a big cross-continental move coming up this spring. So if you want a signed copy, get it early! =)

Kickstarter, Week One

2011-11-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

So, PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND CURLING ROCKS has been on Kickstarter for a week now and has reached one third of its funding goal.

During that week, it has been repeatedly brought to my attention that some people don't actually know what Kickstarter is. ::gasp:: Sadness! I love Kickstarter and my family has got some really great things off there. In fact, last week we received a new game called Road to Canterbury via their Kickstarter project, and it has the potential to be one of my favorite games. It's certainly the best new one I've played in a while... Plus, I get to say that I helped make a game based on The Canterbury Tales happen, which I think is worth quite a bit.

But I ramble and even digress. What Kickstarter is, for those who don't know, is a platform for crowd-funding projects. I'm using it to help cover some of my start-up expenses for publishing my book. (Editing, cover design, ISBN registration, bar code purchase, etc, etc, add up to a lot more than the $600 goal, but I wanted to minimize my risk of falling short.) Should you chose to offer your financial help, Kickstarter will send you to Amazon payments. If the project succeeds, your credit card will be charged and I'll jump into action to get your rewards to you by Christmas. (And maybe Hanukkah. Certainly before the end of Hanukkah if you're in the US or Canada...) Should the project fail, no one owes anyone anything. Your card won't be charged, I won't get to make you bookmarks or jewelry, and...

Honestly, the book will still come out. But not for another month or three because I can't just cancel my kiddo's Christmas to pay to publish my book. And, of course, there will likely be tears and wailing and all sorts of negativity that I'm sure you don't want to inflict on me or my family.

Many people have told me that they're planning to donate, but later. I'm not sure why they're putting it off as they're not going to be charged until the end of the month either way. But I do wish they'd go ahead and pledge if they're going to because the more activity a project has, the higher it gets on the site and the more likely people who don't know me are to be exposed to it. That's not the sort of thing people who haven't had projects like this really think about.

Donating through Kickstarter does involve registering with the site and I think I under-estimated how unwilling people are to do that, but I've never gotten spam from Kickstarter and there are a lot of other worthy projects there. If you're sick of corporations owning the arts, this a good place to monitor even if you don't want to help me with my book.

If you haven't checked it out yet, my project is here and if you have any questions I haven't answered either here or on the project site, please ask them! If you have a question, odds are someone else does to!

I Am Kickstarting!

2011-11-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

At long last, my book is almost in print! Almost! (And you can pre-order it here!)

The editing is complete, we've got a really awesome cover in the works, and all signs point to me being able to wave a physical copy of this bad-girl around before Christmas. Yay! (And you can wave one too if you pre-order it here! ;)

The whole process really hasn't been easy on me or my mental health, but I'm trudging along like a good little writer. I even made a video. A video, people! And you know what? Turns out recording video sets off every social phobia and anxiety issue I have. But I did it. And I've been told I don't look too much like someone on the verge of passing out from nerves.

I've got some really neat rewards for the folks who help me out, beyond simply making the universe a better place and getting a new book. There are also homemade bookmarks just like my favorite one and these nifty custom-designed-by-me necklaces...

So, check it out. (Did you miss the link? It's here. :) And tell your friends. And your friends' friends. And those people who live up the street and they're not really your friends but you remember them being all excited about the curling last Olympics. Or, heck, tell some curlers. ::g::

NaNo 2011

2011-10-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

So, last year I sort of skipped NaNo for a variety of reasons discussed here. I say sort of because I did work on a shorter project with my son. But... Well, we started off "behind schedule" due to a trip and that made me tense enough that we never really had as much fun as we should have been having. Possibly because I thought we should have a schedule in the first place.

That sounds like I'm down on NaNo, but I'm not. The schedule just didn't work for what my son and I wanted to do. It works for other things, like encouraging a single author to push out a heck of a lot of words (IE, its goal).

Last night, I slept about two hours. One of the things I thought about while I wasn't sleeping was NaNo. A year ago, I said I didn't need NaNo to finish a rough draft. But guess how many rough drafts I've finished since then. If you guessed zero, go grab a cookie. How many did I start? Um... At least three. Plus my serial, but I'm not "supposed" to have finished that yet.

Not that I haven't done anything all year. I completed several revisions of PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND CURLING ROCKS and got started on that whole indie-publishing thing. So it's been a good year. But...

Anyway, I posted last night (um... this morning) on G+ that I was going to do NaNo again this year.

My beloved commented, "Blerh!"

Don't start thinking I married an unsupporting jerk though, because I most definitely did not. He's just worried about me because NaNo traditionally brings out my obsessive side. And I do mean the kind of unhealthy obsession that leads to not eating, not bathing, not talking to anyone for weeks straight kind of stuff.

I really don't think it's going to be as bad this year though. He's thinking about my first NaNo, which I plunged into without an outline and had to get out fast because I was dying to know what happened. This time, I have...

What I have is nearly 400,000 words of something I love but which is so cluttered and drawn out and poorly paced that I don't have a clue how to start revising it. So... I'm retelling it. This time instead of first person present, I'll be doing an epistolary novel (fancy speak for journal entries) and the old draft will be just a really long and detailed outline.

If it goes well, my plan is to use the NaNo project as my next serial. That way I can focus on the new curling novel without having to switch back and forth between WIPs. (I also plan to finish the current serial by the end of the year.)

So, stay tuned and wish me luck! :)

The Riddle of the Warm Ice

2011-10-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

I walked through the door and took a deep breath of energy-laden air. "This," I said, "is what a room full of ice is supposed to feel like."

The second I set foot on the ice, my body was completely surrounded by cold. It wrapped me in its comfortable embrace and I felt more at peace than I had since spring.

This is not how I felt the last time I was on ice. That was in Wenatchee, at their Desert Rocks Spiel. It's awesome that a town the size of Wenatchee has a club and it's filled with great people and the bonspiel was fun, but... Arena ice really isn't the same.

And it's not just the ice, though the ice was the strangest I've curled on. (I still haven't figured out how a rock can travel in a series of 's' curves. That doesn't seem physically possible.) The thing that made me really not as happy there as at my home club was the air.

If you've been ice skating indoors, you know what an arena rink looks like. Just put some curling lines down amongst the hockey ones and you've got it. But the room is huge. The walls are far away and the ceiling stories above. To top that off, this particular arena has heaters aimed at the seats around the ice, to keep spectators warm. Which would be fine with me if the heat stayed there, but it spreads out and warms the entire building. So the ice is cold, but the air above is just too warm.

Normally, I curl in a jacket, long-sleeved shirt, short-sleeved shirt, and some form of warm hat. Sometimes I get warm enough to unzip the jacket.

At Desert Rocks, I was stuck with the jacket because it had my team name on it. But it was unzipped, the sleeves were rolled up, and I had a thin tank top on under it. I had to lose the hat. If I could have lost the leggings under my skirt without worrying about ice burn or flashing people, I would probably have entered the last game bare-legged.

No one had warned me about the heat and I don't know if it's all arenas that are like that or just this one. I'm sure I'll find out eventually. But for now, I'm happy that I get to play in my freezer of a curling rink.

And, yeah, I'm happy to get to play at all. Friday League started last Friday and I'm, really glad to be back. :)

This is Adventure. Really!

2011-09-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, so remember my announcement? Not the bit about moving, because I do that all the time and so what? The part about independently publishing my book?

Well, I'm working on that. And while I'm working on that I thought I'd share some of my process with the world. Not that I expect the world to be interested, of course. But maybe someone in the world will be.

There are a lot of things to consider when publishing one's own work and the right answers are going to be different for everyone. Yeah, I know that's lame. Doesn't make it less true. So remember that I'm not trying to tell anyone else what to do, I'm just saying what I'm doing.

There are a few things that I knew for certain when it was still a matter of "If I publish this..." rather than "Now that I'm publishing this..."

The first was that I want it professionally edited. Luckily, I know freelance editor Cassandra Marshall. Not only does she offer reasonable rates, but she's been cheering PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND CURLING ROCKS on since she first learned I was outlining it. Also, she provided incredibly valuable feedback as a beta reader, so I know she gets this book. (And I've beta read for her, which makes me comfortable that she can work with my style even though her voice is different from mine.)

The second was that I want both print and e-editions. E-editions because this is the Twenty-First Century, and dead-tree ones because it makes me jump and clap in delight to see a new curling book in my club store and I want to give that feeling to other people. :) And I want DRM-free e-editions because DRM is against my religion. (No, not really. But kind of.)

And the third thing... Um... Maybe there were only two things.

Oh! Yeah, I want a cover. But I'm not sure what I want on it. Cassandra and my beloved are working on it though. (While I feel like a Very Bad Client for having so little clue what I actually want.) In fact, Jimmy is working on the photos he took for it right now. Which has me all distracted from what I had been pondering when I started writing this, which was all about whether this project is going up on Kickstarter.

I think it is, because that seems like a good way to raise pre-awareness and to get my audience involved early. Also, it would be nice to be able to pay Cassandra, the ISBN people, and such without having to tell my kid we're going to skip Christmas so Mom can publish her book. (He doesn't even like this book, although he is a fan of my serial.)

I've been looking at the other writing projects on Kickstarter and trying to figure out what makes a book more successful there. I know what makes me willing to look at a pitch and what makes me consider donating to it. But I'm not seeing too much correlation between that and which projects actually make their goals. From that, I'm surmising that either a.) people browsing Kickstarter for books have different criteria than I do OR b.) people don't browse Kickstarter looking for books and books that get funded there are funded because the author makes the sell elsewhere and directs people to the Kickstarter page.

What am I going to do with this information? I have no clue. But I'll let you know when I figure it out...

This Is An Announcement

2011-09-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I find I have too much to say to say anything at all.

I've been going through a bout of that lately, as you may have noticed. Lots of thoughts, lots of issues, lots of insecurity... Few words.

My husband has orders. We're moving back to the East Coast this spring. I knew it was coming, but I wasn't ready for it. I have months to come to terms with it, but it's going to take longer than that. It took me over thirty years to find somewhere I felt at home, but I did in Washington. And now I'm leaving...

That wasn't what I sat down to write about though. I have much less bittersweet news to share with you... Some of you know already because I've leaked it on G+ and in emails and in person, but here's the official announcement:

I am independently publishing PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND CURLING ROCKS this curling season!

It's exciting and scary and... Well, mostly it's those things. But I think I'm happy about it.

You may be wondering why I decided this. It's no secret that I was looking for an agent for the book to take it in a traditional direction. What happened?

Well... Many awesome agents asked to read to my story and wrote back seeming to honestly have enjoyed it. But none of them thought they could sell it.

Fair enough. The publishing climate's pretty tough right now. But, you know what? I think I can sell this book. Not to Scholastic or anything, but to a decent number of people who will enjoy it. I think the people I wrote this book for are going to be able to find it after I make it available to them, and they're the people I care about.

This decision really has me feeling much more free than before and much less pressured. Which is odd since I have so much more that I personally am responsible for now, but I never claimed to make much sense. And I'm not alone. I have an editor who knows her stuff, I have friends, and I have a community of author-pals who have been through this before. And I have my book, which I think is pretty amazing. :)

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2011-08-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

So, you may have noticed I stopped posting from Vegas...

There are three main reasons for this:

1.) My data connection was incredibly sub-par absolutely everywhere I went, making it very frustrating to upload things.

2.) I didn't have enough time to myself to rest, let alone form thoughts.

and...

3.) It was just too dang hot.

I believe we've covered this before, but I can't function when it's hot. And Vegas? Yeah, it's as hot as you've heard it is. The coolest day we were there, the high was something like 105. Inside is nice, but chaotic, which is also tiring. And every time I tried to lay down, someone came up with something else for me to do. Somehow, that thing was never, ever "Write a blog post."

So... Here's my highlights...

Thursday, the whole family saw The World Famous Popovich Comedy Pet Theater, a performing troupe comprised of a Russian clown, a ballerina, some acrobats, and a lot of rescued shelter pets. I'm not sure if they're really world famous, but they are very entertaining and it was clear that the animals were having fun showing off for us even though they do it every day

>

Friday, Kiddo and I got ourselves out of bed as early as we could to visit Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. Which isn't really a secret... The Mirage has signs up about it all over the place... But it is an awesome place to get close to dolphins and catch glimpsed of some really big cats.

The facility is educational and the dolphins are not trained to perform tricks, but they do play and some of them clearly want attention.

(This lovely lady just jumped out of the water on her own and started posing for pictures.)

After that, we met up with some friends who had rented a car and checked out The Pinball Hall of Fame. Unlike other halls of fame I've been to that had a bunch of photos and stuff to gawk at, the Pinball Hall of Fame is not only filled with pinball machines, but with pinball machines you can actually play. Not only that, but the cost was whatever pinball games had been going for at the time each machine was made. Nice!

Sadly, Saturday wasn't as successful a day. Our friends drove us to the Hoover Dam, which is really neat. But Kiddo had a panic attack on the Tillman Bridge because the height scared him and then one of our friends got sick from the heat. (The kind of sick that means you have to go up to a window and explain that your friend was ill and someone needs to clean it up...) I didn't take any pictures of that...

It was actually really weird to not be the person freaking out over heights or having heat problems. It wasn't that I was fine with the heat, it was just that I didn't feel any worse than I had all week. Which was exhausted and dizzy and kinda nauseous, but I was pretty used to it.

Our flight was at 2:30 the next afternoon. It took off just after midnight. Yeah, that was as fun a day as it sounds. We got home just as our neighbor was leaving for work.

I'm still recovering.

The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside my mind...

2011-08-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

There was a chandelier almost directly in front of us, not quite blocking our view of the stage below, but coming close. My son Eric stared at it as we sat waiting for the show to start.

“I wish I had night vision goggles,” he said.

“What?” I stopped looking at the picture I'd just illicitly taken to squint at him. “Why?”

He pointed upwards. “So I could see what's in that big hole.”

I smiled and let out a little laugh. “Well, what do you think is up there?”

“I don't know! That's why I want the goggles.”

Like, duh, Mom.

“Maybe that's where they keep the dancing elephant,” I said, alluding to a running joke the kiddo had kept alive all day. (“If this hotel is so great, then where's the dancing elephant?”) “Maybe it's an invisible flying dancing elephant.”

His sigh told me he wasn't amused. He never does seem to find me as amusing as I find myself.

As the theater filled with people, he continued to wonder about that hole in the ceiling. I could have told him what was up there, but I didn't. It was more fun that way.

At long last, the lights dimmed and the curtain rose on the opening auction scene of Phantom of the Opera.

Eric shifted forward, perching on the edge of his seat and watching the stage with wide eyes. If I hadn't seen the play so many times before, I wouldn't have been able to follow what was going on because I was so busy watching the wonder on his face. (I know it's cliché to talk about the delights of childhood wonder, but such moments are rare and as a mother, I live for them.)

And then they introduced the chandelier and the setting moved back in time...

The chandelier began to swing as the curtains slid up from the walls to reveal box seats full of mannequins. I don't think Eric saw that though, not with his wide eyes glued on the chandelier.

It kept moving, gaining speed as it swung back and forth.

Eric grabbed my arm, clinging to my side in obvious fear that the chandelier was about to crash down on the audience.

I squeezed his hand, smiling and feeling incredibly blessed to be able to share this with him.

The chandelier went still.

Then it rose, going up to its place in the middle of that hole Eric had been staring at.

He gasped. “That's what it's for!”

“Yep.”

I grinned as he resettled in his seat, still on the edge of it but no longer needing my emotional support. Not until the scene where the chandelier crashed...

Oh! And guess what? One of the plays within the play had a dancing elephant in it. :)

Viva Las Vegas

2011-08-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

As my beloved paid for our dinner, I sent a text to my sister. "I'm in the Venetian! Eating at Johnny Rockets and dancing in my seat to Splish Splash! Miss you!"

I'm not sure what it says about me that this was the first I communicated to anyone that I had arrived in Las Vegas, but I'm sure it says something.

We left the Venetian food court and wandered back into the... Calling it a mall seems inaccurate, but so does hotel shopping area. Jimmy said later that he thought resort was technically the right word, but that complex felt more appropriate. I think he was right, so let's call it a complex...

We wandered through the Venetian complex, amongst stores selling things I can hardly afford to look at (Lladro has a Hindu gods line now! WANT! And have you seen Chanel's latest skirts? So cute!), the famous fake canal and its chlorine smell (I assure you the real canals of Venice do not smell like chlorine), and more tourists than you can shake a stick at. (Where does that expression come from? I'll have to look it up later...)

"If you see anything you want to look at," my beloved said, "just say so and we can stop."

I snorted. My husband is zero fun to shop with. Possibly even negative fun. And our son isn't much better. "Yeah. If I see something I want, I'll make a mental note and come back to look at it without you."

Not five seconds later I gasped, did a little jump of glee, and shrieked, "It's a hat store!"

Yeah, so, to make a long story short (too late!), my first G+ update was "Las Vegas is no longer on the list of places I haven't been. And I already have two new hats. :)"

Another Reason Summer Makes Me Sad.

2011-07-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

So, you've probably gathered by now that I don't like summer much. It doesn't just make me sad, it makes me SAD. As in seasonally depressed.

The days are too long for a night-lover. There are too few clouds for someone who doesn't thrive in sunlight. It's too warm for someone who has trouble thinking when it's over about 17C (63F, IE a degree over where I set the thermostat in winter).

But worst of all... Most of the activities I enjoy Go Away. The ski lifts stop running, the ice rinks melt, and the odds of being able to have a snowball fight are pretty darn slender.

And it's not just the activities I miss. It's the people I do them with. Here's an example of why...

(Yeah, yeah, musically it's... a little painful. But it's fun and full of the humor that I've come to expect from the members of my curling club.)

Happy 50th Anniversary, Granite! Can't wait to be curling again in the fall!

The Black Sheep And The Barn, A Parable of Unsubtle Symbolism

2011-07-16T10:47:00.001-07:00

A huge group of brightly colored sheep stood in a crowded and heavily littered barn. A herd gathered near the door as one of their friends, a black sheep, ambled in from Outside.

“Why are you all still here?” the black sheep asked. “Outside is awesome.”

“It is,” said a pink paisley sheep. “I was there a few minutes ago. I love it. We should all go there.”

“Why did you come back here?” the black sheep asked. She was there largely trying to figure out what was up with the pink paisley sheep.

The pink paisley sheep shrugged. “Most of the herd is still here.”

“Well, yes...” admitted the black sheep. Some of the Outside Sheep considered that to be a major plus of Outside, but the black sheep was frustrated by it. She wanted to be Outside with her herd.

A tie-dyed sheep nodded agreement with the pink paisley sheep. “I'll go Outside after most of the herd has.”

There was a general mummer confirming that most of the group thought this was the way to go.

“But...” said the black sheep, her ears drooping. “Only forty-nine percent of you can do that. Everyone else has to go before half of us have.”

The tie-dyed sheep was a smart enough sheep to know that was true, but didn't seem bothered by it. “I love my herd and don't want to leave them.”

Well, the black sheep loved her herd too. That's why she'd bothered coming back Inside to try to get them instead of just frolicking in the forest she was trying to show them.

“But... There's so much more space for the herd to play in Outside,” the black sheep tried. “There's clean air and things you can hide behind. The sky doesn't amplify noise like the barn roof does. Outside is so much prettier to look at. And you can eat fresh grass instead of having to pick grains out of piles of stale potato chips.”

“Hey!” said a sparkly blue sheep. “I happen to like potato chips!”

“And that's alright,” the black sheep said quickly. She herself couldn't stand stale potato chips, but the sparkly blue sheep's enthusiasm about them had always been endearing to her. “You can still come back Inside for them. You don't have to live here to eat them.”

“Yes,” agreed a green striped sheep. “And Outside really is nice.”

The black sheep perked up. “Are you coming Outside then?”

“No,” said the green striped sheep. “Although I'll visit.”

It was better than nothing. “Alright... And the rest of you?”

“I don't want to visit,” said the tie-dyed sheep. “Not until most of my friends have left Inside.”

“But...” The black sheep shook her head. The tie-dyed sheep complained about the conditions in the barn almost daily, but clearly wasn't ready to budge. The black sheep supposed that was her right. “Okay... But I'm not coming back here.”

The other sheep gasped. “Why not?” they demanded. “We're here and we're not leaving! Don't you care about us?”

“Of course I care about you,” said the black sheep. “I'm just not happy in here.”

Her friends stared. “But... We're in here.”

“Yes, I know,” said the black sheep. “And I'll miss everyone who doesn't come visit me Outside. But if you won't go until your friends stop grazing here... Well, I guess I'll just give you one less friend Inside this stinky barn.”

“I like the barn,” a small peach sheep said quietly.

The black sheep smiled. “Then I'm happy for you. And you won't have to listen to me try to get sheep to leave anymore. I really do hope you continue to like the barn.”

The black sheep felt like a cliché as she left the herd, but she did it anyway. If the world needed rebels, well... That's what black sheep were for, wasn't it?

She made her way back to her patch of forest and sat down under her favorite tree. She missed her herd and knew she would be lonely for a while. But it felt really good to be out of that barn.

She smiled at the snowy white sheep across the grove from her and waved to the shiny silver sheep one tree over. They smiled and waved back as the breeze ruffled their wool.

(Sheep image by Sahiri.)

Intro to Curling, Hollywood Style

2011-07-15T15:19:00.001-07:00

Here's a nice little documentary filmed with the Hollywood Curling Club that serves as a brief introduction to the sport...

Hollywood Curling from Ben Maizell on Vimeo.

Gotta say, it has me a little freaked about the bonspiel I'm curling in this fall over in Wenatchee, which will be my first time curling on arena ice. The arena looks so... open... And there are no physical dividers between the sheets. And I still haven't figured out where people put their water bottles... Surely people without dedicated ice don't just not hydrate? I've never gotten through a game without wanting water...

But on a different note, here's an amusing old clip from the last Olympics proving that curling isn't as easy as it looks. :)

Washed Up

2011-07-01T15:22:00.000-07:00

Okay... So, responses to the snippet from yesterday were encouraging and I really enjoyed doing it. So...

I started a new blog today for posting serials. It is here: auroratalisan.blogspot.com. (Aurora Talisan was the pen name my friends and I came up with way back when. It seems appropriate.)

It's an idea I've been toying with for a while, a way to keep the fun in my writing and stop myself from hyper-focusing on creating publishable works rather than on simply telling stories. Honestly, there's just something really empowering about writing something, sharing it, and not knowing that you're going to have to revise it fifteen times in the next two years.

Washed Up (originally entitle Aentraiya or something like that) isn't the story I was pondering starting with, but now that I have thought of it, it seems really right. It was my first novel, so it's fitting that it should be my first serial. Although, maybe it already was my first serial... When I wrote the original, there was a group of people passing around my new pages as soon as I could bring them in. I hope those people don't hate any of the changes I'm going to make because I owe each and every one of them for helping make me who I am.

Re-Beginning?

2011-06-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

So, I wrote my first novel when I was sixteen. It was a fantasy of what would now be called Young Adult nature. It was supposed to be a short story, but I started writing without an outline and couldn't stop. My English teacher was very accommodating and encouraging about it. And one day I'm going to have to track her down and thank her because that was the first time it really occurred to me that I could be a novelist. I forgot that for a while, but that's not her fault.

Anyway... I don't seem to have an e-file of that around anywhere, though there's a hardcopy somewhere in my house. It probably wasn't very good though. Maybe it was for a completely untrained child, but I'm pretty sure it was riddled with adjectives and adverbs and started out with a nice boring description of the land we were being introduced to. It was also in third person, which I never did get too comfortable with.

I'm not sure why, but I rewrote the opening today... (I'm supposed to be Not Writing this week because the weekend will be so disruptive and it seemed like a better idea to just store up my enthusiasm until Tuesday. Turns out I haven't developed patience in the last week though...)

Not sure if I'll do anything else with this, but here's my re-written opening, eighteen years after the first draft...

***

I've been told it's cliche to start a story with someone waking up. It's probably doubly so if she's doing it on a beach and with no memory of how she got there. So I guess that makes my story cliche, although it's never felt that way while I've been living it.

There's a decent chance that if you thought about it, you'd realize your life is pretty cliche too. Even if you've never done anything as contrived as blink up up through salt-encrusted eyelashes at the backlit face of a stranger while you wondered who the heck you were and how the heck you'd gotten here.

My language functions were intact. I could remember my multiplication tables. I was certain of who won the The Battle of Hastings in 1066, but I couldn't remember if I'd learned about that in school, by reading a book, or by actually being present as William conquered England.

I was fairly sure it wasn't the last one. Without even looking at them, I could tell the clothes I was wearing were nothing at all medieval. Not that I knew much about the fashions of the eleventh century, but I was pretty sure women wore dresses all the time back then and the heavy fabric clinging to my legs was definitely in the shape of hip-hugger jeans.

Now I know that someone out there is saying that this isn't the way amnesia really works. And that know-it-all is absolutely right. That doesn't change the fact that this is how it happened to me. (I learned why later, but we're not at that part of the story yet.)

The stranger was still staring down at me while I tried to process all this. It seemed like he should be saying something, but maybe he was having trouble thinking of something non-cliche to say. If he couldn't say, “Who are you?” or “What have we here?” or “Good morning,” then what was left?

I sat up as the man continued to stare. That was starting to get rude. Sure, I must have looked horrible – I smelled like dead fish and my hair was plastered to my skin, so there's no way I looked like a beauty queen. But shouldn't this guy at least be trying to see if I was alright? I obviously wasn't dead, so maybe I needed something like, I don't know... Help? Or water? My throat was tight and my mouth covered in sand. Fresh water would have been really welcome right about then.

I tried to mention this, but as soon as I drew a breath to speak I was racked with coughing. It burned through my chest and knocked my over onto one elbow as I vomited onto the sand.

Great. Even my vomit smelled like fish. I was going to be smelling fish for the rest of my life.

Going home to have a bath would have been a great thing to long for, if only I knew where home was... Maybe the stranger had a bathtub...

“I feel betrayed,” the man said slowly, his accent something close to British but not quite. “Mermaids are somewhat more attractive in the stories.”

“I'm not a mermaid,” I sputtered, waving a hand through the sand to bury the disgusting pile of puke beside me. From the looks of the puke, I hadn't eaten recently, but knowing that didn't make me tempted to do so now. And I was never eating fish again.

“Well, you're not now.” The man shrugged as his cloak caught in the wind and whipped out behind him.

Cloak? I squinted at the guy. He was slender enough to seem tall even though I didn't think he was. His hair was was ebony, his skin a darkened tan that reminded me of India. Maybe I was in India. Maybe that's why his accent wasn't exactly British. But people didn't go around in cloaks in India, did they?

“What was it?” he asked, holding hand down toward me. “Saw a prince, fell in love, traded something to a witch to transform you into a human girl?”

I started at his hand for a second. His nails were immaculate and he had several gold rings with huge gems on them. If those stones weren't glass, then he must be loaded. That made sense. If you're rich enough, you can wear cloaks as much as you want without the fashion police saying a word about it.

I let him help me up, but jerked my elbow away from him when he tried to hold me steady after I was on my feet. No, I wasn't feeling great, but I wasn't feeble either.

“Impressive,” Cloak Guy said.

It took me a second to figure out what he meant. “I'm not a mermaid! I never was!”

Well, okay, I didn't know that for sure. But it didn't seem likely. All of the facts in my head where about two-legged land dwelling people. Although something about what he'd said was tickling my memory...

“Oh? Then you must be a shipwrecked princess. From which kingdom do you hail?”

Uh... I took a step back, uncomfortably aware that we were the only two people on this beach. Behind me was ocean, behind him cliffs. And to the sides... To the right, the beach curved around without showing hope of civilization, but the left... My breath caught as I saw the castle looming up a steep and rocky incline.

It was huge and imposing and unquestionably old. Surely I should recognize it.

“I'm American.” American? Yes. I was from the United States of America. Probably. I couldn't name my home state or city, but that was the country I came from. And not, judging from the castle, the country I was currently in.

“Merican?” The man frowned. “So you are from the sea?”

“What? No!” I shook my head. “Where are we?”

He raised his eyebrows, which crinkled his face and made him look older than the twenty to thirty something he'd been pulling off before. “Taisland.”

Taisland? Never heard of it. Maybe he was one of those people who named their houses. “And where's that?”

“Vaila. Just east of the Mijorn Peninsula.”

Or maybe he was just crazy. Whatever. He didn't seem like a rapist or a murderer, so I was fine with letting him stay insane. “Do you have a phone?”

“A what?”

His expression was completely blank, like he'd never heard of a phone before. I swallowed a mouthful of fishy spit that burned its way to my stomach. “I need to contact the American Embassy.”

“I don't think we have any ambassadors from Merica, though you'd have to ask my wife to be certain. Perhaps you'd like to see a healer? Or a mage? Our mage is young, but he's quite good and has extensive training in medicinals.”

Righto, I mentally stamped “Myth Confirmed” next to my “Cloak Guy's a loony” theory.

“Sure,” I said. Maybe whoever this mage was would be sane. Going to see him certainly seemed like a better idea that standing around alone on the beach, or even ditching Crazy Cloak Guy and heading to the castle myself.

“Right this way, Miss...” he stopped expectantly, his arms hovering in the air as he halted mid-gesture to realize he didn't know my name. “I'm terribly sorry, but we haven't introduced ourselves.”

He pulled his arm back to his body, bowed, and thrust the arm out again in a strange circling sort of flourish. “I am Sabashar ap Llywendra, Consort of Her Royal Highness Queen Louisa of Taisland.”

Crazy Cloak Guy was a boy toy. Interesting... I wondered what sort of woman would keep him around for that. He was attractive, sure, in a too-old-for-me sort of way. But he didn't seem attractive enough to make up for all the crazy. Maybe Her Royal Highness was imaginary.

Before I hadn't had any idea who I was, but now that I needed to know my name, I found that I did know part of it. “I'm Tori.”

He straightened quickly, his eyes narrowing on me like I'd said something very wrong. Was Tori a boy's name here or something?

My skin crawled as Sabasher walked around me, examining me more closely than he had before.

“When my wife asks,” he said as finished his circle, “tell her something else.”

“Something else?”

“Or say you don't know. You seem confused enough to pull that off.”

The way he said that wasn't mean, but it made me frown. It wasn't my fault my brain wasn't working right! I'd obviously been through something horrible, even if I didn't know what. At least I wasn't the one prancing about in a cloak and blabbering about mages and queens of made-up countries!

“Come along,” Sabasher said over his shoulder as he set off down the beach at a quick pace. “My wife will be missing me soon and I need to get you to Dawane before she sees you or she'll take one look and toss you in the dungeon.”

How could I resist an invitation like that?

The Voices That Control Me From Inside My Brain Say I Shouldn't Kill You. Yet.

2011-06-27T15:25:00.001-07:00

The following is an excerpt from an email I sent a friend about her manuscript, which I'm supposed to be reading. She said it was the most interesting email she's received in a while, so I decided to share it. :)

Um... Hey...

So, I opened your book yesterday and had this conversation...

Me: Yay! Melody's book!

My Eyes: No.

Me: But... What?

My Eyes: We're not reading this on a back-lit device.

Me: Well, I'm not paying to print it out. And you do want to read this,
right?

My Eyes: Yes, of course we do. But what happened to us getting an
e-reader? I mean, Wendy said she'll have a new book for you to beta by
next weekend too. You don't really expect us to read two full novels in a
row on this stupid little phone, do you?

Me: Um...

My Eyes: It is our half birthday, you know...

Me: Really?

My Eyes: Yes... And the new Kobos are out. You like those. They're light
and non-propitiatory and NOT BACK-LIT. Don't we deserve Pearl e-ink?

Me: Well...

My Eyes: It's the 21st century, you know.

Me: Yes...

My Eyes: And Jimmy already said you can have one if you really want it.

Me: Yes...

My Eyes: And it's not like you're too old to adapt to new technology,
right? You're only 34 AND A HALF. Exactly. Because it's your half
birthday.

Me: I guess...

My Hands: We've forgotten how to hold really thick books, so if you're
ever going to read Game of Thrones, you really need an e-reader.

My Head: And I second the e-ink thing. When our eyes are unhappy, so am I.

Me: *sigh* Who am I to argue with multiple body parts?

My Eyes, My Hands, and My Head: Exactly! Let's order...

So I'll have my first dedicated e-reader sometime in the next few days. (*looks at doorstep* No, not yet.) Why did it take me so long to get one? It has a lot to do with DRM, hatred of lock-in, fear of losing my books to technology advancements or failures, and stuff like that. But I've been doing enough beta reading lately that even if everything I read on the device is pre-published, I feel justified in getting it.

I'm excited. I hope my new shiny and I will be great friends. :)

The sunlight! It burns!

2011-06-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

Despite all my whining and protests, the weather has gotten warmer. All around my little town, people are gleefully donning shorts and tanks and cute little skirts that really aren't appropriate for the amount of wind we get here.

I am not one of these people. I'm the one trudging quickly down the sidewalk, my eyes behind dark shades, my head covered with a hat, and every inch of my arms and legs covered by clothing. I'm even wearing socks. Is this because I don't get hot? Why, no, it's not. It's related to why you should never, ever confuse me with...

Annette Funicello

Not even in Ski Party, though I love that movie because it demonstrates a truth I hold dear to my heart: the only difference between a beach bum and a ski bum is the temperature at which we prefer our water.

But, anyway... Don't confuse me with darling Annette. I'm flattered if you're tempted to, seeing as she was and still is absolutely adorable and a lot a fun. I love the ocean. Surfing's always looked like a blast. And who doesn't love a good concert at a bonfire? But all that laying around on the sand in just a bikini and a smile? That ain't me.

It's not that I find anything wrong with prancing about scantily clad. It's not that I have a hard time sitting still that long. It's just that I have PMLE.

Have you heard of it? If you haven't, don't worry. I've talked to people who graduated med school who blinked at me dimly when I said those letters. (Okay, if you're one of those people, go ahead and feel foolish. It's rare, but not _that_ rare.)

PMLE's full name is Polymorphous Light Eruption. It's defined by by a painful, itchy, rash of welts that break out when the subject is exposed to sunlight. To how much? It varies by individual, but for me it only takes a few minutes. Once when I was just figuring out what was going on, it was too warm too early in spring and I had to unload groceries. I yanked off my shirt and tossed on a camisole. By the time I was done with one trunk full of groceries (three, maybe four trips between the house and the car), the skin of my back was prickling. Within an hour, I couldn't sit back in a chair without pain.

I also have other symptoms that were around for a couple of years before the eruptions started and someone diagnosed me. Nausea. Headache. General misery.

So, yeah... I don't like summer much. (And you see why I want to retire in _Western_ Washington and not in Central, yes?)

I also eat my steaks rare. And need lots of extra protein when I've been out in the sun. So, I feel I should also tell you not to confuse me with...

a vampire!

Cause I'm not. Really! I'm just allergic to the sun, usually dress in black, and enjoy the taste of blood... And I have a cat who looks a heck of a lot like the ones in that picture...

(Note: The picture above is by Victoria Frances, one of my favorite artists, and a copy of it hangs in my bedroom. A vampire wouldn't have pictures of vampires on her walls, would she?)

This Is How It Ends...

2011-06-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

My second calendar year of curling commenced with the 2011 Spring League. It was fun and I loved my new teammates, but I'm glad that this wasn't my first curling league.

Spring League is short and meant to be fun more than anything, which makes it a great time for experiments. Last year, my league had a slightly odd system where league standings took into account not only who won games, but who won ends. This led to people playing out games that would have otherwise ended in concessions, but it wasn't that big a deal.

This year's league manager had a very different vision than what I was expecting though. Different enough that I never really figured out what it was. It had something to do with drawing as many allegories to baseball as possible.

It didn't really matter. So what if I was put on a team named for a baseball team I dislike while the league manager was on one named for his favorite team? So what if he kept referring to the AL and NL? So what if he kept talking about playoffs rather than playdowns? It didn't change the curling.

But he sent an email with the rules for what to do if a "playoff" game was tied after eight ends that was just so very WTF? that I felt it gave me an opportunity to blog.

Tie Breaker Scenario
A tie will resolved by having the teams perform the following challenge.
1. Each team member throws 1 stone with sweeping
2. All stones stay in play
3. Points are determined only after all 4 stones have been thrown (rocks may be moved into or out of position by other rocks)
4. No practice throws
5. You earn points on the following scale

Distance ............. Points
Not in house .............-5
Biting 12 .................... 1
Full 12 ....................... 2
Biting 8 ..................... 3
Full 8 ........................ 4
Biting 4 ..................... 5
Full 4 ........................ 6
Biting button ............. 7
Fully covering pin ... 10

The maximum at team may score is 31 points (1 rock covering pin, other 3 stones biting button). It is not possible to have 2 stones covering the pin; only 1 stone can occupy an area at one time.

If a tie still exists any one player from each team throws one rock for closest to the button with sweepers. The team that shot last in the 4 rock tie breaker throws first.

When I got this email, I sat there staring at it for several minutes.

I have no idea where the league manager got this or how it fits into his baseball theme. If the World Series were tied after nine, they wouldn't settle the game by assigning points to different areas of the field and seeing which team could hit balls into the most valuable areas. They would play extra innings.

That's what usually happens in curling too. If you're tied after your regulation ends in a game where you can't just call it a tie and go have drinks, you play on until you're not. The hammer (last rock thrown) goes to whoever didn't score last and you play on just like it was any other end. I've seen mention of clubs who play shortened extra ends where they throw fewer than all eight rocks, and I'm told it's fairly common for there to be some sort of skip-vs-skip draw where the winner is whichever team's skip gets a single rock closest to the button, but I'd never heard of anyone changing the scoring rules like this.

When I emailed my go-to girl for curling info, she said that one of our club's spiels used something similar last year for determining who advanced in the case of a tied bracket. In that case, it was a time-saver though since it prevented the teams from having to play an entire game to settle the tie like they would have ideally done. In this case though... Between the time taken to throw, the time taken to score, the time to move the rocks around, and the time spent going, "What the heck are we supposed to be doing?" this will not take less time than playing an extra end.

But, hey, whatever, right? I mean, it's Friday Spring League. That's about as social a league as you can get. And, like I said, if there's a time for curling experiments, this is it.

So take this post not as a complaint, but as a demonstration of this crazy thing I just saw. And, please, if you have any stories of tournaments or leagues with weird rules, comment. You never know, it might be crazy enough to inspire a new novel. :)

Gotta Solve That Mystery

2011-05-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

My son woke up not feeling well, so he and I have given our morning over to a marathon of Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated. Because I'm me and thus constantly analyzing all fiction I come across, I've spent a lot of my viewing time trying to figure out what it is that makes this my favorite Scooby Doo series to date.

Looking at the various renditions of Scooby Doo is an interesting exercise in concept versus execution. The feel of each series is different despite the basic set-up being the same, ie a group of kids and their talking dog solving mysteries and unmasking monsters. There's always an element of humor and at least a dash of the ridiculous, but the nuances shift.

I asked my son why he thought I like this version more than the ones that were on when I was a kid. (I didn't like Scooby Doo much as a child. But it was the Scrappy Doo era, so...) He said, "I think it's because it has a wider target audience."

Let's take a second while I bask in how freaking proud I am that my nine-year-old talks like that.

I pointed out that jokes aimed at parents are hardly a new thing for Scooby. They've always been there. And jokes aimed at my generation of parents (as opposed to my parents) are all over What's New Scooby Doo, which even has some halfway decent alt rock tossed in on the soundtrack. Yet, I think he has a point. Something about this makes it target both him and me, to the point that I'd watch it without him. I like What's New Scooby Doo, but not enough to put it on just for me. That's unique to Mystery Incorporated.

The look of the show is clearly different. The screen shots don't look like a kids show, but like a comic book. That's undoubtedly part of it, but there are two other factors that I think weigh more. 1.) Scooby isn't the only main character and 2.) The kids all have lives outside of what's happening in this episode.

Yes, I can hear obvious objections to both of those points.

I'm aware the entire gang has been in most, though not all, incarnations of Scooby. But more screen time was given to Scooby and his sidekick Shaggy than to all the others combined. (Except for the ones which went so far as to remove the other three humans all together.) For the most part, I find Scooby more annoying than amusing or interesting, so it certainly helps to see the cast more balanced.

And, as for two... Yes, there was always an implication that there were things going on outside the episode. The crew would roll into town because somebody's uncle's best friend's former roommate invited them to his creepy mansion, thus telling us that these kids have families somewhere. But we didn't see their parents or their siblings or their school or even their town except the parts directly involved in the mystery du jour. In contrast, Mystery Incorporated has a thriving background full of recurring secondary characters, a series plot arc in addition to the episode mysteries, and evolving relationships inside of Mystery Inc.

I'm sure many people are annoyed by those last two elements. Many people don't want to need to watch multiple episodes, in order. But this isn't one of those shows where you are completely lost if you missed last week's broadcast and the continuance makes the characters much less static than the used to be. Personally, outside of pure comedy (like, say Family Guy or The Simpsons), I place the possibility of character development over the convenience of watching things out of order.

And while a lot of people want to vomit just thinking about teenage relationship drama, as a writer of YA romance, I'm obviously not one of them.

On a slightly different note... I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the makers of the 2002 live action Scooby Doo for making certain that Scrappy Doo can never, ever be brought back into the Scooby-verse. Cause, really, anything that doesn't have Scrappy Doo in it is an improvement over anything that does.

To Drive or Not to Drive

2011-05-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

I took a deep breath and swallowed, the spit sliding down my throat like acid. The steering wheel was sticky in my hands, from the best heat and humidity Alabama had to offer, but soon it would be slick with sweat.

Daddy said something, probably something that was supposed to be comforting, but his voice melted into the blood pounding into my ears and I couldn't make out the words.

I closed my eyes, letting the darkness comfort me enough that I could at least hear my dad say, “It's okay. Take as long as you need.”

Uh huh. If it was okay to take a long time, why was he drawing attention to how long I was taking?

The key clicked when I turned it, but the car didn't make a noise. I opened my eyes to stare at the dash and its stupid gauges all stared silently back. Weren't they supposed to light up or something?

“First, you need to press the clutch,” Daddy reminded me. We'd been through all that, I'd even sat there mindlessly shifting through the gears earlier to get used to the feel of it, but between the heat and the sun and the pressure of being an eighteen-year-old who didn't have a license but who did have a car, my brain was pretty toasted.

It took me three tries to start the car and I don't even know how many to get halfway up the driveway. In my defense, I don't think putting someone who'd never driven a stick on a sloped driveway and telling her to back out of it was the best idea my father ever had. I'm pretty sure he figured that out well before I got out of the car, slammed the door, and went back into the lake house we were renting while my parents closed on the new house. I yelled something at my mother, flung myself on the bed in the room I shared with my kid sister, and started reading a fantasy novel set in world where no one had ever heard of anything as evil as a car.

I never did learn to drive that particular car.

A few years later, the aging automatic my parents gave me when it became obvious I'd never make friends with the first car they tried to designate as mine died a long and agonizing death that involved returning to Atlanta from a road trip to Florida with the tailpipe resting in the back seat. It was sold it to CarMax for its bluebook value, ie $200, after several junk yards had informed us we'd have to pay them to take it from us.

I didn't drive much in Atlanta. If you've ever driven in Atlanta, you can probably guess why. But my beloved and I lived too far from his school for him to walk there for his last semester, so he took advantage of an about-to-graduate-college loan offer and bought a late model Mazda B2300 (basically a Ford Ranger). Manual transmission.

He'd never driven a manual before the test drive. (He also spent all of his high school years overseas and didn't drive anything at all before coming back to the States as a college freshman, when he figured out how to drive my aging automatic. I'd say I taught him, but really, he taught himself while I sat beside him.)

My beloved did a better job of teaching me to drive a stick, most likely because instead of acting like I was completely destroying the vehicle every time it stalled, he just reminded me that the transmission wasn't great when we got it and we needed a new clutch anyway.

Once I figured it out, I refused to drive an automatic again.

I've been thinking about this because Tessa Dare tweeted the other day asking her fellow stick-drivers to raise their hands and say what driving a stick says about us. My answer? Mostly, it says I like to accelerate. ::g::

I don't speed more than the average person, always slow down for work zones, and stop before the line at red lights. But when I tell my car to go, I want it to go NOW, not whenever the computer catches on that I'm trying to pick up speed.

I'm pretty sure that says something important about me, which is why I now have to ask my characters what kind of car they like to drive.

I Think I Accidentally Started a Novel

2011-05-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

This time last year, I was in the midst of writing PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND CURLING ROCKS. My goal was to finish revising it within a year. Writing it seemed slow, slower than anything I'd done in recent memory, and at times I thought I'd fail. But I didn't. I not only finished it, but I think I completed the strongest work I've ever done.

There's a new goal for the book now. Find it an agent. But, well... There's research involved and each agent I address gets a personalized letter, but it's not a full time job. And even if it was, it isn't writing. Not creative writing, anyway, which is what I live for.

I assume I'll have plenty of revising to keep my mind going after I find an agent, then more after I get an editor. But in the meantime, I've got a huge case of What-Now-Itis.

I've started two novels since I finished the rough of CURLING ROCKS. Neither have gone well.

The first was a retelling of PERSUASION, told from Wentworth's POV. Only my Wentworth is a modern female Navy Brat, not a returning Napoleonic war hero. It was a scary prospect because I've never touched on the whole Navy Brat thing before. To say that it's personal is an understatement. That wasn't the problem with the story though, the problem was all the stuff I was trying to shove in there that wasn't taken from Austin or my thirty-plus years of being a Navy Dependent. These elements were lame and hokie and, honestly, I think they were there mainly because I didn't want to fall into “moving is so hard!” melodrama or “no one understands what Dependent life is like!” angst.

After restarting the story several times, I put it on pause about four months ago. It wasn't until this morning that I realized all that stuff I just said about trying to contrive a cheesy plot to hide the real non-romantic plot. I was tempted to start re-outling, but really didn't know if I should. Then a Twitter friend of mine (@wendysparrow, one of the most awesome people on Twitter), had some insight about timing that made me realize now still isn't the time for me to tackle PERSUASION, but that I don't have to give up on it entirely.

Many of the themes in my retelling concern the heartbreak of returning to a place that used to be home but isn't anymore. (That guy who said you can't go home again was right. Because you won't be you when you get back and it won't be the place it was. You'll expect things to be the same way they were, but they won't be even close.) It's something I've done several times before, but also something that I'm likely doing next year. So I'm putting down working on this story as something to do after my move, when I can at least call it therapy even if it still doesn't quite work.

The second story I started... Well, it was an experiment on returning to pantsing. (Nonwriters: Pantsing = writing without an outline.) I pantsed my earliest works, after all, but then got more and more locked into stricter and stricter outlines. I was worried at the time I started that outlines where strangling me, that they were why writing sixty thousand words was suddenly taking longer than ever before. The experiment conclusively proved my hypothesis invalid. Also, the story stank. Even after I gave up and started outlining it, it has major issues.

So am I bailing on it too? Well... Yeah, I guess I am. For now at least. I still like the characters a lot, so maybe I'll get back to it later.

For now, the strongest voice in my head belongs to a story that popped into my brain in the shower last week. It's called MUCH ADO ABOUT CURLING.

So, yeah, I'm thinking of a new curling novel. One based on Shakespeare rather than Austin.

There are two reasons I haven't thrown myself wholeheartedly into this project yet. First, I want to make sure this is a reasonable decision and not just me letting myself give up when things get hard. And secondly... Triss, the new MC in my head, doesn't like curling much, at least not at the start of her story. She's just doing it to make her cousin happy. This is something I really don't want spilling into my head before my spring curling season is over.

Thing is... I've already found myself jotting down lines without meaning to, focusing on the outline when I'm supposed to be doing something else, and, yes, even thinking like Triss when I'm on the ice. So I've started working on this novel whether I meant to or not. Which I guess means that I am accidentally writing a new novel.

(Of course, even as I write this, my son is talking about writing a fairy tale in space and the back of my mind is working furiously on a sci-fi retelling of... Well, I don't know what. But I'm sure it would be fun!)

The Square Roundabout

2011-03-23T14:45:00.000-07:00

It would seem my sister and I aren't the only ones who noticed that the late Pearl Roundabout wasn't a square!

From that Irish pub in Dubai (the one I have a coaster from over yonder), an ode to Bahrain's square roundabout...

M
(not working? Click here.)

Note: The Irish are uncontested masters of making funny songs about unfunny things. This is why I love them.

The Broken Pearl

2011-03-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

Last month, I wrote an entry I called the Pearl of the Arabian Gulf about my former host nation of Bahrain and the recent unrest there. (The name comes from Bahrain's claim to be The Pearl of the Gulf in reference to the island's historic pearl industry.)

I'd hoped that all I had to say on the subject was said then, but it wasn't. The talks I had hopes for didn't happen. More people have died. Tanks have crossed the bridge from Saudi. Large gatherings have been forbidden. And... They tore down the Pearl.

This was the Pearl Roundabout. I rode by it at least twice a day for two years. My mom got a flat there once. It flooded every year come the rainy season. It glowed at night. And it graced I don't even know how many thousands of post cards.

The Pearl Roundabout was a symbol of Bahrain. In many ways it was the heart of Bahrain, a symbol of that country's heritage nestled in the middle of a massively important intersection.

The image above shows the Pearl as it will always glow in my memories. The below shows a photo tweeted last night...

It's hard for me to judge what the average Bahraini thinks of this destruction. Certainly those who were already displeased with their government are more so now, but what about the people who have been standing by the Crown? I've seen many comments along the lines of "It's really only been there since 1982, so it's not that old," and "That intersection always had horrible traffic problems anyway." Both of these things are true and if the monument had come down because of planned improvements for the infrastructure, I would have felt merely sad to see it go. But that's not what happened.

The monument was destroyed because the Crown decided that the fact protests had been held there was more important than the fact that it was a symbol of the entire country.

It hard for me to see this as anything other than a temper tantrum, like when a toddler smashes his favorite toy because his brother was looking at it.

The official line is that this was an attempt to erase bad memories. Personally, every time I see a picture of the Pearl from now on I'm not going to think about the protests, but about a petulant government once again hurting their own people.

Maybe I'm so offended because I'm too American. I keep imagining what sort of uproar would occur if the White House tore down the Lincoln Monument and filled the reflection pool with concrete because people like to gather there to say unpleasant things about the government. If that happened, I wouldn't care what the protests had been about or whether I agreed with them. It's simply fundamental to my beliefs that governments don't have the right to act like that.

I know that tearing down a monument is civilized compared to other things that have happened in the Middle East this week. I continue to acknowledge that the Bahraini deaths have been appalling but less appalling than those in Libya and now Yemen. But being more reasonable than complete maniacs doesn't say very much for a government.

I'm sad today, mourning my hopes that a more fair Bahrain could be found without more violence. All the protesters wanted at the start of this was the basic right of representation. Things have moved beyond that now, and every day all parts of Bahraini society seem to be growing more uneasy and more on edge. I truly fear for Bahrain's near future.

I'm sorry for another downer, this is just important to me.

Here's something a little lighter... A picture from my sophomore year at Bahrain School...

Believe it or not, that really is the best picture in there of me. Le sigh. I was editing for the school Lit Mag, but have no idea why I was doing it with such a fat pen. (Also note that the writing mentions we met on Sundays. That wasn't the weekend. Sundays were our Tuesdays. :)

A Year on the Ice

2011-03-06T13:43:00.000-08:00

The above Pretty hangs on my wall, but hasn't done so for very long. It was given to me Friday night by my skip this season as a "Thanks for putting up with me" gift. (His wording, not mine!) I can't tell you how touched I was that he made these for me and my teammates.

If you're wondering what, exactly it is... The curling sheet is obvious. The ogham is probably less so. Oghan, also known as the Tree Alphabet, is a form of medieval Celtic writing. You read it from bottom to top, and in this case it says, "C-U-R-L."

Not only did this gift coincide with the end of my first full season of curling (we're still playing, but it's the post-season now), but it also came very close to the anniversary of my first real life curling experience.

I wrote about that here: Playing on Ice. (Note: I still don't know why I thought "hack" sounded like "hat." Sure, the instructor was from Boston, but it's not like she has a massive accent or anything. I've been curling with her on my team all season and she is not in the least bit difficult to understand. My only guess is that it had something to do with how loud it was on the ice that day. A rink full of open house visitors makes more noise than a rink full of curling matches.)

I've learned a lot over the last year. I can usually get either the weight or the line right when I throw (occasionally both). I still don't think I'm capable of slide sweeping, but I am moving around better on the slider than I used to. And I hardly ever hurt myself now. (No, don't look at the bruise still lingering on my knee from my last practice session! I was trying to find a new/better form and, well, clearly one's going to bang on the ice a lot while doing that.)

More importantly, I've met a lot of awesome new people and had a lot of fun with them.

I've also written a novel. Which is directly related since it's a curling novel. I learned a lot of lingo and strategy for it, and some techniques that are well beyond my skill level thanks to my competitive curling beta-reader being able to say of several things, "Yeah, we tell beginners that, but Darcy would know..."

It has been a truly awesome year for me. I have my fingers crossed that the next one will be amazing.

Me and My Minion, a love story

2011-03-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

Meet Edit Minion. His website is here: www.editminion.com. He is my new best friend.

He reads the chapters I show him and he highlights all the things I should take a closer look at. Things like adverbs, weak words, and passive verbs. Especially the passive verbs. I'm really prone to those. Edit Minion recognizes that none of these elements need to be completely stricken, but by highlighting them for me, he helps me to decide which ones are needed and which can be changed for the better.

He also gives me interesting data on the words that I use most, letting me easily see if there's a word I'm overusing in a given writing sample.

Plus, he's really cute.

Edit Minion has been a massive help to me in the last two drafts of my curling novel and I suspect we'll stay friends for a long time to come. In fact, I've been thinking that I might run that ghost story through him too, despite my resolution to let that sit until after the "dead MC" trend I was unexpectedly caught in fades away.

Edit Minion is still officially Beta. I'm not sure what additional features Minion's humans plan on adding, but he's already one of the most useful tools I've found. He's somewhere behind Word Processing Programs (I just switched to LibreOffice, BTW, and am quite liking it) but ahead of the dry erase boards I keep notes on.

Alright... End of this little PSA. I have a revision to finish!

The Pearl of the Arabian Gulf

2011-02-28T13:38:00.000-08:00

Bahrain School, Manama, Bahrain

1992

Ms Daugherty drew on the board of my freshman world history class, making a simple diagram of the political spectrum from left to right. She turned at looked at us, a mixture of young teens collected from across the world and living in the small Arab nation of Bahrain. “And where do you think Bahrain falls?”

I shifted, uncomfortable with the question. I knew where I'd put it, but I also knew that the Bahrainis in the room were likely to be offended, maybe even hurt, by being labelled as insanely ultra-right.

“On the left,” someone said.

“Here?” Ms Daugherty touched a point slightly left of the middle.

“No, further left.”

A few of the Arab kids worked together to place the dot well into the liberal zone.

One of my American friends and I exchanged a glance, then looked quickly away before we started laughing.

Ms Daugherty ran her eyes over all of us. I met her gaze for a second, seeing she knew that while my lips were silent, my mind was screaming, “Are you freaking kidding me?”

No one said anything, we just shuffled in our seats as the seconds ticked by.

“So everyone agrees?” Ms Daugherty asked, looking straight at my section of the classroom. IE, the American corner.

I shook my head, but wasn't the one brave enough to say, “No.”

The American and European members of the class moved the dot to the far right while the Arab kids looked at us like we were nuts. It was an excellent demonstration on how relative terms like “conservative” and “liberal” really are.

I've been thinking about that class a lot over the last few weeks, as my former host nation has been rocked by violence. I've been trying to find the words to write about my thoughts and feelings about what's happening over there, but I find them really hard to pin down. I know I'm upset, more upset than I would have thought considering that it's been eighteen years since I was last there and considering that I didn't really love living there all that much. (Note: I was angsty at sixteen. I'm not certain I would have liked living anywhere.)

A lot of things have bothered me about the coverage of Bahrain I've seen recently. As my sister pointed out, a number of people writing about it kept referring to “Pearl Square” in an obvious attempt to make the situation seem more like Egypt than it is. “If anyone ever needed proof that the media just plain doesn't get certain things, that right there is a starting point,” she wrote. “How are they supposed to grasp what is really going on when they can't even figure out the difference between a circle and a square?”

(Pearl Roundabout)

Yeah, the Pearl ROUNDABOUT is circular. My sister and I used to commute past it to get to school, so we're pretty sure of this point. (Note: Tahrir Square isn't a square either. It is also a traffic circle. Here's an entire article about these places being circles: Roundabouts and Revolutions)

Also, I saw several references to “Bahrainians,” including some supposed expert on CNN. If you use this word, I will instantly stop listening to you. The people of Bahrain are Bahrainis. I don't expect the average American to know this, but anyone who's going to try to shape my opinion on these protests should. If you don't know at least that much about the country, I guarantee you don't understand what the protests are about.

I don't think anyone who isn't Bahraini really has much of a clue what is going on there right now, myself included. In fact, I'd take that further and say a large number of Bahrainis don't really understand it either. How can they? The choice of sources is between the protesters' propaganda, the government's propaganda, and a bunch of people who failed Kindergarten geometry. I frankly don't trust any of them very far.

I do think I know several things about the situation. I know this isn't the first time the government has been protested. I know that the lives of the poor in Bahrain really are difficult and that religious discrimination in Bahrain is a very real thing. (This was a serious problem when I was living there. Things have improved in as far as there is now a Parliament, but it is a Parliament set up to give the common people as little voice as possible, as evidenced by the fact that any of their rulings can be overridden by a committee appointed by the king.) I know the ruling family has a lot of faults, but that actively being monsters isn't one of them. (Remember that I went to school with some of them! I didn't like them all, but that doesn't make them evil. Call them foolish, misguided, or spoiled, and I probably won't argue with you, but they aren't demonic.) I know that by the standards of the Middle East, Bahrain is a permissive and easy-going place.

I think a lot of stuff too. I think that even as things stand, every Bahraini is lucky to be from Bahrain and not from Saudi or Iran or a number of other places in the region. I think Bahrain needs more democracy and less discrimination, although I don't think they need to completely axe the monarchy immediately. I think the protesters aren't puppets of Iran. I think they really do want more democracy, not a different and more restrictive government. I think Sheikh Khalid Al Khalifa, Bahrain's Foreign Minister, was honest when he tweeted about being appalled by Qaddafi's actions against the Libyan people. And I don't think that was hypocritical of him, because there's a big difference between people dying because the police force got out of hand and people being slaughtered en masse by their leader. (Not trying to make light of the deaths in Bahrain. I do consider them tragic and am upset by them. And I don't think that the middle of the night was an appropriate time to tell the protesters to vacate their camp. However, it does bother me how many people have been lumping the Bahraini government in with that of Libya.)

I'm not sure why I share all this with you. I don't expect it to sway opinions or even to explain anything. (The best summary I've seen so far, IMO, is here: A Revolution Paused in Bahrain. Note that the authors can recognize basic shapes!) But I have a blog so that I can think things out in writing and I haven't been doing enough of that lately.

I've moved a lot in my life and everywhere I've lived has left a mark, whether I wanted it to or not. Even though I was only in Bahrain for two years and I left without intending to ever return, it hurts me to see the nation in so much pain. I don't know how this will resolve. It's been two weeks since the outbreak of violence was ended and nothing seems to have been decided, other than the Grand Prix being moved elsewhere. I sincerely hope, insha'Allah, a resolution will be found to give a voice to all citizens of Bahrain without completely abandoning their cultural hertitage. And I hope even more fervently that it will happen without any more bloodshed.

Bahrain, for what it's worth, I'm thinking about you...

I'm Old

2011-01-03T15:57:00.000-08:00

Oh, dear. My son has his first blog! That makes me old, right? Like truly ancient?

Okay, so he's not doing it all on his own. It's under my profile and I set it up, though he directed me. And, yeah, I typed his first entry. (A short story about a magic snowman.) The story really was his though. I kept him from rambling at times and cleared up a few sentences, but the plot was one hundred per cent kiddo's and so was the idea to write a story today and put it on a blog in the first place.

Our attempt at writing a NaNo novel didn't do well. We got too far behind too early thanks to traveling and never really found our groove. But today has given me renewed hope for my child as a writer. Although... I do fear he's better than I am! He's certainly better than I was at age nine. But that's okay. Maybe being the mother of a best selling author will help me get published one day. :)

Check out kiddo's first entry here: The Snowman.

Merry Christmahanakwanzika, or other holiday of your choice

2010-12-21T10:51:00.001-08:00

This is me last Friday, on the ice at my curling club...

See the Santa hat? Isn't it festive? Note the bell? It went *jingle, jingle* as I swept.

From this, you may be getting the impression that I like Christmas. Well, if so, you're wrong... Oh, there are things I like about it, such as hats and bells and reindeer. I like that people try to be nicer than usual. I enjoy the eggnog and mints and cookies. And I do like a lot of the movies. But I don't like the work involved in putting up trees, I don't like the music, and I hate the pressures I put on myself.

I don't even like the presents.

Wait... Did I just say I dislike presents? Well, yeah. I do. Or the whole hubbub surrounding them anyway. Both giving and receiving gifts are great sources of stress for me. Someone gives me something and I feel guilty, unworthy of the attention or the money spent. If it's a gift I dislike, then I feel bad for not liking it. If it's one I do like, I worry that whatever I gave in return wasn't as well suited. I dread selecting gifts, certain that no matter how well I know the person I'm gifting things to I've made an error in judgement and they would have rather had something else. And if I don't know the person well... That's just a nightmare where I play That Crazy Aunt Who Gives The Crazy Lame Presents. I mean, the aunt who gave Ralphie that bunny outfit in A CHRISTMAS STORY probably didn't know what she was doing, right? She was just remembering that he'd liked bunnies when he was three or something. What if Star Wars LEGO toys became the new bunny suits and I didn't notice?

So my stomach has been in knots for weeks and I'm all stressed and I won't feel better until next month at the earliest. Which is sad because it means I'll still be suffering Christmas Distress on my birthday, which is December 26th. And, oh, how I wish they'd move Christmas so that it wasn't right next to the one day that's supposed to be mine!

Anyway, this leads me to a Christmas edition of People Not To Confuse With Andy...

Clark W. Griswold.

Oh, it's easy to see how Clark and I could get mixed up in your head. We both try too hard and generally wind up sabotaging ourselves as a direct result. We get ideas in our heads and run with them, regardless of the strange looks our families give us. We keep forgetting exactly how klutzy we are, so we try to do complicated things that require coordination we simply don't posses. We miss important details, often spending hours trying to solve problems that could have been addressed in seconds if we'd just been able to realize what really needed done. We hate disappointing people and really want everyone to be happy, so much so that we make them miserable with our efforts. And I'm certain that if someone made a movie about my life, they'd cast a member of Saturday Night Live to play me. Possibly Tina Fey. Can she curl? (She doesn't have to do it well.)

But somehow Clark remains cheerfully dedicated to the concept of the perfect Christmas. And personally I'd just as soon give Christmas a miss.

But I can't skip Christmas. It would break my son's heart. So I'll celebrate it and try to be as merry as I can manage. And I'll wish you all well, hoping that whichever winter holidays you chose to celebrate are filled with unforced cheer and happiness.

Yes, Virginia, you need editing.

2010-12-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

My friend Cassandra Marshall made this button to advertise her editing services...

Well, someone writing things based on Austen has to love it. =)

If you missed it, there was a bit of a hubub a few months ago when an Oxford professor started saying Jane Austen required heavy editing. (See here for the NPR segment with her.) Apparently if you look at Jane's actual manuscripts as she sent them in, you'll see that she had a shaky grasp of punctuation and couldn't spell worth a darn.

Well... So what? I don't enjoy her works for their comma placement or for 'i' coming before 'e' except when it shouldn't. I love her for her characters and plots.

However, that isn't to say that the errors didn't need correcting. It's hard for your genius to stand out if people are busy wondering if you know what a dictionary is. If everyone who saw her writing when it was first published had said, "Bah, she can't even spell!" and tossed it aside, then the books wouldn't have become classics and I never would have seen them.

No matter how brilliant you are, you need editing. Even when editors write books, they find other editors to work on them.

"Yes, Andy," you may be saying. "That's why publishing houses have editors."

Exactly! But you're probably thinking that means you don't need a freelance editor if you're pursuing traditional publication. And you may be right. Certainly there are a lot of horror stories about unethical freelance editors out there. And certainly the standard for getting an agent is a little lower than the standard for getting on the shelf at Barnes and Nobel. You have to look better than Austen's rough drafts, but you may be able to do it on your own.

If you have good beta readers, you can definitely try to find an agent without an editor. People succeed at it all the time. But if you're in doubt about whether your manuscript is polished enough... Well, click on the link to Cassandra's page. It costs nothing to have her look at a sample and tell you whether she thinks she can help. And, yes, I do actually trust her to be honest about it.

If you act fast, you can even enter her Year-End free edit contest, here. Though you do have to be willing to tell her what you want for the winter holiday of your choice. :)

NaNo: The Next Generation

2010-10-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

November, as many of you know, is National Novel Writing Month. (If you don't know what NaNo WriMo is, you can check out their website here. But basically, it's a huge group of people spending a month writing a large number of words.) I've participated the last several years and blogged about my past projects here.

The first year I did it, I decided to play the night before and was astonished with how much I was able to create. It took me only two weeks to pass 50k and I was completely done with the book in just a few more days. Considering that my previous novels had taken years, this was pretty amazing.

The second year, I didn't even consider not doing it. But by the third, I'd realized that I didn't really need the national group support to write that quickly. I'd knocked out several roughs in equally short periods on my own and had realized it was the next step of the process I really needed to be focusing on. You know, the bit where you take an unpresentable rough and turn it into something printable? But I wanted to participate anyway because I liked the program and wanted to help support other writers. That year's project was something new, an adult romance. It didn't go too great, even though I passed the 50k goal as easily as ever. What I wrote wasn't what I wanted it to be and when I tried to rewrite it, I lost heart.

Then came last year... I decided to participate mostly to make up for the year before. I hit 50k and finished the story, but it took most of the month. For me, that was depressing. Most of the issue was because I had spent so much time with editing that I was incredibly conscious of what needed to be done. I wasn't quite editing as I went, but my internal editor was definitely screaming for me to slow down and pay attention to what I was doing.

So this year, I was thinking maybe I shouldn't do NaNo. I've passed the point where I need the encouragement to finish and I'm becoming comfortable with a slower pace that interferes with the rest of my life a little less than NaNo does and leaves manuscripts that don't need quite as much work. Plus, I'm about half-way through the first draft of my park skiing novel.

But... So many of my friends are doing it. And I do still like the idea.

So, it occurred to me... What if instead of having trouble fitting homeschooling and family life around NaNo, I made NaNo a part of homeschooling and family life this year? I went to my eight-year-old and asked him how he'd feel about co-writing a novel with me. The last two years, he's done his own projects during NaNo and produced short works of fan-fiction (by which I mean to say that he dictated them to me, thus taking time away from my own writing while I tried not to be too frustrated that he was telling us what happened to Mario rather than showing us), but I proposed that this year rather than doing separate projects at the same time we could do one together.

Now, before a NaNo purist points out that the adult site says you can't work with a partner, let me point out that I'm aware of that. Honestly, I've never been able to figure out why that's a rule. Maybe they figure it would mean each person writing 25k on their own and thus wouldn't convey the full experience. But a.) Why not if that's how the book you want to write works? You still get a book you might not have otherwise. And b.) That's not even remotely what the kiddo and I are doing. We'll be sitting side-by-side discussing each sentence we type. Frankly, it sounds a lot harder to me than writing on my own is.

I'll be surprised if we hit 50,000 words. That's not really our goal. Our goal is to finish a middle grade novel. There are examples of 50k MG books, but most of them run under that. Maybe we'll finish and move on to a sequel to make the word count. Maybe we'll finish and refuse to talk to each other until Christmas. It's hard to say.

We're going to have a lot of challenges. I've never co-written a book before. I've never written a Middle Grade before. It's been years since I've worked in third person, as kiddo wants to do. I already mentioned I'm halfway through something else and I don't plan on putting that completely on hold. And we're starting off the month with a week-long trip that will include at least two days where we'll be lucky to get anything written at all. And one of those days is the first day of the month, so we're going to be starting out behind schedule. =/

Overall, I'm exited though. I'm sharing something I love with my child. We've been working on character sheets today and I'll freely admit it's given me a headache. However, it's also let me see my boy's eyes shine with enthusiasm and hear gasps of excitement over sudden realizations. He's super-stoked and while part of me is tired just thinking about starting this project, seeing him thrilled about creating a story tells me it's something that should be done.

If you want to want to follow our progress, I'm sure I'll be Tweeting about it. Or you can check out our NaNo profile. It's under my old account name, ladyhegehog, and is here.

It's Gotta Be the Shoes

2010-10-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

The teams on sheet four left the ice a few minutes before I was due to start on sheet five. I went out onto the ice, needing to take a few slides in my new shoes.

I was highly aware of the forty or so people behind the glass behind me as I got into the hack, even though I generally don't notice people in the warm room during games. Nothing I could do but hope they weren't paying attention. They probably weren't. It's not like I stare at everyone I see practicing. And it certainly wasn't like anyone ever mocks me however bad I look.

I drew a breath and slid, fully expecting to do something embarrassing and just hoping it wouldn't also be something painful.

But... It was smooth and steady. At least, by my standards. It wasn't the gliding you see if you watch someone curl on TV, but it was a lot better than the wobbling I was doing in week one.

I took another slide, feeling more stable than ever before. Thank the Ice Gods. My delivery's still a long way from perfect and it started to get worse as I got more tired, but it seems like I'm on a good track to improvement.

So, I love my news shoes. If anyone reading this is trying to decide if they want to curl in real curling shoes or just put a slip-on slider over a street shoe, I vote for the curling shoes. These are the cheapest shoes my club store carries and they are still worlds better than my slip-on. Plus I didn't have to worry about making sure my slider made it to the right side of the ice at the end of the end. Total win!

A few people have asked me questions about curling shoes and some have asked to see them. So, here are some photos.

As you can see, they look a lot like sneakers, just with funny soles.

Here's the bottom of the left shoe, first with the gripper over the slider and then with just the slider. As you can see, the gripper slips over the shoe and covers the lovely teflon up. When I sweep, I wear the gripper. Curlers with more experience and better balance don't have to do this, but I like not falling.

Only the left foot has a slider. This is why it was such a major deal for me to realize minutes before the first game of the season that I had neither balance nor strength in my left leg and why I've spent the last fortnight doing funny looking one-legged excercises.

Here are the right foot grippers...

In contrast to the snazzy new shoes, here's the set up I used to have. Chuck Taylors with slip-on slider and grippers.

You can see in the next photo that the slider doesn't fit over the shoe quite right. This is because my shoe size is right at the edge of medium and large. The teflon's thinner, which makes the slider less efficient, and it always felt too flexible and wobbly.

The Chucks are cute though and I'm happy to be able to wear them outside now. :)

So is there anything else you've always wondered about curling shoes that I didn't cover? Don't be afraid to ask!

UPDATE: 10/24/10

One of my friends/teammates/beta readers (yeah, she's full of awesome) commented on my Facebook link to this post about the whole sweeping with a slider concept. She pointed out that while you do see championship-level men doing it, it is incredibly rare to see even a world-class female competitor doing it.

The reason is simple now that it's been pointed out to me. You get less power in your sleeping if you're sweeping with a slider. My friend says that she knows from Mixed Doubles experience (Mixed Doubles being a curling variant were you have to sweep with a slider because you're sweeping the rock you just threw) that she loses three or more feet of potential gain when she slide-sweeps. Three feet can easily be the difference between a great shot and a missed opportunity.

People with greater strength may be able to trade the extra distance in for the precision of weight judgement you gain from sliding at the same rate as the rock, so an advanced men's team can absolutely do it without hurting themselves. However, I don't see it being something that would ever be in my interest to do. Unless, of course, I one day decide to try Mixed doubles. :)

Potato Power!

2010-09-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

My child was curled up on his bed, giving me that adorable “but I don't wanna go to sleep!” look of his. “Mom...”

I sighed, but gave him a smile. “Yes, love?”

“When we were playing Dragons and Dungeons.... You and Rory were acting like it was a joke.”

Well, we were certainly laughing a lot as we played his free-form di-less roleplaying adventure, yes. I mean, our friend Rory was a half-orc half-ogre ninja and I was a human potato mage. As in a mage who specialized in spells involving potatoes and whose main motivation for questing was finding something to cook potatoes in. But... “We were having fun.”

“But it wasn't Dragons and Dungeons!”

“Dungeons and Dragons,” I corrected.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “The order doesn't matter.”

It did, kinda, but I didn't feel like arguing about it. It's not like the game was really D&D anyway. Maybe Dragons and Dungeons was a better descriptor. “I'm sorry if we upset you. We were enjoying ourselves. That's how I play these games, you can ask your dad about it.”

“Maybe I should have made a demo level.” He nodded to himself in thought.

“That might have helped,” I agreed, smoothing down his blankets and starting to tuck him in.

His eyes brightened. “Okay, make a character.”

Um... I smiled gently. “Can we do this tomorrow, honey? It's late.”

“It'll be fast,” he promised. “What do you want to be?”

“An elvish potato mage? I liked being a potato mage.”

He sighed. “You're a human wizard. You are in a padded room. There is a gnome attacking you.”

A gnome? I was being attacked by a gnome? Okay... “I throw a potato at him.”

Eric sighed. “It knocks off his hat. You are struck by lightening. You are dead.”

“What?” I asked. “How'd that happen?”

“It just did. You are a human wizard in a padded room. There's a gnome attacking you. What do you do?”

I smiled. “Throw a rutabaga at him!”

The child let out a moan of despair. “I don't even know what a rutabaga is!”
“It's a root vegetable. Like a big turnip.”

“You are struck by lightening. You are dead.”

I had similar results from throwing a banana, a bunch of grapes, and even my pet dragon. Thought I had a shot at doing damage with the dragon, but no...

I eventually defeated the gnome by casting a freeze spell on him, but then killed myself when the spell that was supposed to break through the wall bounced back at me. Spell-reflective padding. My kid's an evil genius. But he was an evil genius who was already up past his bedtime, so I stopped playing then.

A few days ago, I had a strange idea that I shared with my son. The last two Novembers, he's done National Novel Writing Month with me, producing short pieces of video game fan fiction as I cranked out novel rough drafts. This year, I've been doubting if I want to participate because, frankly, I think I've gotten past the point were it really helps me and it adds a lot of stress to my family life. But it occurred to me that if I were writing something with one of my family members.... Well, my husband may still feel neglected but he won't be able to accuse me of neglecting the kiddo. So, I asked Eric what he thought of the idea of writing a middle grade novel together.

He's excited about the idea, even though I set the rule that we had to do something original rather than fanfic. Me... I'm a little scared to be honest. I've never co-authored before and never written a middle grade novel. But it has the potential to be a great adventure. :)

How Does Your Garden Grow?

2010-08-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

When I was sixteen, I went to boarding school in England. The image that just popped into your head probably wasn't accurate though. This wasn't a proper British school with uniforms and a campus that looked like an Ivy League college like the ones you've seen in movies or on TV. No, this was a United States Department of Defense Dependants School. It was on a base left over from World War II and the dorms used to be barracks.

I was in High Wycombe, England. My parents were in Sicily. And so, sadly, was my dog. I missed my parents, but the absence of pets was a complete hardship.

So I did what kids in dorms all over the world have done to compensate. I bought a plant. It probably had a name, but I don't remember it. It certainly had a species, but I don't think I ever knew what that was.

The plant lived on my windowsill. Luckily for it, this was back when I could have uncovered windows without fear of headache, nausea, and rashes brought on by PMLE. I gave it water. I played music for it. I tried my best to be good to that plant.

One day I opened my window and the plant tumbled out. I sprinted down two flights of stairs and ran outside to retrieve it.

A few days later, it fell again. I went after it again, wondering why it never fell into the room but always fell outside.

The third time the plant fell, I realized what was happening. The plant was attempting suicide. It would rather take its own life than live with me.

I couldn't really blame it. The decision was a sensible one. Better to die quickly falling from a window than to languish away in my care. Which it would have, eventually. I've never been able to keep a plant alive, not even one that wasn't trying to kill itself.

So, I present the third person Not To Confuse With Andy...

Alan Titchmarsh
(aka That Guy from Ground Force)
Or Anyone Else Who Can Keep a Plant Alive

You probably shouldn't confuse me with someone who'd be sniffing a flower either. I'm allergic to most of them. The suicidal plant may have been some kind of fern... I really don't know. It was definitely not something with flowers.

Oops. Did I do that?

2010-08-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

The Phineas and Ferb soundtrack was playing. It's energetic and fun and it makes me want to move, so I decided to do something productive. I'd put away the dishes!

The end result was this:

Sad, isn't it? It was one of my favorite and most used dishes. Pretty and the perfect size for pasta. I still have three of them, but I use them in pairs. The loss of this poor bowl means I will have to do dishes more often. Which increases the odds of this happening to other innocent dishes.

Note that I didn't drop the bowl. That would have resulted in in shattering. I know because I've dropped plenty of bowls. I've also broken things by smashing them into the side of the sink or the faucet, mostly back in the days when I didn't have a dishwasher. This was the first time I broke one by hitting the side of the cabinet as I was trying to put it away though. I think.

So now I present number two in my series on People Not To Confuse With Andy...

Anthony Gatto

I can see how confusion could occur. I mean, 'Anthony' and 'Andy' sound sort of alike. And I do know how to juggle. But not like this guy... Check it...

Yeah, that's not me. I can do several three ball variants. Used to be able to do a five ball multiplex. But not reliably. And I stress the 'used to' part of my statement.

This is also not me:

That's Bruce Lee. Playing ping pong. With nunchucks. I play ping pong with a paddle and still manage to miss more often than not.

Neither am I this girl:

I don't know who she is. But definitely not me. Although I have ridden a unicycle, I was also accused by my Wii Fit of falling a lot when I try to walk. And it was right.

So, to recap... You Should Not Confuse Andy With Anthony Gatto, Bruce Lee, unicycling Oklahoma girl who balances stuff on her head, or anyone else possessing coordination.

Once Upon a Time

2010-08-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

"Okay," I told my son. "The card says we have to end the story with 'And when her father saw her babies he knew he had to allow the marriage.' That means you can't kill the father. Or his daughter."

"Right," he said, sounding like he'd already forgotten sabotaging our last attempt at co-operative Once Upon A Time with just such a move not five minute before.

I played my first card, establishing that there once was an old man with a beautiful daughter.

"And he was blind!" My son threw down the blindness card and I closed my eyes for a second.

"And he was blind." I flicked the cure card onto the pile. "So she went on a quest to find a cure so that when she has babies, he'll be able to see them."

Kiddo's mouth made a little 'o' as he slowly realized he'd made our goal harder to reach. But it was okay, the girl had a reason to go out and meet her love interest now. "She heard that there was a cure in the castle."

"So she sailed down the river toward the castle..."

Kiddo grinned. "But she was stopped by... a fiend!"

"The instant the fiend stepped foot on her boat, he fell madly in love with her."

Kiddo stopped grinning. "What?"

I smiled. "The fiend saw her and fell madly in love."

"But he's a fiend!"

My smile got wider. "Welcome to paranormal romance."

"But... A fiend!"

"Yes. A fiend. Who's in love with the girl on the quest. You can see why her father will object."

And thus began half an hour of me trying to arrange for the fiend and the girl to have kids while my son tried to break them apart.

They ended together, with her dad coming around like the card said. Kiddo wasn't happy I pulled that off though. I'm pretty sure we're never going to become a mother-son novel writing team. :)

(Note: if you're not familiar with the game Once Upon a Time, here's a link: Atlas Games, Once Upon a Time. We've been playing a modified version where players take turns playing cards rather than interrupting each other. This has helped with the problem the kiddo has with catching when he can play interrupt cards. We're still working on his sense of narrative though. :)

All Smoke and No Fire

2010-07-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

I knew who was at the door before I answered it. I'd hoped they wouldn't come, that the message not to had gotten to them in time. Apparently not. Or maybe they just felt like coming anyway. Because I'm sure it's awesome fun to put on fifty pounds of protective gear and ride around in hundred degree heat.

“Hey...” I gave the firemen on the porch a nervous smile. “I'm so sorry.”

“Is everything okay?” the oldest one asked. I assumed he was the one in charge and focused on him, even though the one beside him was cuter.

“Yeah. It was a false alarm.” Which, you know, explained why the building wasn't on fire. “I canceled it as soon as it went off and called, but they'd already alerted you... I'm really sorry.”

“It's okay,” said the cute one.

The older one nodded agreement and took out a pen. He looked like he expected me to say something else.

“Yeah, um... I burnt lunch. There was a lot of smoke. But just smoke.”

They all smiled like it happened all the time. Which it probably does. It's actually kind of amazing that I'd gone as long as I had without the fire department making an appearance considering how bad I am at cooking.

When I told my husband he'd have a message on his phone from the alarm monitoring company, he asked, “What were you cooking? Water?” Which wasn't very nice of him but wasn't all sarcasm either. I actually did set off an alarm boiling water once.

So... First item on my People Not To Confuse With Andy list:

Julia Childs
Or anyone else who can competently use a kitchen

Lost: One Profound Thought

2010-07-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

The sun was blaring down on the car as my beloved drove our little family across the desert to dinner. I was huddled in my seat at an awkward angle, trying to keep my skin from getting singed. (If you know me, you probably know I have PMLE. So when you think of me crossing a desert, think of the non-sparkling kind of vampire trying to do it.) Between the sun and the motion, I was starting to feel pretty queasy, yet I still managed to have a Profound Thought about the park rat novel.

I had a mini notebook in my purse. I had my Blackberry. I could have recorded the thought. But I didn't, so now I don't know what it was. But like all thoughts that a writer fails to jot down, I'm certain it was The Best Thought Ever.

It had something to do with why I'm retelling Persuasion from the point-of-view of Wentworth. (I'm switching the genders, so Freddie the Park Rat's a girl. But she's still Wentworth. :) It was something beyond the obvious reason I'm doing that, which is that Anne spent most of the novel reacting to things whereas Wentworth was evolving and, eventually, acting. It's not fair to say Anne was completely without growth, but the whole setup behind the story is that Anne listened too much to the wrong people. She had to learn to trust herself. But she never had to do anything based on that new trust unless you count responding favorably after Wentworth summoned the courage to tell her he still wanted her. And it wasn't like it was a big deal to accept him at that point, now that he had rank and money and Anne's acquaintances had all been gushing about him for months.

There was possibly something in the thought about how Wentworth is the more sympathetic character to a modern reader. Anne had practical reasons for rejecting him but it's always been hard for me to go as far as saying she was right to do it. I think if I were to write from her side, there would be a lot of angst about how silly she'd been in the past, misery that he's all flirty with other people now, and just whining in general. (Remember I'm recasting Anne and Wentworth both as teens...)

Whatever the reason, I'm doing it this way and wish I could remember that thought. If you see it floating around, let me know.

This Week in Andyland

2010-06-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

Friday, I finished the second draft of The Curling Novel. It wasn't all that much different from the first draft, but I'd fixed everything I then knew to fix and it was time for my first run of betas.

So there are people reading my book. If you've ever hit send on a manuscript, you know how scary that feels. I remember being told it would never get better. For me, though, it actually has. Maybe it's because this is such an early draft. It's okay if people don't love it. Particularly if they're able to tell me why they don't love it. Which isn't to say that I don't want them to enjoy the book, I do. But if they don't, the world doesn't end, I just have stuff to work on. If they send me twenty pages of “Why I hate Andy's curling novel” then I'll have twenty pages worth of inspiration for revising.

The initial responses have been positive. None of the reviews have been too detailed yet but I already have a few ideas for things to alter in the next draft thanks to them and I have hopes I'll have some more to play with soon. It's exciting.

While waiting for my feedback to come in, I started plotting a new story. It's about park rats. (The kind who play on snow, not on concrete. Not that I have anything against the skate park type, I'm just a terrain park person. :) And it's about Jane Austen's PERSUASION.

So... Not going back to paranormal, at least not yet. And no curling this time. But staying with people who play in the cold and with Austen.

Yesterday, I wrote the first chapter of The Park Rat Novel. I hadn't meant to. I was supposed to be waiting and plotting and working out how the themes of PERSUASION translate to modern high school kids. But the main character's voice started going on and on in my head and she wouldn't shut up, so I had to type.

I think The Curling Novel proved that I don't have to be as fast and obsessive as I'd taught myself to be in the past. I can finish something in a reasonable time frame without sprinting to get it out in two weeks. And that's what I'm going to try to do with my park rats. I'm not sure how well my new MC's going to play with that idea, but we'll see.

The Naming of Names

2010-06-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

So the winner of the New Name for SHADOW poll was... Write in candidate I'D RATHER NOT BE DEAD. There was a discussion about this over on my Facebook page with people arguing both in favor of and against the inclusion of 'not' in the title. I was against it. "I'd rather be dead," is something I can hear my main character say. It conveys her voice better than any other title I've ever considered. But then a friend of mine made the graphic below and I said, "OH!" It works perfectly!

Sadly, saying that I want the title to look like that is probably a cover choice and hence not something I'm supposed to be expressing at this point. Which bugs me because if 'not' isn't shoved in like an afterthought I still don't like it all that much. But I can stand putting it there because I do agree with the people who maintained it makes you go "Huh?" and maybe look twice.

So, I hereby announce that The Novel Formerly Known As SHADOW is now to be known as I'D RATHER NOT BE DEAD.

Now... Can I think of something I like better than PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND CURLING ROCKS for the work I'm editing this week..?

What's In a Name?

2010-06-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

Okay... So... There are apparently fifty million dead-girl books being queried right now. Mine's having trouble standing out. (Seriously? After I spent years on it because everyone was saying not to bother with my Weres or my vampires because those are too common? Good grief!) I don't think it's helping that the title's pretty overdone. No, I can't think of anything named just plain SHADOW but there are a lot of books out there with that word in the title.

So... Not saying that changing my title is going to solve all my problems, but I'm thinking it can't hurt. So I'm looking for something that conveys some of my MC's personality. I asked her opinion and she suggested I'D RATHER BE DEAD.

When I asked Facebook and Twitter, folks seemed to like it. But then my sister suggested I'D RATHER NOT BE DEAD, presumably because the MC isn't all that stoked about being in the ghost realm. (Which is called Shadow, that's where the old title came from.)

My sister made some suggestions. Her favorite was SLIP KNOT, which is cool but more of a thriller title. One of her other suggestions struck a chord with me though and that was DEAD AND CONFUSED.

So... I ask the world, what do you think?

+++Thanks for your interest, but the poll has been closed. Please see next entry for the winner.+++

See You in September...

2010-06-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

I slid smoothly from the hack, balanced and confident I'd gotten the weight right. It was a big contrast from the deliveries in my first game, when my knee slammed onto the ice so hard and so often that I had a bruise covering the entire thing for two weeks.

The rock glided down the sheet, right on target. It landed exactly where I'd been asked to put it.

I'd gotten better over the season, but not by enough that I wasn't pleasantly surprised.

I didn't shoot anywhere near one hundred per cent in my final game of spring league curling, but my weight was more consistent than ever before. Weight, for the non-curlers reading this, is what determines how far down the ice the rock has the potential to go. The sweepers can affect ultimate position by many feet but sweeping alone can't take a rock thrown far too light into play and it certainly can't keep a rock thrown too heavy from sailing out the back of the house.

Right up to the end of the league, I improved just a little every game. And while I'm still a very inexperienced novice player, I do feel like I've grown a lot over the last few weeks. (There was even some talk that I outplayed my beloved in that last game. He claims it wasn't the first time, though he's had many more impressive shots than I have.)

I will be back in fall, though it might not be easy. The club's two hours away and getting there involves going over a mountain pass that is prone to seasonal closures. But the beloved and I are determined. And, well, we bought a broom. So.... :)

I'm very sad the league is over, both because I had a lot of fun and because it leaves me one less activity during summer. Summer is a hard time of year for me. My solar allergies keep me locked inside and, honestly, I have difficulty thinking straight if the temperature is above seventy. That's a problem since I feel it would be highly irresponsible of me to set my thermostat quite that low. Losing my nice building full of ice until fall is a blow.

I'd like to tell you that I'm going to spend the next few months being incredibly productive, but historically summer is my least productive time of year. Like I said, I have a hard time thinking when it's too warm. And everyone has a hard time doing much of anything when they're depressed, which being trapped inside tends to do to humans.

I'm nearing the end of my curling novel's rough draft. I have a list of things to revise before letting betas look at it, then I'm sure I'll have a new list. I have other things to revise. I have new things that want to be written. Maybe the memory of ice will motivate me enough. We'll see...

Twisting the Cat's Tale

2010-05-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I went to a presentation of artwork done by the children of the art program my son just finished. A friend's daughter was also there, though she wasn't in my son's class, and I got to look at her work. Her group did a day where they created an Eric Carle style picture to be the cover of a short story they wrote.

My friend's daughter's book had a brightly colored, mostly pink, cat on it. It was all sorts of cute. But the thing that got my attention was the story... When she showed me the book, the girl said the story was really bad. This may be evidence she's destined to be a writer because she was wrong about that.

The tale was about a girl who wanted to be a cat. She goes to a farm run by a magic user and makes her wish. And now the farm is guarded by a cat statue.

Yep, that's right. The girl gets turned into a statue of a cat.

Isn't that awesome?

I really wasn't expecting such a dark twist there in the last line. Which is, of course, why it works.

Part of the surprise came from the cover, which was very pink and girly. If it had been dark and Goth and looked like something I'd wear on a t-shirt, I wouldn't have been as delighted by the ending because I wouldn't have been expecting things to turn out well. And part of the surprise came from knowing the author, who feels I shouldn't wear so many skulls even if they do have heart-shaped eyes. But a large part came from the story simply seeming innocent and happy right up to the closer.

There's a lesson there about reader expectation. Defying it can seriously strengthen the impact of a story's ending. But one has to be careful. A lot of people wouldn't have liked the ending of the cat story and would have felt betrayed rather than delighted. I think it's easier to pull this kind of switch in shorter fiction than in novels because the reader's invested less time in it and thus are less tied to their notion of how it's going to end. Rather than saying, “I spent a week reading this and you end it like that???” they're out only a few minutes of their time. It gives you a lot of freedom.

I've never felt drawn to writing short stories, but I have to admit my friend's daughter has me feeling inspired.

My Mom Loves My Novel!

2010-05-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

You don't have to look far to find someone saying that you shouldn't place much value on the opinions of your friends and family on your writing. In fact, in some places you'll find people openly mocked for statements like, “My mom loved my novel!” Which kind of upsets me, because it's important to me that my mom enjoyed SHADOW. But the true value in mother's feedback wasn't when she said she loved it, it was when she told me what she didn't love.

When my mother first asked to read the book I kept talking about, I'll admit I was worried. Scared even. I kind of expected her to give me a quick, “That's nice, dear...” and not much else. Sort of like when my eight-year-old babbles out a tale that makes no sense to me and I smile at him while trying to edge away. I had no idea if she'd like it or not and I was worried I'd never even really know. I mean, my mom's a really nice person. Plus, you know, she's my mom...

Turns out, I should have had more faith in her.

My mother's an amazing woman, someone I've always admired. She's strong. Smart. Brave. You have to be brave to call up your daughter and tell her, “Yeah, that's nice, dear. But....”

I've given much more beta-reader feedback since I sent Mom the second draft of SHADOW to read than I had prior to that, so I have an even better understanding of how much guts it took to give me the help I needed. When I write notes for other writers, I spend hours staring at them before I hit send, trying to see if it all really needs to be said, hoping I'm not going to hurt someone who trusted me, praying I'm not going to say something that's going to make this other writer give up on their dream... How much worse would those fears be if I were talking to my child?

She considered the easy route, just metaphorically patting me on the head and saying she was proud. She even called my sister and asked her if I'd really meant it when I said I wanted to know the flaws in my novel or if I just wanted her to give her support. I suspect she more than half-hoped my sister would let her off the hook. But my sister writes too. No pardon was granted.

So my incredibly awesome mother got on the phone and told me all the problems she had with my story. At first, she sounded as uneasy as I've ever heard her, like she was certain I was going to yell or cry or call her names. When I instead ate up everything she was saying, she started getting into it. By the time she was critiquing the ending she was downright gleeful suggesting alternatives to what I'd written. (I'm going to assume that's because she relaxed. Not because she got to the bit where she insisted someone who originally lived needed not to... ;)

SHADOW wouldn't be what it is now without my mom, it would be something much weaker. I've had a lot of other beta-readers, several of them writers and many of whom said really helpful things, but none of them came up with nearly as much to work on as Mom did. She pointed out plot holes, she brought my attention to problems with characterization, she let me know the sections where the mood was off. She came up with a whole slough of things that no one else had mentioned. She was hands-down SHADOW'S MVB, Most Valuable Beta.

So, yeah, my mom loves my book. She loves it so much that she was willing to man-up and tell me which parts of it could be improved. She gave me what my novel needed, even though she wasn't certain it was what I wanted until after the fact. It's one of many things I love her for.

***
This slightly sentimental post brought to you by Mother's Day.

How Andy Burned Her Beloved

2010-04-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

Last night, I played my first league curling match. Afterwards I tweeted I hadn't done anything too stupid. That wasn't quite accurate.

Sometime late in the game, the skip showed me and Jimmy this little timer device. You velcro it around the broom handle and then use it to time how long the rock takes to cross certain marks on the ice. This number tells you how hard the rock was thrown, which is useful for determining how much you'll need to sweep to get the rock as far down the ice as it's supposed to be.

So, I had this neat toy to play with, right? And I was trying to figure out how to use it. All you have to do is press one button, but I'm not all that great at interacting with new devices. Maybe I'd press the wrong button. Maybe I'd press the right one twice. Or at the wrong time...

I was trying to time Jimmy's throw. He lined up in the hack and I stared at the timer, making sure my finger was in the right place on it. I looked at the rock, ready to press the button exactly when the rock went over the line... Jimmy slid, released the rock... I pressed the button. At the right time! Got the second button push right too.

Then I went back and Jimmy said, “You know you burned me, right?”

Huh? I burned it?

No, not it. Him.

Burning is what you call it when you touch one of the rocks. I'd never heard it applied to a person before, but that's how Jimmy was using the word. I was so obsessed over the timer that I didn't even notice smacking into the shooter.

Sigh.

This is the kind of thing I do.

I'm not sure if saying I burned Jimmy is accurate phrasing. I'm not sure that action happens often enough to have a standard verb.

But it wasn't a mistake that changed the game. Which we won, despite my involvement. Overall, I don't think I played that horribly for someone on her second game ever. (Big qualifier there, but it's important to keep things in perspective when starting a new activity.) I had a lot of fun. And both my skip and my vice are very good at being patient and explaining things. Which is really good since they get to deal with me.

Clearly, I'm still learning a lot. Hopefully I'll keep that up for a long time.

You may be wondering how all this learning is going to affect the novel I'm writing, the one about the curling team. Well... I don't think it will. At least not that much. I may come to a better understanding of curling culture and that could leak in. But all these details like the timer and what the numbers it spits out mean? All putting those in would do is confuse people.

There are scenes that take place on ice. And there are a few shots that get mentioned. But saying, “The rock was moving too fast, it was going to overshoot the target,” would tell readers a heck of a lot more than spouting out a number they don't know what to do with.

I think I know enough for a novel already. At least for the game play aspects of it. But playing does make me feel more connected to my characters. Plus, it's good for me. I like it as much as they do. Well, maybe not as much as the MC, but as much as her less obsessive teammates. :)

The league I'm currently in will run for another eight weeks. I'm looking forward to them. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to stay with curling in the fall. The club is two hours from my house after all so it's a major deal to attend matches. But I'm really glad I'm getting the opportunity to play now.

On the Ice Again...

2010-04-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

My wrist turned, taking the rock's handle to exactly ten o'clock. I concentrated hard as I pulled the stone back and then moved it forward again. It had taken several ends for someone to spot the reason I kept getting my spin wrong. It had to do with turning my wrist a second time before my lunge. Well... Except for the quarter of the time or so when it had to do with me getting the skip's signal backwards.

I got the direction right this time. But as my knee came down on the ice, something I couldn't seem to stop doing despite the massive bruise that had sprung up there, I realized I'd been so concerned with the handle I hadn't put any thought at all into the weight I was throwing with. Had I used too much? Too little? Had I gotten it right by sheer chance?

The rock went down the ice... Too far to the side. Misaimed. And, yes, the weight was wrong too. It sailed right through the house. It was supposed to have been a guard. You know, one of those rocks that stop before the big circles?

In my defense, at the start the weight may have been fine. But the ice conditions had changed. It was something that I knew happens through the course of a game, but until I played my first one I had no idea exactly how strong the effect is. It's massive. A serious bowler will tell you bowling lanes change as you play on them too, but you have to be a good bowler to notice it. You do not need to be a good curler to notice the changes in the ice.

Of course, I'd had trouble with guards from the beginning. I kept hitting high in the house rather than stopping shy of it. Which is actually the way I call games when I play on my DS, not being aggressive enough to want to use the free guard rule most of the time, but isn't what my skipper wanted to do and thus not what I was trying for that night.

On my second throw, I got my weight closer to where I wanted it. And my aim was better. But I forgot about making sure my wrist stayed still so my curl was all wrong. I hit one of the other team's guards and groaned.

There was a brief discussion between the skips while I shook my head and wondered what was going to happen now. On the first two throws, you aren't allowed to remove the other team's guard from play, so what I'd done was bad. But they seemed to be debating something about the rock in question. Had it been touching the house? If so, it was fair game.

The skips left the rocks where they were and the other team's second lined up in the hack.

Turns out, I had hit a guard. But though it landed outside of the house, it was still in play. So I hadn't removed it. So the shot was fine. It was arguably a good shot if we'd been meaning to do that. Not that I could have thrown it if I were trying.

I grabbed my broom and waited for my turn to sweep, trying to hold the handle in a way that wouldn't aggravate the blister I had formed on my left hand.

Upstairs, my son stood by the window that looks over the ice and waved at me. With a smile, I waved back. It was good having a fan, even if I obviously didn't know what I was doing.

***

So, yeah, I'm a bit late in writing about it, but the week before last my husband and I both curled in our first games. We'd gone into Seattle to get some practice time in because we'd only done a throw each at the open house and got picked up as subs in league matches afterwards.

I had a complete blast and learned a lot. And despite having me on board, my team won. On the down side, I really did have blisters and a bruise that still hasn't healed all the way. And my legs were sore enough that I limped for days, due in large part to poor technique but possibly also because I don't usually run that much. And my arms hurt, because sweeping? Yeah, it's not like sweeping the kitchen. It's aerobic and it requires muscle. So if you're in the “curling's not a real sport” camp, I wish I could share that pain with you. All in all though, I'm very glad I was able to play and I'm looking forward to my league starting up next week.

My first game as part of Granite Curling Club's Spring League will be Tuesday evening. The beloved and I will be on the same team, along with two people with years of experience who will hopefully be able to resist the urge to kill me. I'm assured most teams don't kill their leads very often. Still... Wish me luck. =)

Confessions of a Wannabe Ski Bunny

2010-03-27T16:01:00.000-07:00

I talk about skiing a lot. Skiing's very important to me. I love it. I get depressed if I go too long without doing it. It makes me happy.

Sometimes I worry all this discussion gives off the wrong impression though. It's possible people think I'm good at it. Or trying to pose as good at it. So, here's a disclaimer, world... I am not a good skier.

Seriously. Ever seen one of these 'Easiest Way Down' signs?

Know who they're there for? They're there for me.

This particular sign is at the midpoint of Alpental, one of the base areas run by The Summit at Snoqualmie. It's halfway up, which is as high up the ski area as I've ever been. Not that there's disgrace in that. The lift that goes higher services some of the most challenging terrain in the Northwest, including Upper International, one of the steepest runs in the US. Go the wrong way up there and you may go over a cliff. Go the right way up there and you still might. But hopefully you were expecting it.

This was the first time I made it up the Armstrong Express lift. In the past, I've been happy staying on lower, easier intermediate slopes at Alpental and over at the other Summit bases. I'd done some of the blacks at Summit West, but they scared me less than the blues at Alpie. However, it's late in the season and the resort has slowed down to a crawl. The lower lifts weren't running. West was closed. Central was on its last day of the season because the snow there had thinned out so much. So... Not much choice unless I wanted to put on my touring skis and skin up slopes without a lift. Which I didn't really. So, I wound up here... Looking for the 'easiest way down' signs...

(Photo at the top of Armstrong of the sign showing me the ~~wussiest~~ easiest way down.)

I have very little experience with powder, even less with crud. Most of what I experienced yesterday was crud. Crud, for non-skiers, is like powder in that it's not flattened out by machines after falling out of the sky. But it's snow that people have been skiing over, so it's all choppy and collected into piles. Skiing on it... It's challenging. I'm told the key to skiing in it is patience. Patience is not a virtue I really possess. When I try to turn, I want to turn now. Not in five minutes. It's also important not to panic, but no matter how many times I re-read my Douglas Adams books that never really sinks in to my brain either.

I was possibly the worst skier at Alpental yesterday. But I was never seriously uncontrolled, never in danger, and never close to hurting anyone else, so I'm not going to worry about it. I was practicing something new. My inappropriate rotary techniques left me with sore thighs and at one point I did something really stupid to leave my knee hurting, but I enjoyed myself.

(Photo looking up at my skis after a fall.)

Ironically enough, I was feeling pretty good for several dozen turns before I went sprawling down the hill and was in the position to take this photo, which I call 'Ooops'. I think my mind had started concerning itself with getting over the the lodge rather than with dealing with the snow I was on. As the next picture shows, though, I was fine. And happy. Because while I may suck at skiing, that doesn't stop me from loving it.

(Photo of me smiling and being okay.)

Shadow-bow

2010-03-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

When one of my beta readers woke up the other morning, she went into her kitchen and discovered a rainbow shining on her printout of SHADOW.
Drew is no fan of rainbows and sunlight is Very Bad for me, but I think this could be a good omen anyway. At least, that's how I'm going to interpret it. =)

Still Thinking About Ice

2010-03-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

After he read my last post, my beloved made two comments. (Out loud, obviously he didn't use the form or you could see them there. =)

His first comment was that the hosts weren't saying, "Hat." The plastic thingy wedged into the ice is a hack. But I didn't feel like stopping the entire class to ask about that, so at the time I was writing about I was stuck on, "Hat doesn't seem right, but both of them said it several times..."

His other comment was that curling teams aren't called teams, but rinks. However, curlers know what you mean when you refer to a curling team and non-curlers would assume a curling rink was the building. Which it can also be. Although most people call the building a club. And the ice itself can be called a rink, although it's usually called a sheet. Confused? Check out Wikipedia's curling glossary.

However, if you haven't seen Stephen Colbert's pre-Olympic meet with the US men's curling team, watch that first. It's funnier. =)

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Skate Expectations - Curling Team Tryouts - Colbert vs. Shuster

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Skate Expectations

note: If that really was Mr. Colbert's first throw, I'm impressed. He looked a lot better than I did! Not as good as my beloved, but my beloved gets paid to teach people skiing so his balance skills are super-human.

Also note: I love the Curling To The Limit song! *g*

Also also note: If you like sports comedies and want to learn more about curling, you should track down a copy of Men With Brooms. Yep, there's a curling movie. And it's a pretty decent one too.

Playing on Ice

2010-03-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

Sounds echoed off the rafters and I tried to block them well enough to remember what I was supposed to be doing. I looked down at my feet. One was resting on a slider, the other was braced against a piece of plastic wedged into the ice. I thought the hosts had called it a hat, but I wasn't certain.

I drew my weight up some. I wanted my center of balance over my foot and had to ignore the temptation to move it forward, over the curling stone. My right hand gripped the stone's handle, my left wrapped around the balancer, a construct of plastic piping that I was told was far more forgiving and easier to use the than brooms Olympic curlers tend to rely on.

Right... Was there something else I was supposed to be doing? I looked down the ice to where my husband was playing the role of skip. He held a hand out. Oh, yeah. I was supposed to turn the stone so I could give it a spin just before I released it, making it curl.

The ice tried to hold the rock still as I wiggled it from side to side. It broke free with a little pop of suction, suddenly able to move freely. I got the handle right. I looked at my feet again. I looked up at the host, who nodded. I loosened the rock again, because it had already started to re-stick to the ice.

I pushed forward, wiggling and wobbling as I slid on the ice. When the hosts did this, they glided like the people on TV. I was a long way from gliding. Still, I could have been worse, several members of my group splattered onto the ice the first time they tried this. Truth be known, I was a little proud of myself simply for not falling.

I released the rock just before I started slowing down, remembering to turn it but sending it way too far to the right.

My son was waiting to be one of my sweepers, but he wasn't expecting the rock to be as far to the side as it was. It clipped his foot. Which meant several things... 1.) The rock was burned and would be removed from play. 2.) The rock was slowed enough not to make it into play anyway. And 3.) My son may never forgive me for hitting him with a curling rock.

(Eric with a kiddie curling rock.)

So, yeah... I went curling this weekend! (Yes, really and truly!) It was a lot of fun and although I wasn't very good at it, I also didn't seriously hurt anyone or get hurt myself. In addition to the people who went splat trying to the throw the rock, we also had a girl slam face first onto the ice while sweeping. One second, she was scooting along with her broom, the next the impact was sounding through the entire building. Luckily, she seemed more embarrassed than hurt. Still, it helped me understand when the kids' curling teams took the ice and were all wearing helmets.

I was pretty sure before I went that curling is a lot harder than it looks. I was right. It's a little like bowling while standing on one ice skate and leaning forward to touch your toe with your non-throwing hand as someone pushes you.

I'm very glad I went and my family is seriously considering joining the club. (Seattle people: that's the Granite Curling Club in north Seattle. They have another open house next Sunday. =) I learned a lot and get to mark it all down as work because I was honest when I told Twitter I was going to write a curling book. Yes, even though this is crazy. It's not about curling, it's about a curling team, so maybe that makes it less crazy. And it's a lot like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, just with curlers rather than sisters. I'm excited about it, even though I'm very confused by the fact that no one in it is dead, undead, Fae, or able to change shape. The entire cast being human is just strange...

Into the Misty Dark

2010-02-22T16:40:00.000-08:00

The chair rushed up behind us, faster by far than the ones on the lift we came off of. My son faltered, thrown off by the speed. The attendant pressed the stop button. The men behind us groaned.

We sat on the chair, which stayed put well past the point I was embarrassed and the kid was bored. Slowly, it started up again.

My son tapped his ski poles against his legs, nervous or impatient, I couldn't tell which.

We climbed through the loose fog we were already used to from the last run. Up over the race course the skiers behind us were anxious to get back to. Up past the top of the lift I would have rather taken had it been running that night. Up into thicker fog.

The fog kept getting more dense. I could see the chair in front of us, but not past it.

"This is taking forever," my son said.

"Lift rides always seem too long in the fog. It's the lack of visibility.” But inside I was thinking he was right, that we had been on the lift too long. And the lift was so much faster than I'd expected... What if it was the wrong one? What if I was confusing it with a lift at one of the other ski areas and I'd just put us on something going too far up the mountain, something leading to runs we couldn't handle?

“It's spooky.”

I smiled and tried not to look worried. “Yeah, it is.”

It was getting spookier too. The higher we went, the less well-lit everything was. I had no idea where we were going. The slope under us could be anywhere, all I could see of it was a tiny sliver. It was steep, too steep. But wide. Maybe. It was supposed to be. We should be able to cut across rather than go straight down, giving us a harder run than the one we were bored with while still being well in Eric's comfort zone. If this was the right slope.

“Are you sure we're on the right lift?” Eric asked.

“Yes,” I lied. Not well from the look he gave me.

“Mom, is this the wrong lift?”

“I'm not sure.” I put an arm around his shoulders and pointed at the ground. “But see the way the slope goes across? There's nothing between here and the last slope we were on, so we can cut back no problem.”

“Okay...”

The fog grew heavier. I could barely make out the chair in front of me. Then we past the last light. I touched my jacket, feeling the bump from the headlamp I'd taken from the car just in case. Still there. Good.

Finally, the end came into view and my son gave a cheerful, “Tips up!”

When we unloaded, there was a map board barely visible through the fog and dark. But when we skied up it it, we found the map itself was completely unreadable. Damn. I could read the signs pointed to different slopes, but none of the names meant anything to me. Double damn.

The racers swept past behind us. I watched where they went, knowing I didn't want to go that way. Far to the right of them was a welcome sign.

“Easiest way down,” I read, pointing out the sign to my son. If we were where supposed to be, the easiest way down was a very easy intermediate slope, more of an advanced beginner slope. If we weren't where we were supposed to be, and I honestly couldn't tell... Well, it couldn't be harder than the race course and we'd both done harder slopes than that, just not while people were racing and we couldn't see anything. “All we have to do is follow the signs until we can cut back to where we were.”

Ninety percent of the lift traffic went to the race course, so we were able to hobble down the easy way without worrying about other skiers at all. We skied into the light and I saw trees that I was almost sure were ones I knew. Almost. It really was hard to tell since I'd never been there in either fog or darkness before.

The fog got heavier, but we didn't panic. It was part of our adventure.

Andy's Ideal Agent Wish List

2010-02-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

I have been putting a lot of energy into performing yet another round of edits on Shadow. Nothing showy this time, mostly line level tweeks. Where should this phrase go? Is this word needed? Is it clear who's speaking? That kind of thing. That's not all I've been doing as I gear up to start pitching it to strangers though. I've also been putting effort into figuring out who I want to approach.

There's a saying that having no agent is better than having the wrong agent. It's hard to accept as a member of the unagented masses and I'm not totally sure it isn't just something people say to make other people feel better, but I am absolutely sure the right agent is hands down better than the wrong one. And by wrong one I don't mean a scammer or an incompetent, I mean a respectable agent who simply doesn't mesh with me. There's more to being a good fit than trying to sell my books and not ignoring me.

So, what am I looking for? Beyond obvious things like the agent representing my genre and liking my stories, what would make someone mesh with me? My ideal agent personality list, in no particular order...

Ideal Agent is not insulted by this post. He/she is more likely to respond with an Ideal Author list than to be miffed by me. Ideal Agent isn't offended easily or often.
Ideal Agent doesn't take him- or herself too seriously. Or me, I certainly don't take me too seriously.
Ideal Agent has a strong sense of humor. Preferably a wonky one. Preferably one compatible with mine.
Ideal Agent is loyal and wants to work with me for a very long time. Because I don't plan to stop writing. Ever.
Ideal Agent gives me straight answers to questions, even if I won't like them. Ideal Agent isn't mean about it though.
Ditto on career advice.
Ideal Agent gives good answers and advice because Ideal Agent is freakishly smart.
Ideal Agent knows when to tell me, “Stop whining and work,” and when to tell me, “Stop whining and ski.” And recognizes the skiing is a part of work because it makes my brain function.
Ideal Agent sends emails if there's something important I need to know, even if we talked about it on the phone for three hours, because Ideal Agent accepts my learning style.
Ideal Agent accepts my obsessions, even the ones based on sports they don't understand or TV shows they've never seen or weather patterns they dislike.
Ideal Agent is liked by my kid and likes my kid back. (Or at least pretends to.)
Ideal Agent likes animals and will go to the zoo with me should we be in the same city at the same time. And welcomes my kid to come along.
Ideal Agent loves me even though I'm quirky. Ideal Agent is likely quirky too.
Ideal Agent is someone I would want to know even if I weren't a writer.

Anything else I should add to my wish-list? =)

New Blog

2010-02-11T13:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is officially my new blog site!

I've moved everything that used to be on the old one over and put tags on all the old posts. Yay for tags! I always wanted those! (Old software had trouble telling the difference between me and my beloved and piled all the tags together, so if I had figured out how to get a list there half the tags on it would have been about how much Linux rulz. =)

I've set up new content on my website proper too. It's a work in progress. Jimmy took some awesome photos for it, but they haven't been edited yet. And the writing's a little choppy. But, I think it's a step in the right direction. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

Things I've Learned This Year

2010-01-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

The other evening my beloved was talking to a friend he hadn't seen in fifteen years, doing the “This is how my life has been...” thing. During it, he mentioned to her that I was a writer, have been writing seriously for the last few years, and have been working on getting a book sold for the last year. And I thought, “What? Really? For a whole year?”

I didn't argue with him because I almost instantly decided he was right, but my first instinct was to contradict him. It's not like I've been phoning up editors trying to get them to buy my book for the last year. I haven't even been phoning agents. Or anyone else, I don't like phones. Not their voice-chat apps anyway... Um... Sorry, ADD. As I was saying, I haven't been waking up every morning and pestering people to buy my book. Last summer, I sent out a few agent queries, yes. Then I stopped bothering people so I could do more revision. If Shadow were a house, you could say I had a few agents glance over it but none of them thought they could sell it as is so I decided to do some renovating before talking to anyone else. If I were telling someone about it I wouldn't say, “I've been trying to sell my house for the last year,” but something like, “I've been trying to get the house ready to sell.” I haven't been actively knocking on doors trying to sell my novel for a year, but I have been working on selling it because I've been working on making it salable.

I've learned a lot over the last year about the publishing industry and about how a book goes from sitting on a laptop to being in store. The technicals I was mostly aware of, but there are a lot of details that I never though about much before.

Some of what I've learned has been things people outside the industry have no way of learning without being told. For example, did you know books opening with people waking up will almost undoubtedly be tossed after the first sentence? I didn't. How could that be clichéd when I can't think of any books that start that way? Some movies and a few TV shows, yeah, but books... Oh, wait... Arthur Dent started The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy waking up, didn't he? Hang-over, bulldozers, aliens... Yeah, alright, there's a book that started that way. And I've likely read others, but not many, at least not compared to the number of books I've read that start out with a woman dressed as a slut in order to get some bad guy to drool over her long enough for her to stab him in the back. As far as I can tell as a reader, chicks who consider tight leather and miniskirts to be assault weapons would be much more clichéd than people whose stories start in the morning. But then I started looked at agent blogs and they assure me it's way overdone. How overdone? Well, last week I saw an agent tweet that she'd gone through 25 queries that morning and 23 of the samples featured someone waking up. It seemed like she was commenting on that being a lot rather than trying to say it was standard, but she didn't sound shocked. Things can clearly be clichéd in slush submissions without being clichéd in published works.

I've learned that agents want authors to have domain names before querying. I learned that after querying, of course... In all honesty, I'd assumed that it was presumptuous and as annoying as people querying for fiction with marketing plans. Apparently I was wrong. Industry types also don't seem to consider it an attempt at buying attention, which was my other fear. And they like blogs and use of social media too, if you're curious.

I've learned to Tweet. And, yes, that's part of the quest for publication. No, not just because of what I said a second ago about agents liking to see authors use social media. On one level, I follow a long list of agents, editors, and published authors who all give me valuable insight into the industry. But more importantly to me, I've found a collection of fellow writers who function as an awesome support network. They encourage me when I'm having trouble bothering with opening my word processing window. They commiserate when things go wrong. They cheer when things go right. I wasn't on Twitter when I queried before, but when I'm ready for it again my Twitter friends will be there to cheer me up when the head shakes come in and will be there to shriek with me when I finally make it to a nod. The impact of not feeling alone should never be underestimated.

I've learned to use the word “that” less. Like hundreds, maybe thousands, of times per manuscript less. I've learned to use fewer dialog tags and to simplify them. I've learned there are alternatives to adverbs. I've learned I use too many commas. I've learned my characters blink too often. And sigh too much... Yes, they're teens and that means a lot of sighing is natural, but it also means readers will be able to assume a lot of them without the words being there. I've learned a lot about saying too much and some about saying too little.

I've learned the Open Office word count feature is useless for novels because it counts quote marks as words. It might not be too far off for a novel with little dialog, but it shifts my word count by over ten thousand words.

I've learned I need to enjoy rough drafts. I've learned it's possible to enjoy revising, but that I don't have to. I'm learning when I can be forced to work and when I can't.

I've learned that I'm not going to give up on this writing professionally idea because it's hard and painful and frustrating, that I'm strong enough to keep at it even when it feels like it's killing me.

And I've learned that I'm not going to stop learning anytime soon.

Play Ball!

2010-01-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

I'm watching the Vikings trounce the Cowboys, which puts me in a good mood even though my own beloved Ravens fell to Indy yesterday. After the first touchdown, my husband was making fun of Favre's reaction, saying he looked way too happy. And he had a point, Favre was stoked enough you'd think they just won the game not merely been the first team to score. But I liked it. Favre's enthusiasm has always been my favorite thing about him. Even with the saga of his re-retirements, I've never doubted that he loves the game. We wouldn't have witnessed that saga if he didn't.

As I watched him after the most recent touchdown, I realized the game was actually demonstrating what I was blogging about yesterday. Brett Favre knows how to play.

Now, in football, the verb “play” is used no matter what you do, but Favre is a master of having fun. And I think that's why he's so good at the rest of it.

In contrast, look at Romo. Tony Romo's not a bad quaterback, and I hate the Cowboys so you know I mean it when I say that. I'm betting he likes his job too. I'm sure he cares about what he's doing and I've certainly seen him get emotional about it, like that time he sat down on the field and cried after loosing an important game by making too many mistakes. But while I've seen him demonstrate misery incarnate on several occassions, I don't think I've ever seen him cloaked in the “Holy Shit, this is FUN!” arura Favre wears so often. Sure, I've seen him happy, but not in the same way. And I think it's because when Romo's on the field, he's at work.

Obviously, I know neither of these men. I could be way off. But that's sure what it looks like to me. And even if Romo weren't a Cowboy, I'd much rather be Favre.

Uncharted Waters

2010-01-16T15:26:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, I stated in my Livejournal that I thought I had a need for more direction in my writing. I realized that while I had put writing on my schedule, I sat down to write without knowing what I was working on. I had a list of things that I needed to do, but if I was going to force myself to do any of them I thought I needed more direction.

Then I started reading CHAPTER AFTER CHAPTER by Heather Sellers and the very first exercise is to simply sit down and write something. So I did, even though none of the stories rattling in my head were anything more than vague ideas and even though I was very aware of having a lot of editing to trudge through.

Two hours later, I had three thousand words of a new story. I've added to it the last two days and am loving the freedom of writing without an outline again.

When I first started writing, I never used outlines. Then I realized the results were rambling and long and unpublishable without a lot of rewriting. I started outlining. It worked, so I kept at it. And I got more and more detailed. My first outlines were a few pages long. My most recent one took up a whole notebook with scene by scene breakdowns. And my most recent rough draft, IMAGINE, based on that detailed outline, was a uninspired lump of drivel. Sure every scene had a reason to be there, sure every line was feeding the plot. But the story itself was DOA.

Now this could be coincidence. Not every idea works out well, so maybe the problem wasn't that I killed my joy of writing by sticking too close to a blueprint. But in the past, even when a book didn't work I at least had fun writing it. I do believe that shows through in the words, but even if it doesn't I'd obviously rather enjoy myself than not.

I'm enjoying the new story. And I do have an idea of where it's going, I just haven't written any of it down and haven't put much thought into how to achieve it. This week has felt a lot like when I first did NaNo and re-learned to move past editing while I worked in order to just write. (It was something I knew in school, then trained myself out of trying to become a 'serious writer'.)

The best part about my new project is that since I started it I'm able to look at the more developed WIP's again. Monday was productive, but that died the next day. Tuesday I did nothing and Wednesday morning I couldn't stand the thought of fixing my physics problems in SHADOW and I had no idea what to do about the revising of WERESTORY after I hit the part in the work that needed real revising rather than mere edits. I got past everything I remembered needed to address in SHADOW yesterday and will be continuing to pass through it this weekend. And I now have faith that I can move past my block in WERESTORY. Although I'm not quite up to opening the file and mucking with it yet, I'm in a much better headspace to deal with it.

A friend over on Livejournal suggested the solution to my problems might be taking a planned week off writing. (In contrast to the unplanned six weeks eaten up by holidays and illness.) Obviously, I didn't follow that suggestion, though I may have had I read it before starting the new story. I think I followed the spirit of it though. No, I didn't stop writing, but I gave myself permission not to work. And that may be the true failing of IMAGINE, that it was work. For me, the work part of writing needs to come with the revisions. The stuff before that needs to be freer, more alive, and certainly more enjoyable. Before the work stage is the play stage. Don't confuse playing with something untaxing though, it can be hard to play. It takes energy and focus and dedication. But it's still more fun than work.

Oh! And people have asked, what is the new story about? Dragons. No, not the dragons from before. This story takes place in the old story's universe, but takes place earlier and follows different MCs. And, yes, I did see tweets about agents saying they were suddenly getting a lot of dragon books. I decided to ignore that. And that feels good too...

Chill, Girl!

2010-01-11T15:24:00.000-08:00

I've been productive today.

I rewrote a part Shadow's ending that was bugging the heck out of me without me realizing it before the weekend. I rewrote all three lengths of my synopsis enough to reflect that. And I rewrote my query based on feedback from Jodi Meadows, who used to screen slush for a boutique agency and thus really knows what she's on about.

No, I'm not sending the query out yet. For one thing, word is there's a query-flood on right now. But more importantly, there are a few other things I want to tweak in my story. And I need to work on my plan of who to send the shiny new query for the improved less-lame version of my story out to. And I need to keep an eye on myself and make sure I don't screw up my basic query trying to personalize it.

There are people out there who think it's acceptable to write “Dear Agent” and cc the query to as many addresses as they can find. These people are wrong. However, I tend to go overboard in the other direction. I don't just write a name, I also write why I'm writing to this person specifically. I praise blogs and Twitter feeds and the books on the agent's list. I think it comes across as just too much. I fear I sound fake. That really bothers me because it isn't fake. If I gush at you, I mean it. But there's no way for a stranger to know that, no reason for them not to simply lable me a suck up.

So, world, here's another little detail about me... If I sound merely polite, feel free to suspect my words. They're probably still sincere, but they're schooled and overthought. If I sound like a crazed tween in awe of the Jonahs Brothers... Well, I'd never try to sound that stupid on purpose, so what you're seeing is the uncensored me. Feel free to think I'm annoying, just don't think I'm dishonest.

Get On With It!

2009-12-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

A lot of people are talking about beginnings this week, for obvious reasons. A new year is upon us, what new things shall it bring? I don't know, but I've been thinking about beginnings myself. The beginnings of novels.

I just read Jaclyn Dolamore's novel Magic Under Glass and didn't need the jacket blurb to point out similarities between it and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It wasn't merely that we have a poised, erudite young woman in somewhat unfortunate circumstances being hired by a well-to-do widower whose house may or may not be haunted and whose wife may or may not be dead, the novels have a lot of the same atmosphere, which I described in a tweet as “rather creepy in a beautiful way.”

There are obvious differences, of course. Unlike Jane, Nimera's an exotic foreigner. She's not a governess, she's a singer. She isn't hired for the benefit of a ward, but to sing accompaniment to a piano-playing automaton. Her employer's a sorcerer. And there's a bunch of stuff about fairies.

All that's set-up. From that point, the stories diverge almost completely. This isn't a steampunk fantasy retelling, just something with a few familiar elements. You may be thinking to point out that Jane Eyre didn't actually start with Jane finding employment, so allow me to admit, in a somewhat ashamed whisper, that I always thought it should have.

In Magic Under Glass, we start off with a girl performing in a show that's clearly beneath her, but she isn't bitter about it so much as sad. She has a backstory, yes, but we don't need to know it on page one to understand she's fallen from a height and is the sort of person most of us feel bad to see this happen to. We know her life hasn't been easy, we know she longs for more but is afraid to put that in words from certainty it's never going to happen. We learn how she came to be on that stage latter.

I suspect that if Ms. Bronte had written the story, we would have started out in Nimera's homeland. We would have seen her as a happy child, would have seen what happened to make her leave, would have seen the passage to the country she's in now, would have had two hundred pages or so of how bad things are in this new city. Nim wouldn't have stepped foot onto the stage until around page three hundred.

I'm possibly exaggerating. It's been a long time since I forced my way through Jane Eyre and the main thing that stuck with me about the novel was all that trudging through what happened before Jane even met Rochester, the whole while I was going, “Uh... Isn't this supposed to be a romance? Doesn't that require, oh I don't know, someone to have a romance with? Is this ever going to get to the point?” It's always been my feeling Charlotte Bronte was good enough that she could have skipped all the whining about how terrible Jane's life was yet still make us feel for her because we don't have to witness all the bad stuff to care about it. In fact, I would even hazard that we may care more when we don't see it, particularly if seeing it seems somewhat pointless.

Clearly, Charlotte Bronte had something going to create a work that's still being read a century and a half after she wrote it. However, while the opening drudgery of Jane Eyre made a strong social statement, it doesn't work at all for most modern readers, who are likely to tune out before ever caring about Jane and very likely before even meeting Rochester. (It took me several attempts to get that far.) Maybe we're impatient because we watch too much TV, as people often allege, or maybe it's just that we have so many options. I can't read every book that comes out this year, I can't even read every book that comes out in a genre I enjoy. You need to grab me from the start so I know what the point is in taking the time to read this novel. Life's too short to read boring books.

So, this New Year's I'm thinking about where novels should begin and how that isn't necessarily at the start of the main character's story. It's a very tricky business, knowing not just how to start, but when. And it's not just about knowing the story, it's also about knowing the audience. Jane Eyre worked when it was released, worked for people who would have found the opening of Magic Under Glass abrupt, or possibly confusing or vague. It still works for a few, but most of us are left sighing and urging, “Come on, Charlotte, get on with it!”

The Door is Shut

2009-12-14T15:19:00.000-08:00

There was a post last week on Edit Torrent about sentence fragments,here. Alicia, one of the editors who blogs over there, isn't a big fan of fragments. Since I'm guilty of using a fair number of them, and feel it's part of my conversational first-person style, I paid attention to what she was saying in case I was getting something horribly wrong. My conclusion at the end wasn't that I need to go through everything I've ever written and remove all sentence fragments, but the post reinforced my compulsion to do something I was doing anyway – going through and asking if each fragment helps or not. Just saying, "Well, my voice likes fragment," isn't enough.

Below I'm putting some exercises I did based on two sentences Alicia gave. She wrote as an example of a fragment that probably wasn't needed, “He headed for the door. Which was closed.” My first instinct was the I could work with that, so I wrote a few snippets based on it.

I think these blurbs show the difference in my character voices. Some of them use fragments. Some don't. And, yes, that's part of the voice. That's not the only difference between them though. Placed in the same situation, walking to a closed door, each girl has a different reaction. And, yes, one of then was comfortable with Alicia's fragment...

Drew (from Shadow) -

I head to the door. Which is closed. Naturally. Because why would the universe allow the door to be open when it could so easily mess with me just by closing it? Hell, what am I talking about? Universes don't close doors, people close doors. And I bet I know who did it too. Cooper Finnegan.

Poor Finn. He may well have shut the door, but it probably had nothing to do with annoying Drew, who's a ghost and can't open most doors. He was probably trying to keep the ferrets safe or something. Though I could be wrong, couldn't really blame the guy.

Michaela (from Werestory) -

I trot toward the closed door. How am I going to open it without shifting into human form? Too bad it doesn't have a pet flap.

Unlike Drew, Mike notes the door's closed before she's trying to go through it. It's not that Drew couldn't see the door was shut before walking to it, it's just that it wasn't important to her before then. Mike thinks ahead more than Drew does. I think that's part of why I sometimes worry that Mike's a little boring. She isn't really, it's just that she's so much more subdued than Drew is.

Lucia (from Imagine) -

I head over to the door. Which is locked shut. Lovely. Annoyed, I sit down and wait for someone to come open it. It isn't long before the door clicks open, thanks to hastily imagined stick figure holding a key.

Hmm... Yeah. I did say the story had problems.

Althea (from High Sorcery) -

The door's closed. Assuming it's really there. I walk over and lay a hand against the wood. If it's an illusion, it's a good one.

It surprised me she thought the door might be fake. I guess she was thinking there was something weird going on, what with her not remembering how she got into this room in the first place. Al lives in the sorcerer story, which is going to be re-written almost entirely soon. Being whisked to an imaginary room with an illusion of a door in it is the sort of thing that would happen to her.

Joanna (from Succubus)-

The door's shut. Pretty sure it's locked too. I go to the window and try to judge whether it's safe to jump or if I'd wind up splattered on the ground.

Screw the door! I don't need no stinking door! Oddly enough, she doesn't. She can walk through walls. It's just so well ingrained in her that she can't do that lest someone notice that she's considering leaping from a second floor window rather than just walking out of the room.

Maggie (from Faerie Story) -

I head to the door, but the knob doesn't turn when I try to open it. Damn. With a deep breath, I hold my hand out and focus my thoughts on imagining the key in my hand. There's a faint tingle as it appears in my palm. I undo the lock, then send the key back to wherever it was in the hopes no one noticed its brief disappearance.

She probably could have walked through the door too. Or thought herself on the other side of it. But that wouldn't have unlocked the door and she was apparently more concerned with that than with leaving the room she was locked in.

Kyra (from Earth and Fire) -

I head to the door. It's locked, but it doesn't stay that way long. It takes me about a second to convince the metal in the bolt to open itself for me.

Apparently Earth Dragons make good thieves. Go figure.

Terra (from Vampires of Summit County) -

The door's closed and the knob doesn't budge when I try it. Sigh. Probably just as well, I doubt I want to see whoever's on the other side anyway. I drag my phone from my pocket and type a message to Ian, telling him I'm going to be late for gaming tonight, might even miss it altogether.

This message is important. Bad things will likely happen to her character while Ian is NPCing her, but worse things would happen if Terra simply failed to show up. Terra will likely start worrying about herself now, will realize she has GPS on her phone, and will figure out where she is. She may pass that on to Ian as well, although I imagine he'll have already tracked her by then trying to tell if she's gotten herself in trouble or if she's just blowing the game off.

Andy (me) -

I frown at the door as I pull out my phone. Loading Ubertwitter, I type out a tweet. “Am in a strange room with a locked door. No idea how I got here. WTF?"

Anyone else want to play?

Post-NaNo Reflections

2009-12-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

Dear Ms. Brokaw,

Thank you for contacting me in regards to IMAGINE. I see much merit in your project's premise, but unfortunately I did not love the execution of your plot as much as I had hoped.

Please feel free to contact me with future projects should you elect to move on to something else.

Best wishes,

Yourself.

So... Yeah, I hereby officially reject my own novel. But it could be worse. I mean, it's not a complete form letter, I at least pasted my title in along with my name and gave a hint about why I'm passing. And I did tell myself to contact me again with other work, that's promising...

I'm unwilling to say writing Imagine was a complete waste of effort, but I don't love the story enough to continue working with it. Which is somewhat sad as I've been wanting a do a story with a pooka for a very long time. Maybe one day I'll lift Seeley out of this story and drop him into another one. (Yes, yes, voice of Seeley in my head, I'll take Cia too. Sheesh. I'll just rework her circumstances and give you a better storyline.)

This story illustrated a few problems about me and my writing. Or my writing as evidenced by this work, anyway.

1. I don't handle ensembles well. At least, I lack confidence in my ability to handle them. People get lost too easily. I literally had people dropping out of the party at random, then I had to go find them, then I wondered why they were around at all since I obviously didn't really need them. I think I can usually handle books with a lot of people in them, but I can't handle scenes with a lot of people in them. So having a lot of people who decide to go on quest together probably isn't something I should do.

2. My characters tend to be a bit too open too soon with one another. This makes for less tension than there could be.

3. My leads don't seem to have much connection to anyone other than each other. Sure, I'll put in a best friend and an entire family, but they all get forgotten really easily. On one hand, this is slightly true to life when love is new, so it makes sense in a romance and especially in romances involving teens, who are notorious for ignoring their families under regular circumstances. On the other hand, the other people in your life don't vanish just because someone new becomes important to you, no matter how obsessed you are.

4. When magic is involved, I have a tendency to make characters too powerful. It wasn't just that Cia could do too much, it was that she didn't have to work at it. Once she knew she could do something, all she had to do was concentrate on doing it. There's no reason I can't write a book about an all-powerful goddess, but she needs to be up against other freakishly powerful deities. And even then, it's not that much fun.

I'm happy to say I don't think any of these things are true of Shadow. I'm thinking they're not even true of Werestory. My other stories have at least one of these issues in each of them though and they're things that really could be avoided at the outline stage now that I'm more aware of them.

Speaking of outlines, I'm working on re-outling both my sorcery tale and my dragon story. Not sure which I'll seriously start working on again first, but I'm hopeful for both of them.

If Your Heart Jumped Off a Bridge, Would You?

2009-11-28T15:13:00.000-08:00

It's fundamental, writers are told repeatedly, not to try following market trends but to write what's what we're passionate about. Don't write something you don't love just because it's selling better. People will know when you're faking it. Follow your heart...

Yet, we also have to sell what we wrote if we want to go from being a writer to being a published writer.

Agents and editors frequently answer the question, “Would you have rejected Twilight?” Most say they would have, in a heartbeat.

What I ask myself is, “Would you have pitched it?” And the answer is no. Had I written that book, it would be sitting in the back of the hard drive somewhere never to be seen by anyone. I may well have never even bothered with revising it from the rough draft. Because while I could clean up the language, there's no changing the fact that the story is slow, Bella isn't the strongest MC in the world, there are a wide array of logic-holes in which to sink, the vampires _sparkle_, the hero spends most of the book stalking a teenage girl a century younger than he is (creepy! And she's flattered by it? WTF?), and it's at least twice the length it should be. Everyone knows vampires are overdone and impossible to sell. And all this from a writer with zero credentials?

Meyer says when she sent out queries for the first book, she didn't know any of this was wrong. People had to explain to her later exactly how lucky she was to have found an agent, let alone a publisher. Her ignorance may have been the reason she's now a world-famous multi-millionaire author. Well, that combined with managing to create a story that spoke to millions of people. We never would have known she'd done it if she educated herself out of trying to see it published though, if she'd moved on to something with a sane word count, a stronger MC, less sentiment, more plot, and something less overdone than vampires.

So if your heart is set on a slow and wordy vampire romance, maybe you should leap off the bridge with it. Yeah, there's a good chance it will get broken when it smashes against the rocks of reality at the bottom. But maybe it won't. And maybe, either way, it's still the right path.

And, yes, I'm talking to myself here. I have far too many stories being ignored because I lack confidence that I can sell them. It's in danger of happening to Shadow. (Seriously. There was a Twitter conversation a few weeks ago where a few agents were going on about how they were seeing way too many ghosts all of a sudden. They weren't trying to fling my spirit on the ground and dance on it in stilettos, but...)

Thing is... The people saying not to force something that isn't there are right. So I'm sitting here quoting Polonius on repeat... Above all, to thine own self be true. If it were easy, we wouldn't have to be told that though.

PS – I finished my National Novel Writing Month novel today. I'll likely talk more about that later.

A Couple of Insights

2009-11-20T15:12:00.000-08:00

After leaving his wonderful comment about differentiating between vanity and self-publishing, my beloved said something insightful about the whole Harlequin mess. He said it sounded like Harlequin had been taken over by someone with a business background but no understanding of the industry.

Ah! Yes, indeed. To people used to selling just about anything else, Horizons and the paid critique service sound like obvious ways to make money. They wouldn't see anything unethical about making offers people are free to ignore. Not even doing it as a big respected name that aspiring authors are going to trust. As far as they can see, that just makes the idea better! They're completely baffled by the vehement rejection of what they thought was such a brilliant idea everyone should be doing it.

Are they still unethical leeches if they don't understand they're doing anything wrong? That's an old debate – is evil defined by its actions or its intentions? Maybe they aren't horrible people. That doesn't mean they aren't trying to accomplish horrible things.

And I had an insight of my own a little while ago. Someone had asked Twitter what we thought of the Harlequin situation. I tweeted, “Doesn't change my opinion of Harlequin authors or editors but the company management lost my respect. I'm disgusted with them.”

The thing surprising me in my statement was the sudden inclusion of the editors. I don't think I'd really thought of them before having to summarize my feelings so succinctly, beyond not wanting to have to field the phone calls I'm sure they've been inundated with all week. But now I've considered the implications for them, I feel really bad for them. In fact, I'm thinking it might actually suck more to be one of them than to be a Harlequin author. And it's no more their fault than it's the writers', this all came out of management.

And now that I'm sympathizing with new people... What about the parts of management that had no say in any of this? Yikes... No fun. At all.

The Soap Opera Continues...

2009-11-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

Looks like I may have been right about Harlequin assuming the Romance Writers of America wouldn't do anything in response to Horizons. Kristin Nelson posted this lovely announcement. Harlequin is surprised! And somewhat understandably upset that the RWA issued their decree through an announcement to their authors prior to saying anything to Harlequin about it. They've conceded to author concerns far enough to announce a name change. They haven't said what to yet, but assure us it won't have "Harlequin" in it. That still doesn't change any of the other ethical objections, but it's a start. Had they done it from the beginning, this massive drama may have been less flamboyant.

But, wait! There's more! This isn't the first time an authors' organization has expressed dismay with them! The Mystery Writers of America had already contacted them concerning the eHarlequin Manuscript Critique Service. I had to read that last one a few times for it to truly sink in. Harlequin is running a paid critiquing service. Paid critiques are one of very first signs new authors are taught to look for to spot scammers, folks.

The MWA had a cooler reaction than the instant blast from the RWA and gave Harlequin until Decemeber 15th to respond to their concerns before removing the entire company from thier list of approved publishers (and their authors from consideration for Edgar Awards), but of course there are fewer mystery writers published under Harlequin lines than romance writers under them.

I'll try to be quiet about this now, but it's hard... And surely the folks over at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are going to have something to say eventually...

UPDATE: And, yes, SFWA had issued a statement! A very well written and not at all permissive one. The word 'scathing' springs to mind. Read it here.

A Little More On Horizons

2009-11-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

Jackie Kessler posted an excellent guide to the Harlequin Horizons situation here. She points to some details that had escaped me previously, including Harlequin's stated intention to include contact information for Horizons in the rejection letters sent to authors submitting to their traditional lines. Yeah, they're going to send out letters saying, "Your writing isn't worth publishing. But if you want to give us money to print it anyway, here's the address." And at that address, they'll assure you that if you print this way you might get noticed by their editors and claim that having a bound copy of your novel can help you get an agent. Which is blatantly false unless a heck of a lot of agents have been lying to the whole world.

Jackie also gets into whether or not Horizons is really a self-publishing set-up or not. Her conclusion, with which I am inclined to agree, is that it's not. It's a vanity press. What's the difference? In self-publishing, the author pays all costs and pockets the profits. In a vanity press, the press is making a large amount of money off of the author. Sort of like when Wal-Mart takes your money to make a photo book for you. Would you say you were published because you had a book about your last summer vacation printed for your grandmother? Because I've done that and I'm pretty sure it doesn't count. There's nothing wrong with making Grandma a book. In my experience grandmas like that sort of thing. And there's nothing wrong with Wal-Mart profiting over it. But you'll note that Wal-Mart doesn't have a little icon on their photo center page inviting you to click on it and become a published photojournalist. And I'm pretty sure you aren't given a link there when you submit a photograph to Time and they turn it down.

I'm not sure if the above is as inherently nauseating to people outside of the writing community as it is to those in it, but to me it's pretty revolting. And there are plenty of rants around the blogosphere assuring me I'm not alone in that. This is the main basis of the RWA's objections and why they're willing to punish established authors from Harlequin's traditional lines in order to express their disgust. I suspect it's also why I haven't seen any of those authors bashing the RWA. I haven't seen any of them outright lash out at their publisher yet either, which is a well ingrained no-no to most writers, but I wouldn't want to be a Harlequin editor fielding calls from my authors this week.

My beloved (AKA Jimmy Brokaw) commented on this when it was posted elsewhere. Here's what he said:

I looked at the Harlequin Horizons website, and I didn't think the prices were bad for a self-publisher, but they're awful for a vanity press. I don't agree with your test to differentiate the two (price), so let me explain mine.

A vanity press charges you money to publish your book. The key is they are publishing your book -- you write the book, send them money, and now they sell it and give you a small pittance for each copy they sell. Amazon buys books for something like half the list price -- if the publisher sells copies to the author for anywhere near half price, that's vanity publishing. In fact, many vanity presses give authors a 10% or 15% discount over list price, meaning they charge the author far more than they charge Amazon for the book. The author may retain legal ownership of the copyrights, but he isn't in control of the publishing process.

In self-publishing, the author is the publisher and the company is the printer. Obviously the printer must make money, so the author will still pay per copy, but that cost will be related to printing costs and not related to the list price of the book. The author sets the price on his own.

As a general rule, vanity press is evil. As you state, it works for one-off or very low production runs like a holiday scrapbook. But those products shouldn't come with startup costs running several hundred dollars, either. Vanity presses that charge authors $500-$2000 in initial fees then allow the author to purchase their "own" books for $10-$15 each (paperback) are predatory scum. A self publishing imprint that charges the same set-up fee but then allows the author to purchase copies for $2-$5 each gives a motivated marketing-savvy author a chance to make a decent profit on a book a traditional publisher might pass on.

Which is Harlequin Horizons? Beats me. They list start-up fees but not the cost to actually purchase the books. The statement on their website that they give authors "bulk purchase discounts" makes me think they are a vanity press. They can't give authors a "discount" unless they're setting a price for the books and giving the authors a "discount" off that price. If they were a self-publishing house, they'd have a price list for printing books, and that's what it would cost the author to purchase the books.

Who's Publishing What?

2009-11-18T16:21:00.000-08:00

Wow. Big news out of Harlequin has started a lot of talk amongst the bookish this week.

Harlequin has announced the formation a new imprint. But people aren't cheering they way they did when Harlequin Teen was announced. And why's that? Because Harlequin Horizons is ::gasp:: for self-published books.

Lots of folks are really upset about this. They're talking about how it cheapens Harlequin's name. They're wailing about taking advantage of people by taking money to publish them. They're revoking Harlequin's rights to Romance Writers of America's conference resources...

Yeah, that's right. The company that is romance to a lot of people, the company that publishes over half of the romance novels in America, is being cold shouldered by the RWA. The announcement was clear that Harlequin is not being barred from the annual RWA conference, just that they're not being given free space or... Okay, I haven't made it to an RWA annual conference yet, so I'm not altogether certain how much they're losing here. But I still get the impression the RWA is seriously biting their thumb at the house in retaliation for introducing Horizons.

Personally, I don't quite get it.

Part of the uproar appears to be based on the choice to go with Harlequin Horizons as a name rather than simply Horizons. If it were just Horizons, it wouldn't be that different from other houses who have their fingers in self-publishing endeavors. But the logo doesn't look anything like any of the traditional Harlequin line's and I'm thinking that if you're savvy enough that you look at it and know it's owned by Harlequin, you're savvy enough to realize it's the self-pub line.

I don't see myself holding anything that comes out of Horizons against anyone from other lines. It's not as though I've enjoyed everything Harlequin's ever printed in the first place, that doesn't lessen my love of the Harlequin authors I do enjoy or my respect for anyone involved. I sort of doubt that many people in the general community are even going to notice the line much. It's not like they're going to start seeing Horizons books in the supermarket aisles. They'll be relatively rare. Plus, Harlequin readers are used to looking for just the line they're interested in anyway.

The allegations of scamming are more worrisome to me. Harlequin is a big and respected name, people trust them. That the Horizons site is going on about how people from the parent company will be monitoring sales and may pick up more popular titles for one of the traditional lines makes me nervous. They aren't making any promises, they do have lawyers. Yet there's an implication that paying money to print your novel could result in you becoming the next Barbara Cartland. And maybe that's possible. But it's a long shot from probable, even if you have the skill and allure of one of the greats.

My certainty that there are people out there willing to go broke and break their own hearts thinking this is a way to bypass the usual process of getting into traditional publishing makes me sad. Sure, they do it all the time with other self-pub companies, but having a big name house behind the printing and an assurance that the house is actually paying attention... The ethics seem objectionable even though I'd never deny that Harlequin has a right to make money.

But... Maybe I'm going under a faulty assumption here. Maybe this is just a reflection that the industry's changing. Maybe this is future and the rest of us just need to catch up.

Self-publishing isn't always a bad choice. For a lot of situations, it works. And I've read self-published books I enjoyed immensely. I've also read some that made it painfully obvious where the assumption that self-pubbed books are unedited trash that would never be touched by a traditional house came from. I can see why people aren't stoked about being on an imprint with a similar name to the latter books'. Which goes back to the part where people would have been a lot less annoyed had the name simply been Horizons...

All in all, I feel nervous and uneasy about the imprint. And I shouldn't feel that way. If different choices had been made, I think I could have been very excited about Harlequin offering a POD line. A subsidiary line where marketability was less of an issue but there was still some amount of quality control would have been something I could cheer on. But this... I don't know, maybe I'm uncomfortable because it's been presented to me with a lot of negativity or maybe it's just that they've partnered with Author Solutions rather than someone a bit more respectable. All I know is that if someone who is open to seeing the value in self-published books is feeling this ambivalent, someone somewhere has done something wrong.

ADDITION:

Oh... Looks like the RWA's declaration could bar Harlequin authors from receiving any RWA awards. Yipes! I haven't looked up the stats, but I'm betting a sizeable chunk of RITAs usualy go to Harlequin authors. And, of course, all of their current authors signed up not having any clue this was going to happen.

And I'm torn... I know I'm upset with someone. But am I upset with the RWA for shafting folks because their publisher has a self-pub line, something which I firmly believe has no reflection on the merits of their traditional line authors, or am I upset with Harlequin for putting people in this mess? Or, more aptly I assume, for being arrogant enough to assume this wouldn't happen despite the RWA rules appearing to be pretty clear because OMG! they're Harlequin!

Is anyone taking bets on who's going to come out on top in this mess? What are the odds? And who's favored?

My Favorite Things

2009-11-17T16:19:00.000-08:00

I've been busy the last few days. My local ski area had their opening weekend and I was there! My town had its first snow. All my favorite NFL teams won their most recent games. I've made several soups, from scratch and not cans. And I've made a lot of progress in NaNo. I've just had my second five thousand word day in a row. And, better yet, I've got this thing plotted right up through the end so I actually have some idea where I'm going now.

In light of all that, I didn't have time to write a full post for here. But I did have an idea rattling in my head and I'll put it up here as a Getting to Know Andy offering...

Kindly excuse me for masacuring a well-beloved song. I have no musical talent whatsoever...

My Favorite Things

Hedgehogs and kitties
and mountains and beaches.
Skiing, and football,
and good breweries...
These are a few of favorite things.

Novels and writing
and creative moments.
Playing and laughing.
My boy and his father.

Texting and Twitter
and my RSS feeds.
These are a few of my favorite things.

When the wind blows
When the rain falls
When it's night outside...
Then I'm happy and pleased as can be
for these are a few of my favorite things.

What's My Age Again?

2009-11-12T16:12:00.000-08:00

Last night, Twitter's #yalitchat featured two hours of discussion with S. Jae Jones, aka JJ, a new member of the editorial staff at St. Martin's Press, who was there to introduce a genre she and her boss are calling “New Adult.” In a nutshell, New Adult bridges the gap between Young Adult and adult literature. The first time I saw the word, I squealed and laughed and clapped and was very geekishly thrilled.

Most of us at the chat were very excited about the idea. Some seemed a tad confused. And a few folks came across as fairly antagonistic. One person in particular stood out to me as being against the label, repeating saying that a lot of mainstream adult lit focuses on the age group already so no distinction is needed. I was a little confused as to why he was in #yalitchat to begin with, honestly, as the same argument was made against the emergence of the Young Adult tag once upon a time. It seems to me that the argument of “It's out there, let readers find it themselves” can be extended to preclude any sort of genre distinctions at all. There's some merit in that, but I personally appreciate being able to find books I'm likely to enjoy without having to pick up hordes of things my grandmother would enjoy first. I already spend several hours a week browsing for books, I don't need to make the process harder.

There are two things about the concept of a recognized New Adult label that I really like. The first is that I want to be able to find these things easier. The second is that I want these books to see print more often. Even though I'm past thirty now, I mostly read YA and it isn't just because I write it, it's because in general it appeals to me more. The sense I got from JJ is that her vision is to blend more mature focus with the more accessible and fun voices of YA. She says she's targeting herself and I think our tastes have a lot in common. Except she's into skydiving, which I think is crazy. Then again, people have told me I'm crazy for strapping sticks to my feet and sliding down mountains, so... =)

The fellow who kept saying the age group is covered kept quoting examples of general fiction. And I conceded he may have a point about that. Since I read remarkably little general fiction I don't really know. I do know that in urban fantasy and paranormal romance, the characters tend to be either in high school or past their mid-twenties. In the exceptions, they're people who we are told are younger but who act as if they're at least thirty and somewhat stodgy. There are a lot of ideas and roughs that I've pushed aside due to the fact that the characters are too old for YA and too young and/or immature for adult. I love the notion of having somewhere to classify them.

None of this has any affect on SHADOW or the marketing thereof. SHADOW is Young Adult, not because Drew is still in high school but because of the themes and tone. However, I've been holding off on rewriting my dragons again in part because I wanted to make the leads younger than they were in the original, but not young enough for the story to be YA. And I have a bunch of faerie stories that I wanted to revise into what would be New Adult, but that wasn't an option before so they've just been sitting there. I've actually been toying with the notion of posting those tales as an on-line serial. Which I may still do for a variety of reasons, but this makes me feel I have more choices available.

JJ has much more discussion on the New Adult concept on her blog, www.sjaejones.com, which is worth checking out if the idea intrigues you at all. She's also on Twitter as @sjaejones and doesn't seem like she'd be averse to answering questions if you have any for her.

In the meanwhile, I must be back to my NaNo project... 22k and rising!

National Novel Writing Month and Me

2009-11-09T16:04:00.000-08:00

We're nine days into NaNo. Historically, I'd be well over half done by now. Last year, I hit the fifty thousand mark on this date. This year? My official tally is presently hovering just under 15k. It's a total I usually pass by day three.

On one hand, it's a respectable number of words. I'm right on target to reach the 50k mark at the end of the month.

On the other hand... It's so much less than I'm used to. Something's wrong. The question is, what? It's not the story, I know that much. It's me.

My brain is sluggish, hardly awake. The million thoughts that are usually there aren't. It's quiet. Too quiet.

It could be Depression. I've had recurring experience with the condition. The apathy fits.

It could be an aspect of ADHD. Just my brain being in an inattentive phase rather than the mental hyperactivty I'm used to.

It could be burn out. Exhaustion.

It could be a strange symptom of dehydration. This desert I find myself reluctantly living in is killing my skin, maybe it's murdering my brain as well.

It could be that I'm daunted by the amount of work ahead – sure, a rough draft's fun. But then there's months to years of rewriting. And then the agony of trying to get someone, anyone!, anywhere in the publishing industry to even look at the thing, let alone profess their undying love of it and overwhelming desire to see it in print.

I could simply have lost heart. Maybe the odds are too daunting, the pain too assured.

Maybe it doesn't matter why I've lost my motivation. Maybe I don't need to know that to find it again, to rediscover the joy of making things up. I was hoping NaNo would help me with that. So far, it hasn't yet...

----

My National Novel Writing Month History:

2006 – WERESTORY. YA Paranormal Romance. Girl gets bitten by a Were and winds up at a school for shapeshifters. 50K in 16 days. Draft completely finished at 64k in 20 days. Current Status: Endless revision. Came up with a Big Revision Idea near the end of summer that I'd like to explore later.

2007 – SHADOW. YA Paranormal Romance. Girl dies. Her spirit's tossed back in time by the trauma of her death, but she has no idea when or how she died. 50K in 13 days. Draft complete at 69k in 17 days. Current Status: Revised until summer '09. Sent out a few queries, got some requests for partials which were politely rejected. Revised, then revised again. Now need to summon the energy to bug more people with it in the hopes that the revising fixed whatever the other people didn't like.

2008 – EARTH AND FIRE. Paranormal Romance. My first attempt at non-YA. Shapeshifting Dragons in the Cascades. Reached 50k on Day 9. Reached 80k and realized that my story was too big. Why, exactly, were a relatively low-ranked Guardian and a bartending jewelry designer handling something that the federal government would have been all over the second there was a hint that a Senator was threatened by or involved with the bad guys? Lost several chapters due to computer wonkiness. Started over with a more personal less world-is-at-risk plot. Reached 50k again before the end of the month, but never finished the rewrite completely because my mother-in-law came to visit, it was Yuletide, and then I had to move. Current Status: haunting the back of my mind and influencing my car buying. (My family just picked up the exact same car the hero drives. I attempt to drive it a tad less recklessly than he does. =) I will complete a story about these characters one day. But I don't know when.

2009 – Imagine. YA Paranormal Romance. Girl has imaginary friends who are real. Her wandering throughts start affecting things around her. Bad things start happening, but she's not sure if they're her fault or someone else's. Status: creeping along at 15k.

Breaking Silence

2009-10-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

Yes, I have been a bad blogger... It's the twenty-sixth and this is the first post of the month. Oh, dear...

I have excuses, of course. My parents brought my grandmother out to visit me the first week of the month. Then after three days that were supposed to be restful when orignally planned, but weren't because other people kept scheduling fun things for me to do, I flew to New York.

Yep, I was in New York City for a week. (More rambling about that is available on my livejournal.) No, I didn't sell my book or find representation for it, didn't even try to get a meeting with anyone in the publishing industry. I was visiting my sister, who lives in Brooklyn, and my goals for the week were hanging out with her and letting my son explore. It was a great success. So much so that my son wants to move to New York. ASAP.

I came home a week ago. And slept until Friday. Not continually, but close enough. I was tired. And maybe sick. Toward the end of the week, I started reading and went through several novels. I'll count that as work because if I don't, then I did nothing productive at all.

Obviously, I'm a little behind on the whole writing-thing this month though. It's not just this blog that's been neglected. I haven't posted on LiveJournal. I haven't Tweeted as much as usual. I've fallen behind on Facebook. And I've made very little progress finishing the current edit of SHADOW. (I did the hard part before my folks arrived, but the easy part has been sitting there waiting.)

I'm slowly getting back into my groove. I need to get on my feet, get the house clean, and be ready to start National Novel Writing Month on Sunday. But more on NaNo later... I have editing to finish.

Who is Andrea Brokaw?

2009-09-29T15:52:00.000-07:00

So, I've got this line in my query letter about going to my website to learn more about me. But there's not actually much about me here. This strikes me as a problem.

I was going to ask folks for a list of things I should mention in a biographical post or a FAQ, but then it occurred to me that it would be more fun to put up a "What others say about Andy," post. So... If someone asked you, "Do you know Andy Brokaw? What can you tell me about her?" what would you say?

I'm letting my son (Eric, age seven) go first...

"She's very nice and sweet. I mean, what kind of not-nice person would get her son his favorite candy almost everytime she goes to the grocery store?"

So, there we have it. I'm nice, sweet, and wrapped about my kiddo's little finger. What else should people know?

This was originally posted in a different blog. Here are the comments from there:

Kelly Allen:

Hmmm, how about your fear of the cymbal playing monkey?

(Comment response: Trust family to remind you have thirty-year-old terrors!)

Melody Daggerhart:

Hm, hm, hm … Generous and compassionate enough to offer a gift of hope and a shoulder of support during a situation that could have been tragic, was my first impression. Unique enough to appreciate underappreciated things and be true to yourself. Pensive enough to reflect deeply on a matter to try and understand it; creative enough to expand on it in very entertaining ways. =)

(Comment response: Aw! How sweet!)

Jimmy:
I want to know more about this cymbal playing monkey....

(Comment response: No, dear, you don't. It is an evil and horrible monkey! Evil and horrible in a not-good way.)

Bama:
Ander is a lot like me... only the best parts of me. She has an open mind and an open heart. She's more gentle than I am, and nicer. She's probably nicer than you, too.

Y'know, Ander is the type that has long hair down to her waist. She grows it out because she likes having long hair, scupper the fashion of the week. Never does much with it, because she's low-maintenance, but just *has* it. And enjoys it.

(Knowing my luck, she'll probably send me a recent picture of her, hair cropped into a pixie cut. But personality-wise, the hair is still there, long and loved.)

(Comment response: Well, the hair's neither a in pixie cut nor down to my waist anymore. But it's still just kinda there... =)

Mom:
When asked to describe my daughter, I do not know what to say. She is a brilliant, clever person that can write a heck of a lot better than her mother, who cannot seem to find the adequate words to describe someone as unique and wonderful as Andrea is.

Andrea is a loving daughter, a devoted mother and rumor has it that her husband is quite happy with her. Overall, she is a smart and creative young woman who I am proud to call daughter.

(Comment response: Aw. Love you too, Mom. *g*)

I Don't Want To Read This, So You Can't Either!

2009-09-28T15:49:00.000-07:00

Banned Books Week is in full swing.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal this weekend that was somewhat disturbing. (Finding Censorship Where There Is None.)

The article leads with a statement that censorship isn't much of a problem in the United States because censorship is defined as a government act. Alright, our government isn't stealing books off library shelves. Our government isn't hosting book burnings. Our government isn't going on TV and saying certain books shouldn't be allowed in our communities. It's private groups doing these things.

The article also argued about the use of the word 'ban' with the claim that a book is only banned if it's difficult for the average person to obtain and that since the invention of Amazon this is hard for anti-book groups to accomplish in America. Yes, it is true that as long as it is legal to have anything in print, we do have the option of buying whatever we want and having it mailed to us from more tolerant locations. If we have money. I don't think it's fair to say we shouldn't be worried or upset when literary materials are taken from libraries simply because we can always pay to order the book from somewhere else.

Furthering the issue taken with 'ban' the article points out that much of the discussion during Banned Books Week isn't about books that actually were banned anywhere in the US, but about books that were challenged. I'll grant the truth of this. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried that there are so many people out there who think they have the right to dictate what's available to everyone else.

The article goes on to point out that most of the challenges have taken places in schools and claims, “What inflames the ALA, in other words, are attempts by parents to guide their children's education.” (Oh! Invoke our kids to get an emotional response from us! Classy!) It's the sort of statement that makes me wonder if the writer is deliberately missing the point. Petitioning a school to remove a book from its library doesn't merely impact the children of those complaining, it impacts all children at the school. And where is it going to end? You don't like Harry Potter because you think magic is evil? Okay. What if I wanted to ban the Little House books for being too preachy and Christian? You want to protect your child from the language of Cather in the Rye? Well, I want to shield mine from the sheer nastiness of The Scarlett Letter. Upset over the homosexuality in The Perks of Being a Wallflower? Moby Dick is about pursuing the brutal murder of a whale! Name a book and I'll think of something about it that's objectionable to somebody. If you're really so worried that your child is going to be ruined by reading Philip Pullman, maybe you should consider not allowing your kid to read his works. Personally, I'd be happy to lend my son my copy of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

If you want to read an excellent account from someone who strongly believes that book bans are alive and well, probably because some dimwits in Oklahoma decided to ban her books recently, check out Ellen Hopkins's account of her recent experiences.

I'm celebrating my freedom to read whatever I like by ordering several of Ellen Hopkins's books. What are you doing?

Is This Good Enough?

2009-09-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

My seven-year-old has responsibility to clean two rooms. One is his bedroom, but I never make him bother with it unless someone like my grandmother is coming to visit because I've never in my life had a neat bedroom and frankly think they're overrated. My room is my sanctuary, it should reflect me. And I'm not a neat person. Neither's my son.

The other room he's supposed to clean is the game room, which he uses much more than anyone else. For the most part, he does a decent job, but once a fortnight or so it'll fall apart and he'll have to be nagged to tidy it. Several times during the process, he'll appear before a parent with the question, “Is this good enough?”

His father will state there's no such thing as 'good enough' and the room is either clean or it isn't. And, yeah, we did demonstrate the point that line's crossed, but it isn't like we expect the kid to shampoo the carpets or anything. He's not aiming for immaculate, but for 'clean enough my parents will shut up.' He's absolutely going for good enough and just wants someone to tell him what that is in a way he can understand and remember. Getting the room acceptable once didn't get him to really grasp the goal.

I'm thinking about this now because this morning I started attacking Shadow again, ripping apart the opening chapters and gluing them back together in a way that will hopefully be more demanding of attention. I'm supposed to be done with Shadow. I thought I was. I thought I couldn't do anything else to it, or I wouldn't have been trying to get people to look at it over the summer. But the people I did convince to glance at it didn't love it, leaving me wondering if the problem was them or if my story isn't good enough.

There's controversy over the words 'good enough' in the writing community. Some people are very offended by it, saying we shouldn't be aiming for good enough but for our best. Well, yes... But... When do we know if our current best is good enough for anyone else? There's never going to be a point when I can't look at something I've written and come up with something to change about it. I'm one hundred percent certain of that. And I can point to several books on my shelves that are revisions of books published earlier in their author's careers, which leads me to assume other writers are the same way.

Like my son cleaning the game room, I'm looking for good enough. Good enough to make myself happy. Good enough not to embarrass myself. Good enough to entertain others. Good enough to be published. Those are four different good enoughs. And I have little idea what's good enough by the standards of strangers. I know I can't drag them over to my manuscript, force them to look at it, and demand they give me a straight answer on the issue. So I struggle along, working in my vacuum and wondering if I'm even in the vicinity of where I'm supposed to be.

To Be Or Not To Be

2009-09-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

I have been largely silent over the last few weeks, not just on this blog but elsewhere. It was likely obvious from my posts before the withdrawal that I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic or even content. That's only part of why I've been gone though. The instigating factor behind me crawling under a rock for awhile was the death of my laptop power adapter. I could have continued to post using my beloved's computer or even my phone, but I was already dispirited so it was easy to just curl up instead.

I've been thinking a lot while being curled up in my figurative ball, trying to get a better idea of where I'm going and if that's somewhere I actually want to be.

Back in high school, I had a class in Shakespeare. I was thrilled when I saw it offered at my new school, but the thrill didn't last. I had to drop at the end of the semester because it was obvious to me that if I didn't I was going to completely lose my love of the subject matter. The over-analysis of the materials murdered everything I enjoyed about them. Some people would be pointing fingers at the teacher over this, saying that if she'd focused more on how entertaining and clever Shakespeare is and less on remembering which bit character had a line in Act Three, Scene Four and on writing entire essays on the symbolism of one word in one line, the choosing of which I was certain was determined by the sound of the word more than its meaning, maybe I wouldn't have been so turned off. But I've always thought she did me a favor. Because of her, I knew I didn't want to be a lit major. Not that I couldn't be one, just that if I went that direction I was going to turn into someone I didn't want to be.

To clarify, I'm not saying all lit majors are joyless people with souls deadened by critical snark and pedantic attention to meaningless details that detracts from appreciation of the overall work. I'm just saying I was pretty sure I would end up thus. And I didn't want that to happen. I was born loving stories and I wasn't going to do anything to kill that.

Which is one of the reasons I'm upset with myself lately.

In the last two weeks, I have given up on two books without finishing them. This used to never happen, but lately there've been more books that I either haven't finished or have realized when I did that I should have trusted the instinct thirty pages in to toss the thing in Goodwill's direction.

The book before last I just didn't connect with. It didn't help that I thought the author was trying too hard to be Meg Cabot. Meg Cabot's a goddess, trying to be her if you're anyone else is going to fail. There were a few details that bugged me, but the big problems were the fake-seeming voice and the sad fact that I was bored by the story and the main character. I wasn't happy to give up on it, but I hung in for several extra days trying to make myself like the book and I just couldn't do it.

The one I stopped yesterday bothers me more. In part, I hated the main character. If that was the only problem, I wouldn't be upset with myself. This person was in many ways an anti-me. But since I despised her I had zero tolerance for other problems. Like when the love interest, who was supposed to be an alpha male but who reacted to things like a rather wussy female, started saying things while his lips were pressed together in a tight line. Without there being any mention of him being a ventriloquist. The bitchiness lines like that was bringing forth in me really bothers me. I don't want to be hateful just because someone organizes her sentences in ways I don't approve of. I don't want to feel an urge to throw a book at the wall because the author used some descriptors that seemed to contradict each other. I don't want to be pissy for hours because I came across an egregious run-on sentence. I want to enjoy the story.

I can only hope that when I shift from editing my work to death and return to writing something completely new I'll start being more accepting.

Earlier in the summer I was very worried about slaughtering my love of writing with all the things I've been forcing on myself in the quest to find publication. I'm struggling not to let that happen. I had thought losing the joy of writing could well be the spiritual death of me. Now I'm terrified of murdering my ability to enjoy reading. I really don't know what'll be left of me if that happens.

UPDATE: I wrote this yesterday but couldn't post it due to a forgotten password. Last night, I started a new read, The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. Why did I take so long to buy this book? It's amazing! I love it! And am very happy to be loving it. =)

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

2009-08-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

Today's post is prompted by agent Jennifer Jackson's latest post on livejournal . Someone wrote to her, "If only you would read my book (not just five pages), you would see what a great work it is. After all what do you have to waste but a few hours of your precious time?" But Ms. Jackson read nearly three hundred queries last week. Obviously, she doesn't have a few hours to spare on each of them.

The last few days, I've been gushing over Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games. When amazon first told me I wanted the book, I informed amazon the notion of The Running Man, but with kids, didn't really appeal to me. Furthermore, the reviews sounded somewhat literary and I don't like literary. But then a bunch of folks whose opinions I respect started tweeting about how awesome a book it is, so I gave in and ordered it. The first five pages were okay. At the end of the first chapter, I wasn't thinking, "Gee, everyone on Twitter's insane." But I wasn't in love. I can't say for sure when I fell for the book. I can say that I was up most of the night finishing it.

So, basically, given a query letter and five pages, I would have passed on what turned out to be an incredible book that I absolutely adore.

I could use that to argue publishing types need to learn to read even faster, invent ways to avoid sleep, and hire larger staffs so they can read everything sent to them rather than just glancing at queries, but that would be ridiculous. Instead, I'm going to use it to launch an observation on the effect of burden of proof on reading.

When an industry professional receives a query letter, no matter how fair he tries to be, on some level there's an assumption the book isn't for him. Sure, he'd be thrilled if the book was something he wanted, but the odds simply aren't in favor of it. There are hundreds of other messages in the in-box wanting attention and even if the books represented in each query are outstanding and destined for great success, a single agent or editor can't possibly handle a fraction of them. He wants you to hand him a reason to love this book. He'll give you a chance, he'll work with your letter to try to want your book. But even if you do nothing wrong, the query's getting rejected if you haven't done something very right. Doing anything else simply wouldn't be practical, or fair to the five hundred ninety-nine writers in the queue.

In school, most kids aren't exactly fond of the books required in English class. Hand a book out to a whole room of high schoolers and you'll be treated to a massive groan of teen angst from the assumption the book sucks. Even if it's wrapped so no one can see the cover and nobody knows what book it is. The book might be perfectly enjoyable if encountered in the wild, but in the confines of the classroom it's going to have to be amazingly awesome to possess any hope of winning over anyone other than the future English majors. Even being on a "pick one of the following hundred" list doesn't give it much of a shot.

When a reader buys a book of their own free will, the burden is reversed. Even if we come across a book we've never seen reviews of, we assume it has value or it wouldn't have been printed, particularly if it was printed by a house we're fond of or carried by a store we feel in-tune with. We feel invested in enjoying it because we've paid money for the book, or at least bothered to borrow it. We chose to select the book and want that decision vindicated. So we take it as given that even if it's not immediately obvious, it's a good book, and if we wind up not liking it we feel a need to justify that.

There's a reason the burden of proof is referred to as a burden. It's harder to win a debate when you have it. Books you buy, books your best friend gives you, books the writers of your favorite book blog loved, are all good until proven bad. Required reading is boring until proven entertaining. And a random query is "Sorry, not for me" until proven otherwise.

What's the point, really? When you get down to it?

2009-08-19T14:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Michael Stearns over at Upstart Crow ended a blog entry with, "Do you all feel that without immediate rewards for blogging that it isn’t worthwhile?"

I responded that I'm a writer, I'm used to not having instant rewards.

Yet today has nevertheless found me battling a massive infection of Why-Bother-itis.

Why bother blogging today? It's not like I've made my Mon-Wed-Fri goal the first two weeks. It's not like the comments are fixed. It's not like I'm happy with the way the site looks. It's not like anyone could possibly care anyway.

But, worse than that, why bother writing anything? It goes beyond the common I'm-never-getting-published blues and into a realm where I can't see why there'd be a point even if I were someone so brilliantly wonderful that people would be studying my stories two thousand years from now.

I don't write for external reward. But days like today, I'm not sure what the motive is.

Write What You Grock

2009-08-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, someone introduced my grandmother to the trite writerly advice, “Write what you know.” I don't know who this person was, but I've long yearned to smack him up the side of the head with something really heavy. A rusty iron skillet pops to mind.

My grandmother has wasted countless breaths urging me to adhere to this axiom.

It's not bad advice, in my opinion, but it's value lies in how it's applied. To my grandmother's reckoning, it appears to mean one should write about events one has experienced. I think that misses the point. To me, the true meaning would be better expressed as, “Write what you understand.”

Even in memoir, where one is writing things that happened to oneself, what makes a writing work isn't that the writer experienced things but the writer's observations, conclusions, and voice. An autobiography of someone who hasn't done anything to make themselves known before writing the book isn't going to succeed in captivating the interest of anyone, save maybe the author's grandmother, if there isn't some major hook. The hook can be a simple as humor or insight, but it had better be interesting. Personally, I don't have such a hook.

My grandmother would find fault with the last paragraph, claiming I've done loads of fascinating things, but I'm of the opinion that everyone has. Every single human being on this planet has an interesting story. Yes, even a toothless cashier at a rural Wal-Mart, a kid working the fryer at Burger King in some random suburb, an illerate factory hand, an overworked farmer, and a middle-aged accountant who insists on wearing knee-high socks with sandals at the beach. No matter how dull we may appear on the surface, everyone has something that would make others go, “Oh...” if only they knew. The problem is, even people who have more obvious draw can rarely write about themselves in a way that doesn't make other people roll their eyes, fall asleep, or fling the text as far as they can.

Of course, my granny is perfectly fine with me writing fiction rather than memoir. She just doesn't see why I'd write about ghosts and Weres and faeries rather than about a Navy brat who grows up to be a Navy wife and has done the exact same things with her life as I have. Except maybe not skip college.

The thing is, I believe I do write about what I know. No, I don't know what it's like to be dead or to have another form or to wield the sort of magic you find in fantasy. But I do know what it's like to be an outsider, to have people look through you and try to deny your very presence. I know what it's like to struggle coming to terms with being different. I know what it's like to hide just how different you are. And how to reach through all that to connect to others. That is what I really write about, growing into yourself, accepting yourself, finding people who can accept you, and learning to accept other people even though they're different from you. These are things I'm not always good at doing, but the struggle for them is most deffinately something I know.

My Socks Have Ghosts on Them

2009-08-11T14:26:00.000-07:00

Rachelle Gardner posted today to let us know Two Things That Don't Help a Query.

The first is telling her what kind of socks we're wearing. I think you can tell a lot about a person by their socks, but Ms. Gardner is of the opinion you can't tell a lot about a book by the author's socks and she may well have a point there.

The second item is the one I imagine most agents are sick of people mentioning, which is how long you've been writing. Unless you've been published and/or been handed awards while writing, it doesn't make a statement about the novel, just about you. (And even then, I'm not sold that it means much about the present book.)

Since she doesn't want to see the information in our queries, she asked her readship to post in comments how long we've been spinning tales and I figured I'd repeat myself here.

The first book I remember writing was a picture book I authored somewhere around the age of eight. It was about Penny the Pineapple and her first story featured Penny traveling to Scotland, where I had just moved. So it was sort of autobiographical, except I wasn't really a pineapple. I sent the book back to the States for my grandmother, who claims she still has it somewhere. There were other Penny tales, but I don't know what happened to them.

My first novel-length book was written when I was fifteen. It was a fantasy about a girl sucked from our world into a realm of magic, only to find that's were she was from in the first place and she'd just had amnesia about her old life when she was in Florida. It was supposed to be a short story, but wasn't.

My son has a headstart on me. He dictated his first children's story to me when he was six. It was a fan-fic piece about Sonic the Hedgehog. Prior to that, he also co-authored several tales about the adventures of Llama and Spyro the Dragon. I'll let you know when he pens his first novel.

"Never."

2009-08-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

I skipped blogging on Friday because I was ill. When my body temperature goes over 100F, I start having trouble forming sensible thoughts. But somehow I found myself sitting on Amazon rating books I've read. Just rating them with stars, not trying to say anything about them since my brain was mushy, but I quickly noticed there would have been one recurring comment had I been making them.

Some books I gave fours and I can't say what would have bumped them to fives. One I gave two stars because I was too nice to give it one and nothing could have saved the book for me short of completely rewriting it as something else. But there was a passel of three star “It's okay” books. And in almost every case, the reason the book failed to get a fourth star out of me was... It needed at least one more revision. To flesh it out.

The writers and the non-writers probably differed by their reaction to what I just wrote. The non-writers started thinking of books they thought would have been better with more actions around dialog or if the author had bothered describing anything anywhere in the text or if there were a few more scenes adding depth to the relationships portrayed. The writers winced. Because writers in the modern world are obsessed with cutting their word counts. Google writing tips and you're going to get a ton of suggestions for shortening a story. Read agent blogs and you'll find hordes of complaints about queries for books that are just too long -- a few people mention folks seeking representation for books that are too short, but in general the hate is on length.

Sometimes less is more. I get that. But sometimes it's just less.

Let's go back to that raven, shall we? With the Internet's help, we already rewrote his line "Never," said the raven. There's no adverb to cut, so we don't have to worry about the raven being allowed to say something mysteriously or ominously or mockingly. But why do we need a dialogue tag at all? Let's trim that. And remove the nonsense about the statue he's perched on, it just makes people wonder who the heck Pallas is and causes them to make jokes about busts. When it's the bird's turn to speak from his bust-less seat over the door, all we need is "Never."

I wonder about our fixation with brevity and who we're doing it for. I cannot count the number of times I've been told to aim for sixty thousand words in my YA or how many times I've seen someone write that he or she won't even look at a YA novel that's over eighty or ninety. Yet, what's the most popular teen novel out there right now?

Yes, writers, I'm offending my entire species again by invoking the T-word. Twilight.

Twilight runs one hundred and thirty thousand words. And whether you like the book or not, you can't argue that it isn't popular. Not only can people read something that long, they will. They may even go on to write fan-fic about it because they want more time with the characters.

When Stephenie Meyer started trying to find an agent for Twilight (then named 'Forks' ::shudder::), she says she had no idea her book was twice as long as it was supposed to be. Getting someone to look at a writing sample rather than laughing, saying yet again that authors need to learn what acceptable word counts are in their genres, and happily sending a rejection without ever reading a word of the actual book was a miracle.

Now I'm not trying to say that everyone who has written a longer-than-average novel is Stephenie Meyer. Most of us authors probably can stand to cut a lot of our words. BUT, when I read a book that was published as something I'd classify as an outline but it could have been one of my favorite books had it not been so skimpy, it makes me want to weep.

"Never," said the raven.

2009-08-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

Saturday was in many ways a massive disappointment for me. My family and I went up into the mountains in search of cooler temperatures and found that while it wasn't as unbearably hot as where we live, that was relative. Additionally, the hike that my husband remembered as mostly in shade wasn't. It was filled with sun, which is very bad for me as I have PMLE, a condition that makes me feel very ill when exposed to sunlight. The long sleeves the PMLE compels me to wear weren't fantastic when the temperature hit 90F either. I was somewhat fortunate to make it back to the car without passing out.

But there was one redeeming thing about the weekend. When we walked into the Ranger Station to renew our parking permit, my eyes fell on the most wonderful raven puppet. It was love at first sight and I left with the raven clutched in my arms.

As we drove off, I thought about what to name my new friend. “I think I'll call him Always.”

My husband shrugged. “What's wrong with Quoth?”

“Quoth is a good name.” At least I liked it when Terry Pratchett used it for the raven in his Discworld series. “But I keep being told that saidisms are bad. So Quoth should be Said.”

“Said the Raven?”

“Yeah. Not as dramatic, is it?”

I did decide to go with Said, mostly to remind myself that while it's good to be aware of your writing and to seek out advice on improve it, following with blind fervor is bad. If I applied the net's advice to Poe's most famous line, Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!” would wind up reading ”Never,” said the raven. And that would be a massive pity.

On a related topic of being careful how much weight one gives to external influence, Jessica Faust made a post on Monday titled Be True to You. It was about writing what it's in your heart to write, not what people tell you is hot. As Polonius said, “Above all, to thine own self be true.” Everyone and their cousin is clamoring for steam punk right now. It makes me sigh and wish like anything I had a steam punk story anywhere in my soul, or better yet in my Documents folder. But while I enjoy steam punk, it's just not something I'm drawn to write. Trying to force it would at best result in a lifeless lump of a manuscript and a depressed author.

If you want to write high fantasy, don't force yourself to write something you think has a better chance of selling if it's not a genre you love. And if your ravens go about quothing, “Nevermore,” I say let 'em.

The main problem I personally have with taking the above advice is one of belief in my instincts and myself in general. A week ago, Nathan Bransford asked readers Tell Me: How Do You Deal With the “Am I Crazies?” How do you keep from drowning in uncertainty while pouring so much of yourself into something that may never garner recognition or respect, let alone income? Well... Maybe it's by being stubborn. Or maybe it's by answering the question with a proud, “Why, yes, of course I'm crazy. Who'd want to be sane?”

Why Are You Doing This To Yourself?

2009-08-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently asked why I'm not self-publishing. It was a reasonable question; it doesn't take a genius to see that the process of querying agents is doing horrible things not just to my self-esteem but to my mental and even physical health. And that's just trying to find an agent who wants to work with me. After that comes trying to find an editor who wants to print my book and then a whole passel of new stresses over which I will have very little control. Why not self-publish and skip most of that?

The notion has certainly occurred to me. I could self-publish. Or I could subsidiary publish. My husband's novel, Waiting for War, was printed through a subsidiary press and all parties were pleased. (What's the difference between subsidiary publishing and self-publishing? A subsidiary press is sort of a cross between a small traditional press and a self-publishing one. The author is expected to put up money, but the costs are shared by the press. Since the author is helping to fund the venture, a subsidiary press can afford to be less picky about what they print than a traditional house, although they still have quality control standards. By contrast, a true self-publishing company will print anything they're asked to regardless of content.)

The answer of why I'm trying to go the traditional route isn't as simple as my friend may have suspected.

Over the weekend, I started Donald Maass's The Fire in Fiction. In the introduction, he states that he's seen two types of writers, Status Seekers and Storytellers. I think the fact that this is the first of his books I've read says which group I primarily fall into. My library has a copy of Writing the Break-Out Novel, but I never bothered to check it out because the title really turned me off. I'm not trying to hit the NYT Bestseller List. I just want to tell my story as best I can, and hopefully have other people share it. The sharing part is important to me, but not for status or money. I just happen to think stories should not only be told but heard. If a story sits on a hard-drive and no one reads its words, was it really told?

That could be read as a reason for me to self-publish. It would the the fastest way to toss my book out to the world so that I can stop being so distracted from the other stories I'm trying to tell. But... That would mean my book would be released as is. There would be no professional help to point out lines to cut and objects to add descriptions of. There would be no one to tell me which plot arc needs buffing up. There'd be no one to notice extraneous uses of 'that' or misuse of metaphor. In short, there would be no one whose job it is to help me make the story better. Because it's not perfect, it's merely as good as I can get it without professional help.

This is only part of the answer, though. Just after getting my friend's question, I came across an entry in The Green Apple's blog, entitled Self-Published Authors, in which it was stated, “pushy and self-promoting is the only way to get it done if you want to get your book into a store.” Note that the writer, whose job it is to stock a local bookstore, wasn't trying to attack self-publishers with that. She was simply pointing out that a self-published author is a salesman. Has to be. All authors are to some degree, but the self-published author has no one helping him. One of the reasons I'm finding the query process so heinous is that I'm not a salesperson. If I were a marketer, I'd be trying to get a job in marketing. I'm a writer. I want to write. But like I already said, I also want what I write to be read. Which means someone is going to have to market it and while I recognize the sad fact that even traditionally published authors are expected to do extensive self-promotion, I'd at minimum like for someone who knows what they're talking about to be available to advise me on if I'm doing things in a way that approaches right and to help me figure out what I could be doing better.

All of which is the long version of what I initially wrote back to my friend with. Which was, “I don't want to be alone.”