So 5 Fashion

I'm totally famous... or at least my shoes are. Check me out at Shoewawa, one of my favoritest sites because I lurve pretty shoes. Skye and I discussed these particular shoes not even a few days ago. I believe we were considering the merits of orange shoes and I couldn't resist adding that I have a lovely pair of lime green slides.

In other fashion news, the Forbes contingent of the So 5 parentage contributed to our wardrobes with Pithy-Sayings Sweatshirts. They are So 5. I promise a picture shortly... um, as soon as I can unbury my camera from the post-vacation pile o' crap. Thank you, Forbes contingent of the So 5 parentage! We think you are the... um... 5-iest.

Oh, and guess what! I'm actually, like, writing again. So awesome, I know. Ok, so I've only written a page. But the idea is totally cool and I'm going to write more tonight. My excuse from last night is that I didn't get home until 10:30 because I have a big SUCKER sign tattooed on my forehead and got button-holed into planning, setting up, and cleaning up a reception for 150 people. Fabulous. Also it was my anniversary. However, when I gave Romeo a completely free opportunity to play off the fact that he forgot our anniversary by saying, "Happy anniversary, honey," he replied, "Oh I forgot that was today." Smooth, baby. Smooth.

Pity and Lame-ness

Um, so I've been back for over a week now, and I'm still forcing Skye to post in my stead. I guess that's kind of rude of me. So I'm posting now. Everyone leave a comment on Skye's post though, so she'll know that you are a pity commenter and she won't feel so bad about my vast numbers of minions who hop on over here to comment because I brow-beat them and promise them goodies if they'll only please just comment fortheloveofgod.

I don't have much to say, really. My vacation was grand, spectacular, fantabulous. All that. Plus I didn't fall off the ship. So that was awesome.

Skye asked me on chat today whether I have been writing anything lately, to which question the answer is a resounding and lame-assed "no." I know, I totally suck. Skye said she hasn't written anything either, but she has this little excuse called Law School. I have no excuse besides the fact that I am super lame. So this must stop. I will not be super lame. I refuse.

But what should I write? Any ideas? I could:

a) finish the Western I started, although I've decided that it will have to be full-length as opposed to the 10k or so I had originally envisioned because I'm not selling shorts to eBook people any more unless they can promise me my royalty checks won't suck. Greedy much? Yes, but at least I admit it.

b) start a Regency like I've been saying I'm gonna. I read a lot of Regencies, so in some ways it makes sense for me to write one. In other ways, it makes no sense at all: (1) research gives me hives; (2) most of my story ideas involve contemporary situations. So I'm torn.

c) work on Spooky, the tale of 3 sisters cursed to be the crone, mother, and maiden every full moon. It's kind of kooky and weird and I'm not sure where I'm going with it, but it has potential.

d) procrastinate until November, which is National Novel Writing Month and which I vow to win this year.

e) start something totally new.

So what do you think? Do you even care? Wait, don't answer that last one...

The Death Knell of Oscar Mayer

Yes, I'm afraid it is time to put Lying Eyes six feet under, where it belongs. Ailments contributing to its timely demise:

• A hero named Oswald Mayer (who does not, in fact, have a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A thank you).
• A wishy-washy heroine who faints all the time.
• Gigantic gaping holes in motivation.
• Not enough evil.

So goodbye Oz and Anne. If you never see the light of day, it won't be too soon.

In happier news, I am going to gloat now because I get to read Skye's Battle for Valhalla before the rest of you schmucks get to, and it's awesome, and you're going to love it, but you can't see it yet because it's not published (but will be soon, I'm sure). Nyeh nyeh.

Anyways, back to the drawing board for me. Don't worry, I'm used to it. I've kind of been living on the drawing board lately.

Poor poor Detective Acker

Have you noticed how many opinions people have? Just all on their own? And then, if you combined several people's opinions, you're bound to have much disagreement and variation. I mean, can't we all just get along?

For instance... I end the first chapter of my book with "I knew what I had seen. (paragraph break) Detective Acker was going to die."

Makes sense, right? I mean, that, on its own, implies Detective Acker's demise is imminent.

So, one of my editors tells me "Everyone is going to die. What makes Detective Acker special?" Seeing his point, I change the sentence to read: "Detective Acker was going to die soon."

Then, my most fabulous critiquer, Sonja, gets the chapters and leaves me a note next to that line that says: "I get why you changed it, but it lessens the impact. You should make die or death be the end of the sentence."

So i contemplate changing it back. Before i do, however, i consult with others. These are the suggestions that followed:

"Soon, Detective Acker would die."

"In the Pringles can of Detective Acker's life, only a few chips remained."

"I knew what i had seen: Detective Acker was going to die."

"In the Academy Awards of Detective Acker's life, the orchestra had already begun to swell"

"I knew what i had seen. (paragraph break) The mark. The mark of death."

and other such helpful suggestions. While i appreciate the input, i was just a little bit on mental overload, about this one freaking sentence. I mean, we all know Detective Acker is doomed. Do we really have to focus so much energy on it?

Poor Detective Acker.

Any of you have thoughts on how i should inform my readers of his imminent death? I eventually changed it back to what I'd originally said.

Detective Acker was going to die.

On Chaos and Platitudes

I owe you some winnahs!

From Skye's post about rejection, the winner is Cherie J! Cherie, we love you, please have a book to ease the pain of getting fired on your birthday! How totally harsh! Email me at sonja@sonjafoust.com with your address and the book of your choice from my inventory at BookMooch and I'll send it to you.

From my post about my blue hair (which is still blue and getting bluer, by the way), the winner is Amy S.! Amy, email me at sonja@sonjafoust.com with your address and I will get The Shoe Queen by Anna Davis in the mail for you. Hopefully it will erase all bad memories of the Wal-Mart highlights.

My writing world has been suffering of late, mostly because the rest of my life is (or rather was) in a bit of an upheaval too. But this weekend I managed to clean my house which just makes life seem so much better. I also hopped on the bandwagon and joined FlyLady. I always kind of thought I didn't need platitudes to keep my house clean, but it turns out I sort of do. So, um, thanks FlyLady, even though I'm kind of embarrassed about signing up. But not as embarrassed as I was about my CHAOS: Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. And now I'm FLYing: Finally Loving Yourself... uh... Myself... or something. (Do you see now what I mean about the platitudes? FlyLady is chock full of them, lucky for me.)

So anyway, now that my house is no longer a disaster, I can get down to the business (fun business) of writing! So here are my upcoming goals:

Numba One
Edit Lying Eyes
Submit
Deadline: August 15


Numba Two
Finish Courting the Preacher's Daughter
Figure out where to submit
Submit

Numba Three
Write a Regency (Skye even promised to critique it, even though she doesn't read Regencies.)

You all have my full permission to beat me with a wet noodle on August 15 if I cannot provide you with a touching tale of how I've edited at least the first three chapters of Lying Eyes and sent it off for Cerridwen to hold onto for like 90 days or something ridiculous like that.

So what about you? What are your upcoming goals, writing or otherwise? Are you going to finish that home improvement project? Read War and Peace? Join FlyLady with me? Spill.

Technicalities

So, as Sonja is already well aware, I may be a techno geek, but I'm totally anti-social-networking, which both she and my boyfriend despair of, since I spend quite a bit of time making fun of their MySpace pages. Anyways, I don't actually READ blogs online, per se. Not even the ones I write on, including this one. They are emailed to me, but they don't get here until a day later. Which means that by the time I get this blog in my email, I only have a day left to post. So, all this time, I've gone of the (probably wrong) assumption that I will post 2 days after I read it. Therefore, I usually wind up posting 3 days after Sonja.

Which is what I'm trying to clarify. Is this bad and wrong? Should I be adhering firmly to the 2 day limit we set out way back when? Or am I okay with letting it slide? Thoughts, comments, suggestions?

Anyways, in other news, I'm back in North Carolina, which means I get to see my bestest buddy, at some point. Hopefully. Sonja? Are you out there? It only took me and JB a mere 30 hours to make it across the country. We practically could have driven faster. And we spent a wonderful night at the Dallas airport. So I'm one up on Sonja- to prepare for the RWA National Conference, I stuck it out in Dallas, just to see what the weather was going to be like. Which, i'm not pleased to report, is sucky. But maybe it'll be better by the time we get there.

For other preparations, however, I'm also lacking. Since my eyeball was out of comission, I was unable to stick to my writing schedule and finish my WIP before the conference. Which means I'll be pitching an unfinished book again. Oh well.

I'm also trying to find the motivation to get to working on the book again. I've had 4 or 5 weeks off of it now and I'm struggling to get back. Need inspiration... Any help for those of you out there in readerland?

And one final note to Sonja... Quit yer bitching about being compared to your sister. You're IDENTICAL TWINS!!! And while you and I may not think the two of you actually look that much alike, most of the rest of the universe only sees the similarities. Also, on her wedding day, she probably looked fabulous. So being compared to her is a compliment. Suck it up.

Boredom = Danger

Like Sonja, I often change my hair based on what's happening. But usually, i do it in tune with how bored I am, instead of how many rejections I get (i get so many, i'd be bald in a few days, so it's safer that way).

Boredom, as my parents can tell you, is not good for me. Or those around me. I've been known to pester, poke, prod, plague, provoke and uh... other things to people nearby when i'm bored.

At any rate, I like to think i'm growing out of that, but who knows. Those who know me best are probably more able to tell that.

I know, i know, those of you out there in Blog Land are saying "Well, just write when you're bored." But dang it. Haven't you ever been so bored you can't do anything? Boredom sucks motivation. You could have 14 things to do and still find yourself bored and unable to do anything anyone suggests.

Me: I'm booooooooored.
My mom: Read a book.
Me: No.
My mom: Watch a movie.
Me: No.
My mom: Go for a walk.
Me: No.
My mom: Well, at least stop harrassing your brother.

For example.

Still, i've at least gotten over the habit of changing my hair whenever i get bored. I used to dye it different colors and cut it when serious boredom with my lifestyle came upon me. But i haven't done that in quite some time. Maybe i'm maturing!

Want to know a secret? I haven't been working on my book as much as i should be lately. Know why? I've been bored. Not even the world in my imagination is enough to get me out of a bored funk. Look out world!

I might be taking this research thing too far...

Since I almost got my boyfriend punched because of it. In my current WIP (that's Work In Progress for you non-writers), my heroine often stands only 5'6" tall (the rest of the time, she has her Valkyrie form, which is 6' tall). The hero, usually stands 6'7". So, I needed her to try and punch him, but it started to occur to me that i didn't know how well that height difference would work out.

In my quest to figure this out, I looked at a website that allows you to stand people next to each other... and figured out that 5'6" to 6'7" means that the shorter person's head barely comes to the bottom of the taller person's head. This didn't really help. I mean, that still has nothing to do with the amount of force you could put into a punch, right?

So then I asked my brother, to do me a favor. It seemed simple enough. "Stand on your tiptoes and find someone who's 5'6" to punch you." After all, he is 6'5" and just about close enough, right? Strangely, he wasn't so keen on the idea.

However, later that day, I was at dance (ballroom) and my oh so lucky boyfriend, JB, was there, dancing with his instructor, who just so happens to be a munchkin. She's 5'1". I can say this safely because i know she doesn't read my blog :) Anyway, JB is a very handsome 6'4" and so I asked Alyona if she could punch him. She reaches up and tries, and would just barely make her first reach his chin.

But then, seriously, in her wonderful Ukrainian accent, she says "If I really needed to, I could make it work."

Fabulous. So, JB almost got punched in the chin, but at least i got the research i needed, right? Right?

In case you couldn't tell from this post, I'm tall too (5'10"), so i have no idea what it would be like to be that much shorter than someone and try to punch them. Sonja was also useless to me, being 5'8". Obviously, we're slackers.

So 5 means Special Needs

Writers are a very unique breed of people, I've found. Most of them seem normal on the surface (others not so much, uh, hello, Sonja?), but lurking underneath is a very strange creature waiting to get out.

You know those t-shirts that say "I MAKE STUFF UP"? Well, yeah, that's writers. By definition, writers are liars. Well, the fiction ones. And some others. Hi James Frey! Anyways, that means that you probably shouldn't trust writers.

Now, I'm not saying that writers are all bad. We're SPECIAL (and so 5). It just takes a little bit of practice to get used to us. For instance, a recent conversation I had with my father:

Me: Hi Daddy, have time to talk?
Him: Sure, sweetie. What's up?
Me: So, say you have this monster that was made out of electricity and he's holding somebody up in the air, they aren't getting shocked because they aren't grounded, right?
Him (mostly likely thinking "call the men in the white coats, my daughter has finally lost it this time," but what he says is: well, it depends on the voltage of the monster.

See? That's love. Accept your crazy writer for who they are. Love them, even though they're a little "tetched." Be patient when they call you for bizarre plot problems.

By the way, it's not curable. We're going to stay this way. And probably get worse. Sorry!

Also, Wikipedia is the bomb. Just so you know. I love researching random crap there. Don't worry, I don't take it all for granted- i know a lot of it is random people, thinking they know everything (when they really know nothing), but who cares if it's true when it's so much fun!

Another one of my fun facets of being a writer is my ability to get totally lost in research. I mean, yeah, the writing is the best part, it's what drives me. But I like knowing a lot about what I'm going to be writing about.

For instance: my current project, the Valkyrie thing. I looked up Valkyries on Wikipedia and promptly wandered off through the links into Norse Mythology, from there to Marvel Comics and from there... well, suffice it to say, 4 hours later and I still hadn't written anything. But i know a lot more than I did! If it's true, that is. :)

So another important job for those of you unlucky enough to love a writer is to dig your writer out of the research pit every once in a while and get us back on track. Oh, and you also might want to make sure we've eaten recently.

Best of luck, you special writers and those who love you.

Now it's time for... Name That Tune!

Hello good citizens of our world. It's so 5 to see you again! Today, we have a special game for you!

It'll help exercise those brains of yours and keep you mentally limber. Yes, that's right, it's name that tune. But, because of the low-budget and shoddy operation we run around here, we don't actually have a tune that you can listen to. Instead, we want you to use your minds even more and imagine it.

The Tune:

Picture the scene. A misty battlefield, warriors all around. Silence fills the air, everything hushed with tension and fog. Suddenly, the leader of one of the armies draws his sword out of the sheath. A very distinctive noise fills the air as metal slides against metal.

The Game:

What words would you use to describe the sound of a sword being drawn from a sheath? A couple of people have given me great analogies, which helps, but right now, I'm looking for descriptive words to describe the sound.

The Payoff:

If you supply me with the most wonderous description, Sonja will give you a book! (I haven't actually checked with her on this, but it seems like she'd be okay with me volunteering her to give stuff away...)

At any rate, I'm looking for description to make my new book resonate in my mind... Bring on the genius, people!

Shoot. I knew it was my turn...

But I didn't get around to posting anyways. Oh well. Better late than never. Besides, if I had posted, we all wouldn't have gotten to enjoy Sonja's story. Which was totally worth me not writing anything witty.

Still, my wittiness is now to be called upon. But, well, you're probably out of luck.

While not witty, I have been feeling especially creative these days- I've come up with several new story ideas... and one re-"vamp" ing (as it were) of an older story. Yeah, that's right. Vampires. I know, that's HOTT.

What's interesting is that the other night I had a dream and while i was telling my brother - Brynswick Stew, that is, and JB, it was all kind of hazy, as dreams are. And then, JB, being the genius that he is, said it sounded like a good short story. So then the dream went from being randomly hazy to being a story idea. I've even started thinking of how to write it. Which is great... yet another writing idea that i can continue to not work on.

But what's really surprising is that the dream made vague enough sense that it could be worked into a story. Don't you ever have those dreams where you wake up in the middle of the night and think "Ah ha! The next great American novel!" and maybe, if you're really with it, write down the basics. However, the next morning comes along and in the harsh light of day, if you can read your handwriting, the idea is ridiculous and not even worth attempting to put words down on paper?

Yeah, that happens a lot to me. I'm not sure why your psyche things you're so much more brilliant during the night, but I've had a lot of failed story ideas go that way. So it's especially exciting that this one might actually make it. Maybe I'll take a page out of Sonja's book and make it a short story. I'm feeling inspired enough to write a few thousand words, maybe. Although, i probably won't. You know, I'm just saying.

Oh, and for the sake of my entertainment, everyone please email Sonja and ask her how she's doing on her quest to master the hula hoop. Because it would be funny. :)

Shadows and Sexy Puma Men

I wasn't going to post again until I gave Skye a looong chance to catch up... but if I post today, my posts totally take over the front page of the blog, and I win. Nyeh nyeh, this blog is all me. Heehee.

Updates on the writing front:

Love In Shadow now has a release date. I know, right? As authors, we're taught to wait patiently for months and months for our release date, only to have it pushed back at the last moment until we scream, "Uncle! Uncle, damn publisher! You win! I don't care about my release date!" But apparently in the eBook world, it's different. I got a contract in the middle of February and my release date is March 23. How awesome is that?

[Plug plug: I now expect you all to have 3 eDollars ready to plunk down for my fantastic piece of American literature on March 23. You have been warned.]

Puma Man (which is totally not what I'm calling it, thankyouverymuch Bryn) is a little more than halfway done. I'm considering where to send it, and am still undecided. My publisher keeps begging for dark paranormal, which is the category in which I'd stick Mr. Puma, but I want a pretty cover. (Call me vain, but pretty covers make me happy.) Anyway, be looking for a sexy California cougar shifter coming soon from moi. Added bonus: The setting is my sweet, quaint hometown of Redlands, California. It really has become more of a character than a setting in the story and I love that. It makes my spidey-sense tingle. Added added bonus: Um, sexy cougar guy. Need I say more?

I Was Drinkin' When I Wrote This

... so sue me if I go too fast.

Oh, wait, this is a blog, not Prince karaoke. Sorry.

Anyways, since Skye is, you know, stuck in the hell that is Hawaii, I'll fill in the gaps with what's been going on in my dull-but-writer-like life. Instead of cleaning, organizing, or folding laundry this weekend, I instead wrote the first half of a shape-shifter short story. I know, right? I'm so 5. Who needs a clean kitchen when you've got a shape-shifting puma-man? Seriously.

I also watched a couple of Grey's Anatomy reruns. Seriously.

Since I know you're all dying to see what brilliance I've devised for my shape-shifter story, I'm going to give you an excerpt.

Sike.

Seriously. Did you think I'd actually post the tripe that is a First Draft? Instead, I leave you with this image from Fark.com that is now my desktop background. Enjoy:

Sonja is so right...

I admit it. My plan is in fact to be published with my monster of a book and gloat about it endlessly. Failing that, I'll just cry myself to sleep every night. But such is life.

Actually, to be honest, Sonja's fabulous success has inspired me to begin working on my book again... so i've dredged up the many edits that Sonja gave me for Misdirection that i totally ignored and am currently wasting work paper to print out my novel and begin editing (again). No, really this time. :)

At any rate, this is Skye, popping in to say howdy, before I leave again. I'm back from one trip, but am leaving for another. Ah, the life of an unemployed writer is just so tough. But on this trip I will be taking along my edits and will theoretically be working on them. Just you wait, I'll be published yet. But while I will gloat about being published, I will still give all credit to Sonja for being published first. And even though she's too good to talk to me nowadays that she's published, I still love her. :)

News!

In Skye's absence, I get to run around screaming, "I have news!" Only it's more like, "I have nyoooooooze!" because I'm super duper excited. Head on over to my blog and check it out! Thanks!

To sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub

I realize I have yet again fallen behind in posting. And will probably continue to do some in the next few weeks, since I'm going walkabout on Sunday to go visit law schools. And friends. :)

At any rate, I have nothing to offer Sonja in the way of advice for getting up earlier... I love sleep. Not even cattle prods would convince me to wake up earlier if I didn't think i was ready to get up. My mom (and brynmuffin will corroborate this) used to be SO cheerful that she would sing obnoxiously cheery songs in the morning to wake us up. I once chucked a pillow at her and told her i was practicing for the weekend. This, however, did not work. Alas, as a result, now that I'm no longer forced to wake up for, say, work, I don't. Simple as that :) JB does occasionally drag me out of bed with him (the crazy man only needs a little bit of sleep! how weird is that?)

Anyways, to connect sleep and inspiration, I have 2 stories. One involves an old book and one involves a new one.

The first: While i was writing my first book as my senior thesis in college, I was having troubles coming up with a title for it. I strained my brain trying to think of something and couldn't come up with a title that suited it. So one night I went to sleep after a hard day's work of typing. Ah ha! Suddenly, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most insightful title i could never have thought up awake. I was so excited! It was perfect. The book would sell on the title alone. This was it. Of course, I thought that i should write it down, but couldn't find any paper near my bed and thought to myself "Well, it's so perfect, I'll never forget" Yep, bet you can guess the ending to this story... I woke up the next morning with the memory of having thought of the perfect title.... AND NO MEMORY OF THE TITLE ITSELF. Ugh. It took me several months to come up with another one that I'm quite sure isn't as good as the first: Misdirection. Of course, I'm left to wonder if i ever really came up with the perfect title or i just dreamed that I did. You know how when you dream and you think you've solved something perfectly and you wake up and are like "well, obviously my brain is on crack because that wouldn't work in a million years?" well, it's possible that's what happened. But i prefer to believe in my genius. And then my lameness in forgetting. :)

Oh, and I should add as a p.s. to that story that when I actually thought up Misdirection as a title, I was flying somewhere and had another ah ha moment. And then remembering my mistake of last time, asked the man sitting next to me if i could borrow his pen for a minute to write it down. :) Lesson learned.

The second story involves a dream from just the other night. It's all getting vaguer in my head as time passes, but it spawned an idea for a book that I still remember, so I'm counting that as progress. The dream involved a lot of lawyers, basically, and as the dream progressed in odd ways (which I'm not sharing because it'll take too long) I figured out that all of the lawyers for this law firm i was dreaming about were VAMPIRES. Yeah, basically, i can't figure out if I'm 1) reading too many vampire stories, 2) watching too many back episodes of Boston Legal or 3) am really nervous about becoming a lawyer and having everyone hate me. What do you all think?

My story idea, of course, is way cooler. :) But yes, it includes vampires and lawyers all the same. Lucky me!

Call For Advice From the Blogminions

Bryn definitely needs a blog nickname. But as Skye is his sister and I am... uh... not, I shall abstain from the nominating process. I totally get a vote though.

Do you hear that, thus-far-anonymous blog readers? Comment and ye shall receive fame, adulation, and a nifty blog nickname. It'll be so 5.

So, since I haven't written a single darn word anywhere that matters (well, you know, besides here) since the beginning of January, I decided today that it's time to Get Serious About Writing. I recently Got Serious about that whole running thing when Skye and I goaded each other into going on the couch to 5k program. Now it's time to goad ourselves into writing.

I, for one, am taking the advice of this blogger and getting up earlier. Sigh. I know. I can feel the urge for Metamucil and 60 Minutes growing. Wanting to get up earlier = getting old. But I am forced to admit that, after a day at work, my creative energy has been sapped by trying to imagine that I am not in a windowless basement staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day. (Oops, am I breaking the No Talking About Work rule?) Anyway, I have nothing left to give to adventurous and romantically inclined psychics and frustrated doctors-turned-artists looking for love in the Bahamas after I get home and run on the Treadmill of Pain and Suffering and eat some leftover macaroni & cheese and sneak in a few recorded episodes of Gray's Anatomy. I just can't dooo eeet. So earlier rising it will be.

I need help from our commenters: How would you motivate yourself to get up earlier? I mean, you know, besides the prospect of all that butt-in-chair time producing the Next Great American Novel. Would you promise yourself breakfast? Set the coffee maker to start making at your predetermined wake-up time? Attach alarm clock activated cattleprods to your toes? I really want to know.

Inspiration and Puppy-love

First of all, I am so proud of Skye for actually posting about writing that I might just wet myself. I am even more jazzed about the fact that she has newfound inspiration. It always sucks when your bestest bud is in the doldrums, whether they be writing-related or otherwise. So yay. Happy joy.

I myself have been struggling madly to get out of the doldrums lately too. Inspiration strikes very rarely in the Land of Sonja, and in its absence, I soldier on without it. I know that's what you're supposed to do and everything, but it's not as much fun. Butt In Chair time is great, but it's never as good as oh-my-god-if-I-don't-write-this-down-this-second-I-will-pop inspiration.

But allow me to share my theory on inspiration: Inspiration is a little bit like having a big huge crush on someone. It feels great, makes you all fluttery and gushy, and will carry you for a little while. But, like puppy-love, it fades. And when it fades, something has got to be there to take its place. In the case of a crush, it's either true lurve or a break-up. In the case of inspiration, I guess it's just commitment to the project. Butt In Chair time. So in the end, even though Butt In Chair time isn't as exciting as inspiration, it's the thing that gets the book done.

Tonight, I'm going to attempt to take my own advice, and put my butt in my chair for a while, even though I'm not really feeling my novel right now. And maybe, as with true love, just being with my project for a little while will inspire those old feelings of inspiration and we'll all live happily ever after.

Hang on! I'm actually posting about writing!

Yeah, like the title says, this post is actually going to be about writing. Sonja's dying of shock somewhere, but hey, I like to shake things up every once in a while. Okay, always. :)

I had a story idea. Now, that's not anything unusual, given I consider myself a writer and almost any writer will tell you that they often have ideas and if they're really lucky, they remember them and then can eventually spin them into a story later which they sell for lots of money and, lucky them, Fabio appears on the cover. So it hasn't worked exactly that way in my case, I do have a lot of story ideas. I keep a file for each, usually and add to it when i think of something that relates.

At any rate, I need to preface my post a little bit with how this idea came about. I was lucky enough to get an xbox 360 for my birthday this year. Along with it came a bunch of arcade games. I've been wandering through the arcade games, seeing what there is to see. Tonight, I was playing Bejeweled 2, which is a totally brainless game involving gem swapping to get rows of 3. Or something like that. So I was sitting there playing it, not really focusing, and I started daydreaming. And in to my mind popped a story idea about a girl who plays video games. (Now you'll never ask an author where they get their story ideas from ever again, right?)

And the longer I played, the more fully formed the idea became. I started expanding on the main character... and who her hero was going to be. I started pondering how much research it would take (because, let's be honest, no one's going to read a book about Bejeweled 2, and that's pretty much the only game I know anything about), and other facets that i will eventually need to bring this book to life.

Obviously, the moral of this story is that I need to turn my brain off and let it do it's thing. For the first time in a long time, I was actually inspired to write. Which is a bummer, given I'm in the middle of packing up a 2 bedroom apartment to fit into a 10 x 10 storage space and also, theoretically, working on my work in progress (forever after referred to as my WIP) which is entitled A Girl's Guide to the Afterlife, and is, to my egotistical way of thinking, a really great concept. I mean, who wouldn't want to read about Valkyries? I know I do! Besides, there's so much potential for Fabio to be a manly Viking on the cover.

So, my writing goals (which Sonja has been wanting me to post since the beginning of the year) are now thus:

1) Finish the damn book. A Girl's Guide to the Afterlife really needs to be finished. And I need to make the hero less lame.
2) Send massive amounts of paper to Sonja so that she can take 2 years to edit my book, much like the last one :)
3) Work on new book, an as yet untitled project about competative video gamers

and finally,

4) Play Bejeweled 2 a lot more in the hopes of sparking more writing brainstorms

It's Half Full, Darn It

Happy day, people. Not only has my bestest buddy returned from paradise (despite its lack of internet access), but yesterday I got a request for a full! Yaaaay!

Ok, so if you're in the writing world, you know that a request for a full really doesn't mean that much. It means the editor liked my query enough to go, "hmm, I think I'd like to read that." And then my manuscript sits on her desk for a while until she has time to read it, and then she reads it, and then maybe, just maybe, she says, "Oh my god this is the next great American novel!" and she picks up the phone and dials my number so fast that the keypad smokes, and then she begs, begs, BEGS me to sell her my manuscript. Yeah. Shut up and let me have my fantasy. I'm not going to dwell on the fact that there's a larger chance, even if she actually likes my manuscript, that for some reason it's just "not right" for her. All you "glass is half empty" people can blog about that part.

Anyway, if any of you are curious about it, the manuscript that got requested is a short story of mine called Love in Shadow. Click the link to read an excerpt and also to see my brand shiny new website design, which I did last night after exclaiming, "My god, what if she looks at my website?" (Because editors have to look at websites to confirm their potential authors' brilliance, see?)