Bethanie's Brain

Alarm Bells

2011-07-28T21:52:00.004-05:00

I hate it when there are alarm bells going off in my brain about someone and I can't quite place why or what the problem is, or therefore, and perhaps most important, what the hell I should do about it.

I have somehow managed to become entrenched in such a situation and, if you hadn't guessed, am failing to manage to extricate myself. [Insert disgruntled emoticons here...]

These are the details, without going into... overmuch detail. (erm... ha.)

I have this "friend"... OK, "acquaintance" would be much more congruent with reality, but I think she considers me to be in her "friend" category as she probably considers everyone she's known for more than 5 minutes to be a "friend". (Yes. One of those.) I met her through work and got sucked into an outside work thing that she's doing and.... well.... I want out, because she's actually really fucking crazy.

Worse, in a way, she's supposed to be teaching me something -- something fairly important to me and something I've wanted to learn for a long, long time -- and over the past several weeks/months, I've come to the conclusion that she's completely incompetent as a teacher.

Teaching is hard. I know this. I've done it. And unless you put some serious thought and effort into constructing an effective lesson, you suck and you suck hard. She spouts the party line without thinking about it and that sort of laziness just pisses me off on principle.

So. Here I am, stuck, and unable to think of a graceful way out that doesn't involve hurting feelings and/or destroying an already (I suspect) fragile sense of self worth/confidence/esteem and starting to realize that I really, really, really need to and soon.

Thus, I am torn between wanting to help her get better at what she sucks at and having NO desire whatsoever to be her guinea pig, my natural tendency to want to be helpful and my other natural tendency to be brutally, horrifically honest, and my deeply ingrained sense of loyalty and my extreme intolerance of inefficiency.

Blarg. Sucks to be me this month. :/
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Space

2011-02-23T21:55:00.003-06:00

I like my space.

I like it red and dark, quiet, because there is no one else here to speak, loud, because I have the music up as far as it will go, messy, because my children have been here, clean, because they've gone again.

I like the way the stain on the bookcases I bought matches the stain of the wood on the floors. I like the way my books look when they're out of their boxes. I like the things I nailed to the walls wherever I wanted to without having to ask anybody if it was OK to put them there.

I like having no TV and a good espresso machine and excellent beer and my clothes put away. I like that I fixed the doorbell by myself and rearranged the den four times before I was happy with it.

I like that I'm here by myself but not lonely. I like it a lot.

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Sorrow

2011-01-30T22:23:00.003-06:00

Someone sent me a thing Ann Landers said -- about people who drown their sorrows forgetting that sorrow knows how to swim.

It made me laugh.

Yeah, I know. It wasn't meant to. But I'm a bitchin' swimmer. Way better than sorrow ever hoped to be. Way better.

No, seriously. I am.

I get suffering. I've been there:

4th grade: All the way home (I was a walker), some jackass and his buddy making machine gun sounds at me, because they found out my family was German. (I had no idea what the hell they were doing or why, but for the very first time, I understood that being German wasn't the awesomest thing ever.)

7th grade: Gym class. Er...I don't actually need to go into detail, right?

9th grade: Another jackass, a different jackass from the 4th grade jackass (I assume), this one spit on me. Other jackasses called me names for no reason (well, other than I wasn't tall and blond and beautiful) or felt free to call out insults about what I was wearing or had done to my hair or... whatever the wrong thing of the day was that day.

College: Yeah, I know. The bad shit is supposed to go away in college. And some of it did. Except for the part about my grandfather and two friends dying in the space of just a few months.

Today, I thank the jackasses and the bad shit; they taught me to swim, after all. They taught me that no matter how deep the wounds, no matter how much water is forced into my lungs, in the end -- I'm still gonna float.

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Dissolution

2011-01-15T22:13:00.005-06:00

I suppose I should have seen this coming.

I'm a loner. Always have been. Unlike most people, it isn't actually possible for me to have more than one or two good friends at a time. I just can't manage it. I need to be alone, because it makes me quite insane, if I am forced not to be.

So that's the good part of divorce. I will get the alone time on a regular basis, whether I need it that week or not.

The rest of it, at this point, however, is a big ball of pain and failure.

The failure, in the end, is the worst part for me. I don't fail at things. Ever. And to have failed at this -- arguably one of the most important bits of one's life -- is inexcusable, abominable, and so completely, fucking frustrating, that I don't even have the words really.

The pain, on the other hand, I can deal with.

If you've ever read Dune, you'll remember the "litany agaist fear". I don't remember the exact words (and I can't find my fucking book to look it up), but it amounts to this: I will stand and face my fear. I will allow it to pass through me. And once it has passed through me and gone -- only I will remain.

Pain works the same way.

The days it finds me, it is awful. As bad as death. In some ways, it is even worse. It is death without the "closure", without the comfort that, "at least, he/she no longer suffers".

As with fear, one must let it do its worst.

Scream. Cry. Excoriate yourself. Let it devour you.

When it thinks it has exhausted you and won, it will saunter off, humming, triumphant, oblivious to the respite it gives you when it leaves.

Yes, it will come back. Yes, you will suffer again. Perhaps even worse than the last time (turns out pain hates failure even more than I do). Let it do its worst. Again. Then laugh when it leaves. Actually, laugh while it's still got its hooks in you (it probably won't make you feel better immediately, but pain really hates being laughed at and will tend to stalk off to sulk sooner when you laugh in its face, even if you do so a bit hysterically).

Eventually, pain gives up. And only you will remain.

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Two NaNo Things

2010-10-22T20:52:00.002-05:00

1. The door locks are genetic. (*eyepop!!!*)

2. "Ich bin im Wasser verbrannt...." (hmmmm....)

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Six Impossible Things

2010-10-11T07:52:00.005-05:00

So the brilliantly funny/entertaining posts that are the NaNo forums have already begun. Yaay! One of my favorites is "How 'Impossible' is your Novel?", in which the original poster has challenged WriMo's to name 6 impossible things in their novel.

Naturally, it took me about 5 minutes to come up with mine....

The entire human race abandoned the dying, uninhabitable Earth in huge space ships jetisoned off to each of the known (and hopefully) habitable extra-solar planets.
Faster-than-light-speed space travel!!! :D
The main female character is stronger than any man.
Also, she has fangs.
However, she is NOT a vampire!! 8-D
Her people biologically engineered themselves to survive the nasty not-so-habitable-for-humans planet they ended up on (the fangs are part of that, see? :).

And, yanno, that's just for starters. And before I've even begun writing. And they're even somewhat believible!

Just wait til NaNo actually starts. I'm sure I'll be back with a list of Truly, Outrageously Impossible Things in My Novel....

Ah, NaNo.... how I lurve thee!

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2010-10-01T17:25:00.002-05:00

So a while back, kick-ass authoress Holly Lisle, in her fantastic newsletter, mentioned something about multi-tasking as a writer. Not in those words exactly, but what she was getting at (paraphrasing here...) was: 'don't work on more than one project at once'. Or at least, if you're serious-writing on one project, don't be serious-writing on another at the same time. World building on another project and/or final polish-editing on another project (i.e., max: 3 projects at once) is probably managable (if-and-only-if you MUST).

And I thought: 'is she serious'??

Because I am a many-many projects at once sorta gal. At least I thought I was.

But then I got to thinking and it sorta started making sense. When you're serious-writing on a project, you're immersed in that project's world. You live it. You breathe it. If you're a bit of a method-writer like me, you become your characters and take on their personalities from time to time in your real-world life (handy, if you're naturally shy and you're character's not... ).

World building and editing, on the other hand, at least for me, is work that can be done bit by bit, piece by piece, a section (or two or three) at a time. It's different, in other words, from serious-writing.

And, oddly enough, I hadn't really thought about it exactly like that. The "sub-tasks" of writing -- world building, character development, serious-writing, editing -- these things had been melded together in my head before as part of the Big Picture -- part of the Process of Writing. I had not separated them out and seen them as discreet and different before. Seems obvious, but yanno -- if anybody's gonna miss The Obvious, it's gonna be me....

Anyway, it makes sense, now that I think of them separately, that serious-writing on more than one project is going to get you Nowhere Fast.

And that's not where I want to be.

So....

Somewhere in the deep, dark, secret recesses of my mind, I'm thinking I really need to finish -- and I mean Finish-Finish -- the first complete draft of Dragons before NaNo starts.

Which gives me a friggin' deadline, I suppose, of October 31.

Fuckin' A.

Guess it's a good thing I've got my NaNo all plotted and ready to G.O., since I failed miserably at Screnzy. The up-side of failure being I have the plot for NaNo pretty much all D.O.N.E. (other than some world building.... conveniently enough....)

Hmmmmmmmm......

Methinks the wisdom of me elders might be sinking in...

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Test of Mobile Blogging

2010-06-21T22:46:00.001-05:00

Testing this blogging via email thing, because while i would prefer to post updates from China to Facebook (because it's easy and I'm lazy...), ye ol' FB is blocked in China. So no FB...and that will be no fun for the folks back home who will worry about where we are and what we're doing, so.... this is a Test of Alternative Updates Method # 1....

Let us hope it works....

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MayNoWriMo: Das Plan

2010-04-27T21:24:00.003-05:00

So the plan for MayNo is to complete An Actual Revision and in order to do that -- and because I know myself all too well -- I know I have to break that overarching goal down into small, quantifiable steps, things I can formulate into a Grand To Do list and tick off one by one. Without that, I will get sidetracked and bogged down and Go. Nowhere.

Which will piss me off.

And will piss Dorothy off. And will make Inge very, very freakin' happy, because she hates mucking around with MY writing. That's very uncomfortable for her and she would really rather tear to shreds somebody else's writing.

Thank goodness dear Inge isn't in charge and I am.... heh...

Anyway, below is The Grand and Wonderful Plan that I came up with this evening to achieve my MayNoWriMo Goal. I even put time limits on each major step so that I have mini-deadlines in the midst of the Grand Deadline of May 31st.

We'll see how it works. I'm a little worried about not setting an upper limit on the number of items in Step Two -- Inge could subversively suggest change after change after change and thus ensure I never finish the damn thing -- so somewhere in the back of my mind there's really a range: 3-5 plot-related changes, 3-5 character-related changes, etc. The range is fairly small, because the original manuscript is only 20 pages long and this thing is NOT going to turn into a full-on novel (ya hearin' that, Dorothy dear??).

Right, well: Das Plan:

Overall Goal: Complete a revision of the fairy ring story

Step One: Read Through Manuscript and Make Notes [DONE]
a) Read through manuscript hard copies (full first draft and started-but-abandoned second draft). [DONE]
b) Make notes on the h/c and in a separate notebook on changes that need to be made. [DONE]

Step Two: Evaluate and Plan Changes [5 DAYS MAX]
a) Identify at least 3 specific plot-related changes
b) Identify at least 3 specific character-related changes
c) Identify at least 3 specific world/setting-related changes
d) Identify at least 3 new scenes that need to be written (~7,500 words)
e) Identify at least 3 existing scenes that need to be entirely re-written (~7,500 words)
f) Identify at least 3 scenes that need a minor amount of work
g) Identify at least 3 items to research

Step Three: Research [3 DAYS MAX]
a) Research the 3 most important items identified in Step Two g)
b) Spend NO MORE than 2 hours on each of the 3 items

Step Four: Make Changes Identified in Step Two [15 DAYS]

Step Five: Make ONE pass of the full manuscript to line-edit/polish [5 DAYS]
a) Read through a HARD COPY marking changes
b) Type in the changes

Step Six: Send the Manuscript to Beta-Readers.

One final side-note: Step Six, though it may seem sort of trivial, is really important. The whole point of writing for me personally is to get shit out of my head. All well and good, that. The point of revising, however, is to create something other people can read -- so that has to be the ultimate goal and the final step and measure of success or failure here. That is to say, on May 31, 2010, I have to be at the point where I can send out an email or post a facebook status that says, "Hey, I wrote something. You want to read it?"

Yoiks. I think I just scared the piss outta myself.

What To Do, What To Do...

2010-04-15T20:28:00.002-05:00

Trying to decide what, exactly, I'm going to do for MayNoWriMo.

My first inclination is, of course, to jump into that new thing and just run with it --bang out 50K in a month, even though I still don't know its ending. In other words: my usual.

I'm thinking, though, that that isn't probably what I should do.

For one thing, I already know I can do that. I've done it 6 or 7 times now -- enough times that I've actually lost count, which means....

Probably, what I should do is something I've never done: Finish. Something.

Well, maybe not finish-finish... but, at least, Get Through. Yeah, Get Through would be great. In fact, in the interest of creating an actually-attainable-though-challenging, goal, I should be quite specific: Get. Through. A. Revision.

There. It's in writing.

I think I'll do that weird fairy ring thing that came out of nowhere in the middle of December when I had 900 other things to do. It didn't totally suck when I read through it. And it's small enough to actually Get. Through.

Kewl.

Love it when a plan comes together out of nothing. :)

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MayNoWriMo!!

2010-04-14T18:41:00.002-05:00

So the FANTASTIC Joely Sue is instigating and organizing MayNoWriMo, a writing-project extravaganza of the NaNoWriMo variety. And I'm so pleased, because the whole script writing thing just isn't happening for me.

Like at all.

Like, I'm still on Page-Fucking-1.

I could blame the foreign formatting thing. I could blame the as-usual-IN-FUCKING-SANE Evil Day Job. I could blame the county's timing of Spring Break during the first 2 weeks of April....

But I won't.

The fault is all mine and all the fact that I can't seem to connect with my characters unless I get to Be. In. Their. Heads. And let them spew their innermost thoughts, desires, urges, and unpleasantness through my fingertips. That's where it's at, apparently. At least, for me.

So I'm frikkin' bouncing in my seat about MayNo! Because the alternative was to wait and world build (a.k.a. procrastinate) until fucking November.

Hallelujah!

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Struggle

2010-03-13T06:57:00.002-06:00

So I'm trying to prepare for this Script Frenzy thing and, apparently, certain aspects of screenplay writing are going to be no different from novel writing for me. That is, I'm up against the same old brick wall: I've got great characters, I've got a fabulous, far-out setting, I've got absolutely No Plot.

OK, I'm exaggerating. Slightly.

There's an inkling of Plot. There's a beginning of one in that my characters want something (each other) and can't possibly have it without risking their lives and the lives of everyone they care about. There's even a real, nasty bad guy this time.

And here I am: Stuck and No Idea what to do with them now.

Aaargh.

So. Frustrating.

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Whose

2010-03-03T20:37:00.000-06:00

Learned something new the other day while editing a client's manuscript. I love that.

I ran across this sentence:

The Mann-Whitney test was performed to identify genes whose expression was altered during allergen exposure.

I stopped short at "whose", thinking "WHAT?! 'whose' should refer to a person, right? A 'gene' is not a person. I need to fix this."

Unable to come up with a rewording that I liked, I went looking for an alternative to 'whose'. Strunk and White had nothing to say on the matter. Likewise, the 9th Edition of the AMA Style Guide.

Stymied, I turned to Google. (When Strunk & White fail you, what else is there, right?)

And I found Grammar Girl! Grammar Girl had this excellent explanation of why 'whose' is, in fact, perfectly fine. Shakesphere used it this way. So did Milton. I won't bore you with repeating what Grammar Girl has already explained well, but the gist of it is: English doesn't have a relative pronoun for use with inanimate objects.

Which I find absolutely fascinating! (Yes, I am a certifiable geek....) We clearly have a need for such a thing, and yet we have only this uncomfortable stand-in. How did that ever happen? WHY did that ever happen? Will we, eventually, ever do anything about it? Like come up with something else. If we did, what would it be?

*sighs*

Ah, the things one can wonder about once the children are abed...

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How to Amuse the Muse

2010-02-08T18:59:00.002-06:00

I think I've figured out part of the reason for my writing slump of the past year. OK, aside from the ridiculous idea of going back to school and taking actual classes for actual college credits (which was a well-worth-it but miserable experince). And aside from the full time job, two kids, freelance business, house, and husband.

My car sucked.

No, really. I hated it. And that's a bad, bad thing if your muse lives in your car like mine does.

Oh, fine, laugh all you like, but she does. I don't know why, but she likes to sit behind me when I'm driving (and obnoxiously cranking my tunes) and whisper in my ear about worlds, weapons, and wonderment. Not sure if it's the motion, the tunes, or what, but she likes it there, and when I'm stuck on a character or plot, that's where I go to to get unstuck.

And having to drive a car that I grew to actively hate made that impossible, since I spent most of my time in the car cussing at it (and its utter inability to accelerate properly and tendancy to require an Act of Congress to change gears). This left the muse little opportunity to whisper anything, nevermind the fact that whispering wasn't going to cut it over the volume of the cussing (though, surprisingly, the whispering does just fine against the tunes - go figure).

Anyway.

In December, we got rid of the Stupid Car and bought Ruby. I love Ruby. Ruby shifts when I would shift. Ruby pushes you back in your seat when you hit the gas. Ruby has a bump shift, which means I can take her out of Drive, put her in Manual, and shift her myself, if the roads are a mess of snow and ice. Or if I just need to.

Yeah, silly as it is to love a car, I LOVE Ruby.

More importantly, my muse loves Ruby too. And the last few weeks she's started whispering again. And that makes the brain happy.

So what if Ruby was just barely in our price range. So what if the payments give me a heart attack. So what if I had to compromise my high-gas-mileage-or-forget-it principles.

The muse is amused. Some days, that's all that matters.

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Review: The Chocolatier's Wife

2010-01-16T06:59:00.000-06:00

by Cindy Lynn Speer

A beautifully sweet story (pun unashamedly intended).

OK, leaving aside the fact that anything having to do with chocolate is almost automatically certain to be a hit with me, this really was a great story. Set in a world far, far away where marriages are 'arranged' by magic and one's mate is usually determined when one is very young, the story consists partly of letters written back and forth between William and his 'intended', Tasmin, over the course of the time before they meet and partly of the 'present day', in which William has been framed for murder and Tamsin comes to free him, since she knows from his letters that he's no murderer.

Their letters to each other alone are a good enough reason to read the book. They are charming and cleverly written, not only because they subtly reveal the nature of each of the main characters, but also because they evolve through the story, moving along from the first letter William writes as a 7 year old to Tamsin as an infant to them writing back and forth as adults. This imparts a depth to the characters and the sense that you have known them their whole lives yourself.

Meanwhile, in the main storyline, touches of magic, mystery, and romance are deftly woven together into a memorable tale that I really didn't want to end, since it meant leaving William and Tamsin's world. Throughout, author Cindy Lynn Speer's eloquent writing repeatedly put a smile on my face just from appreciation of the sheer skill it takes to write sentences that are cleverly put together, but still easy to follow.

So, in short, if you like a well-constructed, sweet (but not sappy) story spiked with a bit of whodunnit, The Chocolatier's Wife is Very Highly Recommended!

Publishing Crooks

2009-12-17T06:34:00.003-06:00

OK, this will be brief, but this is an issue that really burns me up.

I got an email in my Inbox this morning from Wiley-Blackwell, publishers of all sorts of books. I'm on some mailing list they have and get these periodically -- it's basically an ad for news books. I don't mind it, because I love any and all forms of books.

Including eBooks.

Typically, the actual content of these ads don't interest me enough to click through, but this one caught my eye. So I clicked. I salivated over the Description. I drooled over the Table of Contents.

I frowned at the price tag. And then I saw this:

Other Available Formats: Adobe
E-Book

I cheered! I clicked! I had a small myocardial infarction at the price of the E-Book -- which was the same as the fucking hard copy!!!

What. The. Hell.

Seriously?? You're going to charge me $45 for a fucking computer file?? GET WITH THE PROGRAM, PEOPLE!!!

It costs you almost nothing to produce a PDF file. Yes, OK -- you have to recover the cost of setting it up, etc., but once it's set up you don't have to pay for paper, ink, and printing machines to print it. You don't have to pay to ship it to a retailer. You don't even have to pay to ship it to me directly! At least give me a friggin' discount!!!

Arrgh! It's no wonder the major players in the publishing industry are spiraling the drain -- with attitudes like this, they deserve to.

There. I have spoken.

Breathing Deep

2009-12-16T18:28:00.003-06:00

I'm not even sure I can write a proper blog post anymore. It has been so long -- and I am now so used to teensy missives such as will fit into my Facebook status without generating a nastygram -- that I'm not sure I'm actually capable of anything else. So we shall just have to see how long this lasts...

Anyway, Anatomy & Physiology is over. I passed. More importantly, I learned a hell of a lot and feel a lot more confident in my ability to NOT introduce mistakes when I edit medical documents (a huge fear). So that is good.

However, I have decided NEVER to take another class during the fall. With NaNo and then the holidays, it's just too nuts. I'm sure I'll have to eat that 'never', if I ever do get into grad school, but for now, when I'm just putzing around doing whatever the hell I want -- Fall is For Fun. Spring is for classes.

Except for this spring. Because I need a fucking break after that hellacious fall.... heh...

I mean, I really SHOULD take Molecular Bio to get it out of the way, but I think I'll wait and take it next year. Most of it won't be new to me anyway, because most of it is stuff I've (slowly and painfully) taught myself over the last 6 years. Besides, me and Eldest Daughter need some serious dental work, so I need the freelance income and I can't freelance, if I'm trying to get good grades. And once the dental work is taken care of, there's that big, expensive, fucking car we just bought. *dies at recollection of pricetag* (It was worth it though. I love that car already.)

Anyway, my focus at the moment is to breathe deep, get through the rest of the week, get to Florida and breathe deep some more (preferably whilst laying in the sun beside a pool or beach...), survive the Night of the Man in Red, eat waaay too much, and see Avatar. Somewhat in that order. :)

(Wow! That's, like, four whole paragraphs!)

NaNo 2009 - Snippet!

2009-11-08T08:53:00.003-06:00

Oh, my, has it ever been an age since I posted... well, you know the story. Busy, busy, busy...

Anyway, against my better judgement, I'm doing NaNo again this year. But just for the insanity part. :D

My villain just did away with her first victim, and I thought I'd share. Enjoy the evil!

*************

At first, he thought she’d missed, because he didn’t feel anything. But she wasn't acting like she had missed. She was just sitting there. Watching him. And looking thoughtful.

Then he saw something drooping down into his field of vision from above. He could barely see it if he crossed his eyes and looked up, but there appeared to be a miniature dart embedded in his forehead.

“What the… what is that?” he asked, his voice sounding far away.

Wynonna gave him a thoughtful, assessing gaze that sent chills down his spine. Or maybe that was something in the dart. It was hard to say really.

Finally, she answered him. “A prototype.”

And that was the last thing he heard before the dart dissolved into a small cloud of nanobots that bored into his brain.

**************

Life, The Universe, and The Kitchen Sink

2009-08-22T21:02:00.003-05:00

Yeah, yeah. It's been a while. I'd launch a volley of excuses, but I don't have time. xD

And that's the whole story of late.

I've never been so busy in my life. Between kids, work, the official and suprisingly successful launch of the freelance biz, kids' school, my school, etc, etc, writing has suffered. There's a project in the works, but it's slow going. Most nights I have freelance jobs to work on, and by the time I'm done with those, the poor little brain is shot.

And I don't even want to talk about my goddamn kitchen sink (which is usually full of dirty dishes that no one but me seems to know what to do with....).

Oh, well.

My only goal for writing this year, I've decided, is to finish One Thing. Just one single project. Get it done to the point where I would let someone else read it. I'm hoping it's going to be the project I'm working on, but I don't know. It's taking me back to a time in my life that I'd rather forget, so sometimes it's tough to get into it. And there's that lack of time thing.

But whatever.

I'm just gonna keep on keepin' on....

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Bethanie's Fantastic Summer Reading List

2009-05-06T19:48:00.009-05:00

Ah, yes, well part of it anyway. Do not be deceived by its present length -- I expect it to expand. (And please feel free to suggest stories, books, tales, sagas, etc. that you loved or have heard were really great.)

Anyway, The Plan - and I have to have A Plan, because if left to my own devices, I will read nothing but fantasy - is to alternate a fiction with a non-fiction. Why not just give in and stick with fantasy and nothing but fantasy? Well, I could do that. But I really want to read the non-fiction on my list and in order to do that I have to set up the fiction books as Rewards for reading the non-fiction, because otherwise all the shiny fiction will somehow find its way to the top of the pile and then it will be September and summer will be over and I'll still have a stack of non-fiction sitting there forlornly beckoning...

You think I'm kidding?

Exhibit No. 1: Let's take the Oliver Sacks book, Uncle Tungsten. I think I bought it at Christmas, which means I've had it for months. I started it. It's awesome. Oliver Sacks and his family are fascinating and he really did have an Uncle Tungsten and since tungsten happens to be my favorite metal (er, yes, actually I do have a "favorite metal"... um, doesn't everyone??), I can't wait to find out more about it.... But since Christmas I have also acquired four or five or seventeen fantasy/mystery/thriller/etc. books and, the way my brain is wired, they win the Oh-what-shall-I-read tug-o'-war every single time. Hence, the Rewards...

A few notes on the actual List as it appears below:

Color coding: Unread books are yellow and orange (alternated just for ease of reading). Green are books in progress (yes, there are currently two -- two is my lower limit and you'll notice one is electronic and the other is a hard copy -- each has its time and place, you see).

The "Epidemiology Chapter" is my plan to get through the epidemiology text book that Boss Lady loaned me (three years ago), by classifying it as non-fiction and forcing myself to read a chapter before reading another book from the fiction pile. I think that's doable (if I assign myself the whole book, it'll never happen, so I'm trying to be realistic).

About "Twilight". Yes, I know, it's a teeny-bopper book and there has been SO MUCH FREAKIN' HYPE about it, that I almost don't want to read it, but The Husband and I rented the movie last weekend and it actually looks interesting, so I'll get me a copy from the library (hopefully...) and decide for myself.

Yes, I know there are holes. I've forgotten some author names and I'm too damn lazy to run to the other end of the house and check and/or look them up on amazon. Sorry. Deal wid it.

[EDITED: OK, I couldn't stand it. I had to fill in the holes and add a bunch of the rest.]

Allrighty then. What are y'all reading this summer? What should I add to my list? Suggest away people!

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Summer Break

2009-04-30T21:57:00.002-05:00

I know. It's still spring. But my final exam is Monday, which means summer starts for me as soon as I hit "Submit Quiz", get the news, and calculate my final grade. :D

And I am So Fucking Sick of cramming my brain full of stuff I have to know, that I have actually formulated a plan to spend all summer cramming it full of stuff I want to know just 'cuz.

Specifically, I am talking about Bethanie's Fantastic Summer Reading List. Yaay for summers!! Yaay for reading!!

I plan to post The Official List here and check in with it and check things off and comment and review and contemplate and theorize and otherwise generally wallow shamelessly in my neglected and now-towering TBR pile. So. Be looking for the Fantastic List sometime next week and feel free to suggest any Must Reads on your Fantastic Summer (or Other) Reading List in the meantime (since I just know you're sitting there on the edge of your seat with nothing better to do...).

And we now return you to your regularly scheduled griping about how studying for a final sucks and what the HELL was Bethanie THINKING when she decided to go back to school in the midst of a full-time job, 2 kids, a freelance business....

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It's Here!!!

2009-04-23T20:18:00.002-05:00

It's here! It's here!! IT'S HERE!!!

Witch Ember is here! It arrived this afternoon and I was so busy I never even checked the mailbox, and was shocked and delighted when The Husband brought it in this evening. Yahoo!

I'm delivering it straight to the TBR pile. I'm gonna be good -- I'm not even gonna crack the cover, 'cuz I'm not allowed to read it until after my final on May 4th and I don't want to be tempted and ....

Say! Check out those maps!!

Uh-oh...

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Cake Wrecks

2009-04-20T14:58:00.003-05:00

So a friend at work sent me a link to this blog and it's so damn amusing, I added it to my list of Distractions & Addictions. It's called Cake Wrecks and it's all about... well, let's just say the title is self explanatory...

It's been a great stress reliever over the past few weeks of family, family, wedding, school, work, family, family, OMG-more-family. In a word (or two) it's fucking hysterical. You must check it out! 'Cuz I said so!

Back to searching the archives for the Pepto-Bismal Barbie cake I made for Ms. Six when she turned Ms. Four (or was it Ms. Three...). Heh. No, seriously. Anyway, enjoy y'all!

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John Lawson's Witch Ember

2009-04-17T08:04:00.004-05:00

I did it. I had to. I couldn't stand it anymore.

John Lawson's Witch Ember just sounds too awesome, and it finally popped up used on Amazon at a price I could afford, so I raided the emergency funds (books are an emergency, yes?) and ordered it. So there.

And so what if I won't have time to read it until after my effing A&P class comes to its gruesome and excruciating end in May. And so what if my freelance workload is scheduled to pick up right about then. And so what if my stack of Absolutely-Positively-Must-Read-This-Summer books is already taller than I am. So what!

Witch Ember goes to the top of the stack as soon as it arrives, and if it's here, it gets cracked open the minute I'm done taking my final on May 4th. So there!

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Review: Sorrow by John Lawson

2009-04-09T07:16:00.001-05:00

First, The Usual Warning – probably, I am not going to do this review thing right. My 'reviews' are more a part of my own learning process as a writer than 'proper reviews’ in the traditional sense. They are more my ruminations, more my thoughts on and reactions to stories I either read or watch (yanno, movies), and more my attempt to process - mainly for my own benefit - the techniques and bits of craft that I most admired (or that didn’t seem to work for me). For that reason, it isn’t enough for me to say ‘I liked it’; I need to think about and say exactly why, so I get very specific.

Oh, and sorry about all the italics and bold and bold-italics in this one. I went sorta wild with it...

There. You have been warned. :)

On to Sorrow, by John Lawson!

* * *

I'm not going to begin with a synopsis or blurb of the plot. I think that's boring. Sorry. I'll tell you there's an assassin and nobody knows who it is, but they need to find out before more people die. That's plenty, right? :) (OK, if you need a real synopsis or blurb, and/or would like to read an excerpt, go to Drollerie Press's Sorrow page.)

I will begin with happily admitting that it was the cover that sold me on this one. What can I say? I'm a sucker for good visuals. I just HAD TO KNOW what those black tears were about. And that's good -- a cover that creates a story question and compells you to buy a book as just as all important as those first few lines you read standing in the bookstore (or sitting at your computer, if you're in an ebookstore...). Those lines should draw you into the story in such a way that you CANNOT put the books down and simply MUST. BUY. IT.

And next I will admit that the first few lines of Sorrow had me doubting the whole purchase thing...

There is a prologue, you see, and prologues are tricky. All the writing books say you don't need them and shouldn't use them and should start the story where the story starts and all kinds of other bullshit that, frankly, isn't all that helpful. As a reader, I think a prologue is totally fine -- as long as it relates to the story and totally draws me in and makes me HAVE TO buy the book.

Sorrow's Prologue almost didn't. I mean, it's neat -- it reads like a creation myth, so it's got a cool tone and the feel of a parable and I could see it being told by elder to a bunch of people sitting around a fire at night.... OK, so, yeah, it created really good visuals there and I loved it when I went back and read it after reading the rest of the book, but as a beginning it was almost too mysterious, plus I'm impatient and wanted the story to start already. I actually thought about giving up on it....

And then, quite suddenly, it ended and I hit this:

They were going to betray him.

Which is the first line of the 'real' story, which grabbed me like a super-size vise grips and never let go, which is exactly what I love in a first line. Bravo!

Overall Impression

Better yet, the rest of the story is fantastic. It's part who-dun-it, part dark fantasy, part horror (OK, I'm a light-weight with the horror, so take that with a grain of salt), and moves quickly through a vividly imagined world with a plot that twists and turns until the very, very, very end. In other words: definitely my kind of book. In fact, not only is Sorrow a serious contender for the Bethanie's Favorite-Books-of-All-Time list, but it has also made the Yes-I-Want-A-Hard-Copy list, which is huge, because there are very few books that merit an allowance of space in my teeny, tiny house, as well as the I-Can't-Wait-To-Read-It-Again list.

The Specifics

Plot. As I've already mentioned, the plot moves quickly. This is always good. What made Sorrow really interesting for me, however, was that the who-dun-it part was somewhat non-traditional. It starts out traditional: there are clues, there are red herrings, there are possible suspects... and then, about two-thirds of the way through the story, you know the Who.

Now I suppose the pundits and mavens will tell us that is a Serious No-No and that John Lawson is a rule breaker and should be locked up writer's prison, at which point I shall happily thumb my nose at them and inform them that Sorrow is a good example when to go ahead and break the damn rules. Because instead of relieving the tension by knowing Who, the tension is instantly 10 times worse. Which makes you keep reading - just as fast as you can - because now you are howling to know WHY!? It's brilliant.

Language. I have read other reviews of Sorrow and several have mentioned that there is a lot of story-specific language, strange/foreign words, and that readers should be prepared to use the glossary. And yes, there's a lot of that and you might prepare yourself to use the glossary frequently or you might steer clear of Sorrow, if you don't like that sort of thing.

Me? I'm a language junkie. I love that sort of thing. For me, there is no such thing as too much. Especially when it's so expertly woven into the story, as it is in Sorrow, that you swear you can feel the fabric of the world the characters are moving in. I mean, it's really well done -- almost Tolkein-esque. Seriously! (And really, you can figure out most things from context, so I'm not sure what all the whining is about in the first place.)

Names. What I did find confusing at times were the myriad names, titles, and forms of address for any given character. An example, and perhaps the most confusing for me, was Hashii, who is referred to by three different names -- "Lord Ash", "Count Hashii", and "Hashii" -- in the section of the story where he is introduced. (OK, maybe the last one shouldn't count, but I'm trying to make a point here, bear with me.) I had to read that section three times before I was certain there was only one character. Even just re-reading it now, I kept thinking Lord Ash was Hashii's boss.

Perhaps my confusion is due to being American and having no clue whatsoever about titles and nobility. Or perhaps I'm being especially nit-picky on this because I'm so very guilty of it in my own writing... :D Could be... In any case, it really threw me in spots and, lesson learned, is something I'll try to avoid myself.

Characters. I suppose it goes without saying that good characters are essential for a good story. Sorrow is full of good characters. They are as vivid as the world they live in, as human as anyone you know, and are drawn with heartbreaking detail, like the woman who makes a doll for every miscarriage she has so when she eventually has a child, it can play with its brothers and sisters. (That one killed me... *sobs*)

The End. Since I'm an utterly hopeless romantic, the ending was not what I was hoping for. It's not exactly unhappy, but it's not happily ever after either. And yet, for all my romantic loyalties, I wouldn't change a thing about it. It was perfectly "right" for the story. And that's where my respect for John Lawson really soared. I hate endings. I suck at endings. I can't write a proper ending to save my life. To see an ending so expertly put together is amazing.

My Only Real Complaint... ...is that there are two other Witch Ember books, Witch Ember and The Raven, that I can't get. Boo! Hiss! OK, I guess you can get them used through Amazon, but they're, like, 40 bucks each or something crazy and, dude, that is so out of my price range. :( Bummer.

Hopefully, that will change sometime soon, but in the meantime, go get you a copy of Sorrow. You'll be glad you did. It's available here from Drollerie Press.

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Drowning

2009-03-28T08:46:00.003-05:00

OK, so it's been a while since I last posted. But we are drowning here. Drowing in more ways than one. Drowning in life due to soccer, school events, and life events (we have a family wedding this weekend, so everyone's in town and wants to visit). Drowing in resposibilities at the Evil Day Job, which is getting perpetually stranger every single day...

Oh, yes. And it's raining.

It's been raining all week. We're supposed to have "possibly severe thunderstorms" today (so the wedding won't be outside this afternoon; poor sister-in-law-to-be :( And actually, we get a break from drowning in soccer today, since the fields are closed, which is good since because of the wedding we'd have been running around like crazy all day. This way we're only running around like crazy half the day....)

I don't even want to talk about school - my school - and the test I have tomorrow and how I haven't even read the chapter yet, let alone done any studying...

Writing, needless to say, isn't even on the damn list anymore.

I mean, story-related things occur to me here and there throughout the day and many times throughout the nights that I'm spending half of awake because I can't stop thinking, worrying and otherwise stressing about everything else. But I'm too exhausted and disheartened to bother even jotting them down any more.

So poor Caleb the Supernatural Bank Robber and Pollo the Dragon-Seeker Pirate are on perpetual hold for now. Maybe permanent hold. I don't know. Maybe I'll try again when my class is over in May. But for now, I'm sick of failing to finish anything. I'm sick of the dread in the pit of my stomach I get every time I think about actually working on a story. I'm sick of everything I read about the writing process making me feel totally inadequate. I'm sick of feeling like I've never had an original idea in my life.

It sucks to be a quitter, and I know that, but something has to give and for the moment, it looks like it's going to be writing.

*theatrical sigh*

Well. Off to study for that test, then...

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Watchmen

2009-03-14T19:09:00.002-05:00

So The Husband and I got to go on one of our very rare movie dates this afternoon and picked Watchmen. Yaay for the small miracle of movie dates!

Almost 30 bucks and 3 hours later, I'm still sort of shell shocked. It was violent. It was graphic. It was gory. It had waaay too many flashbacks and moved waaay slower than I would normally tolerate and yet I've come away from it thinking it was great.

I'm struggling to put my finger on why.

I mean, normally any movie that moves that slow has me yawning, bored and pissed off that I just spent 30 bucks to be bored halfway through and hoping it will end. Watchmen somehow eluded this fate.

I think there are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, there was a giant, blue man walking around totally naked for most of the movie. Two thumbs, way up! ;-D

Seriously, though...

The characters had enough depth to keep me interested. Maybe not as much as I usually like, but there were interesting internal conflicts going on. There were interesting inter-personal conflicts as well -- not to mention the sometimes brutal action going on in the main story line (slow as it was at times).

I had the who of who-dun-it figured out early, which should have ticked me off, but the way it ended left me OK with that. Not your typical Hollywood wrap-up, for sure. So that was good too.

There was also a lot of superheros kicking butt, which I always like a lot. And there was superhero humor and sex and betrayal and - my favorite - an antihero.

I don't know. I'm still struggling with why I wasn't unhappy with it, and the last half was definitely better than the first half, but it was worth the money. Go see it!

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The Grindstone

2009-03-14T08:30:00.002-05:00

So a few weeks back a Big Editing Company notified me that they wanted to hire me as a freelance editor, but didn't want me to edit in the field where I actually have editing experience -- they wanted me to edit in the field I have a degree in, even though I haven't done THING ONE in that field for 14 years. I didn't know what to tell them because I was so irritated with their lack of respect for the actual work that I DO and their apparent faith in a piece of paper given to me by my undergraduate university so long ago that it is now lost in the mists of time.

So I did what came natually: I ignored them.

Yesterday they emailed me back, ever so politely requesting that I send them the other stuff they need for me to start editing for them and again suggesting that I edit in that other field.

Perhaps they're hard up for editors in that particular field. I don't know, I don't really care, and my inclination is to ignore them again. However.

Drollerie Press had this great celebration of ebook week and were giving away two free ebooks a day. It was awesome and exciting and now I have a bunch of great ebooks I can't wait to read. But I also missed a bunch, because I wasn't fast enough on the clicker, and so I decided to just outright buy some of those plus few others I've been meaning to pick up, and now.... well, now I have a habit to support.

And the extra income from the freelance work would certainly help support the habit, so.... I'm still annoyed with the Big Editing Company, but now I'm also reconsidering their offer.

In other words, I'm gonna whore myself for books.

I guess there are worse things in life, right?

(Oh, and if the folks at Drollerie Press were hoping that pushing ebooks by giving away free samples would help boost sales, well.... it worked! At least for me and anyone else I can convince to go check them out. :D )

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Giving Up Writing.

2009-03-11T21:38:00.003-05:00

Or: Maybe Not.

So I decided last night that I was done. After reading so many good books lately while occasionally glancing at my growing pile of pathetic, feeble - and entirely unfinished - attempts at writing, I just gave up.

"Fuck writing," I said. "I'm all done. I'll just read from now on. And edit. And maybe review some stuff."

As I left the house at 6 AM this morning, I was resigned to just driving. No more plotting on the commute. No more conversations with my characters during the inevitable stop 'n' go near Trinity Lane. No more feeding Dorothy the Muse with my new favorite song while going 80 in the slow lane. Just no more.

Dorothy apparently took offense at this decision and smacked me upside the head continuously the whole way to work with all kinds of things I've been stonewalled on for the past several weeks. Figures.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I may just ignore it and go ahead with the plan to take up something that involves less blood-letting. Like boxing, maybe....

But damned if Dorothy didn't make Caleb all freakin' interesting...

Crap. Crap on a stick, in fact.

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eBooks: A Rant

2009-03-11T05:18:00.002-05:00

So Fictionwise - and it's little brother eReader.com - have been acquired by B&N apparently. I've been an eReader.com customer for ... well, a really, really long time. For me, the initial draw to ebooks was based on 1) convenience (lots of books available all the time, all in my purse on an itty-bitty reading device), 2) ease of storage (ebooks take up no physical space - a good thing in a small house), and 3) PRICE.

PRICE was the big one (that's why it's in caps, heh-heh). Ebooks, back in the day, were cheaper than regular books (paperbacks or hardcover). The people who produced ebooks seemed to understand that since they aren't having to cover the cost of paper, printing, shipping, storage, etc., it ultimately costs them less to produce an ebook and hey, why not pass that savings on to readers. OK, yes, sure - they have to maintain servers and websites and such, but these days, most booksellers have to do that anyway.

The price has gone up over the years, but I don't mind paying 7 or 8 bucks for an ebook. That's about the same as a paperback these days, and let's face it: the economy sucks and ebook producers have to feed their kids too, so I don't mind doing my part. :) And honestly, the convenience and storage features are worth it, so the $7-8 range seems quite reasonable.

So imagine the sticker shock I experienced when I clicked on a link to an interesting ebook in my newsletter from eReader.com and discovered that the fucking thing is $25!!! WHAT?!?? I just sat there blinking at my screen thinking, "You're fucking kidding, right? That's, like, a typo, right? That's the price of a hardcover! I'm seeing things, yes?"

But, no. I was not seeing things. That was the actual price, and folks, that is fucking ridiculous.

Now I understand that a hardcover book costs more to produce than a paperback, and for certain books, I'm not only willing but happy to pay it. But I'm sorry, but I see no reason for an ebook "equivalent" to a hardcover -- other than the greed of the booksellers. OK, if they want to make a bit extra by charging double the cost of a paperback, let's say $15 or $16, for a new release, I'd pay that much (and have) for an ebook that I really don't want to wait for. But I draw the line at paying over three times the cost of a paperback. That's just highway robbery, plain and simple.

Besides that, I'm seriously doubting that authors see anything extra when their ebooks get priced this high. The poor author of the ebook I was interested in unfortunately isn't going to be seeing ANYTHING from me, because I refuse to participate in the greedfest. Bummer. It sounded really interesting too.

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How Come...

2009-03-05T18:39:00.001-06:00

... every time I HAVE time to write, I find a 1001 other things to do instead

and

... every time I'm up to my eyeballs in everything else, all I want to do is write?

Why is that, huh?

Rambling

2009-03-02T05:33:00.001-06:00

I really have nothing to say, but I haven't been writing-writing much lately, since I'm deep in the thinking part of Think Sideways and/or otherwise occupying the brain with kids, food, laundry (and more laundry!), other people's writing, and various body parts (anatomy & physiology, people! heads out of gutters, please...), so my fingers are itchy and I'm here to scratch them, I guess.

Anyway, I spent the entire weekend unplugged. I never even took my laptop out of the backpack I use to haul it to and from work-work. It was kind of nice. I got to sit in different chairs (our wireless router died 2 years ago and we haven't replaced it yet, so being online means being chained to my desk with a little blue cable...).

I got to read One for the Money by Janet Evanovitch. Never read anything by her and it was GREAT! Especially as a study in characterization. Seriously. I think it was some part of Joely's Character Clinic that mentioned if you can remove all the dialoge tags and still know who's talking, you've done a good job at characterization. Well, Janet E. has got that DOWN and it was cool to actually notice for the first time that I had read a whole page of dialoge with NO "he-said's" or "she-said's" at all and never once got confused about who was talking. Wow! Very educational. And entertaining, of course. Stephanie Plum rocks!

I also finished reading Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, and it's great, too. A bit slow, maybe in the middle, but I didn't mind. The characters, the twists, and the general awesomeness of imagination made up for the slowness in spades. Can't wait to read the other two in the series and now I can allow myself to see the movie! (I never, ever, if I can help it, see a movie based on a book before reading the book nor do I ever, ever read a book based on a movie. Not sure why in either case. I just don't.)

Guess that's all. :D Off to work-work!

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Stupid People

2009-02-23T05:40:00.003-06:00

OK, I can tell from the way my face is breaking out that I am PMS-ing and it is, therefore, entirely possible that I am not being completely rational.

That out of the way: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?!!???!!!!!!!!

Honestly. All I want to do is set up my freelance editing business and edit stuff that I want to edit. Is that so hard?

It seems to be.

Here's the sordid story: I'm trying to set up a contract with a company in a non-English speaking country and can't seem to get them to understand that while, yes, I have a degree in a certain social science, I do not really consider myself qualified to edit in that field because I have done nothing in it for the last FOURTEEN YEARS.

Meanwhile, I have oodles and oodles of experience editing in certain areas of biomedical research, areas in which I have undertaken a great deal of training, formal and informal, but which apparently - because I have no piece of paper to declare me competent in that area - counts for nothing.

This is stupid.

OK, OK, I can see that they might want a person with a "hard science" degree editing hard science stuff. That makes sense. To a point. Then it gets stupid.

Because if you have at your disposal a person who is a good editor in a certain area, what difference does their level of formal training make? I assert that it doesn't make much. I may be a bit more cautious when changing certain things than a person with a hard science degree. I may query authors a bit more than someone with a hard science degree. But I'm a damn good editor and I will make the language you use to report your science all shiny and appealing to journal editors. That's what I do.

Furthermore, I really have nothing by a passing interest in my undergrad degree field. I'm sorta just over it.

Which puts me in quandry: What do I do? What do I tell these people?

I've tried already to explain my position, but they aren't listening. My option is to edit in this other field -- the one I've been out of for 14 years -- or... nothing. No contract. No money. No nice little start-up client for my fledgling freelance biz.

Which sucks.

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Lessons Learned

2009-02-16T18:04:00.003-06:00

I thought the Character Clinic (CC101) Joely hosted over the weekend was fabulous! Even though I didn't win anything, I learned a ton about how to build characters and what I like about them - among many other things.

And it's the "other things" that, for some reason, are really churning around in the ol' brain right now.

Two interesting things occurred as a strangely direct result of CC101. One, I'm not prepared to discuss yet. It's still churning, and it ain't turned to butter yet...

The other is the big one for me (a big pain in the ass, that is...): theme. Stories have themes. They just do. Any good story worth the paper or pixels it's printed on, anyway, has a theme, an overriding, overarching thread of wisdom that guides the ultimate outcome. That's how I define it for myself, anyway.

I flat-out SUCK at theme in my own writing.

There are reasons for this.

First of all, I blame the fact that as a reader, I don't like to analyze. I don't like digging for meaning. I hated high school lit classes (and didn't take any in college unless they were in another language). I just about despise what Susan likes to refer to as "great litra-chur", because, dude, I bust my ass all day, every day with job, kids, house, hobbies, etc. I do not want to work when I read -- I just want to be entertained, be lost in another world, be someone else for a while.

Second, I like a story with an adventure best, and that's what I like to write too. My ever-so-logical brain therefore likes to argue: "It's an adventure! It's a quest! We don't need a theme! We just need more monsters!"

Last and most important, I am not a Believer In Things. Maybe I'm overly practical, maybe I'm a die-hard cynic. I don't know. I do know that I don't do god or God or Buddha or Allah or whatever else is out there. If you've stopped by before, you probably already know this.

But it goes deeper than that. And gets weird.

For example, as much as I love a good love story in my adventure or even a well-written romance sans adventure, here's what I believe love actually is:

Ya ready? You're gonna be shaking your head with pity, I guarantee it.

OK, really: Love is...

a biological trick your mind plays on your body to get you to reproduce.

That's it. No cupid. No destiny. No such thing as a soul mate. It's all in the DNA, in other words. All that happy, glowy, goo-goo, ga-ga crap is a mere by-product of a very successful ploy - encoded in your DNA - to ensure that you... make more DNA!

Now isn't that cynical in the extreme? How can someone who believes this at the very deepest core of her being ever write a love story?

Logic says it's impossible. Logic says: Oh, please! Get a grip!

And yet... something about all that reading about character creation this weekend shook something loose somewhere. Don't ask me how, 'cuz I really don't know. And I haven't changed my mind about any of it, but somehow my perception changed.

I think it must have been taking a second look at my favorite characters through other writers' lenses -- Oh, that one's static trait is this! and .... OOOOoooh! It means that! and Heey! He's a Cancer! and so on.

At some point late last night or early this morning, it all shifted and instead of "It's just DNA", I now have "It may just be DNA, but it's going to find you whether you want it to or not."

Makes sense, right? I mean, it happened to me (and if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone...) - I fell in love, I got married and here we are smack dab in the middle of Happily Ever After.

So now I have a theme, at least for Novel #1 with which it fits PERFECTLY (*boggles*):

You can run, but you can't hide. Love is gonna find you whether you like it or not.

101 Ways to Love Your Characters: Characters by Collision

2009-02-15T12:00:00.000-06:00

OK, like I said several posts previous, yapping about how great my own characters are gives me the willies. But in the spirit of CC101, I will do it anyway. :D OK, I'm not really going to talk about how great they are, but I will tell you the story of how two of my characters came to be.

First, let me introduce Fenn and Kesera, the two main characters from my very own Novel #1 (of spaghettified plot fame...). Fenn is Prince Charming with a tragic past and a drug problem. Kesera is a bi-racial damsel causing distress (to pretty much everyone around her). I like them a lot. They are very patient with me, thankfully, so perhaps someday, when I become capable of plotting my way out of wet paper bag, I will manage to get their story told. :)

Anyway.

The story of the way they came about as characters is sort of interesting (at least I think so), so I thought I'd share it. It goes like this:

I saw this movie, King Arthur, which I absolutely hated almost every minute of (despite the fact that Clive Owen is in it). Leaving aside the idiotic idea that Arthur was actually from the Russian steppes (don't mess with my legends, maaan!), the reason I hated the movie so much is because I never felt that any of the main characters really had anything at stake. OK, sure, according to the plot, they were supposed to, so maybe it was just that the acting wasn't remotely convincing. Whatever. In my opinion, there was nothing worth seeing in that movie. Save one thing.

Now - I made a point of saying I hated almost every minute of that movie. The minutes I did not hate, had him in them:

Only he looked like this:

The actor's name is Til Schweiger and in that awful movie he played Cynric, the son of the invading bad guy. Cynric's story was the only one I cared about in that movie; he was the only one who had anything at stake -- he wanted his father to respect him. His father wouldn't give him the time of day.

None of which matters, because it wasn't his story that stayed with me, but his face. And his outfit. And that braided beard. And the look of despair he had when he finally gave up on his dad.

A few weeks later I saw one of the Tomb Raider movies, the one with the mountain in Africa and the well of life or whatever it was. I don't remember. What I do remember is the guy who played Lara Croft's almost lover, specifically I remember his accent. I think it might have been Scottish.

Anyway, soon after seeing that movie, the accent collided with the face, outfit, braided beard, and look of despair. Next thing I knew, there was Fenn. Glaring at me, all silent and deadly-like. From the deck of a ship headed south, a direction in which he did not want to go.

I had no idea why. I had no idea who he was or what the hell he thought he was doing in my head.

But when I asked him, he told me.

And thus was Kesera born.

Fenn didn't describe her or anything -- he had never seen her himself -- but he told me where she was and when I poked around in her castle, there she was. Also glaring, also kinda deadly-like.

I don't remember now whether her appearance came from a movie -- her hair may well have been inspired by Lara Croft's -- but I know her eyes are exactly like my friend Megan's (bright jewel-blue; in the right light, they almost seem to glow). The rest of her came from a song called The Gypsy Rover. As sung by the Wiggles. (Yes, those Wiggles. Of "Fruit Salad, Yummy, Yummy" fame...)

So - that's the story of Fenn and Kesera and how they came to be. And, yes, most of my major characters sort of "appear" like that -- all dressed up and itching to tell me where they want to go. They are usually made up of bits and pieces of other things I've seen or heard that have run into each other in my brain and melded together to make something new. I guess it's an odd way to come up with characters, but I'm one of those "visual learner" people, so maybe that's the best way for them to get my attention. lol! :D

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101 Ways to Love Your Characters: Neil MeqVren

2009-02-15T05:17:00.005-06:00

I think my favorite thing about reading is being in a character's head. Nothing is quite like it. Movies, for instance, are great and I love them, but they can't ever come close to the experience of almost being someone else that you can have when you're reading a story in a well-written, really tight POV.

My favorite example to give of this is Greg Keyes' Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series. It's a great, great series and an amazingly told story. Four books follow a handful of characters caught up in a battle between good and evil. In a nutshell: there are kings, queens, princesses, knights, demons, aliens, assassins, religious cults, magical creatures, and dangerous secrets as old as the world. (Yeah - it's awesome.)

What I really love about it, though, is how the POV switches between the 4 or 5 main characters - a young, very headstrong princess; her mother, the queen; a knight in the queen's service; the "holter" in charge of the king's forest; a novice priest - and several of the minor characters to tell the complete story. Every time the POV changes, the whole feel of the story changes - a whole new world within the world of the story opens up. It's a whole new experience. Sometimes it's amusing, because each character's perception of the other characters is, of course, vastly different from character's views of themselves. Sometimes it's terrifying, because you find yourself in the head of a character who is being murdered. Sometimes you're in the head of the villian. Each time, though, you are totally immersed in that character's experience - to the point where you find yourself missing that character as his or her chapter ends and another character's POV takes over.

Neil MeqVren. Neil is my favorite character in this series and one of my top five favorite characters ever. He has one of the best journeys of any character I've ever read in a book. He is endearing in his innocence in the beginning, then tragic as his all convictions about honor and loyalty are slowly and brutally shattered, then he's charming as he begins to accept that if something might go wrong, you can count on the fact that it most definitely will, and then you cheer when he finally takes matters into his own hands.

The fact that you are so tightly in his head the whole time makes the experience that much better. You are privy to the thoughts he will not allow himself to speak aloud and the feelings he can barely stand to acknowledge at all. I suppose it's the juxtaposition itself -- knowing what he's thinking and observing that he won't say it -- that makes him such a powerfully memorable character. It's what makes him spring off the page, because haven't we all had thoughts we dare not voice and feelings we dare not admit? It says volumes about him without saying anything at all. Brilliant!

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101 Ways to Love Your Characters: the Darkyn

2009-02-14T11:00:00.001-06:00

Yes, it's me again with yet another entry for the Character Clinic! I feel like I'm being totally obnoxious posting this much. Oh, well. :)

This post is another in honor of Joely and her fabulous idea, because it was she who introduced me to all the wonderful characters in Lynn Veihl's Darkyn series. She held a contest, see, and I won a copy of Twilight Fall. Yaay! Winning is good, but being introduced to a fabulous series of books you never knew existed is even better. I liked them so much, I went out and bought them all, and now I am merrily foisting them on everyone I know. :D

Anyway - the characters are what make this series so interesting and keeps me coming back. (That and the writing is really, really excellent, which pleases the editor side of my brain no end and is probably a topic for a whole other post, but whatever.) The characters are memorable, because they are so vividly portrayed -- each one has a very distinct personality.

More to the point of my post, however, is that they stay very much "in character" when they react to each other. This is one of my biggest pet peeves as a reader. Stories I end up not liking are stories in which characters have sudden and inexplicable personality changes. I get really pissed off when characters that are dark and sardonic one minute become sweet and sappy the next for no apparent reason -- other than the author needs them to for the plot to progress. This is something I learned ages and ages ago in high school acting classes and it was drilled into me by one of my favorite teachers of all time. It comes down to this: KNOW YOUR CHARACTER'S MOTIVATION. Every single second you are on stage. Every single page, paragraph and sentence of your story. In other words, KNOW WHY your characters are doing what they're doing. More importantly, however, make sure your reader knows why. Don't assume I'll follow a sudden personality shift, if you've given me no reason for it. Make it plain, make it easy to see. Otherwise, I'll put your book down mid-way through and not pick it up ever again. Lynn Veihl's Darkyn characters never violate this rule, and that's what keeps me coming back.

Some of my favorite characters are below:

Alex. Alex was, before being made into a vampire, a surgeon, a really, really good one. Her basic motivation is to "un-make" herself and go back to being human. Everything she does in the stories is based on this and she never deviates from this basic premise. She also a sarcastic, sharp-tongued, in-your-face modern woman, and she never lets the medieval-minded vampires change that, not even the one she loves.

Jayr and Aiden. The story of these two characters is told in Evermore, probably my favorite book in the series. Jayr, I like because she reminds me of me - reserved on the outside, on fire on the inside, but she'll never let anyone see it, especially not Aiden, the vampire she's loved in silence for 700 years. Aiden loves her, of course, but for his own reasons can't say anything either. Throughout the story they keep coming close to getting together, but it keeps going wrong -- for reasons that you understand completely as a reader because each time, what keeps them apart is based on their own basic motivations.

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101 Ways To Love Your Characters: Miphon, Morgan Hearst and Elkor Alish

2009-02-14T07:36:00.005-06:00

Another entry for Joely's Character Clinic:

These are my three favorite characters from the book "Wizard War" by Hugh Cook, which was published in the UK (and possibly Aus and NZ) as "The Wizards and the Warriors". Fabulous book, fabulous author, freakin' shame that it's out of print, in my opinion, and freakin' CRIMINAL that most of the rest of the books in the series Wizard War is part of never even got published in the US, because it's some of the best magic, world building, characters, and plot EVER and ....

Erm, anyway.... back to the characters...

Miphon. I love Miphon. And not just for his green eyes, I promise. Miphon is a wizard of the order of Nin, a weak-ish order of wizards in his world and "lives as as traveling healer with no fixed abode". He is often called a 'pox doctor' and regarded with something just above scorn by his colleagues (two other wizards of more powerful orders), but we instantly like him as soon as we meet him in the book because he is sensible, practical, sort of slyly, mildly sardonic, and seems to have a mysterious past that is alluded to here and there, comes in handy once or twice, and that is never quite fleshed out completely, which leaves you wanting more, more, more about Miphon, please!

He is, in a word, fascinating-from-the-very-beginning.

And he gets better. He makes mistakes - stupid mistakes - that lead to huge problems with solutions that make you want to smack your head when you realize YOU should have figured out the solution to his problem too and way before he did. He is tempted, tempted powerfully, and in exactly the right way, a way that makes you want to scream, "Take it! Take the power! Do it!", because you know he deserves it, you know he's earned it, you're sure - sure - he'll do good with it, and you cheer loud and long when he does - and then he scares the piss out of you with what he starts to do... and then he makes a really stunning and heart wrenching choice that has you all weak in the knees over him all over again.

Mmmmmm'yeeeeeeaah.... Miphon.

Morgan Hearst. Ah, Morgan Hearst... how I love Morgan Hearst! He's complicated. He's flawed... OK, really, really flawed. He drinks too much. He thinks too little. He's an anti-hero -- no, no, he's an anti-hero's anti-hero! He's... well, OK, honestly? Morgan Hearst is a freakin' mess. And you love him for it. You can't help it.

Elkor Alish. A warrior. An unbeatable, flawless, ruthless warrior. Elkor Alish is a tough one, actually. I'm never quite sure why I like him so much... maybe because he's so broken inside... *gulps, sniffs* yeah, that would be it. That, and you want so badly for him to heal himself... he has a tragic past, see - and I'm a sucker for a tragic past - and that makes you feel he really deserves to have it all made better in the end. *sigh*

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101 Ways to Love Your Characters: Gregar

2009-02-13T06:03:00.000-06:00

Entry Number One in Joely's Character Clinic: Well, since I think Joely is so clever for thinking this Charcter Clinic thing up, I thought I'd start off with one of her own characters! Hah!

Gregar. Ah, Gregar... where to start? Well, I'll start with where you can find him: Gregar is a character in Joely Sue Burkhart's book The Rose of Shanhasson. (Go on! Go get it! You'll be glad you did, I promise!)

I always love a conflicted character (as you'll discover in coming posts...) and Gregar is definitely that. He is driven. He has a mission and a duty, and he is honor-bound to fulfill them. However, in his secret heart of hearts lurks an undeniable need that conflicts so deeply with all that honor, that Gregar would pretty much rather die than allow himself to have it. Excellent stuff.

And oh my, let's not forget: he's dead sexy and dark and wickedly dangerous -- in other words, three of my favorite things! :D

In all honesty, though, what really makes me a raving, rabid Gregar fan is that his conflict is one that strikes a chord with me, one I thought was deeply buried, one that drags me out of my warm, comfortable, married-with-two-kids-and-a-steady-job life right down into Joely's Well, the place where all our darkest fears and desires hide and which is terrifyingly similar to my own Well. Which perhaps is why, at a certain point in Gregar's story, I just sat there reading this one page over and over again while I cried and cried and cried.

That's why Gregar stays with me, I guess: I've been there. I've felt that. I know just what he's suffering. And that is the kernel of a great character for me: a character that reflects some bit of being human that I recognize. Maybe it makes me feel validated. I don't know - that sounds sappy as hell, but I'm a sap, so it's probably true!

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eBooks

2009-02-11T17:29:00.005-06:00

(This one's a rambler, guys, sorry. This is what happens to Bethanie when she is subjected to all work and no play...)

I've been meaning to post about ebooks - at length - forever. Of course, my life is such a vortex of unending activity, I have yet to really get around to it.

And since I'm in the middle of cooking supper, I don't really have time now either, but I must put in a plug, because I'm so... oh, I don't know, giddy, I guess, over my latest discovery/acquisition/experience. :-D

Here's the story: I've had a Palm OS PDA for years and years and years. I've upgraded from a Handspring to a color Handspring to a Tungsten E and - finally, a year or so ago - to a Treo. I love them - love them, love them, love them. I mean, I'm practically evangelical about them. Really. Don't get me started on how great they are unless you have 30 or 40 minutes for me to show you mine and all the wicked nifty things it can do.

Including my all-time favorite feature ever, an ebook reader.

Actually, I now have 2 ebook readers on the ol' Treo. One came from a company that started out as Peanut Press (or something like that) back in my Handspring days, which evolved into eReader.com, which is now some arm of Fictionwise, I believe.

And I like it. It works great, has never crashed on me and I have something like 60 or so ebooks that take up NO space in my house and that my children cannot destroy.

However, for the last couple of years, I keep seeing Mobipocket everywhere. I finally broke down today and downloaded it (it's free, but I dislike having two gadgets that do the same thing, so I resisted -- this is the same reason I haven't yet bought a Kindle... although the Kindle 2 is seriously tempting me -- the thing reads to you!). Why now? Well, because I really, really, really wanted a copy of Angelle Trieste's Devil Falls and since I didn't win the contest but was totally hooked by the excerpt posted as part of the contest, I said, "OK, fine. It's time."

So I downloaded Mobipocket, bought the ebook, downloaded it, loaded it on the Treo, and now here I am all ready to read! No muss, no fuss - no gas used up driving to the bookstore, no useless little bag I can't use for anything else, no paper receipt I have to stress over where to store, instant gratification, no worries over what to do with a book I end up not liking, etc.

I am pleased. :)

The moral, or rather morals, of this long and rambling tale of mine:

1. ebooks are freakin' COOL and are just getting cooler.

2. Writers, especially new ones trying to break in to the biz, listen up: Contests work! Posting excerpts works! Posting a link to where I can buy your ebook works great!

3. I want more.

4. Yaaay, ebooks!!!

5. I think that is all. For now.

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Where, Oh Where, Did Bethanie Go?

2009-02-07T08:00:00.000-06:00

OK, it's been a scandalouly long time since I've posted ANYTHING here... terrible!

I have excuses - dozens, in fact - but I'm sick of dealing with them to the point of not wanting to re-hash them here, even if it means missing out on bitching about something. :D

Anyway, I've been working on some posts that are scheduled for next weekend for Joely's Character Clinic, and it's been interesting - and educational - picking apart why I like certain characters so much. There are some striking similarities, especially when it comes to male characters, heh-heh... :)

When it comes to my OWN characters, however, the brain gets all shy and tongue-tied and won't cough up anything. Weird. I suspect this stems from my rather vast insecurities about my own writing -- it seems presumptuous, at the very least, to expound on what makes my own characters so great and/or what clever tricks I use to add depth to them and make them memorable, when not only have I published no fiction whatsoever, I haven't even ever submitted anything, and rarely let anyone read what I've written.

In other words, I'm chicken shit.

Which is not something I will put up with from myself.

*sigh*

So I guess that means I will be forcing myself to write at least one post about my own characters.

But I think I'll save it for last, heh-heh...

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Online Class

2009-01-18T19:21:00.002-06:00

Tuition & Fees: $600.

Required Book & Lab Manual: $335.

Assorted Notebooks, Pens & Binders: $25.

Going to Class at 4AM in My Pajamas: Prrrrriceless!

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Need Directions To The Nearest Plank...

2009-01-16T05:10:00.001-06:00

...so I can walk off it, 'cuz I could really use a dip in the drink today.

It's been a helluva week. It started with a list of 5 papers to edit, submit and/or do something! with (as-soon-as-possible, thank-you-please), which soon grew to 7, then 8, then 10, which is as many as I normally deal with in a month.

Add to that another massive data entry project (which apparently counts as editing, don't ask me why...) and -- drum roll, please! -- a page proof! I knew it! I just knew there would be a page proof this week, since I'm insanely busy. There's always a page proof when I'm insanely busy. Never on a slow week. What fun would that be, anyway?

And then, there are the pirates.

I got frustrated with them for going full-blown novel on me, when all I wanted was a short story, so I fussed, pouted, and was generally very grumpy until they agreed to tone it down. And then I tried to cram them into a 500-word flash piece.

That sorta worked, because I actually FINISHED something for once. But I'm not sure it works as flash, and I'm thinking I'm going to rewrite it in short story form, but based on the flash storyline... if that makes any sense at all...

Probably not. But whatever.

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Pirates, Walk The Plank, Please

2009-01-11T20:23:00.002-06:00

So I’ve already used up 3500 words of my 5000-word limit on the pirate story. That’s good, in a way, because I’ve written a whole bunch in the last few days and I don’t hate it and I love the characters, but…

I love the damn characters and – totally fucking predictably - they’re taking me WAY deeper into their adventures and lives than I have room or any business being in a short story. I mean, I could write 5000 words worth of just backstory! Seriously, if I manage to tell the story they’re wanting me to tell in less than 20,000 words, I will find a fucking plank and walk off it. Gah!

Part of the problem with me writing short stories, I think, is that I don’t read nearly enough of them on a regular basis. I just don’t have a good enough sense of how they’re put together to successfully put one together myself. I’m making an effort to correct that, but … well, there are only so many minutes here and there in a day during which I am not required to be doing something else.

*exasperated sigh*

Anyway, I’m not giving up (since I love the characters so damn much), but I think I’m probably going to have to sit down and think about what the bare bones of the story are.

And then start over.

*blows raspberries*

Some days it just sucks to be me, don’t it?

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Ta-Dah!! NaNo 2008 Complete! Finally!

2009-01-09T07:55:00.002-06:00

It is not pretty. It is not even "right" most likely.

But for now, I don't care.

It's done! It's done! IT'S DONE!!!

I can move on. I can do something else now! I've started a pirate story... ??!?

I know: pirates - WTF, but cool! I'm hoping to cram it into 5000 words and submit it to Membra Disjecta for their March issue.

I'll let ya know how that goes... (Short stories are definitely not one of my strengths as a writer...)

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Aw, Crap....

2009-01-04T07:51:00.003-06:00

Or: NaNo - I Hate It When That Happens

I just realized I took a bit of a wrong turn in my final climax/battle-to-the-death scene. A wrong turn that is going to cost me 1200 words that I spent the last, like, 3 or 4 days writing. Yeah. 1200 words totally wasted.

God damn it, but that SUCKS.

I think I'll go do something fun now. Like laundry or swabbing the kitchen.

Gah!

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NaNo 2008 – The Final Stretch (I MEAN It!)

2009-01-03T08:34:00.004-06:00

OK, I have swallowed my horror at not finishing the story in December and set a new goal of 85K words to reach the hallowed ground know as “The End”. That will add a little over 5000 new words. Which should be PLENTY, dammit.

I’ve got a pretty tight deadline for this – January 12th. That’s when my online Anatomy & Physiology class starts, and since I’ve been out of college for a shocking 14 years (*faints*), I think it’s going to take some adjustment to get used to that kind of brain activity and I doubt I’ll be up for writing much (at least, for a few weeks).

Anyway, if I reach The End before the 85K mark, I’ll go back and work on some of the new scenes I’ll have to add when I edit.

If I’m still not to The End at 85K, I’m just gonna throw a big, fat hissy fit.

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Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T07:27:00.003-06:00

Well, I think I failed to complete even one of my 2008 goals, which is both depressing and surprising. I really thought they were good, achievable goals. Apparently not.

And now that I look back at them, I get the sense that they aren't as concrete as I thought they were when I made them. I mean, I said things like "complete and submit one short story", which is good as far as it goes, but still vague. WHICH stort story? Submit WHERE? Another goal was to complete an edit of either NaNo 2005 or NaNo 2006 - WHICH ONE? I needed to be that specific.

I also didn't set deadlines. I now see that as a real weakness in my plan. Deadlines get my ass in gear. Without them, I don't do much.

That in mind, this year I have made an effort to be really, really, really freakin' specific.

1. Complete the kestlebird story. A kestlebird is a mythical creature in my fantasy universe and I have had a bunch of ideas kicking around and one story started. But not completed. I will complete it this year. DEADLINE: Hmmmm.... let's say March 31st.

2. Get back on track with my writing course. It's Holly Lisle's Think Sideways course and it's fabulous and I'm weeks behind now, even though I'm doing the every-other-week option instead of the every-week option. I need to get back on track with it ASAP, because I'm starting an online anatomy and physiology class January 15th... ack! I can handle both. I think. But only if I get back on track, hence - DEADLINE: January 31, 2009.

3. One complete edit of NaNo 2008. There is a LOT to do on this one. First, I have to complete the first rough draft. The deadline for that is January 12, because my class starts on the 15th and I don't want to be trying to write a thousand words a day while also trying to spend 8 hours a week doing actual classwork. So that is Goal 3a. Goal 3b is to read through the draft and take notes on what to add, what to rewrite, new scenes needed, etc. The Goal 3b deadline is April 30th (I was going to say the 15th, but that's Tax Day, isn't it? Yeah. How 'bout I don't set myself up for failure there, eh?). Goal 3c is to take the notes from the read through and incorporate them chapter by chapter. I honestly have no idea how long that will actually take, but I'll set a deadline of September 3o, 2009, since I'll want to start planning for NaNo 2009 October 1 and will likely get very little else done after that.

OK, I'm going to stop there. That's probably as much as I can handle, so anything I would add (and I have a long list of things I could add) would be pointless.

Good luck to everyone with their goals!

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NaNo... My Gahd. Will It Never END?!??

2008-12-31T21:17:00.007-06:00

So we drove home from Florida yesterday and are safely back in Itty-Bitty City once again, where it is considerably colder than the shorts-and-T-shirt temps we had became used to. Sad, that, but one cannot vacation forever when one is not independently wealthy, which - sadder still - we are not.

The trip went well (no one puked!), but I wrote NOTHING. Instead of working on my own novel, I spent my non-driving hours reading some (truly dreadful) "stock" romance novels (I got them for free and I believe it to be an essential part of my writer education to read other fiction genres (and I learned a lot - mostly about what NOT to do - but more about that later)), regardless of whether or not they actually interest me (and let's just say "stock" romance is, erm... not my first choice).

Anyway. The point of this post is to lay out in public the fact that I have not yet completed my December goal of 22,500 words and the phrase "The End" typed at the bottom of my 2008 NaNo.

I cannot and will not accept failure.

So - it's 9:30-ish, the children are in bed and The Husband just left to pick up his dad and step-mom from the airport. I have approximately 1-1/2 hours of pretty-much-assured continuous silence without distractions -- and about 1500 words to write.

Here 'goes.

Wish me luck!

EDIT - 11:25 pm: Well, I made the 22.5K goal-for-December. Yaaay!! :-D Didn't break 80K, though. And didn't type "The End" either. On the bright side, I'm ending the day in the midst of a battle scene and Bran has an arrow embedded in his abdomen! Oh, dear. Poor, Bran... how ever shall I get him out of this one??

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NaNo ... Uphill in January?

2008-12-27T07:07:00.003-06:00

Still making progress, but slogging along. Christmas, Florida, and family are NOT conducive to writing. Like, at all. I wrote all of 29 words before the kids woke up yesterday, and then it was non-stop Everything Else all day long. Tennis, shopping, Bananagrams (great game!), and movies (Wall-e, which is effing brilliant) - oh, yes, and eating, let's not forget eating - took up the rest of the day.

This morning I managed to get just over 1000 words, so all is not lost, but I wanted to be DONE by now! Arrrgh! At least, the story is where it is supposed to be. Two more scenes and That's. It.

Until it's time to edit and probably add another 20K...

OK, I think I'll go quietly insane now...

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NaNo Florida

2008-12-23T05:40:00.002-06:00

Hello from sunny - but cool - Florida!

Yes, we're here! We made it! And with only two bouts of car sickness (thank you, Ms. Baby) and a minimum of 'are-we-there-yets' (thank you whoever invented portable DVD players). It was one long, long day, but whatever. It's over and I went swimming yesterday.

Progress on NaNo 2008 creeps along. I wrote NOTHING in the car at all, though I did get some really sticky plot problems worked out. I don't know why, but driving always helps immensely in that area. Terry Brooks mentions this in his book on writing, and I doubt it would work for everyone (not everyone actually likes driving), but there's something about having a particular proportion of my brain occupied with a task like that that frees the rest of the brain for more interesting things. So, yippee for that!

It's hard to find time to write here, though. The kids want to play. My sisters and my mom want to shop and talk and eat and drink coffee ALL DAY. I think we have a field trip of some sort planned for today. So it's hard to squeeze writing in anywhere.

But I woke up at 5:15 this morning and just said what the hell. I'll write til the kids get up. And now I've got just over 1000 words today and here I am at 75,000 for the story!

If that continues, I should be good on the December goal. After that, I'm not sure what I'll do. I know at some point, I should just put it away to come back to later. But I don't think it's ready for me to do that just yet. I think I need to go back through with the notebook I kept during NaNo of Things that Need Fixin' and take care of them. Then there are several bad guy POV scenes I want to add, and THEN I think I'll let it sit.

So that means I'll have to sit down and figure out how many words that will take and set a new goal with a new spread sheet and a new word ticker and.... *sigh*

I wonder if it will ever actully end...

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Ooooo! Nifty-ness!

2008-12-17T19:48:00.003-06:00

Thanks to Soleil's blog, I found a nifty little word counter thing-a-ma-bob!

The Angel and the Assassin

72,022 / 80,000
(89.0%)

This is cool, because it shows what I did before (the gray area) and the progress I'm making on 'phase II', so to speak. Very cool! And I think if you click on it, you can get one too! :-D

EDIT: Ooo, weird... does it look all broke up to you? It seems to be fine in my sidebar, but here in the actual post, it's ... been julienned! Ack!

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Updates, Updates, Updates.

2008-12-15T05:01:00.001-06:00

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 70,121

Cumulative Total Words for December: 13,432

Aaaah! I broke 70K last night and it felt good. Bran and Heilla are still a crazy mess and I still don't understand a few critical things that are happening, but I'm just going to go with it. I really, really want to finish the draft by the end of December and I'm running out of time! We leave for Florida next Sunday, and between Christmas and my sisters, I have a feeling not much writing is going to get done there...

Plus, there are some other BIG things going on: I got my business licenses from the county and city last week, which means I really need to get the content written for the website so it's ready when the design is done. Saturday in the mail I got notification that the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences thinks I have enough experience to be eligible to take their certification exam - woo-hoo! and I'm thrilled, but now I have to go through the study guide, figure out where I'm lacking skills and knowledge and make up a plan and schedule for filling in those gaps by next October, which is when I want to take the exam.

Yikes! Full steam ahead!

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NaNo: Onward, Ho!

2008-12-13T11:49:00.003-06:00

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 68,936

Cumulative Total Words for December: 12,247

I am happy to report that the pogo stick worked and the story is now suffering under the weight of some serious Plot Bunny Proliferation Problems (which I will take any day over Brick Walls of Utter Nothingness, thankyouverymuch). Yahoo!

In part, I owe this wonderous turn of events to the fact that I woke up at 3:30 AM horrified that I still had No Idea what Fancy Dessert I was going to bring this afternoon to Christmas-Early-Because-Everyone's-Traveling-This-Year at the in-laws (OMG, did that even make sense? how much coffee have I had today...). Thanks to Internet-on-my-Phone, I soon found something (cranberry orange bundt cake!) and tried to go back to sleep.

However.

Bran and Heilla kept jabbing me in the back and whinging on about how they were cold, lost in the fog and hungry and would I please, please, pleeeeeeeease consider getting out of bed (even though it was still dark) and get them out of the freezing rain and under a blanket or something.

At 4:23 AM, I gave in to the jabbing and sat down on the couch with a Hazelnut Soy Latte (which, miraculously enough, no one woke up while I made) and wrote 1,836 words!

And now Bran and Heilla are in even deeper shit than they were before... 0.0

But that's good. And there's hand-to-hand combat on deck for late this evening or tomorrow morning. And that's even better (I do love a battle scene...).

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Typo of the Day

2008-12-10T14:22:00.002-06:00

For once, not one of my own...

Happened across this today: What happens when you remove the first "e" from the word "genome"?

Yes! You guessed it! You get a "gnome-wide association study"!!!!!

'Cuz, yanno, the better we understand the gnomes among us, the happier our gardens will be. Or something.

Anyway, Go Gnomes!!

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Brick Wall, Meet Pogo Stick

2008-12-10T05:10:00.000-06:00

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 65,433

Cumulative Total Words for December: 8,744

Yep. Still steaming along and even averaging over 900 words a day! Which is bloody amazing considering how much else is going on (most of which I can't even talk about, because it's so top secret...).

Unfortunately, it's all about to come to a crashing halt. At least, it's trying to... I can see a brick wall on the horizon.

See, Bran and his girl have to escape. They're currently on a forced march through the wilderness to a worse prison than they were in before.

But that isn't even the real problem.

The real problem is that they have to get away before the bad guy catches up to them, and he's not far behind. Only they have no means of getting away because they're marching through a meadow. There's no cover. No bushes. No boulders. Not so much as a tall weed to hide behind. Plus, it's early spring, so the meadow grass is all flat and half rotted from sitting under the snow all winter - in other words, it won't hide them if they lay down in it.

So I know they get away. But I don't know how. So I'm about to be stuck.

Enter, Pogo Stick.

If there is one thing I have learned, and learned well, in four years of doing NaNo, it is this: Stop. For. Nothing.

There's no need. It will work itself out or you will figure it out later (i.e., after you are done with the draft and can afford the time to sit down and think it through). Either way, it isn't worth derailing your momentum and chances are the solution will present itself one way or another.

So wish me luck - I'm about to make the big hop! (Seriously, it's been, like, 30 years since I last mounted a pogo stick....I may well break something...!).

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Maybe There Is Hope For Writers

2008-12-08T05:08:00.000-06:00

Or, at least, there is someone with some sense out there.

Someone posted a link to this NY Times article on writing to the AMWA freelance listserve. It's brilliant and painfully, painfully true.

Typing Without A Clue

And it reinforces my sense that SOMETHING has got to change in the publishing industry, and that if it doesn't change itself, we-the-writers will figure out a way to circumvent it. Maybe POD. Maybe PDF. Maybe something entirely different. I don't know.

But there has be a way. There has to be. Because I'm tired of waiting to read Susan's novel about Trevor and the gang. I'm tired of not having hard copies of Joely's stuff. I'm tired of reading about people like Joe the Plumber and OJ Simpson getting published, while people who can actually tell a damn good story don't.

OK, so what if the rules are the rules and life isn't fair. I say let's change the damn rules already.

So there.

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How To Make An Entrance

2008-12-07T09:10:00.003-06:00

So Ms. Baby (a.k.a. the Loudest Child on the Planet), out of the blue this morning, starts yowling at the top of her lungs and stomping her feet as she marches across the living room floor, comes to an abrupt halt between my desk and the couch her sister is sitting on, grins around at her now rapt audience and says, "Hi Everybody!".

Something tells me her teenage years are going to be... "interesting".

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Laughter

2008-12-05T10:30:00.002-06:00

Boss Lady had a meeting today with somebody who arrived when I was away from my desk (they have to walk by me to get to her), so I didn't know who it was. I could hear them talking, but they were speaking in Chinese, which I don't understand well enough to figure out who the visitor was from listening in.

And then the visitor laughed - a good laugh, genuine, not fake.

And then I smiled, because I knew exactly who it was.

It's a good thing when you can recognize a person from their laugh, and it makes you smile, you know what I mean?

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Still on Target

2008-12-04T05:35:00.002-06:00

Amazingly enough... I have not yet fallen behind!

OK, OK - so I'm only going for 750 words/day. That's still the Mt. Everest of goals some days, what with grant deadlines, kids, colds, Christmas, and the ever-present Hell known as Housework... :)

And things are getting "interesting". I had this one character that had sort of dead ended during NaNo, so I had just let her sit and pout in a corner. Monday morning on the commute in to FPU, she burst out with what actually happens with her while her cousin is being tortured...!

Yahoo!

Total December Words: 2,399
Total Words for the 2008 NaNo: 59,088

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Figures...

2008-12-02T15:51:00.003-06:00

I was going to actually sit down and re-figure out how much story I have to write, then post a number, but naturally Boss Lady has a grant to submit tomorrow, so - no time for such pleasures...

However, my ball park guess is 9 more scenes and since my scenes tend to run about 2500 words, it comes out to 22,500 for December, which it totally doable. I've set my daily goal at 750 words and snagged that easily yesterday.

Tonight, of course, will all about the angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels) and the genes in this pathway related to breast cancer survival. Oh, the joy. I can hardly contain it.

Gah!

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NaNo: Victorious-ness!

2008-12-01T06:41:00.003-06:00

Weeee-hooo! I won! *does happy dance*

Naturally, the story is only 2/3 to 3/4 of the way to the extra-happy happy-dance state of Actually Finished, but it's a good start. I took Turkey Day off (well, from writing-writing... I took a notebook and pen and worked out the final scenes in the car on the way to the sister-in-law's house), but on Friday decided rather than be trampled to death in a shopping frenzy, I would get back to work and try to get as much done as I could, so I would have less to do in December -- because I WILL finish the story in December, come hell or high water. We've got a long (15-hour) car ride to my parents' place in Florida, so there's a good chunk of time, even if I have to do a lot of the driving myself (I may be driving one way with just me and the girlz, but we'll see, we have yet to finalize dates and such...)

Anyway, I'm still using the 200-word Trick, because it works so incredibly well for me. I routinely hit 2,000 on days that I do this, and it's relatively painless. OK, that's a lie. But it breaks the pain into small, managable pieces and I tend not to bleed all over my keyboard quite as much as if I try to sit down and just write 2,000 words all in one go. :D

So to keep myself honest, I'm going to work out my goal for December today, post it and update it. Hopefully, that will keep me from slacking off and finding new and interesting ways of slurping eggnog instead of writing.

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Procrastinations Galore

2008-11-26T21:50:00.002-06:00

Word Count as of 7 AM today: 46,009

Word Count as of 6 PM today: 49,018

Which is impressive for me, until you consider that I've been at it just as hard for the last 3 hours, BUT:

Word Count as of 9 PM today: 49, 436

Oooo - 400 words in three hours. Positively smokin', baby. *blows raspberries*

Why, I cannot say, but it's alway the last 700 words of NaNo that are the hardest to spit out onto the bloody page. Always. They kill me.

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Counterspace

2008-11-26T14:41:00.002-06:00

Itty-bitty, 197os kitchens with NO COUNTERSPACE are clearly in violation of the Geneva Convention. I'm sure of it.

I mean, seriously, I've had dollhouses with bigger kitchens than mine. Bah! Humbug.

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NaNo: The 200-Word Trick

2008-11-25T19:15:00.002-06:00

So if you have kids and you write, you know how hard it can be to find writing time. Some days, it is well nigh impossible ... OK, make that most days....

And then you decide to do NaNoWriMo. And discover that you knew nothing about trying to find writing time. :)

This year has been especially challenging for me, because my work schedule has changed since last year, so the time I used to have on reserve for writing - 5 AM to whenever the kids woke up - is no longer available, because I'm getting ready for and then am on my way to ye olde work-work. That has left the couple of hours after the kids go to bed at 8 or 8:30, by which time I'm usually asleep on my feet and incapable of writing anything I don't hate myself for in the morning.

Two weeks ago, however, I found the Magic Elixir.

No, really! And I managed laundry and kitchen dredging at the same time!

You think I'm lying - and that's OK. But it's all true!

What's the big secret? Well, I do not enjoy laundry or kitchen dredging in the least, but things had become desperate (because they had been ignored for so long - no underwear, no spoons, oh the horror!). To add insult to injury, I had also reached that inevitable point in the story where I utterly loathed it, had lost all motivation to pick the story up and was very, very close to just pretending I had too many other things to do and abandoning it altogether.

But I SO hate to lose at anything. And I would so hate to lose NaNo even more.

So I joined my mild ADHD with my hatred of losing and set the following rule: I would write 200 words, then accomplish some Unsavory Task (i.e., one that was housework-related). Once the Unsavory Task was accomplished, I had to sit my fat butt down and write 200 more words, then it was time for another Unsavory Task, and so on.

Astoundingly enough, it worked! The first day I tried it, I ended up with 4,000 words! The following weekend, I had a 5,000-word day! For me, that kind of speed is well nigh unbelievable!

More importantly, however, the 200-word trick got me through the I-can't-imagine-WHY-I-ever-thought-this-story-was-so-cool doldrums and delivered several brain-popping Story Epiphanies.

It really seems to work for me, and I think part of the reason it does is because 200 words is about as much as I can write before a kid needs desperately something. Cool, huh?

Now. If I could just get The Husband to stop practicing his #%@*&$# duck calls in the living room.... Can't have everything, I guess...

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NaNo Bits: Sheer Shock

2008-11-22T23:54:00.003-06:00

It is now midnight and I should be in bed, but I must express my ... I don't even know... shock, awe, amazement-at-the-shit-that-comes-out-of-my-head?

Something like that.

It's like this: My very boring, very plain, very straight laced, very innocent (or so I thought...) main character up and decided she could not avoid murdering someone today. Murder! She couldn't avoid it. She really couldn't. It was a terrible line, and she had to cross it, but I am appalled. Appalled. And very much not OK with this turn of events. (How sympathetic is a character that is that cold blooded??)

But mostly, I am very, very shocked at how terrifyingly neatly this murder thing fits in with something else that I already knew about but didn't know the particulars of.

See, there are these bloody knives that another character finds later on. Only I didn't know whose blood was on them or how it got there.

And now I do.

0.0

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NaNo Bits: Character Mutiny #1

2008-11-20T17:22:00.002-06:00

It happens every time I write any kind of fiction. I don't know why it still surprises me.

But it does.

I guess there's just something sort of shocking (and exciting and magical, truth be told...) about your characters looking up from the page/screen, giving you the hairy eyeball, then shaking their heads at each other and - in unison- yanking the plot out from between your fingers.

It's just so ... well, I don't know what to call it, but it's very similar to the rush I got in my younger (and fitter) days from skiing and rock & ice climbing. Thrilling, maybe? I don't know. That seems corny.

Whatever.

Let's just say it's just really, really cool when you realize that your charcters know your story better than you do.

As you might have guessed, it happened again today. I had this scene all planned out where these two characters, who haven't been getting along, suddenly find some common ground. Only they didn't. Well, actually, they not only didn't find common ground, they fought like cats trespassing in another cat's territory. And it was exactly what they should have done and much better than what I had planned for them.

Wild.

Anyway, here's a snippet. The writing totally sucks (I consider the end product of NaNo to be nothing more than a really detailed outline, so be warned). I'm only posting it because this is the end of the scene and they're supposed to be all hugging and bff with each other... hah!

Heilla’s expression changed to one of irritation. “Oh, I see. This isn’t about you or me – this is about Bran, isn’t it?”

“You just stay away from him,” Eydis snapped. “If I catch you near him again, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born. Understand?”

Heilla managed to look dignified as she said, “Perfectly. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find some clean clothes.”

“Right,” Eydis sneered as the other girl went past. “You do that. Just don’t go anywhere near the infirmary. I’m serious.”

“Whatever,” Heilla said and she left.

NaNo ZeRo

2008-11-13T18:17:00.002-06:00

So I was sick yesterday - couldn't-get-out-of-bed sick, no less. And I didn't write a word. Not. One. Word.

That is a new record low for me for a NaNo daily word count (previously, it was 57 - really!). My first ZERO day. Eep!

I don't much like it, especially since - another first - I am officially BEHIND on the word count of the day tally. I've always, always, always been ahead. Always. Until now.

Don't much like this either.... and I'm hoping I'm not starting a trend that will result in this being the first year I don't "win".... That would seriously suck. Seriously!

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NaNo Bits: Day 8

2008-11-08T09:05:00.003-06:00

It's still going reasonably well, which is shocking the hell out me - I've averaged almost 1650 words a day during the work week! That's astounding for me. Last year, I was lucky if I could manage 800 during the week and then had to make it up on the weekends, which sort of sucked.

Seriously, I think I finally struck the right balance between planning enough but not too much. My characters are continually surprising me, but in a good way for once.

Then again, the first six scenes of the story were pretty well laid out and I had really good visuals on them. The same cannot be said for The Middle of The Story.... However, I'm hoping that because The End of The Story has been pretty well mapped out too, that The Middle will take care of itself.

Well, one can dream, right?

Anyway, I have to thank Susan for her post on new music, via which I found Apocalyptica's Farewell. It's stunning and was perfect for the scene I was writing last night. Thanks, Susan!

And now for a snippet. Eydis has just lectured Bran about being reckless. He doesn't listen very well, and it's about to cost him.

Eydis looked up to find herself walking in the wrong direction. Why she’d started walking towards the bloody Tower, she couldn’t even begin to guess. Thinking too much, instead of paying attention most likely. She was about to turn around and head back through the onion patch, when she saw something streak up the side of the Tower.

Bran! The idiot – what did he think he was doing? Didn’t he know he could be seen?

She wanted to scream at him – with mind and body voice both – but she didn’t dare. She watched with horror as he soared past the top of the Tower, hung for a second in mid air, then dove down the other side. He emerged beyond the top of the compound wall, silent and moving fast.

There was a shout from the direction of the gate and Eydis heard the sing-song chatter of the Han guard.

Then her blood froze in her veins as she heard the sound of a bow string lose an arrow.

Word Count as of Right Now: 14,035.

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Help! Need Tunes!

2008-11-07T13:53:00.002-06:00

I've finished with the first two of my three POV characters for the NaNo, and it will be time to start on the third this evening (probably late this evening, which cannot, unfortunately be helped...).

Everyone else has theme music (Bran=Buckcherry & Glasvegas, Heilla=Kronos' Caravan), but Ms. Eydis here is being a pain in my ass and refusing to mesh with anything I can find on Napster, despite me finding a LOT of cool music...

Hence the plea for help.

Some background: Eydis is a pretty strong chic - stubborn, tough, and resourceful, but she's been through hell having grown up in a prison colony, so she can also be suspicious of strangers, close minded, and brutal when she has to be.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'll try anything. Really. Anything at all.

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Deluge

2008-11-06T15:02:00.003-06:00

'Cuz it can't ever just rain, yanno...

Here's a summary/brain-dump about the multitude of shit going on in my life that is simultaneously about to hit the fan, just so I can clear my head:

There's NaNo, of course -- 1667 word/day, right? Do-able and I've done it. But I wasn't planning on having quite so many other things going at the same time.

Work-work is being crazy-crazy and the rumors, they are a-flyin'... there are more small signs every day that I should maybe be looking for another job - so I started to...

...which means updating the CV, churning out brilliant cover letters, answering unknown numbers when my cell rings, being all bright and goddamn cheerful when I do so (this requires a rather monumental amount of effort for me)...

Trying to come up with a catchy name for my business that doesn't sound just like every other biomedical editing firm out there. Harder than it sounds, because as it turns out there just aren't that many ways to say 'biomedical editing'...

Website design for the business. I have someone doing this, but she needs some input from me about what I want, and it takes time to gather information, examples and put my thoughts together coherently.

The Husband's birthday is Sunday. He likes to have a Big Fat Hairy Deal made out of his birthday, even though he's past the age when that's really appropriate. That means I have to go birthday present shopping and I hate shopping and I hate it worse when I'm buying presents for people who are picky and impossible to please.

Another of my sisters-in-law is pregnant and her baby shower is Saturday afternoon. So I have to go shopping some more. At least, she is registered at Babys-R-Us.

Because I'm going to be an independent editor, I finally decided it would be worth it to take the board exam that would certify me as such, which means gathering transcripts together in one place and getting three letters of recommendation (yes, I have to have to have recommendations in order to take a test - isn't that a pisser?). This also means that...

... I have to draft the recommendation letters, since the people I'm going to ask for them will expect me to provide them with something to work from, since that's how such things are typically done in Academia.

OK. I think I'm done (for now).

I think I might even feel better.

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NaNo: Favorite Bits From Day Three

2008-11-04T05:55:00.001-06:00

I hate the Daylight Savings time change thing. I woke up at 3:30 AM - and I mean wide awake - and couldn't go back to sleep. I gave up eventually and got some words in on the NaNo... not great words, but that's not the point, I guess...

Anyway, writing-wise, other than what I'm posting below, last night and this morning was a biatch. I have a time line issue -- always my nemesis -- that is refusing to resolve itself and had many false starts. It being NaNo, of course, I didn't delete a single word of them....

Bran straddled the ridge of the dormer window roof as best he could, took a deep breath and prepared to call the bailak.

Time to stow the wings, he called softly into his own mind.

So soon? the bailak replied, sounding wistful.

Don’t worry. I’ll need them again in an hour or two, Bran promised.

Very well. Are you ready?

Bran was never ready for what the bailak was about to do to his body, but he'd learned not to scream out loud while it was happening.

Off to work-work...

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NaNo, Day The Second

2008-11-03T06:42:00.005-06:00

The Husband, curse him (OK, not really), got two free tickets to the Titans game yesterday and took his grandpa with him (see? brownie points). Since he was gone, I figured I'd have kids climbing on me all day and get zippo done on my NaNo.

Shockingly, the kids cooperated. Ms. Six spent most of the day playing with her friend across the cul-de-sac and Ms. Baby was quite happy to play in the front yard, while I sat in the sun on the front steps (it was frikkin' 74 degrees outside and sunny yesterday - in November...) with my pen and notepad and went to town. That's always a good technique, because when I typed up those three notebook pages during Ms. Baby's nap, what was probably a couple hundred words on paper turned into a little over a thousand in the computer file. Yay, me!

Here's today's mini-snippet:

Not surprisingly, there were sixty four men around the first campfire and around the two others he counted. It was always some multiple of eight. Every time.

That was the Han for you, Bran thought shaking his head, bunch of superstitious bastards.

Oh - final word count for yesterday: 5,116.
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A NaNo Mini-Snippet

2008-11-02T08:56:00.002-06:00

This was Joely's idea, of course, this mini-snippet thing....

Er, let me back up...

NaNo is in full swing! I actully managed to finish the first scene yesterday and it went surprisingly well. OK, maybe it shouldn't have been surprising. It's one of those scenes that I could see the whole thing, beginning to end, which is not always the case. It really helps, lemmetellya... 'cuz the next one is d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g...

Oh, well.

Anyway, final word count for yesterday was 2,772 (which is also the phone number for my HR person at work... scary, that...).

And since I think it's a neat idea to post my favorite (or least suckiest) line each day, here's the opening for this year's adventure:

Heilla rushed down a frightfully empty corridor, one hand on her head to keep her head scarf from flying off as she ran, the other holding up a handful of skirts out of her way so she could run faster. How she had managed to oversleep again, she couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

Waiting Impatiently

2008-10-31T23:25:00.002-05:00

NaNo starts in 28 minutes. I am trying to be patient about it. I am not very good at patient.

So I'm trying to distract myself and happened to notice Google's word of the day today is 'gloaming', one of my all-time favorite words ever.

In part, I really like it because it's one of those words with really, really deep English/Germanic roots. No, no Latin-ness here, thank you very much, this one goes straight back to Old English and the time of Beowulf.

I also like it because of the images in evokes in the old brain - low clouds mob a purple streak of twilight on the horizon, something in an alley waits, full dark is coming soon.... sort of the same feel as the first scene of this year's NaNo!

Oh, great... here we are again... waiting...

Aaaah!

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Happy New Year

2008-10-31T05:37:00.000-05:00

As long time readers will know, I have no religion.

I have never met one that could hold me. The Christians, the Buddhists, the pagans - in one way or another, they all espouse the One True Way, a concept that provokes my brain into instant and utter rebellion. (I will NOT be told what to think. I will NOT be told how to see the world. I will NOT be made to believe without question. And this thing you call 'faith' that you want me to drown myself in? You can shove it.)

And yet I cannot call myself an atheist either.

It's not that I'm waffling or hedging my bets or reserving my right to say 'oh, well, maybe...' at the last minute. I simply don't think you can know one way or the other (which is why, technically, I'm an agnostic, but whatever).

All the same, I have these moments - like when I stumbled across this: Dreaming the Dead. It's a post on Holly Lisle's blog about a dream she had in which someone who died appeared in her dream with a gift. I had goosebumps the whole time I was reading it. It's that cool - go read it yourself. Seriously.

You're back? OK, good.

It's situations like that, when the universe appears to be hopping up and down and waving its arms in your face to get your attention, when it's difficult for me to maintain a totally atheistic world view. Shit like that doesn't happen for no reason. It just doesn't.

What's really giving me goosebumps, however, is the odd parallel going on in my own life at the moment. Nothing popped into (or out of) a dream for me, but unfortunately, there are some very scary rumors running amock right here in Real Life that may have an effect on my job. A really large effect on my job.

So large that, in fact, that I finally got around to shelling out a bunch of money to have my freelance editing business website domain-named, designed and hosted. The very idea of venturing out on my own into the wide, wild world scares the freakin' crap out of me. But it must be done, and it must be done now. My universe, you see, is either rehearsing for a Broadway musical or knocking itself out to get my attention....

Which, believe it or not, brings us back to the title of this post: Happy New Year.

In the comments to the Holly Lisle post, several people commented on the fact that this dream happened quite close to Halloween, and Halloween - if I'm remembering right - is the pagan/Wiccan/whatever New Year. New Year, yanno, out with the old, in with the new? Yeah, that New Year. And this whole situation I've found myself in has that feel -- new beginnings, new adventures, bid the past adieu -- all that .

So in the spirit of moving on with the beginnings and letting go of the endings: Happy New Year!

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Wine Bottle. No Corkscrew.

2008-10-23T18:19:00.003-05:00

I've been meaning to get another Swiss Army knife, one with a corkscrew, because when I got my first one I thought, "Oh, I'll get the one with the screwdriver - I'd probably never use a corkscrew." Since that time I have, naturally, had many an occasion to regret that decision and this evening was no exception.

After the day's workshops and keynote addresses, etc, I ventured out from my hotel to wander the very interesting streets of Louisville and, among other items, found a bottle of my favorite wine. Woo-hoo! I thought and headed back to the hotel, thoroughly pleased with myself.

Until I discovered I had no corkscrew. Duh.

That should have occurred to me when I bought the wine, but yanno - a day spent contemplating coronary heart disease in women and how to report correlation and regression analyses can fry the thinker somewhat.

So I googled "no corkscrew", which turned up this: How To Open a Wine Bottle Without a Corkscrew, which suggested banging the bottom of the bottle against a tree. Alas, no tree in the hotel room.

So I went down to one of the expensive little boutique-y shops off the hotel lobby to see if I could buy one. And I could have! But they were all out.

I decided to give up. The Husband - from 150 miles away - came to the rescue and proved, once again, how resourceful and handy he is.

"Call room service," he said. "They'll bring you one."

"Oh. Right. OK," I said, baffled at the very idea of putting someone to the trouble of bringing something so inconsequential all the way up to the 10th floor.

The room service people were only too happy to do it, though, so now I am sipping my wine, feet up, laptop in place. Yahoo!

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Be Careful What You Wish For...

2008-10-22T20:58:00.004-05:00

So. Boss Lady offered (once again) to pay for me to attend the Great and Wonderful Annual Medical Writers/Editors Conference this year (have I mentioned yet today how much I adore Boss Lady?). Of course, I went, but unlike previous years, this year I went by myself. As in, I left Ms. Six and Ms. Baby and The Husband at home.

And so here I am in my hotel room and .... I'm ALONE. There are NO childen climbing on me. I have TWO beds AND a whole bathroom that I don't have to share with ANYONE.

I have NO IDEA what to do with myself.

OK, I'm exagerating - I have plenty of ideas, believe me. :D But this is the first time since Ms. Six was born that I have left my babies and gone away overnight by myself, and frankly, it's a little eerie. Not that I'm not enjoying myself, mind. But it's mighty odd after six and a half years of somebody demanding something from me every second of every day to revert back to being responsible for ONLY ME.

It's a little bit like being in college. Except with money and a really nice car. :-D

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Finger on the Button

2008-10-18T08:28:00.004-05:00

The plotting of NaNo 2008 has been plodding at a snail's pace this week due to some sort of creeping crud that has been working its way through the family -- so I'm not nearly as far along as I think I should be.

However, everyone finally has a name (Thank You, Viking Answer Lady!) - Mystery Girl very nearly got axed for not ante-ing up (and she's still waffling about the spelling, but whatever). And everyone finally started piping up about what the hell happens in The Middle Of The Story after I threatened to axe everybody and use the outline from 2005, which was completed but never got used because the vampires showed up at the last minute.

Interestingly enough, most of the Middle-Of-The-Story progress was made in a frantic, long-hand, 20 minute period sitting backwards in the driver's seat of my car -- NO, not while I was driving, while I was waiting to pick up Ms. Six after school yesterday. I told Bran and Mystery Girl (she doesn't get to use her name until she tells me how to spell it) they had until the bus arrived back from the field trip to tell me what happens or else.

Lemmetellya, there is nothing like a deadline to make characters start squawking. It's like poising your finger over the button that will deliver an electric shock. Or - more appropriate for my fantasy world - holding their feet over a bed of red hot coals ... or threating to pull out their fingernails ... or ...

Poor Bran... no wonder he didn't want to tell me what happens...

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Best Forum Thread. Ever.

2008-10-04T20:55:00.003-05:00

This is why I love NaNo and will probably always find an excuse to do it:

Guns, Shooting Velociraptors Out Of

For real. Go check it out. It's so hysterically off the wall it makes me want to cheer.

I don't know why shit like this gives me hope, but it does. I so totally identify with people who look at the crazy, horrible, ridiculous world we live in and say, 'oh, yeah? well, i'll raise you a velociraptor! how do ya like them apples?!'

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Grant Hell: Coda

2008-09-28T14:32:00.002-05:00

The Training Grant Adventure from Hell is over. Fucking finally.

I didn't think we were going to make it when I got to work on Friday at 6:30 AM.

I didn't think we were going to make it at 12:00 PM when we were still missing 3 biosketches.

I didn't think we were going to make it at 4:00 PM when we still didn't have the signature page.

I didn't think we were going to make it at 5:00 PM when Boss Lady LEFT to go pick up her son and attend his piano concert. (Nope. She didn't come back.)

And I really, really didn't think we were going to make it at 7:15 when we were still making copies and only had 15 minutes to get them assembled and downstairs to the FedEx drop-box.

But we did and it's gone: signed, sealed, and will be delivered Monday morning by FedEx.

And then I almost had to kill someone.

Because after I had run downstairs to the FedEx box and dropped off the boxes with the proposal inside, I came back to my computer - at 7:30 PM, mind you - and found this email in my Inbox:

Bethanie, if you have not already sent the proposal, please hold. Boss Lady might want to add another paragraph. Signed, -Other Chinese Person on the Proposal

My jaw hit the floor. I blinked very rapidly, certain I was seeing things. I was not.

And so I wrote back: Sorry. Just dropped it off. And I hit send, shut my computer off and went the fuck home to see my kids for the first time that day.

I found the lolcat below just now and it about perfectly sums up how I felt about that email:

more animals

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headdesk

2008-09-26T07:01:00.003-05:00

Well.

My bank failed this morning.

Not a good way to start Grant Submission Hell-Day. Does not bode well. Not at all, really.

Gah!

Where IS my coffee and when can I have another one please?!??

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Start the Countdown, Ensign...

2008-09-25T22:29:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow is Doomsday.... er.... I mean, Grant Submission Day. Yeah... um, same thing.

Anyway.

I've been at it since 6 AM this morning and now we're approaching 11 PM and, even though I shockingly only had ONE coffee this morning, I am SO AMPED, I can already tell that I'm never going to get to sleep in time to get any kind of rest before the alarm goes off at 5 AM Friday and the race to beat the FedEx guy starts....

I'd use this time to do some fun fiction writing, but I've been typing for, like, 16 hours straight and my damn hands are about to fall off....

I suppose it's not helping matters I'm listening to death metal....

*collapses on floor in fits of giggles*

Yeah. It's that fun.

Don't you wish you could do this for a living, too?

OK, I'm off to bed now. Really.

*more giggles*

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Pirate Ship Party Sandwiches

2008-09-24T12:19:00.005-05:00

So last week, Ms. Six's after school program had a Pirate Party on Friday afternoon. I signed up to make sandwiches, thinking I would surely find something clever and pirate-y online and not have to think too hard about being clever myself.

Well, I seached. And I searched. And I searched.

And Google failed me.

Nothing! I found exactly nothing - nothing pirate ship-ish, nothing really all that pirate-y even. (OK, there was one "pirate sandwich" that involved bologna and olives, which caused it to be immediately vetoed, so it doesn't count.)

So there I was - Thursday afternoon and desperate - wandering around the grocery store with NO IDEA what I was going to do. I had turkey in the cart. I had cheese in the cart. I had Ms. Baby in the cart starting to get cranky and very bored with her third trip through the bread aisle.

I had just about given up on the whole Clever Idea thing and resigned myself to Wonder Bread (*gags*) --- when I saw them!! A bag of tiny, tiny little dinner rolls...

After that it was merely a matter of cocktail toothpicks and skull-and-crossbone images pirated (*wink, wink*) off the Internet....

And so I present for your partying pleasure:

Pirate Ship Party Sandwiches!

Oooo... Pretty Colors....

2008-09-23T21:11:00.003-05:00

Yes. I've lost it. In case you were wondering.

But the Special Hell known as The Training Grant will soon be over. On Friday, we'll make 6 or 7 copies of all 350+ pages of that fucker and FedEx 5 plus the original off to Washington or Baltimore or wherever-it's-going and It. Will. Be. Over.

And I can't wait.

But in the meantime, I thought I'd share the pretty chart I made to keep track of all the people we needed to get stuff from and whether on not we'd asked for it, got it, initialized it, modified it, finalized it and obtained the hard copy.

See the pretty chart? Ooooo.... Colors.... And yes, they all mean something.

Friday has never seemed a sweeter word.

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NaNo Dillemma-ness

2008-09-20T20:07:00.002-05:00

I don't really want to do NaNo this year.

Really, I don't.

I have too much going on. Someone will get sick. An unplanned grant is sure to appear out of nowhere and be due in the middle of the month. My family is coming here for Turkey Day.

Reasons against abound.

But it's NaNo's 10th anniversary. Seems like a shame to miss it.

And while I was washing dishes a bit ago, I got this totally wicked idea. A deadline would be a really good thing for it, right?

Right?

Dammit.

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Oh, Brilliant

2008-09-17T19:04:00.002-05:00

Gas prices are shooting for the moon.

Wall Street is crumbling into the sea.

A hurricane has scoured whole towns off the map

My freakin' mortgage company appears to be next.

It's just rumors at this point, but um... just what are you supposed to DO if the bank holding your mortgage does the dead fish routine??

Do I keep paying them if they've filed for Chapter 11? Am I allowed to get irritated if they get bought out by somebody?

Probably not, but it would be - literally - the FIFTH time my mortgage has been handed off to somebody else since we bought the house two years ago. I was just getting used to them! After they held onto to the note for a whole year, I finally broke down and got set up to pay them online. I actually trusted them that much!

And they repay me like this?

Great. Fabulous.

Figures.

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Hell and Her Hounds

2008-09-16T20:46:00.003-05:00

Rain pounds the rocks. They are slick, trecherous. The only moon in the sky this time of night is Hell, and even She and Her Hounds are hiding.

A hand appears over the edge of the precipice. Stark white, waterlogged, it scrabbles for a hold on anything at all. Its owner doesn't seem to notice when it is cut to the bone by a bit of rock.

Wheezing and panting with fear, a small, wretched form pulls up onto a tiny ledge. No telling whether it is man or woman, it makes for a crack in the cliff that rams into the ledge. There it huddles, gasping, shivering, praying for the storm to pass, the rain to cease, morning to come.

This is how I feel right now. Beat to a pulp mentally and physically (even though I was chained here in front of my computer all day and hardly moved).

I do not like Training Grants. I do not like them, Sam I Am.

Seriously. Somebody just shoot me.

Please.

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Stairwells: A Rant

2008-09-09T12:38:00.002-05:00

I just got back from a little jaunt around the Gorgeous Office Building (GOB) where my little department of FPU is located. I took my little jaunt in the interests of NOT taking part in the general obesity epidemic that appears to be sweeping much of the developed world - i.e., I got off my fat ass and got some exercise - and in the spirit of getting some exercise, I also took the stairs - up and down - instead of the elevator.

Well. Lemme tell ya. GOB has some seriously uninspirational stairwells.

They're narrow. They're kinda stuffy. Some walls are painted, some are not. There's carpet here, but not over there. There's graffiti in spots. Not the sort of place that makes you want to come back.

Not that this is news to me - I take the stairs all the time (well, down, anyway...), so I'm pretty familiar with their uninviting nature. And really, how much can one expect from a stairwell?

However, it occurred to me as I was out jaunting around GOB - which is so very pretty on the outside - that in light of the fact that most people who work in pretty office buildings sit on their asses (fat or otherwise) for most of the day, wouldn't it be in the interest of public health to encourage people to take the stairs so they increase the amount of exercise they're getting and decrease their personal contribution to the obesity epidemic?

The sorry state of the stairwells is not helping this cause.

Why not make the stairs a place one would actually want to be? Why not make them pretty, like the rest of the building? Why not make them interesting? Why not make them spiral or weave or soar over a pretty atrium with plants and a waterfall? Why not sprinkle them with lovely landings here and there, with trendy couches and chairs and poofs, so people will actually want to visit them? Why not make them a destination in their own right?

OK, OK - this is pie in the sky, sure, and stairwells serve other purposes, such as acting as a tornado shelter, a fact I am intimately familiar with, having spent several hours in one last spring as a very violent storm screamed by outside.... So GOBs will always have to have those interior, uninspiring stairwells.

But still.

Why not make a pretty set of stairs an option, at least?

It just might help. Ya never know.

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Pizza. From Scratch.

2008-09-06T18:52:00.008-05:00

Yup. Got a bee in my bonnet for homemade pizza. Homemade stuffed crust pizza.

The girls had cheese:

The Husband had pepperoni and mushroom:

I had Everything:

Yup. It don't get no better than that.

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Grant Hell: A New Nightmare

2008-09-05T07:19:00.005-05:00

And just when I thought things were going so well...

I've got a pretty good handle on the grant thing by now.

R01's? I can do 'em in my sleep.
K series? A few extra details, but no big deal.
DOD-BCRP? Details galore, so they're a pain in the ass, but I've done enough of them by now that I know how to head off the worst of their gremlins.

And, really, I knew better than to believe Boss Lady when she told me in July that the endometrial cancer grant was the last one for the year. I did. And sure enough, we're submitting TWO this month. (TWO!!)

But she managed to blindside me anyway. With a monstrous beast known as a Training Grant.

It is colossal. It has fangs. It has teeth. It is due on the 29th.

This means I will be eating, sleeping, dreaming, breathing Training Grant for the next 3 weeks.

Oh, the happiness. Oh, the joy. Oh, the glory of offering myself up as a sacrifice to such beasts.

Gah!

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Vampire Red

2008-09-04T08:22:00.004-05:00

Call me juvenile. Call me an adolescent throwback. Call me having a mid-life crisis.

I don't care. I did it anyway.

Yes, yes - I went to Manic Panic. I ordered Vampire Red hair dye.

I just can't stand it anymore.

There are too many rules here. Too much "clean your desk off, we have Important People visiting the office tomorrow". Too much wear the right clothes, wear the right shoes, drive the right car, toe the line, be on time, smile pretty, be polite and helpful and pleasant to everyone, especially the people who deserve it least.

I've had enough.

I must rebel.

I must.

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Lab Rat

2008-09-03T16:41:00.003-05:00

I almost was one. I was this close: ||.

But then I thought I should probably tell them that Ms. Baby is still breastfeeding (yes, she just turned two and yes, she's still breastfeeding and no, I don't plan to wean her until she's good and ready. so there. :D) and as it turns out, breastfeeding women do not make good endometrial tissue sample donors.

Bummer. Bigtime, 'cuz they would have paid me $200/sample and I could have donated up to six samples, and that would have covered the launch of my freelance medical editing gig very nicely. With room to spare, probably.

OK, I would have earned that $200 every single time, because I don't think endometrial tissue donation is, like, a really pleasant experience, involving as it does a speculum up your wa-zoo and dilation of your cervix... But hey - I survived two labors with no meds, so I think I probably could have hacked it. I mean, really, how long can it take? Not more than 10 minutes, 15 tops. Piece o' cake.

Anyway, I must now re-think how I'm going to finance the 'big ticket item' - the website. It's essential, given that most of my clients will have to find me via the Internet and I know better than to fart around and slap some half-assed, ill-thought-out, 'temporary' site together.

I've been there. I've done that. It ain't worth it.

You just end up doing it all over again. So I'm not going there. I do, however, need something up and running in time for the AMWA conference in October.

I suppose I could dip into my savings. I hate to. But it might be necessary...

Rats.

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Crank It Up

2008-08-26T06:00:00.002-05:00

It never fails to amaze me when I'm driving along in the car, minding my own business, Song of the Day cranked up as loud as I can take it, and suddenly

BAM!

I get fwapped on the head by the huge-est of epiphanies about a story I thought I knew inside out.

It happened again this morning.

Now just yesterday I had the huge-est of epiphanies that this particular Song of the Day (Viva La Vida by Cold Play, of all bands...!) is NOT about the character I thought it was, but about someone else entirely and makes so much more sense that way. So I was not expecting another huge epiphany, not so soon after the other one.

But there I was, squinting through the pre-dawn dark made even darker by the blessed rain that dear ol' Fay has delivered (it hasn't rained here in a month), Song of the Day cranked up really, really loud - like, loud enough that I could feel the drum bit reverberating in my chest. And as I'm sitting there, squinting and cursing my windshield wipers for not moving fast enough to keep up with the rain, the Back of my Mind is chewing on the lyrics of Song of the Day (played over and over and over) as they apply to the proper character and her personal history (violent, bloody, vengeful - oh, but she is fun!) and out the blue (well, the blue-black - it was painfully early) comes this:

It was the Norn who built the Temples, the Han had nothing to do with them.

And in the background is this character peering at me with the tiniest of amused little grins as if she has known this all along and has been withholding the information merely so she could amuse herself by surprising me with it like this. (She's almost as bad as Lars, this one.)

Anyway, I am fairly blown away, because it was one of those sticky little back story things about the history of Imbue (the world where my fantasy stories take place) that I could never quite figure out how to fit togther with the time of Novel #1. And it's just SO COOL because it fits so perfectly with what I already know and it solves the problem of how I could never make the Han mythology fit with the Temple/Tower complex because it doesn't.

*sigh*

Anyway, it just goes to show, that if you crank the tunes loud enough, everything works itself out eventually.

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Back to School

2008-08-19T05:42:00.001-05:00

It's funny the way the brain works. Sometimes it's in Create Mode -- that's when I'm writing -- and sometimes, like now, it's in Sponge Mode.

Sponge Mode is just what it sounds like -- the brain just wants to soak up everything it encounters. Eventually, it will get saturated and things will start to drip out. In other words, we'll be back to Create Mode. :D

For the moment, though, I'm a thirsty sponge. So thirsty, in fact, that as I mentioned before, I signed up for a class at FPU, a class in Human Genetics, a graduate level class, come to that (eep!). I'll be in way over my head, no doubt, but that's OK. That's where I've been with almost every manuscript I've edited over the last 5 years. I'm used to it.

But on top of that, I'm doing the homework for the statistics workshop I'll be taking in October and I'm peeking at the epidemiology textbook I have every once in a while and I'm still working my way through Holly Lisle's Clinics...

So this morning I realized that, essentially, I've got a full course load this fall: Human Genetics, Statistics, Epidemiology and Creative Writing.

With all that going on, it won't surprise me in the least if the brain fills up and starts overflowing in a couple of weeks -- I'll be itching to write and won't be able to because of all this incoming stuff!

Just figures, don't it?

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Yes, I'm Alive

2008-08-17T12:37:00.003-05:00

Too busy to even think about having anything to say, but here's what's been shakin' the last few weeks:

School started.
My parents came to visit.
Ms. Beautiful, her daughter and her still-in-utero twin sons visited.
I signed up for a workshop and registered for this year's medical writers conference.
I tried not to faint when I saw the charge for the conference on my credit card statement.
All the visitors left.
I signed up for a class (a class! what am i thinking?) at FPU.
OK, I'm auditing a class at FPU (which proves that I'm not totally crazy).
We watched lots of Olympics. I mean, LOTS.
Oh, and we cleaned the house yesterday (since it was starting to fester).

And I have done zippo as far as writing.

Boo, hiss. I had great plans and that synopsis was really starting to gel and then illness had a party with obligation and it got all set aside for 'some other time', preferably one when I wasn't exhausted, covered with vomit and/or supposed to be doing Something of Critical Importance to the Fate of the World (the world of my family, anyway).

I don't expect I'll get back to writing before the end of the Olympics, because they come on during my 'writing time' and they only come around every 4 years and I'll be damned if I'm gonna miss something amazing just because one of my characters is having a moment. So there.

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Happy Birthday, Ms. Baby!

2008-08-09T20:25:00.004-05:00

She turns two today (at 11:45 pm to be exact). I like two. They can talk enough to make themselves understood and 90% of what they say is just so damn cute you want to write it all down so it will be preserved for all eternity (but, of course, you can't because the minute you turn your back, they've emptied the supposedly child-proofed bathroom cabinet and started taste testing your soap collection...).

We'll have cake and ice cream tomorrow, since everybody's too exhausted (and germy) from the last bout of Childhood Illness 101 to even open presents today (OK, yeah - or even to wrap presents today...), and being two, Ms. Baby won't really know the difference. But we did sing Happy Birthday to her and she thought that was pretty cool.

Here's to many more, squirt!

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2008-08-09T11:31:00.002-05:00

Holly Lisle's husband has a really excellent article up on The Escapist website about the Adventure Known as Parenting.

It's really well written - clever and funny - so check it out (because I said so...).

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God Fucking Dammit!

2008-08-08T11:26:00.002-05:00

Apologies for that name in vain thing. Apologies for the four letter word thing. Apologies for nothing else.

I. Am. Pissed.

Ms. Six is sick. AGAIN. AGAIN!

She puked all night and is now running a scary-high fever. I have calls in to all known RNs in the family. And I have calls in to all mothers and mothers-in-law. And I have calls in to her pediatrician. And...

Wait just a fucking second.

Didn't we JUST fucking go through this, like, two weeks ago??!??!!!

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we did.

Fucking. A.

WHY does this keep happening? WHY are my kids CONSTANTLY sick?

If this were happening to me, I'd be taking it as a sure sign that something in my life was out of balance and that I needed to change it. So am I being a horrible mother? A horrible housekeeper? Am I feeding them horribly wrong? Am I horrible person for working and not staying home so I can keep them out of daycare where every nasty fucking germ on the fucking planet seems to hang out?

GGGrrrrrrarrrahhh!

Who knows. Maybe childhood illnesses are not subject to philisophical meaderings and I should just suck it the fuck up.

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Time Warp

2008-08-07T22:30:00.002-05:00

I just spent an hour looking at photos from my high school's 20th reunion.

I didn't go. And I think I'm glad.

Well, sorta. It would have been neat seeing some of those people. But it would have been heartbreaking seeing others. (And, quite possibly, as annoying as it ever was to see the rest.)

All in all, though, it was just really shocking.

I mean, crikey - who WERE all those fat, old people??? (and somebody please, please, please tell me I'm not one of them...)

*pants, clutches chest*

OK, OK - I'm overreacting. I know I shouldn't be, but it was... disturbing... to go from this image I had of people - an image from 20 years ago - to these gray-haired, pot-bellied folk. I didn't even recognize most of them. A few here and there, I could come up with names for, but the rest melded into a sea of vaguely familiar faces.

What stood out were the smiles. The smiles and the eyes. Those were the two things that went whizzing into the dark reaches of my brain and connected with something, and then the something triggered something else somewhere that went "Oh! I should know that person..." And then I'd squint at the name tag, curse the photographer for putting the word 'Proof' right in the middle of what I needed to see, and sometimes figure it out and sometimes not.

I don't suppose it would be quite as shocking, had I had any contact with these people over the last 20 years. But I'm not good at that. In some ways, I see my past as a prison, and once you escape a prison or have served your time, why would you go back?

Makes me wonder what I'll do when the next one of these shindigs comes around.

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