Archive for November, 2009

My Thanksgiving was Great, Thanks. How was Yours?

This Thanksgiving I flew myself to Los Angeles to stay with my sister, her husband, and their 4 kids for the long weekend. We made the 65-mile trek to my mom’s for Turkey Day, along with my two brothers and their families. Chaos ensued. Here are the highlights.

1. My Sister’s Pre-Birthday followed by her Birthday – When did birthdays stretch into more than one day? I felt sorely abused and taken advantage of by her excessive use of the “it’s my birthday” card every time I disagreed with her. Well, guess what? My birthday’s in May. It’s my pre-birthday 6 month marker.
2. Midnight Madness at the Mall – Black Friday kicked off at midnight at the mall. After a Thanksgiving dinner. After two pieces of pie. And turkey. Only my sister pulling the “it’s my birthday” card could have put me in that mall. Payback’s hell. That’s all I’m saying.
3. Phrase of the Weekend – After reading my “10 Things I’m Thankful For” blog entry, my sister and our friend, Lesa, adopted this phrase into every conversation: I frickin’ heart [insert object of lust here]. For instance, at one point I shrieked, “I frickin’ heart BJs.” This sounds dirtier than intended and was said way louder than it should have been. I was actually talking about BJs Brewery and their house-brewed root beer. For those who had whiplash from turning to stare at me, mind your own business!
4. Sarcastic/Bitter Phrase of the Weekend – I frickin’ heart [insert here]. Example: I frickin’ heart shopping at midnight on Black Friday because my sister blackmailed me into it with “it’s my birthday.” Or “I frickin’ heart revenge.”
5. Suicidal Ken – I walked into the kids’ bathroom after two girls – ten and eight – had wrapped up an afternoon of playing Barbies. I discovered Ken hanging upside down by his feet from the window pane. He was either (a) attempting to commit suicide by forcing the blood to his head until it exploded (you’re such a tool, Ken), or (b) Barbie decided to hang him out to dry while she found a new man. I vote option B.
6. Six Adults Standing Around a Deep Fryer – We decided to go the heart-unhealthy route this year and deep fry our bird. I stood several feet away, so at least one of us would be able to dial 9-1-1. We all escaped unharmed to enjoy the BEST TURKEY EVER. Thanks for asking.
7. A Trip to Neverland (otherwise known as Green Valley, CA) – This is WAAAAY out in the hills. When explaining to a friend where it is, my sister told her “it’s where the rainbows touch the earth, the unicorns frolic in the valley, and leprechauns hand out pots of gold.” I laughed so hard, I almost forgave her for Midnight Madness in the Mall, especially when my 5-year-old nephew kept asking where the unicorns were on the drive up. I frickin’ heart my sister.
8. My Nephew’s Response to My Sister Asking Why He Didn’t Close the Bathroom Door for Privacy – “Mom, why you gotta get all up in my business?” He’s five. And believes in unicorns. My sister is in for a world of trouble.
9. A Moment of Shared Understanding between Siblings Followed by a Moment of Shared Laughter Between Siblings – We had whole conversations with just our eyes. And then we mocked a common friend who came to Thanksgiving dinner. At least it wasn’t each other for once. That’s love, man.
10. Explaining to my 14-year-old Nephew that Auntie’s Kisses are Like Snail Tracks – Slimy, and leaving behind a wet smear. And proceeded to quietly threaten him with said kisses and cheek squeezes. While his friends looked on. He laughed as he always does when I tell him I intend to he is old maid Aunt Bunny with a hundred cats and ugly sweaters with pompoms. Stupid kid knows I’m allergic to cats. And old maids.

I hope your holidays were as great as mine!

LOL: A Manifesto to Stop the Abuse

There are certain words in the history of the English language that have displayed certain flair, a je ne sais quoi. Words that punch you in the gut and leave you feeling like you’ve been through a wringer or longing for a kiss or wishing you were sitting in the shade on a veranda with a mint julep in your hand or wishing you knew what was in a mint julep. Damn, now I want a mint julep. [slinks off]

As I sip on my mint julep, I reflect on the odd phenomenon that happens when a powerful word – a ninja word, if you will – gets adopted into everyday use. That ninja word gets cuts down with each use, until it loses its mojo and becomes Karate Kid III or The Hills sans Lauren Conrad.  This wordwashing (like greenwashing, but with words. Duh.) also  occurs with acronyms in forums, chat rooms, and Facebook. The acronym used most heinously? LOL.

One person posts a pic of their cat wearing reindeer ears, and another tosses out LOL. Someone says my kid fingerpainted with potatoes and someone says LOL. I send a text to a friend complaining about how exhausted I am, and she texts back LOL. Were any of the aforementioned examples funny? Only if you also laugh at car accidents and crying babies.

Stop the abuse! In case you have been sorely misguided about the meaning of LOL, allow me to educate you. It stands for Laugh Out Loud. That means your belly is jiggling, your chest is heaving, and some sound is escaping from the depth of your body where your funny bone is cleverly hidden between your heart and your madly typing fingers. You literally Laugh Out Loud.

Since its entrance into everyday usage, LOL now means something like “slightly smirking in a snarky way” or “my eye twitched a millimeter in amusement.” Worse, it sometimes translates like “I’m politely fake laughter even though I think you’re as funny as clowns.” (Seriously, who is amused by clowns? They’re just creepy.) Please, please don’t allow this acronym to be watered down. Laughing is one of the amazing joys in life. Use LOL with extreme prejudice and only if your body engages in the physical activity of guffawing or chortling. Rant over. Titter, chuckle, snicker, and snigger on.

BTW, here is a recipe for mint julep for those who wonder what’s in a mint julep.

10 Things I Am Thankful For

A Thanksgiving meme borrowed from my AWer buddy, Kate. The rules? List ten things you are grateful for, but every even numbered item must be about writing in some way.

1. My Four Fathers (not to be confused with forefathers). Without them, I would not be me. Nor would every work I write have a running rant about fathers. Or a girl who is afraid to love/has abandonment issues/is fiercely independent/needs therapy.
2. iTunes Genius. Seriously. An insta-playlist that creates an insta-mood for whatever scene I’m writing. The rubber on my second set of earbuds has disintegrated from overuse.
3. My Sister. Who else would listen to me whine? Who else would take me on a tour of every TJ Maxx and Marshalls between Redondo Beach and Palm Springs? Who else would tear the lace off my shorts without asking and then tell me to get over it already? Who else would love me and encourage me and threaten me when I need it? My friends, that’s who. But not one of them could make me laugh like my sister does. – Even though she’s older and stole my “baby of the family” thunder, or as I tell her, she “stole my sunshine.” And then I rub in that I have blue eyes and she has brown and she fumes with jealousy. Deal with it, Sis! – Who else has that kind of shared history with me? And who else would have four kids just cuz I love being an Auntie? (at least that’s what I tell her).
4. Querytracker.net. The insanity tamed by tables and charts.
5. My Million Nieces and Nephews. They keep me grounded in things like Spongebob and iCarly, and their dreams inspire me to have ones of my own. Damn right I can sing the entire Spongebob theme song.
6. AW Forums. My fellow writers keep me sane and the Bewares and Background Checks for Agents keep me smart. SNI stands for Shiny New Idea, and hell, no, I’m not paying an agent to read my manuscript! < — See what I learned.
7. My New Asthma Doctor. Funny how we take breathing for granted. Huzzah! My lungs work again! *tackles San Francisco hills* I can so take you now!
8. Dr. Irena Praitis. My grad advisor in my Master’s program. Second week of school in her poetry workshop, shy little me proceeded to announce how much I hated poetry. Two weeks later I wrote my first sonnet. A year later I had a scholarship to the West Chester Poetry Conference and received honors for a Master’s Project that included a sonnet redoublee. Don’t know what a sonnet redoublee is? Look it up, and be very afraid.
9. Starbucks. You bring me together with my friends. You are the starting point for outings with my sister. You are the maker of the bottled Frappacino that my mother buys for our camping outings, while shaking her head at our ridiculous need for you. You are the place I write and procrastinate and write. You are the keeper of the Caramel Brulee latte. I frickin’ HEART you.
10. Beta readers. Where, oh where, would I be without your taunts, LOLs, rusted-bloody-box-cutter criticisms, and encouragement? Probably huddling in a corner rocking. Or sticking my fingers in my ears and squeezing my eyes shut to avoid editing.

Tag! You’re it! Oh, wait! Kate tagged everyone already. Damn you, Kate!

Teaser Tuesday

It’s Tuesday evening, but technically still Tuesday. This isn’t a teaser really, but another workshop exercise. We were given a picture and challenged to write from a POV we don’t normally use for twenty minutes. This is obviously very unfinished, but looking at it now, I love the unexpected “A Rose for Emily” quality to it.

Picture: Black and white print of a senior woman wearing a cape, hat, and dress standing on building stoop with a dog on a leash

What I Wrote (unedited – sorry for any mistakes):

Every day, at exactly six o’clock, whether the sun was setting into New Jersey or reigning the Manhattan skyline, Miss Prudence Devereaux stood on her doorstep. Year-in, year-out, we watched her step out the door of 121 Maple Street, handbag over arm, cape wrapped around her shoulders, and that hat – the grey one with the black ribbon and the scarlet flowers hanging on the front – until her eager pace turned to an awkward shuffle, slower but somehow no less eager. We watched her, our eyes the windows in the building at 123 Maple Street, and saw how she waited, glancing uptown – always uptown, as if expecting an old beau to pick her up for dinner and dancing at that cozy club on Fifth Avenue. At 6:20 sharp – we kept time by the clocks in the shop behind her, imagining the tick, tick, tick of those infinite minutes and seconds passing in the heart of a woman waiting for her lover to come – she disappeared back into her building. Miss Prudence Devereaux never seemed to age, but we saw the years passing in the gray fur on her silent companion, the canine that waited with her.

Teaser Tuesday

Okay, you got me. This isn’t really a teaser. I’ve been doing a lot of writing on the sequel to TOUCHED, but nothing I’m willing to share. In place of a teaser, I thought I’d share some random bits of writing. This summer, my MFA professor had my workshop do some timed writing. She’d hand us a photo to use as inspiration to explore some aspect of writing, and we’d put pen to paper. The objective: try something new.

I haven’t looked at this passage in months, but I was surprised to discover what I’d set down in twenty minutes of freewriting. This is not something I would normally write about, nor a perspective I would write from. Yet, things can happen when you push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Not to say this writing is great, but that it pushed me to use my imagination.

Picture: A young boy in a hospital bed surrounded by various stuffed animals, including a whale.

Challenge: Describe a setting using the picture as inspiration

What I wrote (unedited):

Dylan Beckman never left his hospital room, but he had a whole group of friends who visited him, bringing with them their tales of the outside world. His heart could not withstand the potential infections and germs that could be found in the average restaurant or playground. If his mother knew how fast his heart beat when listening to his friends’ stories, she would have forbid them to visit. So he kept their late night meetings secret and never let on that the black smudges under his eyes had nothing to do with his poor oxygen levels and everything to do with lack of sleep. Of all his friends, Shane told the best stories, the ones that would cause his heart to skip three beats instead of two. Shane had been to the farthest oceans and seas, including the Antarctic Ocean once (though he thought that place was “too damn cold”). Shane claimed the freezing temperatures had cut right through his black and white rubber skin, nearly turning the white a shade of blue. When he described the black depths of the water, how everything glowed when you swam deep enough, Dylan could see it, could feel the weight of the salt pressing him down into a sharp bed of neon purple coral, while a distant pilot fish provided the perfect nightlight. In that place, he could float, his slow heart beating at a normal pace in the freezing cold, his uneven exhalations muted by the liquid in his lungs, and finally he could sleep, hidden in a world where the soles of Mrs. Nancy’s shoes didn’t squeak on the tiled floor, his mother wasn’t crying, and the foreign machinery didn’t count off beats of his heart.

Editing Your Manuscript; Or Amputating Limbs

Today I did something I haven’t done in a while. I sat down and read my book from first page to last. I clipped my inner-editor’s wings and let myself get lost in the story. Guess what happened? I LOVED IT. Now, that my sound egomaniacal to you, but let me put this into context. For the last four months, I have been stuck in the seventh ring of hell that I like to call editing.

Painful, gut-wrenching, and confidence breaking. That’s editing. And every time I make an edit, it feels like cutting a little piece of myself off. Fingers for sentences, and arms and legs for whole paragraphs and pages. Yet, I do it because it’s necessary. Then, I send my baby off to beta readers, hoping they will tend to it as carefully as I have.

The hardest discovery through this process is the one we all knew the moment we picked up our first Dr. Seuss book. It’s a subjective experience. No two people feel exactly the same way about their Green Eggs and Ham. Beta reading can be likened to this experience. One may tell you that your opening chapter is on fire. The next tells you to cut, cut, cut. You fix one thing only to create another problem, another limb that needs cut off. And you find yourself wondering, where does it end? What will be left of me when I’ve sliced and diced and carved away?

Gold. Pure gold.

That’s the dream, anyway.

YA Highway Road Trip Wednesday: What else do you read, besides YA?

Admittedly, there haven’t been many of late. In the last year, Young Adult literature has managed to reignite my passion for reading. A surprise for me since, by the time I was a teen, I had already moved on from Young Adult literature. I should say, I am a voracious reader. For cripes sake, I have a Master’s in English, so I better love to read. Yet, most of my studies focused on the classics, or surveys of things like Modern Drama and Women in Literature. When I graduated, I thought, “Now is the time. Now I will get caught up on all those books I couldn’t read, while I was busy with school. Books everyone talks about, like Seybold’s The Lovely Bones, or anthologies that tout “The Best American Short Stories” for the year.

I took recommendations from friends. Scanned the reviews and the book clubs for the books many considered must reads. I bought a ton of books. I read and read and read. And I discovered something. About myself.

Too many of the books and stories left me feeling dissatisfied and empty. I discovered gritty, ugly characters, and the horrific things that can happen to innocents. I was introduced to characters that cared about nothing at the beginning of the novel and were far more indifferent by the end of a 300 page journey. Judging by many of the things I read, our world and the people in it have very little to redeem themselves. We are an unhappy race of people, and flat, hopeless characters full of ennui are representative of what modern society is about.

My reaction? Tossing a book across the room and wondering how I could get those wasted hours of my life back. I want books that make me think about possibilities. I long for stories that make me care about growing and stretching personal boundaries, whether you’re ten or eighty. I want something more than shock value, empty relationships, and one-dimensional characters who let the world happen to them. And what in the hell ever happened to somebody believing in something heroic and standing up for it?

Maybe young adult novels allow a greater flexibility to explore hope and uncertainty of the future. Perhaps that’s because the characters are of an age where possibility exists. I’m not talking about the Hallmark movie of the week with happy-ever-afters. Great Expectations and Othello do not have fairy tale endings, but they leave you with something. A few hours of entertainment and a little magic. I’m talking about still believing in the possibility of BECOMING MORE, BELIEVING IN MORE, HOPING FOR MORE than current literature tells us is possible.

THAT is what I found when I picked up a YA novel.

So, what am I reading outside of YA these days? Not much. I’m rereading my classics and settling in to my YA section, while I wait for the publishers to believe me – the reader – is capable of MORE.

I-OCD, or Inbox Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: A Writer’s Malady

As many of you know, the manuscript of my novel is currently on review by several agents, along with reams of manuscripts from all the other hopeful writers. While I am waiting for one of these busy, dedicated professionals to read my work, I have been afflicted with a dangerous disorder, I-OCD, or Inbox Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Today, in place of a Teaser Tuesday, please allow me to share what it’s like to suffer from this illness.

7:30 AM – Wake up. Immediately check iPhone to see if agent has called or emailed.

7:30 – 8:30 AM – Get ready for work with iPhone nearby

8:30 – 8:40 AM – Check email again. What if some well meaning agent’s email got snagged in my spam net? Write to fellow AWers to commiserate at lack of news.

8:40 – 8:50 AM – Drive to work through an obstacle course of buses, messenger bikes, and pot holes

8:50 – 9:00 AM – Steal a parking space from the auto shop across the street that thinks they own the street; high five self for a damned fine parallel parking job while under the steely gaze of said mechanics.

9:00 – 6:00 PM – Work like a fiend while eyeing iPhone every ten minutes wishing the thing would ring already. Wonder if I gave out my correct contact information. Pick up ringing phone and snarl at telemarketer ignoring the “Do Not Call” list.

6:00 – 6:10 PM – Drive home through reverse obstacle course, except now dodging homeless on dark street to get to car in aforementioned prime location.

6:10 – 7:00 PM – Give in to craze to check all three email accounts and spam boxes. Fight urge to send more queries just to make something happen.

7:00 – 12:00 AM – Head to 24-hour Starbucks to get some writing done. Fail miserably when caving to desire to check email every 10 minutes. Put iPhone in backpack to avoid lure of blank, black stare. Worry ring can’t be heard from backpack and take back out. Try to write. Wonder why the hell I signed up for NanoWriMo. Give up on writing and try to outline. Give up on outlining and check email again. Play with iTunes. Finally get some writing done. Check email one last time, knowing New York agents have been in bed for hours and couldn’t possibly have emailed.

12:00 – 12:20 AM – Drive home. Curse three other Mini Cooper drivers who wrangle for parking on street. Forget to check which side of the street has street cleaning tomorrow. Remember two tickets received for forgetting to move car. Run back to check sign and move car. Curse under breath.

12:20 – 1:00 AM – Get ready for bed, update Nano count. Check email one final time. Dream of being a published writer.

Feel my pain.

How are the rest of you dealing with your I-OCD?

Novel Setting

Consider this. Your setting is a character in your story. The way it looks can set the mood and tone. It’s flaws and strengths can weave through your plot, impacting how your characters act and think. Better yet, it can be a pool of water at the bottom of well, reflecting the hidden emotions your characters can’t find words to express. When I began TOUCHED, I knew I wanted forests and beaches and overcast skies. The story can be dark, and I wanted the setting to reflect that. I also wanted a place of great, unapologetic beauty that could reach out and grab a young woman who had mile-high defenses from years of abuse.

Last September I spent a week in Seattle and traveled to Bainbridge and Bremerton Islands. Something about the islands and the ferries stuck with me, and I knew they had to be in my story. After doing a little research on Google, I came across the perfect setting – Port Townsend, Washington. A small Victorian seaport on the Olympic Peninsula that the locals refer to as the “City of Broken Dreams.”

I was halfway through my novel when I had the chance to take a trip there. I rented a car in Seattle, took the ferry to Bainbridge, and drove the two hours to PT. I stayed at the hostel at Fort Worden where a crucial scene from my novel takes place. The locals offered stories and tips on places to go. In two days, I hit every location I could to take pictures and make crazy notes. The amazing thing? Many of the places I visited were exactly as I imagined. Unfortunately, the genre of my novel and the proximity of Port Townsend to Forks, WA has created too many comparisons to the Twilight series. I couldn’t give up the places that make PT unique so I created a fictional town and island in Maine and renamed a lot of the locales, while keeping the descriptions the same. Enjoy some of my pics from PT! (Sorry for the quality! They were all taken on my iPhone.)

Teaser Tuesday

This is from Chapter 8: Lessons. This is the last Teaser from TOUCHED. I don’t want to give away too much!

*Removed so as not to spoil things for my readers*