Guess How Much I Love You cake

Happy Father's Day! Of course, the cake I made for my husband is based on a book.

WSJ and Darkness Too Visible #YASaves

OMG. I just logged into Twitter to find a flurry of #YASaves tweets. Not knowing what all the hubub was about, I clicked. Dear lord. It seems every time I make a post, something very similar is going on in the world around me of which I'm completely unaware.


I hate that. Especially since my last post could easily be construed as being supportive of the WSJ attitude. Let me clarify that it absolutely is not. I think it's awesome that hard topics are explored. The dark doesn't bother me, nor should it be avoided. And the WSJ's idea that this is something totally new is crazy. It's not. Incest, death, violence, suicide, etc., are themes in many books older than I am.

WSJ really made me wish I hadn't even posted that blog yesterday because now I feel like I have to take it all back.

I don't think it's necessary to have gratuitous sex and language but that doesn't mean that I don't think there is a place for sex and language in YA. I very much do. I think that how it is handled is what separates it as a genre. Sometimes it does require a bit more grit than normal. But for the most part, it can be done superbly without those things. I just like the idea of knowing what I'm getting. Otherwise I really don't see a need to separate them. Most adults are reading YA and most kids are reading fiction.

I think back to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book in which there were many complaints about the f-bomb in a book that was being marketed by some as MG. His response to that was that it was never meant to be MG. Just because it is about a kid doesn't mean it is for a kid. And that's kind of were I stand on the matter. It's not that I object to the actual content or that kids are reading it.

And let's just clear this up right now: appropriateness is going to vary by age, family views and the like. Sex is not appropriate for a a 7 year old to be reading. No one is arguing that.

Kids are going to read what they are going to read unless parents are involved and controlling their decisions (good luck with that, by the way - that rarely works out well). My parents never monitored what I read and I thank them for it because it allowed me to discover what I like and what I enjoy reading, not what they wanted me to read. I read because I loved to read. And I read everything I could get my hands on and went on way more adventures than should be legal.

It didn't change who I was or what I did. I was still me and decisions I made, I made on my own, not because a movie, a video game or a book made me think it was cool. If a kid is really like their parents, it'll show. Their preferences will be toward the books the parents want them reading anyway. I knew when I was fourteen that my parents and I had very different views on life. It hasn't changed. Give kids more credit. Kids aren't stupid, stop treating them like they are and using them as an excuse to remove all things adults find unpleasant or unfit for human consumption.

Let's face it, that's really what it boils down to, getting rid of things a group of people find distasteful. They don't just want to get rid of it with kids, that's just the excuse for right now.  If that were to ever be successful it would eventually move on to adults.

I do tend to believe that we do have more violence today than we did, say a hundred years ago. But I don't think it has to do with games, books, music or movies. I won't get into what I think is the real problem here but suffice it to say, it isn't the fucking books people read.

It's a lame excuse to say a book might trigger a relapse. Basically what that says is that no one, ever, should discuss these pathologies, as Mrs. Gurdon likes to call them. No movies, no talk shows, no nothing. Because hey, they might trigger relapse.

We should be sensitive to others. But we also can't skirt issues.

Procrastination station

This is me.  I'm procrastinating so much. I have a lot of semi-legit excuses. But a big one is going to be running out in about 2 weeks.

I'm actually glad for that because well, I'd really like to write again but it seems like now, when I do have the time, I'd rather do something like relax and watch a TV show since my DVR is getting backed up because I'm too busy to watch TV. I think I've developed bad habits since undertaking my semi-legit excuses (husband out of the country for 6 months, kids and their activities, house, labor intensive graphic design class-yanno, that kind of stuff) where I just give in and do whatever else it is I'm thinking about because my time is so limited right now.

I've never understood how people can just write for 2 hours a day. I get it now. Sometimes life just demands that you write for those 2 hours and those 2 hours only whether you want to or not because it's not getting done any other way. And they become much more productive.

I think I get it.

Now I must get to disciplining myself to be strict about how I write. That'll be interesting. Every time I do sit down to write, I look around and see the dishes aren't done or the house is a wreck and all this work has to get done sometime and I'll get more done if I just do it now so I can write after and so on and so on and it all just amounts to a bunch of not writing.

So scheduling my time to write seems like a good idea to me. I just need to figure out what time I have - and that isn't easy either.

Suggestions?

Crits, comparisons and Twilight

You know what really annoys me? Having a critter say they are reminded of Twilight just because there are certain commonalities. Like dark hair. Or family. Or a bit of a romance. It's incredibly annoying, as if no one ever had characters like Bella or Edward before.  It's like saying Romeo and Juliet is just like Twilight.

When the story is clearly not the same story, is it necessary to try to plug it into Twilight?  Can no one ever have dark haired, tortured characters ever again? Can no one ever touch the same themes again?

Grrr.

Seriously.

Sorry. I just saw a crit (not one for me - although I've gotten it and I've seen it said to several other people when their wips weren't anything like Twilight, either) and it's really annoying. The critter generally loses a lot of credibility with me when that happens because there are millions and millions of books out there. Not everything is Twilight because there are teens falling in love. There were books similar to Twilight before Twilight and there likely will be after.

Read the fucking story. Crit the story. Before you say it, please think really hard about it - is it really like Twilight?

There will always be characters that remind you of other characters. There are only so many personality types. And there will always be books that remind you of other books.  We wouldn't have genres if that weren't the case.  It would all just be called fiction.

Get over the Twilight comparisons unless it actually means something. If everything reminds you of Twilight, you need to read more books.

No offense to Mrs. Meyer intended.

P.S.
Mine isn't even about teens, vampires or anything else close to the themes of Twilight. Why?

Now a card carrying member!

Just got my evil library card. Get your very own card at evilreads.com
Sent from my EVO - these are not the typos you're looking for...

Multiple projects rock.

I always thought people were crazy to have more than one wip going at a time.  I'm discovering the error of my thinking.

I'm having trouble finishing my wip.  It's not that I don't care about the story or that I can't write it or that I've lost it.  I just got bored with it because I already know it.  I don't know if that happens to other people and I honestly didn't know it would happen to me.  But it did.  Color me shocked.

One of my crit partners decided to run a prompt.  I wanted to do something in first person (which I don't like so much) and I wanted to explore a morally ambiguous character.  I never planned on it being anything more than an exercise so I picked something easy to work morally ambiguous into.  Vampires. Lo and behold, it wouldn't stop.  So it looks like I have a new wip.

It's working out well.  I get bored with one, I move to the other.  I'm liking this so far.

Does anyone else get bored?  What do you do about that?  And how do you feel about multiple wips?

Do you remember reading your first book?

I had this post scheduled to publish on 3/16.  I have no idea why it never did.  I'm sure it has something to do with my lack of HTML skills.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been thinking about reading my first real book ever.  It's probably no surprise that I don't remember since books make into the "dream" file.  That leaves me with only one option.  The books that I remember in the most interesting way.

The Encyclopedia Something or Other.  No, that's not the real title but my parents had a set of encyclopedias that also came with a book of nursery rhymes and another for fairy tales.  I read these often.  When I was older, I read all the mythology stuff repeatedly.

The first book I truly remember wearing down the spine and killing a book from near constant use was really a set of books.  Comic books, actually.  It was the entire Peanuts collection by Charles M. Schulz.  At the time, the collection wasn't that large but it was a seven or eight hardback box set my parents had bought me.  I read that set over and over and over and over.  I remember once asking my dad a question about it.  It went something like this:

Little Miss Brat:  "Dad, how do you pronounce this name?"
Dad: "Bay-toven."
LMB:  "Nuh uh!"
Dad:  "I'm serious.  That's how you say it."
LMB:  "Okay.  Thanks."  But I really don't believe you and I will continue to pronounce it Beeth-oven until I'm truly old enough to know better.

Mr. Schulz is responsible for my very deep love of comics and graphic novels.

"Bunnicula" by Deborah and James Howe.  I loved the vampire bunny so much that this book never made it to the dream file because I owned it for a very long time.  Maybe you can see my tastes developing with the above three choices.

As I got older, a book that I remember made an impact on me was "A Gift of Magic" by Lois Duncan.  I read it in probably the seventh grade.  It was my first experience with a fantasy book made me feel a connection between old world and modern world, today it would be filed under paranormal.  I checked it out from my school library, my favorite place in school.  After a few years, it hadn't gone into the dream file but I couldn't remember who wrote it or where to find it or anything else.  I didn't even remember the title. But I would always think about it every once in a while. Over the years, I had even tried to find it again and never did until just last year.  I knew the word gift was in it and knew that it maybe had the word magic in it.  By some strange chance, I stumbled upon something about Lois Duncan and saw a list of her books.  Voila.  There it was.  I bought it.

Then there's "A Wrinkle In Time" by Madeleine L'Engle, read just after "A Gift of Magic."  I had actually forgotten all about this book until I saw it in a book store many years later.  I got incredibly excited because even though I hadn't thought about it, I remembered it so vividly.  I bought it.  Just remembering reading it brings warm fuzzies.

Then there's "Cat's Cradle."  I can't tell you the author because I don't remember but I can tell you this much:  it was horror and it wasn't William W. Johnstone, as far as I know, his was published several years later.  I came to this after a bender on reading things like "North and South" by John Jakes and the VC Andrews books.  I wanted a change.  So I got into horror and Stephen King.  Here's what makes this book so special, though.  I read it, liked it and a few months later went to check it out from the library again.  I like to reread books.  I ended up with Kurt Vonnegut by mistake.  And now I love Kurt Vonnegut.

I can go on and on about books that made an impact on me in some way, shape or form but the list would get out of control.  All of these books were read at fifteen or under.  It's interesting to go back over them and think about how much they meant when I was a kid.  At the time, I didn't realize what they meant.  Hell, I probably still don't realize it.  If I had to make this list again tomorrow, it might look a little different.

And you thought zombies weren't real.

Time, y'all.  It's just a matter of time. Scientists are involved.  If you're using your handy-dandy once-was-fiction-but-not-anymore guides for zombie destruction (hint: double tap and aim for the brain), that's never good. The zombie apocalypse is nigh. Zombie-proof your homes, build your compounds and prepare to hunker down.  With lots of ammo.
Fungus Makes Zombie Ants Do All the Work
A tropical fungus has adapted to infect ants and force them to chomp, with surprising specificity, into perfectly located leaves before killing them and taking over their bodies

*Thanks to Confessions from Suite 500 for bringing this to my attention.

Red Cross fundraising for Japan relief efforts

The League of Reluctant Adults has an awesome fundraising auction going on!  They've split into two teams to auction off crits of the beginning of your ms and your synopsis, all ya gotta do is win.  And this isn't one crit.  It's everyone on the team reading and critting.  Holy smokes, if that ain't awesome.

Go bid, win a crit and help raise money!

Team Fang

Team Claw

If you haven't seen Margaret Atwood's Publishing Pie talk, check your internet connection, something's not getting through to you.  This awesome talk has spawned T-shirts!

Dream books?

Like most writers, I've read for as long as I can remember.  I started thinking about my first book, trying to find out if I could remember what it was.  Instead, I thought of the book that I thought was a dream.

I had a book when I was young, I can't tell you how young because I don't remember.  As I got older, the memory of this book (and a couple others) faded into the depths of my unconscious.  For a while, I remembered specifics.  Then I remembered bits and pieces.  Then I only remembered illustration.  Illustration morphed into a simple feeling the book gave me.  Until it finally got filed under dreams I must have had when I was a tiny kid.

I found out at *cough, cough, cough* years old that my dream that could've maybe possibly been a book that I once read really was a book.  Before I tell you the title, I must add my disclaimer.  I graduated through the ranks of reading fairly quick and I promise you that once I graduated, I didn't slum it in the younger ages anymore.  I was too well read to go back to kiddie books.  *snark*

My husband and I were in the bookstore (Borders, we're sad to see it go) searching for books to load up for our soon to be born child.  I squealed when I found THE BOOK (or rather, one of a couple).  Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen.  Now you might be snickering at me and wondering why I wouldn't remember a book like that.  Especially since I do remember Where The Wild Things Are.  WTWTA seems to be more visible than In The Night Kitchen.  Let me just refer you back to my disclaimer above.

I knew it when I saw it because the dream-like thing I always remembered was how cool the illustration was but I couldn't describe it, I could only know it when I saw it.  I remember something about a naked boy in a dough airplane flying around a huge jar of milk.  Now, this isn't something you go around asking people, "Hey, was there a book about a naked boy and an airplane?"  Go ahead, ask someone.  I dare you to try it and see what looks you get.  Come back to me afterwards so I can say I told you so.  Because that's precisely why I didn't ask anyone.

I have another book I hope to one day rediscover that has also entered into that "maybe it was a dream" file.  It was dark and scary and had super cool illustration but that really is all I remember about it.  I think it had something do with a couple mice making a deal with the devil.  I also remember a fallen tree.

The Lion, The Witch and Wardrobe (the cartoon, not the book) was like that for me for a couple years, too.  Only the cartoon got played often enough that I eventually rediscovered it much earlier.  I was a kid when I filed it in dreams and was still a kid when I rediscovered it.

Do you have anything like that or am I the only crazy lady in the house?  Have you read something so long ago that you start to think it was a dream when your memory gets all fuzzy and squirelly about it?  Something you think about and wonder if it was a dream or some kind of amalgamation of a book you read with a movie you saw and maybe some urban legend thrown in the mix?

I always think I'm the only person with those.  I'm hoping I'm not.

10k words by Sunday

Yup.  Busy mom, here, goes and decides to have a challenge in the crit group to write 10k words by Sunday.  I have about 2.5k.  I'm behind, as usual.  Today, the only thing I've written is a blog post.  I've been swamped today.  And the rest of the week isn't looking much better.

Late night for me!  Woo hoo!  Who's with me?

*crickets*

I do have a couple of things, though.  I find Write It Sideways to be a fantastic blog.  Lots of great and useful information.  I think I've plugged it before.  This post brought some interesting thoughts.

I'm not very good at writing a short story.  I tend to have too much to say and any story I want to be short ends up growing in plot and size because I can't keep help but add subplots and such.  In essence, I can't write short.  I can't throw away ideas just to keep within a word count.  I've tried, I've failed.  So I plan to look over the links in the post just to see what the hell I'm doing wrong.  I'm sure it's a lot.

On Stacia Kane's blog, there's a great post that not only tells you to not "kill your babies" - thank you, Stacia, I could kiss you, but also a good explanation on what it means to write what you know.  You've heard that said over and over.  I write UF.  I don't know how to fly.  If you don't know that there's a deeper meaning to "write what you know" then this would definitely be a good post to read.

And now I'm off to try to catch up on my word count.

What makes you put a book down?

Over on Nathan Bransford's blog, he's got a poll asking what type of reader you are - the kind to power through what you feel is a bad book or the kind to toss it as soon as you know you don't like it.

It got me thinking - what makes me put a book down?  Since I've generally always powered through even when I was less than thrilled, I never considered myself much of a stopper.  I'll usually put a book down for a while and pick them back up when I've run out of better options on my shelf.  But I have stopped.  And I found that in the last year, I stopped more books than I ever have before.  I stopped three books last year knowing I will never pick them back up.  Which is kind of unheard of for me.  My history has really been to only give up on maybe 1 book every few years.

So why did I put these three down with no desire to pick them back up?

Book 1:
I'm not a fan of first person.  I'm especially not a fan of first person/third person changes.  Even moreso, please don't go from first person present to third person past when switching to different POV characters.  It really bugs me and throws me out of the story.  But even then, I'll usually power on and see if the story will redeem the dislikes - there are plenty of first person stories that I adore even if it's not my favorite POV.

But then there were just things about the story I couldn't accept.  I can easily accept changes in mythology and someone putting a new twist into an old story.  But too much of a twist that just isn't easy for me to picture or get beyond the status quo of what it should be?  Not so much.   If I could handle sparkling vampres, I should've been able to handle this change but I couldn't.  It totally turned me off and coupled with the POV issues for me, it was a total goner.  If I'm too busy complaining about the mechanics, I can't look beyond them and follow where the writer wanted me to go.

Book 2:
It was YA that really should've been more middle grade.  It was simply too young for me and didn't have a good enough sense of wonder and enchantment.  It wasn't like Harry Potter where you could be whisked away without really thinking about the age of the characters.  When the mentality of the characters are that of a 7 year old when they are 16 or 17 and it's not balanced with something redeeming and more mature, its a no-go.  There really needed to be more character development.  I like a good plot but if it's attached to one dimensional characters, it turns a good plot into a bad series of convenient happenings with no depth.  Which may be fine for the actual genre and not really any reflection on whether or not the book was good given the intended audience - I may just be too old for it, after all.  I don't really know what publishers look for in YA and MG as far as maturity of the writing vs. audience expectations.

Book 3:
Oh my God.  There are certain things that the rest of the world might not feel the same way as I do and this might be one of them because when I say bad writing, I don't mean bad grammar or shallow story or flat characters.  I'm sure that less people will agree with me on this one but I can't help it.  It really affects how I view a story.  Here it is:  titles (personal titles, not book titles - things like Major or Captain) that are just dumb.  Whenever I see dumb titles I'm reminded of a movie to which I can't remember the title but here's what I do remember:  the MC was called GS-5 So-and-So.  Now, to most people, this might not matter one iota.  To me, it grated on my nerves absolutely every time it was said because I'm an Army brat and a GS-5 is never called that.  A GS-anything is never called that.  They are called Mr./Mrs./Ms. So-and-So.  It's a pay grade, not a title.  Not to mention that fact that the person you call in as some specialist to Vietnam to handle sensitive stuff, which I no longer remember (that should tell you how much I hate this type of thing - I remember exactly why I hated it but can't remember squat about the story) is not going to be a GS-5.  A GS-5, Step 1 makes about $27.5k today, but much less back when this movie came out.   It's not the paygrade of a badass, even for government standards.  And more importantly, it simply doesn't flow off the tongue.  So when I hear a title, even one that is fictional, it better flow.  This one did not.  It took the mythology the book was based on and turned types and jobs of the different players within the mythology into titles.  And it truly ruined the entire book for me since it was all over the first few chapters.  I put it down in disgust, that's how strongly I feel about crappy titles of people.

What about you?  What kinds of things made you put a book down forever?  We all know the basics.  Bad writing or bad story but what specifically turned you off?

Is it now cliche to say I love Neil Gaiman?

I do, I really do.  I don't care that 50,000,000 other people love him, too.  I'm okay with that and hope he picks up more and more fans.  I'm already grooming my kids to love him.  (If you haven't read Instructions to your children, do so now.)

I follow his blog, follow his twitter and I hang on his every word as if he were speaking directly to me.  Okay, well, maybe not.  I'm delusional.  Sort of.

Jim C. Hines wrote a fantastic post about Mr. Gaiman called "20 Neil Gaiman Facts."  (I can't even bring myself to call him Neil - I'm such an idiot.)  It will have you rolling on the floor laughing, pinky swear.  He made a T-shirt, too.  I'm not sure why it's not in the zazzle store anymore, but keep checking, maybe it'll pop back up.

I haven't been able to decide on a favorite.  I think it might be number one.

New feature!

If you'll kindly look to your right, you'll see I've added a new widget.  You can now subscribe to the blog via email.  Woot woot!

Nathan Bransford's first paragraph contest

Wow.  I mean, wow.  1,515 entries.  My sympathies to agents that see this daily in their inboxes.

I don't really know what possessed me to enter the first paragraph competition since I'm not even sure that's where I'm going to start anymore but luckily, with the odds above, I'm not too worried about getting picked.

Speaking of Nathan Bransford, have you all sent in your first 250 for page critique friday?

I sent mine when he moved it to the forums and I have to say, I've edited several times.  I'm afflicted by that terrible disease - you know, the one that makes you tweak what you write a gazillion times?  Yeah, that one.  I've tweaked and tweaked until I had a page I felt was pretty darned good and tweaked and tweaked my way right out of that good page.  I haven't edited it since then and every friday I pray that my first page is not picked because I've made it my mission to not tweak anymore until I've finished my WIP.  (I'll admit that I probably should at least tweak the first 250 until I'm happy again since there's always a chance it'll be picked and I don't want to be humiliated by something I'm not happy with - I'd rather be picked apart by something I actually think is good.)

I sent it to The Knight Agency's First Impressions draw, too, wherein I'm also hoping not to get picked, especially since I can't even edit that one.  WTF was I thinking?  I sent in crap and I know it.  I think, at the time, I was riding on that high of, "I think I've got it now!"  Given a day or two, I realized the bitter truth.  At this point, I'm just praying that my critical eye on my own writing is just severe lack of confidence and that it's better than I think it is - but I really do laugh out loud at that thought.

I know that everyone has their doubts on how well they can pull off writing.  I wonder, though, how bad is it for everyone else?  I always expect to hear how much I suck - even if it's in the nicest words possible.  Is it as bad for you as it is for me?

Amazon and the erotica debacle

I'm coming in late on this topic, I know.  But bear with me.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a personal account from an author that had her books pulled.  Although I'm a bit late to the game, Amazon has stood their ground as evidenced by the fact that her books still aren't back up.

I don't want to get into the arbitrary decision process they have adopted as to why certain erotica books are removed and others aren't or why they accepted them in the first place.  The mechanics of this particular business choice is, fortunately for them, theirs to make.  Not so fortunate for authors, since now they really have no idea what they can publish with them or distribute through them.  Even traditionally published books are being sent to the trash bin.  Customers are again complaining about their books being pulled from their archives without any notice or refund.  But there's plenty being said on this already.

The one thing I've found interesting in reading all the uproar about this is that no one has mentioned that this practice of removing purchased items from archives isn't just ebooks and it isn't something they've only done once or twice before.  Amazon has been doing this regularly since it started selling digital content.

I ordered the movie "Coraline" (because who doesn't love Neil Gaiman?) when it first became available for purchase - tells you how long ago this happened.  I purchased it, not rented it.  When I went back several months later to watch it again, it was removed.  I have no idea when they removed it and I had to call and ask for a refund.  I was told it was removed because they lost the license.  Well, great.  Why didn't you offer me a refund when you took it back?  I don't recall any vocal outcry like there was for 1984.

Which leaves me to believe books are pulled from Kindles all the time.  Movies are pulled all the time.  Music probably isn't affected nearly as much because the music is usually transferred to iTunes or something similar so they have no direct access.  I'm praying they don't come out with some crazy MP3 player that will only play music from them because you know it will lead to some new proprietary format that won't let you play it anywhere else.  And if that wouldn't be crazy enough, people will buy it.

All their digital content is open to removal from your archives at any time.  Last time I checked, even the periodical subscriptions that you may have purchased are going to be tied to the serial number of your Kindle, not you - so hope you never have to get your Kindle fixed if you have periodicals because you won't get yours back.  I don't know if the periodical thing is still the case but at the time I was finally jumping on the ereader bandwagon, it was.

And there have been complaints to Amazon about this very practice forever and yet it hasn't changed. People still shop there and people will still continue to shop there.  It's unfortunate but true.  They will continue to take back what they bought and hope you never notice so they can keep their money.

I would like to see an accounting of how much money they've chosen not to return to people who have no clue they are missing purchased items.  I bet it's fairly substantial.

I no longer purchase anything digital from them.  If I ever purchase an ebook from them again, I will download it to my hard drive.  I can't do that with movies (because you're forced to watch online through any player that will connect to Amazon) unless I get software that allows me to record my computer screen, so I won't be buying movies at all.

The moral of this blog is that when dealing with Amazon and any digital content, buyer beware.  This isn't an anomoly.  It didn't only happen with 1984 or erotica.  Amazon does this all the time with everything digital.  They simply have a very poor business model when it comes to digital content and it's not stopping anyone from shopping there.

I tend to think that the backlash just isn't going to mean much to them or their bottom line.  It hasn't before and it probably won't ever.

And that's why I went with a Nook.

New look!

What do you think?  Should I keep looking for new clothes to dress this baby?

I'm real, I'm real!

But I'm not a boy.  Just making sure everyone knew I wasn't a figment of their imagination with people thinking to themselves, "Remember that one blog on writing?  You know, the one that only had two or three posts ever.  Ink-something-or-other."

I don't have anything I'm going to claim as a resolution, I'm just not that crazy anymore.  I have lots of things I could easily put out there into the ether as a resolution but I steadfastly refuse.

I do, on the other hand, have a few things I would like to say I will try to do better.  Like blogging, for ince.

Sure, blogging could be considered a fairly self-important endeavor and it could be said that you'd have to have some amount of narcissism to partake but I would disagree. Who cares what I have to say, after all?  Well, let's not go from self-important to self-deprecating.  I don't particularly want to blog because I think someone wants to hear what I have to say but because I simply like it.  It's kind of a like a diary I get to look back over and see how utterly ridiculous I was back when.  Or those moments when I was brilliant.  But mostly just seeing the moments in time and what I was doing or thinking.  So it's really more for me.  Maybe that does fall into the "self-important" category, after all.

So I'm choosing to do try to do better.  Did you like how non-committal that was?

On another note, I've been catching up on all the blogs I've lost track of over the last few months.  That was a lot of reading and a lot of time that should have been put to my MS.  I wouldn't call it totally wasted, though because I learned more useful things to put toward my writing.

Happy New Year, everyone.  I hope it brings lots of motivation to write, write, write for all of us.

Distractions...

Today, I'm determined to write more than a couple paragraphs.  No distractions today.  I'll post later to see how that went for me.  So far, it's apparently not going well...