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?

Trying to write more

I'm slow.  I'm actually way too slow.  I'm easily distracted by my life which makes writing incredibly difficult.  I have two kids, I'm back in school despite already having a degree, I moderate a listserve and a few other boring things I won't mention.

That leaves me pulled in a lot of directions.  I haven't posted on here in a week simply because I have to get some control over things.  I need to make time to write my ms.


I'm quite disappointed in myself.  I honestly thought I'd be finished by now.  So finish, I must.  I #amwriting, are you?

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.