Inscriptions

Last Year's Books

2010-03-23T17:25:00.000-04:00

Although I haven't posted here in a while, I'm not abandoning this blog forever. As proof, here's the list of books I read in 2009. It's a bit later than usual, due to a Major Life Event commonly known as a new baby. But here it is all the same.

I'm also posting this on my Huggermugger blog, and most of my book reviews I've linked to are on that blog, not here.

January

Women of Valor: The Rochambelles on the WWII Front by Ellen Hampton
I Hate Hamlet by Paul Rudnik
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

February

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Complete Short Stories of Jeffrey Archer by Jeffrey Archer

March

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
A Darker Place by Laurie R. King

April

Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout
Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

May

Hollywood Buzz (Starring Pucci Lewis) by Margit Liesche
The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
Giant by Edna Ferber

June

Mary Anne by Daphne du Maurier
Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs

July

Brisingr by Christopher Paolini
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

August

O Jerusalem by Laurie R. King

September

101 Things You Didn't Know About Jane Austen by Patrice Hannon

October

Death du Jour by Kathy Reichs

November

A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King
By Myself by Lauren Bacall

December

The Watcher's Guide: Volume 1 by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

Pretty different mix from the year before in one major way: in 2009, I read six books I'd read at least once before; in 2008, nary a one. A lot of old favorite authors this year: Jasper Fforde, Rex Stout, Laurie R. King, J.R.R. Tolkien. And two new authors who quickly gained my appreciation: Jeffrey Archer (for his mad plot-twisting skills) and Kathy Reichs (for her plotting prowess and technical knowledge). Two non-fiction books, one memoir, one play, a healthy dose of fantasy, several novels, and gobs of mysteries. A satisfying year, for sure! If a somewhat scanty one -- the older my son gets, the less time I have to read. Now that I have a baby daughter too... who knows what 2010's list will look like!

Adieu, adieu. Remember me.

2009-06-22T09:36:00.002-04:00

I've decided to stop posting on this blog for a while. My own writing seems to be going through a rather stagnant period, and so this blog has as well. I'll continue writing reviews of the books I read, which you can find on my Huggermugger blog at www.huggermuggerblog.blogspot.com -- if you enjoy those, please join me there. I'm not deleting this blog because I do intend to continue it at some future time, when my writing life regains its vigor. When I do, I'll post a message on my other blog announcing the revival of Inscriptions, so if you follow me there, you won't miss anything.

Thanks for reading! I hope I won't be gone too long.

LRK Podcast Link

2009-06-10T19:59:00.003-04:00

The podcast of Laurie R. King's reading and discussion that I attended is now available here. You have to scroll down a little, until you find May 2. You can also download the mp3 file. Enjoy!

"Giant" by Edna Ferber

2009-06-05T16:01:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid, one of the movies my family watched over and over was Giant (1955), which stars James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor. I was crazy in love with James Dean's character, Jett Rink. He was sweet, sad, shy, and eventually became a gazillionaire. Swoon.

It's surprising that it took me this long to read the novel, I guess. But not nearly as surprising, for me, as the differences between the book and the movie. Much of the movie is very faithful to the original plot, characters, and setting. But there's one major difference: Jett Rink. No shy, backwards ranch hand with a schoolboy crush is he, not in the book. He's mean, he's conniving, and he's cruel.

But despite Jett being so different from my childhood idol, I did enjoy this book. Ferber has a firm grasp of full-bodied characterization and an acidic wit that made for a fast-paced, enjoyable read. I didn't even mind her occasional bursts of stream-of-consciousness. It was a good way to kick off the summer.

But I like the movie better, mostly because of Jett Rink.

"Hollywood Buzz" by Margit Liesche

2009-05-11T15:38:00.004-04:00

I love classic Hollywood and the WWII era, so it's no surprise I enjoyed this book. Hollywood Buzz (Starring Pucci Lewis) by Margit Liesche is a fast-paced mix of mystery, excitement, Hollywood glamour, and a little romance thrown in just for fun.

The lively heroine, Pucci Lewis, is a WASP -- as in Women Airforce Service Pilot -- who also happens to be good at undercover work. She gets assigned to Hollywood to see to it that a film about the WASPs is portraying them accurately, and also to try to find out if a fellow pilot's recent accident was the result of sabotage or not. Pucci tackles both parts of her assignment with a determination and bouncy charm that kept making me try to decide whether they should cast Claudette Colbert or Ginger Rogers in the role. The supporting cast includes an attentive screenwriter, a mysterious Gypsy housekeeper, a handsome former pilot, and none other than screen legend Bela Lugosi.

Hollywood Buzz is a fun, fast read, perfect for the beach blanket or hammock this summer. It's actually a sequel to Liesche's debut novel, Lipstick and Lies, which also stars Pucci Lewis, and which I intend to get from the library myself this summer.

I Survived!

2009-05-02T16:12:00.005-04:00

I just got home from attending Laurie R. King's book talk at a nearby town's library. Yes, I survived. I even asked questions after she did her reading! Two questions I'd thought up in advance so as to have a chance of sounding at least somewhat intelligent, which I think I managed to do. She answered both of them as if I was intelligent, at any rate. I asked her how she approaches writing from a male character's point of view versus a female character's, and how much research she does for her books. Which are both things involved with my own writing, since I write from a male POV so often (particularly in my fanfiction), and I write so much historical fiction and have to do research for it sometimes (also mostly for my fanfic).

After the talk and Q&A period, Ms. King signed books. She signed a copy of The Beekeeper's Apprentice for me, which I bought with some birthday money a couple days ago. And I bought a copy of her new book, The Language of Bees, there at the book talk, which she signed for my college advisor & lit prof, Ramona Czer. As Professor Czer doesn't read my blog (as far as I know), this will be a surprise gift, which I may send to her right away, or I may hang onto and give to her in person in September when Larry and I visit our alma mater. I learned today that one should buy a copy of the author's book before the talk starts (which I did), because they may run out (which they did).

The library is going to podcast this in a week or so, and I'll link to that from here then so you can get to hear Ms. King's insights into the craft of writing (and my little chipmunk voice asking questions) for yourself. Meanwhile, if you've never read one of her books, but like mysteries or mysterious fiction, I strongly suggest them. The Beekeeper's Apprentice is my favorite of the 8 of her books I've read so far, and I also loved Keeping Watch, which is a sequel to Folly. She has two series, the Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell books (Beekeeper is the first) and her Kate Martinelli mysteries that are set in modern San Francisco. I've got a permanent link to her website, www.laurierking.com, in my sidebar here if you want to learn more.

So what did I personally gain from this afternoon, other than a couple of autographs? A renewed enthusiasm for writing. I hereby vow to stop using what should be Writing Time to work on things for my craft store or take little quizzes on Facebook or surf around online finding new pictures of Hugh Jackman. I will take my writing seriously again, and I will do my very best to finish writing the first draft of Salem before the end of the year. And I will also work at finding new ways to enjoy writing again, since it's become something of a chore these past few months. This afternoon was the first step toward that renewed joy, of that I'm certain.

Chewing My Fingernails

2009-04-30T17:03:00.005-04:00

Laurie R. King is giving a reading on Saturday at a city about an hour from here. She's got a new book out, The Language of Bees, the latest in her Holmes/Russell series, and so is doing a book tour.

So, naturally, I'm going.

So, naturally, I'm nervous. I only started reading her books a few years ago, but she's rapidly become one of my favorite current authors. The only other author I've met is Ray Bradbury, and that was back when I was in college. And I had reinforcements then, namely my best friend and a professor. Now it will just be little me, driving to a city I've never been in before and then meeting someone whose writing I enjoy and admire and getting her autograph and trying not to have a Watermelon Moment and say something really dumb.

But I'm as excited as I am nervous, so that's good, right?

"You're Doing it Wrong, Jack."

2009-04-14T16:04:00.008-04:00

Deborah Koren and I were discussing writing last week, particularly stories that don't seem to work. We compared stories we'd read and written, trying to pinpoint why some stories aren't as good as others. And I observed that some writers seem to come at writing stories backwards, thinking up things for the characters to do, rather than coming up with a situation and letting the characters react to it.

Yes, there's a big difference. I can remember when I first started writing, I would sit around brainstorming exciting things for characters to do. Rescue their kidnapped brother or stop a hold-up or capture a bad guy, whatever. The problem was, then I had to spend even more time thinking up reasons for my characters to do those things. Sure, I could say, "They're good guys -- this is their raison d'etre." But when I look back at those early stories, so many of the plots seem contrived, flimsy, or just plain unbelievable. Because coming up with things for your characters to do is just not a good way of approaching fiction.

If you have fully rounded, three-dimensional, interesting characters, you don't have to think up things for them to do. All you have to do is give them a situation and let them react to it. It's a subtle difference, I know, but an important one.

Let's take the Kidnapped Brother scenario. If I approach this story as, "Albert gets to go rescue Jules from a band of evil kidnappers," that sets up lots of stuff for Albert to do, sure. Talk to cops. Gather a ransom. Maybe find time to inform their other brother, Joseph, who's in the slammer for counterfieting. Outwit the kidnappers and rescue poor Jules. It's straightforward, it's exciting, and what's wrong with that?

But if we approach it the other way, it's even better. Someone kidnaps Jules and sends a ransom note to Albert. What Albert does is all up to him as the character you've imagined. If he loves his brother, he'll figure out who kidnapped Jules, decide whether they'll really let him go if Albert pays the ransom, maybe work with the cops to stage a preemptive rescue. But what if he doesn't? What if he's happy to have Jules out of the picture so Albert can marry that sweet young thing they've both been squiring around town? Then he'd be more likely to let the cops do what they can, and let the chips fall where they may. He might even decide he can't come up with the ransom. And what about brother number three, Joseph? He's probably met up with all sorts of unsavory characters in the hoosegow. What if he's trying to get revenge on Jules for testifying against him? Or hoping both brothers will get caught in the crossfire, leaving him the only heir to their uncle's not inconsiderable fortune. Or is he a loyal brother who uses his contacts to rescue Jules before the cops even get there?

Do you see how letting characters act for themselves creates more interesting, layered stories? Instead of forcing characters to follow a chain of events, you just create a problem and turn them loose. If you've got good characters, you're only problem will be keeping up with them as they act out your story.

Jeffrey Archer

2009-03-15T15:39:00.003-04:00

I've just added another author to my list of favorites: Jeffrey Archer. He joins the ranks of Jodi Picoult, Laurie R King, Michael Munn, Jasper Fforde, and Jan Karon as one of the few living authors whose name on the spine alone will cause me to check a book out of the library. And I've only read one of his books so far, a collection of short stories.

But what short stories they are! Each one holds at least one surprising twist that spins the whole story around into a new light. And of the 36 stories in this collection, only a handful contained a mild expletive or short, tastful love scene. If you read modern fiction, you know how rare -- and, to my mind, welcome -- that is.

My father-in-law actually recommended Archer to me, and I'm so glad he did! I want to try one of his novels next, maybe The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot if the library has it.

Don't you love discovering a new author you like, and knowing there are now a whole bunch of books just waiting to delight you?

"Walk a Crooked Mile"

2009-03-03T11:22:00.004-05:00

My new Combat! fanfiction story, "Walk a Crooked Mile," is online at last! Here's a direct link, or you can find it by going to www.fruit-salad.com and choosing the Hot Joe page.

I've gotta admit I really dig this story -- it has lots of hard choices, juicy emotions, and even a fistfight! And it features one of the secondary characters, Littlejohn, who I have a special fondness for. He doesn't get to be the focus of very many episodes or fanfic stories, but he's always there in the background, a steady presence you can count on. I wrote one of my all-time favorite stories, "Dying Like Men," from his perspective too, and found him comfortable to understand and write.

Not all of the Combat! characters come easily to me, even after loving the show for half my life and writing fanfic about it almost that long. I struggle with Hanley and Caje every time I write them, and Saunders can sometimes be inscrutable for me as well, even though he's my favorite character. I can usually get inside Doc's and Kirby's heads, but not always. However, I can write Billy and Littlejohn all day long and into the night, no problems whatsoever. For whatever reasons, I really relate to them and understand where they're coming from better than any of the others, which makes them easy to write.

You see, one of the greatest struggles when writing fanfic is to keep your characters true to the ones presented in the show. Sure, every fan has their own perceptions of every character, but if they're way off-base with "canon," then people aren't going to want to read your stories.

Anyway, hope you like my new story!

Polishing

2009-02-23T10:17:00.006-05:00

After three rewrites, my fanfic story "Walk a Crooked Mile" is finally ready for some polishing!

What's polishing, you may ask? Other than something you do to merit badges and old silverware?

My very first draft of a story is just about getting the story down on the page -- it's full of places where I couldn't think of the right word or didn't describe something properly, things I know I can fix later. If I stop to fix them the first time, I get too caught up in fiddling with words and staring off into space trying to figure out just how big a building is, and I never finish my story. I very often leave myself a little parenthetical note, like (YUCK!) or (Fix this!) so I can trust my future self to spiff it up and not worry about it right then.

Subsequent drafts are for fixing plot holes, character glitches, and anything else in the structure of the story that isn't working. I usually take care of those parenthetical notes during the second and third drafts, but I don't agonize over word choices yet. I'm more concerned with making sure my story makes sense, keeps a reader's interest, things like that.

But when I get the story to where I like it quite well, and my one or two trusted pre-readers say it makes sense to them too, then it's time to bring out the silver polish and rags.

My first step is to search for all my problem children. In MS Word, I do a search for things I know I struggle with. I search for "was" and fix my passive voice problems. I search for "ly" and kill off as many adverbs as I can stand to dispose of. And then kill more of them. I search for "is" and "are" and fix more passive voice. I fix "ing" and "as" phrases. I search for words like "of" and "in" and kill unnecessary prepositional phrases.

And then I start in on the bobble heads. When I write dialog, and I write a lot of dialog, I tend to describe people as nodding or shaking their heads a lot. If I left all those in there, my characters would look like bobble head dolls, no question about that. They also shrug a lot. So I search for "nod" and "head" and "shrug" and decapitate those bobbling heads.

And once I've done all the searching and finding and replacing and killing I can, I print off my story and start line-editing it. Scouring every single line for fluff and padding that I can remove so that my story is just a lean, mean, entrancing machine.

I'm in the middle of the search-and-destroy phase with "Walk a Crooked Mile" right now, and should probably get back to that. Ciao.

Music hath charms

2009-01-21T09:42:00.003-05:00

When I write, I generally listen to music. Movie soundtracks sometimes, especially if I'm writing an actiony scene and need the music to help me keep the momentum going. Other times, I just listen to whatever's in the CD player, or create a playlist on my computer from all the stuff I've loaded in there. I've got playlists for different moods, everything from "rowdy" to "solace" to "cowboys." I also have specific playlists for Pike and Salem that include songs I mention in the books or that fit the overall mood of the characters.

And once in a while, I get fixated on a certain song and have to play it first to get myself into the writing groove. Back in 2006, when I was finishing my first novel so I could start Josey for Nanowrimo without those other characters in my head, I had to listen to "Romeo's Tune" by Steve Forbert to get myself going. That continued through most of Josey and any other stories I worked on at the time. Then for a long time, I didn't have a specific song to get myself in the groove. But since this past November's Nano, I have. This time, it's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler. It has nothing at all to do with the Combat! fanfic I'm working on right now, though it did work quite well for a couple of the stories I did for Nano. But it's a habit now, like making something hot to drink and lighting a candle. A ritual to get me into the writing mindset.

Another year, another list of books

2009-01-06T16:13:00.000-05:00

And now it's time for me to list all the books I read in the past year. Why? Because it's a tradition. Because I love learning what books other people are reading. Because I have fun looking for patterns in my reading habits.

As usual, books I've blogged about have links to those posts.

January

Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years by Michael Palin
The Red Box by Rex Stout
Coffee with Hemingway by Kirk Curnutt
Day Dreams by Rudolph Valentino

February

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would be King by Foster Hirsch
Salem's Lot by Stephen King

March

Touchstone by Laurie R. King
The Osterman Weekend by Robert Ludlum
The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty

April

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
The Rose Legacy by Kristen Heitzmann
Two Histories of England by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, introduced by David Starkey
Sweet Boundless by Kristen Heitzmann

May

The Tender Vine by Kristen Heitzmann
A Prize for Princes by Rex Stout
Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks
A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King

June

Eragon by Christopher Paolini
The Strong-Willed Child by Dr. James Dobson
The Essential Wolverine: Volume 3 by Larry Hama and friends

July

Sein Language by Jerry Seinfeld
The Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King
Eldest by Christopher Paolini
Hollywood Vampire by Keith Topping

August

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum

September

Chocolat by Joanne Harris
Lone Creek by Neil McMahon
Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult

October

Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana

November

Richard Burton: Prince of Players by Michael Munn
The Hotel Dick by Axel Brand

December

The Essential Uncanny X-Men: Volume 1 by Stan Lee and friends
The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

This was a year of firsts. The first time I read a Stephen King novel. The first year since 2002 I didn't read any part of Lord of the Rings. And the first time since I can remember that I went a whole year without reading a single book that I had read before. Every single one of these was a new adventure for me, though many of the authors were familiar.

T'was the night before

2008-12-24T09:10:00.003-05:00

"Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

2008-12-20T16:28:00.002-05:00

It began snowing at noon yesterday, and didn't stop for more than seven hours. It snowed more overnight, and a bit today, so we now have more than nine inches of snow, and more in the offing. I am, of course, doing periodic Dances of Joy. I love snow! The more snow, the better! Especially since I don't have to drive to work at night in the snow anymore, like I did for four whole years.

The only dead mouse in the pudding sauce is that Mom is flying up tomorrow to spend the week, and now it seems likely her flights will be delayed or cancelled or whatever, and it'll turn into a big mishmash for her. But she should get here by Monday at the latest, Lord willing and the creek don't rise.

And meanwhile, we have snow to play in! Daniel really likes it this time around -- we got a wee bit of snow a couple weeks ago and he was not very fond of it. Or, more precisely, he didn't like having to dress up like the Abominable Snowman in order to go outside. But he's gotten the hang of walking in his new boots now, so all is well. He spent quite a while this morning trying to pick up chunks of snow, helping his daddy brush off the car, and attempting to scale the snow mountains pushed up along the edges of our parking lot. I expect we'll be doing the same tomorrow :-D

The rewriting begins

2008-12-15T14:51:00.003-05:00

It's amazing how much editing I can get done with a hard copy of a story, a green pen, and a new set of surroundings. My lunch writing date at Panera was awesome -- I was there for not quite two hours and steamed through the first fourteen pages of "Walk a Crooked Mile" and figured out how I want to try to rewrite the ending. If I'd been at home on my computer, that would've taken me days.

On the other hand, I have to go back and implement all these edits into the computer now, but I don't think of that as wasted time, I think of it as an opportunity to do even more editing. The more, the better!

Pause

2008-12-10T14:31:00.003-05:00

Well, so much for my resolution to write during Daniel's morning nap five days a week. I managed to do that exactly once so far this month: on December first. And it went miserably -- my brain and fingers simply rebelled, as if to say they'd had enough and needed some time off.

So I've spent the last nine days writing Christmas cards, wrapping presents, decorating the apartment, and catching up on things I'd let slide during November. I listed new things in my craft store and blogged on my crafting blog. I finally started crocheting a baby blanket for a friend who's due at the end of this month. I started cleaning up the house for my mom's arrival in a little over a week.

And today, I pulled up "Walk a Crooked Mile" and began editing it. I think it's the closest to completion of my four stories from Nano, and I finished the first draft almost a month ago, so it feels like a good time to start rewriting. Things went a little slow at first, but I worked through some comments from Deborah Koren and started figuring out what needs to be cut to make a tight, fast-paced, tense story out of what is currently a rambly tale. I think the next step will be to print out a copy and attack it with a red pen (or maybe green, if I'm feeling festive). I'll probably take it along Saturday when I meet up with Kristi for our lunch writing date.

I'm just glad it's over and it has a happy ending.

2008-11-29T16:39:00.003-05:00

I win! I win! I finished NaNoWriMo 2008 a whole day early :-D My final word count is 50,662 according to the Nano site, altho my own calculations say it's a bit lower. Hmm. I'll trust them, lol!

I finished four stories and got a nice chunk of a fifth written. And I did that in 26 days, because I took a few days off and finished early. I wrote an average of 1,934 words a day, with my lowest word count being 302 and my highest being 2,527 (yesterday, actually). There were only three days that I didn't top 2,000 words.

I do not intend to continue this madcap writing pace, but I do intend to sit down and write five days a week, during Daniel's morning nap while Larry's at work. I'm back in the habit and I want to keep my momentum going at least somewhat. I have a non-Combat! short story in the works, and I should really finish Salem one of these days, dontcha think?

Anyway, it's pretty awesome to have 50K of raw fanfic on my hard drive. But that's not the only good thing to come from this year's Nano. By attending two write-ins and a meet-up, I've made a new writing friend! Her name is Kristi Petersen and she runs the Admit One Literary Theme Park website, a collection of stories set in Disney World. We're making plans to get together twice a month to write together and bask in each others' writerlyness. Shiny!

Almost There....

2008-11-25T12:32:00.003-05:00

I passed 44,000 words today! Less than 6,000 to go, and then this year's madness will be at an end. To celebrate, I posted a new snippet and treated myself to some hot chocolate with a candy cane in it.

I finished another story yesterday, and started a new one. Here's a list of the stories I've finished so far:

"Walk a Crooked Mile" (8,350)
"The Better Part of Valor" (10,000)
"No Song Unsung" (14,000)

I'm still working on:

"Ships That Pass" (6,536 so far)
"Shattered" (2,467 so far)

If you're doing the math and scratching your head because that doesn't add up to 44,000 words, well, I'm also counting some random bits of silly stories that may never see the light of day. And I did start working on another story one day when I simply couldn't get anywhere on these, but I've since abandoned it, so while I'm still counting those words, I'm not including the story here.

It's kind of funny -- I've had the basic idea for "Shattered" for months, maybe a year, but I only just started it yesterday. And I got the idea for STP before NSU or TBPoV, but I'm totally stuck on it and haven't written more than a paragraph or two on it in over a week. The easiest story so far was WaCM, which I got the idea for while watching an episode of "Rawhide" and which switched protagonists right before I started writing it. And it's turned out the coolest, I think -- I'll probably be able to spiff it up pretty quickly and might even be able to post it on Fruit Salad before the end of the year. We'll see!

Anyway, enjoy the new snippet, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

And then what happened?

2008-11-19T19:55:00.005-05:00

So, I don't actually have a plot for the fourth story I'm doing for Nano. I have a few scenes in my head, about half of which are now on paper, and I have a vague idea of the direction the story is heading, but mostly I'm just along for the ride and hoping it'll all work itself out.

This is how I used to write all my stories, so I'm not too worried. I know that eventually, I'll find the plot, or it'll find me. It's not the best -- or quickest -- way for me to write a story, but it does work. In fact, it's kind of fun to work this way again, after quite a few years of knowing what my stories are all about before I write them. Well, maybe not all about, but I at least usually have an ending I'm heading toward and a point I'm trying to make. But just drifting along is a nice change, for a while, anyway. Let's just hope I don't either drift onto a sandbar or out to sea!

Halfway

2008-11-14T15:01:00.003-05:00

I just passed the halfway mark for NaNoWriMo! I've got 25,045 gleaming words :-D I feel a little more than halfway done with my stories, however -- two of the four are finished, one's about half done, and I just started the fourth yesterday. Let's hope this last story is a long one! Of course, you never know -- another story could crop up just when I think I'm running out of words. Or one of these could turn out to be way more complicated than I expected. It's happened before....

"Richard Burton: Prince of Players" by Michael Munn

2008-11-13T09:10:00.006-05:00

I am hereby declaring Michael Munn to be my favorite biographer of movie stars.

Actually, I've been a fan of his for a few years -- I bought a copy of his John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth without ever having read it, which is odd, because I'd never managed to finish reading a biography of John Wayne before. They always angered me, because if they were written while he was still alive and acting, they were generally hyped-up image-creators; if they were written more recently, they focused on his flaws and failings and tried to destroy his image. But I bought Munn's book because from the back cover and the few pages I skimmed, I learned he had actually met John Wayne and had respect for him, as a man and as an actor. It turned out to be one of the best book purchases I've ever made. Munn treated Wayne as a human, neither deifying nor demonizing him, which is exactly how I wanted my hero treated.

So when I saw Munn's biography of Richard Burton on the "New Books" shelf at the library, I picked it up. And since the index at the back of the book listed no fewer than nine references to Hamlet, I had to get it.

Richard Burton is not one of my very most favorite actors -- he's probably in my top thirty. I enjoy his work, I've seen quite a few of his movies and own three or four, and I love his turn as Hamlet on stage. But he's not someone I'd seek out a biography of. Still, since Michael Munn had written this one, I figured it was worth a read. And I was right.

Michael Munn knew Burton personally and worked with him several times, so the book is full of first-hand accounts and anecdotes, as well as stories told to the author by Burton's friends and colleagues. And once again, Munn's subject emerges as a fully-rounded human being, a man with a talent for acting and a taste for alchohol and women. Munn neither condones nor condemns Burton's faults, he simply tries to get his readers to understand him. And what more could anyone ask from a biographer?

I'm going to see if the library has any more of Munn's books, as I see he's written about other actors I like, such as Jimmy Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, and Clint Eastwood. If you like learning about Hollywood and the real people behind its glitzy images, I suggest you do the same.

A new shop and a new blog!

2008-11-11T20:10:00.003-05:00

I recently opened a craft shop through Etsy.com. Yes, it's true, I am a crafty person -- I freely admit it. I crochet, I sew, I draw, I paint, I cut up little pieces of paper and glue them to things... and now I sell some of my creations online! My shop is called Huggermugger, which is an old word that means "jumble" (among other things). And yes, I got this word from Hamlet. You guessed that already, didn't you?

My shop has been open for about a month, and I'm enjoying this new challenge so much, I've started a blog where I can talk about what inspires my different projects. Of course, many of the things that inspire my writing also feed into my crafting, so you'll probably notice some themes emerging, like movies and books and, yes, Hamlet. So drop by my new blog and say hi!

Still chugging

2008-11-05T13:27:00.002-05:00

It's day five, and I'm still going strong! I'm aiming for 2,000 words a day, so that I can take Sunday off every week, and so far, I've totally hit that -- I'm at 8,468 right now. At this rate, I should be able to take Thanksgiving Day off too!

So far, the stories are flowing well too. I'm encouraged by that, although I know the first week of Nano is usually a sort of honeymoon where words and ideas spill onto the page with little effort. We'll see how things are going next week....

Here we go!

2008-11-01T16:41:00.003-04:00

It's the first day of NaNoWriMo! And I've already gotten 2000 words written. Whee! Today was a total breeze, once I figured out which story I wanted to start with. The characters are coming through loud and clear, I had two new minor characters who just stepped right up and named themselves without a fuss, and everything generally went really well. I'm suddenly feeling very confident about this Nano, after worrying and worrying the last few days. I should even have time for a shower before Daniel wakes up from his nap!

And I've even posted an excerpt! Read it here.

Prep work

2008-10-29T14:16:00.002-04:00

NaNoWriMo officially begins in less than 60 hours, so in preparation for writing 50,000 words of Combat! fanfiction, I've been watching... John Wayne movies?

It's true. Yesterday, I watched Brannigan for the first time ever, and today I watched Operation, Pacific for the forty-ninth time ever.

And actually, Pacific does count as prep work for Nano. Because Patricia Neal has cast herself as one of the characters in two of the four (five?) stories I'll be writing. Okay, that came out somewhat weird. Want an explanation? Good, cuz you're gonna get one.

One of the stories I originally planned to write has a female character in it, and when I started envisioning her, Patricia Neal popped into my head. Or rather, Patricia Neal's voice, and I decided to go ahead and imagine the rest of her in the role too. And then one of the other stories I'm planning to write sort of evolved in such a way that it contains her character too. And then I fell victim to my trilogy-mania and started thinking of a third story to connect the two, but that one isn't quite far enough along in the planning stages for me to count it for sure. So I might be writing four stories, or maybe five. Or six. Or seventeen. We'll see!

Oh, and daaaaang, I forgot how good John Wayne looks at the beginning of Pacific when he comes out of the jungle with his shirt unbuttoned down to there....

Run away! Run away!

2008-10-24T15:31:00.004-04:00

So, I've obviously gone entirely mad. Again.

Yes, I signed up to do NaNoWriMo for the fourth year. I'm signed in as Hamlette as usual, and you can view my personal page here.

As you can see, if you visit my page, I'm doing fanfic this year. It's not strictly a novel, but instead a collection of short stories in which Sgt. Saunders tends to save the day. Which is why I'm calling the collection "Saunders Saves the Day," since it's nice to have a title to put on my the Nano profile.

I'm doing fanfic this year for a couple of reasons. One, I still haven't finished Salem, the novel I started for Nano last year. And two, I have a whole bunch of Combat! ideas bopping around in my brain, and this will be a great way to get several of them down on paper.

Actually, I had planned on skipping Nano entirely this year, but I've become something of an addict to this month of write-your-fingertips-off madness. Daniel is still taking at least two hours of naps a day, and that should be enough time for me to get my wordcount in. I just won't be able to do little chores like sweeping the floors or putting away laundry unless I've made my wordcount for the day already. Or at least, that's my plan!

And if you think I can't write 50,000 words of fanfic, well, my three Marc d'Yae stories ("Hide and Seek," "Finders, Keepers," and "Ashes, Ashes") total 46,499 words. That's awful close.

Blast from my past

2008-10-15T11:35:00.003-04:00

Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if just one thing in your past had turned out differently?

Last night, we stopped at the Walmart where I worked as a cashier between my freshman and sophomore, and sophomore and junior years of college. It was about 8:30 and the store was fairly empty, so when Dad and Daniel and I got up to the registers, most of them had short lines. Dad chose the shortest, and to my sudden flummoxation, who should be the cashier at that line but a guy I was truly, madly, deeply infatuated with my first summer there! I had never expected to see him again. That was nine years ago! No way would he still be working at that Walmart, right? By now, he should have a great job writing music for cartoons, or at least be in Walmart management. But there he was, still cashiering.

My brain crashed for about three seconds. Went totally blank. Then I could think again, I picked Dano up from the cart so Dad would have to do all the interacting with him, since a) my brain still wasn't all systems go, b) he probably didn't remember me anyway, and c) I suddenly felt really guilty that I have this awesome life now and he's still working there.

And then I began to wonder. What if he and I had gotten together that summer? Would I have gotten my AA from Bethany and then gone somewhere in NC for my BA? Possibly to App State, where he was going part-time? What if we'd gotten married? Would we both be working at Walmart still, maybe on opposite shifts so our kids wouldn't have to go to daycare? Or would his life have turned out differently too?

Totally pointless speculation, I know. And it made me realize just how great my life is. Sure, I live in a tiny apartment in the middle of a city, but I have a wonderful husband with a cool job, a beautiful and talented baby, and a writing career that's not exactly stagnating. Yay me!

But I think I should hire my former flame to be my writing muse, because I got not one but two new story ideas from this encounter. And nine years ago, he inspired dozens of poems (some of them pretty good!) and a fanfic story that I'm still really fond of. Wonder what's up with that.

"Lone Creek" by Neil McMahon

2008-09-21T17:02:00.004-04:00

I just finished reading Lone Creek this afternoon. The only reason I didn't read it all in one day is Daniel; spending most of my time running around after him meant it took me three days to read it instead. And considering it runs 300+ pages, that tells you something about how engrossed I was.

Lone Creek is a noirish mystery set in modern-day Montana. It has a flavor that's a cross between Raymond Chandler and Larry McMurtry; the protagonist is sort of hard-boiled-detective meets good-old-boy. It revolves around two mysteries, one in the present and one in the past.

It all starts when Hugh Davoren finds a couple of gruesomely slaughtered horses. And since we all know that anyone who's mean to horses is Evil, we all know that there must be an Evil Person around. Then the human bodies start piling up too, and Hugh winds up on the run from the law and the Evil Person. And he also falls for a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to a girl who died mysteriously when Hugh was a boy. That old mystery gets tangled up with this new one, and it's not until several plot twists later that everything gets straightened out (mostly, anyway).

My favorite character was actually Hugh's best buddy, Madbird, a Blackfoot Indian with a flair for sarcasm and spookiness. Every scene he was in was extra-intriguing.

If you like tales of the New West, mysteries, or love stories with a touch of the supernatural, you'll probably like Lone Creek.

"The Wrong Face"

2008-09-06T17:37:00.002-04:00

My short story, "The Wrong Face," has just been published by Perpetual Magazine! You can read it here.

I'm very excited about this, because it's been almost a year since I had a story published, and that evil little critic inside my head had started whispering that maybe I just wasn't any good anymore, and would never be published again. But he was wrong!

I first wrote this story back in 2006, and had it accepted by an ezine which promptly went belly-up before it could publish my story. Several revisions later, "The Wrong Face" has finally found a home. It's one of my favorite stories, so I'm happy it's finally out there being read! Sometimes it takes a long time for a story to find the right publication and editor. Writing is definitely not about instant gratification!

Anyway, I hope you like this story. Perpetual has a feedback section, so feel free to leave a comment about my story there if you want!

"Eragon" the movie

2008-08-23T15:16:00.005-04:00

It's been almost exactly a month since I last posted. Sorry about that. Daniel and I spent two weeks with my parents, where he perfected his walking skills. Then my husband had to attend a week-long class up in NH for his job, so we went with him. But I'm finally home and ready to get back in the blogging groove.

While we were in NH, I caught the movie version of Eragon on cable. Since I enjoyed the book, I figured the movie might be fun too, and it happened to be on while I was fixing lunch, so why not? Well, remember how I'd heard the book described as a rehash of Star Wars? The book might not be, but the movie sure feels like it. When they pared the book down into movie-size, they kept just about every similarity to Star Wars, and even accentuated some of them. Plus, they totally rewrote the end battle and made it into basically a dogfight with dragons and evil flying things. Now, I must admit I didn't get to see parts of the end due to dealing with a walking ten-month-old, but that's how it came off.

It's true I've been spoiled by Peter Jackson's treatment of Lord of the Rings -- he's another Hollywood great I'd love to work with. Not only were those movies visually stunning, but the screenwriters stayed incredibly true to the source. Sure, they had to cut things out and combine some parts, but pretty much everything you see on screen is in the books at some point. They didn't rewrite the ending so that Frodo and Sam ride an Oliphant up Mount Doom and battle a couple of Nazgul before disposing of the Ring. Which is very much how the ending of Eragon the movie felt. Plus, the visual effects were just... obvious. There were so many scenes that made me go, "Blue screen!" or "Digitally added!"

I'm not even going to discuss the acting, except to say that Jeremy Irons as Brom was lovely, and his scenes were emotionally charged and well-crafted.

So I guess what I'm saying is, read the book, don't bother with the movie. And if you've seen it and decided not to read the book, please, don't judge the book by its movie.

Huzzah!

2008-07-24T21:17:00.003-04:00

I finished the rough draft of "Unforgiven" today!

I first got the idea for this particular piece of Combat! fanfiction at least two years ago. It may have been longer than that. It was inspired by two movies (what a surprise!): The Rundown (2003) and L.A. Confidential (1997). I watched them both in the same night, and the combination of Seann William Scott and the noir themes of laying traps and seeking revenge got all whirled up in my head and turned into the central idea for what I then called my "Kirby Story."

But I was in the middle of writing a couple of other C! stories, and then other stories popped up that needed to be written, fanzines needed to be edited, and the "Kirby Story" just kept getting pushed aside. One night last summer, while on the way to work, I was listening to my favorite Metallica's songs, and their classic "Unforgiven" struck me as having a great deal to do with this story, so I had a title long before I started writing.

I finally started working on "Unforgiven" at the beginning of this year, but I quickly realized that Seann William Scott no longer fit in the story. So I threw him out and re-imagined my OC*. Along with him, the trap-laying theme went out the window, and the revenge theme got muted too.

So what I have, now that I've finished the first draft, is a story that only vaguely resembles my original idea. But that's okay -- that happens almost every time I write a story. And in subsequent drafts, I expect it will change even more.

*OC stands for Original Character, ie, a character original to me, not one featured in the series.

If I Worked in Hollywood

2008-07-16T17:22:00.003-04:00

If I worked in modern Hollywood, there are three writer/director/producers I would love to work with: Joss Whedon, Baz Luhrmann, and M. Night Shyamalan. All three of them are creative geniuses whose work inspires me to try to be a better writer and more creative person. And they all have new things coming out this year! Baz has Australia, Night has The Happening, and Joss has... Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog????

Yes, it's true. Joss Whedon has created an online episodic supervillain musical. Because there just aren't enough of them, you know? Anyway, it's funny, it's silly, and it's full of Jossness. Act I aired yesterday, Act II arrives tomorrow, and Act III will be released on Saturday. And then on Sunday, it will all disappear into the ether. Well, not really, but after Sunday, you'll have to pay to download it. Until then, it's free! Free! Freeeeeeeeeee! (Cue the maniacal laughter.)

Stuck

2008-07-14T15:13:00.003-04:00

I'm procrastinating. I'm supposed to be working on "Unforgiven," but I'm stuck. Not irrevocably stuck, just "out of gas" stuck. I worked on it during Daniel's morning nap, and now that he's taking his afternoon nap, I'm working on it again. And I'm stuck. So far today, I've written 1200 words, so I shouldn't feel bad at all. That's like a third of the story's total word count so far. But I was cruising along so well that now that I'm stuck, I feel like I should just get myself unstuck and keep going, maybe get the story close to finished or something.

But I'm very stuck. I know what happens about five minutes after where I am, but I have no idea what happens during those five minutes. And I can't just say, "Five minutes passed," because that won't work at all. Grr.

So I'm procrastinating by blogging. I'm pretty sure I could get through those five minutes if I really wanted to, but my oomph seems to have petered out. I may just have to let it sit until tomorrow.

"Eragon" by Christopher Paolini

2008-06-22T15:05:00.005-04:00

If you've gone into a bookstore in the last five years, or even walked down the books aisle at Wal-Mart or Target, you've probably seen this book. It probably made the biggest splash in the young reading market since Harry Potter. Several of my friends read it, read the sequel (Eldest), and are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the final book (Brisingr) later this year. So why did it take me this long to read it myself?

Probably because I kept reading/hearing that it was really just a rehash of Lord of the Rings. Or of Star Wars. Or of Harry Potter. People also said it was badly written, or immaturely written, or predictable, or boring, or... you get the picture.

So I decided to read it for myself, to see if it was as good, or as bad, as people said.

It is.

Christopher Paolini started writing Eragon when he was a teenager. And it feels like it was written by a teen, with some odd pacing and writing that is both spare and wordy. S. E. Hinton he isn't (but who is?). So don't read this book if you're looking for sparkling prose or perfect plotting. But if you want a fun, fairly fast read, something to divert you this summer while you're on a plane or the beach, go for it! I liked it well enough that I got the second book out of the library.

Oh, and as for the accusation that it's similar to Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Harry Potter -- of course it is! It follows the pattern of all great myth-based stories. Our hero gets a call to action, acquires a mentor, meets up with some archetypal characters, and engages in a big battle against the Evil One. I don't call that copying, I call that utilizing the mythic story structure. For more info on that, read The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth by James N. Frey or The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.

Back in business

2008-05-28T21:38:00.004-04:00

I've started working on Salem again! Yesterday, I pulled up the file and started rereading what I wrote during Nanowrimo before I had to quit and start packing. It's not as horrendous as I remember it being, which is pretty amazing considering I was writing it while dealing with a one-month-old baby. I'm about half through reading it, and have been beefing up my bio notes on new characters since it's been more than six months since I created them. I've got some good ideas for the middle section that I skipped during Nano, and I think I know what happens toward the end as well. So let's just hope I keep working on it! I do really love the main characters of these three novels (Josey, Pike, and Salem, which I'm calling the Carolina Chronicles for now) and it feels great to get back into their world.

"Diamond of the Rockies" series by Kristen Heitzmann

2008-05-22T15:43:00.005-04:00

Although I write Christian fiction myself, I'm not always a big fan of the genre. Too often, Christian novels are more like morality plays, with lots of lessons, but little character development or plot. It's almost as if authors feel that the only way their books will be considered "Christian" is if the characters constantly stop in the middle of the plot to convert another character, and that every plot point needs to revolve around some religious experience.
But I believe that, as C.S. Lewis put it, "[t]he rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general" (Lewis, 46). Good Christian fiction needs to be good fiction, not just have a good message.

Over the years, I have read a lot of Christian fiction, some good, some mediocre, some downright lousy. Yesterday, I just finished reading the final book in Kristen Heitzmann 's "Diamond of the Rockies" series, a trilogy of historical Christian fiction that recounts the adventures of a young Italian-American woman whose journey to a mining town in Colorado changes her life. I think this is the best Christian series I've read since the two Stonewyck trilogies by Michael Phillips and Judith Pella. Although they're infused with faith, the stories themselves stand up as solid fiction. I relished these books and wish I hadn't finished reading them, because I still want to know what will happen next!

Kristen Heitzmann utilizes conflict far better than I fear I ever shall. Every single character is almost always at conflict with every other character in some way, whether emotionally, physically, or spiritually. I know that feeling of "what happens next?" comes from her masterful weaving of different conflicts together, and I can only hope some day I'll manage to do half as well. I have a tendency to get far too fond of my characters and want life to be nice and smooth for them, but that doesn't make for very interesting reading. These books have actually renewed my determination to finish writing Salem and start editing that trilogy. And yes, I plan to add more conflict whenever possible :-)

Works Cited

Lewis, C.S. “Christianity and Literature.” Religion and Modern Literature: Essays in Theory and Criticism. Ed. G.B. Tennyson and Edward E. Ericson, Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1975. 46-54.

Keep crawlin', crawlin', crawlin'....

2008-05-17T21:24:00.005-04:00

Daniel crawled for the first time about an hour ago! He's been getting up on all fours and rocking back and forth for over a month, but tonight he actually started moving his hands and feet and making progress across the floor! Not a lot, as we have wood floors and they're slippery for little denim-clad knees, but he managed to go five or six feet. Not all at once -- he started and stopped several times (which allowed me to grab the camcorder), but he finally made it to his destination: the movie shelves! Seems he's his mother's son, eh?

Walls, walls everywhere....

2008-05-11T16:34:00.006-04:00

When Robert Frost wrote "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," he must have meant "except in Connecticut, where they're crazy about them." In the twenty-some miles we drive to church, I count more than forty stone walls on either side of the road. Some of them are modernized, stones and rocks set in cement bordering people's yards. But most of them are just loose stones piled on more stones to make a teetering, wandering wall.

The ones I like best are the ancient walls that run through a stretch of woods or a vacant field, because when I see them I can imagine colonial New Englanders walking through freshly plowed fields, picking up stones and taking them to the edge of the field, balancing them just so on top of other stones they picked up last spring. Year after year, the wall grows higher, until one day, they stop plowing that field for whatever reason.

But now the colonists are gone, the fields are gone, and the stone walls remain to mark boundaries no one cares about anymore. It makes me a little sad, to think these walls have no real purpose anymore, that all that hard work is now meaningless. But it's also a comforting thought, because it reminds me that all the things I sometimes worry about in this life -- whether I'll ever get published again, whether we'll get the fanzine done in time, whether I'll ever get around to dusting my furniture -- all these earthly things don't matter much in the real scheme of things. All the walls I build may one day lose their meaning, but it doesn't matter because I have "a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys." (Luke 12:33b)

Lazy

2008-05-07T14:30:00.002-04:00

I just realized I'm not actually writing any stories or novels right now. I have two stories that I'm preparing to write, one fanfic and one not, but after finishing my story for this year's Combat! fanzine last month, I haven't worked on anything. I've been proofing other stories for the zine, but not writing anything myself.

Shame on me! I'm getting lazy in my old age, huh? I do at least have the excuse that my non-fanfic story needs some research, and the book I ordered through inter-library loan took a long time to get here. But I'm taking Daniel on a walk to the library later today to pick it up, so soon I won't even have research as an excuse anymore.

I really should get back to Salem and finish that first draft so I can start editing the whole trilogy and start trying to get it published. But that sounds like an awful lot of work right now, and I have these other two stories that are nearly ready to start being written, and... okay, yeah, I'm full of lame excuses right now. Sigh.

"Espresso My Love"

2008-04-29T21:24:00.003-04:00

People in Connecticut seem to be obsessed with Dunkin' Donuts coffee. There are Dunkin' Donuts quite literally everywhere -- there are two within walking distance of my apartment, one two blocks away, the other more like six or seven. Everyone rushes madly about, clutching their styrofoam cups of DD coffee as if they would be paralyzed without the stuff.

I'm not sure why they're so obsessed with this coffee, because I've had it four times now, and I am not impressed. Maybe I have bad timing and always get there when the pot is almost empty, but all four times the coffee has tasted burned. Now, I'm not a huge coffee consumer like a lot of my friends and relations. I just like a cup now and then, something to sip while I'm writing or reading when I'm not in the mood for hot chocolate. But I don't like burnt-tasting coffee. If I'm going to pay a couple of bucks for a cup, it had better taste good, doggone it!

So why don't I just brew coffee at home, you may ask? I have a coffeemaker, after all. And an espresso machine. Why not just plug them in and go my merry caffeinated way?

I have an answer for you: limited counter space. The cupboards hang so low over my counters that I can't put either my coffeemaker or my espresso machine out -- they're both too tall.

But my parents rescued me! Mom bought me the coolest thing for my birthday: a one-mug-sized French press coffeemaker from Bodum. It looks like this, and it rocks! You just put in your coarse coffee grounds, add hot water, steep for four minutes, press the grounds down, and voila! One tasty cup of smooth black coffee.

I like the coffee I've been making with my birthday present so well, I baked some biscotti yesterday to enjoy with it while I write. Or while I proof stories for a collection of fanfiction I'm helping put together.

Oh, and my title? It's a song by The Divers, a folk group from my college.

A new beginning

2008-04-23T21:13:00.003-04:00

Lately, I've been a bit bored by this blog. And I figure if I'm bored by it, anyone reading it probably is as well. It seems I don't have nearly as much to say about what I'm writing and reading as I thought I did.

But I'm not giving up on this blog. Far from it! Instead of letting it languish, un-updated and unread, I want to try to inject a little life into it. My life, to be precise. Because I do not write in a vacuum -- my writing is informed by much more than just the books I read and the occasional movie that happens to pertain to writing. It's informed by all the movies I watch, the music I listen to, the people I meet, the places I go, even the things I eat. Everything in my life goes into my writing, one way or another. So why shouldn't my blog reflect that?

Starting today, I will post about more than the things I am writing or reading. I will post about whatever I think will interest all six or seven of my readers :-) And if I can show how things in my life tie into my writing, all well and good.

Why start today? Because it's my birthday. Seems like a good time for beginnings.

Speaking of books I'm reading, my husband got me a great book for my birthday: Essential Wolverine: Volume Three. :-D Yes, my tastes in literature are as varied as my tastes in ice cream.

Author Gary W. Moore interviewed on CNN

2008-04-07T13:30:00.003-04:00

Last year, I read the book Playing with the Enemy by Gary W. Moore. When I mentioned it in my year-end list of books I'd read, Mr. Moore left me a comment thanking me for reading his book, and we traded a few emails about it. Now, here's an interview he gave about the book on CNN not too long ago:

I enjoyed this book a lot, since I love learning about WWII and the people who were involved in it. Plus, baseball is the only sport I really enjoy watching and know anything about. The book is being made into a film right now, although I don't know when it will be released.

"The Ninth Configuration"

2008-04-02T21:23:00.002-04:00

Huh. Here's another rarity: I just read a book that a movie was based on, and decided I liked the movie better. Usually I see a movie, then read the book, and like the book better, but still like the movie too. Sometimes I read a book, then see the movie, and generally prefer the book. Not this time.

I saw The Ninth Configuration in a film class in college and liked it right away. It's twisted, it's weird, it's off-beat, it's creepy, and it's very unlike most of the movies I like. But I dug it anyway. In fact, I dug it so much, I actually bought a copy, albeit a used one from a video store that was going out of business.

The story centers around this Vietnam-era batch of soldiers (and one astronaut) who are presumably bonkers (but possibly faking). They're stuck in a funky old castle in the Pacific Northwest. Into their midst comes one Colonel Kane, psychiatrist, all-around sweet guy, and also... no, I can't tell you the rest, it's too wonderful a movie to spoil.

So when I found the book a few months ago at a used book sale, how could I resist? It was written by William Peter Blatty (author of The Exorcist), who also wrote, directed, and produced the movie. I picked it up, hoping I would like it as well as I like the movie.

But I don't.

Oh, it's pretty well-written, and for the most part the movie follows the book very closely. Sometimes it's word-for-word, which is to be expected from a screenplay written by the same guy that wrote the book.

But he changed the ending. And I like the movie ending better. It's not a big change -- essentially the same things happen, except there's a slightly different reasoning going on in the movie, and there's one little thing that I really liked that isn't in the book. So I guess I'll be keeping the movie and passing the book on, as I definitely don't have room in this apartment for books I only sort-of like.

Bummer.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

2008-03-20T11:19:00.005-04:00

I rarely stop reading a novel before I've finished it. I can remember maybe two or three over the past twenty-seven years. I never got beyond the first chapter of Moby Dick, I think because I decided to read Ivanhoe instead. I do still intend to read Moby Dick someday, though. That was just a temporary stopping (temporary being ten years ago, but still....)

However, this week I stopped reading a novel half-way through and I do not ever intend to finish it. What was the book? Mrs. de Winter by Susan Hill, a sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Why did I stop reading it? Because I realized that there was no way it was going to end well, that Maxim was probably going to end up dead or paralyzed or disappeared or in jail or something else equally unhappy. And I just can't stand for that to happen.

Rebecca is one of my top ten favorite books. (I really should post a list of my favorite books here sometime, shouldn't I?) I've loved it since the first time I read it during I think my senior year of high school, when I read it clandestinely when I was supposed to be doing school work (sorry, Mom! I did get my schoolwork done too, though.) And it ends happily enough -- not dancing-and-singing happily, but not badly. The good guys survive and the bad guys go away.

But I don't think the sequel ends that well. If it does, oh well, I've missed out. But I can't bear a sad ending for these characters, who are practically like old friends because I've read Rebecca so often. So I stopped reading the sequel half-way through, when it was at a relatively happy place and nothing truly horrible had happened yet.

Besides, this was a sequel written by someone else, not by du Maurier. I think if it'd been by du Maurier, I would have finished it, because I trust her. Her books generally end well, if not happily. And her vision of what happened to Maxim and the Mrs. after Manderley would be official, not a sort of fanfiction version written by someone else.

(FYI, my title is the opening line from Rebecca.)

Jodi Picoult

2008-03-04T17:29:00.002-05:00

About a year ago, I blogged about how Laurie R. King's book Keeping Watch changed my attitude toward modern fiction. Today I'd like to talk about another author who has reinforced my new perception that good non-genre novels are being written still today: Jodi Picoult.

I've read three of her novels in the past couple years: first The Tenth Circle, then Plain Truth, and now Nineteen Minutes. Each one involves tough subjects like teen sex, infanticide, and school shootings, each contains characters that feel like real people, and each handles its subject matter thoughtfully and sensitively. Picoult doesn't offer easy answers to the problems her characters face, and she uses multiple points of view to show multiple sides to every situation.

As my husband will attest, when I'm reading a Jodi Picoult novel, I use every spare minute I can find to read because I can't wait to find out what happens next. I even start thinking up possible solutions for the characters' problems, as if I could somehow offer them advice. In fact, I have to limit myself to reading one of her books only every so often, or else I'd spend all my time engrossed in her fiction and never write any of my own.

"Ashes, Ashes" is out

2008-02-19T12:56:00.008-05:00

"Ashes, Ashes," my latest piece of Combat! fanfiction, is up at Fruit Salad, so here's a direct link. I'm pretty happy with it -- it's not my best piece ever (I still think "Dying Like Men" is my best), but it's a good story and I'm glad to finally have it finished so I can move on to other projects.

Because I do have other projects! I've got two new pieces of fanfic in the works, as well as a new non-C! story. Here's where I am on those so far:

+ "Unforgiven" (C! fanfic) has a story, most of a plot, but no ending scene. I love my ending scenes and really hate to write a short story without a good idea of the end in sight, so this one is still waiting to really get started.
+ "Untitled Doc Story" (C! fanfic) has a story, a plot, and an ending, so it's what I'm actively starting to write right now.
+ "Driftwood" (western) has most of a story, part of a plot, and no ending at all. I'm working on rounding out the two main characters, plus the villain, and ruminating on the plot.

And if you're wondering about my differentiation between 'story' and 'plot,' I'll try to explain. To me, a story's story is something like: "Saunders is wounded and Hanley is trying to rescue him, and they run into Moseby Lovelace and this French guy Marc d'Yae." The plot is: "the Nazis are building a secret air base in the middle of France, and d'Yae and Lovelace are trying to destroy it." The story is the main concept, and the plot is the hows and whys and what-fors. I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I'm battling a head cold right now, so let's just blame an overdose of vitamin C for any unclearness, okay?

"Forgotten Front"

2008-02-01T18:16:00.000-05:00

How I do love Combat! I just watched a first-season ep that always hits me hard: "Forgotten Front." It's a really early ep -- number 6 -- and Kirby's first appearance. And I'd never seen it before the DVDs came out, so it always feels sorta new to me. I watched it today because a new piece of fanfic I'm starting (working title: "Unforgiven") kinda ties in with it a little.

Anyway, in it, Sgt. Saunders and Caje and Kirby and Doc1 capture this Kraut named Dorffman. He's not a big, scary Kraut, he's a little, combed-over, funny-nosed man who never wanted to be a soldier and would rather sing songs than shoot people. He's played with perfect pathos by Albert Paulson, who went on to play a super-scary Kraut in "The Pillbox" and a tired one in "Escape to Nowhere." But here, he's just a scared prisoner who wants nothing more than to stay alive.

Therein lies the inevitable rub. And this is where, for me, the ep gets amazing. Dorffman has overheard that the Americans are planning a big advance. And there's a German tank on the scene that's trying to keep our guys from getting back to our lines. Dorffman is now a big liability: do we try to take him with us even though he will slow us down and possibly alert the Krauts to our whereabouts? Do we leave him behind, where he can tell his superiors about our plans? Or do we take him out of the picture permanently?

And Saunders implies to Caje that when the time comes, he needs to take Option C and kill the Kraut. Wait a minute -- this is a 1960s TV show! And Saunders just (implicitly) ordered Caje to kill an unarmed prisoner? Whoa! To me, that's pretty shocking. (Though I can't help wondering why they couldn't have tied Dorffman up and gagged him and left him in the cellar where he probably wouldn't be found until his info was obsolete anyway.) Anyway, this ep always strikes me as kind of envelope-pushing, like viewers would be left going, "Wowee, what'll they do next week? Abandon a baby to the Fates? Kill off a regular? You never know, with this show!" I guess it strikes me as a sort of 60s equivalent to Joss Whedon killing off Jenny Calendar in season 2 of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: viewers will never feel entirely certain of an ep's outcome after this.

(You can go read my snarky Scuttlebutt comments on this ep here on our C! fansite, Fruit Salad.)

Yet another year's worth of books

2008-01-31T16:31:00.000-05:00

Time to list all the books I read in 2007, like I did for 2005 and 2006. As had been my habit, I began the year with the Lord of the Rings trilogy... something I'm afraid I haven't done this year. It's hard to find time to read with Daniel around, especially since I'm not even done unpacking yet. Maybe once we're more settled, I'll pick them up.

As usual, books I blogged about are linked to those posts.

January

Looking for Normal by Betty Monthei
Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino by Emily W. Leider
Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Here, Bullet by Brian Turner

February

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
Pink Panther: The Ultimate Guide to the Coolest Cat in Town by Jerry Beck
The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery

March

Man in Black by Johnny Cash
Emily's Quest by L.M. Montgomery
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet by Richard L. Sterne
Folly by Laurie R. King

April

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Fear is the Key by Alistair MacLean
Keeping Watch by Laurie R. King
The Perfect Fit: Fat-free Dreams Just Don't Taste the Same by Louise Kean

May

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography by Marc Eliot
Samurai Shortstop by Alan Gratz
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

June

Playing with the Enemy A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams by Gary W. Moore
Borrowed Time by S.M. Ballard
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Gambit by Rex Stout
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

July

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
The Key by James N. Frey
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

August

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
The West End Horror by Nicholas Meyer
The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean

September

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
Death by Chick Lit by Lynn Harris

October

Three Aces: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus by Rex Stout

November

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

I didn't finish any books during December. I started a couple, but I was too busy packing and moving and unpacking to read much.

But I think I had a nice mix of non-fiction and fiction, fantasy and traditional, old and new. And I re-read all the Harry Potters prior to the release of the final book, which was great because it let me really picked up on themes and long-running threads. Besides the Harry Potter books, seven of these were actually re-reads, so it seems I was into revisiting books this year.

Early edition

2008-01-14T15:29:00.000-05:00

I hate editing my work. I would far rather create new stories, essays, and poems than go back and revise them.

I know why too -- it's because when I edit, I have to admit I didn't write it perfectly the first time. And then I subconsciously get mad at myself for not being perfect. And then I realize that no matter how long I write, I will never write a perfect first draft, and then I get depressed.
So I make some hot chocolate or put on some happy music or play some Solitaire until I have the courage to go on. A page or two later, and I have to stop again.

I'm currently editing "Ashes, Ashes" and playing my thirteenth game of Solitaire since 10am.

A day in the life

2008-01-11T11:19:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Michael Palin's Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years right now and bemoaning my own journaling.

I started keeping a journal when I was fourteen and a half. For nearly half my lifetime, I have recorded my daily doings, if I started or finished reading a book, and what movies or TV shows I watched. When I was in college, I only wrote on the weekends, and now that I have a baby, I write every two or three days. But my journals will give you an accurate account of my actions and experiences.

But rarely do I write much about who I am, how I feel about events, or what I'm thinking. Michael Palin's diaires do all of those, and provide a real insight into his life and the world of the seventies. So now I'm resolving, it being January and all, to try to add a few more thoughts and ponderings in my journal instead of reporting only the things I do and read and watch. Because I love reading back over old journals, remembering who I used to be, and I think this will make future rereadings that much richer.

"Is anyone alive out there?"

2008-01-02T15:20:00.000-05:00

Okay, yes, I'm still alive. For a few days there I felt like it was touch-and-go, though! If I never again have a move as eventful as this one, I will rejoice and be exceeding glad. After a while, I just (metaphorically) held my breath and kept my helmet on, waiting for the next bomb to drop.

But suddenly, it's 2008. Our new apartment is still overflowing with boxes, and I'm due to fly back to my parents' home on Sunday to spend 2 weeks with them while my hubby goes away for 2 weeks of job training. I just spent a week with my folks for Christmas, but of course they jumped at the chance to have the grandbaby around again.

I should be posting my list of all the books I read last year, but that'll have to wait until I unpack my journals.

Meanwhile, been doing some rewriting on one story, and giving a friend some comments on a story she's working on as well.

The cookie crumbleth

2007-11-16T21:53:00.001-05:00

Well, so much for NaNoWriMo. My husband got a new job this week, one that requires moving to Connecticut. By December 10th. And while there is much rejoicing around here for the long-awaited job offer, there is also not a little moaning and groaning from the person whose task it now is to pack up our worldly goods: me. Because most of said goods are mine, and because I'm home all day, not finishing out the last two weeks of coal-mine-ish drudgery. But I also have Daniel to deal with, which means that on a good day like today, I manage to pack 9 or 10 boxes, total, between nursing, changing diapers, and assisting the baby star with his latest costume change. And that means that, alas, I have no more time for Nano :-(

(Truthfully, I'm not as sad about this as I'm pretending to be, because my novel was being difficult and I was struggling to crank out my required 1,667 words per day. I was keeping up -- got 20,242 words as of the 12th -- but I wasn't enjoying it. But don't tell anyone I said that, huh?)

Words, words, words

2007-11-11T15:21:00.000-05:00

I've been so busy working on my Nano novel, I haven't had time to even blog about my progress! I really should be getting some lunch right now, but Daniel is nursing and about to fall asleep, so I'll quick write a bit here, then make a sandwich or heat up some leftovers when he's asleep enough for me to put him down for a bit. Poor little guy caught this evil Rotavirus thing and has had diarrhea for the last six days. It's finally slowing down a bit, but keeping him hydrated has been a big chore, as it means nursing him even more often than I was when he was going through a growth spurt a couple weeks ago. Yet another reason I haven't blogged for a while.

But about my Nano novel. It's going both better and worse than I'd expected. I kind of jumped into this one without doing much preparation, I'm afraid. I know my main character, Salem, and I have her voice very strongly in my head, so that's not a big problem. But I only had a bare outline of events figured out, with large gaps in the time line where I don't know what happens. So a few days ago, I ran out of the beginning material and hit this big gap... and for about two days, I really wanted to quit. I was getting my word count in, but it was all total crap, just me filling pages with totally expendable blatherings.

So I decided if I was going to have any hope of seeing Nano through, I would have to do something I totally loathe doing: I would have to jump ahead. I hate doing that, because I know all sorts of things happen in the part I skipped that will have a bearing in how characters have developed at the stage where I picked it back up. I'm already making allusions to things that haven't actually been written, and having to make little notes like, "Have so-and-so do such-and-such" so I don't forget to have these things happen when I go back and fill in the blank spots. I hate that. But it was either skip ahead to a part I really like, or quit in disgust. And I refuse to quit, if only to thumb my nose at a couple of naysayers who told me I was biting off more than I could possibly chew, let alone swallow.

The part I really like? It's where the characters start auditioning for a college production of Hamlet. Hmm, wonder why I like that? ;-) I've gotten a couple of soundtracks to various movie version of Hamlet from the library, and they're rather fun to listen to while writing this section.

So I'm actually a little ahead on my word count right now -- I have 18,728 words today, and I only technically need 18,337 to stay on track. But I'm trying to write 1,800 words a day for the next couple weeks, instead of 1,667, so I can take a guilt-free day off to go to a family gathering Thanksgiving weekend. Got to show off Daniel to all my hubby's relations!

My Halloween story is published!

2007-10-25T11:24:00.000-04:00

Yup, you can go read my WWII Halloween story right now! It's called "Spooked" and is published at The Copperfield Review.

I wrote this story a couple of years ago, actually, and have sent it to several places and revised it a hundred times. And it finally found a home! A pretty cool one too -- it's all historical fiction/nonfiction/poetry and has great interviews with history-oriented writers like John Jakes and Jeff Shaara. They say they're on the lookout for essays about the life of a writer and about the process of writing historical fiction too, so who knows, I may submit something else to them some time.

Anyway, I'm all happy-glowy right now because it's been a few months since I had anything published, and this came just in time to get me all revved up for NaNoWriMo (I hope).

Utterly mad

2007-10-23T09:58:00.000-04:00

Obviously, I've gone utterly mad. I've signed up to do NaNoWriMo again this year. Even though I'll have a month-old baby to deal with. I realized he does sleep now and then, I'll be home 24/7 now, and it usually only takes me a couple hours a day to get my word count in, so why not try it? What's the worst that can happen? I fail to complete the challenge -- which is exactly what happens if I don't try it at all. And I actually have a plot outline for this novel, which is more than I had last year.

This year's novel is going to be Salem, the third book in the yet-unnamed trilogy that started with Josey and continued in Pike. If I manage to finish it, that will make three novel first drafts in three years, which is pretty doggoned impressive, if I do say so myself. And then maybe I can really force myself to start seriously revising them? Here's hoping!

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

2007-10-16T06:39:00.001-04:00

My son, Daniel, is one week old today. So far his favorite activities are eating, sleeping, hiccuping, and having The Hobbit read to him. He also loves to have his daddy sing really low songs like "Sixteen Tons" to him.

As you can imagine, not particularly doing any writing right now. In fact, keeping up with email is a struggle, as is journaling. But hey, we've survived the first week, and they tell me each one gets a little easier. I believe them, because already today is going better than yesterday, and when I think back to our first day home... yeah....

But guess what? I just got an email from The Copperfield Review saying they'd like to publish my WWII Halloween story "Spooked" later this month! I'll let you know when it's up.

And That, Gentlemen, is How We Do That

2007-10-05T05:35:00.000-04:00

I finally finished the first draft of "Ashes, Ashes" this week. After working on it since what, December? Though in my defense, it did get put on hold to write "Pebbles" and to edit the fanzine. Now I need to let it sit for a few days, maybe a week, and go over some plot points in my head, see what I think about some suggestions Deb Koren has made, etc.

I'm ecstatic about having this first draft done -- there was a big action sequence that really had me scared because, well, I'm more comfy writing dialog than action. I can just hear dialog and sort of take dictation from the characters. But I have to see action scenes plotted out step-by-step in my head, and sometimes I have to set them down on paper that way too. But I spent part of an evening just watching the scene in my head a few times, making sure I was clear on where each character was and why, etc. The next evening, I wrote the whole scene in one fell swoop. Didn't even play solitaire to procrastinate between bits!

In other writing news, I have two short stories sent out to ezines right now. Hoping to hear back about one of them in a week or so, but we'll see.

No Nano :-(

2007-09-24T22:49:00.001-04:00

I won't be participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I've known that for months now, and I have several reasons for not participating this year:

+ my baby is due in a week,
+ my hubby is practically hired for a job that will require us to move halfway across the country,
+ and I don't have nearly enough thinking done on the book I was going to do for my third NaNo ("Salem," the third book in the trilogy that started with "Josey")

But yesterday, I got an email reminding me that sign-up for this year opens on October first. And I suddenly really want to sign up and just do it. Even though I'll have no way to feasibly even attempt it. My brain says no way, but my inner writer is convinced it can spend the next four weeks figuring out "Salem" and be totally prepared to write it by November first.

Three first drafts for three novels in three years -- a complete trilogy ready for revision. It's so tempting. Sigh.

Break's over (I hope)

2007-08-31T05:47:00.000-04:00

Gosh, I've neglected this blog for ages, haven't I? Between being pregnant, editing the fanzine, and going on a three-week vacation this month... I just haven't been writing much, to be honest. A little here and there, between naps and packing or unpacking, but very little at that. The urge was gone, except in little spurts here and there.

It's coming back, though, that urge to write. I've picked up some fanfic again, revising "Ashes, Ashes" to fit in a new angle to the plot and a new character. I've worked on it three times in the past week, which is as much writing as I did in the last two months put together. And that's got the old creative juices trickling again, enough that I pulled out a WWII (non-fanfic) story I wrote a couple years ago, edited it and spiffed it up a bit, and sent it to an e-zine.

So here's hoping that I just need a little break, some time off from writing to relax my imagination or something. Maybe I'll be able to get some good writing done before the baby arrives -- that's only about a month away now! Yikes!

Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title

2007-06-27T21:07:00.000-04:00

I've started a new story. Actually, I finished the first draft of it like a month ago, then let it sit mouldering in a journal while I concentrated on proofreading stories for the 2007 Combat! Journals fanzine. But as I'm nearly finished with that, I've pulled out this yet-unnamed new story again, typed it up, and sent it off to Deb Koren to see what she thinks of it. Ahhh, the myriad uses of writing mentors!

Anyway, it feels good to say I have a new story I'm working on. I was beginning to worry I'd never have a story idea (at least a non-Combat!-related one) again. But I shouldn't have worried -- it never does any good.

"A Gift from the Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

2007-06-20T21:47:00.000-04:00

It's hard to describe why this book has impacted me so strongly. I really feel like I need to read it again -- or for a first time, technically, since I listened to it as an audio book on the way to a friend's house. But for now, let me just say that I think the things I got from this book are what my writing prof was trying to teach me by having me read "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf. That didn't really speak to me very much, or maybe I wasn't in the right place in my life to listen to it. But this book did touch me in some pretty profound ways.

I've been a fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh ever since I read Bring Me a Unicorn for my Creative Writing class when I was a college sophomore. Her letters and diary entries reminded me of myself, in a way, a young girl growing up not exactly lonely, but apart somehow. That book crossed my path right when I was ready for it, ready to look back at my childhood and adolescence and think about how it had shaped who I was becoming.

A Gift from the Sea also crossed my path at a rather perfect moment. As my baby grows and stretches my tummy farther and farther, thoughts and curiosities and fears about motherhood occupy a slice of my mental life. Will I still be able to find time to write? Will I want to? Should I want to? Will my need for alone-time, now fulfilled in the one night a week my husband works that I don't, decrease? Will I still need time to myself, but feel too selfish to take any? Lindbergh discusses this exact issue from her vantage point as a mother of five and successful author, and the things she said resonated with me and the ways I expect to feel in the coming years. If nothing else, her words assured me that I'm not the only woman who needs alone time, who needs to create things to feel more complete, be they stories or books or afghans or pumpkin pies.

That's about all I can say about this book right now -- I definitely need to read it again. I'll probably put it on my Christmas list. But if you're interested in women writers and their perspectives, find this book.

"Pebbles" Finally Finished

2007-06-07T21:53:00.000-04:00

I finally finished spiffing up my latest fanfic story, "Pebbles," and posted it on Fruit Salad. It took me extra long to finish because I was also wrapping up a couple of short fanfic stories for this year's Combat! Journals fanzine. One is all mine and the other is co-written with Deb, which is always fun (although it's not a fun story).

By the way, if you want to read the story she and I co-authored for last year's fanzine, it's now available online here.

I'm also working on proofing the stories for this year's fanzine, and that's taking up my writing time right now. Which is okay, as baby still seems to be sapping much of my creativity. So I'm focusing more on less creative stuff like proofing stories.

Two "yay"s and a "grr"

2007-04-26T10:37:00.000-04:00

Yay #1: I finished the fourth draft of my fanfic story, "Pebbles" and have shipped it off for another beta-read! I think it's much improved, thanks to some helpful nudges in the right directions from my mentor Deborah Koren.

Yay #2: A collaborative story I'm working on is starting to shape up. As in, I'm actually doing some writing again! Whew! The creative reservoir hasn't run dry after all.

Grr: "Wearing Dillinger's Face" was rejected by Glimmer Train on my birthday of all days. I submitted it to a different ezine today, but still, grr.

"Keeping Watch" by Laurie R. King

2007-04-21T09:36:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to write this blog post for about three days now, but I can never seem to find quite the words I'm looking for. So I guess I'll just go with the words that come to me without requiring a hunting expedition.

Once in a while I read a book that changes me. Many books delight me, some inspire me, and others teach me. But every now and then I read a book that changes me in some way. Maybe it changes my understanding of war and killing, the way On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman did. It could end my distrust of biographies of famous people I love, the way John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth by Michael Munn did. Or it could change my attitude toward the usefulness of descriptions, the way my first Raymond Chandler novel did (that was The Big Sleep, if you're interested).

Laurie R. King's book Keeping Watch changed me. It's one of the first modern adult novels set in the present to suck me in so deeply that I don't want to leave the book's world even when I should be sleeping or eating or showering. Older books can do that for me, and the Harry Potter books as well, but most modern novels for adults somehow keep me at a distance. Either the characters are too self-aware and self-critical for me to really like them or the plot is too conscious of being clever, or the bad guys have too many nice streaks for me to hate them. Something always goes slightly awry and keeps me from disappearing into the book. Even the predecessor to this book, Folly, did not pull me in completely. It was a fascinating book with a great character, but I kept guessing what would happen next. Even though I was wrong half the time, the fact that the story felt guessable kept me from being entranced.

(I've read two of King's Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell novels, and they were very enjoyable, but they never sucked me in this way either.)

But Keeping Watch never felt guessable. I couldn't imagine what each new page would bring, but I couldn't wait to find out. Even though the subjects aren't pleasant -- child abuse, soldiering during the Vietnam Conflict, and the mental disturbances that can result from both -- the characters felt so very real that I simply needed to find out how they would deal with whatever happened next.

And I've been forced to change my mind about the quality of modern fiction set in the modern world. It doesn't have to be bleak, post-modernist, self-absorbed, or self-conscious. This just might mean I'll have to read more modern books and see if there are other good ones out there.

"John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet"

2007-03-28T05:36:00.000-04:00

As I may have mentioned before (and probably have), I'm very fond of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. I've read it probably ten or eleven times in the past ten years and seen at least six versions on film (though none on stage yet). I've read several books pertaining to it, ranging from the scholarly Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt to fictional retellings like John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius and Alan Gordon's An Antic Disposition. I wrote several papers about the play during college and studied in in a couple different classes.

So while I am by no means an expert on Hamlet, I am definitely familiar with the play and more than passingly fond of it.

Which means it's very odd that it took me this long to get around to reading Richard L. Sterne's journal of rehearsals, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet. I actually did read a tiny bit of it when I was a college senior while doing a paper on Gielgud's relationship with the role, but I didn't have time to read the whole thing. All I can say now is, what a shame.

Because this book is brilliant. Basically, Richard L. Sterne had a small role in the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet that starred Richard Burton as the embattled prince and which John Gielgud directed. Sterne smuggled a tape recorder (which occupied a whole briefcase back then!) into all the rehearsals and recorded all the cast's discussions of the play and, most importantly, Gielgud's own ideas about the play and the main role.

And the insights Gielgud had into the play are breathtaking. He'd played the role hundreds of times, setting the previous Broadway record for performances of the play in the 1920s (which Burton broke and I believe still holds). He'd participated in quite a few productions, even one in Elsinore itself. And he'd obviously studied the play and thought deeply about it for years and years and years.

Which means the book is chock full of wonderful little perceptive statements from Gielgud like these:

"I don't agree with Larry [Olivier], who said in the film that this is a play about a man who can't make up his mind. Surely it's about a man who cannot reconcile his own conscience with the world as he sees it, but who is able to come to this reconciliation by the end of the play" (56).

"What I find so fascinating about the part is that Hamlet always begins a scene one way and has to end it in another because something has happened in the course of the scene. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's spying doesn't occur to him until he catches them. The arrival of the Players causes another enormous change. he meets Ophelia in the nunnery scene and he doesn't know how she'll react to him. Then he realizes they are spying on him and there's another change. He goes to his mother, hears a voice, and kills Polonius, and this changes the whole course of his life" (59).

"Claudius is a professional poisoner, and as soon as Laertes mentions it, we should see him already planning to go one better" (71).

"They're bad, shallow people, the people in this play. All except Hamlet, Horatio, the Gravedigger, and the Player King. They all have a zestful superficiality which should create a feeling of corruption" (91).

And there are lots of wonderful discussions about the various parts and scenes between the actors and the director, things like this:

"BURTON: John, do you suppose I could start the "too, too solid flesh" before the court leaves?

GIELGUD: No, no. This is the most realistic of the soliloquies and it would seem odd that the Courtiers would fail to hear it if they were there.

BURTON: I would like to be close to the audience for this. (Burton moves downstage and says the soliloquy with great energy and passion.)

GIELGUD: That's fine, but I think it's too active. Keep it sad and simple. Soft. He's down -- a very sad boy, but not morose" (22-3).

You get to hear all about the process of blocking the play, rehearsing different scenes, changing things around, even changing the costumes. In fact, it really made me wish I was involved in a theatrical production again. Maybe some day I'll go back to living in the daylight and join a local theater group or something. If I get really gutsy.

At any rate, this book was so delightful, so crammed with thoughts about the play that I'd never even considered, that I simply had to buy my own copy. I have a feeling it's one I'll return to often.

(All quotations taken from the 1967 edition from Random House.)

Reasons

2007-03-23T19:19:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I mentioned that I thought hormones might be playing a part in my recent writing slump. Now that we've informed family and friends, I can now say that pregnancy hormones may be the culprit. I'm three months along, and although I'm not having a lot of mood swings or anything so far, my creative drive seems to have faded to the background a bit. However, I do have spurts of creativity -- last week I sat down and wrote a completely new short story in one sitting. And I do still keep doing the more mundane bits of writing, like editing and rewriting parts of a piece of fanfic and doing research for a historical short story. So all has not come to a grinding halt ;-)

Stalled Out

2007-03-06T22:30:00.000-05:00

For the past couple of weeks, maybe almost a month, my writing has stalled. I still make myself sit down and write every few days, but the desire seems to be gone. I have to force myself to sit in my chair and write and not check my email or play solitaire or create new playlists on my computer jukebox. I've been getting a little work done on a coule of stories that way, but nothing exciting. Nothing that makes me want to sit there for hours and just keep writing and writing and lose track of time.

I'm hoping it's just a temporary slump, one caused by hormones or the weather or whatever. I've had them before, where the drive to write just fades away and I'm left wondering if it'll ever come back. It always has so far, usually with a fresh story idea.

So meanwhile, I'm not pushing things, just trying to do what writing I can whenever I can manage to find some time. And one shiny day, the writing urge will return and I'll be back to typing madly. At least, I hope so!

Laurie R. King's Blog

2007-02-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

I've been reading the blog of author Laurie R. King for the past few months. I've read two of her books, The Beekeeper's Apprentice and O Jerusalem, both of which are in her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. She has a pretty neat blog, the kind that lets you know that she's a normal person (okay, as normal as any writer, anyway). And she actually interacts with her readers/fans -- she's not all snobby and "hey, look, I'm published and renowned." I don't agree with her political and religious views most of the time, but it's an entertaining and informative blog nonetheless.

Also, she's talking about starting up a reading group on her blog, where people could all read and discuss one of her books at the same time. Sounds pretty nifty, and I just might join in when it starts! I'm so much braver online than in person, hee hee.

Page to Screen

2007-02-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

They've made a movie version of Bridge to Terabithia. I'm not going to see it. I liked the book too much as a kid to be willing to see a movie version; it was the first book that wasn't about animals that almost made me cry. When I was a kid, I only cried over books like Rascal, Old Yeller, and Where the Red Fern Grows. But Bridge was about imaginative, unruly young'uns just like me, and I grew very fond of it. So I'm not going to see the movie version.

See, I'm a bit odd that way. I'd rather see a movie first, then read the book that it's based on. That way, I almost always like them both. If I read the book first, I usually get disappointed by the movie. Parts get left out, characters don't look or behave or sound the way I imagined, and I end up disliking the movie.

Oh sure, there are a few exceptions, like Rebecca (1940) and Master and Commander (2003), which perfectly realize my book-formed ideas. But they are few and far between. Much more typical are things like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jane Eyre (1983), and Laura (1944), where I watched the movie first. Reading the books was like discovering added treats, little treasure-troves of things that didn't fit into the movie. And so, I love them both.

Also typical, unfortunately, are my experiences watching movies like The Indian in the Cupboard (1995), where I book I love was turned into a disappointing movie. But this doesn't stop me from reading books -- it just makes me a little more choosy, sometimes, about what movies I see. Which, I've gotta admit, isn't a bad thing.

"Static Movement" Print Anthology

2007-02-10T09:31:00.000-05:00

If you like speculative fiction, or if you've read some of the stuff published in the Static Movement ezine, click on the above banner and it'll take you to lulu.com where you can order the first print anthology. Besides, my story "Seth" is in it! And Deb Koren has a story in it too :-D

"Jacqueline"

2007-02-03T20:39:00.000-05:00

My short story, "Jacqueline," which I wrote last year, has been published at long last! It's in the February issue of Static Movement; here's a direct link to my story.

My February column is up as well :-D

One Draft Down....

2007-01-31T05:48:00.000-05:00

I finished the rough draft of "Pebbles" just now! It's pretty rough, I admit -- several places need a lot of work yet (particularly the action sequences, whodathunk?), but at least I've got the main story down!

Which means that since Deb Koren also finished her fanfic "assignment" within the last day or two, we can both buy the first half of season two of Big Valley!!! Aren't deadlines great? Even self-imposed (or friend-imposed) deadlines can really move things forward.

AND Deb and I can now begin writing our joint fanfic story for this year's Combat! Journals fanzine -- remember we co-wrote the story "Fools of Fortune" for last year's. That was a total blast and turned out excellently well (sorry I can't provide a link to the actual story, but it's only available in print form. Follow the above link for more details). So we're all excited about starting this new project :-D And about the ones we've just finished. Yay! Much good writing going on for both of us! Yay!

Oh, and I'll be posting in a day or two about a short story of mine that's getting published online this month... stay tuned for details....

Just Teasing

2007-01-25T20:55:00.000-05:00

We've posted a teaser for my new Combat! fanfic story, "Pebbles," over on Fruit Salad. I haven't actually finished writing the first draft of this story yet, so putting up this teaser may be a little premature, but this isn't going to be another one of my long drawn-out serious stories. It's going to be short(ish) and light(ish) and lots of fun!

And I can't take forever to write it, either. Deb Koren and I have made a pact that, by the end of January, she will finish the fanfic piece she's working on and I will finish my first draft. If we don't, we won't be allowed to buy the first half of season two of The Big Valley that's coming to dvd at the end of the month. Well, we won't be allowed to buy it right away, we have to wait a whole week. Which, trust me, is quite the punishment!

Onward and Upward

2007-01-18T00:48:00.000-05:00

I've got quite a few writing projects going on right now. I always work on more than one story at a time, because that way if I get writer's block on one story, I can switch to another. But I just realized that right now I have more things cooking on my mental stove than usual. Here's a quick rundown:

+ Josey -- I've started revising it at long last. So far what I've done is chop off the first twelve chapters and then renumbered the remaining chapters and put in breaks where I think I'll be cutting up chapters to lengthen scenes, etc. And then I started rewriting the first few pages, tweaking things and adding details, etc.
+ "Ashes, Ashes" -- I'm now 21 pages into the first draft, and only maybe half through the story? Yeah, gonna be some major cutting down going on when I start the second draft. I already know of one scene that will be downsized a lot.
+ "Pebbles" -- Another bit of Combat! fanfic that I've written the first couple of pages on, but have shoved onto the back burner so I can finish draft one of "A,A" first.
+ "The Wrong Face" -- I'm tightening it up some more and changing the focus a teeny bit, and I might retitle it too. Looking to submit it somewhere later this month, so I really need to finish my revising and get that out.
+ Untitled Angel noir story -- Um, haven't worked on that for ages. Since before Christmas. But it's still on my brain.

I guess that's it right now. Of course, Pike is around too, but won't work on revising it until I finish Josey. And Deb Koren and I are cooking up a new collaborative C! story for this year's print fanzine (like the one we did last year). But we haven't started writing it yet. And I've got another couple random short story ideas percolating, but not ready to start writing them or even talking about them yet ;-)

Another Year's Worth of Books

2007-01-07T20:58:00.000-05:00

Well, it's that time of year again... time to haul out all my journals and see just what kinds of things I read this year. If you compare this list to last year's, you'll notice a few names popping up again, like Robert Ludlum and Alistair MacLean. Also, I continued my habit of reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy every winter.

(I blogged about a few of these books, so I've linked their names to those posts.)

January

Laura by Vera Caspary
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
The Golden Rendezvous by Alistair MacLean
Confessions of a Not It Girl by Melissa Kantor
Zorro by Isabel Allende
Lost Stories by Dashiell Hammet
One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

February

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
An Antic Disposition by Alan Gordon
The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

March

A House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
A Family Affair by Rex Stout
Puppet on a Chain by Alistair MacLean

April

The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
Out There in the Dark by Wesley Strick
Confederate Women: Beyond the Petticoat by Bell Irvin Wiley
The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson

May

The Cry of the Halidon by Robert Ludlum
The King's General by Daphne du Maurier
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
Dreaming the Dead: Draft Two by Deborah Koren

June

Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
Justice for None by Gene Hackman
Tim by Colleen McCullough
Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman
The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

July

Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Road to Gandolfo by Robert Ludlum
The Films of Alfred Hitchcock by Neil Sinyard

August

The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler
The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
Peter and the Shadow Thieves by Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson
No Time for Sergeants by Mac Hyman

September

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Mountaincat Murders by Rex Stout

October

Pretty Babies by Andrea Darvi
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Wolfling by Sterling North
Maskerade by Terry Pratchett

November

The Road to Omaha by Robert Ludlum
A Hero of Our Time byMihail Lermontov (transl. Vladimir & Dmitri Nabokov)
O Jerusalem by Laurie R. King
The Great Wisconsin Manhunt of 1961 by Marshall Cook

December

Joshua Chamberlain: A Hero's Life and Legacy by John J. Pullen
The Essential Wolverine by Chris Claremont, Peter David, & Archie Goodwin
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson
Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery
The Sheik by Edith M. Hull
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Unlike last year, there's not really anything on this list that I wish I hadn't read. Some of them, like Emily of New Moon, The Shiek, and The Beekeeper's Apprentice, have been on my reading list for years. Others, like The Great Wisconsin Manhunt of 1961 and An Antic Disposition came to my attention and I promptly got them from the library and read them.

Back at It

2006-12-28T05:23:00.000-05:00

After a brief respite for Christmas (which means for about a week I wrote absolutely nothing meaningful and gave my imagination a holiday) , I'm back to writing fanfic and percolating a new non-Combat! short story.

My new fanfic piece is the third section of a trilogy that wasn't originally supposed to be a trilogy. It was supposed to be just one story ("Hide and Seek"), but then I decided it wanted a sequel ("Finders, Keepers"). And then someone (who shall not be mentioned but whose name rhymes with Jeb Snorin) suggested another sequel and reminded me of my penchant for trilogies (this'll be my what, fourth Combat! trilogy?), and before I knew it, I had another story all percolated... okay, the percolation process took two or three months, but that's pretty speedy considering I have three other fanfic stories in my head right now that have been there for nearly a year.

I started work on it yesterday; it's three pages right now and we haven't even gotten through the first scene. And I have a title: "Ashes, Ashes." And I know how it ends, so I feel pretty surefooted at the moment. Which usually a sure sign that the whole thing is about to twist out of my grasp and start charting its own course, of course.

Christmasy Combat! Cheer

2006-12-21T09:02:00.000-05:00

I've got a new short bit of fanfic up on my Hot Joe page of Fruit Salad. It's called "Yuletide Treasure," and it's a response to a challenge to write a story in which one member of the squad gets a Christmas present from an unknown benefactor. This story is actually a tag-along for the Christmas story I wrote a couple years ago, "Shepherd's Watch," so you might want to read that one first, although this one should stand alone okay too.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Good Tidings of Great Joy, Compliments of the Season, etc!

"One Step to Dawn"

2006-12-10T21:29:00.000-05:00

I've got a piece of flash-fiction (also called a short-short; a tiny 1000-words-or-less story) published over at Anotherealm.com. It's called "One Step to Dawn"and is a submission for a contest. They put up some kind of intriguing snippet for you to riff off, then they publish the entries. At the end of the contest (beginning of January, in this case), they'll declare first, second, and third places. No money, but hey, it was a fun story to write ;-)

It's All Denoument From Here!

2006-11-29T04:53:00.000-05:00

I finished NaNoWriMo! Wooo! About twenty minutes ago, I passed 50,000 words, so I uploaded my file to the website and got my winner's icon and printable certificate of completion. Whew! I even managed to finish a couple days early, due to writing more than 5,000 words tonight :-D

And my novel is almost over too. All I really have left is the denoument, which I think I'll put in either an epilogue or a final tiny chapter. Probably an epilogue, since I started the thing with a prologue. They can be my bookends.

Whew. Finished with Nano. That is one flamin' good feeling, let me tell you! And in another day or so, I'll be finished with the first draft of my third novel as well. Craziness!

I think I'll go watch a couple movies now and let my brain peace out. And my fingers!

I Think I Can, I Think I Can, I Think I Can....

2006-11-23T00:17:00.000-05:00

I didn't blog about NaNoWriMo last week because, frankly, I was inches from giving up on it. I hit a wall on Tuesday night, a big grey billowy curtain that my main character, Pike, had drawn across the whole middle section of this novel. When I was preparing for Nano, he would never let me see the middle part. He'd only refer to it as "The Descent", then change the subject. So when I finished the beginning and started trying to edge into the middle section last week, it was like being blindfolded and told to use a fallen log for a footbridge over a big chasm. I got a couple thousand words into it, had no idea where I was going, and stopped dead.

In fact, I actually considered scrapping Pike and trying to write something else for Nano. But the month was half over, I'd written 23,000 words already, and I didn't really have any other projects on the horizon that might hit 50,000 words. So I thought maybe I should just give up on the challenge this year and try next year when I was better prepared. I actually didn't write at all on Wednesday night, I was so lost.

And then Pike decided to get cooperative. Maybe I scared him (and myself) into talking. Anyway, I spent most of Thursday night at work sorting through the things that would take the story from the end of the beginning to the beginning of the end. And I found enough material to (I hope) take me there. So I started writing again. I've even managed these last two nights to write extra so I can take Thanksgiving night off to be with my hubby's family before I head to work. But it's been an uphill battle, that's for sure. I spent three days playing a hand of solitaire, writing a paragraph, playing another hand, doing a paragraph, back and forth until I'd get my word count in. Not until yesterday did I really hit my stride again.

But I've got a little over 38,000 words done now, so less than 12,000 to go. I can do that. The story is nearing the beginning of the end at last, and I know about what happens from here on out. I've definitely learned a valuable lesson, though: do NOT let my characters keep me from planning my story out before I plunge into NaNoWriMo! No matter how much they whine, I need to wheedle the whole storyline out of them beforehand so I'm not panicking mid-month. That doesn't mean there can't be surprises. But I need to at least be able to see where I'm going.

Oh, Grow Up

2006-11-15T04:44:00.000-05:00

I refuse to grow up. I made up my mind when I was about eight years old that I would never, ever grow up. I swore on the head of my most beloved stuffed animal that I wouldn't, and so far, I have succeeded.

When I say I refuse to "grow up", I do not mean I have refused to become a mature adult. Obviously, I can't stop myself from aging. And even though I was "born older" as Mr. Bailey explained it to George, I have certainly become more emotionally and mentally mature as I age. I am responsible, mature, and sometimes even logical.

But I don't believe I've "grown up". That phrase, to me, means losing your grip on your love of life. Your ability to appreciate the beauty of freshly fallen snow without worrying about how much it will suck to drive in it. Your curiousity. Your eager anticipation of things like Christmas not because you want presents, but because you want that special tingling sense of joy and delight that fills your whole body with giggles for no real reason except that it's Christmas. Your belief that the pit of suckiness does have a bottom, however unrealistic that belief may be. The stubborn insistence that cream cheese and peanut butter and cheddar cheese and lettuce and tomato might taste good together, so you just have to try it to find out. The ability to revel in puppy kisses without thinking, "Ew! Germs! Ew!" immediately. The desire to watch movies with happy endings because you believe they're possible, even if they're not happening to you right now. The ability to play, to have fun, to be silly. To imagine. To dream. And the ability to see things from different points of view, not adhere rigidly to the same one all the time. The ability to change your mind.

In other words, the ability to throw reason and logic out the window and watch them splatter on the pavement far below. You might not do it all the time, but you know you can.

"Grown up" people have either forgotten how to do all this, or they refuse to allow themselves to do it. And I feel achingly sad for every person that I see "grow up". Not everyone can stop this from happening to themselves. Not everyone wants to. But I do want to, and I have so far. Because if a sense of "things suck and there's no escape from them" is what adulthood is supposed to be like, then no thank you.

Identification

2006-11-15T02:23:00.000-05:00

For instance, wanna know why I'm so devoted to Angel? Becaue I identify with Angel himself. In some weird imaginary way, I'm him and he's me. A character mocks Angel, it's like I'm getting mocked. Angel gets hurt, I feel hurt (not quite physicaly, but imaginarily, yes). Angel is happy or satisfied or angry or irritated or in an ornery mood, I feel it with him. Same goes for Sgt. Saunders on Combat!. And Wolverine in the X-Men comics and movies. And Jane Eyre in both book and movie. And Hamlet. And a hundred zillion other characters in a hundred zillion other books and movies and tv shows and plays.

In fact, that is what makes or breaks a story for me. Do I connect with one or more characters enough to identify with them? If I don't, I'm probably going to be bored and/or dislike the story (be it in book or filmed form).

And it's not always the main character. On Buffy, I don't identify with Buffy (heaven forbid!). Or Spike, even though he's my favorite on the show (after Angel, ubviously). It's Willow and Xander.

So when I watch a movie or read a story about a girl who can magically connect with horses, if it's well-written/acted, I identify with her. For the duration of that story, I am her (or, in the case of most of my favorite books about horses, him).

There. Now you know why I get so very deeply involved in the books I read and the movies I watch. Because I'm inside them. This is why I laugh out loud while reading books in the break room at work. Or why I weep over sad parts. Because I have willingly identified with a character or two so much that I have basically inserted myself into that story.

(Hope that doesn't creep you out!)

One Week Down, Three+ To Go!

2006-11-09T05:13:00.000-05:00

My first week of NaNoWriMo has been pretty exciting this year. Considering that I only had about three scenes of the whole novel actually visualized before I started, I think things have been going pretty smoothly. I've managed to keep writing every day, even when I didn't know for sure where my novel was going. And the results have been pretty cool!

For instance, on Saturday night, I finished writing my quota for the evening and left for work as usual. I'd ended my stint that night with my main character, Pike, deejaying at a local bar's karaoke night and facing down an unsatisfied and hulking customer. I had absolutely no idea where I was going with that scene. In fact, I was thinking I might have to scrap it completely and start somewhere else the next day.

So off I went to work, to my wonderfully mindless job at Wal-Mart where I can use 10% of my brain to stock shelves and the other 90% to work on stories. That's the best perk my job has. The real reason I have such a job, in fact. Anyway, I let my imagination start playing around. Just set my inner viewing screen on 'play' and let things unspool.

And it worked. A brand new character I had never met stepped into the situation, introduced herself as Rusty, and not only saved Pike's face from potential bruising, but also flirted with him madly and convinced me that I should see where else her character might fit into the novel. And guess what? She's going to be instrumental in setting Pike onto the path out of the murky grey middle area of the book!

Not only that, but on Sunday our pastor's sermon jumpstarted my imagination too and, during the offering collection, I figured out my ending. Or at least the climax... there's probably some denoument fallout stuff I'll have to find later, but at least I have that ending to shoot for! Of course, I still really don't know what happens in that middle part. Just trusting my narrative instincts and beloved imagination to carry me through. But with an end goal in sight, maybe I can pull it off. Hope so! 'Cause I've only written 15,554 of the required 50,000 words so far....

And They're Off!

2006-11-02T05:27:00.000-05:00

It's begun! I started my NaNoWriMo novel last night, and just finished tonight's stint. So far I'm up to 4,032 words, almost one tenth of the way already! And it's almost 700 words ahead of where I "need" to be right now!

I think it's going pretty well. Already Pike is surprising me with the strength of his voice. I was a little worried that he was going to sound too much like Josey, that I wouldn't be able to capture him. But it turns out he's a very strong narrator, with his own word rhythms and patterns. He likes his little choppy sentences, that's for sure. Josey liked to bubble on and on, like the fountain of optimism she is. Pike has kind of a staccato thing going on, punchy like drumbeats. Which makes perfect sense for him, since he used to be a drummer back in high school and still has the whole music thing going on.

Anyway, so far so good!

"Finders, Keepers"

2006-10-28T08:50:00.002-04:00

I have finally finished my latest piece of Combat! fanfiction, "Finders, Keepers." It's posted on our Fruit Salad site, on my Hot Joe page. It's a sequel to the last fanfic story I wrote, "Hide and Seek". I wanted to get it finished by the end of this month so that I don't have any projects vying for my attention during NaNoWriMo, and whaddaya know? I succeeded!

I'm getting a little better at writing action scenes, thanks mostly to Deb Koren's coaching and prodding and cheering. And patience, she's got lots of that ;-) Needs it, too, when it comes to mentoring me, I expect. Anyway, check out the story or surf around the site if you haven't been there before :-D

One Week More!

2006-10-26T02:48:00.000-04:00

One week from today, I'll start on this year's Nanovel. Yikes!

I was talking to a couple of writer friends this weekend and the subject of NaNoWriMo came up, of course. One of them said she'd been checking out the site and saw where they warn that you'll be writing a lot of crap, and she kind of wondered why you would want to go through all that stress just for a lot of crap.

Yeah, last year I wrote plenty of crap during Nano. In fact, I'm throwing out practically everything I wrote during Nano, or else using it in flashbacks. But do I think I wasted my time? No. Because by writing 50,000 words, I basically forced myself to finish the novel. That's too large a chunk of novel, too much time invested, for me to get all lazy and not finish the first draft. And a finished first draft is enough incentive to get me to do a second draft. Or so the theory goes :-)

So... next week, the madness begins again! Yippyskippy!

Lights! Cameras! Action?

2006-10-19T21:43:00.000-04:00

You know, it's kind of weird that I write so much fanfiction about a war-themed tv show. Because that usually requires at least one big action sequence per story (although I've written several with no fire fights whatsoever), and I don't like writing action. It doesn't flow for me. Now, dialog? Dialog flows directly from my imagination to the page.

And I think I know why this is. It's because I see and hear my stories like I was watching them on the screen. Not just my Combat! fanfic, but all my stories. They unspool like a movie. And I can type dialog fast enough to just basically take dictation from my characters as the story unwinds. But action? Well, with action scenes, you have to write everything that's happening during the fist fight or fire fight or car chase. Describe it in detail. And that requires rewinding the movie in my brain over and over and over so I can write out every little step in the sequence.

I think I'm getting better at it, however. Or at least, I'm getting resigned to the fact that action scenes will take me ever so much longer to write than dialog, and that's just the way it is. I just have to slog through them -- I might not enjoy them as much as dialog, but they won't kill me. At least, they haven't so far.

The End is the Beginning is the End

2006-10-12T22:10:00.000-04:00

Wow, the last two nights have been extremely productive for me! On Tuesday night, I finished the new rough draft of "Finders, Keepers". It's 26 pages at the moment, although it will shrink somewhat after I finish tweaking it, I'm sure. Anyway, maybe I'll be able to post it on Fruit Salad before the end of the month.

(Oh yeah, we have a new address for Fruit Salad, the Combat! fanfiction site that Deborah Koren and I run. You'll find it at www.fruit-salad.com now.)

And then last night, I finally finished outlining the way I want to revise my NaNoWriMo novel from last year, Josey. So after Nano this year, maybe I'll actually get my fingers in gear and start doing the real revising, right? Right.

Back in the Saddle Again

2006-10-05T12:02:00.000-04:00

After my amazing two-week vacation, I'm back. And now it's time to start gearing up for NaNoWriMo again already! Crazy. Guess I should try to finish my Combat! story, "Finders, Keepers" so I can concentrate on my Nano novel next month, eh?

I barely did any writing on vacation. Kept up my journal, and that's about it. I'm hoping this has recharged my creative batteries enough to carry me through the next couple of months. As soon as I get myself back on the night shift and can manage to sleep more than 4 hours at a time, I'll be lucid enough to get back into writing. I hope ;-)

Vacation

2006-09-20T09:05:00.000-04:00

I'm officially beginning a two-week vacation this morning. Two weeks with nothing to do except attend a Combat! fanfic convention in Atlanta, then spend a week hanging out with my family and friends back home in NC. Who knows? I may even get a little writing done! That would be a good thing, as I've been most delinquint about writing. I tried to work on my fanfic, "Finders, Keepers," last night... and in forty minutes, I wrote two paragraphs. Not long, juicy paragraphs, either. Little three-sentence ones. Grrrr. Just can not seem to make my mind settle again after being sick for a week. Seems my brain decided to take a vacation before my real one started.

Actually, the problem is probably just that I'm so psyched up about the convention and then seeing my parents and Grandma that I can't focus on anything else. Or at least, that's my excuse ;-)

Sick in the Head

2006-09-15T21:04:00.000-04:00

I have a headcold. You know what sucks about being sick? I get to stay home from work for a couple of days, which is pleasant, but I can't use that time to write. Not anything really productive, anyway. I usually take some form of cold medication, and that plus the congestion in my head sends me into this ultra-loopy state of consciousness in which I tend to write incredibly long, relatively meaningless sentences. Or else I devolve into this surreal Monty Python-esque mindframe in which WWII soldiers suddenly start holding yacht races and singing Broadway showtunes. Entertaining, yes, but not quite what my current writing projects need.

NaNoWriMo Approacheth

2006-09-06T23:58:00.000-04:00

Holy cow -- NaNoWriMo is only seven weeks away! How did that happen?

I probably should be panicking about now. But I'm not. I know what I'm going to write: the sequel to Josey, called Pike. I know how it begins, and know several things that happen in the middle, and I know (sort of) how it ends. I don't have to work on developing the main character, because he's in Josey. I do need to develop some of the minor characters more, but I think that, considering I still have 7 weeks to let it percolate before I can write the first sentence, I think I'm on track.

But I have completely failed to live up to my plans for the summer. My plan was to have a second draft of Josey completed by September. Or at least by the beginning of the next NaNoWriMo. Hah! I haven't even really started rewrites! All I've managed to do is outline what I want to keep from my first draft, and what I want to add. Grr.

Three Great Books in a Row

2006-08-30T22:34:00.000-04:00

I've just finished reading three great books in a row. That doesn't happen very often to me. Usually I'll read something that's very good, and then the next book or two will be mediocre, at least in comparison to the previous book.

What are these three books, you ask? I will tell you.

The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. It traces the history not just of the writing of Frankenstein and the writing challenge that inspired it, but of Mary Shelley's whole life, as well as an overview of the lives of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron too.

The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. Cool novel set in the early 1900's out on the prairies. It's about three boys and their widowed father, the housekeeper they send off for, and her quirky brother. It has a major paradigm shift at the very end that I totally dug.

Peter and the Shadow Thieves by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Sequel to Peter and the Starcatchers. In other words, another prequel to Peter Pan and more fun than most children's books lately. For example: "Hook sighed the heavy sigh of a great man doomed to go unworshipped by the fools around him." Love it!

Busy, Busy, Busy

2006-08-24T02:49:00.000-04:00

Whew. I just finished doing the initial proofing on the Static Movement print anthology. It's ninety pages of fiction and poetry, and when the artwork is added in, I'm sure it'll pass the 100-page mark. Crazy cool, if you ask me. Not to throw a little shameless self-promotion out there, but I believe they'll only be charging $8 for it... I'll post more info when I have it.

Deb Koren and I got our joint Combat! story finished in time to be included in the fanzine, so now I'm back to working on Josey and my other C! fanfic story, "Finders, Keepers". Business as usual, I guess you could say.

I thought I was almost done with "Finders, Keepers". I'd finished a third draft and just had a bit more polishing to do before I could put it up on Fruit Salad and be done with it. And then someone gave me an idea of how to revamp the middle 2/3 of it and make it even shinier. So now I'm yanking one character out of the middle and replacing him with a much different character, and making this new guy bearer of the POV to boot. Which will undoubtedly be gobs of work, but worth it in the end. I did this once before with a Combat! story, "The Nutshell." Worked then. Hope it works now.

Accepted!

2006-08-09T11:31:00.001-04:00

Ragged Edge Publishing accepted "The Wrong Face"! Yippee! It's not posted online yet, but I'll alert you when it is.

Someone asked me if there's a point to getting stories accepted by non-paying online magazines that no one has ever heard of. Sure there is. There's the whoop factor, for one thing, when I go bouncing around the house convinced I'm a bonafide Good Writer. And then there's just the fact that it's good experience to get used to sending out query/cover letters and interacting with publishers/editors. Besides, I hear that you're more likely to get considered seriously by bigger print magazines and even book publishers if they see that you've been published in several different places and have had experience working with publishers/editors. Or something like that. Anyway, that's what I told that person. They thought it made sense.

Anyway, much jubilation going on here. And also much last-minute editing of the fanfic story Deb Koren and I are writing for that Combat! fanzine... it's due next Tuesday! Ack!

The Beat Goes On, Dadadoomdadoomdada

2006-08-02T21:04:00.001-04:00

I've submitted "The Wrong Face" (the short story I started writing in April) to Ragged Edge Publishing. They're an ezine that's been around for a couple of years, although they had a computer meltdown a few months ago and are only just getting up and running again. When I started writing "Jacqueline", I actually had REP in mind as a venue for it, but their meltdown occured before I had the story finished. As "J" is still out to another mag, thought I'd send them "Face" instead, since it got rejected by the ezine I sent it to in June.

So, as Sonny & Cher and Eminem remind me, the beat goes on. One place doesn't take a story, I send it to another place. I finish a story, I start another. Got a brand-new idea for kind of a quirky haunted-house-style story as I was falling asleep this morning, so kind of jazzed about that too.

Teasing

2006-07-27T21:39:00.000-04:00

Hey, guess what? Static Movement is going to be putting out a print version of our best stories from our first six months of existence! Go here to for a glimpse of what it will be like! We're the second book listed, if you can't tell ;-) And... my story, "Seth", has been chosen for inclusion! Yippeeeeeee!

Also, I've got a teaser for my new Combat! story, "Finders, Keepers", posted over on Fruit Salad. It's short, shiny, and to-the-point ;-) And now I'll probably be getting hate email from rabid readers wanting to know what happens next....

Creeping On Apace

2006-07-20T07:09:00.000-04:00

Got some more work done on "Finders, Keepers" tonight, and worked on the collaborative Combat! fanfic I'm writing with Deb Koren earlier this week. Not going to get much writing done until the middle of next week, though, because my mom is here for a visit. We'll have loads of fun (have had already!), but between hanging out with her and working, the writing will get put on hiatus. Again.

But such is life. Spending rare time with Mom is more important than writing. If she lived next door, or just down the street, or even in the same state, it might be different.

Nudges

2006-07-12T11:39:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the oddest thing will nudge me into just the right place to write a particular scene.

My second draft of "Finders, Keepers", my latest piece of Combat! fanfic, has been stagnating for weeks. I finished the first draft a month ago, did a little glossing of some rough spots and got a very helpful critique from Deb Koren... and then I stalled. I knew I wanted to redo two scenes, one toward the beginning and one at the very end. But I couldn't figure out how to make them work the way I wanted them to. One scene contains a very angry mob, and the other is full of messy family emotions. These scenes actually frightened me a little, because no matter how I turned them around and around in my head, they just wouldn't cooperate.

And then, tonight, I was doing my usual night-off routine of watching a few movies while my husband was at work. Filling up the old imagination reservoir. Around midnight, I made myself a couple of hot dogs and watched Chinatown. It was a wonderful, ouchy bit of noir film, and the end got me so deliciously depressed that I ran over to the computer, pulled up "Finders, Keepers", and rewrote the end, full of conflict and unresolution and dashed hopes. It's not shiny yet, but it's definitely got the emotional content what I was hoping for.

A little later tonight, I watched The Wild One. And all those angry townspeople trying to wreak vengeance on poor Marlon Brando gave me precisely the sense of outraged citizenry that my mob scene needed. So I hopped back on the computer and rewrote that scene too, at least enough so that it's going in the direction I want it to.

Two very different movies that I've been wanting to see for a while, and somehow they both contained exactly what I needed to nudge my head into the right place to rewrite two key scenes in "Finders, Keepers". Wow. I didn't expect tonight to be so productive!