Yearly Archives: 2012

We always remember the books/movies/music/TV shows/etc. of our youth fondly. They’re the words that awakened us, touched us, and spoke to us in a way that made us think they were written just for us.

There’s a category of culture that I think can only be truly appreciated if you experience it at the exact right point of your life. Take Catcher in the Rye – I know there are people out there who love it, and people who hate it. I kind of fall in the “indifferent” camp, because I’m in the group that believes that your opinion of it depends on when you read it. It was never assigned reading for me in high school, and I finally decided to pick it up in college to see what the fuss was all about. Admittedly, I was a little disappointed – I’d heard how this book was amazing, it had changed lives, how it had spoken to so many people…and it didn’t really do anything for me. However, I do concede that if I had read it 3-5 years earlier, I think I would have been all over it and firmly on the love train.

Then there’s the category of stuff we outgrow. On one of the online forums I visit (I don’t remember which one), I remember someone making a passing comment (half joking) about how she had loved Rent when she was younger, but now that she was an older, responsible adult, she just wanted to yell, “Get a REAL job and pay your damn bills!” to all these characters. I saw her point.

I was getting bored with the CDs in my car, so I decided to switch them around today, and put in ones I hadn’t listened to in a long time. Among the new ones was the Rent soundtrack. I remembered that comment that poster had made, and part of me agreed. While they’re entertaining, I don’t really know if I’d want to be friends with any of these people in real life. (Well, maybe Joanne. She could be the type who’d organize my filing cabinet and make a spreadsheet with me and have fun doing it.) I appreciate devoting oneself to one’s art, but at the same time, there comes a point where yes, responsibilities take over and the rent must be paid.

That said, it still holds a certain magic for me. Firstly, the music and lyrics really are just so well-written. That alone makes listening a worthwhile experience. And while I may be all old and responsible now, like many appealing works of fiction, there’s still that element of fantasy, of imagining a different life filled with drama and passion. Again, I don’t know if I’d truly want any of it, but it’s nice to daydream sometimes.

Even though I haven’t listened in years, I still knew most of the words. “Another Day” continues to be one of my favorite tracks, and is a fantastic song in general. Apologies for the sub-par video – most of what YouTube turned up was from the movie version, and I’m just used to the original arrangement.

“What makes an alpha male?” That’s like asking “What do women really want?” It’s highly subjective, and I don’t know if we’ll ever agree on a solid definition.

Whoops, haven’t checked in here in a week. The past few days were busy with writing like crazy for a deadline, and then celebrations of oysters and yarn (not in the same place) as my mom and I road tripped it around New England. There was lots of good food, my list of knitting projects has grown, and I got paid for reaching that deadline. (The amount I got paid, alas, is a fraction of what I spent at the yarn convention. Oh well.)

I had to neglect my novel-in-progress for a while, but I’m happy to report I’m back in that routine again. Things may be hectic, but I do better when I’m occupied, as opposed to sitting around, looking for things to do.

Now I just need to balance writing with playing with all my new pretty yarn….

I hate having to admit that I haven’t had as much time to work on my book-in-progress as I would like. The best excuse is that I picked up a little side writing job (one that actually pays weekly, albeit a minimal amount), so starting from when I get the assignment, that takes priority so I’ll be sure it’s done by the due date. The not-so-good excuse: bah, I just have a lot of STUFF going on.

I have a wedding to attend today (and yet, I’m still parked on my couch in my PJs). The rehearsal dinner for said wedding (I’m not in the wedding party, but my husband is) took up a large chunk of Friday. I’m leaving Thursday afternoon to go to an oyster festival and a yarn convention, and I won’t be home until Sunday. I’ll have the laptop with me, but I’m not sure how much writing I’ll get done with other people around.

In a way, though, having all these other things going on has been beneficial. My weekly writing assignments are nicely broken down into ten different chunks. Sometimes I create the schedule of completing two per night, and once I hit that, I’m already in a good writing routine, so I can go back to working on the book. If I know something time-consuming is coming up, it can have the effect of making whatever writing time I squeeze in more productive. For example, I had plans with my mother last night, and I really wanted to finish up the chapter I’d been working on. She surprise!texted me to tell me she’d be at my house an hour earlier than expected. I worried for a moment or two, but guess what? The chapter got done.

I do have the added bonus of not having to get this book done by a specific deadline. That said, I’d prefer not to spend the rest of my life writing it. It’ll get done, I know, but things just keep getting in the way!

Cool story, bro: when I was in the first grade, I was eventually banned from participating in my class’s spelling bees because I kept winning all the time. The teacher tried to make things fair by letting me pick some of the words, but then there were complaints that the words I picked were too difficult. (For example, I tried giving “spring” before the class learned the -ing ending. Bah.) Don’t believe me? When my best friend gave his man-of-honor speech at my wedding, that’s the anecdote he chose to open up with. Good times.

Regardless of my spelling prowess, there are certain words that I just can never spell correctly on my first try. I don’t know what it is. I try memorization, mnemonics, repetition…nothing works. I have a mental block. I’m sure I’m leaving some out, but here are a number of my most frequent offenders:

embarrass(ed/ing)
mischievous
occurrence
camouflage
fluorescent (I think these two have similar issues)
viscous
insistent (why is that E not an A?)
dissipate

For the record, when I hit spell check just now, sure enough, I’d missed a couple and had to fix them. All hail the mighty spell check. I would be embarrassed without it.

Meet Ro. She’s a badass.

That security camera never stood a chance.

My good friend Boobulon knocked out this sketch when he needed something to draw the other night. I love it. I haven’t really written a character like Ro before, and I’m loving that too.

Ro (aka Agent Rohalia Bernard) doesn’t care what you think of her. She doesn’t even care if you like her. The filter between her brain and her mouth is almost non-existent, unless you ask her something she doesn’t feel like answering. (Or, as another good friend put it, “She speaks her mind, but doesn’t bare her soul.”) Some could argue that she’s selfish and insensitive. She still wouldn’t care.

As with everything else, I need to strike the correct balance with this character. She’s the female MC in this book, and while she may not care about how she comes across to other people, I don’t want her to be completely unlikeable. (Or maybe I want readers to like her for being unlikeable? Here I go running in circles again.) She has to have some redeeming qualities (and I assure you, she does). It just becomes a question of how to peel away the layers in a convincing way.

Either way, she’s fun and fearless, and quite possibly my favorite character to write so far. I can only write good things about her, you see. Or else she’ll kick me in the face and possibly stab me.

Last night, when I was futzing around the internet instead of writing, I was reading a brief article on a website I frequent about a remake of “RoboCop”. I’d never seen the original, knew nothing about it (other than, presumably, it involved a cop who was a robot), but the website is humorous and the article was short, so I read on. As I read the one-paragraph summary of the movie, I started feeling queasy. “Shit,” I thought. “This sounds an awful lot like the book I’m writing.”

Panicked at the thought that I would be accused of ripping off a rather popular franchise, I rushed over to wikipedia to read about the original movie. Long story short: while there are some similarities, enough was significantly different from my book to allow me to breathe a sigh of relief. But that got me thinking – how many “original” ideas really exist?

Back in my high school music theory classes, a friend and I were being all philosophical one day, and we pondered whether there would ever come a point in time where every tonal melody or logical chord progression has been written. (The comedy group Axis of Awesome may have proved we’re closer to this than we think.) The same can be applied to literature – have we run out of ideas? Are writers just taking the same basic plot outlines, character archetypes, and other tropes, and just twisting them around?

There’s a large group of people out there who believe Suzanne Collins’s mega-popular “The Hunger Games” trilogy is a ripoff of an older Japanese novel (later film and manga) “Battle Royale”. She claimed that she had never read/seen it prior to writing THG. Some people believe her, some claim there are too many coincidences and she must be lying. Me, I never strongly cared one way or the other, but I fell on the side of believing what she said was the truth.

It never seemed too strange to me to consider that two people in two different places (even at two different times) could come up with similar ideas. There have been plenty of such occurrences over the course of history. But let’s come back to my near heart attack from last night: As I said, I have never seen the movie “RoboCop”, or anything that spun off from it. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I knew practically nothing about it. Until I read the wiki article, I’d assumed for some reason that Arnold Schwarzenegger was in it (I was wrong).

Will I be accused of stealing ideas from this movie I’ve never seen? Possibly. I know the truth. Regardless of whatever similarities there may be, I also feel that there’s a big difference between a novel and a 90-minute movie. I’m not saying one is necessarily a better form of entertainment than the other, just that they’re different experiences. I like to think that I can develop my characters and themes enough that my story will truly become mine. (And let’s not forget about the erotica component.)

However, I’ll also make sure that when I write up the blurbs for promotion, I’ll highlight the points that make my book different and unique. (That is, if anything’s really unique these days!)

I know it’s blasphemy to some, but I edit as I go along. In The Edge of the Sphere, I edited at the end of every “part” (there were four main parts, a brief interlude, plus a short “Part Five” with a shorter epilogue). The current project isn’t broken down that way, so I’ve decided to edit every 10,000 words or so.

I was going to write another blog post about my editing experience. However, it has become clear to me that while I think I’m learning things as I keep plugging away at writing, I’m probably just fooling myself. I decided rather than rambling on about the same nonsense for another couple hundred words, I’ll just provide an illustration to speak for me in regards to what I’ve been doing today and yesterday:

Fear my mad MS Paint skillz.

I know “that” is unnecessary, like, 95% of the time. I’ve been trying to avoid it. I KNOW IT IS WRONG. And yet, “that” keeps sneaking in there. Between “that” and the adverbs I’ve also been slicing mercilessly, I’m surprised my word count is still above 10K.

From now on, whenever someone says “I hate that” in reference to just about anything in the world, I will agree. And I will not be lying. I really do hate THAT.