writerinchains, posts by tag: writing - LiveJournal

And so is a publishing contract!

My Christmas story found a home!  Not sure of the details yet, but as soon as I know I'll be spamming the heck out of you all!  *lol*  Guess I don't have to spend part of today reformatting it to meet another e-publisher's submission guidelines.

I keep hearing "three days, man, three days!" in my head.  *lol*  That's how long it took for this press to come back and offer me a contract.  I think I'll be doing a lot of laughing today.

Happy Monday!  *bounces out to work on another story*

So this morning I wanted to find a new blog to read that I can both learn from and be entertained by so I logged into my Blogger account for the first time in a couple of years (okay the second, but the first on my desktop PC).  As recently as two years ago I read a smattering of writing-related blogs very regularly so I thought I'd start with those & found something interesting.  

Nathan Bransford was a literary agent the last time I checked in on his blog & now he's an author.  I didn't submit to him, but I'll probably read at least one of his books.  I'm pretty sure he writes Middle Grade Lit, which is younger than I'm usually drawn to, but how can I resist this?  

Space travel is all fun and games until someone breaks the universe.

This line does exactly what it was meant to - makes me want to pickup the book.

But that's not why I ran right over here to post.  Mr. Bransford's post today is titled "Why Do Women Dominate YA?"  NPR released a Reader's Top 100 List of YA Novels & 63% were written by women!  Most of the YA I've fallen in love with over the past year and a half has been written by women, but I thought that was only my own bias coming through in the choices I was making.  It's nice but also a little weird to find myself going with the majority of readers in any given area.  Maybe this bodes well for the YA writing I'm working on.  It's surely made me re-think the name I want to use if I'm ever lucky enough to publish in that genre.  Before I took my two year hiatus from writing, the common wisdom said boys wouldn't read a book by a woman, but girls didn't care as much about the gender of the author.  Obviously, that's not a concern anymore.  Which is a relief since I wasn't sure how I'd ever answer the question of "what does that stand for?" in a manner suitable for the young adult crowd.

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Last night I polished off my last book of 2011, so anything I read now can count toward my 2012 challenge.

I read Kiss of Life by Daniel Waters, the sequel to his Generation Dead that I absolutely loved.

KoL was very good as sequels go – even if the ending left me feeling a little dubious about calling it a standalone.  I’ll have to read the third one before too long & just hope he ties up all the loose ends I would like to see tied.

The characters were mostly old friends from GD, but he added some new characters and showed new facets of some minor characters we didn’t know all that well from GD.  I’m trying to figure out exactly why I like Waters’ work so much (in the hopes of duplicating those things in my own work), so at least part of this entry will be me doing that.  Tucking the rest behind a cut, for rambling & spoilers.
 

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Today at lunch I started & finished Locke & Key #3 & tomorrow it’s on to #4.  Super cool series if anyone’s into horror &/or graphic novels.  I don't plan to count either in my reading challenge, it doesn't seem right.  Joe Hill is just enough like his father so I like (most of) his style, but different enough so (hopefully) what I see coming won’t actually happen in the last installment.  Or at least it’ll happen in a way I haven’t imagined yet.  He also says on his blog that he has a new novel in the pipeline that’s longer than Heart Shaped Box + Horns put together.  If it’s anything like HSB or L&K, that’ll be sweeeeeeeeeeeet.

So how many times will I compose a post in an Outlook window over the course of a workday & then curse when I have to monkey around with the format & ruin my Zen?  *shakes fist at Outlook*

Hopefully not another one after tonight. 

 

 

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I love Kurt Sutter.

I love Charlie Hunnam.

I love Katey Sagal.

I love Danny Trejo.

I love Kurt Sutter.

And that's all I can say right now without being spoilery as all hell . . . except US Attny, you Weird Dude, & everyone who's made it so SoA will be back for S5, I love every last one of you too.

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Some days it's good that I have a day job.  Today, all of you playing along out there were spared a long involved rant that wouldn't have accomplished anything except working up my Inner Existentialist (who takes up about 90% my innards, everything not classified under hopeless-romantic).  She truly doesn't need any help getting started on a rant about the undue credit given to the artificially imposed structure of religion or the ghastly toll it's taking on our society . . .

And I think I'm up to about 10Kwds.  Looks as though the particular type of masochist one has to be to write stories nobody's interested in buying -- that's the kind I am.  But at least I'm happy.  That's something.

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Usually I use my extra hour to sleep; this year I've used my extra hour to write.  I'm sure it's not the first time I've done so, but it's been quite a while since I've been up this late writing & feel like I won't be able to get to sleep even though my eyes are crossing.

Interesting research I've done so far for NaNo2011 (too many links to grab just now, sorry):

*  Popular baby names in the late 1990s.
*  Constellations visible in India in the summer.
*  How RU486 is administered & potential side effects.
*  Exotic sounding baked goods made with complex and intricate recipes.
*  Norwegian names for boys (with a side trip to pretty pictures of ski instructors in Norway).
*  Acronyms (they're not as easy to create for fictional organizations it would seem to the casual observer).
*  Pushing stories to the next level for screenwriters (serendipitous, but it still counts).
*  Removing Sharpie from a locker door with a dry-erase marker.

And I'm only at 6,065 words so far.

The feeling I get when I write makes me believe this is what I'm supposed to be doing.  I'll probably implode from joy if I ever find my niche & someone else agrees that this is what I'm supposed to be doing.

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ETA:  Wow, that was a cross-posted mess!

So in my never-ending quests to improve my writing & find new authors to squee over I’ve been concentrating on genre fiction, mostly YA Horror/Fantasy.  Which has (I hope) done a bit of good for both.  I know it’s been great for the second thing, & a bonus to finding authors is that they love to talk about books -- & not only their own.

A little while ago Sarah Rees Brennan blogged about Gothic Romance & mentioned (among others) Jennifer Cruisie’s Maybe This Time.  I’ve been a little afraid of Cruisie because she was linked with Chick-Lit (not sure if it’s justified, but that was enough for me), but this one was fun.  The ghost story was a bit predictable, but not 100%, and her dialogue was really fun in spots.  Not sure if I’ll read any of her Romances sans the Gothic label, but I’m glad I read this one. 

Before that, I read Generation Dead by Daniel Waters.  I found it through, of all places, an icon site on LJ.  Someone had made icons using some of the oft-used phrases from that book & the rest is history.  Although, I seriously question my Google-fu because I had no idea it was more than one stand-alone book.  *shrug*  More likely, it’s my spoiler-phobia at work. 

GD was much better than I thought it would be, & Waters does a great job creating complex characters (my favorite!) who also manage to be believable teenagers.  Who are fun to read about.  His foreshadowing is a little heavy handed at times, but when whatever-it-is actually happens I forgive it more often than not.  I have the second book on deck now, but I wanted to read one of SRB’s short stories today for more inspiration.

I’m telling myself I’m doing NANO again this year.  Last year was so much fun, & I’m still working on that book every once in a while (mostly the prequel, which is more fun probably because there’s more sex in it *g*).  This year, instead of a bunch of characters I’ve known since the early ‘90s and enough newbies to make it interesting, I have a concept.  I have a cool concept and two characters, but one of them’s been dead for about 13 years so knowing her doesn’t seem to be much help at this point. 

And did I mention I have no friggin’ idea where I’m starting or most of what’s going to happen?  Not sure if I’m more excited or terrified at this point, but I’ll give it a shot & see what happens.

Last weekend I did a bunch of crafty stuff (some of which is close to being finished) (sort of) & watched a movie I'd rec (& in the theater, no less!) - Moneyball -- but it's almost 9 o'clock now so I'm off to knit in front of Grimm.  I hope it lives up to the hype.  :)

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OMG, am I loving SoA this season. 


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In other news, this cold is hanging on like a baby screecher monkey & I've noticed that Chunky Soup tends to explode in the microwave like a naughty angel.

Said revelation made me laugh until I almost hacked up a lung & it looked like I'd been crying over a lost love.

That was my day.

Now I'm going to go think about how best to torture my own characters until the cold meds knock me out. 



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That's how good writing looks once it's finished -- effortless.  You don't see the scaffolding off  in the corner, no little corners of blue painter's tape clinging at the edges of plot holes (or wads of duck tape patching everydamnedthing).  The first ep of Being Erica S4 was like this.

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And what other show could make me want to quote Paris Hilton?  Well, maybe SPN, but BE made me realize how long it's been since I even heard her name, so now I'm happy for another reason.

And that's it for today.  :)


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Intellectually I know the answer to this, healing ministry & all that, but sheesh I'm tired of dealing with them.  I think I paid my dues during the first 27 years of my life & am entitled to just stop now.  Well, maybe soon . . .

The inspiration for that mini-rant is that when I made my follow-up appointment with Dr. Pusher the little gal who made it for me, instead of entering my name on the appointment card, wrote "Mrs" and then my last name.  That didn't bug me at first, even though I've never seen that before even when I was married, but over the next few days it really got under my skin.  So today when I called to cancel the appointment & suggest Dr. Pusher be more forthright with his patients when prescribing the hard drugs, I brought it up.  I almost didn't, the lady on the line was probably older than my mom & kept either forgetting what I said the moment after I said it or was hard of hearing.  To make a long story a little shorter, here's how it went:

Me:  There was nothing in my paperwork that suggested I was married and yet the gal who made my appointment entered Mrs. [C] instead of my name on the appointment card.

She (interrupting):  That was presumptuous.

Me:  Yes, and inappropriate.  It may be worth bringing up in a staff meeting.  She couldn't know whether I was legally barred from marrying the person to whom I'm committed.  In that case it would be inappropriate and also insulting, which I'm sure was not her intent. 
(Yes, I'm a bit of a prig when I'm trying to broach a volatile subject and not actually BE volitile.)

She:  Okay.  Thank you. 

Her 'thank you' was much chillier than the rest of the conversation, which had just been a little vague . . .  I was very nice and matter of fact, but I don't think I created a new ally.  Not that I think I had a shot in the first place with someone who had to ask me four times how to spell my last name (which ONLY HAS FOUR LETTERS), but a different reaction would've been nicer.  I could just see her wiping all my previous comments to the doctor from her screen.  But, that's less than charitable, so now I'm wiping that image from my mind. 

I felt pretty good about this afterward.  It's not really like me to do this kind of thing, but maybe it's like me now.  We'll see.  Or not.  I'm never going back to Dr. Pusher so I'll probably never know what, if any, impact that had.


In other news, SoyNuts are good.  Thanks sulien !  And tonight I cooked couscous with zucchini & broccoli from scratch so the only sodium besides what's naturally occurring was in the parmesan cheese I sprinkled overtop.  And it was yummy.



Also, to everyone who has anything to do with the writing on Game of Thrones:  I love you!  Pleasepleaseplease teach others to do what you do.  Or at least live longlong lives so I can be entertained.  Because it's all about me.  And Aidan Gillen.  Gawd I love that guy (even when he's not Stuart Alan Jones :)).  Nobody does what he's doing there quite like him.  And that's about all I can say without spoilers except OMFG, this week's ep!!!!

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