Eternally Confused

As You Wish

Jackson Pearce’s latest release was my latest read and you can bet I’ll be picking-up her next one in June.  And let me just tell you right now, As You Wish kicked wicked awesomesauce. 

Here’s the skinny: Viola is crushed after her lifetime bestfriend and boyfriend for a year, Lawrence, comes out to her.  In the wake of his ascent to the high school Royal Family, Viola is left feeling invisible and, to quell this pain, inadvertantly wishes a Jinn to her world.  But when Jinn asks her to make three wishes so he can go home, Vi is stuck.  While she plays ‘hard to wish’, it gives both Jinn and Vi time to fall in love, setting them both on a path for heartbreak.  And that’s where I’m going to stop because I don’t want to give away the ending…because it’s clever and awesome and makes me squee!

You see, I have this thing for strong female leads (see here) and awesome, rugged dudes (see here).  Not to say that this book was about the girl being strong (because at first, she’s not, but she grows into strength, which is even better) and the dude isn’t always rugged (love pushes him to find his limit, to become all fisty-cuffs with the ‘bad dude’).  That’s a recipe for awesomeness right there, in my opinion.

But, not only were the characters perfect for me, they were well defined, strong and their voices were each unique.  Which became very handy since the story is told in alternating points of view between Viola and Jinn.  Which is awesome.  But then there was this other part–the story.  It rocked.  There was the pressure of time weighing them down, the coming together of two worlds, the hurt of a real relationship.  It was all there.  All the good things.  And the plot never let me down.

Even in the end, when I was like ‘oh, here’s the kicker’, it didn’t leave me lacking.  The twist on the star-crossed lover concept was unique and bright.  I loved it.  I want you to buy it.  And I want there to be a sequel, or at least a follow-up with one of the other characters falling in love.  It was so good, I think I’ll go read it again.  Thank you, Jackson Pearce.  Thank you.

If you would like to see more Spreading the Awesome reccomended reads, go see Tiffany Neal.  She’ll rock your socks with her review of Neal Shusterman’s Unwind.  And if you’re trying to track down some 60+ Spreading the Awesome reccomended reads, check out Elana Johnson’s list of all the participating blogs.

I’ve been around now for a while listening to what other authors are saying and learning the craft.  Not to say I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I am going to confess to having been trying to learn for at least the last year.  So, one of the things I’ve learned from my very studious mentors is that you have to get the ideas on the page first.  Worry about the big stuff, then go back and fix the little things.  I recently have gotten to the point in my writing where I can now actually look at the little things and puzzle pieces started to fit together in my head. 

photo credit: wilhei55

And, like being woken on an emergency room table and being told you’ve been dead for three minutes, I got it.  The concept was brilliant.  If you’d like, I can share it with you.  Whatcha think?

Ok, I’ll do it.  It’s the anatomy of a book.  And here’s how it goes:

1) Big stuff comes first.  That means Draft 1 is only focused on the following:

• voice
• major plot structure

2) Little stuff comes second.  This means Draft 2 is focused on bringing together Draft 1 and a little class and organization.  Organization comes with the following:

• sentence structure
• rhythm
• over-jokification (one of my worst offenders)
• explinations (also one of my worst offenders)
• word count

3)  The final edit (because that’s actually what’s happening after step 1) leads you through the tiny-whiny stuff like:

• fine tuning the voice
• plucking some minor plot-asides (bringing them out as micro-plots or slashing them)
• highlighting the tension in some scenes
• honing the knife’s edge of your MC’s emotions

So there.  It’s that easy. 

Isn’t that crazy.  So you write. Then you make it readable.  Then you go after and beat it until it’s awesome. 

This is why editing rocks, folks.  Because it makes your book shine.

Do you ever have a secret thing you really, really want to write, but you want to be more confident about your writing abilities before you take it on so that it’s a ROCKSTAR of a book?  Maybe you just write what happens along in your head, but not me.  I store ideas like a chipmunk facing a new ice age. 

photo credit: Gilles Gonthier

Yeah, that’s me with my stories all crammed in my cheeks like both my arms might fall off tomorrow and I’ll have to re-think the idea of writing (there’s always voice recognition software, right).

And one idea that won’t leave me alone:  (shhh, this is a big secret) Red (don’t tell anyone that I shared the title with you, because that’s totally how I write–I start with a title, don’t ask).  But I don’t want to write Super Secret Title because I really want it to be like the most AWESOMEST thing ever.  Not to say that I don’t love, love, love what I’m writing now, but come on.  I can’t be perfect.  I have some growing to do (see Tuesday’s post on writerly-growth).  And I don’t want to ‘waste’ this story. 

WTF?!  You might ask. 

Yeah, I think I’m asking myself that right now, too.  But seriously, I can only work on one project at a time and I know that I’m not the conssumante writer that I WILL be, so the harder, tougher story of Re–I mean, Super Secret Title, really deserves that writer I know I’ll become. 

So, anyway.  Tell me about you.  Are you holding any ideas on the backburner in wait for the day you have an agent and have that ’seal of approval’?  Surely not.  Hopefully I’m the only crazy out there…

Oh, and here’s a little something that I thought was really exciting.  I found this really rockin’ new author, Jackson Pearce.  Not only is her name cool, but she’s a YA author!  Her first book As You Wish is already at bookstores, so I’m headed out (as soon as I change out of my PJ’s) to pick it up.  Her next book, though, (which is actually what reminded me about my beloved monster Red–I mean SST*) Sisters Red, sounds AWESOME.  I can’t wait to read it and encourage all of you to go check-out her website and all her books. 

Ok.  Talk to me, or not.  Whatever. 

I’ve heard a lot of talk lately about two types of writers that I never realized lay under our mild-mannered surfaces.  This conflict astounded me, made me think.  So, I thought I’d share my thoughts with teh interwebs.  Then, later when I’m famous, someone can come back and say, “see there, she was thinking.”  But I digress.

Here’s my rub:  There are two kinds of writer-folks out there.  One group is the type that never says “this is so awesome, I don’t need to ever grow past this point or have any critique ever.”  The other type is the group that never says “this is ok, but I know it could be better–I need to go see my crit group and really listen to what they say.”

In other words, there’s a gruop out there of writers that KNOW they can grow, even if they’ve written 39 books and are tapped to speak at conferences so much that they’re turning down offers.  Then there’s the other group that, maybe this is their first novel, and they are so keen on keeping their baby intact (which may or may not be ugly, mind you) that they can’t see past their egos to listen, really listen, to their crit group.  Did you know there were two factions of writers?  I didn’t.

But then some of this happened in our crit group and I began to wonder.  If we all had, say, group 1’s attitude of ‘never surrender until you have every crit in the world considered’, the world might be full of really awesome, really stupendously, califragilisticly rockin’ good writing.  If we all had, say, group 2’s attitude of  ‘I’m so badass I don’t need no crit’, all literary works would suck, for the most part, and there would only be the occassional diamond that popped-out to the world.  Hmm. 

And think about agents and publishers if you’re part of group 2.  Do they really want to work with that?  I mean, it’s their business to get what sells out into stores.  If the book is perfect as-is, fine, but what if it’s not?  Will people from group 2 find a place to publish?  Maybe, but is it where they really want to be, or just a place?  I’d hate for my attitude to be what holds me back from making a career out of my dream job.

If you can’t tell, I’m on the side of ‘NEVER SURRENDER’ (could be an Alamo thing, but who knows).  Think about you. What group do you fall into?  What group do you wish you fell into?  Does it amuse you that every time I type ‘group’ today, I spelled the o and u backward.  Let me know!

I’m watching a lot of old cartoons lately (don’t ask) and I’ve come to the conclusion that there has been a shift in cultrually-acceptable love between same-sex characters.  Case in point, Yogi the Bear and his partner Bobo. 

 Don’t ask me what the picture is from.  It just looked cool.
photo credit: L. Marie

Not to make like stereotypes are the way we should judge others, but to make my point, it would be best if I stuck with some stereotypes, then hit the harder stuff.  Here’s what my research has revealed about the likely sexual-preferences of Yogi:

1)  Impeccably dressed, much more so than the other bears/animals in the park.  I mean, have you ever seen Yogi or Bobo with out the tie or bow-tie, respectively?  Uh, no.

2) Though he loves to eat the pic-inic basket contents, he never gains an ounce of weight.  Yogi must be exercising like a mad-thing.

3) Loves kids, but doesn’t have any (yet).  I hope Yogi and Bobo decide to adopt, I really do.  They’d make great parents.

4) Yogi ‘hibernates’ with Bobo–in the same bed.  That’s a pretty substantial clue.

So, there.  That’s my case for Yogi.  I won’t go on, because, really, that’s his private life we’re talking about here and it’s really none of our business.  But it does provide for a convenient spring-board for discussion.  Do we see any of the male-duos of love running around (sleeping together) in popular, more recent cartoons?  I don’t, but maybe I’m just watching too much older cartoons to notice the new stuff.

I think there’s been a cultural change.  I think that when Yogi and many of the other ancient cartoons were made, we didn’t have, as a culture, compunctions about two dudes sleeping together.  We just didn’t think about it–it was ok that it happened.  Now, I think there are just a lot more people thinking about it, so the organically-developed relationships in cartoons are just not happening.  The relationship is now over-thought, over-complicated.

I vote that we go back.  I like that we were open to things by just not really caring.  I think that’s the way it should be.  Help me out here, if I’m wrong, but isn’t that more awesome?

Wow.  What a title!  I can’t believe I have the balls nerve to actually put this out in teh interwebs.  Um, so, now that you’re here, I want you to know–your actual mini-you is not actually ugly.  Nor is your mutt puppy.  Just your novel.  Or, at least that part of your novel that your crit partners have told you to kill a thousand times and you keep holding onto.  Yeah, that baby.

  photo credit: D.C.Atty

(BTW: when I search for ‘ugly puppy’ why do only pugs show-up?)
Maybe it’s your whole novel (for me it was my writing style so my whole first novel had to go), maybe it’s just a chapter (yeah, that happened to me, too–see below), or maybe it’s just your favorite line (like mine: Janie made me so mad I wanted to punch a kitten).  Yeah, that baby is UGLY.

Don’t be a scrabbler and hold-on for dear life.  Don’t be afraid to re-write or remove.  It might make your piece better.

Let’s take a ‘for example’: 

Chapter 2 of my most recently completed MS.  It sucked.  I knew it sucked, but it was so important.  I had to shake and move a lot of things in that chapter, introduce a lot of characters and give an info-dump without being an info-dump.  And the first three times I wrote it, it sucked.  Big time.  I had the rockin’est Chapter 1 and the BEHEST Chapter 3–but the limp noodle in the middle was killing me.  Until I was like: This is it! Eureka! (I just wanted an excuse to type eureka in a sentence.)

I took it to my crit group.  Apparently it still stunk.  And I’d worked so hard on it…I wanted to cry.  Then I bucked-up and did a little trick I like to call ‘rewriting for the millionth time’ and threw out what I’d already written and started from scratch with the main points in mind.  And you know what?  It worked.  I now have a solid (and I mean solid) Chapter 2.  I introduce characters, I swing in and out of info-dumps without info-dumping, I have great GREAT dialogue to help shore-up my MC’s backstory.  It’s like my brian cells decided to hold a full-orchestra symphony just for me.  Thank bob because I was about ready to just leave it–yeah, you heard me.  I was almost ready to just leave it and see if it floated with an agent.  But you know what?  It wouldn’t have.

So, my advice today:  Don’t hang-on to what doesn’t work.  Your baby is ugly–admit it, revise/remove/slay it and move on!

How do you know when your baby is ugly?  Have a hard time admitting it?  Let’s talk.

Let’s go back to college and re-introduce ourselves to E.C.  I didn’t take English in college.  You heard me.  I didn’t take English in college.  Nor did I take creative writing or any of that jazz.  I tested out of all of those classes in high school.  So, let’s remember that E.C.’s never been in a Writing 101 class.

Second, let’s look at E.C.’s learning curve:

Yeah, you’ll notice that I didn’t come into writing over a year ago with all my facilities intact.  I had a LOT of learning to do.  And my first step was NOT getting better–my first step was making some mistakes, so I could learn from them.

So, the lesson here is:

1) Mistakes still count as part of the learning curve.  Don’t worry about making some mistakes when you start-out–that’s how we learn.  Just learn from them and go on.

2) Get a crit group (I can’t say this enough) and find yourself that ‘right person’ that’s going to help you get through this sane–mine just happens to be the infamous Jamie Harrington at TotallytheBomb.com.  You’ve got to take that step to move forward, though.

3) Learn.  Then learn some more.  Don’t stop learning.

4) When you realize that you might actaully be able to write (yeah, because for a while, it won’t feel like that at all), you need to keep learning.  It might look like I’ve drawn a plateau of non-learning at the end of my curve-atious curve, but it’s actually got an up-tick.  But now, I’m fine-tuning stuff.  Yes, I still make mistakes–but now it’s not ‘amature’ mistakes, it’s the mistakes you might see in a lot of published works…I’m making mistakes like the pros.  Not that I don’t have to learn from them, but still–these are the good mistakes, I’m told.  

5) Keep going.  Don’t get to the place where you feel like you can write and then just stay there.  Keep working at it, polishing yourself and your work.  There’s a lot more to writing than just being in front of a computer all the time–go to a book fair.  Go to a conference.  Fine-tune your social networking skills.  These are another part of writing that maybe you didn’t know about before. 

How about you?  How did your learning curve work?  Where are you at in the process?

Hi, my name is E.C. and I’m a happy-ending-aphobe.  I’ve been happy-ending free for nearly 25 years (basically since I began writing).  I can’t write a happy ending for the life of me…Can anyone help me?

 
photo credit: anmuell

This is a really tough thing to talk about, but I’m happy to dissect myself for your reading pleasure, so ok, here it goes:  I love books that have a happy ending, especially those that are the climax of a multi-book series.  As a matter of fact, if the final book in a long series isn’t somehow satisfying, I get really miffed.  Like angry-and-I-will-never-read-another-book-by-that-author angry. 

But then I sit down to write an ending…hmmm…how does that go again?  Oh, right–I panic.  I can’t write a happy ending.  I can’t force one out.  Because, for me, life doesn’t have happy endings.  I mean, me and Mr. E. are very happy and we’ll be together forever, right?  But then there’s all the rest of life that we have to deal with.  And the rest of that life sucks.  People die.  People hate.  The world does end.

Why can’t I get past the unhappy, I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because every book I’ve written so far seems to be the first in a series (which I then don’t want to write the second because if the first doesn’t sell…ouch).  But even when I write the ending and try to make it happy, it just doesn’t work.

How ’bout yous guys?  Happy endings work for you?  Or no?

I’m not usually hung-up about movies way in advance of their opening date–I like to wait and see what the critics are saying. But not this time. No. The production company could put the preview on the screen eighty-nine times and I would sit through every ounce of it.

The name:  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

THIS. IS. AWESOME.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/scottpilgrimvstheworld/

Enjoy.

The best thing that ever, EVER happened to me as a writer was critique.  No, seriously.  Not my awesome idea for a–oh, not telling you that; or my way cool mom who encouraged me…or all the other nine thousand things that got me on this path.  No–critique.

Here’s what critique helped me do:

1) Find my voice.  My voice.  Not the stilted adult voice that I thought I needed to be writing in.  Not the voice of some other writer that did only cutesy things…no.  My voice.  Dark and fluffy, but cute and sharp all at the same time.  And all mine.  And I never would’ve realized that I wasn’t even using it without a critique or two (or eighty-billion).

   Basically, my critque partners gave me a microphone and asked me to write what I really felt.  It was awesome.
photo credit: Aural Asia

2) Bravado, bravado, bravado.  I never would have gotten over my fear of the business and the whole ‘querying’ thing without my awesome critquing group.  There.  I said it.  I was afraid of, yes, business.  Me.  Ha!  And they keep pouring more info in my head (sometimes faster than I can absorb it).  They give me the guts to keep going and they show me the path (which they sometimes are trodding along with me or miles ahead of me, but whatever) which I may not ever have found without them.

3) Being my cheering-section.  Let’s admit it–every author or author-in-waiting (as I prefer to think of myself) needs a crowd of peeps* behind them.  My peeps are no longer the marshmallow variety.  They have names and faces and show-up on a regular basis to share their opinion about my writing and thus I get to share my opinion about their’s.  It’s kinda awesome knowing I have friends who get me.

  My advice:  Go find your peeps.  Today.
photo credit: bochalla

*Peeps are delicious and I think we should all run-out and partake–right now.  I have not, nor have I ever been paid by Peeps to make this annoucement, but I would be happy to take thier money if they are passing it out, just FYI.