Sunflowers near Fairbury, Nebraska

My mother drives along a stretch of road every day that passes this sunflower farm. I'm so glad she drove me out to see it!

While I never want to live in the middle of nowhere where these things appear, I can see why some people do. They're georgous.

The 50 Book Challenge

So, this year I decided I WAS finally going to read fifty books in a year. I've been trying to strengthen my plot-forming abilities, and so this year I've been reading mostly pure genre fiction.

Turns out, genre fiction reads faster than I expected. It's almost September, and I'm at sixty-seven books. Three or four of them I wasn't able to finish, but that still puts me far ahead of fifty.

Now the difficult question: What, really, have I learned about plotting? I have about two weeks ahead of me where I won't have time to read, so we'll see if I can come up with an answer by then.

Not Posting

I may not be posting, but I'm reading and keeping that list updated.  In my own defense, even if I'm not posting, I am getting work done on a novel.  

One Pass Manuscript Revision

Why, oh why, did I not find this back in September?  

Holly Lisle's brilliant technique.

The good news is that I'm at the perfect point in my current first draft to deal with her first step in revision.  Should make both the writing and the fixing a lot easier.  

Roomba vs. Ferret

A Roomba is a robot vacuum.

A ferret is a fuzzy creature with sharp teeth.

Our ferret Jack wants to kill the roomba.  

Watch.

The Wentworths

I really like stories about screwed up families.  

The Wentworths by Katie Arnoldi was a great one.  Here's the backstory.  How cool!

Reading Binge

While trying to find an agent for my completed novel, and fleshing out the idea for my next, I've been reading.

A lot.

I'm going to hit the 50-books-this-year mark, no problem.

I can tell I've been reading far too much urban fantasy, because today I wished for a spell to make the idiots driving too fast on my road slow down.  Uh-huh.  Also, it looks like I've been reading wordy UF, judging by that last sentence.  Sheesh.

I think it's time to break out some short story collections.  No extra words there, usually.

The View

Halloween picture weirdness. Took this Thursday night in the oldest building on the Texas Wesleyan University campus. More to come--if you're local to me, check out the CBS 11 news on Halloween for more of the story!

Cards and Waiting

So in order to not stress about all the query letters and synopses I've sent out, I've been reduced to this: playing cards with my cat.

I really need to start working on something else. It was all the cat could do to stay awake.

Bookmarks

These bookmarks are one more reason to love World Market.

Yes, Mom. One of those is for you.

No, I'm not telling you what color the fabric on the back is, but I promise you it's not what you'd expect.

Genres

So I've gone through four complete revisions of a novel, and I'm finally querying agents.

This entails pigeon-holing my novel, which isn't working. It's had me laying in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about genre.

See, every time I sit down to write, I intend to write horror, and I'm always shocked when it never comes out that way. I mean never as in not once have I come close to true horror. And I'm good with that--it's fine not being horror.

Creepy, sure. Paranormalish sometimes. Weird. But not horror.

In my queries, because I can't say--"This would be women's fiction, if there was less blood. This would be horror, if my main char had meant to do it. This would be mystery, if the plot ended with whodunnit,"--so I've called it mainstream, or character-driven.

Character-driven is about the only genre-esque term that seems to fit.

Lack of objectivity sucks this morning.

New Uses for Cards from the Catalog

So libraries are phasing out card catalogs. My heart broke a little writing that sentence.

So what are they doing with the cards? This. How cool!

I Hate Summer.

Usually, I'm still in love with summer in July. My patio is shaded in the morning, my flowers are all blooming, and I get to read the newspaper, in the shade and watch the hummingbirds in relative comfort, yanno, 85 degrees, 90 maybe, before 10am?

Not this year. I spend the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee out there, and I'm so soaked in sweat I'm running for the shower. The a/c unit is running so often it's chasing away the birds. My flowers, watered every night, wilt in the reflected heat from the brick by noon.

I'm considering putting tin foil in the windows to reflect the heat back. (The cost of electricity jumped 32% here last month, youch!) Comfort is winning over taste, clearly. It hasn't rained in weeks. The cats are even avoiding the windows.

This year the summer sun is evil. Check out this forecast. I'm not supposed to visit my friends in CT until September, but I'm seriously considering going now. Like, tonight. It's rainy and in the low 80's there. Not fair.

Cute Mutt

Michael's been out of town this week.

I finished draft three, the hand-editing, anyway, in four days. It'll take me two to put the revisions into the computer, but hey, I got the wrack-my-brain stuff done. Yay me! (Coincidence? Doubt it.)

And this dog wandered into my yard.

Again. And again. I took this picture a few weeks ago, but the dog keeps coming back. Normally, I run off stray mutts; I hate dog poop. Really and truly, I own no dogs, I want no poo in my yard.

I've been known to carry little yap-yap dogs back to their houses, and bang on the door until the owner appears, wondering who the hell I am, and why I have his mutt. It's not that I don't like dogs. I do: if it's my dog.

But this mutt's cute. He comes over, lays in that same spot, and watches me. He doesn't poop. After about an hour, he leaves. He's become my daily little joy.

Second Drafts

So last night I finished the second draft of this novel. I call it 'this novel' because I still lack a title. I have some, but I hate them all.

About two hours after the printer shot out the last page, I started to feel something like anxiety. Wow, I really finished the second draft. Now I can send it out.

Add an hour. Anxiety has turned to panic. Did I remember to actually put the shovel in where I thought I did? Did the soup burn? I didn't describe Mark enough. No one will know what he looks like! Wait, the glove, where's the glove, oh god, I can't remember which chapter I'm supposed to look for it in!

Add thirty minutes and some vodka. This novel will never be fit to see the light of day. I will never be done tinkering with it. Agents? They'll laugh, this novel is so not ever going to be ready.

That was my night. Sanity returned this morning. And as I was perusing some writing blogs, I came across this: Writing a Novel, A Love Story.

Libba Bray is brilliant.

Second Season

Mom, this is the second Stargazer season you've missed. Just sayin'.

Small World

So weeks ago Jon mentioned that he'd met a couple guys in the Border's where our writer's group meets, and they were working on something, and he invited them to drop in one Thursday night.

Tonight they did. They're working on a graphic novel, which I know almost less than nothing about. In conversation, one of the guys mentioned he used to work at a casino in Connecticut.

Foxwoods, I asked, in utter shock.

Nope, he says, Mohegan Sun.

I look at him and say that I'm from Ledyard, mostly.

He grew up in Groton. We were both shocked to run into each other in Fort Worth, at a writer's group! So the three of us ended the evening lamenting the loss of grinders (the sandwich and the word!), shops that deliver grinders, and Greek pizza.

Small, small world.

Wait until I tell them that there are at least two more people from Ledyard (that I knew, anyway) in Texas: one in Denton and one in San Antonio!

Bikes, Books & Soaps

So my bike broke the night before last. The consensus seems to be that I shifted gears while putting too much power on the pedals, which caused the chain to jump off and rip a spoke out from the wheel. I almost crashed. I ended up waiting in a nursing home lobby while M rode home and came back with the car. The nursing home was creepy, but waiting at 11pm in a butcher shop parking lot didn't sound like much fun either.

Anyway, the lack of a bike gave a family member and I time to have dinner last night. It didn't go so well. The highlight was when she said books were just like soap operas. You get the same thing from them, she said.

I asked her nicely to please never, ever say that again, and things went downhill from there. She wanted me to explain, and of course I did, and I'm sure she was offended, because soaps are her life, but she refused to counter my opinions. That was almost more irritating that the original comment!

I miss my bike.

Tattoos and Dentistry, oh my.

Monday night I broke a tooth. Luckily, I already had an appointment for Tuesday, so that was happy. The tooth could be crowned, rather than yanked or replaced with an implant, happy again.

But the assistant stuck her foot in her mouth, and she's so nice, I feel bad for her.

She had me captive, gauze and mold-making goo in my mouth, water running down my back from the irrigator they use with the drill. She asked me if I'd ever written a children's book.

I told her no, I don't have kids, never was around them much, I wouldn't know where to start.

She's uber-Christian, by the way, and I've known this for the past three or four dental visits. So I'm pretty sure I know what's coming.

And yup, there it was: I should write children's books preaching to kids about how they shouldn't smoke, drink, pierce themselves, get tattooed or do any of the things they're tempted to do, of which a good Christian woman would dissaprove.

Wow, does that sound boring. But that's beside the point.

So she says all this, and removes some gauze, and my hair falls behind my ear. She notices then I have three holes in my earlobe. She squints, says nothing, and wipes off my face. She really is a lovely woman to have poking around in your mouth, she's very good at her job and always happy. And she believes me when I say, ouch! I'm not numb yet! More drugs!

So she keeps on, and talks about tattooing some more. Then I get out of the chair, and because I've just had my hair chopped off, she sees the tattoo on the back of my neck. (Luckily, she missed the big on one my leg.) Her eyes get huge, and I can tell she's so embarassed.

As I'm paying my bill, and telling her how relieved I am that my tooth could be fixed and not yanked, she says goodbye, come back soon, all this, four or five times. Her face was beet red. I wanted to tell her not to worry about it, really, I don't think kids should do permanent things to their bodies either, but I was afraid I'd make it worse. I'm good at that. Too good, often.

Stinks, though, cause I wanted to tell her not to be embarassed.

The Cost of Commas

I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday, looking at geology books with my FIL. In my wandering, I came across a book that was regional, of a specialized interest, and written by a person with whom I am acquainted.

Cool, I thought. It's a little pricey, sure, and that font is kinda big (insert warning bells here) but I know this guy and I like this subject. So I bought it.

I began to regret it on the drive home. I read the first two chapters in the car, and by about page four, I was wondering where the hell the copyeditor was before this book went to print.

Then I began to wonder just how much commas really cost in print, because there were more missing than not. I mean, if they cost that much, the sentences could have been recast, shortened, phrasing removed, and they wouldn't have then been needed, right?

It's not that there was a misprint on one page. There were big bad mistakes on most pages.

When I arrived home, I googled the publisher. I was smelling POD, or some other printing company that advertised itself as a publisher. This one was small, perhaps new, but legit by web appearances.

Then I found the bookmark in the book, soliciting authors for books to be written on the same subject. (Insert more warning bells here.)

As I got to chapter three in the book, I began to really feel sorry for my friend, whose typos went unfixed, wrong words uncorrected, and whose clunky sentences kept their clunk. And their howevers. All of them.

I want to send the publisher a copy of Strunk & White. Mostly though, I hope they spelled the author's name correctly on the paycheck.

(ETA: Just did some more research, and discovered more warning bells. Their contract states that the author must pre-sell 1000 copies of the book before they'll take it on. Yikes! Linky.)