Blog Chain: The Things That Move Me

This chain was started by Kate.

Post pictures, songs, movie clips, poems, or novel excerpts that make you feel. Feel what, you ask? Feel anything. Happy. Sad. Angry. Nostalgic. Hopeful. Hopeless. Jealous. Joyful. 

I have read in several different places that YA novelist John Green said of his latest novel, The Fault In Our Stars that he wants to make his readers "Feel All The Things." I would love that someone could go through this blog chain and through what we all choose to post have that same Feel All The Things feeling.

Here are mine:

"Gram is worried about me. It's not just because my sister Bailey died four weeks ago, or because my mother hasn't contacted me in sixteen years, or even because suddenly all I think about is sex. She is worried about me because one of her houseplants has spots." ~The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

I love this book. Go read it. You can thank me later. :)

And this because it makes me laugh:

 I totally believe in the power of the blanket, btw. It's protected me from that Pet Semetary kid for years. ;)

Be sure to check out Christine's post from yesterday and Amparo's post tomorrow.

Blog Chain: Pieces of Me

It's blog chain time again and I'm late. Despite being a short week thanks to the holiday, it's been a very long week.

This round was started by Jon.

Imagine the home(s) where you grew up, and start drawing a floor plan. As you draw, memories will surface. Grab onto one of those memories and tell us a story.

I tried to come up with one particular story, something to capture the essence of my childhood, but whenever I think of that house, it's a collage of small moments, a thousand little things.

Sharing a tiny bedroom with my three younger sisters. Torture for a teenage girl, but I survived.

Sitting in my older (and only) brother's room, planning a novel for which we never came up with a premise, much less any sort of plot. But it was going to make us rich and famous, of course.

Kittens, kittens, and more kittens. So very many kittens.

The summer monsoons followed by a plague of baby toads, which we gathered in buckets and brought home. I always loved those tiny toads.

Rain coming down in buckets. I used to sit at the window and watch it flood the road in front of our house until it flowed over the edge of the sidewalk. An Arizona thunderstorm is still one of my favorite things to watch.

The smell of orange blossoms from the groves that surrounded our street. We loved to play hide and seek (and whatever else we could think of) in those orange groves--totally against the rules--and never got in trouble because we never got caught.

Or hopping the fence to swim in the irrigation ditch behind our house--also against the rules and we did get caught a few times but that didn't stop us. I mean, it was an irrigation ditch. Hours of endless fun.

Hanging out in the kitchen with my mom, learning to make bread, and fudge, and pies. For being the diet queen, my mom always made the best fattening foods.

Many hours at the kitchen table with my mom, learning to sew, or just talking for hours about anything and everything.

And late nights with my mom and sisters spent laughing at nothing. A sound that still echoes in my thoughts whenever I think about that house.

What about you? Anything about your childhood home you want to share?

Be sure to check out Michelle's post from Wednesday and Amparo's post today. :)

Blog Chain: Where and When

This round of the chain was started by Tere. She asked:

What conditions do you need to get your best writing done? Closed door, crowded coffee house? Computer or notebook? Can you just sit down to write, or do you need to wait for the time to be right?

This varies for me. If I'm on a roll, I can usually tune everything out (TV, video game noise, fighting children) and just write. Okay, that's not entirely true. My oldest daughter has recently developed the habit of listening to her current favorite song over and over and over. And over. This is VERY distracting and does stop me from making progress.

Any other time, if I'm stuck or I find that I'm easily distracted by email, Facebook, Twitter, and other internet things, it usually means the story isn't going in the right direction. Once I realize this is happening--I'm slow, so sometimes it takes me a while--I'll grab a notebook and move somewhere without immediate access to my computer. And in this situation, I need quiet, so I can think.

Now, I'm not saying I can't find ways to procrastinate with just a pen and paper. My notebooks are filled with doodles in the margins and in between paragraphs. But those are usually pretty mindless and help me think. And I don't know what it is about notebooks, but they have this magical way of getting me unstuck. One time, I was stuck on a scene for over a week. Every time I sat down and opened Word, I made no progress. But as soon as I turned to the notebook, it all worked itself out, and it only took me a couple of hours. Totally magical. ;)

As far as time of day or location, it doesn't matter. With kids, I've had to learn to be flexible.

What conditions do you need to get your best writing done?

Be sure to check out Jon's post from Wednesday and Amparo's post tomorrow. :)

Blog Chain: Greatest Accomplishment

This round was started by Michelle Hickman. She asked:

This is the month in creating writing goals and making big accomplishments. What is your greatest accomplishment -- in writing, your life or perhaps something incidental that had a big effect on you?

I'd like to say I've accomplished a lot over the years, but my life seems to be filled with many, many half-finished projects and ideas that probably could've gone somewhere if I hadn't gotten bored with them. At one point, I thought maybe my kids were an accomplishment, but truthfully, they're really only halfway to adulthood. Not that I'm giving up on them, not at all, but most of the time, I think the accomplishment belongs to them, for surviving another day with me as their nutso mother. ;)

Two years ago I probably would've said my greatest accomplishment was that I'd written a novel, start to finish. And I could've stopped there, patted myself on the back, and congratulated myself on actually finishing something. But now I know it wasn't really finished, and I think deep down I knew it then too. My subconscious just knew better than to make me aware of that fact because it probably would've stopped me from moving forward. I mean, a year to rewrite the entire thing from scratch and then another nine months to do it again? Talk about daunting.

So, at this point, I'll say my greatest writerly accomplishment is sticking with that story until it was as good as I could make it, despite HATING it at least 50% of the time I was working on it. Now I just have to muster the courage to query the thing. I know I said I sent a query out a couple of weeks ago (and I did), but that one doesn't really count since it came with a safety net. It's those this is your ONE chance to impress me queries that keep stalling me. Maybe that'll be my actual greatest accomplishment: hitting send on an email. ;)

What about you? What is your greatest accomplishment, writing or otherwise?

Be sure to check out Jon's post from Tuesday and Amparo's post tomorrow. :)

The Hunger Games!!!

Can't wait! :)

Blog Chain: My Favorite Monster

It's blog chain time again. This round was started by one of our awesome new members, Matthew MacNish. He asked:

What is your all-time favorite monster? You can take this in any direction you'd like. For example: my most bad-ass monster would easily be a dragon, and it is my favorite in some ways, but you don't have to go with that kind of measurement. Like me, you could go with the most ridiculously hilarious monster you ever heard of, or, like Stephanie Meyer, you could go with the most romantic creature to ever grace the pages of mythology. Or like Carrie Ryan, you could choose the old standby: Zombies. One alone might not be much to handle, but the horde is probably the single most powerful monster force ever invented in gaming, film, literature, or legend. It's up to you: what's your favorite monster?

As much as I love Halloween, this should've been an easy one for me, but I can't really come up with a favorite. Other than loving dragons when I was younger, I've never been that big on monsters.

That doesn't mean I don't enjoy a good scare. In fact, I love scary movies. I just prefer something more psychological than physical, I guess. :)

The first scary movie I ever watched was The Watcher in the Woods. Now, I know that movie isn't that scary, but it's pretty creepy, and I was young, maybe seven or eight, so it scared me. A LOT. But that didn't stop me from watching it over and over till I'd memorized most of the lines. ;)

Anyway, since I can't come up with a favorite, I guess I'll go with the one that has scared me the most. And maybe I'm cheating a little because I'm not sure if this is technically a monster, but the kid from Pet Semetary totally freaked me out. I saw that movie when I was thirteen and I couldn't sleep with my feet outside the covers for years. Even now, the thought of that little dude slicing through that guy's Achilles tendon gives me the heebie jeebies. *shivers* Shield your ankles, people! ;)

So, what about you? What's your all-time favorite monster?

Be sure to check out Christine's post from yesterday and Amparo's post tomorrow.

NaNo... Out... Mo?

I'm sure all of you are aware that NaNoWriMo starts today. I thought about participating, but I just can't write that fast. I'm too much of a perfectionist. Yes, I realize getting over perfectionism is a really good reason to do NaNoWriMo, but I think it would be counterproductive for me. I tried it once, for a week and a half, and I wrote a lot (around 18,000 words). But I got so burnt out, I couldn't write anything for like a month. So, yeah, not happening.

I'm a pantser through and through, but I think I might be able to outline successfully if I really dedicate myself. So that's what I'm gonna do. I've had a story bouncing around in my head for several months now as I've been wrapping up the last round of rewrites on Embrol. And now that I'm querying Embrol--first query goes out today (yikes!)--Descent can finally have my undivided attention. Poor Descent. So neglected. ;)

Armed with my shiny new copy of Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success by K. M. Weiland, my goal is to have my whole story completely mapped out by the end of November. And the number one rule is NO WRITING. This will be hard so for me. Every time I try to outline I only make it through three or four chapters before I just want to get going on it already and then it's bye-bye outline and hello 7000 rewrites. :(

So, who's with me? Any pantsers out there who want to join me? Maybe we can form a support group. ;)

Good luck to everyone doing NaNo!

Query Contest

To celebrate her move to Nancy Coffey Literary, Suzie Townsend is doing an awesome query contest. Submit your query to her between 9-10 am EDT tomorrow and she'll respond with complete honesty. Totally scary, but so awesome at the same time.

Plus, in the comments she said that if you query her for the contest and she rejects you, you can resubmit your revised query later as a regular query. And if you've queried her before and been rejected, you can still submit to the contest. So cool, right?

You can check out all the details, here. Don't wait. The entry window is really small. Good luck to all of you who enter! :)

Spaghettification: Making Up Words for Your Story

For those of you who are not familiar with black holes, spaghettification is a real-life term used to describe how the gravity of a black hole (or anything with a very strong gravitational pull) affects objects that get too close and are subsequently sucked in to their deaths or maybe transported to another place or time. Lots of sci-fi possibilities in black holes. If you want a more detailed explanation, you can find one here.

I'm not a scientist, so I don't know how frequently this term is used outside of television (I watch a lot of astronomy shows because I'm a huge nerd), but every time I hear it, it makes me laugh. And the last episode I watched on black holes had the black holes rolling around in space looking like space Roombas, so I don't think that helped.

And then at the end of that episode, the narrator said something to the effect of, "Black holes truly are the masters of the universe." Which could only lead to this: 

Because I have nothing else I should be using my time for. ;)

Anyway, the use of the term spaghettification (and my amusement over it) got me thinking about how it applies to writing. Doesn't everything apply to writing?

If you write in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, you've probably, at some point, had the need to make up words unique to your worlds. But how do you know what works and what doesn't? You don't want the reader to laugh because it sounds too ridiculous or totally made-up.

Personally, nothing pulls me out of a story like a made-up swear word. I know that most pretend worlds wouldn't have the same swear words that we do, but most of the made-up ones sound silly and we all know what they're supposed to replace so why not just use the real thing? Okay, so that may or may not be one of my pet peeves. ;) 

In my own writing, if I need to come up with a world-specific word or even a name, I'll usually turn to other languages and try to find something I can tweak to fit my world. Or I might type the meaning into a baby naming site and see if there's something I can use there, and not just for names. I've come up with at least one world-specific word using a baby naming site. Even then, I'm not always sure that what I've come up with is working. I just try to go with what feels and sounds right for the story.

And I always google the word to make sure it doesn't already exist. Except for when I forget to do that and one of my crit partners has to point out that one of my character names is a gelato flavor. :)

What about you? How do you feel about made-up words in stories? Have you made up any words for your own stories? If so, how did you go about it?

Backing Up

You'd think I would've learned this lesson already.

Friday morning, I sat down at my computer to find that some "wonderful" updates from Microsoft had been applied during the night and my computer had been rebooted automatically. I'd saved everything I was working on, so no big deal. Well, except that the computer kept locking up. So I restarted it, since that usually corrects any issues.

That was the beginning of the end. Okay, so maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but when it got stuck on the welcome screen (probably not the actual name of the screen) and refused to boot, I freaked out a little. Other than the whole I can't write without my computer concern (yes, I know technically I can still write without my computer), I was mostly worried because it's been at least six months since I backed up my hard drive, probably a lot longer.

Periodically, I will save my WIP to my hard drive and then to a flash drive where I keep the most recent version, plus I recently uploaded it to my crit group and printed it out, so I knew that was okay. My photos and all my other documents, on the other hand, are only on my hard drive. Fortunately, my computer is setup with a recovery program, so I was able to go in and backup all my files--four very stressful hours, especially when it got stuck at 89% for over twenty minutes, but it did work.

Then it took three tries, but System Restore finally decided to cooperate (I swear System Restore HATES me) and I haven't had any problems with it since. Well, except for my Norton Internet Security which either got damaged in the process or was the cause of the problem (and probably the reason System Restore hates me), but that's taken care of, too.

So, my point? Remember to backup your files on a regular basis. This could've been so much worse. Losing my writing would be hard, but my photos? I once lost six months of photos (including my youngest daughter's first birthday) thanks to a computer crash and I was sick for a week. It still makes me a little nauseous when I think about it.

What about all of you? Do you backup your computer regularly? Is it set up to run automatically or do you run it manually each time? Anyone using an online backup system? If so, how do you like it?

Photo credit.