Insanity

I announced last night on my figment page that audio chapters of The Hearthsinger will be up next week--I'm going to guess on Tuesday or Wednesday. As they are recordings of a point in the middle of the book, it's also a sneak peek of sorts. I'll give more details on this whole wonderful process as soon as I have a moment to breathe. For now, some pictures of what my workspace currently looks like...

Script papers scattered.....everywhere....

Editing, editing....with my dinner in the corner.

A closer look at marking speech patterns, etc., for the Narrator.

My classy attempt at showing more speech patterns/notes/markings with my oh-so-clear iPod camera (regular camera's battery is dead), allowing my shadow to loom ominously and clash somewhat with the smiley face floating above the third line.

What I'm Reading Right Now

I've spent far too much time on figment lately, but I've also had the wonderful, amazing, lovely, delicious time to read at ALL. Books! I bid Borders a sad goodbye in 2011, but there's a Barnes and Noble within fifteen minutes of my house, and the employees must be getting tired of seeing me. I'm the kind of girl who sits in the back all day with a stack of books and doesn't move till closing time. It just [insert creepy side note] smells so good in there.

1. Happy Cafe -Figment novel by Enaam Alnagger
Figment has introduced me to the wonderful world of magical realism. It's rare that an entire genre hooks me in, but I'm dying to try it for myself. In the meantime, I have scads of beautiful stories both of the paper and of the electronic form. Happy Cafe is the story of Elodie, a lonely girl who discovers a magical cafe, carried to her town with the beginning of the winter. I got hooked by the story right away. It's a really beautiful piece of work and full of characters I'm dying to learn more about. I love, love, love the name Elodie, by the way.

2. Midnight in Austenland, by Shannon Hale
This is the third time I've read the book since it came out in January. It's the sequel to Austenland, which is coming out as a movie this year, directed by Jerusha Hess! And since both books are just a big chunk of wonderful, I'm going to go ahead and tell you what they're about. Austenland is the story of Jane Hayes, a single, thirty-three-year-old New Yorker. Is there a reason she's single? Oh yes. Jane is obsessed by the idea of Mr. Darcy, particularly Mr. Darcy as played by Colin Firth in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. When her great-aunt discovers her secret, Jane finds herself the recipient of a prepaid, three-week vacation to a secret resort called Pembrook Park. In Pembrook Park, it's still 1816, and life is easy--full of empire dresses and Regency manners, strolling in the park and maybe, just maybe, a proposal from a certain gentlemen. Once firmly in Austenland, however, it is up to Jane to discover what is real and what is only fantasy....

Midnight in Austenland could stand on its own, but the two books together form such a scrumptious series. It takes up a new main character, Charlotte Constance Kinder. Charlotte, a successful businesswoman, loving wife, and mother of two, will never understand what drove her husband away. Cast off in favor of a mistress, Charlotte takes comfort in Austen books and soon, discovers Pembrook Park. However, this time, things take a dark turn, and Charlotte begins to suspect that a murder has taken place inside Pembrook's walls. Add that to the mystery of the brooding Mr. Mallery and Miss Gardenside's unusual illness, and Charlotte becomes a detective extraordinaire, determined to solve Pembrook's secrets...

Shannon Hale is so unbelievably original and witty. Her books have me literally laughing out loud. While Austenland obviously draws inspiration from Pride and Prejudice, Midnight in Austenland takes a Northanger Abbey turn, with murder, mystery-solving, and a fair amount of gothic romance. Both of the books are fantastic.

3. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl
Yep, you heard me. I went through a hefty Dahl phase as a child. My favorites were Matilda and James and the Giant Peach. I suppose Dahl wrote magical realism as well, though I've never categorized him into a genre before. I have to confess I'm still drawn to the children's section in bookstores. Everything is colorful, the books are creative and funny. I still pull books off the "5th-8th grade" shelf. Recently, I wandered over and found James again. Then I sat down in the cafe and read it from cover to cover. One of my favorite things about Roald Dahl aside from his fantastic imagination is his wordplay. The Big Friendly Giant still gets me laughing ("You are once again gobblefunking! Don't do it. This is a serious and snitching subject.") and it was just the same with the naughty singing Centipede on the peach trip across the Atlantic. I think I even had a Dahl cookbook when I was little that taught you how to make "hot noodles made from poodles on a slice of garden hose....."

4. Birdcage Girl -Figment novel by Kimberly Karalius

I've read pretty much everything else Kimberly has posted on figment, including her awesome novel-in-progress Boys and Bees, so it surprised me I hadn't dived into Birdcage Girl yet. Once I did, I hung over my computer for five days, reading the deliciously short chapters. Another foray into magical realism that left me with nothing but awesomeness. Birdcage Girl centers around Ashlyn, a girl kept locked in a birdcage by her overprotective mother. One of my favorites aspects of the novel (well, okay, I had a LOT of favorite aspects) was the characterization. A girl locked in a birdcage, a doctor who knows secrets of her past, a butler with metal bones, and a female cat named Jimmy.
Any time there's a cat, I'm hooked. ;)

5. The Jane Austen Handbook: Proper Life Skills from Regency England, by Margaret C. Sullivan
A birthday present from my mother, and I'm loving it. It's perfect that it came while we're in the middle of reading Midnight in Austenland (I read aloud to my mother--yes, with a bad British accent). It's amazing that Jane Austen still garners so much fascination from readers, two hundred years after the publication of her books. The book recalls some good moments from Austen's books (disastrous proposals, gossip, and a nice chunk of Miss Jane's humor), and gives information on everything from hairdressing, to what to do during a summer visit to Bath, to how to politely reject a proposal of marriage ("If all else fails, swoon.")

It's never fun during the schoolyear when I rack my brains and realize I can't remember the last time I read a book. Vacation time is good time in my book (hahahah, okay, sorry, there's a stray pun), where I can sleep in and spend the day reading (also writing, tracking down that lost camera charger, cleaning the kitchen, applying for a job, recycling the scads of scrap paper in my room, ripping the stray threads out of my new sweater.....). You get the idea. As I'm geting older and just a tad busier, I'm realizing more and more what a gift a good book is. The bookstore will never get rid of me.

Words, Writing Exercises, and Where I've Been Lurking

My excuse is always and unabashedly schoolwork. It should be slowing down any moment now....*checks watch*. In the meantime, I've been here, at my computer, writing up data on animal life in central Texas and remembering that I haven't done a blog post since early February. But now, ahhh, isn't spring break wonderful. Add that to the fact that the weather is beautifully sunny, I've made a return to being blonde, and there's leftover birthday cake, and I am rolling on a big cloud of happy.

I've recently gotten sucked into a secret project (I'll be announcing it on figment within a few weeks, and I hope it's something that makes people happy, because I'm super excited about it!), that, as awful as it is, has distracted me badly from Hearthsinger and TDS. The up side is that it has kept me writing a bit each day, when I'm too tired from school to write a 2,000-word chapter of Erin's adventures in London. I'm very excited for it, because although it is, like Default Sweater, set in a contemporary time and place (a genre I NEVER used to venture into), it's got a fair bit more whimsy. I love whimsy.

In other realms of internet snooping, I ran across a website which offers different exercises for writers. I'm not normally into intensive story webs/exercises/breakdowns/character interviews/so on and so forth, but I was hooked by this one. The challenge offered was to write the opening of a story as a film prologue in which the main character speaks directly to the audience, introducing him or herself and his dilemma. I tried it out on Default Sweater and liked it quite a lot. :) Since I'm not a big fan of first person (for my own writing, at least), I was surprised that I enjoyed it and that it seemed to flow quite well. Whereas with a few of my other projects, like Lilla and Hearthsinger, I sometimes have difficulty writing realistically, since the stories are fantasy, Default Sweater has a very real-and-touch-me feeling. It's stuff I can picture well as part of the real world, for example, as a film prologue. Cars. Annoying younger sisters. Spaghetti sauce. That sort of thing.

But I'm rambling.

Here's the exercise! This is written from Erin's point of view.

            If you’re wondering, I’m not paranoid.

            You know, about the kissing thing. Isn’t it weird that we can’t stand a love story unless it’s sealed with that perfect touch, the kiss?

            And not just any kiss. A First Kiss. That’s the touch that’s supposed to change you, isn’t it? It redefines your whole life, theoretically. Sometimes you forget and slip...mm, remember all the love stories you’ve read or watched where the hero rushes in and sweeps the heroine up to kiss her? Look at her. She just melts into his arms.

            Stop looking at me like I’m a woman who sits along at home analyzing movie kisses. It’s not like my whole life revolves around kissing. Because it doesn’t.

            I mean, it can’t, since I’ve never been kissed.

            Oops. Guess we got that out of the way. 

            I can’t talk about it, see. I can’t even admit it to myself. How much I want...that. I mean, not just that. If I was the kind of gal who just liked the gratification, I’d grab the nearest guy who reminded me of George Clooney and pin him against a tree. Or a lamp post. Or whatever.

            But that’s not how it is. I mean, look at that. With a touch like that...won’t your heart follow? If you give someone a kiss, it must mean something. Like a leap into forever maybe. But I wouldn’t know.

            I am not asking Maury.