While I Should be Sleeping....

Today, I was drifting around my room trying to clean, and I started thinking about The Default Sweater. Draft two is coming along, slowly--I have my roommate yelling at me to finish, but right now I'm working through it backwards.

Yeah. Backwards.

I guess TDS sort of falls into a romance category. If it were a movie, it would probably be a rom-com, but I feel odd about that. I think if I approached the story with a romantic comedy attitude, I would come away feeling awkward and embarrassed and stumbling over my own feet. Though I've dated a couple guys, romance has always been a bit of a mystery to me, so the story would be silly, straight from my imagination. The thought of imaging Erin as some desperate woman on a manhunt makes me cringe.

In a way, this goes back to several posts ago, where I talked about female characters. I don't think I set out, exactly, to write a typical romance story. At the time I started TDS, I was a junior in high school. I didn't have a boyfriend. I was significantly younger than the protagonist. The only thing I really had to power the story was a familiarity with the vulnerable feeling of wanting to be loved, and wanting to learn about boys and romance and, yes, Erin's hangup, kissing. However, her preoccupation with getting her first kiss is not just to pass a milestone, and that's why she ultimately doesn't want it from just anybody.

(On a side note, I could write a whole blog post on the invention of the kiss. Kisses are so unappreciated and underestimated. What were they thinking when they tried it out for the first time? And what do you do with something that makes no sense and yet means so much?

This is why the conflict in TDS is perfect for me.)

That, therefore, is my Erin. I don't think it's a "rom-com" as much as a heart story, maybe even a bit of a fairy tale. Erin has a preoccupation with those, too! I love the idea of a contemporary, real-world story that can be written as a fairy tale, taking a measure of that sugary sweetness into a place that's so often unromantic. I love the idea that everything can mean something. There's a reason fairy tales endure, after all. We still understand them in the knock of our nitty-gritty reality, and there's that one grain of truth, and we read it, and think ahhh, there it is. 

So maybe it's something in between--not a fairy tale, perhaps, but distinctly fairylike.

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.

The Reasons I Love My Mother

My mother is always my first reader. I love her critiques. We bicker about them and argue about words, and before I know it, she's become my editor-in-chief, with new suggestions, opinions, and hopes for where the story is going. Of course, most of the time, she's the one who catches my mistakes.

Her comment from my most recent Default Sweater chapter?

"Erin stabs food with her fork too much."

Thanks for catching the little things, Mom. Love you.

Ramblings on Condwiramurs and Lilla

Aside from Charles, I have very few characters based off of real people I know. Most of them are a mix of other characters I've read or experienced in movies. I do, however, want to confess that my shining star from the real world is Condwiramurs the kitten, who makes her appearance in Chapter Eight of The Default Sweater. And, like a middle school kid who writes love poems about their crush and pretends they're actually about someone else, I stuck her in. Because I'm completely smitten.

Meet Senior Cat, who lives under the lockers at my school and emerges in the afternoons to twine herself around people's legs. I go to a very small school--only twenty-seven people in my graduating class--and I have to say, everyone is smitten by Senior Cat. I mean really smitten. I mean feeding-her-the-lunch-meat-out-of-sandwiches smitten. Who couldn't be? Just look at her. Aww....

*Ahem*

For any literary buffs who want to call me out on the weird name, Condwiramurs comes from a medieval German legend about a knight, Parzival, who goes searching for the Holy Grail. Condwiramurs was the queen of a kingdom called Pelrapeire and Parzival's wife.

Just a side note.

ANYWAY, on another note, today the weather did one of its delicious mid-January swoops up to eighty degrees. The sun was bright and warm, the sky looked good enough to eat, and a tiny breeze looped through it all. Heaven. I got home, seized my chance to put on a summer dress before the weather plunges to forty again, and went outside to read in the sun.

Somehow or another, I got to thinking about my new project, Lilla & the Tower, which is a retelling of the Cinderella story. I've been wanting to post a couple more chapters of it, but Default Sweater is really flowing right now, so I'll hopefully get back to it in a day or two.

But writing about a heroine trapped inside a tower, without even a window to breathe out of, made me think today. With the weather so beautiful, I couldn't help but be a little disturbed. I was thinking about all the things that Lilla has never seen, starting with sunsets and ending with trees and animals. I was most discomfited at the thought of the sky. I live in central Texas, and the sky here is never halfhearted; it is bold with its sunset colors and even with its blues. It sparkles when the sun is bright. On days like today, it pulls my attention to it and I can't look away.

I'm starting to realize that Lilla's frustration of being stuck in her tower is much more than just going a little stir-crazy. I was amazed to think about all the things she's never done. She's never snapped a pine needle in half to smell it. She's never seen light reach through trees. She never got to do a hundred kid things, like jump in piles of leaves or go swimming in the summer or splash in puddles with her church clothes on. I'm feeling twice as sorry for Lilla as I did when I started writing. I think it's terrible of her father to keep her shut up like that, without even a window to lean out of and smell the air.

Come on, Savannah, you wrote the book.

Right. Sorry. But seriously, what do you do if you can't lean out a window and smell things?

What am I Doing Right Now?

What am I doing tonight? Not doing homework, an architecture essay on the history of Neuschwanstein. Not cleaning the house or working on a resume or any number of things I should be doing. Instead, I'm writing Chapter Nine in TDS and making brownies.

And the slacking is wickedly, wonderfully, delicious.

Mm, brownies.

Just Some Updates

With the sun setting at 6:00 pm, I'm so tired I could curl into bed right after dinner. So I'll keep the post short for today and just give anyone who checks in a heads up on what I'm plotting lately.

The Hearthsinger
I got a call today from the magnificent mother of a friend of mine, who offered to help set up recording sessions for The Hearthsinger throughout January. Keep your fingers crossed for me! I am so so excited to finally get the main parts cast. A beautiful friend of mine named Claire has agreed to read Mari for me, and I promised to bake her as many cookies as possible. It'll be worth it. She has a beautiful speaking voice and a perfect one for Mari. I'm going through a heavy editing phase right now, but I'm aiming to get things done by early December. And hopefully I'll be posting more chapters soon!

The Default Sweater
Erin got mentioned in the Figment newsletter this week, and I'm so happy for her! Very excited to make editor's choice, and hopefully I'll be getting a couple more chapters posted over Thanksgiving break!

Both Hearthsinger and TDS have gotten new covers, and they are gorgeous! Thank you to Carolyn Fisher for her work on The Hearthsinger.

Other than that, all's quiet on the home front. Man. I love vacations.

I'm Not Hiding

I don't know that I have many people checking my blog, but there might be a few of my fellow figs popping in every now and then, so just an update: I'm not hiding! School has been so busy lately, and I'm scrambling to keep up as much as I can. I had one very difficult course end last week, and suddenly I have so much free time, I don't know how to handle myself. I can read. Sit down at a table to eat meals. Shower. All that good stuff.

I'm very, very excited about The Default Sweater. It's been chugging along so well that I'm trying to keep up. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I'm a very systematic writer and have to block out the entire storyline before I can delve too deep into writing. With TDS I took an unusual leap and wrote the first few chapters with nothing more than a vague idea of my plot. But now I'm almost done with my outline (and the writing's not going too bad either), and I'm silly with excitement.

Anande Sjoeden, author of Nattie and Finn, very kindly mentioned Erin and me on her blog, and I felt compelled to return the compliment! Nattie and Finn has kept me on nail-chewing tenterhooks since I began reading. It's my daily treat to come home and read a chapter if I get lucky and she's posted (yesterday, I got FOUR!).  Figment has a feature where the approximate time it will take to read a certain book is posted on the book's description page. At the point I started reading, Nattie and Finn was at about seven hours. That Friday, I sat at my computer until two o'clock in the morning, not able to go to bed until I finished. She also has several other books posted that I'm really looking forward to reading.

Hopefully, I'll be able to blog more now that the bulk of the year's schoolwork is accomplished. Darn those teachers. Darn their sorry hides.