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.

My Secret Collection

I have a document on my computer called "Stash". Just like with candy, or my mother's odd obsession with cookbooks, or my stepmother with her grocery coupons, I have a delicious secret stash all to myself of words.

So often when I read, I get excited when I read certain things. They're the kind of phrases that make me twitch with excitement, that just hit me in exactly the right place. So much so that I have to, of course, write them down. It's the most fun when I find them in old stories I'm no longer working on; I just copy and paste the line, or phrase, or paragraph, that I like and squirrel it away for another story. More often, I find them in already published works or on figment. I'm so impressed by other authors, how beautifully they craft their words. Some of my favorite authors ever include Shannon Hale, whose lyrical descriptions capture an element of truth that always leaves me stunned, Gail Carson Levine, one of those authors who has made me fall in love with every one of her heroes, Roald Dahl, who was so witty and clever with words (albeit a tad creepy), and Chaim Potok, who does such a wonderful job of capturing characters that I name mine after his, apparently, without even thinking about it.

Recently, I submitted to peer pressure and finally read The Hunger Games. I read the first two in two sit-in sessions at an independent bookstore over the holidays, and the third one several weeks later. I had a hard time with these books. As I was reading them, I was asking myself constantly whether I wanted to read a story containing so much violence. I'm the kind of person who listens to Owl City, likes sunshine, and enjoys a good comedy. Happy stuff. I wasn't sure I wanted to read books that center around gladiatorial games. Squeamish, much? But true.

The result? I was completely swept away by Suzanne Collins' language. I read the second and third books of the trilogy twice in two weeks. Literally, I read #2, #3, then #2 again, and #3 again. The second time through, I sat with a pad of paper beside me, copying out bits and pieces I liked. Purely for my "stash". I admire other writers so much and can see in comparison how much refining my own writing needs. I love learning from people like Shannon Hale and Suzanne Collins and the hundreds of talented writers on figment and beyond.

Here are some excerpts from my "stash" of writing. Sometimes I have no idea why I like what I write down. Every now and then I can place my finger on it. Sometimes it's something as simple as, "I like this because it's so succinct, it stunned me." Sometimes I just am surprised at the chord it strikes with me. The stash is drawn from blogs, books, trashed writings of my own, songs, and from my friends and teachers. Enjoy!

Suddenly he's sitting up, eyes wide in alarm, short of breath. "Katniss!" He whips his head toward me but doesn't seem to notice my bow, my waiting arrow. "Katniss! Get out of here!"
~Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

There's a raw innocent purity among the trees, I can feel it.
~Adam Young

I already know he can laugh.
~An earlier draft of The Hearthsinger. My, aren't I shameless? Pulling quotes from my own book.

"I had some ham for breakfast. I do not get ham much, what with pigs such dirty beasts and not on the property." His gaze wandered.
Jane tried to think of some appropriate response to that. She came up with, "Hooray for ham!"
"Yes, lovely," said Aunt Saffronia.
~Austenland, by Shannon Hale

The children in the library, poring over yellowed textbooks on topics like flower pollenating and building proper bee boxes, looked up from their books and thought the same thing.
Hedda Sparling must be reading love letters.
~Boys and Bees, by Kimberly Karalius

You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse.
~Caliban, The Tempest. William Shakespeare

"Natalie," he says. Quietly, like I've just handed him a delicate flower.
~Nattie and Finn, by Anande Sjoeden

I don't like that smile, so sad it's barely a smile at all.
~Ever, by Gail Carson Levine


By writing down snippets that really speak to me, I only want to be able to read them and understand what it is about it that I like, so I can learn to write what I like.

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?

Writing Around Writer's Block

These past few months have been tough. I feel like schoolwork has punched me in the gut, tied me up, and rolled me in front of an eighteen-wheeler. Now, back from Christmas break, I have something amazing plunked right in front of me.

"'Free time'? What is this 'free time'?"

That's pretty much how I feel. The last few days, I've barely moved from my computer, which is a shame, because Texas has suddenly gotten a burst of beautifully sunny weather, and I'm missing out.

But I've been writing, which is awesome.

I finally managed to crank out Chapter Twelve in TDS. I've been really frustrated with it lately. I feel almost like it's turned into a series of events, like Alice wandering around in Wonderland. Now she meets the caterpillar. Now she goes to a random tea party and they talk about silly things. I didn't want my story to turn into a predictable romantic comedy via Valentine's Day, and I worried that that's exactly what it was doing.

As a distraction on the side, I'm challenging myself with Lilla & the Tower, which has been enormously fun to write, and very good for me, since I'm a) foraying into the whimsical and the fairy tale with a retelling of Cinderella, and b) not doing a chapter mapout. With Hearthsinger and TDS, I sat down and wrote out exactly what would happen in however many chapters. I do give myself room to move. Chapter Eight in TDS, for example, where Danny brings Erin to help with birthday celebrations, was not in my original draft, but once I started writing it, I definitely felt like there had to more than just 'Erin goes to give Danny his library card, and they wander around and talk'. That, coincidentally, was another very difficult chapter to write. Writing is kind of like gambling. It's lovely, and very rare, that I can sit down and crank out two thousand words in one sitting. More often, I have to write, check my word count, check my chapter map, encourage myself with chocolate, go running, get up to smell the Christmas tree, make a cup of tea, or take a shower. In the case of Chapter Eight, or the last two chapters I've written, Eleven and Twelve, I had to write a draft, print it out, mark it up in red ink, trash most of it, and rewrite.

Anyway. Lilla. With Lilla, I had one of those wonderful moments where I just sat down and started writing the first chapter out by hand because I didn't even make it to a keyboard. I'm having so much fun with it, because unlike any of my other projects, in which a single chapter can take me a couple days to write, each of Lilla's chapters are only about a thousand words. I'm challenging myself not to map chapters out. Stay strong, Savannah!

My chapter mapping usually looks like this:

Six:
Start with some reflections. Erin is thinking as they walk through London. The party: Erin, Jenny, Emily, Roxanne, Allison, Kathryn. It’s apparent that Allison and Roxanne don’t always see eye to eye. Erin gets separated from the others and, frustrated, sits down on a bench, wishing she had a working phone. She starts talking to Danny, and they talk so long that he finally asks, tentatively, if she would like to come have dinner with him. Erin confesses she’s actually lost, and he helps her call home and gives her money for a train. “I haven’t actually got a car. I’ve got a bicycle.”

There are both pros and cons to this. It's something that works very well for me, and helps me construct the pacing, so that I'm not dumping information on readers or rushing through an important section. It also sets some constraints on me that makes it difficult for me to stray from the original outline when need be. So Lilla is an experiment. I felt like, unlike with a really involved storyline like TDS, Lilla would do better if I just felt my way through it. At the end of each chapter, I sit and stare vaguely at my computer screen, and decide what's needed in the next chapter.

I'm guessing this is working well for me with a simpler story with shorter chapters. But we'll see. Either way, I'm having fun.

One pro, though, to doing my chapter progression, is when I'm stuck with writer's block. I've been so annoyed with TDS lately, I feel like everything I write falls flat. I think I was mostly just grumpy. Today, I went back to my chapter progression to write a note for myself, and I got to looking through the chapters coming up in parts two and three. It reminded me how excited I am to write this story, and how much fun it's going to be, and how much I like the characters and the little moments I have in mind and a lot of mushy gushy stuff that only writers understand. (Right?) I'm standing here in front a semester of nothing but college applications and half-days of school, and I have this wild hope that Default Sweater might be finished by the time summer rolls around. We'll see about that.

I should have another chapter posted tonight or tomorrow, and then I've really got to get to unpacking. Really. It's shameful that I've let myself go like this, just to sit at a computer for two days and write about a girl and her sweater. :)