Aaaand.....Close!

I hope I can officially say that my utter out-of-figment-craziness-just-remembered-she-has-a-blog time is finished. For those of you who actually read my blog, and to everyone who has been following my progress on figment, you guys have been very patient! Summer break has started, and aside from work, I have nothing to do. The freedom is bewildering.

Because it has been an embarrassingly long time since my last post, there's lots of news to share!

First and most exciting, Default Sweater is finished! It's officially official, folks. I really wrestled with those last chapters, but I'm thrilled at the way things turned out. It's odd not to turn on my computer and head straight for that word doc the way I've done for the past eight and a half months.


Final count: 76,969 words. Oooh, I can't wait to start editing some of those boys out. I haven't gone back and read the whole thing yet, but I know my fingers will start jumping to fix everything up as soon as I do. Editing is like cleaning, or washing dishes....cleansing, creating order out of havoc, isn't it? ....or is it just me?


I announced this on my figment account, but I'll go ahead and give it another plug--there's going to be a sequel! I can't usually plan sequels out in detail while I'm still working on Book #1, but even while I was writing TDS, I knew I wouldn't want to let go of those characters. At this point, I won't have to, anyway, since I'll be an editing fiend with the story for a good long while yet, but having reached the end of draft one, I'm glad I decided to continue the adventures for a while. Looking back at it, I really feel that there were a few characters who didn't reach the end of their own story, even though Erin has. I'm excited to continue for their sake.


So! Right now I'm being a good girl and working on my new main project, Lilla & the Tower, which will probably carry me through summer and into early fall. I'm very excited to switch back to that girl--she waited a long time for me. Sheesh.


Sequel details: The TDS sequel will be going up on my page in the late summer/early fall! It will feature a new main character who, yes, did appear in TDS. It's in the early planning stages right now, but it's looking to be something very new. I'm very excited.

To everyone who has given me so much help over the last months of writing The Default Sweater--thank you. I've got some homemade chocolate chip cookies with your name on them.

Tea and Other Curiosities

So, I lied.

I recently looked back at my last post and realized I had promised to post Hearthsinger audio clips by early April. So I guessed that slipped past me. I have no concrete theme for today's blog post; my life has been so hectic lately, so I guess I'll just share a bit of what I've been up to with you all until I have time to sit down and write a nice fat post about the audio process with Hearthsinger.

Figment News:

Most exciting news is, Default Sweater is almost done! I can't believe it. I'm scanning my "Chapter Progression" word doc and counting remaining chapters. I'm already planning edits for the second draft and I'm just so excited. Finishing a story, even a first draft, is funny, because I'm simultaneously so excited to have this brand new story there for people to read, and sad to let it go. Writing TDS has been such an adventure, and it's taken me through more twists and turns than I ever expected. But more on that later. :)

My post-TDS plans are exciting, too. Although what's posted on my figment account right now is just a first draft, I'm feeling the need to step back from the story for a little. My plans as they stand right now are to return and keep writing Lilla & the Tower, which I'm totally excited about. It's fun to switch back to fantasy for a little while after working on TDS, which has no magic to speak of.

Well, except perhaps the magic of manly eyes. Manly eyes in droves. I'm realizing I need to go back during rewrite time and count mentions of eyes.

Also, TDS has no girls locked in towers, feuding queens, or possibly glass slippers. All things I'm hankering to write.

In the meantime, I'd like to talk about something else. Namely tea.

I like tea. I think about tea a lot. In the past year, I've read two figment works which consistently mention tea (namely Waxflower Wood, formerly Nattie & Finn, by Anande Sjöden, and Birdcage Girl, by Kimberly Karalius). The tea mentioning was not a central plot point in either of these, but I'm a tea kind of girl, so I noticed.

My family has actually given me tea for Christmas before. So my next goal, as soon as Default Sweater is finished, is naturally also tea-related. I guess it was perfect for me to write a story set in England, a place I've never actually been.

When I was little, we lived in the frigid Siberianesque state of Maine. I was seven when we left, so while we were there, I went through a merciless strengthening of my immune system....e.g., I was sick ALL THE TIME. My mom isn't a big one for medicine, unless it's cough syrup or aspirin, so often, I was left to fight through it with more natural remedies, like vegetables, chicken soup, blankets.....and tea.

I drank it like an Englishman, with milk and sugar. When I was sixteen, I lived in Fichtenberg, Germany for six months, and encountered more tea-drinking, of the milk-less and sugar-less variety. Germans have a national distrust of "flat" water--e.g., non-fizzy water, and, like typical Europeans, a love for frequent tea, coffee, and cigarette breaks. My host mother used to make a pot of tea in the morning. Whatever we didn't drink before catching the bus for school, we'd drink with dinner that night.

So I'm a big tea drinker. My father thinks I'm nuts. He's a typical southerner, so "tea" to him implies black tea, boiled with sugar, then left to cool and be drunk with breakfast. He kind of regards me as some sort of European hipster who drinks unheard-of herbal concoctions and doesn't like "real tea"--cold and sweet.

Okay, this one is coffee. But it was delicious. The cookie, too--already had a bite out of it before I took out my camera.

My tea fascination obviously comes out in Default Sweater, and my next goal is to count mentions of tea just for fun. The next chapter's going up soon. Thirty-three down, three to go. WOOT WOOT.

Off for a cup of tea and Chapter Thirty-Four. It's eighty-five degrees outside, but I defy you, stars.

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.