When the beat hits you, it hits you real hard.

Silence! So much silence, there is almost too much to say, lovelies!

First of all, thank you so much for your guys' enthusiasm about Heartstoppers! I seriously DID NOT expect people to actually say; oh, this sounds cool! That is amazingly nice of ya'll.

Right now, Heartstoppers is undergoing revisions, which is cool. It's actually becoming a different book, with the skeleton in place. I think I learned from writing this that I work better with a fast-skeleton set down first, and then a month or so of revisions. Does anyone else do this? Am I tres strange?

Secondly, I've been cultivating a great concept. It hit me hard when I was driving! (Which could have been scary, or bad, but I was enraptured but also in control of the wheel, so that's good!) It's super seekrit as of now, but I'm hesitant to call it Dystopian. It's set in a future world, but I'd say it's more of a thriller type of thing, without all the REALLY advanced tech. I'm not sure what to call it. It could be called sci-fi, but I know that lots of agents are scared off by that genre. :( So. Definetly a thriller, though.

Oh, and completely random; Alfredo. I think it's now my signature dish. If any of you have something to celebrate, lemme know and I'll whip you up a plate of cyberfredo.

<3

Contemps? CONTEMPS!!

I just have to squeal about this.

I'm writing a contemp and I don't think I"ve ever enjoyed something more in my life ever. Not even a Firefly marathon. Not even four milkshakes all to myself.

Oh my goodness every word is like christmas. I haven't been this excited about writing since FEAR ITSELF.

Guys.

GUYS.

I LOVE THIS CONTEMP.

<3

I declare this the Week of Amazing. (And literary monsters!)

This week has been made of win. Allow me to explain.

First, fellow lovely AWers Chanelle and Lindsey got 'The Call'! Two awesome writers repped by two awesome agents! Congrats ladies!

Secondly, I'M MAKING FIG-CHOCOLATE CAKE. (This is the most important part, obviously.) The fig tree in our yard has made a few fruits! I don't like raw figs, but baking with them is divine. They do for baking what mushrooms do for cooking - absorb flavor and eek it out in bits as the heat gets to it.

Fig-cream is DELICIOUS. I could eat cartons of the stuff. I make my own with heavy cream, figs, cinnamon, and vanilla. Whip it all together until it forms stiff peaks. Oh gosh, I'm drooling a little just thinking about it. Still haven't ridden that bike yet. :'D

Thirdly, I can't stop listening to this on repeat. For hours. It's just gibberish...but it's so...cool? Hypnotizing?



As I'm writing this new WIP, I realized something! My favorite part of writing, more than building characters, more than world-building, more than plot-creation, is making the monsters.

Monsters are more commonly referred to as 'antagonists'. Antagonist, in the classic sense, is a bad guy. Someone who pushes AGAINST the fabric of normalcy, messes it up, has plans for it, wants to control it, whatever. The cut-and-dry antagonist is just evil for the sake of being evil. It could be a group of people, an empress, otherworldly demons, a crazy police officer (looking at you, Stephen King), or the devil himself (Looking at you again, King. :D).

I like crafting my monsters. I like giving them more heart than the average bad guy. The average bad guy who's bad just for the sake of it is what we're warned against as writers. Swell writers know a bad guy isn't simply bad - they have just as many layers as the protagonists. We strive to craft multi-layered cakes of black that we can call THE BAD GUY with pride. Our monsters are just as precious to us as our characters.

Maybe not. Maybe a monster who rapes and pillages isn't loved by the author who crafted him. Maybe it's hard to love that monster because of the despicable things they do, but you might come to love them in your own way. You know that in the end they'll still get speared through the heart with a falling beam, but you love their death equally. It is because they die that you love them. You love their story, whether it sickens you or not. Maybe moreso.

I was taught the most dangerous monsters are the agents of chaos. The ones who have no morals, no qualms, no connections to this world, and no regret. They can do anything, anywhere, to anyone, without a single logical reason. That is the monster king. They impose no limits on themselves, and you impose no limits on them.

But at least you can predict unpredictability.

To me, the scarier monsters are the calculated ones. The ones who have a goal.

I always give my monsters a reason. They aren't always the black cake. They are the gray cake, too. The in-between. Good and evil are relative. I think in my books I have this facsination with survival. I send this message that survival trumps 'good' and 'evil'. Survival has no morals, no limits. Everyone is just trying to live in the best way they can. My monsters are trying to survive too, and they're better-armed, better-built, and just a bit more ruthless than the average person.

Sometimes concepts for monsters are born when I'm just talking with people. I was doing a paper for Psych 101 a year ago, and I found myself on a part of the textbook that talked about people that were cut off from their emotions, as in physically incapable of feeling anything. I asked myself; what would take the place of emotion? The person would be made of all memories, and no emotion. Survival would take first importance. Clinical curiosity, too. Maybe the person would even try to blend in with other people by imitating their facial expressions or speech patterns, just so they wouldn't be harrassed or treated suspiciously all the time. If you took away those emotions, what would that person be?

The answer; an organic machine as nature intended. It's purpose; procreate as much as it can before it dies.

Then I thought what a race of these 'organic machines' would be like. Things just progressed from there, until I got a whole story based around them. I made their exact opposites, too; people with no memories but all emotion. They are conflicted, internally tortured and confused, and full of rage that devolves and corrodes to eventual insanity.

Monsters: Best Made By Questioning Everything. How do you come up with yours?


I hope everything is going well for you wonderful people. I wish I could send you all a piece of this cake. :3


Also, I read another very astute article that said 'Only readers have the luxury of reviewing, not writers'. It had some good points I couldn't refute! So you might notice my blog has gotten a little shorter and a little less negative-reviewy. I mourn the death of my self-expression a little, but I'm sure this'll be a good thing.

Also, the parentals have hijacked Facebook. I don't know whether to cry or....weep and dramatically melt into the floor.

A little bit of a silly new WIP.

This the just the first couple pages of a silly, flashinglights clubmusic mudandpoop honestsexy sort of WIP. I'm not quite sure where it's going, but it makes me laugh when I write it, it's more for my enjoyment than anything else. These characters, also, practically wrote themselves! (Tentatively it's titled DEMON CLEANERS, but it deserves something wittier! Maybe, "I'll Never Get This Demon Out of My Shirt, Will I?" or, "Demon Spit Only Comes Out With Bleach, Darling." If you've got something along that line, drop it in the comments! You'll have my eternal LUVVVVVVVVVVV.)

I guess this is kinda like an early Teaser Tuesday, huh? Well, I hope you enjoy!



%

snipped for great justice!!!

%

Oh, Garron. You are silly and I like writing you.

Baking Bad.

(Get it? Intsead of Breaking Bad -? Okay. I'll stop.)

So, between my new job and querying, life has been pretty hectic. (New job is CRAZY hectic, agh agh agh) What little downtime I have I usually pour into writing (yeah!), reading ARCs (double yeah!), or a recently acquired vice; baking. (I SHOULD be riding the bike I got for christmas...but...uh...)

I've made everyone in the house gain at least four pounds. I'm apologetic because gaining four pounds is no fun period, but I am also a little proud of myself because the fact people are eating it attests to quality!

Baking is calming. Favorite recipe I've made so far? Banana-pumpkin walnut bars. Eventually, I want to get good enough/experienced enough to start making healthier things, with soy milk and wheat flour, etc, but retaining all the taste. For now, it's mostly white flour, but once I get familiar enough with how the ingredients work with each other, I'll be able to implement healthy stuff in! (Does that...is that somehow a metaphor for writing? Is it is it is it?)

Right now, the greenhouse kinda erupted with strawberries, so I'm making a version of this;


















with strawberries! And if there are more berries tomorrow - I'll try strawberry flan! I'm also growing vanilla bean, gonna dry it in my closet instead of paying $3 a bean at the health food store. (Have I mentioned I'm cheap? Because I am.)


As for writing - I'm being rebellious. A lot of people advised me to write an entirely new WIP, which I started, but I ended up starting to write the sequel to my querying novel. WHOOPS. WHOOOOPSSSSS. ISN'T THAT THE BIGGEST LITERARY NO-NO IN THE WORLD?! WHAT CAN I SAY, I LOVE THAT WORLD TOO MUCH TO LEAVE IT YET. I've tried over and over to go to the new WIP, but I keep getting dragged right back into the sequel. Evil, evil imaginary world of mine. Filled with...addictive substances.

Whenever I get a request for a full, (which I got today! YAY!) I get this hot, heavy sickness in my stomach. It burns, but in a good way - everything is hanging on your full. Before I send one, I obsess one last time, going over the manuscript in a fervor, knowing that it's as good as it will ever be, but this comma here is bad, and this sentence is too slow for the agent's taste, and oh god oh god it must be perfect even though it was perfect just a week agoooooooooooooo.

In the end, I send the same manuscript I finished writing last month, but it still feels WRONG. I still feel like I could do something better, even though it's the best it ever has been.

And then I remember the cake in the oven.

Oops.

How I accidentally wrote a YA and why I'm never going back.

My very first WIP was completed on October 13th, 2009.

This is was what it ended up being;

















(You'll have to forgive me, I've been dog-sitting three dogs for two weeks. I'm a strict cat person. I love the dogs, it's just this huge CULTURE shock, you know?)

This first WIP, as you can see above, wasn't worth ANYTHING, really. This WIP had a 34-year-old office-lady MC, and a really Sci-Fi plot. I queried, got 0 responses, and decided to rewrite it into a new WIP. The new MC was 15, the plot was convoluted and dense, and it was basically a YA protagonist in an Adult mystery/sci-fi setting.

Finally, after suggestions by a wonderful agent-who-shall-not-be-named who read the full but rejected it, I rewrote that WIP into Sightless/FEAR ITSELF, and it's now a full-fledged YA and it's right at home there. The story took nearly two years to get to this awesome point, but it was never, EVER intended to be YA.

There were two reasons for that; 1. I was always a huge fan of YA, starting with good ol' Harry Potty, but the influx of Twilight clones at the time had me convinced the only YA worth reading was contemp. I read only contemp YA, and I didn't want to write a fantasy YA in the slightest. And 2. I didn't want a typical YA heroine at all!

I didn't realize Sightless had become YA until halfway through the latest WIP. (Which is now out on query.) I despaired a little - not YA! I can't be writing a YA - a genre which is nowadays discounted as a flurried batch of Twi-clones and Potter-prints. If they're not one of those, they are either solid contemps or white-bread heroines poised to inherit some great power/live in a dystopian world and smooch two hot men fighting over her at once.

Of course, I've learned now that YA is much more than that, but a part of me died as I was writing Sightless. It was reborn, thankfully, with the single-minded goal of doing one thing - kicking those other heroines to the curb. My MC came out tough as nails, vulnerable in ways I couldn't imagine, and deeper than I ever thought possible. She wasn't just a symbol of my desire to see something fresh, anymore - she became a person.

I struggled with the fact I was writing a YA. It's a genre I both loved and hated, but I realized it was more than that - it's a genre I want to contribute to. A genre I want to help shape, pull back from the musty dark ages of heroines who let us down, generalize us, limit us with their carefully-crafted accessibility. I wanted to see characters again, and so I wrote characters.

I might've not done the best job, but I tried. And at the end of the day, that gives me faith in my writing. And at the end of all things, faith is the one thing that matters most. Oh, and hard work. OH! Luck too. OHH! And if an agent loves your work to bits, that also helps, too. ;)

As corny as it sounds; I didn't choose YA, it chose me. I don't think I could leave if I wanted to.


Hope 2011 is going well for you, lovely readers!

Rejection and why it doesn't kick my ass as much as it used to.

This is what rejection feels like;




This year of querying is my third time. Not first, not second, but third time querying the same WIP. Granted, after the second round of rejections I flipped a poo and rewrote the entire thing, and the result was AWESOME.

A lot of agents talk about the 'practice novel' and how the author will sometimes query it to them. I made that mistake twice, and it killed me. Right now, I'm doing something rather devious and querying the same agents I queried before, but with this shiny new WIP and new query with changed character names.

I'm relying on the fact that agents tend to FORGET a terrible past query. (I hope.) D:

So now that the REAL DEAL of my WIP is done and out there in the query world, I feel pumped. Excited beyond recognition. For the past two query times, I had no confidence in my manuscript at all - I expected all rejections and I mostly got all rejections. But even if Satan came up and slapped me in the face, I wouldn't quaver away from my confidence with this WIP.

So far, the rejection count goes something like this;

Formal Rejection: 3
Partial Requested but Rejected in the End: 1
Haven't heard from yet: 56

Rejection doesn't hurt anymore, but not because I've grown used to it. I have this crazy glowing trust that defies rejection, because the WIP is just that good. It deserves nothing less than getting published, and very soon. I KNOW it will get published, because I can feel it. Hard to describe, but the feeling is there, like a deja vu I've yet to trigger, but know is around.

And when it happens, I'll probably just explode. And throw a party. Not necessarily in that order. Or maybe in that order. I've always wanted to go to a party as a cloud of unrecognizable fleshy bits.

Put your WIP in Wordle and Weep.

Slow day at the office.

I did this instead.

http://www.wordle.net


I pasted my ENTIRE 306 page manuscript into there and it comes up with a wordcloud, with the largest words being the most used. It's a really handy tool, actually, and the list of most used words goes like this;

1. Shadus (UH OH. MAIN LOVE INTEREST UH OH.)
2. Miranda (She's one of the top five main characters, so this is expected)
3. Eyes (hurr durr)
4. Back (what the fuck?)
5. One (uh...sure.)
6. Lara (yup. Main character.)
7. Like (and I'm not even from California)
8. Head (???)
9. Face (I'm concerned because body parts seem to be a trend.)
10. Away (??? I don't recall writing it that much?)
11. Know (I recall writing this MORE.)
12. Time (Ditto above.)
13. See (Verbs are really common on this list. Bad or good? No idea.)
14. Around (An Approximate word. Ugh lots of these fags)
15. Away (APPROX. WORD)
16. Joseph (Yeah! Mexican badass.)
17. Geoff (No! Evil guy!)
18. Look (...kid's book much? I coulda used 'gaze', but nooooo)
19. Moment (MAKES SENSE.)
20. Anything/Something (TIED FOR 20th place the irony does not escape me.)
21. People (Duh.)
22. GCIP (Mofos.)
23. School (Ugh.)
24. Cure (Disease isn't even on this list. Suspicious.)
25. Makes (VERB.)
26. Stands (VERB.)
27. Kill (I'M STARTING TO GET WORRIED ABOUT THESE VERBS.)
28. Light (Yeahhh a noun!)
29. Even (APPROX WORD. FUCK.)
30. Go (VERB.)
31. Get (VER-UGH.)
32. Voice (Noun yay!)
33. Cassie (lololol the Main Character is down here because it's first person POV.)
34. Good (I don't know whether to cry or commit seppuku.)
35. Basement (THIS ONE WAS A SURPRISE.)
36. Gutters (duh.)
37. Quiet (Not silence? Weird.)
38. Life (i herd u liek mudkipz.)
39. Feel (VERB.)
40. Every (APPROX WORD jesus christ.)
41. Quickly (ADVERB. I am so dead by the syntax nazis)
42. Never (APPROX WORD I wish I never used dem.)
43. Right (WRONG.)
44. Now (APPROX WORD)
45. Still (APPROX WORD)
46. Just (APPROX WORD WHERE IS A NORTH KOREAN BOMB WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE SWALLOWING ONE?)
47. Mr. (Yeah, Geoff rigged this one.)
48. White (Where's black. I r disappoint son.)
49. Blood (HURRRRRDURRRRRR)
50. Smiles (gay.)



So, this was informative. I'm going to slash and burn as much as possible. The main theme of the most used 50 words was verbs and generally unneeded approx words. Body parts were also very common even though I don't remember writing about them so much. I also thought Kill would be higher up (and Cassie). And I expected more colors.I was disappointed in myself that Shadus was #1. Oh well.

YOU LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY - *brick'd*