Crying Buckets is Okay Except not

Long time no talk! I've been busy crying my eyes out while writing. I have no idea why, I'm usually a very unexpressive person, especially when it comes to tears, but this book has wormed its way into my heart and yanked it around.

I finished my 40k contemp today, it focuses on drugs and, well, drugs! I think the blurb I made up explains it better than I could in this emotional state.

HEARTSTOPPERS - 40k YA/Contemp

"After Cynthia's father dies in a car accident her little brother goes mute, her hotel maid mother is told by God to become a teacher, and Cynthia starts making and selling pills from the stall in her high school's bathroom.

Except the pills are fakes, and they get insanely popular lightning fast. Cynthia is tossed ass first into the whirlwind world that is big league drug dealing, scraping by with the help of a fallen drug lord out for revenge on the current king of the town, Eight Gold Eli. Throw in the fact Cynthia has no idea what to do with so much money, that her crush's dad is a DEA agent bent on busting her, and that Eli won't stop until she's dead or out of business, and you have the recipe for the perfect disaster - or the perfect emotional recovery from the addiction of misery."

I don't know why this book got me all emotional. It's very close to my heart in some ways, and I'm very excited to start querying it!

On another note, I've gotten into making vanilla wafers cookies, and they are the best things on the planet! I'll edit the recipe in here later. <3

The greatest love song ever wrought.

Whenever I'm writing a romantic scene, I can't quite bring it all together unless this is playing in the background.




Maybe I'm just weird.

Edit: Okay, it's confirmed. I had toast and chocolate sauce for breakfast. I'm weird!

THIS IS A POST ABOUT BANANAS AND WOMEN.

I've been catching up on my reading pile (some new, some old), and something is nagging in the back of my head because of it. I read a total of four books this past month, all YA. Here's the most important bit;

I don't remember the main character of any of them. NONE of the main characters stuck with me, or in my head. If you asked me to sit down and describe them, I could give you vague details about the color of their hair or eyes, but that's it.

This is bad.

I'll admit it right now - my memory is less than stellar. My short term is confined to what I ate, and my long term is busy remembering who I've queried or not, but the space where I keep literary main characters is flawless. Spotless. Excelsior. A good/even somewhat decent main character will stick in my mind because I have that knack. (Nevermind math, I remember the direly IMPORTANT stuff; IMAGINARY PEOPLE).

But these past four books, I don't remember their MC at all. This means one of two things;

1. On all four books, I just wasn't paying attention enough. (Not likely.)

2. The MC's just really blow.

'Blow' is a subjective term, and when I use it my age becomes evident - too young to drink, but old enough to have read a lot of books. I'm a product of the Power Rangers and Sailor Moon era, for those who know their decades of TV.

So these MC's blow. When I say that, I mean they were one or all or a mixture of the following;

1. Were merely a vessel for the plot to work out of

2. Had no defining characteristic traits, or traits that were muddy, undefined, or otherwise altered to fit into the story

3. They were blatant Mary Sues thinly disguised by attempts to NOT be a Mary Sue and therefore rendered even MORE Sue-ish.

4. All four MCs were girls, and this means that they also might have been 'living' through their love interest. The author, at times, made their relationship the most important thing in the book, and as such the MC suffered character loss for it.

5. The MC was a repugnant, idealized, 2D, or inaccurate representation of the modern teenage female.

6. The MC and her 'voice' were simply a amplification device for the author to express their own stands on things, such as divorce, materialism (which apparently many of the MCs approved of), and stereotypes (ironically, if the MC points out that she 'doesn't get stereotypes', this is often an indication that the author is trying to make her NOT look like one, but it has the exact reverse effect).

7. The MC was racist, and described everyone who wasn't white as 'creepy' or 'disgusting'.

8. The author frequently seemed to forget who's head they were supposed to narrating out of - theirs or their MC's.

You can see why I didn't name names. :P I'm just entirely appalled by the state of YA MC heroines at this point. Dear industry, can you still recognize a truly 'strong' female MC and publish her? Is the YA industry still being written for young adults, and not older adults who enjoy YA? The last MC I enjoyed was in Jackson Pearce's Sisters Red, and that was when I read it over a year ago. Since then, I have yet to read a female MC that I enjoy and would like to know in real life if she was real.

I may come off as picky, but if I can't remember even one decently built character detail about your MC, something is wrong.

C'mon writer friends! Shake it up for us, your loyal readers. We're RAPIDLY losing interest in your silly Buffy-clone MCs. ;)

Note: This is not to say my own characters are perfect. They actually kinda fall into a lot of those catergories I mentioned above. XD I'm working hard to perfect them.

The Importance of bein' Honest.

Courage Wolf has a point here, but no. Today it's all about honesty.


There has been hullabuloo.


This hullabuloo has centered around a certain string of points made by various peeps, all of which may or may not have upsetted your little stomachs.

I am here to clarify what this hullabuloo is all about. Get me a cape with a huge C in it. The Clarifier is here to save the motherfuuuuuing day. (And if I had my way, Brandon Routh would be my co-star. Ahem.)

The hullabuloo in a nutshell: SELF-CENSORING ON YOUR OWN BLOG IS BETTER THAN NOT SELF-CENSORING. ESPECIALLY, (ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY) IF YOU ARE A WRITER IN SEARCH OF PUBLICATION.

The clarification: Self-censoring actually sucks.

A blog is your personal domain. You can tweak the colors, the pictures, whatever you want. This applies to your posts, too. You, aspiring authors, may post whatever you damn well please. The one exception is as thus; It would probably not be wise to post rants that hurt/directly attack certain individuals or companies. This is true in real life, too. The old addage; If you have nothing nice to say, don't say it works wonders. If you HAVE to say something, say it to your clutch in the ladies room, or halfway between sips of mojitos. At least with the latter you can pass it off as tourettes. (I have passed many a snarky comment off as tourettes, I will admit. Other times, I blame it on stubbing my toe. See? You can be clever about this.)

Of course, we are creatures of opinion! I love opinions. I only really dislike opinions that say other opinions shouldn't exist. Opinions are the lifeblood of a human society. It is what we do best.

After this hullabuloo, I was also very tempted to go through my blog (some of which is very personal to me) and delete everything except the carefully looked over posts. Then I stopped. Why should I? They don't hurt anyone, and they are representations of me. If a blog is my personal space, what better to represent me than the entries in which I was myself? You can find a bunch of them on here, (to a bit of my shame) because I decided not to delete them. For now, they accurately represent me, my soul, and what I'm all about, yo.

The hullabuloo went on to say that posting any negative reviews of books is certainly not favorable. This had me making a face, mostly because I like reading reviews, especially if they are HONEST. Not negative, or right out sugarcoating, but HONEST. I wrote a review of a very popular book that may or may not have been glowing, but I'm not keen on taking it down. It is an honest review of a book I didn't like. Okay, good. I made up for that by doing a review of a book I DID like! It's all part of the balance.

The hullabuloo states that if you have any of these things on your blog, agents will probably reject you. I think what the hullabuloo meant was that you certainly have a lower chance of being offered rep by an agent who likes the book you bashed, and that is if they even do reasearch on you in the first place. Your blog represents you, sure, but it should not represent a santizied you. You do NOT want to lie to an agent or a fellow reader/writer/author/follower by presenting a facade. When they find out it's not who you really are, things could get quite ugly.

As you can tell, I'm the sort of person who's the 'you get what you see' type. Heheh.

Honesty is a great truth. Writers are oftentimes liars, sure. We have to be. We lie to make a story that doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean it isn't sincere, or genuine, or even based a little in truth. You can lie and build facades in your writing, but if you don't really mean it or it doesn't fit, it will show. The reader WILL pick up on it. Write your lies for the good of your writing, with heart behind it, and never lie about the person you are. There is no reason to lie. You are a wonderful, talented human being. Hiding and lying is like refusing that fact.

I want to meet real people, and real stories.

And if you really have to rant, there's always the draft section. ;)

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*