Wishlist Wednesday

  

Welcome to my first Wishilist Wednesday, a meme by Pen to Paper! It's a blog hop where we all post about a book in our TBR pile or that we're dying to get onto our bookshelves. Here is one I've been wanting to read for a long time:

 Book Description: 

   Richelle Mead, Lisa McMann, Michael Grant, Meg Cabot, Laini Taylor, and nine more of the hottest YA authors to hit the shelves explore the concepts of prophecy and prediction in this story collection edited by NYT bestselling author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan.

Have you ever been tempted to look into the future? To challenge predictions? To question fate? It's human nature to wonder about life's twists and turns. But is the future already written—or do you have the power to alter it?

From fantastical prophecies to predictions of how the future will transpire, Foretold is a collection of stories about our universal fascination with life's unknowns and of what is yet to come as interpreted by 14 of young adult fiction's brightest stars.

This collection includes works from:
Malinda Lo (Ash)
Lisa McMann (Wake)
Kami Garcia (Beautiful Creatures)
Margaret Stohl (Beautiful Creatures)
Laini Taylor (The Daughter of Smoke and Bone)
Michael Grant (Gone)
Saundra Mitchell (The Vespertine)
Richelle Mead (the Vampire Academy)
Matt de la Pena (I Will Save You)
Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries)
Heather Brewer (The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod)
Diana Peterfreund (Rampant)
Simone Elkeles (Perfect Chemistry)
Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth) 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

K, first off, this cover looks sweet. It has the perfect spooky, haunted feel to it which matches the title perfectly.  Also, a big reason for my initial interest in the book is the fact that one of my fav authors Laini Taylor contributed to it. Here is the opening line from her contribution "Gentlemen Send Phantoms" (which you can read on Amazon preview. Do NOT read if you are in the drafting process or you will be cast into the pit of despair unable to lift head or limb.  You'll also have visions where being a garbage worker or an accountant in April might be better suited to your skills because obviously you'll never be able to write anything comparable to Laini. Not that I've ever felt this way. Ahem.)

 "Once, when the moon was younger than tonight and not as plump, three girls gathered by the hearth to bake a dreamcake"

 Ahh. That is great writing in the way only Laini Taylor knows how to do. And how awesome is that title? And the boy is totally swoon worthy.. which, they always are. (DofSandB?!) There are so many other stellar authors contributing to this book it's a must-have for my bookshelf.

What books are on your wishlist?

Your own bookshelf looking a little thin? Find more wish-list books at our host blog Pen to Paper!

Library Fail

    Today I loaded up my two-year old and 2-month old and we drove 20 mins to the nearest library. It was also pouring rain which I was all about because coming from the desert, there is nothing more exciting than a booming downpour to shake up the weather.
 
  So we're soaking wet by the time I get them loaded into the car and then out of the car and into the library. But it's worth it because there's a little cafe off the front foyer that I'm dying to go back to and write in, and a flat screen tv behind the information desk with advertisements for tots' reading time, adult book club in the fireplace room etc. I'm standing there with a big grin on my face because I love libraries and this one is sweet.

   Then I get up to the counter dripping water everywhere and present my change of address form to get a card. I totally get REJECTED. Because it didn't have my first name, only my last on the page. I tried to tell the kindly lady that my license has my former address printed on it which is also printed on the change of address form but it was a no-go. I seriously got all teary and it was embarrassing and I hope the lady didn't notice and I wheeled us back out to the rain.

 Maybe it's hormones. Maybe it's my still-newborn-stage-lack-of-sleep. Or maybe it was the feeling that heaven's doors were closed before me after I had tried to live a worthy life. Anyway, it was horrible. The library is in my top three favorite places to be in the entire world and all of that goodness was closed to me and my little'ins. So, back out into the pouring rain which had somehow (or maybe it was just me) seemed to be pouring even harder and colder. Suck.

 So now we're home eating lunch. In my new "I love to clean. I'm all about cleaning" mantra I'm trying hard to embrace, I have of course thrown out every envelope that might possibly, probably had my name on it. Then I found a receipt from when I signed up for electricity. Does that count? Has my full name on it..it's a receipt for payment for turning on electricity and my address right there under my name. I am going to call and see. I'm determined to get in there. They can't shut me out! haha.

 That said, I'm slightly lagging behind on my ms. I've gotten it into my head to build most of the furniture we are needing. Such as bookshelves, a tv console, a dresser etc.. I just can't find what I like on the market and am unwilling to pay $400 for a cheap dresser glued together and glazed. So I'm really psyched about it but there goes most of my free time when I was already trying to claw out as much time for writing. I've decided to set some concrete goals:

   End of Nov (and Nanowrimo) MS complete
   End of Dec: Round 1 Crit partners finished
   Jan: Proffessionl edit and personal edits from Crit partners, cover design an formatting, scrounging up advertising/marketing.
   Feb: Marketing, ARCs, release info, reviewers selected.
   Mar: Book release, home-town book release party.

 I hope that's plausible. I've been working and re-working this story for over a year now. I've found that I need a few days of just planning the next set of scenes without any writing. Then, I take a week of great writing until I get to the end of my planning. Then it's back to the drawing board. It makes for slow work but I believe that's the best way I work. At least for this story.

  I do feel a little anxious trying to get all of this done. I mean, we don't have ANY furniture in our house. (Well, the girls have their cribs and I have our old queen size bed and we have a tiny kitchen set that's falling apart. But we need a king size bed and a new kitchen set so not sure I count it!) And when I was talking about how to prioritize everything meaning, "do I put my book on the back burner until we're more settled in?" Or, "do I put building furniture on the back burner until my book is done?" To me, they are both needs. I go crazy if I don't write. And, frankly, I'm a little nervous that the elements that make up my book will go out of style and a new wave will come in and all this work will be passe. Dystopian. Paranormal. Magic. Those have been around for a bit and sniffing the wind, I wonder if they are starting to fade? Agents are looking for epic fantasies and sci-fi these days. So maybe I'm still good.

Well, better go. More later!

Mustn't be Afraid to Dream a Little Bigger..

Oh Tom Hardy..

Writing Wednesday and I Totally Suck

    Photo: Wikimedia Commons: Paul Keller

      We've been 8 days without any furniture or any belongs besides what we fit into our luggage, a few camp chairs and a blow up mattress. It really makes me wonder why we have so much STUFF when really, you can get by with so little. Finally, today the movers came with our belongings.Two nice gentlemen probably in their late 40's. They made good conversation with me, assembled everything they could and wouldn't let met help etc.. Capital fellows.

       6 hours, two broken bookshelves and a broken desk later the movers finally left. I was a little bugged about the broken furniture, about the fact that while the door was open a million flies swarmed in. But mostly I was bugged about myself.  That I didn't mark the rooms to make it easier on the movers like I'd thought too last night but was too lazy to do. That I didn't have any energy drinks on hand, nor anything but peanut butter sandwhiches to offer them for lunch. I'm new in town and our 2nd car, my car is still somewhere between  here and Las Vegas so I couldn't even go pick them up something.

    BUT all of that is so small compared to the big kicker...I had NO cash on me for a tip. 6 HOURS of work. I know they get paid but it really bugged me that they worked so hard and were so nice to me and I had nothing but change in my purse. I feel like such a schmuck. The embarassing part is that I hid out in the bedroom peering out the window to make sure they drove away and weren't coming back to bang on my door and demand their rightful thanks. This was so that I could finally take a breath. See how pathetic I am?!

  ::sighs:: THEN it was school bus hour so every time a big vehicle would pass the house I'd hold my breath feeling like they really were coming back with missing paperwork or something else in the truck so I'd have to face them again. A guilty conscience I tell you....

 So that's my confession and I'm probably over-reacting but they worked hard and hard work deserves something extra. Is it too much to stop by the home moving office to drop off a few $20s? Too weird?

  This whole move I've tried so hard to see it as an adventure. It's been huge and patience-testing with a 2-yr old and 2 month old baby on my hip. Only now as I sit here in my new living room surrounded by boxes, broken furniture and a million flies do I feel a bit overwhelmed. I'm not an interior decorator by any means. We've got so many things we have to buy...a couch, new bedroom set, drawers for the girls, kitchen towels etc..I'm not a spender. (Which is why we need to buy new things..the old ones are just plain too old now). And I really want to have a sophisticated grown up pad. This is our first kind of official place we're going to spend some time at and we're already making friends so I really want to have a place that reflects where we are in life. I think I'm still so geeky and weird and socially awkward. I don't mind sleeping on a blow up mattress. But girls my age should have a proper bed with proper matching bedding and a real sidetable instead of some  that maybe I don't want people to see that so much as the other side -the confident-in-my-skin person I'm trying hard to be or maybe are becoming more. The art lover, the collector, the cleaner. Actually I never see the cleaner in me so that personality just might not exist. So these next few weeks are going to be challenging to say the least.

   Now, moving past me and my whiny meanderings...Beth Revis has a blog series "Writing Wednesdays" that totally rocks.

   Oh Beth Revis why are you so cool? You probably never leave your movers hanging out to dry.If Beth Revis offered online writing classes I would so sign up. She spins each "lesson" in her own way that makes each topic refreshingly new and actually applicable. Case in point? The last few paragraphs of today's lesson totally blew me away:

  This is what separates the very best of the best YA. Good YA has the character realize everyone wears a mask. Great YA has the character realize he wears a mask, too.

The best YA lifts the mask off the reader.

There is no greater accomplishment than a book that can make the reader realize who he is behind his mask.

I'm telling you, sooooooo goood! So check out her blog post today HERE. Your writing will be better for it.

The "Exploratory" Draft

  I have a love/hate relationship with writing. I love the idea of it. I love reading words written or "having written" as you've probably heard before. I love going down to the art store and buying a sketchbook full of empty blank pages of beautiful paper and filling it with little scene ideas, dialogue snippets, character profiles and histories etc and sometimes I get carried away in that stage until one day it hits me. 

    I cannot sell this book. This is not, in fact, a novel. You're not actually writing.

    Crap.

    Which means Drafting must begin. Which means gallons of ice cream will be consumed. There will be much throwing of oneself onto the bed wailing that "it's just not mean to be!" followed by well-intentioned consuling from one's husband.After a half dozen times he turns on the tough love and you schlep yourself back together to begin again. And again. And again.

 At least that's how it is for me. You're probably an ubber-galactic steller writer who churns out books in mere days. You suck.

Drafting is by far the HARDEST part for me.

The part where I feel most hopeless of ever becoming a writer. The task of taking all of these random bits and turning them into a full-fledged novel is daunting to say the least. What's the method? How does one bridge the gap between pure imagining and the finished work with all the elements? This is where the published writers out work the dreamers. Key word: WORK.

Laini Taylor (author of the Dreamdark series and Daughter of Smoke and Bone, LOVELOVELOVELOVE) describes the first draft as an exploratory one: (I hope it's okay Laini to post your words here instead of mine because they're so much better!):

                Imagine you’re standing at the edge of a jungle in, let’s say, Borneo (because I have a fascination with Borneo). You have a rough idea of how big this jungle is -- you’ve flown over it in a helicopter and seen dense green treecover, and you know what’s on the other side. You know where you want to get to, and you have a very vague idea of what’s IN the jungle, but you have no map, and as of yet there is no trail. What you do have is a machete, a blank roll of paper, and a grease pencil.

                There’s only one way to get to the other side of the jungle: take out your machete and start whacking. Carve your way forward and forward, sometimes sideways and sometimes back, until you get to the other side. That first time through, you’re going to come across ravines, swamps, viper nests, rivers, all sorts of things you didn’t expect and you’ll deal with them and get around them, over them, through them, in all manner of resourceful ways. And when you step out of the jungle on the far side, what you’ll have in your hand is a sprawling, wrinkled, sweat-stained mess of a map of the territory you’ve just discovered. It might not look very pretty, but it is a glorious thing, a document of discovery. You clutch it to you, and after you’ve rested and healed for a while, you go back to the far side of the jungle and. . . you start again. (Source here)

Isn't that awesome? I love all the bush wacking involved and really, isn't that how it feels a lot of the time? You day dream and mentally interact with your characters, you see things in real life that spawn a mini scene in your brain that makes your hands itch to write down.You have all this beauty and intrigue and pure potential rolling around in your brain so hard it makes you want to explode and then comes the painstaking process of adequately transcribing those feelings and mental images into WORDS. It's like trying to strain pudding.
 
  But Laini's words bring a measure of comfort.These first few drafts are exploratory, getting to know the lay of the story land. Go easy on yourself. Give yourself permission to write horribly. Set an impossibly high word count as your goal and set a timer and write and write and write. It will come together. Slowly but surely.

You'll probably write a lot of what won't make it into the finished novel. But this helps two ways:

1. You have tons of great back story that helps you write a more dimensional, believable character
2. You're getting so much practice writing that subsequent drafts will be THAT. MUCH. BETTER.

And in the end, those who write, publish. It can be as simple as that. Keep writing my friends!

Bookstores only for Elite?

                                                           Wikicommons photo: by Phillip Capper here



    Read THIS article. It's about Marc Jacobs opening new bookstores in Europe. On the heels of bookstores closing all around us, I can't help but wonder if the future of bookstores lies in the pocketbooks of the ubber wealthy. The rest of us will be downloading our books for 99 cents-$3.99 per copy.


 Your thoughts? Please comment below! More on this later, the afternoon sunshine is calling my name!

Back in the Saddle

 
 
     Ah it's good to be back. ::Leans back in buttery leather chair, sips tea and commences to write:: Having a baby and a cross country move have really shook life upside-down but it's all been good things. I'm loving the midwest atmosphere..it's chilly, the moon lights up everything in an eery blue-ish light and there is the scent of fall slowing creeping in. A perfect atmosphere for writing.

   Work on my story is going really well. A lot of the times when I'm up pacing the floor with the babus, I get time to plot. The hard part is, that the writing itself suffers for lack of time. But, just last night I conversed with the Husband and we have come up with a tentative schedule to allow me more time to write.

   I was looking up PW articles online yesterday (why is an annual subscription $240!? Why!?) and my heart burned with excitement. I love the publishing industry. I love the writing world. I belong in it. There is a high I get whenever I read interesting articles about anything on these topics. In fact, yesterday also bore great news that had me passed out on the bed with excitement. My good friend Veronica had an agent request a full of her latest manuscript. And she's had her ms out there for only a few days! It's going to get picked up. I've read it and it's fantastic. Really well done. So of course I practically pass out from excitement.

         For some history, Veronica and I used to work at a hospital together and every Friday we'd meet up for lunch and discuss our WIPs and our dreams of publishing. That was just over three years ago. Now, it looks like she'll be published. I feel like it is my own manuscript that has been requested. We're part of a super-secret club of closeted novelists and she's the first to "go beyond". I really thought I was sick..my stomach as all excited and I was jittery ha! Imagine what will happen when I publish! haha I don't know if I'll be able to handle it!

   Anyway, there's the good news and it feels so good to be writing and blogging again. More to come!