Aaaaaand we're back!

I'm sitting here racking my brain for a lovely quote about travel or some such thing to open with, but sorry, I've got nothing. I am a jellied sack of jet-lagged mush--albeit a content one. There's something very satisfying about the routine after you return home from your travels, unpacking and doing laundry and getting settled back in, having survived your journey intact. 

The trip was great. Saw some very cool stuff, met fun people, ate tasty food (although I think I could stand to go a year or so without seeing another french fry). Almost met my end in York by taking a bad step off a curb, which sounds dumb but is surprisingly easy to do when you let your right-lane instincts take over in a pinch. Learned of the joy of hot coffee and rum in a pub in Edinburgh after nearly taking flight in one heck of a windstorm. Went to Manchester and...well, not much happened in Manchester. It rained, I bought a dress.

One thing that completely blew me away was how polite and friendly British people are. If there are any Brits reading this blog, and my stats tell me there are approximately one of you, then kudos to you on being so damn civilized! Maybe I just felt that way because I was visiting from Los Angeles, where your chances are about 30-30-40 of running across: a) a nice normal person, b) a phony pod-person, or c) a raging asshole. And, once you've been living here a while, you have about the same odds of being one of those yourself at any given time.

Angeleno aggression notwithstanding, I had a big smile on my face today as my taxi flew down Lincoln Blvd. Most of that had to do with the sunshine and the warm breeze whipping my hair around, but also because I'm excited. I got the break I needed, I read some great books (more on those later), and I'm ready to get back to work. I've got a big month ahead of me--it turns out that I'm going to the Big Sur writing workshop in March, and the amount of work I have to do beforehand to prepare is frightening. Like, I want to go stick my head in the pool and scream frightening. But it's going to be okay.

Anyhow, I need to go pick up my cat now. So happy to be back!

Görüşmek üzere! See you soon!

Okay folks, I'll be going radio silent for the next week as I'm going away on vacation. Where to, you ask? First London, then we'll take the train to York, Edinburgh, and Manchester. My husband and I were invited along on this trip by my husband's childhood friend from Istanbul and his lovely wife, so it's just me and the Turks. I'll be reading a lot, like I said, and also mentally working out a sticky plot point and some some upcoming character revisions for my MC.

On a side note, I can't believe that nobody named the movie I quoted in my last post. Have none of you seen Beerfest?? Maybe I just like it so much because of the time I spent in Germany, but if you enjoyed Super Troopers, you'll love this one, and if you haven't seen Super Troopers, well then I'm just sorry for you. Meow.

Recommended only if you like movies about drinking that are kind of offensive, and hilarious

I suppose I could have set up some scheduled posts to go up while I was away, but I'm just not that organized right now. I'll be back next Monday the 7th, hopefully rip-roaring ready to go on that ravaged creature that is my manuscript. Until then, I wish you all a wonderful week ahead!

And Then Her Brain Turned To Mush

Today I promise you the most incoherent post thus far.  In my attempt to fit in work, home-selling prep, critique group and my Revision Smackdown, I stayed up until almost 3 a.m. last night.  Work today is going to be awesome.

In terms of the Revision Smackdown, if you look a couple of posts down, you'll see that today I am supposed to be working on chapters 18 and 19.  Folks, I was already dabbling in Chapter 19 last night.  I can't get too excited though, because these revisions are so freaking rough, I could get a splinter on them.  I desperately need to get some distance from this thing, and I'm not just talking about flying 5,437 miles away from my laptop.

If you're a frequent visitor, you may have noticed that the books in my Goodreads Currently Reading widget rarely change.  She's been reading Across The Universe for two weeks!  Slowest reader ever!  Like most of us who are in love with books, I'm actually a very fast reader, but lately I've been denying myself the pleasure.  I know, I know: a good writer needs to be reading constantly, but there are only so many hours in a day.  By the time I make it to turning on my Kindle, I'm already in bed and I've got about fifteen minutes until my eyes start rolling back in my head.

I am so looking forward to getting away and putting all my spare moments into reading. Reading on planes, reading on trains, reading when all my travel companions are speaking Turkish and I so rudely zone out to catch a few pages on my phone.  I've got an ocean of great books waiting on my Kindle, and I'm ready to dive in.  I want to freeze my ocean of books into ice blocks and skate on it and melt it in the springtime and drink it! (Bonus points if you can tell me what awesome movie that's from...)

Reading is the best way for me to get some distance from my own voice, to make the words I've written look unfamiliar.  Do you find that this is the case for you, too?

Double-Milled Always Tastes Best

As a writer, probably the scariest thing you will ever do is let someone else read your work. When I finished the first revision of my WIP last year, I started with baby steps--gave it to a friend who'd persistently bugged me to let her read it, and to my husband.  They gave me some suggestions and the praise I needed to hear, and my husband asked some intelligent questions that eventually led to the current whopping round of revisions.

But as much as I appreciated their help, I couldn't escape the nagging voice in the back of my head that said, You need more feedback, you lunatic. And so I nervously began a hunt for critique partners--and got very lucky, because the first person I contacted, the fabulous Liz from Liz Writes, turned out to be a great match. We were both members of our local SCBWI, but I first found her by searching for Tweets near me--I forget which search terms, 'writer' or 'YA' or something like that. I'm glad she didn't get creeped out when I contacted her and it turned out that we only live a few miles from each other!

Starting with a new critique partner is like starting a new job--you're testing out the waters, trying to figure out what is required of you and what your expectations are.  Am I supposed to line edit?  Should I question the motivations from the start, or should I wait until I've read a little more?  You might come away from the first few sessions feeling a bit bruised, having never been subjected to such a deep analysis of your work before.  But eventually you find your groove, getting to know each other and the stories, and it goes from being nerve-wracking to fun.

A good critique partner asks you the structural questions you need to hear:  What does your MC want? Does this scene move the story forward? You may not even agree with all the changes your critique partner suggests, but still find that their feedback highlights an area that needs better definition. And you, because your brain has been filled with thoughts on plot and narrative, should be examining their work with the same critical eye--which in turn may help you learn more about your own writing style.

Shortly after meeting Liz, I also joined a new critique group forming in a different part of town. We meet less often, so they see the chapters that I've already gone over with Liz, and they still always have great suggestions and critiques for me.  Going through the whole thing twice like this can only make it better-- double-milled quality, if you will. (I was thinking of flour when I wrote this, but according to Google you can double-mill just about anything: cheese, cotton, steel, pool cue sticks...fascinating.) The more eyes that see your work, the better.

Last weekend, Liz pinged me out of the blue to tell me she'd thought of a pitch idea for my WIP, and it was terrific. Boiling down my story into one crystalized thought is incredibly hard for me, and when I got her suggestion I did a happy dance right in my car and asked her, What would I do without you? To have someone who knows your story, your characters, but who can look at it from a distance and perspective that you will never have--that's priceless.  So, writer friends, don't be afraid to share your story, because the results can be so rewarding.


(I acknowledge that I've gotten very lucky, and not everyone has the best critique group experience. For an interesting rundown of the possible misfires, check out the YA Muses' excellent Critique of the Critique Group.)

Letting Go (Also, a Revision Smackdown)

Back in 2006, my husband and I decided that we were ready to become homeowners. It only took us a few weeks to find the perfect place--a fixer-upper condo with a brick fireplace, two (2!) full bathrooms, and a gigantic patio. We had a blast tearing out the pink carpet and the flowered wallpaper, and we painted the walls in warm, cozy hues. We filled the big patio planter with tomatoes and herbs. We installed a hammock.

But Rachel, you may ask, wasn't 2006 a bad time to buy a home? Why yes, my friend, you are correct. Over the years, we watched the value plummet, and our fixer-uppering dwindled to a halt. Things we had looked forward to changing--the archaic bathrooms, the scarred kitchen floor--became things we accepted. It took a couple of years, but we've finally realized that this little adventure is not going to have a happy ending, and so yesterday we took the first steps toward hitting eject.

It's not too hard to make the writing analogy here. I love my home, and I'm attached to it, but I've got to let it go now, because it's not right for us. It's pulling us down into a black hole, both financially and emotionally. The same goes for those favorite scenes--you wrote them, and you want very much for them to work, but sometimes you've got to make that tough call and let them go so that you don't pull your reader out of the story. To use my mother's favorite phrase, Such is life.

In other news, I've got a week left until we head off to Europe for a ten-day vacation, and I'm Really Freaking Serious about getting my content revisions done before then. To that end, I've drawn up a Google calendar for my Revision Smackdown, an eight-day plan to hit all the chapters that need major content changes. Here's what it looks like:

My goal is to get all my major content changes done before the trip, so I can leave for ten days, come back refreshed and ready to polish, maybe send it out for a last few beta reads, and hopefully soon I will be ready to send this puppy out into the world and see what happens. At least that is the plan! I'm supposed to fit this around trip preparations, getting my condo ready for a sales showing, and, oh yeah, my full-time job. So we'll see how it goes.

Do you have any deadlines set for yourself? How are they going?

About Face

Fellow writers, how goes it?  I have to say, blogging is so much more fun when you've got some great followers!  I really appreciate each and every one of you for taking the time to come hang out with me here.  When I first started blogging/tweeting, I kind of felt like the frog in that Emily Dickinson poem, "I'm nobody! Who are you?" This is so much better.  I love reading your comments, and I adore you all.

I'm still working on revisions here, big shocker.  My biggest concern right now is tweaking some of the mystery elements to make the ending more fun for the reader, and a large part of that has been changing my characters.  Not swapping out Bob* for Joe, but turning Bob into a different person than I first thought he would be.  Sometimes I need to do this to alter the reader's perception of him, and sometimes because I realize that it just makes the story work better.

This is something I find pretty difficult.  For the past year or more, Bob has been living in my head as an intense, commanding, moral person, and suddenly I need him to be friendlier, more down-to-earth, more sly.  It takes me a while to get used to the new Bob.  I like it though--especially when a character change makes a whole other row of other logical changes snap into place.

Do find that you need to change the personae of your characters during revisions?  Or do you generally stick with them as you originally envisioned them, and change other things?


*Not the real character names, I'm still too chicken for that.  Also don't want to give anything away.  Just, ya know, in case... ;)

Story of a Diamond Ring

It was unfair of me to ask you to guess my middle name in my last post, since I doubt any of you has ever heard of the name Zouri before.  I was named after my great-grandmother, Zouri Frances Colahan Gerstacker.  RootsWeb.com, that charlatan, lists her as both Louise Zouri and Frances Zouri, but a copy of the 1900 Cuyahoga County census gives the correct name, alongside her older siblings, Harry and Stella, and her parents, Solon and Lizzie Colahan.  It also lists Solon's occupation: Huckster.  A huckster???  Is that a real profession?

Family legend says that Solon chose his second daughter's name from a book about India he was reading at the time.  I have never found this book, so I'm not sure how reliable this information is.  All Google will tell me is that it is Japanese for flip-flop.

Zouri married Edwin Gerstacker, and they settled in Rocky River, Ohio, near Cleveland. When the Great Depression hit, they suffered some financial losses, so they relocated to a farm in Lorain County to raise their three boys, and moved into the house where one of them, my 92-year-old grandpa, still lives today.  My mom describes her Grandma Zouri as a country lady who was quiet, classy and refined.  A few years ago when I was getting married, she told me this story about her.

For a long time after they had moved to their new farmhouse on Baird Road, the Gerstackers were still viewed as "outsiders" in the Henrietta farming community.  Zouri had joined the Women's Guild of the local church and tried to participate in all of their events.  At one of these, a baking get-together at a neighbor's home, Zouri was helping wash the dishes, when suddenly she realized that her diamond wedding ring was missing.  She searched frantically all over the neighbor's home before coming to the conclusion that it had slipped off in the sink and gone down the drain.  She went home in tears, devastated.

Ed consoled his wife, and the next day, he went to visit the neighbor.  I'm told Ed was a gregarious fellow, a cigar smoker and big talker.  He politely asked his neighbor for permission to take apart their sink and examine the drain trap to look for the missing ring, promising to leave everything as he'd found it.  The neighbor said no.  I'm sure Ed tried to argue, but for whatever reason, the neighbor wouldn't relent, and finally Ed had to give up.  The ring was gone.  So he went out and bought his beloved Zouri a bigger, prettier diamond ring to replace what she had lost.

What happened to my great-grandparents is not the most original or surprising story, but I loved hearing it and knowing that these are the kind of people I come from.  I'm sure a new ring was probably something they couldn't really afford, but all Ed cared about was trying to take away the sadness and guilt his wife was feeling (and maybe a little f-you to the neighbors).  Great achievements earn awards, but it's the smaller, easily forgotten acts of kindness that teach us to be compassionate human beings. And so, today I would like to recognize my great-grandpa, Edwin Henry Gerstacker, as an Awesome Ancestor.  I even made a little art for the occasion:

(I feel I should mention that these are not the Gerstackers)

Do you have an Awesome Ancestor with a great story that you think deserves to be told?  It doesn't have to be as sappy as mine--maybe a funny story?  If you are so inclined, I invite you to copy this picture (or not) and tell their story on your blog.  If you do this, please leave a link in my comments, so I can read your story!