A Monday Five

I've started a few posts in the past week but finished none, which I take a sign of continued posting burnout (actually they all just felt too navel-gazey), so I'm going to make things easy on myself and toss out some bullet points of (possible) interest:

• Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving weekend! My father-in-law was here visiting from Istanbul, so we've had an action-packed week touring around L.A., going out to eat a lot (so stuffed), and hitting up a Lakers game (yes Jack Nicholson was there looking like a BAMF). Back to the normal routine today, tgim!
• The end of NaNo is nigh! Are you on track to end big? I didn't take part, but a few of my good writer buddies did and I have been jaw-on-the-floor impressed with their productivity. From what I can tell, a little thing called Writeordie.com had a major part in their success, but I am yet unfamiliar with its magical qualities. 
• I haven't had a ton of time for reading, what with the houseguest and all, but lately I've read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Cat Valente, which was lovely and clever and I highly recommend. (I did find myself wondering if the people who worked on this book had some sort of shorthand title for it--The Girl Who? Fairyland Ship? TGWCFSHOM?) I also finally read Cinder, which has been on my radar for a long time. I highly recommend this one as well--great, inventive world-building and Cinder herself is an awesome character. The sequel comes out in February! And now I'm reading Code Name Verity, and I'm loving the voice, but a little afraid of what's going to happen. I'm anticipating tears. Will there be tears? 
• We went to the theater yesterday and saw Lincoln, and overall I give it a big thumbs up. There was a little of the Spielberg slickness, but between Tommy Lee Jones and Daniel Day-Lewis (swoon), it's well worth the price of admission. 
• Okay, that's only four, but my cat has pinned me down and there's a lovely book here waiting to be picked up again, so I'm calling it. I hope to have a SipSwap post for you later in the week...

A Room Of One's Own

Hello, writer friends! Sorry again for the infrequent posting--the past month has been on the far side of busy, and in these times, blogging is always the first casualty. Things are slowing down a bit now, and last weekend I got to hang out with some of my very favorite writer friends on a little road trip that I will tell you more about another time. This week doesn't look too crazy yet, so I might finally manage to post a saved-up book recommendation, or force another Classical Thursday upon you all.

Last week my husband, who NEVER gets sick, caught a bad enough stomach bug that he had to stay home Monday-Thursday. I myself was fighting a sinus infection for a couple of those days, so we sat indoors and enjoyed each other's company in a soggy, hazy sort of way. By Thursday we were well enough to take a long walk, and somehow we ended up in an Apple store, where my sneaky husband set about fulfilling his dream of setting me up with my own home office. One of our rooms is already a dedicated office, but he wanted me to have my own space to spread out and make my crazy messes. Actually, the major motivating factor here was that he hates seeing me write on the couch, with my feet up and my legs wrapped in blankets and cats, when all the world knows that People Work At Desks, and when my husband gets an idea lodged in his head, woe to those who would try to reason with him.

So, here I am today, with my own monitor at my own desk (aka our former Ikea dining table) in our guest room, the guest bed covered in blankets and knitting patterns and double-pointed needles, the bay window stacked full of books, my sketchpad and colored pencils resting on the dresser. He even gifted me with an office plant, a massive box of orchids that I think qualifies as a piece of furniture. Unfortunately the orchids are too much fun for small cats to resist, so my kitten is yowling out in the hallway where I had to shut him out. A solution will have to be found. I was perfectly fine writing in the office or on the couch, and I'll have to pack up and move out whenever we have guests, but I have to admit that it's nice to build my own Rachel Space, free of scattered bits of electronics and photos of Falcon rockets plastering the walls.

Do you have a space in your home that's all your own? What does your dream writer space look like?

The orchid jungle

Hello, Thursday

Sorry to drop off the face of earth there for a bit! My husband and I had to fly to Turkey on short notice last week for family-related stuff, and we just landed back in L.A. last night. I've been up since 5 this morning and I'm kinda whacked out on jetlag, but I'm counting on my friend coffee to help me make it through the day. MAN did my own bed feel great last night.

As the end of October rolls around, I'm seeing a lot of chatter on blogs and Twitter about NaNoWriMo. I've never done it myself, and I think I've made my feelings pretty clear about it being the Wrongest Month of the Year for a writing challenge. I mean, who has time in November?? Anyway, I *was* actually considering it for this year, since it sounds kinda fun and I had a new idea I was mulling over, but that project is going back in the steaming drawer for further marination and future exploration. Also--big surprise--November is going to be super busy, with a long-discussed vacation that may possibly still happen during the first week (I know, STAY PUT ALREADY. It's hard.), and family coming to stay with us for the second half of the month. So I'll be using my spare moments for plotting and planning and scrawling and scribbling, but it won't be too different from my usual schedule.

How about you--are you planning to NaNo your heart out this year?

Interview! With the amazing Elizabeth Briggs!

Today I've got a special treat for you on my blog: an interview with my critique partner, Liz Briggs! I met Liz about two years ago via our local SCBWI chapter's Critique Connections, and we started holding weekly meetings at Panera to tear each other's books apart. Since then we've traveled to conferences together and stood by each other through the agony and the ecstasy of querying, and through it all we've become great friends. I can say with no exaggeration that meeting her was the best thing to happen to my writing. Plus she's snarky and hilarious and so much fun! Liz is a total ninja, with a foot on both sides of the publishing world--she's represented by Kate Testerman, and she interns for Jill Corcoran. And frankly, I think the world should know more about her, so here goes:


What are a few of your favorite things?
Good books, fluffy dogs, action movies, smart TV shows, RPG video games, Comic Con, Peanut Butter M&Ms, the color green, warm coffee, swimming pools, garlic bread, French fries, rainy days at home… I could keep going, but you probably get the idea.

If your life was a movie, what would be the title?
CROUCHING RED PANDA, HIDDEN T-REX

Give us a snapshot of A Day in the Life of Liz Briggs, Writer.
For the most part it’s terribly boring and full of non-writing things like the dreaded day job, plus a few moments of interning for Jill Corcoran. I try to squeeze in writing whenever I can. And sometimes I fight ninjas. As one does.

If you won an all-expense-paid two-week vacation to anywhere that left tomorrow, where would you go?
I’d go to Italy! I’ve always wanted to visit Italy and my husband and I planned to go for our honeymoon, but for various reasons we haven’t made it happen – yet.

What type of research do you do for your writing? What is the most surprising thing you have learned in your research?
I’m a researcher for my full time job, so I research everything like crazy both before and during my first drafts. The coolest thing I found while researching was that the Russians built nuclear shelters into their subway system during the Cold War. Once I discovered that, a lot of things clicked into place and I used one of those shelters as a location in my book ALTERNATE.

What genres do you read? What genres do you write?
I read all sorts of YA and MG, and in adult I read science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and some historical romance – in particular, Regency and Victorian era. I know, kinda random. I’d love to read a YA Regency romance. Or maybe I should write one… (Editor's note: Liz must have gotten too distracted by the idea of plotting romantic young regents to share that she writes mind-bending, heart-thumping YA sci-fi!)

What one YA novel do you wish you had when you were a teen?
The DUFF by Kody Keplinger

What is easier to write: The first line or the last line?
The last line. I usually know it long in advance, whereas I tend to re-write my opening chapters about a hundred times.

What word best describes you?
RAWR!


Yup, I'd say that's about accurate. Thanks for being a sport, Liz! I'll see you at Panera--so get writing and bring me the first chapters of your YA Regency romance!...

That WIP meme...

I've been tagged by the fabulous Caitlin in the WIP meme that's going around. Now, I tend to play my cards pretty close to my chest when it comes to my writing, but I like to be a team player. So I'll share a thing or two about the newest project I've been toying around with, and hopefully my vagueness won't be too annoying, ha.

What is the working title of your book?
Err, yeah, I'm pretty terrible with titles. This one's just filed under TOWER for now, and fyi, there's no tower planned in the book. Yet. My last project had the working title FAIRWEATHER, and that never ended up having anything to do with anything. 

Where did the idea come from for the book? 
Sooo...I can't really say I've got the idea figured out yet. This one came more as a desire to do some fantasy worldbuilding, followed by lists of names I liked and thought went well together, which led to an initial setup. I've got some fun characters lined up, but right now I'm testing them out in my head and trying to plan what kind of torture I want to put them through. This is about the same order of creation I went through on my last book as well.

What genre does your book fall under?
Middle grade fantasy

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I'm too unfamiliar with child actors to cast my own books in my head, though sometimes I visualize the adult characters as looking like certain actors. Not for this one yet though, sorry!

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
No plot = no synopsis. No fun, right? But I'm still waiting for the pieces in my brain to settle into a configuration that grabs me. This could take a while. 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? May we see an intro?
I've written one practice scene so far, and it's not the intro. I'm not sure how long it took me to write the first draft of my last project, because I dawdled and dawdled for ages on the first 30k, and then I finally realized OMG RACHEL THIS DREAM IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN IF YOU DON'T GET SERIOUS and set a goal of writing 1k per day until it was finished (sound familiar?), and that took about 3-4 months. And yes, the first draft was way too long.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
See my previous post re: Leonora Carrington and her demented fairytale paintings...it's got me thinking that I'd like to try writing a sort of bizarro dark fantasy at some point.  

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
Hmm, ask me again in a few months and I might have an answer. I'll leave you with this image instead:

Words and Words

After the glut of middle grade I've been reading lately, I needed to change up the pace a little and went to my friendly neighborhood AbeBooks.com to hunt down an out-of-print copy of The Seventh Horse, a collection of short stories by Leonora Carrington. Ms. Carrington was a British surrealist painter who spent the majority of her working life in Mexico. Her art is less avant-garde than Man Ray, more digestible than Salvator Dali--to me it looks like the illustrations of crazy fairytales. I only learned about Leonora Carrington last summer, but I like her paintings a lot, and I was pretty excited to find out she was also a writer. I guess I was not expecting a surrealist's writing to be quite so...surreal.

Here is an excerpt from her short story, "The Skeleton's Holiday":

It happened one day that the skeleton drew some hazelnuts that walked about on little legs across mountains, that spit frogs out of mouth, eye, ear, nose and other openings and holes. The skeleton took fright like a skeleton meeting a skeleton in bright daylight. Quickly he had a pumpkin detector grow on the side of his head, with a day side like patchouli bread and a night side like the egg of Columbus, and set off, half-reassured, to see a fortune-teller.

What the what?? Was that just a well-played game of Mad Libs? That's the end of the story, by the way. Leonora Carrington was deeply interested in spiritualism, alchemy, and the occult, and apparently she used a lot of code words to dictate meaning to her art, so I will probably never know what meaning she hopefully intended with her writing. At least not without more research on the subject than I am willing to participate in.

But as crazy as they are, I'm actually kind of enjoying these surreal short stories. As readers, we're used to a predictable progression of words, building sentences with understandable meaning that form stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. Reading about a philosophical skeleton who likes to play dirty tricks for no discernible reason (and for what it's worth, the excerpt I posed was really the most extreme thing I saw--it's not all quite that nuts!) or a three hunters cursed so that all their trophies turn into sausages--well, they're not nearly as satisfying and it's certainly not for everyone, but as an occasional detour, I think they're worthwhile just for the marvelously bizarre imagery.

What do you read when you want to switch gears?

Self Portrait, 1937

A Michigan Girl

Growing up in the Sault, I used to tell my classmates that I was from Ohio. It made sense to me--my parents were from Ohio and all my relatives still lived there, and we traveled back regularly. I wanted to draw a firm line between myself and what I considered the local kids, the ones whose relatives all lived within an hour's drive, who went to school with their cousins (or, in some cases, their aunts and uncles). I was even born in Ohio, which helped my credibility, but I'd only spent my first year there before being whisked off to the Upper Peninsula. So really, looking back now, my claim was a little thin.

I may choose not to live in Michigan anymore but I can't deny the twenty years of my life spent there, and when I come back to these cool blue lakes and piney forests, it sure feels like home. I get a little thrown off guard by how friendly and straightforward so many of the people here are. Not that everyone in L.A. is a savage, but it seems like the bigger the city, the more guarded and short-tempered its population, and when that's your norm, Midwestern friendliness can make you almost suspicious! Yikes. So here I'll share a few shots of where I'm from. I may seem like an ocean-loving, road-raging Angeleno, but at my core I'm a Michigan girl.

The world famous Soo Locks!

This is how you trap tourists: FUDGE

Lots of nature here in the U.P.

Tahquamenon River

Tahquamenon Falls

Whitefish Point and icy Lake Superior

Mmmmm pan-fried lake perch...

Setting up for a bonfire on a balmy September day

Pumpkin season!