Back from the Brink

Oh, boy, folks, have I had a crazy few weeks. Grab a cuppa coffee/tea/wine/beverage of your choice and let me tell you all about it.

So I needed a mini break of blogging because I hadn't quite figured out how to manage my writing, my "new" job, family, life, and blogging all at the same time. I think I've figured it out now, so we're gonna try a trial of me blogging on Tuesdays and Saturdays for a while, and see how it works. Please bear with me as I reintegrate myself into the blogosphere.

This is your brain on editing.
Any questions?

Then there was the writing. In late October not only was I trying to manage some pretty intense revision on my novel (currently listed on my WIPs page as FIGHTING FATE, though I plan to change the title to IN FLAMES). I wanted to get a full round of revision finished before NaNoWriMo started, while also juggling my NaNo prep. That took a LOT out of me, and I edited until my brains turned into liquid goo. Seriously. It was messy.

My own personal NaNo shield

On November first, having finished that round of editing, I was happy to accept my NaNo fate. I greeted it with a warm, strong handshake. And on the fateful afternoon of November 1st, I had an extra meeting with my boss, wherein he asked me to work overtime in preparation for our display at an upcoming conference (I work for a small, specialty academic publisher). And in my inner ear, I heard my NaNo plans go *squish*. My boss and I negotiated trading the days in early November for days around Thanksgiving, so not all was lost, but it put some stress on my NaNo plans nonetheless.

As of November 12th, one-third of the way through the month, I had only written about 14K over the course of 4 authentic writing days. Ouch.

On the morning on November 13th, as I'm leaving my house to pick up a friend, I grab my phone to let her know I'm coming, and see that I have a missed text message from my boss--who, I might add, never sends me text messages. It said, more or less, that he was in the hospital, post-surgery after having had a heart attack. Everything okay. Call to talk about conference prep. SERIOUSLY. My boss is in the intensive care unit on a Sunday morning and wants to talk about conference prep. Now, granted, the conference started on the 17th. My boss isn't really all that Type-A, but we did still have a lot of work to do, and that essentially took the editorial side of our house from 3 to 2 employees doing the bulk of the work (we have a few work-study students, but regular employees, we are three). So now add more overtime work to my schedule over the next three days, making the first day of the conference (Nov 17th) day 5 for writing. Not a good sign.

See how the Jell-O powder gets all goopy with a little water?

Not to mention that on the 17th and the 18th I was about as worthless a writer as an uncooked box of Jell-O, from working 10hour days three days in a row, and the emotional turmoil of talking to my boss on the phone while he was doped on morphine and falling asleep. Yup, powdery Jell-O.

Somehow, though, I managed to pull a few days writing between 5-6K. Don't ask me how. Perhaps some superhuman feats of strength that even kryptonite couldn't squelch. Who knows? But I have to attribute at least a little of my success to Hart Johnson and her stupendous idea for hour-long sprint-writing sessions. I think those were ultimately my saving grace. Coordinated over Facebook, I would periodically join Hart, among others, on these sprints, and both the time and the community support helped a ton.

And, imagine, through all of that, I actually won!

Granted, according to my word verification, I only have 50,002 words, but I don't care! I'm 2 words over what they need (although, according to my Scrivener file, I have 50,019), and that's what matters.

Anyway, now it's December. A little over two weeks until the holiday break comes, which will entail lots of time with family, friends, and fruitcake. I'm already celebrating by eating too many sweets and listening to Christmas music while I cook and bake. And, dangit all, I am MAKING these cookies if it kills me. I just have to find some sweet rice flour first...

Be seeing you around the blogosphere!

The Delusional Doom Blogfest

Thanks for Hart at Confessions of a Watery Tart for hosting today's blogfest. As soon as I saw her post about it, I wanted to participate. Here are the rules/options:

You can do ANY (or all) of the following:

Predict your own death

Predict someone ELSES death

Write your own obituary

Write someone ELSES obituary

Plot a murder of someone sorely asking for it, step by step

So, without further ado, I give you my entry of delusional doom, a prediction of my own death. Writing this took time, since this is outside of my normal genre. I hope you enjoy it.

**WARNING** This gets a tad violent. It's not gory, just violent. Read at your own risk.

*     *     *     *     *

When I leave grad school this semester, I will go work at the local JoAnn Fabrics in whatever town my husband and I find ourselves. I love sewing and crocheting, enjoy sewing and quilting, have dabbled in scrapbooking and stamping, can reupholster a chair and make a slip cover. Why wouldn't they want me? And, spree, if they need me to figure out something linguistic for fun, I'm good for that, too.

So I'll work there for a couple of months. Learn the store. Get comfortable. Make friends. Overstock my yarn collection to extreme proportions until my husband buys my yarn its own house.

Until one day. I stand in the second aisle, replacing the Easter collection with gnomes and ducks and other spring lawn decor. My boss turns past the hand-painted watering cans, followed by another woman in a green JoAnn's shirt. She will become my arch nemesis—we'll call her Mandy Brown. She gets transferred from her store across town. She's also a fiber arts diva, and a linguist to boot.

She says, "Have you heard the the one about the linguistics professor who was trying to explain basic phonology to a class of sophomores?"

I stare at her. Damn it! She was funny too? "No."

"He wanted to explain voiced and voiceless consonants, so he starts by saying, 'Let's consider the b-ness and the p-ness of the consonants'."

I choke, cough, and turn back to my shelf stocking. I don't want my boss to see me laughing at such a horrible joke.

The first night she's there, two women—post-retirement sisters who only work a couple of hours per week for the discount—are murdered in the break room as they close the store. The manager finds them the next morning, bludgeoned with a bolt of broadcloth, stabbed with size 000 crochet hooks. The police come. The police leave. The police leave the case unsolved, practically untouched. The looked on their faces make it clear that they're not interested in a couple of sewing grannies.

Toward the end of her first week, we close the store together. As I start walking toward the back to grab my personal items, she says to me, "Better watch your back." I don't respond because I don't know how. Is she threatening me? I watch her over my shoulder as I walk away. She picked up a pair of thin, metal knitting needles and weighed them in her hand before the door to the break room swung shut. I snap on the light and wonder who decided to decorate the break room with the little ceramic gnomes.

I go in the next day to find Mandy has covered someone else's shift. I do my best to avoid her through my time. I hide between the sheets (of fabric), behind the buttons, under the weather-specific garden items. But everywhere I hid, she found me. Where did we stock the the extra sheers for the cutting table? Did we have any more of the purple lamé spandex? When would the next shipment of 18 gauge modeling wire be coming in? I give up hiding and chose the spotlight instead—the cash register.

And who closed again? Mandy and I. As the only other remaining employee waves goodnight, I stand alone at the register. Scissors? Modeling wire? Yesterday Mandy weighed the knitting needles in her hand? Maybe I'm next, following in the frightening fate of the sisters. It all seems like she has it in for me. I'm the only other linguistic knitting novelty. I'm her only competition to be the store's linguistic bauble, stocked next to the charms at the end of the jewelry isle.

I just can't figure out why she wants the purple lamé spandex.

So I go about closing up the store: lights, locks, leftover remnants. As I'm heading back to the break room to collect my things, Mandy appears next to me. She's looking at the door to the break room. "Watch your back," she says.

No, I decide. I won't let her intimidate me. I straighten my shoulders and walk directly into the break room. The door swings shut behind me. A giggle echoes.

My hands are grasped behind me, and feel the wire wrapping around my wrists. Something else binds my legs from knees to ankles. I'm shoved in the chest with something the weight of my overfed cat, and I fall to the floor. I hear the crack of my head against the cement before I feel it. The cat continues to sit on my stomach. Something stabs me in the chest. I scream.

Light floods the room, and the commotion ceases. I'm greeted by the creepy, deranged expression painted across the face of a gnome. It's tiny ceramic hands grip the orange handled scissors plunged into my chest.

A knitting needle flies, striking the gnome in the neck and sliding through it like it was meant to be there. Another needle flies, and I realize it's struck the gnome tugging at the purple lamé spandex wrapped around my legs. I turn to the source, and see Mandy in the doorway. She throws several more needles, disabling other garden goodies which are already frozen in the light.

With the danger under control, she drops to my side. "I've called 911."

What can I say? I'm predicting my own death here. We all know it won't matter.

"Where's a linguist's favorite place to shop?" she asks me.

"Where?"

She smacks her lips together. Being on the verge of death, it takes me a moment to remember the International Phonetic Alphabet. And what's the symbol for the bilabial click, a sound as common as t or d in Botswana? Well, it's a circle with a dot in the center. Make it red, and you have a Target logo.

What really kills me? It's not the massive head injury. It's not even the scissors in my chest. It's the obscene amount of cough-laughing I do from the worst joke I've ever heard.

And that, my friends, is how I will die.

_____________________
Be sure to check out the rest of the entries!

Guest Post: Hart Johnson – Wonky Trails

Today Charity and I are both pleased to host Hart Johnson, awesome naked mistress extraodinaire, and author of some upcoming cozy mysteries.

Hart and I frequently see virtual-eye to virtual-eye. We both came back to writing through fan fiction (though not the same subject matter, since mine is a Buffy obsession). So I asked Hart if she could talk about how fan fiction helped her get to where she is today.

Since I've started writing again, it's taken me a while to realize that my one way is not the only way. I can't just write a novel, query it, and become the next JK Rowling. Granted, I wrote fan fiction at the early stages, but I wrote it for me only, without any thoughts of posting it somewhere. Now, I'm looking for different ways to break in, and I'm open to suggestion.

This is part of the reason why Charity and I are hosting the HONE YOUR SKILLS Blogfest. Many of us only focus on novel-length fiction, but we all have different means to get in the door. One way (though not Hart's) is to join us in our blogfest by writing short fiction. We're interested in helping each other build our resumes, hoping an agent will be more willing to take a chance.

All that aside, I'm pleased to welcome Hart Johnson to talk about how she broke into the market. For those of you who know her, you already know she never follows the traditional route... for anything :)

And so, without further ado....
_________________________________

First of all, I really want to thank Rosie and Charity for asking me to play. Most kids are worried what their mothers will think, so it's nice to have people take a chance. Seriously though, I've gotten to be good friends with Rosie and I think if it weren't for geography and maybe about fifteen or twenty years, we would have hung out together for real. That's one of the things I love about this blogosphere... meeting people you actually have... I guess it's similar processors to... because on paper I'm not sure we have so much in common, but we assess things very similarly.

Anyway, Rosie asked if I'd address my...erm... alternative route... I never do things the way they say you should. It's just not the way I roll, but somehow I've managed to slide in there sideways...

Thus... Wonky Trails

Once upon a time I wanted to be a writer... but it was the same kind of desire as wanting to be a model or an actor. It seemed some OUT THERE unattainable thing. I would plot stories and write a couple paragraphs and then bury them as even more embarrassing than the angsty poetry that filled several dozen notebooks in my teens. At 26, the summer between my first and second year of grad school, I suddenly had 'time on my hands' (when full time work and full time school cut back to only full time work *rolls eyes*) and even managed about 250 pages of an (amazingly bad) horror novel (set partly in Portland, and partly at Lake Coeur d'Alene—pic above). But I was under the disillusion that a person wrote as they went and was just inspired... and I didn't know where that dumb thing was going... the combo of getting busy again with school and not having a clue what came next was enough to drop it.

Enter a decade or so and a Harry Potter obsession...

Before Harry Potter I had maybe a dozen books I'd read twice. None more than that. But when my daughter brought the first one home from the library (she was a first grader) I fell in love. Santa brought the set (4 at that point) so I read them to me, and then I read them to her... and then I read them to her again when the fifth came out... and then my son wanted to read them all... So in the wait for Half Blood Prince, the writer in me was itchy to predict what would HAPPEN next... I found HPANA and a FABULOUS group of people who (I swear have changed my life) debated endlessly, supported by canon, finding the clues... and in spite of myself I learned that a well done book, and ESPECIALLY a well done series has a PLAN (buwahahahahahahahahaha –excuse me. That is my plan demon).

I had a WILD theory that because Voldemort had killed his father, (and because of some things in the timeline—death years) that Voldemort made his death eaters kill THEIR fathers to prove their loyalty to him... which led to Snape... Would Snape have had to kill his father? Well, OBVIOUSLY!

Nobody would believe me.

So I wrote it. I ventured into their fan fiction forums with my story from an Eileen Snape point of view... about her life... a brother sucked into Voldemort's realm... killed for his doubt... a plan for revenge...

And I learned what it takes to finish a story... and I wrote more.

I am a deep believer in fan fiction as a training ground because as a writer, you can work on a couple angles at a time. There are already developed characters, so you need to think about things like consistency. We had debated so much that we thought about things like WHY certain characters were the way they were (thus my goal of explaining much of Snape's bitterness... and how a WITCH allows herself to be abused by a muggle). That first story was a PREQUEL, so I knew where it ended... all the things we have in the books had to be consistent with my ending...

But I also wrote a 'book 7' before Deathly Hallows was out where I got to plot ahead. It is a really nice system for being able to not have to think about everything at once.


The REAL Book (because of course fan fiction is imaginary *shifty*)

 Not very far into the writing of The Other Prince (because of course it was posted serially), one of my readers, Rayna Iyer, told me I should consider writing a regular book. I'd had an idea niggling at me for (literally) years and I started to write down some of the details. I wrote a couple scenes, then got another idea... and FINALLY had an epiphany about how to fit the two ideas into a single story that had a lot more meat to it.

I continued to write the fan fiction because of course... my readers wanted me to! (the other bonus... you are accountable) but I also wrote Confluence... took 2 ½ years... and then another 6 months before I thought I was ready and queried my 204,000 word book *dies* (oh yeah... nobody said there weren't bumps)


That's about when I started BLOGGING

Now here I need to explain something... I envision myself as erm... dark and mysterious... I write SUSPENSE *shivers *...

But when it was time to blog, I sort of looked at what I had to work with, and honestly, I'm sort of a nut... possibly insane... definitely delusional... my strength is in my ability to PLAY. So I thought, 'fine, let's work with that.' Suspense readers are hiding under their beds shivering anyway, and I had networking to get to.

I found a few successful bloggers, and I stalked 'em like a good blogger... and I met some people... and I bet I hadn't been doing it three months when I heard 'you should write cozy mysteries.' (say what?) I stored that in my hat, or something, because frankly, the idea of mystery scared the crap out of me. It seemed like finely honed CRAFT, far more organized than... you know... me.

But last February an opportunity arose for an 'audition' of sorts... now most books are written in full and submitted to agents, revised, then submitted to publishers (with about a hundred layers of rejection built in) but some genres have such avid readers that there is a bit more of a... system... This exists for romance, and it exists for Cozy Mystery... The various editors define some parameters and give writers a chance to 'try out' with the first 50 pages. I had a referral to an agent to help me with this and... I GOT IT... It's a three book contract, the first of which is with my editor right now—hopefully the feedback will be positive, but I am waiting to start the second in case she envisions a different direction.

So see... while a more normal path might be and MFA program, or writing short stories for literary mags... I snuck in the side door. And what I've learned, is CONSTANT VIGILANCE! The way in may NOT be the one you expect.

_____________________________

Thanks, Hart!

While Hart was definitely lucky to have found the side door, I know I haven't found it yet.

Have you found a different door? Or are you trying to squeeze through the front with the rest of us?

Remember, join us for the HONE YOUR SKILLS Blogfest, in which we help each other build that resume. There's still three more weeks before D-Day, so there's plenty of time to focus on a short piece of fewer than 1000 words!