Scores, Strings, and A Crazy Little Thing Called Memberships

First, remember to sign up for the What's the Score Blogfest for June 1st. List songs you'd like to be in the soundtrack to your WIP, and win prizes just for participating. Click above or on the right for more details.




_____________________

Jessica Bell is organizing the promotion for her upcoming release, STRING BRIDGE. Think you might be interested in getting an ARC and posting a review? Being involved in the Amazon Chart rush? Her Blog Tour? Hope over to Jessica's blog and sign up.

If you missed the trailer:

_____________________

For those of you new to my life and woes, there's something you need to know:

I'm a recovering linguist.

This means several things for my writing. First, when I write, I have to focus A LOT on the voice, because I'm still trying to purse the academicese from my writing. Keeping my prose clean of the dry, scientific, observational sentence structures is tough. Seriously.

Another remnant of my linguist days are my society memberships. I'm a member of LSA, SLS, and  AATSEEL. I even freelance as an editor for the publisher of the journal associated with SLS. I'm in deep, folks... at least until I have to renew again in the winter. Then I can let those memberships laps.

But thinking about those has got me thinking about memberships in writerly organizations, and I don't know which are the best for a budding writer on a limited budget. For example, SCBWI is $85 for the first year. I'm sure it's worth it, but that figure about makes me want to faint. Membership in LSA was only $20! I could stay a linguist for four more years and still be able to buy lunch.

Okay, I'm done complaining.  SCBWI offers lots of great services and perks to members. The question is: do I belong there?

Really, that's the problem. I don't know where I belong. I could join SCBWI, but my work straddles YA and adult. Would SCBWI be a good fit for me? What about RWA (at $110)? I don't really consider myself a romance author, though there are strong tones of romance. How about SFWA? Well, a quick look at their website indicates that I'm not eligible, anyway.


So, help me out. What societies are out there for a writer trying to make her way? If you're a member, do you feel you get your money's worth from the dues? How do you make the most of your memberships?

An Award :)

First, if you haven't heard yet or you're still on the fence, please join me and Charity for the HONE YOUR SKILLS Blogfest on March 16th. It's a chance to try your hand at a short story, get feedback from fellow writer-bloggers, and encouragement to try and publish it. We'd love to have you, so just click the link above or on the sidebar to join.
_____________________________________

Last week, I was given an award from Allan Russell at Publish or Perish AND from Michelle at Perfecting the Craft...

UPDATE: I also just received this award from Kristina at KayKay's Corner. Man, am I feeling the love or WHAT?

Kristina also gave me this award:

Thank you so much, Al, Michelle, and Kristina!

For those of you who don't know Al, he is the author of Veiled in Shadows, the beautiful cover of which is staring at me from the top of my to-read pile. Then again, maybe I'm just a sucker for the big blue eye :)

(On a side note, stop by on Monday for a guest post by Al.)

According to the rules of the award, I should tell you seven things about myself and then pass it on. Here's a random assortment of things you may not yet know about me. I'll limit myself to non-writing things this time. For other random Rosie facts, you can check out these other posts: from here, here (the the truth behind it), here, and one more.

1. As a recovering linguist, I'm a language junkie. I'm not fluent in any language (I sometimes contend that I'm not even fluent in English), though my husband likes to argue this point with me. Anyway, over the few decades of my life, I've studied (in no particular order) Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, Macedonian, and Welsh officially. If I have a dictionary, I can usually read Czech, Slovak, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian well enough. I also know lots of random syntax facts about Icelandic, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Dogon (my friend is currently working on a Dogon grammar).
2. I'm a graduate student in my last semester of coursework. There exists about a 2% chance that I will write a dissertation (with a 3% margin of error).
3. If I were ever to write a dissertation, I would write it on Polish syntax and the reflexive particle się. (I promise, it's a little more interesting than Wikipedia makes it out to be.) Last summer I got to meet Norbert Hornstein, whose most recent syntactic framework is called MOVE! (yes, with the exclamation point), and talk to him about my ideas using his framework. We argued a lot. We disagreed even more. It was fun and discouraging.
4. My graduate employment consisted of teaching Russian for only one year. I have never worked so hard. I taught in the 2007–2008 school year. Many of my former students were freshmen that year, and so are seniors now. I occasionally run into them on campus, and sometimes they even invite me out for a drink to catch up. :)
5. My current GA employment is working as the Managing Editor of the for Journal of Slavic Linguistics for Slavica Publishers. I prepare journals and books for publication. In addition to the journal, which I have worked on since 2006, I am currently preparing a book on Macedonian. It should be finish in the next month and be published by summer.
6. I have never published anything regarding linguistics. I've only edited other people's work. This doesn't bother me, though my colleagues think it should.
7. I had no intention of this turning into a Rosie's-grad-school-life post. Just to mix it up, I'll tell you that I got new glasses last week. They've got the Transitions lenses, too. I can't begin to tell you how excited they make me :)

Okay, now for passing on the love.

Carol at ArtziCarol Ramblings
Jan at Crazy Jane
Sallee at The Highly Educated Housewife
Medeia at Sharif Writes
Charity at My Writing Journey
Dezmond at Hollywood Spy

Thanks again to Al, Michelle, and Kristina for the award. :) Have a great Wednesday!

Calling All Members of the Geek Squad!

Imagine, if you can, a particular signal in the sky, calling you to the special secret meeting place.  Is it a bird?  Is it a plane?  Is it a poorly-written footnote with an incorrect bibliographical reference?  If you're a true member, you already know.

Today's been odd at best.  This morning (and when I say morning, I mean 9am to 1:45pm), my Macedonian class met at Kroger.  Yes, at Kroger.  I now have pages upon pages of food vocabulary to memorize on top of my delinquent backlog of vocab from three units of my text book.  Luckily, random things like cilantro (coriander) are (transcribed) koriander, or mango, or banana.  But I digress... 

While sitting in the wacky little cafe-like area at this particularly over-sized Kroger (like a genetically engineered watermelon/lubenitsa?), I open my planner to write down my homework, and there, written in my usual, messy, pencil scrawl, is a note telling me I have a meeting with one of my linguistics professors at 3.

Crap!  (I think I actually said that out loud in the middle of discussing our favorite movies.)

Yeah, I forgot.  Camping and migraines certainly didn't help, but I don't need to make excuses for myself.  I just plain forgot.  And what preparation had I done?  Zero, zilch, nada, nic, nishto, nichego, rien, ingenting...  (If anyone has any other languages to kick in, I'll happily inflate my list.)

So I rush home from this morning's grocery-store antics, flip open my computer, rummage around trying to find the right files full of half-baked Polish clitic data.  I've migrated computers since I collected the data, and I couldn't remember where it ended up, so it took an extra couple of minutes.  I had enough time to print off two copies of the data, eat my lunch, and read a handful of today's blog posts before I had to hop on my bike and head to campus.

And was it worth it?  So very, utterly, completely worth it!

Yup, I'm a geek.  Possibly the queen of geekdom.  Why? you ask.  Well, because I'm taking an incredibly complicated problem (the one that guides almost everything I write anymore**) and trying to work it into an up-and-coming new alternative framework.  And you know what?  It might not work.  And that's friggin' cool, because it means that I get to adapt the system.  Oh, yeah!

On the other hand, it means that I need to be WAY more organized with my life and my time.  No more three-day stints of laying on my couch for eight-hour stretches and trying to increase the sexual tension between my characters.  Nope.

*sigh*


The Priorities List: (the order is subject to change without notice)

1) Study for the class I'm actually taking right now!

2) Work.  Yeah, I have a job.  I usually forget about it since it's relatively freelance and my boss is infinitely more disorganized than I am (meaning, he doesn't check up on my progress).

3) Friggin' awesome linguistics research.

4) Writing.


I hate that writing comes at the end of my list, but surely it must at the moment.  We'll see how well that sticks, but I need to try for a little while.  Blogging should probably also come in as #5, but... well... a girl needs her cyberfolk, right?  Here goes nothing...


**...that's not fiction. Although it might be fiction.  I'm not sure.  Most graduate studies that abstract past the point of sanity could (should?) be considered fiction.  But that's probably a topic for another blog post.

Don't Get Cocky, Woman!

Today, I had a reality check.  I'm currently taking an intense language course--1 year's worth of language in 8 weeks--to finish up my PhD coursework.  I'm the only person in the class (of 3) with extensive background within the same language family.  In fact, this is my 3rd Slavic language--Russian, Polish, and now Macedonian... And, no, it's not Greek.  It's Slavic.  I promise.

And the class--of course!--is moving quite quickly.

But, this weekend, I didn't study.  In fact, I did very little work for class at all (and I'm hoping that my instructor doesn't link to this blog from my other one to see me admitting this).  After a trip to the farmers' market and a little gardening, I spent virtually all of Saturday working on writing the correspondence between my 2 main characters, and trying to imagine what it would have been like for my male lead when he was 14.  Sunday, I got up late, cleaned a little, did the bare minimum of my homework, and then we had people over for a BBQ potluck.

So, how did that go for me, you wonder?  Or do you even need to ask?  How many words were there today that I couldn't remember from just last week?  How many ways did I mispronounce the numbers we learned on Friday?  And yet I could still guess what the verb is for "sell" and "sing" based on the other languages in the family.  But that doesn't mean I know what I'm doing.  That means I'm a halfway competent linguist with a good aptitude toward guessing.

After feeling rather embarrassed this morning by my lack of preparation, I've decided to kick it into a higher gear.  Despite the fact that I've spent the last two hours reading my blogs and finding a few new interesting ones, I'm getting ready to go to work.  You may think I'm procrastinating by blogging first (and maybe that's true), but I felt compelled to write about this.

As Charity Bradford has been comparing her writing process to cake baking in her recent blog posts, I would like to compare my language class to my writing.  When I finished the first draft of book 1 (ahem... Russian), I started book 2 without hardly blinking (Polish).  And then book 3.  Admittedly, my momentum dried up about halfway through #3, and I had to pause and "rewrite".  I put rewrite in quotes because what I did constituted hardly more than copy-editing.  So I "rewrote" #1-2 before making my way back to book 3 and "finishing" (Macedonian).

And then I got cocky.  People started asking me if I would want to get it published.  "Sure!"  Who wouldn't want to do just that?  I hadn't even spent a year on it, so why shouldn't I expect a nice advance and instant fame a la Stephenie Meyer?  HAHA!

A number of humbling experiences have brought me back to reality, and I've gladly pulled my head out of... er... the clouds.  I have good friends who are graciously critiquing my work, telling me which areas I need to work on more, or where I'm just missing the bigger picture.

Is this sounding like a good teacher yet?  There's only so much that a person can do on their own.  Of course, there are those few people in the world who sit down and 48 hours later they have a publishable novel, or they sit down with a textbook and are fluent in Chinese the next week.  I am NOT one of those people.  I need to talk things through.  I need a guiding hand.  Eventually, I can get to the point where I can be self-sufficient and continue learning on my own, but that takes time.  And I'm not there yet.

So, before I let my head inflate to unmanageable proportions, I'm off to study my vocabulary, my verb endings, and my numbers.  And I'll probably post at least one exercise on my other blog... after I go back and revise some of the old ones :)

Quote of the Day

For this quote, two definitions are necessary:

1) sex: ... well, maybe you know this one.

2) subjacency: (noun, linguistics) a restriction on grammatical movement in the sentence that prevents elements moving over more than one boundary, the definition of boundary varying as a parameter from one language to another.

Completely understanding number 2 isn't vital.  Number 1... well, Darwin thinks you need to know this one.

Quote: "Subjacency has many virtues, but... it could not have increased the chances of having fruitful sex."

From Lightfoot, D. (1991) "Subjacency and sex". Language and communication 11: 67-69.

This is one of the many reasons why I love linguists.