Changes, Constants, and the Big Announcement

Anyone know what happened to Blogger over the past few days? I suppose that’s what I get for delaying my announcement.

So, as some of your may know, I just finished my time in graduate school. Hurray! I’ve decided to move on to other things—like writing (plus a part-time gig)—to while away the hours. For a while it didn’t look possible, but my husband was offered a pretty nice new job with his shiny new PhD. We’ll be moving in August, though just across town. My life is full of changes right now, though they’re all for the better.

But I’ve got one consistent thing in my life… okay, yeah, I’ve got TONS of them, considering we’re not moving to South Dakota or Peru or something. But, when it comes to the relevance of this blog, I have something that’s strongly consistent.

The blog itself.

May 31st marks my one-year blogiversary!

And you know me. I HAVE to celebrate. What does that mean?

BLOGFEST :)

To celebrate, I’m hosting the What’s the Score Blogfest.

On June 1st, post any number of songs, artists, composers, posers, who/whatever that you might want to include in the soundtrack to your WIP. YOU’RE IN CHARGE! You make the soundtrack the way you want it.

Don’t have a WIP? Is your WIP’s soundtrack personal and not something you want to share? No problem! Take your favorite book, or the book your reading right now, or a book you remember well, and make a soundtrack for it.

Want to enter? The Linky List is at the bottom of the page.

Are you thinking, “Meh. Too much work?” Can I add a little incentive?

No celebration is complete without prizes, right?

Prizes:

• Every person who participates is automatically entered to win either a $20 AMAZON GIFT CARD.
• Every person who participates is automatically entered to win a BOOK OF HIS/HER CHOICE from Amazon.
• Anyone who WANTS to have their name added to win either a CHAPTER CRITIQUE or a QUERY CRITIQUE, just let me know in a comment ON THIS POST.

Odds of winning?

Honestly, I have no idea, and I’m horrible at statistics, so I can’t really answer that.

HOWEVER, would you like a better chance to win?

• +1 participating
• +2 current follower (as of 5/13/11) / +1 new follower
• +1 for Tweeting (max. 3; include @rosieanabelle in your Tweet)
• +1 for Facebook post (please provide a link)
• +3 for adding the graphic to your sidebar (please provide a link)
• +5 for posting about it (please provide a link)

That’s a total maximum of 15 points. Talk about increasing your odds!

Well, I hope the announcement was worth the wait, especially with Blogger being funny. Hope to see you on June 1!

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.
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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!

One Week Down

This week classes started at the university again. I'm trying to get my schedule in order, and the pieces don't seem to want to fit into the neat little slots I've assigned for them. Figures. It's just going to take some time to sort things out, I suppose.

The biggest problem with trying to reorganize is that writing tends to fall to the side. I need some time when I can concentrate and sit in personal-zone silence (meaning, I can be at a coffee shop as long as no one's talking to me), but when my life is a mess, I don't generally make that time for myself.

So my plan for the long weekend (which, since I only have Mon-Wed classes, means I have until Tuesday) is to work out a schedule in which I can:

• get my homework done reasonably and without extra stress
• use extra homework time to write
• get to the gym 3-4x per week
• schedule time dedicated to working on my freelance projects
• read at least one hour per night
• write at least a couple hours every day
• have time to spend with my husband

Pulling off that schedule would be a feat of the invincible. If I can work it out still come out sane on the other side, I do believe I should transcend to superhero status.

How do you keep yourself organized? How do you find time to write if you have a job/school?

Back from... Somewhere

Look at me, hosting my 100 Followers #contest, and then I disappear for days.  Bad Rosie!

Welcome to my newer followers!  Thanks for coming by to check out the blog.  And a big thank you to my old followers for staying interested and putting up with my time-lapses :/

Don't forget! You have until Friday to enter!

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It's been a difficult week, and I'm not sure where it went, to be honest.  I remember Tuesday, and then all of a sudden it was Saturday.  I think I must have hit a temporal flux somewhere along the line.

My sincerest apologies, folks.  Here I am, attempting to rejoin regular blogging society.

Update: the write-up from my interview... well, it happened.  I turned it in on Wednesday.  After we'd passed them back, during the course of discussion I realized I hadn't entirely followed the directions of the assignment.  Ack!  Plus I didn't like the characterization (though there's very little one can do in 400 words), and many other things about it.  I suppose as writers, we're always highly self-critical, right?

On Friday, I was chatting with another student from the class outside the building when our instructor came up.  She started chatting with us, talking about how much she loved everyone's story from class so much, and that she planned to read a few during class.  Well, she started with *mine*.  Dumbstruck = me!  She had a lot of great things to say about it, including that, with some minor tweaks, I could get it published. 

Say what???

Oh, so giddy am I.  Later that day, I got a lovely compliment from someone in my critique group, too.  Since I wasn't feeling well, the two of those things really lifted my spirits and made my day so much better.

Otherwise, my last three days have been spent in a haze from which I am only beginning to recover.  While I've gotten some writing done, I'm terrified as to the quality I will find when I go back to edit it.  But the positive comments from this week also make me feel a bit more confident about what I'll find.  Editing will be necessary (when is it ever not??), but maybe it won't be quite as bad.

It all got me thinking about the advice and criticism we all crave.  For months, since joining the online blogosphere of the writing world, I've desperately wanted hard-nailed constructive criticism.  And I've gotten it in many forms.  Each time I've welcomed it (mostly) openly, and appreciated each piece.  In my desire for the constructive to improve my craft, I think I lost sight of the need for positive reinforcement and how much that's necessary as well.  While I feel a little head-swelly from Friday's compliments, I also remembered that, yeah, it's good to hear that people like my work.  There's only so much self-flagellation a girl can take without caring for her wounds, too, right? Or eventually it gets to be too much and she has to stop.

So, hurrah for the positive!

And here, I need to send a out a quick thanks to those who have given me the most positive feedback along the way and made me feel like I can really do this: Jose, Maria, Catalina, Nazarea, Carol, Auzy, Astra, and the rest of my crit group.  You're all awesome!  Thank you :)

What's some praise you've received recently?  Publication of a small/big work?  Partial/full request?  A friend saying how much they enjoy reading your chapters?

PS—I've recently received a few awards, too.  Yea for more praise!  I'll be posting them over the next couple of days.

Real World Writing

No, this has nothing to do with MTV.

Yesterday my writing class took a field trip.  Our instructor told us nothing before our arrival in class as to what we were doing or where we were going or how it related to writing.  So we arrived, expectant, and waited for her announcement.

The assignment (and there was no choice regarding acceptance): (i) go to the Student Union and interview someone you've never met about a time when they got kicked out of somewhere, (ii) write up the details of said story, and (iii) fictionalize it into a story of 300-400 words.  And we only got one shot once the person agreed.  She forbade us from interviewing multiple people.

At the words "you've never met", my adrenaline kicked into overdrive.  I'm not an interviewer.  If I were, I'd be in journalism classes, not fiction.  I'm a lock-myself-up-and-write type, and... other people? What's that?  As we left the classroom, another woman from class and I started discussing, first, how this was crazy and we were already embarrassed :) and then strategies on how to find people who weren't trying to study and would therefore be more willing to talk to us.

I guess it worked—once I swallowed my pride and my fear.  The first person I asked not only was willing to talk to me (sitting in the food court with his half-eaten Pizza Hut bread stick), but he had a great story.  Due to confidentiality restrictions required by the assignment, I can't share it, but I will tell you that I laughed the entire time he relayed his story, and that it involved a Walmart and a ripstik.

Feel free to use your imaginations.

This exercise really emphasized the importance of using the real world (as opposed to the Real World) in writing.  Once I got over my initial apprehension, I realized what a fabulous assignment this is.  I'm still nervous about the writing part—even though the instructor assured us that we in no way had to stay true to the original story—but it's taken me beyond my comfort zone and asked me to do more.  That I sincerely appreciate.


What leaps do you take for your writing?  Have you ever been nervous about taking extra steps to make your work more authentic?  How do you push yourself to include the real world (or the Real World if you love MTV)?

Writing Prompts Gone Bad

What do you do when your writing prompt goes wrong? I mean, rebels, takes a gun, and robs a bank, bad.  Or Charles Manson bad.  Or passive-aggressive, why didn't my mother ever love me bad.

(Warning: Info Dump!)

As you know, I'm taking a writing class right now.  We have two pretty nice books: The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante and Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern.  They each have many good qualities, though I've read fewer than 100 pages total.

Okay, back to the point.

In Stern's book, there's an interlude entitled "Don't Do This: A Short Guide to What Not to Do" (65-76).  They're all obvious things (e.g., don't end you story with "And then the alarm woke me up."), but some of them stuck with me, and I want to force fun stories from them.  I have no intention of writing the typical story that the author is warning against, but twist it into something entertaining.

For example:

Hobos in Space.  This prompt has a lot of potential for a bad MST2K kind of story.  Stern wasn't literally suggesting take a hobo and put him/her in space, but instead discussed the abhorrent mimicking of Samuel Beckett.  That's not my plan.  (And I can't stop hearing the muppets yelling "Pigs In Spaaaaaaace" in my head.)

Bachelor party takes groom-to-be to brothel to find bride hard at work.  Yes, I intentionally used the word "hard".  The point Stern was making here was that many times this is the end of a story.  I really want to write this one from first-discovery on.  Do they still get married?  Does she get mad at him for invading her "office space"?

The Zero-to-Zero story. The MC who never learns anything. Yes, this is horrible and cliché and a disservice to the reader.  But what about the Zero-to-Two story, where the MC kind of gets it, but not really, and inevitably gets it wrong but sort of tried?



Try any good writing prompts lately?  Or any ideas on how to expand upon the prompts above?

I Love Knowing Smart People

Okay, folks.  Remember how I've been trying to find balance and order between all of the many haphazard parts of my life?  Well, I found part of the answer yesterday on the blog of a very smart woman.

Jemi (Just Jemi) described how she's ordered her blog reading with folders in Google Reader.  Totally copying from Jemi, I not only set up folders for each day of the week, but I added a Daily folder (mainly for agents' blogs), and a "Whenever" folder (e.g., for the gluten-free food blogs I follow).  I know this is going to make my life so much more manageable.

Thanks, Jemi!

So, for those of you who I've missed recently, fear not.  I shall return.  I just might not return every day.  But at least this way I get to see you sometimes! :)

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In writing-related occurrences, if you didn't see yesterday's post, I'm excited about my new photo acquisition for a character in my WiP.  I'm still working toward finishing my latest draft of WiP#1 by the end of September.  My current word count holds at about 36K.  I didn't get any time to work on it on Monday, but hopefully I'll find some time on Tuesday.

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Here's a school update after day 1, for those of you who might be interested.  I've gone to my first fiction writing class already, and it was awesome.  The instructor's cool, excited, and adorable.  The other students are a wide mix from campus: seniors and freshman; creative writing majors, grad-me, and psychology majors; an even balance of men and women.

It looks like it's going to be a good class.  For the first few weeks, we'll be focusing on characterization one week, story arcs another, dialogue another, etc.  And at the end of each class she'll give us 5-10 minutes and a writing prompt to get the ol' brain cells activated.  We'll see what comes out of yesterday's prompt over the weekend...

I also had my German for reading class.  It was more or less what I expected.  The instructor said from the get-go that this would be a boring class—monotonous and tedious—but I so sincerely appreciated his honesty about it.  A few years ago I took the equivalent French class, and it was torture for many, many, many, MANY reasons (are you getting how torturous it was??), but the fact that the instructor RESENTED our boredom was ridiculous.  You translate sentences, go around in a circle to talk about your translation, you get a little bit of grammar instruction, go home, prepare, and do it again the next day.  What's exciting about that?  So, kuddos for the German guy for his honesty and bluntness.  And he doesn't care that I bought the e-book, which is good since it was 1/2 the price!

For said German class, I was dreading my hike to the library in the hopes that one more German-English dictionary could be acquired from the shelves, but I didn't have to go :)  My adviser loaned me his German-English dictionary from when he took the class XX years ago.  I'm smiling at it right now.  I love when things are easier than they should be.

In that vein, I get to pick up my books tomorrow, prepackaged and waiting for me at a pick up window in the Union.  How cool is that?

Oh, and finally, after German I went for wine with my awesome friend from the Spanish department—who, coincidentally, suffered with me through the French class.  This woman is so funny that, by the end of my third glass of wine, I was laughing so loudly I was probably irritating the wait staff (who were trying to go home... we were the last folks there...).  It was a great way to end the long first day.

And, today, the gym.  Duh duh dunnnnnnnn....


So, I stink and have no good question for you, my lovely readers, today.  My excuse: I'm writing this Monday night and am an alcoholic lightweight.  Sorry!  I promise for my interesting and writing-related insights throughout the rest of the week.

Happy Tuesday, y'all :)

The Weekend Calls

This is officially my last weekend of summer before classes begin on Monday.  Many of our friends have returned, and so people are excited to get together before the grind starts in earnest.

In other news, I still have no good formula for balance.  I'm working on it.  Google Reader is helping, but it feels so impersonal without the cool layouts.

What else?  Oh!  My totally awesomely amazing friend Rory, who you may remember from the wedding we were in a few weeks ago, sent me a page from her Vanity Fair.  While we were waiting to have our hair and makeup done, she and I flipped through a couple of magazines, chatting about this and that.  She was in mid-sentence, but my enthusiasm got the better of me, and I twisted the magazine around to show her an ad and said, "This looks exactly like one of my characters."  Then, distracted by, oh, the WEDDING, I forgot about it until I got home.  When I tried to find a picture of the same woman online, it was obviously impossible since I didn't know her name or even the ad she was in, only that it was in the Vanity Fair with Lady Gaga on the cover.  In a moment of desperation, I emailed Rory and asked her to mail me the picture.  And she did!!  Thank you, Rory! Rawr! :)

PS—Having the ad in hand doesn't make it any easier to find it online to share with you.  If you care, it's from the Lady Gaga issue.  It's a Banana Republic ad on the left-hand page.  The woman in the ad is holding a black umbrella and is wearing a gray sweater and pink blouse.  She's a beautiful redhead with freckles and blue eyes. If you find an electronic copy of the ad, PLEASE let me know.  I keep my pictures together in a file on my computer for when I'm not at home, and I don't know when I'll be able to use a scanner next.

In other writing-related happenings, I recently joined an online critique group and it's awesome.  I've not only gotten some fabulous feedback, but I've had a chance to review other people's work and learn from their positives and negatives.  The folks are great, balancing the critiques with the good and the needs-improving.  Luck is what I can attribute to it.

One of the "events" from the group is finishing our word-count goals by the end of September.  This should prove interesting.  I have the original MS, which is close to 150K, but I'm changing a few things in the plot and rearranging certain events, and hoping to end up around 90-100K before more editing and cutting.  I'm currently at 34K, but since I'm reusing some of the old MS, I do have less than 66K to go in a month.  I'm thinking about adding a ticker to the sidebar, but I'm not sure where to get one.  Any suggestions?

How about you?  Any great writing news to share?