Write night

Around 30 Austin-area children's and young adult writers gathered for a Happy Hour Wednesday at Waterloo Ice House. Unfortunately, I didn't even get a chance to say hi to everyone who showed up, but everyone I did speak to was great company! As usual. Thanks to Cynthia Leitich Smith for organizing the event, and Jennifer Ziegler for finding a good location for the meeting.

Here are a few pictures, and I know P.J. Hoover's blog has a few more.


Donna Bratton looks quite animated as she talks to P.J. Hoover and Madeline Smoot.


This blurry pic shows Brian Anderson speaking to Jennifer Ziegler. Just behind them is Debbie Gonzales.


Lindsey Lane, Debbie Gonzales, and Mark Mitchell were remarkably patient with my attempts to get a decent shot of them.


A very bright-looking Shana Burg (and of course she is bright!) hanging with Madeline Smoot near the end of the evening.


Recent Austin transplant (convert?) Margo Rabb with Varian Johnson, winner of this year's Alumni Award from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program (congrats, Mr. V!)

And for the record, please note that organizer Cynthia Leitich Smith's absence from the photographs posted does not necessarily have anything to do with the fact that she writes books about vampires, who apparently do not show up in photographs. ;-)

Happy things

1) My toddler did great at the Parents' Night Out the other night! He even seemed to like it! He was there 4 hours, and the worker was sad to see him go because she said he had such a great laugh!

2) Because of that, we got to go on a real date, without kids, for the first time in 18 months!!! (Technically the second time, but the first time we couldn't stay long and he did cry nearly the whole time we were gone.) He picked up some kind of stomach bug from the childcare that made him get sick about 20 times over the next couple of days...but it was worth it!

3) My husband finally finished reading my midgrade novel manuscript last week, and told me, "I don't see any reason why we won't be seeing this on the shelf at Barnes & Noble soon." :-)

4) To my amazement, Jennifer Ziegler's daughter and son both read and liked the aforementioned manuscript when I gave it to Jennifer to read, and her daughter, who is in the target age group, said it was her "favorite book ever"!! That was so unexpected and wonderful, it probably made it worth it to write the book even if it never gets published!

5) I get to look at this every day.

Friday six

Six things on Friday, because alliteration is overrated.

1) My baby turned 18 months old yesterday and learned to jump off the ground with both feet in the evening! My other kids didn't learn that until around 2. This one keeps going, and going, and going... We took him to the children's museum during the day, and at night we had a mini half-birthday celebration for him with cookies he didn't care for and popsicles he definitely did.

The very happy half-birthday boy:



2) The older boys went to art camp this week at an ice rink. I went ice skating with them on Wednesday. It was fun, and I especially enjoyed the fact that skating rink music hasn't changed much since my heyday of skating in the 80s! I remember hearing The Doors, Journey, Howard Jones, and other stuff from the 80s or earlier. So, I may have liked it more than my kids did.

Blurry pic of me on ice, taken by my 7-year-old:



3. I need to finish my monthly garden article and turn it in. It's one of those months where I have so much great information, it's going to be really hard to make the article short enough!

4. We're trying a "Parents' Night Out" again tonight for all 3 boys. Last time we tried one, we were called to pick up the baby because he wouldn't stop crying. This was the first week he's ever played in the church nursery instead of crying or sleeping the whole time--still cried a lot, but played in the middle--so maybe it'll work, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high!

5. Our computer broke this week! Just what we need when we can't afford to replace it. It says it can't find the operating system--yikes. That's the family computer. I still have this laptop (with almost no hard drive space available...), so my husband is going to remove the hard drive from the other computer and hook it up to my laptop to see if the data is still accessible. I sure hope so, because it has our whole lives on it...photos, documents, music and audio clips, etc., going back about 13 years! A lot of it has been backed up, but I think we'd lose the last few months' worth.

6. I'm going to Austin SCBWI's "Day with an Editor" in September. I got in while there were still critique slots available--hooray! I think the whole thing is probably sold out by now.

Time management, tongue tattoos, & video

This morning I went to Austin SCBWI's monthly meeting to see P.J. Hoover talk about goal-setting and time management. She gave out the coolest thing after the meeting: personalized "tongue tattoo" fruit roll-ups with the name of her upcoming book, The Emerald Tablet, printed on them, along with her name and Oct. 2008 (the release date)! A friend of hers won personalized fruit roll-ups and gave them to her. Too fun!

Here are P.J. Hoover and author/illustrator Mark Mitchell showing off one of the fruit-roll ups. Unfortunately, the color in this photo is awful so you can't really see it! I don't think the fruit roll-up, which was reddish pink, was really the color of her shirt, which was somewhat orange. Oh well! P.J. (Tricia) and Cynthia Leitich Smith took close-up pics of a roll-up and will probably post those later. 



In other news, I pushed past my inexplicable bias against online videos and watched the much-ballyhooed Dr. Horrible videos last night... which turned out to be right up my alley. 

Then, probably because of that breakthrough in online video watching and my memory earlier this week of making lots of cassette recordings as a kid, it occurred to me that my digital camera will take short videos. I've used it many times to take family videos, but I just realized that I could do other things with it. So while my husband has been out swimming with all 3 boys this afternoon, I've been using it to practice reading my manuscripts out loud, and even doing some silly voices, singing, and all kinds of goofy stuff just to practice public speaking, etc.

Why didn't we have stuff like this when I was in theatre??? Okay, a couple of families had their own video cameras, but it wasn't common. They were new then, and I didn't really get to use them. I even bought a strange video camera in college so I could make my own short films, but it was bulky and didn't work with regular lighting, so it really wasn't useful. But if I could have taped myself rehearsing or working on stuff years ago, I think it could have made a big difference! Interesting... I can't see myself doing video blogs because (a) I don't really like them, and (b) I write partly because I'm more comfortable communicating in writing than in person. But every time I can see things in a different way, it inspires me!

Awesome workshop

I spent three intense but wonderful days this past weekend at the "Awesome Austin Writers' Workshop" hosted by Cynthia Leitich Smith and Greg Leitich Smith, mostly at their home with the exception of a party at Helen Hemphill's fabulous downtown Austin loft. This involved 25 to 30 writers, in-depth critiques, and excellent food and conversation. I haven't managed to process the whole experience yet, but it definitely lived up to the "Awesome" in its name!

But it wasn't just awesome; for me, I think it even bordered on life-changing. If I look at myself at the protagonist of my own life and try to figure out what I want, what my underlying character goals and motivation are...I think I got some of those things this weekend. While I didn't achieve my external goal of getting a book published, I experienced payoff in some of the areas that make me want to be a writer in the first place. I felt that I was heard. I felt that I was validated. I felt that I was taken seriously. I learned a lot. And the creative charge was amazing!

In my teen years, I was very involved with theatre. I loved the process of acting, bringing new worlds and characters to life (similar to what I still do in writing), but much of what I loved about theatre--the thing that kept me hanging around even when I didn't get a part--was the energy and atmosphere of being surrounded by creative people, bouncing their creativity off of one another, expanding their horizons together, and challenging each other to do excellent work. I have felt a taste of that creative energy again at writing conferences and writing retreats, and even to an extent in my last job as a technical writer, surrounded by other writers, most of whom had their own creative aspirations outside the job. But in my job, we had interesting people focusing on largely boring work. We could spice it up with creative approaches, but I still couldn't get too excited about hardware driver code. At this weekend's workshop, we had interesting people focusing on interesting work, really delving into it and inspiring one another to grow and see things in new ways. This meeting of minds and ideas in the framework of a vibrant and supportive writing community was far more intoxicating than the wine served at the party portion.

At the end of the weekend, Jane Peddicord described Cynthia and Greg as being like fairy godparents for the Austin children's writing scene, and indeed the experience they helped create for us was magical! But I'm hoping that, unlike Cinderella's pumpkin/stagecoach magic, the magic from this won't wear off anytime soon. I feel that I ended the weekend in a different--and better--place than I started it in. It has motivated me to dive back into my own writing with new perspective, and I'm hoping the friendships I made there will continue.

Some of the other participants have also blogged about this: see entries by Greg Leitich Smith, PJ Hoover, and Jo Whittemore. I also found myself in the photos on Greg & PJ's blogs!

Draft done!!

I am pleased to announce I finally have a draft of my midgrade novel, Purple Panic, completed, a whopping 5 years, 7 months, and 12 days after starting it! (Scroll down to my November 10, 2002 blog entry to see when I wrote about starting it!). The current manuscript is 38,488 words long, a far cry from the short chapter book I thought it might be when I started it. I won't be sure what I think of it until it has time to sit for a while, but it's at least to a point where I can let my 9-year-old finish reading it! And now I have to print out all 144 pages.

Meanwhile, I desperately need to get a freelance article done but haven't managed to talk to my interview subject yet, and I'm trying to read and form coherent thoughts on nearly 300 pages of manuscripts for a workshop in a few days. Not to mention dealing with a crazy toddler and a two stir-crazy boys who are home for the summer! They start Magic Camp in two weeks, but for now, it's full days of wall-to-wall kids. (Indeed they do run from wall to wall and back again, leaping and jumping and crashing into things and each other with more energy than I can handle!)

Cool clusters

I've seen these on other people's blogs the past few days, and I find them fascinating! These are word clusters of some of the most commonly used words in my manuscripts. The Wordle application generates them in randomly chosen styles, fonts, and colors.

Click on them to see them larger!

Here's one from the midgrade I'm almost done drafting right now, Purple Panic, which is obviously about chewing gum! This one seems perfect to me.



And here's my favorite, from my YA-in-progress, End of the Line. This was the first one I generated, and as soon as I saw it I gasped because it looked just like something my protagonist might doodle about her own story. (I've noticed the protagonist's name doesn't appear in it, though!)



For my older YA novel that's the closest to being done, Chasing Monday, I had it generate a few versions with different fonts and colors, but I think this rather fish-shaped one is my favorite of the ones I saved. Clearly, my protagonist is a little self-absorbed...but since it's basically about her figuring out who she is, I guess "I'm" is a decent word to be the most common.



Then I even made some for the picture book manuscripts I just submitted to the mustard writing contest! Think the word "mustard" is prominent enough? It's certainly more prominent than in a typical manuscript!





And finally I did one for my abandoned NaNoWriMo novel from 2006, which I only got about 7,000 words into. This almost makes me want to go back to the manuscript!



I did a few others besides those, but most of them didn't seem worth saving.

Oh no, my template!!

I just accidentally overwrote my highly customized Blogger template, which made my blog look like part of my website. It had tons of custom images and my own navigation bar, and made everything look seamless...and now it is gone, gone, gone! I don't even have a copy of it or a printout of it! I have no idea how to modify the new generation of Blogger templates the way I had modified that one years ago, now that I've accidentally migrated to the newer Blogger platform, where everything seems to use more complicated scripts. Argh!! It may be time to retire this blog and replace it with the one I use more often, anyway... but I love the history of this one since it goes back to July 2001! I can't believe I didn't save the old template at all, but of course, I didn't realize I was about to lose it or I would have.

Whoa!

I sat down to write on my midgrade novel today, and can't believe I ended up writing 5,408 words! I didn't even mean for it to get that much longer at all! It's now at 37,308 words. It's mostly finished, but longer than I wanted it to be, and it still needs a wrap-up scene, which could probably be just a thousand words long or so. I also think I made a plot misstep today, which I'll have to rethink, so I may have to revise the way things go down in the section I wrote today.

The whole manuscript has gotten sloppier and sloppier since I started working on it again this spring, and I've dropped entire characters, etc., that I didn't mean to drop, just because I didn't keep going back to previous sections to get their names and couldn't really remember them or how they fit in. I need to add several characters back in. I won't feel like I'm done with a draft until I actually write a final scene for it, but wow, I did get pretty far and I wrote some stuff today that I really liked! Now I am tired.

No more pencils, no more books? Not quite!

In 4 minutes, my kids get out of school for the summer. I'm not exactly crazy about this, but at least homework crises will be over for a while!

As for me, I originally set a goal to be done with a draft of my midgrade novel by June 11. I thought I was going to surpass that goal and be done on Memorial Day weekend, but busyness got in the way, and now I haven't written on it in over a week. I tried at the library a couple of days ago, but got nowhere with it. I feel like I've been knocked off my horse and can't figure out how to get back on. But June 11 is still 6 days away, and our busyness is slowing down with school ending, so I'm hoping to get back on that horse within a day or two and make it to the finish line by my goal!

And speaking of my kids and writing, the week before last I helped my older son submit a haiku he wrote to the "Your Own Pages" section of Highlights magazine. When I was a kid, I very much wanted to submit something to a kids' or teen magazine (I remember perusing the readers' writing sections of Cricket and Seventeen longingly over the years), but never got around to sending anything. So I felt good about helping him get this sent off, whether they choose to publish it or not! Though actually, he was already published in our local SCBWI newsletter at the age of 3. ;-)

P.S. Wasn't Alice Cooper clever to write that "School's Out" song that radio stations have been compelled to play every May & June for years afterwards, even 36 years later? And it runs through my head at the end of the school year whether I want it to or not!

P.P.S. And speaking of the end of school, we finished paying off our student loans yesterday! Nearly 11 years after my husband got out of grad school... It was pretty anti-climactic since the debt has been low for a while, but still felt good to pay something off!

Pausing for breath...

I am thrilled that my monthly freelance article is coming together as well as it is this month. It was nearly painless getting the information. I didn't get writer's block like I did the previous two months (which probably has to do with all the other writing I've been doing lately). And all 7 businesses I requested photos from (the worst part of this gig) got back to me right away! I still don't have all the photos, and not all the photos they sent were good ones, but I have most of what I need to send, and it's pretty much ready to go, with a day to spare. Whew!

In my novel writing, I'm in a weird place. I pushed past a block and finally drafted a couple of scenes about what happens after the main character and her friend make up. I was wondering how to maintain tension when it looked (falsely) like things were mostly resolved, and finally decided that my first-person narrator could just come right out and forecast upcoming disaster. It was kind of a "duh" moment. But then, lying in bed a couple of nights ago, I had a much bigger "duh" moment when I realized I had completely dropped a big plot thread! Just a couple of scenes ago, the MC gave away a secret she'd been protecting for probably half the book. And then I wrote more scenes that didn't address that at all, and I didn't give it any consequences. So now I have to figure out what to do with the scenes I wrote after that, at least one of which I rather like, and how to make it all come back to bite her! I just can't believe I forgot about that when I was writing.

And then...school's almost out, eek! But between end-of-the-year conferences, end-of-the-year parties, Field Day, and the 3rd grade Living History Museum tomorrow, I have to be at the school so much there's hardly any time left to get stuff done without the kids around! (Not that I'm ever without my insane 16-month-old, who, among other zany and heart-attack-inducing things, tried to jump off of a kids' picnic table this week--I caught his head about 3 inches from hitting concrete! He is fearless, endlessly active, and way too physically adept for the amount of sense he has!)

At least I don't need a plot to blog...

I'm up to 25,482 words in my midgrade manuscript. I anticipate the whole thing will be around 30,000 words or a little more (probably more, as long-winded as I am), so I'm definitely closing in on it! But the plot, which has given me so many fits that I let the whole manuscript sit for years, is giving me more even now. Why can't this be easy?! Also, why would I or anyone else do it? Sometimes I think I'm crazy even to try to write a book!

More progress

2146 new words! I worry that my pacing is all wrong, but I'm still happy I'm making progress!

Finally!!

My husband gave me a wonderful secretary desk for Christmas, which I'd already wanted for over a year at that point. Well, two of the legs broke off as it was being carried upstairs, so in all that time, I still haven't had a desk to use. I've only had my lap, or desks and tables at libraries and cafes. The furniture store ordered replacement legs for us at no cost, but they didn't come in until today!!! So, I finally have a desk of my own!!!

We set it up in the bedroom, which I thought was an imperfect solution, since it's not necessarily very private, not like my very own office. I also wanted it in a certain corner, but there wasn't room so we put it against a different wall. But I'd forgotten I mainly bought this house for the big bedroom windows in the first place, and having my desk right by the windows is so lovely! I love it! It reminds me very much of an office setup I saw in a writing course ad once, which stuck in my mind forever as an ideal-looking office.

  


The pictures are deceiving because they don't show the clutter, toys, etc., in the rest of the room, so it's not really as clean and spare as it looks--but doesn't it look like a nice place to write?! Also, I may have to take out the movable section of drawers that's behind the computer in the picture and put them on top of the desk so it's taller, because otherwise I can't close the desk with my computer on it. We'll see. The drawers may also prove strictly decorative, since anything I put in them will be grabbed by a crazy toddler! But still, I have my desk, and already wrote 1644 new words at it!

I'm happy with my 1644 new words. They surprised me. I wrote a scene that probably shouldn't be that long, and didn't even go as far into the story as I meant it to. It also ended with a twist that didn't fit my plans. And I'm not sure if I'll keep it going in that direction or not, but it made me clap my hands when I wrote it, and just may help things fall into place. Yippee. Writing can actually be fun. And I finally have a desk!

Writing by the numbers

1.5 hours at the library
1 midgrade manuscript
465 new words of text
574 new words of notes!

(They're pretty helpful notes this time, so I think things should go easier from here on out...)

3 super things about today (so far)

1) My baby finally kissed me for the first time ever! (He'll be 16 months in a week, and my first two kids started kissing at about half that age.)

2) I heard Jo Whittemore speak at the Austin SCBWI meeting, and it was good.

3) I wrote 1578 new words on my gum manuscript!

Fishing for ducks and ideas

My kids threw a really cute Mother's Day Festival for me yesterday. They had a balloon/dart game (tossing rubber darts at water balloons), a feet-only dunking booth game, a ball toss game, a wheel to spin for a prize, a game with one of those paper "fortune tellers" determining the prize, and cutest of all, a duck pond game with a homemade fishing pole that allowed us to fish for rubber ducks to try to get a winning one. Most of the prizes were handmade, including a pinwheel my oldest son made from cut and folded paper, a stick, and a thumbtack. They also performed a few physical feats for entertainment, and my oldest son recited some poems he'd written. Very cute! I got some cards & gifts, too. 




On the writing front, I tried to make progress on my gum story, even going to the library for quiet space to write. It didn't help much. I started trying to write the next scene, but got bogged down in more questions, questions, questions, about where to take the plot. I tried to just write without necessarily knowing the answers, but ran into walls. So I mainly wrote more notes and questions for myself. For example, I need to figure out when and how my main character should make up with a friend she has alienated. I can't decide if it would be more satisfying if she and her friend make up now and work together to change things, then show up together to face everyone else, or my character should only make up with her friend at the very last minute, during a big showdown when she has to take a stand one way or the other. And there are 8 or 10 more things like that, some big and some small, that are all blocking my path when I try to go further! So, I came home with just a rough start to a scene and a list of things to figure out.

14 places I'd rather be right now

1) In a wide open space in New Mexico
2) Rehearsing for or acting in a play
3) On a train somewhere in Europe
4) At an 80s retro concert with friends
5) On the beach in Hawaii
6) At an outdoor cafe in Greece
7) Riding a ride at a theme park
8) Behind the scenes on Sesame Street (why not?)
9) At a writing conference or meeting, discussing writing and ideas
10) On an Alaskan cruise
11) Walking aimlessly in Wales
12) Listening to an impressive street musician
13) At a magic show in Las Vegas
14) Almost anywhere signing a book contract

My brother's movie

My brother acted in a movie, A Plumm Summer (imdb.com link), which is finally coming out tomorrow, currently in a limited release in California, Alabama, Minnesota, and Montana. Given how many film festival awards it won, I think it should get a wider release! I was fortunate enough to see it at the Austin Film Festival last fall, and thought it was a good film...I rated it 8 out of 10. It's also family-oriented, though it does have some rather tense scenes involving the main characters' alcoholic father. The film stars William Baldwin, Lisa Guerrero, Henry Winkler, Brenda Strong, and several excellent child actors.

If you live near any of the theaters showing this movie, I recommend it! My brother plays Wally, described in Variety's positive review of the movie as "a bumbling general-store clerk." I don't think he's that nerdy or bumbling in real life, but I haven't seen him in a few years since he's gone all Hollywood, so I can't say for sure! ;-)

Choices in writing

Sometimes when I watch movies, I'm surprised by what the writers got away with writing. Makes me wonder if I second-guess myself too much!

I recently watched The Darjeeling Limted and Juno. Of course, both of those are indie movies so the scripts probably didn't undergo all the editing and script doctoring most studio movies do, but people did have to buy into them on some level. The Darjeeling Limited has some very heavy-handed symbolism, and my husband thinks Wes Anderson probably used some of it almost ironically, because it's so obvious, but still...there's one scene near the very end where I turned to my husband and said, "I would never have written that. I'd be embarrassed to write that!" I felt like if I'd written the action I'd just seen on screen, any editor or critiquer would have taken me to task for its groanworthy obviousness (and indeed, some reviewers at imdb.com did mention it, but it's still in the movie, and is really almost the basis of the movie).

Similarly, in Juno, I wouldn't have ended Juno's personal story the way it ended. As a viewer, I liked it, but as a writer, I'd assume everyone would say it was too cheesy and corny for a character like her, or for most teenagers today. Not only that, but I realized one of her main choices at the end of the movie grew out of a scene where her father gave her advice. I'd be scared to write that in a YA manuscript, since people would tell me the character would have to reach her own conclusions without guidance from a parent. While of course, she did reach her own conclusions, she really listened to her dad's advice (which I found refreshing). That may be an indie film, but there's a similar scene near the end of the movie Along Came Polly, where Ben Stiller's adult character gets advice from his dad that helps him see things more clearly. I do have a scene in my Chasing Monday manuscript where a peer helps my main character get perspective on things, but I've always been a little embarrassed to have it in there, and figured someone might question my use of that scene. Yet here are movies, including the one that won the Academy Award for best original screenplay, in which characters use advice from their parents to help them make decisions. Interesting. (Now, if only my own kids would take my advice--even in elementary school, they'd usually rather not!)