In Which I Revise (Still)

So I'm revising Break Free. Scratch that. I've been revising Break Free for maybe 2 months? 3? I dunno, I'm a terrible estimator of time and I'm waaaaay too lazy to go look.

Okay I lied. I'm not that lazy. Okay wait. Yes I am, I'm just more curious than lazy. It's been just a little over 2 months say my records. Granted there were a few weeks in there where the day job was so so busy that there was no writing done at all. And also a week of vacay where the writing stuff was not done. But still, you get the idea.

Anyhoo, where I'm going with is, next week I have another week of vacay. Staycay actually. And by vacay I mean, not working at the dayjob. Instead twin and I will be working around the house. Preparing the veggie garden for winter, yard work, house repairs etc. So, you know, better than work, but still actually doing work.




True story: this is not our garden

I'm really, really close to finishing these rounds of revisions. And then I can send the MS to a few beta readers and hope they give me the sign off to send that baby back into the world. If not, it will be more revisions. It's not like I'm really in a hurry, but I kind of am in a bit of a timing crunch to get it back out as soon as possible for varying reasons that I won't get into because that's a whole post on it's own.

So for right now, my goal is to try and revise the shit out of the MS this week in the hopes that I can send it to beta readers and not have to worry about it on my staycay. And by worry about it, I mean, not have to worry about how I'm not revising because I'm tilling the garden or tevs.

So anyway, wish me luck!

How about you? Are you revising? Or writing? Or brainstorming? I want deets!

In Which I Housekeep

So, I'm going to be out of town for the rest of the week. Myself, Twin and our mom are flying down to Chicago to visit with Youngest Sister. Then, next week I actually have to go into the office for work for some huge-o project I'm involved in, which means around a 3 hour commute each day, which also means that I won't be online hardly at all.




So, this will be my last blog post for about a week.

Also, I realize I forgot to post my NaNo username for anyone who wants to be buddies. It's Falen1 (natch). The new website appears to be up and running, so I'll probably be messing around there at least once a day.

Also, if you're participating in NaNo, don't forget to also participate in 30 Covers in 30 Days. This is the contest where you can win a book cover done by a graphic artist. You can see the one I won last year on my sidebar. Needless to say, I Love it, and think everyone should participate for a chance.

A lot of people don't know how that part of NaNo works so I'll give you a quick breakdown.

Under the NaNo forums, there's a forum titled 30 Covers in 30 days (there's nothing in there yet because of the website change, but soon there will be some announcements and junk)


You only need 2 things to be eligible to win a cover - A novel title, and a novel synopsis. Make sure you've updated your author page with both these things and you are entered.

BUT! Usually in the forum, there's a place where you can nominate yourself or someone else, to draw attention to an awesome synopsis etc.


There's usually either a forum post where you can nominate yourself, or a form you can fill out . There will be an announcement in the forum once they've got this set up.

And that's it!

Definitely take advantage of it, I will be, because it takes very little effort on your part.

And that's pretty much all I had for today. I'm flying out early tomorrow morning, so I'll chat with you all when I'm back online.

Have a great weekend!

In Which I Didn't Get Much Done

So last week I had a plan. I was going to hit the ground running and get my synopsis done. Or at least started.

Then Monday rolled around and all my best laid plans went to hell. My day job was cray-cray the whole week, so I pretty much got nothing done at all.

I wish my job was like this...

Also, I barely found time to read blogs (which is why my commenting was more infrequent last week).

But here we are, another Monday, and my plans this week are the same as last week. Get My Synopsis Written!

Since, as we can see all see, it's April, and my goal for this month is to begin to query (Excitement! Fear

And since I'm a person that doesn't like to start things half cocked, it's not an option to me to start querying without a synopsis, even to agents that don't need one.

Because I know if I don't write one before I start to query, my laziness will kick in and I'll probably never write one and therefore lose the opportunity to query those agents who request one.

It's just the way I am.

So cross your fingers for me this week. Synopsis - here I come!

In Which I Take A Few Days Off

I think, like most of the rest of our blogging community, that I am going to take the rest of this week off from blogging. Work is going to be super busy this week (I actually have to go in to the office on one day. boo) and I also drew a blank when trying to think of what to write about today.

So I will see you again in 2011, when I will be participating in 3 blogfests in a row (Saturday, Sunday and Monday)

The easiest blogfest ever The Eye Candy Blogfest

followed by the 2nd Annual No Kiss Blogfest

and finished off by Summer's Hannah's and My Show Me Yours blogfest! (link to the top right).


I hope you have a wonderful New Year's weekend. See you again soon!

In Which I Return

Hi all!

I'm back from vacation, all limbs intact. This is just a short post. I'll be in training for this week for work and since the commute is at least 1 hour one way, I will have less interwebs time than I normally would, so I can't promise I'll have posts for the rest of this week.

HOWEVER, before I went on vacay, my followers rolled over the 200 mark, which means CONTEST!

I'll have more details later, but I plan on picking up a fun prize at the MN Renaissance Festival, which is where I'll be spending every Saturday until October.

Anything exciting happen in the last week?

In Which I Conference

So I mentioned on Monday that I was out all weekend (and Friday evening).
And the reason was:

Palindrome and I went to a writing conference!!

4th Street Fantasy to be exact.

It was our first writing conference and Hannah located it by doing an interwebs search for local writing conferences. She's just so clever.

It was quite a bit of fun. And we got 4th St Fantasy pens that were also flash drives! AWESOME!

The Program and thoughts (in red) are as follows:

Thursday, June 24, 2010

8:00 PM – Three Shouts On a Hill
Last year we added a pre-conference opportunity to laugh and play. It was so successful that we decided to continue it and establish a tradition! Tonight we share in presenting the world premiere of Jo Walton's play version of the Irish legend of the Sons of Tuirean: Three Shouts On a Hill.

Jo Walton, Author, on the right

Hannah and I did not attend Thursday. We have day jobs and junk.
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Friday, June 25, 2010

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM What should I be reading (that I'm not)?

An open discussion of what's exciting out there: not limited to fantasy or genre at all! We want to know what's getting us jazzed in the world of books and web stuff.
Tom Whitmore, with much audience help

Tom Whitmore, Conference Organizer and retired reviewer

Again, the day jobs prevented us from hitting this one. Too bad because I bet it was a lot of fun. However they made a list and posted it online.


5:30 PM – 6:30 PM How do you know when a story's going wrong?

An editor, a writer, a reviewer and a reader talk about how to tell when a story is going wrong, and what to do about it, from their perspectives.
Steven Brust, Karen G. Anderson, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Pamela Dean

Steven Brust, author, and his awesome editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Hannah pulled some strings at the day job and was able to leave work early. So we got zazzed up and hit this panel as our first foray into the conference. Both Steven Brust and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (editor for Tor books) were fantastic panelists. Funny and enlightening. Mostly the conclusion was, things can go wrong in the beginning, middle and end, but the middle and end mistakes are usually brought about by poor revision. Also this panel served to add to my confidence that the majority of work in the slush is terrible so we're already at an advantage.


8:00 PM – Getting to know you gatherings

Join Steven in the Smokers Den for Philosophy and Fun, Peggy in Courtyard Ballroom A for Singing and Silliness, Tom in Courtyard Ballroom B for Musings and Meanderings, or Janet in the ConSuite for Munching and Mischief... or stroll among them all. Other amusements will undoubtedly ensue.

Since we weren't planning on attending anything on Friday, we skipped this because we'd have to be up early for Saturday. Next year, I would definitely stick around to get to know everyone better
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Saturday, June 26, 2010

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Mixing genres

We've had a raft of different ways of mashing up genres over recent years. Fantasy with rivets, dragons with novels of manners, future-setting fantasy — what's coming next, and why does this sort of synthesis work well (when it does)?
Jo Walton, Elizabeth Bear, Teresa Nielsen Hayden

We started off with a delicious breakfast. Twin came with and I brought my camera to take photos but for some reason it stopped working (though it's miraculously OK now...).
Elizabeth Bear told a fun story about how her first novel she submitted was All the Windwracked Stars which has MCs that are: A Valkyrie, Fenrir and a two headed mechanical horse. The response from her editor was that it was a good book, but not suitable as a "first novel". It was eventually published as her fourth book (and both Hannah and I picked it up from the dealer's room)



11:30 AM – 12:30 PM Beyond promotion: Reputation management

Why is it wrong to put a stack of your books in front of you at a panel? What is effective at a convention in terms of promotion, and why? How do you get a reputation, and what do you do once you have one?
Steven Brust, Ctein, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

This was my least favorite panel. They pulled someone from the audience who was actively engaged in self promotion to sit on the panel as well. But all the authors more or less said, why would anyone want to self promote themselves when that's what the publisher was for. Which wasn't very helpful for everyone in the audience who didn't have publishers. Or who were published at small prints and couldn't even get bookstores to understand that they weren't self pubbed. Still, it was an entertaining panel. It just made me think that I should try real hard to be published with Tor books (BTW, they still accept un-agented submissions. Crazy awesome, right?)


2:00 PM – 3:00 PM How does the medium affect the story?

There are many ways to tell stories. Why choose graphic novel over song? What are the advantages of keeping it short or making it long? Why has epic poetry pretty much died?
Adam Stemple, Elise Matthesen, Elizabeth Bear

Elise Mathessen, writer, jewlery maker

This was an interesting panel. It ended up mostly focusing on using music or jewelry as a medium. Elise Matthesen was one of the most interesting people at the whole conference. She also had a jewelry booth set up for shopping where Hannah bought a set of earrings based on Jo Walton's discussion of her face shape. Hannah also bought an old Renfest costume of Elise's that she was selling for $80 which is ridiculously cheap. (I wanted one of her necklaces, but it was $425 and there's no way I could ever justify that). While the panel was going on Elise made us vote on what kind of jewlery we wanted to her to make. Eldirtch Horror won out, and then Pirate (even though Steampunk was CLEARLY the better choice...). When the panel was done she had created two necklaces.

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM Fantasy vs. Progress

Sarah Monette had a blog post which began a discussion on the nature of progress in fantasy, and how conservative fantasy tends to be. Of course we had to continue it.
Sarah Monette, Marissa Lingen, Adam Stemple, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Elise Mathessen, Sarah Monette, Elizabeth Bear (aka Bear), authors

This panel discussed why, in fantasy, we rarely reach, or go beyond, the industrialized age, and why we think that is so. Topics included Tolkien and his supposed dislike of technology that somehow allows him to have bicycles and umbrellas in The Shire which are not simple bits of technology



5:00 PM – 6:00 PM Submit, or die!

What keeps you from submitting and what keeps your submissions from being seen by the right people? Includes stories about the story an author won't submit.
Tom Whitmore, Elise Matthesen, Skyler White

For some reason, I can't remember what was discussed in this panel... WTF

Update: I now recall, with help from Hannah, that the discussion more or less centered around the fact that sooner or later, it becomes more painful to not submit, than to submit

7:30 PM – 8:30 PM Second thoughts: The morning after

The aftermath of Food, Fashion, and Fornication. Happily ever after? I don't think so. Unruly, lively discussion of what happens next.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Jon Singer, Elise Matthesen, Karen G. Anderson


We skipped this one and went home so we'd have more energy to tackle Sunday
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Sunday, June 27, 2010

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Point of view: How not to suck

Who's telling this story, anyway? Why should I care? Does it make a difference?
Jo Walton, Sarah Monette, Steven Brust

This was a fun in depth discussion about POV and authors that use it well and those that don't. A lot of focus was spent on the unreliable narrator



1:00 PM – 2:00 PM The new cliches

When does something change from a fad to a cliche? What's jumped the shark recently (besides "jumping the shark")?
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Tom Whitmore

Discussion ranged from anti-cliche's that become cliches to trends. General consensus was that if you begin a story by examining a cliche, it was probably OK, but if a cliche was the punchline of your story (ie - aliens come to earth in the past and create Adam and Eve) then you're in trouble


2:30 PM – 3:30 PM But that's a different panel...
Everything you wanted to discuss that got tabled until now.

We voted on two topics to discuss. And though both Hannah and I voted for "Why the horror genre collapsed" the winners were "How to make your problems fun" and "When to stop revising"

For "Problems" there was discussion about how every writer is given a "freebie" which is a writing skill that just comes naturally. For me, it's dialogue. Then to take that skill and use it to help the areas you suck at. Bear stated she hates setting, so she uses her freebie, which is fun, to try and make setting fun to work on.

For Revisions it all depended on what kind of writer you were. Do you know the ending? Then you probably need less revisions. If not, you'll need to go back and work it in. All the authors said they had had a book that they either had to, or came close to, starting completely over on. Also they pointed out that every writer, on every book, will always reach the point where they feel like they're the worst writer in the world.

So that was it! It was super fun and I'll definitely hit it next year.

In Which I Return

Hi everyone! I'm back from my small blogging hiatus.

How has everyone been? Anyone get an offer of representation or a book deal? (besides Elana I mean. And how awesome is that?!)

I had an enjoyable week off from work and it went too fast as usual. But now things should return to normal and since I tend to be a person of patterns that's a good thing. Especially since I got absolutely no revising done on Foxfire while I was mucking about.

But that's OK. Sometimes you need a little break to build the excitement for it again. It's a bit like a re-boot.

Also I have my writing group tonight with Palindrome and Teebore so I'm sure that will get me all jonesed to get home and get to work again.

Twin and I did a lot of gardening last week so I'll post some pics tomorrow for those of you interested in that kind of stuff (I know I am and was so jealous when I saw everyone who lives in a warmer climate gardening months before we could...)

Anyway I will be systematically working my way through everyone's blogs, catching up anything I may have missed while I was away from the interwebs.

Glad to be back!

Friday Fun Words

Hiya Ape-Friends!

Yvie here to provide you with your weekly fun words to use in every day conversations.

I'm pretty excited because Mom just informed me that neither she, nor Anne have to go to work at all next week. How exciting is that?!

That means I will get all the worship and love I deserve. So ape-friends, if you wonder why she's not hanging around the interwebs, it's because she's too busy cuddling moi!

Required Cuddles

Onto the words!


Stivvies - skivvies for Stevens

Trishily - trashy Tricias

Judgmedl - when metal is really judgemental. You know, it's all "Oh her? Pshaa, she's not nearly iron enough. And also, she used to hang around dolomite"

"My body is 40% dolomite!"

Frorat - a hair style for rodents, allowing the hair to extend out from the head in a large rounded shape, much like a halo, cloud or ball

Firfore - golfing for trees

Stabliti - when you stab someone. But just a little.

This picture here is going to turn into too much stabbing

Thumsban - when thumbs are banned. Usually this happens when apes or maybe possums hang around animals without opposable thumbs which causes jealousy and then a ban.

That is all for this week!

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and week and enjoy getting cuddles from your loved ones.

In Which I Forgot To Write A Post

So I pretty much forgot to write a post for today. I was super busy at work (not stressed, just busy) and Wednesdays we head over to my parent's after work for dinner and some TV. And then came home and watched Glee and then went to bed and I barely remembered to write this little post.

Sorry. My Bad.

To make up for the short post, please accept this LOLCat as an apology.



Also here is a haiku Twin's friend/co-worker wrote that I found funny. She allowed me to share it so here you go:

My enemy waits
Lying on the bathroom floor
Never-ending bits!

Awesome.

Anyway, I hope you all have a nice Thursday! Just a few more days to get through until the weekend.

I'm excited because this weekend, besides being full of awesome things (like free tickets to an advanced screening of Shrek Forever After at the MOA (That's the Mall of America for you non-locals)) it also begins the beginning of my week off from work. Which means, a week of sleeping in.

So.
Excited.

Yvie will be in tomorrow with her usual Friday Fun Words.
See you there!

In Which The Interwebs Makes Me Happy

So normally I try to write a few blog posts on Sunday, so I can be ahead in the week. But this weekend I only wrote one. We spent the rest of the evening playing Halo until our Xbox offered us up the red ring of death again.



Damn you Xbox. Why do you make it so hard to love you?



So then yesterday I was super busy at work which led to a range of consequences:

1. I didn't get to comment on as many blogs as I usually do. Though I did manage to read most of them

2. The super busy amounts of work, combined with crazy dogs that were trapped inside until the lawn fertilizer dried, left me in a super foul mood.

• Also, co-worker that I don't even know: If I tell you I can't help you with something and I don't know who you need to speak with, don't keep pressuring me to give you a name. And when I cave, certainly don't tell that person I gave you their name.

3. Which in turn left me with no idea on what to write for a blog post. Mostly I just wanted to take a bath, read a bit, and then go back to bed. Steaks for dinner notwithstanding

So what all this means is that today's post is going to be a random post of fun things I like on the interwebs.

Yay!

Do you read
hyperbole and a half blog? I swear, if you don't, you will regret it. Check out this post which may be my favorite. So. Funny.

We were discussing on Hannah's blog the wonderfulness of The Silence of the Lambs and I mentioned to her the wonderful Lego musical version which she has not seen. So here it is in all its glory.

WARNING: there is language in this video, much like in the real movie. You. Were. Warned.



I know we've talked a bit before about the kind of music I like (rock. A bit of metal thrown in as well). Lately I've been re-listening to Twin's Fair to Midland CD (shhh, I stole it from her...) and I had forgotten how much I LURVE them. Their song Dance of the Manatees is awesome, but my favorite is the below: (unfortunately the video is just the lyrics but you can still hear the song)




Here is Brother's, Twin's and my all time favorite LOLCat

Here's another fav


And that's all I have for today! Hopefully you found something that made you smile.


PS - I'm off all next week from work. Since Twin and I will be doing hella gardening and yard work, I probably won't be as present on the interwebs as I normally am. But I will be back in full splendor the following week.

In Which I Fight A Funk

I've been in a bit of a funk lately. Sure I set myself a goal. But since then, I've done really no editing.



I got my first chapter crit back from Chimera Critiques and I can't even really bring myself to look at it (OK, I glanced at it, but I know I've got to let it sit aside for a bit before I dive in. Got to separate myself from any emotions so I can look at it objectively).

I think my funks align directly with my "day job". If I'm a bit fed up there (like now, because I've got all these projects to do that I'd just rather not) then it bleeds over into real life.

Mostly I just want a few weeks off from work where I can sleep in and relax and do nothing. (I've never had more than 10 days off from any job I've ever held. I can't even imagine what it would be like to have more that two weeks off from work. I bet I'd never want to come back)

In the past I know a cure for a nice funk is just time. If I wait long enough, it will go away. But I feel like I'm just wasting time. I would love to be at the next stage, seriously crafting a query to send out. I'm not even worried about if Foxfire will be accepted or rejected. Obvs acception (...is this a word...?) would be AWESOME, but I don't have a problem with trying again if it's not.

Le Sigh. Stupid funks. Messing things up.
I think I'm going to start line editing some of Foxfire. That's an easy revision process that I can just do without any commitment. I mean, I'll need to do 2-3 more line edits later so one right now won't hurt anything.

Then maybe I can tackle some of the bigger changes that have to happen (heightening conflict, making MC Fox as likable and enigmatic as MC Quill, working on that hook).

Is it the weekend yet?