In Which I Read A Book

Guess what I finished up during my short hiatus?

That's right! Elana Johnson's Possession!

I don't want to get into details too much, because I know not everyone has access to an arc, but I will say it was fun and sassy and filled with cool tech that I want. Like a cube that makes food you wish to eat.

Who doesn't want that?

No one, that's who.

Also, there's been a lot of talk on the blogsphere about how great bad boy Jag is in the book, and yeah, I like him OK. But know who I really like? Jag's brother Pace. MMMM, much more to my taste.

Good times. Good times.

In Which I Am Unplugged

Hi All - I'm going to be unplugged this week.

Real life has been real busy, and I just want to finish up Glimpse as fast as possible. I'll still be around your blogs, though, so no worries.

Regularly scheduled posts will resume next Monday.

Have a great week!

Friday Fun

Yvie returns, ape-friends, to fire you out of a cannon of fun into the loving net that is the weekend.

That's right. I can metaphor too. Bam!

The weather has been great this week! All the toys in the yard that were buried under the snow have been picked up and washed, and all us dogs started working on learning new tricks.

Tula is going to learn how to roll over. And play dead.

George is learning how to spin.

And I'm going to learn how to go out (where I head out in the yard and find a target).

So far, it's all going good.

Onto the fun!

SQUEE! PETITE LAP GIRAFFES!

In Which I Revise Backwards

(OT - is anyone else having blogger formatting issues? It now makes me code with html all my paragraph breaks and hard returns. It makes me want to punch every bee in the face.

Sorry. Onto the real post.)

So whenever you read articles or books about revising, almost always people will tell you the same, or similar, thing:

Do the big stuff first, then the little stuff. Which, for the most part, makes sense. I mean, it would stink to do a whole bunch of line edits, then change things around and have to re-do the line edits.

So, logical. But that's not for me. I mean, first off, I rarely have to make any huge changes. Or at least, I have yet to have to do so.

Sure, I may delete a few scenes here or there, or maybe need to add some scenes but nothing massive and crazy. And certainly no huge amounts of rewriting. You know how I feel about that.

This is probably because I'm an outliner, and once I have that story structure built, I don't realy veer that much from it.

SO, because of this fact, I tend to revise backwards. That is, I line edit first. Crazy? Maybe. But I can't stand moving scenes around if there's clunky prose and typos.

Also, I tend to revise as I write as well. Once I've written my bit for the day, then I read back over it and fix it up some. Since I'm a sloppy typer, there are always things that need fixing - so I don't end up with typos like "She had long, stinking back hair" when I meant to write "She had long, striking black hair".

True Story.

Anyway, that is why I line edit first. Maybe sometimes I end up editing something that I then later delete, but you know what? I'm OK with that.

What about you? Anyway you break the revision mold?

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 Participate In A Contest

As mentioned on Thursday, Shelley Watters from Is It Hot in Here or is it This Book? is having a followers contest where you post your pitch on your blog today or yesterday, and enter in a chance to win a full manuscript request from SUZIE TOWNSEND.

Yeah, that's right.

The pitch could only be 140 characters (ie twitter) so I had some advanced thesaurus usage to get mine down 16 characters, but here it is!

Title: Glimpse of Another Shore
Genre: YA Fantasy
Wordcount: 56,000

Pitch: In a land where one family member must join the navy in the war effort, Pier rescues a sea serpent and finds a way to save his home from war



There's a linky on her blog if you're interested in seeing the rest of the entries, otherwise you can check the comments on her blog tomorrow for all the entered pitches.

Now I'm off to play some racquetball, where my racket "Wesley Crusher" and I are planning on dominating.

See you Monday!

Friday Fun

Well, here we are, another week gone and the beginning of another rockin weekend. How are all of you, ape-friends? Staying warm and comfy?




Our snow has started to melt again. There's still quite a bit left, but we all know that soon it was be gone and things will be sunny and warm again. Onto the fun!

























Check out these Solar Roads. For reals. It's amazing.



See you next week, Ape-friends!