Janette Rallison's Blog, page 32

The best group of losers

I've been at the LDStorymaker's conference this week. It's always super fun because I get to see so many writing friends and because people at Storymaker's actually think I'm cool. (My children refuse to believe this fact, but it's true.)
Here I am with Angela Morrison and international bestseller, Anne Perry. She was the keynote. Pretty much everything she said sounded amazing because she can quote Shakespeare, Dante, and speaks with a British accent. Memorizing large passages of classic literature is probably beyond my abilities, but I may start working on a British accent.

Every year at Storymakers, the Whitney Awards are given out. This year I was presenting the romance award with Sarah Eden. We were supposed to come up with a cute way to introduce the contestants. The problem with that was that Sarah and I spent two days joking around about all the bad and completely inappropriate ways we could present the award, so what we really did was come up with our introduction while we were getting dressed for the event. I'll put it in a future blog: Ways to tell you might be addicted to romance novels.

Every year, the funnest part of the Whitneys, (at least for me) is the after dinner drowning-your-sorrow-in-cheesecake because you didn't win pictures that Julie Wright, James Dashner, and I started years ago.

I didn't even get nominated for a Whitney this year. (The one book I had out in 2012 was disqualified because it was a rewrite of an earlier book.) So I figured that made me a double loser and I was completely qualified to crash the loser photos this year.

Here I am with the lovely Julie Wright, Melanie Jacobson, and Krista Jensen.Julie does despondent so well.


And here's the bitter group photo with awesome writers: Kelly Oram,  Tanya Parker Mills, Julie Wright, Melanie Jacobson, Krista Jensen, Theresa Sneed, Gregg Luke, Marsha Ward, and Annette Lyon.

Every time I look at Gregg I laugh. He's got the concept down.

Even though I love the loser photos, it wasn't my favorite moment this year. Julie Donaldson won the romance category for her book Edenbrooke (and best novel by a new author), which was especially  neat for me because she was one of the ladies in a week-long class I taught at BYU a few years ago. When she accepted her award she thanked me. I seriously nearly cried. I was so touched. It was way better than winning a Whitney.

research, sky-diving style

I hate getting details wrong in my books. This may not be entirely apparent since I have more than once gotten details wrong in my books, but I really do a ton of research. 
In Slayers: Friends and Traitors (due out in October) I have characters jump out of a plane, and I decided it would be a good idea if I went skydiving so I could write a more authentic scene. I didn’t think it would be too frightening since a large amount of people skydive every year. I figured, hey, people pay a lot of money to skydive so it’s probably even fun.
That was my first stupid assumption. People are idiots and you should never do something just because a lot of people pay large amounts of money to do it. Case in point: golf.
So I booked an appointment, went to the airport, and signed the twelve page waiver that detailed all the hideous ways I might die.  This was my favorite part:

Basically it says I may be struck by passing aircraft, hit by vehicles on the ground, or may run into trees, buildings, or poisonous snakes.

I still wasn’t all that nervous because I knew I was going to be strapped to an experienced instructor. He was not likely to skimp on parachute inspection or whatever, because he didn’t want to die any more than I did.
Then I met my instructor. He was a twenty-three year old guy who I suspect had no sense of his own mortality. I became a little nervous.
He took me to a small plane that sounded like a lawn mower and seemed to be held together with duct tape, super glue, and erector set pieces. I was a little more nervous, but I was still okay because I figured the pilot had been flying the plane for quite some time so he had a lot of experience doing important things, like not dying. 
We took off, gained altitude, and putted around in the sky for several minutes. I was now more nervous and cursing myself for ever switching from writing romantic comedies to action novels. Really, when you come right down to it, it would be fine to write a book about boring people who never do anything dangerous.
And then the plane door opened.
At that point a spike of terror hit me. I realized that people are born with several strong survival instincts and one of them screams: DO NOT JUMP OUT OF A PLANE! IT WILL KILL YOU!
I said many things at that point, all of which my twenty-three year old instructor ignored as he dragged me out of the plane.
And then we were falling through the sky.
Falling at around 130 miles an hour was like standing in a wind tunnel. All I heard was the wind screaming by. I couldn’t even tell I was falling because nothing around me was moving. Then the parachute came out and I glided through the air at a gentle 15 miles an hour. It did feel like flying then and was really fun—especially when we did spins. Spins are the best.
I landed and felt great.
This would normally be the end of the blog except for one thing.  Later that day I got a call from the skydiving company telling me that their computer crashed. (I guess this is better than hear that their plane crashed.) They had unfortunately lost all the pictures of me but they would let me skydive again for free if I wanted to reschedule.
Well, at that point I was still thinking about how fun the last part of skydiving had been and not the terror of the ominous open-plane-door-moment, so I not only rescheduled, I decided to take my teenage son with me. (Yep, these are all pictures from the second jump.)
This dear readers just proves that there is no cure for stupidity. Because there is only one thing more terrifying than being in a plane when the door opens and you know you’re going to plunge out of it. And that is: being in a plane when the door opens and you know your child is going to plunge out of it.
I do not recommend this as an after school activity.
When I went out of the plane the second time, I wasn’t looking for sensory details to use in my novel. I was searching the horizon to make sure my son’s parachute had opened.
It had.
And when you all read the skydiving scene in Slayers: Friends and Traitors I hope you appreciate my diligent research.

The Cruising Life, part two

For those of you who have never been on a cruise, the experience is pretty much like being aboard a floating buffet. Seriously, the ship had 24 hour pizza and ice cream. Which means that at some point, you feel obligated to eat pizza at 2:00 in the morning. And at 2:00 in the afternoon.

One of the coolest sights we saw were dolphins that swam along side the ship. They were probably hoping for discarded fish sticks.
 For some reason that isn't clear to me, Carnival decorated their dining room so that it looked like Ursula from the Little Mermaid was attacking the ship. Nothing says, "Dig in and eat!" like big purple plastic tubes. And if that's not classy enough for you, they added orange spiderweb designs to the end of the tubes. Maybe if you're really drunk, this all makes sense.

 Here's a hugely gigantic Mexican flag that stands at one port.  If you ask me, it's too large. It almost seems like they're compensating for something else.
 The stewards always left little towel animals on our bed ever night.  Oh sure, they look cute and cuddly . . .

But while you sleep, it's a different story.

 There were all sorts of these signs on the ship. I'm assuming there were no words on them because the sign makers wanted to add to the general confusion the signs communicated. Here you can see two different signs, side by side. The first is clearly warning you that ninjas may drop from the ceiling and surround your family.
 The second is telling you to run like heck--which is the normal response if you are being attacked by ninjas.

And here you can see a cruise ship taking a wrong turn somewhere on the Mississippi River. By the way, it took us nine hours to get to the sea. This is probably why Huckleberry Fin was such a long book. And lastly, here I am with a pirate. I think it is pretty clear--judging from the position of his gun--what happened to his leg. Which is why you should never drink and be a pirate at the same time.

Things that don't mix with chocolate

I just got home from a cruise, which means I have a mountain of laundry, a thousand unanswered emails, and no one to shape my hand towels into cute little animal figures.

I had one of those Janette Rallison moments on my cruise. Although technically speaking, it wasn't my fault.

On the first day, the cruise held a welcome barbecue out by the pool. (Loud music, people chatting and laughing.) After I ate dinner, I went back for a brownie and noticed a tub of brown liquid by the brownie plate. Okay, in retrospect the tub of brown liquid was also by the ketchup and mustard, but I was only paying attention to the brownies at that point.

I put a brownie on my plate, pointed to the tub of brown liquid and asked Martino, the guy standing behind said objects, "Is that hot fudge?"

It was, after all, the logical conclusion. Brownies + hot fudge = joy.

Martino nodded and said, "Yes."

I didn't take into account that it was noisy outside and English probably wasn't Martino's first language. I happily ladled a spoonful of brown liquid onto my brownie.

Again in retrospect, Martino's startled expression probably should have tipped me off. But no, I walked back to my chair and took a big bite of my brownie. Which was completely covered in barbecue sauce. Then I spit the bite back onto my plate and did a really elegant gagging-wiping-my-tongue-off thing as I tried to get rid of the taste of barbecue and brownie.

So it turns out you can't mix chocolate with anything and make it taste better.

Martino walked by me a few minutes later, keeping an eye on me like I was clearly crazy.

It was a totally unfair reaction, since he was the one who told me it was hot fudge in the first place. I dub it a Martino moment.

More on the cruise life next blog.

As you may remember from your high school English class (...

As you may remember from your high school English class (you kept all of your notes on A Midsummer Night's Dream, didn’t you?) Shakespeare invented around 1700 words in his plays and poems.

Frankly, I think I should be allowed the same freedom, and I get all snitty when copyeditors point out details like “Apexed isn’t a verb.” (And right now Microsoft is insisting that 'snitty' isn’t a word either.) Shakespeare never had to deal with such constraints.Here are some words you probably didn't know he invented: eyeballs, puking, obscene, and skim milk. Cool, huh?Here are some words I wish he would have invented:Another word for 'drop'. Oh sure, there’s plunge and plummet, but you can’t use them interchangeably. You can’t have a character plunge her car keys on the floor.  No one has ever said, “Hey, plummet the act. I know you’re lying.”  Nor has anyone’s mouth ever plunged open.Another word for 'door.'  We use them all the time. Character’s are constantly coming in them, stalking out them, walking toward them, and slamming them.  It’s hard not to overuse the word. And don’t tell me I could use portal—no one actually thinks of a door as a portal unless they are in spaceship or a submarine.And  Shakespeare should have invented multiple words for 'turn'. In your novel, things will turn colors, turn up, or turn from one thing into another. Your characters will take turns, make right turns, turn over, turn back, turn their attention to things, see how something turns out, and turn things down. They will also frequently turn to each other. You can replace a few of those turns with spin, but that only works if your characters are angry or ballerinas. If any word deserves a few synonyms, it’s turn. On the other hand, there are also words I could happily axe from the English language to make my life easier.  Ask me how many times I mistyped the word rifle in Slayers: Friends and Traitors and spelled it riffle.  The problem is that riffle is a real word. Spell check doesn’t catch it.   It means: to form, flow over, or move in riffles.How many times have we all written about our riffling habits?Maybe someone should add a function to the computer so that anytime someone grabs a riffle, a little warning pops up that says, “You amuse our computer brain, silly mortal.  And by the way, you have lightening cuting through the sky while your character is waking to the car.Then again, sometimes I could use a good lightening bolt.
 

Why I don't swear in my books

I don't swear in real life. Seriously.

Well, okay, there was this one time when my 18-month-old daughter was seriously hurt, and we had to take her to the ER and I was frantic. We had to get our oldest daughter from a party and figure out where to send her and her four year old brother (You don't want that many children in the ER). I was going to go to the ER and my husband was going to arrange for the other kids, and then we couldn't find the car keys, (Little children carry them off) and then one car's battery was dead. And right when we finally had overcome all of those things and were ready to go, my husband said, "Just a minute, I need to go to the bathroom first."

I snapped. For a reason that is still not clear to me, a string of swearwords issued forth from my mouth. I didn't even know they were there. They all just came out in between the words: "They have bathrooms at the ER!!! Now get in the car!!!"

Not too long ago I said something to my now teenage son about how I never swear, and he said, "You did once. You swore that time you went to the Emergency Room."

I was surprised he remembered that all these years later.

That's probably how swear words should be. If you use them, they're so rare people will remember them decades later.

I've heard people use the F-bomb so many times in a sentence, it was a noun, adjective, and verb. I always wonder what those people do when they're really mad. I mean, what is left to say? "I double-dog F-bomb you!" or "F-bomb times infinity!"

I've seen the same problem in books. If you have a character swear all the time, it loses potency, and at least to me, comes off crass.

My problem as an author is that I sometimes have characters who would swear in given situations. I still don't include swearwords. (I have used the word h word--don't want to write it here, lest my blog be blocked by some filters--but only to describe the actual place, which I don't consider swearing. Although some younger kids don't seem to realize this difference. I was a Sunday School teacher for 8-year-olds once and had to refer to it as that-place-the-devil-lives because otherwise they gasped every time I said the word. And yes, I did try to explain the difference between swearing and naming a location, but they never seemed to grasp this finer point.)

Anyway, I can't have my characters swear for one simple reason. At my house I long ago instituted the rule that anyone who swears will have to pay five dollars.

I have over a million books in print. I am not that wealthy. I will have to continue to be swear-free.

KABAM (Kingman Area Books Are Magic)

Hey assorted friends, fans, and potential stalkers,

I'm peeking out of a stack of revisions to go to Kingman this Saturday, April 6th, for the KABAM festival. I'm assuming from the title it will be like a comic book and we will all be saying, POP! WHAM! and KABAM! a lot.

Here's the pertinent info:

This year, the outdoor poetry slam will be held on the evening of April 5th and the outdoor festival will be all day on April 6th, 2013.

Throughout the week, schools and literacy groups host events to encourage an interest in reading. Events include author visits to local schools and an evening poetry slam. The festival concludes with an outdoor festival in Metcalfe Park in downtown Kingman.

KABAM celebrates our authors, readers, and local businesses by bringing our community together to celebrate the fun and adventure of reading. We hope to see you at KABAM this year!

KAPOW! I hope to see you all there!

Things in real life I would never believe in fiction

As a fiction writer, I have to follow rules of believability. My plot and characters' motivations have to make sense. I can't yank the reader out of the story by making him stop, pause, and think, "That would never happen in real life."

The ironic thing about this rule is that generally it doesn't even matter if the thing in question does happen in real life. For example when I wrote Just One Wish, I originally had the cast of a TV show working over Thanksgiving weekend. I'd heard from my Hollywood sources that if a cast is behind schedule, they do indeed work over weekends and holidays. But my beta readers questioned the schedule so I had to change it.

As a writer, the whole truth is stranger than fiction principle can be baffling. People are continuously more stupid then I give them credit for.  Here are a few real life things that make no sense to me.

1) People who willingly go on national television to air their dirty laundry and share the most intimately painful details of their lives.

If I didn't know who my baby's father was, I certainly wouldn't want to advertise this fact. Ditto for my problems in bed, struggling marriage, or my children's behavior that is so unruly I need Super Nanny to expose their flaws and my pitifully inadequate parenting techniques.

How does a person show up for PTA meetings after going on one of these shows?

2) People who record themselves committing crimes and then post the videos on the internet.

On one hand, I've got to applaud these idiots for helping law enforcement to incarcerate them. Carry on, stupid criminal, carry on!

3) Whoever invented and first invested in bottled water.

I am old enough that I remember the time when you had to physically pour water into your own bottle if you wanted bottled water. Really, it's not all that hard. There is only one ingredient to this recipe. So when bottled water first hit the stores, I thought it would be a foolishly short lived idea. I mean, what was the original advertisement for this product? It's just like the stuff you can get from your sink, only more expensive! Who would pay for that? 

As it turns out, a lot of people. This is why I will never go into business for  myself. I apparently don't know a good product when I see one.  Although lately I have been toying with the idea of marketing bottled air. It would be a great way to recycle all those used water bottle containers.

4) People who break into cages so they can mingle with carnivorous animals.

If the thing is called a Killer Whale, it is probably a pretty good indication that you should not dive into the tank for a social visit. And despite the fact that baby polar bears look huggable, a two minute search on the internet will let you know that polar bears eat seals. You are about the same weight as a seal and apparently have a close enough resemblance to a gray mammal with flippers that the polar bear is not going to be all that picky about eating you.

And last but not least 5) Road construction projects that take four months. One of the roads near my home is the victim of such a construction project. It makes me wonder what the men in the orange vests are doing on the days they show up--panning for gold? Excavating lost cities?

Fictional characters would never get away with being so slow for no apparent reason--but alas, we live in real life.

Tucson Book Festival update

Despite just experiencing a bumpy airplane ride, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I haven’t blogged this week because I’ve been busy with school visits, conferences and such. I know you’re all wondering how the Tucson Book Festival went. Remember how I told you that my typical audience for a book reading at the teen tent was an average of, oh, a couple wandering people who wanted to rest their feet for awhile?  Well, you will think I’m a liar when I show you the picture of the audience I had.
But before you think I’m that cool, I have to admit that most of the audience who came for my reading were there because they knew R.L. Stine was doing his reading after mine and they wanted to make sure they had a seat. Smart people. And a captive audience. So yeah, the reading went really well.

The panel with Bruce Coville and Jennifer Nielsen went great too—except for the Q&A session when my friend, Angela Fox insisted that Hotel California was the greatest song ever written. Pa-lease, Angela. No one has done the Harlem Shake to that song yet.
Mysweater makes me look really fat in this picture. It is a clear sign of how awesome I think Bruce and Jennifer are, that I'm posting it anyway.

After the festival I went to Utah for a week of school visits. Those are always fun because a good author visit makes you feel like a rock star. I am currently at Lady Gaga status. Although no, I will not be donning a bubble dress or raw meat any time soon.
Lastly, I presented at Teen Author Bootcamp. The kids there rocked!
Now I’m back home and I want to sleep for a really long time. 

You know you want to come to Tucson--and a true story

I'll be there this Saturday, March 9, and would love to see you. Really. I'm not just saying that because I want something from you. I'm not like those other love-em-and-leave-em authors that have done you wrong so many times. No, I care.

Now don't you want to make the trip out Tucson to see me? Forget the fact that it might be lousy weather. A little rain never stood in the way of true devotion.

Too much?

I've been reading romances today, so it's hard to be objective.

Anyway, I'm in currently breezy Tucson for the book festival. Close to a jillion authors will descend on the U of A campus Saturday. It will be awesome and literary and totally worth driving all night to get here.

2:30 – 3:15 –Teen and Author Meeting Place South of the College of Education on the Main Mall.
I'll be doing an informal reading and Q&A. These are generally lonely and sparsely attended events where authors ponder their popularity and careers in general.

True story: The last time I was at the Tucson Book Festival doing a reading, I was pleasantly surprised that I actually had quite a few people in the audience. A group of women had come with their daughters. They were attentive and laughed in all the right places. They asked thoughtful questions. Then as I wrapped things up, I asked if anyone had any more questions.

"Yes," one of the mothers replied. "When does Louis Sachar get here?"

Turns out they had come to see him and had gotten the time wrong.

Yeah, so if you're anywhere in the area, please come by.

4:00 – 5:00Panel Discussion in Room 353: Worlds of Fantasy: Dragons, Monsters and False Princes with Jennifer Nielsen, Bruce Coville, C.J. Hill AKA Janette Rallison

This will be well attended because it's bound to be really interesting. I will pretend the entire audience has come to see me.


5:00 – 5:30Autographing right outside the south entrance of the COE and to the east.

This is when my illusions that the whole audience came to see me will be brutally shattered. Again, if you can come by, buy a book and have me sign it. It doesn't even necessarily have to by my book. I'll happily sign Bruce and Jennifer's books.