Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 144

Random Thoughts While Packing

I just have a couple of things to pick up on my way to choir tonight (since that store is near the church), and I'll be ready for my trip. I have my clothes packed and all the non-refrigerated food ready to go. I need to gather a few more of my hiking/outdoors items and some other supplies like that. And I want to do a bit more tidying around the house. So it will be a busy afternoon.

Some random thoughts, etc.:

Is anyone watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on the CW? I decided to give it a shot because of some good reviews, and I'm finding it to be a lot of fun. It's kind of scratching my romantic comedy itch. It's basically a chick-lit novel in TV form, but it's also a musical, with really clever original music (rather than covers, like on Glee) performed by Broadway-caliber actors in a way that sounds like real singing, rather than over-produced and auto-tuned. The plot is straight out of chick-lit: a neurotic Manhattan attorney evaluates her life when she sees a butter commercial that asks when was the last time you were really happy, and she thinks about the time she went to summer camp in high school. When she then runs into the guy who was her camp boyfriend, she takes it as a sign. But he's moving back to his hometown in California. So she turns down a promotion to partner and moves to this rather nothing town in California (2 hours from the beach, 4 if there's traffic). She keeps claiming that it's not because of him but because she needed to make a change. And then she meets this guy's best friend. We can tell that her teen boyfriend is probably Mr. Wrong and his best friend is Mr. Right, but she's too big a mess to really see it, but on the other hand, the ex can be a decent guy and the friend can be kind of a mess. In the pilot it seemed really obvious, but they've done some interesting things with the scenario. And every so often, musical numbers break out in her head. Some are full on Broadway or Hollywood style, and a few others come closer to parodies of pop songs (a la Flight of the Conchords). There are some actual Broadway names involved, and the best friend is played by the actor who was the voice of Hans in Frozen and who was the prince in Broadway's Cinderella. Here, though, he's more of an adorkable boy next door type. He had a wonderful musical number in this week's episode that's currently stuck in my head. The show can get a little raunchier than I would prefer, but even the raunch is rather funny, so it's almost like it's satirizing the raunchy romantic comedies.

Entertainment Weekly has the new Harry Potter universe "prequel" on the cover of their upcoming issue, and it's a cruel tease because the movie doesn't come out for another year, and there's Eddie Redmayne looking rather wonderful in costume. I find him fascinating to watch as an actor, so I'm curious to see him in a less heavy film.

Now, off to continue packing and cleaning.

A Suspicious Type

I was utterly useless yesterday. About the only thing I accomplished was making travel playlists and washing some dishes. So today I really have to get my pre-trip act together. There will be housework! And packing! Then I'm just down to the last-minute Target and grocery runs for tomorrow. So far, the weather forecast is holding steady on rain during my travel day and sun and cool weather the rest of the time. It should be perfect for hiking, and the last fall foliage report for the area said it should be at its peak, but the trees are starting to lose leaves. I'm planning to spend much of the days hiking, the rest of the days sitting on my room's private patio, reading, drinking tea, and looking at the mountains, and the evenings using some of the fun little spa treatment things I picked up at Tuesday Morning. Supposedly, there's satellite TV, but I don't know what channels that will entail. I'm actually not sure whether I want it to just be the major networks, so I'll be forced to entertain myself in other ways and shake up my routine, or whether I want the full spectrum so I can kick back and relax after a busy day. There are picnic tables with grills near the rooms, and I've been going back and forth on whether I want to try to bring supplies for grilling anything or even just for sitting by something fire-like at night. It might be nice, but it might be more trouble than it's worth.

I made the Executive Decision a little while ago to hold off on the house purchase for a while, since there are things that the HOA has to do to this place before it can sell, anyway, and home prices may be hitting a bubble around here, and use some of the money I've saved to take care of some bucket list travel items. I've figured that I have a flexible schedule, and I can work wherever I am, so I may as well take advantage of that flexibility, especially while I'm living in a place where I don't have to worry about stuff like lawn care. So, I need to renew my passport, and then I need to start looking into those things I always wanted to do and places I always wanted to go.

Last night, I was reading a mystery novel that fit the old "weekend house party at a grand estate" model, but it was updated for the grand estate to have been turned into a hotel. I thought that sounded like something that would be fun to do, to stay in one of those places for a night or two. But preferably without the murder part.

And then my imagination got carried away and started mentally writing that mystery novel, from the perspective of the cop just trying to have a weekend getaway, with me as one of the other guests at the hotel when someone is murdered. It was a little odd seeing myself through someone else's eyes and evaluating me as a possible suspect. The other guests saw me as "that American writer," and my general aloofness and lack of interest in any group activities didn't help matters.

And no, I am not planning to write a mystery novel with myself as one of the suspects. I just want to spend a couple of nights in one of those grand old houses or a castle, no murder at all.

Concert, Vacation, and a Road Trip

I survived my busy weekend, and now it's vacation week. I don't leave until Thursday, but there's some getting ready to do. You know, essential stuff like creating road trip playlists and cleaning the house enough that I won't recoil in horror upon my return.

Meanwhile, I need to figure out a bunch of new characters who have suddenly joined the book I'm working on and what role they'll really end up playing.

We did our performance of Requiem last night, and it was wonderful. I don't know how it sounded to the audience, aside from one video someone posted to Facebook of one of the movements, and that sounded better than I imagined, so it must have been good for the audience, but it was really a wonderful experience to sing. I think my solo went well. It's hard to judge, and I'm a raging perfectionist, but I got a lot of compliments from some professional singers and from people I don't even know, so I guess I did okay. The impression I got from the way people phrased the compliments was that they really got the emotion in what I was singing, which was the idea, so I'll be happy with it. I moved people, and that was the point. I felt pretty good about it. So that's one item from the bucket list dealt with. One thing that hadn't even occurred to me was that I would get a special round of applause as a soloist. The director acknowledged the choir, then had the choir sit and the soloists stand. That was cool, but I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. I could see one of the pros, and she nodded a bit, so I did that.

I'm a little sad that we won't be singing this music anymore. I'll miss it. I got a little teary-eyed in the last movement because I realized it was almost over.

And now it's time to get ready for Christmas music. We're having a retreat to work on that next weekend.

But first, vacation week!

In other news, I did a guest post for the From the Shadows blog, providing a "Paranormal Road Trip" of New York settings from my books. Check it out!

Falling

It's Halloween weekend, but for me it's mostly about All Saints Day on Sunday. That's because I'm spending Saturday morning in a rehearsal with orchestra for the John Rutter Requiem we're doing Sunday night, and then I'm also singing in a chamber chorale for both services Sunday morning. That means the rest of the weekend is going to be pretty quiet. The Requiem is mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting to sing, and nerves will be on high because I've got a solo. I've sung by myself in church services, either as soloist with the choir or an ensemble or as part of a duet with solo parts, and even once as just a soloist, but this is a concert with orchestra. I'm mostly over the worst of my singing stage fright, but I'm nervous about this, and I think I'm mostly nervous about being nervous. If the nerves make me mess up, then it'll be back to square one. But I know I can do it. I've done well enough in rehearsal that even the pros have complimented me. I may be more nervous about the rehearsal with orchestra tomorrow because the while the audience is likely to be very supportive and less critical than I am of myself, professional musicians have different standards.

So, anyway, there will be lots of resting and taking care of myself to build up the energy levels. Today is cool and rainy, so it will be a writing day, and then the season premiere of Grimm is tonight. I'm skipping Saturday night's Halloween party in part because I can't really do a late night before the Sunday I'll have and in part because there are indoor pets at the host home, and I don't want to take the risk of an allergy flare-up. Under other circumstances, I'd just take medication, play with the pets, and then not worry about a little sniffling or wheezing. I'm planning on watching Doctor Who and some Halloween stuff and going to bed early.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Halloween. I mostly like Halloween because it's part of fall, which I love. I've always found it to be a magical time of year. I love looking at the colorful leaves. I even used to enjoy raking leaves. When I was a kid, I got excited about the idea of raking leaves into a pile and jumping in them (it was never as fun as it looked on TV, though). I've always loved fall clothes like plaid skirts, sweaters, boots, and hats. I love fall foods, like soups, stews, and stuff with cinnamon and apples. I remember checking a children's cookbook out of the library when I was a kid. It had a cookie recipe for each month, and for October it was snickerdoodles. The illustration was a snickerdoodle as the harvest moon, and that image has stuck in my head, so I associate snickerdoodles with October. This is a time of year when I want to take long walks in the woods and come home to have hot tea and cookies. I want to curl up with a good book on a rainy day. I want to watch romantic movies and drink hot cocoa.

Unfortunately, the season is fleeting. It comes so late here, and even though the fall weather often lingers until Christmas, once December arrives, "fall" gets replaced with "Christmas." In places where fall comes earlier (in Germany, it started to feel like fall in mid-August), winter comes earlier, though I suppose in many of those places, you actually get the season rather than a scattering of days over the course of months. There's only so much "fall" you can cram into the stretch from the last week or so of October through Thanksgiving. I have a list every year and seldom get to most of it. This year, just as the temperatures started dropping, El Nino hit, so it's too rainy to do much outside. And of course my vacation next week is going to end up getting rained on, though the forecast seems to change daily. I guess I'll get to walk in the cold rain and come back to my room for hot tea.

Now I'm going to devote the rest of the day to falling (I made it a verb). I think I'll bake some snickerdoodles and drink tea and write while watching it rain, in between bouts of practicing music (the second soprano part on Requiem is really tricky).

Villains and Victims

I talk a lot about the way good and evil are portrayed in fiction, in particular dealing with the attitudes toward good guys and bad guys in current popular culture. There's that idea that good guys are boring and bad guys are more fascinating, which I think often comes down to the attitudes of the writers. If you think good people are boring and bad people are interesting, you're going to write boring good people and interesting bad people.

There was a horrible crime in this area recently that had an even more horrible aftermath -- a guy who may possibly be mentally ill decided he wanted to kill someone and hacked a random jogger to death, and then not long after that, the victim's widow committed suicide. She couldn't imagine a life without her husband. There's a lot that's been written in the wake of these events, but this article about it gets into some things about villains and victims that fit some of my thoughts about why the "fascinating" villain is a false premise.

The writer, a veteran crime reporter, talks about the disconnect he had with editors who only really wanted the killers' stories when he was trying to sell true-crime books. Here's what he had to say about that:

Crooks have less going on upstairs, not more, than honest people. Crooks are basically smash-and-grabbers. See what they want, grab it. Money, sex, power, vengeance. Not into long-range planning. They divorce themselves from empathy. They have less, not more, to think about.

The effect their crimes have on survivors, on the other hand, is immensely complex and almost infinitely profound. As regular, decent people battle their way through the challenges of a normal life, their ability to deal with catastrophe, after all, is not infinite.

And that, right there, sums up why I'm far more interested in the good guys. I don't see anything all that interesting about someone who's out for himself, takes what he wants, and doesn't care what that does to anyone else. I don't care about his sad childhood, career failures or romantic disappointment. I'm more interested in the people who've gone through bad things and rise above them, who don't use their own troubles as an excuse to victimize others.

I'm even more interested in the good people who have to deal with the villains, whose normal lives are disrupted and who have to find their way back from that, or who have been permanently changed by their experiences. That change may be for the good, in that "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" way, but even that process is more fascinating to me than the process of what makes a person become a villain.

I remember when the first Star Wars came out, and so many people (including my baby brother) were fascinated with Darth Vader. He was considered very cool, with Luke being derided as bland. But to me, with Darth Vader, there was no "there" there. He was a faceless (literally) thug. He had no strong personal motivations -- he was mostly just following orders. He didn't have a particularly interesting backstory (in the original trilogy) aside from the mention that he was a promising pupil who turned bad. He didn't have any struggles or complexity. He was just a black mask doing bad things because people he could crush with a thought wanted him to do them, and it didn't seem to bother him one bit. Even fleshing out his backstory in the prequels didn't make him more interesting to me. That just made him look even more shallow and selfish. On the other side of the equation, we had a guy who had his entire life turned upside down, who lost everything, including his image of himself, who got what he thought he wanted and realized it might be more than he could handle, and who had to transform himself -- fast -- not only to ensure his own survival but to ensure the survival of everything he believed in. He was yanked abruptly out of his comfort zone and thrust into a broader world than he could have ever imagined. That's way more interesting to me. Even anti-hero Han Solo (the other character it was cool to like) wasn't quite as interesting -- he just went from cynical and selfish to joining a cause, but there wasn't much else to his characterization other than witty one-liners. He was tough and glib, but there wasn't a lot of depth there.

Or in the Harry Potter world, sometimes I think Harry himself was the least popular character. Draco Malfoy was the one who got swooned over -- the spoiled rich kid bully who believed he was part of a master race who had every right to rule over the lesser races. But he had a sad childhood because his father was abusive, so he couldn't help being evil (and, of course, he could be healed by the love of a good woman, if only any of the girls in the books could have seen beneath his tough shell, the way the fanfic writers would, of course). Never mind that Harry had just as abusive and far less privileged a childhood and didn't turn out to be evil.

I'm not going to say never, but so far I haven't written from the perspective of a villain, and I don't really intend to. I'd rather look at the world through the eyes of someone trying to stand up against villainy. It's like the way every time someone commits a horrid crime, there's a huge social media campaign to not mention the names of the criminals, but rather to focus on the victims and heroes. Maybe if we did the same thing in fiction, there'd be less interest in villains in real life. I'm not saying that fiction makes people become evil, but if the prevailing view is that villains are cool and heroes are boring, that has to sink into the psyche, and the thought can take root and rot in the minds of some people, so that if they want to be noticed, it seems obvious to them that they have to be villains. If they do good or save lives, they'll be ignored or even criticized as hypocrites if they're less than perfect, but they'll get attention and even sympathy if they take lives.

Incidentally, I somewhat disagree with this writer's premise on the article as a whole. It wasn't that the wife's suicide itself was harder on us, it was that it was the topper to an already horrific crime, it was shock on top of shock, so her death wasn't just the shock of a suicide, but was the shock of a suicide that stemmed from a shocking murder. It amplified the initial crime.

Busting Writer's Block

In my last writing post, I talked about fighting the Don't Wannas -- a variation of writer's block when the problem is not so much not knowing what to write as it is not really wanting to write. But what if you really don't know what to write, if you eagerly sit down at the keyboard (or paper) and can't seem to make the words come?

There are a number of reasons this can happen, and some of the same techniques can work on all of them.

One thing that can happen isn't so much that you don't know what to write but that it's getting crowded out by everything else in your head, so it feels like you don't have anything to say about this project. You're poised to write the next scene, but all you can think about is your grocery list, menu planning for the week, that vacation you'd like to take next year, that other story idea that just popped into your head, etc. The story you're working on is still in there, but it's drowned out by all the noise.

A good way to deal with that is to do a brain dump and get rid of the extraneous stuff. Take a moment and write down your grocery list, your menu plans, vacation ideas, the other story ideas. Don't get too carried away and start researching your vacation or getting out cookbooks to plan menus. Just write down everything that comes to mind. You can do this by focusing on the specific thing that's distracting you or by doing freewriting, where you write for a certain amount of time or a certain amount of pages, just writing whatever pops into your head, whether or not it makes sense. When you do that, you may find that you're thinking more clearly and are more able to focus. By the end of your freewriting session, you may have come back around to writing about your work in progress and what you want to happen next because you'll have cleared everything else out of your mind.

If you're just stuck, whether it's having no idea what happens next or being torn between possibilities, it can help to go back and re-read what you've already written. Start by going back a chapter or so, but if you're really stuck, it's often because something has gone wrong further back in the book and your subconscious can't move forward from where you are because it's all wrong, so you may need to go back to the beginning. I'm a big advocate of writing straight through instead of getting bogged down in making things perfect, but there are times when the only way to salvage a story is to go back and fix things. There's no point in pushing forward down the wrong path. Even if you don't have to make major changes, going back to the beginning helps you put the book into perspective because then you can experience it like a reader does, in much bigger chunks. It can take days, weeks, or even months to write what a reader goes through in hours. Re-reading can give you ideas for moving forward and can revive your enthusiasm for the project.

Another block-busting trick is to make a list of things that could happen next. Make yourself fill a whole sheet of paper. Some of the ideas are going to be silly, but as you keep going, you're forcing yourself to think more deeply and you may come up with some possibilities. This is another good use of freewriting, just forcing yourself to keep writing about your story until you've filled a certain number of pages or used up a certain amount of time.

If you're torn between possibilities, try outlining or sketching out both ways it could go and then listing where it could go from there. I sometimes find that it helps to open a new file or to use pen and paper when I'm uncertain about where I'm going. It feels like less of a commitment to the actual book. I'm just playing around with possibilities, not writing something in the book, and that limits the fear and restraint that comes with writer's block. If I like it, I can add it to the book.

If you know something that will happen down the line but are struggling with how to get from where you are to where you're going, write that future scene and see if you can reverse engineer. I know of writers who are entirely nonlinear, who just write the scenes as they come to them and then put them in order and create transitions later. You can try that if writing linear scenes isn't working for you.

One thing that helps me prevent both the Don't Wannas and writer's block is to end my writing sessions on a cliffhanger rather than neatly at the end of the scene, and then make some notes about what happens next. That makes me more eager to start writing the next day, and I already know how to start my writing session. It's usually easier to start the day by finishing a scene than by trying to start one, and I find that once I'm writing, it keeps flowing. Starting is the hard part.

When a Book Makes Me Feel Inadequate

I was all ready to rock and roll on the writing yesterday because I knew what would happen next -- and then I realized that while I have the big-picture sense of what was happening next, I was entirely lacking in specifics. And then I realized that I was lacking some information. Sometimes, "I need to do some research on this" is a procrastination method, but in this case, it turned out that my vague assumptions were wrong, and that will affect how I write the next part. It doesn't change my plot, just the timeline and how many actions I need to cover the span of time it takes to get from point A to point B.

Though there were one or two research rabbit holes I might have followed that weren't specifically relevant to my work but that were interesting.

So now I have a better idea of what's happening, and today should be rock-and-roll day.

It's possible that I was a little reluctant to write words because I had a reading hangover from the weekend. I read one of those books that leaves me feeling like a fraud and wondering why I even bother. At that library event last week, I picked up a copy of The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, the "one book, one city" book for the year. It's a book that's a bit difficult to describe. Plot-wise, it's about a girl in 1939 Germany whose mother has to give her up (her mother is a communist, and therefore outside the pale of Nazi-era society, and she reaches the point where she's unable to care for her child) and the couple who takes her in. In some respects, she has as idyllic a life as she can expect against the backdrop of war in a small town near Munich. She has friends and her foster parents are good to her. But her foster father is an anti-Nazi and has trouble getting work because of that, so times are tough. He never got on board with the party because of the anti-Jewish stance, since his life was saved in WWI by his Jewish friend. And now the son of his friend is in need of help. The "book thief" thing happens because this young girl has a habit of picking up books -- first when the gravedigger drops one at her brother's funeral, later when she finds one that didn't burn in a book-burning event, later still when she gets access to a private library. She becomes more and more fascinated with words and their power.

But it's not really a book about the plot. The slightly odd thing that takes some getting used to is that it's narrated by Death, who is fascinated by humans and who becomes interested in this girl when he sees her as her brother dies. There's a lot of meditation on the human condition and the impact of war. It's both brutal and beautiful, and it ends up working quite well in a way that had me sighing, "I'll never be able to do something like this."

It's also a pretty intense book. I was glad I'd seen the movie because otherwise I'd have been skipping to the end. I wouldn't have been able to take the tension otherwise. I'd call the ending bittersweet -- part realistic, given the circumstances, but with a big dose of hope.

So, yeah, the kind of thing that gives me inadequacy issues. But then last night I pulled something off the To-Be-Read shelf that had me wondering how it even got published, so I think I'll be back on track today.

Revisiting Old Role Models

We had a delightfully rainy (maybe a little too rainy in some areas) weekend, and now it's my favorite kind of fall day, crisp and cool. It should be a good patio writing day with a jacket and some hot tea.

First, though, I'll be sending off a book proposal to my agent. Then I'm going to keep writing on the book because I may as well keep going while I'm on a roll.

Over the weekend, I did a lot of reading, watched a few history documentaries, tried to catch up on all the old Doctor Who ("classic" era) episodes piling up on my DVR. The local PBS station is showing third Doctor episodes late at night on Saturdays, and BBC America is showing fourth Doctor episodes on Sunday mornings. Mostly, that means getting lots and lots of Sarah Jane, which is okay by me. The more I see of her, the more I like her. You could move her character, as she was then, into the current series, and she'd fit right in (though would likely spend less time unconscious -- it seems that the standard-issue cliffhanger for the end of each episode within a serial was her being knocked out). I loved her appearance in the more recent incarnation as the older and wiser, been there, done that, former sidekick, but her old self would also have been right at home.

I'm still not sure when I watched this show when I was younger, just that I must have because I knew it was something I liked when I encountered it again in college, and I recognized all the familiar images. I'm also pretty sure I imprinted on Sarah Jane somewhere along the way because even her look was my unattainable ideal when I was a kid (I wanted the sleek, swingy, bouncy hair like that, and that's not going to happen with my hair). And then there was going to journalism school.

Actually, I think it's time for gaucho pants and knee-high boots, worn with a turtleneck sweater (and optional vest) to make a comeback. Not all 70s fashion was "disco." We can skip the light blue eyeshadow, though.

I Love a Rainy Friday

After a long, dry summer and only a little measurable rainfall in September, we're getting a deluge, and it's glorious. It's going to be like this all weekend. I suspect there will be baking because that's what I do.

I'm hoping there will also be writing and reading. I was up late last night going over my book proposal. I've got about 20,000 words written (five chapters), plus a synopsis, plus I have short outlines for two entirely different possible books. I think I'll send the chapters to my mom to look at this weekend, and then send the whole thing to my agent on Monday.

Meanwhile, I'll keep writing the book. I'm just getting to the really fun part, and I want to see what happens next.

It doesn't help that the other outlines I wrote got those stories moving in my head, too.

So many stories to write, so little time. I'll remind myself of that the next time I have a raging case of the Don't Wannas. "Yes, you do want to write because you have to finish this book before you can write the next one, and you really want to write that next one, and the one after that."

I guess I won't be working on the patio today. I may sit on my bed with the blinds open and watch it rain while I work.

Too Happy an Ending?

I've done my pre-rainstorm grocery run, so I'm prepared for the forecast deluge. Apologies if my preparedness ends up preventing the much-needed rain. Not that I really needed to stock up for an impending apocalypse, but I was close to being out of some critical items, and better to buy them now than to have to venture out in the rain. I have milk, bread, and eggs, so if all else fails, I can make French toast.

I had a rather weird reading experience last night when I finished a book I was enjoying, and the ending kind of killed it for me (in a bad way) because it was too happy. Not that I'm a fan of sad endings or want characters to be miserable. I probably wouldn't have liked it if these couples (it was a women's fiction/chick lit kind of thing with multiple stories woven together) hadn't ended up together, though there was one I think I would have been okay with not happening. I think my problem was that the getting together was too easy for the problems that were set up, and it was like flipping a switch from off to on, with no transition.

The set-up for the emotional conflict was really strong, which was why the book was so interesting. It was the kind of thing where you could understand why one person either wasn't into the other person or just didn't want to deal with getting into a relationship. We're talking about scarred-for-life kind of stuff and real, believable issues, not "one person treated me badly once, and therefore I can't trust you" fake conflict. And then we got to the end and all these situations were essentially resolved by saying, "Oh well, I guess that wasn't true after all, let's go to bed right now."

With one situation, that might have worked, where the woman was into the guy but didn't want to get involved with him for a good reason, and then it turned out that he was only pretending to be the thing she didn't like about him, and he was pretending in order to help someone else out. So I could kind of buy the "Whee! You are someone I can be with! Let's not waste a second!" reaction. But another situation required a total shift in worldview to accept any involvement with anyone at all, and just learning that the worldview was based on something that turned out to not be true wouldn't change things. It would take professional help and some gradual adjustment, so I couldn't buy the "Oh, I guess it wasn't true, never mind" and instantly diving straight into the deep end of a relationship. And then there was another story where I'm not sure I bought the resolution at all because the thing causing the conflict was just too huge, or it would have taken a long process to overcome. Watching that process could have been interesting, but the book skipped it.

I guess I really want to feel like the characters earned their happy endings, rather than the author just waving a magic wand and making everything work at the last second, and I like the sense of a process along the way. I want to see them gradually moving through relationship stages rather than instantly going from off to all the way on.

That's why I like series and taking time to develop a relationship rather than trying to wrap it up in one book.