Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 214

Holidays for Introverts

I finished proofreading Book 7 and sent it off to my agent yesterday. I took a bit of a break the rest of the day, but now I've got to get back to work. I've got to proof the layout for one more sales venue for book 5, and then I've got revision notes on another project to review before I chat with my agent about it later this week. And meanwhile, I'm continuing research for an upcoming project.

I'm having one of those days when I really don't want to leave the house, and yet I kind of need to get milk. The last time the only thing I needed to get was milk, I ended up being seduced by a shop near the grocery store, where I found a killer dress I wore to the wedding last weekend. But even that thought wasn't enough to entice me today (I don't really need another killer dress). I think I can get by for one more day, and if I get really desperate, I can always stop by the store on the way home from dance tonight. It's just such a perfect working day, cool and cloudy, and I don't want to waste it.

Thanks for the book recommendations. I now have enough options that I think I'm set for my holiday reading time, assuming I let myself have that time. My evenings are pretty solidly booked already. I've got dance on Tuesdays and Thursdays and choir on Wednesdays. I've got two Saturday nights booked and one Sunday night. There's going to be one weekend that's absolutely insane, so Friday may be veg night that weekend. And I think the weekend before Christmas will be pretty quiet for me. That'll probably be my big "take a moment" time because all the crazy stuff will be done, other than the two Christmas Eve services and the trip to my parents' house.

This may be one of those "you know you're an adult when …" things. You know you're an adult when the holiday season hasn't even started and you're kind of looking forward to it winding down so you can relax. Or maybe that's just introverted adults and others actually enjoy being so busy. I do enjoy all the stuff that happens, but it is tiring for a raging introvert. The local paper had an article this morning about survival tips for introverts (I don't know if that link is behind a paywall -- they do have all kinds of sharing options for the article, so maybe not). But most of those are about finding those moments to recharge while around people. With me, it's not so much alone time (though that's important, too) but home time. I get twitchy without enough home days. My idea of a great day is one in which I don't have to get in the car. Which is why I now need to get to work, so I can earn enough money writing to not have to get a job that requires going to an office every day.

Seeking Holiday Books

I'm actually kind of glad to be back to work after a very busy Thanksgiving week. I had a lot of fun and saw a lot of people, but it's good to be back to normal. I'll probably take a walk today, but I don't anticipate leaving the house otherwise.

My mom's birthday was last week, so I went to my parents' house early to celebrate. "Celebrate" meant food, a short shopping trip, and just hanging out. My brother and sister-in-law joined us for Thanksgiving. More food and hanging out, and I worked off dinner by letting my brother's little dog chase me around the back yard (though he didn't like it when the horse in the pasture behind my parents' yard stuck his head over the fence for a nose scratch). Then it was back home for the wedding of two of my friends, which meant it was essentially a gathering of all my good friends. I took a long walk yesterday before getting down to work.

Now I have the holiday season ahead of me, and as usual, I'm not mentally ready for it. It doesn't help that it's so warm that it feels more like spring (the flowers are even still blooming). Thanksgiving was early this year, though, and I prefer not to go into Christmas mode until December. But everyone else seems to be in full gear, and Lifetime is showing all their holiday movies when I'm not yet ready for them. I think I may get out my decorations next weekend and then I'll start my holiday season with the beginning of Advent.

As I do every year, I've been trying to track down books to read in the appropriate atmosphere once I have the house decorated. That's one of my traditions, a way to force myself to take a quiet moment or two amid all the usual craziness that comes around this time of year. It started purely by accident when I just happened to have a book to read and sat down amid my lights, with some holiday music on and a cup of cocoa, and it turned out that the book was set during the Christmas season, which made it really special. The trick is finding the right book.

I'm not crazy about the obvious "Christmas" books -- you know, the romances with titles like "Her Secret Santa" or anything in which someone learns the true meaning of Christmas, which is never actually the true meaning of Christmas but rather just generic "spend time with loved ones" greeting card stuff. I'm looking more for fun books that happen to be set during the holiday season without actually being about the holiday season, and that makes them much harder to find. It looks like Amazon has removed their tagging feature, so I can't search that way. I'm down to looking at "people who bought this also bought" and then reading the description and some of the reader reviews for clues.

I lean toward chick lit-type books because they're like movie romantic comedies. Nothing dramatic or "heartwarming" about finding adorable moppets a home for the holidays. Definitely no stuff like getting over bereavement. Basically, I'd love something like the movie The Holiday in book form, where the holiday season provided the setting and the situation, but the plot wasn't really about the holidays, and the lessons the characters learned could have come at any time of year. Or like a lot of the Lifetime romantic comedies, where they stick some Christmas-related title on any movie that happens to have a Christmas tree in the background of a scene and some snow. The ones I've found in the past were A Promising Man by Elizabeth Young, which just happened to be set during the Christmas season and included scenes of shopping and a dinner with the family, and The Rose Revived by Katie Fforde, which involved one of the characters having to pull together a family Christmas celebration at her new boyfriend's ancient farm house.

So, any suggestions of books you've happened to stumble across that might fit? I'm probably going to do an Amazon order later today for some other things, and may as well throw one more book in, if I find something.

By the River and Through the Woods

I can't believe it's Thanksgiving week already. This will be my only real "work" day of the week, as I'm adjusting my usual holiday schedule. Some friends are getting married this weekend, so I'm coming home from my parents' house earlier, and so I'm going to my parents' house earlier. Tomorrow is my mom's birthday, which makes it a holiday anyway, right?

I've already got my laundry done. Now I just have to pack, wrap some presents, proofread half a book and do a little baking. Oh, and there's a choir rehearsal tonight. Eep.

As I mentioned, I went to see Skyfall on Friday. My verdict is that they remembered to make a Bond movie while making a good action film (something I think has been lacking in the Daniel Craig Bond films). There were lots of fun callbacks to the entire series even while shaking things up. I love the new Q and his dynamic with Bond. And we have further proof that no matter what role she's playing in any film or television series, Judi Dench is going to be the biggest badass in the show, period. I love that about her, that she's this tiny lady who's so incredibly imposing. This is the first time in ages I've left a Bond film actually eager to see the next one.

My other weekend viewing was part one of The Dust Bowl. I just read the book The Worst Hard Time, upon which this seems to be largely based (the author is one of the major talking heads, and most of the same stories come up). It's interesting to get all the visuals to go with what I'd read, and we get to actually see some of the people whose stories were told in the book. I've heard of the Dust Bowl my whole life, but I had no concept of what it was really about until I started reading about it recently. That must have been absolutely terrifying to live through. I've been through some nasty West Texas dust storms, and those were nothing compared to the black blizzards of the Dust Bowl.

My other weekend fun was my first foray into geocaching. The friend I went to the movie with had found that there were a number of caches near my neighborhood, so we set out to find some. For those who haven't heard of this, it's like an orienteering scavenger hunt, where there are GPS coordinates and clues to finding hidden containers that may contain little prizes and a log book to show who's found them. They're all over the park where I like to go walking by the river. Though I think using GPS makes it almost too easy because it just points you there. More thinking and clue-solving should be involved, but that's just me liking to do things the hard way. If you're going on a treasure hunt, it should be stuff like "take ten paces from the first phase," and you have to figure out that the starting point is a rock that's kind of shaped like the first phase of the moon. Just looking at a map on a smart phone seems like cheating. Though I think there are caches like that (considering that the GPS coordinates for one are in my yard, those coordinates aren't always where the cache actually is). We were just going after the obvious ones to see what was there.

I was going to say that I didn't need another hobby, but this is just a layer onto an existing hobby. I like going walking and hiking. This might give me more to do on my walks and hikes.

If I don't manage to post the rest of the week, have a Happy Thanksgiving, to those who celebrate it, and a good week for everyone else.

Getting with the Program

I've had my new heater all checked out, so I'm ready for cold weather. I also finally programmed my programmable thermostat. My life doesn't really fit the programmable options, so with the AC it was easier just to set it manually, but I figured out how to make it work for me with the heater. The thermostat I have only allows you to set programs for weekdays and the weekend, which I think proves that whoever designed this probably doesn't go to church or have kids with weekend activities because whose Saturday and Sunday schedules are exactly the same? I imagine I'll be using the manual override frequently and occasionally reprogramming when I have a schedule change (It would be lovely if they let you save an override schedule for that one day that's going to go differently, rather than having to reprogram the entire weekend or weekday schedule and then put it back the way it was).

So, here's the at-home freelancer's programmable thermostat schedule:
Sleep -- overnight, low enough that the heat probably won't come on but high enough that the pipes won't freeze if it gets really cold. That means quiet and being able to snuggle under blankets, which is my favorite way to sleep.
Wake -- let the house start warming up around the time I usually wake up, so I can make/eat breakfast and get dressed in a warmer environment. Also, getting warm will force me out from under the covers. The cold house makes it harder to get out of bed.
Leave -- This is supposed to be the setting for when you're away at work all day. For me, it's a good setting for when I'm upstairs under a skylight, next to a portable radiator or wrapped up in a blanket while reading, writing or watching TV. If I'm staying mostly in one place and not moving around much, why heat the whole house?
Return -- I set this slightly warmer at around the time of night when I'm taking a shower and getting ready for bed. It's also around the time when I'm getting home from dance or choir.

I haven't really figured out the weekend settings, other than sleep and wake, since my weekend schedules are so different on Saturday vs. Sunday and vary each week.

And now I'm off to see Skyfall and maybe do some neighborhood exploring before trying to get a little work done in the late afternoon so I can enjoy my night of TV. Tonight's episodes of both Grimm and Haven look particularly intriguing.

Introducing the Tambouraca

I invented a new musical instrument yesterday, one I have decided to call the "tambouraca." It's sort of a cross between a tambourine and a maraca. It's a shaker and makes a similar sound to a maraca, but you can also play it like a tambourine and hit it as well as shake it. This is the kind of musical craft project a very non-crafty person like me might come up with.



Basically, it was a bit of desperation in trying to come up with something that would be easy enough to pull together. The song my kindergarteners are doing for Christmas has a sort of Latin/Caribbean feel to it, so I thought some kind of rhythm instrument might be fun, but all the instructions I found for making various shakers were either too complicated or didn't allow enough room for the kids to be creative (where's the creativity in pouring rice into plastic bottles?). The tambouraca involves two dessert-sized sturdy paper plates put together with duct tape around the edges and dried beans inside. The Target store brand plates are white and aren't coated on the bottom, so the kids could decorate them with crayons and markers or stickers. I found white duct tape that's sturdy enough to hold them together, and I had a bag of beans in my cupboard that had a hole in it, so I scavenged the beans that had spilled all over the shelf.

I was surprised by what a huge hit this was. They loved this project. They enjoyed making them (they mostly did the coloring and the adults/teen put them together) and then they danced around playing them. Now I just have to come up with how we'll play them to go with the song and try to get them to follow instructions and play them together. I sat with the pastor at dinner last night and mentioned the idea of having these instruments in church, and he didn't seem alarmed. I suppose they're less easily weaponized than rhythm sticks, and he was impressed with our bravery in letting preschoolers use those in church last semester. Then again, our pastor isn't the type who expects kids to be absolutely silent in church. As he's said, if the kids are making sounds, then he knows someone in the congregation is awake.

I had made one as a proof of concept, with just enough coloring to test both crayons and markers, and when I showed it to the kids to let them know what we were doing, one little girl looked at it with wide eyes and sighed, "Oh, it's beautiful!" This is why I put myself through this. It's good for my ego.

Tackling the Chair of Doom

I would normally be answering Enchanted, Inc. questions today, but I don't seem to have any that I haven't answered, though it's entirely possible that there are some buried in my in-box that I've forgotten. It's been one of those weeks. It's just hit me how much I need to get done between today and next week. Really, how much I need to get done between today and tomorrow.

Tonight I have children's choir, and I need to pick up some supplies for that because we're making some instruments to play with. I also have the furnace guys coming out tomorrow morning to check the new heater before I use it for the first time, which means I need to clean/straighten up the bedroom and bathroom to clear a path for them and get my stuff out of the way. The Chair of Doom is piled rather high with clothes, since the rapidly changing weather means that I sometimes need two or three changes of clothes a day -- start the day in warm clothes, switch to short sleeves in the afternoon, then add a sweater in the evening or change into something nicer to leave the house. That means a lot of things that I wear only for a couple of hours and put aside to wear again for another couple of hours. I also need to buy a couple of wedding presents and some Christmas presents for people I'll see at Thanksgiving but probably not at Christmas.

Meanwhile, I really need to start proofreading that book and brainstorming titles. Yesterday, I just did research reading for the next project and had a few goosebump moments. This project is something I came up with when I was in college. I did all the plotting and world building in my early twenties. In my reading yesterday, I found a real-life historical parallel to the situation I developed, right down to the supernatural explanation that was given at that time, which maps beautifully to what I'd plotted. And yet this was a period of history and an aspect of that time frame I hadn't heard of until I read it yesterday. It wasn't a period I ever studied formally in school or even read a lot about before the last ten or so years. It's rather freaky that I had something happen in my fantasy world that actually did happen in the real world (or, at least, that's what people at the time believed happened) that I had no way of knowing had happened. This event was just a side note to the subject I was reading about, so I have a whole new line of research to do. I will try not to cackle with glee (I love research).

But now to go put clothes away and otherwise shovel out what happened to my house while I was sick and then working on a book. I had been so good, but I really let things slide. But hey, now I have an incentive for getting the house in shape for the holidays.

Filing Off the Serial Numbers

All my grand plans of what I wanted to accomplish yesterday went nowhere. Late morning, I got a bit of a headache, and since I could feel exactly which muscles in my scalp were tensing up, I figured that if I lay down for a while and relaxed, the headache would ease. It turned out that I was right, except for the "for a while" part. I slept most of the afternoon (without ever realizing that I was really asleep and not just lying there -- I thought I'd been just lying down for a few minutes, until I looked at the clock and saw that hours had passed), and because the lying down happened before lunch, I woke up shaky and groggy. So there went my day. I figure my body must have needed the rest. But I'm making up for it today. I've already done a load of laundry and cleaned the bathroom. Now I really, really must obtain the tea because I don't have enough for tomorrow morning. This could be a crisis.

The depressing publishing news of last week was that yet another book that started as alternate-universe Twilight fan fiction got a huge book deal. My beef isn't with Twilight, although I have to admit that the appeal of that story went right over my head. What I don't get is the publishers jumping all over themselves to buy books that they know are just rewrites of another book. This is going to sound like "back in my day, if you wanted to publish a book, you had to walk two miles in the snow, uphill both ways," but there was a time when you hid any fan fiction origins to a novel and would only disclose that after it was a success. A publisher wouldn't touch something they knew originated in fan fiction. There's even language in most book contracts that amounts to the author swearing that the book is all the author's work and that the characters and situations are the author's own creation. Now they're seeking it out and publicizing the fan fiction origins. I suppose it comes down to money -- that's a huge audience, and the book is a guaranteed success, so why not? The original characters are thin enough that it's not hard to file off the serial numbers, stick them in a different setting and make them have lots of sex instead of just gazing at each other with longing.

But still, ethics and originality should mean something, shouldn't they? It's very depressing to be someone who's desperately trying to write something original and then see publishers throwing huge wads of money at people who are openly rewriting a recent book. Maybe the key to success is to find a way to map my original books onto something popular, post it as fan fiction, gain a following, and then change the character names and identifying details (back to the original book) and get a book deal. Except I suspect that what makes this fan fiction so popular is the inclusion of lots of sex, and I don't write good sex scenes, so this clever scheme won't work. I have written fan fiction in the past (for TV shows, not books), but my trademark then was really capturing the characters, to the point that it felt like a lost episode. If you're doing that, and if the characters in the universe you're playing with are at all three-dimensional, then it's impossible to change the names and file off the serial numbers and have something that even remotely looks original. The fact that these books can be published without lawsuits from the Twilight publisher means that they're bad fan fic (as in, not really adhering to the original, just co-opting the names) of a generic story. And the fact that this is what publishers want right now says something really sad about the industry. The fact that the reason publishers want it is that readers want it makes me kind of sad about these readers. There's so much good, original stuff out there, so why limit yourself to retellings of the same story?

Disaster Survival Strategies

I talked to my agent, who said she wouldn't be able to look at the book until after Thanksgiving, so I don't have to worry about crunching the final proofread. I can take my time with it and take some time to get my life in order this week. I need to do a massive house cleaning in preparation for the holidays and buy some wedding and Christmas presents. And there are a few books I want to finish reading. I'm mostly enjoying the feeling of being able to breathe again. There's a sense of discovery with a first draft. With revisions, although it can be fun, there's also a sense of obligation, especially when a deadline is looming. Finishing a book feels very much like back when I was in school and leaving the classroom after the last final exam. There's this amazing feeling of a weight being lifted.

Today, I really must get tea (I keep procrastinating on that errand, even though it only involves walking a couple of blocks). Then I think I'm going to put on some music and sing my heart out while cleaning the house. I think I really and truly am finally fully healed, and my voice is back. It needs some limbering up. We had a choir workshop this weekend, and I learned a few new drills and exercises to practice. I need to get in shape for the Christmas singing season.

It's just occurred to me that I may need to get extra cheery this holiday season to balance out my research reading. The next book I want to work on is set in the aftermath of a disaster, when the world hasn't really entirely recovered, with all the physical, sociological and psychological implications of that. Which means my research reading is on cheerful stuff like the Dust Bowl and the Black Death, and probably post-WWII Europe. This isn't dystopia, just more of a situation in which people are feeling burned (it was a mostly man-made disaster) and leery of taking any chances with what burned them, even if it may be necessary to really save the day for good. And in a bit of perfect timing, there's a PBS documentary miniseries on the Dust Bowl next weekend.

I do love the fact that reading about history counts as work. There's other stuff I'll need to research that's a lot less depressing, and there are some good "triumph of the human spirit" stories even in all the depressing stuff. The kind of scary thing is that I find myself concocting survival strategies for these situations -- what I might have done if I'd been there. Though, of course, if I'd been there, I wouldn't know what I know now to concoct those survival strategies. I do think I'd probably be safer than most from the plague, seeing as how I'm kind of a hermit. If I were working on a book, I'd emerge from my cave at the end of a draft and wonder where everyone went. I ran into my next-door neighbor on Saturday, and she thought I'd been out of town for a month.

Suspense

I finished the big round of revisions/rewrites last night. Today's task will be re-reading the second half of the book to send to Mom (since I kind of left her hanging). Saturday during the day I'll be busy, with a choir workshop in the morning and a meeting/gathering in the afternoon, but that night I think I'll start the major proofreading by reading out loud to myself. Then I should be able to get it to my agent on Monday, so I'm on target for the deadline.

And then I will promptly collapse. Actually, I'll need to do some shopping, do some house cleaning and generally get my life back in order, maybe even repaint the bathroom after that sheetrock repair from this summer. I have research to do for the next project, and I'll probably soon have revision notes on another project, but none of that will be urgent. It will feel good not to have this weight on my shoulders. I really love the ending of this book and I think the final result will be one of my favorite things I've written. It was just a challenge to write, and not entirely due to anything in the book itself. The bronchitis came at a bad time and brought me to a screeching halt that it was difficult to recover from.

Now I just need to come up with a title.

But I will allow myself a fun Friday freaky TV night. Both Grimm and Haven are getting really intense, and Haven has done a really interesting cliffhanger in which the ultimate outcome isn't in much doubt, but we can already see that getting there will be very difficult. And both of these have reminded me of one weakness in first-person narration: You don't get to build suspense in quite the same way.

There's a quote attributed to Alfred Hitchcock about the difference between suspense and surprise. If you show a group of people sitting at a picnic table and a bomb planted under the table goes off, that's surprise. If you show the audience the bomb under the table, but the people sitting at the table don't know about it, that's suspense, as the audience knows more than the characters and waits for that bomb to go off while urging the characters to get away from the table. All you can really pull off in first-person narration is surprise, since nothing can happen without the narrating character knowing about it. You can't do any of those "No! Don't trust him! We just saw what he's really up to!" moments because the audience doesn't get to see stuff that's going on behind the narrator's back.

To get suspense, you need multiple viewpoints so you can see what's going on elsewhere in the world that the hero doesn't yet know about. With first person narration, you can have a character who knows she's in possible danger and doesn't know what might happen to her, so there's tension, and you can use surprise. I love writing in first person and seem to write better that way, but there are times when it's limited. Like with the current situations on both Grimm and Haven, if I were writing those shows in narrative, I couldn't use first-person, even though both are built around a central main character. A lot of the time, things would work from only Audrey's perspective on Haven, since she's so central, but the current situation wouldn't work at all because the audience needs to know what happened when she wasn't there, and us knowing something major that she doesn't know has had me gnawing my fingernails all week long.

I guess I'll throw this in the hopper of my literary bucket list. The project I'm about to get revision notes on is in third person, and I did use that audience-superior thing a couple of times, where the character is about to go into a situation that we already know is bad even though she doesn't know it, but I don't know if I really milked it for suspense, to the point that readers will be screaming, "No! It's a trap!"

And now, off to buy more tea/take a short walk, then down to work so I can get this book over with and move on to the next thing I'm dying to write.

The Book That Ate My Brain

Those of you who've bought paper copies of No Quest for the Wicked may have noticed some odd little printing quirks where it looked like HTML was inserted at random. It turns out that there was a conversion error when CreateSpace took our (very clean) file and put it into the format. That error has now been corrected, so any copies ordered after this week will be correct (until I discover something else they messed up -- we're on round four for this book). We're working to see if there's some way those who got the bad copies can get something done, if having a perfect copy is important to you, but I don't have the answer on that yet. It's more weird than disruptive, and hey, you now have a collector's item. For future books, I may be doing the interior formatting myself. I have the templates and specs and will be working on that to see if I can do it. I would certainly be faster, and I'm probably more obsessive.

I'm so very, very close to being done with this round of revisions on the current book. There are about twenty more pages in the book, and I think I can keep most of them. I will likely be adding more pages because there's stuff I forgot to incorporate. Now I just need to figure out how to incorporate that stuff. This is the part of the book where, in the first draft, I was just flinging things in. In the synopsis, it was something like "and then the good guys win," and I thought I'd figure it out by the time I got there. But I didn't. And now I really have to.

That means I may not be going to dance class tonight. I'm a bit sore still from Tuesday, and if I'm close to being done with the book I may not want to break the momentum. I may be making up my September classes well into the next semester, but I think my teacher is pretty understanding. I'm seeing that it's not just the expense that keeps me from taking two classes a week. It really is a time crunch.

We had children's choir for the first time in weeks last night, and they were as crazy as always. The attention span was down to about thirty seconds. I tried a new game that may have been too advanced for them, so I may see about modifying it for them. Next week, I'll have a craft project for them (we'll be making some instruments). I just have three more sessions until the Christmas break, but that also means three sessions to learn a new song to sing in church. Eep.

And I still don't have a title for this book. I may have to call it The Book That Ate My Brain. But I say that about every book I write.