Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 240

Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

I had a rather earthshaking weekend -- literally!

I'd spent all day Saturday in a massive proofreading session, the kind of thing where I read an entire book out loud in one day. It was more than seven hours of work, with breaks here and there. I finished a bit after 10:30, and there's always a kind of adrenaline-fueled exhaustion that comes after something like that, where I'm dead tired and can barely keep my eyes open, but I'm also too wired to actually rest. I curled up on the sofa to watch a DVD, and then I thought I was in really bad shape because my head started swimming. I lay back on the sofa, hoping that would make me feel better, but then it seemed like the sofa was shaking. I'd consumed copious quantities of sugar and caffeine throughout the day, so I was pretty much vibrating already and I assumed it was just me. But then I noticed that the safety cage on the nearby fan was quivering. That was when I realized that it was an earthquake. We just got the tremors coming off the earthquake in Oklahoma, so it was very subtle, but that made it rather unsettling. I thought for a moment that it might have been a really big truck sitting at the traffic light behind my house, since those often rattle my windows (and set off my security alarm), but this was a different kind of shaking. It wasn't so much a vibration like that is, but more like being on the water. I felt a little seasick. It seemed to go on for a long time, at least a full minute, but I remember where on the DVD I was watching it started and stopped, so I guess I could go back and figure out the timing.

I know that even the main earthquake was minor in California terms, but this was the first time I'd ever encountered anything like it. The local late news was on, since it had been delayed by a football game, so I switched over to that and eventually they reported that an earthquake had happened in Oklahoma at that time, and then later in the newscast they mentioned reports of tremors in our area, so I knew I wasn't crazy and that I really had felt something.

Now I know how to describe it if something similar happens to a character. I know how it feels when artillery fire lands nearby, and that's the way I'd imagined an earthquake would be, but this was very different.

Meanwhile, my major project is done and off my plate entirely. However, I may have scuttled my plans to take it easy the rest of the year. I ran into one of my favorite former clients at the party Friday night (I guess the fact that she's the only former client I'm really in touch with and we're still friends and interacting socially to the point that she's introduced me to her friends means she's my favorite former client), and she's got her own agency now. She mentioned that she was desperate for freelance writers and before I knew what I was saying (wine was involved), I said I was done with my big deadline for the year, so I could pick up a few projects. She was excited because she'd wanted to ask me but was afraid I'd be too busy. I'm already pretty far ahead on potential books and need to give my agent a chance to catch up, and even if one of these projects does eventually sell, it could be at least six months before I see any money, so it won't hurt to spend some time on paying work. Income is good. Besides, I seem to be more productive when I'm busier because I have to manage my time better. And since it's totally freelance and project-by-project, if I get too busy or need a break, I can just decline a project. She said these were things I could probably write in my sleep.

But for today, since I don't yet have projects or deadlines and since I just finished something, I'm planning a nice reading day. Though the reading counts as input for a brainstorming session I have planned for tomorrow, so it's still "work," but the nice thing about my job is that reading is part of my work.

Renting Books?

My ballet teacher is back and everything in class is back to normal -- including having other people in the class -- so at least that part of my world is right once more. When your main form of stress relief becomes stressful, that makes things difficult. But since I'd missed a couple of classes after being scarred for life by the one-on-one session, I suspect some soreness will kick in later today. I hope it's not too bad because I've got a party to go to tonight, a real grown-up party. It's a wine tasting, so that means no Tylenol.

This week, Amazon started a kind of rental program for e-books. Right now, it sounds kind of like a Netflix model -- Prime members can borrow up to one book a month, one at a time, with no due date -- but it also seems like they're trying to demonstrate that e-book rentals can work before rolling out something on a bigger scale. As usual with anything new, that's resulting in the publishing industry wailing, gnashing their teeth, rending their garments and screaming, "The world's coming to an end!!! We're all going to die!!!"

As a reader, I think this sounds like an awesome idea and might be the sort of thing that would push me into buying a Kindle (I'd prefer something less proprietary -- and if other e-book vendors do this sort of thing, I'd go with that). I might actually start spending money on books again. Due to a variety of reasons, I've bought only two new books this year and I've set foot in a bookstore twice. That's in spite of me being a big-time reader.

One reason is convenience. My book purchasing declined significantly when they opened a new library branch a couple of blocks from my house. I hate to drive, and if I can take a very pleasant walk to a place where the books are free, then that's what I'll do. I imagine I might buy a few more books if it were the bookstore instead of the library just down the street.

But I think a bigger part of the reason is a combination of price, current publishing trends and clutter. When mass market paperbacks were about three dollars, they were an impulse purchase. I was a lot more willing to take a chance on something that sounded interesting because it was no big loss if I didn't like it. Now a mass market paperback is about eight dollars. Buying one is a decision, and it's a bigger loss if I don't like it. Meanwhile, what editors currently think people want to read is not lining up with what I want to read, so there are very few books I'm interested in purchasing these days, and even when I hear they're good, the subject matter is iffy, so I'm not eager to shell out eight bucks to see if maybe the book overcomes the subject matter. In most of the cases when there was something that sounded interesting to me and I bought the book, I've been burned by discovering that the book itself still fit more with the current trends than with my interests. I've gotten into a couple of new series in the past few years, but otherwise all the new books I've bought have gone straight into the "sell to the used bookstore" box. I haven't even shared them with my mom because I know she wouldn't like them. And that brings me to the clutter problem. My house is overflowing with books, so I don't want to add anything new that I don't love. If I buy a book and don't like it, then I have to deal with it in some way. Most of the new books I've bought in the past few years have been either authors/series I already know I like or keeper copies of books I initially read from the library. I know an e-reader would eliminate the clutter problem, but that still leaves the problem of paying eight to ten dollars for something I end up not liking.

But if I could pay two or three dollars to rent an e-book for a few weeks, I'd spend a lot more money on books because it's a lower risk. I'd be a little more adventurous, try a lot more new authors, and I'd get things when they first became available instead of waiting for them to show up at the library. It would be cool if you had the option to buy a book after renting it and your rental fee applied to the purchase price, so if I did like a book enough that I might want to read it again, I could have a copy to keep. If I didn't like the book, it wouldn't be left cluttering my house or my e-reader. I'd probably still buy the same books I already buy, but I'd then be spending a fair amount of additional money on the rentals, and the rentals would likely lead to a few more full-on sales than there would have been without them. I might still use the library a lot, but there are a lot of things (usually the mass market genre fiction) that I can't readily find at the library, and that would add to the library as a way of test driving books before I buy them.

As an author, I also think this is a great idea. I'd rather get maybe 25 cents a copy from a rental book (about what I got in royalties per copy when I wrote mass-market paperbacks that sold for $3.50) than not get anything at all from people not buying my books because they weren't willing to pay the full price for a book they weren't sure about. And then there's always the chance that the rental would lead to a purchase and then subsequent purchases of other books I've written. The boom in self-publishing, with success coming from mass sales of very low-priced e-books, has shown that e-book readers are willing to take chances when there's little financial risk. It seems silly for publishers not to come up with a model to take advantage of that, and rental seems like a way to offer a lower price while still not entirely eliminating the market for selling books. There are people who never re-read books, but they tend to be voracious readers who would still amount to a lot of revenue even just from rentals. I think, though, that a lot of avid readers do want their own copies of books they know they love, even if they've already read them. Even if they don't, I'd bet the numbers would still work out due to volume. You could make more money on five people renting a book than you would on one person buying a book, and while the rental option might mean some would-be purchasers would rent instead, I think there would be far more people renting who otherwise wouldn't have bought the book.

Dreams from the Other Reality

I got the edits that I'd been waiting for entered, and now I'm letting the book rest a little before I devote my Saturday to re-reading the entire thing straight through so I'll catch any continuity issues that might have arisen from the edits. And then I will be done! Done! I think then I'll take a break for the rest of the year. It won't be total slacker party time, but I will try to get some balance in my life. I have a couple of projects that are in a "pick at it" phase where it's probably best to do a little at a time, focusing on working on specific aspects rather than diving in head-first. I also want to do a big fall cleaning on the house. I've tried doing the small bits at a time thing, and that hasn't worked. I just need to go with my all-or-nothing nature and devote a few days to the effort. That may give me enough of a boost to keep going to finish more gradually. And then I want to catch up on my reading, watch some movies, maybe do some day trips around the area, go hiking, bake and generally have a life.

Meanwhile, I have to ask: How long do I need to be out of school before I stop having the "I have an exam in the class I've been forgetting to go to!" nightmare? The other night I had a particularly pervasive one, as it followed me through multiple dreams. I was tracking the guy who was fighting a Terminator and searching his last motel room when I had a nagging feeling I was forgetting something, looked in my bag, and found a class schedule and realized I was missing a class. Then there was another dream where I was on a vacation with my mom, and I found the class schedule again and realized I was missing a class. Then there was a dream more about the forgotten class where I learned there was an exam coming up, and it was an art history class where it was all lecture and slides, so I couldn't catch up by reading the textbook, so I knew I had to start going to the class. But then there were still more dreams about lots of other things, all of which included some element of me not being able to get to that class because I only remembered it while the class was already in progress. I finally woke in a panic and had to remind myself that I've been out of school for more than 21 years. And I never took art history (though I did take one history course that involved art and literature from the time period being studied, and that did involve a lot of slides, but I got an A in the class with little effort because I loved it, so I don't know why it would trigger anxiety).

I swear, on my deathbed I'll wake up briefly from a deep sleep, and my last words will be, "I've got an exam in art history, and I've been forgetting to go to class." Though the class varies in the recurring nightmare. Sometimes it's a foreign language, sometimes it's English literature. Sometimes I don't even know what it is other than that I'm missing it. When I was actually in school, I kept dreaming that I was skipping ROTC, and I was never in ROTC (though my dad taught it when I was a small child, and I was the mascot for their drill team).

I ought to start tracking occurrences of this nightmare to see if it maps to anything in the real world. There must be some anxiety that triggers it. Like maybe rushing to get a project done after having to wait for someone else's input that didn't come until after the deadline. That certainly breeds anxiety, but I wonder if there's something else out there I'm forgetting to do.

Now I'm thinking that there might be a story in there somewhere, like one reality leaking into another, so you're getting anxious about stuff the other version of you is supposed to be doing or should have done years ago.

Conveying Character

One little correction to yesterday's post: the author Kim Newman I mentioned is a "he" not a "she." I should have noticed that they used masculine pronouns in the intro to the story, but then he handled a female POV character well enough that I never got that "man writing from woman's point of view" vibe.

I've been talking about character development for a while -- about figuring out who these people are from the inside out. But all that planning and thinking doesn't do any good until you put it into the story, and that's where things get tricky. "Show, don't tell" is one of those writing mantras that gets repeated a lot, and characterization is one of the main areas where it applies. You can't tell readers that a character is brave, kind, impatient, evil, curious, etc. You have to show it through the character's actions.

A brave character will take on the school bully on the playground, will volunteer for the dangerous mission, will stand up to the boss, will eat the strange foreign food that makes everyone else at the table queasy. A kind character will do nice things for people and notice when people may be in need of help. A curious character will ask questions and investigate and won't be brushed aside with partial answers. You get the idea.

But it's not just big actions that show who a character is. You can also convey character traits through little mannerisms and body language. The impatient person is probably going to be a little fidgety, not sitting still, maybe pacing, and will interrupt or finish other people's sentences. A shy person blushes easily, may not make eye contact, won't initiate conversation and may maintain a larger than normal personal space bubble. The curious person may be nosy about everything, asking a lot of personal questions, picking up and looking at items, reading anything left lying around. The important thing about using mannerisms to convey character is that you have to be consistent and persistent, but you don't want to overdo it. Unless something happens to change the character, these actions should continue through the whole story, in every scene where they apply. It's way too easy to start the book really showing the character and then forget to carry these traits throughout. But then you don't want to go overboard with these actions so that the reader is shouting "I get it, okay?" It should almost be subliminal, where the reader just gets the impression you're trying to convey without noticing that you're trying to convey it.

It can help to make a list of actions and mannerisms that might convey the key aspects of your character. Then you'll be less likely to keep going to the same ones so many times that they become annoying. Your plot should also help convey character, since the choices the characters make will affect how the plot progresses (or else the plot turns will reveal character -- it's a chicken-and-egg thing). If your plot has your character choosing to take on the dangerous mission, you're showing that he's brave. If the plot has him going into hiding instead, then let's hope that "brave" isn't a character trait you're trying to convey.

One area where you may resort to "telling" is in the way other characters react to a character. Other people in the story may talk about this person, which means they're telling their impressions or attitudes (and the fact that they're telling these things is in turn an action on their parts that shows us something about their character). People are probably going to say nice things about a kind or brave person, and the fact that people like this person will help your reader see the kind of person he is.

If there's any conflict or contradiction between showing and telling, readers will believe the showing over the telling. No matter how often you tell us what a person is like, we're going to believe what the person actually does. This is often where the "Mary Sue" effect shows up, when the author overidentifies with a character to the point of losing all objectivity. In those cases, all the other characters will talk about how great this character is and this character will be universally loved -- and yet we never see the character doing anything that gives any reason for this universal appeal. We just see this bland, empty person that all the other characters tell us is great, and we don't believe the other characters.

However, you can use that show vs. tell conflict to effect if you do it deliberately. It can work if your character has a secret identity -- people treat Peter Parker or Clark Kent like they're useless wimps, but we see them acting like superheroes. Or it can work if the other characters just don't get this character, so they say he's one thing but we see through his actions that he's another way. Or you can use it to try to keep readers guessing. In a book I'm working on now, we hear about a character from the other characters before we meet her, and when we actually meet her, she's not at all what we expect based on the way others talk about her. But then once we start seeing her in action, we can kind of see why people see her that way, but we can also see that they're not getting the whole picture, and it takes a while for the viewpoint character to figure out what she's really like. Carrying that off requires a mix of showing and telling, with clashes and sometimes agreements between the showing and telling. But you have to do this on purpose for a reason. Otherwise, it just looks like you don't understand your own characters when there's a clash between the showing and telling.

This wraps up the series on characterization. I'm open to questions on other topics related to writing and the publishing business.

Recent Reading

The scariest part of Halloween for me was when the church across the street from my house (I live on a corner and the church is on the adjacent corner) had a "fall festival" carnival that involved a live band playing outdoors, extremely amplified. They sounded like a bad Gin Blossoms cover band -- very mid-90s slacker monotone whining rock -- though I would imagine the lyrics were rather more religious. It was loud enough that it was uncomfortably and distractingly loud in my house, with the windows closed. To make matters worse, the noise was really upsetting my neighbor's dog, who howled constantly in protest. And then the squeals of what I believed to be teenage girl band groupies started carrying across the street. I resorted to ear plugs, but the drum beats still carried, which made it fairly hard to concentrate on the serious editing work I was doing. Fortunately, they stopped playing at eight. I couldn't help but wonder what the neighbors who protested when the owners of that lot were trying to change the zoning from office to commercial to put in a small shopping center had to say about the noise. They thought a retail center would mean more noise and traffic, but the office park we got after the zoning fight is mostly taken up by a church, and I doubt the retail center would have ever had live bands playing outdoors at night. I guess it's only a couple of times a year, and the church does provide assistance and bottled water to victims of the frequent accidents at the intersection, but I could do without the outdoor concerts across the street.

I haven't talked about books in a while, so here's a wrap up of some recent reading. I've been trying to tackle some things from the towering To Be Read pile, and most of them haven't been worth talking about, but I did find one gem that's a perfect example of Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover. I got a novella collection called The Fair Folk in the goody bag at the World Fantasy Convention in 2006 (at least I think that's where I got it), and it's languished in the TBR pile mostly because it has a cover that looks like what you see on really bad self-published or extremely small press (the kind of "small press" that mostly exists to publish the author and her friends) books. It's not so much that the art is all that bad, but there's just something about the way the cover is designed and printed that screams "cheap and cheesy" to me. It turns out that the book is full of novellas by rather distinguished, award-winning authors, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of them. The theme is the fae -- not the cute Disney fairies with butterfly wings, but delving into the folklore version of fairies/elves/fae. I'd read a lot of the authors involved but will be looking up some of the others. In particular, there was a story by Kim Newman that seemed to come from a universe she's established in other works that's sort of a steampunky/gaslight fantasy with a secret society that investigates strange occurrences in Victorian England, and I want to read more about that world. Unfortunately, this collection appears to be out of print.

I picked up what I think must be the latest (it was on the library's new books shelf, but that doesn't mean much in my library) of the Elemental Masters series by Mercedes Lackey, Unnatural Issue. Finally, the book about Peter (a recurring character who provides a lot of the connective thread to this series but who hasn't yet been the "hero" of a book). These books are all loosely based on fairy tales, but the connections aren't overt. Some of the fun is figuring out which tale is being used by finding the patterns. I think this one was based on "Donkeyskin," the one in which the princess has to flee her home when her father decides he has to marry her, since he swore he couldn't marry any woman who isn't as beautiful as his late wife, and the daughter grows up to look just like her mother, so he sees her as the only option. It's a Cinderella-like story, as the princess ends up working as a servant in another king's castle. This book got a bit creepy, what with the father wanting his daughter and all (in a way that's actually ickier than the original fairy tale), and then it gets into the start of WWI, and you can just imagine what can happen when you combine a necromancer and trench warfare. But I really liked the main characters and the way the relationships develop. It's books like these that I read for my romance fix because the romantic aspect is more satisfying to me than the romances in most romance novels.

Then the book that kept me up way too late Sunday night was Goliath, the final book in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy. I'm going to have to re-read the end, since I was barely staying awake for the last few chapters. I was really tired and wanting to sleep, but I couldn't put the book down so close to the end of not only that book but of an entire trilogy. I've learned that when I do that, I tend to dream bizarre endings to the book and don't sleep well, so I may as well stay up and read. But then I miss a lot when I read while barely awake. This series is about a girl who disguises herself as a boy to join an airship crew, and then a fleeing Austrian prince who gets picked up by the airship at the start of an alternate version of WWI. Things get a little complicated when the girl falls in love with the boy but she can't do anything about it because he thinks she's a boy and because he's a prince and she's a commoner. In this volume, their ship picks up a mad scientist in Siberia who thinks he's invented a weapon that can end the war. And meanwhile, the girl's secret becomes less of a secret and they have to deal with the consequences. I enjoyed the book, but I may not be entirely satisfied with the outcome to the series, though it's possible I'm applying adult standards to a YA series. After all, these characters are 16. Their lives shouldn't be decided and settled, so it's probably going to feel a little unfinished to me as an adult. Though this trilogy has ended, the outcome does leave some threads hanging that might lead into another series with the same characters as they move into the next phase of their lives, and I'd like to see that.

I'm really behind on my reading this year, so I hope to catch up in the next couple of months. I think I'll go on a lighter schedule after I get this one project done, and then I can do a lot of reading (which is still work-related).

Happy Halloween!

I way overslept this morning, in part probably because I'd had two late nights in a row -- a Halloween party and then reading a book where I was sooo close to finishing, and it was the end of a trilogy, so I was not only waiting for the resolution of the story but for the resolution of the characters' lives -- and probably in part because I was just too comfortable to get up. And actually, I wasn't truly sleeping for the last hour and a half or so. I was just lying there, thinking and daydreaming and being way too comfortable to bother getting out of bed. And then I looked at the clock and freaked out because I had no idea it was that late.

So, the Halloween costume for the year. It was a theme party this year, with a focus on 1950s science fiction movies. I did a sort of space vixen spaceship crew member thing the way they tended to be represented in movies from the 50s and 60s, where the men might be in very practical, functional uniforms, but the women wore high heels and cat suits. It doesn't show in the picture, but I had my hair in a bundle of looped braids, kind of like Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. The original plan was to wear the pleather pants, but they're extremely uncomfortable (as I said, like wearing a sauna) and didn't give the sleek look I wanted, so I got very brave and wore leggings in public with a sweater that only came to my waist.

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At the party we watched some 50s movies, including the Mystery Science Theatre version of This Island Earth and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Now I finally have that project I've been waiting on for two weeks -- naturally, on the day I think it would be good to clean house -- so I have serious, urgent work to do. It's a good thing I had a fun weekend.

Halloween Preparation

I got a late start this morning after staying up and watching the end of the World Series game. I thought that since I'm a good luck charm in person (the Rangers never seem to lose when I'm at a game) I might help them when I watch on TV. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to hear all my shouts of, "Just one more strike, and you win the World Series. No, that was a hit. That's not what you wanted."

In addition to finally doing something with my Stealth Geek blog, I've also revived my semi-defunct cooking blog, The Mildly Adventurous Chef. Yesterday's cooking adventure was pulled pork in my Crock Pot.

I started re-reading that fairy tale book I mentioned earlier this week, and you know, I really like it. It's young adult, which was a departure for me, and it's possible that it didn't find a home because it's not the angsty Twilight stuff that's taken over the YA market. There's no real love triangle, for instance, and no vampires at all. There are a few things about it that I'm reconsidering, but I won't make any decisions about what to change about it until I've read the whole thing through and maybe had someone else give it a sanity check. Then I guess I'll have to work out how to do a cover (I have a cover in mind but will have to figure out the logistics of producing it) and how to do all the formatting/uploading. Maybe I should aim at getting it out there around Christmas, so people who get new e-readers for Christmas will have something to buy. That will depend, though, on how much work it ends up needing. If I'm going to experiment with e-publishing, I may as well go for it with something I've already written that probably won't sell to a major publisher but that I think there may be a market for.

Now I have to get ready for Halloween. I need to bake for Saturday night's party, and there's an item I may need for my costume. I could do without it, but the alternative I already have isn't all that comfortable. This particular costume is maybe a little more edgy than I usually go, but then again, there was the year I was the Generic Urban Fantasy Book Cover:




The (temporary) "tramp stamp" tattoo is a bunny rabbit, because that's what I had handy. I couldn't be a Generic Urban Fantasy Book Cover without a tattoo. And those pleather pants are like wearing a sauna. I may have lost five pounds that night. But at least they're easy to wipe off after a small child has climbed all over me with sticky hands. The smile probably isn't representative of the Generic Urban Fantasy Book Cover, but I couldn't stop myself, and this wasn't the camera/photographer who captures my evil side.

Tune in Monday to see this year's costume.

Hurling Pumpkins and Launching Books

I didn't have preschool choir last night because it was the Halloween carnival, so instead I helped run the "pumpkin bowling" game at the carnival. This involved using mini pumpkins as bowling balls. There were some bowling pins, but they were very lightweight plastic and wouldn't stay up, so they drew ghost/pumpkin faces on toilet paper rolls, and we stacked those into a pyramid. It became a weird cross between a softball throw and bowling, depending on how each kid threw the pumpkins. I must say it was highly entertaining to watch. There is something rather satisfying about hurling pumpkins at things.

I now know to be flattered when my preschool girls call me Rapunzel. I think half the girls were wearing some kind of Disney princess costume, and Rapunzel was this year's favorite. Some went all-out with the long wigs, and they were proud that their hair was longer than mine. We also had a surprising number of Darth Vaders and Jedi Knights, especially considering that some of these kids weren't even born when the last prequel came out.

Speaking of throwing things, I keep forgetting to mention this … At WorldCon, there's a newsletter every day listing events, parties, etc., and there are a lot of book launch parties mentioned. On the last day, they do a joke newsletter, and in that one, there was an article announcing the results of a book launch party, giving the winning distances.

I immediately thought that sounded like more fun than the typical book party. It was a pity I didn't have anything coming out. But then I thought, why would I want to do that to my own books? If you're having that kind of book launch party, it should be for the wallbangers, the ones that deserve to be hurled with great force. Unfortunately, I'd have to find some other place to hold it because I don't have enough lawn to really go for distance, and I live either within or dangerously close to the airspace of a major airport, which would affect how high we could go. And with my friends, yes, yes that would be a potential issue. Mentioning "launch" would start a discussion on the best way to achieve orbital velocity. But we really must have a book launch party someday.

Today is my favorite kind of autumn weather, nicely cool and grey. My (hopefully non-homicidal) Crock Pot is busily making dinner (and possibly plotting against me -- but I know which circuit breaker to flip if it gives me any attitude), I've made a pot of tea and since I still don't have that work that needs to be done, I may declare this a research reading day. I need to provide stimulus input for my creativity.

Being Creative

Wow, it sounds like there's actually some interest in my wacky fairy tale book. Sadly, every single publisher in New York rejected it. I suppose it could be that the idea was clever but the writing wasn't good enough. Or it could be that they expected it to be a chick-litty style comedy when it's more of a mix of humor and drama (I'd say a similar tone to Buffy -- some humor and funny one-liners, and the premise may sound kind of silly on the surface, but they're actually in some really scary situations. Instead of being a comedy it's more of a serious story about characters who have a sense of humor and who are dealing with an odd situation). That is a book I'm considering e-publishing myself, since I have it written, the publishers don't want it, some readers might want it, and it's not doing me any good just sitting on my hard drive. I haven't looked at it in a couple of years, so I may want to give it another once-over and see if maybe the publishers were right and how much work it needs. Or maybe I'll still love it and decide to prove the publishers wrong.

In the meantime, I'm stuck in a holding pattern where I have something with an urgent, pending due date, but I can't do anything about it until someone else gets their part done, and they're already a week past when they said it would be done. When I get it, I'm going to have to leap on it instantly and then work really hard to make the deadline, so I'm almost afraid to delve into any other work that's only going to have to get shoved aside. So I've found odd little ways to spend my time. Yesterday, I was working out my Halloween costume. I had something planned that would actually be pretty timely for pop culture, but it turns out that the party I'm going to has a theme this year, and while dressing for the theme isn't required, I think it would be fun, and my planned costume was the exact opposite of the theme. I planned something else that was kind of tangential to the theme, but then yesterday I got an idea for something else that might fit better and that could be a lot of fun. However, I suspect it will generate a lot of photos posted to Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet. Hey, publicity, right?

The other thing I was doing was reading a book I picked up for a dollar at that warehouse sale. It's a business book on creativity, written by a guy who apparently does seminars for corporations to help them brainstorm new ideas. Supposedly, this whole process is copyrighted, but it's very similar to what I do when working on a book idea. In fact, he seems to have validated my creative process. One of his principles is that just telling someone to come up with ideas doesn't get you a lot of ideas, and those ideas won't be very good. You need some kind of stimulus/input to generate creative ideas. The first step in one of his idea generating sessions is to immerse the group in all kinds of input relating to the project -- research as well as relevant sensory input. That's pretty much how I start working on a book. I read all kinds of random stuff even tangentially related to elements of the story, including non-fiction research and novels that have something in common with the story. Then before I really dive into the work, I do a kind of "retreat" in which I watch movies that remind me in some way of the project, listen to music and create a kind of soundtrack for the book and sometimes even eat food that relates to the setting or the characters. After that, I'll start the serious brainstorming and plotting. This theory also validates what I call "iTunes roulette" that I sometimes use either when I'm stuck or when I'm plotting. I put iTunes on shuffle and let it play in the background while I brainstorm, and sometimes a song that comes on will spark some idea. One of my favorite plot twists ever (in a book that got rejected, but I'm salvaging that plot twist for another project) was inspired by a song that came on at just the right time.

There are a few other things in this book that I haven't tried, so I'll have to put them to the test. I do know that I need to improve my sense of adventure. I tend to be a bit of a scaredy cat -- rather risk-averse -- and I need to force myself out of my comfort zone. Most of his suggestions for things to do to generate a sense of adventure utterly terrify me -- not physically because they're not things like skydiving, but socially, as most of them involve some kind of interpersonal situation that would have me looking to join Mole Boy in his tunnel. Sometime next year, depending on when I get the current slate of projects cleared and depending on what becomes of those projects and whether I'll need to do editor revisions or copy edits, write sequels, etc., I will be diving into a totally new project, so I'll have to apply some of these ideas in the planning stage.

Really, though, creativity isn't my problem. I have no shortage of ideas. I'm not sure what my problem is or if it even is my problem, aside from the problem of being square when round is the big trend of the moment.

Fantasy on TV

One weird thing that came out of that "where are they now?" thing at the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books site is that an editor for a romance line e-mailed me to say that she couldn't help me continue my series, but she would love to see any manuscripts I had that might be suitable for her line. I must confess to enjoying a moment of ironic glee at writing a "your line doesn't suit my needs at this time" letter to an editor, since all my manuscripts contain fairies, wizards or other forms of magic and use romance as only a subplot. Not that I'm really in a position to "reject" an editor, but my writing really would not be a good fit for her, and trying would only make me miserable and would likely fail. If only an editor who might want the kind of stuff I write had seen that post and the response to it and had come recruiting.

It does seem like there's a TV cultural trend possibly brewing that fits my style. I caught up with the premiere of Once Upon a Time last night (since I was out singing when it was on), and it seems like the kind of thing I might write. In fact, I have written something similar, except I was using the Piney Woods of East Texas instead of Maine (that area reminds me of some of the forests in Germany, and it gives me a fairy tale vibe). I did a spin on Sleeping Beauty, using the ballet version of the plot, in which the good fairies (enchantresses in my story) took the infant princess away to raise her in obscurity and hide her from the wicked fairy (enchantress) until after her sixteenth birthday, only in my story, they brought her to another world entirely, so this Disney princess with all those magical gifts of beauty and song had grown up in a small East Texas town. Everyone thought that her tendency to walk down the street doing her own musical numbers with lots of small animals following her around was kind of weird, but they couldn't help but love her. Then on her sixteenth birthday the evil enchantress had managed to find a way to open the portal and send her men to fetch the princess, only there was a mix-up and they got the wrong girl, so a very ordinary, non-princessy (but very practical) teenager was in this fairy tale world where everyone thought she was the princess, but once she figured out what was going on, she had an advantage because she knew how the story went, while everyone around her was living it and didn't realize they were characters in a story. The sequel took place in our world, when they found that Sleeping Beauty wasn't the only person who'd found their way here to take refuge. They found Snow White working as an aid in a nursing home, where she was looking after seven feisty WWII veterans, and the evil queen had come looking for her, setting herself up in a beauty parlor where she was surrounded by mirrors. I wrote the whole first book, but no one wanted it, so the series didn't really get developed.

Anyway, I really liked Once Upon a Time, since I'm a sucker for fairy tale stuff. It looks like it could be fun. My only complaints were that the "fairy tale" parts of the story suffered a little from the curse of SyFy fantasy movies, where the characters in this quasi-medieval European fantasy world speak colloquial modern American English -- except when they don't -- and that they seem to be doing a very Disneyfied version of the fairy tales (since ABC is owned by Disney), so that the dwarves have the Disney dwarf personalities, and they seem to be considering everything made into a Disney animated movie to be part of the same fairy tale world, like Pinocchio. Still, I like the characters and the situation so far, even if I now have an urge to dig out my Into the Woods DVD.

However, there was something oddly familiar about the set-up: A snarky blonde with no friends or family who doesn't even know anything about who her family was travels from Boston to a small coastal town in Maine, where she learns that the town is under a kind of curse, the town may be the key to her mysterious past, and she may be key to breaking the curse. Now, where have we seen that recently?

They had a sneak preview of Grimm OnDemand, about 20 minutes of the pilot that I think may be enough highlights to let us know what's going on and to get into the plot, and then cutting off at a cliffhanger moment, and I think I may like it, too. It's like a fantasy procedural, and I like what we saw of the characters. Also, on a shallow note, the main character is really cute and has a very pleasant speaking voice (he would make a really good Owen), so that alone would get me to give it a try.

Apparently, the ratings for Once Upon a Time were pretty good, so maybe this will start a trend. And then maybe they'll want more contemporary fairy tale-like series. I know of a good possibility ...