Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 118

swim jinx

I don't consider myself to be a superstitious person, but I admit I was afraid that there might even be a jinx in talking about the acknowledgment page jinx. I am still waiting for something bad to happen.

In high school, I believed I had a swim jinx and of course, the more I believed it, the more it came true. The jinx I believed was that I thought the more important a race was, the worse I would do at it. The proof? The early races of the season I seemed to do really well at. And I inev...

acknowledgment page jinx

I have come to believe that there is a jinx on acknowledgment pages. I know too many authors who thanked an agent profusively on such a page and then promptly found a new one for the next book. I also know of several circumstances where there is a friendship breech after an acknowlegements page thank you. Like, best friends won't speak to each other ever again.

While the rational side of my brain accepts that this is probably more because we writers in general are a fickle and over-emotio...

unfair division of talents

In sixth grade I sat next to a cute boy named Garrett. Garrett could draw like I could not believe. He could not, however, do much of anything else in terms of school. Or he didn't want to. I'm not really sure which it was. In any case, I was working on a book of Greek Mythology and I needed illustrations for it. I didn't intend for it to get published necessarily. I sort of thought of it as a book for me and my kids and of course, if it was wonderful, then someone could "discover it" ...

first jobs

My first job was at Burger King. I went in, asked if they had a job opening, filled out an application, had a five minute interview with the manager on duty and got hired on the spot. I worked maybe 20 hours a week the summer between my junior and senior year. I don't know that everyone needs to have a job at a fast food restaurant, but it was good for me. I discovered that I had amazing skills in the real world. I could work a cash register and handle money without a problem. Also, I w...

Nazis

I don't usually do political topics, but I got a little riled up last week at an article in the newspaper about Nazi hunting in the US and I'm still riled up about it. I suppose that if you have a PhD in German Literature, you are bound to have been bombarded with WWII stuff, or perhaps you have to be a WWII fanatic to study German Literature for that long. There is a temptation in German Literature classes for everything to be either an explanation of how "this" led to WWII, even if "this"...

interviews

This is an interview I did recently on-line that I thought came out well.

It reminded me of my years of really, really bad interviewing, through high school, college, and on. So many stories.

#1 I interviewed for the Sterling Scholar in Foreign Languages in high school. I had a fever of 103. When asked why I wanted to be a Sterling Scholar, surely one of the stupidest questions in the history of interviewing, and yet never tired of, I said, "for an ego trip." In very bad German. I could ...

failures

I was reading in my Princeton Alumni Magazine about scientists describing their path to success, which was mostly filled with failures. So, there are these grad students who are doing an experiment and they can't see how the results have any meaning. And the professors start to tell the grad students that they aren't looking at it the right way. Not that the professors know the answers. They don't. They just know that science shows that if you do an experiment properly, the results will ...

trilogy ramblings

I am hard at work on book 2 of my new trilogy about two rival princesses who become friends, beginning with TWO PRINCESSES. The WIP is TWO MAGICS, and I am really struggling with knowing how to end this book and where to begin the next one. I have written one trilogy before, unpublished, and I'm not counting the Hound Saga because those books all finish before the next one begins and are related, but are not a trilogy in the LORD OF THE RINGS sense, which is to say that they are really one ...

an open letter to Jim Butcher from fan girl Mette

Note: Do not read this letter if you care about spoilers!


Dear Mr. Butcher,

What. Were. You. Thinking?

Seriously?

You end the book like that? Why not end it two pages earlier? I think it is my duty now to all readers and lovers of Harry Dresden everywhere to stealthily enter every bookstore in the country and cut out the last two pages. Your readers will thank me. Even though it is the middle of a sentence, and it is already a cliff hanger. It is a better cliff hanger, because we all know...

writers as artisans

I think one of the things that has changed for me as I have moved from a beginning writer to a more seasoned one is the way I look at writing. There is something magical in it, but it is not the same kind of magic as before. I think I used to think that writers had to have a special kind of genius, and that they sweated bullets getting each perfect sentence into each perfect book. I'm sure that many writers, like I do, take care to look over a manuscript again and again.

But the sense tha...