Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 119

baby steps

I find myself breaking up almost any task into smaller steps that seem more manageable. Sometimes, I "lie" to myself and say, if you finish this much, then you can be finished if you don't feel like doing more. Well, maybe it isn't completely a lie because there are occasions when I do let myself off, but when the next step is truly small enough, I can usually keep at it.

When I am running on the treadmill, I tell myself I only have to take one hundred more steps and then I can reevaluate. ...

changing your process

I was talking to an artistic friend about process this weekend. She is one of people I think of as binge/purgers. There are a not insignificant fraction of artists who work this way, thinking things out in their head before they ever produce anything tangible, and then when the need strikes, finishing everything in a rush of a few days/weeks and then going back to the quiescent stage for another year or so.

My process, on the other hand, is steady. I work a few hours a day, then rest and...

30 books/authors that influenced me most

In chronological order from when I read them, not counting anything read in the last ten years:

1. Prince Bertram the Bad
2. Mop Top
3. Half Magic
4. Greek Mythology
5. John Bellairs
6. Narnia
7. A Wrinkle in TIme
8. Rebecca
9. Gone With the Wind
10. Perry Mason
11. Sherlock Holmes
12. James Bond
13. Star Trek (I read Jame Blish's adaptations first and then tons of the later books after the TV series was over, so I'm counting these as books)
14. Heart of Darkness
15. Robin McKinley
16. Jane Austen
17. Jane Ey...

March 2010 wrap-up

Books Read and Recommended:
The Poison Eaters by Holly Black
Heist Society by Ally Carter
It's a Jungle Out There—Dresden Files Comic by Jim Butcher
Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier
Lifelode by Jo Walton
Blackout by Connie Willis
The Lincolns by Candace Fleming
A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner
you don't know me by David Klaas
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and Jason Buscema

I find that it is very difficult to spend only thirty minutes drawing a day. Once I get started, I get...

the great American novel

When I was 5, I knew I wanted to be a writer. But what kind of writer? As a child, I wrote a lot of stories with magic. When I was a teen, I wrote a Star Trek novel, a Sherlock Holmes novel, a Perry Mason novel--you get the idea. I loved series. I remember once coming home from the library after checking out another thirty or so of Erle Stanley Gardner's books, which I could not get enough of, and my mom asked me if I didn't want to try something else for a while. But I tended (and stil...

incompetence

So I was reading an article, of course I don't remember where, but it was about the paradoxical relationship between our competence and our evaluation of said competence. The problem is that people who are utterly incompetent have absolutely no idea how incompetent they are. They are unaware of how much there is still to learn. And so they evaluate themselves as very competent. They are unable to tell the difference between their own incompetence and others who have some competence becaus...

partnerships

I was talking to friends last night about partnerships. I have been in any number of partnerships where I have felt that the other person was not doing his/her share. In the past, I used to get annoyed and then pick up the slack, doing twice as much work as it seemed I ought to have had to do. And then, I stopped. This was a conscious effort on my part, and not an easy thing to do. I think the important part was that I let go of my need for something to be done my way, or the right way.

T...

editors

One of the best presentations that I have ever done at a conference was the one last week where Ruth Katcher of Egmont and I sat and talked back and forth in front of the audience about what we remembered of our relationship. It began with our first encounter selling THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND and then the revisions process we went through. Then my attempts to sell several other novels while apparently marketing at Harper kept asking if I would do a sequel. I didn't remember them asking th...

scholarships

I've updated my website this week and will try to do better about keeping a calendar of events there.

16 recently received a scholarship from a local company trying to revamp its image. She can't really use it for 3 years, but I suppose it's nice to know that it's there, waiting for her, along with matched funds from local universities. She is very worried about getting enough scholarship money to go to school four years at a college she thinks is worthwhile.

This is because I have told her...

Eric Rohman

I am name dropping freely the last few days. I got to hang out with very cool writers and illustrators at the conference last week, and it is one of the very best perks about being a writer that I did not know I would enjoy so much until it happened. However, at least some of the fun comes from going to conferences and anyone can do that. I think that when I was starting out, I had the idea that going to a conference was supposed to help me by giving me an "in" to an editor who otherwise w...