Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 123

links and appearances

I will be signing this Saturday, February 6 at the South Towne Barnes and Noble from 1-4.

Also, I will be speaking at LTUE at BYU next Thursday and Saturday (I might be there Friday, but I might not).

Specifically,
Thurs 1:00 Children's
2:00 Romance

Sat 1:00 signing in bookstore
3:00 blogging
5:00 Edgy YA
6:00 Children's

In other self-promotional news, I have a new story in Issue #16 of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show called "Through the Blood." You do have to pay $2.50 to buy the is...

voices in your head

I think it was Kate Wilhelm who answered, when asked why she wrote, that she did it to get those damned voices out of her head. Yes, that is true for me, too. I do not know what to say when people ask where I get my ideas from. I have too many ideas. I wish some of them would go away and leave me alone without making me go to the trouble of writing them down. Strangely, the ideas do not care if I write them down well. Once they are on paper, they are perfectly happy to be badly written....

price

I have been thinking a lot about the price of various tasks. I have difficulty with the casual application of the phrase "Do the best that you can do" because I am not sure that I have any idea what the "best" is. This has become even fuzzier for me lately with my endurance events. Running 50 miles is not something that I thought I could ever do, not at any age. To do it repeatedly makes me realize that the "best" is rather a stretchy concept. The truth is, people don't really know how f...

metteharrison @ 2010-02-01T08:42:00

Books I read and loved:
Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs
Gifts by Ursula LeGuin
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
Hunger by Michael Grant
Tamar by Mal Peet
The Regional New York Single Mormons Halloween Dance by Elna Baker
The Thief (again) by Megan Whalen Turner
The Queen of Attolia (again) by Megan Whalen Turner
The King of Attolia (again) by Megan Whalen Turner
If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson
Powers by Ursula LeGuin
Evermore by Allyson Noel

Poets read:
Anne Bradstreet
Emily Dickinson

Some random notes on POWE...

new ending

My editor sent me a letter a couple of months ago on the first book in my next series, TWO PRINCESSES. She had a problem with the ending that was perfectly reasonable. I thought it just needed a tweak to fix it. But when I was actually sitting down, typing it in, I started to get excited and realized that I could make a fabulous, visually stunning, emotionally gripping ending if I just changed everything. Every single word in the chapter. And, consequently, that is going to leave some pr...

male povs

I've been thinking a lot about why it is that so many female writers choose to write male povs as their protagonists. And yes, there is the money. We are many of us convinced that boys will not read about girls but girls will read about boys and even if girls read more, you're still cutting out part of your audience. Stephenie Meyer may be the antidote to this.

But I actually think it is more than that. I think it relates to the problem of white authors writing black characters. It's so t...

giving up control

15 is in Driver's Ed this semester and she's good enough now that I let her drive to and from swim team and to the other high school where she takes a class for practice, when it's just her and me in the car. She doesn't slow down as early as I do or as much on turns, and she stalls a lot (because we are making her learn on a standard transmission--we don't have any other choice). I find myself putting out a hand to the door to brace myself, as if that would protect me from a crash. I try ...

experts

At a family dinner, this weekend I expressed my frustration (again) with the public school system's "rules of writing" that my children come home with. One of my brothers told me he had been reading a book about beginners versus experts and according to the book, beginners are always looking for rules, whereas experts have internalized all the rules and all the exceptions and tend to work by "intution." This makes many experts very bad teachers for beginners, supposedly.

I thought this was ...

Writing Lessons from King of Attolia

I thought this book was written from the point of view of Costis. Wrong again. I've read it 5-6 times, but I didn't remember it was also omniscient.

The scene I used to love best was the one where Gen has to get stitches and Ornon yells at him to stop complaining because it's bothering his doctor.

This time through, my favorite scenes were the ones with Relius. This to me was a lesson in how to make a minor character into a vital one. He doesn't grow a life history as a major character wou...

Writing Lessons from Queen of Attolia

Do you remember what pov this book is written in? If you had asked me that last week, I would have said it was alternating third person, between Gen and the Queen. But it isn't. It's omniscient. The pov changes paragraph by paragraph sometimes, when Gen and the Queen are in the same scene. This is generally considered an old fashioned formal choice. Jane Austen used it and so did George Eliot and Charles Dickens and many Victorian writers. But it doesn't feel old fashioned in Turner's ...