Dot Hutchison's Blog, page 9

Soundtrack of the World

I started a new project this week, one that equal parts thrills and terrifies me, and surprises me with unexpectedly funny moments. I love that I’m only three chapters in and it’s already surprising me- to me that says the characters are as real as I can possibly make them.

But, after all of the planning was done, after I had the outline of sorts written into my notebook, waiting to see how much or little I’d deviate from it, and before I opened up a fresh word doc and typed so much as Chapter One, I spend a few hours going through my music.

My life has a soundtrack. There’s music over the system at work (thank God or I’d go NUTS), there’s always music playing in the car, and when I’m home, there’s either music or something on the TV to provide background sound. When I write at home, it’s with my iPod plugged into a speaker. When I write elsewhere, it’s with the headphones in. Without music, my brain comes to a crashing halt. I lose the ability to focus, get way too distracted by all the sounds going on around me, and yet silence (such as could be obtained through noise cancelling headphones) freaks me out just as much. Not only does it make me feel deaf, but my brain starts trying to fill the void with imagined sounds, which does not help with the focus. Even when I’m asleep there’s music playing, or there isn’t sleeping.

Until writing Elsinore Drowning, I never created a specific playlist for projects. I had a couple of staples that I could write to- Scythian and The Town Pants, usually, two bands I know and love, and sometimes The Tartan Terrors- and every now and then as I wrote a specific scene, I’d find myself putting a song on repeat that really just sank me into what I needed to craft. Around the time I was researching and planning for Elsinore, though, I kept stumbling across posts by authors I enjoy that talked about playlists. How much they helped, how they really just nailed the characters or certain scenes, and in some of them, how the song they were playing at a given point could even give away spoilers. As long as it was one or two, I was pretty much “meh, whatever works for them”, but by the time I hit a dozen, I was starting to wonder if there was something to this.

So, I decided to try it. At the very worst, it wouldn’t add anything and I’d go back to my standards tracks. It was an experiment with completely acceptable stakes. In the interest of approaching the thing right, before I even opened my CD books or iTunes, I sat down with a blank piece of paper and wrote down songs or bands that in some way captured the atmosphere I wanted to bring into the book.

It was a VERY strange list, and not one I would I ever have imagined writing to. This may or many not give you an idea of the book, but there was a lot of Evanescence, Linkin Park, Lacuna Coil, and songs that had been accumulated on the Grey’s Anatomy soundtracks. There were individual pieces stuck here in there- a song from The Town Pants, which kept me from feeling totally out of my depth, Josh Groban’s cover of a Cirque de Soleil song, Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox and Lord of the Rings, Saosin. I wrote the last quarter of the book to Christina Perri’s “Jar of Hearts” on repeat, which stunned me when I realized it but also felt exactly right. There are songs on the list that I ONLY listen to while writing or editing this book, and the simple fact of how easily it let me slip into the world within the pages made me decide to do it again for my next project.

This is the fourth project with a specific playlist, and I’ve learned that forcing myself to really think about what the music will help me do helps me understand even more about what I want from the book. The single hardest song to find was one the evoked the atmosphere of a specific place, because while I had plenty that could fit the bill, I needed it to be non-intrusive, as well.

Because one of the things I’ve learned about book specific playlists is that it’s not enough that they work for the book- they also have to work AS A PLAYLIST. If the songs don’t somehow work together, if the jump from one song to the next is choppy and jarring, it’s going to bring you out of the page. Ideally, a playlist should do everything you want it to do for the book but also become something you don’t consciously notice. I know a playlist is right when I start the first song, start writing, and look up at some point later at the silence and realize the entire playlist has gone by without pulling me from the words.

Even after I’d pulled all of the songs, I had to spend another hour figuring out the order. Were there songs that acted as a theme for a specific character? For the first time, the answer was yes, so I knew I wanted that song to be where we meet that character. There were songs for specific scenes, which needed to be placed more or less with those scenes if you pretend the playlist and the outline are equal timelines (did that make any sense?). But then there are attitudes or places that repeat, and I didn’t particularly want to repeat songs within the playlist. Repeat themes? Fine. But not the individual songs. It required a greal deal of thought to come to something that worked both musically and inspirationally.

This playlist had another first, as well. There are some soundtracks that are so brilliantly done, so completely inmeshed in the situation in the movie or show they’re from, that I can’t write to them. I can’t hear them without seeing the images from the screen. I can’t hear “Cassandra’s Waltz” without seeing lips and a pair of baby blue peepers on a skin flap. I can’t hear “Impossible Planet” without seeing that beautiful, deadly black hole. (Why yes, Doctor Who IS on my Do-Not-Write-To-List, what makes you guess that?) For the first time, though, a handful of songs from Doctor Who so beautifully fit with the other songs in the list, as well as drew the appropriate suggestions of the characters and scenes, that they’re on the playlist.

In no particular order of significance, timeline, or frequency, Shiny New Project’s playlist includes songs from: The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo De Silos, Doctor Who, Cirque de Soleil, Scythian, Children of Dune, Inara George, Daft Punk by way of TRON: Legacy, The Piano Guys, Adele, Celtic Thunder, District Tribute, Pan’s Labyrinth, Celtic Woman, Final Fantasy X, Green Day, The Tartan Terrors, Masters of Chant, PianoSquall, and Solas.

Just looking at the names, it’s a STRANGE list.

And yet, when I put in the headphones and press play for the first song, it immediately sucks me in to this world so incredibly different from the one that surrounds me.

How about you? For those of you who write, do you listen to music when you write? And if you do, do you make specific playlists for it?

Until next time~

Cheers!

Giveaway Times Two!

So I’m a horrible person, who feels very bad about not posting meaningful content recently because life just keeps kicking me in the pants.

Today I’d like to make that up to you, not with meaningful content unfortunately, because life is still happening in a kind of bad way at the moment, but with two giveaways.

Normally I don’t like to giveaway ARCs of books that have already been released. The first few weeks of sales are so critical for an author’s success with a given book that I don’t like to detract from that in any way. However, quite simply, the money isn’t always there. If it were, I think we’d all rush out and buy ALL THE BOOKS as soon as they came out but all too often we have to make choices. If it’s between books and food, I choose books every time, but sometimes that second option is…oh, RENT.

Recently I received two ARCs of books I’d already purchased, books that I wanted the finished hardcopies of no matter what, so I am offering them up to you. First one is Origin, by Jessica Khoury, and the second is Hidden, the third book in the Firelight series by Sophie Jordan.

All you have to do to enter is comment below and tell me which one you want and why. That’s it. (Well, and make sure your email address is tucked away there somewhere, that will be important). If you want both books, you can tell me that and why, and you can be entered for both, but you cannot WIN both- winning one will remove you from the draw for the other.

I’ll draw the winners next Sunday (7 October) and contact them, so you have a full week to enter! Feel free to spread the word (please?) but it doesn’t actually get you any extra entries.

Best of luck!

Until next time~

Cheers!

Be Smart. Be Safe.

I’ve been a little delinquent here lately, but there’s a simple reason for that: I’m still unpacking. Real life intruded in the form of work, so progress has been in miniscule increments, and by my own rules, I’m not allowed to read any new books until I’m completely finished. Which is kind of killing me, to be honest, because my stack of bribe books is amazing and I desperately want to read them NOW and I can’t. So, until I get my house out of boxes and in order, posts are going to be somewhat sporadic.

This is important, though.

As some of you have probably heard, an agent was attacked this week outside of her home by a disgruntled querier.

Attacked.

Outside of her home.

By a disgruntled querier.

As she was posting the tweets with updates on the police side of things, my brain simply refused to believe it. I could not wrap myself around the idea that anyone could get that worked up over a form letter rejection. A FORM LETTER- nothing personal or hateful, just routine.

This was in NO WAY the agent’s fault, but I think it made a lot of realize how easy it is for our personal information to get out there for others to use.

-If you use twitter location or 4square (or similiar location announcing media), consider turning it off. Or, waiting to ‘check in’ until you’re leaving. Announcing your location through social media makes it easy for people to track you down, especially if you have a set routine*

*more on routine later

-for authors, but also especially for bloggers: if you do a lot of giveaways, consider renting a post office box. It doesn’t have to be a big one, and you never need to worry about actually receiving mail there, but you can list the post office as the return address, so you don’t have to put your home address down. A very resourceful, determined creep could narrow down to city and general area, but they won’t be able to narrow it down to, oh let’s say, your house. The little ones are pretty cheap, and even though the chances of being attacked are slim, the fact is, it does happen.

-be careful who you give your address to. Think about how many times you give out your address in a given week, either to giveaways or online purchases or even just writing it down on the return lines for bills. We get really excited that we’ve won a giveaway, but pay attention to the site on which you’ve entered- if something is giving you a bad feeling, you might not want to give out your personal information. Kind of like giving the creepy guy at the club the number of an intimidating-sounding male friend if he won’t take no for an answer on getting your digits, you might want to have a backup location (which goes back to the post office box). If you don’t want to give the creepy guy your phone number, don’t give his online parallel your address. You can do a lot worse with the address than with the phone number.

-vary your routines. A lot of have routines that we settle into. They make life easier, they make it less likely that we’ll forget to do things (or forego doing them in favor of something more interesting), and when we’re braindead and on autopilot, they make it possible to function. But routines, by the very nature of their predictability, make it easy for Creepers to guess where we are or where we’re going to be. If you get coffee at the same Starbucks every morning at 7:15, it isn’t just the baristas who’ll know to expect you. Change it up a little. Leave a little earlier. Hit up a different Starbucks. Even little things can help protect you. We’ve all seen the Criminal Minds episodes where the serial killer stalks his victims and learns their routines so he can abudct or kill with the least amount of external attention.

-if you’re outside your house and you notice someone sketchy hanging around, pay attention. They may be harmless, but they may not be. Notice what they look like, what they’re wearing, and if you get a creepy vibe, keep driving.

-when in doubt, call the police. Seriously, as irritated as it might make them to drive out and talk to a kid who mistook his girlfriend’s house number, they would rather do that a thousand times than have you suffer through an assault or worse. Don’t panic, but if there’s something wrong, don’t hesitate. Police are here to keep us safe. Just because you might feel silly afterwards is no reason to discount the very real fear you feel when someone is acting in a threatening manner around you or your home.

-if your car keys include a clicker, don’t lock or unlock your car from a distance. Do it right next to the car so no one has a chance to get in from the other side where you can’t see them.

-if you’re leaving work or school, someplace you’re expected to be for long periods of time, try to walk out with someone else. As you’re walking, keep your keys in hand and pay attention. Don’t dig in your purse, pockets, or backpack, don’t text as you’re walking. Pay attention to what’s going on around you. This not only helps you keep from being run over, it also helps you notice anything not as it should be. If your work or school is someplace sketchy, it wouldn’t hurt to keep your car key between two fingers, kind of like the brass knuckle from hell.

-on that note, consider the keyring bottles of mace or pepper spray. You can get them pretty easily, and yes, they make your keyring a little clunky, but it’s an extra sense of security for you, and it’s another chance to get away if you ever are cornered or threatened.

You should never have to feel unsafe in your daily life.

Be smart.

Be safe.

Until next time~

Cheers!

Book Review: School Story, by Andrew Clements

Natalie is a writer, one with a wonderful book pouring out onto the page, one her friend and teacher are sure should be published. Natalie is twelve years old. With hard work, determination, and more than a few pushes from her bossy friend, Natalie just might be able to pull off the improbable, but what she learns along the way? Is worth so much more than a book deal.

This is one of those stories that seems light and sweet while you’re reading it, and then clobbers you with deeper layers a few hours later. I picked it up a few years ago because one of my coworkers, herself a former Children’s Lead, told me I absolutely had to be able to talk intelligently about Andrew Clements. He’s a staple, she told me. Teachers love him, parents love him, kids love him. Learn him. So, given my interest in writing and publishing, picking up School Story seemed like a no-brainer. I read it, loved it, promptly lost it in a sea of books.

But the other day, as I was pulling books out of the boxes and sorting them to make alphabetizing and shelving an easier task, I came upon it again. It’s a thin book, the kind that bridges perfectly between chapter books and middle grade so the reluctant readers aren’t as scared and the stronger readers can trust an author they love to deliver, so when it was time to take a break, I took the book with me.

And fell in love with it all over again.

On the surface, I love the basic walkthrough of publishing. For any kid who has ever dreamed of being a published writer, it’s a gentle wake up call. At no point does it say “You can’t do this”. At every step, it says “This is work, but it’s wonderful”, encouraging and inspiring. Though from a purely selfish point I would have wished to see self-revision before submission, we get to go with Natalie from first reader to second reader, to submission reader, to acquisition, and beyond that to some of the numbers of a deal, the levels of a publishing house, and all the steps that go into making a manuscript into a book. We learn, as Natalie and Zoe do, that it truly is a process- you can tell the kids who’ve read this book because they’re the ones who aren’t surprised that their favorite series only come out with one book a year. They know all the things that are happening behind the scenes to fill that year.

Natalie is a wonderful character, a little timid, a little down on herself, but full of a cautious optimism at seeing her book come out into the world. Even as a twelve-year-old, the neurosis is there a little, and frankly, that won me over in a heartbeat. Most writers are neurotic people, especially when it comes to our writing, and re-reading some of the scenes in this book made me think of Rapunzel leaving the tower in Tangled. we want to send our books out into the world, but at the same time, we really don’t want to leave our safe little bubble of ignorance. Her relationship with her mother, her lingering struggle with her father’s death, they’re very real, and they invest both the story and her character with a more personal thread. Her best friend Zoe is a perfect match for her, brash and brazen and uber-confident, sure of getting her own way in everything, and not at all hesitant to go for what she wants. She and Natalie have a push-pull relationship, with Zoe tugging on Natalie to trust in her manuscript and Natalie pulling Zoe’s more out-there ideas to a more practical place.

One of the things I loved most- and not something you see all that often in kids’ books- was how important and supportive the adult figures are. Ms. Clayton, their teacher and eventual club sponsor, is young and starting to wear down a little under the grind of daily teaching, but despite feeling a little bewildered and over her head, she at no point tells the girls not to pursue their goal. She helps them with the more practical aspects, often mediating between the disparate personalities, and perhaps most importantly, she’s an adult they can trust and depend upon. She protects them and helps them, even at the risk of losing her job. Zoe’s father becomes someone else they can trust, and they also learn the nature of confidentiality. Some will keep your secrets purely because you wish them to; some will keep your secrets because they’re legally obligated to do so. Not that Mr. Reisman wouldn’t help his daughter and her friend of his own volition, but it’s another practical lesson in the process of publishing. And yet, his true importance to the story is less in what he does for the girls, but in the validation he gives to Ms. Clayton as a teacher and a role model- she is precisely the kind of teacher who changes lives for the better, the kind of teacher everyone wishes for their children. Parental acknowledgment of superior teaching helps so much in buoying up teachers who are constantly worn down by non-existent budgets, children who frequently don’t wish to learn, and the legion of parents who just don’t care. The interaction between these two adults is limited to a single phone call, but those few minutes are enough to reaffirm the faith and spirits of a young teacher.

I especially loved the relationship between Natalie and her mother, Hannah, who’s an editor. There’s a balance of curiosity in her work and the simple joys of being with her mother for movies and Chinese, but they don’t so much dance around the place where Natalie’s father used to be as they do embrace it. It’s hard and it’s painful, and sometimes the memories are heavier than others, but their connection is solid, which makes Natalie’s professional progress a beautiful mirror to her personal progress. And Hannah has her own progress to make within the workplace; Natalie came by her partial-timidity naturally. The adults in this novel (well, most of the adults in this novel; Letha is less than rounded) have their own journeys to make alongside the girls, becoming as real and as significant as either of the girls. That’s rare in this field.

I don’t care what age you are, this is a book to be read, treasured, and passed down and around.

Until next time~

Cheers!

Alone But Not Lonely

All moved into the new place, I’ve spent most of today trying to set up the library in my office. It’s not much yet. Most of the books are still in boxes, waiting to go to their homes on the empty shelves, while others are stacked in piles on the floor in groups of letters so I can alphabetize them. There are a couple separated from their fellows- a copy of Hamlet sitting by my chair, an architecture/religion book by the bed- but most of them are in view of the empty cases with the shelves stacked against their sides. All of the office supplies are in a similar state of transition, packed away with only a few pieces free to be used. The walls are bare, the cork and white boards leaning against the wall, and the desk is littered with the odds and ends that come of trying to unpack. A screwdriver, a hammer, a pair of scissors, packing tape, small things that never properly fit into boxes.

It isn’t an office yet, but it’s on its way.

It has potential.

Most importantly, it has a door that closes, and only one chair.

Writers are a strange breed, largely because what we do is simultaneously isolated and crowded. We sit for hours in a room, on a bench, at a table in Panera, staring at notebooks or computers, often with headphones in to filter away the outside world. We’re in our heads far more than we are in the space around us. We go for hours at a time without talking to other living human beings. We hole ourselves away, to plan, to draft, to revise, and our family and friends roll their eyes and let us be because they know our habits. We have bursts of connection- collaboration with partners or sounding boards, critique partners, conversations with agents and editors and bloggers- but most of the time, it’s a writer and a Thing.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that writing has a reputation as being a very lonely sort of profession.

It isn’t, though. Even when we emerge from the office craving simple human contact with ANYONE, even the rowdy pot-smokers on the stairway, it’s not because we’ve been alone or lonely. It’s because we’ve spent hours surrounded by people we can’t reach out and touch.

Far more than I think we ever successfully translate onto the page, our characters are real people in our heads. One of the joys of having my own apartment means I don’t need to worry about weirding out a roommate when I have conversations with my characters.

No, seriously, conversations. I talk with them, testing out their voices, listening to the patterns of their speech. My background is in music and theatre, so the sound of a thing is very important to me. When we read, even if we’re not consciously dissecting the language, we notice when sentences are ungainly or dialogue seems awkward. I like to read my stuff out loud- not just the dialogue, but the narration as well- to hear how it reads, to make sure it’s smooth. One of the things I look for is speech patterns.

Speech patterns change from person to person, taking into account personality, vocal habits, regionality, education, hell, even what they like to read or watch on TV. (For instance, you can always tell when I’ve been watching BBC.) What we say, and how we say it (where we put pauses or emphasis, even the order in which we string the words together) is distinctive, so one of the best ways I learn my new characters is to simply talk to them. I play with the sounds, and in so doing, I usually learn a great deal.

The more real the characters become, the more they’re able to stand on their own feet as people, the less lonely we as writers become even sitting alone in our workspaces. They talk to us, they share their backgrounds and their personalities, they tell us where they’re going and how they’re getting there, and eventually they reach a point where they just don’t shut up. We come to know these people better than we know most of our friends (that’s not a bad thing- everyone deserves their privacy, and characters rarely have any from the writer once they breach the levee). We’re the only person sitting in the room- we’re surrounded by people no one else can see.

We may be socially isolated while we’re writing, but we’re far from lonely.

Until next time~

Cheers!

Book Review: The Diviners, by Libba Bray

Evie O’Neill has a posi-tute-ly neat-o party trick that lets her read memories from touching anyone’s personal possessions. Doing it at a party, however, gets her kicked out of her home and sent off to her Uncle Will, in Jazz Age New York. What should be a delightful escapade is soured by the presence of a twisted killer with a ritualistic aspect that brings Will into the investigation. As Evie reconnects with old friends and makes new ones in the heady world of Follies, fashion, and speakeasies, unearthly powers are shfiting, pulling together young men and women with unusual gifts. The Diviners are being called- and their story is only starting.

Sometimes timing sucks, because this ARC arrived right as I was supposed to be getting down to the nitty gritty of packing to move. Nitty gritty didn’t happen until the book was finished, because OH MY GOD, strap in.

As much as I want to speak about this intelligently, I’m not even sure where to start. The characters, the setting, the story, the MAJOR creep factor…there are eight million pieces to this book that all come together in this amazing manner that is just mind-blowing.

So…characters. There are a lot of them. The perspective shifts between them, some of them only with us for a chapter, or even part of a chapter, some of them prominent. In as much as you can say there’s a single MC, it’s Evie, but this is very much an ensemble cast. She’s centerstage for this one, but you get the strong feeling that the others will be taking their turns in later books. Despite the sheer number of characters to keep track of, it doesn’t prove to be a difficult or daunting task- each of them is so finely crafted, so detailed and distinct, that you can’t really confuse them. What I really love about them- all of them- is that they each have specific journeys to make. Every significant character has his or her own story arc that doesn’t end with the final page. This is the definitely the first book of a series, but we don’t have to wait for each book to see the growth. Every character has their surface layers- the slang and the parties, the devil-may-care or the dedication to a cause- but they also have layers of secrets and dark pains that define them just as much as the bobbed hair and charming smile. To talk about them individually would take up the entire review, but in a nutshell, some of the things I loved the most: Mabel’s anxieties, Jericho’s broody introspection, Sam’s adaptability, Theta’s vulnerability, Henry’s generosity, Memphis’ guilt, and Evie’s slow realization of a world beyond illegal gin and patterned stockings. Brilliant.

In opening the front cover of this book, we’re invited into Jazz Age New York, the height of the Roaring Twenties. The Great War is done, leaving in its wake a surge of nationalism and euphoria as the nation heals from the first wholescale slaughter of trench warfare. Prohibition is in effect, women have only recently won the legal right to vote, and social reform has swept the streets of the poorer parts of the city. Harlem is the center of jazz, silent pictures and elaborate burlesque stage shows are in their heyday, with the bells poised to ring their deaths with the creation of talkies. Women are bobbing their hair, showing their knees, and glorying in fashion after the deprivations of war. Slang is rich and fast, and for the flappers and their boys, every day is to be lived to the fullest, without care or concern for anything beyond right now. The details of this world envelop us, never drowning or trying too hard to set the stage or to explain, but simply bringing us into it. I mean EVERY detail, right down to word choice and the fact that you have to crank the car to get it started when it’s cold. I’m not normally a Roaring Twenties girl; I kind of overdosed on it in a phase back in high school and haven’t yet gotten past that. But this is…this book made me fall in love with the Twenties all over again. The setting wraps around us in a million different ways, some of which we don’t even notice until we specifically look for them, but it keeps us firmly planted in a time without cell phones or mini-skirts.

It’s a fantastic story, the supernatural woven through with the obsessive nature of the fanatic, a careful balance between the demonic and the divine. There’s a large degree of disgust that comes with the murders and deepens as we learn more behind the motivations and purpose of the deaths, but there’s also a pervading sense of menace. Be careful reading this book at night- some of the most superbly terrifying parts of this book are packed into just a few pages, even a paragraph or two in the midst of so much more, but you devour the pages and in the back of your mind there’s the little voice that’s singing a child’s song that just sends shivers stabbing down your spine. I don’t think it would be a Libba Bray book if it weren’t laugh out loud funny, but it’s a very different type of humor than, say, Beauty Queens, where everything was in your face and over the top and absurd. Here, the humor is part and parcel of the Roaring Twenties, when wit was fashionable and one-liners were idolized. It’s funny as hell, but it’s fast and snappy, and some of them are most enjoyable when the characters around them miss what’s being said- or why it’s funny. Just as the slang and the rhythms of speech show proof of the flawless and deep research, so does the humor.

And the fact that this is a series? Makes me jump with joy. I’m sorry- I truly am- that I can’t talk about this more coherently, but there is just SO MUCH to this book. It’s a hefty one, so it may lose some of the more impatient readers, but those who stay through til the end? Will be waiting for the next one just as much as I am.

And if you want to win an advance copy before it comes out 18 September, check out my giveaway, open til midnight ending Wednesday, 19 August!

Until next time~

Cheers!

The Diviners Giveaway!

I said there’d be another giveaway, right?

There’ll be an actual review for this on Wednesday, but I move tomorrow and still have a bunch to do, so once again, YOU WIN! This book absolutely blew my mind and I want to share it with you all, so I am giving away my advance copy. Seriously, you want this book; Libba Bray is an absolute genius, and despite the length and the incredible humor, you’re held in thoroughly creepy suspense the entire time.

Part of that creep factor comes from the book trailer.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m not a huge book trailer person. Every now and then a really, really good one comes along, but this is the first time I’ve ever been influenced to read the book based on the trailer. Normally it’s a function of wanting to read the book in spite of the trailer. (Fair’s fair, I already wanted to read The Diviners, but the trailer clinched it). If you watch the trailer before reading the book, you actually HEAR the song throughout and it’s just so…

So…

Well, you may or may not want to read this book in bed, and if you do, keep a nightlight handy.

And all you have to do to enter the giveaway is watch the trailer and tell me below what you think.

Isn’t that amazing?!

Entries will be accepted through Wednesday, August 29th, and I’ll be choosing the winners for all three giveaways bright and early Thursday morning so I can get the books out on Friday. (Haven’t seen the other giveaways? Up for grabs is Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr, and a combo pack of For Darkness Shows the Stars AND Seraphina, by Diana Peterfreund and Rachel Hartman respectively)

Until next time~

Cheers!

Not A Book Review

So, today is supposed to be a book review day. It’s a Wednesday (or at least it is as I’m writing this) so it’s supposed to be a book review day.

And I even finished my book yesterday- spent the entire book going o.O and LOVING IT and thinking of all the wonderful things I wanted to say about it. But even before I finished the book, The Grossness hit. I spent most of yesterday in bed with the cat, even though I was supposed to be packing, because of The Grossness. I don’t know what this thing is, if it’s a cold, if it’s sinus issues, if it’s allergies on sterioids, what, but what I do know is that it’s majorly kicking my ass. I’ve reached the point where I can barely breathe (nose stuffed, chest tight) and blowing my nose produces a feeling equivalent to getting stabbed through the ear with a knitting needle.

Fighting The Grossness all day yesterday and all day today (and today was a full work day) has left me with a mental level on par with Ron Weasley in Advanced Arithmancy. (Yes, I know he never took it- there are reasons for that.) So, incoherence is strong with this one today. Seriously, it’s disgusting how many tries it’s taken me to get things right just to this point. The thought of trying to intelligently discuss a book I loved, in all its intricacies, is actually painful.

Buuuuuuut I feel kind of guilty for piking off a review.

You get to reap the benefits of my guilt.

I am giving away a finished copy of Diana Peterfreund’s For Darkness Shows the Stars AND Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina. You can enter through Wednesday, 29 August, and I’ll contact the winner the next day.

All you have to do to enter?

Comment below with your favorite read of 2012 so far, and why you love it so much.

That’s all you have to do!

(Plus, the giveaway for the ARC of Melissa Marr’s Carnival of Souls is still active through Wednesday 29 August, and check back on Sunday for ANOTHER giveaway of the book that blew me away even before the descent of The Grossness)

Until next time~

Cheers!

Please. Don’t Quit Your Day Job

Sometimes the universe comes together in strange ways.

Every now and then at work, I’ll pass by one of my co-workers telling a customer that I have a book coming out (I guess they’re proud of me or something :D), or it’ll come up when I’m in conversation with a customer, and sometimes I get what I’ve always thought of as a pretty strange comment/question. I got it several times yesterday, and it was kind of bothering me, but then I woke up this morning and three separate posts on my Twitter feed held answers to that, so I figured this was as much a sign as I’m ever likely to get.

“Oh, you have a book coming out? And you’re still working here?”

Um…

There seems to be this mindset that you sell a book and BAM you’re in the bank!

Not so much the case.

There are always exceptions, but usually it takes a long time of steady writing before you actually have a solid enough foundation to quit your day job. If you have a spouse who can support the family- or if you’re on a trust fund- sure, writing can be your Main Thing, but for most of us, writing isn’t going to be what pays the bills. That’s why it’s called a Labor of Love.

The three posts this morning (one by Laurie Halse Anderson, one by The Rejector, and one by Barry Lyga) say pretty much everything about the money thing, with the exception of taxes. Mandy Hubbard has a post that helps add the taxes into the picture.

Writing is a passion, right up until you get paid to do it- then it becomes a job about which you’re passionate. The thing about jobs is that you can love them, and love them deeply, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to pay you enough to live off of. I say that from experience. I love my job, but without getting into numbers, I have to scrimp most months to make my bills, and I don’t live an extravagant life. My vice is books and I actually work my budget around them (sacrificing quality of food in order to make up the difference when I fall short), but I don’t have unreasonable expenditures; some months my savings account (which is a fairly new thing) takes a hit just to pay the power bill.

I’m not saying that to complain or to garner sympathy, because hey, at the end of the month, the bills get paid.

I say that because it’s given me a certain outlook on money, namely that it doesn’t stretch as far as we’d like it to. Even when I get a windfall of any measure (a surpise check, extra hours, or hey! selling a book), I tend to break down the numbers by expenses. It’s this many months of rent, or this much of a rent payment. Even in its smallest doses- oh hey, that’s three meals if I’m careful. I know how much I’ll pay in rent in a year, how much for internet, about how much for groceries and power and gas, and the financial life of a writer- being based on sales and projected sales- is far from predictable. You don’t know how or when your book will sell.

I’m a worrier, I admit it. I worry about that next rent payment, about that oil change I have to budget in, about unexpected expenses that pop up when we can least afford them (flat tires, etc). I’ve spent too many years playing the game of which paycheck I can use to pay which bills, which bills I can pay late if I absolutely have to, to be comfortable not having a steady, predictable income. The notion of quitting my day job? Makes my skin crawl.

There’s a me from the past- the one that thought being a starving artist would be totally romantic and nothing could be wrong with that- that thinks Yes! Throw the shackles of the day job away and write Write WRITE!

Then there’s the part of me that pays rent, that likes having food in my belly and clothes on my back.

That feeling that comes with selling your book is a high unlike any other. It really is. And there’s this part of you that looks at the numbers with wide eyes and thinks of all the things you could DO with that money. But there are bills, and there are taxes, and there are things you HAVE to do.

So please do yourself a favor and DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB.

Until next time~

Cheers!

Book Review: Amy’s Eyes, by Richard Kennedy

This is less of a book review than it is talking about a book re-view.

When I was in fourth grade, I pretty much lived down in my school library. I finished my assignments so far ahead of my classmates that my teacher sent me off to the library so I wouldn’t get bored and cause trouble. (Not that I was a troublesome kid, but if I was bored, I would try to entertain myself- sometimes caused unintentional problems.) I read through great swathes of that room in my years at that school, and one of the books on the shelf was this great fat thing with selveged pages called Amy’s Eyes, by Richard Kennedy.

I fell in love with that book. It was an epic thing of sailors and pirates, the search for treasure, family lost and found, secrets, dolls coming to life and even little girls becoming dolls out of loneliness and sorrow. It had orphanage hi-jinks and adventure on the high seas, it had mutiny and religion and nursery rhymes, and what made me truly fall in love with the book- and this may or may not say something significant about me- was that it taught me the song Greensleeves. I checked that book out several times that year and next, and when I found that my middle school library didn’t have it, I checked it out from the public library. I read that book at least twelve times through the next three years.

But then Things Happened, and real life intruded, and with how insane my schedule was, the public library became rather hard to get to, and while I still thought fondly of the book, there wasn’t really a chance to catch up with it.

Fast forward to senior year of college, as I’m sitting down with my honors thesis advisor and talking about the influence of books in my life, and he tells me to track down a handful of books with significant influence and re-read them. Some were things I still read again and again- David Eddings’ Elenium trilogy, for example, which is largely responsible for my sense of humor- but I immediately thought of Amy’s Eyes. I remembered it as being a great adventure full of sweetness and laughter. It was out of print and a little tough to track down- none of the libraries I had access to had it, not even the trusty library back home; it had been stolen and they hadn’t replaced it. I finally found a used copy online that a former library copy, and not too dinged up (I’m a little OCD about my books), and when it came, I settled down to immerse myself in childhood nostalgia.

HOLY CRAP.

Somehow in reread after reread after reread when I was younger, I had managed to completely miss how CREEPY large portions of that book was! There were some sections, even some characters, who absolutely made my skin crawl coming back to it almost ten years later. This went far beyond merely unsettling- this was sit up awake in bed clutching the baseball bat against the moving shadows terrifying. As a child, I’d categorized the characters into three groups: Good, Bad, and Surprise. As an adult, the characters were much more difficult to dismiss into those simple corners. I understood a lot more of the nuances in their personalities, got a lot more out of the shifting loyalties and the plaintive confusion at their existence. The nature of identity, the simple fact of existence, weaves through this story in ways I never could have grasped when I was nine years old.

As a child, I thought parts of the book were sad. As an adult, I found some parts downright tragic- and not always the same parts. I learned about disguise as a part of truth and how far some people would go for love- and for greed. There were a few stray elements that I remembered as being the same, but in so many ways, it was like I was reading a completely different book.

For the next two weeks, before my next advisor meeting, I tried to wrap my brain around just how different this was from what I’d remembered, and therefore expected. The book, of course, hadn’t changed. I was two years old when it came out, and the text hasn’t altered a bit since the date of publication.

What had changed was me.

Another decade of life, another decade’s worth of experiences, had changed my perspective on things. As a child, I didn’t understand anything about betrayal or greed or black-hearted villains except for what I read in books. As an adult, I’d learned, and if I’d sometimes mourned the knowledge, I still had the deeper experience. Limitless devotion wasn’t something I took for granted anymore, so seeing just how far some of these characters would go to protect and reunite with the ones they loved wasn’t something I took for granted anymore either. Because of those life experiences, everyone reads the same book in different ways.

What I learned from re-reading Amy’s Eyes proved invaluable when I wrote the novel for my thesis, and for each novel after that. The character who was most deeply unsettling was also the one for whom we feel the deepest sympathies. Good and evil were not nearly as separate as I’d previously imagined, and just because a person is Good, it doesn’t mean they don’t have deep flaws within them. And perhaps the deepest lesson- the one that wove its way through again and again in what became Elsinore Drowning: sometimes we injure those we love the best, even when- or perhaps especially when- we’re trying to do what’s best or right.

Have you ever had a book that seemed drastically different upon a re-read?

Until next time~

Cheers!