Nicole Field's Blog, page 18

bookwild:Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella + one of my many...

bookwild:

Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella + one of my many favorite parts

“But I’m sick of this bloody jagged graph,” I said in frustration. “You know, two steps up, one step down. It’s so painful. It’s so slow.”

And Mum just looked at me as if she wanted to laugh or maybe cry, and she said, “But, Audrey, that’s what life is. We’re all on a jagged graph. I know I am. Up a bit, down a bit. That’s life.”

I’m not crying, YOU’RE crying.

Not since Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell, have I had such serious love for a book from an author I had never heard of before. If the type-setting above just isn’t enough for you to go ahead and look at this book, then let this recommendation be the thing that tips it over the edge. 

Audrey suffers from social anxiety disorder and general anxiety disorder. In short, this means she can’t leave the house. Even while in the house, she is always wearing sunglasses. She can’t see other people outside of her family, she certainly can’t talk to them. Mobile phones and internet conversations are just seriously right out.

But this story isn’t just about Audrey. It’s also about Frank, her brother who loves playing computer games, their very slightly neurotic mother who’s taken off from work to look after her daughter, four year old Felix who is just about as cute as a button and way more crazy, and their dad who just kind of looks at the whole family with love while you’re sitting there wondering how he doesn’t go screaming off the deep end himself. 

And there’s Linus. Originally Frank’s computer gaming friend, he becomes the first person outside of family who Audrey has reached out to since The Incident. (Those are my caps, aren’t I clever.) Although he seriously has no idea what to do with a person who lives with an anxiety disorder, he means well and seriously what teenager did know what to do with anxiety disorders? He’s entirely sweet and entirely human and that makes him just as loveable as the rest of them.

What makes this story so amazing is that it’s genuinely an ensemble novel. Every single person in this cast has something that they work through in the process of this novel, which makes it beautiful and interesting and totally a book that you can almost read in one sitting.

Except I couldn’t read it in one sitting because Audrey went off her meds cold turkey and that was just wayyy too much for me to deal with late at night. However, although I felt it kind of tended towards not quite believable in how easily that was dealt with (and yes, I do take all of the plot points into account while saying that, having both done that and watched someone else do that) the book had a very satisfying ending and I would suggest it to anyone with mental health issues or just someone who enjoys a nice snuggly book.

May Monthly Update.I’ve been a little unwell which has put me a...

May Monthly Update.

I’ve been a little unwell which has put me a little behind deadlines than I would like, and certainly has put me behind on shifts at RL work because it’s hard to go there when, well, you’re not well. 

HOWEVER, just when I was thinking that my writer’s life was becoming a little quiet, I managed to sell the rights in both ebook and print for a short story involving what happens to the Cinderella story if, after the wedding, Prince Charming is too busy ruling the country to be able to pay attention to his new bride. This short story is a bisexual/lesbian retelling. 

Fairytales, yes! Slashed, zomg yes! Anyone who knows me knows an anthology with this title was basically going to be my life’s blood and this was a slam dunk when it came to deciding whether or not to send in a submission. I am so beyond happy that I’ve been invited to appear in this anthology. I can’t even wait to see what other stories there will be.

Fairytales Slashed will be out early next year as I have updated my upcoming publications tab to reflect. 

But just a gentle note to anyone wanting to purchase my writing sooner than that, Prima Facie is still available for purchase on preorder here. 

Dear Maggie, my mom is a writer and lately her books have been getting bad reviews, mocking the stories or who she is as a person. She's obviously very upset. What do you do when you get bad reviews and know you can't say anything about it?

Dear steepingstars,

I feel for her; the internet has become a more gleefully nasty place in the years since I’ve first gotten published. Internet culture has decided that you can still be a heroic person as you mock or drag someone, so long as you have proven your victim to be a villain of some kind. I know very few villains, but I know a lot of people getting dragged. I won’t lie; it’s a hard place to be a writer in.

That said, I have three pieces of advice — and this isn’t just for your mother or for published authors, this is for any writer or creator. This is the world you’re birthing your stories into; you might as well get the nursery ready.

1) Think of your favorite novel. It has to be one that you’ve read lots of times. One that is basically a vacation home on your shelf. You’ve memorized lines. You know it so well you can open up to just a single chapter in the middle and reread it for the comfort of rereading it, and you don’t have to even read the rest because the story’s already hooked so securely to the coils of your brain. 

Now go to Goodreads and find the page for that book. Read its 1 star reviews. They will be terrible. They will be scathing. They will shred it. How do I know? Because every book has terrible 1 star reviews. As you sit there with your curled lip (WHO COULD HATE THIS PERFECT NOVEL), take note of the teachable moments within. Notice how the 1 and 5 stars reviews will sometimes disagree — “the character development is crap!” “the characters are amazingly like real people!” — but also notice how sometimes they will agree. “Chapter 14 was a leisurely dream; I loved it” or “Chapter 14 was pointlessly slow.” It’s important to remember that there is not a single story in the world that everyone will love. You don’t need everyone to love it. You have to write like you’re writing for readers who will love it. You have to write like you’re writing for the readers who want that story alone. 

2) If you throw out the extremes — the most searing one stars and the most dazzling five stars — you start to get into the reality. Despite what the reviews say, the odds are very unlikely that you are actually either the worst or best writer to have ever lived.

3) The personal attacks are a hard pill to swallow, particularly when someone shouts something you know isn’t true, but there’s no real point in defending yourself. Often readers come in assuming certain things about you, and it doesn’t really matter what you say or write, they’ll twist it round to make it further evidence of their predetermined thesis. I advise using list item #2 in this case as well. If you throw out the most glowing statements about your person and the most terrible snarled comments about your person, you start to get closer to the reality of who you are. Remember, though, the Internet is not your friend, even when they are friendly. They are also not your enemy, even when they’re terrible. They can’t be, because they don’t really know you. Only you and your inner circle have an inside line on the true colors of your heart. 

urs,

Stiefvater

lauraroselam:mjolnirsammy:writing is great but it’s also insanely tiring because likewriting...

lauraroselam:

mjolnirsammy:

writing is great but it’s also insanely tiring because like

writing is frustrating

not writing is frustrating

wanting to write and not being able to is frustrating

not wanting to write but knowing you have to because deadlines are a thing is frustrating

I feel this in my bones. 

Hello! This is a day in my life! 

I have two more scenes I need to write to finish my current WIP. That’s, like, a max of 5,000 words. I could have done it yesterday. I could be doing it now. Instead, I’m playing around on Tumblr, reading my library loans and pretending like that’s because I’m trying to cut down my neverending list of to-be-read books. 

Hint: That’s not all true. 

And then there are ALL THE OTHER NOVELS that I want to make a start on / finish editing, and not doing that either because, dammit, I’m not starting another new thing before I finish THIS ONE.

Frustrating? Maybe a little bit. 

winneganfake:timemachineyeah:This is a jar full of major characters Actually it is a jar full...

winneganfake:

timemachineyeah:

This is a jar full of major characters 

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories. 

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls. 

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left. 

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left. 

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left. 

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right. 

Until these are the bowls. 

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other. 

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl. 

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference. 

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss. 

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world. 

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat. 

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant. 

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.

*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*

Because given recent events, THIS CLEARLY FUCKING NEEDS TO BE SAID AGAIN.

m/f where the man is transOh my heart, today is the best day...

m/f where the man is trans

Oh my heart, today is the best day ever. My book, Prima Facie is featured on a list with books from @francescablock and Elliot Wake (@leahraeder). I feel like I could not be in better company.

I have loved Francesca’s novels since I read The Hanged Man in 2003. Her lyrical writing has been such an inspiration to me, and the ‘taboo’ topics have always been something I’m sad more authors don’t pick up. Love in a Time of Global Warming is such an imaginative and gripping story, as well as being an incredibly clever take on both The Odyssey and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Elliot Wake was someone I found more recently when he was still writing under the name Leah Raeder. I feel head over heels in love with his work when reading Black Iris that looks into lesbianism and mental health in a gritty, real, no-holds-barred kind of way and I have never looked back. OMG am I ever excited for the release of Bad Boy later this year.

I legitimately do not have words right now. Please consider voting on this list, and adding to it if you can think of any other titles that fit m/f where the man is trans. Representation is so important.

"and if he wants to leavethen let him leaveyou are terrifyingand strange and beautifulsomething..."

“and if he wants to leave

then let him leave

you are terrifying

and strange and beautiful

something not everyone knows how to love”

- Warsan Shire, For Women Who Are Difficult To Love
(via larmoyante)

gillsanderson:Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth reunite...

gillsanderson:

Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth reunite twelve years later to sing ‘For Good’ to honour Wicked producer, David Stone (x)

To all you gorgeous people in my life.

"“Look away,” Leo murmured, soft enough that Bruce almost didn’t hear him. “What?” “Look away,”..."

“

“Look away,” Leo murmured, soft enough that Bruce almost didn’t hear him.

“What?”

“Look away,” Leo repeated.

“Leo, we don’t have time for this.”

Leo sighed. Then, somewhat anticlimactically, he pressed the palm of his hand against the locking mechanism and it… disabled.

Bruce stared.

“What? That’s – that’s all you did to disarm the space ship?” Bruce demanded.

Leo looked over his shoulder at him. “I didn’t want to ruin the air of mystery,” he said, evasively. Then he was prepared for flight again. “Come on.”

”

-

Captain Hart: The Last Superhero draft.

Writing the beginning of an action sequence for my trans superhero novella with the thought: What would Joss Do?

lokisweboflies:roane72:Honestly, I think the whole “don’t pay the writers” thing boils down to...

lokisweboflies:

roane72:

Honestly, I think the whole “don’t pay the writers” thing boils down to the notion that everybody thinks they can write. It’s the old saw about the novelist at a cocktail party having to hear someone say, for the millionth time, “I’d love to write a book someday.”

Someone–Stephen King? Pretty sure I saw this in a Stephen King foreword–once said they’d like to say to a brain surgeon, “Boy, I’d love to do brain surgery someday.”

We treat “the ability to put words into a sentence” like it’s just the same as “the ability to form a coherent narrative that engenders a variety of emotions within the reader and puts them in a scene and shows them what they didn’t see before”.

And that’s like me drawing a stick figure and saying I’m an artist.

Writers are constantly devalued because everyone thinks they have a book in them and don’t realize the level of skill and commitment it takes to finish even a short story, much less a whole book. 

This goes well beyond fandom, but man, I would’ve hoped fandom would know better.

***REBLOGS AGGRESSIVELY***