I saw this on Barb’s blog, and I thought it was an interesting coincidence, since I’d just been discussing with a co-worker this morning how I listen to certain music when writing certain things (O, Brother, Where Art Thou Soundtrack during the composition of my senior thesis, Bily Joel’s “Downeaster Alexa” during the writing of my first novella), and she was telling me that her husband and her running partner both queue up U2’s “Beautiful Day” on race day. So I thought I’d try it, despite the fact that it’s difficult to limit myself:

1. Name one song you hate to admit you like.

(whispering) TOXIC, Britney Spears. I know, but it’s just so catchy.

2. Name two songs that always make you cry.

I’M ALREADY THERE, Lonestar. I actually got stopped by a cop once because I was crying so hard to this song, he was worried about me.
THE SONG REMEMBERS WHEN, Trisha Yearwood. Damn country singers.

***Bonus*** LIVE LIKE YOU WERE DYIN’ Tim Mc Graw. Country singers again!

3. Name three songs that turn you on.

SATELLITE, Dave Matthews Band. Don’t ask me why.
CLOSER, Nine Inch Nails (apparently this is the title, not the one I always assumed it was).
FIELDS OF GOLD, Sting (yes, I realize these two are very different).

***Bonus*** AURAL PLEASURE, Blackalicious (and that’s not even getting into the Rolling Stones, etc.)

4. Name four songs that always make you feel good.

THE MIDDLE, Jimmy Eat World. Play this one every single time I get a rejection.
RED RUBBER BALL, Simon & Garfunkel
CHANTILLY LACE, Big Bopper
WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE, Billy Joel (because I know all the words… and what they mean)

***BONUS*** WHAT DO YOU LOVE MORE THAN LOVE Dar Williams (this song saved my life)

5. Name five songs you couldn’t ever do without.

Like numbers 3, 4 and 5 on this list, I’m finding it difficult to narrow this down. There are so many songs that turn me on (the Prince oeuvre springs immediately to mind) and so many that make me feel good (more Sting, a lot of Elvis, much 80s pop, a fair bit of Nelly and WATERLOO by ABBA). This is *hard*. Five songs whose lack of existence would make my world a miserable place?

IOWA, Dar Williams
YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE (Who did this?)
YOUR SONG, Elton John
THE PROMISE, When in Rome
BOMBS OVER BAGHDAD, Outkast

Oh man, that doesn’t even begin to touch it. I need ROCK THE KASBAA the Clash, more Sting, some Beatles, TIME AFTER TIME Cyndi Lauper, THE WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL Michael Jackson… okay, clearly we need to multiply these numbers.

I was initially concerned when I read this post and realized that there were several words on the list that I had never heard, let alone spelled. I thought, “I knew it; I’m getting stupid. If only those jealous SAT rivals from high school could see how the mighty have fallen!”

A few clicks on Dictionary.com later, I discovered that the unfamiliar words were archaic terms or period costume jargon. (Then I enjoyed a moment of, “Thank God I write contemporary. I already know what a hoodie and a thong are!”)

But the experience reminded me of one of the best reasons to read: to learn. A recent critique from a CP I think the world of asked me, “Do you *really* want your readers to have to look up a word on every third page?” No, I want them to do what I’ve been doing since I was seven: figure the meaning out through context. Had I been reading Joyce’s manuscript, I’d probably have gotten the general gist of cicisbeo when her heroine accused her rake hero (or whatever) of being one.

Read a book and learn something. Imagine that.

I was clear on this as early as first grade. We got our weekly vocabulary lists, then one of our asisignments was to write sentences using the words. I wrote stories, natch. My mom still has them in my old black-and-white ocmposition books (woman is determined to make a mint off my juvenilia). It’s fun to use stories to learn words. More fun than flashcards.

So yeah, if it means using the right word for the right story, I’ll risk some reader thinking about picking up her dictionary. Most likely she won’t bother. That’s the beauty part of context.

Of course, this easily expands into the ongoing debate about people who assume that fun and educational are mutually exclusive. I think that a book that teaches you something is more likely to take up residence in your heart than one that lets you turn off your brain for the duration. And if that means learning something about history, about language, or about the human experience, it means you come away a bigger and better person than you were before.

But before I go about getting too deep here, let’s talk about a few words that contest judges and others have had issue with in the past year:

pique (don’t get me started)
formication (used as a pun)
plausibility
legerdemain
preternaturally

And that’s just in the first three chapters. However, I think few of these are even SAT worthy. (Either way, they are staying. ) Strange, I never thought I peppered my writing with difficult terms. I just try to be precise in my usage, and the right word does wonders.

Unfortunately, I can’t post a picture yet, but I’ll definitely do so as soon as I can.

Someone asked how this came about. An acquaintance of mine, Tara Kearney is a photographer who does a lot of music, fashion and food shoots. She’s also done some book covers, including work for Red Sage and Tor. I posed for her once before in a shoot, but the publisher didn’t buy the cover.

When I was home in Florida a few weeks ago, she called me and asked me to model for her. Last time, it was a solo job. This time, it was with a man — a man who was not wearing very much in the way of clothing (!!!) The intros went like this:

Tara: Diana, this is Sean.
Me: (sitcking out my hand) Hi!
Sean: Hi. (takes off his shirt, revealing rippling muscles and smooth, tanned skin)
Me: Um, do you guys have wine?

You know, I didn’t think that having a strange, gorgeous man holding me would make me so uncomfortable. What I most remember from the shoot was Tara calling to me from behind the camera, “Relax! Breath! Relax!” Maybe wine was too weak. I needed tequila.

Eventually I started getting into the fun of it. We took some shots with his hands in my pants (!!!) and a whole bunch with us holding each other. My favorite was the series where I stood behind him with my arms wrapped around him and my thumbs hooked through the belt loops on the front of his jeans. we took a lot of pictures in a position that I changed my tank top from green to blue ot black, and he remained shirtless. I tossed my hair around a lot and smiled at the camera in flirtation. I squeezed his biceps a good deal.

I smelled like his cologne for the rest of the night.

In the end, the shot they chose is one of us holding one another, with me turned slightly towards the camera. My hair is falling over my face, but I’m giving the audience a secret, sexy smile. I love it. It’s very sexy, yet very classy. I didn’t worry about what my family would say when they saw it.

The book is supposed to be out in time for Reno. I wonder if they give tables to cover models… no? I guess I’ll need to get my name on a book as well, huh?

Stupid internet quizzes…

Which File Extension are You?

I spent the weekend in NYC, hanging out with friends and attending a production written by talented young playwright Dorothy Fortenberry. Burned Over is a two-act play about the Millerites, who were members of an apocalyptic movement in the 1840s. They were progressives, abolitionists, and they happened to think the world was very soon going to end. They did all kinds of wild things, went into enormous amounts of debt, and through social conventions by the wayside. After all, the world was going to end.

And then it didn’t.

In Burned Over, a young graduate student discovers that her family’s past is rooted in the Millerite cult. The story takes place in the present and the past, where the graduate student’s ancestor, her fiance and her sister all react very differently to the influences of the movement. The second act, in particular, is very strong, as the graduate student’s life shows some eerie parallels to the sisters’ story. It was thought provoking, well-written and emotional. This girl is going to be a big hit, I’m sure.

Moreover, it gave me an opportunity to step outside of my normal artisitc sphere. I liked seeing another young writer making good, especially since it was in such a very different field. Not a whiff of bias or comparison colored my opinion. (Hey, I’m only human.)

So my past few days worth of posts have disappeared. Wah. Will try to reconstruct. Stay tuned…

PS: Those waiting for a pic of the cover, hold on to your horses. I can’t share it yet…

Ha! Fooled you. You thought I was going to post about how my job is going. Alas… no. Rather, I’m going to tell you that I just got word one of the book covers I posed for has been bought. So, it’s not my name, but it’s my face. I’m now officially a romance novel cover model.

Like Fabio.

First day of work was great. Realy cool people, really cool building, really cool new cubicle…

But a bit overshadowed by what happened when I got home. So you may recall that three weeks ago I received a short “Dear Writer” form R from one of the agents who’d requested my single title. Well, today, about three seconds after walking in the door from my first day at my new job, I got a phone call from said agent telling me that she was VERY interested in NV, was sending it out to a second reader, and wanted to talk to me about it. Well, I don’t think shocked is the word I’m looking for here. I listened to her, tried to take notes, asked her to get back to me about her decision, and all the time, the words going through my head were “WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?”

Three weeks ago, I took this agency off my flow chart. No longer was it “if so-and-so offers and what’s-her-face doesn’t before who’s-it gets back to me…” So to hear she was interested was like dropping chocolate in an egg mixture I’d just decided to make into fried chicken batter (forgive the lame metaphors, I was cooking dinner at the time).

She said that it was sent to me in mistake, which means her assistant opened my package,  handed the manuscript to the agent to read, and then mistakenly stuffed my SASE with a form R. What are the chances of that? Of course, I’ve heard these stories before, but I always thought they were urban legends. Writers whispering to each other in the dark, “They sent me the form R by mistake, I just know it! When they realize it, they’ll call me at once to tell me how much they love my book and how sorry they are for playing such a nasty trick on me! I know it. I know it…”

I mean, come on, that doesn’t actually happen, right?

Watch. Now she’ll reject me for real and I’ll get the chance to be disappointed all over again.

Int he meantime, it’s nice ot hear someone talking about how much they like your work and how they’d be interested in marketing it.

All right, my pretties…

Here we are with another installment of Diana the Grammar Goddess. Today, we’ll be discussing three common mutilations of the language I have sworn to uphold and protect.

1) A person’s interest is piqued, not peaked. Anyone who thinks otherwise should take a long walk off a high peak.

2) The phrase is a lot. Two words. You wouldn’t write alittle, would you?

3) And the most heinous and far-reaching of them all: begs the question When something begs the question, what it does is make a conclusion without even raising the question in the first place. In formal logic terms, what it is doing is “improperly taking for granted” the situation at hand. My philosophy prof. taught us to think of it as “beggars the question,” which isn’t quite correct, but got the job done. No one in my class misuses it to mean “raises the question” or “begs us to ask the question” or any of the other teeth-grating ways I’ve seen people use it recently.

I should have known better than to join any of the new RWA loops. I thought they were basically worthless in their old incarnation — just the same six people posting on the same six topics. Out of curiousity, why did we all have to change? Different spellings? The new loops have been active for — what, a week? — and have already descended into the usual flamewars wherein some writers published with small or electronic publishers *not* recognized by RWA present their *tragic* situation as if

a) all e-publishers are shunned by RWA (not true) and RWA is “behind the times” in not recognizing their publisher.
b) all people who want to publish with a large, RWA-recognized publisher are directly insulting them and their decision to publish with smaller ones and
c) (this is the new one that shocked the hell out of me) there is some sort of conspiracy between Ellora’s Cave and RWA that allows EC to be recognized and no other epub. WTF????

One writer insisted that because she was not allowed in PAN, the most she could get out of RWA was beginning info about how to write a query letter, no advanced writer advice, promotional or contract tutelage. Um, excuse me? What RWA is she a member of? I’m not PAN, but that info is readily available both in the monthly RWR, in regular online workshops sponsored by RWA or at their yearly conferences. The folks I know in PAN tell me I’m not missing a thing on that loop.

Can we get one thing straight here? RWA is not in the business of keeping writers down. They have standards *because* they want their members making money. They are not keeping information from you. And publishers could care less whether or not your publisher is “recognized” by RWA. The fact that your publisher is not recognized is not ruining your rep. They pull some stupid shit (for instance, not reconizing as a “novel” a book that the publisher is calling such becauase it’s a few thousand short of the minimum-required word count), but what organization doesn’t? If your publisher is not recognized by RWA, it is for one of two reasons:

1) Your publisher hasn’t bothered to apply. (And, sheesh, if you want them in just ask them!)
2) Your publisher isn’t selling the highly minimal requirements to achieve recognition.

And once again, the big publishers don’t care. They want a great story and a proven selling track record. If they don’t have one, they’ll settle for the other. They’d prefer both.

Me, I want a contract with a big print publisher that has a proven track record for getting books into stores. But I know there are many ways to achieve that goal. Sell straight to the big pubs, work your way up with short stories, novellas and novels to small pubs, magazines and electronic pubs that are well-received and sell lots of copies or win a bunch of contests that improve your chances of getting noticed by the big guys (or even get a contract, like with American Title. Each way is perfectly valid — and NONE is better than another! The end goal is the same, if the path is different. To make a living selling books.

If you’re getting closer with each pass, each submission, each small sale, each contest win, then you’re getting it done. If you’re making a living selling your books, then you’re getting it done. (And if you’re making a living, then your publisher should DEFINITELY be recognized.)

Re: self-publishing. I admire people who self-publish and have the wherewithal to find good cover art, distribution, etc. Honestly, you people are my heroes. I know that wouldn’t be me. Furthermore, if you’re making good with your self or small-pubbed work, I can almost guarantee that the big pubs are interested.

Alternately, if you’re just looking to sell a book and don’t care how much money you make or how many other people read it, then go ahead and publish however the heck you like. But don’t get defensive with RWA for setting standards. They’re doing it for your ultimate benefit.