Okay, so now we have the wings and halo made.

Next you get dressed. What you choose to wear is going to determine what kind of fallen angel you are. The first girl I made this for was a very traditional angel, wearing a long skirt and a velvet top. The second wore a sexy black corset, fishnets and boots. (Perhaps more of a succubus in that outfit?) I wore a long, black velvet mermaid dress and bell sleeves. My friend wore a black skirt, lace top, and sheer, capelike negligee.

Then, the makeup. The first girl used a red palette, giving herself sorrowful red and purple eyes. We even tied blood-red ribbons in her hair below the halo. Last weekend, my friend and I stuck to blues and purples. Our eyeshadow was dramatic, with blue and white “wings” and heavy eyeliner. Then we streaked bits of black “soot” on our cheeks.

Then you take a wired ribbon in the color of your choice (black or sparkly/iridescent ribbon looks great!) and thread it through the inside corners of each wing. Have a friend hold the wing up to your back and tie it on, backpack style. I actually tied the wings in a cross across my chest to simulate the ties on classic dress.

Take the “halo” and pin it crookedly to your hair as if it has fallen down.

Ta-da! And, because it’s hilarious, the fallen angel checking out a D*** In A Box:

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Halloween is my favorite holiday, and due to circumstances beyond my control (hurricanes, they don’t really have it in Australia, etc.) it’s been several years since I was able to go all out. Also, my idea of a Halloween-themed wedding was vetoed.

I was determined to go Halloween or go bust this year. And this year would be the year I made the Fallen Angel costume… for myself.

The first time I made the Fallen Angel costume, it was for a friend in college. She was performing at a costumed music recital that evening, and she wanted something special. So she provided the clothes and makeup, and I made the wings and halo. And when we put it on her and tied the blood-red ribbons in her hair, the effect was incredible. She looked amazing, beautiful.

The second time I made the Fallen Angel costume, it was for another friend from college. She was a single girl living in New York City, and wanted something to kick up her black corset and fishnet ensemble. I’d developed my technique by then (it’s all about the black organza) and her wings were simply amazing.

It’s many years later now, and my best friend lives in town, so we could make the Fallen Angel costume together. See, because that’s the thing about it. It has to be a costume for someone else at least. It’s the tradition.

And this is how you do it:

1. Take two wire hangers.

2. Bend them into a rough teardrop shape, with the “hanger” part on one side.

3. Wrap the hanger with black pipe cleaners.

4. Create a latticework of pipe cleaners across the framework of the wrapped hanger.

5. Next, the feathers! You’re going to need about 1.5-2 yards of material all together. I like to use a mix of different kinds of materials, a bit of lace, some organza, some other shimmery or sparkly stuff, and some opaque material for filler. All black of course.

6. Cut the material into a double-feather shape with a bit of a strap between. It should be somewhere between 8-12 inches long.

7. Tie the feathers onto the lattice work and frame so that the feathery bits hang down on either side. Make sure the different materials are spaced out. Towards the bottom and “outside” of the wings (the side opposite the hanger part), make sure the feathers are somewhat longer to make the correct “folded wing” shape.

8. After the wings are covered, wrap the two “hanger parts” together with pipe cleaners. You may have to wrap some pipe cleaners around the inside as well to keep it all secure.

9. Now, the halo. Take embroidery thread in the “tarnished silver” color and braid six strands together, loosely. Tie the ends together. (Loose bits just make it look more “frayed.”)

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about assembly.

Today is the day I post on other blogs.

My continuation of the Manuscript Maven’s Halloween Choose Your Own Adventure Story is up today.

Also, my query letter for SSG is posted to Fangs Fur Fey.

Check ‘em out!

I’ve have a new hypothesis, and as far as I know, it has absolutely no basis in scientific thought, but anecdotal evidence seems to support it. Ready?

Caffeine makes me fall asleep.

Seriously. With all I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been looking for a bit of an extra kick in the evenings. Last evening, I stopped by at Starbucks, and then later had a soda, and I was in bed by 12:30 anyway, barely able to keep my eyes open. Today, I had no caffeine, and I’m still going strong. Weird, huh?

I’d say it was impossible, but I’ve read the back of Nyquil packets where it says stuff like “may cause drowsiness or sleeplessness” so I’m thinking that perhaps we don’t know what certain drugs will do to our systems. Maybe my body chemistry is just the type that caffeine makes sleepy.

NyQuil, on the other hand, just makes me hallucinate. Seriously. I never touch the stuff, after one particularly bad experience during flu season in college where I saw spiders crawling down the walls. I’ve since met two other people who also have the “spider” side effect with NyQuil, so I know I’m not nuts. Not completely, anyway.

The other person living in this apartment also has a strong reaction to caffeine. If he gets near it, he’s awake for days. Our genes might mix in an interesting manner, methinks.

So there was a suggestion put forth in yesterday’s post that I read people’s queries here on the blog. As Carrie can attest, I’m a nosy little snot when it comes to query-tweaking, so on one hand, it seems like a good idea. On the other, I don’t know if it would be a very popular proposition for folks, for the following reasons:

1) For it to work on any kind of ‘workshop’ level, folks would have to post their queries on the internet. And though I know a lot of people are perfectly comfortable doing that (like Erica, who did very well with her Miss Snark Crapometer entry), it’s not a practice I recommend, so I feel weird about encouraging it here.**

2) I’m not an agent or editor. If you send your query to Jessica Faust or Nephele Tempest or similar, you have the possibility of gaining the attention of these fabulous agents. And though an agent or editor is always welcome to contact you (or me) if they see something they like here, it’s not as clear cut as it would be at an actual agent’s blog. I have no idea if any agents read my blog. (Actually, I know at least one does, because she told my editor at lunch that she did. Hi, Agent!) But seriously, if you could get your query critiqued by Jessica Faust or me, go for Jessica. That’s a no-brainer.

3) It’s way, way harder to fix a query when you haven’t read the story. I’m not going to be reading stories. I noticed this a lot during the Miss Snark Crapometers and similar experiments. Miss Snark et al. are usually very good at pointing out the queries that are focusing on the wrong details, but with the generic ones, they can’t do much except make up wild conjectures about the actual plot of the book. Which may point out to the writer what they are doing wrong, I guess, but having seen more than one writer’s reaction to such a response, my guess is that it mostly pisses them off. Which leads me to…

4) Man, I don’t want to piss anyone off.

So I’m still mulling this over. Maybe it should be a contest kind of thing: enter if you want your query critiqued, and I’ll pick a couple of people. Maybe then at least I’d know if there are more than one or two people actually interested?

If a query crit is something that might interest you, please leave a comment here (anonymous is fine). It definitely wouldn’t be for another few weeks though, what with the wedding and all.

Speaking of, look what my friends did to me at the bachelorette party:

Their cheesiness knows no bounds. Lovely gals. I’m so lucky to have them!

_____________________
* It occurs to me that, in the light of the jargon from my books, this title sounds a lot sketchier than it is.
** I do not mean to inspire paranoia. Certainly I don’t ascribe to the idea that industry folks are out to “steal your stories.” But the internet is the internet, and there are certain things that don’t need to be Googleable until they are under contract, IMO. We have no idea who is reading this blog. Seriously, someone got here the other day by Googling “What is Snuffleuppagus’s first name?” Just keep that in mind.

‘Cause everyone’s talking about pitching…

Agent Kristin Nelson tries to prove that you can write a perfect query letter while only detailing what happens in the first 20 pages of a book here. And is immediately besieged by naysayers who don’t really get the point — do not get bogged down with trying to include EVERYTHING. Tossing in a mention of a Quidditch match is just adding detail on the subject of “being a wizard.”

It’s much more interesting to say “Quidditch match” and get the agent to go, “how curious, what in the world is Quidditch?” than it is to say “magical stuff” just as it’s more interesting to say “nightclubs of the damned, where deadish strippers flaunt their insides for the drooling masses” than to say “zombie stuff”. Which reminds me…

The folks at Fangs Fur Fey talk about their query letters that worked here (and all week — I’m Sunday).

I once held a pitching workshop on Romance Divas (sorry, you’re going to have to dig for that yourself — it was an Author of the Month workshop), and I read a lot of pitches that week. The biggest problem I saw was a lack of specificity. The second biggest problem, interestingly enough, was getting so bogged down in detail (the wrong details) that you missed the big picture of the story.

Clear as mud? (If not, read Carrie Ryan’s post on the topic, here.)

You have to strike a balance in your pitches between showing the big picture of the story and also, not being generic.

Let’s take as an example, the film Working Girl. Great film. Totally high concept. How would you pitch it?

Too generic:
A girl from a working class background will do whatever it takes to make it in the executive NYC business world. Life isn’t fair for Tess McGill. All she does is work hard and try to improve herself and get a better job, but it seems like you can’t get a ahead by playing by the rules that other people set up. Finally, one day, she decides that she’s had enough and she’s not going to follow the straight and narrow anymore, which leads her to big adventure and maybe even love.

Losing the big picture:
A secretary from Staten Island takes a lot of night school classes because she wants to get a promotion, but because she has a smart mouth and doesn’t want to put up with the sexual overtones she gets from her misogynistic bosses, she keeps losing her secretarial jobs, and her boyfriend only buys her lingerie and doesn’t seem to have the same ambitions as her. When she wants to talk about work, he’s just worried that the pizza they ordered will get cold. Things get worse one day when she arrives home late to discover that her slimy boyfriend has been sleeping with a hometown girl whose ambitions aren’t as big…. (and on and on, and we haven’t even met Sigourney yet!)

How about a little of each?
Tess McGill, a smart mouth secretary from Staten Island hopes her new female boss will be the business mentor she’s dreamed of. But when the boss is injured and must take a leave of absence, Tess discovers the cutthroat executive has been stealing her ideas and decides to break a few rules herself. She pretends to be an executive and launches a major business deal with Jack Trainer, one of her boss’s associates, a devastatingly handsome corporate type who is as intrigued by the financial potential of Tess’s proposal as he is by her highly unorthodox (and sexy) approach.

Which one do you like best?

Today, an excerpt from Extras, the #1 New York Times Bestseller by Scott Westerfeld:

“Come on, Hiro,” she said. “Unicorns aren’t real, and I know stuff about them. Like… they have horns on their foreheads. And they can fly!”

Hiro groaned. “No, that’s Pegasus that flies. Unicorns just have a horn.”

Now, I ask you. What can that possibly be except a shout-out to yours truly?

Take that, Justine. Guess we know where your old man falls on that all important unicorn/zombie divide. I’ve yet to see a zombie reference in this novel. Also, thanks Scott, for clearing up the confusion, even if we do have to wait until the future.

However, I must disagree. Unicorns are real. And they are very, very dangerous…

The Manuscript Mavens are doing a special Halloween “Choose Your Own Adventure” project, so stop by, catch up on the story and vote. (I’m one of the guest authors, so vote good, folks!)

You may have noticed that blog posts have been a bit thin on the ground in the last few weeks. That’s because I’m so busy I can’t see straight. I’ve got revisions due for Rites of Spring Break, plus another book to write, plus that whole pesky wedding thing happening in — eep! — just a few days. And yes, the proper adjective for wedding is “pesky.” Some people say “lovely” but I say pesky. And I say that because I have a forty-item To Do Before The Wedding list sitting on my desk right now.

I’ve handed a bunch of these items off to Sailor Boy. My brother, who got married this summer, once made the unfortunate comment that a groom’s only job was to show up at the wedding in a tux and say “I Do” at the appropriate moment. My poor sister-in-law, widowed before her time.

Back to the grind/table arrangements/revisions/programs/dry cleaning…

Today we welcome special guest Amanda Brice, who has a story to share which is all too familiar:

___________________________________
Diana, thanks for letting me blog today.

My freshman year of college, I lived down the hall from a girl named “Kate.” (Names changed to protect identities. If I get to have a pseudonym, then it’s only fair that they do, too.) Kate and I became close pretty early in the semester. She also became very close with a guy named “Scott.”

I remember one night in early November, Kate and I went out to some fraternity parties with my then-friend-soon-to-be-boyfriend, “Mike.” Scott stayed back at the dorm, like usual.

After a few hours at the frats, we decided to head back to the dorm. There were no cell phones in those days, so before heading home, we used a campus phone to call in an order for pizza delivery, so that it would hopefully arrive soon after we did.

When we got back to the dorm, Kate went off to find Scott, and I went off with Mike, but we promised her we’d let her and Scott know when the pizza arrived.

About 20 minutes later, we got a call that the pizza guy was there. Mike went downstairs to pay while I knocked on Kate’s door. She said to come in, so I pushed the door open.

Kate and Scott were curled up on her bed, watching a movie. They looked just like any happy couple. I let them know that we’d be eating pizza in the commons room, if they wanted to join us.

I’ll never forget what happened next. Scott screamed, “Why do you need pizza? I thought you already ate?” He then whipped his head in my direction, and grilled me, “Where were you?”

“Uh…” I stammered.

“Tell me!”

“We were at the KA party,” I said, not quite sure what was going on. I thought he knew we went out to the parties.

Scott jumped up, knocking Kate off the bed, but then dragging her off the floor by her arm. He smacked her, yelling, “You didn’t tell me you were out with that slut, Amanda! What were you doing?”

I was too shocked to react to the fact that he’d just called me a slut. I was more upset that he’d just hit her, yet was riveted to my spot, and couldn’t move.

Scott pushed Kate to the ground again, and then stormed out of the room. Before I had a chance to ask her if she was okay, Kate ran from the room, down the hall, calling his name.

I ran after her. She almost caught up with him outside his dorm room, but instead of following him inside, Scott slammed the door on Kate’s arm. I thought it was just an accident, but it wasn’t. He proceeded to open and shut the door ten more times, each time intentionally catching Kate’s arm in the door, while he called her things much worse than what he’d called me earlier. Finally, after he’d sufficiently banged her up, he pushed her away, and locked the door behind him.

Kate collapsed in a heap outside the door. I rushed over to her, to try to comfort her, but she just said, “Leave me alone.” I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to go get help.

When Mike and I returned less than five minutes later, Kate was no longer on the floor outside his room. We tried her room, but she wasn’t there either. Mike banged on Scott’s door, demanding that he open up, but nothing.

The next morning, I saw Kate and Scott at breakfast and they acted like nothing had happened. I cornered her in her room later on, and told her she could tell me anything. She said there was nothing to talk about.

I asked her where she spent the night. Turns out, Scott let her into his room while I was getting Mike. I tried to bring up what had happened.

She said, “He just has a temper. My dad has a temper, too.”

Turns out that Kate had grown up in a violent household, and tragically, she was acting as an apologist for Scott’s behavior because it was what she knew. It took a while, but eventually we convinced her that this was not normal, and she sought help from the counseling services.

That was almost 12 years ago, but the memory is still vivid, even today. I lost track of Kate, like so often happens. A little over a year ago, on a whim, I decided to Google Kate, and see what she was up to. I learned that she’s now an attorney, specializing in domestic violence cases.

When I first read that, I cried, remembering that awful night. But my tears turned to hope, because Kate’s experience had made her stronger, and encouraged her to help other women.

I knew I wanted to do something to help. So I pitched the idea for a charity anthology to my publisher, Freya’s Bower. Thus, Dreams & Desires: A Collection of Romance and Erotic Tales was born.

Did you know that:
• Nearly 25% of American women report being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabitating partner, or date at some point in their lifetime?
• 37% of women treated in emergency rooms for violent injuries were hurt by a current or former partner?
• 73% of domestic violence incidents go unreported?

Scary statistics. Fortunately, I’m not one of them, but I’m certain that each and every one of who reading this blog has either been a victim or knows someone who has.

In order to help bring those statistics down to zero, all net proceeds (that’s 100% of the profit – nobody involved with the project is making a dime) from every Dreams & Desires anthology purchased will go to a battered women’s shelter in Florida. Through education and support, we can make a difference.

The participating authors in the collection are: Jenna Bayley-Burke, Faith Bicknell-Brown, Amanda Brice, Sela Carsen, Rachelle Chase, Gemma Halliday, Candace Havens, Zinnia Hope, Jackie Kessler, Susan Lyons, Richelle Mead, Debbie Mumford, Rhonda Stapleton, Bebe Thomas, Emily Veinglory, Sasha White, Lois Winston, Shaunna Wolf, and Kit Wylder. The collection is available in trade paperback, hardcover, and e-book.

Dreams & Desires has had such great support from readers, bookstores, and reviewers (Mrs. Giggles even gave us a rare 90!) that we’ll be putting out a second volume in February, with proceeds going to a shelter in California. (The participating authors in the second volume are C.T. Adams & Cathy Clamp, Jenna Bayley-Burke, Amanda Brice, Shannon Canard, Sela Carsen, Rachelle Chase, M.E. Ellis, Jenny Gardiner, Gemma Halliday, Candace Havens, Zinnia Hope, Babe King, Susan Lyons, Sarah Salway, Rhonda Stapleton, Bebe Thomas, Emily Veinglory, Lois Winston, and Shaunna Wolf.)

In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Freya’s Bower has discounted all formats (paperback, hardcover, and e-book) of Dreams & Desires for the entire month of October, but this deal is only available through the website at: http://www.freyasbower.com/content/view/132/77. Please help us raise more money and awareness for this important cause.

In addition, I’m also donating my proceeds from the Legally Fiction online workshop that I’m teaching through AuthorMBA. The course runs from Oct 29-Nov 16, and will cover copyrights, trademarks, and the laws of cyberspace.
http://www.authormba.com/workshops/legally_fiction.htm

Thanks again, Diana, for letting me come and spotlight this important issue.

As I was walking home from yoga class with my best friend last night (did I mention that she moved to town — literally down the street from me, and it puts a smile on my face every day to think that?), clutching our fruit smoothies (a post-yoga class tradition of ours) while simultaneously wearing a fleece jacket, it occurred to me that glorious DC summer is over and we’ve hit that time of the year — even more glorious DC autumn — that will all too soon give way to miserable winter.

I am not a fan of winter. And it lasts forever here. Grrrr…. thinking about how much I hate winter in DC makes me wonder how I ever survived four years in Connecticut. Anyway, right now the weather is overcast and I have to spend the afternoon outside with the monkeys (still preferable to DC winters) and I’m really looking forward to enjoying the remainder of fall. Pretty sure when I get back from Florida it’s already going to have started getting icky…

Oh, and hey, congratulations to Scott Westerfeld, who is on the NYT Bestselling list THREE TIMES this week. Go Scott! (I’m waiting to read Extras until this revision thing dies down.)

So I’m at that inevitable stage of working on other projects where I get all these glorious ideas for new projects that appeal to me so much more than, say, doing revisions. Of course, I’m also at that stage where rearranging my closet is more appealing to me than revisions. It’s part of the process, I’ve found. I’m not alone in this. I remember attending a writing conference back in high school and listening to an author talk about how she tricked herself out of that stage and forced herself to finish writing the book at hand. She promised herself she could work on the other project next. I’ve tried that, with mixed results. I think it’s because usually, when I’m tricking myself into something, I can see right through me.

Bitchslapping myself works a lot better, in my experience.

Hey, check it out — I got curious about that author and what she’s doing now, and here is her website. Sally Keehn was one of the first authors I ever met. her new book sounds adorable.

In personal news, I got my hair cut yesterday. The Great Diana Grows Her Hair Out Experiment is at an end, thank goodness. It’s weird. I had long long LONG hair for practically my whole life, but when I cut it all off at 23, it was like I realized that I was actually not a long hair kind of person. I feel so much more comfortable when my hair is not long. Despite all the cool things I can do with long hair (I know more kinds of braids and twists and inverted herringbones and other hairdos that sound more like gymnastic routines than you can imagine), I was actually a short haired person inside, all along, just waiting to come out and rock a lot less hair. Plus, what I save on brushes and barrettes…

And I guess it turns out that my hair doesn’t grow very quickly, either, since it can’t seem to get much past my shoulders anymore. It didn’t when I was living in Australia and it didn’t all this year. (see picture from the post from the other day.) So now it’s short again, la la la. I’m considering hacking even more off after the wedding, seeing if I’m actually a pixie cut person in secret.

First of all, some congratulations are in order:

*Congratulations to C.L. Wilson, whose debut Lord of the Fading Lands just hit the USA Today Bestseller list! I’ve been friends with C. for years (she’s responsible for the pseudonym I’ll take if I ever take one) and to finally see the fabulous Tairen Soul in book form and getting the recognition it deserves is a true delight.

*Congratulations to Ally Carter, whose Cross My Heart and Hope To Spy just hit the New York Times Bestseller List! Go, Sally, go Sally, go, go, go Sally!

*Congratulations to Carrie Ryan, who has some very special news to share today (when she spills, I will). Carrie, I’m ready with that sentence whenever you want… sold her fantabulous post-apocalyptic zombie novel, as reported in Publisher’s Marketplace:

Carrie Ryan’s THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH, about an isolated village generations after the zombie apocalypse where a 16-year-old struggles with the town’s religious order until the village walls are breached and the only chance of survival is to escape into the forest beyond, to Krista Marino at Delacorte, in a pre-empt, in a two-book deal, by Jim McCarthy at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.

Speaking of other writers, I had the opportunity to meet one of my very favorite bloggers this weekend: debut YA author Robin Brande. Puppy-lover Brande was signing copies of her new book, Evolution, Me, And Other Freaks of Nature at a Borders store in York, Pennsylvania, home of the infamous Dover school evolution lawsuit. Yoga enthusiast Brande was sweet as could be, as were her companions, a local librarian and a high school English teacher. (Avid hiker Brande was in between speaking engagements at the school and the library.) Though she’d been placed in the back of the store, which may have limited visibility to passers by (I actually wandered around for a while before I found her, and I’d come all the way from D.C.), it gave us an opportunity to chat about evolution, feminism, sexuality, religion, politics, reading lists, and other issues facing young adult writers and young adults today. We also met a lovely young man who may or may not show up as a hero in one (or more) of our books someday. Bookworm Brande demonstrated her no nonsense attitude throughout the event, problem-solving with readers who approached, talking about life and faith, and coming up with real-world solutions. (I was pretty amazed — at a booksigning, I sign books. Stop.)

But ardent self-improver Brande is much more proactive than I. Of course, she did put the kidlit conference together, and I can’t even seem to design freakin’ ceremony programs, but that’s neither here nor there. I did make myself a Halloween costume. More on that later. Back to gourmet vegetarian cook Brande. I got a chance to ask her a couple of questions about her book, but not nearly enough to satisfy all my curiosity. Expect a long email, wilderness first responder Brande. If you haven’t yet read chocolate-giver Brande’s fabulous debut, I highly recommend it.

Also, all that sharing of chocolate with others and not herself, hiking, and gourmet vegetarian cooking is clearly good for you because talented novelist Brande looks fabulous!