Once upon a time there was a young writer — let’s call her Leanna — who had a deadline. Now, she wasn’t new to this experience. She had a few books under her belt, and knew how to begin, continue, and finish writing a book.
But here’s the thing. Writing a book teaches you how to write that book. The next book? That’s a whole new course of study. And with this book, Leanna was having a problem. A plotline wasn’t falling into place, or a character wasn’t behaving the way they were supposed to. And no matter how many times Leanna rewrote that section, it didn’t end up working. So the deadline grew closer, and Leanna was stuck running in place.
Enter the first Seventy Days of Sweat. Using the template, Leanna was able to finally shush that internal editor (always a tough proposition for her!) and move forward in the book without fixing that scene first. And the rest of the book came together.
So now the next Seventy Days of Sweat Are upon us, and you can sign up here. I’m a sponsor this time around, but I won’t be participating, because I’m in the midst of revisions, wedding, traveling to Europe, etc. But I want to be involved, so here I am, acting as coach and cheerleader. Go! Write! Win!
(You can even fold it into NaNoWriMo if you want. NaNo is also gearing up now.)
Here are the rules:
1) You agree to write from 750 to 1500 words a day (depending on your project needs) between October 15, 2007 and January 15, 2008 (93 total days – 70 challenge days = 23 free days). The goal is to finish with between 60K and 100K words, whether a single book, multiple novellas, etc. Whatever combination gets you there!
2) There will be check-in posts here every Wednesday and Sunday. Stop by and in the comments, let everyone know how you’re doing.
3) There will be additional posts on the site throughout the week. Stop by as your writing time allows, or add the blog’s feed to your reader.
4) If you have time and would like to meet your fellow writers, click on the blog of the sweating challenger who has commented above you on check-in days and offer some rah-rah go-go encouragement.
Grrrr… in a bad mood this morning. Missing my WRW Meeting because the TRAFFIC in this TOWN is SO RIDICULOUS that on a SATURDAY MORNING I was stuck in GRIDLOCK on the beltway for an HOUR and only got about FIVE MILES from my house.
Ahem. Feeling better now.
A new agent named Jennifer Schober recently visited the Author MBA blog. This was my favorite quote: “I’ve been actively acquiring as an agent since October of ’06, and since then have sold 15 books.”
This is how you tell the difference between a real agent and a scam agent. When an agent says they are new and that’s why they haven’t made any sales yet, they better have hung up their shingle recently enough for their celebratory cake to still be fresh. When agents go on for years, signing clients, hanging out at conferences, and making ZERO sales, having zero sales listed on their websites…
Look at that agent. One year of agenting, fifteen sales. Keep that in your head.
One of the very very few nice things about being as sick as I am is that lying propped up in bed with my computer on my lap, awake for 15-20 minutes at a time — though not, perhaps, conducive to revisions — is very conducive to catching up on this season of Dancing with the Stars.
Why didn’t Amanda Brice make me watch this show a while ago? I remember watching it once in the hospital last May (which was the only good thing about being in the hospital, as both SB and I will tell you) and thinking that it was super fun, what with Apollo Ono (who SB and I decided minorly resembled Brandon) and Ian Zierling and all… but this might be even more fun because… well, Jennie Garth! And Jane Seymour! And Wayne Newton! And on and on and on. I love this show. I think my favorite might be the Cheetah Girl, whose existence I wasn’t even aware of before I saw this show, but she’s totally got moves. SB is just amused that “billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban” is on it. My favorite pro is still Julianne, though. Is it me, or does she look like what Tara Reid might have once looked like?
Also, I skip the “results” shows, except I’m really glad I caught that one scene with Savion Glover dancing. I actually met Savion, back in high school. I took watched him teach a master tap class. I suck at tap. He was Savion Glover. Nuff said.
So the other thing I’ve been doing (besides laying around and groaning and eating black bean soup) is catching up on my enormous TBR pile. I read both Robin Brande’s debut, Evolution, Me, and Other Freak of Nature, and Jennifer Echols’s The Boys Next Door. Both were YA romances, both were excellent, but they had two very different spins. Brande’s book was set against the backdrop of a very high concept, political/religious debate about teaching evolution in high school. Good stuff. I’ve been looking forward to reading this debut for a while and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. As a geology major, an individual of faith, and, oh, a person who has read the news in the past few years, the topic of teaching actual science in a science class is one very near and dear to my heart. I love the way that Brande’s heroine, Mena, despite the trials she was put through by her family, friends and community, never lost sight of her own strong faith.
The Boys Next Store is Echols’s second book (after last year’s Major Crush, which I adored!). Like her last book, this one is set in a small Alabama town, but it follows a motherless tomboy named Lori whose only friends are her older brother and the three boys next door. All five of them work at the marina and go wakeboarding on the lake every day during the summer, but Lori — about to turn 16 — is ready for people to see her as a woman. Her romantic entanglements with the various boys next door is very passionate and very personal. Echols’s strength as a writer is her ability to capture exactly what teen romance feels like. First kisses, first touches, every minutiae of discovering those feelings for the first time. She nails it.
Love. Love love love love love. It’s like Big Fish but with a necromancer. Narrated by Jim Dale. Yes, that Jim Dale. The Harry Potter one. And it has Sylar’s mom in it as an ex-synchronized swimmer with a personality disorder. And Swoozie Kurtz as her one-eyed twin. And Kristin Chenowith, who is always hilarious. And it’s so vivid and imaginative and quirky and fabulous that I just know people aren’t going to get it. I actually avoided it because the whole “bringing people back to life for a minute at the morgue” premise sounded a lot like that disappointing Eliza Dushku show where her name was some sort of positive quality that was cleverly incorporated into the title, such as “Touching Destiny” and her name was Destiny but that wasn’t it.
Please, please ABC, don’t cancel this show. Please? Please don’t let it drop into oblivion after only a few episodes like the creator’s other efforts, Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, neither of which I liked half as well as this one.
Also, the main guy is really cute. Mark Henry described him as a young Kevin Spacey, and I guess I can see that, especially in qualities of voice resonance and the way he exudes calmness, but I think he’s adorable, and I don’t know if I thought young Kevin Spacey was adorable. Certainly not in Working Girl, at least.
So yeah, everyone go watch Pushing Daisies. Just go to abc.com and you can watch the pilot (or “Pie-lette” — get it, he’s a pie chef!) online.
So yesterday I had a nice chat with my editor about my revision and then I talked to our wedding cake baker and then I got a terrible migraine and basically slept for the rest of the day. That sucked. When I woke up, my head felt like wet cement and I could still feel the headache, lingering right there, smothered, perhaps, by painkillers but still all lumpy and waiting for me in 6-8 hours.
Last chance to enter the CL Wilson Lord of the Fading Lands Giveaway (see below). I’ll be back at noon to pick a winner.
AND THE WINNER IS: RUTH. Ruth, please email me with your mailing address to receive a copy of this fabulous new novel!
There’s still time to enter theLord of the Fading Lands Giveaway (below). Don’t miss your opportunity to get your hands on this fabulous new book!
For those who missed it, yesterday’s theme was, “things that are frustrating me.” I’d like to add to it that certain retail corporations, along with the other faults I described yesterday, will send a single china teacup in a two foot square box filled with styrofoam packing peanuts. I have SO MANY of these boxes lying around the apartment it’s not funny. And every time I gather them up and take them to the styrofoam packing peanut reclamation place, I get half a dozen more.
However, I did discover that CBS has put the new episodes from the third season of HIMYM on the internet, so now I’m all caught up. I also saw Lily and Marshall’s honeymoon video, which is hilarious.
Sometimes it’s very frustrating not having a TV. It means I’m totally dependent on the networks to put things on the internet for me to watch them. And then I think, well, me watcing HIMYM or Heroes or Ugly Betty or Moonlight on the internet is not proving to these companies that the show is a viable property — and then I remember that I’m not exactly a Nielsen household, so maybe me clicking on it on their websites or downloading them to iTunes is actually more helpful in terms of stats.
Uh, not that Heroes needs my help. (Nor Ugly Betty, for that matter.) Moonlight, however…
Sigh.
I’m watching this show because of the very passionate affection I hold for one Mr. Jason Dohring (aka Logan Echolls). I’ve seen the pilot. Eh. Look, I’ve got two seasons of Angel on DVD sitting in my DVD cabinet right now. Is there any reason I need to watch this show? The main character is so bland, and I can’t believe how much they ripped off Angel. And I’m not even talking about the premise (which has been done before)! The “fast cut night shots of LA” that occur between each scene, the skeptical blonde, bland cop internet investigative reporter human who looks like the younger version of the blonde cop chick who left Angel to go be a prosecutor on Law & Order… sigh sigh sigh. Oh, and he slayed his ex-lover/sire. You know, before the show started. But she’ll be back, I’m sure (judging from the promo photos), and he’ll no doubt become obsessed with her. Wasn’t this show originally scheduled to be produced by the same dude who produced Angel? I think they need to mix it up a bit.
Also, I don’t understand why you can either drink blood or inject it. And their vamp faces look stoopid. And poor Jason Dohring, who seems like the only interesting character on the show (love the Big Lebowski Porn King house he’s living in!) doesn’t look like he’s having fun with the character at all. SB doesn’t agree with me. He thought Dohring was the only redeemable aspect of the show. But I know that he is capable of being very, very gleefully evil, and I’m not seeing glee out of him, which is when he’s at his best. Maybe the problem is this character is too much like Logan (morally gray but lovable?) and he’s trying to separate them out. What it means, though, practically, is that he delivers all his fabulous lines (the only decent lines in the script) in a rapid-fire monotone.
I’m trying not to judge on the pilot. I learned my lesson from HIMYM, which I gave up on after the pilot and now regret it. And heck, I even gave the execrable Studio 60 three episodes before convincing myself that yes, it really did suck and that was okay and popping in a DVD of The West Wing instead. So I’ll give Moonlight a few more episodes. If they have that many.
Question, though: why oh why would they put bland, unattractive what’s-his-face in the main role when they could have had Dohring?
C.L. Wilson, in a show of arguably misplaced gratitude, has tagged me and pretty much everyone else I know (thereby neatly preventing me from tagging anyone else) with that Eight Things Meme that I tried really hard to avoid last time. Here goes (see if you can spot the theme):
1. A high school classmate forwarded me a letter from our reunion chair that included me on a list of “lost alumni.” The classmate was as baffled as I that I could possibly be considered “lost.” Especially given that the alumni coordinator at my high school attended my launch party in 2006. Oh, and Google pretty much has me nailed. And I get a couple of emails a month from people who knew me when I was six, saw my book in a store, and figured that “Peterfreund” isn’t a common name.
2. I have a new book out this week. It’s called The World of the Golden Compass, published as a Borders Exclusive by BenBella Books, edited by Scott Westerfeld, and available in all your Borders Stores. (Not to be confused with the Scholastic book by the same title, which is a behind-the-scenes film tie-in.) My essay is called “Ghost in the Machine.” Other essayists include Ned Vizzini, Maureen Johnson, Ellen Hopkins, and Linda Gerber. I’m incredibly excited about this book and I’d love to link to it here, but it appears neither on the Borders site nor on the BenBella Books publisher’s site.
3. I’m sick. So is Sailor Boy.
4. I got this chain letter in the mail. The actual mail. I haven’t gotten a chain letter in the mail since I was about 13. I ignored it when I got the exact same chain letter over email, but I feel inclined to respond to this one, because of the sender and the sender’s earnest admonitions on behalf of the person she received the letter from. Problem is, I loathe chain letters on principle, even harmless “let’s share recipes” ones.
5. Extras is out. I’m still in the middle of revisions.
6. Apparently, certain retail corporations find it entirely acceptable to ship items to your home without any kind of notation informing you who purchased these items for you, which makes it a tad tough to thank the giver. Why do they think this is acceptable?
7. I missed my Yoga Nidra class this week (see #3) and to make it up, I have to drive to the yoga place’s other location.
8. I finally got to see the second season of the hilarious How I Met Your Mother, but now I’m two episodes behind on the third.
There. That theme should be pretty obvious, I think…
I was lucky enough to read this book years ago, before it was even a glimmer in the eyes of the legions of fans Wilson has already claimed. And yes, I’m very smug about it, Why do you ask?
It’s an astounding work, as intricately imagined as any of the classics of high fantasy, with characters, cultures and language that will remain with you for years to come.
Once he had scorched the world…Once he had driven back overwhelming darkness… Once he had loved with such passion, his name was legend….
Tairen Soul
Now a thousand years later, a new threat calls him from the Fading Lands, back into the world that had cost him so dearly. Now an ancient, familiar evil is regaining its strength, and a new voice beckons him—more compelling, more seductive, more maddening than any before.
As the power of his most bitter enemy grows and ancient alliances crumble, the wildness in his blood will not be denied. The tairen must claim his truemate and embrace the destiny woven for him in the mists of time.
Q: What’s worse than being stuck in the house on a beautiful fall day*, doing revisions?**
A: All of the above, while sick*** (and tending to sick boyfriend****).
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* It’s ridiculously gorgeous outside. Makes me wonder if it’s not worth dealing with winter just so we can have fall days like this. I want to go apple-picking. ** Notwithstanding last week’s post, revisions are no fun. *** Some sort of rapid-onset nastiness. I was perfectly fine at 7 p.m. I felt like crap at 9:30 p.m. **** Sailor Boy has had it since Saturday night, when he experienced the same sort of rapid onset nastiness. His appears to be much worse than mine. So far.
