Save the Words!

Thank you to my dear friend Krista for introducing me to the site Save The Words, where you can adopt words that have fallen out of use from the English language.

I just adopted the word: aquabib

n. water-drinker.

Let's use it in a sentence:

Sally Tutu was such an aquabib that she woke up one day to find her eyes swimming in her head.

Feel free to adopt a word and use it in a sentence in the comments!

As It Turns Out: Somebody Likes This Blog

Thank you to the lovely, talented Lisa Galek for honoring me with my first ever blogging award: The Honest Scrap Blogger Award. Apparently, I'm honest. Which is quite ironic given the fact that I'm a fiction writer. Mwahahahaha! I write lies! All lies!

I have to share ten things about myself and share this award with other honest bloggers. So here goes...

1. For quite a long time I have had the story of a 16 year old girl in my head but had never written for a young adult audience. So, I was pretty scared to write it. This week, I officially decided to take the plunge. I hope all of you YA writers will welcome me with open arms and loving hearts and help me not be so scared.

2. I wrote a novel when I was 11 years old called "Ten Is Enough." In the coming weeks I plan to subject all of you to a few excerpts. Get excited!

3. I love to cook and I love to eat. I am obssessed with the farm to table craze and I belong to a CSA which forces me to figure out how to cook with things like 12 pounds of Kale.

4. I have lived in New York state for 27.5 of 30 years. 2 years were spent in Boston. .5 in the UK.

5. Of the 27.5 years in New York, 1.5 of them were spent in Astoria, Queens. 17 of them were spent in a town called Hicksville which is on the semi-north shore of Long Island. (Yes, it's called Hicksville.) 3.5 of them were spent in Ithaca. 4 of them were spent on the island of Manhattan. 1.5 of them were spent in Brooklyn.

6. I currently live in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood technically called the Columbia Waterfront District. Some people call it Red Hook. Others call it Carroll Gardens. I call it no-man's land because it is a 10 minute walk from the subway. I live with my boyfriend, Tyler.

7. I am an only child but I like to think I play well with others. Unless you want to borrow my bike, in which case, I'll cry.

8. I work at a toy company as a writer and producer. In other words, if you push a button on a toy, I wrote, recorded, edited, and produced all the music and speech you hear. Every time I tell people what I do, they ask me if working at a toy company is like the movie Big. I am here to tell you, it is nothing like the movie Big.

9. I loooooove dresses and skirts. From May to September, I do not wear pants. In the winter, I wear the same clothes but I put turtlenecks and wool tights underneath them.

10. I really love to blog and read your blogs. This whole 'I write, you read' then 'you write, I read' thing makes me really happy.

I would like to extend this award to the following bloggers:

Sharon Mayhew at Random Thoughts, who was my first blogging friend. She is as sweet as cake and writes about cake. I plan to to buy all of her children's books when they are published and give them to my kids.

Lori H. Walker, who always has so many thoughtful, interesting things to say about writing and teaching on her blog.

Karen at The Oliva Reader who reads and reviews the kinds of books I like to read on her blog. We are encouraging one another in our month of writing and I'm very excited.

Kerri Arista because her songs and her words are beautiful and honest and I'm excited she is writing a book.

Christine at Inwardly Digesting because I've just discovered her blog and I like it very much.

Small Streets, Tiny Windows

As I was looking through photographs from a trip to Provence last November, I found a rather interesting trend. In all of the towns we explored, Montaureux, Aix-En-Provence, Nice, Cannes, Avignon, Marseilles, I had taken numerous pictures of tiny, narrow streets. The sun creeping up one side and shadows, on the other, crawling down to the cobblestone path.

There is something I feel when I see a small street, a little room, slivers of windows, tables pressed together in charming village restaurants. It is intimate, comforting, dark, close. I always think to myself who goes there? They are always the kind of secrets I want to know...

Writer = Reader. Right?

After reading Lauren Miller's piece in Salon and an intelligent response at My Friend Amy's Book Blog, I began to think a lot about reading as writers. To sum up the issue, Lauren Miller wanted writers to think twice about participating in NaNoWriMo because she believes that putting quantity before quality is irresponsible. She also scolded writers, believing that we should really take the time to read more, not write more. My Friend Amy responded by applauding and encouraging writers who participated in the challenge this month and she brought up an interesting argument: Literacy is a much larger problem and writers are not the target.

Amen.

While I've never participated in NaNoWriMo, I am inspired by a month dedicated to novel writing. Maybe everyone does have a novel in them. And what's the harm in that? Maybe you don't need to go to the Iowa Writer's Workshop and sit in a dark room for ten years playing the role of tortured writer before birthing a novel.

Do I think that writers who participate need to realize that sitting down to write 50,000 words does not a novel make? Of course! Those who participate should take the time to revise and edit and hone their craft beyond the November frenzy. (Sorry for the public service announcement.)

Not only does it seem irresponsible to discourage a new generation of writers, but accusing an entire community of writers for not reading is offensive.  Because, as far as I can tell, writers are not only reading books, but devouring them whole, plugging them on their blogs, giving away dozens of copies, interviewing authors, participating in campaigns not to ban them, joining online challenges to read more of them, buying more bookshelves to house them, forcing unsuspecting family members to read them, and spending their entire paycheck to buy them. They have to-be-read piles in their homes that are toppling over and to-read lists that are virtually impossible to maintain given the life-span of an average human being.

There are a lot of reasons I love to write. But the biggest one is that I love to read. If I didn't, I'm not sure why I would want to enter the publishing industry, where salaries are embarrassingly low and new writers aren't exactly pulling in the kind of seven-figure advance they dream of. In my opinion, an aspiring writer wouldn't spend the days writing hundreds of thousands of words, spending ridiculous amounts of money on writing conferences, workshops, and fed-ex submissions, crying over hundreds of e-mail and snail mail rejections from magazines, editors, and agents, unless they had an absolute psychotic love of the written word. Because writing, in general, (never mind 50,000 words in 30 days) is INSANE, my friends. And there's no reason you would do it unless you love books, on certain days, more than your first-born.

But maybe I'm flat-out wrong. Maybe you've all never cracked the spine of a book in your life.

Tell me, writers, do you read?

The Dystopian Novel Anthem

Do you write Dystopian Fiction?

I was listening to some Muse and happily discovered what I'm calling "The Dystopian Novel Anthem".

Assume this will run in the credits of the upcoming Hunger Games movie ;-) Eat the berries Katniss! Eat the berries!



UPRISING
Lyrics by Matthew Bellamy

Paranoia is in bloom
The PR transmissions will resume
They'll try to push drugs that keep us all dumbed down
And hope that we will never see the truth around
So come on

Another promise, another seed
Another packaged lie to keep us trapped in greed
And all the green belts wrapped around our minds
And endless red tape to keep the truth confined
So come on

They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
So come on

Interchanging mind control
Come let the revolution takes its toll
If you could flick the switch and open your third eye
You'd see that we should never be afraid to die
So come on

Rise up and take the power back
It's time the fat cats had a heart attack
They know that their time's coming to an end
We have to unify and watch our flag ascend
So come on

They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
So come on

Hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey

They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
So come on

Tuesday Books for Writers! Breaking Away

I am not following the rules of Tuesday Books for Writers! this week. Not that there are really that many hard and fast rules to this, but the label does suggest that I will be discussing a book. I'm not. I'm discussing a movie.

Because Tyler and I are obsessed cyclists, we rented Breaking Away, a film from 1979 about a young man from a working class family in Indiana who is obsessed with Italian cycling. It was a fantastic coming of age story. A story that would probably translate to Upper YA in the publishing world. Dave Stoller is not-quite college bound and believes he's destined for cycling greatness in Italy. But his friends believe they are more likely destined to stay in their small town working dead-end jobs, living in the shadow of the prepsters at the local University. And Dave's parents also question their son's inane ambition. By the end of the film, everything is turned on its head and none of the characters end up where they thought they would be.

The characterization in this film was near perfect. Within the first ten minutes I knew exactly who the main characters were and got an immediate hint of their struggle. That is quite a feat in ten minutes! It reminded me how important those early moments are in any story. That we must share what type of person each character is through specific dialogue and behaviors. It also reminded me something an old screenwriting professor told me. That the first five minutes of a character's time on screen shapes what viewers will believe about them for the next two hours. It's no different in a book.

Not only were the characters well developed, but their character arcs were also fantastic. Even secondary characters had major arcs throughout the story. The people they became made sense given their intentions from the beginning of the story, even when their goals changed as they faced obstacles and setbacks. The script was really a great example of the hero's journey and seems like it would be a pretty good format to follow in your own writing if you really dissected it.

So if you writing a coming of age story or if you're just interested in learning more about character development, I highly recommend watching this film. It's also quite funny, so you're in for a treat. And if you've seen it please let me know what you thought!

MeNoWriMo

I wanted to wish everyone the best of luck with NaNoWriMo this year. It has me excited that so many people plan to write their butts off this November.

I toyed around with the idea of participating, but realized that this kind of challenge wouldn't work for me this month. I'm a little lost with my writing lately. I'm losing interest in project after project, abandoning pages and words left and right. So I wouldn't even know where to begin if I did it. And the truth is, I write really slow. Painfully slow. I know the goal of NaNo is to write and not self-edit, but the goal is also to get 50,000 words and I don't feel comfortable forcing myself to get to a word goal when I'm just not ready.

So, instead I'm participating in Melissa's Novel Writing Month, which can also be adapted to Me and My Novel Writing Month.

It goes a little something like this. By December 1st, I plan to accomplish the following goals:

1. Nail down which project I am going to focus on.

2. Come up with a solid concept for that project.

3. Come up with a writing schedule for that project.

4. Begin that project and gooooooo.

5. Submit my short story, "The Symphony" to 1 literary magazine a week for the rest of my life until it gets published.

6. Recap on Dec. 1st on this here blog so that I am held accountable for these goals.

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? What are you working on?

Is anyone not quite ready for NaNoWriMo, but ready to focus their writing goals?

If so, I hope you'll join me this month and rock out to Me and My Novel Writing Month. Which basically means, set some personal writing goals that work with who you are and where you are with your writing.

GOOD LUCK to all NaNoWriMo and MeNoWriMo participants! :-)