A Blog Award, A Blog Banner Contest, and Chin Dimples

Yep, I'm trying to do it all today.

BLOG AWARD ALERT!

Huge thanks to the lovely Angela Felsted for passing along the...

In keeping with the spirit of the rules, here are seven things you didn't know about me:

1) My astrological sign is Cancer

2) I was born in the year of the pig

3) Both of my sons were blessed with the amazingly adorable chin dimple (Hollywood, here they come)

4) I've been in a plane crash, but never a car crash

5) My circulation is so bad, I get cold if the temp drops below 74

6) The moon makes me smile every time

7) My favorite color is not orange. It's yellow, but I do love the way they go together on my blog.

I'm supposed to pass this along to FIFTEEN people, which is a great way to spread the love, so I'll see what I can do:

Colene Murphy,     Lindsay (aka Isabella),     Matthew Rush,      Christy Evers,    

Beth Revis... 

Umm, I'm sorry. I got distracted after FIVE by Beth Revis and her book launch party!! Holy delicious book website! Happy Birthday, AtU!

Did you buy ACROSS THE UNIVERSE YET? My copy is sitting by my bed, just where it should be. 

BLOG BANNER CONTEST

Kristal Shaff of Operation Awesome is sharing her amazing talents with all our awesome readers. Head over to see samples of her work (umm, or just look at my beautiful blog banner above. That's her craftsmanship, too). Good luck! I hope you win your own specially designed blog banner!

Now for my mini-blog post:


Check this out! "To Boldly Go: What Made 400 People Volunteer for a One-Way Mission to Mars?"


Just got my copy of a book about colonizing a distant planet, and then I read this. Fun coincidences.  It's crazy how close modern technology is to achieving the stuff of decades of science fiction! It kind of makes writing sci-fi daunting. What hasn't been done?


Beth Revis mentions drawing inspiration for some of her tech from her iPod. If you write sci-fi, or even fantasy cross-over with science fiction elements, how do you make now-old ideas fresh? From where do you draw your inspiration? (I get mine from old science fiction and new "scientific breakthroughs.")


Update: Okay, my husband expressed concern that my readers might think my kids are spawn of Edward and Jacob. To prevent this and give credit where it's due for the awesome chin dimples, I'm posting a picture of my hunky husband:

Huge Pendulum Swings

Life is volatile and unpredictable. One day, you're laughing cheerfully with your family in your living room, and the same night you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and BAM--life changes forever.

We write about it in fiction all the time: Fred is going along minding his own business at the bus stop when somebody knocks him over with a silver attache case that, it turns out, is filled with a million dollars in counterfeit cash. Fred doesn't have time to process what he's clutching to his chest, as he lies on the sidewalk, before an entire squad of unmarked police cars rolls up, guns at the ready. Fred is going to jail.

It's exciting and it's dramatic, but it also happens in real life all the time. Maybe not cool twists with spies and counterfeit money, but the pendulum certainly does swing. One minute, you're enjoying a political rally with your kids, teaching 'em all about this great country we live in and the ways citizens can be involved--and then the unthinkable happens. A gunman opens fire, not just on one unfortunate target, but on the entire assembly of civilians, politicians, and service people. Your mother is struck down. Or your son. Or your daughter. Life for you will never be the same.

Last year, my aunt lost a toddler to a brain tumor... all of a sudden. He was angelic and playful and filled with the potential of youth, and then he got sick and, less than two weeks later, he passed away.

Occasionally when I'm reading, I'll come across a character's back story that feels contrived to me. Another teenager lost her parents in a car accident, or somebody's little brother was shot in a gang drive-by. But then real life things happen that give me back my perspective. These things are present in literature because they are present in real life. Art imitates life. Tragically. But realistically.

The truly sad thing is that I think as a society, we sometimes care more about the fictional characters than we do about the real ones. The far-away stories that don't touch our lives are easy to ignore, or forget, or push to the backs of our minds. The books we read and the movies we watch, however, get played over and over again in our imaginations, forcing us to face the reality--the sick twisted evil that we know lurks in our own world. Through fictional characters, we process what we don't even want to think about. That's what makes books like Speak or The Hunger Games so powerful and so important to us as a society. But if we aren't mindful, it is all too easy to forget that we wept with Katniss when she lost Rue and others in her world, and to brush off real-life murder and rape with an, "eh, it happens" attitude.

I can never forget how, when the towers were hit on 9-11, I watched the second plane hit the second tower. I watched it go down. And then I heard the eye-witness accounts from people who were there on the ground. They weren't seeing it on a screen. They were seeing it framed by nothing but smoke and blue skies, and yet they said, "It was just like a movie. It was like it wasn't real."

I was studying Communications at a university at the time, and we had to watch that footage over again to process how the media handled it, and how the people responded to it. I remember two things most of all:
1) A man jumped out of a window near the top of the building as it crumbled. He jumped out! And I cried.
and 2) The idea that we could witness a real life tragedy and think, "It's just like a movie" really unsettled me.

We cry in movies, but in real life, we detach ourselves from the reality of it? I guess this is just human nature. I guess it doesn't really mean anything devious about us as a society. But it's a sad thing, I think, that we process our real world through the fiction that defines us.

It means your job as a writer is that much more important. You've got to make sure your writing keeps us locked into the sensitivity and compassion inherent in each of us--that it doesn't desensitize readers to atrocities. That it shows how one bullet, one disease, and one clenched fist brings down a multitude of hopes.

Or maybe you don't. But it's something to think about.

Look! A Free Copy of ACROSS THE UNIVERSE!

Right over here: Operation Awesome Word Verification Giveaway

Click the link, then make your comment's word verification into a science fiction term in honor of Beth Revis' upcoming debut, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE and be entered for a chance to win it! There's still time to get it on release day! Woot!

Haven't read the blurb yet? I took care of that for you, too:

A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules. 

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone-one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship-tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

Would you keep going?

If you were the only writer in the world, and there were no blogging buddies, critique partners, or beta readers... would you keep going?

I don't think I could.

I picture what it must have been like for early writers who scribbled away on parchment or in notebooks without the technology that allows me to move an entire paragraph or just one word with Ctrl X, Ctrl V. I imagine my friends thinking I'm crazy because I'd rather write than go to a ball or a party. Can you just taste the disappointment mixed with utter loneliness that some of our favorite writers must have experienced?

Two of my heroes are J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Individually, they're epic and respected writers. Together, in their little Inklings group of writers, they are pure awesome. What would one of them have been like without the other?

Answer: Like me, minus Amparo, Lindsay, Kelly, Angie, Kristal, and Michelle (my Operation Awesome critique partners and blog buddies). Sad. Discouraged. Alone.

I can't even tell you how many times one of them has cheered me up or kicked my butt into gear. And I couldn't possibly count or even recall every time one of your blog posts (yes, you, reading this blog) has taught me something about writing, or reading, or being human.

Without you guys, I wouldn't know how to start a story or how to finish one. I wouldn't understand story structure or characterization half as well as I do now. And I'm still learning from you.

We're not alone. And that makes writing 100% fun and 0% lonely.

For a glimpse at how much I've learned from my blogging friends, check out Pot Holes and Aha Moments in Your Writing Career by me over at Operation Awesome.

New Creations! Another Fun Blogfest :)

Summer Ross is hosting a fun and easy blogfest today. I found out about it from the awesome Amparo Ortiz.

Post one last sentence from a 2010 story you wrote. Post one first sentence from a new project this year.

Join the fun here.

My last sentence is from a new age/science fiction novel: 

“What do you know?” he whispered so that only I could hear, though Tracy stood just two feet away. “We can create our own reality.”

My first sentence is from a YA urban fantasy:

Grandma had lightning white hair and eyes so dark they surrounded me like a thunderstorm when she stared my way.

See the other entries here. 

 Can't wait to read yours!

I'll Show You Mine if You... BLOGFEST!

BLOGFEST! I almost forgot, but better late than never. :)

January 3rd: post 500 words of your Nano novel.

Join the blogfest here.

Setting: Central Park

The sun went down in a splash of color that freckled the horizon. Normally, it would have been romantic, but I wasn’t feeling it tonight, even with Travis’ hand clasped around my own. It felt strangely delicious, being close to them this way—the dust of the Earth once made the brightest stars. People didn’t see themselves that way, but that was just because they couldn’t. They didn’t see what I saw when I closed my eyes. They didn’t see what my third eye revealed: the truth of their origins.

“What are you thinking about?” Travis asked me, brushing the blunt cut bangs from my face, a futile gesture, but a romantic one.

“I’m thinking about you,” I lied. But it wasn’t a lie, really. I was thinking about him. His kind.

His big, country boy hand squeezed mine, and a wholesome, toothy grin made his aura swell a brilliant royal blue. “It’s incredible,” he said. “How do your eyes change so quickly? It’s almost like you’re from another planet.”

I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even chuckle. I cried. I know—wuss, right? I’m a total wuss. But if you’d said goodbye as many times as I had in the past three hundred years, you’d know the salty taste of tears by heart. I’d have loved to taste that salt just once, but tears weren’t part of my makeup. The Earth and I were only passing friends. And Travis…

“Oh, Travis.” I looked at our hands with so much longing, my heart chakra threatened to explode.

“What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself since Carnegie Hall. Are you really so put off by fame and fortune?”

I smiled at his nervous chuckle, grateful for once that I couldn’t produce tears. “You know I have no use for those things.”

“Well…” he squeezed my hand again and wrapped a burly arm around me. Stronger and bigger than most of my chosen ones, he was the softest of them all on the inside. That’s what made this so hard. “Every girl likes to have nice things, right?”

“Not this girl,” I told him, letting my face go slack. “This girl wants peace and quiet and retirement.” And there it was—the first whole truth I had ever told him.

“Why push us so hard, then? Why push me?” For the first time since the purple pink hues of the horizon faded to white, Travis frowned. “You don’t want fame, but you want me to be famous. What do you really want, Azalea?”

Right then, I wished I could zap out—reveal my nature in my escape—a clean break. At least for me. “I want to say goodbye,” I whispered, finally looking him full in the face. “And I want you to understand that it’s not because of anything you did.”

The look of shock—the tense open jaw, the round, lovely eyes—yanked at my soul. I’m sure my eyes turned navy blue, like his aura.

He couldn’t speak. He never could when it came to goodbyes.

The Challenge of Story Structure

Ninja Warrior Obstacle Course, pic from this site

Have you felt this way about your story? Like good story structure is a ninja obstacle course with an un-hole-y plot on the other side, but you just can't seem to reach it across that mud pond?

Lots of people say the answer is to outline. But what if you write an outline and then blow it off for an exciting new development? Is there a perfect medium between outlined and inspired?

I'm wondering this myself. See, I totally wrote an outline for my WIP using the six-point structure of screen writers. 

Stage 1: The Setup


Stage 2: New Situation


Stage 3: Progress


Stage 4: Complications/Higher Stakes


Stage 5: The Final Push


Stage 6: The Aftermath

I wrote a short paragraph for each stage, making for a pretty complete synopsis, what would function as a book proposal if I were writing non-fiction. But when I got to about page twenty of the actual writing, something went wrong. I accidentally wrote a detail that derailed the other five stages.

Crap.

So then I cut the offending piece and moved it to my gigantic EXCERPTS file, but I wasn't satisfied with my storyline anymore. A complication--an appealing complication--had been introduced into my mind. Suddenly, I needed to explore that. I had to write a bunch of scenes from different POVs to explore what could be. I had to reevaluate whether or not I even wanted to write the whole thing in dual POV. Present or past tense? And should it be her story, or his?

You could say that all this resulted from my failure to commit. Some people romanticize it by saying their characters surprised them or their story took on a life of its own. As for me, I prefer to think of it as a test. It's the universe testing me to see if I have what it takes to write this story. Maybe that's just my stubbornness talking; I do tend to see everything as a test of my will. :)

So what can you do when your story takes over and spoils your well-laid plans?

There's nothing to do but THINK.

I believe this point is what separates those awesome published writers I idolize from beginning writers. A beginner will just plow through and hope it all comes together somehow. A seasoned writer will know this is the time for deep thought. They're being given an opportunity to make their story something more than what they intended. But without careful thought and re-imagining, the story can easily become an unrecognizable blob of half-stories that don't quite click together.

What do you think? Does your story ever take over? What causes it, and what do you do to get your story moving again?

For a nice pick-me-up, go read literary agent Sarah Davies' 2011 wishes for you.

Also, from Larry Brooks at storyfix.com, 12 Worthy Writing Resolutions

And for eye candy plus a reading/writing tip from Amparo, check out Do What You Don't