YAy, it’s Friday!

–Subtle, huh?

Since I discovered I kind of enjoy reviewing books, and since I’m on this YA kick of late, I thought I’d do another review. I haven’t yet had a chance to get to the bookstore, where I plan to pick up Graceling, so I’m falling back on one of the only YA books I owned before Cindy Pon wrote the amazing Silver Phoenix: Caroline Stevermer’s A College of Magics, published by TOR in 1994 and by Starscape (TOR teen imprint) in 2002.

I read this book for the first time just before I traipsed off to college myself, so the timing was pretty much perfect. It’s set in alternate-history early 1900s, where a few details have been changed — like a couple extra countries in eastern Europe, and the existence of magic and the schools that teach it.

Faris Nallaneen, sullen tomboy of questionable noble heritage and heir to the duchy of Galazon, is sent by her underhanded uncle to attend Greenlaw College –according to him, so she can learn social graces; according to her, so he can get her out of the way for four years while he rules Galazon. Without getting far into the plot of this, she gets thrown out after a spectacular fight with her archenemy Menary Paganell, is sent to Paris to learn of her real heritage, and is then packed off to Galazon and surrounding duchies to, well, save the world.

There are a hundred things I love about this book, but I’ll spare you the full list and just say that outside of some rather drastic tweaks to the metaphysical and political structure of early 20th century Europe, it’s great history merged flawlessly with a fantastic premise.  Stevermer’s characters are beautifully drawn, and her gift for witty, razor-sharp dialogue is a showstopper all by itself. This book manages to have car chases, swordfights, political intrigue, assassins and magical duels alongside schoolgirl pranks, deportment classes, and romance. If you like Jane Austen, you should definitely grab this one.

Memes for Writers

Good gods, there’s a meme for every profession, isn’t there?

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and this looked kind of fun, so here goes.

What’s the last thing you wrote? I’m working on an urban fantasy at the moment. The last thing I wrote before this was in that.

Was it any good? Not bad, if I do say so myself.

Write poetry? Rarely.

Angsty poetry? Christ, I hope not.

Okay, okay, probably. Just not in a while.

Favorite genre of writing? Fantasy.

Most fun character you ever wrote? Probably Kinsey, my scholar-prince/librarian guy in SWORD and SONG. He thinks hard, and constantly trips over himself, and is just a little more badass than he seems.

Or maybe I just have a thing for librarians, who knows?

Most annoying character you ever wrote? Lainey, of similar fame. Gold-digging, power-hungry, vain, selfish, whiny, sneaky bitch. It’s good that she annoys me, since I want her to annoy everyone else who reads the books.

Annoying, but also fun as hell to write, if only because her presence in a scene immediately winches up the tension.

Best plot you ever wrote? Eh? I’d like to think they’re all pretty awesome. But I guess if I had to pick, the plot of SONG is pretty fabulous.

Coolest plot twist you ever wrote? I can hardly answer that in detail, can I? Lets just say it involves killing off characters unexpectedly.

How often do you get writer’s block? A few times a month. Or week. Or day.

How do you fix it? Booze and chocolate.

…Barring that, and more healthily: reading something in the same genre, meditating (yes, really, don’t laugh), going for a walk, writing a silly piece where I put my MCs in my apartment and make them figure out what the hell happened.

Write fan fiction? Not since high school. It was Star Trek TOS, if you’re wondering. I am not ashamed.

Do you type or write by hand? Are you kidding?

Unless I’m camping, I type. In the middle of nowhere it’s the notebook for me, and I just have to type it all up later.

Do you save everything you write? No. If it really, really sucks, definitely not. That Recycle Bin on my desktop is there for a reason.

Do you ever go back to an old idea long after you abandoned it? That’s pretty much how I ended up with SWORD, now on sub, so yeah. Ideas don’t die, they just grow up and get strange and borrow money from you without ever paying it back.

What’s your favorite thing that you’ve written? I love everything I’ve written… except, of course, when I hate it. Probably SWORD, if I have to pick one, though: I like the emotional pitch of that piece best.

What’s everyone else’s favorite thing that you’ve written? Not a clue, not a clue.

Do you  show people your work? I kind of have to, starting with betas (and, I guess, anyone who reads my occasional Tuesday Teasers) and ending with editors. Hopefully one day ending with readers. 

Did you ever write a novel? Several, yes.

Have you ever written fantasy, sci-fi, or horror? Fantasy only. I’m getting around to the rest.

Ever written romance or teen angsty drama? Well, a few of my fantasy novels have a little of that in them somewhere, I guess: but as a general theme, no.

How many writing projects are you working on right now? Technically, three: but I’m trying to take them one at a time.

Do you want to write for a living? YES. Does anyone answer “no” to this?

Have you ever won an award for your writing? Sure. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. For –wait for it– a poem. 

Ever written something in script or play format? Only for script- and playwriting classes in college. Never since, though I remember having fun with it.

What character that you’ve written most resembles yourself? Appearance-wise, not a single one. Personality-wise, I think they all have a piece of me in there somewhere, from the MCs down to the cannon fodder. If I don’t bleed at least a little doing this, I’m not doing it right.

Where do you get ideas for your other characters? My head. There’s lots of weird stuff in there.

Though the phrasing of this kind of implies that at least one of my MCs is a Mary Sue, and I’d like to think not.

Do you ever write based on your dreams? Not really: I’ve written after dreaming about a work in progress, though.

Do you favor happy endings, sad endings, or cliff-hangers? Anything but the last one, so long as it’s done well. Endings are important. One that doesn’t work –say, a HEA that doesn’t fit– is like having burned toast for dessert. 

Have you ever written based on an artwork you’ve seen? No, but I’ve found artwork after the fact that blew me away, it was so close to what I imagined my characters to be. If you’ve seen my Twitter avatar, that’s one example right there. I saw it on the cover of a Russian book of poetry and it stopped me in my tracks, it looks so much like two of my MCs, right down to attitude and expression.

Are you concerned with spelling and grammar as you write? Hell yes.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t still eff it up.

Ever write something entirely in chatspeak? (How r u?) No. Not even text messages: I really can’t stand it.

Entirely in L337? What?

Was that question completely appalling and un-writer like? Probably. Maybe. If I had any idea what it meant.

Does music help you write? Yes. As long as it doesn’t have lyrics.

Are people surprised and confused when they find out you write well? Um, I hope not.

Quote something you’ve written. The first thing to pop into your mind. From the current WIP…

This time there was nothing to fight: it happened too quickly for that. The skin of my face stretched –for a second it felt good, wonderful even, and then deep spikes of agony began to flare through my cheekbones and the line of my jaw. I could hear the bass crackle of my own bones, amplified in ears that had started to wander up the sides my head. My joints felt suddenly, awfully liquid. I tried to scream and only managed a breathless wheeze. Balance went, and I wheeled my arms out, pitching forward, every inch of me on fire.

It’s been a while since I did one of these, so I’m only going to tag a few people…

Sarah Eve Kelly

Ralph Pines

Gretchen McNeil

Christa Carol

happy 4th!

May you all drink and barbecue ’till you drop, and I hope somebody out there is getting some sunshine for this day. I know it’s not me.

Also, as a total and self-centered non-Independence-Day-oriented aside, you may notice that The Purple Patch looks a little different: most notably, it looks a little more purple. There’s a great new theme in the free WordPress options that I went for while I was revamping the Projects page, with awesome options that I’ve had fun playing with.

And it’s given me the opportunity to put out my very first POLL, zippidy do dah and hey ho. Because what better way to celebrate July 4th than by voting about meaningless stuff on somebody’s blog, right?

(no, I swear I haven’t started drinking yet: I woke up with that zippity song in my head. really.)

So: is the purple border too much? Tell, do, tell.

great books (my very first reviews)

I have managed, over the last month or so, to get some actual reading in (amazing, no?), and so I just wanted to put this out there, because I got to read some really great books in the month of June.

YA books, no less. This is a genre I managed to more or less skip over past the age of about 11, with the exception of reading the Susan Cooper Dark is Rising series in junior high and a post-college obsession with Harry Potter I have never been able to explain to my husband. I have to say, if what I got to read in June was any example, I’ve been missing out.

So, first: AW’s very own Mistress of Purgatory Cindy Pon’s Silver Phoenix.

Isn’t that cover gorgeous?

With a refreshing non-Western setting, this book is a lovely coming of age story with a strong, complex and stalwart heroine, monsters and myths, murder, and a hint of romance. Ai Ling’s journey to find her father is filled with lessons, magic, danger and darkness: and through it all her smart, sassy, and forthright way of dealing with things that should put a person in hysterics  is a showstopper. The characters in this story are sympathetic, quirky, layered, flawed and and utterly believable. The story itself is fascinating. Cindy’s gift for dialogue and description puts you right in the head of Ai Ling, and brings to life the landscape and the spiritual life of a culture there just aren’t enough books set in, IMO.

It’s vivid, sincere, and entertaining from the first page to the last.  Pick it up the next time you’re wandering through a bookstore and you definitely won’t be sorry.

The next one I read was Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Lexicon.

It’s dark, it’s spare, it’s got magicians, demons, and the people stuck in between them; there’s a twisted bad guy, lots of morally questionable action on the part of –well, everyone really, and good guy who is dark, handsome, and more than a little twisted himself.

It’s also got brotherly love, which carries this novel from page one beyond angry-teen-boy-saves-world and into something new and wonderful and completely compelling. What I love about Brennan’s  protagonist Nick is that he doesn’t think of himself as a good guy, and he certainly doesn’t act like one. There’s only one person in the world he cares about: his brother Alan, and there are times when you wonder even about that. The dynamic between them is just riveting. The writing is clean, clever, and beautiful, and the ending is perfect. (Which is all I’m going to say about it, don’t worry. No spoilers here. I keep my reviews nice and vague.) The only way you’d be sorry you grabbed this one is if you started reading it after dinner, because if you do that I guarantee you’re not going to get any sleep.

So there you have it: I am a convert. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to try writing YA, but I definitely plan to keep reading it.

oh look! it’s….Teaser Tuesday again!

Funny how it just keeps coming around like that.

This’ll probably be the last for a bit (yes, I know, I’ve said it before), while I get my shit together on WIP6, the UF – that one’s finally off the ground and going very well, wahoo!

This bit is from my contemporary fantasy, tentatively titled RED NOISE, and shelved until further notice. In the last teaser from this piece Our Dubious Heroine, Raina Waltham, had just had her first full-blown synesthetic experience, and beat a man to death with a stapler in her office. She’s in a psychiatric ward now.

***

“Describe this for me, Raina, please. Can you?”

She refused the couch on the grounds that it was too Hollywoodish, but the chair she had defiantly chosen instead was stiff-backed and poorly upholstered. She eyed the couch now, after two weeks of sore hips, and wondered how Dr. Capin would interpret such backpedaling. Patient appeared indecisive and confused. Patient was restless. We had a major breakthrough today. Patient propositioned me.

He was sort of cute. And she hadn’t seen action in more years than it was worth counting. But he thought she was nuts.

She was nuts.

Proof of that, if further proof was needed after she’d beaten a man into a coma with a hand stapler, lay in the mirror on the far wall, which wasn’t a mirror. This was the office where the good doctor met the dangerous ones.

Leaning perilously close to the crazy person, Dr. Capin reached out to tap a familiar block of cramped words on notebook paper, and Raina sighed. Nothing was private in this place.

“I was half asleep when I wrote that, Dr. Capin.”

“Nevertheless, I’m interested. Specifically in the mention of numbers here…’the blue tens were always angry’….what did you mean by that?”

“Doctor, I was talking about stuff from, like, kindergarten. I believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and all sorts of shit back then. Don’t expect it to make sense, ok?”

“But it does make sense, Raina. Tell me…” He held up a sheet of numbers that looked like they’d been copied out of a phone book. “What color are the nines?”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Yellow,” Raina said slowly, trying without success to figure out what the catch here was.

“Ah.”

His satisfaction, as he set the sheet down and leaned back, was burnt orange. She doubted this particular piece of information would improve his opinion of her. She crossed her ankles and willed the traffic-cone shapes falling from his lips to go away. The colors were coming back, filling the room. Raina breathed in slowly and sat on her hands. The doctor didn’t have a stapler on his desk: smart man. “Ah what?”

“Tell me…” Nothing good ever began that way in this room. “Do you really think I printed this in color? A sheet of numbers? Why would I do that?”

She looked at him in bewilderment, noting absently the way the thinning turf of his hair gleamed in the sunlight from the window: it was such a normal sight it eased a knot in her shoulder just to look at it. His hair made no sound, had no smell, didn’t tickle or scrape against her skin. It was soothing hair.

Oh man, she was crazy.

Sunday status update: moving forward (woohoo!)

And about time. I’ve officially given up on the notion of being a pantser: I just don’t have what it takes. I know this because I started picking away at a real outline this morning instead of doing my usual pathetic 500 words, and I already have the following:

1. 1500 new words on outline and character goals
2. a very clear idea of what’s happening in the next few chapters
3. a pretty clear idea of what’s happening at the end of this book
4. a semi-clear idea of where the next book could start (yes, I am doomed to write series, it seems)
5. clear goals for my MC and secondaries
6. and, finally, what was really holding me back all this time (I think, anyway): an emotional arc for my MC. I get nowhere without that. I just didn’t realize I was missing one. Apparently character arcs, for me, are connected to plot arcs. I guess that makes sense.

And I’m not even halfway done with the outline.

So, yay.

It’s a nice raining-buckets day today and I’ve read all my new-buys for the weekend, and the reviews of Transformers 2 tell me not to waste my eight bucks, so I have no excuses. I’m gong to finish this outline and geek out in Excel with a few color-coded, comment-laden plot arcs.

Her Dogginess, meanwhile, is filling in on the forward motion of the WIP itself. Which explains why there’s a new chapter about kibble, and why my cup of coffee went missing.

when the real world gets in the way

Warning: minor whinge ahead. Blame it on the rain (and yes, you will all now have Milli Vanilli stuck in your head for the rest of the day, bwahahaha) –even the damn air is wet in Maine right now. Some summer. So anyway…

I’ve been writing in 500-700 word increments for the past month or so.

I hate that. I am a spoiled creature, and I’m used to turning out 1000+ per hour and feeling pretty good about what I put on the page: in a given week, as long as there’s not too much going on, I can turn out a minimum 4K that has already been through my preliminary I-can’t-help-it, slightly obsessive edit as-I-go process, which generally means I’m more or less happy with it, and will leave it alone until I’ve finished the first draft and decided to rewrite at least 15% of the chapters in the book.

Taking unexpected (or expected) RL craziness, social events, and inevitable moments of laziness that can sometimes turn a three day weekend into a shameful TV-watching marathon, that means I should be able to start and finish a novel in, say, 32 weeks. And that’s giving me plenty of room for messing around.

No so, or at least not this time.

I sit down with my coffee, mess around on teh interwebs for five minutes or so, get my music going, open my WIP… and crawl. It’s like I forgot how to type sometime in May. I know, more or less, where this scene is going; I know more or less how this chapter will end, and how the next one will begin (and end). I know, more or less, how this book is supposed to end. And yet here I sit, painstakingly eking out two paragraphs at a time before I realize I’ve been there for 90 minutes and it’s time to get ready for work. It’s like going to the gym in your sexay workout clothes, mp3 player at the ready and workout plan in hand… and calling it a day after a set of biceps curls. Frustrating doesn’t begin to cover it.

Either I’m burnt out from being swamped in my day job (and I am swamped: June in my profession is always a bit of a bitch) or my experiment with writing a book sans detailed outline is going to be a damned short-lived one.

Suggestions? Advice? Chocolate?

*whimper*

teaser Tuesday

Back to the book I’m tentatively calling Dowser (and that will definitely change if I ever finish it) for the moment, since I’m in the middle of some rather delicate, pivotal-type scenes in the urban fantasy at the mo. This is an early scene, almost on top of one I posted for the 2nd or 3rd Teaser Tuesday.

****

The view from her full height was a far better one: it showed her the bodies, their drowned faces mercilessly painted by the sunrise, their town sneers forever erased by her last, desperate attempt at escape. A stein floated past on its side, whiskey winking amber at the bottom. Cass felt the blood drain from her cheeks. She swayed, dizzy with it, and was brought sharply upright by the grip on her collar.

“Don’t faint,” the gray-eyed gadjo said sharply.

Cass wrenched herself free. The boy, hovering anxiously nearby, held his hands up in a confused gesture somewhere between capture and a warding-off; she understood it perfectly, and sidestepped his halfhearted grab with ease. The gadjo only watched, wary of her. She waded one ankle deep in her lake and leant far enough to spit on the face of the nearest unlucky one. Her victim looked back in bulge-eyed, blue-skinned indifference, drifting in the eddy of her movement. Her stomach flipped once, lazily, and she swallowed bile and clenched her teeth together.

The horizon was empty in every direction but Shelton, where the too-proud spires of Nuthian College pierced the coming day. Her kumpania was gone. Her grandfather had warned her he would do it if she made trouble, and gods witness, she had made plenty. They wouldn’t wait for the town-thugs’ kin to come with torches for the wagons and shackles for the men; they were halfway to the Sussex crossroads by now, and Millicent was probably moaning about the bruises on her heels. Dinah would ask after her lost cousin, and Alain would be outraged at the abandonment, but grandfather would be relieved, that was the plain truth: grandfather had never wanted a reminder of his daughter’s mistake, and he would not come back for one didikana granddaughter, not and risk the kumpania for her.

She was on her own with the College spook, a man with eyes so like her own he might have been a brother. That gray meant life right now, a reprieve from town justice, so Cass turned it his way in a direct stare no maiden of the Dromichal ought to give a man; not and expect a place at the fire that night. She had none to claim, so she did it, and tried to still the quiver in her spine and her lower lip.

She was on her own now.

The gadjo raised a brow, with a glint in his storm eyes that said she had at least set him back a step or three. He waved with mocking courtesy toward a coach pulling into the trees, leaving great tracks on the greensward. It was sleek and black, door open on an uninformative darkness.

She was in it almost before she could register Nuthian’s silver-gilded crest etched on the door.

Wordle!

Wordle is the coolest thing ever. Or, well, it ranks right up there, anyway.

I was messing around with this yesterday courtesy of my wonderful Purgatory friends over at AW, where we were talking about the different things we do to get unstuck. I had a boring list: 1) give up caffeine (which is actually not at all boring if you do it); 2) meditate (yes, quite boring, particularly for anyone in the room with you), and 3) paste the WIP over into a new doc, in a new font, and start reading at page 1. Not very exciting stuff. Someone mentioned Wordle, and then we were all off playing with it. As messing-with-the-WIP passtimes go, it’s more constructive, if less hilarious, than MS Word’s AutoSummarize feature, and makes for a nice distraction.

You paste in text and get  a word cloud, which basically means Wordle scans the text and picks out the words you use most often –removing the most commonly used ones, I presume, since THE doesn’t end up in the middle of every result in 88 point font.

For example, here’s HAMLET:

Interesting. Not exactly surprising, particularly the names, since this is a play and every line of dialogue or stage direction includes a name. Now look at what I got when I did SWORD.

A fairly similar prominence of names, which I guess is to be expected for a third person, 100K manuscript: I may not use play format, but while I’m permitted a thicket of personal pronouns, I still have to make sure you know who’s talking, running, stabbing, crying, kissing, what-have-you.

My most common non-name words are a hell of a lot less interesting, or maybe that’s just because I so rarely see tis these days.  But the distribution of nouns and verbs is pretty close, and I expected it not to be, I don’t know why. I thought there’d be more nouns in HAMLET, more verbs in SWORD, but I don’t think I took into account that the command form is used pretty damn often in Shakespearean plays, far more so than in my little novel. Or something like that.

I know it’s not accurate –all the really important stuff in a novel is (usually) not repeated more than a rare few times at most, so this fun little program can’t pick up on any of it — but I  like this. It’s like a snapshot of all the filler in between the stuff that happens; like I get to look at the connective tissue of my novel.

Yes, I’m thinking too much about this. Yes, I’m procrastinating.

And yes, I admit it: I have one of these thingys for every MS I’ve got going, finished or not.

writing without a clear outline

Yes! I remembered to blog! …And I have about 15 minutes before I have to hop in the shower and go be gainfully employed, so this will be short. But hey, I’m back in the saddle, right?

Hopefully.

Anyway. I spent a good 25 minutes this morning in that dreamy, slightly irritable half-asleep state only possible in the 9 minutes between smacking the snooze button, thinking in a fuzzy way about my current WIP, of which you got a short, violent glimpse this Tuesday. Normally I outline, obsessively. I write a 3-4 paragraph back-jacket blurb, then wander off into a 5-7 page blow-by-blow (and boy, is that ever an accurate phrase for this particular book) account. Then sometimes I get really nuts and do an Excel spreadsheet of plot arcs, all color-coded out for characters.

Yes, I am a geek. Quit looking at me like that.

Anyway. I was fuzzily thinking about this in three 9-minute increments this morning because I didn’t get any farther than the blurb for this current book: I’m a bit thrown, I suppose, because this is my very first attempt at urban fantasy, and also my first attempt in 1st person since –oh, high school. So I’m off my usual beat, but I think it’s working so far, even if I do have to fight not to wander off into the thicket of adverbs and adjectives every three sentences or so. That part’s pretty normal for me, actually: it’s just that it’s really, really noticeable, for some reason, when you’re writing in 1st person.

So here I am, virtually mapless, and you know what? I’ve got about three times the normal amount of fight scenes in this WIP as I do in any other I’ve written. I mean, wow. Dari McEacheran isn’t half as badass as Kyali, one of the MCs of SWORD and SONG, but she’s getting bloodied and giving it back a hell of a lot more often.

Which leaves me wondering: is this a normal response to not knowing where the scene is going next? I have my back-jacket blurb to refer to, in all its vague and mutable glory, but I’m writing without the road clearly laid out in front of me for the first time since I started writing things longer than 10,000 words, and I can’t really tell if it’s just that my character is prone to accidents of the fist-to-face variety (and she definitely is) that’s made this plot so full of things exploding and people hitting each other — or if this is me going “damn, what happens now? ….hm. wait! something explodes! that will move things forward!”.

When I was 11 I read a now fairly famous book that had more graphic sex in it than almost any other book I’ve read since (it was quite an education for innocent little me), and I remember thinking that the author threw in a 20-page sex scene whenever s/he got lost in the plotline, or felt like filler was needed. I’m a little worried I’m going to read this first draft and think something similar about me and explosions/fist fights.

Well. I guess this is what rewrites are for, yes?