Day Eleven-- Hello Victory meet Defeat

So, I'm set to pass 50 K today. For those that are wondering, did she not pass 50 K on Day 10 because it was an even number? Some might say that, possibly.

Come on, though. Eleven is both odd and prime--how could I resist?

On the other hand, I also got a rejection today--of the partial request. This means that I should sit down, evaluate, and send out a few more queries. I really get into my queries, though, so it's a huge time commitment. Plus, I'm a little at a loss to know where to go from here. I don't know what I should query or if maybe I should go back and do another set of revisions. I don't know.

This process is a downer, you know?

I seem to be specializing in rejections received on holidays. "Yay! I have the whole day to (opens inbox) spend contemplating my worth as a person and a writer." I got a rejection on Halloween too. (Big ouch, huh?)

Anyway, as luck would or would not have it, this was the only agent I sent Re: Straint out to, and that's also the one that made it into the contest last night.

So, I guess today's post is about continuing writing not always because you're recognized, or published, or whatever. It's about continuing not because it's healthy, because anyone who can type 50 K in eleven days is so far from healthy. (Plus, I am, in fact, the direct opposite of healthy thanks to this nasty cold.) It's not even about even or odd numbers or going to 51K because it's odd. Well, it's a little about that. It's about continuing writing because somewhere deep in your shriveled and sad little soul, it's what you are and "not writing" isn't actually possible.

Anyway, I've conned someone into letting me ditch the kids with them after a minimal amount of infecting them with my presence. In the mean time, goodbye, cold, cruel world and warm, funny, and caring followers.

Squeezing the Lemon by Hand so that Nasty Pulpy Lemon Guts Squish Through Your Fingers and Burn in Cuts

Voila! Lemonade.

Diana told me about a query tracker contest at 4 pm today that was open to the first 70 entrants. First five pages and synopses of a YA book read by an agent. It opened at 6 pm and was closed to entrants by 6:02pm. Seventy people got in the contest in two minutes.

Guess who got in?

Well, this would be a lame story if it wasn't me, wouldn't it?

It would be a better story if both Di and I got in.

Still--that's the nasty pulpy bits.

I GOT IN!!!

I did it! I did it! I did it!

Now, I've jinxed it, but I don't care.

I used Re: Straint. I had to cut a two page synopsis down to one page. (Agony. Agony.)

It was a serious rush of adrenalin. Woo, baby!

Now, I'm just back to waiting--again.

BTW, Di, I put it as a YA Science Fiction. (I was under the gun and nearly gibbering in my excited rush.)

Yay! I got in. I got in.

It's me against seventy other people. Phew. Fingers crossed.

Day Ten-- When the elements combine against you.

It turns out that my immunity is not like the Olympic Spirit that can survive despite great obstacles. My immunity is more like... something else... that I can't think of. I can't even think of a good metaphor--that's how lousy I feel.

In the middle of the night, my lungs and throat gave one last yelp before succumbing to this nasty illness. I was supposed to go watch my sister's four kids today so she could attend a funeral, but I sort of just want someone to take care of me. I ran out of soup yesterday. I'm also out of cold medicine. I also ate the last of my frosting in the middle of the night. It's chaos. I might have to cease my salute to Gollum long enough to go to the grocery store.

Ugh. We hates colds, my precious. We hates bronchial infections and sore throats. We misses our frosting and chicken noodle soup.

Tomorrow is a holiday for my kids. I get to spend all day with them. They're like most wild animals and can sense weakness. I swear they were five times as loud as normal yesterday. I will definitely need more frosting to cope with the stress.

Or... I could call on the goblin king to come take them away for the day. Does the goblin king take away kids for just a day? Sort of a child care sort of option? Maybe the carnies? Fairies swap out with their own children, so that's no good. I don't want to deal with an ill-tempered fairy child while I'm sick.

I'll have to think on it. (And by "think" I mean "stare off into space and cough and moan.")

Day Nine-- Characters so flawed that you just want to hug them and love them and call them George

So, my sister Heidi discovered the mother of all Easter Eggs in my writing--nearly all my main characters have some sort of sleeping issue... whether it's insomnia or talking in their sleep or something. That's a recurrent "flaw" in my characters, but it's not the only one. I really like my characters to have flaws. Most of them are insecure. Several of them have had horribly bad relationships in the past. I've written characters with OCD, agoraphobia, PTSD, migraines, blindness, schizophrenia, and paranoia. No one is perfect, and I like that... I like it a lot. It makes me really get into my characters to know that they're not perfect.

My current characters:

Sidra's father left their family for a woman and she's dealing with the grief of having cared about him once and being a daddy's girl while she despises the man he has become. She is a pyromaniac who feels like a reject at school where a bully has targeted her due to her father's poor choices. She's lonely and afraid to trust anyone. Sidra is easily distracted and spends a lot of her time daydreaming about fire--and then about Asher. Her autoshop teacher has modified his lesson plans to include lots of words that are related to fire just to keep her attention. Her high school vice-principal has the hots for her mom and is nearly encouraging her to misbehave just so he can meet her mom. They, Sidra and the VP, have an ongoing feud with minor pranks as a side plot. Plus, Sidra is hiding a massive secret in regards to her recent paintings of fires.

Asher is hiding an even bigger secret, and he's never even thought of having a normal life. He's been on autopilot since he was six and his mother died at the hands of pyrodemons and his father became insane for vengeance. He's been in training to become a pyrohunter ever since. It's made him feel like his father cared more about vengeance than him. His father has died so he has no way of making peace with that. He really likes Sidra, but he's desperately trying to go slow because the only decent bit of advice his father gave him is that when you meet someone you really want, you'll treat them differently. It's embarrassing for him that his shadowhound feeds off his excitement and keeps going crazy with nervous energy and excitement around Sidra.

So, those are my characters. I love their flaws and exploit them whenever possible.

Speaking of flaws, I'm deep in the land of disgusting sickness. My ears are killing me today, but I think it's just relayed pain from my throat. I've stuffed cotton in them, and it's so much better. Actually, I've got some major auditory sensory issues so it's nice to have noise blocked. It's sad but keeping the cotton in even after I'm better sounds good. If I could wake up without an alarm of some kind (or several alarms) I'd probably go back to wearing ear plugs at night. I'm weird, though... and grossly germy. I love the season of sickness.

On the bright side, I had an entire king-sized bed to myself and I slept wonderfully.

The downside--I had the bed to myself because I'm the queen of germs and gross snoring. C'est la vie. (Such is life--for those that haven't had random French thrown at them their whole lives. My parents both speak French so they've tried to teach us entirely in idioms and phrases. I can also mumble the words to Frere Jacques--though it sounds like nonsense in both English and French, and I might even be insulting someone's mother.)

Have a good Monday everyone!

Day Eight-- Where your plot suddenly

So, I suspected this yesterday, but yeah... my throat is toast, I feel achy. I've been nailed with something new and exciting. It's probably just T's cold. Still, T is just raining buckets of snot. He thinks it's hilarious and finds particularly ghastly sneezes to be amusing. So, really--with a little boy literally spraying snot, it's not such a huge jump that I'm sick. So, I'll be applying cold medicine liberally to my day.

As for writing, I know a ton of you write with an outline, but I sooooo don't. I start writing and when I get to the end, I stop. So, my current story is going along well, but I don't know how it ends. I'm closing in on the end of the book and I have no idea if there is a monster there or not. This isn't so massively unusual for me to not know twenty steps ahead, but it's a little disconcerting when I'm not dealing with a mystery this time. I have a problem instead of a mystery--I have all these pyrodemons running around that my MCs need to take down, but that will require a big throwdown and I have no idea on the hows or whens of that. I'm not entirely sure how far away that is either.

I'm not sure how to deal with a plot that suddenly stops. I guess I'll just keep writing and hope that chapter by chapter I'll get there.

In the meantime, I have two hormone driven teens that I've got to keep apart. Do any other YA authors have situational cold showers that they use to avoid massive makeout sessions on the couch?

Day Seven- All is not tighty whitey

While I think my dialogue, as prevalent as it is in my stuff, is one of my strengths, sometimes I go on... well tangents.

I know. You're shocked. Possibly horrified.

No one likes a smart aleck, by the way. (So tempted to say "smart ass" but, as you know, my mom reads this, so I refrained.)

So, as I'm reading industry blogs and blogs of agented and published authors, they're all quick to champion "tight" writing. I read an author interview with a guy that bragged that his seven hundred page epic fantasy was "tightly-written" and all excess had been removed. First of all, yikes and really? Second of all, is the goal to have svelte, no-tangent, cut and dried fiction such a wonderful thing?

Some of the stories and dialogue and side plots in my manuscripts have no bearing on the plot whatsoever. Yes, I'll admit it. I'm not the super model novel writer. They're not unrealistically free from "fatty goodness." Some help with character building--so they might slide by. Some--just are the random tangents that make it realistic, in my opinion. (Thank goodness for betas who can cut with reckless abandon because I can't tell which of my tangents takes us so far off the road that we can't find the map again.) I will say that tangents that are later cut, get filed in my mind as back-story, so I'm okay with cutting them, and it becomes this private little secret between me and my characters--and my betas.

(See this is why you want to beta with me. We have secret handshakes, virtual cookies, and all these dirty little secrets. Plus, you get the chance to find my typo Easter Eggs that can be so comically horrendous that you get crowned with official typo finder for the book. David won for the first Honor--repel--nay--rappelle, Mon Ami. Jaime won for one of the books--I bet she remembers which one. Heidi has won a time or two. I won for discovering that I'd managed to "diss" Mars in a mnemonic device. Oh... the irony.)

Yes, the above was a random tangent. Please refer to the comment above regarding people that point out the obvious.

So, I don't think my writing is "tight" as far as plot and dialogue goes. I try to cut out the excess on attributions, adjectives, and adverbs. (Not alliteration, because who doesn't like a little alliteration.) I'm trying to tighten it up in those areas. As far as the story goes--I'm the boxer shorts of the fiction world.

It's nearly ten a.m. and you know what they say about ten a.m.

Have a good Saturday, everyone--for whom it's Saturday.

Day Six-- Contributing to the Delinquency of Fictional Minors

So, I'm writing a YA book, and I picked up a few YA books to read lately. I've been noticing a trend in both TV and written media. I find it to be disturbing, but maybe I'm crazy and overly moralistic. I've been reading sites that say that nothing is off-limits in YA books as long as it's handled appropriately. This begs the question: Who is deciding what is "appropriately" and shouldn't SOME things be off-limits?

Drinking parties-- It used to be, back in the old days of the eighties and nineties, that if you wanted to portray someone as a rebel, you'd show them knocking back a beer snuck in a coke bottle at a wild party where everyone was trying to fit in. Lately, every book I've read has included under-age drinking. Sometimes, the focus of the party is just to get drunk. This isn't like nineteen year olds, but fifteen and sixteen year olds are out slamming back a six pack on a school night. The author slips it in like it's nothing. It's not to convey the teen's personality or the atmosphere of the party, but it's a prop--like a soda. They're treating it not as if it's rebellion, but it's normal-- a big "meh" on the normal teenage experience. These are the books that I'll be handing my children to read in ten years? Should we expect to preview all books by the time that decade rolls around?

Sex-- Yes, I said it. I'll admit I'm conservative, but the books I've read recently (intended for a teenage audience) haven't been about adults or older teens in monogamous relationships. Once again, fifteen and sixteen year olds--and it's treated like a big "meh."

Profanity-- Why are movies still getting "R" ratings based on language when apparently using the 'F' word twenty times in a book gives it a PG-13 age group? Plus, I've found, without fail, that the parents are portrayed as clueless in this regard because the minute their child says "damn" in front of them... or even "stupid" the parents jump on them screaming "We don't use that word around here." Twenty minutes later, they're at school dropping words that should burn holes in the paper. I'm disgusted to admit that our local high school only prohibits racist and hate language. It's also why waiting in line at a fast food place behind teenagers includes me covering my children's ears. I've even been "that" parent who taps them on the shoulder saying, "I have kids here. Can you watch your language?" There are still quite a few teens that immediately change their language when they see my kids, but... why are they using so much profanity if they CAN turn it off?

Lately, I've found myself using more mild profanity just because it seems to fit. Taking it out makes my writing unrealistic, but using it makes me feel like I'm about to contribute to the delinquency of a minor. (I have a teenage beta reader, so I will be.) I feel like I need to find a non-profanity type of profanity to fill in the blanks. (AKA "holy crow" ala Stephanie Meyer) Crap and darn sound puny now. Shoot is laughable. When I do a rewrite on my NaNoWriMo project, I'll probably yank out some of the profanity, but hopefully... not add any in.

Anyone else writing YA thinking about this stuff?

Oh, and while most don't consider this a "sin" of any kind, it's also become commonplace for teens to drink coffee apparently with their breakfast? Is this not stunting their growth? Is this really the norm outside of my little world?