Shattered and Defunct

See this:

Yep, that'd be Sheshe's face, all cancered up with fractures.  (Sheshe is my pink laptop's name.)  Don't know how it happened.  Thankfully I can still order an monitor replacement but it will take 10 to 12 business days to get here.  BUSINESS DAYS I said!  @$%#?  *growls* Then tech guys a few more days to install.  In the meantime I've hijacked my dinosaur, 600 ton monitor.  This monitor is upstairs.  Upstairs is the place I never go.  Don't like having to travel so far just to look up something "real quick" on the computer because going that far doesn't make anything "real quick."

That's all i have to say about that.
Thank you and goodnight.
Dana

he said, she said

What the age old adage of “he said, she said” refers to is debatable: an argument, gossip gone askew or the "that's what he said" sexual innuendo thrown into a conversation.  For this blog post I’m creating my own interpretation by using it as a swap-a-roo.  Bear with me here.  Have you ever had said boy and said girl say the same thing?  Recently in my WIP I had a scene where the girl said something romanticy (for a lack of a better word) but when I finished, it just didn’t have the emotional impact of what I wanted to accomplish for the scene.  I tried to layer her words a little thicker thinking that would help, but it just made it worse.

(Redirect.) I love music.  It makes me feel what I otherwise can’t conjure on my own in at any given moment.  Recently I downloaded a new song, “Hazy” by Rosi Golan, featuring William Fitzsimmons.  In the song she sings first, here are the lines:

I watched you sleeping, quietly in my bed.

You don’t know this now,

But there are some things that need to be said.

It’s all that I can hear.

It’s more than I can bear

What if I fall and hurt myself,

Would you know how to fix me?

What if I went and lost myself,

Would you know where to find me?

If I forget who I am,

Would you please remind me?

Oh, ‘cause without you things go hazy.

Sure it sounds, sweet, romantic…all those gooey things you’d expect a girl to think and feel.  Now, just like the song does, take the exact same words, read (or sing) them again but this time from the guy.

Go ahead, re-read it if you need too. I’ll wait.

Yeah, way more powerful from the guys point of view because it makes him vulnerable.  (Not to mention how sexy it is to have a guy watch you sleep.  Only one ex-boyfriend did that and it bought him a little more time before he found the curb.) ANYway, that is what was wrong with my scene.  The wrong person was speaking the emotion.  I switched “he said” for “she said” and BAM, the scene worked.   

Have you ever swapped the dialogue in your WIP?  How did it work for you?

For your listening pleasure, here is "Hazy" by Rosi Golan, featuring William Fitzsimmons (my favorite song for now).


***Technical difficulties, can't seem to get the player up***

Blog Swap: Trust, Cheating, and Love. An Honest Critique by Diana Paz

Hi everyone, it’s Diana Paz, one of Dana’s critique partners. ~waves hello~ Dana was kind enough to let me guest post today... you can still see what she’s up to even though she’s not here, because she’s my guest blogger today! We’ve blog swapped!

I’ve never guest blogged before, and I hope I don’t derail her blog completely with my overuse of exclamations, run-on sentences, and the five-thousand other writing no-nos I always do. My posts are a tad...random, shall we say? For Dana’s sake, I’ll try to keep things together today. No craziness. Limited exclamation points. And definitely no asterisk actions. *nods firmly* *realizes her mistake* Okay except those.

Dana and I brainstormed topics for each other’s blogs and I was really going to blog about the Ten Things I’d Learned Since Finishing My Novel, I reeeeally was, but well... I didn’t. *whispers* And I’m the one who came up with that topic. *whispers even more quietly...* I whispered those asterisk actions so they wouldn’t be as obvious.

The truth is, I couldn’t come up with ten awesome-enough things I’d learned. I mean, by the seventh thing my brain was like, Really? You learned that?? That doesn’t even make sense. Learning stupid things is nothing to brag about.

So yeahhh. New idea time!!! And the New Idea circles around Dana, being that she’s my critique partner, and how having a critique partner you can trust is vital in the writing process. But trust works in stranger ways than you might think.

Writing is personal. But writing for publication means making that personal part of our life into something public. And not only that, it also means a shift in thought, because that private, personal thing-- your writing-- must be sold.

A good critique partner is just that-- a partner. He or she is there for you, helping with plotting and character development and getting to know all the ins and outs of your novel. But the critiquing component of the partnership can’t be underscored enough. Your critique partner didn’t agree to simply read your work, or even to love your work, but to critique it. That’s a whole new level of trust.

But your critique partner might be cheating!

If something in a story isn’t as great as it could be... if something doesn’t sound quite right coming from that character... if something is off and a critique partner doesn’t mention it, that writer has been cheated. She lost an opportunity for a stronger book. She doesn’t even get the chance to agree or disagree, and that keeps the novel from growing. Moreover, it keeps the writer from growing.

The decision to make changes is ultimately the writer’s. No matter what, it will be the author’s name on the book, so the author must make the ultimate decisions about their story. But by not bringing something up that could be made better, a critique partner counteracts the trust of a critique. That critique partner, maybe out of love, has cheated.

When it comes to Dana and I, whether or not I don’t agree with something Dana points out in a critique, I think about it. I consider it and mull it over, and perhaps in the end I realize she was right. Or maybe in that particular scene it wouldn’t be a good change. No matter what, thought is what fuels the process. I’m a better writer because Dana isn’t afraid to tell me the truth. As a critiquer, that’s her job. As a writer, it’s my job to make sure she feels confident that I can handle it. The trust goes both ways. I won’t allow her critique to influence our friendship. If I did, she might not be willing to risk losing that friendship, and her critique might not be as honest...she’d start letting little things go. Before I knew it, she’d be cheating, and I would lose her as a critique partner.

We all love our stories (well, most of the time) and we all want them to be loved. But if our goal is publication, we have to submit ourselves to more than support and reassurance-- both of which are also equally important-- but that third part, the critical eye, that’s something that’s not only hard to accept, it can be hard to give.

It’s just so much easier to only talk about the good parts.

Before I go, I just wanted to say thanks to Dana for letting me take over her blog. And to anyone reading this, a little reward for making it to the end of my post... some juicy secrets about Dana! I learned some really good stuff about her when we had our slumber party at SCBWI: But unfortunately, my time is up! Bye everyone here at Dana’s Blog, it’s been fun!!! Maybe I’ll see you over at my blog sometime! *skips off to find Dana*

Blog Swap!

Come looking for me on Monday, October 18th and you’ll find the fiendishly adorable Diana Paz! She’s taking over my blog and I’m scared. She gets all kind of silliness attacks and who knows what she might do tomorrow.


But then again, I’ll be at her blog, pilfering around, finding her deep dark secrets and there’s no telling what I might post. *raises a single brow*

The Raw Nature of It

Todd Reed does "raw" right.

All through high school I wrote poetry.  Yes, that god awful bleeding heart, paint yourself as a martyr, nobody understands me poetry.  Along with that, I wrote about the love whirlwind I was on or the crashing heartbreak I experienced.  No matter what the subject, I had one strict rule; you can’t change a thing.

No editing.  Not one word, not the title, nothing.  If you didn’t like my poetry for the raw bloody t-bone still mooing on your dinner plate, well then, go hungry!

Oh those were the days. *she laughs wildly to herself* 

Now, revisions are all I talk about.  I’m sure you’re tired of it. I know I am but that is my life, so be it. There are a lot of speed bumps and curveballs that through me for a loop but when it’s all said and done, I wrote a book.  (Three to be exact.)  And I plan to see this baby to the end. 

Yesterday I read a blog post by Cassandra Claire.  It was an old blog post from 2008 but she talked about inspiration.  And what she said, I could not have said it any better.  And I think my favorite line is:

 “And while it may seem depressing to be told that there is no secret way to access inspiration (like, “Go to this address in Cleveland and knock on the door and tell the guy that the red fox barks at midnight, and he will GIVE YOU THE INSPIRATION”) , I hope it’s also helpful to think that you don’t need to.”

For those of you who know me, I am passionate about physical fitness and let’s face it, there’s no other way to be fit and healthy without putting a little blood, sweat and tears into it.  “No pain, no gain” is not infamous without just cause.  The same goes for whatever you do, you get out of it what you put into it. 

I’m happy I don’t view my current WIP as a piece of “brilliance” (trust me, there are plenty of beginners like me who truly believe that) because I’m not naive to think that whatever I regurgitate onto the page comes out manuscript perfect the first time but what I do know is, I have good bones to work with and that is what I need to focus on.

As to the image... I have an affinity for raw diamonds and Todd Reed does "raw" perfectly.

The little things that make me love you...or not.

(Click here to order the Little Things Card)

It’s the little things that make or break relationships.  I was in a relationship, long long ago in a galaxy far far away.  Seriously, before my husband, I dated a guy who was great.  He was an all around friend to everyone, he knew how to have fun but be responsible, and he even charmed my friends and parents with his banter and wit.  But…there were these little things he DIDN’T do that caused me to leave him.

One example is  he never opened the door for me, car or building.  I’m a southern girl, he is a southern boy, opening the door is a form of flattery that I revel in.  Another example, every birthday, anniversary or Valentine’s it was the same dozen red roses, from the supermarket, despite the fact I repeatedly told him my favorite flowers were hydrangeas.  (FYI...I’m not the subtle type, I’m pretty straight forward.)  These are two of many examples of little things that were overlooked.  Alone, they are petty worthless preferences but added together, their sum equaled him losing me. 

As I revise my novel I realize I’m pretty picky.  Yes, sometimes I overanalyze to the point of stifling myself.  But I find as I keep moving forward, I sort out the little things.  Things that individually would not cause an agent to reject my book but if you add all those little things up, I will surely end up in the slush pile.

When all else fails, outline.

As a pantser it is a painful to have to outline.  I'm doing revisions on my manuscript and I keep hitting brick walls.  So the Type A personality that I am, I created the perfect outline.  Well perfect for me that is.  I scoured the internet and found different suggestions and I melded them together in to what works for me.  Some of it seems basic and the other parts really helped me out. Take the parts you like and leave the rest to recycle.  Here goes:

I was actually able to label my own bullet points in Word and it automatically pops up the text/bullets just like I've created here.  I hope this helps you like it did me.  Okay peeps, I'm off to revise.