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Showing posts from June, 2011

Lovin' the Language

I'm not here right now, but I've prepared this lovely post for your enjoyment. It's part of the Lovin' the Language Blogfest instigated by Jolene Perry . Go here to get links to the others. And what is it? I've picked five lines (passages, actually) from my work-in-progress, Drivers . (It's about a suicide-mission driver who falls in love and changes his mind about dying.) They make me laugh, smile, or cry each time I read them. (I hope they don't make y'all cry.) So, uh, here they are, out of context and without any introduction: ONE “Ash.” Zephyr’s breath touches my chin, she’s that close. “Thanks for saving my life today.”  “Do you mean that?”  “I—” Her voice chokes off. Her head doesn’t move, but I feel it pulling, straining against a spider-silk strand of something between us, so fragile. Don’t break it, Zephyr.  “I mean it.” TWO Time stops in the middle of a heartbeat. In the air between Zephyr’s hands and my feet, a perfect universe has

Note to Self: Relax

What makes me do what I do and think what I think and feel what I feel? Every time I try to figure one of those things out, it spins up a lovely frustration in my mind. Does anyone really know? Early Monday morning, I'll be leaving for a Boy Scout camp. Twelve and thirteen year old boys are deceptively simple. A primary motivation for them is impressing each other, usually by making the others laugh, frequently at their leaders' expense. It's a simple motivation. The deceptive part is that there are so many other things going on in their heads that I'll never know or understand. So how do you deal with kids like that? I'll let you know when I figure it out. I guess what I'm thinking is that if I don't even know what makes me tick, I've no hope of deciphering the early adolescent mind. Especially since each one is unique. There are no formulas and no hard rules. You've just got to take things as they come, correct yourself when you're wrong,

(screams) READ ME!

Ash is a suicide bomber. Not the kind you think. He drives an expendable armed robotic vehicle—from the inside. No one even knows he’s there. But it’s an important job and it pays well. Sure, it’s literally a dead end job, but that’s what he wanted when he took it.  Ash turns out to be better at staying alive than anyone expected. And since meeting Zephyr—since falling in love with her—he has a lot more to lose. They don’t want to die, anymore.  The problem now is the unwritten fine print of their employee agreement. They can’t quit. They know too much. A corporate security team, two armies, and their own inner demons will try to stop them.  What do they have? Zephyr’s brains, Ash’s photography skills, and a couple of armed vehicles everyone thinks are unmanned and will be told are out of control. DRIVERS is a psychological thriller for young adults, 77,000 words after the second draft.  I told Ammii this morning that it needs to make you want to read more. Also, it needs to answer mor

Psyched out

You know what's hard to write about? Death. I can't write convincingly without first finding a connection from my own life. Meaning, I have to literally feel what I'm writing. I don't know, maybe this is a crippling limitation. But it's my art, right? I've gotta find what works for me, and the climax I've written doesn't yet. The thing is, I've never lost anyone that close to me. I'm grateful for that. I don't want to. But I still have to find some way to feel like I have, some time in my life where maybe I thought I had, and then let my imagination take it from there. One of those times was recently, when my youngest daughter kept vomiting for no apparent reason. The doctor ordered a CT scan of her brain—just in case. Wait a minute. Just in case what? She has a tumor that's increasing her intracranial pressure? Faced with that possibility, it was easy to imagine how it would feel to lose her. I was in tears just rolling through pos

Random Sunday Thoughts

Look at that picture of me. Over there. I really do sit like that, with one hand against my chin, jaw or some other part of my head. Frequently it's just a couple fingers. Sometimes I cover my mouth. But I do it all the time. Weird. Yet another reason I don't like to watch video of myself. Everyone talks about how getting critiques back from people is scary. Or any sort of feedback about their writing. Personally, it's doing the critiquing that terrifies me. I mean, I've got this precious thing, someone's baby, in my arms. I'm supposed to look it over quick, sometimes one piece at a time, and tell them how to raise it. Like, what if I give bad advice and the thing dies an untimely death? Even if it's good advice, is it really my place to contribute? I try really hard not to make stuff up just for the sake of saying something. If there's nothing wrong with it, there's nothing wrong with it. At the same time, if I don't see anything wrong with it

Shameful Books part II

Many moons ago I wrote that I couldn't think of a single book I'm ashamed to love. Allow me to quote myself: The reason is simple, I think:  if I love it, I really think it's good and am therefore not ashamed to love it. It doesn't matter who it was written for, written by, or how it was written. If I like it, it's good. You see that? Doesn't matter who wrote it. If I love it, I love it. End of story. EXCEPT, my list of favorite books now includes one that I'd be ashamed to say "Oh, I LOVE this novel. It's compelling, exciting, emotional, and the writing is fantastic!" What's different about this book? I wrote it. I've been trying to edit my own novel. I say "trying" because I think I'm missing a lot. Oh sure, some scenes I change quite a lot. And I did a bit of patching up while I was writing. But I find myself getting so engrossed that I can pore through scene after scene without changing anything but punctuation