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Showing posts from 2012

Post Title

That's what I am: completely post title. Like, titles were so three months ago. You know, the last time I posted to my blog. Was that three months ago? That's what it feels like without checking the dates. But I'm not going to apologize for not posting. It's not like I ever promised to post. It's not like you paid to read this blog. And it's not like you've been sitting there thinking, "I wish Ben would post something. He always has the most helpful, funny, and heartwarming things to say." Yes, instead of apologizing, I'm going to offer excuses, in no particular order: 1.  I went to Pennsylvania on a business trip for two weeks. I ate in nice restaurants and seedy little holes, and they all had great food. I managed not to gain any weight, so congratulations to me. Lancaster county is a nice place, and I got to pop over to my sister's house in New Jersey and help clean up after the storm. Still, the trip started right after... 2.  M

You Trust Lucy

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You've read Prince Caspian , right? If you haven't, go read it. (Or at least watch the movie.) Then come back and finish. Ready? Okay. There's a scene where Lucy sees Aslan, the giant talking lion, and he beckons for her to follow him on a course that doesn't seem to make sense. No one else in the group sees him, and they basically don't trust Lucy enough to do what she says. She's the youngest, etc. etc. So they go the other way, run into all sorts of trouble, waste all kinds of time, and Lucy sees Aslan again—and no one else does. Even though he's right there!  Eventually, they come around and everyone sees him. You, the reader, never doubt that Lucy actually saw Aslan. You know they should follow him as surely as she does. Are you simply more trusting of young girls who see things you don't? No. You know she saw Aslan, because you saw him too. A few reasons for this: The book's in third person, and the narrator never leads you astray

I'm A Recluse and I Like It

Today, I gave a presentation to all my coworkers. The weird thing is that I actually volunteered to do it. We have weekly lunch meetings, and once a quarter or so, an employee gives a presentation on a book they've read or something they've learned that might benefit everyone else. There were about thirty people listening. I had twenty minutes. The book I read was  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking  by Susan Cain. (If I were ambitious or responsible or something, I'd put in footnotes with references to pages in the book. But since no one ever reads footnotes—heck, no one even reads my blog—I'll just put in an asterisk (*) where I use info from the book. If you really want the page number to one of them, just ask and I'll look it up for you.) This quiz is from Susan Cain's book. (Actually, the one in the book has twenty questions. I typed it up and handed it out for people to look at.) The more questions you answer as t

Why Not YA?

That's a reference to a post I wrote long, long ago called " Why YA? " At the time, I was working on what I thought was a YA novel. But the words Young Adult infer a range greater than the genre actually encompasses. Notice I called it a genre instead of a category. This is based in part on the sense I've gotten from reading blogs, reviews, articles and other flotsam on the internet. It's also based on responses I got from an #askagent question on Twitter. (Okay, so I only got three responses from agents, but two of them said genre. One said age group. The non-agent responses were evenly split.) The expectations for YA fiction have less to do with age group and more to do with the type of story you might expect to find in that corner of the bookstore. If it were strictly an age grouping, it would include a broad range of fully-fledged genres. Instead, it includes sub-genres that resemble their non-YA counterparts, but also have certain hallmarks qualifying the

SF is in My Blood

...like an alien entity. So, I had a novel idea. (Meaning it was an idea for a novel, not a unique idea. Though it may be that, too. I don't know.) It was about a kid who pretends to be possessed by an alien intelligence as a way of overcoming the deficiencies in his own personality. It was going to be a good, straight book with no actual aliens or possessions, only nice normal things like middle school and social pressure and how hard it is to be an introvert. You know, what they've taken to calling contemporary because everything has to have some sort of genre label. Ahem. Did you notice I said was ? That's because no matter how I tried to put together a plot, I couldn't get excited about it. I mean, it's a great premise. A premise with promise, you might say. (But probably wouldn't.) Also, I actually did pretend be an alien when I was a kid. I have a journal entry to prove it. It only lasted a day, but you might say I have some personal experience w

Death and Hope

So, my favorite author died. I don't know when Ray Bradbury became my favorite. Fittingly, it was the public library that introduced me to his writing. There was Bradbury and Asimov, shelved next to each other, and their writing was so different and yet so wonderful. Isaac Asimov defined science fiction for me. I devoured the robot stories and novels, the Foundation series, and almost died with delight when he tied it all together into one cohesive timeline of awesome. Asimov wrote so clearly. He took mind-blowing concepts like psychohistory and gathered them into tidy conclusions. He made telepathy and seeing the future plausible. I reveled in the depth and breadth of his stories. Ray Bradbury was almost the opposite. He excelled at short stories. Even some of his novels are merely collections of short stories connected by setting and characters, or sometimes just setting. What he wrote wasn't really science fiction. (I think it still defies categorization. There should

Death and Despair--Again

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It's time for another cheerful post about suicide, kids! Seriously, I hope my kids never find this blog. It's not like they don't know what Drivers  is about. They're too curious not to ask, especially the oldest. And I've certainly discussed the topic with my wife in front of them plenty of times. But you know what I think? This is just off the top of my head, but suicide as a conversational topic is kind of like lice. (Ha!) If you've had lice, no one wants to hear about it. They don't want to know how you got rid of them or where you got them. They'd just as soon not have to think about tiny blood-sucking bugs laying eggs on hairs. Heck, just writing this makes my scalp itch! People are usually more open to discussing the topic if they've had lice, treated lice, OR if they're not old enough to be aware of the social stigma. Case in point, my oldest daughter caught lice at school a few years ago. We saw it pretty quickly, treated it, and

We won!

Go Team Krista! I was a pawn participant ;) in a competition (The Writer's Voice) between four writers to see who could pick and coach the most other writers into successfully grabbing a literary agent's attention. Except it was more organized than I just made it sound. See here for a complete explanation. Anyway, Krista Van Dolzer picked me to be on her team, and we won! She did a great job helping me improve my query and did the same for the other ten on the team as well. It was a huge time investment for all the coaches. Thank you, ladies! And what else did I get? Votes from two agents, which translates to a request for more material. I also got a whole lot of nice comments from other people in the contest. Take a look at my original entry here (if you haven't already) on my blog, and then read the new and improved version here on Krista's blog. Full results are here .

Historical Violence

I listened to an audio version  A Tale of Two Cities.  It was awesome. Let me tell you, if the only thing you've read by Charles Dickens is A Christmas Carol , you don't know how good a writer he was. (Confession:  Until this audiobook, I was in that boat. I tried reading Two Cities when I was eighteen, but didn't get very far. It was too slow to start. Now, after having read a few of Jane Austen's books, I think I'd do better. But listening to a good voice actor is a treat.) So:  This book is about a Dr. Manette who was imprisoned by French aristocrats for eighteen years in the infamous Bastille. On his release, he meets his grown daughter Lucie who wasn't even born when he was locked up, and who was raised in London after the death of his wife. She marries another French ex-pat, Charles Darnay, an aristocrat who gave up his inheritance to be a good guy instead of an oppressor. Meanwhile, the book also follows some very bad stuff happening in Paris, most

The Writer's Voice

This is part of a blogfest that's part of a contest and it's all explained here . It's run by four popular writer-bloggers and I was lucky to secure slot 149 out of 175. It's a writer-eat-writer world out there. Rawr. Anyway, Drivers: Ash arrives in a foreign country to begin an exciting, high-stakes job. He’s young and inexperienced, but his new employer sought out and recruited him because of one important qualification—Ash is suicidal. He’ll be inside an armed robotic vehicle that’s supposed to be unmanned and autonomous. Ash will ride until the artificial intelligence reaches its limits, and then because his boss oversold the robots’ abilities, he’ll be given control to drive and fire the weapons. It’s meant to be Ash’s last suicide attempt, but he just isn’t any good at dying. He survives the first mission. One other driver also makes it back, a girl named Zephyr. As Ash gets to know her, his perspective changes. There were so many reasons to die,

I dream

"The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied." Guess who my favorite author is. C'mon. Guess! Guess! Giveup? It's Ray Bradbury. A college professor asked us who our favorite authors were. Then he asked us why. And then he observed that writers usually prefer people who write with a similar style to their own. No, I said. I don't write like Ray Bradbury. I couldn't write like Ray Bradbury. Except now, years later, maybe I could—sort of. I don't reread books very often, but I recently read  Something Wicked This Way Comes for the third time. Ray does tend to go over the top and drown you in metaphor. I don't aspire to write exactly like him. (I prefer an area somewhere

LDS Writer Blogfest: And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

Hi. This is part of the LDS Writer Blogfest, which means I’m going to talk about my religion again. (I’m Ben. I’m a writer. And I’m a Mormon.) But first, and since this is an LDS Writer Blogfest, let me tell you about the book I recently finished drafting. (Don’t worry. It’s not about religion, nor am I totally hijacking the fest.) The Freezer is set in a hypothetical near-future Earth that’s about to be destroyed by a collision with a rogue planet. There are sub-light-speed interstellar ships and fusion engines, but aside from that, it’s a lot like the world we live in. (Also, that about-to-be-destroyed thing tends to affect the way people think.) I wrote the final chapter the Saturday before last, mere hours before sitting down to watch the annual LDS General Conference on TV. (I missed the first few minutes because I was putting out a fire. Literally.) I joined my wife and three kids, who were already watching, right as Boyd K. Packer started to speak. I knew

Addicted, Deserts, and Comics. No relation.

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Addicted: On Monday, I finished the rough draft of my current project, The Freezer . Hooray! On Tuesday, I decided to take some time off from writing, perhaps three weeks or so, but mostly some time off from getting up at five in the morning. This morning, I decided that taking time off from writing so I could sleep in was like taking time off from breathing so I wouldn't have to smell the cows across the road. When I'm not writing, I feel demotivated from doing anything. I feel blah. Directionless. Since I started writing seriously—what was it?—three years ago, every aspect of my life has grown brighter and more defined, like turning up the saturation and contrast on an old TV. I can't even begin to understand why. I feel like writing is what I do, what I must do, what I was—forgive me—born to do. I can't go back, now. I'm too addicted to whatever it does for me. But I want to give myself a little space from my manuscript before diving into revisions. I a

Why I Won't Be Seeing...

The Hunger Games movie. Part of me thinks I shouldn't even dignify it with an entire blog post, especially considering I've already mentioned the series in, like, three posts already. But I got nothin' else at the moment. Here are my reasons, in no particular order unless my subconscious mind has other plans. 1. I'm a book snob. So why would I want to spend three hours going to a theater to watch a movie when I could stay home (or anywhere else I happen to be) and finish reading Emma ? (Title-dropping is what we book snobs do. Between you and me, Emma 's a very, very long book.) 2. It's way too popular. And I tend to shy away from whatever everyone else is doing. Or seeing. 3. Hollywood betrayed me. When I was newlywed, I convinced my beautiful, tender bride to make an exception to her long-standing personal rule against seeing PG-13 or worse movies, and took her to see The Fellowship of the Ring. I literally finished rereading the book in the lobby of

A Rerun!

Because no one read it the first time! You jerks! I'm just gonna post a link to the post that I want to rerun. So go back in time and enjoy a boring post that only a nerd could enjoy. If you're a nerd, of course. Actually, it's mostly a video. It's funny, because when I wrote Drivers  I ended up using that interface that you see in the video, (minus the swaths of red that indicate obstacles.) The drivers see a yellow path to mark where they're going. Nice, eh?  But that's only on autopilot, when the computer is driving. When they're driving, there's nothing. Kind of like life.

Your Worth

Once again, as I sit down to write about a difficult and/or sensitive subject, I don't know where to start. This is usually where I decide not to try and be clever, but simply say what's on my mind. Also, to most of you, indeed to most people in general, this isn't a sensitive or difficult subject at all. I'm not entirely sure why I think it is to anyone. Let's just say that it was to me at one time in the past, and therefore may be to others now. What are you worth? The sum of your belongings? The skills you've acquired? Your knowledge? Your wisdom? Is it something more "meaningful" like friends and the love of family? Is it the service you give or the things you create? The mansions you've built on earth or in heaven? Is it goodness and kindness, or ambition and power? There are "right" answers to these questions that vary with ideology. (No. Sort of. Yes. Definitely. Of course. Yes. No, yes. Yes and no. Respectively.) T

Dude, I'm a pantser after all.

And can I just say I hate the term "pantser?" My Mac hates it, too. It keeps trying to change it into panther. That's a much cooler thing to be. So instead of plotters and pantsers, let's call them plodders and panthers and move on from there. :P Plodders are the people who write detailed outlines of how an entire novel should take shape before they actually start writing it. Panthers are those who simply sit down and write with no idea where they're going, "by the seat of their panths" as it were. Anyway, I do try to outline a book before I start writing it. The first novel I wrote had no outline and it turned into a train wreck. No, it was too far from any tracks to be a train wreck. It was like if you took a train and dropped it in the middle of a lake. The second book, well, I tried to write an outline but I got it all completely wrong and doomed the book from the very start. The third one I thought and thought about for a long time, wrote an

Dear Agent,

These are the things I wanted to say in my query letter but decided I shouldn't. I don't know who you are. I've been sending queries to ten agents a week, and I don't have all day to cyber-stalk you properly. I visited your website, if you have one. First, I looked up your bio to make sure you might want my book. Then I checked the submission guidelines. I started a new email, typed in the subject "Query: DRIVERS," wrote Dear [You] at the top, and pasted in my query letter. I may have followed that up with a painful synopsis and/or sample pages from Drivers  that I'd previously formatted with spaces between paragraphs. (So it'd look better in email, you know.) That query is my sixth version, meaning it was at least my sixth try at writing a query from scratch for Drivers,  which is the third novel I've written, revised, and edited. I wrote it from my heart, the way everyone says we're supposed to, and I've never been sure anyone else wo

Memory

As in mine is seriously bad these days. I'm talking short-term memory, because my long-term memory seems to be fine. I can find my house, usually. Like, I saw a thing where someone asked who said the following: "If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot." And I knew it was from a movie, and I knew I'd just recently seen that movie. It was on the verge of coming to me for like five mind-imploding minutes until I finally just cheated and Googled it. And you know what? I totally should have known who said it, because I had just seen it, and it's from one of my favorite movies, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . I'd just watched it with my kids the week before. (They thought it was weird. But you know, they watch the Backyardigans, so who are they to talk?) But anyway, that's not why I say I have a bad memory. It's because I've thought of three or four things I could write a blog entry about

Just a little update

Wow, that was weird. I typed a title and hit enter, and it published this without any content. So now I'm updating my update. Which is to say, I'm simply saying I've updated my pitch for Drivers,  and you can find it here . (The Drivers tab at the top of my blog.) I've also been working on the manuscript again. Making it better. I just went back and read over the change I made to the first chapter right after Christmas, and I really like it. Love it, in fact. It was one of those, "Wow, I wrote this?" moments. See, there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who group everyone into two categories, and those who don't. Ha! I'm so funny. Seriously, there are those who can relate to a depressed main character, and those who can't. My wife can't. Or couldn't until I started adding memories of Ash's life and how he ended up suicidal in the first place. Gah, it's seven in the morning and my brain is already fried. How shall

A little about me

There are a thousand things I could blog about: Christmas, sushi, Kindles, children, the book I started writing, the book I went back to fix something in, the contest I won, email, fabrication with duct tape and foam core board, desk arrangements, the utter lack of snow on the ground, etc. But I want to say something that only I can say. There are millions of people expressing opinions and viewpoints out there, offering advice, critiquing, etc. (That's the word of the year, I just decided. Et cetera. ) Many of them are very good, insightful, inspiring, etc. (Okay, maybe that's obnoxious.) I want to say things that only I can say. And so, even though there are also a thousand people doing similar things for hundreds of blogfests, I'm going to say a little about myself. Hi, I'm Ben. I love cross country skiing. Since I was a little boy, I've gone with my dad and his friends skiing up the mountain behind our old house or one of the canyons. We don't ski flat