Brigid Kemmerer

Working with an editor

2012-02-09T06:05:00.000-05:00

I thought about titling this post, "Check your ego at the door."

First, some disclosures. I have only ever worked with one agent, Tamar Rydzinski (fabulous editorial advice) and one editor, Alicia Condon (equally fabulous editorial advice), and I get along with both fabulously well.

So, you know when you send stuff out to beta readers, and it comes back with a bunch of comments, and you were totally expecting a landslide of praise, but instead you get a page full of of, "WTF?!?!?!?!"

If it's a beta reader, you can ignore that commentary. You can do it arrogantly ("OMG. She was just JEALOUS of my writing GENIUS.") or you can do it quietly ("Thank you so much for your input. I'm going to take some time to digest your comments.").

If it's an industry professional, you have to swallow your pride and really look at what they're saying.

In my day job, my attitude tends to be, "No job too small." We're all working for the same team, we all want the same goal.

In writing, it's the same. When I disagree with an editorial comment, I have to think about what my editor/agent is going for. This can be tough.

This can be really tough. I have the tissues to prove it. (Does anyone remember the post about Storm coming back from my agent fourteen pages shorter?)

But here's where it's important to check your ego at the door. It's easy to get your back up and refuse to make changes. It's easy to argue that you need that scene and that one and that other one, even though they all basically say the same thing. It's easy to dig your heels in and be difficult.

But why? Same team, guys. Same team.

Your editor and your agent are trying to help make your book the best it can be. They're also trying to help you make money. Half business, half art. Don't get so tangled in the art side that you forget about the business side.

In Spark, one of my editorial comments asked if Gabriel could use a different phrase to avoid offending anyone. I could have refused to change it, saying it was true to the character and I needed those words in there. But really, it was one phrase, and it didn't really matter.

The best part about being a writer is that there are always more words.

Sometimes you need to ask yourself if you really care about the change someone is asking you to make. Is it going to break your soul to change it? Then explain why.

In Storm, Becca is harassed by her ex-boyfriend. Throughout the first third of the book, I only talk about this in theory -- the reader never actually sees it. Along the line, it was recommended that I should cut the actual scene where Drew gives Becca a hard time, but I dug my heels in to keep it -- and explained why. It stayed, and it's in the finished manuscript. There's another scene at the end between Michael and Becca's mother (you guys have no idea who these people are, but stay with me), and it was recommended that I cut the scene because it slowed down the pacing. That scene was so, so important to me, but I totally understood where my editor was coming from, so I cut half the scene and ramped up the tension.

Sometimes it's about meeting each other halfway. It's about communicating. If you disagree with changes, speak up. Explain yourself -- but listen, too. Try to see your work from both sides. You know that saying about how life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it? This is never more true than in an editorial relationship.

(Oh. And in marriage. Parenting, too. Look, it's a great quote, okay?)

If you're working with beta readers now, try to get in the habit of working with the advice you're getting. It's easy to fall squarely on either side of the fence: either rejecting every piece of advice because you don't want to admit you need to change things, or taking every piece of advice until you're completely overwhelmed and you don't recognize your manuscript.

I've seen people in both camps. It's never pretty.

Learn to walk that fence board. Learn to communicate and discuss what's not working. (I can't tell you how many times I've sent something back to a new writer with comments, including the line, "I'm happy to talk this out, if you want." Almost no one takes me up on that.)

Learn to see where your readers are coming from.

It will pay off later.

You know, after you've signed that first book contract.

~~

In other news, keep an eye on that countdown widget, guys. When we hit 60 days, I'm going to release the first chapter of Storm!

~~

On cheating

2012-02-07T06:02:00.001-05:00

So over the weekend, I sent out a bunch of emails to local schools, asking if they'd like for me to come visit and speak to some classes.

Then yesterday, I do a post on bullying, and I mention that I let people cheat off my tests in seventh grade.

Not my smartest move.

(Not that I got called on it or anything. I'm just saying. This is one of those things that occurs to me in the middle of the night.)

I despise cheating. I don't even like cheat codes in games. (Except The Sims. You totally need more Simoleans to set up a sweet pad.) It feels like a lazy shortcut. If you're going to cheat, why bother?

In Spark, one of the Merrick brothers gets caught cheating, and he has to deal with the fallout from that. He has his reasons (just like I had my reasons back in seventh grade), but it's still wrong.

Have any of you been caught cheating? Have you ever cheated and gotten away with it? How did you feel about it?

Later this week, I'm going to do a post on working with an editor. (Hi, Alicia! *waves*)

On bullying

2012-02-06T06:00:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up, my parents moved a lot.

Lest you think I'm kidding:

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska.
By the time I started first grade, we'd lived in Omaha, San Francisco, and a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.
By the time I started high school, we'd lived in Albuquerque, Washington, DC, and three different suburbs of Baltimore.

Between first grade and eighth grade, I only went to the same school for sixth and seventh grades.

Do you have any idea what it's like being the new kid every single year?

Well, I don't have any idea what it's like to go to school with the same people throughout my childhood. I could talk about how I don't have roots, how I'm not one of those women who has a close circle of friends "forever," how if my husband said, right now, "The hell with the mortgage, let's just pack up and move to San Antonio," I'd be right there in a New York Minute.

I'll do another post about my attitudes on permanence someday.

But we were going to talk about bullying.

When I was in fourth grade, I had to ride the school bus. There was a massive fifth grader named Antoinette who used to make my life hell. I hated her. She stuck candy in my hair. (Like, she'd pull a lollipop out of her mouth and stick it to the back of my head.) She ripped the glasses off my face and threatened to throw them out the bus window.

In short, she was a real bitch.

I have no idea what ever happened to her. The bus driver didn't stop her. The school sure didn't stop her. There were no interventions. I just had to put up with it.

The nice thing about changing schools every year was that I didn't have to put up with her for long.

I remember this one girl named Minee (pronounced Min-AY) in fifth grade, who used to ask me where my mom bought my clothes, in this completely superior voice. Prior to that grade, I had never given my clothes one moment's thought. I was eleven! I didn't care about clothes. I cared about books and horses and my dog. But that precise instant was my first experience with that particular vein of disdain. Minee never did anything physical; she just constantly ridiculed me.

Again. Sixth grade, new school.

By sixth grade, I was starting to get it. I was a total nerd, and people knew it. Kids make snap judgments all the time. I remember going to a sixth grade mixer (read: dance), and after about three hours of standing alone in the dark, a boy named Ryan asked me to dance. While we were dancing, he said, "I felt sorry for you standing alone."

I felt sorry for you! He said he felt sorry for me!

And the irony here is that I had called my mom to come get me, and after that, I called her back and said, "I think things are getting better! A boy just asked me to dance!"

Sometimes I want to go back and smack some sense into sixth grade Brigid.

But I was a straight A student, and I realized there was a way I could make people like me.

By letting them cheat.

I'm ashamed to admit letting cute boys copy off my paper. My mom probably doesn't have any idea, and she'll die reading this. But it was sixth grade, I was an outcast, and I needed some way to have friends.

Letting them cheat worked.

I stopped in eighth grade.

These stories aren't all that horrible. Some of you guys had some truly terrible bullying experiences. I'm so amazed that you were courageous enough to share them with me.

I think it's fascinating how some people say you should turn the other cheek, but I personally love when the underdog stands up for herself/himself. I love that scene in Stepmom where Julia Roberts tells the teen girl how to make the boy jealous.

What do you guys think? What's the best way to combat bullying?

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

2012-02-04T06:18:00.002-05:00

First, I have to say everyone who took the time to share their bullying story is amazing. I was just telling my husband that I'm so glad I had decided to do this contest randomly, because I never would have been able to pick from one of your stories. Some of you made me tear up. Really. You're all incredible people. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences.

On Monday, I'll share my own bullying story, but for now, I know you want to know who won the ARC!

*~*~* drumroll, please *~*~*

Congratulations, Roro!

Please email your shipping address to brigidmary@gmail.com and I'll get your ARC in the mail.

Who wants another chance to win an ARC?

2012-02-02T05:14:00.000-05:00

So let's do this again!

This time, let's have a little more fun. Storm has a lot of themes, but one involves bullying. (I'm not giving anything away. You can tell right from the book description that it opens with Chris Merrick getting beaten up in a parking lot.)

If you'd like to win an ARC for Storm: The Elemental Series, leave a comment about a time you witnessed a bullying event, whether as the victim, a bystander, or even the bully him/herself. If you can't think of a time, just throw your name in the hat, and I'll count your entry. (Hey, I don't want to make anyone spill uncomfortable secrets.)

This contest is open to everyone on the planet (Yay, international! Sorry, intergalactic readers), and you have until 11:59pm EST Friday night, February 3.

If I get more than 50 entries, I'll give away two ARCs, so please spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, Google +, email, carrier pigeon, shouting from the rooftops, chalk drawings on your driveway, or any other means possible.

There aren't enough hours in the day...

2012-01-31T06:52:00.000-05:00

I need to recommend some books to you guys. Good stuff. Ready? Here we go:

Awkward, by Marni Bates: I'm currently reading this one. Contemporary YA. Very clever, very funny. Great for fans of Meg Cabot.

The Assassin and the Pirate Lord, by Sarah Maas: Sarah is an awesome fantasy writer. Very rich, vivid prose. I'm in love with every piece of clothing she ever describes. This is a novella that precedes her book coming out this fall. Definitely worth downloading.

Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake: This book was amazing. Some people said that the second half didn't quite live up to the first half, but I still think it's worth the read. I couldn't put it down. It was very frightening, but in a good way. The protagonist boy voice was exceptional. (If you're looking for a boy book, this might be it.)

The Fault in our Stars, by John Green: It's every bit as good as they say it is. I'm still thinking about this book, a week later.

Tangled, by Erica O'Rourke: This book comes out TODAY. I've already pre-ordered on my Kindle! Go buy it, and if you haven't read the awesome first book in the series (Torn), you need to check it out immediately.

Your questions, answered

2012-01-26T06:05:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the delay, guys. Real life got in the way.

Here we go.

Marni asked: Do you ever worry about censorship with your novels? Have you ever felt pressure to make your characters sound more G-rated?

This is a good question. I think about it all the time. (I should disclose that Marni is also published by KTeen, and has read my book. I should also disclose that Storm has a few swear words and some fighting, and a girl is put in a compromising position.)

Have I ever felt pressured to make my characters sound more G-rated? No. Never. My agent never pressured me, my publisher never pressured me, and my family definitely never pressured me. We'll see what the public has to say. Nothing is explicit or gratuitous. I'd rate the novel PG-13. Maybe even PG, considering what goes on in PG-13 movies lately.

I wrote the book with the goal of making it as realistic as possible. Becca, Hunter, the Merrick brothers -- these are all teenagers dealing with real life problems on top of being involved with something paranormal. The Merrick brothers have grown up without parents, and I figured a wayward swear word wouldn't be inappropriate. Becca's situation is ... complicated (I can't say too much without giving the story away), but I think it's something that real teens can relate to.

A friend of a friend of a friend said she wouldn't let her twelve-year-old daughter read my book because it had some profanity. As a parent, I fully respect and understand her choice. I also think that books are a safe way to explore complex and frightening issues, because your imagination can only carry you so far.

Shannon asked: I'm curious if there's going to be 4 novels and why you chose to focus on the 4 elements instead of just general magic?

Another good question! Right now, I'm only contracted for three books. I hope I'll get the chance to write more, but right now, it's going to be three. I haven't mentioned this before on the blog, but there will be a standalone e-Book available shortly before Storm is released, called Elemental. I believe it's going to be free, but right now it's got a $0.99 price tag on it, so I'll announce more when I know for sure.

I chose to focus on the four elements because I struck out with my two previous paranormal attempts. I wrote a vampire novel and started trying to find an agent, right when vampires were getting huge. (And my writing needed work, too. But the idea wasn't fresh and new in 2007.) Then I put vampires aside and wrote a paranormal romance dealing with Greek mythology -- right when Percy Jackson hit it big. (I did land representation with that one, it just didn't sell. Also, there were problems with that book, too. It wasn't just timing.)

In my vampire novel, I had four brothers and a girl named Rebecca. I just couldn't get them out of my head. I knew vampires wouldn't work, and I wanted to go with something less popular, and also something that would work well with the number four. I tossed around all kinds of things. The four horsemen of the apocalypse was in the running for a while. The four elements. Four leaf clovers. You name it. I finally settled on elements because I had a lot of ideas of how I could make it fun.

Becky asked: What do you do to make sure your characters emotions are realistic?

This is a hard question.

My editor just finished reading Spark, and asked if I have teenagers living at home because of the realistic interactions between the teenagers. That made my day. I do have a fourteen-year-old stepson who is phenomenally awesome, but he's a good kid. (Meaning he's not getting into scuffles or mouthing back or providing good conflict fodder for the page.) I used to teach riding lessons to teenagers, so I've had a lot of experience around them. Teen emotions are the same as adult emotions, they're just not shy about sharing them. Teens aren't subtle people, and that's an amazing quality. If they feel something, generally, you know it.

But I put all that on the page. I cry a lot. I always say that if the Merrick brothers knew how much I cry while writing their scenes, they'd demand to be written out of the novel.

The Elementalists asked: Are the boys going to find a long lost brother who is even hotter in 'The Fifth Element?'

Um, no. :-) But I'll be introducing new characters in each book.

Thanks for all the questions, guys! If you have more, leave them in comments and I'll get them answered. In the meantime, I'm gearing up for another ARC contest. Should we do it on the blog, or should I do a Goodreads giveaway? What would you prefer?

Go ahead. Ask me anything.

2012-01-21T18:57:00.001-05:00

So I don't have a FAQ tab. That's mostly because I get a lot of questions about the books, but I wouldn't consider any of them frequent.

I've been toying with some post ideas (how to work with an editor, how to maintain tension from chapter-to-chapter, how I once went out with a guy who asked if I wanted to see a certain something in the men's room, etc), but then I realized that I haven't asked you guys what you might be interested in learning.

So here's your chance. Any questions floating around the blogosphere? About me? About the books? About my book deal? About why I got stuck behind the elderly couple at Giant today, and for some reason they were buying $400 worth of food, yet trying to pay with coins? (Friends of yours, Bobbie?)

I'll answer just about anything. Ready, set, go.

ARC Winners!!

2012-01-20T08:38:00.001-05:00

So I woke up this morning feeling like crap. It might have something to do with the fact that I got about twenty minutes of sleep.

You know what always makes me feel better? Doing nice things.

So even though I didn't get 75 entries, I'm still going to give away two ARCs!

Thanks to the powers of the random number generator, the winners are...

Drum roll, please...

Beth Scharwath and Martha Pao!!

I hope I am not butchering your names. I am not currently at my best.

Please email your mailing address to brigidmary@gmail.com, and I'll ship them out tomorrow.

Congratulations!

And everyone else, stay tuned...we'll be doing another giveaway in February...

Win an ARC for STORM! - LAST CHANCE!!

2012-01-17T05:26:00.000-05:00

LAST DAY TO WIN!! If I get more than 75 entries, I'll give away TWO!

Who wants to win a signed ARC?

No challenge, just a straight up drawing. Leave a comment on this blog entry to throw your name in the hat by 11:59pm EST Thursday night, and I'll draw a winner on Friday morning.

US residents only, please. I'll do an international one in a few weeks, as long as I clear that with important people. Like my husband, who sees the credit card receipts. ("It costs HOW MUCH to send to Iceland?")

Yeah, exactly.

So please spread the word on Twitter, Facebook, etc. (There's a twitter button at the bottom of this post.) Please join The Elementalists on Facebook for news and another drawing sometime soon. (That fan page is not maintained by me, so it's a great place to talk about all kinds of books.)

Ready. Set. COMMENT!

I've heard that there may be problems leaving a comment. If that's the case, either send me an email to brigidmary@gmail.com, or send me a tweet @BrigidKemmerer, and I'll add your name to the list.

Nobody use this to forge my signature, 'kay?

Well, looky what we have here...

2012-01-14T06:30:00.003-05:00

These arrived on Friday the 13th. Who says that day is unlucky?

100 days 'til publication.

I think we should do a contest this week.

Stay tuned...

Oh, and here's an awesome video I just watched, about motivation.

34.

2012-01-11T06:14:00.000-05:00

So I turn 34 today.
It's been a good year.

It's amazing to me how much can change in a year.

It makes me excited to find out what 34 will bring.

Holy crow, people, a lot happened today

2012-01-10T19:18:00.002-05:00

First, check out Nina Berry's AMAZING cover for Otherkin! I got the chance to read this book, and it's fantastic. The cover is gorgeous, and it perfectly captures the book. I should also mention I'm having some serious font envy.

Yeah, I said it. Font envy.

If you don't know, Nina and I are not only agency sisters, but we're also publishing house sisters, and we share the same editor.

I know. Creepy, right?

Second, another agency sister, Syrie James, has a book coming out this month, and she's running an awesome pre-order contest. Forbidden comes out January 24, so don't dawdle.

Buckle up. It's an emotional roller coaster.

2012-01-10T05:57:00.001-05:00

First, this made me laugh:

Then, this made me cry:

And it's only 5:56am.

How's your Tuesday going?

Countdown widgets

2012-01-09T06:58:00.000-05:00

So I took the plunge and created one. It's to the right, in my sidebar.

What do you think? Do you guys notice these? Did I just waste $3.99?

Personally, I can't believe it's only 105 days until my book's release date. 105 days!! I might have to move it down the page so I don't have a panic attack every time I visit my own blog.

If you like it and want to feature it on your site, feel free to click "Get widget" at the bottom. Let's make a STORM all over the internet!

(Okay, that was insanely hokey. Look, I'm a writer. I'm still working on this self-promotion thing.)

Storm: Australian Cover Reveal!!

2012-01-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

You guys.

YOU GUYS.

Have I mentioned that I have an Australian publisher? I do. Allen & Unwin.

And they are AWESOME.

Because of the time difference between here and there, I typically get their emails when I wake up in the morning. And their emails are also awesome.

Especially when they include the Australian cover for Storm.

I'm so glad they said I could share it on the blog because I love it.

What do you think?

So, whadja get?

2011-12-27T06:12:00.000-05:00

Did you get any new books you want to talk about? Anyone get the Kindle Fire? Anyone get anything completely off the wall?

If you got a new scarf, like me, you might find this video helpful:

Happy or merry, whichever you are...

2011-12-24T08:58:00.002-05:00

This dinosaur still inspires terror, even three years later.

Small surprises

2011-12-16T05:31:00.000-05:00

I love leaving small surprises for people. Not like gifts, but things that might make their day a tiny bit easier. For instance, I love emptying the dishwasher, yet leaving the "clean" light on, so when my husband goes to empty it, there's no work to be done. I love paying twice the toll at toll booths, and telling the operator that I'd like to pay for the car behind me. I don't have time to do big things, like volunteer (hello, two jobs and two kids), and I don't have the money to do big things like philanthropy. (Though my husband hates when charities get me on the line, because I almost always give them money. And don't get me started on when the fire department comes to the door.)

But then I read this article about people paying off layaway balances, and it made me cry.

I wish I could do this. Can you do this? You should do this.

I want to drive to Kmart right now and do it.

In a day and age where people are violently assaulting each other to grab an XBox, it's nice to read an article about people doing good, too.

In mourning (no one died, don't worry)

2011-12-15T06:07:00.001-05:00

So I finished Spark a few weeks ago.

I'm really feeling a crash after this one. The character went through such a traumatic time and grew from it that I feel like a son just made it through four rough years of high school and is now leaving home for college, as a successful young man. I'm happy for him, but rather sad, too. I'm kind of mourning the end of the book.

A lot.

I cried over this character. Multiple times. I can think of three scenes right off. I can remember sitting in the bedroom with the laptop in my lap, sobbing so hard that my husband came in to ask what was wrong (and then rolling his eyes and walking out when I told him I was crying over a character). I know Gabriel isn't real. And I know I'll get to visit with him again. As Bobbie wisely said, "...he'll still be in the next book, so he'll be home to do his laundry at your house and raid your refrigerator."

Sarah blogged about this last week, and I'm still feeling the low. Do you guys feel this way when you finish a book? Whether reading or writing?

A fan page, yo

2011-12-08T05:35:00.001-05:00

Look! A Facebook friend set up a fan page for my book series on Facebook!

I'm touched. And honored. And seriously blushing.

But it's awesome, and you should check it out.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Elementalists/191477454272478

A short video on cover design...

2011-12-05T08:30:00.000-05:00

I saw this floating around Twitter yesterday, and since it featured Kensington Books (my badass awesome publisher), I was very interested. It's a cool piece about how romance novel photo shoots are handled, and it's worth a watch, if only for the hot guys. :-)

I'm sorry I can't link directly to the video, but here's a link to the Publishers Weekly article, which has the video embedded.

Well, hello, my lovelies...

2011-11-26T20:00:00.001-05:00

When we got home this afternoon, a package from Kensington Books was sitting on my front doorstep. My husband thought perhaps they were ARCs, but no. They were:

Cover proofs!

I'm very excited. They're slick, and shiny, and I rather love the spine. The people at Kensington are AWESOME.

And yes, if you must know, that is my dining room table, complete with my Kindle, a baby bottle cap, a hair clip thingy, a hair barrette, a booklet of coupons for McDonalds, and a pile of papers from my son's school that I haven't bothered to go through yet. Oh, and my laptop pad, to keep my lap from melting when the laptop is actually in my lap.

Yes, folks, this is where the magic happens.

When to give up.

2011-11-18T13:55:00.001-05:00

I could lead with a bunch of baloney about how I owe you guys a blog post, but really, I'm procrastinating about writing the next chapter of Spark, and I've been thinking about this topic a lot.

I'm never going to tell anyone to give up writing. That's not what this post is about. You become a better writer with every word that hits the page. Even if what you're writing now is crap, it's going to be less crappy the next time around. And less crappy when you get a few words past that. When I was in high school, I thought I was awesome because I'd written something good enough to land an agent. That book didn't sell, and when I read over it now, I wonder what the hell that agent was thinking to have signed me in the first place. Those words are shoved in a box in my bedside table, and they will never see the light of day again.

I'm talking about giving up on your current project.

This is hard to do. Writing is all about persistence, right? It's not for the faint of heart, and it takes for frigging ever. When you sit at your laptop for hours on end, cranking out something four hundred pages long, it's really, really hard to give it up.

It's like raising a child, really. Sometimes your kid is going to hit eighteen years old and be the most fantastic human being on the face of the planet. The kind of kid who carries groceries for the elderly and studies biology for fun or something. The kind of kid who would never sass you or do anything untoward.

Then sometimes your kid is going to hit eighteen years old and run off with a trucker named Joe, screaming from the cab, "Mom, you ruined my life!!"

You want the first kid. Sometimes, despite all your good intentions, you end up with the second kid.

We can't give up on our children.

We can give up on our manuscripts.

I wrote four books before one sold. If I hadn't given up on the first one, I never would have made it to number four. I might not have made it past the second one, but an agent sent me a personalized rejection to my full manuscript, with the line, "Hey, Brigid, there's no plot here."

It was a kick in the teeth. I had a 125,000 word manuscript that I'd toiled over for 18 months, and she didn't see a plot?

But she was right. After I dried my tears and whined to my husband, I realized she was absolutely right. There was no real plot.

And I didn't know how to fix it.

That's the worst part. As writers, we have all this damn persistence. We have all these hours with our butt in a frigging chair. Saying, "There's no plot here," is like throwing down a gauntlet. I had to revise! I had to fix it! I had all these hours invested; I couldn't turn back now!

I could have spent years revising that manuscript, trying to figure out what was wrong. Kind of like a bonzai tree, I could have kept clipping away until I had nothing left but a pile of sawdust and fuzzy leaves.

Or I could do what I did: put it away, and started something new.

If you're stuck, move on. If it's not working, move on. If you've sent out 200 queries and you're not getting anywhere, move on. Those hours are gone, but the manuscript isn't going anywhere. You're not only going to write one book, right? Why don't you start the next one now?

Let your teenager run off with that trucker.

Chances are, a little distance will give you some perspective.

Cover reveal!

2011-11-14T10:35:00.001-05:00

I know you're going to skip all this text anyway and just look, so here it is!

What do you think?

To add on Goodreads, click here.
To preorder on Amazon, click here.

Pivotal moments

2011-11-10T10:01:00.001-05:00

I'm working on SPARK (The Elemental Series, Book 2) right now, and I've been thinking a lot about pivotal moments. I know good plotting is always about choices (good or bad), especially when each choice leads to a new conflict.

About ten years ago, I was driving somewhere for work, and I knew I needed gas. I could have made it to my destination without stopping, so I considered waiting and going after. But I had a little bit of time to kill, and I kinda needed a stick of gum before meeting new people, so I decided to stop first.

If you're familiar with Westminster, Maryland, you'll know that Route 140 is basically a four lane highway, divided by a grass median, with lots of shops and gas stations and restaurants all the way from Reisterstown to Union Bridge -- with lots of space between. I stopped at an Amoco Station, shoved the gas pump into the car, and walked into the little shop.

When I went in, the shop was completely silent. There was a guy behind the counter, and there was another man standing a few feet back, his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt. Since it was Westminster, which is mostly farm land when you get past the shops, both guys were pretty casual, both needed a shave, and neither was older than thirty-five.

But they were just standing there. No one was saying anything.

So I grabbed a pack of gum from in front of the register, glanced at the guy with his hands in his pockets, and said, "I don't want to jump in front of you."

He hesitated and said, "No. No, you go ahead."

And while I was paying, he walked out.

I stood there with cash in my hand, but the cashier watched the guy leave. Then he finally took my cash and rang me up.

While he was handing me my change, he said, "I'm glad you walked in. That guy was about to pull a gun on me."

A gun! I'd walked in on an almost-holdup!

Now, I have no idea whether the guy really had a gun in the pocket of his sweatshirt. I was in my early twenties, and I lived a pretty sheltered life. The cashier could have been wrong.

But it was a pivotal moment in a lot of ways. That guy could have pulled a gun. He could have shot the cashier. He could have shot me. He could have held us hostage.

Moreover, I could have kept on driving, gotten gas after my meeting, and that guy could have held up the store without interruption.

I know this is a pretty boring story, now that you know how it ended.

But I think that's why I keep thinking about it. Because it could have been so much more exciting (and not necessarily in a good way), just by virtue of one choice.

Can you think of any pivotal moments in your life? Any time that a choice may have seemed like nothing, but turned out to be huge?

~~

What makes you pick up a book?

2011-11-02T09:29:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about the books I read, and why I pick them up.

I'll admit: I'm a review reader. But I usually go back and read the reviews after I've read a book.

If I see a lot of people mentioning a book on Twitter, I'll download the sample to my Kindle. Same goes for a blog review that piques my interest. (I found Beastly through a blog review, and it's one of my favorite books.)

Even still, this is only sometimes. Like if I have my Kindle handy, or if I'm not in the middle of reading something else.

We all talk about word of mouth. That's what sells books. You could have a hundred good reviews on Goodreads, but if people aren't actually telling someone else to read your book, it doesn't have as much weight. If I'd looked up Boy Toy on Goodreads and read the mixed reviews, I might not have read the book. But I asked my buddy Sarah Fine for a recommendation, and she said to read it.

I read it. I loved it. You should too. I actually read it twice.

But see? Even that doesn't carry as much weight unless you know me. Even if you know me, it doesn't carry as much weight unless I say, "YOU. You must read this book."

I don't read a whole lot of contemporary YA, unless it's on the heavier side. I enjoy Simone Elkeles, Gail Giles, things like that.

But last year, every time I turned around, people were saying, "You have to read Anna and the French Kiss." So I knew I had to read it.

I read it. I loved it. (It's by Stephanie Perkins. You should read it, too.)

When both Sarah Maas and Bobbie Goettler told me I needed to read Unearthly, by Cynthia Hand, and these are two people who live on opposite sides of the country and could not be more different, I knew I had to pick it up.

I read it. I loved it. (Are you sensing a theme?)

I might not have picked up any of these books if people hadn't practically shoved them into my hands and said, "HERE. YOU. Read this."

Everyone reads books they can't put down. What, in a book, makes you not just review it well, but press it into the hands of someone else? What makes you sit up and say, "HERE. YOU. Read this."

For me, it's the understanding of human nature, mixed with an element of surprise. Not the jump-out-and-say-boo kind of surprise. Just something unexpected happening to people I genuinely care about. It's about a book I can't put down, not for a minute, not even when I'm feeding the baby. It's a book that I'll stay up late to read.

I'm not saying it's easy to write books like that. I'm just saying that's what makes me recommend a book.

What about you? What works? What doesn't?

Muscle Memory

2011-10-28T08:29:00.000-04:00

It's been years since I rode horses, but I still remember how to sit the transition from a walk to a canter. I remember the slide of your outside leg to trigger the movement, the way you'd sit into the saddle just so, allowing the horse to lift up its front end and change pace. I remember it so well that if I sat on a trained dressage horse, I have no doubt I could accomplish that movement right this instant. I might not be in shape to ride for any great length of time, but my body would know what to do.

I think writing is like that. While I haven't been on a break since my son was born (don't ask how fast or at what time of night I wrote most of the Elemental novella), I haven't been writing with solid regularity like I used to.

But the muscle memory is still there. It's going to be weak at first, but I'll hit my stride and the words will come pouring out.

During my school visit, one of the most popular questions was, "What inspires you?" (Right after "If your book gets made into a movie, can I be in it?")

It was a hard question to answer. Harder than it should be. I told the kids that inspiration can come from anywhere. When I wrote the adult paranormal romance A Wicked Little Rhythm, I came up with Jack, the son of Apollo, and I made him own a music store in downtown Baltimore. I also made him a drummer.

I know nothing about drumming. But my husband had bought Rock Band that Christmas, and we played it a lot. I started thinking, "Hey, a drummer would be a cool character. Now how can I make it paranormal..."

Another student asked how I battle writers block. I think that's just a matter of planting your ass in the chair and writing something. Anything. If I'm fighting with a scene, I'll go work on a different one. I'll write a blog post. I'll write an email to a friend about something going on in my personal life. I'll write something.

When I sit down to write, if I'm not feeling it, I'll go watch dance videos on YouTube. I'm not kidding. Right now, I love the song Without You by David Guetta and Usher, and I'll go look for people who've put up dance videos using that song. Sometimes the dance videos suck. That's okay; sometimes my writing sucks. Sometimes the dance videos take my breath away. Those are inspiring. It's art, it's talent, it's something completely different from writing, and sometimes that gets me going.

What works for you guys? What doesn't work?

And since it's Friday, and since I haven't done this in forever, I'll put up a Friday Favorite. Since we just talked about A Wicked Little Rhythm, here's one of my favorite scenes.

~~~

The store was cooland dark, a welcome escape from the humidity that still hung over the city.Sarah knew she had talked to Jack on their walk back, but she could hardly hearher thoughts over the screaming in her head: He almost KISSED me! And he BELIEVES me! And… he almost KISSED me!

The giddiness wasnearly enough to make her pass out.

“You want anothersoda?” Jack asked.

She started toshake her head, but then she wondered if he was going to lock up and walk herto her car if she refused. Or what if he invited her up to his apartment? Wouldshe say yes? What would that mean? Would saying yes give him the wrongimpression? The right one?

She wished shecould call Kate.

“Hey.” He snappedhis fingers in front of her face. “Come back to earth. You want another soda?”

“Um, yes,” shesaid, hoping she was making the right choice. “Please.”

He led her throughthe curtain into the back room and turned on a few lights, then moved to thelittle kitchen area. She watched him pull out a can for her and a bottle forhimself, studying his silhouette in the light from the refrigerator.

When hestraightened, she looked away, not wanting to be caught staring. Her eyes foundhis drum set, similar to the one on display at the front of the store, but moreworn, more used. It made the instruments look comfortable, less intimidatingthan the ones out front.

“Pick up thesticks and bang on them if you want.”

She jumped,feeling heat on her cheeks. He was right beside her, holding out a soda.

She took the can.“No way.”

He smiled. “Whynot? Everybody likes whacking on drums. Believe me. I listen to it all daylong.”

“I think Ihumiliate myself enough when you’re around.” She found she couldn’t meet hiseyes. “I’d…ah….listen to you play,though.”

He put the bottleto his lips and took a long drink. He was watching her again, and she couldn’tfigure out his expression. “Why?”

She took a sip ofher soda, and for the first time in her life, she wished it were somethingstronger. “Because I want to see if you’re all talk.”

She meant herwords to be challenging, something she imagined Kate would say, but she heardthem come out too soft, almost coy.

Jack laughedgently, a good sound that made Sarah look up at him again. For an instant, shecaught a glimpse of how he must have been before life caught up with him.

“All right.” Hepulled a chair away from the table and spun it to face the drums. “Sit.”

She sat.

He took anotherdrink and sat on the stool. “Any requests?”

“Well…” Sheblushed and shook her head.

His gazesharpened. “Yes. What?”

She wished shehadn’t said anything. “I just—maybe you could show me what you meant last week?You said you were doing something to that classical song.”

He grinnedwickedly and twirled a drum stick through his fingers. “‘Doing something.’ Youmake it sound obscene. Poor Johann Pachelbel.” His voice turned mockinglyaghast. “Some guy’s raping his music,and he’s doing it with a drum stick—”

“Okay, okay!” Shewas starting to wonder if her cheeks would ever cool. “I’m sorry I saidanything at all.”

“Don’t be sorry,Sarah.” He leaned toward a small folding table that was set up on the otherside of his drum set. He had to stretch to reach it, and she watched the hem ofhis tee shirt ride up to expose an inch of skin.

She swallowed, warmagain.

“Here. Catch.”

She blinked, andsome sense of self preservation helped her snatch the object he’d tossed out ofthe air. She looked down to find herself holding a remote.

“Turn the stereoon,” he said. “The canon’s not … ah, ready, but find a song you like. I’ll showyou what I mean.”

She struggled withthe foreign remote, aware again of his eyes on her. She was able to turn thestereo on, but she didn’t recognize the song. Her mouth felt dry as she usedthe seek button, trying to findsomething familiar.

“I…I don’t knowwhat I should be looking for,” she said weakly.

“Anything.” Sheheard him take another sip from his bottle, just as she found a melody she’d atleast heard before.

“This,” she said.

He choked on hisbeer. “Britney Spears? Are you kidding me?”

Flustered, shereached for the remote again. “I’ll find something else—”

“No, leave it.”She heard him mutter something under his breath, and she thought she caught thewords boy band. He shook his head andpicked up the drum sticks. “At least it’s something different. Turn it up.Drums are loud.”

She held down thevolume button until she felt like she was at the club with Kate again. The roomhad great acoustics—or the stereo was just top-of-the-line—because the soundwas excellent. She felt tense that she’d picked the wrong song, that he wassomehow making fun of her, that some other shoe would drop and she’d find outthis crazy attraction was one big punch line.

Then he started toplay.

The music trappedher in her seat. Sarah stared, transfixed, watching the drumsticks blur andslow in time with the music, like they played and all he did was hang on. Thesong was the same—she’d heard it on the radio a million times. But he addedanother level somehow, made the song richer, fuller, adding impossible beatsand rhythm until she could almost feel the sound pulse against her skin.Gooseflesh raced along her arms, and she shivered.

When the songended and he struck the last beat, it was like the slam of a door behind aleaving lover.

He sat silent,watching her, the sticks at rest in his hands.

She was breathingtoo quickly, and she licked her lips. “Do it again.” She pushed a button on theremote.

R & B thistime. She barely knew the song, but it wouldn’t have mattered. His talent waspowerful—he could have played with no accompaniment and she’d have been mooningafter him like a lovesick puppy.

“Again.” Shepushed the button, found something older, from the eighties, with a lot ofelectronic sound.

He tackled it headon, making the song modern somehow, adding a layer of sound she’d never thoughtthe melody was lacking. The beat whispered along her skin, seeming to pulseinside her body. She watched his arms, the way his muscles flexed and pulledwith his playing, how his tattoos flashed and danced with the movement.

When he finished,she felt breathless, frozen. His eyes were intense, fueled by silver fire, buthe stayed silent. Waiting for her.

She fought tolower the volume, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t make hersound like an idiot.

She failed. “Thatwas … amazing.”

He put his sticksin one hand and stepped out and away from the drum set, and she watched himmove toward her. He stopped in front of her chair as she gazed up at him. Shewanted to make him play a hundred songs while she just sat and listened.

He touched herchin. “I’m glad you liked it.”

His hand was warm,and she sighed.

Then he held upthe sticks. “Your turn.”

She jerked backand shook her head, sudden nerves breaking his spell. “I can’t—do that—”

“Shh.” He reacheddown and took her hand, pulling her out of the chair. “Come on, you littlecoward.”

Sarah wanted tobalk, but the feel of his hand on hers was compelling, like he was some kind ofpied piper with drum sticks. She sat on his stool, the wooden sticks clutchedin her sweaty palms, and looked at the array of instruments.

She had to clearher throat twice before she could speak, and even then it was barely more thana strangled whisper. “How do you keep them all straight?”

He pulled a chairover and sat to her right. “You know how you can shut your eyes and touch yournose? You don’t miss and hit your shoulder?” At her nod, he shrugged. “It’slike that. Give me your hand.”

She pulled thesticks in close to her lap. “What if I break something?”

“I’ll kill you.”He scooted closer and picked up her hand, wrapping his fingers around hers.

Her heart rateaccelerated immediately.

“Relax,” he said,and he was close enough that his breath brushed her cheek, and she could smellthe sweetness of his strawberry milkshake mixing with the scent of his beer.Her face started to drift toward his when she heard bells in her head.

She blinked. Notin her head. He was using her hand to make the stick tap the center of one ofthe large cymbals on the right, and she realized he’d said something abouteighth notes and the number four.

Relax. Was he kidding?

“You do it.” Hishand dropped away from hers.

Focus took moreeffort than it should have, but she found herself wanting to succeed, toimpress him like he’d impressed her. She discovered she could tap out an evenrhythm on the cymbal without feeling too ridiculous.

Then he said, “Nowadd your foot.”

His voice wassoft, his breath warm against her neck. She almost dropped the stick.

“Relax,” he saidagain. He touched her knee, his hand lingering for just a moment. “This leg. Onevery one and every three.”

She swallowed andfollowed his direction, reveling in the tone of his voice as he softly countedthe beat, and distantly realized that she was somehow making it all work.

He shifted hischair so he was still behind her, but now more to her left. She couldn’timagine him being closer, but he was. She could feel the warmth of his body,achingly close to hers.

“Now your lefthand,” he said, picking up her wrist. The ink on his skin made a strikingcontrast where it ran alongside her pale forearm. “Every two and four.”

He helped, but shegot it. The rhythm was strong and clear, and even with his closeness, she felta bit of elation at her own ability. “I’m playing drums!”

Jack laughed, alittle. “See? You don’t need me.” He let go of her left hand, but she was ableto hold the beat for a moment.

But his nearnesswas too intoxicating. Sarah let the sticks come off the drums and pulled theminto her lap. She turned to face him, her cheeks warm, feeling giddy andfoolish. “Show me something else.”

So he took herface in his hands and brought his lips to hers.

The kiss wasinsistent, his fingers strong yet gentle against her face, along her neck, inher hair. The sweetness of ice cream lingered on his lips, soft and warmagainst her own. She wanted to lean into him, to feel the press of his body,but uncertainty held her back.

Then his hand wasaround her waist, making the decision for her, pulling her against him. She wascertain he could feel her heart beating against his chest, especially when hishand slid under the hem of her shirt to find the bare skin of her back. Sheshivered and gasped against his mouth, and his tongue brushed her lips.

She jerked back,suddenly breathless.

They were on thefloor, kneeling, her body still pressed against his. She didn’t remember comingoff the stool. Jack’s eyes were very close, alert and piercing silver. Hisbreathing was nearly as rapid as her own.

“I’m sorry,” shewhispered.

“Don’t apologize.”He used his free hand to smooth her hair back from her face. The hand along thebare skin of her back pulled free, moving to safer territory at her waist.“Sarah.”

The way he saidher name made her want to melt against him. Her face felt hot. “I’m not—I don’t—”

“Shh.” He kissedthe edge of her jaw, then her neck. Then her lips again, but slower now, less ademand, more a question. She relaxed into his touch, enjoying the warmsweetness of his mouth against hers.

She couldn’t getenough of touching him. She clutched at his arms and made a low sound againsthis mouth.

He broke free thistime, looking almost as panicked as she’d felt a moment ago. His voice was veryrough. “I—I shouldn’t do this.”

She felt her chestcave in until it hurt to breathe. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t!” He tookher by the arms. “Don’t apologize to me. You don’t know—You just—” He shut hiseyes and his hands softened against her skin.

She tried to drawherself up, but her voice and the crushing weight in her stomach didn’t help.“It’s all right.”

“No—it’s not. Damnit, Sarah—” He pulled her forward and kissed her, his hand somehow finding theskin at her back again, sending her pulse racing.

Jack broke free asecond time, and her head spun. She knew he was going to tell her she had toleave, that his issues were too much, that this couldn’t continue.

“Sarah.” Hewhispered her name against her lips.

She shut her eyesand sighed. Her mother was right. This road only led to pain.

He stroked herhair again. “Will you come upstairs and stay awhile?”

Her eyes shotwide. She choked on the change in extremes.

“Just for awhile,” he said, and for the first time she heard him sound uncertain, like heworried she’d refuse. His eyes held hers. “Just to talk.”

She wondered if hecould feel her trembling. “Yes. I will.”

Relief bloomed inhis eyes. He leaned in and pressed his mouth to hers once more, his hand tightagainst her back. When he raised his head, she felt him smile against her lips.“All right, maybe a little more thantalk.”

~~~

School visit!

2011-10-17T17:15:00.000-04:00

This week, I will have the extreme pleasure and honor of speaking at my stepson's high school.

You want to know the last time I spoke to high school kids in a classroom? Probably when they were my peers.

You read that right. I'm a first-timer. A school visit virgin, if you will.

Some of my readers are teens. Some of you are writers. Some of you are both. Some of you are parents of teenagers.

What would you want to hear about? What would your kids want to hear about?

Even more, what wouldn't you want to hear about?

On copyedits! And news!

2011-10-12T08:41:00.002-04:00

So, it turns out that caring for a newborn takes a lot of time. Go figure.

First, some news! My novel has a new title. Sorta. Now it will be STORM: Book 1 of the Elemental series. You may already know that water is the featured element in the first book, and as it's set in September in Annapolis, there's a lot of rain.

Book 2 will be SPARK (fire!), and I believe book 3 will be SPIRIT (surprise!).

The title has not yet been updated on Goodreads yet, but it has been updated on Amazon, in case you wanted to *ahem* preorder. No pressure.

I just got my copyedits (copy edits? I need a copyeditor for this blog post) last week. In case you don't know, the copyeditor is someone who checks all your grammar, punctuation, and spelling, in addition to continuity, chronology, fact checking, and a whole bunch of things I don't even want to think about.

Basically, a copyeditor is a person completely made of awesome.

For example.

I have a spot where I mention that an Air elemental would be able to cause illness, because he or she would be able to manipulate airborne viruses or bacteria. I specifically reference the Black Plague.

Here's the copyeditor's comment:

Bubonic plague is not caused by an airbornepathogen.

First off, I didn't even know that. Did you know that? Would it even occur to you? Do you know how many people have read this book? That went over all of their heads, too. And this is such a teeny tiny detail.

This is why my copyeditor is badass.

In addition to the detailed notes throughout my manuscript, I received a Copyediting Style Sheet. This is an eight page document (eight pages!!) listing my book's chronology (i.e., "X happens on Monday, Y happens on Tuesday"). This was exceptionally helpful, because there were a few spots in the manuscript where I referred back to the incorrect day.

(Did I mention that my copy editor is badass?)

There's also a section of special words I use, like PMS-ing, or 'sup, for consistency. Here's my favorite:

rawr-rawr-rawr (dog sound)

Ha!

There's also a list of every character I mention throughout the book. This includes random high school students whom I might just mention in passing.

Here's my favorite one of those:

Jakubowski, Rick(p. 284); deflowerer of Quinn Briscoe

As my buddy Alison said, the word "deflowerer" just doesn't get enough use.

Finally, as I go through the manuscript, there are numerous comments regarding whether music is too loud for a conversation, or whether it would be too dark for characters to actually see each other, or even spots where sloppy editing on my part has left a brief moment of confusion. (i.e., "What happened to Becca's shoes?")

I cannot imagine the amount of time or effort that would go into something like this.

I'm a detail oriented person, so this has been one of my favorite steps in the process. Right now I'm reading through the entire manuscript to make sure I'm not missing anything.

What about you guys? Would you enjoy the copyediting process, or would it make you nuts?

Do errors in media make you nuts?

2011-10-02T14:21:00.000-04:00

I'm not a grammar freak. I live south of Baltimore, where it's perfectly acceptable to say, "I'm doing good." Really, I think I get more odd looks if I say, "I'm doing well."

I'm also not a perfectionist. I want to put forth the best product I can, but if someone finds a typo in my manuscript, I don't go looking for razor blades. Everyone makes mistakes.

But lately, I'm seeing a lot of errors on television.

A few months ago, there was the Glee math error. Without making you click on the link, they basically put an equation on a white board that read, "5,000 x .25 = 20,000"

Um, I'm no mathematician, but that's not correct.

Yesterday morning, I was watching the new CW show, The Secret Circle. Some of the teenagers broke into the school principal's office to use the computer and hack into student files. When they were reading a specific entry in the school records, the heading read, "Vice Principle's Notes."

AUGH. It's like nails on a chalkboard, isn't it? I actually had to back up the DVR to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me.

Didn't everyone else learn that "principal" is spelled that way because the principal is supposed to be your pal?

I mentioned a while back that I was jarred by a novel that featured a protagonist ducking into a convenience store in Baltimore to buy a six-pack of beer. In Baltimore, you can't buy beer in a convenience store. You can't buy any alcohol of any kind outside a liquor store.

But that's a minor error based on unfamiliarity of the area, and the average reader isn't going to notice it, or care.

The errors on Glee and The Secret Circle? Those are huge errors. We're not talking about something only a stickler or a local would know. We're not even talking about something that could almost be classified as local dialect or casual speech ("I'm doing good"). We're talking about basic math. Basic spelling. How many people saw that math problem and thought it looked correct? How many people saw, "Vice Principle's Notes" and thought it was correct?

Worse, who saw those errors, recognized them, and thought, "Meh, most people won't notice."

I know these aren't isolated incidents. What have you seen? Do these kinds of errors make you crazy?

Peer pressure

2011-09-16T08:18:00.000-04:00

First off, thank you for all the congratulatory emails, and tweets, and Facebook posts, and blog comments. You guys are great. And Baby Sam (a boy!) is doing really well. Here's the obligatory cute baby picture.

I feel terrible about leaving you without content for the last few weeks. I've always been an industry blog addict, and it seems that everyone shuts down their blog during August. Lately, a lot of blogs are shutting down, period. I miss Editorial Ass. Editorial Anonymous. Even Pimp My Novel is shutting down for a while.

I'm crying. Do you hear me crying? I am.

But none of that has anything to do with peer pressure, which is what I wanted to comment on today.

I write YA. You know I write YA. But it means that I spend a lot of my time trying to remember what it was like to be a teenager. Sometimes, that's really difficult.

Other times, it's really easy. Like when I think about the guy I dated in high school. We dated for two years. I loved him. He was wonderful, and well-raised, and fun, and funny, and we had a good time together. He dumped me because I wouldn't have sex with him (I wasn't ready), and all his friends were pressuring him to "do it." He went to an all boys' school, I went to an all girls' school. Every year, my school had a variety show called The Coffee House, and because I played the piano, I was called on for any songs people wanted to sing. My ex-boyfriend came to the show shortly after we'd broken up, for whatever reason.

Wait, I know the reason. To tell me, during intermission, that he'd started dating another girl. One who "did it" with him on their second date. In the back seat of his Nissan Sentra.

(Sexy, right?)

I was crushed. I almost couldn't go back for the second half of the show. I remember sobbing in the darkened school library. I mean, it's one thing to dump someone because you're not getting what you want. It's entirely another to come back and slap them in the face with the fact that you found someone who will.

And all because of peer pressure.

My four-year-old goes to pre-K at a local private school. In the morning, they have eighth graders who direct the flow of student traffic, and hold the doors for parents, things like that. This year, the boy who holds the door is very polite. When he opens the door for me, he makes eye contact and says, "Good morning." When I leave, he says, "Have a good day." From what I can tell, he does this for everyone.

Because I was raised to be polite, I always respond in kind.

A few days ago, his friends were hassling him. Mocking him. "Ooooh, good morning!" and making kiss-up noises, things like that.

He ignores them, and keeps doing it.

But it made me wonder. By the time he reaches his senior year of high school, are his friends going to break him down? Is he going to start being a jerk, just because it finally got to be too much effort to be polite? Is he going to break some girl's heart, just because his friends kept mocking him?

The sad thing is, he'll probably get more girls (or guys, no judgment) if he keeps acting with politeness and confidence. But I know it's hard to see that when you're thirteen. Or eighteen.

Or hell, when you're in your twenties and thirties and beyond.

How have you guys been affected by peer pressure? Does it play a role in your writing? In your life? Do you ever regret following your friends, instead of following your heart?

~

I've been busy lately...doing this...

2011-09-08T14:26:00.002-04:00

Meet baby Sam.

Do you ever feel like a literary moron?

2011-08-31T17:23:00.001-04:00

First, I again apologize for the sparse blogging. I have a lot of pregnancy drama going on, and it's making it nearly impossible to sleep, function, and type.

My sad little wedding band set. *sniff*

Side note: making friends with the local fire chief totally paid off when I needed my wedding rings cut off at 9pm last night. Want to get some attention? Walk up to a firehouse in the dark, at 36 weeks pregnant.

But that's not what I was going to talk about.

I'm not a hugely educated author. Pretty much everything I've ever learned about writing has been on my own. I read a ton of blogs, I constantly self-edit, I do a metric ton of beta-reading so I've developed an eye for what works -- and what doesn't.

I have never taken a creative writing class in my life. The closest I've ever come was that unit of Language Arts when I was in eighth grade.

Even still, I'm not sure any classes would have prepared me for the literary terms that float around out there. Sure, I would have learned the mechanics of theme and dialogue and all the things I had to figure out on my own. But some of them are still a mystery to me. When I hear them, I smile and nod and pretend I have any idea what someone is talking about, but in the back of my head I'm doing the panicked student dance of, "OMG! WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT? DON'T CALL ON ME."

Mary Sue characters. I hear this all the time, especially in regards to romance novels. People have explained a Mary Sue character to me numerous times, and I still don't get it. Is it just a bland character? Someone who just exists to propel the story forward? Someone for whom the author created an image of herself? (I've heard all explanations. I still don't get it. Why Mary Sue?)

Purple Prose. I think I finally have a handle on this one (overwriting? too many descriptors?), but it's still something that makes me pause and think when I hear it. Why purple?

Deus ex Machina endings. This one took me forever. I finally get it: a resolution that comes out of nowhere. But why say "God out of the machine"? I took Latin in high school. Four years of it. And still. That doesn't even make sense.

I know I'm not alone here. What are some of the terms you hear floating around out there that make you squirm and avert your eyes? What are your secret mysteries?

Allow me to entertain you

2011-08-22T06:44:00.000-04:00

Why do we have the term, "sick as a dog"? It seems rather insulting to dogs.

Regardless, that's been my general state over the last week. Sick.

So sick that I won't bore you with it.

What I will do, however, is entertain you with these...

The best responses to obnoxious spelling on Facebook: http://www.happyplace.com/3645/the-best-obnoxious-responses-to-misspellings-on-facebook

A great news story about a dad delivering his baby by the side of the road (the 911 audio is priceless): http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/region_east_cincinnati/anderson_township/Baby-can%27t-wait-mom-delivers-child-in-car-on-way-to-hospital-in-Anderson-Township

And finally, some hot drumming:

Brigid Kemmerer, slacker.

2011-08-15T07:16:00.003-04:00

Yeah, actually, I haven't been a slacker. I've been busting my ass. You know, working the day job, raising my children, growing a fetus, writing a novel, all those little things.

But I've been negligent on the blog.

Luckily, the awesome Sarah Fine talked about me on her blog today, so I thought I'd re-run my post on how to find a good critique partner, since our topics go hand-in-hand. (I wrote this post before I knew how awesome Sarah was as a writer.)

How to find a [good] critique partner

If I were to have a FAQ section for email inquiries, this would be at the top, right above the request for my banking information because I've inherited 500,000 USD from a prince in Nigeria.

(I mean seriously. Does anyone fall for this? And why don't they use the dollar sign?)

I have two main critique partners.*

1) Bobbie. Bobbie has been there since the beginning. Since I thought it was acceptable to query a 130,000 word vampire novel. Since I had no idea how to make every scene move the plot forward one step. Since before I knew about Miss Snark and every other blog out there. Bobbie is one of my closest friends and I tell her everything. I've known her for five years, and I'm so frigging lucky, because she's insanely insightful. I'll tell her I'm struggling with a scene, and I'll get back this in depth character critique like:

So you're unsure of where to go now? How to resolve the moment between Michael and Gabriel? I can see how it's a pivotal moment and you want to play it right. You can't have them hug it out or Gabriel won't need the fire as much as he does now--it's his escape. If all is well on the home front--or even heading there--he won't have the need for release. I like that Gabriel's immediate feeling isn't anger but a sense of betrayal. He seemed to be feeling, before Hannah showed up, that he and Michael could at least be civil to one another and act like brothers now and then. To come home to this accusation would be painful and more isolating.

I think you need Michael to be suspicious, and I think his character would be. But the fire started before he left the house. Hannah could confirm this. But Michael's suspicion might at some point make Gabriel question whether Garrett is the arsonist. And even if Michael comes to believe Gabriel didn't start the fire, he's still going to suspect something's going on, and Gabriel's secrecy is going to bring more tension to their relationship.

I mean, you can't pay for critique notes like that. Sometimes I feel inadequate when I read her stuff, because I can't see all the angles like this. I feel like a caveman writing things like, "Um. This guy seems angry." Seriously, I don't know why Bobbie puts up with ME.

It didn't start out that way, of course. I'd posted a chapter on the critique site www.mywriterscircle.com, and she left some good comments, along with the line, "I would read more of this." So I looked up her profile, sent her an email, and said, "Would you really read more of this? I have half a book."

She read it, she liked it, she sent me some of her stuff. I read it, I liked it. We clicked right off the bat, and the timing was good. We were both beginners, and we were both at the same stage of the writing process.

A lot of that was LUCK. Kind of like love at first sight.

2) Alison: I've known Alison for about a year. She sent me a message on Absolute Write when I had a post up offering beta reads, and because I say yes to just about everyone who asks me to crit a manuscript, I told her to send over the first chapter or so. Then I completely forgot that I accepted, and I felt like a total heel when she emailed me 10 days later to ask if I got her email. (I blame my Blackberry.) But I could tell right away that Alison had some serious writing chops (see my last post about her recent signing with an agent), and I gave her a bunch of constructive criticism and sent it back.

That's usually a make-or-break point with a critique partner. I'm always honest, and I never sugar-coat anything. I've had people get back a critique of twenty pages, and move on. Alison wrote back that it was finally the feedback she'd been looking for, and asked if she could send more. I liked her writing and her style, so I read more. And more. And more. She kept offering to read something of mine, but I was agented at that point, with a book on submission, so I was a lot more careful sending things out. Finally we'd been working together long enough that I trusted her enough to send something her way. (You never know what freak is going to post your book on their blog or something.) Alison's critiques were awesome! Spot on! She picks up on things that I never would, especially when she guesses where the story is going. I remember in one of the earlier drafts of Elemental, she made the comment, "You have all these water bottles popping up everywhere! I can't wait to see what you're planning on doing with them!"

I read that comment and was like, "Uhhh...I'm not doing a damn thing with them. People are thirsty." But it was a great point, and I took out some of the references. Alison is great at picking up on foreshadowing that might not be intentional, or seeing links between characters that I might not have seen. It's every bit as insightful as Bobbie, just in a different way.

I owe a lot of my success with Elemental to these ladies.

I know, I know, you're saying, "Shut the F up about your amazing critique partners, and tell me how to find some of my OWN."

Reading the above, it seems like I just got lucky and found two great people and POOF, my writing life was easy. Brigid has everything! A book deal! Great critique partners! An amazing agent! An awesome editor!

Yeah, whatever. You want to know how many beta reads I did before landing on two people with whom I really clicked? I just went through my email, searched for "beta," and counted the individual email addresses.

Eighty-six.

And that doesn't count beta reads I did directly on message boards like Absolute Write and My Writers Circle. (I do a lot on my lunch hour. Hey, a girl needs to do something while eating.) That doesn't count people who might have used the words "Crit" or "Critique" instead of "Beta" in their email.

That's also over the course of five years.

The point? That's a lot of people. A lot of time. A lot of reading.

Finding a great critique partner is like finding a great husband. (Or wife.) It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take hard work, and compromise, and a solid base of trust.

Some tips:

1) Don't be lazy. If you were going to a bar to pick up men (or women), you'd take a shower, wear nice clothes, and try to look your best. Do the same thing when you're sending your stuff out for critique. Now's the time to be on your best behavior. Sometimes people would email me and say, "I know it's full of grammatical errors and misspellings, but I'll fix that stuff later. I just want to know if the story is worth the time to fix it." I mean, come on. If you don't know if it's worth the time to fix it, why is it worth my time to read it? Don't send out crap.

2) Be honest. Not just with others, with yourself. Maybe someone is AWESOME at critiquing your stuff. If you hate their writing, you're not going to want to reciprocate. That's not fair.

3) Critique a LOT. You know those advice columns where people write in and say, "I'm so depressed, I'll never find anyone. I hate going out and playing the dating game. There must be another way." Don't you want to hit those people? Dating is how you find a life partner. Critiquing a lot of stuff is how you find a critique partner.

Kind of like writing a book, finding a critique partner is something that sounds easy in theory. "I can write a compound sentence! I'm destined to be a great author! Here's where to send my check!" vs. "I'm a really nice person! My writing is amazing, so I'll quickly find someone amazing to read it! At 3am! In five minutes!"

Everyone can find a great critique partner. They're out there. I was, Alison was, Bobbie was.

All you have to do is put yourself out there. You know, with a little lip gloss.

~

If wishes were horses...

2011-08-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

Do you know that saying? "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride."

It used to be one of my favorites, even before I knew what it meant. I was a horse-crazy kid, and I used to beg and pray and plead for a horse of my own.

I didn't get one until I was nineteen years old. He was a crazy whack-job off-the-track Thoroughbred. Genuinely nuts. I have this one picture of him somewhere, and even in the picture, you can see he's a little wild-eyed. When I was 19, I had no idea how to handle him. I fell off that stupid horse more times than I care to remember.

I used to dream that the horse would earn me a trip to the Olympics. Mostly he just earned me trips to the Emergency Room.

But I'd worked my ass off to be able to keep him, and that's all that mattered. I had a horse to ride.

Sometimes writing is the same. I have no idea how many people have read and enjoyed Elemental. A lot, I assume, because I know books have to go through the wringer before an offer is made. But how many? Twenty? Fifty? Ten? My husband hasn't read the whole thing. My mother hasn't read any of it.

I like to daydream about what I'd do if my book became an international bestseller. This is kind of like how I like to daydream about what I'd do if I won the lottery. (And didn't I read once that your odds of winning the lottery are better than your odds of having a huge bestseller?) I could stay home with my kids. I could go to the gym and not wonder if I'm shorting my family on time. I could cook good food every night instead of frozen vegetables and processed chicken patties. Hell, I could hire a cook.

Sometimes my dreams are more concrete wishes. I wish I could get a big check, somehow keep it hidden from my husband, and do something crazy, like buy him a new car for Christmas. (His car is seven years old.) I wish I could buy my stepson a crazy-awesome MacBook for high school. I wish I could buy Nick every Thomas Train ever invented, with enough track that he could circle the house twice.

But I didn't really write the book for money. I wrote it because I love Becca, I love the Merrick brothers. I love writing, and I love the thought of people reading my stuff. Whether there are ten people out there who like the book, or only one, that's worth it to me.

And at least writing a book won't send me to the ER.

(I can hear my husband muttering under his breath: "Yeah. Yet.")

What about you guys? What are your writing dreams?

Congratulations are so totally in order...

2011-08-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite things about this whole publishing gig is that sometimes it's like finding long lost siblings. We're not bound by blood, of course, we're bound by agencies and publishing houses and the sheer love of the written word. Oh, and paranormal stuff, too.

But when I discover that I share an agent and an editor with someone, I know their work has to be truly awesome, and I can't wait to read it.

With that said, I offer huge congratulations to Nina Berry, for the sale of her debut Young Adult novel Otherkin.

From Publisher's Marketplace:

		August 1, 2011


		Children's: Young Adult		Nina Berry's OTHERKIN, in which a girl discovers she can shift into a tiger and is introduced into a world where people and objects aren't what they seem, to Alicia Condon at K Teen, in a two-book deal, by Tamar Rydzinski at Laura Dail Literary Agency (world).

Nina has a blog (don't we all??) at http://thetulgey.blogspot.com/ and a website at www.ninaberry.com.

Go say hi!! And add her to your watch list. I think her book sounds fantastic.

Congratulations, Nina!

Writing is hard

2011-08-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

"Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig."

--From my new favorite column, DEAR SUGAR

In which I stand up for myself.

2011-07-28T20:43:00.000-04:00

I'm not a confrontational person. You will never see me get in someone's face and start a throwdown. I just don't have that kind of personality.

While I have a keen BS-meter, it's rare that I'll call someone on it. I'll smile and nod and let them think they've pulled one over on me -- and then I'll go on my merry way.

When I drive, I'm an assertive driver. Not aggressive, just assertive. When I used to teach horseback riding lessons, especially when teaching kids to jump, I'd always tell them to "commit to the fence." If you're going over a jump, you're going over a jump. Once you've made the decision, there's no time for wavering. The same holds true for driving: if I'm going to change lanes, I do it, I don't dilly-dally about it. If I miss my turn, I go to the next one and turn around. When people are aggressive around me, I get the hell out of their way. Life's too short to police the highway if you're not an actual, ya'know, policeman.

On my drive to work, I exit the highway, go approximately half a mile to a U-turn area, and proceed to make a U-turn. This U-turn area is one lane, meaning only one person is supposed to make a U-turn at a time. Now, this U-turn area can also be used to turn left, so many times people will pull up next to me on my right, intending to go across the intersection, while I'm waiting to turn left into oncoming traffic.

Today, a man in a sedan cut inside me to my left. There was no road there -- only grass and gravel. Clearly I wasn't making the turn quickly enough for him. I drive a minivan, he was in a sedan. There was no way for him to see around me. When the traffic cleared and I started to pull out, he did the same.

I had no idea he was there.

I didn't hit his vehicle, but it was really close. I had to swerve into the other lane. Oncoming traffic on this road is going approximately 50mph, so it's not like I was turning left onto some tiny side street. His action could have caused a massive accident.

He was obviously furious that I chose to make the turn at the same time he did. I know this because he then hit his accelerator, swerved around my car, swerved in front of me, and crossed two lanes of traffic to make a left at the next intersection--which was also my turn.

This left me rather shaken. And I'm a pretty secure, solid driver.

I then proceeded to watch him run a stop sign to beat me through the intersection, then swerve around another driver who had the gall to make a signaled turn into an office complex.

He kept going up the hill, and at that point I knew, I knew he was going to my building. (We're at the top of the hill.) Sure enough, he turned into the same parking lot where I park.

Through sheer irony, we pulled into the parking lot at the exact same time. I wasn't even rushing, and I made it into the lobby before he did -- despite the maniacal driving.

When I got into the lobby, there was a man and a woman waiting for the elevators. I saw my driver friend approaching the building, so I decided to wait. When the elevator came, the woman held the door for me, but I said, "Go ahead, I'm going to wait for this guy."

She must have heard something in my voice, because she held the elevator anyway. (Honestly, I would have done the same thing. Show time!)

When the man entered the building, he was a big guy. He was wearing a polo shirt and khakis, but still a big guy. I'm not a small woman, and I'm also seven-and-a-half months pregnant, and he had at least 100 pounds on me, and a good foot in height.

He was on the phone. He tried to walk around me. He was very deliberately avoiding eye contact with me.

I stepped right in his path and said, "Why would you drive like that? I'm seven-and-a-half months pregnant. Why?"

He hesitated, just for a moment, like he couldn't decide what to do.

So I asked him again, a little more forcefully. "Why would you drive like that? Why? Tell me?"

He gave me a rude gesture -- not quite the finger -- then turned around, ducked into the stairwell (which is open -- no doorway), and sprinted up the stairs.

I was upset about this all morning. I worried that I should move my car. I worried that he'd be waiting in the stairwell with a knife this afternoon or something. I worried that he'd come after me.

But then, this afternoon, I realized something. He ran. From a big pregnant lady. He ran.

And I realized that this is how bullies have so much power. They're used to people being afraid of them. They're used to the impression of size and sheer badassness carrying them a long way. This guy probably drives like a dick every day, and no one gets in his face because he obviously has the size and demeanor to back it up.

Until you call him on it.

Now, looking back, I realized that my brain read the signals as soon as he came in the building. He could have made it into the lobby before I did, but he walked more slowly, probably hoping I'd be up the elevator before he came in. When he wouldn't make eye contact with me, he didn't want to have a confrontation. When he was in his car, he had a steel shield and the power of anonymity. In person, he was a scared little boy who'd been caught with his hand in the neighbor's candy jar.

I didn't scream at him. I didn't get in his face. I didn't even report him to building security, though I thought about it. I can guarantee you he'll still drive like a moron.

But maybe he'll think about it for half a second if he's anywhere near a white minivan.

~

Look, it's been a week since I've blogged

2011-07-27T08:00:00.022-04:00

Here's what's going on:

I received my editorial notes from my editor. They are awesome, but I wanted to get the revisions done quickly, so I've been relying on my husband's good nature to get them done in time.

I needed to request blurbs from people I don't know. It felt like asking complete strangers to watch my kids for an afternoon. Luckily, everyone I asked was incredibly awesome. Honestly, I always think writers couldn't possibly be nicer, and then you all ARE.

I've been working on the sequel to ELEMENTAL. My goal is to be done by the end of August.

I've interviewed two policemen for the aforementioned sequel. Policemen, I've found, are just as nice as firemen, and they love to talk about their work. My favorite part of last night's conversation was when I was asking detailed arson questions, and the officer interrupted me to say something like, "Now, this is for a book scenario, right? Not real life?"

HA. God help me if anything in my general vicinity catches on fire.

Oh yeah, and I'm growing a human being inside my body. I keep forgetting about that. Nine weeks to go! Or is it eight? Totally having second baby syndrome here.

What have you all been up to? Does any of the above sound interesting? Want to hear about editorial notes, or blurb requests, or interviewing professionals for your work? Want to hear some cool fireman/policeman stories? Want to tell gross pregnancy stories?

Here's a non-gross pregnancy story for you. On Sunday, I went to Target. While I was there, I saw a changing table (in a box) on a clearance shelf. Because it was half off, I picked up the box and put it on the cart. Please DO NOT TELL MY HUSBAND THAT I DID THIS. (Watch, this will be the one blog he reads.) The box weighed about eighty pounds.

So anyway, at the register, the girl asked if I wanted help getting it into my car, and I said yes. I was worried I'd pulled something lifting the box in the first place. Then the girl at the next register asked how far along I was, and I said, "Thirty-one weeks."

Her eyes bugged out of her head and she said, "Wow! You're huge for thirty-one weeks!"

Huh. Thanks.

I almost said, "You're huge for not being pregnant."

But I'm a writer, not a stand-up comedian, and honestly, Glen Burnie, Maryland is the last place you want to start a catfight. Or any fight, really. (A few years ago, I went to Wal-Mart at 4am on the day after Thanksgiving, and stood in a mile long line to get a coupon for a cheap television. The girl in front of me had two huge burly guys with her, and I was alone. She looked me up and down and said, "Girl, you crazy. You ain't got no man with you?")

I'm rambling.

Any good news to share? Bueller...? Bueller...?

Demonstrating Strength

2011-07-19T07:04:00.000-04:00

On my desk at work, I have this little list printed out. I got it from Seth Godin's blog, but I can't seem to find the entry again, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

The list is titled "Demonstrating strength."

The first thing on the list is, "Apologize."

I love that.

The funny thing about apologies is that they seem to represent weakness. You're admitting a failure, not only to yourself, but to someone else.

But they don't really represent weakness. It takes a lot of guts to apologize. To genuinely apologize. How much gumption does it take to BS about something? To throw someone else under the bus? To make up a little white lie about why something wasn't done, or why you acted the way you did?

I've been thinking about apologies a lot lately, especially since we've had this roofing problem in my house for YEARS. We've paid one roofing company $4,000 to replace our roof, then another $4,000 to repair our roof, and we're still having a leaking issue. The insurance company sent out a new guy who gave us a quote to rebuild the back section of our roof for a third time -- for another $2,000.

I called the original roofing company. What did I have to lose, right?

I wasn't a bitch. I didn't go in screaming at the owner. I just said, "Hey, we've paid you guys $8,000, and our roof is still leaking. Can you do anything?"

She came out yesterday to figure out the problem. She agrees that we need a flat roof system instead of the shingles they originally installed. It would have cost more money for them to originally install a flat roof system, but you know what she told me yesterday?

She apologized.

And then said they're going to rebuild the back roof. For free.

That took strength. And money. It cost her something.

But you know what? It's going to earn them a customer for life. And a considerable amount of word-of-mouth.

A heck of a lot better than a little white lie, huh?

~~

Agent and editor blogs

2011-07-17T06:57:00.002-04:00

After the last post, a few people have asked what industry blogs I read regularly.

Here's what I've got. (And this is by no means complete, so feel free to make recommendations in the comments, and I'll update the list. Keep in mind I'm writing this from memory, and it's 6:30am on a Sunday.)

These do not include author blogs (unless, like Hannah Moskowitz's blog below, they routinely include publishing/writing information). Most of the author blogs I follow are in the sidebar to the right. And even those aren't a complete list!

Agents:

http://literaticat.blogspot.com/

http://kortizzle.blogspot.com/

http://www.kidlit.com

http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/

http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/

http://www.rachellegardner.com/

http://pubrants.blogspot.com/

http://confessionsofawanderingheart.blogspot.com/

http://mandyhubbard.livejournal.com/

Editors:

http://editorialanonymous.blogspot.com/

http://editorialass.blogspot.com/

http://betsylerner.wordpress.com/

http://www.alanrinzler.com/blog/

Book Folks who don't neatly fit into the above categories:

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/

http://www.therejectionist.com/

http://internspills.blogspot.com/

http://rejecter.blogspot.com/

http://hannahmosk.blogspot.com/

http://merbarnes.blogspot.com/

Kid Rock taught me something about writing. No, seriously.

2011-07-14T06:17:00.000-04:00

So, last night, Mike and I were watching The Daily Show. You know, the one with Jon Stewart. This was my husband's selection. I was just watching until it got to the end so we could watch an old episode of Medium on NetFlix.

Remember, Mike = love of politics. Brigid = trying to keep up with politics for her husband's sake.

Then the featured guest on The Daily Show was Kid Rock, and I rolled my eyes at my husband and said, "I'm really not a fan of Kid Rock." I mean, I like that song with Cheryl Crow, and I guess I like that one about summertime, but I'm really not a fan of grungy screaming music, like Badwitdaba. And I'm definitely not a fan of grungy dirty men. It's just not my thing.

But we watched anyway, because my husband loves Jon Stewart, and you know what was interesting? Jon Stewart started talking about how much he respected Kid Rock, because Kid Rock knew his business. He knew what went on in music production, he know how to handle himself on tour, and he took good care of his kids and was a good father.

After watching that clip, I have new respect for Kid Rock.

But I keep thinking about the part where Jon Stewart was amazed at how much Kid Rock knew about the business. When he asked about it, Kid Rock said that he'd started out sweeping up in a record company. He learned all the terms and grew from there.

But I think it's more than that. I think there's a tendency, once you start getting somewhere, to forget that there's one person in control of your destiny: YOU.

Just because you have an agent or a book deal doesn't mean you should forget about the publishing industry. I still read industry blogs every single day. I read Publisher's Marketplace to see what's selling. I read agent blogs to see what they're looking for. I read editor blogs because they're jaded and funny. NO! I'm totally kidding. I read editor blogs because I'm curious what they're looking for, and they have a different insight from the agent blogs.

I read links about new e-Book advances. About new e-Readers. About self-publishing phenoms. About teens having books banned in their schools. About what people are reading. I read the local news, and not just for my locality. (I love going to CNN and reading all the US links. And I mean all of them.) I want to know what's going on in the world. You want to know where you can really get some good ideas to jumpstart a story? Read some local news articles. In Incendiary, the sequel to Elemental, I wanted to write a scene at a party where some kids would be goofing off with fire, using aerosol cans and a stick to make a homemade blowtorch. I thought to myself, "Would kids really be that stupid?"

And then the next day, there was an article on CNN about teenagers messing around with aerosol cans and a bonfire, and getting injured.

So yes. Kids would really be that stupid.

But I digress.

There's a natural tendency to get to a point and let the experts handle what they handle. And that's okay. There's a reason you want an agent and an editor. They are your experts, and their opinion matters a whole lot. (I'm so lucky to have such great ones.) I don't keep up on industry news so I can nitpick and second guess. I keep up on industry news because I want to be as informed as I can. I want to be a professional artist, not someone who has to be dragged out of a ladies room at 3am, coked up with hair a mess, with a handler hissing, "You have to be on Regis and Kelly in three hours!"

I want responsibility.

I want to be in control of my destiny.

In short, when I grow up, I want to be just like Kid Rock.

(Here's a link to the clip of the show, if you're curious: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-july-12-2011/kid-rock)

Blogger tip, for you writers out there (and anyone else)

2011-07-09T08:51:00.000-04:00

In Blogger, you can tell Blogger to use a special feed if people access your blog from a mobile device. Since about 40% of my traffic comes from iPhones or iPads (thanks, guys!), I thought I might share how to turn on the "Mobile" setting, because it really is far more convenient. I didn't even realize this until I got the new phone, and found myself trying to catch up on some blogs while on vacation.

Just go into your blog settings, click on the "mobile" tab, and when it asks:

Show mobile template on mobile devices ?

Change the option to "Yes."

(This option defaults to "No.")

Let me show you the difference. It's not a huge deal, because most phones can be rotated to expand web pages, but it's a hassle -- and we all know we live in an accelerating world. The more easily people can read your content, the more hits you might get.

My blog.

This is how a blog looks with the mobile template. The posts are shrunk to the width of the screen, with a snippet of each one.

My husband's defunct blog.

This is how a blog looks without the mobile template. The entire webpage is shrunk to the width of the screen, and impossible to read unless you turn your phone sideways and expand the text.

Like I said, not a big deal. Just some food for thought.

How my new phone is changing my life

2011-07-01T05:56:00.000-04:00

So I have a new phone. The Motorola Droid X2.

You can totally ignore the rest of this post if you want to. I'm going to relate it back to my writing, but if you don't care about phones, just stop reading now. I won't be offended in the least. One of my favorite things about the Internet is how you can find out the real deal on just about anything, so when I find something I really love (especially something expensive), I like to talk about it.

I used to have a Blackberry Curve.

Because I really only needed a phone for email and text messaging (I'm not an app person), my Blackberry worked just fine. Mostly. Usually. Until it would freeze when sending an email. Or text messages would be delayed 20 minutes. The ONLY two apps I had on my Blackberry were Facebook and Twitter, and neither of those are hugely intensive apps. I could get to YouTube (if I needed to entertain my preschooler while waiting at a restaurant), but more often than not, the videos would time out.

I couldn't read Word documents. The internet interface was HORRIBLE. Want to read a web page on a Blackberry? Forget about it.

Again, I put up with it because I liked having buttons, and I really only wanted it for email and texting.

But let me tell you, the minute I got a text message saying I was eligible for an upgrade, I was all over it.

Now, I used to be the type of girl to go out, slap down her credit card, and buy something without thinking about it.

Then I met my husband.

Now I'm very careful about my money. I read product reviews. I ask people for opinions.

I looked very carefully at the iPhone 4, the HTC Thunderbolt, the LG Ally, and the Droid.

My husband has an iPhone 4. I'm not opposed to it, but I'm not a fan of the on-screen typing.

Several people trashed the HTC Thunderbolt, saying the battery barely lasted 2 - 3 hours. Since I like to plug my phone in all night, then not worry about it all day, that was a killer for me.

My stepson has the LG Ally. It's nice, but I'm not a fan of the flip-out keyboard. I have no idea why. It's a personal thing. He loves it.

When I went to the Verizon store, I was pretty torn between the Droid X2 and the iPhone 4. I even said that to the salesman, and said, "Help me make a decision."

He said, "Do you want to link it to your iTunes?"

No. I have an iPod, and I will never use my phone to listen to music.

He said, "Then, it's a toss-up."

Really, it was. They were exactly the same price ($199 with a two-year contract). He said the iPhone has better apps, but the Droid has many more free apps. The Droid has a much bigger screen than the iPhone. But -- as I learned later -- the Hulu Plus and Netflix apps are not available on the Droid X2 yet. (They are available on the older Droid X, however.)

But again, I really cared about the phone for email and texting. I wanted to have something my husband didn't have. (This is a big deal. My husband is a tech guy. He has every "toy" under the sun.) So I went with the Droid X2.

The on-screen keyboard is taking some getting used to, but it's not bad. I had to play with the settings because it included a setting that would automatically "guess" your next word. I suppose that's convenient if you say the same thing to forty different people, but I got rather sick of typing "phone" and having it automatically add "input" when I hit the spacebar. (I don't even understand that. Are a lot of people typing "phone input"?)

I also find the "autocorrect" rather amusing. As I told my friend Alison the other day, when I typed "effing," it automatically changed it to "edging." When I typed "f**king," it had no problem with it. Clearly Motorola doesn't want me to be coy.

The Word app is stellar. I didn't realize how nice it was until my editor sent me the back cover copy, and all I had to do was click to download, and there it was. In beauty on the screen. (Reading a word doc on the Blackberry was similar to reading a calculator, circa 1984. Grainy, pixelated, and hard on your eyes.)

I just discovered I can use HBO Go, and it's awesome. The picture quality is amazing.

The camera takes incredible pictures. The Blackberry took pictures that looked like I'd used an old Polaroid.

Here's a picture taken with my Blackberry:

Here's a picture taken with my new Droid X2:

So there you go. Nicer pics. Easily as nice as my Canon Powershot.

The Droid does have a Blogger app, but the reviews said it was a battery hog, so I didn't bother to download it. I can't see myself doing a lot of blogging from the phone. It does have a nice Twitter interface and Facebook interface. I did download Tweetdeck, but that's not really a phone app (not for me, anyway), so I uninstalled it. The Gmail app is fanTAStic if you use Gmail, because it automatically syncs to your computer, and automatically knows everyone you've ever emailed (whereas in the Blackberry, even if you emailed someone from your Blackberry once, if you didn't add them as a contact, it wouldn't remember their email address).

The screen is huge, which I love. Much bigger than the iPhone. I had been considering getting a tablet, but now I don't think I'll need to.


My husband's iPhone on the left, my Droid X2 on the right.

Does anyone else have a Droid? Do you use it to manage your writing career? Do you like it? Can you recommend any useful apps?

Anyone else have a Blackberry and want to throw it at the wall? On that, I feel your pain.

Elemental news

2011-06-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

Guess what? I have back cover copy.

For the non-publishing people, that means I have the words that are going on the back of my book.

My amazing editor sent me three choices, and said I was free to pick one, or I could mash them together and create my own. Let me tell you -- you think writing a query letter is hard? You only need one person to pick that up and want to read it. These are the words going on the back of the book. These are the words people are going to use to decide whether to read the first few pages.

These are the words I'm going to share with you right now:

Earth, Fire, Air, Water – they have more power than you dream.

Becca Chandler is suddenly getting all the guys—all the ones she doesn’t want. Ever since her ex-boyfriend spread those lies about her.

Then she saves Chris Merrick from a beating in the school parking lot. Chris is different. Way different: he can control water—just like his brothers can control fire, wind, and earth. They’re powerful. Dangerous. Marked for death.

And now that she knows the truth, so is Becca.

Secrets are hard to keep when your life’s at stake. When Hunter, the mysterious new kid around school, turns up with a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time, Becca thinks she can trust him. But then Hunter goes head-to-head with Chris, and Becca wonders who’s hiding the most dangerous truth of all.

The storm is coming . . .

So there you go. Back cover copy. What do you guys think? I know, I know, not as exciting as front cover copy, but still fun.

I also have a new release date. May 2012. May has traditionally been a good month for me: I got married in May, bought my first house in May, my son was born in May...so I think this is an excellent omen.

And lest you think I sat here and toiled away on that cover copy on my own, I didn't. As always, I owe great thanks to my awesome agent, Tamar Rydzinski, my awesome editor at K Teen, Alicia Condon, my awesome writing friends, Bobbie Goettler, Alison Kemper Beard, Sarah Fine, Sarah Maas, and Erica O'Rourke.

It took four times as many people to create that cover copy as it does to create a baby.

Elemental is also up on Goodreads, if you'd like to check it out...

~~

So when do I get to call myself a writer?

2011-06-23T06:32:00.000-04:00

I first started writing as a teenager. I was all right at it, I guess. But I didn't identify myself as a writer. My English teacher practically had to arm wrestle me to get me to submit anything for the school's literary magazine. I didn't write poetry, I didn't write short stories. I didn't hang out wearing black, going to readings, or smoking cigarettes. I wrote books. I still have looseleaf binders full of novels written longhand.

Ironically, the four brothers who appear in Elemental originally appeared in the first novel I wrote in high school. Imagine carrying four teenage boys around in your head for almost two decades.

That sounds kind of gross.

Moving on.

When I was 19, I landed an agent. Now this was when the internet was in its infancy. I landed an agent through sheer luck. Some guy on a writing board on AOL was like, "A friend of a friend is starting a literary agency, and I think he'd like your stuff."

Right now, I want to go shake that nineteen-year-old Brigid and say, "YOU HAD AN INTRO TO AN AGENT. YOU FREAK."

Then, I was like, "Huh. 'Kay."

So that intro turned into a real agent, and my book went out to publishers. It didn't sell. I let the agent relationship peter out into nothing.

Even then, even when my book was on submission, I didn't tell people I was a writer.

Years later, when I was married and started looking into this writing gig for real, I still didn't tell anyone I was a writer. They say you shouldn't talk about it until you have a book deal.

I don't know who "they" are, but they're right.

I remember getting my first partial request, and telling a coworker. He told another coworker, and then half the office knew.

And here's the problem with that: publishing takes a long time. People were all excited for me at first, but then I didn't land an agent, and I just felt embarrassed. When people don't know how much time and energy it takes, they seriously don't know. When I eventually landed the amazing Tamar, I told my best friend I'd finally found a literary agent. She said, "Why is that a big deal?"

She honestly thought that finding a literary agent was as simple as opening up the yellow pages and throwing a dart at a name.

Ha. Hahahaha.

Even after I had an agent, I still didn't identify myself as a writer. Still!

And now I have a book deal.

Is the time now? Can I tell people I'm a writer? When people ask me what I do, I still rattle off my regular job. My day job.

Do I wait for the book to come out? Do I wait for the second book to come out?

Where are the industry blogs about these life altering questions?

Do you guys identify as writers? When did you start? When will you start?

On being cool.

2011-06-19T15:20:00.000-04:00

First, the title of this post is kind of a joke. I don't know anything about being cool. Seriously, I was the girl in high school who wore glasses, came in early, and spent her free time in the library.

I'm the same person as an adult. I just have a healthy dose of cynicism and apathy.

So I'm not talking about the type of "cool" that people associate with James Dean or Colin Farrell. Or, for you kids out there, I'm not talking about the type of "cool" associated with Justin Bieber. (Though that right there will get me a little bit of flack from my husband.)

I'm talking about the type of "cool" that means treating other people with respect, no matter who you are.

I asked my husband a very basic question about politics the other day. I'm not even going to tell you what the question was, but most people would know the answer. I've never followed politics, but because my husband is fascinated by politics, I've spent the last year trying to understand it, follow it, and speak intelligently about it. (I'm still working up my nerve on that last one.)

My husband could have pulled the A-hole move and talked down to me. He could have patted me on the head and told me to go back to my little YA books. He also could have done the thing where you answer the question, then keep expanding on it to show how much you know about something. My husband didn't do any of those things. He just answered the question and we moved on with the discussion.

This sounds like a little thing. It's not.

I even remarked on it to him. It's one of my favorite things about him, that he'll never be arrogant or nasty about anything.

He said it's a matter of respect.

I remember once I went out with this guy when I was around 22. My mom set us up, and that should have been a warning sign right there. I mean, the guy drove a Buick. Now look: there is nothing wrong with driving a Buick.

Unless you're 22.

It was a new Buick, with leather seats and all the bells and whistles. I remember he had a button on the middle dash, something about traction control.

Now, I'm a bit of a dork, and I love knowing how cars work. I've been known to read the manual. (Yes, really.) I said to him, "Hey, I've never seen a car with a button for traction control. How does that work?"

He said, really snootily, "It controls the car's traction."

Well, gee.

Not one to be put off, I said, "But how? What does it do?"

I needed an answer. I mean, does it slow the wheels down? Change something about the pull from the engine? I was fascinated by the fact that something like traction could be controlled by pushing a button.

He kept trying to make things up, and I kept asking more questions, and finally he got really flustered and snapped, "Just stop asking questions about the car, okay?"

I think you can all deduce that the first date was also the last.

I mean, he could have just said he didn't know.

We totally could have looked it up in the manual.

But really, I didn't start this post to talk about old boyfriends. I actually started it to talk about writers.

A few years ago, I read a post on a very popular agent's blog about one of that agent's authors coming out with a book. I loved, loved, LOVED the concept of the book, and I was really excited about it. Here's the kicker: the book was coming out eighteen months later.

Every now and again, the agent would mention the book on the blog. Around the time I thought the book was due to be released, I couldn't remember the title. I actually emailed the agent and said, "I've been looking forward to this book for a long time, but I can't remember the title."

The agent wrote back. The book was coming out soon. I followed the author on Twitter.

On the day I ordered the book, I sent a tweet to the author (a debut author), that essentially said, "Just ordered your book! Been looking forward to it since I first heard about it on [agent's] blog! Can't wait."

I didn't expect a response. She didn't know me from anyone. Really, no response would have been fine.

Here's what I got back:

yeah thanks

That's it.

Now, look. I'm not going to judge anyone's Twitter style. Like I said, she didn't need to write back. I'll let you draw your own conclusions of the interaction right there.

I will tell you that I was kind of turned off.

A few years ago, I read the debut novel of Evangeline Collins, Her Ladyship's Companion, and it was frigging awesome. It also has a stunning cover. (It's totally a romance novel, so if that's not your thing, it won't be for you.)

I wrote an email to Evangeline Collins, telling her how much I loved her book. Again, no response would have been fine. I know people have lives, and some people get boatloads of emails from readers. Besides, the purpose of my email was to say, "YAY! I loved your work so much that I wanted you to know!" Not to say, "Please engage me in conversation."

But Ms. Collins wrote back. To thank me. That's class. And when her next book came out, I immediately pre-ordered it. And loved it.

I had another one of these today. A friend asked for some book recommendations on Twitter. Here's the conversation:

LesRhodes:

@BrigidKemmerer oh any book recommendations? im running low. and we need to finally pick a date for a playdate for the boys

BrigidKemmerer:
@LesRhodes Yes, we do!! I just read Boy Toy by @barrylyga and LOVED it. Also The Iron King by @Jkagawa. Good stuff.

If I know they're on Twitter, I always mention the author when I recommend their books. Not only do they know I liked their stuff, but it usually links back to their website in case people want to find their stuff easily.

I didn't expect either of those authors to respond.

Barry Lyga did, to say thanks. I almost went all fangirl, because seriously Boy Toy is one of the best books I've ever read. It's tough to make a book moving and gripping and un-put-down-able while still making it funny enough to make me laugh out loud in places. Incredible book. I almost want to stop writing this post to go read it again.

And the author, the author, took time out of his day and thanked ME.

I mean, come on.

That's pretty cool.

In which my 4-year-old cracks the writing whip.

2011-06-12T12:42:00.000-04:00

Have you guys ever seen the kids' show, "Pinky Dinky Doo"? It's a cute show, about a girl who makes up stories. Nick (my four-year-old) loves it.

This afternoon, we're watching it. I said, "Nick, you know, Mommy is like Pinky Dinky Doo."

He said, "No, you are not."

I said, "Yes, I am. I make up stories."

Slightly more intrigued, he still insisted, "No, you do not."

I said, "Yes. I do. I got paid for a story, and that's how we bought you that swingset."

He thought about that for a moment and said, "Oh. Okay. You can make up some more stories, then."

~

Crits for Water: The Elemental brothers would approve

2011-06-10T09:15:00.001-04:00

So who's looking for a critique? Who's looking to help people on the other side of the world?

Guess what? You can do BOTH.

Kat Bauer, who is an amazing person to begin with, is running a series on her blog to raise money for Charity: Water.

For everyone who donates $10, we're doing a random drawing to win a 5,000 word critique from me (and I'm thorough, people). If you don't win my critique, Kat is still giving away a 2,500 word critique to everyone who makes a donation. So either way, you win. Win win. Or, as Michael Scott would say, win win win.

Now that I've typed "win" so many times, it's starting to look misspelled.

Here's the link to enter the drawing: http://wp.me/phdMs-wU

Here's a link to an interview that awesome blogger Mary Kaley did on my critique style.

In case you don't know anything about Elemental, it features four brothers who can control the elements of water, fire, earth, and air. (Each brother controls a different element.) Christopher Merrick, the youngest brother, controls water. He's the star of Elemental.

Chris would totally be down with this drawing.

Even if you don't want a critique, consider making a donation. It's ten dollars. Ten dollars will provide clean water for one person for TEN YEARS.

Go. Click. Donate. If nothing else, you'll feel better about yourself for doing something right.

Maybe I'm missing something...

2011-06-09T08:00:00.000-04:00

First, some housekeeping: Go congratulate Becky Wallace on signing with Jennifer Laughran! I've been meaning to post this for about two weeks, but since the baby is eating my brain cells, I keep forgetting until after a post goes live. Congratulations, Becky! I had the privilege of reading the first few chapters of Becky's MS back in January, and I knew she was going to get snatched up quickly.

Second, some results: The poll on the right is still live, and it looks like people either hate cliffhangers, or they don't really give a crap. In my opinion, that means we should eliminate them entirely. That's some solid science right there. I mean, fourteen people responded. Clearly a global majority.

Third, the Facebook drama:

Basically (I'm trying to save you from clicking on links), Facebook is rolling out some new software where, if you post a picture, Facebook will try to recognize your friends and suggest tagging them.

People are flipping out about this.

Now, from what I understand, Facebook does not automatically tag you in photos, it just suggests the tag, and you have to accept it. Aside from that, everything is exactly the same. The person being tagged will get an alert that they've been tagged, and they can remove the tag if they want. There is nothing now to prevent you from being tagged in a photo. The only difference is that before, you had to tag your friends manually (using those baby-consumable brain cells), and now Facebook will make suggestions.

Am I missing something? Why are people so up-in-arms? Is it just the knee-jerk reaction to change? Is it like when Facebook rolls out some minor change every six months, and there are a billion "Like" pages about how people want Facebook to go back to the way it was? I understand privacy concerns, but I'm not sure how this is really any big deal. I honestly don't understand how this is all that different from how Facebook operates now.

What do you think?

More on Talent -- Ballet

2011-06-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

I'm going to come right out and say that I don't know anything about ballet. I took lessons when I was a little girl, of course, but the horses quickly took over my life and I don't remember anything but the five positions. My niece is an exceptionally talented ballerina, and wins competitions all the time. I still don't know much about it.

But I still love dancing. Not doing it (I'd need to be drunk), but watching it. I love So You Think You Can Dance, and it's killing me that we're having work done on the house and the DVR is disconnected, because I've missed the beginning of this season.

Did anyone see that movie from ten years ago, Center Stage? Probably not, because I went with my friend Theresa on opening night, and we were the only two people in the theater. It's terribly corny, and the acting is ... well, what you'd expect from a movie that's the visual equivalent of a Sweet Valley High novel.

But I loved the male lead, "Charlie," played by male dancer Sascha Radetsky. Every now and again I Google this guy just to see what he's up to. He wrote a great article for Newsweek a few years back: Don't Judge Me By My Tights, about growing up as a male ballet dancer, and the stereotypes he was faced with. It's pretty moving.

I think I read once on Miss Snark's blog that writers should always spend some time looking at talent that's not their own. Visit an art museum, read great literature, something. I like to watch dancers. Especially good ones.

Here's the finale from Center Stage. It's not traditional ballet (the music is Michael Jackson and Jamiroquai), and it's a fun production. If you have ten minutes, give it a watch. (Sorry I can't embed it here.)

Here's how I feel about the whole WSJ YA censorship thing...

2011-06-05T08:43:00.001-04:00

All right, look. This is going to be brief, because a thousand-and-one people out there are going to say this better than I am.

This relates to the Wall Street Journal article by Meghan Gurdon, talking about YA books:

Darkness Too Visible: Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?

I first heard about this article from Alison Kemper, who posted about it on her Facebook wall.

Did you see some of the "appropriate" books they recommend for teens were written 50 years ago? I'm so sick of people saying kids can't handle what these books are about. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: books are a safe way to explore the world around you.

When you can't watch the evening news without hearing about meth addiction (Ellen Hopkins' CRANK) or a female teacher having sex with a middle school student (Barry Lyga's BOY TOY), or a kid being booked for murdering a classmate by lighting him on fire (RIGHT BEHIND YOU, by Gail Giles), then what's wrong with reading books about it? I'm intrigued by Mormon polygamy due to all the media coverage and the stigmas attached to it, from the beliefs behind it to the religious sects that still practice it. Do I want to move to Utah and join a sect to give it a whirl? Do I want to practice polygamy right in my own home? No, I read THE CHOSEN ONE by Carol Lynch Williams, and it was graphic and horrifying and downright amazing.

(All those books I just mentioned are awesome, and I wouldn't hesitate to give them to the right teenager.)

Personally, I think it's far safer for kids to read these things and virtually experience them than for kids to explore things they see and hear about on the news in their own way. Fifty years ago, the news wasn't broadcast far and wide, with headline crawls and graphic images on thirty different stations. Fifty years ago, there'd be no question of whether to show the gruesome images of Osama Bin Laden's death wound -- there'd be no question, because we wouldn't see it. The article mentions that people protested a graphic cover on a book about cutting? Because that would be too much for a teen to handle? What about when the photoshopped (yet just as disgusting) image of Osama Bin Laden's death was all over the internet -- and on the front page of some newspapers -- for all to see. My four-year-old saw that picture on the newsstand at the grocery store. And we expect teens to be shocked by the image of a few razor scars?

Really?

I was discussing this issue with my husband this morning, after he read the entire article. He said, "I kind of understand what she was saying." He then described a graphic scene in the book he was reading, a book about zombies. He said, "I don't know if this book is marketed to teens or not, but I'd never give it to Jonathan to read." (Jonathan is my fourteen-year-old stepson.)

I hustled to Amazon and looked up the book. Though the protagonist is a fifteen-year-old girl, it's not marketed to teens.

And you know what? My husband is handling books like this the right way. He's reading them first.

I agree that parents need to parent. I had to think long and hard about letting Jonathan read Elemental, because it deals with some pretty strong bullying and there's one near-date-rape. I agree that teachers need to teach, and schools have an obligation to guide teens towards appropriate books. (Much like the author of the Book Reviews and English News blog, where books are read and reviewed prior to being recommended in the school library.)

But I don't think that anyone has an obligation to censor books. If you don't think it's appropriate, don't read it.

Just don't take that opportunity away from anybody else.

~

I'm a writer and a mom. Here's the best advice I can give you.

2011-06-02T20:12:00.000-04:00

Use grocery delivery.

Seriously.

I have never done this before, but I saw an ad that you get free delivery from Peapod (by Giant) for the first 60 days, and I figured, what the hell.

Every Saturday, Michael and I used to load Nick into the car and go to Giant. We have a pretty standard list of things to buy. All total, it takes us about two hours (including driving) to go to the store, shop, pay, load the car...why am I explaining this? You all know how to shop for groceries. So two hours, every Saturday.

TWO HOURS, people. I can write 2,000 words in two hours.

So I tried Peapod. After one experience, I was hooked. I know not everyone has Giant in their area, but most larger chains are offering grocery delivery, so check it out.

Aside from the time premium, we've discovered that we're saving money. I load the virtual "cart" and place the order on Wednesday, scheduling delivery for Saturday morning. Since you can update the cart up until 6pm the night before delivery, as I notice things in the house, I can update the cart. (Oh! We're out of detergent, better add that! Or, hey, we don't need another box of macaroni and cheese, Nick is boycotting yellow foods this week.) So by Saturday morning, I get exactly what I need to get through the week.

Delivery here is $7.95 if you order more than $100. Personally, I haven't spent less than $100 at the grocery store since 1995, so it's not a hard target to hit. It's free for the first sixty days, so there's no risk in giving it a try. If you choose a wider time window, you get $2 off delivery.

Seriously, considering gas prices, you probably blow through $8 just driving to the store and back.

Last week was our first glitch, and it was the 4th week we've done this. We ordered plain Coffee-mate creamer, and they sent French Vanilla. I sent them an email, and they gave us the money back.

I do not work for Giant. I don't care if you use this or not.

But we love it. It's like getting a morning of writing back.

Give it a try.

YA Cliffhanger Trend: Friend or Foe?

2011-05-30T08:17:00.004-04:00

So I've been reading a lot of YA lately. (Hello, my name is Brigid, and I'm a bookaholic.)

I've been reading so much YA that I'm waiting for my husband to bring the hammer down and tell me to stop buying books on the Kindle. (I'm sure he regrets the day he bought me that thing. You mean I don't need to leave the couch to buy a book instantly?)

But there's a clear trend in YA for ending on a cliffhanger. Not just a cliffhanger, almost to the point where the entire first book is almost completely setup, and when you finally get to the climax, the book ends right there. You have to wait for part two.

Elemental is the first book in a series, and while there are open threads at the end, the story arc of book one is complete. The second book (tentatively titled Incendiary) follows the path of a different brother, and it, too, will have a complete story arc with open threads.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this latest trend. When the first story arc is wholly complete but there's a driving need for a second book, I love it. (Like The Hunger Games or Hex Hall, both of which I enjoyed greatly.) When the book obviously can't stand alone, I hate it.

What about you guys? Do you like this new trend? Do you hate it? If you're a writer, do you feel the need to end on a cliffhanger just to keep your readers reading?

I put a poll in the sidebar if that's easier than commenting: ------>

Plagiarism and theft, and why I don't worry about either

2011-05-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

After my last post on critique partners, I received a great email, with a great question. With her permission, I wanted to respond on the blog:

I've been considering publishing since last year, and I think I'm going to quit [my critique site] soon. It was pretty fun and helped me learn a lot, but it's gotten to the point where posting online is no longer a good idea. I'm not really afraid of the little girls plagiarizing my stuff (which often is the case) as I am of the James Freys of this world.

For that matter, while I read your post about finding good CPs (which was a godsend, btw. I've been mulling over the need for CPs for a while), I saw you mention two writer forums where you used to hang out and swap critiques in. I don't know if it's because of the close encounters of the 3rd type with online plagiarism, but joining those forums is something that gives me the heebiejeebies. I know you persisted in the forums until you scored gold, and it's not like I'm cutting corners. I'm merely and simply put: a coward.

I'm still hovering over that cliff between not starting the publishing process (revise, research, network) and starting it, so that's also an obstacle I'm putting on myself. If I hauled my ass to finally get started and begun networking with people, the possibility of finding a CP that way would also open up.

I edited the hell out of her email to lose any identifying details, so if there are any grammatical inconsistencies, they're all mine. Bear with me, it's 5am while I'm writing this post.

My boss said something to me the other day that popped into my head when reading this email: Other people rarely think of you as much as you think other people think of you.

In other words, I think there's more of a tendency to worry about online plagiarism than there is actually evidence of it.

First of all, what's the point? If you look at plagiarism cases that have hit the press, like James Frey, Cassie Edwards, and Kaavya Viswanatha, they all have one thing in common: they stole from published authors.

Seriously, this is a big distinction. They stole something that had already made it through the rounds of publication. They stole proven words. They didn't go scouring the message boards looking for unpublished manuscripts. That's like being an amateur designer and having someone break into your house to steal the half finished clothes you were sewing. Why bother? They're not done, they can't really be replicated, and who even knows if they'll be a success?

Now, I know there are people on message boards who steal story ideas all the time, and then post them as their own. I remember a few years ago when I'd posted parts of my vampire story, and two days later, this other guy posted his vampire story, and said, "This was inspired by another story I read here on the forums." And then he basically rewrote my scene his own way. I was pissed. I was furious. Seriously, I was ready to spit nails.

But you know what? His story was completely different from mine, despite having the same idea. He couldn't write in my voice any more than I could write in his. My story didn't sell. His story didn't sell. Any harm done? No. As my husband likes to say, you make your own stress.

It's just too much work to steal an untested manuscript, make it your own, and then submit it for publication. What happens when you're going to have to write a sequel? What happens when you have to go through and revise, and the revisions aren't in the right voice? And not just that, there are so many other creative steps along the way. The query letter. Brainstorming with your agent. Writing a synopsis. Writing an outline for the sequel. Chances are, even if someone steals your stuff, it's not going to look very much like your stuff when they're done with it.

The natural inclination is to think that our stuff is kinda, maybe, possibly amazing. Yeah, there are self doubts, but you've gotta have some confidence, too. I've said before, writers have to be a little bit arrogant to make it through this publishing game. You do. There are so many opportunities to get knocked down, if you don't have a little arrogance to push you through, you're never going to make it.

So let that confidence start now. Put some stuff out there. See what you get. Don't be stupid about it: I never sent anyone my entire manuscript without knowing them first. I'm a chapter-at-a-time kinda gal. Even then, I wasn't worried about plagiarism; I didn't want an unpolished version of my MS floating around somewhere, so if I did sell it, there wouldn't be evidence of crappier writing sitting on the internet.

And if you're worried about your ideas being stolen? Well...isn't there some saying about there only being seven stories in the world? I'll admit, when I started writing Elemental, I was a little worried. There aren't a lot of books out there about controlling the elements. I mean, there are, but they're not exactly breaking the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble. I was worried about someone picking up my idea and writing their own. I felt fresh and original and new, and I didn't want someone else snatching up my opportunity.

But then I realized that controlling the elements wasn't that original. Anyone could write about that. Just like vampires aren't all that original, or kids in a wizarding school, or writing about the south in the sixties. It's the execution that makes a good story. It's the characters, the passion, the moments that drag you along and won't let you put a book down. People might pick a book up because of the idea, but they're going to keep reading because of the writing. Just like that guy who was "inspired" by me on that message board years ago: he took my idea, but he didn't write the same thing.

I'll finish with Bobbie's comment from the critique partner post the other day, because as always, she's chock full of wisdom:

I'd just add to your list here that you have to BE a good critique partner to get a good one. It kind of goes along with your "Don't be lazy" advice. But if you expect someone to take your writing seriously, you have to take theirs seriously. You have to decide their writing matters as much as yours, that their goals are as important as yours. (This attitude also helps you to be thrilled--rather than envious--as your partner progresses in the business.) When you step it up a notch, so will your more serious beta readers. I likely never would have come to care or think so much about scenes like the one with Gabriel and Michael if you hadn't cared and thought so much about my characters' scenes. You have to give at least as much as you want to get.

On a side note, Online Writers Workshop is another great site for finding critique partners. I've gotten some great help there as well as some hardcore, ego-crushing feedback, so you have to be prepared for that honesty you're talking about.

So there you have it. Go out and be confident. (And careful.) And if you see someone steal your stuff and post their own version? Don't be mad.

Be flattered.

~

How to find a [good] critique partner.

2011-05-24T19:38:00.002-04:00

If I were to have a FAQ section for email inquiries, this would be at the top, right above the request for my banking information because I've inherited 500,000 USD from a prince in Nigeria.

(I mean seriously. Does anyone fall for this? And why don't they use the dollar sign?)

I have two main critique partners.*

1) Bobbie. Bobbie has been there since the beginning. Since I thought it was acceptable to query a 130,000 word vampire novel. Since I had no idea how to make every scene move the plot forward one step. Since before I knew about Miss Snark and every other blog out there. Bobbie is one of my closest friends and I tell her everything. I've known her for five years, and I'm so frigging lucky, because she's insanely insightful. I'll tell her I'm struggling with a scene, and I'll get back this in depth character critique like:

So you're unsure of where to go now? How to resolve the moment between Michael and Gabriel? I can see how it's a pivotal moment and you want to play it right. You can't have them hug it out or Gabriel won't need the fire as much as he does now--it's his escape. If all is well on the home front--or even heading there--he won't have the need for release. I like that Gabriel's immediate feeling isn't anger but a sense of betrayal. He seemed to be feeling, before Hannah showed up, that he and Michael could at least be civil to one another and act like brothers now and then. To come home to this accusation would be painful and more isolating.

I think you need Michael to be suspicious, and I think his character would be. But the fire started before he left the house. Hannah could confirm this. But Michael's suspicion might at some point make Gabriel question whether Garrett is the arsonist. And even if Michael comes to believe Gabriel didn't start the fire, he's still going to suspect something's going on, and Gabriel's secrecy is going to bring more tension to their relationship.

Badass awesome news...about someone else

2011-05-18T06:49:00.000-04:00

Okay, so this is a few days late.

But I have to say CONGRATULATIONS to my friend Alison Kemper for signing with Kristin Miller of D4E0 Literary Agency.

Alison is an awesome writer with an awesome book about ... well, I'm not going to share her whole story right here on the blog. But it's awesome in sixteen different shades.

Alison doesn't have a blog (yet!), but she's on Twitter, so go say congratulations. Or, leave a comment here on the blog. I'll make sure she sees them.

(In completely unrelated news, why the hell did someone find my blog by googling, "Adult Store Kemmerer, PA"?)

~

Cedar Summit Playset (Or, what I bought with that advance)

2011-05-14T07:44:00.001-04:00

(I get a lot of hits on this blog post by people looking for info on the Cedar Summit Play Set. If that's you, keep scrolling down. You'll see our pics and experience putting it together. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions about our satisfaction with the playset, and I'll get back to you. We've had it almost a year and love it so far. Also, if you find this post helpful, please consider buying a copy of one of my books. Just click one of the links for Elemental or Storm above. Chances are, you know a teen who would like one of them. Hey, a debut author will take any sale she can get.)

So I got my advance check a few weeks ago. We set a big chunk aside for Uncle Sam. Another big chunk is going towards some major home repairs. (Does anyone remember the saga of the flooded basement from last fall? Or the major roof leak? We'll rant about homeowners insurance in a later post.)

Here's me with the check. Please pardon my trashed house. I didn't even want my husband to take this picture, as we'd been doing yard work all morning, and I was completely disgusting.

I probably should have spent some of that money on a housekeeper.

My husband is amazing.

My husband did buy me a tee shirt for my novel. I can't tell you how excited I was that he did this for me. (Don't judge the belly. I'm 20 weeks pregnant.)

Anyway. I wanted to buy something fun with SOME of that money, and we have a nice backyard, so we decided to buy a play set. My stepson is 14, and way too cool for play sets, but I told him he could sneak girls out to the clubhouse. For some reason he thought that was hilarious.

Anyway, with a four year old running around and another boy on the way, a swingset was the way to go. We did a lot of research on play sets like Rainbow Play Systems, Cedarworks, and WoodPlay. (I say "we" like my husband did more than smile and nod when I showed him what I was looking at. That's all right. I was saving him for the heavy lifting.) Anyway, I didn't want to drop $5,000 on a Rainbow play system. (No, I'm not kidding.) After looking around and reading reviews, we decided on the Cedar Summit Play Set from Costco. It only cost $999. The downside? We had to put it together. (Again, I say "we" like I had anything to do with it.)

I wasn't even going to do a post about this, except maybe a picture, because I don't want to bore anyone, but when we were assembling the damn thing, I found a few blog posts about other people putting it together, and hearing their mistakes and recommendations was incredibly helpful.

So here you go.

These kids look entertained.

This was the picture from the side of the box. Don't throw this away. If you're a woman, you will want to keep looking at this picture while your husband is cursing at bolts. If you're a man, you'll want some motivation that all this hard work will eventually lead to something.

The climbing wall / ladder combo.

One of the first things to be assembled was the rock wall / ladder combo. Pay close attention to the instructions if you're doing this yourself. The picture in the book is upside down, and my husband wasn't too thrilled when I mentioned that I thought he and his dad had assembled this backwards. (They had.)

Cue cussing. And 8pm drilling.

Fort supports

I think the caption covers it.

My husband accidentally snapped a bolt (or two) by hand cranking the bolts in the corners. Be careful.

Coming together.

At this point, we realized we should probably move the fort into the yard before it got too heavy. Two pages later in the manual, it says you should move it into the yard after installing the floor for the upper level.

Oops.

The floor, installed!

Of course Nick wanted to play at this point.

Of course I didn't want to have a heart attack, so I went inside for an antacid when my husband set him up there to stand.

He looks almost as happy as those photoshopped kids on the box.

Luckily Mike got a picture of it, so I can see it after the fact.

Nick wants to know when the hell this thing is going to be done.

Seriously, Mike would come in the house at 8pm every night (after working a full day, then spending three hours on a play set), and Nick would cry, "But, Daddy! You're not done! Go back outside to finish my swingset!")

I'm trying to remember why we bought this thing again...

Roof coming together...

It was starting to look like a playhouse at this point...

Shh. This was after the ladder / rock wall was rebuilt.

The fort was fully assembled by Wednesday night. (We started on a Saturday.) All that was left was the swing bar and swings, plus the "crows nest" and the slide.

Of course Nick wanted to play at this point, but there was still a huge opening where the slide was set to go.

Two brothers, waiting on the third.

We still let the boys sit up top for a picture.

Swings!

Slide coming together!

From watching my husband and father-in-law get this thing together, I take it the swing bar was a pain in the you-know-what.

But Nick sure seems to love it.

The instructions say the slide takes two people three hours to assemble. We came home from work and my father-in-law (who was amazingly helpful in assembling this entire thing) had put the whole thing together himself.

The finished product!

Now, if we could only get our whacko neighbors to stop blasting death metal all evening, it might be enjoyable to sit outside and watch Nick play on this thing.

We started this project last Saturday, and it was completely done last night. So one full week. My father-in-law worked on it during the day while we were at work, and my husband worked on it at night. Neither is a professional architect or carpenter, though both are great at reading directions.

What I'm saying is that the label on the side of the box that says "12 hour installation" is a load of crap.

That said, it looks beautiful. It's extremely sturdy, and it's going to last a long time.

Nick woke up at 5:45am and wanted to go play on his swingset. I'd call that a success.

This playset made writing the whole book worth it.

Really.

Motherhood

2011-05-08T14:02:00.000-04:00

When I was sixteen, my mother taught me to drive by taking me to the winding country roads of Westminster, Maryland, after an ice storm. She told me if I could drive on icy roads in January, I could drive anywhere.

I tell this story to people sometimes, and they ask if my mother was nuts.

No. She was right. I'm a confident driver pretty much anywhere, and I have no hesitation driving in snow. I know what's possible in icy situations, and what's not. I'm an assertive, defensive driver, and I have my mother to thank for that.

My mom is one of those people who will give you the shirt off her back. Really. I remember once, years and years ago, when she knew a friend of hers from the hospital (my mom is a nurse) didn't have money to buy her kids Christmas presents. My mom gave her three hundred dollars.

And we weren't rich.

(Don't get me wrong. We weren't poor. But it's not like my parents were lining the litter box with ten dollar bills or anything.)

Once we walked out of our house, in a decent neighborhood, and a young girl walked out of a house two doors down and asked us if we knew the way to a nearby bus stop. This was in northern Baltimore County, in a good neighborhood. We were a long way from any bus stop, and this girl was, even to my naive young eyes, a prostitute. Totally out of place, and if she'd asked anyone else for help, they probably would have called the cops.

My mom drove her home.

When we were teenagers, my brother had a friend who was essentially homeless. I don't remember what was going on with his parents or why he didn't have anywhere to live, but my mother took him in, under her own roof, and treated him like her own son.

(He eventually stole money and ran off to live with someone else, but that didn't stop my mother.)

Mom is the kind of mother who will stand back and let you make your own mistakes -- but she's always there with good advice if you need it. God only knows how she keeps her mouth shut when she sees me parent my son, but she does. Sometimes she sounds too opinionated, but she's not. She only gives her opinion once you've asked for it, and by god, she's strong in her conviction. That's a strength.

I tell my mother everything.

Some of my best memories revolve around being in the car with mom. We'd drive to Cleveland, Ohio every year to visit her mother, a solid six hour drive that should have been miserably boring, but we played loud music and joked and laughed and pointed out the landscape. We always stopped in Breezewood, PA, her favorite rest stop.

When I hit my twenties, I finally told her she didn't need to make the moo sound when we passed cows.

When her mother started failing in health, my mom sold her house in Baltimore and moved to Cleveland to take care of her. I'm sure you've figured it out by now, but that's the kind of thing my mother does.

While she was gone, I missed her terribly.

My grandmother passed away in 2006, not long before I got married. I flew to Cleveland to be with my mother. That summer, she moved back to Maryland, and found a house a mile down the road from me.

I love having her nearby.

Since becoming a mother myself, it's amazing how much closer I've grown to mom. I suddenly have a greater appreciation for her strengths and sacrifices, for the amazing job she's done in raising me.

She's a wonderful person, and my best friend.

I'm so lucky to have her.

Happy Mother's Day, mom. I love you. Thanks for everything, always.

Quick and dirty.

2011-05-07T20:49:00.000-04:00

This is going to be a short one, but it's been making me crazy, so I need to see if other people feel the same way.

I love and value good writing. Not just in books. On television, in songs, in movies, whatever.

I'm not a prude, and I don't have a problem with sex, with dirty words, whatever. (I do, however, wish I'd taken my husband's advice to NOT look up what The Human Centipede was about after I read a sidebar about the movie in Entertainment Weekly. Don't do it. Trust me. Don't.)

(Okay, if you're like me and you HAVE to look, at least look on Wikipedia. God only knows what a Google search will turn up.)

(But don't look. Trust me.)

Now I've completely digressed.

While I love hearing clever lyrics in a song about sex, I absolutely hate when the lyrics are straight out vulgar. I know this might make me sound like a hypocrite when I have the F word in my novels, but I don't mind profanity. I do, however, have a serious problem with a song called, "Down On Me." I mean, come on. Thank god I have XM so I don't have to listen to more than a note before realizing I have to change the station. The song is by an artist named Jeremih, and he might be the greatest new thing since sliced bread. I won't listen to it. Especially since his previous single was a song called "Birthday Sex."

There's a song by Flo Rida called "Right Round," loosely based on the eighties song of the same title, and while that song is obviously about oral sex, the guy at least dresses it up a little. It's all metaphor. Or for a more classy top 40 example, go listen to "Come on, Get Higher" by Matt Nathanson. (Come on, really listen to the lyrics.)

Does this bother anyone else?

Maybe I'm just nuts.

Guys, you know you need some pages critiqued...

2011-05-02T21:19:00.000-04:00

Everyone needs their work critiqued, right?

Well, now you can get some badass agents, editors, and authors to give you some feedback. (Including me, the week of June 12.)

Check out http://theflightytemptress.wordpress.com/

Kat is an amazing person running a charity auction to raise money to provide clean water to places that don't have any. There are seriously some awesome people donating critiques, and you can find the list here.

Also, the Brenda Novak Annual Auction for the Cure of Diabetes is going on right now, and she has even more agents, editors, and authors (as well as tons of other cool stuff) to win in an auction.

Normally, I'd never tell you to go spend money to get your stuff read. Well, now I'm telling you to go donate money -- with the added bonus of winning a critique.

What are you still doing on my blog? Go donate!

Random Writing Tips

2011-04-28T20:46:00.000-04:00

Currently reading: Eternal Rider by Larissa Ione. (Yes, yes, yes, it's a paranormal romance.) I also just finished Unearthly, by Cynthia Hand, one of the recommended books from the contest.

A couple people have hinted that I haven't written a writing post in a while. I'm no expert, and I only know what works for me. All the same, I'm happy to share what I've figured out. Let my sweat be your ... well, that was just about to sound gross. So just keep reading.

1) A little goes a long way.

This one always shocks me. When I was doing revisions on Elemental, I needed to clarify a relationship between two of the brothers just a little bit better. It wasn't clear what each brother wanted, or why the younger was so angry at the older.

I stressed about this for weeks. I'd have to rewrite all their scenes together. I'd have to re-imagine all their interactions. It would take hours upon hours of writing to clarify this relationship.

No. It took two lines of dialogue, as part of an argument in the first chapter. Voila. You knew where each character stood, you know what each one wanted.

Start small. Sometimes the smallest tweaks have the greatest impact.

2) When in doubt, delete.

I swear, this is one that always jumps up and smacks me between the eyes. Sometimes a sentence will bother me the entire time I'm writing a story. Sometimes it will be an entire paragraph. I'll tweak. I'll reword. I'll play with it. Eventually, it will go from this beautifully formed cluster of words into a slightly mushy pile of limp, gray letters.

At that point, I'm so done with it, I just delete it altogether. Voila. The manuscript is better. No wonder that sentence/paragraph was bothering me so much! I didn't need it at all!

3) Go admire someone else's talent.

And preferably not another writer's. When I'm feeling blocked, if I pick up a really good book, it frustrates me. If I watch a well written television show, it motivates me. Sometimes watching Friday Night Lights or Vampire Diaries will have me reaching for my laptop because I need to write as soon as the episode is better.

I think this works for me because my stories tend to play out like a televised drama in my head. I "see" the scenes. When I see a particularly good episode of a favorite show, I want to pull off whatever worked in my own writing. Your results may vary.

By the way, you can bash Vampire Diaries as teen crap all you want. But the writers of that show know how to turn a story on its head, so you absolutely cannot stop watching. I gasp at something in almost every episode, and you can't say that about too much television.

Friday Night Lights is just simply amazing. If you're not watching it, you must tell me why. (First season is on the Netflix instant queue. Check it out.)

But if television isn't for you, check out something else. Go for a hike. Walk through a museum. Go watch a hot drummer. Observe someone else's talent, and be inspired to find your own.

All right, that's all I've got for tonight.

Anyone else have any writing tips? What do you guys do?

Word verification

2011-04-25T20:33:00.000-04:00

Okay, seriously, I hate word verification thingies. They're a pain in the ass. I turned them off on the blog because I didn't want to put anyone else through that.

You know what happened? I started getting a metric ton of spam comments.

So they're back on. My other option is to turn off the option to comment anonymously, and I don't want to do that either.

Bleh.

How's everybody doing?

Money talks, and ... well, you know how the rest goes

2011-04-21T07:00:00.005-04:00

So I was going to do a post about money this morning, but it's early, and I'm tired, and I figured I'd just spend my thirty minutes before the kid wakes up reading other people's blogs.

Then I stumbled upon this post by Tahereh Mafi, a very talented young writer who has a book coming out this fall. (Check out her blog, too.)

But Tahereh (can we be on a first name basis in the blogosphere?) talks about money. And since my mind was already on writing and money, I said to myself, "Dude. Respond."

Here's the question her reader asked:

I have a problem. I've always always always wanted to write, but I don't think it's going to pay too well unless I write about vampires or magical kids. So I'm thinking I'll be something science-y. But I love writing, so I'll miss out on it if I become something science-y. WHAT SHOULD I DO?!?!

And here's the link (same as above) to what Tahereh responds.

Before anyone thinks I'm going the wrong way with this, I agree with every word Tahereh says in the response. Writing is not for the faint of heart. The media sometimes makes it seem like you can sit in your apartment for a few months, churn out a novel, and someone will hand you a million dollar check. It takes passion, and drive, and love for storytelling. If you want to write, and writing makes you happy, do it.

But here's what I think Tahereh missed: this questioner can do both.

One of the greatest things about writing is that you don't need a degree (I don't have one), you don't need anyone's permission, you don't need an office, you don't need a coat and tie, and you sure as hell don't need to do it between 9 and 5. All you need is the desire to write, and the passion to make your writing great.

I'm thirty-three years old. I have the corporate career, and I have a good salary. I have the single family house with the chain-link fence and two cars and two dogs and almost-three kids and every electronic gadget my husband convinces me we need.

I'm also a writer, and I also have a book deal.

So are a lot of people. You can do both.

Here's the other thing: a book deal is not a guarantee. When the auction was over and I knew I had a deal with Kensington, the first person I talked to (after my family) was my boss. I told him exactly how much money I was getting, and I reassured him that I wasn't quitting anytime soon. Just because I have money now doesn't mean it's going to keep flowing in droves.

Besides, say you land a big advance. Do you know how much of that money is going to taxes? If you make over $379,000 in 2011, 35% of that is going to taxes. That's after you pay 15% to your agent. (Please note, I am not a tax professional, and this is solely for illustrative purposes.) But that's 50% of your money, gone before you get to spend a dime. That's not even taking into account what you have to pay the state! I can guarantee that's not going to last for the rest of your life. It might last a good long time, don't get me wrong. But that's still not a guarantee.

Your book could bomb, and the rest of your contract could be cancelled. The market could change, and people could decide they only want to read books about cyborgs or something. (Or Elementals. Elementals are going to be huge in 2012. Huge, I tell you.) Just like playing poker, you need a lot of skill, but you also need a lot of luck. Some of this publishing game is all about chance.

Here's my concern for this questioner: what if she forgoes college and that "science-y" career and focuses all her time on writing?

And then, what if she's no good?

Just like promising athletes, I think an education and the potential for a career is a good thing. Think of it as a fall-back. Have something to do. Just because I don't have a college degree doesn't mean I didn't scrape my way through years of learning the financial industry, and now I have a bunch of licenses that mean the same thing. Just because you love writing doesn't mean you shouldn't bother starting a career.

There is always time to write. Always.

This doesn't mean it's easy. You know that funny graphic of the triangle that represents college, and on each point, there are the following options: Good Grades, Social Life, Plenty of Sleep. Then below it, it says, "Life in College: You Only Get Two."

Guess what? That doesn't end when you leave college. Just replace "Good Grades" with "Lucrative Career."

I say if she likes science, I say get that science degree and write in her dorm room. Or get whatever degree will make her happy and fulfilled and employed. Have something to do so you can make the rent while you're churning out the next Great American Novel. I completely agree with what Tahereh says about not getting a massive degree with a bazillion dollars in student loans to make your parents' neighbors happy. That's silly. (Seth Godin has a great post about wasting money on buying a brand instead of buying a degree.) But don't sit on your parents' couch for five years and defend yourself that you're a writer, damn it, either.

You can do both. All of you. Every writer out there can have a career and a child and a husband (or wife) and a house and still have time to write.

You don't have to choose.

You can be happy and have it all.

I promise.

~

Comfort zones

2011-04-20T07:00:00.001-04:00

I read an article or something yesterday about how Groupon is changing the way people shop, or how we value things, or, hell, I don't really remember. I was still in a haze from tax day.

But I remember being startled by that because I never use Groupon. I'm not one to frequently step outside my comfort zone. I go to restaurants I've gone to before. If my husband and I want to go out for a nice dinner, it's either the Japanese Steakhouse (we don't even call it by it's name) or Bonefish Grill. We buy the same things at the grocery store every week -- to the point where my budget obsessed husband sent me an email to tell me that this week's grocery bill and last week's were within $0.06 of each other. If I like a brand, I stick with it.

There's this restaurant in the middle of town called Three B's. I've lived here since May 2005, and I've never once gone there. I've always wanted to -- it looks like one of those truly redneck diners where the letters are falling off the sign but the food is amazing. I mean, there's a massive light-up pig on the roof, so how can you go wrong?

I've never walked inside. I want to. I've just never stepped outside that comfort zone. What if it sucked? What if six years of expectation are flushed down the drain in a moment?

For now, I'm sticking with what I know.

But here's the funny thing: I'm completely accommodating. If someone wants to go somewhere I've never been, I'll go. New restaurant, new food, new pattern, I'm good. When left to my own devices, however, it's pattern pattern pattern.

I've been thinking about this a lot with my writing, because I don't want to fall into the same rut of always playing it safe. I did that with my first few novels, and when I finally said F it and wrote what I wanted, I landed a book deal.

It's scary, though, not knowing what you're going to get, or how it's going to turn out. Once Mike taunted me about only reading paranormal YA (not true), but I decided, "I'll show him." So I went on Amazon and scrolled through the top 100 books that day, and looked for the absolute furthest thing from paranormal YA. I wanted a book that I would NEVER ever pick up on my own. No Jodi Picoult/Jennifer Weiner. No detective novels. No chick lit. No YA.

I ended up with this book with a completely nondescript cover, about three black maids living in the south in the 60's. When the book arrived, I didn't even want to read it, but damn it, I'd made a challenge to myself (I'm all about the challenge), and I was going to sit down and read it.

It was amazing. You know what it was? The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. Pick it up. You must read it. It's all about girl power, and sisterhood, and it's all about a young white writer who secretly tries to find out what's really going on in the lives of these black maids -- like what happens behind the scenes. If you're looking to step outside your own comfort zone, this book will rock your world.

I was looking to make a point somewhere in here, but I think the baby is eating my brain.

Have you guys successfully stepped outside your comfort zone? What were the results?

And now we pause for levity...

2011-04-18T07:00:00.000-04:00

Somehow I was one of the few people who haven't seen this yet.

Contest Results!

2011-04-16T06:32:00.000-04:00

Okay, we ended up with 34 comments, and all these books sound awesome. Seriously awesome, guys. I want to read ALL the books you talked about, especially the ones that got numerous mentions.

But since my husband would kill me if I handed out 34 prizes, I finally decided to use a random number generator to select the two winners.

And so, without further delay, here's who won:

Tom and Kulsama!

Congratulations, guys! Let me know if you'd prefer a $15 Amazon gift certificate, or an actual book. Just drop me an email to brigidmary@gmail.com and I'll hook you up.

For everyone else, I hope to have many more contests in the near future, so stick around!

Contest Update

2011-04-14T06:48:00.000-04:00

First, you guys are awesome. Thirty comments! Thirty! I had no idea I'd get this kind of response. The contest is still open, and you can enter more than once, you can tell your friends, you can re-state your case, whatever.

I'm easy.

So while we're waiting for midnight Friday (like I'll be awake, so I'll be posting the winners Saturday morning), here are some amusing things you might have missed around the Interwebs:

1) This is a hilarious post by Intern, about how author contests have gotten a little ridiculous with the follows and retweets and Facebook announcements, and you practically need an advanced math degree to enter. (Mr. Berry, those might be right up your alley.)

On a completely unrelated note, does anyone else find it kind of telling that the only two teachers with whom I'm friends on Facebook are my high school Calculus teacher, and my high school Physics teacher?

Yeah, me too.

2) This is a very cool Flash thingie that plays music based on which boxes you click. Just start clicking boxes and sit back and enjoy.

3) My K Teen sistah, Erica O'Rourke, has a new cover. Go check it out and leave your opinion in comments for a chance to win an ARC of her debut, Torn.

4) There's a school district in Texas that's considering switching to four day weeks as a result of budget cuts. Until my job lets me work a four day week (something to which I'd not be opposed), I'm not really a fan of finding someone to watch my kids on that extra off day. What do you guys think?

All right, that's all I've got. Keep those book recommendations coming!

~

So I need a book recommendation

2011-04-12T21:24:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I need something to read. (If you're just here for the contest, skip all this crap and scroll to the bottom of the post.)

But the problem is, I'm pretty picky. I always cringe when people buy me a book as a gift, because ... well, it's just weird. It's like getting lingerie from a casual acquaintance. A book is going to be intimate. I'm going to spend long hours of the night engrossed in it. It's going to speak to something inside of me. I need to have a connection to read a book.

My husband learned this the hard way. He once bought me a book, before we were married. I still haven't read it.

Someone gave me A Million Little Pieces or whatever it's called, the James Frey book, for Christmas a few years ago, because they thought I would like an Oprah book. (I have never in my life watched one minute of the Oprah Winfrey show. I have nothing against it, at all. It's just that my mother never watched, and I've been working full time since I was 18.)

Suffice it to say, Oprah's stamp on a book means nothing to me. (Though I really did like The Deep End of the Ocean. Oh, and that other one, Where the Heart Is. But for both of them, I saw the movie, then read the book.)

Anyway, I need something to read. I do listen to book recommendations, and I do read reviews. So help me out here, guys.

Here's what I like:

Right now I'm reading a lot of YA. I love YA books about boys -- but if the author is a woman, the voice has to be right on. I read the book Beautiful Creatures, and though the writing was great (there's a reason it's a bestseller, and you should check it out), I just kept thinking that it was written the way a middle aged woman thought her son would think/speak, not the way he actually would.

(So, hi, I'm clearly addicted to italics in this blog post.)

Yeah, like I said, I love YA books about boys and how they interrelate with each other, with girls, with adults, with authority figures. I loved The Things a Brother Knows (a guy comes home from the military, and is nothing like the charismatic idol his younger brother remembers), and Right Behind You (an eight-year-old boy sets his next door neighbor on fire and spends seven years in a juvenile facility, only to be released into the real world in time to start high school), and Breathing Underwater (told in the first person POV of an abusive boyfriend).

I'm also a fan of paranormal YA, but I've gotten really picky here. I can't think of the last truly amazing paranormal YA I've read, which is saying something. Wait, yes I can. Hex Hall. Here's the funny thing about Hex Hall. I picked it up at the library. For me to check something out of the library, I basically have to be pretty sure I'm not going to like it -- because I buy a metric ton of crap on my Kindle. I was kind of over the witch boarding school thing, but so many people kept liking this book that I was like, "OMFG, FINE. I will try it."

And I loved it. Read it.

Wait, I keep recommending books. I need you guys to recommend some to me.

I love dark books, but it can't be hopeless from the get-go. You know what worked about Living Dead Girl? (A book about a girl who was kidnapped by a pedophile when she was ten, and kept by him for years. The book opens when she's 15.) The book starts when she sees a glimmer of hope at escape. The book doesn't start with the kidnapping, when she's got years of despair and hopelessness ahead of her. It opens when there's the bare hope for escape. That's what makes this deeply moving book so un-put-down-able. I read the entire thing in almost one sitting because I had to know if she was going to succeed in getting away from the most horrifying situation ever.

I've discovered I love romantic suspense, like Pamela Clare's stuff. (I've loved every book of hers I've read.) I need more of that. Any recs?

I love adult urban fantasy, but seriously, if there's a half naked girl with a weapon on the cover, I'm going to be hard pressed to pick it up. I need a little femininity. (This is not a bash to the genre. Like I said, I love it. I think I own every Laurell K Hamilton and Kim Harrison book ever written. This is just me explaining what I'm looking for now.)

Like Paranormalcy. You know what I love about the Paranormalcy cover? It's perfectly feminine. You can tell she's going to be a girl. But in the first chapter, she's bagging a vampire with a taser. I mean, come on. That's awesome.

I'm a little over dystopian. I have nothing against it in general, but I've read about four dystopian books back-to-back over the last few weeks, and I'm kind of done for a while.

Look, I said I was picky.

That's what I've got. Any recommendations?

Hey, let's make this a contest! If you can convincingly recommend a book to me and I choose to buy it, I'll buy you one book I've mentioned in this blog post, or any other book of your choice, up to $15.

You have until midnight Friday, and I'll pick two winners. You have to convince me to buy it from your comment -- no cheating and giving me a link to the Amazon page. It doesn't need to be a full review either. Something like, "Two hot brothers are in a fight for the crown. The dialogue is awesome. No girls say the F word." And I'm likely sold.

Ready, set, recommend!

Don't discount corny

2011-04-06T20:50:00.001-04:00

Currently reading: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah Maas (but that one's not published yet) If it helps, I just finished reading My One and Only by Kristan Higgins and it was AWESOME. (Contemporary romance.)

So the other night, I went for coffee with a woman who coached 3-year-old soccer last fall. We met up to talk about writing, because she wants to be a writer. Since I can talk about books and writing until I'm blue in the face, I was happy to go. And I had an awesome time.

She's a high school English teacher, and she was telling me about a project where her students needed to write a short book for grade school kids. Like first graders. She told me about one boy who wrote a story about a kid who was bullied, so he went and learned Tai Kwon Do, and then he was able to come back and kick the bully's ass.

She explained to the student (and I'm paraphrasing here) that they couldn't give a first grader a story like that, because the parents would be on the phone in a heartbeat. So she had him rewrite it, where the bullied kid learned Tai Kwon Do, and he went with the intention of beating up the bully, but instead, they become friends.

And then she kind of rolled her eyes and said, "You know, corny ending..."

But I said, "No! That's great! Don't discount corny!"

Yes, it's cliched. Yes, it's been done a million times. But if you can pull of corny, there's something deeply satisfying about it. When something is corny, we're really just calling it corny because we don't want to acknowledge that it's really something kinda moving. Right? If your husband comes home and starts smooching all over you and telling you how much he loves you, you'll push him away and giggle and tell him to stop being so corny. (Or silly. Or whatever.)

But really you love it. Come on. Don't lie.

I just read Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and there's a character named Tiny. He's almost flamboyantly gay, but you can't help but love him. Every time he says something wise, you expect it to sound over-the-top and not take him seriously, but because he takes himself seriously and doesn't back away from sounding corny, it just plain works. (Fantastic book, by the way.)

We're always looking for ways to be new and different. No one wants to seem cliched. I get it.

But don't discount corny.

I mean, look at this. The whole movie is really crap, but who wouldn't love this moment? Even if they won't admit it?

On Vacay

2011-04-01T23:16:00.000-04:00

So I'm in Las Vegas, on vacation before the baby comes. Really, I'm just here because Mike's at a conference and I got to go along.

Here are some things that you've missed while I've been gone:

1) I got my first foreign rights deal. Holla, Indonesia! (Okay, in all honesty, I don't even know what it means to say "Holla," so I hope I'm using it right.)

2) I finished Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and it was amazing. Pick it up. (Especially you, Paperback Writer, if you haven't already. I think you'll love it.)

3) I set a goal to write 20 pages while we were here. I've written 4.

4) But I still have 24 hours left!

5) I won a poker tournament. A real one. Fifty people, $60 buy-in, the whole sche-bang. I even beat my husband.

6) I miss my little boy like crazy.

7) I watched my husband play a lot of craps. He's very good.

8) I emailed the awesome fire chief with more questions, and he answered in like five seconds. I think the Kemmerer family will be making a nice donation to the fire house.

That's all I've got. What about you guys? What have I missed? Any good internet gossip? Any good news to share?

Family

2011-03-28T06:22:00.000-04:00

Currently reading: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

(Thanks to Sarah Fine for the recommendation.)

Yeah, the currently reading thing is new. But I pick a lot of my books based on what other people are reading, and I love to talk books. So I'll start including that on my blog entries. Feel free to comment on the book and ignore the post if you want. :-)

When I was a kid, I was the type of person you'd have to tie to a chair to get to listen to adults talk about their childhood. I didn't know my paternal grandparents at all (in fact, I don't even know what their names were), and my maternal grandfather passed away before I was born. So I just had a grandmother, on my mother's side.

I couldn't stand her.

I remember screaming at her incoherently when I was nine years old. I don't even remember why, I just remember I was furious at her for something she'd done or said or some way she'd treated me.

She was kind of hard of hearing, so she didn't hear a word I said, and she finally turned around and saw me crying and said, "What's wrong with you?"

She was kind of partial to boys. She had three sons and one daughter (my mother), and she always treated my brother better than she treated me. I remember one birthday (mine) she took my brother to the mall and spent a ton of money on him. She then proceeded to give me a pencil sharpener because she thought I would find it cute. Of course this made me resent both my grandmother and my brother.

It's a miracle that my mom is so amazing. Seriously.

My grandmother passed away when I was in my twenties, not long before I got married. Now, in retrospect, I wish I'd taken the time to get to know her. She was born in Ireland, and she was one tough cookie. She raised four children through sheer force of will. She raised my mother to be a strong, incredible woman. (I am in awe of my mother.) In all rights, my grandmother was an amazing person. But because I went through childhood absolutely loathing her, by the time I hit my twenties, I'd closed that door. I just wasn't interested.

Now, I wish I had taken the time. What was her childhood like? Was there a reason she favored boys? How did she come to America from Ireland all by herself? You know how they say you should take a recording of people when they're old, because once they're gone, they can't tell you stories anymore? I wish we'd made a recording of my grandmother. Then again, she might not have been willing to talk. We'll never know.

I bring all this up because I was in the car with my husband and his parents the other night. Michael (my husband) and John (his father) were lit after spending the evening at a charity bull roast. Being pregnant, I was stone sober and driving. But they were reminiscing about Mike's grandfather, and all the incredible things they'd done together. How he'd snuck Mike into football games when he was a little boy, or all the times he'd taken him to the track. Mike was very close to his grandfather, and I love to hear him tell stories about him. I never knew a grandfather (or even a grandparent who liked spending time with me), so it's incredibly sweet to hear stories of people who get along with their grandparents.

Now, I see how Nick is with my mom. He loves his grandma, and she loves him as though the sun rises and sets on his command alone. I see how Nick is with Mike's dad, the way John will get down on the floor and play trains with him. I see how Nick is with Mike's mom, the way Dolly will give him a cookie just because he's cute, and makes him feel like the only grandchild even though she has about sixty of them. (Not really. But if you get in her house on a holiday, it feels that way.)

Nick is going to grow up knowing his grandparents. So will baby-to-be. That warms my heart, and makes me long for something I never had.

What about you guys? Are you close to your grandparents? Are your kids?

~

Names

2011-03-24T07:00:00.001-04:00

When I was a teenager, I wrote a book about four brothers. They were vampires. Their names were Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Christoph. (Look, I was 15. Don't judge me by those names. I think I named them after the archangels or something. Except Chris. I don't remember what I was going for there.) I chose Michael for the oldest, because I loved the name. When I was a teenager, I used to tell people I'd marry a man named Michael one day.

Hi, honey. See, you were part of a plot all along.

(In case you're not in on that joke, my husband's name is Michael Kemmerer. He's awesome.)

When I was in my twenties, I rewrote that book about the four vampire brothers. I kept the names roughly the same, but they became Michael, Gabriel, Nicholas, and Christopher.

That book never went anywhere, but I couldn't get those four brothers out of my head. They kept banging around in there saying, "Damn it, lady, let us out."

When four teenagers are pounding around inside your skull, it kind of hurts.

So now those four brothers are the stars of Elemental.

But I started thinking about names, and their popularity. I'm seeing Gabriel around all the time now, but maybe that's because of the recent surge in angel books. I even posted the question on Twitter last night, and other people have noticed the same thing. My most recent encounter with the name was in Kim Harrington's Clarity, which I highly recommend. (Teen murder mystery, two hot guys, just a touch of paranormal? Sign me up. Wait, I already bought it. Sign YOU up.)

Gabriel's a name that's near-and-dear to my heart, too. When I bought my first horse, I named him Gabriel.

He was a frigging psycho, but that's another story.

My second horse was named Nick. That's also the name of my son. (And also a character in my book.)

I already told you about the importance of the name Michael.

When I pick names for my characters, I want them to mean something. I love the baby name sites, but I rarely go for something off the wall. You're unlikely to find a name in my book that you haven't heard before, but sometimes I hate that about myself, that I don't experiment with names. My friend Bobbie Goettler had a boy character named Creek, and I loved that name. I had some serious name envy going on.

The villain in A Wicked Little Rhythm was named Gus, after my husband's avatar on Rock Band.

When I needed a name for the love interest in the sequel I'm writing, my high school calculus teacher suggested Layne, the name of his daughter. Since the character is supposed to be a geeky math whiz, and because I like the name, I used it. It's perfect. Then I saw a picture of his daughter on Facebook, and I realized just how perfect.

(I hope if she reads the book one day, she thinks I did her name justice.)

What about you guys? Do your characters' names have any importance? Where do you find your names? Do your names give your characters an immediate personality, or do you let them grow into their names?

~

Inside jokes

2011-03-21T08:00:00.006-04:00

One of my favorite parts of writing fiction is the ability to insert "Easter Eggs" in the manuscript.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Easter Eggs are more commonly heard about in television, where the actors or producers might insert an inside joke into the script. The audience may or may not get it.

For instance, in the series True Blood on HBO, Jason Stackhouse wears a baseball cap with a panther on it throughout the first season -- an obvious reference (to fans of the series) to the fact that Jason will later become a were-panther.

There's an old episode of Friends (I'm showing my age here), where two people are getting married. (I don't remember whom.) Jennifer Aniston stops outside one room, and reads the sign. It says, "Anatassakis Wedding" which is Jennifer Aniston's real name.

In Elemental, I named a very minor character after my agent. I knew when she read the line she'd either laugh or fire me as a client. Thank god she laughed. And I thought for sure she'd take it out before the book went on submission -- but she didn't!

So you'll all be in on the joke when it comes out next summer.

In another manuscript, I made a character drink Diet Pepsi, just to antagonize one of my closest friend, who has a deep seated resentment for Diet Pepsi. She still brings that up.

I have a scene in A Wicked Little Rhythm where a computer throws a "greenish hue" on a character's face, a joke to my husband, who thinks it's hilarious when movies show a computer reflecting green across an actor's features. Have you ever seen a computer do this? Worse, have you even seen a modern computer with an old school DOS green-and-black interface?

Yesterday, I wrote a scene where I needed a librarian to hush some teenagers. I named the librarian Mrs. Beard, after my friend and critique partner -- who is, in fact, a librarian.

These are little references, most of which will go over people's heads. But they're fun for me, because I'm in on the joke.

What things to you work into your own stuff, just for friends and family?

~

The Power of a Good Story

2011-03-16T21:56:00.000-04:00

I'm going to talk about music, and if you're like me, you glaze over when other people talk about music, but stick with me. I won't submit you to a rundown of my favorite songs or any crap like that. I won't even make you watch the videos in this blog. I'll give you a summary. Okay? Okay.

Besides. This is about storytelling.

This is exactly what my truck looked like. Same color and all.

When I was 22, I bought an extended cab, long bed, Dodge Ram 2500 diesel pickup truck.

I thought it would help me pick up men.

No, seriously, I bought it to tow a horse trailer. Most guys seemed kind of intimidated. Personally, I was kind of intimidated myself, but I was an independent woman, and damn it, that was my truck.

I loved my truck. At the time I bought it, I was dating a bail enforcement agent (read: bounty hunter), and he said, "If you're going to drive a truck like this, you need to start listening to country music."

Now, at the time, I was solidly a Top 40's kinda girl. Dance music, rock music, I listened to it all. Even now, if it's in the top 10 on iTunes, there's a good chance it's in my collection. (I'm in love with "Blow" by Ke$ha and "The Cave" by Little Lion Men right now.)

Anyway. Back then, country music? I'd rather put a bullet in my head.

But I programmed a station on my radio, and every now and again, I'd listen.

Before long, I was hooked.

Now this was in the heyday of country music. It was 2000, and Toby Keith and The Dixie Chicks were tearing up the charts. For you kids out there, this was when crossover started happening. You think Taylor Swift invented songs that worked for pop and country? Nuh-uh. Thank Shania Twain for that.

I'm digressing.

You know what I loved about country music? Almost all the songs told a story.

A lot of regular songs tell a story, too. But they usually tell a love story, and it's usually pretty basic. Guy is hot for girl. Girl misses boy. Yadda yadda.

Country songs tell a story.

Here's a good one:
(And look, the video is hokey. It's country. And it was 10 years ago. But watch for the story.)

Clay Walker - The Chain Of Love (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Clay Walker

Okay, if you're like me, and you can't get videos at work, or you're strongly opposed to country music, or you just want me to get on with the frigging blog already, here's what the song's about.

A woman breaks down on the side of the road. A guy named Joe stops to help her, and when she offers to pay him, he basically says, "You don't owe me a thing. I've been there, too. Don't let the chain of love end with you."

So a few miles down the road, the lady stops at a cafe, where the poor waitress is 8 months pregnant. The lady thinks about the guy's good deed and leaves her a $100 tip, with a note that says the same thing, "You don't owe me a thing..."

And then, the waitress goes home, climbs in bed with her husband (whoa -- this sounds like it's going to be dirty when I write it out like this), taps him on the shoulder and says, "Everything's going to be all right. I love you, Joe."

GET IT?? It's the guy who first helped the woman with her tire.

Now that's good storytelling, and it's done in less than five minutes.

There's a lesson there, I think.

Here are some more great storytelling songs:

This one is about a guy in prison who figures out that if he gets the warden's dog some *ahem* action every night, when he decides to run, the dog will go looking for his lady-love, and won't chase him:

Blake Shelton - Ol' Red (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Blake Shelton

Here's a great power video about a guy getting beaten down and finally rising up to be a badass. (And let me tell you, I had SUCH the crush on Toby Keith when I was 22.)

What about you guys? Do you have any good songs that tell a story? Any good songs that aren't country music?

And, OMG, I just watched that video again, and that crush? Still there.

Remember when Cobus Potgieter stopped by the blog and just about stopped my heart at the same time? Well, if Toby Keith wants to stop by, I sure wouldn't cry about it.

~

Author Promo

2011-03-14T17:37:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I don't know a whole lot about it -- yet. I'm trying to learn as much as I can.

Like from these people. Check out some awesome posts:

This is way cool, and I learned a lot:
http://www.genreality.net/promotional-cargo-cults

This is hilariously funny, and I can't believe I haven't read a Maureen Johnson book yet:
http://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/2010/06/08/manifesto/

This is fascinating, from Betsy Lerner:
http://publishingperspectives.com/2010/11/should-i-tweet/

This is more about grass roots promotion:
http://marketingfloozy.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/a-booksellers-perspective-on-how-to-promote-your-book/

Who else has some great links to Author Promo suggestions? I'll update the list.

~

The hell with research. Just make it up.

2011-03-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

I once had a friend imply that writing genre fiction was somehow easier and more enjoyable because I get to come home from work, sit down in a chair, and (this is a direct quote) "make shit up."

She didn't mean it as an insult, and I didn't take it as one. Really, she was talking about her own struggles to write a memoir, which I totally get. She's already agented based on a blog she kept (which has since been taken down), and she's a good writer.

But sometimes I think about that line. Is that what people think? That I come home, flop into an easy chair, and make up a story?

Yes and no.

The paranormal elements, yes, I make them up. When I wrote Elemental, I researched how the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water worked into different cultures. And I'm using the term "research" loosely here. I read some articles on Wikipedia, I read some articles on witchcraft, stuff like that. Stones play a role in the plot, and I looked for stones that were known for the specific qualities I gave them. (i.e., garnet for confidence, or citrine for courage.)

But that's about it.

The paranormal stuff is the easy part. So yes, making shit up is fun and honestly, one of the best parts of writing. But though the paranormal stuff is HUGE in the book, it's such a minor part of the writing process.

Just like in any kind of story, I needed to keep character motivation at the forefront of my mind. I need to keep character at the forefront of my mind. The plot needs to keep moving. I write every scene with a goal of maintaining conflict on every page. Conflict adds tension, and tension keeps the pages turning. I read my friend's edit letter, and the editor had a fantastic insight: every scene should add a minor turn to the plot. If it doesn't, it's unnecessary.

Last night I was really struggling with this scene in my sequel. Gabriel, who is kind of a badass sports punk who gets into it with everyone, was arguing with Layne, a total brainiac who's having some issues at home. She breaks down crying in the middle of their fight, and I kept revising this one little scene for two hours. He was tender. He was gentle. He was understanding.

Seriously, I was ready to pull my hair out.

Then I remembered that Gabriel is none of those things. He's confused because she's upset, and when he gets confused, he gets mad. Here's how it turned out:

Layne cried for like a full minute before realizing her face was pressed against Gabriel Merrick’s sweatshirt.
Which was quite nicely pressed against his chest.
This. Was. Awful.
She jerked back with an indrawn breath. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t let go, so she kept her eyes fixed on the drawstring of his hoodie. He probably had a dozen remarks just waiting to let fly, and she so didn’t need to see the derision in his face.
But he spoke, and his voice was low. “Don’t be sorry. I get it.”
She looked up, then, because she couldn’t reconcile the voice with the guy. It wasn’t quite gentle—she didn’t think a boy like him could be gentle—but it was something … else.
His eyes were intent, dark blue in the shade of the path. This close, she could tell he hadn’t shaved yet this morning, and with the way his hands encircled her wrists and held her practically pressed up against him—well, it was just way too frigging much. Hormone overload. She was either going to kiss him or start crying again, and both options sucked.
Well, one option sucked.
And that’s the one that seemed to be taking over. Layne jerked her hands out of his and started walking, swiping at her eyes. “Forget it.”
“Whoa.” He caught her arm.
God, his eyes were searching her face. She felt her eyes welling up again.
“Let me go,” she said. “I need to catch my horse. If my dad finds him in the barn and I’m not there…”
“Bullshit.”
Now she pulled against his grip. “It’s true. Just—”
“Why do you keep running from me?”
She gritted her teeth. “I am not running from you. I need to—”
“Jesus Christ, would you calm down a second?”

That's 300 words. It took me about two hours to write them. Sounds easy and enjoyable, right?

Especially when I had a revelation last night and I think I'm going to end up deleting them all.

But it's not just character and story and plot. I can't make up everything. The story takes place in our universe, so some things need to be accurate.

I read a book a few months ago, where a boy and his brother went on a road trip. They had to travel through Baltimore, and there's a scene where they duck into a convenience store to buy beer.

That took me right out of the story, because in Maryland, you can't buy beer at a convenience store. You can only buy beer at a liquor store (yes, really), and in many counties, you can't even buy alcohol on Sunday.

That's minor, yes. But it's one of those details that's so easy to get right.

I'm doing more research for this story than I ever have. I was talking about it (read: whining about it) to my husband this morning, and he said, "Gee, it's kind of like a job, huh?"

Honestly, he's lucky I don't make him sleep on the couch.

But here's what I want to get right:

House fires: I spent two hours interviewing the local fire chief, because I needed to know exactly what it's like in a house fire. What it sounds like, what the dangers are (did you know that most of those "McMansions" are generally built out of nothing more than toothpicks, and they go up like a match? Or that one of the biggest risks for a firefighter is falling through a floor?), what things the public don't think about. These are things you can't make up. And while I spent two hours interviewing him, that doesn't include the amount of time I spent on YouTube watching fire and rescue videos, or the pre-research I did so I could ask him intelligent questions. (I blogged about my trip to the firehouse, and you can read about it here.)

Police procedure: One of my characters is going to get arrested and charged with something pretty serious. Since they're teenagers, I need to know how police handle those kinds of situations. Would he be thrown in the holding cell with adults? Would he have access to a lawyer? Who makes the decision whether to charge him as an adult or a minor? What does the inside of a police station look like? I have an officer lined up to talk to me, I just want to make sure I have my ducks in a row so, again, I don't look like an idiot. Again, these are details that need to be right.

Deaf kids, ordinary school: So far, this is the most challenging. I have a minor character who's deaf, and he wants to play basketball. He goes to a mainstream school, and I've been doing a lot of reading about the pros and cons of parents who make the decision to send their deaf kids to a normal school. I don't know anything about basketball, so I'm trying to find out if his playing on a regular team would even be possible. (If anyone knows anyone who knows anything about working with deaf kids, especially playing sports, I would love to talk to them.) This is something I definitely need to get right.

Yes, all this research is fun, and interesting. Really, going to the firehouse was fascinating.

But it's still hard work. Don't ever let anyone tell you it's not.

What about you guys? What kinds of research have you done for your novels?

~

Guess what this is?

2011-03-05T15:08:00.000-05:00

Is it ironic that this came while I was working on the sequel? Or just appropriate?

Also, please free to judge me on my dining room table. I told you my house usually looks like it belongs on an episode of Hoarders.

All right, really, it's not that bad.

Usually.

Clique Clack Boo

2011-03-04T08:00:00.005-05:00

So, yeah, I'm going to talk about the YA Mafia.

I don't usually jump into the middle of these things, because I'm busy, I'm pregnant, and I'm generally late to the party and my hair's a mess. And most of the time, I don't have a lot to say that someone else has said better already.

First off, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll sum up. There's a bunch of talk rolling around the blogosphere and Twitter that cover a few different things. First, that there are killer cliques of YA authors who band together to smite aspiring authors. There's also some talk about book reviewers getting blacklisted by YA authors and agents for things they've posted on the internet.

Here are some links, if you want to read what other people have said (or just to get a feel for the story).

Holly Black: YA Mafia and the Ruination of Careers

Justine Larbalestier: YA Mafias & Other Things You Don't Need to Worry About

YA Highway: Field Trip Friday Special Edition: The YA Mafia

Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier are great writers, and both those blogs are worth reading, for more than just the YA Mafia stuff. I also enjoy the YA Highway blog, so check it out, too, if you've got time.

Here's some irony for you: when I first heard the term "YA Mafia," I thought it was a new blog or something. Seriously, I thought, that sounds like a cool group name.

A lot of these posts and blogs talk about whether there is such a thing, whether there are YA cliques, whether powerful authors have the ability to blacklist authors, whether YA writers really do band together and talk smack about the little people. A lot of talk. Really.

Here's my talk: who cares?

Ten years ago, I learned a fantastic piece of advice that has become my mantra. Sure, I learned it from a woman who was addicted to prescription painkillers who later accused me of sleeping with her husband in a stall in a horse barn, but don't let that take away from the absolute power of her statement:

You can't change others. You can only change yourself.

Let me tell you, this is my go-to mantra. If I have a problem with people, I say it to myself. I might actually mutter it through clenched teeth while my fingernails are digging into my palms, but I say it. And it helps.

First off, I learned really early that there will always be cliques. Always. What can you do about it? Nothing. When you're outside the clique (especially a clique you want to be in), it's really easy to feel hurt and disgusted and imagine that the people in that group are all mean and hateful and devoting their time toward your personal ruination.

Guess what? They're probably not.

You know what else? When people fail at something, a lot of times, we want to look for excuses. It's a hell of a lot easier to say we were blacklisted by a big agent than to think, "Hey, maybe I should take a look at my writing."

Or to think, "Hey, maybe I failed."

Here's the thing: you can't stop YA writers (or anyone else) from making friends. Sure, I see authors sharing private cover art on Twitter, or talking sorta secretly about inside information, and I immediately get that little gut clench that says, "I wanna know! I wanna be in your circle!"

But then I realize that I have conversations on Twitter all the time with Sarah Maas, and people are probably thinking the same thing about us.

Actually, considering our last Twitter conversation involved Sarah taking my eyeballs and keeping them in a jar on her desk, people are likely thinking we're disgusting.

ANYWAY. I digress.

There's also some talk about a book blogger who was forced to take down her blog, because she'd heard that it was going to hurt her potential for finding an agent or selling a novel. I feel badly that she felt the need to do that, but she made the choice to do it. No one forced her to. She couldn't change the way other people were treating her, so she changed her blog and stopped reviewing books.

Look, people, from a mother, here's another mantra: Life is full of choices, and sometimes they're hard.

Sometimes I want to blog about something that happened at work. I'm deathly terrified that I'll lose my job, so I don't. (Buy lots of copies of ELEMENTAL in 2012, and maybe I can quit my job. Then I'll share all the stories you want.) Sometimes I want to blog about my family, but I don't want to put my husband in a compromising position, so I don't. (My mother, however, is fair game.)

Sometimes I read a book that sucks, and I don't talk about it.

The only person who can make or break you is you.

Here's a little story. I once saw this guy on the news, crying about the fact that he was losing his home and his business. The government was seizing everything he had, and he didn't know how he was going to provide for his family. A family who was used to high-end cars, a personal maid and butler, a huge mansion of a house. The poor, persecuted man. The big, bad government was after him.

Because he didn't pay his taxes.

I didn't feel any pity for that guy. He didn't pay his taxes! I mean, come on! You can't complain about someone coming after you, if you do something wrong in the first place.

I hope I'm drawing a parallel here, but just in case: if you openly trash people online, and they turn around and refuse to support you (or even actively bash you in return), well, you can't really point any fingers, can you? I'm not saying it's mature, I'm just saying you can't be surprised when it happens.

Remember: you can't change others, you can only change yourself.

You can't stop the YA Mafia (seriously, I love the name. I want to join.) if it even exists. You can't stop cliques. You can't stop people from being friends. As my husband likes to say, you make your own stress. If you don't like seeing authors interact on Twitter, stop following them. No, even better, go make your own friends and talk to them.

I have a three-year-old son, and I'm constantly telling him, "Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. Worry about what you are doing." I used to teach riding lessons, and I would say it all the time to those teenagers, too. "But, Miss Brigid!" they would cry. "So-and-so is jumping three feet! Why can't I jump three feet??" Then they'd make snarky remarks about the other girl. She's nasty. She abuses her horse. Her parents buy her everything. She thinks she's so much better than everyone.

Yeah, because being a bitch is going to get you to jump three feet.

Wrong. Riding better is going to get you to jump three feet.

When I sold my book to K Teen, I immediately went to see what other authors had been acquired by my editor for the same line. Did I look at their badass cover art and squish up my mouth and talk smack about them? Hell, no. I sent Erica O'Rourke an email and said, "We need to be friends."

(And people, you need to put her book on your to-read list ASAP. It sounds insanely hot. One of the love interests is the main character's bodyguard. I actually might need to break into Erica's house and steal the page proofs.)

(Don't tell her I said that. Just in case someone actually, you know, breaks into her house and steals page proofs.)

I know I'm dissolving into rambles. I just hate when people get fired up and get their feelings hurt online. Take a step back. Repeat that first mantra to yourself.

I can't change others. I can only change myself.

It's powerful. It helps.

Now go out there and make some friends of your own.

~

P.S. - I'm on twitter and Facebook. I'd love to be your friend. We can talk about extricating eyeballs all day.

Author photos

2011-03-02T06:57:00.000-05:00

I need to give Leslie Rhodes Photography a shout-out here on the blog, because she did my author photos, and they came out so well. Leslie is an amazing photographer, and she has a huge portfolio of couples, family portraits, newborn photos, and weddings. You should definitely check out her site at www.leslierhodesphotography.com.

Annnnnnnnd, if you haven't already seen them, you can check out a few of my author photos, which she featured on her blog! Here's the link for that: http://www.leslierhodesphotography.com/blog/2011/02/writer-brigid-kemmerer/

Look, I'm pregnant, okay? Don't judge the bags under my eyes.

~

Don't make your characters idiots. They won't like it.

2011-03-01T08:00:00.001-05:00

I haven't done a writing post in a while, so here you go.

If you're related to me (hi, honey!), you can just stop reading right now. I mean, if the first sentence didn't get you to click off the page and you're already reading something...

Yeah, he's gone.

You ever hear that phrase that I've seen tossed around the blogosphere, "Too Stupid To Live"? (Or, TSTL for short.)

It refers to characters who do things that are so dumb, they'd never survive in real life. A movie way to describe this is to refer to the cliche of the horror movie heroine who wanders into the dark house after hearing a scream, knowing there's a murderer on the loose. No one would really do that.

Yeah, it's cliche, you think. No writer would ever write something like that. Of course not.

We do. You know why? It's easy.

But it's cheating.

Motivation needs to be at the forefront of your mind when you're writing a scene. If you find yourself excusing your character's actions, you're on the wrong track. This can sometimes work in a movie, when you have body language to help you along, but in a book, it's tough to pull off.

This would probably work better with an example.

Jake rolled out of bed and rubbed his eyes. He'd been on the run from the Russian mafia for twenty-six hours now, and that hour of sleep felt like sixty seconds.

A knock rapped at the door, followed by a woman's voice. "Housekeeping!" she called.

Her voice sounded oddly strangled. But it's not like he was in the business of understanding housekeepers' vocal tics. She probably just had a cold. Jake stood up and reached out to open the door.

I just made that up off-the-cuff. But you know the kind of scene I'm talking about.

You know what ruins it? Jake talking himself out of his suspicion. The reader already knows he's on the run from the mafia. (I don't even know if Russia has a mafia, but stick with me. I write YA, 'kay?) If you, the writer, tell the reader that there's something wrong with the maid's voice, and then dismiss it, it's like having that heroine go running into the dark house. It makes your character look like an idiot. He spent 26 hours running, and he's going to be undone by a maid? Come on.

If you want to pull this off, you have to show Jake acknowledge his suspicion and then act on it. Have him tell the maid to leave the towels. Have him answer the door with a gun in his hand.

OR, don't warn us about the strangled voice. But even having a maid knock on the door is going to be seen as suspicious if you're writing a tense action novel. Our job, as writers, is to create a scene where we believe the hero's motivation from the first minute.

If not, you're screwed. You know why? No one wants to spend 400 pages with an idiot. There's just no tension. No conflict. In my example, you know there's something up with the maid from the instant she's introduced. If the reader knows something, the protagonist must know it too.

So no cheating.

A good thing to look out for is talking your character out of something. Any time you're doing that, you're making your character look silly. "Oh, I thought I saw a glow in the woods last night, but tee-hee, it must have been my imagination."

Think back on the last really, really good book you read. You know what people love when they read? Being surprised. Not jack-in-the-box creepy surprise, not even flash-bang action surprised. People like being surprised by the unexpected.

I'm currently reading Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins. In the first few chapters, Sophie, the protagonist, is approached by a group of witches who ask her to join their coven. They trash Jenna, Sophie's new friend, by saying she killed a fellow student.

When I read that scene, I kind of inwardly rolled my eyes and thought, "Here we go. The standard trope of the maligned best friend, and Sophie is going to believe them and turn on Jenna, when really, the bad guy will be..."

But then I didn't get to finish that thought, because I turned the page, and badass Sophie didn't believe them for an instant. And she and Jenna are still best friends.

I was surprised. I kept right on reading. (You should, too. It's a pretty good book.)

Don't cheat your characters. You love them, right? Don't make them stupid.

They won't like that one bit.

~

The most fun non-writing writing-related thing I've ever done.

2011-02-26T21:28:00.000-05:00

Ever play The Sims?

Yeah, I think it's boring, too.

Then I decided to create a family of the characters in my novel.

Meet the Merrick brothers:

I don't know if you've ever tried to create twins before, but it's tough, since each Sim starts with a random face.
Meet Nick and Gabriel.

Chris, the youngest brother, was swimming. Michael, the oldest, wants him to get dressed. There's work to do.

But Nick and Gabriel convince everyone to play video games.

There's a good chance I just made myself even more dorky.

I really didn't think that was possible.

What's the weirdest non-writing writing-related thing you've ever done?

~

Friday Favorite: The first flash of chemistry

2011-02-25T08:00:00.001-05:00

You know my favorite part in a romance? When the characters first start to realize there might be something there.

Especially if they started the book hating each other, like Jack and Sarah.

~

It wasn’t until she was standing on the sidewalk in front of her building that Sarah realized just how dark and quiet the city was at night. At nearly two in the morning, her office building and the nearby storefronts were all dark. Streetlamps provided equally spaced pools of light and some cars cruised down Light Street, but she was very alone.

She started for the crosswalk and hugged her arms to her body, thinking of all the crazy people who could be hiding in these shadows. She didn’t notice the car that had slowed down alongside her until a voice called out. “Excuse me, Miss?”

She actually stopped and looked around, like he could be talking to anyone else. “Yes?”

He was a young man, maybe her age, leaning out of a sleek black car with tinted windows. “Do you know how to get to Fells Point?”

“Yeah, I think.” She took a step toward his car, stumbling a little. She caught herself with a hand on the window frame.

Something in his gaze sharpened, and his eyes drifted lower. “Maybe you could show me yourself?”

A lick of fear curled around her chest. Sarah jerked herself upright and back onto the curb, suddenly aware of how little clothing she had on.

“I don’t think so.” She turned and started the other way, toward the harbor. Going to a dark parking garage suddenly seemed like the wrong idea. She turned back toward Pratt Street, knowing there was an all night diner one block up, and she could use the phone there to call another cab to take her all the way home.

The guy was yelling out the passenger side window now. “Come on, baby, don’t be like that. I just want some directions.”

“Sorry, no,” she called, speeding up.

“Stop being such a tease.” Anger laced his words now.

Sarah ran.

One block, she thought. I can make it one block.

Her legs disagreed. She barely made it past three storefronts before her heels caught an edge of sidewalk and sent her sprawling. Her face narrowly missed the edge of one of the benches bolted to the ground. Concrete tore through her dress to scrape her ribs.

The car screeched to a stop, followed by the unmistakable sound of a car door opening.

Then the sound of not one, but two pairs of feet making their way toward her.

She couldn’t fight two men. She knew it, but she grabbed the leg of the bench anyway, trying to pull herself back to her feet to run.

“Yeah, you might want to rethink that,” a man said.

I know that voice. She looked up, and Jack stood there, a baseball bat hanging from his hand. The guy from the car was backing up, his hands raised. His car sat idling by the curb.

“Man, I don’t want any trouble. I was just making sure she didn’t hurt herself.”

“Sure you were. She’s fine.” He hadn’t even looked at her. “Get the hell out of here.”

The young guy took another look at her, threw a glance at the man with a weapon standing to her right, and jumped into his car.

Sarah pried her hands off the bench support and scrambled to right herself, pulling her dress closed. Her cheeks were hot, and she hadn’t even done anything wrong. “Thanks.”

He held out a hand, and his voice was gruff. “You all right?”

No. “Yeah, I think.” She took his hand, keeping her dress held shut with the other.

Then the streetlight hit her face. Jack froze. “What the hell? Are you kidding me?”

She stumbled, feeling she must have broken her heel. “I—thank you for what you did. If I could just use your—” She staggered again and gave a small yip when he caught her by the arm.

“You’re drunk too?” he exclaimed. “Lady, I don’t know why you picked me to be your personal—”

“I didn’t pick you for anything,” she snapped, too loudly. “I was just trying to go to my car—”

“Driving. Now that sounds like a good idea.”

“Shut up! I just wanted my phone.” She jerked her arm away from his, and he let her go. She went flying back to the pavement, sitting down hard.

“Wow.” Jack dragged the word into two syllables. He stared down at her and ran a hand back through his hair. “Jesus Christ, you are a piece of work.”

Sitting there on the pavement, staring up at her “savior,” she wanted to melt into the ground. Instead, her eyes betrayed her and she started to cry. She pressed her fingers to her eyes, feeling grit in the cuts on her hand. “Forget it. Just leave me alone.”

He sighed and held out a hand again. “Come on. You can clean up and use the phone.”

She thought he was going to lead her to the store, which was completely dark, but he led her past it to a set of three concrete steps and a wooden door, sandwiched between two store fronts.

He pulled a set of keys from his pocket, but she balked, drawing back. The fear from the guy in the dark car was still too fresh. “Where are we going?”

“I live above the store,” he said. “Where did you think I was taking you?”

Sarah hesitated, torn.

He shook his head and pushed a key into the lock, not looking at her. “Do what you want. You’re welcome to stay out here and take your chances with the next tool in a Lexus.”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

She followed him up a narrow stairwell of carpeted stairs to another locked door. As he unlocked this one, he said, “I thought you didn’t drink.”

She kept a tight grip on the banister. “I don’t.”

That made him laugh, which made Sarah feel like an idiot.

His apartment was huge, larger than she’d have expected, and comfortably cluttered. His furniture was sparse and simple; an overstuffed sofa with an aged coffee table sat along one wall, as did a decent sized television. A stereo took up the other wall, looking newer and more impressive than the TV. Musical odds and ends were everywhere: sheet music, a guitar in the corner, more musical accoutrements she couldn’t identify.

He pointed. “Go into the bathroom.” He went through the other door into the bedroom.

She padded across his floor, barefoot, leaving her broken shoes by the door. The bathroom was clean, at least, though toothpaste, shaving cream, and other guy products sat scattered on the counter.

She could almost hear her mother’s voice now. Everything in its place, Sarah.

But her mother wasn’t here now. Sarah caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her running makeup and hair askew, and thanked god for that.

She kept a hold of her dress even though the door was closed and turned on the faucet, holding the more damaged palm under the cold water. It was only then she noticed her hands were shaking.

His knock made her jump. She awkwardly dried her hand on a towel before pulling the door open.

Jack was holding out a black tee shirt. “Here. You can put this over your dress.”

She stared at him stupidly, surprised by this unsolicited kindness.

Then he ruined it. “Do you need me to translate or something? Take it.”

She took it, and he turned his back. “Where were you tonight that you ended up looking like this?”

She pushed her arms through the sleeves. The shirt was huge on her, and Jack wasn’t that big a guy. “I was with my friend. Some dance club.”

“Some friend.”

Sarah remembered Kate’s offer to walk her out, and wondered where she’d be now if she’d taken her up on it. The man with the sword and the disappearance on the street suddenly seemed a million miles away. Now, standing warm and safe—sort of—inside Jack’s apartment, she wondered if her crazy brain had made up the whole thing.

Then she glanced down at her hands, seeing the first scrapes she’d gotten when she ran for the club doors. Maybe she’d imagined the vanishing, but she definitely hadn’t imagined the rest.

“Did something else happen?” asked Jack, and a new note entered his voice. He turned back around. “Do I need to call the cops for you or anything?”

For a minute, all she could think of was the guy with the sword. Then she realized he was asking if she’d been assaulted. After seeing her face in the mirror, she could hardly blame him. “No,” she said. “You stopped that guy out front.” Her addled brain sharpened for an instant. “Hey, why were you even out there?”

“I do this every night,” he said. “Sit out front with my baseball bat and thwart would-be rapists.”

Did he constantly have to be a jerk? She frowned.

He sighed. “I was waiting for someone.”

“At two o’clock in the morning?” A bookie? A dealer? Surely not, after the disdain in his voice when he’d called her a junkie.

“Maybe you can save being judgmental for a day you don’t show up on my doorstep looking like a roughed up hooker.”

She flinched and turned away from him, bringing her hands back to the sink. Ending up with the guy in the Lexus would have been worse, but Jack was starting to make her wonder how much worse.

She put her hands under the water, gritting her teeth against the sting, painfully aware that he was watching her.

Jack sighed.

Then he was beside her, his fingers wrapping around her wrists, pulling her hands from under the water. “Sit,” he said, and gestured to the toilet. He pulled a hand towel out from the lower cabinet and laid it against the sink, followed by a tube of Neosporin and some hydrogen peroxide.

He turned the water on warm. “Give me your hands.”

She did, feeling more like a little girl than she ever had around him. She expected him to be rough, but his long fingers were gentle against her skin.

He rubbed his thumb against the worst of the scrapes. “You need to get the dirt out or they’ll get infected.” His gray eyes flicked up to meet hers.

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Those knees will hurt worse. They’re a mess.”

Sarah could stand the pain. She wasn’t sure she could bear his hands on her legs. “Who were you waiting for?”

“Hmm? Oh, a friend of mine. He works nights.”

“You wait for him with a baseball bat?”

He laughed softly and turned off the water. “No. I keep that just inside the door. Some punks broke into the store a few weeks ago.”

He blotted her hands with the towel and opened the tube of Neosporin. As he was rubbing it onto the scrapes, his hand went still. “What’s your name, anyway?”

Had she really gone this long without telling him that? “Sarah. Sarah Parrish.”

He nodded and smeared some ointment on her other hand. “I’m Jack.”

“I know.” His eyes flicked up to hers again, and she added, “Big sign over the door. I looked you up, remember?”

“Right.” He recapped the tube and gestured to the tub. “Swing your legs in.”

She started to protest. Even clinically, it seemed too intimate. But she couldn’t force the words past her lips. She swung around until her feet were hanging in the bathtub. He reached over her knees and ran the faucet, then sat back on his heels.

Sarah looked down at her newly treated hands, resting on the skirt of her dress. Bruises were already forming on her knees, and now in the bright light of the bathroom she could see just how much damage her shins had taken. She bit her lip. “I guess I really do look like a roughed up hooker.”

“Not really,” said Jack, sounding amused. Then he smiled. “Crack whore, maybe.”

Sarah winced. But this was the first time she’d seen him really smile. It softened his eyes, pulling some of the tightness from her shoulders.

Jack must have had the same thought, because it had the opposite effect on him. He lost the smile and moved forward to check the water temperature, new tension in his movements.

He cupped some water in his hand and let it run down the front of her left leg, letting the drops pull road grit down her skin. He did it again, using more water this time, not touching her.

She sat very still, watching the muscles in his arm work in rhythm. She was trying to make out the words worked through his tattoos when she noticed he was humming, very softly, under his breath.

She’d almost picked out the melody when he stopped and looked up. “Tell me if this hurts too much.”

“It’s fine,” she said, too quickly.

He ran another palm full of water over her leg, but this time he rubbed at the scrapes with his thumb, laying his fingers against her calf.

Sarah swallowed. “What’s that—” Her voice was breaking, and she tried again. “What’s that song?”

He didn’t look up, but did the same thing to her other leg, his hand strong and warm against her skin. Sarah had to remind herself to breathe.

“Pachelbel’s Canon,” he said.

“You like classical music?” It didn’t fit him, the slow familiar melody clashing with his rough kept hair and tattoos.

He shrugged and reached around her for the bottle of peroxide. “I like throwing different sounds together to see what comes out.”

“You make classical sound like rock.”

He shook his head and smiled slightly. “Not really.”

She fell silent again, watching his hands for a moment, wondering if the peroxide was going to burn, or if the fact that he’d brought it around meant he was almost done touching her. “So what are you doing with the Canon piece?”

Her voice had come out scratchy again, and he glanced up. She hoped he attributed that to the alcohol. “Drums,” he said. “I always start with drums.”

She searched for the silver glints in his eyes. “I’d like to hear that.”

His hands went still. “Well,” he said, drawing out the word as if he weren’t sure what was going to come next. “Come by the store sometime.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice soft.

He stared up at her, his face two feet away, his breathing shallow.

Then he reached around her to turn off the faucet. He grabbed the bottle of peroxide and rose to his feet, holding it out in front of her face. “Can you do the rest?”

His sudden shift startled her. “Yeah—yes. I can.”

“Good. I’ll call you a cab.”

So let me tell you about this kid Cobus Potgieter

2011-02-23T06:27:00.000-05:00

Every now and again, I post videos of this guy drumming to current songs. I usually have some glib line about liking hot drummers (I mean, seriously, who doesn't?).

I first saw a Cobus video about three or four years ago, when I was researching drumming techniques for A Wicked Little Rhythm. He was just a guy who'd posted a few videos of himself drumming, and gotten some popularity around YouTube. According to his YouTube site, he taught himself to play, and he just did it for the love of it. He wasn't trying to get some big recording contract or land sponsors or anything like that. He just loved it, and you could see it in his videos.

I wrote to him somewhere, like on a message board or something, and said that I loved his videos and I was writing a book about a drummer, and he wrote back that it was cool, he'd love to read it one day, whatever. (All the nice things you say to an unpublished author writing a book.)

There's a scene in A Wicked Little Rhythm that is based almost entirely around the concept of a guy playing drums along with a song on the radio. I wrote that after watching this guy's videos.

Cobus doesn't know me at all, and he probably wouldn't recognize my name if you said it to him. (He might, just might, remember the chick who emailed him once about writing a book about a drummer. But not much more than that.) That book didn't sell, but the one I wrote after it did. Maybe we'll get back to the drums one day.

But anyway, I'm getting away from my story.

Cobus is just a kid who has worked really hard at something he loves. Really hard.

It took several years, but now he's got all kinds of sponsors and I think a recording contract, and he's finding success.

By working hard. At something he loves. He never wanted any more than that, and he didn't give up.

I think there's a lesson there, don't you?

So here's how the book auction went down

2011-02-18T15:50:00.000-05:00

I love a good story. So stick with me.

I had my son back in May of 2007. It was a brutal, terrifying delivery. When my due date was originally set for June 18, I remember telling everyone that I was disappointed I wouldn't be delivering in the winter, because I'd love to be one of those women giving birth in a snowdrift or something, just because I love having a good story.

Well, I got one.

Now, I also have a stepson, who's a badass awesome 13-year-old, so I've been fairly content with the children in my life. After the drama of the first delivery, Mike and I weren't sure we wanted to go through that again. I've had a history of other gynecological problems, and last September, I finally said to the doctor, "I'm done. Whatever you need to do to get rid of the pain, let's do it."

He said, "Here's your option: a hysterectomy. You're 33. Talk to your husband, make sure you want to do this."

So Mike and I talked. We decided to give it one more shot. We weren't really going to try to have another baby, but we weren't exactly not trying either. I wasn't sure what was going to happen with the book, I wasn't sure how we were going to deal with day care for another child (I mean, I already have a full time job and a toddler, in addition to the writing), but Mike astutely said, "Hon, it's never the right time."

So in December, I went off birth control, saw the doctor for one more checkup, and listened to him explain that it could take a year, that it might not happen, that my one remaining ovary might have already checked out or be choked by cysts. I was okay with all that. I've had a baby. This wasn't a last shot deal for me. I saw that doctor on December 21.

While all this was going on, my book was on submission.

Now, if you're querying a novel, you're getting slapped with a lot of rejection, right? That's pretty much the name of the game. If you're realistic, you know that not everyone is going to love your book. And they don't just have to love it, they have to think they can sell it. That's key. KEY, people.

Let me just shatter any illusions right here: once you have an agent, the rejection doesn't stop.

Now, I'm kind of a control freak. When you're querying, if you get a rejection, you can say, "F it," and send out another query.

If you have an agent and your novel is on submission, when you get a rejection, you can't do anything.

I mean, you can go get a bottle of wine and cry, but that's not something productive.

I had some early interest in my book: real, solid interest from real, solid publishers. But it was December, and you know what happens in December: everyone has something else to do. No matter what you celebrate, most people aren't thinking about book deals, most people are thinking about cooking or buying or wrapping or sleeping. Not to mention, most of the publishing industry shuts down for the last two weeks of the year. Don't whine about it, it's a fact of life.

Everyone needs a break.

So late in January, I got a rejection that just hit me the wrong way. Usually I let those things roll right off my back, but that one just sent me into a tailspin. I was depressed. I went into the bathroom at work and cried. Then I cried all the way home.

Then I called my husband and said, "I'm going to stop at the liquor store and get a bottle of wine, and I'm going to drink the whole thing tonight."

He laughed and said, "Go ahead." (He laughed because I am SO not a drinker.)

But when I hit the turn signal for the liquor store, I thought to myself, "I should stop and get a pregnancy test first. Just in case." I figured it was a day for disappointments, right? I mean, the doctor said it could take a year, and here we were three weeks after my appointment with him. But I wanted to be on the safe side.

So I picked up my son, went to CVS for a pregnancy test (and jelly beans, hello!), and went home.

Positive!

I owe that editor, whoever she is, a bottle of wine.

So I was thrilled! I have an active imagination. (Hi. I'm a writer.) I started having all these bizarre thoughts. "Maybe this is the universe's plan for me. My book won't sell because I'm destined to become a mommy."

I love being a mother. I couldn't have been happier.

That was Thursday.

Sunday night, my son was up all night puking. The whole time, I'm thinking, "Why the HELL did I want to go through this again?"

Tuesday afternoon, right before an important conference call at work, I get a call from Tamar. She had an offer on my book.

I almost screamed in the middle of my office. Then she tells me there are two more houses who have expressed interest, so she's going to call them to see if they want to make an offer.

[Side note: THIS, people, this is why you need an agent. (In addition to the other amazing things Tamar does.) I would have just said yes to the first offer.]

I. Was. Over. The. Moon.

Since this was late Tuesday, she said we probably wouldn't have firm numbers until Thursday, so I knew I had a little bit of waiting ahead of me.

Tuesday night, after eating steak with my husband, I caught my son's stomach virus. All night, I was puking.

And when you're pregnant, you can't take anything.

The only thing that perked me up was a phone call from Tamar, in the middle of the day, with a new offer, from a second house. (The third house pulled out.) Tamar said she was going to go back to the first house to see if they wanted to up their offer.

Keep in mind, while these calls are going on, I'm throwing up like every 30 minutes.

Tamar called back an hour later with an offer that almost knocked me off my chair. I actually asked her to repeat it. I thought I might be hallucinating.

Then I got another offer.

Thursday, the bidding continued.

This stretched over the weekend.

Finally, on Monday, final offers were in. (No, I'm not going to give you numbers. I'm not shy about that kind of thing, but there are a lot of people involved in this deal, and I'm not going to reveal information they might prefer be kept secret.)The offers were comparable, with different aspects to them.

I picked Kensington, because it felt like the right fit for me and my book. And when I spoke with the amazing Alicia Condon on the phone, I immediately knew it was the right choice. They're an amazing house, and I'm so lucky to be working with them.

Since I got the positive pregnancy test and the book deal within the same week, it made for some interesting times. People kept saying, "Congratulations!"

I'd smile and say, "Thank you!" Then I'd pause and say, "Wait. For which?"

A book deal and a baby, all in the same month.

I should go play a lottery ticket.

~

Cheating

2011-02-17T08:00:00.001-05:00

When I was in grade school, I used to cheat on tests.

Wait, you're getting the wrong idea. I didn't cheat off of other students. I was a straight A student myself; I didn't need to look at anyone else's answers.

I let them cheat off me.

See, we moved every year. I went to a different school for every grade from Kindergarten through eighth grade. Every year. I was always the new kid. I never knew any differently.

Yeah, you'd think military family, but that wasn't it. My dad ran nursing homes, and he was the kind of guy who would go into a nursing home that was close to failing state survey, he'd clean it up, hire people, fire people, get it in better shape, and then move on to the next one. Now that I'm in my thirties, I've heard some stories (from my now divorced mother) about how my dad just wasn't happy anywhere and he just kept wanting to move, but I'm going to keep my illusions about the nursing home thing, thank you very much.

Anyway. Back to the cheating.

So you know what happens to new kids, right? They never have a best friend. They never have real friends, period. I remember being in fifth grade, and starting a fledgling friendship with this one girl. We were eating lunch together, and we learned that our birthdays were one day apart.

I got all excited and said, "Isn't that cool? Maybe we could have a birthday party together! My mom said I can have an ice skating party this year, and--"

She cut me off and said, "Yeah, I really don't like you very much. I was just eating with you because the teacher said I had to be nice."

I don't think I ever talked to her again.

So when you don't have any friends, and you feel like no one likes you, you can go in two directions. You can do what my brother did: spend your grade school years with a chip on your shoulder, full of knee-jerk reactions and defensive attitude. Or you can do what I did: anything you can to possibly make people like you.

When you're a straight-A student, people want to cheat off you.

So I let them. All the time. Copy homework, look at my test, whatever.

Did this make me any friends?

Nope. But it bought me some refuge from the normal new-kid crap.

I did have sorta-friends while I was growing up. I mean every kid finds friends eventually. But mine were always the one-offs. The kids who were already outcasts from their class, so I naturally fit in with them. Maybe they were relieved to have a friend, too.

When I got to high school, I knocked that crap off. I went to a private, all-girls Catholic high school. It wasn't like a feeder school, so everyone was new. There were all kinds of ice-breaking activities and Freshman orientation, and being a good student was a good thing, not something to make you an outcast. I had friends. Lots of them. We were geeks, sure, but we were friends.

And the funny thing was, I didn't have to do a damn thing to get them.

I still don't have dozens of friends. I'm not one of those people who goes out with a big group of girls for every occasion. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a big group of girls, honestly. I didn't go to college for very long (that's a story for another day), so I don't have sorority sisters to hang out with. All my high school friends went off to college after graduation, and I started a corporate job, so our paths diverged somewhat.

I don't want this to sound depressing. I'm a pretty resilient person, I can change gears on the fly, and I can get along with just about anyone. Really, anyone. It makes me very good at my job. I wouldn't trade my upbringing for anything. I have an incredible mom, and I'm married to an amazing man.

When I sold the book and had my first conversation with my editor, she said something like, "You have a full time job and a toddler -- how do you find the time to write books, too?"

I laughed and said, "I have a really supportive husband, and I don't really have much of a social life."

She laughed and said, "Well, you certainly have an active imaginary life in this book!"

I started writing in late grade school and early high school. I used to tell people that I couldn't find enough books to read, so I just started writing my own.

But once my awesome editor said that, I realized maybe it was something else.

Maybe I started writing because I needed friends.

I mean, that paid off, right?

That chick who was "just being nice"? She can suck it.

:-)

~

All right, it's close enough to 8pm

2011-02-15T19:23:00.000-05:00

Our winner is Becky, with the injured child, bed full of something that shouldn't be in a bed, and the case of pinkeye. (Not to mention the indignity of facing the hot orthopaedic doc, either!)

Becky, I'm not sure congratulations is the right thing to say, but I sure hope your week gets better.

The Amazon gift card is yours!

Thanks to everyone for playing!!