Design a book cover contest!

Teralyn Rose Pilgrim is hosting a book cover design contest! My entry:

I love creating covers for my novels and hadn't done one yet for my current rough draft. So I threw this together last night. What do you think?

There is still time to sign up for the contest. If you would like to participate, head here: Linky. And you can also go to the linky to vote for me, which would be awesome as well (I'm number 2)!

Friday Mash-up: Links, WiP Update and Ladies Who Critique

Links!

From my vantage point, the blogosphere seemed to be dominated by a few things this week:

1. School restarting (a sad kind of event for me which reminds me that I do miss teaching)

2. Rachel Harrie's Campaign (Yay! I am overly and unreasonably excited!)

3. Christine Tyler's Sparkfest (Great inspiration!)

But, as usual, there were still quite a few posts on writing that really got my attention:

There were a variety of great posts on exposition and backstory:

Lindsay Smith on The Expository Opening

Elana Johnson on When you need backstory and when you don't

Tuesday Tip on Literary Rambles on Exposition

In other writing advice, Kidlit posted about Overwriting and Why It's a Problem

Writer Beware posted about Satisfying Your Reader without Being Predictable

Natalie Whipple wrote an interesting post about Writing When You're NOT A Reader. It is an interesting read, even if you are a reading writer.

And Nathan Bransford wrote about how there is no such thing as an Overnight Success. I love, love, love this post! It annoys me when people seem to think that Stephanie Meyer blinked her eyes and Twilight was written. Like Bransford says--it takes a long time to write a novel and for a parent, every sentence is a moment you could be spending with your children. This thought plagues me every time I write/critique.

WiP Update

I'm a little stalled. What do you do when you are stalled? I usually try and write though it, but that isn't working for me this time. Sometimes I set the story aside for awhile, but I'm really resistant to that because I only have 15K left--which means if I can get restarted, I can finish the story in a week. Any advice?

Ladies Who Critique

I'm finding this website to be awesome! I've met some wonderful writerly friends, and I am excited to see the forums grow. Especially the historical forum--historical writers are suck a small subset of the blogging/writing world, and we need to find and support each other! I'm usually resistant to these kinds of forums due to unwanted emails, ads, etc--but I've had no problems with Ladies Who Critique.

Teaser Tuesday: The Secret to Lying

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB of Should be Reading. Anyone can play along. Just do the following:

-Grab your current read.

-Open to a random page.

-Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page.

-Don't include spoilers.

-Share the title and author.

My Tuesday read is The Secret to Lying by Todd Mitchell. Todd is a fairly awesome dude. He teaching writing at Colorado State, and I was lucky enough to take a class taught by him last Sunday. It was am-a-zing. I'm still trying to digest everything.

Teaser sentences:

Dickie and I got the Steves back for elfing us by breaking into their room and attaching a car battery to their toilet--one terminal to the water and one to some copper threads we'd taped across the floor. The Steves were such slobs, all we had to do was shove the batter being the toilet and throw a towel over it to make things look normal.

Sparked! A blogfest.

Get your sparkage on with the Sparkfest hosted by Christine Tyler. It runs until the 26th, so there is still time to sign up.

The blogfest questions are:

What book made you realize you were doomed to be a writer?

What author set off that spark of inspiration for your current WiP?

Or Is there a book or author that changed your world view?

I started writing for fun when I was much younger, but it wasn’t until recently that I started writing seriously. And it is completely the fault of my friend Marie.

A few years ago Marie gave me a three-ring binder neatly filled with type-written pages.

Marie and me at 14-years-old:

She’s the one sporting the wicked camera. Yes, we still both look that young and beautiful.

So--she pressed the binder into my hand all serious and nervous.

“I wrote a book.” she said. “Will you read it?”

I asked her when she had time to write a book--with having twin boys less than a year ago.

“Nap time,” she said, like it was the easiest thing in the world to whip out a novel between diapers and tummy time and fractured nights.

Marie’s book, now contained by a binding instead of a binder:

And I thought--if she can write a novel during nap time, then surely I, with summers off due to my teaching gig, could manage to spew out a novel. I’d tried to write them before but always wandered away. Mostly because I spent a lot of my 20s doing this (well, and going to college and grad school on occasion too):

So I started doing this instead:

In between moments of this:

How could I not post such awesomeness?

All because Marie said I could do it, and Marie is usually right.

So I did it--I wrote a novel. And then I did it again. And again. And then the writing obsession started.

Consider me sparked.

How did you get sparked?

Go back to the linky here!

Third Writers' Platform Campaign

I am super excited about joining Rachel Harrie's Campaign this time around. Come and join us!

Find out more about it here.

Peeking at Other People's Bookshelves

I love looking at other people's bookshelves. I'm not entirely sure what the draw is--finding new books, discovering what someone else reads, seeing what books we have in common. I love spying on bookshelves for all those reasons.

As a pet sitter, I've visited a lot of different houses. It is amazing to me how uniquely we all live--how each person's home is a reflection of them. This difference is always apparent in the bookshelf. I can't stop myself from glancing at a client's bookshelf. I'm not some crazy person who goes though the homes of my clients--I won't go into back rooms searching for books, but if the bookshelf is out in one of the main rooms, I always look.

Part of it is that I believe the books a person owns says a lot about who they are. And this fascinates me. It also makes me think about my own bookshelf--and how what is on it illuminates my own desires, interests and passions.

My own bookshelf is a very good representation of me. There is a large about of fiction--mostly classics, YA and horror (most of the horror belongs to Husband). Some non-fiction--humorous non-fict, history, law, homebrewing and cooking. There are a few coffee table books, all that deal with either art, seashells or cats. I stare at the bookshelves and think--yep, that's me.

What do your bookshelves say about you?

Friday Mash-up: Links, co-writing and The Tutors

Linkety links

There are quite a few posts around the blog-o-sphere that I loved this week, so I didn’t feel like narrowing it down.

First, WorldPlay suggests Why You Should Kick Your Story Aside and Write a Different One.

Teralyn Rose Pilgrim discussed Keeping A Work Diary.

The Aspiring Subcreator asked: What does your writing look like? in this hilarious post.

Over at Chasing the Dream, Melissa is Learning to Love Notecards when revising. I just discovered Melissa’s blog this week--I met her at Ladies Who Critique, which is click worthy as well.

YA HIghway gave 5 Tips for Writing Outside Your Gender, something really relevant for me at the moment.

And KidLit did a very helpful First Line Analysis.

The Co-writing Adventure

Writing a novel with someone else is enlightening. Marie and I are brainstorming/ignoring the project until her kids start school in a few weeks. But we’ve got some basic plot ideas for a fantasy story. What I love about working with her is learning how differently we approach writing a novel. For example, one of a recent phone conversations:

Me: Okay, so we have a basic idea of what’s going to happen (in my lawyer-like tone, suggesting we now restate said ideas for clarity).

Marie: Oohhh...who do you want to be? The girl or the guy?

Me: I don’t know. I don’t care.

Marie: I want to write the girl. I thought I’d want to write the guy, but I like her.

Me: Okay, sounds good. So what should we do next?

Marie: Of course, if you want to write the girl, that’s okay too. Or we could just wait and see.

Me: No, I’ll write the dude. I can get a feel for him. So what should we do next? We should figure out the end.

Marie: How will we know what happens in the end if we don’t know the plot?

Me: That’s how I usually come up with a plot--I figure out what happens in the end. And then I work backwards.

Marie: We’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we have to build the world.

Me: But we build the world according to what happens in the story, so we need to know what happens first--we need to know the end. And then we can start world building.

Marie: No, we build the word and then figure out the story. The last thing we figure out is the ending.

A moment of silence.

Me: Okay. Let’s do some world building and then we can come back to the plot.

Marie: You’re saying that because you’ve already decided what happens in the end.

Me: Yep, I know what happens in the end.

Marie: Are you going to tell me?

Me: Nope. I want to see what you come up with.

The Tutors

I’ve been watching The Tutors over the last few weeks. I love historical TV dramas, so this one is prefect for me. I always watch and research at the same time, so while the series is playing, I look up facts and what not on my laptop.

What I enjoy most about the show is staring at Henry and wondering: what the hell is he thinking? Movies/TV are great that way--where you aren’t always quite sure what the MC is thinking. It doesn’t work that way for me in novels, where I like to know the MC’s motivations and reasoning.

It intrigues me how our expectations for characters/plotting differ between film and text--and it makes me want to write a screenplay. Have you ever written a screenplay?

Blog Changes

I haven’t been posting as regularly as I like. I need more structure, but I don’t really like having set days per week. Therefore, I thought I would try something new starting in September. My plan is to have each month dedicated to a writing topic and to make four posts that month regarding it (hopefully one per week, but possibly four on the last four days). For September, I am going to tackle plotting a novel since I am taking a class from the fabulous Todd Mitchell, author of The Secret to Lying, on that topic next weekend. I am sure I’ll have some awesome learning to share!

Have a fantablous Friday!

The Best Advice

There are two nuggets of advice I consistently think about.

1. Go Deeper. I was given this advice last year, but I still return to it again and again. Deeper into characters, deeper into setting, deeper into voice. Most of my revising is directed toward just this--going deeper and really exploring and experiencing the created world. I wrote two posts about going deeper last year (Going Deeper; Going Deeper part deux). Sometimes I write it across the top of my ms when editing--tracing over the words as I contemplate why a section isn't working.

2. No generic sentences. I just overheard this advice a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it constantly. I’ve seen agent critiques that discuss generics before, but the advice didn’t really take hold of me until recently. Specifically about this advice in connection with voice--that every sentence needs to have voice. That every sentence is a gateway to the character and the world. And if it isn’t specific and enlightening, then it isn’t a good enough sentence.

Both of these little chunks of advice are very basic, but both have really colored the way I approach writing. I know they aren’t the only tidbits that have helped me, but these are the two that stick with me. I’m eager to find out what other gems I add to the list as I continue to learn and grow.

What advice do you return to again and again?