New Background, New Year

All right, reader's mine.  I've made a new colour scheme.  If you know the creator of this background, please let me know.  A friend sent it to me with the note, "Thought you would like this."  She had gotten it from another friend, who'd gotten it from another friend, who had no idea where they found it.  Anywho, it eventually made it to me and I thought that I would go colour crazy for the new year.

I have set myself goals for 2012 (because I feel guilty if I haven't completed a resolution):

1. Get more balance back in my life so that I can get myself back to the gym and have a social life again.
2. Finish editing Book 1 and get it sent off finally.
3. Do everything I can to keep the job I love and make it full-time next year.

What are your goals?

The Christmas Wedding by James Patterson and Richard DiLallo ***1/2

Another book mailed to me, another review to write.

This book was interesting.  It's format was different than pretty much any other book I've ever read.  First off, we get a guest list with a summary of important characters at the beginning.  Then we get transcripts of videos sent to family members throughout the book.  Then we get first person narratives from the perspective of each of Gabby's kids and from Gabby herself.    In this way, we get to peek into each person's life.  Gabby, the English teacher do-gooder who has invited her children and their families home to the farm for a Christmas day wedding with the caveat that she will not reveal who she is marrying until the ceremony itself.  Seth, the novelist in Boston who loves his artist girlfriend and is waiting to have his book bought while working as the receptionist in an ad agency.  Claire, who lives in Myrtle Beach with an abusive, pothead, alcoholic for a husband and three kids who are witnessing the crazy.  (You really get to know and like her son Gus, regardless of the stuff he puts his mother and grandmother through).  Emily, the high powered lawyer who's married to a high powered surgeon both of whom are kind and caring individuals you don't actually want to smack even though they are possibly perfect on paper.  And Lizzie, who takes care of her sick husband and her little daughter with strength and patience while her doting husband cracks jokes to make her laugh.

This book is really less of a romance and more about the strength of family, particularly those families that are also friends.  Sure, there are three men who have proposed to Gabby, but they all remain friends.  There is almost no tension between the three suitors, all of whom have decided to do things the way Gabby wants because all they want is for her to be happy.   Some of the book was really powerfully written and realistic.  Some of it, like the men not protesting in earnest and having to be convinced that this was the best way, seemed a little out there to me.  I know, I know.  I can hear the protests already, "But you read and write fantasy and science fiction.  Not like Dragons and Elves are real!  Not like you've ever talked to an alien!"  And, yes, you're right, readers mine.  I do read and write fantasy and science fiction.  However, the reason I love them so is because I can strip away the ordinary faces of people to show you the psychology and the reality of what goes on while doing it in a way that doesn't hit you over the head with it.  To me, the fact that the three men proposed and not a single one of them ever truly pushed for an answer seems strange.  In the end though, if any of them had it would have made this story more dramatic, but not the feel-good story it was meant to be.  Light and fun, this is a novel that really was meant to entertain and to remind you about the Christmas spirit without hitting you over the head with a wooden mallet.  Overall, it achieved it's goal and left me feeling all warm and fuzzy.

Shaun Tan, Neil Gaiman, Characters and Planning

So, I read the conversation between Shaun Tan and Neil Gaiman (Renaissance men involved in about a billion projects, look them up if you don't know them) that was featured in The Guardian and this bit popped out to me because, even though they're planners, they can understand and explain those of use who are not and cannot be.  I know that I have said before, if you can be a planner, do so.  It will make your life infinitely more easy.  I, however, don't seem to be able to.  I can polish plan after the fact to fix up "dodgy bits" but I can't do it beforehand.

 

ST: I don't know about you but when someone first mentions an adaptation, I have, probably a little bit inappropriately, a feeling of weariness at revisiting that work after I'd struggled with it for so many months or years. But then the second thought is "Wow, what a great opportunity to fix up all those dodgy bits."

NG: It's so nice to hear you say that. Somebody asked me recently if I plot ahead of time. I said yes I do, but there is always so much room for surprise and definitely points where I don't know what's going to happen. They quoted somebody who had said: "All writers who say that they do not know what's going to happen are liars, would you believe someone who started an anecdote without knowing where it was going?" I thought, but I don't start an anecdote to find out what I think about something, I start an anecdote to say this interesting thing happened to me. Whereas I'll start any piece of art to find out what I think about something.

ST: Exactly.

NG: I'm going to learn something I didn't know when I began. I'm going to discover how I feel and what I think about it during the process. I will break off little bits of my head and they will become characters and things will happen and they will talk to each other.

ST: Exactly, creating a character is like impersonating another being, so that you can find out what you think about something. You really find out what your style is when you diversify – setting something in a fictional landscape, the far future or distant past. A lot of people think of style or personality in terms of things you do often, but it's not really. It's what you do under duress, or outside of yourself. I don't feel I know myself really well because – again it's that emotional thing – sometimes I feel a little embarrassed by the amount of emotion that comes out in a story. I don't realise that there's so much of it locked up or in denial and then it comes out in the process of doing this conscious dreaming exercise.

If you want to see the rest of the conversation in The Guardian, go here.

Writing and Rejections

Found originally at this blog.
Rejection and writing go hand-in-hand, but sometimes it feels that those pesky publishers simply don’t know what they are talking about.
Here’s eleven reasons writers might just be right after all…

1. Madeline L’Engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, was turned down 29 times before she found a publisher.
2. C.S. Lewis received over 800 rejections before he sold a single piece of writing.
3. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was rejected by 25 publishers.
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected 121 times.
5. Johathan Livingston Seagull was rejected 40 times.
6. Louis L’Amour was rejected over 200 times before he sold any of his writing.
7. The San Francisco Examiner turned down Rudyard Kipling’s submission in 1889 with the note, “I am sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just do not know how to use the English language.”
8. An editor once told F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby Character.”
9. The Dr. Seuss book, And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected for being “too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant selling.”
10. George Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected with the comment, “It’s impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.”
11. The manuscript for The Diary of Anne Frank received the editorial comment, “This girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.”

The Santa Anas

In California, we have these crazy winds.  They made my high school uniform a pain.  Short skirts and high winds don't go together so well.  They dry out vegetation and wildfires are more common when they're blowing.  They cause property damage, make driving more difficult, and knock out power.

Regardless of all this, I love these desert winds.  They come whipping out of the canyon behind our house and buffet our house.  It sounds like a ship at sea in the middle of a storm.  I feel like I'm in an adventure novel at night without any of the crazy rocking back and forth.  It always gives me the best dreams.

56 similies to make your English teacher laugh so hard they cry...

I found this at this blog.

1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.
3. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
4. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
6. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
8. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
11. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
12. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.
13. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
14. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
15. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at asolar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
18. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
19. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
20. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
21. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
22. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
23. Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it hadrusted shut.
24. He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.
25. She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.
26. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
27. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
28. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
29. “Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.
30. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
31. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
32. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
33. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
34. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
35. Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”
36. The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
37. The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
38. She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
39. Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually.
40. Fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often.
41. They were as good friends as the people on “Friends.”
42. Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.
43. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.
44. He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.
45. The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747.
46. Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light.
47. The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.
48. I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either.
49. She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn.
50. Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
51. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.
52. Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.
53. You know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in.
54. The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
55. Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist. 
56. The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.

The Ideal Man by Julie Garwood ***1/2

I've been sent a bunch of books by different people asking me to review them and so, you dear readers, will be stuck reading a bunch of reviews.  That's how this works, after all.  I get asked to read something, I read it, I write a review, and then you read that.  Vicious cycle, really.

Julie Garwood's book, The Ideal Man, falls under the categories of mystery and romance.  I figured one out of two of my norm wasn't so bad.  Then my friend pointed out that the romantic lead was an FBI agent and that he's chasing down a modern day Bonnie and Clyde pair and falls for a girl who's stalked by a nut job.  I was like, "Okay...sounds more appealing."  Then my friend said, "And by the way, the girl isn't flaky.  She's a brilliant doctor who doesn't realize how gorgeous she is."  I was sold on reading the book.

On the plus side: The plot was fun.  Both the main characters and the side characters were believable.  The characters were more realistic and had more psychology going on than I expected.  I came to really like Max--who is built like a mountain, quiet but sharp, and is both fiercely protective and kind at the same time.  I like that he had a bit of a rough past but that the family who adopted him was loving.  I like that he was strong enough to tell her when she had to listen to his better judgement as well as strong enough to know that he needed to compromise.  I also came to really like Ellie, whose history makes he both afraid to love and desperately in need of it (even if she doesn't realize the latter).  I like the fact that she's so smart that she went to college at twelve but that it doesn't make her a total dunce emotionally as an adult.  I like that having a crazy stalker who tried to kill her as a kid has an effect on every single member in her family and that she tries to protect them as best as she can.  I like that her twin sisters had opposite personalities and that both had their own problems that they were dealing with. 

On the minus side: I was a little confused at first by how often and without warning the point of view shifted and because of that, it felt a bit choppy to me.  It sometimes took me a couple of sentences to figure out who was talking now, but typically, the voices were distinct.  I wanted the book to be a little longer and more drawn out because I wanted to see a little more of background.  We got told about when Ellie was a little girl, but I wanted to have a flashback or two.  I wanted to see how she felt when she had to move away from her family and I wanted a little more interaction with the people who took her in.  I also wanted a little more on the cases, but that's just me loving a hard boiled detective story and more cop/fed shows than you could shake a stick at.  On the other hand, if someone says that they want more, it's always a good thing from a writer's point of view.

Overall, I would recommend this book.  It had enough going on that the romance was just one of the many plots, albeit a pretty significant one.  I enjoyed being in the characters' heads.  It was a fun romp on a cold, rainy afternoon and it was a fun introduction to a new author.