Meme Procrastination

I stole this meme from Deniz. Ah, the fun of doing a useless quiz when I should be getting over a rough spot in the novel. {eg}

TECHNOLOGY

What is the wallpaper on your computer?
a boring Vista picture of grass with dew on it

How many televisions do you have in your house?
None

BIOLOGY

Are you right handed or left handed?
Left-handed, even when it's inconvenient

Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
Not that I know of :P

What is the last heavy item you lifted?
A fruit tree branch, to stake it up and keep it from snapping.. It was surprisingly heavy.

Have you ever been knocked out?
Nope.

BULLSHITOLOGY

If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
No, I'd rather be blissfully unaware.

If you could change your name, what would you change it to?
I wouldn't-- I love both my first and middle names!

What color do you think looks best on you?
Turquoise and pink.

Have you ever swallowed a non-food item?
Do insects count?

DAREOLOGY

Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
Already done it for free!

Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
Noooo.

Would you never blog again for $50,000?
Who wouldn't?

Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000?
I'd have to be in desperate need of the money. {g}

Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for a million dollars?
No way.

DUMBOLOGY

What is in your left pocket?
Nada

Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
Never seen it.

Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
Both...sort of.

Do you sit or stand in the shower?
Stand.

How many pairs of flip flops do you own?
One.

LASTOLOGY

Last person who texted you?
My best friend.

Last person who called you?
My older brother.

Last person you hugged?
My mom.

FAVOURITOLOGY

Number?
47

Season?
Summer and Autumn.

Color?
Pink, purple, turquoise with enough blue tone, gold.

CURRENTOLOGY

Missing someone?
My older brother and sister-in-law.

Mood?
Tired.

Listening to?
The soundtrack of Prince Caspian-- for writing music.

Worrying about?
Bringing enough boxes to help my brother move tomorrow.

Wearing?
Pretty turquoise dress with flowers, from India.

RANDOMOLOGY

First place you went this morning?
Outside, to the family orchard.

What can you not wait to do?
Start on my latest drawing (fan portrait of Georgie Henley. {g})

Do you smile often?
Yes.

Are you a friendly person?
Yep.

Losing Perspective

Writing Hidden Underground over the past seven years, the project's become such a part of me that I sometimes feel like I'm losing perspective. My list of criticsms of it could fill pages, but I don't know how to fix them, because I can't look at it objectively, even when I put it aside for months. In my self-critical viewpoint, I'm probably blowing the extent of its problems out of proportion.

My mind pulls up the flaws and goes over and over them, nagging at me that it'll never be finished or ready for publishing. The problems feel huge, overwhelming, like a sore in your mouth when you run your tongue over it. The tone is overall too dark, my mind tells me. The characters aren't fleshed out enough, the plot is too cliche, the main characters' development is too slow, it's way too long, etc., etc.

The thing is, with all of my new WIPs, I know where I'm going, and I can sense whether what I'm doing is working or not. Character development is easy and writing the story feels light as the wind.

I probably need distance again, but the 2nd draft nags to be written and bugs me at night until I agree to work on it in the morning.

So what do you folks do when these blues hit? How do you refresh your confidence and get inspired to keep going?

Ack, Stop Eating My Files!!

My new laptop decided to crash the other day, while I was out somewhere. When I discovered it and tried to restart it, it went into super-buzz mode, until it was vibrating like a massage machine. I had to turn it off, take the battery out, and let it sit for a bit. But when I started it up again, my computer told me it couldn't run Windows, and proceeded to start a system restore, back to two weeks ago.

I panicked of course, and asked my computer-geek older brother what to do about it. Not to worry, he said, pointing to the finer print on the dialog box. It would only backtrack on settings and maybe programs, not files. But when it finished and started up again, I got into my WIP documents and discovered that EVERYTHING I had written in the past two weeks (a good 4-5000 words) was non-existent, gone without a trace. It was only then that I realized with that horrid, sick, sinking feeling that it's been months since I last backed up my work. Needless to say, I blew up at myself and the evil computer and turned into a mess of panic and tears.

Fortunately, my computer-geek brother promptly came to the rescue and showed me that I could restore my system forward again, reverting back to that same morning. I started the process and fled, to prevent myself from harboring violent intentions toward the innocent-looking machine. When it finished, I was almost afraid to look at my writing files. Fortunately, I did, and everything was there again. Whew, talk about huge relief.

The first thing I did was to email every single writing file I've updated since last year to myself on Gmail, a long overdue step toward sane computer usage for a writer. I'd been copying the files to other computers on the family network, and making CD or DVD backups when my old computer let me, but I didn't have any email copies before now.

So the moral of the story? Anything can happen to a computer, even a shiny new one, and it tends to happen just when you can't can't CAN'T afford to lose your writing files because you haven't backed up in a while.

What do you do to backup those writing files of life-or-death importance?

Excerpt from Hidden Underground

Susan Adrian posted a lovely snippet from her WIP on her blog, and suggested that some of us follow suit with short snippets of our own from the chapter we're working on at the moment, just for the fun of sharing. So here goes! :)

Here's an excerpt from Hidden Underground, my historical YA set in WWII Poland. I pulled this from the chapter I'm currently editing, set sometime in October, 1939. Heidi is visiting the town closest to her village, for the first time since the Wehrmacht arrived.

Hidden Underground
Copyright 2008, J Rose D.

A motorcycle screeched toward her as they raced across the street.

“Heidi!” Alina’s shriek echoed in the church doorway. Something grabbed her foot, sending her sprawling—a beer bottle. She closed her eyes to shut out the sting of her skinned knees. When she opened them again, the ground around her was strewn with beer bottles.

In the dark interior of the church the icons lay in a shambled heap among the bottles—twisted, ripped, falling. At her foot, the portrait of Saint Irene was separated from its frame, disfigured by a black bootprint across the face and crown. Cloths, yellow candles and oil lamps had been thrown about from the wooden altar and iconostasis. The ornate censer hung vandalized at the end of a single chain.

“My God,” she whispered. “Why?” She pulled the ends of her close-fitting sweater over her hands. Dizzy—the weathered walls and littered street changed angles. By her side, Alina was shaking.

“Come on.” Johann touched her arm with a gentle firmness. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“Shh.” There it was again—the stifled sobbing. “Someone’s in there.” Heidi navigated her way through the dark, with Johann and Alina close behind her. A chink of broken glass crunched under her shoe, and an old woman’s startled cry answered from the side of the altar.

“Pani Kusiak!” Heidi and Johann exclaimed at the same time. Pani Kusiak, in a Greek Orthodox church? She was an adamant Roman Catholic, and as far as Heidi knew she’d never set foot in here in her life.

I've been tagged!

Sarah tagged me to carry on a new meme going around by writing six random things about myself.

The rules:

a. Link to the person who tagged you.
b. Post the rules on your blog.
c. Write six random things about yourself.
d. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
e. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment at their blog.
f. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Six random things about me:

1.) Whenever someone shakes hands with me, I wait for the inevitable question that follows. "Your hands are cold." My hands are always cold, and they turn freezing cold when I write, for some reason. Apparently my body boxes up any bit of coolness it has and sends it to my hands (I just realized that the wording of that statement could take on another meaning, lol.)

2.) I know Persian well enough to instant message and write long letters in it in both the Latin and Arabic alphabets and I understand 9/10's of what Iranian or Afghani native speakers say online. But I freak out when I get opportunities to actually speak it, probably a consequence of having learned it online (my pronunciation is good, so I've been told, but I don't have the confidence yet.)

3.) People find my accent hard to pin. Usually they ask if I'm British, but sometimes their curiosity turns into a wild guessing game skipping all over Europe--Russia, France, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Few people actually guess that it's a mix of Californian and Australian, picked up from my mother. She grew up with Australians and we children took on her accent, while she dropped it completely.

4.) When I edit my writing I can see whether I have the right balance of dialogue, description, and action in a scene by checking how it "looks," without actually reading it. If the balance doesn't look right, I mark it with "@@" and go back and fix it when I hit a block somewhere else.

5.) I'm an immigrant rights activist. I live in a racist neighborhood in a very divided rural town, so when I do flyering for protests or other events, the mostly Mexican immigrants here are surprised that a white person would get involved in their cause.

6.) I can be a terrible procrastinator sometimes. But once I get going, I'll stick to the task obsessively until it's done, usually blocking out everything else. I get things done twice as fast with a deadline as without.

And now I randomly tag:

Susan
Jenny Meyer
Amy
Marisa
Helene
Jenna

Just for Fun

Just for fun, here's a pencil portrait I did recently, drawn from a photo of a friend's daughter with regular pencil and paper.

The Last Cuckoo

My first novel lies in the midst of the second draft, begging to be edited. I have no excuse to drag my feet on it, really. But instead of buckling down to it, I've been busily writing chunks of my new WIP, as they sizzle in my mind and demand their turn to be heard.

The new WIP sprang from bits of unused research for the last novel. What can I say? I'm a sucker for WWII stories set in Poland. The tentative title is The Last Cuckoo, another name with a double-meaning, springing from the cuckoo symbolism I use in the story. Cuckoos are common birds in Poland, and to hear one sing means a year of prosperity. But what if the MC sees one, up close, but it refuses to sing? It's spring of 1939, and terrible things are ahead.

The story begins a full half-year before Hitler's invasion-- with massive university protests against Germany. One of those scarcely known facts that helped spark the plot. Student activists were well aware of what was happening, far from being surprised. They even expected a Nazi invasion in April, at the time of Hitler's birthday.

Another interesting bit of research I've been doing involves an obscure concentration camp in Lodz, Poland, set up a month after the invasion specifically for intellectuals--doctors, professors, actors, writers, artists, and most of all, activists. Getting rid of these people was Hitler's first priority. But, imprisoned in terrible conditions, these intellectuals banded together in incredible displays of solidarity.

The camp was burned down in 1945, to cover up the evidence, but I was able to find photos of the former factory-turned-concentration-camp as it looked during the war (not to be confused with the memorial set up in its place.)

I love the new WIP, and writing in first person is like candy-- it's so effortless to get inside the MC's head. For now, I need to get back to my editing, but I look forward to writing more of it when inspiration strikes again.

Opening Paragraph Overwork

Over at the Books and Writers forum on Compuserve, I'm participating in the Firsts workshop, where we writers are working to hone the all-important openings of our WIPs-- the hook with which we hope to catch the attention of an agent. We did first sentences, first paragraphs, and first pages. Right now we're in the midst of workshopping our first five pages. I'm amazed at the effort people are putting into each other's work, even four sessions into the workshop, with pieces getting longer and longer. Kudos to all of you!

From the first workshop onward, my first paragraph has evolved multiple times based on overwhelming critiques and suggestions from my fellow writers. I'm grateful for all the good advice I've gotten, and all the time and energy people have invested in helping me get it just right. I think it's a lot stronger now, and more succinct.

But as it continues to receive comments, I'm beginning to ask myself when to stop polishing it and leave it be. One of my best critters confirmed my gut feeling that the changes have gotten to where they are only making the paragraph more awkward, not less. I've restored part of an earlier draft, making it more to my satisfaction.

It's a good rule of thumb that it's time to stop editing when you start restoring bits and pieces that were cut earlier. Seeing as I've hit that point now, I suspect I should be setting it aside and concentrating on other aspects of the opening instead.


Draft #1:

Tension hung in the air like the heaviness of the last summer heat. It was as if the whole of Burzski village was holding its breath. Heidi Jasinska felt it that afternoon, more real than words. Before today, she'd told herself there was no possibility that war could happen here. She had heard her father and his best friend, Andrej Malov, discuss the rumors over cups of coffee, but until now most of the villagers had disregarded their warnings as mere exaggerations.

Draft #2:

Tension hung in the air like the heaviness of the last summer heat. Heidi Jasinska felt it, more real than words, as if the whole of Burzski village was holding its breath. Before today, it didn't even seem possible that war could happen here. True, she'd often heard her father and his best friend, Mr. Malov, discuss the rumors over cups of coffee, but most of the villagers had dismissed their warnings as mere exaggerations.

Draft #3:

Tension hung in the air like the heaviness of the last summer heat. Heidi Jasinska felt it, as if the whole of Burzski village was holding its breath. Before today, it didn't even seem possible that war could happen here.

Draft #4:

Before today, it hadn't seemed possible that war could happen here. But now tension hung in the air, heavy like the last summer heat. Heidi Jasinska felt as if the whole of Burzski village were holding its breath.

Draft #5:

Tension hung in the air, heavy like the last summer heat. Heidi Jasinska felt as if the whole of Burzski village were holding its breath.

Draft #6:

Before today, it hadn't seemed possible that war could happen here. Tension hung in the air like the heaviness of the last summer heat. Heidi Jasinska felt as if the whole of Burzski village was holding its breath.

Literally laughing out loud

Does it ever bug you how often you see the word literally used all wrong? From stories, to blogs, to new articles, and of course constantly in everyday speech, people love to use the word, ending up with some pretty ridiculous sounding assertions.

My brother and I discussed our shared pet peeve about this the other day, which led to a googling challenge to see how many results we got for phrases like "his eyes literally popped out of his head" (eww!!) and "he literally flew down the stairs." (We found a lot by the way-- you can try it yourself.)

In the course of that interesting exercise, I came across this weblog, devoted to "literally" in all it's uses, correct and incorrect alike (but mostly incorrect, of course.) Many of the entries are accompanied with hilarious graphics and comments. Read through the pages of archives and prepare to literally laugh your head off!

http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

And yes, the statement in my post title is true, if a little silly-sounding. ;)

So, I have a blog.

I've finally been sucked into the blog craze, at the suggestion and urging of friends, and by my love of reading other's blogs. (Which are far more interesting than this one will be, you should know.) But, for what it's worth, here's a little about me to start you out with.

I'm a teen writer, published in a few anthologies and still working toward the Big Bite. I'm also a big-time history buff and have a thing for torturing myself with hundreds of hours of research, so I write historical YA. My first novel is set in World War II Poland and follows two girls through the war from the invasion in 1939 to the so-called "liberation" by the Soviets. It's almost finished, at about twice the length it should be, but I'm hoping to fix that problem with the second draft.

My love of writing goes back as far as I can remember. My mother reports me demanding silence as a two-year-old and announcing "I want to write, I NEED to write!" while scribbling with crayons. As a six and seven-year-old, I wrote long, tedious stories about everyday life and the fairy worlds of my stuffed animals. My interests and abilities evolved slowly from there.

I was eleven when I conceived the basics of my first novel/current work in progress. My original version is beyond embarrassing, buried until a more convenient date when I need it to demonstrate how bad I started out. I've worked steadily on the novel since then, for a total of almost eight years now, including my pause for a two or three year research binge. Now it's finally approaching the kind of book I want it to be.

My purpose for this blog? Obligating myself to do more writing, of course, and providing myself with a good opportunity for procrastination. Which will include discussing any aspect of writing I happen to be thinking of or reading about, or anything else in the writing world. I'll also be posting excerpts of my work, or fascinating bits of history from my research. Of course, in the end, I don't really know what this blog will turn into, but that's the general idea.

Thanks for reading!