Showing posts from May, 2010
So in between reading Keats's letters to Fanny and mouthing the words to "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "To Autumn," another missing piece has tumbled out. It's not quite the grand secret of pretty prose that I'm looking for--though, now that I've been re-reading the book, it's not terribly written--could use a little more variety sentence-wise and word choice-wise. I haven't made much progress on the synopsis--my right wrist and by extension, my entire right arm aches.
Here's the missing link: It's called negative capability. Keats was a prolific letter writer. Seriously, if he was alive now, he'd be blogging it up and Facebooking, emailing, and IMing like the rest of us distracted, procrastinating writers. He wrote a letter in 1817 to his brothers, where he discussed and defined negative capability: "When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.&quo…

Missing Link

I've been reading a YA novel today, from internship, and it helped me solve a small but vital part of the book.
Astral projection, ladies and....ladies.
Quoi? You ask.
It's basically a form of an outer body experience. (As Eva says, she is having the MOTHER of all outer body experiences). According to wikipedia: The idea of astral travel is rooted in common worldwide religious accounts of the afterlife[2] in which the consciousness' or soul's journey or "ascent" is described in such terms as "an...out-of body experience, wherein the spiritual traveller leaves the physical body and travels in his/her subtle body (or dreambody or astral body) into ‘higher’ realms."[3] It is therefore associated with near death experiences and is also frequently reported as spontaneously experienced in association with sleep and dreams, illness,[4] surgical operations, drug experiences, sleep paralysis and forms of meditation.[5]
That, along with some quick Googling and…

Characters Who Float

I knew it had to happen at some point. The other day, I open my internship email and look at the stuff under my pretty blue label to be read. Lo and behold, there's a YA novel and it's about a girl who goes into a coma and her spirit is floating around, watching her family and particularly connecting with her sister.

So I had a total "Holy shit" moment. It's all right, though, because it didn't have body switching. Or, as Brixton says, "Your spirit got...transferred." I mean, hell, I re-watched "Just Like Heaven" before starting this story just to see how they did it and to be sure I didn't do it the same way.
I'm writing the synopsis--it's coming along quite nicely, thanks for asking--and I'll post it when I'm done with it. Then it's on to read-through and looking for contests!
Here's something I was wondering about though. You know those characters in books who are there, maybe say a few lines, but don't r…

Entered my ass into a writing contest...

On a whim, after joking about how I seemed to be reading a lot about Brooklyn, I mentioned something like, "Oh, I should write about Queens. I'll call it 'Pink House in the Middle of the Street.'"


I started it. Then I searched for memoir/ personal essay contests. And I found one, run by Writer's Digest. The due date happened to be today, so I entered it. Ha. Is it my best essay ever? No. But it's better than whatever personal essays I was writing in college, that's for sure. Here's the deal:

Win a trip to New York City !


New Blog Name...and Other Things

Note: Changed the name of the blog today. Again. What can I say? I get bored easily.

Yesterday, I went to the Brooklyn Children's Museum with my cousin, his wife, their son and our niece. The niece is almost 2, the nephew almost 1, and with my aunt (the kids' grandmother) in Japan for the moment, enjoying a richly deserved vacation, the parents have each taken a week off to watch both kids. Thus, museum trip yesterday.

It's a great museum, honestly. It's big and there's lots for kids to do. The niece loved the slide (and the tunnel below it). They had an exhibit on Japanese culture, including koi no bori (banners of colorful flying cod, for Children's Day) and Japanese dolls behind a case (to which I took my niece and said, "Look, like Baba's house!") and even a Japanese dinner table set up with chopsticks and tea pots and miso soup bowls. (Once again, prompting me to hold up the kids and say, "Like Baba's house!")

I don't know B…


Practicing some query writing.
I saw your listing in Writers' Digest and noted your interest in edgy, contemporary women's fiction with a fantasy twist. I have completed a 85,000 word manuscript titled Last Request. I hope you will consider me for your list.
For Eva Fontaine, living as another person has suddenly become reality. It only takes one ill-fated meeting with her estranged father and one ill-considered step into a Boston street for Eva to be launched out of her comatose body. She awakens in a young woman's body, one she has never seen before, unsure of how she got there. In trying to decipher whether she is dead, in an in-between world, or a reincarnation gone wrong, Eva recalls her life from the age of fourteen until twenty-six, analyzing her life for signs that this spiritual displacement may have happened before, analyzing the effects of her mother's death and her father's estrangement--and most of all, recalling how she and her best friend Brixton Da…

Marginally OK Second Draft: C'est fini!

12:07 am, May 7, 2010...
And I just wrote the last sentence to the second draft of the soul swapping/ paraweirdo book that I've tentatively given the working title My Last Request to.
It came out at 84, 831 words, double-space, 327 pages. I'd like it to be up at 330 pages, honestly, but that'll have to come in the 3rd draft--whenever I get to that. Think I'll do a read-through tomorrow in between reading other people's manuscripts, then, perhaps, have a few other people read it.
But, for now, c'est fini. This is the third second draft I've done from February 2009 til now.
The next draft of this? Tweaking. Trying to learn the art of pretty prose, etc. The pejorative nickname?
The Hopefully Better Third Draft.
Bringing something over from Word Wenches. It's a post about racial diversity in romances:


*Insert your preferred Gerard Butler in loincloth photos here*
Yes, page 300. A love scene, if you will.
-Chapter 34. Present Day. Boston. Eva has gone a little off the deep end and she and Brix have an argument. -First word: #78, 229 of 83, 353 words -Last Word: #78, 534 of 83, 353 words
First sentence: The bra clasp snaps open and the constriction around my shoulders disappears. Last sentence: The darkness behind my eyes tips to the side, the shakes up and down and then I no longer feel Brix inside of me, on top of me.
Dun, dun, dun...
Next update will be when I finish. Almost there! Word tells me I have 321 pages.