angst-baking, nano, and youtube {oh my}.

So, I did that whole "sick" thing this past week. Great fun. I did not sleep AT ALL last Friday night, which I'm sure didn't help. I never got tired enough to even try. Bizarre. As you may know, I've had a lot on my mind. You know how stuff is, and how it always comes in threes {or, in my current case, fives}. At four in the morning last Saturday, after I stopped trying to sleep, something happened for the first time since college... or perhaps ever.

I angst-baked.

Flourless peanut butter cookies. Yurm. Want the recipe?

Mine did not look like this.

1 cup of peanut butter
1 cup of white sugar
1 egg

Mix it all together, spoon out your dollops, hashtag those puppies with your fork, and bake for 8 minutes. At least, that's what the website said to do. Methinks I should have left mine in for about 10. They ended up tasting like hot dough in cookie shapes. Granted, I have never had a successful solo cooking experience in my life {not counting spaghetti, microwave meals, or frozen pizzas}. So, for me? They were awesome.

Speaking of insanity {weren't we?}, I have decided that I absolutely must participate in NaNoWriMo, regardless of these things:

1. I will be in New York the first weekend of the month, and at camp the third.
2. I have no basis for the story, other than two characters and a vague idea.
3. I will have rehearsals to go to almost every night {oh yeah, I got into a play}.
4. My best friend has a brain tumor.*
5. I have a perfectly good WiP that does not deserve to be abandoned any further.
6. This thing freaking starts in four days.
7. Coffee is expensive.

*Remember the health issue I mentioned a few weeks ago? This is that. I've been not-saying-anything for a while, and it's been eating at me. If you don't want to read about Katie's grade II astrocytoma, I apologize in advance for the inevitability of my posting about it. I know I'll feel A LOT better if I can be open with you all.

On the flipside, here are the reasons *why*:

1. I have confidence that I'll be able to make up for lost words, before and after these trips.
2. I'm sure I have more of a basis than I realize, and I love what I do have.
3. Rehearsals don't start until 7:30.
4. Katie wants me to got for it.
5. My perfectly good WiP has been giving me the evil eye.
6. I'm {mostly) a pantser... why should I worry? I'll wing it, after all.
7. Tea is less expensive, and we have plenty of it.

As stupid as this endeavor sounds, in light of everything else that's going on, I can't help but be excited. Oh, the sweet release of going into another world. I sure could use more of that.

In keeping with the incoherent nature of this post, here's a music video. I've loved this song for years, but never saw the video {the wonderful, delightful video} until this week. I forget about things like YouTube. What a weirdo I am {and thanks, Katie, for finally getting me to watch it}.

Love to all! Tune in next time {or, the next few times} for lists of things I love, an award or two, and a dissertation on why I am OH MY GOSH still awake at this hour.*

*Probably not one to get your hopes up about.

third campaign challenge: delicate tastes.

 *First of all, want to be a part of a fun contest? I'm celebrating 100 followers by hosting a little blogfest (open through Oct. 28) where we all dish about the hilarious things we wrote as children. There will be prizes!

Check it out!

Time to get our third challenge on! The guidelines:

Write a blog post in 300 words or less, excluding the title. The post can be in any format, whether flash fiction, non-fiction, humorous blog musings, poem, etc. The blog post should show:

• that it’s morning, 

• that a man or a woman (or both) is at the beach

• that the MC (main character) is bored

• that something stinks behind where he/she is sitting

• that something surprising happens.

Just for fun, see if you can involve all five senses AND include these random words: "synbatec," "wastopaneer," and "tacise."   (NB. these words are completely made up and are not intended to have any meaning other than the one you give them).

Are you ready for this? I know this wasn't a requirement, but it came out to 300 words exactly.
Here we go.

DELICATE TASTES

On June seventh, I woke up to my father slamming his hand print onto the foggy windshield. “Get up, Cameron!” he bellowed through the glass. “She’s here!” He darted from campsite to sand, and the squelch of his boots disappeared.

“Mughh. Fantastic.” That man and his turtle-watching.

“What did he say, Vijay?” I opened my eyes a slit. Phoolati smiled at me, her wooden spoon aloft.

“Oh, ugh!” I yanked a blanket up around my nose and mouth, but the fumes dripped down my throat, burned my eyes. There was no way I could go back to sleep.

“Open a window or get out,” my stepmother chirruped. “Your dad wanted wastopaneer, so that’s what we’re having.”

“In the bus?! It’s not even light.” I untangled myself and stumbled through our synbatec apartment, hand over mouth. The top of my head brushed a path through the painted eggshells Phoolati had hung from the ceiling.

“You used to love wastopaneer, Vijay,” she said. “It’s a tacise blend of our cultures.” She rubbed her finger over a suspended eggshell.

I grabbed my sweatshirt and unlatched the door. “It’s Cameron, and that was before you changed the recipe.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d started calling it “waste-of-paneer” behind her back. Not that it ever got a laugh.

After kicking against the roots and pebbles of our campsite, my bare feet relished the cool scrape of pre-dawn sand. I found my dad where the tide had washed out, hunched over a nest. May as well help. The light from his headlamp twitched and I noticed something red.

“Dad?” I choked down some wastopaneer-flavored bile. “What are you doing?”

“What’s wrong, Vijay?” he asked, holding up an egg and a flipper. “Don’t you like the new recipe?”

***

 

If you likey, and you don't think I've completely gone off the deep end (sea turtles are my favorite animal, promise. I don't know what got into me), please go votey! I'm number 66 this time. Thanks! 

**edited to add**

DISCLAIMER!
No actual sea turtles were harmed in the writing of this story. :)

real quick, prizes!

... and by "tomorrow," of course, I meant "in the middle of the night on Friday." I know it's easy to confuse the two.

Hokay! Here we go.

Note: NOW RUNNING THROUGH OCTOBER 28th!
MORE INFO ON THE EXTENSION HERE.

In no particular order, the prizes for this fun and delightful contest/blogfest, in which you should all participate are:

1. A copy of Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor {you KNOW you want it.}

2. A $10 grab bag of wonderment from The Book Gallery in Chattanooga. This place is AMAZING. I spent 90 minutes there a week or so ago, and would not have left if my phone hadn't beeped to remind me of the time. They don't have everything, but what they do have is super cheap, especially this month {crazy, 30-day book sale, what?} The winner of this prize will have to email me ASAP with some info on his or her favorite types of books, so I'll know what to look for as I fill up that bag. It is going to be nuts.

3. A first chapter critique. By me! Because I'm interested to see what you guys are writing, and I want to give back! {and I need the practice.}

Alrighty. How about another clarification? The random drawing, and how the first-second-third placings will go:

First place! Will go to my favorite entry. This winner will have first pick of the three prizes.

Second and third place! Will go to the first two names I draw from the hat, so to speak. Second place gets second pick, and third place, well, third place gets whatever awesome prize the other two crazy winners didn't choose, for whatever reason.

The entries!
Post about your early work = one entry.
Spread the news on Twitter = one entry.
Spread the news on Facebook = one entry {make sure you tell me if you're spreading the news!}
Include a picture of a dinosaur or wolf = one entry.
So that's four entries possible. What's not to love? {Oh, and uh, I'm keeping it fair. No one gets to win all the prizes. Haha.}

And there you have it, friends! PLEASE do that whole "spreading the news" thing, especially since I forgot to submit this to the Campaigner Notice Board for this week. Oops.

Happy reminiscing!

in which i finally talk about books.

Perhaps I should talk about books? I think the very fact that I posted about my laptop festering in cat poop is further proof of the non-existence of my brain these past few days. This has been the first cold I've ever had to escalate into an ear infection. Yes, including childhood. It's quite bizarre (now that it's no longer SO painful). Thanks to these ear drops, everything has two (annoyingly dissonant) pitches. It's fascinating to hear myself talk (ha!), but it's HORRIBLE for listening to music. Eek. [And here is where I pause to realize that, much like the cat poop, you guys probably don't actually want to know about this.]

Which is why I've decided to talk about books today. Ahem. So, back in the day (also known as: this past winter), I was all about reading lots of books and blogging about them. This was before I had really come to terms with wanting to blog about writing. It was also before the Hunger Games casting, before I started putting myself out there and actually making blogger friends (hi, friends!), and before I was even close to finishing that good ol' rough draft of yore. Thus, I have not blogged about my reading list in a long time.

Okay, so I talked about worlds on May 16. That sort-of counts. Yay me. Other than that, all I remember posting about is HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE. MmmMmmMmm. So, here are the books I've encounter since Howl (some which I've already mentioned, so bear with me), and a few sentences about them:

FALLEN by Lauren Kate. Not my cup of tea. The setting was the best part. There were definite merits, and I don't like to book-bash, knowing how hard it is to put everything together, but... sigh. Just... not my cup of tea. And that's okay! If the whole brooding fallen angel thing *is* your cup of tea, by all means. Don't let me stop you.

WITHER by Lauren DeStefano. Much more my cup of tea. This book is weird and twisted, dystopian without feeling dystopian, gothic romance without the romance you would expect. Not perfect (sort of lacking in the climax department), but heck, who's perfect? I really enjoyed this book. Thoroughly creepy.

THE TRUTH ABOUT UNICORNS by Bonnie Jones Reynolds. The only non-YA book I've read in a long time. Creepy and long and... kind of grown-up in parts, if you catch my drift, but ultimately a great read. But be warned... it's really weird.

RED GLOVE by Holly Black. Very good. I'm not really on the whole Better-than-White-Cat Bandwagon, but I did enjoy it. Middle books are hard, I'm told, but this one was brilliant. I will say, I was a teensy let down by some things, but not enough to boot this book out of favorite standings. The WORST part about this book is its cover, which makes absolutely no sense once you've read it. What were they thinking?

ORCHARDS by Holly Thompson. I wanted to read this book because of two things: it's written in verse, and it's set in Japan. Anyone read OUT OF THE DUST by Karen Hesse? I adore that book, and it was the first novel in verse I ever read. ORCHARDS was much simpler; it was almost an embarrassingly quick read. But there's lots of good stuff inside, about family, dealing with suicide, coming to terms with your heritage. What's not to appreciate?

THE CHAOS WALKING TRILOGY by Patrick Ness. Shoo. These books are amazing, exhausting, challenging. I was dazed by the end of it all. I still am. Can't find any more words. Still recovering.

PARANORMALCY by Kiersten White. I know. What took me so long, right? Meh, just me being stupid. I was pleasantly surprised, though. I loved Evie more than I thought I would. I loved her world. I even (gasp) loved Reth. Okay, not love loved, but I thought his character was great. All the Fey. Horrifying and totally cool. Lend was okay. Blasphemy! (Just kidding, I loved him, too... I guess.)

DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth. Ah. Now, this is a book I could talk about for days. Perhaps that's because it's so fresh on my mind. I really loved these characters. The factions are brilliant and scary. I would so have ended up in Candor, with my mouth. Or Amity. Or maybe Dauntless, were I insane. If you know much about me, you know that I tend to be picky with romance, and this is one that I really liked. The plot was stellar. Lots of twisting, but never beyond the reaches of what worked for the story. I loved Tris. I celebrated with her, grieved with her. Mm. Great stuff. Do read this one, if you haven't.



Okie dokie. Those are the books I've read since April. I'm halfway to my goal of 60, and, appropriately, just over halfway through the year (is that hard to believe or what?) (the year, not my reading progress). Tune in when I am no longer sick for something more interesting. Yippee!

my funny motivations.

I guess I don't really mean ha-ha funny, here.  Sorry to disappoint the hopefuls.  I'm having a slight woe-is-me fest.  I'm not really sad about anything.  I just feel different.  I feel... unlike other people.  I have always, always felt this way.

In pondering this on the way home from work yesterday, my mind wandered to a story idea I've been toying with for the past month or so.  It's one of those sigh-inducing flights of fancy that may never see the light of day, but it sends me into mental giggles and I can't let it go.  And as I was rattling off all these imaginary things to myself, about imaginary people and imaginary events, I realized:  This sounds so weird.  I am a complete nut.  Because, it is (I am?).  It really very much is.  What makes it stranger is that it's not fantasy.  If I wrote this thing, it would be a contemporary story about some kids in a state of hyper-creative madness.  It wouldn't involve drugs, but it might make you feel like you'd been taking some (pure speculation, there, but one of my recurring ideas does involve a gigantic, pink afro wig) (maybe it would involve drugs).  I don't want to talk about it too much.  I only mention it because it got me to thinking:

Why do I like all the weird stuff?  I mean, has anyone seen The Science of Sleep?  A Life Less Ordinary?  Happy Accidents?  i heart huckabees?  These are some of my favorite movies, but I can't watch them with other people because it weirds them out.  Namely, my adoring and wonderful husband. He abounds in excellent qualities, but he'll pass on the weird movies, thank you.  So why do I love them so much?

I don't gravitate toward inherently weird music, but it's not very much like the stuff other people listen to.  My best friend from high school recently burned me a copy of Florence + The Machine, and I like it well enough, but I literally sighed with relief when I took that out and put The Wild Band of Snee back in.  The Wild Band of Snee, people.  It's a real thing (so, I do gravitate toward weird music, apparently).  Which, now that I think about it, is what instigated the story-daydream mentioned above.

But, you know what?  I love these things about myself.  So, I'm taking back the woe-is-me, and replacing it with heck-yes-is-me.  And, dangitall, I just realized how very Velvet Box-y I am being right now.  Not feeling like anyone understands me.  Being proud of it, anyway.  What was this post supposed to be about again?

Oh, right, how I feel so different.  I've established that I love this about myself.  But it does bring about some challenges.  Like, I don't really care about publishing anything right now, which probably makes every other writer out there think me defective, or "not a real writer."  Maybe I am defective.  But I am a writer (noun: one who writes stuff, i.e. me).  Is it so bad just to be writing because I enjoy it?  And, for the most part, the stuff that I write is so off-the-wall, I doubt it would really "sell."  So, what do I do?  Give up?

Psh.  Of course not.  This is what makes it fun.  If I want to write a crazy adventure set in an implausible world, I'm going to (and, uh, I am).  Does it have anything to do with all those hot paranormal creatures everyone's so a-gaga over?  Nope.  Is it romantic and kissy?  Not yet, and possibly not ever.  But who cares?!  It's fun and scary and intriguing (I like to think these things about my own work, but I could be entirely wrong, of course).  I'm having a good time.  And I have a few potential (or more than potential- yay!) crit partners who will hopefully enjoy it and be blessed by it and help me make it the fullest it can be, and then you know what?  You know what my greatest desire for this story would be (my w.i.p., not the crazy pink afro one)?  To write it out by hand in a series of gorgeous journals, along with illustrations by my grandmother, tuck them into an attic, and watch some grandchild discover them when I'm old.  This is my ultimate fantasy right now.

That makes me weird, right?  I still would love to be an author.  I've dreamed of it since I was ten.  Granted, I've also dreamed of being an actress, singing in a band, and running away to Greece.  But my passion is not in the title "author."  It's in the act of writing.

So that's what I'm going to do.  I read something today about how different people define success.  Success for me would be giving glory to God through this gift he gave me-- the gift of enjoying creativity.  If His plan involves more after that, wonderful.  If not, I'll keep writing the weird stuff and tuck them away in attics to my heart's desire.  And it'll be awesome.

So, friends, tell me.  What makes you weird?

finally, some thoughts about writing.

Step #1.  Go to the library.  Check.

Step #2.  Locate nook.  If occupied, locate next available nook (there are several to choose from, here).  Check.

Step #3.  Drink white chocolate/macadamia nut latte.  Double check.

Step #4.  Disconnect from the internet.  Um... no check.

Step #5.  Write with abandon.  For the first time in two weeks, check.

Step #6.  Have an interesting thought.  Take a break to blog about it.  Unfortunate check.

This is usually how it goes for me.  My brain gets so excited, thoughts start going out all over the place.  It's the opposite of how I focus on something.  I remember learning that women can concentrate on or notice multiple things at a time, like they have millions of antennae coming out of their brains.  On the other hand, men generally only concentrate on one thing at a time, like they just have one big tube on their forehead that sucks up the information right in front of them.  Well, if this is the defining quality of gender, then I am a very confused girl.  I have remarkably few detail-receptors gathering information from all around me.  I have the man-tube.  I am a horrible multi-tasker.  Reading more than one book at a time feels like a thrill ride.  I don't really know what's going on around me, especially if I am particularly absorbed in something else.

But writing today was different, somehow.  I mean, the man-tube (the more I type that, the more awkward it sounds) is definitely in action.  I can't STAND ambient noise, especially in the form of children.  I am either going to be a horrible mother one of these days, or realize how horrible I was before becoming one.  Probably both.  I usually can't stand to listen to music, either, though today I did.  I think I have two qualifications for that:  it must be instrumental only, and it must be relatively unfamiliar, lest I get annoyed.  Also (okay, three qualifications), if one song works, I have to play it over and over again until the mood changes, and then find another song.  If there's not a song that fits the mood of what I'm writing, I can't listen to anything.  Boy, am I picky.  In six months of drafting (has it been that long?), I've only listened to music about twice, so that proves it.  But it really worked today, so that was... sort of fun.  And really weird.

Who am I, all of a sudden?

And then I started thinking about things.  So, I have a completely unrelated question for all you writerly-types out there:  What the heck makes boys cry?  I mean, I was about in tears writing just now, and so it seemed super-natural (not to be confused with supernatural) for my character to cry, as well.  But... but... he's a boy, and boys don't cry, right?  Do boys cry?  Over being reunited with their family?  Is that something that would make a boy cry?  Wouldn't I get mad if I read this from someone else and the boy didn't cry?  Or would I get annoyed that he did?  [If you can't guess, I married a very non-emotional boy.  We make a bizarre pair.]  OH MY GOSH!  WHAT MAKES BOYS CRY?!?!

According to the majority of my Google-image findings,
the only boys who cry are under 12,
impoverished, or artistically rendered.
With one possible exception:

This came with the explanation, "Stock photo,"
meaning it was likely staged (thus, artistically rendered).
You can't even see his face.  Is this a real thing?
Or only an idea perpetuated by
 emotional women trying to write male characters?

Think back to high school, Julie.  What made boys cry then?  You had enough guy friends to see it happen.  Hmm.  Death?  Accepting Christ?  Yes, those things.

Anything else?

Someone help me before I turn this into more of a crisis than it is.

Step #7:  Publish post, get over the thought, and go back to previous writing.  Hopeful check.