How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

1. Lynn Viehl, runner of the most awesome contests on the planet, is also one of the coolest straight shooters I've read on the Internet. Besides her positions on conferences ( she doesn't go anymore ), and her detailing of her recent cover problems ( PINK !!!), she just put up her royalty statement for her book Twilight Fall. God, I love her. 2. In Plain Sight is back on USA, yay! It's about a couple of federal marshals who are responsible for people in the witness protection program in Alburquerque, and is pretty enjoyable. The two main characters have excellent chemistry, and it makes me a little homesick for New Mexico (which is virtually impossible to do, since I didn't like New Mexico that much)* and it's got a fairly original premise. 3. I'm sure by now everyone who cares has seen the vidoe of Susan Boyle, the plain middle-aged cat lady who blows everyone away with her singing voice on Britain's Got Talent. What you may not have been aware ...

1. Writer Mary Walters thinks that agents are the problem with the publishing industry. I can't speak to her experiences, of course, but I have to say that if she's only been rejected by 60 agents, then I'm not sure she's exhausted all her options, yet. The post, and the comments to it, are very interesting, to say the least. 2. Jessica, over at the BookEnds blog , rejected an author and suggested in her rejection that the author do some work on the query. The author's response? " Go f*** yourself ." Stay classy, writers!

As a writer, I steal stuff from real life all the time and put it in my stories. Parts of conversations, situations, character traits, events...all of it goes into my mental blender and comes out onto the page in such a way that, if you knew me, you might be able to pick up. "Hey," you might say, "the name of that character in that story in remarkably similar to your full name, Jay."* Or, "hey, that character's relationship is a lot like your friend M's relationship with her mother." Or "wow, that kid is a lot like the guy you dated when you were a junior in high school." I think all authors do this to some extent.** The beauty of it is, if you're doing it right, the reader who doesn't know you won't get the feeling that he's peering into your secret personal life. Why? Because it's fictionalized. That's the difference between writing a journal entry and writing a story. But sometimes people, especially peo...

1. I am suddenly and inexplicably in love with baseball. I don't know. I don't even really like sports, but suddenly baseball is the cute new kid who sits behind me in a homeroom. Maybe I'll pass him a note and see if he likes me back. 1.5 However, I am baseball's Typhoid Mary. No matter what team I root for, no matter what reason, that team loses. I wonder if I could sell these services to Cubs fans... 2. I really enjoyed the first episode of Southland (which I admit I only watched because it has Benjamin McCarthy in it). The promos made it look like a typical cop show, but it was really better than that, so I was pleasantly surprised. 3. I am at the stage in marathon training (I'm just walking a half-marathon, not the whole thing) where my dog can no longer come with me because she gets tired and wants to go home early. Of course, she can still kick my ass in the 40 yard dash, so I suppose it equals out. 4. A mouse lives in my kitchen. A wily wily mouse ...

When "The Boys of Summer" by Don Henley first came out, about a hundred and fifty years ago, because I am old , people, I didn't really like it. Perhaps it was because I was a teenager at the time and didn't want to think about the melancholy idea of losing love or the regret you can feel at the end of summer (both actually and metaphorically). Perhaps it was because I was a proto-goth and "The Boys of Summer" wasn't melancholy enough for me. Perhaps it was because the song was on the radio ALL THE DAMN TIME, so much so that I had learned all the words, even though I didn't like the song.* Now, though, I sort of love the song. Don Henley is, simply put, a phenomenal song writer, and "The Boys of Summer" is a perfect example of that. Of course, he's famous for a bunch of songs he wrote or co-wrote for The Eagles,** but the thing that's fantastic about "The Boys of Summer" is that it doesn't sound anything like an E...

Agent Nathan Bransford posted a blog entry recently about figuring out what your characters want , and I have to say that this is the thing that I find lacking in a lot of things I read, especially YA. Because there are so many conflicts inherent in a teenager's every day life -- school demands, and cliques, and parental demands, and Big Emotional Milestones -- sometimes what the characters actually want gets lost in the noise of the plot and doesn't come across clearly. But it's not enough for things to happen to a character--the character has to want certain things and try to make certain things happen, and then react when they do (or don't). Since I'm at the beginning of about seven SQUILLION projects right now, I'm figuring out what motivates my characters. This always happens for me in layers, like so*: 1. The superficial motivation. When I first find a character, I already know something of what motivates him or her. That's how they come to me. ...

Colleen Lindsay has a post here about lessons to be learned from Dollhouse, namely, you can't wait too long to hook your reader, which makes sense and is true, but is not what I want to talk about here. Dollhouse is only an okay show. There, I said it. I've seen all the episodes thus far, and Whedon is right--the show did take a huge leap forward when we got to episode six, which was the first episode he really had a hand in (blah blah, compromises with the network, blah blah), but for me it still suffers from the same fundamental problem that it did when it started, namely this: I am not in love with any of the characters. I'm not talking about having a "crush" on a character (CALL ME, TIM RIGGINS), I'm talking about being in love. Like, on Friday Night Lights, I love Tim Riggins ( obviously ), but I also love Tammy and Eric Taylor, and their daughter Julie, and Tyra (OMG, I heart Tyra), and Matt Saracen, and even, sort of Buddy Garrity, God help me. The...