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

Happy Food Coma Day! (God, I love Thanksgiving. I'm going to have leftovers for brunch right after this...) Next year, I have a high school reunion--no, I'm not going to discuss which one it is, because it will make me seem incredibly old, even though I'm really not. (really!) Just thinking about it makes me feel like I've lived for a hundred years. (But I haven't!) Anyway, I've been thinking about the reunion and what music will be played there, and what music reminds me of my high school experience, and this song--"Forever Young" by Alphaville*--just sounds like that experience to me. There are songs that, for some reason, just ARE graduation songs. When they come out, every high school in the country chooses them, or should choose them, as the song played at graduation. "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day, for example. Or "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye to Yesterday" by Boyz II Men. Or "These Are The Day...

One of the things that I always need to work on once I get a first draft done is pacing. I don't worry about it in a first draft--I don't worry about much of anything in a first draft--but once I start revision, I can always always condense two or three or half a dozen scenes into one. For example, this is what the scene outline would look like for the current draft of the TNP: scene 1 scene 2, which takes place 1 hour after scene 1 scene 3, which takes place 1 hour after scene 2 and in which the character tells a new character what happened in scene 2 and/or scene 1 scene 4, which takes place a week after scenes 1-3 because I've skipped all the "boring" parts like the subplot and any relevant descriptions, and also back story and plot. So you can see I always spend a lot of effort working on the pacing. In a very early draft of The Book (which now takes place over the course of about a month), the action took SIX MONTHS, which doesn't sound like that much...

1. "Let It Rock" by Kevin Rudolf and Lil Wayne is a fantastic song. Every time I hear it, I start speeding (assuming I'm driving) or dancing (assuming I'm not driving). I'm going to put it on my "Songs to Speed To" playlist (yes, I have one. Incidentally, what do you think the chances are that, when I get busted for speeding, I can get out of the ticket by playing the judge this song and saying "but Your Honor, this was on the radio!" Yeah, I didn't think so, either. Judges aren't really down with the latest Lil Wayne, as a rule.) 2. Why are all the women on Heroes blond except for Angela Petrelli and Nathan's wife (who's not even really in the show anymore and hasn't been since season one)? And when I say "all" I mean ALL: Claire (played by Hayden Panettiere), Claire's adopted mother, Claire's biological mother, Elle (played by Kristen Bell); Niki/Jessica/Brooke (played by Ali Larter); Daphne --...

Long story short--ebooks will not replace regular books. "But Jay," you may be saying (if you are not Anonymous), "ebooks are soooo much more convenient." Or "oh Jay, you Luddite, ebooks are the wave of the future, like the internet to news." Or even, "oh, Jay, books are sooo twentieth century and ebooks are the new thing!" Yeah, I don't buy it. And it's not just because I often prefer paper to electronic. I send paper cards instead of ecards (despite the fact that I work for one of the largest providers of ecards in the world). It's not that ecards are bad--they aren't. They're super cute, in fact. They have music. They have animation. They have sock puppets . I send them all the time. But for the important occasions--your birthday, Mother's Day, to say thank you for something--you're going to get an actual card or, depending on the circumstances, a handwritten letter !* I don't think ebooks are going to...

Agent Jessica, of Bookends LLC , has a post here about getting rejected by your own agent. An author apparently sent a manuscript to her* agent, who didn't like it. That's gotta suck. I don't look forward to it, myself. But I have to say that I totally expect it to happen. By that I don't mean that I have low self-esteem and that I will inevitably be rejected. (Believe me, I have issues, but low self-esteem? Not one of them.) It's just that, like when I was querying agents and expected to be rejected, I fully expect that someday I will send something to my agent and he'll be like "nah, I don't think so. What else you got?" I don't know where I got that expectation--whether I picked it up by osmosis from the Internet or it was just something I assumed--but when it happened to a friend of mine, not too long ago, I wasn't at all surprised. Disappointed for him, because, like I said--SUCKS--but not, like, shocked . I think this kind o...

I don't like non-fiction generally, because it is usually boring.* It's reminiscent of history textbooks, to me, all first this happened, then this happened, blah blah blah , can't something explode already? Jeez! But, no, it can't explode, because it didn't explode in Real Life, Jay, and this is non -fiction. YAWN. That said, though, good writing conquers all, because there are some writers who can make me read stuff I would never otherwise read (Atul Gawande's Complications ) about subjects I don't even care about (Michael Lewis's Moneyball ), and David Simon's Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets is one of those books. By now, you're probably familiar with David Simon--he's the guy who created infamous HBO series The Wire , which was proclaimed, like, the Savior of All Television, Espcially HBO after The Sopranos went off the air,** but this book is where it all starts. The book is basically a recount of the entire year of 1988 wit...

Over at Mysterious Matters (it's a good blog! I imagine it's probably even a better blog if you actually (a) read mysteries or (b) write them), the author (he doesn't identify himself) in an entry about pet peeves talks about using description in an effective way . I, like Mysterious, don't care a lot about highly descriptive passages. While I'm reading, I'll actually think something like "blah blah blah the rolling fields, great, move ON ," unless there's something about the description that the author has convinced me I need to see. Maybe that's why I don't have a lot of description in my books. I'll throw in a couple of lines about the character somewhere near the front of book (without having him or her look in the mirror, thank you very much!), and that's pretty much it. My books take place in high school, so I guess, on some subconscious level, I thought "everyone knows what a high school is. why bother?" But t...