Go Here

There's a really interesting guest post today over at Nathan's blog about the Top 7 Things Every Aspiring Author's Website Must Have. It's written by writer/blogger Jordan McCollum. She's concise and gives some solid info for the rest of us.

If you've got time, check out the comments, too. Jordan weighs in again and some of the commenters have interesting tips on stuff as varied as hiding your e-mail in a Web-contact form and at what level (if any) you'd want to invest the big $$$ in a professional site.

When mullet-hunting was our official pastime

It's crazy what you can still find on the internet these days. I'd like to direct you to an 8-year-old Web site that my friends constructed back in high school. It's a rudimentary urban dictionary of made-up slang (and the origin of each slang term) spoken by my high school social circle. It's called, appropriately, The Triflin Dictionary. (I said it was 8 years old...)

(BTW, I can't believe the site is still online; apparently nothing ever gets erased from the internet. Alice Hoffman, take note).

What is interesting to me now is to see a concrete list of slang terms, most of which we invented, complete with examples of how we used them and explanations of how they came to be.

Now that I'm old, I have a nerdly interest in word origins and felt a certain glee reading back through the site with an anthropologic eye. It was like rediscovering a journal I didn't remember writing.

It could be a good tool for a YA author wanting to get a better handle on the finer points of youth speak. Granted, eight years is like 1,000,000 in teen years, and The Triflin Dictionary reflects uber-specific speech patterns of an artsy-indie-nerdy crowd of 17-18-year-olds in north Alabama in 2001 (how's that for specific?), but I'd still consider it good research, if only to examine how words were created (the same way I suspect they are now: mostly from funny group experiences).

So check it out. A warning: I have no idea how comprehensible this site is to the average person, but...well, I found it interesting!

P.S. If you've got good eyes, you'll see me in the following photos from The Triflin Dictionary:

-Crud Wars II, in the middle back, holding up my hand like "Girl, please."

-The back of my head as my friend Britney tries to extract a drum stick from my hair (don't ask)

-the photo above. I'm on the far left. The arrow clearly does not point to me.

-on the couch, getting landed on by a friend wearing a sequined show choir vest

-as Miss Sweden in the "Miss Universe" group

-and, oh, a few more.

If you don't believe my book is good, follow me around for a day

Seriously, Margaret Mitchell. A big-shot editor traveled to Atlanta, followed you around and begged you to let him accept your five-feet-high manuscript for publication? I declare.

Don't hate me for another history lesson, but this is too good to pass. Gone With the Wind was published today in 1936. I've never read it, which seems sort of sacrilegious, but we've all got books we should have read and haven't. Mitchell wrote it while bedridden (see full story here, it's the June 30 entry) but was too embarrassed to tell anyone other than her husband she was writing a novel.

Then one of her friends found pieces of the manuscript. The friend worked at Macmillan in NYC and told her editor boss, Harold Latham, that her Southern friend "might be concealing a literary treasure."

Here's what happened next, courtesy of Writer's Almanac. It's so surreal I almost laughed out loud reading it:

"Latham went down to Atlanta to pay Margaret Mitchell a visit and ask her about the novel. Mitchell denied its existence. He spent the day with her, following along on outings with her friends, and asked about the novel again in a car full of her girlfriends. Mitchell changed the subject.

"But when Latham got out of the car, all of her friends in the car kept up the questioning. One friend was adamant that Mitchell was working on a novel, and asked why she hadn't shown it to Latham. Mitchell said that it was 'lousy' and that she was 'ashamed of it.'"

(anybody relate to those sentiments?)

"The friend goaded, 'Well, I dare say. Really, I wouldn't take you for the type to write a successful book. You don't take your life seriously enough to be a novelist.'

"That did it — Margaret Mitchell was furious and galvanized. She hurried back to her cramped apartment, grabbed the assorted piles of manuscript and shoved them into a suitcase, and drove it over to the hotel where Latham was staying. When stacked up vertically in one pile, the manuscript was 5 feet high. She delivered it to him in the lobby, saying, 'Take it before I change my mind.'"

"It was published on this day in 1936, and immediately it was a sensation. Reports abound of people in Atlanta staying up all night to read Mitchell's novel that summer of 1936. It revitalized the publishing industry. The next year, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize."

Oh and then there was, y'know, a little movie made, too.

Can you imagine? Talk about a great publishing story.

Be the turtle

I have a love/hate relationship with running. I love how it makes me feel. I love how it makes losing weight easier. I hate heaving myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to run in order to avoid the Sahara-like temperatures we have later in the day. I hate being slower than everyone else. I hate that an 80-year-old mall-walking granny could beat me in a race.

Sometimes I love the actual running and sometimes I hate it. But I hit the greenway this morning with a new motto: Be the turtle. (Stolen from someone quoted in Women's Running magazine, to which I subscribe more for motivation than anything else.)

Be the turtle. Slow and steady wins the race. And yes, I know the fable is about a tortoise, but I like the word 'turtle' better, and word sounds are everything in a mantra.

(me, this morning. Note the determination in my eyes. The firm set of the mouth. My eyes turn red around mile 2.)

Lo and behold, I ran all three miles without walk breaks. Never mind that my average time was a glacial 13-minutes per mile; I haven't run that far without walk breaks in months and months.

While I was out there, huffing along and chanting about turtles, it occured to me that I treat writing this way, too. I'm embarassed that I'm never one of those writers with three or four projects always in the works, brimming with ideas for 20 more books, writing a book in a few months, finishing in less than a year.

I wait for the one idea among tons of instantly-discarded half-formed ones that strikes me. I stew over it for a few weeks, start fleshing it out. Eventually I start writing and go until I'm finished, constantly editing and tweaking. This could take forever. Then I do more full edits until everything looks right.

I now interrupt this post for a special announcement to agents and editors: I promise I work well on deadlines, and if you were to give me a contract, I would transform into a writing hare and churn out as many novels as you want in a given timeline. Seriously. I promise.....please don't run away.

Back to our regularly scheduled post...

Typically, writing for me is a marathon and not a quick sprint. I plod along on one book and it takes a long time to get a first draft on paper. There's nothing on my side bar listing the WIPs I'm currently working on. That's because, sigh, there's only one at any given time.

Anybody else out there do the same thing? Or are you a fountain of creativity, with no less than three novels polished and ready for submission, with another four in the works? If so, how do you do it?

Interns!

Not much to report today, other than to point you to a fab blog I heard about through...I can't remember now, maybe Moonrat? But anyway, it's called The Intern and it's a super-interesting look at the inner workings of a publishing house, as told by an unpaid intern. Did I mention she's funny and clever? Anyways, go and check it out.

Anybody ever had an intern job? What was it like?

I interned in the PR office of a government agency for two summers during college and still refer to it as the Pit of Dispair. I worked for a regional lifestyle magazine for a couple of years after college, writing and editing. It was an actual job and I learned a lot, but my income was so far below poverty level that it might as well have been an internship.

It's hard out here for...non-paranormals

Veddy, veddy interesting...a post from Nathan Bransford on supernatural overload.

I have lots of love for everyone out there who's writing fantasy and paranormal. Kudos, because world-building looks incredibly hard and I don't know that I'd ever have the...what's that word for when you have a hard time getting totally outside the box?...to do it.

I never read fantasy or paranormal anything growing up. Even now, (please don't hate me) it's not my preferred genre of fiction and I certainly don't want to write it. But ever since joining the bloggy community, it seems like most of the coolest and nicest author and hopeful-author bloggers out there do fantasy/paranormal and I've been wondering if there is some giant bandwagon I've completely missed.

But what I took away from Nathan's article, mainly, is that old maxim that everything's been done before and the trick is to take the freshest spin possible on an old story you love. Which, y'know, makes me feel better for ganking plotpoints from Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Northanger Abbey and Absalom, Absalom! and others.

It's perfect that today's Writer's Almanac had this quote from playwright George Abbott: "I was not a successful playwright until I took parasitical advantage of other people's ideas."

He wrote Damn Yankees, was nicknamed "Mr. Broadway" and died a few weeks short of his 108th brithday. The guy totally knew what he was talking about.

Summer Songs

I don't know about where you live, but here it's a sweltering 96 degrees with 1,000,000 percent humidity today. Oh summer.

Entertainment Weekly has a cool gallery of the 100 Greatest Summer Songs. 100-76 and 75-51 are already up; more coming tomorrow. The best thing is that no matter when you grew up, you'll see a song on there to make you think of summers past.

I'm not ashamed to admit thinking 'aw yeah' when I saw Ricky Martin's "La Vida Loca" on the list. Takes me back to high school. I think JB got me that CD for my 17th birthday.

But have no fear, there are lots better songs on there. "Gangster's Paradise" totally made the list and makes me think of riding the bus home in middle school and singing along to someone's walkman. We suburban white kids could really relate, yo. And Nelly's "Hot in Herre" is so, so sophomore year of college. Fingers crossed that Usher's "Yeah" will make the list because I don't care how old or overplayed it is: that is a Good Song.

I bet you do this too: a song comes on and makes you remember the funniest details about a specific time. I've been doing this nonstop recently after losing my iPod for a couple of days and having to listen in my car to the Top 40 radio station in my hometown ("Today's! Hottest! Hits!") which is a little too fond of the 90s.

So: what song makes you think of summer? Or a special time? Y'know, like the bus in middle school?

*UPDATE: Reading back over this post, I realized it looks like my music loves trend toward R&B and they really don't. Yet the really popular R&B hits oddly define random growing-up moments. Like how Boyz II Men songs always make me think of slow-dancing like five feet away from a boy during a middle school dance.

Pale like me

When you start a new novel, do you know immediately what your characters look like?

I always have my main characters in my head before I start, but for some reason I never, ever know exactly what they look like. I could tell you their traits, loves, hates and all the biggies, but I probably couldn't tell you their favorite color and certainly nothing about their appearance (other than being male or female, and an approximate age).

Is that weird?

I've been researching and plotting my novel for about a month now, but just this week named the characters (although I've known my heroine's name for a while), and I'm just now starting to think about what they look like.

The process usually starts with hair color, and after throwing around a few ideas, I think Quil, my 17-year-old MC, is blonde. And pale. To me, I think she looks like a young Cate Blanchett.

*Time out*

Seriously, how gorgeous is Cate Blanchett? GORGEOUS. And apparently she's going to be Maid Marian in a Robin Hood flick with Russell Crowe. Does this make anyone else want to squeal in a fangirly way as much as I do?

*Time in*

And there's Dixon, Quil's moody love interest. Tradition dictates that he ought to be tall, dark and handsome. With waving hair of midnight black and a furrowed brow that disguises the deep pain inflicted by his tortured pas....

Ahem. Sorry.

But I was kind of thinking maybe he has red hair:

Not the most conventional choice. But have you seen Damian Lewis in The Forsyte Saga? The man can brood with the best of 'em.

But then it occured to me that in addition to all of the crazy people in this book, there would be an awful lot of pale people.

And I can relate to this, being a natural blonde who would not look totally out of place at an albino convention. But I understand that pale-ies are not always viewed as the most attractive. Believe me, I know. I live in the Land Of Tanning Beds.

(Guilty admission: I used a tanning bed for about three months before my wedding. Almost no change. This led to the disheartening realization that for my skin there is either white or red. There is no in between.)

The other thing is--and I don't know if this happens to you--but do you ever feel weird about making your main character look like you, even a little bit? I mean, I'm certainly no Cate Blanchett, but I do have the blonde hair and pale skin. It's like I don't want someone to read the novel and think that I'm secretly or subconsciously writing it about myself.

Which is stupid, I know. I just need to write the thing and not worry about it. But I don't usually feel like a character must look a certain way to make sense in a story. So she could look like anything, and now I'm making her look like me??

Do tell: how do you come up with your characters' appearances? Can you picture them in your mind immediately? And do you have any characters who look just like you? Does this weird you out in any way?