What I'm Writing

I’ve been meeting several other aspiring writers lately, usually though my other correctly spelled blog where nobody knows I’m lysdexic. I’ve been talking to one of my new writing buddies quite a bit about my current project (The latest attempt at a YA novel with a dyslexic main character). In a recent email, she said, “You seem really knowledgeable about the issue, and very sensitive about it. Are you a special ed teacher yourself?”

Instead of emailing her back with a simple NO, I’ve decided to post my full response here.


I'm not a special ed teacher, I'm dyslexic. I had a lot of suport as a kid, several hundred hours of tutoring and an endless stream of audio books, but I didn't really get to the point where I could read actual books until I was in my 20's. I still listen to ten audio books for every one book I read. I think my inability to read as a kid drove me to invent stories of my own. Even though there were years when I never really expected to ever learn how to read, I've always wanted to be a writer.

Learning disabilities never really go away. That's the main thing I want to convey in this book. Stories about dyslexia all go the same way: kid can't read, kid is diagnosed with dyslexia, everyone lives happily ever after, the end. But that's not true. I've known for a long time that I needed to write an honest story about dyslexia, but it's a hard story to tell. This book is actually my third serious attempt.

A couple years ago, I gave up and started writing other contemperary YA stories about literate characters. I learned a lot about writing and story structure in the process. Some of the stuff I wrote was crap, but the story I'd been working on up until a month ago had a lot of promise.

Then three weeks ago, it just hit me. I figured out how to tell this story in a way that will work. So I tabled my old project and have been writing like a mad woman ever since. This project is far less autobiagraphical than my earlier attempts, which works better for the overall story arch, but also makes me kind of nervious. I want to be honest and accurate, even though I'm totally making stuff up.

Dyslexia is genetic, so I have a ton of dyslexic relatives. They were pretty much my only beta readers on my earlier attempts, which is good and bad. I definately want other dyslexics to look at it and say, "yes, that's accurate." But the functionally illiterate aren't generally the best judges of effective story structure. I'm sure I'll attempt to con one or two of my relatives into looking this book over, but I'm not writing it for them. I want people that don't know anything about dyslexia to read this story and relate to the characters. Thus, I need you.

Aren't you excited. You now have a critique partner who can't spell.

Joke of the Day

Dyslexics of the world UNTIE.

I’m Writing Again

I never really stopped writing. I just stopped writing here.

Since it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here, let me re-introduce myself. I’m a dyslexic engineer who dreams about being ya author. I started this blog when I was working on a book about dyslexia—trying to build a platform and all that good stuff.

The thing is, dyslexia is complicated. I’m dyslexic. All my family is dyslexic. I know a lot about it. But I’m not always sure how to write about it. After a few failed attempts, I started writing about non-dyslexic characters. Then I got to the point where I was ready to start querying my books about non-dyslexic characters.

That’s when it hit me. Sreaming “I CAN’T SPELL” all over the internet might not be the best move for an aspiring writer. If an agent or editor googled me, did I really want THIS blog to be the first thing they saw? I didn’t take this blog down or anything. I mean people love dyslexia jokes, even without posting in almost a year, I’m still getting as many as fifty hits a day. I just started another blog where I actually run spell check and pretend like I’ve “read” all the audio books I listen too.

But I started writing again—a new project, about a dyslexic fifteen year old. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and I’m not just being egotistical. This story is good. I needed to write other stuff and listen to a couple hundred more audio books to figure out what I was doing. But this is MY STORY. It’s the story that I was born to tell. And I’ve finally found the words to tell it.

So having a “platform” might not be such a bad thing now. Having a popular “dyslexia blog” is probably really good, if I’m going to be querying a “dyslexia book” soon. Not to soon though. There is a lot of revising and editing in my future. But there will also be a lot of thinking about dyslexia in my future. So I might as well write about it here.

Joke of the Day

What do you get when you cross a dyslexic, an insominac, and an ignostic?

Someone who stays up all night wondering if there's a DOG.

An Example of How to Make Bad Art

Last night I saw “Mike’s Incredable Indian Adventure” at Portland Center Stage. I normally don’t like to give bad reviews, but to be completely honest, the play wasn’t great. Even if I didn’t love the production, I did empathise with the story.

Here is the basic premise. A wannabe actor/director/producer grew up with a silver spoon shoved up his ass and never made any meaningful art for himself. He didn’t even manage to make any unmeaningful art. He basically just wasted a lot of time. Then he was invited to direct a Neil Simon musical in India. The producer was sleezy and it was obvious that the show would be horrible. So the guy agreed to direct the play and then hired a friend to film the entire thing, thinking he’d make a documentary fill about putting on a really bad play in India.

The play in India was really bad, but when he got home and watched the footage, he realized that the film footage was even worse. There was no theme to the documentary, no point at all really, just a lot of craptastic footage. So he started interviewing people and trying to learn about the rolls of America and India in the new global economy and frame his story somehow that way. That just gave him lots more footage, but still no real point. Then after 10 years of failing to pull a documentary out of all his footage, he decided to make a play. The play that I watched last night.

It was a play about a film about a play. And it really had absolutely no point. I felt like I wasted an evening watching it. But much more than that, I feel like this guy wasted a decade making it. I may not be a wannabe actor/director/producer, but I am a wannabe writer. I understand the way people can get caught up in an idea and stay caught up in it long after the project has lost its potential. So please, fellow writers and creative types, don’t be like Mike. If you have a craptastic idea, give yourself a couple of months to try and make it into something. But if it continually spirals further and further into pointlessness, learn to say goodbye and get yourself a new idea.

Joke of the Day

How do you shoot a purple elephant?

With a purple elephant gun.

How do you shoot a white elephant?

Hold it's trunk until it turns purple, then shoot it with a purple elephant gun.

My Perfect Life

I may be thirty years old, but I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. There is one fictional future that I’ve thought about a lot over the years, and recently I’ve decided to just go for it.

So here is a little background on what my life has looked like for the last 30 years. I’m dyslexic and spent most of my early education generally sucking at all things literary. Math and science don’t require much reading, so I always excelled in both areas in school. When I went to college I thought I was going to do pre-med or pre-engineering or maybe just majoring in something highly practical like math.

Then I started taking humanities classes and found out how utterly fasinating they were. A big part of me wanted to be an English major. But I could bearly read, and had to get all my text books on tape. Listening my way through the random English class was one thing, but actually majoring in English without reading felt way to much like cheating. So I majored in anthropology instead. Anthropology is a very fascinating subject. I’m very interested in people and how they tick and loved the puzzle of uncovering ancient cultures through archeology.

I thought about getting a PHD in archeology. But most of my interest was in stone age & bronze age sites, and for general safety reasons moving to the middle east in 2001 didn’t seem like the best life plan. On top of that, I always had this nagging voice in the back of my head that I was selling myself short.

Math and science always came easy to me. And reading clearly didn’t. What if I had the ability to discover some great scientific breakthrough. Would it be fair to humanity to waste that talent on a social science? I know this sounds very egotistical, but at age 21, these were the thoughts in my head.

So a year after I graduated from college, I re-inrolled and earned myself a second degree. This time in civil engineering. I’m glad that I forced myself to give math a serious try. Mainly because it showed me that I’m not all that special. There are a lot of people who could never be engineers, who can’t comprehend linear algebra, and just playing don’t get physics. But there are also a lot of people who can. I’m smart enough to be an engineer. I spent less time studying in engineering school then I did in my anthropology days. And I’ve been gainfully employed as an engineer ever since I graduated. But I know lots of engineers who think in a more scientific way than I do. I’m never going to uncover some great scientific breakthrough. Really, as far as science nerds go, I’m pretty average.

Lately I’ve been entertaining myself by writing YA novels during my free-time. It seems like a nice marrage of my two halfs. I get paid to work as an engineer, and I still have a creative outlet. But when I grow up, I don’t really want to be an engineer or a part time YA novelest. When I grow up, I want to write archeology based children’s adventure stories.

There is this series that I’ve had in my head for years, about this time traveling nine year old who stumbles upon ancient ruins and artifiacts and is then wisked back in time to discover the hidden cultures of the forgotten past. It would be so fun to write that. Way more fun then being a normal archeologist. Way more fun than any other life I can think of for myself. I could travel around the country/world visiting archeology sites, researching ancient cultures, and interviewing scientists. Then I could write books about them for elementry school kids, and skip the tedium of spending decades shifting through the dirt.

So I’m just going to go for it. This summer I’m going on a road trip, and am putting Mesa Verde on my list of stops. In the mean time I’m doing all the internet and library research I can about the ancestrial puebloan people who lived in the Colorado plato 800 years ago. Everything I’ve written up until now has been easy and research free. Writing historical fiction for kids wont be easy and it definitely wont be research free. But it will be me. It’s a perfect blend of my roughts in archeology, my maticiulous engineer’s ability to track detail, and my imaginative writers side. I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. And I’m so excited to get started.

Joke of the Day

A budist munk walked up to a hotdog vender and order a dog with everything. The hotdog vendor took a twenty dollar bill from the munk and handed him his hotdog. "That hotdog only cost $3, and I handed you a 20. Don't I get any change?"

The hotdog vendor looked up at the munk and said, "Change comes from within."

How to Write Good

1. Always avoid annoying alliteration.
2. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
3. Employ the vernacular.
4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
6. Remember to never split an infinitive.
7. Contractions aren't necessary.
8. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
9. One should never generalize.
10. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
11. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
12. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
13. Be more or less specific.
14. Understatement is always best.
15. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
16. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
17. The passive voice is to be avoided.
18. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
19. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
20. Who needs rhetorical questions?
21. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
22. Don't never use a double negation.
23. capitalize every sentence and remember always end it with point
24. Do not put statements in the negative form.
25. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
26. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
27. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
28. A writer must not shift your point of view.
29. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
30. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
31. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to the irantecedents.
32. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
33. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
34. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
35. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
36. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
37. Always pick on the correct idiom.
38. The adverb always follows the verb.
39. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
40. No sentence fragments.
42. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
43. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
44. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
45. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; They're old hat; seek viable alternatives.

Joke of the Day

See entire post.

Once Upon A Time…

The first sentance of a novel is the most important. It’s the first thing a reader is going to look at. And if it sucks, there is a good chance your potential reader wont make it to the second sentance. Here are a few opening lines I enjoy. What is your favorite opening line?

The guy walking towards me is good-looking in an obnoxious way, like he’d play the hot jerk in a TV movie about why drunk driving is bad or how it doesn’t pay to cheat on the SATs. (Wherever Nina Lies by Lynn Weingarten)

By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat. (The Evolution of Capernia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly)

So she tells me, the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee. (Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson)

I lie all the time. (Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan)

Some memories are slippery. (Sweethearts by Sara Zarr)

My plan was to focus my senior year on information I could use after graduation when I set out for Planet Earth from the Pluto that is Trout, Idaho Population 943. (Deadline by Chris Crutcher)

Oh crap. (How to Not Be Popular by Jennifer Ziegler)

If things had been different, I’d be called Nataliya or Natasha, and I’d have a Russian accent and chapped lips year round. (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin)

They call me King Dork. (King Dork by Frank Portman)

My sister Cass ran away the morning of my sixteenth birthday. (Dreamland by Sarah Dessen)

“That’s the worst idea I ever heard.” (Going Too Far by Jennifer Echols)

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling)

It was 7 minutes after midnight. (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon)

Snowman wakes before dawn. (Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood)

Everyone thinks it was because of the snow. (If I Stay by Gayle Forman)

The secret is how to die. (The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown)

It’s hard to imagine what my parents were thinking when they decided to name me Shakespeare. (Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner)

The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World. (Going Bovine by Libba Bray)

I’ve never been to a funeral until today. (I Heart You, You Haunt Me by Lisa Schroeder)

I was born with water on the brain. (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie)

I had two goals that summer; to get the lead in the camp play and to get to third base. (Camp Life by Me, yet to be published)

Joke of the Day

A Fruadian slip is when you say something but you mean your mother.

Finding a Place to Write

This weeks Road Trip Wendnesday over at YA Highway asks the question, where do you write. I have two answers to this question.

Answer #1: The train. I live in the suburbs of Portland, but work downtown. This means I have a 45 minute comute by lightrail to and from work each day. That’s an hour and a half each day that I’m sitting on a train with nothing better to do than write. I bring my laptop with me to work, and write during my commute each day. On days when a story idea nags at me all morning, I often pull out my laptop during my lunch break and write then too.

Answer #2: Bed. I desided to convert our guest room into my home office. There isn’t a desk in there. There is just a bed that only gets used a few times a year. I like sitting in bed and writing. I also like being able to spread notes to myself all over the matrass and not have to worry about cleaning them up when I want to go to sleep. I find the guest bedroom is a wonderful office. We do have a desktop computer at a real desk in another room of our house, but I’ve never written at that computer. How uncomfortable. I sit at a desk eight hours every day. When I get home and want to write, I’d much rather lay in bed.

What about you? Where do you like to write?

Joke of the Day

Never say anything bad about a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. By then you’re a mile away, and you’ve got his shoes. So you can say whatever you want.

Crap, I’m Boring

Anyone who follows this blog with any frequency knows I have a serious addiction to audio books. Last weekend I listened to five books and wrote nothing. I’m aweful, I know. But during all this listening, I had an opiffany. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very good one.

I have this problem, where I keep getting sucked into boring novels with good voices. You know the type. The narrator has an awesome voice and there are lots of really funny scenes. So you start reading, thinking the story is going to be fabulous. Then you get to the end and realize that the story line was way overdone, incredibly predicable, and now you feel like an idiot for wasting an entire Saturday reading this drivil.

Here is the really sad thing though. The book I’ve been working on for the past two months is totally one of those stories. I like the characters, I have some fun scenes. I think I might even be able to suck in some readers with a funny enough opening. But in the end, my story is a total waste of time. I don’t want to piss off my future readers. But I can’t force an interesting plot into the world I’ve created without rewriting EVERYTHING.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m starting over and changing everything. I am keeping three of the characters from the story that I’ve been writing. But I’m making them seniors in high school instead of freshman in college. And I am throwing crap at them that wouldn’t make any sence in the story I already wrote, but will hopefully not waste my readers time.

I haven’t actually started writing this new story yet. But I’m hoping that it will be worth reading when I’m done. I guess it’s good that I realized the book I’ve been writing is boring 50k words into the rough draft and not after I’d hashed out 8 or 9 more drafts.

Joke of the Day

Punctuation Parable

Dear John,
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior.You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can be forever happy - will you let me be yours?
Gloria

Dear John,
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior.You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours, Gloria

Teen Angst - It's Not Just for Girls

I started writing a new novel about two months ago. Because I'm a total pantser, I started writing the very first second I heard a new character's voice in my head and I spent about a month and a half writing non-stop with no idea where I was going. I now have about 45,00o words. The scenes I've written surround a group of friends, and so far I've written chapters from six of these characters points of view.

I'm now at the point where I need to start writing my real story. Which means I need to figure out what my story is actually about. Who is the narator? What is the plot? What is the point? These are the questions I've been asking myself for the last couple of days. Don't worry, I'm not going to keep all six point of view characters. That's just way to crowded and messy.

I thought I might tell the story from Haley's point of view. She's a major character, I like her a lot, and many of the scenes I've already written have been from her point of view. Also, given what I've already written, Haley's clearly the primary female character. The problem is that while Haley does grow and change over the course of the story, nothing that happens to her is all that profound. Her life seems blessed. I really like Haley, but I feel like an entire book about her might be kind of boring.

Then there is Kyle. I love Kyle. He's a total mess, which makes me love him even more. A novel told from Kyle's point of view could be really fun to write. And I think it would have a better chance of engaging/captivating readers than a story written from Haley's point of view. The only problem is that Kyle is a boy. And this story is YA. And everybody knows that only girls read YA, right?

I was discussing the idea of writing my story from Kyle's POV with a writer friend. When I said that this could be a "boy book" I was actually laughed at. But I've read some really amazing books with male narators. Many of my favorite books of all time have had male narators. And I've heard multiple people within the publishing industry say that there is a shortage of boy books. So I did a little unscientific research.

First I looked at amazon. Based on their sales rankings 53 of the top 100 YA novels have a male main character. 53%, more than half, how can that be possible? Is this because there are fewer books with male protagonists available, so they end up selling better than their female counterparts? Or does this mean that the myth that only girls read is truly a myth?

I decided to look further. Next I examined my own reading habits. I am a little OCD and actually keep a detailed list of all the books that I read. Of the last 200 novels that I read, 86 had male protagonists. 43%, less than half, but still a lot. But I read from a variety of genres, so I limited my permiters. 102 of my last 200 reads had a protagonist under the age of 20. Out of those 102 books, 42 had a male protagonist. 42%, almost exactly the same as the stats for all genres.

But these statistics might be a little misleading. Of my 42 books with a boy MC, 7 starred a guy named Harry Potter, 5 stared a guy named Percy Jackson, and six stared a guy named Artimis Fowl. And out of the 60 girl books on my list, only 4 stared a girl named Bella Swan and 3 stared a girl named Ever. So 72% of the Paranormal/Fantacy books I've read recently have had male MC's, and 22% of the non-paranormal YA books I've read have had male MC's.

I don't think this means that boys can't appear in YA novels though. Cause "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian", "The Awesome Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl", "King Dork", "Sleeping Freshman Never Lie", and "The Misfits" are all really good books. I read them all and loved them all. And I expect that there are a lot of teenage girls that have also read them and love them. And I also think there are a lot of teenage boys who like to read, and they are so desprate to find novels they can relate to, that they have forced 53% of the books on amazons YA best seller list to star boys just like them.

So that is that. I'm convinced. I'm writng a book about a geeky boy named Kyle, who I totally love, and nobody can stop me.

Joke of the Day

A hungry lion was roaming through the jungle looking for something to eat. He came across two men. One was sitting under a tree reading a book; the other was typing away on his typewriter.
The lion quickly pounced on the man reading the book and devoured him. Even the king of the jungle knows that readers digest and writers cramp.

Reflection

My writing overentusiasm has slowen down a bit. I started writing THE SECRETS OF SMITH HALL in the beginning of December. I wrote like gang busters for three weeks, then went of vaccation, then came home and started writing like crazy again. Right now I have about 45,000 words. I have a detailed outline of the entire story and have written 26 of the 36 chapters, so I’m 72% complete. If I pushed myself really hard, I could probably finish my rough draft by mid February. But I’m no longer in a big rush.

This isn’t the first book I’ve written. Granted I haven’t published anything else yet, but I’ve done enough writing to know how large the gab is between the first draft and the final draft. If 10k of the 45k words I’ve already written appear in the final draft I’d be surprized. Even if I haven’t written the ending yet, I can see it in my head. And now I’m starting to wonder if that’s really the story I want to tell.

It’s not that I don’t like what I’ve written, or where it’s going. I like my characters a lot, and think this story has a lot of potential. I’m just more willing to take time to reflect and read other things and contemplate how I want this to look in a final draft. The mad rush to finish a first draft does feel all that important. What is the point of writing a first draft in two months if I know I’m gonna have to revise it for at least six more months. Maybe I should just take a breath and write the best story I can.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m reflecting. I’m reading. I’m writing. I’m living. But I’m not rushing.

Joke of the Day

A writer comes home to a burned down house. His sobbing and slightly-singed wife is standing outside. “What happened, honey?” the man asks.

“Oh, John, it was terrible,” she weeps. “I was cooking, the phone rang. It was your agent. Because I was on the phone, I didn’t notice the stove was on fire. It went up in second. Everything is gone. I nearly didn’t make it out of the house. Poor Fluffy is--”

“Wait, wait. Back up a minute,” The man says. “My agent called?”

Copying Classics

CAMP LIFE, the novel I’m currently querying, is a loose adaptation of ROMEO & JULIET set at a high school summer camp. Copying Shakespeare has more advantages than just making it easy to describe my novel in one sentance. I probably read R&J a dozen times while I was writing CAMP LIFE. Every time I got caught up on a plot point, I just went back to the bard.

When I finished CAMP LIFE, I thought about doing a sort of series. I didn’t want to reuse any of my characters in future novels. But I thought about adapting more of Shakespeare’s plays. So each book in the series would be another classic retold. My question was which play to remake next. SHE’S THE MAN and TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU are teen movies adaptations of TWELTH NIGHT and TAMING OF THE SHREW respecively, so I didn’t really want to do either of those. HAMLET and MCBETH are both seriously bloody and seemed a bit grusem for a YA novel, so I voted them out as well.

I thought about trying to remake OTHELLO. Then I reread OTHELLO and remembered how depressing it is. I thought about doing a comedy and looked into A COMEDY OF ERRORS and AS YOU LIKE IT. Either of those stories could be adapted to modorn teens, but I wasn’t in the mood to write about mistaken identity or cross dressing. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is probably the easiest story to retell, cause kids these days are great at gossiping. But my heart just wasn’t in it. None of the stories floating around in my head mirrored Shakespeare. So I desided to write my own story and forget about copying the classics.

THE SECRETS OF SMITH HALL is my current work in progress. In it one of my main chracters gets mono and ends up sleeping through about six chapters. The other characters begin to refer to her as Sleeping Beauty, and the nickname sticks even after she recovers. So that’s got me thinking again. Maybe this book wants to be a remake of SLEEPING BEAUTY. CAMP LIFE may have been Shakespeare, but now I’ve moved onto the Brothers Grimm.

I need to read up on my fairy tales. Haley is only asleep for six chapters, and the only plague spreading over the land is teen angst and immature behavior. So a lot of rewriting would be needed to force this story into the adaptation catigory. I don’t have any current plans of completely recreating a Grimm fairytale, but I hope to tie a few more fairytale themes into Smith Hall.

I’m not sure if I’m unoriginal, or just to well read. But there’s really no such thing as a new idea. So for now, I guess I’ll keep copying the classics.

Joke of the Day

There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer.
When asked to define great, he said, "I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!"

He now works for Microsoft writing error messages.

You Don’t Have to Flounder Alone

In Wednesday’s post, I mensioned that I just started a new writing class. I received several comments left by other asspiring writers claiming that they were jealous. This shocked me. If you want to take a writing class, what’s stopping you? There is no reason for anyone to be jealous of me.

My surrpize lead me to think it might not be a horrible idea to let other writers know what opportunities are out there. I live in Portland, Oregon and can really only speak to the opportunities for aspiring writers here. Since it rains something like 364 days a year in Portland, lots of Portlanders spend their time indoors reading. Where you have lots of readers, it’s easy to find lots of writers. So there may be more opportunities here then there are in other place. But my guess is, if you looked hard enough you could even find writing groups in bright sunny cities like Miami.

The first thing I did when I started taking my writing seriously was join Willamette Writers, a Portland based network of writers. For just $36 a year, I get a helpful newsletter and the opportunity to attend insightful monthly meatings where successful writers talk about the ins and outs of the profession. Plus I get to claim I belong to the same club as Chuck Palahniuk, Chelsea Cain, and Phillip Margolin. This makes me feel like a total bad ass – even though I’m not one. The Willamette Writers also holds a conference each summer that cost more than $36, but is attended by lots of agents and editors so I’m not complaining.

I also belong to a writing critique group that meets once a month. We swap chapters and give each other useful feedback and all that good stuff. I met all the members of my critique group through Willamette Writers and have beniffited a great deal from being a part of that group.

Beyond Willamette Writers, there are a lot of other places where people hoping to improve their writing craft can take classes. I have found that I really like The Attic Writers Workshop, this hole in the wall attic space in east Portland where experienced writers pass on their wisdom to writers earlier in their journeys. The class I just started is a story structure class at the Attic taught by the always hellarious author/playwrite Marc Acito. Out of the thirteen students in my class, two already have agents, three are facing a blank first page of their first novel, and the rest of us live somewhere in between.

This is the third class I’ve taken at the Attic. I’ve never taken any writing classes anywhere else. But I’ve made my way onto enough writer list serves that I get emails about other classes from time to time. I know that several of the local indie bookstores offer workshops for writers lead by local authors. These can be one day events or several week courses. There are also several author lectures at local libraries. These tend to be geared more toward the reader, but are sometimes focused on writing.

Beyond the basic machanics of writing, the main thing I’ve learned by taking classes and attending events lead by big name best sellers is that writers are all just people. The act of writing is very solitary, and most people that make a full time career of writing get lonely. So they like hanging out with other writers and talking to other people. If you start staulking Dan Brown you might be awarded a restraining order. But attending networking type events with reputable professional writers is a great opportunity for you to learn, and them to change out of their PJ’s.

Joke of the Day

A writer died and was given the option of going to heaven or hell.
She decided to check out each place first. As the writer descended into the fiery pits, she saw row upon row of writers chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they were repeatedly whipped with thorny lashes.
"Oh my," said the writer. "Let me see heaven now."
A few moments later, as she ascended into heaven, she saw rows of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they, too, were whipped with thorny lashes.
"Wait a minute," said the writer. "This is just as bad as hell!"
"Oh no, it's not," replied St. Peter. "Here, your work gets published."

The Theme of My Life

Last night I started a new writing class. Well, I’m a kind of slow learner and I actually took the exact same class a year and a half ago. But a new term started yesturday, so lets pretend like I’m gonna learn something new.

The teacher left us last night with a question. What is the point of your story? Once the plot and characters and everything else is stripped away, what is your book actually about? I thought about this question last night and the second I came up with an answer, it hit me. My last book was about the exact same thing. Every book I’ve ever started has been about the exact same thing. Ever curnal of an idea that I haven’t even begun to write is about the exact same thing. The plots and characters can be totally different, but my writing is always my writing. And I only seem to have one point.

So here it is. Being a misfit is okay. Simple right? Basically, I think that all people, but teenagers especially, are really good at casting themselves in fake identities. Pier pressure and societal norms and familial obligations and a million other things constantly tell us who we are supposed to be. But people are all different and you might not be that perfect person that everyone is supposed to strive toward. And that is okay.

If you have a million friends, who don’t know you because you keep yourself locked deep inside, life can be really lonely. Happiness might not lie at the center of the in crowd or in the flashist office in town. Accepting the reality of your own identity and learning to love that person is the key to growing up. And if you’re really lucky you may even find one or two other misfits who dig the real you.

That’s it. That is what all books by Katherine Elliott Scott are about. The false identities my characters take on are all different. And the people they are inside are even more divers. But the struggle is the same. Life is life. And being a misfit is still okay.

Joke of the Day

What did the hydrogen atom say to the heleum atom?
I got my ion you.

Say What?

I write in first person. Third person can work well for adult/literary books. But I write YA. And teenagers NEVER say what they're really thinking. So I the world of lying back stabbers, jumping inside a characters head is a handy tool. But every story has multiple sides, so I like jumping in the heads of more than one character. The result, I write first person with multiple POV characters. I switch narrators at chapter breaks, cause I want to be nice to my readers - plus I'm lazy.

Having multiple point of view characters does provide an extra challange. They all have to sound different. But since I'm writing YA, they also all have to sound like teenagers. I could write an entire novel of "um, yeah, like, oh my god, I'm totally screwed." But that could get annoying really fast. In order to determine the variability in my characters voices, I decided to make word clouds (with the help of the kind people over at http://www.wordle.net/).

Below are six different word clouds based on the vocabularies of six different narrators.

Joceyln and Hunter are the two POV characters from CAMP LIFE. The novel I'm currently querying. My WIP, THE SECRETS OF SMITH HALL, currently has six POV characters. Haley, Austin, and Kyle do most of the story telling and the other narrators pop in infrequently. So I only made the three word clouds for that book. Then I also made a word cloud of my own voice from, THE GIANT IN THE ATTIC ,the memoir I'm currently procrastinating.

These all look totally different right? Maybe I should work on expanding my vocabulary.

Jocelyn from CAMP LIFE

Hunter from CAMP LIFE

Haley from THE SECRETS OF SMITH HALL

Austin from THE SECRETS OF SMITH HALL

Kyle from THE SECRET OF SMITH HALL

Me from THE GIANT IN THE ATTIC

Joke of the Day

Workplace Vocabulary Words:

Blamestorming - Sitting in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

Crop Dusting - Surrepticiously passing gas while passing through a cube farm.

Prairy Dogging - Heads popping up over cube walls to look out for preditors.

Road Trip Wednesday: You’re Writing – Who Knew

I hadn’t decided what I wanted to blog about yet for today, when I saw that this weeks Road Trip Wednesday over at YA Highway was on the topic of peoples reactions when they hear I’m writing a novel. So I figured I’d play along and just blog about that.

People’s reactions tend to vary depending upon how they know me. Since I’m dyslexic, some people that know me well were suprized when I first started writing. But I’ve always been extreamly imaginative, so most of my close friends and family members simply accepted my writing as a given.

The surprize is more likely to come from people that I know professionally. I’m an engineer by day. I think my inability to read is what pushed me to toward math and science as a kid. I didn’t want people to think I was stupid, so I wasted a lot of time honing my mental math skills. Then when I got older I realized that engineering was something I’m pretty good at.

I’m a total geek and get along well with most engineers. But as a whole, we aren’t normally an overly literate lot. I have a couple of engineering friends that enjoy reading, but not many. They’re more likely to be into video games or something really cool like that. Clearly they need to mastered the art of listening to audio books and playing video games at the same time like me.

I do sometimes get blank stares from my engineering friends when I tell them I spend all my free time writing novels. But I think I get even more shocked expressions when I tell my writer friends that I’m an engineer. Many non-writers think that it’s something they could do if they tried. But most non-engineers admit that they don’t understand what I do all day.

Joke of the Day

What do you get when you cross an elephant and a mountain climer?
Nothing - you can't cross anything with a scaler.

Background Music

I tend to be a pretty good listener. The whole not knowing how to read thing, forced me to hone my listening skills as a kid. For years, I had an almost perfectly audographic memory. I no longer remember everything I hear, mainly because I no longer try to remember everything I hear. Still I’m always very concious of the sounds around me. Things like buzzy lights drive me bonkers, and I’m always eves dropping on the conversations of straingers.

In order to block out all the unwanted noises in my life, I spend a lot of time plugged in. Unless I am engaged in an active conversation with another person, I’m almost always listening to my I-pod. That's the main reason why I’ve listened to more than 80 audio books in the past year. But I do have several thousands of songs on my I-pod too.

I normally don’t like to read anything while I’m writing. I get very involved in the books that I read, and I never want my own prose to be influenced by the works of others. So I just yo-yo between reading/listening to 5 books a week, to listening to nothing but music and writing my own books.

Oddly, it is easier for me to ignor background music than electronic white noise. But music does effect my mood. So when I am actively writing, I like to have a soundtrack to my life. I’ve met several other writers who create playlists to write to that put them in the proper state of mind while writing. But I’m more interested in making a writing playlist to listen to during the parts of my day that I can’t write – like when I’m at work.

My last novel Camp Life centered around a production of Romeo & Juliet. It isn’t West Side Story, but I still felt like listening to show tunes was a good way to put me in a properly theatrical state of mind. The result, I listened to show tunes 24/7 for almost a year. I’ve memorized the scores to quite a few shows I’ve never even seen.

Now I’m writting a new novel staring a bunch of geeky college kids. So what do modern nerds listen to? I’m thinking alternative rock. I’ve started to assemble a playlist of Cobra Starship, Belle & Sebastian, Weezer, and Bowling for Soup, but I’m not sure what else to add to it. What obscure tunes do I need to track down in order to keep myself in a properly geekalisious state of mind?

And what about you? What do you like to listen to while you’re writing? Or living?

Joke of the Day

How many punk rock musicians does it take to change a light bulb?

Two: Once to change the light bulb and the other to smash the old bulb on his forehead.

Bit by the Writing Bug

When I wrote Camp Life (the YA novel I’m currently querying) I was super OCD about it. I wrote an average of 3-5 hours a day, not only when I was working on the first draft but also while revising. As a result, eight months after I wrote the opening sentence I completed the fifth draft. I like Camp Life. It was a fun story to write, and when I come back to it almost a year after I finished it, I still enjoy it.

But what about this past year? I haven’t written squat. I mean, yeah, I do have almost 45K towards the rough draft of The Giant in the Attic. But it’s still rough, and it isn’t even finished yet. And I’ve been working on it longer than it took me to finish writing and editing Camp Life.

In November I decided to start writing a new fiction project. The Giant in the Attic is memoir. I have lots of story ideas floating around in my head. So I figured if I just picked one and started writting the OCD behavior would return. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t get into the story I was trying to write, so it felt really flat and boring. Writing fiction was suddenly even more of a chore than writing memoir. So I gave up on that project and decided to just wait until a new project slapped me upside the head and forced me to write it.

Well, on December 2nd that happend. Things like NaNoWriMo don’t seem to work for me. When I want to write, nothing can stop me. So word count gimics really don’t add much modivation. And when I don’t want to write, I can’t get excited about gimics. But in the past five days I’ve written 13,000 words towards my next novel.

I’m not going to tell anyone what it’s about yet, because I’m totally pantsing this. I really don’t know what it is about. I have no idea where I am going with these characters. I’m only 50 pages into it, so I’m still meeting the characters. But I’m back to writing during every free second I can find. And I’m back to loving writing. Sometimes it’s good to be OCD. And even without any stupid gimics, I'll probably hit 50K well before months end - not because I have to, but because I need to.

Joke of the Day

A visitor to a certain college paused to admire the new Hemingway hall that had been build on campus. "It's a pleasure to see a building named for Ernest Hemingway," he said.

"Actually," said the guide, "it's named for Joshua Hemingway. No relation."

The visitor was astonished. "Was Joshua Hemingway a writer, also?"

"Yes, he wrote a check."

Attack of the Day Dream

So far November has been a bit of a whirl wind as far as the wonderings of my mind are concerned. At the beginning of the month I set myself a goal of not reading or listening to any books for the entire month of November. My feeling was that this would force me to think about a new book and I would eventually start writing a lot more.

I did start writing a new book during the first week of November, but it never went anywhere and after about 5000 words and an outline I gave up. I may come back to the idea sometime down the line, but I just didn't care about any of the characters and I couldn't modivate myself to write about it.

I also got really board at work. I've gotten so good at multi-tasking that not listening to audio books while working is difficult. After a week of unispiring music, I gave up and started listening again. I continued to attempt to write for another week before I scrapped my new story all together.

Then all of a sudden, creativity set in. I started thinking about my old characters, from my last book. The novel that I wrote last year is YA and stars an entertaining group of 16 year olds. In my mind these kids are now all 19 - and they are still fabulously entertaining. I really don't want to write down what I'm thinking about right now. Sequils never work - if a long story is written as a series it can be gripping and powerful, but when a book works well alone it should stay alone. Sequil for the pure sake of sequil tends to read really flat and boaring.

To make matters worse, I've rewritten my last book in my mind. Not the whole thing - I just decided to kill off the mother of one of my main characters. In the book that I wrote, this characters parents our divorsed. But for the sake of my new daydream it works way better if his mom is actually dead. So I'm just letting her be dead in my mind now, but she can stay alive and neglectful in the book I already wrote.

So here I am, November is almost over, my mind is spinning with lots of great characters going on great adventures. I've only listened to five books this month (I read or listened to 24 books in October), and I still don't have a new book to write. But I'm not board - so I'm not complaining.

Joke of the Day

I'm trying to daydream but my mind keeps on wandering.

A Change of Plans

I have decided to shelve the book I’m suppsedly writing indefinately. This really isn’t a very big sacrifice, concidering I’ve only written about 5000 words. Basically I’ve decided that writing when I’m not in the mood is never a good idea. Not because my time is precious or anything like than, but simply because the things I come up with are total crap.

I heard the first sentance of my last novel in a dream. I woke up the next morning and started writing. I didn’t stop until I had a completed novel that I felt happy with eight months later. At first there was only one voice in my head, asking me to tell her story. But as I wrote, I began to hear other voices and the stories cast of characters fanned out and came to life. Writing was fun, writing was addictive. Even when I wasn’t writing I spent every waking hour thinking about the characters in my novel.

I finished that book about a year ago. Since then I’ve written about 2/3rds of a first draft of a memoir, I’ve written this blog, and I’ve read or listened to more than 100 books written by other people. But I haven’t caught that addiction to writing again. I haven’t dreampt up a new story that I felt an uncontrolable urge to write down.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about anything. In the past year, I’ve invented about a half a dozen casts of characters. Some have been interesting, and some have been ordenary. But their stories have all had major problems that told me without question that a book about their lives could never find a market. They weren’t stories ment to be written down, they were just stories meant to entertain me.

The book that I started two weeks ago in my half hearted attempt at NaNoWriMo, wasn’t about a character who has taken over my conciousness. Instead it was a plot that I thought might have a market and consisted of characters that I didn’t know or care about. The result is simple. I don’t care about this story. Writing feels like a chore, and everything that I write is flat and lifeless. Nobody will want to read what I’m writing right now. I don’t even want to read what I’m writing right now. So why am I writing it?

Last weekend I went camping – yes in November. I know I’m insane. I didn’t bring anything to read or write, I just hung out in the rain and did a lot of day dreaming. The story I invented for myself over the weekend had nothing to do with what I’m supposed to be writing. It also wouldn’t work as a novel. But it entertained me during a wet rainy weekend.

So I’m just going to take a step back and trust myself. I’m only 30 years old, and I daydream 24/7. Obvoisly, I will write another novel. But I don’t need to force it. When a character wakes me up at night begging me to write – I will. But when I find myself board with my own writing, well then maybe I should just read a book and think about something else for a while.

Joke of the Day

Once there was a man who decided to build a house. He carefully counted out all of the bricks he needed before he began construction. But when he was finished with the house, he had one brick left over. So he threw it in the air.

Good Writing vs Good Story Telling

When I grow up, I want to be an author. So becoming a good writer should be at the top of my to do list. But lately I've been thinking that good story telling is infanately more important. How many times have I heard people say, Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown or some other mega best selling author is a bad writer. These nagative comments could come out of gelousy, or they could be based on the occational poorly constructed sentance. By lets be honest, does it matter? Nobody cares if Dan Brown can't write like William Faulkner - because he can tell a story like Dan Brown.

An authors ability to come up with an interesting story idea that is unlike anything else and then to tell it a gripping and exciting way is what makes readers buy books. If the grammer is all wrong and the writing is so overly flowery that it becomes distracting people will notice. But who really freeks out over the occational adverb? I honestly don't think there is all that much of a difference between the quality of writing in the average high school students English paper and the average best selling novel. The difference is all in the story telling.

So what is involved in good story telling? The characters need to be interesting and relatable. The plot has to be fast paced enough to keep the reader interested. The events need to be original enough that the story stands out against the many other tales available. If the story teller can touch the reader/listeners emtions via laughter, sorrow, fear, ect that's great too. And that is really it.

Maybe that is what people mean when they talk about good writing. The ability to make characters come to life on the page, to grab the readers and not let go, and to make an emotional connection with the audience. So where does sentance structure come in? My answer is, no where. Stringing words together in coherent sentances has nothing to do with great books. Great books are always well told accounts of great stories.

So I'm giving up on becoming a great writer. My spelling sucks, and I often think in run on sentances. All I want to do is make up stories. Sometimes I make up stories that are seriously boring. Usually I have enough forsight to not write those stories down. My latest novel is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set at a high school summer camp. It's a fun story, but I don't know how great it is. I mean, obvoisly it's not totally original - it is a remake of Shakespere after all. But I'll keep dreaming, and I'll keep writing, and with a little luck oneday I will become a great storyteller.

Joke of the Day

A dyslexic entered a spelling bee and came in SALT.