Sunday

Cottonwood fluff on a crabapple 

 on a rosebud

in a spiderweb

Overheard #152

"What’s the point of being in charge if everyone gets a vote?"

Hot Rod Lincoln

“My daddy said, ‘Son, you’re going to drive me to drinkin’ if you don’t stop drivin’ that hot rod Lincoln.’” All of my teen driving posts should have that song playing in the background.

My spies tell me that Jeremy plays air guitar with his right hand while driving with his left. Remember when I told him he shouldn’t sing and drive at the same time?

Sunday

 fuzzy bee fly

dusty red beetle and shadow

Overheard #151

"Bass clef just screams boss."

Wednesday

Blogger finally let me post this photo of the first fairy rose of the year. I didn't notice the bee fly when I snapped the picture.

Sunday

June is a good time to photograph spiderwebs because they catch cottonwood fluff.

From underneath our deck, looking up at the web.

Playing with contrast and brightness.

Overheard #150

"You can fund schools or you can fund prisons."

Does Anybody Really Know What Day It Is?

One of my readers for SSA remarked that my characters were driving around Chicago at an impossible time of day. I’m a California girl who totally understands rush hour. In the early drafts, my characters behaved sensibly, but somehow in one of the revision shake ups, my characters ended up in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I fixed it, by having them drive all night. Believe me, it’s a better option. Other changes expanded or contracted the original time frame, and now all references to the day of the week are incorrect.

My next revision step will be to make a calendar for my novel. I’ll block out a page of scratch paper with a box for each day of the story. I’ll note what the characters are doing on that day and where they spent the night. Let’s hope they’ll make it home on time.

Sunday

 I played with the exposure an color a little with this picture. Taking photos of white things in full sunlight tends to result in a bleached out picture.

Damselfly. Unfortunately my profile shots didn't turn out well. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you might be able to see the hairs on his legs. 

Overheard #149

"I don't think we can do well, but we can do our best."

95 Degrees in the Shade

Is this the same squirrel as last year?

Chaotic Paradise's First Concert

Jeremy’s band, Chaotic Paradise, performed at Lake Lansing Park band shell a few weeks ago. The concert is now on YouTube. In case you’re not up for thirty two minutes of metal music, slide the timeline to 20:24 to hear “Graveyard,” the song Jeremy plans to audition with. When the camera zooms out to show the kids dancing on the lawn, you get a quick glimpse of Sam. He’s wearing a dark blue shirt and standing on the sidewalk.

(If the video takes too long to load, try clicking on Chaotic Paradise in the sidebar.)

Sunday

 poised

landed

Overheard #148

"Falsetto happens."

That Thing Called Love

I’m currently revising two YA novels with male protagonists, so when, Agent Jill Corcoran asked her friends and followers on facebook to name romantic YA novels written from a male point of view, I copied down some titles. From reading them, I learned much about the details that make the voice and passion realistic. Below are three novels listed in order of increasing edginess.

Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto
By Eric Luper
HarperCollins, 2010
When Seth (17) loses his girlfriend, his faith in his parents’ marriage and his job, he creates a supposedly anonymous podcast to figure out love.

 

The Secret Year
By Jennifer R. Hubbard
Viking, 2010
Colt (16) has been having a year-long clandestine love affair with a rich girl. When she is killed in an accident, he is left alone with his secret and his grief.

 
 
 
 
 

I Am the Messenger

By Markus Zusak

Alfred A. Knopf, 2002

Nineteen-year-old Ed meanders through life, stuck in a dead-end job and in a hopeless relationship with the girl he loves. When he inadvertently stops a bank robbery, he starts receiving mysterious messages that direct him on missions to help others, sometimes at great personal risk.

Sunday

Ants love peonies. The sweet stuff must ooze out along the seam.

shiny

Overheard #147

"At what point do you walk away from the monster and say let’s create another one?"

I'm Back

For some reason, Blogger wouldn't let me log on to Words and Pixels from my old computer. My new laptop went to college with Sam (because his laptop crashed). Thanks to Blogger Help, I'm back. It was kind of locking the keys in the car ...

Overheard will be up tomorrow.
I'm not sure if I'll have a picture on Sunday - unless I go out and photograph raindrops.

Sunday

It's hard to photograph bees, but I have all summer to work on it.

 sparkle

 perhaps a faster shutter speed

bee's eye view 

Teen Driving Update

Many years ago, I plated deep purple irises by the edge of the driveway. They've survived an onslaught of rebounding basketballs, but now they have a new peril.

Me: It looks like one of the boys backed the car over the irises.
Husband: It won’t help. They’ll just grow back.

Overheard #146

"His confusion is your confusion."

How Quickly We Forget

The revisions on my WIP stalled out big time because I couldn’t figure out how to fix the character arc for my protagonist. In desperation, I looked back over the character sketches I’d made when I first started writing the novel and the notes I’d made back in November when I started the last big revision.

The answer was right there.

I’d forgotten about it.

Now all I have to do is rewrite the durn thing.

Sunday

 I was surprised to find dew droplets at 4:00 PM on a sunny day.

 I was trying to get sunlight through tulip petals, and it almost worked. In case you have seen enough orange today ...

Ah, magnolias.

Overheard #145

"It was like fighting Gumby."

Blogger Issues

Blogger is doing something to their system, and most of my posts from this week disappeared. Blogger said they'd try to put them back, but it's starting to look like that won't happen. I'll re-post my Overheard today and my book review tomorrow.

Happy Friday the 13th.

Another Spy Book Recommendation

Original Sin: a Sally Sin adventure

by Beth McMullen

Hyperion, to be released July 12, 2011


Shelf Awareness is a daily electronic newsletter about the book trade that features terrific advertisements for new books. A few months back, I saw an ad for Original Sin: a Sally Sin Adventure. I noticed with glee it was a spy book featuring a female operative. Then I saw, “Click here to win a free ARE.” I followed the instructions, thinking I’d never win. A few weeks later, a package came in the mail.

The book is a totally enjoyable read especially for readers who enjoy spy novels and are parents. My two sentence summary:

Raising a toddler is a tough job; so is being a spy. Sally Sin is forced to multi-task.

It’s due out in July.

SPAM

I was cleaning out my spam folder, and I noticed the gmail advertisement was for spicy spam kabobs to serve with rice. That got me thinking about spam.

When I was a kid, my dad would tell dog stories about Spam, a German Shepherd-Collie mix, he owned during WWII. When I asked what the meat spam was, he suggested my mom cook some for dinner. Once was enough. SPAM is an acronym for “Shoulder Pork and Ham,” and it tastes about how you’d expect – and sort of slimy.

Then I wondered why electronic garbage was called spam. According to Wikipedia, the term originated with the Monty Python Spam sketch. Go ahead, click the link, and sing the spam song along with the Vikings.

Mother's Day

Sunday

Oak leaves unfurling.

Overheard #143

"You can live in the Midwest and not know how to polka, but you can’t live well."

Two Great Spy Books

Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre are published by Random House.

Ben Macintyre is a meticulous historian and a fine storyteller. In Agent Zigzag, he relates the story of Eddie Chapman, a double agent and colorful character who schemed against the Nazis in WWII and yet was awarded the Iron Cross.

Operation Mincemeat tells how the Allies deceived German forces before the invasion of Sicily by creating a fictional man who washed up dead on the shores of Spain with a briefcase full of erroneous documents.

When I studied history in school, it was mostly facts and propaganda. The story and its characters were missing entirely. After reading these books, The Code Book and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and watching Foyle’s War, I’m finally learning something about WWII.

Ruffled Petticoat

Sunday

 I had to get pretty muddy to take this one.

I hope someone tells me what kind of wildflower this is.

Overheard #142

"When you have talent, more is expected of you."

Youth Writing Festival

Yesterday, I spoke on How to Write Fight Scenes at the Youth Writing Festival at Calvin College. My presentation includes time for the students to write their own fight scenes. The group of middle school students was large, so instead of reading their scenes out loud, we discussed what they found easiest and hardest about writing fights. Most agreed it was easy to see the scene in their imaginations, and hard to put it into words. No arguments from me there.

As the high school students wrote their scenes, I was delighted to see a girl pull out a thesaurus and consult it frequently. I was less pleased when a boy started thumbing his phone. When my session was over, the young man with the phone asked me to read his scene. I squinted at his tiny, spidery writing and asked if he would read out loud. He told me he couldn’t because English was his second language. The scene was hard to follow because of problems with English usage, but some of the descriptions were unique and lovely, and I complimented him. Later, I realized he must have been using his phone to access a Chinese/English dictionary.

It’s Been a Long Time Since the Last Teen Driving Post

Last week I drove by the high school as school was letting out. The car in front of me had a bumper sticker that read:

How’s my driving?
Call my mom.

It gave a phone number.

Scenes That Excel

Those of you who have read this blog for a while know that when in doubt, I create and Excel file. Currently, I’m developing one to analyze the effectiveness of scenes. My file has the following columns.

Chapter #: Start easy. Not every cell in this column has an entry because many chapters contain more than one scene.

Setting: This is a simple way to denote scenes. If the scene takes place in more than one location, I use an arrow. “living room --> garage” How many scenes happen in the same place?

Characters: I list the characters in the scene and color code them to make it easy to scan for long absences.

Tension: I score tension from x to xxxxx. (Any scene with no tension has already been deleted.) This gives me a vertical histogram of the ebb and flow of energy in the novel.

Words: Are any of the chapters very long or very short?

Purpose: What does this scene achieve in the grand scheme of the novel? I try to be honest, even when it hurts. If a scene has a weak or duplicated purpose, I use the paint can tool to highlight it.

The problems are all laid out. Time to get to work.

Sunday

Seagulls love Catalina Island. I didn't notice the photo realism in the middle picture when I took it.

Overheard #141

"They didn’t mention this when I was student teaching."

Garibaldi Day

Garibaldi swim in the kelp beds by Santa Catalina Island. I don’t have an underwater camera, so the photographs were taken from land, looking into the water. Reflected sunlight, chop and swaying kelp affect the clarity of the pictures, so get your artsy on. For clear pictures of garibaldi, check out Wikipedia.

Spy Stuff

The Rachel Maddow Show helped me out with my series about cool spy stuff in the news. The CIA has recently declassified methods for preparing and detecting invisible ink that were used in WWI. I’m still enough of a chemist to want to try these things.

California, California

Green Pleasure Pier

Last week we went to Southern California to attend our nephew’s wedding and refresh my memory about the settings for two of my works-in-progress. One takes place, in part, on Santa Catalina Island, so we spent a couple days on the island. We saw pelicans dive for fish right by the ferry, and dolphins breach in the Avalon Harbor. Sea lions fished twenty yards from the pier, and bright orange garibaldi swam in the kelp.

pelican

Real estate on Catalina Island is very expensive, and the houses cluster on the foothills above Avalon Harbor. Few of the houses have yards unless the land around them is too steep to build on. Unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to take one of the inland tours to visit the buffalo.

Avalon

After Catalina, we went to Redlands. I’d forgotten how much concrete there is in Los Angeles, or how thick the smog can be below the San Bernadino Mountains. (I didn’t take photos of the smog or the freeways.)

I’ll be posting more pictures throughout the week.

A Link and a Promise

Tomorrow, I'll start posting about my trip to California. Until then, while I'm finishing up the laundry, check out this brilliant post from The Intern.

Sunday

Thorn reflected.

Overheard #140

"Teaching is scary as hell, if you do it right."

Spring Break

I’ve been going through Martha Alderson’s Plot Whisperer videos on YouTube. They offer excellent, user-friendly advice on how to fix novel structure. I’m learning a lot – which is always a painful experience.

This is spring break for Jeremy’s high school. We had three college visits lined up but decided to cancel the last one because that university doesn’t have a guitar major. Jeremy is discovering that rock guitar is the unloved genre at conventional universities.

Next week, I’m off to Southern California for my nephew’s wedding. I hope to take some pictures of the Pacific, blooming flowers and chaparral-covered hills. Michigan is mostly brown and muddy these days, so photo ops have been limited.

Sunday

It was overcast all day on Friday, but the sun came out just when I snapped this photo.

Overheard #139

"I’ve never had any problems with excessive genius."

The Eye of the Beholder

The final assignment at the Missouri retreat was to design a book jacket for our works-in-progress. It had to include flap copy, an author bio and cover art. Writing flap copy is fine practice for a query letter pitch, so I had no objections there. The author bio is also potentially useful.

But drawing cover art? You’ve got to be kidding. I pointed out that some books simply have the title printed in an interesting font. Nope. We all had to draw a picture. Everyone else accepted the assignment cheerfully, so I stopped complaining. The participant who is a published illustrator drew with her left hand so the rest of us wouldn’t feel bad.

In desperation, I remembered K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and decided to draw a pawn from a chess set. My three-word title easily fit inside the pawn’s outline. When it was my turn to show my book cover, I told the group what it was supposed to be. Someone even said it was good. Obviously, she meant the idea of a pawn, not my artistic rendering.

When I got home, I showed my book cover to Jeremy. “Is that a light bulb?” he asked.

Revising the Day Away

I returned from Missouri with many suggestions for improving my two works-in-progress. The amount of work involved is daunting, but I know where to start. One person expressed a logical concern about driving around Chicago, the time of day and the places my characters would stop. That’s an easy technical fix – with Google Maps’ assistance. The suggestions that are harder to implement involve deepening the emotional impact of the novels. I need to bare my soul and bear my characters’ souls.

One of Jennifer Mattson’s talks included a section on broadening characters’ reactions to emotion. She listed five possibilities.

1. Sensual reaction inside the body (for example, heart rate)
2. Sensual reaction outside the body (jittery leg)
3. Emotional flashes from past (remembering a past experience)
4. Emotional flashes from future (concern about something that may happen)
5. Sensual selectivity (focusing on a specific sight, sound, etc. to heighten emotion)

I have the manuscripts; I have the tools; I have no more excuses.

The SCBWI-MO Revision Retreat

I left home early on Friday morning and drove to Kristin Nitz’s house on the west side of Michigan. We continued on to the YMCA of the Ozarks in Potosi, Missouri. It was a long drive, but well worth the trip.

Each participant met twice individually with Jennifer Mattson of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. We were treated to superlative story telling and creativity exercises by Lynn Rubright. We had two in-depth writing workshops presented by Jennifer Mattson. In addition, there were two sessions of peer critiques, and we even had time to revise our manuscripts before our second meeting with Jennifer. We ended with a fun exercise presented by Stephanie Bearce on designing a book jacket for our works-in-progress.

WOW!

I’m full of new ideas, thanks to the helpful suggestions of Jennifer, Kristin and the other retreat participants. Having two sessions to meet with an agent or editor was so helpful. During my revision time, I brainstormed ways to address the issues Jennifer raised. In the second meeting, we discussed my ideas, and she suggested additional way to strengthen the manuscript.

I'll post more details later in the week. 

The retreat was awesome, the weather imperfect. I went out in the sleet to photograph the lake.

Spring in the Midwest

 

Sunday

I was lucky to find that red leaf.

Overheard #138

"Love has no expiration date."

Revision Workshop

Tomorrow I leave for Missouri to attend a SCBWI writing workshop. I hope to return with inspiration both for my manuscripts and this blog. Maybe I'll even take some pictures. Please tune in on Friday and Sunday for regularly scheduled posts.

Snowdrops

This year I beat the deer to the snowdrops.

More on MG and YA

In last week’s post about MG v. YA, I mentioned writing two tween manuscripts. Today, I use them to test my definitions.

In G&G*, the protagonist risks everything to help a friend. This is a YA theme since the main character choose a path that leads away from everything he’s been taught. A secondary theme in the novel is the relationship between the protagonist and his estranged father. Since they resolve their issues and begin to rebuild their family, this could be classified a MG novel.

G&CBS** is about two brothers with nothing in common who manage to resolve their differences. My definition of MG regarding the search for home and family would encompass this story. A secondary plotline is the main character’s attempts to attract his father’s attention. In the end, he decides to go his own way, without his father’s input. That means YA.

My definitions seem to work perfectly since I couldn’t classify these novels before and I still can’t. ;-)

*an old manuscript that I’ve put aside.
**formerly known as TAoCBS

Sunday

photo by me

In honor of the first day of spring, here is my Melting Ice Photo. I took this a week ago, and thanks to a spell of lovely weather, the river is now running. With any luck, the Ice Photo Challenge is over for this winter.

Overheard #137

"I’m unconvinced that you can apply algebraic topology to finance and not commit white-collar crime."

Welcome Back the Guest Photographer

Ice season seems to be ending, but TimInMich and I each have at least one more ice photo to share. This is his Sunshine on Water. It looks like a babbling brook, but it's actually a parking lot.

photo by TimInMich