the weekend, and a new book.

Yes!! I know what the next book is going to be about! (or rather who it's going to be about) And I love it! For discussions' sake, I shall call it Freddy.

Other things going on right now:

--still yucky icky cold. I can feel it descending into my chest, which sucks.
--have to attend a 2-hour groundbreaking ceremony in about 45 minutes for my agency's new building, which I have spent countless hours working on, since I'm on the lovely floor plan committee. Would be fine, if I didn't have a cold. {sigh}
--after ceremony, I get to attend lunch with a bunch of VIPs, including the governor.
--tomorrow is homecoming, so parade and football game (unless it snows, which it might!)
--Sunday I'm escorting Child to a birthday party

I'm rather tired just thinking about it, actually. Must think about coffee and new books instead.

(forgot again, added later) Whadjya eat? I found a cool pre-cooked carnitas pack. Heated that, served with tortillas, refried beans, fresh salsa, avocados and sour cream. YUM. And lots of leftovers.

Huh.

Yesterday was unexpected.

I got a call at 11 AM from Child's school that she threw up, and could I come and get her, please? I practically steamrolled over people racing across town, picturing my poor baby feverish, shivering, you know...ill.

Um, not really. Apparently she got sick for no reason (in the middle of circle time, eek) but was still perfectly fine. She wasn't exactly cheerful, but after we got home and watched a half hour of kid TV she was raring to play. She ate fine, had lots of energy, had no fever...parenting really is a mystery, I guess. As my boss said this morning, "sometimes kids just do that." {shrug}

I, on the other hand, have a nasty yucky head cold, and have already gone through half a box of Kleenex in spite of being dosed with daytime cold meds. Maybe it was good for me to stay home yesterday too. It got me out of a class. {g}

Whadjya eat? Sliced turkey with lingonberry sauce (YUM, better than cranberry), banana-nut muffins, fresh vegetables with ranch.

Ah-chooo

Revisions made to Jenna: check.
Jenna hook: check.
Jenna synopsis: check.

Whew. I still have a couple more teen readers out there, but otherwise I'm just about ready for Surrey.

Time to start on the next book, I think. {s}

I need to turn in my paper today, but it's mostly done. Yesterday I was all crazy productive and cranked a lot of stuff out. Then last night I came down with daughter's cold {sniff}, so am feeling anything but productive today. {SNEEZE}

Perhaps I will take it nice and easy today.

Ya know, I'm thinking this blog has become pretty boring lately. Sorry about that. Sometime soon maybe I'll get back to ranting and actual coherent discussion instead of just updates...

Whadjya eat? French toast, maple breakfast sausage, and peaches.

Yo ho ho

Another busy day! At work I'm putting the final touches on a publication to send it to the printer today. It was a rush-rush project, but we made it right on deadline, whew.

Once that's done, I can think about my paper that's due next week, and maybe do an outline. I also get to do a fun work project and go take pictures of some pretty minerals for our annual calendar.

And tonight I get a massage my hubby bought me (yay) and go out to dinner. And then tomorrow hubby and I are leaving Child with Grandma for an overnight, and going out of town to a comedy/theatre performance. I'm really looking forward to that!

Jenna update: 3/5 readers have given me full feedback, one partial feedback. I'm extremely stoked at the responses so far. AND I was very excited today that another beta-reader agreed to take a look, someone who's experienced epilepsy herself. I really wanted to have some feedback from that quarter before I pitch. Today at lunch: work on synopsis and hook.

my mind is on vacation at least

Hey, y'all!

Since Jenna's out to readers, I'm taking a little vacation (well, if you can call doing classwork and presentations and real work and going to a curriculum meeting at the preschool tonight a vacation...ya know. I was going to work on my synopsis today, but I went out to lunch instead. That's vacation.).

I also took time over the weekend to read Scott Westerfield's UGLIES, and I highly recommend it. It's a wee bit heavy on the message in a few places, but that's far overwhelmed by the strength of the story and the characters, and the originality of the concept. I'll be reading the sequels.

RE the Jenna-out-to-readers thing, I must admit that I've had a few twinges over the past couple of days just thinking how odd it is that my characters and world are now also living in the minds of other people. Five other people max, but it's a start, right? It's a strange thing. These characters--people--were created in my brain, and now I can have actual discussions with others about Jenna and Joe and Dr. Ramsay. WEIRD. Think how Vicki and karen and all the rest of you published folks must feel on a daily basis. :)

Whadjya eat? Yesterday: pita pizzas, with salad. Child gets to make her own, which is fun. Sunday I did a real-cooking thing and made Spicy Garlic Cashew Chicken, and again it rocked. If you like to cook at all, try that recipe.

YAY!

Revisions over, and it's off to my beta-readers. WHEW.

(I should say this round of revisions over, because I know there will be more after readers, but whatevah. Done for now.)

To celebrate, I bought myself this:


Yep, a foam gargoyle with LED light-up eyes.
Those of you who are reading Jenna now will soon understand. It did get rather a "what the hell" from my husband, but I explained that to me it's like a leap of faith in my book. I saw it, thought "that's a perfect promotional item for Jenna signings" and, after dithering a bit, bought it. I realize that as of this moment no one has even read the book but me, much less agents, editors, or readers, but I believe. Someday I will need this for a signing.

{beam}

A heroine

This week I've greatly lamented the loss of one of my favorite authors of all time, and one of my primary inspirations: Madeleine L'Engle. I've done it privately. But today I saw on Jennifer Jackson's blog this poem:

At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place between myself and the powers of darkness!

I memorized this poem, when I was an early teen, and repeated it to myself whenever I had troubles. I read the book again as a young adult in college, and I renewed the memorization, checking myself every few days for a while to see if I had it still, because I wanted to keep it in my head. Because it, and those books, were so important to me. They still are. They always will be.

Not a rant

I could do a major rant today. I want to--it's boiling over in me, triggered by yet another snide comment from someone who loves to shoot others down out of pure jealousy.

But. September 11th does not seem like a suitable day to rant about piddly things. So I will focus on my work, and my book, instead, and put that energy to a more positive purpose.

Out.

Update (yes, I'm alive)

There. Plot revision done. I cut about 7500 words, and added about 5300 new ones back in. That's about 10-12% changeover, and hopefully all for the better. Yay!

Next up: language draft. I expect this one to be a lot easier for me than plot changes--it just will involve going through the whole thing (again) and polishing the language. Taking out repetition, changing up cliched or old phrases, making sure descriptions are clear and fit with the characters. This is the type of editing I usually do, so I'm more comfortable with it. Plot revisions are Not As Much Fun. I have 10 days to accomplish the language draft changes to make my goal of sending it to readers on September 20th. Then I plan to gnaw on my nails until I get comments. :)

We had an excellent weekend. First home football game of the season for the college we both work for, which is a big deal! Sadly we lost, but it was fun. Yesterday I alternated between playing Fish Day with Child (don't ask me, she announced that it was Fish Day and we were supposed to read fish books, play fish games, and dress up and act like fish...) and doing actual house and yard work.

Oh, I'm sorry. I should've given you a warning before I said something so shocking. :)

Anyway, I have to go to class in an hour and one of my authors just called, so must go work. Later!

Whadjya eat? Steak, scalloped potatoes, squash baked with butter and parmesan cheese. This week I've got to do something with the hundred or so apples we picked from our little tree...

Good and Bad

Hola! It's been a while, I know. I just haven't felt like blogging. Too many other things going on, and I've been living in my own little Jenna-revision-world anyway. People keep catching me staring at the walls or the ceiling for long periods of time.

There is too much. Let me sum up.

---------
Good: Last night, while lying in bed listening to the Angels/Mariners game on the radio, I solved my subplot problem. Yes! One thread has been giving me headaches since I started, never quite fitting, never being strong enough to balance everything else. Voila--if I move all the action one month later, I complicate Jenna's life tremendously and make everything more difficult, yet stronger. Perfect. Ha ha.

Bad: I couldn't sleep at all last night, tossing and turning while my mind worked on the implications of the above. Major ripples to deal with. {YAWN}
---------
Good: Child starts Kindergarten tomorrow. Same teacher as last year, so no stress there. And we all love her school.

Bad: Of her two best friends, one moved to another school for kindergarten and the other is in the other classroom. {sigh} AND she's five and so big and her childhood is zooming by...{sniff}
---------
Good: My grad school classes have started and are fun so far, especially digital photography. Yay!

Bad: My grad school classes have started.
--------
All good:
You MUST READ Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst. Yes, it's a middle-grade novel based on fairy tales. I don't care what grade it's for. It's inventive, captivating, funny, and intense. The concept is original and very well done. I read the whole thing in One Day. Go. Check it out. Trust me.

Other Stuff

Some things I haven't mentioned, while I was obsessed with Finishing:

--Child has been attending kid's drama camp all week, which she is LOVING. They get to do a performance of Where the Wild Things Are tomorrow. She plays a monster. :)

--Grad school starts next week. {sigh} Fortunately this term I'm taking catch-up required classes: Digital Imaging (photography and Photoshop) and Professional Presentations. Decided against taking Rhetoric, yay.

--It's been nasty here for about a week, socked in with smoke from all the forest fires in Montana and Idaho. The sky has been orange or yellow, and really icky to breathe. Yesterday it rained (thank God) and cleared a bunch of it up, though. Whew. I have my window open again.

--Last night I started reading Into the Wild, by Sarah Beth Durst, a fellow blogger. (Sarah's agent was one of those who read the full of TMT, so I found her blog while reading up) So far, I'm really enjoying it. Hooray for reading and movies during my self-imposed break!

YES!

Guess what, guys?

3300+ words later, I have finished the first draft of Jenna.

WoooooooooHooooooooooooooooooooo!

(yes, I'm all teary.)

Thanks so much for all your support. Mind, I'll need it again in a week or so when I'm editing, chopping, adding, and re-working, but for now? Thank you.

I know I've been pretty close-mouthed about what Jenna was even about, but since I'm pretty sure the main plot is not going to move around now, I'm going to post the hook (which, yes, I've already written) in celebration. Here 'tis. Gotta go post on the forum now!

The Weirdest Thing about Jenna
by Susan Adrian

Fifteen-year-old Jenna's life is…complicated. Her mom, a true-life columnist, has a new job on national radio—so now people across the country can share every little embarrassing moment. Jenna's been yanked from San Diego and dumped with her dad, in small-town Montana. Oh, and she sometimes abruptly disappears into an alternate world, where each kid has their own shade, one person who is their perfect balance. At least Joe always understands her.

But the other world starts falling apart at the same time as Jenna's real life. Joe and all the other shades are in danger, and Jenna has to help fix the balance to save him, and herself. But just when she's getting it, her dad sees her "disappear"…in what looks like a seizure. Now Jenna's caught up in a nightmare of doctors, tests, and needles, in a world where she has no control, and no one believes her. Are the doctors right, that Joe is just a hallucination of epilepsy? Or is he real, and waiting for her to save him?

Follow Jenna into a world of flying monkeys, cranky nurses, and a hot guy with problems of his own.

There!

{Huge grin}

Still not done, though. One more chapter at least.

Okay, enough about freaking Jenna, but no. Not enough.

98%. I think I'll reflect on that for a moment. 90-freaking-8 percent.

Though I think I will go over the wordcount some. Not much, but some. Which of course is perfectly fine. :)

I see the end, like an image in a microscope, coming sharper as I focus the knob.

Some of it is dorky as is. Yes, I admit this. Hopefully I will fix this dorkiness in the second draft, though it's also possible that some of it is just a reflection of my perfectly dorky imagination. We shall see. I plan on giving it to plenty of (diverse) readers when the second draft is done, so all remaining "oh my god this is lame" moments should be wiped out with that.

I am eating Pringle's Salt-n-Vinegar chips like there is no tomorrow. Must stop that.

From Jenna today: "Oh my God, what a headache. Seriously. The headaches I'd had before when I came back, splitting my skull and all? Machetes vs. pumpkin? Nothing compared to this."

Whadjya eat? Leftovers. :)

Monday report

There, got my minimum words in for the day (800), so now I can do a quick post before I get back to real work.

I had a great weekend. On Saturday we all went out to a sapphire-mining place, where you buy buckets of gravel, wash it in a trough, and pick through the piles hunting for sapphires. It's actually really fun, like finding treasure. And there are so many in this particular area that there are at least a few in every screen-full.

Sunday we hung out and went grocery shopping, and I got to spend some good time with Child. We did ballet together, which she LOVED (I was doing a barre routine with her, with plies in first position, second position, etc., and for once she was following, wide-eyed and smiling, instead of arguing with me that I wasn't doing it correctly. {g}). I did discover later that evening that I'd managed to strain my Achilles "showing off", but oh well. Worth it.

Unfortunately it was NOT a good weekend for writing. I got up early on Sunday to write, expecting about an hour and a half, and Child popped up 3 minutes later. {sigh} Best-laid plans. I scraped about 100 words from the scene in my head while she watched TV, but that was it. Though it was frustrating, it's okay. Real life takes precedence, and she's only little once. :)

Oh...last night hubby and I decided to watch the Masterpiece Theatre version of Phillip Pullman's "The Ruby in the Smoke", which I'd always wanted to read, since I like the other series so well. And it was really good, with funny lines and unexpected bits, intriguing, twisted--and then halfway through the PBS station crapped out and just went blank. By the time it came back up, the show was almost over, so we missed it. Bummer. Will have to track it down sometime.

Favorite line from Jenna writing today:
"But still I was stuck here. Pinned in this world like a beetle on a board."

Whadjya eat? Pork chops with a prepared Thai rub, tomato salad, artichokes with melted butter!

And on and on and on...and stop!

Self discovery: I get very cranky trying to hold scenes in my head all day. Occasionally I mutter them to myself, to make sure I remember them. This probably makes me look insane.

I may be to the end of the headlong rush of words (10,500 words in one week!), just because I'm to the bit where I don't know what happens, how to wrap up one of the plotlines. I had an idea this morning, but I don't know yet exactly how it will work, so I'm going to have to pause to brainstorm it out. I don't expect a very long pause, though. {g} I don't want to stop.

On the other hand, sometime soon I'm going to need to get some real sleep not interrupted by excited thoughts about Jenna. {YAWN}

Whadjya eat? I keep forgetting this. Last night: we ordered pizza. {s} The night before, I made Parmesan Turkey cutlets, which is basically thin turkey slices dipped in an egg/parmesan/basil batter and fried. Can't find the recipe at the moment...

Whoopee

Wow. I got up early this morning to get some writing in while everyone was asleep, and I got about 1000 words before I had to get them up and moving. (Child's getting dressed right now.) We have to do a trip to Bozeman today for a doctor's appointment, so I won't have any more writing time than that.

I could've written all day, if I had the time.

As it is, the next two scenes were already bouncing around in my head in the shower, so that I had to scribble some notes down as soon as I popped out. And OMG, dudes, I love it. It's all coming together, and it just fits perfectly.

{boing, boing, boing}

Yes, that was me bouncing around the room. Yes, I have probably had too much coffee. But that is just okay by me. I'm happy, yay yay yay, it's working and I love it and I can't wait to write it--

damn. gotta go. {g}

Go, go, go, go

Yay! Almost done, almost done! 55,000 by end of this week (that's 10k in 10 days, folks), and then I only have ~5,000 more to go!

{hopping up and down}

Better

Okay, I've been duly slapped, and I feel lots better.

Thanks, Vic. {ow}

Call to the cavalry

Okay. I need a bitch-slap, fast. Get your arms ready, girlfriends.

The writing is going well--you know this. I blather on about it every day. I'm less than 10k from the end, and it's fast and furious. I wrote another 1200 words or so yesterday; turned down lunch with hubby to spend more time with my girl today. Am drawn to her every minute. But.

Apparently my brain is not happy unless it's worrying about something. So in the past couple of days, even while I'm writing like a maniac, I've been obsessed with the following:

1. Is anyone going to want to read this book but me? I know, I know. Now is NOT the time to even think about this. But let's say this--Jenna will be a good book, I think. A compelling story. But it's not exactly fit-into-a-mold. {cough} There are things in there, fairly serious issues, that turned out to be bigger within the story than I thought. It's not lighthearted fantasy YA, at all. I'm picturing myself trying to pitch it, and panicking...

(Why do I care about this? Why am I even thinking about this? SLAP ME!)

2. Even worse. I'm freaking out about what I'm going to write next.

Dudes, I know! But I'd had the idea that I would be able to write, if not a sequel, then another book in the same world. I'm not absolutely positively sure, but I don't think so anymore. I think Jenna is a stand-alone, and anything else I tried to write about this situation/world would be repetitive or derivative. {sigh} This has just become clear. So now my little brain is spinning: if you're not going to write that next, what are you going to write? Huh? Huh? What's next, write your passion girl?

What if I only have one book that I'm this passionate about? What if I can't do this again? (What am I talking about, I haven't even done it once, I'm not done.) Eeeeeeeekk!

Welcome to my mind. Is this just fear of finishing? What the hell?

I'm gonna go read the last bit of Jenna and try to kick some sense back into myself, but any help would be appreciated.