Gadgets

I decided to mess around with my blog today and have since added gadgets. You can now view a button I created on  the left hand side. Below the button is a HTML code that can be posted in blogs, websites, and accounts like Facebook and Twitter.

Simply highlight the code and paste it wherever you would like to show that you read and view this blog.

I also added a word count meter. This shows the cover of my project, Building Houses, which one can view on the novels page, and its current word count. As I post this post, this is what the word count meter looks like:

You can see the cover of the book and the word count that it is currently at: 55,000 words, or 69% done. 80,000 words is how many words the book is expected to be complete at. I will regularly update this meter, so check the sidebar.

If you want to know how to add these gadgets just ask, and hopefully this will help complement your blogging experience on Past the Ink.

Teaser

The mystery is in full swing! This is an excerpt from Building Houses at the beginning of the eighteenth chapter.

(Longer excerpt as I planned to post a review today but Goodreads/Blogger were being stupid.)

---

The first thing Janna told me when she opened the door was, “I found some friends.” I paused from my spot in the door and said, “Already?”

Really. She was so amazing. I shook my head in disbelief. Somehow, less than twenty four hours, Janna had started our case. It was barely eight thirty in the morning and she was up. I hadn’t even bothered to look at the list of interviewee ideas since I’d read it the day before. Janna beamed and slid the door open wider. Two people stood behind her. I squinted, looking at them. One was an older black woman that looked like a grandmother. Long white curls framed her eyes and made her chin appear bigger. Sweet, charming age lines filled her cheeks and wrinkles framed the edges of her mouth. She wore a wide, flouncy dress patterned with flowers and old Mary Jane shoes.

“This is Mrs. Ellis,” Janna said.                                                

“Oh.” I put on my sweetest, sugary smile. I could have licked ice cream off the sugariness of the smile. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

Mrs. Ellis laughed. Her stomach rolled, her feet shook, her hair quaked. “Oh sugar, I think we have.”

Uh, no. I tried to keep my eyes off her rolling stomach. “Ma’am, I don’t think so.” The old woman answered this question by letting out another belly laugh. Janna gently leaned over and placed a hand on her shoulder. This seemed to be some kind of reminder; almost instantly Mrs. Ellis exhaled a deep sigh and fell silent.

“Remember the day they found Lily?” Janna asked, ending the embarrassing silence. “I was talking to Mrs. Ellis. She lives in this building, upstairs.” Mrs. Ellis let out another belly laugh. She seemed to be suppressing herself this time, and thankfully the laughs were quieter.

“Room three hundred fourteen,” she said with a smile. Janna smiled, echoing the grin, and turned to the girl beside her. The girl grunted. She sounded almost like some kind of prehistoric monster. I turned slightly to the right to see her better.

This girl was obviously a teenager, with long blonde hair that nearly fell to her feet. She wore a shirt that purposely was designed to look shredded and pants. If I squinted, she almost looked like a crazy blonde monster. Ahh. Great, now I’d have nightmares. I shook the image from my mind, shaking my head so wildly I got a headache.

“This is McKenna,” Janna said. McKenna – teenager, monster, whatever creature she happened to be – grunted again. She crossed her arms over her chest in some kind of stereotypical angry pose. “She’s Lily’s sister.”

I recognized her. She’d been on TV when they found Lily. In person, she seemed skinnier. The camera put on all those extra pounds of weight. Pixels didn’t always help a person. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Jaycee.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.” McKenna sighed. “So let’s get onto this interview.” Sassy and cranky like me. Somehow I liked her.

“Well, I’ll be interviewing Mrs. Ellis,” Janna said smugly. “She asked for me herself.” I rolled my eyes. There were only two possible interviewers, duh. Mrs. Ellis beamed and patted Janna on the head. She nodded towards the closed bedroom door.

“Can we go in there?” the woman asked.

“Sure. Fine.” There wasn’t anything in the bedroom that  the two of them could mess around with. And it wasn’t like I really cared. The bedroom was more like a storage closet than a bedroom. Mrs. Ellis beamed again and threw open the door. Through the crack she opened, I could see my bedroom: the unmade bed, the pile of books on the dresser. Janna and Mrs. Ellis shared a look and then the two of them walked into my bedroom and slammed the door.

“Well, that’s over.” McKenna snorted. “So we get to have a discussion now.”

“Yep.” I gestured towards the couches. A pile of old romance novels littered the couch coushions. Quickly I slid the worn paperbacks off the couch and set them on the floor. “Sit down.” McKenna raised an eyebrow.

Crap. She definitely wouldn’t sit down. “Okay, fine. You don’t have to sit down.” Why were we even arguing about this? McKenna smirked.

“I was playing you. God, you’re stupid.” She rolled her eyes and collapsed into one of the chairs. I sat down on the couch across from her. McKenna grabbed the remote from a side table. With a click, the TV turned on. The television was turned to some kind of war history channel. An aging man sat in a rocking chair, posing for the camera. A small white line below his name showed that he was some kind of historian.

“The battle was certainly crucial, mostly because it showed the many inferiority complexes,” the man said in a slow voice, “that the culture had provoked, leading to war, disaster, and eventually deaths.”  I rolled my eyes.

“Are you going to change the channel?”

McKenna stared at me. “Why? War history’s not that bad,” she answered, snarky tone still intact.

“I guess. It’s violent.”

“Everything about this damn world is violent.” She rolled her eyes.

“I guess.” It was a lame argument, but “I guess” seemed to be the only thing I could say. McKenna fell back into her chair with a deep exhale.

“What are we supposed to interview about?” she asked. I shrugged. There hadn’t been any time to think of interview questions. Maybe if Janna had told me before that I would be interviewing McKenna, I could have splashed down a few ideas, but now there was no time.

“How you feel about your sister, I guess.”

“How I feel about my sister.” McKenna repeated the question slowly. “I guess I have no fucking idea how I feel about my sister. And I’d like to – sure as hell – not talk about her.”

I frowned. “Then why did you say we could interview you?”

“Why do bad things happen in this world? I don’t give a shit and neither do you, either. That girl came up to me on the street, said a bunch of crap and then I said yes to get rid of her and she got a stupid smile on her face,” McKenna said.

“Oh.” Figured. Janna annoyed everyone. McKenna shrugged.

“So what shit do you want to know on my sister?”

“Um….” I cast around in my head for some kind of notes, some far-off idea I had slid to the back of my mind. Nothing came. I decided to go for the easy question. “How does she act?”

McKenna raised an eyebrow. “She acts like a teenager. Moody, distant. What did you expect?”

Fine, I’d have to get better with my questions. I leaned against the chair, letting myself sink into the warmth of the pillows. “Does she act different now that she’s back home?” There. That was better. I leaned back with a smirk. McKenna paused for the faintest second—a millisecond or a decisecond would have been a better term – and said, “Of course.”

“Okay.” I looked around frantically. Mom had set a legal pad on an end table. I scooped the pad up and flipped it to a fresh lined yellow page. A pen lay beside the pad. I poised the pen against the page, ready to write fantastical words. “How different?”

McKenna leaned back. She furrowed her brow and frowned in an exaggerated pose. “I guess she’s just moodier. Doesn’t talk as much. My mom hates it. It’s as annoying as hell when she acts like that, y’know.”

I nodded. Made sense. “So your mom gets upset. Do other people in your family get upset?” Oh crap. I sounded like a psychologist, asking all kinds of questions in an overly formal tone. McKenna didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah, basically all of them get upset. My mom, my dad, my sister Rosalie, my brother Josh, and the baby, Sadie.” She sounded so casual.

“Why?”

McKenna rolled her eyes. “You’d make a horrible psychologist.”

Looking at My Manuscript Like a Real Manuscript



One of said avatars, Photoshop being my helper/creator/assister.



So for the past few months, I've been writing a YA manuscript. The story is titled Building Houses and in a nutshell it's a girl's path to growing up in a small town while she tries to figure out if a girl is a fraud. I've spent hours and hours writing it,  I've made countless promotional graphics and covers for it. I love the story. I love the characters and the setting and the plot and the foreshadowing and the mystery and everything.

But there's something missing. I look at other writers, their manuscripts in progress. Sometimes I get envious, of course, and sometimes I feel like my manuscript isn't a real manuscript. And I don't understand or know why. And now I finally understand. I wasn't looking at my manuscript the right way. I was just looking at it in a carefree way.

I was serious about the manuscript, but I wasn't looking at it seriously.

I cared about the story, but I didn't look at it seriously. I didn't look at it in my mind as a real novel, though its word count is officially a novel now (50,000 words is the guideline for a novel and BH is incomplete at 53,000 words).

I needed to look at it seriously. If I didn't look at it seriously, editing would be harder. Rewriting would be harder. Even just continuing, when I could say ehh, forget this, and move on -- that would be harder. I needed to have a seriousness to my manuscript. I needed to understand that yes, writing is hard, and yes, that I needed to be serious about my writing. If I wasn't serious, I wouldn't be confident in my writing. Being confident in your writing is key. People have blogged about it before, but you need to love what you write.

And you need to be serious about it.

Have fun times -- like sitting in fields of flowers

That's not to say that everyone needs to be serious about the writing. The truth is, and this was brought up in this week's #yalitchat, that some writers write just for the hobby. If you're a hobby writer, or you have no intention of getting published or getting an agent or writing a query letter, that's fine too. There's nothing wrong with that. Having fun with your writing is great. Have all the fun you want! You don't need to be serious all the time. And if you're a serious writer, make fun times for yourself, too.

But if you're a serious writer, and you do want to be published, find an agent, be published anywhere, you need to be serious.

If you're a serious writer, you need to be serious about your writing.

If you're not, you won't get anywhere. Look at your manuscript seriously. Look at it like a real manuscript. That's what I do now; I look at my manuscript like a real manuscript. And if you want to be a serious writer, look at your manuscript(s) seriously.

It'll get you further.



Let the Gypsies Run

I suppose in my idea for what I would post on the blog, I mentioned something or another about "writing advice". I've posted on books, excerpts, and the dead dog syndrome where dogs pass out (YES! Look in the archives). But I've never really posted much writing advice. I suppose I'll start today, then. Browsing around the Internet, I found these two fantastic pictures  from weheartit.com and it made me think about setting and small towns.

The pictures:

Both of these pictures represent the feelings the characters in my book think about their town. Jaycee, the main character, lives in Deer Valley, Minnesota, a (fictional) small town at the very edge of the Canadian/Minnesota border. And quite frankly, she hates it. It's too stifiling, too small, everyone knows everything about everybody, they're all related to each other, the schools suck, the big cities are too far away....the list goes on and on. She's not the only one that mentions her hatred throughout the novel. I think at least three other characters so far, with others' complaints planned later in the story, have complained about how horrible they hate their town.

I live in a small town. It looks like this:

Well, not really. That's a picture of people lining up for some event (I don't know which one it is. Thus the magic of Google Images) in front of a building pretty close to my house. But that's a picture. It's small. And all the things my characters complain about: everyone being related; people gossiping and knowing everything about everybody; and the closeness of the town happens in my town all the time. And it can both be good and bad.

So today I'm here to discuss one of the magics of settings, specifically small town settings and their community. Because

1). I adore small town settings.
2) They make great metaphors.
3) They interest me...um, I live it.

So what makes a small town different? I think the character motivations can be different. Small town books' characters often dream of leaving, of going onto a brighter future, of leaving the town they hate. Characters in larger times more often have a bigger future, and already have all the luxuries that small-town living MC's can only dream of.

The places can be different, too -- aren't a lot of Miss Patsy's Hoedown Barn in the cities. There are oddder buildings, quirkier people, and that can be great fun to look on. But my favorite part is the feeling of community.

Community can be destructive and encouraging. Community can stifle a person, make them want to go free. And at the same time, it can make characters more connected to their communities, make them feel proud, just like when you cheer on your hometown sports team.

Community has to be developed well. For me to believe you, you need three things. Good characters, people you would actually find in the middle of nowhere or a town of 2,000 people. You need realistic situations -- there probably wouldn't be a high-rise building for your character to get trapped inside in Hokey Tokey Ville.

When I read books and get a sense of community, I love it. I love the characters and the setting and everything. A few books come to mind; Jellicoe Road and Like Mandarin among others. I hope my books show the same thing.

But the point I really wanted to prove was you need to be careful of your setting. I know about small towns.  I live one and I can write one. Deer Valley is very similar to my ---will-not-be-mentioned---town. But it might be harder if you lived in a big city, Minneapolis or L.A or Memphis or NYC or Seattle. You need to be careful, and if you don't know your setting, research. Choose your setting carefully, get to know the town or world's inhabitants and their feelings, prides, predjuices, longings (to leave; to stay).

Make sure it makes sense. Why would your MC be cattle wrangling in LA? You need to be careful. And write small towns.

Kidding.

(Yeah, right.)

And enjoy the magic of your setting. My town is made up of small town gypsies. Yours will be different. Using the power of setting and magic of characters and the world you have created, you can make a heck of a book.

Setting works. Use it wisely and carefully. Let the gypsies run.

Building Houses is almost at 50,000 words

....

That is all.

Teaser

BUILDING HOUSES teaser. It's almost at 50k now. :D This is from the end of chapter sixteen. Jaycee and her neighbor Janna are sitting under a tree, discussing spying. This project is my most major project, and according to Microsoft Word I started it in August and have since spent 15,753 minutes working on the document. Five months, folks. Five months. So enjoy an excerpt from the end of chapter sixteen.

***

“You need to work on your investigation skills,” Janna started. Her tone was sharp and hard, but she didn’t sound too angry. Just frustrated. “I went to an event at the bookstore one time and they talked about being a good spy. You have to stay focused, alert, and interrogate the person so they give you as much information as you need. Ask questions. Keep pushing them and make sure you get everything. Every little bit of information counts.”

I snorted. Where had she gotten that? From one of those cheesy “how to be a spy” books? Mom and I visited the bookstore sometimes, usually so she could grab the latest romance novel or blockbuster spy book for Dad. Every time we went, there always seemed to be an endcap displayed prominently in the children’s section advertising “how to be a spy” books and kits.  I remembered seeing a few “how to be a spy” classes advertised too, at least once a month. The books were brightly colored and filled with easy puzzles to crack and flimsy spy glasses that broke. Mostly they were filled with lame, crappy stuff. Things that kids would do to spy, like hide behind tables and decode their parent’s phone conversations and receipts. Nothing that anyone professional, like the CIA or secret agents in the FBI, did.

“Most of those books aren’t reliable,” I said. “Besides, none of the stuff in those books is anything professional spies do.”

“How are they not reliable?”

                        

“It’s mostly lame stuff. Like hiding behind tables and decoding phone calls.” I rolled my eyes to punctuate the point. Janna stared at me. Her lower lip hung out in dismay, and from a distance she seemed much younger.

“Maybe,” she said. Her eyes crinkled, and she seemed about to cry. Oh god. All I was good at was making people cry. I leaned forward and wrapped my arm around her back.

“Come on. Let’s sit down.” I waved a hand towards the tree. The dirt seemed more inviting now. It looked cool and soft, certain to calm you. I plopped down in the dirt and gestured for Janna to sit next to me. She curled her face into a scowl, but finally sat down beside me with a loud thump.

“I don’t like it when you make fun of things I like,” Janna said.

“I know.”

We sat in silence. Janna leaned over and buried her head in my lap. My pants felt warm and comfortable as she rested her head in the crook of my legs. She sighed, content, and her eyes softened. It looked like she’d be asleep in no time.

Before she could fall asleep, I whispered into her hair, “I think we can be all done with the spying for now.”

Janna nodded, opening her mouth into a wide yawn. As her eyes closed and the yawns continued, she said, “Okay,” before falling into slumber.