Merry Christmas

I don't know that I have ever seen this much snow in this neck of the woods ever, let alone at Christmas. It's beautiful, but...

I am very glad my folks live within walking distance, so they can still come for Christmas Eve. And Matt's mom is on her way from Holly's place, so hopefully she drives carefully and makes it ok. Tonight's feast is not to be missed: Our traditional fondue, with veggies, chicken, beef, and this year's Exotic Meat... Wild Boar. I can't wait.

Thank goodness, too, for my sharp eye that noticed the water trickling down the basement wall last night, entering where the main enters the house. We managed to set up a bucket overnight and caught about 8 litres of water. But the plumbers are here and it...might be fixed now. 

All is good. I haven't showered yet, coz the water's been off, but that is ok, I'll get there. The mulled wine and spiced apple cider are filling the air with their Christmassy scents and we have lots of food, lots of firewood, so if the power goes off we'll be fine. We're healthy and happy, and Santa Claus will make it through any weather.

Merry Christmas to all and sundry, and I wish that everyone has as delightful a time as we will have.

Christmas and Rewrites

Spaghetti's cooking away, the toboggan hill is awaiting our arrival and all those incredibly loud rumbling noises have been identified as the train pulling in in The Polar Express, which is playing downstairs with the surround sound on. That scared the heck out of me, man. 

I want to thank everyone who so kindly sends us Christmas cards, even though we never send them. I do love receiving them, and have them all hung on a string above the pony wall in the living room. I tried to send Christmas cards once or twice but didn't make it through the project and it just became a huge dark cloud of guilt hovering over me. So I just said, NO! to doing Christmas cards. Man, I can't even seem to get the kids' school photos organised and sent out to friends and family. I suck at that sort of thing. [sigh] I love that everyone still sends me cards, though. That's very big of them.

Had a nice chat with Rob today, even though he's sick with the flu, poor fellow. Also talked to Colleen, which I do quite regularly lately, mostly because we're talking writing so much. I told her about my Stream of Consciousness writing I did t'other day. I wanted to find out what was truly going on in Kyer's mind once she gets taken by the enemy at the river. So I just wrote and wrote, occasionally checking back with the story to find out what happens next. I wrote in her dialogue, and her reactions to the things others said to her, but no narrative, just all Kyer's inner monologue. It was very interesting to discover some new things:

1) Kyer notes that Con is a coward. To finally pick her up but require eight men to do it, shows her that he's afraid of her. This knowledge keeps up her confidence for a lot longer than she might otherwise have lasted.

2) This also leads to a determination not to be broken. There are limits, of course, to how much she can take, and she's about to learn about those limits. However, during the trip to Ronav's headquarters she manages to keep her courage up.

3) Kyer compares her current situation to an event that occurred in the schoolyard where it took eight boys to beat her up. She still did them some damage AND walked home. They won the fight but they did not defeat her. Another source of courage for Kyer to draw on during this current little get-together with Con and Gyles and friends, whilst on their way to Ronav's headquarters.

And what a surprise awaits her when she gets there...

Now I need to figure out what nasty things to do to Janak. Derry, Jesqellan, Janak and Phennil are attacked by an ogre at the same time that Con & Co. are picking up Kyer, and I need Janak to incur some damage. Something that prevents them from following after Kyer, and something that royally ticks him off, so he can blame it on Kyer.

This has been the trickiest rewrite I've ever tackled. Don't know why. But I'm finally making headway. Making my characters suffer... what larks. Merry Christmas, guys.

Rejection: Get over it

Jonathan just nagged me to blog, coz I've neglected it. Ok fine. I thought about blogging about the Canadian political circus, but then I decided that some people are afraid of clowns, so I'd better not. It's a busy time, coming up to Christmas. School concerts, shopping, dinner guests, decorating... My advent calendar says we're supposed to buy a tree today. Considering I haven't done the advent calendar tasks I was supposed to do yesterday nor the day before, I can't guarantee that the tree will happen today.

Really, what I want to talk about today is rejection. Again. I got a letter from Eddie Schneider yesterday. It simply was not tos his taste, and there's nothing I can do about that. Rats. But you know the worst part about getting rejected, once I've gotten through the initial drag of reading the letter and a bit of, "Why am I doing this to myself? Why don't I pursue some other career instead?" Really the worst part is telling other people. I always feel like I'm giving bad news. Like a doctor who has to say, "Sorry, your tests results showed a positive indication for [insert Really Crummy Condition here]." 

Everyone cares so much and they get excited for me whenever something cool happens in this long and often painful process, and I hate having to go around and tell people that it was just another false alarm. There's a small part of me that cringes and wants to hide away and pretend it didn't happen, but that's because there's a niggling fear that being rejected means my work is bad; and maybe it's a greater fear that if I tell people my work was rejected, they will believe my work is bad.

As Tom keeps reminding me, Jasper Fforde received 75 rejections for The Eyre Affair before he hit paydirt. 

The point is that the announcement of a rejection needs to be just as matter of fact as the announcement of the request for submission. Work through the misery and dejection and despondency (a process which should take about... 13 minutes) and then hunker down and get back to work. So here goes: Ladies and Gentlemen... I received a rejection from Eddie Schneider yesterday! 

Now where's my pen?

Editing madness

Colleen said to me on Monday, "You're going to hate me." Why would I do that? Because she's editing my MS, and came to a part that she thought was totally lame, and said so. Grrrr.

It's never easy to hear a comment like that, and if you ever get the privilege of being edited by Colleen, you will learn that she doesn't hold back, she makes her points VERY clear with lots of comments, honest reaction, and even a little sarcasm. I take criticism in that way from her because she's my friend and I trust her. (Plus there's that little bit of knowledge in the back of my mind that turnabout is fair play and I'm going to be editing for her some day very soon!!) I brace myself for her negative comments and take lots of deep breaths, but I listen to them and remain objective. I don't get all pissy and mad... because she's... well, she's right. It's refreshing to hear someone say, "I really wanted something bad to happen to Kyer in that scene, and it didn't, and I felt totally let down." Believe me, there was more to it than that. Ouch!

That kind of feedback is crucial. I appreciate her candor, and said so. I don't want an agent to read my book and feel "totally let down." I'd rather get it from a friend in a timely fashion, allowing me to fix the problems before they can be read by an agent who might then reject the whole thing.

So, I've worked on the chapter in question, using a scene I wrote for book two but removed because it didn't really fit. See, that's a reason to never reject an idea: always write the scene, even if you don't wind up using it where you planned. It has found a place elsewhere.

Now Kyer is in bigger trouble than she was before, and furthermore, she tries to talk her way out of it, but it fails, and boy oh boy is she in for it. And hopefully the reader response will be, "Oh NO! How's she going to get out of this?!"  

And THAT is the kind of reaction I want. So once again, thanks Colleen, for being so very nasty. And no, I couldn't hate you if I tried.

"Don't judge a book by its movie"

So says the marquee in front of a bookstore on the Lougheed Highway in Maple Ridge. And it's true, so true.

I watched a bunch of movie trailers online yesterday and I can say with all certainty that I will not be going to see Coraline. Why do film makers think they have to exaggerate everything? If a scene is exciting and intense in a book why is it not possible to reproduce that intensity on screen without overblowing it? A battle scene does not have to be twenty minutes long and keep going until every item in the vicinity has been either smashed, blown up, or used as a weapon. Writers work really hard to create great scenes in their books. Some even succeed. ;-) And yet film makers don't seem to trust that what they've been given is better than something new. 

I liked a lot about the movie of Stardust. But the opening scene was dumb, and the big overblown neverending battle scene at the end wrecked the whole thing for me. Robert De Niro was hilarious, but why did Yvaine call Tristan (and he's Tristran in the book) him "a moron"? That did not work. So many parts of the book they could have followed but didn't. And though I liked a lot about it I was really disappointed with Stardust.

I was talking the other day about A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. I was told a while ago that it had been made into a movie, too. When I told my daughter so she said immediately, "I don't want to see it!" I understand what she means, because I feel the same way. My imagination has created such a vivid picture of what that story looks and feels like that I don't want to wreck it by seeing someone else's interpretation. I was pretty cautious about Lord of the Rings, too, but Peter Jackson et al took such pains to maintain the integrity of the story and I loved it. (I had great difficulty with the changes to the Two Towers, with Frodo being taken to Gondor by Faramir and all, but when I watched the discussion about it in the extended version their reasoning made sense).

Now Coraline is a book I read out loud to my kids in a single afternoon. I had asked them several times if they'd like me to read it to them and they said, "No." So one day as they played on the livingroom floor with their trains and whatever else, I sat on the couch and just started reading to them. They kept playing. They were listening, though. Soon they stopped playing and kept listening. And not long after that they were up on the couch with me, listening and rapt. If I tried to stop they said, "Keep reading!"

It took several hours, but we read the entire book.

And now the movie is coming out. The trailer shows that it is computer generated animation, which is fine. [Upon further reading I have learned it is 3D stop motion. That's fine too] I think it would be better live action, but that's ok. No, the trouble I can see right away is that it's a lot more colourful than the way I see the story. Added to that it looks like they've taken the story completely away from its dark simplicity, that spine-tingling fear of all those things kids are afraid of. From the trailer, it looks like they've turned it into a big spectacular extravaganza. I don't know... I found the book downright eerie, and the movie does not look that way at all. I can just see them overblowing everything, the way filmmakers tend to do these days.

Henry Selick has an alternate vision of the story from mine. Oh well. Enjoy everyone. I will stay home and keep my vision of it to myself. 

Or maybe I'll watch it, but with only one eye...

Favourite books and favourite moments

One more thing... This evening I finished reading A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, out loud to my daughter. MAN, I love that book. Reading out loud is so much more emotional than reading in my head. Maybe it's the actor in me, but I can't just read words when I read out loud. I have to put in all the emotion, too. So there I am reading out loud as Meg tells Charles Wallace that she loves him with all her heart, and begs him to come back to her, dear baby brother whom she loves... Tears are running down my cheeks at the same time as they're running down Meg's and Charles Wallace's....

And a number of years ago, I read Lord of the Rings out loud to my son, and by the end of it, when Sam says, "Well, I'm back." We both of us were bawling our eyes out.

Yeah, my kids are as old as they are, but damn right I still read out loud to them every night. I treasure that time. When they were wee I couldn't wait until they were old enough for me to read Word to Caesar, by Geoffrey Trease, to them. And The House in Cornwall, and Treasure Island, and all the Great Brain books and all the Madeleine L'Engle books. Now I'm reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, to The Boy, coz he's old enough for that, and the Girl and I have watched the tv series of Pride and Prejudice so I can't wait to read that to her.  So many books, so little time. There's a part of me that hopes they never move away from home, coz I'll miss this dreadfully.

In ten years' time, somebody remind me of this, ok?

Another day, a few more words written down...

"So how's the writing coming?" asks Tom today. 

"Not bad," I say. "I'm doing a lot of brainstorming and mulling these days. A bit of writing, jotting notes, playing with ideas, and all that."

See, book three is tricky. This whole story has been based on the Fantasy role playing game my friends and I used to play; that's where a lot of the ideas came from--stories that had already been created. Mind you, very little that happens in the story actually "happened" in the game. There are really only a few events that I've used, and of course I had to create the story to go round them, not to mention flesh out the characters and make them real (one of the funnest parts of all this, I must say). Book one stemmed from Kyer killing Simon at the Burnished Blade. The rest of Dark Elf's Warrior came from my brain. Book two stemmed from an event in the game, wherein Alon Maer (Kien Bartheylen's wife) is terribly ill, and pregnant, and will die if our heroes don't find a cure. The visit to the wizard Kayme "happened" in the game, as did Kyer's rather nasty fall, and of course... The Gate. But now that I think about it, that's about it. The story surrounding those events was all me: The fact that the theme is Trust, the whole relationship with the Guardian, the antagonist's motivation and his goal (look at me not giving away spoilers!), the Indyn Caves situation, a certain pair of twin assassins named Misty and Juggler...

So why is book three so tricky? Now, here's why blogging is a helpful tool: I hadn't truly put those thoughts down in tangible form. I was thinking all along that I had to make book three up completely, but that's not the case. Sure I'm still not sure if they'll take that journey by ship, and if not, then that negates Skimnoddle's need to pose as the merchant Flavius. But if I don't use that, then it also means I lose Skimnoddle forcing Derry to be his lackey which is such a delightful abuse of Derry's gallantry. The battle with the dragon Greok is there, as is the ultimate confrontation... Ah, but IS it the ultimate confrontation? I'm not so sure. See, the Guardian is still around and is most definitely up to no good. Maybe.

Oh, it's such fun! I do have lots of things to work with, now that I think of it, at least as much as I had when I began Book Two. I just have to remember back to the time when I started writing it, and how long did that take? Crikey, I started it at the same time as Book One, because I had no idea how many pages the first part of the story would take up. The Kayme scene was the second scene I wrote, and much later realised that it would have to go in the second book. Sheesh.

I guess the message I am getting from this is that I just have to keep writing and it will all fall into place the same way the first two did. I don't have to plan everything now.

But yes, Tom, I will continue to walk round and round through my living room and kitchen talking out loud to myself to work out ideas. Writers, I think, have to be just a little bit crazy. And please, Tom, chat with Jock and help me with some brainstorming, ok?