2014 Top Ten!

So everybody's doing Top Ten Whatevers. Here are ten things.
Also I have the flu and this is Day 18 and I have consumed A LOT of cold medicine and pain medicine and ice cream and pistachios.

2014 TOP TEN

10

This buffalo. You want to get on it now. Too bad. None of us are getting on it.

9

This amazeballs diving suit.

WTF is wrong with me in this picture.
It's like I'm dying but also enjoying getting abducted by aliens.

8

That time I thought there were going to be dinosaurs and it was a Park & Ride.

LIES.

7A

Two cats in a hamper.

7B

This sexy other cat.

6

This pumpkin my uncle carved to look like one of the Despicable Me minions.

5

These hellbeasts.

4

This hot guy at Pizza Hut.

3

TIE between this rubber frog with one eye and this lovely Easter bonnet.

2

The Dragon Wagon.

1

This hole that I had to climb into. SPOILER: Spiders.

Happy New Year, Internearthlings!

See you on the flip side!

Of this year!

WIP Character Blog Hop! Read All About It!

Hey, Internearthlings. I've been tagged in a blog hop. It's like being tagged in a game of Freeze Tag except instead of answering seven questions about character, you freeze. Wait, that might be wrong. (OK, maybe just to be safe, after you read this post you should freeze until someone untags you.)

I was tagged by Kurt D. Springs. His impressive deets are as follows:

Kurt D. Springs is presently an adjunct professor of anthropology and archaeology in New Hampshire. He holds a PhD. in anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, as well as a Master of Literature in archaeology from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a Master of Liberal Arts in anthropology and archaeology from the Harvard University Extension School. His main area of interest is megalithic landscapes in prehistoric Ireland.

Kurt writes reviews on Kurt's Frontier for Invincible Love of Reading. He also has an author blog, Amazon Author Page, and is on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. Price of Vengeance has its own Facebook page as well.

Professor Springs currently lives in Manchester, New Hampshire.

I did not go to Harvard. But this one time I was in a small chorus singing a gala for mucky-mucks and I was chatting with the woman next to me and she was super nice and funny. It happened that Henry Kissinger was there and I asked my new friend if she knew the Henry Kissinger song (she did not) and I was kind of singing it for her amusement. Then she's like, "So what do you do?" and I'm like, "I'm unemployed. How about you?" and she says, "I'm the Grand Inquisitor* at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard." And my first thought was, "Then how do you not know the Henry Kissinger song?" but then my second thought was, "I am the biggest ass ever."

*My memory may be failing me here. Or not.

Anyway, thanks to Kurt for tossing me the ball! Here's some new info on my upcoming novel, Redwing.

Please note: I don't have any more images for this post, so I'm just going to stick in random ones from my computer. If you don't say anything, maybe no one will notice.

What is the name of your character? Is she a fictional or historic person?

The protag of Redwing is nameless, although the few people who know of her existence call her by what she is, Redwing. I certainly hope she's fictional, and you should too.

When and where is the story set?

The where is a city of hissing pipes, curving temples, boiling water, and birds of burden, all perched on the side of Mol, the great volcano. The when is just before the Deep Dark, one sunless year out of every thousand.

What should we know about her?

It's a bit inconceivable that she exists, and she's certainly not supposed to be alive. Those who believe in redwings know they must be drowned as infants. The problem in real life, as Redwing's father found out, is that they just look so much like real babies.

What is the main conflict? What messes up her life?

The approaching Deep Dark stirs memories of the previous year of night, when an ugly battle shaped the country for the next thousand years. Old grudges have been simmering, plans whispered in secret places. The unique characteristics of a redwing may, in fact, be necessary to prevent the fiery death of Mol's peaceful city. Or maybe redwings, as many people believe, exist only in mythology.

What is the personal goal of the character?

Amid her countrymen's conflicting purposes and beliefs, between myth and history, Redwing must discover -- or establish -- her own identity. And, you know, prevent large-scale lava death if at all possible.

Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?

The working title is Redwing, and there's a tiny excerpt on my website.

When can we expect the book to be published?

I never expect anything to be published -- I just know I will screw it up somehow, like by accidentally burning down the warehouse -- but the plan right now is for Redwing to come out in 2015 from my phenomenally awesome publisher, St. Martin's Press.

Who are you tagging?

I'm throwing the ball to the following amazeballs writers:

Stephen Bramucci, writer of travel, adventure and food, will be guest-posting at Quirk & Quill. Ronald Zupan and the Pirates of Borneo! (Bloomsbury) is coming in 2016!

Lisa Doan, author of the middle grade adventure series The Berenson Schemes (Darby Creek Publishing) and one of the funniest people I know. Visit her blog here.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann, author of Rogue (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin) and Gringolandia (Northwestern University Press), and LEGO book launcher extraordinaire! (Don't know what a LEGO book launch is? Check out some of Lyn's work here!) Visit her blog here.

Even SSS got the LEGO treatment!

Guest Post! 20 Things I Wouldn't Know About Had I Not Become a Writer

[You guys! Today I'm so excited to bring you a guest post by fabulous writer Carol Brendler!! I learned SO MUCH from this list . . .]

Writers sometimes joke that if the FBI ever seized their computers to examine them for evidence, digging up their browser searches alone would suggest that we have very troubled minds and habits. It's true that our research sometimes leads us into strange territory, and we writers tend to have our own idiosyncrasies as well. Hence, I present to you the following:

Things I Wouldn't Know About Had I Not Become a Writer

1. Pangolins.

2. The song sparrow's spring song sounds kind of like "Madge, Madge, put on the teakettle-ettle." Listen here.

3. Googly eyes do not stick very well to a butternut squash.

4. Morse code for S.O.S. is  . . . - - - . . .  Please make a note of it.

5. Linsey-woolsey is a fabric woven from linen and wool. (Duh, right?)

6. The letter U in Cyrillic looks suspiciously similar to our letter Y. Hmm.

7. Egg creams contain neither eggs nor cream.

8. Kraken is pronounced KRAW-kn. Rhymes with walkin'. Can also be pronounced to rhyme with fakin'.

9. Pilot Precise ink pens are superior to all other writing implements on the market.

10. Actress Norma Shearer had a lazy eye.

11. There was once a menagerie worker in a certain circus who had the unfortunate job of having to manually stimulate the female tigers over and over again whenever they went into heat.

12. Saddle shoes were introduced in the early 1900s as athletic shoes to be used primarily for tennis.

13. Earthworms are edible and chock full of protein. There are recipes.

14. That phenomenon where people think they see the Virgin Mary or Jesus' image in a grilled cheese sandwich or a concrete stain under an overpass is called a simulacrum.

15. Steam engines are a little scary to drive. 

16. Lest you think dating ads are a recent development, please note this "want ad" I found from The EveningStar (Washington, D.C.) of  August 2, 1879:

17. Pink fairy armadillos can be found only in a small region of Argentina. Or more likely, they cannot be found, since the vole-sized creatures will disappear into their holes whenever they feel nervous. Also, they are nocturnal and their tunnels are quite well hidden. Because they are so elusive, their official threat status is currently listed as "data deficient."

18. Willie and Tad Lincoln once put on a circus/minstrel show in the attic of the White House and insisted that any available soldiers, gardeners, and servants attend. Admittance was five cents, and Willie wore one of his mother's satin gowns as a costume (without asking).

19. A baby llama is known as a cria. Another acceptable term would be baby llama.

20. Merkins. (Note, this is PG-13 and NSFW)

Good thing I became a writer. Now, you. What sorts of trivia have you uncovered whilst doing research?

Carol Brendler is the author of the young adult novel RADIO GIRL (Holiday House) September 5, 2013.
 Coming summer, 2014: A picture book, NOT VERY SCARY, illustrated by Greg Pizzoli, from FSG.
 Also by Carol Brendler: WINNIE FINN, WORM FARMER (FSG, 2009) a picture book illustrated by Ard Hoyt.

Blog Tour: The Writing Process

Greetings, Internearthlings. I just made that word up. It's a combination of "Internet" and "earthlings."

(THINGS ACCOMPLISHED TODAY: 1)

So this post is part of The Writing Process Blog Tour, which you know if you read the title. And if you didn't, you can go read it now before you either proceed to the next paragraph or lose interest and wander over to YouTube hoping to find something more glorious than John Houseman hawking Puritan Oil. SPOILER: YOU WON'T. [UPDATE: The YouTube video is gone. What are you afraid of, YouTube? John Houseman and his healthful oil will not be silenced! I found them here!]

The Writing Process Blog Tour is a Blog Tour in which Writers discuss The Writing Process. You get tagged by a writer and you then tag another writer, and soon we will all know about The Writing Process of every writer on Internearth.

I was tagged by: 

Alicia Potter! Alicia's newest picture book, Jubilee! One Man's Big, Bold, and Very, Very Loud Celebration of Peace, illustrated by Matt Tavares, just came out from Candlewick Press and Publishers Weekly couldn't wait to throw a star at it because it is that fabulous. You can check out Alicia's other books here. And then you should buy them all because her books are amazeballs, and I don't pull out "amazeballs" very often.

image

THINGS ACCOMPLISHED TODAY: 2

There are four questions that are part of The Writing Process Blog Tour. Here they are.

What am I currently working on?
My next novel from St. Martin's Press! It's a kinda steampunky, kinda mythological fantasy called Redwing and it contains boiling water, ash, and extra-big ostriches. UPDATE: I have decided that its new title is Extra-Big Ostriches.

I also have a new cat, so I'm working on smoothing inter-cat relations in the context of a small studio apartment. The transition is taking lots of patience and love, but I'm happy to say all three cats are starting to become snuggle friends. Haha, I'm just kidding. It's Catpocalypse and we're all going to die.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Um. Well, I hop genres quite a bit, but in terms of this book that's just come out, which I'll refer to as SSS (pronounced "Sssssssss . . . "), I think I've got a bit of a different take on music in fantasy. I feel like when music has a biggish role in a fantasy/magical realism novel, there's often a literal magic associated with it.

art by danbrenus

Yes, Google images of "music and magic" . . . this exactly.

But in SSS, which takes place at a music conservatory, there isn't any actual magic associated with the music itself. It's all in other places, like the homicidal space cat.

Laurie's cat

My novel totally has one of these.

Why do I write what I write?
People who read this blog (you should probably mentally put at least two of those words in quotes) might suspect that my novels are full of shenanigans, but they actually have, like, feelings and stuff in them. And sometimes violence and gore. A relative of mine came to a reading last week, which was very nice of her, but didn't buy the book, which is totally fine. In fact, I didn't even notice she didn't buy the book, but she found my boyfriend at work the next day and she and her husband made a point of telling him they didn't buy the book because of "all the violence," and then they were like, "That's what's ruining the young people today and we just won't support that." So I guess I write what I write in order to ruin the young people.

How does my individual writing process work?
I'm very linear. I start with one sentence that turns into one paragraph that (usually) turns into one scene. That's the basis for the rest of the story, and it's usually the first scene. Then I write until I get to the end.

I have to write each sentence in order, and I revise compulsively as I go. So it has happened that I've stared at my laptop for literally like three hours trying to write one sentence, even though I should have been able to skip that sentence and write stuff after it.

This came up in my search for "stare," to illustrate me staring at my laptop for hours.
And, you know . . .  it's not wrong.

Sometimes it takes me a very long time to get to the end.

But at that point I have a thing that has a beginning, middle, and end, and that's when I can figure out how everything should fit together. Or if it fits together. It's really sad when it doesn't.

This is me in sad airplane form.

Who's Next: I'm tagging Erin E. Moulton! Her newest novel, Chasing the Milky Way, comes out in June. Erin is a fellow graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she likes raspberries and hound dogs, and she has published two other heartfelt novels -- Flutter and Tracing Stars --  and if I tell you one more awesome thing about her you will probably lose your mind. OK, she lives in New Hampshire, the greatest state evah!

image

It looks like this literally everywhere and all the time here.

We're not even allowed to have houses because we don't want to mess up our rainbow trees.

YAY Dragons and TALKER 25!

Hey, guys, I made some dragons & writers pictures to celebrate the launch of Talker 25 by Joshua McCune. You can see them here!

Also apparently there's a fractal called a Dragon Curve. YOU GUYS, REMEMBER FRACTALS??

Alexis Monnerot-Dumaine

I won the Science Fair with fractals one time.

OK, here's a real dragon, by Silverfox5213:

IT'S EASTER WHEN I SAY IT'S EASTER, MEATBAGS.

What Could Have Been

Today I searched "Richard Burton" on Amazon TV.

It suggested "Charles in Charge."

Your shenanigans make him sad.