Spring is almost over...

What to blog about? Not much has changed, hence the silence.

But finals are coming up (I have 2 papers due this coming week, 2 regular "not final" tests... then the week of May 4th I have 3 finals and another paper due), so I'm hitting the crazy part of the semester. I tried to stay ahead, or at least on track, for each class, but some classes have been easier than others to stay on top of.

So, we're going to Six Flags tomorrow for opening weekend and I HAVE to be ready for my Monday test AND have my Monday and Wednesday papers due. Oh, and read about 6 neuropsych articles by Monday's class. Yay, rah.

Writing? I don't have time for that! But as soon as the semester's over, Mandy and I are starting the plot-fest for SuNoWriMos, our own personal Summer Novel Writing Months. My goal is to write at lesat 50K on a NEW novel between June 1st and July 31st, and Mandy wants to write a whole first draft, though I'm not sure what her word expectancy is. It should be fun! Since I'm taking 12 credit hours this summer, I have to take a smaller writing load, but I seriously need to up the writing time this summer because I haven't ticked a SINGLE item off my 2009 writing to-do list :(

Reading? I probably spend too much time doing that. I've recently read 2 Jodi Picoults that I hadn't read before, and now I have read all of her novels and own half of them. I am reading 2 fantasy novels, as well as Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner. And, of course, re-perusing my 3 extra credit books, My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, and A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. They are all good books and I have enjoyed reading them. I probably should have started the reports back in February when I read them though! Just for fun, I am including a picture of my newly-acquired books, thanks to Half Price Books and the Doubleday online book club ☺ I seriously need to finish my schoolwork so I can get to reading. My TBR pile is HUGE!!! To be fair, I guess two of them are re-reads, but I'm still looking forward to them!!



I'm pretty excited for summer for other reasons, too, though. Swimming pools, sunshine, tanning, the end of my advanced neuro class... Angels & Demons (the movie), Star Trek (the movie), and My Sister's Keeper (another movie) all come out in May/June, and I'm stoked! I'm NOT so stoked about allergies, sinuses, and bugs.... but alas, I guess I'll take the bad with the good when it comes to weather. I just can't wait to graduate (May 2010 baby!!) and move to Florida where it will be a lot warmer, a lot more of the time. I'll just have to find a good allergist ☺

Thoughts on Writing

Not much exciting has happened in my world, hence the lack of communication. But I'm on spring break now, so I thought I'd share a couple of things.

I got to meet my favorite author, Jodi Picoult, on Friday. The place was packed -- I heard someone say over 300 people had turned up, possibly closer to 400 -- so there wasn't much personal time with her. But I got my book signed and a picture (which is on someone else's camera so I don't have it yet :( ) and had a great time on a mini-road trip with my niece, Katie. I was exhausted by the time I got home at 1am, but it was fun.

Jodi said some things about writing that I really wish I could remember... but I do know that she said that writing is like making a quilt. You don't sit down and try to make the whole quilt in a day. You work on one square until it's finished, then move on to the next. I thought that was a good analogy, and so true.

Some other words of wisdom I've come across (in the writing world) come from J.R. Ward (whose new book comes out in April! Yay!!). In the Insider's Guide to the Black Dagger Brotherhood, which is the name of her paranormal romance series, she has a chapter on advice for writers. Here are her main points, lifted directly from page 205:

I. P & R -- PERSIST AND REINVENT
II. WRITE OUT LOUD
III. OWN YOUR OWN WORK
IV. PLOTLINES ARE LIKE SHARKS
V. SWEAT EQUITY IS THE BEST INVESTMENT
VI. CONFLICT IS KING
VII. CREDIBLE SURPRISE IS QUEEN
VIII. LISTEN TO YOUR RICE KRISPIES

Not sure what all that means? I'm sure you'll figure it out, like I am. ☺

That's it for now. I just remembered a scene I had forgotten last night, so I'm going to go write it down before I lose it again. Then some spring cleaning, yippee!!

A Month Later...

Well, it's been almost a month since I've blogged. What have I been doing in that time?

School. Lots of it. I added a non-credit Mandarin class to the mix, so now instead of super-busy, I'm uber-busy! With the two little dottie things over the U. Uber.

And I had Lillie for a week, which was amazing. She's getting so dang big! And on Thursday my house almost caught on fire. So that was fun. I had to stay in a Motel 6 for two nights while the furnace got fixed, and I had to bring my two cats and dog with me so they didn't get stuck in a fire should the furnace NOT get fixed. It's been a fun couple of weeks!

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. Mostly Shakespeare and various psychology texts, but also a couple of How-To writing books I got from the library. I absolutely love (and subsequently purchased) Donald Maass' "Writing the Breakout Novel." Amazing. I'm looking into his workshop/conference dates to see him speak, and anxiously awaiting next months' "Fire in Fiction," which sounds promising. I'm also currently reading Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman's "How NOT to Write a Novel." I'm only 61 pages in but it seems promising also.

Here are examples of what to expect from the above-referenced books:

"Who lives in Unpublished Novelville? Many of its most prominent citizens have no traits at all... Even the protagonist has all the depth of a sock with a faec drawn on it in magic marker" (Mittlemark and Newman 61).

"While a revelatory moment at the end of a novel that causes the reader to think back and understand everything in a whole new light -- oh, it was the uncle telling the story the whole time! -- is a fine thing, you may NOT inform the reader after three hundred pages of quotidian realism that the scrappy puppy the hero saved from the fire in Chapter Two is really a magic, mind-reading puppy from another planet, who has just been waiting for the right moment to reveal his superpowers and save the day.. This type of ending is a special instance of deus ex machina, known as the folie adieu, which is French for "Are you FUCKING kidding me?" (Mittlemark and Newman 45)

How NOT to Write a Novel also includes things to avoid, such as "The Underpants Gnomes," "The Manchurian Parallax of Thetan Conspiracy Enigma," "The Second Argument in the Laundromat," and "The Benign Tumor." Intrigued? Then I recommend reading.

I've actually found two things my current WIP is guilty of (err, I'm guilty of placing in my WIP)... and since this is How NOT to Write a Novel, I don't think that's a good thing!!!

From Writing the Breakout Novel:

"To break out, simple plot structures need high stakes, complex characters, and layered conflicts" (Maass 162).

"Think hard. Be honest with yourself. Are the stakes in your current manuscript as high as they possibly can be? Can you define them right now? Can you point to the exact pages in which the stakes escalate, locking your protagonist into his course of action with less hope of success than before?" (Maass, 58)

"Conflict grows and grows until it seems to have no resolution" (This is somewhere in Chapter Six: Plot, and though it really inspired me, I can't tell you what page it's on at the moment).

"Interweave character relationships" (Maass 197) -- This means don't just let the MC have a best friend, a husband, a doctor, a lawyer, a realtor, and a dog. And have her husband cheat on her and her best friend have a breakdown and.... all this stuff. Interweave the relationships to make them more complex: The husband cheats with the best friend, who happens to be the MC's realtor, and the MC and her cheating husband are looking for a new house; even though the best friend/realtor knows this isn't the best time to look for a new home together -- hence the breakdown. And maybe the best friend's husband is the MC's doctor... you get the picture. This was a random, made-up example from my own crazy mind, but it's what I took out of the chapter on Multiple Viewpoints, Subplots, Pace, Voice, and Endings.

That's it for now. I have to study and read and drive myself crazy. If you're a writer, I hope you take a look at these two books. I really recommend them.

First Day of School. Again.

Today was the first day of my junior year. Again. I've been going part-time for a while, with occasional full-time semesters thrown in there. I didn't go last fall (I'm still peeved about that, it set me behind a whole semester, naturally) so I'm in full gear this spring. I'm still not working, so I figure I'll make the most of the unemployment time (while still searching for work around my school schedule, of course) and get as many credits in as I can while my financial aid is still paying for it.

Which might not happen -- finaid's being stupid. Again. But they assure me I *should* have full aid, but classes started today and I won't know for sure until Thursday. So we'll see how that goes.

I really hope I don't have to drop my classes. Again.

I went to 3 classes today, and I have 2 online. My classroom classes are Psychological Research Methods, Cognition (or Cognitive Psych), and Neuropsychology. Yay! My online classes are Intro to Shakespeare and Stress & Health Psychology. See a theme?

IF -- and this is a big "if" -- I can take all of these and pass with good grades, then take a specific Language and Writing course in the summer, and 2 biologies (the hard part) in the summer... then I will only need 2 more psychology classes to graduate in December!!!! I want to take another psych this semester but don't want to overload myself. Again.

So, more on school later. I'm just excited to have completed my first day without crying or freaking out. I don't have books, or even a parking permit, yet due to my financial aid situation, but hopefully when school resumes after MLK Day I'll be set to go!!

Oh, and I colored my hair. Whenever I find the camera I'll take a picture.

Later ☺

Where Has All the Passion Gone?

Something happened the other day that made me sad. While it was just a passing conversation that lasted about a minute, maybe two, it's stuck with me for about a week now.

Hubby and I were watching TV, and a commercial for some reality-type show came one. It was some show where a guy gives relationship advice to couples, yadda yadda. The clip showed him telling a wife that it's very important that she share some of her husband's interests. Or something along those lines.

Hubby looks at me and says, "See? You should be interested in wrestling with me."

I hate wrestling.

So I tell him that I've at least TRIED to watch and participate in his only interest, but I can't get into it. I should get points for trying, though.

He says, "Well, I share your interests too. ... You got me watching One Tree Hill, and Gilmore Girls, and Buffy..."

Those aren't interests. They're TV shows.

So he asks the ultimate question, the one that makes me sad -- "What ARE your interests?"

And after a moment of pondering, I answer: "I don't really have any anymore."

*****

And I've been thinking about that all week. Whenever I have to fill out a survey about my interests, I fall back to the things I USED to be interested in -- or, at least, I acted on those interests ... things like foreign languages (I have a huge shelf of self-teaching books in languages from Portuguese to Arabic and a bunch in between), working out (I used to love to take classes like kickboxing and bellydance, and fun stuff), painting, scrapbooking....

Pretty much the only thing I still do that I used to put on my lists is read and write. And even then, my writing isn't as consistent as I'd like. I'm currently in a rut the size of the Grand Canyon. I'm so burnt out I can't even switch to another story and start it. Grrr.

I was thinking about this conversation while I looked at my university's class schedule for 2009. I was thinking about how I wanted to individualize a major to study comparative linguistics and various foreign languages. How I wanted to be in the CIA when I grew up -- seriously. To translate and interpret multiple languages. And yet, I have not taken a foreign language in years at school because it keeps getting pushed back. Every semester, I enroll in a class, like beginning Chinese (I have a book on Mandarin and years ago I was decent but it's collected dust since 2003), but then I realize that if I take Chinese I, I'll have to take II and III and that will take more time than just taking a higher-level Spanish or French course and placing out of it. Which, of course, I never do because every time I put it on my schedule, I move it in favor of a psychology class or something else I need. My advisor asked me last year, If I love languages so much, why haven't I taken any?

I don't know.

I have interests in my head, but they never make it any farther. Sometimes it's because of money -- I'd love to take some language classes at school, even the cheaper 6-week ones that aren't for credit, but I can't afford it. I'd love to sign up for that community volleyball league, but can't afford it. The paint classes, Pilates classes, photography classes, Mini Marathon, study abroad... there are a bunch of stuff I want to do and I never do.

I'm one of those people who makes lists of things to do and see before I die. So far, I've crossed off maybe one thing on each list. And it makes me sad. But, not as sad as realizing that in the last few years, many of my interests, the things I was most passionate about in the past, have died.

Where have they gone? And can I get them back?

How much do I want to?