Collaboration

I'm reading WILL GRAYSON,WILL GRAYSON by John Green and David Levithan currently and am amazed.

How cool is that to do a collaborative novel, to feel so confident that you can pick up the threads and the story that arrives will work.

I will do this one day.

Ice Cream versus Exercise or why Revision is so Hard.

Okay, I admit it. I adore first drafts. I love the free fall of words on the page and getting to know my characters. I love the crazy and surprising places my stories take me. I could write draft after draft after draft and have oodles of folders in my Writing Folder with names like Cool Story and This is The One and Next Great Thing.

Writing first drafts is like digging into a heaping pint of Ben & Jerry's rich butterfat ice cream - so good in the moment, but often causing a mess afterwards.

And that's where the dreaded revision (aka exercise) comes in. Time to trim the fat. Not to complain, at all, about being agented but as they say in the south -- It's time for the shit to hit the fan. It means, this lover of drafting, hater of revision, has to spend the next few months revising and I am not allowed to write any new stories until I have the two manuscripts my agent is waiting to shop, in tip-top shape.

I guess in the meantime, I better eat a whole lot of ice cream. Oh wait, I mean, hit the treadmill!

The Impact of Our Writing

On the way home from work today I heard an interview with a black historian discussing the book, THE HELP. Perhaps there are those of you who don't know the book, but it's set in the 60's and is about black housekeepers and one emerging feminist white college student. The setting is Jackson, Mississippi which parallels my own hometown of Mobile, Alabama in many ways.

I loved the book. I thought it was a treatise on the South during a certain era. What's more, having been a child in the late 60's and 70's, I felt like I not only knew the story but I knew those women, both the maids and their employers. I thought it portrayed both sides well, white and black. Apparently, because the author is white and it is being billed as a black woman's story, there's a bit of controversy surrounding it.

Which got me thinking, how much does an author consider the impact of her story? When writing fiction are we just spinning a fun yarn, or making comments on a broader world that might have implications in ways we never expected. In my current WIP, I have some themes about the world emerging. I'm still sorting them out, but I'm also just writing a good yarn. Is it subconscious and we aren't even aware of our intentions or is it intentional?

Food for thought on a Thursday evening commute by the river.

Thanks to Laura B! And I promise the "I've got an agent" post soon!

I am the recent recipient of the Liebster award given to me by Laura Barnes at her Laura B Writer blog.

The goal of this award is to spotlight up and coming bloggers who currently have less than 200 followers. The rules of the award are:

1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you.
2. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Copy and paste the award on your blog.
4. Have faith that your followers will spread the love to other bloggers.
5. And most of all - have bloggity-blog fun!

My pics are as follows:

1. Jenna Cooper at Finding the Write Way : I like her easy writing style and fun posts. Plus she gave me an award some time back and I was just too busy to follow through with passing it on. So she gets one here :-)

2. Angelina C. Hansen at the YAScribe blog : Angelina has started a great series of interviews of her "Partners on the Path", other kidlit authors serious about publication but still on the road to becoming agented or published.

3. The folks at Cabinet of Curiosities which includes my friend and critique partner, Pat Esden. This is a new blog of five different children's authors.

4. E.R. King at Get Busy Writing who I "met" during Deana Barnhart's blogfest week. She is storming the blog scene in a quick hurry and has some really interesting posts including a recent interview with Casey McCormick of Literary Rambles fame.

5. LisaAnn at Kicked, Cornered, Bitten, and Chased who I see has already gotten this award, so I release her from passing it on unless she chooses to. I just love her blog and adventures as an animal trainer. I remember visiting Shackleford Island on the Outer Banks of NC and meeting a woman who was a wildlife biologist with a specialty in feral horses. My thought was "wait, how come nobody told me that was a job? I might have done more work in science class!" Anyway, enjoy this up and coming writer's blog about animals and writing.

So Much to Post, So Little Time

So this week has been a madcap romp of highs and lows and I want to write about all of the high points, but time, oh time, is so not on my side.

I have news of new-to-me cars, fantastic reads, a gifted Blog Award, and the biggie - signing with an agent!

I'll try and at least get some of it up tomorrow!

J.Ro