Blog Bling

I recently received this blog bling from three lovely bloggers, Cambria Dillon, Kristine Asselin, and Katrina DeLallo. Thanks, ladies, for thinking of me and for maintaining such awesome blogs yourselves!

To claim them, I have to tell you seven things about myself. After blogging for a year and a half, I sometimes feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to sharing new and interesting tidbits, but I’ll do my best.

1. I was adopted, which you probably already knew, but what you might not have known is that, biologically speaking, I’m White (mostly White), Filipino, and Hawaiian, and that my adopted grandfather is one-hundred-percent Filipino. How cool is that?

2. I lost the fourth grade spelling bee on the word autopsy (which, now that I think about it, was kind of a morbid word for a fourth grade spelling bee). I left out the P. How in heaven’s name did I leave out the P?

3. I remember a lot of my elementary school years by the activity that defined recess. Third grade was the year of the jump rope. Fifth grade was the year of two-hand touch-football. Sixth grade was the year of sitting-around-with-my-friends-and-daydreaming-about-junior-high:)

4. I type pretty fast. During my heyday, I usually typed at around 120 words a minute.

5. I’m a huge BYU football fan--like, colossal. Unfortunately, the BYU football program has had exactly three losing seasons in the last thirty-seven years, and I was a student there for all three of them. Sigh.

6. I was a teaching assistant in the economics department at BYU for about a year and a half. I loved that job. When I had to quit so I could student-teach for my Math Ed degree, I almost cried.

7. I was in labor for twenty-five hours with my first baby and for zero hours with my second. (I ended up having a C-section after those twenty-five hours with I-gots, and we scheduled a C-section with Lady.)

I’m passing these awards on to the following five bloggers:

Ben Spendlove of Imaginary Friends, whose YA urban fantasy I just finished and quite enjoyed

Kelly Bryson of Book Readress, who has been my querying buddy for the last couple of months

Mindy McGinnis of Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire, who comments regularly under the pseudonym bigblackcat97 and recently signed with agent Adriann Ranta

Myrna Foster of Night Writer, who, by the time I finish this revision, will have read Bob almost as many times as I have:)

Pam Harris of Y(A)? Cuz We Write, who, even though she now has an uber-wonderful agent, still comments on just about every agent interview with a thank-you and a smile

Good News

Lots of good news to share with you. To start, several frequent commenters have landed agents in the last month. Cambria Dillon signed with Vickie Motter of Andrea Hurst Literary Management. Here’s her announcement post.

Also, Chantele Sedgwick signed with Uwe Stender of TriadaUS Literary Agency. I especially loved Chantele’s story because her query to Mr. Stender was also her last. She was planning to shelve the project for a while and focus on other things, but she sent out one more query, anyway. Sometimes, the last query you send is the one that sticks.

Finally, Kristine Asselin also signed with Vickie Motter of Andrea Hurst Literary Management just yesterday. I like to butt my head into other people’s business, so I actually found out about Kris’s news last week. It's nice to have it out, since I don't like keeping secrets:) Keep an eye on her blog for more news about the offer and her path to representation.

Congratulations, ladies! That’s wonderful, wonderful news! (And especially encouraging for us, because it only goes to show this whole querying thing really does work out.)

Also, if you’re at all interested in March Madness, you might want to keep on eye on my alma mater. [Insert shameless plug for BYU Cougars here] While I’m a diehard BYU football fan (and I can say that, because I attended EVERY SINGLE HOME GAME during the abominable Gary Crowton era), I’m much more of a fair-weather BYU basketball fan. Fortunately for me, this has been a particularly fair-weather season. They’re currently ranked third in both of the major polls and poised to snatch a top seed in the NCAA tournament coming up later this month (so long as they win out, of course).

What’s made this team so great? For one, head coach Dave Rose has spent the last couple of years putting together an impressive roster. Every single one of these guys can shoot the ball from just about anywhere on the floor. Oh, and they have this guy:



No matter what your field is, you know you’ve arrived when they turn your name into a verb:)

Any other good news you’d like to share with the rest of us?

Tailwinds

Today, I'm grateful I survived my turn teaching preschool:)

The long weekend was wonderful, Thanksgiving dinner tasted great, and my favorite team almost, ALMOST beat their rival. We decided to head home on Saturday since a big storm was supposed to hit on Sunday, and on the drive, Honey Bear and I talked about all our blessings and how thankful we were for them. A perfect end to a perfect trip home.

Somewhere around Cedar City, though, the wind really picked up, and we were suddenly flying down an eighty-mile-per-hour freeway with forty-mile-per-hour storm gusts slamming into our car every couple of seconds. It bugged me because we’d been making such good time up until that point, but then I wondered: How often had the wind been blowing directly behind us, silently pushing us along, and we hadn’t even noticed?

Life is a lot like that, I think. The turbulent times stand out because they’re so, well, turbulent, but the seasons of calm--even the seasons of plenty--sometimes slip past us before we even notice them. How easy it is to forget the true source of our blessings when the blessings are flowing past us on every side.

I need to do better at this. I need to be more thankful. Because I’ve lived a lot of my life in a tailwind.

Of Shoes and Ships and Football Games, Blog Contests, and Things

Minus the shoes and ships. Sorry.

Sometimes, when I’m starting to feel low about my prospects of breaking into the world of publishing, I remind myself that at least I don’t work in the college football business:) That is one truly messed-up industry.

In other news, Authoress is hosting a fun holiday contest over on her blog. Just pen a few new lyrics for a favorite holiday tune and enter them in the comments section of today’s blog post. The lyrics should be “writerly” (her word, not mine--which is too bad, since I’d love to take the credit for adding that one to the dictionary) and, of course, appropriate; the winning lyricist, as chosen by super agent Lauren MacLeod, receives a bona fide query letter critique. The contest opened earlier today and runs through Wednesday morning, so good luck channeling your inner Irving Berlin. If I can come up with something by then, I’m sure I’ll join in. Right now, my chronic poet’s block is acting up…

Well, that’s all I got. Anybody else have anything exciting going on around the www?

When a Hobby Isn't a Hobby

To use Authoress’s words, I’m not one of “those” writers. I’m not the sort of writer who spends seventeen and a half hours in front of the computer screen every day and manages to cram the rest of life into the other six and a half. I can’t be. I have a husband and two kids and a house and church assignments and more laundry than I’d care to disclose, and all of them require my undivided care and attention every now and then. Writing is not the most important thing in my life; in fact, judging by this list, it’s not even the second or third. But sometimes I let it become so.

I went home for Thanksgiving last week, and except for the fact that my five-month-old decided nighttime was for crying instead of sleeping, it was a wonderful trip. We ate loads of turkey and my mom’s homemade stuffing, went on a Black Friday outing that didn’t involve busting doors (we cruised clearance racks instead)--and my favorite college football team even pulled off a win against their longtime rivals. But because Grandma was around to keep an eye on my kids, I started hopping online two or three times every morning. And then two or three times every night. And everything snowballed from there.

There’s so much to do online, after all. I had blogs to read, forums to post on, e-mail to check. Before long, I was stopping by QueryTracker every three or four hours and invading my inbox at least three times a day. And I never check my e-mail that often--the longer I ignore it, the greater chance I’ll have of actually finding something new, or so I usually think. By the time Saturday rolled around, I was feeling as jittery as a caffeine addict during a coffee strike. Every second I wasn’t writing or hanging out on Absolute Write was a second I wished I were. And every second I was didn’t satisfy me.

And then, like a ray of sunshine--or maybe a lightning bolt--it hit me: I don’t have to be this way. I don’t have to let my writing consume me. As my husband once so eloquently put it, my hobby is for me, I am not for my hobby. Writing is NOT the most important thing in my life; I have my priorities, and I’m sticking to them. I’m happier, genuinely happier, that way.

This isn’t the first time I’ve lived through this cycle of obsess and refocus, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Every car rattles itself out of alignment after a while; the trick is to get it to the mechanic before you wear your tires bald. Well, my proverbial tires are no longer balding. I’m happy to report I am comfortably, completely back on the hobby-writer bandwagon. I’m sure my mouse finger will appreciate the break.

NaNo My WriMo

Ah, November. November is a month of goods and bads for me. On the one hand, Thanksgiving--and especially Thanksgiving dinner--is fantastic, but on the other, the air is now cold enough that it can no longer reasonably be called brisk. Fortunately, that means sock season is upon us, but it also means the college football season is kicking its last. And somewhere in the middle of all this is NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) is, apparently, the month set aside for writing novels. The idea is simple: Start and finish an entire novel sometime between November first and November thirtieth. But the actual doing, of course, is much more complicated.

Consider, for example, a 60,000-word novel, which is actually on the shorter side. To complete said novel within the allotted timeframe, you’d have to compose an average of 2,000 words a day, or roughly eight typed, double-spaced pages. If you’d like to take a day off every week, you’re looking at averaging just over 2,300 words a day, or about nine and a quarter typed, double-spaced pages. And if you only plan to write on weekdays, you’re up to a little more than 2,700 words a day, or nearly eleven of those typed, double-spaced pages. And they’re probably not going to be terribly polished pages, either. Heck, I don’t even know if I’d have the time to put 2,000 stream-of-consciousness words down on paper every day, let alone anything that was actually readable by someone who wasn’t living inside my head.

But I think the thing about NaNoWriMo that really gets to me is the whole, I don’t know, randomness of it all. It’s like Valentine’s Day: If you don’t have a special someone, you probably don’t even notice the day’s any different (or you notice too much and work yourself up into a hand-wringing dither that only chocolate will fix). And if you do have a significant other, do you really need a special day to show that special someone you love him/her? I mean, don’t you show him/her that sort of stuff every day?

So it is with writing. Either you don’t write most of the time and you don’t plan to this month (or you decide to try and don’t last the first week). Or you do write, all the time, and then November comes along and you…what? Write all the time? Weren’t you already doing that? Except now your writing is probably far below its usual standard, since you’re struggling to churn out those 2,000 words.

I’m sure this method works for some people, and that’s great. Maybe it’s a wonderful way to produce a first draft and I just haven’t caught the vision yet. As it is, I think I’ll just hunker down and hold out for Turkey Day--and go buy myself a new pair of fuzzy socks.