The Product of Procrastination (With Summaries and Cover Art)

In the name of being completely unproductive and not getting a word closer to wrapping up my sad excuse of an ending, I've spent most of the last 24 hours scouring Google and fiddling with Photoshop in an attempt to create a book cover for my WIP. After all, procrastination is the key to success in whatever goal you're pursuing for the express purpose of not doing something else. In other words, I wound up with two pretty pictures that I'm momentarily happy with.

And to go along with my pretty pictures I've spewed out a summary, which is really quite overdue. I've been yammering for months about this mysterious WIP, commonly known as The 200K Monstrosity. This summary is a tad misrepresentative, as it leaves out rather large parts of the plot and makes things sound cooler than they actually are (which may not be saying much). Anyhow, any attempt to explain my WIP accurately resulted in an obscenely long synop, so I settled for this. I'm beginning to think I might have the right idea with the synopsis - as in, maybe I should cut the parts I'm not mentioning and tweak things to be more like they appear to be in the summary. But I digress!

Without further ado, I introduce you to my big-boned WIP, FIRE AND ICE (working title).

Fifteen year-old Mina Iglacious has lived a sheltered life. She has never felt the effects of war, even though her country has been warring against its neighbours for the past twelve years. Isolated on the northern tip of the Peninsula, her village has been safe from the bombs, famine, and draft notices that destroy the people living inland.

But all good things must come to an end.

When their enemies ally with an adjacent nation and launch a fleet of warships to attack the country's unprotected northern front, Mina's home becomes a battleground and her own country's military become a threat. After over a decade of savage warfare, the army is desperate for new recruits. They will take anyone - elderly men, women, children. Mina.

Flung into the frontline fighting, Mina's only chance for survival rests in the hands of a young captain with a catching smile and knack for dodging bullets. But he also has a tendency to say things that shouldn't be said - things that could get him shot for treason if the wrong people heard. His officers say it's only talk; he's been in the fighting for a long time, he's lost a lot of people, his head isn't on quite straight anymore.

But eventually it begins to look like more than just talk and Mina has to figure out which side everyone is really on - and which side she's on.

Duh duh dummm! And there it is. A summary that is almost as flawed as the book itself. And my first cover seems to have lost its bluish tinge. But c'est la vie! I'm still quite fond of it. And writing this summary has given my muse an energy boost! I had best run off and write before it gets lazy again!

The ILYCYAAYB Award

After reading Sumayyah's blog post and completely agreeing to the point of wanting to amass a non-angry-but-rather-enlightened-and-empowered mob to march through the streets shouting the message, I started to get a vague little idea.

Valentine's Day, for all its misleading marketing schemes, is not a bad thing. I mean, it causes stores to be flooded with very yummy chocolate, which, theoretically, will all be discounted by Monday. Who can complain about cheap chocolate?

Also, it's a time to tell people how much you love and care about them. These people should not be and are not limited to one's significant other, but also include siblings and BFFs and parents and grandparents and so on and so forth -- all those people who have been with you through thick and thin, who have taken care of you through sickness and in health, who have given you pocket money and let you mooch off them when you had none.

Go give those people a hug and, if you haven't eaten it already, maybe some chocolate. They deserve it. :)

And that brings me to the point of this post. By combining these two parts of Valentine's Day (the yummy chocolate and the idea of telling someone they're appreciated), I have come up with this:

The ILYCYAAYB Award! (Which stands for the I Love You 'Cause You're Awesome and You Blog Award.)

Now, I have no idea if I'm allowed to do this -- make up my own random awards, that is. But I'm darn well going to try!

I hereby declare it shall be awarded to 5 people who I love 'cause they're awesome and they blog. And then, ideally, those 5 people are free to and encouraged to give it to 5 people they each love 'cause they're awesome and they blog, and so on and so forth, forming a big web of luvvles and fuzziness in the blogosphere.

And so, without further ado and in no particular order, I hereby force the ILYCYAAYB award upon the following 6 people (because I just invented a new rule that says you can give it to SIX people on Valentine's Day, 'cause I kinda couldn't narrow it down to five. *shifty eyes*):

Sumayyah! Because, you know, her post gave me this idea and she makes really pretty banners and cover art for other people's awesome blogs and books.

Amna! Because she writes awesomely hilarious books about really smexy Huldus and leaves so much warm fuzziness on my babbling blog posts.

Parametric! Because she is the madly-skilled all-knowing TWFT ninja, and she writes such delightfully dark teasers.

Race! Because she posts awesome videos on Random Day and writes about guys who are not only hawwwt but genuinely sweet and oh-so-lovable.

Emilia! Because she writes awesome books and actually comments on my mindless babbling and she makes really awesome cartoons.

Choco! Because she makes such awesomely shiny e-magazines filled with awesome twiftie writing and she read seven books in a week, some of which were really long.

New Rule: you must explain why you love each person and that explanation should, if at all possible, contain some variation of the word 'awesome'.

And there we have it!

Happy Heart Day, everyone!!

Characters Who Lie

Are such a pain!!!

(This refers to the secondary characters and love interests who lie to the MC, not the MCs with dishonest streaks, since the latter can be a great deal of fun.)

Anyhow, when writing a first person POV, facts presented by other characters typically have to be taken at face value. Unless the MC/reader has already seen/heard something that contradicts what the other character is saying, or unless that character is a notorious liar, the things they say are pretty much accepted as truths.

On the one hand, this can be used to create some shocking plot twists. On the other hand, if you knock the reader's feet out from under them too many times, they're going to get annoyed. Even if you only do it once, if a shocking plot twist had no foreshadowing - a couple of events/bits of dialogue the reader can look back on and think, "Oh, now I get it!" - I think we run the risk of jarring readers out of the story and perhaps into closing the book.

And yet, if the foreshadowing spells out that Character B was lying to Character A, to the point where the reader is banging their head against the wall, shouting, "Why haven't you clued in, Character A!?!?" that's not good either.

Surely the possibility of a happy medium exists, but I find it can be very hard to achieve. We, as the authors, know everything. Sometimes it's hard to gauge what a clue or bit of foreshadowing will tell the reader. Is it enough? Is it too much? And then there's always the problem: would this actually happen?

Would Character B actually slip up and say something to make Character A suspicious? Would they leave the mysterious note lying around where Character A could find it? Would they be creeping around, going about their mysterious business outside Character A's window late at night?

In plenty of cases, yes, they might.

But personally, I've found myself having to say no a lot of the time. This is because, in my WIP, I'm dealing with not one but two very good liars. I've got one ex-Intel agent who was trained in the art of deception, and one military captain who's been lying to people like my ex-Intel agent almost constantly for the past seven years. Furthermore, both their lives are on the line, so they're going to be darn careful about what they say and do.

It's had me really quite stuck for a while, and it doesn't help that my MC isn't the brightest crayon in the box, so she doesn't question things too much. Which might drive my future betas insane - I really can't tell -- but anyway!

There was a point to all that ranting and babbling. Honestly, there was!

I want to know what you think of all this. What sort of hints do you give your readers about the things other characters are hiding? What sort of hints do you want as a reader? How clear/obscure do you like things to be, how long can you tolerate mysteriousness dragging on, and/or how badly annoyed are you when an author rips a plot line out from beneath you and turns it around in the opposite direction?

Let me know! I'm curious. :)

Stories We Never Hear

Eek. There's been a bit of a lull in my blogging. See, I was busy waging war against a cold that was trying its very hardest to sink its claws into me. I think it's safe to say I won. With the help of several gallons of orange juice, the cold has been vanquished!

Speaking of wars, while I was guzzling OJ I watched a lot of documentaries on the history channel. Keep in mind I was probably slightly inebriated due to mass amounts of citrus and a crazy-busy immune system, but I saw this show on Vimy Ridge and it kind of struck a chord with me.

Under Vimy Ridge, there are a series of tunnels. In the days and weeks preceding the battle, they served as living space for thousands of soldiers - soldiers who were my age - many of whom would never make it home.

The tunnel walls are made of chalk-based rock, and are easy to carve into. Thousands of soldiers chiseled their names, hometowns, girlfriends', wives', and children's names into the walls, along with intricate designs. (Almost none of which I can find on google! Grr!!)

Three thousand five hundred ninety-eight of these people died.

In the documentary, they traced some of these names and found old letters and military records, and in some cases were able to talk to family members, and it gave a little glimpse at who these people had been and what they had done - what adventures they had, what they cared about, what they achieved. And it got me thinking about the stories we lose when people die.

My great-grandpa was a sniper in WWI. On one mission or another, he was creeping around behind a barn, and ran into a German sniper. They sat down and had tea together.

If my great-grandpa had died, there's a very real chance that no one ever would have heard that story. As it is, I can retell it in three lines. I'm sure there was more to it when he first told it. But I'll never know what that 'more' consisted of. I'll never know what they talked about, or why exactly they sat down and had tea together - two soldiers on opposite sides of the war. It's gone. (Unless maybe there's a German teen somewhere whose family does a better job of preserving stories than mine.)

When I look at old photographs, I find myself wondering about these sorts of little stories. Who are the people? What are their names? What did they do? What stories did they have to tell? I'll never know.

Luckily, I'm a writer, and I can make some pretty imaginative guesses. ;)

This hereby concludes today's gloomy blog post.

Yay for Blog Posts that Don't Involve Thinking!

Because I can't think of a word beginning with F that would somehow relate to contests and therefore create some nice alliteration when paired with Friday.

But there are lots of contests going on right now!

Sumayyah's giving away prettiful banners and cover art at The Raven Desk. Only two days left!

Also, Race is giving away a copy of The Secret Year over on Creare.

I think one day when I have a job/some other nefarious money-acquiring scheme, I shall host a contest. They look like such fun. :)

This Thing Called Writing

It started in Grade 1. (or grad 1, as I so thoughtfully wrote at the top of the page)

My writing is nearly illegible, but I seem to have been writing about some made-up adventure with my friends and...The Three Musketeers?

at ferst reses Dartanyen [D'Artagnan, I assume] was missing from the rok we mett at evry reses

And then sadly my writing gets too messy to tell what sort of misfortune befell poor D'Artagnan. (Rest assured it was something awful and probably involved the Evil Vice Principal.)

But this unreadable passage marks the beginning of my career as a burgeoning story teller. From the garbled writing in my Barbie and Secret Garden notebooks, to the wild tales I told in my Daily Journal at school, to the maybe-almost-publishable wordage I spew out now, I've never been able to stop writing.

Sadly, as is clearly evident by the above passage, no one is born with the ability to write like [insert amazing author of your choice here]. We have to write and write and write and write and commit an obscene number of writing faux pas before we get anywhere.

I've been reading a lot of awesome blog posts about the mortifying excrement stuff writers came up with when they were younger, and it got me looking at some of my old notebooks and Word documents. It was rather amusing to say in the least. I had no idea what sort of atrocities I was committing.

Behold...

Shameless self-insertion Harry Potter fanfiction! (Age 7 or 8)

"Wake up." I heard my mom say softly. "I'm up." I said sleepily only half awake. I heard my mom walk out and down the stairs. I yawned, stretched and sat up. I crawled down the bed and took my white T-shirt with the gold star on the sleeve off the bottem of my bed. Then I reached under my bed and felt around until I found my jeans. I got dressed and went down stairs.

As I went downstairs I could smell my dad making pancakes and toast. I sat down at the table and started to eat the 3 chocolate-chip pancakes and apple juice I just got.

The table was realy crouded. In-fact there were 16 of us at the table! There was: me and Harrys friend Hermoine, me (Rebecca) [in case there was any hope left that this wasn't a shameless self-insert], my brother Harry, my dad (James), my mom (Lily), and my cousins [insert Weasley family here]...

*headwall*

Shameless self-insertion LOTR fanfic! (Age 9-11) (At least I had the decency to give my author surrogate her own name this time.)

I seem to have left the resulting document on another computer. Suffice to say I dragged the Fellowship and my elf-self through all sorts of revamped LOTR plot lines and also plot lines from almost every other book I read over the course of these 2 years. *facepalm* I should also tell you it was 100+ pages written in size 10 Comic Sans font, and I thought it was cool to have huge blocks of text rather than use paragraphs.

Evil Plan Prologues (Age 12)

Lord Lavince looked out into the blackness of the night. Not even a hint of breeze touched the leaves. Nothing stirred. His guards were silent as they assembled behind him. The time had come to put the first stage of his plan into motion.

The plot was seamless, a thing of true perfection. A malevolent sneer darkened his face as again he thought it through. Although dealing with hunters, Sitka’s group in particular, was risky, he had no doubt that they would join him eagerly. They would not turn down the chance to see King Alistar dead, even if it meant allying with a vampire to do it. The werewolves were getting restless. It would not take much to make them forget the old peace treaty, and then a war like no other would erupt, and it would not end in the vampires’ favour. Not when he applied the potion, which that twisted mage, Shauvier, had provided for him. The poor fool. The werewolves would be totally obedient, completely under his command. They would follow his orders, and his orders alone. The potion would strengthen them greatly. The vampires would not stand a chance.

This was my first real book, spewed out during sixth grade. It was called The Undead Prince and it was about (can you guess?) a vampire prince. This Vampire Prince was was kidnapped by an evil vampire lord. Evil Vampire Lord (hence forth known as EVL Hehe that almost spells evil) planned to take the vampire throne for himself, and wanted to keep Vampire Prince alive for some nefarious purpose while he did it.

So Vampire Prince was given an amnestic drug and thrown into the human world, where, of course, he wound up in a grade 8 class (because high school was far outside my range of experiences at this point) and met my inexplicably curious MC.

I later explained this curiosity by revealing that...

My MC was the great-great-great granddaughter of the magical world's most powerful sorceress, but didn't know it until she got stuck in a plot corner and needed to blast her way out of a mountain dungeon.

So anyhoo, let the Epic Quest to Save the Vampire Kingdom commence!

Once it was all said and done, The Undead Prince was a whopping 155K, with a rather decent ending, if I do say so myself. In fact, I think 13 yr old me was much better at endings than 18 yr old me. It all tied together nicely, at any rate.

My mom read it, assured me it was brilliant, and (horrifyingly enough) helped me get my sticky little paws on an agent's email address. We somehow convinced her to read the thing, and she was really quite nice in the sense that she read the first fifty pages and made several helpful comments about character development and so on.

I got as far as several chapters into a third book before realizing the aforementioned agent was not crazy and these books were crap.

After that, I decided to try my hand at contemporary.

Hello, Teen Angst! (Age 13)

Tangled was a story about six five teenagers with extremely angsty lives - Damian, Jake, Amanda, Renae (not Renee! No, no, no!), and Daniel (who I completely forgot about by the middle of the book). Originally there was supposed to be a third girl, Isabelle, but she was rich and had a rather happy home life, so I got bored with her and cut her out.

Damian, judging from the amount of page time he got, was secretly my favourite. He was also the token bad-boy who was supposed to really not be that bad. Suuure, he was a drug dealer, but he really needed the money and secretly encouraged people to stop buying the drugs. And yah, he was involved with some creepy organized crime guy, but again, he really needed the money and just in case you were thinking he could get a regular job I'm sure the bad guy would totally hunt him down if he tried to quit. AND his little brother has CANCER so HA! You HAVE to sympathize with him!! MUAHAHA!

*headwall*

In all its 125+K glory, this book also made a few tremulous steps into the world of publishing. I actually convinced an e-book publisher to look at it, but they weren’t too happy with the 179 instances of the F-bomb.

The Big Move (Age 15/16)

I actually had two of these books. One was about a girl who moved from BC to Texas (watch me walk all over every Canadian and American stereotype ever invented), which I wrote during grade nine and never finished.

Then there was this one.

I am about to die.

Huddled in my mother's old Chrysler Concorde, looking up at my new school, I was dead sure of that fact.

There were too many kids, too many windows with cardboard taped over them, and too many security guards standing by the doorway for me to feel even faintly hopeful that I might make it through the day alive.

I wanted my mother to turn around and drive back to the house. I wanted her to look at the school and say that there was no way she would let me set foot inside a place like that. I wanted her to tell me we were moving back to Riverglen before we all got shot.

But she didn't.

In fact, she was already getting out of the car.

I actually finished this one (YAY!), and at approximately 95K it was my first almost-normal-length book (YAY!). I called it Life is only Ugly until you find its Beauty. (I’m sure that was supposed to have some deep metaphorical meaning.)

Sadly, it has no chance of ever being published. It’s about a girl who does the Big Move from a small town to the rough end of a big city and she struggles to adjust and meets this cute guy in her art class. But I'm from a predominantly upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhood. I can’t really pull off drugs and gang violence and randomly crooked cops all that well.

I did zero research, pulled the ending out of my rear, and my MC and Cute Art Guy don’t even get together in the end! (Because there’s something weird about Cute Art Guy. He’s an extremely gifted artist, but he’s sort of in La-La Land all the time. As the author, you would think I’d know why, but I never really dug around for an explanation. :P)

After this, I moved onto...

CPCS - Chronically Passive Character Syndrome (Age 16/17)

And I still haven't gotten over this one.

Snippet here.

The Boy Who Stole My Heart Car came in at 54K! It doesn't send agents running for the hills! In fact, they seem to like the premise, because I queried a few (read: 4) and most of them (read: 3) requested a partial.

But none of those partials did very well, because my MC is passive to the extreme and I wind up totally glazing over the whole LI-is-a-car-thief thing. *headdesk*

I have plans to fix this one up, though. I think it's salvageable.

Next came...

The Mutation also known as my WIP

It's going to wind up being about 200K. 'Nuff said.

But really, I should have seen this one coming. Look at the word counts that have preceded it. 175K at age 12, 125K at age 13, and there was secretly a 139K attempt at contemporary during my grade ten year that never even got near finished!

I think it's been proven: I have a disease called Longbookitis, I'm still committing plenty of writing faux pas, and the road to being a published author has a very loooong learning curve.

Wow, that turned out long.

Teaser Tuesday

I've been trying to post for the last two days! But Summary Sunday didn't work out so well. I tried to write a summary of my WIP. Really, I did. But it kept mutating into this monstrously long thing. Sort of like the WIP did.

It also revealed some potentially chronic plot problems and the only borderline-almost-decent summary I cam up with completely misrepresented the story. In other words, I made the plot sound way cooler than it actually is. Which makes me think some massive overhauling might be in order during the editing process. Maybe I have the right idea with the summary. It would probably shorten the 200+K mutation into something that won't send agents running for the hills.

But until then, I shall tease. It's a bit rough, since I spewed it out between the hours of 3 and 5am. Hope it's still enjoyable! :)

Context: The military is camped out in my MC's hometown, and everyone has been freezing to death for the last few nights because they don't have proper winter gear. It just occurred to my MC that her family has tons of warm clothes, so she went scuttling off to her old house, assuming her father (who she has seen around camp) still lives there.

My parents' room was still lived in. My father hadn’t made the bed and there were socks on the floor. I went to the closet. My mother had always hidden our birthday presents in there, up on the top shelf.

My father’s military uniforms were hanging nearest the front. I brushed them aside and grabbed an armful of sweaters, scouring the corners, floor, and shelves for the missing jackets.

Downstairs, I heard the door open, and the sound of feet on the hardwood floor.

If my father was off shift, we were late for ours.

Then, “Ay!”

My heart missed a beat. That voice was not my father’s.

“Mina!” Rory’s voice was pure panic and in the instant before I bolted my eyes landed on the insignia on one of the dark green jackets I had thought belonged to my father.

Three inverted chevrons with a line over top – a colonel’s rank symbol.

I ran.

I flew out of the room and raced for the stairs, snagging the clothes hamper as I passed.

Below me there was a bang and a thud – Rory hitting the wall and then the floor. I leapt out of the stairwell swinging. The hamper smashed against something solid and a man in an SO’s uniform – a major – toppled, his baton skittering out of his hand and across the floor.

I clutched at Rory’s jacket, but he was already on his feet and hurtling towards the door – towards the man standing in front of it. The man – the colonel – could only gape as Rory and the box of mittens slammed into him and sent him crashing into the wall. Then Rory and I were past him, out the door, leaping off the porch and tearing up the street.

The hamper was big – awkward – heavy. It slowed me down. Rory got further ahead.

Then something caught my arm and wrenched me around. The hamper slipped from my hands, spilling onto the road. I was nose to nose with the major I had just knocked over. I had a brief glimpse of his snarling red face, saw his arm move out of the corner of my eye, and then my head was snapping to the side and fire was spreading across my cheek and over my eyebrow, up to my temple.

There was a crunching thud and I was sure it was the sound of every bone in my face shattering.

The grip on my arm loosened and slipped away.

My head spun and all I could see were colourless splotches. I threw my arms out, not knowing which way the ground was coming at me.

“Mina.”

A hand caught my wrist, steadying me instead of making bruises.

My vision cleared and I found Sade. The look on his face was as horror-stricken as I had ever seen it. My gaze sunk to the major, sprawled on the ground between our feet.

“Halt!” The colonel stumbled outside, revolver drawn and pointed at us.

“Go!” Sade shoved me forward.

BANG!

I threw my arms over my head and ran.