Instalove or love at first sight

I just read a book that some reviewers have branded as "instalove", a word I'm seeing a lot these days, and not a lot of good about it. This post is me just thinking out loud about it.

I love how Disney's Frozen and Maleficient movies embraced better examples of true love saving someone, than someone you hardly know claiming true love. Finally! After decades of feeding us instalove stories, where basically the moment two people set eyes on each other, they know "they're the one."  I'm picking on Snow White and Sleeping Beauty in particular but there are dozens if not hundreds of others, including classics like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

I just finished reading The Fire Wish, by Amber Lough, which I have many things to gush over: the setting, the diversity (Middle Eastern characters), a fantastic plot, and three strong and thoughtful girl characters. More about all of these on Tuesday for my #WeNeedDiverseBooks post (also the book's release day).

The Fire Wish has a strong dose of double Instalove. The plot is basically laid out in the blurb: a human girl and jinni exchange places with unexpected consequences, and fall in love in their new places.

The blurb from Goodreads:

Najwa is a jinni, training to be a spy in the war against the humans. Zayele is a human on her way to marry a prince of Baghdad—which she’ll do anything to avoid. So she captures Najwa and makes a wish. With a rush of smoke and fire, they fall apart and re-form—as each other. A jinni and a human, trading lives. Both girls must play their parts among enemies who would kill them if the deception were ever discovered—enemies including the young men Najwa and Zayele are just discovering they might love.

I love stories like this, a romantic twist on the Prince and the Pauper switch places kind of story.  And while I recognize the Instalove factor, I still loved it.

Is it because I was raised on Instalove stories? Will a new generation raised on movies like Frozen and Maleficent be immune to the effects of Instalove? Or is it something basic to our nature that we (at least some of us) love "true love at first sight"?

I like asking married couples their "how we fell in love" stories. I haven't run across a case of instalove yet (though some divorced people will tell something similar to instalove and later, disaster). My own story (15 years married now) was NOT NOT NOT instalove. We were friends first. We were even interested in other people and involved with other people while friends.

InstaCrush can be mistaken for love.

InstaLust can DEFINITELY be mistaken for love.

"First flush" - which is what I call that first three or four heady months of a relationship - when both sides are on their best behavior, presenting the best sides of themselves, blind to almost everything except each other - is another easy way to feel like this is certainly true love.

I think if there is truly something wonderful out there - real, true love - it makes sense that there would also be lots of counterfeit love. I wish I'd read more books and seen more movies with examples of counterfeit love instead of the instalove stuff and I'm glad there seems to be trend now towards more slow burn and complicated relationships, especially in young adult stories.

But part of me still guiltily enjoys instalove stories.

Thoughts?

Critiquing or reviewing?

This is a post that I felt like I should write, but I didn't really want to. I've already put it off by posting late and now I'm using more delay tactics, like posting some of my favorite bookish images first:

Okay, now I have to admit this post has nothing to do with those pictures. I just wanted to start out with something positive and happy, because this post is about lessons learned: not so positive and happy... but worthwhile, I think. 

 Last week on Kristen Lamb's blog she had this post: The Three Nevers of Social Media  (I guess blogging counts as social media; I have very little presence on Twitter or Facebook). Her excellent advice: Never leave nasty blog comments, Never be nasty on Twitter, and Never leave bad book reviews. 

At first I just skimmed over this post, patting myself on the back for not violating any of these rules.  Sure, my book reviews point out things that didn't ring true to me or I felt could have been developed better, but I always point out the positives, too. No one could call my book reviews "bad." Um, I think? 

Then the next day Kristen posted Should Authors Write Bad Book Reviews, in response to all the comments she got about the day before (141 comments, I just checked).  The second post has 163 comments currently.  Hmmm, this is a bit controversial! 

Then ANOTHER post showed up the next day, Is it fair for authors to review other authors? Do we ruin the magic? (131 comments). 

I wish I could sum all of this up in a couple sentences. It certainly made me look at reviewing books in a new way. I am guilty of critiquing books rather than reviewing them. See, writers critique. That's how we learn to write better, by getting and giving critiques. So naturally when I read a published book, I critique that book, too. I learn so much from analyzing it - finding its strengths, and flaws. But is that a valid book review?  As a writer and aspiring author, can I also be a book reviewer or is it too potentially controversial?  

Though there are some dissenters with good points, the majority of commenters agree: writers and authors, don't share your reviews unless they are positive.  And don't analyze or critique a book and call it a review. 

I will continue to share the things that I learn from books: but only the positive things, the characters and settings and dialogue and voice that made me sit up and take notice and nod my head, yes!  About the flaws, I will still learn from them - but I don't need to share them publicly anymore. 

Trapped by an unwelcome turn of events

I recently got trapped in an unwelcome fictional turn of events - at least this time it was in fiction, rather than real life (our family has had two major upsetting events so far this year).

 I got sucked into this great book, Some Quiet Place, a young adult paranormal debut by Kelsey Sutton (not yet released; I got a digital review copy from NetGalley). The combination of a very cool, original premise and beautiful, sensory-rich writing made me a happy reader until I got into the second half, when things turned a little too graphically violent for my taste.

Violence is common in young adult (YA), especially in the science fiction and fantasy genres I lean toward, but the descriptions are short and don't get too detailed. Since I'm prone to nightmares (I still get nightmares from those darned Alien movies, even years and years after the fact!) I really shy away from horror and graphic violence. I just don't need those images stuck in my head! And it's not just movies - the Hunger Games series, especially Mockingjay, left some images in my head I wish I could get rid of, too. I love YA books for many reasons, and one of them is that they don't shy away from troublesome topics, but they don't get graphic about them (well, except for Mockingjay. And now Some Quiet Place).

Since Some Quiet Place doesn't release until June, there's not a whole lot of reviews for it available yet. I'm awfully picky about the books I read: it's a serious investment in time, and sometimes money too if you can't wait for your library's copy, so I always read reviews carefully before I pick a book. The temptation of NetGalley and other similar places is you can get free pre-release copies for review, which is kind of exciting (getting your hands on a book before the general public, and for free) but also a little bit of a risk (few or no reviews yet for you to judge whether the book includes something you prefer to stay away from).

I suppose the title for this post was a little unfair - if you don't like what you read in a book, no one's forcing you to keep reading. But I do feel a little trapped when I'm more than half way into a good book, really enjoying myself, and then - WHAP! - too-graphic violence catches me off-guard. I'm invested in the book, at that point, you know what I mean?

Sometimes I toss around the idea of a "content rating" for books - like the rating system used for movies - but I think that would open a can of the worms with far-reaching issues. In general book reviews give you the information you need to know about whether a book's content is suited for you or not. If you are a bit of a cautious or picky reader like me, maybe preleases or new releases, as tempting as it is to get them for free, aren't the best idea. Especially since in exchange for your free copy, the publishers expect you to review the book on your blog, and I'd prefer to talk about books I can highly recommend on my blog, rather than books I have serious issues with.

So maybe I won't be requesting any more titles from NetGalley. But I have committed to doing several reviews here, and I am trying to be honest about the good qualities of these books in addition to the parts I didn't personally like.  I'll be posting my review of Some Quiet Place here on Thursday.

What do you do when you're invested in a good book, and it suddenly takes a turn that leaves you uncomfortable? It's true that books should stretch us outside our "comfort zones" (see the quote on the image) but what about some readers needing a "safety zone"?

A revelation of heartbreak and love

I don't often get personal on my blog - it's a little scary. So I will write this fast before I lose courage, because all my heart cries out to share this truth, though I am almost afraid to believe it.

A terrible fight between loved ones is tearing apart my family, and it's consumed me these past 10 days as I watch the rift grow deeper without any sign of healing.

I'm on the sidelines, loving both sides, seeing both sides, the anger and outrage of both sides. Both sides are right, both sides are wrong. At times I've leaned toward one side, then leaned toward the other. As I learn more about the history behind this disaster, I realize that this fight is the perpetuation of a vicious cycle going back  nearly 20 years, and could very well go back even further than that, back generations.  "Controversial" is too tame a word for the thing that started this fight, but that was just the spark - underneath there were layers and layers of the dry tinder of pain and pride and defense mechanisms, accumulating over the years.

I can't be specific because I don't believe that airing dirty laundry would benefit anyone.  I bet most of us have been through something similar to what my family is going through - different circumstances but surely the same heartbreak. But what's the solution? Once I realized that this is another turn in a long standing vicious cycle, I started straining my poor little brain cells to their capacity to think of a solution.

How do you break a vicious cycle that is rooted in years of pain and hurt and resentment? Where reasoning and counseling and the lie that "time heals everything" have made no headway?

Now you may call me a dreamer, a hopeless romantic, but I'll say the answer lies in a story. A universal theme that I've seen played out in many books - but perhaps most specifically and vividly in  A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. It's been around since the 1960's so I'm going to take a risk and mention what happens at the crucial climax of this story of good and evil, light and darkness.

(Begin spoiler)
Meg has to rescue her father and her little brother from the clutches of a terribly evil being called IT. Anyone who gets anywhere near this hideous being has their mind consumed by IT. Meg's brother has become IT's slave, and if she gets too close, she'll become IT's slave, too. But Meg figures out how to defeat the consuming evil of IT. It is so controlling that it has no concept of love, and when Meg loves the hateful thing, she confounds IT and is able to free her brother.
(End spoiler)

I've loved this story and re-read it so many times that I knew somehow it would play a role in my own writing. What I didn't expect is that it would play such a role of hope in my own dark time. I don't know yet if its theme will play a role in the rest of my family - but I hope. Because it's not just a science fiction or a fairy tale. This theme runs through many fairy tales, yes, but I think it does because there's truth to it that we can apply to our own lives. I really do believe that love conquers all.

Vicious cycles that keep wrecking havoc in families are evil, like  IT, because they are so destructive.  It's not people that are destructive, it's the misunderstandings that consume us and blind us and perpetuate fear and resentment that are like IT and I believe the only way to break them is with love. Even when others lash out in scorn, you just keep loving. Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. 

Does that sound too simplistic?

Perhaps, until you are in the battleground, realizing all the other weapons you've relied on in the past (logic, maybe, or determination) are failing you. Loving unconditionally is the hardest thing in the world. Meg got instant results from her love, that's the science fiction/fantasy part of the story; in real life unconditional love might go for years without seeing any result. It might struggle with the temptation to yell and scream and fight for its rights and its respect or to run away and lick its wounds and vow never to return to get hurt again: but in the end it stays true to its course and just keeps on loving.

I believe this and I am thankful for so many great books and their authors, from A Wrinkle in Time to Harry Potter to Kill A Mockingbird, for not just being books that I read to get through, but books that got through to me with the theme of the strength of love, and gave me hope during a bleak time.

Heart of a female assassin + giveaway

Seriously, I am not the blood-thirsty type. So I was really surprised last year, when I picked up Grave Mercy, by Robin LaFevers, and fell in love with it. Granted, it's not just about a female assassin - it's about a whole convent full of assassins and killer nuns-in-training. The bizarre twist of killer nuns was enough to hook me, but it's the heart of this book that kept me going long after satisfying my curiosity about a convent with such a controversial calling.

And now the next book in the His Fair Assassins series is coming out, Dark Triumph, and I can't wait until April 2nd to start reading. When one of my favorite book bloggers, Shelver of Shelvers Anonymous, asked me to join in a blog tour for Dark Triumph, I jumped at the chance. At the end of my musings here on the heart of a female assassin, there's a rafflecopter for a giveaway of the new book Dark Triumph (and an extra goody, too).

So why am I so excited about another dark book about assassins, when dark and vengeful is really not my cup of tea? Is there something twisted in my psyche I've been hiding from myself? So I took this opportunity to dig a little deeper about this whole idea of female assassins.

First of all, a few facts you might not know: there were attempted assassinations of both Stalin and Mussolini by women. Both succeeded in shooting, but not killing, these infamous dictators from the 1930's and 40's. With just a little googling I found quite a few other historical female assassins, including one from the Bible, honored by God: Yael (or Jael), an Israelite woman who lured an enemy leader into her tent with the promise of food and rest, and then drove a tent peg through his head while he slept. Yikes!

But the female assassin that is most memorable in my mind is a fictional one, from the 1990 foreign film Nikita, also known as La Femme Nikita. (More about the Fair Assassins series in a moment, I promise. You gotta hear about Nikita first).

Nikita is a young, out-of-control drug addict who kills a disarmed police officer, and as a result is sentenced to life in prison, and then given a lethal injection (or so she thinks) in secret. She awakes believing she is dead (wow I remember that scene so well, it's so powerful). Instead she learns she will pay her debt to society by becoming a government assassin. She's extremely talented at her job, with one exception: she hates it. Every time she has to kill someone, you see how it kills her a little bit, too. (Warning, this film is very graphic, much more so than the young adult His Fair Assassin books).

Okay, back to Grave Mercy. Stop thinking sharp-shooter guns, and start picturing swords, daggers, and poisons. And knights in armor (sorry, couldn't help myself)

In Grave Mercy, set in the 1400's in Brittany when women had almost no rights, Ismae isn't given much more of a choice than Nikita: become an assassin or be married off (after she's just escaped a brutally abusive marriage, who can blame her choice?)  But here's the difference, Ismae discovers she loves her job. Her convent serves St. Mortain - the saint of death. She's death's handmaiden, serving her master by taking lives for the greater good. Then something happens with one of her assignments that changes her perspective - and it's not what you'd expect, so I can't give it away.

There's also a talent that Ismae has, that goes far beyond making her a great assassin - something she doesn't discover until near the end. It also relates to the "I love you but I might have to kill you" relationship she has with Gavriel Duval... which is also another reason why kept turning pages very late into the night. Hoping to discover another surprising secret and dangerous relationship in Dark Triumph.

Dark Triumph is about another girl from St Mortain's convent, Sybella, brought to the convent in chains, insane from some horrible thing done to her - we can only guess.  I'll be reading the book because I want to see, like with Nikita and Ismae, how this tortured soul finds her heart again, after insanity and revenge. The attraction of the darkness (at least for me) is how its shadows make the light of hope even brighter.

Here's your chance to win a copy of Dark Triumph along with a nice set of essential poisons oils, similar to this one (actual set may be different).

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Here's some other bloggers participating in the Dark Triumph release party, with more thoughts on assassins  and more to give away, too:

Tuesday, March 26: Robin LaFever's Top Five Heroines of All Time at Bookshelvers Anonymous

Wednesday, March 27: Why I love the His Fair Assassin series at In Which Ems Reviews Books; Fairy Tale Influences of Dark Triumph at Bookshelvers Anonymous

Thursday, March 28: True Love = A Maggoty Carcass (A Dark Triumph post) + giveaway at Mary Gray Books; Cover Love #25 (The HFA edition) at Bookshelvers Anonymous

Friday, March 29: Review of Dark Triumph at Girls in the Stacks; Interview with Robin LaFevers at Bookshelvers Anonymous

Saturday, March 30: An Assassin In Love (The Unlikely Romance in Grave Mercy) at Bookshelvers Anonymous (a guest post from Molli at Once Upon a Prologue)

Sunday, March 31: Review: Dark Triumph at Bookshelvers Anonymous

Monday, April 1: Review: Dark Triumph + giveaway at In Which Ems Reviews Books;The Mythology of the Nine at Bookshelvers Anonymous

Tuesday, April 2: Author Interview with Robin LaFevers (+Giveaway!) at Blue Sky Bookshelf; A Special Message from St. Mortain at Bookshelvers Anonymous

Wednesday, April 3: Interview with a fellow fan at Burgundy Ice; Giveaway! at In Which Ems Reviews Books; Tour Wrap-up at Bookshelvers Anonymous

So, what's your preferred poison? - a medieval assassin like Ismae or Sybella, or a modern day one like Nikita?

Body art and the cost of artistic expression

I love art in just about all its forms - music, painting, writing, sculpture, photography, digital, costume and fashion, etc. I used to dabble in sketching, before I settled down to concentrate on writing as my form of art.

As an artist of sorts, I know that there is a cost to artistic expression. Sometimes art comes easily, at least parts of it, but over the long haul it is exacts different forms of cost in terms of time, money, sacrifices such as limited social life or limits in other areas. The artistic temperament can also extract a high cost in terms mental peace.

The new YA release, The Summer Prince, explores the cost of art in the extremes that science fiction can take you in... and explores types of art that I've never given much thought to before: body art and graffiti.

Body art includes everything from tattoos, piercings, brandings, and scarrings. My teen stepdaughter recently told me how dermal anchor piercings, often combined with tattoos (to add texture and sparkle to a tattoo) are becoming very popular at her school.

Sometimes there are cultural reasons behind body art, and sometimes it is purely personal expression. I think temporary body bling is really fun, but I've never loved anything enough (like a tattoo, for instance) to get it done permanently. But it's always interesting when you get to hear the stories behind other people's tattoos.

Some piercings just blow my mind. Mostly I end up thinking: wow, that must be painful, and I wonder what makes a person want to express themselves that way? (This book sort of helped me understand it better, but I think it will also get teens thinking more about body art than just the short term fun/thrill of it).

Any type of art can be controversial, but extreme body art and graffiti seem definitely fall into controversy because of health issues and alteration of public and private spaces.

The Summer Prince dives into both these controversial areas head first. June, the main character, uses the advanced tech available in this futuristic SF world to do extreme graffiti and body art, as seen in the cover of the book: she implants lights in her skin to form patterns, though an unintentional byproduct of this body-modding is that the lights start to reflect her moods. So cool!

But even more wild, in this book nanotech has allowed for such extreme body modification that it can turn living humans into immortal data streams.

Extreme body modification results in so much controversy that some cities have outlawed it, which forms the basis for the plot and the conflict in The Summer Prince.

In the beautiful pyramidal Brazilian city June lives in, body modifying tech is severely limited, but on the other hand, the city's election of a new Queen every five years is heralded by human sacrifice. And you thought the Hunger Games touched on controversial subjects! The Summer Prince also frankly deals with same-sex marriages, homosexuality, casual sex and voluntary euthanasia. Because it's YA it doesn't get explicit in any of these, but this is still not a book I'd recommend to just anyone. I struggled through reading this book at times, but in the end I'm so glad to have finished it, because it does have strongly redemptive ending (like the Hunger Games series).

Here's five things that stood out to me about this book:

1) In the author's words: "it envisions a future that's not just about the US or about white people, that is cautiously optimistic, that is neither utopian nor dystopian" - neither utopian or dystopian: finally, yes!!! That is what this book is: complicated and hard to categorize, crossing boundaries, controversial, dense and rich, sharp and confusing - this book totally pushes the edge of YA.

2) June's city is governed by a matriarchal system:  it's ruled by women called Aunties. I find that title very amusing and ironic. And talk about an ironic twist at the end that made me sit up and go "wow!"

3) the city has an A.I. (artificial intelligence) system that makes it somewhat alive and sentient. It's illegal to for individuals to interface with the city, but of course breaking the rules is all part of the story.

4) the setting was in South America, and very rich with Brazilian culture intermingled with other cultures such as African and Japanese. Multi-cultural science fiction! It stretched me: I love to see the world in new ways and this book certainly delivers that.

5) Technology allows people to live up to 300 years, with the result that there are many more adults (grandes) than children and teens (wakas) and there are some complicated dynamics between the two. Also, the extreme body-modifying tech - this raises so many questions that the book explores.

My breakdown:

Characterization: June, Enki, Gil and Bebel are memorable characters, if not exactly likeable (they are all vain, in different ways). But they all have fascinating character arcs. June goes the furthest in her arc, and her perception of her art, especially as she strives to win the Queen's prestigious art award, reflects her changes. This is her at the beginning:

I'm an artist, after all, and I live for spectacle, for the construction of emotional states and evocation of suppressed feelings.

Let me tell you, she has quite a different perception of being an artist by the end.

Setting: The setting was tremendous. I could totally visualize this world and I want more of it. I want to visit more of the cities mentioned, with all their outrageous architecture and AI.

Plot:  This is the kind of book that challenged me to slow down as I was reading it and digest everything, and an ironic twist at the end that made me sit up and go "wow! I didn't see that coming, but of course I should have; how brilliantly it was set up!"  There were some morally controversial elements; this book is definitely not one that's meant to be swallowed easily.

Thoughtful elements: The implications of using nanotech to alter our bodies; implications of slowed aging, increased life spans; the cost of artistic expression, implications of matriarchal rule.

What's the last really controversial book you've read... what made it controversial?

Controversy on Goodreads and Twitter

I recently ran across some controversy on Goodreads (a wonderful site which I like to call Facebook for Readers and book fanatics). I was browsing some young adult debut authors with books coming out soon, and when I looked at The Selection, by Kiera Cass, I found something a little disturbing - not about the book itself, but in the reviews listed for it.

Billed as The Bachelor (TV show) meets The Hunger Games, The Selection has a daring premise and I read some reviews to see if held up to its premise. At the very top of the reviews listed for The Selection on Goodreads, there is a scathing 1 star review.

Now, negative reviews don't phase me and won't stop me from reading a book (unless there is a large number of them in overwhelming agreement). Negative reviews are just part and parcel of the subjectivity of art, just like biased gushing reviews from family/friends, and those don't bother me either. I can usually pick out the reviews that avoid either extreme and these provide the best source of info for me. 

But a scathing 1 star review is a sad thing for a debut author to see at the VERY TOP of the reviews listed. Does it honestly deserve to be placed at the top of the list? This is what Goodreads says about how they sort reviews:

The default sorting algorithm on Goodreads uses a variety of factors to determine the most interesting reviews. The recipe for our special sauce is a closely guarded trade secret, but the ingredients are: length of the review, number of people who liked it, recency of the review, popularity of the reviewer (i.e. number of people who have liked reviews by that person across all books). 

Uh oh. Popularity of the reviewer? We live in a world where people with snark and sarcasm garner attention (even if it's negative attention).  Not always, of course there are exceptions. But more often than not, it's the extreme "over-the-top" reviews that gain popularity (e.g. "likes") simply because they are entertaining to read, not because they provide helpful advice to other readers looking for input.

It's a free world (web), but it's also a messy one. Ranking is always a controversial area, but there's an even messier side to this controversy. The reviewer in question has added a little footnote to the bottom her review:

 Some pretty interesting developments occurred. Please check message #270 on this post if you're interested. 

  Message #270 contains a snapshot of a  supposed Twitter conversation between the author of  The Selection and her agent. There is no way to verify if this is an actual conversation (I suppose Twitter experts might be able to figure it out). Because this Twitter conversation is not verifiable, I'm trying to tread very carefully here. 

But if it WERE verifiable, um... what do you guys think???  I understand how the author and agent feel, and I don't have a problem with what they allegedly did ("liking" positive reviews of the book, trying to get positive reviews to outrank the top-listed negative one), but I wonder if they should have been chatting about it publicly on Twitter. However, the author wasn't protesting the bad review, just the PLACEMENT of it and its popularity due to the controversy it had raised.

Join us!

Is Goodread's "recipe" for identifying the most "interesting" reviews fair? And, is "fair" even possible in such a subjective arena?

Teenage love that lasts forever

This is a potentially controversial subject that no doubt has already been talked about by others more knowledgeable than me. But it's something that's been on my mind a lot lately.  There's a whole herd of YA paranormal novels where you've got a girl and a boy falling in love and it's a "I'll die for you" or "I can't live without you" kind of love.

I think Twilight opened a flood gate and there's apparently a big demand for these kind of stories in YA (I confess, I've read quite a few. They aren't the ONLY kind of stories I read though).

I adore a good love story that overcomes all odds but I'm really wondering - I'm struggling - whether its creating unrealistic expectations in YA?

The cynical side of me says, well Disney's been pushing these fairytale love stories on little girls for at least 80 years. The damage has already been done.

And my romantic side argues back, "well, it really can happen. Maybe it's rare, but it's possible."

I also think it's possible to write a great teenage love story and still keep it realistic. But this is where it's a little tricky, defining what "realistic" is. I'm still trying to figure that out. My own love story experience was very different! - a whole lot of false starts, and then finally finding true love in my late twenties. And even then, it's been a rocky road.

So I just had another thought about Disney. The classic Disney love stories are all set in far off places or times - they are basically fantasies. YA paranormal has the distinction of bringing fantasy "closer to home" - so to speak. They are all set in, or at least start out in, a normal teenage high school world, but they create a bridge to a fantastic world. I have yet to find one of these all-consuming teen love stories set entirely in the real world (West Side Story, maybe? - any other real world examples?)

This is my first post for Young Adult Teenage Tuesday  - a new meme started by Sheri Larsen over at Writer's Ally (let her know if you are interested in joining!) - it's pretty much open to anything related to YA reading, writing or teenage life in general.

Don't play it safe

I have two people that I love very much that are struggling with breast cancer right now. And I'm scared for them, but then right after I stumble over some trite comforting words while one of them is half-sobbing on the phone and I'll tell them I'll pray for them, I go the refrigerator and think about what I want for breakfast and what I should write for my blog post today, and life goes on. I REALLY do care. But so often habit trumps action. I hate that I'm compassionate, but not really. That my heart breaks for a minute, and then my stomach rumbles and the daily routine beckons. 


So one of my commenters, Chitrader, directed me to this jolting list of 33 unusual writing tips last week (from the Altucher Confidential blog), and there are a few things in this list that sort of shook me up and have stayed in my mind all week.

Be Honest. Tell people the stuff they all think but nobody ever says.

So I tried that, in the first paragraph.

Don’t be afraid of what people think. For each single person you worry about, deduct 1% in quality from your writing. Everyone has deductions.

As soon as I wrote that first paragraph, I started worrying. What if nobody else thinks like this? What if I'm really just a selfish, self-focused hypocrite and everyone is going to point fingers at me?

Relate to people. The past decade has totally sucked. For everyone. The country has been in post-traumatic stress syndrome since 9/11 and 2008 only made it worse. I’ve gone broke a few times during the decade, had a divorce, lost friendships, and have only survived (barely) by being persistent and knowing I had two kids to take care of, and loneliness to fight. Nobody’s perfect. We’re all trying. Show people how you are trying and struggling. Nobody expects you to be a superhero.

My husband's business went bankrupt in 2010 and he's working for about $15 an hour right now and that really hurts his pride, but at the same time we are both just thankful we have jobs. I love to write, but I hate to re-write, and re-writing is like 80 or 90% of writing, and I feel like a failure when I keep putting it off. I'm not strong enough to strive after my dreams. I just limp along, too worn about by the essential requirements of each day to really pursue my writing dreams.  But, I'm still thankful. My family is healthy, and we apologize and forgive each other after we fight.

Risk. Notice that almost all of these rules are about where the boundaries are. Most people play it too safe. When you are really risking something and the reader senses that (and they WILL sense it), then you know you are in good territory. If you aren’t risking something, then your readers are moving on.

 I have a hard time taking risks. I usually play it safe and put on a pleasant front. I'm really scared to press Publish on a post like this. Be brave with me - what are you afraid to press Publish on?

Two opinions on love triangles

Has the inundation of pictures of shirtless Taylor Lautner, brooding Robert Pattinson, and half-asleep Kristen Stewart made you utterly sick of love triangles yet?

A while ago, the great blog YA Highway posted an article on Why there are so many love triangles in young adult fiction, and some good reasons why maybe there shouldn't be.  Which I sort of agree with, in this respect: without a love triangle, the Twilight series would be a pretty dead series (awful pun, sorry).

But if you took the love triangle out of the Hunger Games series, you'd still have a strong story, don't you think?

I guess that's how I like my love triangles, an interesting "bonus" feature of the story, but not something the entire plot hangs on. 

When someone says Lord of the Rings, love triangle isn't the first thing that comes to mind, is it? Even though there's definitely some added tension in the Aragorn/Arwen love story when Eowyn shows up.

Which leads to my second opinon, if you'll humor me. Arwen/Aragorn/Eowyn love triangle is the only female-male-female* triangle I've found so far... so this leads me to think a) this type of love triangle can really work and b) it certainly hasn't been over-exploited yet! Though there are really lots of other trianglish opportunities out there, as I discovered on the mind-boggling TV Tropes website.

Blast me with your opinions, please!

*another complaint I've heard related to paranormal YA a lot is the girls falling for much older "boys".  Now granted Lord of the Rings isn't YA and was written over 50 years ago, but it was breaking conventions even then: Aragorn falls for an elf-girl many hundreds of years older than him :-)


This is a really me-centered post today because first of all I have drenched you with my opinions and next I go on to say I've won a the Versatile blog award from Jenna Cooper and the Irrestisibly Sweet Blog award from Amy (Ramblings of Amy). Thank you!

I'm passing these awards on to some new friends I've made in the blogging world:

Melissa Marsh at Writing with Style - she's a fellow history lover, like me

Ghenet Mythril at All About Them Words - she writes YA and I love her YA Cafe posts

Bethany Elizabeth at Ink-Splattered - she writes fantasy and YA and she's got this great How-To-Write-Guide based on Nintendo - that has some really intereting points!

Tanya Reimer at Life's Like That - she's a fellow crusader and writes Urban Fantasy and I'm longing to find out more about her immortal "whisperers"

Lyn Kelley at Random Acts of Writing - she writes about pirates and has a treasure map as her computer wallpaper. I'm hooked. (pardon the pirate pun).

I've also been tagged by Lisa Gail Green, Julie Dao and  Sophia Richardson.

But guess what? I really don't think the world needs to know anymore about the last time we all ate chicken meat. So I have CHANGED the questions (I know! I'm probably breaking some cosmic internet rule here!) And next I'm doing something even more potentially dangerous: I'm STEALING questions from the great blog Fantastic Book Reviews, because I love the questions. But I'm giving her credit, so it's okay, I hope.

If you were given a chance to travel back in time, what year or place would you go?

Ancient Greece and Rome - ever since reading the Illiad and Ben Hur, these have been my favorite time periods. Another great book set in ancient Rome is A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers.

Describe your writing work-in-progress (Handful of Scars) in seven words or less?

End of Rome, handsome Huns, troublesome genies.

Please share with us about your favorite book and fictional crush to date?

An obscure book few have heard of: Green Grass of Wyoming by Mary O'Hara. Ken McLaughlin is way too young for me, but there you go. This book is why I moved to Wyoming.

If you could be any character in fiction, whom would you be?

Carey from the above mentioned book, but since nobody knows her, my second choice is Lucy Pevensie from Chronicles of Narnia (not the girl from the movie version, though she's cute too).

If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you?

Liv Tyler, because she's my favorite actress, though about the only thing we have in common is we're brunettes. Oh well.

How would you describe yourself in seven words?

Dreamer, writer, geographer, wife, mom, Christian, friend

Pretty much everyone I know has been tagged already! But if you are interested in answering my new set of (stolen) questions, let me know, because I'd love to do some interviews here of my friends.

Writing to the extreme edge

In your writing, do you have a character that does something you'd never do? Something so extreme that it's just not plausible in the ordinary world? Or maybe your character is the playing-it-safe type, but something outrageously extreme happens to him or her.

Not every best-seller has this extreme element. But as I glanced over the books so far I've read in the past few years, all the ones that really stood out to me are the ones that go to the extreme edge.

I'll start with Twilight as an example, because we're all pretty much familiar with that one.

Bella masquerades as an ordinary girl that millions of girls and even older women can relate to. But she goes to the extreme edge by falling in love with a blood-sucker, and everything about their relationship is extreme, too - stalkerish, obsessive - and with every book it gets weirder, from vampire police to vampire wars and then finally vampire-human babies. You either love these books or you think that they are insane and the author has a twisted sick imagination. (I'm still not sure which camp I'm in). Or maybe, to be fair, we sense we too have a bit of this twisted imagination inside of us, and we admire Meyers for being brave enough to let it out in public and have fun with it.

The Hunger Games is another example. Talk about extreme - teenagers sent to fight each other to the death in the most horrific reality show ever. And I'm not just talking an extreme premise - what the characters do and what happens to them is unrelentingly intense and almost holocaust kind of "how could that HAPPEN?"

Across the Universe, by Beth Revis: being frozen for hundreds of years to colonize a planet no one really knows is livable or not. Extreme. Not to mention the living conditions on that space ship. Oh my.

Possession, by Elana Johnson: teenagers going up against a government that uses mind-control.

Falling Under, by Gwen Hayes: taking a voluntary trip to hell.

And it's not just dystopia and paranormal. I just finished reading The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, which is as real-world as it gets, about two black maids in the south in the 1960's and an idealistic white girl who wants to write their stories. What the three of them go through is EXTREME.

The author is not afraid to go out on a limb. I mean, what kind of guts does it take for a white woman to write a book in the point of view of two black women, in a time period before she was born? Can you imagine how every black person who reads this is going to be critically evaluating her attempt? Think about it. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, was still written from a white girl's perspective. This book is a white author giving voice to black women. Putting her own words into their mouths. Now that's risky. AMAZING book, by the way.

Does this bring to mind any books you've read that have an extreme element? Would you be willing to take your writing to an extreme even if it means potentially millions of people will be questioning what's going on in your head that you came up this stuff?  Writing is a scary business, isn't it?

p.s. My ROW80 friend C. Lee McKenzie passed an award on to me - thank you!(Make sure you stop by her blog, she's posted a video of her interview on CBS!)  Now that I've got this extreme business off my mind, in my next post I'll be passing along her award plus some others I'm way overdue to say thanks for, from Sophia Richardson, Girl Friday,  and Tanya Reimer.

p.p.s. And a big thank you to my other ROW80 fellow writers,  Susan Kaye Quinn (sharing her progress through the "middle muddles") and Sheri Larsen (sharing more helpful advice on rewriting). And thank you, Ghenet, for always stopping by to check on my progress too! I had a great writing week. I got a first cut done on an eight-page synopsis. Anyone else think that eight pages of synopsis is as much work as at least twice or three times the amount of regular writing? But what a great way to make sure all the necessary plot points and character motivations are in place! (Here's a great one-page cheatsheet pdf for writing a successful synopsis).

A great writer and a controversial subject

The controversial subject: is the Internet dumbing us down? In the respect that it allows us to selectively choose material that pertains to our interests, instead of exposing us to broad range of topics and issues.

The great writer I'm referring to is Mark Jenkins, a travel writer with numerous awards, currently a contributor to National Geographic and author of three books. He's from my adopted hometown, Laramie, Wyoming and I got the wonderful opportunity of hearing him speak last night at a local writer's event.


So we've been hearing for decades now about how T.V. is dumbing us down, and now, the Internet? Mark's argument is that people are turning more and more to the Internet as their source of information, rather than newspapers. To paraphrase him, "If your interests are in horses or snowmobiling, the Internet allows you to selectively choose articles that pertain to your interests, and you are less likely to seek out a broad range of news or issues such as provided by a newspaper or news show."

In other words, while the Internet provides us with access to the broadest range of information we've ever had before, at the same time it allows us to stay focused on our narrow area of interests.

His observation hit me head-on because I don't subscribe to a newspaper and I don't regularly watch TV news shows. I get most of my news from the Internet (usually just a quick scan of headlines) and then I focus in on what's of primary interest to me - writing and publishing-related material.

On the other hand, I'm also a voracious book reader, so while I may lose some of the broad exposure to the world via news articles, I feel I gain it back via a wide range of fiction and non-fiction. For instance, no series of news articles could have apprised me of all the cultural richness and issues related to Afghanistan and Pakistan as Khaled Hosseini's books the Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, or Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea.

What do you think? Is the Internet helping us narrow our focus, instead of broadening our minds?

Postscript: "news" is hardly ever objective, of course. Mark has a great article called Seeing the World As It Is, and I had to include this excellent quote:

Americans by and large don’t really understand what’s happening in other countries. And when you go out there on your own two feet and have to buy food from the local market, and have to find of a place to stay and talk to locals, you start to understand how the world is put together. Because if you just stay home and read your local newspaper, you’re not going to have a clue about the rest of the world. The news here is very slanted, and is not representative of the complexities and passions of the rest of the world.