New Year, New Post!

Happy New Year to all and sundry!

It's been a long, long time since my last post—I've been pleasantly engaged being, well, engaged to and subsequently marrying the love of my life, which incidentally took up most of my brain power previously dedicated to blogging. It was totally worth it. :-) I am now an old married lady of nearly two and a half months, and being a new year and all, I thought I might attempt hopping back on the blog wagon again.

I therefore offer you, in all their glory, a few of my goals for 2013:

• Finish rewriting/editing Seer. It's so close!!
• Start agent hunting again!
• Write something new.
• Blog more.
• Pay off my credit card.
• Learn how to cook lots of delicious food!
• Read good books!

I've already started on the first one, though I definitely spent more time fiddling with blog templates (and winding up keeping the one I had to begin with) than writing today. Oops!

And that will wrap it up for now!

Happy New Year! Go forth and be awesome. :-)

The Life and Times…

Goodness. I think should win the Prolific Blogger of 2011 award, you know, with all that blogging I've been doing this year.

Um…… yeah. Anyways.

What I've been up to:

• Went to the UK with my best friend for almost two whole weeks!! Best part was Edinburgh, and seeing David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing, and riding British trains. And the tea. Mmmmmmmmmm tea!!
• Read Mark of the Horselord by Rosemary Sutcliff. Super good, but… :-(
• Read Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee and am partway into Gold Unicorn. She creates the most intriguing concepts/worlds.
• Got about 900 words into a rewrite of Whale and the Tree… several months ago…
• Know the beginning and the ending of the sequel to Seer and have been making copious notes. I'm sure the middle will surface soon.
• Pondering rejoining the NaNoWriMo fray this year to write the abovementioned sequel to Seer.
• Went tubing on the Salt River with a group of friends and didn't get sunburned too terribly bad. I'm vaguely tan for the first time in my life! Weird.

And that's what's been happening. Pretty exciting, right?

Brain Wave

I had a brain wave in the shower yesterday. Several, in fact. My mind nearly exploded with creative possibilities and brilliant ideas. I took it as an excellent sign.

I'm totally going to attempt The Most Ginormous Revision Ever.

'Cause really, shower brain waves don't lie. True facts.

Books and Movies and Not Really Much Writing (oh my!)

So somehow it's April, and I don't know how that happened! Guess I'd better do my taxes soon, right?

Still haven't gotten much done on the writing front lately, although my subconscious has been doing some serious noodling the last couple of weeks, which is generally a good sign. Either a hardcore revision or a story/novel about post-apocalyptic Camelot should be seriously in the works soon. (Yes. Post-apocalyptic Camelot. Don't ask.)

Just got The Ring of Solomon and Sapphique in the mail from Amazon, so I'm super excited to read them. Also bought copies of StarCrossed and Plain Kate via one of my local Borders' going-out-of-business (sad face) sales. I ordered Rosemary Sutcliff's Mark of the Horse Lord, too, but it's currently out of stock on Amazon, so don't know when it will arrive. Love me some Sutcliff.

Which reminds me, I went to see The Eagle back in February (I think), and despite some book-to-movie-adaptation changes, I liked it a lot. Still think they should've kept the original title, but you'll have that. The movie was great, and the scenery was completely to die for. Dude.

Also saw the new Jane Eyre a couple weeks ago (I actually won a pair of free tickets via a GoodReads promotion, which was pretty cool), and although I heartily approved of the casting and costumes and sets and scenery, the movie didn't really do it for me. It felt a little like cliff-notes, and it was missing… I don't know. Something. Somewhere in the adaptation process they lost something important in translation. I was expecting the most awesome movie version of Jane Eyre ever to grace the silver screen, and it just… wasn't. Which made me sad. 'Cause, as I sad, the casting was awesome.

I'll leave you with this adorable little video: It's a Book!

1/11/11

So happy 1/11/11 to all and sundry!

I am very sorry to announce that I have been doing absolutely nothing in the realm of noveling lately. Haven't worked on anything since November and am developing a serious need-a-creative-project twitch, so I've decided to attempt that revision of Whale and the Tree I've been meaning to get around to since, you know, July. Got as far as officially upgrading to Scrivener 2.0 this evening before getting distracted, but that's a start, right?

Just started reading Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers, which is the third of her loosely-connected series of books set in Roman Britain (the first of which, The Eagle of the Ninth, is hitting the big screen next month!!). Finally finished Pegasus, which I had mixed feelings about, and am also partway through Beowulf, which, embarrassingly enough, I've never actually read before. Awaiting an Amazon package that has gotten lost somewhere between Phoenix and Mesa but will hopefully show up soon—it contains my very own copy of StarCrossed, and the fourth Bartimaeus book, which I'm soooooooooo excited to read! I keep meaning to do a "Best of 2010" book list, but I haven't gotten around to it yet…

Here's to a challenging and rewarding 2011!

Re-reading

I'm a hardcore re-reader and re-watcher and 99.9% of the time order exactly the same thing at restaurants and coffee shops and ice-cream parlors because I like repeating fantastic experiences. Well-loved books and movies (and sandwiches) are like old friends. You can always count on them to look and feel (and taste) the same, to move you in the same ways.

I've been re-reading Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia series over the last week or so, and while, admittedly, nothing is quite like the first time through, with all those wonderful startling revelations and aha! moments, I still very, very much enjoyed them. In fact they were still eliciting audible reactions from me, to the point where my roommate looked up from her important doctoral studies to remark, "You do realize you've read that before." :-)

Another reason I re-read is that if I don't read a book at least twice, details tend to fade, and I'm left only with vague impressions of I liked it or didn't like it, which isn't ultimately very useful. And some books stand up to multiple readings more than others; some I find kind of "meh" on a second read, some I find as amazing as I remembered, and some—like, for example, the Attolia series—you almost have to read more than once to soak up all the awesome and intricate things that are going on.

And then there's mood to consider. As much as I love them, sometimes I'm simply not in the mood to adventure into a brand new book and unknown territory. There's a certain amount of comfort in knowing exactly what's coming and looking forward to parts I already have completely memorized and revisiting beloved characters and just experiencing the story again.

Man, now I want to go re-read Lord of the Rings. It's been a few years…

What about you? Are you a habitual re-reader?

Mysteries of the Universe: Sleep

So sometimes I ponder the mysteries of the universe (because, really, somebody has to). Today I spent the better part of my 25 minute drive to and from lessons pondering how people ever got out of bed before alarm clocks were invented. Did they just wake up with the sun or what? I finally had the sense to google it this evening, and happened upon an enlightening article.

Really interesting stuff, and it makes me want to write a novel featuring water clocks. But now I have more questions.

How did the church bell ringers and the knockers-up know when to wake up? Did they always have to employ the bladder-control method (which struck me as completely hilarious)? If they overslept mightn't they throw off the equilibrium of an entire town?? Would anyone even notice? How did they know what time to ring the church bells anyway?

Also, does anyone else ever feel bad for fictional characters' sleeping conditions? Maybe it's just because I'm a light sleeper and always have a horrible time nodding off in unfamiliar or less-than-ideal surroundings, but I'm always in awe of characters who can fall right to sleep in the woods or a cave or a prison cell and wake refreshed and ready to conquer the world. I can't even fall asleep on a comfortable couch unless I'm deathly ill, and if I'm running on less than six (but preferably eight or nine!!) hours of sleep I can barely function. I think I would be pretty much useless on an actual adventure—characters in novels don't seem to have these problems.

They don't have chapstick, either, which is one reason I'm happy to be living in this lovely modern era. I mean, I read once that pioneers put axle grease on their lips to keep them from getting chapped, but that's just gross.

And there you have it.

(Apologies for the glimpse into my peculiar brain. This is what happens when I'm not actively working on a novel.)