My Book List

So, it looks like we're going to be iced in for a few days. Been raining all day, and in about two hours it will be sleeting all through the night. That means lots of time for homework, writing, and reading that we would otherwise not have. I plan to snuggle up with Wuthering Heights after finishing all of the lessons I'm behind in. Then again, I've been trying to read it for about three months and I always find myself getting lost in the language. Emily is a great writer, but Charlotte's classic is a lot better in my opinion. Wuthering Heights is just...a little depressing. I might skip out on it and just dive into Northanger Abbey or some Shakespeare. But, you have to appreciate what another INFP has to say.

There are some books that have greatly impacted me as an author and influenced my writing. Here are a few of them:

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte <<< One of the best novels of all time
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Even though we all know who wrote P&P...)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley <<< HECK YES. It's like my favorite novel right now
The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux (I've read the book, watched the live performance, and watched the movie countless times. It's a classic).
The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
The Uglies - Scott Westerfield
The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
The Christy Miller & Friends Series - Robin Jones Gunn 
The Fairest - Gail Carson Levine
The Two Princesses of Barmarre - Gail Carson Levine
The Fairy's Return - Gail Carson Levine (It's an excellent book of short stories)
The Princess Academy - Shannon Hale
The Ballad of Lucy Whipple - Karen Cushman << Is one of the reasons I write. It was a book that engaged me as a child, and though I hardly remember it at all, I know it made a huge impact on me
*Pretty much anything by Gail Carson Levine that I read as a child

THE BFG - Oh my gosh. Yes. I will read this to my children just like it was read to me. I even named my cat Sophie (not knowing that in the book it was spelled "Sofie," hence being read to me).

What are some of the books that have made an impact on your life? Why do you write? If it's true that there are people reading this - which my statistics say that there are - then leave a comment with your response as proof I'm not just shouting into cyberspace.

Midnight's Song Playlist #3.

A song that I also listened to quite a lot while writing and editing was Of Monsters and Men's song, Yellow Light. It is very eerie and melodic. I especially listened to it while writing the scenes about Elissa's departure, going through the portal, and it helped me a lot with her dynamic with Faolan as well. If you don't get what I'm talking about, you'll just have to read the book and listen to the song while you read it.

Of Monsters and Men - Yellow Light

Stroke of Genius

Well, as for the title, it may or may not be. Writers are sometimes known for their spontaneity. At least, I am. Last night I was reading some news articles and exposés (because we don't have cable, so most of my news consumption is limited to local news and the internet). Lately I've been taking in more and more of the redundancy of this culture and seeing it for what it is - redundancy. I can't really explain it, but all of these ideas I've had for stories over the years came together and became that golden brain-mush that tends to become the embryonic version of a story.

 The problem is, it's one of those ideas that isn't a swashbuckling, fanciful romance novel. It would be dystopian and take place in the near future. If I write something, I want to make it deep. If it has to be realistic, it has to be raw. Realistic is something I struggle with - not realistic in the sense that there are a million plot holes, but I'm just better at writing stories about flying unicorns and talking hippos than I am about a girl born in 1995 or even someone living in futuristic Kansas fifty years from now. It just doesn't seem...fanciful enough. I don't know. Maybe it's not that. Part of this is that...I'm afraid of failing at it. I've tried putting stories in the real world before, and for some reason I never feel as confident about them as the ones written about lands far, far away. That's why it will be a challenge. But I want it to work.

Alright, maybe I'm better at this than I think, but just let me continue my semi-venting/insight filled post.

Renegade is a great example, as much as I cringe over it. I made it take place in the real world in he near future, maybe 120 years from now. It didn't turn out as well as I hoped, even though I (and my family) were immensely proud of it at the time. Midnight's Song was a pretty complex dystopia (even if it wasn't technically a "dystopian" novel) and I certainly can draw from the process of how I created it. But, this still has to be very different from that. Cut the magic, cut the royalty. Cut the things that make that world so drastically different from ours that it seems like another planet. It has to seem like a distant world, but a familiar one all the same. There has to be a kind of technology that dazzles, yet can be somewhat understood.

I think one of the masters of this kind of dystopia is Suzanne Collins. Scott Westerfield is also a master of a sort of dystopia with sci-fi elements in the Uglies Quartet, though it is a little more out there than Collins's technology. The Uglies certainly seems like something that could occur in the next...maybe 4 lifetimes (?) while the Hunger Games hits really close to home for some people in terms of our current fears about the government and the progression of modern culture and technology. Both of them are masters of their own fantasy worlds - as fantastic or familiar as they may be.

Realism is sometimes a challenge for me, because I love making my fiction into a sort of meaningful escapism. Food for the imagination. Something you wish could happen to you and maybe apply to your own life. Realism in the sense that something could happen in real life is a little more of a challenge. I'm not nearly as good at this kind of writing as is my close confidant, Monica. That's why, right after I started pondering these things in the bathtub last night, I jumped out with wet hair - still thick with conditioner (because my hair is thick and our water extremely hard) stuck it in the sink and wrapped an oversized towel over it.

I then got dressed, grabbed a pair of cheap headphones - for reasons of that feedback Skype loves to throw into calls - and tried as hard as I could to put them on around the towel. Monica and I talked until about midnight. We would have gone longer, too, except that both Skype and my phone died. We discussed the idea in depth, because I know that she is a thinker and has an innate talent for bringing the plausible to life. She is an INTP, while I am an INFP. When we talk it's like brain lightning.  She's studying to be a brilliant scientist by the way. And I'm not joking about that. She really is.

Anyway, I think it's been determined that we'll discuss it more as time goes by and that we might end up writing this together. Not going to let to much out about the concept, but the rough idea so far is of a dystopia in which children of the lower classes are half-knowingly sold by their parents into a kind of glamorous slavery to a wealthier - but not the ruling - class. I really would like to deal with the themes of selling your soul to wealth, with a ruling class controlling others using wealth, etc. Sort of Hunger-Gamesy (but not really at all, actually).

Those are my thoughts for now. I played a show at Potbelly today - I'm an in house musician. We had a sort of fiasco on the way there, and my finger tips are absolutely shredded. I've been playing guitar for years, so I've had calluses for a long time. But, lately I've been having a lot of problems. Problems with my fingers, to be specific. Heck, it even hurts to type. I should probably get going before my fingers fall off and I have another panic attack. I also have a date with the first chapter of Monica's new book. I'm very excited to read it : )

Midnight's Song Playlist #2

Hello again,

Welcome to the second edition of Midnight's Song Playlist. The song featured in today's post is one that I listened to non-stop during the writing process (and still listen to non-stop today). It's one of those intense songs that makes you want to ride a horse around the world and then violently eat ice cream. It's also in the movie Snow White and the Huntsman, which is generally awesome. Gives me chills when I listen. That's one of the reasons it was so perfect to listen to while writing my swashbuckling adventure. *Hint Hint* There very well may be a chapter in the book called "Breath of Life" as well. And I may have listened to this song over and over again while writing said chapter for that reason.

Breath of Life - Florence + the Machine

Midnight's Song Playlist #1

Hello cyberspace,

I hope that along with chronicling my journey to publishing, I can also write a little about some of my inspirations for my story and some things that strongly remind me of it. If I'm not just staring at a blank void, then I would like to share one of the songs that served as inspiration while I was writing, editing, and while I am currently promoting Midnight's Song. I think one of the reasons I love it so much is because it is truly lionhearted, just like Elissa. I'm actually so obsessed with it that I wish I could wear it around my neck or something like that.

I love Of Monsters and Men! Ladies and gentleman, King and Lionheart:

[WARNING: The song is great, but the music video may mess with your head a little].

Confessions: The Things We're Ashamed to Speak Of

This may be one of the hardest posts I've ever had to write *tear falls*

Okay, not really. But, it is one that's pretty embarrassing. At least in retrospect.

Everyone has something that they prefer not to talk about or at least have mixed feelings over. For an author, it's often some of their first, worst (or both) stories. For me, it's this:










Beautiful cover (done by my very talented photographer mother) for a very...story.

This story is not quite the bane of my existence, but it's fairly close. A lot of people I knew liked it - but I have the strange sense it's because they know that I wrote it at 14. If you are one of the people who genuinely enjoyed it, know that I love you very much. But, I cannot say it's without its faults. At all. Or that it's original. At all.

Let's just say I don't have my little author daydreams about the characters from it anymore.

I will now enter into the prose of a very disturbed teenaged girl. Excuse me if it seems less poetic than it should be:
 
Once Upon a Time, I was 14 years old. I loved disaster movies and my hormones were beginning to explode. We went to Alaska that year, and while we sailed through the inside passage (a place filled with islands and trees) my cousin and I half joked as we fantasized about being trapped with hot actors on the Alaskan islands that surrounded us.

"I would choose Taylor Lautner," one of us said. "He wouldn't know how to survive, but we could at least hug each other until we died." 

What does this have to do with Renegade? You'll see.

I was a very imaginative woman-child. I always had this fancy little daydream about traveling in the wilderness with some rugged, mysterious guy. I think I was watching a little too much Twilight at the time (never read the books, so you can't call me a Twi-hard). I honestly don't know where it came from...except hormones. I can hardly remember all of my inspiration. I just know I'm ashamed to associate myself with it.

Anyway, later that year all of my girlish dreams collected and manifested themselves into some sort of artificial testosterone. It was like my girly daydreams manifested themselves into an explosive gunfight with secret agents and I don't even know what else.

I came up with this exciting novel idea. I thought it was DA-bomb-dot-com. A girl is really the daughter of a futuristic secret agent and is randomly sent to live with people that she doesn't know. Like the typical teen novel, she's sent to the middle of nowhere in Oregon. She goes through an "I-hate-my-dad" phase for 5 pages, then she and her new BFF sneak across the state to go to a masquerade.

Yeah, I know, it always has to have a masquerade scene. (I was obsessed with Phantom of the Opera...still might be).

Before they carry out their plan she goes to this teen bonfire and meets this mysterious sexy ultra fabulous dude that she feels she knows even though he doesn't say two words to her. He gives her a smoldering look. I think she faints or something. It turns out that he's a secret agent who's been tasked by her father to pretty much stalk her for the last ten years or so as "protection" (and somehow I thought that would be romantic). For some reason, her Dad realizes that his daughter will rebel and go to this dance, so he tells the secret agent to follow her there and slip some drugs into her drink, kidnap her, then to blow the dance hall up. Little does dear old Dad know that Zane (secret agent) will do all of these things, but he is working with the bad guys.

(The "blow it up" part was in the original draft. Then I realized how absurd that was, so I decided that the "bad guys made him do it." Still, he blew the friggin' place up).

So they go to the ball and he's there and she's there and they're all like "LA LA LA let's dance!" and have a little assassin party. He takes her onto the balcony and does the creepy drug-in-the-drink thing and then decides that he will scale the wall with the unconscious girl to get out of the place in order to be more dramatic. He drives away as the place explodes, and then the two of them are launched into the middle of this really redundant wilderness journey toward the bad guy's lair. (Why it had to take place through the wilderness instead of by...say...car; I have yet to understand). Though, there is a predictable change of heart when Mr. Mysterious and Sarah (the one-dimensional Mary Sue) fall in love and they decide to simply walk the other direction.

And I'm not making this up. When he decides not to be a bad guy anymore, they actually start walking in the other direction.

And once again, I still thought this was all very romantic. Thank God I have sense now thanks to Jesus, Austen, and the Brontë Sisters.

As I wrote it, I made my Dad read it. My Dad. I wanted someone, anyone to think it was good. The expressions on his face read a mixture of pride and confusion as he read it. I made pretty much everyone I knew read it. I thank many of them for softening the blow, and I'm grateful that many of them never actually got around to reading it.

I know that I am my absolute worst critic. There are a lot of people who had very kind words to say about this story. And, without it I don't think I would have found the strength to improve myself so much (or that I would have even known to improve myself). I probably wouldn't have written Midnight's Song. But, still, this book was pretty...bad. It wasn't original, it had many many many plot holes (that were not even smoothed over in a believable way). Not to mention that I had very little knowledge of characterization or...grammar.

There was also a part where Zane led Sarah through this tunnel, grabbing her hand and using his other to guide them by torchlight. When my friends read it, they said the only thing missing was a horse. (If you're a Phan, you know exactly what I'm talking about). Oh yeah, and at the end of the tunnel, she faints. *SO DRAMATIC*

I thought the word "fumble" was "thumble." That was the word I used in the story. I thought that the biggest cliff hanger ever would be making somebody get pregnant. I mean, there were some interesting themes, technologies, and situations that I explored - but it was thrown together by someone that I don't even think was really myself (even though it was). IT WASN'T ME, I TELL YOU, IT WAS MY EVIL TWIN! (Because every good story has to have one, right?)

Monica, my literary confidant, was one of the first people to read the finished product. Of course there were things she might have liked...but she really didn't say much about it. I knew that must not have been a good sign, but I didn't figure that out until months later. When I gave her Midnight's Song, she admitted to me..."Yeah, your writing has really improved a lot." And, the great part is that it made her giddy : )

I will say that one of the greatest compliments I've ever received about Renegade was from a friend at church who read it and actually enjoyed it. If I remember correctly it was: "I loved it so much, it was like Avatar and Phantom of the Opera combined!" So, maybe there really was something there. Regardless, I've improved a lot since then. I think that by being open about the things that are not-so-good, I can be better at the things that really are :) So there is my confession. Hope it made you laugh at least a little bit.