Lisa Mangum and Heidi Taylor!

Okay, Lisa Mangum and Heidi Taylor were great! I really wanted to ask Lisa about how she balances having essentially two careers, writing and editing, and she said some really helpful things! At work, she works--she's an editor. When she gets home, she's allowed to play with words and write things that she wouldn't do as an editor. She turns that editor-self off and plays around. Physical location seems to play a very important role in that. Interesting.

P.S. - If you're interested in knowing more about Lisa Mangum or Heidi Taylor, check out http://www.shadowmountain.com/authors/lisa-mangum or just http://www.shadowmountain.com
One of my roommates just about died when she heard that Lisa Mangum was in my class. She wrote the Hourglass Door trilogy, and my roommate loves them!

Usually, since Wednesdays are my really long days, I'm pretty tired by the time I get to this class, The Publishing Business. I loved hearing them talk about Shadow Mountain and what they do there. We also got to work on pitches. Some people had some dang good ones! I wrote one up during class since I haven't done one before, and I shared it. I mean, who wouldn't when you have two editors right there who can tell you what's good about it and what's not so good. I was surprised at how long it took me to write my pitch. I mean, granted there wasn't very much time, but still, I kept looking at it and then wanting to reword it. Finally, after like five or six rewrites in fifteen minutes, I knew I had to just say it, even if it wasn't anything super fantastic. One small part of mine was decently good. I think the rest needs to be rewritten or just dumped. Want to see what I wrote? Haha, prepare yourself for something very mediocre!

Deceived on her wedding night, a foreign princess goes from riches to rags. She lights a fire of rebellion and risks her own life in an attempt to save her country and those she loves.

There you have it!

So, what was good about it? They were intrigued by the very first part, deceived on her wedding night. That's the part that makes it different, thought they weren't really sure of the manner of the deception, so that needs to be somewhat cleared up. The rest of it is just really generic. I knew that for sure about the "riches to rags" part.

Basically, I want to make this sound like a good story with familiar elements but that has something unique and compelling. It was a really good exercise! After this, I thought back to the cover blurbs I did at my internship the other day and wanted to look over them again. I probably did some similar things, though not intending to do so.

On another note, I just finished Icefall, and yes, it is a good book! I don't normally read middle grade novels, but I was so intrigued by Matthew J. Kirby and the bits that he said about it--that's what a good pitch gets you! It was a good break from YA, though. The last YA book that I read was too much. You know when you can totally see a huge plot hole and then you just get bored because you've figured out exactly how it's going to end? Well, it went more or less like that. So, it's been a few weeks since I've picked up a YA novel. But, I'm happy to say that after reading Icefall, I'm back on track! Yay! Time to find another good book to read!

Typical Tuesday

I wasn't planning on posting every day, but I was so excited last night! I signed up for WIFYR, which is Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers. It's a writing conference nearby that goes from June 16-20. I went one year for free because I was in Carol Lynch Williams' class--I believe that she's the main woman behind WIFYR. But I could only go the afternoon sessions because the morning sessions were legit classes with various authors. That's how you get some good feedback on your writing. Well, yesterday I signed up for one of the morning classes! I was so excited! I wish it were June already and I was graduated!

On another note, I got to do something fun and different this morning for my internship. I worked on cover blurbs! It was pretty fun. I got to review some things I had never read before and write the little blurbs that go on the cover as well as some short and long ads. I know it doesn't seem like much, but I liked it.

Icefall

I was very productive this morning, and instead of reading for my Italian class, I read a few chapters in Icefall, a middle grade/YA novel by Matthew J. Kirby. I picked it up a few days ago because the author came to a reading series at BYU (the university that I attend) and he sounded really interesting. He read a little from Icefall, a story about a girl in an ancient Norse culture who is trapped on a fjord with some of her father's best berserkers. I'm about half-way through, and I'm enjoying it a lot.

Also, have you ever heard of a speech jammer? I tried it last night. You set up a system so that when you speak, you hear your voice about .4 seconds later. It's supposed to mess with your speech and make you stutter and stumble. I don't think I do it right because I still sounded pretty normal. My roommate sounded pretty funny, at least. After doing that for about an hour, though, it was hard to speak normal afterwards. You should try it sometime.

As a part of my internship at Cedar Fort, I need to come up with nonfiction book ideas. So, to you few who come across this, any suggestions? I have a lot more experience with fiction, but I'm trying to broaden my horizons. Any and all ideas are welcome!

One last thing--on Wednesdays I have a class called The Publishing Business. It's taught by Rick Walton, a picture book author. Every week, a different guest speaker comes. So far we've had Will Terry, Brandon Mull, and J. Scott Savage. This Wednesday, we'll have editor and author Lisa Mangum. I'll make a post on here about what I learn.

Oh, and if you're into fantasy and science fiction at all and are around Provo, the Life, The Universe, and Everything Symposium will be going on in February, but I believe that registration for students ends on January 31st. It's free if you're a student--I'm going!

A Grand Beginning

Let's start from the very beginning--it is, after all, a very good place to start. But it would probably take too long, so I'll spare you the drama. I had a blog, long long ago, and I have decided to start a new one. It will give me something to do when I really should be doing something else.

I am an aspiring writer. Will I ever achieve the dream? Maybe. But this blog will serve, in part, to help myself along. Right now, I find that too many things take away from my time. There's school, then there's work, then there's my internship (editing), and then my social life, though that last one is debatable. Don't tell my friends--the fish. Yeah, if you look down and to the right you'll see them. You can feed them if you like.

This April, I will finally finish my undergraduate degree, yay! And then I will be off to bigger and better things! Or so I hope. I've been trying to scope out the New York scene and try to find an "in" over there, but no success so far. If I can't do that and be an editor, I should just move out somewhere random and finally finish writing my book.

I know, it seems like everybody you talk to is writing a book. But really, how many of them are actually going to buckle down, finish it, revise it, revise it again, and then maybe (with a lot of luck) find an agent or an editor. I don't claim to be any sort of pro at this. I'm horrible at finishing my stuff. But I've realized that the biggest thing that stops me is myself.

I used to start writing something, and then I'd stop after a few pages, disgusted that I didn't sound more like a "real" author. Now, after meeting some authors and going to some symposiums, I've realized that they really are just people like me, and they've churned out more than one crappy story that will never see the light of day. The difference is that they keep going. They work at it, hard! I have to remember that my first draft is not written in stone. Man is that hard for my editor self! Writing without caring too much about the quality of my work has been a work in progress. I've written lots and lots of papers for school, and I'm used to being able to write something fairly decent on the first go. But a novel is so very different from an essay.

Right now, I'm in what some might call the murky middle. That seems to be the hardest part for me, when I'd most like to give up and start on something new. This is the moment when my "not caring" is put to the test. If I care about it too much, it loses the fun, the adventure of discovering the characters and exploring a new world. That's when I stop. I start thinking about what everyone else would think about it. So I simply do my best to not care. Screw them, write for yourself. There's plenty of time to think about that after the novel is finished.