C is for crush. candy. corpse.

Yesterday, I blogged about the book launch of crush. candy. corpse. by Sylvia McNicoll, who has written 30 books and birthed three fabulous children (including yours truly).  Since today is C-day in the blogging challenge and Mom's book title is so laden with C-words, I will now delight my faithful readers with an unbiased review of the novel.

The book is narrated by Sonja Ehret (Sunny), a teenager who volunteers in the Alzheimer's ward at a senior's home and ends up on trial for manslaughter. Each chapter begins in the courtroom and then flashes back to Sunny's school volunteer journal as the events unfold.

While I always enjoy my Mom's writing, there are books that stand out from the others, times when Mom just nails it and tells a story that is so real, and says so much.  This is one of those books and this is one of those times.  My mother's greatest strength is in creating memorable characters, who you can see when you read them. Every nurse, senior, teen, even the most minor of personages has a face and a voice, particularly the Alzheimer's patients.

Those of you who know me, and have read this blog, know that my grandmother recently died of Alzheimer's. Over the last few years, Mom spent a great deal of time in Omi's care facility, feeding her yogurt and watching her slip away bit by bit. There is so much of my grandmother's journey in crush. candy. corpse.   The book is dedicated to Omi and the story is so personal that Mom named the main character after herself.  Ehret is my mother's maiden name and Sonja was a name my grandparents almost chose before settling on Sylvia. This is a story from the heart, one that needed to be told, and it's beautiful. 

Future Fantastic

Today, as part of Professor's Wiseman's perfect diary, I'm going to write about my future. I'm to imagine everything has worked out wonderfully, all my dreams come true and all my goals realized.  Interestingly, this sort of visualization will not help me actually realize my goals.  For that, I'd have to create a step by step plan and imagine all the obstacles I'll have to overcome. But this isn't about achieving one's goals, this is about good good happy feelings.

Next year my book will be out and I'll be finished the second one.  Having one book published, I'll easily land an agent for the second book and she will be busily negotiating with all the big wig publishers. My improv skills will get me into the invite-only advanced class and I'll do my first show in front of an audience. People will see my mad skills on stage and run right home to purchase my ebook, hoping it's just as entertaining.  They won't be disappointed.  In fact, I'll receive rave reviews on both the show and the novel.  I'll get a little extra money with my new found fame and I'll take the whole family on a canoeing trip in Algonquin. Also I'll pay off my Visa and start work on my Star Trek basement. I'll get that new red couch I've had my eye on forever and no one will pee on it or chew it.

Wardroids Trailer (that I made) and an Awesome Book (that I didn't write)

On the way home from the writing retreat I was thinking out loud to my friend Siobhan about the templates my husband uses to make ridiculous trailers of our family vacations. "I wonder if you could use one to make a book trailer," said I.

So I got home and started messing around with iMovie.  I chose the template best suited to my science-fiction-comedic-action-romance which I usually call "Wardroids" even though several people have said that it's a terrible title (somehow anything else I think of is slightly more terrible).

The problem: footage.  This might surprise some of you, but it's very difficult to find footage of wardroid sex slaves preparing for rebellion on any of the free stock footage sites.  Instead I found time lapse clips of sunsets and a cool slow motion fire ball. 

Here's about where my husband took over.  My sunset and fireball trailer, while dramatic, really didn't illustrate my book very well. Luckily my husband has a subscription to a stock photo site.  I searched and searched and found several pics of people and androids which could vaguely pass as my characters.  Adam turned these into video clips using his magic computer powers and we spent the evening plugging them into my template. I still kept my sunset and fireball in there because it's good to have at least some actual video.

The end result is, I think, pretty decent. 

I bet you all want to read that book now!  Unfortunately it's not published.  You should call up your connections in the science fiction industry and ask them to get in contact with me.  Show them the trailer, and be sure to tell them that the book is way better than the trailer (less stock footage).

One book that is published however (this is a segue, pretty nice huh?) is my friend Siobhan Minty's self-published masterpiece "A Gay in the Life of Melinda Finch". Available on Amazon here and Smashwords here. If you enjoy my sense of humour (and if you're reading this blog I assume you do), you're going to enjoy this.  It's about a woman named Melinda who has to pretend to be a lesbian to write a gay advice column. Also there's a love triangle, which becomes a love trapezoid.  And there's a twist ending. Here's the review some random Amazon user gave it:

Melinda Finch is zany and loveable. Her story is hilarious and surprisingly poignant. A great read from beginning to end. If you don't think that love conquers all, this book will make you a believer. 

Okay that was me, but I meant every word.  And the book is only 99 cents.  Seriously! (Feel free to mention Siobhan's book when you're negotiating my book deal with your publisher friends).

500 words a day

So I've been trying to be more productive with writing.  I'm committed to making a career out of being a science fiction author.  The book I'm working on now I wrote a first draft of when I was about nineteen, the one I plan on finishing next I began shortly afterwards.  I did the math, at 500 words a day, I can write 50 000 words (about the length of my novel) in 4 months.  Why has it taken me over a decade?

Oh I did some other stuff in between, finished university, got married, had two kids.  I also logged a lot of hours of Tetris, Wii, Farmville, Farm Frenzy, and whatever else happened to be my game of the week.  Occasionally I did slightly more productive things.  I painted, I made flash cartoons, I blogged, I wrote for Today's Parent Toronto (thank you, mom).  For a while I wanted to work for a magazine, but ideas for articles don't come to me the way ideas for science fiction stories do.  I sent one query, which I wrote in magazine writing class.  It was kindly rejected.

I now have real excuses.  Adorable excuses named William and Jadzia, who demand my attention before I can complete a sentence.  As I was writing this post, William came to me crying because he had somehow put a chair on his toe.  Jadzia is sitting on my lap right now colouring.  There are pen marks all over her arms and mine.  I no longer have long stretches of uninterrupted time to myself.  I squandered those in my youth. I think my mother tried to warn me.  She has 28 books published.  I'd be happy with one or two.

I'm more committed now than I have ever been.  My book will be done by February 4th.  It's good enough to be published and I won't give up until it is.  And I won't stop writing, I will finish this book and the next and the next.  I will outline and plan.  I will sell.  I will be so ambitious and obnoxious that you won't recognize me.  I am talented.  I'm no longer going to sheepishly pretend that I'm not.  I'm no longer going to be so afraid of success that I won't even try.

BTW: To my friends and family: after February 4th, be on my case.  I recognize that selling the book will be the hard part, and I'll need lots of encouragement to stay on track.  Thanks.

For those who have been missing my on-line presence

My writing brain is mostly being used up for working on my sci fi novel.  This is the same book that I wrote in my early 20s, then read over a few years ago and said to myself "GAH! Why didn't anyone tell me this was so bad?"  I've since been re-writing it to fit my standards of perfection.  When I say re-writing, I don't mean editing.  The plot, characters, and settings have all drastically changed.  I'm a better writer now.  I'm loosely using the book First Draft in 30 Days by Karen Wiesner to help me stay on track, but since my novel has been around in some form or another for almost a decade, you could say I'm not following her time frame.  But this is the first time I've created a scene-by-scene outline, and I'm confident the book will be finished by Christmas (hopefully earlier).

After that my plan of action will be:

• Create a nice pitch letter and synopsis (pitching is my least favourite thing, and I'm really bad at it, so I'll probably need help with this).
• Send the pitch to agents until one of them bites
• While that is going on, write an outline for one of my other books.  I have three projects on the back burner.  One is still in the idea stage, the other two have several chapters written (though I don't know right now whether they are up to my standards of perfection).

Next year, William will start kindergarten and the year after that Jadzia will start school.  It would be nice if I could get something in print by then, so I don't have to start making a living working at McDonald's or something.

You guys are all probably dying to know what my book is about.  If you promise not to steal my idea then I'll tell you, okay?  (Keep in mind, that since making a synopsis is a lot like pitching, I'm also not that good at it):

In the future, there's going to be this war between Earth and the outer human colonies which is fought and won by robot soldiers called "wardroids".  My book takes place 50 years after this war, when the wardroids have all been refitted to be workers and sex slaves (I know, fun right?)  The three main characters (who tell the story through alternating, first-person view points)  are: Emily, a mechanic aboard a space-mining vessel who has no memory of her past; Commander Black,  Emily's boss and former lover; and 32-80, a wardroid who works on the same ship and is a key player in the wardroid uprising.  The book is all about how their pasts and destinies are intertwined.  And there will be action and romance and all that.

Yesterday I killed someone (in my book not in real life, duh) and I was kind of feeling bummed about it.  It's a solution to the problem of evil when you think about it: Why does God cause so much suffering?  As a plot device!  The guy was a red shirt from the beginning, but still it's amazing the guilt one can feel from murdering a fictional character.  Anyway, other than that I've not been depressed or anything, just immersed in other forms of creativity (and, I must admit, some less constructive distractions as well).

Cleavage has arrived!

I've always thought of myself as a fiction writer, but strangely I've never had any of my fiction published. Unless of course you count that story that got printed in a kids magazine when I was eleven, or the time my husband paid to have one copy of my book published. But now, I have a real short story published in a real anthology: Cleavage: Breakaway Fiction for Real Girls. So now I'm a genuine fiction author.

If you buy the book, or just flip through it in the book store, you can find my story ("My So Not Ballerina Boobs") on page 133. It isn't so much a "story" as it is an account of all the times I went bra-shopping with my mother rolled into one embarrassing excursion. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. "I hope I'm not as loud as the mother in your story," Mom said. Of course not, Mommy, I exaggerated in the name of fiction.

If anyone lives in the Toronto area (and actually cares), there will be a book launch on September 24th, from 5:30pm to 8:30 pm at the Canadian Children's Book Centre (Suite 101, 40 Orchard View Blvd, Toronto -- Yonge & Eglinton).

Now I'd better go read all the other stories quick before the boss wakes up from his nap.

The World of Jen (and William)

Rolling update
When William was just over a month old he learned to roll over from his front to his back. Shortly afterward, he would roll over instantly when he was placed on his tummy. Fast forward a few months, William learns the back to front roll. Now he immediately rolls to his tummy whenever he's placed on his back. This is great for things like learning to crawl, but not so great for things like changing diapers.

Tag
Jen and Carol's International Tag(the blog where we compare our respective cities with photos) has gotten more challenging, since we ran out of street signs to photograph. Right now it's stuck at "school bus" because I forgot it was summer holidays. Carol assures me she knows where the buses go at the end of term.

A Little Work a Little Money
I'm updating the October calendar for Today's Parent Toronto. It's an interesting exercise to search for info on Hallloween activities in the middle of July. I'm surprised at how many people have their websites up to date for that period. Yesterday I finished all I could do with the net and today I'm going to once again confront my phobia of calling people.

Meme Dreams
My dream of creating a super-meme has somewhat fizzled, as so far only my devoted husband has filled out my little survey. Just as well, I'm going on to bigger and better things.

Youtubing the Flash
Frequent visitors to this site will recognize this little flash I made a while ago of Spock mind-melding with an orange. With a little bit of finangling I managed to get the thing posted to youtube. It was not, as I first imagined, as simple as exporting the flash file as a video. The end result has a bit of weird interference at the beginning of the clip, but I think it adds to the charm. One day, I hope to create more flash movies of Spock mind-melding with various objects and animals, but that may be one of my lofty goals that never comes to pass. In any case, I'm now in the 21st century.

Baby-proofing Baby-schmoofing
William is getting better and better at that trick of putting his legs under himself and pushing forward. Next step, crawling. I don't have any stairs , luckily, but other than that I think my place is one giant baby death trap. I need to baby proof soon and don't know where to begin. Perhaps with a good cleaning and vacuuming. Ugh. Blech. I HATE to clean.

The masterpiece (or it should be after all this time)
I'm rewriting the one and only book I've ever finished (way back in the day when I first started dating Adam). I say "rewriting" instead of just "editing" what I'm writing now is barely recognizable. It started by me fixing a few things that had always bugged me. Then those small things snowballed into big things. And now it's like I'm writing a whole new book. My Mom and husband liked the original, but I don't want to be the kind of author who goes around toting copies of her self-published schlock going "all my family and friends enjoyed it".

And
The water in the pool is very nice.