Craziness

I've been shamefully absent (still) from the blog scene and at the rate I'm going I'll be lucky to blog once a week. This poor blog has degenerated to a journal-style update of what's going on in my life, mostly because all of my deep thought-provoking thoughts are going into my school work. After I drain my mind there, I just don't have anything left for here!

Sooooo....here's what's going on in my writing life:

I finished the story summary for my screenplay and turned it in to my mentor. He thinks it's good material. He made suggestions, some of which I agree with, and otherwise turned me loose to write the outline. Whew. I was worried the story sucked, so it's good to have some affirmation! Now, on to the work of outlining....

The rest of my MFA classes consist of drowning in reading I can't possibly keep up with and trying to write meaningful, or at least coherent, responses to said reading. I'm not having a lot of luck with the reading or the coherent responses right now. I kind of feel like a college freshman asking, "okay, now why exactly do I have to read this again?"

I've got the first draft of my romance novel out to a couple of people to read and hopefully get some useful suggestions for revisions. I'd like to get those underway. I don't want the poor book to fall by the wayside. My evil plan is to get it (and the 2 subsequent sequels) published in order to pay for my student loans. *crosses fingers*

I'm also gearing up for NaNoWriMo in November. Because I don't have enough stuff crammed into my life, I thought it would be awesome to ratchet up the pressure on myself and try to write 50,000 words in a month. That's in addition to working full time and going to school full time. On the one hand, I could get the second romance novel in my trilogy written in a month. On the other hand in some circles they would call that masochistic. Glutton for punishment in others. We'll see if I survive November.

And, on top of it all, I'm presenting a paper at the Women's Studies conference at University of North Dakota in November.

I must be crazy.

Blog Award

So I received the "Kreativ Blogger" award from Fran at Fran Caldwell's Notebook, a site I enjoy very much. I love keeping up with other writers and sharing the ups and downs of the writing life! So, thank you Fran.

The requirements of receiving this aware include unburdening myself of 7 things that you would most likely not know about me. Believe me, for the most part I'm just not that interesting, but here are those 7 things:

1. When asked if you could go back in time and change anything about your life, many people are self-deprecating and say no, they wouldn't. I would.
2. I want to write romance novels, fiction, screenplays, and stage plays.
3. According to my mother, I'm a late bloomer. Whatever that means.
4. I'm not religious, but I am spiritual.
5. My primary ethnicities are: Swedish, Hungarian, English, Scottish.
6. I don't like dogs. I'm a cat person.
7. I wish I had more money (I'm sick of being broke) because I think money can, if not buy happiness, at least relieve a lot of stress so that you can allow happiness to flourish.

So there you go. Seven things about my you probably didn't already know, or for that matter even want to know, but now do. I'm now supposed to pass this award on to 7 more people, but because I love all the blogs I follow equally, I can't pick just 7. If you read this and feel so moved, please copy it to your site and inform all your readers of 7 things they don't know about you!

24-Hr Play Redemption

So, last night kicked off this year's 24-hr play festival wherein five short plays are written, produced, and performed within, well, 24 hours.

We showed up at 7:30 p.m., introduced ourselves and contributed our costume piece and props which were to act as inspiration for those of us writing (but often aren't very useful). After introductions, actors and directors go home and sleep while writers draw actor's names from a hat to use as our cast, then we have until 6:00 a.m. to write a coherent short play - not an easy task when you're sleep deprived in the wee hours of the night/morning.

The five writers (me included) wrote until about 1:30 a.m. at which point, surprisingly, we all had a first draft ready so we decided to do a preliminary read-through. We already had a read-through scheduled for 3:00 a.m. with the show's producer, but since we had drafts we decided to do one early. I'm glad we did because it allowed me to do some edits. It's amazing how something sounds just awesome in your head and you snicker as you type it, but when it's read out loud it falls completely flat.

I edited and then decided I couldn't function anymore because of the fatigue. Plus I was facing a half hour drive home on dark country highways and I didn't want to fall asleep at the wheel. So I skipped the second read through. I finally got home about 4:00 a.m. then, even though I was exhausted, I didn't sleep well because I was hopped up on adrenalin and sleep deprivation.

So, I woke up at 9:00 a.m., showered, and drove an hour to watch two of my kids run a cross country meet in the most miserably icy, drizzly conditions you could possibly imagine. The good news is both of them cut significant time off their previous bests.

This evening we went back to the theater for performance. Let me take a moment to explain how badly last year's festival went for me. I'll admit it wasn't the best play I've ever written, but I drew the worst actors in the bunch, and they didn't memorize the play. In fact, they got lost about 2 minutes in and completely made it up as they went along. And they sucked at improv. I've never been so embarrassed. You could hear the crickets chirping the theatre was so silent. So I was slightly apprehensive coming into the theatre tonight, hoping it wouldn't be a rerun of last year.

I shouldn't have worried, though, because I drew really good actors this year and they nailed it. They didn't forget or drop any lines, they were professional, and overall it was full of awesome. I was so relieved and really, really pleased. The other plays on the program were all funny and went well, too. It's a testament to the quality of the actors this year that even when they forgot lines they covered really well and actually added to the humor in some cases as a result.

So anyway, that's my experience with the 24-Hr play festival this year. It's a really amazing experience for writers, actors, and directors, and I'm very lucky to have been involved in it for three years running.

Writing News and Other Stuff

It's been almost a month since I posted anything. I feel terrible. My poor little blog must feel so lonely and abandoned. I will hereby renew my efforts to post at least every couple of days. Life's been seriously busy, but I can't let that be an excuse.

Tonight is the annual 24-Hr Play Festival at the local university where we'll be writing, producing, and performing 4-6 ten minute plays within a 24-hour period. As a writer, I have about nine hours to write a ten minute play. This is my third year participating. The first year went quite well; in fact, the play I wrote has been produced a couple of times since then. The second year was a major bomb. I drew the worst actors of the bunch and they really messed up the play. My face was red. So this year I need to redeem myself...wish me luck!

I'm also plowing through the MFA classes. Lots of reading and writing. I'm working on outlining my screenplay but have recently hit some roadblocks....mainly, I'm not sure where the story goes from here. So I guess I need to do some brainstorming. On the upside, I finished the first draft of my romance novel and I've got it out being read by someone who I hope can give me some constructive suggestions! Then I'll start working on revisions.

Any writers out there planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year? Believe it or not I'm going to try to cram it into my schedule. I want to get the first draft of the second novel in my three novel series done during the NaNoWriMo. We'll see how that goes. I need to get some basic outlining done before it starts.

Well, I'm off. I'll try to keep up with posting, and get back to following my fave blogs. I've missed all my bloggy friends and reading what everyone else is up to!

Take care!

Coming Up For Air

Hey everyone. I've been flying under the radar for the last couple of weeks, working hard on the WIP, my grad classes, and the day job. Something had to give, and unfortunately my brain has been unable to come up with anything witty or even remotely interesting to blog about, so the blog has suffered.

But the good news is that I finished the first draft of my novel. There are still plenty of revisions and editing ahead, but at least I can say the first draft is done. Yay!

I've also settled on a story for my screenplay/MFA thesis, so I can now start developing the outline for that. I was getting worried there for a while, but now that I've chosen something I can relax somewhat.

I won't even bore you to death with my whining about the overwhelming amount of reading I'm burdened with for my grad classes. I'm sure you don't want to hear about what a futile effort it is and not humanly possible to read all the novels, screenplays, and fellow-student's workshop material, let alone write reasonably intelligent responses to all of the above and begin to work on the screenplay outline which is the overall goal of the program to start with. So I won't tell you about all that.

So, anyway, that's what I've been doing. I haven't been ignoring my readers, or ignoring all the blogs I love to read, on purpose. I just don't have enough time recently. It's not that I don't love you all, I do, I've just been laying low and trying to keep up.

I haven't abandoned my blog. I'll be back more regularly. I just need to find the groove. Ciao!

Next up: No Country for Old Men

It appears that my blog is suffering from my frantic efforts to keep up with homework and writing my WIP.

My last blog was about Jane Austen's Emma. I promised that the next blog (this one) would be about No Country for Old Men. As it turns out, I can't get the story out of my head, even though I still can't decide if I liked it or not.

If you haven't read the book and you plan to, you may not want to read any further. I plan to discuss story, plot, themes, etc. So be warned.

At first, I didn't. Like it, that is. It's a frustrating book for several reasons, the first of which has to do with style. The author, Cormac McCarthy, doesn't seem to be fond of punctuation. In fact, he completely left out quotation marks altogether, and used apostrophes pretty sparingly. This made it very difficult to read dialogue because you could never tell where it was. It made you actively work at reading the novel. Is that a good thing? I don't know. All I know is that if an unpublished writer (moi, perhaps?) tried to pull that, agents and publishers would sneer at them as being pretentious and throw them out the door. I suppose once you've become a successful award-winning writer you can do that kind of thing and instead of being considered pretentious it's considered innovative.

My second frustration with the novel had to do with story. It doesn't follow that neatly packaged Aristotellian rising-action-climax-resolution model, and that's okay. Not every story has to, I guess. But this one kind of wandered around and I couldn't tell if there was even a plot. And the ending is decidently not satisfying. Of the three main characters, one of the good guys dies suddenly without explanation and just disappears from the story, the other good guy gives up in the end, and the bad guy walks off into oblivion and we don't ever know what happens to him. Where's my happy ending? Why doesn't the sheriff kill the bad guy and avenge the other good guy's death? I want resolution, dammit!

But the point of the story is to examine fate versus chance, free will versus predestination. The drug industry is portrayed as a juggernaut that can't be stopped. You kill one drug runner and 2 spring up in his place. It's futile to resist. And against that backdrop you have a guy who just chances upon a bunch of money and of his own free will he picks it up and involves himself in a mess that gets him killed. The sheriff gives up because he knows he can't win - he's just one guy and he can't make a substantial difference, so he gives in to fate. And the bad guy? Well, he's just crazy and he's obsessed with fate and destiny. But realistically life doesn't always have a happy ending, does it? Sometimes the bad guy gets off scott free.

Like I said, at first I didn't like the book. But I've been contemplating it for a week or so now and I think what I like the best about it is that I'm still thinking about it. It's not cut and dried. There's a lot to consider. It's growing on me.

I also watched the movie, which was okay, but not as good as the book. It's too hard to translate the inner dialogue of the sheriff character to the screen and, to me, the movie felt stiff and choppy and didn't flow very well. The book was hard enough to understand, but if I hadn't read it before the movie I'd have been lost and completely uninterested. In fact, I told a friend of mine I was going to watch the movie and she said "is that the one where the guy finds someone and kills him, then finds another guy and kills him, then finds another guy and kills him?" and I said "yes." and she said, "oh, I fell asleep during that one."

So much for the credibility of Academy Awards. What do they know, anyway?

Overall, though, as I continue to consider whether or not I like the book, I'll probably settle on liking it. It's unothodox, bleak, and stylistic but it makes you think instead of just spoon feeding you a cookie-cutter form where you can figure out the ending one chapter into the book. I certainly didn't expect the ending I got from this novel and it left me scratching my head.

I'm glad I read it. If you've read it, what did you think of it?

One Assignment Down....

I finished the first assignment for my "Reading for Writers" course this semester: Read "Emma" by Jane Austen and write a review of it. I'd never read any Austen before, but I'd heard some good things about her.

However, I must have chosen the wrong Jane Austen novel to read, because I really didn't enjoy it. I found the main character to be a classist snob and even though I know Austen did that on purpose in order to comment on classism, I'm of the mind that if your protagonist isn't in some way sympathetic, you're going to lose the reader.

Overall I understood and appreciated Austen's themes, but the plot was predictable, the language was stuffy and difficult to wade through, and Austen had an obsessive preoccupation with the semi-colon that I found distracting.

I thought maybe one of the half dozen movies based on the book would be more entertaining so I watched the version with Gwenyth Paltrow - no more entertaining than the book.

My conclusion? You either really like Jane Austen or you really don't. So far, I really don't.

I also read the second book on the list for "Reading for Writers" which was "No Country for Old Men." This book I liked much, much better. I'll comment here on that book (and the movie) after I finish and turn in the paper later this week.

In the meantime, are there any ardent Jane Austen defenders out there? Anybody actually enjoy the book "Emma?"