I was doing some demon research online today and I came across a message board about the new A&E show Paranormal State. It's a reality show that chronicles the adventures of a group of Penn State students who investigate the paranormal. On last week's episode, the team encountered what they believed to be a demonic entity and they made a big deal of not saying its name (though the show later revealed it).
The interesting thing I discovered when I browsed through the thread about this particular episode was this: People who watched the show and have what seems to be a belief in the existence of the paranormal were angry because the investigators turned to Christianity for the solution. There was an inexplicable amount of comments like "I can't believe people believe this bullsh!t (referring to religion)." Bear in mind this was from people WHO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS! Few people took issue with the question of whether or not the person might be demonically possessed. That seemed to be a given. What bothered them was that the Catholic Church might have the solution.
Yeah, I had a hard time understanding that myself.
Personally, I don't care about what others believe. I think faith is a personal journey and if you look for God, you'll find Him. That's up to you. I also tend to think that there's more than one way to find Him. This leads to the fine line that I walk when I write. If you've read the First Seal, then you know that. I'm not preachy about religion but I think it's important. I am a bit concerned though, because my current WIP features a lot of paranormal activity and I am trying to find the right balance of that and religion. I know that's vague but I don't want to give out any plot spoilers. (Subliminal advertising: BUY MY BOOK!). I'm looking for some sort of balance that won't raise the ire of my target market and also won't get me kicked out of The Christian Writers Guild (though I'm pretty sure they should never, ever read my work. I get the feeling they wouldn't like it.)
I've had discussions with friends of all religious stripes including atheists (and if you think I might be talking about you, then I probably am) regarding the basis of belief or the lack of it. I'm more interested in what people believe and why they believe it than I am in winning some sort of argument.
So, let's hear it. What are your thoughts?
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
The Moral of the Story is "Don't Give Up."
(I grabbed this from The World in Grey's blog. 'Tis the season for encouragement. Ho, ho, ho.)
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck was returned fourteen times, but it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was rejected twelve times.
Patrick Dennis said of his autobiographical novel Auntie Mame, "It circulated for five years through the halls of fifteen publishers and finally ended up with Vanguard Press, which, as you can see, is rather deep into the alphabet." This illustrates why using the alphabet may be a logical but ineffective way to find the best agent or editor.
Twenty publishers felt that Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull was for the birds.
The first title of Catch-22 was Catch-18, but Simon and Schuster planned to publish it during the same season that Doubleday was bringing out Mila 18 by Leon Uris. When Doubleday complained, Joseph Heller changed the title. Why 22? Because Simon and Schuster was the 22nd publisher to read it. Catch-22 has become part of the language and has sold more than 10 million copies.
Mary Higgins Clark was rejected forty times before selling her first story. One editor wrote: "Your story is light, slight, and trite." More than 30 million copies of her books are now in print.
Before he wrote Roots, Alex Haley had received 200 rejections.
Robert Persig's classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, couldn't get started at 121 houses.
John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was declined by fifteen publishers and some thirty agents. His novels have more than 60 million copies in print.
Thirty-three publishers couldn't digest Chicken Soup for the Soul, compiled by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, before it became a huge best-seller and spawned a series.
The Baltimore Sun hailed Naked in Deccan as "a classic" after it had been rejected over seven years by 375 publishers.
Dr. Seuss's first book was rejected twenty-four times. The sales of his children's books have soared to 100 million.
Louis L'Amour received 200 rejections before he sold his first novel. During the last forty years, Bantam has shipped nearly 200 million of his 112 books, making him their biggest selling author.
If you visit the House of Happy Walls, Jack London's beautiful estate in Sonoma County, north San Francisco, you will see some of the 600 rejection slips that London received before selling his first story.
British writer John Creasy received 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
Eight years after his novel Steps won the National Book Award, Jerzy Kosinski permitted a writer to change his name and the title and send a manuscript of the novel to thirteen agents and fourteen publishers to test the plight of new writers. They all rejected it, including Random House, which had published it.
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck was returned fourteen times, but it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was rejected twelve times.
Patrick Dennis said of his autobiographical novel Auntie Mame, "It circulated for five years through the halls of fifteen publishers and finally ended up with Vanguard Press, which, as you can see, is rather deep into the alphabet." This illustrates why using the alphabet may be a logical but ineffective way to find the best agent or editor.
Twenty publishers felt that Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull was for the birds.
The first title of Catch-22 was Catch-18, but Simon and Schuster planned to publish it during the same season that Doubleday was bringing out Mila 18 by Leon Uris. When Doubleday complained, Joseph Heller changed the title. Why 22? Because Simon and Schuster was the 22nd publisher to read it. Catch-22 has become part of the language and has sold more than 10 million copies.
Mary Higgins Clark was rejected forty times before selling her first story. One editor wrote: "Your story is light, slight, and trite." More than 30 million copies of her books are now in print.
Before he wrote Roots, Alex Haley had received 200 rejections.
Robert Persig's classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, couldn't get started at 121 houses.
John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was declined by fifteen publishers and some thirty agents. His novels have more than 60 million copies in print.
Thirty-three publishers couldn't digest Chicken Soup for the Soul, compiled by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, before it became a huge best-seller and spawned a series.
The Baltimore Sun hailed Naked in Deccan as "a classic" after it had been rejected over seven years by 375 publishers.
Dr. Seuss's first book was rejected twenty-four times. The sales of his children's books have soared to 100 million.
Louis L'Amour received 200 rejections before he sold his first novel. During the last forty years, Bantam has shipped nearly 200 million of his 112 books, making him their biggest selling author.
If you visit the House of Happy Walls, Jack London's beautiful estate in Sonoma County, north San Francisco, you will see some of the 600 rejection slips that London received before selling his first story.
British writer John Creasy received 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
Eight years after his novel Steps won the National Book Award, Jerzy Kosinski permitted a writer to change his name and the title and send a manuscript of the novel to thirteen agents and fourteen publishers to test the plight of new writers. They all rejected it, including Random House, which had published it.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Decisions, Decisions
I have reluctantly taken a break from writing this week because I needed to finish up edits on The Second Seal. I've got a couple more things to fix and it will be finished. Finally.
There is one thing about it that I'm not sure how I want to fix it. That's where you, my audience of experts, come in. I want your opinion on it.
Here's the situation: I have a character that uses two names. One is his real name and the other is an alias. The protagonist learns his real name, but not his alias. On the first edit, I thought it might be a little confusing to keep referring to the one character by two different names, so after revealing his real name, I referred to him only by his alias. I did this even when writing from the protagonist's POV (though he never refers to him by name in dialogue).
On this edit, however, a trusted friend suggested that I change it back.
Which way should I go on this?
I can provide examples if asked.
There is one thing about it that I'm not sure how I want to fix it. That's where you, my audience of experts, come in. I want your opinion on it.
Here's the situation: I have a character that uses two names. One is his real name and the other is an alias. The protagonist learns his real name, but not his alias. On the first edit, I thought it might be a little confusing to keep referring to the one character by two different names, so after revealing his real name, I referred to him only by his alias. I did this even when writing from the protagonist's POV (though he never refers to him by name in dialogue).
On this edit, however, a trusted friend suggested that I change it back.
Which way should I go on this?
I can provide examples if asked.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Does reading matter?
I'm in something of a thoughtful mood today and most of it is because of an op-ed I read to day in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Does Reading Matter?" For those of you not interested in investing that much time in reading a blog post, allow me to summarize:
The main gist of the piece concerns a new study from the National Endowment for the Arts which concludes that people are reading less and less. At the end of the piece the writer suggests that, in the future, those who do not read will find themselves at a noticeable disadvantage.
Around 1439, Johannes Gutenberg got tired of getting hand cramps from the all the writing he had to do and invented moveable type. It changed the world, not only because it made information more accessible but because moving from a culture that was either oral or written to one that was printed changed the way humans think. If you don't agree with me, go argue with Marshall McLuhan. Wait, he's dead. Never mind. However, McLuhan did say this: "Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain and single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition." One of McLuhan's students Walter Ong, claimed television had a similar effect in that it was returning us to what he called a "secondary orality."
If you have kids, you've probably gotten the generalized lecture from some do0gooder about how you should limit the amount of time your kid spends watching TV, playing video games and surfing the web. This often makes me wonder why the schools beg for money to spend on technology and computers on the one hand and then trash them on the other. Several years ago one of my step-daughters breathlessly informed me that they got to use laptops in the computer lab at school. I asked where she sat to use the laptop. She replied, "Oh, in our same seats. We just pushed the keyboard out of the way and sat it in front of the monitor."
I mentioned this story to my brother, who is an elementary school teacher and also the unofficial media tech guru guy, he laughed. "Public schools know they need new technology," he told me, "but they aren't really sure why they need it or what they should use it for. That's why you sometimes end up with goofy stuff like that."
Because I like to play devil's advocate from time to time, I've often been curious about our love/hate relationship with technology. We don't want to ignore it, lest we turn into some technophobic hermit living in a shack in the backwoods of Montana, but we never fully embrace it either. If we did, we'd throw out all of books and revel in a 24 hour American Idol marathon. I think the reason we don't fling ourselves into the abyss is that we worry our mothers will turn out to be right. Television really will turn our brains to mush. By the time we've realized it's happened, it'll be too late to fix it and nobody would be smart enough to anyway.
Does reading matter? For most of us around here (who aspire to be on the other end of that relationship), it does. Books are still very important to many of us, even as technology does its best to render them obsolete. We cling to them almost as if they have a mystical quality about them. Perhaps they do. Perhaps , like technology, we know we need them if we aren't sure why. Too bad more people don't feel that way.
The main gist of the piece concerns a new study from the National Endowment for the Arts which concludes that people are reading less and less. At the end of the piece the writer suggests that, in the future, those who do not read will find themselves at a noticeable disadvantage.
Around 1439, Johannes Gutenberg got tired of getting hand cramps from the all the writing he had to do and invented moveable type. It changed the world, not only because it made information more accessible but because moving from a culture that was either oral or written to one that was printed changed the way humans think. If you don't agree with me, go argue with Marshall McLuhan. Wait, he's dead. Never mind. However, McLuhan did say this: "Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain and single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition." One of McLuhan's students Walter Ong, claimed television had a similar effect in that it was returning us to what he called a "secondary orality."
If you have kids, you've probably gotten the generalized lecture from some do0gooder about how you should limit the amount of time your kid spends watching TV, playing video games and surfing the web. This often makes me wonder why the schools beg for money to spend on technology and computers on the one hand and then trash them on the other. Several years ago one of my step-daughters breathlessly informed me that they got to use laptops in the computer lab at school. I asked where she sat to use the laptop. She replied, "Oh, in our same seats. We just pushed the keyboard out of the way and sat it in front of the monitor."
I mentioned this story to my brother, who is an elementary school teacher and also the unofficial media tech guru guy, he laughed. "Public schools know they need new technology," he told me, "but they aren't really sure why they need it or what they should use it for. That's why you sometimes end up with goofy stuff like that."
Because I like to play devil's advocate from time to time, I've often been curious about our love/hate relationship with technology. We don't want to ignore it, lest we turn into some technophobic hermit living in a shack in the backwoods of Montana, but we never fully embrace it either. If we did, we'd throw out all of books and revel in a 24 hour American Idol marathon. I think the reason we don't fling ourselves into the abyss is that we worry our mothers will turn out to be right. Television really will turn our brains to mush. By the time we've realized it's happened, it'll be too late to fix it and nobody would be smart enough to anyway.
Does reading matter? For most of us around here (who aspire to be on the other end of that relationship), it does. Books are still very important to many of us, even as technology does its best to render them obsolete. We cling to them almost as if they have a mystical quality about them. Perhaps they do. Perhaps , like technology, we know we need them if we aren't sure why. Too bad more people don't feel that way.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
The Agony of Technology
There are days when technology nearly kills me. Today was one of those days. I was up very late last night, slogging my through a most difficult chapter. I finally finished at around 2am, happy with the four thousand words I needed to get my characters where they were going. I got up to do some more work on it this morning.
And the file wouldn't open.
Word informed me in all its smug, Microsofty goodness, that the file was corrupt. I tried all the recommended recovery efforts and nothing worked. It appeared that my entire 20,000+ word work in progress was gone, just beyond my reach into the Land of Lost 0's and 1's.
I won't kid you. I sat down and cried.
I am not the most tech savvy person in the world. Keyboard, mouse and monitor are about the extent of my repertoire. Most anything beyond that I turn over to my hubby so he can put those two engineering degrees he has to work. But, I thought I had one more trick up my sleeve, so I thought I'd try it before I gave up completely.
It worked.
There was my entire document in all its beauty. Even the formatting was still intact. I was and still am so overjoyed I decided to blog about it.
And, now, I gonna go burn the damn thing to disc.
And the file wouldn't open.
Word informed me in all its smug, Microsofty goodness, that the file was corrupt. I tried all the recommended recovery efforts and nothing worked. It appeared that my entire 20,000+ word work in progress was gone, just beyond my reach into the Land of Lost 0's and 1's.
I won't kid you. I sat down and cried.
I am not the most tech savvy person in the world. Keyboard, mouse and monitor are about the extent of my repertoire. Most anything beyond that I turn over to my hubby so he can put those two engineering degrees he has to work. But, I thought I had one more trick up my sleeve, so I thought I'd try it before I gave up completely.
It worked.
There was my entire document in all its beauty. Even the formatting was still intact. I was and still am so overjoyed I decided to blog about it.
And, now, I gonna go burn the damn thing to disc.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
More Criticism of Criticism
My big time-waster today was heading over to Amazon where I got sucked into reading a thread in the Romance Forum. The thread was "What books have you hated but that everyone else adored?"
I was captivated by the title, so in I went.
My favorite thing about this thread was the way posters would say things like It's nice to see no one is being slammed for their opinions and them reel off a couple paragraphs about how much they hate Nora Roberts. I guess that's because it's easier (not to mention much more fun) to talk smack about something than to praise it.
I grew up in a town that is really in the middle of nowhere. There was one radio station you could pick up and they played atrocious music. I had a really cool teacher in Junior High who used to let us listen to the radio while we did math problems. We were doing this one day, when one of the other students piped up: "You know what the sad thing about this is? That someone worked really hard on this song. They put hours into it until it was just what they wanted. They were proud of it. And, after all that work, it sounds like this."
For this reason, I rarely put a book down without finishing it. I figure that the author put a lot of effort into writing it, I at least have the obligation to finish the story.
Now allow me to pile on.
In my life there have only been a couple of books I couldn't finish. The first was The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I got ¾ of the way through the second book and thought "This book is about walking." I made it just as far in the movies. The other book was Traveling with the Dead by Barbara Hambly. I love vampire novels which was why I picked this one up, but it put me to sleep. I just could not get into it.
For the record (and so I don't sound like a total hypocrite), I am currently waiting with baited breath for the next installments in series by Patricia Briggs and Karen Chance (because I loves me the werewolves and the vampires).
Your turn. Dog pile on the writers!
I was captivated by the title, so in I went.
My favorite thing about this thread was the way posters would say things like It's nice to see no one is being slammed for their opinions and them reel off a couple paragraphs about how much they hate Nora Roberts. I guess that's because it's easier (not to mention much more fun) to talk smack about something than to praise it.
I grew up in a town that is really in the middle of nowhere. There was one radio station you could pick up and they played atrocious music. I had a really cool teacher in Junior High who used to let us listen to the radio while we did math problems. We were doing this one day, when one of the other students piped up: "You know what the sad thing about this is? That someone worked really hard on this song. They put hours into it until it was just what they wanted. They were proud of it. And, after all that work, it sounds like this."
For this reason, I rarely put a book down without finishing it. I figure that the author put a lot of effort into writing it, I at least have the obligation to finish the story.
Now allow me to pile on.
In my life there have only been a couple of books I couldn't finish. The first was The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I got ¾ of the way through the second book and thought "This book is about walking." I made it just as far in the movies. The other book was Traveling with the Dead by Barbara Hambly. I love vampire novels which was why I picked this one up, but it put me to sleep. I just could not get into it.
For the record (and so I don't sound like a total hypocrite), I am currently waiting with baited breath for the next installments in series by Patricia Briggs and Karen Chance (because I loves me the werewolves and the vampires).
Your turn. Dog pile on the writers!
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Bits and Pieces
I will be the first to admit that I have been a little remiss in the blogging department of late. However, I refuse to accept responsibility for my laziness. It's the Boy Scouts' fault. Really.
So allow me to just address some bits and pieces …
I am happy to say that I finally managed to get a bunch of books mailed out. So, if you won one last weekend, it's on the way.
I have been completely stressed out of late over The Second Seal. My plan was to have it ready for purchase by Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm even going to manage to get it out by Christmas. L I blame my husband and his lack of editing help for this (he NEVER reads my blog, so he'll never see this.). I am convinced that all of my goofing off during the month of June had nothing to do with it. Nothing whatsoever. And I'm stickin' by that.
On a more positive note, I am quite pleased with my current WIP. I thought it was going to be a ghost story, but it has morphed into a supernatural detective story. I really like the main character and the story is evolving nicely. It may even turn into a series. We'll see …
Finally, I must sing the praises of one of my favorite new authors and mySpace friends, Justine Musk. I just finished her book Bloodangel and it's one of the best books I've read this year. Really, really good. If you enjoy supernatural apocalyptic stories, I'd say you oughta pick it up.
So allow me to just address some bits and pieces …
I am happy to say that I finally managed to get a bunch of books mailed out. So, if you won one last weekend, it's on the way.
I have been completely stressed out of late over The Second Seal. My plan was to have it ready for purchase by Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm even going to manage to get it out by Christmas. L I blame my husband and his lack of editing help for this (he NEVER reads my blog, so he'll never see this.). I am convinced that all of my goofing off during the month of June had nothing to do with it. Nothing whatsoever. And I'm stickin' by that.
On a more positive note, I am quite pleased with my current WIP. I thought it was going to be a ghost story, but it has morphed into a supernatural detective story. I really like the main character and the story is evolving nicely. It may even turn into a series. We'll see …
Finally, I must sing the praises of one of my favorite new authors and mySpace friends, Justine Musk. I just finished her book Bloodangel and it's one of the best books I've read this year. Really, really good. If you enjoy supernatural apocalyptic stories, I'd say you oughta pick it up.
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