Colt Covers the Alphabet Song

A Definition of Bittersweet

Right back at you, Cordell. Right back at you.

Is This Legal in Nebraska?

Pete Hautman quote

“We look for ourselves in the places we want to find ourselves.” –Pete Hautman

Reading Like a Wolf Eats

I laughed when I saw this photo of Stephen King and immediately made it my laptop wallpaper for the week. In a week I’ll be escorting a group of high schoolers to a Colorado Rockies game, and this gives me an idea of what I can do while I’m there since I’m unbearably bored by professional baseball.

Some people, aka my husband, complain about my incessant reading. My adorable and amazing mentor says I’m the most voracious reader he’s ever worked with.

It’s my escape, though. I don’t watch much TV–ignore the fact that I’m currently watching The Presidents on the History Channel and that I’m in love with The Borgias. Or maybe I decided I would be in love with them, so I am.

But I read books the way some people watch movies or landscape yards or fix-up cars or whatever else people do in the spare time. It’s my way to unwind, to relax, to get away from the world.

I think it was Gary Paulsen who wrote “Read like a wolf eats.” He also said in his memoir to read constantly, even while you’re eating, if you want to be a good writer. Lucky for me, I’ve been reading during my meals since I was about 12, or at least when it wasn’t a “family meal.”

And thanks to SK, I know what I’ll be doing next Monday, April 18th, when the Rockies are playing whoever they’re playing.

We Can Dance if We Want to…

Venn Diagrams can clarify any social situation.

Snipehunters and Iron Lungs

Today I read chapter one of Richard Duggin’s new YA novel Snipehunters. It’s in the quarterfinals for Amazon’s Breakthrough YA novel award. Grab yourself a free excerpt here. Rate it. Review it. Send it through to semi-finals.

Richard’s book is a boy’s coming of age story, circa 1950s in the midst of the Cold War and polio. Polio is what struck me most interesting about the chapter, the mother’s obsession with her son contracting polio and her son’s descriptions of the iron lungs, large ventilators that reminded him of coffins.

I remember first learning about the iron lung on 60 Minutes. I was young, maybe 8 years old, and I was incredulous to find that some, albeit very few, people spend most of their lives in them.

Of course, that news story must have run over 20 years ago, and I wondered if anyone actually still used the iron lung today.

In fact, they do. Approximately 30 people still use the contraption in their own homes. While most people needing respiratory help now use mechanical respirators, a few people suffer from rare afflictions that make mechanical respirators ineffective. Others simply prefer the traditional iron lung.

Richard’s book isn’t the first to touch on the iron lung. Margaret Atwood does in Cat’s Eye, and Elizabeth Berg fictionalizes the story of Pat Raming, the first woman in an iron lung to give birth, in her novel We are all Welcome Here.

I loved reading the excerpt of Snipehunters, and I’m not sure how big of a role, if any, the iron lung will play later in the book. But I love the fact that Richard included it—it’s clever, an almost-macabre symbol of that time period, and one that draws in readers.

Now if I can purge Richard’s voice from my head and hear a 13-year-old boy’s voice when I read the narration…

Revisions: Making the Cut

I’ve spent the past few days revising my most recent chapters of my work in progress.

And by revising, I mean cutting.

My mentor says that I put too much extraneous information in my scenes, which is obviously distracting to everyone by the writer, so my focus on this month’s work has been to cut, cut, cut, and leave a detritus of unnecessary words, phrases, and even whole sentences on the floor behind me.

What I did was single-space my draft, print it, and put it into a three-hole binder. With a blue pen, I curled up in my recliner and read. And cut. And sliced. And X’d out.

It was exhilarating, feeling the flow of the story without the extra action or comments. Now we’ll see what my mentor says.

The opening line of The Monstrumologist…

“The director of facilities was a small man with ruddy cheeks and dark, deep-set eyes, his prominent forehead framed by an explosion of cottony white hair, thinning as it marched toward the back of his head, cowlicks rising from the mass like waves moving toward the slightly pink island of his bald spot. His handshake was quick and strong, though not too quick and not too strong: He was accustomed to gripping arthritic fingers.”

-Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

Calvin and Hobbes and Writing Inspiration

Yes! The source of my writing inspiration has been nailed in this comic strip.