Harry Potter fun stuff... (no spoilers on this page)

I just read of an interview Ms. Rowling did, live, on the interwebs, in which she disclosed some of those answers people have been wanting -- I can't even say what type of answers. But if you've read Deathly Hallows or just want some spoilers, have at it.

I take on the dark and stormy night.

Nobody guessed my newsbit, but that's okay. I'll share anyhow.

The results of the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton "Worst First Line" contest are posted, and I know you all can't wait to see... (drum roll)... my dishonorable mention! Yes, I received a nod in the Detective category, and props to Amber for doing the same under Purple Prose. (Amber is the world's best beta reader -- hands off, she's mine -- and I don't actually know if she's aware she placed, because the internet gods have been frowning on her.)

In the spirit of representation, I thought I should include this link to a defense of Mr. Bulwer-Lytton.

The poor man's name aside, I have loved this contest for years, but it only just occurred to me this year to try my hand at the craft of writing bad sentences (*** on purpose). I was excited to hear I'd won a spot on the results page, although they did actually, in posting my vile sentence, correct my character's poor grammar, which I found highly perplexing. For my character Juliette, whose long and complicated past no doubt includes dancing on some sort of pole and rubbing silk hankies across the foreheads of octogenarians, would certainly misuse "whom" by substituting it for a plain old correct "who".

The gods at San Jose State did not agree.

Anyway, I thought I would post that for your reading pleasure. There are always a couple that make me just about fall out of my chair.

Here's my favorite from last year:

"Captain Burton stood at the bow of his massive sailing ship, his weathered face resembling improperly cured leather that wouldn't even be used to make a coat or something."
Bryan Semrow
Oshkosh, WI

Got a favorite from the new batch? Post it in the comments here!

Sharing one's feelings through fabric.

One of the things I'm obsessed with sewing lately is coasters. The "why" of it is easy -- they take about ten minutes each, meaning that I can start and finish a project in the span of an hour. I've made poker-themed coasters for the husb, I've made Caribbean-style coasters for the in-laws, and I've made admittedly countrified coasters for the downstairs family room:


But that wasn't enough for me. Sure, I liked my coasters, but not everyone needs or wants six matching fabric coasters. And as my craft goal is to slowly infiltrate the whole world with my creations, I decided to take a practical approach and find a way to make a coaster that serves its owner on more than one level.

The result is called "Moody Coasters", and I'm very proud of them. Basically, instead of having one patterned side and one plain-colored backing, they have two patterns. One is cheerful, or some object or image that makes a person think happy thoughts. The other side is bad and sad and evokes feelings of anger and rage (okay, maybe not that extreme).

This way, when you're in a good mood, you show the world the happy side of your coaster, and people who drop by your desk/kitchen table/wherever you're drinking will know that you're having a good day and it's safe to tell you the TPS reports will be late. But show your bad side and those same folks will run away in terror.

Here's an example... these are the first ones I ever sewed, and incidentally are up for grabs. If you want them, just ask, and I'll drop them in the mail.



Since sewing those, I've started personalizing the coasters for the people I work with. My goal is that everyone remotely connected to the dog show will have his or her own moody coaster with images that enrage or delight on a very personalized level. So far I've done Snoopy on a surfboard (good) vs. a tractor (bad), and butterflies (good) vs. ballerina fairies (bad).

I'll post a coaster how-to very soon. Happy Sunday!

The one where I realize what a nerd I am.

** A teensy bitlet of cool news tomorrow... like, really teensy... maybe only cool to me! A Moody Coaster and pop panties to anyone who can figure it out before I post it. **

(I mean teensy like teeny-tiny... nothing about a book deal or being accepted as a contestant on Project Runway -- not that I've applied -- or anything like that.)

I'm not going to blog about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, because many have done it before me and better. I finished it last Sunday and I thought it was pretty good. Especially considering all that Ms. Rowling was up against -- how much information she had to share. Man, I want to sell enough books to be a billionaire. That would be cool. Even a ten-millionaire would probably be good enough to keep me from complaining.

So this won't be a long post. We're actually going to try to see the new Harry Potter (ha ha ha, first I typed "Pooter", I'm such a fourth-grader at heart) movie.

One of the great features of Los Angeles is the presence of our fantastic outdoor amphitheatres. There are four that I know of within ten miles of my house. No, five. I've only been to two -- the Hollywood Bowl and the Greek. Just this past Thursday night, we went to the Greek to see Lyle Lovett and his Large Band. kd lang opened, which was awesome. She has The Voice, in my opinion.

Lyle and his band put on a great show. He is the consummate performer -- he makes you feel like you're in good hands. The lighting was gorgeous, the musicians were grand, the repartee was clever.

See, despite whatever else we have or don't have in LA, we don't have mosquitoes. And we do have a desert climate that means all but the hottest of days will cool into a criminally pleasant evening.

So if you're ever here in the summer, I exhort you: go to the Hollywood Bowl. Or the Greek. Or the Ford. Or the Starlight Bowl. Or that one at Universal Studios.

Oh! And, while at the Greek, I had one of those rare moments of self awareness. I saw a woman at the condiment station wearing a jacket that seemed to be made out of one of those Franklin Mint throw blankets. The back was a full-color illustration of a Papillon (a small, active toy breed whose ears resemble the wings of a butterfly).

I thought to myself, "Oh, dear. Now here's a character for you. A woman who goes to a Lyle Lovett concert wearing a jacket with a picture of a dog on the back."

And then I paused.

And then I realized that I was wearing my hoodie that Sue made for me.

And here is what Sue screen-printed on the back of that hoodie:



That's all.

Holy cow!

I can't linger because I'm in the middle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I had to drop in and say that our little movie won "Best in LA" at the 48-Hour Film Project! They screened 17 films as the "best of", and some of them were seriously clever and well-made. Ours was dead last in the lineup and a totally different tone than just about all of the rest of them.

They were giving out awards, and a couple were given out that we thought it would have been nice to have won -- our friend who's a great sound designer (among other talents) won the editing award for his film... so we were resigned to having been in the screening and that being enough. Right before they announced the last award, it vaguely crossed my mind that maybe I should touch up my lipstick, in case we had to go onstage. Then I dismissed that as silly.

When the guy called the name of our movie, I gasped really loudly. It was the only sound in the auditorium. Then the three of us who were there (the husb, who directed; sister-in-law, who produced; and I, who wrote it) went onstage and briefly babbled some nonsense.

It was so crazy! Very cool for the husb to get the recognition he deserves.

The super crazy part?

Ten teams each from New York, LA, and San Francisco are invited to participate in another round for Visa... We have to do the whole thing again in September!

Diet Coke skirt (aka, "pop panties")

I love craft blogs and I read them when I can. I especially like those with lots of pictures -- double especially if they're things I think I might be able to figure out how to make by myself.

I've only been sewing for about a year -- I got my machine in May of 2006. It doesn't seem like I've done a lot, but the volume of things I've produced is actually pretty impressive. My first projects were dog quilts -- miniaturized machine-pieced quilts for my dog and the dogs of friends. Since then, I've moved on to human quilts, wrap skirts, coasters by the dozen, and various random projects like purses and skirts for Diet Coke cans.

I'm hoping this blog will be a place I can express my creative visual side, ranging from sewing to photography to things that inspire me.

Grab the RSS feed and I'll try not to be a bore!

First project: the Diet Coke skirt.

Conceived because every day when I get to work, I take my warm can of Diet Coke out of my bag, tape a Post-It over the tab, and put it in the fridge. I started to feel bad about wasting Post-Its, because they can't be reused (they get messed up during the mad frenzy to drink the cold Diet Coke).

So my crafty friend Sue (that's a pseudonym because Sue has hinted in the past that she doesn't like being blogged about) and I were joking about making little outfits for our soda cans. That would ensure easy identification -- both in the fridge, where unlabeled sodas are liable to get claimed by the masses, and out of the fridge, because who besides a select few would want to carry around a Diet Coke wearing a skirt?

I'm actually quite happy with it. The colors are so cheery. I'm probably going to make one or two more, because sometimes just one Diet Coke won't do.

Because I hate wasting Post-Its, that's why.

Sorry I've been so slow with responding to comments lately! I've been a little swamped. Who knew multi-tasking was so much work?

I got notes on TGLL from the Delightful Editor -- she had some thoughtful insights that I'm excited to address. This whole situation has been such a lesson in the realities of publishing. I never imagined that I would be one of Those Authors -- the ones whose editors leave. You hear about that happening, and you just kind of hope it doesn't happen to you and you also kind of assume it won't. But I know now that it can happen to anyone.

It was scary at first. An editor is the book's staunchest advocate within the publishing house. No matter how great and supportive all of the other people there are, a book belongs to its editor, and s/he is the one who shepherds it through the process. Switching editors is like switching shepherds: the sheep think, "Is he nice? Does he like our wool? Will he feed us as much as the other shepherd did? Will he still want to hang out with us, even though he's not the one who picked us out of the sheep lineup at the livestock auction?"

Okay, so clearly I don't know a lot about sheepherding (except which dogs do it best), and I don't know what the process is like for other authors in other situations.

But for me, it's going as smoothly as I could have hoped. And I can honestly say that the book will be better for another pair of eyes. And the Delightful Editor is as charming and funny and fun as the Lovely Editor (which is probably why they're such good friends). And as I looked over her notes, I got a very clear and comforting feeling that she had truly invested herself in the material. Her take on everything is fresh and exciting and great.

A few years ago, I worked in TV development, conceiving and writing up pitches for shows for kids and young adults. Though it was a collaborative group setting, I had one project that I adopted as mine -- I wrote it, I outlined characters, I shaped the development of anything that hadn't been settled on by the team (and even some things that had been). I worked on that document until my eyeballs just about bled. I knew it frontwards, backwards, and upside down. I knew every word. Then the company folded and the project got shelved. Boo! Hiss!

But the really important part came about a year later, when I found a copy of the document in my files and looked it over.

My reaction while reading could easily be summed up as: "Hmm."

As in, "Hmm, I could tighten that. Hmm, that part is a little long. Hmm, why would the main character do that? Hmm, I think this needs to be fleshed out."

And then the big one: "Hmm. I can't believe I thought this was perfect!"

Nothing is ever perfect. Of course, you have to know when to stop or the book could end up, you know, never finished, but there's also something to be said for a spit-shine. And the more time you have away from something, and the more truly caring and invested people look at it (and these need to be people who are willing to dig in and work from the core of the project), the better it will be thanks to those eyes.

And that is why a book I thought was grrrrrrreat thanks to the input of the Lovely Editor is going to be, in my opinion, supergrrrrrreat thanks to the input of the Delightful Editor. In fact, one of her offhand comments in an email became the basis for an element that I think is going to help tie some things together in a really cool way.

The other things I've been busy with: walking the dog in the morning, writing 2000 words a day on the WIP, working on the dog show, and sewing the object below, because I keep sodas in the fridge at work and I got tired of wasting new Post-Its every day just to keep grubby paws off my hard-won Diet Cokes.



(Yes, that's underwear elastic, but I bought it brand-new, I swear.)

Have another girl cheese sandwich!

The other day I came across this absolute gem of a website: I Used to Believe. It's a website where users submit beliefs from their childhood. Looking over the highest-rated submissions had me literally crying and shaking with laughter at work the other day.

I also learned something from the Common Beliefs page. I am not the only person who thought that:

Getting fired meant they set you on fire.

They handed you a baby on the way out of church after your wedding.

You lived to be exactly 100 and then died.

You can get sucked down the plughole (the tub drain).

I also thought that bathing suits were called "baby suits" and grilled cheese was "girl cheese" and boys weren't allowed to eat it.

Ah, youth.

On a totally unrelated note, we went shopping yesterday for a birthday card, and Hallmark has an entire section now devoted to cards that play sounds! They have tons of them, everything from music to dialogue from movies and TV shows. The husb wouldn't let me listen to many of them because he thought it was embarrassing to stand in the store and make all that noise. So we moved on to Shoebox, the old standby. But apparently some people ARE allowed to listen to cards in the store, because two of the cards at the party we went to were of that variety.

I never get to have any fun.

We went to the beach prior to joining the party, and Winston had a marvelous time. He started out digging for a giant rock and barking at it, then moved on to chasing the tennis ball down the beach, then keeping the tennis balls out of the water (which involves barking at the water), then chased tennis balls into the water.



For such a little dog, he's a pretty good athlete. He is majorly addicted to playing at the beach. In fact, when it was time to go, the husb said, "Let's try letting him walk without the leash," which we've done before (it's not near any roads or cars or anything), and it's usually fine because he's so tired. But this time he just kept running back down to the beach and making all the people down there catch him and bring him back up to us, which was embarrassing. So I put him on the leash.

Today he has major play hangover. I think we all do. I'm so sore. But I'm going to the fabric store and Sue is coming over and we're going to try to sew a skirt.

I want to know what you used to believe when you were a child. Bonus points if it makes me snort coffee out my nose.

Glorifying the tendency to victimize.

I once joked in Robin's blog (in fact, I think it was the first comment I ever left there) that my book has no sex, drugs, or drinking -- only violence.

The memory of this came to mind when I watched a Quicktime trailer for the new Elisha Cuthbert (don't worry, Mary, if you don't know who she is) movie Captivity. As far as I could tell from what I watched of it (not much) and the ginormous billboard on my way home from work, the title pretty much says it all. Somebody captures Elisha Cuthbert, and then proceeds to do terrible things to her for probably something like 108 minutes.

Uh...

Is it just me, or do we not need movies like this? More specifically, do teenagers not need movies like this? This and Saw and its two sequels, and apparently some gorefest called Hostel, and its sequel...

These aren't stories about fighting FOR something. These are stories of sadism -- grotesque, exploitative, lowering-the-common-denominator sadism.

When I use violence, I like to think that (1) it's a last resort for my character, and (2) she is actually fighting for something. She is fighting on the side of good, because fighting is what good people do when they must do it.

(This is not about the war, by the way.)

I feel very prickly and old-fashioned today, thinking about that movie. I mean, lately I have been horrified by stories of people abusing animals, abusing children, abusing one another. Acting out the principles of senselessly mindless violence that have somehow always found an audience.

I don't know. It just seems strange that a nationful of people who thought the sight of Janet Jackson's breast was worth a $550,000 punishment are sitting idly by while their youth, already saturated with marketing and advertisements, are now being spoonfed a sadistic story where the creativity glorified is the ability to cause and create pain, humiliation, and suffering, rather than finding ways to conquer it.

I mean, sure, the girl probably has a Very Empowering Scene at the end where she stands over her tormenter and says some Very Serious Things in a Very Harsh Voice, and then she probably shoots him or something, but I'll bet the majority of the film isn't spent tracking the development of a clever and ingenius plan to thwart him.

I can't help the feeling that thousands of people are going to come out of that movie a trifle less human than they went into it.

Bah!

Sometimes you just walk across the room.

A couple of years ago, I made a conscious effort to read like a writer. By which I mean, pay closer attention not just to the story and characters and what works and what doesn't, but to the writing itself. My book has some action in it, and I found myself struggling with writing clean fight scenes, etc.

The book that made it most clear to me was The Alienist. Okay, this is not my favorite book of all time, but I certainly didn't hate it, and I found a valuable lesson in its pages. Specifically, during a scene in the climax of the book, something of a fight scene.

Forgive me for paraphrasing, as I have not had that particular book in my hands for nigh on two years, but it went something like this: He walked across the room and slapped the man.

No call for meaningful similes. No purple prose. No flowery description of a fight.

Action in real life is quick and hard. Often, you only have time to realize something is occuring before it stops happening.

Action in books can happen the same way. I would say should, but I don't feel like taking a hardline stance.

Especially in first-person, the POV of my main character, a 15-year-old girl who hasn't seen a lot of fighting in her life. Is she going to stand by and flower on at the mouth, or is she going to call events and respond to them as she sees them?

I think the latter.

(I hope the latter, because that's what I wrote.)

How authors really make their living.

Last night, I dreamed that Therese Fowler and Pat Wood tried to get me to rob a bank with them. I initially agreed, but then there was an announcement, really more of a plea, stating that there was word of an intended bank robbery and would the robbers please reconsider? I did change my mind, and then I had to call Therese and tell her, and she said, "I knew what you were going to say." And she was pretty gracious about it, but I was a little worried they were going to send a hitman after me.

I think I had too much caffeine with dinner.

Speaking of dreams, the night before last, I dreamed that we were doing the 48-Hour Film Festival again, trying to come up with a script. And the woman I was on a team with (whoever she was) had this really terrible idea, and I kept saying, "What's the conflict? What's the conflict?" and she said, "He tells her he doesn't like the barbecue sauce," and then when I insisted that this was not enough to carry a story, she fired me from the team.

I'm not sure if there's a conclusion to be drawn from this or not, except maybe that I took this blog entry over at Pub Rants more seriously than I knew at the time.

We have friends in town. They are seeing the sights while I see the monitor on my desk over at the dog show.

Maybe I should change my mind about that bank thing.

Gadget love and film festival notes.

Item #1: My iPhone.

"Sue" (should I say her last name is "Donym"? Get it? Get it? Huh? Huh?) and I left the house Friday at approximately 12:20 pm. We arrived at the mall at 12:40ish. I immediately started worrying because there were SO many cars pulling into the garage. Sue was pointing out how most of them were blue-haired old ladies, or tarts, and trying to calm me down. We went inside to find a pretty long line. Much longer than I had expected. We found a spot at the back, next to a woman with an adorable 9-year-old daughter, and Sue went to count the folks ahead of us -- 133.

I have no idea what we did all day. I spent a lot of time anxious that at 5:59 p.m., one minute before the phones officially went on sale, four hundred billion people would join their friends in line ahead of us. My anxiety was quite wasted, though, because not only were mall security peeps on the lookout for people giving frontsies and backsies, but at one point, the police showed up and ticketed lineskippers for disturbing the peace! People who attempted to jump into line also earned the loud derision of the crowd behind them, and a walk of shame down the line after being expelled.

(Did I mention that Sue didn't even WANT one? She just came with me for support, and to buy two for my friends? What a gal.) So we got the iPhones, came home, tried to hook them up, and encountered the same activation glitches as all the millions of other iPhone users across the country. We told ourselves that it would work soon enough, and left to attend to...

Item #2: 48-Hour Film Festival.

The screening was Friday night. They'd divided the 80-some entries into groups of 10, made up of various genres. I am pleased to report that ours held up very well. The festival producer found the husb at a bar later and was very complimentary. We also had a great showing from our cast and crew, lots of audience support. Here are a few observations, which also function as the advice I promised Miss Scarlet I would post.

* Almost every film, regardless of genre, descended into a kind of slapstick. Our film was Sci-Fi, and very serious from start to finish. I'm not saying the slapstick wasn't funny, or that the seriousness made ours sooo much better, but it really stood out.

* Cheesy things: Guns (every time). Spy movies that are just about one event, like "stealing the jewel". Female vamp characters played by women who don't really know how to vamp. Dream sequences, especially when the locations don't support it (e.g., the "running to one another through a field of wildflowers" bit, but played at the local playground or in someone's teeny backyard).

* Stuff I'm glad we did: Had an original score, thanks to a some musician friends. Shot the very first scenes almost last, after the crew and actors were in the groove. Minimized the fake blood on set. Kept all of our shooting locations fairly close to home base. Had people fill out their paperwork early, before things got insane. Incorporated the prop (a bumper sticker) in a way that supported the story -- some people just had bumper stickers stuck on shirts or butts, etc. Had a boatload of extras ready to help us. Had really great actors pre-booked.

* Stuff we didn't do that we should have: spent some time Friday night breaking down the script. Created graphics we knew we would need early on, because you will never ever have time to do it later (we didn't really). Had more clearly delineated jobs on set.

We went into it with a vague story idea, thinking we would completely (probably) ditch it when we found out our genre. What we ended up making actually was a variation on that original idea. So if we did it again, I would have a set of vague ideas that I felt strongly about -- not necessarily all fleshed out, but a germ I know could grow.

Another thing I would do is figure out what "types" my actors could play. We ended up using two of ours as government agent-type people. They did a great job, and it actually works very well (in my humble opinion), but as we were shooting, I found myself wondering how I had ended up writing two such stereotypical characters. I think because in fiction, you have the power to take any stereotypical character and either make him part of the scenery, or give him quirks and lessen the stereotype -- I just didn't think about how quickly a visual type is established when a character is seen onscreen. And had we tried to go for a quirk, in a supporting character, it would have pulled too much attention away from the A storyline. Happily, the actors and the editing elevated the characters above what I had written.

Lesson learned, I hope.

The screening was fun, and I'm all amped to write more scripts for the husb to direct. He is very talented and swoonworthy, if I do say so myself.

Item #3: back to my iPhone.

Saturday noonish I called the Apple 800# that had been out of order the previous night. Shockingly, I got through, and after spending maybe a minute and a half on hold, I spoke to a human who told me he was putting my activation through. Sure enough, the phone started working soon after. I did a bunch of hoodoo to get the husb's phone working as well, and then I started playing.

Syncing is SO easy. You can choose playlists of music, albums of photos, groups from your contacts, calendars from iCal, email accounts from Mail. I got a Yahoo! address, which is the kind that lets the phone act as a Blackberry, where you get the email as soon as it arrives. I put my zip codes into the weather widget, loaded up a little album of Winston photos, a couple gigabytes of music, and voila...

It's a really beautiful thing.

Next task -- create a bookmarks menu of blogs that are not just the RSS feeds. The iPhone is not necessarily friends with RSS just yet.

But I heart it, bad. Especially for Mac users -- if you are about to spend a couple hundred dollars on a phone, and another couple hundred on a Blackberry, just get an iPhone instead. It is seriously fun and cool.

All right, my brother and sister-in-law are in town and will be back from their walk soon, so I'd better go get dressed. We're going down to funky Melrose Avenue for lunch and boutiquing.

Here's a photo taken with the iPhone... as you can see, he is not quite as enamored with this new gadget sibling as the husb and I are...