February 2012
16 posts
Perfection
Last week on American Idol, one of the hopefuls was cut. Afterwards, she said, “I don’t know what the judges want. I sang every song perfectly.” I shook my head when I heard that because I am not a musician, but every musician I know is acutely aware of every mistake in every performance. There are no perfect performances. Every writer I know hates reading from published...
Gender Masquerades #7: Bones
A friend pointed out to me recently that there is no reverse gendered form of the word “tomboy.” Try to think of one. The problem is that any word describing a male as having feminine aspects has very negative connotations. Because being feminine is negative in our culture. Being masculine, on the other hand, is positive. You may get women who seem disapproving if a girl is a...
Friday Tri: How to Enter a Running Store
The first time I walked into a running store, I was a little nervous. I’ve seen people walking into a running store for the first time on numerous occasions since then and I see the same nervousness in their eyes. So, let me help you. When you enter a running store, you will see racks of sporty clothes, running shorts, bra and shirts. You may have to walk through these in order to get...
Thursday Quotes: Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth...
This is the last entry: March 20: “My birthday. I’m 17 and I’m alive and we have food… Because it was my birthday, Mom let me decide what we were going to have. I found a box of macaroni and cheese. It was as close to pizza as we could get… . The electricity comes and goes, so we don’t know when we’ll be able to depend on it. We have firewood for a...
Writing Wednesday: "Streamlining" Your Career
At LTUE last week, I was on a panel about what mistakes we had made as authors (and one illustrator) and what we would do better if we could do it again. I thought it was a good idea for a panel, though it left things pretty loose. I talked a bit about editors and agents. Then an audience member raised his hand and asked, “Tell us how we can streamline our careers by not making the same...
Book Recs--Theodora Goss
The Thorn and the Blossom by Theodora Goss I read about this book and knew I had to have it. The gimmick is that the book is a romance written from both the male and female point of view. The book has no spine, so you can read the male romance on one side and you flip it over for the other. It is just the kind of book I love because it is about two characters in an academic department coming...
Friday Tri: What have you left unfinished?
I’ve talked about DNF’s before and how painful it is for someone who thinks of him/herself as an athlete to go to a race and discover not only can s/he not do as well as expected, but cannot even finish it. This has only happened to me once, but it’s still something I think about a lot. And I’m an amateur. I don’t primarily identify myself as a triathlete....
Writing Wednesday: Waiting to Share
When I was a beginning writer, I heard about a much more experienced writer who had left our writing group and rarely shared her books with people until she had finished them. Even then, she tended only to ask for her agent and editor to read her book. This seemed a little arrogant to me. We talked a bit snarkily about it in the group and said that she should really be taking more advice from...
Gender Masquerades #5: Miles Vorkosigan
Miles is introduced to the reader in The Warrior’s Apprentice as he tries to take the physical portion of the test to get into the Imperial Academy and follow in his father’s footsteps. The problem: he is physically damaged from an attack on his pregnant mother that has left him a dwarf with very brittle bones. He is, however, so brilliant, that he can get a very low score on the...
Monday Book Recs--Shannon Hale's Midnight in...
I have been waiting with great anticipation for Shannon Hale’s sequel to Austeland. I loved the first, but I wasn’t sure how she would manage to write a sequel that didn’t feel like a retread. I should have trusted Shannon’s brilliance more. She wrote both the sequel I wanted and a new book that was surprising all along the way. The problem is that saying too much...
Friday Tri: Running Tips
1. Keep your arms at a ninety degree angle. Too acute and you risk shoulder pain. To obtuse and you may not be running as efficiently as you could be.
2. Don’t let your arms overswing in front. They should swing back and forth, but not side to side.
3. Keep your stride rate between 90-100 at all times even when running easily. Try to shorten your stride and see how much easier it...
Writing Wednesday: Voices on the Edge
I’ve been known to say that voice is the part of your writing that is wrong, the mistakes you make in grammar, the “faults” that take your particular story out of the norm, that your English teacher would correct. The part of your writing that your copy editor is telling you to change and that you have to have the courage to “stet.” As I’ve been watching...
Gender Masquerade #5: Cordelia Naismith
Cordelia is presented to the reader as a female commander of a crew. She ends up in a tricky situation with an enemy and has to go o a forced march to protect one of her crew members who has suffered a terrible brain injury. Over the course of this forced march, she falls in love with Aral Vorkosigan, the captain of the enemy. In some ways, it’s a typical romance plot. In other ways,...
Book Recs--Kenneally and Wells
Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally I loved the idea of a girl as a high school quarterback. There was a part of my brain that kept insisting that this was sheer fantasy, that it could never happen. Because girls are too fragile, too weak, and the prejudice is just too much against them. But the author was clever enough to give that voice a name in the book, and doubly clever to make that...
Friday Tri: Swimming Drills
Swimming Tips
It’s hard to learn how to swim as an adult, especially if you are athletic as a runner or biker. The rules are very different. Whereas running and biking are all about your heart and aerobic capacity, swimming is all about your technique. You should float in the water, and you should feel comfortable. You should have a part of your stroke that is pure glide, where you aren’t...
Writing Wednesday: Characters Who Feel Real
When I read a book, I want to have the feeling that the characters live on long after I turn the final page. I want to have the feeling that they lived before the story opened, and that there are, in fact, many smaller or larger stories, that could be told about these characters, but which for artistic reasons the author has chosen not to tell. I want to feel as if the scenes I read about could...
January 2012
17 posts
Gender Masquerades #4: The Holiday
Amanda (Cameron Diaz) explains to Graham (Jude Law) that her parents broke up when she was in her teens. She has been unable to cry since and she says that something is wrong with her. Her boyfriend complained that she is not very good in bed, apparently because she doesn’t like much foreplay. Two fairly traditional male characteristics establish this very feminine-looking character:...
Monday Book Recs--Parker
I finished reading Sixkill, Robert Parker’s final Spenser novel. I’ve read all the Spenser novels. I’ve liked all of them to one degree or another, and this one was good. I thought that the character of Sixkill was a little too much like the wisecracking Hawk only less politically correct. I liked the mystery itself and how it unfolded. I always like the sparseness of...
Friday Tri: Strengths and Weaknesses
There are two theories on how to improve in almost any sport. Theory #1 is that you should figure out what your weaknesses are and work on them until they aren’t weaknesses anymore. Theory #2 is to figure out what your strengths are and to make them so strong that no one can touch you there and don’t worry about your weaknesses because you’ll compensate for them in other...
Writing Wednesday: What Are You Afraid Of?
When talking about my frustrations with my writing process, which is generally writing drafts of new projects rather than focusing on trying to fix a project that someone has shown interest in or that I love, a friend asked me, “What are you afraid of, Mette?” I don’t usually think of myself as someone who reacts out of fear and at first, my response was to say, I’m...
I'm doing manuscript critiques again
If you are interested, contact me at mette@argonautfilms.com and we can talk specifics. Basically, I charge $1 per 250 words and I prefer to read YA MG and adult genre fiction (sf/f). I usually ask for you to send me a one sentence description of the book before I go forward with it, and I critique the manuscript, query letter, and synopsis all at the same time. I send comments in text in...
My Gender Masquerade: Mette/Eddie →
Friday Tri: 10% Rule for Running and Illness
In running, there is a good rule of thumb that you don’t increase more than 10% per week in mileage. Also, you don’t increase your longest long run from week to week by more than 10%. So this means you can’t cheat by taking a day off and then adding that to your next day’s workout if it ends up being more than 10% more than the long workout the week before. If you are...
Thursday Quotes: Stephanie Perkins Nola and the...
I was just talking to a friend about what I find romantic, and it’s always the anticipation. The tiny movements. The first time your hand touches his. The first time you see him looking at you back. Not a lot of romance novels seem to get that, at least in a way that works for me. They seem to be about sex, but to me, sex isn’t romance. Then today, I was reading this, and I...
Gender Masquerades #3: Vincent in Gattaca
Gattaca is about two brothers, Vincent (the elder and genetically inferior) and Anton (the younger and genetically modified, superior) who compete with each other throughout childhood and then live very separate lives. Vincent has been told that he is likely to live only until age 30, that he has a heart defect, and that he is myopic and has a high probability of developing mental disorders....
Friday Tri: Why People Fail
So last week, I talked about my belief that you can get what you want, that there isn’t any magic in it, that other people don’t have some special power or talent that you don’t have. But people often fail to get what they want, and I thought it would be useful to talk about why. I was going to make up a big long list, but in the end, it only came down to variations of one thing:...
Thursday Quotes: Neil Gaiman's Dream Country
I believe that writer’s block has nothing to do with writers not having ideas, and everything to do with fear blocking those ideas. Sometimes the fix is external, figuring how to change your life so that you can deal with the fear. Sometimes it’s internal, figuring out for the first time (or the eightieth) how to get past the voices in your head that tell you you can’t write. So...
Writing Wednesday: Authenticity
In the years I was depressed not so long ago, I remember talking to my therapist about what it felt to have interaction with other people. I felt as if they were all robots, bumping into my robot shape, and trying to figure out how to get me to “function properly.” That is, they were looking for a certain basic response to a question—will you do this for me? And I either did...
Gender Masquerade #2: George in Being Human (UK)
Some of you are already anticipating the posts I have planned for the future, and I will get to Bones and The Fringe, along with some romantic comedies. But today it’s George from Being Human. I don’t know how many US viewers have seen the series, and I have to warn you, there will be spoilers in my discussion here, so sorry if you’re planning to see it or in the middle of...
Monday Book Recs--James, Dobson, Kirby
Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James Yeah, so I love Pride and Prejudice and this was an easy sale. It did a lot of the things I wanted, like do a passable Jane Austen voice so that I could almost imagine this is what Jane Austen would write, if she did murder mysteries. It also brought Wickham, Elizabeth, and Darcy back together in tense circumstances. Wickham was not quite a villain, but...
Friday Tri: I Would Do Anything to Look Like You
We all have our vanities. I do not care one little peanut about wrinkles on my face or gray hair. I don’t care about how my hair looks. I wash it and comb it and that’s about it. I sometimes wear nice-ish clothes if I feel like it and they are also comfortable. Don’t even get me started on the subject of shoes. But I suppose I do have certain vanities. I am a little vain...
Writing Wednesday: It's the End of the World as I...
Years ago, I read Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold when it first came out, one of the few hardcovers I allowed myself to buy at a time when I was desperately struggling financially. I love almost everything by Bujold, but this book holds a special place in my heart because it was about a character who was giving up everything he thought he ever wanted, hit rock bottom in all conceivable ways,...
This is a new series of blogs that harks back to my grad school days. I wrote my dissertation technically on male and female Bildungsromane of the late 18th century (Goethe and LaRoche). What I wanted to write was a defense of LaRoche as a real, literary writer. Ah, well. One of the interesting results of this was finding an interesting similarity between the two gendered versions of Bildung,...
December 2011
16 posts
Top Triathlon Moments of 2011
1. Tweeting Ironman St. George (and taking off an hour from last year’s time) 2. Winning Bountiful Tri Overall (for women) 3. Taking an hour off my best time for annual 50 mile run 4. Taking 30 minutes off my best time for annnual Half Ironman (Utah Half) 5. Taking 20 seconds off my best time for annual 1650 yd swim 6. Taking 2nd place in April at annual showdown with favorite nemesis 7....
Top Family Moments of 2011
1. London with 17 and 16 2. The Utah Shakespeare Festival with 12 3. Running the 10k of Jordanelle with 17 after I finished my own race in record time 4. Teaching 9 to ride a bike 5. Watching my kids more excited to give presents at Christmas than to get them 6. Listening to 16 record an album of all new music in recording studio 7. Snuggling in the morning with my kids whenever possible 8....
Top Books of 2011
For the last week of the year, I am going to list top 10—more or less—lists for lots of categories. Today, it’s books: Favorite MG Books of 2011: A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place by Maryrose Wood Kat, Incorrigible by Stephanie Burgis The Inquisitor’s Apprentice by Chris...
Writing Wednesday: Beginning
A writer friend of mine once told me that he thought the most common mistake beginning writers made was that they started a novel too late. When he said it, I had this moment of revelation. This was exactly what was wrong with a novel I had written a year before and had been puzzling over how to fix. I went home, rewrote it over the next two months, sent it out again, and sold it. It was my...
Why I'm Not Paying For My Daughter To Go To MIT
This Saturday, 17 found out that she had been accepted to MIT. The countdown had begun several weeks before. Friday night, she could hardly sleep. We all gathered around her computer for the news and we cheered and made phone calls when we found out. My husband and I took the whole family out for lunch and dessert to celebrate. MIT has been her dream school for years. I was so happy for her....
Monday Books Rec--Leicht
Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht A young man is caught in two wars, one between the Catholics and the Protestants in 1975 Ireland, and one between the fallen and the fey. Liam is the half mortal child of a fey man and a mortal woman. He has the power to change into a huge wolf-like hound and a few other tricks. But he finds his own powers terrifying.Even in prison, when he is being tortured...
Friday Tri: Weight Lifting
I am surprised at how many people who want to be better athletes ignore this very simple way to prevent injuries and improve speed. Now, you don’t necessarily have to go to the gym and use machines to do weight lifting. You can do yoga or Pilates. You can get a ball and do exercises while you watch TV. You can do it all without ever once lifting any barbells or dumbbells and using the...
Wednesday Writing (on Thursday due to illness):...
One of the things my agent asks his clients to do periodically is to write a list of goals for our writing future, long term and short term. Which is easy. I always have long term and short term goals in mind. Then what he does is really scary, because he asks us to write down a wish or a dream we have for our writing, something that we can’t plan on or control, but that we still want,...
Thoughts from "You've Got Mail"
“Closing the shop is the brave thing to do … It is allowing yourself to imagine that you can do something else with your life.” Birdie. “People say that change is a good thing, but what they really mean is that something has happened to you that you desperately don’t want, and you have no choice but to accept that thing and move on.” Kathleen Kelly. I...
Friday Tri: Gear
When I finished this year’s 50 miler, I ended up having an interesting conversation with John, who did it the first year himself just for fun and since then is the main organizer. He said that the first year, a couple had signed up for the race and they walked every step together, holding hands. They signed up on a whim and neither of them had worn good running shoes. By the end of the...
Thursday Quotes: Terri Windling's The Wood Wife
Some quotes that really struck me about art and life: “I supported my ex-husband all through the lean years at the beginning of his career. I stopped writing poetry and hustled my butt getting every magazine assignment I could. Cooper was furious with me but I wouldn’t listen; I was in love, and ready to join that long tradition of the little woman behind the great man… I...
Wednesday Writing: Pretty Words
A friend asked me a few months ago to give advice in ten words or less about writing. Here it is: Clarity First, Pretty Words Second. I am always a little astonished when critics talk about my writing being “lush” or “beautiful.” That’s not at all what I aim for. I imagine in my mind that I try to write as clearly as possible. I tend to be ruthless with my...
Tuesday TV: How to Write Apocalyptic/Dystopian...
1. Ten minutes of normal life in a small town. Yes, it has to be a small town. If you want to show big city characters, you must show them in a community so it is like a small town. 2. The big apocalypse. Mushroom clouds. Aliens. Natural disasters. Plane crash. Whatever it is. Show it in detail, from multiple points of view. Must have lots of screaming. Several people should commit suicide....
Monday Book Recs: Haddix and Levine series for MG
Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden: I am reading through The Shadow Children books with my youngest son, 9, for the fourth time this year. The first in the series is Among the Hidden and I think it is one of the smartest sf books for middle grade ever. Luke is the third child who has to remain hidden or he will be killed by an oppressive government. He survives by enjoying his...
Friday Tri: Visualization
I spend some time almost every time doing visualization about my races. A lot of the time, it is reevaluating what I’ve done in past races. When it’s before a race, I try to do positive visualization of the steps in the race. I think it really does help, especially in triathlon when you have to be moving from one discipline to the next one and transition times can really matter.
What...
Thursday Quotes: Robin Hobb's Assassin's...
“In truth, I was his only failure that year, but I was a monumental one. He preceded us home to Buckkeep, where he abdicated his claim to the throne. By the time we arrived, he and Lady Patience were gone from court, to live as the Lord and Lady of Withywoods. I have been to Withywoods. Its name bears no relationship to irs appearance. It is a warm valley, centered on a gently flowing...
November 2011
21 posts
Writing Wednesday: Capacity for Failure
People talk to me about their dreams of becoming a writer for obvious reasons. I sometimes find myself making judgments in my mind about whether or not they will be successful. I could be absolutely wrong about these judgments. I have not done a scientific survey, but the number one factor in successful writers that I see is the capacity to absorb failure. Not just to throw out a manuscript...