Mothering the Teen/Pre-teen Animal

Photo snapped by my paparazzi child

My parents warned me numerous times when my children were younger that once they reached the teen years my IQ would suddenly drop dramatically.

I was prepared for this. I even experienced it to a milder degree before my daughter officially became a teenager. What I didn't realize until recently was that once you become the parent of a teen and or pre-teen you unknowingly join the ranks of the criminal element.

It dawned on me just this morning as I was watching a youtube video of a symphony orchestra singing about being the parent of a baby or toddler. I longed to hear a composition about parenting a pre-teen and teen child. I thought it could be entitled "Why are You Mad at Me Now?"

Not only am I less intelligent in the eyes of my children. I'm also a criminal against decent society. I think I even outrank my husband in this felony.

Unlike my husband I ask them questions about stuff. Not just any questions, but really hard ones like, "How was your day?" or "Do you have homework?" Most of these questions elicit brusque one word responses like, "Good" or "Yes." Apparently in decent society these short answers are supposed to suffice and make me want to stop asking such invasive questions. But due to my severely lowered mental capacity now, I foolishly continue to question them about stuff in the hopes I might get a full sentence answer. This doesn't usually happen. Instead, the answers continue to be as short as possible and they get more and more brusque. Until finally I ask the worst question of all, "Why are you acting like you're mad at me?" The answer I ultimately receive to this is a very irritated, "I'm not!" But if you're going to join the ranks of the completely stupid I figure you might as well go big or go home. So I very maturely react to this by saying, "Yes you are. You're using you mad voice. I'm going to record you talking to me and play it back for you to prove it." I'm not a very good criminal. I broadcast my intentions too much and then they stop speaking to me altogether.

Other examples of my criminal activity. I constantly insist that they liked something before that they claim to think is boring now. For instance, last year my son, who is now a pre-teen, loved the idea of going to the pumpkin patch near my parent's home to get pumpkins. My dad has a contact (a commercial grower) who allows him to pick pumpkins for free in fields that have already been picked over numerous times. Both kids loved searching for pumpkins each October up there, during their fall break. This year my son informed me that this was boring and all of us but him would spend hours looking for pumpkins and waste an entire day. I was saddened to hear this and was adamant that he didn't always feel this way about pumpkin hunting. But lately he seems to think every idea we come up with is boring. Family vacation to see new places and things, boring. Picking out a costume for Halloween, boring. For someone who is only eleven I am flummoxed by his attitude. Now that I am a criminal against decent society with diminished intelligence I just don't get it.

My biggest crime against decent society is my humiliating habit of following them around everywhere they go, especially after school. I can't just let them go to their cross country meets without showing up there to cheer them on and take pictures. Having your picture taken is another bore my son is forced to endure. His sister doesn't seem to mind it as much. But she tries to pretend I'm not there when she is hanging out with her other teammates. As long as I remain with the other parent felons it is okay. But I'm not satisfied to stay with others of my kind. I actually talk to her and her teammates and walk around the field with her while she's cheering for the runners on the other teams. Worse, I ask her questions about why this or that person isn't racing. I'm sure this equals total embarrassment in her eyes. To be fair she doesn't actually say this. She simply walks faster to discourage me from wanting to walk with her. I guess it could be worse.

I'm hoping my status as a criminal against decent society is just a phase. In a few years with any luck I'll grow out of it and reclaim normal intelligence levels again. Until then I might as well embrace being a part of the criminal element. That being said, I better get going. I have another after school activity to get to with my camera.

Character Through Dialogue

My son a few summers back  with his fave transformer

Whether you write novels, screenplays, or plays, you have to use dialogue to help tell a story. Dialogue helps capture the essence of a character and is a handy tool to use to build tension and conflict into a scene no matter what the medium of story.

I usually feel pretty good about my dialogue and character interaction in my novels and short stories. Sure, I know that its never perfect. But when I'm on a roll and immersed in that fictional world, dialogue isn't usually one of the stumbling blocks that leaves me stuck. It isn't one of the parts of writing that I'm left wondering how to fix, either. Most of the time when someone critiques it they are very specific about why it didn't work for them. This doesn't mean I don't spend large chunks of time working through a scene of dialogue, fine tuning it and reworking it to convey what I want it to, because I do. Usually afterwards I'm emotionally drained from living out the scene through my characters.

Recently, however someone challenged me to do something I hadn't really thought about before. They asked me to show the reader that one of my characters spoke with a Spanish accent using dialogue. This made me sit up straighter. How do you write dialogue that makes the reader hear your character's accent? For the first time I was at a real loss. But I knew the answers were out there for me to find if I went looking for them. I started by searching the internet. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. There is so much information out there about writing and about half of it is less than helpful. So much so that I actually get sleepy at times slogging through it. This time the first article that came up was on a website, PenUltimate Editorial Services, put together by freelance editor Arlene Prunkl. Ms. Prunkl offers excellent advice on how to write dialects and foreign accents into your dialogue in an authentic and conscientious way. Doing my characters justice and not turning them into caricatures of people who speak English as a second language was one of my chief concerns.

Arlene Prunkl gave some terrific examples of contemporary authors who got this sort of thing right. One was an author I enjoy reading very much who writes about characters who live in the past in the Scottish highlands, Diana Gabaldon. Ms. Gabaldon is not from Scotland or the 18th century highlands. She is a native of Arizona and is probably younger than my parents. But she writes dialogue for her character Jamie Fraser that allows me as a reader to hear Jamie's highland accent clearly without ever realizing she's doing this primarily through her dialogue. I've read all the books in this series, starting with Outlander, and never once noticed it. How did she did she do this? By using a mixture of diction (word choice), syntax (word order), and idiom (native expression) in her dialogue. Ms. Prunkle pasted in an excerpt from the novel Outlander as an example, check out the article link to see it. She also lists past authors who've written dialect into their dialogue that doesn't work.

After reading her article on writing in dialects and accents for characters I realized there are numerous books that I've read that do this very thing. Not only that, there are movies that I've watched that do this well, too. The first Transformers, movie being a prime example. Think about it, Bumblebee has a very specific way of communicating that isn't necessarily a form of English we're familiar with. The screenplay for this movie helped convince us as viewers that Bumblebee using radio waves to communicate was a very believable thing for a sentient robot to do.

Arlene Prunkle went on to list nine key tips to follow when you are trying to convey accents or dialect into your character dialogue. The most helpful of which was to write out exactly what you want your character to say in dialogue first, then go back in and try to rearrange it in a way that sounds like something they would say in their particular dialect. Look at your verb choice and arrangement, use idioms sparingly, and concentrate on getting their diction and syntax correct. You can't do any of this, though until you know what you truly want them to say first.

So, I as I've been rewriting chapters and scenes in my book I haven't been worrying about the dialect of my character, yet. I want to get their dialogue down and the scene right before I tackle their dialect or conveying their accents. I also want to read some juvenile fiction by contemporary authors who've written the particular dialect I want to capture into their books. Learn from the masters that have been successfully published and established themselves as solid authors. I'm glad whoever suggested this to me, gave me this challenge. It has forced me to look at dialogue in way that I think will make me better at writing it. It's also made me aware of what others have done with dialogue to convey character. All good things.

What books have you read that have written dialect or accents into their character's dialogue and done it well? Have you read any books that have done this poorly? Please comment and list them here for anyone out there interested in tackling this type of dialogue writing. I highly recommend reading the article by Arlene Prunkle, too. Just click on the link for her website above.

Big Sigh of Relief

Back in School-1st Residency for my MFA at Spalding Univ.

This week it happened. I sent off my first packet for my independent study course for my MFA degree. Each semester we send out five packets to a mentor and get feedback on them. For three weeks I worried and argued with myself over the creative writing piece I was submitting.

I was fighting with the pacing of my novel. After submitting it out to agents and editors, working on it with my online critique group, even sending out excerpts to some of my book club friends, I was getting back the same response. The story had a great premise, the characters were believable, but the pace of the story was too slow and all of it needed dimension and more complexity to keep the readers wanting more.

I'd gotten as far as I could go on it. I needed help. So, I took the advice of another writer I met at a conference and looked into Spalding University's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. After thinking about it for another year I took the plunge and applied. I've mentioned my excitement at getting in. Going off to residency made me nervous and excited. But the other people I met there were great and as committed to becoming better writers as me. My workshop group was the best! I loved getting to know all of them. 

Then after 10 days of being immersed in an environment of other writers and creative people we were sent home to do our independent study. I was assigned my mentor at residency and met with her to create a plan on what I would submit of my writing and what books to read and analyze by writing short critical essays about them. Reading and writing everyday was pretty much what I'd been doing on my own. But now I would be letting someone new see my work. Always a bit frightening, even when you know they have your best interests at heart. 

I wrote and rewrote several chapters of my novel. Most of it I did longhand and a huge portion of it was drivel. I considered taking out one of my secondary characters completely. In the end, I left her in the story. But looking at it with fresher eyes after months of leaving it dormant and getting advice from my workshop group helped. In all of that rewritten drivel I managed to glean a few gems. I also cut out some stuff that wasn't important to my plot. I revised the chapters that lead up to the midpoint of my story and will see what happens. After all, this is why I came to Spalding in the first place. I am capable of fixing this story but need guidance to do it. The mentor I have is purported to be tough, but also terrific at helping writers learn the tools of they need for hard revision work. She may have to teach me to kill some of my darlings or at least cut them out of the story. In a day or two I will know for sure what she suggests. Either way, I will have a wealth of knowledge that I might have taken years to discover on my own and let's face it, I'm not getting any younger.

I will say that even if my submission comes back bleeding purple ink--sending it off felt like a huge accomplishment. I did give a big sigh of relief. And I rewarded myself by watching old episodes of the Wonder Woman TV series that I got on DVD for my birthday last week. :) It will be important research for another novel in the future I'm sure... I do write for children and young adults after all.

Finally! This is the same symbol I envisioned that, Josh the
character in my novel, has on the door of his house. Found it
at Spalding. Coincidence? I think not.

Creating Bits of Magic with Flowers

I've been enjoying the longer, warmer days of late spring and early summer. I managed to get my flowers and plants potted and planted in my garden before I had to leave for my residency. Now they are blooming out and creating little scenes of magic and wonder around my house. I love the growing season for just this reason. Here are a few pictures of one of the ways I keep myself inspired to work by finding a concrete creative outlet beyond writing and reading...

Honest to goodness glass slipper with snapdragons in it that I found at a garden show =)

Fairy garden my daughter and I planted together

The irises were exceptionally pretty this year

Flowers in a teacup sitting in a chair

Couldn't resist this bicolored dahlia

 I also like to plant flowers in with my veggies to help with pollination and attract beneficial bugs to my garden and repel the pests.

Going to have some fresh yellow squash to eat soon. Yum!

What are some ways you add color and creativity to your life? Take some time to enjoy things you love and add a little fun to even the most practical of things you do this growing season.

Short Hiatus

For the next  couple of weeks I will be taking a short hiatus from posting to my blog. I will be doing my residency for the MFA in Creative Writing I'll be starting this Friday. Once I've gotten through this 10 day residency I hope to resume my normal Tuesday blog posts. Until then, take care and for those fellow writers out there, happy writing!

Space Op - er - a - Da-da-da-da...Da-da-da-da

Apologies for being a day later on my weekly post. I've been doing tons of reading for my upcoming residency and a lot of it has involved some in depth critiquing as well. Plus I had to do some research on my topic. Space opera...

Yes, you read right, I'm going to attempt to explain this popular phenomenon in fiction, film, and TV. I've heard of it before, probably even watched some. But I still wasn't really clear on what it was specifically and who had written this kind of work. Hopefully, this post will help clear up some of the mystery for those of you who were curious about this subgenre of science fiction.

Why, you may be wondering am I suddenly interested in space opera? I'll tell you. Tor is doing a open submission for novella length fiction all throughout the month of May. For those of you interested in writing this type of fiction here is the link to the submission guidelines:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2015/05/torcom-is-open-to-novella-submissions

If you submit, best of luck with your submission piece. For the rest of you who are just curious as to what space opera is, here is the definition that popped up when I searched for it on the internet.

space op·er·a

noun

NORTH AMERICANinformal

1. a novel, movie, or television program set in outer space, typically of a simplistic and melodramatic nature. (definition courtesy of Google)

I'm sure that makes everything clear as mud, right? Well...maybe not. Here is a little more info on what space opera is. It is a subgenre of sci-fi that has actually been around quite a while. It began to gain a following in the 1920's and 30's when science fiction magazines began publishing these space dramas and billing them as "super science epics" (Wikpedia, original sited wiki source, Gary Westfahl, Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction, 1 January, 2000). The term space opera is believed to be coined from the term soap opera, which were popular series radio dramas during the 20's and 30's and sponsored mainly by soap manufacturing companies. The main difference initially between space operas and soap operas being that space operas take place entirely in outer space.

Originally space operas were very optimistic in nature with larger than life super heroes fighting evil doers in some other galaxy or on another planet in outer space and trying to save humanity. The subgenre has involved over time, however, growing darker and moving away from "triumph of mankind" template and also becoming more scientifically rigorous in their world building and the technology used. Without bogging you down in too much information about this subgenre, this is a very short summary of what space opera is and some info on how it evolved.

Here are some examples of space opera in both literature and film/tv for your reading or viewing pleasure:

Literature:

The Skylark series (1928-1965) by E.E. "Doc" Smith

The Foundation series (1942-1999) by Isaac Asimov

The Ender's Game series (1985-present) Orson Scott Card

Hyperion Cantos (1989-1996) by Dan Simmons

Saga of Seven Suns (2002-2008) and The Saga of Shadows (2014-present) by Kevin J. Anderson

Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1982-present) by Yoshiki Tanaka

Imperial Radch (2013-present) by Anne Leckie

Film/TV:

Star Wars franchise created by George Lucas (1977-present)

Battle Star Galactica created by Glen A. Larson and Ronald D. Moore (1978-1979 and 2004-2009)

Babylon 5 franchise created by J. Michael Straczynski (1993-present)

Guardians of the Galaxy franchise created by James Gunn (2014-present)

(Both lit. and film/tv lists found via wikipedia.com)

Also, the popular video game Halo (2001-present) created by Bungie is considered a type of space opera (source, wikipedia.com)

So, there you have it. Space opera is a popular subgenre of science fiction that many of you might be familiar with and didn't even realize it. This is also what Tor is most looking for in their open novella submissions for this month. If this is right up your alley, then I hope this helps if you plan to take advantage of Tor's open submissions period. If not, well now you can sound smart and ultra informed about space operas. Maybe you can tackle this interesting subgenre yourself and be the next big thing in fiction or film.

Wizards, Princesses, and Time Travelers

Over the winter and early spring I did a pretty good job of staying away from the library. It helped me make a small dent in my to-be-read pile of books which had grown again over Christmas. I managed to read Persuasion, finally by Jane Austen. I also read a fun new fantasy by J.C. Nelson called Free Agent.

Photo of owned copy of this book

Things were progressing rather well. I even managed to read a few books at the same time. Sometimes I have to do this in order to keep up with the books I'm supposed to be reading for book club or research purposes for one of my novels. Then I hit a book slump. Maybe you're familiar with these. You start reading a book that you thought sounded really good. When you received it as a present you were excited and couldn't wait to crack the cover and get started. Only to find that even though the prose was nice and the character seemed likable enough, the pace was too slow and you just found other things to read as you waded through it. I hate to give up on a book like this, especially when someone has given it to me as a gift. So, I read some of my assigned reading for my writing class. While I was traveling I checked out an audiobook from the library to listen to, and I continued to slog through the book from my pile. I eventually finished it, but this book slump resulted in me visiting the library more than I should have and discovering a few graphic novels as well as checking out the hard cover version of the audiobook I was still listening to, the latest in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood.

I can't say I'm sorry for veering away from my to-be-read pile again. I absolutely love Diana Gabaldon's books. And reading up on Harry Dresden (from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series) in graphic novel form was entertaining. Especially, since Mr. Butcher mentioned in the introduction that the illustrator was "spot on" at capturing what Harry looks like. I also discovered another graphic novel series called Fables by Bill Willingham. In these novels the characters from fairy tales, folklore, and classic fantasy stories are forced to leave their magical homes to live in disguise as ordinary humans in New York City. Of course, things don't proceed happily ever after from there. Murders and infighting ensue and it is up to assistant mayor, Snow White, and a reformed Big Bad Wolf, now Bigby Wolf, the in house detective to solve the crime and catch the perpetrators. The stories are entertaining for anyone who might like a noir version of fairy tales told in graphic novel form. Though, I wouldn't recommend these to younger kids, maybe older young adults instead. Once I get through these books I fully intend to get back to my to-be-read pile again, starting with a mystery about novel characters dislocated from their stories called the Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I'll let you know what I thought of it. In the meantime, I'd better get back to reading if I ever hope to catch up...

Pic of my personal copy of this book