Celebrate the Small Things 17-1-25

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

Long weekend!

Yes, I know I've only been back at work for a week, but that first week back is always the worst.  I've really been struggling to remember anything that happened last year or even what it is I do.  Just beginning to get back into it now...

I haven't got a lot planned for the long weekend.  I'm teaching my first hour-long spin class on Sunday, so that kind of put paid to any plans to go away.  I think my partner and I might go up to his property right after I teach on Sunday and stay there through Monday, but that's weather dependent.

I was super surprised yesterday to get nominated for Quill Awards on the writing website I use.  Weirdly, I was nominated for two poems I wrote to prompts during Poetry Week last year.  I don't really write poetry and certainly wouldn't consider myself a poet, so it was a big surprise!  One of the poems is a ditty and the other is an alphabet poem - one of those where there are 26 lines and you start each line with A, B, C...  I don't expect to win, but it's flattering to be nominated.  And a little embarrassing since I probably spent no more than 10 minutes on either of them.

I've had a couple more rejections for Guide Us which is no longer a surprise.  Some of them are for queries I sent in March last year, so it's definitely taking agents a long time to respond!  I think I still have 40 or so that haven't had a response yet, so I guess there's still a chance someone might want it.  But I'm not holding out much hope.  

Guess I'll whip the new book into shape and get ready to query that one...  Although I'm not sure if I'm hardened enough to deal with Harley getting rejected.

Today's story is a little bit of fun.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Loved: When the World Tips Over

 

I've been a massive fan of Jandy Nelson's writing since I read The Sky Is Everywhere many years ago so when I found this one, I jumped at the chance to read it.  And it did not disappoint!  What a beautiful, beautiful book!  I found myself simultaneously wanting to keep reading forward to find out what happened next and wanting to re-read every chapter as I finished it because the writing was so gorgeous and delicious.  Definitely one I will return to again.

The book is about three siblings, 12-year-old Dizzy and her two older brothers, Miles and Wynton.  All three have been damaged by their father leaving before Dizzy was born in their own unique ways.  And the fact their mother still cooks for him every night doesn't help them feel the loss any less keenly.

When a stranger shows up in town with her rainbow hair, she touches each sibling's life in her own way, but leaves again as quickly as she arrived, who she might be remaining a mystery that must be solved if this family is every going to be able to pull themselves together again.

And it's a complicated family.  The book delves into the history, going back to Europe and old-country curses and rivalries that have echoed through generations.  Part magic-realism. part road trip, part mystery, this book unfolds numerous different stories according to its own logic, piecing together a family saga on its way.

And I loved it.  The writing is magical with descriptions so evocative you can almost taste them and phrases so delicious you want to savour them over and over.  But unlike some books with delightful writing, the story here, and the characters, are as compelling as the language.  

Very, very recommended.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

The Fall siblings live in hot Northern California wine country, where the sun pours out of the sky, and the devil winds blow so hard they whip the sense right out of your head.

Years ago, the Fall kids’ father mysteriously disappeared, cracking the family into pieces. Now Dizzy Fall, age twelve, bakes cakes, sees spirits, and wishes she were a heroine of a romance novel. Miles Fall, seventeen, brainiac, athlete, and dog-whisperer, is a raving beauty, but also lost, and desperate to meet the kind of guy he dreams of. And Wynton Fall, nineteen, who raises the temperature of a room just by entering it, is a virtuoso violinist set on a crash course for fame . . . or self-destruction.

Then an enigmatic rainbow-haired girl shows up, tipping the Falls’ world over. She might be an angel. Or a saint. Or an ordinary girl. Somehow, she is vital to each of them. But before anyone can figure out who she is, catastrophe strikes, leaving the Falls more broken than ever. And more desperate to be whole.

With road trips, rivalries, family curses, love stories within love stories within love stories, and sorrows and joys passed from generation to generation, this is the intricate, luminous tale of a family’s complicated past and present. And only in telling their stories can they hope to rewrite their futures.

Dear Me 2025

Every year I write myself a letter outlining my goals for the year.  I try to do a check in on how I'm tracking mid-way through and again at the end of the year.  So here's 2025's letter.

Dear Me,

I did pretty well with 2024's goals, so here's to doing as well in 2025.

Despite having got absolutely no traction so far in querying Guide Us, I will keep persevering with it.  I know this is a good book and I'm really weirded out that it hasn't had any requests.  The last book I queried was the same, but at least with that one, I knew there was something in it that might prove difficult for agents and/or publishers even if I didn't advertise it in the query.  With Guide Us, I don't think there's anything too controversial in there... I guess religion could be controversial though.  Especially questioning it.

I have a book - Standing Too Close -  coming out sometime later in the year; I'm still waiting for a date for that.  Hopefully I'll find out soon because I'd like to be able to start things rolling as far as publicity goes as soon as possible.  I'm also waiting on edits for that one and would like to get through those before I dive into revisions and editing on A Stranger to Kindness.  They're both boy narrator books but the voices are very, very different.

And talking about A Stranger to Kindness, the plan for that is to get it revised and ready to query before the end of the year.  I feel like that's going to be a tough one because I love this book so much and if it winds up getting the same response as Guide Us, it's going to be somewhat devastating.  I need to mentally prepare for that.

Luckily, by the second half of the year my work will have ramped right up so I will probably be far too busy to get too upset.  Here's hoping anyway...

And as far as non-writing goals go, I suppose they're much the same as they have been for the last few years.  To keep exercising, to keep reading as much as possible and to see films at the cinema least every two weeks.

The exercising should be easy enough since I'm now an instructor at the gym and I'm hoping to pick up a couple more regular classes this year.  I've been teaching only 30 minute spin classes, but I'm starting to learn the hour-long ones now too, so will probably pick up some of those classes in the next little while.

I've lowered my reading target for 2025 to 110 books since I've failed to meet my goal the last two years running.  I've been reading more adult books than YA recently and they tend to be both longer and more complex than my usual YA reads, so they take me longer to get through.  Here's hoping the large number of books I got through during my holiday last week - the weather was not great so there was a lot of time to read - kickstarts things well.

There are a lot of films opening the next few weeks that I want to see, so I should be able to keep up my film-going at least in the early part of the year.  Things might get a little more challenging once the Award Season movies dry up, but by then the Film Society should have started up again.

I finally managed to (sort of) break my nail biting habit in 2024, so I will endeavor to keep my nails nice in 2025 too.  Preferably without having to pay for expensive manicures every few weeks.  I do like having my nails done properly, but it does become expensive.

What are your goals for the New Year?

Celebrate the Small Things 10-1-24

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

I had a relaxing holiday at the beach house.  The weather wasn't amazing so I didn't swim every day, which is very unusual,  but I did get out to walk every day and I read a lot of books - 13 in total.  I knew I didn't take enough away with me, but I really couldn't carry more than 9.

My critique group continue to enjoy A Stranger to Kindness.  One of them has even reached the part of the book I really struggled to write and she has had no complaints about it so far.  Fingers crossed this continues until the end.

I've spent the time since I've been back from the beach doing some deep cleaning of my house.  I have the bathrooms still to do, but I've asked my son to help me with those since I need to try and clean some mould off the ceilings and he's tall enough he may be able to get the mop up there without having to stand on a chair.  Once I'm through those, I'm going to put some effort into my new office space.  I have a bunch of posters I want to put up, but haven't remembered to get any stick-um to do it yet.  

I'm going to (maybe) teach my first hour-long ride class next weekend, so I'm busy trying to learn the choreography for that.  It's not actually that much more to learn than the classes I teach regularly - 10 songs instead of 7,  but each track is longer and somehow it feels a little daunting.  But I'm sure I can do it.

This week's short story has a bit of a twist to it...  

What are you celebrating this week?

IWSG - January '25

 

It's the first Wednesday in January (sort of), so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group!

The awesome co-hosts for the January 8 posting of the IWSG are Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles!

And here's this month's question:

 

Describe someone you admired when you were a child. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

I've been struggling to answer this one.  I'm sure there were people I admired as a child, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. What does come to mind when I read this question is some of the books and authors I loved as a kid that I have gone back and re-read as an adult either to read to my own kids or just out of curiosity.  Some of those books I thought were so magnificent, books I obsessed over for months or years and read until they were rags... well, they're actually pretty dreadful.

I was huge fan of Rosemary Sutcliffe as a child, especially her book The Eagle of the Ninth.  I read two copies of that book to rags because I re-read it so many times.  And a few years back, I stumbled across it at the library when I was looking for something that might interest my son and took it out.  And I could not figure out what the heck I'd liked about it so much that I re-read it over and over again.  The book was boring as all hell.  The characters were flat and the writing wasn't even that good.  

The other books I obsessed over as a kid were the Adventure series by Willard Price.  In these books a pair of brothers, Hal and Roger, were sent all over the world by their father to have wild adventures with animals in South America, Africa, the South Pacific and the Arctic. I think to collect animals for their zoo - I can't quite remember that part. There were 14 of these books all together and I had the entire set which I re-read over and over.  I found a couple of them in the library when my kids were around the right age for them and picked them up.  Again, what a bitter disappointment.  

Apart from the colonialism and very un-environmentalist behavior in these books, they are wholly unbelievable in terms of the characters.  Hal is supposed to be 19 and Roger 13.  What parents let their teenage sons risk their lives with lions and panthers and tigers and rogue elephants and even living in an underwater village?  Not just once, but over and over again?  Even after one or the other of them almost dies in every book?  I can maybe accept Hal getting to go once or twice, with his more experienced father perhaps, but doesn't Roger have school? And given how terrifying and perilous these adventures are, these brothers don't ever cry or need a hug or even touch one another to give comfort when one or the other is hurt.  It's very unrealistic.  Especially how strong they both are and how they know all about how to deal with these wild animals despite being children.

On the plus side, I did learn a lot from reading these books.  I'm always surprised how much I know about Roman legionnaires from Rosemary Sutcliffe and all the random things I learned from Willard Price.  In fact, Volcano Adventure saved my entire family's life once...  We were staying somewhere where they'd lit a coal fire to keep the room warm for us and in the night, my father got up to go to the bathroom and promptly fell over on the floor, waking me up.  I used my Willard Price knowledge and figured out that the room was filled with carbon monoxide and managed to wake my mother and sister and get everyone outside before we all died in our sleep.  I think I was 10 or 11.  

So thank you Mr. Price!

Do you have someone you admired greatly as a child?  How do you feel about them now?

Checking in on goals

 Each year I write myself a letter outlining my goals for the new year.  Ahead of writing my letter to myself for 2025, let's check in on how I did in 2024...

 Dear Me,

I really didn’t do well with my goals last year, so my goal this year is to be better at meeting my goals!  Which means I need to be realistic about what I can actually achieve.  My “new” job is pretty time-consuming and looking at the year ahead, there is not much in the way of breaks between events.  Which means a lot of cross-over as we try and wrap up and report on one, while setting up and producing the next.  It’s going to be intense.

That was 100% true.  There were very few breaks between events this year.

 

With that in mind, my writing goals are going to be limited this year. I want to query Guide Us as I think it is probably more mainstream/commercial than most of my books and more likely to get me a new agent than some of my other stories.  I think it’s really close to being ready. I just need a day or two to read through the whole thing to see if the changes to the timeline and new scenes I added have bedded in properly.  You don’t want someone talking about something in the past that hasn’t actually happened yet!  It would be nice to get another set of eyes over it too, but I think I’ve exhausted my beta-readers for this one already, so I may need to trust my own judgement this time.

I was very wrong about this one.  I queried Guide Us throughout the year, tweaking and changing the query periodically, but so far, I haven't had a single request for more pages.  This has never happened to me with any previous book, so I'm a little baffled. Publishing has changed a lot in the last ten yers or so.

 

In terms of new writing, I’d love to be able to put some real work into A Stranger to Kindness.  I really love my mute foster-kid and want to tell his story. It’s a goodie! Once I’ve got Guide Us out the door, I would like to put energy into that one. I’m just not sure I’ll have the time.  But even 500-1000 words a day would help get it finished and I’m sure I can find the 40 minutes or so a day I need to do that much.  I just find it hard to write like that.  I like to fall into the story and live there while I’m writing, and writing in scraps like that doesn’t get you into that space.  But if scraps of time are all I have, I’ll use them.

I actually did this.  I finished A Stranger to Kindness a couple of weeks ago. It's still a first draft and needs some editing and polishing, but I feel like I told the story I wanted to tell and gave my characters the journey they needed.  I'm going to leave it alone until after I get back from the beach and then read the whole thing to start figuring out where the glitches are.

 

In the rest of my life, that part that’s not writing or work, I intend to keep reading as much as I can.  I haven’t hit my Goodreads goal the last two years, so I’m aiming a little lower for 2024. Not a huge amount, but a little.  Under 120 books for the first time in many years.  Hopefully I’ll manage to actually hit that goal this year.

Nope.  Not looking like it at this stage.  I'm 26 books behind.  But I have read some good stuff this year.  I'm just reading more adult books than I usually do, and they tend to be longer and more difficult reads.  

 

And like every year, I will keep up my exercising and go to the gym at least four times a week and do as much exercise as I can outside of that too.  I never seem to lose any weight, but at least I feel reasonably fit and healthy.  I’m getting older and I probably need to do more to try and keep myself from getting those dreadful issues that older people seem prone to.

I kind of upped the stakes on this one by becoming a fitness instructor at the gym. So staying fit is kind of a must!  I'm hoping to pick up a few more regular classes in the new year.

 

I will also keep gong to the movies as often as I can.  Even though I don’t work in film anymore, it’s still one of the things I’m most passionate about and I am all for keeping the theatrical experience alive and thriving.  I know I can watch films at home, and I do,  but it just isn’t the same as sitting in the dark experiencing the story with a roomful of other people.  I’m re-joining the Film Society for 2024, which means I will get to see something interesting every Monday night again.  And I got a 10-trip pass for the Film Festival for Xmas, so that’s me sorted for July.  Almost…  I probably will go to more than just ten films, but it’s a start!

I did this too.  I didn't go to the movies every week (apart from the Film Society), but I went fairly often.  There just isn't always something on that I want to see.

 

Looking back at this, I feel like I make mostly the same goals every year. So for something new in 2024, I want to stop biting my fingernails.  I’ve done it all my life and I think it’s time to stop.  Before Christmas I experimented with some stick-on nails and they were good, except I kept losing them.  But my nails grew a lot in the 10 days or so I used them.  I even managed to keep them long for about two weeks after I took the falsies off.  Then I was reading at the beach one afternoon and bit them all off without realising.  D’oh!  So when I got home, I went and got my nails done at a salon for the first time in my life and now I have lovely long (half-fake) shiny pink nails.  I’m hoping my real nails will grow underneath while I genuinely can’t bite them (the tips are plastic right now), and by the time the fake ends have grown out, I’ll have nice long natural nails to get manicured and polished with something that will make them too hard to bite. That’s the plan, anyway.  Not sure if it will work.  I suspect my real nails might have been wrecked after all the grinding and buffing and stuff they did.  But it was an experience I’ve never had before, so worth it even if I means I only have nice nails for a few weeks…

I actually did this.  I have nails for the first time in my life! I'm not sure I've entirely broken the habit of biting them, but if I keep them looking pretty, I don't tend to bite them so much.  I just need to be vigilant about keeping them filed.  The smallest snag or rough spot will have me tearing them up again.

And that's me for 2024, I think.  We'll check in mid-year to see how we're doing.  And I'll actually try to remember to do it this time!

So, it looks like I actually did pretty well with my goals in 2024.  I'm surprised.  When I get back from the beach I'll write up my 2025 letter.  I'll have to think about what I want to achieve in the new year while I'm away.

Happy New Year!

Celebrate the Small Things 27-12-24

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

I'm going away tomorrow.  To the beach house where I go every summer.  I need to get myself packed and organized today which means heading to the library to make sure I have enough to read to keep me going for 10 days.

The blog will be dark until I get back on the 6th - there is little to no internet at the beach house so I can only check in on online stuff if I head into town.  I'm not even going to take my laptop with me this year.  I sometimes do, thinking I'll write, but I rarely do.  So this year I'm not even going to pretend to.

See you on the 6th!

This week's story is a wintery one.