The Literary Lily Cate

A Little Blinking Light

2012-02-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

This is not usually how it works for me.

I don't tend to get epic flashes if inspiration so much as little blips and sparks. Like back in the day when there used to be such things as answering machines, and such machines would have a tiny blinking light to tell you there were new messages, that is how it works for me.

I have figured something out, but I still have to interpret for myself. MmmHmm.

We've made it to February already. Last month was filled with a flurry of goals. Lots lists of goals for the new year, and because of the company I keep, it was a lot of writing related goal oriented list making. I probably did one myself at some point.

And then over the last couple of days, I had a little blinking light of a realization about my "goals". They aren't really goals at all. At least as far as writing goes. My lifetime goals might change - do change - from year to year, but with writing, it's always the same:

Make Books Happen

That's it. I write all the time. Every free moment I get. I don't need a list of goals to motivate me to write, or keep writing, or finish writing. I don't need deadlines to keep me focused. Deadlines don't even work for me with early drafts, because it's finished when it's finished. How can I say when I start that first draft that I will have every problem and character detail worked out in precisely so-many weeks or months or years? But that is a discussion of process, and I'm talking about something very different today.

What I need is.... priorities. What do I work on first? When do I set a current project aside to work on something else? Which one of my literary babies gets the spot at the front of the line, and most of mommy's attention? How long should I make myself focus on one project, when my interest keeps wandering to another project?

I only have the one kid, so that is pretty simple. I take care of him first. But I have a whole brood of manuscripts. Right now I am working steadily on one, but when I am finished, which will be very soon, which one gets to be next?
I need to Prioritize!
If only there were a way to do that with any certainty.

Whatcha Readin' ?

2012-02-02T08:15:00.000-08:00

For a blog about writing and by extension, about reading, I haven't posted anything bookish lately. Bad Zombie!
So today let's talk fun and books. Some things I read recently that I really liked, all of which employ hefty use of descriptive prose -



A collection of odd and beautiful stories.(My favorite things) They even look pretty all lined up, don't they?
The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland is just beautiful, from the first word to the last. It has a very episodic story of a girl traveling with no real purpose - at least to begin - but that is easily overlooked by the writing, which is loquaciously descriptive, but in an elegant way. After all, it's Fairyland. The fun is in exploring.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children has a much more streamlined approach to descriptive passages. Part of that comes from the teen male narrator, part from the fact that it's set in a recognizable historical era, and part from the fantastic period photographs used to illustrate. I can relate to that kind of inspiration. I have a copy of Wisconsin Death Trip lying around somewhere. I dare you to page through that and not be inspired to start spinning tales.

And The Night Circus was a marvelous read. I admit that all the endless descriptions did get a little tedious in a few spots. The story centers on a pair of magicians, and the explanations of their magic tricks and illusions were quite captivating. The characters are so big and vibrant, I wanted to watch them do things, instead of sitting through detailed specifications of everyone's outfits and every course of dinner. Aside from the very occasional tangent about fabric and desserts, the tone and the feel of the writing holds true to the very end, and the story finishes strong.

And since I have a seven year old son who is a bit of a history buff, and also not really into the quirky and creepy yet, he and I are reading Gordan Korman's Titanic series.



We're right about halfway through. It's the morning of the 14th of April, 1912, which my son knows is the day Titanic hit that iceberg, so he is very keen to see what happens to the four central characters, Sophie, Juliana, Alfie and Paddy. He is also into villains, and has written a few stories featuring the Irish gangsters from these books. His book is called Titanic- Gilhooley's Revenge. My kid is awesome.

And finally, from the world of adult literature (yes, that's a thing too!)



Now, Kraken was not really what I was expecting, but that was probably my fault. After all, it's China Mieville. He writes whatever he damned well feels like, and you just read and deal with it. Worth it for the Angel of Death/Jar of Bones creature alone.

American Gods goes right ahead and uses The House on the Rock as the setting for a gathering of ancient immortals. That sounds about right. It's totally a real place, and you can't really walk through there without thinking that something must be going on somewhere behind a curtain or hidden door to explain this madness, yet you never get your answer.
Then the story goes ahead and uses Rock City as a setpiece further on down the narrative. I've been there, too, and...yeah. Odin must be responsible. This book has plenty of macabre and grotesque scenes, and is currently at the top of my favorites pile. I went right ahead and read his short story collection Fragile Things when I was done with this one. That is highly recommended by me as well.

And finally Mr. Bryson. I do love me some nonfiction. And Bryson is about my favorite way to roll in that department. After finishing A Short History of Nearly Everything, A Walk in the Woods, and Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, all of which I adored, I'm now reading a history of the English language, and enjoying it. Luckily, there are a lot of Bryson books I have left to read!

Of course I have a considerable TBR stack, but just in case I start running low, anything awesome out there I haven't picked up yet? What are you reading?

Let's Introduce the Band

2012-01-31T08:14:00.000-08:00

So it's the year of the Dragon now. Not only that, it's the year of the Water Dragon. Some time ago, I did this painting for the year of the dragon, and I happened to pick a sea dragon as the model. Happy coincidence, I think.

And now that we are all in our Water Dragon groove, I thought I'd take a moment to meet the band, my back up singers, the mellow balls of fluff and claws that have been there every time I've sat down to write for the past decade or so.

My leads, Zorro and Lola. Zorro is the one on my lap every time I sit down to post on this blog. Except right now. Now he's sitting on the rug having a bath. Lola on the right has been jamming with us for twelve years now. But she only likes to work at night. Now the sun's out, so she's working on her side project, cataloging the squirrels in the back yard.

Then there's the new guys.

Salem

Hobbes.

They showed up last summer, ready to join the crew. Ended up getting a place across town, but we still jam with them once in a while. They're good guys. Their sister Ivy is pretty sweet too. She hangs out over here.

And now that I posted a bunch of cat pictures, I'll get back to writing about writing. Promise.

How Much is Not Enough?

2012-01-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

Are you in the middle of revising a manuscript too? You are! Well come on in. There's fresh coffee over there, and cream if you like. Pumpkin or Peppermint. We're pretty fancy here.
Right through here is the office - yep the couch is brand new. And we just redid the floor. Took out the old carpet and put in pretty shiny wood. Right outside is the deck we put in two years ago, and then the patio we did last summer. Right past that, we're going to put in another deck as soon as the weather warms up. Though, heck, it's been a ridiculously warm "winter". We'll probably do a fence, too. Just along the back, where we can grow some vines. It'll be really cute... when it's done. (hint - it will never be done. By the time I finish one project I have a whole list of new projects to get started. Some of them I probably already have started. There are a lot of paint cans and bits of spare wood lying around my house.)

And this is how I feel about revising. There's always something. I'm actually very good at revising - the rewriting part, anyway. I can make huge cuts and changes all day long. I might even look like I know what I'm doing. The trick I have yet to learn is what to keep vs. what to toss or change. i.e. How not to make more work for myself.

It's quite similar to when we bought our house, and before we had even picked up the key, I had a list of things I wanted to change, or fix or demolish entirely. The yard has been straight forward. There was nothing there but four old trees when we moved in. A nice blank page to start writing my garden. Other things I felt like changing included the kitchen cabinets, the weird black toilet in the spare bathroom, the front porch/ minideck. I had grand visions of new toilets and new decks and cabinets with glass doors... and it was all a monster amount of work.
But gradually, I found ways to work with what was there without getting drastic. Paint on the cabinets, new posts and a coat of stain on the front deck, some white tile and old fashioned wallpaper in the little bathroom, and it all started to fit. It started to look like part of the same house. A more cohesive whole. And it was with tweaking, not ripping everything down to the ground and starting from scratch. It wasn't easier, necessarily. Putting new posts on the front deck wasn't much less work than just replacing the whole thing. But it was cheaper and less wasteful.

I'm learning to apply this thinking to my manuscript revision. It is challenging. I have to see the things that can be salvaged, perhaps with line edits, perhaps with a bit of rearranging, and recognize them from the bits that just need to be axed. Some things are good. Some things are working. Some of the bits need to be left alone. It would be helpful if there was some kind of app that would give me a little slap on the hand when I was about to change something that was working. A little "No, not there. Move along now." But since that doesn't exist, I'll have to do this on my own, like a sucker. I mean writer.

Every part of the buffalo, friends. Use every last part.

C-c-c-c-c-o-o-o-ld!!!!

2012-01-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

I've been spoiled. Spoiled rotten. This winter has been so ridiculously mild that just a few days ago, I was out planting spring bulbs. There was snow on the ground, and mud underneath. And I hardly wore more than a hoodie and a down vest when I left the house.

Those days are no more.
Wisconsin winter is upon us. Yesterday, the temperature finally got it's first minus of the season. Our little old furnace is firing away, trying to keep us defrosted. The cats and blankets and slippers and coffee are all helping out, too. It was supposed to have warmed up enough to start snowing by now. But it hasn't. It's still that special kind of cold that will freeze one's nostrils closed if one pinches one's nose out of doors. And you know what? It's fine.
Today is the kind of day that I sit in my old cat-clawed desk chair, wrapped in my quilt that is bleeding batting, and needs to be patched, with a chipped coffee cup, and a cold nose, and a cat with a patch of fur missing on his side, and I am so very happy to have all of it. Think of all the things I got to do today already -

I got to wake up next to my husband of nine years, and complain about how cold it was going to be when we crawled out of bed, because we were so toasty and snuggled under our mountain of blankets.

I got to make a waffle for my little son, which he barely touched as usual, and I got to see him smile with confidence about his spelling test today, and I got to hug him in his big puffy snow gear right before he climbed on the school bus. Because it's first grade, and you can still hug your mom in front of the other kids.

I had two cups of coffee with peppermint creamer. And they were delicious.

Now I get to climb into my writing cocoon, and work on the ending of my latest first draft. I get to work on something I truly love to do. In fact, I know what I love to do.

And now the house is quiet, and my manuscript is waiting, and I am feeling very thankful, and quite a bit lucky, that all these simple things are mine today.

So...Writing Tips

2012-01-17T07:48:00.000-08:00

This little blog of mine exists in a kind of paradoxical purgatory right now.
I am a writer, that's why I started this blog, but I'm still in the middle of the etiquette minefield that is agent querying. How much can I say about the projects I am still working and reworking and re-reworking? How much should I say about who has my manuscript right now?
I'll just mention that I have a MG steampunk manuscript out there in the big world. (really Blogger? Still don't want to admit that "steampunk" is a word? Fine.)
I have a MG ghost story percolating in first draft form.
I have another MG steampunk in very rough notes/character sketches/random chapters/pre-first draft form.
And a whole file of ideas for MG horror/ghost stories.
So, while I hesitate to talk about what I'm writing with too much specificity, I will happily tell you all about how I write. My suggestions for all writers are as follows.

1. Get a Cat.
Yes, it's trite, I know. But cats love writers. Writers are the kind of people who will hold still for long stretches of time.Cats love holding still. Holding still allows for sleeping. My cats see the laptop come out, and they are overjoyed. Which to a dog would mean hopping about and whining with excitement, but to a cat of course means looking at you with especially cute eyes. I tend to write on one of the couches, or on my bed. Usually they are already waiting by the time I've made a cup of coffee and found my most recent notebook. The cats curl up right beside me, and nothing is a better motivator to stay in place and keep working through some wretched scene than the thought I would disturb those little peaceful wads of fluff. (also, my cats are getting pretty old. They don't take crap off nobody now, and when I try to get up and say, go to the bathroom or refill my coffee, they raise their little heads just enough to glare at me with one eye, in a way that clearly says "Sit down and finish that chapter or I will claw up your favorite dress while you sleep." It's magical.)

2. Get Warm Slippers.
I recommend the boot style, with the softest possible fluff on the inside. No distractions while you're in the middle of the action, and the zing of a cold wooden floor will certainly do that. Also a blanket, if that's your style. In the summer I like to write outside on the deck, but it's January now, so I'm inside, looking at a very fine falling snow, which is the best writing weather, because when it's daylight in the summer, I want to be out digging in the garden, and when its cold and snowy, I want my coffee and slippers and blanket and manuscript.

3. Like to Write
There's more to it than just ideas, kids. Everyone has an idea. You'll need the whole story written down in a way that is consistently interesting. Like, every sentence, for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I love to write. I love the actual act of writing. I love putting words on the page and rearranging them until they make a fine little composition. Not in blog form, obviously. This is the free form jazz of my writing world. In a novel manuscript requires a bit more investment and dedication, and if it's a constant struggle to make yourself write, if you've resorted to coercing yourself into sitting down and working, this might not be for you. Writing is work, and it's usually hard. Always. Even when it's fun, it should be challenging. And that never ends, not on your first book, or your twenty first. It's kind of like marriage and children. A joy that's worth the effort, but effort none the less.

4. Get Another Cat
The problem with just one cat is that it's a cat. At some point, it's going to get all prissy, and not want to sit down for writing time. I've solved this dilemma with the adding of an additional cat. That way, they can trade shifts.

5. Write Lots of Things
The world loves good stories, even when the writer themselves becomes the story, as it was with one Hunter S. Thompson, or Mr. Hemingway, or the Mrss. Woolf and Plath. Or the tale of how the story came to be becomes the story. Some otherwise occupied person has a dream or a vision or an epiphany on a train, and rushes off to whip out a manuscript that within years (or months) becomes the Greatest Bestselling Book in the World Ever. Props to them. But lots of writers - lots and lots and most writers - don't sell their first book. Or their second. And maybe their third gets them an agent, but it's the fourth that gets the attention of an editor, and then the fifth that sells. Really. (This is why #3 up there) Most writers are going to have to write a lot of words, in a lot of different projects, if they ever have hopes of publishing. Which leads me to my final tip

6. Love Your Words
Which could also be interpreted the other way around, as Write Words You Love. Write the kind of stories you like. The kinds of books you want to read. Things that you find interesting. It took me many years to stumble into children's lit, but when I finally found the Middle Grade genre as a writer, I realized "This is what I should be writing." And I went down that path, working on a very odd little manuscript that was puzzling even to me, until I stumbled again on the concept of steampunk, and it all clicked together. I had found my writing home, complete with hot coffee, and slippers, and a pair of old cats. And life was good.

And the Tree Lasted Until...

2012-01-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday.
It could have stayed up another month, the way it was holding its needles. It still smelled fresh from the forest.
Thank you, Blooe. You were a great tree.

And now on to 2012! I don't have much time to blog today. There's a half-finished manuscript and a pot of coffee waiting for me...

Old Blooe

2011-12-05T07:00:00.001-08:00

Maybe it's the writerness in me, but I have a tendency to name everything. Not in any kind of scientific way, or even a way that will help me somehow categorize and organize - you know, behaving practically - I just start calling inanimate things by a proper name. I had a van named Walter. I call the ball of moss in the goldfish aquarium Edgar. And last weekend, when we put up our Christmas tree, I started calling it Old Bluey. Which my son writes as "Old Blooe", so that's the official spelling now.

We went for a real tree this year. We've had one of those up-in-a-snap-prelit deals that comes in three pieces and smells worse every year you take it down from the attic for the last five years. Since last fall, we've been visiting all of our local self serve farms, with pick your own everything from apples to pumpkins to raspberries with fresh eggs usually available as well. And that has been refreshingly fun - to get our own pumpkin out of the patch where it grew, to run through the orchards eating apples right off the tree, and hear the kids get excited over which ones taste sweet, and which ones are tangy.

We also live in a county that has a tenacious hunger to pave itself over, and turn every corner into a gas station/walgrees/fast food emporium, and turn every open field into very boring subdivision housing. Or worse - a hotel casino, and a whole series of new big box stores to replace already existing stores that now sit empty in the middle of some of the ugliest, mid-century subdivisions the human retina can bear to witness. Right after pumpkin season, they put up a commercial real estate sign on our pumpkin patch. Boo.

I'm all for making it worthwhile to keep things growing on some of the land. It used to feel wrong to cut down a perfectly beautiful living tree every year for a month or so of use, only to throw it away, but I've come around to the thinking that buying real trees from our neighbors helps keep our neighbors in the business of growing things. So this year, we drove miles down a stretch of gravel road, way out into the countryside where there were real hills (we don't get many of those around here) out to a tree farm to cut down our own Griswald Family Christmas Tree. It was in the middle of the forest, with pine trees from two feet to twenty feet tall scattered over acres and acres with not a speck of concrete to be seen.

Now, we've lived in the city, and the very-nearly countryside. Right now we live in a cottage near a lake, in a little village that's made up of a mix of summer homes and year-round residents. We have a very good mix of being in a neighborhood and still having a taste of country life. No sidewalks, no streetlights, really nice neighbors and very quiet nights full of stars... yes. But there are a few things that elude us. Our first year as well owners, we let the pipes freeze. We have a lovely collection of stately old oaks on our property, which comes with a lot of wildlife that likes to climb around in the attic. Some of them are pretty cool though. I saw my first wild flying squirrel leaping off our roof. That was a surprise. We're getting the hang of it. Not enough to remember to bring a saw to the Cut Your Own Tree place.

They had a bunch for us to borrow. Smart farmers.
So we marched through a field full of trees and hipster parents like us, wearing skinny jeans and hand knit hats, looking for the perfect tree. Mr. Cate and CJ found it ten feet from the car. I wanted to walk around a little bit, but as Mr. Cate was freezing in his little hoodie and vans and no gloves (I explained about cutting down a tree. I don't know how he didn't realize that was an outdoor activity) and both of the boys were so convinced that they had found the Most Perfect Tree Ever, and that if we didn't get it right away, we would loose it to some other hipster dad who didn't know how to use a hacksaw either, and then Christmas would be ruined - we got the tree. It was a little blue spruce, the lightest gray blue I've ever seen, with half its branches missing, but that's what Mr. and Jr. wanted, so that's what we got.

Mr. Cate dutifully crawled under the tree with the farmer supplied saw. After all, he wasn't going to look like a wuss in front of the other dads. Not after I drove us there in the stick shift that he doesn't know how to drive. Mr. and Jr. carried the tree back to the car, dad holding the trunk, CJ holding the very tip of the top branch. By the time we tied him to the top of the car, I was calling the tree "Old Blooe". And I told CJ that it was his job to let me know if the tree started falling off the roof on the way home.*

We made it home. Old Blooe is now standing in the living room covered in all of our goofy ornaments, the ones Mr. Cate and I have slowly been collecting over the last 12 years, so pale gray it looks like a fake tree - except for the scent, which is so beautiful.

Wow, 12 years. This is going to be our 13th Christmas together. He's put up with my shenanigans for 13 years. Now that's impressive. I think there will be an extra special Happy 13 present under Old Blooe this year.

* we finally lost the old as dirt station wagon over the summer. It was a great car for things like bringing home christmas trees. Now we have two little compact deals, with trunks just big enough for groceries and cat litter. Ah well.

Literary Cinema

2011-11-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

Mr. Cate has finally completed his second film, Dove, and is already beginning to edit his next piece, Ashley, as the second installment of his nature themed trilogy. I worked very closely with him on the first two films, though when it comes to writing, we like to tell very different types of stories. I write middle grade steampunk (and have dabbled in YA dystopian) and he strives for authenticity and realism in his work, which I find much more literary than my own.

This next film has been shot experimentally, and I have to say, it's been exciting to see footage that is "new", something that was filmed when I wasn't standing just off camera with notes and a production schedule and a shot list. Here's the first little sample, with a taste of the score from our own Mr. Jeff Scott Townsend.
(Yes, this is the right music now)

Good News Tuedsays - Someday I'll Get the Hang of This

2011-10-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

But not today, clearly.
However, I have news. Somebody likes my book. Somebody whose opinion I very much respect. And while that couldn't be more vague - perhaps soon I'll be able to be a little more specific - today that's enough.

Writing, or doing anything creative with an intention of pursuing it as a profession, requires such a weird paradox of being confident enough with your ideas to think anyone else would ever want to see them in book form (or painting, film, song, free association poetry, you know, pick your poison) and still being critical enough of your own work to strive for improvement. I think most writers lean toward the critical side. I know I do. Every draft I finish I sit back and think... "eh, I could do better." It's nice when someone says "Sure, but this is pretty good too." Today, I'm giving myself permission to enjoy that.

Oh, and here's a song. Listen and try not to jam along, just a little bit.

Good News Tuesdays - 37 Pumpkins Edition

2011-10-06T06:12:00.000-07:00

We're all creative types here, right? Lots of writers and hopefully - eventually - some avid readers as well, so we can all pretend that I posted this on Tuesday.... Ah there.

What was I really doing on Tuesday that kept me from my totally arbitrary blog commitment? Celebrating! Last weekend, I finished a draft of my WIP. Weeeee! After weeks of being down in the cave, with only coffee and the light of my laptop screen for companionship, I had a to stop and come up for air and give my new project a few days to simmer and congeal. It only took about twelve hours before I had half a legal pad filled with notes for the next round of revisions. But I always need a little breather after a long drafting session, to see if what I wrote is working... or not.

So on Tuesday, instead of writing or blogging or even touching a computer, I spent the day splurging on nerd stuff. I bought new glasses. And a new tall chair to use at my drawing table. And two new dogwood bushes ( I finally found a dwarf variety with that beautiful yellow bark that looks so spectacular in the winter). And about a hundred daffodil bulbs. That's right, I'm into spring bulbs now. It's the one area of gardening I haven't explored yet. I have a bunch of lilies that all bloom in mid-summer. Now I need to work my way into spring. Eventually, I'd like a yard that is just a jungle of greenery, with little hidden spots for sitting and sketching and drinking tea.

In the afternoon we went apple picking at a little orchard a few miles away. We got there earlier this year, in time for the Jonathan, which are tart and delicious. And McIntosh, which tasted like candy right off the tree. That night we made apple crumble with fruit that had been on the tree only hours before. I highly recommend.

We have a lot of pick-your-own places close by, and after repeated failures at growing food in my own yard, I decided that the most fun part is the harvesting anyway. We've done apples, raspberries, strawberries, this year I'm thinking about finding a cut-your-own christmas tree place, since we haven't had a real tree in years. Last weekend we went to the first day of pumpkin season at a local farm that sells pumpkins by the carload. As many pumpkins as you can fit in your entire car, but we opted to just fill the trunk, so they gave us a discount.

When we got out of the car I handed Cate Jr. a piece of netting, and told him he had to be very quiet and throw the net quick before the pumpkins could run away. I think last year he would have bought it, but this year, the wise 7 yr old said, "That's chickens, mom, not pumpkins."

It was muddy and warm and early in the morning, and Cate Jr. walked us all the way up to the highest point in the 30 acre field so we could find the very biggest pumpkins - and carry them all the way back to the car. There were some seasoned pumpking gatherers there that morning, with gloves and garden shears and wagons with inflatable wheels. I came unprepared (except for cleaning out the trunk) We just had to grab those prickly stems with our sweatshirt cuffs and hoof it back across the field.
We packed 'em in to that trunk, too. When we got them home and filled up half the porch and finally counted them up, there were 37. That's how many pumpkins will fit in the trunk of a late 90s chevy cavalier. So now you know.

On Tuesday night I had a house full of pumpkins and apples and tired, happy kids and bushels of fresh thoughts on my next revision. Which is why I didn't get around to blogging, and why I love Autumn so very much.

Good News Tuesdays - Mitten Edition

2011-09-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

So, I'm a day late for my new weekly blog project. But I have a good reason, I swear!
Yesterday happened to be my ninth wedding anniversary -well, mine and Mr. Cate's of course.
This may happen from time to time, as blogging collides with the rest of life.
But I'm here today, with an announcement of a seasonal variety - It's Mitten Time!! Yay!

Okay, so maybe the weather is still pleasantly jackety, but the cold is coming, and that means its time to make mittens.
Last year, my dear mom and I started a little mitten outfit on the open territory of Etsy. And our shop did pretty well. This year we're back, with lots of new mittens, which you may view here, if you're so inclined:

Wild Rabbits

Enjoy the last few weeks of crisply pretty autumn! I am already looking forward to snow :D

Good News Tuesdays!

2011-09-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering a few ideas for a regular feature on this blog, and I've decided to go with Good News Tuesdays.
One of the things I love the most about the kidlit digital world is all the positive vibes zipping around here. It's lovely to see all the congratulations for the newly agented, and all the fantastic work being published. And I can't emphasize that "fantastic" part enough! Lucky kids. Not that I didn't have plenty of great books to read as a child, but when I take my son to the library and the bookstore, I can't help but be all goofy about the ridiculously marvelous wonderland of books we've created for little guys like him. Go team!

I don't have any "Big" news of my own, yet. I don't blog about my query process, so it's not as if good things aren't happening, I'm just keeping my cards on the table until I have all the news that's fit to print.
For my inaugural Good News Tuesday, I'm starting out simple.
It's a beautiful, chilly day, my favorite weather of all. I have a fresh pot of coffee, a plate of peanut butter toast, and six hours of writing time until Sonny Sonshine gets home from school.
It's better than Christmas.

Here's wishing you a day of whatever it is you love to do most.

In Which I Destroy A Perfectly Tasty Cake

2011-09-05T07:48:00.001-07:00

So, my little boy is turning seven next week (!!!) and that meant it was time to throw a party on this beautiful holiday weekend :)
Nothing crazy, just friends and family, a bouncy house, something grilled (Mr. Cate's specialty), and some fun party-type snacks. Also, in accordance with the lil'est Cate's wishes, the party should have a Lego theme. Awesome. Rectangles. I can do that.

Being the spectacular mom that I am, I spent a half hour looking for fun recipes for this party, and I found about 45,000 websites talking about cake pops. Wow, that's cute. And it looks like something I could do*

Basically, you smush up a cake and frosting into a big blob, roll it into little balls, dunk them in a candy coating and decorate. Really, you could do this without even baking, although I made a cake from a box and everything. The cake and frosting part went fine. The big pasty mess even tasted delicious. I used strawberry cake and icing. Yum. The problem came when I tried to do the icing step, so the little guys would look like Lego heads, and not raw meatballs on a stick.

I'm renaming these things "Little Failure Balls".
Main problem - I couldn't find candy melts in yellow. There was some Big Bird themed wedding going on, or some other event that required every store in three counties to have no yellow candy melties. I tried just coloring some melted white chocolate chips with regular old food coloring - Don't Ever Do This. Chocolate is high maintenance, and I'm that girl on the bleachers in the Taylor Swift song. (Sorry if that reference went off the rails. But for the record, I've never seen her jeans and sweats. She seems pretty high fashion to me. But hey, it works for her, cause she's 17 and she should enjoy looking that cute. I would have worn a lot of fancy stuff when I was that age, if I was doing things like singing at the VMAs and such.)

Actually, in regards to the white chocolate, do this, because the reaction from the chocolate was kind of interesting from a chemical perspective. Creamy smoothness became a chunky, globby, half-dried paste in about nine seconds.

So, after making a yellow globby disaster that would be good as a plumbing sealant and little else, I tried this petit fours icing recipe that my mom has used, with Fantastic! results for all kinds of fancy party food. That recipe is pretty simple, too. Half cup of corn syrup, eight billion pound of powered sugar, sifted.
I followed the directions like a girl scout with that one. Carefully blended that mess, added the powdered sugar ever so carefully, making sure no clumps or lumps should fall into the bowl, lest I be shunned from party planning forever... And it made a beautifully smooth, flowing icing, that poured over the cake heads and blocks like silk. ( I made some little cakes, too, to look like scattered lego bricks.)
But.
My petit fours icing was see-through. So then I had little raw meatballs, coated in egg yolk. YUM! Who wouldn't want a big mouthful of that? (on a side note, this might make a great halloween treat if I left the icing plain white- little candy Jars of Brains)

All of this took about five hours.
In the end, we had cake, and it was tasty, and it was cut into the shape of blocks with little marshmallows on top. Done in twenty minutes. And I did manage to come up with my own recipe that all the kids loooooved. Are you ready? Make sure and write this down. You will need the following

1 bowl, large
3-5 bags of M&Ms (enough to fill the bowl)
1 bounce house.

Add M&Ms to children, wait 10 minutes.
Add children to bounce house, allow to simmer for 6-8 hours.
Children remain unaware there were supposed to be adorable little lego head cake pops that went perfectly with the Lego theme. They will however, have fun.

I believe the theme of every children's party could just be "Run Around and Eat Sugar". Because ultimately, that's the mostest fun.

* There are two areas, despite my many talents, in which I simply have no natural gifts. One is music. Despite years of lessons, I am a moderate to terrible cellist, and an utterly crap composer. The other is cooking. I can make food that is edible for human consumption. And that's about all.

The Mystery Butterfly... Unmasked!

2011-08-31T17:41:00.001-07:00

So, when I was a kid, I found a caterpillar in the yard, took it home, put it in an old jar, and hatched it into a butterfly. (Mostly I put it in a jar and it butterflied itself) It was a fantastically bright little guy, with stripes of green and black and yellow polka dot. It lived in my room for two weeks as a chrysalis, and then hatched into a beautiful black butterfly with little colorful spots along its wings. And for 24 years, I've had no idea what the heck kind of butterfly that was.

But then today, Cate Junior and I were looking up butterflies, as we have about a dozen butterfly bushes in our yard now, and they are swarming with little friends. And Ta-da! We found him!
Or, her, I believe, because while I don't have a photo, I do remember there being a lot of colors on the "finished" butterfly, and the girls have more blue than the boys.
So here she is, the Black Swallowtail Butterfly .

From the Birthday Girl

2011-08-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

Hey all. Tomorrow is my birthday. Which one? The awesome one. (aren't they all)
So here's something fun for anyone out and about in the kidlitosphere on my fancy day.
Just some things I like.

Act III, or, This Had Better Be Worth My Time

2011-08-18T07:03:00.001-07:00

So... endings... yeah. Great hooks and well developed characters still need to get somewhere by the last page. And this seems like something of a problem trend in the storytelling industry.

I'm going to use movies as an example, not because I don't see this in books, but just to be nice to the authors. (sorry movies, I know you have writers too, but there are so many more cooks stirring those pots, it seems like less of a personal attack to make an example of you)

For your consideration, Case File One - War of the Worlds (the newer one with Cruisypants) Fantastic opening. Stunning camera work. Compelling visuals and characters I liked right from frame one. The first act of this one is rock solid. But once the Farriers leave the city and get out into the countryside, it all kind of goes to poo. By the time Tim Robbins shows up, things have gone completely crazypants, and when we get to the end, it's just one big WTF up on the screen. Like, everyone involved knew the first 1/3 of the movie was so good, they didn't need to bother making the ending as strong. The peeps were already in the seats, after all.

Case File Two - Winter's Bone
This one was somehow considered a super gutsy entry, maybe because it was helmed by a lady, and that's just not done, unless she's going to make a movie about war and all. (apologies to Mr. Cate. Kathy Bigelow is his favorite director and all, but she can't stop pretending to be a guy. There's a middle ground between Michael Bay and Nora Ephron, after all.)
So we have the very compelling story of Ree, who is courageous and noble and willing to fight her way out of a desperate situation. Again, the visuals and editing and tone of the first 2/3 are perfection. And then at the end *mild spoiler* Ree doesn't really solve her own problem at all. The people around her finally, and inexplicably, after all we've been told, decide to come to her aid and present her with a solution. At least the acting was worth it. That was a seriously spectacular cast.

Case File Three - Everything Danny Boyle's Ever Done.
With the exception of 127 hours, which is getting better.
Otherwise, there are a lot of limp endings there, to stories that are gritty and wicked and honest - right up until that last couple of minutes. But the rest of the films are so entertaining to watch, it seems like he gets a pass on the last ten minutes or so. I really like Boyle's films, in general, which makes it all the more disappointing when the end doesn't shine as bright as the rest. But he might have figured this little chestnut out. I eagerly await his next picture.

Some good examples?

For another Cuisypants example, let's go all the way back to Risky Business. After all the wild and mildly dangerous adventuring, Joel doesn't get what he thinks he wanted all along - but he's developed as a character, and has a greater understanding of himself, and his direction in the world. As simple as it may be, this character had a real story arc, and matured through the storyline.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
One of my favorite films in general, an one that takes a fantasy story and makes it even more compelling by layering the fantastic over the mundane. Joel and Clementine, while viewed mostly in a completely imaginary world, are still real and complex people with depth and authenticity. By the end they too have learned something from their adventure, understand more about themselves, and the film itself comes around full circle to resolve on the melancholy note that love is not of the mind, it is of the heart, you can love someone before you really know who they are (which can lead to heartbreak, but what does the heart care? It acts on impulse, not intellect) and you can't forget feelings the way you can forget memories.

Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, equally.

Again, I love these films. Both are so simple, telling the story of a pair of people who have an undeniable connection to each other, but are too wary to believe what they feel could be real. In the first one, Sunrise, boy and girl meet on a train, spend the night talking, and can't really believe how strongly they feel for each other after so short a time. In the second, Sunset, the same couple meets up again a second time, many years later, and still slightly in awe of the few hours they spent together and how they didn't simply forget about it they way they would have expected.
These are the films that end on that "well, what do you suppose happened??" note that I usually hate, but for these films, it works. The story ends before we know the entire outcome, and that's as it should be. Each time, the curtain closes just before we get to see what decisions the central characters have made, and somehow, that seems right for the story. Sunset and Sunrise are love stories, after all, and the narrative has established that these two characters are genuinely in love. That's all we need to know, as the audience. The rest is up to Jesse and Celine.

And I write this post about endings today because that is what I am struggling with as a writer at the moment. Characters I can do. I can invent people all day. And send them off on adventures. But getting to that clear, satisfying resolution is my major hurtle as a storyteller. I think I'm getting better. I'm paying attention to the endings I like, the ones that really made the story worth the telling. So much writing advice involves strong hooks, great openings, compelling action, and that's very important. But the ending is even more important, I feel. It needs to be the payoff for all that effort, on the part of the MC, the audience, the book or film as a whole. A bad ending will ruin a fantastic premise for me every time.

Start strong, finish stronger. No matter what.

Sprucing up the ol' Blog

2011-08-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that there are a lot of bloggers out there who can stick with one look for years and years. They also seem to post regularly.

I am not one of those people. It's all new project, new template for me! So in honor of sending my last manuscript out into the query world, and turning attention to a brand new kid, I've redecorated. This design fits the feel of the new book quite nicely. Cute, fresh and fun.And outdoorsy.

I like to write a lot of outdoor scenes, probably because when I was a kid, forests all seemed so magical, and they each had their own personalities. Pine forests were dark and slightly sinister, oak forests were stately and wise. Beech forests were the home of mischievous fairy tale hermits and wizards, and the mossy/ferny forests of the Pacific Northwest and the Smoky Mountains were of course crawling with fairies and goblins. I like my setting to have personalities just as much as my characters. So here we are in the forest, the place my new MC fears above all others. Like, she'd rather be in a dark, moldy basement full of weird noises than out in the forest. So... I'm sending her out there. Mean, mean author.

Playing around with video

2011-08-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

I've reached the halfway point on my latest WIP. Woo!
Time to celebrate with a total distraction for a moment.
Here's some clips of projects me, Mr. and Jr. have been working on for the past six months.

First, Jr. wanted to make a zombie movie, so here it is... :D

Then, Mr. Cate has been working on feature film #3, which is taking far longer, as he had to have scenes shot in every season of the year... so, it's taken about 9 months, instead of 9 days like the last film.

Ashley will have its own score, once again by the awesome Jeff Scott Townsend. This trailer has Vorspiel, because it's becoming like a running gag around here.

Also, this music is great

2011-06-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

Enjoy.

Listen to me run my mouth about filmmaking

2011-06-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

For anyone at all who might be interested, here's some interviews we did with the cast and crew of my husband's film, Dove.

Want the credits?
Starring Annie Walaszek, Amanda Soos and Ryan Patrick Shaw.
Written by Ben Lewandowski and Lindsey Becker, Original score by Jeff Scott Townsend.

Chicken v. Egg

2011-04-26T16:23:00.001-07:00

What comes first, the plot or the character?

I'm a characters first writer myself. I know who my story is about before I know what it is about. And this again contributes to my slower writing, because I have to hang out with these people for a while before I know what they are really doing out in their respective worlds.

My closest friends are usually people I've known for months or years before I really developed a relationship with them. My characters appear to be the same way. Still surprising me, still revealing layers even after years of telling their stories. I am not a fan of character sketches and plot outlines for that very reason. I don't really know a lot of details about my characters until I've seen them in action.

So, how do you get started on a new project - with the plot or the characters?

Love, love, love first drafts

2011-04-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

And making playlists for them. Here's the first song on for my new YA paranormal anti-romance.

Found Spaces

2011-03-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

A few still shots from the "sets" of Mr. Cate's new film. These are all real locations, which we use for a number of reasons, including that they are cooler, and more realisitc because they are, well, real.

March Madness for the Kid Lit Crowd

2011-02-28T11:04:00.000-08:00

Back to writing today!
The writing goals I set for February got trashed by family illness, and work obligations. Now spring is peeking through the clouds around here, and I'm already making plans for the garden. There's going to be a new patio in the yard this year, and a nice little sitting area for evenings around the fire. So when a little extra work comes my way, how can I say no?

I also need my writing time! Nothing makes me feel more accomplished than spending a few hours with my manuscripts. Thankfully, the fantastic Denise Jaden has started a March Madness writing/reading challenge, which is exactly what I need right now. Time to get back into my little worlds of strange science, mysterious adventurers and mythical creatures.

Go here to join in! March Madness :)

My goal is getting through my current revision. Hope to see you there!

I Was There

2011-02-27T09:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't considered myself a super-political gal in the past. I write the occasional letter to a representative. I vote. I try to follow news - beyond the endless op-ed pieces run on cable "news" networks.

Until this week, I wasn't really granola enough to put on my marching boots and que up with the masses.

Today, my legs are tired from a five hour march in Madison. Today, my voice is hoarse from singing the national anthem on the steps of the capitol building with a crowd of 100,000. Today, my arms are tired from pulling my son in a wagon, alongside the thousands of other moms and dads and grandparents carrying their children with them on the walk.

I am tired physically, but internally, I feel refreshed, renewed, and encouraged.

Yesterday, we arrived in Madison in time to join the police and firefighters' unions as they marched from the Municipal Building to the Capitol.

There were some amusing characters in the crowd.

The majority of the crowd were just decent people, union and non-union alike. They were smiling, They were singing. They were joining together in a spirit of unity and hope. The mood was overwhelmingly positive and civil. In the middle of a group of tens of thousands, I didn't see a single angry word exchanged. Not a single scuffle, not a single angry slur aimed at anyone in the crowd. The gathering remained unfailingly polite, hospitable and respectful. People handed out food and drink to each other. They kept the grounds spotless.

The people gathering in Madison this past week - over 250,000 so far - have been there to support each other, to speak out on each other's behalf, to stand and be counted together. It has been more than a protest. More than a demonstration. This has been a gathering of respect, of kindness, of civility, of appreciation. That is what the people in Madison have demonstrated this week, and it is all we are asking for from our government.

Solidarity

2011-02-22T06:35:00.000-08:00

Even if you aren't currently living in Wisconsin, have never been to Wisconsin, or couldn't even name the states surrounding us, you've probably seen some mention of what's going on in Madison this week.
Right up front - I fully support the unions. I come from a strong union family, and I have many
friends and family who work for both public and private unions. I've also been spending the last week educating myself about both sides of the issue, looking into how we can be fiscally responsible without trampling on worker's rights.

What has been the most troubling to me through all of this has been the outright attacks on working people, especially teachers. These are people who put themselves through graduate school, and are working for a substantially lower salary in order to use their education and talents for the public, instead of just for themselves. Same for the the corrections officers, mental health care professionals, county workers, and nurses also included in the removeal of collective bargaining rights in this proposed Budget Repair Bill. Most of them are highly educated, dedicated employees, and they are being called thugs, leeches, freeloaders, bums, and many, many other derogetory terms that I find inappropriate to post here.

The teachers, nurses, social workers and public servants I know personally are none of those things. They don't have any agenda beyond retaining their rights to negotiate with their employers. They have agreed to take cuts in pay and benefits in the coming fiscal years to help us all, and still, they are under threat.

But then there is this :

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest Pt 2 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

This is what's really going on in Madison. Things that come to mind as I watch this, and Ben's footage of the demonstrations last weekend-

Peace, Civility, Respect, Encouragement, Rationality, Inspiration. Kind people asking for kindness. Power without greed or selfishness. Dedication to the common good. True solidarity for your fellow man.

Random Writing Tip of the Day

2011-02-09T07:02:00.000-08:00

On the road to my little cottage, there is a big old farmhouse on a steep, rocky hill, with two huge porches, a rambling stone barn out back, and a big pond in the front yard. I've always loved that house. When I was a kid, I thought it was possibly the Best Place to Live Ever.

Not long after we moved here, when Mr. Cate and I were driving home, he looked up at the big old farmhouse and said very plainly, "Yeesh. What a dump. Someone needs to clean that place up."

I was a little miffed. What was he talking about? It was a charming, storybook house! Well, it had been, once. When I looked a little closer, reality started to sink in.
The house I remembered was beautiful, with flowers in the front yard, rolling white fences, a little pier and canoe out in the pond, and horses grazing in the paddock beside the barn.

It had been a few years (20?) since I'd really looked at the place. It needed paint. The garden needed some serious tending. The bushes our front were wildly overgrown, covering much of the front porch. The white fencing had been removed, the pier was sinking into the pond, and the horses were gone. The road had been widened, too, and the house that once sat on a picturesque hill of rock gardens was now way too close to a two lane highway. To me, it was the same darling property I dreamed about when I was a little kid. I hadn't seen it from anyone else's perspective, and I had never told my husband that I loved that house as a kid, so how was he supposed to know?

Which reminded me of my writing.
I have a habit of being too obtuse with my plots. In trying to get too clever, I sometimes get way too subtle. I put in a lot of hints, but I don't actually explain what's going on. As a reader, I hate that. It's not fun, it's just irritating. Some things should be a puzzle, some clues should be left up to the reader to put together, but not everything. Sometimes, a nice, plain explanation is totally appropriate. Especially when you write steampunk, or sci-fi, or magical realism, or any other genre where nothing can be assumed about the characters or their world. Otherwise, you wind up with the endings where something that previously had no magical properties suddenly - does! Or characters have to bring the action to a grinding halt to sit around explaining what has actually been going on for the last 300 pages.

The good news, is, I think I'm improving.
Sometimes, I actually make sense.

"Well, it's not broken..."

2011-01-14T21:29:00.000-08:00

So, 15 days in, and so far I have spent all of 2011 either sick or injured.

Yay!

Wait, no. BOO!

I said I would post a picture of myself a while ago, and here it is:

Ta - Da!

That, kids, is what you look like when Ski Patrol has to haul you off the mountain in a leg splint, because you turned left, but your right leg refused to participate.

So, I spent the last few days on the couch, trapped under a sleeping cat, with various frozen vegetables wrapped around my ankle.

On the plus side, today I made serious progress on chapters 1-3, and I started walking without crutches.

Viva La 2011!!

2010

2010-12-31T16:27:00.001-08:00

Kisses! Hugs! A fond farewell!

So 2010 is over. It was a pretty darn good year, I must say. For us anyway. Hope the joy and semi prosperity extends to you and yours as well.

I'm not a big fan of resolutions, as they are so often about things we're going to try not to do.

I'm more of a goal setter for the new year. At least, I like to set up a target to aim for.

Here's my select few for 20ELEVEN!!

Work on my three WIPs. Get each one to the next stage of development. I'm not going to use that f-word (finished!)

Work on my portfolio. I haven't painted in some time, and my brain can feel the effects.

Finish the house projects. Seriously. The spare bathroom has been in a state of suspended animation since we moved in. Time to finish the trim and painting and actually break that bad boy in.

Take a family trip.

A small one. We managed to get away in '09, but this year, with all the weddin's and family reunions, we didn't really have a chance to get away, just me, Mr. Cate and the little guy.

I think that's enough. If I get through all those, I'll add something new.

Before I know it, I'll be typing my farewell to 2011

It's Almost Finished...

2010-11-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

Mr. Cate's new film.
It's in it's final edit as we speak, but here's a taste.

There's a zombie on my lawn

2010-11-02T10:17:00.001-07:00

My son was Dr. Zomboss for Halloween. We made a bucketful of these little guys to go on his costume. This one has decided to become my writing buddy. He keeps telling me to write "brains" for some reason...

This was the first year we were home for Trick or Treating in our new neighborhood, and it was fantastic.
We have dark, narrow streets, lots of huge, creepy old trees and no streetlights messing it all up. And we went out after dark even. With all the orange and purple Halloween lights up, it was really fantastic.

In writing news I am not, for the 31st consecutive year, joining up for NaNo.
I have a half finished WIP that doesn't need 50k more words, and I don't want to start anything news just now.
But cheers for all my NaNo writing peeps. Good luck with the NaNo project.
I have to get back to my WIP now.
I have a zombie threatening to nibble my fingers off if I don't keep typing.

Updates!

2010-10-20T10:08:00.001-07:00

A lot has happened to our little writing community since I started this blog oh so many years ago. Much has changed. Many bloggers I visited regularly, especially industry blogs, aren't around anymore, or exist now only as archives.
It was time to update the links, and the page as well.
This one is much more fitting with the theme of my last book ;)

What am I missing? Where are the great middle grade, YA, or Steampunk bloggers that I haven't discovered yet?
And if I don't have a link to your blog yet, let's get that fixed!

One Hundred Wonderful Movies #2

2010-10-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

Has there ever been a film more quotable than The Big Lebowski?
A film so awesome it inspired it's own annual festival (that didn't involve space travel of some kind)?
A more perfect celebration of Sam Elliot's mustache?
I think not.

This is the Coen Brother's first entry on my list of all-time favorites. Joel and Ethan Coen are among my favorite directors, and there is no better introduction into their deceptively simple style of storytelling than with the Dude himself.

The Big Lebowski is a delightful bit of absurdity that at first seems to be a random collection of hilarious setpieces, and slowly evolves from general wackiness and gratuitous recreational drug use into a genuine mystery, albeit with characters so inane and self absorbed it's difficult to care about any one of them. And yet they're all somehow so lovable. Walter and his temper, Donny and his total irrelevance, the cold, calculating Maude, Bunny (we're all quite fond of her) and especially the Dude himself.
The Big Lebowski centers around a happily rut-embedded old hippie who spend his days drinking white russians and bowling, and loving every minute of it. That is, until a misunderstanding involving a wealthy man (or is he??) with the same legal name as the titular Jeffery Lebowski (because they got the wrong guy, man... everyone knows he's the Dude.)

What follows is a classic Coen brothers tale, told in a simple fashion, but with a quite densely layered story under all the nonsense. And you can pick out just about any line of dialogue, throw it out into the world, and someone will join you in a volley of Lebowski-isms. Plus, the soundtrack is absolutely classic.

One Hundred Wonderful Movies #1

2010-10-14T14:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, this year was kind of a snooze at the local cinema.
Since January, there have been about five movies I've really wanted to see in a theater, or bothered to, for that matter.
Youth in Revolt, Despicable Me, How to Train Your Dragon, Inception, and The Social Network.
(I rank them 5, 4, 2, 3, and 1, respectively. Social Network gets points over Youth for starring Jesse Eisenberg, Inception gets major points for Joseph Gordon Levitt, looses some for being in a race with no real competition)
(Note, I still need to see Get Low and Ondine) Still scheduled for release sometime this year are The Rum Diary, The Black Swan, (in which Darren Aronofsky decided not to cast his wife, so he could make it extra "adult" apparently) King's Speech starring Colin Firth, and The Tempest. (wow, really? yes, the actual The Tempest. Ooh, that's spectacular. I know, right??) Also, the Coen Brothers are remaking True Grit. But until they actually debut, it's been a rather slow 10 months for us film people.
Good news, we have Netflix, and all kind of things "on demand". (How do I sign up for Dr. Pepper "on demand"? Where's the button I hit for that? Isn't this A'merca?) So, if you're looking for something to watch you may have missed the first time around, I'm going to make a list, in no particular order, of my 100 favorite movies.

Starting with (again, in no particular order) The New World.
Terrence Malik is the kind of director who turns up every decade or so with an offering of lyrical, heartbreaking cinematic poetry, only to disappear again until the next Transit of Venus, or whatever it is that entices him to get back in the director's seat. In 2005, he shot the million feet of film that would become The New World (His next film Tree of Life, will premiere in 2011)

And so it goes. For over 135 minutes, or 170 in Malik's rerelease, hardly anyone speaks aloud, and every frame is completely captivating. There are no theatrics, almost nothing explicit. The film diverges from the historical record to focus on the legendary but probably fictional love story between Pocahontas and John Smith. The relationship between them is delicate and subtle, (partly because the actress was only 15) but it still manages to illustrate love and a true connection between souls with sincerity and brilliance. Smith and Pocahontas don't need to speak for us to understand exactly how they feel - her surprise and curiosity, his deep inner conflict and mistrust of his own feelings. Inaccurate as it may be historically, it's one of the best depictions of true love on film.

I thought that would be a good one to begin with.
99 to go!

The Social Network

2010-10-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

I graduated from college in '02, so I missed facebook by about a year and a half.
Not the current incarnation of facebook, with all the games and quizzes and family photo albums. The original facebook. You know, for kids.
Watching the Social Network made me simultaneously wish I was three or four years younger, and also totally relieved I wasn't three or four years younger. It also made me want to go straight home and delete my facebook account.

The Social Network opens with a conversation between Harvard freshman Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend. While discussing his goals and ambitions for the upcoming year, Zuckerberg calously offends his girlfriend in just about every possible way, but is still confused and deeply hurt when she announces she wants to end the relationship.

He reacts in a classically immature way, by rushing straight back to his dorm room to get drunk and post some malicious gossip about her on his blog. In the same night, he whips up and posts a website that lets users rate the hotness of the female undergrads. Fasmash, as he calls it, is so popular that it crashes the Harvard network within a few hours.

In the first ten minutes, we've learned two very important things about Zuckerberg. He's a frighteningly talented programmer, and he's also incredibly vindictive and petty. Throughout the rest of the film, Zuckerberg's actions are surrounded by a haze of ambiguous motivation. Is he acting the part of a shrewd entrepreneur, or reacting as a jealous, insecure kid shaking his fist in the air and shouting "I'll show you!" ?

The raging success of Facemash gets the attention of a trio of young entrepreneurs on campus, Divya Narenda, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. They pitch Zuckerberg and idea for an exclusive website that would basically help Harvard guys find girls that want to hook up with Harvard guys. Yes, these are the big ideas of 20 year old guys. Zuckerberg immediately runs to his best friend Eduardo Saverin with an idea of his own. Zuckerberg's idea borrows a bit from the Winkelvoss's HarvardConnection, but it also incorporates a bit of Myspace, and essentially just expands the already existing Facebook sites run individually by many of Harvard's school houses.

Did Zuckerberg end up backing out of the Winkelvoss's project simply because of immaturity and a lack of foresight? Or did he intentionally screw them over because they were exactly the kind of guys his girlfriend jokingly suggested she preferred to Zuckerberg himself? Either way, with Saverin's help and initial investment of 1k, Zuckerberg's site, The facebook, is up and running in a few short months. From that point, things move at a freakish pace, with the facebook expanding from Harvard to a handful of schools, to nationwide in a few short months.
Zuckerberg and Saverin succeed in getting the attention of Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, who meets with them to discuss business, or so they think.

There is immediate tension between Saverin and Parker, with Parker coming off as a greasy, opportunistic weasel, but also the guy with the corporate connections Saverin wishes he had. It's Parker's involvement that really gets the site from a project to a viable business, but it's also the wedge that finally splits Saverin and Zuckerberg. This was my only real problem with The Social Network as a whole. The film alternates between scenes of the founding of facebook, and the eventual avalanche of lawsuits by nearly everyone involved or remotely connected. We know that Saverin is suing his best friend for hundreds of millions of dollars. But when it comes down to the pivotal scene, where Saverin is cut out of the business, Zuckerberg is conspicuously off stage. What was his involvement in that decision? It's left very vague, probably as a result of non disclosure agreements attached to everyones multi million dollar settlements.

In the end, Parker ends up looking sad and desperate, Saverin comes off looking like a charming, trusting, betrayed but loyal friend, and Zuckerberg is exactly the same as he was in the first scene. A brilliant, awkward, immature, insecure kid. The only difference is, he's worth a billion dollars.

The Social Network draws immediate comparisons to Startup.com, the 2000 documentary that was supposed to chronicle the rise to success of another trio of sharp young entrepreneurs in the new landscape of internet business. Instead, it was a dramatic depiction of the 90's .com bubble popping. The only difference is that the facebook founders were fighting over real dollars, and the Govworks.com guys were so busy dividing up shares and squabbling over control of the company, they never really bothered to create anything that worked before they tried to sell it.

Zuckerberg would have been old enough to understand the .com mania, and the ensuing destruction of the new era of internet business. In that context, many of his decisions make perfect sense. He makes the right moves for the business, and it is a smashing success. The problem is that he also makes the best decisions for himself, and at the end of the day, he's standing alone at the top of the hill. He gets his revenge, even against those who tried to help and support him.

In the Grocery Store - Alone

2010-09-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

For the past six years, I haven't been to the grocery store alone.

That's the kind of thing you don't realize when you're expecting your first child. Some changes are obvious, like "this is a lot of responsibility" or "This is going to be very expensive" You realize this when the equipment starts rolling in. Cribs, swings, car seats, diapers, bottles, safety equipment for your coffee table. It's a lot.

But you still don't really get it until a few months in. You're never really alone anymore. And I don't mean in some metaphysical sense. I mean seriously, there's a kid with you all the time. It doesn't quite sink in until you're living it.

The advice to other expecting parents becomes the stuff that blindsided you. My favorite bit of advice - enjoy being in the bathroom with the door closed. Especially for stay at home moms like me. It won't happen again until that first day of preschool, when you are finally alone in your own house. That's like 3 or 4 years of leaving the door cracked so you can hear what's going on in the other room. But preschool was still only half day. I had a few hours to write and paint, so I spent my few precious alone hours working, and did all the errand running when CJ got home from school.

Now he goes to school full day. There isn't enough time after he gets home for a big grocery store trip. Yesterday, for the first time in six years, I found myself shopping all alone. No carseat bucket, no cart cover for the seat, no kid circling the cart every .8 seconds. No 20,000 questions. There were a lot of other moms with little guys in the cart, looking exasperated while they compared the price of pasta or canned soup.

The only thing in my cart's seat was a can of pizza sauce.

It was sort of zen to be able to shop in silence. To just pick up what I needed and get out of there. But I also missed my shopping buddy. From now on, I'll be handling this mostly solo. That's the other thing I wasn't expecting. Once you get used to the situation, it all changes again.

cool things

2010-08-21T13:59:00.001-07:00

Forgive me, guys. I'm still a little tired from staying up till 3 to read Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth cover to cover. I had to. It was one of those perfectly paced stories, where so much has happened in the first 10 pages that I was thinking "There's so much book still in my hand, what else could possibly happen?"
And then all of a sudden, four hours later, I was sitting there with only 10 pages left, thinking, "How can this possibly get wrapped up with only 10 pages left? What else could possibly happen?!?"

In other great things news, I love this blog A New Dress A Day.
I love this idea. It's inspiring, without adding that sigh of "oh yeah, I'd love to do something like that... someday..." It's something I can do right now! Plus, I hate, hate, hate clothes shopping, and I love making things.
Although Marisa is absolutely adorable and looks to be about a size 2. She can pull off a few looks I wouldn't dare. Like the spaghetti straps, or strapless altogether. Uh, not quite for me.
Lots of her creations end up with that funky/vintage look of ModCloth dresses, which I love, and don't wear enough.
I must wear more dresses! Not just hippie skirts and maxi sundresses, either. Real dresses!

What I'm Doing When I'm Not Writing

2010-08-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

Opinions?
We have 2 versions of a teaser trailer for Mr. Cate's new film.

Or

Which one, peeps?

Ooh, you have books? I want some!

2010-08-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

Sara McClung is doing a sweet book giveaway, and hey, I like books. So I'm helping her up the traffic in a bid to win some of those sweet titles for myself. Even though I just came home from the library with a chin high stack. She has some great new titles in the lineup, including Clockwork Angel and Paranormalcy.
There are never too many books in the house.

On the homefront, we have finally acquired a fishtank, or, to be more honest, we have decided to open a goldfish mortuary in our bathroom. First up on deck is a sharp little black and orange feeder fish that my son proudly named "George Rudebeckia". He's been giving me hourly updates, along the lines of "He's still alive, Mom!"

He has a nice little tank with a filter and everything, so we'll cross our fingers and see how hearty this little guy is. So far, only one marble has "accidentally" fallen into the tank.
Also, George seems to like watching the Simpsons.

Writing Tip #1 Show vs. Tell

2010-07-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

Example 1.

I am a klutz.

Example 2.

The two liter Dr. Peppers were stacked chest high at the end of the aisle, in plastic trays that resembled giant egg cartons. I reached for the nearest one of only three left on the top tray. As soon as I lifted the bottle, the entire tray plummeted to the floor, sending one giant bottle of soda bouncing across the supermarket tile. The other bottle hit the ground ass end first, blowing the cap off and sending out a mentos-fueled jet of Dr. Pepper that hit me directly in the chest from ten feet away. I screamed, or squealed really, out of shock as I stood there getting showered in delicious, sticky soda pop. Then Mr. Cate walked casually over from the next aisle to find me dripping wet and standing in a puddle of Dr. Pepper, to which he replied, "I heard something blow up, and I heard a scream, and I knew it had something to do with you."

True story. That's a pretty typical trip to the grocery store for me.

Into the Sunlight

2010-07-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

I don't have a picture of myself up here, I know.
(I'm working on it. I just got bangs after years of not having bangs, and I haven't decided if I like them yet.)
Anonymous blogs can be a lot of fun, but I really like seeing the people behind the curtain. Especially writers, who so often are just the words they submit for public scrutiny. People never look like what I expect they might.

Well, I don't have a picture for you today, but you can listen to an interview I did with my husband about independent filmmaking.
It aired in April on WUWM, Milwaukee's Public Radio affiliate.

Check it out here, under Starts Friday.

Also, I'm joining the online conference world with WriteOnCon, which rolls out next month. I've never been to a live conference, so this should be interesting. There are a lot of great writers and publishy people onboard.

Well, I wasn't expecting that

2010-07-14T06:21:00.000-07:00

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hm. Is this good or bad for a MG/YA writer?

Also, I had no idea Joyce was into steampunk. Fair play to you, Jim.

Research

2010-07-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

Working on a new steampunk ms.
This one is set far outside of Victorian England, which means it's research time. Fun research, because once I've read about the history and the mythology, I get to rewrite it all into something new and weird.
Fun times.

Anyone out there read steampunk? Need a recommendation?

I don't post a lot of reviews because, frankly, I'm not a great reviewer. Bad reviews are usually the most entertaining, and I can't bring myself to say anything negative about most books because, well, as a writer, I can't stop thinking about how much work went into the making of the book. Unlike a movie, which is the work of hundreds of people, or even music, which is a collaboration among a dozen or more, books are so singular in their creation. Of course there are many stages of editing and input along the way, many helpful minds that contribute to the finished, polished product. (shout out to all the betas out there) Still, a book is viewed so much more as a singular work.
I've seen reviewers slam books for things the author likely had no control over, like titles, or cover art, or similar works published at the same time. I know a little bit more about what goes on backstage. I just find it hard to say anything beyond, "Well, you wrote a book. Good for you! That's really hard work!"

And back to the writing...

Well how will you know unless you try?

2010-07-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

A few years ago... like... eight now... I went to work with my dad for the summer. He's been at the same job for over 30 years, working in a plant that makes fruit juice. He works with a lot of lifetime juicemakers, so many in fact that even when he'd been there 32 years, he still didn't have seniority in his department. Yeah.

All of those long time employees have wracked up some heavy duty vacation time. So over the summers, when most of the union plant workers take their 16 weeks of vacation, the plant hires their college student kids on as temps. It was fantastic pay, and a great chance to see what my dear ol' dad really did all day for all those years.
This being the day and age of OSHA, the first week I was there I was in a room with twenty other undergrads, in a conference room, sitting through safety seminar after safety seminar. At the end, the lovely gentleman who would be our supervisor asked if anyone wanted to drive a forklift as their assignment.

Of course I volunteered. We were in a juice plant. Every other job involved manning a machine for 12 hours a day. Standing in one place, in the big gray windowless factory. No thanks. Forklift meant a magnitude of freedom, and besides, that's what my dad did.

Turned out I was the only one. No one else wanted to drive the forklifts. It did seem a bit scary, especially taking a fully loaded pallet up ten feet in the air, and stacking it in the freezer, but guess what? I was pretty damned good at driving that thing. Even though it steered from the rear. I even learned how to change the propane tank, (I think?) that powered the thing. It was great.
I spent 12 weeks zipping around the floor, bringing palettes back and forth, loading trucks and crates, and hanging out with my dad, who brought me a donut every morning at 6 am.

It turned out to be a pretty cool summer. And I was so good on the forklift that they asked me to come back the next year, even though by then I was out of school, and employed full time. It was kind of sad to say no.

So I am a natural born forklift driver, and working with my father is pretty entertaining.
You never know what you're going to be good at until you try it.

The New Templates are here!

2010-07-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

Ooh, new decorations!
I'm going to have to try a few of these out.
Why? Because it's New Manuscript Day! Huzzah!

That's right. Today I started with a brand new Chapter One Page One. Otherwise know as "The Hardest Part of the Book to Write".
Not on the first draft, neccessarily, but in revisions, for sure.
That first page has to be perfection. Not just the first page, but the first paragraph, the first sentence... the first word. Give the reader any excuse to close the cover on you and they'll do it. I know I have. There are just to many wonderful books, too much brilliant writing out there, to spend time on something I don't enjoy. Not just enjoy, but love.
I get it, you agenty types. I know what you want. Perfection.
Well, I'm trying, damnit!

Spit Shine, Tie the Twine, Glass of Wine, Yours and Mine

2010-06-28T08:40:00.001-07:00

Ah revisions.
There are more stages of revisions than of grief, or addiction recovery, childbirth, aren't there?
I'm in the quite-possibly-end stages, where there is little rebuilding left, and mostly cleanup. The sheet rock is up on the frame, the walls are taped and mudded. Now it's time to sweep up the dust and hang some art on the walls.
Time to make sure all the seams are stitched nice and even, with no puckers or gaps. No characters heading upstairs to take a quick shower, and disappearing from the narrative, never to be seen again.

So I'm reminded of the plot holes in a lot of my favorite books and movies.
Such as this scene from the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.

Clever, except for the fact that you can't fold a painting in half like that.
It's stretched over a wooden frame. If he just broke the frame, fine (forget the fact that he would probably destroy a good portion of the painting if he did so) but he takes the painting straight home and hangs it directly on his office wall, undamaged.

Then there's the awesome parade scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But it's supposed to be late afternoon on a weekday.
Is there really a parade going on in downtown Chicago then? (alternately, remember when they used to shoot movies in Chicago? That was fun)

Also the basilisk in Chamber of Secrets. Traveling in the plumbing sounds pretty clever, until McGonagall points out that the school, and also the Chamber, were built a thousand years ago. When there was no indoor plumbing. Would there even be bathrooms that long ago? And if they were installed later, then surely the Chamber would have been discovered, etc.

And so on. Sometimes it's artistic license, sometimes it's a writer hoping the audience won't notice, but I like to try to write things that are tight and logical, even when they are entirely fantastic. Fantasy still has rules. And if you're going to break a rule you've just invented, have an explanation why or at least how.
Otherwise its a big distraction for us smarty pantses.

New Music, New Movie

2010-06-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

Here you go, writer pals.
Some more of my current favorite inspiration.
It can be hard to find modern tunes that have a steampunk feel, but I think these guys nailed. it.
Also, Silversun Pickups have a new album that is delicious.

#1 Rather Lovely Thing
#3 Song for Jesse
#4 Falling

also

Exogenesis Part 1
Exogenesis Part 2
Ex0genesis Part 3

My thanks to Muse, and also Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Brilliant.
The blog has been a little slow lately. CJ is taking a summer school class, which means I start my weekdays with one pot of coffee and four hours of writing time now. Can't pass that up.

The Playlist

2010-05-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

I hesitate to post much about my WIPs here, because, well all the reasons, from coming off as unprofessional to looking like a total nut, but since this is supposed to be a blog about writing, I should, yanno, write something about my writing.

So I'm giving you guys my playlist for the ms that is sitting in middle draft stage, bubbling and reducing from a pot of raw ingredients into a thick, glorious stew. Or perhaps a gut busting sludge. Here's what I was listening to as I wrote -

Feist Honey Honey
Fleet Foxes Blue Ridge Mountains, White Winter Hymnal, Your Protector
Gorillaz Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head
Franz Ferdinand The Dark of the Matinee
My Chemical Romance uh, all of it.
Silversun Pickups Three Seed, Checkered Floor, Rusted Wheel, etc.
The Rolling Stones, You Can't Always Get What You Want, Ruby Tuesday, Angie
Vampire Weekend, Walcott, Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Weezer - anything off of Weezer, of course
Passion Pit To Kingdom Come

And a whole pile of others, as well, but these were on the heaviest rotation during drafts 1-4.

Any other music-fueled writers out there? What do you listen to when you write?

New Film

2010-04-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first production meeting for the new film. We are privileged to be working with some fantastic actors, and shooting is scheduled to start next month.

While I'm submerged in this project, it has given me some time to slow down, and learn to be patient with the ms.

Rushing is my biggest problem-wanting it to be done as soon as possible. Writing every day keeps me motivated and activated, but it doesn't mean I'm doing my best work.

Plus, my reading is falling woefully behind. Happily, it was book sale day at the library last week, so for 3 bucks, I picked up a grocery bag full of goodness to tear through until The Boneshaker comes out in next month.

What are you eagerly waiting for?

Honesty in Dedications

2010-04-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Let's be honest...
Who really deserves the credit for getting you through that book?
When it all comes down to it, what really got you through the minutes, hours, days, months and years from that first word on the page to completed manuscript, or better yet, printed and bound copy with that legit publisher's logo stamped in gold on the spine?

Mine would be hot cocoa and preschool. Seriously. I get so much more done with them in my life. It's nice to be so simple.

Books of all kinds

2010-04-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

You might have been there... so deep in revisions that every minute is problem solving. You're writing while you're driving. You're writing while you're working. You're writing while you're shopping, chopping onions, tilling the flowerbeds, getting dressed, cleaning the house, sending emails, paying the bills, washing the car... just... all the freaking time.

It was time to take a mental break. A little time where I kept the laptop/notepad at least 20 feet away, so I couldn't drop everything to write notes, or jot down a revision of some particularly stubborn sentence.

And to do that, I have to work on something else. Which happens to be books. Ha!
I love fabric. I love chopping it up and making new things. (like writing much??) So I chopped up some fabric and made some journals.

And then some bookmarks to go along.

The way to take a break from making books is sometimes to make more books.

What have you been up to, eh?

2010-03-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

Good gravy it's been almost a month.
What's been going on?

Around here, I've been
- revising ms 1, for 2010, Year of the Agent.
- setting off the smoke alarms every time I made dinner for about 2 weeks running.
- painting in the mornings with Cate Junior.
- more revising.
- worrying about the old, old car that's starting to make weird noises and smells...
- more revising
- reading sample pages from new crit buddies- you guys are some good writers!
- more revising
- getting some pleasantly surprising feedback on parts of ms 2, which I was feeling less than love about, but seems to be hooking the readers.
- more revising!! It's like working out, man. Pointless if you don't do it every day.
- seeing lots of movies.
- reading Chamber of Secrets with CJ. He's five now, and getting bored with pbs already (tear) so we've moved on to HP, and he's loving it.

And of course, revisions.

So, what is everyone else doing?

I have to go turn off the smoke alarm, and take the potatoes out of the oven.
Oh, and call my little brother... it's his birthday!

New Artwork Day

2010-02-25T08:24:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to putting some of my illustrations up on etsy.

More to follow, of course.

This is the dog. Not a Chinese dog, I know. He's a borzoi, or a Russian wolfhound. This is the dog I have always thought I would get, if I was in any way a dog person. Maybe it's all the years of staring at Alfred Knopf spines.

Advantage: Books

2010-02-22T07:11:00.000-08:00

There are 10 movies nominated for Best Picture by the Academy this year. I think this is the second year since they expanded the category. Looking at the list, there are five wonderful, crowd pleasing, artistic, brilliant entries- The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, An Education, Inglorious Basterds, and Up. That's five good ones. Give it to any of those, and I would totally agree. (except I'd swap out Up for Where the Wild Things Are) so why do they need to tack on stuff like The Blind Side, and District 9?

Because a few years ago, the movies were too good.
No, really, that's the logic. Remember '08, when No Country for Old Men won? When its competition was There Will Be Blood, Atonement, and Michael Clayton? Well, it was also the lowest rated Oscar broadcast of all time. Which was immediately attributed to the Academy being full of snobs, and the movies being too smart. The average movie goer couldn't relate, or wasn't interested, or whatever excuse was used for low box office grosses among the most decorated movies. To get people to watch the Oscars, they added 5 slots to the Best Picture category in an incredibly crass attempt to show give the television audience a reason to tune in.

The problem isn't that the most artistic films are too high brow, and no one wants to see pictures of that caliber. The problem is this- the nearest cinema to my town is a 14 screen multiplex. 14 freakin' screens, and they didn't show Atonement until after the Oscar picks, and Michael Clayton not at all. ?!?!

Let me repeat- Not. At. All. FOURTEEN SCREENS!!! They could set aside two whole screens for art films, still show 3 screens of Alvin and the Chipmunks, plus 3 screens of Avatar, and still have six (6!) other screens for showing whatever plotless Nicholas Sparks novel was just optioned into a film, plus all those buddy cop comedies we've been clamoring for. The multiplex, of course, argues that audiences in my town don't pay to see films like An Education, even though they don't bother to show films like that in the first place, so what data are they basing this on? Of course they didn't make a profit off of a product they didn't offer for sale.

Now, to see films like An Education, or No Country on release day, I drive 45 minutes to see it an an art house. Fine. They have 3 screens, they show only stuff like documentaries, foreign films, and stuff with Daniel Day Lewis involved, and they've been around since long before the era of the multiplex, so they seem to be turning a profit. Surely the 14 screener can support something other than blockbusters, mindless rom-coms, and 12 Tyler Perry movies a year.

My point is this- Movies suffer greatly at the hands of distributors, theater chains that pander to the lowest common denominator, and an industry that blames their own audience, and calls them dumb. There is no reason in the world why artistic awards should be based on box office grosses. If they do, then things like Norbit are going to start being nominated*, so Eddie Murphy can be named in all 4 acting categories at once.

Books have distribution issues of their own, certainly. But when I want to read almost any book that is in print, I can find it online, buy it, and let the publisher know with my $$ what I support as a reader. I can't choose to vote with my dollars at the box office if the movie I want to see is only in limited release in LA and NYC.

So I hope, dearly, that our publishing industry can get their @$%! together with the e-readers and electronic rights. There is no reason now to say that a certain genre, or a topic won't sell in a given geographic area. We can finally see what people in the flyover states really do want to read and watch, and this could be a golden age for literature.

* Norbit was nominated for an Oscar the same year as No Country for Old Men won. No, seriously.

Happy Valen-Tiger Day

2010-02-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

So it's Valentine's Day and the official start of the Year of the Tiger.

Here's my Tiger, from the series of Lunar Zodiac animals I've been painting. Yes, he's still a work in progress. I'm hoping it's good luck to finish him in his official year.

I am from the year of the Sheep, or the Goat, depending on what source you use. I prefer sheep, because then I can be the black one.

Mr. Cate's year was the Rabbit, which brings me to the other occasion today. I know I should be making a list of romantic books, but cuddling up together and reading silently isn't exactly something you plan for a date night (well, maybe in this crowd!). Also, Mr. Cate and I met at a movie theater, and fell in love (even more) over late night diner discussions of cinema. So here's a list of my favorite romantic movies that I can think of right now while I type this.

Before Sunrise

This one is so simple, and so touching. The whole movie consists of one night of conversation between two twenty-somethings who meet on a train ride through Vienna, and spend one bittersweet evening together before they have to go their separate ways. This movie had one of my favorite endings, until the sequel-

Before Sunset

This one came out nine years later, and once you overlook the opening, in which Ethan Hawke's Jesse is wrapping up his international book tour for his debut novel at a reading in Paris's Shakespeare & Co. (where the crowd of media types is hanging on his every word) and get to him catching up with his long lost love, Celine, it is the perfect follow up to Sunrise.

The Fountain (2006)

This one was surprising, considering it came from the director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Wrestler. And also its about a woman dying of cancer, and a time traveling philosopher/soldier/scientist who is driven to the brink of madness trying to find a way to be with her forever, and in the meantime, ends up loosing the short amount of time he really had. But when you think about it, Aronofsky has cast his wife, Rachel Weiss, as the embodiment of beauty, unattainable perfection, and eternal life. Kind of an elaborate way to say "I love you", but hey, it works.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Charlie Kaufman is one of my favorite screenwriters, and this is possible his best script. It also boasts a cast that includes Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, and what will probably be Jim Carrey's best theatrical performance. As in the best Kaufman works, its not the story he tells, but how he tells it, through the memories of Joel Barrish as he simultaneously tries to erase his ex-girlfriend Clementine from his memory, and desperately hang on to her. In the end, Joel and Clementine realize that even if you could wipe someone from your memory like erasing a tape, you couldn't forget that you loved them.

So what are your favorite love stories? They can be books, too ;)

How Sports Works for Me

2010-02-08T07:29:00.000-08:00

Hockey is awesome live. Can't stand it on TV.
Baseball can be fun live, but the season is too long.
Football is awesome always. Someday I'll get to see a game live. Good work, New Orleans.
I have absolutely no use for basketball. Ugh.
The Olympics are coming up, which means we get to see some weird sports that don't get out otherwise. Biathalon? Cross country ski races? It's like a world-wide county fair.
Bobsledding and downhill skiing are unreal. Love to watch those.

Romance Versus Responsibility in YA*

2010-02-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

Ah, stupid teenagers... thinking love is all pure and true and magical. Why can't they just be bitter and disillusioned like normal people?

I keep coming across opinion pieces discussing the perils of all the romance in YA, and how it is silly/stupid/damaging to young women. How too much of female centric YA is about love and guys and how bad that is for the self esteem of every teen girl, which is the most fragile thing in nature, and must be guarded like the mythical mcguffin of every fantasy novel- when we all know it will fall into the hands of some dark lord or other eventually, anyway.

Romance is for teenagers. The way Christmas presents are for children. Yes, we still get some when we're older, but it never holds that same mystery and wonder as it did in the beginning. There's a reason Juliet was all of 13- any older and she would have thought about it for a minute.
"Kill myself?... I mean, you're cute and all, but damn, I have to think about that one."

Make her a 30 year old, and it just doesn't fly, the way the woman in Braveheart seemed WAAAAAY to old to be living unmarried in some pastoral hut village when the clearly 40something Mel rides back into town and woos her. That never played right for me, because were both just too stinking old.

Your teen years are the only chance you get to fall in love for the first time, all fresh and optimistic.
At my age, if you're still out there dating, it's because you're a little messed up, or something a little messed up happened to you. Now, that doesn't mean you don't find happiness. You probably end up making smarter choices. It just isn't as magical watching a jaded 30 something chick lit heroine learn to love again as it is to see a 15 year old have that first experience of "I really like him, and he really likes me back!!!"
In that way, romance was made for teenagers.

Yes, there is a metric ton of romantic YA being backhoe'd into bookstores every week. Yes, agents you get a lot of queries for YAs with paranormal love stories. That's what teenagers like to read. Always? No. A lot of the time? Yes!

I don't think books about relationships, or romance, or even sex are damaging to girls. It's the "Happily Ever After" part that requires some caution. We have to remember that we're telling a story, not the whole story. People of every age get the difference between fantasy and reality.

*Disclaimer- written by a girl who met her love at 19, would have married him that day, and has been wildly in love with him every day of the almost-11 years since.

** also, thanks for the opinions on the posters!

A Shameless Solicitation

2010-02-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

So it's February!
Wow.
This is the month to discuss Romance in Writing. I have some plans for the upcoming posts. But first, in the name of love, I have to ask a question on behalf of Mr. Cate.
Which one do you prefer, the green background or the white?

This is his new project for '10. We're camera shopping now, which is a trip. There are some new cameras you can pick up at Best Buy that do more than the top of the line DV camera Mr. Cate used to film his last movie, Starts Friday.

Also, from now on, I promise to keep the film making stuff to Mr. Cate's blog. Oh, that's right, he has his own blog now, and for some reason, he's adorably shy about it. So I'm going to try to help get him some followers. Pop over to September Son Films and say hi.

New Love

2010-01-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

I have found something AWE-some to share with you all.

Beards!!
- to a degree. The lead singer is a bit over the barrel on this one. But still. I like beards.

Also Rock Dulcimer!! Woo Hoo!

These guys (and an ocean of coffee, let's be honest) are getting me through this round of revision.

Thank you Foxes.

P.S. This album is also fantastic to ski to.

The Literary Tastes of a Flying Green Marshmallow

2010-01-17T06:52:00.000-08:00

We all have our preferences for the stuff that works for us, so we stick with it even in the face of improvement. My grandmother has her window air conditioning unit and refuses to get central air, my mother has a VCR and refuses to get a DVR or TiVo of any kind, and I still ski, despite the fact that snowboarding is infinitely cooler.

See, I learned almost 20 years ago, and I'm now proficient enough to actually have fun while skiing. Even though my very first ski experience was a disaster in which I was knocked over and clocked in the head by the ski lift while on a class trip, and this got around the school faster than I could get back, resulting in widespread rumors that I was in the hospital with some kind of skull fracture.
Ah, eleven year olds. It was just a goose egg, people. I kept right on skiing, although it would explain a lot.
When I got my first lift ticket, snowboards were brand new. Like, most hills wouldn't allow them, and those that did had special times and places to keep those punk kids away from us normal, respectable skiers.

No freaking wonder this caught on like hot cakes.

After high school I got a little busy, with things like college and jobs and a husband and a kid, and I didn't get out for years. In the last few years, I started hitting the slopes again, and holy crap, those kids are everywhere.

There are still a lot of us old, crusty 25- and- up types on our comically long and ridiculous skis, with out silly poles and our little knees bent like we're trying to sit down daintily the whole way to the bottom of the course. But everyone under 18 who isn't training for the giant slalom is riding a snowboard. Its just so undeniably cool. And the outfits are way better. Snowboarding gear is in some kind of graphic design renaissance. And everything coordinates, from the ear buds to the boots to the hats has the same design as the image on the bottom of the board. You know, the one nobody can even see unless you're sailing off a huge jump and spinning through the night over our heads.
(also, stuff they NEVER let you do when I was a kid, but now they have whole terrain parks where you are free to smash your face into rails and poles and moguls embedded all over the hill.)
My skiing ensemble is not very cool. Big puffy lime green jacket, big puffy dark green snowpants, mitten-gloves, and a complimenting lime green hat with poofball. Classy.
No, it's not very cool, but I'm warm, and dry, and I don't have to stop at the top and bottom of every hill to take my boots out of their bindings. (Which has to be annoying enough to make up for the coolness, right? No?... Fine)

So my point was- really, this was going somewhere- I know what I like by now.
I don't read a lot of contemporary, or high fantasy, or mysteries. In the interest of professionalism, I'm trying to put more on the list, expand a little, even though I'll probably never write something like that myself. If I'm selecting something I want to read for my own enjoyment, it wouldn't be one of the above categories, either. I prefer adventure, paranormal or magical realism type stories that start off with reality, and then make up a few new awesome rules. But genre categories, unlike the definite ski/snowboard divide, blur a lot. Which is why I will probably never try snowboarding, but I will keep picking up new books and at least giving them a shot.

(spell check does not like the words "snowpants" nor "poofball". Stop being such a snob, spell check)

Youth in Revolt

2010-01-14T08:06:00.000-08:00

I'm not the biggest Michael Cera fan.
Superbad was alright, Juno was pretty meh. And then I saw Jessie Eisenberg in Adventureland, and thought "How is this kid not a bigger deal than that Cera guy?"

Youth in Revolt almost changed my mind a little bit. Cera is perfect for the role of Nick Twisp as written for the screen. If you've read the book, you might have wondered how 20- something Cera was going to play a 14 year old character. Easy. By jumping him up to 16. You could argue that casting a real 14 year old instead of cashing in on Cera's built-in dweeb appeal might have been funnier, but it would have made the movie much darker. Count your blessings, writers, that you can always get away with more in a book than you can on the screen.

Cera's Nick Twisp is close to the stock issue sex obsessed teen. He's so frustrated with his lack of accomplishment with the women that he is actually envious of the amount of action all the adults in his life seem to be getting, despite the complete trainwrecks they are the rest of the time.
After meeting a girl who's actually interested in him on an impromptu lake vacation, Nick determines to be reunited with her by any means necessary, including the creation of a "supplementary persona" with the much cooler name of Francois Dillinger.

Unlike the suggestion in the trailers that he undergoes a personality makeover, Francois is more of a split personality along the lines of Fight Club's Tyler Durden. Nick, however, is always present when Francois takes charge.

From there, the plot becomes completely implausible, and the characters are a little too indy-quirk. Note to film makers everywhere: some of your stock "Indy-Quirk" trademarks are about to become cliche, including obsession with hideous suburban interior decor, teenagers who would rather listen to vinyl records and don't own an iPod, and drugging the uptight parents are on that list.

But it's a movie, after all. It's just as offbeat as Adventureland was surprisingly earnest. The characters are far from realistic. The dialogue sometimes sounds like it's all coming from the same mouth. The teenagers are able to manipulate their situations to such a degree that the initial conflict seems like it would be much easier to overcome that all the hoop jumping that comes between the credits. Similar to a Charlie Kaufman or Wes Anderson project, Youth in Revolt takes place in a semi-self contained alternate world, where the characters all speak with the same voice. Sometimes literally.

But it is still a lot of fun.

Okay, Go

2010-01-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

Alright, now I'm ready for Christmas. It's like this every year. It's such a rush from Halloween through New Years, with way, way too much going on and then the first two months of the new year are... nothin'.
Which is kind of nice, but just as everyone is packing up the ornaments and lights, I'm feeling like I'm finally in the tinsel and cocoa mood.
Oh well.
It's not like we don't have enough going on. In fact, here's a link to Mr. Cate's new project, which will probably take up most of our free time in '10. (note: writing time is not valid for transfer to "free time" hours)

I know the new year means a lot of new writing goals, besides all the resolutions to become Perfect within 12 months.
What were they for you? What is the plan for this 20-10 thing we have going now?

New Artwork Day

2010-01-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

No thanks to the Scanner Beast. (see below) But regardless, I have found a way! This Bunny is the first of the Nouveau Zodiac. Next is my Year - the Sheep.

Also, Steph Bowe is hosting a first five pages critique contest over on her blog, and I need some eyes to look at any and/or all of my YA, so I'm in.

Was This Helpful? NO!

2010-01-09T09:30:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, I really hate new stuff. Especially when it has 4000 new features, and none of them are what I need.
I used to have this oooooooooooold sewing machine. It was my mother's actually, and it was made in about 1973. I used it for years. She used it for years. Then the motor finally blew. I wanted to get it fixed. Instead, Mom went out and bought me a nice new one, with computerized controls, and all kinds of fancy push button features. (like, Instant Buttonhole, which I still can't use right) It actually sews great. The problem came when the teeny, tiny little screw that holds down the sewing plate came loose. I don't know when, or how, I just know that the other day, my machine was suddenly @$#! and one of the teeny, tiny little screws seems to have fallen out. (??)
Let's parallel this with my printer/scanner situation.

I used to have an Epson scanner. That's all it did, was scan. And it did a FANTASTIC FREAKING JOB. Perfect, crisp scans, with super accurate colors. Awesome. Perfect. Except the plug port broke, and then it was crap.
Of course, by the time it broke, that model had been discontinued. When I went out to get a new scanner, everything was a scanner/printer combo. I didn't need this. I had a wonderful, cheap-piece-of-crap printer that none the less printed beautiful, clean images on anything I jammed through the paper feeder, from photo paper to fabric sheets. It was wonderful.

And then it all ended.

I bought one of those stupid scanner/printer combos. I hate it. No, literally. It does absolutely nothing I need it to do. The scans are fuzzy, the software doesn't give me as many options for setting the scans as my old one did, it won't print on anything besides printer paper (even though the box said it would handle card stock and photo paper. It lied.) It just all around sucks.

Meanwhile, for some reason before I knew the new scanner beast was a useless paperweight, I let Mr. Cate take Old Trusty to work at his non-profit office day job. Grr.

I now have two useless machines, and a ton of work I need those machines for.

But wait- we live in the internet age. I can hop online and figure these problems out.
First, the screw on the sewing machine. It is such a weird size and shape that there is nothing, even in my engineer dad's office, that quite matches. But, I think, maybe I can just order a new one over the ol' computer.
No.
The company does not sell replacement parts for my machine- or any other- online. In fact, to just submit a question or comment, I have to register a new account, with all kinds of info they don't need- unless they just want to send me endless spam and junk mail.

Same thing with the printer company. In order to submit a question to their troubleshooting page, such as "how do I get this !@#! machine to do what the box says it will do??" I have to register an entire account I don't need. I hate doing that.
So much, that I would rather buy a new printer/scanner from someone else, and never deal with these Epson people again.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to say, to all companies that make it a total hassle to get some customer support- YOU ARE USING THE INTERNET WRONG.
You loose.
This is supposed to be more helpful. Don't make me long for the days of those horrendous phone menus. At least there was always a way to mash down the buttons, and get a person on the phone. They never had any answers either, of course, but there was sometimes a little satisfaction when they sounded like they were trying to help.

First and Last Book of the Decade

2010-01-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

I'll start with the last book I finished in 2009. Which was Impossible, by Nancy Werlin. This was the first book I've read by Werlin, and I think I'm going to pick up another, for comparison. I grabbed Impossible because of the premise- a paranormal story revolving around an ancient curse hidden in the lyrics of Scarborough Fair. This was a song my sixth grade teacher made the whole class learn, and I thought it was fairly depressing even as an eleven year old. So I thought I would connect pretty sharply with a story that basically parallelled my initial reaction to the song.

Werlin does have a great concept here, but overall the story seemed to suffer from something I see a lot of in YA, especially girl-centric YA- Perfect Characters. Not just the MC, Lucy, but the whole, entire human supporting cast. The only real baddie is the supernatural villain. Everyone else, from the saintly foster parents to the obvious eventual love interest, are just unbelievably, overwhelmingly Kind and Understanding. Even the rapist isn't really a bad guy. (when there would have been plenty of ways to make the story more interesting without the rape, actually)
There is also a lot of scrambling in the beginning of the book to set up the plot.
Overall, it's a romance, and a fantasy, so I give the characters a little bit of a pass, but it would have been refreshing to see at least one negative reaction, other than a lot of worrying that everything will reach it's inevitable happy conclusion.

Impossible is by no means the only book I've read lately with characters that seem a wee bit too nice.
In fact, here's a short list of the Random Writing Trends I noticed in the past 6 months or so.

Fraternal Twin Protags.
This is mostly in MG, but last summer it seemed like every other book I picked up featured a set of brother/sister twins at the helm.

Super Short Chapters
Like, less than a page. These are everywhere. Of course, that's not new, it just seemed to be in a lot of the new books I've picked up lately.

Super Disgusting Characters
This is for adult fiction, actually. I'm not an especially queasy person, and I like a bit of grit and realism, sure, but I could use less graphic descriptions of aging bodies and "performance" issues among the guys. Yuck.

Now, on to the First Book of 2010, Sarah Dessen's Lock and Key. Which I picked up simply because her books are freakin' everywhere, and yet I've never read one before.
I'm about 50 pages in, the chapters are nice and long, and we're barely into the plot outlined on the back cover, which was essentially nothing.
The Brother In Law is shaping up to be one of those Preternaturally Nice Characters, but the bitchy sister has some potential. We'll have to read on and see just how good this gets...

Up in the Air

2009-12-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

Finally.
I've been waiting for the good crop of '09 films. They always wait until the very last minute.
And this year, a lot of them seem to involve George Clooney.

Fantastic Mr. Fox - with Clooney voicing said Mr. Fox- was, well, fantastic. But it was Wes Anderson directing stop motion animation, which is a better combination than I could have dreamt of in my philosophies, Horatio. That is to say, the interminably quirky (and my biggest cinematic crush) Anderson seems designed for an odd ball medium like stop motion. He writes and directs from the perspective of a brilliant but wimpy fourteen year old boy, and whatever a kid like that would think is totally cool. Mr. Fox looks exactly like an Anderson movie, just with puppets. And this in the same year as Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. I mean, who did I please to get this? And how do I do it again? Kids are so spoiled these days. I had The Rainbow Bright Movie, and my kid gets to watch WTWTA and Fantastic Mr. Fox in the same year? Not Fair.

The only thing better than a Wes Anderson animated feature based on a Rohl Dahl book (I'm going to faint) was that my little son was in love with it from the first preview. Sitting in the shopping cart in the middle of the produce section of the grocery store a few weeks ago, he looks up and asks me, "Mom, who directed Fantastic Mr. Fox?" followed by who directed WTWTA, Nightmare Before Christmas, etc.
Yes, he is my son. (He's working on his own movie, titled Race Car Fight. His imaginary son is slated to be the DP)

Then, we went to see Up in the Air the day after Christmas. (Just Mr. Cate, my cousin and me. We didn't bring the five year old)
Another Clooney Movie. This one directed by Jason Reitman, who is on his way to collecting that little gold guy. Probably not this year, but some day, if he doesn't Michael Cimino himself in the foot.

Up in the Air is the story of Ryan Bingham, a man who has made his life a shrine to efficiency and independence, to the extent that he needs nothing he can't fit in his carry on luggage, and no one other than his boss, via cell phone. Within the first three minutes you see why- Bingham's job is to fire people, all day everyday, all over the country, for companies who are afraid to do the dirty work themselves. He sits at a desk, in a suit and tie, and faces people at the moment when they feel they have lost everything- their purpose, their stability, their sense of self, and everything they have worked for for years, or in some cases, their whole lives. He sees people who have compromised every aspect of their lives for an anticipated payoff that turned out to be a swift kick in the ass.
Ryan protects himself from this miserable fate by traveling light, and staying in the air as much as possible. He doesn't fear loss because he has nothing to loose. His life is not tied up in material things- possessions, a home, even people. His success is measured in frequent flyer miles. Literally.
He has set a goal of ten million miles, and he would be only the seventh person to do it, which saves his place in posterity.

And this is a fine existence for him. Ryan is perfectly happy and fulfilled in his work and with his plans until he is grounded- again literally- and forced to come back down to earth and start dealing with people on an emotional level, which quickly becomes messy and complicated.
From here, this film could have easily strayed into cliche territory of the goal driven suit who stops to take a look around and realizes what he has been missing.

Instead, Up in the Air remains brutally honest about the realities of relationships, families, and getting involved in other people's business. There's a lot more to the story after the kiss at the altar, grand romantic gestures don't work out so well in real life, and getting involved often means getting hurt yourself, even when you did nothing wrong. People are frustratingly, confoundingly uncontrollable. They change, they make unreasonable demands, they have expectations. They can disappoint. Ten Million Frequent Flyer miles, however, are forever.

By the end, Ryan has of course been given the chance to reassess his situation, and reevaluate his goals, and decide if he has really been on the right path. And at that point, Up in the Air remains not very optimistic but still painfully sincere.

Jason Bateman has found an niche playing the Generic Inoffensive Corporate Drone lately, and his deadpan performance here as Bingham's boss is perfect. He plays a smart straight man to Clooney's fit-throwing hotshot. Vera Farminga (Scorcese's new infatuation) is elegant as the female version of Bingham, complete with her own ulterior motives for cultivating a relationship with the thinnest of connections, and reveals some of Bingham's surprising naivete towards the end.

And the soundtrack is phenomenal. Right on par with a good Wes Anderson film.
I might actually go see this one again.

Welcome Home

2009-12-27T08:55:00.000-08:00

Ahhh.
Writing again.
After five days of total chaos, things are quiet and relaxed around here today.
We're sitting cozy under a pile of big, fluffy snow with coffee, and new pajamas, and 4 solid hours of writing time this morning.

Wonderful!

We all survived Christmas, mostly. The electronic hamsters showed up in the UPS truck on Christmas Eve, none of the cookies burned, and the streets didn't get as icy as predicted. Cate Junior is in the living room, writing a thank you card to Santa and Mrs. Claus, Mr. Cate is back to work today, and I have a black kitty cat sitting on my lap, happy that we're home for the first time in days.

There is also the strong possibility that I will actually get through the current draft of my YA by the end of the month. (Yippee!!!)
It's looking good, folks. My deadline was January 31 for readers to start ripping it apart.

Which is why I have decided that 2010 is going to be the Year of the Agent for me. Last year was Finish a Book Year, and it happened. I even wrote an additional one, to boot. I think I'm getting somewhere with this writing thing. I had enough interest in my last novel, the MG which I plan on revisiting when the YA gets out the door.
There are goals, finally, and ones I'm hitting with regularity. There are many new book outlines in the laptop, and piles of notes on my desk. I have a lot of work to do, which makes me insanely happy.

So here's a little cheers to finish out the year, and get us all off with a bang in the next one.

New Artwork Day!

2009-11-24T06:16:00.000-08:00

I finally added some artwork to my Etsy site. I'm building, slowly, slowly.

Also- as of today, I'm only 15k away from finishing my new first draft. Right on track!
How's everyone else doing on the mannys? Good? Bad? Ready to frame it or ready to burn it?

Part of the All Inclusive Service

2009-11-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

I've been cutting my kid's hair since he was 5 months old. Just part of the job. He has his dad's very thick head of hair, and it grows like a weed. And since he's old enough now, and I can't stand parents who use their kids as fashion accessories, I let him decide how long he wants it.

Dad and I both have pretty long hair. Pretty long? Mr. Cate's is down to his waist in the back.

Junior wants none of this. He wants it fairly short. High and tight, like Peyton Manning recommends. And he hated getting his hair cut in the cute little children's barber shop with the fire engine chairs and the muppet videos. Hated it.

So I bought myself a big electric clipper. I've used them before- on horses. How hard can it be to clip one little head?

I explained what was going to happen, that if he sat still it would all go much quicker. I even asked him how he wanted it cut, he still wasn't happy when he saw those clippers on the table. But he sat there bravely, trying not to scrunch his shoulders up while I trimmed the back of his head.

When we were all done, there were big smiles in the mirror. My customer was pleased. But most importantly, I got this ringing endorsement-

"Good job, Mom! You didn't even cut any holes in my head!"

You're welcome, son. It was the least I could do.

Post Script

2009-11-14T08:15:00.001-08:00

Here's your real problem, O troubled Rejectionist- were the very best books of this whole year really only written by men?
be sure to but take a click over to the children's list ;)
Yay Maggie!

Tidying Up

2009-11-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

Hey, my blog has a brand new look! And a nifty new banner I made!
What gives??
Well, it's Revision Time around here, which means I'm trying to think clean, organized, well polished thoughts. Some artists and writers talk about the terror of the blank white page. I treasure it. A new, clean page is that much more room to work in.

My Kid Drew a Picture

2009-10-06T07:03:00.000-07:00

Ordinarily, not a news flash, huh? I mean, while it is a pretty cute representation of some kind of submarine space car, and I am of course, incredibly proud, kids draw all the time, don't they?

Not mine. He had no interest. Didn't like to color, paint, play with clay. I figured this was just his taste, a little cosmic joke- give the artist the kid who has no interest in drawing. He was into more technical things. Blocks, legos, electricity and mechanics. Those were his interests, so I didn't push the drawing thing. I didn't worry when he was very resistant to writing, or even holding a pen.

Then, he started looking at things out of the corner of his eye. I tried to test him, asking him to read things up close, and then at a distance. I even put my glasses on him, to see how he reacted. He said everything looked fuzzy. The teachers at preschool didn't even notice him looking at papers sideways. He could write, a little, which is reasonable for four year old. At his regular yearly checkup, the doc tried to give him a simple eye test, but the kid wouldn't cooperate, and the doctor let it go. "We'll do it later. It's no big deal".

But it was a big deal. I decided to take him to an optometrist on my own. Turns out, he was very farsighted, and nearly blind in one eye. It's not that uncommon, and it is completely reversible for a child his age. He wore glasses and an eye patch (fancy ones with zebra stripes and pirate ships printed on them) for about a month, and his eyesight is nearly back to normal. It was just about the simplest fix in the world, and it cost about $16 in eye patches "for boys". To save my son's eyesight. Had we not gotten him a more thorough eye test, he might well have gone permanently blind in one eye. Instead, for the first time in his life, my little son pulled out his paper and markers all on his own, and spent hours drawing and decorating cars and boats and airplanes and "space trains". Because he could finally see.

Just a notice to anyone with a small child- my son had terrible eyesight, but the signs were not at all like the ones I had as a nearsighted kid. He didn't squint, he didn't complain about headaches, he could read images both up close and at a distance, because he is able to force his eyes to focus for a little while at a time. And it is completely fixable, because he is a little kid. It is also hereditary, as both of his grandfathers had vision problems as kids.

Disclaimer here- I am not a medical expert of any kind. Just wanted to share our story and one example of a mother's instinct being right on the money.

Blog Stew

2009-09-28T01:11:00.000-07:00

It is dark and quiet and windy right now, and I have a chance to catch up on a few things.
Or, more importantly, decide what to focus on right now. There are just too many chunks in the stew. Artwork has been put inexcusably on hold for Writing. Now Writing is out in the world, being ripped apart in the agent query cattle call/cage match, and I realized that I haven't updated the artwork on my own actual website in months.
Shame!
Not that I haven't been working, it was just little assignments. Not portfolio pieces. I think it's time for the final revision of a picture book dummy that has been languishing for too long now. Researching agents has led me to a surprising number of houses that rep author/illustrators. This is encouraging.

Also encouraging- we saw Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs last week. Very funny without being gross, very cute without being sappy, very hyper without becoming annoying. The 5 year old loved it. And the animation was gorgeous. The story was nothing like the classic storybook, aside from the giant food in the sky, but it was refreshingly well done. Just like in books, there is nothing that irritates me more than a movie that looks slapped together or sub-par because it's written for kids.
And I think we finally have a computer animation studio that can compete with Pixar on the quality level.

In which I go all Stuart Smalley on your- manuscript

2009-09-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, first I have to congratulate myself and Mr. Cate on hitting anniversary #7 last weekend. Go us! Marriage is a lot like writing, isn't it? Some passages turn out brilliant on the first draft, and other ones, well... you really earn. It's those of us that are working the hardest that make it look the easiest.

Anyway, onwards and upwards, to a topic near and dear to all of our hearts, big, smelly 'ol rejection. Yep. Turned down, escorted out, no date for the prom.
I've had some encouraging little ego boosts in regard to my writing (and most importantly improving my writing) lately, and so now is probably the time to write something smug and pithy about rejection, because it comes for all of us, like chicken pox used to when we were kids. If you don't get it early, you won't have immunity later, and it will really hurt and possibly make you sterile.

Does getting rejected mean your writing is no good? Or your book unpublishable? Not necessarily. Every time I'm in the bookstore, I have to play the exact same game as the agent facing that inbox o' slush. I don't have the money to buy every book I want. There are thousands to choose from. So the elimination process has to get pretty rigid. Books get taken out of the running immediately for being too short, too long, wrong genre, terrible cover art. Arbitrary, yes, but can I read every single one before I make my decision? No.
Then step two- actually pulling the book off the shelf and reading the back cover, or the first few pages. Think of how far that book has come, just getting selected off the shelf of two hundred others. Now more random disqualifiers; writing style, point of view, prologue, no prologue, realizing it's the first in a series of 20, and I have a thing about commitment... the "reasons" are endless. I just have to find a way to pick 4 books I really would like to read out of a pool of 100,000.

I'm just saying, when you get that "no" it doesn't really mean that you can't write, or that the agent/editor hates you, or it is the worst injustice of your life. It means you have to remember the 2 rules of being crazy enough to write for publication.

1. There is always, always room for improvement.

2. Everyone who has ever been published has heard more NOs than YESes.

Shakespeare & Company

2009-08-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've left Jeff up there long enough. I think all 5 of you have gotten a chance to see it.

Onward, then, to a whole bunch of stuff about me, and what I've been doing.
Mr. Cate and I went out to the woods to see Shakespeare, and eat scones and coffee and wine in a big, fluffy white hotel bed. In other words, a snobby adult weekend. ("adult" in this instance meaning "without juice box fights, whining about the bathroom, and kicking of the back of your seat the entire drive")
Don't feel bad for little Cate Junior. He went to the county fair, a pool party, and a Day Out With Thomas, so, he was covered.

The play was "The Winter's Tale", not the most loved Shakespeare, but I figured, when else are we going to get to see this one? It's not done that often. This one was fantastic, especially in the 4th and 5th acts, when the heavy royal Athenian pretext is generally dropped in favor of very Elizabethan comic characters. The three actors playing Autolycus, the Shepherd and the Clown were perfect. One of the actors also happened to be a guy I performed with in high school theater. Of course, he was great as well.

If you're into Shakespeare, or classic theater in general, try to hit APT at some point. Really. Mr. Cate isn't much of a theater guy, and by the end of the weekend, he was talking about getting season tickets for next year, and spending our anniversary watching Henry V.

We also got to see Inglorious Basterds this weekend. Nice little bookending, wasn't it? Some Tarantino to open, some Shakespeare to close. Actually, I might draw some parallels here. Both of them added wildly comic elements to what could have been strictly dark and gruesome stories. Both of them took tremendous liberties with known history, or in the Bard's case, a previous literary work. Both of them hit the mark about 60% of the time.
The only "problem" with Winter's Tale, is that it seems almost too airy and slight for such a heavy story- one of Othellolike suspicions and Oedipal level misunderstandings, although Shakespeare skirts the ickiest bits in favor of brilliant comic relief.

Tarantino, on the other hand, takes every scene and makes it at least a minute too long. The amount of tension by the end is almost unbearable. You know what's about to happen, and then there's 20 minutes of misdirection and stonewalling before the payoff. Then add the brutal, gory violence, which Tarantino glosses over with his own brilliant comic relief. (much the same way Oliver Stone was nailed to the wall for doing in Natural Born Killers all those years ago. But Tarantino's picture is set in wartime, so fair play, I suppose. If you want to get away with multiple closeups of guys getting scalped, set your story in WWII, not a coffee shop in Nevada)

And both of these stories have "happy" endings. Shakespeare's is weird and almost sappy, Tarantino's is shocking and absurd.

The end of my weekend? I bought three new books, so, score.

Enjoy

2009-08-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Love this.
This is one of the songs in Mr. Cate's film.

Hometown cinema, with spoilers

2009-07-23T09:09:00.000-07:00

Public Enemies last night (a title so ripe for misspelling it makes me blush) that's 3 movies, at the theater, within a few weeks. whoa. That hasn't happened since Sonny Boy Cate Junior arrived.
But this movie was filmed in and around my hometown at the time, so I almost had to go, right? Just to point out all the local landmarks I recognized? "Hey, that's the bank my cousin got married in!"

Plus, Johnny Depp.

And Billy Crudup, looking oddly puffy about the neck and head as good 'ol J. Edgar.
So what did I think? It played a bit like a flashier version of the History Channel's Eighteen Months of Mayhem, hitting all the notable plot points- Dillinger's '33 jail break, his association with Babyface Nelson, various bank robberies, the shootout at Little Bohemia, etc. LOTS of gun fights, LOTS of gunshot wounds, LOTS of old-timey car chases, and at least 2 really great character dynamics that never got fully developed.

One, young J. Edgar Hoover trying to get a quirky little startup law enforcement agency called the FBI off the ground in the midst of the Depression and the country's greatest crime wave to date.
Second, the gangsters harboring and supporting Dillinger, who turned on him once they realized he was drawing too much interest in the escalation of criminal offense laws, which was bound to have an effect on all their illegal interstate commerce.

Both of those points were touched on and then sidelined in favor of the far less interesting John Dillinger/Billie Frechette romance, which in reality only lasted about 6 months, and seemed to be enhanced for the film to give John Dillinger a hidden, misunderstood heart of gold. Just overlook the fact that while Billie was arrested, beaten, and then incarcerated for aiding and abetting him, Dillinger was living in a brothel and taking prostitutes out on dates. That must just be part of the abusive Dillinger Charm that was strongly sold to the audience, but which I didn't really believe.

In fact, this film implies that Dillinger was so much of a folk hero in his day that his captor, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale in a fainter version of the Eliot Ness/ Al Capone dynamic of The Untouchables) is haunted for the rest of his days by his role in Dillinger's gruesome story.

In Public Enemies, Michael Mann seems to have tried to show a compassionate side to a very dark and violent individual, even implying that if only Dillinger hadn't been double crossed by a madam at the final turn, he would have made that last big score (in a bloodbath of a robbery, certainly) and he and Frechette would have lived out a blissful retirement somewhere in South America. Even in the film Dillinger himself doesn't seem to believe this scenario will play out, but he's pretty hopeful, for a cornered man with no other options.

More honestly, Dillinger was a thief and killer who captured the attention of desperate people in a desperate time, and suffered a deserved swift and brutal end for it. (Some strongly assert that Dillinger himself never killed anyone, or at least, he was never convicted of killing anyone, or that he killed one guy, and felt pretty bad about it, although this film never commits one way or the other on the issue, and he certainly shoots directly at a lot of people. Bad aim isn't analogous to a firm moral stance that shooting people is wrong.)
Also, in this alternate reality, the Depression seems to only be happening in one dilapidated farmhouse out in the pit of the Dust Bowl. The mostly deserted towns in Illinois and Wisconsin are full of architecturally stunning banks, dance halls and restaurants packed with patrons eating steak and wearing furs, and one or two homeless guys.

Many of the performances were outstanding, including Crudup as brash, cocky J. Edgar Hoover- I could have used more of that- Stephen Graham as the manic George "Babyface" Nelson, and Branka Katic as Anna Sage.
In the end it seems like that kind of movie that could have used just one more script revision. Pick a direction and go with it, because in film biographies, as in Harry Potter adaptations, you just can't tell the entire story in 3 hours or less.
If you want a historically accurate overview of Dillinger's crime spree, heavy on bullets and gore, then, three thumbs up. If you want a more insightful examining of an era, and how a handful of outlaws became cultural icons, then just pick up a good biography, or catch Eighteen Months of Mayham when it is replayed on cable.

55 Central Park West

2009-07-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

Adrienne's comment reminded me of the first time I experienced Ghostbusters.
And I use that term because, as a youngster, I was not allowed to watch it. To begin with, I was four when Ghostbusters was released theatrically, and although I had seen E.T. five times in the theater, by then my parents would be about where I am now- just not able to get out to the show every week of the year.
So, a few years later, when they got a hold of it on video, my dad and his siblings decided to watch it on one of the infamous "Night of a Thousand Cousins", during which my aunts and uncles gathered to hang out, and myself and my 10,000 cousins ran around terrorizing the neighborhood of whichever family member was brave enough to host us.
( I might be exaggerating. I probably only have about 8,500 cousins on Dad's side)
On that particular evening, still gun shy from the Creepshow on Cable freakout of the previous winter, my Dad wisely decided that maybe this Ghostbusters thing would be too scary for little kids, and so we were given our snacks, patted on the head, and sent upstairs to bed. (i.e., go play in your rooms and give us a break, already)
But we were already wise, you see. Someone had overheard the title "Ghostbusters" and, well, our curiosity was peeked. So, knowing that if we all herded downstairs we would be in trouble, we did what any enterprising young smart alecs would- we sent down a representative to spy for us.
He did a great job, too, coming back every few minutes with updates, which we were certain had to be embroidered, at least a little.
"The ghost flew right through the guy, and slimed him! He was all gross and gooey!"
"Eggs popped out and fried on the counter." and "the chair turned into a monster, and the fridge ate this lady!"
"The guys have these jet packs that shoot fireballs!"
But the coup de gras was, of course, the finale, at which point all of us littler cousins had huddled around the door like zoo animals at feeding time.
"There is this huge marshmallow guy walking through the city, and they blew him up with their jet packs, and marshmallow fell on everything, and everyone was covered in marshmallow!"

No. Way.
He had to be making that up. What he was describing was, quite possibly, the greatest movie since "The Chipmunks Big Adventure."
We spent the next day begging to watch it, which didn't happen, for some reason. I didn't actually get to watch the original movie for years, until well after the dippy afternoon cartoon version.
I was still impressed.
How can you not be? It's Ghostbusters, after all. It doesn't get any funnier or weirder than that.

Characters Everywhere

2009-06-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a backstory. Even peripheral characters. Even pets. I'm sure Runner Bean from the Charlie Bone books a story to tell.

This is a picture of two old souls with long stories.
They were both old when I met them; thoroughbreds retired from the racetrack to the show ring, and then retired from the show ring to the lesson barn, both at the end of their carriers. The gray was a huge old gelding named Dwight. I have no idea what his registered name was, although he had the tattooed upper lip that proved he was at one time a racehorse.
The chestnut mare was his best friend, Cheerios. At the time she was 29, still perky, with a little bit of grey on her nose. She still had a strong, straight back and sound legs. She gave lessons to the littlest beginners, five and six year old girls who were so excited to ride a real racehorse. She was the low mare on the totem pole out in the pasture, and she stuck very close to me when I brought her out in the evenings.

I last saw them about seven years ago. Cheerios, after decades of carrying riders over racetracks and jumps and trails, was finally beginning to slow down, and Dwight was developing back problems that would retire him from riding permanently.
Not long after, probably some time around her 30th birthday, Cheerios was finally put to sleep. Dwight might still be around, but I haven't heard from him in a while. He would be in his 20s, which is a good age for any horse.

They were a great old pair, always looking out for each other, always together out in the pasture. They must have had wild stories to tell. Each one could have been owned by dozens of people, traveled the country, carried hundreds of riders and won countless ribbons and rosettes. Someone somewhere has other photos of them, at shows, in other pastures, with other horses, with a jockey in the saddle.

Some horses have well documented lives. But the ones living at riding stables, or working as lesson horses, they have the colorful backstories.

Adventureland

2009-04-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

*** With minor spoilers***

I say minor because this is the type of movie you could still watch and enjoy even if you knew the entire plot. It's the opposite of High Concept- the Character Driven Story.
It might be suffering a bit from miss-marketing. What I got from the trailers was essentially a Superbadesque comedy by way of Diablo Cody, filtered through a Judd Apatow-ifier. Starring Kristen Stewart as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and a roadshow version of Michael Cera. Most of the reviews I read came down a little harshly that the third act didn't deliver as many laughs as the beginning. I wasn't that interested. But it was this, or Fast & Furious, so we went with Adventureland.

And I really liked it, with one complaint.
The acting was wonderful. Stewart needs to find another motion besides running her hands through her hair, but her character was far more complex and genuine than I expected. Jesse Eisenberg is fantastic. The supporting cast were pretty sincere as well, for being the typical comedic chorus of misfits.
For the way they were played up in the trailer, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader have very little screen time, which was great. While they were funny, they played such ridiculously over the top characters that cutting to them was jarring after watching the much more realistic acting from the rest of the cast. Wiig and Hader seem to be doing an S&L skit in the middle of an otherwise offbeat dramatic film. Their scenes were the only times the story went totally off the rails in search of a laugh.

The storyline, for the most part, was also very honest. The characters are well-written and complex, and even with a minimal amount of action, the scenes are full and engaging. Everyone (with the exception of Wiig and Hader) behaves believably, and in the "dull" third act, consequences are actually meted out, and choices have to be made. And for the most part, this sticks to the logic of the rest of the film.
And here's where my single complaint comes in. Also a possible spoiler, if it weren't so obvious.
The setting of this film is Pennsylvania. Most of the characters, being college aged, are in a transitional phase, still dreaming and ambitious about their futures. Some of them are a little stuck, but they all have "Plans" even Stewart- although I don't think we ever even find out what her major is.
She plays Eisenberg's love interest, as we all know from basic plot formula. She is alluring, and mysterious, and beautiful, of course, but what seals it for Eisenberg is when she reveals that she is a student at NYU. That's right, she's practically a New Yorker. Everyone else in the cast seems to project the same ambition- to get out of town, lest they end up like any one of the "adults" in the cast, trapped, money grubbing, pathetic, desperate and still dreaming of moving away to one of the two acceptable places for interesting people to live their interesting lives. New York, or L.A. Eisenberg wants to attend grad school in New York, Stewart is a student there, even Ryan Reynolds, as the theme park maintenance man and self made local legend seems to dream of going "out to L.A." even though that at the age of perhaps 34, he is far too old to still be holding out any hope for his future. He has a Wife, after all, so his life is over, as every other married man in the Adventureland universe is portrayed as the kind of sad, wimpy suburban drone that Tyler Durden and Lester Burns revolted against. The only way to escape this is to move to New York or L.A. There are no acceptable alternatives.
Even though Eisenberg's character discusses with naive zeal his desire to travel the world, for him, that journey can only begin in New York. Stewart even asks, at one point, "Why do you have to go to school for that?" which I thought might lead to a natural kind of conclusion by the end, but no, it went the predictable route, with Eisenberg finally winding up in NY, where the invigorating spirit of the city was enough of a lift to make him feel like he'd accomplished something.
Because New York in 1987 was paradise, after all.
But I can forgive this. It is about the characters, and that is what's true to them. As a writer, I have a hard time looking at films or books without dissecting them. Advetureland is a film with nearly all the elements working together, to make a comedy that is funny because it's characters are natural and a little bit vulnerable, not because hijinx ensued. There are plenty of ways to make working at a crappy 80s theme park zany and ridiculous, but this time, the filmmakers created more of a portrait than a caricature.

The real reason your printer's not working

2009-01-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

This is not in the manual, people. This is real life scenarios. Eventually, we've all got to step out of the classroom and get our hands dirty.

5. The USB cord isn't the right color.
You might not have learned this, but the printer is very fashion conscious. It can tell the difference between the black cord, the grey cord, and the navy blue one. The navy one worked yesterday, you say? Well, swap it out with the grey one today. You can never be seen wearing the same thing two days in a row.

4. There is a Hot Wheel jammed in it.
Look for someone wandering around in footie pajamas, munching on cinamon toast. He and/or she can probably tell you what happened there. But they won't.

3. This is all a dream.
Don't worry. This isn't really happening. It's just printer-induced psychosis that's causing rampant night terrors. Spending too many hours a day battling with tempermental machinery is bound to cause you some internal termoil. The only solution here is to take a day off from trying to get anything done. Really, it's the only way. In the meantime, you're still asleep, so here's a beautiful meadow full of your favorite beautiful movie stars. Go have fun.

2. The printer is experiencing ennui.
The printer is contemplating life, and regretting some choices it made. It didn't want to print mapquest directions, and movie times for the rest of it's life. It wanted to be some kind of data processor on the space shuttle. What kind? I don't know. It just sounds really cool. But it's too late to join the Air Force now, and they wouldn't take him anyway, with all the Hot Wheels dents.
This is a temporary problem. The printer will start funcioning again when shown some of the beautiful copies it has made.

1. @*&$#!!!
Sorry. This one's a head scratcher. Everything's hooked up right. It's got fresh ink. Paper feeds through just fine. Must be a problem on the computer's end. That one is a real piece of work. Maybe it's time for the two of them to try some couple's counseling. Someone needs to work out why they never seem to get along.

Illustration Nation continues

2009-01-23T06:44:00.000-08:00

What's rockin' the Zen? Wolcott by Vampire Weekend
Admittedly, music is my weak area. I can talk books, and art, and movies, but I am pitifully unaware when it comes to music. I like this album, although VW does sound like they should be doing the soundtracks for film adaptations of Brett Easton Ellis novels. Must be that east coast texture.

Okay, I talked about music briefly, something I have almost no business doing. Now, on to my specialty, illustration.

So here's another illustrator on my list, Brian Lies. His work includes over a dozen books, many by other authors, and a few he penned himself, including Bats at the Beach and Bats at the Library.
Beach is darling and funny, with the bats applying moontan lotion and roasting bug-mallows embedded with delicious insects. And Library, well, how could I not love a book about books? Lies includes a few spreads of the bats imagining themselves into classic stories.
Lies paintings are magnificent examples of using light well. Of course, he picks a subject that suggests dark colors and deep shadows. Night scenes require very sharp and precise light sources. In Lies's work in his Bats books, the lighting becomes absoluetly theatrical. Simply showing the ordinary settings of a beach or the library at night gives them a bit of a twist. Here's a chance for little guys to get a glimpse of that mysterious and intriguing gray area known as "after bedtime". What the heck goes on then, anyway?
As an author/illustrator, Lies has hit a nice harmony. An interesting subject illustrated with skill and creativity. This is the kind of work done well enough to make an insanely difficult job look easy.

Another Illustrator I Heart

2009-01-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

What's playing on the Zen Kids by MGMT

Okay, enough about me. We all have problems. Let's talk about this guy.

D.B. Johnson. Writer and author of the Eddie's World, and the Henry books, in which he uses a little black bear as a stand in for Henry David Thoreau.

The Henry books include Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, Henry Builds a Cabin, Henry Climbs a Mountain, and, I just learned in April there will be a brand new edition, Henry's Night. Take a look.

D.B., I like your style. Henry's got a clever cubist thing going on here, and he's still pretty darn cute.

Keeping with the persona of Thoreau himself, Henry the Bear Version is a minimalist, introspective, free spirit. He involves himself with the local community, meets the Bear Versions of Nathaniel Hawthorn and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he's on the fringe, man. Henry Works - yeah, the book right above- follows Henry on a little journey around his town and countryside, in which he observes and interacts with nature, and encounters all manner of charming townsfolk. They all have the benign attitude that Henry peacefully wanders around, with no direction, although Henry keeps insisting that he is, in fact, working. By the end of the tale, one of his friends finally asks, "What is your work, Henry?"

He replies, "I'm writing a book."

I hear you, Henry.

And D.B., who has had a long carrer as an illustrator. His paintings are bright and elegant. They make Thoreau accessible to a kid, without loosing anything of the real historical figure. Johnson's depiction of Henry's environment makes it easy to see why he would be so keenly interested in nature, and so happy to spend his time outdoors. Henry's world is lush and full of life and experiences.

So there's another illustrator who's work I admire. I plan to keep posting these, and if there are any illustrators that have really turned your head, I'd love to hear about them.

And because I'm new at this, and I forgot to add it the first time around, go here to see more about Gris Grimly.

New Year, New Home, New Goals, New Blog

2009-01-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

Welcome.
It's a new year, and a new day, and I have decided, rather impulsively, to start another new project. Introuductions next? I am an artist and writer, specifically of children's lit. I also love snow. And look at that-we've got a few more inches in the yard this morning.
Time to go out and play.