Jade Winters

A year or two ago, I decided to write what I like to call a “puzzle poem.” I call them this because it’s a fun way to describe an object, place or activity without using typical words, and allow your reader to guess what the poem is about. I had planned to write a bunch of them, but I think I only ended up with two. Anyway, here’s the first one I wrote. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think it’s about.

Cleansing

Rippling pools cascade down
From their steel cage entrapment.
Cool porcelain groans and sighs
As the heat coats its surface.

The purple nectar rains down
Casting an iridescent hue
As steam rises up from the depths
Clouding lavender-flavored air.

Flickering flames cast shadows
Across glistening waters
While moist skin marinades
In the simmering broth.

Damp tendrils clinging to flesh
As loose muscles are engulfed in warmth.
Dewy eyelashes brush cheeks
While troubles seep down the drain.

Last week, I was participating in YAlitchat on Twitter, like I often do. Normally, I just sit and watch the conversation go by without jumping in. But this time I saw something that I had to respond to. Somebody posted that it’s unprofessional for writers to tear apart an agent on their blog. I responded to her and told her I agree, but it’s also unprofessional for an agent to post a query on their blog and tear it apart.

A lot of people (agents included) responded to that, wanting to know when I’ve seen an agent do that. I personally chose not to cite specific times or people for a reason, and I also conceded that the agents may have had permission to do so before posting. In that case, of course it’s no big deal. It’s also not a big deal to me if they’re doing it in an effort to educate other writers so they don’t make the same mistakes.

But agents are people too. I wish that all aspiring writers would remember this and not put agents on a pedestal, or do things that they wouldn’t normally do just to impress an agent.

Last night, I saw a blog post from an agent that bothered me. This agent sent a normal, polite form rejection to a guy who had queried her. The guy responded in an extremely unprofessional way. The agent then went on to post his response on her blog, and chose not to remove his name because she wanted other agents to watch out for him.

Do I think the guy was wrong for sending the agent that email? Absolutely.

But I think the agent was MORE wrong for what she went on to do. This aspiring writer didn’t go to his website and publicly trash-talk the agent. He sent her a PRIVATE email. The agent, who has quite a following, has now spent quite a bit of time defaming this man’s character on her blog and on Twitter, and has gotten a lot of writer’s to join in.

It disgusts me.

I’ve seen some pretty childish and immature behavior in the writing community over the last 24 hours. And because I haven’t wanted to ruin my own chances at finding an agent, I’ve kept my mouth shut. But I’ve also sat here most of the day, watching all of these people that probably wouldn’t normally bully and make fun of someone this way, stooping to new lows in an effort to please an agent.

I was losing faith. I was sitting here today, determined to write but not quite able to. Because really, is this the community I want to be a part of? Do I really want to sacrifice everything to throw my hat in an arena with a group of people who would do this to somebody? Sure, the guy made a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. As far as I’m concerned, this agent made a mistake as well. And unfortunately, her mistake was bigger because she did it so publicly. I’m sure she was hurt and annoyed by the things he said. If she had just taken his name out of the whole thing, I might not be so bugged by it.

I haven’t written much today. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to. This dream that I’ve had for as long as I can remember suddenly seemed tarnished somehow.

But my faith has been restored, and it’s because of these awesome writers who weren’t afraid to speak out: Myra McEntire, Kirsten Hubbard and Saundra Mitchell. They’ve totally reminded me why I’ve grown to love this community so much. Bullying happens every day, but that doesn’t make it ok.

One last note about this agent. As I said in the beginning, agents are people too, which means they make mistakes. It would  be nice, though, to see this agent realize and recognize that she made a mistake, and maybe do something to correct it.

As for the guy? It’s doubtful he’ll ever attempt to correct his mistake. But hopefully, some day, he’ll learn the correct way to respond to a rejection. That, or he’ll burn every bridge he has all on his own.

That’s right, it’s official. I am the family mooch.

I didn’t used to be. I’ve always done just fine taking care of myself, and often taking care of others too. But it turns out that “aspiring author” doesn’t pay real well. That’s even more apparent to me today, when I couldn’t even scrounge together 10 bucks to buy myself food at Shari’s.

Thursday was my brother’s birthday. As a family, we don’t all get together much anymore. We’re lucky to see each other on holidays. But my brother decided we should all meet for brunch today. Great idea. Except….oh wait. I’m completely broke and, oh yeah, my car is broke down so I can’t even get there. Of course, being family, they all understand that I am now the family mooch. Not that they like it, I’m sure, but at least they understand it. My brother said he’d pay for our food. My mom came and picked us up. Then my sister ended up paying for our food, and my mom’s food, and my brother’s food, AND drove us home.

It’s not a good feeling for me. It’s kind of that lowest of the low. I don’t like relying on other people for things, and I really hate feeling like I owe people things. So now I’m home with some mixed emotions. On the one hand, it was nice seeing my mom, my brother and my sister all in one place. That hasn’t happened since Christmas and probably won’t happen again until next Christmas. It was nice getting out of the house since I’ve been such a hermit lately. But I also feel like the biggest loser, and not in the good way where you lose a lot of weight, get a makeover and win money.

Today is one of those days where I feel like I need to give up this dream and go find a “real job.” One that actually pays perhaps. The problem is, I’ve gotten so spoiled sitting around the house in my comfy clothes all day that the second I got home from my 2-hour outing, I went to my bedroom, changed into my pajamas and settled back onto the couch.

Is there a job that would pay me to sit on my couch in my pink pajamas with my green fuzzy frog socks and surf the web? Really, if you’ve heard of any, let me know. Next time we all go to brunch, it would be nice if I could be the one treating everybody. Or at least be able to pay for my own chocolate milk and toast.

You know those times when you have this awesome idea for a new cupcake recipe, so you rush to the store and buy all of the ingredients, you hurry to the kitchen and start measuring and mixing, you get all of the little cups filled and just when you’re about to put them in the preheated oven you dip your finger in and taste it and realize it tastes a bit like those mud pies that your brother and sister used to make you eat when you were little?

So you sit and wonder, where did you go wrong? Perhaps it was the rutabaga that you decided to throw in at the last minute. Or maybe it was the grand idea of using honey instead of sugar. Or maybe it was something in the base itself. Was the flour old and moldy? Was it the baking soda that you pulled out of your freezer? Maybe by soaking up the odors in there, it also soaked up the flavors and that’s why your cupcakes taste vaguely like beef and vanilla ice cream. It might not be any of those things, though. It could have just been the beaters on your mixer that got all rusty when your kid decided to leave them in a sink full of water.

So what do you do? Throw the whole thing out and start over? Well, of course. But you don’t disregard the whole thing. You keep some of the ideas you had and you experiment with others to find the perfect mix.

And sometimes you take a break. You go bake some cookies and come back to the cupcakes later, when you’ve gotten the bad taste out of your mouth.

That’s where I’m at. Death Becomes Her is being set aside right now. I still love the characters. I still love the basic story. But the plot wasn’t working for me and I just couldn’t find an easy way to fix it without rewriting and changing the whole thing. So I’m working on a new, as-yet-to-be-titled, book now. And when I finish that one, maybe I’ll come back to Death Becomes Her and the characters that I’ve grown to love, and see if they have a NEW story to tell me.

I need to write a bit about preconceived notions. The other day I had somebody critique the first ten pages of Death Becomes Her. It was the extremely ROUGH draft since I haven’t even finished the book, so I knew when I sent it that it needed a bit of work. I even knew WHERE it needed the work. Anyway, my book is about a 17-year-old girl who finds out she’s a Reaper.

Let me tell you about the world I’ve created. In my book, Reapers aren’t dead. In fact, being a Reaper is something that you’re born to do and it’s passed down in families, much like red hair or blue eyes. Not everybody in a family becomes a Reaper so it’s seen as quite an honor when a child is shown to have this ability. And Reapers aren’t evil. They’re seen as the noble few whose soul purpose is to guide confused souls to Limbo so they can go where they’re meant to go. They don’t kill anybody. They don’t “steal” people’s souls. They simply release the soul from the body and produce the gate for them to pass through, giving them comfort when it’s needed.

It’s a lighthearted take on a subject that many people think should be grim.

So here’s my issue: This person who critiqued my book went into it with preconceived notions. She had it in her head that Reapers are evil and that my book should be “dark and gritty” and that my main character should fight AGAINST being one. She told me that her parents shouldn’t be proud, they should be telling her “we know this sucks but we’re going to have to find a way to live with it.” Basically, she wants me to change my book completely to fit the idea she has in her head.

These preconceived notions that my reader had really didn’t help me in my first round of edits (which will be coming soon). The only way it helped me is that I now know I need to put a little more info into that first chapter so the reader realizes that they need to drop those preconceived notions and read the book with a blank slate. The other thing it showed me, is that everything is subjective.

Today an agent posted on Twitter that she’s looking for YA novels. She went on to say that if your characters smoke, don’t bother querying. Of course, this caused a bit of an uproar for writers who, I assume, have already written or are writing books where their character smokes. It’s tough for me because I can see both sides of this. I can understand not wanting to influence young people to smoke. I can also understand the hatred of smoking, being a smoker myself (who absolutely hates it) and having watched my dad die of lung cancer. But then, I can see the writer’s point of view that agents are essentially censoring books because of their own preferences.

And really, I think a book is better if there’s some realism to it. And the realistic fact is, a lot of teens smoke. They also drink, cuss, have sex and do drugs. That doesn’t mean you HAVE to write a book with teenagers doing those things, but it does mean that a lot of teens would like to see this in books written for them. A lot of people like to see characters more like themselves so they can relate to them. And if you’re writing a serious novel about a teen who is abusing drugs and the struggles they go through to overcome that, it kind of makes sense that they’d be a smoker.

I understand the agent not really desiring a book where the character is smoking. But if they throw those preconceived notions out, and realize the writing may call for smoking and the story is more important than that, then they might find themselves with more great books to rep.

Just a thought.

Now, I should get to work.

I really can’t stand pretentious writing. It drives me absolutely crazy and I tend to roll my eyes and stop reading. I guess I should clarify what I mean when I say “pretentious”, huh?

I’m not necessarily talking about poetic writing. Poetic writing has it’s place in poems, obviously, but also in literary fiction. Although, I will say that too much poetic writing in a novel and I start to lose interest. It’s important to describe your setting but it’s also important not to go on too long about it because you don’t want to take your reader out of the story.

Pretentious writing is different. It’s that writing that says “Oh, look at me! I have a big vocabulary (or a handy thesaurus) and use big words so I must be smart!” I really hate it. I had an English professor who wrote like this and she expected all of us to strive to write like this too. Except I never wanted to.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my thesaurus. I don’t use it all that often, but I absolutely love it for those times when I know what I want to say but I just can’t think of that perfect word. Or those times when I don’t want to be repetitive.

A story should flow. If you have to stop to consider each word, and “translate” it, then it breaks up that flow and pulls you out of the story. But so many people think they need to dress up their writing in big words and fancy adjectives in an effort to prove that they know “the craft.”

Oh, I have examples. lol  I took a sentence from my book and made it as simplified as I could. Here it is:

She looked out at the lake where the sun was reflecting off of the water.

There’s nothing wrong with that sentence, right? It’s pretty straight-forward. The problem is, it doesn’t really give us a picture of the scene, does it? Well, I enlisted the help of Wren on this one because, as he knows, he can have a tendency to be pretentious when he writes. He doesn’t do it on purpose but there’s a part of his brain that feels like if he uses big words, people will take him more seriously. He writes a political blog, so I understand why he feels this way but I tell him all the time that a good point speaks for itself, so he doesn’t need to make it all fancy. And a lot of times when he does make it all fancy, he loses what he’s trying to say. For my purposes, though, I made him tap into that pretentious side and rewrite that sentence. Here’s what he wrote:

She strained her vision across the placid waters of the picturesque basin where Helios looked down from the heavens, scattering his gaze into a myriad of dancing silver across the azure carpet.

lol  Ok, I laugh whenever I read his example. It definitely illustrates the point I was trying to make. That description totally pulls me out of a story and make me go “Huh? Why did the writer have to go to that extreme to describe light reflecting on water?”

I will admit, though, that my first example is a little mundane. Keep in mind, that’s not an actual sentence from my book. I took a sentence and reworded it to make it simplified. I like to think my original sentence is a nice, happy medium between those two examples. Judge for yourself:

She looked out at the lake, the sun glinting off of the waves like diamonds on a bed of velvet.

It’s simple, yes, but it paints an image of the lake in front of her. It’s mildly poetic without being pretentious.

Of course, this is really just my opinion. It’s entirely possible that other people would think my sentence sounds pretentious, while others might think that Wren’s sentence is perfect. I think in most cases it’s a matter of preference, but it’s also a matter of knowing your market. If you’re writing YA books, you certainly shouldn’t talk down to your reader, but you also don’t want to write a book that’s going to have them scrambling for a dictionary every time you set your scene. You can appear smart without using flowery sentences. In face, often time you’ll appear smarter if you get rid of that thesaurus and describe things in a way that your reader can relate to.

My 5-year-old just said something very wise to me. Yeah, she said “sometimes my art just falls apart” as she shrugged her shoulders in acceptance.

Back story? Well, for Christmas I used my Sculpy clay and made them all a bunch of their animals that they collect. She collects penguins, so one of her presents was a crocheted bag (which I made for her) with 10 penguins inside. She loves them and plays with them all the time.

Today she got home from school, found a little canister of yellow Play-doh and made ME a penguin. She wanted me to bake it but I told her you can’t bake that kind of clay so I set it on a shelf for it to dry and hoped it wouldn’t crumble in the process.

And then I went back to writing. But she kept coming in here and moving the penguin. She wanted it to dry quicker, so she set it on my bookshelf in front of the little fan that I have there. She came back in and checked it a couple of times, even though I kept telling her to leave it alone. Then she came and moved it again. And this time, its nose fell off.

She went to get a glue stick to fix it. lol  It was cute, but while she was gone, its head fell off. She insisted she could glue it, and I suppose it worked for now because the penguin is sitting on my tv stand intact. And she very casually told me that sometimes her art just falls apart.

Isn’t that true for writing, really? Writing is an art, and sometimes it can just fall apart. If we’re lucky, we can develop the attitude of my 5-year-old, shrug our shoulders, and pull out the glue stick. After all, it’s all fixable. No big deal.

I’ll try to remember that as I finish up this book and get started on my first round of edits.

Wrote this awhile back on a different blog and I figured I should share it here too.

For the last two days, I’ve been working on my next book. I had to write out my character sketches, and do a quick synopsis, then work on outlining my plot points, all before I could start the actual writing.

I didn’t used to do things this way. I was always the “fly by the seat of your pants” type of writer who just sat down and started writing. But I never finished a book that way. My focus with the story was never clear enough so I’d get half the book written, then give up on it. Now I’ve figured out a system that works well for me, with my 3×5 index cards and my notebooks full of outlines.

But see, this is how I work:

I sit on my bed surrounded by stuff. You know, my laptop, two or three notebooks, five or six ripped out pages of stuff that I need to copy over into a notebook, my pink and white box that holds all of my index cards, and of course, the cards themselves, spread out on the comforter around me.

It took me the last two days to get it all written down. Sadly, it’s not like I wrote a lot. A couple of pages in my notebook and one or two sentence plot points on about 30 index cards. But it took me awhile because I’m pretty easily distracted lately.

And now I’m writing. I moved to my chair to write, where I can put my laptop on my lap (where it’s apparently supposed to be as opposed to on the bed in front of me where I have to lean over it and kill my back), I can put my feet up on the bed, and I have all of my paraphernalia on the little wicker shelf next to me. You know, my writing essentials. My notebook, my index cards, my cell phone, my ashtray, my Mountain Dew and my cigarettes.

So I write about 50 words.

Then I get distracted by Must Love Dogs, which is playing on my DVD player and I spend the next 20 minutes or so watching it. I shake myself and get back to my laptop.

And I write about 25 more words.

Then I click on my Mozilla, which is open (with 9 separate tabs, mind you) and minimized. Up pops Facebook, which I refresh just to see what’s going on with people or if anyone has left me any comments. I spot a status that my niece posted saying she got a new chair for when her baby arrives. So I leave a comment asking her what kind of chair, and then I scroll through and read all of the other status updates since I last checked. Then I minimize my Mozilla again and go back to Word.

And I write another 50 or so words.

Then I’m distracted by Diane Lane having slept with Dermot Mulroney’s character even though he’s clearly a player and she should be with John Cusack’s character, who is a bit kooky but that’s no big deal. Kooky is fun sometimes. The excitement on the screen fades so I turn back to my computer.

And this time I had a writing burst….of 100 words.

Then I check to see if my niece responded to my comment because I’m really curious what kind of chair she got. Is it a rocking chair? Or is it a bouncy chair for the baby? Or maybe it’s some neat, new thing that makes parenting easier. You know, something that they didn’t bother coming out with when my kids were babies because I didn’t deserve to have my job made easier for me. I had to do things like bounce one kid in his bouncy seat with my foot while feeding another in the high chair and balancing the third on my head because he was learning to be an acrobat so he could run off and join the circus. But no, still no comment from my niece. So I quickly check my email (which is empty, by the way), then refresh my MySpace (which is completely dead because, duh, nobody uses MySpace anymore) and finally I go back to Word.

Where I write another 50 words.

But then I start to feel like I need something to munch on, even though I’ve already eaten half a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, two eggs and two pieces of toast, and a slice of banana cream pie with a fresh banana chopped up and sprinkled across it. So I look around and find the box of Fig Newtons that Wren bought for me earlier and I eat a couple of those. Then it’s back to work.

And the food has refreshed me. I manage a whole 200 words.

But then I just have to go back to Facebook and see if my niece has responded yet and oh! Look! There’s one notification. My niece got a glider rocker with an ottoman for a really good price. So I have to leave her a comment warning about fingers or toes near it, which is probably pretty insensitive since she just shut her son’s finger in the door last night and I didn’t think about that when I wrote it so I added that I’m not a fan of rocking chairs or recliners ever since our kitten was killed in one, hoping that by mentioning the tragedy of our cat’s death about four years ago, she’ll disregard the fact that I had in essence pointed out her own guilt in smashing her son’s little finger. Once the comment is posted, I quickly go back to Word before I end up deciding that I should probably go delete it because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

And I write another 25 words.

But really….I should go delete it, right? I love my niece and lord knows, I’ve done enough emotional and physical damage to my kids that I’ve actually felt guilty about. I’d hate somebody callously bringing up those moments and making me feel more guilty. So I go back to Facebook and delete the comment real quick, hoping that neither her or her sister (who had also commented on that post and would be notified of my comment) had read it yet. Breathing a sigh of relief that my stupid comment wasn’t there for the world to read anymore, I go back to Word.

And I write another 50 words.

But then I get distracted by Diane Lane finally realizing that John Cusack was the right man for her as they awkwardly kiss in the grocery store. And I wonder what kind of face cream Diane Lane uses because she really looks so good for her age. I mean, seriously, she doesn’t look a day over 25 if you disregard the slight bags under her eyes but those could just be because she was up all night sweating with some 18 year old hard body and had to be on the set bright and early in the morning.  Hmmmm…..maybe that’s what keeps her looking so young, huh? But yes, back to my book.

Another 50 words pop up on the page.

But then I realize the movie is over and it’s awful quiet in my bedroom and I just can’t write in a silent room, it’s too distracting so I have to get up and find another movie to put in, which could take me quite awhile except I had the foresight to bring TWO movies up to my bedroom when I got ready to start writing. So I throw Because I Said So in the DVD player and settle back in my chair for some Mandy Moore and Diane Keaton goodness and I smile at the slight coincidence of me choosing two movies that star ladies named Diane, before turning back to Word.

And I write another 75 words.

But the previews on the DVD are showing the movie Knocked Up and I remember that we had that movie at some point because I remember watching it, but I don’t remember seeing it since then and I don’t know what could have happened to it so I send Wren a quick text asking him and, of course, he has no idea but I’m thinking maybe it went to the pawn shop at some point and we never bothered to get it out and I should buy it sometime because it was really a pretty good movie. But, back to writing.

Another 25 words done.

But then the previews are over and I have to find the DVD remote to hit play on the movie and, you know, while I’m already distracted, I should quickly check my Facebook again and just make sure neither of my nieces read my comment before I deleted it, and I’m relieved to see that they didn’t unless their lack of responses is just because they both read it and they’re so appalled that I would say something so mean and they’re currently on the phone with each other wondering why they even bother calling me family since technically I haven’t been with their uncle in over 7 years now.

I shrug off the worry and check my empty email box again and then, while I’m already distracted from writing, I figure I should write a new blog all about my writing process so maybe other people who want to be authors can learn from my super-organized skills and I realize that in the last 2 hours I’ve managed to write about 700 words of my book but in the last 20 minutes I must have written about 1500 words on my blog and why is it so much easier to write a blog than work on  my book?

Hmmm…..you know, maybe none of you should try to learn from my writing techniques actually. Go buy a book about writing or something. Because that way at least you know the person you’re learning from managed to finish and publish at least one book, right?

Writers constantly hear people say they shouldn’t use adverbs. I hear it all the time from other writers, editors and agents. It’s always bugged me, though. I mean, adverbs are an important part of our language and writing is all about language. Why would we totally discount them?

Well, it’s really not that they should be discounted completely. As I said, they’re a part of our language and they have a place in our lives. But I finally get why they should be used sparingly. (And yes, I’m using adverbs here. Bare with me.)

It all goes back to the “show, don’t tell” advice that I completely agree with. When you’re reading a book, you don’t want to feel like your just being told a story. You don’t want somebody hand-feeding you information. You want to be treated like an individual who is smart enough to come to your own conclusions, and if the story is told correctly then, as a writer, you can be sure that your reader got what you were trying to say.

For example, don’t just tell your audience “the girl was beautiful, with brown hair and blue eyes.” Describe the girl and let your reader conclude by your description that the girl is beautiful. After all, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder and how do you know that all of your readers find brown hair and blue eyes beautiful? Maybe one of them is totally opposed to brown hair, or they think people with blue eyes are the ugliest people they’ve ever seen. (I’m personally partial to guys with dark hair.) By telling those people that your character is beautiful, even if they don’t agree that those features are beautiful, you’re essentially turning yourself into a liar. And at that point, why would the reader believe anything else that you (as the narrator) tell them?

So yes, yes, show, don’t tell. Assume that your readers have a brain of their own and can make their own assumptions based on your descriptions.

Which brings me back to adverbs. I suppose I never saw them as “tell” words. I saw them as descriptions really. They were words that described an action, and just like an adjective helps a reader get a better picture of the scene, I figured adverbs help a reader get a better picture of an action. But once again, you’re assuming that your reader can’t judge for themselves so you have to tell them. And you’re not putting your reader in the moment.

I’ve never been a person who overuses adverbs. I do use them, however, and because I’ve had this view that sometimes they’re necessary, I don’t usually look for them when I edit. My opinion has since changed.

Here’s a line from the book that I’m working on right now:

Mikaela smiled as she watched her friend frantically look around the room.

In this sentence, I’ve used the word “frantically” to describe how her friend looked around the room. I’ve told instead of showing. Here’s a great way to fix this problem:

Mikaela smiled as she watched her friend look around the room, her head whipping back and forth like a dog at a tennis match.

In the second example, I’ve done a much better job at painting a picture for the reader, while also allowing them to draw their own conclusion: that her friend is frantically looking back and forth.

For me, this writing doesn’t come easy. It pains me to admit that, but it’s definitely true. Over time, I’m sure it will get easier for me in my first drafts, so I won’t have to go back and revise quite so much. For now, though, I’ll continue writing the way I always do so I don’t break my flow, and look for those nasty little adverbs in my first edit.

More writing tips at another time. Next time, maybe I’ll talk a bit about flat writing. Or purple prose. Because both of those are things that have been on my mind.

Found another great contest that I really must enter.

You can find it here: Lots of free books!!!!

I want every single one of those books!!!!!!!