No, it isn't Garbage Day -- that's a whole other celebration on its own. Today's title is yet another West Wing reference, which is deserved since (a) I have a lot of points to cover tonight, and (b) today at 7:00 A.M. I watched the episode "Impact Winter," which is a good indicator of how the show found its mojo again after the mumbling, consternation and unhappy facial expressions that defined Season 5. Plus it was the episode that in the greater story arc of the entire series that saw everything about who Josh Lyman was come to fruition, and make a decision on his own that actually changes world history. If you have no idea what I'm talking about in this paragraph -- your loss.
So. A handful of topics to cover. Many of these are things that I at one time intended to be stand-alone posts, but as that first day of school grows closer, I find myself all too willing to indulge in the lazy for the few days I have remaining, knowing what it's going to be like when that first day arrives and I'll have to hit the ground running.
**First with the writing. Emily is still out there, trying to find herself and agent. A new record was set today: My absolute fastest rejection turn-around ever. Seriously. It took like four hours. Good news, it wasn't a form letter. Bad news, the letter basically said "I like everything about this: the title, the concept, the premise. Except your sample pages are boring." Kind of backhanded as far as compliments go, but hey. What are you gonna do except continue to get kicked in the mouth and try again.
**Also I feel some sideways progress, and significant progress at that, has been made on the new book, which I suppose I can call "Briarwood" in here even though that's only a working title and it's never going to stick. After the writing conference last week that I was all woe-is-me about in my previous post, I decided to try a new method; I honestly don't remember if I came up with this idea on my own or if I read a mention of it somewhere during the conference; either is possible. But regardless, it seems to be working. The whole issue here is to make the characters stronger, because EVERYTHING that was mentioned in that conference as far as what makes manuscripts stand out came down to two things: characters, and voice. Now, if I can be momentarily immodest (yeah, some of you are thinking, "momentarily?"), voice I'm not so worried about. I've been doing this for more than twenty years now, and in that time I think I've managed to craft myself a voice. But characters are tougher, because you have to make them real. So in that pursuit, I've decided to set aside the big push on novel word count for now, and I'm splitting time between word count and development. To get to know the characters, I'm writing a series of very short stories - 3 to 6 pages each - where my characters interact with each other in situations other than what happens in the book. Some of the things I'm learning about them are fascinating, and it makes it much easier to know how they would react when something happens to them in the main story.
**I'm crushing on Iron Maiden's brand-new album "The Final Frontier" today. It was released today, but being the huge iTunes nerd I am, I've discovered that if you time it right, you can actually find your way to downloading new releases about an hour before the actual release date -- I think it probably has something to do with time zones. But whatever gets the music in my hands faster works for me.
**Today was a good day, overall, for one reason. I'm going to keep that reason hidden away on my other blog, but trust me -- it was big. And good.
**iPhone Love. It only seems fair that after the huge deal I made about this all summer that I recap how awesome it is. I don't miss white at all (particularly since they still aren't even available). My old phone was one that I usually had silent or off, and not many people had luck reaching me on it. The iPhone has brought me to the point where my cell phone is my constant companion. I have a record of all text message exchanges, about 100 favorite photos I've imported, a growing contact list of about 45 people (with the goal of assigning each of them a photo and a personal ringtone), a calendar that includes every important date I have coming up in the next three months so far, access to my Facebook page, access to two of my three blogs, a countdown to when different agents are scheduled to reject my manuscript, a Nick Hornby book, Pandora, an app that will tell me what song I'm hearing (I tried it on a movie trailer; it works!), Radio Paradise, three different apps that I use to keep track of all my health and fitness business, a flashlight, an app that will tell me any kind of business I want to find in a certain radius, what times the movies start at whatever town I'm in, my Netflix queue, a drum machine, ten different games, Rush bobbleheads and trivia, NFL status and a predictor that will give me percentages of which teams are favored by how much throughout the season, iMovie, so I can edit the HD video I shoot with the built in camera, two other photo editing apps, KARE 11 news updates, access to my e-mail, and well over 1,000 carefully chosen songs, podcasts, and feature-length movies stored on the iPod part of the phone. Not to mention that having Bejeweled Blitz, Maya Pyramid, and Collapse on my phone more or less eliminates 90% of the reasons I would ever sign on to Facebook, so that's kind of nice, too. It amazed me to think today I was driving around listening to a new album, in my car, through a telephone that's really more of a computer that fits in my pocket which was plugged into my car. Welcome to the 21st century. It's not all global warming and political divisiveness.
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