I wish I could say my favorite summer memories were from the year my parents forced me to go to a resort that, weirdly, employed professional ballroom dancers, and I fell in love with the bad-boy dance instructor, then impressed my parents at the end of the month with a super-special ballroom routine. Or... it was the summer after I'd just graduated high school, and I spent it driving around in a car with my buds, drag racing Harrison Ford, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and chasing an elusive blonde. Memories!
Honestly, nothing has ever happened to me (yet) during the summer. I spent most of my childhood summers reading and maybe taking one or two art classes. Not that that wasn't great! It just doesn't make for a very exciting story. I think my best summer reading was when I found my mom's huge stack of Glenna Finley and Emilie Loring romances (I counted once--there were 108) and burned my way through them. Spoiler alert: they all had the same plot.
Oh, and one summer when I was fourteen I was in a production of Grease.
Off-topic question: what's your favorite movie about summer?
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Travel can be scary and stressful. The last time I flew, I declared I never wanted to be in sight of an airport ever again. I do not enjoy being trapped on a plane or in a car for hours on end, or having to sleep in strange places and live out of a suitcase.
But traveling can also be inspirational. Going to different places and learning about them first-hand is my biggest source of inspiration. In one of my current works in progress, my heroine goes to Rome and Florence, and through her I re-experienced some of my favorite places in Italy.
The thing is, I would never be able to write a story like that if I hadn't been there. I'm horrible at translating descriptions into a visual reality (one of the reasons why I dislike long descriptions in books), so if I tried to write about Florence based on guidebook descriptions, it wouldn't make any sense. But I also wouldn't be interested in writing about Florence if I hadn't been there--I wouldn't have anything to connect it to in my mind that would make me think, "This setting would be perfect for a story!"
Whether it's horrible or fun, travel is an experience. Going to other places makes me think, "What would would it be like to live here?" and have some first-hand experience to help answer that question. The rest is inspiration.
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Pet peeves! There are so many, how can I choose just five? I think I'll limit this list to Twitter pet peeves, just to give it some focus. I don't spend a lot of time on FaceBook, but I do on Twitter (according to RescueTime, I spend 6 1/2 hours a day on the computer, and nearly 4 of that is on TweetDeck), and I've gotten to the point where I'm pretty precise about what's going to make me annoyed enough to unfollow someone.
Saying "lol" all the time. Like ALL THE TIME, multiple times per tweet. "That was so funny, lol. lol you guys should have seen it." "lol Look at the sunset." "Just walked into a wall and broke my nose, lol." I am not loling at your lols; stop doing that!
People who believe their tweets are so important they can't carry on a conversation with you without making sure everyone else can see their responses. They usually do this by RTing your tweet, then putting their reply ahead of it, or putting a period in front of the @reply, or putting the @reply at the end of the tweet. Most of the people who do this see every tweet as a promotion of themselves--I actually literally saw a tweet that the other day that said, "I need to focus my tweets on promoting myself, so I can't carry on a private conversation with you." Wow, unfollow. Listen, you do realize that if people want to see your @replies to others, they can tweak Twitter's settings to do that, right? If they don't, you're just annoying them and making yourself look like an attention whore, which probably isn't the best message when you're trying to promote yourself.
Boobs. I don't need to see pictures of your boobs at any time, but most especially I don't need them popping up in my Twitter stream constantly while you're tweeting. And do you really think that's professional, Author Who's Trying To Promote Her Books On Twitter?
Celebrities who only have conversations with one another. You guys can't text?
And last but not least, particularly in irony: People who whine about what other people tweet. Twitter is an open forum where anyone can say anything--that's the beauty of it! It's freedom of speech at work. Likewise, you are free to unfollow a person at any time. IF SOMEONE IS ANNOYING YOU, UNFOLLOW THEM. Don't tweet or @them about how the hashtag they're using is clogging up your twitter stream, or the joke they just made was completely inappropriate, or you don't want to hear about what they had for lunch. If people are annoying you on twitter, it's not their problem, it's yours. Unfollow or stfu.
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I personally hate being confronted with this question. I have trouble planning a week ahead, let alone years. Not to mention, with certain variables like possible apocalypses coming up, who can really say?
I think these questions are also based on a fallacy of thinking that life is linear you can anticipate going from point A to point C. When in fact, life is more like a labyrinth. You can travel what seems like a long ways and find yourself in nearly the same place you started, or in a completely different place than you expected.
I have no idea where I'll be in ten years. I certainly have hopes for where I'll be (or at the very least, not be), and I have things I'd like to do during that time, but no idea where that will take me. Wherever it is, though, I hope to be surprised!
This post is part of Blogust. Check out Beyond Elsewhere's blog for more information, daily topics, and to sign up!
Hello, my as-yet small group of readers. Since this is the official start of my blog, I thought joining Blogust, hosted by Beyond Elsewhere, would be a great way to kick things off. What is Blogust? Basically posting every day in the month of August. There are daily prompts that sound really interesting. I encourage you all to join!
Today's topic is very appropriate for me: Why do you write? I like most people write simply because they want to communicate, and I do too. Writing is one of the few mediums where I feel absolutely comfortable expressing myself. At the same time, writing is mysterious--how does a story work, what makes a book "good" or make it click with certain readers put others off? Where does inspiration come from? There are no certain answers to these questions, and anyone who says otherwise is putting you on.
To me, writing is a world of possibilities--a world of ifs instead of thens. When you open a book, anything can happen. One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of sitting in front of my mom's bookshelf and imagining what stories were embedded in the pages of all those books. Writing has just as much, if not more, chance for possibility and discovery, if you're willing to wonder.
