Sorry for the lack of posts lately, the worry over my hands has forced me from the computer a little bit, and now I’m headed out of town for a week or so on business. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to post whilst I’m gone, so I’m putting this up just in case. I will come back ready and raring to get back on schedule, though, trust in that!
Meanwhile, I do have a story set to go up on Tales From the Hollow Tree tomorrow, so don’t forget to check that out!
Just a quick fun song for today, enjoy!
What author set off that spark of inspiration for your current Work in Progress?
I don’t know that there’s one particular author who set off the inspiration for my WIP. I’d been reading a lot of young adult and middle grade fantasy of various types, and really what drove me to work on this story was the wish to write something expansive. Not “epic” necessarily… but definitely expansive.
If I had to point fingers, though… I think I’d have to single out Shannon Hale.
Despite what I just said, I’m really not much of a reader of fantasy. There is very little of it out there that doesn’t give me the urge to roll my eyes… especially high fantasy. Unless you’re J.R.R. Tolkein or Brandon Mull, you can keep your dragons to yourself, thanks. And fairies? There was the occasional brilliant book (Lament and Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater) but mostly they seemed like a thinly veiled analogy for teen angst, which I didn’t care for. And unless it’s Harry Potter, don’t even talk about wizards.
But Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl reminded me of the fantasy that I loved—had always loved. Fairy tale magic. Subtle, natural magic. Magic like the whispering of words on the wind, or later on in the series, of the language of fire and water. The Goose Girl also had this wide, sweeping landscape and crossed whole nations. It had castles and communities and class-action suits. Okay, not exactly that last one, but close enough—a group of people who were fighting for equal standing, for recognition.
Shannon Hale’s world was so real that I felt like I’d been there, maybe in a dream. I wanted to create something like that. A dream-memory-worthy world. That sure sounded expansive to me. I didn’t want to retell a fairy tale, though. Too many people were doing that… or just about to do that. I wanted to write my own fairy tale. It’s one I’ve fallen dearly in love with, with elements from many of my favorite stories throughout folklore, but I’d like to think with my own special twist.
Other inspirations for my WIP include things like Willow, The Princess Bride, and The Polar Bear King, a movie that I loved to death when I was a kid. I wanted my world to stand alongside worlds like these… quietly magical, wonderfully alive fantasy. Even Robin Hood has had its influence here and there.
Another thing all these worlds have in common? The hero in the story isn’t quite what you’d expect. Sad girl, pirate, misfit… There’s a lesson in a lot of these stories that strength can come to anybody who stands up and fights for it. That’s something I wanted to write about, too. About extreme conditions, extreme need making even an outcast into a hero.
Wish me luck with it.
New DC LEGOs revealed at Comic Con
This weekend was Comic Con. I’m not about to tell you everything that happened there… you can find that anywhere and all over, if you look. Here’s a little rundown of the things that I saw and enjoyed:
– Kick-started with the very first viewing of Captain America. Chris Evans was there to introduce the film in person (very, very pretty person). This movie was really wonderful. I was impressed by Evans’ portrayal, by the faithfulness to the WWII era, and by the acting of Stanley Tucci and Hayley Atwell especially. Tommy Lee Jones was perfect for his role. Surprise hottie of the film was Sebastian Stan, AKA Carter Baizan from Gossip Girl. This was possibly my favorite superhero movie yet. Don’t get me wrong, I love Iron Man, but this had more heart to it. Also, the sneak peek at The Avengers at the end was AWESOME.
– Went to see the Batman Arkham City panel with Mr. I’m not a gamer myself, but I most certainly am a Batman fan, and this panel was especially great because I was able to see Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill talk about having worked together as the voices of Batman and The Joker for almost two decades. I had no idea they’d all worked together so long. The game looks fantastic and gritty, and I know Mr. is very excited for it.
– Went to Simon & Schuster’s first ever Comic Con panel, and won two books by Wake author Lisa McMann! The first is Cryer’s Cross, about high school students disappearing, and the second is an ARC of McMann’s first Middle Grade novel, a fantastic looking book called The Unwanteds that’s about a world where children are punished for being creative. It was explained that she got the idea from talking with her son about how all the art programs are being stripped from schools.
– I was able to also see Scott Westerfeld and his panel about bringing to life the world of Leviathan. This was an exciting panel for me because I was able to get some insight on the worldbuilding from a series I really enjoy. He spoke about why he wanted to write an illustrated novel, the history of World War 1 and the collaborative process with Keith Thompson that went into making this series. I was excited to snag a signed copy of Leviathan from the Simon & Schuster booth at the end of the Con, and am really looking forward to Goliath, the last book of the series, due out in September.
– I stood in line with a bunch of other great girls during the Name of the Star giveaway by Penguin Teen, and a lot of us were tweeting back and forth with Maureen Johnson whilst in the line, which was a lot of fun. We’re some of the very first to be getting this book, and I know for example that the girl behind me had a guy with her because someone on Twitter had offered to give $50 to a favorite charity for anyone who got them a copy of the book, so she got him to grab one for herself. Clever! Eventually the booth gave the books to us a little earlier than planned, because the line had gotten so long that all the spots were taken! I think next year will be a very good one for book swag at the Con…
– My favorite moment at the Con was the signing I went to after the Middle Grade panel that I went to. I was able to meet and chat with some awesome book people. Firstly I was able to get my Beyonders book signed by Brandon Mull, author of the magnificent Fablehaven series, and I was able to tell him about how he was one of the authors I was sort of proud of, because I found him on the second-to-bottom shelf in a fenced-off children’s section of a Deseret Book, before there was any hype about his books, and that I’d been telling people to read them ever since. He gave me a high five and sincerely thanked me for telling people about his books, saying that’s how you gain readers. Also, I told him I hadn’t had a chance to read Beyonders yet, and he assured me that I’d really enjoy it, telling me how it’s a little bit of an older audience than Fablehaven, and that he honestly thinks it’s better.
– Sitting next to Brandon Mull was John Stephens, author of the new Middle Grade novel The Emerald Atlas, part of a series called The Books of Beginning, which my sister bought at the Con. Stephens has also worked on two of my favorite TV shows—Gilmore Girls and Gossip Girl. I was able to thank him for being involved in Gilmore Girls, especially (he told me he was a writer for the first four years of the show), telling him that I was grateful for anyone who’d had a hand in bringing Rory Gilmore to life, as she was the same age as me and was so wonderful to have on TV as a smart girl who loved books.
– I was also able to very briefly talk to Nathan Bransford, agent and author of Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow. I was able to thank him for the wealth of information available on his blog about the publishing industry, telling him that I was one of those people who want to do it “right” when I have a manuscript ready to submit to an agent. He told me that I was going about it the right way—learning all I could about the industry and about individual agents themselves. All three gentlemen were extremely nice and it was such a thrill meeting them, mainly because I love book people, and it was so new for me to meet people in person who are as passionate about the bookworld as I am.
– I did also see the panel for the new Spiderman movie—which I’m really surprisingly looking forward to. I thought it looked ridiculous at first, but it’s being done by the same producer as (500) Days 0f Summer, and looks like an actual, organically told story, instead being as cartoony as I’m used to Spiderman being. I think what broke me down was when they showed an exclusive trailer, and the music that rolled in was Coldplay’s “Kingdom Come,” which is probably my favorite Coldplay song ever. And it was on footage for Spiderman. Suddenly this didn’t look like a movie about an obnoxious, whiny kid who puts on a red suit and fights bad guys. It looked like a movie about an actual teenager who was smart and conflicted and was coming up with solutions to problems. The producer talked about how influential music was in making the film, and I sort of wanted to make out with him. Also, the kid playing Spidey—Andrew Garfield, was just adorable in the panel. He reminded me of a young Daniel Radcliffe with his overacting talking and excitedness. And the movie has Emma Stone in it, and if she’s not the cutest thing to hit Hollywood since Meg Ryan, I don’t know what she is.
So, maybe not what you were expecting from a Comic Con post, but it’s what I enjoyed the most! It was very exciting to see the book publishers back at Comic Con in full force. It seems like their presence has weakened over the past few years, but they were definitely there this year!
The past two weekends, dozens of quilt shops ranging from southern San Diego all the way up to Ventura County participated in the annual Southern California Quilters Run. If you don’t know what a quilt run is, it’s a bunch of shops getting together, and offering sales and raffle prizes (and free block patterns, snacks/drinks) so that quilters can run around and see what shops are available, and check out new shops they’ve never seen before.
You get a passport and get stamped off for each shop you go to. For this quilt run, each shop has a $300 value prize basket, and each AREA (there were four… um… “Southern California” covers a lot of space—if you don’t believe me, google the distance between Chula Vista and Lancaster, the southmost and northmost shops participating) had another big prize. I think in the San Diego area it was a $100 gift certificate to each participating shop. There’s another prize if you get to ALL of the shops, but I didn’t make it halfway.
Why was I there at all? Well, my mother is a quilter. So, I’m used to this sort of craziness. For me the weekend consisted of a lot of driving, and then stopping to take pictures of fun things, and snack on cookies and mini cupcakes. Some shops even had hot dogs—these shops were the treasures of the run for me.
I do like looking at pretty fabrics, though…
Like this. Big old kits full of coordinated batiks. Batiks are about my favorite fabrics, full or rich vibrant colors. (The basket I wanted the most was from this shop, and had one of these batik beauties in it).
A…hem. Anyhow. A quilt run means a LOT of quilting ladies. And occasionally husbands being dragged around to collect goodies (like mine… sorry hun). (He enjoyed the hot dogs too, though.) Me? I enjoyed myself a lot. Quilting is something I’ve only been marginally involved with—but I’ve been marginally involved in it my entire life, and use the basics all the time in my Etsy shop. It’s a whole different type of creativity than writing, and something that can be quite satisfying so far as finished products go.
The other great thing about quilt stores that you might not know?
They have cats. Well, some of them. That’s an incentive to go in and of itself. Or maybe that’s just me. 🙂
So, the A-Z challenge didn’t work so well for me. I didn’t even quite make it halfway through the challenge, and then I stayed away from my blog to avoid my shame. We really do get silly about our blogs sometimes.
I’ve been up to my elbows in edits for Drollerie the past couple of weeks, and am likely to be there for some time. It’s pushed writing to the corner of my mind, but I’m trying to keep the story talking in my head. I’ve been working on the mythology behind Jethro a little bit, talking it over with Isabelle Santiago. She’s helped me to realize that I still had thrown-out ideas that would work, and that maybe I should re-incorporate them. Previously I had taken them out because they were a little too complicated, but talking them out, I found solutions for a few things I hadn’t thought of before.
In other news, I feel a bit sheepish that it’s taken me so long to do this, but I’ve been given a Creative Blog Award by Deirdre Coppel of A Storybook World.
Thanks Deirdre!
It’s been a long day, and I’ve spent 75% of it in front of a computer, so I’m going to leave you today with something fun, my favorite comedy sketch about writing, ever, via The Mitchell and Webb Look.
🙂
So, I have a little bit of a yarnie love. No, not love, addiction. In fact, if there’s one hobby I could do for a living that wasn’t writing, it’d probably be spinning yarn (yes, like on a spinning wheel or a spindle—actually I haven’t tried a spinning wheel yet, but ooh would I love to!)
This yarn-yearning has been part of me since I was a very small child. I was fascinated with the stuff, though I didn’t know what in the world to do with it. Knitting didn’t strike my fancy at that age, and try and try again, I just could not learn how to crochet. I was taught, too—twice. I could never get past the single chain, basically the very first stitch.
I toyed with crochet once or twice as I got older, but all meager attempts failed, more or less. Then, my freshman year of college, I learned how to knit, taught by a neighbor of mine. I started slow with knitting, making basic garter-stitch scarves and not even learning how to purl (which is what makes knitting look all nice and smooth) for a couple of years. I loved knitting—it was very in at the time I was going to school (which was really only a few years ago) and was full of instant satisfaction for the creative being in me.
Then finally I 
decided I needed to learn how to crochet. Knitting and crochet really go hand in hand. You can know the one without knowing the other, but it’s far more beneficial (and freeing, in terms of what you can make) if you know both. After all, I’d learned how to purl on my own, I’d learned how to cast off knitting on my own… (well, thanks to youtube) why couldn’t I learn how to crochet?
I bought the book Stitch n’ Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker, and with that guidance, finally learned how to do something more than a chain of stitches. The exciting thing about crochet is that once you learn the basics (and by basics, I mean just barely beyond where I’d been the majority of my life) you can do just about anything. 
I’ve fiddled with the whole gamut of crochet, from scarves to toys to tiny motifs. I even have a little etsy shop where I sell the tiniest granny squares you’ve ever seen.
I like to use my crochet in other ways, too… like to ornament stuff in my main Etsy shop, CinderLisaDesign. Really, crochet just makes me happy. I knit more, to be honest, but crochet is my comfort craft. Easy to fix if you mess up, easy to shape stuff ways you want it. I’m always extra pleased with crochet stuff I do, to be honest, because there was a time I thought I’d never be able to get the handle of it. I’m glad I kept going. 😉
I’d say this doesn’t have anything to do with writing, except that for me it does, in a way. It proved to me that I could conquer things that I was hesitant about… something I also did in writing. I was sure that I couldn’t write believable fantasy for a long time, when the truth is, that’s almost all I’m writing right now, and makes up the majority of my planned projects, too. Sometimes you just have to keep trying until it works.
Okay, I really can’t sit still and blog right now… I have more important things to do, like get words on paper as quickly as possible, because last Thursday I had a big revelation as to how to finish up Jethro. All of the major dots are now connected in my head, and it all works together so beautifully that I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. I spent most of Thursday night hashing it all out in my head and with Isabelle Santiago, along with generally freaking out about it as much as I could.
Friday I didn’t get much writing done, as it was New Year’s Eve and I had some partying to do (with some extra reason to celebrate!) and I went with my husband and some very good friends to Salt Lake City’s EVE party, where I partook of live music, improv comedy, dancing, fireworks (of course!) and general frivolity. Also, bounce-houses. It was a blast, and I really enjoyed it. Today I had some editing I needed to finish up, so I’ve been doing that most of the day… after sleeping in late to recover from last night.
So, anyhow, a few vital things that need to be said:
1) Welcome to 2011!!! I hope it’s a great year for us both. 😉
2) This novel suddenly seems much more like an eventuality than a possibility, and that’s an amazing feeling.
3) I could never have gotten this far without supportive family and friends.
That about sums it up for now. I’m off to get my writing in gear!
Lisa Asanuma 