An Awesome Launch: Michelle McLean's HOMEWORK HELPERS Giveaway!!

So. This is an EPIC week for us here at Operation Awesome. E-p-i-c.

Why?

Oh, no big deal. It's just that our very own Michelle McLean has a book coming out!!! *fist pump*

*fights urge to hug it*

In honor of Michelle's book birthday, we here at OA wanted to throw a bit of a bash. And no cyber-party is complete without a BOOK and SWAG GIVEAWAY, right? Right???

Here's what you can win:

1) A copy of HOMEWORK HELPERS: ESSAYS AND TERM PAPERS

2) A super awesome swag pack filled with goodies, courtesy of the awesome Michelle!! 

On Thursday, January 20th, Michelle will do the honors of announcing one lucky winner! 

Want to be that lucky winner??

Here's what you have to do:

1) Follow the OA blog *waves hi*

2) Leave a comment on this post with your email address 

Then make sure you come back this Thursday to see if you won! Simple as that.

Future winner: I'll try not to be too jealous of you. Keywords: I'll. Try.

Best of luck to those who enter!! 

And HAPPY BOOK LAUNCH, Michelle! :)

Paul McCartney, Prancing Poodles, and Girls Who Play Football: Miranda Kenneally in a blogshell

SCORE! 

Possible covers, just to tease us. (from Teen Fire)

I'm not yelling SCORE only because Miranda Kenneally agreed to do an interview with me on Operation Awesome! I'm also yelling SCORE because Miranda's debut YA novel, SCORE, is due to come out this year!


Here is Le Blurb from her website:

What girl doesn’t want to be surrounded by gorgeous jocks day in and day out? Jordan Woods isn’t just surrounded by hot guys, though—she leads them as the captain and quarterback on her high school football team. They all see her as one of the guys, and that’s just fine. As long as she gets her athletic scholarship to a powerhouse university. But now there’s a new guy in town who threatens her starring position on the team…and has her suddenly wishing to be seen as more than just a teammate.

SCORE, my debut YA novel, will be released by Sourcebooks Fire in December 2011!

Add SCORE on Goodreads!   

Read an excerpt from SCORE

Meet Miranda Kenneally

Le Interview: 

Katrina: Brushing shoulders with President George W. Bush?! A thumbs up from Paul McCartney?! I was absolutely floored by your list of 25 things about you. 

Do you seek out these crazy experiences or are they the result of chance?

Miranda: These days, I’m about as introverted as it gets. I prefer sitting in my green chair with a book, and anytime I’m out of the house, I can’t wait to get home and back into my green chair.

I work for the government, planning high level events and conferences and summits and whatnot, so I often find myself in strange situations.  Like having to show Newt Gingrich where the bathroom is.  Or having to test every single pen that will be used by a world leader the next day. 

But when I was a teenager and a college goer, oh yeah, I totally got myself into trouble.  I was the idiot who tried to blow up a tree someone planted in my tanning spot on the grassy knoll I liked.  One time I got into a fight with Sister Souljah (don’t ask).  That is something I regret.  A lot. 

I also regret not speaking to John Green when I had the chance.  I saw him, and I just stood there straight as stale licorice. 

Katrina: What inspired a story about a girl playing high school football? Do you play?

Miranda:  In elementary school, I was awesome at baseball (always got chosen first!) and volleyball, so the boys let me play football, even though I wasn’t very good at it.  Okay, I’m terrible at football.  I can’t catch anything without a glove. 

In junior high, I asked to be on the team, but the coach said no.  So I wrote an essay entitled, “Why I should be allowed on the football team.” My only supporting argument was that I’d beaten a scrawny wide receiver at arm wrestling in the cafeteria one day.  It didn’t work.

Growing up, I mostly hung out with guys, and in high school, I was the manager of the boys’ soccer team, so I really understand the strange creature that is the teenage athletic boy.  So writing SCORE was pretty natural for me.  What’s not natural for me is writing about your standard cookie-cutter girl.  Now that would be a challenge!

What inspired SCORE? I really have no idea. I was bored one day at jury duty and just started free writing.

Katrina: Jury duty?! Best first-draft story ever! Okay, so SCORE is a romance, but our main girl is far from the stereo-typical romantic lead. What was the hardest thing about writing from Jordan’s perspective as a girl whose priority isn’t romance?

Miranda:  This actually wasn’t very hard. I mean, we’ve all been there.  We’ve all seen that guy who just makes our stomach curl up like a slug doused with salt.  We’ve all longed for somebody. 

That being said, it was definitely hard to show why seventeen-year-old Jordan had never gone after a guy, and why none of the guys had ever pursued her (you’ll have to read the book to find out more!). 

Katrina: Any news on the SCORE cover? The ones we’ve seen on Teen Fire and your website look amazing! Has a decision been reached?

Miranda:  YES! And I’m really thrilled with the final choice, but I’m not allowed to show it to anyone yet.  I’ll give you an update as soon as the handcuffs have been unlocked.

Katrina: You’ve got excerpts on your site for a romance (SCORE) and a comedy (BEST.DAY.EVER), and you mentioned working on a romantic thriller! Love the sound of that. Is there a particular genre where you feel more at home? What do you think would be the hardest genre to write? (Personally, I think it’s the acrobatic poodles genre.)

Miranda: Those poodles = My worst. Work. Ever.

The hardest genre? Literary adult fiction. I would never even attempt this. My dad writes literary adultish stuff, so when he reads my stuff, he’s all like, “Well this doesn’t totally suck.”  Snob.  :D

I feel most at home writing your standard YA contemporary transformative/character development novel a la Sarah Dessen.  BEST. DAY. EVER. is a quest novel about a girl from poverty who gets to shadow a famous disgruntled country star for a day, and it changes both their lives in positive and negative ways.  It’s like Before Sunrise meets Ferris Bueller’s Day Off meets Pretty Woman meets American Idol. 

I also love writing crappy free verse and haikus and stuff.  SCORE is partially written in verse. 

AWESOME POEM TO FOLLOW the end of this interview.

Katrina: What’s your writing process like? Are you a plotter, panster, or a mix?

Miranda:  These days it goes like this:  I tell my agent what I’m thinking and she says either, “OOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOHHHHHHHH” or “Eh, it’s been done.”  If it’s the former, I write a crappy first draft over a few weeks.  I send it to my dad.  He tells me why it’s crappy.  I get back to work on it.  Then I send it to other people to read.  They tell me what is good and what is bad.  I play up the good, kill the bad.  This continues for several months until it turns into a book. 

To me, writing is a team effort, and that’s not a bad thing.

Sometimes I start writing first drafts and then quit after a day or two, because it feels forced. 

I figure if I haven’t sold the book yet, no harm, no foul.

Katrina: How much time do you spend on revision versus writing the first draft?

Miranda:  My (crappy) first drafts take me less than a month.  Revisions can take anywhere from three months to six.  I haven’t gone over six yet.  Knock on wood.

Katrina: Are there any snacks, rituals, music tracks you simply must have to get into your writing zone? Paint a picture for us of what it’s like in your writing space.

Miranda:  Green chair, Diet Coke, Twitter, notes scratched on napkins and on my hands, husband constantly interrupting me and me ignoring said husband. J 

Katrina: I think we’re all a little envious of you for your agent, Sara Megibow. What’s she like to work with and what’s the most important thing you’ve learned since you started working with her?

Miranda:  Sara’s great.  I’m really honored she took me on as a client.  First, she always answers my emails in a timely fashion, and she always tells it like it is.  She’s not a big sugarcoater.  She carefully reads everything I write and offers LOADS of suggestions on how to make it better.

The most important thing I’ve learned from her is to relax and not try so hard. Forcing anything is BAD.  

Katrina: You’ve got an agent and a book deal, so that puts you on the other side of a Cat’s Claw fence from those of us still searching. Is there any advice you can offer to those of us in the querying stage of our careers?

Miranda:  Just keeping searching for the right story that fits your voice.  That’s the key, I think.  For so long I tried to write stories that just weren’t “me.”  The minute I started writing like myself (and not trying to be the next Orson Scott Card or Terry Pratchett or Phillip Pullman) was when I started getting attention.

Katrina: Thank you so much for answering my questions!

Miranda: THANK YOU!!! :D

And now, in Miranda's own words (channeling her character, Jordan)...

Silly poem from SCORE:

Evolution (a.k.a. Second Attempt at Tackling a Poem)

I’ll admit it

When I first saw Jake Reynolds

     I thought I’d died and gone to the Super Bowl

                   (as starting QB)

That blonde surfer-boy hair

That tan body that won’t stop

That bottom lip: upturned, a sexy invite 

And then he spoke

“Damn, Jordan. You should play tight end

     because your ass is wound tighter than a baseball.”

Now every time I see a hot guy

     my first reaction is to brace myself

       Wait for the sewage to seep out of his mouth

       I thought Henry was the last of his kind

       I thought hot nice guys had gone extinct

       Be still, my hormones

       Ty is here to repopulate the species

Give Miranda a shout-out in the comments. She's kindly agreed to answer some questions today from the comments, as well! Woot! 
Follow her on twitter for cover news pending

Hope and Dread

Writer Bryn Greenwood describes hope as a beautiful butterfly that you follow, eyes in the sky, until it leads you right off a cliff. She inspired a few blog posts on the subject of hope this week. (You might surmise we aren't the cheeriest bunch right now.)

Tracey, Hope

Steven, About Hope

Bryn, Dead Butterflies

Here’s mine.

When I submitted my current WIP to my agent, I made sure that it was a complete draft because I was so sure she was going to terminate her contract with me. I knew if I had a finished novel, when she pulled the rug out, I’d have a nice soft manuscript to land on.

But I still had hope. I hoped she’d love it as much as she loved my first book. I hoped she’d have a dozen editors in mind who were dying to read it already.

Instead she terminated her contract with me -- not what I hoped, but what I dreaded. And boy, it hurts.

Ouch, there’s that cliff again, with me bruised in a heap at the bottom.

I’m trying to sort through what being agent-free means. After all, “agent free” sounds pretty good. “Free agent” sounds better. Now, I can look for a new agent who really, really gets me. Maybe I can sub my first novel myself to editors who never saw it, or my future powerhouse agent will love it and sell it with my WIP in a two-book deal. Yay! Hope!!!!

The reality is that I’m going back in the slush pile, and I’ll never make it through without hope. So yeah, I have hope, but along with hope comes dread.

That slush pile is high and steep, and I’m braced to fall off the edge.

Who Are You?

I'm an upbeat gal. I'm the one who talks about being extraordinary, book workouts, query sushi, how even famous writer's poop and my fondness for cookies.

But sometimes I feel like I've misrepresented myself. Why? Because while I am all those things, being positive is only part of who I am.

Don't worry, I don't dress up in a superhero costume and climb tall buildings (not yet anyway), but I do have another side.

I have down days. I can be shy. It takes a lot to make me angry. I cry at Disney movies. I don't always brush my hair if I'm not going outside. I don't like needles. I'm allergic to garden grass (yes, you heard me right. I'm allergic to lawns -- I'm a freak.) I can be sarcastic, I'm loyal, I get hyperactive after drinking coffee, I'm perfectionist. I could go on, but it would bore you.

Why am I telling you this? Because it's part of what makes up my character.Those sides don't come out all the time, but they're still there. They lurk inside me, but I wouldn't change them.

It's the same when we're writing. While we all want our MC to be kick-ass, they still have another side to them (even if you never show it all). Do they pick their nails? Do they hate fish? What makes them happy? You don't have to write it down (I don't), but it helps to think about it for a few minutes.

Knowing these things about your characters, even if you don't write them, will make them seems more real. In the end that's what we all want, right? A believable person to spent 300+ pages with.

What about you? How do you approach getting to know your MC?

Win a Customized Blog Banner

I did this a while back on my personal blog, and got a good response. I'm no professional, mind you, but I do love to play with banners. If anything, it is a great way to procrastinate editing. (grin) I also play around with our little mascot, Oliver. Here are a few examples of the work I've done.

 Operation Awesome

 

Elizabeth Briggs

Lindsay (a.k.a Isabella) 

Katrina Lantz

Colene Murphy

I've seen a lot of blogs with the basic template banners, and I'd love to fix you up with something personalized. If you'd like a chance to win a custom made banner by yours truly, there are several ways you can earn points.

Comment on this post: +1

Previous OA Follower: +2

New OA Follower: +1

Tweet about this: +1

Facebook Post/Linkage: +1

Blog about this: +3

I'll end this contest a week from today. Please post in your comments which points you are taking advantage of, plus links to any posts, etc. 

Good luck! I'm sooo excited to create something new!

Awesome Book Reviews: PAPER TOWNS by John Green

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues - and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.

Printz medalist John Green returns with the brilliant wit and searing emotional honesty that have inspired a new generation of listeners.

Review: My first John Green experience was LOOKING FOR ALASKA. It blew me away, to say the least. So when I picked up PAPER TOWNS, I figured I was in for another mind-blowing experience. I was right.

From page one, readers have no choice but to fall in love with Quentin. He's one of those smart outcast-types with few (hilarious) friends. He's also in love with the girl next door (literally). Margo is a force to be reckoned with--she tells it like it is, and isn't afraid of not being liked. Quentin's not only fascinated by her, but he's constantly hoping the feeling is mutual. That hope gets a little crushed when she disappears one fine day. She does that every once in a while. Maybe to force her parents into paying attention. Maybe because she's bored. As a reader, you're never 100% sure. But she always leaves clues to where others can find her. And this time, her clues are for Quentin.

What I loved most about this book can be boiled down into two categories: 1) what is; and 2) what isn't. Quentin's quest (say that ten times fast...) to find the girl of his dreams makes you worry. About him. About her. About life. 'What is' refers to how Quentin sees Margo and the world around him. 'What isn't' is everything else--the truth. By making Quentin connect the dots of Margo's whereabouts, John Green's connecting the dots that make us all human. He's bringing the 'what is' and the 'what isn't' together. Isn't that what growing up is all about?

My verdict? Read PAPER TOWNS. Twice a week. A bazillion times a year. John Green is a genius. I will someday make a T-shirt that says so. 

Tell me: have you read a John Green book? If so, which one?  

Who's In Charge?

You put a character out there and you’re in their power. You’re in trouble if they’re in yours. 

~Ann Beattie

That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. 

My characters are galley slaves.

~Vladimir Nabokov

I love the above quote by Vladimir Nabokov. I’m a control freak. I like things organized and ordered and scheduled. Although things rarely work out this way when it comes to anything having to do with my fiction work. I don’t always write my books in order, I always don’t outline (though I'm trying to more), I don’t always have a grand plan (except for knowing the basic storyline), I set word count or page goals that I rarely stick to….so why should I expect my characters to toe the line any better than anything else in my fiction world?

Yet, while reading through my favorite book of author quotes, most of the authors listed agreed with Ann Beattie. They felt their characters should be allowed to roam free, that they just sit back and watch as the characters dictate the story. Only a couple of them were on Nabokov’s side, such as John Cheever who said, “The idea of authors running around helplessly behind their cretinous inventions is contemptible.” (I love that quote) :D

I think for me, it is a little bit of both. My characters have a certain voice, an attitude and personality that is uniquely theirs. When a certain situation arises, there are certain ways that character is going to react, and often it is not the way I planned on it happening. I’ll write a scene with a particular situation in mind, envision my characters acting a certain way, and then start writing only to see the scene playing out completely differently in my head.

Now, sometimes what is coming out works – but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I will reread the scene and think, “Wait a second…Kesi is cute and spunky, but she’s a little unsure of herself. She wouldn’t react that way.” And I have to go back in and change things.

Other times, the way she reacts is EXACTLY how she should, but for some reason or other I need her to react differently. Maybe I want her to step out of her shell and do something unexpected. So again, I go back and change whatever it is that needs changing.

So for me, I think I allow my characters a certain amount of freedom, though I by no means run helplessly behind them. :) They get to take the lead….as long as they are doing it correctly. If they don’t, I go all galley master on them and make them do my bidding. (Mwahahahhahahaaaaa) ;-)

How about you? Are your characters in charge? Or do they obey your every command?

Across the Universe PRE-ORDER GIVEAWAY! - CLOSED

Update: erica and christy you won the drawing! 


It was SO fun reading your awesome word inventions.

Thanks to everyone who entered! 

Guess what comes out next Tuuuuessday!

This:

I know, right? 

I'm dying! I've already pre-ordered my copy, but I was thinking about all those other times an amazing book came out and I just didn't get around to picking it up until much after it came out, and I didn't want that to happen to you guys. 

So we're giving away one pre-order of Beth Revis' ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

If you haven't gotten around to pre-ordering it yet, then this will be perfect timing for you! I'll pre-order tomorrow so there's a good chance it will arrive by Tuesday in the U.S. (no promises for outside the country, though, but still... a free book!) 

All you've got to do to be included in this random drawing is this:

A) Follow us if you're not

B) In honor of the epic spaceship setting, turn your WORD VERIFICATION non-word into a science fiction term at the bottom of your post. 

You can do this by leaving a comment, pressing POST COMMENT, and then EDIT your comment to include the WORDVER new definition. Don't forget to enter the word verification for the camera, too (you know, so our blog doesn't think you're a really clever robot).

Amparo will be blogging a review once it's out, so be sure to check back for that. And now for the juice of the book (for those of you who have missed all the ever-present buzz):

A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules. 

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone-one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship-tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

Pot Holes and Aha Moments in Your Writing Career

A writing career, just like any other kind, starts at the bottom and works its way to the top. It's a journey, filled with pot holes (hee hee, plot holes), and Eureka moments. 

My first Aha moment as a writer came after I penned my very first novel. It took me from 2003 to 2008 to finish it. Yeah. No, I wasn't working on it the whole time. I belonged to the someday-I'll-write-a-book club. My pot hole was that I didn't have any discipline. From August to October, I finally finished it.

In 2008, my Aha moment said, Writing on a daily schedule yields faster, better results.

Duh, right?

When you write every single day, or close to it, your story simply has more cohesiveness, more natural flow, than it will when you put months between each chapter. Not to mention how your writing style will change over time, even if you're not writing regularly. If you want to see what it looks like when 19-year-old me writes Chapter 1 and 23-year-old me writes Chapter 27, I've got a manuscript that can demonstrate it palpably. An unpublished manuscript. A terminally unpublishable manuscript. I will never do that again.


Another pot hole I faced as a writer was my essay training from high school, which told me to seek out the fanciest word to drive home my point. Never, ever use was or said, my teachers said. If you try to take every was and is/were/are out of a paper or manuscript, you will end up with some funky variations on sentence structure and some even funkier word combinations. Or maybe it's just me.

(e.g. It was proven that the chicken pox are contagious. 
becomes--> The researchers found that chicken pox bore communicable properties.)

Stilted much? Yeah, this won't sound good in your YA novel. Thus, my next Aha moment came after my third book (we'll skip right over the sequel I wrote to the first book which had all the same problems as the first, but with a catchier ending).

It said, Stop trying to sound smart.

I am smart. You are, too. But we don't have to prove that to our readers by using words like ruminated where it would sound more natural for the character to say thought or pondered. Sure, if you've got a narrator or character who would use that word, like John Green's child prodigy in An Abundance of Katherines, then by all means, say ruminated all you like. But not because you're too good for boring words.

A meandering hell of word-vomit at the end of that book taught me this:

A rough outline is better than no outline at all.

Which leads me to today's Aha moment. Two books later, I am still learning the importance of story structure and planning in creating the elusive perfect novel. Meandering? Still happens to me, unfortunately. I'm finally frustrated enough to do something about it. Enter Larry Brooks of storyfix.com:

"In essence, story development separates into two sequential realms: the search for story… [followed] by the rendering of story."

otherwise realized as...

If it took you half the book to figure out your plot and character arcs, the reader has no hope.


Smart guy, that Larry Brooks.


What Aha moments have you had lately? What road blocks or pot holes have you hit?

If you're about due for another epiphany, check out Larry's article: A Mindset Shift That Can Get You Published, which inspired this post.

Sliding Down the Longest Chute: Norma Johnson-MacGregor

Note from Kelly: This wasn't my best writing week of all time. My good friend Norma Johnson-MacGregor offered me some words of solace, and I asked her to put them into a guest blog for Operation Awesome.

Sliding Down the Longest Chute

This time last year I was flying high. I’d worked hard and landed a reputable agent, my manuscript was on submission to editors and I -- naively I can now see -- thought it would only be a matter of time before I received the elusive and coveted prize many writers aspire to obtain, the book deal.

To say the least, I was on cloud nine.

Then, a few months ago, I received a double whammy. That manuscript was unable to find a home at the several houses the agent had submitted it to and my next manuscript failed to spark the agent’s fancy. I was released from our contract.

Just. Like. That.

In retrospect, I can see that this was for the best. However, at the time I felt as though a gaping hole had just opened beneath my feet, causing me to tumble into an abyss. I was shocked that I hadn’t been given the opportunity to present another manuscript and further surprised at how quickly our relationship had begun and ended. Since then I’ve had my eyes opened -- painfully so -- to just how fragile agent/writer relationships are and how subjective and uncertain the publishing business is in general.

I have collected the pieces and moved on with a new work in progress. I’ve received countless advice and support from fellow writers. I’ve realized that in publishing, as in many things in life, the most we can do is accept the situation for what it is and move on, move forward, continue looking at the horizon and striving to make our wishes come true, no matter how unlikely it seems.

And yet, something haunts me that I’ve never quite been able to shake -- how much the process of trying to become a published author has damaged my writing self-esteem. I find myself constantly plagued with a case of the ‘why bothers’. Why should I bother trying to get my work ‘out there’? It’s hard. As hell. And those tumbles to the ground hurt, gosh darn it! And now that I’ve had an agent, I can’t help but feel like tarnished goods, like ‘who’s going to want me now?’

Sometimes, even though you know this is the standard ‘trial by fire’ rite of passage that many writers go through, it feels like you’re an island alone, and no one could understand the lows you’re experiencing right now.

I wish I had prolific advice, I wish I had a story of triumph, but I don’t.

The most valuable thing I have learned, is that all you can do is continue on even though it can be heart-breakingly difficult and you, too, may become plagued with a case of the 'why bothers'.

I read Chasing Brooklyn by Lisa Schroeder -- I really like her stuff. Anyway there’s a part where the main character, Brooklyn, and her brothers are playing Chutes and Ladders that really stuck out for me:

…When I land on the square and slide down the longest chute of the game,
Matthew says, "I hate that one. Sorry, Brooklyn."

Everyone hates that one. It's the square nobody wants to land on.
But it's there. And when you land on it, you slide down,
practically to the beginning, and all you can do is keep going,
wishing and hoping for a ladder to push you back up

As I think of that I realize losing Lucca was my chute.

After that, I gave up, so sure a ladder would never show up.

When it's my turn, I roll the dice.

I'm not giving up.

Now, the topic of this book is far more serious than losing an agent. The main character’s boyfriend dies. That’s her chute. Still, when I read this, I thought that losing my ex agent was my chute. After that the ‘why bothers’ and I became good friends.

I don't know about the not giving up part yet...when I feel brave enough to start querying again, if that project gets shot down I may throw in the towel…for a little while. I don’t consider myself to be a wimp but I am human!

But what happened to me (and probably some of you reading this), losing an agent, suffering through doubts and failed submissions, that's definitely the 'square no one wants to land on'. The ominous one that takes you back to square one, leaving you with no other option but to wish and hope for better things to come.

If you have had a bad experience, just know that you’re not alone in your doubts and fears, and you’re not the first writer to have had the rug pulled out from under you. If you want your dream to come true, keep trying. That’s the only thing you can do.

A friend said this to me once when I was trying to decide whether or not to go back to University (which, thanks to his support, I did and ended up graduating with a Master’s Degree):

Don’t look at the ground because you’ll never see your full potential.

Don’t look at the stars because you can never touch a star and you’ll only become discouraged.

Look to the horizon, and go…

-- Norma Johnson-MacGregor

Be Extraordinary

So it's 2011.

I'm not one for resolutions. I have the worst time remembering to take vitamins let alone stick to a resolution. And if anyone suggests giving up cookies, cake (or any form of confectionery), I may cry.

But I do like to do one new thing each year. This year I invite you to join me in being extraordinary.

How? By continuing to write.

Each time you put pen to paper, open that word document to begin a new project or think about a story/plot/main character you are extraordinary.

Every word you write. Every revision. Each re-write. Every query sent. This makes you extraordinary.

Why are you extraordinary? Because you never give up. We write, we learn. We read, we learn. We query, we learn. Every part of this journey tests, inspires, challenges and frustrates us, but we learn.

We grow.

We do what we love. And by doing what we love, we are extraordinary.

I don't know about you, but I think that's a great way to spend a year.

Do What You Don't

Happy New Year, blogging buddies!! *tosses confetti*

So. Many of you made resolutions. Many of you didn't.

I fall somewhere in between.

You see, I haven't made a list of goals or anything. BUT I do know which goals I want to accomplish. Even so, I'm not going to actively pursue them (save for finishing my WIP and surviving my second semester of grad school). The others will stick around in my mind, but I won't freak out if they don't happen.

And this is where I jump into the folks-who-make-resolutions pile.

Obviously, I love books. Be them YA or adult. But I've noticed a pattern in my purchases--there is very little contemporary fiction. *slaps wrist*

Sure, you gotta have your preferred genres, but diversity is always welcome, right? And it's not like I don't like contemporary fiction. It is made of win. So why have I been ignoring it?

Because of this, I've decided to make... wait for it... a list. Of YA contemporary books I'll read this year. My goal? To read at least 30. The rest I buy will be in the other genres I've exploited. :D 

I'm calling this my 30 Contemp Books Challenge. I'll be writing down every title I get my hands on, just so I remind myself why I'm doing this--to grow as a writer. To soak up the sheer awesomeness of others as a reader. To not be so freakin' predictable.

My New Year's resolution: to do what I don't. 

Why?

Well, I think RPattz says it better than I ever could:

What about you? Doing anything you don't usually do this year??

Happy New Year! from a few awesome writers :)

As I am winding down from a long (though fun) Christmas vacation with my kids (filled with games of Sorry and Bananagrams and very few (aka no) new words in the WIP) and am gearing up for a whirlwind month of games and prizes leading up to my book release in a few short weeks (eep!) I thought I'd share with you a few favorite New Year's quotes from a few awesome writers :)

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."

- Edith Lovejoy Pierce

"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account." (hehe)

- Oscar Wilde

"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential."

- Ellen Goodman

"One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things."

- John Burroughs

"For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning."

- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

Happy New Year's Everyone :) May the new year bring you WIPs filled with usable words, requests or at least rejections filled with useful advice, helpful critiques that are blunt and truthful but never cruel, and above all, may you laugh, love, and WRITE! :)