Ramblings of an aspiring writer

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The craziest thing happened today.

I woke up to find that Katee (http://redqueen1.livejournal.com/) had given me the Kreativ Blogger Award. I was stunned. Then I found out I had to blog seven things you might not know about me, and I panicked a teensy bit. Refusing wasn’t an option though, so here we go:

1 - I tend to be very Thornton Wilder on rough drafts. Setting is pretty much non-existent. I have to go back and add it in during revisions. It’s one of the main reasons I prefer to have something done and revised (at least once) before I send it out for public consumption.

2 - The title of the first novel I started writing was Wars and Wishes, Disasters and Dreams. It was this sweeping epic love story about a pair of teenage runaways. It had (as I recall) this beautifully twisting plot that kept ripping the characters apart and throwing them back together. Sadly, I was in elementary school when I started it and never thought to write an outline. I believe I have the ten or so pages I managed before quitting in a trunk somewhere.

3 - I started college majoring in aerospace engineering, but switched to chemistry sophomore year (graduated with a 3.46). After college, I did data entry at Pharmacia-Upjohn (now Pfizer), temped in an environmental lab (I have a scar on my left index finger from that job), worked as a test lab tech at an injection molding plant, then went into teaching (high school science and careers).

4 - I have this crazy love for writing challenges. So much so that I have to be careful how many I take on because it has interfered with my novels in the past. I organize the writing challenges on Kelley Armstrong’s website, have participated in NaNoWriMo three years running, and keep being sucked in by these crazy little writing prompts people toss at me. It’s a sickness. It really is.

5 – My penchant for honesty causes confusion sometimes in that I’ll forget whether or not I’ve told a particular person something. I’m beta reading for my friend Jodi (shameless plug #1: http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/) and there is a snippet that perfectly mirrors something my mother did to me. No idea if I told her that story and she found a way to use it (if so – YAY!) or if she came up with on her own (in which case, it’s creepy that she inadvertently wrote my mother as a character).

6 - Paul (shameless plug #2: http://strugglingwriter.wordpress.com/) said knowing my favorite album/artist would be very telling. I have to admit that I haven’t listened to it in years because I owned it on *gasp* cassette tape. Because of Paul I looked up songs on youtube. The winner? The Eddie and the Cruisers 2: Eddie Lives soundtrack (the movie was bad, but I still love the music). My favorite artist changes about once a month, so I can’t name only one. There are American Idol alums I have mad love for though, especially Chris Daughtry, Adam Lambert, and David Cook (in fact, several of Cook’s songs inspired scenes in later PRT novels).

7 - Another friend, Rayna (shameless plug #3, even though I’m 99% sure she isn’t interested in what I write: http://raynareads.blogspot.com/), wanted to know what book changed my life. For a lot of writers, that’s an easy question. Not so much for me. EVERY book I read changes me in some way. But I refused to take the easy way out, so I thought about what books led to what I write and why. My first thought was Anne Rice since she humanized vampires and made the monsters sympathetic. Then I realized Frankenstein did that for me first (maybe not you, but I’m just special like that). And I started spiraling. What about that book I read as a kid with the talking dog? That made me want to write stories. What about The Velveteen Rabbit? It still makes me cry. Ultimately, I realized the book that changed me in the biggest way was the one that led me to developing my writing and putting myself out there. For that, Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten gets the big shout out.

That’s me. You might have known some of this, but somehow I doubt any of you knew all of it. I can only hope you enjoyed learning something new about me.

So, backtracking a couple blogs in an attempt to figure out how this thing works, I can apparently give the award to up to seven people. Therefore, in addition to the people I shamelessly plugged above, I wish to give the Kreativ Award to Michelle (http://michellemuto.wordpress.com/) and Nikki (http://bookwyrmknits.wordpress.com/) from OWG. I’m sure I forgot people, but I tried to spread the love around so that it could get to some of my other friends too.