Tag: authors

Posted on

Intimate Details of the Sleep Habits of the Author of the Insomnia Apocalypse

I wrote a book about what would happen if everyone on earth stopped sleeping.

Every night I sleep with an app on my phone which records my movements and translates them into neat data about my sleeping habits.

I’ve always been fascinated by sleep.  I’ve had bouts of insomnia, usually to go along with hugely stressful times, and periods of anxiety and depression.  It laid the groundwork for a lifetime of being fascinated by, and appreciative of, sleep.

Being a movie-theatre Film Projectionist for over a decade let me see a variety of sleep cycles, both in myself and in others who worked in the whacky world of a Grindhouse; closing the booth one summer had me on 17:00-01:00 shifts, which wreaked havoc on my sleep schedule.  When I took over as Head Projectionist I got to make the schedule for the booth, and set myself up with 10:00-18:00 shifts that better fit with ‘having a normal schedule’.

I watched as coworkers and managers were sick constantly.  I saw many become slowly crushed by the job.  I’m sure some of it was at least partially due to the abuse they inflicted on what should have been their ally, their treasured companion in life: sleep.

Seeing people close-open (close the threatre at 1 or 2 in the morning, and have to be in to open the theatre the next day at 9 or 10) was totally crazy to me.  When people are tired, they get sick more often, are less happy, and, from a business standpoint, cost money in the form of mistakes.  In the projection booth, these mistakes could equal big bucks.  Scratched prints, dropped prints, mistakes when splicing reels together (in the correct order, please), adverts and trailers put in upside-down and backwards… the list of things that can go wrong in a booth is long.  And when you sleep-deprived people, mistakes cost customer satisfaction and money.

We know that sleep deprivation can cause impairment.

My fascination with sleep bled into the career I’ve been working towards my whole life: being an author.  It seems inevitable that sleep was going to be the focus of a book at some point.  All my past experiences aligned and I got a bolt-from-the-blue idea that set me off on the wildest journey of my life: writing a book about an insomnia apocalypse.  “What if the whole world stopped being able to sleep?”  I set about crafting a book to explore just what would happen.  I wrote it in the style of World War Z, so every chapter could showcase some new element, a new character, a new location.  This let me produce a book with many windows into an apocalypse, and effectively illustrate just how badly we need sleep.

Spoiler alert: we need sleep a lot.  Like, so, so much.

Here’s where I can share some nifty things about sleep: I have been sleeping with an app on my phone that records movement and translates it into sleep data.  For two years, I’ve been tracking my sleep.

I have data that spans the most massive changes in my life yet:

  • going through a divorce
  • moving to the other side of the world
  • publishing my breakout novel, fulfilling a lifelong dream

I feel like my sleep data is personal.  It clearly shows the ups and downs of my life.

Also interesting are the periods where I’m on meditation retreats, contrasted to the times when I’m living in town, in ‘regular society’ and not in the peace and quiet of a meditation centre.

By far my favourite data is The Longest Night.  To celebrate my book launch, I stayed awake for as long as possible, live on a Twitch stream.  I made it 80 hours before I called it due to safety concerns.  After those 80 hours, I slept for a whopping 16 hours and 43 minutes.

It was amazing.  The days following it are also interesting.

Want to see some neat graphs about all this?  Hold onto your butts, here we go.  I give you:

Intimate Details of the Sleeping Habits of the Author of the Insomnia Apocalypse

First, everything all at once. Check it.

And here’s each individual graph so you can see the appropriate values:

But wait, there’s context.  My life during the past two years has been WILD.  Lots of ups and downs; ups from living a beautiful new life, downs from processing the end of a marriage.  Here’s the data with a bit of timeline:  

My sleep quality has been very closely tied to stress.  Moving out on my own for the first time was great; it alleviated the crushing weight of a failing marriage and I slept so much better than I had in ages.  The dip in January was me nearly dying of a broken heart.

But hey I’m still here, thanks in no small part to some Epic Meditation.  It totally changed my life, and I’m so grateful to have it.  It really helped get me through some rough times.

You notice that green line of sleep quality dips as it approaches January of this year.  You may know that I’ve been working my whole entire life to become an author, and my first book, Sleep Over, was released on January 16th.  The stress leading up to that was enormous, and you can definitely see my sleep affected by it.

The next increase in sleep quality was relief from Sleep Over hitting the shelves, in print, from a bonafide New York publisher.  I was so happy to have it behind me.  This started off a two-month period of intense meditation retreats to help process this massive life event.

Here’s more recent data in the same detail:

And again with some life events in the timeline:

And again, the separate charts for values:

The most interesting sleep, by far, is this one: The Longest Night, the night after I stayed awake as long as possible (80 hours!) for Sleep Over‘s release.  Check it.

Time in bed: 16 hours and 43 minutes baby!  Holy WOW.  Interestingly, I dipped into The Deep (deep sleep) my usual 5 times.  It was so good.  No sleep is ever going to top it, not unless something goes drastically wrong haha.

My previous Longest Night (and also one of the BEST ever) was the first night after I arrived in New Zealand, fleeing a life on fire and into the loving arms of so many helpful people.

Sleep is so helpful!  When things are hard it just makes life much easier and better if I can get the sleep I need.

Now, some nights in detail, just to show off what I know about my sleep cycle now, after observing it for 2 years.

My ideal night has 4 or 5 dips into deep sleep.  Whether I need 4 or 5 depends on how well rested I’ve been leading up to that night.  If all is well, I only need 4.  But if I’m totally knackered, I need 5, over 8 hours.

This is a recent sleep.  I’m super pooped from a new job.  As you can see, I have to be up really early, but it’s okay because I was in bed just after 7, leaving me enough time with my head on the pillow to dip into deep sleep those 5 times I need.

Now look at this one where I only need 4 dips and 7 hours:

Fun fact: on deep meditation retreat, I can be totally knackered but I only need 4 dips into deep sleep to feel well rested.  And I need far fewer hours with my head on the pillow.  The graph above is from an intense day on a 10-day vipassana retreat.  It was the hardest I’ve ever focussed and was totally in ‘the zone’.  (Absolutely MASSIVE days chockers full of sitting and learning vipassana).  4 dips woo!

Now a typical one from the heart of my month-long retreat:

I needed fully one hour less in bed than normal, and I was waking up naturally between 4 and 5.  I was often having a lay-down after lunch to get another hour with my head on the pillow, so some days when I only got 4 I was actually needing 5 (but it was too exciting to stay in bed, not when I could have the meditation hall all to myself haha).

Just to contrast these pretty great sleeps, here are some truly terrible sleeps.  The plateau leading up to the first dip means it took ages for me to fall asleep, and the plateau on the tail end means I was super restless coming out of sleep and didn’t want to get up, hoping I’d get another dip into good sleep, but not getting it.  This was the night after moving my things into storage and preparing to leave my friends and family.  A very disruptive time, and it definitely shows!  Only 3 dips into The Deep as I’ve come to think of it.

Here’s another bad one, where I wake up with anxiety twice in the night.

Nearing the end of my post, here’s a 100% quality sleep, from when I was helping do good in the world and feeling generally awesome.

So there you have it, some sleep data.  I always love sharing it in the hopes it gets people thinking about their own sleep health.

In conclusion, sleep is really important to me.  Its quality is critically linked to what’s happening in life, and how much stress I’m experiencing.

Questions?  Comments?  Have a gander at this reddit thread where I’ll be interacting to answer and chat!

And if you’re interested in a book about an insomnia apocalypse, Sleep Over is part of a Book Bub promotion this week- the eBook is only $1.99 across all U.S. platforms!

Or if you want to just toss me a gold coin, hit up Patreon.

Thanks for hanging out.  Cheers!

-H.G.

P.S. Sleep well ^_^

Posted on

Cognitive Bias Affecting A Writer’s Ability to Maintain Consistent Character Portrayal

OK so here’s something I’ve been thinking about.  For the life of me I cannot find the source study that this post is based off of, but I remember enough of the gist of it to go from here.

You can change your cognitive bias by writing opinions opposite to what you believe.

Let’s say you believe the television show Dr. Who is stupid.  If you write, hand-write on paper, the phrase “Dr. Who might actually be ok.” a bunch (I cannot remember the efficacy of numbers of repetitions), your opinions will drift.  Where you started out hating the show, after you write that phrase, your opinion of it will be measurably boosted.  You will now allow for the possibility that the show might actually be ok.

This is fascinating.  We can change our opinions simply by writing words on paper, even if we do not believe those words, and even when we are aware of this phenomenon.

So, how does this interact with writing?

I theorize that this phenomenon affects writers’ ability to maintain a cohesive portrayal of a character over a long period of time.

Think about it.  You’re writing a character, and part of that is making value judgements of them from the perspectives of other characters.  In effect, writing the opinions of other characters will affect how you perceive and portray your characters.

If you’re constantly expressing opinions about characters, then your own opinions of them are constantly being modified, and will change how you portray them.

!!!

You can see such ‘character portrayal drift’ in TV shows that run for a long time.  If one character is constantly told by others that ‘they don’t know what they’re doing’ for instance, then future portrayals of that character may lean into that judgement.  Over time, said character may become completely inept at everything they do, because they never know what they’re doing.  There is of course the actor’s portrayal of the character, and that can become caricaturish, but they are still working from a script, where writers are furthering the character on the page.

This is how shows become almost caricatures of themselves.  Characters become more of whatever everyone in the show thinks they are.  The stupid ones get stupider, the meticulous ones become more meticulous.

Writing is non linear.  Edits are happening all over the place, and drafts have whole sections cut and added all throughout.  But the flow of time when we write remains constant, and so as we make changes, our biases change the characters.

I’m still trying to figure this one out… this post has been in my ‘drafts’ folder for a few months now.  I wanted to get it out there and percolating through the cultural morphic field.  See what comes back to me.

So there’s something to pay attention to.  What shows do you notice this happening in?  What books?  If you think about it, has this phenomenon effected your writing?  I’d love to hear about it.

And because that was all work and no play, here’s a cool thing for fun.

Cheers.

Heidi out.

Posted on

Character Creation Part 1

While I’m between projects, it’s interesting to see what starts to bubble up in my creative mind.  Sometimes it’s plot, sometimes it’s setting.  Right now it happens to be character.  For some reason, I’m getting wicked insults popping into my head in a new character voice.

Wicked dialogue does not a character make.  I must craft one, and hopefully I will create one to suit these lines that my hindbrain is feeding me.

So, here are some notes on character creation.

When writing, you have to know your character pretty well before you start off.  A lot of the discovery of who they are happens while you’re writing them, yes, but you need to have some idea of who they are at their core before you begin.

The trimmings can evolve as you go, and it’s quite thrilling when you discover parts of a character on the fly.

But who they are deep inside is yours to lay out and set in stone before the first time they grace your page.

It is a writer’s basic duty to lay out coherent characters.  If the players in your story are unbelievable, that is to say, they are untrue and your audience picks up on it, you lose all credibility as a writer.

Your plot can be genius, your settings magnificent, and your prose delightful, but if your characters give your reader pause, you’ve failed.

This is a rare case when the converse of the rule is just as true: your plot can have some holes, your setting could be a little bland, and your prose might be a bit generic, but if your characters grab your audience, buddy you’re in the door.

My first draft of this post included some examples of this, but I thought it would be better for you to discover your own.  Ask yourself, are there any stories that come to mind, films, TV shows, books, anything at all, where you forgave them a few mistakes because of their characters?  When you excused a lame plot hole or some flat exposition, because you were being drawn onwards by the strength of the character?

We forgive a lot if the characters ring true.

So how do we go about making believable characters?

First let’s look at where we get aspects of the character from.

From life.  “People watching” is a great way to spot things to stow away in your bag o’ writerly goodness.  From the smallest gesture to the way someone stands, from their accent to their dress, you can take that and run with it.  You can expand this into people you know, but there is a danger there.  Tuckerizing someone as an injoke is one thing, basing whole characters off of people you know is entirely another.  And I think very few writers would recommend it.  Let’s keep the friends we have, eh?  There are plenty of people yet to be invented that we can abuse.

A common mistake for new writers is to get hung up on names.

The name of your character is mostly unimportant.

Let me say that again.

You don’t need the name before you write the character.

Use a place holder name, and for godsakes, don’t wait until you have their perfect name before writing the story.  That’s an excuse and you’re fooling yourself.

I’ve heard some people advocate changing character names every ten thousand words, or every few dozen pages, or every other chapter or whatever.  The idea behind this is that we don’t want to get too attached to our characters- we need to be able to hurt them in brutal ways, and if you’re all precious about them, you’re going to have a hard time doing things that will make your work better.

So rename them.  Figure it out later or as you go along.

I like to pick a name and generally stick with it, but I’ve often found myself at a loss for a name at the start of something, so I use placeholder names.  Ctrl+F and replace is your friend.  Don’t get precious.  Names are unimportant.

But don’t be clever- stupid names that draw attention to you as the writer instead of keeping your audience in the work where they should be is something to avoid.  If it doesn’t make sense in the context of the story, find something ‘less cool’.

I’ll do another post about how writers intrude on the story, but for the purpose of character creation, one of the big ones is naming them.

With that out of the way, onwards.

So where do characters come from?  Life, yes, but also fiction.

Writers cannot ignore the thousands of years of story telling from cultures around the world, and all the myriad of characters that have already been created.  There is nothing new under the sun, but we’re all beautiful unique snowflakes, right?  So there should be characters left.  There will always be characters left.

The archetypes are there and you have to be aware of them.  Good writers get pretty familiar with maybe half a dozen archetypes, great writers have more.  These skeletons can be helpful forming a basis for your characters.  The specifics of their motivations, backgrounds, and surface details change, but these archetypes exist for a reason.  Use them.

As you get more and more specific with a character, the closer you come to creating a character that already exists.  It’s impossible to know every single story and every single character that’s ever been created, but this is where a sometimes overlooked aspect of creating comes into play: consuming.

You have to know what’s out there.  What characters are in the popular culture right now?  Are you inadvertently recreating them because they got under your skin without you realizing it?

One morning, I independently invented Dexter.  :/  Good thing I already knew about Dexter, or that could have gone on longer than it did.  It was one of those “smack your forehead and laugh” moments.  You can search the internet, ask friends, and check out TV Tropes.

Consuming media, literature, movies, TV shows, opera, whatever, is a vital part of the creation process.  You cannot write in a vacuum.

Where else do characters come from?

From yourself.

DANGER DANGER

HIGH VOLTAGE

This is very risky business.  A lot of first-time writers write themselves as the main character.  It’ll save you some time if you just listen when I say to NOT do that.  (Other characters that are wasting your time: a writer, a writer struggling to ‘make it’, someone writing anything, especially in a coffee shop).  I mean, I can’t tell you what to do… but know that agents and editors delete those stories without a second look as soon as they see those characters.

Of course, how do you write a character without putting yourself into them.  I don’t know that it’s possible.  Even the vilest of characters, those who I would be loathe to think I had even the slightest bit in common with, come from within me.  And because I’m not just creating flat evil, as in, a bad guy who has no past and is evil personified for no reason, I know that they have motives, desires, and feelings.

Empathy is the strongest source of character creation.

Understanding why characters do what they do leads to crafting complexity into them, and this is the breath of life.

I’ll say it again.  Empathy.

The best characters come from understanding.  You craft their stories, and in doing so, delve into their pasts, their motivations, their thoughts and feelings.

Truly understanding a character will allow you to bring richness to their portrayal that will draw your audience in.

This seems like a good place to leave off, as this topic is rather dense.  To recap:

Realistic characters are needed to tell your story.  These characters come from many places: real life, people you know, characters that already exist, and yourself.  Understanding your characters enables you to write them more convincingly.  Understanding what characters already exist enables you to create new characters.

Well I hope this has been helpful.  I do enjoy sharing my notes.

Happy writing!

Until next time dear readers, thanks for stopping by.

Heidi out.

Posted on

What Makes Agents Stop Reading (SiWC), and We Have a Winner!

First off, congrats to Phillipa, the winner of my first ever book giveaway!

Thanks to everyone who entered.  I will be doing another one soon, and you’ll have another chance to win then, by commenting here, on Reddit, and my Facebook page.  🙂

And now, more notes from SiWC!  This time I’ll be taking a look at their wonderful “Surrey International Writers’ Conference IDOL”.  Basically, it’s four people skilled in the art of rejecting authors, and one person who reads.  What do they read?

Everyone is invited to submit the first page- ONLY the first page- of their manuscript.  It’s blind and it’s stark and brutal and beautiful; the words have to do the work, there’s no preamble, no explanation, no baggage of any kind to go along with them.

Here are the rules: if one of the four judges raise their hand, the reader keeps reading.  But if a second judge raises their hand, the reading stops, and the judges explain why they stopped it.

If they get to the end with one or zero hands raised, they also talk about it.

It’s absolutely fabulous.  Riveting.  There were some amazing first pages mixed in with the mediocre and the just plain bad.

To give you some context, the judges were:

Michelle Johnson, founding agent of Inklings Lit.

Nephele Tempest, an agent at The Knight Agency.

Patricia Ocampo, an agent at Transatlantic.

Bree Ogden, agent with D4OE Lit.

And the reader was the illustrious Jack Whyte, author of such novels as The Camulod Chronicles, The Knights Templar Trilogy, and The Bravehearts Chronicle, and owner of one of the most magnificent voices I’ve had the pleasure of hearing.  I would have listened to him read a phone book.  But instead, he kept me captivated with stories of every kind, his sonorous Scottish accent lulling me into that wonderful state of “I’m listening, please, never stop.”

So that’s our setup.  Four amazing women in the industry waiting to blind judge the first words, sentences, and, if the writer was lucky, the first paragraphs of as many first pages as they could get through.

Here’s why they stopped readings, peppered with reasons why Jack Whyte made it to the end of a page without the hammer coming down.

Please note- the first pages spanned every genre and tone, and going into the specifics of what they contained would not add to this; the reasons for stopping reading are universal.  I hope my notes are enough to give you an overall sense of why agents put work down in the first few sentences.  And as usual, this is a mix of the agents’ words and my own interpretations and additions.

x= complete stop, 1/2= one hand up, but made it to the end, and ✓= no hands raised.

x  too much happening- what is going on, we the reader cannot make heads or tales.

x  too boring, there’s no hook.

x  who is talking?  And why do we care about them?  (Not identifying your narrator or having a clear main character was a much-repeated reason to get the agents to stop the reading).

✓  pacing was great, and there was a good balance between setting and character.

✓  the voice was clear and captivating, there was an excellent balance of setting, character, all aspects; drew us in.

x  too much description, going nowhere.

x  there’s more to a story than beautiful imagery.  Wonderful writing, but flowery descriptions are not what draws people into the beginning of a story.

x  to local- super specific small town setting was a turnoff (so we need to set our stories in Anytown, USA?  Dang.).

1/2  (one hand raised, this first page barely squeaked past)  not much happening, nothing at stake, no conflict.  No reason to put it down, but also no reason to keep going either.

x  too much exposition- thinking about thinking, telling not showing, no action, the age of the narrator is inconsistent (the voice was inconsistent, giving the reader mixed impressions of the narrator), what is the conflict, and there were 2 typos ._.

x  cliché and lame, plus the implausibility of a 14 year old being in handcuffs, AND being able to pick them.

1/2  we’re lost; it’s interesting, but *what* is going on.  Confusing your reader is not the same as hooking them.

x  waking up (don’t start your story with your character waking up.)  (Seriously, don’t.)

1/2  good description but confusing- who is the protagonist, who is the narrator; beautiful, but what is the story?  Sometimes it’s useful to flip the first chapter, putting the end at the beginning, to draw the reader into the story (the setup comes after drawing them in).  Telling not showing…

1/2  all backstory and repetitive writing.  Varying sentence structure was great and switching up what the sentence is about (switching between character, description etc).  Cliché opening line was a turnoff.

x  descriptions galore, choppy, unrealistic depiction of emotion, unrealistic reactions.

x   waking up (don’t start your story with your character waking up) (seriously, don’t).

x  word usage- “lovers” and other sex specific words (this was an agent preference).  Trying to be clever- the writer getting in the way of the tone (see my previous post on how the author intrudes on the story).  The description doesn’t match the tone and content; huge disconnect between content and the voice.

x  a lot of telling, no showing

x  description of how someone travelled- who cares, and now we’re in another location.  We don’t need to know what airline they flew.  Rule of thumb for backstory: a little at the beginning, some in the middle, none at the end.

1/2  saying the same thing in several ways, get on with it.  Beautiful sentences, but telling not showing.  Whose story is it.

1/2  great voice but too many adjectives, cliché and poor word choice.

SO!  That is the list of commentary I took down as the judges meted out their sentences on those authors lucky enough to have their first pages drawn for the reading (it was random, and no, mine was not one of the lucky to be eviscerated evaluated, which is a shame, because none of the others started off the way mine did, and it would have been lovely to hear what they thought!).

Hope others find this helpful.  I surely did, and it I was glad to have had the opportunity to hear this raw and unfiltered look into what gets an agent hooked enough to want more.

Several of those writers whose work made it to the end were asked to approach the agents afterwards.  One of them was Russel, a young man whose story of a jester on stage absolutely captivated the room.  When Jack Whyte looked up at his audience and found us spellbound, and we realized there was no more to the story, there was an audible reaction from the crowd.  We wanted more.  And so did two of the agents.  I went up to Russel afterwards and offered my congratulations; he hadn’t finished the manuscript, but he had talent enough to hold a room full of his peers.

What an opportunity!  This is one event at SiWC that I will attend every time.

Cheers.

Heidi out.

P.S. It’s the last day of Aaron’s (well funded) Kickstarter campaign for a superior Spirograph!  Check it out and join the fun!

MATHEMATICAL!

Posted on

“Luka and Iso”- Top 10% in The Nicholl Fellowship!

Hello wonderful blog readers!

I received an email from the Nicholl Fellowship today.

Every year, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences picks five writers and pay them, based on the strength of the script they submitted, to produce another feature length screenplay.

I didn’t make the cut for the Fellowship, but my script scored in the top ten percent!

7,251 entrants, and I’m in the top 10%?  Pretty awesome, but of course, disappointing not to advance.

Ah well, I’m hoping I can find someone out there as excited about the story of the first genetically engineered dragon as I am!  Perhaps this will help me along.  It will make a killer film.

Congratulations to everyone that is advancing.  I’m sure there are some amazing scripts, and how they’ll ever pick just five is completely beyond me!

In other news, I received my second ever royalty cheque!  Seems that A Quick Bite of Flesh is still selling.  Want some zombie flash fiction?  Then this book is forrr yoooouuuu!

I am waiting on an awesome agent for a new book I’d like to see in print.  Paranormal romance/urban fantasy here I come!  I’m well into the sequel already, and hitting short stories out of the park on a daily basis.

I’ll keep at it until- BWA HA HA YOU CAN’T STOP ME

Thanks for stopping by.

Oh what’s that?  This is my 100th post?

Hurrah!

Oh man, if I’ve been this into my small successes so far, when I get my first novel picked up I’m going to be happier than a kitten with a feather.  More excited than a porcupine with a banana.  You do know porcupines love bananas, right?

Anyway, thank you for stopping in and staying with me on this long, long journey to authordom.

Heidi out.

Posted on

Kells and Reasons for Rejection

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  The Book Of Kells is free on iTunes today.  I don’t know a thing about it, but I will soon enough.  Enjoy!

And today, author Michael J. Sullivan posted some interesting insights from another author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, on Why Stories Get Rejected.  A good read, and something every new author needs to internalize.

I have it down pat by now.  Though I think this can be a problem; this insidious expectation of rejection has effected me in a way I didn’t anticipate.  I have four things that I’m really excited about right now: my novel got a full request at an agency I would love to work with, my screenplay is being considered for the Nicholl Fellowship, as well as a contest to get me into Pitchfest, and also a short story of mine has been shortlisted for an anthology I’m excited for.

This is a lot of excitement.

Usually it’s just a lot of little things, various stories out for various anthologies, and the trickle of rejections come in steady and constant.  No big deal (anymore).

So when I actually have things to be excited for, I realize how oppressed this expectation of rejection was making me.


Sometimes we need to step back to see things more clearly…

The danger of getting excited is that it makes the rejection just that much worse.  I’m finding this creeping into other aspects of my life; I’ve stopped getting excited for movies (movies that I would have gotten excited for in the past!) because of past let downs (not a rejection, but the same feelings are at play).

Last week was the most difficult I’ve found meditation.  My mind kept racing forward to the future, and I’d have to pull it back.  Sit.  Stay.  Not terrible, but it got me to realize just how much I’ve been not been letting myself get excited.

So I’m excited.  Even if none of these four amazing things happen, it feels good to have so much possibility laid out before me.  And even if a single one does happen?  Well damn.  Things are pretty swell.

 

Silly kitty.  My own is hiding under my blankets, scared of the wind.

Right!  So, hope all is well with you, dear reader.

Thanks for reading.

Heidi out.

Posted on

Checking in, Space, Baby Cakes

I have spent the morning reading over past short stories, seeing if can do any work on them, or perhaps adapt them for the screen.  Seems as though I’ve been infected with the screenwriting bug, and it’s addling my brain into wanting to write more scripts.

Good?  Bad?  I never wanted to write short stories; they were supposed to be a stepping stone for larger projects.  And now that I’ve had some success getting them published, what do?  :O

While I’m bandying that about in my head, I will see if any of my fellow writers need a second set of eyes on anything.  I’ve contacted a few of my writing-exchange peeps, and maybe I can help them out with whatever they’re working on.

Oh hey, did you ever want to know how many people are in space right now?

Heh.  Spoiler: it’s 6.  I can’t wait until we’re in the tripple digits for this.  I am ever excited to see how space exploration progresses in my short window of observation (another what, seventy years?).  🙂

And now, BABY CAKES!  Teeny, tiny cakes.  They were fun.  My friend and I made them before games day, and then the group feasted on the fruits of our labour.

Getting the components all laid out:

Cutting the mini-cupcakes to size:

Taking up the whole table:

Some of the finished products: (d20 for scale!)

So tiny!

The two-layer cakes were amazing.

Each one more adorable than the last!


Tiny LAYER cake you say?

Heh.  Sure was fun.

Bonus pic: our SUPER close game of Lords of Waterderp (this was before we scored our Lords mind you, but WOW!):

Good thing I’m back at the gym again!  Nice to be able to indulge every now and then.

Cheers guys.  Hope you’re feeling as good as I do right now.  😀

Heidi out.

Posted on

Victory Hot Chocolate: The Melting of Kings

So I made those marshmallows, and they turned out great!

Making Marshmallows.

Cut them into cubes with scissors.

Melting into the hot chocolate…

One for Aaron too.  🙂

*Gloop!*

Perfect

A great way to end the week.  It was brain intensive; I didn’t anticipate that big of an edit before my Nicholl Fellowship deadline, but, well, the script is way better for it.

And now, I’m off to Bon’s to meet a friend for breakfast, and then another friend I are are continuing down the ‘tiny-food-making’ path, and decorating *tiny* cakes.  Of course, pics to follow.

If you’re looking for a short story to read, I suggest “All Quiet on the Temporal Front” by Bennett R. Coles.  His Sci-Fi fu is fantastic.  Now that I’m not in the thick of editing, I’m going back to read his “Virtues of War“, which is incredible so far.

Cheers guys.

Heidi out.

Posted on

Weekly Top Lists and Polls!

Hey guys.  Sorry I’ve been bad about updating; it just feels like I can only post “I’m working on it” so many times.  😉  But yeah, the manuscript is done.  I’m now waiting for my beta readers to get back to me, and their notes are trickling in.

I met with a high school book club on Monday, which garnered me 10 contacts in my target audience!  I’m extremely pleased but also nervous as butts.  Writing it is one thing, having other people read it is entirely another.  Good ol’ Alot of Doubts rearing his stupid ugly head again…

Onwards!  I have decided, to keep my posts regular, that I shall post a Top 5 list every week, with an accompanying poll for all you awesome readers to take part in.  I’m hoping this can get us all thinking and talking about our favourite whatevers!

Why top 5?  Well, top 10 seems overdone, and much too easy.  I tried to just do top 3, but that was far too hard!  I ended up with runners up, which defeats the purpose.  So, I have settled on a top 5.  Each choice pertains to my ‘elemental’ theme, with each selection relating to the ‘element’ I pair it with, if only esoterically, and often without explanation  Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, and, sort of the runner-up category, Heart.

I was going to call it the EFWWH List, but that felt like tripping at the finish line.  So I’m going to go with “The Captain’s Five”.  Aside from the obvious Captain Planet reference, it sounds cooler, and more sci-fi.

So I give you, without much further ado, the first “The Captain’s Five” List and Poll!

The Captain’s Five:

Top Sci-Fi Novels

“Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card

This is a quintessential Sci-Fi read.  Compelling and extremely well written, it has characters that get under your skin, that get inside your head.  The story follows a boy bred for Battle School who must take charge and lead the other children as they prepare for another war with the alien “buggers”.  The whole series, and the shadow series from another character’s perspective, is at the top of the sci-fi food-group pyramid.

“The Hyperion Cantos” by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion” and “The Fall of Hyperion” are just, absolutely, stunning.  Sci-fi at its best.  Set in the far future, the first book contains the stories of the pilgrims sent on the suicidal Shrike Pilgrimage to face a terrible being who contorts time and breathes death.  Beautiful and terrifying, it is full of wonder.
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

It may have been the timing of me reading this one, namely in the formative grade 8 adventures into more ‘adult’ lit, but this one really struck home.  I think my English teacher was rather horrified when I championed some of the ideas in the book.  Eugenics to steer the future of the human race?  What’s not to love!  Oh, maybe not the way they taylor the classes, people bred to be stupid, you know, for slaves.  0_O
“Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus” by Orson Scott Card

I know I know, two OS Card’s on the list?  Well, he *is* my favourite author.  And the two I picked are knight and day different.  Pastwatch goes about the business of studying humanity by peering back through time, literally spying on people as they go about their lives, unaware they’re being watched by the future’s anthropologists.  But when the earth reaches the tipping point where we’ll be unable to survive on it, Pastwatch embarks on a mission to save it by sending people back in time, to strategic places, to try and correct the mistakes of our past.  Absolutely fantastic.  This is my most lent, and most bought-as-a-gift book.
“WWW” (“Wake”, “Watch”, and “Wonder”) by Robert J. Sawyer

I think Robert J. Sawyer is brilliant at seeing the world, and telling us how it’s going to be.  Or rather, how it’s going to be if just this one thing happened.  In WWW, that one thing is a sentient being coming into existence in cyberspace.  It’s gripping, and asks some truly important questions on what it means to be human, and what our reaction to such a scenario is likely to be.

So, thus concludes the first ever Captain’s Five!  I hope you enjoyed it.  Mayhaps I’ve left you with a new book or two to find and read?  🙂

Now: take the poll!  Let everyone know what *your* favourite sci-fi book is.  Results published along with next week’s “Captain’s Five”!

…Please ignore “Sample Question 2″…  Ain’t nobody got time for that.  >_<