1. This week has been kind of a draw on the jogging.  I got up and did it Tuesday morning, barely getting more than 1.25 miles and feeling like I was going to DIIIIIIIIIIIE.  Ice picks between ribs must be a horrible way to go because it sure sucks trying to run through it.  Thursday was supposed to be my next jogging day, but my alarm didn’t go off and I barely made it to work on time.  But I did get up this morning and do 2.25 miles, 1.5 of which was jogged and I didn’t die, so that was my enormous YAY.  I also realized that the new shoes I bought are walking shoes.  This is not actually a shock as when I bought them I hadn’t lost my mind and decided to start running.  But since it appears I’m going to continue, I ordered a pair of proper running shoes as well, to be kitted out with the Superfeet insoles I ordered.  Those are working out, I think.  Just need a bit of breaking in.
2. I haven’t been eating as well as I ought.  Well, I’ve been eating fine, just eating too much.  Had 3 meals out this week, which is over budget, and then last night made a bacon cheeseburger soudough pizza (it’ll hit Pots and Plots eventually), which was AWESOME but put me a whopping 700 calories over the upper end of my budget.  Oops.  So if I break even on the scales this week, I’ll be happy.  I did get in my full 3 days of weight lifting, so that was good.
3. I ordered a new exercise bike.  Our old one we inherited started making a knocking noise about 2 months ago and has not gotten so loud that I can’t use it while hubby is sleeping.  Which means, essentially, I haven’t been using it.  As it’s been, up to now, a lynchpin in my workout routine, that just isn’t gonna fly.  Decided on a recumbent bike this go round for a few reasons.  I am really picky about bike seats and I didn’t want to order an upright without getting to sit on it and see if my butt could tolerate the shape.  Hubs and I have both had issues with our fannies going to sleep on the current one, so the recumbent seemed like a good option to fix that.  Recumbent is supposed to be better workout for your butt.  And whenever we get around to having kids, I’ll be able to use a recumbent one a lot sooner afterward (yeah, see, planning everything again).  So, yeah, that’s supposed to get here on Tuesday.
4. The writing has been going really well this week.  Monday: 705, Tuesday: 778, Wednesday: 1458, Thursday: 1365,  Friday: 659, Saturday:  890.  I’ve been trying out a new method, not exactly on purpose.  See I had this scene from Act 2 (which I haven’t gotten to yet chronologically) come into my head, SO FREAKING CLEAR that I just had to write it.  I seldom ever do this because as a rule, I’m a very linear writer, and I like to see how things unfold in order.  But I did it, and it came out well, I think.  And then I proceeded to jump all over my manuscript because I had very clear bits of other scenes and I decided that instead of just making notes about them (which is what I usually do), I’d just write whatever was in my head.  So I did that, and now I’ve got bits of a lot of later scenes and my word count is climbing.  I think I’ll stick to this for a while, see if it continues to work.  The linear thing is, for me, a holdover from my pantser days where I had to go in order or I’ve wind up all kinds of off track.  Since I’ve become the Princess of Planning (my agent’s nickname for me), I know exactly (for the most part) where the story is going, so getting out of order in the writing of it really doesn’t cause any problems (that I can see).
5. I also got some significant work done on the plotting out of the first in a YA novella trilogy, I have in mind.  I know, like I don’t have enough on my plate.  What can I say?  Anyway, I knocked out the scene list for the first of the three, so my brain is busy working on the details of the plot in the background.  I’m nowhere near ready to actually start WRITING this story, but I’m happy to be sorting out the specifics.  I think it’ll be a lot of fun when I do get to it.
6. The plan for today, as my poor hubby has to work until 7, is to knock out the next scene in DOTH and do some plotting on Longest Night.  There are some details in the latter that I haven’t figured out that have kept me from adding to the word count on that one, so since I have a long stretch of quiet time with nothing but cooking and laundry to interrupt me, I’m hoping to figure out those details so I can get rolling on it again.  At the risk of shooting myself in the foot, I’d really love to get a scene a week going on that one.  Slow and steady progress since it’s a secondary project.

As I say in my syllabus on the first day of class “I didn’t know!” is not a valid excuse.

Rather than wax on about the dumbing down of higher education (which would take a tome), I’d like to take a moment to look at this in a broader context.

People are lazy.  This is, I have become convinced, is the default state of human nature.  Part of the malaise of modern society is that people can’t be bothered to educate themselves about…anything.  They pick someone who they deem “should know” (though usually without any actual basis of legitimacy on why this person should be a so-called “expert”) and just go with what they are told rather than finding out themselves.   It leads to this horrific infantalization of our society because people would rather be told what to do than make some effort on their own.

It doesn’t matter what the topic is.  Which candidate to vote for for president (people pick based on party or what someone says rather than ever looking at their stances on important issues).  How to format an ebook.  Big names (:cough: a bunch of middle aged men) say it’s hard, and others believe them rather than bothering to READ THE INSTRUCTIONS.  Whether one form of promotion is a good thing (aka: KDP Select) without actually reading the details and thinking about the ramifications.

In general it seems like so many people put in only the BARE MINIMUM of work for less than mediocre results.  And then they are surprised when problems arise or when something doesn’t work out.   And then trying to claim “I didn’t know!”  Well duh, you didn’t put in the work to find out.  That’s NEVER a valid excuse when the information is out there for the finding.  And it usually is.  Right in front of their faces.

This drives me BONKERS.

Why are people like this?  I mean, I get that we have a lot on our plates and there are never enough hours in the day, but dude, REALLY?  Why can’t people be bothered to read instructions or inform themselves about whatever it is they need to know?  Why are people just taking some random person’s word for it?

So this inquiring mind wants to know your theories.  Why are people too lazy to inform themselves?

So I got to wondering: is this a thing?  If you write both first and third person works, does one tend to be longer than the other for you?  If so, why do you think that is?  Let us know in comments.  I’m curious.

The writing has been going well.  I’m currently doing something I NEVER do and jumping forward chronologically to write a scene from Act 2.  Usually I’m a very linear writer and I need to trace things in order how they happen to get the right feel for the characters as they change through the story.  But this scene came SO CLEAR in my head that I had to go ahead and start writing it.  Which has led to some clarity on following scenes.  And making me wish I was already through the FPP and properly into the middle.  Holy crap.  Yeah.  I’m actually looking forward to what I used to refer to as the Dreaded Valley of the Shadow of the Middle.

It’s always interesting to me to see how each book develops.  The idea for this one is a lot different from how the execution is going.  The characters are different than I expected as well.  Which is good.  I don’t want to write the same characters over and over.  Bree is not Elodie under another name, though she is damaged in her own way by the events of the story.  She must find her strength.  Which is very new for me, as I’m used to writing take no prisoners, kick ass heroines from page one.  And Jake…while he has the protective thing going on, as Sawyer did, it’s very different in expression and reasons.  Their relationship is really complicated in the way that all “I’ve known you for years” relationships can be, particularly when they start to change.  It’s such a delight seeing him go from this sort of two dimensional cowboy character (I admit, initial impressions were fab abs with a cowboy hat) to a real, flawed person.

Lachlan I’m still working on.  I know enough about him to know how Bree is going to respond to him and why, but his personality is still murky.  Need to give some thought to how their relationship is going to grow in contrast to the one with Jake (yeah I know, I’m actually doing a love triangle of sorts, though not one of the annoying wishy washy, I want to have both of them kinds).  I haven’t decided how this is going to work because Lachlan is immortal and of the Otherworld.  He’s…really freaking old.  Mentally and physically around 22 maybe, but he’s not a vampire, so it’s not like he got stuck in some form of arrested development.  Bree is 17.  Not a young 17 and not an emotionally ancient 17 like Elodie.  Just normal 17.  That’s one of those dynamics that can often come off as creepy or skeezy.  Her feelings for HIM make total sense, but I want to give some serious thought to the development of his own feelings.  Note, I said FEELINGS, not crazy, mysterious attraction (this is a peeve of mine in much YA fiction–yeah I get it that attraction is a thing and hormones and blah blah, but it means so much more if it’s BASED IN SOMETHING).

Anyway, that’s where I am.  Hope y’all are chugging right along with your WIPs.

My university subscribes to Turnitin, an absolutely AWESOME website/software that detects plagiarism.  It caught three plagiarists this week.  Now it’s up to the professor to decide how to handle such things.  If it had been an example of somebody swiping text from the book and not citing it, I’d probably let them off with a low grade, issue a warning explaining what they’d done wrong, and just moved on.  But that’s not what this was.  This was wholesale copying and pasting from other websites that traffic in assignments at the college level.  Turnitin makes a lovely report giving percentages plagiarized, highlighting every stolen word, and giving the link to the source.  So there’s really not room for argument.  So when I got a 91%, 85%, and a 67% plagiarized, I gave in to my ill-temper over it being Monday and already cranky from other issues, and opted to give them zeroes and report them directly to the Honor Council so that if they do it again, they move up to the second level and fail the class.  Irritating, lots of paperwork, students notified, done.

And then.

And then one of my students had the nerve to ARGUE WITH ME, claiming that she didn’t copy and paste (there is no refuting the fact that she did, as she was making statements that had obviously come from graduate  coursework out of another program).  And THEN she had the audacity to tell me what constituted plagiarism.  I held it together–barely, and managed not to completely rip her a new one, but instead pointed out the errors in her statement and informed her that even had she actually included quotation marks (which she hadn’t), to indicate they weren’t her words, her answer would still have been wholly unacceptable and STILL plagiarized.

Y’all I had to have 4 squares of Ghiaradelli chocolate and then come home and have a glass of wine, I was so pissed off.

It’s not even the plagiarism itself that gets me.  I’ve been teaching too long to be surprised by the laziness of students.  No, what really infuriates me is the absolute INSULT to my intelligence that they put forth NO EFFORT and think that I’m too stupid to catch them.  Dude, if you’re going to plagiarize, at least pick multiple sources and mix it up some (at which point, really, you should just put forth that amount of effort on doing the ACTUAL work).  Don’t just wholesale copy and paste from a couple of random internet sources and think that’s gonna fly.  Don’t think I was freaking born yesterday.

And DON’T, for the love of all that is holy, dare lecture me, your professor, with years more training, on what constitutes plagiarism.

One more email.  Send me one more email arguing about this and I will fail you for the entire class.  I dare you. >.<

Idiot students should learn never to eff with me on a Monday.  I freaking hate Monday.

I had a long, detailed post about exactly why my blood pressure went through the roof, but I had the good sense to rethink posting it.  It would be unprofessional of me, so suffice it to say that I’m just very frustrated about some issues with Evil Day Job and will probably go run after work to blow off some steam.

Or not.  I might just pour all of this into the scene I need to write.  It’s gotta go somewhere–might as well be into words.

So in lieu of an awesome post, I leave you with the cutest freaking baby seal known to man:

This little pup could totally facilitate world peace from the AAAAAAAAWWWW Factor.

I’ll come back with some awesome–or at the very least decent–tomorrow.

The short and sweet of it is that it’s a group dedicated to writing 500 words a day, with the goal of winding up with 183k words at the end of the year.  Since that’s in the ballpark of what I’ve been aiming to do for the last three years, it seemed like exactly the place for me.  I signed up and went ahead and submitted my YTD wordcounts to founder Cara Michaels (who may love spreadsheets as much as I do and gets immediate love from me for having one of my favorite quotes on her profile: You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury)

Based on the whole notion of 500 a day, I ought to have 14000 words so far this year.  I’m about 3,500 words behind since there were several days I didn’t write due to travel or one thing or another, but I shouldn’t have a problem catching up in February.

The whole thing prompted me to look back at my productivity spreadsheets for 2010 and 2011, just to compare.  I only wrote 1 more day last year than I did in 2010. Upped my average daily words from 605 to 735, and wound up with about 23k more total words last year than the year before. I know I can do better than 126k in a year.  I wasted a lot less words last year.  Wasted 22k in 2010. Only 6k last year.  So what I’m writing when I’m writing is better the first time, which is efficient.  We all know I value efficiency.

Will I wind up with that 183k this year?  Who knows.  I already know I won’t write every day.  I’ve learned that about myself.  There’s downtime between projects and life that happens.  But since my average wordcount is consistently above 500, and if I can manage to nudge it up into the 850 range like I hope, that should give me a significant buffer such that I just might make it.

I’m such a stats geek.

Anyway, if you’re looking for additional peeps to hang out with for motivation, I highly recommend #WIP500.

Carpe Verba (seize the words)!

Fortunately, I had to be out of town for the afternoon for work, so I didn’t actually MAKE any of that response.  No doubt some of the 100 odd people who popped up to comment probably made my points for me without the need for me to get involved, even though the poster himself deleted any comment he didn’t like, while making responses such as this jewel:

I don’t have the time, nor the inclination to deal with a pack of throw-away housewives [emphasis mine] who still sit around thinking about romance like a 13-year old girl. You can do that if you want to, but do it away from me. I like women, not little girls. I think you’ll find most men in the upper half of the IQ spectrum feel the same way, as do most women.

Yeah, good like finding any actual women, since you think so little of our sex.  You do a great disservice to both our gender and your own.  And given your consistent restatement of your thesis and failure to support it with a single relevant example (renaming anything that is deemed “good” from traditional literature as something other than romance–my college freshmen make better arguments than that), I can’t see that you’ve provided any evidence that you actually DO belong to the upper half of the IQ spectrum, so really, you don’t know whereof you speak.

Really, there’s no point in any of us getting involved because no amount of reason or logic is going to sway his ill-informed opinion.  There’s this widely held belief that the answer to prejudice is education.  Actually, psychologically, that doesn’t hold true (most of the time).  No amount of erudite argument pointing out his fallacies of thought is going to change his grunting Neanderthal attitudes (since it’s obvious from his entirely unflattering profile picture and the statements he makes on said profile he actually IS a Neanderthal).  However, for some truly enlightening discussion of the issue, check out this post over at Promantica (and do read the comments–they reiterated several that were made and deleted over on the original post).

So I was one of the lucky few to get ahold of an eARC of Vicki Keire’s latest novella, Worlds Burn Through.  First, the blurbage: 

Chloe Burke dreams of creatures who walk through fire and a strange boy who saves them both.

Her parents convinced her long ago that the dreams are the result of a childhood fever, but she can’t shake the feeling that some of it is real, most especially the boy.

Beneath the dreams lies a deeply buried reality: Chloe and her family are refugees from Annwyn, once a formidable techno-agrarian civilization now burned to ash. Years before, a handful of her world’s survivors escaped to present-day Earth after their world was razed by the Abandoned, powerful elemental creatures who burn through world after world in an endless cycle of consumption and destruction.

Using a combination of alien technology and indigenous elemental magic, the refugees sealed off their burning world from modern-day Earth by binding one of the Burke bloodline to the portal. To keep her safe, Chloe’s parents hide her as a normal teenager in Atlanta, with no knowledge of her true birth or purpose. But the Abandoned slowly infiltrate anyway, brutally murdering everyone who knows their ultimate goal: to reopen the portal and let more of their kind through.

Eliot Gray is a Guardian, the last member of a powerful warrior tradition, kept isolated from his adopted world by the uncle who trained him. Unknown to his blood-bound Ward except in dreams, he must convince her that not only is her life in danger, but to trust him as well. Enraged by her family’s lies and grieving over her losses, Chloe must face the truth about her origins as she becomes the Abandoned’s next target. Together they journey to Gray’s Landing, the tiny town sparsely populated by refugees from her world, in order to protect the portal hidden there.

But just across the river from Gray’s Landing is Raven’s Ward, an industrial wasteland of a town determined to expand no matter what the cost. When Alexander, troublesome heir to the vast Ravenwood fortune, returns home after getting kicked out of school, he finds that his power-hungry father has strange new business partners who are determined to make Gray’s Landing their own. Unsettled by the changes he sees in his family and home since their arrival, Alexander vows to do everything in his power to keep these bizarrely dangerous partners from growing stronger.

Can Chloe and Eliot keep their adopted world safe from annihilation, while Alexander fights the Abandoned in his own home? Will the secrets buried in the past’s deepest, darkest ashes destroy yet another world?

Now I love Vicki Keire’s work.  I fell in love with her Angel’s Edge trilogy last year and have been eagerly awaiting its conclusion (she assures me it’s coming right after The Chronicles of Nowhere finishes up, in case you were wondering), so when the chance arose to take a gander at the first novella in the Chronicles of Nowhere trilogy, I jumped and might have gone through several iterations displayed by students who want to get the teacher’s attention.

The novella did not disappoint.  Despite being short, it packs a wallop, building fast and intricate characterization and setting up a fantastic situation that manages to take a few familiar genre tropes as a foundation to orient the reader and build them into something wholly unique.  Which is to say that it hits the ground running on the first page and doesn’t stop. I like Chloe.  I like Elliot (though the spelling of his name makes me twitch…there should be another t).  And I want to know how she’s going to get them out of this hair-raising situation.

Plenty of readers might feel that this is a tease.  To that, I say, hey, volume 2 comes out next month, so you don’t have long to wait.  Volume 3 is the month after that and the whole thing will be released in totality in April.

That would be the marketing musings part of this post.  This notion of breaking the whole up into three parts (which are, in themselves, complete, despite what detractors impatient for the rest of the story might say) and releasing them back to back to back prior to the whole is intended to really play up on the changing market with ereaders.  We want stuff and we want it now, and it is an intriguing concept.  I’ll be very interested to see how this tactic plays out as a means of launching a new title/series.  Give them enough to hook them–then make them wait…just a little while (not long enough to have forgotten the story or characters), before feeding them the next installment.  It’s meatier than a serial but faster than a normal series of release dates.  My gut says that it’s a method that ought to work quite well.

Anyway, Worlds Burn Through is available:

• Amazon: US | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES
• Also: Barnes & Noble | Smashwords

And you can find Vicki down here:

• Vicki Keire’s Homepage
• Follow Vicki Keire on Twitter
• Like Vicki Keire on Facebook
• Circle Vicki Keire on Google+
• Vicki Keire on GoodReads