YA Writer, Tech Support Girl & Tea Addict

As part of YA Highway’s Roadtrip Wednesday, Colin D Smith and I managed to stumble into each other – and it was clear fast that this guy has blogging down to a tee. If you leave a comment on his blog, you’re instantly part of this community of awesome people. It’s great.

So of course when he selected me for the 7×7 Link Award, after searching my brain for suitable posts, I had to join in. For the award, you need to a pick a post from your blog for each of the 7 categories, and then award the 7×7 Link Award to 3 other great blogs.

Okay, let’s give this thing a shot.

The categories for the award are:

Most Beautiful: This was the trickiest category for me to pick, because none of my blog posts are trying to be beautiful – they try to start discussions, or deadpan about events, but being pretty isn’t really on their itinerary. I’m going to go with Blog Post to a Haggis – it rambles, but it does contain a nod to the great poet Robert Burns and it brings in a lot of people Googling for haggis. It’s also inspired me to post poetry once and a while on this blog, because poetry is cool.

Most Helpful: Lauren Kate’s Advice on Editing is a nicely-written, solid piece of professional advice that deserves more attention.

Most Popular: Exotic Sweets! Fancy Candy! seems to be answering a lot of people’s questions about sweeties from around the world. It also brought me a step closer to understanding America’s amazingness.

Most Controversial:  While it was mostly met with agreement over points that annoyed readers, my Fallen review managed to ruffle one commenter’s set of not-so-angelic feathers:

WDF?? Y THE HELL R THEY PROPER DISSING TWILIGHT AND STEPHENIE MEYER. IF THEY DNT HAVE NOTHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT IT, THEN THEY SHOULDN’T CHAT!!!

And waaaay back in a post about a bad experience in publishing, I ended up in an argument with a commenter known as ‘Cranky’ who thought I was ungrateful for complaining about being screwed over. We declared handbags at dawn and the comment thread dissolved into beautiful friendship.

Most Successful: This is another category I’m having trouble with, so I’m giving this one to the Deep Fried Mars Bars Adventures. The success is that I survived those artery clogging things, with the bonus success is that I may have given other people the idea to try them.

Most Underrated: The time one of my foreign publishers tried to use Final Fantasy X box art for my book cover still makes me laugh. Another reason why writers should play video games. Lauren Kate’s advice on editing comes in second place.

Most Prideworthy: Man, I’m just gonna say the whole thing. I love you, blog, and I love you readers. It’s nice to yell into the void and hear someone chatting back.

AND NOW, THE BIG IMPORTANT PART – THE AWESOMESAUCE GUYS AND GIRLS I AM TAGGING TWEETING COERCING NOMINATING FOR THE AWARD:

Suitchef.com – The most dapper suit-adorned English chef you will find in Scotland. I’m being a git here, because I don’t think he’s got 7 posts up yet to nominate. Consider it a future goal, Josh? Also, his URL makes me think of sous chef and that’s clever.

Ryan Graudin – This up-and-coming YA superstar writer is all kinds of awesome, with amusing video blogs and an uncanny ability to push herself to new levels of brilliance with every novel.

MissAdventure – Is that URL also a pun? I am fairly sure it is, and I am impressed. Kate’s posts are smart and helpful in ways that will make you want to cuddle her across the internet. She writes YA, and when the fateful day comes that her works get published I will celebrate all night long because when I read her work, her characters stay in my head forever after.

Now I’m off to tweak this site’s theme, draft a few posts, lurk some wonderful blogs and hate my own hesitation when it comes to finishing the final act of my latest manuscript revision. I think I’ve gotten so hung up on the structure of acts and climaxes and the oh-god-everyone-else-is-better-than-me that I’ve frozen up. Still, if I keep chipping away at the writers block I’ll get through – and I’ve scribbled ‘WRITERS WRITE’ on my notebook so many times I might as well get it tattooed.

The musician ‘The Steve Kelly’ has recently put up a track about Inverness-shire. It’s tongue-in-cheek and not for the faint of heart or ear – it’s also brilliant.

Invershneckie (it’s the fuckeen business) by thestevekelly

Meet Buck from TeamCerf on Vimeo.

This short is amazing – So colourful! So fluid! So kinetic! SO SUPER COOL, AND OH MAN THAT DEER IS SPIFFY.

It’s about Buck, a guy with a deer’s head, meeting his girlfriend’s hunting obsessed father.

Equally amazing is the action packed and ever-so-shiny Salesman Pete short:

Hope you enjoy. And more importantly, hope you all have a Merry Christmas!

We’ve already had a pre-Christmas celebration involving nerf guns, remote controlled helicopters, lots of tea, mulled wine, roast potatoes and venison. (Ooops, sorry Buck.) It was pretty fantastic, but I’m still trying to clean up all the dishes that were used making the meal….

Now I’m off to Inverness to see the family!

There’s a relatively new trend in video that I think is really awesome. It’s called kinetic typography (moving text, in other words). You’ve probably already seen it in a few things, like movie opening credits.

Two of my favorite recent examples have been in fan-made music videos for Jonathan Coulton songs. Jonathan writes a lot of geek-themed songs, most famously the Portal ending song ‘Still Alive’.  Another song by him, ‘Re: Your Brains’, also plays in Left 4 Dead 2.

Below is a fan video for ‘Still Alive’:

And his song ‘Shop-Vac’:

(A ‘Shop-Vac’ is basically a Henry Hoover, as far as I can tell.)

If you’re a fan of what you hear, here’s a cute animated video for ‘Code Monkey’, a song about the lonely life of a techy monkey. A few years back, when I was still in secondary school and spending most of my evenings coding websites, I found and loved this song. Didn’t pay much attention to the romance aspect, mind – I was probably too busy being in awe of people who not only also code things, but write songs about it!

And an audio-only video of Re: Your Brains, drawing some relatable lines between being an officer worker and being a zombie.

Just back from another driving lesson – just little trips with family, I don’t have the money for proper lessons just now and I’m still lacking far too much of the basics to bother anyway.

Again, nobody died! Not even the rabbits that plague that bit of road. I managed to go right round an area of road, corners and all, and to swing round a lorry. Most importantly, I figured out how to break! Most important thing I didn’t know: Taking your foot off the accelerator a bit when coming off the clutch stops it speeding out so much and makes it a lot easier for my nervy self. As for things I’m still really bad at, I drive too close to the centre of the road and I haven’t quite fixed my habit of trying to break with my left foot. It’s all just a matter of practicing until I get comfortable with these big metal death machines.

Still, it’s progress! I am excited, even if driving still seem’s too expensive to be within reach.

A few links of a writer-y interest today: a query from the Batman was sent to agent Janet Reid. Janet Fitch gave a few good tips of writing – they’re fantastic, but a bit too technical to worry about when doing the first draft so I think I’ll be printing out a copy for using when I’m at the 2nd draft. Finally, a page that tells you what famous author you write like. There’s been some controversy over it’s preference for white male authors, and going by various reports it seems to be based on keywords instead of a genuine formula. I gave it a few chapters from my WIP and got: Chapters 1 + 2 are William Gibson, 3 + 4 Dan Brown, 5 Douglas Adams, 6 Stephen King.

In non-writing news, the first trailer arrived for a movie about Facebook, “The Social Network”, with one of the founders played by Justin Timberlake. The trailer soundtrack is a creepy choir cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”. Everytime I mention this I have to explain that I’m not joking. The founders themselves have responded to state the obvious – that it’s heaviliy dramaticized and there wasn’t really that much sex involved in building a website.

It actually looks like a decent movie, though. I think I caught a glimpse of them sitting on Facebook while some wild party rages on around them, so rock on boys. Tell it like it is!

Now I’m countting down for the announcement of “Don’t Be Evil”, chronicling the decent of a start-up search engine as it goes from letting us all find what we need to know on the internet to sending out spy cars to stealing personal info through wifi. I’m waiting, Hollywood.

Speaking of the writing side, this week I’ve been hopping between scenes a bit. Aaaand I cut out my entire first chapter to speed up the pace, which I really shouldn’t be doing in a first draft. But I shouldn’t be doing any editing in the first draft. Still, I’m really liking the results and looking ofrward to finishing the full draft so I can start slimming it down and giving it a sharper form.

Oh, and I watched ‘Shutter Island‘. Really wasn’t impressed by the first wee while – a retro-cheesy style going on and really irritatingly over-saturated colours. It turns out it was irritating mer on purpose and had a few tricks up its sleeve. It’s a great movie, and it’s extremely difficult to peg exactly how it’s going to end – definately worth a watch. It also has a few nods towards 50s-60s mental illness treatments, which are always fascinating because they’re so inhuman – those are ‘The Bell Jar’ and ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ years when they thought depression could be cured by shoving an ice-pick through your eye-socket and wiggling it around until y0u either died or lost most of your mental functions. You don’t really have to add anything to make a horror movie out of that.

I’ve managed to develop a throat-destroying cough in the space of starting and finishing this post, ow. Time for some Covonia, and possibly sleep. Na-night!