Three Things Thursday

There's not much going on, hence the tiny amount of blog posts lately. I'm just chilling out waiting for my work permit to be approved so I can start working. We're going to Oktober Fest in Munich this weekend, so I'll show you that. But for now let's do Three Things Thursday!

Three things about...

what you watch.

1.    Only movies. I’d rather live my own life than watch tv. But movies are like heaven. A little escape from the world. I'll watch action, comedy, romance. Pretty much anything except horror (remember I get nightmares) and stupid comedy. I absolutely hate to watch a movie that makes me feel like I wasted two hours of my life. Sorry Mike Myers, your stuff is just dumb.
2.    I watch my favorite movies over and over again. Whether it’s to focus on the deeper meaning or to just veg out. Pixar is amazing. A few of their movies are kind of meh, but none of them are bad. Finding Nemo and Wall-E make it into my top ten list.
3.    I have pages and pages in my scrapbook filled with movie tickets from going to theaters.

(By the way, the dress Keira Knightley is wearing in that picture is the wedding dress I imagine for Liza in my novel Her Daughter. Also the picture belongs to Focus.)

So tell me in your own blog post about what you like to watch or tell me in the comments.

Rainy Day Blogfest

Today is the Rainy Day Blogfest (click on those words to see the other participants) hosted by Christine at The Writer's Hole. She loves rain and wanted to see everybody's scenes where rain is involved. I wrote this scene specifically for this blogfest, but it goes in my novel Her Daughter. We're supposed to post under 500 words (I have 505, lol) sorry! Here ya go:

Liza sat at her desk watching the rain slide down the glass, obscuring her view of the front yard and the cars that drove by on the street. She couldn’t hear the TV downstairs because of the downpour; she knew her father was watching it, and her mother was in the kitchen making dinner. After sitting for another five minutes she made her decision. Putting her hands firmly on the desk, she stood and turned to her bedroom door. She swept through into the hallway and stopped just over the jamb. Listening for her parents, she tip-toed to the trapdoor into the attic, pulled it down, and slipped up the stairs like a ghost.
In the dusty attic she pulled the cord for the bare light bulb and closed the trapdoor behind her. The rain was even louder, rat-tatting on the roof with little insulation between her and the pouring wet. She pushed boxes aside looking for the one marked for her baby clothes. She found it under a smaller box. Settling onto the splintered-wood floor, she brushed the smaller box aside. It tipped over and dumped journals. She ignored those and pulled at the old cardboard box with her baby clothes inside. When she tugged the top open, dust flew into her face and made her sneeze. She stopped to listen for any sign that her parents were coming, but all she could hear was the relentless rain.
Out of the musty box she pulled a bonnet and long dress: her christening gown. Then she found a blanket with teddy bears on it and a yellow summer dress with frills along the edges. She wiped at the tears that made tracks through the dust on her face.
She set the dress in her lap, smoothing the wrinkles out of it and plucking a piece
of fluff from the collar; she turned to the journals. Randomly selecting a pink one with yellow stars, she smelled it first. It made her sneeze twice. But it smelled of plastic and paper with just a hint of a flowery perfume. She opened the pages and let them fall open to somewhere in the middle.

Mother walked in. She saw me. With Josh. Naked. In bed. My first time. We were right in the middle of it all and the door burst open. I’m mortified. She saw him, on top of me, under the blankets. She slammed the door shut again. When I went downstairs (he climbed out the window) she called me a whore. I’m so ashamed.

Liza slammed the journal shut in sync with the next beat of thunder. Was that why all the hostility? She tucked the other journals back in the box, hid the pink one under the yellow dress in her baby box and put everything back the way it had been.
Sneaking back to the trapdoor, she made her way to her bedroom and sat at her desk again to watch the rain slip and glide down the glass of her window.

Guess That Character Blogfest - The Reveal

Today is day two of the Guess That Character Blogfest hosted by Jen of Unedited. Yesterday you guessed what my character looked like according to her voice. Now I'll give you a photo and a short description of Liza to see if you were right. The photo is from Paloma in Flight on flickr.

Liza from Her Daughter:

Long brown hair, deep brown eyes, slender and short (I kind of gave that one away). The dress in this photo almost matches the wedding dress. I imagined Elizabeth's dress from the Pride and Prejudice ball at Netherfield (the movie with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth).

She is timid, especially when it comes to her mother, but she has her reasons. And she is very much in love with her college sweetheart, John.


Talli Roland was right on.
Nicole Murray had her personality down.
Steph Sinkhorn pinpointed her style and the fact that she smiles because she's in love.

Now my question is: what do we take from this? Is my voice not strong enough, or are people reading the character the way they want to read? Obviously you can't get a complete picture of who she is without the rest of the book. So what do I do with this information? Anybody have any ideas?

Guess That Character Blogfest!

It is time for Guess That Character Blogfest! I will put a snippet from my novel about Liza here, you guess in the comments what she looks like, and tomorrow I'll post a photo. Go check out the other participants and the lovely Jen from Unedited by clicking on the photo for the blogfest.

Snippet from Her Daughter:

They arrived at the mall and went into some of the fancier dress shops. Liza didn’t like anything in there so they went into a privately owned shop down the road from the mall. There wasn’t a lot of selection, but after digging through the racks, Sarah came upon a very simple, white dress. It was spaghetti strap with bunched fabric over the chest and a slimming, straight drop to Liza’s calves. There was a tiny bit of sheer tulle sticking out of the top and another tiny layer of it running along the bottom hem. Liza put it on in the dressing room and didn’t want to take it off again.
“Girl! I want to see it. Get out here,” Sarah called.
Liza finally walked out with a big smile. “I love it,” she said.
“Oh wow, me too. It’s amazing. It even works on your shortness.” Sarah walked over and peered down at Liza.
“Not funny. But it is beautiful.” Liza looked up at her six foot friend. “This is the dress. God I wish I could wear this on my real wedding day.”
Before Liza could slap her hand over her mouth, Sarah grabbed her wrists and looked her straight in the eye. “What did you just say?” she said and laughed. “Are we having a secret wedding? That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure. Tell me, tell me now.”
“Yes. John finally saw how my mother is at the wedding planner’s office yesterday. She picked pink, yuck, for the aisle runners. John said it wasn’t a good idea because he knows I hate pink. She told the planner we would go with it because it was perfect.”
“What a witch.”
“No, Sarah. She’s still my mother. I don’t care how she treats me, she’s still my mother.”
“You are too sweet for your own good.”
Liza twirled around in the dress.

The Book

I'm through the first edit of the book I wrote in November. It's all situated and in the right order. I just have to fill a few holes and finish the ending. It's really coming together nicely. Now I just have to worry about finding an agent. Anybody have any tips?

I thought I'd give you a little snippet from the very beginning. Let me know if you like it!


The fluorescent light reflected in her big, brown eyes. She gripped the edge of the bed and gritted her teeth against the pain. Her indifferent mother watched from the chair in the corner. Her father held her hand with his head turned away.
“You’ll be just fine, Sweetheart. Just fine,” he said.
“No one can survive this,” she whispered.
“I did. You’re here, aren’t you? This is the consequence for what you did. It felt good at the time, didn’t it?”
“Margaret, hush. You’re making her worse,” her father berated her mother. The sheets soaked up her sweat and turned a funky yellow color. She didn’t think she could handle the next onset of intense pain. As her back relaxed, she settled into the pillows and rubbed her hair away from her eyes.
“Is there some water?”
Her father handed her the glass with the straw. Dragging on the liquid with a severe sucking noise, she swallowed quickly before the next contraction hit her. While she struggled against the clenching muscles, her mother stood and left the room. In just a few minutes the doctor came in and flipped up the sheet. He probed between her legs and snapped off his gloves.
“You’re ready. We’re going to move you into the delivery room.”
“No, no. I’m not ready. This can’t be happening. I’m not ready. Mama, please. It hurts so much. Please don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone.”
Her mother patted her arm and walked alongside the bed. Her hard-as-steel eyes stared straight ahead. Before her mother could stop walking, she grabbed her sweater and held on for dear life.
“Please come with me. I’m sorry,” she sobbed, “I’m so sorry. Please don’t abandon me. Please help me.”
Her mother looked down into those wide, insane eyes and softened just a little bit. “I’ll be right here, Elizabeth. Don’t worry. You’ll get through this. You’ll survive, and then you’ll give that baby to someone else. Someone who can handle this.” She swept some stray hairs out of her daughter’s face. “Why did this have to happen to us?” she asked the air.

I finished!

I got to 50,000 words tonight on my very first novel. I think ever since I was about eight years old I've wanted to write a book, and this is the first time I've been so close. Now I get to spend the next few weeks looking back through it and deleting, adding, and editing. Don't know where I'll go from there. I will definitely give it some time off so I can have a fresh mind next time I look at it, but we'll just have to wait and see what my next steps are. I want to scream from some place very high (quote of Luigi from the Cars movie).

Lay it out there...

Here comes one of my very rare 'lay it all out there' blog posts. I don't like airing out the dirty laundry, and I suppose this isn't really any big secret or anything, but I usually also don't blog or talk about my feelings a lot.

But I have to say...

I'm exhausted.

- I have Deutschkurs (German course) every day from 8-12. Which is getting increasingly more overwhelming. I'm trying to switch schools for one that is a little bit closer. That's taking a lot of time that I don't have.

- I've been trying to finish this NaNoWriMo novel, and it's getting really hard. If I don't finish it, by the 30th, I will be so mad at myself. It may get to the point where I won't want to touch this book again because I'll blame the book. And I'll be in a slight depression for the next three months. I have to write just over 15,000 words by Monday, ugh.

- Albert is sick, so now I have to worry about him and worry about catching his cold. I really need to go to the store, especially so I can get some soup for dinner tonight.

- The laundry is really lacking. I have piles of clean clothes and piles of dirty clothes all over our bedroom. Those of you who have seen my apartment before know I usually do that anyways, but since we've been in Germany I have kept up on putting the clothes away, until now. It's frustrating to look at it.

- I'm really trying to keep up on making new things for the shop and researching the Deutsche Post system. I finally figured out how many stamps it takes to send to the U.S., but I still don't know how to buy those stamps and put the letters in a postbox instead of taking my letters to the post. And I have a new calendar that I will be listing today.

- The Porsche is registered, but its oil is really bad so we have to change it this weekend. Plus it needs gas now, and that's dang expensive here.

There's more to the list, but it makes me tired to think about it all. So I'll leave you with this little glimpse into my days right now.

On a happy note, I found the brand new Harry Potter DVD for only 9 Euros (that's like 13 Dollars)!!! Yay for movies.

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month and I'm participating in the fun. Basically, it's a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. After the first week, I'm at 11,767 words. I think it's the most I've ever written. And, amazingly, I like every word so far.

If you want to stay updated on my status just click on the picture to the right ---->

If you are a NaNoWriMo participant, friend me! I'd love to check out other novels and watch as you reach your goals.

Wish me luck. I have the whole month open to devote to this, and I'm using it well. Hopefully by this time next year I can tell you when my book will be on the shelves.