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Showing posts from 2011

Dear Blog, Part VII

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Dear Blog, I'm sorry I've neglected you in recent months. You should know that this isn't intentional on my part, but more of lack of motivation paired with not being chained to a desk 40 hours a week. I promise that I will work out a schedule that will suit both of our needs while entertaining The Lurkdom. Please know I've enjoyed our time together and that you've taught me a lot in the last few years. Since we've renewed our partnership with vigor, I will not abandon you now. Of course, revisions have also pushed you to the backburner and I'm sorry for that. In the spirit of total disclosure, you should know that you are here to enhance my writing career, not become it. Much love, Alicia PS: While I'm slaving over revisions, you can be mesmerized by The White One's sweater.

Best Read Books in 2011

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Back in January, I made it my goal to read a book a week. By the summer I blew that goal out of the water. With so many books read over the year, it's hard to pick just five. I did it though, Lurkdom, just for you*. What were the best books you've read this year? * Though, as with everything here at The Pie, opinions are subjected to change at the whim of Yours Truly.

On Unemployment... and Writing

Six weeks ago, I was laid off from the day job. The same day job that should've only lasted three weeks in 2007. This fact hasn't softened the blow and I've been staving off a major bout of emo-ness for weeks. This totally explains why I still haven't cleaned the basement. Unless you've been laid off or are very close (read: married or related) to someone who has been laid off, you might not realize what a slap in the face the situation is. You've been rejected. The company that you've worked for has essentially left you for someone else. Yeah, I know there's circumstances like budget cuts or reorganizations, but it doesn't matter at this point. You feel worthless. It's very easy to fall in to the trap of doing nothing while on unemployment. At first, it's like you've taken a few days off from the day job. You sleep in, stay up late, wear a crazy amount of lounge pants. Then, a month has gone by. The dishes pile up and you're work

The Flippant Girl's Guide to Surviving the Holidays

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Credit Whereas Thanksgiving is a one-day-a-year phenomena, December through early January is riddled with holidays and holiday parties. If you're not careful, you can sucked into three events in a night. This many parties and dinners will seriously expand your waist. (Trust me, I'm a professional.) Of course, you can be in the opposite boat and not have even have a plan of Chinese and a movie. You might feel that this is worse than being overbooked. Don't worry, we can debate the misconception of that later. Today's all about holiday survival. 1. Drink in abundance. There's a reason why Santa is so jolly and it's not because he's full of good cheer. Embrace the nog, snuggle with schnapps, spike your cocoa. Make a drinking game out of every festivity you attend*. Is someone wearing an ugly sweater? Take a shot. Is there a couple snogging under mistletoe? Chug until said snog is complete. 2. Confuse holidays. Light sparklers and play John Philip So

Zombie Holiday Gift Guide 2011

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Zombie Thursdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here . There's only a week and a half left to get your Christmas shopping done! I've barely started, but hopefully I'll think of some good gifts to buy in the next week. How are you all in the Lurkdom doing on your shopping? Are you behind on your shopping? Fear not! If you have any zombie lovers in your life, then I have the perfect gift guide for you! Zombie Hunting Permit This is a great stocking stuffer! Made by some lovely people on CafePress, this (faux) hunting license gives authority to your little zombie killers to go out and take down some undead walkers. The permit is actually printed on a 3x5 vinyl sticker, so it is perfect for applying on your car, notebook, or anywhere else you might want this little guy. The permit costs $5. Munchkin Zombies Munchkin is the perfect card set for the gamer in your life. It is so much fun on its own that the only way it could possibly b

Yay! Fictional Christmas

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Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday. Today's topic : What would be the ideal holiday present for your main character (or favorite character)? Credit I'm entirely engrossed in my requested revisions for Falling to Normal, which means I'm focused on Cheyenne and the gang. Coincidentally, Christmas happens during Falling to Normal's timeline. Of course there are things Cheyenne would love to get for Christmas, as long as realism isn't an issue. The ability to reverse time For her past to remain that--the past Her first kiss. That's it. Don't forget to go to YA Highway and see what everyone else is saying.

Like Contests?

Of course you do. So do I. Because of this mutual bond, you should head over to YA Highway and enter their contest*. * And if you win, my birthday's coming up and I love presents.

Things That Amuse Me: Tacky Christmas

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It's a known fact among my group of friends that I don't really rock the Christmas spirit. If there's not a sense of tacky, chances are I'm not into it. I mean, there is a reason why I own a six-foot royal purple tinsel tree. So imagine my utter happiness when Bestie Danielle told me about the chicken nativity scene. Credit Credit That's right. There's a chicken Jesus and a chicken Mary. It can't get more better than that. Well, it can and you can see more here . Confess, Lurkdom! What's your favorite Tacky Christmas item? ____ Last.fm hit of the day : Graveyard Love Song by Miguel and The Living Dead

NaNoWriMo: Why I Participate

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Oh god, y'all are thinking, not another NaNoWriMo post. It's December for chrissakes. I know and I'm sorry, but we'll all get through this together. Every year, NaNoWriMo gets a lot of flack, saying that it enables people who fashion themselves as writers when they're really not. I disagree, but that's a subject for a different day. Today is all about why I always go back to NaNoWriMo*. It's so easy to get stuck on the revision/editing wheel that anyone can get so sucked into it that you can go two years without writing anything new. NaNoWriMo guarantees me that at least once a year I'll create a new novel-length work, which is important since I want to have a writing career. With this in mind, I use NaNoWriMo to experiment. Whether it's planning techniques or story structure, I make sure that I try something new each year. This is how I learned I was a plotter and that plotcards are what works best. If it wasn't for this, I would never

How to Cook Brrrraaaaains

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Zombie Thursdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here . How is everyone surviving the holiday season? So far, I'm not fairing so well. See, I work in retail. I work in one of the most profitable retail stores in the world, and it's kicking my ass. I apologize so much for slacking on my writing duties. If I haven't been working, I've been visiting family for Thanksgiving, having family visit me, and also trying to work on days when I'm not supposed to work because I'm super poor. I hardly know what day of the week it is anymore. So again, I'm sorry for be absent. As Alicia is fond of saying, "Life Happened." I love that phrase. She should copyright it. Well, life has been happening to me. But I have something really fun for you all! How many of you know what Epic Meal Time is? Let's pretend you don't know anything about it and I will give you a quick run down. Epic Meal Time is an online cooking s

I Would Sell My Soul for Twilight Money

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Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday.  Today's topic : How far would you go to get published? More than once I told Bestie Danielle that I would sell my soul for some Twilight money. This should give you an idea of my lack of scruples. On a more serious note, even though I'm attached to my story lines and characters like The White One and plastic, I'm not stupid. I do realize that the publishing industry contains a bit of give and take. So I'd like to present my list of how far I'd go. Revision. I have no problems revising. There are people out there much smarter than me that want to make my book better. I've been known to take pretty much any suggestion and try it out*. There are just certain things that won't happen in this though. If you want me to revise so there's a more ly

More About The White One

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Making himself comfy at VESCONE. It's been officially a month since kitty drama has began and I'm happy to say that it's now over. Without getting into the realm of TMI, The White One couldn't keep food down. After several rounds with the vet and the nice people at VESCONE , everyone was confused. He acted fine, just couldn't keep food down.  They confirmed that cats don't have eating disorders and it was determined that he needed surgery to find out what was wrong*. Now would be the time to mention that I thought myself to be the type of person who would never opt for surgery on a cat. Turns out that was me being delusional because there was no doubt in my mind that we were having the cat operated on. The White One, of course, had other plans. Trying to hide from surgery**. So they operated on him and found nothing in his GI tract. They biopsied him and thankfully that came back fine as well. The verdict was he swallowed something too big and by

Where's Alicia?

My apologies for the radio silence this week. I'm taking a temporary blog writing and reading hiatus until mid-next week. The White One had surgery Monday, which equals a lot of stress at Chez Gregoire. I encourage you to poke around the archives while Hubs and I get our life back on track. Hopefully the hiatus will jump start my brain and I'll be able to give you all in The Lurkdom some fantastic posts full of (deep) thoughts.

The Flippant Girl’s Guide to Thanksgiving

Disclaimer: Just like the previous Flippant Girl’s Guide, this one is also written days in advance, during the NaNoBoston 24 hour write in. Thanksgiving (and holidays in general) can be a stressful day filled with cooking disasters and logistical nightmares*. Some people would prefer pajamas and cribbage all day and yours truly is no exception. What people like us need is a no-frills, pain-free way to celebrate Thanksgiving that doesn’t have you contemplating suicide for the day. Lucky for you, I’ve thought about this. A lot. If you’re anti-dinner planning and entertaining, you will love the dinner and a movie option. Take your Thanksgiving guests to your closest all-you-can-eat buffet. For about ten bucks per person, you can eat all the turkey and fixings you want without the prep or clean up. Then instead of working off your turkey coma by watching hours of football, go watch a movie. This year I’m voting for The Muppets, though if you’re in a heckling mood, may I suggest the

Moral Choices with Zombies

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Zombie Thur sdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here . Happy Thursday to you all! Currently I'm on break at work, and have been pondering a zombie topic all day since catching up on the last episode of The Walking Dead . I'm not going to go into any specifics, but consider this post to have possibly Level One spoilers for the show, especially the current season. Again, I won't give any character names, but if you don't even want to know any situations going on, it might be best to stop reading. I'm really interested in hearing what you all think... sort of an "open dialogue" per se about different moral situations and what you would do or what you feel would be best for a group of survivors. I've talked in the past about how you might handle killing a family member or friend who had made the full transition into a zombie. I personally think it would be difficult, but completely necessary. At that point, I

Turkey in the Blog

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Instead of blogging, I'm busy completing my WIP. While I do that, please enjoy a photo of Yours Truly being attacked by turkeys. Image courtesy of Bestie Danielle Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Are you prepared?

In Which Cats Stare at Each Other

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It's Tuesday, Lurkdom! Last night I completely made 50,000 words on my WIP and I'm hoping that by Wednesday, I'll be 100% done. To celebrate this milestone and to further my sleep dep*, I decided to play with Windows Live Movie Maker. What better way to try a new piece of software than to use  your cats as guinea pigs. Cats, while they don't "amuse" me per se, they do fascinate me. Their colorings and patterns, the way the pounce bottle caps, their communication. Their stares**. Disclaimer: I am not cinematographically inclined. What this means to you: there are no smooth transitions. As you can see, the cats provide me with tons of entertainment. Both videos were taken when I should have been doing something else. The combined video? Again when I should have been doing something else. Tell me, what do you find yourself doing when you should be doing something else? * This will explain any ramble-like qualities of this post. Seriously. ** Not

Pitch Writing Tips from the Pros

Last Thursday, my local Indie, Porter Square Books , hosted The Book Doctors and the touring PItchapalooza. The gist of a Pitchapalooza is you get one minute to pitch your book to The Book Doctors and then they will give  you feedback. Awesome, right? You also have to buy their book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published for a chance to pitch,* and you weren’t guaranteed actual pitch time, but regardless you did walk away with a free 20-minute phone consultation with them. While not everyone will have a chance to attend one of these, I thought it would be helpful to share some of the tips I heard on crafting your pitch. Take your time crafting it. It took The Book Doctors six months to craft their one-minute pitch for their book. At the end of the pitch, there should be a feeling of “what happens next.” Comp titles. If it’s not clear where on the shelves your book belongs, you have to include some comps, but you don’t need to pull just from other books in your genre

Mandatory Writing Things

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Today's post is super-late and I'm sorry about that. Lots of exciting things have been happening to Yours Truly as of late and since I don't want to jinx anything, that's as much as I can write.   The materials I need when I sit down to write vary depending on project, so this topic is challenging. Since it's November and I completed my NaNo novel this week, I'll talk about what I needed for drafting Scenes From Last Night. Zero distractions. With both Hubby unemployed, he's always home so I decided I wouldn't be. Thankfully my dad hooked me up with a temporary office where I holed myself up for eight hours a day over the last two weeks.  Caffeine. I'd be lying if this doesn't show up as needed for every project, but when my brain goes "mumble mumble," the caffeine is super important. The caffeine of choice is usually Dunkin Donuts iced coffee. Music. Another item that shows up all the time, I constantly listen to music whi

The Flippant Girl's Guide to Completing Your WIP

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I write today's Friday Fives prompt several days in advance from the discomfort of the veterinary emergency room where The White One has caused me and Hubby too much stress in a small amount of time*.  With all this kitty (not to mention Alicia) drama, I am painfully behind my NaNoWriMo word count and each setback like this one is enough for me to tear out all my hair. Right now I just want to get it done and retire into an afghan-making frenzy**. If only there were a way to get this done in an efficiently painless way. There is.

Pandemics and Zombies

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Zombie Thur sdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here . Hello, zombie fans! During Halloween week, there were a lot of great shows on television that would never be played throughout the year otherwise. It's cool that channels like the History Channel and Discovery will air shows about zombies and witches, etc. during October, but kind of sad that they won't air anything like that the other eleven months out of the year. I happened to watch one really cool show about zombies! Even though the show had a lot of repetition and not a ton of new information, it did bring up some very interesting points. One of the main things I took away was a comparison to other viral plagues that have crippled the planet throughout history. I had never thought of zombies in this way. While perhaps a zombie apocalypse may not happen in the foreseeable future, there is the potential for a viral outbreak to occur that could completely destroy society the

If I Was a Literary Super Heroine…

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Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday. Today's topic: What are your writing/publishing superpowers (drafting? plotting? writing queries?) – and what’s your kryptonite? Today’s answer is going to be wicked fast because it’s been a loooong week for yours truly and I have this mammoth word count I need to play catch up on. If I was a literary super heroine, like Wonder Woman, I would totally rock a fantastic no-gym-necessary body and spandex would love me. There would be comic books with variant covers and movie options showering upon my creative genius. If I was a literary super heroine, I would have my own batch of super friends (you) and we would have our own version of the JLA and call it Young Adult Literati Legacy, or YALL for short. If I was a super heroine, my super strength would be dialogue. With it, I wo

Your Novel's Soundtrack

Soundtracks. We know about them. All movies and TV shows have. Yours truly owns a stupid amount of them. I have playlists for the gym, editing, and for various projects. I'm sure you have these as well. As I was getting ready for NaNoWriMo this year, I worked on coming up with a soundtrack for SFLN. Which is harder than you would think when you're doing it consciously. How do you manage to go beyond your "go-to" music to get the feel right for your story? It's a good question. Below I've listed a few tips that will help you go past the norm and beef up that soundtrack. Broaden your musical horizons. This should go without saying. If you listen to music beyond what's in your iPod, you might hear something that will blow your mind. Last.fm is a good place to start as you can listen to music based off of genre, similar artist, or other Last.fm users. Go by song title. Sounds lame, but sometimes a song title will give you some insight about what the

Guilty Pleasure Alert: Dirty Soap

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Those in the Lurkdom that know me IRL know I have a love of daytime television. Bestie Danielle likes to make fun of me because of this. I'm devoted to One Life to Live so much I went into a mini depression when it was announced that it's coming to an end. I could write several blog posts about soap operas and how they apply to writing. Don't worry, that's not what today is about. Nor is about my other love, reality television. I'm not talking about the trashy reality TV, like Jersey Shore, but something a little "classier" where the focus is more on actual life and not just hookups. Source: images.search.yahoo.com via Amira on Pinterest In September, E aired Dirty Soap , which is reality television about soap opera stars. Best reality show ever? Hells yes. Dirty Soap focuses on the lives of eight people involved in soaps. Each star is at a different stage of their professional and personal careers. There's rivalry, family drama, and baby d

What Would They Do?

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Happy Friday, Lurkdom! Today marks the first weekend of NaNoWriMo, which means I have no excuse not to rock my word count. While I'm doing that, instead of pondering WWJD, I should think about authors I love and what they would do if stuck with a difficult plot. Or a bout of "I can't take it anymore" itis*. Stephen King. Not that I write horror or even long-ass descriptions, but I admire Stephen King for his tenacity and belief in a project. This is something I have talked about before on The Pie, but it definitely bears repeating. SK had such faith in Roland's story that no matter how many times he put it down, he would pick it up the pen again and continue on. Whenever I begin to doubt my own pet project, I think about The Dark Tower. Personal SK Pick: The Dark Tower series ( Hm... This is more difficult than I originally thought. Maybe it's because a lot of the writers that inspire me aren't actually visible in my writing? ) Madeleine

Grab that Whistle

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Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday. Today's topic: Per Sarah's August post ( http://bit.ly/qi9Ed1 ), what kind of writing coach do you need? What kind are you? I think about this from time-to-time because who doesn't want somebody cheering you on while you work and making sure you don't quit? Despite my self-esteem issues and my total bouts of "I suck," I don't want you to kiss my ass. That's not going to make me a stronger writer. I want someone who will tell me what's wrong when they crit me, but also let me know what's working. If I'm stuck, I want someone who is there to help me brainstorm my way through the problem. Basically, I want a Danielle*. As for myself, if I was a writing coach, I'm not sure what kind I am. My mood dictates a lot about my coach

Writers and Social Media Fatigue

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Over the last few weeks, I've been finding it difficult to keep up with Twitter, Facebook, email, and even blogging. No matter how hard I try, I end up missing something and then feel guilty. Let's not even get into the fact that with my phone, I'm plugged in to social networking 24/7. After over seven years, I've finally got social media fatigue. What Is Social Media Fatigue? According to Technopedia , social media fatigue is when people grow overwhelmed with the time and energy spent maintaining and initiating all of these connections. (Yes, this can include people you know IRL that you only now communicate with through Facebook.) Writers are more prone to suffer this than the average bear. We constantly hear that we need to build our platform, interact with our writing community, and make ourselves visible. (That's on top of constantly honing our craft, reading, researching, and the million other things that make writers awesome.) Many of us are online late