IT LIVES!

I'm baaaaaaaaaack... :)  Didja miss me?   I'll tell ya what, I don't think I've ever been that sick in my entire life.  Not pretty.  It took every one of us down, one day at a time.  No gory details, because... ick.  I'm still pretty tired.  It hasn't been a full week yet and although I am feeling good, I definitely don't have my usual level of energy, probably because I'm just now getting my appetite back.  And when you spend your days fending off teaching six year olds, it pretty much takes full energy (phasers on STUN), which has left nothing but an empty shell of Lindsey in the evenings.  One who does not write.  Or blog.  One who sleeps.

AND one who reads!  When you don't have the energy to do much else, you have a great excuse to read.  A lot of times, my reading sadly goes by the wayside because I have other important jobs to do like marking papers of cleaning toilets or fancy stuff like that.  (It's ok to be jealous.)  So this week, I actually got to read When You Reach Me and Lips Touch.  Both!  In one week!  Which, ya know, is a feat when you have a job and kids and a house and a dog and Brownie patches to sew.  I don't really write reviews on this blog, mainly because that feels like work and you can't make me work here in my bloggy playground.  But I truly enjoyed both books in their completely different genres and styles.

Guess what else?  When you're sick for a while and you haven't had the energy or a clear enough head to write so your novel is sitting but you catch up on blogs sometimes, you lose a little bit of the steam you had for your work and you start to overthink all of the brilliant writing advice out there in blogland.  Of which there is much.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I am grateful for advice.  I am a beginner, and I will take advice and some of it will stick and some of it will not (I am the Advice Sieve) and some of it really makes me think.  So advice is not a bad thing by any means.  But it can be overwhelming.

So when I took a break from all of the advice and did a bunch of novel reading, something warm and fuzzy began to grow like a fire before me and I stuck my hands out to warm them by it because it went a little something like this:

JUST  RIGHT  WRITE

I laughed when I read these novels because they gave me a revelation.   Because When You Reach Me is crazy.  It jumps tenses and characters and uses the same word twice in several sentences and toward the end calls one character He and You interchangeably, and often within the same sentence.  It spits in the face of a whole lot of conventional writing advice and it works.  Because, for this particular story, it makes sense.

And Lips Touch?  Whoa baby, the language in this book is so lyrical and lovely, I could live in it.  But guess what Laini Taylor does?  She uses an omnipotent narrator.  The narrator can tell you what several different characters are thinking and feeling, sometimes switching back and forth within the same chapter or on the same page.  (The horror!) And she does loads of telling instead of showing.  She tells thousands of years of backstory.  Chapters of it.  And guess what? It also works.  Because, for these particular stories, it makes sense.  And she has three prologues in that one book.  Rock on witcha bad prologues, babe.  I love her.

Newbery Award winning book.  National Book Award finalist book.  Completely bucking convention... not for the hell of it, but because it works.

So of course all of this reading has inspired me to get back to my writing but I am still feeling exhausted.  (You can probably tell by the complete babblefest that is this post.)  But spring break is coming and since my kids have school when my school is out (and vice versa), I will have some time soon.  And I'm going to shake off some of the "this is how you should be doing things" and just write. :)  (Talk to me again in revisions, but that is a million miles away!)

If you haven't entered my contest yet, it ends March 15 - CLICK HERE TO ENTER.  Good luck!