Some of you are going to laugh at me. I critique novels for lots of people, and when I come across flashbacks, I tend to complain about them. They're usually just delivery of backstory, and I have a low tolerance for switching between many POVs and times and settings. That's one reason I haven't read G.R.R. Martin's fantasy series, even though it is highly praised, because I've heard he switches characters constantly and that will annoy the crap out of me, so much so that I fear I won't like the book.

What can I say? As a reader, I'm monogamous. Not only for the characters, but for time and setting.

So you guys who critique my novels are going to be amused, because my new novel is full of flashbacks. Payback time! You can all complain about them.

I'm actually quite curious to see how people will respond. I have a theory about flashbacks. My theory is that they can work if you first establish a hook and make the reader want to know a particular bit of backstory. So if I raise a question with the reader, and the flashback answers the question, the flashback, while perhaps a touch jarring or annoying, will be welcome. The key, of course, is that the question I raise must be a good enough hook to make the reader willing to leave the present narrative to learn the answer.

Another tactic I've used is to make the flashbacks short. Sort of. I meant for them to be just a few paragraphs long each, but the first one landed at two and a half pages. It was just such a cool scene. I couldn't trim it down. The others will probably be shorter.

My third tactic was to make the flashback scenes as interesting as possible. I mean, obviously, you want every scene in a novel to be interesting. Skip the boring bits, right? Well, there are always some slower, quieter transition scenes. Not only are they inevitable, they're needed, if for no other reason than to let the reader catch their breath. What I've done for the flashbacks is raised the bar. There are no transition scenes, no slow, quiet, character-developing scenes in the flashbacks. Those are all reserved for the main storyline. The flashbacks show only the most intense moments, the major turning points. So, the idea is that I've annoyed the reader by yanking them out of the main storyline, but I'm trying to make it up to them by making the flashback scene extra interesting.

Will all this work? Ha. You guys will let me know.

4500 / 100000 words. 5% done!

I've said before I love tower defense games. But it's a niche genre and they're hard to find. That's why I was excited when a friend's husband pointed me to "Defense Grid: The Awakening," which cost me all of $10 on Steam.

What's a tower defense game? It's a game where you kill hordes of enemies by building defensive towers. If you've played "Plants vs. Zombies," that's a tower defense game. In that game, the enemies are zombies, and the towers are plants. In "Defense Grid: The Awakening," the enemies are aliens, and the towers are... well... towers. Gun towers, laser towers, missile towers, etc.

I enjoyed the hell out of this game. It obsessed me for a week, drawing me away from WOW and making it hard for me to meet my writing goals (though I did meet them). It's not as cute as Plants vs. Zombies, but it's far more strategically complex, because the placement of your towers alter the route the aliens take. The key to success is to place towers in such a way that the aliens are forced to pass by them multiple times and spend as much time within firing range as possible. Here's an example:



It's probably hard to figure out what's going on if you're not familiar with the game, but I've placed my towers such that the aliens have to walk a little maze where they spend a long time being fired upon. I also blocked off an alternate route so they're forced to walk through the maze twice.

It's a simple game put out by an indie publisher (yay indie publishers!), but devilishly fun, and the voice work is outstanding. The game has a narrator, a guy who helps you learn the game and comments as you play. The narrator is a soldier from thousands of years ago who downloaded himself into a computer. Every so often, he forgets he's in the computer and thinks he's alive, and that his son is still alive, and those little moments of his confusion are touching and sad. This is one of those rare games where I actually enjoyed and paid attention to the story.

My only complaint? The game was too short! I finished it in a couple of days. Then I went back and redid all the missions, aiming for a perfect score on each one. Once I'd achieved that, I started doing all the missions again in hard mode, aiming again for perfect scores on all of them. I haven't finished that yet. I will be sad when I do finish. I wish there was a way to download new missions. Or a random mission generator that could construct an infinite number of variations! If the game had a random map generator, I'd have happily shelled out $50 for it and played it endlessly.

I find it interesting that I prefer games that involve indirect killing. I wouldn't be interested in a game where I had to shoot aliens myself. But building towers that shoot aliens? That, I love! I suspect my wartime ancestors were not the front-line soldiers, nor were they the officers giving orders. They were the geeky engineers, the ones who spent all their time trying to figure out how to make that trebuchet fire a little faster, or a little farther. Tower defense games satisfy my inner trebuchet engineer.

I'm writing again! What a rush. I'm really excited about this book. It's going to be challenging but super fun.

After I finished SSV, I took a few weeks off to let my brain recharge, and to make some much-needed upgrades to my website. Now that's done, so it's time to start work on novel #3. I'm behind on OWW reviews, by the way, because I didn't review anything during my writing break.

I wrote my first 1000 words today. I forgot how hard it is to do 1000 words/day, even when the words are allowed to suck. It took me all afternoon (minus the time spent shuttling the kids around), and much of the evening. The early chapters are extra hard because I have to give names to everything. I started this book without a name for the protagonist. Funny, because I know virtually everything else about her. I was going to ask for help naming her, but to do that, I'd have to post all kinds of spoilery information about her, and some of you are my beta readers, so I'd better not.

I'll give you the first four sentences of the novel, though:

His flesh moved against hers, loathsome.

He looked down at her and sighed. "At least pretend you're enjoying yourself. If you can't fool me, you'll never fool the Emperor."

No critiques please. It's a first draft and I never subject first drafts to critique. (Besides, it's only four sentences!)

What's going to make this novel extra fun is that both the hero and heroine are not particularly good people. That's a major difference from the first novel, because Janto and Rhianne were good people--very much so. So in a sense, this is a return to Finneas-style characters. Neither Lucien nor the unnamed heroine is as bad as the duplicitous Finneas Trapp, but they are both highly flawed characters who operate in moral gray areas. I think (hope) they will also be interesting and sympathetic.

Another difference: this novel will have more explicit sexual content. Not a whole lot of it, but definitely some, because the sex scenes carry important plot events that I simply cannot skip over.

New book! So exciting! I hope it works. About half my novels fail in the drafting stage. This one had better not be one of the casualties. I love it too much.

1000 / 100000 words. 1% done!

Those of you who read the writing blogs will already have heard of the Harlequin fiasco. For those who don't know about it, Harlequin, a major publisher of romance novels, which formerly had a good reputation, has decided to earn some extra cash by funneling its rejected authors to a vanity press.

It happens that you need a lot of publishing industry knowledge to understand why this is a bad thing. In fact, Harlequin is counting on this knowledge gap, which it will exploit to fleece aspiring authors. There are some really good blog posts that go into why it's bad. I like Scalzi's take best. There's also a really good comment trail at Smart Bitches (though I was surprised and disappointed SB Sarah was taken in by the scheme), and an article here that goes into the nuts and bolts of what the deal offers and why it's exploitive.

I don't have much to add to all that's been said already. I'm certainly opposed to the scheme, and I said as much in my comments on Scalzi's blog. But I will add this. I like to divide jobs and businesses into two groups: productive and parasitic. Productive work adds value to people's lives by giving them something they want. Parasitic work transfers money from one person's pockets to another's without providing anything of value.

So. Authors and publishers? Productive. Burger flippers? Productive. Doctors? Usually productive, unless they're ordering unnecessary tests and procedures to protect themselves from lawsuits or pad their paycheck. Lawyers? Mostly productive, except the ones who file frivolous lawsuits. IRS auditors? Believe it or not, productive, since they force people to pay their taxes so we can have much-needed government services.

Thieves and scammers? Parasitic, of course.

Vanity presses? Also parasitic. They charge exhorbitant rates to create a worthless product--a book that will never find an audience. Sometimes I wonder, if it were possible to tally up the percentage of productive work vs. parasitic work in an economy, would that number be a useful economic indicator? Parasitic work causes dollars to fly around without any value being created. Are economies overburdened with parasites on the verge of collapse compared to ones that are mostly productive?

Anyway. Back to Harlequin. Harlequin was previously a productive business. They published romance novels that people bought and enjoyed in high numbers. Their business was (and is) so successful that it continued to make a profit during the recession. However, Harlequin's parent company, Torstar, which mostly publishes newspapers, was hit hard by the recession. Among its holdings, only Harlequin showed a profit.

Then Harlequin announced this change in its business model. It is adding a parasitic business (a vanity press) to its productive one. Unfortunately, the vanity press is likely to damage its productive (and profitable) business of selling romance novels. The RWA, MWA, and SFWA writers' associations have already revoked Harlequin's status as a reputable publisher. Many authors will probably cease to submit to Harlequin--and those who continue to submit to them may be counting the days until they are successful enough to move to an untainted brand. As someone put it on Scalzi's blog, Harlequin is eating its seed corn.

Why would they do that, when their business is successful and profitable? Probably because Torstar ordered them to, in an attempt to cover the newspaper losses. The net result is we've lost a good publisher. Not right away, and maybe there's still time for Harlequin to backtrack, but I think we're looking at a slow, inevitable decline for a once-great publisher.

I don't know why we let companies form conglomerates like this. I doubt Harlequin would have made this decision on its own. Torstar is sacrificing a long-term successful business in order to make some short-term cash. How is this good for the economy? It's ALL BAD. Writers lose (especially the ones who get fleeced). Readers lose. Harlequin loses. The publishing industry loses. Probably the Torstar executives pocket some cash, though. Go, parasites, go.

The other possibility is even scarier. It's that Harlequin, despite its continued success and profits, sees publishing as a dying industry, and has decided to get out now. In other words, they think there is more money to be made fleecing desperate authors than in selling books. The sad thing is that they may be right, and for anyone who loves books, that is a terrifying prospect.

R.I.P. Harlequin.

Ethan: How old was Jesus when he died?
Me: I don't know.
Ethan: How much money did Mary have?
Me: I don't know.
Ethan: How much did Jesus weigh?
Me: I don't know.

You can see he's asking the important questions...

The other day the kids and I were stuck in a horrendous traffic jam, and to pass the time, I put on my old "Jesus Christ Superstar" CD. The reason I thought of it is we'd previously listened to "Chess" which features Murray Head. The kids found Murray Head's voice interesting, and he also sings the part of Judas on JCS. I thought they might like hearing him in that role, where he's younger. Also, the kids have learned time signatures (3/4 and 4/4 time), and I thought they might be interested to hear the unusual 5/8 and 7/8 time signatures used in JCS.

So it was for musical reasons I put the CD in, but they got caught up in the story, which I had to explain to them. Sean knows some of it, since I read him a children's bible ages ago, but I think he's forgotten most of it, and "JCS" hits the darker sides of the story, material that's glossed over or sanitized in the kid's version we read. The kids were fascinated and horrified. For those who don't know, "Jesus Christ Superstar" is a musical about the last days of Jesus's life, including his betrayal, trial, and crucifixion. Some versions ends with the resurrection; others do not.

I was raised Christian, sort of, though my family did not attend church very often. Now I'm Unitarian. Unitarianism developed out of deism, the belief system of many of the Founding Fathers. Unitarians are big on social justice and religious tolerance. We believe there are many paths to God, and each person must find their own. So I'm perfectly happy exposing my kids to any and all religions, and Christiantiy is one of the ones I know pretty well since I was raised in it. And I've read the Bible cover-to-cover at least once.

Ethan, in particular, was very interested. He asked tons of questions, which I did my best to answer, and when we finished the CD he asked me to start it over at the beginning so he could listen again. That evening I brought out the Children's Bible and started reading to him, starting with the birth of Jesus. We haven't gotten to the crucifixion yet, but I know he looked ahead in the book, because he's started asking me questions about pictures from the chapters coming up. He also started drawing crosses on his music homework.

I've mentioned before how Ethan loves the Narnia books above all others. It's Aslan he gravitates to--an all-powerful, all-knowing being who rewards the good and smites the wicked. Ethan loves moralistic stories where the wicked get punished. One of his favorites, for example, is "The Little Red Hen," where the lazy dog, cat, and goose don't get to eat the bread because they didn't help make it.

You know what? It might be just a phase he's going through, but I wonder if I'm raising a future conservative. That would be fine by me, even though I lean left myself. I have a great respect for thinking conservatives--the ones who've been run out of the party of late by the radical fringe. But they'll come back someday. I've always believed the country needs both liberal and conservative voices. Maybe Ethan and I will have some spirited political arguments in the future.

In the meantime, he can keep learning about Christianity. I may even see if a friend would like to take him to Sunday School to see what he thinks. However, I suspect that if things turn too didactic for Ethan, he'll lose interest. He loves to learn, but he hates to have learning forced upon him.

I think this is an old one, but I only just found it, and it's a fun read.

Jennifer Crusie on why she enjoys writing romance

Quote:

"Which brings us to the sex scenes. They don’t make me write them. I love writing them. Every time I finish one, I think, 'In your ear, Hawthorne.'"

I posed this question on the OWW list, but got no response. I've been having the weirdest problems with my email lately. About a third of the emails I send are not arriving at their destination, and the OWW one may have suffered that fate. The worst part is I don't know which emails arrive and which don't.

Anyway.

When you send a query letter by email, you're supposed to send it in plain text, because you don't know what sort of email reader the agent has, and if it's not compatible with yours, your rich-text email may come across to him/her as gibberish. Gibberish == form rejection.

Now, if I'm just sending a query letter, that's not a problem. But some agents request sample pages, and those are to be pasted into the email, which is in plain text. When I queried Finneas, that was fine, because there were no italics in my sample pages. But SSV's opening pages are loaded with them. I use italics for some direct character thoughts, and for a telepathic conversation between Janto and his ferret. The text will be confusing without them.

So what do I do? Leave the italics out, and never mind that the pages are confusing? Switch to rich-text format and pray the agent has a compatible email program? Or come up with some plain-text marker for italicized text, like brackets or asterisks or something?

How have the rest of you handled this?

The problem may be about to get worse, because my current SSV opening is getting mixed feedback and I'm considering dumping it in favor of a new one that opens with a direct character thought. So, more italics.

Last night I babysat a friend's 10-year-old daughter at my house. She gets along really well with Sean, but unfortunately Sean was at his dad's for the weekend. I have two sons, no daughters, so my house is full of boy stuff. And kids get hard to entertain when they reach the tween years. She was kind of bored. She listened to her MP3 player, noodled around on my piano, pulled out some of my old toys and played with them.

I finished my evening chores, gave her a slice of fudge cake (new recipe! thumbs up!), and booted up World of Warcraft. She came over to watch. I was playing my shaman, doing a quest where I had to identify traitors in a keep. I have this orb I can use to find the traitors. Wouldn't it be nice to have an orb like that in real life? After I find a traitor, guess what I do? KILL him, of course!

The friend's daughter, whom I will call A., watched with mild interest as I executed my McCarthyist mission. Then I shifted my character into wolf form, and she perked up. "Whoa! How did you do that?" she asked. I showed her the ability. She asked if the class you choose to play affects what things you can change into. I said yes and told her the Druid was the ultimate shapeshifting class. I logged in my Druid and showed her how I could turn into a bear, a lion, or a bird that can actually fly. Then I showed her my shaman's ability to summon spirit wolves to aid her, and my priest's rideable white dragon.

Well, that was it. She wanted to play herself. I tried to set her up on Sean's machine, but it wasn't working, so I gave her mine and let her create a new character on my account. Originally, she wanted to make a druid, but there are only two races available for druids, tauren and night elves, and neither appealed to her much. Then she clicked on the blood elf and gasped, "She's so pretty!" Forget the druid--she wanted to be a blood elf. I steered her towards the hunter class because clearly she liked animals, and a hunter gets to choose any animal in the game to be her pet. "Do they use bows?" A. asked. I said yes, they did, and apparently that was a selling point, because she then wanted to be a hunter.

While the the WOW population is mostly male, the game has been very successful at luring in women gamers. A lot of the reason for that is that the game is social and cooperative. But Blizzard also gets a lot of mileage out of companion animal fantasy. There are two things that really make the game for me, the animal aspects (shapeshifting into animals, summoning animals to help me in battle, collecting mounts and pets) and flight. I enjoy many different aspects of the gameplay, but there are two situations that really make me feel happy. One is summoning my shaman's spirit wolves:



I get to summon these guys once every 3 minutes, and I love it, because they are AWESOME. They attack anything I attack, and very intelligently too. Usually one of them pounces to stun the target, while the other approaches from another direction. They fight from behind, which is proper damage-dealing technique. I am darn near unkillable while they're present, because they also heal me. When they're present, I essentially berserk, killing all enemies in sight before my wolves fade away (they do not last long).

The other is flight:



Is there anyone who doesn't dream of flying? WOW is probably the closest simulation of it I'll ever have. Flight engages, I think, two senses in particular--sight and touch. I'll never know what it feels like to soar through the sky with the wind ruffling my wings--a computer game cannot simulate that--but I do know what it LOOKS like to be in flight, because WOW does simulate that. I can fly high and watch the creatures on the ground dwindle to ants, or I can swoop low over the plains and watch the grass rush by beneath me. I can dodge in and out of trees. It's marvelous.

I have a couple of good friends who play a different MMO, "Lord of the Rings Online." I tried to play it, because I really enjoy spending time with them, but I couldn't get into the game. "You can't FLY," I told them. "So?" they responded. They never played WOW after flight was added, so they don't understand what they're missing.

Now that I've experienced a game with flight, I don't want to be stuck on the ground anymore. Why be on the ground when I can FLY?

The point I'm trying to make is that while WOW is at its core a game about killing monsters, doing quests, running dungeons and levelling up, its appeal and its addictive nature arise from more than that. It is also a powerful source of wish-fulfillment. You can fly! You can ride a dragon! You can summon wolves! You can transform into a lion! If it were just a levelling game, I'd have gotten tired of it in less than a year. It's the wish-fulfillment aspects that have me still playing 5 years after it came out.

It's also a haven for female gamers trying to avoid sexism. I'm not saying there isn't any. Sometimes the game chat gets ugly and misogynistic; this is unavoidable when many of the players are socially stunted adolescent boys. I report it when I see it, because the admins will temporarily suspend accounts for it, and I want the offenders to know there are consequences for their hate-speech. But the game itself is not sexist at all. There are no chain mail bikinis, no female models with ridiculously large breasts. Check out my blood elf paladin, as an example:



She's beautiful, and she is unrealistically skinny, but aside from that I don't think she's overdone. She doesn't have huge breasts. She's not scantily clad. I am perfectly happy, and not embarrassed at all, playing this model, and this is the model my friend's daughter fell in love with and was determined to play.

Someone in a position of power at Blizzard must have decided, when they built this game, that it was going to be female friendly, with aspects that appeal to women, female character models that are attractive but not sexed up, and consequences for sexist or misogynistic talk. And it's a major reason the game still has my loyalty after 5 years.

I came into the den yesterday morning to a mildly disturbing sight: half a pumpkin (the small decorative kind), thoroughly chewed, seeds scattered everywhere.

I was on my way out of the house, so I left the mess there to clean up later. When I got back, I found a more disturbing sight. No pumpkin, no seeds. NOTHING.

And my dog Spirit had an urgent need to go outside.

I had a "hand, meet forehead" moment while doing Friday's NY Times crossword (it's actually the one from several Fridays ago, because that's what the Seattle Times runs).

The clue was "Composer of a famous ring cycle."

Now, I knew that was Wagner. But I couldn't make it fit into 10 letters, and I couldn't remember his first name. Also, I couldn't get any cross clues off "Wagner" as the last 6 characters. Huh.

Then this morning I figured it out. Actual answer:

( Answer )

Gah! How did I of all people miss that??

(This is why I love the NY Times crossword, especially the Friday and Saturday, which are so full of tricks.)

The Rejectionist rants about the latest trend in YA romance: the Enfeebled Heroine.

I have just one thing to say about this article.

WORD.

All Through the Night, by Suzanne Brockmann

I try to read all the major bestselling authors. I consider it part of my job as a learning writer. These people are obviously doing something right, and I can learn by reading their stuff. Books by these authors are widely available, so I often pick them up at school used-book sales, which is where I got this one. For a dollar. In hardcover.

My reactions to the mega-bestsellers vary a lot. I loved the Harry Potter series, hated Twilight. I can't finish anything by Nora Roberts or Laurel Hamilton. I read one book by James Patterson and two by Sue Grafton, and they all went in one ear, out the other, without really registering. Love Steven King. Love the Hunger Games series, which may not be at mega-bestseller-dom yet, but I think it will be.

And now I've tried out Suzanne Brockmann, with a book randomly selected because it was the one that happened to be available for a dollar.

I like Suzanne Brockmann. Yeah, I had my complaints about the book. It was thin on conflict. The characters seemed a little too perfect, with even their "flaws," like Jules's jealousy, only making them more appealing. They're all super attractive, and all the guys are FBI agents and Navy SEALs and Oscar-winning movie actors. You can see one reason these books are so popular: wish-fulfillment. Just throw in a Regency-era English duke, a Greek billionaire, and a Scottish laird, and all the favorite romance-hero prototypes will be covered!

And yet. I liked her FBI agents and Navy SEALs, and even the actor. And I'm not being fair, either, because the hero in one romantic subplot was a journalist--not your standard romance hero at all. And did I mention the primary romance in this story was a m/m gay romance? That surprised me, because while gay romance does very well in e-publishing and small press, I didn't think it had gained mainstream acceptance yet.

Maybe you have to be Suzanne Brockmann to get a gay romance published. In the afterward, she tells the story of how she did it. The book I read was the 12th book in her "Troubleshooters" series. She introduced Jules, a gay FBI agent, in book 2, and gave him romantic subplots in subsequent books. When those books were successful, she gave Jules a starring role in the next. The book I read isn't actually that book. The book I read is the followup book, about Jules's wedding, and it's a novella, not a novel. That kind of explains the thinness of plot, and the amazon reviews confirm that her regular readers think this one was slight on plot compared to her other books. I sort of got the impression this book was like a family reunion, bringing all her characters from previous books together so the readers can catch up with them. And there are some good subplots as well.

The writing is top-notch, and Brockmann has the knack, similar to Lois McMaster Bujold, of making characters extremely likeable. I liked the military content combined with romantic content (heck, I ought to. SSV combines those elements too.) And I came away from the book wanting to know more about Jules and Robin and Sam and Alyssa and the other characters. I don't feel a burning desire to run out and buy the rest of the series right now, but I do know that if I see another good deal on a Brockmann book, I'm buying it.

The kids had their swimming lesson yesterday. I used to take Ethan into the women's locker room with me, but now that he's turned 6, I can't do that anymore. They go into the men's locker room on their own to get into their swimsuits, and I wait for them by the pool.

They took a little longer than usual to come out to the pool this time. Ethan came out sniffly and teary-eyed and informed me he'd been TRAPPED INSIDE IN A LOCKER.

In the women's locker room, before he turned 6, he used to play with the lockers. They are big, and he's a small kid. He can fit inside them. I always told him never to climb inside, because what if he accidentally got locked in?

And now it's actually happened. In the men's locker room, where I couldn't help him. It was Sean who locked him in. Sean claims it was an accident, but I do not think it could have been 100% accidental. It sounds to me like they were horsing around and not thinking about the consequences. When Sean realized he'd locked Ethan in, he immediately ran to the front desk for help. A guy came in and freed Ethan, who I'm told was screaming and crying (I don't blame him!), though I couldn't hear him where I was. I told Sean he handled the situation well by going for help, but I grounded him for a day for causing the problem in the first place.

Ethan is a remarkably stoic kid. He cried a little after it happened, but so far that's been the only consequence. No nightmares or anything (yet). I'm not prone to irrational fears, but being trapped inside a dark space the size of a coffin would scare the crap out of me. So I wonder if we'll see consequences later. I hope Sean hasn't made his little brother claustrophobic for life.

On the plus side, I doubt Ethan will attempt to play in the lockers again.

I never know what to say for Veteran's Day. I don't come from a military family (aside from a grandfather who fought in WWII and an estranged uncle who was in the service in some capacity, I think as a meteorologist). Nor do I really know any military families. My closest exposure to the military was when I used to train dogs at Ft. Lewis. I could tell you some funny stories about that, but they'd set the wrong tone for this post.

I guess all I really have to say to the veterans who've kept us safe and made the world a better place is thank you. You guys and gals impress the hell out of me.

Have I mentioned how much I hate late-stage revising? The problem with it is there are no clear goals. When I'm drafting, the goal is 1000 words/day, every day, no excuses, words are permitted to suck. When I'm writing the second draft, the goal is at least one scene per day, words are not permitted to suck. Same for the third draft except it's one full chapter per day.

Now that the novel is near-final, it's harder to know what to do. I've gone through the whole novel a couple of times, polishing wording, and I'm combing through saved feedback to see if there's anything I really ought to fix. I put my query letter through 5 rounds of critique (with 5 different groups of people), and my synopsis through 2 rounds of critique. I'm getting a final round of critique on my opening chapter now. Then... am I done? Hell, I don't know. Maybe. I think I've reached the point where further revisions will make the story different but not better. It's not perfect, and neither is the query letter or synopsis, but I think they're now about as good as I can get them. I think I'll be ready to query once that first chapter gets its final round of polish.

That said, I don't think I'll actually send the query letters out until mid- to late January. Given that agents are always overburdened with queries and looking for reasons to reject, I think throwing my query at them during the insanely busy holiday season would be a bad idea. Also, agents say they get a huge glut of queries in early January, probably the result of New Year's resolutions and people finishing their novels during the holiday break. So I'll want to avoid that time period as well.

In the meantime, I won't be just sitting on my ass. I've got some work to do on my website, and then I'll be writing that Lucien novel, which promises to be all kinds of fun, though I still don't have the plot quite figured out. C'mon, subconscious! Get going! Figure out the plot!

I had this conversation with Ethan yesterday:

Ethan: I know what I want to be when I grow up.
Me: What?
Ethan: A book writer.
Me: [how sweet! he wants to be a writer because I'm a writer!]
Ethan: You know why?
Me: Why?
Ethan: Because Sam is going to be a book writer.
Me: Oh.
Ethan: And I'm going to be whatever Sam is.
Me: Oh.

(Sam is his best friend from kindergarten.)

Ethan is now hard at work writing books. Except he can't read.

Have you ever heard someone who doesn't speak English imitate an English speaker? It's really funny. They say gibberish, yet it bears an uncanny resemblance to English. you hear all the sounds that are characteristic of English, just not actual words.

Anyway, this is apparently what a book looks like when you've seen a lot of them but can't actually read the words yet. It's a page out of one of the books Ethan made:



What gets me is the exclamation points. It's all just writing-like squiggles, except for a "!!!" and a "!". My inner editor wants to step in and tell him, go easy on the exclamation points! Let the writing speak for itself!

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I couldn't get any of Sean because we skipped the awards ceremony for his division, and parents were told not to enter the tournament room for grades 4-6.

Why did Ethan write on his face that morning? I don't know. "War paint?" I asked, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

A while back I posted about how Ethan had trophy envy. He kept stealing the chess trophies from Sean's room and wearing Sean's medals. Well, no longer!



The boys had their first chess tournament of the year this weekend. Ethan was in the kindergarten division, while Sean played in the grade 4-6 Open.

This is the first year I've had a kindergarten chess player, because Sean didn't start playing until 1st grade. The difference in skill levels between the kindergarteners is tremendous. There were two who didn't even know how the pieces moved. And one kid had a rating of 900. 900!! To give you an idea of what a 900 rating means, Sean's chess team, which had kids ranging from kindergarten to 6th grade, brought about 15 players, and of those players, only one of them has a rating over 900, and that's Sean himself. His rating is 1000.

To get a rating of 900 as a kindergartener, this kid must have been playing the circuit last year as a preschooler (you can enter a preschooler in the kindergarten division; many chess families do), and he must have done a lot of winning, which means in addition to being bright, he's had extensive instruction. Ethan's friend G.P. said he took a summer chess camp and this kid was in it, so yes, clearly he comes from a family that is serious about chess.

Ethan played his first game against one of the kids who didn't know how the pieces moved, and won. In his second game, he came up against the 900. Now, here's the thing about chess tournaments: parents don't get to watch their kids play. The kids are shut into a room and even the windows are papered up so we can't peek. I guess this is to prevent cheating and parental pressure. So, Ethan came out from his game against the 900 and told me he won. I was astounded--how could a kid with a couple months' of chess instruction beat a kid with a 900 rating? Well, it turned out he didn't. The standings, posted later, showed that game as a loss for Ethan.

He won his third game, and then reported a loss for games 4 and 5, but the standings showed a win for game 4. I don't understand the discrepancies, and I hope there wasn't a mistake, but the bottom line was he won 3 games and lost 2, which gave him 3rd place in the kindergarten division and qualified him for state! He loves his trophy and carries it everywhere. And on the way home, he asked when was the next tournament.

I am afraid Ethan became quite insufferable after the tournament--arrogant, oppositional. I see he's one of those kids whose self-esteem can't be allowed to get too high, or else he winds up with an obnoxious sense of entitlement.

For older kids, there are two age divisions, 1st-3rd grade and 4th-6th grade. Sean, a 5th grader, plays in 4-6. Those two groups are further subdivided by rating. In 4-6, there is an under-900 division and an open. Because Sean's rating is 1000, he must play in the open. It's an honor to play in the open, but of course it's far more difficult because every player is excellent. The lowest-rated player in the open is a better player than the highest-rated player in the under-900.

Sean lost game 1, won game 2, lost game 3, and won games 4 and 5, for an overall result of 3 wins, 2 losses (same as Ethan!). It did not earn him a placement or trophy, because the 4-6 open is a much bigger division than the kindergarten, but he got a medal and qualified for state.

Sean has extraordinary gameness. It just impresses the hell out of me. In his first game, he was playing against the 3rd-highest-rated player in the whole tournament. His chances of winning that game were near zero, but did he give up? Hell, no. He fought that one hard, and was in the tournament room for an hour, making that kid work for it. That was true for all his games. Frequently, he was one of the last players to finish his game. In one case, he and his opponent were the VERY last board to finish. And it's not that he's a cautious, defensive player--he is the opposite. He plays a highly aggressive game, and when he wins, it's usually in mid-game with a lot of pieces still on the board.

It had to be kind of tough for him, watching all his teammates play in the under-900 division and rack up quick, easy wins, while he, the only player from his team playing in the open, had to fight hard every time, for less glory. (Even harder, perhaps, seeing his little brother get a trophy for exactly the same score as his.) Sean didn't want to stick around for the awards ceremony, so we left early.

First tournament of the year, and both my boys are qualified for state! I couldn't be prouder of them.

For those of you who know some of the others, J.P. and T.C., fellow 4-6 open players, were not at the tournament. But K.C. placed 5th in the kindergarten division, and G.P., a 1st-grader playing in the 1-3 under-800 division, won 5 games in a row and tied with another kid for first place! That's going to shoot his rating up big-time.