Two birthdays + Christmas + New Year's + another birthday =

WHEW! I have officially survived my baby's first birthday, my dad's birthday, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year's Eve (upon which I stayed up until nearly 10:30 p.m.), New Year's Day, and my oldest son's sixth birthday. To celebrate, I shall post this picture:

Christmas morning! Awww. Aren't my boys handsome?

I have been slacking with queries, but shall resume forthwith. Once I recover from all the holidays. Whew!

Movies!

I really want to see Catching Fire. And Ender's Game. And part two of The Hobbit. I've read all the books, and I would love to watch the movies! But when I had a choice this weekend (and, more importantly, a babysitter), I went with my husband to Frozen. Because of this:

I want ice powers! And singing powers! And...wow.

Pretty.

Secrets?

I've been thinking a lot about flawed characters recently. Characters who are jealous, or angry, or arrogant. And so I decided to make a list of flaws I secretly like to see in characters because I've experienced them myself. Because I love lists. And I really should post a bio thingy for Pitch Wars but I don't want to, so a list of dark secrets characterization tips should cover that, right? Right.

1. Jealousy. I'm the oldest of four girls, and my two sisters just younger than me had blond hair and blue eyes. They looked like Disney princesses (who were, excepting Snow White, blond), and I...well, I sorta matched the wicked witches. Oh, and there was the stop-following-me-don't-catch-up-to-me-in-swimming-lessons jealousy, too. I'm sympathetic to jealousy.

2. A feeling of awkwardness/not fitting in. My mom permed my hair in middle school. Like huge, poofy, I-was-struck-by-lightning perms. In middle school. And I wore Winnie the Pooh shirts. And I had braces. I did not get invited to parties until I joined the swim team in high school so the chlorine and wetness could kill all the frizz. I think everyone's felt alienation. But not everyone had to go to school smelling like horrible home-done perm. And that is a very good thing.

3.  Overconfidence leading to ruin or humbling failure. Two of my favorite authors growing up were Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (of Dragonlance, Darksword, and Death Gate Cycle fame). I know they're nerdy, but I love a lot of what they write, largely because they're really good at this theme. Truly intelligent, talented characters who know they're intelligent/talented/magically supreme make extremely arrogant plans and end up trapped in the abyss, or leading their people to slaughter on the battlefield, or destroying their entire planet. I suppose I've never done anything that disastrous, but give me time. As a sleep-deprived mother of three young children, a teacher, a writer, a shameless book/video game/animation/MyLittlePonyDr.WhoTheLastAirbenderAdventureTimeJossWhedon geek, there's plenty of stuff (including small humans!) that I could mess up on (especially if I'm overconfident enough to think I know the schemes of my small humans...).

I like crises of faith, too. Oh! And anger while grieving, and humorous revenge (like Fred and George's takedown of Umbrage), and mistakes made in anger and exhaustion. But I've told you enough (yikes! the perms!), and I promised to post a video for my five-year-old if he went to bed  well (hooray for sleeping!). So the video below is for him, but feel free to list flaws you like in the comments! I like growing my lists. Maybe that's a flaw, too.

And, just because I like Imagine Dragons (did you hear about what they did?), I kinda like this odd music video...

Princess Bride

We've started watching old movies on Sundays with our kids. Stuff like Mary Poppins, Wizard of Oz, and Disney classics. Our five-year-old can get nervous about some of the newer animated films (Mufasa! Nooooo!), but he's really enjoying a lot of our carefully-explained Sunday choices.

So a few weeks ago we watched The Princess Bride. And tonight, whenever I ask him to do something, he's been responding with "As you wish."

It's really cute.

I love him, too.

Submitting

Submitting! Submitting?

I don't know which punctuation the word deserves.

I'm sort of nervous. Sort of so wrapped up in real life that maybe I'll be distracted and submitting will be easy. Sort of unsure about everything, except that if I don't send my manuscripts to agents, I won't get an agent. So.

I've actually been taking a break from all submission stuff since the birth of my third son. I couldn't get time off from my teaching job, and, of course, I still had to keep my two older children alive. I needed less stress, and while I couldn't give up writing without going crazy, I could easily give up the submitting process (whereby I send out many emails to agents and get requests and wait and revise and wait some more). So I worked on some agent-requested revisions. And wrote my third book. And kept my kids alive, and taught, and read, and lived...

Now I'm back to the submitting. Back to the Absolute Write Water Cooler forums (once I make another post--I've been a silent lurker for ages now, it seems, and I'm strangely nervous!), and querytracker and contests and all the rest. It's hard and it's scary, but I'm really glad other authors endure it because then I can read their books. And if there's one thing I love, it's reading a good book.

Writing's fun, too. Sometimes.

So if you're submitting, too, I wish you the best of luck.I applaud your courage, whether you get an agent this round or go back to revisions, And for those of you who persevered and got agents, hooray!

Submitting!

From here. I could visit this path quite happily. Mmm...peaceful submitting path...

The Cephalopod Coffee House: Blood of Dragons

I love fantasy. I read widely across genres, from picture books (of course) to literary works, middle grade and young adult, contemporary-realistic to steampunk and beyond. I've even dabbled in westerns and romance! But my favorite authors in later elementary school were Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, and I have to admit: a fantasy novel with good characterization will get me pretty much every time. So in addition to all the books I'm reading on autism, plus critiques and papers I'm grading, I picked up some fantasy to help me with my sanity.

Enter Blood of Dragons, the best book I've read this month!

Robin Hobb writes some excellent characters, and I've been reading her books (in trilogies, although not exactly in order) for a couple years. And her endings--well, her endings make me happy. Blood of Dragons is the last book of four, and Robin Hobb gave me pretty much everything I wanted. Comeuppance for evil villains! Survival of those who absolutely had to live for me to be satisfied! POV from reptilian dragons who seem very much not human! Carnage (in all the right ways)! Internal, thoughtful characterization, where characters grow to accept their strengths! It's not quite as good as the Liveship Trader series (my favorite), but Blood of Dragons distracted me during a rough month, and that's about all I could want in a novel.

Running out of gas

My title could be metaphorical, what with the three children and teaching job and cats and house that is sort of not falling apart except you could probably see the mess in our front room from Google Maps if it's been updated recently (don't check!), but this is a literal running out of gas. Let me tell you what happened a few days ago...

It all started when I was taking my five-year-old to Kindergarten. We were having the usual conversation ("Can I play games after school?" "No." "Can I stay home from school?" "No." "Whhhyyy?" "School is important. Look! A distracting noun of some sort that I see out the window!") when all the lights on our Prius lit up at once. The giant red triangle-exclamation-point thingy, the squiggly exclamation point, the one that has a plus and minus, the engine light, all of them. Luckily this made it so I didn't have to find a bee or a rabid dog outside to distract my five-year-old. I could point to the lights. But then again, I had never seen so many lights.

"What happens if our car explodes?" my five-year-old asked, clearly hoping to be exempt from school.

Unfortunately for him, the car stayed intact and made it to the kindergarten door with a minute to spare. Five-year-old dashed out, forgetting everything he'd just said because look! friendsrecessyay! He headed inside, and I headed for home. It's only a mile or so drive, and the many lights had dimmed to just three (including, of course, the big red exclamation triangle of potentially expensive despair), and I was just turning the fourth-to-last turn when our car slowed, the miles per hour ticking down from 15 to 10 to 5... I pushed the gas petal, but we were gentle-breeze slow at that point.

"Wheee!" said my three-year-old with absolute conviction.

"Whee," I said, pulling over to the side and hoping I wouldn't die right behind someone's driveway.

I drifted to a very slow stop in front of the house with the big star on it. I pulled out the three-year-old, who was extremely happy to have the car die because, hey, running by fences, and the baby, who drooled on my arm. We walked home. I put them down for naps. An hour later we walked back, me pushing a stroller and carrying a gas can that I hoped would let our car move.

It worked. The lights turned off. My baby and three-year-old had to go back in the car, which smelled very much like gas because of the gas can I had to carry in the back.

Whee indeed.

So. Moral of this story is that the battery in a Prius only lasts about a half-mile once you run out of gas. And school is important.

Look!

A platypus!