see you in NY?

I'm packing my bags tonight for NY SCBWI. Can't wait to get my creative  batteries recharged and connect with my writing world in person. I hope I'll see lots of LJ friends there--keep an eye out for the redhead with the Debutantes tote bag.

next step for CANDOR

FedEx delivered my page proofs today. My story is laid out in page format, complete with copyright page, acknowledgements, and dedication. I'll have about two weeks to do one last read of CANDOR and mark any necessary changes.

I can't calculate how many times I read CANDOR while I was working on it. But now it seems entirely different. I read the first chapter and it felt like someone else wrote it. It's amazing the difference a simple layout can make.

songs fueling my writing lately

I do my best writing when I listen to music. While I've been working on the synopsis, plot planning and character outlines for my WIP, here's what's been inspiring me lately:

• "Don't You Evah" by Spoon: I love this loose, weird, affable rant against people who have the easy life. Or at least that's how I interpret it...
• "Throw It All Away" by Brandi Carlile: Because her sad songs make me way, way sad. Helps me to crawl into my MC's Big Problem.
• "Poison Pushy" by Stanton Moore: The retro loungey song is the soul of the duh-he-loves-you dude that my MC mistreats... and mistreats...
• "Say Hey (I Love You)" by Michael Franti: 'Cause it gets my fingers moving!
• "Another Postcard" by the Barenaked Ladies: It's absurd (a mystery person sending postcards with chimpanzees), and I'm inspired by the absurd in this work. Although I DID take out the rogue genetically engineered rooster that popped in at about midnight one night...(did you just hear my agent and editor shudder with simultaneous relief and fear?)

I would admit to having "Full Moon" by The Black Ghosts on heavy rotation but I don't want to be tooooo much of a Twilight fangirl...

My favorite new writing tool

What writer doesn't love their gadgets? My new favorite is a lonnnnnng wire picture hanger that I bought from IKEA. It's a thick wire that stretches from one end of a wall, over my desk, through an open area, to another wall. That's about ten feet of uninterrupted hanging space, though I think it could have gone for as long as twelve, if I had the room. There are little clips dangling from it--also purchased from IKEA--and I attach index cards to them. The clips easily slide along the wire, and I can also simply pull one off and move it to another part of the wire.

This has made plotting quite a lot of fun. I fill index cards with chapter ideas, then place them on the wire. Shuffle. Shuffle again. Take some off, add others. Repeat.

It also makes my study look like there's a Serious Writer who works in it. Perhaps a slightly unhinged Serious Writer. Which makes me stand a little straighter and plunge into work a little sooner when I walk into the room.

The picture hanger, plus two packages of clips, ran me about $18. Well worth it!

Haiti

The speaker showed us pictures
and spoke
searing words.
Haiti suffers.
1 hour away
from Us.
Rich us.
Rich me,
moaning:
oh woe dirty bathroom sink
oh woe defiant child.
No running water
in Haiti’s villages.
Rampant disease.
Parasites invade
feet
soaked in sewage.
2 out of 3 children
Dead
by age 5.
Dead.
His organization built
toilets.
They are
the villages’
Pride.
I can open my
wallet.
I can tell my
friends.
But I can’t understand:
why them?
why not me?
How do I begin to
Deserve
my riches?

For more information, please visit the website for Voice of Haiti.

what I'm working on

For the curious--these days, I'm working on the synopsis and three sample chapters for my second contracted book with Egmont USA. Once I've finished work on those, I'll send them off to my agent. Hopefully she'll love them. After we've had a chance to talk and I've made any necessary changes, I'll shuttle my new baby off to my editor. Hopefully she, in turn, will love them--and then I'll be drafting book 2 like crazy.

In the new year, I've tried something new for setting aside writing time: making a weekly schedule. On Sunday nights, I draw a simple grid that lists the hours I'll be writing each day (such as 6-7 AM and 9-10 PM). I commit to a minimum of 10 hours per week (although once I start steaming along, I tend to spend more time than that). Then I post the schedule on my study door. My husband knows when to expect me around--and not. And I also can see that I've still got some time for vegging in front of the TV, vacuuming (or coming up with reasons not to), and sleeping!

I'm also trying to set aside some time each week to work on marketing/promo things for CANDOR. The great thing is that easy, free opportunities are out there to promote my book. But many of them take some initial effort--filling out questionnaires, etc. So I just chip away as best I can.

Finally I'm working on my goal of being more involved in the writing community: joining local organizations like the WNBA (no, not the basketball league!), being a more frequent participant in the my listservs and online communities, and heading to conferences (can't wait for NY SCBWI!).

Wordle fun

My sister just pointed me to Wordle. Paste in the text of your book and it'll make a word cloud from most frequently-used words. You can pick the font, the colors, and tweak the layout. Addictive--and actually could be a good writing tool, if you want to see what words you tend to use most frequently.

I pasted the first three chapters of CANDOR into Wordle, and here's what I got (click on the image to see the full version):

title="Wordle: CANDOR by Pam Bachorz"> align=center src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/441762/CANDOR_by_Pam_Bachorz"
alt="Wordle: CANDOR by Pam Bachorz"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">

go win yourself some swanky swag

Today and today only, enter to win a goody bag over at The Feast of Awesome, a community of writers with YA and MG books coming out in 2009.

miles between us

Your DVD
came today.
Full of
memories.
We eat dinner
while we watch,
consuming
eagerly.
A cruise.
Colorado.
Piano recital.
Birthdays
we missed.
Jack-o-lantern
we didn't
see.
You're running
the race
alone
I want
to be next to you.
I won't cry.
Not in front of
my Boy.
But inside?
I howl.
I love you.
I miss you.
I wish
moving didn't put
miles
between us.

Apps I'm using to build my website

I've known for awhile that I needed to do a website, but I wasn't sure where to start. This was particularly annoying since, two cities ago, I used to build websites for my day job.

But it's a new world now and I don't have the snazzy (and expensive) tools I used at work, like the Adobe CS Suite and high-end HTML editors. Plus there's style sheets and Flash and other cool dizzying technologies. In my days of website building we used HTML and PERL. And we thought animated GIFs were just insanely cool. I'm about 10 years behind.

But I had an unexpected windfall of free time this weekend, so I decided This Was It. I was either building this site or writing up a description of what I wanted so somebody could do it for me.

I started by surfing author sites--a LOT of author sites. I decided to go with a very simple layout that used minimal graphics--partly because I like the look and partly because I didn't want to monkey with making graphics or have to find someone to make them for me!

Then I looked for HTML editors that would help me to build the pages. I found Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer, which I downloaded as a 21-day free trial. It's quite nifty. I don't know if it would be friendly enough to someone who's never built sites, but for someone who understand the basic concepts of design but doesn't want to monkey with code, it was perfect. Once I got my home page built, I knew I could do the whole site.

I also embedded content in my pages with some cool tools (all free!):
--flickrSLiDR embeds a slideshow of  images that inspired the setting of CANDOR (which I stored on flickr)
--Playlist offers a list of songs that helped to inspire we while I wrote CANDOR
--Quibblo let me build a fun online quiz

So I am proud to say my site is nearly, nearly done. As soon as I have a book cover--or a placeholder graphic for it--it'll go live. And I'll be sure to post here when it does!

If anyone has nifty ideas about creating placeholder cover graphics, or you've seen someone do it effectively, please let me know.

Next challenge: book trailer.

Cool tool to see links between words

This Christmas I got a nifty gift: a piece of software called Visual Thesaurus. I'd  been using the web version but it's a very limited demo. VT draws 3-D clickable maps to illustrate the links between words, clustering groups of related words. It's so much more useful than the straight text list you get in a conventional thesaurus. I've used it to brainstorm about character attributes, to discover title ideas, and just to find that perfect word that I can't quite put my fingers on without help.

The software also comes with a ton of proper names--people and places--linked together, but I haven't tried it. Useful for writers of historical fiction, maybe?

I have no financial interest in boosting this product! I'm just a big fan.

my title is a word of the day

CANDOR is the word of the day on dictionary.com! Gosh darn, it doesn't mention my book. :-)

I particularly like the old Latin definition of "purity and openness"--which is the opposite of what reaaaaaly happens in my fictional town of Candor, Florida. Lots of hidden dirt and secrets!