Someone Loves My Blog

You like me! You really like me!

I would like to thank Jamie Eyberg for nominating me. So now I must share the love.

Here are the rules:

1) Add the logo of your award to your blog.
2) Add a link to the person who awarded it to you.
3) Nominate at least seven other blogs.
4) Add links to those blogs on your blogs.
5) Leave a message for your nominees on their blogs.

Let's see. I nominate . . .

Chris F. Holm is a scientist by day, writer by night. He's got the goods. Plus, he cracks me up.
Jennifer Jackson is an agent at the Donald Maass Literary Agency. If you want to get into the mind of an agent, this is the blog for you.
Janet Reid is the Query Shark. Submit at your own risk. If you're struggling with the query letter and you want to know what NOT to do, take a look. It's also good if you need a quick laugh at someone else's expense.
Jennifer Brozek is the editor of The Edge of Propinquity ezine. He blog is visually sharp and clean. She is a lady with a lot going on. I get stressed just READING about her daily chores.
Kameron Hurley is someone I just recently stumbled across, and I'm glad I did. She has a great voice, a warped take on life (in a good way) and is too young to have to watch her pizza intake.
Jamie Eyberg is getting another one (and not just because he sent me mine). He's a writer of all trades, a man that likes to work with his hands, and his blog is great to read. Makes me want to visit Iowa.
Last and certainly not least is Catherine Gardner. I know, I know. She's been given like a hundred of these, but that should make you sit up and wonder what all the fuss is about. Go on. Check out her blog. I promise I won't get jealous (well, maybe just a little).

On a side note. I was going to nominate my wife's blog. Let me tell you a bit about this lady. She's strong, but lets me baby her. She's smart, but she tries to tell me I'm smarter. She's independent, and dependable. Beautiful, but not vain. And when she laughs her nostril flare in a way that makes me want to kiss her. She does do some writing but keeps it to herself. Her blog is about her journey through life. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's heartbreaking. I would have nominated her and put a link up, but she asked me not to. But she didn't say I couldn't tell you all a little about her.

The Most Wonderful Distraction Ever

On Tuesday, September the 9th, 2008 at 7:31 a.m. (EST), I received the most wonderful distraction to my writing that I could ever want. My beautiful daughter made her grand entrance into the world, weighing in at 7 pounds, 13 ounces.

Trying to adjust my writing schedule to fit the needs of my son (who just turned 18 months) has been a nice learning experience. Now that I have two in diapers, life will be nothing if not interesting.

I'm very happy to be a father (there was a time I wasn't sure that I could be a father, but that's a different story). My family is the greatest treasure I have. I know that life is a bullet train with no stops. That's why I try to look out the window as often as possible.

I'll just keep on writing the ten to midnight shift. You'll not hear me complain.

TEoP

Last night I receive an email from Jennifer Brozek, editor of The Edge of Propinquity. A few weeks ago I had received an email from Jennifer stating that my story "The Mask of Deslow Mansion" had made it through the first round of readings. Of course I was happy for that good news, and have been waiting with faux-patience for the follow up letter.

I’m in danger of getting off topic here, so I’ll try to keep it simple. Back to the email from last night.

When I saw it come up in my inbox I was just happy that it wasn’t spam. That’s all I seem to get these days. It took me a few minutes to open it, as it always does when I’m opening letters from editors. It started out like this:

"Unlike every other one of my story submissions, you do not get a form letter response."

Ah oh, I thought. It’s a rejection. But at least it was going to be a nice rejection. The kind that come with advice or admonishment. The kind that are like nice girls, who after you hit on them, explain to you why they aren’t going to give you their number, and somehow make you feel all right about it.

I’m not saying that’s ever happened to me (not the being rejected part, the feeling all right about it part) but I’ve heard stories.

Anyway, I forged on through the email. It takes me a second to absorb what I’m reading. I’ve told you before, I’m preternaturally thickheaded. The words are all in English. I just have to wait for my brain to put them in order. When the ol’ gray matter finally kicks in and I see the sentence that follows, this is what I read:

"Rather than keep you in suspense, the short version is: I want this story."

I just love acceptance letters. Love ‘em! Like a fat kid loves cake.

Sorry. I’ll be all right.

"The Mask of Deslow Mansion" is slated to be in either the January or February volume of The Edge of Propinquity.

I can’t wait.

Where is 44 & 51?

All is quiet in the World According to Gabe. The Mask of Deslow Mansion has made it through a first-round reading at a particular publication, and now I’m just doing what I always do . . . wait with a side of more wait.

I have no new projects on the burner due to my obsession with perfecting my first novel, Guarding the Healer, before sending it out to agents. I have my query letter and my short one-page synopsis written. Right now I am systematically polishing ten pages of the novel a day--most days anyhow--while writing my long synopsis (a.k.a. the dreaded outline). It’s rough going since the only good time I have to work is from around 10:00 p.m. to around 1:00 a.m.

But, hey, sleep is overrated, right? Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, the hallucinations from sleep deprivation make great writing fodder.

So, to make up for my short and pointless post, here is a neat little item that I stole from Catherine J. Gardner.

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
*
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

* Numbers 44 & 51 seem to be missing for some reason. I tried to track them down, but was unsuccessful.

Milk Duds On My Desk

I’m sorry to report that my story "The Mask of Deslow Mansion" will not be appearing in Graveside Tales’ anthology Harvest Hill.

Though they liked the story, it just didn’t fit well with the group. I always did have trouble playing with others.

Oh well, back to submitting. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. The box of Milk Duds sitting on my desk is helping.

Congratulations to all who find themselves between the covers of Harvest Hill. I’m sure it will be a great read.