Monthly Archives: March 2010

Mar 26 2010

Rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success.

I keep telling myself that, but it’s not very humbling.

I received another rejection letter this week in my in-box.  In a way, I’m glad it came because I can breathe a sigh of relief.  This particular agent asked for my full manuscript back in early January, so I’ve been waiting on pins and needles for two months for their response.  Here’s what they said…

I’m not the right agent for your project.  I didn’t connect with the story, but that isn’t to say that another agent won’t fall in love with your manuscript. Many agents, myself included, represent authors whose work they feel passionately about–it’s very subjective.

Don’t be deterred and keep on submitting until you find the right agent.

Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to review your work and best of luck.

I’m happy to have at least gotten a somewhat personal letter, instead of the (quote) “This is not for me! ~Liza”  (end quote) I got a few years ago.

After I read this, I immediately went to dictionary.com and looked up subjective because for some reason, that word stuck out at me….

Existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought.

If that were true, wouldn’t agents just represent their own work?  And then I laugh and think…Wow!  Some agent actually represented A Night Without Armor.  How sad!  It’s nice to know at least one person was passionate about it; I don’t even think Jewel really cared much for it in the end.

So, it is disheartening.  No one likes rejection of any kind.  But I’ve always said that writing is 99% rejection.  I think I read that on a bathroom wall somewhere.

In the back of my head, I mostly expected this one to come back as a rejection.  But I admit there was a small tiny light of hope, a flicker, that this one might just say Yes. I know my audience for this book and I admit it’ll be small.  But that’s okay.  It’s a story I wanted, I needed, to tell. It lacks a climax, or at least the climax it has is very small and very quick (No sex jokes, please!).  You could say I wrote this book for me.

So, I’m torn.  Do I keep submitting?  Or do I move forward with publishing it myself?  A part of me still wants to keep this one to myself for a while, like a bottle of fine wine in the cellar or like a passionate affair with a secret lover.

It’s subjective.

Mar 21 2010

The Replacement…

Some smartass genius once said that the best way to find what you’ve lost is to buy a replacement. That guy must have never lost his car keys when already running late for work. But I guess that proverb can be considered true for most stuff which can physically be replaced: an ink pen, jewelry, a child’s toy, your favorite CD, a can opener, cigarette lighter, your cell phone, books, a camera… the list goes on.  Then there are those things we must continuously replace because we use them up on purpose.  They are our own personal resources: shampoo, coffee, candles, cigarettes, cough drops, food, beer, toilet paper… you get the idea.

It is the belongings that we can’t replace which we worry about the most, but which we least consider the possibility of losing in the first place: your hair, your waistline, your sanity.  Okay, maybe that last one is a bit dramatic.  Things like youth, memory, and hearing are all possessions we take for granted.  We don’t compare their loss to something as diminutive as losing our car keys. It’s just a harsh reality that those things are all going to go and we have little or no control over it.

What about life itself?  We count down the days to each week, to each month, to each year just checking blocks on the calendar. Each year we replace the calendar, but we can’t replace the fact that our days our still numbered.  We lose track of time; we lose time itself. We may not make it through another year to buy a new calendar.  We can’t replace the loved ones that go before us.  We can’t replace the memories we have of them, although those memories can be lost just as easily as a child’s marble or an action figure.  If only it were just as easy to retrieve them.

Cleaning under the bed one random day, the vacuum gets clogged on your fifth birthday party. Organizing your closet, you find your very first kiss.  It just doesn’t happen, and that’s why there are no replacements for those things.  But we lose them just the same.

Then there are those things that we lose metaphorically speaking.  We lose our minds. We let someone steal our heart away. We have sex and lose our virginity. We waste our life away on useless things like surfing the internet or drinking.

No, we cannot replace our actual life, but we can try very hard to replace those things, physical and emotional, that make our life irreplaceable.

-Shannon Yarbrough

Mar 21 2010

New Moon

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more boring... ABS!

I just finished watching New Moon.  Like any teen girl getting her breasts for the first time, I was anxious to see it.  Two and half hours later I’m still trying to figure out what the heck I just watched and the only thing I can conjure up in my brain is yummy shirtless images of Jacob.

Like the expressions on Edward’s face at any time during the movie, the plot is slow and painful. There’s even a scene where the camera spirals around Bella’s head as she sits in a chair and watches three months go by out the window, while some sad slit-your-wrist teen angst song plays in the background.  They could have cut an hour from the movie just by shaving one second off all the long silent face scenes. I couldn’t wait for Jacob to cut his hair and take off his shirt.  That, and I wished I’d seen the movie in the theater so I could have laughed out loud at all the boring scenes where the teen girls probably cried, like where Edward tells Bella he’s leaving.

And when Jacob finally did take off his shirt, it was done with a flourish (and a tease glimpse of abs) so he could use his shirt to wipe blood from Bella’s face. But gay men need not worry.  Jacob spends almost the entire movie shirtless.  Just when you think the movie is getting boring (which is most of the time), here some hot bod Jacob to liven things up a bit.

In the end, I say yay! to the neat camera angles and special effects and eye candy, but I still hate Stephanie Meyer for getting rich off this melodrama crap. Oh, and can’t wait till part 3 comes out.  OMG! Scrreech!

Mar 13 2010

MJ Furniture to be auctioned…

So Yahoo posts this pic of a chair owned by Michael Jackson which is to be auctioned and will probably bring thousands of dollars, and MJ probably never even sat on it.

Why do rich people own ugly tacky things?

Isn’t it enough that MJ went from being black to white, grabbed his crotch a lot, shared a bed with children, carried around a chimp named Bubbles, wore outrageous clothing that put Liberace to shame, married Lisa Marie, was the best man at Liz Taylor’s wedding, and had tons of plastic surgery?  But this chair???

If I had millions of dollars, the last thing I’d buy is an animal print chair laced with feathers and with clear legs!

Now, the Elephant Man’s bones?  Maybe….but this chair?  Never.

Mar 12 2010

“I am the iPod from Amazon! Nano! Nano!”

…said the pack-of-gum sized mechanical contraption when I took it out of it’s box.

It lay sleeping in a tiny clear coffin-shaped container, awaiting my iTunes kiss.

I immediately searched for the instructions to learn how to work the damn thing!  What I found was a Christian track sized flyer telling me to go to the iTunes website and good luck.  Oh, and it told me which  button to push to get the radio to come on, which I pushed with much success but then couldn’t get the stations to change and ended up adding some white noise station to my Favorites about 10 times.

Technology is hard!

Question?

If you could download any song, what’s the first song you’d want to download?  Any one.  Pick one. Just one.  Your favorite song?  The song you danced to at your wedding?  That latest Lady GaGa?  Song from the prom?  Song you sing every morning in the shower?  Something profound that speaks to you?

I chose the latter.

I downloaded Regina Spektor’s “On The Radio” because in it, she sings this…

This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t
You try until you can’t
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath

And then I downloaded “Suddenly Last Summer” by the Motels.   Don’t ask why because I’m not going to tell you.

And then I downloaded “Here Comes Your Man” by Meaghan Smith from 500 Days of Summer. Would have preferred the Joseph Gordon-Levitt version from the movie but it’s only 92 seconds long.

Lastly, Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap (also from 500 Days of Summer and a Coke commercial (I think). )

And then I got lost in a sea of music I’d never heard before like a kid in a candy store or a reader in a bookstore, or where ever you like to go to get your groove on. So many songs, so many titles, so little time….

I think I will call my first playlist Shannon’s World.  After all, it is my world isn’t it and everywhere I go I hear music and I say, “If my life was a move, this song would be playing right now.”

Technology is awesome!

Mar 11 2010

One Step Forward….and one step backward…

JACKSON, Miss. – Constance McMillen didn’t believe her Mississippi school district would really call off her senior prom rather than allow her to show up with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo. On Thursday, a day after the Itawamba County school board did just that, the 18-year-old lesbian high school senior reluctantly returned to campus to some unfriendly looks, she said.

“Somebody said, ‘Thanks for ruining my senior year.’” McMillen said.

The district announced Wednesday it wouldn’t host the April 2 prom. The decision came after the American Civil Liberties Union demanded that officials change a policy banning same-sex prom dates because it violated students’ rights. And the ACLU said the district not letting McMillen wear a tuxedo violated her free expression rights.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford to force the school district to sponsor the prom and allow McMillen to bring whom she chooses and wear what she wants.

District officials didn’t returned numerous calls left by The Associated Press seeking comment on Thursday.

McMillen said she never expected the district to respond the way it did.

“A lot of people said that was going to happen, but I said, they had already spent too much money on the prom” to cancel it, she said. “I’m just trying to get done what I originally wanted done. Now, we’re having to fight just to have a prom.”

McMillen said she didn’t want to go back to Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton the morning after the decision, but her father told her she needed to face her classmates, teachers and school officials.

“My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I’m still proud of who I am,” McMillen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The fact that this will help people later on, that’s what’s helping me to go on.”

A school board statement said it wouldn’t host the event in Fulton, “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events” but never mentioned McMillen or her girlfriend, who also is a student at the school.

Same-sex prom dates and cross-dressing are new issues for many high schools around the country, said Daryl Presgraves, a spokesman for GLSEN: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a Washington-based advocacy group.

“A lot of schools actually react rather than do the research and find out what the rights of these students are,” said Presgraves, who was preparing to facilitate a discussion about anti-gay bullying at a National Association of Secondary School Principals meeting.

U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., said a bill he’s introduced in Congress would protect students such as McMillen. Polis said the measure would make it illegal to discriminate against gay and lesbian school students. He said his bill is modeled after similar laws in at least 10 states.

“This situation with the prom is a perfect example of why we need to protect students from discrimination. In this case it’s a prom. It other cases, it’s getting beaten up or killed,” Polis said.

Polis said he was “dismayed” by the school board’s action.

“They ruined the prom, not only for this young woman, but for all of the straight kids at the school,” he said.

The school district had said it hoped a privately sponsored prom could be held. McMillen said if that happens, she’s sure she’ll be excluded.

“It’s a small town in Mississippi, and it’s run by an older generation with money. Most of them are more conservative and they don’t agree with it,” she said.

Fulton Mayor Paul Walker said he supports the school district’s decision and knew of no private efforts to host the prom.

“I think the community as a whole is probably in support of the school district,” Walker said of the town of about 4,000.

Southside Baptist Church Pastor Bobby Crenshaw said he’s seen the South portrayed as “backwards” on Web sites discussing the issue, “but a lot more people here have biblically based values.”

Itawamba County is a rural area of about 23,000 people in north Mississippi near the Alabama state line. It’s near Pontotoc County, Miss., where more than a decade ago school officials were sued in federal court over their practice of student-led intercom prayer and Bible classes.

A couple of students had different reactions to the decision.

Anna Watson, a 17-year-old junior at the high school, was looking forward to the prom, especially since the town’s only hotspot is the bowling alley, she said.

“I am a little bummed out about it. I guess it’s a decision that had to be made. Either way someone was going to get disappointed — either Constance was or we were,” Watson said. “I don’t agree with homosexuality, but I can’t change what another person thinks or does.”

McKenzie Chaney, 16, said she wasn’t planning to attend the prom, but “it’s kind of ridiculous that they can’t let her wear the tuxedo and it all be over with.”

Presgraves said his organization hears about school districts that prohibit same-sex prom dates and gay-straight alliance clubs at schools. He said those kind of policies are detrimental to gay students.

“It sends a message that these students shouldn’t be treated the same,” Presgraves said.


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Mar 8 2010

2010 Reading Goal Update

I just finished book 6 for the year on my reading list for pleasure.

I finished Perry Moore’s Hero week before last. Unbeknownst to me when I started reading it, it’s actually teen fiction.  The book follows Thom Creed, a teen who is on the basketball team at school, but still an outsider.  Other guys call him “gay.”  Thom questions his feelings about other boys because he is attracted to them, but is soon faced with a bigger situation at hand.  Being the son of super heroes, Thom discovers he’s developing powers of his own.  His mother has disappeared and his father is now an ex-super hero and trying to live a normal life. When Thom must “come out” and face his sexuality and his super powers, its a big challenge for a kid. He wants to confess to his father but is afraid of what his reaction might be.  When Thom is given the chance to try out for the League, he goes for it and is soon teamed up with a group of other “outcast” heroes who must save the day.

I have to admit this was such a fun read, and definitely not the norm for something I would read.  It requires a lot of imagination and there’s a lot of fantasy involved as the super heroes fight the bad guys with their powers.  The double metaphor of “being a hero” and being gay offers up a great lesson for teens, and I only wish I’d had a book like this when I was growing up and found myself faced with the reality of being different.  I highly recommend this book for anyone with a troubled teen, and even for adults who can open up to such topics and just want to have some fun for a change and read something light.  This book is well written, and I personally can’t wait for more from Mr. Moore.

This past week I read Sea of Tranquillity (yes, that’s how he spells it) by Paul Russell.  I finished it in record time at 400 pages in 8 days, although I have to admit I schemed through a lot of the last 100 pages after realizing this book was not going to really go anywhere.

I was first introduced to Mr. Russell’s writing when I chose his book, The Coming Storm, for a book club pick for a Gay and Lesbian Book Club I used to host when living in Memphis. I immediately fell in love with him as an author, and somehow I’ve made it through all these years without reading this earlier work of his.

Sea of Tranquillity follows the Cloud family.  The father is Allen Cloud who is an astronaut preparing for a trip to the moon. His marriage has ended and he’s just learned his son, Jonathan, is a homosexual. Jonathan moves to Tennessee with his mother where he meets Stayton in biology class.  The two hit it off and become lovers and best friends.

I was immediately drawn to Jonathan as a character because he is extremely different.  He’s that kid in school who looked like a hippie in tie dyed shirts and beads, with long hair.  He has dreams of his own that are a bit overshadowed by his parent’s problems and the fact that his father has walked on the moon. The passages written about Jonathan having sex with a black lawn man are absolutely haunting and even sad, although Jonathan is not. I found myself quoting this book quite a bit on Facebook just because there were sentences that I found myself relating to and I couldn’t get them out of my head.

Overall, the book is pretty stagnant.  Stayton renounces his friendship with Jonathan, and Jonathan moves to Turkey with his mother who has a drinking problem. I found myself skimming through the chapters about the mom because indeed they rambled on like a drunk. Jonathan returns to the states years later and finds Stayton in a relationship with a professional French horn player named Kai who they knew while in high school. Jonathan has also contracted AIDS.

Here, the book follows the three of them as Jonathan encourages them to set up a green house and rehab some property that Kai has inherited. Jonathan and Stayton are still drawn to one another, but Jonathan warns that he is “poison.”  Again, beautiful passages and metaphors throughout intertwined with chapters about Jonathan’s parents that don’t really push the storyline forward.

By page 300, I wanted the story to be over because I knew where it had to go.  And indeed, that’s where it went.  I felt like Russell had poured his heart and soul into breathing life into these characters because they are both intriguing and sad, but in the end he had no idea what to do with them.  There are a lot of passages from Turkey to Africa that I just couldn’t relate to or find out they affected the story.  The parts where Allen is on the moon are both well written and inspiring.  But Jonathan is the center of attention here as we see him grow up, eager for love and adventure, only to have his fate sealed in the end.

Beautiful writing overall that will stay with me forever, but in the end, I’m glad it’s over.

Afterwards last night, I immediately started reading Cirkus by Patty Frazee and I’m only a few pages in and enjoying it very much so far.  Hope to finish it and squeeze in one more before the end of March!

Mar 1 2010

Picture it….Spring…2007…

…I was sitting in my little corner of the world one morning with a cup of coffee in one hand and a voice in my brain that belonged to a young OCD man named Blaine who was trying to get a date.  That’s all I knew about him. I looked at the coffee.  I looked at the blank screen in front of me.  And then I started writing right from page one without a single idea on where this voice would take me. Three months later I had a rough draft for a book I called 33 And Counting later to be renamed Stealing Wishes.

And here I am again three years later. March is here. We’re supposed to reach almost 50 degrees by the end of the week. I’m anxious for Spring, and even more anxious to start writing (doing) something. Only this time it’s not a new idea.  It’s one that’s been haunting me since probably 2005-2006.  Yep, that old historical fiction pitch I’ve been rambling on about for quite a few years now.

Hey, I’ve got 40,000 words invested in this story. That’s half a novel.  I can’t back out now.  And those damn characters won’t get out of my head.  They won’t stop talking to me. Their story must be told!

So, this Spring I’m determined to finish it!  And I think at least another 50,000 words will do it.  So, I’ve set up my little writing meter over there on the right side at the top of the blog so you can see how I’m doing.  As I reach my goal, a stack of paper will pile up in the middle, trying its best to reach that 50,000 benchmark. And if you scroll over to the far right of the blog, you’ll see Spud, my little couch potato mascot.  Right now, he’s busy watching TV but soon, he’ll get busy typing.  Just you wait…

Spud and I are gonna make history this Spring…even if we have to write it.  Oh wait…it’s historical fiction so we will be writing it!

Welcome to Spring!