Rituals & Pouring Chocolate on Stuff

When I was in high school I worked at an ice-cream and pizza place.

And if you think that's funny - I worked at a Hallmark during college. Yep. Mindy, selling greeting cards. It's downright surreal.

Anyway... whenever we had a new ice cream flavor for people to try we let them have a sample before committing to buy. But I had a little trick where I offered to pour chocolate on stuff if they were unsure after a plain taste.

And it totally worked.

It's weird the things that become buried in your skull, popping out at completely inappropriate moments years down the line. I don't know what it was... maybe the fact that there was a counter between us, or that I really wanted the student to fall in love with the book I was giving them, but with that ice-cream joint 10 years in my past I told the kid -

"Try this. If you don't like it bring it back and I'll pour some chocolate on it."

Since the title was THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO by Patrick Ness, I didn't end up pouring chocolate on anything, but it was a good lesson in a few ways.

1) The kids knew early on that the new librarian was insane.
2) Association can be buried deep, and we're not always in control of what our brain is kicking out.

Because of being in the service industry for most of my life thus far, I wanted the person across the counter to be happy. My brain randomly offered to pour chocolate on something to accomplish that goal and my mouth said HELL YES! GOOD IDEA, BRAIN!

This is why writing rituals work so well. Once those synaptic pathways in our brains have been beaten into well-formed tunnels, our thoughts squeeze through without a lot of voluntary action on our part. This can apply to so many things in life, but it's especially useful for writers.

We're always terrified we're going to fail, that this time the white page will remain blank, or the cursor is just going to blink instead of produce a string of words in its wake. If you can set up a ritual before writing - even a small one - and stick to it, soon you'll find the thoughts flowing from your brain out through your fingertips because both brain & body instinctively know what to do in this situation.

My own ritual is quite simple. I write in my bed, lying down, usually between the hours of 9 and 11 PM. If I'm not working on a WIP at the moment, I use the time for blogging, or reading. My brain knows that I'm either going to write, or absorb writing through reading. Either way, many of the same synapses are firing, and I can count on them to rev right up when I call on them to do so.

The drawback?

I haven't poured chocolate on anything in a damn long time.

Thursday Thoughts

Thoughts lately...

1) Having watched Skyfall last weekend I have to say that just once I'd love to see James Bond jump into a boat / car / motorcycle that he doesn't instinctively know how to operate. While I really enjoyed watching Daniel Craig wearing a very nice suit and operating a backhoe, my farmer-girl suspension of disbelief hit a serious bump. Those things are NOT easy to operate.

2) I also watched quite a bit of professional boxing this weekend. Instead of all the posturing and grunting, I think it'd be totally awesome to see a boxer who apologized to their opponent every time they got a good hit in.

3) I have an issue with cereal milk. When I get to the bottom of my bowl and still have milk left, it tastes fresh and cold. But when I go ahead and put more cereal in there it tastes lukewarm. This makes no sense to me. 

An Interview with Elsie Chapman, Author of DUALED

I'm lucky (or cunning) enough to have lured yet another successful writer over to my blog for an SAT - Successful Author Talk. SAT authors have conquered the query, slain the synopsis and attained the pinnacle of published. How'd they do it? Let's ask 'em!

Today I've got an extra special person on the blog with me, Elsie Chapman, author of DUALED. Elsie is a fellow Friday the Thirteener, and we have a heck of a lot of inappropriate fun together. I got my hands on an ARC of DUALED and I wanted to have an extra special interview with her tailored to help get the awesomeness that is this debut title out into the world. DUALED releases TODAY from Random House Books for Young Readers.

DUALED’s world is a militant place where the survival of the fittest has been taken to new heights. Where did you get the idea?

My son got the wheels turning, actually. He asked me one day, How did we know for sure we didn’t all have someone out there just like us, and we just didn’t know about them? It was a really interesting question because the implications would be incredible. Imagine someone out there walking around with your face, your body, living a whole other life. So then I started thinking about parallel worlds, and which world would get to be the real one and why, and it took off from there.

West Grayer isn’t a conventional character. She’s got big issues in a world where everyone is faced with dealing death to their alter ego. Was it hard to write a character that isn’t going to be easy to swallow for some readers?

I hope it doesn’t make me a horrible person if I say no, because it came really easily. Mostly because I had to get into West’s headspace, and from her point of view, you can’t be anything but ruthless. I also wanted her actions to be truly hers, right or wrong. Whatever she does is not because of forced circumstances but truly her own decisions. That we get to see how it all weighs on her makes her more relatable, too, I think.

In DUALED, every teen has a window of time once they are “activated” to take down their Alt. Violence is dealt in the streets and bystanders know to make themselves scarce in the face of it. Not only is there a sense of kill-or-be-killed, but also every-person-for-themselves type mentality. Yet West forms strong relationships with her brothers and sisters, as well as Chord, her brother’s best friend. How can relationships like that persevere in an environment where anyone can be taken from you, any moment?

I think for Alts to know such love and experience a loving childhood only emphasizes what a completion is worth. It makes Alts want to do their best and to be the ones who end up surviving. Not only to return to such relationships—for someone like West who’s lost nearly everyone, this wouldn’t be possible—but for the chance to create more once they’ve completed. It’s a pretty hardcore society, and it’s human nature to try to justify a system that asks them to live the way they do.

Along with other children, West spent her early years training to kill someone who looks exactly like her. What kind of impact has this had on her?

In the beginning of the book, West comes across as pretty confident. She needs to believe she’ll win, otherwise she’s already at a disadvantage. But she’s also a realist, like most idles are before going active. She doesn’t actually allow herself to dream, or even think about the future that much, knowing that until she’s complete, there’s no point. It’s when she experiences a huge loss that her confidence gets shaken, and all of a sudden she starts questioning her own capabilities. I really liked seeing how she changed throughout the course of the novel.