Good Things

Written yesterday, but posted in the wrong place. Oops. 

I'm twenty-four today. I have many feelings about this, but they tend to make anyone older than me roll their eyes, so I'll leave off here. It's been a rough few weeks for me mentally--I hate winter--but today has good things. A new Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Grey's Anatomy (with Zola!), and Crash Course. Dinner with my friends. Good things. Also, I finally unpacked the latte maker my mom gave me for Christmas and holy shizznit, I may never leave the apartment again. Not like I do anyway.

Other good things are the fact that I've decided to start querying Ghost Light again on the first. I got a rejection on the full I had out (this morning. Happy birthday to me), so it'll be a fresh start. Also, I got into Cupid's Blind Speed Dating Contest thanks to the kissing scene I posted (totally exciting, because that was my Revision-in-Progress), and it'll be finishing up. Perfect timing, no excuses.

The next Maureen Johnson book comes out Tuesday. I pre-ordered from Harvard Bookstore, rather than online, because it's less than half a mile away. I forgot that about snow. I forgot that I have class on Tuesdays, and will have to walk up there with my bag, and that it's further than the bus stop I take paratransit rather than walking to. I have a major presentation that day. Picking my book up before class. Honey badger don't curr. Of course, online-orders are starting to ship, but the sooner I get it, the sooner I'll want the third one. I can wait.

This is the reasoning that started when I got denied the ARC from NetGalley.

My sorority little posted this on my facebook wall this morning. Snape's last line is particularly apt, because I do, in fact, share a birthday with Alan Rickman. Enjoy!

Another Reading!

Real update one of these days, I swear, but for Bostonians, I'm doing another New Voices reading at the Brookline Public Library on Wednesday, the 20th, at 3pm. It's the day before my birthday, so please come if you can!

CLC Kissing Scene Competition

You guys know I rarely post writing here, but this was too fun to pass up. Cupid's Literary Connection is having a kissing scene contest, and I just got to the hot first kiss in the manuscript I'm revising!

This comes from my YA manuscript FALL TO PIECES. After an accident at a concert that leads to her losing her leg, wannabe rockstar Meridian has had to forgo the transient life she has with her travel-writing mother. She moves to suburban Massachusetts to live with with her aunt, uncle and cousin, Natalie. Most people in town think she’s an attention-seeking brat, except for Kyle, the boy next door, who is the only one who doesn’t treat her like a snobbish foreigner. In this scene, they’re sitting in her front yard, waiting for her aunt to get home.

“I have a theory about why you’re avoiding me,” Kyle said.

“I’m not one of your characters. You can’t dissect me.” I reached for my crutches, but his breath was brushing my cheek in a way I couldn’t bring myself to pull away from.

“You’ve never told anyone so much about yourself. You’re used to people either knowing everything already, or not caring about the past.”

I put one hand against the trunk of the tree and lifted my butt up a couple of inches.

“Don’t.” His pressed his hand against my knee—my left knee. His face didn’t show that he’d even noticed where his fingers landed. He didn’t care.

“Your freckles,” I said, tilting his face to examine them. “They’re like tiny clusters of musical notes without a scale.” He leaned back a little and squinted at me. I smiled. He didn’t always know what I was thinking. “I wonder what they’d sound like.”

“Can you play them?” he asked. The blush in his cheeks went up a notch, and the curiosity in his eyes was even more intense than it got whenever I told him about my most fascinating Parisian nights. 

“You know it.” I pressed my lips against one of the freckles, then moved it down to the next one, varying speeds based on the width of the dots, like they were whole-notes and eightth-notes dancing around without a time stamp. “How’m I doing?”

Writer Boy didn’t respond with words. He moved his neck just enough for our mouths to meet, and in the beat before my mind processed the tingling in my lips, I realized that silence could express as much emotion as song.

Kyle kissed without desperation or impatience. He put his arms around me, but his hands didn’t go straight to my waistband. Too soon, he drew back. The flower slipped out of my hair, but he caught it. He swept it across my mouth and then offered it to me. “I just want you to know, it’s okay. You can tell me things. Anything you want. I won’t….”

Longing

Because the semester has started (and how) I spend a lot of time at my desk, hunched over a book. The other day, midway through reading an article on masculinity in Tom Sawyer, I had the thought that in a few months I won't be doing this anymore. No more long hours spent slaving away with sticky flags and highlighters.

Except there will be. And they will be hours I love. I will be able to spend more time marking up and taking notes on my own manuscripts, and I absolutely can't wait.

I've been sick the past few days with some sinus thing i caught on the plane, and maybe a little homesickness. Yesterday morning, I woke up at seven-thirty with my head exploding. But, still, I stayed up until one working on my current revisions. This morning I woke up and actually wanted to get out of bed for the first time in days. Having my brain really working on writing does that to me. It makes my life better. And I can't wait to have it more.

On a totally different note, most of you know I've been working on a MS that deals with amputation for a long time. I would like to note here that there is a scene in it very similar to one from last night's Grey's Anatomy--which involved treatment for phantom pain--years from now when I finally get the MS published, I plan to link here when people ask if I got the idea from my favorite show because I didn't. It's been in my MS ever since my friend told me about the technique some time in 2011.

Just for the record.

Flip Side

My surgery went well, although it's kept me home a week past the time we thought it would. I'm having to Skype into both my classes this weeks. Oh, modern technology, the wonders of you.


We're somehow halfway through January, so it's pointless to do any year-in-review now, I suppose. This post will be more of a plan for the year to come.

Starting next week, I want to go back to a M-W-F posting schedule, as best I can. It's going to be a year of change no matter what. God and grades willing, I'll be finishing my program this year. This will probably mean I'll leave Boston at some point, or maybe not. To go home, or get a job, or who knows.

I'm going to start querying Ghost Light again next month. My four requests have become three rejections, so it'll be a clean slate. My main goal for the year is to get the two other WIPs into querying state, and we'll see where it goes from there. Clean-ish slate!

Happy new-ish year!

At the end of the year....

This should be an awesome 2012 recap post, or a top ten books/shows/memes list, or an outline of my plans for 2013. Unfortunately, it's can't be. I'm ringing in the new year in the hospital. I had a planned surgery on the 26th and have to lie in a bed called a clinatron, which is full of sand and has air blowing through it to keep the sand moving. This prevents pressure from being on any part of your body so a wound can close. It's loud and I can't sit up well in it. This, no major post, just s note to say thanks to all who have read this blog in 2012. Old friends, new friends, roommates, family. All of you are so special to me and I love you! Better post when I'm discharged. And please no worry about me. I'm lying around reading and am thus happy. Also, nobody panic, I have seen Les Mis. All is well.

How're We Gonna Pay?

Oh blogosphere, I know it's been far too long, and I have so much to blog about, but finals are kicking my butt! I turned in my independent study, but I have one more paper before I'm through. However, I wanted to take a break from that work to bring you a post about the production of RENT my roommate and I saw on Sunday night.

It was a student production done at the cabaret-style club near our apartment, where I saw Cabaret and where Amanda Palmer played a bunch of times. The spaces incredible for a minimalistic show like RENT, and they used it beautifully. The ensemble songs like "Rent" and "La Vie Boheme" were excellent, mostly because so much of the chorus just owned it. Angel and Mimi were also really talented.

The production made a few odd choices, though. The arc of Mimi's drug use wasn't clear--a shame because Mimi was great--which made her and Roger seem to be yo-yoing only because of Benny. Roger, therefore, seemed like a bit of a jerk, and the actor wasn't very strong in songs like "One Song Glory." I didn't believe he was dying. I didn't believe Mimi was dying, either, which makes me wonder: Are we too far out from the AIDS epidemic for a privileged group of Bostonians to do this show justice for a quick Christmas run? To understand the pains of young artists trying to make it in the East Village of the 90s? Ot was this just a group of musical theater students who haven't quite gotten the "acting" thing down yet? I'm not sur, but the part of my brain that critiqued a million shows during my days of high school theater woke up and wondered.

There was some whitewashing in the cast as well, which is unfortunately unsurprising in this town. Collins was white, which doesn't matter, except that his inability to nail the jazzy tone in "Santa Fe" called attention to this. Benny was Caucasian as well, and none of the typically-white (or, I guess, originally white) characters were different. In fact, the girl playing Maureen looked strikingly like Idina Menzel. It wasn't the specific racial choices that felt odd so much as the lack of diversity.

Still, it was my first time seeing the show live, meaning I can check something else off sixteen-year-old Chelsey's bucket list.