Just a quick note, minions. If you’ve emailed me at Heather@HeatherBrewer.com and have not received a reply, I’m deeply sorry. I just learned last night that my email has been placing a large percentage of my incoming mail into my Spam/Junk-mail folder and deleting it. Ick…the wonders of technology, eh?

So, if you emailed and I didn’t respond, I didn’t get it. Feel free to resend.

Heads up, minions! Last night I received my editorial memo (Yay!), so the blogging may be thin for Auntie Heather over the next two weeks. In true hermit style, I’m taking a sabbatical from the forums I frequent, donning my ever-so-professional Happy Bunny jammie pants, and settling down with Vlad to hammer out some revisions. Posting may be sparse, but I’m just an email away, should you need me.

Last night, I went to a reading/signing by Melanie Lynne Hauser. Melanie is so sweet and just a bundle of fun (she’s also very, very little–I had to resist the urge to pick her up and put her in my pocket). Go buy her books, minions (the sequel will be out shortly). Support a great author and a truly good person.

Make Auntie Heather proud.

Does anyone else have a life that’s, at times, like a still pool, and at other times, it’s like a bunch of kids are chucking rocks into your pool? Today’s a bit like the latter. My poor pool.

Today will be filled with a mishmash of craziness much befitting a goth/witch/writer/dork such as myself. First, I have to find a kind way to boot the tent worms out of the tree in my backyard (because…ew). But without a boot…because that involves too much, well, squishiness. Then, after getting a thousand or more (hopefully more) words into Wonderland and fretting over the upcoming deadline for Eighth Grade Bites (final revisions due May 15th), I have to try…try…to recreate what the hair guy did to my head last Thursday (because, as it turns out, he wasn’t a butcher at all–Jeremy was seriously cool). Then I have to call my bank and threaten physical harm on someone for screwing with my account balance (even though I’m quite the pacifist). And then later on tonight I get to meet the wondermous Melanie Lynne Hauser when she’ll be doing a reading/signing at my local library.

Somewhere in there I need to schedule goofing off time.

Screw it, I’m goofing off now.

Something is wrong with the world.

Strike that. Many, many things are wrong with the world. I’m focusing on only one thing today.

It seems like accusations of plagiarism are filling the media these days, from Dan Brown’s trial to the Opal-Got-Kissed girl’s recent admissions. And more and more, we are seeing students google, copy, and paste their way to research papers. Do they know it’s wrong? Do you?

According to the gods of Webster, plagiarizing is defined as follows:

Main Entry: pla·gia·rize
Pronunciation: ‘plA-j&-”rIz also -jE-&-
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -rized; -riz·ing
Etymology: plagiary
transitive senses : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source
intransitive senses : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
- pla·gia·riz·er noun

In short, that means if it wasn’t your completely original, fully realized idea first, you can’t use it without permission or at least crediting the source. (Depends on the situation)

Believe me, I know how much writing essays on something as coma-inducing as Spandex’s Affect on Society in the 80s can suck, but you have to do your own work. Why? Well, 1) it’s illegal to plagiarize and 2) you might learn some pretty fascinating things about spandex if you do your own work. I doubt it, but hey, stranger things have happened.

Don’t steal. Bad monkeys. No banana.

My friend Toni (man, just saying that makes me feel like a gangster…) has a great list on her blog today of ten things she knows about writing. She brought the concept onto Backspace this morning and asked us all to make our own lists. So, without further ado, here are ten things I know about writing:

10. Not everyone will get what you’re trying to pull off with a story.

9. As in everything, be yourself. Good things will follow.

8. I’ll never understand how writers got that poetic alcoholic stereotype. Who can write when they’re tipsy? Not me.

7. It’s easier to believe the bad things people say about your work than the good.
6. It’s easier to answer “What do you do?” when you have a book coming out.

5. Waiting on agents never, ever, ever ends.

4. Even when you’ve sold a book, it won’t feel like you’re going to be published…and maybe it never will.

3. Wow…sitting in a chair and writing all the time sure has an affect on the size of your butt.

2. Writers–even amazingly successful authors–are the nicest, most giving people on the planet and they all want you to succeed.

1. Buy stock in Office Depot.

What about you? What do you know?

I have a serious crush on all things Russian–the land, the language. *sigh* Major swoonage for Auntie Heather. So for fun, I hopped on babelfish and translated my name, Heather Brewer, into Russian. Brewer Вереска–that’s me.

And now I’m off to NOT procrastinate, as I only have a little over three weeks until revisions of Eighth Grade Bites are due. Be good, my minions (I know better than to tell you to behave), while I’m strapped for time.

My dorky glory shall descend upon the Backspace Conference in July despite the raising of both voices and pitchforks! Okay, okay, so nobody’s raised any pitchforks…nor voices…not even one measley little torch…not yet. But one can always hope.

Regardless, I just sent in my registration fees. No backing out now. New York City, here I come! I’m completely geeked about this trip and I’m hoping to squeeze as much book-related fun out of it as I can. (With getting to meet all those wonderful people, hobnob with pros, see my agent and my crit partner in person…I’m likely to explode with happiness)

Today is a busy day for me, filled with paying bills, buying food, and chop-chop-chopping some of my hair off at the local butcher academy. Er…I mean…”salon”. (The last time I let anyone else do my hair, they gave me bangs…BANGS! Can you imagine? Framing my adorable cherub face–no lack of self-esteem here–and making me look like Jabba the Hut…with bangs. It was awful.) Hopefully later I’ll be jumping back into Wonderland. But for now, Dillon’s on hold until I get all this other crap out of the way.

Now, why are you reading my blog? Shouldn’t you be registering?

Sometimes you write a book because you absolutely have to. Gray September is like that for me…which is odd, because its predecessor, Black and White, was like that for me as well. Gray, however, is a whole different beast, its own story, unique. And the truth is, I haven’t talked about it much because I don’t want anyone to tell me that I shouldn’t write it. Not that I need permission, but people tend to have opinions on everything and they loooove to share them. I’m working on Wonderland, no worries–it’s a much bigger priority than Gray right now. But every once in a while, when I get inspired or stuck on something with Wonderland, I’ll turn to Gray and see what’s up.

Yesterday was huge. We’re talking over 3,000-words-in-a-day-huge, plus I mapped out the rather complex plot with a rough outline, and deleted more words than I wrote. The story is about three people (Dorian, Brian and Chloe) and how each of them deals with the fragility of life. But more than that, it’s about loving someone so much, that you have to let them go. Terribly sad and not at all a Young Adult novel. Gray is actually a sequel, but it’s important to me that it doesn’t look like a sequel, because Black and White may never see the light of day.

Dorian gets dumped by his steady girlfriend, drops out of college and moves to a new city to get his head on straight, but he never counted on meeting Chloe–let alone loving her. And he most certainly never counted out finding out what he does about his dad. Brian had settled into a pleasant, quiet life after the death of his best friend years before. But now he’s learning new, scary things about that friend that are drudging up the past in a too-vivid way for him. And Chloe…man, Chloe. She’s got a cheating boyfriend, a reluctant crush on Dorian, and an unreasonable phobia of the color gray. And that’s just the icing on the Chloe cake.

If no one ever reads it, that’s fine. Because I’m writing this one for me.

By the by, Wonderland’s outline? It’s with my fabulous agent right now. Here’s hoping he likes it.

Just when I think I have a firm grasp on just how I write, along comes another shift and I’m once again left clueless.

For the longest time, I resisted writing outlines. Then, for quite a while, they looked something like this:

Chapter One–Billy finds the dead cat.

But now, for some strange reason (I’m guessing it’s Dillon’s way of reminding me he’s not Vlad), the outline I’m doing for Wonderland is closer to this:

Chapter One–Billy walks into the old house. It smells like mold and dust, but he keeps searching the building until he comes across a shoe box. He knows what’s in the shoe box before he removes the lid, but does it anyway. Inside is his grandmother’s cat, dead.

I’m filling my outline with much more detail this time around. Why? No clue. (And just so you know, there is no boy named Billy, nor are there any dead cats featured in Wonderland) But it may be that I’m still finding my groove in this writing gig. Or it may be that my groove is full of changes, that I’ll never settle on one specific way to do things for every book I write. After all, my life is ever-changing. Why not my writing methods?

The important thing is to trust yourself. If you feel inclined to write a detailed outline (or to resist writing one altogether), go with it. You have to find your way of doing things.

If I ever find mine…I’ll let you know.

Yep! That’s a light at the end of the tunnel, I’m pretty sure.

I just finished writing my synopsis! Hip hip HUZZAH!

It’s pretty crappy, I think, and ugly as ugly can be, but finishing it lifts a huge weight off my shoulders. Besides, now (after I clean it and the outline up a bit) I can go back to Wonderland and spend some much-needed time with Dillon.

I’m so giddy with excitement that sometime over the next few days, my fabulous agent will get his first real peek into Dillon’s world. I hope he likes it.

Who am I kidding? I hope he LOVES it!

In other news, Erica Orloff has a fantastic entry on her blog today. It should be required reading. Seriously.