I got tagged by Ari! And much celebrating was had.

1. What is the name of your book?

KILL THE LAST ONE

2. Where did the idea for your book come from?

I wanted to write something I’d never written before: a modern day science fiction story with teenagers, with the possibility for changing alliances and character reversals. That’s it. A million little ideas came from that; and together, they created the current conception of KILL THE LAST ONE. There was a LOT of time spent brainstorming. A lot.

3. In what genre would you classify your book?

Young adult science fiction.

4. If you had to pick actors to play your characters in a movie rendition, who would you choose?

To be honest, I’m not someone who does this often. I’ve seen a couple actors where it’s like, “That looks like so-and-so,” but more often I see people who fit my mental picture in awkward public situations. And then I stare at them for too long.

Please note that I’m not quite following the rules of this question, as these are not (necessarily) people I think should play the movie versions. They are people who I feel have an uncanny physical resemblance.

And yes – this means I fall into the trap of imagining my characters as unreasonably good-looking.

Rupert Grint reminds me of my main character Casey. I don’t know why. It doesn’t make much sense, because Casey has brown hair.

Tiya Sircair looks so much like Pembe that I did a double take when I first saw her. It’s not just because there’s a severe lack of diversity in Hollywood; I imagined Pembe as someone with a slightly round face and big, beautiful eyes.

And Blake Lively is pretty much how I imagine Rebecca. Obviously, I imagine her as blonde, but I also imagine her as tall with lots of sharp angles. I’m not sure that Blake Lively has the requisite muscles, since Rebecca is a basketball player/athlete…

…to be honest, when I’m thinking of this character, I’m actually imagining my old math tutor. (Sorry, old math tutor.)

For all of these actors, you’d have to use some sort of age-changing potion to turn them into teenagers.

5. Give us a one-sentence synopsis of your book.

For years, a monster has stalked eighteen-year old pothead Casey – a titan of a monster with dark fur and red eyes that no one can see or touch, including him; nonetheless, Casey is convinced that the monster is there, a belief that is validated when he starts receiving strange letters that invite him to a place called the Mock Universe – a place where, the letters warn, his monster has the potential to become devastatingly real. 

I know, I cheated. That sentence never really ends, does it?

6. Is your book already published?

Nope. I’m still writing it.

7. How long did it take you to write your book?

Well. As I said, I’m still writing it. Here’s a run-down of the process:

• Started the brainstorming process in the summer of 2011.
• Spent the fall writing an outline (which I quickly scrapped when I started seriously writing the thing), and otherwise flirted with the story by writing a page or two here or there.
• Started seriously writing it on New Year’s Day 2012 (yes, it was a New Year’s Resolution – and a pretty successful one at that) by utilizing the heck out of 750words.com.
• Stopped adding new words in the summer, taking a couple breaks to focus on short stories and attempting to put together something coherent out of the words I’d already written.
• Now that I’m back at school, I don’t have the time to focus and make things pretty, so I’m back to vomiting up words on 750words.com. At this point, I have enough pages to make a book (maybe even two books?) except that a lot of those pages exist in versions of the story that no longer exist and/or are generally terrible.

…so, yeah.

I’ve stopped trying to make predictions about when I’ll be finished. I do know that my ‘first draft’ is significantly more polished than a first draft necessarily has to be, which hopefully means that I’ve saved myself some time on the editing process.

But maybe not. Writing a book is hard.

But there is progress. And I’m at the point where I can’t turn back now, because I’m totally committed to Finishing The Thing. Which is a good (and difficult) point to reach, methinks.

8. What other books within your genre would you compare it to? Or, readers of which books would enjoy yours?

The Maze Runner. Battle Royale, to the point where I’m a little worried. (Shockingly, however, it’s very different from The Hunger Games). Um, and…Animorphs?  There’s also a resemblance to the Japanese manga Please Save My Earth. 

In other words…

I do what I want.

9. Which authors inspired you to write this book?

Oh God, every writer I’ve ever loved? That list could go on forever. When I think about these things, I tend to think of Neil Gaiman first – but that’s probably ’cause he’s so popular and therefore on my mind.

10. Tell us anything that might pique our interest in your book.

Alien spiders! Past lives! Basketball! Saxophones as weapons! Brotherly friendship between actual brothers! And a corgi.

Ari might have a squirrel (and a parrot!) – but *I* have a corgi

So I’m supposed to pass this on to five people. But I can only think of four people. So too bad. ;p

• Amanda Rudd

• Sara Ingle

• Jean

• Gretchen Schreiber

Ladies, don’t wanna creep or nothing – but I wanna see your stories.

Please?

In other news,  I haven’t been too consistent about this blog. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I wanted the schedule to be. But now I’ve decided to update on Saturdays. It’ll only be one post a week, but I think that it’s more important for me to be consistent than to have a high post rate.

So. I’m gonna be consistent now. On Saturdays. For reals.

Sorry for the brief hiatus!

I actually have a legitimate reason, this time. I got sick - and then I managed to injure my ankle to the extent that I need physical therapy.

Yeah.

…basically me, except that I can’t even hop

Not to be a Debbie Downer! Life has been good – and I’m excited to share some helpful online links, courtesy of a panel at the Yale Writer’s Conference on the process of submissions. Mostly, the panel focused on submitting to magazines, with a secondary focus on submitting to book publishers.

• Columbia College Chicago, Online Markets: A great listing of online literary journals.

In particular, these online literary journals were highlighted:

• Dogzplot

• Fail Better

• Word Riot

Back to more general publishing links:

• Duotrope: A comprehensive database of publishers, with helpful statistics such as response times and acceptance ratios.

• GalleyCat: To stay current on the newest developments in the publishing industry.

• Submittable: My FAVORITE link. If you’re like me, then you easily forget where you’ve sent what story. This site will help you track your submissions. The free version allows 100 submissions a month, which is not bad. If you’re going over 100 submissions a month, then you’re probably spamming people instead of submitting with care and intelligence.

• Publisher’s Lunch: Apparently VERY helpful when you’re about to submit to agents, but not that helpful before then, and maybe even depressing. It’s a paid service, so it was recommended that we subscribe during the query process – and then cancel our subscription afterwards. (But please, don’t tell them I told you that.)

Just for fun:

• Library Thing: Sort of like Goodreads, but not Goodreads. I’ll be honest, I haven’t tried it out yet – but I’m excited for any social networking site that involves books and reading!

• View from a Keyboard: Just a fun writing blog, about writing and – you guessed it – pictures of writer’s workspaces.

• Genre in the Mainstream: A blog series from Tor about genre elements in mainstream fiction. Fascinating reading. Great source of book recommendations.

To conclude, I’m going to post pictures of an adorable parrotlet. Because I can.

In the first video, Koolaid the parrotlet plays peekaboo.

In the second video, Koolaid runs after a ball.

SUNDAY LINK LOVE

• David Powers King writes incisively on the subject of prologues. If you’re struggling with a prologue, I highly suggest you check it out. Also, he recommends the Mistborn Trilogy – an opinion I have come to share.

• An amusing loop of TV shows referencing each other:

• Okay, I know we’re past Valentine’s Day – and that there has been an endless saturation of fandom-themed Valentine cards. But I can’t help myself – these Game of Thrones Valentines cards are pretty boss. From io9.

• More Valentine’s day shenanigans! I like to imagine that this was cut for a significant other:

ROW 80 UPDATE

My ROW 80 goal is to write 750 words a day on 750words.com.

So I missed the last check-in. Sorry about that. That was a somewhat hectic travel day…but I probably still could have posted if I’d mustered up the energy to do so. Despite the fact that I missed the check-in, I’ve been successful with my goal: written 750 words every day since the last check-in.

Previously, I posted about plotholes. I’m glad that I worked out the kinks in my plot, even though it involved some backtracking and scrapping of what I’d already written. I’d been scraping the bottom of the barrel for scenes to write, feeling at loose ends, but now I feel like I have a definite direction. It’s a good feeling.

How was your week, fellow ROWers?

If you want to support/find out about ROW 80, check it out here.