Happy/sad/mad + characters

I love how life contributes to art. Or not.

At the moment, I'm trying to write some big emotions for a couple characters, and I'm not quite getting there. Things are still flat. So what does Life decide to do? Hand me situations that I can translate to the page. Grrr . . . I've gotten brained with the sad stick and pounded with the angry stick about sixty times this week (thank you, birth family! thank you, publishing industry!), but hey, it's great for my WIP, right? Grrr. But now I get the sadness that drags Callie down, and the anger that eats up Ray's insides. Still--dang--I'm tired!

Luckily, life also whacks you with the happy stick, and those beatings contribute to the goofy, silly things my characters do. So, some things that have made me happy this week:

Image swiped from here, and the guy with the website is the guy with the funny sign. LOVE. IT. And yay for same-sex marriage in California!








Also this:

I was in the mood to strafe the world, and I let them do it for me. Perfect. Plus it's a decent action film with a relatively coherent script.

Back to your regularly scheduled emotions. Whew.

How a writing career should be

When I think about my writing career, I want it to be like this photo: heading forward, not jumping the track, maybe picking up goods along the way, with a great whistle to comfort me(seriously, I love train whistles). Steady and sure, I'd just chug along (bonus points if I was a steam engine and could really chug!).

But it's really more like this.

Fun maybe once a summer. Otherwise you throw up a lot.

But then I saw one of these today. And it's still January!


So then I felt hopeful.

And then I saw this dude (he's a mountain goat, I know he's hard to see), on top of a truck that belongs to the crew blowing up the mountain at the Crazy Horse Memorial.

And I laughed my ass off.

Now I'm going to try to catch my train, even though I know I'm still on the rollercoaster. Maybe I could ask the mountain goat to help me. He seems pretty determined.

12 Gifts of YA #6, 7, 8, and 9: Four Emotions of the Apocalypse

This post reveals a great mystery. Or not.

In my silly YA world, the 4 Emotions of the Apocalypse are anger, sadness, anxiety, and love. I believe them to be the secrets gift of YA. I haven't heard anyone talk about it--so maybe it's just my own weirdness for believing it's a gift--but writing teenage angst is a huge blessing. I get to channel my drama queen tendencies into my characters' lives!

For grown-ups, the negative three of those emotions can be brought on by myriad sources: bills, spouses, kids, jobs, you name it. GROSS. For YAers, on the other hand, those emotions tend to be more pure, more related to identity and learning about the world and themselves. That purity rocks, because it gets me back to the root of what it means to be human, what it means to be struggling to find yourself in this batshit whacked-out world.

Love is almost more tricky than any of the others, but I also believe that kids as a whole love more purely than grown-ups. They don't see the flaws in people/places/things as quickly as us oldsters. Or maybe they love *despite* the flaws, because nobody has told them to do otherwise.

And the apocalypse thing: teenage emotions go BOOOOOOOM, and I adore it. Grown-up emotions do, too, but other grown-ups look down on us when we let it happen. Grrrr. With teenagers, however, angst is *expected*. Excellent! It's a blast when characters lob nuclear emotion bombs at each other, even if they're *my* bombs from the flat tire or the rude colleague.

Enough posts about emotions, yes? Yes. And I have one day of finals left, and 3 YA gifts to go. I can do this!

BOOOOOOOOOM.
Image shamelessly swiped from here.