One more day until I’m officially on Spring Break. Ten years ago, I’d get really excited about Spring Break. Drinks and boys and beaches.

Now . . . . I’m just thinking, “I wonder if I’ll be able to clean my house?”

I’m thinking that adults need a Spring Break now and then.  You know, that time in your life when you get away from all supervision, go somewhere exotic like Daytona Beach, and blow off everything but the tequila. One week without a single responsibility or item on your to-do list. One week without a child needing attention. One week with nothing to do but go to parties, lay out on the beach, and sleep in.

Sometimes, I wonder if my writing needs a Spring Break too. Those moments where we block out every rule, every item on our to-do list, and just write. Not worrying about if we got the setting right, or if the finished product will fit the right genre. Not stopping to fix the spelling errors or dig through the thesaurus for the perfect word.

Just write with the complete abandon that only nineteen-year-olds left unsupervised with a keg can manage.

I was writing yesterday and trying hard to get into my heroine Josephine’s head. And the thought crossed my mind that Josephine doesn’t react all that maturely to a lot of things. She feels things deeply, but doesn’t want to admit that. So she does stupid, stupid things to stop feeling things.

I wondered if I was writing a character that was “too bad.” Someone who broke too many rules to be a heroine, someone who couldn’t be sympathized with. She’s a bit like a nineteen year old on Spring Break.

But sometimes, we need that abandon. That complete recklessness that comes with being too young. Sometimes, we need to say to hell with the rules, and just write for the sheer joy of writing.

What does writing with complete abandon mean to you? What would you do if you could block out everything else and just write? What would you do with a whole week without a single responsibility?

The undead monkey screeches, swipes his grubby paws through the icing on the cake, and darts off. Chance keeps the drinks coming, and keeps all the pirates loaded.

Cap’n Hellie stumbles up to the front, and Sin helps her stand on a whiskey barrel. “Attention crew! No one, and I mean no one, was supposed to know!”

Hal leans over to Marn: “How much has she had to drink?”

Marn: “Not that much. What’s Chancey putting in these drinks?”

Cap’n Hellie totters on the Whiskey barrel, but regains her footing with the help of one of the cabin boys. “Thank you, dear. If you stick around, I’ll thank you properly.”

The cabin boy pinched her butt as he walked away.

Ter raised her glass: ‘Now this is turning into a party!”

“Noooo!” Cap’n wailed. “No one was supposed to know!”

Sin and Chance, at the bar, looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Right, secrets on a pirate ship. Does she think she’s commanding a crew who actually listens to her?”

“Apparently not!” Hellie sat down on the barrel to avoid to avoid tottering again and re-adjusted her birthday tiara.  “I thought I’d fooled you all last week with saying I was taking time off for no special reason.”

Ter refilled her glass and whispered to Sin, “Right, like that was going to actually work.”

“But the point,” Marn said, “Is that now we get to have a party! Where’d the cake go?”

“I think the monkey ate it,” Hal said.

Santa came rushing up from the galley, J hot on her heels. “I saved the cake! I saved the cake!”

J held up the undead monkey by his scrawny neck. “And I caught the little bastard.” Icing coated his face while he squeaked away.

“Okay!” Hal said. “Now it’s a freakin party!”

Happy birthday to Hellie! Who wants to party with us today? Chance, what are you putting in those drinks? Santa, this cake is delicious!  Who put these decorations–they’re awesome! So Hellie, what did you decide to do with your time off? Johnny’s at the bar. He seems sad waiting for you. He has a very special birthday present to give you!

I’ve been stuck in my house since Friday. Actually I take that back — I got to go to work on Tuesday, and then drove straight back home. My only attempt to leave the house all week. Our mayor has actually installed a curfew, threatening immediate arrests of anyone driving a motor vehicle after dark, and we have well over three feet of the snow on the ground in an area that normally never sees more than a flurry or two in any given winter.

Cabin fever doesn’t even cover it. I’m all twitchy and snippity, and if I play one more game of solitaire, or watch one more rerun of NCIS, I might just lose it. I’m like a small animal that’s been backed into a corner (namely, my living room), and is going to come out biting and squealing.

So to occupy myself, I started wondering how Josephine, my current protagonist, would deal with two blizzards in one week.  She just got out of prison, and has a bit of a problem with claustrophobia, so I doubt she’d deal any better than I would. Then again, she’d certainly know how to entertain herself for a few days — what is prison if not cabin fever?

I have another character, Ana Lucia, who has been held hostage in an underground bunker for over a year. Sheesh, anyone else sensing a theme? Both women have been trapped, and been trapped for a long time. Enough time to get much meaner than just twitchy and snippity.

Long enough to come out fighting back.

Everyone reacts differently to being trapped. When we’ve been backed into a corner, whether it’s a physical like my characters, a snow-created like me, or an emotional imprisonment, we all react in our own ways. I just bitch at my husband until he smiles all cute and talks me into playing naughty games to pass the time. Ana Lucia keeps her head buried in a book and tries not to think. Josephine creates new chemical equations, wishing she had an actual lab to test out her experiments and find new ratios for the best explosion.

What do your characters do when trapped? How would they withstand a blizzard? What if their backed into an emotional corner — do they come out fighting? Who else is buried under feet of snow? Marn, Ter — you guys holding up?

So I’ve run into a problem in my WIP. I run into this problem regularly, in fact. I’ll be cruising along, writing a new scene, playing with the dialog and making fiddling with the setting, thinking…Now, what?

And then the other day, I was flipping through a how-to book for a chart on structure, and I found the answer to my question.

Yes, but…

Let me explain. In each scene, there should be a goal, right? Something your protagonist is trying to attain or achieve.  And there’s some form of obstacle in her way, be it the hottie next door or the vampire trying to suck her…blo0d.  So she has a goal in each scene. Does she get it?

There are only four possible answers to that question:  yes, no, yes but, or no and furthermore.

Yes and no are boring answers. They don’t leave you with anything next. You say yes or no to the conflict of the scene, and then you’re stuck staring at the screen, going, “Now, what do I do?”

So how about the other two options? “No and furthermore” gets more interesting. No, she didn’t get attain her goal, but furthermore…fill in the blank with a way it can get worse.

“Yes, but” gets interesting too. Yes, she attains her goal. But…

Recently, I had a scene I was floundering with. Josephine, my protagonist, had a goal. She was being released from prison, and about to face the media storm standing between the gates of the prison, and the car taking her to the airport. And she did it. She withstood the media, made it into the car with her dignity intact.

And then. . .

So I thought, what if the answer was “yes, but” instead of just “yes.” What if she gets through the shit storm of cameras and questions, but there’s something worse waiting for her in the car?

Suddenly, there are new possibilities. The things I needed to have happen plot-wise can, yet the possibilities in front of me are now endless.

So how about it wenches? Anyone have a scene they seemed to stall out on, and are left going “Now what do I do?”  Check if the answer to the protagonist’s goal is a plain yes or no. Will giving that scene a “no, and furthermore,” or “yes, but” ending open up your future options? What else do you use to get you past the “Now, what?” sticking moments?

There are a lot of parts of the male body we can admire. The abs, the pecs, the face, the jaw, the thighs, the quads, the…

Where was I?

Oh yes, the good parts on hot boys. One that gets looked over is their arms. And man, do some of these boys have great arms.

So what else? What body parts do we not pay nearly enough attention to?

Since the topic of professional athletes came up this week, I figure it would be nice to round out that conversation with some eye candy. Somebody’s gotta keep these pirates organized!

What do you think?

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And since we started by talking about baseball, it only seems right to round out the week with………a baseball bat:

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So what do you think, wenches? Feeling more organized now? They were even in alphebitical order!

For those of you who haven’t heard me yammer on about this, I’m working on my MFA in genre fiction at a school in Pittsburgh. And this semester, I asked for a new adviser for my thesis, as I wanted to be challenged more.

I’m starting to understand the funny looks I got when saying that, as perhaps I didn’t want to be this challenged. But there’s one comment he had about my writing that’s really stuck out to me. And since it’s been filling my head, I now get to share it with you.

In the opening ten pages of my WIP, there’s a lot of dialog. And interspersed with all this dialog is apparently a lot of nodding. A lot of nodding. As in, seventeen nods in ten pages. He counted.

His comment: “Congratulations, your characters have officially turned into bobbleheads.” Yikes! Then, to get him really worked up, I tried to convey one character’s shock, awe, and excitement by saying, “She blinked up at him.”

Now, in my defense, this sentence is used in a good percentage of fiction to convey shock (though, oddly, in a writing program, “but everybody else uses that sentence” isn’t a good defense J). He wrote in the margin: “She doesn’t blink. She reacts like a bloodhound who just caught the scent of a fresh kill.”

Now that creates an image in my head! With only that one sentence, I saw her entire upper body straighten, her eyes zero in on her new target, her shock quickly being replaced by the new pulse of excitement. Hell, she almost licks her lips in my head.

So I decided to take his advice and try this again. I have a boring piece of description: “The reporters swarmed the car as we drove away.” Not a terrible sentence. Swarm is a good verb that evokes something about reporters. But there’s no real image evoked, and certainly no emotion. So I tried again, and here’s what I came up with:

Through the tinted windows, reporter’s faces, their mouths frantically gaping, bobbed and hovered next to the window before being replaced by the next face in line, their microphones stretched out to the car like lifelines.

It was an inverted fish bowl. I was safely cocooned in the bowl; they were the dying, gasping fish, hoping my story could save them.

“You did good.”

The car pulled away, leaving the fish to flop on the pavement. Yeah, I’d done real well.

Still not perfect – the writing itself is rough – but there’s an image there.  Does it evoke any emotion for you? Any mental pictures? Any suggestions for improvement?

So let’s hear it wenches! Who wants to fess up to the same bobbleheaditis I was suffering from? Anybody willing to give this a try?  Take a plain piece of description, and let’s see what you can do to make it pop!

This week’s earthquake will go down as one of the worst disasters to befall the Western Hemisphere, and it’s nowhere near over. Search and rescue teams have come from all over the world to assist, and even five days later, they’re having extraordinary success pulling survivors from the rubble.

So while there are a myriad of ways we can all help, one of the ways has got to be ogling the hot bodies of urban search and rescue, and cheering these guys on. It’s a dirty, demoralizing job, and their time is running out. But who better to believe in the impossible than a bunch of pirate writers? So let’s cheer these boys on! (and enjoy the view while we do it!)

So I’m in Pittsburgh right now, which is buried in snow and ice. I’m not good in either snow or ice. So as I was looking for hotties, I thought I would get some more enjoyment out of the cold if I had some winter-themed hotties.

Turns out — there aren’t a lot of hotties bundled up in winter coats. So I figured, what the hell, let’s go the opposite way. Shirtless hotties!

So, did I make the right choice: shirtless over bundled up in coats? I figure this will warm me up quick! Who else is trying to stay warm today?

Last month Nintendo re-released the old Super Mario Brothers for Wii. It looks just like the one I played as a kid. It has the same mushrooms to pounce on and scary World 8 full of lava and even has the same music. It’s like stepping through a portal in time to the 4th grade.

But there’s one distinct difference in the new Mario. When multiple people play together, they literally play on the same screen. Mario and Luigi run side-by-side; Luigi can give Mario a boost or Mario can give Luigi a power-mushroom.

It’s nice — the better, more experienced players can assist the newer players. If you need help, there’s someone to help you.  And if you jump off a cliff or run face-first into a turtle, there’s someone to rescue you and put you back in the game.

It’s like having a community. You can see where I’m going with this analogy. Mario rescuing the Princess as Writers striving for that finished book. Maybe Mario should be a pirate too. How do you think an eye-patch would look with the mustache?

Anyway, we have a community when we write. Others who know what we’re going through. Both those more experienced who can show us the path and offer us new resources, and those newer than us whom we can lend a hand to in return.

But Mario’s foils with Luigi and his two toad helpers are the same pitfalls writers face in their communities. Mario is supposed to collect these big coins, right? Three per level. Most of the coins are easy to find and get, but some are hidden, some are booby-trapped, and some buried. Now and then, Mario finds a coin he can’t get by himself. He has to have a helper, someone who can give him a boost, or help carry the load.

There are parts of writing and publishing that require the same thing — a partner. Someone to read over your work or help encourage you through rejections or celebrate good news with you.

But there are some coins that Mario has to get alone. If he has to jump at a certain time, or squeeze through a spot, it’s just to hard to keep someone else with you. He has to go it alone.

There are times in writing, too, when we have to go it alone. The long stretches of writing when we don’t think we can pull another word from our tired brains. Debating over tiny points of characterization that no one else could possibly know.

In Mario, the key to getting all the star coins is knowing which ones you need a partner to get, and which ones you need to figure out on your own.

In case it wasn’t obvious, I spent my break playing Super Mario Brothers and relaxing and reading. I’m ready to get back to writing. What about you? Have you been writing over this break, or are you coming back to it now? Are you facing the new year energized or discouraged? Anyone else obsessed with this game?