I'm thankful for...

My wonderful, supportive family and friends.

My health.

My job.

That I've got the time, energy, and wherewithal to write.

Writers like Harper Lee, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Dave Simon, and George R.R. Martin.

That fragrant pumpkin cupcake with cream cheese frosting I just ate.

The warm, friendly waves at Bellows Beach.

The Advil I just took to counteract the sugar headache from the pumpkin cupcake.

Dictionaries, thesauri, Google, wikipedia, my DSL connection.

Whoever designed my favorite underwear.

How a newborn baby feels when you hold him.

Ink on paper.

Dreams. Hope. Excitement. Laughing till I squeak.

A fat yellow full moon hovering over the Hollywood Hills.

My cat Lucy asleep with her legs in the air.

The smell of orange blossoms.

Plumbing that works.

My other cat Max insisting on lying on top of me.

Charlotte's Web, the Chronicles of Narnia, Half Magic, and all the other books I loved as a child.

Emily Dickinson, John Ford, Van Gogh, Nefertiti's sculptor, the Cave at Chauvet.

Having a wonderful place to go on Thanksgiving filled with people I love and the smell of turkey and pie.

Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing...

There's a character is Finding Nemo named Dory who is terribly upbeat and goofy, and one the little mantras she sings is "just keep swimming, just keep swimming..."

I've been feeling a bit low and sorry for myself and disappointed in some stuff. Some of the waiting is over, and I didn't hear what I wanted to hear.

So, after some wallowing, I go back to the mantra - Just Keep Writing. Thank goodness I have supportive friends, some of them fellow writers, some of them not, who tell me that I'm not insane, not to give up, and to get off my ass and keep writing.

So I'm brainstorming some new ideas and having a blast. Nothing like creating a whole new world to make you feel empowered, at least in your own imagination.

Put It Out There

Why is it so hard for me to show people my writing? That's what I want to do for a living (eventually, fingers crossed, if I'm lucky), right?

But some part of me magically wants to make that living writing cool stuff that no one will ever see. Because then no one can ever judge me and find me lacking, silly, or pointless.

Conversely, I find it super frustrating to write continuously in a vacuum, with no reward coming from all the effort.

Jeez, I'm a pain in the ass. I feel like kicking my own butt all over the planet.

But these are the contradictory feelings that I'm always battling - I suck. No I'm great. Why does no one realize how fabulous I am and pay me for it? Why would anyone pay me to do anything?

I suppose there's a middle way, and the truth lies somewhere in there. In the meantime, I'm going to keep pushing back the fear and darkness and try to put it out there, let people see my stuff, and see what happens. It's terrifying, man! But life is short, and other cliches. Just because you broke your leg last time you jumped doesn't mean this one will go badly. Just triple check your parachute.

Why Does this Feel Appropriate?

From The Onion:

Cancer June 22 - July 22
While it's true that the universe works in mysterious ways, it's becoming pretty clear what it has against you.

The Hardest Part

Remember that Tom Petty song, The Waiting? The lyrics say it all: "You take it on faith/You take it to the heart/The waiting is the hardest part."

I can't be specific about what I'm waiting for. It's just not politic. But waiting is part of what you have to do as a writer, and it just fricking sucks. So much about being a writer sucks! It's really hard, man. Don't do it unless you can't help yourself.

Write or Die

Found a cool widget/website at Write or Die/Dr. Wicked that will help you get words on the page.

Check it out here - put in your word count and the time you allocate for yourself to achieve that goal, click, and start to write. The widget will keep track of your time, word count, and even help you paste what you wrote to the clipboard to save it.

I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year, but this would be very handy for any NaNo-ers out there trying to meet their word count goals every day.

Or consider this NaNoWriMo calculator to help you stay on track:

1667

Photos

I finally downloaded my photos of Prague and Budapest. You can see them all at my Flickr site, here.



That's me in front of the John Lennon wall in Prague. Back in the communist days, students started graffiti-ing a tribute to Lennon on a wall in the Castle district of Prague. Despite crackdowns and white washing by both communist and the current regimes, new graffiti continues to appear. I added: "All You Need is Love."



Here I am overlooking Budapest. I'm in a very cool series of towers and walkways in the Buda section of town, overlooking the Danube and Pest on the eastern shore.

Travel is such a privilege. I'm so grateful that I get to galavant all over creation, taking photos and soaking it all in. It's wonderful to be surprised, and every new place I go surprises me in some way, beyond anything the guidebooks could ever tell me. It keeps me humble, widens my viewpoint, and makes me appreciate coming home. If you can get away to another country - go! The flights are hell, the lack of sleep is daunting, and you get sick of looking at a map every time you want to go somewhere. But in return you get to see the world from a different perspective, like a shaft of sunlight hitting the world at an angle you've never seen before. It's revelatory. And it's damned fun.

Yes We Can

Jet Lag = Early Voting

Thanks to jet lag, I awoke at 6am today. So what the hell - I got up, got ready for work, and walked to my polling place at Gardner Elementary School in Hollywood. I'm not a morning person, so I've always voted after work. But today, with an historic, exciting election in the offing, plus jet lag from my trip to Europe, I broke with precedent and actually GOT IN LINE to vote.

I've never had to wait more than two minutes to vote. But today, with a possible victory for a Hawaiian-born black man, I had to wait a whole 30 minutes. It was worth every second.

I love voting on Election Day. I'm all for early voting, absentee voting, or voting by telepathy if that were possible. Anything that makes voting easy and available to all is fabulous. But for myself I love doing it on the official day, stepping up to that rickety little voting "booth" (really more of plastic mini-cubicle at my polling place) and using that short squat inky pen-thingie to mark my choices. Folks around me in the other wobbly cubicles were taking their time marking up their ballots.

I trucked through - click click click, and looked up, blinking. Was I really done? I made way for the next voter and handed my ballot to the wild-haired elderly Russian-American man waiting for me next to the crouched machine that ate it up and belched somehow to show him all was well. He handed me my "I Voted" sticker and a felt a swell of silly pride - in myself, and justified pride - in my country, where power changes hands peacefully at the command of the people.

Voting rocks. It's like telling, for a brief moment, the story of our country, the narrative of your state, the tale of your city.

Empty shoes - Budapest

Another great shot by Wendy. This time we're in Budapest, and the shoes are a memorial to the victims of the Nazis who were executed as they stood along the river Danube. They were forced to take off their shoes before they were shot and fell into the river.

Who were the people who once stood in these shoes? As a writer, my head spins with the possible stories that lead the people to this spot and this horrible fate. How many fascinating stories will never be lived or told because people weren't allowed to live their lives in peace.

Me at the Lennon Wall - Prague

Taken by my lovely travel companion, Wendy. This is a wall in Prague where, during the days of communism, young people would graffiti images of John Lennon. He inspired them. The tradition continues to this day, even though the government routinely white washes the wall. It only provides more room for new folks (like me) to add their own tributes to Lennon.

Interesting how popular art like this can be so moving, so inspirational. I not only had to add my phrase, I wanted immediately to listen to Lennon's music and start lobbying for peace.

Prague and Budapest

Checking in very quickly from Budapest thanks to the internet! I'll post pics once I get back, but here are my quick impressions:

Prague: Sumptuous and hard.

Budapest: Grand and melancholy.

More details to come.

One way to read to children...

Free Expert Advice

Interested in a longerm career as a novelist? Check out a free 268-page book by big time agent Donald Maas called The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success, which you'll find at Writer Unboxed.

It takes awhile to load, but it's chock full of real life advice from a top agent who knows what he's talking about.

Research

Did you know, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria let go of 14,000 employees in its secret police? At the same time, it stopped paying all the wrestlers, boxers, and weight lifters it had on the payroll. Yeah, they paid hundreds of athletes so they could dominate certain sports in the Olympics. But after the Iron Curtain fell, all those jobs went away.

What happens when thousands of secret police and hundreds of major league athletes are suddenly unemployed?

Crime. Beware unemployed young men with training in weaponry, strong arming, and criminal contacts. The Bulgarian wrestlers were soon tops in the Europe's largest car theft ring, moving stolen vehicles from countries like Germany to the Balkans and Easter Europe. Former members of the secret police used their extensive networking contacts to form multi-national organized crime syndicates that moved arms, drugs, cigarettes, and women for sale all over the world.

This is the sort of thing I'm learning as I research my next book. I love research. It gives you all kinds of ideas, sets you off on flights of fancy, solidifies the backgrounds of your characters, sends you away in different directions than you ever dreamed. It's this whole discovery phase where you start to figure out what your book is REALLY about.

So will the facts about the Bulgarian secret police, wrestlers, weight lifters, and boxers end up in my book? You know, I think they might, in an oblique way. A shadowy character is actually Bulgarian, and I just might've figured out some crucial elements of her background, thanks to this research.

But before I decide for sure - more research!

Welcome Home

Saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog, then followed it the source. The soldier you see here called it: "My dogs greeting me after 14 months in Iraq." Andrew Sullivan called it a "mental health break," and I agree.



My dog, Missy, looked a lot like these dogs. We had to give her to my cousins when we moved back to Hawaii, but she always remembered us whenever we came to visit.

And thoughts and prayers go out to all our men and women serving in Iraq. Here's hoping you all come home soon, and that all are greeted with this kind of enthusiasm.

Time + New Knowledge = Perspective

Now that I've been working in TV development for over a year, I'm finally getting a feel for how this whole cock-eyed business works. And since I work specifically in developing for cable networks, I'm beginning to understand just how specific the networks' needs are. Each network has its own brand that they feel they must maintain at all costs.

All this is now so helpful when I take a look at the TV pilot scripts I have written myself. I went back last week and took a look at something I'd written two years ago - eons ago. It was nice to see that it wasn't half bad, but with my new perspective, I realized that it wasn't quite right for any of the networks. The writing wasn't half bad, and the idea had some merit, but it sat fat in the middle of the road, just being itself, not making a big statement one way or the other.

So now I'm tilting it more strongly in the direction I think it needs to go to appeal to a network. I've got two networks in mind in particular. I don't expect them to ever buy it or make it - don't get me wrong. But at least now I've got a goal in mind that will sharpen and focus the script. And that should make it a better writing sample.

So my unsolicited advice to would-be TV writers out there - when you write your spec pilot script, aim it square at one network or the other. That way, when someone reads it, they'll think - wow, I can really SEE this on ABC, or HBO, or TNT. You don't need to know the identities of all the networks, but if you pick one and go for it, it may help you write a script that actually feels like a real TV show.

Who Does She Think She Is?

Female artists have it tough. Don't believe me? Check out the trailer for the movie Who Does She Think She Is? (Feel free to skip the intro and go right to the trailer.)

Looks like something every female artist should show to the men in their lives, so maybe then they'll start to get it.

NaNoWriMo is Almost Upon Us

Thinking about writing a novel? Consider NaNoWriMo, that's National Novel Writing Month, which comes now every November. This is a completely free, voluntary movement to get people to write that novel that's been stuck in their heads.

The goal is to write 50,000 words (which would actually be a very short novel) the month of November, and to get support from fellow NaNo participants. You can find them by signing up at the NaNo site. Here you will find forums full of advice and hilarity. You can also sign up to join "write ins" in you area, and attend your local launch party, where you'll meet fellow NaNo-ers as you eat and drink.

I'm trying to decide whether to participate this year or not. I'm rewriting a script at the moment, but should probably get going on the next novel too. A writer's work is never done! And NaNoWriMo can be a powerful motivating force as you struggle with your writerly demons.

The Website is Up!

It's a bit early for me to have a website. I don't have anything published (yet) and thus don't have much to promote (yet).

But logic hasn't stopped me. Common sense be damned. My website is up! Check out ninaberry.com.

Woo hoo! You can link to the blog from there, see some of my fave links, learn about me me me (because websites are all about narcissism), and eventually you'll be able to buy my books there. Maintaining it isn't all that expensive, and this way it'll be ready, willing, and able to do its thing once I'm officially an author. I'll get an official, spiffy author photo to go on the home page as publishing dates near, and there'll be more about the book as well.

Note how fricking positive I am. I'm trying to note it myself because I can't quite believe it. Is it arrogance, faith, or delusion? I can't wait to find out.

HUGE thanks to Elisa, the fabulous designer, and to Meg, the technical genius behind it all. If anyone out there needs a designer or a website techie, I'd jump at the chance to recommend these talented women.