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Check out my 1st guest blog post over with Kim at Book Butterfly Reviews. Comment and win an iTunes gift card! =)


http://butterflybookreviews.blogspot.com/2010/08/guest-post-with-christy-trujillo-author.html

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Snap Decisions

I’ve always been a spur of the moment, first gut instinct is always the best, just do it, kind of girl. You know, the kind that bought the first wedding dress she tried on or house she looked at. The kind that makes a decision and just goes with it. Sometimes, this is a good quality. Like when I decided to write a book and when I decided to try to get published. Clearly good decisions. OTHER TIMES, like last night when I decided to color my hair, stopped at Target, let my 7 year-old help me pick out a color, came home and promptly turned my hair a lovely shade of navy blue…not so much.

I’ll pause here for laughter…

Yes, that’s right. Navy blue. I mean, it’s just hair and I’ve already called my boss and let her know I was going this morning to get it fixed. But really, I feel this is a much deeper problem for me and quite a few other folks. I don’t think things through. I don’t pause and say, is this really a good idea or is there a better way to do this? I think today’s fast paced environment has cost us the right to be indecisive. We are told to get it done and to be quick about it. But I say, stop people. Take your time. Unless we are talking about administering life-saving medication/medical care, whatever the problem is can wait for you to decide what the best resolution will be. Whatever the whim, it can wait for you to properly think it through, and hell, you can even go ahead and change your mind a few times because ultimately, we are the ones pushing ourselves to be faster, better, stronger. While I am a fan of the better and stronger, I think we should lay off the faster.

Slow and steady wins the race. Yet again, my mother was right.

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Wait Till Helen Comes

When I was in..oh I think it was about fourth grade the mobile book fair came to my school. I remember the smell of new books mixing with fumes from the bus when I stepped in. I had read a few things before that, I think perhaps a Judy Bloom novel or two. My eyes scanned the rows and I was just about to settle for a unicorn bookmark when the cover of a book caught my eyes. It was Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. I had to have it.

“It’s going to scare you,” my teacher told me.

And holy crap she was right. It scared the crap out of me and God help me, I loved it. Every second of it. Every word and flip back to the cover to study the little ghost girl’s profile, making sure I had the right images in my head because that’s where the story was playing out. The words were making a movie in my head.

That pretty much did it for me. There was no turning back. I read everything I could get my hands on and yes, I had a tendency to get my hands on the paranormal books. To this day, I can’t pass up the opportunity to be scared half to death, whether it is by a movie, or the movie in my head. If you ask me if I believe in ghosts I will say no. Do I believe in the paranormal sightings people claim to have? No. But I want to and I wish I did.

Maybe that’s why I write about these things. Because I hope that one day, it won’t be fiction I am writing. I’ll be telling a true story, that happened to me.

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My 2 Cents

During the editing process for Emmy’s Heart, I learned that adverbs should be kept to a minimum. In fact, I had so many in my first draft that she highlighted every single word that ended with ly and I had to go back and rework the sentence. I did it, of course. I’m new at this whole author thing and appreciate all the help I can get. But I’m here to ask you, what is wrong with adverbs. I love them. Ask anyone I know, I use them all the time. I use them so much my son has picked them up.

Me: Cam, are you done with your chicken nuggets?
Cam: Clearly.

And now all of the people who think their writing is better than everyone else’s will be saying that you shouldn’t write the way you speak and blahh, blahh, blahh. Last time I checked, writing was a form of expression. A way to put your soul out there, a way to fulfill a never ending compulsion to spill your guts to random strangers. So why can I not add in words that I like? It just gets my goat when I read people smashing the way others write. A great deal of the writing community is what I have classified as writing snobs. So quick to criticize someone for having too many adverbs, or telling and not showing. You want to know what the really funny part is? 99% of the writing snobs that I know, are NOT published. So let me get this straight? You, who are not published want to say there is something wrong with a book that has sold millions of copies? The only time it’s okay to do that is in a crit group where someone has flat out said, help me, I need your opinion. Because, folks, when it comes right down to it, great writing is a matter of opinion. Numbers are black and white. Words are gray. There are fifteen ways to say something and ten to spell it. One person can read something and think it is crap while another will have tears streaming down their face at the perfection of it all.

We all have our opinions and more often than not, they are welcomed and appreciated, especially from one writer to another. But perhaps sometimes, people just need to be encouraged.

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