So I’m thinking it’s an okay time to announce this…. I’m a writer now. Officially. As in very soon to be published!
I’ve written a story for the comic Zombies vs Cheerleaders that is due out next month and already have another story almost ready to be drawn.
I’m a very happy girl right now. Dreams coming true, big time.
Short blog tonight because my head is pounding. Today was a struggle. It took me a while to figure out how to get to point A to point B. Trying to focus on descriptions because I know that is what lacks the most in past noels I have written.
I also have decided to make the conscience decision to try not to put much description of my main character in the novel. I want girls to read it and to be able to picture themselves in that role. I’ve been tempted many times to go into detail about her but I’m resisting. Plus, I honestly don’t know what she looks like at this point.
Current word count: 3557
Ahead of word count again!
And here I go again!
Yes, I totallly beat NaNoWriMo last year and I’m back for another round. 50,000 words in a month, here I come. I’m going to try my best to update everyday on here too.
This year I have choosen to write Young Adult Fiction. I’ve recently been reading a lot of Sara Shepard (The Lying Game and Pretty Little Lairs) so that will definately be a big influence on this book. Also a comment a friend said about something we were watching stood out to me and made me rethink exactly what I wanted to happen with the novel. I’m so excited with the direction though. I’ve been ready to write for weeks but waited.
One thing surprised me about my first day of writing. I’m suddenly writing in third person. My other novels have always been first person. I think my unconscience choice to do that comes from the fact that most books I have read lately are written that way. It might also come from the fact that the main character is someone I don’t want based on myself. In the past I think I made all my main girls have elements of myself. My new character isn’t that way though. At least yet. So far she is just sad and confused so personality hasn’t started coming out. I know it might sound weird to nonwriters but I really don’t know what she is going to be like yet. Actually the other girls in the novel are coming out with really strong personalities so far. There is one in particular that I really like how she is coming out so far.
Current word count: 1858
****Contains some spoilers from The Lying Game (book series and tv show) and Ringer (tv show)****
Twins seem to be the theme this season on television. ABC Family brought us the small screen adaptation of The Lying Game by Sara Shepard. Easy to see why they choice that series after the success of Pretty Little Liars. Also we have CW bring Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy!!!) back to television with Ringer.
The Lying Game brings us the story of Emma and Sutton. Emma takes her twin’s place while Sutton is on the search for their mother. Emma struggles to keep her identity secret while trying to uncovering plenty of secrets of her own.
Ringer tells a similar story of Bridget who takes on her sister Siobhan’s life after she believes her sister commits suicide. She sees taking her sister’s place as a way to escape her past but soon finds out Siobhan’s life may just be worse.
The two shows have many similarities between them. Besides the twin thing, there are many similarities between Bridget and Emma. The first being that they both appear to be the twin in the more unfortunate situation. In Emma’s case she is a foster child and flees from the current family she is with after she is accused of stealing money. In Bridget’s case she was an ex stripper who was witness to a crime. Fear of the man accused coming after her drives her to seek out refuge with her sister. Both stories include cops after the runaway twin.
Siobhan and Sutton are also similar. Both come from rich lifestyles and appear to have the perfect life. But those around them are keeping secrets that their twins came across and taking over their lives. Another similarity between the two is that they were both having affairs. Sutton with Ethan and Siobhan with Henry. The two guys seem to not be similar characters at this point. Ethan realizes right away that Emma is not Sutton but ends up falling for her and helping her put together clues about her mother. Henry seems to be a fairly cocky character so far. I really thought when he first kissed Bridget that he was going to call her out just like Ethan did but that has not happened yet.
Both series very from the book series The Lying Game. In the books, Sutton is actually dead and the story is told from her perspective. At first I thought that Ringer was going to be similar to the series in that one sister is dead. At the end of episode one we realize that is not that cases though when we see Siobhan in Paris.
So far, I am enjoying both series because of the fast pace and mystery that builds with each episode. The books series was impossible to put down and I can’t wait for the next one to come out. As for the television shows, as much as I love Sarah Michelle Gellar, I would say that I prefer The Lying Game. The drama in it pulls me in and I love that there is also stuff that makes me smile like Ethan doing nice things for Emma. Plus Ethan is super super hot. Although I do love Kristoffer Polaha who plays Henry from his days of playing Baz on Life Unexpected.
Hey here is a little sneak peak at In Stitches by Anthony Youn.
Also go check out the Facebook page. www.facebook.com/institchesbook Leave them a comment saying Heather Finley sent you.
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Prologue: The Face in the Ceiling
What a pair. Double D’s. Poking up at me like twin peaks. Pam Anderson, eat your heart out.
Too bad they’re attached to a fourteen-year-old boy.
I ease the black marker out of my lab coat pocket and start drawing on my first surgery patient of the day. Phil. An overweight African-American boy. Phil has severe gynecomastia—in layperson’s language, ginormous man boobs. Poor Phil. Bad enough being fourteen, awkward,
and a nonathlete in a tough urban Detroit school. Now he has to deal with breasts?
Two weeks ago.
I sit in my office with Phil and Mrs. Grier, his grandmother. Phil lives with his grandma, who’s raised him since he was ten, when his mom died. He’s never known his dad. Mrs. Grier sits on a chair in front of my desk, her hands folded in her lap. She’s a large woman, nervous, well dressed in a light blue dress and matching shawl. Phil, wearing what looks like a toga, sits on a chair next to her. He stares at the floor. “It happened fast,” Mrs. Grier says. “He shot up, his voice got deeper, he started to shave.”
She speaks in a low rumble. She looks at her grandson, tries to catch his eye. He can’t see her. He keeps his head down, eyes boring into the floor.
“Then he became quiet. Withdrawn. He would spend more and more time in his room alone, listening to music. He would walk around all day wearing his headphones. Seemed like he was trying to shut out the world.”
Mrs. Grier slowly shakes her head. “Phil’s a good student. But his grades have gone downhill. He doesn’t want to go to school. Says he’s sick. I tried to talk to him, tried to find out what was wrong. He would just say, ‘Leave me alone, Nana.’ That’s all he would say.”
Phil clears his throat. He keeps looking at the floor.
Mrs. Grier shifts in her chair. “One day I accidentally walked in on him when he was drying off after a shower. That’s when I saw . . . you know . . . them.”
Phil flinches. Mrs. Grier reaches over and touches his arm. After a moment, he swallows and says in a near whimper, “Can you help me?”
“Yes,” I say.
I say this one word with such confidence that Phil lifts his head and finds my eyes. He blinks through tears.
“Please,” he says.
The night before Phil’s procedure.
I can’t sleep. I lean over and squint at the clock on the nightstand. I twist my head and look at my wife, deep asleep, her back arched slightly, her breath humming like a tiny engine. I exhale and study the ceiling.
A shaft of light blinds me like the flash from a camera. My mind hits rewind, and I’m thrown backward into a shock of memory. One by one, as if sifting through photographs, I flip through other sleepless nights, a string of them, a lifetime ago in medical school, some locked in the student lounge studying, some a function of falling into bed too tired or too worked up for sleep. Often I would find myself staring at the ceiling then, the way I am now, talking to myself, feeling lost, fumbling to find my way, wondering who I was and what I was doing. The memory hits me like a wave, and for a second, just as in medical school, I feel as if I am drowning.
My eyes flutter and I’m back in our bedroom, staring blurrily at the ceiling. I see Phil’s breasts, pendulous fleshy torpedoes that have left him and his grandmother heartsick and desperate. I know that his emotional life is at stake and I am their hope. I know also that isn’t why I can’t sleep. I blink and see Phil’s face, and then I see my own.
I was Phil—the outsider, the outcast, the deformed. I was fourteen year-old Phil.
I grew up one of two Asian-American kids in a small town of near wall- to-wall whiteness. In elementary and middle school, I was short, shy, and nerdy. Then I shot up in high school. I became tall, too tall, too thin. I wore thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, a stereotypical Asian bowl-cut hairdo, and then, to my horror, watched helplessly as my jaw began to grow, unstoppable, defying all restraint and correction, expanding Pinocchio-like, protruding to an unthinkable, monstrous size. I loved comic books, collected them, obsessed over them, and as if in recognition of this, my jaw extended to a cartoon size. I was Phil. Except I grew a comic-book jaw while he grew National Geographic breasts. Like Phil, I only wanted to look and feel normal. I just wanted to fit in.
It hits me then.
My calling—my fate—was written that summer between high school and college, the Summer of the Jaw. My own makeover foreshadowed my life’s work. Reconstructing my jaw showed me how changing your appearance can profoundly affect your life. Now, years later, I am devoted to making over others—helping them, beautifying them, changing them. I have discovered that plastic surgery goes beyond how others see you; it changes how you see yourself. On occasion, I have performed procedures that have saved lives. I believe that I will save Phil.
My mind sifts through my days in medical school, and in a kind of hallucinogenic blaze, I conjure up every triumph, every flub, every angst-filled moment. I remember each pulse-pounding second of the first two years of nonstop studying and test-taking, interrupted by intermittent bouts of off-the-hook partying. I see myself in years three and four, wearing my short white coat, wandering through hospital corridors trying to overcome my fear that someone—an administrator, a nurse, or God forbid, a patient—would confuse me for a doctor and ask for medical attention. I teetered a hair’s width away from those moments that might mean life and death, facing the deepest truth in the pit of my stomach: that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And neither did any of my medical-school classmates, those doctors in training who stumbled around me.
But things changed. Thanks to my small circle of close friends, my focus, work ethic, and drive to succeed, I slowly grew up. I entered medical school a shy, skinny, awkward nerd with no confidence, no game, and no clue. I came out, four years later, a man.
A smile creeps across my face. My eyelids quiver. I catch a last glimpse of the face of my younger self in the ceiling as it shimmies and pulls away. Sleep comes at last.
Phil’s surgery goes well. Ninety minutes, no complications. I lop off his breasts with a scalpel, slice off the nipples, then suture them back onto his now flat chest. I nod at his new areolas. They have decreased in diameter from the size of pie plates to quarters. I leave Phil stitched up and covered with gauze, a normal-looking high school freshman. Good news, Phil. You will not break new ground and become the first male waiter at Hooters.
I once saw an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which a character suggested that she—and every doctor—experienced an “aha moment” when she realized she had become a doctor. That never happened to me. I experienced an accumulation of many moments. Some walloped me, left me reeling. Others flickered and rolled past like a shadow. They involved teachers, classmates, roommates, friends, family, actors playing patients, nurses, the family of patients, and patients themselves, patients who touched me and who troubled me, patients whose courage changed my life and who taught me how to live as they faced death, and of course, doctors—doctors who were kind, doctors who were clueless, doctors who were burned out, doctors who inspired me and doctors whom I aspired to be, doctors who sought my opinion and doctors who shut me down.
Thinking about all these people and moments, I see no pattern. Each moment feels singular and powerful. They stunned me, enveloped me, awed me, but more often flew right by me unnoticed until days, weeks, months, years later. Until now.
**Book sent for free for review**
Medical school.
Something I can honestly say I know nothing about beyond the first season of Grey’s Anatomy so when I was asked to review a memoir about it, I couldn’ t wait to get my hands on the book.
In Stitches by Anthony Youn tells the story of a Korean-American boy that grew up being told he had to be a doctor. He had to do perfect in school. He had to be successful and most importantly, he had to make money. A quite mother and a strict father made growing up hard but even harder was dealing with his peers, especially the opposite sex. The book follows Youn through college (still struggling with the ladies) to medical school (where he has to find his own path while making his family proud).
The first part of the book focused mainly on Youns’ home life, medical problems (jaw problems that eventually lead him to corrective surgery), and of course his struggle to interact with girls. Previews for this book seem to compare it to Tucker Max and made it sound like this part would be hysterically funny. Overall, I found this part slow and more sad than anything else. I think someone that was more into heaartfelt memiors would enjoy this part but personally I just wanted to get to the juicy stuff. Even the chapters about his first few years in college felt this way to me.
Then Youn started medical school. Just like I had assumed when I decided to accept this book for review, I was completely entralled with this part of the book. First of all, I didn’t know anything about the structure of medical school. The first year involved classes which is what I assumed most of medical school was. Turns out second year it is problem solving with actual actors. People actually get paid to let second year medical students stick there hands…well you get the picture.
The third year and fourth year were by far the most interesting parts of the book for me. Third year students do rounds in several different fields and fourth year they focus on what exactly they are going into. In Youn’s case, he opted for plastic surgery. The third year part had some funny and some sad stories. I would have liked to hear more of those. The plastic surgery stuff, especially the last part in Beverly Hills was the stuff I just ate up. Honestly, I would love to see Youn write a second book that goes more in depth on plastic surgery.
Overall, I ended up liking this book. Like I have already mentioned, I would read a second book from Youn if he decides to write one. His writing is fun to read. I checked out his blog http://www.celebcosmeticsurgery.com/ after reading the book and found that interesting as well. I’d recommend this book to anyone curious about medical stuff or who enjoys memoir writing.
Thank you so much to Sneak Attack Media for sending me this book.
So sad to see the Georgina Kincaid series end. I cried at the end both because it was touching and I was so upset that it really was the end. Definately one of my very favorite series. Actually screw it, favorite series hands down. Weather Wardens is my second. Review up soon. Too many other things to do tonight.
Anyone interested in a giveaway? Trying to gage interest before I commit to having books sent to me. What does everyone think?
Who else is overly excited for the new Rachel Caine series?
Only a week from today!
Alright so since I’m editing my book I have a few questions about other books you have read that have characters similar to mine. Kind of trying to do some marketing research. Any help is huge so thank you so much!!!
1- What books have you read about Angels/demons/nephilim?
2- Were they cast in typical roles aka angels good, demons bad?
3- If there was nephilim, were they good or bad?
4- What did you like about these books?
5- What did you dislike?
6- Were their humans involved as main characters?
7-Were the angels/demons/nephilim portrayed as typical human in terms of their physical shape (ie-no wings, horns, etc)?
8- Was their biblical references in the book?
Thank you again.
PS- Here are some of the books I’ve read/have with angels/demons/nephilim.
The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare
The Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare
Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick
Georgina Kincaid series by Richelle Mead
The Fallen series Thomas E. Sniegoski
Fallen series by Lauren Kate
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman
