Internationally Bestselling Quirky Children's Books; Adventurous Heroes Doing Good
This week we talk about the weird things we would never do, so basically the anti-bucket list.
So many thanks to everyone who participated! You all are fan-freaking-tastic! And it was so good to see you!
The music you hear in our intro and outro was provided by the amazing Stubhy Pandav. He’s brilliant. You should check him out.
Yep, we’re going there, because we’re the only self-development podcast that will.
Join us as we talk about brawls in the Waffle House, farting, and creating systems to actually achieve your goals.
Sometimes you have to review the system to stop having resource guarding. Cough. Pogie. Cough.
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
https://www.thirstyfornews.com/2022/12/29/customers-start-wwe-style-brawl-in-texas-waffle-house/
We also talk about a link from Medium that won’t embed up there, but the link is in the narrative. Thanks for joining us and here’s to a good 2023!
So, this podcast episode is probably going to be Shaun’s favorite because he grew up in a family that was not uptight about sex.
I, however, grew up in a family where a couple of the branches pretended we were all born out of the immaculate conception or just maybe sperm drops on a toilet or something.
We have some friends—good friends—who are currently exploring all things sexual in a consensual, relationship way.
They aren’t uptight.
Shaun’s not uptight.
And one of these things are not like the others.
Spoiler: Me. I’m the thing that’s not like the others.
But, it turns out that a lot of people are like me. Join us as we talk about five ways people are uptight and our bonus random thought about people who received a letter about secret spaces in their new home.
Sometimes you just got to grab on and go for it (consensually, of course)
https://www.womansday.com/relationships/sex-tips/advice/a1004/get-over-your-sexual-hangups-92993/
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Let’s say your cat gets trapped in the pantry overnight and manages to chew through two bags of cat nip, spread it throughout the pantry and then have a panicked pea on top of a bucket of cashews before knocking over a vase, which smashes to the ground alerting you to the fact that she’s been stuck in there all night.
Or let’s say you’re a guy who decides to eat 40 whole chickens for 40 days.
You can take those experiences and be . . . something? This episode we look into the chicken man and the cat peeing in the pantry and the scale of positive and negative experiences.
Diener, E., Wirtz, D., Tov, W., Kim-Prieto, C., Choi. D., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (In press). New measures of well-being: Flourishing and positive and negative feelings. Social Indicators Research.
https://psychologyroots.com/scale-of-positive-and-negative-experience-spane/
Schimmack, U., Diener, E., & Oishi, S. (2002). Life-satisfaction is a momentary judgment and a stable personality characteristic: The use of chronically accessible and stable sources. Journal of Personality, 70, 345-385.
Schimmack, U. & Reisenzein, R. (2002). Experiencing activation: Energetic arousal and tense arousal are not mixtures of valence and activation. Emotion, 2, 412-417
Schimmack, U., & Grob, A. (2000). Dimensional models of core affect: A quantitative comparison by means of structural equation modeling. European Journal of Personality, 14, 325-345.
Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2008) Happiness: unlocking the mysteries of psychological wealth. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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servings30
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minutes300
kcal2–3 lbs cherry tomatoes, stems removed just like how traditional publishing has removed your heart through their constant rejections.
1/4 cup best-quality olive oil you can afford, and a bit more for roasting, so basically whatever brand is cheapest at WalMart because YOU HAVE NOT SOLD YOUR BOOK YET!
1 large yellow onion, diced up. Be careful with the knife, okay?
1 Tbsp fresh garlic, minced. Seriously. Be careful. Knives and round things don’t always go together, much like your book and Harper Collins apparently.
Fancy herbs! A small bunch of fresh basil leaves;
3–4 sprigs, fresh thyme, stems removed;
kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper, to taste;
steak seasoning if you can’t find any herbs–you can improvise here just like you improvised the use of a semicolon 7,777 times in you 50,000-word novel. Just kidding! Just kidding!
When I was growing up in Bedford, New Hampshire, humor was something that was somehow cultivated in our school system and in my family. To put it into context, Bedford is where Sarah and Laura Silverman, Josh and Seth Myers all grew up. Adam Sandler spent a few formative years in Manchester, the big city next door. New Hampshire, the state where the motto is “Live free or die” was somehow a funny place.
Who knew?
Maybe it has to be funny with a motto like that? Where hard granite peeks out beneath the soil almost anywhere you go?
I grew up thinking women laughing and women making jokes was absolutely normal. In my family, we laughed at anything and everything even when we were desperately poor, even when one of us is dying in the ICU. We laugh.
One of my favorite stories that I tell about myself is when I got a prestigious award for my first young adult novel. I received the award, preening, went back to my seat thinking “I have finally made it! I’m not a goofball anymore. I got an award! Look at me! I’m a serious writer now.”
Two seconds into my glorious preening, the emcee for the event (the governor’s wife) yelled into the microphone, “Carrie! Carrie! I forgot to ask you. What high school do you go to?”
There were titters in the crowd. Someone gasped. Someone other than me actually. My heart stopped. Did this woman who just gave me an award think that I was actually in high school?
I blurted, “What? Me? I don’t go to high school. I’m old!”
Apparently, she thought the genre of young adult could only be written by young adults? Or maybe she was drunk. I don’t know. I do know that I turned bright red and people laughed really hard.
Recently someone said to me, “You laugh a lot during your podcast.”
And I said (brilliantly), “Yeah?”
“You laugh really loud.”
“I always laugh loud,” I said. “I commit.”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s just really loud for a woman.”
According to an article by Jennifer Crusie, “Happily Ever Laughter: Writing Romantic Comedy for Women,” there’s a political element to comments like that one.
“The biggest barrier to writing women’s humor is the intrinsic belief that Good Girls don’t laugh. Ever hear a woman laugh out loud – really loud – in public? Chances are your first reaction was, ‘She’s no lady.’”
Oops. Apparently every single time I find things funny or joyous or ridiculous I’m losing my lady status. Judging by the amount of times that I laugh, I probably lost that when I was five. I’m cool with that.
Crusie continues, writing, “A woman’s laugher not only tells the world she knows, it also communicates strength and confidence. A woman must be very sure of herself to make the joke, to tell the story and to laugh out loud knowing people will stare. She must be proud, strong and confident.”
To laugh is to defy the norm, the social constructs that tell us in this culture how ladies are meant to behave.
Crusie extols writers to write funny women, women who make the readers laugh with them, women who laugh with rather than laughing down.
So how do you do that?
People who write humor are like poets. I know! I know? What am I talking about. Funny writers and poets only succeed because they are truth seekers and truth-sayers. They take the mundane, the detailed, the ridiculous and turn it into something universal. They notice things and then they stop to reflect on it.
So be funny. Be brave enough to laugh out loud in your books and in your life. Let the people stare.
The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
Continue reading “Women Are Allowed To Laugh, Aren’t We?”Okay. Cough. We had a bit of hiatus here on Cooking With a Writer mostly because I lived in a camper all summer while we rented out our house to make cash.
Not a good excuse, I know!
This wonderful recipe was adapted from Serious Eats and Stella Parks. She is a genius and has a much easier to follow version and all sorts of good stuff. You should check them out and also eat biscuits
[ultimate-recipe id=”3992″ template=”default”]This is not a main meal, but it’s delicious.
YUM! MORE!
I love carbs.
Steve Wedel and I wrote a super creepy book a few years back called After Obsession and it’s making a big freaking splash in the amazing Netherlands thanks to Dutch Venture Publishing and its leader Jen Minkman.
Check out this spread in a Dutch magazine. I met a whole bunch of Dutch readers last Friday and let me tell you? They are the best.
The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site.
You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps).
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
As you may remember last week we began Carrie’s Anti-Craft Book of Literary Terms, which is also called:
GLOSSARY OF IMPORTANT LITERARY TERMS, WHICH I WOULD (MAYBE) FIND IN A CRAFT BOOK IF I COULD BRING MYSELF TO READ ONE AGAIN, WHICH I CAN NOT, SO NO TRYING TO FORCE ME! I AM NO LONGER IN A MFA PROGRAM, SO JUST STOP IT RIGHT NOW. IT’S MY OWN LIFE DAMNIT:
(Note: the rest of the summer my posts will be much more intelligently done, I promise. Sort of? I sort of promise.)
This must be pronounced LIT-er- AHHHHHH-ture with either a wealthy Bostonian or Philadelphian accent (Although if you can become fake British for a moment, please do it. Everything sounds better when you sound like the Queen) or else it doesn’t count as literature and you obviously aren’t writing it.
There’s been some debate over literature writing vs. genre writing and which is better or if there’s even a difference.
There are differences.
People who claim to write Literature always say the word with that special accent and they remember to make the word capitalized. It’s that important. And gosh, darn it, so are they.
People who write in specific genres tend to be able to afford to eat dinner, lunch, and breakfast, and occasionally even have snacks.
(Note: This entry is not written so as to offend the literature writers. It’s just that if there is a penultimate smack-down between the two, I have to side with the genre writers because:
I, of course, would like to wave the flag of happiness and peace and beg both sides to love each other, and say: C’mon, dudes. The two things are not mutually exclusive. Do not tell me that OCTAVIAN NOTHING is not both Literature and genre. It is! All Young Adult novels count as genre.
This is something many writers never actually see. Although, sometimes if you read your poems loudly enough on a street corner and put a hat out, people will throw their hot dog wrappers into that hat, which is almost like money.
Note: Licking the ketchup off used hotdog wrappers and occasionally catching a tiny piece of onion is enough to nourish a starving writer for 10 hours.
Melodrama is something many writers add to spice up their conflicts.
Beware! Melodrama is like pepper. If you must pick up the melodrama grinder, you only want to twist it once or twice!
Melodramatic characters tend to have tragic pasts. They are often orphans because their parents died, and they did not die of heart disease or cancer, they died in a house fire, car wreck, or, best of all, were murdered in front of the protagonist’s eyes so the protagonist can weep over their dead bodies and slip the wedding ring from their mother’s finger and carry it as a keepsake. (Not that I ever wrote a scene like this. Ahem.)
Watch out if your character description looks anything like this:
“Azadriel is a fallen angel vampire who was cursed to be an assassin by the Dark God Lazmortius. His parents died when he was six when they were murdered by a demon ghost. Also, he is missing an eye and wears an cool-looking eyepatch and he has some awesome scars. Now he wanders the earth assassinating people…but secretly yearning for the love that will end his curse!”
Become familiar with this word! You will hear it often from your agent/editor/copy editor/publicist/writing group/critique partners/readers.
No, writing about condoms is not a good idea for a picture book.
No, writing about rainbows who fall in love is not a good idea for a young adult horror novel.
No, you did not earn out your advance.
No, you may not sleep over again tonight.
No, I am serious, there is no narrative arch in your book.
According to THE TONGUE UNTIED, “Using the objective case indicates that the pronoun is acting as an object. The object pronouns are: me, you, him, her, them, us, whom and it.”
Almost all craft books will tell you that the opening sentence MUST catch the reader’s attention. It must be beyond brilliant. The opening sentence must have hands as strong as the Incredible Hulk so that it can grab the reader by the throat and the reader can not get free, not ever, not even if she/he wanted to, because that opening sentence’s grip is so strong.
Opening sentence! Opening sentence! Loosen up. The reader needs to breathe. Vessels are popping the reader’s eyes, you’re holding on so tightly.
Whew.
Okay. Reader? Reader? Can you breathe?
Good.
Example of a good opening sentence:
Yikes!
(I know you think this is cheating, but come on. It’s hard to lose a reader’s attention with just one word.)
Example of a bad opening sentence:
While ornithology may be the study of birds and some people may enjoy studying things with feathers those same people have been know to extol the charms of beaks that are of the yellowish-tint as opposed to the orange-tint of others, which has come to be a major issue in the field causing ornithologists to occasionally have full-throttle pillow fights, the likes of which only rival the throw-downs between writers of the literary vs genre factions.
What some authors get obsessed about. Others get obsessed about word counts.
Author 1: I only wrote 10 pages today. I am such a slacker.
Author 2: Dude. I only wrote 24,000 words.
Author 1: Oh my God. Why am I so slow?
Author 2: Dude. You think you’re slow. I should’ve at least written 28,000 words today, but I started looking at Facebook.
Author 1: (bangs head on computer keyboard) I can’t believe I suck so bad.
Author 2: Dude ….
Author 1: (screaming)
Author 2: (points at blank screen) Dude, I think you erased your file when you hit your head on the computer.
Author 1: (passes out)
I refuse to talk about this because if I do the comma splices will hear. They hear everything. And then they will come, to get me, I can feel it, oh no, they, are already here.
The sexiest of all the table. Seriously. Look at them.
My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site.
You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps).
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
Let me just say this up front: I don’t like craft books.
Yep. You read it, right.
I don’t like craft books.
I’m sure there’s a deep-seated reason for this, which probably requires years of counseling; however, I am a writer who has holes in her clothes and I can’t afford years of counseling. So, unless someone decides to cough up the money to take care of my soul, it seems the roots of my craft book dislike may never be discovered.
So because I have some sort of death wish (Please do NOT kill me fellow toll writers, especially writers of craft books), I am going to create my own, special GLOSSARY OF IMPORTANT LITERARY TERMS, WHICH I WOULD (MAYBE) FIND IN A CRAFT BOOK IF I COULD BRING MYSELF TO READ ONE AGAIN, WHICH I CAN NOT, SO NO TRYING TO FORCE ME! I AM NO LONGER IN A MFA PROGRAM, SO JUST STOP IT RIGHT NOW. IT’S MY OWN LIFE DAMNIT:
These are the verbs that everyone wants. These verbs take no prisoners and aren’t all namby-pamby passive like everyone’s complaining Bella in the Twilight series is. These are the Rambo of verbs, the Natural Born Killers of verbs, the Stephen Colbert of verbs.
Interestingly enough, in the sentence, I WILL LICK YOUR FEET, MR. PRESIDENT, lick is an active verb, not a passive verb.
See? It makes no sense.
The horrifying addiction (not described in most craft books) that happens to authors after their book debuts. Symptoms include:
This is the ultimate of all goals for most writers, unless of course, you are Stephanie Meyers, J.K. Rowling, or God, then your goal is media domination or at least a multi-book, seven-figure contract.
Here. Let me use it in a paragraph:
The author claimed to have a book contract, but actually it was a book contact. It’s true. She touched a book. Once.
Oh, the comma. It is the evilest of the punctuation marks. It once made a Kirkus reviewer very mad at me. Who would think that this ,,,, could be so evil? Oh. Right. The Kirkus reviewer.
This is what happens to writers who do not memorize Diane Hacker’s RULES FOR THE WRITER ( Memorize that fifth edition – it’s the best!!!) and they fail to remember not to “use a comma between compound elements that are not independent clauses.”
You can never be free of the comma curse once you have it. Trust me, you don’t want it. It causes embarrassing itching in between the typing fingers.
The hoity-toity word for all the stuff that happens after the climax. The climax in the book. Geesh…
According to Evolution 101 at Berkley this is “descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.”
Try not to write about this. It may make your book banned.
This is what happens when you get super famous and dead and other people (teachers) force students to read your work in high school or college and they (the forward writers) have to explain before the actual text how important you and your writing is to the entire universe or at least to post-colonial New England, specifically Amherst, Massachusetts. It also shows up in those BEST OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY collections.
Hint: If you have a foreward in your book, you may be dead.
### I will continue with this next week if I don’t get kicked out of the Writers Club of Writerness
Now, I’m going to Revision Land and when I get to page 300 I’m going to reward myself and never think about tan people rubbing basil on their bodies again.
My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site.
You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps).
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
LISTEN UP MEN!!!
Here’s the awful truth: Your white briefs are no longer making you sexalicious.
1. They are no longer white. Do I have to explain the dingy factor? Once-white underwear is always gross.
2. They are drooping more than my gravity heavied earlobes, which is really saying something, because I wore a lot of heavy earrings in the early 1990s.
3. There are gaps where there shouldn’t be gaps!!!!!
4. The elastic is barely holding on and we all really, really, really need the elastic to hold on. Remember there are children at the beach or driving by. They can be scarred. Do you want to be responsible for that? No. No you do not.
5. Wearing a t-shirt with just your white briefs DOES NOT HELP!!! I repeat. This does not help your sexalicious ranking AT ALL. It makes you look like a toddler running around in a diaper and his mommy has put on a t-shirt to make sure he doesn’t get sunburned. If you are going for a sexy look, making women and men think of diapers, mommies, or spit-up DOES NOT HELP!!!
I mean, there are some people who are into that, but in general? Just no.
6. Wearing a cape doesn’t help either:
Thank you, Mr. Pilkey for the cartoon evidence.
Now, Men. I’m begging you.
Please, go reassess your underwear situation right now. You need some new ones. Remember your waist measurement when you were 12 is PROBABLY not your waist measurement today. That’s okay. You’re all grown up. That’s why we love you. Just not your underwear.
My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site.
You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps).
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
