Jenn's World

I got married!

I also bought a house!

My blog's been dark for awhile, I haven't had the time or energy to put into it. Plus, my life's been turning to the intensely personal lately. There are some things you don't want to share with the world (unlike weddings)

All in all, I think I'll save updates for when I'm actually getting published and have something to say. I will mention that after months of work I'm finally getting back into swing of things. Revisions on White War are humming along at the 10,000 words per day range, in no small part because of my loving best friend and husband, Jeremy, who is so very supportive and creative. Love never seemed real to me until I found it with him. I want to spend a part of every day crying in joy because I have found the other half to my soul.

Now, I just have to accept the idea that being deliriously happy is okay. Otherwise, I'll screw it up myself with my endless neuroses.

Anyway, I can't post wedding pictures on facebook until I show the family, but I thought I'd put a few of my favorites up here. Because why not? What bride doesn't love to show off her work?

We got married in the Provo temple on June 15, 2013. (Not as cool as our engagement date -- 2/13/2013-- but oh well.)


We were joined by friends, family, and a ridiculous 9-foot-long lace veil that my grandmother got married in.


We ate lunch at Chef's Table (where they whipped something special up for my vegan mom) and then had a ring ceremony and a reception in my grandparents' backyard. We were lucky that the roses were in bloom.


My bouquet was by Macey's (the grocery store) tired with ribbons and lace stolen my grandma's stash. So were the boutonnieres, which my aunt whipped up for us at the last minute (I'd wanted to do them the night before, but I was so tired from all the prep that I just fell asleep. Am I the only bride in the history of the universe who slept like a baby the night before her wedding? Maybe).


My sister-in-law, Lindsay Putnam of Vanilla House Bakery, did our gorgeous cake and our lovely cake buffet.


 I found the cake toppers on etsy, though we made stand. I bought the mini-blackboards there, too.


I also found our leaf-stamp guest tree there. To save money, I only booked our awesome photographers (Dave and April from Pointe Digital, who did photo and video) for the first part of the reception. So they left before our stamp tree was full.


I did our centerpieces out of silk flowers from Hobby Lobby, weighted down by ball bearings found my grandpa's basement. They have the best silk flowers, but if you want to buy them, wait until they have a 50%-off sale on floral stems. One happens every month or so. My mom made foam board cutouts that looked like bride and groom 'meeples'--a reference to the fact that Jeremy and I love board gaming.


The pictures are kind of small, but you may have noticed the paper cranes. Jeremy did those. We hid one in each boutonniere and two in each centerpiece.


Silly crane, how do you think you'll be able to fly with our rings perched on your back?


And here the rings are on the tablecloths my grandmother sewed for me out of $3-a-yard fabric I dug up at a store in Layton. Boy, those rings do get around! The diamond is recycled and belonged to my great-great-grandfather. The bands are from Losee's Jewelers. I had mine custom-made with rose gold. (The original design was white gold only.)


But we all know the true star of the show wasn't the rings or the flowers. It was ME!!!!!!!!!


And my shoes.


No, I'm kidding. It was actually the cake. OM NOM NOM.


What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't have had such a wonderful day without the special people in my life who volunteered their time and their love. Some of them worked right up to the last minute.

This came to me tonight while my friends were playing Persona 4. I don't know if I'll ever be able to use this line since I mostly write fantasy/sci-fi, but here it is:

"If Cruella DeVille had wanted a speedo instead of a fur coat, this is what it would have looked like."

The weirdest things come to me when I'm tired.

January 9, 2013 -- 3:29 p.m.

Speaking of callbacks and deaths, I almost wish there had been more dying. Lan's fight with Demandred might be one of the top moments of the entire series for me. But you can't SHEAVE THE SWORD and then walk away after. That's cheating. My favorite actual death was either Egwene's or Siuan's. Even if Siuan's is only a couple lines, you got to admire someone who heroically goes to their death, even if they aren't sure it will accomplish anything. That's true heroism. I wish we'd had one last Bryne POV as he went beserking to his death to accompany it, or that they'd found his body later with 90 dead trollocs around it, but you can't have everything even in a 900-page novel, I guess.

I liked the male/female working-together dynamic that was running through everywhere (Andol/Pevara, Elayne/her generals, Rand/NynaRaine). That was a cool pay-off of the series' philosophy. It was cool to see the flaws in Callandor be intentional. That was great.

At the same time, I was disappointed by how useless Moiraine and Nynaeve turned out to be. What did Moiraine do that was so important for saving the world? Alivia could have come in her place and nothing would have changed. Mat sacrificed his eye so that, what, Moiraine could tell Egwene she needed to break the seals when she got her hands on them? I guess coming to a truce between them was good, but I wasn't sure Moiraine was the only one capable of doing that. I had really hoped she'd get to do something awesomely dramatic. And she did, at the very end with exploiting the flaw, but that was Rand's idea, so she only gets partial credit with it.

Ditto with Nynaeve. Alanna could have released the stupid bond at any time. So Nynaeve actually knowing how to do stuff without the power (a theme repeatedly hashed on this whole time) didn't actually turn out to matter. It also brings up the question: Moiraine knew she was going to die, why didn't she release Lan and save him a little suicidal angst? Not good on you, girlfriend. I always assumed she didn't because it was some complicated weave that could only be done with time/effort. Nope!

And all the stuff we had to slog through with how many books with the Windfinders? Did it pay off? Nope. Not that I wanted to spend time with a culture that beats up its teachers. WTF was that???

Padan Fain was the biggest letdown. He's been screwing things up for our heroes ever since the first book and he barely gets a mention (except for two obvious 'help remind the reader that's he's still out there' moments by Perrin) until he's suddenly a mini-roaming Mashadar who gets two pages and then gets offed. Thanks for wasting our book space for however many years only to give Mat something to do at the bore for thirty seconds!

Speaking of Mat, how great was it that the Hornsounder didn't end up sounding the horn after all. Great thing or greatest thing? (TEAM OLVER 4EVAH!!!)

***END SPOILERS***

Overall, even though I was annoyed at some little things, I loved the ending. You can't have a book series go on for so long with so many things being juggled without there being a few disappointments, and I'm in awe that Brandon Sanderson managed to complete such a daunting task.

So bravo, team Jordan, bravo. A part of my life feels...empty, now. Good thing GRRM's still writing books for me to obsess about. If he finishes a Song of Ice and Fire, I won't know what to do with myself :)

December 4, 2012 -- 6:39 a.m.

Since I found the NaNoWriMo website's tracker to be such a helpful motivator, I decided to create my own using Microsoft Excel. This is what it looks like:


It doesn't look as pretty as the NaNoWriMo version, but it only took me ten or fifteen minutes to do. It's been a while since my linear programming classes, so there's probably a simpler way to do this, but here's the instructions if you want to copy what I did. I tried to keep the instructions really simple for those of you who aren't as familiar with excel:

You'll need four columns.

1) The first is for days of the month. If you don't manually want to type in the numbers, you can type 1 in the first box. Then, in the next box down, write =A2+1 (or whatever box you used). Select that box. You should see a little black square in the lower right corner, almost like one of the dark pixels from one of the old video games. Click on that square and drag down to fill your column up with your formula. If you've done it correctly, each box should have numbers rising consecutively (day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) etc. Stop when you've reached the appropriate number of days in the month.

2) The second column is your daily word count. I like being able to see how much I write a day besides how much my total word count is, so I can monitor whether I'm being consistent and look for patterns that might help me figure out how to increase my productivity. Leave this column blank for now.

3) The next column will be your total word count for the month. It's a running total. If you're writing all in one document, you could just be recording this yourself using Word's automatic word count feature, but I like to write every chapter in a new document so I'm less tempted into endless revisions on my book. This can make keeping track of total word count a little difficult, since you're looking at totals over multiple documents.

For that reason, my total word count is going to be a sum of all my daily wordcounts. To create this, I start by setting the first box of column C to =B2. In this case, that's zero, because I took a break after NaNoWriMo to celebrate finishing a winner. For the next box down, you want to sum the old total (zero) with the new total (anything you added in day two.) So, an easy way to do this is to type a formula summing the two cells. In this case, SUM(C2, B3).

Now click on the corner of the cell and drag the formula down the column. Excel will automatically change the cell number for you, so that cell 3 (C4 in this example) will automatically read SUM(C3, B4).

4) The final column is your daily target. You don't have to follow NaNoWriMo's 50,000 word target. This can be anything you want. But I figured I might as well stick with 50,000. 50,000 divided by 31 (the days in December) means I should be approximately doing 1613 words a day. So for these cells, you start with 1613 in the first cell, and every cell thereafter should be +1613. In this case, I wrote =D2+1613. Click and drag down.

5) Test to make sure everything's working by putting random numbers in the daily word count boxes. If your word count total changes appropriately, you've done everything you needed to do.

Voila! You have a bunch of columns with numbers in them. If you don't want the graph, you can stop now.

But you want the graph, don't you? I decided to use a scatterplot graph because it's easy to make and easy to read.

1) Highlight columns A, C, and D. You don't need column B for this one. To highlight multiple, non-adjoining columns, hold the control key down and click on the column letter at the top. This should highlight the entire column.

2) Go to the tab menu at the top and click "Insert." In the middle of the menu, there will be a variety of graphs to choose from. I chose a scatterplot with smooth lines. If you chose the right columns to highlight, it should create a graph with days on the bottom and number of words running up the side with a smooth slope of your goal in the middle and another line with your progress.

3) The default this produces is an ugly graph. I like mine neater, so I right clicked on the axis and hit "format axis", then used it to format the maximum on each side (so I wouldn't have extra days or words along the sides) and also set my word count axis to thousands. If you get to the axis format menu, that stuff's fairly self-explanatory, so I'm not going to walk through the steps with you. I also changed the graph's format from the default to one with axis titles and a main titles, but your personal preference may vary. I deleted the axis title on the left by clicking it and hitting backspace because I wanted the graph nice and big instead of wasting space on a redundant label.

Like I said, this is not especially pretty or fancy, but it's functional. The graph looks wonky now since the total's so flat, but by the end of the month, my plateau should be more of a jagged blue mountain. And it's really easy to do. My instructions probably make things look way more complicated then it actually is. And if you want to make it cooler, you can make every column a different color, or use the conditional formatting button in the home tab to make your boxes red when you're below your goal and green when you're above it. (Hmm, that's a good idea. I'll go do that now. *Click*)

If you run into any problems or have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. There's a moderator queue to stop the spambots, but I do glance and sort through the comments every once in awhile. I'll do my best to help.

Edit: Oh, I just remembered. If you want to make copies of your sheet for next month, make sure to do it now, while the sheet is clean. If you try to copy the sheet at the end of December, you'll have to delete all your word counts. Easier to do it now while your cell values are still blank.

November 30, 2012 -- 6:29 P.M.

Well, it's been awhile since I posted. Life has been hectic. My laptop got bathed in soup and I ended up in Seattle for a family emergency. Otherwise, things are going pretty well. The school I was going to decided to discontinue the grad program I quit, so I'm definitely not going back. Which means I have to decide to do new things. If I'm going to try for another grad degree, I'm going to try to find one that lets me move slowly. The bottom line is that writing is my first love. Any program that asks me to spend 50-60 hours doing something else is just going to make me miserable. I'm not sure how many part-time statistics masters degrees are available, but since I need to do some undergrad work to brush up my math skills, I'm not going to worry about that right now.

Unfortunately, Utah doesn't consider me a resident because I never bothered to get my vote registered. I know I should have for the local voting even if the bigger elections go straight R, but the local decisions Provo's city council and mayor have made depress me so much. Not only the actions they've made, but the willingness to make actions without considering their costs. When they decided to build a rec center, they only consulted biased sources. Nowhere in any of their presentations did you see comparisons to other local rec centers. No figures on how much the Orem one ended up costing and how much it would be used. From my calculations, it would have been cheaper to buy everyone in Provo passes to the Orem center for the next ten years or so than to build one in Provo. Or buy them a Gold's Gym pass. The local gyms were afraid that the rec center would cut into their business--which it will--and so the Provo city council promised that they wouldn't have things that would compete with the gym. So what does that leave the rec center with, other than an over-sized swimming pool? The marketing was also really shady. "Your taxes won't rise!" No, but they won't drop either. And to build the center, they demolished both the city's teen and senior centers, which, from the plans, they intend to include inside the senior center as one room. (Teenagers + old people. Best combo ever!) I didn't hear any comments from the administrators of the teen center in the process about how their stuff would be positively/negatively affected by the change.

Maybe the whole thing will turn out to be a big success instead of another iProvo. But even if it is a good idea, the process was really crappy. It points to the quality of the Daily Herald, Provo's newspaper, that the reporters never questioned any of the data. My grandfather was particularly incensed because the city council claimed 80 percent of Provo residents would use it at least once a week (based on a mail survey *SMACK!*) but the plans included a parking lot that wouldn't accommodate nearly that many people. That suggested to him that the Provo city council knew their numbers were absolute bunk but presented them as fact anyway.

Oh well, I shouldn't be fighting old battles. Especially since the battles are old enough that I might be misremembering the facts. (Huh--spell-checker doesn't consider misremember a word? Who programmed this thing?)

All my family crises seem to be mostly averted. The first draft of the two-year behemoth I was calling "Wyrmborn" is almost finished. The name of the book is "White War" for now, which is a much better title. Over August-October, I've broken out of my rut and written some 62,000 words. Not too shabby at all. At this rate, I should finish draft 1 by the end of November. I've signed up for nanowrimo under the user name 'Vegetathalas' (don't ask, it's a long boring story.) to help me in my quest. Not sure how long the book is total, since I've discovered the secret to productivity is to store my chapters in different documents so I don't go back and endlessly rewrite stuff. This means it's going to be quite a pain to put everything together. But that means I should have a draft I can bear to show people out by January. Yay!

After that, my tentative plan is to give Skin Farm one final revision and then start writing grouping/querying it. I know the YA post-apocalyptic market is pretty oversaturated, but I like Skin Farm enough that I can't bear to let it sit in a trunk without even trying to get it out there. I wish I had understood more about writing plot and my own personal writing process when I started that thing. I could have had it done ages ago.

After that, it's time to start on a new book. I've plotted out a YA superhero book about a girl mechanic who suddenly gains the power to control vehicle engines, but I'm sort of reluctant to write it because I know nothing about cars and it would mean a lot of research and finding someone with mechanic-y know-how to alpha read and point out all my mistakes. Either that, or I could go back to my first book and re-write it as a YA fantasy with a stronger plot, keeping the same characters but giving them clearer motivations, making the magic system more understandable, and starting out with one main conflict instead of the, like, thousands I introduced. Basically, simplifying. Also, making the Empire more hateful and the rebellion more effective. Or I could write something entirely new. I could even try my hand at short fiction.

We'll see what I feel like after I get the other two books in order. It's always possible that I'll have a book contract by then and so I'll need to start writing sequels. (Hey, a girl can hope!)

Oi! It's been a long time since I've written anything. I've mostly decided that blogging takes up energy that could be better used on my book, so I'm focusing on that. So don't expect many updates from me. I thought of reviewing the Dark Knight Rises--which I very much enjoyed--but lost my enthusiasm after the shootings. And the comments boards of articles that deal with the shootings. Some people have no respect. My heart goes out to all those poor people in Colorado. My prayers are with you.

So why am I posting? Because I got an email this morning. I couldn't find any Google hits on the subject, so I'm putting up a warning just in case something like this wends it way into a gullible person's inbox:

Hello! 

We're emailing you to let you know that we're currently looking for new models. We noticed that you have expressed interest before in becoming a model. Our agency is the perfect place to get your start into the modeling world! 

If you're interested in applying to model with our agency, please send us a brief description of yourself - your hobbies, why you want to get into modeling, etc. - along with information to contact you should you be accepted. Also, please send photos with your application. We would appreciate it if you sent a few photos in a modeling type style. Please send us at least one photo from at least one of the following: nude, swimwear (both one-piece and two-piece is acceptable), or underwear(lingere is preferred, but not required). 

If interested, please reply to fancifulmodeling@yahoo.com, with the required information and photos. Also, all of our models must be 18 or older. If you do not meet this age requirement, please disregard this message.  

Thank you, 

Loriane Varner 

Modeling Agent Coordinator

Obviously this is a scam. The agency is asking for nude pictures instead of head shots, there's some sloppy grammar (ie, 'into' instead of 'in' in the first paragraph), I got this out of nowhere (I'm 28--not exactly a prime demographic for new models), and Fanciful Modeling has no website and operates out of a yahoo address. All this makes me believe that Fanciful Modeling is, well, fanciful.

The question is: What do the people doing this want? Are they in it  just out for free amateur pornography? Or after the photos are sent, are they pushing pay-for-hire services? I am half curious enough that I almost want to send them a fake photo and see what happens, but my email is on too many other spammer's lists already. Ah well, I suppose stuff like this is more interesting than Viagra ads.

I'd recommend anyone who is contacted by a modelling agency by email check out this scam warning from the federal trade commission.

May 27, 2012 -- 10:00 p.m.

Just went and saw Avengers Friday. I loved it. It was a lot of fun. It was very Whedon. I don't think it's possible to handle an ensemble movie more deftly. I wish they'd give him X-men. I liked the subtlety of some parts of it (subtlety not being the usual operative word when it comes to big explode-y things) and the character interactions. The actors were all awesome. Loki was lovin' it. The action shots were cool. Everyone felt like a defined character, even if that meant they had to scream out what trope they were representing. "LOOK AT ME, I'M A MAVERICK PLAYBOY WHO HAS TO LEARN HOW TO BE ABLE TO OPERATE WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF A TEAM!" It was done in a good way, playing on conventions audiences know and love.

But...what was up with the Hulk's internal character arc? It was built up that the Hulk doing his Hulkin' was going to be this huge, dangerous, horrible thing. And then it was a horrible thing, because he put his beatdown on the damsel in distress. But then at the end of the movie, he can somehow control his greener self? Why? What was the turning point? Or does the magic wand of Robert Downey Jr.'s charm just heal all ills?

Maybe it's explained in the canon material. I'm not very familiar with the Hulk, though the movie's Bruce Banner made me want to be.

Anyway, it was a fun movie, partly because it never took itself to seriously. Probably my third or fourth favorite comic book movie ever (I'd have to rewatch the Spidermans). But with all the hype around it, I expected another Dark Knight. Instead, I got a superlong Buffy episode. With superheroes. Which is a good thing.

Hmm...superlong Buffy episode with Superheroes SINGING. Hmm. (*Calls Hollywood*).

PS: It's funny how Scarlett Johansson managed to get herself pinned by wreckage in such a way that her butt shows off to best advantage. Curious how falling rubble is selective that way.

May 24, 2012 -- 4:19 A.M.

The good news is that I found out what was making me sick. The bad news is that I didn't figure it out soon enough. I got so far behind on homework, I felt like I couldn't make it up and decided that I wasn't happy anyway so I dropped out of my program. I'm too emotionally stressed right now to deal with school.