My Book is in Heaven, Waiting to be Born

It's Friday morning and I'm at the BYU Writing for Young People who Read Good Conference, so I'll make this quick.

RANDOM SMELL STATUS: The random stench in my basement is gone, but now my car suddenly smells like puke. On the drive to lunch it smelled fine. After lunch, it smelled like puke. Did someone break into my car, hurl under the seat and then run away laughing? Ah, the excitement of a mystery.

CONTEST
Remember to follow me on Twitter (or link to me) by Sunday to be entered into the drawing for free autographed books.

WE RULE
The push for world domination was successful. Just this morning, we topped that elusive 2 million mark. The procreating bunnies tapped out at 1.7 million. I think the pressure got to them.

In other news, local animal shelters say June is a great month to give your honey a bunny.

RANDOM CONFERENCE CHICKEN NUGGETS OF WISDOM
1. Dandi Mackall gave a great talk at the conference, and at one point, she recounted a dream in which she went to heaven and found all sorts of books who were waiting patiently for an author to man up and write them.

I couldn't help but picture a little 8-year old book, looking longingly down to earth at me, hoping to be born into this world, only to discover I tied my brain tubes. All night, I heard this tiny voice, screaming her guts out from the sky: "Brodi! You promised me!"

I promise, little book, I will try to reverse the procedure, and write you.

2. Tracy Hickman talked about how a book doesn't exist until a reader reads it. (He said it a lot gooder than I just did.)

Anyway, he likened it to the theory of Schrodinger's Cat. Anyone familiar with the famous feline?

The theory goes something like this: If you put a cat in a metal box, with a poison time-release capsule, you'll never know if the cat is alive or dead unless you open the box. So while the box is closed, the cat is alive and dead.

Did that just blow your mind? Alive AND dead! I'll give you a moment to scrape your brains off the wall.

Here are a few graphs to help you understand.

























I'm not sure what it had to do with writing, but I came home and wrote a scene where a cat suffocates in a box. So it totally helped me.

3. For one exercise, I had to draft a letter from my Main Character to me (the author). Here's what my Main Character had to say to me:

Dear Brodi,

Gimme a plot already, booger-brain.

Love,
M.C.

Apparently, my Main Character overheard the flogging of my book during critique, and she sided with my fellow writers.

4. The BYU bookstore was charging $4.76 for those little plastic contact cases.









Seems a little price-gouging for a religious institution.

More details to come on Monday. For now, enjoy the Big Bang Theory's take on Schrodinger's cat.