Tag: Thoughts

Cyclic in Nature

Writing as Art IconIn the past three years (Gosh, it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long!), I’ve come to realize that my writing process is quite cyclic in nature. This isn’t so much tied to the time of year when I may or may not have more free time, but feels more like one of those buckets on a waterwheel. First, it dips into the river and scoops until it’s overflowing, along the trip up out of the river, some may splash out, but really it empties in one big dump to contine back around again for another refill.

Sketch of a water wheel by Jon Constable, Oct 11, 1814I seem to always be in one of those two modes, where I’m either pulling all sorts of things into my brain or dumping them back out again. The river of information includes several sources such as books, blogs or workshops on the craft of writing, published novels both in Regency Romance as well as any other out there (and sometimes the further the better), poking around into various research sources, as well as just plain ol’ people watching. Depletion of these creative stores is where the actual writing and idea generation come in. Once my head is stuffed full of ideas and they have a chance to percolate, they simply must escape again.

The problems come when I foolishly try to work against this cycle. I should know better by now that trying to generate new word count when I’m in need of an inflow period, it isn’t going to be pretty. Talk about a feeling of writer’s block. Oddly enough, reading an article or book on the craft of writing while in the middle of an outflow period, doesn’t switch the flow, it just doesn’t click or get absorbed as well.

Since returning to writing mode late last spring, I’ve been busy building word count and struggling to reach “The End” of Beneath His Touch. The good news is that I have something written for the whole plot line. The problem I’m up against now is that I need to go back and layer in actions, descriptions and thoughts around the runs of dialogue that went down so smoothly in the past couple months and every word is like pulling teeth.

I’ve been fighting the urge to set it aside and work on something else, anything else, because it feels so close to be able to say, it’s done, but I know it isn’t. Also, my critique partner is ready to kill me over the cliffhanger chapter endings and she KNOWS she’s only 4 chapters from the end. I’m nearly done with chapter 18, but the thought of doing two more chapters is killing me.

Because of Veteran’s Day, the kids had a four-day weekend. This translated into more segmented time for me, especially since their dad was home sick one day there as well. I made the mistake of picking up a craft book. Yup, I have even less desire to go work on those last two chapters now. I want to either start a new project or go back to page one and rework all the progress I’ve made in the last three years on this one. And I said I picked up “ONE” craft book right? Wrong. I may have said one, but that lead to at least two others as the weekend progressed.

The great thing about going back and rereading these books is that after letting them percolate for a while and trying out some of the techniques, those ideas become assimilated and internalized. So it’s a great feeling to go back and read them again to find that I get something new from the text, or something that didn’t quite make sense before, suddenly clicks.

My brain is telling me that I’m ready to embark on my next journey of study. But I’ll be good. I’ll force myself to flesh out these last two chapters, but then look out! I’m ready to dive in and conquer plotting. Yep! I seem to be going about this completely backwards, but I believe it’ll all be good in the end. By the time I figure out how to string scenes together effectively, all the other stuff will hopefully be second nature.

If you know of any good books, workshops or websites discussing plot, I’d love to hear them!

So much for a post about what I learned by finaling in the SYTYCW contest, but I think I covered that in the introduction to my Excerpt Monday post that will go up tomorrow morning with the extended opening of Marcia’s story: Revealed. So come back tomorrow to check that out!

Ruts Suck

Photo of early 1990s car stuck in a rut. I think my parents messed up when I was born. My middle name should have been ‘procrastination’ instead of what they wrote down on the form at the hospital.

Unfortunately, even knowing that the longer something is put off the harder it becomes to start doesn’t seem to prevent me from falling into those same ruts of routine. Thanks to Toni Sue for prompting me to look at this blog and question why I haven’t been giving it any attention for so long.

Have I run out of things to say? Nope. I just haven’t had the energy to pry them out of my head and plop them down on the page. Having my son out of school this year for 5 months really took its toll on me. It’s not a good excuse, and I wasn’t really looking for an excuse, but I can pinpoint when he started the independent study program as the point where my free time vanished.

Why I say I wasn’t looking for an excuse and that’s not a good one is that he went back to the traditional campus at the end of March. *flips through her calendar* Uh.. yeah… So… what have I been doing the past two months? A heckuva lot of nothing. Nothing meaningful anyway.

I’ve been stuck in a very passive rut. Barely reactive, forget proactive. What really sucks is that it’s not just writing that’s suffered, but pretty much everything. I’ve tried to keep up with a bare minimum of requirements, but honestly, there’s not much spark in anything right now.

Back at the beginning of May, I started working through The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray and Bret Norris. This has been helpful in sneaking back up on writing, but it’s still feeling a bit more like a chore than fun. I suspect I may need to cut out all my passive entertainment during the day and just play around with my characters again for a while. Anything to get the wheels back on track and find a routine that works for me.

Am I insane for thinking this can work just as I switch gears from school year to summer vacation mode? We’ll see. Something’s gotta give.

Warrior Writer Recap

So, the Warrior Writer Workshop. I was scared it was going to be too similar to Todd A. Stone’s Novelist’s Boot Camp, but reading the book, Who Dares Wins, I realized the Blood Lessons and the Circle of Success rang much truer and allowed me to take those ideas beyond the writing and see the applicability to other parts of my life. This is for those who want to be the elite, not just the rank and file. One is filled with only tactical approaches, Warrior Writer is a strategic approach that helps you build for overall success.

Continue reading “Warrior Writer Recap” →

Tick, Tock…

How is YOUR day structured?
How is YOUR day structured?

I joined Bria‘s writing goals accountability thread on Romance Divas‘s forum and have been thinking about time management a lot lately. The other night, Andi and I were talking about how this past year has flown by so quickly. There’s lots of theories out there and I’m not going to dig into any of them here.

I’ve always been bad at time management strategies. Stuff either happens or it doesn’t. For me, this usually means it doesn’t. I’m a major procrastinator: Why do today what can be put off ’til tomorrow? This accountability thread has been keeping my on my toes. I did great the first week and the next three days, but then with the holiday looming and the realization that other obligations also need to be met… well I earned my first unhappy face. I don’t know how the rest of this weekend is going to go. I’m nearly done with two of my goals (journal entry and blogging), so that just leaves 2 hours of writing on my WIP for today. Sounds easy you say? If I didn’t need to live in the real world, sure, piece of cake.

Most of the time I find myself hyperfocusing on something that allows me to escape from things I don’t want to do or think about. I shouldn’t be surprised when DD and DS whine that they don’t want to do boring but necessary jobs around the house. No one likes to (do they?). They certainly don’t have the best role models.

I’ve always been amazed and a little awed by people who manage to fit so much into their lives: scouts, sports, work, hobbies, entertaining, as well as all the little daily maintenance things that make their lives run smoothly. I like the idea of “found minutes”, but I think I’ve lost so many minutes I think they’re all curled up with the dust bunnies. I know they add up, but I find it takes time for me to get into tasks and then once there, I tend to hyper focus and my perfectionist tendencies override any permission I’ve given myself to do the task for “just fifteen minutes.” Because you can do ANYTHING for just 15 minutes, right?

I also find I lie to myself all the time by pretending I work well under pressure with tight deadlines. Papers in college were always started the night before they were due and that worked out ok. However, as I get older, I find I want to enjoy more quality time, but the guilt of other things left undone ruins that. I don’t want to put everything off to the last minute any more.

I think the best quote I ever read was “We all have routines, but is the one you have working for you?” I’m learning to juggle my commitments, but finding that sweet spot of balance is difficult. I just need to keep at it and establish better routines that actually work for all the areas I need to balance instead of just going with the flow and ending up caught in the eddies.

A little knowledge…

forms of knowledge… is a dangerous thing. Maybe this is what Andi and Bria were getting at when they asked if I thought too much craft info stuffed in my head was a bad thing<tm>.

I admit I was pretty bored with the workshop on Saturday as the nuts and bolts were gone over. It’s a good thing the personality of the speaker was engaging and funny. Also, I think Dana Belfry was highly amused by the little origami boxes I made out of Hershey’s Treasures wrappers during the talk.

In a way, I was appalled that the workshop was so nuts and bolts in its approach. Maybe I just assumed the audience for it should already have known the basics of having two of their characters speak to one another on the page? That doesn’t seem like that outlandish of an assumption.

On the other, maybe my expectations were just too high. Did I really expect the speaker to simply download her brain to ours? I don’t know, but I know there was a definite disconnect there. I don’t consider myself to be an expert on dialogue by any means, but the basic mechanics of it have been pretty obvious for a while now.

If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Gah! What a snobbish bore!” you can relax, because I’m definitely running into my share of challenges in the Deep Editing class, Bria talked me into taking with her. I’ll be the first to admit that editing is brand spanking new to me. You mean there’s more to it than fiddling with a word choice here and there? Cool.

Anyway, I’m learning technical terms for all sorts of rhetorical devices I knew existed, but never played with on a conscious level. I can hear my DH yawning right about now. Yes, dear. Old hat for you, but I was taking econ and business classes instead.

I think my favorite quote from Saturday’s workshop will always be, “Do it well, but don’t do it often!” That seems to apply to these rhetorical devices. I think the do it well part means you have to make it blend in with the writing around it too. It can’t just stick out like a sore thumb on the page. Otherwise, it just looks a bit purple.

I do feel I am learning from the class (yes I just signed up yesterday), but the EDITS system and taking a highlighter and painting the different sections (dialogue, description, internalization, emotion, and blocking) different colors really lets me see why I like and dislike various sections. Clumps are bad. A nice smattering of everything reads much better.

In other news, I’m over 10k on the Flower Queen’s Daughter story!

Journal Query

Pen on journal pageIn my journal entry on Friday, I wrote a big whine about how my progress with The Flower Queen’s Daughter was going. It isn’t really relevant except I was asked in chat what I wrote about in my journal. I replied that I usually use it for ranting, whining, and thinking out loud about what I’m working on, how my process is working or not and ways I can improve as a writer.

Just the question sparked a tangent in the second part of the entry where I was still thinking about how I was approaching this story and writing in general. The following is excerpted from that entry with minimal editing.

It’s funny when people ask me what I write about in my journal and I come out with one of my “big think day topics” or even just say that I’m thinking out loud about my story and what’s working and what isn’t and I’m surprised by how impressed they sound. Don’t other writers think about what they’re doing? Maybe they don’t or maybe it’s just that they don’t write their thoughts down. I certainly didn’t do either when I tried this back in college. I just sat down and started writing words down. I didn’t think about things like conflict, or scenes or anything like that or even plot.

I know my writing has improved since then, but I often find myself paralyzed by insecurity and indecision. I need to push through that and not worry so much about getting things wrong, I just need to write something down. It’s much easier to fix something you can see, than something that’s just wisping around in your head.

Writing doesn’t exist until you put it on the page. This is not performance art we’re talking about where it’s only experienced once in the moment. This also isn’t sculpture in stone. This is malleable and evolving art form. Nothing’s written in stone until it’s in print and even then, small changes can be made in subsequent editions.

In any case, I need to stop worrying and just write. It really doesn’t matter if it sucks. It’s all a learning process. Everything can be improved until it’s released out into the world. I won’t be judged on the early drafts. DH will only send me back to rewrite it if it sucks, but he won’t think less of me because of it. I just need to keep on rollin’.

So, which side of the line do you fall? Do you feel you over-analyze everything or do you just write as it all comes to you never looking back? Or have you managed to find a happy medium?

Thursday Thirteen: Happy Birthday!

Thursday Thirteen

 

13 Happenings On April 3, 1968

 

You say it’s your birthday? Well, it’s my birthday too! This is somewhat of a running joke in my son’s Cub Scout Pack. I share my birthday with his den leader, but she’s older than I am =P We also share the day with my other friend there’s daughter who will be three-years old. At the meeting last night, she had invitations for a playdate at the park with her and said I could come celebrate too.

Last year, I yelled at another friend for sending me one of those joke emails that get forwarded to everyone you know because it was directed at women over 40 and how life was so much better for them. I took mock offense since I was still legitimately outside that demographic.

So, how’s it feel to be in it now? Bleah. Turning 25 was hard enough. A quarter of a century gone and nothing tangible to show for it. Turning 30 was a breeze except for lugging my DS around in my belly (and for another 18 days afterwards). But I find closing the decade of my thirties is making me look at my accomplishments so far and find them lacking. Oh sure, I have two great kids even though I call them monsters and a wonderful DH who I wouldn’t trade for the world, but I still feel a lack of something to point to where I can say, “I did that!” Maybe I can do something about that.

So, let’s take a look back and see what else happened 40 years ago:

BTW: IE 7 sucks and completely undoes my careful formatting. Firefox is much better for you anyway. =P Go get it. Now. Kthxbye.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I’ve been to the mountain top” speech in Memphis, TN. It was rather difficult to find other happenings on this date because of this and his assassination the next day. My mom remembers being in the hospital with me as a newborn wondering if there were going to be riots an hour away in Baltimore on the 4th.
2. From all the casualty reports from April 3, 1968, you’d never know that North Vietnam agreed to meet with US Representatives to set up preliminary peace talks.
3. The largest draft card turn-in to date in Boston, MA was the same day. How’s that for irony?
4. Concerts that day included: Jimi Hendrix in Virginia Beach, VA and the Grateful Dead at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco, CA.
5. After the NY premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey that night, Stanley Kubrik went back to the drawing board and cut 19 minutes of the film.
6. There was some competition at the theaters, as Planet of the Apes also opened everywhere in the US that night.
7. Of course, if you were the stay at home type, you may have watched the finale of the sixth season of the Beverly Hillbillies instead.
8. Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends album was released that day as well.
9. The Volkswagon Country Buggy was released to the public. The question still remains, “WHY!?” I guess it was their version of the Hummer. Only uglier, if possible.
10. Sebastian Bach of Skid Row was born in the Bahamas. My parents visited the Bahamas during my mom’s pregnancy with me. Wonder if we were both there at the same time, unable to enjoy the view.
11. Mike Lansing of the Montreal Expos was also born that day.
12. Remember the redhead from the 1994 movie Four Weddings and a Funeral? Charlotte Coleman was born then too. Unfortunately, she died in Nov. 2001 of an asthma attack =(
13. Tank Girl comic book artist and Gorillaz co-creator, Jamie Hewlett was also born forty years ago today.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1 Kathleen Oxley 2 Winter 3 Alice Audrey
4 Danica/Dream 5 nicholas 6 Gina Ardito
7 SandyCarlson 8 Deanna Dahlsad 9 Tempest Knight
10 Thea @ I’m a Drama Mama 11 On a Limb with Claudia 12 Jennifer McKenzie
13 Sarah in Disturbia 14 Di 15 R.G. Alexander
16 Kimberly Menozzi 17 Tamy 3 Sides of Crazy 18 Jeanine
19 Sandier Pastures 20 Paige Tyler 21 Robin L. Rotham
22 The Pink Flamingo 23 A. Catherine Noon 24 Laura
25 Susan Helene Gottfried 26 Motherhood for Dummies 27 Gwen Mitchell

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

Excellent Blog Awards

Kat from Kat’s Krackerbox gave me an Excellent Blog Award today. How very sweet of her. Thank you so much, Kat!

Excellent Blog Award

The Rules: By accepting this Excellent Blog Award, you agree to award it to 10 more people whose blogs you find Excellent Award worthy. You can give it to as many people as you want but please award at least 10. You deserve this! Feel free to recognize blogs that have already received this award.

I visit the following blogs at least once a week and some of them even more frequently. They are all writing related and all manage to have unique perspectives on the process. Some are just getting started and some have been at it a while. Some are working alone and others pool their experiences.

They’re all Excellent Reads. I would like to pass this wonderful award to the following 10 blogs (in no particular order):

Gwen Mitchell Midnight Moon Cafe
Fionn Jameson Purple Hearts
Gina Ardito Romantic Inks
MJ Fierstein Tales from the Crit
The Redneck Romance Writer
Will Work For Noodles  

Check ’em out! You won’t regret it.

The End or A Train?

The light at the end of a tunnel near Milford Sound in Fjordland, New ZealandI’ve reached 37, 514 words now. Slow going this week. Very slow. It feels like I should be able to see that light at the end of the tunnel. I probably have 17 or 18 more pages to write and it’s like pulling teeth all over again. Today when I went to pick up the kids from school, I sat in the car with my clipboard and tried to write a bit more detailed notes for these remaining pages.

You guessed it. It feels more like I’ve run into that proverbial train. The pages I had the most problem describing what should be happening were the next 5 to be written. The heroine is at this masquerade ball and is supposed to be having a great time, really opening up and blooming. However, all she seems to want to be is coy. With ME! How rude. The hero’s not playing along very well either at the moment. Grumble.

Surprisingly enough, I didn’t have many issues with the last 11 pages. Can I just skip these six and get it over with?

No. I know if I don’t write them now, it won’t come out right or I’ll never go back to them and there the file will sit. I may have to go back and reread a couple of sections so I can echo them here in this part.

I’m also frustrated because I know I’m not going to get much time to work on this over the weekend. Tomorrow, the kids are going for their belt tests in martial arts and will hopefully both move up a rank. Then, we’re driving to LA to spend the night near friends so we can go to a game/party at their house in the afternoon and not have to drive 5+ hours all in one day. We need to be back at a reasonable hour Sunday night because of school on Monday. It’ll be fun and exciting, just tiring. I should have gone back to bed this morning too. With all the rain, I don’t see the lights getting put up or us going to pick out a Christmas tree this weekend either.

It’s amazing how much this story has changed since I first posted it up here. I was hoping that’d I’d be able to lift sections of the original and plop them down, but there’s no way now. The heroine grew her own backbone, no need for the hero to go plant the guy a facer. I think he’s a bit disappointed by that, but I think he likes a woman who will take charge in the heat of the moment. Lots of interesting little twists like that have cropped up. I can’t wait to finish this and go back to read the whole thing.

Thursday Thirteen: NaNo Lessons

&NBSP;

13 Things I Learned During NaNoWriMo

1. Priorities are important — especially when you have multiple projects all due by Nov 30th.

2. The month of October is for planning, start EARLIER than Oct 31st.

3. I definitely need a road map/game plan. This plan needs to be extremely more detailed. Lord SO_N_SO is not sufficient to get a grasp of his true character. Luckily, this was not the hero, but that little piece of cardboard was whispering that he’d like to apply for the job someday.

4. Progress is progress. Any progress is good.

5. My mornings are usually more productive than evenings, although a couple of my best runs were from 10-midnight after the kids were in bed.

6. I work better when someone else is working too — I knew this, it was just reinforced in Live Chat on Romance Divas. This is especially true when I’m not quite in the mood to be working. Getting 10 words down and knowing someone else is working against the same clock goes along way to finding motivation.

7. I can write 2-3k words a day when I put my mind to it — however my journaling and blogging and real life suffered for it. My kids & homework do not mix well during writing time. I need to teach them the benefits of #6. Martial Arts class time, however, was good for working on notes on paper.

8. It is possible to stuff my internal editor in a box for extended periods of time. I still haven’t really stopped to go back and read what I’ve written, except to ramp up for the next session. I will admit to some fiddling, but I noticed that I was zapping words instead of adding new sentences — not good for NaNo.

9. Peter Gabriel’s Passion CD is great for background noise. The rhythms build throughout and help keep the momentum going. Stomp — the found instrument percussion group — is also good for background music.

10. I need a wider variety of instrumental music in my iTunes. Lyrics distract me much more easily.

11. I’m more comfortable with letting conversation flow and then going back and filling in action beats and internal dialogue later. Long passages of descriptive narrative were often more like torture, especially if it was internal reflection about some deep emotional issue.

12. I was more comfortable in my heroine’s head, especially when she’s reacting to the off-stage hero.

13. I had a lot of fun doing this even though I won’t “win” with only 35,856 words still. It was a lot of work, but it was another form of a puzzle for me. Must. Solve. Puzzle. Having my spreadsheet that took Dunne’s Emotional Structure and Vogler’s Writer’s Journey diagrams and smushed them all together really made it easy to see where the patterns needed to go. Having that based on page numbers also felt like it helped me with pacing. But most importantly, I learned a lot about how my own personal process. I’m going to keep working on this one and then start the process again for the story that comes before this one, only at a much more reasonable pace while I start to unravel the mysteries of the self-editing process.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1 Tempest Knight 2 Ava Rose Johnson 3 Gina 4 Susan Helene Gottfried
5 Heather 6 Carrie Lofty 7 Ember Case 8 Alice Audrey


Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!