Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

May President's Letter

I was chatting with another author about some old books I dug out and was re-reading from years ago. You know, way back in the ice age when ebooks didn’t exist.


Architetto -- Blocco notes by Anonymous - Notebook (or note-block?) by Francesco 'Architetto' Rollandin.She said, “Oh, so you actually read the kind of books you write.”
That took me a bit by surprise. “Well, yeah, of course.” Um?
Sure I began to write toward a trend, but it was a trend I love, have loved for as long as I’ve been reading. But the conversation made me think.
There’s a writerly saying that goes: Write what you know.
Well, I’ve never had magical powers or have time traveled to the past, so that’s a bit out of my experience range. Plus, boring. I don’t want to read what I already know. I want the fantasy of doing things I’ve never done.
Besides, even though writing is hard work, it’s also amazingly fun.
Always Write What You Love.
And then research anything you don’t know. That’s part of the enjoyment.
Let your own joy and excitement lift off the pages of your book. Readers can feel the depth of a writer’s enjoyment, even if you are gleefully taking your enjoyment writing a deranged bad guy. They will feel it. I believe that.

So that’s my hope for all of you this month. Write What You Love. Now go forth and create in this beautiful month of May.  

Waiting Room Boredom

My husband went in for a simple procedure yesterday. What should have taken less than an hour ended up being 3 hours, half of that waiting to even get called to the back to begin.

So what do you do when you have to wait? And wait. Here are my tips:

1. Always have a book on you. Whether you bring an eReader or a paperback, have it.

2. Pad and Pen. A must have. Yes, I got some writing in. Other waitees kept giving me out-of-the-corner glances, wondering what I was writing so furiously and could it possibly be about them.

3. Bring a snack. Okay, I didn't. Nor had I eaten because I wasn't hungry and we were going to grab lunch together afterwards. Mistake. The only thing louder than my scrawling pen over paper was my stomach growling. That got several looks as well. And then we didn't have time to eat because I was late for work. Grrrr. A reeses peanut butter cup, though satisfying, is not lunch.

4. Um, possibly the food network wasn't the best channel for the telly's waiting room. Oh my gurgling belly, all these mouth-savoring dishes kept flashing across the screen. I think all of us in there were holding back from making a run on the nurses' stash and devouring all the juice and crackers. Several were white-knuckling their armrests. Have enough courage to ask the receptionist to change the channel.

5. Bring a smart phone. I do not wear big girl panties yet. I have not graduated into the era of smart phones, mores the pity. I bored holes into the guys happily social networking their way through waiting room boredom, most likely tweeting about being trapped in a waiting with a scary woman staring at their high-grade technology.

6. Play Brick Attack on your not-smart dumb phone. Boringest slowest game ever. Pong was more exciting.

How do you relieve waiting room boredom?

Edits and Second Contract

Editor Ami sent over the first round of edits for Upon Eagle's Light. Being my first edits ever, I stared at them for awhile, not knowing exactly how to go about inserting my own strikethroughs and such. Of course after I went through the trouble of finding the strikethrough function on the dropdown toolbar, it turns out I didn't need it as Ami had the document already set up so when I deleted something, it didn't delete, but struckthrough automatically. Duh. It also tracked the changes I made, not only in blue, but with a notation tracker that marked what time and day I changed it. I noticed some of her entries were made at 3:24 am. Now that's dedication. Or insomina.

I also stumbled on how to read her comments with the dropdown menu from the View toolbar. I can't even tell you what it feels like when your editor writes that she is crying at a particular part and that is a mark of a good writer. Yay, I made her cry.

Anyway, I had an entire month to go through the edits, though Ami suggested I take only a week so it could get released on schedule. It only took me two days, and yes I went over every word, every symbol, every sentence structure. Ami had already caught almost everything and she had some great suggestions. All in all, this was an enjoyable experience to see what she thought about it.

And while we were in the middle of that, I sent over a short story I had written. The Wild Rose Press is having a contest you can read about here.
The gist is it has to be a time/travel romance where the heroine travels back in time going through this particular garden gate in Bury, England. Well, I thought about it and came up with an idea about a girl who goes back to the Civil War, although unlike many characters who travel back in time, I wanted her to be someone who hadn't studied enough history to know much about it. You know like how the New Englander in King Arthur's Court knew the date of an eclipse. Had many people would really know the date of a eclipse?

Anyway, the story came at me fast, just flowed. I couldn't get it down fast enough. I even got cramps in my hand, no lie. I wrote it in 3 days in between work and then realized that the heroine was transported from a civil war museum. I'd totally forgotten that she had to go through a gate in England for the contest. And it worked so well the way I had it, I wasn't going to rewrite that part. So I bagged the contest and sent it in to Ami. She loved it and sent me the contract.

So now I have two books coming out. This one will be published as a short Miniature Rose. I'm very excited, esp. because now that I have more than one, I feel like maybe it wasn't just some quirk of luck, but that I really am a good writer. Now, I'm off to work on the eaglekin's sequel, which is not flowing nearly as fast as the time travel.

Here's a real short excerpt from The Sweetheart Tree:

“Oh, sugar,” a solider-reenactor-a tall, slender one cooed at her. “Did you think you’d be safer dressin like a lad? Is that why you cut your hair?”

“Did a poor job of it, if you ask me,” another said. “There’s no mistakin she’s a woman. You need something much baggier, miss, if you don’t mind me pointing out.” All eyes seemed to be taking in her jeans and T-shirt, which seemed to gleam in the darkness.

“I never saw attire like that,” the tall one said. “Where you from?”

“Montana,” she snarled it.

“Mont Anna? Is that in Prince Edward County?”

Oh, please. She had to hand it to these guys. They were sure staying in character, pretending they never heard of Montana as it wasn’t even a territory before the Civil War. They hadn’t missed a beat. None of them. What? Were they required to attend reenactment school?

She’d wasted enough time with them. “Please let go of me.”

The young lieutenant frowned down at her. “Ma’am, I can’t let a woman wander around out here alone. It’s not safe. Sheridan’s army is burning everything. Don’t you know what could happen to you?”

“Gee, let me think. You mean like being dragged into the bushes by several filthy men? Something like that?”

At least he had the decency to wince.

Good Hook

"When Jake Matthews walked out the door for his early morning run, he had no idea he’d be dead in twenty-three minutes. Nor that it would begin the biggest adventure of his life."

I jotted this down this morning. I've been working on a book off and on for a couple of years. You know, it's that book, the one that won't go away, that you have completely plotted out and know it inside and out, yet it is just too big of an idea to throw yourself completely into at this time in your life, so it percolates, always there, but never quite right, even while I'm actually working on it between other projects. The beginning, those first few crucial lines have never been right. I've rewritten them a quintillion times, but today I thought I had something good. I didn't realize how right until my 15 year old daughter came in and saw my scratchy lines, lying on my desk and startled me by saying, "Is this a life after death thing? or does he have an adventure in only 23 minutes?" I had hooked her. She had to know. So much so that instead of running off to do her own thing, she sat down at my computer while I pulled up the first chapter (all that's written so far) and she read it right then and there.

Yeah, I'm smiling.

So what's been your favorite first lines that hooked you?

Aspiring Writers 101 Lesson One

I started this blog mainly to appear more professional as a writer, you know have an online presence to impress perspective agents and editors. But as life took over, it became a nice little place to update my family and friends about my son's illness and to vent, of course. I have, however, established my own web page devoted solely to my writing, but occasionally I would like to share something worthwhile and writerly.

I joined the Online Writers Workshop of Sci Fi and fantasy several years ago, expecting to wow all the other workshoppers with my unparalleled stories. What I immediately found out was that my writing was not anywhere up to snuff. Extremely simple things that I thought I had learned in high school, I hadn't. It was actually quite embarrassing, but also extremely enlightening. There was something about learning from my own mistakes from other people's eyes that seemed to get into my thick head a lot more powerfully than just looking at other's people's errors. When my own little babies were ripped apart word by word it was heartbreaking, sometimes discouraging, but damn did it make me a better writer.

I especially owe a great grammatical thank you to one Larry West who I traded critiques with. Frankly, I don't think I helped him greatly, but he was a lifeline to me. A literal grammar guru professor type, he patiently and painstakingly went through each of my postings line by line and kindly pointed out all my many mistakes, then explained why they were mistakes and the proper way to write it out. I can only imagine he must be the type of person who likes to fix things, search for things to fix, you know, the type of person who loves crosswords and puzzles, because, well, I had a lot.

However, after months of trading critiques with him, he sent one of mine back with the words close to: "This is near perfect, Clover. I'm hard-pressed to find anything to correct." Had you been a fly on my wall, you would have seen my chair fly back from my computer desk as I proceeded to do a very happy victory dance.

Anyway, in honor of Larry who was willing to tolerate someone who had very little skill in grammar, my little nuggets of writing wisdom to pass on will be bare-boned simplistic. I'm talking about things that should have been taught in, if not elementary school, then at least intermediate or junior high, possibly things that were taught, but tuned out, because passing colorful doodle-enhanced notes between friends was far more entertaining than droning teachers. No past perfect presence tense lectures here yet or things that professional writers don't even sneeze at. I'm going basic, simple . . . to things that make all new writers that are first getting serious about their craft slap their foreheads, exclaiming, "Duh, I should have known that." These are the things that make us feel dumb and stupid and way out of our league because we should already know this, but missed it somewhere. So I will be the brave writer here and say, "Yeah, I didn't know these things either." I once thought that it was better to be a great storyteller and have talent than grammatical skill. I couldn't have been more wrong. A lot of hard work and relearning and being humble enough to let my work be slashed to pieces, shaped me into a far better writer than I ever could have been.

Okay, since I rambled, the first lesson will be short.
Aspiring Writers Lesson One:

It's verse Its. It's is the conjunction for It is. Its represents that the It in question has ownership of something. You wouldn't write her's, or his's for their possessives. Just remember: His, hers, its.

End of lesson.