Welcome 2012!

November and December were months that I slacked on just about everything: exercise, reading, and writing. I did pick up a few new GRE words with the help of a $1.95 audio book for my IPOD containing the 500 most necessary words. The dude has a deep old man voice which amuses me, but he does not pause when his instructions clearly suggest otherwise. In all fairness: R&R and my trip to California, not to mention the Christmas/New Year Season in general seem to be as good excuse as any to slack a bit.
However, I have turned it around the past couple days. I wrote about 500 words yesterday and already 900 today. Meager in the long range, I realize. I had to restart somewhere. I got great advice from inadvertent slacking a few days ago. I was reading an article I stumbled upon while dreaming that one day I may be able to be a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's of America. This lady, Rachel Aaron wrote an article about increasing her word count. It had a lot of good advice, some of which I knew: I won't write as much if the Internet is available and butt in seat time is a must. However she has a perfect writing triad (or at least that is what I shall forever think of it as), which at each corner had one of the following: time, knowledge and enthusiasm. Time: I have plenty, but I use it poorly. Knowledge: this I was lacking and I didn't even know it! She increased her time by taking at least five minutes to plan out where her novel would go for that day. That way when she sat down to write, she didn't have to waste time making it all up on the spot (which does take longer). Enthusiasm: I sometimes lack, but after planning out where I'm going during my writing time, I am honestly more excited to see every detail play out. While I haven't gotten anywhere near sitting down for six hours to write or 10,000 words per day (which might correlate), I have been able to forgo the session where I sit down to write and become so confused that I give up before I start. So thank you Rachel Aaron (whose link to the mentioned post is below), you have helped me become happier while writing because I'm less confused, more excited, and hopefully will increase my output and finish this damn book!



http://www.sfwa.org/2011/12/guest-post-how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-a-day-to-10000-words-a-day/

No news is bad news.

At least not when it comes to writing my blog. I have to admit, I've been a bit of a slacker on the writing front lately. However, Rob came home for R&R, which allows a reprieve from writing. Then I went to California to visit my brother. While I did write a bit on the plane, it wasn't enough to make up for the lost month or so. Oh well.

Rob began to read my novel, he was interested, but he asked to wait to finish it until he got home because it was sad. Which I agreed with and to. Sadly, he hadn't gotten to the saddest part. Question of the day (and yes I am looking for input) Can a book be too sad for too long, where no one will want to read it?

I have written a couple of short stories/poems in my in between time. It never seems like too much commitment to write a poem, but I'm sure they're all bad. At least that's what I think about poems after taking the poetry workshop in college. I thought poetry was open and broad and could be whatever you made it. My professor made it seem otherwise, and I could never get what he wanted. Why is what one person wants necessarily right anyway? Maybe my B poem to him would be and A+ to someone else. ?

I have found another conundrum in my story, which I swore I fixed already. The time issue. I found today as I was trying to figure out how old one of my characters was in relation to the other at a certain time that I was off by ten years in some places and five in other. For the record, I made a timeline to prevent this problem. Obviously it didn't work.

Writing and literary magazines

I write, a little bit of everything: poetry, a novel (in progress), short shorts, a blog (obviously), lists of all kinds, notes to myself, a lot of things I never finish, and I journal, but I think that was all fairly common knowledge. The problem is, I don't know what to do with anything after it's done. There are like a million literary magazines and I have no idea which ones are right for me. Online or print? Artsy or edu-ish? The problem is: I know what I like to read, and I like to read what I write, but is what I write like what I like to read? Sometime consider the fact that a lot of popular authors are published and become famous posthumously, that could be me, but then I shouldn't hold back so much when I write. Get it all out there, ya know? But I really want people to know me when I'm alive, like my writing, want to read it, can't wait for more. That brings me back to the problem I started with: where to submit?

3/4 the way done with a rough draft

At 42,400ish words, I am three fourths of the way done with draft 1 of my novel. It's about 155 typed pages. I have written it completely out of order; beginning with the middle, then end, next I wrote the beginning, and now I need the second half of the middle. Confusing? I hope not once it's all together. The next part is sure to be the most challenging because it is set in a place I have never been. Yikes! I began researching it the day before yesterday, and have already made some slight modifications to the location. The hard thing about setting a story in a real location is that the skeletal information needs to be accurate. With that said, my characters need to live in a house in a neighborhood that suits them. They need to act like transplants and then eventually come to know the restaurant that is all hype and go where the real good food is. I know that happened when we moved to the SAV area, we started out going to the places that got all the attention, but now have local favorites that tourists rarely know about. I have requested info from the visitors bureau of that city and look forward to my information. I do plan on making a trip there, but not until I know what I don't know that I need to know more clearly.

Chugging along

I'm happy to report that I have over 39,000 words written at this point. I have written about 2000 in the past two days. I need more days like this. I really want a rough draft done by the end of the year. It's all fitting together nicely and the only major road blocks I have are feeling what my characters are going through and not writing because I don't want to deal with bad things for them. I wonder if this is a common writer thing? Maybe some day I will know.

I found a genius way of studying vocabulary for the GRE. I have been helping out a friend bringing and picking her kid up from pre-school. This is a brave new world of mini-vans, suv's, mother's, and a plethora of children that I so don't fit in to. However, they do a pick up line that takes forever and a day to get through. In fact, getting in line ten minutes early only ensures that I will be at least fifteen cars back. So, I got smart last Thursday and brought my flashcards with me. I had nothing else to do during that time, so it was a HUGE success. I may just leave the flashcards in the car for good. Pre-school pick up = four days a week and if they're in there, traffic jams, accidents, red lights could all help me get in studying in otherwise wasted time when I would be rocking out to the radio (which is probably embarrassing, yet I so don't care).

In other news I thought of a genius way to put together a lot of my short stories into a book while I was about to take a nap earlier today. The main theme will be examining truth through a characters eyes, because as we all know in every story there is more than one truth depending on whose eyes the story is told through. The terrorist sees what they are doing as a noble act, the victim sees it as (dare I say) terrifying. While everyone won't agree with either perspective, it's the truth to someone.

Last thing of note pertaining to writing: I have officially set out on my quest to decide what my "critical" paper for getting into graduate school will be about. There are suggestions that candidates often revise papers that were written as an undergrad for this task. I have printed out three of the more likely choices to mull over. They are all hugely different, and they seem like I wrote them forever ago. (It was about four years ago, yikes!) So that will be fun . . .

In 2 Books

I have to give a shout out to a website called www.in2books.com. It's a pen pal program that matches students with e-mentors. The students get to pick the books they read, the mentors read the books, then they exchange emails about the books. I am an e-mentor for the first time and am really enjoying it. I just finished the first book, A Letter to Mrs. Roosevelt by C. Coco De Young. It was an engaging book, and I have already written a letter about it to my student. I realize this post isn't really about my writing, but reading helps writing and helping young people love and think about reading is important to me. It's a super easy way to volunteer and help a child and I am able to do it on my own time.

On another side note, I had a great time at Disney World and now have friends staying with me. It's actually been a very side tracked month, but I am settling into a schedule. Hopefully that will allow me to focus more on writing, and all of the other things I should be doing.

Trip to NY = SUCCESS

Well I haven't posted in a couple of weeks because I went up to NY to visit family.  It was nice to spend quality time with family, but I am glad to be back in my own bed, with a backyard for the dogs to go run around and relieve themselves in.  Walking them three to five times a day was getting a bit of a nuisance.  It is so much easier in the middle of the night to stumble out of bed in my nightdress, open the back door with my eyes half open and let them in the yard.  I will never live at a house without a fenced in yard. 

Getting to the good stuff:  why was my NY trip such a success?  One of the places my 'novel' is set is an old farm house outside Batavia, NY.  The house is largely based on my father-in-laws parents farm.  I never sat down to write about the house, but when I began thinking about where my character would live, I thought it was the perfect setting.  I have been to the farm a handful of times, but had not ever really studied it like I would need to in order to describe it.  I knew it was beautiful in a way I couldn't create, because I don't know much about architecture of old houses.  So, I did what any good writer would do, I asked my father-in-law if he would bring me up there and show me around.  It was better than I could have expected, he is very knowledgeable about the house, and antiques in general.  He let me snoop around the attic, basement, and barn.  He drove me around the property, so I could have a better picture of the land size and layout.  He answered questions I had about the house and gave me information I would have never thought to ask.  I took pictures for reference, since a sixteen hour drive every time I wanted to see the exterior would be a bit extreme.  I am really excited about the information I gained and the adventure I got to have with my father-in-law.  While I am sure, some things about the house or property may very well be modified in order to fit in with my character's personal preferences on style, overall it is perfectly quirky as is.

I did work some, albeit, not much, on the reformatting and writing of my 'novel' while I was in NY, but I really do need to get my butt in higher gear, since my goal of having a 'complete' first draft done by the end of the year will approach faster than I expect, I expect.  However, this weekend I am headed to Disney World (FOR FREE) thanks to my awesome cousin who works there currently. 

Note on names:  I try not to use names of people in my blog posts.  This is a personal preference to protect their privacy since anyone in the world could see this if they wanted to.  I do however occasionally give shout-outs to people who are 'public figures' when the information I am giving out is fairly common knowledge (ie:  author comes out with a new book). 

Oh, one more thing.  (Hey it's been two weeks, I have a lot to say.  Walden Books went out of business in my hometown (sad).  However, happy for me!  I got TWENTY books for FIVE dollars.  It was their last day of business and the selection was well picked over, there may have only been like 60 different books to choose from total with at least ten in Spanish.  With that said, I didn't look at them too much, and a couple of the books are in the process of being given to people who may appreciate them more than I.  One book is on the chopping block for recycling.  I normally love all books for what they are, however, this book can NEVER fall in the hands of one of my future children.  I thought it was a book of vegan recipes for children (and while I am not vegan I do eat food without meat/animal products sometimes).  However, when I got home and opened the book up, it was a children book promoting veganism. Which, in itself is fine, but it basically tells children that drinking milk (beyond babies) is unnecessary, and that shearing sheep for wool is cruel.  So the book must go.