Anyway.

The title post is in honor of the book I am currently reading: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I picked it up at the grocery store last week. I had seen previews for the movie and was interested in seeing it. I had no idea it was a book. As a rule, books are better than movies. So I did the obvious Tina thing and decided to read the book before I watched the movie. (Not that I will go to see it in theaters by myself so I will probably wait until it comes out on DVD or On Demand). However, the "not going to the movies by myself" rule may be off when The Hunger Games comes out. Oddly, I didn't follow that rule (read the book before watching the movie for Twilight or New Moon. In my defense, I wasn't sure about them. I was teaching high school and once I realized all the girls were ga ga over it, I was concerned it might be teeny bopper. Obviously I changed my mind. I saw the preview for New Moon, had to watch it. So I bought the Twilight DVD, saw New Moon in the theater, then got all the books for Christmas and read them straight through. The books are better than the movies. Movies just can't have as much info. There isn't enough time.

Anyway. (haha) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is really good so far. I love the narrator. He is quirky, but realistic. He is full of dimensions and the author doesn't spell them all out, which keeps him interesting. Today I keep going back and forth between reading that book and writing my book. It's actually going well. I have written over 1,000 words already today without really trying. I give partial credit to the coffee, but most credit to my brain and cold fingers.

Until, next time!

I feel like I'm back in school.

I've always loved projects, but I had a very hard time convincing myself to start this one. My motivation used to be to get "A's" which was a good motivator. In this case the pay off (if it ever comes) will be a book that is well developed, hopefully read and (dare I say) liked.(?) I have been putting this off. Since I've needed to complete it in order to continue writing, I've been putting writing off too. It just seems so formal, and that it's not my job. In many ways it's not. My character is the one doing this research. He's the one the mapping, reading, putting things together (in a slightly neurotic way). However, it has to be really done because I while I don't believe in what he's researching (it's fiction after all). He does. Not to mention I created him. So I'm taking "facts" (which is a term I use lightly) and allowing him to make assumptions about them. However, I have to get it all straight before I can allow him to manipulate them. It's really hard to leave my judgments out of it. However, on the positive side, someday if all this works out and my dreams come true and yadda yadda yadda, all of this work could become prized possessions of my zealous fans. ha!

Wow this post makes me sound crazy one more than one level. Until next time.

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 . . .