Ann Marie Gamble

Better Characterization through Personal Hygiene

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

The fancy manicure, twenty minutes in

I’ve been shredding my nails and it’s time to stop. One thing and another, I decided to glue on fake nails–give me some time to get out of the habit of picking at them and give my fingers a chance to heal.

It’s jarring catching a glimpse of this foreignness at the ends of my hands. I can’t pick at my fingertips any longer–but neither can I smear on lotion (it gets gunked under the long nail tips), open soda cans, or let my hands soak in water (the glue isn’t that great). (more…)

Posted in Characters, Process, Writing | 1 Comment »

Take a Deep Breath . . . Now Hit “Send”

Friday, October 7th, 2011

Posting today at the Pop Culture Divas.

You know when you’re ready.

Posted in Editing, Process, Writing | No Comments »

Harvest

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Lately when we pick up our CSA veggies, my thoughts turn to soups and preserves and things we can freeze. We’ll still be able to get local vegetables into November, but there’s a chill in the air and the Tupperware drawer is full; I dump out the week’s haul and think, “What here do I want to be eating in three months?”

This week I drafted my kids as sous-chefs. They chopped most of the ingredients for big batches of potato soup and gumbo. They won’t eat the gumbo, probably, so I pour that into cup-and-a-half-sized containers so I can thaw out single servings for my lunch. Most of the potato soup we ate in one sitting—soccer practice takes it out of you, and they didn’t know I’d subbed cauliflower for some of the potatoes.

Last week the farm had a glut of cucumbers, so we made refrigerator pickles. Like the soups, I’m long past using a recipe. I put the ingredients into the pot in patches so I can see the ratios and what I’ve already added. I’ve learned to pour spices into my hand first just in case the lid is loose, and that way get the desired amount into the pot. (more…)

Posted in Creativity, NaNoWriMo, Process | 2 Comments »

Dictation Software

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

“You talk, it types”: accurate dictation software is the dream of multitaskers, futurists, and linguists. The current reality is that software has a learning curve to use it efficiently, let alone make it an accurate translator, and it’s expensive. I use Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.1 on a PC: here are my reactions.

I flirt with carpal tunnel and repetitive stress injury in my wrists most of the time. My day job is editing and telecommuting, so I can log a lot of time at a keyboard. One thought I have after a decade of doing this is that there isn’t one ergonomically perfect solution (although some positions are really bad): our bodies’ real need is variety. But I’m not looking anymore for the one fix.

I work at home and I have kids. I bought the house knowing I’d be doing some work on it. So writing is something that competes with the usual cooking, cleaning, fixing, and beating back of the raccoon hordes. (more…)

Posted in Process | 1 Comment »

Script Frenzy Mood Map

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

I like keeping track of word count to help me learn about my work habits—what works, what stressors take their toll, what’s really happening versus what I think is happening. NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy have a widget that graphs your daily word count or page count, and I added some notes about what was going on away from the keyboard.

(click the image to make it bigger)

Now that I’ve done more than one of these power-through, get-the-draft-down challenges, I think I can say this about my writing process: (more…)

Posted in Creativity, Process, Script Frenzy | No Comments »

Reading for “Fun”

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Lately, while I haven’t been writing a lot, I’ve been checking out stacks of books from the library. My mission is threefold. First, knock some titles off the TBR pile—our library’s catalog lets you save a list of books you’re interested in, and mine is now four pages long. Second, I’m looking for an author or book that is (sort of) like mine, for those “John Updike meets The Wizard of Oz” comparisons—or, more likely, to see what agents are thanked in the acknowledgments. The third reason is also infotainment. I’ve been watching a lot of TV, and while that’s a quick way to see how story and character can be revealed, it’s visual, not verbal; I miss this aspect of technique if I only study shows. (more…)

Posted in Process, Reading, TV | No Comments »

Waiting

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

I’ve taken a long break from blogging. We had a lot going on last summer, fall is always swept up in the new school routine, I participated in NaNoWriMo and I crashed my computer. On some levels, it was a needed break. I have finished drafts that needed to percolate before I knew what I wanted to do with them. I needed to let the project dust settle to see what I wanted to work on next. I needed to unpack. And although I got less the writing done than I wanted to, this time was productive in other ways. I did figure out (at least parts of) what I want to do in my revisions. I found a new toy, Tumblr, my great scrapbook in the cloud, which has helped me decide what novel I want to write next. Several novels later, I’m becoming more comfortable with with my discomfort at various stages of the process, if that makes any sense. (more…)

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Are We There Yet?

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

I’m at the stage of the game where I have to work to think positively, which I have to do to keep working. I could be cleaning the house for our pre-Thanksgiving pie smorgasbord! I could be reading overdue library books! Instead I will keep typing.

One positive bit is the continued learning experience and comes with sticking with it. I’m discovering that perhaps the end of the first quarter of any story is hard for me, not just this point in this particular one. The end of the first quarter is the point after I’ve introduced the characters and set up the situation; now they’re dealing with the tests of the plot and so am I.

Another experience I will now generalize is that some of my outline problems I’m just not going to figure out until I start writing—I won’t see that they’re there at all, let alone how to fix them. Something about being in the thick of things is when I can see it’s not going to work. It’s easy to feel virtuous about a method—some way of preparing and researching and proceeding—and end up not doing much writing. (more…)

Posted in NaNoWriMo, Process | 1 Comment »

NaNo, Nonette; or, I Didn’t Think That Would Happen

Friday, November 12th, 2010

      A couple of the things swirling around lately:

My kids had never heard the song (they have heard of my typos), so we dialed it up on YouTube and came up with this link to a scene in a French movie. Go on, click it and watch—it’s worth it, and I couldn’t embed it.

I start these things out with a dry, cliched notion of what the trouble is or who’s responsible and the knowledge that I have to write something out to arrive at more understanding. I can’t make myself “make something up”; I need a pen in my hand, some swirling-around space, and pages of bantering dialogue while the characters wrestle my mental fog and turn it into something verbal. (more…)

Posted in NaNoWriMo, Process | 2 Comments »