notes from the wordsmith trenches
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012
aka The Middle
The wham zing, here’s our world, hooktastic beginning has been laid out, baby, whiz bang–magic fingers, do your work!–and now . . .
well . . .
Now we see that we don’t in fact know this character that well, we’re not really that clear on what would drive them from point A to point B and we certainly haven’t gotten to their deepest fear yet. Lord, there are a lot of players in this little drama. Why does this world need this particular feature? And moreover, how does this feature work and why does this other character keep fiddling with it? If I keep naming this stuff after things in Star Wars, is that gonna be a problem?
Le freaque, can I just write the ending already and leave it to you, Dear Highly Intelligent Readers–yes, plural! So I’m an optimist!–to fill in the gaps as I know you want to? Call it critique, call it fan fiction, maybe Dad was right about medical school? This part is supposed to be half the book?
I’ll start at the end and work my way back. Except this one part–I totally know this part and it’s gonna stay in, no matter what else happens. And once it happens, I do at least know that the fuzzy character has to confront the neighbor. What’s this–the neighbor has the letter? Yeah, there we go. Another couple days with something to do . . .
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
So this is happening:
I’m going the rebel route this time: rather than one 100-page project, I’ve had a few shorter things in the hopper for a while that will come in around 150 pages when finished, so I’m taking advantage of the party over at Script Frenzy to get back in the habit of getting new words on the page. (more…)
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
The meme:
The Lucky Sevens Game:
Okay, Jenn Spiller–you . . . you tagger, you–I thought I was off the hook because I’d lost the log-in info for my blog and my webmaster is on a week-long silent Zen retreat (damn these helpful support files). My next resisting strategy was legalism: which manuscript is my current WIP? The draft or the current revision? Double-spaced manuscript or raw text?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seven lines from Rite of Return: (more…)
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
It’s been a good year for the Brain Trust, a group of writers I meet with in person. We chat, brainstorm, commiserate, and egg each other on. We pick apart story structure of movies we’ve seen instead of rating them; I can admit in this crowd that I read eleven True Blood books in twenty days even though I profess no interest in paranormal stories. But we got a lot of writing done, tried some new things, got things submitted and accepted, and had a couple of NaNo winners.
This week the activity has been thinking concretely about goals for the year. We e-mail our list to the group and cheerlead. I like reading what the others are cooking up and how their year ebbs and flows—kids at home and university campus neighbor, I know that really the new year starts in August (you even get new supplies), but I’m willing to play along with the January people. (more…)
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…)
Friday, October 7th, 2011
Posting today at the Pop Culture Divas.
You know when you’re ready.
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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