Well, on the blog.  Still buried alive in work, can’t see light at end of tunnel. Possible cataclysmic event happening in life.  Haven’t slept properly since the workload began…

On the upside, I hit 4 out of 7 doing my 15 minute minimum of creative writing per day, this week I’m only 1 for 3, but trying.

Also getting BETTER at reading, writing, etc.  But mostly writing.  I’m actually CRAFTING now, not just diarhea on the page…

Postponing accredited BA while I continue WriterStudio.com program.  It’s growing me, it’s so awesome.

What else?  Reading Middlemarch and A Thousand Words for Stranger.  Middlemarch rock,  IMO.  Stranger is, well, scifi hard core, but not bad.

Tired, must go work, blech…

Excellent selection of advice for us creative types, from the too-awesome “I Should be Writing“:

http://isbw.murlafferty.com/2008/07/07/what-do-i-tell-you-whats-my-mantra/

It’s funny, perhaps this is the opposite of what I posted yesterday, but it IS ok to suck, because you have to get through the suckiness to get better.

Lots and LOTS of suckiness 

But seriously, we may be born with a certain purpose or a predilection toward a certain skill, but even the top selling artists around the world PRACTICE.  No one is born a master at their craft.

That’s all that needs to be said.  Keep writing…

hey, there, I know it’s been A LONG time since I wrote, but I’ve been buried alive in work.  OK, so yesterday over at Freelance Writing Gigs I saw this:

http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/2008/07/advice-for-new-writers-from-stephen-king/

He’s absolutely right.  It happened to me just a few weeks ago, lol…

If you’ve read some of my older posts, you know that I usually keep a running story in my head.  Now, while I am not a fan of romance genre, I am ALWAYS a fan of romance in a story or plot.  If there isn’t one, I tend to get bored…hence my dislike of war movies and Westerns.  (War novels are DIFFERENT, and “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” as well as “A Thread of Grace” are the two I’m thinking of that I love.)

This little running story is a period piece in England and early Americas (so the mid-1700s), and involves a wealthy demure noble teen who is “ruined”, the guy who saves her (completely cast with Clive Owens), and her future.  On vacation, this novel came to mind.  I didn’t bring a book, which is not an issue - even if I had time to read in the bathroom, the light is entirely too dim to even see your butt at my resort - so I turned again to my story.  Only this time I realized that I never had the initial bad guy factor back in and boom!  I thought I had a pretty good story.  I’m wondering if I should write it?

I like what I’m hearing about romance, about its strict structure.  So, given that I have this dargone fantasy epic killing me, I’ve decided to deadline it.   I’ve discovered through one of my writing lists this very affordable course:

http://www.midwillamettevalleyrwa.com/online.classes.htm

I’d like to take the September course, which gives me a completion deadline of 9/1 for Shapeshifters (again, that in no way at all describes my novel).  If it’s not done by then, it’s over, I’m moving on or just putting out what I have and moving on to something new.

BTW, I completed my short story.  Now I just have to figure out mood/tone and adjust.  Yay, GO ME!

Crazy thing, I never thought to create one!  My LinkedIn profile has a lot of my writing, so it wasn’t too hard to set up.   And yes, this is for freelance writing, not creative writing.

Thing is, I’m so hugely talented…I’m good at all KINDS of writing and at editing as well.  So, why not go out there and look for what I’m good at?  Maybe it’s wrong, but I don’t feel like writing of any type can hurt. 

As mentioned, I’m back from vacation, but just before we came home, something really horrible and potentially catastrophic happened.  All is well, but up until last night I still had post traumatic stress about it.  I was fine all day until time to drift off, at which point I played all the BAD “what if’s” over and over in my head.

On the return trip, I realized that I could use this to get a feel for the traumatic events happening to my character. While it was still fresh, I noted down all the physical feelings that happened to me.  For example, my tongue got so dry with a matter of 20 or so minutes, that it swelled up and I could barely speak.  Who knew?

Thinking back, I wish I had done the same thing as I sat in New York on 9/11/01 and watch the towers fall.  I had written down some of my feelings, but not quite enough of the physical reaction.  Same with my stroke.

Next time I’m in the hospital, somebody had me a pen!

Like the excellent podcast, I Should be Writing, I think I should be writing right now.  But I am SOOOOO exhausted. Who knew it would be so hard to get back into things after Disney?  I have zero plans for this weekend so I can do web work, but when does the writing happen?

I also feel like I STILL have some heavy decisions to make about writing and for my goal this week, work on my commitment.  But again, I am way too tired.  Sleep sounds so so beautiful right now…  Mama needs her energy to pick one story and STAY WITH IT.

Next topics: Channeling Pain, School Plans, and Romance??

Hi folks, it’s taken me a few days to get up to speed.  I have a lot to blog about but for now I just wanted to check in and let you know that we had a blast as usual in Disney world, but it AINT easy dragging around or flying with 2 preschoolers.

I sort of feel like, “Writing?  What’s that??”

Heh…

So check THIS out:  As you know, I’m taking a class at WritersStudio.com and I’m in the midst of my last assignment before leaving for vacation.  I noticed that there are some assignment where I really love the piece and some where I don’t.

But, even when I DON’T like the piece, I’m getting better at capturing the persona narrator, which is the aim of the course.  Which tells me that not only CAN I write well, I can write ANYTHING.  I’ve written pieces on a gay mafia daughter, cancer patient, a father, a teen with acne, a woman who was a girl scout as a kid, a girl growing up in a gang house, a creepy womanizer, and those are the first persons.  Third person, I did a group in a 1970s blackout, a severely injured hiker, an unhappy married couple.  Wow.  I don’t have ANYONE like these people in my stories.  In fact, I don’t even know where I came up with this stuff - some of it is very different than the assigned story.

Very cool.

Ok, this is last post before vacation, see y’all in a week or so…

How awesome!  This is what happened: I read my Holly Lisle newsletter yesterday, the last one, about how something was missing in her story and nothing she did brought a solution, and then in the shower, randomly, it came to her.

It took FOREVER yesterday to GET to the shower, but while I was there, I thought I might try to figure out a way to make worldbuilding fun, or at least a whole lot less like root canal or labor & delivery.  I begrudgingly built another typed out page, answering questions that I didn’t want to, knowing too well that a book that involves politics, a ruling monarchy and a coup needs to have it’s history, culture and foreign policy worked out.  Argh.

I finally got in the shower, plopped on the shampoo and let my mind wander back to Earth Science, a class I took 10 years ago, and thought about a planet accreting together from the dust in the cosmos.

Don’t ask me HOW, but that did it.  15 minutes later, I’d gotten all the way up to nearly modern times in my country, and even started to form the underpinning theology of the major religion, also critical to the book.  I still have big swatches to go through, like foreign affairs, but I went to bed, opened my notebook and let my world grow.  AWESOME!!