1. Signed up for my first college writing course, Nonfiction Writing, at Cedar Crest, for the fall.
2. Big one: started re-editing “Shapeshifters”
3. Learning to read like a writer. I’m reading a poorly written book that I picked up in a chain store that I like. The plot is not bad, but the writing is anything but economical (I’m big on that). I’m learning from it because I can see redundancy and it is pulling my interest out of the book.
Ok, since my last post, I have done A LOT. Here’s a list:
-listening to weekly podcasts of The Writing Show and Will Write for Wine. Just discovered I Should be Writing so that’s on my list too.
-doing very well in my online writing course.
-went to first local writer’s luncheon with experienced & published writers who were very nice and really offbeat (my kinda crowd!)
-spoke with a coach (my client) about organizing my stuff to position myself, my mom blog, and start pursuing more journalistic types of writing in order to build an audience. I have a long task list under this.
-wrote my daily schedule and fit in TWO sections of writing time for weekdays. First would be the 1st half hour after work before picking up the kids - not always availabe. The other is 10:30 at night, when I do work sometimes. 2 blocks allows me to get in at least 30 minutes of writing or editing.
-subscribed to Time to Write newsletter
-got first edition of P&W from my subscription
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Still keeping up with this, I had a few more accomplishments:
1. On Thursday, I spent my lunch 1/2 hour doing a prompt from writing “Without the Muse”. VERY instructive.
2. This is major. On Wed., I compiled a list of goals required to get to where I want to be. It had topics such as “Financial”, “Business”, and “Creative”. Next task is to set a general timeline for these goals, then break them down into steps. Finally, I’ll need to pick up a planner and schedule them.
3. Scheduled an appointment with Dean of English at local college in 2 weeks.
4. Looked into more MFA programs - turns out there is one with low residency and a professional writing co-cirriculum. Hm…
All in all, not a bad week. Some other ideas I’m thinking of is looking for an accountability partner.
3/12: participated in Will Write for Wine writing prompt, joined forums and posted.
3/11: joined Will Write for Wine group, listened to podcast, made appointment to meet dean of English at new prospective college I’d like to attend in the fall, researched local groups and meetings.
3/10: harvested some writing blogs and sites, considered joining another local writers group (timing is bad with class)
3/5: setup AIM for writing course, contacted teacher.
Hm, must to better than this…
I’ve decided to start up this blog again, to have some accountability for my writing.
I’ve gone into it at more depth over at mom-blog (read more here), but it’s come to my attention that I need to dedicate myself to my real purpose here - NOW. This is the year, and I’m not wasting another moment. To that end, I’m trying to do something daily that will forward my writing career. Here is a round up of what I have done the last few days:
Tuesday, 3/4:
-signed up for online class at the writer’s studio
-signed up for a local writer’s group that looks like they have productive meetings
Monday, 3/3 and Friday, 2/29:
-starting working on a short story which is a backbone to a new novel idea.
Monday, 3/3:
-listened to Will Write for Wine podcast on genre.
Thurs, 2/28:
-joined list at www.internetwritingworkshop.org
Tues, 2/26:
-asked writers.com writing group for advice on progressing
Also listened last week to several podcasts on writing and began re-editing my fantasy novel. So that’s A START. I also recently learned that NANOWRIMO takes place several times a year, so I may consider participating in the next one. We’ll see.
I wrote a little something, just a start to get started, well, writing again. Comment if you like:
It happened like this:
Jeanette had some gift certificates for book shops to spend, and opened her email to find that one of her favorite online shops was having a sale. She thought she’d see if any of the bargain books were POSSIBLY any good, or contained classics, or perhaps one of those hidden treasure books that were not popular but awesome reading anyway.
She stumbled upon one about children with sensitivity issues, and 5 minutes later discovered a website that gave a name to her daughter’s condition: Sensitivity Processing Disorder.
She stared at the screen for several minutes.
It even had a goddammed acronym.
The rage boiling up in her bones was the only thing keeping the floor solid beneath her feet. Sure, she was fine. Sure, she’d learn to look on the bright side: that the website gave her tips, that people were starting to become aware, that doctors and psychoogists were studying the issue.
But for now, all she could feel was anger. In fact, the rawness of it astounded her.
Was it not enough to have one precious child with Down syndrome? Now she had to find out her other child had a “disorder”?
She breathed in. She breathed out, S L O W L Y. Why was she so angry?
And who could she possibly be angry at? Or more appropriately, “Who”?
Her relationship with God had been coming along wonderfully. They were two peas in a pod during the day, she alone with her computer and work while the kids were at daycare. It was almost like having a friend in the room.
A friend who thought it great sport to give her burdensome crosses.
She felt guilt immediately rush in at that thought. She could just as easily be angry at herself. Children with conditions affecting the brain would strike at the very heart of her own hubris: her oversized intellect, the one she had wasted. Had she really expected her children to pick up the slack for her inability to focus on a career, to find and follow her own dreams, despite high grades, high ambitions, and high ideals?
But still. She didn’t need her daughters to be presidents, or solve the energy crisis, or cure cancer, or win nobel prizes for literature, but did she have to go down the road so far as to not even be sure if they could go to college or even high school?
She sighed and with it, her shoulders sagged and her head hung down until her chin touched her chest. Now, after all this time, she realized why she’d never wanted children in her youth. The pain of this was excruciating. And the timing couldn’t be worse.
The daycare was terrified of taking on a Down syndrome child, even if it was a mild case, and every minor behavior issue was blamed on her daughter’s disability. This would be life for Lia. Every minute little incapacity would be chalked up to her “syndrome”. She wasn’t even 5 years old yet and the prejudice had begun already.
She wasn’t even aware that she had slammed her hand down on top of her glass desk until she heard the crack. On the right side of her desk, a spider web of a crack started to blossom in all directions, like ice cracking on a barely frozen lake. she pulled her hand away and held her breath. After a minute or two, she put her hand down on the glass and more tendrils of the crack appeared.
She put her head in her hand and rubbed her forehead. How would she explain this to Pete? The desk would need to be replaced and somehow carefully removed before the break attracted the children. She rolled her chair away from her desk. That was enough work for today. Tomorrow would be here soon enough.
My 2nd meme, this one courtesy of Addofio.
The below listed books are the top 106 books most often marked as being “unread” by LibraryThing users.
The instructions are simple:
Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your TBR list.
? If you’ve never heard of it.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell TBR
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 TBR
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice**
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies?
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin?
The Kite Runner TBR
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex TBR
Quicksilver ?
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ?
Love in the Time of Cholera TBR (I may have read it, long time ago.)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys TBR
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984**
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse ?
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (in high school, maybe?)
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections ?
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ?
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury ?
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things ?
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present ?
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything ?
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves ?
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake ?
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed ?
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion?
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth?
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
See that last post? About a story I’m writing in my head? Well, it turns out that it had a start - and an end. I thought that perhaps it was computer-worthy, that is, a book I’ll actually write, but I think it’s just mine. So I can write an entire plotline in under a month. A novel-worthy plotline, that is. Cool.
I’ve gone back to writing fiction in my head as a form of relaxation over the last year. I almost yearn for bed because right now it’s the only place I feel writerly. So what did I do the night AFTER my story ended?
Came up with an awesome idea for a plotline that ties into another concept I had earlier this year. I’m thrilled about this. I know, too, that I have to find time to complete the novel that I’ve kind of lost interest in (too close not to), but I’m not worried about it. I’ve also got the possibility that perhaps next year I can take some writing classes, so while time is at a premium right now, I think it’s all part of something larger leading me BACK to fiction writing as a profession.
Maybe.
Just a check in. I am still writing - what’s happened is that now that my novel is reaching it’s end, my workload has quadrupled (can you imagine?), SO the only kind of writing I can do is in my head. I had what was an innocent fantasy, though, suddenly turn into a historical novel in my head.
These are my favorites kinds of novels, and I was highly affected by the last book I finished, The Witch of Cologne
The Witch of Cologne
Reviews coming soon, I hope, just as soon as I have a free buncha moments…
So I have 2 new clients (3 really, but I’ve been pro bono with one for years, so this is no surprise), and both are writers. Finally today I caved and told one I was a writer too. I guess I phrased it wrong because she wrote back:
“you gave up writing because you found someting you like better.” OUCH! OK, now we are back to the 2 chairs theory.
The thing is, how come all the really successful people in the world do EVERYTHING they like? And yes, I like designing, and web maintenance is actually MUCH better than design as a steady career, but writing is like…it’s like the blood in my veins, something I was born with that won’t go away.
At the risk of sounding cruel to my Down syndrome daughter, being a writer is a CONDITION. It’s not something you can change, it’s not something you choose, it just is. That’s how it is WITH ME.
About a million years ago, I wanted to be a singer. I sang a lot as a kid, but I was too scared to join anything. In high school, I joined the glee club and a band, and a week later my voice just CHANGED. I spent the next 5 - 10 years with allergies that prevented singing. When I was around 25, I decided to take singing lessons. This was something I wanted, but I have a bent ear canal and basically I’m tone deaf ANYWAY.
I still get a pang over singing from time to time, because really I SUCK and I could be good with daily practice of 1-2 hours and enough years. Yea, ok. So when I hear singers say that you need to be born with talent, it might be annoying but what they mean is that you have this gift that is more natural (than say like for me). Not that they don’t need to practice, but it’s just inherent with them.
It’s the same with me for writing. It’s just there. And yea, I’ve written some sucky stuff (my blogs for example, lol). But I practice.
And I think when you feel this way, it is your divine calling and you can’t run or hide from it. Ideally, it would be your career but we can’t all be that lucky.