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Feb 15
Posted: under Crisis of Vision, Editing, Life beyond writing, Revisions, the writing life.
Tags: craft of writing, Life beyond writing, progress report, revision, the book business, the writing life February 15th, 2011
Today has been not-quite-typical but sufficiently full of writing stuff that you might find it interesting. Though it started not with writing stuff but with the car making odd noises the last time I had it out.
Feb 07
Posted: under Kings of the North, Life beyond writing, snippet, the writing life.
Tags: Life beyond writing, progress report, snippet, the writing life February 7th, 2011
What?! I hear you cry. What do new chairs have to do with writing the book?
It’s one of the mysteries of the creative mind. Suffice to say that throughout our entire marriage (over 41 years now) we have never had “real” kitchen chairs. And now we do, replacing mismatched, aging, and uncomfortable folding chairs with real wood chairs that are up to our weights and sizes. Library chairs, in fact.
New chairs with new tablecloth & trial chair pad
Feb 03
Posted: under Crisis of Vision, Editing, Kings of the North, Life beyond writing, Marketing, Oath of Fealty, the writing life.
Tags: Life beyond writing, revision, the writing life February 3rd, 2011
Writers with what I call Engineer Mind have perfectly organized desks and files. I’ve met a few of those. I’m not one. I have what I call Writer Mind (in lieu of calling it Chaos Mind.) All my organizational skill goes into the writing…none is left over for anything else.
This becomes even more obvious when I’m faced with competing demands on organizational ability.
Feb 02
Posted: under Life beyond writing.
Tags: Life beyond writing February 2nd, 2011
Or, why you always want some slack in your writing schedule. As in, colder weather than we’ve had for at least 10 years, in terms of both hours below freezing and how low it goes (both plain temp and wind chill), in a house designed for a hot climate. As in, husband sick and unable to help with the outside stuff like feeding horses, mucking out, helping with blanketing horses, checking outside faucets to be sure they’re dripping, chopping ice in the horse trough, going to the bank, feed store, and post office, hauling hay from the stack to the barn, hauling horse feed from the car to the barn, etc., etc. As in, the need to check indoor faucets as well, to keep the house pipes from freezing up. Oh, and connectivity issues and power outages. And the first signs that whatever he’s got, I might be coming down with. Do. Not. Want.
Feb 01
Posted: under Life beyond writing.
February 1st, 2011
Elizabeth called just now. They’ve lost power, so she’ll be offline until it’s restored.
Jan 28
Posted: under Life beyond writing, the writing life.
Tags: Life beyond writing, progress report, the writing life January 28th, 2011
The major speed bump of the week, the big report I had to write, kept me away from Book IV a couple of days, though I wrote some after choir practice (staying up too late, after midnight, to finish a scene.) I didn’t want to leave Book alone that long, and Book definitely did not want to be left that long. By the time I finished the report, Book’s frustrations had taken over my brain and I was a very grumpy camper indeed. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 22
Posted: under Life beyond writing, the writing life.
Tags: Life beyond writing, progress report, the writing life January 22nd, 2011
End of week, Book IV is just over 31,700. I made it to 10,000 (the week’s goal) by midnight Thursday and sort of loafed along on Friday and today.
Jan 18
Posted: under Life beyond writing, the writing life.
Tags: Life beyond writing, progress report, the writing life January 18th, 2011
Book IV continues to behave like a healthy young book that wants to be written. I didn’t work on it Saturday and it niggled at me. Came home from church Sunday and it was doing worse than niggling. So Sunday ended with 1893 words before I could make it let go so I could sleep, and Monday produced 2011, despite my spending a couple of hours in the garden helping Richard put up the support for the peas (T-posts, the pipe from the top of the chainlink fence we’d taken down, and chicken wire.) Today was a slow start, but ended 2332 words to the good. So the week’s off to a good start, 6236 words already.
Jan 08
Posted: under Life beyond writing, the writing life.
Tags: Life beyond writing, the writing life January 8th, 2011
“You killed her!”
Yeah, that’s right, I have no self-control, and now Book IV has a first paragraph. It may not be the real first paragraph (the actual start of Book III isn’t what I first wrote) but you have to admit it’s attention-getting (and I wrote it early this morning before the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords…hours before that happened. Now it looks…too related. )
Dec 24
Posted: under Craft, Life beyond writing, the writing life.
Tags: craft of writing, Life beyond writing, the writing life December 24th, 2010
When writing fast, I often write “what happened” and not “where/when/how/why”–without much context. Sometimes whole important conversations, because I’m “hearing” the people talking to one another, without any guide to who said what.
This requires backfilling. Scenes must have context (physical, emotional, whatever else is needed) and transitions from previous scenes. Conversations that run on for a couple of pages with no “he said/she said” or “[name] said/ [othername] said” lead to reader confusion…and lack the cues to reaction to the previous speaker’s words.
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