Anthology Clockwork Phoenix 3 (“new tales of beauty and strangeness”) is open for submissions from October 1st to November 15th. Guidelines here.
wordle image
September 26, 2009 2 Comments
o, the fickleness of me
September 22, 2009 Leave a Comment
Have you ever been in this situation?
You get a book from the library, a nice fat book, in a genre you don’t normally read, but the premise is intriguing.
You start reading it one evening and it hooks you so much you read for four hours. You read it in snatches over the next couple of days.
Then, around page 367, you get it. Everything clicks into place and you know how it’s going to end. The story’s a train on tracks, and you know exactly where it’s headed.
Trouble is, you’re still 200 pages from the end. And now that you know how it all turns out, you have no desire to read the rest. You realize you didn’t want to spend any time with the characters. All you wanted was to solve the mystery.
And now that you have, you peek ahead to confirm (yep, am right) and you’re done with the book.
*sigh*
It was such a fun read until I hit that point.
the first draft: slow and steady
September 19, 2009 6 Comments
Definitely slow, not as steady as I would like. I’m 18.5 K into the story, solidly in the part where all the political intrigue comes into play. I have at least one cool scene coming up which is going to throw my MC into a tailspin and send her running for her life. Is it mean of me to be looking forward to writing that?
My main goal right now, though, is to get back into the habit of writing. Since it’s very easy for me to be distracted by things that are not as hard to do as writing (Internet, video games, reading) and the urgent-but-not-important (almost all housekeeping tasks), I’ve set the bar low for myself: 500 words a day, 5 days a week. That gives me days off, and prevents me from using the excuses of “I’m too tired”, “I don’t have enough time”, and “It’s been a long day” (when are they not??). 500 words a day on a first draft? That’s peanuts. I can do this.
I’m also using author Holly Lisle as a pacesetter, having taken her up on her Write a Book With Me offer. Just posting my wordcounts on her daily threads and enjoying the support of the community she’s created is good for my motivation.
Beginning a writing session is always the hardest part for me. I can spend all day wanting to get to my nightly session. I can think story and plot plots and scheme schemes while washing dishes, vacuuming, and driving. Then the time *finally* comes to sit and write and I got nothing. No fizz, no drive. It’s like wanting to go for a swim and you finally get to the edge of the pool and realize it’s cooooold in there. So you stand there shivering, unable to take the plunge.
So here’s what I came up with to ease myself back into the story: I created a novel journal document and before (and sometimes after) every writing session I throw down all my thoughts about the story: why it’s stupid, what I want to accomplish in the scene I’m working on, a cool realization that RB threw at me, why my characters suck, why my writing sucks, why my story is totally great, etc. etc. This idea is not original; I got it from an essay by Sue Grafton in the The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing. It’s a good way to get all the uggh out of my system so I can get to my story without all the baggage of self-doubt and “why, bother?” and “woe is me, for I am an untalented hack” and all that.
It’s also a handy place to keep notes on my next scene so when I come back to it, I have a map for how that particular scene should go.
Do you have any rituals/tips/tricks to get you started writing and keep you going?
Picture Books: Exploring Down Under
September 16, 2009 2 Comments
(Artwork inspired by aboriginal dot paintings by Miss M and Sir I)
Wombat Stew by Marcia K. Vaughan and Pamela Lofts: One day, a very clever dingo catches a wombat and sets about making wombat stew, with a little help from the other animals. Fear not for the wombat, though! My kids loved this one and went around singing, “Wombat stew! Wombat stew! Gooey chewy, crunchy munchy, for my lunchy, WOMBAT STEW!” for days after.
Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French: This was a birthday present for Sir I from my Aussie writing buddy Jo. Features a sleeping-all-day back-scratching carrot-devouring hole-digging wombat who trains humans to feed her on demand. Very entertaining.
The Biggest Frog in Australia by Susan Roth: In the Dreamtime, the biggest frog in Australia wakes up very thirsty. He drinks up all the puddles, the billabongs (I added this new word to my vocabulary and I’ve been itching to use it ever since!), the rivers, the lakes, even the rain in the clouds. Now the frog is huge and swollen, the land is dry and parched, and the other animals are suffering. They need to get all the water out of the frog, but how?
Bilby Moon by Margaret Spurling: A bilby is enthralled by her first sight of the full moon, smiling down at her. Her joy turns to distress on subsequent nights as the moon starts losing pieces of itself. She enlists the help of other desert animals to find the lost pieces, becoming sadder as the moon grows thinner and finally disappears. Then an owl tells her not to worry–she’ll be surprised again the following night when the moon comes back. A charming, reassuring story.
Stories from the Billabong by James Vance Marshall: This collection of aboriginal stories from the Dreamtime has lovely dot painiting-inspired illustrations. Not all the tales are appropriate for my kids’ ages, so I picked only a handful of them to read aloud (usually the animal ones). We all enjoyed “How the Kangaroo got her Pouch”.
ooh, shiny
September 14, 2009 Leave a Comment
This open-ended and process-oriented project was a huge hit with my older two. I mixed up equal parts of white glue and water and gave each child a piece of aluminum foil and lots of cut-up tissue paper. The kids spread the glue all over the foil (shiny side up!) and stuck on the tissue paper. They covered the first layer with more glue and added more tissue paper. Sir I. really got into the layering; he must have created four or five of them. Miss M. skipped ahead to the last step, which was to sprinkle glitter and sequins (and other shiny things) on the last layer of glue.
I love how, even using the same process, the kids’ projects turned out so different and beautiful. I can see this technique being used for other crafts. Foil-and-tissue birds, with feathers glued on the last layer. Fish with sequins for scales. Butterflies. Pretty wrapping paper.
I couldn’t resist the lure of shiny things and made one, too. I forgot to take a picture of it, but it was also glittery and colorful.
the first draft: journey into uncharted territory
September 13, 2009 4 Comments
I re-started work on Kai’s Book a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the premise, by the by:
A cursed runaway princess, despised by her people, returns from across worlds to save the homeland she fled after committing murder.
The “princess” part is a bit misleading since your typical princess doesn’t exist in this world. It’s more Dark Ages than medieval, where the king is just the warlord who has a bit more power than all the other warlords. There’s also a viking-type world and a steampunk world thrown in there, which makes things rather fun, especially since Kai crosses over to all of them in the first three chapters.
It’s been a long time since I worked on a first draft of a novel. I had a hard time getting back into the mindset. While looking through my notes, I was rather disturbed by the fact that large swathes of plot were completely unknown to me. Even intensive brainstorming and extensive freewriting didn’t bring these areas to light. I was getting rather worried there…
Then I remembered.
Novel first drafts are like setting out on a journey with a very rudimentary map. The starting point is pretty clear–the star on the northern coast of the continent with a You Are Here right above it–and the ending is generally also somewhat known–that nice beach somewhere down on the balmy southern coast. Between those two points, however, are blank areas with no features, save for maybe a large lake or two in your way and a mountain range bisecting the entire continent (of course!). Off in the fringes are places marked Here Be Dragons.
If you’re lucky, you packed well.
Usually, you didn’t. Usually you didn’t anticipate the desert that appeared right before the mountains, or the landslide that buries your pack mule halfway through the range, or the acidic spores of the Mushroom Forest, or the townspeople that seize you and put you to work in the peanut fields for wearing purple on a Thursday.
But that’s the joy of writing novels. The story is full of surprises, forcing you to be quick-footed and quick-witted, and dealing with the consequences if you’re not.
Not only is writing fun, it’s adventurous. Now that I’ve remembered that, I’m happy to have only a couple scenes plotted out in advance of where I am. More scenes will come to light. They always do.
I just have to keep going on, even if it’s through the Vermilion Marshes of Man-Eating Flies.
How’s your writing going?
coral reef
September 12, 2009 3 Comments
This is the coral reef the kids and I made a few weeks ago. The coral is made from salt dough, which we shaped (check out the brain coral I made. It’s the one that, funnily enough, looks like a brain), dried and painted. Then we set about creating inhabitants for our reef. The cupcake liners are giant clams; the egg cartons with bits of ribbon around the top are sea anemones; the cotton balls with pipe cleaners sticking out of them are sea urchins; the smiley-faced skinny ovals are fish and those vaguely star-shaped objects on the left are indeed, starfish. Oh, and the cut-up pink sponges pieces are *gasp!* sponges.
It certainly turned out to be a very colorful and crowded project!
Sir I. and the new definition of luck
September 8, 2009 Leave a Comment
Heard today:
“Mommy, Baron is lucky because he bited a book and got thrown in jail, but he escaped from jail and that’s why he’s lucky!”
Personally, I think it’s pretty darned UNlucky to get thrown into jail for biting a book (hmm, I wonder what would happen if someone broke into a museum and took a huge chunk out of an important document–like say, the Constitution–with their teeth?). But anyhow. Sir I. stands by his definition.
Speaking of Baron, the following exchange made me realize just why my kids are so loud. They can’t get attention any other way.
Me: *pours milk for older kids*
Baron: Me, too? Please?
Me: *pours milk for quiche*
Baron: Milk, mommy? Pleeeeeassse?
Me: *puts milk away in the refrigerator*
Baron: *ear-splitting train-whistle shriek* *agitated flailing of limbs*
Me: Oh? Did you want some milk, too, sweetie?
Baron: YES!
