Category: My Writing Life

All three acts in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog are up and today is the last day to watch it free!  It’s fantastic–my daughter and I both loved it.  I would give specific hilarious parts, but don’t want to ruin the surprises. 

You don’t want to miss.

http://www.drhorrible.com/

The defrag took all day yesterday, so I have to make up my payjob work today.  No new words last night because silly me introduced the hubby to Pandemic 2.  He never gets into games, so I didn’t think it would hurt. 

My son was on the desktop, so I snuggled up with the hubby since he was determined to figure it out.  Have to admit, I had a wonderful time with him.  At least we were doing something together.  We both always have several projects going at once and hardly ever slow down. 

And for the record, we didn’t win once.  His new motto is “Get Madagascar, get the world.”  <g> 

And because I refuse to get behind on word goals, I’m pulling double time tonight. Tomorrow, I need to have a good 3000 words to report. 

I will.  I couldn’t sleep last night because the story is taking on shape at a fast rate.  I can’t wait to dive in tonight!

I’ll leave you with a tidbit I found highly amusing yesterday. 

This is me with friends and writers Deb Brehens, Betty Sanders, Jordan Dane… and I’m sorry, but I don’t know the bookstore owner’s name.  Oops. Check out the snippet about Jordan in Vicki Pettersson’s blog post yesterday.  😉

I came into my office early this morning.  Had to run a defrag and scan on the external hard drive I use in my payjob.  It’s been dragging and slowing progress. 

So, I decided to write for a little while since the kids are still asleep and it’s quiet.  These defrags/scans take forever!

Apparently, I write well in the early morning hours, too, because I cleared 2000 words already! 

My mother-in-law just came by, it’s nearing ten in the morning and I’m still in a robe.  See?  I write and just disappear.  Was loving the flow of words so much, I probably would have sat here, petrifying, until I’d written half the book.  But I have to do the other work for awhile.  Sigh. 

I’m in my robe, my mother-in-law, who thankfully knows I’m not a layabout was here and as she arrives, I’m dragging a huge chair onto my front porch.  The Special Olympics people are coming through the neighborhood today, collecting donations, and I have a bunch of clothes.  I don’t know if they’ll take this big chair, but I’m hoping.  I’m tired of my hubby griping about it.  So what if I bought it three years ago with plans to recover it?  So what if it’s currently a hideous peach color?  If they don’t take it, I’ll drag it back inside.  I admit it.   I’ll never have it recovered.  I’m too interested in other things. <g>

I have a point believe it or not.  Thing is, dragging that chair onto the porch with five trash bags full of clothes, meeting my MIL in my robe… I suddenly realized I was confirming my neighbors’ fears.   

Yes, a crazy hermit who never gets dressed lives here. 

You see, I had to write this morning to make up for being bad last night.  I was all jacked up worrying about  my son who failed to check in properly while going to the movies with friends.  I couldn’t concentrate, so I tried out this game I saw on Lilith Saintcrow’s blog.  Oh man, this game is highly addictive.  I keep trying the different virus, parasite or bacteria strains, keep changing up their tolerances or their symptoms and no matter what I do, one small part of humanity manages to survive!  Since I’m into sharing, here ya go. 

<big, evil, wicked grinning here>  Pandemic 2 

Normally, I won’t let myself play until the work is done, but I’m a worrier.  The now-grounded boy will remember to call me with movie times from here on out. 

And okay, I wasn’t only playing a game… Heather reminded me how much I love this movie, Hot Fuzz, so I was watching it again. 

It’s violent, hilarious and has some of the best dialogue!

Since this morning was make-up, I still have to make my goal tonight.  I will not play Pandemic 2.  I will not play Pandemic 2…

Started my official daily word goal last night.  Had a heck of a time turning off the internal editor and had to wrestle her to just let the shitty first draft flow.  But I did.  Writing on a set schedule is important if you want to slam through deadlines and goals.  

Plus, the drafts may start shitty and and weave in and out of truly wretched, but something good always mushrooms from them.  (Sorry, couldn’t resist. heh )  It’s all about getting into the zone and it doesn’t usually happen right away.  Stick it out and you get there.   I snipped and shuffled, but cleared 1500 new words last night.  Yay!

I think writing at night works because everyone is asleep, there are no distractions and I feel absolutely no need to get up and do a load of laundry. 

Plus, all that darkness and quiet just floats the imagination.  

Summer comes with sharp-edged juggling. 

While I’m glad we don’t have the frantic activity schedules, the early morning daily hassle, the hours spent micro-managing my unmotivated son’s time and uh, the dreaded constant notes from his teachers about why he did the homework but didn’t turn it in– summer comes with a price. 

I truly miss the uninterrupted stretch of time I get each day while they are away.   And, there is a lot less Mom Guilt then. <g>  My payjob is at home as well, so I spend hours in front of a computer.  Hours they spend occupying themselves.  I truly believe it’s good for them to have a certain amount of time occupying themselves–we do them no favors by filling all their time, but with two “in front of the computer” jobs, that time gets heavy.

It’s hard on the kiddos, too.  For instance, a few days ago, I was working, earphones set to medium, typing like crazy.  My son came into the room and walked right up to me.  I was so caught up, I gasped and nearly jumped out of the chair.  He felt so bad, his little face fell and he turned to leave, muttering apologies.  I had to stop and soothe him, tell him it wasn’t his fault, I was just concentrating.

Then I said yes to a soda.  Sigh. Freaking Mom Guilt.

So, I moved the writing to the late hours for the summer.  I know me.  I’ll blend into the quiet and the dark and will easily get lost in some kind of fanciful world of my own making.  Much easier and way more fun when you aren’t wondering what the little ones are up to…

The pastel options in my last WordPress theme drove me nuts.  I like pastels… in some things, but I prefer deeper, jewel tones. 

I also like dark blogs, but I don’t like white words on a dark background.  This theme offered hard colors, the grittier, darker feel that fits my writing more and the actual posts are on a lighter board.  Works for me.  It just takes a long, long time to get a site together, so I’d been putting it off or just settling for a change in header or two. 

It’s done for now and it’ll stay like this until I have a professional website done with an attached blog.  That’s a ways off at this point, but I have bought the domain. <g>

So, I’m going to make dinner for the family, then follow through with the tagline here.  Burn some midnight oil since I have writing time to make up and it always seems to flow better in the night hours.  In fact, I also uncluttered my workspace to better unclutter the head. 

I’m past all my surgical stuff and feeling great, so it’s time to get into that solid, rhythmic flow of a daily word count.  Besides, I need to give my wonderful, workhorse critique partner,  Rachel Vincent, some healthy competition and maybe… something good to read soon. 🙂

I will be messing around with the theme here for a couple of days.  No, my big face will not be staying up there, but I need to find the right sized photo to purchase and I’m about to head out for a bridal shower. 

It’s also too busy and there isn’t a way to save all the work you do in a widget and move it to another column.  That is infinitely annoying. 

So, it’s still me and there will be strange changes a foot.

Hope you are all having a most excellent weekend!

So.  My husband has been watching this show lately.  I don’t know if it’s new or not–it’s new to us.  Desperate Landscapes.  I can’t handle the hours of HGTV, DIYand Food Network he likes (Can we please, please, please have a new Star Trek series?  A good one?  Or better yet, start the Charlain Harris show earlier???) so I usually settle into my big chair with my laptop and earphones.  It’s surprisingly easy to slip into my fictional world while he’s dreaming of all the renovations he’d like to do to our house.  He even has a list.  Makes me break out into a cold sweat just looking at it. 

But, lately, he’s turned to DIY more.  Says they actually do stuff and aren’t as showy as HGTV–none of that next design star crap.  (Yeah, alt-world here since I have no freaking idea what he’s talking about.) 

But uh, there’s a problem with this new show. 

My eyes are drawn to the screen often.  Still have the earphones, so it’s not the exciting music or promise of a pretty landscaped yard.  No, it’s something way more basic.  Have you seen this guy’s arms?????  

He’s always digging out big trees or using saws.  How is a woman supposed to concentrate with all that going on? 

You know, the hubby used to bring me to work with him.  He was a trim carpenter then.  I’d have a book (was never without one) but peek over the top to watch the muscles in his arms as he worked…

Uh oh, he’s grinning at me.  Probably just figured out why I’m smiling and staring at the screen over here.

But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

H.P. Lovecraft

It’s weird being home on the computer so much during a holiday weekend.  Kind of feel like I’m the only one, but I’m pretty sure a lot of writers feel this way.  This particular weekend, it’s more about letting the tummy heal, but it’s not that far out of the norm really.   I started finishing books when I learned to say no. 

This had to be the most difficult thing I had to learn.  I have a seriously hard time saying no.  (Even to my kids–which is a bad, bad thing. <g>)  Well, I did.   I have a huge family, lots of wonderful friends I’d love nothing more than to hang with… but I REALLY, REALLY want writing to be my career.  So, I play less. 

Luckily, I quickly realized that once the writing becomes the fun, saying no gets easier.  

So, yesterday,  I promised to share writing and I will soon.  Once again, I had a bit of trouble which is so out of effing character for me when I’m this excited about something, I started to wonder if maybe putting off finishing book two in my first series was the problem.  You see, I’m also excited about Blood of an Ancient and man, I look forward to digging deep into the meat of the story, but still want to wait and make sure my prospective editor approves the proposal.  (Positive.  Thinking.  Good.)

But working on different projects hasn’t been a problem in the past for me, so no, I figured that wasn’t the issue.   

This new book, which we’ll call WTT for now, was to be the start of a new series and man, I have to say it’s one of my coolest ideas. <g>  But I started, then started again.  I wrote about the that difficulty here.  So, yesterday, I looked over all my research notes and realized why I had started the book three times.  It was supposed to be my hero’s book.  He is the reason for the cool title.  But the more I looked things over, the more I realized this is the beginning of a trilogy about three eighteen year-old triplets who are basically the norns reborn.

It can still be his story, but my heroine needs to have the main voice.  She was chaffing under the restraints I’d placed on her.  Oh, and my original main character?  He’s strong enough and easygoing enough to be completely entertained by the idea… and her.  Yay!  (BTW, these will be urban fantasy, but they’ll also hold a pretty strong love story–or stories. ) 

So in a nutshell, sometimes a story doesn’t start well because it’s not that character’s story.  Sounds weird, I know.  I mean, I’m the writer.  I made this story up, right?  I can do whatever I want with it, right?  Yeah, I did and yeah, I can.  But a good story wriggles about, squeezes into corners, then flows into a pattern that’s all its own. 

A good story tells itself.

So occasionally, a writer must just say no to the original idea, dump over seven thousand words (ouch) and go with the flow.  I’m not worried.  When it’s flowing, seven thousand words is chump change.

Added:  For an interesting take on wiggle vs. wriggle, here’s a cool article.