Sep

26

Fun With Pictures

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I decided to play with the pictures of the moon I took several months ago. This one I cropped down and used a sepia photo filter. Neat effect, I think.

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Sep

25

Cleaning: A Writer’s Boon and Bane

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Has it really been over a week since I last posted here? I find that hard to believe. Dates on the blog entries don’t lie.

What have I been doing during this time? Writing and cleaning. Or, as I like to say, “editing my life”. :)

As I’ve mentioned before, I work at home. For reasons I won’t get into, I’ve let the housework slide. Doing the bare minimum, letting things pile up until it hits a crisis point. It’s stressful on all of us, and it’s taking a toll on my writing. I’m just not happy and can’t concentrate well. When the world around me is cluttered, my mind is cluttered. To fix that, I’ve set up a new routine - I spend the morning cleaning a specific section, taking it 15 to 20 minutes at a time (with breaks so that I don’t burn myself out), and the afternoon is spent working on stuff like the novel.

The cleaning process got delayed by two days because the belt in the vacuum cleaner snapped, and the first place we tried to get the replacement didn’t carry them. So I went this morning and bought what I needed at Target. I didn’t get as much cleaning done as I wanted to, but another section of floor has been cleaned and vacuumed. Tomorrow’s job is to go through my cookbook/reference bookshelf. Figure out what I’ll leave on the shelf, what’ll go into storage, and what I’m going to get rid of. The stuff I’m keeping is going to get scanned into Readerware. I figure I might as well do that, so we can complete the inventory of our books and record which ones are on the shelf and which ones are in bins (and which bin).

Editing of the novel is going slowly. 200 words today (I lost half the day and half my evening to running errands and school related activities). I’m still moving forward, which is good. Not updating the WIP meter, though. I only do that when a chapter is completed.

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Sep

17

Quote of the Day

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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou

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Sep

15

The Dangers of Research

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The biggest challenge a fiction writer has is to make their work realistic. Even if your story is set on the moon of Wikihiki in the Membar galaxy, what happens needs to be believable.

For example, you’re writing a piece of sword and sorcery fantasy, and your barbarian warrior princess leaps onto the back of her horse to ride bareback into combat. Her horse rears up onto its hind legs, whinnies a challenge, then charges at the enemy. Sounds like a good scene. Only one problem - could she actually stay on the back of her horse when it rears if she doesn’t have a saddle? If you don’t do your research, then you won’t know. If someone who knows horses and rides a lot knows, and you get it wrong, there’s a very good chance you’ll lose them as a reader forever.

But that’s the dangers of not doing research.

If you’re like me, you’ve got three five-shelf bookcases crammed full to the point of breaking with books, magazines and other documentation, all in the name of “research materials”. I’ve got everything from my husband’s old anatomy coloring book from his high school science classes, to Howdunit reference books to books on New Age magic. Some of them I’ve bought because they were in the bargain bins for a couple of bucks and I thought they might be useful some day. Others are left-overs from my time in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Of course, there are those I bought for projects, and those that fall into the purely “oh, that’s cool, I gotta get it”.

The Pirate Primer is one of those “oh cool”. (And yes, it’s an affiliate link if you click on the image above - I gotta pay for this blog somehow :) ). What is it? Just what it says - a primer of the pirate “language”. It’s divided up into two basic parts: what to say (all the words and phrases, divided up by type, such as Oaths, Curses and Threats) and how to say it (such as pronunciation and basic grammar). It’s a goldmine of information, and it’s just so cool (yes, I know, I keep saying cool, but I can’t help it).

See, it’s that coolness factor that’s the danger. I opened the book and started reading it, and all of a sudden I wanted to cast aside everything else I’m working to write a period pirate story, so I could use the stuff in the book. It’s incredibly difficult to set this book aside. It has a chapter entitled simply “Arrgh”. How can you not be enthused about that, especially with International Talk Like A Pirate Day coming up on Friday?

But I digress. There comes a point where you have to stop researching and get on with the writing. Especially if what you’re researching has nothing to do with what you’re working on. That said, if any of you check The Pirate Primer out and end up having the same problems I did, I apologize for that now. :)

Popularity: 23% [?]

Sep

11

Strange Dreams

Filed Under Novel In Progress, Personal | Leave a Comment

It’s been a couple of days since I wrote a blog entry. I’ve been busy doing a number of different things. Not sleeping well because stories are whirling around in my head is part of the problem, but last night was just so weird.

In my dream, Alton Brown was at our house. I don’t know why, other than it was a surprise and he ended up on our doorstep. For some reason, our bedroom was off the living room and Brown was going to be sleeping on the sofa bed. He asked if it would be okay to play music while he slept, and brought out this huge portable stereo.

When it was time to cook supper, he wouldn’t let me start cooking until he checked out each and every item in my kitchen. Not because he was being picky or obnoxious, because he wanted to know what was in my kitchen - what each thing was, what I used it for, and if it was a multi-tasker. And in the dream I was thrilled, and proudly showed it all to him, including things only my dream self knew what they were and what they were for. We never actually started cooking, and I woke up thinking “what the hell was that?”

I have no idea what prompted the dream. Does this mean I should stop checking out the Food Network website so much?

So, on the writing front….

Working on Chapter 5 of TMA today. I’m still having problems with the scene with Sgt. Tucker after the animal attack. I’m beginning to think that maybe I should just cut the scene altogether. It doesn’t really move the story forward at all. It shows another aspect of Alex’s personality, but that can be done in another scene. Plus, if I cut the scene, it’ll make it a lot easier to finish the chapter and get it posted. If I do cut it, I’ll write it up on a cue card and set it aside in my extra scene pile. You never know - I might just use a variation of it later.

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