Salmonella Dub – For the Love Of It (not the version I was thinking of, but it will do)
Why do you write?
When I published my post the other say, somewhat jokingly bemoaning my as yet undiscoveredness, I did get a couple of reminders that we should be writing because we love it, not in order to get famous or (heaven forbid) rich.
Well, I just want to take a moment to be honest… Continue Reading…
Number 1… but, you get the idea…
I love the lunge… and the legs in the air… and how he looks to the music video for inspiration…
Yep. I’m just damn proud that my son enjoys a boogey! We have little dance parties in his bedroom now. Usually to “Mahna Mahna”… sometimes to Kylie Minogue…
Gets me up and moving, too… Can’t be a bad thing!
Every year we attend the Christmas Eve Dessert Party hosted by some friends of ours (the 9th annual, this year). Tonight’s party has kept the toddler up two hours past his bed time… He’s just gone down (it’s MY bedtime, now). Time to wait for him to drift off, so I can sneak in there and be Santa… He’s 2. This year sets a precedent, I think. I hope I get it right…
Do you know how many times I hovered over the WordPress drop down menu and clicked on the link to go to my home page, rather than going one step further to click on the link to create a new post? Five or six. I didn’t think it was important enough to start counting… maybe even seven. Enough times, anyway, to put my head in my hands. Yes, yes I did… Continue Reading…
Today is … today.
A trip to a farm. “I’m in the back of a ute! I’m a REAL dog, ma!”
It’s the first of October here in New Zealand. This morning, when I realised the date, I also recalled, of course, what tomorrow is … October 2nd. Which was, and always will be, my first dog Griffin’s birthday.
And I realised something … I miss him, deeply.
Griffin came into my life when I was a 17 year old school girl, potentially on the cusp of making stupid decisions. But I didn’t need to. I had Griffin. I loved him and he loved me, and we did everything together. I still fancied boys, but I didn’t need a boy. I had Griffin.
Every year, we gave Griffin a present under the Christmas tree. It didn’t need to be food, yet he could always pick it out. And as long as the paper wasn’t that shiny stuff, he could open it himself, too. But he would always carry it to my mum to get the OK, first.
My Pop (mum’s dad) was diagnosed with cancer soon after I got Griffin, and a year later passed. I will always remember Griffin running happily into Pop’s house, which we were staying in to attend his funeral, and running around looking for him … he was very disappointed Pop wasn’t there. Continue Reading…
I must be letting off a vibe that I’m on a deadline. The toddler has become incredibly difficult to get to bed – day and night sleeps. Until recently, he was the model child when it came to bedtime. Yesterday, we skipped the daytime sleep altogether (!), which meant my writing/editing time down the drain, and it took him an hour to settle at night. I swear . . . he knows.
He’s just doing it to keep me on my toes, eh? I keep making calculations: If I write … words per day, I’ll get there; If I edit … chapters per day, I can make it … It stresses me out, it really does. I knew it was an ambitious goal to get this thing close to finished by the end of this month, anyway. That was with regular, reliable writing times. Now, he eats into that, and then I’m all wound up and stressed for the first 1/2-1hr of the time that I do get … which might only be that long. It’s not easy, I tell you.
Anyway, that’s why I’m quiet everywhere. I’m editing/re-writing (or working/mummying). Mostly, I’m doing it away from the computer, with a print-out. The thoughts feel less jumbled then.
Back to it. Wish me luck.
Managed something along the lines of 2,400 words today – I’m not entirely sure because I closed my session of Scrivener (after giving myself a MASSIVE fright when I renamed my story’s folder while Scrivener was open (duh! – rookie mistake) … oh boy, is it scary watching your files go blank? Yes, yes it is … luckily, I just had to open the file from the newly named folder and all was well).
How did I manage this (the 2,400 words)? It’s Saturday here in beautiful Aotearoa/New Zealand and my husband managed to have enough spare time to take our son to the supermarket and then to a friend’s house with him, giving me a decent few hours alone with my WIP.
I probably could have written more, but I get distracted now and then, and got a wee bit held up after a review. A fellow writer was reading my chapters to date (well, up until a few days ago) for me, as I wanted to know how things felt to someone less close to the project. In particular, I know I want a romance to develop between my leads (oh, come on, it’s what people like to read), but I want that development to feel natural, which can be tricky when I’ve had these people at various stages of togetherness and apartness (sure, it’s a word) over the last few years. Anyway, my reviewer gave me some brief feedback on my first chapter, and they made comments in particular on my writing style. Now, because writing style is really quite fundamental to writing, this gave me a big pause. I mean, how do you just keep going, knowing you’re gonna have to come back and pretty much re-write just to fix your basic voice? Continue Reading…
Or, rather … what an end to a crazy week. Hmm. No. I’m not so sure it’s over, yet.
OK, here goes. (I’m on caffeine, so bear with me). Last week, I learned new stuff about writing (Thanks, Janice) and I set about implementing what I learned in my WIP. This meant MAJOR re-writes (good-bye scenes I was really quite attached to …). The problem with doing this now is we start reviewing in the “First Three Chapters” group I am part of next week! Eep! OK, that’s fine. Breathe, you can do this. And … you know what? I was doing it. At over 2,000 words per day, I was doing it. The end of Chapter 1 is done. Chapter 2 is done. Most of Chapter 3 is done – thanks largely to the fact I can reuse some old stuff here. And, I even finished a short story (~2000 words) for a competition yesterday. Yeh man. I am a MACHINE.
So, the two competition stories I did over the last couple of weeks? They earned me two 3rd places. Not too shabby, huh? OK, so they weren’t major, prestigious writing comps, but that’s OK. It’s nice to prove to myself that I can write to a prompt and do alright. Especially when the story I write is away from my WIP. As a novelist, I get worried that I’ll only ever have one story in me. This is it. Once I’ve sent these characters out to play, I’ll be stuck. I’ll never write anything again. Oh woe is me.
So, I encourage you to play with short stories. Find a few competitions (writing.com is great for it … but I’m sure there are others) and challenge yourself.
Even better than placing in competitions is getting feedback – in-depth feedback – from an enthusiastic reader. And I found one today. Continue Reading…
I was writing some ideas down on a scrap piece of paper while away from the computer. Baby-J picked it up and headed straight for the shredder … I was thinking ‘just my luck if he suddenly figures out how to use it’ …
It was one of those moments where I was thinking to myself “Do I stop him to avert disaster? (OK, hardly a disaster – the ideas weren’t ground-breaking, although they were helping me clarify my thoughts.) Or, will I be just a little bit proud if he actually makes it work?” (there’s no way his fingers would go into it, so all is fine on that front).
And then I got thinking how like a plot-line it was. The child grabs the piece of paper and crawls along the floor with it, heading straight for the shredder. You can see the ending – ideas shredded into thin strips – a disaster! But, then again, just maybe, the child will fail to achieve that end. Will he be thwarted by his inability to properly control the paper as he goes to line it up? He has every other time. But, what about this time? Another stride on hand and knee. The tension builds. What will happen?
Why is this here? No reason, I just really like this short/sweet number.
It went into the shredder bin. Whole. (It’s a cheapy plastic bin with a wee shredder sitting on top, so it missed the working part altogether).
… with a baby.
It’s tricky. I’ll tell ya that. At Summer Solstice (~21-22-Dec) it doesn’t get 100% dark. Sure, the sun goes down & the moon comes up (“& long ago somebody left with the cup… ” – sorry, music is never far from my brain), but the sky only gets so far as a dark blue.
BabyJ’s bedtime is 8pm – I think that’s too late for a 1 yr old, but it’s what we’ve managed to settle on, so far. Only, it’s getting tricky to even enforce that. And I get it. I remember being a kid & not getting the fact that it was still light outside & I was in bed. But a post 8pm bedtime followed by a 4.30am wake up. Ah, no. That doesn’t work for me. It’s bad enough that my tired brain is ready to switch off by 8pm, doing me out of some good writing time – assuming there aren’t other distractions, like dishes & washing & baking & those other things that come with keeping a household ticking. Hence my dull blog posts of late. Creative processes die off in the evenings. I tend to use the few morning moments I get to work on WotW. And, that is coming along quite nicely, thank you. OK, so I haven’t added to its wordcount in a week, but I have been thinking about it, and those thoughts have led to some pretty solid ideas, if I do say so myself. I’m hearing my characters talk again, which is nice. For a while there they’d gone rather quiet. I blame the odd tangent I was taking. They didn’t want to go that way. Ooh, now I’m starting to sound like a crazy writer – ”I just sat back & my characters wrote themselves. No, really.” Honestly, though, there is certainly room for gut instinct in this writing game.
OK. That’s all you’re getting from my tired brain this evening.
Any parents got any hints for bedtime? Or at least some words of encouragement so I don’t feel like the meanest mother in the world for enforcing a bed-time. In all honesty, I think I’d feel better about it if I could say it was strictly in his best interests. But, no, by the time evening rocks around, I am hanging out for child-free time.There. I said it. Turn me in. Lock me up. I crave ‘me’ time. Continue Reading…
One person's nitty-gritty, icky-sticky, goopy-soupy creative process. No one said it had to be pretty.
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