I have been spending way too much time over on the NaNoWriMo forums.  Probably close to an hour a day at this point.  Time I could/should be writing.

Not that I’m not writing.  I’ve been keeping up with my blogs.  And editing my 2007 Nano Novel, The Fairest of the Faire.  I still want to have it edited and up to Lulu for publication by the time Nano2008 starts.  But at this point, while wasting time on the forums, I am not getting that done as quickly as I could.

At least I know that once Nano starts, the forums get awfully slow, making them frustrating to hang out on to begin with, and also I would rather work on my Great American Novel than piddle around having discussions with people.

But right now, the distractions are numerous, and not helping me get the job done.  I feel like I have ADD.  I was reading the online news and found out that Neil Gaiman has a new novel out…a new novel!!  How can I not want to go out and snatch it up RIGHT NOW and start reading it, leaving all that is Nano behind me?

I won’t, though.  I’ll solemnly ask our reference librarian to order it, it will appear in December and I can read it over Christmas.  Why?  Because Neil Gaiman is a huge fan of Nano, and a great supporter of writers of all levels, and I should honor that.  Gaiman even wrote a pep talk for last year’s Nano.

So, back to work I go.  I’m about 3/4 of the way through the rewrite of Fairest of the Faire.  It is up to about 80K, which is respectable.  I don’t think it’s my best work, but it’s good enough.

Today is October 1st.  That means it’s only one more month until Nano begins!  Yes, it’s a long month, with 31 days, but stilll, it’s one month away!

I have a sort of a plot.  Actually, I have a beginning, and an end.  I don’t have much in the middle.  It’s a contemporary romance, again, and I need more romance.  I’m determined to have fun with this year’s story, however; I am going to write a main character who is somewhat like me, doing a job like I do, with crazy coworkers like I have.  The romance will pair her, a “green” girl, with an architect who has spent years mowing down green space to build office buildings.  The two of them end up together, living off the grid in a cabin in the woods.

Should be fun.  My FMC even has a really cool name, Dulcie Cunningham.  Haven’t come up with a name for my guy yet, but I will.  Also have to come up with a title.  That’s always the hardest for me.  I was almost done with Nano last year before I came up with a title!

I want to call this “A Cabin in the Woods” but I think that gives away my ending and where’s the mystery in that?  All suggestions welcome.

I’ve been hanging around on the NaNoWriMo forums the last few days, reading and responding to posts.  People are getting wound up, as am I, for the first of November.  We are about a month away at this point.

What I noticed was the over-abundance of teens who are spending time on the forums.  There was a question about “where do you write,” and the majority of answers are along the lines of “in my bedroom because I don’t have a license.” And here I am thinking “I’m going to write anywhere but home because I can’t get anything done at home.”

Where are the adult writers hanging out on Nano?  They’ve got to be somewhere.  It’s not that I don’t want to see the young writers there, believe me, I want to see them there!  I was a young writer once, and wish there’d been somewhere like Nano for me to spend my writing hours.  I wrote a lot, I have the notebooks, all in long-hand, to prove it!

But for me, I need to connect with other writers who are doing what I’m doing…trying to squeeze in book-writing between taking care of children, working a full-time job, watching after elderly parents, and planning for retirement.  I need the support system that writers like me can provide.

I asked on the Nano boards why there was no “40’s” forum for people like us and was politely and bluntly told that we should hang out in the 30’s forum.  Gee, thanks.  I haven’t been in my thirties for almost 10 years and honestly, I was going through a divorce then and going to school full-time and that entire decade is pretty much a blur for me now.

Nano can’t come soon enough.  I’m getting anxious and really want to get started, even though I don’t have much of a story to work with.  It’s the one time of the year when I can ignore almost everything and just do what I want to do (write) for an entire month.

NaNoWriMo is virtually upon us.  In just over a month, I will once again be pounding away on my laptop, trying to finish another novel.  Never mind I haven’t finished the last THREE YEARS worth of Nano’s!

I’m trying hard to finish up last year’s.  It needs some editing and I’m working on it but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done that I want to do, and with as many distractions as I have on a regular basis.  I keep telling myself I need to figure out how to write NO MATTER WHAT but I guess I’m not ambitious enough to make sure that happens.

And if that’s the case, does that mean I’m not so committed to my stories?  I hate to think that’s true, but actions speak louder than words, right?  “Just do it,” I’ve told others.  I need to take some of my own advice!

As we drove all day to come home from Wisconsin, we listened to some old radio shows on the satellite radio.  What a luxury that thing is, there was every type of music and etc. you could ever want.  Most of the rental cars we get have it, and we’ve gotten to where we look forward to having it.

We were listening to Dragnet, and early in the show he describes the crime scene.

“The crowd was gathered around the crumpled body of a woman sprawled on the sidewalk.”

Which is it, crumpled or sprawled?  To me these are almost opposites.  I found it odd, and couldn’t hardly listen to the rest of the program because I was distracted by this strange description.  Makes me wonder who wrote it!

I just read about a youngish (46 years old) author who killed himself.  This, in some ways, seems like a trend in writers and artists.  I don’t quite understand it, as, although I have my moments, I have never been suicidal nor do I ever see myself being that way.

Many a good writer has ended their life prematurely, leaving us inthe world without the benefit of what may have been some very good writing.

So the question is, does it take great angst and terminal depression to be a “good” writer, or a “classic” writer?  Gee, I hope not, because although I am a writer and would like to be considered “good” and “classic,” I’m not willing to give up my life for it!

I recently checked out a book called The Actor Performs, by Mel Shapiro.  I wouldn’t normally be looking at an acting book, but a couple weeks ago I was editing for audio a portion of this book, and a particular part caught my eye and I talked about it in a blog post.  I felt then that I needed to see the entire chapter that surrounded the part that caught my eye.  I found it through our library exchange and just finished reading two chapters on characterization.

There wasn’t much more useful than the original quote, but I read it anyway.  One of the things that caught my interest was how an actor might do characterization of the role they are performing.  It was suggested that the actor observe “people in the wild” to gather bits and pieces that can be put together into a characterization.  I do this all the time.  Many times I can build a story completely around a character I encounter “in the wild.”

The other good suggestion was to make up an interview with your character.  I have never done this but have heard of it being done by writers.  Maybe I don’t know my characters enough to actually do this, or maybe I should make a better effort at doing it.  I know that I have a lot of trouble making my male characters seem “real.”  They are always a little flat, a little cardboardy.  And it’s getting worse as I continue to write; it’s almost like I don’t know what they are supposed to be, and I keep changing them around to mold to the female characters.

I’m going to have to work on that.

J.K. Rowling just won a well-publicized lawsuit over a fan creation called the Harry Potter Lexicon.  I find it really hard to understand why she would have sued in the first place, rather than come to some sort of financial agreement with the author of the lexicon.  Steve Van der Ark spent many a year (unpaid) creating the lexicon; his only intent was to give fans of the Harry Potter series of books something else to have fun with.

He never got paid a dime for his work, but when he attempted to publish, J.K. Rowling hit him and his potential publisher with a lawsuit.  It makes her look petty and territorial.  She has freely admitted that she is done with Harry Potter, the story line is complete and she’s not adding to it.   Why deprive the fans of more Harry Potter, then?  Wouldn’t it stand to reason that by allowing companion works, she is only encouraging her current fan base, and opening the door to new fans for many years to come?

Seems like there could have been a compromise made somewhere.  Now the world will be deprived of the Lexicon, an outstanding and unbelievable piece of literature created through the love and devotion of one fan.

Hubby was upset the other day about hearing a comedian use a joke on air that he knew another comedian had written and used years before.  The joke wasn’t exactly the same, but it was similar, and he felt that it had been “stolen” by the other comedian.

I reminded him that there is nothing really new under the sun.  All the jokes have been written and told.  There are no truly new jokes, just new ways to tell them.

I believe that is true in storytelling as well.  There are no new stories, there are just new ways to tell them.  It’s like a quilt; you can take all the pieces apart and swap them with another quilt’s pieces, and stitch them all back together, and you have an old story told in a new way.

I learned the theory of “nothing new under the sun” way back when in Creative Writing class in college.  At the time, I fretted that if there were no new stories, then trying to be a writer was a lost cause.  But that’s not true.  How many new books come out every year, books that millions of people buy and read and pass on to others and rave about in blogs.  So just because there is nothing new under the sun, it doesn’t mean I can’t write an old story in a new way.

I am reminded of Neil Gaiman’s themes, especially in American Gods and the Anansi Boys.  Both of those novels are full of old themes, old stories, old legends, but pieced in a new way, making a whole new story.  I want to do that.  Take old stories and quilt them in a new way.

That title is misleading, in a way.  Today on a mailing list I’m on, a member asked the following:

“It has seemed to me that some works of fiction seem to hold more kernels of truth within them than many works of informational non-fiction.  I wonder why that is. Has anyone else felt that way? Could it be because some works of fiction come from a place of the authors personal truth and perhaps we recognize this?”

My response was that just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it can’t teach us things or touch us.  Ever read Weekends with Morrie?  Or anything by Barbara Kingsolver?  These are fictions, but they can teach you many many things.

As a fiction and non-fiction author(ess), I know that my fiction can touch people just as deeply as my non-fiction can, depending on how it is written.  Many times, I am writing fiction to sort through issues of my own, and that comes out in the story.  It’s my way, sometimes, of finding a solution.

I got this bit of a quote from an Actor’s Workshop handout.  This is from a characterization section in An Actor Performs, by Mel Shapiro.

“It is helpful to keep a scrapbook of anything that you feel might be of interest later: faces for makeup studies, photographs of people in situations that are personally evocative to you, postcards of paintings in various museums — anything.  It’s like having a songwriter’s trunk: One day you’ll use that song (character) in a show.”

Isn’t this what we, as writers, do with our little notebooks and stacks of index cards with ideas on them?  Don’t we each see things and think, “I could use that in my next book” and madly write down a note that will (hopefully) help us remember what we saw?

I know it happened to me the other day.  I was at the little junk antique store down the way from my house,  the junk antique lady had set up a dollar table under the tree.  I can’t ever resist a dollar table.  So I’m poking through the dusty umbrellas and wicker baskets and there is a man in a pickup truck talking to the antique lady, showing her things he’d bought at a yard sale.

“That’s from the thirties!” the antique lady crowed.  She obviously knows her stuff.  But the pictures weren’t anything I’d have bought (Hummel-esque), even for a buck.  She was going on and on about how much they were “worth.”

The Antique Lady is going in one of my novels, for sure.  She is so wrapped in her own world, a world with no basis in reality, she will be a perfect character.

I think I need a “Writer’s Trunk.”  Why should songwriters be the only ones to have a trunk?

I finished Bookmark Now this afternoon.  I read every essay in its entirety except one that droned on about McSweeney, and another entirely too-long piece of prose centered around a lesbian couple who are both writers and have lived together for 17 years.  It wasn’t the lesbianism that stopped my reading, it was the utterly uninteresting, and should I say, boring discussion of how they collaborate on reading each other’s work, and how one of them is “this way” and the other is “that way.”  Don’t care.  And who the heck is McSweeney?  I must be showing my age.

Anyway, minus these two bits that I passed over, the rest of the book is full of wonderful inspiration from writers of all types.  I’m not sure the title of the collection, Bookmark Now, is quite accurate, as there were only three or four essays that dealt with online writing at all.  Mostly, the essays dealt with writing, in general.  I consider this an absolute must-read for any writer who struggles with their own self-worth or ability; the fact is that if you are writing anything, you are a writer, and that should be enough to keep you going.

I know it will keep me going.  The book has, unfortunately, been relegated to the remainder tables at bookstores, if you can find it at all.  Copies are available on half.com for about 75 cents plus shipping.  It is certainly worth the read and I highly recommend it.  I am passing this copy onto a friend who needs it; several times as I was reading it I would stop and say, “Tim needs to read this.”  So, Tim is getting this book when I see him in a week or so.  I hope he feels as inspired by it as I was.

Onto other business, I have some healthy comments from the first reader of my latest work, Fairest of the Faire.  I have not decided if I will start the rewrite on that now, or wait until after this year’s Nano.  I am also feeling some obligation to get back to writing Without a Net, which has been languishing on hard drive for more than a year now.  I have lost my direction on that story, and I need to get back to it.  It needs a complete re-write, which I started a few months ago but was easily distracted away from it.

I’m getting a wonderful opportunity in a couple weeks to visit the archives and library at Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin.  I’ve been trying for two years to do that, so the opportunity is something I’ve looked forward to.  But considering I’ve not been inspired to work on my circus novel (Without a Net), I don’t know how much I’ll really get out of the visit.

I should probably go ahead and pick up Spangles, Elephants, Violets, and Me that I received at Christmas and get it read before I leave for Baraboo.  That might just be enough to get me back to working on Without a Net.

A wonderful quote from Pamela Ribon.  Her entire essay was inspirational for me.  This came from Bookmark Now, edited by Kevin Stokler.  The title of the essay was “Look the Part.”

“There are still days when I pace my living room, crumpled paper at my feet, rejection letters tacked to my bulletin boards.  If I still smoked, there would be overflowing ashtrays.  If I could grow a beard, I would have one.  But I no longer have the fear that deep down I’m not supposed to be a writer.  You don’t get to decide thosethings.  It’s not about having a degree or winning a prestigious award or finding a respected mentor.  It doesn’t have to be about chapbooks and literary journals.  How it works now is that if you’re writing something someone else is reading, for better or worse, you’re a writer.  You just have to decide what you’re going to do about it.”

I needed that…

Every year about this time, Barnes and Noble goes deep-discount on me, and I snatch up books like they are the last ones I’ll ever buy.  In the dearth of books on the discount table, some as low as $2, I often find some great diamonds.  Along with an Oceans coffee-table book for $2, I also picked up a copy of Bookmark This, compiled/edited by Kevin Smokler.

So far, it’s the best $2 I’ve spent in a while.  I’m hoping Kevin made a lot more on this book before it hit the discount table, because it is definitely worth the read.  Published in 2005 and with a life expectancy of only a couple of years because of the speed at which the Internet grows, there’s still plenty of information that doesn’t change in this book.

I found myself rooted and committed to finish reading the introduction after the first couple of paragraphs.  He makes an interesting point about being “well-read” in the traditional sense.  In Kevin’s eyes, being “well read has an enormous image problem in this country.”  He goes on to say:

“We authors give dull, mumbly readings at bookstores and see interaction with readers, at best, as tedious distraction and, at worst, a frightenly awkward social predicament.  Universities, local lecture series, and writers’ conferences are enablers, presenting writers in hushed, reverent tones, as if they were dangerous animals on safari.  When books do show up on television, they are seen as playthings of the affluent (Gilmore Girls), the urbane (Will and Grace), or the middle-aged clad in tweed (CSPANN’s Book TV).  And when was the last time you heard public radio, that vanguard of  a well-read America, treat an author like a human being, warts and all, instead of with the quiet deference reserved for an elderly relative at thanksgiving?

“Is it any wonder that the average person, who might consume movies, television, and music with gusto, ignores literature?  That they see books as all good and well for the Lexus and latte set, but not sexy enough for Saturday night and not real enough for the world of jobs, rent, and fun when you can manage it?

“We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.  But look at how literature presents itself in public; then say loudly, ‘Where the hell is the fun?’”

This is so spot-on, from my perspective, that I wonder why I didn’t see it myself at some point.  Reading IS fun, but it’s also an elitist and hoity-toity way to spend an afternoon, in many people’s eyes.   Bookstores are silent as tombs, darkish with few windows, and the people in them look like mostly yuppies and the elderly/retired.  I’m neither of those and I hang out in bookstores, but I can see how others may view “readers.”  They are “out of our league.”

I recommend this book, if only for the introduction alone, to give you new perspective as a writer, and new perspective as a reader (or potential reader).

My thanks to Kevin Smokler for giving me permission to reprint some of his words in this blog.

I always say that the heroines of my romance novels are a bit like me.  Not “like” me exactly, but have characteristics that I wish I had.  One way I see this when I’m re-reading my work is that they are practical people.  I’m relatively practical, although not always, but I see practicality as a positive trait in people.

So, in my 2007 Nano, my heroine drove a small Honda.  My 2006 Nano featured a heroine who drove an old Toyota.  The heroine in my 2008 Nano will likely drive a Subaru.

Practical cars for practical girls.

Of course, they aren’t completely practical girls.  They fall in love with the most unlikely boys sometimes.  But those boys, they have good stuff underneath their goofy, misguided exteriors, and in the end, these practical girls can’t help but love their goofy, misguided exteriors after all.

I guess it is going to be a “theme” for my heroines.  They will be practical girls, not frivolous girls.

I finished the first round of edits of Fairest of the Faire today.  I gave a copy to Lillers to read for continuity, although she freely admits she’s not a romance reader and may not be able to help me much. That’s really okay, I just want to see how it reads through with another pair of eyes.

Secretly, I’m hoping she easily sees the two places where I need to rewrite a little harder, where the two main characters act just a little too much out of character.

In general, I’m happy with the story, and will publish it with the others, hopefully before November.  Depends what I see when I read it next.  I didn’t publish last year’s Nano, or the one from the year before, which makes me feel bad.  Both are good stories and one needs only a little bit to be publish-worthy.

But I’m done, and I’m glad.  Now I can let my brain work on something else for a while.  November is less than three months away, and I need to figure out which of the two stories floating in my head can be better developed.  Or maybe they just need to be put together.  We’ll see.

Today’s Daily Writing Tips website had an article about 10-minute writing.  They had some good suggestions for squeezing 10 minutes of writing into practically anywhere.

None of the tips are surprising or difficult.  And the fact is, I do most of them, just not when it comes to my novel.  Instead, I spend my little 10-minute chunks reading email, surfing the web, or writing entries in my blogs.

Yes, blogs.  As in more than one.   I now maintain my Momilies daily blog almost daily, this writing blog, write two or three times a week for the Geeknewscentral blog, and once a week or so for the ATHEN blog.  And in some fit of stupidity and/or genius, last night I started a brand new blog to serialize my experience with my hysterectomy.  Welcome to the White Pants Club is just another exercise in putting off what I should be working on…and that is my novel.

Why is it I can set deadlines for work and meet them every time, but if I set a deadline for myself, I put things off until it is obviously too late to make it?  And if someone else sets the deadline, I’ll make that, too, but never make the ones I set for myself.  Why is it easier for me to start a new project than to bother finishing an old one?

Ugh.  For almost two months I’ve promised my friend Lillers that I would have my latest work, Fairest of the Faire, ready for her to read.  I have about five pages of editing to do, right at the end.  I go to sleep each night putting the puzzle together in my head about how I want to finish it.  But morning comes, and evening comes, and another night comes, and I’ve not done what I told myself I would do.

It is ONLY five pages.  How hard can it be??  Sheesh.

From XKCD cartoons…this one is just ME.  I have such fabulous dreams…but by the time I get to a point I can tell someone about them…it is too late.

XKCD Episode 430

There has been some controversy over the years about kids (and adults) spending too much time online instead of reading books or writing.  Well, the surprise is…not all kids (or adults) spending time online are playing computer games.  Most of the internet requires READING and WRITING.  Not a shock, eh?

I know I do more reading than ever, but it isn’t always books (in fact I have not read much lately out of a bound item).  And I know I do more writing than ever.  My daily blog (http://momilies.livejournal.com) gets two or three entries a day at times, and the tech blogs I write for also get regular articles from me.  And I write emails of course.  All of this is online.

The Internet has definitely changed the world, some for the worse, but some of it for the better.  If it gets my kids reading and writing, then it can’t be all that bad, right?

So today I was listening to the “I Should Be Writing” podcast by Mur Lafferty, which always has a tendency to make me feel a bit guilty about what I’ve not been doing.  She primarily interviews writers, PUBLISHED writers, and talks about all the projects she has going, and the conferences she is attending or wants to attend…

The podcast I listened to today was from June.  Yeah, I’m behind like that.  The author she was talking to writer Tim Pratt, who is multio-published and quite successful, although he still apparently has a day job.  Both of them talked about conferences to attend, and getting involved with writing groups and critique groups.

I’ve not done one of those things, yet I’ve been writing since I was about 10 years old.  I am published, but not by a major publisher.  My writing has included my novels (romances, mostly), gazillions of blog posts, a collection of erotica, and little else.  But I’ve never gone to a critique group and the closest I got to a writing group was attending a lecture by the St. Louis Writer’s Guild, which I’m not even a member of.  Unless you count my Nano Creative Group, we meet once a month but mostly sit and pound out work on our computers.

I guess I’m a bad doobie.

But the real truth is, I don’t know where I’d find the time to add one or two more meetings a month, or time spent with a critique circle.  Unfortunately, it is always the same…when the kids are older, when I don’t have as many other things on my plate, blah blah blah.  I’m not getting any younger, and I’m not getting any closer to my goals, either.  I still have novels sitting here waiting to be published, and I’ve not sent out a single one to be looked at by a publisher, much less by someone who could critique it.

And that does frustrate me to some degree.  I’d like to be published.  But then again, I may not want it so badly, because I’ve not invested any of the effort needed to get published.  My friend Lillers calls herself a “hobby writer.”  Maybe I’m a hobby writer too, or I just write because I like to write.  Like some people like to do needlepoint, or go shoot people with paintballs, or spend time shopping.  Maybe writing is just my thing to spend time at when I’m not doing something necessary.

It’s always, “maybe one of these years” when it comes to doing things that would get me published, or at least closer to being published.  And I’m so ambivalent about it that I don’t know if I want to push myself harder to do it or not.

I’m strangely wishy-washy on the whole issue, which isn’t like me.  I usually have more ambition than that.