Work In Progress

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Writer's Block

Image by thorinside via Flickr

I haven’t been racking up the page counts as I’d expected to this past week, but then again, I didn’t expect to write much of anything in the month of August knowing how challenging my paythebills job would be this month. So, if I think about it, any progress I made this month is a good thing.

BUT. I still have a goal to get this draft finished by September so that I can get feedback on it from my dear crit partners (*waves hi*).

Seeing that I haven’t made a lot of forward progress in the storyline, I decided to summarize what I had so far, and really think about my MC’s motivations, backstory, basically, evaluating the characters’ goals, why they had them, and what’s stopping them from reaching those goals.

Admittedly, I started out with a lot of nothing.

http://twitter.com/#!/lizakane/status/108737159997042688

And then, Snow Patrol’s Olive Grove Facing the Sea started playing on my Pandora Radio station, which is the first song that I have ever associated with WIP2 back in January. I let myself be transported back in time, and relived the emotion that I wanted to capture. Soon enough, I was able to brainstorm a little and add in little details that I forgot about; I even added in little bits here and there to make the story more logical and believable.

I have a long way to go. Those little bits are not smoothed into the story at all, and I’ve added a lot of [insert something here], but even these little tweaks have helped me stop fixating so much on some issues I’ve had with the beginning, issues that were holding me back from making forward progress because I knew they were there, being all…wrong.

Anyway, I hope that in a few weeks, I’ll be able to report that I’m 85% done with WIP2. Until then, I hope you enjoy some Snow Patrol. I love their live performances, which are sometimes better than their studio recordings. There’s a long introduction here, but he’s funny and cute so please humor him. ^_^

 

Share The Love

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First off, I wanted to shout out Rachel Harrie’s Third Writers Platform-Building Campaign! I had a lot of fun participating in the last Campaign, and enjoyed meeting a lot of writer friends, and visiting other blogs! If you’re interested, act NOW! The list of Campaigners will close tomorrow, August 31.

Hope to see you around the blogosphere, and on Twitter via #writecampaign

Photo shared generously by Poppy Thomas-Hill

Ok, now to share more love!

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks here, so here are a few highlights from my last few weeks…

While roaming around the blogosphere, I LOVED these posts:

Laurie Halse Anderson: The Nuts and Bolts of Crafting a Creative Life

Carrie Ryan: Revisions, The Why and The How (courtesy of WriteOnCon)

Beth Revis: Don’t Give Up (courtesy of WriteOnCon)

I also twittered a little bit, and I LOVED these tweets:

http://twitter.com/#!/Committed_Jay/status/82263496196227072

http://twitter.com/#!/veertothewrite/status/106797419995475971

I also read a TON and LOVED these books (I wish I could review them ALL):

Eona: The Last Dragoneye (Eon, #2)Eona: The Last Dragoneye by Alison Goodman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think of Eon and Eona as one epic saga, like Lord of the Rings, versus being a book and its sequel. Goodman did such an amazing job weaving culture, language, magic, action that while I read, the words just disappeared and I was living the story.

Just to emphasize how gripping this tale is, I started reading this book around 9PM Wednesday night, thinking to read a few chapters before bed. Well, I HAD to keep reading, and got to The End around 5AM. I only had three hours to sleep before going to work, but the story was SO worth the lack of sleep. (Besides, that’s what coffee is for!)

Amazing work! I only hope that one day, I can develop my scifi/fantasy to this level of sophistication.

WitchlandersWitchlanders by Lena Coakley (released TODAY, August 30!)

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Witchlanders is told through the perspectives of two boys, Ryder and Falpian. Ryder is a farm boy in the Witchlands, struggling to support his family after his father’s death. Falpian is a Baen prince from the Bitterlands, mourning the loss of his twin and his potential for magic. Born enemies, Ryder and Falpian discover they have a common destiny, and need to work together to uncover the mysteries behind the cultural assumptions that they’ve inherited.

Witchlanders delivers high fantasy without plodding backstory and cumbersome terms. Coakley beautifully weaves together cultural traditions, histories, and magic to create a rich, immersive reading experience. It has the scope of being an epic story, and the potential for companion tales. And, though I would read a sequel to this story (and I hope there is one considering how this story ended), I would REALLY be interested in reading a prequel.

*Note: I read Witchlander as an egalley, courtesy of Simon and Schuster’s Galley Grab program.

View all my reviews

[I’ll be archiving any of my book reviews on my Book Love page (see menu) and of course, GoodReads.]

Those were some of the things I’ve loved these past few weeks…how about you?

Breakfasts

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Breakfast of rasperries, blueberries and oatmeal.

Image via Wikipedia

{I’m not an expert on fitness or anything like that. This is just me being accountable to my own goals. :D}

I love breakfast foods.

Probably because most of my life, the driving force that got me out of bed was my ravenous stomach. I ALWAYS woke up hungry. Even in college, when most people slept in on Saturdays, I still made my way down to the dining hall for Saturday brunch, which was served buffet style. Endless plates of scrambled eggs, waffles, sausage, bacon….delightful!

Anyway, since I started working in a retail environment, my shifts varied a lot, and some mornings (like today) I’m simply not in the mood for breakfast. Weird, but, it happens.

So, when I get wishy washy about what to eat, instead of skipping breakfast and risking the temptation of a fast food something, I make myself oatmeal.

As plain and uninspiring as it sounds, I love oatmeal because it’s quick to prepare and so versatile. I can put whatever topping I want on it. My favorite? One tbsp of natural peanut butter and one tsp of raw honey. The oatmeal ends up tasting like an ooey, gooey peanut butter cookie. (Yes, I’m eating it right now.) Along with my black coffee, I feel like I’m eating dessert for breakfast!

Do YOU have any healthy go-to breakfast meals?

*Special thanks to my friend Jackie of Girl With No Name for sharing this breakfast idea!

#100Blogfest, A Guest Post by Martin King

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I’m pleased to host the next childhood story in Martin King’s #100Blogfest, where he has committed to write 100 childhood memories on 100 different blogs. I’ve been inspired to share a childhood memory myself, so look out for that sometime next week-ish. 😉

“Paint”

by Martin King

It’s funny how memories come flooding back when you start thinking about it. Here is one I forgot totally about. I was about six years old at the time and my mum had bought me some paint to make lots of pretty pictures.

Now this paint which was supposedly for kids came in these smart little tubes and these clever invented tubes of paint for small children had these small tops. Now according to the instructions on the side of the paint, it said that you had to forget about the paint and play with the little totally safe screw caps.

So that is exactly what I did. I invented a game where I had to push the little screw cap as far up my nostril as possible and then see if I could get it out again.

This worked fine a couple of times until the moment I realised I had shoved it too far and I couldn’t get it out. My mother rushed me to the doctors’ surgery, but our local doctor couldn’t get it out neither. He called in all his colleagues one by one in an attempt that one of them would, but alas no.

So I was on the verge of being taken to hospital when on one of his last attempts, he managed to pull it out with his tweezers.

These blogs are all about fun and sharing. Thank you for reading a ‘#100blogfest’ blog. Please follow this link to find the next blog in the series: http://martinkingauthor.com/blog/7094550076

Thank you, Martin, for sharing your childhood memory with us!

My Writing Groove

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make it happen!

I’m roughly a third of the way into my current work in progress, nicknamed WIP2.

I really enjoyed writing the beginning. I felt like an utter genius, writing down all the scenes that zipped inside my head. Truly, I couldn’t write fast enough, and those who paid attention to my Twitter timeline knows I barely slept throughout the month of July.

I was ok with not sleeping. I had a goal. I knew that my paythebills job would be time consuming throughout August, so I wanted to write down as much of the story as possible.

Well, here I am now, after all the Stuff from my paythebills job has gone away (for the moment), and trying to get back into my writerly groove as before.

Hate to admit it, but I’m not there anymore. Nothing seems to be grooving together. My writing is awkward and cringe-tastic. Scenes aren’t making sense. As I’m writing them, I can feel how horrible they are and know that they won’t find themselves in the story AT ALL.

And…my body is ACTUALLY making me sleep. No joke. Like last night. I sat down to write on my laptop for a bit after dinner, and I literally fell asleep right there. (And, no, it wasn’t my writing that put me to sleep. I didn’t even get a chance to open my document!) Anyway, it was all rather surprising for this write-through-the-night writer.

Oh, but I long to get back into that writerly groove again! The feeling of my fingers flying over my keyboard, of my heart pounding because, yes, this scene makes so much sense, of laughing at how ridiculous my MC can be…I want to feel that again.

So, I’m reminding myself of some of the helpful things that I’ve done previously to get me this far.

First, I promised myself that no idea is stupid. Any fleeting thought or terminology that I think could be useful, I incorporated it into my story. I free wrote a little bit to see where the idea will take me, and paused for a moment here and there to check a few facts. Then, I re-read what I wrote, and smoothed out any rough spots.

Second, I told myself that no idea is sacred. Even if that idea, item, thing had a fixed meaning in this world, in my universe, I could do whatever I wanted with that idea. That way, I didn’t feel so trapped, and enjoyed the full range of possibilities that an idea sparked in my brain. (My brain elves had absolute free reign!)

Third, I loosely plotted out what the next logical steps would be through my MC’s perspective. I thought about any potential obstacles that may come up, and what MC would do to get around the obstacle and to the goal.

And then, of course, I wrote it all out.

Writing what worked makes the process look SO easy. But the major obstacle for me at the moment is my own fear of failure, and my desire to get the story just right, right away. I hate writing scenes that I know  will never see the light of day. And, what’s especially annoying is that I know that writing them is all a part of the process.

Or, as Melissa, my wise crit partner told me today:

“Sometimes you just have to keep going and any of the rubbish that turns out lining your recycle bin will have brought you one step closer to understanding your characters, their wants, needs, etc…All you’re doing is finding the paths that don’t work. This is just as important as finding the ones that do.”

(Sigh, I LOVE my crit partner! Especially since she’d be the first to tell me what’s not working ^_^).

Melissa also referred me to Laini Taylor’s blog…I’m pretty sure she meant THIS article when she referred me to it!

Ok, enough philosophizing about writing. My personal deadline for WIP2 is September 30. I will need to write four pages a day to reach my goal. Time to make it happen.