Monthly Archives: March 2007

Writing Habits: Do something fun in your writing

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First off, I just noticed that I let the writing habit section slide after just one entry. I’m not sure what that says about me; I guess I need to get in the habit of creating a habit? Talk about organizationally-challenged…

Oh well. You’ve discovered my terrible secret.

So, for this week’s habit, let’s do something fun each day that’s writing-related. Some interesting writing exercises might be fun. Here are a few I’ve used in the past with varying success.

  1. Freewriting is usually a good choice for me. I enjoy the spontaneity of it.
  2. Childhood events are a good choice. The trick is digging up a memory; this works better for me if it’s NOT something I readily remember.
  3. Old family photos are good for triggering memories, and possible stories. Look at the people and things in the background. Maybe it’s the vase your grandmother gave you or the doll you got for your fifth birthday. If you look closely, something is likely to trigger an interesting memory or idea.
  4. Think of a place from your childhood. Maybe it’s your room, a classroom, a playground, anything. It should be somewhere you spent a lot of time though. Draw the place in as great a detail as you can. Put in everything from the furniture to noting the color curtains and if you had a teddy bear on the bed. The more details you remember, the more likely the exercise will work.
  5. Rewrite an event from your life and make it like you’d have liked it to happen.
  6. Rewrite something that happened to you, but change the gender of the people involved.
  7. Browse the internet, magazines, etc. and write a brief monologue for a person you encounter there.

I plan to take a camera on a little road trip this weekend and take some pictures that might serve as inspiration for some stories. If nothing else, they might make for some interesting blog posts.

Increase Your Site Traffic

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Here’s an interesting article, which describes 30 ways to increase your blog traffic.

Some of the techniques are good, but I think you also have to be careful. For example, the article recommends leaving comments on others’ blogs with your url. That’s fine, as long as you’re leaving a REAL comment, and not just posting something gratuitous to get a link to your blog. I love how the yarn harlot puts it… a person’s blog is like their living room. They invite you in, and you need to show a bit of courtesy (well, maybe more than a bit…). Trying to push your own blog on someone else’s site without offering something constructive for theirs is a little like going to a stranger’s yard sale and setting up a table with your stuff in their yard.

Another suggestion that I think can come back to bite you is the recommendation to be controversial. If you like that, and it works for your blog, fine. However, don’t go for the controversial topics just to boost readership. Your regular readers will quickly figure out what you’re up to, and you’re just as likely to alienate them as gain new readers.

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is to provide good content, and keep it coming at a relatively regular pace. As many others, I’ve failed to do the latter on more than one occasion. Whether the content here is “good,” I’ll leave up to you.

Ping the blog tracking sites when you update your blog. You should be able to set that up automatically, so that’s a no-brainer.

Post worthwhile comments on others’ blogs, with a link back to your own. This works best if you’re posting to blogs that are somewhat related to your own. It probably wouldn’t do much good for me to post to an car-enthusiast blog, but blogs about writing, reading, knitting and organization are good choices based on what I write.

Time is on your side. Post regularly, and you’ll see your traffic grow steadily.

Grammar Helper: Ensure, Assure, Insure

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Ensure / Assure / Insure

Use “insure” when you mean to buy insurance. As in “I need to insure my new car.”

Use “ensure” when you want to convey the idea of making sure. For example, “I left early to ensure I’d have enough time to make it through traffic.”

Finally, use “assure” when you’re referring to convincing a person, or making someone feel better about something. “I assured my mother that I’d study for my finals.”

Hope you find that useful!

Dead Mouse Hunt

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Just as I was getting back into the groove of editing, and finding some time to knit and relax…. It’s always something.

In this case, the something turns out to be a dead mouse. To complicate things, they’ve hidden in very, very well in our room somewhere. For the last couple evenings, we’ve been turning the room upside down, looking for it. You can imagine what it smells like…

Anyone want a couple cats?

Outlining with OpenOffice

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I thought some of you might find my outlining technique interesting, or even useful. I use openoffice, which is a free office suite, similar to Microsoft’s. I really like it, and the word processor is terrific.

As you know, I’ve been outlining the novel, and I’m finding it much easier to do the outlining right in the text of the document. I put in four things at the top of each scene, much like you would a chapter heading. Each is prefaced by a letter to remind me what it is (in case I have a severe brain fart…)

S: summary of the scene

C: the major conflict in the scene (or lack thereof)

N: notes of things to fix, general impressions, etc.

E: how does the scene end, and whether it works

Each of these gets a heading 1, 2, 3, 4 style, respectively. To do that in OpenOffice, highlight the text you want to label, and then choose the style you want. That should already be in the menu bar at the top.

Next, create a table of contents (Insert > Indexes and Tables) at the very front of your document. On the first tab (Index/Table), you’ll click the button next to “additional styles” and arrange your headings as you want them to appear. I have mine indented much like you would for an outline.
Click okay, and the Table of contents should appear. Any time you want to update it, just right click in the table and select “update.”

One very cool thing you can do is put the body text into the table of contents too (using the “additional styles” button).

Finally, to get the table of contents converted to something editable, copy and paste it out to a new document. You’ll keep the formatting, but it will no longer be attached to the document.

So far, it’s working well for me. I haven’t tried this in MS Word, but you can probably do something similar there as well. I’m not sure though that Word will let you put the body text in a table of contents though.

I’m off to keep on editing. I have another short story stirring around that I’m planning on putting on the site as a pdf. No promises on when that will happen, but I’m working on it.

Struggling Along

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The amount of time I’ve had to spend editing the novel is pitiful. There’s really no other word for it, and I’m alternating between angry and depressed about the whole situation.

I’m sure most of you have faced the same sort of situation. There are just so many things I have to do, there’s so little time for what I want to do. I know the answer, re-evaluate what I think I have to do and move some of that to the “nice but not necessary category.” If you could see my house right now, you’d see I’ve been doing a decent amount of that already.

The reality is, we have to have clean clothes. I have to pick up, even occasionally, or eventually I’ll start to lose pieced of furniture in this mess, let alone the pets. We have to eat, wash dishes, take out the dogs, and do all the day-to-day things that keep a house going.

Problem with that is, that leaves precious little time to do what I want to do, what I need to do, really. And that makes me sadder than I’d like to admit sometimes.

Help me out here. How do you manage?

Novel Editing

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I’m still working on editing the novel I’m working on, and it’s going painfully slowly. I’m finding lately all the things I HAVE to do are taking up most of my time, so that I have very little chance to do what I WANT to do. That sucks, to be blunt. I hope that this situation doesn’t last long — it’s putting me in a real funk.
Enough bitchin’. I thought I’d talk a little about the editing I’m doing, and how I’m doing it. The novel is very rough, and I know that a lot will need to be moved around. For one thing, there are timeline problems. Some scenes need to be completely removed. Others need lots more detail or a new direction.

I’d love to be able to do a one pass revision, as Holly Lisle talks about, but I just don’t think I can do a decent job unless I focus on just a few things at once. I know a lot of people recommend her method, and she has some great material on her sight. I think it’s just a matter of focus (or lack thereof) for me.
This is my first pass, and here’s what I’m doing.

  1. Using a calendar to figure out what day it is so that I get the timeline down. Things like wordays vs. weekends, mentions of time, etc. tend to cause problems for me in the first draft. Some scenes will need moved to accommodate this.
  2. Decide if scenes should stay or go. I tend to be ruthless. If I’m not sure it contributes, it usually goes. If I like it for some other reason, then it gets a heavy rewrite. For me, scenes have to advance the plot or show some conflict that develops the characters. Period.
  3. Make notes about major things that need rewritten. These can be mistakes, or maybe the novel took a turn later that I didn’t expect in the early scenes. I don’t stop to rewrite at this point; if I did I’d write the same fifty pages over and over and never get any further. I make rough notes about what needs fixing, adding, etc. and leave it at that for now.

I tend to edit in short bursts. I find that I can’t concentrate at the level I need to for more than a half hour or so at a time. After that, I tend to get a little foggy, and I start missing things. I’m estimating that I can get a first pass finished in about a month, providing I work on it almost every day.

How do you go about editing? Care to share any tips?

Blog Update

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Note that I added my Google Reader shared items to the sidebar. I love how easy it is to do this. If you haven’t had a chance to try Google Reader, you really should. It’s a terrific way to keep up on your blogs.

Updates

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Wow, it’s amazing how optimistic I can be.

I thought that I’d be able to get right back on schedule. Yeah, right. I’m winning the lottery and getting elected President too.

My mom is still not quite well, but certainly better than she was. I’ve missed more work in the last month or so than I care to think about; thank goodness I had lots and lots of vacation time to use. My boss is really good about those things too, so I’m lucky there as well.

The house is an absolute disaster, despite my husband’s attempts to help me keep up with things. Things are slowly getting better, but it’ll take a while. When you’re exhausted, sleep-deprived, and stressed, something has to give. Housework is one of those “somethings.”

Unfortunately blogging and writing have also taken a back seat, and that’s been a source of stress as well. I’m TRYING to edit the novel, but things are going at a crawl.

To add to the difficulty, I’ve been dealing with a difficult coworker. When I get home, I desperately need to de-stress before I can think or do anything. How do I do that? Knitting! I thought you might enjoy seeing a couple of the things I’ve been doing.

This sock picture is horrible, but I took it with my camera phone, at night, so what do you expect. It does give you a good idea of the size of the sock. Note the laptop in the background (and no, it’s not one of the new, ultra-small laptops). I’m just now working the toe decreases, so the sock is still not quite complete.

Knit Sock in Progress
No, my feet are not that big. (Okay, they’re big, but not THAT big.) These are for my husband, Mr. Size 13-wide. I think I have as many stitches in this sock as a sweater would have. Can you tell I’ve been working off a lot of stress?

We did manage to get out last weekend, for the first time in a few weeks. We’ve gotten a lot of snow, and here’s a couple pictures of the snow melt. These were also taken with my camera phone, so they’re not great. I never seem to have the “real” camera with me.

Parkersburg WV

Parkersburg WV

And, to wind up, I give you a picture of my wildflowers from last spring. I can’t wait till it warms up!

Wildflowers