Monday’s Muse

See, I didn’t abandon the blog completely even though Holly Root and Barbara Poelle said I could.

I was going to post a contest today, but I’m not quite ready with all the pictures I need. First of all, I injured my ankle on Thursday (“it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt”—truer words were never spoken). According to the x-rays (yes, it hurt enough that I went for x-rays), nothing is broken—just severely bruised (they called it acute bruising, but there’s nothing cute about it). They gave me an air cast (a brace that has inflatable things on each side for support—it’s weird and probably alien made) and told me to stay off of it for the next 2-3 days. So I did—mostly. I was a good girl and propped it up and wore the wrap and the cast, but they also gave me crutches.

Yeah. In case you weren’t aware of it, using crutches takes upper body strength. And I learned just how little I had. *sigh* My arms ached within minutes of crutch use. No kidding. And every time I used them my poor arms burned and begged. And I was huffing and puffing like I was going to blow down the little pigs’ houses (like I had enough breath left for that?). So I gave up the crutches, spent most of my time in bed, and hobbled/hopped whenever I needed to walk anywhere. In spite of my walking on it, it’s doing much better today. So why no contest?

Things got crazy with J’s online school today and I haven’t had time to take pictures (yes, I need pictures of the prizes to entice and excite—I hope they will anyway). I’m going to take pictures now though and should be all ready for contest posting tomorrow morning. YAY!

Okay, enough about that. This is supposed to be a Monday’s Muse post. Let’s get to it.

As many of you know, I’ve been taking some classes from Joyce Sweeney. It’s a ten week course and today was lesson nine. I’m sad that there’s only one more week to go, but I’ve learned so much I’ll probably need another ten weeks to absorb it all and get my notes typed up.

In addition to the course by Joyce, I’ve also been studying some books on writing. Right now I’m reading James Scott Bell. And I’m amazed. It’s crazy that after almost eleven years of writing, I’m still learning new things about the craft. It’s true that you never stop learning. And some of the things I thought I knew, I realize I wasn’t as knowledgeable as I thought.

For example, at the beginning of the class with Joyce, she had us grade ourselves (A-D) on these novel elements: Plot, Voice, Structure, Concept.

I gave myself the following scores :

Plot- B

Voice- B

Structure- C

Concept- D

Okay, so I have a big ego.

After taking the course and learning about each of these four elements, I’d rate myself thusly:

Plot- C

Voice- B

Structure- D

Concept- B

I always thought I was pretty good at plot, but I discovered it’s one of my weakest areas. Yikes. There’s a lot more that goes into plotting that I realized. And for some reason I had it in my head that plotting and structure were basically the same. Yeah. WRONG. Joyce said structure is the vehicle that carries the reader through the story and plot is the road the structure travels upon. Who knew (probably you, but it was news to me)?

So now my eyes are open and I’m moving forward armed with knowledge and Joyce’s awesome plot clock. I so wish I could share that with you! It changed the way I’ll plot forever. But it’s her secret weapon and she only shares it with those who take her class. Sorry. No, truly, I am!

All this knowledge won’t guarantee me a perfect novel with amazing sales, but it sure has improved the way I write and even the way I think about writing. With what I’ve learned from these newest founts of knowledge, I’ve come up with some new methods.

Two of my favorites are my book planner and my scene planner. These will be huge in helping me organize my structure and make sure my novel is delivering the emotion it needs (did you know that structure is what delivers the emotion? I didn’t). Once I get the planners typed up, I’ll share them with you.

I’m excited about writing again and can see ways to revise my past work and write future work that I never before imagined.

Hope things are going well for all of you! See you tomorrow for the contest posting (seriously, it will be here).

Write on!

Writing Words on Wednesday

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about plotting and writing in general. I’ve looked back on how my writing has changed over the years (yeah, I’ve been doing this a LONG time). When I first started writing, I just wrote words. My manuscripts would include notes to myself either in parentheses or between asterisks. I’m not talking just a little note or reminder to fix something, I’m talking pages and pages of notes where I rambled on about the possibilities of a certain plot twist or general brainstorming.

I still leave myself the occasional note within the manuscript, but it’s usually when I’m done writing for the day and I don’t want to lose the train of thought or where I want to go next in the MS so I’ll leave a note before I save and close the document. This has cut down on my time when I come back to write the next day because I no longer have to read through what I wrote in the previous writing session—I just read my notes and pick up where I left off. Well, I may read the paragraph or a few sentences before my notes to get back into it, but it’s a far cry from the pages and pages of wordage I used to do.

I wrote by the seat of my pants with no plan whatsoever. Then I transitioned to doing my brainstorming sessions in notebooks. I ended up with pages and pages and sometimes several notebooks for one novel. Now this may be due to my obsessive nature; if I had to “cut” an idea or decided to change a plot point, I had to rewrite everything in a new notebook so I wouldn’t be distracted by things crossed out—those scribbles on the page drive me crazy (I even rewrite my lists if I have to cross something out).

And now I have a new method for writing/plotting. I mentioned the 3x5 index card plotting before, but I can’t stress enough how much time and energy this method saves me. If you aren’t familiar with this amazing method, you really must check it out. I first learned about it from the ever amazing Kimberley Griffiths Little. She has some posts on her blog that tell you all about the 3x5 index card method. You can read her first post here, the vlog from WriteOnCon is here

, her follow up post can be found here, and her newest post can be found here (with some quotes from an email I sent her). Blogger seems to be having a  bit of trouble (or maybe it’s just my computer) today so if the links don’t open right away, try again.

Anyway, this method has changed the way I write. Drafting is so much easier. Though the notebook people will be sad to lose my business, it’s awesome to be able to throw away a card instead of having to rewrite entire notebook pages because I changed my mind or the plot or a character changed.

For example, in the new MG I’m writing, the main character’s uncle played a huge roll. I had several cards with info about him, scenes with him, etc. I decided it was more important for my main character that her uncle not play such a large roll. So I went through my cards and took out the ones about the uncle that I needed to change. I rewrote new ones and slipped them into place. SOOO easy! He’s still a character in the book so I did keep the cards with his character information, but the scenes with him were thrown out and re-plotted—with the exception of one scene.

It’s been enlightening to take a look at how my writing process has changed over the years. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s changed the way they write. I don’t think we SHOULD still be writing the way we did when we first started—because we’re supposed to improve our writing. I don’t think our writing can improve if the way we write doesn’t change too. I could be wrong though.

Let’s see if I am! How many of you out there are still writing the same way you were when you FIRST started writing (you don’t have to count the things you wrote as a child—unless you want to)?

Write on.

Words on Wednesday

1. I haven’t gotten much writing done the last couple of days. Mostly due to sickness. I caught a cold or some such virus from my adorable niece on Saturday. My brother and sister-in-law warned me their baby was sick, but I just couldn’t resist holding and cuddling and playing with her. And now I’m paying for it. But it was worth it. I don’t get to see them often and most of the time when I do she doesn’t want anything to do with me (cause I’m not around enough for her to know me). But this time she let me hold her and play with her and she held onto my fingers with her chubby little hands and let me “walk” her around the room. *sigh* good times.

2. Monday I spent cleaning out the storage facility we rent. We’ve been throwing stuff in there for years and it needed “organized” so we can throw more stuff in there. And it’s important to me that it gets done because it means I’ll have a writing space free of clutter (so I can concentrate better) and hopefully have fewer interruptions. More on that project to come.

3. I’ve been working on a new MG novel. I know, I know, I shouldn’t jump from one project to another, but this new idea is awesome (at least I think so), and I couldn’t wait to get started on it. The revisions I was working on will wait.

4. The best thing about this new project is I learned a new way to write from the awesomeness that is WriteOnCon! On Wednesday, the amazing Kimberley Griffiths-Little did a vlog about her 3x5 plotting method. I’d heard of it before, but didn’t fully comprehend it until I watched her vlog. And what a difference it has made! It took me a little less than two days to completely plot out my new novel on the 3x5 index cards. I have a stack of abut 41 scenes to write up, and it’s so much easier to work from the 3x5 cards than it is to flip through pages of notes in my spiral notebook (my old method of plotting) trying to find what scene/idea/bit of dialogue I want. Here’s a link to the vlog Kimberley did at the conference. And I’ll try to embed it below (if I can get it to work).

How do you plot your novels/stories?

Hope everyone is enjoying their Wednesday!

 

Write on.

Words on Wednesday

It’s K’s 11th birthday today. She got her presents yesterday since they came in the mail and she just couldn’t wait until today—she wanted to play with them and knew she’d have to go to school this morning and not have time. She wanted Perfect Petzzz; a Chihuahua and Porch Cat with Kittens. They are truly adorable and since they don’t need food or water—only the occasional “D” sized battery, they’re most welcome to stay. Unfortunately, the Chihuahua is having a bit of trouble “breathing” so I contacted the seller to see what we can do about it. I replaced the pooch’s battery, but it still isn’t working.

Here’s a link to the website for those not familiar with Perfect Petzzz (I wasn’t). If you don’t want to click over, these are basically molded animals with synthetic fur that have a motor mechanism inside that makes them “breathe”—the fur moves up and down near the back legs like real dogs and cats do when they’re sleeping. They are in fixed positions so there’s no moving them around, but at first glance, they do look real. K fooled E (who’s 19  now) for a little bit. He thought we’d gotten some cats and new dog.

Anyway, K is upset that the Chihuahua isn’t working, but she thought it just needed a new battery. She’ll find out when she comes home that the batteries I got this morning didn’t do the trick. *sigh* Hopefully it won’t upset her too much and “ruin” her birthday. She is my drama queen, after all, and this might be cause for a scene.

I managed to get quite a bit of writing done yesterday. This is awesome since I’m going to be crazy today with getting cupcakes to K’s class this afternoon and trying to get her cake and stuff done for after school today. Not sure I’ll get much writing done today. Tomorrow I should have the first part of the morning to write and then after I grade the spelling tests at K’s class I might get in another hour or so of writing before the kids get home. All in all, things aren’t going as well as I’d hoped on the daily writing front. Hopefully things will slow down next week.

Oh wait, next week is crazy too—it’s WriteOnCon!! I’m so excited about this (if you can’t tell by the exclamation points)!! I’ve loved being able to attend this conference each year. Being a poor writer with not much money to spare for conferences and the like, it’s great to be able to attend this online conference each year for FREE!! Yes, for FREE!! It still amazes me. There are always wonderful agents, editors, and authors at WriteOnCon, and there’s always more to be learned. This year, my very awesome, amazing friend Kimberley Griffiths Little will be one of the authors on faculty. The WriteOnCon theme this year is Back to Basics (and who doesn’t need to get back to basics now and then) and Kimberley will be demonstrating her 3x5 card plotting method. YAY!!

What are you doing on this lovely Wednesday? Are you planning to attend WriteOnCon next week?

Hope you all have a great Wednesday!

Write on!

WOW!

I just finished watching America’s Got Talent. This singer shocked the heck out of me. If you haven’t seen Andrew De Leon’s audition, you’ve GOT to watch this!

 

 

Sing on!