My newest online hangout is finally here. We wanted to lend voice to a collaboration of writers who are at different stages in their careers, from published down to those penning or editing their first novels. So wherever you’re at in your writing, here’s a place to stop and refuel, find information and get retrofitted with new ideas.
Come join the fun at my new co-blog, Journeys in Ink.
I’m kind of weird, in case you haven’t guessed. Okay, not kind of. A lot weird. For instance, I don’t read the way normal people read. Most people can grab a book and sit down in a library or curl up on the couch in a quiet house with some tea in hand and read away.
Not me.
I’ve always needed some kind of noise to read: people talking, the TV on, music in the background. For some strange reason, needing to block out noise helps me focus and I can then absorb the information. The more boring and complex the book, article or essay, the more chaos I need to actually HEAR the words.
In college whenever I had to read something dry and dull like Economics or Government, I’d show up early to a basketball game and read chapters during the warm-up. That worked perfectly. I could get my homework in and then have fun by watching basketball.
But this little issue of mine made it impossible for me to take reading comprehension tests. The actual testing method contradicts my strange process of absorption and comprehension.
First, you must read boring material—and several blocks, not just one—in a fast amount of time in total silence, except for the blasted, ticking clock. Of course you can hear the clock eating away at your grades, dragging you closer and closer to an F or a dunce cap with each deafening second. Then you must answer questions to prove you can read those boring tidbits, but you can’t really READ said paragraphs because that’s NOT how you read. Awesome!
In Third Grade, they even stuck me in Special Ed because they were concerned about my “inability to comprehend”, but being 8, I couldn’t explain that the test just didn’t work for me. If I could have had a walkman and no dripping hourglass, I would have aced the test every time. I’ve never had a problem comprehending anything, aside from maybe medical jargon or legalese. Noise is just a necessity for me and not just with reading.
Now, I require some kind of background noise while penning a novel to keep straight and finish off my various threads. Being a just-wing-it girl rather than an outliner, music helps me to stay focused and on track. And often times, music feeds my fire and drive as well.
Here are a few of the songs that I found inspiration in while penning Sapphire Reign—which I’m close to wrapping up.
Field of Innocence by Evanescence. This completely encompasses my storyline and tone. If I can acquire the rights for a reasonable cost, I want to use this song for my long trailer.
When the Children Cry by White Lion.
Another Brick in the Wall (Here’s part 2) by Pink Floyd.
Stop Crying Your Heart Out by Oasis
So, when you’re writing do you prefer the silence of a snowy day or some kind of noise like music, TV or people talking? And do you find inspiration in music? Just wondering.
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
Well, I have little under a month left to reach my finish-this-stupid-novel goal. I skipped Nano this year so I could concentrate on it. I’m just a few chapters away from typing THE END, so I think I’m gonna go all Nano speed and write like the wind so I can get it done. When the dust settles, then I can worry about creating perfection. My edit-as-I-go method of writing keeps me plodding along at a very slow clip. But I am determined to see “THE END” in my MS before the glittery ball drops. I can do it!
And once that’s finished, I will start a new book, probably another upper YA, and also be more diligent about querying agents. I’ve just been doing a few here and there.
How are you planning to wrap up your year?
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
Just in case you can’t get enough of me, and miss me terribly due to my flights of fancy and dream chasing, here are some freakish facts to tickle your ears while I avoid posting anything of substance in this seriously neglected blog.
1. I am terrified of bees and sharks, but my biggest phobia of all is large knives, like the psycho chef knife…or bigger. The Rock-n-Chop is not of God! I can watch all of Predator without blocking my eyes or cringing, except the part where the soldier is shaving with a straight blade. Uuuuhhh! Can’t watch that.
2. I love soda and have NO cola preference. Coke, Pepsi, RC, Polar—or Dr. Pepper when I need some pep—I drink it all. It makes no difference to me. I probably drink too much though…SODA not alcohol. I’m not a big DRINKER drinker. IF I DRINK drink, which is not often, it’s one. Yeah. I’m a wimp.
3. Bacon is one of my favorite foods. I put it on meatloaf—write me for my very own Bacon Double Cheeseburger Meatloaf recipe—, on pizza, in tortellini Alfredo, in corn chowder, in my white lasagna—you can write me for that recipe too! And I’d put it in salad if I ate that. Not the Baco Bits either. Real bacon. I don’t think God’s ever tasted bacon, because if He had, He’d be like, “Oh. My mistake. Scratch that. That is GooOOooD too.” Thankfully, I reside under the Blood of the Lamb and am not bound to the Law. More bacon for me! Pass it!
4. I have three kids and absolutely love the baby stage. Maybe I’ll have one more. Maybe. Just one more.
5. I’ve loved the Dallas Cowboys since the Staubach days and had his poster on my wall with those glorious blue stars…alongside the crushes of my 5-year-old heart: Shaun Cassidy, Bo Duke (character) and Andy Gibb…Old. This girl’s old.
6. I LOVE flavored coffee, and when I see a sign noting some flavor I’ve never tasted, I’m compelled to try it. Usually the little podunk places have the best coffee like Blue Moon. Check it out.
7. I was 8 when I went to my first game at Fenway. Took the bus with my dad, and we had a fun day.
8. One Christmas, my cousin and I went around caroling in my grandparents’ neighborhood and people gave us money. We collected like 28 bucks. Haha. My livid grandmother berated us for accepting it and made us give it to Toys for Tots.
9. I’m reeeallly not a fan of estrogen-heavy movies. Not quite. e.g. Steel Gagnolias, The Yaya Boringhood, the Joy Yuck Club.
10. I’m considering adding one more book to Kings & Queens and Sapphire Reign to make a trilogy. Dominion of Darkness is my working title. No plot yet, but that’s okay. Novels usually come to me in pieces.
11. I didn’t see E.T. until I was 22.
12. I have a difficult time sitting still when I’m on the phone. I walk all over the place, do ballet moves, stair step, pace lines on the floor, pick up toys.
13. By the time I was holding my college degree, all my grandparents were dead.
14. I thoroughly enjoy when musicians successfully incorporate various styles into their music, like Peter Gabriel.
15. I believe everyone should have at least one passion. What’s yours? If you don’t have one, go find one. What are you waiting for? Life is short.
16. I love rollercoasters, especially steep and loopy ones, and I usually aim to ride them when I first get to an amusement park.
17. My Freshman year in college, 6 girls on my hall shared my first name and 3 were on my intramural softball team. To differentiate without having to use an initial, I started saying my name the way my French Canadian grandparents pronounced it.
18. I somehow lost the notebook that held all the deep, melancholy, angst-ridden poetry I wrote in junior high. It was pretty good too.
19. I used to collect roach clips with rawhide strings and colorful feathers…to wear in my hair of course. What can I say? I was cheesy at 11 I also only wore the ultradark blue Jordache jeans and collected a rainbow of Jordache purses.
20. I’ve never been to the ballet or the symphony.
21. I want to go to Ireland and run and/or hike on one of those amazingly gorgeous, scenic dirt roads along a hillside that you so often see people enjoying in videos or pictures. I’m always thinking, where in the world is that? I’ve never seen a road like that. I’m pretty sure they’re in Ireland. So that’s where I want to be.
22. The scent of gingerbread makes me sick and anything rose…except roses themselves.
23. I never mastered double dutch because I was usually building forts with the boys.
24. Even though I know right from left, when verbally giving directions, I cannot tell someone which way to turn without using my fingers as an L-frame visual guide. The side that makes the L is left. I do it without hesitation, and then I instantly know.
25. I really, really wanna see Les Miserables on Broadway, but the only musical my husband would be willing to see LIVE is Spamalot.
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs
I’ve always longed to be the featured champion on a box of Wheaties. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh, but when I was a small kid, I possessed an incredible degree of power and strength. I beat every kid in my class in callisthenic, strength and endurance tests in nearly every event, especially those involving running and jumping. And learning dance only provided me with greater agility and breakaway speed—handy when you’re playing Wide Receiver BTW. [Yes, of course! Tomboy here.] In 1984, I even beat Gold Medalist, Evelyn Ashford’s time by a hair in a 100-meter dash with 10.63 versus her Gold Medal/World Record time of 10.76.
But all that greatness and potential is lost. No Wheaties box for me. Other than an occasional moment of playtime, I’m not really as sporty as I once was. I certainly can’t Jazzercize my way into the champion-seeking hearts at General Mills. And hills STILL own me in my running, sometimes wiping me out more than another two more miles would. Even if I breeze up those monsters with ease, running won’t get me there. I’m slower than a slug now, not even close to the blazing flash of lightning I once was. I don’t know what happened.
No…I do know.
I never really strove to develop and hone my skills, to increase my strength, to improve. Because it all came naturally, I didn’t feel the need to practice or pressure to get better. I beat everyone who ever dared to race me, boy or girl. I WAS a winner…a champion, owning a slightly better time than a World Record holder and Olympic Gold Medalist “Eeee-ven”…sans Snagglepuss from Laff-A-Lympics. “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”
To become a champion, and remain one—in whatever your passion may be—, you need to bring your A-Game every time, carrying the certainty that you can attain your dream and also have it snatched away at any moment by someone else. If you don’t act as though you have heat on your heels, it can all be lost. Writers should approach their passion for words with the same intensity athletes do their games, races, matches, meets and competitions. So, what can you do to be Wheaties-worthy?
LEARN THE RULES: As rules exist in sports, there are many in writing beyond grammar and we hear them plenty: show don’t tell, no head-hopping, no passive voice, no abundance of adverbs or adjectives, no be-verbs, no huge blocks of internalization, no breaking the fourth wall, no stopping action for long blocks of description…
Once you understand what the rules are and why they’re important, you can learn to break them according to your story’s needs. If you know what you are doing and why, then you can demonstrate this deliberateness.
Like with passive voice, let’s say you’re in First Person and your character IS passive or sees everything as a martyr or victim or is unreliable, then a sense of detachment and distance might be appropriate. Or if you understand that hanging three adjectives on every noun creates drag over pretty language, you can then choose to use this technique when you do want to slow things down, maybe increase suspense, like describing a room where everything looks creepy to the observer.
Familiarize yourself with the rules, particularly those regarding narratives and structure. If you don’t have a firm grasp of narratives, how will you be able to spot head-hopping when it creeps into your story or know if your work would present better in Omniscience? You need to know the difference.
No matter what your story calls for, you can then demonstrate you’re a true player in the game and not just flying by the seat of your pants, doing whatever you want.
PRACTICE, TRAIN & STRETCH: To become excellent, you need to keep working. Push yourself in uncomfortable directions and attempt things you never thought you would. I tried a celebrity vampire story when I didn’t think I could do it, and the story came out great. It didn’t win the contest I entered, but I’m so glad I got it done. Choose a difficult task or goal for your character or a crazy outcome and wrestle your way there. Practice and try something new and different like a villanelle or flash fiction. The more you stretch, the better you will become.
GET IN THE GAME: Once you have the playbook in hand, get in the game, what are you waiting for!? You can comb over it again and again, but you’re never gonna know your story’s worth or what you’re capable of if you don’t put yourself out there. Find some critters, adopt a thicker skin and let your baby be ripped to shreds. I know exposure is scary and that it’s painful because writing is so soul-baring, but you need to get in the game and risk some injury if you want to become a champion.
When you’re aware of your weaknesses, you can adapt your methods, rid your bad habits and make your work indubitably stronger. Even becoming aware of a little thing like repeat words—“huffed” for me—and fixing that will improve a work. You likely wouldn’t notice such a thing on your own. You need feedback, desperately, so get it. Once your work is polished and shiny, you’re ready to seek expert opinion and publication. Go! Get in the game.
PLAY WITH SPIRIT: In order to enjoy writing and make it as engaging as possible, you need to find your own style and voice. People can help you along, give you guidance, offer suggestions, but only you can tell the story brewing inside you and innately know the best way to tell it. You may need to work and wrestle and dig deep to find your voice, but once you do, your words will string together much more smoothly, your characters will come to life much more easily and your plot turns will surprise you. If you’re just writing to get words down or meet a contractual obligation, it will show. Don’t lose your soul’s fire. It’s normal to have down days, to get disheartened and discouraged, but stay in the game, maintain your energy and excitement, stay focused and be true to yourself.
HAVE A VISION OF SUCCESS: Where do you want to be as a writer? What do you hope to achieve? Visualize that. Don’t just picture it in your mind; learn what you need to do in order to make that happen, set goals and work at getting there. There are tons of books and online resources, including agents’ blogs, that give you the tools you need to write well and get attention. Seeing yourself as the champion of your dream will help you maintain a positive attitude even when all hope seems lost. Your vision of success may need to change, and that’s fine; adapt as you go along.
DON’T QUIT: If your work ends up being not as wonderful or as well-received as you assumed, that’s okay. Start over, change things up or write something else. The first novel I wrote has great elements, especially the romance between the adorable characters, but it depends too much on coincidence, and taking out one thing would collapse the whole rickety thing. It’s in a purple folder somewhere and that’s likely the only binding it will ever be in. If you write something that isn’t suitable for mass consumption, that’s okay. Try again. Very few people are fabulous on their first go. It can take several efforts before you have a winner. Stay tenacious. Even if you don’t get validation in the publishing world or never sell one self-published book beyond your family members and friends, don’t stifle your creative breath, don’t quiet those characters crying out for birth, don’t put down the pen. Keep doing your best for YOU.
Will I ever be on Wheaties everywhere? Doubt it. Not unless General Mills considers plume athleticism worthy of their boxes. Maybe then I’ll land up there for my most awesome excellence. It takes just as much, if not more, determination, wits and skill to be a master of words—words that can stir laughter, draw tears, sooth a soul, infuse hope, empower, change a life—as it does to catch a 4th-and-goal touchdown pass from the 2 to win the Super Bowl.
Don’t just write; become a champion, great enough to be on Wheaties.
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
…Dara Sorenson, whom I also want to thank for nominating me for this award. I thoroughly enjoy reading about the sources of inspiration she finds as writes and breaths life into her her characters. Check out her blog, Tales from the Writing Front.
And my other awards go to these great bloggers, who are in no particular order of excellence.
Definitely check out these amazing blogs!
~ Signing off and sendign out cyber hugs.
Cuz that’s what I need. More copies of ME to write out all my ideas. I’m bursting with them. But that many freaks running around would disrupt balance in the world and it might actually implode. I suppose it’s a good thing, that I have more ideas than I know what to do with.
Bit by inspiration, I wrote a scene for another book this morning. So now, I have the first chapters written for three books and no time to work on any of them since I’m currently trying to finish my sequel and querying agents.
I have a goal to be done with my book by the end of the year, but now I NEED to be done with it, so I can move on to editing and start one of my new novels. The other problem is this particular book is Christian, but edgy Christian, not the CBA kind. It’s more the independent/small publisher kind, or even the self-publish kind, because old ladies will certainly shout non-euphemisms at me—cuz euphies are bad too—try, BLAST, says Steeple Hill—and throw tomatoes and pocket Gideons.
Not that I have a problem with Christian books. I just think I need to work on other YA/potential crossover books with my very own brand of weirdness, so I can carve out my niche in book world.
Since I can’t create more MEs, I guess I’d better work faster. 
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
Okay. I was sidelined for about two weeks as I worked on lowering my word count. And I also tweaked my query letter, infused it with more personality. It’s longer, but I really felt my other letter lacked voice and characterization. I did get a couple of bites, but with tastes so subjective, a couple is not enough.
Rejection happens on the road to publication, but it’s difficult to know what’s off in your presentation when you collect form rejections. Was it my letter? The sample pages? Did my character not come through? Does my plot sound sucky, my novel hard to place in the market? Did I goof somewhere?
This new query letter has voice, plot, characterization and vital stats. Hopefully, those tweaks and my less-scary word count will help it make a bigger splash in Literary Agent World, where they’re super busy and trying to figure out how e-books will factor into the equation.
Well, I’m back in the game again. Fired my latest first one off today and will send a bunch more to make up for lost time.
My writer friend, Ann Simko, and co-blogger from Journeys in Ink, received 155 rejections and never gave up on her great novel. Her thriller, Fallen, is scheduled for release on Nov. 16th by Lyrical Press. And she has three more books slated for release during the next eighteen months. Go, Annie! Check out her way-cool website and rockin’ book cover.
Keep on striving for your Gold!
And when you win it, shoot for another.
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
Antioxidants are great brain food, which can help give you a boost when you’re feeling droopy and unfocused. Seriously, who can write with a case of the frazzles? Fruits and veggies that are rich in color like grapes, plums, red cabbage, pomegranates, berries, apples, citrus fruits, acai, broccoli, eggplant, kale, guava, tomatoes and sweet potatoes are known to have antioxidants, which benefit you in so many ways, including stabilizing free radicals and making your heart healthier.
Since pomegranates and blueberries are the perfect Jedi knights to bring balance to the force, what better way to get your fill than by combining all that healthy awesomeness in a delicious smoothie?
You can use any berries, but I prefer blueberries. And using frozen berries gives the smoothie a nice frothy texture. If you don’t have frozen fruit, add a few ice cubes to the mix.
Here’s what you’ll need:
Combine ingredients in a blender or smoothie mixer, blend on medium until you reach desired consistency. Pour into a tall glass, and there you go. It’s the perfect treat for NaNo too. Enjoy!
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
Every writer who wants to be repped by an agent and published needs to master the art of query writing, getting that monster plot down to a suitable mini-synopsis that reflects both character and voice.
It sure is a pain in the booty to get that query letter right. I worked so hard to get my novel down to a few sentences, but those sentences reflected plot alone, not character and certainly not voice. So I went back to the drawing board and gave my letter a bit more personality.
There’s so much conflicting advice all over the web about what a query should and should not have. And so many well-meaning writers actually make the query writing process more difficult for other writers on the brink of shopping.
Well, here it is, query letter writing, stripped down to the most important elements by Literary Agent, Jennifer Jackson. Check it out.
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
by my guest blogger, Tirzah Goodwin
Ah, you write the last sentence of the final paragraph of your 200,000-word epic American Novel and you hit save. You’re exhausted, you’re elated. You’re just a little bit smug. I’m sure you’ve hit Twitter to brag to all your writing frenemies out there in the web world.
Then, the next morning you push your computer’s little ‘Go’ button and the screen remains mysteriously black. Mmm, that doesn’t look good. You check all the cords and it’s plugged in. You hit the button again, several times. Because repeatedly hitting it always works…lol. Still, just a black screen.
Now, your heart is pounding, little droplets of sweat start to stream down the crack of your ass (the sign of real desperation).
You call all your friends, a couple of enemies, and even your sister’s idiot husband who thinks he’s good with computers. Nothing works.
Nearly hysterical by this point, you get in the car in pajamas and flip-flops and drive to the nearest computer fix-it shop. You hold your broken laptop out to the 12-year old with the name tag and blubber, “ahbubhabib broken, boghsdiguy novel”, which he understands as ‘My computer is broken, please retrieve my novel.’
Only three hundred dollars later you know your laptop is dead forever. The boney kid swilling AMP at nine in the morning manages to save a couple of files. You have the draft of six chapters, about twenty-thousand words.
You literally lie down on the sidewalk and wait to die. God is not merciful.
Eventually, the police make you get up. Authority figures rarely understand the pain of losing your writing. And it’s best to go the heck home to start all over on your novel or to throw yourself on the bed and scream. Whatever works for you.
If you’re in an apartment, I suggest you scream with your head buried in your hypo-allergenic pillow. Neighbors don’t understand creative pain either.
Next, you’ll twitter all your friends about your bad luck. Several of them have the nerve to snicker a bit at your expense.
Don’t let this be you!
How can you avoid the humiliation?
First, back up your writing in multiple places. At the very least, set up a free yahoo or g-mail account and email each chapter to yourself. This way it’s waiting in a third party email account that you can access from anywhere.
Second, put it on a flash drive. Then put your flash drive where children can’t flush it down the toilet. Don’t trust the dog around it either. My male dog did something unspeakable to my flash drive that I can’t even repeat here for fear the porn police will arrest me.
Third, put it on an old-fashion disc. There’s a reason we used those things all these years.
Fourth, sign up for a third party writing site that allows you to load your writing but not display it. I use a couple of these sites to ‘store’ my writing for emergencies.
And the last thing to remember is not to dwell on what’s lost. It’s gone. Have a good cry, a beer, or kick a stuffed teddybear but get over it. Either re-write it or write something new.
And back your writing up!
But if you forget and erase something, remember to tell everyone how great it was. After all, they can’t prove otherwise, now can they?
Good Writing!
~ Tirzah
Also posted at Journeys in Ink, my new collaborative blog.
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