A Million Words

Welcome to the next chapter of this blog! Apart from one lonely stub post in 2012, I haven't touched this blog in over 9 years. Back then, I was focused on all things domestic. In some ways I still am, but my focus has really been all over the place. I finished my fantasy series and a Regency romance. I still write miscellaneous articles for the local press. My two kids are now well into their school years, and doing fine. Our family was on a TV show a couple of years ago, which was interesting, and my husband now has a thriving Youtube career. As for me, I'm casually looking for a job, trying to get around to building a new chicken coop, playing guitar a little (this is new-ish), reading a lot, and continuing my usual hobby of immersing myself in one subject after another. This year, it's health -- a broad topic, but pretty important. At my age, and being as well-informed as I like to think I am, I should have figured out how to be healthy by now, right? But no. I do o...

I don't remember when I first heard about The Artist's Way , by Julia Cameron. It must have been over a decade ago, but I never felt the urge to try out the program until a few days ago. It's just not my style, not what I really needed. I was pretty confident about my creative direction and the work I was doing. I was writing novels, revising them, sending them out, getting rejections, and starting the whole process over and over again. The accumulation of rejections, without a single expression of interest in my fiction writing, was moderately discouraging, but not unusual. I was prepared for it. I kept going, knowing that persistence was the key to success. I could have kept going like that, but since our return to the US almost three months ago, I just can't find the time. You might think that with all the other adults around to entertain Nova, I should have more time to write than I had in Galway, but it doesn't work out that way. There, I could write while she...

Two weeks before our departure from Ireland, Mike, Nova and I jetted over to London to visit some friends of mine. While there, I fit in a bit of research. We visited the Soane House Museum , Spencer House , and the Victoria and Albert Museum . There was not enough time for any of it, and I was struggling with the early stages of the head cold from hell, but I managed to glean a few general impressions. Here's a picture of us on the Tower Bridge. We were there, honest, even if my memory is a bit cloudy: We visited Soane House on Saturday morning, with Nova in a very fussy, tired mood.  She didn't like the closed-in, crowded rooms, so Mike took her out to find some ducks while Meg and I looked around. It was quite an eclectic collection of stuff, and interesting to see the house of a moderately well-off architect in that era. I also picked up a book from the museum shop called The Soanes at Home , which is a fantastic resource on daily life in their era, from the late 1700s thro...

A week from today, we will be on the plane back to the US.  I was going to chronicle our oh-so-organized process of sorting through our things and packing up, but so far it's just happened around the fringes of my attention.  Mike has made great progress sorting through his collections of books, games, art supplies, and dice, while I occasionally throw a few books into a box, or clothes into a bag. Mostly, I'm trying desperately to finish this draft of my cheesy romance novel before we take off.   I began plotting this novel in late October or early November of 2007, shortly before Nova was born. I knew that I wouldn't have the energy and brain power to do NaNoWriMo that year, but a year later, in the midst of ridiculous amounts of household stress, I decided to give it a go again.  I started writing on the first and plowed through a few bumps in the road before losing two days to a vicious stomach bug (first me, then Nova, then Mike... or maybe Nova was first).  I took tw...

May has been a good month for reading. I read Mort , by Terry Pratchett, , which was good fun, and I finally knocked another item off of my to-do list: Read Strunk & White. Many years ago, I read that every writer should read The Elements of Style , by Wm. Strunk and E. B. White , study it, and re-read it every year. This struck me as such fine advice that I went out, bought the book, and read the first ten pages. With less then 90 pages to go, it shouldn't have taken me another six years to get to the end, but somehow it did. I got caught up on the mysteries of colons and semicolons, two punctuation marks that I have never fully understood. The book slipped back onto my bookshelf and has stayed there ever since, near the front of the pile but rarely opened. I am now happy to report that I have finally read the whole thing. I felt its influence on my writing immediately, as if I could tighten sentences better than ever before. I felt my critical eye sharpen as I read. I did...

Lately I've been thinking about starting a serious blog, with regular, reasonably frequent posts and content that other people might actually want to read.  To that end, I've whiled away most of the past week learning about blogs, websites, etc.  I have fallen behind the times.  Sure, I knew about twitter and indexing and submitting to search engines, but the intricacies of feeds, wordpress, etc. are all new to me.  I didn't even know how to set up a counter on this blog. I'm still looking for one.  I am making progress, though. Two days ago, I signed up for a website hosting account at Fat Cow, and this morning I figured out how to sign up for Google Analytics .  I was surprised to discover that it was free.  Why didn't I know that before?  I'm hoping to get all this sorted in the next few months, and to launch my new blog/website sometime this summer.  I'll probably even announce it here, just in case anyone stops by.

Yesterday afternoon I attended my first ever poetry slam.  I've been wondering about slam poetry for a few years now, but between one thing and another I'd never actually been to a slam until yesterday.  I had heard that they were loud and full of hecklers, but that was in America. Here in Galway, poetry audiences are quiet and respectful, even at slams.   The slam took place at the Roisin Dubh, a pub which people frequently use as a landmark when giving directions in Galway.  I'd never been in there before, and found it much like any other bar, except very crowded for 3:00 in the afternoon.   About a dozen poets participated in the slam. First up was a young woman in a short, hot pink dress who did a piece about long-post-Woodstock wannabe psychedelia. I thought it was pretty good, but I couldn't follow the narrative thread of it at times, and her performance was a bit too nervous.  She was the best of the first few in my mind.  The next one I thought was good was a ma...

The Cuirt festival is on this week in Galway, and I'm thrilled that this year I'll be here and able to attend at least a few events.  I started off this morning with a workshop, which was a lot of fun but left me wondering: Am I getting old?  I am terribly ageist when it comes to writing workshops.  I can take each writer as an individual, but generally there are two groups in any class; those who aspire to careers as professional writers, and those who write primarily for their own amusement.  The career-oriented writers are generally younger, in their 20s and 30s, while most of the hobbyists have long since gone grey and retired from their day jobs.  I know that some of the older people will go on to write actual books while the younger ones lose heart in their creative endeavors, but I still felt more than a little discouraged when I looked around the table today.   The trouble was that the instructor, Nuala Ni Chonchuir (and yes, I'm too lazy to figure out how to put t...

I've read another book already!   The Princess Bride is a good bit shorter and lighter than the last two books I read, and it's good... but not as great as I thought it was at the beginning.  In the final third of the original story I became impatient with the narrator, and in the hundred page added-on section at the end, Buttercup's Baby  I just wanted to be done with it.   That said, I'm thrilled  that I've managed to read a whole book in less than a week, and it was highly entertaining a good 3/4 of the way through. I also enjoyed all the commentary on life as a rich and famous wrier, even if the narrator was a jerk.

I have never been an especially fast reader, but I used to be able to get through a book in a week or so, most of the time.  So, when I made my new year's resolution to read one good novel a month, I thought I should be able to manage it.  Three and a half months into the year, I'm starting to slip. Well, my book for March wasn't a novel, and I didn't get properly started on it until well into the month.  I finished reading White Mughals around midnight last night, and I must say it was worth the effort and more. I picked it up as research for the historical romance that I'm supposedly working on. I wanted to learn a bit more about the East India Company around the beginning of the 19th century, as background for the male lead in my story.  It gave me what I was looking for and greatly broadened my perspective on that period in history.  In addition, it had a compelling plot and was excellently written.   I had checked the book out of the library, but made such slo...

I wouldn't say that I have writers' block, it's just that I'm having a hard time getting back into things.   November was a very intense and stressful month at our place, but I still managed to crank out just over 50,000 words of a rough draft of a novel in those thirty days, along with a grant application.  It was really too much. In December, I made myself unnecessarily busy with holiday baking and things, and I'd just begun to recover from all that when my hard drive died beyond hope of recovery on January 11th. I'd backed up most of my work, but not all of it, and not often enough.   I've had my computer back for two weeks now and have reconstructed what I could, but I still haven't gotten back to work in earnest. I had planned to finish the rough draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, but I lost my scene list and besides I've been away from it for too long to just pick up where I left off.  Instead, I decided to re-work what I have already. I've gotte...

It's over, and I came in a winner, pulling past 50,000 words yesterday afternoon.  I didn't really think I'd make it for a while there, but I had signed up for the regional word war, and that gave me the motivational boost to stick with it and recover my losses.   In the end, I'd say it wasn't actually that hard to write 50,000 words in a month, but they were 50,000 reckless, adverb-heavy words of a fluffy romance novel which will need lots of further work before it's fit to read.   In the final eight days of the month, I put together a grant application, made Thanksgiving dinner,  baked a cake for Nova's first birthday, and wrote over 16,000 words while our now-ex-flatmates moved out, leaving us with no salt, coffee table, or wireless router, among other things.  It was kind of crazy, but I won.

I was just looking at Sherry's blog in which she shares the following tip: "Clean up your desk." It reminded me that I do not have  a desk at the moment. Our apartment is small and frequently over-populated.  My files are in boxes in closets and my current writing projects are mostly tucked into folders on the living room bookshel ves.  In October when I was working on four different projects and doing a lot of revision the lack of a desk was driving me crazy.  I wanted to convert the "spare" room into a study/nursery so I could have a fixed place to work and spread out my charts and marked up pages.   October passed and no room-re-arranging happened. Now it's November and I just finished day 9 of NaNoWriMo. Things have changed.  All I'm doing is writing -- adding words to a single document. I hardly even check my plot notes or the minimal research I've done.  Not having a desk is a distinct advantage at this stage of writing.   16k and counting!

I am signing up for the annual insanity of NNWM, National Novel Writing Month, a pledge to churn out 50,000 words by the end of the month. I got up at 6:30 this morning, and it was near 7:30 by the time I had the document open on my computer.  At 8:15, when Nova woke up, I'd only written about 500 words.  If she takes a nap today, I might be able to do another thousand, but I'm not optimistic.  Still, I'm looking forward to it in a sick sort of way. I'm planning to write a regency romance and take a break from my never-ending fantasy series.  We'll see how it goes.

Character-Conflict-Change Scene protagonist: Who is he/she? What does he/she want? How does he/she feel? What actions does he/she take to reach the goal? Scene antagonist: Who is he/she/it? What does he/she/it want? How does he/she/it feel? What actions does he/she/it take to reach goal? Other characters: Role in scene? Is each necessary? Distinct as an individual? Is the conflict strong and/or clear enough? What is the worst thing that could happen in this scene? Scene-Setting-Senses-Story What does the reader learn about the story’s world in this scene? Do they need to know that information at this point? Can any information be held off until later? Is any necessary information missing? Does the reader get a vivid, multi-sensory sense of the setting? Does the setting contribute to scene tension? Are the character’s senses and emotions engaged? Does the scene stop at a point with forward momentum? Do you want to turn the page to the next scene? If not, can you end the ...

I haven't looked at my blog in a week and a half.  I'd like to say that I've been busy writing, but that would be only half true.  I've been busy thinking about writing instead of actually doing it -- what I should be working on and whether I'm up for this rewrite. I spent a lot of time thinking about what it takes to make a living as a novelist.  I've known a few people who've done it, so I know it's possible, but I also know that very few writers ever make it to that level.  I understand that hard work is more important than talent, and that connections can be handy but won't carry anyone all the way, and that luck has almost nothing to do with it.   I figure that about 1,000 living writers are making a living as novelists in the English language market today.  I know a couple of them, a handful of writers who have published novels but won't be quitting their day jobs any time soon, and many, many more who are steadily working at their craft an...

The weekend before last I had my flood of inspiration, and for most of the past week I've been planning my next re-write of Scrapplings. I drafted this version of the story at the 1369 in November-December 2006, re-wrote it and edited it during the first half of 2007, then sent out 59 queries and submission packs as Nova got ready to be born. A steady stream of rejections trickled back to me, and some are still out there, unread and un-responded-to.   As I sit down to write again I find myself hesitating.  What makes me think that this time will be different?  I've written, re-written, and pitched this novel, and the second one, so many times that it seems to be futile.  Earlier this year, I was thinking that the premise, the whole idea that my fantasy world was built on, was fundamentally un-salable. Now that I've seen the plot from a new angle, will it make any difference?  Should I really sacrifice all this time and energy for a story that has always let me down in the p...

I didn't manage to read to the end of two books in the month of June, as I'd resolved, but this morning I turned the last page of Writer Mama:  How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids by Christina Katz .   Writer Mama  is a pretty good book, a focused program for building a career as a non-fiction writer in whatever time you can snatch from the daily round of child-rearing and housekeeping.  It advises starting out small, with short articles and local publications, then building up to the better-paying markets and feature writing, followed by the possibility of a non-fiction book deal.   I could do this, I really could. I know what to write, how to query, and where to send it.  The trouble with Chirstina Katz's program is that non-fiction doesn't really fire me up. I might write an article here and there, but I always feel like it's a distraction from my serious work, fiction. The trouble with fiction is that the career path of a novelist is formula-resist...

Earlier this week, I was leafing through the internet or a book, and came across the advice that one should read to babies starting from the very beginning.   Now, I would love to read to Nova, but she sees books first and foremost as a thing to chew on.   Goodnight Gorilla   already sports quite an array of toothmarks.  I went onto one of the parenting chat sites I waste so much time on and asked for advice.  People had all sorts of opinions, as you might imagine, but all in all I was encouraged to give it another go.  The night before last, we turned all the pages of Goodnight Gorilla .   One piece of advice I found interesting was that you can read a baby your  books, by which the poster obviously meant whatever books you are reading, but that wasn't how I read it at first glance. I thought, "Aha!  I can read Nova Scrapplings  and all the other books in the Anamat series that I've been trying to write since 2002."  So last night, as I lay there just this side of sl...

To work or not to work, that is the question that plagues me now as I watch Nova sleeping in her car seat, which rocks her back to sleep when she startles.  I feel lucky even to have the choice. As Nova crests the 6-month mark, I am considering whether to get a regular, paid day-job. I would like to get out a little more, have a little more grown-up time, and make some money, but when I run the numbers it just doesn't add up.   It seems like most of my peers in America are compelled to go back to full time work six weeks after their babies are born, or three months later if they're lucky.  Here in Ireland, most wait until six or seven months, about Nova's age now.  The little ones go into daycare at rates that cancel out ordinary wages, but if you're a well-paid professional you come out a little bit ahead financially and, more importantly, stay up to date in your career of choice.  The babies are generally fine, but a whole load of natural parenting options go out the...