Monday, March 19th, 2012  You can now read, “On the Path,” for free if you participate in the Amazon digital lending program.
Here’s a link to it.
I’ve been sitting on the fence about the program until now. It sounds great in theory, but I don’t know how it will work in practice, so I’ve been “watching” it.
Though I have to say I didn’t add On the Path to the program because I’d heard anything good about it (or anything bad for that matter) – I just haven’t had any time to do anything else with the story.
I had these great aspirations to get “On the Path,” onto both the Smashwords and B&N platforms as well, but my spare time has been non-existent lately, so the story has been idling over at Amazon Kindle by itself for a few months.
(They just make it so easy, you know?)
Since my time is not going to free up soon, I’ve decided to put On the Path into the lending program for at least three months to see if the sales are any better than on it’s own.
Here’s the link again if you’re interested.
Please feel free to share the link!
Friday, March 16th, 2012  My background is journalism, so naturally I have my own morgue.
The “morgue” in newspaper parlance are the file cabinets holding all the research materials, notes and photos that went into producing a news story. All the pieces are usually filed together in a single folder by year or story. Sometimes the photos have their own morgue. Depends on the newspaper.
Pretty inefficient, really. While a lot of those records are filed electronically now, most of it still goes down the same way because who has the time to turn scribbled notes and library research into electronic documents when you’ve got to write the next news story?
And really, that stuff almost never gets looked at again unless it’s a really big story that has repercussions years later and needs to be referenced again. Or, the newspaper runs one of those “Five years ago, Ten years ago, etc. columns.
Writers tend to have ideas folders (stuff where they put ideas they’ve had, but aren’t ready to be written yet, snippets of overhead conversations, inspiring photos, etc.) and “trunked” files: a place for those stories that were written, but never got sold for whatever reason.
I have another file I keep, my “Culled from ‘XX Manuscript'” file: this is the place where I copy and paste the stuff edited out of my manuscripts. It contains idle scenes, verbose paragraphs, misplaced character thoughts in long and short phrases.
It’s a file that makes me feel better when I’m editing: I can take all that “hard work” which should never see the light of day, and keep a record of having written it. I tell myself I’ll go back there one day and make use of it.
I’ve never, ever done so (unlike my morgue or ideas folders…)
But this past week while I was doing some major edits, I realized that that file contains a lot of good stuff even if it wasn’t polished enough — or well thought out enough — to use in the current manuscript.
It’s plenty good for inspiring ideas when you need a kick.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Raid your ideas folder or junked stories for a snippet, phrase, paragraph, description, etc. to get your juices flowing: we’re not looking for an old idea to use here, we’re reading until you find a phrase that sparks a new idea. Find it and write.
- Kill two birds with one stone: edit something that needs to be polished. Take all those words and phrases you cut away and save them into another file. Likely, they won’t be ‘sparkers’ this early: they’re too fresh in your mind. Set them aside for a few weeks and then revisit. In the meantime: you’ve polished up some writing. Send it out!
- If you don’t have ideas folders, trunked files, or writing that needs some editing (Welcome, beginner!) pick a book off your shelf — something you haven’t read in a long time, or something you’ve never read — and open it to a random page. Read until an idea is sparked.
- If none of these ideas appeal, here area a few very short phrases from my latest edits. Feel free to use them for your own stories:
- “I’m damn tired of not getting my money’s worth.”
- So, what did he want me to do about this?
- It didn’t matter why the old man told him the story: he didn’t want to hear it.
- …stiff and away from the window…
- Chasing women was something he’d never had to do
- Convinced he could do no more for the creature than make her comfortable, he…
- The priestesses had long controlled the northern parts of the continent because of…
Good luck!
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Photo Credit: A story about the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch newspaper morgue.
Monday, March 12th, 2012  I had another major #bookfail this weekend, what with the local library hosting their winter book sale.
I was disappointed last year, having picked up only a few things, but this year, I got lucky. Or not. Depending on your point of view.
(The Husband of Awesome™ is, of course, shaking his head in resigned acceptance. He knows I can’t help myself. It’s a sickness.)
This year I picked up eight bags of books. I looked like a crazy person pushing my overflowing cart to the front counter to pay. And I was not embarrassed in the least when one of the bags spilled out all over the floor, and someone’s four-year-old stooped to help me pick them up.
Right on, Mama! I was thinking. Get the kids addicted from an early age.
I should note that several of the (ahem, 200+ books) are hardbacks which will be replacing some of the paperbacks on my shelves. And at least 30 of the procured books were picked up for other folks.
But what made this sale awesome was that someone had cleaned out their collection. Many of the books I purchased were wrapped in plastic, collector’s bags. They’re in fine condition and included several of the “Year’s Best” anthologies.
I’m in heaven. (When I’m not thinking that this collector has died, instead of switching over his collection to ebooks.)
Getting these books is a little like heading off on my monthly grocery shopping trip. You know the one: the trip necessitated by only having ramen in the cupboard and even the pickles and olives in the fridge are growing mold.)
What? You don’t shop every four-to-six weeks?
Well, ok, I do shop for fresh bread and cream for the coffee as needed, but the rest waits for The Big Trip.
The problem is, when I get home from a trip like that, I want to sample everything.
I want to make a deli sandwich on fresh bread. Eat fresh fruit. Break into the rice pudding. Eat some mint chocolate chip ice cream. Nibble on the vienna finger cookies. Boil some eggs. Open the chips and dip. And salsa.
You know what I mean? (Or am I just a crazy person?)
But that’s just how it’s been with these books. I’m taking a few off the top, some from the middle, and a few from deep down in the sacks and reading a chapter here and a chapter there.
They’re all so good, I don’t know which to put down and which to finish. I’m halfway through two of them. Three-quarters through another, and on the first two-to-four chapters in several others.
I hate to admit it, but there is one book that’s been sitting on the dresser in which I have only the last page to read. The last page! I got interrupted when I was reading and put it down, and haven’t finished it off.
At first, that was just funny, and now I’m trying to figure out how long I can stand it.
What about you? How do you go through your stacks of books? One at a time or several?
Friday, March 9th, 2012  I’ve talked about cliches before in my “How to Write Like a Professional Journalist” post some time ago.
In that post, I stated that writers should work to eradicate clichés from their written words.
Clichés are shortcuts: a hackneyed phrase we use in a collective to get a point across very quickly. It’s easier to tell someone you didn’t come to work yesterday because you were “sick as a dog,” instead of going into detail about your fever, vomiting and chills.
Used in context, your friends will also “get” that you had the worst hangover ever if you let them know you were “sick as a dog,” after last night’s bachelor party.
In writing, however, clichés tend to make a writer sound like an amateur. (There are some exceptions to this, of course. I’ll get into them in another post.)
One thing clichés are useful for is giving your brain an immediate picture of what’s going on. If I use the term “man cave” to describe a guy’s office, some kind of image is going to flash into your mind.
The thing of it is, what I meant when I said “man cave,” and what you perceived (or saw) when you heard “man cave,” are probably two different things. So, in writing, you should take the time to explain things, rather than settling for the cliché.
Another thing clichés are good for — since they deliver an immediate picture postcard of the idea – is to use them as story starters or scene ideas.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Search your current writing for a cliché and re-write that passage to say what you really meant. (If it’s in dialogue, leave it alone. Dialogue is one of the exceptions!)
- If you want to write, but feel like you’re blocked, find a hackneyed phrase you like and see what it conjures up. Spend fifteen minutes free writing a journal entry, the beginning of a short story, a scene from a much larger work, or a poem.
- Do the same if you’re writing your memoirs, letters or working on genealogy: use the phrase to prompt a memory, then write what you recall.
If you can’t think of a phrase, the ClichéSite has a tremendous list of clichés. Wonderful!
Thursday, March 8th, 2012  An amendment to a Scottish law going into effect April 1st (no joke!) is going to severely handicap authors — and others — from providing free readings and other entertainment to the public.
The new law requires that any event to which the public is invited, now be licensed. The license may be purchased at a flat rate of £245 (Today’s Conversion Rate: $285 USD).
In the past, free events were not required to be licensed. Apparently, non-free events licenses could be licensed on a sliding rate.
Scottish politicians are trying to spin this as “people control” and “crime deterrent,” but it’s clearly a mechanism to increase cash in the government’s pocket.
I got my information via the blog SUBROSA. You can read the full story here. The blogger talks about how a writing group she’s associated with is going to be hurt by the new law.
I encourage you wander over to SUBROSA and read the comments. Folks bring up the fact that affected events now include such things as Easter Egg Hunts and Yard Sales (I gather it’s large charity sales, such as those for Scouts or other clubs which are included, not personal yard sales).
One author mentions that it will be cheaper to take a train out of Scottland to do a reading, then to pay the flat rate fee.
How much do you want to bet that Scotland sees a dearth of free public events rather than an uptick in the fees collected for such?
It’s scary legislation. SUBROSA calls it “insidious.” I agree.
Unfortunately, I envision it happening here soon.
Friday, March 2nd, 2012  Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!
Theodor Seuss Geisel, writer and illustrator of many of my favorite stories, was born March 2, 1904. Even as an adult, I enjoy reading Seuss books (and can quote verbatim from several)!
Most of Seuss’ books are composed of rhyming couplets of simple words, making them easy for children to read, and learn to read. But they’re fun, too, which makes them all the better. Many times, Seuss made up his own words to make the rhymes fit.
(In fact, Dr. Suess created the word nerd, though with a different meaning than we think of it today. The word’s first known existence is in his book, “If I Ran the Zoo,” in 1950.)
The couplets Seuss wrote are the type “anapestic tetrameter,” which is often used in comic verse.
A few definitions:
meter: the rhythm of a line of poetry, composed of feet
foot: a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables
anapestic foot: a pattern of three syllables, of the form: unstressed / unstressed / stressed
Since “tetra” means four, each line of anapestic tetrameter verse contains four instances of an anapestic foot (or twelve syllables total).
A good example of anapestic tetrameter is from Dr. Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle:
On the far-away Island of Sala-ma-Sond,
Yertle the Turtle was king of the pond.
A nice little pond. It was clean. It was neat.
The water was warm. There was plenty to eat.
The turtles had everything turtles might need.
And they were all happy. Quite happy indeed.
You know what your prompt’s going to be, right? Below I’m going to tell you to go write some anapestic tetrameter.
I know some folks might feel intimidated by the challenge. So, I offer the following advice:
If you don’t think you can write anapestic tetrameter on your own, take a line from Seuss and change all the nouns and verbs.
For instance, instead of the first couplets above, you could write:
In a kitchen fantastic, in the dead of night
An egg-frying ghost, gave me a terrible fright.
Transparent, and shimmery, and nearly not there
He flipped the eggs with one hand while munching a pear.
He read from, “On Writing,” by the great Stephen King
And had just turned the page when I heard the toast ding.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write a poem in anapestic tetrameter. Don’t feel constrained to make it silly. Try a horror poem, or romance, or science fiction.
- I you’re feeling ambitious, write an epic poem — or short story — in anapestic tetrameter.
- If the words don’t flow, draw a whimsical picture like Seuss might have done. Remember: it doesn’t have to be silly! Seuss drew ‘scary’ pictures, too, like those “pale green pants, with no one inside them!”
Monday, February 27th, 2012 The National Education Association celebrates Read Across America annually on Dr. Seuss’s birthday, March 2, but the local elementary schools are celebrating all this week.
Today, the kids started the program with a reading of The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss, and at random intervals throughout the day, they had to DEAR: Drop Everything and Read.
Part of the fun was loudly dropping one’s pencil on the desk to clatter, and scootching out your chair to go find a book.
(Personally, I would love it if the boss called out intervals of “DEAR” at work on occasion. I think it would make the work day much more relaxed.)
I’ve been invited to read to a class of first graders tomorrow. I’m so excited!
I was asked to read my favorite children’s book, which, unfortunately is probably too long and too scary, for first graders. I speak of Patricia Coffin’s The Gruesome Green Witch. It’s a treasure unto itself: written and illustrated in green ink.
Instead I’ve chosen to read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton.
Had I thought about it longer, I might have read, Ferdinand, by Munroe Leaf. I adore this story.
I love them both, so I’m equally pleased to read one or the other.
Do you have a favorite book? Do you ever DEAR? Do tell!
(And just for completeness’ sake, here’s the cover of Patricia Coffin’s The Gruesome Green Witch.)
Friday, February 24th, 2012  On February 24, 1836, Colonel William Travis issued a call for help on behalf of Texas troops defending the Alamo.
The Alamo — a fortress, the site of an old Spanish mission, and one of two ‘gateways’ into Texas from Mexico — was under attack by the Mexican army.
A bit of history:
Travis moved from Alabama to Texas in 1831 and became a leader of the movement to overthrow the Mexican government. When the official revolution began in 1835, he was given command of a small troop of soldiers in the recently captured city, San Antonio de Bexar.
On February 23, 1836, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana arrived in San Antonio — weeks earlier than anticipated — accompanied by a large contingent of the Mexican Army, and called for Travis’ surrender.
Travis and his troops, heavily outnumbered, holed up in the Alamo along with a volunteer militia led by Colonel James Bowie.
On the 24th, they answered Santa Ana’s demand with a cannon shot from the Alamo. Furious, Santa Ana ordered his men to take the Alamo. Travis sent out several messages via courier asking for help. He signed them with the now famous tagline, “Liberty or death.”
Travis’ pleas were largely ignored: only 32 men from a nearby town came to his aid. Still, the men of the Alamo put up a grand fight.
They held the fort until March 6, when Santa Ana’s troops broke through the outer wall. Travis, Bowie and 190 ‘rebel’ soldiers were killed — most by execution, once Santa Ana claimed the fort. (Though during the siege, the Texas rebels killed at least 600 of Santa Ana’s nearly 5,000 men.)
The loss of the brave men at the Alamo turned the tide in favor of the Texas Revolution, and soldiers were heard to cry, “Remember the Alamo!” as they entered into the fray with the Mexican army. Santa Ana was soon captured by the Texas Army and on May 14, 1836, Texas officially became an independent republic.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write a ‘what if’ essay: What if you had the power to stop a war. Would you do it? Would you have stopped a past war in history, knowing that it would mean your life would be very different today?
- Choose a legendary historical war and imagine “the other side” won. Re-write history.
- Write a war poem. Use onamonapia to convey the feeling and action of the war.
- Write an essay, a poem, a short story, a vignette etc.:
- glorifying war
- condemning war
- using war as a metaphor for something else, or
- using something else as a metaphor for war.
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012  Bugs Bunny fans will recognize the phrase, “I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”
I’m sitting here saying the same thing as my current manuscript is no longer recognizable: It’s taken a left turn into erotica.
You regulars will know that I write dark fantasy and science fiction. (Those of you who came here after googling “erotica” know that now, too.)
So, it’s as surprising to me (as you) that I’ve written three complete — and soon to be four — scenes in my current manuscript that are so steamy, I had to step outside in the cool air for a minute before I sat down again to finish them. (And nobody’s even had sex yet!)
I was reluctant to release them to my critique partners for their review. (But they enjoyed them — even the men — so that’ll show me to want to hide my work.)
What’s strange to me is that I think the male lead in the erotica section is going to become a major character. At first, he was a walk-on. In the second scene he tempts the book’s main character, not only with the promise of really good sex, but with heart’s desire: healing a demonic wound which will not heal.
I can’t decide if she’ll go all the way with him in this next scene. If she does, she damns her immortal soul. But she’ll be whole again, gain a huge amount of knowledge about something, and have incredible sex all night long.
She just might be tempted. After all, her immortal soul is only lost to her if she dies. There are ways to cleanse it before that happens, right?
Yeah, I’m still working out the sticky bits of the plot. This is what happens when the characters start talking to you and they refuse to play the roles you’ve cast them in.
I can’t wait to see how this turns out.
But I’m curious: as a reader, would you be willing to pick up a book not quite like the last you read by an author, or would you bypass it in favor of something else?
Friday, February 17th, 2012  I was running a few minutes late to work this morning.
This is a problem, because running even a few moments late can mean being a half-hour to forty minutes late overall.
Case in point:
First I had to wait through the traffic jam at the stop sign.
Yeah, I know that sounds funny. But, because I was late, I had to wait for three cars to go through the stop sign at the intersection onto a larger road. (Normally, I arrive alone, see no cross traffic, and pull out immediately.)
Three of us were waiting for cross traffic to pass. So that made me a few moments later.
Then I got behind the pokey driver (+ a few moments) and because we were pokey, the school bus pulled out in front of us (+ a few more minutes) and then we got stopped by the train (+ a lot more moments while we waited for I-stopped-counting-at-57-cars to go by.)
When I finally got to the highway, traffic was nearly bumper to bumper, and I lost my early morning commute advantage.
::: sigh :::
The inclination is to get in the hammer lane and speed along with all the other crazies so that I can make up some time. But I exercise patience, because as the billboard says, it’s better to arrive 6 minutes late, than six feet under.
(Although in my case, it’s about 35 minutes late. That’s still better than six feet under.)
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write a story, essay or scene where a character’s patience led him into trouble. For instance, due to patience, someone lost a career opportunity; or, someone watched a loved one die while they patiently waited for a quack doctor to affect some kind of cure.
- Write a story where not being patient brought on loads of trouble. (This one is almost too easy: impatient driving caused an accident, bailing out too soon meant taking hit in the stockmarket – but holding on a day could have meant making zillions, jumping to conclusions loses you the love of your life, etc.)
- How about a play on words? Use patience, patients or pay / shuns in a poem or essay.
- If you journal, write about a time you had to convince someone else to be patient…and you were wrong. What happened?
- And some obligatory quotes to stir the juices:
- Patience is the best remedy for every trouble. ~ Plautus
- Patience is a remedy for every sorrow. ~ Publius Syrus
- Patience, and shuffle the cards. ~ from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius. ~ Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
- Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts. ~ James Russell Lowell
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Stop sign photo from UltimateImages.com.
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