Writing

Writing — 8 Comments
2
Oct 11

Musing on a Mac attack.

In the interest of journalistic integrity — every now and then — I have to let my hideous underbelly show.

My husband got me a Mac Pro.

Big SMOOCH. Right?

Wrong.

It’s freaking me out.

It’s like I’m in physics and all the people around me are getting it. I’ve got no clue. Once that bell rings, I’m heading straight to the register to drop it and add BOTOX for DUMMIES 101.

Take today. There are pictures I downloaded and I am completely unable to move them to this blog.

What makes matters worse is that every member of my family is circling over my shoulder…

When are you going to learn your Mac? When can I take over the carcass of your old laptop? NEVER.

Because at this very moment I am going to switch to my old laptop so I can add pictures to this post.

<<<< great gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair >>>>

It looks so purty till I try to do something and everything vanishes and I have no idea which universe’s black hole swallowed it.

Okay Mac Pro, You’re smarter than me. There I said it.

Are you happy now?

Some of you are thinking I’m an ungrateful uglyword.

I am a frustrated uglyword because I have work to do, very little time to do it (in between loads of laundry, food preparation, cleaning house, etc.).

This new operating system has really messed with my cheese.

But it will not defeat me.

At times, I do see glimpses when its brilliance and my mediocrity get together…

And it’s really cool.

Today, I had to prepare a document for a little presentation to my writing class tomorrow.

I was determined to conquer my Mac-frustration and Mac-phobia and write it on there.

I created this….

That must mean there is hope.

What do you think Mac users? How long did it take you to feel confident behind the wheel?

Writing — 11 Comments
28
Sep 11

Musing on whatever happened to that woman in my expletive first draft ? #iPPP

Yesterday, I took on a cleaning project and unearthed lots of forgotten things.

Such as this…

A novel.

One hundred eighty some pages of a shitty first draft (as Anne Lamott so eloquently puts it).

Before I started writing a column each week, before I got regular freelance work, if I woke up late at night and couldn’t sleep, I wrote on this shitty first draft.

And finding these chapters, I started to remember.

1. People actually critiqued them.

I went to Harriette Austin’s UGA Continuing Education class.

Members would volunteer to read their work and then the group would discuss. Harriette had two rules: no graphic sex and no cruelty to animals.

Easy for me because I was basically writing my life – in fiction.

My heart beat out of my chest the first time I read aloud.

People laughed. In the right places.

That was a huge. As a writer, we never hear laughter. We hear nice people saying they laughed after reading something we wrote, but to hear laughs over something I had written.

Cool.

But the book was still very much shitty-first-draft bad.

Even worse, I didn’t know anything about the structure of a novel. I only knew that I liked to write in the quiet pitch of night and that hearing people laugh at something from my head onto paper was colored sprinkles on top.

*** * ***

Life got busier and the drive to Athens harder to make. And Harriette’s health began to fail.

2. Joined my first official writer’s group.

This group had been meeting a while. I went that first Saturday and handed out my work.

This prologue was AWESOME.

They didn’t think so. They said (among other things):

* Prologues don’t sell.

* Prologues from child’s point-of-view really don’t sell.

* My non-selling, from a child’s point-of-view prologue was shitty.

Devestated, I stiffen my upper lip and vowed never to let anyone read my work again.

Then I came back next month with other pages of the woman’s story and they liked them.

Looking over these pages yesterday, I miss her.

I missed writing the shitty first draft of her story.

What changed?

3. I learned about shitty first drafts.

I learned how much I didn’t know.

This time I would write in first person. Even though my critique group said first person won’t sell.

I know about things such as tension, character development, a twist a third of the way through — all building to a climax. Climax as in a non-graphic, literary resolution.

I could fix some of the newbie mistakes. Such as….

* Don’t start with character asleep. (She was asleep at the beginning of each chapter.)

* DEATH TO ADVERBS. I can only promise to try.

* Don’t describe main character by looking in mirror.

Oops, oops and double oops.

4. Find the time to write her story.

I belong to another very talented, very supported critique group.

I want to start this PETA-loving, no-porn story again…..help.

Do you have a story that you’ve put down, almost forgotten about? What made you stop writing?

Children / Writing — 2 Comments
25
Jun 11

Musing on Diaries. And Anne Frank.

Most people who dare to call themselves writers can look back and see they’ve always written in some form.

A diary or journal is often the first mode of written expression.

I still write in a journal every day — part prayer, part catharsis, part therapy.

In Garrison Keillor’s daily Writer’s Almanac it was mentioned that today in 1947, Anne Frank’s diary was published.

This was the portion of her work they included:

“It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I — nor for that matter anyone else — will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.”

“I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.”

Lovely.

Do 13 yo grls rite lik tht anymre?

Is sumthng b-ing lost?

Writing — 3 Comments
4
Jan 11

Musing on clean starts.

I’m standing in my underwear.

Not really. But this is one of those bare-all posts when people photograph themselves in their skivvies and proceed on a month long starvation and exercise binge.

My desk.

Doesn’t look so bad from afar but when I sit down and look to my left to see….

Those M&Ms aren’t mine. They landed there because my daughter was screaming that everyone was eating her candy. That pile of paper. It’s just exhausting to look at it.

And it looks like another roll of innocent mailing tape

came to rest here after dying at the hands of my seven year old.

Then to the right…

This loveliness.

Ruth Bearden there lies your Christmas letter. It is sitting there to remind me to email you to tell you how much I enjoyed it. I actually did that 10 days ago.

Letters from charities I’d like to send a little money, notes to myself that go unread, a Southern Living from June 2002 (I remember why that is in here, though I used it over a month ago)

A book on “how to write the perfect book proposal” suffocates under a dictionary.

Wonder why I haven’t got very far with that?

I am sparing you the really scary stuff at my feet. (And unbelievably I’m not talking about my feet themselves.) Why, you cleaners ask. Why, would someone operate like this?

How does someone operate like this is the better question.

In a week, this will all be gone. With pictures. I promise.

Okay, January 11.

God Found in the Everyday / Writing — 2 Comments
25
May 10

Tension — unmet desires. Where did Jack Bauer go?

Tension.

Writing the word gives me a headache.

Style and tension were the subject of my writing class on Monday.

Not going to blog about style. With all the Sex in the City 2 hype, the only image I have is Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha swathed in fabric striding some sand mountain.

Tension.

Every good story has to have it. A writer’s job is to create it from the first scene and build it, weave it — keep it rising on a string up to the climax. The moment when the conflict is resolved.

This includes creating empathic characters with deep motivations. Their motivations manifest themselves into desires and wants. Good writers block and impede the fulfilment of these desires until two-thirds to three-quarters the way through the story — the climax

That creates tension. The more tension, the more compelling the novel.

Why do we like to read stories filled with so much conflict — yet no one can live that way very long in good mental and physical health?

Our lives might seem pretty lame on the surface.

Granted there is lots of activity. Work, school, volunteering, baking cupcakes for end of school party, battling against the creatures that are shredding my collards. Nothing is as life shattering as the drama that unfolded in the finales of Lost or 24. Thank God. But why don’t we feel peace?

Jack Bauer is a tough *@###*. If I ever have to battle international terrorists I hope he is on call wherever he has run off to.

You never know. I might find a nuclear zucchini planted in my garden.

It might not be as sexy as a John Grisham thriller, but our inner selves are mega-repositories of tension caused by unmet motivations.

That must be why I religiously run, but that only releases physical manifestations. It doesn’t go to the root of the motivation that’s not being met.

I’ve been studying Galatians. Been working through Chapter 5 this week. The war of the flesh and the Spirit.

Very interesting stuff.

Galatians 5:22.

I really am going to miss Jack Bauer. Don’t tell my husband because all I did was talk about how violent that show was.

But have to admit, tension looked good on Jack.

Writing — No Comments
17
Mar 10

A deadline. Please pass the laundry detergent.

Deadlines.

It’s amazing how much laundry gets done when there is writing to do.

Anyone reading this regularly knows I’d rather vomit 48 straight hours than do a load of laundry. It’s top of my time waste list.

Except when there’s work to be done.

I could sit here and analyze why I wash and dry and fold when I need to be writing.

Those truths must remain locked deep in my subconscious for another time and a professional. Today I write.

I’m setting a goal. First draft done before I can get up. Before fingers removed from keyboard.

This does not include reheating coffee. For my body must function to write.

Potty breaks must coincide with reheating coffee.

I can do this.

Here’s to a very green productive day and piles of stinking gym clothes over my left shoulder.

Writing — 2 Comments
17
Jan 10

Writers at the Round Table. Well, it’s kind of round and in the corner.

Today over lunch I met with my writing group. We haven’t met in quite some time. Starting December I sent around an e-mail saying I missed them…and it took a over a month, but we collected again over lunch.

I pulled up late…as usual. They sat at same table and even though it had been over six months since we met, immediately it was like old times. Except only better.

Roger passed around a letter saying an editor so loved his book, after he made changes she couldn’t wait to pass it around to agents. She wrote of his dialogue (He does have way with dialogue), loving his characters in his flashbacks to Vietnam, on and on. All true. So happy for him because I had read lots of his stuff when we used to meet regularly before life got in the way.

Tracy had a crazy, crazy story about her agent (who is no longer her agent). Hate it when that happens. But she is working on another book, vampire romance thing which I read today while on elliptical (first four chapters) and it had me interested…though did question the hero’s (are vampires heroic?) use of “Jesus” and “Christ” as expletives. Are vampires able to do that without poofing away?

Then Kelly, who is a great writer, but stays busy trying to help everyone and everything. I think I made a huge break through today convincing her that she would be aweseome editor, and she needs to get paid doing this stuff.

I gave them the start of a new novel. Roger asked what happened to my old novel…did the protagonist have the affair?

I said that she didn’t have the affair; her husband did. And no, I wasn’t working on her story anymore ~ it wasn’t going anywhere. On second thought, maybe she should have been the one with the affair? Maybe that’s why it was RIP at this point?

No, that isn’t the point. The point is that he even remembered her and her story when I hadn’t thought her in a year. That was cool. (Very cool.) It was wonderful to be with my dear friends again, none of whom I would ever had known if it hadn’t been for this writing thing.

I am so much richer because of that meeting today…

What group in your life have you been missing? What is keeping you from emailing and scheduling a lunch or dinner?

Writing