Writing

Jump Start or Just Insane?

I don’t know if this NaNoWriMo thing was a good idea or not. I’ve managed to get 3855 words down on paper which is more than I wrote fiction-wise all last month. However, I’m not sure I can sustain that rate or if I’m prepared enough to carry this story for 50k words. I also…

NaNo? NoWay!

Ok, I have to admit that earlier this summer I briefly flirted with the idea of participating in NaNoWriMo and quickly discarded it when I realized it was in November. NOVEMBER?!? What the hell were they thinking? It seems like August through December is always crazy around my house. Things don’t seem to settle down…

Brute Force Won’t Cut It

When I’m trying to write lately, I feel like nothing fits smoothly. DH says I’m trying too hard and over-thinking everything. I’ve tried to back off and let things ferment, but so far that’s not working either. I’ve had a week where I was pretty much away from the computer and didn’t even write out…

Slow Return to Normalcy

We just received news that 20 staff and over 340 students in the Poway school district have lost their homes. Staggering news. In order to get the community back into normal routines, they have canceled the half week off school next week for Parent/Teacher conferences. Guess it’s a good thing we hadn’t planned a trip…

Gender Differences

Last night, I was talking to DH about yesterday’s Thursday Thirteen. He made the mistake of asking what I thought of Dr. John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. We started off into a discussion about the types of love, but got derailed on Gray’s “point system” and how men and women…

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Contrary to Popular Belief…

I have not fallen off the face of the earth. Real life has intruded and decided to complicate life further. Nothing bad, just I have more than one person should have to do at once. The number of demands on my time, my attention, and my car are quite high this week. My in-laws are…

Emotional Composition

The exercise today on Romance Divas in their author of the month workshop with USA Today Bestselling Author C. L. Wilson is to take a scene we’ve already written and revise it so that it has a completely different tone. I’ve been thinking about which scene to use and am coming up with a blank,…

Perfection!

I’m sure many of you remember the game where you had to fit all the funky shaped little pegs into their appropriately shaped holes before the timer counted down, the board popped up and they all went flying again? Anyway, that’s how I feel lately. I’m holding too many funky shaped pieces and they don’t…

Magic Number 3

Have you ever noticed that three is truly a magic number? I’m not talking numerology or anything like that, but the number three keeps coming up in everything I’ve been reading lately. The Classic Three-Act form. A hero must pass 3 tests to get his reward. Three cheers. Make sure you highlight a setting with…

More Structural Designs

My son’s Cub Scout Pack spent the weekend camping in the cold and windy mountains. No incidents involved wild critters, but at night, we could hear the wolves howling at the nearby preserve. The boys had a great time imitating them. We left home later than we’d hoped, so I put up the tent (mostly…