Jun 29, 2005 | Uncategorized
Sunset Beach, Oahu's North Shore. See, there are too uncrowded beaches on this island. Just not in Waikiki.
Hubby took a week off of work, starting today, so my routine is seriously compromised. He has class work to do, so he will be off doing that on the other computer. Maybe I will get something done after all. It's not the same as when I'm alone in the house, though. He's already announced plans to wash his Jeep, clean the yard, and go grocery shopping (me in attendance for this part) because he plans to smoke ribs and brats tomorrow morning. The man takes a week off work, but then decides to spend a morning smoking food and taking it up to his office for lunch. Sweet, but crazy. And I am invited. Read that as I am required to help. 🙂
Yesterday's writing: not stellar, but not bad either. I didn't write those 5 new pages, but I did finish a scene, and figured out what needs to happen next. Unfortunately, the next scene was written in the hero's POV when it needs to be in the heroine's. She's the one with a goal in the next scene, an important one that doesn't actually involve the hero (though he is there), and she doesn't get her goal. Further complications ensue, and her goal is pushed back a bit. Since the hero doesn't actually know what her true goal is at the moment, being in his POV is sort of pointless. He could watch her crash and burn, see she's upset, but he wouldn't know the import of the situation to her. So, it's her POV and I had to cut the entire scene to make way for writing the new one. At least I know what I'll be doing today! Oh yeah, provided I don't get dragged Jeep washing, yard cleaning, and grocery shopping in succession. I am only supposed to go along for the grocery bit, so we'll see. Since I need to go to the PO, and it's next door to the store, I don't mind this part.
And tonight is critique group at Borders. Ann Peach is joining us. She's a lovely lady who is so encouraging to writers. She writes a column in Romantic Times magazine about the craft of writing, though I don't think she's done one lately because she'd been sick. She's recovering now and hopefully will be back to it soon. I believe she moderated a panel on writing at the last RT convention. Or she was slated to anyway, not sure if she made it or not. I've never been to an RT convention, but there's a good chance the 2007 one will take place in Honolulu, so I guess I'll have to pop in.
Oh, got a fun email from American Express. I totally giggled. Here's the sentence: You can earn 5% cash back on each eligible dollar you spend on everyday purchases such as gas stations, supermarkets and drugstores when you spend over $6500 annually. I don't know about you, but I don't think my credit limit is high enough to buy a gas station! And I'm sure it'll cost more than $6500 to do so. Now, to be fair, I know I've written some clunky sentences in this blog (one really good misplaced modifier for sure, which I refuse to point out and which I decided to leave intact just because I don't want to be anal about the blog; a story is different, of course), but good grief, this is a business letter designed to make me spend more on my AE card! Where is the copy editor?! I'm not complaining really. It gave me a giggle, and that's always a good thing. 🙂
I hope I get my new AlphaSmart today. Naturally, since they said 3-5 days and this is only day 3, I'll get it Friday. Nothing ever arrives when you want it to. I could go to Borders early and work while I wait for everyone to show up. Well, I could do that anyway with the borrowed Alphie. My only problem with the borrowed one is I can't connect it to my laptop. It has that old keyboard port, and my laptop is brand new and fussy, so I have to connect to the desktop, download, share the file, and then access it from the laptop and cut and paste. Too much work. I want my spiffy USB connection!
Okay, today's goal. Uh, not too sure there, because of temporal disturbances in the Force (i.e. hubby is home and has personal agenda) so maybe I'll just say I'm going to write the new scene and hope I manage to do something more than that.
I guess I am pau (finished) for now. Aloha. 🙂
Jun 28, 2005 | Uncategorized |
In some ways, I already have the lifestyle one thinks about successful writers having–if you're thinking about a tropical island and palm trees swaying in the wind. If we're talking about money, or a house on the beach, fuggedaboutit.
Tuesday morning, and here I am with my 100% Kona coffee (best darn stuff in the world), the windows and doors all open, and a gentle tradewind blowing through the house. Can it get any better? Uh, yeah. I could actually have an income from my writing and feel a lot less like a slug. I'm happy, but I feel guilty because my husband gets up every morning and trots off to work. He loves his job though, so I shouldn't feel too bad. I am a lucky woman, and I thank God every day for that.
Okay, so what did I do yesterday? I had a 5 page goal, and I'll be honest, I'm not sure if I reached it or not, because a lot of what I did was layering and revising of earlier stuff. If I'm brutally honest with myself, probably not. Probably more like two new pages. Except, I had a better idea last night of where I was going than I did when I started.
I did waste a lot of time at the eHarlequin website yesterday. But I can't really call it wasted. I found a Q&A with Brenda Chin where she talks about the Blaze line and contest. Learned some stuff, I did! For instance, she doesn't care if the manuscript is incomplete. She'd rather work with you on finishing it than have a complete mss that needed a lot of work. Also, the big word count and format bugaboo that drives writers nuts. She said computer word count was fine. (!!) She also said she didn't care if your margins were 1 or 1.25 inches. A standard 12 point font is fine. Nothing weird. TNR probably works best for that, my opinion, though I am in the habit of putting work for submission into 12pt Courier with 1 inch margins and 25 lines per page. This will be a hard habit to break, especially since it has been hammered into me since I was a baby writer that it was the professional way to do it. Only amateurs use fancy fonts and improper margins. Uh-huh. Think again.
Word count is the key though, and probably why they don't care about the format so long as you know the word count. And, let's face it, these days, we're all using Word and we've all got the same count feature and its pretty standard. And it's come a long way since the days of Windows 3.1. Uh, yeah, I was a 3.1 user, so I guess that dates me. In fact, I was on the Internet back when you used to have to Telnet and Gopher. I'm not really that old, for heaven's sake, but I was on the information superhighway before it had easy to read road signs. 🙂 I remember bulletin boards and getting on line with a 2400 baud modem. When we upgraded to 9600 baud, we were flying. Ha! And I am not yet 40, so there, that should dispense the image of a graying old lady talking about walking uphill both ways through snow to access her internet connection.
Worked on my contributor notes for the short story anthology I'm appearing in. It's always weird to try and write something that sounds interesting and yet remains the truth. To prepare, I looked at notes from other publications. Some folks are very wordy, others have 3 short sentences about themselves. I tend to the wordy side, but I think I managed 4 sentences. And then the sentences about the story itself, in which I still managed to talk about me. Ha! But the inspiration for the story comes from my life, so it wasn't gratuitous.
I love these early mornings in Hawaii. The sky is almost always blue, and the air is warm and fragrant, and it makes you feel happy to be alive. I love the day just beginning, and the idea that it's a new day and a new chance for me to write something, to get to a new place in my story. It stretches before me like a blank canvas, and it makes me want to achieve something before I climb in bed at the end of it. My husband wants me to trek downtown for lunch, but I don't really want to. He works in the center of the island, but today is in Honolulu. If I go, if I spend time getting dressed and driving down there and finding parking and meeting him in the Ala Moana mall, I won't get a thing done. I'll have to go to Williams-Sonoma to look at pots and pans and gadgets, and I'll have to pop into Macy's and the Gap, and before you know it the day will be galloping toward a close and I won't have anything done. I could take my borrowed AlphaSmart and try to work, I guess, but since I need to be onscreen with the current story right now, I'd have to work on something different. Nope, probably not going to go. I don't feel too bad, since he's taking tomorrow off anyway.
Oh, speaking of AlphaSmart, I ordered my own finally. I just have to have it. Naturally, they charge $25 to ship to Hawaii, but it should be here tomorrow or by Friday at the latest. It better be, since it cost that much to ship it! My husband thought it was just a useless gadget, especially since he bought me a nice new laptop, but when he saw it and saw me using it, he changed his mind. The AS is less worrisome. If I take it to Borders, I'm not as worried as I am over my laptop. When I set up my laptop, it's a process, even though it's a great computer and slim and features the Centrino technology. The AS runs on AA batteries and you can toss it into a bag. It's not fussy like a computer. The thing that bothers me about working on my computer in a public place is how bright and lovely the screen is. Anyone who gets close enough can see what I'm writing. Don't like that, not because I'm worried about someone stealing my words but because it feels like exposing yourself to have raw work out there for anyone to read. On the other hand, when I do a writing day at my friend's house, I love to take my computer. It's just the two of us, though, and I don't have to pack up the computer when I need to pee.
Okay, I've been at this blog for half an hour, and I'm certain the writing batteries are charged, so it's time to get busy. Again, I'm trying for 5 pages.
Jun 27, 2005 | Uncategorized
So it's Monday and I've promised myself I will do things right this week. Today, like it or not, I have to write. Preferably, I'll write something on the WIP that I'm targeting to Blaze, though maybe I'll end up writing something on my paranormal chick-lit instead. I did not get much done last night, even though I thought I would manage to do something. Instead, I got busy surfing the web, working on the Anchor Chain (newsletter of which I am Editor), and tweaking the website. I tell ya, I can't stop playing with it. I like it, but then I go to other writers' websites, the professionally done ones, and I think, whoa. No way does mine look anything like that. How do they do it, I want to know.
See, I'm the kind of person who thinks I can do nearly anything that involves learning. I'm not a computer professional, not even close, but darned if I don't think that with enough study and tinkering, I can pass for one. It's not true, of course, and it's as bad as a computer professional saying, hey, with enough study and tinkering, I can write a novel as good as yours. Not that writers don't come from all walks of life, of course they do, but I'm talking about the guy or gal who isn't the least bit interested in writing to begin with. At least I know my foibles, but it doesn't stop me from studying those sites and wondering how I can improve mine. Maybe when I sell a book or two, I can justify paying someone to design a site for me, but right now I'm on my own. A few short stories, poems, and articles doesn't yet qualify me to spend moolah like that. My husband, dear man, didn't argue about the fact I'm paying for web hosting, or that I spent two entire days last week building a site, but he did ask me when I thought I'd finish the book. He thinks it was time and money well spent, for the future, but he also thinks I need to get my work out there or what's the point.
He's right, of course. I haven't queried an agent or an editor yet with either of these novels. One is still in second draft phase, so I'm not yet satisfied with it, and one is half done. They aren't ready to be out there yet. Unlike my last novel, I intend to be completely ready this time. But you know what, I hate that I have to write the entire novel every single time until I get a contract and can sell on proposal. I know I'm capable of seeing a novel through from beginning to end, but of course an editor or agent can't know that since I am unpublished in book length fiction. They want the complete novel, rightly so, but still. It takes so friggin' long. I wrote my last complete novel in a month and a half, so that's not bad at all, but of course that's first draft. Fleshing it out, turning it into something–that takes a lot longer. I wrote 115 pages of the current novel in a week, but I wrote myself into a corner and I'm busy digging out of that, so it's taken much longer than it should.
Writers are great time wasters, I think. Here I am on a beautiful Hawaiian morning, and I'm blogging and drinking coffee and avoiding opening my book. I will do it, and writing in this blog isn't so unusual for me because I often write in a journal before I begin anyway, but the temptation to surf is strong. I am not a television viewer at all. I'm proud of that, proud of the fact I don't know when Desperate Housewives comes on, or what day I can tune into CSI, etc. I don't have cable, and I never feel the urge to turn on the boob tube. But, I have my own addiction, darn it, and it's attached to my computer via a cable. The WWW is out there, waiting for me to go skipping through it every day. I think the reason I don't like television is because the web is faster, because the sound bites are trimmer, because I can avoid commercials and get the info I want instantly. I don't care about watching American Idol when I can read about what happened instead. And that scares me somewhat because I think, wow, if my attention is this difficult to hold, what do I need to do to be sure I can hold a reader's attention for four hundred pages?
Anyway, guess I need to stop blathering and get busy. I'm aiming for 5 pages today. We'll see how that works out…..
Jun 24, 2005 | Uncategorized
I know this is a writing journal, but gosh, I can't help it when other things strike my fancy. First, it's cloudy in sunny Hawaii today. It'll probably pass later, since this is summer. If it were winter, forget it. We'd get several days of rain instead. I love the weather in Hawaii. After six years of living in Europe, I missed it when we first moved here, but jeez, where was my brain? Slippahs and shorts all the time, baby. Mo' bettah, ya?
Anyway, reading this morning about zombie computers. Seems these teenagers with nothing better to do wrote a code to hijack computers so they could inundate particular websites and get them shut down because of too much traffic. In this case, an 18 year old gave a 17 year old tennis shoes and a watch to get him to shut down a rival sports jersey website. And, apparently, this zombie computer thing is common and you don't even know your computer has been hijacked. So, if you get a solicitation telling you where to get free nude photos of your favorite movie star, don't click.
But, really, the biggest thing on my mind this morning is that idiot woman who locked her 12 year old son in the basement while she ran errands because the pit bulls were acting up. Natually, he left the basement and got mauled to death. Now why on earth didn't that stupid woman lock the damn dogs in the basement instead? Better yet, why didn't she get rid of those dogs if they were acting aggressive around her child? They've arrested her for neglect or something. Damn straight. She said in one interview that it was just his time to go. Ack! His time to go? His time to go? Her son died because of her negligence and she says it was his time. Poor kid, never had a chance.
And my mom informs me recently that my redneck brother has a pit bull tied up in his back yard. He has three children, one that's only about 6 or so. Sheesh! I'm not sure what to think about these dogs. An entire breed can't be bad or evil or whatever. But what is their purpose? And why do we always hear about people getting killed by these kinds of dogs (and certain other breeds as well)? Then again, if you thought about the population of pit bulls and the incidents that happen, it's statistically small. So what's the answer? Darned if I know. Recently, on a trip to the humane society to look for a dog, my husband and I saw the sweetest dog. You could just see sweetness in her face and demeanor. And she was half pit bull. I'll be honest though. Knowing she was part pit bull, complete with that locking jaw thing they have, made me pass on her. She probably was sweet as could be, but I have a cat that I didn't want to become dinner.
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