I spoke today at the Tyler Public Library’s Writing Club Facebook Group on Humor in Writing. I shared a handout on writing humorously and we did some writing exercises. It went really well! If you are a member of the group, you can see the replay of the live video here: {link}
Blog
This is week two of my Spiritual Practice Class. This week we talked about our spiritual practices in terms of what we do when, and where we do it all.
In terms of Daily Practice, we discussed different kinds of mediation, like breathing exercises, journaling, or praying. We talked about going to a place with permission to not be distracted. Safe spaces, basically, which lead to a discussion of places we found safe throughout our lives.
For me, the spaces I found safest were places my mom couldn’t get to me easily. I was that kid that was always off hiding somewhere, usually curled up with a book. In Nebraska, it was usually up in the tree in the front yard. My mother hated that. She and the neighbor across the street would usually meet nearby to have a venting session and she hated to find out that I’d been listening the entire time. Which I really wasn’t, because of the aforementioned book. Once we moved to Texas, I didn’t have a good climbing tree any more. But we got a pool a couple years after the move and I found that I loved to swim. I’d swim in any season. My hair turned green and my mother would have to beg me to get out and come back inside (which cracked me up after her years and years of begging me to go out and play).
Where do you go to find sanctuary? Is it a person or is it a place?
I will be presenting a writing lesson on “Humor in Writing” at the Tyler Public Library’s Writing Club Facebook Group on July 29th, 2020 at noon. If you’re a member of the group, you can find us here: {link}
I get emails all the time from various writers trying to sell their latest books about writing, writing courses, etc. Sometimes they are full of interesting things, sometimes not so much. Today’s message from bookfox.co caught my eye sent me down this rabbit hole:
Write down your favorite album, your favorite movie, and your favorite artwork.
Now answer a few questions about these selections:
What do your answers have in common?
What kind of art are they?Why do these pieces of art, above all else, move you?
Now to figure out what this means. What do your answers tell you about the type of writing you should produce?
My answers:
Favorite album: Nomads, Indians, and Saints by the Indigo Girls
Favorite movie: Sliding Doors
Favorite artwork: Van Gogh’s Starry Night
What do these things have in common? I chose them all during my college years. They all represent a time to me when I was first starting out, making my first decisions away from my parents, living on my own for the first time. And even with twenty years in between those days and now, I still love them. I still think about them as some of the first things that were really, truly my things.
Other things they have in common is a certain amount of wildness and inconsistency, some questioning of reality, a journey to find what really is true about the world. Those are still things I’m thinking about today, even though some of my thoughts on those subjects have changed, my quest for truth in the world has not. I’m still striving for my own authenticity in a world that wants me to be just like everyone else. But not I can see how different everyone else really is and see what that means in their lives. My world has expanded so much since then.
The next part of the email made me realize that I’d gone off the intended path of the lesson at hand for the day, but that’s okay. I like the answers I found.
Hello writers! I attend a critique group with the East Texas Writers Guild. Our critique group has a couple openings right now. We meet every other week on Friday mornings at 9am to give critiques in person (right now we meet via Zoom). We can send up to 15 pages of short stories or fiction each for each meeting, due by email the Friday before the meeting. We currently have two historical fiction writers and two fantasy writers, but most genres (no erotica, please) are welcome. If you are interested in joining us, please contact me at lisa.holcomb@suddenlink.net. Looking forward to hearing from you!
I spoke today at the Tyler Public Library’s Writing Club Facebook Group on “Writing More Productively.” I talked a lot about From 2K to 10K and shared a lot of links both during the lesson and afterward. If you are a member of the group, you can see the replay of the live video here: {link}
I will be speaking at the Tyler Public Library’s Writer’s Club at noon on July 15, 2020. My topic will be “How to Write More Productively.” Hope you will join us! {link}
My dad came up to spend the July 4th weekend with us. He arrived Friday and we thought he was going home on Sunday, but he extended it to Monday to make some much needed repair calls for his house up here and now he’s extended it one more day to meet the termite people in person. All of which to say that I haven’t gotten any writing done since last Thursday.
So today, I’ve got some time and my brain says “nope.” I am not letting that deter me. For my birthday in April, I got several of those books in the writing thesaurus series and I have not managed to look at a single one until this morning. So I looked up my notes about the scene I was supposed to be writing – “Edward & Minerva talk in hotel room after meeting Sharon. E’s POV, also show how he is more like Stephen/Walt in tenderness towards wife, but how that is a magically manipulated response.”
So then I looked up these key words: “adoration” “apprehension” (both from the “Emotion Thesaurus“) “hotel room” (from the Urban Settings Thesaurus) “manipulative” (from the “Negative Trait Thesaurus“
Then I made notes about each key words and dumped those into my scene document et voila! Half the scene is already done. The part I consider the hard part, usually. Now to add dialogue.
Was it quick? Not really. But it’s a scene started rather than the two sentence outline I previously had. 🙂
I always intend to blog more than I end up doing. I type up my morning pages and then think “I’ll add to these and make a blog post.” And then I end up dumping the info into a post and don’t edit it or hit publish until a couple weeks or month or so later, when I do several at once. I do that with a lot of things. I think “I’m going to do x,y, or z” and then don’t plan well around that thing, so not as much gets accomplished and then I feel bad about it. I decided to get better about planning writing things.
On Sunday I got out my new HP Classic Planner, the Welcome to the Book Club one. It’s super fun and has lots of book themes dividers and pages. I got the accompanying planner stickers, too. What I failed to notice in my buying spree was that this is a horizontal layout, not vertical, and I converted to a vertical process for regular life stuff several years ago. I had no idea how I was going to use this one. I had initially decided I was going to chuck July through December and start it in January. I’d have a plan by then, right? But on Sunday a beautiful plan came into my mind and I had to try it.
So here is my new writing planner for July.
I have only included writing goals, writing related events, and the odd regular-life event that impedes my normal writing time slots. Blue ink is for writing, purple for revision, green for events (like writer’s guild meetings, library writing class, other writing-related classes, conventions, etc.) and pink for impending due dates.
Weekly view looks like this:
I’m using the left side for planned scenes to write and # words needed for that day, the middle for word sprint counts, and the right side for events that might impede the schedule. The bottom right provides a place for overall word count for my main project, things I love this week, and what writing related guidebook I’m reading this week.
I started using it on Monday and it’s working out pretty well so far. (these photos are from Sunday when I first started filling it out) I like being able to just get up andstart on work I already know needs doing. I plan on updating it weekly on Sunday like I do my regular life planner and meal plan. 🙂
I mapped out all the new scenes I need for Chapters 1-8. That took a while and one change I made affected several other scenes, so there’s new things to add into already written ones as well. It’s all good and I think it will make for a better story and some better flow.
I need my brain to cooperate and actually push out the words and scenes now. I’m having a bad hand month, it seems, so my typing is more erratic lately than it had been. I really have to concentrate to hit the right keys and that frustrates me. Tomorrow I will start back to the actual writing.
Lisa Holcomb 