Roast chicken with onion, potatoes, and parsnips. In the world my story takes place, people can dream up whatever food they want and it appears to them and they can eat it. This part of the story is a little bittersweet because the children learn that they can have their dad’s special dinners conjured up for them and it tastes just like home.
Category: Writing
I learned about Inktober in a NANOWRIMO forum this year. A lot of people there are doing it, too. Some of them are drawing, so are writing about the prompts, and some, like me, are drawing things that go along with this year’s Nano novel. 
Every year at this time, my little family takes a break from work and school and goes on a church-sanctioned trip somewhere that we get to choose. Some years we go to the beach (my preference), sometimes to the mountains (my husband’s), and sometimes we stay close to home due to circumstances beyond our control. This is another beach year, our third time at our present destination. Our eldest is a senior in high school and this is the place all his summer camp friends were gathering, so since it is our last time with all our kids to go with us, we let him choose.
So how does all this equal writing? Well, the spouse and kids leave me every day for a couple hours and do the church thing over across the bridge on the other side of the resort. I stay here, in our 7th-floor condo overlooking the ocean, and write, mostly by hand with a fountain pen into a cheetah print notebook someone sent me last year as part of a Halloween craft swap. I have been doing writing exercises from various favorite writing books and writing a few poems and just generally shaking out the cobwebs from my brain.
When the family comes back, we go out for walks along the beach, swim in the ocean, laze by the pool reading books, snark about the internet, and sometimes meet up with others and have escapades. We do not really worry about time or location this trip. Since it is our third time here, we have done all the things worth doing and gone on the dolphin watching trips, and shopped in all the little boutiques that are still open in the off-season. We are just relaxing this trip.
And that has been helping the writing flow…
Yesterday I went through all the half-novels, unfinished short stories, and other writings in my giant folder of Writing from the last 20 years and made a list of where I stopped in each and every case. Because I always stop before I am done with a story. I never, ever finish one. Oh, I have endings written, I just don’t carry through on the other bits…and I wanted to see what those stumbling blocks were.
In the beginning, it was actually writing that got me stopped. I outlined, wrote character sketches, started world building. I wrote a couple scenes within each story and an ending and then stopped and moved on to another idea.
Ten years ago, I would write and write without an outline. I had beginnings, middles, ends, but no transition scenes and no climax written.
In the last five years, I was outlining, world building, character sketching. and writing stories chronologically as they came in the novels, but then quit just as the climax of the novel came. I’d skip over it, then write a quick ending, and move on to the next book.
So looking back at my lists, I see a pattern: I don’t know how to write the climax scenes. I was talking about it with an indulgent friend who lets me talk about everything and in talking I realized that that is the part of books that when I’m reading them, I skim through them. I want to know the ending so bad that I don’t pay close attention to how they got there. I just want the end. And I’m like that in real life as well; if there is any way I can avoid a conflict, I will.
So now I know what I need to to work on. I am spending this morning going through all the writing books I own to find sections on writing climaxes and if I don’t find anything (I haven’t so far in 4 books), I will go out an buy another book. Anyone have any suggestions?
I know, you’ve forgotten I exist, or I’ve forgotten I exist, or something like that.
Last time I wrote here (a year and a half ago. Yipes!), I was starting Novel in 90. It went really well, I nearly finished that novel, I started outlining for the next, life was going well. Then school ended, several financially horrifying things happened in real life, and we spent a LOT of time trying to repair that situation. I did spend quite a bit of last fall writing and then dropped off in the new year again. I took a lot of time off to crochet and cross stitch and then end of the year PTA stuff took over. The summer was busy, filled with trips to Nashville and Wisconsin and summer camps and family reunions and prepping kids for new schools and one for his senior year of high school.
Last week hit hard with a new medical diagnosis (which I will write more on later); it was that kind of thing where you look at your life and go “WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE!? I HAVE ALL THESE THINGS I WANT TO ACCOMPLISH AND I NEED TO STOP WASTING TIME AND START NOW!!” The biggest thing: WRITING.
So this week I am starting back to basics with writing. Yesterday I spent my “writing time” listening to podcasts about writing prep work, reading articles about getting your writing mojo back, and generally just dipping my toes in the water. This morning I installed Scrivener on the new computer (another one died last year) and am working my way through the tutorial for a refresher course and this afternoon I am doing a NANOWRIMO Prep Write-In.
So today is two big lasts: my last day being on Effexor and my last day of going to mental health therapy. It was completely random that they coincided like this.
So far, the drug transition has gone pretty well. I’m on week two of three. I see my regular doctor on Thursday about everything, but I think it’s gone pretty well. I had a few bad days and a few really good ones and several in between.
The therapy went really well, too. I’ve learned a lot more about myself and what I want and how to get there from here. My therapist was really great to work with and asked a lot of good questions that honestly if I’d been self-help-booking it I would have just glossed over and not answered. It’s important for me to have someone there looking at me waiting for an answer before my brain will provide me with one.
I have spent the last two weeks mostly avoiding the world, though. I haven’t done any writing at all (though plenty of daydreaming), or paying much attention to the calendar (sorry I missed a few things), and am at the whoa-nuke-my-email-inbox-and-start-over stage of emailing. Thankfully nearly all important things are texted or FB messaged these days. So if you’ve been waiting for an email response from me…well, try again through another method because I have totally just been deleting everything these days.
What else? This afternoon I start writing actual words again. Tonight I’ll work on a therapist-suggested daily schedule for writing/housework/hobbies. I’m also outlining a new chores/consequences schedule for the kids, since they have not been motivated by rewards (also therapist-suggested). Tomorrow I’ll put all that into motion.
I think that’s it. Whee! On to the writing….
Yesterday I had no words left after a good week of writing. I decided to give myself the day off from writing and to let myself doing some story intake instead. So I watched bits and pieces of a few different things.
Today when writing time came, the writing came out like a deluge. I wrote about 1500 words in about 45 minutes. It was fantastic!
Then I spent some time perusing other writing projects I’d set aside and adding details into them and bringing their files up to date. During the digging through old files, I found a little chart I used to keep of how many words I wrote each day about 14 or so years ago. I never managed to get above 250 words at once. I am doing so much better now! 🙂 I can usually do about 1000 words an hour these days.
Sometimes it is good to look back at old things. There were a few story ideas that I feel more than willing to tackle now that I didn’t feel like I knew enough about writing to do in the past. I’m so excited that I’m back to writing and feel good about it again.
I have a novel that I’ve been working my way through on and off for a couple years now. I like my characters, I like the setting, I have some great scenes, my brain keeps coming back to it, but something about it just hasn’t been working.
So this week I’ve taken some advice and am just starting over. I didn’t do anything drastic like throw away my notes or delete my files, but I have allowed myself just a little bit of re-imagining time with it. I’ve done a few exercises from The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the story within
I’ll let you know how it goes. 🙂
Today I got the rest of yesterday’s words done and went 47 over on today’s number of words as well. It’s going pretty well, although at one point Scrivener told me that I had written -22 words (I got rid of a terrible scene and replaced it with a better one that was apparently 22 words shorter than the original.)
Ben caught me writing in the van on little bitty post-it notes. He thought I was crazy. I probably was…but I’d had thoughts and my little travel keyboard needed charging before it would connect with my iPhone and I was desperate. Six or seven post-its later and I was fine. 🙂
During our writing retreat last weekend, Steph told me her writing group was doing Novel-in-90 starting March 1st, so I joined that community. Yesterday we started. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted because I was busy, busy, and more than busy, but I hope to make up for it today.
I am working this year mainly on the Magical PTA novel, which I started during a different Novel-in-90 with the same group of people a couple years ago. I’m about 25,000ish words into it already, as I obviously didn’t finish last time. Hoping to do much better this time around. 🙂
Lisa Holcomb 