I have been asked to speak at the February meeting of the East Texas Writer’s Guild on February 10, 2025. They meet from 6:30pm-8:00pm in the Genecov Room of the Tyler Area Chamber of Commerce Building (aka The Blackstone Building) in downtown Tyler. Hope to see some of you there!
Tag: writing
Today I’m giving a lesson on Sounds in Poetry over at the Tyler Public Library at 1pm in the Makerspace (behind the computer lab on the third floor). But don’t let that scare you away if you’re not a poet. I’m covering poetry, a little bit about songwriting, and how to use lyricism in your prose as well.
Hope to see you there!
I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group (at the Tyler Public Library) at 1pm on January 22nd on the topic of “Sounds in Poetry”.
If you think this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve been talking about doing this lesson for about three years now, but we needed more poets in the audience. We have more poets now! 🙂 YAY!
Come on over and join us!
If you know me in real life, you know I love analyzing things. One of my favoritest things to look at is my writing data. I love seeing which months I had the most success in and in which category and then what that looks like over time. So here’s what 2024 looked like.
All Writing Combined:
140,352
Number of Words By Month:
January: 9,017
February: 19,253
March: 9,440
April: 6,562
May: 6,166
June: 9,417
July: 13,961
August: 23,215
September: 5,966
October: 13,824
November: 22,477
December: 1,054
Number of Words By Category:
Blog: 2527
Essays: 1,063
Lessons: 43,549
Lake House Mystery: 36,258
Journal: 21,503
Miscellaneous: 16,939
Short Fiction: 13,664
Poetry: 4,434
Best Month for Each Category:
Blog: January at 546
Essays: June at 487
Lessons: February at 12,031 (that surprised me – I really thought it’d be October)
Lake House Mystery: November at 18,468 (that did not surprise me)
Journal: April at 3,811
Miscellaneous: October at 2,890
Short Fiction: June at 2,494
Poetry: February at 2,157 (that poem about teeth was LONG, y’all!)
I know, I know…you almost forgot I worked here. I have the usual excuses, all tied up with string, sitting under a cat somewhere. Last year was a doozy of a year, filled with all manner of distractions, procrastinations, and other sundry explosions of my life.
I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about what my writing goals are for this year. One is to make my usual chart of what all I wrote last year, but that isn’t done yet because the transcribing isn’t done. So no numbers today. Maybe tomorrow. After I’ve written, of course.
I’m on the schedule with an editor for September, so my big goal is to finish the latest draft of my big epic fantasy novel and polish it up. This is the novel y’all have heard me refer to as Caro’s Quest in the past. I still need a better name for it, but that will come. 🙂
Smaller goals include finding homes for my poetry and short stories, finishing putting together my first poetry anthology, finishing my research on the best time to release it, and then publishing that anthology. I’m aiming for sending off at least one poem and one short story a week. We’ll see if that’s a manageable goal as time goes on and reassess after the first quarter is over.
I’m no longer on the board for the East Texas Writing Guild, nor my UU church board. Those were positive decisions for me, based on me needing more time to write. I’m continuing on as a moderator for the Open Door Writing Group at the Tyler Public Library for the foreseeable future, which means writing and giving a presentation for a monthly lesson about writing.
That’s about it, y’all. It’s my first day back at the writing desk. I’m planning on starting off all my weekdays from here on out at my writing desk, working on stories or poetry for the first half of every day before moving on to social media, lesson writing, and marketing in the afternoons.
Yay 2025! I hope this year will be so much better than the last. 🙂
I spoke today at the Open Door Writing Group – Day Group (at the Tyler Public Library) on “Elements of Crime Writing”. Despite some technological conundrums early on, I got my slide show up and running and the lesson ran smoothly. Several writers piped in with good bonus information, which I always love to hear…and add to my notes for later presentations. I’m always improving on my lessons, y’all.
You should definitely come visit this group sometime! More information here: opendoorwritinggroup.com
I’ve spent most of the last week running around trying to keep my and my kids houses from falling down around our ears due to storm damages. A tree fell through the roof at the kids house, so they’ve moved back home this week. The power’s been out and then even once it came back, we had no internet for days and days. It’s been really nuts, so I haven’t managed to finish transcribing from May yet. There’s no telling how many words I got, though I’m going to hazard a guess that I almost matched February’s numbers (around 17,000) because I was really going hard on my short story work. I’ll do an extra update next week about that. (Update: I couldn’t find everything in order to transcribe it all, so I didn’t hit my goal. I was somewhere around 7,000 when I ran out of things to transcribe.)
One of the other writing related things going on behind the scenes is time spent putting together an anthology for the Open Door Writing Group. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before. We’re having members of our group (both online and offline) write short works of non-fiction, fiction, or poetry on the theme of frogs. It started off as a fun little writing prompt, but it really took off. The in person writers were entranced by all of our frog stories and really wanted a wider audience for them. Since I have the most behind-the-scenes knowledge of how to start an anthology, I’ve been doing quite a lot of the legwork for the project. We’ve opened up the possibility of having writers also contribute to putting the anthology together and handling stuff as well. It’s been fun so far. I hope all the hard work pays off. We’re anticipating a mid-November launch date.
In other real life stuff, we had Mother’s Day, which we celebrated early at a sort of local renaissance festival (2 hours away), and then actual mother’s day I just sort of spent hanging out. We finally got our roof replaced from the hail storm in February. Then we had all the graduations and parties to attend and finished up the month with my husband’s favorite annual family BBQ (which we host here at my house).
This month’s word count was even worse – only 5,562 words overall, nearly all of it journaling projects I was working on as homework from therapy. My Wednesday writing group started an offshoot nighttime group this month and I’m one half of the team leading it. So far we haven’t had quite the turnout we hoped for. So many people said they needed an evening group, but far fewer are showing up. ODWG also started work on an idea for an anthology, which should be fun. I prepared and taught one lesson on “How to Write For an Anthology” and one on “Character Reactions” for both the day and the night group. I wrote a few things about frogs for the anthology.
In real life, I got strep throat on top of all my other illnesses. My city was in the path of totality for the solar eclipse, so I got to enjoy that from my front yard. I lost electricity due to another storm for a couple of days. A tree fell in my kids’ yard, taking out nearly all of the patio furniture. My kids beloved band director unexpectedly resigned midyear and we have no idea what’s going on with that. My youngest kid bought another car, this time from his brother’s ex-girfriend, and sold us his old one. It was also my birthday month, so I went out with the kids on my birthday, took my husband to the airport for a work trip, then had lunch and a fun afternoon with my BFF in DFW that day, then had a dinner with other friends later in the week.
This month, I managed 17,967, but 2/3 of it was lessons for the ODWG. I also tried to train a new membership chair for one of my local writing groups.
I wrote one really long poem about teeth. No, really. It started off about teeth and then it got weird. I also wrote a poem about grief that involved Pokemon. You know you want to read that one. (There were several other poems this month as well, but those were my favorites).
I also was the featured speaker of the month for my local writers guild. I spoke on “How to Get Back on Track After Life’s Disasters.”
In real life, I had to figure out how to do my local church’s annual certification because our board president’s life exploded that week. I attended the first of hopefully many delightful meetings of a local yarn group. I loom-knitted one sock and then tried to figure out how to regular knit it’s partner after my sock loom broke. I started a crocheted snowflake blanket.
I also spoke at two other groups, using the “How to Get Back on Track…” lesson as a starting point. Which was only funny because disasters kept making it so I almost didn’t get to speak at either group (first an epic hail storm and then a mass internet outage).
I also read The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammet.
This month, I eked out 8,749 words, but a lot of it was poetry, so when I think about it that way, that’s a LOT.
I prepared and presented two lessons at ODWG. I also worked some more on the Lake House Mystery and made a whole new system for tracking my poetry and short story submissions.
I also rearranged my entire writing studio again because it turned out that one of my bookshelves could not stand up without the support of the two on either side and books were everywhere.
In real life, one of my kids had an MRI for migraines and also sliced open his foot badly, all in one month. My dad visited for a long while. I started crocheting the Pineapple Peacock shawl, took it apart and restarted it twice more, then finally gave up. Knitted a scarf for my spouse instead.
We had a polar vortex hit and had several “ice days” I started reading “Barbara and Susan Talk About Empty Nests” once a week as a kind of devotional for therapy homework. I also read “Shadow and Bone” and “Lessons in Chemistry”.
Lisa Holcomb 