Writing 101, Day 12

Today’s Prompt: Write a post inspired by a real-world conversation.

So, I might have mentioned this before, but there’s not one, but two great little coffee shops on Main Street in my town.  One is this quaint little place that’s been there since forever.  The other’s very new, very posh, and serves Starbucks.  I love them both.

It was in the newer of the two that I seem to run into the best conversations, though.  It seems to be the meeting place of some different groups that are just fascinating to listen to.  Lawyers hang out there, and judges.  It’s just a block from the courthouse, you see.

A wonderful group of pastors also meet there once a week.  I love to got write while they’re there.

I’ve never had a very good opinion of organized faith, you see.  I’m a Christian, but anything that smacks of someone having authority over other people and saying it’s in the name of God makes my skin crawl.  I think it’s something about all the arguing over religious dogma, and the constant infighting that always seem to go with it.

But these pastors, they meet, and they talk shop.  They talk about writing their talks, and helping their congregation.  They put all differences aside, and talk to each other like brothers and sisters.  You know, the way we’re supposed to treat each other.

I sneezed once, and they all blessed me.  It was kind of cool.

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The Writing Life

So, let’s do something a little different this week.

This week, I want to share some of my own personal journey with you.  My own writer’s life.

Because, let’s face it, I’m far from a place where I can just sit back and give advice like an old wise woman.  I work really damn hard on my writing every day.

So from now on, I want to start something new on Tuesdays.  I’ll talk about what I’m doing with my writing, and you tell me what you’re doing.  What are you working on this week?  What did you accomplish, or wish you could have done more with?

Remember, this isn’t about having written a book. It’s about being a writer, every day, and sharing the journey.

This Week-

If you haven’t noticed, I finished the rough draft of Starting Chains, the second book of Woven.  I’d been working on it since November, so it’s a huge relief, but also kind of sad.  See, now I’m done moving the story forward for awhile.  I’m already excited to write the third one, which I won’t be doing until last year.

I’m starting on four different e-books now that Starting Chains is done.  Now, I know that sounds like a crazy amount of work, but really, it’s not as messed up as it sounds.  One of the books is a non fiction about writing a fantasy series.  I’m not a huge fan of writing non fiction, so this will be a very slow process.  Probably at the rate of a chapter a week.

As for the other three, they’re short fiction collections.  So, while I hope to write two short stories a month, I have no idea what book it will fit into.  With my luck, they will probably all progress at the same time.  So, yeah, that’s four books at once.  This week I intend to edit the short story I wrote for the first week of Writing 101, cautiously titled Letter on The Bar.

Then, there’s the fourth draft of Broken Patterns.  That’s four of five, total, I hope and pray.  I also hope and pray that I’m going to finish this one this year, and I can start sending it to agents.

Oh, and I’m also working on a secret project for Paper Beats World.  It’s huge and wonderful and scary and awesome, and I’ve been working on it for about a month already.  Can’t say anything yet, but just keep watch around July.

Alright, so that’s what I’m working on this week.  What are you planning?  Let us know in the comment section below.

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Writing 101, Day 11

Today’s Prompt: Where did you live when you were 12 years old? Which town, city, and country? Was it a house or an apartment? A boarding school or foster home? An airstream or an RV? Who lived there with you?

Can I be honest?  I’m not totally sure I remember where we were living that year.  We moved around a lot when I was young, and by a lot I mean once or twice a year.  I realize now, as a grown woman, that my mom must have had some sort of good reason for this constant moving around.  Surely she wouldn’t have put me through the incessant packing, uprooting me from school after school, constantly leaving people places and sometimes pets behind without good reason.

But maybe she didn’t.  If there was ever a reason, she never shared it with me.

What resulted was a very fluid childhood, in which there were very few constants.  Except the town.  I was born in Connecticut, and we spent a year in North Carolina.  But the rest of my life, I’ve lived in Butler, Pennsylvania.

For someone who spent most of her childhood either packing or unpacking boxes, there’s a comfort in this.  I can see the hospital where my daughter was born from my bedroom window.  My first job is here, and so is my first good job.  People know me here.  Some people even like me here.  I take my kids to the coffee shop I used to stop at after school with my friends.  I walk down Main Street, where there’s still a Burger Hut that my mom used to work at.  We lived right above it, in this crappy little apartment.

We lived in a different crappy little apartment on Main Street when my mom managed a greek restaurant for her boyfriend, that’s now a chinese restaurant where I took my older daughter for her fourth birthday.  (After taking her to the Carnegie Science Center, of course.  No four year old wants to go to a chinese place for her birthday.)

I walk past the junior high I went to when I was twelve, every day on my way to work.  It’s across from the Catholic church my great grandmother attended.  The only time I was ever in it was for her funeral.

So, where was I living when I was twelve?  In Butler, and that’s all that really matters.

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What to Do When The Book Is Done

You’ve heard the old line, hurry up and wait. Well, when you’re a writer, you will learn the meaning of that term, I promise you. You do all that work, making your manuscript shine, suffering over your query packet. Then after days and nights, maybe years of work, you send your manuscript to a market.

Maybe it’s a literary agent. Maybe it’s a magazine. Either way, one thing remains true; you will have a very long wait before you get a response. If you ever get one at all.

So, what do you do while you’re waiting? Well, first you take a pen and write the date you can expect a response by. This should be available somewhere in the submission guidelines.
Now, here’s the hard part. Forget the thing exists until you get to the day you put on your calender.

There’s an episode of Castle with Dean Koontz. He’s playing poker with the main character, Rick, and a young writer who’d just sold his first book and was being rather boastful about it. Koontz looked at the young man and said, “Do you know what I did after I wrote my first book? I shut the hell up and wrote another one.” You know what I did after I finished my book, (not Broken Patterns, the really bad one I wrote before that) and started sending it to agents? I sat down and started on Woven. Which is a really good thing, because as I just mentioned, the last book sucked a whole lot.

I also wrote a lot of short stories, some of which were published. I started this blog. I wrote poetry, and journal entries.

When I got a rejection letter, and I got a lot of rejection letters, I’d save them and send the book out again. I spent time with my family and posted on Twitter. And I wrote. Twice I revised my query pack, when I saw it wasn’t working for me. That got more requests for the manuscript. Basically, I worked like I’d never sent a book to an agent.

What I’m saying is this; don’t wait around for your book to get an agent. Get it out there, and get back to work.

To sum it up, here’s a handy list of things to do while you’re submitting your work to an agent or magazine.
* Write another one.
* If you wrote a book, write some short fiction.
* If you wrote a short story, maybe think about writing a book.
* Write some poetry.
* Make play dough with your kids.
* Write some more.
* Start a blog. Write some blog posts.
* Consider the rain on the windows of a coffee shop, then write some more.
* Clean a little. The house is probably trashed if you just came off a big project.
* Write some more.
* Write a non fiction article for some magazine you’ve never heard of.
* Write again.

The writing’s never done. We can’t all be Harper Lee. So, you’re book’s done? That’s great. Shut the hell up and write another one!

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Writing 101, Day 10

Today’s Prompt: Tell us something about your favorite childhood meal — the one that was always a treat, that meant “celebration,” or that comforted you and has deep roots in your memory.

So, food.  There wasn’t a real celebration food in my house growing up.  My mom wasn’t a very good cook, and never wanted to be bothered with it, really.  I can’t really think of anything my grandmother made that was particularly memorable, either.

It’s my grandma June that I talk about the most when talking about food.

Grandma June was particular.  Near the end of her life she didn’t eat or drink anything but oranges and diet, caffeine free Pepsi out of a can with a straw.  But the whole time I had her in my life, she always had white tic tacs with her, wherever she was.

She had a little garden in the back yard, and she’d grow tomatoes.  Then she’d slice them, and make tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise, salt and pepper, on bakery bread.  She’d never buy pre-cut bread, my great grandma.  She always went to the bakery, and bought rye bread there.

Then, there was the stuffed cabbage she made.  It was the best thing ever, and she’d make it any time I was coming over to stay the night.  She’s also the one who taught me to make cookies from scratch, and not out of a box.

The best thing, the closest thing to a traditional seasonal meal, would have had to been her pork and sour krout, every New Years Eve.

But the thing I remember most is the tomatoes.  Even to this day, I can’t bite into a tomato without thinking of my Grandma June.

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Writing Prompt Saturday- Write a Renga Poem

Ready for some group fun?  Continuing my love of Japanese poetry, I’m so excited to introduce the Renga poetry form.  Which can basically be called a poetry party game.  So, grab some friends and play.

Here’s how it works.  The first person makes a three line stanza, with 17 syllables.  It can either be a haiku or a senryu, either one.

Then, the next person makes the next stanza, attaching it to the first.

Being a great party game, I thought it would be fun if we did it here.  I’ll start

Petals on the floor

mixed with broken bits of glass

in the morning sun

Alright, anyone who wants to pick it up in the comment section, go!

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Writing 101, Day 9

Rough draft, mostly playing with this idea.

WARM

It was warm out finally, and thank God for that, Marcey thought.  At 72, the cold was no fun.  But finally the winter chill had gone, the wet grass was dried by the late May sun, and she could take her work to the park.  So she packed up her knitting supplies, and took herself down to the park.

She bought herself a cup of coffee, and settled into her work.  She was making a little red sweater for a client who wanted something more personal for her nephew’s second birthday.  It made Marcey’s daughter laugh whenever they talked about her little ‘side hustle,’ as  they called it.  It wasn’t like she needed the money.  She wasn’t hurting like some her age.  She just liked to keep busy.

As she made her way to the chest of the sweater, a young couple walked past.  The woman was keeping up a constant stream of chatter.  The man, however, stopped in his tracks, and stared at Marcey.  Specifically, he stared at the sweater.  She was starting to wonder whether she should yell for the police, when the man burst into tears.

“Sorry,” the woman said to her, pulling the man away.  “I’m really sorry.”  She hurried away from Marcey as quickly as she could, still dragging the sobbing man along.

“What was all that?” Marcey muttered.  Since she knew she wasn’t likely to find out, she sipped her coffee, and made a mental note to tell her daughter about it later.

It was a warm day, but Jordan didn’t feel very warm.  There was never such a thing a good weather for a funeral, after all.

She’d put a lot into helping Paul plan it.  There was no one else around to do it, and hadn’t he always been her best friend?  So she pulled on her black dress, and went to his apartment to pick him up.

Paul was dressed when she got there.  Well, that’s a step in the right direction, she thought.  He even managed a smile for her when he came to the door.

“Did you eat?” she asked him.

“Not yet,” he replied.

“Let’s take a walk through the park, and go to the diner,” Jordan said.

“Yeah, okay,” he agreed.

Jordan felt triumphant as they started along the path.  They’d talked about nothing but the funeral for days, so she thought of anything she could to talk about now other than that.

“So that Rick guy called me again,” she said.  “Just out of the blue, like our last date went well or something.”

“No kidding,” Paul said, and actually managed a laugh.  “After spending half the date talking on his phone?”

“I know,” she replied.

They were coming up on a bench.  There was an old woman sitting there, drinking a coffee and knitting a red sweater.  When Paul saw her, he froze.  Then he started to sob.

The woman looked scared to death, which made absolute sense to Jordan.  Generally, people don’t start crying at the sight of art projects.  “Sorry,” she said, and started pulling Paul away, “I’m really sorry.”  She drug him down the path, trying to figure out what about that old woman had made Paul so upset.

If it had only been Maureen, Paul thought, maybe he could stand it a little better.  He dressed in the bedroom they had shared for three years, where her side of the bed still smelled a little like her.  He had loved her since the first day he met her, and when she died it broke his heart.  But if it had only been her, he supposed it would have healed.

Jordan was pulling up.  She’d been so great though all this, the only person he’d had to rely on.  He had put so much of this on her, even though he knew she must be hurting too.

So when she suggested a walk through the park and breakfast at the diner, he gave her a smile and said yes.

And at first, he really did feel better.  Listening to Jordan babble, walking with her in the sunlight, he felt warm for the first time since Maureen died.

Then he saw the woman, knitting a sweater with red yarn.

Maureen had laughed at him when he brought her that red yarn and a pair of knitting needles.  “I hope those are for decoration,” she’d said, “because I don’t knit.”

“Yeah, but you’re going to be a mommy now,” Paul had told her with a laugh.  “Everybody’s mother should knit.”

He couldn’t help it.  He started to weep.

If it had only been Maureen, he supposed he could have healed.  But knowing there would have been a baby, and now there never would be?  He didn’t believe he would never be warm again.

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What I’m Reading This Month, April 2015 edition

A long time ago, I participated in the monthly online book club run by Modern Mrs. Darcy. Did it for two months, had a lot of fun, the I forgot. And every month, the fifteenth would roll around, and the posts would pop up on my feed reader, and I would say, “Well, it’s okay that I forgot, because I am reading nothing new. Just Half Blood Prince for the fifth time. Really don’t need everyone knowing that. Better that I just skip it is month.

But then the new year started, and one of my goals was to read all new books. And I’ve kept it so far. Haven’t had much time to read, but so far I’ve gotten through Uncle Montegue’s Tales of Terror, and Divergent. Uncle M is great if you liked those Scary Stories books with the wicked awesome illustrations by Alvin Schwartz. Divergent is great if you, you know, breath.

This month, though, I tackled a book I have been wanting to read for a few years now, but every time I start I get distracted by something. It’s The Great Hunt, book two of Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan.

I know, after all my fangirling over Brandon Sanderson, you would think I would have already read his favorite series, and the one that he was so honored to finish after Mr. Jordan passed away. Well, here’s my little secret. I am a fan of Sanderson, the writing teacher. I haven’t even read Mistborn. (It’s on my list, I swear!)

Getting back to Great Hunt, I’ve really been loving it so far. The amazing array of point of view characters is handled really well. At no time do I not know what’s going on, *cough cough, George M. Martin, cough cough*.

More important than that, I am interested in all the different story lines. Never is there a chapter where I’m like, “This loser again? Dude, nobody cares what’s going on with him!” Bran Stark. Not even any fake coughing this time, I have read almost the whole series and skimmed every Bran chapter.

Long story short, read Great Hunt if you haven’t already. Read Book One, too.

Have you read The Great Hunt? What did you think?

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Check This Out- Preditors and Editors

Really, the only excuse I’ve got for never mentioning Predators and Editors before is that I must have assumed you already knew about it. Predators and Editors is a must read before you submit to any agent or editor.

The way the website works is this. Let’s say that you’re looking into agents A and B. Both seem really good, the websites are pro level, but you can’t see a whole lot of publishing credits. Maybe the agent is new. Maybe they prefer to keep their client list exclusive. Or maybe they are a big old scam artist.

How is an innocent writer to tell?

Well, first we’ll look at agent A. We check their name in P&E, and find a $ sign. This is good, it means this agent has a recent sale with a reputable publishing company. Oh, look, it also tells us that this agent is part of the AAR, a well respected literary agent group. Well, this agent checks out. Great.

What about agent B? Here next to their name, in big red letters, are the words, “Charges reading fees. Do not recommend.” Well, that really says all there is to say. No reputable agent asks a reading fee, ever.

Consider Predators and Editors our Better Business Bureau. It’s not a flashy sight, and it’s not meant to be somewhere you can just lose yourself in for hours. But it’s got your back in this world of thieves and liars. So check it out every time you’re considering an agent. Remember, an agent has to accept you but first, you have to accept them. Be sure of who you’re working with.

Have you ever been burned by a bad agent? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

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