Taking Time

There are times like now when preparations for a short trip, entertaining, etc. begin to pall. That’s when I choose to take my mind completely away from the current time consumers and look for something totally different.

Doing this clears the mind to allow for subtle preparations and mental lists to go on while the body and front brain are engaged elsewhere.

Today, that elsewhere was learning more about how to effectively use Office 2010. Beginning with Word, the process moved me though templates, themes, styles, etc. There was very much to learn and try to keep straight in the mind. Though I used this version of Word for over a year, I’d never gotten to know it and its potential. That oversight is rapidly being corrected.

Suddenly the idea of all of those lovely pages that I saw everyone else put together didn’t intimidate me anymore. For so long I’ve watched from the bleachers while all around me creativity was flaunted with such ease that I felt like a complete idiot.

I know there are books that seemed written just for me. I’ve seen them on the shelves and felt too embarrassed to actually buy one. Way back when I got my Office 2010 software, I went to all the trouble of buying a nice book called “The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft Office 2010.”

I’d refused to take sufficient time or attention to read, absorb and fiddle on the computer to learn anything it might have had to say about my new programs.

Shame should cover me with its scarlet flush. Now it’s possible to create marvelous-looking documents with simple tools. Hope springs up in my heart; hope of learning how to edit with notes in the margins, or that exciting photo modification that’s available—and  dare I think Publishing. Can’t wait to get to that chapter.

Study time has ended for the day. Perhaps this weekend while I’m killing time in a motel room in Washington, I can take on the next phase of this process called “becoming familiar with Office 2010.”

Laptop and book will accompany me on our short trip westward. I’ll keep busy with learning and reading.

Anyone who is only now beginning to take this software seriously should drop by the local chain bookstore. Get yourself a copy of a book like mine that can walk you through the process of learning ribbons, media creation, etc. You don’t have to go online and listen to tutorials unless you want to, or unless you have two computers; one for the tutorial and one for hands-on practice.

Jump in and explore some of the options. If you’re like me and haven’t taken the time to dive deeper than you’ve gone before, strap on the scuba tank and take a gander at what’s on the sea bottom. I’ve found treasure I didn’t know existed. All I have to do is haul it up and cash in on it.

Until later,

Claudsy

View From the Road

I wanted to show you all the kind of autumn day that comes our way here in northwest Montana. With Jo's permission, I put  this together with a poem I wrote for the occasion. I hope you all enjoy it on this marvelous Sunday afternoon.

Think of this as my little postcard to you all.

Claudsy

Allowing the Story to Grow

A couple of months ago I set about creating a slew of character studies in preparation for work on a new novel-length project. I figured that when the well ran dry at the end of a long writing session on my sister’s and my country tour book, I could work on something totally unrelated. Plus, I could use some of the material gathered from our trip, as well.

A reasonable prospect, don’t you think?

Inspiration to Dilemma

That’s where the problem began. I’d accumulated such diverse material that deciding on a series of plot twists and points of interest evolved into a nightmare.

I first had to decide on voice—poignant or dramatic with mystery. There was always a possibility of putting those two directions together and running them parallel. I hadn’t seen that done often, which helped make that bridge an interesting one. I patted myself on the back and continued.

The MC’s character definition was set. I could go on to build her circumstances into a realistic model. No problem there. Background details sprinkled along the way could create clarity.

Lastly, I needed to decide how far I was willing to take this character and her story. I’m an organic writer and most of what I put down in copy in my first draft is as much a surprise to me as to the reader. As a result, I require a point of exit for the story. That stop sign in my mind helps put my rewind brakes on when I get too enthusiastic with the storyline.

You can see the difficulty. I had a great main character and several feisty and intriguing secondary characters. I had so many who were dying to have their stories shown to readers who hadn’t yet met them. What could a writer to do?

Learning a Lesson

Veteran crime writer, Elmore Leonard teaches that using tiny details about a character creates something memorable for the reader as well as for the other characters. He advocates using major bits of dialogue to drive the story and reveal the secrets. He’s used these techniques to create crime novels that continue to fascinate readers since producing “3:10 To Yuma” back in the pulp fiction days.

I used this lesson and learned about my characters’ tiny details. Those can help drive both dialogue and reveal secrets. I know that my MC despises the married life she’s lived for seventeen years.  I know that she longs to be free and living on her own terms. I also know that she goes to the library twice a week and spends the day there, which her husband allows because he deems the activity harmless and safe from temptation.

Those and more surround the major points in her life. Smaller details include the fact that she wears different clothes to the library than she does at home or to church. She wears a certain scent when she goes to town. She likes hats. Each of these facts assists in the creation of the overall picture of the character’s reality.

Mystery whispers around the base premise. Her friends and other secondary figures also hold secrets. These help move the reader toward discovery at the plot’s conclusion. Without that sense of mystery, that sense of anticipation, the story would fall flat and remain lifeless.

Many of the MC’s personal details are things that would resonate with folks in a Southern location. Ergo, setting made it known and added another dimension to the tale. With all of that worked out, I could move on to plot and setting.

Mapping the Plot

From first page to last, only one serious question required an answer at each juncture along the plotline.

What if? Those two words are drivers of stories. I listened when my MC told me that she had a secret life and that she really didn’t need her husband for any reason. She had her own life. It simply wasn’t as free as she would like it to be.

What if the MC goes to the library one day and is assaulted or raped? How would these actions play out? Would she hide in shame and refuse to tell her husband—a husband who might blame her for the attack? Would the police be brought in? And if the police were involved, who would they find guilty of the crime? Why would the attack happen that day, to that woman?

With that in mind, logical questions would follow. “What if her husband wasn’t around anymore? Would she prefer that he leave her alone but not have a divorce?

Why did her best friend need to be involved and what could she contribute to the MC’s situation. And on and on…

Discovering a Conclusion

Many of those “what ifs” evolve from the story’s regional setting. People behave differently in each region to the same stimuli. Anyone who has traveled around soon comes to that conclusion.

That fact allows me to work with a bit of logic, a bit of intuition, and a listening ear to discover what might be the only proper end to the story. After I have that piece of the puzzle, I can put the chapter outlines together and ready myself for a true beginning to the writing project.

Because I wanted to use material gathered for a different book project, I came away with much more. I came away with a novel, starring a character that previously had remained hidden somewhere inside my mind. In addition, I found a literary use for some of my travel material, which also gave me walk-on characters.

I titled this novel “Dreamie’s Box.” My writing partner told me to set aside the first two chapters for use as bits of backstory later in the story. Beginning with the death of the MC’s husband in Chapter Three will force a much faster pace to the story. It’s a good thing. Thankfully, I have a scrupulously honest writing partner. I may finish this thing long before NaNoWriMo.

Until later,

Claudsy

Conquering Writer's Guilt

One of the things I’ve been contemplating this past week has centered on why writers can’t stop themselves from writing.

Admit it. If you don’t write on a regular basis, you get cranky, unbalanced, and not pleasant to be around. Little things that have no import begin to tick you off for no real reason. In the end, you must take up paper and pen or keyboard and monitor to put something in writing, whether anyone else will ever read it or not.

Many of you are nodding, thinking back to when you were a youngster and creeping off to a corner where no one would find you for a while, in an effort to put your thoughts, ideas, and ponderings into a more permanent form.

Some of you, like me, were either teased about your use of words or discouraged in a more hurtful way. It wasn’t pleasant. You felt misunderstood, unworthy, and alone in a world that didn’t honor you. I remember those days well. By the time adulthood came along, you probably had no more belief in your abilities or writing dreams than anyone else had shown throughout your life.

I’ve never understood why those who are supposed to love us can’t give encouragement to a child’s dreams and aspirations. I’m at an age now where I know that I’ll never understand a person’s need to berate another rather than move toward understanding.

Whether we still hunker in corners for secret writing sessions or sit at desks and flaunt our right to express ourselves to the world, one aspect of a writer’s life tends to remain true; at least in my experience.

We all tend to feel guilty if we haven’t written anything on any given day. It doesn’t seem to matter how busy and cluttered with errands that day has been. What matters is the reality that we didn’t find at least fifteen minutes to put words down for use later.

Guilt seems to be built into the job description of most writers. You feel guilty if you’re running behind on a timeline, even if you’re the one who created the timeline. Pangs of guilt flutter around your head every time you think you haven’t spent enough time on research, editing, critiquing of other’s work, what-have-you.

Have you kept your presence fluid and immediate on your social networks and the media? Another source of guilt has come to roost on your head. Have you been keeping close enough email ties to your contacts? No? Well, you’d best get cracking. You could lose those contacts. They could be offended and never really be friends with you again.

You see what I’m talking about. Be honest. You’ve felt some, in not all, of these symptoms of a Writer’s Guilt. The cause is unknown. It lies so deep inside the psyche that few, if any, would find it without a bulldozer and other heavy equipment.

The only cure is striving for a regular dose of preventative. Write a long email to someone you’ve not contacted in a while. Apologize for the oversight--make no promises about doing better, since that leads to more guilt later—and be positive in your relating of doings in your life, what you’ve been working on, and how insanely chaotic your personal life has been. That will take care of that problem for now.

Edit an old story and get it submitted anywhere. It doesn’t matter where. It’s the submission that matters. Another symptom will be gone for the moment.

Continue with these types of firebreaks and soon the guilt will be controlled. You will be able to say “See, what I’ve done this week. I’ve gotten all of this done.”

Until the next time I feel guilty about neglecting this blog for another, have a great weekend and week to come.

Claudsy

Family Separation, Disconnection, and Chaos Theory

What happens when you’re suddenly contacted by someone you’ve not seen nor talked to in 26 years? Stick around and let me tell you what happened to me.

Last week when I called my father, who’s recuperating from hip surgery in a convalescent center, I got to talk to my brother who happened to be in the room at the time. He asked me if I wanted the phone number and email addy of my first cousin, Pat. I took up pencil and paper and duly wrote down the information. Color me too  shocked to object or question anything.

It seems that she’d paid a visit to Dad that day while visiting with an old classmate. She even brought along the classmate. She’d been thinking about him recently, had spoken to her friend about not being able to contact him, and this classmate happened to be in Burger King one day to discover someone who knew Dad. In that round-about way, Pat was informed of his stay at the convalescent center.

Talk about your seven degrees of separation!

The upshot was that I now had in my possession the information to make contact possible after 26 years. The oddest part of this story, I suppose, was that this cousin had been on my mind for a couple of weeks. I had no clue why I kept thinking about her, though. Couple that oddity with the fact that all of a sudden I’d been picking up friend requests from writers from Indiana for a solid week, when I had no others before that. Now you can glimpse my need to shiver a bit.

Yep, things aren’t always what they seem on the surface, unless you’re like me, and have dealt with too many coincidences in the past to take them lightly. There is no such thing as a coincidence, in my humble opinion.

I contacted Pat, who now goes by a different nickname, by email. It was short and sweet and inviting. She responded immediately and we’ve been corresponding daily since.

We’re getting reacquainted. As we all know, people change over time. Life does that to a person. I’ve learned some things about this lovely woman that I would never have expected. For instance, she loves poetry and buys books of poetry every time she finds a poet that she can click with. She's happily used her time to garden since she retired a few years ago.

These are the kinds of things that I would have known if we could have communicated over those intervening years. We’ve lost time with each other. We’ve lost our connections. As we grow older, having family contemporaries becomes more difficult.

She is one of only three cousins of my age—within a year or so—on either side of my family. That’s a really small pool to draw from, and she’s the only relative that I know left on my mother’s side of the family. That pool just got dangerously small.

Why am I talking about all of this? It has to do with recognizing how fragile connections and communication really are. It focuses one’s attention on those bits of self that have been left behind; bits that impacted other people that one never expected. And, it allows for more examples of those seven degrees of separation that Chaos Theory is always shoving down our throats.

Remember I said that Pat loves poetry. I sent her a link to some of my published poems on the Soft Whispers site. She came back to me expressing her pleasure in a specific poem and told me how much it reminded her of her favorite poet, Gwen Frostic. She told me that she used to go to Gwen’s studio each year to get any new books of poetry that had come out since the last visit.

Now I’d never heard of that poet, but I remedied that with a Google search. Though deceased now, Gwen became an instant favorite of my own, as well. Look her up and see if you can figure out why. Her books are also still available on Amazon. Somehow I can see an order in my future.

I discovered a new poet, introduced to me by a cousin long estranged, reconnected with a much forgotten past, from a place I hadn’t lived in 26 years. I think that’s a good week’s work, don’t you?

I’m just trying to figure out what I’m going to discover this week. Until I find out, take care, all, and may blessings litter you path through life.

Claudsy

Relatively Speaking

An old adage says “Everything is relative.”

Everyone stumbles across this one truth at some point in their lives. That is, if they’re paying attention.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll remember that to walk into a house heated to 65 degrees from an outside temperature of 32 or less feels like you’re walking into a hot house. Give yourself a couple of hours and the inside temps won’t seem so warm.

Place that same scene in the dog days of summer with outside temps of 100 degrees and walk into that same house set at 65 degrees. Suddenly one has walked into a meat locker.

Someone has undoubtedly thought of the analogy of “How do you boil a live frog?”

The power of relativity has come to bear on our lives so often that we seldom pay attention to it. We make our statements about conditions around us and move on to another distraction. It’s not something that seems terribly pertinent.

Why am I talking about such a petty little observation? Isn’t it the petty little observations to which writers must pay attention?

Whether a writer is dealing in fiction or non-fiction, it’s the details that will either set you free or bury you. If you’re working in non-fiction and you present one of those little observations of relativity incorrectly, credibility will be tainted. Precision of detail is critical in non-fiction. The writer cannot afford to allow relativity to color those details too much. Even memoir has its limits concerning relativity.

If the writer works in fiction, the relativity displayed by character and situation makes or breaks the reality of the story presented. If you have a character who hates feeling cold, who lives in the desert for that reason, for instance, her air conditioning unit won’t be set at 65 degrees in the summer. The character would never stand for a temperature setting that low. Yet, such a situation can be successfully used to further define the character’s individual needs, tastes, backstory, etc.

Some people call this perspective since relativity is reserved for a physics theorem. Regardless, writers deal with the continual relativity/perspective factor every day. Many times we do it unconsciously. Somewhere, on an intuitive level, we understand how critical it is that we appear authentic and accurate.

The genre dictates how we use this factor, as well. Children’s writers must write as adults. Their presentation of material or story, on the other hand, must be from the perspective of the readers’ age for fiction and use appropriate language level, etc. In non-fiction children’s age-appropriate language also holds hands with concept understanding and developmental stages. Targeting the proper age market for one’s work is crucial to success in that genre.

The same holds true for marketing any piece of writing to any audience. Relativity/perspective demands proper marketing for success. The writer of technical journals, for instance, targets only those who need that particular information, written at specific levels of expertise.

As you can see, everything is relative. From the content to the marketing the writer juggles accuracy with approximation every time she sits down at her computer, regardless of what she’s writing.

Maybe that’s a large part of why this industry is so fascinating and frustrating at one and the same time. If anyone has another take on this subject, let me know.  I’m always up for discussion.

Until later,

Claudsy

Driving Focus Needs the Right Schedule

Spinning one’s wheels without forward movement is a true exercise in frustration. Putting more on one’s plate than can be eaten in a meal is gluttony. And writing without a plan of action is just plan insane.

We all know these truths. If we haven’t learned them within the first few experiences, we don’t deserve to call ourselves intelligent.

I bring all of this up to preface my new beginning. I’ve been stacking so much on my writer’s plate that even Hercules couldn’t have lifted it without a forklift. There are just so many marvelous projects that I must stick my fingers into right now. I know that I have four-ten other projects sitting in the wings looking for a finale. I understand that a new project needs extra time for development, which eliminates time slated for other work.

Yeah, I get it.

Addiction is a terrible thing. This addiction on mine to constantly find new, more fascinating projects to tinker with has got to stop. That’s why I’ve taken today to develop a work schedule for myself that is rigid enough to keep me focused and flexible enough to allow for movement between projects and chores outside of writing.

I’ve done scheduling before without success, I think because too much rigidity and I don’t get along well. We tend to go to war. Blame that on my need for flexibility.

With this new attempt, I’ve built in those non-writing tasks that always stole time I didn’t feel I had before. I built in time for email and social media twice a day. I built in time for reading for review and for pleasure. I built in specific timeframes for writing on different projects on different days of the week.

I even built in time each day for personal home tasks and half an hour of exercise. Believe me, that’s definitely new.

Each week’s schedule will shift just a bit as administration tasks are completed and others take their place. Now I can go to my day’s calendar and see just those things that need my focus, without having to think about those that will come on a different day.

Down the line further, I will build in all of the deadlines for submissions. I’ve already allowed for a few hours each week for marketing research and submissions.

I’m going to try, with determination and focus, to get this new attempt to work for me. Every other one has failed so far in the last two years. I’ve learned a bit about myself since then.

Wish me luck and check in on Monday to see how the work proceeds and how my newest project is coming along. What is that project, you ask. It’s a women’s fiction novel titled “Dreamie’s Box.” I’ve completed the first two chapters and moving forward.

Until next time,

Claudsy