CON HANGOVER

Whew! A weekend writers conference (DFW Writers' Conference) is like taking a week on a remote island with people just like you (other writers) and jacking into your gray matter and draining it away so that the Monday morning after conference hangover feels like you got sucked dry energy-wise, but zinged and jazzed and hyped at the same time.

I’m stoked! Can you tell? :)

I’ll probably be telling yall tidbits about the conference all week as I remember them or get time. Just know that I am up before noon for no good reason other than to edit the first 3 chapters, synopsis, and query to send out to one agent who requested it, then I’ll work on the rest of my novel for the other 3 agents who requested that, (and then, back to my high fantasy for an agent who requested that, and so on).

So, if we’re counting (and I am LOL) that’s 4 out of 4! (Is that some kind of great save percentage out there or not? Sorry, hockey terminology. Go Yotes!)

Happy dance!

OK back to my computer, catching up on email, a little editing for a client, a little posting on my urban fantasy class which is winding up this week, and oh gawd, I almost forgot, I gotta judge a contest. OK I’ll worry about that Tuesday, right? LOL

Happy Monday!

ecause the First Plot Point is the moment when the story’s primary conflict makes its initial center-stage appearance.  It may be the first full frontal view of it, or it may be the escalation and shifting of something already present.  In either case, nothing about the story is the same from that moment forward.   

There is a time and a place to introduce the reason your hero/protagonist sets off down the appointed path of your story – at roughly the 20^th to 25^th percentile.   That moment is the First Plot Point (FPP), sometimes referred to as the Inciting Incident.

It is the bridge between Parts 1 and 2.  Which means, everything that comes before is a set-up for it, and everything that comes after is a response to it.

http://storyfix.com/story-structure-a-kinder-gentler-first-plot-point
http://storyfix.com/story-structure-series-5-part-2-of-your-story-the-response
http://storyfix.com/story-structure-series-4-%E2%80%93-the-most-important-moment-in-your-story-the-first-plot-point
http://storyfix.com/hook-vs-first-plot-point-dont-get-fooled

ORDINARY MOMENTUM

I was hopping around the web today and came across a blogpost about something I should know well, but always forget: “[URL="http://momentumgathering.com/ordinary-momentum/"]Ordinary Momentum[/URL]”

[B]Do one, simple thing every day that moves you in the direction of your biggest dream—and do it FIRST.[/B]

And I will add, do it LAST.

If you read the blog, you’ll understand a bit where the author comes from. But, this also applies to our live’s love, writing.

Before you go shopping, or even make a shopping list, write. Before you workout, write. Before you take a shower, write. Before you take out the trash, write.

OK. I know many of you ladies out there say, “Ew! But then my house will be dirty, the laundry undone, the cats won’t get fed, and we’ll run out of food.”
When I hear this, and almost always from women, I laugh.

Why? Because it tells me then that their priority isn’t writing. They SAY they want to write a novel, publish a book or short story, etc., but what do they do? The dishes.

Of course, all these things need to be done, but you know what? They will ALWAYS need to be done, if not now, eventually. But, if you really want to be a professional, you will learn to deal with these constant interruptions on your writing life.

Set your priorities.

If you simply must run at 5am no matter what because you have to go to work, or you just love the feel of the lifting dew from the grass, then write at 4:30am. And then when you run, record your thoughts on your writing as you run.

If you take a lunch break at work, write. It might be difficult at first, but once you get into the hang of it, and your coworkers hear you bark at them to leave you alone enough, it will be easier (been there, done that. I was known as the grumpy lunch lady.)

Before you go to bed, spend 15, or 30 or more if you have it, minutes writing.

If you’re in editing mode, edit. This puts your writing in your mind before you go to sleep. Studies show that thinking about a problem before you go to sleep helps the brain work on it while you sleep. Not just “oh, I’m thinking about my book.” But REALLY thinking. And to do that, you need at least 15 or more minutes of nonstop indepth thinking. After that, you’re brain is primed and while your body is resting and repairing itself, your subconscious is working. (You know, we can’t control our subconscious but we can tweak it and make it work for us instead of letting it do what it wants LOL.)

I love having my first cup of coffee on my back porch, listening to the birds sing, watching the squirrels chase the cats across the top of the fence, spotting new butterflies flitting across the new flowers I just planted, etc. I do that, but I also take a pen and paper with me and sketch a little and write a little about the book I’m working on. What started out as my back yard, can turn into the world of my protagonist and new  ideas begin filling my imagination.

I remember when I first began writing for publication (which is different than “writing”), I attended a lecture by an award-winning literary author in Dallas. I can’t even remember her name now, but she was like the Lamott of local literary writing.

She said, she didn’t really write until she had left her family and lived in her own space for a year until her novel was finished.

Whoa Nelly! Do you know how that grates on the ear of the Southern woman? That’s like telling a red-blooded American woman that she’s an ax murder! LOL

What the author said was that she never got any good writing done because she had to do laundry, cook meals, clean the house, run errands, all for a very large family and a husband whom she loved dearly, who made good money (and even having a housekeeper didn’t help much) but wasn’t rich (so no cook, cleaner, butler, errand-runner, ie, no house slave LOL). She went on to tell us how she asked repeatedly for more help from family members. She made schedules and assigned tasks, etc., but that never lasted. Which led to a ton of discord among family members, not the least of which was her husband.

What did she do?

She moved out. She rented a tiny one room apartment in a very “cheap” part of town and left. Now, she had planned this for a while, because she saved up some money ahead of time. Then she told her husband and said she expected to be paid a stipend for a year while she finished her novel. They made date nights to keep in touch, and family nights for the kids, but otherwise, she was removed from her family, as removed as she could afford to be. Naturally, her husband wasn’t hot on this idea, but somehow she worked it out and became a well-respected author.

I’m not saying go this far.

But find your quiet place, make it. Best-selling fantasy author David Farland says when he writes his first draft, he moves into a motel or goes to stay at a friend’s place well away from his own home for about 2 weeks. He says it’s an investment in time that pays off when he sells his book 6 months later.

Even a weekend away helps. Do whatever it takes to be who you want to be, whether it’s a writer, a long distance runner, a teacher, a musician, whatever.

I run several writers groups. Another complaint I hear a lot from writers, beginners and not-so-beginners, is that their spouse isn't supportive.

From women, it's that their husband thinks writing is a cute hobby, but don't let it detract her from ...... fill in the blank, cooking dinner, entertaining him and his friends, doing what he wants to do when he wants to do it. Whatever it is. Same for men, but I hear this mostly from women.

Why? Because women, most women, want to nurture and please. They want to take care of their family. Family is what is really important, let's be real. All the money in the world, all the fame and glory, means nothing if you don't love and be loved by your family. Period.

However.... you have needs and desires that must be met for you to be a complete person.

So sometimes we have to interrupt family, rearrange it somehow, to fit our needs. Most times we can, sometimes, like the writer mentioned above, we have to "exit, stage left" for a period of time to get our head in the right place to write.

What do I hear underneath that complaint? Fear.

And I don't know their home life. Are they afraid their husband will leave them?

Afraid he'll get angry? So what if he gets angry? Is that the end of the world? Sometimes, do accomplish great things, we have to rub people the wrong way, do things they don't like. But you know what? I don't live to do stuff others like all the time, even my husband. I live for me, as well as my family, but I don't live to be dictated about my life.

It's all about choice.

Set your priorities. If you need help, ask other writers, but don't listen to the ones who whine about the same thing, that won't help you.

And make that "ordinary momentum" work for you.

Subimssion woes & taxes & things

OK. It's another Monday in 2012 and I'm slipping behind my goals. Of course, I haven't been practicing what I preach. I should know better. I do.

"I do hereby vow to practice what I preach on tracking my submissions and pushing myself to get those daily/weekly/monthly/yearly goals in line and on track."

There. I said it. Whew. :)

What made me realize I'd gotten so far behind? It's only March, after all, the 3rd month of the Gregorian calendar year.

Because, hell, it's the 3rd freakin' month! THIRD and I've only submitted a couple of things to date. I haven't been keeping up with my Examiner.com publications as I should be, not as often nor recording them as I should (I have an Excel spreadsheet for both), nor have I gotten my 2011 taxes up to date (I have an Excel spreadsheet for that), nor have I written anything new since I submitted .... I submitted .... wait, it'll come to me, it was a flash piece and I can't remember the title of my own work! (ACK! I have cheesebrains afterall!)

OK. I found it. The flash fiction piece "Skies A'fire," whew. (I don't know if my usual absentmindedness is getting worse, or I'm just afraid that, at 56, people might notice I have such. It's not anything new. Even as a kid, my Dad thought I was a bit retarded in that regard.. but that's another story.)

And, of course, I opened up my Excel file "WritingOrganizer.xlsx" and nothing has been added for 2012. (Can you say late night with wine and Excel time?)

I'm conflicted about my Examiner articles. Continue writing them, taking time away from completing my novel? Or continue writing them, growing an audience who just might remember when when novel publication and selling is crucial? (Get organized you say? Hello? Do you KNOW me?) I enjoy writing them, I really do. And just the writing of the articles is pretty quick. It's all the article formatting--researching and inserting links--and adding the images and videos and so on that take more time than actually writing the freakin' article! Seriously. I know, I know. I could leave those things out, but in our visually-addicted society, those things gotta be there. Period. (Even though I don't like doing videos very often. It's not that I don't like videos, they are usually just a slower way to get the information. Now, I do do some that I just listen to while I do something else, but those are rare.)

Not conflicted enough to be considered a "tortured writer," just in case you were worried ;).

So, after reading Shawn's post on metered prose (which I'm still figuring out how to balance the prose and the meter and not be too wordy at the same time) and then reading his goals and milestones, I realized, DUH! Hello, MacAlley!                                  

See, this is what happens when I get deadline fever. There's this little panic attack syndrome that begins in the back of my mind and the closer it gets to the deadline, the more it questions everything I do. (I never used to be this way. I used to just stomp my way to the deadline, come hell or high water. What happened to THAT me? I think I stomped on my own foot.)

What happened was I'm actually doing something I care deeply about. My writing. It's just so me. I love what I do. I really love all the aspects of writing, though some more of others, yet it's all I do, write, think about writing, do workshops on writing, now I teach a bit about writing.

When I ask myself why didn't I do this sooner? I remind myself because I had kids and I was a single parent. I needed money NOW, not 6 months or years later. Had I been the gold-digging kind of girl, I would have gone in search of some rich man to support me and the kids in the style to which I wished to become accostumed. Ah well, wish in one hand ... :) (I can't even think that would have worked, because then, I wouldn't have the great guy I have now. That's another story, too LOL)

Back to my whole point--goals, milestones, and misplaced focus. So, just cause I needed to say it, even if it's to some virtual world out there (that's the world I live in as a fiction writer anyway, right?), I'm realigning and calibrating my brain a bit.

1. health: I've inserted even more veggies, fruits, & stuff than last year. Last year, hubby and I added more of that, and with our Tai Chi exercises, we both managed to lose some weight and feel much better. (tho with me, the problem isn't losing, it's not letting it find me again.) So more of that this year.

2. submissions: 1 flash fiction piece so far. Wish they'd hurry up and reject it so I can resend. I've got 2 other shorts, one flash and one longer, being read by beta's (readers not the fish) and then they'll go out.

3. rejections: 0

4. writing--novel: I'm working on the last half of The Angel Project with Larry Brook's story structure template. I know the big picture, now I'm working on the details, zooming in speak, little by little. The problem with writing is that, when your brain refuses to contemplate something further, for whatever reason, it's damned hard to work around it. Because it's your brain that has to do the work around. I've developed different tricks to try to sneak through whatever roadblock my brain has thrown up to thwart my progress. (But damn, it's smarter than me!) I know that usually means something is wrong, somewhere, somehow, in the story, something needs work. I'm trying to do actual "puzzle" methods to work some stuff out. Wish me luck. I'm usually the 'write 100,000+ words to figure the story out first' kinda writer. This is a new and excrutiatingly difficult process, but ony hard at this point because it is new. (Funny how that works, eh?) I'm giving myself a due date of The DFW Writers' Conference, where I'll be pitching this novel again, though it got accepted by everyone I pitched it to last time, but wasn't finished. (Do I pitch again? Or just send it to them a year later?)

5. writing--novel: There's others vying for my attention and the din is sometimes overwhelming, but I've managed to hold them off a bit longer.

6. writing--short stories: I've discovered flash fiction is a great way to make an otherwise almost good unsalable short story market-viable. Well, so I think LOL. We'll see. It's a new way to focus and I like the fact that they are short and I can get back to my novel sooner. Sometimes, however, like the story "Oleya and Joeran" (which I'm not sure whether to title it such or "Cultural Exchange"), it begs to be expanded into a novel. In fact, almost everyone who's read it asks for a novel-length story from it. So, it's not like I don't have other novels begging to be written. But, well, you know.

7. writing--poems: Yeah, I've been playing with those again. They bubble up now and then and now with this 2012 Space Poetry Anthology Contest from the National Space Society of North Texas, I'm itching to do some more. Strange how that happens.

8. writing--other: As said earlier, Examiner.com is waning because it's just too time consuming. Not much else is coming up except some blog invitations for writing sites throughout the year.

9. Tai Chi: My main non-writing fun. We couldn't afford our usual hockey addiction this year, so this is all we got left.

10. Judging: I'm juding a contest this week for an RWA group. I'm not doing many anymore. Too time consuming and I'm not sure my comments are really worth the time I put into them. Most romance writers aren't writing to become better writers, they are writing to be "good enough" and that is not my goal, so ... (shrug)

11. Conferences/Workshops: As I said earlier, DFW Writers' Conference, just cuz my own writer's workshop is hosting it, and cuz it's local. I've cut back on attending very many cons or workshops. ConDFW was in Feb, then FenCon in Sept. Think that's about it. And there's my usual monthly NTSFW.

OK enough. I'm warmed up and I gotta go see how my students have done over the weekend with my class in editing at SavvyAuthors.com.

Oh, and I've discovered Pinterest. So far, a total waste of time, but it's pretty.

Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom

Scientists Find New Dangers in Tiny but Pervasive Particles in Air Pollution

For Space Mess, Scientists Seek Celestial Broom

Lending Your Car to Strangers (for Cash) ... they're doing this in Europe already. My friend, Yann, is considering loaning hers out. My problem, I do a lot of spur-of-the-moment errands.

Nice to see Martin has 2 of his series on the Best Selling list at NYTimes. And the dead guy, Stieg Larson, is still selling big.

OK time to fix the granddaughter her lunch.