They’re Called Calluses

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I was rubbing my thumb over my fingertips as I did some on-line reading (yes, it’s impossible for me to be still) and I was struck for a moment because I couldn’t feel with the tips of my left fingers.

I had to think a moment before realizing, Oh, they’re from all my guitar playing lately.

In the past I’ve only noticed calluses as they’ve (messily) gone away, so it was fun to notice my playing is having some effect.

For almost two weeks now I’ve been playing my guitar every day.  I have no structure to my blips of practice, and so I’m probably advancing slower than I could, but its “clicking” better than ever before and I enjoy practicing like never before.

~

I find it interesting that I dove back into guitar a week after I had storytelling off my plate (and I was thankful to be able to focus on writing as my single “creative” endeavor), but one of the benefits of having nothing set in stone is that I can follow my inclinations and see what happens.

Guitar has been a nice balance to my writing as a physical, musical act to balance the stillness and (relative) silence of the novel.  It’s also been nice to take into the room where the kids play or pack to the park so I can get some time while still being available to my children.

Have I said lately how much I love my job?

Tell me anything else I could be doing that marries so perfectly my responsibilities and my inclinations.

July Links– largely homeschooling

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Stuff I’ve left open in tabs for a few days and decided I wanted to link.

  • Practical Ways to Cultivate Spirituality in a Child: Part 1
    • For the youngest children, i.e., mine are almost there.
  • Your time: Ten not so respectful answers
    • Deliciously snarky answers to express your busy-ness.  The type you’re glad to read but doubt you’d have the gumption to use.  I *loved* #4, and #2 was great, too.
  • Separation of Church and Home(school)
    • This was the timely finding of a discussion I wanted to watch people thinking about (confused yet?)
      • I had just this week been wondering how I could call myself consistent if I accepted the classroom model for Sunday school and not general academics.
      • Can’t say I align myself with everything discussed here, but I appreciated the point about the church having a mandate to teach (e.g., to help and equip the parents to teach their children) while the gov’t, via public schools, have basically created their own mandate.  This distinction worked for me.
  • 50 Reasons Why I Could Never Homeschool
    • Very straight forward and defensiveness-inducing for anyone resisting the idea to homeschool.  Rather encouraging for those seeking affirmation to go for it.
  • An essay/article-writing contest with a big-mag paycheck ($3000) for the prize.
    • If I don’t get around to writing something myself, I’d love to recognize the name of the one who did. ;)

Interviewing Myself about Writing

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The kids are playing with a friend right now, and I’m writing at her table, but I’m a little psyc’d out about writing on my novel just now.

Because I’m so close to the end? Because this is the more baseless section I’m having to create from scratch?

Whatever the reason, I’ve told myself I’ll be able to do it in my next “real” writing session, in my normal writing-space, with my peach white tea and the kids asleep. Everything seems to work then; my brain’s just used to that drill.

For the balance, while I have time to write meaningless ramble, here’s a meme that no one would ever ask me to do, but is entertaining for me. And, as I keep pointing out, that’s what this blog is for.

The Writer’s Meme

What’s the last thing you wrote? The beginning of Chapter 15 of The Lindorm and his Lady (that title’s sort of a take-off on Beauty and the Beast is that weird?). My beginnings in these later sections have been discouragingly slow, but I remind myself just getting it down is the first step.

What’s the first thing you ever wrote that you still have? A piece I “worked on” while in 5th or 6th grade and actually typed up the beginning of in 8th grade. No digital copy, just a print-out of “No Puppies Aloud.” Yes, I noticed the mis-spelling before submitting it to my teacher, but I didn’t change it because I thought it would be clever to keep it this way– since part of the reason no dogs were allowed was their noise.

Can’t remember what my teacher thought.

Favorite genre of writing? Fantasy. Less initial research required. Doesn’t stay that way, of course, but it doesn’t get in the way of writing the way is does in, say, non-fiction.

Most fun character you ever wrote? I don’t know about most fun, but I’m really enjoying Runa, who’s a totally cerebral person—very Spock-ish to the point that the “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” line is actually true of her.

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Made for Useful Work

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Remembering this line of thought I tried to articulate some months ago, I found an excerpt that put a nice bow on it:

I think the feminist movement has denied a good deal of what it is to be a woman by denying the innate desire to be home, raising children. But I also think the church has done the same by denying her desire to work. In reality, the desire to labor productively and to rear children are two halves to the same person.

From Dana Hanley’s article in Home Educating Family magazine.

I appreciated hearing her say about the “Proverbs 31” woman, Her day was not focused on entertainment, nor her children, nor fellowship with other believers. Her day was filled with useful labor, and through her Godly example, her entire family grew spiritually.

We all admire the intelligence of those who think as we do, but I hope that doesn’t negate the validation I felt reading that statement.

Times-Two

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So now I’m more than half-way through my scheduled chapters: 10 out of 17 1st-draft done.

And there’s this pesky chapter that has been jumping in and out of the book, and around within the order of this book.  It’s causing more trouble again as I haven’t been able to decide which POV it needs.

Currently titled “Without Honor,” it shows a confrontation between a 1/2-djinn major character and a full-djinn: his father and the big-baddie.   Useful scene because it shows the difference in power, avoids a talking-heads scenario, and shows a lot of relationship dynamics.

I have come down to writing two versions of the scene (neither is done yet, they’re both written about to the same point– in two different nap-time writing blocks), in order to see which has more of what I want to be shown by the scene.

When viewed by Runa (the novel’s voice-of-reason character), I end up with a completely different feel and set of characters revealed than when I’m in the head of Ivan, being nearly torn-up by his father after decades of careful grooming.

Ivan’s trying to leave the djinn-world for a human life.  I imagine it’s a bit like trying to leave the mafia.

I might have to finish the whole book before I know which point of view, ultimately, will be the most useful.  The main criteria I’ll use are

  • Who has the most to lose, and
  • What characters need to be known best in this installment of the story.

(H/T to the Book Therapy blog.  If you had a search bar I would have linked two specific articles. :) )

A Novel Organizing Exercise

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Here’s one I haven’t seen before that illustrates a bit of Sol Stein’s “suspense technique” that I alluded to in my last post.

I know it didn’t originate there, but it sound’s better than “Go read Redwall.” which you can still do if you want to see this technique used with mathematical precision.

The simple summary is that you want to keep your reader tense.  The way you do this is by not answering the questions as soon as they arise; you create a question an then take a walk with someone else getting in trouble before you go back.

Here is my chart:

Cutting edge, I know.  Moving on.

What you see here is my effort to visually represent the pattern of each returning character’s appearances (by chapter).

That is, any characters appearing only once (my crowded Inn in Chapter 3: Old Friends and Others is a great example.  Characters that don’t come back until a later installation) don’t make this list.

You can see my main character in the third row, and I was pleased to see my section-working has her plot advancing just about every-other chapter.  This was my goal.

In the case where she appears in two chapters in a row (e.g., 2 to 3) I changed the POV (point of view) so that the interaction still feels different.  We’re not in her head the next time we see her, so we still have the lingering question of how she recovered from the events of Chapter 2, and new information that we wouldn’t have seen from her POV: that her face is bruised.

~ ~ ~

This chart helped me in several ways.

  1. It clarified something I’d missed in translating my time-line into chapters (while I would have figured it out eventually, this saved me unnecessary work)
  2. Showed me a chapter to cut/change because I had three in a row with my MC
  3. Showed me gaping holes in presence.

This last is (currently) the most useful, not the least because of I’m at an early stage in this draft.

When I made my first version of this chart (While I snuggled my kids watching The Hephalump Movie) I realized that Ivan– the purple in the middle– disappeared after chapter 8 and reappeared at the denouement to produce the Perfect-Thing for the rest of the story.

I hate it when I read stuff like that, so I had to go back and look for other places to lay the foundation for that same act.  Those are the empty circles I added.

The bottom color, Garm, needed to be added to almost every chapter Linnea (MC) is in because he’s her dog, and it’s a sort of plot-point that he’s always around.  I had forgotten this as I went along.

I still have to decide how present her son (second from the bottom, light-green) is.  There are some places he’s necessary and some places he just can’t be.

~

So, there it is, for what it’s worth.  Very helpful exercise for me; maybe to someone else too.

Answering Writing Questions

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Karen asked some questions that made me think, so here I go answering.

These answers are only related to my work, that is, my novel and the Young Adult (YA) category, that I’ve researched as I’ve been writing.  If you want more widely applicable (and experienced) advice related to writing fiction you need to check out Kaye Dacus’s blog: Write Place, Write Time.

1. How many words are you aiming for?

The number I’ve heard batted around (for YA) is 50,000 words.  I’m aiming at the high end of the age-range, so I think I’d be “allowed” a few more words than that, even being a new face, but I don’t know how far I’d be able to push it.

I can’t say what I’m aiming for or precisely “expecting” because I have no other experience in length to compare this one to.  This book is my classes 102-105 in writing for length, and I expect to know more when I’m done.

2. Are you an outlined or inspired writer? Or something in between? I’m sort of in between and I suspect that is the trouble I’m having in deciding exactly when my story will be finished.

The language I’ve heard is “Seat-of-the-Pants” rather than “inspired.”  I prefer this because I think we’re all inspired or we wouldn’t be writing. ;)

I did my 50,000 NaNo words mostly SotP, jumping to a new section when where I was stalled or got boring.  I had the basic structure of the folktale (without which I don’t think I could have written as fast as I did) and I had a list of names and “terms” I had researched in the month before I started, so I didn’t have to slow down and work our plot problems or stop to find the perfect name.

I discovered holes as I wrote, but November wasn’t the time to contemplate or fix them, so I just kept a document of questions to return to.

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Getting Back On-Track

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Solid 3,000 words today.  Jay gave me most of the afternoon to work.  Good, good man.

Most of that increase was from importing and revising sections of the first draft to fit the new format.  I’m still working at getting back into the rhythm of the story after being gone for a month.  It’s harder than I had expected or I might not have let it alone so long.

Also working on a new spreadsheet to solidify the time-line of events (in the actual novel, not the whole world), where multiple things happen within a short time, and making sure that’s logical with travel-times and all.

This draft has been more streamlined than the first, so I am (when I let myself think that far ahead) waffling again on whether the story will be better served as three too-short books (I’m visualizing Spiderwick here) or one long-ish one.

Also, due to the need to polish my first 10-pages for a mss consult coming up, those pages are now (tentatively) available upon request.  The tentatively part depends on whether I know you. ;) I’m not yet so confident about it all that I’ll give it to anyone.

E-mail me if you’re interested.

Still hoping to get a few hours of writing in after the kids’ bedtime.  My goal is to be back to normal production by the end of the weekend.  If I can do that I should still have the first book (or first third of the book) done by the time school starts.

“Next Child” Advice

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I know you’ve all been dying for my opinion on the next thing I felt like talking about…

Actually I was just organizing these thoughts for friend and decided I wanted them here for me too.

One of my largest frustrations during my second pregnancy was the discovery that none of the new-baby books in my library assumed there was more than one child in the picture.

On one level this is fair: those most likely to read how-to books are those who haven’t done it before, i.e., first-time parents.  But this was the first time I was about to be outnumbered by my own children, so I was seeking guidance too.  (Leaving utterly aside the assumption I might not need guidance since I had a child a whole 17.5 months older than the newest one.)

“Every good and perfect gift comes from above,” so I’m convinced God gave me the idea of looking in the twins section of the pregnancy/parenting books.  Here were books that assumed my soon-to-be reality: more than one child with equally self-centered wills.

This reading was very helpful to me and helped me establish a core part of my parenting style that has carried me into three children with hardly a hiccup.

That part is mainly this: when there is more than one need/scream/tragedy, how will you handle it?  The two main options (actually, I can’t think of any others) are complete one project (child) then move to the next, or juggle both until both are done.

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Rained-Out.

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Real-life resumes.

We had “unseasonal rains” all last night and the first half of today, stirring up enough silty mud to create a nice slick slime on the grounds where the Renaissance faire was to be held today.

It was canceled on account of the rains, so I didn’t do any (public) storytelling today.

Anyway, I am dying to get back into my novel, but I’m holding back until I get my house back in order

  • Sewing machine/projects away
  • Laundry folded
  • Next-size out for the poor child who’s been running about in capri pants not designed to be capris.

But then, Ah, *then.* All the sparks that have been nipping at me will be given their own little fire pits and we’ll learn how much flame they contain.