Time Out

Sorry I haven't been blogging much the last few weeks. Life is busy! And now I'm going on vacation. I'll have ye old laptop with me, since I'm getting close to done on the rewrite of my novel. So I might be posting.

But then again I might not. Sometimes you need to shut down the electronic connection to the outside world and curl up and rest. I won't be resting completely, since the rewrite continues, and I simply must visit my fave beach in the world. But it will be restful. I hope!

Have a splendid Memorial Day weekend. Hope it brings you closer to your writerly dreams.

Mind Map-o-Rama

After reading Chuck Wendig's hilarious and helpful post on how he uses mind mapping to find out who the characters in his book are, I stumbled onto yet another fabulous use of mind mapping at Visual Thesaurus. Check it!

I'm a visual person, so seeing things mapped out like this is helpful and also sends my mind off into new corners. Connections I didn't understand before seem obvious, and words become like planets, each with their own rings or moons or asteroids orbiting.

You can download free mind mapping software from Free Mind here.

Almost Just For a Moment

Back from a trip to Napa to say - see those words in the title of this post? If you find them in your manuscript - cut them!

I use "just" a lot and "almost" a ton, and "for a moment" to make things feel transitory. Truth is - things feel transitory enough without "for a moment" most of the time. And something is stronger without "just" or "almost" in front of it.

Don't hedge. Don't be redundant. Cut these words. Use the Search function if you must to track them down and delete!