April - a Poem a Day

Robert Lee Brewer at the Writer's Digest blog Poetic Asides in once again having is Poem a Day in April challenge.

For those that are poetically inclined, it's a great way to get those creative bats fluttering. Robert posts a prompt every day, you write a poem and put it in the comments section of his blog, and he picks his favorites.

I tried this last April and it was a complete mixed bag. My chocolate chip cookie poem got picked as a favorite, but some of my efforts were so awful that I ended up deleting them from this blog. Never to be read again!

I won't have the time to do it again this April, (too much else to do!) but I do think I'll check out the prompts and try my hand once or twice along the way. If anything I churn out is slightly palatable, I'll post it here.

If you take the challenge, let me know! And good luck!

Outlining

Thanks to a member of my writing class, I found a very useful post on Deadline Dames about outlining here.

If you've never tried outlining, I can't recommend it highly enough. The post on Deadline Dames shows a couple of fairly simple, straightforward ways to do it. One uses a fave of mine The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler to get things going.

Whenever my writing bogs down and I feel like I'm trudging through sludge to get something on paper, it's almost always because I have no idea where I'm going or why this scene exists. The answer is - outline! Every scene in the outline has a purpose, and knowing that purpose makes it ten times easier to write the scene.

Things will change as you write. You'll come up with ideas that never occured to you before, or see that things should go together differently. That's fine. The outline is not set in stone. I often reoutline, or jot notes in my old outline to indicate changes. It won't squash your inspiration - it'll foster it.

Busy Week!

Went out a lot this week, date-y things, friend-y things, civic duty things. And then there's all that working out and washing my hair and giving medicine to my ancient cat. I thought about bringing my laptop to jury duty but have a horror of schlepping things around. Plus it gave me an excuse to keep reading YA book WAKE by Lisa McMann, which is excellent, by the way!

All of which means I only have four new pages of writing so far. My class deadline (only two more to go!) to submit up to 15 pages is Saturday at 9am (realistically, that means by the end of the evening on Friday because I sleep in on the weekends, babe). I can submit less, but my teacher, Jill Santopolo (children's author and editor at Balzer & Bray), is fabulous, and I want to maximize my use of her talents by getting as much feedback as possible.

So let's be real: no way am I going to churn out 11 pages by the end of the day today. I might be able to generate 5 or 6 - if today is a good day So I'll have maybe 10 or 11 pages for Jill and the other class members to rip into. Sigh. Then just one more week of feedback before I'm on my own again.

Well, not quite. I have good friends who are talented writers who give me their feedback if I do the same for them. Halleluyah! But it's weird how I have this compulsion to squeeze every last drop of feedback out of Jill before she slips away. I guess it's just a sign of how valuable her comments are!

Busy weeks happen. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't write more, but at least I wrote something!

Think Big, Write it Down

Writing is useful in so many ways. I just read a post on The Art of Nonconformity about writing a Big Life List.

I've done variations of this and found it to be very useful. I wrote a list of writing goals here in this blog at the beginning of the year, and am on my way to achieving them - I hope!

The other day I found a list of life goals I'd written many years ago. I'd put it away in an obscure place and came upon it. And guess what? I'd achieved the majority of the goals I'd written there! And that happened without looking at the list after I'd written it. I think writing it down makes it more concrete, lays it down in your synapses somehow, so that you take in the goal unconsciously and start moving toward it.

It may be time for me to form another list of Big Life goals. Maybe it's time for you as well? Check out the links above to see ways to help yourself. Take your time, be concrete, think beyond adventure goals (climb Mt. Everest), and consider publishing the list somewhere. All these things can help you have a life that's more fulfilling as you go through it.

Anyone But Tom Bombadil

Author Neil Gaiman sat down with Stephen Colbert on his show last night to discuss his lovely Newberry Medal-winning novel The Graveyard Book. (Read it now! I loved it.) The interview below reveals the theme of the book and that Neil loves Tolkein but hates Tom Bombadil.

Because I follow Neil on Twitter, I've learned that they cut out 40 second of the interview, where Neil said his favorite Tolkein character was Gandalf, and Colbert said his favorite was Faramir. Enjoy!

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Neil Gaiman

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NASA Name Contest

Indulging my Inner Archaeologist...

They are opening up the chambers in the Bent Pyramid in Saqqara! Check out the announcement here.

I did make it into the pyramid of Menkaure when I went to Egypt in 2003. You had to crouch and walk, maintaining that crouch, down a steep incline, clinging to the right hand wall, while people coming out climbed up past you on the left. As you descended, it got dark and sticky and hot. The stone above your head bulged downward. You became accutely aware of the tons of stone piled on top of you. Many people turned around and got the hell out of there after a few moments. Those tomb robbers could not have suffered from claustrophobia at all.

Now I have to go back to Egypt. And maybe write something about exploring underground tunnels beneath a bent pyramid, the tons of stone weighing down from above...

Writing with a Cold

I've been under the weather for about three days now. Hopefully today is the big finish and I'll start getting better. But it did make me (blearily) wonder - how do people write to deadline if they get sick?

I had a brief burst of energy last night and did manage to write two pages. Now I'm afraid to go back and see what I wrote. But I do figure it's better to get something down, almost anything, rather than leave the page blank. Rewriting is a certainty as it is, and you might as well give yourself more to rewrite, right?

We'll see if I have enough energy to crank out two more pages tonight. So far, no. Just typing out this blog entry is making me want to go lie down. So I'm going to lie down.

But all you writers out there, who write sick, on deadline or not - hang in there. Keep writing.

The Grace of Surprise

Okay, this really has nothing to do with writing, but I found the video clip below and am just in awe. In it, a basketball player Chris Paul dribbles the ball through rival team member Jason Perry's legs at lightning speed. It's so fast you can barely see it.



Never thought you'd see a sports clip on this blog, did you? Thank goodness for slo mo and replays. The pass to his teammate who makes the dunk afterwards is almost as spectacular. I could watch this kind of graceful athleticism for hours. It shows the benefits of hours of practice, natural talent, and determination. Writers take note!

(As a tall chick, I also like seeing really tall people show the world that just because we're tall doesn't mean we're clumsy.)

Ten Commandments for Happy Writers

Check out agent Nathan Bransford's post today about the Ten Commandments for Happy Writing.

He's pretty much nailed it.

The Impossible Dream

I haven't seen the Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire yet, but I saw a montage from the film that just floored me, and inspired me.

Getting published. Making a living writing. Impossible dreams, right? Well, take a look at the clip below of Philip Petit, the man who walked on a wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It's a lesson in how to make your impossible dreams come true.

At one point, Petit says, "I thought, okay, this is impossible. Now let's get to work."

Social Networking Etiquette - Agents

So you want to friend an agent on Facebook, or follow your dream agent on Twitter? There are some rules, baby.

Check in out here, on the Literary Agents blog.

I'm now on Twitter. Please forgive me.

At the urging of my evil friend Elisa, I joined Twitter today, and you can follow me @ Ninaberry if for some god-forsaken reason you're on Twitter too.

My excuse? I'm trying to see it as a writing exercise.

Okay, so... yeah. It's a narcissitic writing exercise. For those of you not up on the latest web insanity, Twitter is a site where people just post updates on themselves all day. Unless they block you, you can follow the updates of folks like John Cleese and Neil Gaiman (two of my faves!) and even send them messages. Along the way, you can post your own updates and get your own followers. There's a central feed where every single one of the kajillions of updates is listed as they are added.

Even just this one day of experience has shown me how valuable writing talent is when it comes to Twitter. Would you rather read witticisms from Stephen Colbert or learn that your Aunt just bought some Cortaid? Exactly. That's why Colbert has thousands of followers and your Aunt just has your obligated ass following her.

So I'm going to TRY not to bore all four (!) of my followers with dull updates. This is a challenge since my life is not all that exciting. So I must find ways to make my plodding life and dull observations sparkle and shine. This is a writer's lot, to find the universal, the funny, the beautiful, the truthful in the things and people around them.

It's not easy! But that's my excuse for joining Twitter. Later on no doubt I'll descend into narcissitic madness. Stay tuned!

Oscar Nominated Screeplay Podcast

Deceptive title for this post, ey? My friends Brian Pope and Mike Musa star this week in Pilar Allessandra's latest ON THE PAGE's podcast #76 - "Oscar Talk." You can check it out here or on ITunes - just search for On The Page.

Brian and Mike are funny and smart, and sometimes they're even right! The podcast is a lighthearted and informative. As a writer, I often try to figure out what makes a movie great, and how much the screenplay has to do with it. Of course, if the screenplay is awful, the movie won't be much good. But can a movie be great when the script is just okay? Can a truly great script lift an otherwise adequate movie to greatness? Which of the nominated films has the best screenplay and why?

I live and work in Hollywood, so the Oscars are a big deal around here. They arouse much passionate discussion. Personally, I enjoy the hullabaloo and the excuse to talk about movies, but rarely do I agree with the choices the Academy members make.

You have to remember that the Oscars are first and foremost a marketing tool for Hollywood. On Oscar is not like the hand of God reaching down to pick the best movie. It's a bunch of industry folks with their own weird takes on the people and movies involved.

Fortunately, Pilar, Brian, and Mike know movies, but they also know the truth about the Oscars. If you care about writing or movies, they are definitely worth a listen.

Exposition Central

Conveying vast quantities of exposition is fricking hard in a novel! I have a ton of info to convey on the world, the organizations in it, the people within them, their titles, names, hierarchies, conflicts - oy! I managed to hint at a lot of this in the early, action oriented scenes, but there's only so much of this stuff you can show.

And we all know showing is infinitely better than telling.

So what am I doing now?

Telling.

One character is telling stuff to another. It's logical that he would do this. But I just know that I'll need to change some of it later. This is where I have to force myself to just power onward, rather than stopping to make it perfect now. I can lose a lot of momentum worrying about things like this, and right now I need to just crank out pages, imperfect though they may be.

But exposition's a bitch, baby. Hopefully later I'll make it MY bitch.

busy busy busy

Write write, read read, edit, comment, read, write write.

Blog.

Write write write. Read, edit, comment. Write write write...

A Writer's Credo

Agent Michael Stearns has an effing brilliant quote from Raymond Carver on his blog As the World Stearns, which clearly gives a writer's credo. Check it out here, and be reminded of what it is to be a writer.

25 Random Things

There's a viral note going around Facebook that asks you to write down 25 random things about yourself. Then you tag 25 of your friends and they write down 25 random things about themselves and tag their friends. And so on. Of course, most people don't do it, but I did. And I think it could be turned into a writing exercise of sorts. How do you convey your personality in this list? How can you be creative? Maybe we should make these random lists about the characters in our novels and screenplays? Herewith, my list:

25 Random Things About Me

1. I love random things. I score very high on the random side of random vs. sequential.
2. I am a cat and dog person. I even think opossums are cute.
3. I have an extra vertebra.
4. By the time I get to the last stanza of "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, I'm all choked up.
5. I get choked up easily.
6. I feel happiest and most at home in the waves at Bellows Beach, Oahu.
7. When I'm irritable, I get clumsy.
8. I keep snacks on hand so my blood sugar doesn't drop and I don't get irritable and clumsy.
9. My favorite movie is "The Searchers."
10. I think hot tubs, illegal drugs, and Girl Scout cookies are overrated.
11. Single malt scotch is my favorite alcoholic drink, but it takes me about two years to get through a bottle.
12. I love stationery stores. All that blank paper gives me a weird happy high.
13. I often get impatient reading "great" books, so of course I was an English major.
14. But Shakespeare is my favorite writer. After him it's probably David Simon of "The Wire."
15. I once disproved Einstein's Theory of Relativity, using a sneaky Socratic method.
16. I think Socrates was full of it.
17. I once fooled a Frenchman into thinking I was French.
18. Best food I ever had was in Bologna, Italy.
19. My dentist stories are worse than yours.
20. I've worn the ring my mother gave me on the same finger since high school.
21. I'm starting to feel self conscious about writing this list. Am I revealing horrible overly narcissistic tendancies to the world?
22. I like to howl at the moon.
23. For a long time I wanted to be an Egyptolgist.
24. I can count to 29 in Turkish. If I knew the Turkish word for "thirty" I could get up to 39.
25. Currently, my favorite word is "pulchritudinous."

100 poems for 100 days

If you have any poetry in your soul, check out this site.

An Excellent Waste of Time

Was mooching around YA Author Eileen Cook's blog like the passive aggressive lurker that I am, and saw her recommendation of this site as a top-notch time waster. I checked it out and agreed so wholeheartedly, I'm passing it on to the eight people who occasionally waste time on this site!

It's called Passive Aggressive Notes. And it will remind you of all the wonderfully horrible things people do, and the hilarious notes we leave to tell them to just stop it already. I copied one, which you can see above, but that's just the beginning of the panty-raid story! Also, take note of the misspelled "steeling" with the second "e" changed to an "a" post printing. At least we know the panties aren't made of steel. Imagine the chafing!

Side note: is there a sillier word in English that "panties"? If you can think of one, post it in the comments.

Red, White, and Blue Day

I'm so proud of our country. We take for granted this peaceful transfer of power, I think, forgetting how revolutionary it still is.

It's an amazing day. I wish I could be there with the two million who witnessed the inauguration of Barack Obama, but I feel as if we are all there in spirit today. The thing with feathers is fluttering in my heart once more, and I'm a bit verklempt. It makes me realize how difficult these past eight years have been. I've been holding my breath, braced for more horror from my own government. Now, I hope, I can breathe a bit freer. And so will the rest of the world.