Still chugging along...

I haven't done much writing over the past couples weeks because I've been distracted by the holidays, and I was starting to feel like Jack Torrance in "The Shining."  I decided it was a good idea to take a small writing break because I was on the verge of writing "All work and no play makes Mandy a dull girl" thousands of times over.

Last night I went to sleep close to 4 AM because I was busy adding the last couple chapters I wrote a couple weeks ago into the manuscript finally.  Around 4 AM is also when my coffee buzz finally wore off.

Earlier today I was talking with my brother about what I wanted to do for the next chapter.  The brainstorming session with him helped immensely because I was able to demolish the writer's block that was on the horizon.  It was frustrating for me because I kept thinking about how I wanted the story to go after this chapter, but I couldn't get the next chapter completely thought out in my head until earlier.

I had a dream that helped somewhat last night, and sharing that with my brother helped me to work out the entire next chapter instituting some of his ideas as well.  I outline the chapter with a rewrite in an earlier chapter before I came to the library tonight.  I'll be working adding that chapter sometime this week.

I was hoping to have "The Shepherdess Princess" finished by the end of 2013 at the latest, but now it might take another week or two.  I'm on the home stretch with it!

Happy New Year to all my readers!

Thanksgiving, and Other Matters...

It's been a while since I updated this page.  I was planning on doing another blog update a day or two after my last one, but I came down with a terrible cold and today is the first day I've been out and about among the living again.

I have three new poems I wanted to share that I wrote 2-3 weeks ago now:

Remembrances

It has been a couple months

Since September 11^th came and went.

Signifying twelve years since that day

The terrorists tried to take our way

Of living when two buildings were destroyed,

And a third plane was grounded that was deployed

To go for our Nation’s Capital.

Instead, the passengers recaptured

The plane from the hijackers,

And landed it in a field

Before their lives they would yield.

 On that day.

No one thought it would turn out that way.

They went to work like usual,

Or got on a plane that was fueled

To go to their destination,

And ended up being casualties of terrorists’ premeditation.

Those people were not the only heroes to fall

As I think of the men & women who answered the call

At the twin towers:

The very people who spent hours

Looking for survivors

And losing their own lives being the heroes they were.

Then there are movies like Remember Me

That shows another side unseen.

What the families have to go through

As they mourn their lost loved ones.

Where would they be now

If that horrible day never came?  And how

Different would our lives be

If the terrorists were stopped completely

Before anyone was sacrificed?

We’ll never know, so we go on with our lives.

In remembrance of everyone that gave

Their lives to save

Our way of freedom

As Veteran’s Day was also seen.

Yearly, the people’s minds are cast

To those whose sacrifice showed their “last

Full measure of devotion.”

I bet all the dead bodies could fill the Pacific Ocean.

Novel Moments

It’s almost completed:

The novel that will be repeatedly

Distributed when it’s accepted

By a publisher that’s been affected

By my words.

Being read by many is what my characters deserve.

I  will go home from a coffee trip

With the intent

To turn on my laptop,

And get lost in my imagination.

Other writers are about

Hoping to get their word count

For the day.

Oblivious to their surroundings

As they get lost in the creativity.

Sealed With A Kiss

“The last single girl kiss”[1]

Was shared last night in anticipation of wedded bliss

With an ethereal audience waiting

For the two halves to become one

Under a blanket of stars with no one

Except the priest to bear witness

As their vows are sealed with a kiss.

The Heavenly Hosts approve

As a beacon of light shines through

The night sky,

And surround the united groom and bride.

Their love will go on forever,

And when they grow old they’ll remember

As they sit on the porch swinging

Of that long ago day with wedding bells ringing.

“You’re as beautiful as the day we met,”

The husband admits with no regrets.

The wife’s cheeks blushed a rosy hue

As they smelled the dew

On the grass.

Both wish this moment would always last.

---

[1] This is part of a line delivered by Carrie Bradshaw in the Sex and the City movie.

Other Writing:

I'm still working on finishing "The Shepherdess Princess."  I was hoping to be nearing the end by the time this weekend rolled around, but I've had a terrible cold for the past week and a half.  Thanksgiving day was the first time in the past couple weeks that I added anything to my manuscript, and I have a couple more chapters written out longhand that I'll be adding to my computer when I get home from the library tonight.

I have finally jumped the hurdle that led me to print out my manuscript and edit what I had before I continued with the story.  I broke through that stumbling block yesterday, and came out of it a woman possessed!  I spent a couple hours last night before going to bed writing 5 more pages in my spiral notebook.  Then I added 2 more longhand pages this morning when I woke up.

The end is so close that I can see a shimmer of the light at the end of the tunnel!  I have an idea for four more chapters that will take place at the ending.  This weekend I'll be working on closing the gap until I reach "the final four" as I'm going to refer to them from now on.  I have a scene written out already that is staying in my novel's splice file until I need it that will end the book.  I just can't believe I have the end scene figured out already, but I'm beginning to feel accomplished because I'm so close.

If my creative streak keeps going, I should be typing the words "The End" to "The Shepherdess Princess" by the middle of December, so stay tuned!

7 Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

A friend of mine shared a link to this article on Facebook, and I thought I would share it on this blog.  For two main reasons: 1) I like Ernest Hemingway, and 2) I'm writing fiction novels, and struggling a little bit with it.

Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

in Books, Literature, Writing | February 19th, 2013 36 Comments

Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction.  He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing. We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.

1: To get started, write one true sentence.

Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

There is a difference between stopping and foundering. To make steady progress, having a daily word-count quota was far less important to Hemingway than making sure he never emptied the well of his imagination. In an October 1935 article in Esquire ( “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter”) Hemingway offers this advice to a young writer:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.

Building on his previous advice, Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:

When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.

T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.

Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.

6: Use a pencil.

Hemingway often used a typewriter when composing letters or magazine pieces, but for serious work he preferred a pencil. In the Esquire article (which shows signs of having been written on a typewriter) Hemingway says:

When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.

7: Be Brief.

Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.” In a 1945 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway writes:

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

Oops!  I'm guilty of breaking number 3.  I'm always thinking about the story when I'm not working on it.  And I break number 6 because I always use a pen when I'm writing something new down in a notebook to add to my manuscript on my computer later.  Number 4 I have done, and it does help me to come up with new ideas for future scenes.

Another Update...

I've been wanting to update this blog for the past couple weeks with my newest poetry, but I kept forgetting my USB stick at home.  Well now I have it with me.  Here's the two newest poems I wrote:

Trick-Or-Treat

Once upon a Halloween

Amid the blood-curdling screams

Emitting from the goblins & ghouls

Going from door-to-door

Trying to score

The yearly sugar-induced coma

Before heading home.

“Trick or treat” they cry

At each house they stop by.

They want more treats than tricks

That’s for sure.

The goblins & ghouls return home

With sacks and buckets full to show

Their friends the next day

How much candy they came away

With, and to gloat

If it was more than their friends got.

The Forgotten One

(Co-wrote by Sara Megan Kay)

Look at the bones

In the coffin entombed

With no visitors

On record.

The forgotten one dwells within

The family mausoleum

With no family and friends alive

To visit him.

The flowers have seen better days.

They were newly left there in the month of May.

Several years have come and gone

As the brick work crumbles one by one.

As for "The Shepherdess Princess"...

I finished editing what I had so far in the manuscript on my computer file.  I still have to rewrite a bit the scene I was stuck on before I continue with the rest of the story.  I'm mainly having a flow problem with the newest scene, but I have an idea for fixing that.  I'm going to be working on that for the rest of the week.

I'm not participating in National Novel Writing Month this year because I'm using the month of November to hopefully finish this novel.

Other News

I have a surprise I want to share with my readers, but I'm going to wait a while to see how things pan out first.  My partner-in-crime already knows some of my news because it pertains to the book we co-wrote together.

Stay tuned...:)

A Writing Update

Finally!  I have to remember to bring my laptop to the library more often if I want to update my fans on my writing because the library computers don't let me write in any body text when I try to update my blog.  All it allows me to do is put in the blog title.  It gets frustrating after a while.

ANYWAY...

I haven't made my minimum self-imposed deadline of October 8th to be finished with writing "The Shepherdess Princess" because I haven't been able to write anything new in it for a while.  However, I am slowly making some progress because I printed out what I have so far in the manuscript, which came to 87 pages after I changed the page size to 8 1/2 X 11 and double spaced the document, and am now halfway through editing it in my computer file.

As I've gone through the motions of editing it, I am getting ideas for continuing from where I'm stuck that I jot down for future reference.  I'm ending up with quite the outline I can refer to in order to help me finish the book itself.

Other Writing...

My time struggling with "The Shepherdess Princess" hasn't been a total bust.  A couple weeks ago I wrote a new poem that I added to my manuscript, and over the past couple months I worked on a short story that I submitted to "Chicken Soup for the Soul" a week ago.

This Coming Weekend...

I am going to be working more on finishing the editing I have left, so I can to the rest of the story.  A writing session with a friend may be in order!  ;)  :)

Ten Rules for Writing by Elmore Leonard

I was just about to come on here and share Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules for writing when I saw this posted by a friend on Facebook: "Elmore Leonard, Master of Crime Fiction, Dies at 87."  He was a great writer, and will be missed.

Anyway, I read a book called Behind the Mystery: Top Mystery Writers interviewed by Stuart Kaminsky a while back and I came across some quotes and these ten rules for writing that I copied down into one of my notebooks.  The Ten Rules for Writing was found on pages 25-26 in the book.

Ten Rules for Writing

By Elmore Leonard

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create an atmosphere and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long.  The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.  There are expectations.  If you happen to be Barry Lopez who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.  But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction.  A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s okay because a character in the book makes a point of what my rules are all about.  He says, ‘I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy who’s talking looks like.  I want to figure out what he looks like by the way he talks…figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says.  I like some description, but not too much of that…Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle…spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language.  That’s nice, but I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it.  I don’t want hooptedoodle mixed up with the story.’

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

          The line of dialogue belongs to the character, the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.  But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, and lied.  I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ‘she asserted’ and had to stop reading to get a dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”.

He admonished gravely.  To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin.  The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange.  I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write the historical romances “filled with rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.  If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers like Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation.  I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

One you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the pages with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop.  Notice the way Anne Piroux captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered in Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants: what do the “American and the girl with him” look like?  “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.”  That’s the only reference to physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison.  But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10. Try to leave out parts that readers tend to skip.

A rule that comes to mind in 1983.  Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see too many words in them.  What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpretrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up 10:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go.  I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.  It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.  (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)  If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what’s going on and I’m nowhere in sight.

I found some of the rules to be rather comical, and I realized I'm guilty of breaking rule #2, and #6 already in my own novel.  That just means I have something to work on when I get to the editing stage.

I also like seeing how other authors deal with writer's block because everyone deals with it differently.  I took the following quote from page 61 of Behind the Mystery.  It is Faye Kellerman’s answer to a question about writer’s block:

“I have situations where writing comes easier and situations when it comes harder, but I force myself to write something.  The most important thing is not to freeze when it’s not perfect.  Nothing is ever perfect.  Don’t be a baby, and say ‘It’s not coming.’  Work on it.”

Is That a New Post I See?

Yes, it is!  You are not imagining things.  I finally found the time to update my readers on my life since my last post.

1.  I have bridged the gap I was working on in "The Shepherdess Princess," so now I can continue on with the rest of the story.

2.  I've decided to add a bibliography to the back of the manuscript to show my readers what resources I used in bringing the story together.  I've been working on that for the past few hours at the local library because some of the information I printed out from online resources didn't have website information and such.

I'm mostly done with the bibliography now except for the several documents I printed out that has the website information.  I have mostly Wikipedia articles to add to the bibliography now, and then I'll be done with that.

3.  I have started compiling a list of possible publishers I can send my manuscript to when it's done.  Yes, I am that close to being done with the book!  ;)  If I hunker down and write, I'm planning on being finished by October 8th, 2013.  Halloween at the latest!

TEASER

For being such a patient group of followers, here is another teaser from "The Shepherdess Princess" for your reading pleasure:

            As Jazelle and Philippe were walking out of the woods, side-by-side, Jazelle couldn’t help bringing up a subject that was still nagging at her.  “Philippe,” she began, anxious to think what the outcome might be, “Can I ask you to clarify something for me?”

            “Of course,” Philippe croaked out, wondering if he’d live to regret what came next.

            “Back there you said that you were withholding information to protect those you know and love,” Jazelle said, heart racing, “Does that include me?”

            Jazelle’s words caused Philippe to stop in his tracks, and face her.  What should I say? He thought, Should I finally come out with how I truly feel about her?  Would she reject me, or accept me without knowing everything about me?  “Of course, I love you,” Philippe admitted, “You’re my best friend, my only friend, that I’m really close to around here.”

            “I love you, too,” Jazelle’s face beamed as she threw her arms around his neck, and their lips met in a steamy kiss.

            “Whoa,” Philippe said once he was able to push her away before the kiss deepened anymore than it already had, “I didn’t mean it that way!” He lied.

            “Oh, I’m so embarrassed,” Jazelle replied, covering her face with her hands.

            “Don’t be,” Philippe said in an attempt to console her, “I liked it!”

            “Pig,” Jazelle said before pushing him aside as she stormed off.

            All Philippe could do was stand there and chuckle as  he watched her from behind.  “You know, you’re kind of cute when you’re pretending to be angry,” he called out to her.

            Jazelle stopped, turned around, and went charging back to him.  SMACK! Her right hand slapped his cheek so hard it began throbbing instantly.  He dropped the bread he carried onto the ground as his hand flew up to caress the red mark now forming there.  She hurt her hand, too, but was too pissed off to care about the pain as she left him again.

I hope I've left people salivating again.  Maybe the book will actually be distributed to the masses by the next time I have to share another teaser.