Category: side projects (Page 2 of 4)

Blogging Every Day? (Again?)

April 16, 2023 / / 2 Comments

I don’t know if this is a worthwhile challenge for myself, but maybe I should try blogging every day again.

(To use the word “again” feels like a bit of a stretch. In late 2020/early 2021, I almost managed to blog every day… for a few weeks. But when March rolled around, I was back to sporadic posts and self-loathing. So, to say I’m doing this “again” feels misleading. Anyway. The point is, I’m gonna try blogging every day.)

The trouble with a challenge like this is that my life is filled with the ups and downs of raising young children, and there’s a reason Hollywood directors don’t like working with kids or animals. I can have the best intention of blogging every day, and then suddenly I’m taking care of three sick kids with a stomach bug, or someone’s broken their arm, or they’ve all declared war against each other over who gets to play with the big foam blocks.

I hate setting a challenge for myself and then not completing it. Story of my life, unfortunately.

But I’ve being doing a private challenge for the past several weeks, and that challenge is still going strong despite the hectic life I sometimes lead. Back in the beginning of March, I made a commitment to write at least one sentence of fiction every day (with Sundays being an optional day), and since March 6, I haven’t missed a single week. There are days when I can only write one sentence, but I still write it and count it as a day in my habit tracker

Maybe something similar can be applied to blogging. I might not write long, epic posts every day, but I’ll post something. I’ll write a quick missive about what I read or watched or listened to, or something I noticed the kids playing, or an update on how my writing is going. I don’t know. Kind of a “show your work” project.

I still want to write longer, more in-depth blog posts, but perhaps I can work on those slowly while also posting my shorter, day-to-day ones. A bit like how I write my newsletter.

I might fail this challenge, but I’m still gonna take it on. I’m nothing if not persistent, I guess.

Kickstarter is LIVE!

October 5, 2022 / / 0 Comments

The campaign for Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion has begun on Kickstarter

I can’t believe I’ve already reached my funding goal and unlocked all the stretch goals! I’m in shock, frankly. Everything else at this point is gravy.

Both of these novels aren’t coming out officially until summer 2023, so to get advanced copies, consider backing the Kickstarter.

I’m offering both ebook and paperback versions of both (with some special perks if you pledge at higher levels), as well as stretch goals that include two short stories and a digital copy of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, so please join the campaign if you can!

The Bamboo Curtain

August 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Today I finished another chapter in Avalon Summer. It’s called “The Clay Mines.”

Not sure about it yet. The novella itself is based a lot on my memories from childhood, and sometimes I’m just writing things as I remember them, not really thinking about plot or structure or conflict or tension or anything, just seeing everything in my mind’s eye and transcribing it on the page. The ending of “The Clay Mines” was like that. I was just remembering things and putting them in there, hoping that somehow my subconscious was making connections.

When I go back and reread my words tomorrow, maybe I’ll see things that don’t fit and I’ll cut, or maybe I’ll see a place to add more, but sometimes it’s hard to judge. Everything is hard to judge when it’s your own work. There’s the version in your head and the version on the page — and they don’t match up — but it’s hard to know if what you put on the page is trash, or if it’s just that artists can’t judge their own work.

I think it’s probably better — as the artist — not to judge at all. Just put it all out there and let the readers decide.  This is where enjoying the process — the crafting of the story — is more important than the finished product. Whether the “Clay Mines” chapter works or not is/should be an after-thought. I had fun writing it today. I had fun remembering and trying to picture everything clearly, and to my delight, I remembered a detail about my grandparents’ basement that I hadn’t thought of in years.

That memory alone was worth all the time I spent writing the chapter. Suddenly, with the memory of that detail, an entire vault of other memories opened up and came back to me. That experience is part of the reason I’m writing this book in the first place. I want to remember those forgotten details of the past and put them into some kind of coherent narrative, to lift them out of memory and bring them to the present. Today, I did that.

Drawing a Picture of Structure

August 14, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I was experimenting the other day with drawing pictures of the structures of my two works-in-progress (Gates to Illvelion and Avalon Summer).

Avalon Summer was pretty easy. The drawing was like a bullseye target with my main character, Sarah, moving through each ring of the target until getting to the center. The novella is very much an interior journey for the characters. Each ring of the target is an experience or set of experiences that leads to insight, facing fears, internal change, etc. I could visualize what I was doing very clearly.

For Gates to Illvelion, however, my first attempt at drawing the structure was a mess. I had these venn diagram/concentric circles going around and then in the middle of it all I drew a “traditional” plot structure (the old linear up and down lines leading to a climax). Somehow I was trying to express the story’s circular nature as well as its linear progression. As a drawing, it was a mess.

Does that mean Gates to Illvelion is a mess too? I don’t think so.

I tried to draw the structure again.

This time, I drew two jagged lines, one on the left side of the page, one on the right. These lines weren’t slowly going up, though, they were going down to a point in the center. This point was the low-point for each of them, the characters of Gwenhivar and the Queen. They were on parallel but also crisscrossing journeys, and I realized that what I had drawn was a mirror image.

THAT is the structure of Gates to Illvelion. A mirror image. The young girl and the older woman are on mirror-like journeys, one going down into the depths and the other trying to find her way back to the surface. A much better image than my first attempt.

Why even do all this drawing anyway? What does this have to do with storytelling, with writing, etc.?

I guess I just wanted to have some fun. To see what my stories would look like visually instead of verbally. I suppose I also was hoping such drawings would help clarify things for me. What kind of stories I was telling, how my imagination should experience them. I don’t work from an outline (not anymore, anyway), so visualization is important. I need to see the movie unfolding, flickering into view from the darkness. But I also need to have some idea of the form my story is taking. This isn’t the same as an outline, but it is a way to “see” what I’m making. Outlines are too plot-focused for me. If I outline, then I get bored of the story when I actually sit down to write it.

But if I discover the story as I’m writing, the experience is thrilling and a lot of fun. No boredom.

However, at some point in the process, I need to have a feeling for the form the story is taking. I need to feel the shape of the story without necessarily knowing what will “happen next.”  I don’t think it would be useful to draw a picture of the structure too early in the process; that would be too much like making an outline.

But once the story is a living, breathing organism, then a picture can help. It can show me what kind of organism I’m dealing with. I still don’t know what will happen next in the plot, but I know what kind of story I’m telling, and that lets the movie images flicker more clearly through my mind so I can transcribe them onto the page.

Daily Blogging?

July 8, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Can I get back to daily blogging? Would it be worth it? There’s a part of me that thinks, “What’s the point?” since nobody really reads my website, and the time devoted to daily blogging might be better spent elsewhere (like soliciting new editing clients…), but then I think about the joy I get from hitting “publish” and seeing my blog post go live to the world. Sure, nobody will read it (except my husband, maybe), but there’s something satisfying about being able to write a few thoughts, ramble a bit without any direction, and then hit publish.

I have loved the act of blogging since I first discovered it more than fifteen years ago. I have always preferred blogs to any of the other social media that have sprung up afterwards. Yes, I do have a newsletter (I’m on Substack like everyone else), but the blog is a different kind of space. It’s more intimate, somehow. And it’s a lot more like a playground. I’m just doing whatever, no pressure or purpose other than to muck around. I’m not doing this blog to make money; no monetizing or ads or anything like that. I just want to write and explore and post it for other people to see. Even if no one sees.

Maybe daily blogging wouldn’t be worth it. Maybe I should be doing something else, something more “productive.” There’s an argument to be made that I should spend these fifteen or twenty minutes a day working on my fiction instead. That’s probably the most persuasive argument against daily blogging. I love to write fiction, and I should always be doing more of it if I can. I have novels and series that need finishing. I have readers who are waiting for new books.

But—

As much as I love writing fiction, blogging uses a different part of my brain, a different writing muscle, and I want to use that muscle. Blogging has a way of helping me with my fiction. It gives me a chance to get words down on paper, to open the floodgates so to speak, so that all of my writing — fiction, nonfiction, journaling, copy writing — becomes easier. There’s this weird phenomenon where words beget more words, and more words beget even more words, and if I’m writing on the blog, suddenly I’m writing more fiction, and if I’m writing more fiction, I suddenly have words I want to add to the blog. Instead of the blog taking away from my other writing, it almost ends up feeding it.

Time, of course, is the most precious commodity, and there will be days when I don’t have enough time to let all the words out that I have bubbling up inside, and so I guess on those days, one type of writing will be sacrificed for the other. Maybe some days I only blog or I only write fiction. But I gave up my teaching job precisely so I could have more time for writing, and even though time is still scarce (I have young children, after all), I have more freedom now to use my time as I will. Even if it’s just for five minutes, I can use that time for blogging.

It’s not really the time that matters anyway. It’s the desire, the will to do it. If I say I want to blog everyday, then I can do it. If I say I want to write fiction every day, then I can do it. Even one minute is enough.

I think that’s why I want to start blogging again. It’s another way to write, another way to get words on the page. And words beget more words, and more words, and more words. For a writer, that’s a good thing.

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