Category Archives: Writing

Random Acts of Kindness

My darling little sister, who is reading my next book in MS form, just sent me a lovely e-mail telling me she got tingles from reading the opening sentences, and voila, my day is better. Thanks, love.

Also, I have remembered that work =/= writing all the time, and am reading a second-hand well-used copy of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. A page in and boom, the highlighter is out, and the sticky bookmarks, my notebook is revving up, and my brain is moving.

I still have to leave in forty minutes, though.

Whoppitas, Whirrs, and Ums

Marissa says something interesting about work-in-progress reviews by writers and non-writers, and I’m going to paste it here for immediate reference too.

I think it’s extremely valuable to have non-writers read and critique books. This is not in lieu of having skilled writers doing critiques but in addition to it. Ideally, the finished books will be read by non-writers, and just as only having people of one sex or only having people of one age critique a book can skew the type of critique one will get, only having people of one approach to the written word read it might skew the response.

I think some non-writers are a little shy about this because they don’t necessarily know what a good critique looks like. Trust me, writers sometimes have all the jargon down and brilliant ideas for exactly how, technically, to fix a scene — and other times we will look at each other and go, “I dunno, it’s just that this part kinda goes whoppita whoppita whoppita when it should go whirrrrrr, y’know?” Or else, “I think it needs to be more, kinda, um, um…manic…does that make sense?” If you socialize with writers you should know that we are not necessarily more coherent than other people until we’ve had several drafts to hammer out the whoppitas and the ums. And we probably ask each other, “Does that make sense?” more often than the international average, not less. And sometimes the whoppitas and the ums are the bits that make for a good and useful critique and the detailed, technical jargon ideas about how to fix something turn out not to be very useful.

“Does that make sense?” has to be one of my top five frequently-uttered sayings.

She’s right. Even though I’m a writer, I find it hard to put how a story works (or doesn’t work) for me into words. And so I often resort to the technical review instead. It’s a cop-out, but I feel inadequate giving someone a crit that essentially says, “That scene didn’t work for me but I don’t know why; it just felt like it fizzled”. I keep looking for a way to suggest a fix for it, instead of just saying “This needs something else here”. A non-writer wouldn’t necessarily be looking for the fix; I think they’d be more comfortable saying “This led me to expect X and I didn’t get the payoff, and what I got instead wasn’t enough”.

This is one of the reasons why I drag my feet about doing reviews of works in progress for friends. I get stuck over-analysing why I feel a certain way about a scene or a chapter or a turn of events, and I have no way to express it clearly. This is completely my problem and has nothing to do with the MS I’m critiquing. I hate handing something back with vague “this made me feel” kind of feedback; I feel as if I should be saying more, giving them more value, so to speak, because there’s nothing worse than getting a work back with no concrete crits whatsoever. (Hello, the A minus that has haunted me for decades! What made it an A- paper? What could I have done better to make it an A?) I always feel that I’m not necessarily the best person to give another writer with whom I’m personally acquainted feedback. I can do it for strangers, because I don’t know them and the way they write, think, and work: they are completely separate from their MS. Understanding how and why a writer does something because one knows them in person is in some ways a handicap. The general public does not know an author personally (and reading their on-line journals or web sites does not constitute ‘knowing them personally’), and reads a book or short story as a discrete entity, free of any authorial association.

To be fair to myself, I do need things to be as technically tight as possible before I can focus on reading and evaluating the story; that’s just one of my quirks. Floppy prose or distracting grammatical errors mean it’s hard to find the story in order to respond to it. So doing a tech critique before/while I respond to the story is just the way I have to do things. It means taking longer to do the crit, though, which is another reason I drag my feet.

That was all rather stream-of-consciousness, wasn’t it. And I have no pithy wrap-up for it, either.

*wanders off*

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 8,800
New words today: 1,250

Five hundred words before a two-hour nap (the nap bit was intentional, the two hour part was not), the rest in the hour post-nap before I went to get the boy. The five hundred took longer. I’m remembering that my most productive work hours are between four and six. The problem now is that I have to leave at 4:45ish to collect Sparky.

What I’m currently struggling with on this hearthcraft project is the balance between spiritual and practical information. Ideally, one would explore the spiritual associations of each practical bit of information, but that’s just not possible. I’m at the throwing information down on the page stage of the process, and I keep thinking in the back of my active brain that it all should be much more meaningful. There is plenty of time to go into the spiritual aspect of all these practical things once that practical things are down. Baby steps, brain. One thing at a time.

Today’s amusing tyop: ‘crate the ambiance’. Because you can’t let it be catching, goodness no.

Cautious Improvement

Today things are much better, thank you. I left the boy at the caregiver’s giving giggly hugs to all the other children and the flock of them jumping around like kangaroos. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to pass out or not, now that I’ve handled my correspondence and filing. There will likely be a nap later, and my hair needs a wash. I’ll see if I can pull off a thousand words first. It may take a while, as I can’t think straight; my head feels like it’s stuffed with treacle-soaked cotton. I give myself permission to give up at some point.

Sunny out, but very cold. The car doors on the passenger side were frozen shut this morning.

I received my first Christmas present in the mail yesterday: a renewal to last year’s gift subscription of Fine Cooking! Thanks, Mum and Dad!

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 7,551
New words today: 2,511

I originally ended at 6,721 to yield another 1,682 word day, but that was too much of a coincidence, so I did a short expansion on spoken magic and ended up with 6,905. That gave me a day’s total of 1,866 and I said heck, I can add another 44 words to make an even 1,900. So I did, talking about the use and care of cast iron, and I just kept going, because I might as well finish the section. Of course, that left me fifty words below 7,000, so I did it again. And then again when my daily total was 2,487, because 2,500 looks so much better.

Heh.

So much for stopping at four o’clock to give myself some time off before I have to go make supper. But an extra eight hundred words in half an hour? I’ll take that any day, thanks.

(Twelve percent done! Woo-hoo!)

The Good And The Bad

HRH found the combo brush/scraper in the garage. Yay! Just in time for umpteen centimetres of snow!

We have a Monday appointment to have our snow tires put on. More yay!

WHY are there so few new words in this book? I have been working ALL DAY. There are references all over the floor! I have tracked down historical information from everywhere! I have expanded incomplete phrases! Okay, there’s a tenth of a book here already, but it feels like there should be more.

That’s it; I’m working till four and then I am stopping.

Friday Morning

It feels odd to be sitting down to work at eight-thirty. HRH took the car to work today, dropping the boy off at his grandma’s on the way. Usually I’m not at my desk before ten o’clock. I like it. I may ask that this become a regular thing on Liam’s grandma days.

There’s nice light in here this morning. Although it’s overcast, there are lazy snowflakes drifting in the air, and what light there is is bouncing off the snow on the ground. Yesterday’s freezing rain completely coated the maple tree out front, and every single twig was coated in a glistening sheath. When we went out this morning to put Liam in the car, the breeze brushed the branches and I heard clicks and cracks, a sound that I haven’t heard in months. The poor blue cedar in the corner of the back yard is equally frozen, and already bending towards the snow-covered ground. Every year it happens earlier, and every year we think we’ve lost it to the weight of an ice storm. We’ve tried tying it to the telephone pole behind it, propping it up with wood… we’ll see if the roots actually stay in the ground this year, and if so, for how long.

Liam and I made our first loaf of bread in the new bread machine (or, if one reads the French on the box, the ‘robot baker’), and it’s delicious. The texture is nice and even throughout, not too light, and not too crumbly. The crust is even, too. It’s good to know that I can bake one or two of these a week, that it will be fresh right up until it’s eaten (yesterday’s is half-gone already) and not preservative-ridden. I like knowing exactly what goes into the things I cook. My one regret is that the smell of baking bread doesn’t permeate the house, but if I’m craving that then I can always take the dough out of the machine after the second rise and bake it in the oven instead. I’ll try a whole-wheat version next, and buy some seeds to make a flax-sesame-poppyseed version too.

There was a Liam-related accident with my cello bow yesterday, resulting in a snapped frog. I have another bow but it’s heavier, and as I haven’t practised this set of music with it I’m concerned that it will adversely affect my performance or cramp my hand. Some of the Grieg requires a light touch, for example. HRH is bringing home some Krazy Glue tonight, so we’ll try to fix it that way and I’ll see how it works tonight at the dress rehearsal. If it doesn’t work the frog can always be professionally replaced, but that’s not going to happen by tomorrow night. The temporary solution doesn’t have to hold beyond the end of tomorrow’s concert. I’ll bring both bows, just in case.

Research books for the hearthcraft book are starting to arrive, and there are more second-hand ones to order today. Except I’m currently watching my outgoing cash flow very, very closely at the moment. One of the problems with doing freelance work is that you do the work and get paid at an unspecified time later, on someone else’s schedule. It makes for a nice surprise when the cheque finally lands in the mailbox, but the watching of the mail until that point isn’t as much fun.