IWSG: The best Beta-partner? & Writer's Update

 

 It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means IWSG posting! 

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

The awesome co-hosts for the September 2 posting of the IWSG are PJ Colando, J Lenni Dorner, Deniz Bevan, Kim Lajevardi, Natalie Aguirre, and Louise - Fundy Blue! 

Every month there is an OPTIONAL question:

September 2 question - If you could choose one author, living or dead, to be your beta partner, who would it be and why?

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I've had some fun thinking about who I'd like to have as my beta partner. I mean, I already have some of the best, members of this group with a keen eye to plot and prose. But what could I learn from Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie? 

Maybe not as much as I think. I love their books, but there's no denying their writing styles are dated. So maybe I can think about someone contemporary... I'll pick on a few mystery writers I really admire, and whose style I think would compliment my own. Here's the short list off the top of my head: 

Jacqueline Winspeare. Her Maisie Dobbs mysteries are beautifully crafted, both plot-wise and linguistically. And I bet she could help me get a grip on my characters' feelings. 

Rhys Bowen: Her "Royal Spyness" series proves she knows a lot about goofiness and sometimes wild plots, developing characters that are just a touch over the top, and how to balance humor with murder.

Elena Taylor/Elena Hartwell. She knows a thing or two about quirky small towns, as well as about humor in murder mysteries. Plus she set her first series in Bellingham, WA, just a stone's throw from Pismawallops Island. 

Finally, just for the sake of some of the best prose I've ever read, I'll take Ivan Doig (see an example of my ravings about his writing here or here). 

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Now for my writer's update. I spent a lot of the last month on the road, or in the wilderness, so much of my writing was mundane journalling, with some less mundane entries, and a little work on the main character of the new mystery series I'm contemplating. 

But all is not about hiking: I did manage to complete and send in my entry for the new IWSG anthology, and am still plowing, little by little, through the edits on Death By Donut.  I have a lot more travel on my agenda now through October, but I do have some hopes of completing the book and bringing it out early in the new year, though I don't think I can make the pre-Xmas target I was trying for before the world turned upside down.

My mind wants to skip around, too. I still have other stories and some anthologies in mind to work on. Maybe as my ability to focus returns (not that it's ever great), and when I settle in this fall to stay home for a couple of months (mostly), I'll be able to at least edit the shorts and put together those anthologies! 

Every word written, every page edited, is a triumph.

This month's photo treat: a couple of really nice moose. Meese? Mooses?

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All images and text ©Rebecca M. Douglass, unless otherwise indicated.
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

 

 

IWSG: Writer’s Update

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! If it links to Google+, be sure to change it as Google+ is going away in January. Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.

Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.   
The next posting day is August 5th. 
Sign up here.

 

The awesome co-hosts for the August 5 posting of the IWSG are Susan Baury Rouchard, Nancy Gideon, Jennifer Lane, Jennifer Hawes, Chemist Ken, and Chrys Fey!

My update:

It’s hard to believe it’s been 3 months, during which I have managed to write 3 not-very-good short stories—and about 12,000 words for my eyes only. It helped a little in my fear that I’m not a writer anymore, when I realized just how much journaling I had actually done!

Where things stand now as a writer: I wrote and on Friday will share on my blog another silly SF story about my favorite hapless, er, intrepid space explorer, Xavier Xanthum. I produced a very poor draft of a story for the IWSG Anthology, which I have some rather small hopes of being able to spiff up enough to submit in time. I have also resumed edits on my new Pismawallops PTA novel, and am finding that going much better than expected. I've regained enough focus to work for 45 minutes or an hour, and the editing at the front end of the novel is pretty simple, so it's soothing.  I have also worked on an exercise to try to write a character who accepts her feelings, rather than trying to hide/deny them as most of my main characters do. That one isn’t producing any kind of story, but it is good writing practice.

That leads me to a question I asked a couple of weeks ago about fictional characters who are good with feelings, and that’s sent me to start re-reading Jane Austin, but I also realized as I was relaxing with a new mystery that Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisy Dobbs is someone who is very much in tune with feelings, her own and others’. While she may not always show them, she at least doesn’t deny them to herself, which may be what we are really looking for. It’s not that one—or one’s character—needs to wear her heart on her sleeve, but that feelings should be acknowledged and accepted, not condemned as a weakness. I'm reading through The Emotion Thesaurus, and giving some thought to how my characters express emotion--and how they reveal it when not speaking of it, too.

That brings me to Chrys Fey's new book, Keep Writing With Fey. It's blog hop day for the book as well as the IWSG, and since the hop is about dealing with depression, burnout, or writer's block, my update is right on topic! I've been reading at this book, too, and considering what might help me from Chrys's many smart and thoughtful suggestions. So far, the big one for me is to do *something* every day--and celebrate having done so!

Hop around to get inspiration from the other writers participating in the hop, as well as to the other IWSG bloggers!

I’ll take a pass on this month’s optional question, but feel free to leave comments about genre or about your own struggles with writer's block, depression, grief, or anything else that you want to talk about.

Oh, and I'm out of the mountains, home for a couple of weeks. So here's a random pretty picture:

NaNoWriMo Update #2

Something happened to my good intentions about weekly updates, and since my first update on Nov. 5, somehow an extra week slipped past.

I'm happy to report, though, that it didn't slip past my writing, and I can report progress good enough to probably carry me through the Thanksgiving weekend with its more limited writing opportunities. I caught up to par on the 14th (so it did take me almost half the month), and have been sailing on ahead since, continuing with 1800-2200 words most days.

I will confess that because I am turning a collection of flash fiction into a novel, I am able at times to lift a paragraph or two from the short stories (far less than I expected, though, and each of them needs careful consideration and reworking to fit the novel). I guess that means I can't claim a "legit" victory. News Flash: I'm not interested in playing by a set of arbitrary rules. I'm interested in writing a novel.

I think that's the text for the pep talk part of this post. The writing is the thing. Whether you are doing NaNo or not, it's not about rules. It's about finding the way that works for you to write and keep writing. Maybe that means locking yourself in a room for a month each year and writing like crazy (and then searching elsewhere for the much greater time commitment involved in revising it?). Maybe it means writing 350 words a day.

Or maybe you fall somewhere in between, like most of us do most of the time. The point is, you write, and then you edit. You don't sweat about anyone else's "rules" because there are no rules about this. You do whatever helps you and inspires you (so I play along with NaNo because it gives me artificial goals and deadlines, which works for me), and you ignore what doesn't. Let no one tell you at the end of this month that you aren't a "winner" if you don't have 50,000 words. If you write anything on any given day or in any given month, you're a winner in my book.

So go forth and write, whenever and however you can.

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One week until release day! The Problem With Peggy goes live on Nov. 28, but you can preorder now from Amazon and Smashwords for the ebook. For the best deal, Preorder the paperback directly from this site and we'll pick up the shipping costs--offer only lasts through November 30.
 

WIP Blog Tour

It has been a long time since I devoted a post to talking about writing. Long enough for people to forget that writing books is what I really do, rather than reviewing them (though obviously reading books is what I spend the most time doing, and I don't even review everything I read!). So it was perfect that I got a tag this week from fellow Goodreads author Heidi Chandler to take part in the Work In Progress Blog Tour.

The rules go like this:  Provide the link back to the post by the person who nominated you (see above). Write a little about and give the first sentences of the first three chapters of your current WIP, then nominate a few other writers to do the same.

So my first job was to decide which WIP to write about. I'm currently in final edits on my humorous middle-grade fantasy, Halitor the Hero; in early edits on the second Pismawallops PTA mystery, Death By Trombone; and starting to draft stories for a third Ninja Librarian book, which doesn't even have a title yet, though I think of it as "The Problem of Peggy."

Since only one of those has a clear first three chapters, the choice was pretty easy. And I here realize that I haven't yet done any of my homework--writing blurbs and summaries and all that. Here's my chance to start!

Halitor the Hero

Young Halitor has failed at every possible career for a peasant lad in the lands under the Ice Castle when his parents manage to foist him on Bovrell the Bold as an apprentice Hero. But he's no good at that, either, and when his master abandons him at an inn in Loria, he would be willing to settle down to being a kitchen boy, as long as they feed him. But Melly, the kitchen wench, has other ideas. Soon the two have set off on a journey to try to find her father. What Halitor learns along the way is a lot more than just how to be a Hero.


Chapter One: Halitor the Hapless
A girl’s scream sounded through the afternoon, and Halitor clutched his sword in a sweaty fist and reined his horse to a halt at the edge of the forest.

Chapter Two: Halitor the Homeless
Once Melly had gained some skill with the sword, she began to suggest that they needn't stay on at the Drunken Bard.  

Chapter Three: Encounters with Ogres
Melly clutched Halitor’s arm and pointed into the woods. A pair of small ogres looked back, growling and gnashing their teeth. 

(Okay, I cheated on that last one and put the first 2 sentences).

So the great writers I'm nominating are:
Jemima Pett
M.G. King

And I still need to do a post about writing!

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On a housekeeping kind of note, I've looked at my last few reviews and decided I need to take a break from reading and reviewing kids' books and reset my grump-o-meter. I'll try writing more short stories, posting more photos, and talking about writing until I feel more objective.