Things I Just Don't Get

I like to think of myself as a fairly educated person. I have a college degree that I actually use. I graduated from said college with a 4.0. No, really. I've taken 53 post-graduate credits to earn a Master's Equivalency so my district will pay me more. You didn't know you could earn college credit for watching TV, didja? Hmm...I did. But there are some things I just don't get. Here's what's on the top of the list at the moment.

1. People who drive slow. I mean, really. And if you are a said slow driver, why oh why do you pull out in front of someone and then go really, really slow? I just don't get it. I, myself, like to drive fast. Maybe that should be capitalized. Fast, people.

2. Boilers. It was 92 in the computer lab today. That's one degree hotter than yesterday if any of you are keeping track for like, a science experiment or something. The fans didn't do much unless I was right in front of them. The waves of heat slapped anyone who walked within 5 feet of the door. Oh, and everyone else in the building was all bundled up because their rooms are so cold. The custodian turned the boiler down 2 degrees. Um, yeah, 90 is still HOT, but thanks for trying. It just proves that the Magic 8 Ball is always right. I love that thing. I even put it in one of my novels. No, I am not joking.

3. Halloween. I think I'm going to duck now from all the outrage that will be flying over this one. I just don't get Halloween. Who wants to dress up, making a complete fool of themselves, just for fun? I just don't get that. I mean, I can buy candy at the store any day of the week, so what's the allure of Halloween? I'd rather have chips—or one of those awesome pretzels from Costco—than candy anyway. Or a lemonade bar. Or pizza. Now if someone was giving out whole pizzas, I might consider dressing up. But only for a minute, and then I'd just call in my own order. It's just another thing I don't get.

Am I alone in this? Can someone explain the mind of a slow driver? The inner mechanics of boilers? Why in the world we humiliate ourselves for the sake of sweets? Have at it.

Perks for Today

I think some of you will think I'm making these stories up. I swear I'm not, but I do think I'm cursing myself. Every night I lay in bed and think, "I wonder what will happen tomorrow." I need to stop doing that.

So I present some perks of my day:

1. The road I take to work was closed. I think I've mentioned my need for order and routine. I turned right, found a different street, made it back to the main road. Construction. Again. I turned left, completely ignoring the barriers for some reason, right out into the marked off lanes you weren't supposed to drive in. Luckily, they hadn't made it to that section of road (why it was blocked off, I don't know, grumble.) and I was okay. But I felt stupid. See what happens when you close the road I normally take? I can't even function!

2. The computer lab is currently 91 degrees at the writing of this blog post. Ninety-one. I'm so boiling hot, I can't even think. And the kids keep asking me, "Why is it so hot?" I don't control the temperature of my own room. It's a district thang. "Can I take off my coat?" Um, yes. "Will it be hot tomorrow?" Let me look into the future. Magic 8 ball…signs point to yes. I mean, those district guys can't do anything fast. Or easy. I'm sure a committee will be formed to discuss the hotness of my lab. No, really.

3. Pack meeting. Lots of face painting, and one of the boys got his bear. The paint is all brown and the parent basically paints a face around your existing face. By the way, if you haven't experienced a pack meeting, you should be extremely thankful right now. If you have, please accept my condolences. Back to the face painting. So the boy's mom paints on a face on the boy's chin. She accidentally got some on his lip. He laughed and was all grossed out. The cubmaster said, "Oh, is that messing with your lipstick?" I lost it. I laughed and laughed and laughed some more. This is sooo something both my husband and I would say to our students at school. Every few seconds, I busted into more silent laughter. I'm still laughing!

Ahhh, the ups and downs of life.

Reading: ENNA BURNING by Shannon Hale

Bawl Babyitis

Well, I think it might be official. I'm the biggest crybaby on the face of the planet. I think my family thinks I never get emotional, but it's all a carefully constructed façade. I tear up nearly every single day. During songs. The worst one? Measure of a Man by Clay Aiken. Now before you go all like, "Ew, CA?" let me explain. His first CD was quite good. That song has me in near hysterics every time I listen to it. It's quite embarrassing while driving. Crying and driving don't go so well together, as tears usually make things like stop signs blurry. I know this from experience. Anyway, that song is so romantic, I lose it every time.

You'd think that only romance makes me weepy. Not so. Just the other day I teared up over a lame-o Zack and Cody episode. If you don't know what that is, just count your lucky stars. Those of you who have preteen boys, you should know Zack and Cody. I wish I didn't, but I do. And I was crying during one of the episodes. Sheesh, Disney channel.

As if Disney didn't do enough by airing Zack and Cody at least five times a day, I almost always cry during their movies. The worst one? Lion King. And we have the book and I was reading to my daughter the other day. When that Mufasa dies…tears.

We got my daughter's Halloween costume today. She's going to be Uniqua from Backyardigans. Those of you who have preschool kids, you should be familiar with this show. See? I run the whole gamut of Nickelodeon and Disney shows. Hey! I read, too!

Anyway, she was so happy to have it, and we tried it on and she was so cute. You guessed it. Started bawling. Played it off like I had something in my eye, but they knew. Kids know everything, especially that their mom is a complete bawl baby, suffering from bawl babyitis.

This is the worst example.

Last night, I was watching Spiderman 2 with my family. Spi-der-man Two.


I started to cry. And not even at one of the romantic parts—mostly because my husband makes sarcastic comments the whole time about the female lead. He doesn't really like her.

Nope. The part on the subway or L train or whatever that thing is. Where Spidey stops the train and blacks out and the people take him into the train and just look at him.

Yup. Tears welling up. Embarrassing. Glancing over to see if anyone's watching. They're not. Whew.

Then the two kids give him his mask back and say, "We won't tell no one." Then they hand him the thing and he puts it on. "It's good to have you back Spiderman." Awww. So sweet.

And a little psychotic on my part, but there ya have it. I am a Spiderman bawl baby. Oh well. There are worse things to be, I guess.


Reading: STORMBREAKER by Anthony Horowitz

The Mirror Book Trailer

I made a new book trailer using Windows Movie Maker. It only took three hours instead of three days. Now, before you go crazy thinking that three hours is indeed, a really long time, let me explain. I'm sort of inept when it comes to technical things.

I put metal in the microwave. If an electronic is making a weird noise, I turn it off and keep my mouth shut. I used to hit the VCR when it started to screech, and it would usually stop. Seriously.

So it's a miracle I can make a book trailer at all.

I did have a teensy bit of trouble with the music. See my USB drive is broken (or something, it just stopped working. I have that affect on small devices.) so I had to email all my pictures and sounds to myself to get them from the Mac to the PC. This worked beautifully--except for the song I wanted to use. It was a m4p file. Yeah, I don't know what that is.

Neither did my PC. So I burned a CD. Popped it in the PC, ripped the songs using Media Player, budabing, budaboom, shoulda worked. Not so much. But when I ripped the songs, it put them in another file somewhere--I don't know where, trust me. Somehow I found it and dragged the song I wanted to the desktop. That's pretty much all I know how to do. Drag and drop.

Then I was able to import the song into Movie Maker. Whew. The song part took at least an hour. Oh, and then Movie Maker saves the file with like forty letters behind it as the file type. YouTube couldn't recognize it, neither could blogger or wordpress.

Just as I was about to give up, I read the help section. Sometimes that works. I was able to save my movie as a .wav file and upload it to YouTube.

That's all included in the three hours people. So it didn't take that long. Reading this probably made you want to take a nap, though. I sure feel like I need one!

Enjoy!

TGIF

I'm tired. I actually worked four days this week. I mean, dude. That's one more than I've worked the past two weeks. Who knew going to work on Friday could be so exhausting? Holy brown cows, I need some bubble gum. I'd really like some Oreos, but I snarfed all of those last night. After parent-teacher conferences. While watching The Office. Life does have perks.

No, I haven't had a week full of Batman-drama. There's only so much a girl can take. This week has been more like "Kids say the funniest things" week. My own kids are crazy, but I'm blaming that gene on their dad. Seriously, I think the guy must have been on medication while we were dating, because I had no idea how Crazy he was until it was too late. And that's Crazy with a capital C.

So my daughter says today, "Here's my turtle's shelf," and she points to this turtle she made at daycare. It's pretty cute, made with a paper bowl or something. (Precisely the reason I DON'T teach preschool or kindergarten.) I said, "You mean his shellllll." She goes, "No, his shelf. He holds stuff up there." I was about to ask what kind of stuff, and really drive home my point that it was really called a shell and not a shelf, but you can't argue with a three-year-old. So I smiled and listened to her babble about the "shelf" all the way home and what kinds of things this poor shelf-ridden turtle could hold. Then she made me carry him in the house because "he's too heavy." It was a PAPER bowl. Yes, I carried it, cuz I'm that kind of mom.

Yesterday, one of the kids at school asked me, "Mrs. Johnson, can we have a piece of your soul?" This actually has a pretty good story that I won't share right now, but it just made me laugh out loud. Because we were walking down the hall when he asked, and a first grader and her parents were going the other way. You should have seen the look on the mom's face. I swear she pulled her daughter closer. Yeah, we're giving away souls in elementary schools now. Whatev.

So, with all the soul-sharing, shelf-carrying I've done, I'm ready for a nap. At least it's Friday. And next week I only have to work two days. Nice. I love Fall Break.

P.S. Rice doesn't cook so well in crock pot. In case any of you were wondering and wouldn't be able to sleep tonight without knowing this very important fact. Oh, and you should probably test ye olde crock pot out before volunteering to bring said rice to a faculty pot-luck lunch. 'Nuff said.

Blog Chain - Perkiness, Quirkiness, Smirkiness

Quirkiness, smirkiness. Here we go. You asked for it.

The topic for this chain is quirkiness, not to be confused with perkiness. One I have a lot of, the other, not so much. The awesome Mary started this topic, and her post on her neatness and her sheep are awe-inspiring. There have been uber-fantastic posts between hers and mine, so go check them out. The blogger before me was Abigail and the next person is Terri. Keep the linkage going, baby.

So here's the question Mary posed:
What kind of quirky habits or rituals do you have regarding your writing? (or regarding anything else, if that is more fun.)

Many people have posted pictures of their writing space. Um, I can't do that. I don't have a desk. I write on a laptop, and it's become a third appendage. It goes with me everywhere I go. I write on the couch while my husband plays X-box, at the counter while I eat breakfast, or in my office at school during lunch. (In fact, I'm posting this during lunch.)

My favorite place to write is in our old, blue recliner upstairs. I guess I can post a picture of it. This is my desk space. It's right by the window, which is a bonus, because it has a windowsill for my popsicle sticks, my USB drive, pens, the remote, and anything else small enough to fit. There's no place I like better than my blue recliner. The footrest up, headphones on, laptop open…ahhh, the life.

I'm very orderly, not to be confused with organized. That's one thing I'm not. But everything has an order, and must be done in that order. I feel funny writing that, because I very rarely write a novel from beginning to end. I guess it's the process I go through to write that's orderly.

I guess I'll call it a routine. I think routines are important. I teach school, and I always joke that things don't go well until the kids are trained, which is about October. My husband and I refer to the kids as dogs. Now, before you go all postal on me, I don't think kids are actually dogs, but they are very trainable. Once they know the routine, they very seldom deviate from it. I live my life like this. Everything has a routine. I get nervous if the routine is disrupted in any way. I guess that's my quirk.

Before I write, I open the Internet. I check email, then my forums. Once I'm satisfied I'm all caught up, I open what I'm working on. I usually back-read about ten pages to get myself in the right mindset, editing as I go. I make a few notes about what's coming next, and then I write. I always do everything in the same order. Before I quit, I make a few notes about what I should work on the next writing session, just to remind myself.

It's all in the routine of writing. It doesn't matter if I only have a 30-minute lunch to write or a two hour block of time after my kids go to bed. I always follow the same routine.

I'm not really sure that's quirkish enough for you. So I guess I'll spill a couple other quirky behaviors about myself. Notice I said quirky, not to be confused with obsessive. I'm a very scheduled person. I get up at the same time every work day. I get ready in the exact same order—shower, dress, check email, brush teeth, dry hair, makeup, dress daughter, do her hair, breakfast. If I have to deviate from the order, I'm all discombobulated for the rest of the morning. Like if my daughter won't come when I call her, I just stand there at the top of the stairs, trying to decide what to do. I can't do anything, because it's simply time for her to get dressed and do her hair. I can't go out of order.

I drive the same way to daycare and then school. When they closed the road (for construction, it's open again, phew) to my daughter's daycare, I just sat there at the intersection, a little nervous. It's not that I don't know my way around the city. I've lived here for nine years. It's my routine—and it's being disrupted. Eliza even says, "Mom, this isn't the way to Rainy's." I grip the wheel a little harder, try to smile, and say, "I know, but we can get there this way, too." We really can. It's no big deal. Except that it is.

Everything must flow in order. And it's time to check the email, yes, I do that about forty times a day. There's always time for email, that can come in any order. How's that for quirky?

Yeah, check out the next blogarific link in the chain, Terri.

Holy Drama, Batman!

I've had so much drama this week. I need a rock to crawl under and just disappear for a while. On Tuesday, a student in my class fainted. Fell to the ground and everything. Gave a little shiver, moaned a little bit. It freaked me out. I thought she was having a seizure. I sent another student to to the office for help. We woke the student up, but she fainted again. And again. That's when 911 was called. Sirens. Crowds. Paramedics. Blood pressure taken. I see the bat signal...pressing the button...getting all leathered up.

To the batcave, Robin!

The next day, I had an angry parent in my classroom. I'm not going to go into details because it's just not fair (to her or me), but she was mad at me. Luckily, we talked through our issues, and she went home happy. But I never enjoy confrontation, and it just added more drama to my life. Good thing I had my bat mask on, she was a little intimidated by the ears, I think.

Today, I showed up to work to be informed that the Internet was down. I teach computers for eight classes a day, to students ranging in age from 5 - 12. The Internet is pretty important. Still, I've gone without it before, and we have a few programs at school the kids can play around with. I could've handled the loss of the Internet.

Holy login, Batman!

The Internet was the least of my problems. The entire network was down, despite what my district tech told me. He said the internal network was "fully functioning." Yeah, he was wrong.

The first class came in, tried to log in, couldn't. Panic rising...I don't have a back-up plan if the computers are completely defunct. Well, yes I do. Simon says, anyone? Come on, who wants to play that for five freaking hours? Not me.

I informed the tech that the internal network was indeed NOT working, and ran to the office, silky cape flowing behind me. I pulled out my Bat-stars and took down a couple of sixth graders who were in the hall when they shouldn't be. Yeah, I just wanted to use the cool tools in my Batbelt.

On my knees, I begged the principal to let me show Bill Nye videos. So, I watched eight (yes EIGHT) Bill Nye videos today. I like Bill, but...Holy Science Overload, Robin!

As if that weren't enough, I have a substitute tomorrow since I'm going on the Man Trip 2.5...details will be coming soon. I'm so excited to see what men do! But that's a whole different topic for another post. See? Even Batman gets distracted.

I'm hoping I can leave my bat costume in the sub plans and she'll be able to take over for me. I dunno, I mean, Batman doesn't have an easy job. Not just anyone can do it, you know.

Anyway, at lunch the tech left, informing me that the situation had been "escalated to 3Comm." I just stared blankly, nodding, smiling, thinking I needed a new job. I told one of my friends in the faculty room that apparently Vineyard Elementary is now part of the Department of Defense since we've been "escalated to 3Comm."

I'm still not sure what that means, despite my secret bat senses. All I know is, the Internet came back up around 1:00, but my internal network is still non-functioning. Maybe we need to be escalated to Congress or something. I'm not sure if Batman has that power or not, but I'm callin' in the all favors I have to those in a position to help. Superman. Wolverine. Mr. Incredible--he's got government connections.

Holy Drama this week, Batman.

Yeah, and it's only Thursday.

Tag, You're It!

So I've been tagged. Not to be confused with Tagged, which is capitalized and used as something really, really bad in my science fiction novel. Really. You don't want to be Tagged. Unless it's a blog tag, which is what this is.

My crit buddy, Jennifer Wilks, tagged me. It's so funny, because we were just talking about how we'd never been tagged, and bam! Jen's tagged like three times in the next couple of days. So she tagged me.

I *think* that means that I'm supposed to answer the same questions she did when she tagged me. Thankfully, it was an easy one. Here are my answers.

4 goals I have in the next 5 years:
1. Find an agent and see my book at B&N
2. Learn to play the piano
3. Go to Disneyland
4. Clean out the garage enough to park in it (really)

4 places I will visit someday:
1. The Sacred Grove
2. China
3. Perth, Australia
4. The White Cliffs of Dover

4 of my favorite foods:
1. Pepperoni pizza with ranch
2. Macaroni and Cheese
3. Chicken Pot Pie
4. Dreyer's Lemonade fruit bars

4 jobs I've had:
1. Assistant manager at Golden Corral
2. Machine operator at Pepperidge Farm (garlic bread line. Not smell so good.)
3. Secretary in the stats department at BYU
4. Teacher

2 places I've lived:
1. St. George
2. Logan

2 places I'd like to live:
1. San Diego, California
2. New York City

4 things I'd do with my spare time (if I had any):
1. Read
2. Cook gourmet meals (as long as someone else does the dishes)
3. Take singing lessons (I'm awful)
4. Make cards


Okay, enough about me. I tag some of my blog chain friends. Heather, Kate, and Michelle! Tag, you're it!

Stay on Target...

I've been so scattered lately, I can't seem to stay focused on anything. I find myself clicking on Firefox after five minutes of concentration on my synopsis or my query letter. I have goals, they're not being met. Serious distraction issues. Serious.

I can't help but share my newest addiction. No, I don't mean the Dreyer's lemonade fruit bars. Seriously, people. If you haven't had one of those things, dude. Now. Get the keys now. They are deliciouso. Major good eats.

Anyway, my new online distraction is I Can Has Cheezburger? Freak, if you haven't seen this, you so need to. Here are a couple that made me have some major spewage, like Sprite-out-the-nose spewage. Which burns a little, by the way.



For Harry Potter fans...



I love beavers. Just the word beaver makes me smile. This one is classic beaverdom. Priceless.



More funnies:




LOL!


And my favorite, which I am not doing. If only I could stay on target...I might meet my goals. But i haz dem. :D

Dominoes

If I were talking about the little tiles with dots, life would be great. No, I'm announcing my new curse word for writing.

Dominoes! I shout it when I realize that I've tweaked something in chapter three, and now I have to change not only chapter four, but six, eight, thirteen, nineteen, twenty, and argh! Dominoes!

Revisions are really hard. I just made another decision. A big one. Like main character big. It's going to be a long month of D-O-M-I-N-O-E-S aka revising-until-my-eyes-bleed.

Symptoms of Dominoes include, but are not limited to, constant muttering while cooking, showering, driving, or other mundane activities, frantic copying and pasting to compare drafts, frequent distractions (see My Writerly Addictions on the sidebar), insomnia as stewage over a certain scene just won't go away, and staring off into space for long periods of time. Of course, sometimes the occasional curse word escapes, even when things are going well. Dominoes!

This curse word should not be confused with Crickets, a well-known ailment many authors suffer through the querying process. No, the symptoms of Crickets are obsessive email checkage, heart palpitations while opening the mail box, increased patience, major writer's blockage, increased weight gain due to increased chocolate intake, and helium inhalation to keep the spirit from sinking into the depths of rejection.

Both of these diseases are real, people. Do not treat them lightly. Consult your writerly friends if you feel like you are experiencing symptoms of Dominoes or Crickets. Some patients may also experience a need to blog excessively about their experiences. Be kind. Comment. You never know when you'll experience your own case of the Crickets or go through the horrible ordeal that is Dominoes.

That is all.

Back on the Blog Chain

This topic has me beat. I can't think properly. I can't come up with anything intelligent to say. H.L. Dyer started this chain, so if you'd like to start at the beginning and get caught up, go there first. Abi posted just before me, and Terri is up next.

How do you as an author choose or create your story-world and give that setting authenticity?

Yup, that's the question. I think some of those words are English. Seriously, when I read that I was like, "Oh, freak. I'm so not cut out for this. This requires thinking." Luckily, I've been doing a lot of that lately. So here goes.

The real reason I struggled with this so much is because I write speculative fiction, mostly urban fantasy, but I have pounded out a dystopian science fiction novel as well.

For me, I don't call it a story-world. It's called world building, so let's just get the term straight, 'kay? Once I figured out that Heather was really asking about world building, I was like, "Ohhhh, got it. Story-world = world building. I do that. I know how to do that." And then I was gold.

Or so it would seem. I might have been able to pontificate about building a believable magic system, but Archetype did that so brilliantly I'd only embarrass myself if I tried to say anything more. Back to the drawing board.

I don't research. Well, I'll retract that. I research when I have to. I'm certainly not Michelle who lives and breathes just to research. Check out her post for a fantastic example of researching to world build. So strike two for me.

I've been to writing conferences where fabulous fantasy authors give great advice on world building. Someone once said that you need to take a setting and introduce a problem that the setting contributes to or that makes the setting part of the plot instead of just a place the story happens.

So I thought a lot about that.

In my book, Shadows, one of my main characters isn't alive. He's not dead, either. And he doesn’t live on earth. He exists between life and death, in a whole new realm called the realm of Lost Souls. I had to build his entire world, giving it characteristics that he despises to make his desire to return to earth believable. So it's dark there all the time. Even when the sun is up, it's gray. He can touch things, but they're weightless and he can't feel them. No texture, no temperature, no pressure. He can't smell anything. No taste, not that he needs to eat, but still, could you give up the Big Mac? I think not. He can see and hear, that's it. Now, I don't know about you, but I think that would suck. I basically took the five senses and robbed him of three of them. Sure, he has magic, but he can't hold hands and feel it. Can't smell bacon sizzling in the pan. Can't enjoy the said Big Mac. Major suckage, right? Right.

I did this so I could build a world where no one would want to live, to create sympathy for the character, so the reader would know and understand why he just couldn't exist in that dreary realm for one more minute. And so that when he meets the one person who can save him, who shines in bright colors, who he can touch and feel, he'll know what he's missing. So will you. You'll want him to be able to leave the realm of Lost Souls and return to earth, even though he'll have to die—eventually.

See, he'd give up immortality to be able to feel, smell, taste. Wouldn't you? Maybe, maybe not. But the world has to be real enough to evoke that kind of emotion. Thus, the world building has to be done stick by stick, level by level, to make sure you know exactly what it's like to live there. Then you'll understand why he has to leave, why earth is so much better, what drives him to do specific things in the novel.

That all stems from the world building—the setting. It's part of the story, not just where the story happens.

More Wordle Art

I seriously can't get enough of this stupid website. It's just so much fun! My writerly friends have made some cool art for their books, stories, whatever. Check them out.

Michelle McLean
Carolyn Kaufman
Kristal Shaff
and of course, the lovely Heather Dyer, who started this madness.

Wait, maybe it's just me who's gone mad. Either way, I made a couple more wordles. One is for a young adult paranormal novel, and the other is for a young adult dystopian science fiction novel. Since I don't have a synopsis for either one of these, I just used my query letter. I followed Kristal's advice, who said she typed in her MC's name a few extra times so it'd be bigger. Seriously, awesome.

Words, Gotta Love 'Em

Okay, so I think my friend Heather really hates me. She's always finding these cool things that take up my time. I think she knows deep down that she's going to addict me to yet another thing on the Internet...and she's cackling to herself in a deep voice, "Mwa-ha-ha!"

I can just hear her.

Because she posted the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. That may reveal how unexciting my life is, but I'm okay with that.

It's called Wordle. It's awesome. It creates word clouds with blocks of text you paste in. I pasted in my synopsis for my work in progress, once titled Shadows, now re-titled as The Mirror. Or something. I don't really have a title right now, let's just say that.

But, seriously. How cool it this? C-O-O-L, I know. You should try it out, too. Wordle. Create. Play. Post. Awe-some.




You can see a bigger, cleaner version in the Wordle gallery.

Revisions

I've been waiting for my turn in the blog chain before I posted again, but it looks like it's going to be a few more days. I'm relieved, actually, because I have nothing of value to add--yet. I keep thinking that something awesome is going to hit me. Hopefully, it will be something about writing, and not something like, I don't know, a car or a bus or something. We'll see.

So I've been thinking a lot this week. More than my usual quota of deep thoughts. :D It's time to revise ye olde manuscript again. Just when you think you've got something good, you realize you really don't. I received a great suggestion this week, something I knew needed addressing, but didn't quite know how to address.

Thus, the thinking. I couldn't work on the revisions, because I didn't know how. So I thought and thought and thought about how I could make the revisions without rewriting everything. I can't. Part of the story is going to be lost, well, at least lost to the reader. Of course, I have the original on my computer. But after all the driving and thinking, eating and thinking, making dinner and thinking, I finally concluded that the suggested revisions are A) necessary, B) worthwhile, and C) an incredible amount of work.

So I rolled up my sleeves and tackled the project. The first thing I did was make a spreadsheet where I could write in word counts, POV, and a snippet of the plot for each chapter. I methodically went through the manuscript filling out the sheet with title chapters (yes, they change and I don't fix it), word count for each chapter, each point of view character, and the plot and sub-plots. I could immediately see why the revisions were suggested. I could see places to cut, things that weren't necessary. But I still didn't know how to do what needed to be done.

Several hours of stewage later, I decided that the only way to make the manuscript better was to rip it apart and attempt to put it back together again. And it hurt. A lot. I started yesterday and each scene gets copied and pasted into a new document. Analyzed. More thinking. Stewage over a grape soda or a popsicle, depending on my mood. Then some rewriting. Major rewriting.

I made it to chapter three. Whew, only thirty-three more to go. If I can keep up the pace, this should only take me eleven days...yeah, right. It took me five just to get started, so I'm sure it will be a lot longer than that. Hopefully, every minute will be worth it in the end.

Reading: SABRIEL by Garth Nix.

Freed Up To Write

Finding time to write is one of the things that I think all writers struggle with.  For me, it's been pretty easy--until now.  I have a three-day weekend every weekend, I don't work in the summer, and my husband pretty much lets me do what I want.  So since I started writing, I've been glued to the laptop.  But I've realized that writing can't be the only thing I ever do. So I've been managing my time a little better, and keeping my house cleaner, and making dinner more.  

All of which cuts into the time I used to spend writing or editing. I've come up with some solutions that don't take away from my responsibilities as a wife and mother.  

1.  I write during my 30-minute lunch. I may only get in a few paragraphs, but at least it's something.

2.  I check my email and chat boards as soon as I get home.  My son isn't home from school yet, and my daughter can usually eat a snack and watch a cartoon during this time.  Once my son is home, the computer goes away so I can spend time with the kids.

3.  I write/edit/whatever after my kids go to bed.  That's around 9, and by 10 or so I'm dead tired.  I force myself to stay up a little bit if I have a good vibe, but I pay for it the next day.

4. I haven't volunteered to read someone else's work for about a month.  The time I spend reading and critiquing their work is time away from mine--and from my family. So I've cut down on that.  I still have a couple from a long time ago that need to be done, but they'll have to be in bits and pieces.  I have to keep up on my critique groups and I sometimes do those during lunch, too.

So all in all, I've cut my computer time by several hours each day, but I think I've managed to find a balance between writing and real life.  I haven't been able to meet my goal of 1000 words a day for quite a while, but in the long run, it doesn't matter. I'm still writing every day and that's what counts.