This isn’t even mine, but my husband’s photograph. He was out on his ebike 30 minutes away from us. But his enjoyment is my enjoyment. Pretty fabulous to crest a trail and see this.
I so enjoy pet sitting for Mack and Elway. Wouldn’t you? We had a lovely week together though I missed my own two fur faces.
While pet sitting, I got out for a girlfriends day. Always nice since I’m staying in Midtown where there’s lots of fabulous eateries. We went for gyros. Tori brought me gifts. She loves getting me Kodiak/Grizzly bear cards because she’s in love with Andras Johns, my alpha shifter in The Starlight Chronicles, and aren’t the mug and stickers awesome!
More fun things from my hubby this month. He found this coffee table book for a steal on eBay where he also sells knives. Doesn’t this knife scream Mando! Think Beskar and blue triangles.
Last but not least, I’m digging on my May WIP! This novel has been in the works for a couple of years and my current focus. Toxic Friends Can be a Good Thing is a YA Urban Fantasy. Shifters, ninja brothers, hidden places beneath Long Beach, CA, an unhoused teen girl, and her stray Aussie Shepherd companion are a few of the elements.
Stay tuned!
Thanks for catching up with me!
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May in the high desert is a crap shoot. Will it be hot? Will it be cold? Will there be snow on the mountain top? Will a freeze crush all the blooming plants? Will I need my allergy medicine? This May, all of that is happening and more.
I love my home environment for that very reason. You never know what kind of day it will be when you wake up. Roll the dice and get any combination of the above-mentioned scenarios in one day! That’s exciting in my book. If I take a walk in the morning, I might need a jacket and will see my breath in front of my face. If I walk at noon, I’ll need a hat and sunglasses to guard against the hot sun while I inhale all the wonderful-smelling natural blooms. If I walk in the afternoon, the high winds will push me and the huge puffy clouds along for the ride, and I’m back in my jacket.
The high today was 58, the low 36–Fahrenheit. But the sun is oh so warm… until the wind blows. We had snow last weekend. No one in my 5,000-foot elevation valley plants anything until June.
Views from my place
May brings other things to enjoy besides the mercurial weather. It’s MerMay for one. I love checking out the creative output during MerMay and have been doing so for the last five years, ever since I got embroiled in my mixed media phase of life. It’s primarily about sketching and art, but we writers get inspired too.
At the end of the month, I’m participating with five indie authors in a MerMay Selkie Take Over giveaway. You can follow me on Instagram if you would like to participate. We’ll be posting the event instructions and the drawing results. There’s more about the event and selkies in my May newsletter going out soon.
What’s MerMay you ask? A Disney creator back in 2016 posted an illustration of two mermaids chatting on their “shell phones” and the craze was born. Every May, artists follow daily prompts to draw something mermaid-inspired throughout the month. Check out MerMay.com and this NPR piece for the scoop.
Here is my MerMay gift to you. It’s humble, I know, but she’s sort of cute. She was inspired by a class at Willowing.org and has lived in an art journals for a while now. I recently ran her through a couple digital backgrounds (side images. I know… duh) to explore color alternatives.
My other big happening coming up is a pet sitting gig. I don’t pet sit for just anyone. Okay, so I only have one client–because I adore her dogs–and it’s like going on vacation–and when they do what they do the cutest, which is sleep side by side, it even becomes a writing retreat.
Meet Bully brothers Mack and Elway. They’re actually quite active a good portion of the day, but I love listening to them snore. Can’t you hear it?
I had a rare week to myself in my small home set on a rural two acres. It’s a quiet spot normally, very little traffic, quiet neighbors, and the music of nature surrounding us. Inside, the place is occupied by one person besides me and two canine kids. Not a big family as families go. But my three are active and keep my home lively. I didn’t realize how much until the human went on an ebike excursion with a friend.
So, after cleaning the house to my satisfaction (also a rare treat), I rolled up my sleeves and got busy writing. I was certain that it would be the most productive week of my writer’s life… Until I kept pausing to listen to the silence. It called to me–needed me to break it up–to liven up my surroundings… like I was used to.
Recently, I interviewed an author who talked about her writing space being in the corner of her game room, the hub of her family. Her advice to other writers was to learn how to tune things out. Coincidentally, as I prepared for the interview I came across a Medium blog that provided famous writers’ advice on daily writing routines. Completely different writers from different eras and backgrounds all had similar advice when it came to sticking to a daily routine. Tune out distractions.
My favorite was from E. B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web, my most adored book as a child.
This was the edition in my extensive childhood library, too. Isn’t that the best title you’ve ever seen on a cover?
I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me.
In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
E. B. White
Can silence be a distraction? I learned this week that it can. Did I learn how to tune it out? Eventually. I got lots of writing done. But I’ll be glad when my hubby gets home. Next to him in the living room is where I’ll be writing for a good long while.
How is your writing going in November? I hope you have all sorts of great things to be grateful for this month, and if a new novel is one of them, awesome!
All the experts say the best way to improve your writing is to write every day. In my naivete, I initially thought that meant working on my novel every day. Yet somehow, without any intentions one way or the other, my writing took an organic journey down all sorts of wordsmithing avenues. I do so much writing that Grammarly tells me every week I’m more productive than 99% of its users. Sure, that’s a ploy to get me to upgrade, but still! 99%??
So, I thought about that. Obviously, it’s tracking my keystrokes and correcting my grammar, which includes everything I’m doing on my two keyboards. This month that meant: 1) writing a 2000-word short story for a contest; 2) completing a 20,000-word short story for an anthology submission; 3) starting a new novel and reaching 25,000 words (a solid 10 chapters) that I am quite thrilled with because its the best start to a novel I’ve ever had; 4) writing four Q&A interviews, two that posted in November and two for December since I wanted to get a head start before another busy month; 5) assembling and publishing my newsletter; and 6) assembling, breaking down, and reassembling my third novel in my series… otherwise known as the neverending story. Number 7 is email correspondence, and chatting on various platforms with my writing buddies. Hmmm.I don’t know Grammarly, that sounds like the same schedule all my writing buddies engage in. Who are you tracking, anyway? Oh, and number 8 is writing this blog, which Grammarly isn’t tracking because it won’t work in WordPress for some reason.
It’s not exactly Ray Bradbury’s formula for honing writing skills. But maybe it’s touching the outer limits (okay, so he wrote other sci-fi short stories for TV, but I had to use this pun). Here’s Mr. Bradbury’s advice.
The problem with novels is that you can spend a whole year writing one and it might not turn out well because you haven’t learned to write yet. But the best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week — it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start — but at least you’re practicing and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. It can’t be done.
I’ll give you a programme to follow every night. Very simple programme. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That will take you ten minutes, fifteen minutes…for the next 1,000 nights.
Ray Bradbury
All I know is that I took every one of the five days allotted to me to write my 2000-word story for the contest this month, but I like the idea of getting 52 out in a year so that you have a few good nuggets to proffer to the world, if we can take Mr. Bradbury at his word.
What do you think about about this goal?
On the other side of that coin is reading. The closest I’ve come to reading lots of short stories is participating in short story contests. With Writing Battle contests, you not only write a story but act as a peer judge for ten other stories. While you wait for the final judging you can share your story and read others in an open forum for more feedback exchanges. That can add up to a lot of short stories!
These contests I admit have been a fantastic learning processes. I like the principle of committing to writing a story every week and reading a story every night. But in practice… Hmmm.
Let me know your favorite techniques for staying productive with daily writing.
For more on famous authors and their daily writing routines, here is a great article from Medium.com, which is where the quote from Mr. Bradbury was borrowed.
I’m talking about Grammarly here. It’s stalking me even as I write this and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Still, the invisible English professor peeping over my shoulder has saved me from embarrassment too many times already, and I’ve only just invited him into my writer’s den.
But is his constant presence worth the distraction? That little red underline flashing at me and the errors stacking up on the right are so annoyingly in my face that I often have the urge to holler, especially when it makes a stupid suggestion. Wait… What? How can you “meets” someone? [Confession, my structure needed changing… again. Now meets makes sense.]
I came across a glaringly simple tip for pounding out that first draft. Turn off Spellchecker! But it’s scary now that I’ve come to count on Professor Tom standing behind me with a comforting hand on my shoulder. [Grammarly told me to use “his” hand and not “a” hand. I like “a” better, dang it!] I’m so conflicted! I don’t want to miss a single, horrible, cringe-worthy typo, and I like that the professor is always ready to help me restructure my sentence [As alluded to previously, I can bang out a sentence backasswards with the best of them]. I admit using this tool and others like it has trained my brain to type it right more often now. (I just typed “write” instead of “right.” Eeek!)
The other issue… My comforting professor is a double agent and spies for Big Brother… [I’m just adding this for drama… but it makes you think.]
A blurb from Grammarly:
Grammarly helps people communicate with confidence across devices and platforms. Our AI-powered suggestions appear wherever you write, coaching over 30 million people and 50,000 teams every day to improve the correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery of their writing.
Yes, statistics… lots and lots of statistics. My fiction writing is data now. Okay, it’s for my benefit to help me be a better writer, but Grammarly crunches all that data to learn how we humans can better engage our readers… Hey, I’m the one who invited the professor in.
Here are the statistics Grammarly highlighted for me to fix more areas… if I pay for the premium version:
Overall, no critical issues.
Wordy sentences = 3
Incorrect phrasing = 2
Unclear sentences = 2
Misplaced words or phrases = 1
Word choice = 1 (backasswards)
Intricate text = 1 (what does this mean?)
More… = 2
You might be interested to know two of the problem spots were in the blurb from Grammarly. 😁
Happy writing! Let me know what you think about Grammarly or generative AI tools like it.
I was just chatting with my writing buddy in Scotland about pushing on despite the relentless Imposter Syndrome and this popped up in my inbox. I love synchronicity. Enjoy a little boost to quell that inner editor. And remember writing is all about the joy.
I enjoy the blogs from Writers Write immensely. When the one below popped up today, I totally related. Do you find yourself swooning over morally grey antagonists, those nasty villains with a vulnerable side and a broody brow? Do you secretly hope they will win in the end?
Writing the antagonist is probably more fun than writing the hero. Hmmm. I think that’s a confession that will prompt more soul-searching. Well, at least I can accept that it’s all part of the learning process as I continue this writing journey. And whew! I’m thankful for these blogs assuring me that I’m not the first writer to struggle with dreaming up steamy scenes with the antagonists more often than the heroes.
These blogs gave me more clarity. Heroes and antagonists are not all black and white. They are the perfect blend of both with one topping the other only after they take all those twists and turns in their destiny, and it’s what they do with that heady mixture of imperfection that makes the story.
This means my heroes can be a bit of both good and bad, so I don’t have to struggle with choosing which one to fall in love with. Wait… I still need a villain. Sigh… I’ll keep working on it. That’s the joy of being a writer.
After reading this blog, I searched for more. Enjoy these great insights into loving your antagonist.
Fall means writing. That’s a funny thing to say since every day means writing to me-and every day I write. But everything is better in the fall. I love this season the best for feeling rejuvenated, hopeful, grateful, and just plain happy. It could be the cooler weather, the smell in the air, the colors, a new year approaching, or the perfect time to reflect on the past year. I just know I love it.
I have another reason to be grateful this year. I get to enjoy fall as a full-time writer and a retired public employee. This time last year, I would never have believed that to be possible. What a difference a year makes-and taking that leap of faith.
As for the writing… Seems like fall is the season for that too. There are so many events. I’ve got three anthologies to submit; one in September, October, and November. I actually submitted September’s this weekend. I’ll get word after the 1st if it’s accepted… Nail-biting time…
I’ve got a Writing Battle contest (you can meet the creators on my Spotlight) coming up at the end of October, and November is NaNoWriMo, which is slated for banging out a new novel that has a deadline for the middle of next year. I don’t like deadlines, but I’m going to ride this happy train into winter and see what I can accomplish. The plot is done, and the characters are stacking up. I’m writing it as part of an indie writers romance group, which I’m hoping will be a lot of fun.
My spotlight interviews are also booked out through December. I keep trying to scale it back, but it’s a growing thing that’s taking on a life of its own… and… drumroll, please…
The latest guest to accept my spotlight invitation is a USA Today bestselling author!!
I’m a huge fan and was thrilled when Grace Draven responded to my invitation just this week. She will be chatting with me in December. If you are looking for immersive epic fantasy fall reading, check out her novels. Her romance is beyond fantastic and it’s set in high fantasy worlds that will sweep you away. The audio versions are amazing. I guarantee it.
Happy writing, stay cozy, safe, and healthy, and enjoy your fall!
I spend an exorbitant amount of time on Canva crafting video promos and posts for social media because… Well… it’s fun. I love creating art as much a written story and this is the perfect way to engage in both passions. So, I keep trying out new designs and methods to convey my stories and characters. The problem is there are so many combinations of elements, taglines, imagery, arrangement, music, length of time… You get the idea. Also, I may not be up on the trendy stuff as much as I need to be. I like what I like (including music like rock and blues, not pop) and not necessarily what I’m told to like. Hmmm.
So, hitting on a formula that will grab attention and tap into those algorithms is exorbitantly difficult.
Exorbitant = exceeding the bounds of custom, propriety, or reason, especially in amount or extent; highly excessive
Dictionary.com
The most fascinating aspect I’ve discovered is how the same video will get completely different engagement between social media platforms. There’s never any rhyme or reason. It will soar on TikTok (Disclaimer-soar for me means topping out at 700 views) and flop on Instagram or vice versa. Facebook? Forget it. I’m invisible there. Same on Tumblr. On occasion it might do well on Twitter… I mean X (what is that? – talk about invisible… and uninviting).
Here are some of my attempts just today. I would love your opinion about spending our time creating post after post in the seemingly futile game of hitting the right formula. And thank you for supporting my creative efforts and highly excessive passions.
The collage template
The flash of Wow😍
The evocative draw
If you’d like a story with a loveable heroine, smashing alpha males, found family, otherworldly friends, adventure, a cozy mountain town, a lively roadhouse, and princes from an ancient race who are trying to kill the MC’s date, pick up a copy of Ursus Borealis. My stories are full of exorbitant passions as well. 😉
