New poll on the home page of my blog: What time of day do you prefer to write?
I’m a night owl stuck in an early bird world: my answer used to be 4a because I stayed up that late. Nowadays it is 4a because I got up a little early.
Uh huh. So this is the adulthood that I was so eager to get to.
Our dog got sprayed again the other day, chasing a skunk in our backyard again. I can’t decide whether she…
a) still does not understand the connection between chasing the skunk and getting sprayed?
b) thinks the risk is worth the reward?
c) likes the smell?
d) likes to get that special bath?
I’m pretty certain the answer is not d), given how little she likes baths.
The last time she got sprayed, I was covered in it by the time we figured out why she was foaming at the mouth. In line at the grocery store, people around me were sniffing the air and saying, ‘smells like burning tires.’ Heh.
A couple days later, I was still emitting eau d’skunk in the 110 degree room of a Bikram yoga class. Turns out the instructor was one of those one in a billion who loves the smell. (Dog in previous life?) This, however, did not make me less of a pariah during the class. But for once I got the floor space I deserve.
Mysterious symbols on a busy road near my house.
Bike riders on this path ascend quickly to heaven?
Epitaph for a comedian:
Three worms walk into a bar…
It is a struggle for me to watch live theater productions. I feel tense the whole time because I fear I will witness an actor seriously and obviously botching lines, and watch an uncomfortable struggle to get past the problem. Something deeply disturbing about seeing the actors’ eyes signaling to each other while, with their mouths and bodies, the show goes on.
I don’t know why I have this fear. I go to live music all the time and never worry about performance glitches there. Maybe I had an abusive theater experience as a child.
Anyone else have this? Anybody?
Saw a statistic today about how rapidly brick and mortar bookstores are dwindling in numbers. I confess that overall nowadays, I prefer reading a screen to reading a page. But I would hate it if there were no bookstores. Wandering among books is such a great pleasure.
I think printed books will turn out to be like vinyl records. Simply too good to go away.
Here is a baby harbor seal, once injured and nursed back to health by a Santa Barbara, California, rescue group. When able to fend for himself, he will be returned to the nearby ocean. And not a minute too soon – he is mighty bored!
Humans are as disturbing as they are inspring. In the aggregate we do so much harm to so many critters but there are always a few to step in and reverse any bad trend.
Typically, plots of my novels start with a collection of images, moments, vignettes, and other idea snapshots that feel related to me, although I do not always know why. Gradually, I discover the connections as the planning and writing evolve. During that evolution, there will always be ideas that turn out not to fit, after all, and I have to scrap those.
Similarly, my characters start as a pastiche of attitudes, actions, and problems, which may be drawn from people I know, situations I have experienced, or stuff I’ve overheard in passing. (Beware discussing your life while standing in a grocery store line. There may be an eavesdropping writer nearby.) As the book progresses, I inevitably discover that multiple characters have conflicting traits that all belong to me. Real humans tend to be more contradictory than even the most complex of characters. Perhaps on certain levels I use the characters to work through some of my contradictions.
Kelly Joe Phelps is one of the great guitar players of our lifetimes. He clearly lives to play music, he tours continuously, and my guess is that music is what keeps him alive and keeps his many demons mostly under control.
He has just announced cancellation of his current tour dates on two continents because he is suffering from something called ulnar neuropathy, which prevents him from using his right hand.
For all of the reasons stated above, I fervently wish him a fast and full recovery.
Most people don’t know about him. One of the few good and lucky things about the years I lived in Oregon (long and other story) was my discovery of Phelps there, shortly after his career started, back when the locals nicknamed him “Cujo”. As a fan, I’ve strayed over the years, because sometimes he is just too much for me. But I’ve always come back.
If you want to check him out, here are some facts and links:
Warning: I really geek out during this post! But I supply these details in case they help another writer who wants to leave notecards behind.
When I first started writing, each novel would have an inches-thick stack of notecards. I taped cards to a wall and removed or X’ed them as the writing advanced. The advantage of notecards, of course, is that it is so much easier to add, reorder, and scrap when a single idea exists on a single page.
Even though I was an early adopter of computers for every other stage of writing, for a long time I still needed the heft and tangibility of the note cards for planning.
I wanted to switch to digital planning long before I actually did so. I tried a number of apps and softwares designed for organizing ideas (mind maps and stickies and To Do list kinds of things). They didn’t work for me.
Then I tried presentation software, and that has allowed me to replace notecards with slides. Nowadays, I plan my novels on Keynote on my iPad… unless I need to do wholesale reorganizing. When that happens, I convert the file to Powerpoint and work on my computer, because if I need to move a lot of stuff around, I want a mouse and Microsoft’s “light table” features (where all the slides can be seen at one time) are more versatile than Keynote’s. I adore my iPad but editing on an iPad induces pain.
P.S. To plot the bigger, broader, arcs and trends of a novel, I am fond of a software called Popplet, which lets me put ideas in small color coded boxes, move them around, and connect them.
Required Writing 