Pregnant ergonomics, reading list

by | Apr 21, 2005 | Uncategorized

I keep running into things I need to change in my desk setup to accomodate pregnancy. I’m using a foot rest. I’m adding a pillow to the small of my back to hopefully alleviate backache. And now my stomach pushes me too far back from the keyboard. Not sure what I’m going to do about that one. I wonder if anybody specializes in pregnancy ergonomics?

No BIAW progress yesterday due to various things, like my overwhelming need to sleep instead of write. Some days I’m very energetic all day long and other days I have sleep attacks. I try to maximize the good days to make up for it.

Aside from BIAW, I’ve been putting together a reading list for my maternity leave. So many good books coming up! Here’s a list of reading I’m really looking forward to:
LKH, A Stroke of Midnight
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Sarah Bird, The Boyfriend School
Lillian Stewart Carl, The Secret Portrait, Lucifer’s Crown
Cricket Starr, Nemesis in the Garden, Echo in the Hall, Violet Among the Roses

Feel free to send me recommendations to add to the list!

So much fun it can hardly be legal

by | Apr 20, 2005 | Uncategorized

Making excellent Book In A Week progress. I don’t actually expect to complete a book, but I set my goals low enough to be reachable and am exceeding them. Book In A Month fits my pace much better. Anyway, I finally found the beginning of this project and am writing away at it. I never seem to be able to write from chapter one to the end in order. I start with some scenes and then from there I figure out what has to come before, how it has to end and what has to tie it together. Writing a book is so much fun it can hardly be legal. I know, there are all those people out there who talk about opening up a vein and angst angst angst, but really, for me not writing is what’s hard. Writing is easy.

Revision can be pretty painful and frustrating, but only because I can be very slow to figure out what the real problem is and how to fix it. My real goal in reading Maass is to figure out how to speed up the revision process and take the pain out of it, not to change my writing process. I’ve gotten tired of rereading the same section repeatedly, muttering, “I dunno, it feels squishy. I need to punch it up. But what’s missing?”

It’s BIAW again!

by | Apr 19, 2005 | Uncategorized

Yesterday I finished up my RTB column and got it entered to post on the 22nd. And I did the line edits for Dangerous Games, which was just hysterical. My favorite part? Comments from two editors discussing the correct, official Star Trek-approved spelling for Ponn farr. I should’ve emailed Wil Wheaton to ask him which one was correct.

Jaynie R. won the first Dangerous Games giveaway and she’ll be getting her copy in just one week! (No, I didn’t post the giveaway on the blog, so you didn’t miss it. And yes, I will do another one.)

Anyway, with all that business cleared up I have plots to twist and characters to torture and I’m all over it!

Maass production

by | Apr 18, 2005 | Uncategorized

I have finally gotten brave enough to crack open Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel. I tiptoed around it for a while, because I’d heard so much about it. Scary things, like it comes with a workbook. It sounded an awful lot like there would be Rules and the kinds of systems I can’t apply involved and it would tell me I’m doing it all wrong.

Surprise, surprise. I loved it from the opening sentence. It validates what I have come to deeply believe, that the story is everything. Furthermore, it says…that I broke out when I wrote Dangerous Games. Yeah, it shocked me, too. There are many levels of breaking out, and it will be interesting to see how readers respond. But I understood exactly what he meant when he described breakout novels, how they are bigger, there is more at stake. That came out in Dangerous and in Love Spell, too. My earlier books are good, but these stories are at a different level and I felt it when I wrote them. I just didn’t know what exactly was different about them until I read Breakout.

I expect to learn a lot from this book and the workbook is probably a valuable resource, too. It focuses on the craft aspect of breaking out, and I came at it from the art aspect. (To find out how to get there from the art side of things, read Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer.) There’s an astounding set of tools in Writing the Breakout Novel for a writer to add to their bag of tricks.

Of course, I can’t develop an idea quite the way he describes because I’m a panster and my brain doesn’t work that way, but I plan to use the checklists at the end of the chapters after the first draft is complete to see what I need to strengthen or layer in. All part of being an organized panster.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve arrived and I know everything now, because that is so far from the truth. But I do understand my process and what matters in my writing now in a gestalt sort of way that I had no words for until I read Writing the Breakout Novel. And I’m looking forward to utilizing new tools that help me do more of it and better. One of the beautiful things about writing to me is the endless challenge. There is always room to grow and improve.