Why Cell Phones are Better then Land Lines
October 21, 2008 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as The Lone WriterI have a new cell phone. Some refer to it as a crackberry and they’d be right. It fulfills my obsessive compulsive need to have all my phone numberss, calendar, voice notes, INTERNET access, etc. in one place. Seriously.
You want to hear the craziest thing about being a writer? I never have a pen. Ever. My purse is an abyss of things to write on and write with, they get sucked into a black hole I swear. So the new blackberry? It has voice notes. I can record a note to myself at any time and hear it later, and it allows to me ramble without fearing that my handwriting is becoming illegible because I’m on the freeway.
That being said I’m now torn. Do I keep my landline?
Why I love my cell phone:
- The Amazing Ringtone
- Free call waiting
- Free call ID (best invention EVER)
- Almost my friends are on my network (WOOT!)
- The ability to continue my phone calls in the car, on the beach, while standing in line at the grocery store. (awesome!)
- VOICE NOTES
Landline
- The only way I can get DSL
You see my problem *sigh*
How about you? Do you use your land line more or your cell phone?
10 0 Read moreCHOICES
October 19, 2008 by Marianne H. Donley in category Archives tagged as Member At LargeMonica Stoner, Member at Large
A story has been making the rounds recently about the profound influence the choices we make in our lives have on our future. The main character of the story is a man who makes the decision to be happy every day, no matter what. Even after a horrific accident, he decides to not only live, but to bring his positive attitude to everyone around him.
How can this apply to our lives as writers? We make a choice every time we put words on paper. We can choose to put off writing until later. We can choose to write to our lowest level since we think no one beyond our critique partners will ever read it. We can fret over every word, searching for perfection from the very beginning. Or we can find our personal special place in our minds, letting us get the words on the page.
We make that same choice when we critique or judge others writing. Do we hunt for every possible error, or do we look for the story under the writing? Do we toss the work aside because it starts in the most boring, banal fashion possible, or do we hunt for that perfect opening line? Most of all do we come away from these readings with a better sense of purpose in our own writing?
To think of always entering a room with a positive attitude takes us back to lessons from childhood. Turn that frown upside down and walk on the sunny side of the street. Banal then, boring now. Except how many grumpy gloomy people attract anyone not grumpier or gloomier than themselves? Not many. Try leaving the gloomy side in the car, at the gate, packed up in a box for a couple of days, and see how much easier life can be. Is writing any easier? Well, I got this blog done, which is more than I=ve managed on my down with everything days!
0 0 Read moreWriter on the Verge
October 18, 2008 by A Slice of Orange in category Writer on the Verge by Kate Carlisle tagged as Homicide in Hardcover, Kate Carlisle, Writer on the Verge
I know the phrase “shock and awe” might seem like exaggeration, but that’s what I felt when, after so many years, I held my first book in my hot little hands. 
Here’s a preview of the real deal. Now that’s a beautiful thing! Kate Carlisle’s first book in the Bibliophile Mystery series, Homicide in Hardcover, arrives February 2009 from NAL.
The Write Way
October 17, 2008 by A Slice of Orange in category Writing tagged as Maureen Child
Yep, I can’t believe it either, but it’s contest season again!
I know, you’re wondering what this has to do with writing. Well, a couple of things, actually.
If you’re unpublished, contests give you the opportunity for lots of feedback from not only published authors, but sometimes editors as well. I’m not saying the judges you get will all be kind, or even right. But when you’re first starting out, getting some objective opinions on your writing is a good thing.
You don’t necessarily want to make every change suggested by your judges, but if two or three of them mention the same thing, then that’s a sure sign for you to sit down and do some thinking.
If you’re unpublished, but further along the ol’ career path, contests are a great way to get your work noticed by people who might be in the position to buy it!
Published writers love contests because mainly, we like the badge jewelry! Let’s face it, we all want pins and things cluttering up our name badges and finaling and winning a contest gives you some great little trinkets. But there are other reasons, too. Say you make the finals of a prestigious contest or two. Then you get to email or phone your editor and agent to spread the news. They in turn spread that news everywhere else. Marketing hears about it, publicity and maybe even other houses who just might sit up and take notice…
My point is, contest season is time consuming and expensive. But enter as many as you can. You have nothing to lose and lots to gain.
Maureen Child is the author of more than one hundred romance novels and novellas. She is currently bagging up her RITA entries.
On Finishing the Damn Book
October 15, 2008 by Marianne H. Donley in category Apples & Oranges by Marianne H. Donley, Java Plots by marianne h donley tagged as fast drafting, finishing the book, Java Plotsby Marianne H. Donley
I am taking an online class titled Fast Draft. The idea behind the class is to send your internal editor on vacation. Somewhere nice, of course, like the East Coast where she can bask in the fall colors and leave you the heck alone. Then you’re supposed to write twenty pages a day for two weeks. (For those of you who don’t want to do the math this early in the morning, that would be two hundred eighty pages.) You aren’t supposed to pay the less bit of attention to the quality of your written pages, here quantity only counts.
It was actually working pretty well there for a while. I will admit that I struggled to get twenty pages completed each day, but I was getting much more writing done. Since the start of the class, I’ve been averaging about ten pages a day. Before the class, I would be thrilled with three. No internal editor in sight. When an idea for tweaking an earlier chapter popped into my head, I made a note of it and then forged on.
Then we went to the Poconos on Saturday. What was I thinking? The Poconos are on the East Coast. Yes, the fall colors were beautiful, but the place was just crawling with internal editors. I think at least six of them hitched a ride home with us. Now, they’re crowded into my little writing cubby, whispering things.
Internal editor #1: That first scene in chapter six. You must be joking.
Internal editor #2: But we can tell you how to fix it.
Internal editor #3 It really isn’t funny. It doesn’t move the story forward.
Internal editor #4: Wait, chapter six is fine. Can we talk about the ending of chapter seven? Can we say weak? WEAK!
Internal editor #5: What the heck happened to the dog in chapter four? First she was there barking and then she disappeared. You have to go back and explain what happened to the dog. Short fix. It won’t take you long, a sentence here, a bark there. Two or three hours at the most. You know if you don’t do it now, you’ll forget all about it.
Internal editor #6: No offence, in that scene you just wrote, your heroine is acting like a twit. But I can tell you how to fix it. All you have to do is rewrite her scene from the hero’s POV, so instead of her just cleaning things up, he’s searching for clues. Clues are much better than cleaning.
I don’t think all of the internal editors who hopped into the car are mine. Some of them could be yours. If so, I wish you would call them home. I have to get rid of them, especially the ones who don’t belong to me. I enjoy writing a lot of pages each day and I don’t like all the whispering going on while I write. Sending them on vacation didn’t work for long. Yet, I don’t want to do anything too drastic like tossing them in the septic tank. While that would help get pages done, I really wouldn’t want to work with them after they lived in that environment. In addition, I suspect they won’t be too happy about the whole situation. Since I want to make use of them later when the first draft is done I really don’t want them mad at me. I suspect living in the septic for any length of time would make them all a bit grumpy.
So I’ve decided to give them all sleeping pills in this morning’s coffee. These are going to be long lasting magic sleeping pills, sort of like apple Sleeping Beauty ate (which I guess makes me the wicked witch, but I can deal with that). They are going to stay asleep until I write the magic words “The End” on that last page. So if I have YOUR internal editor hanging around, you might want to get her out of here before breakfast, otherwise she won’t be working until the end of November.
Marianne Donley writes quirky murder mysteries fueled by her life as a mom and a teacher. She makes her home in Pennsylvania with her supportive husband Dennis and two loveable but bad dogs. Her grown children have respectfully asked her to use a pen name, which she declined on the grounds that even if some of their more colorful misdeeds make it into her plots, who would know the books are fiction. Besides, they weren’t exactly worried about publicly humiliating her while growing up.
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