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ROLLING ON AN ACORN

October 24, 2007 by in category Archives tagged as

By Jann Audiss

For the last several years, I have been fortunate to spend time a few terrific days with close friends in a home on the north shore at Arrowhead Lake. We read, discuss our writing, watch movies, take walks and generally chilling out from our hectic work schedules and life in general.

Our days start at just before sunrise. Clad in hats, coats, gloves and wrapped in blankets, we sit on the deck sipping coffee from steaming mugs. Every morning we hope to see the local beaver swim by. It’s a quite time. We look out over the lake whose mirrored surface is broken only by the ripples of the occasional fish as it jumps to catch a bite for breakfast, or by the small wake left by paddling ducks. It’s paradise.

We usually take our retreat in October. On daily walks through the neighborhood we revel in the leaves as they start to turn the rich, vibrate colors of autumn. The oak trees drop acorns by the bushel. This time, one such oak tree dropped two particular acorns that found their way under my right foot. My ankle turned painfully and down I went. Needless to say, I let out several unladylike words to the astonishment of the local squirrels watching from near by.

After I crawled on my hands and knees to bed that night, I decided that a trip to the local ER was in order. While I sat in the examining room waiting for the doctor, my imagination began to work overtime. I must have dreamed up at least five or six different scenes between hero and heroine. There was the “can’t get out of the bath” scene. The “ER doctor who makes an after-hours house call to check up on his patient” catches her in a very provocative position after she drops her crutch. The “local Ranger finds the heroine crawling along the trail on her hands and knees.” The hero who…

I think you get the idea. It vividly showed me how a writer draws from her experiences. Although I can’t recommend spraining an ankle, I can advise that you take advantage of your adventures for everything they are worth. There’s nothing like “writing what you know” from first had experience.

In a special note – my heart goes out to all the residents in Lake Arrowhead and throughout Southern California who have been devastated by the fires. To the men and women who are on the front lines fighting to protect lives and property and those working in the evacuation centers – God Bless.

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The Lone Writer

October 24, 2007 by in category Archives tagged as

A World in Flames

I realize this is a writer’s blog. I like to think it’s more about a writer’s life then just about the act of writing itself. Otherwise, this would be a pretty boring place and OCC/RWA is never boring. As such I decided to take this opportunity to blog about something I am a little too close to: smoke and flames.

On Sunday night, my family and I left the Orange hills in search of Chinese food. As we were driving we saw big plumes of smoke in the distance and thought “Oh no! Something is on fire.” On our way back from dinner it was dark and we could no longer see smoke. But we did turn on the TV to see what was going on. Malibu fires, San Diego fires, Agua Dulce fires and (as if that wasn’t horrifying enough), Santiago Canyon fires. I stayed with my parents and watched the news as towns where old schoolmates once lived fought for survival. My parents’ house is on a hill on one side of a valley. On the other side we can see Santiago Canyon Road, and parts of the 241 freeway. There are mountains, some closer then others. At around 9pm my sister shouted “look out the window” The entire right hand side of the mountain nearest ours was aflame. I’m not talking about smoke, I’m talking about bright orange flame.

After some debate my years of education paid off and I won an argument against my mother!
Her logic? It’s pretty far away.
My logic? You are about to sleep for eight hours. That fire has 40 mile-an-hour winds behind it, there is NO WAY that fire is eight hours away.

My father, a doctor, headed to the hospital just in case he was needed on hand. The rest of us evacuated to my apartment further north. As we drove away, two cars full of people, papers and clothes I could only be grateful

It wasn’t until we reached safety that we started thinking about all the things we hadn’t packed. A portrait of my grandmother, childhood momentos, irreplacable things that we could have packed quickly if it had occurred to us.

A lucky shift in the wind saved my childhood home, and I am grateful. But if there is one thing I’ve learned, there are two kinds of pain. There is the pain of the physical loss of a loved one, and also the pain of the emotional loss of a cherished memory.

In the days ahead, many people will face challenges. I urge you, and your families to think of what you cannot live without. Make a list, take pictures, do whatever it takes, but don’t leave yourself vulnerable to a double loss. Your home can be replaced, you and your memories, cannot.

Be safe, be well, and be careful.

-Dana Belfry

Dana Belfry is an aspiring author and a proud member of the OCC/RWA. She happily lives near the beach, rollerblades as often as possible and constantly comes up with story ideas. She is currently working on a contemporary single-title. Visit Dana at her blog at http://www.danabelfry.com/blog/

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Bookseller’s Corner

October 20, 2007 by in category Archives tagged as

Hey there bibliophiles,

This is the strangest fall, because for the first time in 25 years I haven’t been planning my Autumn Book Sale. Weird, unsettling, a little crazy making and( because I usually use the “extra” money to pay my property taxes) sorta scary. I told someone the other day it was like divorce. I was really glad to lose the cranky customers, fighting about money and property maintenance with the landlord and the day to day sameness of it all.

What I miss are my wonderful customers/friends, the freedom of working for myself, the tingly feeling of got when a really rare book came in and just getting to touch it.

I’m still grieving my loss, I know this is what I had to do do to save my sanity, my health and not having live in a box on the street, but I really miss seeing all those people who loved my books as much as I did. I miss opening boxes all during the week and seeing the new book covers on the racks and calling my author friends to tell them that their books were in and I was had been hand selling them. I miss decorating the store windows for Halloween. Silly, yes, I know, but I JUST REALLY MISS IT!

I got over being married, I’ll get over this. I just don’t know when, but I’ll let you know.

Don’t cry for me Orange County, BUB was supposed to be immortal. I never wanted to leave you but hey *hit happens

Michelle Thorne
www.bearlyusedbooks.com
agreatreadoccrwa@aol.com
1998 RWA Bookseller of the Year

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Traveling Member At Large

October 19, 2007 by in category Archives tagged as

MEMBER AT LARGE

More on traveling…

Some people have asked how I could travel to far away exotic locations and not sightsee more. The easy answer is I plan to return with my husband and will behave more like a tourist at that time. I could also cite time constrictions and the involvement in dog activities. The real answer goes deeper and speaks to my life as a writer even when I’m not writing.

Unless my characters fall into their stories from a group tour or from their long planned vacation that’s about to become disarranged, they’re not going to be spending much time in museums or at well known locales. Far more likely they will be driving along the winding back roads scared spit less but not ready to give up yet. Or they’ll be running for their lives along the walking paths cut through fields all over the country. Hope they don’t trip over the many old dogs waddling along those paths and not likely to step aside.

Thatch roofs cost 20,000 pounds to maintain and have to be redone every so many years, which really reduces any desire to have this sort of roof. Each locale has a particular style of thatching, and it’s a very lucrative profession. Maybe you can find that kind of information on the Internet but did you realize old thatched roofs look like packed moldy straw with chicken wire on the top. Not quite as appealing as the pictures I’ve seen of cottages with bright straw thatching.

In New Zealand, now known as the country where Peter Jackson filmed Lord of the Rings, the opportunities off the beaten path are even more fascinating. In Wellington, there’s a bridge which looks like it was thrown up overnight during a drunken contest. Every section slants a slightly different direction. In fact it is magnificently engineered to look like the set of a Disney cartoon. Crossing to the bridge from the waterfront, I found a large concrete sculpture mounted in the ground, quoting Pat Lawlor, Wellington writer: “And now, as I grow in years, I feel at times like an old violin played on by a master hand. You, dear city, are the maestro drawing the bow over the sensibilities of my mind, echoing the music of my days.”

On the bridge itself I read another plaque: “It’s true you can’t live here by chance, you ave to do and be, not simply watch or even describe, this city of action, the world headquarters of the verb.” Someone had sprayed letters across this message, I suppose in their own statement of action. Later I learned this is a part of Wellington’s Writer’s walk – now I need to go back and take the rest of the walk!
My host felt New Zealanders were dour and often depressed, unlike Americans who always seem positive and upbeat, or even Australians who seem sometimes aggressively cheerful. I had to disagree. How can any people who intentionally build a bridge looking like it was thrown together in the dark, and erect buildings in the shape of sheep and sheepdogs be depressed? Much less people who feel their writers are important enough to have concrete plaques installed. Subtle, perhaps so much so they fool themselves. My host reminded me much of New Zealand was settled by Scots, who tend toward a dour attitude. When I thought about this it made perfect sense. Both peoples live in a country with immense natural beauty and so many creative minds but so far away from most of the world.

More fascinating was the attitude of the current residents, depending on their ancestry and for that matter if they were born in New Zealand or emigrated later. Those who came over as bond servants and made their way in the new world by interacting with the Maori, who preceded them by about 1,000 years, told me about the losses for the Maori when New Zealand was “discovered” by Europeans. Those whose ancestors served as officers in the British army showed me paintings of the forts commanded by their great great grandfather, erected to defend the British against the Natives. Perception really is everything.

Monica K Stoner

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Writer’s Word

October 15, 2007 by in category Archives

A Proper Break
by Jenny Hansen

Several years ago, I traveled to the UK to train several groups of students there on how to use the (then) newly released Macintosh OS-X Jaguar and the new version of Microsoft Word that came out at the same time. I learned a lot in that trip to London, mostly about the many things that I thought I knew how to do and really didn’t.

For example, I heard a lot about how to brew “a proper pot of tea.” Nearly every group I taught my first few days there had to show the American how to brew tea. They would take me over to the break room in between class sessions. (Mind you, we took breaks about every hour) and take me through British Tea 101: use cold water, bring to a full boil, warm the teapot with a good swish of hot water before you begin to steep the tea for 3-5 minutes. The directions were quite precise and without variation…I’ve included a link at the bottom of this blog for any who would like the full list of tea Do’s and Don’ts.

Proper tea was just another thing, along with phrases like “being hard up” (poor) and “pissing down” (raining) that I thought I knew the meaning of before I went. I heard all kinds of great phrases but I particularly liked the word “squiffy” – I think it has a cute sound – and, since I did participate in a local pub crawl, I heard it quite a bit (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=squiffy).

George Bernard Shaw wasn’t kidding when he described England and America as “two countries separated by a common language.” I discovered, as I taught these British students, how important it was to be precise in my directions to avoid confusion. I learned to drop slang from my classroom presentation – we would end up talking about American slang instead of Microsoft Word – and I absolutely delighted in listening to my students speak.

One particular girl came to several of my classes and I loved to hear her speak in her Cockney accent. She ended up visiting my classroom almost every day and every time she came, we made each other laugh. We had long discussions about the differences between our cultures. I’d thrill her with my impersonation of various American accents and she’d ask me questions like, “What do you mean you’ve never seen a proper tea spoon?”

It was from her that I learned that Americans work more hours and take less vacation than Europeans do. When I shared with her that we get two weeks of vacation a year as part of our standard employment package, she was struck dumb for a moment. When she recovered she said, “Two bloody weeks a year? The lot of you must be mad! I’m dotty on less than four.”

In return for all the fantastic local slang she shared with me, I stayed through lunch one day to brew her a proper pot of tea and teach her, in her own words, how to make a proper break.

A proper Break, you ask? How does one MAKE a proper Break?

In Microsoft Word, there is a tool that every creator of long documents – particularly long documents with sections (like chapters) should know – and that is how to use Breaks.

Think of a break as an interruption:

I want to interrupt this page… one would use a page break.

I want to interrupt this column…a break would help again!

What about if I need to go to the next Chapter and have the Header or the Footer change to say Chapter 2 instead of Chapter 1 now…once again, a Break!

There are several different kinds of Breaks and they are all located in the Insert menu under Break…:

Page Break
The keyboard shortcut for this is to hit the CRTL and the Enter button at the same time. This will immediately move you to the next page without having to hit the Enter key eighteen times to get there.

Column Break
The keyboard shortcut for this is to hit the CTRL, the SHIFT and the Enter key simultaneously. If you are creating two or more columns of text (think about our newsletter or even your own notes and lists of words), the Column Break can keep you from having one little orphaned line at the bottom of a column. A Column Break says, “Move those lonely little words out of this column and into the next one.”

Text wrapping Break
This is a new feature that was added to the later versions of Word and it is quite useful if you use a lot of tables or graphics in your documents. This ends the current line and forces the text to continue below a picture, table, or other item.

Section Break
There are several different kinds of section breaks, though most writers use only one. I don’t want to short-change anyone who wants to use them all so I’ll define each type in greater detail.

Section break types:

Next page
Inserts a section break and breaks the page so that the next section starts at the top of the next page.

I use section breaks in conjunction with changes to chapter Headers and Footers in my manuscript. (If you don’t know what I mean when I say “Headers and Footers” you need to either refer to an earlier column or go to Word and hit the F1 key to get help on this feature.)

Next Page breaks allow you to break this chapter and go to the next. When you are finished with your manuscript, you will then go back through your manuscript and change each section to have the proper heading (i.e. Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and synopsis). By using Next Page section breaks, you allow your page numbering to stay consistent throughout your manuscript and this is HUGE. I know writers who put their page numbers in by hand and it breaks my heart to see them waste so much time. USE BREAKS!!!

Continuous
I think of this as interrupting formatting for part of a page, rather than an entire page. For example if I want to have a page of text with three columns in the very middle of the page, the only way to do it is to put a Continuous section break before and after the text I want to turn into columns. Otherwise Word will turn the entire document into columns.

Note:The only individuals I’ve ever seen use the next two types of breaks are people who make course ware books for subjects like math where the text goes on the left page and the diagrams go on the right, or vice-versa.

Even page
Inserts a section break and starts the next section on the next even-numbered page. If the section break falls on an even-numbered page, Word leaves the next odd-numbered page blank.

Odd page
Inserts a section break and starts the next section on the next odd-numbered page. If the section break falls on an odd-numbered page, Word leaves the next even-numbered page blank.

I’m sure you’ve already guessed how this odd topic came up in an everyday discussion about Word. However, if you are still wondering, my student was one of that special breed of people…she’s a writer.

Promised links:

How to brew a proper pot of tea if you are British or Irish: http://www.superluminal.com/cookbook/beverages_tea_english.html

A list of all the Microsoft Word keyboard shortcuts mentioned in this column, plus a whole lot more:
http://www.fgcu.edu/support/office2000/word/shortcuts.html

p.s. Keyboard shortcuts are the same between Macs and PC’s – you simply substitute the Command button for the CTRL button. The only notable difference is CTRL+Q, which “quits all paragraph formatting” in Word for the PC, and Command+Q, which ejects a diskette for the Mac.

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