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Do You Want To Be Nice?

July 10, 2009 by in category Archives tagged as

My daughters and I love words. When one of us comes across an unusual word we share it with the others, often taking the time to look up the meaning in the dictionary. A friend and fellow author on Facebook, Brandilyn Collins, always posts a word of the day, many of them ones we’ve never heard before. My girl’s favorite so far is “tenebrific.” The meaning is gloomy or dark, which describes one of their “emo” friends at college. We always have a lot of fun rolling new words around on our tongue and trying to think how they would be used in a sentence.

In our quest to look up words, we discovered that some commonly used words have changed drastically over the years. For instance, when we use the word “nice” to describe someone, we have visions of a person who treats us with kindness. Perhaps we use “nice” to tell a friend about a dress or pair of shoes we found at a store and would like to purchase. Those definitions are listed in the dictionary, but they are not the first or even second definition. Instead, “nice” as we know it today is listed as number six in my Webster’s College Dictionary.

We found that the original meaning of “nice” came from words that meant strange, lazy, stupid, or foolish. The first definition for “nice” is difficult to please. In the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the first definition is obsolete, but means “wanton or coy.” Nice can also mean “picky, or difficult to please.” This puts a whole new slant on referring to a person as “nice.”

As writers words are our business. I love to use less common words throughout my writing. I don’t mind if a reader has to grasp the meaning from the context, or even take the time to look it up in the dictionary. Often, I will stop in the middle of a book to look up a word, and that never takes away from my pleasure in the story. In fact, it often increases my interest in that author’s work.

How about you? Have you come across words that you enjoy, but which aren’t commonly used? Care to share those with us? I’d love to see what words you might share with your family.

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The lure of travel…and body painting

July 8, 2009 by in category Archives

There’s a photo essay in today’s New York Times (in the online version, at least), called Why We Travel. Lots of great photos, with travelers explaining how they came to be on that particular trip. Reasons vary from the mundane to the cool to the downright weird.

I love to travel, and next week I’m off to Washington, D.C. for the Romance Writers of America conference. Yes, it’s work…but D.C. is a fabulous city and I haven’t been there for about 20 years, so I can’t wait to revisit the monuments, the Smithsonian, those streets full of opulent homes and stores…and some new (to me) attractions like the Spy Museum. I’m also spending a couple of days in Annapolis, where I’ve never been before and by all accounts it’s beautiful. Bring it on!

I think most of us have a list of must-see places in our head that we hope to get to one day. Croatia is high on my list. Back to Italy, definitely. New Mexico. Skiing in the Rockies. This list could run and run…

Tell me somewhere special that’s on your list, I’d love to know and maybe even to expand my own list…

And while we’re on the subject of travel, here’s a link that popped up on the NYT front page – http://www.nothingtohide.co.nz/ – You know those safety demonstrations that flight attendants run through before takeoff? Well, this is Air New Zealand’s safety demo, and the crew are wearing body paint and not much else. I can tell you, you’ll never watch a safety demo with as much concentration as you’ll give this one 🙂

Happy Travels
Abby

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Networking

July 6, 2009 by in category Pets, Romance & Lots of Suspense by Linda O. Johnston, Writing: It's a Business tagged as , ,

There’s nothing like it!

Writers are a solitary lot. We have to be, at least to some extent. It’s not possible to be surrounded by people all the time and still create our stories. I, at least, can’t write with other people’s voices interrupting my thoughts.

But we need other people around sometimes–including other writers who understand what we’re going through during our creative process.

That’s why I’m really looking forward to our upcoming OCC meeting. The afternoon session of the meeting is all about networking with published authors. Whether you’re published or not, talk to us! Especially if you’re attending the upcoming RWA National Conference in Washington, D.C.

I’ll be at the National Conference. I hope to attend some workshops. But mostly, these days, I go there to network–with other writers, editors at the houses that publish my books, my agent… as many people as I can. It helps to inspire me.

How about you? Will you be at OCC? The RWA National Conference? Both? And what do you hope to get from them?

Linda O. Johnston
http://www.lindaojohnston.com/
http://www.killerhobbies.blogspot.com/

Linda O. Johnston is the author of 16 romance novels and several novellas, including a Nocturne Bites, with at least one more Nocturne upcoming. She also writes the Kendra Ballantyne, Pet-Sitter mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime.

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The Artist’s Way

June 29, 2009 by in category The Artist Way by Gillian Doyle tagged as ,

“If you feel stuck in your life or in your art, few jump starts are more effective than a week of reading deprivation.
No reading
? That’s right: no reading. For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our systems. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.
It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world.”

– Julia Cameron, THE ARTIST’S WAY, pg 87

In the workshop that I attended — http://www.artistswaylosangeles.com/ — facilitator Kelly Morgan had said that Julia has since updated this assignment to media deprivation, not just reading. Immediately, students protested. What about reading emails required for work? Same for texting. What about music on the car radio to and from work? Not to mention the traffic reports to maneuver the commute on the freeways? An hour’s drive in silence? You’ve got to be kidding! Elevators have video screens with news feeds. Some supermarkets have them in the produce section, meat department and at the checkout aisle!

We are in Hollywood, for god’s sake! Okay, technically, the class was being held at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in WEST Hollywood, but still … This IS the Media Mecca of the world. Even billboards are full-featured video screens. One classmate works at a television network that has multiple flat-screen TVs lining the walls of the office. How do you implement media deprivation in that kind of environment?

The buzz of conversations in the classroom made me smile to myself. Wow, did this ever push the big panic button in everyone! Myself, included. It was probably one of the most difficult assignments. Some students did better than others. I must admit that I “fell off the wagon” a few times.

Aside from work-required media, Kelly did allow one small exception. If it meant the difference between doing or not doing the assignment, she suggested tuning the car radio to a station that played only instrumental music so that there were no words to draw attention away from your own “mind chatter.”

Then there’s the computer . . .

I think a lot of us writers get lured away from our writing with research-surfing or PR — texting/tweeting/emailing/blogging to keep our names out there among the readership. I know from my own experience how much these things drain hours out of our day. We think it’s just a few minutes here and there, but it isn’t. And I do believe that our brains get lulled into thinking that we did our writing for the day. Thus, when it’s time to get back to work on our novel, we don’t have as much energy as we could have.

Julia writes: “We often cannot hear our own inner voice, the voice of our artist’s inspiration, above the static. … If we monitor the inflow and keep it to a minimum, we will be rewarded for our reading [media] deprivation with embarrassing speed. Our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our well is running freely.”

So if you are having a tough time with your writing these days, try this assignment. Just for one week. That’s a do-able time frame. Give yourself this opportunity to find out what this experience is for you. No two people will have the same experience. So it won’t do you a bit of good to hear about my experience, what I learned. You need to find out what your inner Artist is going to say to you. It’s a challenge, but well worth the effort. It doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t require taking time off from work or flying out of town to a conference. What do you have to lose?

– Gillian Doyle
http://www.gilliandoyle.com/
http://twitter.com/GillianDoyle
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/gilliandoyle.novelist?ref=profile
http://www.myspace.com/gillian_doyle
http://www.gilliandoyle.blogspot.com/

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Learning to Love the Writing Process

June 28, 2009 by in category Archives tagged as , ,

Writing a book is not easy. If it were, everyone would do it.

It’s not like writing a term paper. Yes, it requires hard work and research, but the thing that makes a book special is the heart and soul the author puts into it. It really is like childbirth. There’s a lot of pain and sweat and maybe some cursing, and then finally a new project is brought into the world—a unique and wonderful project that is nothing like anyone else’s. Just like a baby.

When a writer first decides to write a book, most of the time he or she is not quite sure how to go about it. The non-writing part of the population figures you just need to sit down and put in some time and poof—a book is born (See term paper reference above). Yes, writing an entire book does take time. How much time? That depends on the writer. And you can speed up your writing time by accepting and loving your Process.

What is your Process? It is how you write your book. Not how I write my book—that’s my Process. You need to figure out your own process—what works for you that gets you from Page One to The End. And the best way to do that is to write a book, all the way through.

Every writer has his or her own process. I’ve written and published twelve books over the past ten years or so, and I still call up my friend when I get stuck. And I still get stuck at the same place in every book—between chapters five and nine—where I spend a long time banging my head against the wall and wondering if I will ever finish another book in my life…EVER. And you know what my friend says? “Oh, that’s just your process.”

For some reason, knowing that this is my process immediately makes me feel better.

“You do this with every book,” she says.

I do?

“I’ve been studying your process. I’m trying to learn from it.”

You are? Can you clue me in?

I have learned some things about my process over the years. There’s the chapter 5-9 problem. Usually when I’m in the middle of a frustrated, Tasmanian Devil spin, the realization that I am at the end of chapter six calms me down. Okay, this is what I always do. Grit teeth and tough it out.

Then there’s the fact that I am sort of an organized pantser. I’ve been selling on synopsis for about eight or nine years now. I write a synopsis and get approval from the publisher, and then I start writing the book. I write the first couple of chapters. Go back, change them. Decide no, that’s not where the story starts. Write a different beginning. Okay, this one might work. Write some more (usually just up to chapter 4 or so—don’t want to hit the No Man’s Land of Chapters 5-9 while still wrestling with the beginning). I might even write a third incarnation of the beginning of the book. Send to writing friends for review. Get comments. Maybe I hear a speaker or read a writing book that makes me reconsider the beginning. Maybe I try storyboarding, but something still isn’t right. In the end, nine times out of ten I will end up going back to my first version of the beginning of the book. Turns out that was the right place to start after all.

Once I have accepted the beginning few chapters, and I have wrestled with my chapter 5-9 issue, I usually get to the first love scene in the middle of the book—around chapter 10 or so. Writing love scenes and sexual tension is easy for me, so once I get to that point, the rest of the book flies. I am able to surge forward at warp speed and finish the book on time.

With every book I write, the frustration is still there. The certainty that my last book may well have been my LAST book. Every beginning I chase myself in circles. Every second quarter of the book I bang my head against the wall. Then I hit the middle and suddenly the words fly almost faster than I can type them. And when it’s all over, I have a book to submit.

Then I have to do it all again for the next one.

Understanding my process definitely makes it easier to accept while I am in the midst of deadline angst. Loving my process is harder, but the two of us are joined irrevocably. We create wonderful stories together, and that makes it all worthwhile.

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