Home 2016 (Page 6)

Year: 2016

Eight-Minute Writing

So I recently discovered Monica Leonelle. She writes fiction and non-fiction. I’ve read several of her non-fiction books, and one of them caught my eye: The 8-Minute Writing Habit: Create a Consistent Writing Habit that Works with Your Busy Lifestyle. This book was life-changing for me. First of all, if you’ve been reading my posts for awhile, you know that I’ve written every day of my life (with a few exceptions) for at least ten years. Eight Minute Writing (the book) focuses on integrating writing into your lifestyle by writing just eight minutes a day. Brilliant, right? Anyone can grab eight minutes a day to pound out some words. Monica suggests doing this several times a day, and eventually upping it to maybe ten minutes, or fifteen. Back when I was struggling with Survivor, my psychological horror novel, in 2007, I wrote 50,000 words of it by writing just fifteen minutes a day. I was having ~issues, and fifteen minutes was a no-pressure, easy solution to the problem. I highly suggest this for anyone who is struggling to find time or struggling period. It removes the expectations and wibbling (something which I engage in frequently) by giving you a clear deadline. Eight minutes and you are done. Note that there are no wordcount goals. This is strictly a time goal, and what you get — whether it’s 50 words or 300 — is fine. But, since I’m already writing every day, I thought about how this might work for my…

Continue reading

Hey Hey, We Won the Super Bowl

In a break from our normal subject matter here, I’m going to talk about football. You can’t escape it around here these days. You see, we (meaning me, Kit, and the rest of Colorado) won the Super Bowl on Sunday. Well, the Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl. I did very little to help. Super Bowl 50! I don’t want to tell you how old I was when we last won in 1999.

Continue reading

Co-Writing for Fun and Profit

Didja miss me? Well, too bad…I’m back! Today I’d like to share a bit about Turtleduck Press’s next novel (title and cover art forthcoming in due time). Kit and I have both talked in this space about the fact that we’re co-writing, but we haven’t gone into any detail about the experience…until now. It’s not Kit’s first time co-writing a novel; I’ve done it before too, but not for many many years. And I’ve blogged before about having a major crisis of faith as a writer last year. So I was a little apprehensive about how it would go. In fact, it’s been quite a smooth process — at least as smooth as novel writing ever is! It’s helped immensely to have somebody to bounce ideas off, to trade chapters with (we each wrote one point of view, in alternating chapters), to keep each other motivated. Having two minds to work on the worldbuilding and plotting has not meant that we’ve each done half as much work as on a solo novel, but it’s certainly helped — I think we’ve done a better job on this story than either of us could have on our own. Luckily, we’re on a similar — though not identical — wavelength when it comes to planning. We did a pile of worldbuilding first (it’s a fantasy novel, more or less), then identified our respective characters and wrote some sample chapters. Those went out the window and we started over, with a clearer idea this…

Continue reading

The Obligatory Winter Blues Post

Every year I find myself writing about the winter blues — what I’m doing to cope, how well it’s working (or not). And why should this year be any exception? 😉 This year hasn’t been too bad so far. For starters, we’re having a really mild winter with almost no snow. Amazing what that does for one’s state of mind. Don’t get me wrong, I like snow, especially the proper crunchy snow that I grew up with and Toronto so rarely gets, but months of it will drag one down. And the cold, and the dark, and the post-Christmas, post-New Year’s letdown…okay, winter is still tough even without snow. I’m doing all the usual things — taking extra Vitamin D, using a full-spectrum lamp, exercising (dance and yoga, with some walking here and there), focusing on coziness (blankets, slippers, tea, soup, comfort reads). This year I’ve also added a couple of new things. First up, my latest creative outlet — Instagram. I  finally joined Instagram last summer so I could post pictures of my garden, but when the harvest was over, my account sat idle. Then in early December I noticed a friend doing a daily photo challenge, #decemberreflections. I jumped in and enjoyed it so much that I joined a second challenge this month, #savouringjanuary. I haven’t been quite as diligent in this second round, but it’s been a lot of fun looking for subjects to match the daily prompts, and seeing the wide variety of ways in which…

Continue reading

Trigeminal Neuralgia: 5-Month Progress Report

Thought I’d give you an update on how I’m doing. For the most part, I’m pain free, which is wonderful. Some days I still have severe pain though, usually if it’s raining, if I’m stressed out, or, surprisingly, if I laugh too hard (that really threw me for a loop, but I suppose it makes sense — the motions of the face while I’m laughing must irritate the trigeminal nerve). I still have a bit of breakthrough pain near my next dose, and lately, I’ve had breakthrough pain as early as five o’clock (my second dose is at nine o’clock in the evening). Sometimes it will hit me out of nowhere with no discernible cause, and those times have me scratching my head. TN is definitely still a mystery, and I think it will take some time to peel all the layers off this condition. BUT when I think of where I was around this time last year, in excruciating pain and hopeless, I am ecstatic. Most of the time, I’m okay, and I’ve been able to handle the breakthrough pain well enough. It’s not constant anymore. And, I have a diagnosis. I finally have a reason why my eye and face hurt so much. That’s invaluable to me. And to think that if I hadn’t done the research, had given up hope…I’d still be in pain and depressed and probably suicidal (did you know that TN was once called the “suicide disease”? Because people, like me, were in such horrific…

Continue reading

Freedom!

So, as Siri talked about last month, we’ve been co-writing a novel which we’ve dubbed the Sekrit Project and have proceeded to infuriate everyone by keeping to the “secret” part of the name. And I am pleased to say that it’s more or less done, and is now in the pipeline for publication here at TDP. So it’s in the editing process, and I find myself free until we get comments back. Free! ::kermit arms:: Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed writing this book. I enjoyed working with Siri. I did not so much enjoy the fact that we gave ourselves eight months to go from nothing to polished novel draft. In retrospect, that is obviously not enough time and I don’t know what we were thinking. But hooray! We did it! And I’m pleased with the story and hope everyone else likes it as much as I do. But it is nice to have a little bit more leeway in what I’m working on at any point and not have a mad dash toward the finish line. So what am I going to work on now?

Continue reading

Happy New Year! Or Something.

Due to a scheduling issue, Siri Paulson is busy being awesome elsewhere. So you get me again this week. Are you sick of reading about resolutions yet? Have you blown yours already? Come sit by me. Have some ice cream. I understand, and I don’t, the thing about starting a new life in a new year. I’m optimist enough to believe we can change our lives with determination and courage. I’m cynic enough to think if I can’t do it any other day of the year, the 1st of January isn’t looking so great either. So I make decisions. Proclamations. Plans. And I expect they turn out about as well for me as they do for many another, and we all sitting around thinking of the things we could have done if we’d just gotten around to them. Yeah, me too. Have some more ice cream. So anyway. I’m trying something a little different. Because I love my phone and gladly submit to its technological dominion, I got an app. It’s called 7 Weeks, and the idea is to track the habit you want to build for seven weeks–that’s when it becomes a real habit, supposedly. So far I’m only doing “write every day” and “watch the money.” And really, I have to decide what I mean by “watch the money” because if I’m just watching while I happily spend it all, that’s probably not going to be helpful. Anyway. That’s what I’m doing. I’ve got my to-do lists, my…

Continue reading