Tag: writing

What is Inspiration?

Chapter 3 of Pep Talks for Writers deals with inspiration and the idea of a “muse.” I’ve been carried away by inspiration in the past, largely during my fanfiction writing days, when the words just sort of come to me.

I had a dear friend (RIP, Janet) who had a form of aphantasia, I think. She couldn’t imagine characters in her own head, she had to have a physical image of the character. This is why she exclusively wrote fanfiction for television shows. Their faces were right there. She also didn’t understand what a writer means by a muse. She seemed to think that those writers were having hallucinations of an actual person telling them what to write. Several of us explained to her that, for most of us, “muse” is a metaphor for that “groove” you get into when the words just happen.

Not that every one of us have that experience. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, does experience a hallucination telling them what to write. But that’s never happened to me.

In Chapter 3, though, Faulkner tells us that most professional writers just show up and write. That sitting down at the keyboard, or with the pen and paper, or whatever, is inspiration enough.

And that is one thing I need to work on. The showing up part. Putting the words down and making them go by sheer force of my will, rather than by waiting for my “muse” to help me. I’m going to try to do that more often in the future.

How Do I Create?

The second chapter of Pep Talks for Writers (germane Amazon Link!) is about the circumstances that one uses when one writes.

One of the things that Faulkner talks about is planners versus “pantsers.” “Pantsers” are people who line up their characters/subject/whatever and just write and see where it goes. Planners, well, that’s pretty self-explanatory.

I’ve always sort of done both. Back when I could let my mind wander on the job, I used to get a lot of writing done. Sometimes I was at the photocopier or the fax machine or sorting documents to send to shareholders containing the annual report, or waiting for a report to upload to a database or whatever.

I could use that time to say, “Sally’s memory won’t come back until she’s home, but her home burned down 20 years ago. Should I just make her an amnesiac forever? But I really want to restore her relationship with her brother. The graveyard. She sees her parents’ graves and that’s what triggers her memory. Subconsciously, being ‘reunited’ with them is coming home and. Oh, yes, that’s perfect.”

And then I’d go home and write the scene. And, yes, that is a scene I wrote. It was in a Dark Shadows fanfiction that I’ve just realized I might be able to scrape the serial numbers off of and remix. Well, technically, I realized that I could do that when I was thinking about this chapter while unraveling the first blanket* and then I sat down and wrote all this out. But potato-potahto.

So I guess I’m more of a planner, but there are definitely surprises in the process of the planning. I’ll be prewriting something and a new character will pop up where I’m not expecting it and I’ll have to incorporate that new character, things of that nature.

The chapter ends with a challenge to mix it up a bit. And I guess that my experiments with dictation might count for that. I could also maybe get Evelyn to sit down and have a writing day sometime. She has a picture series in her that I’ve been trying to get her to commit to because just maybe that will be the thing that brings her financial success.

At the very least, I want the books (about her Jack Russell mix dog) to be out there in the world.

*I know that a couple of posts ago I said that I was going to make those blankets into a new blanket, but now I’m thinking about knitting a coat out of them. The threads have all seen better days, so it would have to be a casual sort of coat. Also, I definitely plan to work two threads of each color so that it comes out sort of heathered. And also having four strands should mean that if any one (or even two) wear out, the whole thing won’t fall apart. I hope.

Creativity, 4/24/2022

I finished the first “pep talk” of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo. In it, Faulkner tells us that we don’t need permission to be creators. And I am, of course, already a creator. I knit and I crochet, and (inspired by Micarah Tewers), I’m thinking about getting back into sewing.

And I write. In the back of my head, I’d always planned to become a professional writer pulling down a full-time income. Of course, the way the world fell out, I will need two full-time incomes to have the life I want, but the professional writing thing would certainly work as one of my full-time incomes.

I’ve been toying with several novel ideas and I may put some time in on those as well as the blog. One of them was the gothic novel I talked about earlier this month. I also have a fantasy novel set in a female-dominated world where that is just as out of balance as our more male-oriented one is. The Journey song Wheel in the Sky has long made me think of a different fantasy novel, this one about someone questing for the cure for the illness of the queen of their land.

And then, just yesterday, I had an idea for an inside-out version of Beauty and the Beast, where the prince is cursed and, rather than looking for a way to break the curse, the government just names a regent, locks the prince away, and keeps going. Beauty is the daughter of a foreign dignitary who comes to their country and happens to overhear a conversation in which the regent is hiring someone to kill the prince, who is about to come of age. She decides that she needs to save the prince. Will they fall in love? I guess we’ll see when they finally meet. Will the curse be broken? Maybe. Maybe it’s just that land’s destiny to be ruled by a prince with a curse.

I may continue to massage these in my mind. But for now, I have this blog.

I’m Not Sure What I’m Doing Right Now

I’ve been just. Meh.

I’m cleaning and working on my wardrobe a bit. I’ve bought some books on the creative process that I’m going to start working my way through in hopes that —

Okay. I’m not sure that Alex is going to think of this but here goes. I had an aunt and have a cousin who were both members of the La Leche League, a group dedicated to breastfeeding babies. I didn’t know of any members of the LLL here in San Antonio or anything, but I bought a book called So That’s What They’re For! (Germane Amazon Link!) and would sit there and read it over and over while nursing Alex. It was a bit of work getting established but I successfully nursed him until he was six months old. It wasn’t completely exclusive — we had to supplement with formula for a couple of weeks — but it worked.

And now I’m wondering if I could use these books the same way.

I mean, I can’t literally read while I’m writing. I’m good, but I’m not that good. But I’m wondering if I could open, say, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo in one window and just flip back and forth whenever I begin to bog down in my writing.

Can’t hurt, right?

Anyway, I have been cleaning a lot. I didn’t really want a house. That was Thomas’s dream. But I have one now and I need to get this place under control. I’m getting rid of a decade worth of old junk mail and preparing a bunch of beautiful stuffed animals for donation. I’m hoping the Children’s Shelter can take them. I’d love for them to find homes with children who love them.

They’re all in like-new condition, but since they’re old, I’m sure there are dust mites and things in them. So, since the CDC says freezing can kill dust mites, I’m putting them in the freezer for 24 hours, then I’m putting them in my trunk, since I have a dark blue car, it will make them hot enough to kill any dust mites still left after freezing. Then I’m going to pop them in the dryer on fluff, which should remove the tiny corpses of the dust mites, put the stuffed animals in a box, and take them to the shelter.

I have three totes of stuffed animals that I’m going to treat this way. I’m not doing this with all of them, but if I can’t remember where the animal came from, it’s going to find a new human who will.

I’ve been downsizing my book collection, as well. I am rereading all of my books and selling the ones I don’t think I’ll read again to Half-Price Books. Hopefully I’ll have them narrowed down to a reasonable number someday. Maybe.

Computer Update

I’m having a bit of a delay on my my next section of my Riverwalk post.

My computer is apparently older than I remembered. I could’ve sworn I bought more computers than this since Thomas’s and my breakup, but I guess this dates from 2012.

Anyway, the poor thing is feeling its age and it was hard to do anything with the computer, so Alex sat down with it on Wednesday and added a solid-state drive and upgraded the fans. He tried to add more RAM and a new graphics card, but my computer wasn’t having that.

As a side effect of all of this messing around, my computer decided for a day or so that it didn’t like my old hard drive. I finally got the hard drive back, but neither Word or Excel will work any longer. I also have lost all of the passwords saved in my browser.

What this amounts to is that I have found that I could open my posts in the version of OpenOffice that I’ve had since 2015 and was finally able to rescue my dictated blog posts and, well, it’s like trying to read old shorthand. When I first started cleaning up the post, I remembered most of what I said. But now, I’m down to remembering the walk and just kind of using keywords from the dictated post.

So now I know that I have to get my dictation translated in less than a week. Also, I think I need to enunciate more clearly to avoid some stuff like “I don’t know why the bear that very thing has some items on nowhere else.” I don’t know what I was trying to say there.

I guess it’s time to get back to interpreting my dictation.

I also have been going through lists of books and now have over 700 books that I have read or want to read on my Goodreads page. So I’m not likely to run out of Amazon Links (Gratuitous or Germane) for quite a while.

So, for today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, I have We Ride Upon Sticks, by Quan Barry, a riff on the Salem Witch Trials set in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1989. Just so good. After selling their souls to Emilio Estevez, the girls’ field hockey team from Danvers High School goes from losers to the top. Does Emilio Estevez have dark powers? Or is something else going on?

The Temperaturepocalypse Is Coming

They’re predicting really cold temperatures for tomorrow (by the time I post this, it’ll be “today,” since it’s 11:26 pm right now.

I’m stocking up on stuff that will be useful if the temperaturepocalypse brings along with it the collapse of the power grid. I bought an indoor-safe propane heater but so far I only have picked up two canisters of propane. So, I picked up some tealights so that we can try making one of those radiant heaters out of tea lights and clay plant pots.

I figure if nothing else, we can use the propane heater in my dad’s living room and take turns using the clay pot heater to take the chill off our bathrooms or something like that.

The only pots I could find are pretty large, so I don’t know how well they’ll work. They were also pretty gross, so I’m bleaching them in the sink.

Crap! I literally just remembered my phone batteries. I’ll be right back after I plug one of them in to charge it up

Okay.

I’m using a pretty strong bleach solution on those pots, so they may well be clean enough to eat off of by the time I finish with them.

On the third hand, I have a pretty small pot that I’m using to try to root a piece of my plumeria plant. Maybe I should use that and my smaller big pot for the heater.

Nah. Let’s stick with Plan A for now.

I also picked up some foot warmers to put in my shoes to keep my feet warm. I get a mild case of Raynaud’s phenomenon when I get cold, so even though I love going for a walk on a chilly day, I have to be kind of careful.

Raynaud’s is when the tips of your fingers and toes turn white from cold. I figure mine isn’t so bad, since it can turn your fingers and toes blue, and my fingers and toes have never turned blue.

I’m pretty sure it’s primary Raynaud’s, since secondary Raynaud’s usually comes with autoimmune problems, and I’ve never been diagnosed with lupus or anything.

So, if I go for a walk tomorrow, I can put those in my shoes and hopefully stave off my Raynaud’s. And I do hope to go for a walk tomorrow. The biggest issue is that the ground will probably be icy tomorrow, so I won’t really want to drive anywhere. Fortunately, I’ve got a park within walking distance of my house and can get from there to the Salado Creek Greenway without having to walk along the street. However, I would have to walk along the street to get to the park.

So. It’s now nearly 1 am on Thursday, February 3, and it’s thundering outside. Since I’m trying to post a blog every day this month, I won’t be actually posting this until 12:30 am on February 4. By then, we’ll know what, if anything, comes of temperaturepocalypse.

I may write another post in the morning, or maybe I’ll queue up my second COVID post for the 5th. At any rate, I’ll see y’all later and, oh, blast. I need a Gratuitous Amazon Link don’t I? Where was I? In the middle of 2020, I think.

Welp, I’m going to go back to late 2019. I don’t remember doing The Strangers by Margaret Peterson Haddix, so there you go. The Strangers is the first book in the Greystone Secrets series. Chess, Emma, and Finn discover one day that three kids with their same first and middle names and their same birthdates have been kidnapped. Soon afterwards, their mom has to go on a business trip and leaves them with a stranger. This begins the Greystone kids on a science fiction adventure that I’ve really loved so far. I haven’t read the third book, but I did just finish The Deceivers, the second book, and it looks like this is going to go some fascinating places.

Now, to schedule this before a power line goes down and we end up in darkness. See you tomorrow, probably.

New Plot Bunnies. Maybe I *Will* Write Fiction Again Someday.

In the last month or so, I’ve had two “plot bunnies” occur to me.

The first one I probably will never actually write, because I don’t know enough about the music industry.

When I was at the Yatra/Iglesias/Martin concert, Ricky Martin gave us this speech. I’m trying to remember the exact words, but it was about, like, putting the whole COVID thing behind us (not like living dangerously, but like not being afraid?) and looking forward to a new world and things like that.

I started pondering a singer who had the power of suggestion that could give his audience hope and determination to make a better world like that. Then I considered the certainty that the recording industry would at least try to abuse those abilities. What would make the singer make the break from the music industry? What would that look like? Would it be ethical to use those powers on an audience even if it were for a good cause? Would the attendees of the concert need to sign a consent form? Would that cause the fans to fall away or become more enthusiastic?

Way too many questions than answers for a situation like that. And, again, I know nothing about the recording industry, so I would only display my ignorance by trying to write this.

If anyone who reads this post would like this plot bunny, feel free. Some kind of attribution would be nice.

Then there’s the second “plot bunny.” This one I like and I may even take a stab at writing. It’s a reversed, or maybe even inverted, Hallmark Christmas movie-type story. And I have a bunch of subsidiary ideas that are in parentheses throughout because, like I said, I’m actually tempted to try this one.

Now, remember that I’m ace and probably more than a little aro, so . . . .

Our heroine lives in a small town where she runs a business (coffee shop? bookstore? independent pharmacy?). She’s been with her boyfriend since forever (high school?) and while she loves him, he’s self-destructive (meth? alcohol? reckless driving while on meth or alcohol?) and it’s killing her to watch him.

So she leaves. She breaks up with him on New Year’s Day and moves to the “big city” (Chicago? San Antonio?). We spend almost a year in book-time on her plans to move (what’s she going to do with her business and home in her small town? how will she find a new place in her new home?) and has her grand opening around Thanksgiving.

Then we watch both her business and her personal life grow. She meets a handsome guy in a suit, coded as possible romantic interest, but it turns out that he’s interested. She’s still mourning her relationship and isn’t interested. And when he won’t back off when she tells him to, she would never be interested. She ends up having to do something drastic (police? self-defense classes? public humiliation? a scary friend?) to get him to leave her alone.

Over the next few years, she opens a second location, develops a found family and gets a dog. Her found family gets together for Christmas. The end.

Originally, the pet was going to be a cat, but they always show women with cats and men with dogs, so why not switch that up a bit. Also, having a dog would give her chances to get out and meet people in a way that a cat wouldn’t.

I may also throw a bone to the “but she neeeeds a maaaan” part of the audience and have one of her found family members be the child of a matchmaker, either professional or avocational, and then if the reader wants to imagine Our Heroine in a relationship, there’s an opening for one someday.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual, by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. I loved this book and found it very inspiring the first time I read it. In fact, when I bought tickets for the virtual book tour for Jenny Lawon’s Broken, it was very serendipitous that I had passed up Neil Gaiman and Judy Blume* for Luvvie Ajayi Jones. I didn’t know Jones from anything, but by the time the tour date came, I was almost as pleased to see her as to see Jenny Lawson. And as I wade farther into my planned writing and (hopefully!) proofreading businesses, I may need to reread this occasionally. I have it on my bed right now, waiting its turn after I finish Still Life.

*Put a pin in this idea — I need to write a post about Blume. As a former ace kid, I always kind of had issues. I’ll get into that later.

Back to Cleaning?

I’ve been having a heck of a time with writer’s block lately. This is hilarious because the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to teach yourself to just write. Well, I’m 11 days in and that’s not happening.


So I’m considering procrastinating a bit on writing and maybe doing some thinking about writing while I do it by working on decluttering my closet, cleaning the floors, bleaching my shower, etc.

So. I just hauled my current bag of old clothes out to my car, found most of the pants that I’m planning to cut into strips and macrame into a bag or something.

My weight is doing weird things right now. I’m exercising and watching what I eat and so forth, but I seem to be actually putting on weight? One of the dresses that I am jettisoning was too loose on me once upon a time and now it’s too tight. I don’t even know.

I cleaned out my car a bit and then did a little cleaning in the kitchen. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to write a very, very spoilery Wheel of Time post about my favorite character, who has just made her first appearance in my current reread.

I’ll need a good photo to use as spoiler space, though.

Maybe I’ll even put a cut on this post so that someone just glancing down my home page won’t get spoiled. Because, argh! It’s just. So good.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have the second in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters. This may well be my favorite book in the series. I mean, Percy, Annabeth, Tyson, Grover. What’s not to love?

Now if only I could find my copy of The Lightning Thief. Grrr.

A New Chapter in my Attempt to Dictate Entries

Well, I have finally given up and signed up for a for pay software dictation software.

None of the free software I’ve tried was a damn bit of good, so I downloaded Dragon Anywhere.

Hopefully, this will be a worthwhile thing. I have just signed up for a one week free trial, just to see if this is any good.

Next up, is to see if the wireless headset I use works.

Now that I have this new set up, I up completely out of ideas about what to write about. Hopefully this writer’s block will end soon.

Next question is whether I can transfer this over to WordPress.

Apparently the wireless headset does not work because when I do not have the phone to my mouth it only picks up a few words. Good to know. Now the next question. Can I walk with this? So far I’ve made it about half a block from my house and it’s still working. It’s night, and I’m looking around looking over the phone to be able to see what I’m doing.

Theoretically, I should be able to use the wireless headset. But it isn’t working for some reason. I mean, if you can make phone calls on it, shouldn’t you be able to dictate with it? I will have to futz around with it to see what’s going on with that.

I found a button that claims to copy everything to the clipboard. I am not sure if it’s going to take everything, and I don’t know if it’s going to put everything in the other paragraphs in the correct order, but let’s give it a try. No, I realized that I need to download the WordPress app to my phone so that I can just copy and paste.

There is a pair of ladies walking along behind me talking and I don’t know if this is going to pick up what they’re saying or not I think it might be this could be an issue.

They continued to go straight and I just turned that he will be okay if. If this is able to pick up other conversations, that may be an issue on some of my walks, because I do like to walk, like, on the Riverwalk where there are usually a lot of people.

I just installed WordPress on my phone, and my phone says I’m out of memory. So, it looks like I’m going to be cleaning up the memory of my phone for a while. Wish me luck.

I did it! I’m editing this post on my desktop computer after moving it from Dragon to the WordPress app.

I Went Downtown Tonight (November 1, 2021)

I sat around all day, working on my reading and writing blog posts (this is my fourth post for today, and will go live on November 5), but not getting any exercise, or any reading on The Eye of the World.

I was so close to having The Eye of the World finished and I figured that a trip from my house to the Pearl and then walking downtown from the Pearl and then reversing the trip should be enough time to finish The Eye of the World and, just maybe, get started on The Great Hunt. And it was, too. Yay!

I was a little nervous a couple of times during my walk, but I mostly enjoyed the walk. I saw a couple of Christmas trees while I was out and about, but mostly it felt like a nice, autumnal evening.

I enjoy taking night photographs in the city because the play of light and shadow is so interesting. During the daytime around here, everything’s so bright. We get an occasional darkly overcast day, which makes photography interesting, but mostly it’s just . . . sunny.

Tonight’s picture of the Alamo. There were people standing in front taking family photos, so I decided to get an angled shot for this one.

Unfortunately, even after all of that walking, I’m still 2,000 steps short and it’s 10:45 at night. Let’s see if I can knock some of that out before bedtime (which is about an hour away).