Writing to Write

  As Jane Austen famously said: I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am. Having trouble getting into the groove here so I thought I'd warm up with a blog post. Maybe it's the terrible weather we've been having. Almost every day for the last three …

Setting Goals

I've never been one to use writing prompts to get myself writing. You've probably seen them, all kinds of open-ended one liners like "The peanut butter was on the counter..." and you're supposed to run with it and write a paragraph, or 500 words or something. Those things just leave me cold, I get nowhere. …

Name That Character!

Ok, people, I need help. I'm renaming my female character YET AGAIN, and I can't make up my mind. I'm trying to find something that's not über-common, yet not so outlandish no one can pronounce it. I've listed a few choices below that I'm considering, although in the end I can't guarantee any of these …

Oh Mighty Isis!

Those of us old enough to remember Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman will know that phrase. So yes, I have another new(ish) deck, the Moon Oracle by Caroline Smith and John Astrop (who also created the Elemental Tarot, The Oracle of the Radiant Sun, and the Runic Tarot). It's an interesting deck, divided into 32 …

Inspired Monday

As Mondays go, today is not too bad (so far). Halfway through, and nothing dreadful yet. The Nebbish is out of town for a couple days (YAY!). That cheered me right up when I remembered. Most of the time I answer him as briefly and cheerlessly as I can. Anything else and he would take …

You know it’s a bad sign when…

...the novel you're working on makes you cringe at the idea of actually showing it to someone. So what to do. I can toss the whole thing, forget it ever existed, and start something else, hoping it'll be better. I can revise, losing large chunks of what I've already written and take the story in …

Daybreakers and a Breakthrough

Eureka, a breakthrough. I'm not sure if it was from going to see Daybreakers yesterday, or just all the collective time I've spent immersed in thinking, reading, and writing about vampires, but I finally got a direction I'd been searching for. It's a fairly critical plot point, I've been dancing around this incident almost all …

The Well’s Gone Dry

Or maybe it's just frozen over. It was a whopping 8ºF at my house this morning about 6 o'clock. But the point is, I haven't been able to think of anything to say here for days. Maybe November and NaNoWriMo just drained me, but even during NaNo I was blogging and it almost seemed like …

Out of Ideas?

I think it's safe to say most of us have more ideas than we will ever get around to developing. They fly at us out of nowhere, and usually at the least convenient time (like when we're driving, or in a meeting at work, out of a sound sleep at three o'clock in the morning when …