of reading and baby books

Yesterday, I spent a whole day at a seminar swamped with info on unschooling teens, college acceptance, and the risks and joys of "delight-directed" learning. Thank heavens we aren't quite at the point of college applications. It's been a rough year, but also enlightening. Dear daughter, who has always claimed she had no interest in writing (not having time for it due to shark studies), suddenly announced she'd started writing a story and asked if she could read it to me. Of course I was delighted, and astonished that the kid has a terrific grasp of dialog, setting, and the gripping scene. No character development yet, and the plot has not been revealed, but doggone it, I'm so proud of her.

How did she learn this wonderful stuff? She reads. Book after book after book. Many of them she reads over and over and over (Harry Potter books at our house have extremely frayed covers). She reads mysteries, romance, history, horse books, funny books, and books on sharks and oceanography. She's well known by our local librarians.

When she was an infant there were just a couple of things I wanted to see in her life as she grew: a love of God and desire to be his intimate friend, and a love of books. The first, of course, is a lifelong goal for us. The second was apparent from a very young age.

When she was a few months old, I used to take her in her stroller into a large bookstore near us and roll her over to the children's books. I'd hold up a book and if she showed any enthusiasm for it, that was a take home. Sandra Boynton was a fast favorite, and still is, for both of us. My baby loved books and wanted me to read to her for hours, something I was happy to do for a large part of each day.

What makes a book interesting to a baby may be pretty close to what appeals to adults. The covers may get us to pick it up, but the rhythym, the emotion (Boynton's humor and the sweetness of her books like The Going To Bed Book, for example), a story that engages us, and a character to whom we can relate make it an experience we want.

That's the kind of book I'm aiming for. I just hope I can keep up with Boynton.

Good grief, I just killed off another character!

The problem with writing without an outline is that you may, as I did recently, get the bug to kill off a character, which leaves one, me anyway, with a problem. I just killed the guy who was supposed to be the big bad dude, the one responsible for the first killing and of whom everyone is afraid. Now who do I blame?

Well, I find this rather invigorating, because I have someone in mind. But it also brings me back to the fact that I really do need to sit down and make a map for my books so that I've got the road laid out, though not yet paved. I really do need to do that. My problem may be the same as yours if you're struggling to finish a writing project--time.

Time used to snail by, but now that I'm nearly ancient (according to my teenager), it moves like a bullet train. I know that one doesn't find time, but makes time. If I want to get these books done, I need to make time. And I feel like I need to make a huge block of time. And huge blocks of time do not just lie around waiting to be picked up and used at my house. I need a weekend retreat. And I'm going to plan one. Soon. I promise. I'll get back to you on it.

how to increase your writing time

My daughter and I recently visited family in both the Northwest and in the Northeast. It was a long trip. We returned to find a DVR hooked up to the TV. Because I am technologically challenged, this has increased my writing time by about an hour a day. I have to ask my 13-year-old child how to turn the TV on. Yes, there's a booklet I'm supposed to read, but I'm still doing laundry from the trip while pulling everything I can out of the living room so the painters can get to the walls. When do I have time for the booklet? So most of the time, I just forget it. It's probably better anyway to spend my time doing more creative stuff than watching Perry Mason.

Like making some sort of skeletal outline that would keep my books moving along. Since the second book is taken from excerpts of a fictional book that I included in the first book, I have these little vignettes to serve as "fenceposts" for the story that I'm stringing out. This is a huge advantage over the first book, which began as a class project and has been sculpted and trimmed as I write along. Still undone, I do think I know where I'm going, but I haven't set it on paper. That would be good--to draw myself a map.

It's gotta be easier than reading the DVR booklet.

Letting the characters lead

I am loaded with energy and optimism tonight. Critique group this morning went really well. Heard some great stuff from my buddies: poetry, biography, mystery. We're all progressing, albeit slowly, toward publishing real books full of good stuff.

Robert Frost wrote about The Road Not Taken, and I think about that a lot as I write. I made a choice this week to have one of my secondary characters, Barbara, step into a situation that revealed more about her, and in the process, it revealed a bit more about Anna, my MC. I had intended for Barbara to veer into something different, but she didn't want to go there. She wanted the road NOT taken.

Come on, you fiction writers, you know exactly what I mean. You create a character, and non-writers think you "make" them go where you want them. But once a character has been defined to a certain degree, and she begins to "live" for you. Like the Velveteen Rabbit she becomes "real" and then look out! Characters do lead writers along. As Stephen King says in "On Writing," you uncover the bones of your story--and your characters are the ones who do the real work for you. So make them strong and give them a variety of tools for their job--physicality, personality, spirit, and all the other strengths and weaknesses that make them resonate with your readers, then let the story unfold!

My name is Karen and I'm a library-aholic

Right now, I'm having a hard time working my way through my writing. I would rather write something short and funny than keep my behind in the chair long enough to finish my books. A huge obstacle this summer is that my daughter is volunteering to sign up kids in the reading program at our nearest library. That means I have to run her there and pick her up, so I am around the library almost every day. And libraries, in case you aren't getting this, are full of books. Other people's books. Some of the writing is not so good, but there is so much good stuff that it's hard to walk away with just my daughter and her books. I have to pick up a couple more every time I'm in. I think I've read a dozen books in the last week, and at least one of them wasn't worth reading, and another couple were marginal. The rest were actually good books. Joanne Dobson's latest with her Professor Karen Pelletier, Death Without Tenure, was a book I'd been pining to read.

Now that I've read all these books, I think I need to contribute to the library system. I will finish my own books and hope they are added to the shelves and that others will find them better than marginal. As we have said in our critique group, "Friends don't let friends write mediocre books." God willing, mine will make it through the gauntlet to bookshelves in homes and libraries across the country. I just have to keep my bottom in the chair.

Good grief!

It's summer already. My critique group will be splitting up for travel plans, coming back together when we can--we never totally knock off for any length of time. We've already had a couple of members take trips to spend time with family in other states. The rest of us have stayed put, for now, and all my energy seems to have gone into making brownies for all the end-of-the-school-year stuff. Yes, even homeschoolers celebrate that. Three or four batches for the various co-op classes, potlucks and recognition night. Whew. I do not want to see any more brownies for a long time.

The books are simmering. After my great time visiting an AA group for research on my recovering alcoholic MC in book #2, I'm just letting all that settle. Those folks are incredible. Such poignant humor about their situation. They were all upbeat and looking to the future. One of the women really seems a lot like Cody, my MC. She was at least six feet tall and athletic, although she didn't show any signs of being as irascible as Cody. The meeting gave me a lot to think about as I craft that book.

I need to re-do the outline for The Fictional Writer--the original has long since been changed so much that I dumped it. Better ideas rule. And I have NO outline for The Big Kissoff, the Cody book. I've been far too organic with that, and it's not going to work for long. Although I fully believe in letting the story unwind, I've concluded that if I don't have a destination, I'm going to be like the Israelites wandering in the desert.

Marketing hints for magazine articles

I just got both a phone call AND an email from an editor who wants to publish the humor article I sent her. Pretty fast, since it just went out to her last week! I'm remembering what someone at a writers conference told us about selling magazine articles: You send the same piece out to similar publications in different markets. For example, regional parenting magazines, or different denominational publications--non-competing markets that may pay less than a huge national publication, but for which the total payoff will be higher. If I can sell this same piece to four or five different small publications, I can make as much as by selling it once to one national behemoth. Such a deal. Although the pay is less, the competition is also less, and total sales MIGHT make up for it.

Besides getting a little money out of the deal, I also have a nice fresh clip for my clip file. That's always good. And the pay will help cover the toner for printing out my novel's pages for critique group. That's also good. But the best thing about getting back in print is that it helps to boost my morale. I must be a real writer if I'm getting in print. And that's VERY, VERY good.