My First Blog Hop

I'm joining my first Blog Hop. Do I have any idea what that means? Not particularly, but I've enjoyed reading the results of other Blog Hops so I thought I'd give it a go.
Visit RJR Daydreamer for details on this Hop. Looks like fun and you still have until the weekend to join.

The Memory Eater

Calling all writer's! Want to try something fun and, in my humble opinion, exciting? Check out The Memory Eater Anthology. Fire up your keyboards, dig into the deep recesses of your creative mind and write away!

C.P. Anthologies is looking for submissions on a peculiar subject. My entry just needs a little polishing and editing and it's ready to go! Is yours?

Give it a peek, see what you can come up with.
Write away! Right away!
Nina

A Free Writing Course

Greetings all,

I know I haven't been very active lately, I will admit not much writing has been getting done. A prologue, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are complete but not to my satisfaction. Something is missing. Some crucial element that ties the writing to the pictures and words in my head.
Which leads me to the free writing course. I figured I needed a little extra help on the delivery of my sentences, on creating my scenes and finding "my voice". Low and behold, I get an email for a free writing course, so I checked it out. It actually seems pretty cool. I'm only in the orientation week, but so far so good. Everyone is really nice and helpful, and it's a fun community.
Its called the F2K writing course, and I'm not sure if they are still accepting students but if you wanna try to see if you can get in, the link is http://www.writersvillage.com/free/
There are instructions right on the main page explaining how to sign up for the course.
Happy Writing!
Nina

Writing Lesson - The Hyphen

Ok yes, I know, I know... We should have learned this in elementary school. In fact, it's quite possible that I did, and then forgot. But I was having a hard time figuring out if I should hyphenate certain words in my novel, and lucky for me, I came across an article that addressed this specific issue.

So here is the rule: A hyphen is used to join two words that describe an object, when the descriptive words can't be used on their own.

Example: The blood-stained walls
You can't describe the walls as simply blood, or simply stained. Therefore a hyphen is required.

Example #2: The mushy, green peas.
Both words can describe the peas on their own, therefore no hyphen is required.

So for those of you who like little tricks for grammar and punctuation, I hope this comes in handy.

How to Show Not Tell

If you've taking any sort of writing course, or read any articles on creative writing, you are bound to have come across the phrase "Show don't Tell". Click here to read my article on "How to Show Not Tell".
Let me know if you find it useful, or if you have any other tricks for Showing not Telling.

Hit the 1500 word mark!

I hit the 1500 word mark on my novel. A total of 1588 actually. It's still the rough draft, which will need a lot of re-writing and editing, but it's a good start. I find it good to walk away from it when I know exactly what comes next, and I'm excited to write about it... That way when I sit back down to keep going, I'm not staring at a blank page. It keeps me pumped up about getting back to it. I suppose the same argument could be made for not leaving the work when you are still passionate about it, but so far this works for me.

Stretching to pat my own back

I finished my goal of outlining all parts of my novel, that I have figured out, up to this point. I also managed to add 458 words to the novel writing itself, bringing me to a grand total of 958 words. Of course 90% of those words will probably be thrown in the trash can during editing, but what the hell... you can't edit what's not there, right?
In addition to my oh-so-very-productive-novel-writing-bout, I also managed to sneak in the time for a brief writing contest, a visit to my mom and I watched the golden globe awards. My life is so exciting, how do I contain myself?
For now I'll be running a hot bath and mulling over what happens next in my novel while I soak.
Check out the Contest entries above and follow the link to read my latest piece of work.

Outlining by storyline

I tried with my novel, to just write and write. I really did try. But I got easily confused. I have 4 hooks/threads going at once and a hard time figuring out how to introduce them, keep them in order, integrate them, and know what should go where and when. Plus I still have a lot of unanswered questions as to what happens with certain characters, plot-lines and back story. So I consulted the experts, both in physical published format and in cyberspace.
I took a plethora of ideas and "how-to's" and made them my own. Instead of doing an outline and following it according to the experts, I did an outline for each hook/thread. Being the visual and gadget-happy person that I am, I used colorful paper, and trinkets and such to divide each section and started actual outlining.
The results? PRODUCTIVITY! I had fun filling in the blanks, I progressed the plot while answering each question, and made notes for myself explaining what scenes needed more thought and solutions.
I'm hoping that by tomorrow, I have entered into my pretty-little-outline-pages, all the information on my novel that I have floating around in my head. I'm not going to assign myself the unattainable goal of finishing my outline by tomorrow, just the parts I'm already sure about(and can easily change should some parts take on a different direction).
So a big ol' YAY ME!

What is your novel about?

If you happen to mention to someone that you're writing a novel, the question of "What is the story about" is bound to follow. I personally have a really hard time with this answer. I have so many ideas floating around in my head, so many twists, turns and sub-stories that a brief 1 minute explanation just would not do.

So an exercise was generated after this very issue came up. In between 200-250 words, what is your novel about? Write it out for yourself, not for anyone else. Don't worry about sentence structure or proper tenses, just do it for you.

Let me know how it goes!

New idea in the brainstorming phase

I finally have a new idea that seems to be sticking. Well so far anyway. I'm in the brainstorming phase and I haven't quite figured out the details yet, but the story is starting to take shape in my head.

I have a tendency to like an idea until I hit a block where the story doesn't hit one of my criteria.

For me, the main storyline has to be:

#1 - Something I know about
#2 - Something very different
#3 - Something with meaning
#4 - I need to already know how it begins and how it ends, and the ending has to be awesome.
#5 - There has to be at least one character that is super different
#6 - There has to be a major twist even I wouldn't see coming

So far I'm 5 out of 6. We will see where it goes!
Wish me luck:)

When nothing seems to stick...

No ideas for a novel seem to be sticking. Does anyone else ever have this issue? Is there a super glue for writer's out there that I haven't heard about? If I don't stick to a novel idea and theme, I'm afraid one won't be written (well duh!). Is this what they call "writer's block" or is it "writer's wall" because the ideas seem to pile on top of each other though none of them come to completion. My thoughts run crazily into each other and I can't seem to focus on one. Oh how I long for a nice warm sunny day to walk along the beach and be alone with my brainstorming little mind.

Any ideas on how to get past this?

For now i'm just jotting down any and all ideas that come to mind that mean something to me...

In desperation, I move on towards the glimmer of light I call hope... or madness ;)

Starting on a new idea

It's been over 6 months since I have even peeked at my last project. It had nowhere to go as far as my thought process was concerned. So it took a few months to finally say, "Ok, it's not the time to write this novel". Then it took a couple of months on top of that to have a lovely little brainstorm about a new project. That brainstorm hit about 2 nights ago when I was trying to sleep.

The idea came to me while I was reflecting on my life, and my death really. No I'm not dying, that I know of... but my mortality has come into view lately, as well as the mortality of those I love and the idea just built on itself.

So here I go on a new project, no fancy notebooks and binders, cutesy sticky-notes or colour co-ordinated pens. Just a plain old composition book, a pen, my laptop and some ideas... well maybe a few cutesy sticky notes for good measure ;)

Picking the Title

Who woulda thunk picking a title for a novel would be so brain bruising? Pain I tell you, actual pain! I mulled, sorted, read, studied, mulled some more only to come up with a basically plain title for my novel. I wanted something extraordinary, I settled for "it will do".

I was going to save the title picking for when either A: it just came to me or B: the book sort of came up with it's own title or C: someone who I had read and edit the book suggested a title. BUT, I obtained yet another How-To book and I'm ATTEMPTING to follow the steps. One of the first steps is to pick a title. My guess is I'll wind up changing it eventually, but in the meantime it will do. Has anyone else had a problem picking a title? Do the tells PLEASE! I'd like to know I'm not the only one with this issue.

Breaking the Block - Changing the Point of View

I finally broke the writer's block. I switched my sub-character for my main character and the story took on a whole new feel. I'm pretty excited about it. So I'm revamping my character sketches and plot sketches a little bit to accommodate. Having the story unfold in this character's eyes has really opened things up. I might switch it around again, who knows? For now though, I have some definite structure coming about. I have even started on my plot sketches, though I am certain they will change around quite a bit before I get to the fun stuff of actually writing.

Character Sketching

Let's look at Character Sketches to start. Now I'm at the point in writing my novel where I need to do my Character Sketches in order to keep my brainstorming going. I've read a LOT about Character Sketching on different websites. Most author's websites that have suggestions for new novelists focus loads of attention on the characters. Apparently, according to most, the character development is the most important process of writing a good novel. If the reader isn't interested in who the person is, they won't care what the person does and that pretty much leaves your novel discarded.

What everyone seems to agree on is the more effort and background you put into your character sketches, the better. It's all about the detail. Even if the reader never finds out that when the hero of the story was a little boy, he threw worms at his sister and because of that she never truly trusted him, or worms for that matter, as long as YOU know it, you'll be able to build up the character accordingly. Here are a few websites with Character Sketch Sheets or ideas, if you can fill in all the blanks, you may have yourself a full bodied, 3-dimensional character that your readers will love to follow. ( http://www.angelfire.com/freak2/writersblock/sketch.html http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/kswiesner/FDmap.html http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/char_sk.html)

Researching

The next section in my How-To book is all about the researching. I'm guessing researching is a lot like brainstorming in the sense that it's really a "to each their own" kind of thing, but the ideas in the book were interesting. Once you've figured out what kind of story you're going to write (after the brainstorming), there will inevitably be some things you need to research. If you are writing a story based on a certain time period, you will need to know the clothing styles, customs and the basic day-to-day life in that period. Depending on where your story takes place, you would need to know such things as climate, diet and regional information about said place. What about your character's occupation? You may need to research a little more than a few ER episodes if your character is a doctor or a nurse. This is all pretty basic information that most writers would have thought of.
According to the How-To book you should have most of your research done before attempting to write your novel because within the research your story will develop. That's not to say that researching isn't going to go on a long ways into the book.
My issue at this is point is; by reading this book I technically am researching. But I don't already have an idea in my head for a specific novel to correspond this information with. Then I think I should start to plan my novel, but I don't want to do so and bypass important information I'll acquire from the book. It's kind of a catch 22.
Regardless of the setbacks and confusion, I plug on...

And so it begins...

Ok well not really. It began years ago. I've been trying my hand at novel writing for some time, but this specific journey pretty much begins now. Like most writers, my creative juices for a novel are running a good part of the day. I play scenes and characters out in my head, often for hours while doing other tasks. It gets pretty busy in there sometimes and I find myself having to purposely shut my thoughts down. I hope it's the same way for most writers and that I'm not just a freak on that one.
So today I read the first chapter of my How-To book (if you want the title of this book just ask, but I won't post it publicly). It makes promise of some good ideas, but I have to say, the amount of typos (like words being completely omitted from a sentence) is a little disconcerting. Regardless, it's a start.