Wow! I did some transcription today because I had an assignment in a class I’m taking and I was feeling way too lazy to type. I was kind of disappointed that the 4-ish minutes per assignment seemed to take forever for me to get my thoughts out and I was expecting the word count to be minimal.
But between the two recordings, less than nine minutes altogether, I got just over 1100 words down!! I almost never get that much IN AN HOUR of typing when I’m writing fiction!! Transcription is AMAZING!!
In today’s video blog, I tell you about my transcription experience from Day 1 and whine about losing all the italics in the print version of Love at the Fluff and Fold. Yes, it’s been an up and down kind of day. :-/
Hello, my friends! I’ve never done a video blog before, but today it just seemed like the perfect thing to do. 😀
I’ll try to capture as much of NaNoWriMo and other interesting things here in video form. You just have to tell me if you like these or not. Today, I’m talking about entering the RITA awards for the first time, learning to dictate a book this month, and starting a new podcast.
Enjoy!
Last week we had unusually cool temperatures in Southern California – highs in the 60s and 70s – so I had to take the morning last Friday to enjoy it. I knew it wouldn’t last (I was right, the forecast is for the 80s next week), and I wanted to enjoy one more green hike while I still could. Besides, exercise is supposed to help your creativity. 😉
I found a park a mile back from John’s work and thought it might have some nice trails. Sure enough, the Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve was beautiful! (Sorry for the misspelling, that “n” is supposed to be an enya, but I don’t know how to make it show up.) About 4000 acres of flat trails and hilly trails and a creek and a waterfall (that was shorter than me!) and lots of birds and lizards and a snake and even a deer!
The deer reminded me of the verse from Psalm 42:1 – “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.” S/he was very calm, occasionally watching me with her huge ears pointed my direction. (Hence, the name “mule deer.”) She didn’t give any more notice when several very loud military jets flew overhead. Of course, she’d be used to them her whole life living so close to San Diego.
It was a beautiful morning, three hours of walking through green and yellow and mauve fields, along the very green creek, ducking out of the way of dozens of mountain bikers, out to the very small but nice waterfall and back. I took a bunch of pictures, and thought I’d share them with you. I added a red circle around the deer so you can find her in that picture. 🙂 Enjoy!
Mule Deer Watching Me Hike
Enjoy the green while you can – summer is about here!
Very Small Waterfall
A peaceful patch of the stream
Hard to believe the I-15 freeway and an industrial park are just out of sight
I’ve been teaching a time management class for writers in January for the last few years called Going the Distance. I’ve been thrilled that it’s been so hands-on useful to my students, and I started thinking I should do another shorter class in the summer called Restart. It would be about taking the time to stop and re-focus when your schedule gets out of control.
Yesterday, I had a brief Restart moment myself. The last few years have been very difficult financially and career-wise for both me and John. The last few months of unemployment I’ve been trying to think of ways to bring in money without totally turning away from my writing and teaching business. After looking at a lot of options, the only appealing one was to try to grow the teaching side of my business.
That has taken up most of my time (8-12 hours a day, 6 days a week!) since I put out my last book in December (A Very Merry Superhero Wedding). When I have tried to work on “My Bullheaded Superhero Valentine”, my latest superhero short story (that was supposed to be out by February 14), I have had to fight to get every word on the page, and still it’s only 15 pages long. Combine that depressing number with the numbers I pulled together for our tax accountant, and I was half-heartedly wondering at what point I should just give up.
Then John was unexpectedly called back to work two days ago! I immediately lost the feeling of wanting to give up, but I felt I needed to take one of those Restart moments and ask God again what I should be doing. You know, check in, touch base, see if there is a new direction, same direction, or if I’ve been blown off course and need to correct my route.
Turns out, it was the last one. I’ve been so focused on our daily need for money to pay the bills, I was chasing that rabbit and too often ignoring the one thing that I’ve been certain of the last few years – that God wants me to write.
And that’s why I’m here. I need to course-correct. So I’m going to hit the Restart button and start blogging regularly here again. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the posts. 😉 But sometimes you need to do things because it’s what you need regardless of what the marketing experts tell you. And what I need is a place to talk about the things that interest me – like spirituality, neuroscience, relationships, and comic books. So I’ll be doing that on Wednesdays every week.
One thing I used to write a lot of is devotionals – little stories about life and how a Bible verse or subject applies to it. I love writing those stories because it’s an outlet to share the silly, ridiculous, interesting, and heart-wrenching things I’ve seen or experienced as well as giving voice to the things I learn about God and his amazing love for us. So I’m going to start writing devotionals again (yay!) and post them here every Sunday.
That nudge I got from God yesterday – that I’m not really doing what I know I should be doing – has turned around my dragging feet and helped me not to feel so down about my writing career. Just the act of writing this post has revived my spirits already! And this is just day one!
I encourage you, if there is anything you feel like you should be doing but haven’t been, take a moment to stop and think and listen. Hit the Restart button in that area and begin again. You may feel your spirits revive, too! And please share it with me here. It’s more fun when we have a conversation instead of me monologuing like a super villain!
Thanks so much to Jennifer Brassel for inviting me to join the blog tour. 🙂 Jennifer’s blog can be seen here. Jen and I both have stories in the romance anthology, Moonlit Encounters, and her book Secret Reflection is a modern Gothic tale complete with ghosts, romance, and an unsolved crime.
What am I working on? Right now, I am finishing up the second book in the Adventures of Lewis and Clarke series, Superhero in the Making. At the end of book one, Unexpected Superhero, Tori has decided she definitely wants to pursue life as a superhero. But it’s harder than it looks. On top of everything else – family issues, secrets uncovered, and secrets to keep hidden – there’s another woman trying to catch Joe’s attention. Tori is trying to keep in mind that undercover superhero work is a job like any other, and Joe is a professional. But can she trust him?
How does my work differ from others of its genre? The Adventures of Lewis and Clarke is about superheroes living their daily lives as our next door neighbors. It’s about love and marriage, friendships, family, and trying to save the world one person at a time. It’s also about the battle between good and evil, and constantly begs the question – am I up for the task? It’s romantic comedy meets urban fantasy. I really enjoy writing this series and I hope to continue for several books to come.
Why do I write what I do? I love writing about people in love because I’m in love! 😀 But I think it’s more interesting to see the ups and downs and sideways parts of love, not just the happy moments. Falling in love and getting married is awesome, but nothing prepares you for what comes next. It’s hard! But it’s so worth it. Add that to the fact that I am amazed at how God created us to be strong, good, loving people and yet the world and the dark forces around us keep knocking us down so that we’re weak, selfish, and greedy, and there is a lot of room for stories in there! I’m trying to write about both of these elements in my superhero series.
How does my writing process work? Well, that depends entirely on my deadline! LOL! Right now, I am writing six days a week, 8-12 hours a day to finish this book in time for WonderCon. I’ve taken time away to write at a timeshare several times recently, and over the years, because I can focus on just writing. I usually start with the big idea and boil it down to six or eight main points, then whittle those down to a dozen or so scenes each, then create 3×5 scene cards that I spread out on the floor looking for holes in the story. Once I’ve got the first quarter of the story worked out, I start writing based on the scene cards. Then I look at the second quarter, see if anything needs to be changed because of what I wrote in the first part, tweak the scene cards and write the second quarter. Repeat for the last two quarters of the book. Then I talk to my editors (I have two, Marcy and Sarah) about plot problems, etc. It’s intense and exhausting, but I wouldn’t trade it to do anything else. (Though I’m really looking forward to a vacation soon!)
I hope you found this fun and interesting. Maybe you learned a little something about me that you didn’t know. It was fun giving you a glimpse into my world. 🙂
If you’d like to read about another of my Aussie friends with a story in Moonlit Encounters, check out Coleen Kwan‘s My Writing Process blog here. Coleen Kwan writes both contemporary and steampunk romance. She lives in Sydney, Australia with her partner and two children. When she isn’t writing she enjoys avoiding housework, eating chocolate, and watching Criminal Minds.
And now – back to writing!
I’ve been listening to this Brandon Heath song rather a lot lately. It just keeps showing up on my playlists. I’m beginning to think it’s a sign! LOL! With or without the lyrics to this song, I think 2014 is going to be a great year. I think we’re going to need to be flexible and willing to make fast changes, but I think it’s going to be a great year! 😀
Anyway, enjoy the lyrics to the song. You can buy the whole thing on iTunes, or just listen to a minute of it. It’s a catchy tune!
“Don’t Get Comfortable”
Hello my friends! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s. I sure did. I’d planned since last Christmas to take two full weeks off and relax. Right up to the last minute, I was sure I wouldn’t “be able to” do it. But in the end, I did!
My workload piled up during the two weeks off, but I feel so much more relaxed and rested and ready for work! How did I manage to take so much vacation time when life has been battering me for the last couple of years? The primary reason is because last January I laid out a written plan for my year.
Granted, a LOT of things went wrong with the plan. I couldn’t have anticipated six months of unemployment for John. I made more money than I did in 2012, but it wasn’t enough to offset the costs of a few book-selling risks I took that didn’t pay off. Near the end of the year, I had to put my writing business on the back burner and work full-time at a temp job.
But for the whole year, I could look at my writing plan and my calendar and I could figure out how each of my plans would be affected by the new turn life took. I could move the sticky notes on the calendar to change deadlines. I could cancel things that just couldn’t be accomplished now that the course of life had changed.
And I could do it all with more peace than usual because I had a written, changeable plan.
If you’d like to work with me over the next four weeks to get a plan in place for you this year, please sign up for my online class Going the Distance: Goal Setting and Time Management for the Writer. Due to popular demand, this is the fourth year I’ve taught this class, and there’s always something new to learn and share. I hope you’ll join us!
What do you want to accomplish this year?
One of the pots I made in college
A couple weeks ago, one of the pastors of our church, Pastor Care Crawford, gave one of the most moving sermons. Care’s voice is very soothing anyway, so that added to the nuances of the story. And the fact that the sermon sounded more like a story made it even more intriguing for me.
Care talked about loving Play-Doh as a child, and taking a pottery class in college. I was totally in sync with what she was saying because that was me, too. Then she talked about the Bible passages about God being like a potter with plans for each and every pot that he makes. And we’re the clay.
Since Care has had pottery classes, she explained exactly what happens in the creation of a pot. And since I’ve taken a pottery class, I knew what she was talking about, and I could completely see the parallels between the potter and the clay, and God and us.
It’s not that I haven’t heard sermons on this topic before, but the life I’ve been living recently has been seriously tough. And being reminded about how you have to handle clay to make a beautiful pot was seriously helpful in gaining perspective on what’s been happening.
Right down to remembering what it’s like to squeeze the clay back down to a ball because it’s not shaping up right. I didn’t do that because I hated the pot I was making or because I had it in for the clay. I did it because I knew I could make the pot better and the clay could take it. I’ve still got some pots I made in college, and I still love them.
So I’ve been trying to keep in mind lately that God knows what he’s trying to accomplish, and it’s better than the life I’ve lived until now. And like the clay, God believes I can take the pounding. That makes me believe I can, too.
This might be one of my favorite pictures by my friend Neville Crombie. Lucky me, I have been able to live near jacaranda trees since I moved to Southern California in 2001. How happy I was to find out jacaranda trees are in Sydney, too! I think part of the reason we picked out the apartment that we did (when we lived there) is because there was a jacaranda tree in bloom outside what would be the office window. 🙂
It’s fall in America, with amazing colors in some areas of the country. And it’s spring in Australia – with amazing colors in some areas of the country! This is a beautiful little Illawarah Flame tree standing next to a lovely jacaranda. And if I’m not mistaken, this is Centennial Park – the most perfect park in the world to run in! (Right, John?) 😀
