S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 146

NaNoWriMo Countdown: Outlining Resources

For my NaNoWriMo novel I've written a series overview (I actually outlined three books, and the one I'll be writing is the first) with a one-page synopsis for each novel and a ton of handwritten notes when I was structuring the idea. The overview, the synopsis for the first book and my notes are the first additions to my novel notebook. Now I have to work out my timeline and my chapter summaries, which will be today and tomorrow because I'm running out of October.

How (or if) you outline your book is up to you, and if you're interested in trying some new methods there are a lot of resources on the internet that can help. Before I start throwing links at you, let's talk about the good and bad of outlining, and how you can make it work for you.

My first advice on outlining is not to worry about form or format at all. Remember all those rules your English teacher hammered into your head? Toss that right out the window. When it comes to outlining for yourself form doesn't matter, and neither does format. No rulers will be employed, and you will not be graded on how perfect your indentations and margins turn out.

A workable novel outline is like a map of your book. Look at any real map and you'll notice a few things: a generally defined area, natural features, landmarks, communities and the routes you can take to move through the area. A map defines any place it charts in the simplest terms, and features only the information that is necessary for the traveler. What you generally won't see on the map is every single trailer park, bike path, apple tree, chicken place or convenience store in the area, and this is because you don't need that kind of detail to plan a journey. Plus you will discover all those things as you travel, which is kind of the point of any journey through a new place.

It's the same thing with writing an outline for a story. Pretend for a minute that you're the map maker, and the story is the place through which your characters will be traveling. What are the things you need to know in advance in order to make this trip? You'll need to define this, and once you do that's what you put in your outline to create your story map. If you're not sure where to start with what you need, try the reason the story is happening.

I think people are the most interesting part of any story, which is why I usually start developing a story by defining who a character is, what the character wants, and determining what is the worst thing that can happen to them. Example: a vampire-hating psychic thief searches for the vampire who killed her parents, and ends up rescuing and then falling in love with another vampire (and if you've read my novel Night Lost, you also know the big twist at the end with all that.) That was where I started my story map with that idea: the thief, what she wanted, and the worst thing that could happen to her.

You don't have to start your outline with a character, their goals or their conflicts; you can work from any catalyst around which you want to build your story. Some writers use an event, a setting or even an object as their core concept. In Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen used the endless amiable and eligible Mr. Bingley moving into the neighborhood to stir things up for the Bennets. Shirley Jackson used things like lotteries and haunted houses; Tolkien had that ring. It can really be anything, as long as it's compelling enough to have you write an entire book about it.

Outlining works best when it gives you just enough direction to make the journey possible. Again, this is something you have to define. My advice is to keep it as simple as possible, and don't try to nail down every single detail. You'll have plenty of time for that as you do the writing. Keeping it basic will also help because something you've loosely sketched is a lot easier to modify (versus some enormously complicated masterpiece you've chiseled in stone.)

For more ideas and ways to outline your story, check out these links:

Planning, Scheming, and Plotting by Stephannie Beman -- Stephannie talks about her method of sketching out a nice, brief checklist to loosely organize her stories in advance of the writing.

Keith Cronin abstains from Roman numerals in his hybrid pantser-plotter approach to outlining, The Big O.

For those who prefer to write the classic synopsis as an outline -- there are one or two of you like that, yes? -- Charlotte Dillon has a fabulous page of info and links here.

If you'd like to organize your outline online, I recommend trying Hiveword, Mike Fleming's free online novel writing organizer, which I demo'd and reviewed here.

If you hate the idea of outlining at all, you may get some comfort (and ideas) from Crawford Kilian's post Writing Without an Outline.

Advice from a master: Effectively Outlining Your Plot by Lee Masterson

Alicia Rasley's classic article Outline Your Novel in Thirty Minutes asks all the right questions; you provide the answers.

For a very brief outline, test drive my one-page ten point novel concept outline template (the first page is the blank template; the second is filled in as an example.)

If you like Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method of outlining, you'll probably also love TextTree, a freeware written as a companion program for it.

TiddlyWiki is a free service that provides a reusable non-linear personal web notebook (LJ Cohen did a terrific virtual workshop a few years back on how to use TiddlyWiki to organize your novel.)

Try virtual whiteboarding with the free online service Trello, which I demo'd and reviewed here.

Juliette Wade's Sequence Outlining offers an event-driven method of outlining.

Writing.com has a Blank Novel Outline worksheet here.

And finally, a post I wrote that after five years remains the #1 most popular on PBW, my Novel Outlining 101.

NaNoWriMo Countdown: Winner & Sessions

The winner of the NaNoWriMo Countdown giveaway is:

traveler, who wrote:  Writing with index cards is my most practical item.

Traveler, when you have a chance please send your full name and ship-to address to LynnViehl@aol.com so I can get your package out to you. My thanks to everyone for joining in and offering so many ideas on things to help with National Novel Writing Month.

In order to win NaNoWriMo 2012 we have to write 50,000 words during the month of November, and it's a good idea to set reasonable, regularly-scheduled writing goals in order to reach the finish line. If you're plan is to write every day for those thirty days then producing 1,667 words per day (about six and a half typed, double-spaced manuscript pages) is your goal. Writers who want to take off the weekends (and there's nothing wrong with that) will still have 22 week days to write, which raises the daily goal to 2,273, or about nine manuscript pages per week day. Holidays in November include Remembrance Day (Canada, UK), Veterans Day and Thanksgiving Day (U.S.) which should also be factored in. I have family coming to visit for a four-day weekend, and I want to spend those days with them, so I've planned to write for 26 days. To accomodate that, my NaNo daily writing goal will be 1,923 words, or about seven and a half manuscript pages per day.

You can work out how many hours you'll need for your daily writing session by writing every day for a couple of days and noting each day how many hours you write and how many words you produce. Once you've done that, average them out. If you work twenty-one hours in a week, and produce a total of 12,600 words, then you write about 600 words or about two and a half pages per hour. I can write up to 2,500 words or ten pages an hour if I have to, but the pace that's more comfortable for me is 1000 words or four pages per hour, so I'll be working on the NaNo novel about two and a half hours a day (two hours of writing + three ten minute breaks.)

Speaking of breaks, you should allow yourself at least one during your writing sessions, and make it a real break. Get up and get out of your writing space. Stretch and loosen up your muscles. Take a walk around the house or the yard. You should also keep hydrated, and if you're hungry, have a sensible snack. I don't eat or drink anymore when I'm writing, so I like a cup of tea and a snack during my breaks (bananas and strawberries are my favorite.) I don't use sugar anymore but even back when I did I wouldn't have anything sugary while I was writing; it made me too restless.

My daily NaNoWriMo sessions are loosely scheduled now to be from 7 am to 9:30 am, but I'll probably have some days when I start at 6 am or 8 am or some other morning hour. My daily edit of whatever I write will be after dinner, probably around 9 to 10 pm just before I update my weblog and finish out my e-mail. I like a long break between writing and editing so I can shift gears.

Of course you don't have to plan exactly when and how often you'll have your writing sessions during November, and it may be counterproductive to your process to do so. But if it doesn't bother you to schedule your writing time then you should take a look at it. Most of you have days jobs, and when I was working I would get up an hour early and write while the house was quiet, write again during my lunch hour at work, and then spend another hour or two working on my stories at night after everyone went to bed. Short writing sessions can seem frustrating at first -- by the time you've gotten really warmed up they're over -- but I found that I began unconsciously writing faster. Those short sessions also made me see how important it was for me to separate the writing and editing process so I didn't waste my brief amount of writing time backtracking and fixing things.

You may have to sacrifice a few things to create writing time for yourself, but if you're smart you don't have deprive yourself or let your household descend into chaos. For example, record your favorite television shows instead of watching them live and you'll probably buy yourself at least seven to ten extra hours of writing time per week. You can glom on the recorded shows all you want after November, or maybe use them as a reward for making your weekly wordcount goal -- if you meet yur quota, allow yourself an hour to watch one.

If your family is supportive, ask them to help out, too. I did, and my daughter volunteered to cook three nights a week during November, which will give me an extra six to nine hours to focus on work. Since she took culinary classes in high school and is a great improvisational cook like her grandfather I'm looking forward to some fabulous meals. My guy will take over the morning walk with the dogs; he'll also vacuum, do dishes and laundry and attend to any other chore I request. This is one of the reasons why I love him: the man cleans bathrooms.

Finally, do what you can this last week before NaNoWriMo to get your life ready for this. I've been keeping up with my housework and laundry so my house and my crew will be tidy going into November. I'm making double batches of everything freezable (chili, pasta sauce, soup and casseroles) so I'll have an extra week of entrees I just have to defrost and serve. I'm also going to make some slow cooker (crock pot) recipes next month, which will be great with the cooler weather. I've paid all the bills in advance and cleared the calendar of appointments as much as possible, and I'm writing as many blog posts in advance as I can so I have a good stockpile of those for days when I'm too tired to post anything coherent or useful.

Do you have any tips to share on how to save time, create opportunities to write or otherwise improve writing sessions during NaNoWriMo? Let us know in comments.

NaNoWriMo Countdown: Giveaway

One of the neat things about beginning a new novel is putting together all the stuff I'll need to get the work done: notebooks, folders, sketchpads, research sources, pens, pencils etc. It's like getting ready for the first day of school minus the dread of meeting all those new teachers. I usually have to run to BAM or Office Depot or Target for something I don't have (this year, some new quick-dry pens for my scribbling) but I enjoy that as well. It's what I imagine a trip to a jewelry store is like for the other gals; I adore browsing through office supplies and lusting after something I don't need or can't afford.

While I was shopping I picked up some extra stuff to put together for a NaNoWriMo giveaway: A slim zippered cloth portfolio bag (just the perfect size to hold some chapters, a notebook and pen), an idea portfolio and notebook covered with inspirational words, a pack of the quick-dry pens I'll be using along with some mechanical pencils, a Keep Calm and Carry On bookmark, a Don't Quit journal and a sticky-note mini-journal. I also added a copy of Writing Fiction by Gotham Writer's Workshop, the one how-to I think pretty much covers all the basic nuts and bolts of writing.

If you'd like a chance to win the pile, in comments to this post name something you've found to be helpful with NaNoWriMo by midnight EST tonight, October 26, 2012. I'll draw one name at random from everyone who participates and send the winner everything in the picture. This giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.

NaNoWriMo Countdown: Work Space

I can write just about anywhere, and I know this because I have. I started writing for publication on one corner of our dining room table. I've also written in coffee shops and hotels, lobbies and waiting rooms, in cars and on airplanes, in physical therapy whirlpools and once (rather memorably) while I was a patient in Labor & Delivery. Nineteen hours of labor is long and exhausting and utterly devoid of fun, especially when you elect to do it completely naturally. They don't let you order in pizza, either, but if you plan ahead you can your guy smuggle it in between nurse checks. To me extra pepperoni is way more soothing than chipped ice and back rubs . . . but I digress.

Where your writing space is, how large it is or how much you can fit into it doesn't matter as much as making it work for you. Once I turned pro I definitely needed a dedicated work space, but at the time we had no spare rooms I could make into an office. My solution was to invest in a rolling computer stand. I figured with it I could make my writing space portable and move it to whatever area in the house was unoccupied.

It worked great. I usually kept the stand in a corner of the living room or our bedroom, but when things got noisy I'd roll it out on the porch. One winter when we had a lot of house guests I took it out in the garage and worked there for two months. All I really needed was a quiet place with an electrical outlet, and I was good to go.

When you think about creating or changing your work space you might consider what is the ideal working atmosphere for you. If you write best in a quiet space, look around your home for a spot away from areas your family most often use. Some writers choose to work in spare bedrooms or garages; I read an article recently about one novelist who turned a walk-in closet into a work space. Others choose to write in attics and outdoor sheds. Many public libraries offer quiet rooms where you can get some work done, too.

If you write best in a public place like a park, mall or coffee shop you should try out a couple and see where you're most productive. I often like to go to the park with a bag lunch for a writing session, especially now when the cooler weather is chasing off the bugs. You should also look at how accessible your favorite public spot is when you need to write; some may be closed or too crowded during the times you plan to work.

If home is too busy and public places are too distracting, you might check with family, friends or your place of worship and see if you can borrow one of their spare rooms as a temporary work space. Churches are often happy to lend you a quiet room in exchange for a minimal fee or even some volunteer time. If you have a day job and a friendly boss, see if you can stay after work to write at your desk or in one of the offices for an hour or two. When I worked a day job I used to spend my lunch hour writing in the back storeroom (and since I was a bookseller being surrounded by all those boxes of new arrivals was very motivating.)

In what sort of space are you most productive with your writing? Have you found any great alternatives that might work for other writers in need of space? Let us know in comments.

NaNoWriMo Countdown

We've got eight days until the kickoff of NaNoWriMo 2012, and this last week before the craziness begins is a terrific opportunity to organize in advance what you'll need to write your novel in November.

I'll be putting up a series of posts this week with things to hopefully help you do that, but before we dive into all the details and logistics let's take a moment to talk about the why. As in, why do this, this crazy thing, this impossible task of writing a novel in thirty days?

You might not know it, but you have more than a novel inside you. Actually, you have an entire library in your head. Its shelves are packed with your ideas and your dreams and your experiences and your longings. Your imagination is like a librarian who keeps acquiring all this stuff; she works tirelessly and endlessly to sort through it and catalogue it and have it ready for use. Your use, because you are this library's only patron.

Writing is about opening the doors to that library and bringing the stories shelved in it out into our world. At first it's going to be just for you and the page, but even that sharing is not an easy thing to do. Writing is not simply putting words on paper in coherent order; it's an act of creation. It takes courage to make that attempt, to make what resides only in your head into something real. So it's okay to be a little scared, and doubtful, and worried. Trust me, the rest of us are right there with you. On November 1st me and many of your writer pals and thousands of others all over the planet will be opening up the doors to our idea libraries and bringing out our stories. If you do this, you'll be writing along with the world.

So that's my thoughts on the why. In the meantime, if you haven't yet settled on what sort of story you want to write, now would also be an advantageous moment to make that decision. If you have a lot of ideas and aren't sure how to pick the best from them, I talked about my method in this post.

Making up a title for your book now can be fun, too. Input keywords about your story concept into Wordle and let it recombine them; often the clouds it produces include some interesting pairings. You can also search Bartleby.com's verse database with your story keywords to look for title ideas from poems. This title doesn't have to be anything you chisel in stone, either. If you can't think of anything that works even temporarily call it your NaNo 2012 Novel, or Scrambled Eggs, or whatever comes to mind (I once wrote a novel with a working title of Carnival Geek because those were the two words that inspired the whole idea.)

If you're planning to join in NaNoWriMo 2012, in comments let us know what you'll be writing, where you'll be posting about your progress, or anything else you'd like to share.

Off to Write

Create a sticky note online for your blog at Wigflip.com's sticky note generator, Superstickies (link originally swiped long ago from Gerard over at The Generator Blog.)

Also, just a heads-up for you Anne Frasier fans, according to her blog today you can get three of her backlist titles for free: Pale Immortal, The Girl with the Cat Tattoo, and Max Under the Stars (link leads to her post with more details.)

NaNoWriMo Ten

Ten Free Things To Help with NaNoWriMo

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Hiveword -- a web-based novel writing organizer service you can use to build your novel from synopsis to characters to plots to scenes. Nothing to download with this one; you use it online. Hiveword also allows you to save your work on the site and will be free forever, thanks to Mike Fleming. Check out my review of it here.

 
The Novel Notebook -- My free e-book which contains a variety of templates and worksheets, examples from my own works and other info to help you organize your novel.

Pseudo-Elizabethan Place Name Generator -- I still get e-mail asking for this rather fabulous place name generator, which disappeared for awhile before it returned via Inkalicious.com (and thank you, Michele Albert, for whatever you did to bring it back.) The place names it generates may not work for everyone, but collectively they're all wonderfully inventive and beautifully quirky.
 
Seventh Sanctum -- your one stop online for fun generators. Do check out the writing section for some great story spark and other writing inspiration gennies.

Smart Edit -- simply the best free editing software I've ever found. See my write up about it here.

Wordle  -- My favorite online toy, which can be a serious help when it comes to story craft. It generates word clouds based on the text or URL you input, and you can use the clouds to come up with story titles, character names, place names and more (and to see what I've done with it, here are all my posts on Wordle.)

Writer's Knowledge Base -- this is a search engine specifically geared for writers, and offers a comprehensive list of valuable links for just about any writing topic you want to research. Immensely efficient and helpful when you have a particular writing-related problem you want to solve sooner rather than later.

Writertopia's Picometer and Progress meter -- if you need a free wordcounter for your web site or blog, these two are quite popular and easy to install.

and last but not least:   Way of the Cheetah , my how-to on boosting your productivity, is now available for anyone to read online, download, print out and share etc. for free until December 1st.

Do you have any great writing-related links you want to share for NaNoWriMo 2012?  Post them in comments.

Making it Work

Last week I took out a lovely piece of dreamy batik fabric I'd saved for a couple of months for the right project. I'd come up with a new design idea that only required two fat quarters of fabric and some bias binding to make a cute little quilted bag. I could see it perfectly in my head; my lovely fabric paired with some icy silver satin would work great. Off I went to the fabric shop to get the rest of the materials I needed.

I did the cutting first, at which point I discovered the satin I'd purchased didn't like me. I'd chosen it because it was sinfully soft to the touch, but that quality also made it slither all over my cutting mat. No fabric gets the better of me, however, so I pinned and repinned it until I got it sandwiched with my lovely batik, batted it and sewed it up. And I was so focused on taming the satin that I didn't bother to actually measure the batik; I simply matched it to the sides of the satin piece.

When I took everything to the ironing board to press it after sewing, I forgot to check the setting on my iron and promptly scorched a nice big hole in the unruly satin. Not a problem; I could make it work. I got out the seam ripper, took the piece apart and did it over a second time with a fresh piece of the slithery satin. I then hand-quilted and beaded the piece for two days, during which time I discovered my lovely batik was stiff as hell while the slithery satin really didn't want to be quilted or beaded when it could fray, pucker or pull. Both fabrics fought me every stitch of the way. I was sure I could force them to work, though, so I kept at it until the quilting and beading were done and the piece was ready to be stitched into a bag.

At this point my friend Jill came over to borrow my spare sewing machine and sat with me while I assembled the tote. "Why are you using bias binding for the sides?" she asked.

"It's a new idea I had," I told her as I fought to pin down the binding, which both fabrics naturally hated. "Simple and elegant."

Jill waited as I stitched up one side and then surveyed the results with me. "Interesting," was her first observation. "What are you going to do about the inside seams?"

I hadn't thought about that. "I'll zig-zag them."

"You'll have to do it by hand, they're too bulky.  That's going to be a major pain." She took the bag from me and held it up. "It's a half-inch short on this side, too. Did you square this before you sewed?"

"It's not short." I snatched it from her, and saw that I was short -- and no, I hadn't squared it because I'd been too involved with the satin. "I'll put in a dart." I put in the dart, and that created a pucker. I put in the other side and darted that to make a matching pucker, which looked about as awful as it sounds -- but not as bad as the bulky inside seams did.

I looked at Jill. Jill looked up at the ceiling.

I had too much time invested in this bag to give up now. "Okay, scratch the binding." I reached for my seam ripper.

While I ripped and ripped and ripped some more, Jill examined the strap I'd made for the tote out of the last bit of fabric. "Uh, this is going to be too wide now."

I glanced at it and saw it was too wide now, but it had taken me an hour to pin and sew together and I wasn't taking it apart again -- I had at least a couple of hours to spend reworking my design. "It'll be comfortable."

"It'll be clunky-looking." She saw my expression. "You could fold it in half, maybe. Sew the sides together. Have you got a denim needle?"

I didn't have a denim needle, but I could make it work. "I'll ribbon-braid it later."

"Why are you talking through your teeth?" Jill wanted to know.

"I'm not," I assured her (once I'd unclenched my teeth.) "I'm fine. This is going to be fine. A fine, simple, elegant little bag."

"Uh-huh." She didn't sound convinced. "By the way, you'll need to pad that beadwork from the inside, too. It's way too heavy for that satin to support. You could cover that with a pocket." She saw my face. "I'm leaving now."

Jill left, and I went back to work at making it work. I ripped out the binding, reassembled the bag, fixed the gap, padded the beadwork from inside, made a pocket to cover the padding, and ribbon-braided the tote strap. All that and cleaning up all the little mistakes the fixes caused cost me another day, but at last it was done.

 I took it with me to Jill's the next day to show her the completed project. "See?" I waved it in her face. "Finished."

Nice." She frowned at the front of my tote. "What are you going to do about the blood?"

I stopped smirking. "What blood?"

She pointed to a tiny dark spot on the front of the bag. "That blood."

"It's a shadow." I held the bag under a light. No, it was blood. At some point while doing the finishing hand-stitching I must have poked my finger with the needle and bled on the damn bag. "I'll spot clean it."

"You'll never get it out," Jill called after me as I stomped out, went home, and spot cleaned the blood, which of course didn't come out. But I wasn't letting a tiny stain defeat me, oh, no. I went back to the fabric store, bought some decorative lace that matched the batik and sewed that over the spot.

And then -- THEN -- I was done.

I studied my simple, elegant tote. I'd made it work, but after all my fixes it didn't really seem simple or elegant anymore. Despite my ribbon-braiding the tote strap still looked clunky. The decorative lace covering up the bloodstain made the whole bag look too busy. The lovely batik was riddled with tiny holes from all the seam ripping I'd done, and the slithery soft satin looked as wilted and exhausted as I felt. One last bonus from hell: while fixing the other problems I must have pulled a stitch on the snowflake beading, one branch of which was now slightly askew. The only way to fix that would be to rebead that section of the bag. After I removed the pocket and the padding. Which would probably screw up something else.

Much as I was tempted, I didn't rip the tote to pieces or burn it in the backyard. I took it to my closet and carefully tucked it away in one of my fabric storage bins. Which I'm ready to try that idea again, I'll take out the bag and study it.  I'll remember all the things I'd done to make it work.  Then I'll find another lovely piece of fabric and try again, and be sure to use all of what I learned from making what surely has to be The Tote from Hell so that I don't make the same mistakes twice.

What does all this sewing have to do with writing?  That I will leave you to ponder. 

Bits & Pieces

In the reality imitates fiction department this morning: Where there are rats, there are cats, and turns out that the latter actually do know their way around ancient Roman catacombs. Those of you who read my Darkyn novels know this was my reason for Richard Tremayne's particular changeling transformation. Isn't it lovely when reality backs up the plausibility of a character's backstory?

Here's a neat-sounding sub op for you Cthulhu lovers: Innsmouth Free Press has an open call for their Sword and Mythos antho: "What we want: Sword and Mythos. This includes any element of the Cthulhu Mythos (creatures such as shoggoths, characters like the King in Yellow, locations like Leng) combined with sword and sorcery (heroic fantasy). Stories can be told from the viewpoint of sorcerers or other non-traditional heroic characters, although fighters with brawn and brains will also be accepted. We are looking for a variety of settings and characters (Yes, we are GLBT-friendly). Although much sword and sorcery has utilized a proto-European setting, we’d like to see stories that take place in settings inspired by Middle Eastern, African, Asian, Prehispanic, and other cultures. We will accept secondary world stories and stories set in historical settings with magical elements. For example, Robert E. Howard set his Mythos-inspired “Worms of the Earth” in real-life Great Britain. We might also consider some sword and planet stories. But no copyrighted characters, please. We can’t afford the lawsuits. There are many famous sword and sorcery male characters, but we’d also like to see women hacking tentacles. Or summoning Mythos creatures. Overall, we want to be surprised and inspired to read beyond the first page." Length: up to 5K; Payment: "Sword and Mythos pays 5 cents per word. We are asking for First English Anthology Rights. Because we are a very small press, we don’t pay royalties. We do, however, offer to buy the stories on a non-exclusive basis. Each contributor will receive two physical copies of the anthology and an e-book copy." Query on reprints, electronic submission only, see guidelines for more details. Reading period opens January 15th, 2013; do not submit before! Deadline: February 15th, 2013

Across the pond: UK Publisher Alchemy Press is starting a new e-book/omnibus print line: "The Alchemy Press intends to start a new line, Alchemy Novellas. In the first instance, we will publish four novellas a year as eBooks. Then the novellas will be collected together and published as a print book – so readers have the best of both worlds. Our proposed publication schedule for the eBooks is February, May, August and November. We are looking for original, unpublished novellas that touch on almost all areas of Fantasy and Horror. There will be a payment for both eBook and print publication." More details and submission guidelines available on their blog here.

Finally, the magic of gorgeous special effects paired with a spooky poem-story of tricks & treats = best Halloween video I've seen this season (narration and music with this one, and it may be a bit too intense for younger kids):

The Green Ruby Pumpkin from miguel ortega on Vimeo.

Dreaming It{aly} 2

Earlier this year I found a gorgeous prize-winning video about Italy by Matthew Brown; here's the second part of his digital diary, Lost in the Alps (narration and background music with this one):



Daydreaming It{aly}: Lost In The Alps from Matty Brown on Vimeo.