S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 151

Get Back to Writing Week: Journal

The winner of the Get Back to Writing Week Short Story giveaway is:

Vetta, whose first line was You're no good and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other.

Vetta, when you have a chance please send your full name and ship-to info to LynnViehl@aol.com so I can get your package out to you. My thanks to everyone for joining in.

This morning I got up at 5 a.m.  Once I'd attended to the first tasks of the day, I retreated to the porch to hang out with the pups and the birds. After meditating for thirty minutes (something that helps clear out the head cobwebs and centers me) I wrote this entry in my personal journal.  Journaling is part of my daily writing routine, and it helped me warm up for composing this blog post. Once this is finished I'll deal with some correspondence, biz stuff, and then tackle the day's fiction work schedule.  I think of it as a cascade writing effect -- beginning with an easy flow and then building on the momentum that creates.

I journal first each day because it's very undemanding writing. I can write whatever I want, in any style I want, and it doesn't have to make sense to anyone but me. I don't have to edit it, polish it or make it presentable. I usually write with my favorite fountain pen, which gives me that lovely feeling of creating art with words.  Personal journaling provides me with daily opportunities to quietly wonder while I chronicle things important to me as a person. In that sense the personal journal can be like your private treasure chest, in which you can store gems of inspiration, pearls of writing wisdom and the beautiful things we craft from our own experiences with the work.

Writing in a journal is writing for yourself, and that offers a bit of creative breathing room.  As a professional my work is always subject to scrutiny and opinion coming at me from all directions: the agent, editors, writer friends, readers and everyone else metaphorically reading over my shoulder. Since I'm a storyteller I don't mind the attention -- naturally the work is meant to be shared -- but having twenty minutes of writing liberty via journaling makes me calmer, more focused and better able to cope with being under the microscope the rest of the time.

Before you dive back into writing fiction after a long break, it can help to open a blank book, notebook or make your own journal, and write for yourself for a time. Whatever caused you to give up the work, as well as why you want to get back to it, could be the perfect place to start.  While I don't think you should use a journal simply to vent 24/7, it does give you the right place to get out any negative thoughts that might otherwise interfere with the work (as well as put you in a better mood to write what you do want others to read.)

There are no rules with journaling, no deadlines, no marketing, no pressure. You certainly don't have to journal every day, nor do you have to tell anyone about your journal.  If you really want to protect the contents, once it's filled you can always destroy it (which I recommend for any journal with contents that for whatever reason you never want to be read by anyone else.)

A journal also doesn't have to be in diary form. I've written a couple that were simply long letters to friends, which I mailed off to them after they were filled. You can use a guided journal as a daily writing exercise workbook, or write your journal as one of your characters (I did one for Lucan from the Darkyn books, and it was not only fun writing in his voice -- excellent practice for dialogue tone, too -- but helped me better understand him.)

To get back to writing by journaling, in comments to this post write the first line of a journal entry you'd make today by midnight EST on Saturday, September 8th, 2012. I'll draw one name at random from everyone who participates and send the winner a copy of the second issue of Pages magazine, this lovely Peacock blank journal, and a surprise. This giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.

Get Back to Writing Week: Blog

The winner of the Get Back to Writing Week Poetry giveaway is:

Charlene Teglia, who offered this haiku:

All my kids are sick
I can't get my writing done
Poetry might help.

Charlene, when you have a chance please send your ship-to info to Lynn Viehl@aol.com so I can get your package out to you. My thanks to everyone for joining in, and keep writing those haiku and other poems -- they really do help.

Taking a long break from writing generally makes for a difficult return; trying to go back to it after you've quit writing, unplugged from the internet, and actively avoided your writer friends, NetPubLand, and basically anyone and everything to do with writing is probably the toughest road back. I know because I stopped writing -- and everything related to it -- for a year.

When I quit I was pretty ruthless about it; I shut down my blog, stopped teaching online classes, dropped out of my writer organization, quit going to cons and having booksignings, and even stopped submitting proposals to publishers. To generate some income I went off to work as a bookseller and moonlight as an antique quilt restorer, two things I loved. My old writer pals, however, kept e-mailing to nag me to come back and start blogging and teaching again (in hindsight I probably should have shut down the e-mail, too.)

At the time no one but our family knew that my guy had just been diagnosed with cancer, and I intended to keep it that way. Helping him through his surgery, treatment and recovery was all I cared about; I knew the writing would wait. As for the biz, it could go hang itself.

My writer friends didn't let up, and once my guy was out of danger one of them convinced me to (partially) reconsider my shutdown. While I still felt fed up with the biz, I'd never lost my love of sharing ideas and resources with other writers. I was even writing a little again, too. My friend suggested I start another blog. The idea appealed to me; it would be a way to get in some writing practice and maybe teach while still preserving my privacy. What the heck, I thought, I could write about the real writing life. Maybe five or ten writers would read the thing; we'd all get tired of it in a couple of months and I could finally quit the biz for good.

That was ten years ago, and here I am, still posting away.

Blogging brought me back to writing because it provided me with the motivation I needed to return to a writing routine. Posting every day meant not only writing about writing, but thinking about it again, and letting it back into my life. I didn't have to write much, but as a lifelong journaler I felt an obligation to write something. I also wanted it to be useful, so as not to waste my visitors' time, or at the very least offer them some entertaining content; otherwise why do it?

Gradually I recognized that by blogging I was meeting like-minded people who cared about the same things I did: appreciating the art of story, reading great books, improving the craft, protecting the work and finding new opportunities. These were the other writers I'd always hoped to find but until then never had. Blogging about the writing life turned out to be the writing life I'd dreamed of but hadn't found anywhere else. As epiphanies go, that one was pretty major.

This is why I'm proof that blogging can provide a solid avenue to get back into a writing routine. If you've never tried blogging, try creating one and commit to posting twice a week. If you've neglected an old blog for some time, dust it off and restart it. Try a new blog skin or template to give it a fresh look. If the prospect of going it alone intimidates you, talk to your writer friends about starting a new group blog. You don't have to write about writing; write about anything. Go to a site with blogging prompts or invest in a how-to book with writing sparks. Let people know what's been happening with you, what you've been reading lately or what else grabs your interest. You can even chronicle your journey back to writing as it happens.

To further tempt you to get back to writing by blogging, in comments to this post name a topic you'd like to write about on a blog by midnight EST on Friday, September 7th, 2012. I'll choose one name at random from everyone who participates and send the winner unsigned copies of Week by Week ~ a Year's Worth of Journaling Prompts and Meditations by Amber Lea Starfire and How to Blog a Book by Nina Amir. This giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.

Get Back to Writing Week: Short Story

Novels are like theme parks, in that they hold a lot of characters, surprises around every corner, neat rides to go on and other cool things to do. As a reader you can spend days wandering around and basking in the excitement of these places.

As a writer, you can do that, too, but you have to build them first.

This kind of fiction construction takes tons of ideas and tools and plans plus all the time it requires to actually gather the materials, put it together, troubleshoot it, polish it up and get it ready for others to enjoy. It's why we call it world-building; writing novels means you really do build a world and everything in it from scratch.

If you've taken a hiatus from writing, the sheer size of that kind of project can seem especially daunting. So can the very good odds that you'll do all that work and get nothing in return. What if you choose the wrong theme for your novel park? What if the cast members are a bunch of boring wall flowers who just stand around and talk to each other about housekeeping stuff? Those doubts and fears often convince writers to put it off until next week, next month, or next year (when -- for mysterious reasons that I've never understood -- it's supposed to be easier.)

To get back to writing after a long break it's sometimes good to start with a project that isn't as long as a book. One option is to write some flash fiction, or a story told in a very minimal amount of words (some folks say it has to be less than 300, but I've also seen it defined as less than 1000 words.) This sort of writing can be a great form for people who want to work in shorter sessions in order to ease their way back into a daily or weekly writing routine. If you're a fast, focused writer, you can probably knock out at least one or two flash fiction stories per day; if you're slower or want to explore the form you still won't have to deal with a lot of blank pages to fill; four is about tops.

My personal favorite go-to short fiction form is the short story. A short story is like a roller coaster in the great theme park of fiction; they can be fast, fun and full of thrills. I've always written them for practice purposes as well as to get a feel for characters and scenes, and I think they're the best way to test-drive characters and novel ideas before I commit to writing a book about them. Both the StarDoc and the Darkyn series were based on short stories I wrote for fun, so for me this kind of writing practice also regularly leads to bigger and better projects.

The easiest subject for a short story is a day in the life of one of your characters (this gives you 24 hours to follow them around and get to know them, so it's a terrific method for exploring your characterizations.) You can write a short story about the worst or best day in your character's life, the day their world came crashing to a halt, or the day their second chance arrived. Likewise your character can do anything in this 24 hours: witness a crime, discover a secret, or win the lottery.

If nothing like that comes to mind, here's one of my personal tricks for writing practice: grab the nearest nonfiction book you love, turn to any page at random and jot down the first sentence you see on the page. The line you write down will be the opening sentence for the story (and just a note for those who may choose to pursue publishing a practice story written this way; you should remove the opening line before submitting, obtain the author's permission to use the line, or footnote it.)

Here's an example: from page 79 of The Medieval Underworld by Andrew McCall:

As was usual then, with medieval justice, a prison sentence meant one thing to those who were rich or influential and quite another to those who were not.

This is a great opening line for a short story; I'd use it to tell the tale of how two prisoners (one rich, one poor) live out one day of their sentence. I'd find a way to have them meet, of course, and hate each other, and then for some drastic reason become dependent on each other in a moment of crisis. I'd find out who they really are beneath the wealth and the poverty; one could be guilty of the crime for which the other was actually convicted. I might have them be in love with the same woman; I might have them fall in love with each other. That one line is just a door opening to endless possibilities.

To get you back to writing via short stories, in comments to this post give us the first line of a short story you'd like to write (or if you can't think of one, just toss your name in the hat) by midnight EST on Thursday, September 6th, 2012. I'll choose one name at random from everyone who participates and send the winner an unsigned copy of Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite how-to books by my favorite short story writer, and a signed-by-me copy of Ring of Fire, a short story anthology which includes A Matter of Consultation by Yours Truly writing as S.L. Viehl. This giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.

Get Back to Writing Week: Poetry

A lot of writers are not writing; this I know because it's the most common complaint I hear lately from my fellow scribe pals. Whether it's caused by the demands of life, too much involvement in social media, or some biz-related despair, not-writing seems to be acquiring the dimensions of a plague. But then you can always find a good reason not to write. You can put it off for now and instead deal with whatever is messing with you. Of course you'll get back to it, you tell yourself, maybe tomorrow. Then tomorrow turns into next week, next month, next year, etc.

Sometimes that is what you have to do: stop writing, deal with whatever, and then go back to it. I've done it more than once myself; no judgment here.

I find that the toughest task is the going back after a long time of not-writing. When writing is no longer part of your daily or weekly routine it has to be reintegrated. Since every spare moment we have these days seems to be dedicated to doing something else time has to be made for it. Then there's the picking up where you left off or starting fresh on something new. Often you have to do this with the reason(s) you stopped writing in the first place still hovering in the background, waiting to distract you -- and railroad you -- again.

If you're wrestling with this problem, there are plenty of ways to cope. National Novel Writing Month is less than two months away now, and there is no better time to seriously dive into your writing than NaNoWriMo. Before you commit to producing a novel in a month, however, you might consider dusting off your muse and warming up your writerly muscles by getting back to writing right now. Pick a simple project and get to it: write a poem, a short story, update your blog, start a handwritten journal or research and outline your NaNo novel. Do this, stick with it and by the time November arrives I'll bet you'll have a lot more confidence in yourself and your writing.

In my toughest times with writing I often turn to poetry to inspire and renew me, and of all the poetic forms haiku is my favorite for this. It's brief, it's beautiful and it's fun, and it doesn't require a huge amount of time to practice. Try starting a haiku journal, and commit to writing one new poem in it every day for a week. You can also take your favorite nature photographs and use them as inspiration. If you have a set of magnetic poetry, try writing haiku with it on your fridge. Once you've built up a nice collection of haiku you can use them for other things, too; I've made mine into bookmarks and holiday cards; I've also embroidered them into quilts and added them to artwork for artist trading cards.

You can start getting back to your writing via haiku right now, too. In comments to this post write a haiku (or if you can't come up with one, toss your name in the hat) by midnight EST on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012. I'll draw one name at random from everyone who participates and send the winner a set of Haikubes and an unsigned copy of Writing the Life Poetic by Sage Cohen. This giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something at PBW in the past.

Wishing You

This and That

There is nothing like a fabulous book, except perhaps a fabulous book that ends a streak of bad reading luck. Mine came along last night in the form of A Druid's Herbal for the Sacred Earth Year by Ellen Evert Hopman.

At the moment I'm beginning some research into homeopath remedies to use with a writing project, and I always like to consult the pagans because they know more about herbs and natural healing than anyone. Ms. Hopman is a master herbalist and a terrific writer, and handles what would otherwise be very dry reading with superb confidence. I also liked the simple respect the author has for the Old Ways; she also included very specific warnings on which herbs should not be used by people with health issues, pregnant ladies and so forth. This one is a must-have reference book for your library if you're writing about the practice of herbalism, earth religion, the pagan calendar, or want to learn more about them.

I'm also finishing out my work schedule for the year by planning my online promo for Nightbred , book two in my Lords of the Darkyn trilogy. If any of you bloggers out there would like to have me stop in at your place for an interview, guest post and/or giveaway from November 15th through December 3rd, please e-mail me at LynnViehl@aol.com. In return I can offer your readers signed books as well as some holiday-themed goodies.

Bad Reading Luck

I've been doing a lot of random reading lately, which involves reading new-to-me authors I acquire in an unplanned, spontaneous fashion. While most of the time I'm lucky with this method it doesn't always work 100% of the time. At the dollar store I picked up ten hardcovers, and I'm a third of the way through those, but only Charles de Lint's The Mystery of Grace has held my interest long enough to finish it (and you were right about that one, Di.)

While reshelving some books at home I also found a book by an author I meant to read six months ago that somehow got lost in the shuffle, and tackled that. Decent world-building and interesting characters made me think I had a winner, but the mediocre story and dialogue so inept I was rewriting it in my head by chapter three persuaded me otherwise. I finished that one, but the ending was just as lame as the plot and every word out of the characters' lips.

I also picked up one of those chunky oversize paperback BSLers from the grocery store in hopes that its millionaire author would break my losing streak; great writing, a promising story, but it devolved in the middle into a muddle that never recovered. After I write this post I'm going to start a literary novel because obviously I haven't suffered enough this week.

I don't mind occasionally hitting a run of books that for whatever reason don't appeal to me. For one thing, bad reading luck never lasts forever. There are always plenty more new books out there to turn to, and often starting a new random pile will do the trick. If that doesn't work I know rereading something from my keeper shelves will revive me (Marjorie Liu and Rob Thurman are especially skilled at helping me stomp a reading depression.) And if all else fails, I'll employ what always pulls me out of a slump -- I'll write a story to entertain myself.

The other reason I don't mind reading books that don't work for me is that they always teach me something. The lost-in-the-shuffle book made me realize the importance of not getting completely sucked into your own world-building and characterizations at the expense of the story; something that is quite timely as I'm presently constructing a new series universe and crew. The chunky BSLer has me mulling over middles, muddles and making the story count on every page, not just the first fifty. The dollar store pile is especially fascinating because most of the books are from one publisher and are less than a year old, so I'm getting great insights into what they want to put in print (as well as why their books so often flounder on the market.)

Some books I've read that left me wanting a lot more/better storytelling also energize me. They make me more conscious of the great responsibility of the craft, in that it's not enough to simply write something that makes sense. As writers we have an obligation to give every page our absolute best, every single time we go there. Being bogged down in a bad run of books only makes me more determined as a writer to learn and improve and deliver something worth the reader's time and financial investment.

How do you all cope with bad reading luck? Do you have a sure-fire way of pulling out of a reading slump? Let us know in comments.

Must Chuckle

Today we must laugh, for it is the Friday of a three-day weekend and we want to start things off right, yes?



I usually dodge anything to do with that boobonic plague known as American politics, but this is simply too perfect for even me to resist. So now that I have my candidate, I just need a T-shirt (pretty sure I'll need one for Kris Reisz, too.)

I also absolutely loved this clever video (and its utterly adorable, geeky-hot presenter) from Popularlibros.com which details all the benefits of the next big thing in reading technology, the Bio Optical Organized Knowledge device (in Spanish, with English subtitles):



What's made you laugh lately? Let us know in comments.

Roll With It

My guy could never be a vampire; he loves garlic too much. One of his favorite things in the world are those lovely knotted rolls you get at good Italian restaurants. He especially likes the rolls at one local place, which they serve drizzled with olive oil and topped off with chopped raw garlic.

Because I like making my guy happy, I've been trying for years to find the equivalent of those rolls that I could make at home with my Italian meals. I've tried jazzing up my own rolls, rolls from the bakery and frozen garlic knots (which are pretty awful no matter what you do with them) but no luck. Nothing tasted as hot, fresh or light as the rolls from his favorite restaurant.

I don't give up that easy; I'm the daughter of a chef, and while I'm never going to win a bake-off I'm a pretty decent bread maker. I felt certain I could figure out the recipe, I thought, by experimenting until I got it right.

I knew by taste that the rolls were made with yeast, so my first attempts were all variations on yeast roll recipes from various cookbooks. Some were too dense, some were too sweet, and none of them had the right texture. The dough needed to be light but chewy, almost like a good bagel, so I moved on to bagel dough recipes. That didn't work. I then tried to make them based on recipes for Italian bread, homemade pretzels and even my mother's fried dough cakes, but no luck there, either.

I was close to driving myself crazy over these rolls when I thought of something: the restaurant that made my guy's favorite garlic rolls also did a big business in take-out pizza. A lot of pizza meant a lot of dough -- and good pizza crust is made with yeast. If they wanted to save time, they'd probably use some of their pizza dough for their rolls instead of another, different recipe.

It seemed almost too stupid to be right, but I was pretty sure I was onto something, so I made a batch of my homemade pizza dough, cut it into strips, rolled it into knots, and baked them. They came out so close to the restaurant's rolls that after one bite I nearly fell on the floor. They were using pizza dough. Despite my success the rolls still weren't quite right; they didn't have that correct crispness to the crust, and the garlic in my olive oil drizzle seemed mushy.

I talked about the recipe with my daughter, who took a culinary class in school last year, and she suggested I use an egg wash on the rolls to improve the crust (and that worked.) Then I tried different ways to prepare and add the chopped garlic, all of which failed to replicate the restaurant's version. It ended up being too chunky, too soggy, too crunchy or too mushy. I was too close to give up, so by trial and error I discovered that if I waited to chop the garlic (in the food processor) a minute before the rolls were finished baking, and added it to the rolls after applying the olive oil drizzle, it worked.

Now my guy can have his favorite rolls whenever he likes, no restaurant required. I know it seems like a silly thing to spend so much time puzzling out, but you don't know how happy these rolls make my man. He practically kisses my feet every time I set a basket of them on the table.

Of course, I could have saved myself a year of trial and error baking by asking one of the people at the restaurant to tell me how they make their rolls; we're such regular customers I'm pretty sure they would have given me at least the general idea. Or I might have searched online until I found the exact right recipe for garlic knots and copied that. There's nothing wrong with either of those options; they certainly would have eliminated a lot of mistakes and failed batches of rolls.

That also would have taken all the fun out of it, and I wouldn't have learned things like egg wash is great for making crisper crust on bread (thank you, daughter), or that garlic is better chopped than crushed. Even while taste-testing different types of garlic while I was involved in this experiment, I found out that Mexican-grown variety is a little too bitter for my taste, and the elephant variety (which has huge cloves) is kind of bland.

It's also given me an infusion of assurance that I didn't have before; I really don't have my Dad's gift with food so I've always been more of a by-the-book cook. I've adapted existing recipes, but I've never invented one from scratch on my own. Now that I've done this, I think I'll be open to experimenting more often.

There's one more bonus I got out of this cooking experiment: I'll never tell my guy this, but I like my garlic knots better than the ones we get at the restaurant. This is because I know exactly what goes into them, my ingredients are all-natural and healthy, and they're made with love. How can any restaurant top that?

With writing, most everyone develops their own creative process based on what they're taught, what they read in books and what they imitate. None of these are wrong; whatever helps you to learn and improve your art is a good thing. But every now and then, it doesn't hurt to figure it out on your own. It may take longer, and you may fail several times, but you'll also learn, and eventually you will find the way to make it work. And that will be your way, not someone else's, and that will instill a sense of confidence that no teacher or book can ever give you.

About the BookLoop

With my last giveaway of Rob Thurman's All Seeing Eye I included for each winner one of my BookLoops, the design I came up with last summer when I decided to reinvent the bookmark. Recently I made a bunch to play with different types of anchors, and since I have more than I can ever possibly use I thought they'd be a cool little surprise to tuck in the packages.

Two people who received the BookLoops have already asked about them, and since some of you weren't around when I came up with the idea I thought I'd restate my intentions -- I originally shared the project so other people would use it to make their own. If you like the idea, please feel free to use my design to make your own BookLoops, improve on the design, give them as gifts, use them for promo, sell them as crafts, or whatever you like. It's also a great project for kids because they're uber-simple to make.

For more details about the design, here are the two posts on PBW I've written about the BookLoop:

Reinventing the BookMark Idea #3

Improving the BookLoop