Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 77

Loose Change

When I was growing up, I was always used to seeing loose change everywhere.  It fell out of my father’s pockets and was  abandoned on the floor.  My mother picked it up and deposited into a shoe box in a drawer.  Eventually the shoe box bulged from the weight of all the coins.

I think she never did anything with the coins because it was too difficult to cash it in.  We didn’t have coin machines in those days; we would have to get coin rolls from the bank and laboriously put each one into it.  The bank had us write the account number on the side, too, in case we shorted them.

Now, when I have enough coins to cash in, I use the coin machine and the grocery store so I can spend it on food.  Oddly, I always end up with more change to put in my pocket.

I pick up pennies too.  I know some people say that pennies aren’t worth it.  Every time I go to the coin machine, the pennies add up.

But I have my father’s problem when I get the change.  Somehow, loose coins turn up all over the place still.  I empty my pockets into a mason jar, but somehow coins manage to escape from their fate, to end up on the carpet.   Then I’m vacuuming, and I hear the crackle, bang, bang, as a penny gets sucked up.

Or, as I open the door to the laundry, and hear the thunk, thunk, thunk of a coin in the dryer.  That’s after I went through the pockets before I washed everything.  Still managed to miss one.  Today, it was four.  Those coins are sneaky.

The coins come out of the dryer hot.  I bounce them from hand to hand, like a hot potato, until they’re cool enough to hide in a pocket again.

And back to finding a way onto the floor.

Filed under: Personal, Thoughts Tagged: Coins, Loose change, Mason Jar, Memories, Pennies

The Mad Rush of the Holidays

I ended up dropping off the face of the earth for my novel project for about a week.  With the holiday ramping up, work got really crazy because everyone was trying to get everything done before they went off on leave.  Of course, the culture now seems to be everyone waiting until the last minute, then screaming, “Help!  It’s an emergency!” By then it is, but it’s pretty bad to have to prioritize the emergencies to which is more urgent.

So when I got home, brain wasn’t functioning much (remember Buffy: “Tree pretty.  Fire bad.”). Yeah, it took me a few days to recover, and I’m going to take advantage of the four day holiday.

Word count total: 3600

Total words: 14300

Thanksgiving

My family has some origins in Thanksgiving, including one that I found out this week.  My great-great…grandfather John Adams (no relation to the president) was on the second ship that arrived at the Plymouth site.  It was funny reading a book that described the men there as “lusty young men.”

One does not think of their grandfather as a “lusty young” man!

He married my grandmother there, then died during an illness that swept through the colony.

The thing I found out this week is that Mayflower was owned by the Vassall family, who is also related to us.  William Vassall came over to the colony on one of the later ships, though he later had a spat over religion and left for Barbados.  His daughter married John’s son, James.

And, while I think the news sat on this story for timing, archaeologists think they discovered the site where the Pilgrims lived.

Military Stuff

The Army is the only service without a museum.  But they’re building one in Virginia.  The ELC (they don’t define it, at least not that I could find) looks interesting: It’ll be virtual training exercises so anyone can get the soldier’s experience.  That’ll be pretty fun.  When I was at Fort Lewis, one of the coolest training exercises was a computer simulation of calling down artillery fire.  We map it out and see the results on the screen.  Since that was a good 25 years ago, these are sure to be much better than that.

Filed under: History, Holidays, Military, Personal, Thoughts Tagged: Army, Army Museum, Fort Belvoir, James Adams, John Adams, Mayflower, Nanowrimo, William Vassall

Rogue God

Rogue God

Anton Keymas is part of a magical Special Forces, the Vai, and blessed by a party goddess.  His mission?  Hunt monsters that no one believes in any more and try not to get killed.

But this new monster has killed two soldiers.  Now that it’s gotten a taste of human flesh, it will be back for more.

Keymas has little time to stop a monster that is intelligent and cunning.  He may have to do the one thing he has refused to do, and even that has a cost, especially when gods get involved.

Available from your favorite bookseller for $4.99.  Amazon.

Filed under: Thoughts

Nano Day 14 & Pantsing 101

Unbelievably crazy day at work.  I was amazed I came home and didn’t just not want to deal with anything.  But I got some writing in anyway.  Did a little at lunchtime, too–I was thinking of grabbing more than that, but a friend joined me, and we had an interesting talk about the aftermath of the election.  Not on who won, but speculation on strategies we might see.  In DC, the new President always affects everything everyone does here.  Sort of like when I was in the military.  Get a new company commander and now we do things differently.  So we shall see what happens.

Downtown is already starting to build all the stands for the inauguration.  They started that the day before the election.   Might see if I can go downtown on the weekend and see what they’re doing, take a few pictures.

Pantsing 101

I had enough that I needed to rearrange the scenes for some semblance of order (we’ll see how that works out).  One of the pieces that popped into a much later scene is now something I’m also bringing in earlier in the book.  If I’d written “straight through” without stopping as “everyone” says is the correct way, that later scene would have come in, but I wouldn’t have been able to see the connection of where I could put it.

At one point during a past project, my creative brain got so tired of writing “straight through,” that when I put a book through Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel (which is for outliners, by the way), I was finding all these things that came in way, way out of order, but were stuck in the story where they were.  Rearranging during the creation process is a like play in itself, like having a big jigsaw puzzle and moving around all the pieces until the right piece fits.

Day 13 Word Count: Collision: 1000

Story Total: 10700

Filed under: Thoughts Tagged: Nanowrimo, Outlining, pantsing, Pantsing 101, Writing out of order

Navajo Women May Have Been the First Enlisted in the Military

A historian discovered the women’s names in the records for the late 1800s:

While compiling a lengthy list of Sandoval County veterans — from the Civil War through Vietnam — retired Army colonel and amateur historian David C’de Baca made an intriguing find: Two Navajo women who served as scouts with the Army’s 20th Infantry Regiment in the summer of 1886 could be the first women to have officially been enlisted in the U.S. Army.

The rest of it is in the Army Times.  I thought it was pretty cool that it wound up in this publication.  There are four sold on every military base–one for each service, so this is going out to the military.

Filed under: History, Military Tagged: enlisted soldier, Military Women, Navajo, Women Soldiers

Nano Day 13 & Pantsing 101

It was a gorgeous fall day. The winds died down, so I did a walk at a local historical park that I discovered last year. The leaves are coming down, but a lot of the trees still have them, so another week or two year, I think.

Pantsing 101

I sort of wandered between the scenes I’d already done today, fleshing them out more. Absolutely nothing’s in any kind of order. I pretty much just created a new text file in the Scrivener binder and plopped it in right there. Probably have to rearrange it at some point.

When I’m flying like this, I often use placeholders for character names. There’s a character named XYZ because I couldn’t spare the interruption to come up with a name. I had another guy named SMITH as a placeholder, but he became a hyphenated name because I happened to run across a man who changed his name to a hyphenated name. Why not?

I don’t spend a lot of time coming up with character names. I used to at one point, prior to my Civil War Thriller. I’d laboriously go through my baby name book and pick a handful of names I liked, then go over the list and start crossing off ones for various reasons. But when I hit the Civil War book, that story required so many characters that taking that much time simply was out of the question. Sometimes I change the names in midstream. In The Crying Planet, I named one of the characters Reed, and that name became a problem because it was too similar to the other form of the word. In fact, when I did a search and replace of Reed, I had to weed out replacement typos like Breed for BSmith. Oops!

I usually keep a list of character names. But it doesn’t feel like I need to do that yet. I just do it when I start confusing the characters or having to hunt for a name.

Day 12 Word Count: An additional 500

Day 13 Word Count: Time Management in Chaos: 300 and Collision: 900

Story Total: 9700

Filed under: Writing Tagged:

Nano Day 12 and Pantsing 101

I’ve been somewhat off my game the last few days. I only got 2,000 words over the last few days for several reasons.  The first is DC weather.  This time of the year is always hard on the sinuses.  The winds kick up and knock the leaves off the trees, and all the dust flies around.  Having problems with sinuses can suck the energy right out.  Today was much better, though I had to stay inside most of the time to keep out of wind.

But the other reason is that I started a–diet is the wrong word–a way of eating that’s different.  It had a detox effect for the first few days, and I was really tired by early evening, as in struggling to stay awake at 6:00.  I’m trying it actually because I don’t want to spend from November to April struggling with my sinuses, and I don’t want to go the drug route.  The plan is in a book called Eat Fat, Get Thin, which I ran across in the Washington Post (in the context of the election of all things!).  I eliminated dairy last year because I’m lactose intolerant and was much improved.  This plan includes eliminating dairy, wheat, and sugar–and eating more fatty items.  It was kind of scary at first because I was eating so much food.  I did a trial run for one day, and the next I went a last time IHOP for pancakes.  For the first time, those pancakes did not taste good!

After only one day.

Pantsing 101

I’m all over the place today.  I’ve always needed to write in order because that’s how my character development progresses.  Because this is a series and I already know the characters from the last book, I’m putting scenes into Scrivener in no particular order and writing them.  My creative side is driving this.

Most of the scenes are not complete, and my critical side is trying to nose its way in by telling me that I should fill out more details.  I’m having to trust that it’s okay not to describe something yet because I’m still processing what the story needs.

Scrivener for Windows is a really good program for this type of writing.  You just put your documents in the binder and move them around as the story realigns.  I remember working in Word and trying to shuffle a chapter.  It was cut the chapter, scroll to the point where it needed to go (hoping the power didn’t go out), and then paste it in.  Okay with a handful of chapters, but clumsy if the book’s over 100 pages.

I worked both on Collision, and a second project called Time Management in Chaos, a non-fiction book.  I’m not an expert on time management, but I have a job that’s chaos.  It’s the one that doesn’t fit any of the molds of time management experts.  Those books often tell me to create systems (theirs, of course) to manage time and email, and I’m so overloaded that I wouldn’t be able to create any of their systems or maintain it.  So, the book, which I will work with on and off.

I might have more words later this evening, but in case my sinuses go on the fritz, I’m posting this early.

Day 7-11 Word count: 2000

Day 12 Word Count: 1000 (Collision) and 600 (Time Management Chaos)

Story Total: 8000

 

Filed under: Thoughts Tagged: Fall, Microsoft Word, pantsing, Pantsing 101, Scrivener for Windows, Time Management in Chaos, Washington DC

A Tribute to Women Veterans

Women veterans tend to get forgotten because the assumption a veteran is a man.  This is a song that pays tribute to the women veterans.  Enjoy!

Filed under: Military, Videos Tagged: Veteran's Day, Women Veterans

Nano Day 6 & Pantsing 101

I definitely didn’t feel like doing anything today.  I woke up, and did all the usual stuff.  Then I walked down to the farmer’s market to buy my vegetables—and they were still setting up.  Very strange. A couple of us were wandering around trying to figure out what was going on, and we finally realized it was the time change.

Do-ah!

So I got up earlier than I needed, and I’ve been running tired.  It was a gorgeous fall day, though windy and cold—normal for this month.  Tree colors aren’t very good.  I think most of the leaves will turn brown and drop off without changing.

Only two days now until the election!

Pantsing 101

I stepped out of time in the story for this day.  I was a little stuck, which is expected.  The opening of the story is tough for a while, because I’m still feeling out where the story is going.  I don’t always know everything I need until it suddenly pops in and announces itself.  And sometimes the ideas for new things don’t occur in order.  So I jumped ahead to some scenes that will be later and started writing them.

Day 6 Word count: 1250

Story Total: 4400

Filed under: Thoughts Tagged: Nanowrimo, pantsing, Pantsing 101, Washington DC

Nano Day 4-5

I didn’t do any writing on Friday or Saturday.  This is normal for me.  I’m not an every single day writer.  I was too tired on Friday, and Saturday I went to see a show at the Kennedy Center.

The show was called Steb and was an action show.  It had about six people who did various stunts, most of which involved body slamming.  The men were not bulked up to the extreme like a weight lifter (in fact, one of the women looked like she’d bulked up more)–probably because one of the stunts involved landing on top of the person below, for stack of five.

Afterwards, when I rode back to Metro in the shuttle, everyone on the shuttle was talking about how painful all the body slams looked!

Filed under: Thoughts Tagged: Kennedy Center, Nanowrimo, Steb