Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 150

Waiting Out Insomnia

The last blog written in Minnesota: While I was home and dealing with insomnia, I spent time playing with story stuff. I did a synopsis for the Work in Progress (WIP). Summing up a book I haven't written yet is a special kind of hell all the time, but for this particular story it was worse than usual. I think I finally put together something decent. I hope.


I also played around with other things. I created a spreadsheet with formulas to add up word count as I recorded each scene. I'm not sure I'll actually remember to use this, but it might be a helpful tool. When I see progress, it encourages me to keep going while I'm writing and get back to writing when I get home from work or am on lunch or something.


I bought a couple of books on plotting. People who know me just fell out of their chairs. It's not that I don't plan things or know generally where the story is going, but I'm hoping to have less false starts. If I ever added up all the scenes I've trashed, I probably have enough word count for like ten more books. I thought if I had better focus, I could produce stories faster.


To shock those who know me further, I read both books. Some of what I read are things I don't think I'll be able to do—like the 3x5 index cards. I had a bad experience with a how to be a writer book and index cards.

Then I played around with PowerPoint. I created slide shows for each of my series using pictures of the characters. Yes, this is a total time waster, but the cruel thing about insomnia is that even though I can't sleep, I am tired enough that writing is impossible. I'm hoping to create a Book of Knowledge for the series I'm writing using PowerPoint slides. I can fill in highlights about characters and storylines and facts about the world and have them all in one place.

And yeah, I'm trying to pretend that I really wasn't wasting hours of time.
I really wish I could have written while I was home. When I left Atlanta, I only had two more scenes to go to have the proposal pages done. I even lugged my writing laptop to MN along with my everyday laptop because I was sure I could finish the project during my downtime. It just didn't happen. I worked so hard on the house, that I was mentally exhausted every night even before the insomnia kicked into high gear.

I'm still calling my time a writing win, though, because I have a synopsis for the WIP. Maybe it will need some tweaking, but I think it's close to ready to go, and hopefully, by the time you're reading this, I've finished the two scenes. ::fingers crossed::

Lessons Learned

Another blog written in Minnesota: I learned a few things while I was getting my house ready to sell. I thought I'd share some of my (ahem) wisdom here.
First thing I learned (big time) was to get rid of stuff instead of hanging onto it. I spent monster time going through my house last year and clearing out things. I can't even tell you how many boxes of clothes and other things I gave to charity. I do know that I donated more than 3,000 books to the library.
With God as my witness, I swear I will never let things accumulate like this again. It felt really good to get rid of old things, even the books. I felt like this burden was lifted from me with each box that went out the door. I wish I'd had more time because if I had, I think I could have gotten rid of a lot more stuff.
Second lesson learned was that Mr. Clean's Magic Erasers are 1) Awesome! and 2) don't last very long, so have lots on hand for big projects. (I receive no consideration of any sort to mention the Magic Erasers and I bought the box myself.)
I don't know what is in those things and I don't care. There wasn't much the Magic Eraser didn't do well. By the way, beyond awesome for taking smudge marks off walls. Just have a damp cloth to wipe the wall afterward because it leaves a slightly white residue behind. I couldn't see it on my really light walls, but on even slightly darker ones, it was noticeable.
The thing is that I'd tried to get those smudges off by washing the walls. That lightened them, but didn't get rid of them. I didn't even have to rub very hard with the magic erasers. They handled just about every tough job I had. Highly recommended.
Third lesson learned: Don't store candles inside a white drawer without wrapping them in something first. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the dye from the candles would permeate the wood and nothing—not even the Magic Eraser—could touch this problem.
The fourth lesson learned I guess ties back to the first. I'm happiest when I have fewer things in the house. I confess to dumping a boatload of stuff at my parents' house to get my house to look as good as it did and I like the less cluttered feel. When I find a house in Atlanta and start unpacking boxes, I'm going to make an effort to get rid of more stuff.
I know, it's silly to move it to begin with, but like I said, time in Minnesota is so limited that I just don't have any more days to spend going through things to get rid of it before it gets put on a moving truck. I will do what I can, but I want to make a concerted effort to shed more things.

Memorial Day

Tomorrow is Memorial Day in the US. It means a three-day weekend, the start of summer, and cookouts. It means more than this, though. Please take a minute and remember those who gave their lives for their country.

Sold

Another blog written in Minnesota: So it's done—I have an agreement to sell my house. In a way, I'm sad. Really sad. I love my house so much. I'd saved forever to have it built and got to pick everything myself: the flooring, the lighting, the counter tops, and the paint colors. This house has some awesome energy.
On the other hand, it's a relief to sell the house as well. It's a worry off my mind and I'll finally be able to buy a home in Georgia instead of having a temporary place to stay. It's moving forward, accepting that Atlanta is where I live now. Minnesota, though, will always be home.
I believe in serendipity and think it was in full force on my house sale. The very first couple of days that I was home, there was an article in the Minneapolis newspaper about housing sales in the Twin Cities. The article said that there were so few houses available on the market, that people were afraid to put their homes up for sale for fear they wouldn't find one to buy. That was very good news for me.
I set to work on the house. I've watched enough HGTV to have some ideas on how I wanted to stage the house. In earlier visits to MN, I'd already gotten rid of boxes and boxes of stuff—all donated to various charities in the area. The books I donated went to the library.
We (my parents and I) started in the basement. We broke down the metal shelving units—the wooden ones stayed up with all the many books I'm moving with me. We dusted rafters, swept the floor, but things away so they weren't stacked everywhere.
Then we moved upstairs. My house has three bedrooms. The one at the front of the house is where my office is. That was already setup the way I wanted it and was easy to take care of. The second extra bedroom was a disaster.When the painter guy came, we'd shoved a ton of stuff into that room since it wasn't going to be painted and other rooms were. I ran out of time to fix it then; now I had to get it done right. After much work, it was staged as a child's bedroom, complete with Scooby Doo pillow and stuffed dog. It ended up looking really nice.
We went through the whole house, cleaning as we went. No drawer or cabinet was left untouched. And we were into week two and my dad was complaining about how long it was all taking. Didn't I understand I had to have the house listed before I went back to Georgia?
He raised my stress level considerably and it was already pretty darn high. Insomnia became my nightly companion and I'm still dealing with it as I write this.
I'm not even sure how it happened. My dad ran into a neighbor and somehow the topic of my house came up. The neighbor wanted to take a look at my house because she and her husband were looking for something smaller. My dad told them they could come on Friday.
Major frenzy cleaning mode hit because while we'd been cleaning insidethe drawers and cabinets, we hadn't been cleaningas in vacuuming the floor or dusting the surfaces. And then there were all the smudges and streaks on the walls to the basement. Two days to get everything done and finish the final setup of the house.
While I firmly believe this had to be done, I really didn't think they'd like the house. It's much smaller than their house and I'm contemporary/modern in my style and picked lighting fixtures and countertops that matched my style. Most people are traditional in their décor.
You don't even want to know how shocked I was when I heard they wanted to buy it. So now I'm in a position where I have to—gulp—negotiate. OMG, I hate negotiating and I hadn't read the chapter about For Sale By Owner in the House Selling for Dummies book because I fully intended to hire a Realtor. Now came frantic research on how to price a house and hours at the library trying to come up with comparable houses. A nearly impossible task since my house was built in 2006 and pretty much every other house in the surrounding neighborhoods were built in the 1960s or earlier.
To keep this from being even more epic, I'll skip to the happy ending. We reached an agreement on the house with very little trouble.
There are couple of contingencies attached. First the housing inspection. I'm confident that will go well since the house is new and I haven't noticed any trouble, but I can't help but worry. I'm not an expert and who knows? One of the guys at work had a hidden problem that he'd never known was there until his house was inspected after it was sold. And I'm a worrier by nature.
The second contingency is a house sale, which I know you're not supposed to agree to according to the book, but I'm pretty confident everything will go through. Just in case, though, send some good vibes my direction. I need all the help I can get.
But ultimately, my house sold without ever being listed to someone who promised to take care of my tree peony and who likes my retro counters and modern style. Serendipity.

Really, Advertisers?

Another blog written in Minnesota: I didn't plan to talk about television advertising again, but I saw yet another commercial that has me irritated over the portrayal of women. My college major was advertising and I understand why women are used in ads for products aimed at men. The problem is how women are portrayed.
The latest example is a commercial for Armor All. A man comes out in a bathrobe because he hears noises in his garage. A Viking-like male is in there and he's holding a box of Armor All products. The first man admits that the product was a gift from his brother and the Viking guy says he doesn't deserve it or the car (that's covered in dirt). So far, it's fine.
Then comes the part that I didn't like: a scantily clad woman prances out (and I use the word prances deliberately), looks at the guy she's sleeping with, looks at the Viking, and as the Viking leaves, she prances after him.Really? Really Armor All? Women are so brainless and fickle that they'll follow some strange man dressed up like a Viking because he's got a clean car?
The number one offender in my opinion is Axe personal care products for men. They're the ones who had a commercial where a man was portrayed as his hair style and the woman as a pair of breasts. That was downright offensive.Their latest campaign for their Apollo line features a woman in jeopardy (fire, shark attack). She's rescued by a man (firefighter, lifeguard) and instead of thanking him, she spots a man who uses Apollo products and brushes past the man who saved her because Women love astronauts.I don't have a problem with the saving part; I consider that a legitimate ploy for the ads. What bothers me is the subtle message being transmitted by the way the women are portrayed. It's not just Axe. It's not just Armor All. It's a message being sent in a number of ads to young men and women who watch television and it's not a positive message.I'm not naïve. I know women have been portrayed as objects in advertising for a long time, but there's something different about the current trend. It's not just that it's 2013 and we should be beyond this—although one would hope we, as a society, would have grown up a bit more than we have—it's the idea that women are that brainless. I hate using the same word over and over, but it fits the scenario. They're like Stepford women, nothing more than robots to satisfy males.When I was in advertising ethics class in college, we looked at using sex (and women) to sell products. We examined print ads, which granted are different than television commercials, but I think it will sort of illustrate the difference in how women were used back then as compared to how they're used now. (Heavy emphasis on the word used.)The one ad that really sticks in my memory was for liquor. We see a man and a woman alone in an upscale living room. He's in a suit, she's wearing a black dress that's sexy, but wasn't so revealing that a woman in real life wouldn't wear it out for an evening with her guy. The models are sharing a drink and a suggestive look. In the corner of the ad was a bottle of the liquor being advertised and a glass with ice cubes. The ice cubes definitely had a phallic arrangement, but that would be something picked up subliminally. Most people wouldn't look at a print ad long enough to notice it consciously.In the liquor ad, the couple are portrayed as equals. They're both interested in each other—it's a choice they're both making.In the TV ads today, women are not equals. Women aren't even portrayed as people in the Armor All and Axe commercials. Women are merely objects for the man to take or not take as he wishes.I've been trying and trying to remember if this brainless, Stepford portrayal of women has been around and I just hadn't paid attention, but I don't think so. I tend to study ads and notice nuances and trends because I got used to doing this while I was in school. This seems to have popped up within the last five years or so and it doesn't seem to be abating, not when the Armor All commercial really didn't need a woman in it at all to get the message across, but they put one in anyway.Why do I think this is happening? Leaving the larger societal issues for the professionals, I'll speculate that it's laziness on the part of the advertising community. Sex sells, but instead of being subtle about it—which takes some time and cleverness on the part of the copywriters—let's just throw it out there because that's easier.This lack of subtlety is something I've seen across a broad swath of commercials, not only the portrayal of women as sex objects. Ads have hooks. When I was trained, the copywriter tried to camouflage the hook with a carefully wrapped worm. Now, the ads like maybe try to yank a worm on the hook, but don't do a very good job with that. In fact, I've wondered for a while if viewers don't notice the tactics advertisers are using to reel them in or if the advertisers just don't care if their target market sees their hook.Whatever the reason, though, this portrayal of women needs to change. There's a big, big difference between using a woman's sex appeal to sell products to men and objectifying women so that they're nothing except sexy brainless robots. I've had enough of the Stepford women.

Ring of Fire Solar Eclipse Australia 2013

This video shows three different views of the Australian annular eclipse that just happened this month.

Experimenting With Synopses

Another blog written in Minnesota: Writing synopses are never fun. Well, at least not for me. Maybe some anal plotter type enjoys them, but I find them torturous. While I was up in Minnesota, working on my house, I spent some time trying to come up with a five-page synopsis for my Work In Progress (WIP). I met with failure after failure.
Multiple tries for me on a synopsis is par for the course, but I was doing a particularly bad job with this story. We're talking world champion horrible. Something clearly needed to be done differently.
To get my head straight, I started listing the plot points I felt needed to be mentioned in the synopsis, and as I'm making this list, it dawned on me that I could do this for my hero's growth arc—it's his book since he's doing the major changing—my heroine's smaller growth arc, and the romance.Four lists with the items all in bullet points. Now all I had to do was blend them together into one cohesive synopsis.
I started on that the same day I finished the final list and it helped. A lot. I came in at six pages, not five, but it's much more concise without a lot of unnecessary information thrown in. This was one of my primary problems with the earlier versions—lots and lots of extraneous detail.
This method actually proved helpful. I'm probably going to try it again the next time I have to torture myself by writing one.

Life Without Internet

Another blog written in Minnesota: It's really kind of amazing how dependent I am on the internet. I've jokingly called it Life Support, but it's become such a part of everyday life. I don't have internet while I'm in Minnesota. My parents don't need it and I gave it up when I moved to Atlanta. None of my neighbors were kind enough to leave their networks unsecured.One of the things I need to do while I'm home is get my taxes done. I thought I'd copied all the information I needed to my computer only to discover I'd forgotten all about the information I had saved on my online email account. Oops.Today I was getting my hair cut and I used the time at the salon to get that information written down. I didn't have time, though, to do everything else I needed to do and that was so frustrating. And with so much to do on my house, it's not like I can park my butt there and keep using it until I finished.The other thing that's frustrating is I need to buy a few things for the house—namely new curtains for my bedroom and some new towels to put out in the master bathroom. I shop online all the time. I hate real, go-to-the-store shopping unless I have no other choice. I didn't have time to look at curtains or towels online either. Now I either have to bite the bullet and go to a store or hope the tax guy will let me use his wifi.It's kind of amazing to realize that in 1999, I was one of the first people I knew to hop online. I remember how frustrated I was over how few businesses—no matter how big they were—had a web presence. I got coffee mugs from Amazon every year in the beginning because I was a good online customer. Among the earliest.I'm feeling so cutoff right now. I think I need internet anonymous.

Two Spocks

I thought this was cute.

Dated Attitudes

Another blog written in Minnesota: I mentioned that I'd re-read a couple of old favorite books of mine while I was home in MN. I talked about slang, now I'll talk about a few other things that make them dated and I don't mean the technology or lack thereof so much as the attitude.
I've worried off and on about the technology dating my books. Things have changed so fast that it's hard to anticipate what to put in when writing a story. What will stay fresh and what will leave readers going, that's so 2006? Personally, as I read these books again, the typewriter and lack of cell phones didn't bother me because I knew the books were older. The hero's attitude, though, was another story.
First, let me say that I still enjoyed both books and I'd still re-read them. The author released them as ebooks and I'd love to see if she rewrote them or not. I know, for me personally, I left my stories as they were written originally. I call them O'Shea Classic and only fixed a couple of things that really bothered me. My thoughts on this were that people who wanted to get the original story in ebook format, should be able to get that. The other point is that I want to work on new stuff, not rewrite the old—which I could do indefinitely.
Um, but I digress. So anyway, I'm reading the original 1989 version of these books, and while I'm curious if the author rewrote them, I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't. And honestly, she didn't really have to although there were a few things the hero did that made me grit my teeth.
Pet peeve of mine is when the hero calls the heroine "a little idiot." This is something that happened a lot in the old 80s era romances I hunted down. There were books written in the early to mid-80s that I read in the 90s that had me rewriting the story so the heroine ditched the so-called hero and found a better man. These books weren't that far gone, but there was the little idiot factor at work.
There was the way the hero threatened the heroine with spankings and actually did spank her once. Not because it was a BDSM book or kinky in anyway. It was because the heroine got too mouthy. This seriously annoyed the hell out of me. The hero wasn't a full-blown asshole, but there were some lingering wisps of that here.
The one other pet peeve of mine—and I've blogged about this several times—is the constant use of the characters names in these old books. Some new books today, too, but I think the 80s were particularly bad for soap opera dialogue where the name is used in every paragraph of conversation between the h/h and sometimes more than once per paragraph. People do not talk that way. But I won't digress down that path any more than I already have.
Reading these older books do get me thinking, though, about how my own work will hold up to time. I already know one book where my reference to a website is already dated. It was almost to that point when the book was released, but I hadn't guessed how fast MySpace would fade from public use. It dropped like a rock. I've learned and I'll mull over my re-reading lessons a bit, too.