Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 50

The Paladine League Heroines

Since I talked about the guys on Tuesday, I wanted to talk a little bit about their heroines.

Langley and Zo became fast friends after they met (once she realized Zo really did have feelings for Finn) and it's really not a surprise. They are a lot alike, but in one way in particular. They both learned to conceal their emotions.

As the daughter of an ambassador, Langley needed to be circumspect and not make waves. She took it upon herself to carry it out farther than necessary.

Zo's parents are at the root for her, too, but in a different way. Both her Mom and Dad are very emotionally reserved and critiqued Zo's behavior endlessly when she displayed emotion. She learned to internalize everything and this isn't healthy. Fortunately, Zo had others in her life (like Tia Izel and Tio Luis) who kept her from being completely closed off and she's working on her issue in therapy.

And then there's Griff's heroine, Cat. As far as I can tell, she's not remotely reserved. Her emotions are right there. I haven't seen her hide anything yet.

Langley pulled in when she was angry at Ryder. Zo and Finn argue until they reach a compromise. Cat and Griff just square off. And yet the attitude works for them. Griff absolutely needs someone that's going to give as good as she gets. He'd walk all over someone who didn't face him down that way and Cat backs down from nothing that I've seen yet.

I have a feeling this might play a role at some future point in their story. Time will tell whether or not I'm right.

Three Different Uses of the F Word

One of the things that's been interesting is watching my three (so far) heroes in the Paladin League series and their use of the F Word.

There's Ryder (Wicked Obsession) who used it in front of Langley and she told him she didn't like it directed at her. He then made a concerted effort to not drop the F Bomb, but he wasn't always entirely successful.

Finn (Wicked Intention) uses the F Word around his teammates, but only uses it with Zo in two circumstances. The first is when he's angry. Finn's really good at appearing calm even when he's furious, so Zo's tip off that he's mad is when he uses her full name and/or uses that word in front of her.

The second scenario where he uses it with her is sexual. Finn and Zo have three modes: Making love, having sex, and f**king. I saw a scene between the two of them that didn't make their book and defined what they meant by these three uses. Unlike Langley, Zo doesn't mind Finn using this word in front of her.

Right now, I'm writing Griff's story, Wicked Salvation, and he has no problem dropping the F word in front of his heroine. In fact, he did it during the first conversation the two of them ever had. It doesn't faze Cat in the least. She used it right back at him.

He puts her back up and Cat doesn't back down. This is both good and bad. Good because Griff needs someone to push back when he's abrasive, but she's also impulsive and hellbent on her plans. She's already making Griff climb the walls. I'm enjoying this because he totally deserves it.

Happy New Year!

 Here's hoping that 2021 is kinder to us than 2020 was. Happy New Year, my friends!

The Backlog Continues

I mentioned previously how backed up I am on podcasts. I turned almost all of them off for automatic download, but I'm still backed up. As I mentioned in that earlier blog post, the problem is that I listened at work to block out all the noise from the horrible open office concept seating and I didn't need to do that at home because it's mostly nice and quiet here.

But those few podcasts that I wanted to listen to and were still downloading and backing up my episodes were still an issue. As I write this, I'm at 68 on one of my favorite podcasts, the one I always listened to on my commutes. At 40 podcasts for one about screenwriting, which I find interesting even if I have no desire at this point to actually write a script. And I have a handful of others with between 4-14 episodes.

I did lower a couple of other podcast feeds down very low that were really, really high numbers by being tough. Was I interested in that episode/topic? If not, it went. And then I powered through the other ones to get sort of caught up.

Why not do it with the other ones I mentioned in paragraph 2? Those are longer podcasts. The one I listened to on my commute is two episodes a week--one at around 90 minutes and the other at about 2.5 hours. Great when I was driving so much, but it's slow going to get caught up on those. Basically all the podcasts left are ones with longer episodes.

But I might have a sort of solution. It's not going to get me caught up, but maybe it can keep me from falling farther behind. I'm listening while I walk. Since I can't go to the gym, this is my exercise. Normally, I listen to fast-paced music, but I've been flipping on the podcasts and trying to keep my pace quick.

We'll see how this goes over the long term, but so far it seems to be keeping things even.

Merry Christmas!

 For my friends who celebrate, Merry Christmas!

A Little Too Beginner

I blogged months and months ago about how sewing masks for the pandemic was the first time I'd touched a sewing machine since junior high school. And I wasn't very good then. I did okay on the masks, but the sewing ignited my "I can make that" urge and I wanted to get more into sewing. I haven't done anything else. Yet.

But I noticed that Craftsy had a new class. It was a beginning sewing class that was geared for a parent to do with their child. Hmm, I thought, this might be worth my watching. If it's geared for kids, maybe it'll cover some things that would help me.

I think I might have picked up a tip on how to setup the thread to wind the bobbin, but overall I knew everything already. This kind of surprised me and made me wonder how indelibly imprinted nine weeks of sewing when I was 13 or 14 is on my brain. :-)

In a way, it was kind of cool, though, that I was like: I know that! Now I need to actually do some more sewing. It's too bad I don't have a dedicated crafts room because putting the machine out on the dining room table means I can't leave it out indefinitely. Maybe if I did everything in stages.

Why Paper Cards

To wrap up the index card story, maybe some of you are wondering why I didn't go for some online or computer version.

I did think about it. I have Scrivener which has an actual screen view that looks like index cards. I have Plottr which has a similar type setup. I have OneNote and Scapple, both of which would have worked.

In fact, I have a huge mind map in Scapple. So huge that I can't see it all without scrolling. FYI, it's for the Blood Feud World. There are so many different couples that I have in the wings, waiting for their stories and I have additional groups of supernatural beings who are waiting, too. Some day.

But scrolling. Lots of scrolling to see what I have. It doesn't work for me. I need to be able to see it all in one view and my dining room table would allow me to lay out all of the paper index cards.

Ultimately, though, while I love computers and electronic things more than most people, there are some things I simply want on paper. This index card-plot layout is one of them (I also like my paper planner and I brainstorm better on paper, too.)

Like I said on Tuesday, we'll see how this works out. The nice thing about being flexible with your process (and I am hugely flexible) is that I'm not afraid to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. I'm not sure yet that this won't slide to the floor, but we'll see.

Index Cards, Oh My!

So last week I was talking all about writing and index cards and screenwriters.

As it turns out, screenwriters use colored index cards--one for the A storyline, a different one for the B storyline, and a third for the C storyline. This sounded good, but colors are limited in index cards and they're more expensive than the regular, lined white ones.

I found some on Etsy, but I had to order 100 of one color. Those weren't assorted colors. I could have messaged the seller, but I didn't feel like it.

That's when I started wondering about highlighters. What if I just drew a line with a highlighter across the top of the card? I have a ton of highlighters and probably could buy even more colors if the 5 or 6 I already have weren't enough and if worse came to worse, I have a bazillion different colors of markers. I'm a pen slut.

As I researched screenwriting and index cards, I saw a writer who did use highlighters. Not one line across the top, but circles of different colors that meant different things to him. He didn't explain his color-coding system, but I was like: Yes! Perfect! I ordered white index cards. 1000 of them, as I mentioned last week.

And I had another epiphany while I was working with the cards--why don't I use these little hexagon stickers I have instead of a highlighter? They're neater and cleaner looking, I already have them, and they're small. Uniform.

This worked really well, but I wanted more than five colors. I'd used one color per storyline--book 1, book 2, book 3, and bad guy events. But wouldn't it be helpful to mark if it was a hero scene or a heroine one? And what about marking for action versus romance? Balance is important. To do all this, though, I'd need more colors of stickers.

I have a Silhouette Cameo 3 sticker cutting machine. Okay, it does vinyl and other things, too, but aside from a few vinyl pieces, 99.9% of what I've cut has been stickers.

I found printable dot stickers at Etsy, bought them, and I will begin cutting dots to use on my index cards.

You know what's really hilarious, though? I still don't know if index cards are going to work for me as a writing process, but like I said at the onset of these three posts: I obsessively jump in with both feet if I'm sufficiently interested. I just hope I don't end up with 900 unused index cards in my closet.

The Index Cards Arrive

 

Because I am hopelessly obsessive, I ordered 1000 index cards. Okay, they were also cheaper per card in bulk, but that's obsessive in its own special way.

While waiting for my index cards, I'd done a little online searching, reading how screenwriters use index cards. They were all over the map, but I took what I thought would work for me and made notes.

Then my cards came and I wrote one action on each card for the series. I knew a little bit about each book, but not a lot about the first one at all.

And in total honesty, this is a project I started to write, years ago, but never actually finished a chapter on any of the stories, so my ideas about events was pretty vague. That was noticeable on the cards. Especially the lack of cards on story one.

I gave it a little more thought, shuffled cards around, added a few more. Somewhere during this process, I realized that the bad guy was driving so much of the trilogy, I should do cards for him. This was exceptionally helpful and I was able to add more cards.

Now I had four piles of index cards. Hmm. While they are three separate books, there is an over arc that goes across all of them. It would be helpful to have the cards intermingled. I only had white index cards (I'll blog about this on Tuesday), so I planned to use highlighters. Only then I had another thought. I have little hexagon stickers that I bought for my planner and never used. Maybe those would work.

They did. I had five colors and I used four of them. There were more things I wanted to color code than just which storyline/book the action belonged to. I clearly needed more sticker dots!

Latest Writing Experiment

Anyone who's read this blog for a while knows that I tend to jump into things with both feet and full steam ahead. I don't know why I do this, but moderation isn't my forte.

This time my latest jump into the deep end foray is writing related.

I blogged back a ways about being backed up on podcasts. I finally listened to one where the guest was a novelist who had gotten into screenwriting. Most of the interviews wasn't particularly interesting, but I was listening while walking and didn't feel like digging out the phone to change to a different podcasts.

But there, about 20 minutes from the end, was an AHA moment for me. She was talking about writing a TV season and said anything they knew would happen went on on index card.

I'm not a plotter. Oh, I sort of plot in my own fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants way, but not like a real plotter who knows so much of what's going to happen beforehand. I've blogged many times in the past about how if I try to force my characters to do something they don't want to do, that they go on strike. And index cards?!? OMG! I read plotting books as a teenager and index cards scarred me for life.

But something made sense that never made sense to me before. Just write down a few words on a card for what you know is going to happen. That sounded intriguing to me. Don't ask me why, but I suddenly became obsessed with the idea of using index cards to figure out a storyline.

I'm in the middle of a book right now and didn't want to risk messing my head space up in case this was a total fail, so I pulled out an old project and started making notes. Not on index cards. I didn't have any. Yet. But I'd ordered some.

Tune in on Thursday for Part 2: The Index Cards Arrive