Ransom Noble's Blog, page 13

Preschool Graduation Tomorrow!

My daughter’s ceremony has taken up a lot of my time today. Why do I think it’s necessary to make not one kind of cookies but three? Picture to follow… Today is set for getting ready and figuring out some kind of outfit and getting the camcorder ready to go.

Hope everyone out there is having as much fun as I am.

Readers and Writers

Writers are readers. We can’t help it – what draws us to words is love. Sometimes I end up thinking about the writing side and neglecting the reading side, but not this week.

This week I went to a book club. It’s called Dagobah, and they focus on science fiction books. At least, I think they do. It’s a small group and they meet once a month to discuss the books they read. It’s different from what I often think about for a book club, where you choose one book and everyone reads and discusses it. 

[I know a friend currently trying to force herself to the end of her book club's selection, and I hope she makes it. I also hope nobody has to do that with one of my books!]

The cool part about sharing books this way is that I get to hear about books I might not have chosen and I get to share books I love. It’s also a great way to keep me reading, because with limited time sometimes that is what falls by the wayside. 

It shouldn’t be, I know. It’s hard to keep up with a genre when so many books are published (traditional and indie). 

One thing I thought interesting: most of the people seemed to read older novels. It might just have been this month. And I can’t say much for myself, I’ve been listening to the BBC production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

For the future: watch for news of The Art of Science ebook!

With the Nose

One of my weaknesses, writing-wise, is food. I know it seems like such an odd thing, because it isn’t like I forget to eat regularly. Actually, maybe that would help…

No, seriously, I won’t starve myself. I know one of my handicaps as a person is that I cannot smell many of the things that other people take for granted. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I called my friend to remark about how I could finally smell the laundry aisle at the store, because it was the first time I could remember having that sensation. At first she remarked, duh, but then we talked about how I was in the sixth or seventh month of pregnancy, and that it took that much to get me to smell those scents. My nose is more sensitive to certain kinds of aromas, and others I miss completely.

Unfortunately, I can smell diapers. I could smell the mulch outside my daughter’s preschool this week. But I can only vaguely remember what the flowers smelled like during my pregnancy. I’ve never smelled most of them on my own, but not for lack of trying. My husband (before we were married) would bring me flowers. I would bury my nose in them and inhale deeply. It isn’t because I can smell the roses – I literally can’t – but it is one of those automatic gestures I do when I receive flowers.

When I started editing Don’t Tell Your Mother, I have several places where the characters have food or it is cooking. My critique partners underlined them, asking what they were eating, what they smelled at that point, or something else along those lines. Sometimes, I just can’t even imagine what I’m supposed to put in there. Even when I can describe the actual food, whether there are cherries in the dessert or rosemary in the pot roast, I don’t always know if those things give off enough of a smell for most people to identify them.

[Yes, I'm still editing Don't Tell Your Mother. I'm still struggling over some of these food descriptions.]

I started asking other writers about food in stories. A few of them find it brings out their experience to have these things described. To bring them into focus even though the food itself is not dragging the plot forward, in most cases.

The other problem with that novel is that it takes place on a farm, where the smells are different than they are in the city. Livestock is kept on the farm, and there are certain smells that I’m sure I haven’t delved into the descriptions nearly enough for people who have never visited one. Thinking of that makes me want to print off another copy and highlight all the places where I might have missed some smells or other sensory perception that would aid in creating my setting.

What is it you look for in a scene where food is present? Scent is supposed to be linked strongly with memory, so do you find it more interesting when there are smells, tastes, and textures along with the sights and sounds? It’s definitely part of the “show, don’t tell” advice to bring in all the senses to bear when using description. Or does all of that just get in the way of the narrative when you’re reading?

Writing-

Always writing. It’s one way I know I am a writer, because I can’t stop. [See December, when I tried to take a break.]

750 Words is a site where I write privately. I’ve blogged about it before. Today they went to a subscription service to help pay for the site for new members, and asking older ones to donate when they can. I have donated this year, and if I have extra I will again soon.

As of today, I have been a member at 750 Words for 2 years. I have written on 675 days (of 731 total). I have written as few as 750 words and as many as 6827. I am currently on a 57 day streak. That break last December didn’t just break my habit, it made it very hard to resume. My average number of words per day came out to 994.

I find it much more satisfying to say I’ve written 671,196 words. It also makes me want to go add four more to today’s total. I’m quirky that way. It’s not even all the words I’ve written, between rewrites in the current draft and blog posts and a few other things that didn’t get captured in on the site because I wrote them without internet access. I’ve even done my 750 on my phone once because we weren’t connected to the internet any other way. With that much dedication I ought to have a longer streak than 57 days, but I will be patient and I’ll get there again.

It’s silly how much harder I try to do something like that when they tell me stats and give me little badges because I’m on a streak of so many days or I completed 500,000 words.

I think I need to do something special when I hit 1,000,000 words. Just because I can keep track of them now, not because I haven’t written that many in the past. I wish I knew when I hit that first million words, but it might have been before I ever joined 750 Words.  

How Long Can Seven Chapters Take?

I suppose the real answer is: forever if I do not work on them.
 
I’ve been playing around with the new Surface tablet. Just got the new “typing” cover, which means that while it is three times as thick as the touch cover, I can type nearly three times as fast and the thing is still pretty thin. Thinner than the first generation iPad my daughter loves to play with. Thinner than the second generation iPad that this thing is supposed to replace (with case and Bluetooth keyboard that I never did get accustomed to using).
 
Saw the commercial for the Surface since purchasing one, and I told my husband it looked like the pen was included, but it is not.
 
So tonight, after getting the kids to bed, I need to make it my goal to also finish editing at least one chapter. And tomorrow night, and the night after that. And by next week I will be finished with only that one subplot to stuff into the middle weave into the narrative.  
 
I know part of this is still the resistance to finishing the thing. It’s almost like I don’t want to send it out. Like I’m afraid it will get summarily rejected. That it isn’t good. That it isn’t good enough.
 
But good enough for what? It will soon be as good as I can make the story with the tools available to me. It is a good story. Definitely worth sharing. Or it will be when I am done.
 
Focus on the prize. I will finish it. I will share it. I will shop it out and stop letting this undercurrent of unknown undermine me.
 
In other news, my daughter seems to have stopped taking naps again. That might also explain a bit of my lack of progress, but maybe we can start running laps around the house (or the park) so she goes to bed earlier…

New Technology

Michelle Tuesday had a commentary about the recent uproar in the publishing industry about the future of writers, publishing, and royalties, but the part that really clicked in my head was when she referenced Who Moved My Cheese?

My husband bought me a new Microsoft Surface tablet for Mother’s Day. Yeah, it isn’t until next month, but he’s the kind of guy who likes to take advantage of triple points at Best Buy. Silly, huh?

I’ve been frustrated with it. The apps are different than the iPad I currently cling to. But is it like the mice and the humans and the cheese? Sometimes I resist the changes to new things. It’s not all bad to change platforms, but some of it just doesn’t transfer.

The worst part is typing. It’s something I had mostly given up on with the iPad. I can do it on the virtual keyboard. I have a Bluetooth option, but I don’t like how hard I have to push on the keys to register the movement. When I write, I like to follow where my thoughts are and I make my fingers keep up with the mess. Last November with NaNoWriMo, I was trying to get 3000 words in half an hour. I haven’t made that yet, but I might one day. With the Surface, I have struggled with the magnetic keyboard. I haven’t been able to break 40 wpm. The errors are atrocious. I hooked up my USB keyboard and things are looking up.

It’s enough to get over the worst of the frustration. But I also want to try other options than this keyboard with typing tests before I decide on which one I will be stuck with. Otherwise, I’ll probably have to drag a lovely USB option around to annoy my husband.

Adventures in Baking

I suppose baking might be labeled as a hobby for me. I love to make things from scratch – so long as it can be labeled a bread or a dessert. For some reason, dinner has never called to me that way.

I’m lucky to have joined a new DISH club where we get together for a couple hours once a month and go home with a dozen dishes to make later. The variety is pretty good, and while I might not have made these meals myself, I am enjoying the part about not having to think about it. I defrost it, cook it, eat it.

But that also leaves me open to pursue the baking front. My son’s birthday in January brought on a renewed love for it when I made my first from-scratch cake. It was a hot milk cake, and it was tasty, though it wasn’t picture perfect. I realized later that I made a mistake and overmixed part of it. It’s easy to do on a first attempt. I created two kinds of frosting for it, but I wasn’t really happy with either of them. The kids loved them.

I am pretty sure it was because I made the thing for company. Anything created for family automatically turns out beautiful because there isn’t anyone there to see it.

March brought birthdays for both my husband and my daughter. I know his favorite pie is rhubarb, and so I set out to make him one. Then I invited company, so I also made a chocolate mayonnaise cake (with brown sugar frosting). The problem was the pie bakes at different temperatures, and the second temperature was the same as the cake. So of course I put the pie in first, on the top rack.

I didn’t realize the racks were too close together, and put the cake on the bottom. The pie dripped on the cake. The cake rose into the pie. When I went to move the cake, the rack ripped off the top where it had risen so beautifully. Talk about a mess. I didn’t know where to put the pie, because the bottom of the dish was covered with chocolate. The cake fell and created a nice depression in the middle I then tried to cover with the frosting. I was lucky they both tasted good. The pie was the ugliest I have ever made – the crust wouldn’t hold together for anything.

Two weeks later, I made a pie that my husband wouldn’t have to share with anyone but me. It’s beautiful, even though I did forget to create air vents in the top crust for it to breathe while in the oven. I’m sure it’s because it was just for us.

Yesterday my daughter got to bring in snacks for her birthday, and I set about making a bunch of cupcakes from scratch. She was adamant about them being chocolate, though she only once mentioned (to my mother) that she wanted chocolate raspberry. They’re chocolate raspberry cupcakes with coconut milk-based dark chocolate frosting and they’re a decadent delight. I shared them with her teachers, too, and my friends. At gymnastics tomorrow I will share some more, because her birthday party is on Saturday and I need to make something else to share at the party.

I ended up making the frosting the night before, but in the morning I had to shower and hurry because I didn’t realize I was nearly out of eggs. (Why didn’t I check that earlier than the morning I’m making cupcakes?) They’re pretty, but both my kids tried to put their hands in the beaters while I was mixing things. I finished only soon enough to get to preschool and not to do the art project like usual. However, everyone who has reported back so far has enjoyed them immensely. [I cannot find a link for the cupcake recipe, though it was from Taste of Home.]

For Easter I made beer bread to go with my father-in-law’s chili, but I forgot it when we left. It figures. Now I have beer bread to eat with various meals. No mix there, either, because beer bread is so simple once you learn the recipe.

I made Semlor, a Swedish Lenten treat, only once. The recipe I had called for fresh yeast instead of dry yeast, and that threw me off terribly until I researched the differences between them. I have a better handle on it, so I’m going to have to make it outside the regular season once my daughter’s birthday party is over. All the research has done is make me wish I could get active yeast at my local grocery store, but so far no luck.

Good thing I’m chasing two kids around most of the time or trying to write when they sleep, or I’d be up to my eyeballs in sweets. Novel update – Don’t Tell Your Mother has seven chapters left in this edit, plus the subplot is mostly written and needs to be inserted. It will be done soon!

Resistance

I don’t generally give myself enough time to find excuses to not work on something. However, I have noticed that I’m working on a lot of things that are not the one with the deadline that’s about to whoosh by. 

The deadline is of my own choosing, so it isn’t like I’ll be in too much trouble if and when it whooshes past. I just want to work on something else, something different, something new (read: shiny). 

The last few days I notice a lot of shiny ideas around me. They are taking over my brain space and making it difficult to concentrate on the editing. I feel like I’m really close to being done. But it isn’t quite there, and that’s difficult to force my head around. There have also been a lot of distractions from spring break: My daughter doesn’t have preschool, but instead the museum has interesting traveling exhibits like the Insect Zoo and Instrument Petting Zoo.

Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big distraction. I remembered my daughter loved bugs, but I didn’t realize that would be over four hours of my week devoted to large creepy-crawly creatures. This is me holding my son and a Vietnamese Walking Stick and my darling daughter standing close, who couldn’t get enough of the bugs. 

 

I’ll be working with the resistance. I still want to finish this novel by Sunday (the darling girl’s birthday), but it might slip a few days. Whatever else happens, the time with the bugs was well spent. (And a big thank-you to the “bug lady” Ginny Morgal for taking this picture and explaining so many wonderful things about her bugs.)

Speaking of bugs, remember I love science fiction and fantasy? Those lovely creatures sparked even more shiny ideas that threaten to keep me from that last bit of editing! 

The what-ifs are piling in my notebooks, and they need to wait. I have a novel to finish! If you have any great ideas (or even just good ones) for tackling resistance to the project, I’d love to hear them.

Digging into Chapters

Today I started wondering what makes up a chapter. I’m working on my current project (because I still pretend I’m going to finish it by the end of the month), and I read through comments from a friend about how my chapters are short. That was the beginning chapter, then a few segments in (realizing all of the “chapters” are short) the comments were only on the ‘super short’ chapters.

How do we know how to say ‘end of chapter’? It’s not something that occupies me for the most part. I like to leave a cliffhanger ending if I can. There’s something about the pacing of the novel that just says where the ends ought to be. Or so I’ve always managed in the past.

But the comments started making me wonder about that. This particular project is young adult aimed at reluctant readers. When I put that into my thoughts, mostly the way I’ve done the chapters really fits the pace of the book.

Now I can put my chapters into all kinds of perspective. I can count them by number of words and decide that the math will tell me everything – in which case I have a few that are way too short. Average, minimum, maximum, and standard deviation all come into play. Interpretation is anybody’s game, though, so it only gives me more questions.

A good reminder to all the writers out there: fiction is not a game of numbers. 

Even more that is true if I think about all the books I’ve read: Which Twilight book was it that had four pages marked for the months like chapters and absolutely nothing written in them? The effect was clear about the passing of time where Bella had no recollection of events. Not that things didn’t happen, but she had completely withdrawn from life.

If a chapter can be as short as one sentence or as long as necessary, then why do we focus on such things as a magic number of words per chapter? It might be more effective to think about what a chapter needs to do. The chapter needs to make a point. The story needs to go forward.

Chapters have specific duties within a book. Start with breaking up the narrative. It’s hard to take an entire book in one sitting for most of us, and a chapter ending will be a place where a reader stops if possible. [And this is the best place to throw in cliffhangers!] In some third limited viewpoint books, a chapter break might herald another character viewpoint. Some give gaps for the passage of time or to change location.

It’s never perfect, and it never will be. Analysis only leads me to improve my work as long as I don’t get too far into the details. I’m sure I could eventually tweak all the chapters to be the exact same number of words, but that wouldn’t suit the project. It would be great to say they all need to be X number of words on average within .5 standard deviations. Yet that isn’t the part that really makes it something worth reading.

Each chapter I put down follows some inner voice in my head that this is where it needs to end. All of it is something that follows each different project to be a new whole. I wish I could quantify it more than that, but the answer is elusive. I can tell I’m not the only one – check  this article and the discussion here and here.

I have a rough draft of another book that I haven’t finished putting the chapter breaks into yet. The first piece turned out a longer than I originally intended, but that doesn’t mean I need to chop it into pieces. I’m still grappling with the entirety of it, and I’m sure it will come to me. 

How do you deal with chapters as writers and readers? 

Did I forget to mention I am a writer?

Sometimes I struggle with this in my day to day activities. People who have known me for a long time have seen me shift from one kind of career to another, but a lot of my new friends and acquaintances only see me as mom running my kids around. Funny, huh?

All right, I’ll say it out loud. I’m a writer. It doesn’t mean I don’t do a hundred other things a day. It doesn’t mean I don’t have other career paths. However, this is what I love to do and what you can find me doing when I have any spare time at all.

Spare time? That’s another funny concept. Time doesn’t create itself in moments that can be considered empty or spare. I make choices about how to spend my time. Every time the little darlings go to sleep, I go to work.

I know a lot of people who get ideas. Some of them try writing from time to time. Others are writers like me. There is a difference between the ones who write occasionally and those who are writers. The writers I know have to work through the tough parts. They take each piece and examine it thoroughly. They never stop pursuing those pieces of story until they’re polished.

So I have worked other places, doing many other things. I get that faraway look in my eye when an idea comes to me and try to remember it long enough to write it down. I try to only choose things that are fun. And all of it, from that Scentsy party  to the towers we build at the Family Museum to the random tidbits I read, contributes to my writing.