Ransom Noble's Blog, page 15

Grill Master

Have you tried McCormick’s GrillMates? Some pretty amazing stuff is contained there.

The husband’s been trying out a couple of them when grilling. I’ve always loved his creations, but this adds a little flair. The photo above is of Molasses Bacon seasoning added to the hamburger meat and Brown Sugar Bourbon BBQ sauce. The resulting explosion of taste was beautiful.

The meal got rave reviews from everyone who has shared those meals with us. You just might see more of that in our future!

Madagascar 3

What a party! There were mazes to fill out, tic tac toe puzzles to challenge each other with, and connect the dot images to sketch. Everyone grabbed a pen and started things off well. There were even a couple matching picture challenges.

The older kids were game for Tape the Tail on the Gloria, but I couldn’t talk the adults into it. [They were a little camera shy.]

But my favorite part about a Madagascar party was the four kids each playing with the masks and trying to make the baby believe they were characters from the movie. He didn’t seem too worried, but he’s pretty used to his sister throwing him a bunch of curve balls in the way of roars and dropping dragons near him.

I taped the faces around the baby’s crib to keep him company. I hope he’s as amused as I am. The movie was awesome (but the baby had to stay home), and we can’t wait to watch it again. Hope you enjoy it as much! It’s fun to add to the movie experiences for the kids with little take-home games and activities.

Demons Are Jackasses – An Interview with Tru

I invited Frankie Blooding to bring one of her characters in to talk about Demons are Jackasses. So excited about this book and I hope you will be, too. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, but I don’t mind.

Hey, folks! Today I’m here with Tru, Paige’s brother-in-law as we discuss Demons Are Jackasses! We’ve got a lot—

*waves excitedly* Hey, guys!

*frowns* Not yet. *turns back to the audience* We’ve got a great line-up for you this month as we build up the excitement for the book which is currently available only in—

*the EMF meter buzzes loudly*

*@_@ at Tru*

*frantically turns it off while studying it and trying to find the source of the EMF…at the same time*

*talks over the buzzing* Anyway, it’s still only available in paperback, but the book is SO pretty!! I really recommend having it in paperback. I’m…mildly distracted by the–*takes EMF meter and turns it off*–character joining us today! His name is Tru and he’s a ghost hunter, if you couldn’t tell.

*grabs the EMF Meter from Frankie and turns it back on* There is something here with us!

*leans over and whispers back* It’s the readers, you doof! They would show up as energy since this is CYBER SPACE!

*thinking frown*

*takes the meter away and sits on it*

*glare*

Anyway! Wow! He’s distracting! Tru is a really FUN character and I usually enjoy having him IN the scenes! He’s originally from Texas and Webster’s definition of the word “Geek”. Please help me welcome Tru!

*turns beat red and grabs digital voice recorder*

So, Tru, tell us a little bit about yourself.

You just did.

*grins and says through teeth* So tell them something else, you twit! You’re the one who wanted to do the interview.

*talks through grin* That was BEFORE the spotlight was on me.

Just relax. Be yourself. You’ll be fine.

*deep breath* Well, I’m the husband to Paige’s sister and a proud father of three—oh, wait, at this point we’re at two and a half – children.

Why don’t you tell us what it’s like living in the Ansley household.

It’s a ZOO! *dead pan look at audience* No. Really. Alma is the craziest witch I’ve ever met. This woman can make the house shake on the foundations! And she knows how to weld the wooden spoon. Like, seriously, my hand’s been nearly broken more times than I can count!

LMAO!! I’ve seen that happen a time or two!

You laugh! My oldest daughter is a fire starter, so when she’s pissed off, fire comes shooting out of her ears! It makes it really tough to be a father! So, I let me wife wear the pants. I prefer not being the pig on the spit, so I’m the nice Dad. My middle son is a bard, of all things. Now, here’s me, the dumb dad, thinking, “Hey, having a bard as a son is SAFE! My daughter might be trying to kill me, but my son is going to be AWESOME! Ohhhhhh noooooo! He threw a tantrum at the age of two and broke every glass bottle in the pickle aisle!

ROFL!!! Pooor Tru!

I MIGHT, maybe, get my pants back after the little one (that you’ll see in Angels) is grown and out of the house. But let’s just say that being the Muggle in the Ansley house SUCKS!

*picking self off floor* What are your thoughts on Paige?

*pauses…blinks…shifts in chair…explodes* Thank GOD I married the one that talks to dead people!

*chuckling* Okay, well, folks, that’s all the time we have right now! Stay tunes and be sure to check out Demons Are Jackasses!! It really is a great story!

Flowing Words

Some days they do; some days they don’t. I’m excited to say I’m coming up on 300 days of writing in a row at 750words.com. At a minimum daily count, that’d be over 222k words.

I’ve written more than that.

I actually joined that site a year ago yesterday. In the 367 days, I missed 12. My streak as of yesterday was 297 days. Yes, somehow I managed that through moving (Thanks, Mom!) and having a baby (always with the technical gadgets when he slept) and figured how I could do that minimum through my phone if I had to.

My fastest entry took 7 minutes to reach the goal, over 100 wpm. My 355 completed days have accumulated 344,110 words. The most I ever accomplished in a day was 4944 and makes me wonder why I didn’t push to the 5k mark. [Personal best writing day is over 8k - before I ever had children or found 750words.]

The site also tries to give insights into my writing, whether I’m feeling affectionate or thinking about death or if I use present tense verbs or what sense (read: vision) I’m using for description.

But that isn’t the information I turn to when I want to understand my writing better. Besides the words themselves, and there are a couple budding novels in there if I’m not careful – or maybe if I am. Some days it’s hard to tell. The information I gather lends more to understanding the process.

I learned I can type off the top of my head and still send words flying out of my fingers over 100 wpm. When I say they’re on fire, that’s pretty close. I learned I can type over 3000 words in an hour. That might seem like a modest 50ish wpm, but keeping it up for an hour or more is daunting.

My best time of day is the morning, but I can’t type in the morning because I’m busy with kids. So I almost always do my writing during afternoon naps. When I have to do it in the evening it takes longer, especially if there are distractions like the TV or my husband. [I told you I was writing. Go do something else until I'm done!] Longer often means five times as long, slowing me down to the average at this site, somewhere around 13 wpm when averaged with the distractions.

When I get warmed up and set a timer, I can shut out pretty much everything else. It’s really fun to just sit there and commune with the characters while they’re doing weird things.

So now I’m working on figuring out how to do that all the time. Because every now and then I end up with random brain dumps that, while helpful, aren’t exactly fueling my fiction word count. Except they do by getting the other stuff out of the way. It’s amazing how full the brain can get just going about your daily business.

I keep working to refine what I write, to learn more from this tool, to pursue more goals in my writing. It’s an ingrained habit for me, and whatever else it teaches me, that alone has been good enough to keep me at it.

Now what I need is a tool that makes me sit there and edit things on a daily basis. Because having the rough draft out only gets you so far. My drafts are improving, which means some of them are not complete dreck when I spew them out.

And today, when I sit down to write my words again, I’ll be figuring out something else to take time and make my words count. It doesn’t always have to be a race for speed. It’s about what I need to get out in order to do the writing I want to complete.

What tools do you use to keep your habits going for writing, editing, publishing, social media, other writer-type habits I’ve forgotten? Please share.

About the Eyes

I’ve been reading several books about children’s development, which makes sense since I have a 3 year old and a 3 month old. One of those books called attention to how adults and children may have different ideas about objects, with one reason being adults are much more likely to take in a visual aspect while children might be more inclined to taste or smell or touch or listen to it.

Actually, when you think about kids this just makes sense. Who knows what taste there might be on a pine cone? I bet a child would tell me. Probably also explains why so many parents are always screaming “Get that out of your MOUTH!”

But how does that translate into what we write? The majority of authors (especially in brick and mortar stores) are adults. We would then use a lot of visual description when we want it to be real to the readers.

I have a group of characters living on some far-off planet who don’t use their eyes. These nearly blind people can sense movement but not much else. It was such a difficult thing for me to describe things using their noses and ears as the primary senses and the visual as a distant fourth (behind touch). While I haven’t yet decided to have them put everything in their mouths to taste, I can’t promise anything about their futures.

What do you do to distinguish between characters? Do they all use their eyes as a primary sense?

I think if I were to catalog all the descriptive words in my current novel, most of them would be geared toward the visual. Makes me think I should look at that while rewriting. Yay! Just one more thing to edit and polish. I will finish it eventually, I swear. Though it might help to find less things I want to fix.

What Color Was That?

I started thinking about this as a friend of mine used a color to describe some different kind of person in his story. Jim Butcher had white, red, and black vampires in his Dresden Files. Jacqueline Carey used a deep blood red called sanguine for her character Phedre and to represent her distinguishing feature of being an anguisette. Vulcans from Star Trek have green blood. (Though doesn’t that make you wonder about a half-Vulcan half-Human – shouldn’t he not have either red or green blood? or both? I’m sure that’s another topic for another day…)

As long as we’re doing colors, why isn’t it cerise instead of just red or cerulean instead of just blue? I rarely hear anyone talking about aubergine. Is it the one syllable quality of red and blue and green that make them so common? Yellow simply doesn’t have the same impact. Yet it can’t simply be about the name, because pink will never have the impact of a neon orange – and that never rolled easily off anyone’s tongue.

When I ask someone’s favorite color, often I get a generic blue or purple or brown. The aforementioned aubergine ranks for one friend of mine, and another told me burgundy. It made me think about my own response, which is much more vague since I am fond of too many colors to pick just one. It’s very dependent on what it is for (a car or a purse or the walls of my bedroom)  and my particular mood.

How does color affect how you write? Do you search for a specific shade like chartreuse or will bright green work? Do you work to figure out the perfect color for everything or do you leave a few to the reader’s imagination?

Does having all that information conflict with your own ideas when reading? I’d love to know!

You Don’t Know Me Yet –

I had fun today. I finally connected to the writers in my new local area. It took me too long, but considering all the moving plus baby stuff, I think it was good to get there now – before the next move. (It’s just a little move from this temporary place into a house, but it’s still fraught with anxiety. All moves are.)

One of the things I love about writing groups is how being connected to them reconnects me to my projects. Another is hearing all the great things they bring to share.

They talked about a future meeting and it’s hard to realize we’ll be moving into our new home that day. I’m excited about the new house, but a little sad to be missing part of this group just as I connected with them.

Maybe I also needed a new perspective. I mean, I’ve been working on this piece and that for a while, and every group gives something a little different where feedback is concerned. And the new perspective makes me very excited to dig into the project again. If only I had time. I’m about to start packing for this next move!

They’re very encouraging, and I wonder how old they think I am. I get the feeling they don’t think I’ve done this much before, but I can’t be certain. The age groups seem to be either older or quite young. And by quite young, I mean two of them were about high school aged. Interesting, but good.

It also makes me feel a little more at home, now that I found where some writers congregate. It’s funny the things that make us feel like we’re in the right place, but that seems to be one of them for me.

But I think I know what I want to take next time I have a chance to write. And it’s exciting!

Competitive Streak

Do you ever look at one of your friends or even just a challenge, and think, "I can do this!"? One of the times when this competitive streak shows is during NaNoWriMo. The challenge was created to out-write your internal editor, and if someone can do it, why not me?

Some days it's the same thing with those grading sites. Marketing Grader and Tweet Grader were mentioned today, though we've also compared Klout on occasion. If you send us (and I'm talking about a specific friend who shares my competitive drive) one of these tools, we try to integrate it into our knowledge base.

And why? What does it matter if my Klout score is 15 or 57 or even 95? [For the record, it is none of those.] That won't sell my books. It doesn't matter if the Marketing Grader says my website is 0 or 100 out of 100. Did any of you check the scores before buying a book or a service from someone?

I think it's even funnier that I can admit that those scores are geared toward businesses selling a product online, but many of the people I know who try to learn from it are online but not necessarily selling a physical product. [Yes, I know books are physical products, but bear with me a moment.] I can look through all of the stats and see whether I'm capturing an audience by Twitter followers, or Tweet Graders or other options. I can figure out what I'm doing on Facebook by fans and shares and other activity. My blog has subscribers and links to various social media.

So what are we doing with it? Just checking. It's a sliding scale to see whether we're engaging someone or just talking in a bubble. Are we using the platform not as intended but as we can to get conversations moving?

And then, when it's quiet, my friend and I try to outdo each other strictly by the numbers. If you're curious, we have the same Klout score and our Marketing Grades are a single point different. It probably helps that she and I share information and little tricks when we find them and also encourage and support each other to keep up with blogs and tweets and posts. It's a crazy thing to try to keep all of these things up, but somehow it works.

I'm really grateful that she's there to help keep me motivated and focused on the target. My target isn't a number – I'm just here to talk and share and learn as I write and publish. Life and work are good, but it can be good to remember it isn't just a numbers game.

Except I can't stop trying to get those numbers higher!

Silent Sunday

 

Silent Sunday

Bye-bye, House.