Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 270

Tackling the In-Box

What a difference a day makes. Monday was the hottest day of the year. Today, it's still in the 70s. I celebrated by going shopping after physical therapy. It would have been a nice day for one of those open air, fake old downtown shopping centers that have become popular around here, but those are all far away, and the stores I wanted are at the mall just down the road from the therapy place. Or I thought they were. I hadn't been in a mall in a couple of years, and a few things had changed. ...

Book Report: The Other Bronte

Our heat wave is supposed to break this evening when a front comes through, so temperatures the rest of the week and on into the long-range forecast will be at least 10 degrees cooler than they have been. It's not so much the highs that are a problem -- 95 is cooler than 105, but it's still not really comfortable -- but it's the lows that make a big difference. If the morning low is 82, there's never a truly comfortable part of the day. If the morning low is 72, then at least much of the morn...

Movie Monday

Today is apparently the start of the new school year for those who attend school. For me, it meant going through a school zone on the way to physical therapy. While stopped at a light near the middle school, I saw a girl heading to school who looked freakishly like I did at that age. Even her school uniform (they do the khakis and solid color polo shirt thing around here) looked a lot like the kind of clothes I chose to wear to school. I had a brief pang of nostalgia.

Meanwhile, I think I've f...

Random Roundup

Starting over again turns out to have been a good idea. I think the new version works so much better, and I think it even improved the character's voice. I did cheat a little and incorporate some of a transition scene from the earlier version, but from here on, I'm going to force myself to write from scratch. I only had about 10,000 words written, and I can do 10,000 words easily. I did go through quite a lot of procrastination before I started writing. My head was churning with random other ...

Shutting out the Voices

I think I finally have what I want to do with this book straight in my head, so today I'm going to start over and try again. At a writing conference, I once heard a speaker say that once you've written a draft, you should put it aside, not even look at it, and write the book all over again. The idea of it will be clearer in your head after you've written it and the characters will be more developed, but if you just try to revise the words, then you'll still be too tied to those words and the ...

The Hero's Journey: Ordinary World

Last night in ballet, I managed to get my bad arm into the one position I haven't been able to do at all since my shoulder went wonky. It's not quite entirely back to normal -- the physical therapist can tell a difference, and I can feel the difference -- but it essentially looks normal. The therapist responded by really upping the amount of weight I have to lift. As a result, today's session was hard. I was glad I'd run all my errands on the way because I was ready to collapse by the time I ...

General Updates

I had a spectacularly unproductive Monday, which is odd because I'm usually all motivated and dedicated on Mondays. But I'd had a very restless night, then was sore from physical therapy. And then I was also kind of antsy and needed more physical activity, so I went swimming, which then wiped me out for the rest of the day. I always find it odd how tired swimming makes me, but I think swimming is deceptively effortless. You don't get hot and sweaty, so you aren't aware of how much you're work...

Monday Movies

I got another 5,000 words written on Friday, so I'm about halfway to the point I want to be when I send the proposal to my agent. I think today I'm going to devote some time to fixing the part I've already written. A lot of that involves world-building stuff that I'll need to know going forward. I think I'll also be deleting some of what I wrote Friday because I was doing some meandering -- hashing things out on the page as a way of getting them straight in my head. Now that I have things fig...

Doctor Who: The Season in Review

I wrote more than 5,500 words on the new book yesterday. It was what I'd originally planned as the first chapter, but it's too long for a chapter, and I think there's still some development I need to do on this part that will make it even longer, so it will end up being the first two chapters. I did that in only a little more than two hours, and I think I could have gone on to write more, but that passed even my "bonus" goal for the day, so I deserved a break. I've been trying to decide wheth...

Ready, Set, Go!

After Tuesday's ballet class and yesterday's physical therapy session, I think every muscle in my body is now sore and quivering. I guess I wasn't keeping up with ballet exercises as much as I thought over the summer. It really didn't help that there was a lawn crew whose truck and trailer were parked in front of my driveway in such a way that it took a lot of fancy maneuvering, backing up and moving forward in tiny increments for me to get into my garage on my way home from therapy, and the ...