Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 296
July 31, 2009
Virtual Vicarious Vacation Friday: The Cotswolds
I'm visiting the parents today, so just a quick Virtual Vicarious Vacation post. We're still in England, from October 2000, the day after my day in Warwick (from last week). It was a day in the Cotswolds. I took a train from Oxford to a town with a train station, where I caught a bus to another town, where I bought a book of walks and then walked across-country to another town, where I caught the bus back to the train station. I don't have my guidebooks or photo albums with me, so I'm guessing o
July 30, 2009
Dislikes
It just occurred to me that my birthday is a week from tomorrow, and I've made no plans whatsoever. It's not that I forgot my own birthday. It's more that I've lost track of where I am in time and hadn't realized it was coming so soon. There is a gathering planned the next day that has nothing to do with my birthday but which includes the people I'd invite to a party. Not that I'm really up to putting together an actual party for a week from now. Maybe I'll see about getting together with some f
July 29, 2009
Common Threads
I'm still doing a lot of self-assessment as part of the Ongoing Quest for World Domination, and there's a thing going around in the writing world that really has me thinking. Writers are to find the things that are true about everything they've written. I guess the idea is to see what really seems to speak to you, what core story it is you want to tell, and maybe what your strengths are.
It's a difficult exercise for me to do because the books I wrote earlier in my career aren't the kind of book
It's a difficult exercise for me to do because the books I wrote earlier in my career aren't the kind of book
July 28, 2009
Developing Creativity
Another cool, cloudy morning -- and I even slept with the windows open and the AC off last night, so I got a really good rest. I can't believe this is July in Texas. It has occurred to me that the streak of really hot, dry days ended not long after I bought a new swimsuit. Since then, the only days suitable for swimming have been when I had something else going on. I'm not taking the credit for changing the weather, but I do find it somewhat amusing. If I'd known that all I needed to do to get c
July 27, 2009
More Monday Movies
It's been a lovely stormy morning, so of course I am utterly blissful. I'm also tempted to nap because this is perfect sleeping weather. Fortunately, it's also good reading weather, and I'm still doing tons of research, so that means I can lie on the sofa and read all day and it counts as work. I suspect this is going to be one of those books where I read a ton in preparation, and only a tiny sliver of it will actually make it into the book directly. Otherwise, it will all be mindset and idea ge
July 24, 2009
Virtual Vicarious Vacation Friday: Warwick Castle
Juggling three writing projects may not be good for my sanity. There's the previous project, that I'm wrapping up. There's the current one I'm rewriting. And there's the future one I'm researching and brainstorming and that is really taking over my brain. Yesterday, I read straight through the previous project. I think it's important to try to read a book the way a reader would because you catch a lot more things than you do when it's weeks or even months between the time you wrote the first cha
July 23, 2009
Favorite Fictional People
While I'm in the preparation phase for a new book, I've been doing some self-assessment to figure out what I like and don't like in books, what gets me excited, etc. I've done lists of plot elements that I like and that I don't like, and the other day I made a list of the characters in books, TV and film that have really captured my imagination -- the ones who linger in my imagination or who are the reason I got really emotionally involved in a story. I've discovered some interesting trends.
For
For
July 22, 2009
Avoiding Talking Heads
That "misty" idea is really coming out of the mist now. I had to turn the light on in the middle of the night and write notes to myself, which I never do, because the pitch/back cover copy for it came to me, word for word, and it was too perfect to let slip. So now I know what this book is actually about -- what the main plot conflict is. Lots of details are still missing and I have tons of research to do, but I'm making progress.
I dug out my college acting textbook last week because I like expl
I dug out my college acting textbook last week because I like expl
July 21, 2009
Romantic Comedy Round-Up
The weekend was eventful enough that the weekend HBO report got shoved to Tuesday. I guess I was in a comedy/romantic comedy mood this weekend (or else that's what was on).
I started with Definitely Maybe on Thursday night, which I liked better than I expected, but still not enough that I would have been willing to pay for it in a theater. The plot structure is similar to I'm With Lucy, being mostly told in flashback and with the person the main character ends up with in the present part of the s
I started with Definitely Maybe on Thursday night, which I liked better than I expected, but still not enough that I would have been willing to pay for it in a theater. The plot structure is similar to I'm With Lucy, being mostly told in flashback and with the person the main character ends up with in the present part of the s
July 20, 2009
Eventful Weekend
This weekend was full of stuff to talk about. First, Walter Cronkite's death. We didn't watch CBS news, so I didn't see his coverage of even the major events I was alive for. I mostly recognized him from those "You are there!" films we saw in history class. But the way I knew him was as a teacher. After he retired from CBS, he was on the University of Texas faculty as an adjunct lecturer (or something like that). My guess is that they were playing off the fact that he went to journalism school t
