Michele Venne's Blog, page 2

Making Progress

After a week of work, I can say that progress has been made on all three projects. While at the writer’s retreat last weekend, I spent a few hours editing a couple of the stories from one of the writers in the anthology. I read, critiqued, and returned the four stories to the writer who has been absent for seven months. Hopefully it won’t take that long for the rewrites. It would be nice to…

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A Bit of Reflection

I’m excited for this weekend! It’s the second time I’ll attend a writer’s retreat for the group I belong to with the retreat ten minutes from the house. The presenters will center their talks around AI. I’m AI neutral. I don’t use it, except when visiting a website that uses AI and I have no choice. I don’t use any AI in my writing. The program I use for editing has AI, but I ignore it’s…

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Just on the Other Side

Just through this hole in the hedge lay the unknown. Perhaps a set of croquet balls and white wire wickets. Or a litter of puppies rolling in the grass. Maybe a cliff overlooking a placid blue sea with gulls riding the thermals. This is the way I feel about things. One writer sent her correctly formatted and completely edited stories for the anthology. Now there are two stories populating the…

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Cycles

Sometimes it’s not so much the ebb and flow, but the cyclical way of things. Around this time last year, I was granted the privilege of once again teaching Language Arts. Though I had donated and recycled most of my teaching materials since I left the classroom, I still have half a dozen tubs with resources I won’t part with. I used them last year. This week I rifled through the tubs and pulled…

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A Changing Perspective

I mentioned before that it took over two years for me to change my mind set about my author career going forward. I don’t regret the time and introspection it took to arrive where I am now. I feel a freedom I didn’t have the first 15 years of my writing career. And with that freedom, I see opportunities. Because of that freedom, I can choose which opportunities I want. This different mind set has…

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On to the Next

In this month’s newsletter to my subscribers, I wrote about May being a time of transition. As the days march to the end of this particular month, other little transitions are happening. The big one I mentioned in my newsletter was the shift from a lot of clients to a few clients. This leaves me more time for writing. The transition back to more clients and less time for writing happens in August.

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Editing

This is the stage I’m on with The Lost Gift. Editing, rewriting, tweaking all point to adjusting my words on the page to make the story better. I’ve read recently that the first draft is for the writer. All the editing makes the manuscript ready for the reader. One advantage to hand writing my first drafts is that it keeps me from editing on the screen. This lets the story flow… as long as I keep…

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The Why of Creative Acts

It’s important for artists have a why. Why do they create? This answer—it can more than one and it often changes over time—acts as a compass to guide the creator. My own why has changed. And for a time when I was floundering with my writing, it circled around to, at least partly, that I’d lost my why. Creativity, like everything in life, ebbs and flows. It’s tough to ride the ebbs.

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The Next Step

I finished The Lost Gift! As the story wound down on Wednesday, I kept writing. The main characters, after surviving a plane crash and a kidnapping, needed to be at their family’s home for Christmas. I kept writing. The hero needed to propose to the heroine, even though they’d been engaged five years before. I finally put the pen down. Like other bits of the story, I’ll need to edit and tweak the…

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Changes

Last week, I stretched my 3-day writing streak to 5 days. Same with this week. What is a 2-week streak called? Since my words with this holiday novella flowed, if in a meandering way, I just kept writing. Two days ago, I decided that if I didn’t get to the climax, whatever that was, this novella would become a novel, and not an exciting one. I had a chat with the muse and jotted down 4 details to…

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