Kristin Wolden Nitz's Blog, page 5

Success…of a Kind

Emily Dickenson may have been of the opinion that “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.” But she only submitted her poetry to The Atlantic Monthly once.  After her first rejection, she never tried again. A few of her poems were published in her lifetime, but only because her friends wanted to see them published.  But today’s success is pretty sweet:  my agent was pleased with all those changes that I made last fall! In fact, that chapter that didn’t want to be written must have worked because her only requests for clarifications were on another matter entirely.

Back to Blogging

Believe it or not, I’ve missed my little soapbox.  Every once in a while I would find myself thinking that it would be nice to pull together a nice little rant on some topic or other.  But then I’d think about my stack of undone student assignments.  I know how hard it can be to wait for feedback, so I try to avoid making them wait any longer than I have to.  And then there was the siren call of Venice for my Italian chase novel.  I was really struggling with my first chase scene along the canals of Venice. Not that I was suffering. After all, I was busy checking out bird’s eye and ground level views of Venice courtesy of Google Maps.  This is such a great tool and time-waster all rolled into one. 

I’m also keeping copies of Rick Steves’ Italy and Art for Dummies  within an armslength of my computer. These books were invaluable when it came to deciding on what to visit when my family lived in Europe. 

I remember wrinkling my nose when my husband picked up the Dummies book until I saw it was by Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He definitely made art interesting and accessible.   And now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be writing this novel in this way without the  perspective he offered on one of his favorite artists, an artist who should be better known….

Presenting at Michigan Reading Association

I’ll be discussing the reading and writing of mysteries at the Michigan Reading Assciation this Sunday.

Taking a Break

I do intend to get back to blogging.  If nothing else, it’s served as a great project diary.  But my husband and I are going to be moving soon.  I’m going to have to dedicate almost all my time to packing, sorting and cleaning and unpacking for the next month or so.  But I’m hoping to steal a few minutes here and there for my novel.

The Google Map of Venice has been particularly useful as I plan various incidents for my Italian Chase Novel.

Meditating on Scenes and Characters

There’s something to be said for prolonged meditation on a scene.  As my husband and I have been hunting for houses and preparing our house to go on the market, I haven’t had a lot of time for my own writing.  So today I sat down for forty-five minutes and popped out about 400 words.  I still need to add in description in order to make the scene three-dimensional, but that will mean studying Palladian architercture in Vicenza from my photo albums, Flicker and Google images.  That’s fun research when your plot demands it!

 

What Really Happened to Humpty? He won!!

My friend Jeanie Franz Ransom just received some eggs-citing news! Her picture book WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO HUMPTY just won the New Mexico Land of Enchantment Award for best picture book narrative.  So right now her eggstremely funny book is sitting on a website just to the left of THE HUNGER GAMES.   I’m proud to be an official aunt to this book.  It says so in the dedication!  What does a literary aunt do?  She offers support and encouragement just like the biological ones.  Literary aunts are also extremely proud when they see a manuscript hatch and go on to really great things.

Finished Again

Stories are fluid things until they’re typeset.  That’s when most tinkering stops except for minor word tweaks and punctuation fixes.  The Monday before Thanksgiving I finished Calyn’s story again and sent it off to my agent.  My hope is that I’ll get a chance to finish it three or four more times with an editor who falls in love with it.  I have no control over that!  But I can look book on all my work through the prism of some words from Barbara Ueland’s 1938 classic If You Want to Write:

“I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time,—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.  With every sentence you write, you have learned something.  It has done you good.  It has stretched your understanding.  I know that.  Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.”