Brandy Hunt's Blog, page 4

State of the Writing

Sorry I'm so late posting today.  I have been running a low-grade fever, and I'm not sure if it an infection or just the heat in general.

However, I have gotten a few more chapters of Promise Kept's sequel edited for typos and horrible grammar.  I also am starting to pick at a couple of other stories.

I have to admit I find my daughter to be very distracting right now, since she knows all the cool games like tea party, dress up and school.  Then there is the fact I'm a bit of a farming widow right now as the seed is coming in and needs to conditioned and cleaned for storage/sale.  I can't do everything, and Chris is too tired to help, so I end up letting some things go until we can't find the swing set in the Bahia grass.

I guess that is it for the moment.  I have some thing on the back burner, so I might be posting something over the weekend here.

Status of the Writing

Sorry I'm so late posting today.  I have been running a low-grade fever, and I'm not sure if it an infection or just the heat in general.

However, I have gotten a few more chapters of Promise Kept's sequel edited for typos and horrible grammar.  I also am starting to pick at a couple of other stories.

I have to admit I find my daughter to be very distracting right now, since she knows all the cool games like tea party, dress up and school.  Then there is the fact I'm a bit of a farming widow right now as the seed is coming in and needs to conditioned and cleaned for storage/sale.  I can't do everything, and Chris is too tired to help, so I end up letting some things go until we can't find the swing set in the Bahia grass.

I guess that is it for the moment.  I have some thing on the back burner, so I might be posting something over the weekend here.

Writing weirdness

Most people don't write the way I do.  I'm not only a seat of the pantser, but I'm also a many projects at oncer.  So the weirdness?  I found a project that somehow didn't get put on my writing to do list.  It's been languishing in my writing folder while I danced around it for at least a year or more.

Yeah, weirdness.  Could also be a form of clutter blindness.  I think the end of this year, I'm going to double-check that everything in my writing folder matches something on the writing list.  Why wait, you may ask?  No telling what I'll lose between now and then .

Tagged: to do list, writing

State of the writing

Well, not much to report.  I've been down with heat wave.  The only cool room in the house is the living room and I no longer have a desk there.  Writing is hard when you don't have a way of balancing your laptop and type.  I have gotten some editing done on the sequel to Promise Kept, but so far haven't heard anything from my proof editor for Promise Kept.  Not sure what to think about for that.  Is a week too long or too short?

In other news, I'm currently learning how to use Tweet Deck, because I didn't have enough social media to troll through already.

Remembering "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Terri Long has a very educational post up right now about story structure.  One of the stories used as an example is "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman.  For those of you who may not have read it, the story is about a woman whose husband, John, is a physician.  The woman, whose name is never mentioned, appears to be having trouble with postpartum depression, and her husband, her caregiver, prescribes the rest cure, and tells her that if she isn't well by the end of the summer, she will be sent to another doctor who runs a sanitarium that specializes in a more extreme form of the rest cure.

For those who do not know, the rest cure was a bit of torture come up with by a man named Silas Weir Mitchell.  The idea was that women were not really having problems with their emotions — they were hysterical.  The most extreme form of the rest cure was to actually be restrained in a bed for two months, and the less extreme was to be confined to a room for some period of time.

Did the rest cure actually drive anyone insane?  In her essay on why she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman explains that she actually had one of these rest cures, and it did help, but the prescription given by the doctor when she left his care – stay close to home, give up all creative pursuits, and have only two hours of intellectual stimulation a day — had her looking over the edge three months after.  Having come to the end of her rope, Gilman took a friend's advice and began working again.

I'm sure part of the reason for men never suffering hysteria and being confined to a bed for months on end has something to do with sexism, but I think it also has to do with the perceptions we have about work.  A woman knitting is just knitting.  Most feminists and others still see this as some sort of backward step.  Why is she not creating something from literally nothing?

I think the same goes, sometimes, both ways for both genders.  Men who work with wood or in construction are often seen to be less than a man who wears a tie to work.  Sorry, but that carpenter is creating something — the same with farmers and just keep on listing.

But back to "The Yellow Wallpaper" — work is often the only thing that helps bring me out of my problems with depression.  For some reason, it also keeps the insomnia away as well.  Being stripped of the thing that gives you validation is not what those women needed, and Charlotte Gilman did an excellent job of pointing that out.

Everyone needs some sort of validation for the good work they do.

I wanted …

… to thank everyone who managed to get to my guest post over at Me Wants Food.  So far I haven't heard from the owners as to how much traffic they had, but three comments are pretty good as far as my blog is concerned.  I suppose eventually they will tell me if I did a good job or not.   Or maybe it isn't like that when you do a guest post.  I don't know, this is my first.

But anyway, just wanted to say thank you to everyone who went by .

State of the writing

I have completed going through Promise Kept.  It is currently wafting through the internet attached to an email to the lovely friend who is editing it for me.  Also, I have an idea for new cover art, and hopefully, someone in the family might draw it for me.

Now, time to work on something else until I hear back from my lovely editor.

BTW, tomorrow I have a guest blog at Me Wants Food about post apocalyptic literature, dystopias, and the people who love them.

Found an editor for Promise Kept

Yes, I've found an editor for Promise Kept.  A good friend of mine has agreed to give me the old friend discount, and so hopefully, I'll have another revision out very soon.  One that will fix most of the grammar problems and the problems with the ending.  There might even be new cover art in the works.  Let's hope this marks a change around for Promise Kept.

Tagged: promise kept

More Operation E-book Drop

Six more service members added to the Operation E-book Drop roll.  Got those emails sent out this morning.  If anyone is interested in contacting Edward Patterson about Operation E-book Drop, please click on the logo in the side bar to go to his face book page for OEBD.

Tagged: OEBD

Outcome of Blog Tour de Troops

So the final outcome is over 10K e-books given away, and 7 Kindles gifted to troops overseas!!!!!  What a wonderful Memorial Day weekend!!!!!!!!!!!