Nancy E. Shaffer's Blog, page 8

Sit. Walk. Write: Natalie Goldberg’s “The True Secret of Writing”*

Changing Hands Bookstore

Tempe, Arizona

March 21, 2013

I have a confession to make: when non-Asian first-world people use Buddhist philosophy as a guiding framework for understanding some random part of life, it feels pretentious to me. I guess it’s because I’ve never vibed emotionally with that particular school of thought. Intellectually, I understand what someone describing their practice is saying, and there’s nothing that feels false or wrong-headed in it. It’s just not my soul’s “way.” So...

The kinks: stories and our emotional response to them

A friend and I were discussing some of the more “interesting” fannish speculation we’ve encountered while out and about on the interwebs for various reasons re: Once Upon A Time. We both agreed we have no plans to participate in general fandom again. It is a hairy quagmire of divergent points of view and divisive passions, and we have both been there, done that with the bruises to prove it. Best to stick to the discussions we can have with our immediate internet friends.

But that got me thinki...

Holy Yikes! Self-publishing and Tax Law

I published a book last year. I made some dough on it. Not a lot, but enough to generate two 1099-MISC forms from Amazon and Smashwords.

This week, I went to the TurboTax website to do my taxes. 1099-MISC with an amount in box 2, it told me, is either property rental income or business income. Plz to be proceeding to fill out a Schedule C.

I have a business?

So I start in on the schedule C. Business name, business address, business type code. This all seems rather silly. I write fiction from a c...

Know thy book

Now here is a lesson I need to take to heart:

http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2013/02/05/tell_me/

I think I spent more time during the writing of the first draft of my novel explaining what was going on to my beta reader verbally after the fact of her reading a chapter than I spent writing the chapter.

In my defense, I thought I was writing an entirely different kind of book than I was. I thought I was writing a book in which the true nature of one of the heroes, several of the villains (including...

31 Things

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to clear out Stuff I Don’t Need from my living space. To that end, I resolved to get rid of one thing (or set of things) every day this year.

So far, so good, although I suspect January is easy because there is more junk around at the beginning of such an exercise. One thing I noticed is I really didn’t hunt down one thing per day. I gathered multiple things on more motivated days and distributed them forward for the coming week or two. The result is the sa...

Once Upon A Time: On Henry

I got the first season of OUAT on DVD for Xmas and have been doing a rewatch. Simultaneously, I’ve been plotting the second draft of my novel using the hero’s journey as a rough template, so I had the concept of the Guide archetype in my head while watching.

Assuming Emma Swan is the Hero of OUAT, the first Guide she encounters, at least in season one, is her son, Henry. He has the “Once Upon A Time” book, and he is constantly interpreting events and people for Emma (also, for Mary-Margaret/Sn...

Writing update, week of… January so far

I suppose I didn’t have an actual recorded New Year’s resolution to report about my writing to the webosphere, but I nevertheless thought that might be something I’d do for accountability purposes, now that I don’t have a reader waiting for new material as I did in my first draft. Somehow, though, the first two weeks of January passed before it occurred to me to do so. It is now mid-January. Mid-January! How did *that* happen?

Well, at least it feels like mid-January ought to feel. Brrr.

So, o...

Writing goals 2013

The problem I’m having with setting a writing goal for the coming year is that there is no one task I do everyday when I’m writing. Not even putting words on a page. Which is why a daily word count goal is meaningless. Jeez, if my goal was word count alone, I could do that with a manuscript like that creepo was typing up in The Shining. Writing is also not (for me) a linear process of going from page one to page 341 (or whatever). I don’t write start to finish. Sometimes, the end has to come...

365 Things

One of my New Year’s resolutions is less a resolution than an experiment. I am going to try to rid myself of one object, thing, trinket, machine, doodad, tchotchke, whatever a day for the next year.

There are not many people who would accuse me of having a cluttered house–I don’t think it’s cluttered–and yet, I still wonder what it would *feel like* to live in a house that isn’t full of what are basically useless distractions. Junk you save thinking it will “have a use someday” that sits there...

Writing plan 2013

It’s Monday morning, December 31st, 2012. Do you know what your writing plan for 2013 is? I recently read an article by Dean Wesley Smith on the topic, and his take(s) on it were (1) clearly for full-time writers, and, also, (2) insane.

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=8367

But I am not here to be his poster girl for failure, making excuses why I can’t follow any of his suggested plans (words per hour? Seriously? How can anyone even have a ballpark figure of “how many new words they can write...