Nancy E. Shaffer's Blog, page 9
December 30, 2012
Resolutions
A lot of people don’t like doing New Years resolutions, and I don’t blame them. Each year of our lives has a particular flow, and the flow we are in in one year is different than the one we veer into in the next, and therefore the expectations we develop from one may not apply to the other at all. We can’t always control the way our lives flow.
But I think those of us privileged enough to have some semblance of control over at least part of our time ought to at least visualize how we’d like to...
November 3, 2012
The Plan
I am in the throes of NaNo-Envy, but I am still happy not to be doing NaNo. Yes, a contradiction, but I love the social energy this month brings in what is often such a solitary activity. OTOH, I am feeling under the weather, and I finished the first draft of my novel last Sunday, so… not great timing for me this year.
But I am in earnest planning mode on the second draft and the general outline for the trilogy of novels that is going to emerge from my first draft. I’ve actually been thinking...
October 28, 2012
I just finished the first draft of my novel
Woo-f***ing-hoo!!
But yes, alas, that means I am officially not doing NaNo this year, ’cause October has been my NaNoWriMo–a non-stop writing-and-editing spree that began each morning as soon as I woke up , stopped only so I could go to the stress-hell that has been work this month, and resumed the minute I got home until I collapsed in bed.
I think part of the reason I managed to whack out the rest of this story in one month is that work has been so sucky, writing distracted me from dwelling o...
September 29, 2012
NoNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month, AKA NaNoWriMo, gets a bad rap. I certainly used to knock it. What could you possibly accomplish in the attempt to pound out 50,000 words of new original fiction in one 30-day span, other than incoherent drivel?
I still sort of think if I attempted the above exactly as stated, that’s what I’d get. Of course, I’m a pantser, not given to overly pre-planning new writing before I start it, because the act of writing itself always transforms whatever I thought to write...
September 25, 2012
Review: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
I enjoyed this book. If the goal was to bring me back to reading, and to feed my writing with eloquent words, then this book succeeded.
Warning: spoilers below
I thought sometimes the writing was a little too eloquent. Unnecessarily flowery. This was especially distracting when the author was in the point of view of a character who wouldn’t possibly talk with the author’s grand eloquence, or know the things the author knows about neuroscience, or literature, or music.
I picked this book because...
September 18, 2012
The free-floating knot
The anxiety is back. The kind you feel in your arms and your legs and your gut but that never attaches itself to anything in particular in your thoughts. The kind that feels like the butterflies before you give a speech, the tension in your muscles when you know you absolutely have to do something unpleasant you’d rather avoid. Only, there may or may not be anything like that going on in your life at the moment. You feel the sensations anyway.
At first, I tried to stick to my regimen of herbal...
September 4, 2012
That reading thing
Lately, I have been pondering ways to do more pleasure reading. As a kid, I always had a book on hand. I devoured them by the gross. In the years since grad school, however, I have found myself reading a lot less, and I know that is effecting my writing.
Okay, stop: just the fact that I am thinking about this in terms of how it “effects my writing” tells me I am not really framing this as “reading for pleasure,” and that’s one problem right there. Reading has become a means to an end, an oblig...
August 29, 2012
Who am I on social media?
Yes, this is me, yipping about social media again. ‘Cause it’s on my mind. And an article I read today got me thinking about how difficult it is for me to compose website blurbs, blog entries, Twitter tweets, and Facebook feebs. At least when I’m posting as an Author.
It’s a philosophical thing, you know: the marketed person is not the real person. Ask any celebrity.
A friend recently commented that she preferred to follow writers on Twitter or Facebook if they came across as a “person,” and no...
August 27, 2012
The curse of social media
I have been a bit off the webosphere radar lately. And ironically, it’s because I’ve been busy organizing the various outlets I am using to increase my internet presence. Website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads…. You know, I know I’m not the first person to say this–it’s one of the blogging topics du jour–but the demands of social media to promote yourself as a writer (or artist, or any other creative type) interfere Big Time with the actual creative process.
Yesterday, my plan was to spen...
August 15, 2012
In defense of fan fiction
