Tonya R. Moore's Blog: Tonya R. Moore, page 30
February 13, 2017
Getting Out of a Slump
From time to time, you find yourself down in the dumps and uninspired. At those times, you just can’t seem to summon the wherewithal to write.
Sound familiar?
Recently, I found myself in one such rut again but this time, I decided to brainstorm ways to overcome the mental blocks that were keeping me from writing. I took some time to consider my predicament and try to ascertain why I was blocked and what I could do to sort of shake some ideas loose, so to speak.
For one thing, I’ve been a bit stressed out lately. Due to some personal circumstances, I’ve been living outside of my comfort zone and possibly will be for a while. Although it’s not a bad situation, I do find that I’m frazzled and unable to focus on writing at times.
Still, the problem isn’t so simple as needing to find ways to relax and unwind.
For writers, articulating ideas is highly dependent on our ability to affect an individual’s senses and perception with nothing more than words. To do so, we need to be in touch with our own senses and able to translate our impressions of the world around us into the written word.
I think that for most writers, especially in the speculative fiction genres, we become so caught up in the cerebral aspect of creating fantasy worlds that it becomes easy to forget the basics of story-telling. This is perhaps where a good eighty percent of my problem lies.
It became clear to me that what I really needed to do was get back in touch with those senses and revisiting some of the basics of creative writing.
Here are a couple of exercises that are helping me to rediscover the fun in writing:
Observe and Report
Describe in detail, someone you encounter today. Describe that person’s appearance, mannerisms and explain what makes that person memorable or forgettable. Be succinct or be verbose. Try this a few times and see what develops.
Who knows? You might enjoy it so much that one day, you’ll find yourself hunched over in a corner of the local coffee shop, notebook in hand and hiding behind sunglasses as you observe and describe complete strangers.
Sense Memory
At the end of your day, think back to the most memorable sensations you felt today. List then explain them. Was one of them something you tasted? Was one something you touched? Which sound is currently still going round and round in your head? What visions do the memory of those things bring to life in your head?
When you stepped out of your house for the first time today, what were the first five things that entered your awareness? What did they make you feel or recall?
As you can guess, these are very simple and potentially boring exercises.
What you might find, though, is that over time, a clever turn of phrase at an inspired moment sneaks its way in and before you know it, you might find yourself breathing life into a new and remarkable piece of work.
Do these seem like exercises you might want to try?
What works for you when you’re trying to get out of a rut?
February 8, 2017
Sea Witch Song Cover Redesign
Sometimes, you come across an image and it just grabs you and speaks to you. It’s abstract but compared to the previous cover of Sea Witch Song, the abstract underwater background more profoundly conveys the general mood of the story… or so I’d like to think.
Sea Witch Song is the horror novelette that I wrote during NaNoWriMo last year.
Premise
[image error]Uma Brown grapples with grief and communes with the hoary beast that killed her lover.
Tarah Jackson died at sea. At Tarah’s wake, a drunken fisherman claims that Tarah was killed by a monster from the deep.
Late that night, while the fishermen who witnessed Tarah’s death drink and wrestle with memories of the monstrous encounter about which they dare not speak, Tarah’s grieving lover, Uma takes a bottle of rum and her fiddle to the sea.
There, Uma plays a song raw with grief. She lets the tears fall free. She drinks from the bottle, cries out to the heavens, and curses the sea. Along comes a monster from the deep.
Sea Witch Song is currently available for download:
SCIFI Women Interviews
In November 2016, I was interviewed as a part of Natacha Guyot’s #SCIFI Women Interview series.
February 4, 2017
Editorial Calendars for Cheapskates
If you try to blog on a schedule, you tend to learn quickly that you won’t get very far without a bit of planning and organization. This is where an editorial calendar comes into play. An effective editorial calendar not only allows you to plan posts weeks, even months ahead of time, it also helps to keep you on task. When using an editorial calendar, I’ve found that I’m more likely to publish new blog posts with greater frequency and consistency.
When using an editorial calendar, I’ve found that I’m more likely to publish new blog posts with greater frequency and consistency.
Back when I first had a self-hosted WordPress website, I simply used the Editorial Calendar plugin. At the time, it suited my needs since I was only updating my blog sporadically. Then that I had a WordPress-hosted website and that Editorial Calendar plugin was no longer available to me (WP’s woeful lack of useful plugins caused me to switch back to self-hosted).
Since I decided to blog on a schedule and with greater frequency, I figured I needed something a bit more robust to use as an editorial calendar.
Naturally, I instantly gravitated toward the ever so amazing Co-Schedule, which truly is the ideal editorial calendar. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but balk at the price. The lowest tier of a Co-Schedule subscription is $30/month, if you pay for an entire year up front. The thing is, from what I’ve seen, the application is worth the price tag but it’s clearly meant for professional bloggers. I simply can’t justify spending that much on an editorial calendar, superb as it may be, for my blog.
The search for less costly alternatives yielded several solutions that offered the functionality that I was looking for:
The ability to have items in both list and calendar views, as well as scheduling recurring items
I needed to be able to easily access and manage it using my phone.
Creative Editorial Calendar Solutions
It would have been easy enough to find or create something that I could handwrite entries in but I was pretty much stuck on the idea of a digital solution. I simple search lead me to applications that I had come across before but perhaps had not thought to use for this particular purpose until now.
Project Management Applications
Freedcamp, Zoho, and Wrike are some examples of free project management applications that can be used as editorial calendars. Having tried Zoho and Freedcamp and finding Freedcamp more suited to my needs, I think project management applications are well suited as editorial calendars. I used Freedcamp for a while and was generally happy with it but it only has an Apple app and I’m an Android user. For that reason only, I decided to continue my search for something that would work as an editorial calendar.
Remember the Milk and Google Calendar
Right around the time I decided to stop using Freedcamp, I remembered that I have a Remember the Milk account that I kept meaning to make better use of plus I already use Google Calendar. All I needed to do was create a Blog Posts list in Remember the Milk then use the calendar feed for that list to create a Google calendar, which I simply renamed Editorial Calendar. This simple solution has made my blogging life a lot easier and while I do have a Remember the Milk Pro Account, it didn’t have to cost me a thing.
If you can’t be bothered with the minor hassle of using a to-do list in conjunction with a calendar, you can always check out Hubspot’s article How to Create an Editorial Calendar using Google Calendar.
Some sites also offer up free Editorial Calendar templates as an incentive for joining their mailings lists, etc.
Whichever option you choose, an Editorial Calendar is quite the handy tool for a blogger.
Do you use some Editorial Calendar solution not mentioned in this post?
Please share it in the comments below.
January 27, 2017
The Shapeshifter’s Story
How a Pantser Learned to Plot
January 26, 2017
Is Firecracker Really Godpunk?
My First Stab at Horror
Blood Magic and Mayhem
January 21, 2017
2017 Blog Schedule
Tonya R. Moore
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