Loni Townsend's Blog, page 18

2016 – It Ain’t Over Yet

Every year, I get letters from friends giving their year in review. I ogle at the pictures and how organized they must be to achieve such feats, while I haven’t been able to get even a Christmas card in the mail for …well… forever. That’s not going to change, but I figured I might as well reflect on 2016.

The Great Stuff:

* My husband got a new job

* MY husband and I celebrated 10 years of marriage by buying Legos and going to an arcade like responsible adults

* My husband talked me into playing WoW again

* My husband now has a computer that no longer shuts down at random

* My daughter and I had fun with a dress-up photo shoot

* My daughter progressed to the highest belt in Little Ninjas

* My daughter (crookedly) cut her own bangs

* My daughter earned 2 awards at school

* My son started preschool

* My son got to ride an elephant

* My son is now potty-trained

* I jumped out of an airplane

* I ran a 5K event with my sis-in-law

* I painted a painting

* I started teaching myself how to digitally paint

* I revamped the cover to This World Bites

* I talked on a writing panel

* I finished 3 short stories (1 was accepted, 1 I’m waiting to hear back on, 1 will be the prologue to book 4)

* I figured out a name for my companion novel

* I dyed my hair purple

* I dyed my hair green

* I improved my art skills

* I took some photos

The Not-So-Great Stuff:

* I got rear-ended and it totaled my car (but hey, I’ve got a shiny new all-electric car now and have saved as much in gas as I spent on the car)

* My husband had a health scare that escalated to an emergency room stay. Thankfully, what started that has been proven benign.

* I did something wrong with my breathing that it now hurts my head to do push-ups, which hasn’t helped my overall fat-loss goals

* My kids and husband have been sick a lot this year

* My husband discovered he has sesamoids in his feet that are easily aggravated leading him to painfully limp around on occasion

* I don’t want any more kids, but my body keeps rejecting my preferred method of preventing that outcome

* I didn’t write nearly as much as I wanted to

It’s been quite the year.

Since I have been rather art focused these past few weeks, I wanted to share some of my art from over the year that I’m fond of. Some aren’t so great, but most of it is self-taught so I don’t feel too bad. The first two are digital painting, the next is a chibi/bobble-head version of my two main characters, and the last four are sketches I did on paper, took a picture of with my phone, and enhanced in an app called Snapseed.

What does your 2016 look like? What were some great stuff that happened for you?

The post 2016 – It Ain’t Over Yet appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

Falling Behind #IWSG

November wasn’t great for me. I failed NaNoWriMo, barely surpassing the 16K mark. My kids and husband got sick, twice, and I had my own medical stuff to deal with. On the plus side, I did manage to potty train my son, so no more pull-ups for this squirrel. Thank goodness. I’d much rather deal with the occasional accident at night. All-in-all, I survived, but I spent most of the month grumpy.

But all the excuses in the world won’t refute the fact that I’m falling behind. I wanted to have Murder Most Fowl finished and out this year. That’s not going to happen. I wanted to finish Isto and get that out next year. That’s not looking good. It wouldn’t be so hard if I could write while distractions clamored about me. If I could write while my children demand my attention, while the project manager calls me in the middle of my lunch, while my husband relays the events of his workday. But that would cheat both sides. I wouldn’t be dedicating my focus to what I should be doing, and my writing would reflect my distraction.

So when it comes to the IWSG question of the month:

In terms of your writing career, where do you see yourself five years from now, and what’s your plan to get there?

The answer is right smack where I am presently. I doubt I’ll ever have a career in writing anything but code, and honestly, I’m okay with that. I enjoy being a programmer. But in five years, I should at least have another two books done. Maybe 4 if I’m lucky.

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group



You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

The post Falling Behind #IWSG appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

Why I Like yWriter

I had intended to post this last week, but illness struck the Town’s End (again), and I completely spaced blogging while I instead cared for my kiddos. My friend Angela had asked our local Treasure Valley NaNo Facebook group if anyone used yWriter or something similar and what their thoughts were about it. I quickly piped up that I loved it and used it for my big books. Others chimed in how much they liked Scrivener.

But that little “Thoughts?” part ending her inquiry made it hard for me to leave it at that. I’m a verbose person. I like explaining and sharing knowledge. So, I wrote up the following for her. She requested I post it to a more shareable platform, aka my blog. Here it is for all of you!

Why I like yWriter (with pictures)

(Click the pictures to view larger versions.)

I use yWriter for my larger projects because of the way I write: I have multiple points of views and I write scenes as I visualize them.

First off, I can define my POVs (along with other of my numerous characters):

I mark my POVs as major (thus they appear darker) and the other characters I’ve defined as minor.

Since my natural method of writing is to write whatever I have in my brain, I just create a new scene, set the POV character, give a one-liner of what the scene’s about, drag to where I think I want it, and go. This is a glimpse of my current project to give you an idea:

It gives me a word count for each scene and whose POV it is. I try to keep consistent chapter word counts, so this helps when I start figuring out how to group them together.

Phase 1, I just do it by putting it in the scene name:

Phase two, I start breaking them into their own chapters. For instance, here is a view of Thanmir War:

The drag and drop ability to move scenes around is what got me the most. I might be writing a scene and decide to throw something in, and realize it might fit better in one spot than the other, or just dragging and dropping scenes from one chapter to another, yWriter makes that easy.

I’m also a curious, analytic type. I can run a report to find out word count per character.

I’m also a person who writes a lot, and then tosses it out. I can toggle a scene or even a chapter as unused. For instance, I’ve got one chapter in Thanmir War that I’ve marked as unused, with a bunch of scenes that I wrote that I never used in the book:

This way, I don’t lose any of my writing even though I’m not going to use it.

Reading might feel like a bit of a pain because you’ve only got one scene per window and it’s not continuous:

You can click Next to move on to the next one, but you also have the option to export the entire project to RTF (which opens in Word, if you’d like) or just a single chapter. When you export the project as RTF, it puts the title of each chapter at the top of a new page, inserting nice page breaks and what not.

You can also go to ebook or HTML, both of which I’ve used for releasing my final product to Kindle.

You can also split a scene, if you decide it really should be multiple. I’ve also imported an entire document and then split it into the scenes using that functionality.

There are other tools within yWriter that are available, I just don’t use them. I don’t track settings (like the place the characters are at), I don’t track items (weapons and such), I don’t set daily writing targets, I don’t plan or structure my story in advance.

Flaws I’ve noticed:

* Ctrl + Z doesn’t always undo to the point you think it should. (But I’ve had this occur in Notepad so I’m inclined to believe it’s more of a Windows problem than a yWriter problem.)

* Dragging scenes from the bottom of a long list toward the top sometimes makes the window scroll weird. I usually have to drag to the top of my screen, drop, scroll, then drag again. If creating a new scene, it’s much easier to open the scene just before or after it and choose to create a new one from there.

* There isn’t an app for that

When don’t I use yWriter?

If I’m writing a short story, I’ll typically do it in Google Docs just because it autosaves as I type and I’m confident it’ll pick up where I left off if I have to suddenly close my browser. For longer pieces but single POV, like the Cera Chronicles, I’ll use Word because I think and write linear with those stories. I don’t have an overall plan for how the story will go, so I’m just pansting it with a semi-reasonable series of events. There is nothing in those stories that inspire me to write out of order, so I just write. Word is aesthetically pleasing for me when I’m writing, but I’m not sure that matters. Google Docs also allows for Word Editing, so I can go through it on my phone.

Not being able to read/edit my big books on my phone is a frustration*. I would love to be able to pull it up and read it in a continuous layout and make edits in yWriter, but I can’t do that unless I plan ahead and export the project. yWriter isn’t a web-based tool, so it doesn’t store stuff in the cloud. To get around that, I use a number of cloud syncing services. For my big books, I use SpiderOak. I install SpiderOak and yWriter on all the computers I write on (three at the moment). It’s got a 2GB storage limit, and all my yWriter projects total 731MB:

This gives me access to my writing on whatever computer I’m working on. This is good, considering how many USB drives I’ve destroyed. It just doesn’t help me on my phone because the SpiderOak app only allows me to read the files, and it doesn’t open the .yw# files. I can dig into the RTFs since yWriter stores each scene as an RTF, but the naming convention doesn’t tell you much about what’s on the inside:

Since I do like to pull up my Cera Chronicles on my phone, I store those in Google Drive for ease of access in Google Docs.

So there you have it! I went with yWriter over Scrivener because A) I am cheap and B) when I demoed Scrivener (5 years ago), I couldn’t find a way to indicate POV, which was a really big deal for me. After I found yWriter and it did exactly what I wanted, I felt no need to look elsewhere.

Download yWriter here. (No one paid me for this review. I just like spreading helpful knowledge and sharing useful tools.)

*As a programmer myself, I know the limitations of trying to build an app for different platforms, so I have no expectations that there will be one in the future. Also, with the capabilities of yWriter, trying to tailor it to a touch-only environment would be difficult, and I’d dig in my heels if it were suggested to me. But a squirrel can dream. I think I’ll just wait for technology to advance to the point where I can pull up any application on my mobile device and display it in interactive holographic form right in front of me.

Do you use any special software for your writing? Have you used yWriter before? What are your thoughts about the pros and cons?

The post Why I Like yWriter appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

Pictures and Progress

I’m in a better mental state this week. The kids are doing better, my husband is no longer on antibiotics, and my projects at work are back on track. The parental stress is still running high, but medically, I’m fine.

I’ve also gotten more words in. Yay!

Granted, I’m still 16K behind, but I made it past my block of “this character has nothing to do.” How did I get past it? I killed a bunch of people! It spawned an investigation, which escalated to her theorizing as to why the monster didn’t kill her last time, which led to her encountering invaders on their borders. Things are rolling along.

Of course, writing with children around is difficult, thus why my word count is low. But I have mastered the art of sketching while playing with my son. He’ll drive cars up my legs and over my knees, while I make sound effects and draw pictures. Am I a bad parent for doing that? Yeah, perhaps. I should be more invested in playing pretend and crashing cars into each other. Instead I’ve got the characters in my brain seeping out through my fingers.

First is Cameron. He is usually a clean-shaven guy, but there’s something about a five o’clock shadow that I like on him. He gets pretty scruffy in Isto because he’s out in the wild, and he ends up with a full beard at one point. It’s not until he reaches the Halqua palace that he gets a shave and a haircut, and his best friend says, “Ah, there you are.”

Next is Derek. This is the guy who spawned the whole writing deal. He’s the core piece to the entire story, and the maker of his own mess. But gosh darn it, I do love him. All he wants to do is live a peaceful life with the woman of his dreams and make lots and lots and lots of babies. Is that too much to ask? Of course it is! In Isto, he must leave to find a cause and cure to an illness before it kills his adopted daughter, while battling his own ailments that could result in destroying the world. No pressure. Oh, and he can’t grow facial hair beyond his eyebrows.

I’ve found I can’t draw the same face twice, so I’m practicing getting a consistent look throughout my sketches. These two are the closest I’ve come to matching the vision in my brain.

Do you have a strong visualization of your characters? If you’re unable to write, do your characters or story come out in a different way? Do you ever kill off a bunch of fictitious people just to get from one place to another?

The post Pictures and Progress appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

Just a Little Squirrelly

It’s been a crazy time at the Town’s End. Both kiddos ended up with fevers, my husband has been sick, and I had a medical detour that resulted in me bawling at the table while shoveling cheesecake and gummy bears into my mouth. Don’t worry, I’m fine. I just love cheesecake. And gummy bears.

Health stuff aside, NaNoWriMo hasn’t been going great. I’m at 2K right now, and I’m supposed to be up over 13. What’s the problem? Glad you asked.

I’ve been trying to play catch-up with my character LaTonya. I know her pretty well. She’s a feminist who wants nothing more than to destroy the monster that killed her guardians. Her goal is to protect Naomi, the last guardian and likely next target of the monster, while dealing with a misogynistic foreigner who seems to be hunting the same creature. The problem is, there isn’t much for her to do. She is pretty much stalking Naomi and butting heads with this overly cheerful guy who has a horse following him everywhere. She gets to deal with broken guardians, missing leaders, attacking monsters that eat her power, and transporting people where they need to go, but writing her point of view… well, she’s really nothing more than a powerful babysitter.

That’s pretty darn boring.

She’s relevant because she’s part of the team that takes out the monsters in the end. Her sword becomes the instrument of her revenge and a cage for an immortal monster that would otherwise continue to be a threat. She saves the hero and learns how to cope and continue on without her life-long companions. But what the heck is she supposed to do until then? While the other characters are trying to cure people, keep the world from imploding, fix the imbalance of power, cope with becoming a monster, and figure out new powers while accidentally ripping apart deities, she’s just kind of hanging out.

I don’t know if I can handle anymore subplots. I’ve got too many as it is. But I need something for her to do. She’s supposed to be the character who introduces the reader to the new races invading their land. That’s great, except I don’t have a clear path ahead of me. So we’ll see if I’m tossing out another 50K after November is over because I pantsed a bunch of words that just won’t work in the long run.

I know I missed IWSG last week. I was under anesthesia, and I didn’t think I’d be coherent enough to visit blogs. Sorry. But if you didn’t see last Friday’s post, be sure to check out Aldrea Alien’s rerelease of Dark One’s Mistress. It’s worth the read.

Have you ever had a character who seems to do nothing? How did you get past it? Are you doing NaNoWriMo?

The post Just a Little Squirrelly appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

Dark One’s Mistress Blog Tour

When I heard Aldrea Alien was rereleasing her book, Dark One’s Mistress, I got super excited. Clara’s a fun character to read about and Aldrea has a great way of twisting the heart strings. Now it’s my great pleasure to present that book to all of you!

Here’s a bit about it:

For centuries, the people have lived under the protection of their so-called Dark Lord. Now, with news of his death reaching the quiet village of Everdark, rumour whispers that his son, Lucias, is hunting for a mistress to beget him an heir.

Clara doesn’t put much stock in village gossip, until she finds herself forcibly taken to the Lord’s fortress. Escape is not easy. She has no way out and, against a man with magic, little chance of fighting back. But the Lords are still men and the death of Lucias’ father is proof that they die just the same. And yet, if Lucias dies heirless, his army will be free to terrorise the land.

Such is the goal of Lenora of Ne’ermore, an old enemy and ex-prisoner of the kingdom. She is sending a man to slaughter Lucias and, to ensure there’s no chance of an heir, his mistress must die as well.

Caught between regaining her freedom or losing it for the good of the kingdom, Clara struggles to decide her path before certain death breaches the gates.

Egads, I do enjoy Aldrea’s stories. She’s an amazing author with some incredible tales. If you haven’t dived into her writing yet, this is a great place to start. I’m not scheduled for a review for this blog tour, but I’m throwing it out there.

This earned 5 stars from me. Clara is spunky. She’s not a push-over damsel in distress. She works hard to try to free herself. I’ve got to admire that in the girl. And then she goes and acts selflessly. And the sweet romance just makes the heart pitter-patter. I’m looking forward to the next book in the trilogy, and you can bet your buttons I’ll be picking it up and reading it as soon as I’m able to.

You can pick it up on Amazon US or Amazon UK, but definitely add it to your Goodreads TBR pile.

About Aldrea…

Mother. Animal lover. Vampire. Fangirl.

Aldrea Alien is a New Zealand author of romantic speculative fiction of varying heat levels.

She grew up on a small farm out the back blocks of a place known as Wainuiomata alongside a menagerie of animals, who are all convinced they’re just as human as the next person (especially the cats). She spent a great deal of her childhood riding horses, whilst the rest of her time was consumed with reading every fantasy book she could get her hands on and concocting ideas about a little planet known as Thardrandia. This would prove to be the start of The Rogue King Saga as, come her twelfth year, she discovered there was a book inside her.

Aldrea now lives in Upper Hutt, on yet another small farm with a less hectic, but still egotistical, group of animals (cats will be cats). She still hasn’t yet found an off switch to give her an ounce of peace from the characters plaguing her mind, a list that grows bigger every year with all of them clamouring for her to tell their story first. It’s a lot of people for one head.

Find her here:

Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook

Don’t Forget the Giveaway!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This tour was brought together by the hard-working people at YA Bound Book Tours.

Do you like spunky story heroines? Have you read this book yet? Why not?

The post Dark One’s Mistress Blog Tour appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

For The Love Of Words #AmWriting

I love words, especially the creative, expressive ones. You’ll find them littered throughout my stories, contributing to my voice and style.

Is that a good thing?

There’s advice to use precise verbs in place of verb + adverb. I tend to lean that direction. Then there’s the advice to use simple words, words everyone will understand. It brought Olga Godim’s IWSG post from June to mind.

When I picked up a new online critique partner, I realized just how much of my everyday vocabulary isn’t common. She’s not a native English speaker, so I saw this as an excellent opportunity to see which of my words might give people pause. Sure, there are the colloquialisms of egads, woot, and criminy. But I was surprised by other words such as scampered, scurried, and prodded.

Will I change these words? Probably not. As a young teen, Piers Anthony inspired me to learn all the wrong words with his character the Demoness Metria. But I’ve been mulling over how much of my vocabulary I take for granted, and it’s an interesting observation.

Have you ever worked with a non-native English speaker with your writing? Do you tend to use common words or more expressive ones? What are some of the words you’ve encountered that were unfamiliar to you?

The post For The Love Of Words #AmWriting appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

Of All The Fowl Luck #AmWriting

I made it through my panel!

Before going, I’d debated what I wanted to wear. I could wear a skirt and blouse, but would that really be true to my style? Yes, that’s what I wear 5 days out of the week to work, but the air of a programmer is a bit different from the air of a fantasy novelist whose bio confesses to be a squirrel. (It’s true, btw.)

So, I donned my Shark Unstealthiest Ninja shirt, pulled on my skinny jeans, and grabbed a zip-up hoodie–my typical book-event attire.

Needless to say, I didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the panel. They were cool, practiced professionals, as to be expected from organizations like the Idaho Writers Guild, The Cabin, Rediscovered Books, and the Boise Public Library. But the rep from the IWG said I was merely representing my genre.

Opening My Big Mouth #IWSG

Indie Author Day is coming up this Saturday. When J.C. Jackson mentioned it, I got stoked and contacted the main Boise library to see how I could participate. There’s going to be panels, book selling, signing, reading…I had several options to choose from.

In my email exchange, I happened to mention the only topic I could speak on with any confidence was starting and running a successful local critique group.

Guess who’s on the panel for local resources now?

I’m not scared of talking in front of people. I was in drama some 16 years ago. Plus, I’m a ham and adore attention. (I have bright green hair and have no issue heading to the supermarket decked out in full steampunk attire.)

What I’m terribly insecure about right now, is forgetting what it is I plan to say. I’m to deliver 10 minutes worth of content about local critique groups. TEN MINUTES! I jotted down some stuff and it took me 2 1/2 to run through it all. Egads. Plus I’m trying to memorize it so I’m not reading directly from notecards or a sheet of paper. Back in high school, I had months to prepare.

Now? I have until Saturday morning.

Wish me luck!

I’ll be up on the panel discussion from 10:30 – 11:30. I encourage you to view the schedule of events and pop by if you’re in the Boise area.

IWSG Question of the month: When do you know your story is ready?

If I answer that question in the context of the last short story I wrote, I knew it was ready when my husband smiled and said nothing else bugged him about it. My husband is a critical guy. In fact, when I first started writing, he refused to read any of my work because he didn’t want to make me feel bad. So having him sign off on my short story was the thumbs up that it was good to go.

He must have been right. I got an acceptance email yesterday. ^_^

Do you have any suggestions for public speaking? Have you ever been on a discussion panel? Will I see you at the Library on Saturday? Do you have any critical readers in your life?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group



You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

The post Opening My Big Mouth #IWSG appeared first on Squirrel Talk.

Racing Like A Rabid Squirrel

As you might’ve guessed by my previous posts, it’s been a month of doing stuff. Since I’ve already regaled you of my leap from an airplane, I won’t rehash that. But hey, look! I’ve got pictures! Hopefully they don’t make anyone sick.

I mentioned running a 5K. The Ultimate Wine Run was set in a scenic local vineyard (actually the same vineyard my best friend got married in). Thankfully, the day wasn’t too hot. My sis-in-law and I finished in 35 minutes. No, not a great time for anything competitive, but we hadn’t practiced on unpaved roads or uphill, so it wasn’t too shabby for us. We’ve since added running in a nearby national reserve to help prepare for future events.

My best friend and I took Friday night off from the kids to zen out with Paint Nite. The artist within me had qualms with the results of my painting, but the mantra they made us repeat before starting said we weren’t allowed to be critical of our work. So here I am, not complaining that the reflection of the rocks wavers with the water, but the bamboo doesn’t…

Ahem.

Meanwhile, in family life, my son started preschool. Yay! Except for the fact that the bus didn’t pick him up the last two days. Nothing like begging your boss to take off from work early two days in a row just so your son doesn’t miss his first days at school. Oy. But on an up note, I managed to get a haircut, refresh my hair color, and write 1,000 words on Murder Most Fowl. Still, someday, I hope to use my vacation time for actual vacation.

Speaking of Cera (the main character of MMF), I’ve added a song to her playlist. Granted, it doesn’t apply to MMF or any of the Cera Chronicles because I’d place it before the series starts. It encapsulates the rough and disorienting start of her journey (having everything she thought she was supposed to be crumble before her) to the transition to her embracing life on the “road” and building her confidence. My friend Dani doesn’t like the sound, but I love the unique style.

Take It From Me by KONGOS. (Note, some might consider a couple of the outfits in the video risque, in case that bothers anyone.)

Also on the writing front, I finished and submitted a short story to an anthology. Now I’m crossing my fingers to see if it’ll be accepted. My spirits were bolstered by the fact my husband read this story (first thing of mine he’s actually read), and he liked it! But even if it doesn’t make the cut, a friend said it would be a good fit in one of her future compilations.

That’s a rundown of most of what I’ve done lately. I’ve got other events coming up, such as Indie Author Day (brought to my attention by the wonderful Jei Jackson) in October where I might speak on a panel about getting feedback and starting a critique group. Then there’s Whiskey and Words coming up in November where I get to team up with Troy Lambert, Sherry Briscoe, and Renee Settle to hopefully bring people an enjoyably unique night.

Despite everything going on, I think I’ve finally gotten my feet beneath me and I’m ready to go blog-visiting once again. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to catching up!

Have you had much going on in your life lately? Have you ever tried painting in a social setting? Do you enjoy running? Got any writing projects going on?

The post Racing Like A Rabid Squirrel appeared first on Squirrel Talk.