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Birds and Roses: My cure for writer’s block

My writing goal is to write between 1,000 to 2,000 words per day. My average per day, is much less… more like 400 – 700 per day, once every three days instead of every day. Well, it’s better than nothing, and I’m still inching my way to my goal.

My problem seems to lie in that I get the urge to write at times when I just can’t write, but than at the time I set aside to write, I’m to bored or restless or want to read or whatever… anything that is not writing basicly.

I’ll be right in the middle of something, say walking my dog, or cleaning the catbox, when this great idea well pop into my head, with not a pen or paper in sight. Than an hour or two later, I’ll finally get to some paper, and I find I can’t think of what I wanted to write down, or else I can’t get it worded right, or worse I’ve forgotten it all together!

I write amazing outlines. You should see the detailed historical timelines I can come up with for my story ideas… than I sit down, my outline in hand, ready to type the story itself and nothing. I’ll just sit staring at a blank screen wondering what to write about.

Than I’ll start typeing away, got a 1,000 words before I know it… WOO-HOO! I’m done for the day! Than I read what I wrote. Not one word of it goes with the book I’m working on; instead it goes with some book idea I gave up on 4 or 5 years ago.

sheesh! Now I have to start all over again, cause those 1,000 words didn’t count!

I find myself doing this all the time… the result is I end up working on 4 maybe 5 stories at any one given time, and never finish them on deadline.

The up side: When I do get finshed, I have 4 or 5 stories finished at the same time.

I’ve got a flower garden… with tall rose bushes over 13 feet tall. There’s one on each side of the path, and they grew up entwining to make a natural archway. Little songbirds sing and twitter all day long. It’s so peaceful and relaxing. There’s these old mossy logs, I sit on to do my writing. I find that if I’m stuck on my typeing on the computer, that the best way for me to get back on focus is to pack up a few pens and a lot of paper and head out and sit in the garden. By the time it’s dark I’ll have 30 or 40 pages written and I get to stay up all night typeing them into the computer. For me that is the best cure for “writer’s block”. I can’t explain it, but I do my best writing and my highest word count writing when sitting in the garden, listen to song birds and writing in longhand.

~~EK

See more progress on: write and publish a book

Twighlight Manor Research: Two Heads

Those who know my Twighlight Manor series,  know that it’s prime villain, The Red Dragon (as he calls himself) is a man with 2 faces and 4 arms; a conjoined twins born during the 1600′s and treated like animals, who as adults became the mass murder (s) behind the bloodbath that took place within the walls of The Manor, forever marking it as a cuesed house. While the series’ most notorious and bloody villain, I do not use him very often in my stories. I am currently working on editing “Love, Lust, Madness” , and (spoiler) The Red Dragon has resurfaced in this story, after not being used in a Twighlight Manor story, since Sir Roderic’s “accident” in 1984.

Well, seeing how I’ll being useing the Red Dragon once again, after so long of not writing about him, I decided to do some research into his “deformity”  in hopes of learning possibly why he was born as he was, and to thus better write about him. Well, in 1984 I had not the internet, so I was very limited in my research about his birth. In the end I was only able to find referances to this type of birth happening twice, both in Russia, and both in the early 1900′s, and this info came to me from Guiness World Records. Now I have the internet and just seconds into my search I cam across info about Abigail and Brittany Hensel. OMG! I have never seen real pictures of anyone like this before! When I created the Red Dragon, I had no idea that it was even possible that anyone could be born like this! I don’t know why, but seeing these girls, just changed my way of thinking about The Red Dragon. I have had a hard time writing him into my stories, becaused his deforminty seemed so unplusible. I think I may start useing him more often

~~EK

Why Do You Blog?

 Why do you blog? That is a very good question. I’m glad you asked, cause it makes me stop and evaluate myself. I like doing that. Now I have to stop and think. Why do I blog? Okay, let’s see.

I think it’s a “multi-task” reason. First off, I started blogging because I just wanted to have a place where I could talk about any subject that popped into my head. At the time I had just started building websites, and I found out than how longwinded I could get. No, that’s not true…. I already knew how longwinded I was. I’ve have pen-pals since the 1980’s, more than 70 of them from all over the world. My average letter to each person was 20 pages long and I wrote on both sides for a total of 40 written pages. I wrote a letter a day, on top of my fiction/book writing. I was a teenager in the 1980’s and I was writing to other teenagers. Sadly, one by one, my pen-pals grew up, got married, had kids, and eventually we all stopped writing to each other. I went from writing to 70 people to writing to 2 people. I started feeling very lonely. I transfred from pen snail mail to email in 1997. By 2004 blogging was becoming the “in thing” so I tried it out as well, and it quickly took the place of my pen-pal writing.

So, I guess you could say, blogging was my way of communicating to people worldwide, when pen-paling went out of fashion. Like when I was pen-palling though, I keep my blogging and my book/fiction writing separate. I do not think of them as the same things. One I do because I’m obsessively compelled to write about the characters that are in my head, I have to get them out on paper, otherwise I’d never be able to do anything else; I have never felt that I had control over my books, but that the characters themselves take over.

The other (blogging) I do, because I am driven by the desire to just talk about whatever topic I may want to talk about. As those who have today, meet me face-to face know, my actual ability to speak is rather limited due to the fact I grew up in a family where speaking was almost forbidden, and topics one could talk about were limited to The Bible or the Book of Mormon and pretty much nothing else. The result was I rebelled against them by writing to people outside the confines of our family: pen-pals and later blogging.

Last year when I got my job at Macy’s I was faced with something I had never anticipated: the telephone. This is not a thing that I had used more than a couple of times in my entire life. The first few times it rang, I did not answer and my boss was quite upset with me. I had not realized that I was supposed to answer, she had not told me that use of a phone was to be part of my job, and when I did answer it, I found it very difficult to use, never having used one before. This causde me to be chided by the other girls who I worked with, girls 10 to 15 years younger than me, girls who asked, how can you have never used a phone before? Girls who found reason to force me to speak as a result. My answer was quite simple, I have never needed to use a phone before, I don’t talk, I write. At work they questioned my working and never taking a break to talk with either costumer or worker. My answer again, was the same. I do not talk, I write, I was there to do my job, not talk, I had no reason to talk and saw it as a waste of time that distracted from my work. My job at Macy’s was my first real face-to-face contact with people outside of family or my family’s church, I had not realized how much people talk. Nor had I realized that getting a job would involve the act of talking or phoning. When I want to talk to some one I write them a letter, that is what I have always done. Now with the online world, people no longer answer my letters, they respond only to tell me their phone number or email adress, neither phone nor email I use, and so instead I write a new post on one of my 12 blogs. For me blogging is a form of communication, that takes the place of talking, talking being a thing which I don’t really like to do, simply because I’m not used to doing it. Blogging is, for me, what I suppose you would call “talking”, which is why I do not consider blogers to be writers..

And there in lay the difference I find between blogging and writing. Writing is something that I do to write books, as I have been doing since 1978. Writing is the creation of stories, while blogging is just me talking to you. That’s why I blog, to “talk“ not to write.

My other reason to blog, is to teach people what I know about writing. Writing takes up 90% of my time. I spend about 8 hours a day asleep, 2 or 3 hours a day taking care of the animals, and the rest of those 13 hours I spend writing, either on paper for my books or online for my blogs. I have been doing this for 27 years now. My life evolves around writing, the result of my writing so much, so often, is that I’m often asked for my advice about writing, thus how my blog turned into a blog devoted to helping other to become writers and why most of the posts on my blog are devoted to teaching others how to write.

That is why I blog.

~~EK

Conventional Advice that Didn’t Work for Her (or Me Either!)…

Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”.  After reading her article, I have to say that basicly, she has said pretty much what I would have said, and what I do say, whenever someone asks me.

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

1) Write every day.

This piece of advice is repeated in almost every book on “how to write.” Maybe some people need this sort of discipline, but I would find it counterproductive. Sometimes I write feverishly every day. Sometimes real life intervenes. I have a demanding job and a family. If I believed I had to write every day, even when I absolutely had no time, I’d quickly grow to hate writing and I’d stop doing it. Mostly, I have more ideas than I have time to process, so “forcing myself to write” is not a problem. And during those periods when “real life” heats up and I can’t write, I don’t feel any guilt. Why should I? Writing isn’t a religious penance or a health routine. It’s something I enjoy.

My responce to what she says:

You’ve heard it preached from the pulpit of every sacred book on writing: WRITE EVERY DAY!!!

Now ask yourself this: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A hobby?

If you think of writing as a hobby, than who cares when you write? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if your writing gets sloppy? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if you ever get published? No one. If you write as a hobby, than by all means writer seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, because you know what? If you are writing because writing is a hobby, no one cares. Why? Because hobby writers write for their own pleasure. If they get published, it’s a great big WOO-HOO! for themselves and their family. But very few hobby writers ever get published. Why? Because they are content to post their stories on message boards and web-sites and blogs. They are happy to see their work on the internet. Writing after all is just a hobby to them. They are content with what they do.  So, for writers who write as a hobby, it is not important when they write, because their family is not dependant on the writing. Just search on Google for Fan-Fiction. Millions of stories are posted all over the internet, but because they are written by hobby writers, tthose stories well never be printed in books. They well never be published, but no one cares, not even the writer. So why than does it matter if the hobby writer writes every day?

Let’s look at the other side of this story.

Now ask yourself this once again: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A career?

I ask you: What is your day job? Do you  wait tables? Drive a school  bus? Are you a cashier at the local super market? Maybe you teach high-school geography? Whatever it is that you do for your day job, ask yourself this: How many days do you work each week? A few well say three, some well say four, almost all of you well say five. By law your employer is required to give you at least two days off each week. That’s a law. That law is enforced. If an employer asks you to work more than five days a week, they are required to pay you time and a half. That too is a law. Why? Because even the government knows that you can’t get the job done if you are not given a day or two of rest. If you work seven days a week, you well run down, wear out and get sloppy. Your work well suffer, because you didn’t get a day off.

So, we come back to your answer: Why do you write? Hobby or career? If you said career, than you know that being a writer is just like every other 9 to 5 job. Nine o clock you sit down at your desk and you start writing. Around noon you take an hour break for lunch. After lunch it’s back to your desk to write until five. Five o clock comes around and no matter how compelled you are to keep writing, you put down your pen, turn off the light and don’t go back to your desk again until tomorrow morning when nine o clock rolls around again. Like any other job, you take the weekend off. Why? Because for you writing is more than a hobby. For you writing is what puts food on the table. For you writing is what puts clothes on your children. Writing just paid for your teenager’s PS3. Writing pays the mortage. Writing pays the vet bills caused by the recent pet-food recall. You write because writing is your career, your job, your livelyhood. For you writing is not a hobby. You can’t afford to let you writing get sloppy and you know that, which is why you also know that it is foolish for you or any other writer to think that it is in your best interest to write every day.

And that is  why I do not write every day.

Moving on to myth #2…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

2. Don’t Edit Until the First Draft is Done.

I edit obsessively as I go along. I like rewriting things. I can’t imagine another way to write and would be utterly incapable of completing that first draft if I didn’t do it this way.

My responce to what she says:

This, I think, depends on the writer and what they are writing about at the time. Personaly I do not believe in editing as you write, as a general rule. Why? I find that when I am writing, I  write better if I don’t stop. I have learned to ignore typos and spelling mistakes, to turn a blind eye to bad grammar, and to not listen when my mind says I should go back and re-write what I just wrote. Why? Because if I stop, it creates a speed bump. That speed bump slows me down and causes me to go lose track of what it was I was writing. So I find myself going back to where I had stopped, because I have to re-read what I wrote several times before I can remember where it was I was going with that train of thought. In a sence by stopping to edit while I was writing, I have now derailed my writing train, and put it back on a new track, and it just can’t get back onto that old track, because the old track for some odd reason is no longer there. On a road, a speed bump just jostles your car a bit and make you slow down, but on a train track, that same little speed bump not only jostles the train, but knocks it off track and sends it flying into the oncoming train on the other track. That speed bump is now a mangled mess of crumpled train cars, which ow must be towed away and tossed into  a junk heap. A huge rusted junk heap towering high above your head. The next thing you know you can’t write anything at all because all there is is a pile of mangled wreckage. You have hot a writer’s block.

So, where are we now? Well, for me, stopping to edit while I’m still writing is the deadliest thing that can happen while I’m writing. Usually, but not always. This is just me though, and as I said, all writers are differant.

Moving on…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

3. Use Note cards or Notebooks to Organize Ideas

Even the thought of using index cards to organize fiction ideas is almost enough to make me run screaming into traffic. In my mind, these little cards will forever be associated with undergraduate term papers. I don’t use notebooks because I hate to write longhand. I do all my writing on the word processor — even background notes for novels. Actually, I prefer to do background for novels as short stories, even lame short stories with no chance of selling. I see things better that way.

My responce to what she says:

As most of you know, I never went to school. I can’t identify with term papers because I’ve never had one, let alone seen one, and I’m not realy sure what they are, except that everyone who talks about school talks about term papers too. I’m not sure what an undergraduate is, I’ll look it up next time I’ve got my dictionary at hand. For those who have followed my posts on the net since 1997, you already know that when I joined the internet world, it was my first time typing. I had never used a keyboard before in my life. Likewise, I had also never learned how to spell. I wrote at that time in what I have since been told is a form of a “native lingo of my own invention, cause by lack of previous contact with humans”. In 1997, I first I joined the internet, and became an over night celebrity, not because I posted on every forum and chat room I could find, but because people were fascinated by my complete and total lack of any ability to spell. In the years since that time, my fan following grew to a cult status as people set out to teach me how to spell via online forums.

Than came a revilation to the world, that no one had befor known: My books, the Twighlight Manor seires, several thousand pages, and countless drafts of each, had never seen typewritter, I had written all of them in longhand. The manuscipts where totally written in bright colored notebooks with Lisa Frank art on the covers: thousands of them. Some 40 boxs worth of notebooks, stacked floor to ceiling. Noetbooks that I have been writing in since 1978. Thirty years worth of notebooks.

Today, I still write my books in longhand. I still hand write all of my manuscripts in bright colored children’s note books. To date, I have only ever written one outline. I have never used index cards. I do not type my manuscripts until after haveing hand written several drafts. I do not organize my ideas, my ideas flow from my mind at a rapid rate, and I write them as they come. No notes. No note taking. They are not my style.  They do not work for me.

And finally we come to:

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

4. Keep a Story Circulating until it Sells.

This is another piece of almost universal advice that I don’t follow. I tend to select my markets rather carefully. If something is rejected at the market I’ve thought most probable for it, I will normally only try it on one or two other markets before giving up (or in some cases no other markets). Although there are a lot of magazine markets for speculative short fiction, there are actually relatively few professional markets for speculative short fiction of any given type. I guess my economics training makes me weight the possible benefit (payment for a story) by my subjective evaluation of the “odds” of being published in that magazine. If the weighted payoff is less than the postage, I put the story in a drawer and work on another one.

My responce to what she says:

In some cases, this is true, in others it is not.

Some times I write for copyrighted characters not of my own making. For these stories there is only one publisher that I can legally send the stories to. If they reject the story, than that’s it. It can’t be sent to anyone else.

More often I write stories of characters of my own invention, and for these, I can choose any publisher I damn well please. I can also choose who I DO NOT want to publish it. Than again I can also choose to do what I usually do, and that is to self publish my stories. That is how I came to own my own publishing house. It is through owning my publishing house that I came to become an editor. Today I am a writer, a publisher, and an editor, because I reserved the right to choose when, where, and to whom I sent my manuscripts too: no one!

Well, that is my take on what Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”. 

~~EK

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LuLu has come a long way

LuLu seems to be on many writers minds lately. It seems like everywhere I go, someone is talking about how they have published a book on LuLu. I look at these people and I say: “LuLu! You have got to be kidding! Who in their right mind would get a book published by LuLu!” I guess you can tell it’s been a very long time since I had any dealings with LuLu. I remember the old LuLu. Quite differant from the LuLu of today.

I remember LuLu when it first started, not sure when that was, but I remember searching Google for self-publishing and finding this little site that boasted to haveing printed “over 100 books”. The site was a total mess, very unprofessional, hard to navigate, and really had no info about what they did. Basicly the whole thing looked like someone had dropped a bomb on Hell. It was terrible. So terrible in fact, that I never went back.

The whole web site was based on a chat-room, and didn’t really have a home page. I remember laughing at it and saying that no one in their right mind would let such a crappy looking web site publish their book.

That was a few years ago, and their site was online, maybe a month at that point, and had a notation that it was “under construction”. I blew it off as someone’s little pipe dream and never gave it a second thought.

Well, last week I was chatting with some fellow writers and one of them was telling me how she was doing her next book with LuLu. I thought “You have got to be kidding! Is that crappy site still going!” She tells me, that yep they were and boy had they changed. So I went and checked it out, and WOW! Did they ever change! It don’t even look like the same site. I’m amazed that they have come so far in just a few short years.

Well, now I’m intreeged. This “new” LuLu has gathered my interest, and I think I’ll test it out. I’ve got a short story, I wrote a while back, but never published anywhere, yet, and I think I’ll test LuLu out with it, see what happens.

While searching for info about LuLu, I also came across this blog. I recomend it to anyone who is thinking of starting a project with LuLu, as the author has written a wounderfully detail step by step instruction of the LuLu publishing process.

I’m interested in hearing of others’ experiances with LuLu. So if you’ve ever published anything with LuLu, feel free to comment and share your thoughts, both the good and the bad. I’d like to know more about LuLu as told by the authors who’ve been published by them

~~EK

What type of pens do you use?

What type of pens do you use?

How important to you is the brand of pen you use?

Do you have a fave pen? Ink color?

as a writer who write’s freehand first and types later, pens are very important to me…

my all time fave pen was a fountain pen made by Eversharp… used a lovely sepia ink, I had it for about ten years before it broke

for everyday writing I use Bic Crystal Stic, black ink, works great for writing hours of novels longhand… cheap pen with looooots of ink… great value for the money

for drawing or when I want a better quality ink, I use Pilot Razer Pen in super fine tip

when signing, it depends on my mood and what I’m signing, often I use multi-color gel-pens in varying shades of pink and gold

Why Do You Blog?

Why do you blog? That is a very good question. I’m glad you asked, cause it makes me stop and evaluate myself. I like doing that. Now I have to stop and think. Why do I blog? Okay, let’s see.

I think it’s a “multi-task” reason. First off, I started blogging because I just wanted to have a place where I could talk about any subject that popped into my head. At the time I had just started building websites, and I found out than how longwinded I could get. No, that’s not true…. I already knew how longwinded I was. I’ve have pen-pals since the 1980’s, more than 70 of them from all over the world. My average letter to each person was 20 pages long and I wrote on both sides for a total of 40 written pages. I wrote a letter a day, on top of my fiction/book writing. I was a teenager in the 1980’s and I was writing to other teenagers. Sadly, one by one, my pen-pals grew up, got married, had kids, and eventually we all stopped writing to each other. I went from writing to 70 people to writing to 2 people. I started feeling very lonely. I transfred from pen snail mail to email in 1997. By 2004 blogging was becoming the “in thing” so I tried it out as well, and it quickly took the place of my pen-pal writing.

So, I guess you could say, blogging was my way of communicating to people worldwide, when pen-paling went out of fashion. Like when I was pen-palling though, I keep my blogging and my book/fiction writing separate. I do not think of them as the same things. One I do because I’m obsessively compelled to write about the characters that are in my head, I have to get them out on paper, otherwise I’d never be able to do anything else; I have never felt that I had control over my books, but that the characters themselves take over.

The other (blogging) I do, because I am driven by the desire to just talk about whatever topic I may want to talk about. As those who have today, meet me face-to face know, my actual ability to speak is rather limited due to the fact I grew up in a family where speaking was almost forbidden, and topics one could talk about were limited to The Bible or the Book of Mormon and pretty much nothing else. The result was I rebelled against them by writing to people outside the confines of our family: pen-pals and later blogging.

Last year when I got my job at Macy’s I was faced with something I had never anticipated: the telephone. This is not a thing that I had used more than a couple of times in my entire life. The first few times it rang, I did not answer and my boss was quite upset with me. I had not realized that I was supposed to answer, she had not told me that use of a phone was to be part of my job, and when I did answer it, I found it very difficult to use, never having used one before. This causde me to be chided by the other girls who I worked with, girls 10 to 15 years younger than me, girls who asked, how can you have never used a phone before? Girls who found reason to force me to speak as a result. My answer was quite simple, I have never needed to use a phone before, I don’t talk, I write. At work they questioned my working and never taking a break to talk with either costumer or worker. My answer again, was the same. I do not talk, I write, I was there to do my job, not talk, I had no reason to talk and saw it as a waste of time that distracted from my work. My job at Macy’s was my first real face-to-face contact with people outside of family or my family’s church, I had not realized how much people talk. Nor had I realized that getting a job would involve the act of talking or phoning. When I want to talk to some one I write them a letter, that is what I have always done. Now with the online world, people no longer answer my letters, they respond only to tell me their phone number or email adress, neither phone nor email I use, and so instead I write a new post on one of my 12 blogs. For me blogging is a form of communication, that takes the place of talking, talking being a thing which I don’t really like to do, simply because I’m not used to doing it. Blogging is, for me, what I suppose you would call “talking”, which is why I do not consider blogers to be writers..

And there in lay the difference I find between blogging and writing. Writing is something that I do to write books, as I have been doing since 1978. Writing is the creation of stories, while blogging is just me talking to you. That’s why I blog, to “talk“ not to write.

My other reason to blog, is to teach people what I know about writing. Writing takes up 90% of my time. I spend about 8 hours a day asleep, 2 or 3 hours a day taking care of the animals, and the rest of those 13 hours I spend writing, either on paper for my books or online for my blogs. I have been doing this for 27 years now. My life evolves around writing, the result of my writing so much, so often, is that I’m often asked for my advice about writing, thus how my blog turned into a blog devoted to helping other to become writers and why most of the posts on my blog are devoted to teaching others how to write.

That is why I blog.

~~EK