Life in progress

Tag Archives: writing


by 25 Comments

Research laziness

There are so many things I want to know! The minutiae of details I’d like to put into my stories require a vast amount of research. While I enjoy doing most research, it’s not all easy. For instance, I’d dearly love to know enough about horticulture so that I don’t have to search for pictures in order to name the flora I can so easily envision.

Like this:

hedge

I’ve been living with this hedge for three and half years and do I know what it is? Not a clue.

I’m good with researching things like diseases, psychology, historical eras and objects, sexuality, (okay, that one’s fun), culture, geography – all kinds of things.  But when it comes to botany…

hedge flowers

It’s just real purdy.

(I did just look up the difference between horticulture and botany.)

What do you have a hard time researching?


by 37 Comments

The future of publishing crap

This probably won’t be a very popular post but here I go with it anyway. With the invention of e-publishing new writers are coming out of the woodwork. These days anyone can publish their own work without having to pay money to do so. ANYONE. Who can be held accountable for what goes out there? It used to be that when you bought a book there was at least someone out there who believed in it. Sure, there was still a lot of crappy writing, but at least if you didn’t like a book you could sell it at a garage sale and get some of your money back.

I may not be in a position myself to say what I write is good, or that I won’t eventually go the route of self-publishing, but I’ve been reading long enough to distinguish what’s good and what is crap and I am appalled at how unbalanced it has become in the wrong direction. Up until last year I had never failed to finish reading a novel, no matter how bad it was. This year alone I have thrown up my hands in disgust at no less than three novels on my e-reader. Nowadays everyone thinks they can write. Many of the people self-publishing have long forgotten what they learned in Grade 3 grammar, and I hate to think what novels would look like without spellcheck.

For me it came to the forefront with ’50 Shades of Grey’. The author, E.L. James, actually said in an interview she understands that people who read her books are people who don’t normally read. I can easily believe it. When I read it I thought to myself, great! If this can get published anything can. By God was I right. Everybody and their sister said the same thing! I’m sure editorial slush piles have never been bigger, making it that much harder for talented writers to get noticed.

Will we get to the point eventually where there are more writers than there are readers? The way it’s going now I wouldn’t be surprised. I copied and pasted the following from Kindle’s website. I think I can keep my tongue firmly planted in cheek and let this speak for itself:

Do I need any special skills to publish with Kindle Direct Publishing?
Kindle Direct Publishing does the basic work for you, but if your content contains a lot of special formatting, a bit of knowledge in HTML may come in handy.

In closing, if you’re serious about writing a novel and you want to publish it, take a class or two. Brush up on your skills first. Make more than the effort to learn HTML and learn how to write! Hold yourself accountable for putting out a good product. Perhaps we can keep future of publishing out of the crapper after all.


by 22 Comments

Singular

Dandy
You are unique. I know you wish you weren’t. I know you don’t want to be thought of as different, but the fact is that you are.

There are not thousands of you, or even hundreds. There is you.

No one else thinks the way you do. No one looks like you or sees the things you see in exactly the way you see them.

No one even smells like you; you are sweeter than the rest.

When you go, the people who have known you will grieve, but they will also learn to smile. They will remember the joy with which you illuminated everyone around you.

Be proud to be unique. And know that the way you touch the earth is precious.


by 7 Comments

Private Thoughts, Private World – Part 7

We all have reasons why we write what we write. As I talked about in my blog post ‘To Pseud or not to Pseud’ there are just some things we need to get out of our systems, not all of which we believe our families and friends will appreciate reading or hearing about. But keeping our thoughts to ourselves isn’t just for fiction.

I was reading this post by my good friend at HarsH ReaLiTy and he brought up some excellent points about the dangers of writing non-fiction as well. To simply have an opinion can be not only unfavorable amongst those we know and love but also a very real danger to our well beings. Besides the things Jay (not his real name) mentions in his article such as the repercussions that can result in marital strife and the legal aspects of slander (whether intentional or not) there are also dangers that go from things as simple yet traumatic as internet fights and harassment towards both yourself and your family to the very real possibility of stalking and, Gods forbid, physical harm. Do we therefore stop writing? Hell no!

Hiding behind a pseudonym though can only solve half the problem. Since medieval times and possibly before (I’m no history buff) people have been writing and hiding their names to protect themselves. Our digital footprint, whilst being put into being to protect our children from pedophiles etc., makes it that much harder to conceal ourselves. So unless we go back to printing up leaflets upon which to get out our message we must choose carefully what we decide to share. While I don’t really want to get into the entire ‘freedom of speech’ debate, we still have to consider what our responsibilities, our boundaries and our level of comfort all are before we write publicly.

I read an interview with Sakurai Atsushi (get used to seeing that name on my blog) in which he said, “…I can’t really help who I am and what I create.”  That touched me profoundly. The absolute need for a dedicated writer to produce and to expel his or her thoughts is irrepressible. I believe THAT, not whether or not we have or ever will be published is what makes us writers. How much of that should be restrained or hidden from sight or just concealed from being affiliated with our real identities is something we have to be able to judge for ourselves. May our judgement be sound.


by 6 Comments

Lunchtime!

I’m going to eat my last avocado. Wish me luck!


by 7 Comments

Why I write fiction

English: Icon for lists of science fiction authors (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was sitting here trying to come up with a blog post when I realized it. There’s nothing going on in my real life that’s worth writing. Whenever I came up with something, it was either something I want or something I imagine.

For instance, I was out on my paper route today, looking as I always do for inspiration, and there was this woman walking her dog. From a distance it was an odd looking dog, mostly because it was black and gray and the gray parts of the dog blended in so well with the sidewalk that parts of it were invisible. So, of course, my imagination took over.

What if I woke up one day and no longer recognized things that I should… as though I’d woken up in a different dimension. And what if I saw this dog on my paper route and *gasp* it had four legs?!? Everyone knows that animals all have two or three legs – except birds who of course have four. But imagine that! An animal that resembled a dog except it had FOUR LEGS!

So that’s my life. Dogs with four legs. Exciting stuff, eh?


by 34 Comments

To pseud or not to pseud

…that is the question. What’s in a name after all? It’s something by which you are instantly recognized. But which one of you do you want recognized… I think that’s really what it comes down to.

We all have different personas for different occasions. To my children’s teachers I am nothing but a dedicated mother. To my readers, a sage. (Stop laughing.  Oh okay laugh. It was a joke.)  But seriously, I am myself. I am a woman who has never, on a regular basis, worn makeup. What you see with me is what you get. And yet few of the people in my real life understand where my imagination goes.

This post was brought about by the fact that, after a rather questionable fic I wrote last night, I lost a follower on my fiction blog. Whether it was someone who went ‘Ewww, what am I reading?!’ and clicked unfollow or whether it was someone who deleted their blog (a robot perhaps?) I have no idea. But it got me to thinking. My writing covers many different things. I’ve written a children’s book which is currently being illustrated by a friend and most certainly will go out to a publisher under a pseudonym. The stories I tend to enjoy writing however, go from humorous (my Second Seat on the Right series ) to perverted ( Beauty ) to horror (see a short story entitled ‘Reaper’) and of course the psychologically horrific Boy Series on this blog.

I understand that it’s probably important to write under different names for different genres. My biggest concern, however, is protecting those I love from the depths of my imagination, not only for what they would think (I believe they already suspect a great deal anyway – case in point, my eighteen year old son telling me I’m a sick fuck) but also for what the people my kids have to deal with on a daily basis – what are they whispering about mom?

Having been married a number of times I’ve been through a few aliases in my life, to the point where the hardest part of filling out an application form for something was deciding on my surname. My kids don’t even have the same last name as I do, and to this day you wouldn’t find me under Linda Hill in the phone book. But it was the name I was born with and the name I’ve chosen to stick with from now on, no matter what.

Unless I don’t.DSC00191


by Leave a comment

Private Thoughts, Private World Part 6 – Beauty

In each of us the idea of it is cradled, warm and glowing. It’s something we wish for, something we strive for, something we hope to behold and to create. For each of us there is a singular nuance that we recognize and when we see it, or hear it, touch it, taste it or even smell it we know. It lights up a part of our brain like nothing else can.

It is beauty.

It moves us, it inspires us. It comes in so many forms. I remember once, I had taken an overnight flight from England back home so I had been up all day the day before and because of the time change and having to look after my kids… let’s just say I was exhausted. In this state, I was in the car for some reason and the song ‘Comfortably Numb’ came on the radio. I sat and listened to the entire thing. It wasn’t until the guitar solo at the end when I started to bawl my eyes out, positive that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life. …at least since I saw Pink Floyd live so many years before that.

How do you describe something that, to you, is so beautiful that it makes you cry? By giving it life. Like the gritty, piercing of David Gilmour’s guitar crawling up the back of my neck and wrapping me in a warm blanket of pure, ear-splitting devastation.

By giving an inanimate object a soul we can not only describe what we see but how it makes us feel.

Sakura2

Sakura

I see a delicate cherry blossom, known only to spring. It signifies both the brilliance and the swiftness of life and all its glory, for it comes and goes, so very quickly.

Beauty can be defined in so many different ways. For some of us it is in a face, in the sound of children’s laughter. For some it is home and the aroma of freshly baked cookies or the comfort of a roaring fire on a cold winter night. For some it is the exquisite line, where pain and ecstasy meet – the drop of blood,  the single tear shed for love.

Beauty is one of only many things that move us, that make us want to write or to articulate our emotions in other ways. To be able to elicit in others the emotion that comes from our deepest most precious place where we know things such as beauty is a gift. It’s one that I hope to practice and somehow, perfect.


by 12 Comments

Sundays

I remember Sundays BK (before kids) as a day when I woke up in the summer to hear lawnmowers going and the scent of freshly cut grass wafting through my window. I remember waking up and going downstairs to retrieve the Sunday Sun and laying in bed with my first husband, reading the paper and thinking about coffee.

I remember Sundays of watching movies on tv and spending my day on a knitting project or going for quiet walks or long drives: destination no where in particular. Maybe for ice cream. I remember laying in bed in the spring and seeing the new buds on the trees outside my window.

DSC00152

But that was all BK.

Now my Sundays are filled with cooking for the family, cleaning, entertaining a little guy with an unlimited amount of busyness about him. Sundays are about breaking up fights between my elderly mother and my young son. Sundays are about sleeping in until 6:30 if I’m lucky.

The one thing I can still hold on to?

080729_tim_hortons_3202

Coffee. There will always be coffee.


by 13 Comments

Proof

It is done – my final assignment for the last of the courses I am taking this semester. A few extra grey hairs later and more than a few late nights of agonizing over words and sentences and paragraphs and I can finally breathe again. And blog. Speaking of blogging…

As of this moment (that is before I publish this post) I have had a grand total of three visitors to my blog in the eighteen hours that have passed since midnight. This shows me that in order to have anyone visit my blog I have to visit others and comment on them – two things I have had little time to do these past days.

Proof positive that if you want an active blog you need to be active in the blogging community.

…or you need to put hashtags in front of trending words in your title…