Day 1

Ok...this is my first post on my way to hopefully becoming a better writer.  I dedicate this writing experiment to Kris Trolinger, who's been doing this on Facebook for the past year.  She started on her birthday, but I didn't want to wait until Spring to start.  I'm impatient that way.
I met Kris at MTSU in the Band of Blue my junior year (I think) of college.  She twirled a rifle and a flag and we marched together in guard the next two years.  We share several mutual friends and shared many fun times together on and off the field.  As with a lot of friends, everybody grows up, gets married and starts their 'adult' lives.
I recently found Kris again, about 20 years later, and have enjoyed being in contact with her again.  Now that we're all grown up, she's grown into an intelligent and very funny person.  When we were in college, she was always so quiet.  Who knew there was such a wit hiding underneath all her shyness?
I see promise in her writing and have encouraged her to write for real.  From what she said on her wall, her job seems to be stifling her creativity.  I think that's why she started her own 'blog' posts on Facebook.  I love her voice and point of view when she writes.  You can always see everything she's talking about.  Sometimes she posts a picture with what she writes, just to give the reader a little more...You can't write a whole chapter in a Facebook post.  At some point, I'll tell her I've written about her and am taking her great idea and trying it for myself.  Hopefully, when she reads this, she'll be proud to be a part of it.  This is a picture I stole from Kris' page is of Kris and our former guard instructor Bo.  I love them both.  I figured if she had this on her Facebook page already, that it wouldn't be a big deal for me to have it on here.  Kris, you've really inspired me in all your daily posts.  I hope I can do half as well.  :)   Love you girl.  LLL for ever!

Stealing a really good idea

I have a friend I went to college with that has committed to write something every single day on Facebook...365 days....she's WAY dedicated.  What a great exercise in writing.  Her posts are always interesting.  I think she would be a great writer.  Her voice is strong and funny at the same time.  I wish I could be that dedicated.  She started this project on her birthday last year and will end it on her birthday...except, I hope she doesn't end it.  I always look forward to hearing about what she's seen or what experiences she's had that day.  Most of them are mundane things, but the way she writes about them make them so relatable and sometimes thought provoking, it keeps me interested.  My only worry that is if I attempted to make this sort of commitment, would I be able to stick to it?  I'm not sure.  I've told myself that I wanted to post more often on this blog, just to give myself an outlet to write and write about writing.....This would hopefully make me remember to put something on here.  Maybe, if I knew I had to write about something on this blog, I might take more notice of things that go on around me...like a good writer does.

All it could do is help me....:)  That's my goal...I want to be a better writer...and I'm hoping this will help.

relationships

I've come to the realization in the past couple of days that two of my characters came across each other earlier in their lives.  This meeting, while brief, will impact them both later on.  That does happen in real life...I've noticed it a lot since facebook has become so popular.  I have friends that know friends and I didn't know they knew each other...does that make sense?
It's that whole six degrees of separation.  Does it apply to everybody?  I was thinking it was only supposed to be from famous people...or Kevin Bacon.  ;)

revelation

I was just on one of my favorite writer's websites:  agentquery.com.  Those people are extraordinarily gifted as well as some of the nicest 'writer types' I've ever talked with.  Always helpful and super knowledgeable..

Got some great advice tonight about query letters and it completely clicked with me.  Query letters shouldn't be more than 250 words.
This letter is your 'application' for an agent to look at to say, "hmm....that looks like a writer I might be able to sell"....or 'nope/delete/next'
which is what happens to the majority of the letters they get in a day/ week or even in a month... they have an average of 10,000 queries a year and maybe will have 2 new clients out of them  2....those odds stink.

So....as a writer, your job is to get noticed...plain and simple.  Your book, if you want it to be picked up by an agent and hopefully sold, has to be strong enough in characters and plot to get this small task done.
Tonight, got some great advice.
Your query letter, no matter if you have 1 or up to 4 main characters, should only be about the one MAIN character.  About their own journey through the book.  The query isn't meant to tell the whole story.  It's just a 'sneak peek'....just like a movie trailer shows you some of the coolest parts of a movie so you'll want to see it.  The query works the exact same way.  Except movie companies have professionals editing their trailers to look and sound wonderful and exciting.
Your query only has you...you're the only one that knows your book and knows it well enough to write the query.
Limiting yourself to THE MAIN CHARACTER in the book...sounds almost impossible, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

Now....to sit down and work on it to see how it goes....I really have a good feeling about this....I hope it's not a false sense of security!  :)

1.1.11

Happy New Year!

This is one of those very special days that hardly ever come along as far as the calendar goes, but other than that, it's been a relaxing Saturday at our house.  No major historical happenings going on.  We've watched a 'Jaws' marathon and laughed at the 3-D effects in the third one...other than that...pretty calm day.

I thought I'd post something on this historical day, just so I can go back and say....oh look...cool date...:)
As far as writing is going, I'm editing and rewriting  stuff all the time.....I fight the distraction monster constantly...
I took a test on Dr. Oz's show the other day to show if you probably need to get tested for ADHD...out of 20 points, if you had more than 15 you needed to get tested or you most likely were ADHD....I was a 17...I knew I had it...I've known it for a long time.  They said a lot of adults that have it end up getting divorced because it turns into a parent/child relationship.  Where one person is the 'parent'--constantly having to remind or 'nag' the other person to do this or that.  Loses patience with the other person because they forget things all the time....
In 2009, I was getting there.  I'd been married 19 years, and I was just about done with feeling like I was such an idiot...or being made to feel that way every time I made a mistake...I'd heard Dr. Phil say that his wife, Robin, was his 'soft place to fall'.  I didn't feel that way with my spouse, which was a red flag to me.

I've become more verbal since then, and it's helped.  I've told my husband when he makes me feel that way, and he's gotten a lot better about it, but I was inching really close to asking for a divorce around December of last year.
I'm glad I didn't.  I'm glad I stuck it out, because our relationship has gotten better from a year ago.
I think it's only because I decided I was done putting up with stuff and started standing up for myself.  If he hadn't liked it, then he could leave, which he did not want either.
So we made it through our 20th year of marriage and Greg always says, "We're almost to 21"....
I'm thinking I want to give year 20 as much credit as possible, but he wants to move forward and look toward number 21.
So here we are, the first day of 2011, in pretty good shape, I hope we have a good year full of life, love, health for us and our family and friends and happiness.

Cheers to your new year!

ok...here goes....

House is quiet right now...Shannon's at Matty's and Cassidy is on the computer in the back of the house.  Greg has gone to fight with the Best Buy people about why we still don't have the tv we bought a week ago...
So now is a good time to work on writing/editing/ and anything else that takes brainpower...

It's so hard to do any of that with the TV going...I fight the distraction monster on a minute by minute basis...so after I make my grocery list, I'm going to block out about 2 hours of quiet editing....I'm working on Chapter 4...again...trying to take it line by line...read a blog post about line editing that was very helpful as far as how your mind has to be when you're line editing....helped me realize the point of view I need to be looking at the words from....not just the  imaginary reader, but also from the point of is this really necessary?  Do I really need that sentence?  Can I rephrase this without losing what I'm trying to convey?  Those are questions I was asking myself, but not as often as I needed to. 

Twitter has really been helping me find other blogs and helping me see what to do and not do and how to approach writing in general...It's becoming a valuable resource...

Been awhile

When I created this blog, I wasn't sure when I would post or what I would post.....hadn't really read many blogs to know about 'blog edicate'...like if you're going to have one, you need to update it every once in a while.  So this is me, thinking I didn't have anything to say and then realizing that all the blogs I've read since creating this one are just regular people saying what they think.  Well, I can do that...

Then tonight as I sit here while Polar Express is running on the TV for the second time tonight, (gotta love ABCfamily) I thought maybe I needed to use it to track my progress in my writing.  I've been at this for what seems like forever, and I do have a full time job, and I'm a mom.  I only started on Fall Break of 2008, but sometimes I get distracted and I lose track of time.  I read a blog post from a lady that said she'd been editing for 6 months.  I started wondering how long I'd been editing....hmmm.....seems like it's been FOREVER...
I catch myself starting over on the same chapter to try and get the flow of the story only having read it a thousand times, I'm not really appreciating where the mistakes are or where the sentence needs to be restructured.  Tweaking has to be a excruciatingly, patient process....thorough attention to details....which I have a hard time with...
I get distracted fairly easily, so my progress is slow.  I thought maybe if I use this blog like a diary and show myself where I am, it'll light a fire under me to stay more focused.  After reading some other peoples' blog posts about writing and how it's close to impossible to get published anyway, it makes me want to just stop fooling with it....but at the same time.....I don't want to....I'm too stubborn to take no for an answer, no matter how many times I hear it.  No matter how bad of  a writer I am.....I know I'm not any good yet.  Writing is a craft you learn...it's just like playing an instrument.
When I first started playing the trumpet in high school....I sucked...because I'd never played one before, but that didn't stop me....I practiced every day...started after marching season was over, around mid-November, and then by our Christmas concert, I was playing the third part of all the music.  I was last chair, but that's ok.... I knew the more I did it, the better I would get.  In two years, in my senior year, I went from last chair to 4th and from 3rd part to 1st part.  That's not too shabby.
I feel like as a musician, I have the determination to get this done....musician's know....pieces don't get under your fingers or out of your mouth if you don't practice...so that's where I am...I'm just going to keep practicing, and allowing other people's eyes to look over it and see where the mistakes are when I can't see them any more...keep up with Twitter more...that seems to be where all the agents hang out...and write, write, and write some more...:)