I Have a New Favorite!

Add a thunder shower and a cup of cocoa and I'm in heaven!

Friday night, sweet hubby went walking with the girls then brought them back for a daddy Mario Kart challenge. After a full day of grading writing papers and teaching, I snuggled into fluffy socks and a warm robe. With my hot mint tea and a piece of chocolate cream pie - interesting flavor combo, but it worked - I got to immerse myself in a brand new book that I've been trying to find time to read for a couple of weeks now.

So glad I waited. It was well worth it to find a time when I could focus on this literary gem.

Writer Tips - What to Do When I Get Dry?

I've got blog ideas coming out the wazoo. I've had such fun investigating baseball, compiling grammar rules, and waxing rhetorical on all sorts of topics.

Trouble is, this time my ROW 80 goal doesn't include my blogs. (I've written 3,171 words on just my blogs in the last two days!) When it comes to my suspense novel, though, I'm sunburned. Entering the fourth chapter, I find I'm bogging down a bit.

Much of the excitement lies ahead and part of the excitement has past. This section has some key clues,

but my writing crawl-speed turned into a camo-crawl and then a full stop. Uninspired, I seriously considered tossing the whole story.

I could do that, but what would I learn? Instead, I think I'd like to flex the muscles of all that I've been learning. I need to get my elements so firmly in my mind that when I get back to the drafting the tension can't help but be on every page because there is so much going on.

I started the initiative last night, brainstorming with my Precious Redhead until almost 1AM. The exercise was enlightening! I realized that my story line isn't messed up, and my two protagonists are strong with deep character arcs.

Then there's my antagonist. He's sort of ... um ... missing. It's one thing for readers to be in the dark about an antagonist in a suspense, but the writer should probably know all about him. And I knew nothing about him.

Aha! I found my problem. Without a strong antagonist chart, I have no conflict with the protags, no goals or expectations for the antag, no story. I guess I just thought he would develop as I wrote, but he didn't. I'm not a seat-of-the-pants writer, duh, so I don't know why I thought it would just happen for me.

But after a day of solid focus on my antag, I not only know who he (generic "he") is, but I know what he does, and why he does it. I know how he gets himself connected and in his spiral into conflict with my main character. Almost without effort, my story has muscle, and plenty of tension.

All that is to say, I haven't added anything to my ROW80 goals since Sunday, but have added a ton of work on my story. I think the words will start to flow much easier now!

Where are you in your current projects? (Writing or Otherwise?)

More Comma Love

I used to think commas were a gift from the Netherworld. After all, the inconsistency of the little bugs more than annoyed. They gave nightmares to trusting youngsters, offered weapons of belittlement to the all-knowing instructors who acted upon them with the smack of a ruler, and twisted the insides of every college student with a paper due.

Which is all of them and a lot of Pepto-Bismol.

All this writing I've been doing has succeeded in

giving me more comma clarity. I started blogging about commas last week and you can find that article HERE.

Here's what else I learned:

• With more than one adjectives in front of a noun, use a comma between them only if you would use the word and to separate them. Like if you said: The arrogant, stubborn captain of the Enterprise never listened to advice. In this case, an and can go correctly between arrogant and stubborn. On the other hand, I wouldn't need a comma in: The arrogant Enterprise captain never listened to advice.

• Of course, everyone knows to separate a city and state or a city and country with a comma. Just like when writing an address, this would be correct. Picard grew up near Paris, France. When the sentence continues after the country, another comma is needed, so that the country or state is set aside as extra information. Picard grew up near Paris, France, but didn't stay near home. The only time this wouldn't be the case is if the country is in a possessive form. Picard's boyhood home was near Paris, France's famous wine country.

So come on in!
(The sign actually begs for a semi-colon or period.)

• While you must always set off quotations with commas, be careful not to make them comma-spliced sentences. "Whatever you do," Han Solo said, "don't touch that button."
"I see the button," Luke responded. "Why do you have to be so bossy?" In the first sentence, the identifier breaks one sentence into two parts. In the second, It separates two different sentences. If a comma was used in place of the period, it would create a run-on sentence.

• Negatives, or contrast words, need a comma. Han, not Luke, had the recklessness to come through in a pinch. He became dependable, if not honorable. 

• Finally, use a comma to avoid confusion in your sentence. OR Finally use a comma to avoid confusion in your sentence. 

Hope this continued list has been helpful and informative. I found information at several sources, including my Precious Redhead's English book, Grammar and Writing by Bob Jones University Press, this website (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/commas_big.htm#4), and that one (http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/commas.asp).

What grammar rule gives you the most grief when you're writing?

Round of Words in 80 Days

I know, it sounds crazy. How can making a word count goal actually produce halfway-decent writing? Just because the number of words increases doesn't mean that they are really worthy of any notice.

I admit, when I started the ROW80 program back in July, I was more than a little skeptical. But I knew

Love Is . . .

My first year of marriage, I clipped the "Love is . . . " cartoon out of the newspaper every day. At first I tucked them into my sweet hubby's briefcase, but he didn't get them. So I

Twist and Shout

I dream in tornadoes.

They rarely scare me, although sometimes I'll wake in a cold sweat. But they sure enlighten me to whats going on inside my head. Now I'm no psychologist, but I understand where these dreams come from.

I've experienced them over the course of more than a decade:

• when a conflict comes up with a friend
• when the school year is about to start
• when I'm doing something that makes me feel terribly vulnerable or unfamiliar like planning a big party or scrapbooking retreat - especially the first time.

Surely Not

For some crazy reason, as I'm driving down the road on yet another volleyball carpool errand, this old Gospel song keeps running through my mind. Words were written by Reverend Josiah Alwood around 1880, but the song has been recorded by Toby Keith, Willie Nelson, Brenda Lee, Randy Travis and Jim Brown to name a few.

Oh, the land of cloudless days
Oh, the land of an uncloudy sky
Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise
Oh, they tell me of an uncloudy day.
 
I THINK I'VE FOUND THAT PLACE!

Literary Contortions

Jody Hedlund's article on flexibility inspired another article by Elizabeth Spann Craig. Her article inspired me, as I happened to read it first. Both are excellent and worthy of your time.

Both blog authors are also published authors and write from their publishing experiences. I'm still in the pre-published stage, so I have a different slant on the flexibility focus.

When I started this journey, now about 2 1/2 months ago, I felt totally alone.  I know my forte is brainstorming and building ideas with others, but writing is a solitary career, right?

Type-Casting: I've Been Tagged???

Character day - Well, I guess I'm certainly one of those!

Thanks to Jessica R. Patch, a fun online friend I met through Twitter, I get to answer questions today. Well, their really not hard questions, but I'm a little nervous. See, she ended her article with a question, "What song best describes you?" and I swear I sat staring blankly at the screen for a full 5 minutes. I finally settled on "Does Your chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Over Night?" (Well, Mom always told me it was a real song.) It seemed appropriate since I have 0% creativity this morning!

But I'm nothing if not game. (No, not gamy, that would be my boy.)

Favorite Articles from this week!

While I have the time, this summer, I've been visiting blogs like crazy! I've bookmarked several, followed even more, and when I find articles that really speak to me where I am, I post them at the end of each week as my favorites.

I didn't get to 10 this week. I confess, I'm pretty choosy. It's not that I read things that I didn't like, at all! These are just the ones that resonated with me when I visited.