fa la la

After ten grueling months I have finally finished the manuscript. Incredible. It only took my social life, huge chunks of my day and the best bits of my personality. My friends have had to keep me accountable in order to not turn into an insufferable grump.

Why is the process of writing such a love/hate relationship? You'd think playing god would be a little more fun. But it isn't. Half the time, I'm plagued with thoughts of what my characters are going to do next (you'd think I know this, but alas, I rarely don't) and the other half I'm wrestling with getting the story down.

Of course I've had help from many directions, in the unlikeliest of places, mind you. The first came from my mother. If I've never written about her, I'm sorry. She could fill up every page of the next book I write. She is a dutiful wife, with all the charm of old Spanish ideals and traditions. My mother is supportive of her daughter wanting to be a writer and has racked her brain of ways she can help. This has included asking me when I'm going to law school, when I will get married and will I please just go to grad school? Or go abroad? (her wanting me out of the continental United States is a mystery in of itself).

Then, one day she tells me she knows a professor at Cornell (or Yale? or Princeton?) and I should write him. He is Bolivian, too! And he writes in English! And he has a cute nephew (probably!). Being a dutiful daughter, I will of course write the professor and go on a date with his probably attractive nephew.

Other help has come from the online writing workshop (this could also explain my infrequent blog postings) called Scribophile. If you're writing a novel and need some objective feedback, gather what courage you have and post your work on Scrib. I have received tons on top of tons of helpful input and advice.

I also have to thank all of my "test readers" (please read: friends) to go through the MS and point out any glaringly obvious mistakes that thwart grammatical success.

And, I confess I am a repeat offender on Amazon.com. I have ordered more books on editing, revising, and query letters than any person really should. I'll pick my top five (one day) and share the wealth.

Now, I have to write the QUERY LETTER which is synonymous (in my crazy mind) with DOOOOOOM.

We'll see how that goes.

Thanks for reading. Whoever you are. :)

small world, big words

How amazing that we live in a time where a phone call can be placed to someone on another land mass, across a big blue ocean and in a different time zone. I can be eating a bowl of cinnamon toast crunch (is there anything better, really?) while a friend on another line is enjoying skirt steak with chimichurri sauce.

That being said, I can't believe how posting a few lines about a cause I love can spark someone to reach out to me, no matter where they are in life, no matter what continent they are on. Responding to me. Isn't much of life reacting and responding to people? I've been thinking of people's reactions and how any one person can react vastly different than the next one. I've noticed this particularly when it comes to men and my girl friends. One friend can have severe heart flutterings while in the company of said man, while I can comfortably pick my nose in front of the fellow and not think a thing of it. (For the record, I avoid my nose and it's pickings as a rule while out in public.) What is it when our hearts react to something? Why does it skip over one person and captivate another?

By now, I have a good picture of what captivates my heart. Pretty days. Quills. Paper. Ink. Loud volume. My chucks. Human slavery (that arises such a strong sense of disgust in me). Black Pianos. Big dogs. Ugly dogs. Faith. Learning. French Revolution....The list goes on.

What does it take for someone to respond to me? To respond to what I write, the story I will tell. The pictures I draw, the photos I take? What makes anything memorable? Is it simply because we remember our response?

Food for thought as I attempt to write a tale that can captivate people.

I received the nicest email from a young lady in Ireland who read about Storyville and wanted to know if there was a way to host a concert in Ireland. I honestly didn't know I could reach that far out. How encouraging.

Thanks for reading.

storyville live

With the end of the Vive chapter, a new one started, appropriately named Storyville Live. I need a full time job like you wouldn't believe, and through divine workings, I landed a job with a coffee company called Storyville. This coffee company admires and respects International Justice Mission (IJM.org) and wanted to help them liberate the 27 million people who are currently slaves on our planet.

Enter mission. Enter my job. Enter live music and cups of coffee.

The new division is called Storyville Live, where I work as a concert producer (funnily enough). My job is to produce a series of private, at-home concerts that help spread awareness about human trafficking through our partnership with IJM. If you ask me what I do for a living, I can think of various ways to say what I do, "I drink more cups of coffee than any person really should", or "I cold call realtors all over the Continental United States", or it can be my favorite: "I free slaves."

No one, not even through my words, can know the degree of my outgoing personality through my written word. The truth is, I have no shame. Zero. I can talk to anyone, "break into" the well constructed walls surrounding a person's heart. Somehow I can always convey the same message, "I'm asking because I care. If I were you, I'd want someone to listen to me, too."

And now I talk for a living. With a pretty rad headset provided by the folks at Storyville. I love what I do. I love that a phone call can lead me to Urban Meyer (true story, had no idea who he was) or to members of Sister Hazel. Or to some sweet realtor in Vermont who just adopted a little girl from China who spent time in a brothel. She signed up to host a concert. Amazing.

Onward to my recent thoughts/moments about THE NOVEL. Incredibly, it is starting to frighten me. Is that not the most bizarre thing? As I near the end, and yes I mean just the first draft, the periods in which I'm not writing lengthen. When I get back to the screen, I freeze. Not unlike a deer would before a cement truck. I have to walk away and then come back, but only after I've given myself a pep talk. A rather long pep talk.

I have decided to try and find a writing workshop in my area. I have gone through many a workshop process, but since I've graduated I'm wanting some feedback for what I have written. I've managed to cut, rearrange, dress up and dress down some of my earlier chapters.

Looks like I have some research to do. Speaking of, researching medieval Spain has been fun. I could bore anyone at dinner parties now with my trivia.

Thanks for reading, whoever and wherever you are :)

consistency is not my middle name

It has ben a little over a month since I've been brave enough to come back to this site and continue the writing process, on here and in the novel. Admittedly, I have sketched and noted down new ideas in the story in my red journal, but virtually none of it has appeared on my word processor. Or on here for that matter.

I may as well just come out and say I've been hiding from my computer and the Mapmaker. It's down to the last lap of the race and suddenly I got the urge to sit out. Maybe that just means I have to add more victory laps once I'm done. I don't know.

It seems that since I've started working, writing for ME has all but gone to lunch. How do people do anything else while they work? I'm amazed to hear my friends have social activities planned after a full day. My energy take is seriously depleted after a working day and the commute back home.

The best solution is staring right at me, and all it will take is to have the discipline to implement it (the discipline I don't have, mind you). I need to have set writing hours (and here my father would say, "and working out hours, spend time with your family hours, and then my mother would say, cleaning your room hours). If I care enough, which I believe I do, I have to make the time. Which is true for anything else in my life that takes up space. Not sure how much I care about cleaning my room. It makes my mom happy very happy anyway.

Back to work.

my curse

When I turned 18, I left home, following a rite of passage like the rest of my peers. Since then, I have moved every single year. That's seven times in seven years. Need I delve into how annoying of a process this is? The number of boxes I've used, the rolls of duck tape, the I don't know how many hands who have helped me load and carry my crap across the city of Orlando, to Tampa, and back to Orlando, and now to West Palm. Each move was necessary, some were planned, and some were surprises. Each time, it's worked better than the year before. I can't complain (though my brother does, as he is the main set of arms who have helped in my relocating), since each year has taught me something different. How long will I continue this rather nomad existence? I happen to think the curse will break when I get married, as an alternative line of thinking than you're typical fairy tale. I shouldn't take that seriously, and neither should you (that would be you reader), as I am a raving sentimentalist/romantic who needs to get a grip on my reality (my reality being that I have less than $100 in my banking account, my new jeans are still a little snug, and it looks like traveling Europe won't happen until after I've done something moderately respectful). The curse could very well break as soon as I find a Chipotle, Barnes and Noble, movie theater, Anthropologie, Hogsmeade, and Gamestop all in one strip plaza.

I just got back from the leasing office, breaking my first lease, deviating from my norm of staying put for one year in the same place. I had thought this year I might be able to break my curse, and finally settle down and have the same zip code for two consecutive years. I was pretty confident this would be the case, but then I didn't get into grad school like I'd arrogantly thought I'd be able to.

Hence, the job search. And now, I'm going to Publix for the umpteenth time in my life to ask for extra boxes.

P.S. I finally added chapters to the novel. I have eighteen of them. Hoorah.

before i start my day job...

For anyone keeping track (other then my lonely self), I got a job. Finally. Upon hearing the news, I was a little surprised I didn't receive noise complaints from anyone living up to five states away. That's how loud my relief was.

Today I had a serious reality check concerning page count. I'm at 50,759 words in the story, and 239 pages on my microsoft word program. By my best guess (and of course, this should be taken with a grain of salt because what writer ever really knows) I'm about two/thirds of the through, providing the characters go and say what I want. I've found they have minds of their own however, and I admit a third of the story is them doing what they want. So much for being in control. Anyway, I learned that a typical page in a novel (adult) has around 440 words. Young Adult books tend have around 300 (and reader, whoever you are, I took the time to count a page out of Hunger Games). Divide my lamentable, paltry sum and I've got about 169 pages. It could be worse I suppose, like the day I find out there are only about three sentence worth keeping in the whole thing. Yeah, lots worse.

I just finished reading Catching Fire, second installment in Hunger Games series. Awesome. If you haven't picked it up, please go do so.

Night.

what goes in...

As I write, I'm uncomfortably aware of how much of what I've dealt with in the past goes into the story. Moments of the more catastrophic of my mistakes, times in which I've brutally mistreated someone, and the awful few days of loneliness that invariably plague me some months come back with such clarity, I end up walking away from the computer in a state of cowardice, feeling unable to capture what I've been through. All of it comes back when I'm writing a scene in which the words I write match what I've felt in the past. I can't see a possible way around it, if indeed my goal is to capture human beings. I'm really not that brave.

I hate these moments of dealing with past emotional junk I've stored underneath my bed. If somehow I've come across like I'm in a wretched mood, I'm really not. What you're seeing is good old-fashioned fear, the likes of which prompt me to want to hide from writing.

Pressing on...

Page count: 224
Word count: 50, 113

in a serious funk...

I went away this weekend to tampa, ran the breast cancer Susan G. Komen race (more like strolled, ambled, sashayed, skipped, and walked, etc) and haven't written since Oct. 1st. I've sat down in front of my computer, looked at where I left off, decided I didn't want to be in that scene, thought about what else I could clean in my apartment, and then went back to the computer (after not cleaning anything). Went to the first scene, realizing that perhaps the beginning would be a good place to start.

It wasn't. But it may be my best chance. How did I get to be so disorganized about this? I had a game plan: finish the first draft. Keep going, get it all down, then break down the novel into sections. Rewrite sections.

I've already gone against the plan. When I go against what I've set out to do, somehow I chalk it up to a slight failure. Not a big one, but just a hiccup level one. I need to get back on track.

Sidenote: I have written tons into my journal (my real life, tangible one). New character developments, new traits, and notes on the next book have all been jotted down for later usage.

There, I'm not a total failure.