Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Also I'm not dead....I promise (or in jail)

I recently got married. Actually, today is my one month anniversary. Why am I writing yet another blog you might ask, instead of celebrating said anniversary with my new husband? We may have been married for only a month, but our six year anniversary is in February...i.e. what's the big deal about a month when we've been together for half a decade. So yea, I'm back from the dead (wedding) and blogging. The last blog, Writers Anti-block I wrote ages ago I just forgot to publish it.

I blame the wedding, everything in my brain that worked remotely well before the wedding shut down while I was planning it. For two months I felt comatose and taken hostage by a wedding date. I will add that the wedding itself was absolutely perfect. Not one thing went wrong. My uncle who did the ceremony was amazing, the cupcakes were great, the food hot and yummy, alcohol a-plenty, and all my family and friends showed up (minus two or three who were legitimately out of the country, sick, or just unable to attend). The wedding was perfect.

Now after the haze has passed and I feel rejuvenated and not dead from the neck up, I have returned from the dead (wedding) ready to write. The blog (the personal and not the book) has suffered. The book one is always suffering. I hardly ever write it. It's just a more professional blog than this one where I frequently whine, cuss, am brass, obnoxious and probably make countless grammatical errors. Hence the reason this one is more fun...I can say FUCK, and not feel guilty! BOOM! Yes that is two completely capitalized words in a row. I just did that. That is why I will always rant here and not on the boring, ho hum overly professional book blog.

I just fell asleep typing that. It's that boring. Ugh, I should just delete it but I feel that if a person (literary agent, publisher, editor, reader, or my mom) were to Google my book and find the blogs, that they would read that one first in the hopes that I appear to be an adult and not a fourteen year old brat girl trapped in a thirty-something body.

Also the jail reference is rather funny. Yesterday the honey (who is still breathing) stole my iPhone. I am pretty sure that in itself is reason enough for divorce, separation, and maybe even death or dismemberment. He stole said phone while I was asleep under the surmise that he had in fact told me while I was drooling on my pillow. Can anyone else spell Asshole, I can, and did upon finding my phone gone. I was in a murderous rage. See the worst part isn't that he took it, and didn't tell me. (To the Honey: telling an unconscious person is not a conversation, just so you know.) It's that I looked, and looked, and looked for my iPhone for hours before I figured out what had happened.

In a blur of cuss words and fantasies of dismemberment, I wrote a Facebook status that went something like:

Walter took my cellphone, I had no intention of going to jail today........sigh.

Simple short, and a little sarcastic like me. Hehe see what I did there. Anyways so my good friend, and best friend, having no idea I was joking, (and they say they know me), commented in worry that I was actually incarcerated and not being ridiculous. I would not actually kill Walter (this is for you future FBI profiler, if anything ever happens to Walter I did not do it. I only joked about it, yes I know that is stupid, and juvenile, see the line above about my being a fourteen year old brat girl trapped in a thirty-something body. end quote).

So to end my rant on all things death and jail, that was my month. A wedding that didn't kill me, a missing iPhone, and a sarcastic not perfectly clear status update that proved yet again that texting and the internet still don't have a sarcasm font. Damn them.



Writers Anti-block

Writers block is an ugly thing. It can take all those wonderful words that have been running in your mind and make them disappear. A split second and months of carefully planned out dialogues and scenarios are gone.

I don't know if all writers do this, the planned scenarios bit, but from all the quotes I've seen on Pinterest about how writers never stop writing, I'd like to believe it's true. I'd like to think we are all these scary obsessive people that can't help but work constantly. It would make me feel a little better anyway. Especially when the honey, or the brats are trying to get my attention and I shush them because I'm busy thinking....thinking about writing...

The only things that I have found that can help with a block, other than a break from writing, is music and research.

Music can help get you in the mood, seriously, and not some cheesy, bow chica wow wow type of mood. But the mood you need to feel in order to get into that one characters head, or that one action sequence. Music helps.

Research, on the other hand, can inspire. Some of my best idea's and block wall climbers have come from research.

When I was working on the Wild Hunt, I went through ups and downs while writing it. I even took a six month long vacation 80,000 words into it. The one problem I kept coming across was the need for a myth. I wanted something substantial and real to back my characters. I knew I wanted Lorelei to see ghosts. I knew she'd experience a world of pain and loss that shaped the damaged individual she became. Knowing those things however, couldn't help me come up with a myth.

Sure, I could have just made something up, but how much cooler is it that I actually found one that fit the story I was trying to tell. Something that could explain her aversion for ties, labels, and restraints of any kind. An aversion that was actually something that gave her real power. A reason to explain her ability to see ghosts, and a tie to the supernatural world.

That's when I found the Cwn Annwn. They were a long awaited blessing in disguise. I had a friend ask me recently if what I wrote was all planned out. My answer, was ineloquent and choppy. Sometimes, but not really.

When I write I let myself imagine the characters in my head. I imagine them in certain scenarios and try to imagine again what they would do, and say while in those scenarios. I think about where I want the story to go and what could happen to get me there.

I swear a majority of what I do is all about the what could happen. The ability to imagine a thousand different scenarios. So when I say that I have anti writers block ideas, what I mean is I have ideas that will help you get writing.

These are not scientific fixes. These are just things that work for me. At the moment I jumped ahead while writing The Otherside, because I was having a hard time moving the story forward, that means I need to get back to the drawing board, and come up with ideas.

Move the story forward.

Sometimes you get lucky, and your characters surprise you. Sometimes you do a mountain of research while listening to Ben Howard's Black Files over, and over again, praying for that one great break, that moment of inspiration.

So turn on your Spotify, and fire up your Google search. Those are by far the two best helpers for writers block that I know.
 
Ben Howard-"Further Away"




"And nobody gives a fuck about you, tell you its a damn shame, prettiest eyes in the whole world, the same fool in the same game."
 
 
"You've been growing up, you've been growing on
Further away, further away."