"Dialogue"

Who would have thought that one of the most natural things we do in life is going to be what drives me mad as a writer.

Dialogue… Ugh!

The human is race is constantly speaking to one another, even if in the simplest fashion as a “Hi, how are you?”

So why is it that I seem to be having the most brutal time having two of my characters talk to each other? I stare at the computer screen just wishing that my Fairy Godmother will pop in and beat me over the head, hopefully knocking me unconscious, with her magic wand. Then use a little of that magic to write the dialogue for me.

Is that really too much to ask?

Well since it hasn’t happened yet, I have had to resort to finding assistance in other ways. I had a BPL meeting on Sunday, the first one I have been to in a month. Boy life gets busy. Anyways, so I brought my personal mountain size obstacle to the table for discussion and received some pretty sound advice.

Take a tape recorder and go to a few high school football games or go to the mall food court and people watch/listen to.

Luckily for me school has just started which means football games are just around the corner. I am going to tackle that one first to see what I can come up with and maybe, just maybe I can get out of going to the mall. Even saying that word gives me small goose pimples.

I just hope no one notices me carrying around a tape recorder, eavesdropping in on their conversations. That would definitely make for an awkward exchange in itself.

Go Back!

It has been almost a month since my last post. And here I had promised myself to be more on top of my blog and writing. Am I allowed to be mad at myself for breaking my own promise?
Um, that would be a negative. People might think I am loony, well more so than normal.

My day to day life has been so hectic; it felt as though my head was spinning like in the Exorcist. But for the present time, the chaotic has reached a plateau and I have attempted to write again. Yay!

Except for one small, itty bitty problem…

I jumped all the way to the ending of my WIP. I am only 2/3rd’s done with this piece and I just skipped ahead. (oops!) Okay, well since I wrote the ending, technically I am now 3/4th’s done now… Right?

Anyways, I was lying in bed the other night and my thoughts were reeling trying to jump back into Mady’s life and it hit me square in the brain. I had the perfect ending twist to my story. It has been screaming at me from day one, why hadn’t I thought of it sooner?

All of the final scenes came to life and acted out in the exhausted movie screen of my mind. It all played out so perfectly in my head I had to get it out. I powered up my laptop and of course it took a sick day and shut back down on me. (Maybe I should look into replacing the darn thing.) So I went back to basics.

I grabbed a pen and my notebook then wrote until my wrist ached and I couldn’t form another legible word on the paper.

Then the next day, I was hit in the brain with another almost brilliant idea.

There is this one scene that I have now caused a fork in Mady’s road. The only problem is… I already went left and right now my brain is screaming Go back! Take a right instead!

So what do I do? Do I leave it how it is written and trudge through as is and make drastic changes later. Do I go back and reroute her decision on that one night causing a six chapter rewrite up to the present (where I left off before jumping ahead to the very end.). Or option three, leave it as is?

Oh decisions, decisions.

A Parody

I am a member of an Author’s online writer’s workshop. Every so often she gives us challenges and assignments to keep us on our toes in our writing and try pushing us to do more than we normally would.

Well the newest challenge starts today. We are to step out of our comfort zone; i.e. writing, reading, read something we normally wouldn’t or write something we wouldn’t normally. Then for the next five weeks, write 500 words a day, five days a week.

I think I can handle this challenge, it seems manageable enough for me. I hope.

I started off by getting a book that is definitely out of my norm. It's a Parody of a popular Young Adult series. When I picked it up and read the back I knew it was going to be silly, that is the whole point right? But I assumed it would be a funny stupid.

This book is not a funny stupid. It is, by far, a ridiculous stupid. 151 pages of absolutely painful ludicrous words, and I am only 77 pages into it. The price of this book is $13.95 and I am just thankful that I borrowed it instead of spending actual money on this absurd waste of a tree. Poor tree. I would be pissed if I would have even wasted Monopoly money on this thing.

I get that Parody’s are meant to be mocking. But being a published item, it should have at least been edited to a better degree. Missing punctuation, ill grammar, sentences that jump to and fro that make you go what the heck just happened?

Okay, Okay, enough gripping about it, sorry. So my first shot of stepping out of my box was a failure, but I will not let it deter me in continuing out of my comfort area.

Now I’m off to my 500 words, till next time.

Back Up Plan

The rule of thumb is to have back up to your writing. Do not just keep one copy of anything.

I have had a near heart stopping experience when my laptop went out on me and I thought I had lost EVERYTHING because I had only saved my work on the laptop. (You might remember that posting labeled Not So Funny posted on 01-27-10)

After that night I made sure I had several back up plans to anything I was working on. I went out and purchased my very first flash drive (Yes I have been behind in the times, I have been told that I need to join the new millennium.) and I saved everything I had onto this flash drive.

Then to back up THAT plan I started emailing myself at work and keeping a file there, just in case. On top of that I opened a strictly writing email account, one that only holds emailed copies of my work as I finish each writing night.

So I thought I was good to go, I took ALL precautions possible. Right?

Well what in the world do you do when your flash drive crashes in the midst of writing and you hadn’t had a chance to go through your twenty minute saving process?
I’ll tell you what you do… You call your husband crying in the hopes he can whip out some magic over the phone powers for you.

After he tells you to calm down – Don’t you hate it when someone says “Calm down, it will be okay” when in fact it is not okay? – You hang up and curse him to the pits of Hell. Even though you know it is not his fault your electronics hate you so much.

Then you growl at the blasted computer and go take a nice long bath and read a good book. Well, this is what I did last night.

Luckily for me, my husband is a freaking genius and managed to pull apart my newest enemy, saving everything onto his own laptop. So I didn’t lose anything this time.

But how do we solve major/minor problems such as these? Am I going to have to stop every few minutes and save my WIP in ten different areas so I won’t have to feel the gripping fear of losing anything again? At what point am I spending more time fretting over if it is saved or not than I am writing the actual story? Even now writing this post I have saved it seven times…

Maybe the real problem is me, appliances and electronics just do not care for my presence.