A little bit of this and…

….a little bit of that. I think I’ve used this title before. Hmm…

Anyway, I wanted to let you know about a few things. First of all, the look of my site will be changing. My husband’s company FrogSlayer Software is designing webpages now, so they made a custom skin for my wordpress site. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.

Second, I’m starting a new writing group here in College Station. I love my Houston group to death, but needs must and all. Anyway, if you know anyone near Bryan/College Station who is looking for a group, leave me a note in the comments and I’ll give you the details.

Did you all remember that I post every Wednesday on Fansci? Just thought I’d give you a reminder. ^_~ I’ll be linking to that from now on…sigh, when I remember.

I’m racing through my new project now. I think I’ve hit my stride. Looking forward to editing in early May and then the writing conference in late May.

Is everyone as busy a bee as I am? Whew! sometimes I forget what it’s like to slow down.

Y’all aren’t from around here, are ya?

I’m using a surprising amount of dialect in my current project. Why surprising? Because dialect usually pisses me off. I’ve seen it so thick in some books that it becomes hard to parse, sort of like the story was written by lolcats.

However, sometimes the level of dialect can be just right as with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. That’s more of the direction I’m aiming for. I’ve used dialect in dialogue before, but now I’m slipping it into the narrative, too.

Take the following sentence from my project: “If a body stopped in the night on the side of the road and had to get out to do…whatever, he turned the radio down before he did.” I wouldn’t normally use that “body,” but I slipped it in for a sense of dialect, just to make the tone more country.

Eh, I’m still not sure if I like it. I’m afraid that as I gain momentum with my project, hurtling toward the finish line as it were, I’m dropping my dialect in my narrative, but keeping it in dialogue. Nothing to say I can’t inject it as needed later, much like I do with description, another aspect of story-telling that gets lost as I hurry to finish a first draft while I’m still “feeling it.”

What about you? Pro dialect? Or do you like your narrative told in a more neutral style? What do you leave out of your first drafts that you know you’ll have to amp up later?

Should have learned a lesson from Nanowrimo

I’ve been agonizing over my new project. I know I’ve been dragging my feet on it, trying to pull out of the writing slump that attacked me in February. I’m slowly but surely coming out. I wrote over 3500 words yesterday and I hope to do just as well if not better today. I want to get the entire draft done by the end of April, you see, the better to spend May editing. And as I watched my word count go up yesterday, I still thought, “I’m never going to make it in time.”

Rubbish. Have I learned nothing from Nanowrimo? Or even of my other writing experience for that matter? I shouldn’t be looking at projects as a whole. I should be taking them bit by bit, word by word. I took what I had written, subtracted that from my word goal for my first draft and then divided that by the days I had left. Know what I found out? C’mon, have a guess.

Just over a 1000 words a day. Just over a thousand. Not even up to nano totals (1667) a day. I can blow that out of the water. I can do it in my sleep. I knocked over nano in two weeks before. Needless to say (too late) I’m feeling positive about my word count total now and just thought I would share that with you. It’s almost never as bad as you think. ^_^

Did something you were recently dreading turn out for the better? Or did you take a turn for the worse? If so, you have my sympathy. I’ll bake you a cake.

The small press march continues

I submitted to another small press today. Blurgh. I’ve almost gotten to the point where I can say that in the same tone of voice as, “I went to the bank today,” or “I’m off to buy some throw pillows.” There’s hope, resignation and a sense of the everyday about the whole thing. I can’t say I get the exact same mishmash of feelings about throw pillows, though.

I’m doing pretty good on my current project. Spending most of yesterday at IHOP eating waffles and writing helped a lot. I’m definitely going out somewhere again this week to see if I can keep my roll going.

As for pen displays, I haven’t started trying to make a wall display yet. You all had some excellent suggestions, and I think the one that I might try first are those foam shapes that you buy at hobby stores. From what I’ve seen they, have all sorts of shapes and I could paint them and then mash pens down into them. I’d have to figure out how to hang them on the wall….

What’s taking up all your recent time?