Archive for January, 2011

There’s an owl in my tea

12
January
2011

Actually, there isn’t, yet, but there very soon could be… Aren’t these hidden animal teacups adorable?

Hidden Animal Teacups
(Found via My Owl Barn)

And that owl cup would make an excellent carrot for reaching 20K on the current project. (No, I am not above self-bribery when it comes to writing. Especially at the beginning.)

Because I am in a drafting fog, with not enough brain to put together something more coherent, here are a few other tidbits:

~Yesterday at my day job (I design software to turn globes into maps. Yes, it involves MATH. Fortunately I love geometry!) I misread something referring to the somethingtechnical methodology as the somethingtechnical mythology. Which would probably require something a lot stronger than an if/else statement to implement.

~Hey, don’t steal books! Saundra Mitchell lays out exactly how book piracy has hurt her, and other authors, personally. Remember, libraries are your friend!

~Here’s a nifty 12-point plan to be a creative badass, by author Justine Musk (thanks to Stephanie Burgis for the link!). I especially like #11, Get Open. A good reminder to open myself up to whatever the universe sends me. As a historically shy person who can be a closed-up creature of habit, I do need to actively *practice* being open to new experiences. This is probably worth an entire blog post, about Zumba and LARPing and finding ways to let oneself go deeper into one’s fictional world. Will have to ponder this more…

~Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Pancake mix is delicious! But also, sadly, seasonal.

~We adopted our dog Charlie three years ago today. He’s the best dog! And he keeps us moving…
Charlie loves to run

Dogs make life look so fun, don’t they?

Small Steps

10
January
2011

I can forget, sometimes, how different the entire world feels when I’m writing regularly. How just making a tiny bit of forward progress every day can make everything feel full of promise and possibilities.

And yet I do forget, and I fritter my writing time away. Some of it on useful things (say, baking banana bread), some of it on fun things (look, someone built an Antikythera mechanism out of legos!) and some on pointless and/or self-destructive things (hello, Amazon rankings).

So on Jan 1 I did something slightly desperate and unplugged the wifi when I got up. Then I sat down and started my new project.

It was still tough. I hadn’t tried to write in a few weeks, and before that I’d been struggling with false starts. I wrestled with that blank screen for three hours, writing and deleting different openings. But finally, finally, I found a sentence I liked, and it led to another and another. And an hour after that I had a 600 word beginning. It didn’t feel anything like a book. It didn’t even feel like the dream of a possible one-day-maybe book. But it was a step forward.

Ten days later, my wordcount just hit 10019.

It’s finally starting to feel like it could really be a book. You know, if I can do this all over again, seven more times. Heh.

So good luck to anyone else out there taking small steps! You can do it!

On an only tangentially related note, here’s a quote I saw on twitter today that resonated very strongly:

The side of me which longs, not to write, but to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. ~ C.S. Lewis

And last of all, hooray for all the winners of the ALA Youth Media Awards! I’m especially excited to see a sci fi book win the Printz (Ship Breaker by Bacigalupi)!