Fall Notebooks

 

Writing is lots of hard work. Reading and Studying is too. I bought these and 3 dozen Traveler's notebooks for organization. Everyone knows I love flowers.

Wildflower Explosion.

 

 Images © Lucia Leyfield 

This is something I want to do. Nature journaling and doing watercolors of my flowers from my garden. I started one a few years back but got distracted by life. This time I have planned better. I have already purchased lots of watercolors, etc. But I just love how Lucia Leyfield designed her pages. She has a website, and is on IG if anyone is interested. I first saw this image on Twitter. No one knew who the artist was and then they made a search. I had too, but I did not see all of Leyfield's page due to time and circumstances, so I missed this entry on her workshop. One can buy it to learn and paint along.

Roman History Notes

 Written by Titus Ursus, Primus pilus of Legiō IX Hispana, in the third year of Hadrian's reign (*120 AD). 

"This will probably be the last papyrus and my last note. Our legion was ambushed in the wild realm called Caledonian Forest and was almost completely annihilated. Half of my first cohort is all that was left of the IX legiō. We were pushed into the marsh and we will probably die here, fighting bravely to the end in the name of Rome and the Emperor. We were attacked by a demonic pack of the barbaric Picts. They looked more like wild beasts than humans. Some of them were dressed in animal furs, painted with strange runic signs... others seemed to be two-legged wild beasts. They tore us apart as if we were made of paper! I saw our legatus and my brothers in arms being eaten alive, I will never forget their screams. The barbarians attacked us unnoticed, quickly and with wild fury, then disappeared in the fog. Mainly at night. Our shields, swords and armor were no use here. The enemy we face seems to be the ancient wrath of some dark gods we have awakened. We should never invade these lands. I hear demonic howls, they're coming! They're coming!" ⠀

Beautiful writing is...

“Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers’ minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader’s mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme.”
           ― Donald Maass

I am alive . Good night.

 

Good night. 

I am still alive.

So grateful

That I can even smile.

I am here. 

What do I love?

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
              ― Katherine Mansfield

YUNGBLUD - I Was Made For Lovin’ You (from The Fall Guy)

Added to the writing soundtrack. I love this cover of Kisses' song. So good.

Cleaning upi and making a routine

One can't really understand the stress I have been under due to illness and also predicament. For example, I had a medication adjustment by my personal physician which finally put me in the ER two days before my June 1 birthday. Then I was gardening on June 11th and some insect bit me and I got severe hives, angiodema, and a rash, which after two weeks put me in an Urgent Care clinic so I could get steroids. I stopped up my bathtub drain with repeated oatmeal baths. Laughing. Before that was over, a young girl I knew (22), (TRAGIC) who was indigent, committed suicide, and weeks later after being on life support, donating her organs, and being put in the county morgue, her family didn't have the money to bury her so I paid to have her cremated to keep her out of a pauper's grave. That was May and June and part of July. What a nightmare.

On top of that my writing coach and I decided I needed to change the setting of my story and create a more complex fantasy feel while keeping the found family dynamics. This means major rewriting. REWRITING. After yesterday, with all the political nightmares, I decided I needed a break from everything. 

So I am reading some genre fantasies, so I can immerse myself in a wonderful and complex worlds and maybe learn something from the experience while being entertained. I am going to break from social media while I read with exception to posting comments on the book. I just can't take it anymore. I need to clean up all my writing and work rooms, three of them and then develop a routine. One can't write what I need to without a routine.

And my son made me some sausage pinwheels because he knows I am unhappy. Food helps.  

This entire year has been strange and full of challenges.

"It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff..." — Mark Twain (Elizabeth Donaldson 2002-2024)

Elizabeth, in my opinion, died on June 23, but was put on life support in order to be a donor.

WIP Day 2-4 Revision Notes

 

   I've had some busy days working out the reverse outline and making notes and deciding what is to be done on the WIP. I will never do another NaNo project in my life. Laughing. It's messy and ridiculous and while it gave me a great idea, well, we know what they say about ideas. They are a dime a dozen. It's not a book. It doesn't look like a book because I have torn it to pieces. Think of it as a cake that is just a wish and all the ingredients are sitting on the kitchen counter but the bowl is empty and the oven is still cold. I had to stop, take a deep breath and make a list of how to approach it all because there is so much good material and so much bad material and yes, as I wrote earlier in the year, before illness overtook me, I am really rewriting the book. 

That's okay. I have done that many times. It's been long established that writing is rewriting. That's not an issue for me at all right now. The issue is what to put in the bowl. What kind of cake am I making. With a little help from a friend, I managed to organize how to approach this kitchen counter covered with ingredients and decide what to throw away and what to keep and if I wanted to reimagine the story in a few other ways. I did.

A reverse outline is a masterful way to look at your story when you know it's too long, has too many characters, and maybe even too much plot. I was taught this method, with a few special details by my first literary agent. She's long gone now, and if she were alive, I might have called her and cried a little. When Alice went. through the Looking Glass, the world was reversed. Nothing made any sense and she encountered lots of nonsense, including that wonderful poem, Jabberwocky. But Carroll was very logical and mathematical and in this sequel to Alice in Wonderland, he approached some clever ideas. It's my favorite of the two books, the one I reread over and over.

So I am baking a cake. Only I have to get everything proper together or I will end up with nonsense, once again.

How I came to realize what to do with the book, you know, what kind of cake it is, well I made lists of books I loved, books I have reread over and over, and all the things I loved about those books. Then I made lists of my gifts and weaknesses as a writer and followed that with lists of the things I felt were really wrong with the book and had been since Day One of NaNo. I got very cold and logical. I put away my feelings at times, because this time next year I want to be completely finished with this project. Since this is my revision draft, I am guessing it will take me six months to put all the right ingredients together and another six months to polish and edit it. If I am lucky....I've been so ill this year, I just hate to make predictions on what life will bring me.

But this is the plan.

One thing big changed. This is now a Historical Fantasy. I have completely changed the setting. This was the boldest thing I have ever done when revising a draft. I feel good about this for many reasons. 

Second big change. I am writing a full outline and doing character sheets, something I always did when working previously but not done on this NaNo draft.

And the one before....

And the one before....

And that is why I do not have a finished book. NEVER AGAIN will I be in this mess. Unlike Alice, I know exactly where I am going this time around.

Art work by John Tenniel from Through the Looking Glass.

RIGHT NOW I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT THE DETAILS, THE WAY FORWARD, AND THE MECHANICS OF IT. HOW TO DO IT.

July WIP Day 1

 

Due to life, (laughing) I am behind schedule on the WIP and will have to work all July to catch up with work. Work. Work. Work. So the other day, I decided to make a schedule of what needed to be done first. I can't believe this year. I was writing so well, until the middle of March and since then I have been ill every month with something different, the last being bitten by some unknown insect while gardening (ants are suspected) and I've had serious hives and rashes since June 12th. It's hard to accept that this happened, but I still am taking medication for persistent hives right now. Now I have to get back on track. I started last Friday, looking and reading the work and making decisions on what I needed to do and in what order. I feel shaky coming back into this 2023 Nano Project but better late than never. I've hardly written a word for three months. Scary. I just want to make this note on the blog, because it's an important day for me. Making a renewed commitment to the work.