WOW! Did I find a lot of good stuff on the interwebz last week or what?
That’s the thing with me. Sometimes, I’ll be all over that. Sometimes I won’t. This week, for instance, being on the road, I don’t think will be very productive for the linkage. We shall see.
When I wrote about my first experience hosting a twitterview last month, someone commented, asking what the heck a twitterview was.
Yeah. BIG oversight on my part.
So, here, for your edification, is the long-delayed explanation.
A twitterview is an interview conducted by tweet chat. What’s a tweet chat, you ask?
Tweet chats are when Twitterers, or Tweeps (people on Twitter), get together and chat about a specific topic. They make themselves a virtual meeting room by using a hashtag to mark all of their tweets. Only those participating in the chat and using the hashtag can see all of the tweets, but the followers of each participant get to see all of that participant’s tweets.
This is why it’s so important to use the hashtag consistently. If you don’t, your tweet will not be included in the conversation and will not be replied to. It’s also kind of frustrating to see only half (or less) of a conversation.
In Twitter itself, you can search the hashtag and bring up a list of the most recent tweets using it.
This is what it looks like.
If you want, you can participate in the chat from there, but you will experience some limitations, like the inability to alter tweets when retweeting (RT) or modified tweeting (MT). This can be a pain in the butt.
If you’re comfortable with Hootsuite, you can set up a stream for your hashtag. In the new stream panel at the end of your existing streams, select Twitter, and then the Search button. Enter the hashtag, and voila, you have a stream dedicated to just that hashtag.
You can also use Hootsuite to alter tweets when RTing or MTing, or to schedule tweets for the twitter chat if you’re so inclined.
Also, hashtag rooms can be set up using tweetchat.com (chat must be active to enter room) or tchat.io.
The main benefit of a hashtag chat room is that the hashtag is automatically added to your tweets posted using the chat room service. Very convenient.
If you want a little more information on tweet chats and how to participate in and conduct them, here are a few helpful links:
Or you can Google your own results using the terms twitter party, twitter chat, or tweet chat.
Thus endeth the lesson.
I’m doing this in the hope of encouraging some of the more Twitter-phobic among my followers to give tweet chats and twitterviews a try, especially my upcoming twitterview with book doctor and bestselling author, Roz Morris next Saturday.
That’s Saturday, March 29, 2014 at 2 pm EDST. Use Twitter, Hootsuite, tweetchat.com, or tchat.io to attend, but if on Twitter or Hootsuite, don’t forget the #Mto5 hashtag!
So looking forward to my second twitterview hosting gig. If you like Roz or have read any of her books, please drop by next Saturday. We’re going to be talking about all things Roz 🙂
This afternoon, I attended my fifth Brian Henry workshop.
This one, the third held in Sudbury and hosted by the Sudbury Writers’ Guild, was on “How to make your stories dramatic.”
These workshops are Brian’s bread and butter, so without giving too much of the content away, here are my notes:
The scene is the basic building block of your story.
There are two kinds: the dialogue-based scene, and the action-based scene.
Every scene must have a plot-related point. It must answer the question, “so what?”
Push and pull. The push is the point of view (POV) character’s need. The pull is what the pursuit of the need leads to (promise, twist, decision, new threat, etc.).
Your characters must be interesting. They should be unique, have their own interests, passions, a quirk, backstory (dole it out gradually). If two characters are similar, shoot one.
Readers, sadly, do not remember names.
Your protagonist should be a good “tour guide.”
Every character has her or his own agenda (the scene’s push). It’s better if they are at odds with one another.
Pick your scenes carefully. Show the important stuff. Tell the rest.
Don’t get to the point too quickly.
Scene = hook, hook, and hook.
Ford Madox Ford, “No speech of a character should reply directly to another character.”
Dialogue shouldn’t be smooth.
An action scene consists of set up, action, and wind down.
Set up = setting, background, tone, suspense.
Action = plot, character, relationships.
Wind down = the result, new information, what is gained or lost.
Dialogue is important, even in action scenes.
Make sure it feels exotic (most people don’t spend a lot of time fighting, in chase scenes, etc.)
Use internal monologue to your scene’s best advantage. No long-winded explanations.
You need to have some kind of surprise.
Have more than one thing going on at any one time.
We went through a few examples of dramatic scenes, one from Lawrence Block, one from George R. R. Martin, and one from Bernard Cornwell to look at the variations and interplay of action and dialogue. We also completed a writing exercise, for which I chose a scene (to that point unwritten) from Gerod and the Lions.
Since I’m always trying to learn and improve upon my craft, the workshop brought up a number of bits and pieces that I’ve learned over the years.
Last fall at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, I attended a Diana Gabaldon session where she shared her technique of driving a scene forward by raising questions in the reader, but delaying the answers for as long as possible.
I just finished reading Victoria A. Mixon’s The Art and Craft of Story, in which she describes “holographic structure.” This takes the basic three act structure of hook, development, and climax and breaks it down.
The hook consists of the hook and the first conflict, the development includes (at least) two more conflicts, and the climax consists of the faux resolution and climax.
In fact, breaking it down even further, each of these six elements contains its own six elements.
Thus, the hook part of the hook section contains its own hook, (at least) three conflicts, faux resolution, and climax, as does each of the remaining parts.
If this seems confusing, please read Victoria’s book. She explains it at much more length and much more clearly than I do.
Suffice it to say that the ultimate breakdown is at the scene level, and each scene, in keeping with its overall purpose within the story, has its own hook, three conflicts, faux resolution, and climax.
That’s all the insightful I have for you today, my writerly peeps.
Just so you’ll have this straight, Tipsday is for writing-related finds and Thoughty Thursday will be for other interesting stuff. It’ll be a mix of science articles, health articles, and other stuff that might be cool for inspiration or research. Info of the public service announcement variety may appear here as well (I have my causes). Occasionally, there might be a music or other fun video in there, ‘cause you know, we all love the YouTube 😉
Oh, and BTW, happy spring, though up here in Sudbury, we’ve just had 10-15 cm of snow 😦 This is what the first day of spring looks like up here:
David Brin shared this next amazing blog post and video.
Mr. Science, A.K.A. the hubbie, informs me that the ribosome moves around far more chaotically, directed by something called Brownian motion and bumps into the transfer molecules until it finds the one it needs for the sequence.
Still, this is supposed to be “real time,” so imagine how quickly everything is moving about in the stew that is you 😉
Clara Hughes, multi-Olympic gold medal winner in both summer and winter Olympics embarks on her latest journey to bring awareness to the issue of mental health. I admire this woman so much.
The overwhelmed employee is foreseen as one of the new crises of the modern workplace. This is hard, researchy stuff, but it’s actually pretty fascinating. From the day-job file.
Though I had all of one respondent to my poll at the end of last month, I’m going ahead and curating for you.
Part 5 of K.M. Weiland’s Creating Stunning Character Arcs series. You can follow from the beginning, Katie is always good about posting the links to all that has gone before.
You’ll see some regulars here from week to week. I read a lot more bloggage than I’ve shared here and I’ve even gotten some good material out of a lot of it, but I’m only gathering up the material that spoke to me enough to share on the interwebz.
First, I headed down to Mississauga (second of three trips for the day-job this month) on Monday. Since I had full travel days (Monday and Thursday) this week, I was able to travel in a more leisurely fashion.
My mission: to co-facilitate the Business Writing Made Easy course (my seventh time with that particular curriculum) with one of my colleagues.
Monday afternoon was spent preparing the room and testing our technology. There were a few tense moments. There was a TV in the room, and we attempted to hook it up as the monitor for the lap top so we could use it to show the slides for the course. It didn’t work.
So we brought the good old SMART Board into the room, and while not able to achieve full connectivity (some of the cables were missing) we were able to use it as a basic projection screen. Good enough.
My colleague was preparing for her own trainer certification. At this time, our employer’s internal college is getting out of the certification biz, however, and so she had to record a full day’s training, edit it down to four hours, and demonstrate the eighteen trainer competencies.
This would mean that I couldn’t be in the classroom, though, because to have a co-facilitator in the room would have invalidated her certification.
So what would I do? Due to another colleague’s absence, I was able to set up at her workstation, but there wouldn’t be a lot of work I could do.
The day ended, and I had to leave ends a little loose for the time being.
That evening, I tried to connect to the interwebz through my hotel’s wi-fi. It wouldn’t even let me have multiple windows open (that’s how I manage my SoMe). So that meant dependence on my smart(er than me) phone for SoMe for the week and actual productive writing time.
This was a boon in disguise. I quickly accepted it for the gift it was.
That night, I realized that my colleague and I would be co-facilitating Business Writing Made Easy again at the end of this month (my third trip of three) and that she could record her session again there. In the morning, I proposed that I observe her and give her some tips for the end of the month, then jump in on day two.
This was an agreeable plan and so we proceeded.
There was a little panic (actually ongoing) because we were uncertain whether the course at month’s end would be approved.
The video tapes (yes, it was an old camcorder) ran out before half the day’s training was finished. We weren’t sure if my colleague would have enough footage to even make up the four hours she would need to submit.
Regardless, that night we went out to celebrate and enjoyed Korean BBQ, a first for both of us. You cook your own food, right at the table, and it’s a la carte, so you just keep ordering as long as you’re hungry. It was very tasty.
The next day, a snow storm blew in. The course finished well—the grammar module is my favourite—and my colleague had figured out how to transfer her video to digital so she could edit. So she had a possibility of moving forward with her certification video even if it turned out we couldn’t co-facilitate again.
I had a quiet night, writing away, and finished editing my NaNoWriMo novel. I just have to fill the ending out a little more now. We have denoue- but need a little more -ment.
The drive home on Thursday was terrible, largely because of the previous day’s snow storm.
It took me an hour and a half to travel a distance I normally would in about fifteen minutes, even with traffic. Then I got off the highway and travelled a little more indirectly to bypass the closed lane I assumed was the reason we couldn’t travel more than 10 km/h.
Once past that bit, I was fine, but I didn’t get back into Sudbury until about 3:30 pm.
When I got home, I noticed I had received a lovely email from R. Leigh Hennig of Bastion Science Fiction Magazine. They would like one of my stories for an issue later this year. W00t!
I have to back track just a bit. I submitted my story on March 1st. There was originally a deadline of February 28, but when I went to check on the web site, I noticed the date had been removed and that Bastion was now accepting submissions on a rotating basis, with issues filling up fast.
I decided to take the extra day to polish, and I’m glad I did.
When I was in Mississauga the week before last (first trip of three), I received an email that my submission would be brought forward for discussion with the editorial team. I was cautiously optimistic. Hell, I was all alone in my hotel room doing the happy dance.
And yes, I was dancing again on Thursday night, to Phil’s delight, when I received the second email confirming Bastion’s interest.
In fact, while I’m not one to too my own horn (it makes me distinctly uncomfortable), I have to share the following: “After some careful deliberation on this piece with the rest of the staff, we’ve decided that it would be a crime not to publish this.”
Oh. My. God.
Mellie was a wiggle-puppy.
Please donate (find the link on their About page) to support this wonderful new magazine.
It was back to work on Friday, and I forgot my phone, which meant no keeping up with email or SoMe or my reading during the day.
Then it was over to my friend Kim’s for home-made chilli and much writerly talk with Kim and a new (to me) friend, Violet. There was wine. I had to drink tea to sober up before the drive home and I ended up getting home after 11 pm when I finally caught up on email and SoMe.
Connecting to like-minded, creative souls is an important part of a writer’s life. It was wonderful, even if I didn’t get to write.
Saturday morning was cranberry bread French toast with Mom, a quick clean up of the house, and then an afternoon of shopping while Nuala went for her spa day (grooming) at Petsmart. After ordering out pizza for supper, I hosted a couple of friends from out of town.
It was another night of great conversation, though accompanied by coffee and oatmeal cookies instead of wine.
Unfortunately, that meant I was unable to meet a writing deadline. I was hoping to submit to the Northwestern Ontario Writers’ Workshop (NOWW) because the judge for the speculative fiction category is none other than Robert J. Sawyer. I would have loved to get something in front of his wise eyes.
I wouldn’t have given up my time with my friends for anything though. So, I’ll have to look for other opportunities.
So it’s been a week of ups and downs, but more ups than downs. It’s been a good week. And now I’m looking forward to a week off so I can recuperate and prepare for my next business trip.
How about you? How has your week played out? Let me know in the comments below.
March will be a busy month for me. I was out of town this past week for training, and will be heading out again tomorrow and for the last week of March.
Though I was happy to have the opportunity to pilot the training I worked on for most of February, I noticed something while I was away last week.
I was exhausted.
I didn’t have the energy to write in the evenings. I didn’t sleep well.
I know a lot of trainers who travel frequently, and many of them take sleeping pills. I can’t. I tried at one point, but couldn’t take the side effects. I’m not fond of the side effects of most medications, but that’s another story.
I used to really enjoy the opportunity to travel for training. I’d get my work done during the day, go out with class members or co-facilitators in the evenings, and still manage a decent day’s writing.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed that I just can’t do it anymore. I can only pack so much into a day. Or an evening.
Last night, my mother-in-law commented how the circles under my eyes look so much more pronounced than usual.
Feeling old, with the grey hair, wrinkles, and dark circles to prove it 😛
It’s a family trait, but I do look more bruised when I’m tired.
I’ve never been one to have those traumatic, age-related realizations that others have.
At 20: I’m not a kid anymore.
At 25: I’m a quarter century old!
At 30: My baby-making days are numbered (for women only).
At 40: I’ve lived half my life at this point, and what have I to show for it?
I’ve not hit the big five oh yet, so I can’t go any further than that, but I’ve never felt any of that age angst that friends have reported. And mostly, it is women. At least, I rarely hear of a man complaining about his age.
Aches and pains, yes. Age angst, no.
I’ve always felt young, relatively speaking. I may have felt fat, or prematurely winded because of smoking, but neither of those are age-specific complaints.
This past year, however, I have been feeling increasingly old. O.L.D.
It’s interesting more than distressing, but it’s also inconvenient. I need to write. It’s not an option anymore, and when I can’t write, I feel legitimately crappy. If I can’t write because I’m feeling crappy to begin with, that only makes me feel worse.
This can result in a negative spiral that leads to burn out and depression. I know those two feelings. I need to manage them carefully.
I just have to remind myself that I am enough, that I’ve done enough this day, and that it’s been a good day, because in most cases, it’s true.
We can only do what we can do. We can get back on the horse the next day and rock it.
How about you, my writerly friends? It doesn’t have to be age, but life has this habit of happening while we’re making other plans. Are there things over which you have no control that complicate your life? How do you cope?
As I mentioned yesterday, this winter has gotten me a bit down, and as a result I have not written as much as I would have liked to this month. There were some nights that I didn’t manage to write anything at all.
With the increasing light, however, I’ve started to feel better and I’ve gotten back on that horse.
So here’s what February looked like for me as a writer.
As with last month, I continued working on a project each week, plus blogging on the weekends. I don’t think I’ve stayed with the strategy long enough for significant results, either negative or positive, yet, so I will stick with it for the foreseeable.
Once more, I wrote the most words for my blog, 6303 to be exact. I’m still good with this. Most of my projects are revision at the moment and new words are sometimes hard to come by, particularly when you end up cutting scads of words rather than writing more.
Also, I attended WANAcon last weekend and, as Kristen Lamb said in her Blogging for Writers session, blogging teaches you to ship. That means you learn to pump out quality material on a schedule. It teaches discipline. I’ll have a bit more on the blog later in this post.
The next highest total was for my short stories at 1835 words. I have finished working with On Spec editor Barb Galler-Smith of the final revisions for my story “Downtime” and they have been submitted to the magazine. At this stage, we’re looking at the fall 2014 issue, most likely, but I should be getting confirmation on that in the future.
I also finished revising another short story for submission to Bastion Magazine, which I sent off yesterday. There’s nothing that feels quite as good as that combination of finishing and submitting.
In other short story news, I was once again rejected by Writers of the Future. I’m still waiting on tenterhooks to hear about my submissions to Tesseracts 18. I’ve been trying to get into that anthology for years.
Next up is the Northwestern Ontario Writers’ Workshop contest in which I will be submitting another speculative fiction piece. The judge for the category is Robert J. Sawyer (!) I’m bloody excited about that one too.
After short stories was my MG fantasy, Gerod and the Lions, with 1296 words. Last month, I pushed past what I had previously written and it’s all new words from here on out. Though I have a rough outline, the writing is proving a little daunting at this stage.
I’m blaming it on my winter funk.
Figments, my YA urban, came in next at 308 words, and Apprentice of Wind rounded things out with a scant 47. Both of these projects are of the revision category and most of the work I’m doing on AoW is structural and cut-work. With Figments, I’m filling in some of the gaps.
My Figments week was the week I had missed the most evenings of writing (3). It was also the week I started writing a course for work and it took me a while to learn how to conserve some of my writerly energies for my personal creative endeavours.
My total word-count for the month was 7954. I’m still pleased with that, even though it’s a lower total than January’s. If all of this year’s writing was focused on a single project, I’d be a third of the way to a finished draft. I don’t think that’s too shabby for a writer with a day job.
I still haven’t heard back from all of my beta readers, so I haven’t dug into the next round of revisions on Initiate of Stone at this point.
In other writerly news, I’ve reserved my accommodations for all of the conferences I’m attending this year. I’ll wait a bit before booking my flight for When Words Collide in August. I’m still struggling to pay down my Visa from Surrey and this year’s conference registration fees.
I have done some research and have identified 50 agents that I can start querying. I’m also watching Chuck Sambuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents site and Brian’s Henry’s Quick Brown Fox for agent news. I have a free year on Writer’s Market online to cash in and will also be using that tool to amend my list.
I’m going to wait until I get IoS revised one more time before I start into that process in earnest. By then, I should have a much more solid draft of AoW to work with, be mostly finished Figments, and well into GatL.
I have assessed my life and skill set and have decided to aim for a traditional deal first. If that does not materialize, I’m going to move on to self-publishing, but I will do so reluctantly. Perhaps if I wasn’t working full time it would be a better possibility, but right now I’m doing all I can just to write.
I have become involved in the M2the5th Google Plus community, however. I blogged about my first outing as Twitterview host last weekend. My next event will be with Roz Morris on Saturday March 29 at 2 pm EDST.
As a lead up to the Twitterview, March has been declared Roz Morris month on M2the5th. Please join us to read and share our thoughts on Roz’s blog, books, and general brilliance (more details available in the community).
As I mentioned in my post on the conference, WANAcon was great. It got me thinking in all kinds of ways. A lot of it centered on my web site/blog.
I’ve been thinking about a site revamp for more than a year now and I just can’t get around to taking action on it. I’ve been slowly reviewing my past blog posts, but because I’m on WordPress.com, I just can find a free template that’s any better than the one I have now.
I’ve decided that I’m not going to make the move to self-hosted WordPress until I have made more progress toward publication. Though I received my first comment on my CV this past week, and it was complimentary, I don’t think my accomplishments to date are sufficient to impress an agent or publisher in this day and state of the publishing industry.
When I do make the transition, however, I’m going to invest in a designer and an author-focused hosting service.
Finally, I’m considering expanding my blogging schedule again. I’m thinking of including a couple of curation posts. Tuesday Tipsday will focus on writer’s resources and blog posts that I’ve discovered through the week. Thoughty Thursday will feature articles that don’t directly relate to writing, but that might provide some interesting research or blog-fodder for others.
My thinking is that curation posts based on my activities elsewhere in social media will be fairly simple to pull together and may provide some added benefits for those of you who do not follow me elsewhere.
Please see the poll at the end of this post if you think these additional curation posts would be worthwhile for you.
Coming up on Writerly Goodness: I’m going to be piloting the course I wrote this coming week. You know I’ll be blogging that 🙂 March will also see Brian Henry return to Sudbury for another workshop. I always get something worthwhile out of Brian’s sessions.
This winter has been a challenging one pretty much everywhere this year. Though we’ve only broken a couple of records in the cold temperature category, I don’t think we’ve broken any for snowfall, which feels strange to me, because we’ve had more snow this winter than we have in … well a lot of years.
They say we have global warming to thank for all of this, but that seems counterintuitive to me. This whole winter has been alternating snow and freezing temperatures. It even snowed as far south as New Orleans. New York and the Maritime Provinces have been repeatedly slammed. Our weather certainly is messed up this year.
Winter has always been a difficult season for me. As a person with depression, the seasonal reduction of daylight combined with the number of overcast days makes me prone to seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
I’m more tired than usual, and I’m tired most of the time. I just want to hibernate.
It’s a struggle to remain productive, both at work and in my writing life. I miss more days of writing in the winter than I do at other times of the year, which distresses me. It’s more difficult to feel enthusiastic about things, even things that I enjoy. I have to fake it until I make it.
I also eat more and am less active in the winter. I gain weight. Fortunately, this doesn’t distress me so much, but it can lower my self-esteem.
I feel like I’m falling behind. There aren’t enough hours in a day. Everything seems to take longer to do.
The light is returning, though. We’re in March and only weeks away from the Spring Equinox. I’m starting to feel better already.
It’s frustrating that we still follow it. I call it self-imposed jet lag. Just as I’m beginning to feel better because of the increased daylight, we leap forward an hour, plunging my mornings back into darkness. It’s once more a challenge to get out of bed and start my day.
Plus I lose an hour and that messes with my already fragile circadian rhythm. Insomnia abounds.
It can take me days, sometimes weeks to recover.
The claim is that DST saves energy from the use of incandescent lighting and has economic benefits in the summer because of increased retail, sporting events, and other activities that can more easily be conducted in the evenings due to the shifted hour.
I really don’t see it. We use lights when it’s dark regardless of whether it’s dark in the morning, evening, or both. We’d take advantage of the daylight regardless.
I can’t change legislation, though. So for now, I must simply deal.
What about you? Do you get SAD in the winter? Has this winter’s wonky weather patterns got you down? Do you see the point of DST, or does it bother you? Do you even have to deal with DST where you live?
Pinterest boards for writers. Do they inspire you? They inspired me to join Pinterest (finally).
Always Looking Up 