Posts Tagged ‘Writing’
By Belynda, August 20th, 2009 in Other | 1 Comment
Tags: "Ristening", 100 Classics Challenge, audiobooks, challenges, GoodReads, Reading, Writing
This year, I decided to do away with that dogshit resolution everyone makes about eating right and getting in shape, and decided to spend my time in a more constructive way.
I got some pretty serious heckling about the fact that I never found time to read. Between a full time job and three college classes at night, I didn’t really feel like doing anything but watching television and sleeping. But as someone who really does love to read (unfortunately I can’t do it three or four pages at a time on the can ::ahem!::), I took heckling to heart, and started picking up some audio-books** to occupy the spare minutes in my day (driving, groceries, laundry and the like.)
**Side note: The audiobooks of course then sparked the now-legendary debate of what is technically “reading”… if I’m allowed to say I “read” a book a listened to… issues of academic snobbery… and of course Beth’s clever compromise of calling it “Ristening” (ever the diplomat!) Nothing’s ever easy, is it? But whatever, I took the NEW heckling and used Ed’s guilt at having teased me to open an Audible.com account. I win 
So in January, I decided instead of promising myself that I was going to go to the gym three times a week and eat ridiculous salads and only drink, I was going to read/listen to a book a week. 52 books in a year, to make up for the paltry 13 from the year before. I was already off to a good start: When I left my job at the end of July 2008, I never turned on the television while I was home. I was finishing/editing a book at the time, and found that the best use of the quiet in the house was to write and read. I took a break from the job hunt to read “Love in the Time of Cholera” (I’d had it hanging around ever since I fell in love with the movie “Serendipity”) and looked up 5 hours later, wondering why I was hungry and why it was getting dark out.
I did a little thumb through my Goodreads list yesterday and realized that by month end, I will be a good 7 books ahead in my goal! Woo! If I can wrap up my current shorter selections, The Cellist of Sarajevo and Let the Right One In, House of Sand and Fog and maybe fit in a few quickies on my 100 Classics list (Camus’ The Stranger is only like 150 pages) then I should be a 41 by the turn of the calendar page.
I thought today of accelerating my goal to 100 books… but then I’d have to quit my job.
Hmm… actually…
The List So Far (parentheses denotes in-progress):
(House of Sand and Fog)
(The Cellist of Sarajevo)
(Let the Right One In)
The Sun Also Rises
Mother Night
Candide
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Pillars of the Earth
The Strain (The Strain Trilogy, Book 1)
The Painted Veil
The White Tiger
The Sociopath Next Door
The Road
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Little Bee: A Novel
Beloved
Crime and Punishment
The Catcher in the Rye
Dexter By Design (Dexter, #4)
The Trial
1984
Girl, Interrupted
Three Case Histories
Madame Bovary
Fool
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Nights in Rodanthe
Anointed: The Passion of Timmy Christ, CEO
Never Let Me Go
Brick Lane
The Rose Variations
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Eat Pray Love
Billy Budd
The Virgin Suicides
Brave New World
Waiting for Godot
By Belynda, August 3rd, 2009 in Other | 3 Comments
Tags: clickbait tags, credit cards, Deb Ng, elance.com, freelance writing, laziness, What I did with my summer vacation..., Writing
In the first of a nine-part series about what I’ve been up to for the last three weeks, I’m going to talk about my adventures freelancing… or at least my adventures in bidding on freelance projects, designing some very rock’n'roll business cards, and buying a sparkly, shameless new domain name to hawk some literary goods.
I decided recently that while I love writing long-form fiction, it’s unreasonable to assume that my novels will be international best-sellers within the next year, or even that they’ll be sufficiently edited to see the light of day (that’s important, too.) With that in mind, I decided I’d like to start slinging articles on the downlow to make some cashymoney, stash it away for that little single-family I’ve had my eye on.
Away! To the Intertoobz for some getfilthyrichery!
Freelancing is not as easy as one might think. Basically, getting into freelancing is like turning 18 and wanting to get a credit card: No one will give you credit because you don’t have credit because no one will give you credit. There are resources out there to help you out, such as Deb Ng’s Freelance Writing Gigs blog. Deb is a special flavor of awesome in my book. She digs around for leads, posts them every day on the blog, and even gives some advice to the newbies on getting leads, getting noticed, and getting paid. I’ve been perusing her information, as well as checking out some of the less “pretty” ways of getting work, such as Elance and Guru.
It’s a lot of fun so far.
Elance.com is basically reverse Ebay for freelancers. You can roam the listings and bid on projects you think you want to work on. This sounds very shiny and awesome until you realize that there’s between 3 and 48 proposals for every job, there’s always some bastard who bids the minimum (Edit my 25,000 words doctoral thesis! $50 minimum bid. Some dude - whose profile reads like the product of a bad acid trip -invariably bids the $50 bucks.) Don’t get me wrong, Elance is great, but there are a lot of projects that dangle forever, get canceled for policy violations, mysteriously disappear, or get offered to the $50 guy… whether or not his english language skills lead him to believe dromedary is a synonym for boobies. Still, it’s good for building confidence and it’s a motivation to write some sample articles.. like a nifty one I just wrote about divorce. Have I ever been divorced? Nope… do I love to give unsolicited relationship advice? Yep.
I’m happy to report that I’ve actually nailed down one project so far, thus validating the $10 per month service fee, and then some. With this bounty of income I will get some business cards, and even ::gasp:: a website to peddle my wares. I feel a little self-aggrandizing buying my name as a website of course, but I’m going to do it… becuzzitswhatcha do! I’ll be able to host some examples of my work, post prices, and e-pimp myself to those needing some wordiness in their lives. It will come complete with a artsy picture and a self-important bio that only vaguely resembles the nutcase you all know in real life. I know everyone will really appreciate this. Don’t worry though… I won’t give up on Dimestore.. I’ll be posting here as much as I always do… which is to say, practically never.
By Belynda, May 19th, 2009 in Other | No Comments
Tags: achievement, awards, GPA envy, hard work, school, talents, Writing
“Your talents are God’s gift to you. What you do with those talents is your gift back to God.” - Benton’s Mom (ER)
Just got back from the MCC Awards Ceremony, which was a lot of fun and ended at a restaurant with a particularly good glass of wine. The ceremony itself was an eye-opener.
I do very well in school, considering I procrastinate my ass off and do everything slapdash. It always seems to work out. I have a near-photographic memory for facts, I’m not too humble to say my writing skills are top-notch. On top of that, I genuinely enjoy being in school. When I found out I’d won the English Department award at my college, I was sort of cracking up over it, because I basically felt like I’d always done the bare minimum to scrape by (even if scraping by for me is A’s). I’m forever burning the midnight oil, or writing a paper on a book I only barely paid attention to, waiting until the last minute. I’m a pressure-cooker student I guess; I fare best when the clock is ticking. I’m not saying it to be an ass, I know that my academic successes are a blessing. But I didn’t have a full appreciation of the benefits hard work can reap, because I’d become so accustomed to just breezing by in school.
I got to the ceremony, and listened to some of the stories of other award recipients, and I was truly humbled. One kid, a commencement speaker, came over on a fishing boat from Viet Nam at age five. He has a 4.0 and is going on to a business program. He’s involved in half a dozen clubs, went on a fellowship program to China, and helps his uncle run a business. Another woman had a 3.95, which she maintained while raising three school-aged boys, running the books for her husband’s small business, and also involving herself in school programs in whatever time she could otherwise be using for sleep. There were many other stories of people who completely worked their ass off while struggling through strokes, disabilities, language barriers, family problems. Every single person on that stage deserved to be there, and I found myself feeling like “What the hell did *I* do, take a few extra lit courses? It didn’t even feel like work.” But I guess that’s the thing. If you’re doing what you love, and you’re doing what you’re talented in, then it’s not going to feel like work. To the rest of the world, it’s a sacrifice, but to the individual, it’s just the way of things. I hear people tell me “Yes, but you work full-time and still keep your grades up, and find time to write!” Let me be the first to say that this so-called “achievement” is total dogshit compared to some of the things I heard tonight.
I came away from the ceremony with a renewed sense of wanting to apply myself, really apply myself, to school, to my writing, to my talents. I want to work towards that 4.0 in my new pursuits at NEU. I want to finish the re-writes on the book and take courses that will get my writing to the next level. I want to stay away from my television (which I’ve done a bang-up job at in the past 9 months), stick with my artwork, sing more, read more, and re-commit myself to better things.
Going to the ceremony wasn’t just good in feeling like I’d accomplished something, although the recognition was nice. Better, it put hard work into perspective for me, and made me want to rededicate myself to the worthy things in my life.
It was a good night.
By Belynda, May 10th, 2009 in Other | No Comments
Tags: audiobooks, bath-reading, Dexter, fridges of doom, nablopomo, Reading, time crunch, Writing
My blog posts are starting to resemble rebel-party communiques, written in the dead of night by the feeble illumination of my computer screen, usually after writing a paper of some variety, grocery shopping (which got done at 9:30pm!) and finding a few spare moments to bust chops with the love of my life.
I just climbed into bed and ducked under the covers to read a few pages of “Dexter by Design” when Ed whimpered in his sleep “Did you do a blog post today?”
“Damn it!”
I slinked from beneath the sheets and dragged myself back out to my trusty computer to rattle off a few lines. I don’t really have anything to talk about, so I guess time crunches are my topic of the night. I just passed in an annotated bibliography for one of my courses, and got the shaking finger of disapproval from the electronic upload site because It was “Past the due date” at 12:09am. I emailed it to the teacher directly, with a few wise-cracks about burning the midnight oil to draw his keen eye away from my penchant for late-night cramfests.
So, in the spirit of cramming everything into my day at odd angles, like packing for a vacation at gunpoint… I realized today that with the schedule I keep (full-time job, two classes, writer, and an apparent addiction ot Na:::Whateverthehellitis:::Mo’s, (Nanowrimo, Nablopomo, Script Frenzy… I think I’m going to start “National Pie Baking Month” for June.. what do you think?) that I often have to choose between writing and reading because there just isn’t time. Even writing this post is guaranteeing I wake up a shattered wreck in the morning… my co-workers know that talking before coffee = death. They understand.
Which brings me to my latest way of jamming extra stuff into my life. For a while I’ve been doing most of my “reading” by audiobook. I listen to them in the car for the morning and evening commute, sitting in my car snarfing a sandwich at lunch. I actually listened to my current selection tonight while grocery shopping. How’s that for multitasking!
I get no small amount of teasing my audiobook love… Ed contents he doesn’t count it as reading… Beth calls it “Ristening”… I used to get a fare amount of well-intentioned jibed that I didn’t make time to sit down with an ACTUAL book, and not do any of the other things I have to do. I got a fair amount of crap for being an English student who has no time for anything but assigned books. So this year I decided “Hell, you know what? They’re right!” and made my new year’s resolution to read/listen to a book a week this year, no matter what I had to do to accomplish it. I love to read, but got away from it in my working years because there just isn’t enough time. I’m not one of these people who can read two pages at a time and be satisfied. I read “The DaVinci Code” in a single eight-hour sitting. During my job-hunt last year, I was at home one afternoon and cracked open “Love in the Time of Cholera”, finally looking up five hours later realizing I was getting hungry. I’m a marathoner when it comes to reading, so I hadn’t been making the time to do it. But that changed this year.
What got me back into reading in a big way, was writing my first novel in 2007. I wanted to be a better writer, and nothing will hone your skills by immersing yourself in the writing styles of lots of other authors. I started saying to hell with the dishes and the laundry while I was writing, and then editing, and now that’s sort of carrying over into my reading goals for the year. My house looks like it belongs to that flaky writer chick from the remake of “The Stepford Wives”, and my fridge varies between a black hole and a science experiment- but damn, I’m on my 20th book of the year, I am editing at lunch, reading in the bath, shopping at the end of the night, and blogging way the hell after my bedtime.
Some people know how to turn a dollar into two. I can turn an hour into three.
By Belynda, April 12th, 2009 in Writing | No Comments
Tags: funny desserts, mania, query, Script Frenzy, top secret project, Writing
Hey Everyone!
I know. It’s been a little while. Between running the Boston chapter of Script Frenzy with my buddy Marion and working on the query, there hasn’t been a lot of action on the blog lately.
(Rest assured, Ed and I have been working on a top-secret plan (not so top-secret if you’re a Frenzy) and you’ll be seeing new videos very soon!)
In the meantime, I’d like to share the fruits of my query-writing labor. After some intense editing, re-editing, crumpling of paper and drinking of caramel lattes, the polished version of my pitch for CROSSING THE CLOUDS is now available for your perusal. The original can be seen in my previous post,“Red Pen Rampage”. It’s pretty different.
My Twitter folks have been hearing me pipe about it a little today, and yes in fact I did celebrate it by enjoying a very unorthodox dinner . It was pretty awesome.
So, without further ado, my finished pitch:
Cora Caffrey’s wedding was over before it began.
When her fiancé Christopher stands her up at the altar, she is left with no apartment, no explanation, and no idea what she should do next. Best friend Kate’s suggestion of an “Un-eymoon” makes as much sense as anything, and Cora finds herself booking a flight to the tiny village of Sevenoaks, England.
The last thing she ever expected was to find someone new. When Cora meets Alex- Kate’s bookishly handsome best mate- her three-week escape becomes something much more, and the unlikely couple soon becomes inseparable. It’s like a Hollywood romance- until reality pays a visit from across the pond. Cora learns she is pregnant, a parting gift from the man who broke her heart. When Alex initially pulls away, it seems their expatriate romance might come to an end.
Instead, determined to stay by her side, Alex takes a leap of faith and suggests the only plan that can keep the pair together.
“Marry me and stay.”
If only it could be so easy as saying “I do”. To be a British subject, the baby must have a British parent. In order to have what they most desire, Cora and Alex must invent a new history for themselves, and protect the most important secret of their lives.
Keeping their secret from the Registry Office is one thing; Keeping it from Christopher will be quite another.
What do you think? Sound off!
By Belynda, March 26th, 2009 in Writing | 4 Comments
Tags: agent, excited, Fiction, nervous, Novel, query, Writing
Hey Everyone,
My Twitter followers have been listening to me giggle about finishing the final edits on my first novel, “Crossing Clouds” this week. Hooray!
Now, it’s time to write the query letter, and I’d love your input!
I’ve been thinking about my pitch for quite some time, but crossing the finish line on this past round of edits has definitely brought it to the forefront. Now I’d love to hear what YOU, my beloved readers, have to say about my pitch!
Love it? Bored? Have suggestions to make it stronger? I want to get your gut reactions, so get out the red pen!
Thanks a million!
Alone in the back of a limo on her wedding day, Cora Caffrey’s first love suddenly becomes a man from her past; her groom-to-be, Christopher, has left a letter at the church, and walked away.
Desperate to escape the well-meaning advice and sympathetic looks in the aftermath of that day, Cora astonishes everyone—herself included— and boards a plane for the village of Sevenoaks, England. The weeks pass, and soon it is clear that the brief reprieve from life in Connecticut has become something very different.
Cora is enchanted by life in the small village, and the longer she stays, the harder it becomes to part with it. Then, a misplaced wallet leads her to the doorstep of Alex Bishop, and her reluctance to return home blossoms into a desire to make a new one. But when Cora’s past visits her in the form of two little pink lines, everything about the burgeoning romance changes.
“Crossing Clouds” is a story about family. It is about discovering our desires, and the virtues we will abandon in their pursuit. The manuscript is complete at 79,000 words and is available for your review upon request.
By Belynda, March 23rd, 2009 in Writing | No Comments
Tags: editing, manuscript, query letter, text-to-speech, word lists, Writing
Everyone has words that become mainstays of their vocabulary. There are pet lists of “crutch words” available online that you can search for which weaken your prose. (“That” is a big one. A good three times out of four, you can eliminate “that” from a sentence because it’s implied.) After you’ve gone through those common “weak” words, go the extra step: Identify YOUR crutch words.
For some reason, mine is “little”; I realized that it comes up a lot in my writing, like “A little shop”, “a little tired”, “a little thing”. So I started to notice it, and did a global search. What did I find? Ugh…
Two-hundred and forty three “little” crutches in my work.
“How the heck did that happen?!” I said to myself. It happened the same way it happens in conversation. We tend to revert to certain phrases, words, or tones of speaking that help define us from the 6 billion OTHER people yammering on all over the planet. This “flavor language” makes us interesting, funny, identifiable from the rest of the crowd- whatever. But in your writing, your characters won’t all speak with the same “verbal mannerisms” that you do, or at least they shouldn’t. They are their own people, after all.
So, how do you identify words that crop up more than others, sneak into descriptions, or become a crutch for your imagery? The short answer is: Read. Read your work. Read it more than once. After you’ve read it? Yeah, you know what I’m going to say: Read it again. I’ll be the first to admit that reading your full-length manuscript after the initial hammer-fest, and then sober first-draft edits is a labor of love- I’ve been editing my book in some shape or form since this past August- but it’s worth it. It should be your priority to make certain your prose is as diverse as the world have created. It will show.
Besides reading? Listen. I know, you’re about to say “What am I supposed to do, read my 350-some-odd page novel to myself out loud?” No. But we live in the computer age. Most computers have seldom-used accessibility software (newer versions of MS-Word have a “Speech” option under the toolbars section), primarily intended for use by the vision-impaired. It’s a fabulous tool for actually hearing what your work sounds like (and what it will sound like in the head of a reader, who will catch every missed word and typo.) I’m writing this blog-post from 30,000 feet while flying home from a very exciting three days in Las Vegas, after which I’ll be using the 5-hour flight to listen to Alex read me “Crossing Clouds” so that I can pick out missed words, strange-sounding phrases, rough edges and the like. I’ve been through the first eight chapters already, and you would not believe the things you might miss with your eyes that will become clear as day when your computer-voice-of-choice is reading things to you. (The brain has this lovely habit of filling in gaps. Clever thing!) The best part is, you can make the changes on the fly as you listen along.
It’s a tough world out there for new writers and established authors alike. Every blog I’ve read has made some mention of publishing cutbacks, killed tours, and piles of queries littering the desks of agents and editors. This is all the more reason to identify the “little” weaknesses in your manuscript, fix them now, and send your absolute best and sharpest work out the door. It could well mean the difference between an enthusiastic full-manuscript request, and a polite “we’ll pass” letter in the mailbox.
By Belynda, January 27th, 2009 in Writing | 2 Comments
Tags: curmudgeonlyness, Eddie, family, Hemingway, tee-hee, Updike, Writing
Song stuck in my head at the moment… “Here It Goes Again” by OK Go
***
I’m sitting here editing while snarfing down a tuna melt, and I came across a funny note in the manuscript that I left for myself. I’m describing Alex’s mother, an earthy, salt-and-pepper woman in her 50’s, introduced with Cora’s first visit with the family.
The note says: “Hey Ed… Who’s this in real life? Tee hee!”
First off, no, I am not ashamed to “tee hee”. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Despite the rumors of my curmudgeonlyness, I tee-hee often. Get off my case.
The thought I had was this: It is often the case with fiction writing that the real world slips in and makes a home in the lines of your work. While some writers will try to wheedle out of this practice, I’ve found it’s easier to embrace it. People from my life always show up in my work. The woman described above? Eddie’s co-worker, who’s just the happiest, huggiest, most joyful person you could want to meet. When I think of Alex’s mum, how she would be, that’s who she is.
Even better, my favorite cameo in the book: The happy old woman on the boat in the flashback in Chapter 4? That’s Eddie’s Nonna, possibly the sweetest little lady who ever lived. She used to take my face in her hands and say “Thank you for making my grandson so happy” in this tiny little voice that sounded like it was full of a life well lived. When I thought of what a wonderful little old lady would sound like, it’s Nonna all the way.
The good news is this: It can be your little literary secret. Everyone has someone that fills that archetype in their head. I always use Hemingway as an example. One of his good friends was a bullfighter. Knowing that, read “The Sun Also Rises”. See what I mean?
If you write them well, you can enjoy seeing your own cast while you’re writing, and your fans will enjoy their own cast when they’re reading, and your work will be the better for it on all fronts. It’s a glorious little win-win.
***
On another note.. I would be remiss if I didn’t say a word on the passing of John Updike. Very rarely does an author come along who writes so much, earns so many accolades, wins not one but TWO Pulitzers, and passes off a Nobel Prize to a fictional character. The man has moved on, but the books remain…
