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Archive for the ‘Favorite Places’ Category

Posted in Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , on November 16, 2011| 3 Comments »

 Travels With Maggie

This trail at Laura Walker Park called to me

Maggie and I were just about half-way around this 1.5 mile trail at Laura Walker State Park, located just a few miles from Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, when we came upon a warning sign that said beware of bears. I think she and I covered the last half of the trail in a fourth of the time it took us to walk the first half. It was beautiful trail, however. -- Photo by Pat Bean

NaNoWriMo Update … 26,697 words  

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London 

Busy day today. Lots of errands to run. I’m not pleased with my word count, and hopefully I will get some more writing done before I go to bed.

I find it interesting that when I start writing a scene, things happen that I don’t know are going to happen. I find it frustrating, however, when I start a scene and then it doesn’t know where it wants to go. Both of these happened to me today, and numerous times over the past 15 days.

Keeping the action moving, trying to insert clues and red herrings, and leaving out all the boring stuff is my goal. But meeting it isn’t easy.

There is so much I want to do to make my words better. But I tell myself to just keep writing … just keep writing … just keep writing. Better is for later.

I would take heart in that the challenge is halfway over and the fact that I’m on target with my word count. But I fear it’s easy part that is all over. I’m thinking hard on the “S” word again

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Mesa Falls and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , on November 14, 2011| 3 Comments »

Somewhere over the rainbow is Mesa Falls in Idaho -- Photo by Pat Bean

My Favorite Places

 “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes. – Agatha Christie

NaNoWriMo Update … 25,743 words

Two glorious days of writing going well, followed by two miserable days of brain farts. At least I got a little more written these last two miserable days, and thankfully I was ahead of schedule.

Next two days have chunks of missing writing time: Doctor’s appointment, final physical therapy appointment (The therapy for my neck went much better today than the writing.), and drive to my oldest son’s for his the official retirement ceremony from the military after 37 years.

I sure hope Christie was right about writing going on even when you’re not writing. But just in case she’s not, please send words my way.

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Utah Wonderland and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on November 12, 2011| 4 Comments »

 

The landscape along Highway 95 in the Glen Canyon Recreation Area dwarfs my RV, Gypsy Lee. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 

My Favorite Places: Glen Canyon

Highway 95 Bridge across the Colorado River in Utah. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.” —  William Sansom

NaNoWriMo Update – 23,643 words

Continuing with the 5 a.m. start. The writing came slow at first but then it picked up momentum. This one scene, where a self-righteous hypocrite and her lover get caught with their pants down, was a joy to write. I had wanted to put the woman in her place and couldn’t figure out how to do it until today.

After it was written, I wanted badly to go back and polish the writing, But I convinced myself that leaving it alone, at least for now, is a good thing. At the end of this challenge, I want to be excited about going back and doing the necessary rewrite.

I am now seriously thinking what I’m writing could be turned into an actual book. It’s a necessary ego trip that keeps me writing. Otherwise I’d have given up after the first week when the doubts started to slip in.

As an old broad who made her living writing for a newspaper for 37 years, I never doubted my ability to write. What I wasn’t confident about were my ability to finish such a lengthy project, and whether I had enough imagination to write fiction. It’s not nearly as easy for me as writing facts. But writing a mystery, which I love to read, has been something I’ve wanted to do ever since I got hooked on Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys.

Thanks NaNoWriMo for challenging me to actually do it. It’s been a long time coming.

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A Desert Landscape and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on November 10, 2011| 2 Comments »

 My Favorite Places: Tonto Basin

I love Arizona's Tonto Basin any time of the year, but it's especially colorful in spring. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” Elmore Leonard

NaNoWriMo Update: 19,476 words

I was up and at my computer at 5 a.m. this morning. It’s much easier for me to write before the sun comes up than after it goes down. I’ve also started using a timer set for 30 minutes. When it goes off I get up and move around for at least a couple of minutes, or a bit longer if my neck feels stiff.

I actually love it when the bell jangles while I’m in the middle of a sentence. Such an untimely interruption makes it easier to get back immediately into the writing.

In this way, I’m surviving what past NaNoWriMo survivors say is the second week slump, a time when you’ve gotten to know your characters a bit and maybe don’t like them. I know my first-person character is coming off too bland, while those with supporting roles seem to have personality up their ying-yangs.

One piece of advice I got today from one of the NaNo blogs was that if you didn’t like what was happening “get kooky.” Gotta think about how to do that. I mean not every one of us can write like Janet Evanovich – and we shouldn’t.

I pick my daughter and her husband up at the airport in a little while. I’m worried about how the writing will go when I have people around me again. It’s been great having a big old house to myself, although I miss writing in my RV where I can I look out at the world. When I’m visiting my daughter in Dallas, I have no place to hookup. It’s been the only place I haven’t slept in my own bed in seven years.

But sleeping in my own bed will happen again when I change home sites next week. I’ll headed to my son’s place in Harker Heights, and he has a great set up for my RV.

The downside there, however, is that I’m going to have to steel myself away from early morning games of Settlers of Catan with a daughter-in-law. She and I are both addicted to this board game, and when I visit we play it a lot. I’ve already warned her I have to do NaNo first.

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An Alabama Lake and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Books, Favorite Places, Lakes, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , on November 10, 2011| 5 Comments »

 My Favorite Places: Lake Claiborne

Lake Claiborne, Alabama, in the fall. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.: –E.L. Doctorow

NaNoWriMo Update – 17,309 words

Only about 1,500 words today, but they felt like good, words and I feel I’m back on track with places to go in my book. A couple of new plot lines finally hit my brain cells. .

I also don’t feel too bad about the fewer words because I had several errands to run and two hours of physical therapy for my neck. I also did an extra blog to promote Rana DiOrino’s “What Does It Mean to Be Safe,” a children’s picture book, but one that has good advice for adults as well.

The other reality I’m facing is the fact that I can’t sit and sit in front of the computer as I want. It’s most likely what got my neck so horribly stiff in the first place. I need to get up and move about every 30 minutes.

So what I’m now doing is writing my book in short scenes, and then taking a short break. I walk the dog, put a load of clothes in the washer, do my neck and shoulder exercises or whatever. The key is to get right back to the computer and go into the next scene. It helps if I get up in the middle of a sentence so I can get right back into it. A timer’s helping me do that.

I’m also trying to convince myself that I really can write after the sun goes down. I don’t like it, but I can see it’s going to have to happen if I’m to meet the 50,000 word goal without screwing up my neck any more than I already have. Can I say my favorite “S” word right now?

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Epcot and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on November 8, 2011| 4 Comments »

 

It's hard to improve on Mother Nature, but Epcot sure gives it a shot. -- Photo by Pat Bean

My Favorite Places

Epcot's garden depiction of Peter Pan. I could do with a little of J.M. Barrie's imagination right now. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it.” – Jules Renard, “Diary,” February 1895

NaNoWriMo Update – 15,845 words.

Another slow going day. I’m on target to meet the 50,000 word goal, but because of commitments later in the month I had hoped to be about 1,700 words farther along than I am.

I got one difficult scene worked out today, which I had been thinking about for two days. And I went back and filled in a few holes. But I had to keep slapping my hands to keep from doing anything but minor editing to make everything agree.

It’s interesting in writing such a long figment of my imagination that I can come up with what I think is a brilliant idea, but then it contradicts something I wrote earlier. It was much easier when I wrote a long journalistic series. I had everything outlined before I started, That’s because facts are facts, and not something to be played around with, I didn’t have to remember whether my main character had blue or green eyes, and whether another character was in her 70s or her 80s.

I have to tell you that I have written one novel, also a mystery, which took me two years. I finished it, but it had holes and I never went back and fixed them. A hard copy of it still sits in a file folder. The biggest problem with that first book was that my ending lacked drama. So already I’m worrying how to put the drama in the ending of the one I’m writing now.

Or perhaps my biggest problem is that I’ve started questioning myself.

Is my book good enough? Is this what I really want to be doing? Can I continue? Is what I’ve already written just horse pucky? I think it’s these things that have slowed me down the past two days.

I feel like Edvard Munch’s woman in “The Scream.”

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An Arkansas Lake and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , on November 7, 2011| 7 Comments »

 My Favorite Places: White Oak Lake

You can travel far to see beautiful landscapes, or you can stay close to home. White Oak Lake, shown above, was only 20 miles from my daughter's home in Camden, Arkansas. What's in your backyard? -- Photo by Pat Bean

“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.” – Anne LaMott

NaNoWriMo Update … 14,307 words

Still have 700 more words to write today to meet my goal. But I’m currently stuck, mostly because my mind just doesn’t seem to be in to it today. I have to go to physical therapy for my neck in a short while, and so I thought I would go ahead and post my blog and hope I can come up with some ideas while the therapist is twisting my body around.

My book has taken a few odd turns I wasn’t planning on. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t work from an outline. Is this good or bad. Who knows?

The fun part of today’s writing, at least what I’ve done so far, is writing about endangered Ridley sea turtles which nest on the Texas Gulf Coast. It just so happens that one laid a nest of eggs in my mythical town of Sandy Shoes.

OK. I’m going to post this little bit of NaNoWriMo nonsense – it truly feels like that because my fingers are tongue-tied – so I can go back and try to write 700 more words before the day is over. Is there anyone else out there struggling like me today.

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Mossyrock, Washington and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , on November 6, 2011| 2 Comments »

 My Favorite Places: Lake Mayfield

Mayfield Lake in Mossyrock, Washington -- Photo by Pat Bean

“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” – Ernest Hemingway.

 

NaNoWriMo Update, 12,512 words.

Very difficult writing today. I kept thinking of all the changes I wanted to do to what I had already written. My first half hour of writing yielded only 10 new words, because I went back and did a bit of editing. Since I always overwrite, a lot of words got chopped. I had to slap my hands to stop it.

Part of the problem getting started today was that I ended writing yesterday with a finished scene and wasn’t quite sure where to go next. I finally asked my main character what she was going to do. She then fixed herself a bowl of soup and took it and the local paper out on her ocean-front deck to read and think. I had already established that she talks her ideas over with the dog “of uncertain lineage” that she inherited when her grandmother died.

I now find in addition to establishing a character chart, I also need a timeline chart. I couldn’t remember this morning whether the murder had occurred three or four days earlier.

But when I finally started writing, it went well. I started writing at 6:15 a.m. and had a little over 2,000 words written before noon. And today I left a place to start for tomorrow.

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Arches National Park and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , on November 5, 2011| 4 Comments »

 

Balanced Rock in Arches National Park in Southern Utah was shown in the opening scene of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." -- Photo by Pat Bean

 

My Favorite Places

The Three Gossips at Arches National Park

 

“What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.” – Logan Pearsall Smith

NaNoWriMo Update – 10,313 words

It feels odd to be writing by the seat of my pants, so to speak. While I have a vague, and I do mean vague, plot line in my head, there is no outline. I’m just writing from one scene to the next, filling in all the blanks about the characters’ lives as I go.

I find I’m taking a piece here and a piece there of myself and people I know to bring the imaginary people I’m writing about to life. One of my minor characters, the wife of a more major character, is a university professor at Rice. I was pondering on what to have her teach and came up with English literature, and then thought of the professor at Weber State University who taught a class on Sherlock Holmes, and suddenly that was what she was teaching.

Another example is that I belonged to an informal group of friends in Utah, all uppity old broads like myself. One of the member’s son’s called us the Murder of Crows, and we were so pleased with the name that we adopted it. So suddenly I find that three old broads in the book called themselves The Murder of Crows. A murder, by the way, is what a flock of crows are called.

Perhaps all of this will change when I get past the month and 50,000 words and start rewriting, but pulling these bits from memory is certainly helping the work flow. Just about 2,000 more words today. Whew….

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Grand Staircase – Escalante and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Uncategorized, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on November 4, 2011| 4 Comments »

 

Hogsback Ridge between Escalante and Boulder on Utah's Highway 12, often called America's most scenic road. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 

My Favorite Places

 

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument landscape -- Photo by Pat Bean

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” – Richard Wright

NaNoWriMo Update .. 8,326 words

Sitting down in front of the computer for five straight hours today wasn’t going to happen. I was stiff from two hours of physical therapy yesterday to make my old broad body unstiff, particularly my neck and shoulders.

So I did my writing in bits and spurts. I got up to 2,000 new words by 4 p.m., after starting at 6 a.m. Did I mention I was still in my pajamas?

My main character is going to have a dog, and if there’s anything I know it’s a relationship one can have with a beloved pet. So today I wrote a lot about that, along with planting a first clue for my mystery. I’ve always hated it when you read a mystery and there are either no clues – or no red herrings.

Thankfully today, I had nowhere to go and my daughter’s big house al to myself, well except for three dogs, one cat that needs insulin shots twice and day and three aquariums full of fish.

. It also showed me, however, that I tend to get more done on the days I have to do more. I’m finding this challenge very interesting.

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