Just Pictures...well, pictures and captions

Always a good suggestion, Tim Gunn.

In the comments, what books would you wish this treatment on?

I'd argue picking a favorite kid is easier (especially when it's not my kid). Favorite is the quiet one entertaining themselves with a book.

Every day.

The Truth About Publishing

Nathan Bransford is a big name in the blog-o-sphere of literary agents and authors. He was the former and is now the latter.

[As an aside, is blog-o-sphere even still used? Am I behind the times again? Maybe I should just stick with the classic slang. Nathan Bransford is a smart tack, a smart cookie, he's an old-timey newsman who knows what he's talking about.]

Anyway...he posted a breakdown of the publishing process, from initial story idea to book release and beyond, in GIF form!

And it's awesome. Not the least of which is because of the Troy Barnes ("Community", played by Donald Glover) "My emotions" gif.

You should read it, too. Go. Go now.

When you feel like it, and when you don’t

In many writing blogs and books and advice, people say to make a schedule. 4 hours a day writing, or 5 hours in front of the computer, or 2000 words, or 10 pages... The exact kind of schedule varies, and should, depending on the writer--what they are comfortable with and what works for them.

This is good advice.

It’s important for someone who wants to be a writer to sit down and write regularly, even when they don’t feel like it.

But I know there are days when writers don’t feel like it.

I am having one of those days today. Technically, I am grading today, not writing, but I don’t think I’d be able to write even if I wanted to. I am dealing with a frustrating situation, and it’s making my headache worse, and I don’t even feel like grading right now, but like a writing schedule, it is something that has to get done.

To me, the goal is not always to plow through a bad mood and force oneself to continue writing (or grading) no matter what. Sometimes that can just make things more frustrating. On a few occasions when I’ve done that, I still get little to nothing done and end the day feeling as bad or worse because I put aside the time and still didn’t accomplish my goal.

On those days, I think the solution isn’t to plow through the mood block, it’s to fix the mood.

Take a walk, watch a funny movie, take a nap, call up a friend, play a computer game (just for a while, not all day; the cheapy computer games you buy for 5 or 10 bucks work well for this), but do something that helps you get away from the thing causing the frustration, or change the scenery to escape the other cues of your bad mood.

That is what I should do, too. Which I guess means that I should end this post now.
Happy writing, everyone.

Two Pieces of Good Advice: Do Research and Wear Sunscreen

"Wear Sunscreen" is a song/rap/spoken word poem set to music, which I heartedly enjoyed when it came out. In college, a friend made me a cd of awesome songs, mostly from the 90s, and included this one.

Today, there is a new version out, courtesy of author Seanan McGuire: Do Research.

For the writers out there, it is an adaptation filled with advice, both concrete ("Get plenty of sleep. Be kind to your wrists, you'll miss them when they're gone," and "Stretch") and more abstract or hard-to-quantify ("Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to correct your spelling through interpretive dance," and "Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to spend your life writing").

It's a great way to start the day (my opinion, but I'm not the only one who thinks so, according to the comment stream). It's just great fun, and I suggest anyone who needs a smile clikcing over there and giving it a read. It has the same feel to the original, plucking at my emotions when she writes "Do not read Amazon reviews, they will only make you feel ugly," even though I haven't published anything yet for this to be an issue.

Still. It's good advice. Go. Read. Enjoy.
~Sabrina


Seanan McGuire is the author of "Rosemary and Rue," and "A Local Habitation" (urban fantasy, starring a changeling who has lost everything). Under her pseudonym, Mira Grant, she has a political zombie apocalyse, "Feed," in stores now.

Despite the absolutely horrid stomachache...

I want to get some writing done on the first day of the year. Seems like a good way to start things off, even if January 1st is four hours from being over). A couple of days ago, my computer shut down for no apparent reason (though I suspect it was because of how little space there is on my hard drive, or a memory issue). And, I've been in a bit of a writing slump lately, never able to write very much in the course of a day. But I've tried resorting to longhand, paper and pen, and ended up with about five sheets full of text. In the midst of transcribing that onto the Word document, my computer shuts down and restarts. I lost all that I had typed.

Upside, I still had the written version, so I could retype it. Downside, I didn't feel like retyping what I'd just typed, and ended up not writing for the rest of that day and the next.

I want to type up all that stuff now to start the year off with writing, like I said, and to hopefully pull myself out of this funk.

Over the summer, from the end of June until nearly the end of July, I didn't turn on a single computer. Didn't type one word, didn't check my email or my journal. Not even a game of solitaire on my desktop. I actually had at least one friend concerned because of my absence (as email, instant messaging and our online journals were the only way we really connected). I never want to do that again. I felt so unproductive that month, but I just couldn't bring myself to turn on the computer. So now if the mood hits me, I'll shut off the computer early, maybe even take a few days off, but I keep a pen and some folder paper near at hand and I'm never gone for longer than a week.

I guess I'm just hoping the act of turning on the computer is a step forward. Even if I only type a few hundred words that day (pretty bad for me, I can average 2,000 on a good day), it's better than nothing.

I never like reading those articles or receiving the advice to set up a daily word count or page count or time frame (write an hour a day or some such). I know it works for some people, but beyond a sense of 'I'd -like- to reach at least this many words' I try not to set a goal like that. Maybe it's from college--that desire to write a good enough essay on the first draft that it only needs minor revisions, so I take more time with writing it out--that I would rather have 200 words that equal a pretty good paragraph, than 2,000 that I'll just delete the next day anyway. That's ignoring the fact that with my novel-writing, I know there'll be a couple rounds of heavy editing anyway beyond the first draft.

Ah well. My stomachache is not well (possibly the rich dinner we had tonight, or the accumulation of rich dinners during all the recent holidays), but if I can just get through a few pages of retyping, I'll feel good (mentally at least).