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Monthly Archives: August 2014

Editing: Looking at the Big Picture

15 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Editing

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Editing

So a manuscript is finished, yay!

Most people suggest that the first step is to put it away for a while to get some distance from what you’ve written, some objectivity about your words. I do think that’s a sensible idea. I don’t do it very well myself. With Ghosts, I tried to wait a month, but actually I spent that month posting chapters at Critique Circle and resisting the temptation to make more than minor edits. With later books, I’ve managed a few days or a couple of weeks. With A Lonely Magic, it was more like a night. Ah, well.

My true first step is to read the whole manuscript, beginning to end, in a format not the same as the one in which I wrote it. I usually create a Kindle version and use that. My goal is to try to read it as a reader would. I don’t try to make fixes along the way. Instead, I make notes. Lots of them! Here’s what I’m looking for:

    1) Scenes

    Does every scene have a clear purpose? Does every scene move the plot forward? Is every scene necessary? Why does a given scene HAVE to happen? What does it accomplish? If the scene disappeared, what effect would it have on the overall story? If it’s not accomplishing anything important, could I add something to it that would be valuable?

    The flip side, of course, is whether I’ve skipped scenes. I do that more often than writing useless scenes (although I’ve done some of the former.) For example, I’ll often start a scene, then throw in some background information, something that’s happened previously, then continue the scene and in the first read, I realize that the background information should have been a scene on its own.

    In A Gift of Time, most early versions skipped from the bistro to days later at Natalya’s house. Then at Nat’s house, I had multiple paragraphs about what had happened at the police station and with the therapist. In the final version, that was a full scene of its own, one which established Colin’s character, developed a better sense of Kenzi’s behavior, gave Nat & Colin another opportunity for tension, dropped a bunch of clues about Kenzi’s background, and let me balance out my point-of-view switches a little better.

    2) Setting

    I don’t like writing description and I don’t like reading description, so I generally avoid it as much as possible. Sometimes, though, that makes scenes feel floaty, un-anchored, or even confusing. I revised the first scene in A Lonely Magic repeatedly, trying to make it more visual while maintaining the tension, and some readers still found it confusing. Of course, too much description can be boring. I also almost invariably wind up marking my descriptions with notes that say things like, “Clunky and boring, trim!” or “total cliche, fix ad make interesting.” But I make sure in my first revision that each scene has a clear sense of place. If you read my CBCA series of posts, you can think of it as a contextual embedding check–I make sure that I haven’t skipped including those details, because for me, they’re easy to not include in a first draft.

    3) Pacing

    This is an easy check, a hard fix. If I start skimming–and I’m a serious skimmer most of the time, so it’s instinct for me–I immediately stop reading, identify where I started skimming, and mark it for revision. Maybe it needs tightening, maybe it needs to be deleted, maybe it needs to be pumped up, to have some emotion added. I don’t necessarily know as I’m reading what I need to change, but I know that the pacing is wrong if I start skimming.

    And the flip side of that, of course, is that I also look for scenes that are too quick. I think every book I’ve written has a first version of the climax that almost a bare bones outline instead of a complete scene. Those are easy to identify but less fun to fix.

    Finally, I try to consider the overall pace of the story. In A Lonely Magic, the first draft has a climactic moment that is immediately followed by a ton of exposition. In the final version, almost all of that conversation gets moved ahead of the climactic moment so that the pacing doesn’t go straight from a major adrenaline high action moment to a thud of historical detail. So in this first revision pass, I look at the high and lows of the story and try to make sure that they flow the way they should. One of my favorite reviews of ALM calls it a “tilt-a-whirl” which I loved. It means I hit what I was aiming for!

The final element that I look for in this first draft revision is the most important to me, so I’m going to give it a whole blog post of its own next time. Any guesses about what it is?

*****
Today’s writing goal: a whole chapter, at least 1000+ words, of my final Eureka story. I’m dragging my feet about wrapping it up, because it feels like I’m closing a chapter of my life. But it’s time.

The most fun object in my universe *

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Bartleby, Pets, Randomness, Zelda

≈ 5 Comments

* Within my budget

Yesterday I took R to the actual mall to buy new shoes for school. Pro tip: if the mall parking lot is so crowded that multiple cars are illegally parked on grassy verges and over curbs, you’re not going to like the lines or the crowds.

But we persevered, because he leaves on Saturday (!!!) and eventually wound up with two pairs of Vans shoes, one a subdued gray and the other black with a blue pattern. They’re very nice and quite R-appropriate. I did decide, however, that since I was surviving a situation which is pretty high on my personal list of nightmares, I deserved a present for myself. A cheap present. Something fun. And/or something useful, but if useful, still cheap.

As we wandered the mall, I considered my options. No, no, no, no. Too expensive, not fun enough, too unnecessary, too wasteful, not fun enough. I considered some soft t-shirts for a while. I could use a few new t-shirts. But I could tell that they were the kind that would wear really quickly–worn for a summer and then good-bye, and even at $15 for 2, I didn’t think they were worth it.

On the way out of the mall, I felt sad. Sadder, I guess. Robin Williams’ death hit me hard. To have someone so successful, so gifted, so loved, lose the fight to depression is heartbreaking. But it’s also frightening. If, with everything he had, he couldn’t make it out of the black hole, will my hole someday be that deep? (My psychiatrist, incidentally, promises me no, and I take her at her word. Well, to the best of my ability, I take her at her word.)

Addicts probably felt the same way about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. And I know, #depressionlies. Also depression hurts, also depression comes back, also depression kills. People diagnosed with bi-polar disorder get 9 years knocked off their life expectancy and not just because of the risk of suicide, but also because of higher rates of every kind of health misery. (I remind myself of this every time I worry about the fact that I’m using up my retirement savings trying to be a writer. It matters less for me because I’m likely to have a short retirement at best, ha.)

Although lord, I really hate the people who say, “he’s in a better place.” Talk about making suicide tempting! Seriously, what’s up with that? During my earliest suicidal periods, the risk of burning in hell for eternity was a thread that tied me here. I’m not going to say it kept me alive, but if I’d thought suicide was a shortcut to heaven… well, that wouldn’t have been good for me.

But I have now seriously digressed from my story. I was sad. So I started thinking about what single object–within my extremely limited budget–could possibly make me happy? Store after store after store in the mall, all of them filled with stuff, and what object would make me happy?

I was almost out of the mall when I thought of the answer.

Zelda's best-beloved toy

Zelda’s best-beloved toy

Zelda has owned this duck for at least eight years. When a visitor comes over, she brings the duck out to the living room and offers it to them. At night-time, she searches for it. When we were on vacation, the first night she tried very intently, repeatedly, to tell me something and I finally figured out that I’d forgotten to bring her duck. Two nights ago, it was shut in the wrong room at bedtime and I had to disturb R after he’d gone to bed to retrieve it in order to get Zelda to relax. She always sleeps with it, generally after licking it for a while.

And it’s wearing out in a big way. I’ve sewed it up several times. One wing is half-chewed and both wings are held on by replacement thread. The beak’s missing, the head wobbles. It is as well-loved as any kid’s teddy or blankie. There is no way it can ever be replaced. But! The most fun object in my universe, within my budget, is definitely another duck for Zelda. So I came home and splurged and bought this plump duck. It arrives tomorrow (with some squeaky chipmunks for Bartleby and Macie, because I can’t buy one dog a toy and not give the others something) and I am so, so, so glad that the universe contains dogs and dog toys and dog love.

Self-editing, part one

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Writing

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I edit as I write. If I let the words flow without any polishing, I wind up wallowing in the depths of self-loathing. Well, or writing-loathing. My self-talk becomes all about what a terrible writer I am and how bad the words are and how stupid what I’ve written is and how no one could ever enjoy reading it. I know everything can be fixed in editing, but if I don’t do some self-editing along the way, I get stuck.

What sorts of edits do I mean? Mostly tightening and smoothing–changes that harken back to one of the fundamental rules of The Elements of Style, “omit needless words.” For example, the above paragraph began life as:

I do a lot of editing as I write, although I wish I wouldn’t. But I’ve definitely discovered that for me, if I simply let the words flow without doing any polishing of them at all, I wind wallowing in the depths of self-loathing. Well, or writing-loathing. The loathing state where my self-talk is all about what a terrible writer I am and how bad the words are and how stupid what I’ve written is and how no one could ever possibly enjoy reading it. I know that we’re supposed to remember that everything can be fixed in editing, but if I don’t do some self-editing along the way,

I stopped when I began to start editing it, cut-and-pasted, then finished editing the original paragraph and ended it. And then, I have to admit, I went back and made a few more edits. I actually try not to edit my blog posts because a blog post for me is just an exercise in getting my fingers moving. My goal with these posts is to kick my brain into gear and my fingers into motion, so that I start the writing that matters to me, my fiction, ready to move, not agonize over each word. It’s a warm-up, a practice session. Despite that, I still edit, because I can’t stop myself.

Unlike the post-draft editing–in which I’m systematic and rigid–my in-draft editing is mostly intuitive. My natural writing is wordy and meandering. Often I write around an idea, trying to understand what I’m trying to say even as I type it. I’ll write a paragraph or three, and then immediately go back and clean it up, deleting words that don’t add value, tightening, getting rid of adverbs, adding stronger verbs, fixing passive constructions. And then I move on. Obviously, I also fix typos! My “first” drafts often appear to have very few mistakes, but that’s because every paragraph has already been gone over two or three times, at minimum.

If you don’t write that way, good for you. Don’t start. It’s slow and time-consuming and undoubtedly a major reason why it takes me so long to finish a manuscript. But I’ll be using examples in this series of posts from my own work, so do bear in mind that all of my “first” drafts have been edited along the way.

On my next post, I’ll talk about my first edit round: the big picture edit.

*****

Meanwhile, today I’m going to work on writing a Eureka fanfiction. I have one unfinished story that I started three years ago, and I’ve made it my goal to finish writing it this week. It’s been surprisingly challenging in really fun ways–over the course of the year that I wrote Eureka fanfiction obsessively, I wrote multiple versions of the characters. This story returned to the canon characters, but it turns out that some of the versions of the characters I wrote are more real to me than the show’s versions. I wrote an AU (alternate universe) story in which two characters changed positions, and I have to keep fighting not to let those characters take over the story I’m writing now. That probably doesn’t make any sense, but I probably can’t explain it any better without getting deep into the nitty-gritty of what happened and who the characters were. Suffice to say, I’m enjoying digging deep into these characters again.

I’m also loving my technological inventions. The most fun part of my Eureka stories were the crazy science & gadgets I invented. In this case, one of characters created an invisibility worm that she sent viral. No digital media–which is all just bits and bytes–records her existence. Or rather computers delete her image whenever it appears in their databanks. It couldn’t really be done without vastly superior recognition technology than we have today and the side-effects from errors would probably be dazzling, since individuals aren’t so easily differentiated, but it’s fun nonetheless. I loved making up crazy technology and mixing ideas.

I got an incredibly lovely message from a former colleague yesterday in which she told me that I was “truly gifted as writer, storyteller, imaginer,” and I so, so loved the last word in her list. I know spell-check is saying that it’s wrong, but it makes me happy!

Okay, over 800 words of babble. The fingers are warmed up. Away I go.

A dog post

11 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Bartleby, Pets, Randomness, Zelda

≈ 1 Comment

For the entire time I’ve had him, Bartleby has been anxious in the car. He whimpers, he fusses, he climbs around, he tries to get into my lap while I drive or escape from his carrier if I’ve used it. It makes sense–one day last summer, his people must have stuck him in a car and then dropped him off all alone, totally throwing his world into chaos, so it’s not as if it’s unreasonable for him to be worried about car rides. Dogs remember trauma, even if they don’t exactly remember the details.

When we went on vacation, I figured he’d calm down. An hour or two on the road, and he’d relax.

Not so much.

Writing about it now, it does seem a little optimistic of me, but I thought he’d get tired and go to sleep. And the RV was nice and big with plenty of places for a dog to nap, especially for a dog who likes to hide in small spaces. Under the table, behind the bed, on the floor of the passenger-side seat–lots of options.

Instead he cried and fussed and tried to get in my lap and was a general pain for days. He made himself thoroughly unpleasant to R, growling and snapping at him when I was driving. He also had ear infections for which he needed daily ear cleanings and ear drops and he was miserable about those. He wound up biting me once, actually drawing blood, when I was trying to hold him still and I finally had to muzzle him twice daily. Eesh.

But I persevered, of course, and we were on the road, so it wasn’t as if I could change plans, and when he was mean to R, I made sure to be super-nice to R, petting his arms and talking softly to him. R thought that was creepy, I think, but Bartleby needed to see that R outranked him in our pack and that growling at R meant R got attention and love. That was my theory, anyway.

I think it was a good theory. By the time we were driving home, Bartleby had relaxed. His favorite seat was the front passenger side. He’d curl up in it and sleep, then stand up on his back legs, peek out the window, check the road, then lie back down and go back to sleep again. He stopped whimpering and while he didn’t exactly get easy about his ear drops, I don’t have to muzzle him every time anymore. And he stopped growling at R, as far as I can judge.

And I think my optimism has been rewarded. Now that we’re at home, Bartleby is being a sweetheart. Over the course of the year that he’s been with me, he relaxed a lot. He went from constantly hiding to generally hanging out with us. He’s a lap dog, and loves to be held and petted, but he also… well, expects to be ignored, if that makes sense. He’s a self-sufficient little guy. (Not literally, obviously–he does not go out hunting his own dinner.) In the last week, though, he seems to have gone from a reserved affection to decided fondness. Nothing like Zelda’s level of devotion, of course–Zelda is the poster girl for unconditional doggie adoration. But a notch up. So much so that he is now (for the first time) responding to his name when called, sitting down upon command whether or not I have dinner in my hand, and every once in a while tentatively licking me. I would think it cute how careful he is with his kisses, if I didn’t mostly think it’s sad that he’s so cautious.

He’s still getting ear drops and he still hates it, but he watches me and listens to me, and mostly puts up with it. Such a good dog he is.

In a related R story, R found a Yorkie in the road the other day. No tag, no collar, tangled fur. He made his friend stop her car so he could get out and get the dog out of the road and then they wandered door to door for a bit looking for an owner. And/or someone who would take the dog off their hands. He said he spent the whole time with a deep fear that he was going to wind up bringing the dog home with him and that we would end up with four dogs living with us. I think maybe he’s afraid that I’m turning into the dog version of the crazy cat lady. But eventually an owner came out of a house and claimed the Yorkie, so with much relief, he was free. He told me this story and I laughed, as I was meant to, but afterwards, I was so ridiculously filled with pride. He stumbled across a lost dog and he didn’t just leave it in danger or to be someone else’s problem. He took the time to make sure the dog was safe. Such a good boy he is.

Updates

08 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in A Lonely Magic, Ghosts, Randomness, Self-publishing

≈ 2 Comments

This’ll be a weird little post but that’s the kind of mood I’m in.

1) Glitter nail polish is extremely difficult to remove. I scrubbed at a single nail for a couple minutes before giving up and scraping it off with a nail file and there are still silver specks on the nail. That stuff is like glue. My finger nails may still be glittery weeks from now. I bet my toes will still have glitter on them at midwinter.

2) I remembered I should mention that the audiobook of A Lonely Magic is not going to happen anytime soon. I went back and forth with the ACX guy. He had nice comments for my delivery but I couldn’t manage to get rid of the background noise he spotted, because Florida + summer + closet recording studio = yes, the air-conditioner has to be running. I might try again in winter, if I’m feeling like reading aloud for hours a day would be fun. That sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it? More realistically, I might try again if I can get an audio producer willing to do all the hard parts, while I do the reading.

3) A Gift of Ghosts reached an amazing milestone today–two hundred 5-star reviews. For my quirky little book, with its video-game playing hero and anxious, geeky heroine! I feel proud, humbled, (embarrassed that I might sound like I’m bragging!)… but mostly like the world has more possible friends in it than I ever realized. It’s a good feeling. I’m celebrating by returning to Eureka for a while. I’m going to complete Reckless, a fanfic that I’ve left unfinished for almost three years now. I suppose that’s sort of an odd celebration, but it feels fitting.

CBCA: Subjective experience

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Writing

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CBCA & Writing

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but Criteria-Based Content Analysis is based on the Undeutsch hypothesis, which states, “an account derived from memory of a self-experienced event will differ in content and quality from an account based on fabrication or imagination.” According to CBCA, one of the ways true stories differ from created stories is by including criteria #12, subjective experience. Basically, that means that when we’re telling true stories, we include information about how we felt or what we were thinking.

Two versions of a true story:

1) I went to CVS today to pick up a prescription. The pen I used to sign my credit card receipt was a vibrant orange.

2) I went to CVS today to pick up a prescription. I was feeling really annoyed, because my current health insurance is horrible and the prescription costs about $20 more than it used to under my old plan. When I signed the credit card receipt I had to smile though, because the pen was such a bright, vibrant orange that it made me think of sunshine.

Version 1 is actually not a bad little story: it includes some contextual embedding (a place and a date) and a weird detail in the shape of that orange pen. But Version 2 is a much better story because it includes my subjective experience–how I was feeling, what I was thinking.

As writers, we’re continually told “show, don’t tell.” If your character is feeling angry, you’re supposed to write him stomping across the room, a glare on his face. And yes, that’s good. But Twilight is one long stream of Bella’s feelings. People read it anyway. JK Rowling doesn’t shy away from telling us how Harry felt. In The Hunger Games, Katniss is overwhelmed, angry, scared, filled with hate—and that’s just in the five pages that I skimmed through while I was writing this. Suzanne Collins isn’t afraid to say how Katniss feels, using those exact words.

I’m sure somewhere along the way in this series, I’ve talked about the advice to not use “thinking” words. It’s valid advice. You don’t want to distance your reader from the characters and the action by adding in lots of extraneous words that separate them from the experience. For example:

“I noticed the sun was shining again. It felt warm on my face.”

is better as:

“The sun was shining again, warming my face.”

That said, for your stories to feel true, your point-of-view character should have feelings, thoughts, reactions, emotions. Delete the thinking words (as much as possible) but make sure that the subjective experience is still clear and real.

Your POV character should also think about the mental state of the characters around her. People don’t exist in a vacuum and most of us speculate about other people all the time. Including “attribution of the accused’s mental state” is criteria #13. In the context of writing, it means that your point-of-view character will seem more realistic if she is (reasonably) aware of other character’s emotions and attitudes.

I threw in that “reasonably” because you do have to be careful about this. Your point-of-view character cannot (unless she is Sylvie or Lucas from A Gift of Thought) know what someone else is thinking. But some POV purists view even simple lines like, “Ralph was angry” as verboten (assuming Ralph is not your POV character). In my opinion, though, if it is reasonable to assume that your POV character would be able to tell how Ralph was feeling, it’s better to include that detail than not.

It is, of course, better if you do it via words that show the reader what’s happening instead of just telling. “Ralph was angry” is not nearly as strong, for example, as “Ralph stomped across the room. Megan’s shoulders tightened. Any minute, he’d start yelling.” But one way or another, to make your stories more realistic, your POV character should attribute mental states to other characters.

Rather than summarizing everything, I’m going to go back and tag all the posts I’ve written on CBCA so that they’re easier to find, but one last note before I wrap up: it turns out that CBCA is not always terribly effective when it comes to lie detection. In a 2010 study from the Netherlands, researchers found that false stories told by high “fantasy-prone” individuals (ahem, that would be most of us, I’m guessing) are more believable than true stories told by low “fantasy-prone” individuals. Good story-tellers already are good liars and most of the elements of CBCA are probably already in your stories anyway, whether or not you’re telling the truth. Still, when a story is feeling weak, looking for details that provide contextual embedding, stand out by virtue of being strange or unusual, and include the emotions & thoughts of your protagonist and her opinions of the same for other characters can help make your story more believable.

The truth of a story lies in the details.

Plans

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Writing

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I never finished my posts on Criteria-Based Content Analysis for writing, which feels like a metaphor for my whole life these days. Everything is half-done, messy, and unfinished. Some of those messes I simply can’t clean up right now: my ripped-up floor needs fixing but not while I’m still trying to sleep in the same room and not before I find out from the insurance company how much they will contribute. I have a $1000 deductible, so I know it’s going to cost me, but the insurance payment will be the difference between going as bare bones on the floor repair as I can and actually trying to replace it with something equivalent to what I have now.

(For those who don’t keep up with my other blogs, I had a little tiny water leak from my refrigerator that turned into a gigantic monster of a mess before it was through. Because it was a little leak, it was unnoticeable until it started seeping up through the floor in my dining room/office + bedroom-while-R-is-home-for-the-summer. The damage control guy says basically most of the floors in the downstairs of the house should be replaced, gah.)

Ditto trying to clean up some of the chaos. The floor in my bedroom is stacked high with books, because I had to move them out of the office while the floor was getting ripped up. I don’t want to put them back in the office until the floor is repaired–why move hundreds of books around if you don’t have to?–but it means just walking into my bedroom stresses me out.

And then my writing life is a cacophony of half-written and just barely begun stories. A middle-grade novel for my niece, the opening of A Precarious Balance, the honeymoon story set in Belize, the beginnings of an outline for A Gift of Grace, a random short story started when I got seriously annoyed at another book, two fanfictions that I never finished and really should–stuff galore, none of it done, none of it moving, all of it filling up my brain with incoherent thoughts and random scenes. It’s making me kind of insane. Well, more insane than I am already.

So–a plan! I want to finish something and the CBCA analysis feels like the right sort of starting place. Something to get the fingers moving, something I can complete, something structured and organized to fight against the chaos. After that, I’m going to start writing a series of posts about editing–not because I’m editing at the moment, but because I was asked about it recently and thought, hmm, yes, that does sort of seem like an obvious topic, since I know a lot about it, and actually don’t know of tons of posts about editing your own work (at least not ones that go beyond the obvious basics.) Although that makes me wonder–there might in fact be tons of posts about self-editing out there, but I probably wouldn’t have bothered to read them since it’s my area of expertise and I don’t feel like I have much to learn on the subject. Well, I’m going to write about it anyway, so I hope it will be useful to someone!

But first things first… CBCA. I shall put it in a new post so that anyone strictly interested in writing advice doesn’t have to read me blathering through all of this. After I figure out where I left off!

Caprese salad

04 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Randomness

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2014-08-04 15.42.51

I would love to know why WordPress ate my post. But it’s a simple salad, so I’m not going to bother to rewrite it. Home-grown delicious tomatoes, fresh basil, mozzarella, a little salt, a little pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, some balsamic vinegar, let sit until room temp. Nothing mysterious but very yummy.

Home Sweet Home

04 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by wyndes in Randomness

≈ 8 Comments

Actually, home is sort of a chaotic mess at the moment, but still, it’s nice to be back here.

I had great visions of blogging while we were on vacation, writing quick little daily updates about our adventures, turning it into a vacation that I would always remember… but yeah, that didn’t happen. I also imagined myself reading my auto-immune cookbooks and planning out a month’s worth of menu plans, with recipes and shopping lists, during the copious free time that I would have while R drove the RV. Turns out that didn’t happen, either. I did get to be a passenger some of the time, but I used it pressing buttons on the radio searching for some station that we’d both enjoy (memo to self: next time bring CDs!) or trying to convince the dogs that they didn’t really both need to be in my lap. And occasionally napping.

On the surface, it was a prosaic enough vacation: R and I drove to Pennsylvania and visited relatives. I got to spend some time with an aunt and uncle in State College, an aunt and cousin in New Jersey, and my brother and his family in Allentown. Exciting, right? But it felt like an adventure, because it was the first time I’d driven the RV any serious distance. Putting gas into the RV–and more importantly, getting into and out of the gas station without hitting anything–felt like such a triumph. Setting it up at the campgrounds (admittedly with the help of a lovely 10-point checklist that my dad created for us) made me feel terribly competent. Sewer hose? Sure, I can do that! Oh, I screwed up a few times. The worst was when I scraped the side against a metal railing. Oops. It made a horrendous noise, but my dad scoffed at me when I pointed out the resulting scrape. Good thing RVs are tough.

Two other new things from vacation:

2014-08-03 15.03.56

Yes, I put glitter on my fingernails. Well, I didn’t. A nice woman at a nail salon did. When I told her I was camping, she tried to talk me into some kind of gel polish that would apparently last for a really long time. I declined, because I was sort of infatuated with the idea of purple glitter, mostly because it seemed so wildly inappropriate for camping. But I didn’t want it to last for a long time. Two days seemed just fine. Once it was on, though, I was totally sold. My nails look ridiculous and I love them. I may become a purple glitter kind of person.

photo of me driving W's tractor

And the other new thing I did. I said after I got off that I never knew driving a tractor was on my bucket list, but oh, it was. Picking up the dirt and moving it around took me several tries–figuring out that scoop thing was not as easy as it looked–but it was so fun! Like playing in a giant-size sandbox.

Now that I’m home, it’s time to start writing again. I feel surprisingly uninspired, though. The combination of the house disaster, R’s college financial aid numbers and some unexpected vet & medical bills means that I’m stressing about money. I wish that motivated me, but instead it seems to stifle me. I think it’s because I know the economics of writing don’t make sense. I’d earn more at a minimum wage job. I read a blog post today that talked about the formula for success–which is apparently releasing a bunch of books at the same time, followed by another a month later, followed by another two months later. That’s how to keep visibility high and make your books discoverable. So let’s see, seven books… at my average speed, that’ll take me about four years. So four years from now, I might be successful. Unfortunately, I’ll be homeless and starving before then. That’s not good math.

But, hey, it was a nice vacation and I’m glad I took it despite the chaos. Tomorrow will be whatever it is, but yesterday–and the preceding eight days!–was a good day and I get to be glad that I had it.

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