One Small Step For Us, One Giant Leap For Art

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As I sit here, grumbling that I have a blog post due and I’m sick and would rather be in bed, I’m reminded yet again of the power of the little:  one small step can, over time, add up to big progress.

What do I mean?

I’m facilitating a workshop using Julia Cameron’s book, FINDING WATER.  Sundays are the day I post the new week’s essay and discussion-starter.  Today, though, I’m dealing with a cold that seems to want to suck all my energy out of my nose.

After fighting with it for a while, I cracked open the book and the words on the page jumped out at me: “What small step can I take today?”  I don’t have to write a huge essay, just grist for the mill.  I just have to start the conversation and keep the ball moving.  A small tap will do.

Rachel and I are celebrating the release of our novel, TIGER TIGER, from Samhain Publishing.  At times, we had to remind ourselves to just focus on the next right step.  Finish one chapter.  Edit one section.  Draft the synopsis.  These small steps can add up to a novel.

So, dear reader, I offer this to you.  What small step can you take in the direction of your own art?

Writer Wednesday – Catch a Tiger by the Tale

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Catch a Tiger by the Tale Blog Tour
Day Three – Website Design
TT | 07 | 2K13 | 03
Happy Wednesday!  Since today is my Writer Wednesday post day, I thought I’d share some thoughts on designing a website to whet your appetite for our big reveal later this week.  That’s right, sports fans, we’re redesigning the Noon and Wilder and A. Catherine Noon websites!  We’ll have more content, new images, and lots of fun stuff to dig through.

But what does that mean for Writer Wednesday?

Here are some of the questions I tried to answer as I worked on the redesign:

  • What do I want to showcase?
  • What do I want my website to be?  Is it a dashboard of all things “me”, or is it specific to a story or a universe?
  • What do I have to say?  I had to go and look up posts that I had written and bucket together similar topics and stories.  I admit, I had to use Excel to track topics and things, but the philosophy behind it doesn’t require fancy software – just look for common themes and voila – you have your topic list.
I finally broke down and got a designer.  My current sites are ones I built myself and I am proud of them because they are built from the ground up by me, using knowledge I learned in classes.  On the other hand, they don’t really do our stories or image justice, so I finally gave in to some advice I’d gotten on Romance Divas and got a good designer to help collaborate with us as to what we wanted.  I’m so excited about the results.  Stay tuned; we’ll release the new design later this month.
Do you have a website?  How did you decide what to put on it?  Do you have a blog?  Same question; how do you decide what to write about and showcase on it?

Resuscitating the Inner Artist

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I’ve been making a real attempt to renovate the front garden this year.  The neighbors must be pleased; I know I am.  While gardening is invigorating, if often sweaty and exhausting work, the results have been spectacular.  But as punishment for years of neglect, a noxious weed plagues my perennials.  Bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis), otherwise known as wild morning glory, is sprouting all over as the season advances.  What I once considered an acceptable invader with its tiny white flowers now alarms me with several feet of growth in mere days.  The skinny vine rapidly winds around my cherished butterfly bush, mangling the delicate blooms.

As I unwind this vermin, deceptively tender stems snap off at the ground and give me a false sense of accomplishment.  Only upon identification of the weed have I learned that new shoots will emerge from the smallest bits of roots left in the soil.  Complete removal requires pesticides that I’d rather have avoided for the sake of the wildlife I want to attract.  There’s just no way that I want to try eradicating this thing without modern chemicals.  Heck, one recommended compound is 2-4, D, a component in Agent Orange!  So I’m going to continue unraveling the vines from my flowers, leaving enough at ground level to target with the broad spectrum herbicide glyphosate while avoiding the desired plantings.
I face a prolonged, fastidious process.
With a weakness for metaphors, I can’t help but see yet another in this lesson.  My artistic side has been suffocating for a long while.  I’m slowly learning that there are a number of weeds I’ve allowed to infiltrate and strangle my writing.  Time and persistence are required to identify, control, and eventually decimate these damaging trespassers.
Distractions, doubts, and detractors that keep me away from the page have to be systematically acknowledged before destruction.  That critic in my head with those easy whispered excuses must be confronted.  I have tools at hand such as those taught by Julia Cameron.  In fact, a group of very supportive forum friends (some of whom contribute to this blog – thanks to you all, dears!) are currently guiding me through Cameron’s “Finding Water”.

This fight can be won.  I just need to stay alert, attentive, and consistent with my efforts.  The fruits of these labors will be well worth the effort.  Now excuse me while I go work on a story.

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Cultivating the Imagination – Darla’s Writer Wednesday

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Recently I resumed gardening with a vengeance, renovating neglected areas of the yard as summer simmers in my region of the United States.  Succumbing to cliché, I can’t help making an analogy with my fiction writing and the situation currently underway.

No longer do I wake with plot ideas brimming.  Instead, the once active muse continues to lie dormant after an extended period.  Attempts to pollinate my inspiration wither on the vine in sterile soil.  A tiny Haiku feels like a big accomplishment (though I guess that’s okay to some degree, as it is at least a form of creation).

The frustrating this is that many months ago I wrote with furious intensity at every opportunity.  Pages of notebooks filled up with penned stories that I later transferred to computer.  Sheets of print-outs stacked on the passenger seat of my sedan allowed editing at long traffic lights.  I’d reread while on the NordicTrack making further, if sometimes difficult to decipher, notes of improvement.

Minor elements twined together to sprout unforeseen branches for ever-growing characters.  I began to feel as if I’d been possessed by some benevolent spirit sharing stories from the afterlife.  Now, when I have more time to devote to writing than ever, the field is barren.

Enough of the self indulgent puns, however.  As a wise friend pointed out, life ebbs and flows like the tide (Thanks for that uplifting remark, A. Catherine Noon!  What goes out must come in, eh?).  The author in me seems to be stuck in winter, but no season lasts forever (Okay, one more pun).

I’m going to try starting fresh each morning, perhaps assigning each weekday with a particular goal.  Mondays could be devoted to reading those short stories moldering in a binder.  Tuesdays can be spent working on blog material, which I’ve neglected.  Wednesday might be time to develop new ideas, whether for a virgin project or an unfinished one.

Before I go on, let’s just say that I’ll have to find what works.  In the meantime, I hope you don’t stagnate in whatever you desire to achieve.

Now let’s go create!

Maybe I’ll scribble down a Haiku before logging off…

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Twas the Day After Vacation, and All Through the House…

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Lots has been written on the benefits of vacation and how to take one, where to go, what to do, etc. etc. ad nauseum infinitum.

So how come nobody talks about coming back from a vacation and how to get back into the swing of things?  It’s the beginning of June and almost the Summer Solstice and I’d rather hide under my bed and nap.

So, in honor of napping, let’s discuss summer reading!

TIGER TIGER is available now for pre-order from Samhain Publishing and will be out officially on July 23rd.  The most exciting part of this book, for me, is them trying to find the killer.  They know it’s a tiger, and they know it’s not one of Neal’s men, but they have trouble finding the actual perpetrator.  It was fun trying to figure out how to hide some of the clues and reveal others, and decide when to do it.  You’ll have to tell us if it “worked” for the story or not.

In the meantime, I’m going to go hide under a pillow with my kitten.  Enjoy!

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“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
– E.E. Cummings

My links: Blog | Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | Amazon | LinkedIn | Pandora
Knoontime Knitting: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Ravelry
Noon and Wilder links: Blog | Website | Facebook
The Writer Zen Garden: The Writers Retreat Blog | Forum | Facebook | Twitter
Team Blogs: Nightlight | Nightlight FB Page | Beyond the Veil | BtV FB Page | LGBT Fantasy Fans and Writers | LGBTFFW FB Page
Publishers: Samhain Publishing | Torquere Press

Check out BURNING BRIGHT, available from Samhain Publishing.
Check out EMERALD FIRE, available from Torquere Books.
Check out “Taking a Chance“, available from Torquere Books.
Check out COOK LIKE A WRITER , available from Barnes and Noble.
Watch for TIGER TIGER, coming July 23, 2013, from Samhain Publishing.

Writer Wednesday – The Importance of Hope

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I am considering changing my career and have gone back to the basics, which for me, is What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles (which, if you haven’t read it or it’s been awhile, go pick up the new version, it’s awesome).  In the very first chapter, he writes about Hope and how to find it.

I think he’s right-on.  You can read his book for his four keys to finding hope because they’re well worth reading – regardless of where you are on your career path.  But for my purposes here, I wanted to highlight his first point:  make sure you have at least two alternatives in every situation.

We’ve talked about this kind of mindset on Writer’s Retreat before.  Darla’s Keeping the Faith and my own Power to the People are two recent examples.  Writing is, by its nature, a solitary pursuit and it’s critical to keeping the fingers moving on the keyboard that we keep the right mindset.  I don’t know if “right” is exactly the word I want, more likely it’s “effective” as in, “does what I’m doing work to keep me on the page?”  If it does, great, if not, try something else.  And that, Dear Reader, is where having alternatives comes in handy.

For example, let’s say we’re writing a story about Jake and Luke.  Jake is a biker and Luke is a day trader.  What happens if we make Jake a suburban cyclist instead?  Or what if Luke is a child counselor?  What if Luke is Lydia?  What if they’re brother and sister, instead of a romantic partnership?

It makes sense from a battle standpoint, as well.  There’s an old saying, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”  How does a strategist prevail, then?  By having a backup plan, contingency plan, whatever you want to call it.  Figure it’s your Zombie Apocalypse Survival Plan.  It doesn’t matter what you call it, it matters that you have it.

After all, having a plan to survive the apocalypse means you have to hope that you will survive the apocalypse, eh?

See why hope is so important?

Darla’s Day Out

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The local arboretum called to me recently for a much needed walk in the fresh air.  To my delight, a mother mallard watched over her newly hatched brood in one of the ponds.  Not wishing to disturb them, my companion took this picture.  If you look closely, you can spot a couple of the ducklings in the direction the cautious mother faces.

I decided that an excuse was in order to share this iconic and heartwarming image of spring.  So here is my resulting thought, that writers need to be like this duck.  We ought to be on constant lookout, though not in search of the dangers for which she scanned.

Our eyes should be open to inspiration.  It’s simple, I know, yet our view is often stunted by daily chores and responsibilities that narrow our focus, directing our vision toward mundane matters.
This blog’s own talented A. Catherine Noon recently hosted a workshop to spur writing from prompts.  Her grand ideas support the notion of awareness, whether she guided us to write from a set of written criteria or via the use of our various senses.  It did me good to open my mind and just let inspiration spool out.
Just the other day I stumbled upon an ancient Israeli name, Aziel, that spawned an idea for a character.  It’s difficult to say where this might lead, but I intend to find out.
I hope we can all expand our horizons and see what creative sparks fly.  Happy writing!
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Spring Fever

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While I am posting this several days late, there are several achievements of which I am very proud.  For one, I figured out how to set up events in Google Calendar and share them.  Yeah, yeah, I’m behind the times, but I get there eventually.  Anyway, now such tardiness should not reoccur.  This is something I’ve been meaning to do and, like most things I procrastinate attempting, proved much easier than expected.

Another big accomplishment took more time yet felt even better.  Over the years, recipes accumulated in a kitchen drawer, migrating from one spot to another when the space was renovated last year.  This afternoon I flipped through an inches thick stack of computer print-outs, culling those never expected to be made again if they were even tried in the first place.  Honestly, with several bottles of delicious hot sauce open in my refrigerator, the odds of me whipping up an experimental batch are slim to none.  So those are out, along with anything deemed better left to the professionals (naan, for example, when a great Indian restaurant is minutes away).

In between those tasks, I tackled the most emotionally charged one of all.  Laugh if you want.  I actually cleaned out my underwear drawer.  Silly thing to put off, isn’t it?  There were many things which had seen better days – in more ways than one.  First, once pretty items were faded and often a bit ragged when viewed with an honest eye.  Second, my body hasn’t fit the lingerie in the back of the drawer for many, many months (years, actually…  sigh…  better days, indeed).  It was time to face the fact that if I ever reach such sizes again, I’m going to want new garments.  Heck, I’ll deserve them.

So with all that accomplished today, I think it’s official that the verdant spring growth around my home has reinvigorated me.  And having ridded this house of clutter and prodded my intellect by learning a new minor skill, it’s time to wake up my hibernating muse and shake out the cobwebs.

I hope you’ll begin anew with me, stepping lightly into whatever season awaits you.  Once we clear out the odd bits, we may find some wondrous creations within.  Or, at the very least, we won’t have to stuff freshly laundered unmentionables into an over-packed drawer.

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