Tag: Rachel Wilder

  • One Small Step For Us, One Giant Leap For Art

    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

    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?

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

    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!

    —
    “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

    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?

  • Writer Wednesday – Using Prompts to Expand Your Repertoire

    In celebration of Spring, I am teaching a free workshop on “Using Prompts to Expand Your Repertoire” at Coffee Time Romance this month.  All during the month of April we will play with new and tried-and-true tools for getting, and staying, on the page.  I hope you’ll join me!

  • Up in the Air

    I wanted to share with you some recent photographs I took while flying across the country to visit Rachel.  Many of the pictures don’t seem like pictures of land, more like textures or maybe even baked cookies on a sheet.  What do you see?

    I am thinking of sending this one in to Southwest, actually.  I love the way it came out.  You can see the horizon-line starting the sunrise.  The sun is over the plane on the right, as though it’s over my shoulder.

    I love this.  It looks like waves or something.

    Somewhere between Colorado/Utah.  Looks like the moon.

    Fuzzy horizon (actually think this goes with the first shot, just without the airplane wing).

    I’ve always wondered, do the squares down there form by roads, or just natural contours of the land?

    Clouds or landforms?

    Clouds?  Snow?  Water?  All of the above?

    This looks unlike land, to me; maybe a map?  Frosted cookies?

    More sugar-frosted brownies.  You can see those lines I mentioned above much more clearly in this image.  Map lines?  Aliens?  Roads?  Elephants?

    I have always loved planes.  This is the back-end of the jets on the wing.

    More mountains.  Haze in the air as the sun cuts across it.

    Much less snow here.  Utah, methinks.  The plane wing is more shadowed, I think we changed direction and are headed a little more northwest.

    Forest with the line of snow.

    There’s just almost a rainbow in the right side of the picture.  Weird how the camera interacts with the double-pane glass of the airplane window.

    Almost looks like clouds, but I think that’s actually snow.  Interesting, since the snow indicates elevation but the whole ground looks like it’s mountains of the same height.

    This looks like meringue, no?

    My knitting project with my notes.  (You know I had to get knitting in here SOMEwhere, right?)

    This is me playing around with the “effects” on my phone.  This one is the vignette setting.

    Looks like cloud froth, but is actually snow.

    This looks like ocean waves, but is actually mountains, valleys, and some cloud formation.

    This is the “negative” effect on my phone.  (Who knew negativity could look so cool, eh?)

    More meringue.  Anyone getting hungry for pie?

    What do you see?

    —
    “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“, part of the Charity Sips 2012 to benefit NOH8, available from Torquere Books.
    Watch for COOK LIKE A WRITER, coming February 2013 from the Guerrilla Chicks.
    Watch for TIGER TIGER, coming July, 2013, from Samhain Publishing.

  • Ways of Seeing

    In college, one of our assigned books was Ways of Seeing by John Berger, based on a series of 30-minute films in the early 1970’s.  While I recommend the book, this isn’t a review of it.  Rather, the title is evokative of a state of mind.  It’s on my shelf in my line-of-site from where I do a lot of my writing, so it’s something that’s in the background of my consciousness and the words have become a phrase in the substrata of my mind.

    The way we see is unique.  Each of us could look at the same scene and come away with different impressions and imagery of what we saw.  This is valuable and necessary.  We don’t have to believe it for it to be true; we just have to see.

    Do you have a camera, even just the simple one in your phone?  (Granted, some of the smart phones out there have cameras that are anything but simple.)  Have you experimented with just shooting a picture series of what you look at every day?  Try this:

    Tomorrow, as you go about your daily round, take pictures.  If you drive, pause and snap what you see out your windshield before you start driving.  If you walk or take transit, snap pictures of stuff you see every time you go on your route.  The more mundane, the better.  Like a detective, we are after data and facts, not art.

    Do you dislike pictures of yourself?  Experiment by taking one picture of yourself every day this week.  Do not judge; just take the picture and record the date.  “This is what I looked like on Tuesday.”  Play with different expressions and poses.  If you find yourself with one particular expression a lot, make that expression (for example, the one you have on your face when the phone rings) and take a picture of yourself.  What do you look like with that expression?

    If you don’t have a camera, there are several good, inexpensive models you can find here, here, and here.  See if you have a friend who would loan you theirs.  If you have an affiliation with a school, they sometimes have them available for loan.

    The point here is to become acquainted with how we see the world.  A fun twist on this exercise is to do it at the same time as your kids and then compare notes.  See what you might learn about each other.  Be prepared – leave your expectations at the door.  When you open your eyes and look, you’ll never know what you might see.

    Have fun!

  • Join Me Over At Chez Delilah’s Today!

    Join me over at Delilah Devlin’s blog today for some ruminations on the magic of craft.

    Happy Holidays!

  • Lovely Monday

    Boria

    It’s Monday at four o’clock in the morning, almost five.  I couldn’t sleep so I got up to write a bit.  I figured I’d use the time to share some thoughts on writing and life, at least according to Noony.

    First, a digression: the picture above made me laugh this morning when I wandered my archive looking for something to illustrate today’s post.  Boria is an odd cat.  Raised by our dog, he thinks he is a dog.  This is a look he gets on his face when I do things he doesn’t expect – like get out of bed at an unholy hour.

    I talked about blocks last time I had a regular bimonthly post, and I’m still in a similar situation vis a vis my story.  But this isn’t all bad, at least in my opinion.  Why?

    Fallow periods are necessary in any artist’s life.  Sometimes they arrise because we fish our pond too aggressively and don’t take the time to restock the fish.  Other times they arrise because of outside stressors.  This latter one is the case for me as I extricate myself from an organization I’ve been actively building for the last three and a half years.

    On the other hand, as I sit back and reflect on all I’ve done and learned, I realize I am wealthy indeed.  I’ve made friendships that I’ll keep for a lifetime, and, like Thomas Edison is quoted as saying relative to his failed attempts to invent a working light bulb, I’ve learned things that don’t work in running a business.  While I haven’t been writing as much in the last two months in terms of story output, I have been blogging quite a lot and working on my social media tasks.  I think it’s important to remember that even if we aren’t working on a particular project, it does not mean that we are not working – even if there’s no action apparent to the outside eye.

    Fallow periods are necessary and deserve our respect.

    One hopes that after this one, I won’t freak out my cat anymore, as well.

    Boria

  • Writer Wednesday: Why Blogs Are Good For Writers

    In thinking about a topic for today’s post, I am reminded why blogging is good for writers.  Of all the forms of social media available to us, blogging is the most flexible and the most adaptable to an individual writer’s style.  Not to diss Facebook, by any means, I merely want to point out that if you’re a writer, you ought to be blogging.  Why?

    Here, then, are Aunt Noony’s Five Reasons Why Blogs Are Good For Writers:

    1.  Blogging allows you to explore your voice.  What is voice?  It is, quite simply, the thing you use to talk with.  It’s a Zen concept and, for that reason, tough to pin down.  But what is definite is that voice is as individual as the writer.  The better we can get in touch with our own voice, the better writers we become.  We get in touch with our voice by writing.  A lot.  Blogging lets you do that in a low-pressure, supportive environment.

    2.  Blogging gives you a platform.  Do anything long enough and you begin to develop a set of topics and opinions upon which you can feel qualified to write.  If you love coffee, for example, pretty soon you’ll get tired of writing “I love coffee” and start to come up with some interesting coffee facts.  Collect enough of those kinds of articles and poof: instand coffee platform, just add water.

    3.  Topics for blogs are unlimited.  Do you enjoy talking about underwater basketweaving?  Go for it! Cosplay?  Have at it!  Knitting?  Do it!  Any and all topics, both tame and adult-oriented, lend themselves well to blogging.

    4.  You can expand your skills by blogging.  You will, over time, learn a bit of HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language), the language in which websites are written.  You will begin to understand how search engines find topics when users are looking for things.  You will make friends and influence people though your blog, and one day, maybe help others into the world of blogging.

    5.  You don’t have to limit yourself to arbitrary character limits.  If you only feel like posting a sentence or two and a bunch of pictures, you can.  If you feel like writing and writing and writing on a topic that makes you passionate, you can.  The sky’s the limit!  You can adapt your writing to your moods and, in the process, collect a set of clips that you can leverage later to other blogging opportunities.

    Still on the fence?  Why not ask your favorite blogger if they’d be willing to let you do a guest post on a particular topic?  No one says you have to dive in head-first your first time.  You can ease into the blogosphere gently.

    I’ll warn you, though.  It can quickly become addictive.  Enjoy!

    Write on!