I have wanted to reintroduce a character Evie May from Uneasy Spirits, my second book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. I wrote this book in 2010, fell in love with the character that exhibited signs of dissociative disorder (but in the 19th century setting, seen as a trance medium). And I recently found the idea for basic plot for her. It will either be a short story or novella, which is how I often deal with stories about minor characters from the series. So, as soon as I finish my current work in progress, and start the research for the next full-length novel in my mystery series, I will start this shorter work. (I hope within the next 3 months.) I am very excited about this and I am really looking forward to getting reacquainted with this character (who will be 4 years older).
I do like knowing where I'm headed after the current project; it all begins to gestate around a corner...and yes, it IS exciting!
Love this idea and work of spin-offs, and further exploration of a character. Always good to continue to follow their lives; this creating thing is very odd!
Yes, very odd. I remember how writers would talk about a character taking on a life of their own, and I certainly experienced this a reader, as I often continued a character's story on in my head after I closed the pages of a book But experiencing it as a writer really is surreal. Not just the way that I can find myself having a character say and feel something I never planned for them (and one really does feel as if you are just channelling sometimes) but hadn't expected that characters would nag at me to let them have a fuller life than their walk on roles. I've written 8 short stories and 5 novellas now, each letting a minor character have their own story, and I have found this so satisfying (as to many fans of the series.) Something I know that would have been much harder to do if I had taken the traditional route.
Goals? Hoo-boy...! Kind of like making a long overdue appointment to see a medical provider. You know it's for the best, but you're not always ready for what's involved, or for the results. I love this so much: "Through my lived-experience of this though, I find it almost always happens just before I think I’m actually ready."
So, that whole book idea. It niggles around in the back of my brain, and it seems more than a few of "us" are setting that as a 2024 intention, and I'm still very much in the "not ready" phase. I don't know how to get past that, because I think, in my heart of hearts, I don't feel worthy. :sigh:
Ah! How can I click "like" when you say you're "unworthy"? I am curious as to why you think this... but continue to let it sit, as Time has a way of re-shaping. Read around the subject; by "around" I mean loosely, not directly. Build slowly. Keep working on other things; let your mind think you have no intention of Going There... head games we play! Keep us posted!
Alison, I missed this earlier and am glad it found its way to me now. I appreciate the wise counsel to sit, reshape, hold loosely, and build slowly. And, I'm giggling at the idea of tricking my mind into thinking I'm not thinking about it! I suppose, if I did a bit deeper into that sense of unworthiness it's really a cover for fear of failure. My mind says, "I can't possibly be good enough for this to be worth what it will take to achieve," as a backdoor way of preventing me from falling flat. Make sense? Yes, updates will come as they come. Thanks!
I look forward to the updates! And if you explore that sense of failure-fear/unworthiness... I suspect that's something we all feel at some point or other. One can do the slippery slide into the other. And then it can cause us to stop in our work, or flounder. No!
“Like a bowl full of jelly” is a terrific simile, maybe the best one in the poem, although I wonder if children today would see it jiggling as we oldsters do. Why would you eat a bowl of jelly, etc?
In the updated pastiche “Cajun Night Before Christmas,” it’s interesting to see what new similes the pseudonymous author “Trosclair” came up with. In the original, St. Nick looks “like a pedler.” What’s a peddler, etc? In the Cajun version: “He look like a burglar.” More realistic and funny to boot.
I’m indebted to Brian Spears for introducing me to the Cajun version. His recent column is here and includes an embedded reading that also shows the original illustrations.
I was rather fond of jello as a kid--probably because we had it so rarely, usually when ill. Maybe that made it easier to imagine; I could always tell when my mom watered it down--it was even more jiggly!
Thank you for the link to the "Cajun Night Before!" and Brian Spears newsletter--a good find! You're right in your comments there: it's a good read and hear aloud! Love the gators (they ate the reindeer??)
I agree, This writer’s-life trip is a strange one! After being with my publisher for the past 13 years, she has decided to change direction and not publish children's books anymore. So I am about to self-publish the next Amanda book. It's an amicable separation and the first 9 books will still be on her books. I am scared but willing to try this avenue and see how I do. So that is my big project for 2024.
Oh!! Keep us posted... in fact, maybe we can do a Q&A about the process and choices you make. Let me know. I'm sorry for the disruption--I know you've so enjoyed working together! Here's to Amanda in '24, Darlene!
Songs are also great places to listen for simile and metaphor. In one of Lana Del Rey’s songs, she sings “Happiness is a butterfly / Try to catch it like every night / It escapes from my hands into moonlight / Every day is a lullaby / I hum it on the phone like every night / And sing it for my babies on the tour life.”
Two good metaphors, both pretty simple, but she extends them by giving examples of how happiness is like a butterfly, how every day is like a lullaby.
I think the second metaphor is the more powerful one. Obviously she’s not literally humming or singing the “day.” Maybe she’s like a mother (or therapist) while on the road, perhaps to the younger members of the tour, her backup singers, her “babies” — to complete the lullaby idea. One test of a simile or metaphor is if it sticks in the head — this one does. The rhyming of butterfly with lullaby is pretty darn good too.
Yes--great point about how it works within the reader's mind!
I remember setting aside a book that described a head as a melon... when there was nothing melon-related or connected in the text in any way. It DID stand out! But only to remove the reader from the experience, to cause them to question. (This reader!)
It should serve to build the story/character/setting--what you want the reader to walk away with--and resonate.
These are lovely examples! Thank you. Quite right about butterfly/lullaby!
There's a commercial I see a lot while watching sports at the gym, a concussion awareness one that says "Mind your melon," featuring cartoon characters, including a child whose head is a melon. It's a great metaphor, and the phrase is alliterative and thus memorable, and everyone knows what happens if you drop a melon.
I would like to try my hand at a novel this year. I’ve only done short pieces up to this point, so my desire is mostly to see whether I am able to craft a story long enough and complex enough to fill all those pages. (The mountain is there, y’know.)
on learning: I love the Unschool...a writer's community led by Alison. Even when life side tracks you, I can pull over and read an article or other writer's comments and it reminds me that this road is still here. I appreciate that more than you know. I've been to school and studied the formal 'stuff' so this leads to goals...
on goals this year: to write...to put my writing into the world. I'll be spending more time in Arizona it seems, so I need to evaluate whether or not, I can write there. If the desert doesn't accommodate my writing, that may be an issue! But I do love walking in the desert...it is a great place to wander.
(just ordered the Scent of Time...excited to take this to the desert!)
Thank you for all that you do Alison and being the writing road through 2023!
This means so much to me, Shirley! Thank you. So grateful you are here, and writing!
I spent much time in the desert this past year. It'll be interesting to see what you find there, with your work. There's such a tough and fragile beauty to it. Yes, so good for walks.
I'll be curious to know what you think of the Han book. I continue to read it in snippets, and ponder.
On the one hand, being retired I have "all the time in the world." On the other hand, being retired on an insufficient pension I'm always jobhunting and panicking, picking up short term jobs ones I love, thank heavens! - volunteering to improve marketability (that's never worked in my entire life of hours and hours of volunteering) further limited by physical stupidities. Additional training. Chronic financial stress inspires some writers. It freezes me. So do unsettled schedules. So does knowing I need to move but not knowing when I'll find the place. The de-cluttering. NEVERTHELESS, I have come back to a short story that is good in so many ways, but not good enough. The pivotable scene, fine on its own, is lost when the story is read as a whole. Why? How to burst it to the fore? Despite many rewrites, I may have to rewrite from the beginning to find my way inside this scene and come up with what needs to follow. And then there's the rabbit hole of a memoir which various people over the years have told me I need to write, but I haven't because my life is boring, but find myself - partly through these prompts, thanks a lot, Alison - digging around in the past. Adding these bits to my decades of journals to cull - only I don't have the space to lay all this out. In a nutshell, my resolutions are to move my muscles and my life and to focus on writing.
I talk about having multiple projects on the go...
What I should add to that is the need to focus on only one at a time as I'm working on it. A bit of mental-blinders there! This is not easy. Especially for those of us who've worn multiple hats throughout our lives simultaneously. Here, I'm thinking specifically of being a working/studying/writing etc parent. That parent hat always stays on for many of us, even as we do all the other tasks. Being a writer can be the same; it just doesn't come off. So even years later, it's so habitual.
I still often time myself working on one piece: "okay...an hour with this one." And focus on that alone until turning to another thing on the list...
I have wanted to reintroduce a character Evie May from Uneasy Spirits, my second book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. I wrote this book in 2010, fell in love with the character that exhibited signs of dissociative disorder (but in the 19th century setting, seen as a trance medium). And I recently found the idea for basic plot for her. It will either be a short story or novella, which is how I often deal with stories about minor characters from the series. So, as soon as I finish my current work in progress, and start the research for the next full-length novel in my mystery series, I will start this shorter work. (I hope within the next 3 months.) I am very excited about this and I am really looking forward to getting reacquainted with this character (who will be 4 years older).
I do like knowing where I'm headed after the current project; it all begins to gestate around a corner...and yes, it IS exciting!
Love this idea and work of spin-offs, and further exploration of a character. Always good to continue to follow their lives; this creating thing is very odd!
Yes, very odd. I remember how writers would talk about a character taking on a life of their own, and I certainly experienced this a reader, as I often continued a character's story on in my head after I closed the pages of a book But experiencing it as a writer really is surreal. Not just the way that I can find myself having a character say and feel something I never planned for them (and one really does feel as if you are just channelling sometimes) but hadn't expected that characters would nag at me to let them have a fuller life than their walk on roles. I've written 8 short stories and 5 novellas now, each letting a minor character have their own story, and I have found this so satisfying (as to many fans of the series.) Something I know that would have been much harder to do if I had taken the traditional route.
Character nags... yes, they do that. That's a substantial number of stories to come of that nagging and exploration. They do push us!
Goals? Hoo-boy...! Kind of like making a long overdue appointment to see a medical provider. You know it's for the best, but you're not always ready for what's involved, or for the results. I love this so much: "Through my lived-experience of this though, I find it almost always happens just before I think I’m actually ready."
So, that whole book idea. It niggles around in the back of my brain, and it seems more than a few of "us" are setting that as a 2024 intention, and I'm still very much in the "not ready" phase. I don't know how to get past that, because I think, in my heart of hearts, I don't feel worthy. :sigh:
Ah! How can I click "like" when you say you're "unworthy"? I am curious as to why you think this... but continue to let it sit, as Time has a way of re-shaping. Read around the subject; by "around" I mean loosely, not directly. Build slowly. Keep working on other things; let your mind think you have no intention of Going There... head games we play! Keep us posted!
Alison, I missed this earlier and am glad it found its way to me now. I appreciate the wise counsel to sit, reshape, hold loosely, and build slowly. And, I'm giggling at the idea of tricking my mind into thinking I'm not thinking about it! I suppose, if I did a bit deeper into that sense of unworthiness it's really a cover for fear of failure. My mind says, "I can't possibly be good enough for this to be worth what it will take to achieve," as a backdoor way of preventing me from falling flat. Make sense? Yes, updates will come as they come. Thanks!
I look forward to the updates! And if you explore that sense of failure-fear/unworthiness... I suspect that's something we all feel at some point or other. One can do the slippery slide into the other. And then it can cause us to stop in our work, or flounder. No!
But good to giggle at the head games!
“Like a bowl full of jelly” is a terrific simile, maybe the best one in the poem, although I wonder if children today would see it jiggling as we oldsters do. Why would you eat a bowl of jelly, etc?
In the updated pastiche “Cajun Night Before Christmas,” it’s interesting to see what new similes the pseudonymous author “Trosclair” came up with. In the original, St. Nick looks “like a pedler.” What’s a peddler, etc? In the Cajun version: “He look like a burglar.” More realistic and funny to boot.
I’m indebted to Brian Spears for introducing me to the Cajun version. His recent column is here and includes an embedded reading that also shows the original illustrations.
https://brianspears.substack.com/p/learning-to-holiday
Who was “Trosclair”? No one seems to know. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf wonders if “Anon” was often a woman.
I was rather fond of jello as a kid--probably because we had it so rarely, usually when ill. Maybe that made it easier to imagine; I could always tell when my mom watered it down--it was even more jiggly!
Thank you for the link to the "Cajun Night Before!" and Brian Spears newsletter--a good find! You're right in your comments there: it's a good read and hear aloud! Love the gators (they ate the reindeer??)
Peace in '24 -- (We can hope.)
I agree, This writer’s-life trip is a strange one! After being with my publisher for the past 13 years, she has decided to change direction and not publish children's books anymore. So I am about to self-publish the next Amanda book. It's an amicable separation and the first 9 books will still be on her books. I am scared but willing to try this avenue and see how I do. So that is my big project for 2024.
Oh!! Keep us posted... in fact, maybe we can do a Q&A about the process and choices you make. Let me know. I'm sorry for the disruption--I know you've so enjoyed working together! Here's to Amanda in '24, Darlene!
Thanks. Will do.
Songs are also great places to listen for simile and metaphor. In one of Lana Del Rey’s songs, she sings “Happiness is a butterfly / Try to catch it like every night / It escapes from my hands into moonlight / Every day is a lullaby / I hum it on the phone like every night / And sing it for my babies on the tour life.”
Two good metaphors, both pretty simple, but she extends them by giving examples of how happiness is like a butterfly, how every day is like a lullaby.
I think the second metaphor is the more powerful one. Obviously she’s not literally humming or singing the “day.” Maybe she’s like a mother (or therapist) while on the road, perhaps to the younger members of the tour, her backup singers, her “babies” — to complete the lullaby idea. One test of a simile or metaphor is if it sticks in the head — this one does. The rhyming of butterfly with lullaby is pretty darn good too.
Yes--great point about how it works within the reader's mind!
I remember setting aside a book that described a head as a melon... when there was nothing melon-related or connected in the text in any way. It DID stand out! But only to remove the reader from the experience, to cause them to question. (This reader!)
It should serve to build the story/character/setting--what you want the reader to walk away with--and resonate.
These are lovely examples! Thank you. Quite right about butterfly/lullaby!
There's a commercial I see a lot while watching sports at the gym, a concussion awareness one that says "Mind your melon," featuring cartoon characters, including a child whose head is a melon. It's a great metaphor, and the phrase is alliterative and thus memorable, and everyone knows what happens if you drop a melon.
It IS a good metaphor for that, yes!
I would like to try my hand at a novel this year. I’ve only done short pieces up to this point, so my desire is mostly to see whether I am able to craft a story long enough and complex enough to fill all those pages. (The mountain is there, y’know.)
After writing short works, the expansiveness of a novel is to luxuriate. It'll be interesting to see how it feels for you... Keep us posted, please!
on learning: I love the Unschool...a writer's community led by Alison. Even when life side tracks you, I can pull over and read an article or other writer's comments and it reminds me that this road is still here. I appreciate that more than you know. I've been to school and studied the formal 'stuff' so this leads to goals...
on goals this year: to write...to put my writing into the world. I'll be spending more time in Arizona it seems, so I need to evaluate whether or not, I can write there. If the desert doesn't accommodate my writing, that may be an issue! But I do love walking in the desert...it is a great place to wander.
(just ordered the Scent of Time...excited to take this to the desert!)
Thank you for all that you do Alison and being the writing road through 2023!
This means so much to me, Shirley! Thank you. So grateful you are here, and writing!
I spent much time in the desert this past year. It'll be interesting to see what you find there, with your work. There's such a tough and fragile beauty to it. Yes, so good for walks.
I'll be curious to know what you think of the Han book. I continue to read it in snippets, and ponder.
Wishing you the best in '24!
On the one hand, being retired I have "all the time in the world." On the other hand, being retired on an insufficient pension I'm always jobhunting and panicking, picking up short term jobs ones I love, thank heavens! - volunteering to improve marketability (that's never worked in my entire life of hours and hours of volunteering) further limited by physical stupidities. Additional training. Chronic financial stress inspires some writers. It freezes me. So do unsettled schedules. So does knowing I need to move but not knowing when I'll find the place. The de-cluttering. NEVERTHELESS, I have come back to a short story that is good in so many ways, but not good enough. The pivotable scene, fine on its own, is lost when the story is read as a whole. Why? How to burst it to the fore? Despite many rewrites, I may have to rewrite from the beginning to find my way inside this scene and come up with what needs to follow. And then there's the rabbit hole of a memoir which various people over the years have told me I need to write, but I haven't because my life is boring, but find myself - partly through these prompts, thanks a lot, Alison - digging around in the past. Adding these bits to my decades of journals to cull - only I don't have the space to lay all this out. In a nutshell, my resolutions are to move my muscles and my life and to focus on writing.
I talk about having multiple projects on the go...
What I should add to that is the need to focus on only one at a time as I'm working on it. A bit of mental-blinders there! This is not easy. Especially for those of us who've worn multiple hats throughout our lives simultaneously. Here, I'm thinking specifically of being a working/studying/writing etc parent. That parent hat always stays on for many of us, even as we do all the other tasks. Being a writer can be the same; it just doesn't come off. So even years later, it's so habitual.
I still often time myself working on one piece: "okay...an hour with this one." And focus on that alone until turning to another thing on the list...