Come Inside My Head, if You Dare…
Please think about this!
No amount of complaining, demonstrations, protests, harassment or heckling is going to change the fact that Donald J. Trump is the 25th President of The United States.
The time for tantrum throwing and slamming social media with your self-righteous outcries, has passed. Being sore-losers is so undignified and childish. Please stop this. Accept that Hillary is not President, and move on.
♥ TTFN ♥
It means you need to suck it up and re-write them!
In the case of my novel, Through the Door, this means a lot of hard work has been added to its ‘to-do’ list. More research, more brainstorming, more organization. I will do the work to tell a better story – because it deserves it.
I love the characters, the plot and the premise. So I’m stubbornly plugging along on the to-do list and outline. This year work halted a couple of times when family stuff needed my attention. Coming back after a month or two is hard! It is amazing how confused and lost you feel at first. Getting oriented again takes some reading your notes and referring to the outline.
I’m learning so much while writing this novel. The most important lesson is to make sure you outline more details and organize things tightly, so you do not lose your way in the midst of the chaos. I believe that if I had more details planned out that I would be finished with the writing and working on the editing by now.
It has been said, many times, “write what you know”. I know a little about a lot of things. What I do NOT know MUST be researched. This can be a chore at times, but I would be so disappointed it if I were reading a novel and the flow is interrupted by wrong things about a subject I am familiar with. It has happened and I was.
I’m growing to like doing research. Often, I am surprised/delighted about what I find out, and now and then I learn something that slides right into my story and makes it better. Win-Win, as it were. [Hubby hates the win-win saying, but sometimes it really applies.]
When I needed to learn about head lice, what I read grossed me out enough – they didn’t need to show me photos! Google it if you dare. short articles and huge hideous (zoomed in) photos of creatures from another planet. My scalp itched for hours after. Telling hubby about it later (he saw no photos or text), his head started itching. Sorry if yours is now. My Bad.
Books, archived newspapers and the internet are my best sources, however the most fun is chatting with someone who has experienced for themselves the trials or situation that I’m writing about. They made it feel more real to you, and you pass that along to your characters. Having a 98-year-old early resident of a small mountain township will have stories to tell that are not recorded in history, but happened just the same.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have a date with my manuscript…
♥ TTFN ♥
First off, my day was going wonderful. That abruptly changed while driving home from the grocery store. I missed the turn onto my street – probably because it was pitch black outside (remember there are no street lights in my neighborhood), the storm was raining down hard on my windshield and I have night blindness, so I could not see much other than raindrops in the car lights. I did not realize that my windshield had fogged up so badly until I opened my window (to shine my little girly LED flashlight on a street sign so I could read it, which did not help at all). I had driven the last couple streets blind. Not a good thing – especially when one side of the road is a dirt wall and the other a cliff.
Still, you may be thinking, “she’s lived there for over 4 years now! How could she miss her own street?”
“That isn’t important. That isn’t even the worse part.”
I needed to stop somewhere safe and get out my GPS. I saw a cement driveway in front of a white garage – perfect! I will pull in there and figure this all out.
Because of the dark and unfamiliar road I had to ease forward, ease backward (a bunch of times) to turn around in order to turn into the driveway. That is the turn I did not make. Then I proceeded to make things worse, by trying to back my car away from the residents lawn, while turning my steering wheel all the way and cautiously gave it gas. My car did not budge. When smoke came from my breaks, it was time to brave the storm and go out (girly flashlight in hand) and see what was going on.
Somehow, my little car’s front end was sunk to the frame in mud. A few naughty words came out of my mouth when I knew that I would not be able to handle this without hubby and his big-assed truck. Gratefully I thanked my guardian angel for making sure I did not forget my cell phone – AND that I caught enough signal to put a call through to my house.
I was able to tell hubby where I was with the map on my GPS. IT knew all the street names I could not read. Too bad I did not remember I had it right away – I would be home drying out by our wood burning stove and not soaking wet and feeling stupid. More like “stoopid”, really. Hubby must have bit his tongue, refraining from calling me that.
I only shut off the engine because I was low on gas. I left the flashers and headlights on so I would not get broadsided by a car going by. Did I mention my car was sideways across one lane on the road? Anyway, my car remains sideways in the road. When the car was not running, my transmission would not allow me to change gears. It was not running because the battery died.
“You should have turned off your headlights,” hubby said. More than once.
“I should have waited for the morning to go to the store.” I said. Now I have to try and get my car fixed, instead of doing the baking I planned to do in the morning. Baking was the reason I needed to go to the store in the first place.
It’s got conspiracy written all over it.
♥ TTFN ♥
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