A Pantser’s morning monologue upon sitting down to write.

Oh…gawd.

What the Aytch-Eee-Double Hockey Stick am I doing here? I mean here in the middle of this book? Did I not have a plan when I started this? What has been going on for the last ten chapters, and why-oh-why do I have all these characters off in different places doing different things? For the love of Virginia Woolf, every narrative is supposed to have a central trunk from which all the other stuff branches out – I swear somebody told me that in a class at some point – and all I have here is a thorn bush!

Hey, a squirrel out the window. Look at him go… Continue reading “A Pantser’s morning monologue upon sitting down to write.”

How Breaking Bad Made Me a Better Writer

As I’ve said before, I live in the middle of nowhere. We don’t even have cable TV. In order to get any TV, you need satellite. Well, our phone company about a year or so ago promised us we would have cable this year (2012). Umm, yeah, didn’t happen. So, since we have lovely DSL internet, we decided to do Netflix.

I normally don’t like shows like Breaking Bad. It’s not my normal viewing fare. My hubby got me into watching it—we watch 1 episode every morning as we eat breakfast. At first I didn’t like it, it was drama, drug-related, and in general, rather crude. But something happened after the first few episodes: I found myself looking forward to the next episode. Why? Suspense. Continue reading “How Breaking Bad Made Me a Better Writer”

Would Anyone Notice if I Quit Social Media?

Guest post
by Emma Meade

In the past 12 months I have spent countless hours of my life on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads. I’ve roamed around the blogosphere reading posts, leaving comments, tweeting links to interesting articles and writing for my own blog. If I were to delete every online account of mine tomorrow, would anyone notice or care? Being honest, I’d have to admit few would. And why should they? I have many blogs I enjoy, people on Twitter whose tweets and links amuse me, but if they upped and quit the virtual world and I never read another blog post or tweet from them again, I wouldn’t be broken-hearted, at least not for very long. Continue reading “Would Anyone Notice if I Quit Social Media?”

Thoughts on The Hobbit, and other “Big” things.

So I am presently watching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy for the umpteenth time because The Hobbit is coming out soon and, well, I am a big ol’, oliphaunt-sized Fantasy Nerd. How big, you ask? It should go without saying that I’m watching the extended versions of all three movies with all the deleted scenes and so forth, making each film something like 57 hours long.

And I love it. Continue reading “Thoughts on The Hobbit, and other “Big” things.”