Thursdays with Taryn~ The Older I Get #life #distraction #learning

Life's been smacking me around a bit lately- so much so, that my writing, edits and anything to do with my stories has taken the backseat to everything else life is throwing at me. There are some days that I'd love to just curl up in a ball and sob the day away because I just can't fit everything in. I can't be every place I need to be, or where I want to be for that matter.

My writing's suffering for the sake of Life in general- laundry, meals, school will be out soon for my kids, I've been making an effort to do yoga and dance exercise as well as dealing with emotional/hormonal issues and I have lost nearly 30 pounds (and sticking with this new lifestyle has NOT been easy!) and I'm trying very hard to learn to drive- as an adult - Which is VERY frustrating for me. (I practiced parallel parking for the very first time today and thought I might pull my hair out and grind my teeth down to nubbins! Oh, and the turnabouts...yeah...don't care for that EITHER! But I have to know it.)

So anyway...I might have mentioned this before, but when I lived in my hometown, I walked pretty much everywhere I went— to the store, work, wherever I needed to go, unless I was going somewhere with friends or family who drove. For me, there was no need or rush to get my license, though it would have made traveling more convenient and perhaps opened more doors for me career-wise, but then I never anticipated moving away from where I grew up and I had a teensy fear of driving to cap that off, so I didn't worry about it.

Of course, all that changed when I moved here, a good 2 1/2 hour drive from everything I knew. I never thought it was that big a deal then either, when I first got down here, but as time has marched on, it has become an issue for me. Living in the country is nice, but it places me far from being within walking distance of most anything. Even the closest gas station is a mile there and back and that is one LONG walk, lemme tell ya! I've walked it, and that was back when I still weighed a lot more than I do now!

I don't work outside the home, so that's seemingly convenient, but more and more these days I feel stuck and stagnant and often, when there are things I could go get or pick up or go do, I can't because I don't drive. And oftentimes, it makes me feel beholden to others, having to rely on them to the point that I feel burdensome and I HATE that feeling. I feel like I'm missing a keystone to what's essential to most every living thing- a sense of freedom and movement.

Now I'm here, nearing that big "black" milestone birthday in blah blah blah years, I have two kids in school and I live in the country- quite a ways from town and quite a LONG ways from my roots.

I used to think that being away from where I grew up would get easier with time, but the older I get, it actually seems HARDER. I've been away for almost 12 years, but there are days that make my heart ache so fierce, its hard to get through the day. Maybe it's because my kids are getting older, but maybe it's also because my parents are as well and life is moving too swiftly and it can easily get away from us before we realize it.

That fact does not escape me. Life is far too short and several things recently have reminded me that if you aren't living your life fully, then you need to stop and assess that, especially when you reach a point where you don't know what you're passionate about anymore- or when you don't feel passionately about your life.

I'm still learning...but sometimes I don't feel that I'm living and there are days I feel like a shell of myself. Think a lot of that is what's jamming me up creatively and until I sort myself out, or push through, it's just going to take time...I just don't want to waste time being unfulfilled and unhappy.

#WIPlash Wednesdays- #Advice for #Aspiring #Writers

What advice would you give an aspiring author who wants to be published?

1. WRITE- Get those words down, build those worlds up and bring your characters to life. Prove to yourself you can finish that first manuscript and give it wings to expand from there. Write more...
2. NEVER GIVE UP- No matter what anyone tells you, believe in yourself and keep moving forward. There will be bumps in the road no matter what your dreams or goals, it's up to you how you navigate those potholes.
3. BUILD YOUR BRAND- Know what you write and promote yourself. Whether you write romance, mystery, suspense, general fiction- find your niche and work it. Decide early if you're writing under your real name or a pen name. This helps build the brand.
4. BLOG- Talk about your writing, things that interest or inspire you- things that make your writing life YOURS. Do you write with music? Do you have sentimental writing totems? Special habits?
5. SOCIALIZE & NETWORK- Join online groups, follow other authors if you're on Twitter. Post your blog links where others will see them. Interact with authors and readers alike. Join writing associations where you can talk "shop" with other authors about the craft, the industry. Socializing and putting yourself out there is the only way to gain followers of your own & build your reader base. Guest blog and host other authors on your blog.
6. SUBMIT/GO INDIE- Work hard and get that manuscript or manuscripts polished and then submit to publishers who are looking for your kind of stories. Or, take the wheel of your own writing career and drive the self-pub highway. Investigate, talk to other Indie authors. Do you want to go Big House or Small Pub? Or would you rather strike out on your own? Ebook or print or both? Know what you want and go for it.
7. TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE- Most importantly- write for yourself- the stories of your heart. Yes, challenge yourself as a writer, but never try to "shape" yourself or your stories in a way you can't live with. If it makes you uncomfortable or makes you feel you are writing to suit someone else with something you're not proud of, don't do it. Some will tell you to pay attention to what's popular or sought after, but also be true to yourself and write what touches your heart. Paying attention to what's out there is important, but don't let the "popular today" handicap your writing or your confidence for your career future.

When it all boils down to it, do the thing you enjoy most- write. Then pursue this dream with all you have.

Have a great Wednesday! Write on-
I can see the weekend from here.

In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason (Favorite Book Spotlight)

Today's book holds special meaning for me, in several ways that may be hard to express, but I will try to put it down without rambling on and on.

IN COUNTRY
by Bobbie Ann Mason

"In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father died in Vietnam just before she was born. The first children born to American GIs who went to Vietnam were coming of age, and they were starting to ask what happened."

In 1989 I lost my grandfather to suicide. He suffered with manic depression, though I wasn't aware of it at that age, and well, sometimes bad things happen to good people. He was a churchgoing man, he and my grandmother had gone to South America in the mid-70's for missionary work. He built houses, she taught in a school. Suicide was the last thing I ever expected.

He died in February, not long after my 14th birthday. I was in the 8th grade and it was the first truly traumatic life experience I had. I don't think I really took time to mourn his death. I still had trouble coming to grips with the fact that he was gone when we would go over to visit my grandmother at their house. It felt like he was still there and for me, the very idea was too surreal. He would come in out of the garage at some point, he would be there and things would be fine. My 14 year-old mind just couldn't make sense of it. It happened so quickly that there was no goodbyes, there was just an emptiness I didn't know how to deal with.

That fall, I started my Freshman year of high school. The culmination of several events that year- my grandfather's death, humiliating myself over some boy(who I'd have to face daily on the bus) and then the general stress of high school did something to me. I don't know if my coping mechanism broke or what. Normally an A & B student, I was struggling to keep Bs & Cs, if I was lucky as the school year got underway. Only a couple of months in I grew depressed and started having problems with my stomach. Whether they were real pains or psychosomatic, I might never know for sure, but I thought I was broken.

I saw my regular doctor, who ran tests for stomach ulcers. Nothing. We saw another doctor, who thought it was just my nerves and prescribed pills. I saw a psychologist, but she simply made me meet her at the high school and forced me to walk up and down the hallways in front of my peers while I cried in embarrassment, still uncertain WHY I was having so much trouble. She thought putting me in the environment I was struggling with would make it more comfortable for me. Yeah...well, that didn't work.

Then came the psychiatrist who prescribed that icky pill that starts with an X. One of the pills I was taking gave me nightmares so my mom flushed them. I was getting sick and tired of all these people shrinking my brain, my family and friends thinking I was crazy and heaven only knows what my classmates thought about me. I heard the rumors—

I had stomach cancer and was going through treatment.
I'd gotten knocked up and moved away to Virginia to have the baby.
I think some even thought I'd died.

I don't blame anyone for thinking it. My situation was confusing to me for a very long time, as it was.

When it became clear that the psychiatrist deemed me capable of returning to school the weekend after my 15th birthday in February and I was still refusing to go to school out of irrational fears, my parents had to find an alternative. It had been almost a year since my grandfather's death, I'd seen more doctors than I ever cared to see in my entire life, I'd been publicly humiliated by the psychologist(who I thought was a crackpot anyway), and we had gone through every plausible reason for my emotional and physical turmoil. I ended up dropping out and took home school shortly thereafter and I stopped all visits and treatment with the headcases.

It took years for me to self-diagnose where it began and ironically, it seems that it was the one thing my shrinky-dinks didn't even mull over for very long. A traumatic sudden death in the family that was never truly dealt with at that age will definitely pack an emotional toll. At least, that's my take on it.

It was around the time I dropped out of school, that 15th birthday, that my dad gave me a belated Christmas gift. A signed copy of In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason-

See, the construction company that my dad works for was building her house in my hometown. He meant for it to be a Christmas present, but hadn't gotten the opportunity to get it signed by her until after the holidays were over, so it ended up becoming a belated gift/Birthday present that year.

It was my first foray into reading more grown-up realistic fiction. It was down to earth and honest. It felt real and it was a gift that I'll always treasure because my father knew I aspired to be a writer, even though he warned me and warned me about how hard it was to break into the business...that it was a tough industry and not everyone who wants to write CAN write, especially when you have to support yourself financially and the business can be so fickle. I guess in some ways it wasn't any different than the advice he would have given me if I'd wanted to be a rock star or an artist. Being a writer is a lofty dream.

And yet, every time I took up that book, and saw her signature inside it, knowing she was a writer and she was from Kentucky and she lived in my hometown- it inspired me to believe that I could be a writer. That my circumstances didn't have to define who I was, as a person, or as a writer. The trauma of that loss and change in my life didn't have to turn me into a thing that cowered in the corner, that feared living life. This book will always inspire me, not just for the story Bobbie Ann Mason told, but because of the way in which I came to know it.

If you want to know more, you can click the book cover or her name at the top of the blog to go to the In Country Amazon page or her website.

Thanks for stopping by.

WIPlash Wednesdays- Questions from Mary Ellen & Katie

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

~E.L. Doctorow~

Mary Ellen T.- Is your book about your life or someone you may know? I wonder how you can put everything together for a book.

Everything I write is fiction, so no, my book, nor any others I release, will be about my life or anyone I know. As a writer I know that parts of who I am, and those I love, are woven into the fabric of the story, but I never write myself or others intentionally. I do think it just comes with the territory that, as a writer, our stories are who we are, without ever meaning to be because they come from the heart of us.

(the 2nd half of Mary Ellen's comment also kind of blends into Katie's below)
Katie M.- Do your plots just come to you?

Putting together a story for me is rather free form. Sometimes plots come to me freely, spinning out off something I heard, saw or imagined. Some of those ideas percolate in my dreams, but being I'm a pantser (write by the seat of my pants), I don't plot or outline the stories in great detail.

In 2006, when I first started writing with the serious intentions of getting published, pretty much every story I had started with bare bones- character names, a general idea about what they do for a living, how they might get thrown together, what kind of conflict could exist between them and a tentative title.

All the stories I've written so far stem from those. In truth, I'm still working on writing all the ideas I already have jotted down and it hasn't been until more recently that several ideas sprung from the well I thought was dry. The only problem is that until I finish some of my others, the new ones have to be put on the back burner.

How did the new ones come to me? I fell asleep one night with all the thoughts racing in my mind and when I woke up they were still there, burning into my brain, so I wrote them down. Doesn't happen often, but I figured it was worth taking notes. Some have followed me to bed and taken their sweet time to congeal over long periods. The majority of them though, I wrote in a month, taking my cue from my participation in NaNoWriMo- conforming my writing patterns to nailing down the first rough draft within 30 days. I tend to produce a lot more when I work under such tight self-imposed deadlines.

How do you keep all the back stories straight?

Keeping the back stories straight is usually pretty easy. I don't outline, but I do usually keep a list of all characters, main and secondary, in a notebook wherein I also keep track of how scenes play out, how characters are connected (family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances- I've even jotted a sketchy-at-best family tree, just to make sense of how many siblings there are), how long the chapters run, and make notes of things to come as I'm writing or even research I've done online for certain things like preparation of certain meals or dishes or decorating jargon, rodeo information, the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Grauman's Chinese Theater, or when the match came into existence, etc.

For Castaway Hearts, I was halfway through the story when I wondered if matches even existed in the late 1700s. A quick search on Bing found my answer.

Friction matches, were first invented by an English chemist in 1826, so no, my character couldn't light pipe tobacco from a match. So what did they do to start a fire? Before friction matches, also known as lucifer matches, men lit their pipes with a paper spill or carried a tinderbox with them for lighting their tobacco. This was a much more time consuming habit, but I knew I had a few places in the story where I needed to remove the match lighting and give a little insight into what would have been the norm in that bygone time.

Story timelines, most especially for those that play out in chronological order are definitely something I need to police myself over a little more. I realized at the end of January while reading through to finish my current WIP, that a secondary character, who was pregnant in a previous book, would have been due in March, but when the WIP started, it was already May, but she was due anytime...I kept thinking, wait...2 months OVERDUE? That's just not possible! And so I had to fix it. And then there's the whole, "did that couple get married in the last book, or are they getting married in this one?"

It's a juggling act, to say the least, but something I enjoy tremendously.

Thanks for the questions ladies! Tune in next week for a question from Joey R.

Feel free to leave me more questions in the comments here at anytime.
I'll be happy to answer them.

Happy Hump Day! I can see the weekend from here!

Jumping Hurdles & Rambling Thoughts

I made some good strides yesterday with my revisions. Can I say that I'm proud of myself? LOL

I got more than halfway through my novel and corrected some mistakes and took a better look at some of the historic elements and corrected some of them as well. I even upped my word count just a smidge when I found a spot here and there that I felt needed a little more explanation or definition. A couple of weeks break from my novel seems to be helping me with revisions. Cleared my head a bit to help me see things clearer.

When I found a good stopping point last night before I headed off to bed, my vision was blurry and I felt a minor headache coming on from eye strain, but I felt more accomplished than I had in almost 2 weeks.

I feel refreshed and pleased with this turn of events.

I also got my books yesterday that I ordered to read up on information about history on Norfolk, Virginia. My characters live near there, not necessarily right IN Norfolk, but close enough and finding information on it has been a difficult task. Most books are about the general info in regard to population and such, and doesn't really give you an indepth look at how people dressed or things like that, especially when trying to find stuff that is for a specific year (late 1780's).

As I've said before, I'm not great at research and I'm not really all that fond of it, but I am finding a developing interest in the time period and the history of Virginia's coast. So I guess in a way I have started educating myself, without realizing I was doing so. I may develop a new hobby or interest in the process, who knows!

This year has been full of surprises for me, that's for sure. I would never have guessed I'd have spent so much time working on this novel or researching for it.

I would like to get this one done though, so I can move on to the next one. I'm not sure which one I'm going to work on though yet. I have a lot, but not sure which one will feel closest to my heart next. Right now this one is filling my heart so much to get it polished and done that I haven't really thought much about the others for a while. Plus, I still need to go back through my other two and do revisions and polishing on them as well. And I may just do that, rather than setting myself another WIP goal just yet.

I am also looking forward to National Novel Writing Month in November too. 30 days to write 50,000 words. I plan to participate in that again. I really enjoyed the fast pace and the looming deadline to get a novel pumped out.

Which makes me wonder if I will enjoy having deadlines in the future...LOL

Before last year's NaNo, I was absolutely certain that it would take me YEARS to write a novel, based on my singular experience with my first novel, that took me ten years of blood, sweat, and tears to finish. I had to literally DRAG the words out through most of it and some of the scenes were hard to write. I did a lot of deleting and rewrites over the years. There was a lot of emotion packed into it and some was a little too close for comfort.

But I never imagined I could write a novel in a month. That was Greek to me, a foreign idea I wasn't sure I could comprehend. But after my participation in NaNo last year, and having finished a 80K word novel in less than 30 crazy days, it gave me a different perspective of myself as a writer. I enjoyed the personal challenge and it gave me hope that I can actually complete something when I put my mind to it and in short order at that.

I'm stronger and more determined than I have ever given myself credit for. In my youth I didn't always follow through with my plans to do things, no matter how much I wanted to do them.

In my early 20's I did a novel writing workshop through the mail. I didn't finish it. Why? you might ask. Because I took the instructor's critques to heart and wore them like a badge of failure. I was young and stubborn and aggravated.

I thought her critques were a huge neon flag blowing in the breeze, showing every one of my faults and all my shining ignorance, for all the world to see. I took it mentally and emotionally hard and it didn't help matters that the man I was engaged to at the time basically told me he didn't support my dream of becoming a published writer (or believe it would ever happen) and he couldn't love me unless I had a "real" job.

Needless to say, he and I broke up and I quit my workshop and never looked back. I believed that I didn't deserve to be a writer or even dream about it. But it kept coming back to haunt me. Novel ideas would pop into my head at odd sporatic times and I would sigh and think how great it would be if I could be a writer, but still doubted I had any business thinking about it because I just wasn't good enough, no matter how that writing desire burned my insides up.

I've grown a lot in the past decade though and I've jumped a lot of hurdles emotionally and mentally to get me to the here and now. It took me this long to realize that if I want my dream to come true, if I start believing in me, and surround myself with good supportive friends and family, I can accomplish it.

That former self-doubting belief system I had relied on for so long is history. I can't live my life that way. My writing flame is stronger than that and has been burning inside me for far too long for me to let it snuff out without so much as a second thought. It won't let me. It's the driving force that keeps me thinking, desiring, wanting and needing to write.

It's an eternal flame that can't be put out. It's my heart and soul.