#ThursdayswithTaryn Good Morning Glory! #busy #writer

My morning glories are starting to bloom now. My husband swears he's going to have to fight them because they're taking over some of his elephant ears. He says they're jerks who are trying to be elephant ears- their leaves are massive and do sort of resemble his plants but they have pretty little flowers. He is right though- in some respects they're trying to choke out the other things around them, so they can thrive.

I originally planted seeds on this one corner of the house because we had an old rot iron trellis that had once been a corner piece of the carport. When we closed in the carport to add an additional room to the house, the corner piece had to go, but I didn't want to toss it, we dug a hole and for a while used it for a rose trellis, but it died back, so I planted morning glories there. I haven't planted new seeds for a couple of years, but each season, late summer, they begin to flourish and they drop seeds aplenty for next year. They are taking over the wild white rose bushes I have on the side of the house.

Of course, they take care of themselves, replenishing their supply and I kind of like that I don't have to think about them much anymore. I just know they're going to be there. I always thought morning glories bloomed early summer to fall, but these tend to take their time and don't begin to bloom in shades ranging from pale pinks to dark purples until late August, early September. It's become a signal for me that school is going to start, that the weather is going to start shifting, that fall is on its way. And it gives me one last touch of summer before it's all gone away.

The Autumnal Equinox isn't until the 22nd of this month, but I already feel the change, see it out my window and it gives me a sense of purpose. The end of summer represents a slow down, but not just that, it drives me toward being more focused in my life, my writing, how I use my time.

This shift in focus might be noticed in the lag in blog posts recently, but I'll try to keep up a few times a week, even if things have gotten quiet on the blog front. If I'm not posting, it could be that I have a LOT going on behind the scenes, especially since I recently finished up the who-knows-how-many-eth read-through edits on Love by Design and there's some things I'm either working on or sorting out, so there might well be news soon about when I'll have a cover, a release date and other goodies to share with you. It's an exciting time, but also one I need to devote to doing the things behind the scenes to move myself and my books along toward self-publication and I hope you'll stick around to see how that works out because I honestly can't wait to share these stories with you.

Have a wonderful Thursday!

Tomorrow in the Friday Spotlight is

The Daughter by Christina Wolfer

so be sure to swing by and check out her novel!

#WIPlash Wednesdays- Spring Broke Me

(Click images for larger, clearer versions)

Spring Break is over. :( I had a really wonderful visit with my family and friends but as always, the visit never lasts long enough. Usually the time away gives my brain and body a break from the daily routine we have during the school year. This time, I find I've come back with a lot of things weighing on my mind- Blog scheduling, promo'ing, and all sorts of other things that need my attention.
The plans changed on Saturday, as my husband was going to drive up after work, stay the night at my parents' and we'd head back on Sunday morning, but then he found out he'd probably have to work Mon-Fri rather than his regular Wed-Sat due to a small inventory they've planned at the warehouse for this coming weekend. Fly in the ointment.
Considering we needed to restock the cabinets with food, grocery shopping needed to be done, as well as getting the yard mowed in case the weather didn't permit me to take care of it during the day while he was at work. So we headed home Saturday evening, much to our daughter's dismay because she still wanted more time with Grandma and Pop-Pop and she was NOT happy that we had to leave early.
Sunday we tackled the grocery shopping and the yard, got the kids ready for heading back to school after a week without a regular bedtime and days away from books and homework. It's time to knuckle down and knock out the rest of the school year. Less than a month now, I do believe.
So, anyway...Monday I balanced up the checkbook, put bills out in the mail, kids on the bus, laundry into dryer and started another load, ate a bowl of cereal, unpacked my laptop and then collapsed on the bed and took a nap with the Miz until 10 AM.
Then I spent the rest of the day finishing laundry, playing catch up on email, scheduling blog posts (I've fallen so far behind) so I have "unwritten" blogs lined up in the drafts where I can easily see the titles of what kind of posts I have coming up and give myself time to think about what I'll even write. I also spent some time out of doors snapping all these great photos of my roses and irises that are in bloom at the moment.
Tuesday was spent doing more of the same, when I'd really rather have been writing. Yes, what good is WIPlash Wednesdays if I write nothing? Honestly, these writing spurts are driving me insane. There seriously are not enough hours in the day for me to accomplish all the things I want to or need to and sometimes I feel like I'm just barely keeping up. When will the world slow down so I can catch up?
I need focus and a schedule and it needs to include writing. Most of what I spend my time doing focuses around social networking and building those skills and getting the word out, etc. Monday night I lay in bed, wide away for an hour before my busy brain would let me nod off to dream land, just because everyone else in the house was asleep and I felt obligated to go to bed when they did. Unfortunately, I wasted that hour staring into the darkness, with only the black and gray shadows illuminating the room, vague blocky images taunting me that I should have gotten up and used that time wisely.
I need to listen to myself more and stop letting all the outside interference create static so that I can't hear what I need to.

How do you find balance?
Is there such a thing?
What do you do when life gets out of control and you need to slow things down?
Do you take a step back to breath?
Share with me what helps you.

#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.

1 Year #Anniversary- #BookContract #writer #TMPress

March 13th, 2011- I didn't know it that day, what was waiting in my email for me, but when I opened that email up, I nearly hyperventilated with excitement when KJ at Turquoise Morning Press offered me a contract for Castaway Hearts.

Now here we are a year later, less than 3 weeks away from the release of my novel and I still get giddy all over again thinking about the day I opened that email. I was about to start painting the living room, hadn't thought much about my email over the weekend and then decided to check it before I got started because I knew painting was going to be an all day job.

A few days later, March 18th, I signed my contract, then the next day I posted And So It Begins...

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!

WIPlash Wednesdays-Question from Marlo

WIPlash....it's what I get when I work with on my current novel(s)-

Unlike the real word "whiplash"- I'm putting a new spin on it.

WIP= Work In Progress Lash- the flexible part of a "WIP"

Wednesdays are also flexible. They're not quite so stressful as Monday, but not nearly as exciting or as looked forward to as Friday and the weekend. It's a nice little in-between to take inventory of where you've been and where you're heading.

WIPlash Wednesdays will be that place for me in my writing. It will be a day to take inventory of what I've done on my current manuscript, whether it be writing, editing, or whatnot. It will also be a nice place to just answer questions from friends and family about my life "as a writer." Questions that other writers also get from family and friends or curious strangers and their readers. Eventually I'll probably pool all the questions and my answers into a FAQs section on my website, but for now, I'll just be flexible and go with the flow.

Hopefully soon though, I'll be adding word count to my meter again(I added 3,046 new words to my WIP just the other night), working through various manuscripts, and talking again about the thrill and excitement of creating, of actually getting words on paper (or on screen, as the case may be.) I have more stories to tell and many miles to go before I sleep.

Today's WIPlash will include a question from one of my friends on FB. Of course, as my fellow writers can attest, these questions remain the same, but the answers are usually as personal and as individual as the writer who answers it and those answers vary tremendously among all of us in the writing industry.

Here's my take on one question. I think I'm going to get long winded on this question, so bare with me. Other questions will follow on other WIPlash Wednesdays in the coming weeks.

From Marlo- I've always wondered how writers come up with their characters.

My characters come to me in a variety of ways.

Catherine, from Castaway Hearts, came to me via, of all things, a Myspace background in 2006, which I'll touch more on when I post my blog in a few weeks that introduces her. (not sure who this image actually belongs to, but this is where Catherine really started to come to life in my mind)
See, though the story came to me via this "black & blue" image, Catherine Barrett had actually existed on paper since I was a teenager. I wrote what I considered the introductory couple of pages—just one sheet, front and back, but I never got any farther than her stepping up the planks of her grandfather's ship. I knew the story was historical, I knew she was going to sail away to a new world she was not accustomed to, but I hadn't yet dreamed what that story would possibly be. The image above helped bring Catherine from my past to the present. It haunted me as I'd lay down to go to sleep at night. This girl was so forlorn, so heartbroken and I knew the ghostly ship meant something, but what?

But what of all the other characters? Some were born when I gave them names, and their personalities bloomed from there. Literally. Others, names just came to me and I just already knew what kind of person they were and still others, a name has come to me, but they are playing coy and keeping their secrets about themselves a mystery for now.

In my Love By series, the four sisters originally started out as individual book ideas, single titles. There wasn't going to be a series, but their names all seemed "flowery" and this formed a synapse in my brain that said they HAVE to go together, those characters are SISTERS!

Some authors name characters and give them characteristics based on their names, the origins of the names, based on the cultural and ethnic backgrounds of their characters but I go on gut instinct a lot in choosing names. The wrong name can make or break the character, or do little more than create a block when it comes to writing them as they should be. The right name that suits a character feels like it fits them like a second skin, blends with who they are and makes writing and reading them a pleasure.

Tune in next Wednesday for more and questions from Mary Ellen & Katie!

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!

Cowgirl Up!

I need a boot camp to reteach me how to focus. All the manuscripts I have finished were written in great part due to having, what I would call, writerly tunnel vision.

I was SO wrapped up in story and writing that I simply zoned out of "life" whenever my fingers came to rest on the keyboard. There was peace in it. I had a Muse and my focus was so tight, I didn't get distracted by much.

Like a rodeo rider of writing, my focus was a bucking bronco and I hung on for dear life, clearing the 8 seconds without so much as blinking an eye. I loved it. The thrill of every moment I tapped out more words, creating a reality within my fantasy worlds and breathing life into characters that had, thus far, only existed in my imagination.

But then, home life altered when my husband had to change jobs. And then came his on-the-job injuries and rehabilitation from knee surgery and other disruptions in the background of our lives.

No longer able to rely on a Monday through Friday schedule- one that I had once relied on so heavy to get so many words pumped out- Now my weeks are this buckshot of scattered hours and odd days off. My normalcy has been shot all to bits and I'm left picking pellets out of myself, peering through the holes that remain in my routine and wondering how to piece them together.

I've been trying to turn our current schedule into something I'm able to "use." It doesn't seem to be working for me though. I can't concentrate, I find myself thinking and dwelling on all the time I waste not being productive in any way. Yes, I just said it- I'm wasting time by wasting time. LOL

I've cast aside my yoga and walking as well as my writing. And I hate it.

I need to come back to my center- to find the focus that has seemingly vanished from my grasp. Yoga was one thing I've found that was helping me center myself emotionally and the walking made me feel better physically. Now I need to get my mental focus in check, for my writings sake, and bring all those things into balance together.

I'm going to have to play around with our weekly schedule and see if there isn't some way to alter my waking/sleeping hours to make this work not just for me but for the kids and my husband's schedules, too. It needs tweaking, especially on hubby's odd days off, which feel like a weekend in the middle of the week and instead of enjoying it, we're running to the grocery and taking care of the things that we would normally put off until the "weekend."

Truth is, that leaves the weekend not feeling like much of one at all and for me it's a downright nuisance. My brain works on a Monday-Friday schedule- I guess because I have little ones in school, but with my husband's work schedule, wherein Monday-Friday is this foreign idea that doesn't mesh, I'm stuck trying to figure out where I can fit MY schedule in. Especially now that I am going to be published. I HAVE to get my edits done in a timely manner and be able to make a schedule that works for me.

Nighttime writing and editing and working might be my only course of action. I've contemplated it before, but always end up going to bed when my husband does on the nights he has work the next day, but also because I have the kids to get up for school during the week, as well. I go to bed with a serious guilt complex that tears me between responsibilities to home and responsibilities to my writing career. Especially when the family doesn't see that I HAVE responsibilities now, not just to them, but to my publisher and that this isn't just "Mommy's" hobby or the little wife's "playtime."

So there it is---Maybe I'm a bit too southern, but I'm afraid it's time to cowgirl up, pull up my big girl panties, dust off my denim, slap my hat back on my head and stuff my feet into my ass-kicking boots.

If I don't have a a special camp for it, I'll just have to take the bull by the horns (or bronco by his mane) and lasso my focus back into submission, bucking and snorting the entire way. I'll break the beast just enough to get back up there astride and tame it to my needs.