Do You Want Your Name In Lights?

Write your first draft with your heart.  Re-write with your head.  ~From the movie Finding Forrester

 

Of course you do!!

Whether we tell ourselves that we want to be published or not is irrelevant. Deep down inside we all want the same thing. Thankfully, there are choices and different paths we can now take to achieve that end goal. I have something for you that will help- a writing contest.

Before you dismiss this because you’re self publishing, or you’re already published in another genre, you better check this out. The Lone Star Writing Contest gives you tangibles that you won’t necessarily find anywhere else. No matter how you decide to publish, an author always needs outside help. I’ve yet to meet a writer that could spot all of their mistakes. For a very small fee, your pages will be read by two published and one non-published judge. If you final, your story will be sent to an agent, an editor, and an e-publisher editor. (Wow- three for the price of one!)

How is this any different? Well, besides providing training for the judges, revamping the score sheet to reflect the writing not “romance” rules, this contest also offers a few bonuses! If you win your category, you will receive a banner for your website, FB etc. This is worth its weight in gold! Free advertising screaming how good you are! If you final, you will receive a seal that you can use in the same way. How cool is that?

Everyone who enters also has a chance to win a 50 page critique by a published author whether they final or not. This is an open playing field where all have the same chance to win. There will be a drawing for each category and the winner’s name will be drawn irregardless of how they placed!

I know I’ll enter this year. Don’t miss the Early Bird Special which ends in a few days!

 

 

Northwest Houston RWA announces The 20th Annual Lone Star Writing Competition.

Along with awesome feedback and a new and improved score sheet, the Lone Star offers a NEW Special Prize!!!

All entrants will be entered into a drawing for a 50 page critique by one of NWHRWA’s published authors. There will be 7 winners, one for each category.

Romantic Suspense: Teri Thackston
Historical: Melinda Porter (Anna Katherine Lanier)
FF&P: Suzan Harden
Inspirational: Carla Rossi
YA: Christie Craig (CC Hunter)
Single Title: PJ Mellor
Contemporary Series: Cheri Jetton

The Lone Star Writing Competition is one of the few contests with two published authors and one unpublished author judging the first round. Finalists will be sent to BOTH an agent and an editor for judging. In addition they will be sent to an e-publishing editor.

EARLY BIRD ENTRY FEE: $5 discount on all entries submitted by midnight May 26, 2012; $15 for NWH members/$20 non-NHW members.

Entry fee: After May 26, 2012 – $20 NWH members; $25 non-NWH members.

Winners will receive a custom made sterling silver pin and a website banner !!!! Finalists will receive a seal to put on their website.

For more information including rules, the score sheet, and entry form, see our new, updated website at www.nwhrwa.com.

Dead Babies In A Suitcase

It’s good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there’s more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.- Charles De Lint

Good morning Muse Trackers!

I’ve thought quite a bit about The Artists Way especially since our Link Of The Week brought you to a wonderful tool based on one of the exercises found in that book. The premise is that you are to write three pages (preferably handwritten) every morning. The tool that I found creates a platform for you to do it electronically and store your pages to be retrieved when you need them. I was excited that many of you chose to comment and share your own spin on Morning Pages. Based on that, I thought you might like a spark. Give it a try, who knows what might happen

 

Today I would like to share a story with you. It’s so intriguing and has the bones of a fantastic novel, but it’s real life. Someone once told me that you just can’t make this s*** up- and I believe they’re right. This proves the old saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

Two women made a shocking discovery when they began to clean out their apartment building’s basement. It was full of items left from tenants long gone and forgotten. As they made their way through the piles of stuff, they came across three suitcases obviously left there for decades. The women brushed away years of dust and mildew and flipped the latch on the top two cases. They were empty. Disappointed, they went for the last case on the bottom. No one could have prepared them for what they would find hiding inside the leather luggage.

Stacks of books were neatly set on the left side and on the right side were two doctor’s satchels tightly wedged into the small space. You can imagine their excitement when the books proved to be copies from the 1920s and 30s. Surely, they had found a time capsule from a long ago era. The ladies carefully pulled out both satchels and opened them up. They seemed to be stuffed with newspaper also from that time period. They each took a bundle from the bags and unrolled the ball of paper. One discovered a mummified infant and the other unrolled a fetus about 20 weeks along.

Investigators determined the luggage belonged to Janet M. Barrie who had emigrated to the U.S. from Scotland in the 1920s. She was the home nurse for a Los Angeles dentist and died in 1992. Her belongings had been packed up and stored in the basement- apparently forgotten until these two decided they wanted to clean things up. The cause of death for the babies has not been determined. (I don’t know if the cause of death has ever been determined or not.)

The rest of her belongings did give a slight picture of the women who harbored this grisly secret for so many years. Janet Barrie appeared to have an interest in J.M. Barrie who wrote Peter Pan. There was a copy of the book as well as a membership certificate for the Peter Pan Woodland Club, an upscale resort. They surmise it’s because he was also from Scotland and carried the same initials. They also found postcards from exotic places like Korea and South America sent to Janet bundled together in the case. The mystery deepened when they pulled up a ticket stub from the closing ceremonies of the 1932 Olympics at the L.A. Coliseum

At the time when this article was written, the authorities had tracked down some of Janet Barrie’s relatives living in Canada and were DNA testing the remains of the babies.

 

If this doesn’t get the writer juices going, I don’t know what would! Why did she keep those bodies all those years? Who are those post cards from? Did she meet someone at the Olympics? Is there more of a connection to the author Barrie? Was she a killer? Did she hide them for the dentist? Are they her babies? Why didn’t any of her relatives claim her belongings? Why? Why? Why?

 

What is your take on this story? Who is Janet Barrie?

 

Keep on writing!

Dating Myself- Finding The Joy In Writing Again

Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”       The Talmud

 

How many of you sit at your computer and stare at a blank screen? Perhaps you have words on said blank screen, but you know it’s total crap.

I would suggest you go on a date with yourself.

Julia Cameron, who is a noted Hollywood screenwriter and director, wrote The Artists Way. It is a gem of a book. I’ve pulled it back off my shelves because I desperately need to do something different if I ever want to get back on track to being creative.

Before I begin with the meat of this article, I’d like you to get to know me a tiny bit so you can see that the writers here at Muse Tracks are the same as all of you struggling to find the road (and stay on it) to being an author.

Well, here goes…

I am a dabbler. I have a closet full of pencil sketches from copies of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings to pen and ink creations of my own imagination. I have watercolor paintings stacked at my mother’s house I dabble in textile arts and have woven, crosstitched, needlepointed, and even threaded fabrics through my paintings. I love to paint walls and decorate- my house is an ever changing canvas. Photographs clog the memory banks of my computer. Cooking is a total creative outlet for me and travel feeds my soul. Through all of this dabbling, I have learned quite a bit about the arts and am a lover of museums and artists from all walks.

While I’m a dabbler at all those things and have had varying successes at them, I consider them fun endeavors. It really doesn’t matter if I’m any good at them or not. I simply create.

Did you notice something missing?

I never once mentioned writing. I realized this while I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. We were talking about things we enjoyed and writing wasn’t on the list. He questioned me about its absence. I couldn’t answer him during that conversation, but it’s been waddling around in my head like a drunk duck ever since.

The Artists Way is a wonderful book that first and foremost gives us permission to be creative. It empowers us to delve into the fanciful, explore the beauty and remember that we are not whole if we deny this side of our being. (OK- I now officially feel like Earth Mother holding up a peace sign.) However artsy and spiritual this book may sound, the message is one that I believe everyone should hear. Is it fear, guilt, jealousy, or some other force that limits your beliefs in yourself? What causes you to self-sabotage? (My specialty) We have our own unique answers built on our own unique lives. Julia Cameron provides exercises that offer ways to inhibit the roadblocks we throw up for ourselves.

One of my favorites is dating myself. Basically, the advice is to spend time with ourselves nurturing and refilling the well of creativity.  Tomorrow I will attempt to have a date with myself all day. There will be no TV, no computer, no radio, no electronics of any type, no books- just me. The day will be spent in my garden, sitting on my back porch with a pad and paper, and visiting with my friends. I might go to an artist’s shop to wander the aisles or I might drive up to my brother’s lake house and sit on the dock. I will not think about the rest of my life. I want to remember the joy I had when writing was also simply about creating. Somehow it became about editing, publishing, marketing etc. Those issues are important, but are meaningless if it dive bombs the writing. Writing was fun, wasn’t it? It was a wonderful place to get lost in another world with characters who told us a fabulous tale. I want to get back to that.

Commanding Writer’s Block

There are many things that I enjoy about writing, but staring at the empty computer screen isn’t one of them. That white page surrounded by a sea of blue is intimidating and the “page 1 of 1 with the word count at the bottom left bellows my lack of words.

Sigh. Writer’s Block.It isn’t pretty.

All that being said, I am in good company. Some of the best loved writers throughout history have been plagued by this affliction. What makes Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf different from other writers? They didn’t let the Block paralyze them for any length of time. They figured a way around whatever it was keeping them from producing pages of writing. If they can do it, so can you. So can I.

What is this mysterious thing called Writer’s Block? I found a working definition on Wikipedia:

“Writer’s block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some “blocked” writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers. It can manifest as the affected writer viewing their work as inferior or unsuitable, when in fact it could be the opposite. The condition was first described in 1947 by psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler.^”

Here’s a definition, but that still doesn’t help me with what to do while I’m lost. Why does this happen?

A grammar website named it the “Censor” that resides in our brain. Little voices inside our head tell us that we have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say, nothing that we’ve experienced would be interesting enough for others to read. The Censor skillfully takes these voices and tears them down only to build them back up brick by brick until we have a wall so tall and so wide that we couldn’t possible find a way around it. Maybe the Censor was created because an English teacher told you that your poem was drivel in 7^th grade, maybe an agent told you that what you were working on wasn’t politically correct or maybe you just had a traumatic potty training episode- it doesn’t matter why it’s in existence- it just is.

An American poet, William Stafford, states, “There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.” WHAT?!? Are we supposed to create crap? Are we to be satisfied with the mediocre?

What the man is trying to tell us is that we need to lighten up. Stop taking ourselves so seriously. If you sit down with the sole intention of writing the best thriller, the most profound poem, the scariest horror novel, then you’re screwed. (Pardon my vulgarity-but it sums it up so succinctly.) Give yourself permission to write whatever flies from your fingertips. The point is to not write another great novel right off the bat, the point is to simply write. I highly doubt William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in a single take.

Joanna Penn (The Creative Penn) has a wonderful list of suggestions to push back the Censor creating Writer’s Block in your head.

1. Rid yourself of the genius curse- everything that comes from our brain does not have to be brilliant!
2. Don’t be married to results- most folks have to write pages and pages of “stuff” before something good bubbles to the top.
3. Don’t compare yourself to other writers- your talents are unique. We don’t need another Stephen King, we need you!
4. Remember rejection letters are made of paper- they can be disposed of quite easily.
5. Write ahead of yourself- we’re all walled in by our own habits- break out!
6. Cannibalize your older writing- don’t be afraid to chop your words, but keep them in a separate folder. There might be glimmers of brilliance.
7. Break old habits of voice and style- if it’s stale to you, it will be stale to your readers.
8. Break your assumptions- If you are writing a light hearted comedy and get stuck, bring in a killer and see what happens. You can always change tone in a revision.
9. Write every single day- we all know this rule.
10. Join or start a writing group- I get by with a little help from my friends.
11. Combine all of these approaches- nuff said!

 

 

 

 

 

 

“A Vital Gem…A Kick In The Ass.”

How many of you have wanted to write a great book? How about simply finish your first one? Have you ever wanted to do something bigger than yourself? Learn to speak a language? Lose a bunch of weight? Run a marathon or join a humanitarian aid organization? If the answer to any of these is yes- then you have met the enemy.

Not the wanting. The desire to rise above yourself embodies all that is noble and good in humankind. The enemy is Resistance.

“Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our unique genius. Genius is a Latin word; the Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul’s seat, the vessel that holds being-in-potential, our star’s beacon and Polaris.

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We’re not alone if we’ve been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us. And here’s the biggest bitch: We don’t even know what hit us. I never did. From age twenty-four to thirty-two, Resistance kicked my ass from the East Coast to West and back again thirteen times and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face.”

Steven Pressfield

The War of Art

 

I found the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield with other craft books at The Lone Star Conference this past weekend. I’m late to the table of knowledge, but better late than never.

He breaks this book into three separate books. Book 1 is about identifying Resistance- the insidious evil that sucks us from our potential selves. There are many things he labels as Resistance. I’m guilty of a lot of them, but my main enemy is PROCRASTINATION! I found myself procrastinating about writing this article pointing out how procrastination will turn my potential into an unrealized dream. Now, if that’s not pathetic, I don’t know what is…

Book 2 is about “Turning Pro”. Words like professional, order, endurance etc. pop up and you know this writer is a pro. All you have to do is look at his career to know he practices what he preaches. His history books are used at West Point and by the Marines, some are even assigned by professors at Oxford. One of his fiction novels, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was made into a movie and The War of Art is used by artists and entrepreneurs worldwide.

Book 3 is called “The Higher Realm” which lies beyond Resistance. This is where we find the pay off for persevering through our own nonsense. After you’ve done a day’s work, your mind is free to receive other ideas that seem to multiply rapidly. The most important thing in art, of any form, is work. When you show up day after day trying to create, something special begins to happen. We set a process in motion where power is concentrated and muses are allowed to flourish. Ideas come. Words are written. We are artists.

Have you read this book? If not, I recommend it to anyone who wants to try something out of their comfort zone. To quote Esquire, “It truly is a vital gem…a kick in the ass.”

What do you already do to beat Resistance? Share with us your techniques…I’m sure we can use all the help we can get!

 

The Spy Who Loved Me…Enough To Let Me Write This

Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.  ~Gene Fowler

By: Stacey Purcell

New York!

I was so excited as the wheels to our plane touched down on the tarmac. Jenn and I were on our way to the Romance Writers of America’s annual national convention. I knew I would meet hundreds of interesting people while I was there. After all, it is the crossroads of the world.

I never knew that I would stumble across someone who completely captivated me.

While attending the conference, I had the opportunity to attend workshops led by the industry’s most talented. Planning out the next day’s agenda, I came across a workshop titled Spy Lingo. That got my attention.

The class started like all the rest. Sue Simon stood at the front of the room. She didn’t look like she had a background in counterintelligence. (Of course, I don’t know what that would look like!) She looked like an everyday kind of woman. (Again, what does THAT look like?) Well, with all my stereotypes swarming in my head, she surprised me. She looked more like a mom than a spy.

I was wrong.                                        Boy, was I wrong.

Without further ado-   Sue Simon…..

Tell us what you used to do.

I got a job when I was in college on a Naval base as a civilian and found cryptographics so interesting. The office I was assigned to used satellite communications through cryptographics. They needed someone cleared to Top Secret quickly and since I was young and had never even spit on the sidewalk, they cleared me. I found Intelligence and Counterintelligence work to suit me almost perfectly.

 Except for the part about losing boyfriends over not being able to tell them where I was going and when I’d be back. Yes, it’s all fun and games for awhile until they showed up at the airport and I get off the plane with a guy from work and I can only greet the current boyfriend then have to go on with said guy. Sure, that’s believable for awhile.

So I worked Intelligence for the government (best training in the world) and private industry (better pay).

 

Can you tell us the different levels of security?

Super brief-

Confidential -Don’t tell others what your company is doing, even if it is just land acquisition or the secret sauce recipe (like that’s a secret).

Secret- You’re working on a government project, please don’t talk about it.

Top Secret- You’re working on a government project, shut up or else.

Beyond Top Secret- Don’t even talk in your sleep about what you do. (Yes, they check to see if you talk in your sleep.)

 
What do you mean when you say you worked in “the black box”?

It’s slang for a lockup and I don’t mean jail. Projects that do not exist or items being made that are above top secret must be maintained in an area that is extremely secure. The offices, engineering computers, and personnel access the area through several retinal, hand, badge or visual means. Sometimes you have to sing the Star Spangled Banner to gain access…

I’m kidding you can stop rehearsing!

So we work in a secured area like the almost indestructible black box on an airplane so it’s slang, black box. The word ‘black’ like in black ops is well known to the general population and originated as code for these special projects, black projects. But since everyone knows….. Computers are encased in lead shields and there are no windows. Obviously, you don’t share this information with your dog groomer or anyone else.

If you have to be so secretive about your job, and you work in a black box- How did you date and meet your husband?
I told myself I’d never date an engineer, uh huh. On a new project in private industry I was the intelligence liaison. There were many young, hunky, intelligent engineers who needed to be briefed onto the project. Craig was one of those, especially the ‘hunky’ part. He was the first man I dated who actually knew what I did for a living! We didn’t have to kill each other to get information so we got married.

 

That’s all the time we had this week with Sue. Stop by next Thursday to learn more about this woman. Just when you think this has nothing to do with writing, I want you to know that Sue is also an adoptive mother, an opera singer, a comedian, a children’s writer, a romantic suspense writer, and is working on a sitcom in LA.

You’ve got to hear the rest of her story!

All You Need Is A Tomato To Solve Your Problems

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.  ~Agatha Christie 

   TIME   William Shatner says space is the final frontier, but for me it is time. It is the frontier where most of my daily battles are played out against the enemy known as Sir Procrastination. The very mention of his name runs shivers up and down my spine. He is an insidious enemy, threatening to suck endless hours away from my grasp.

“Damn you, Sir Procrastination!”

Time is fleeting, at best. More often than not, we consider it an enemy that must be harnessed, conquered or made to bend to our will. Sadly, none of these things will happen. We can’t change the nature of time and Sir Procrastination will always be there lurking in the shadows, but what we can do is learn how to manage ourselves. In the face of the speeding time bullet, we can employ a simple method discovered by a university student in Italy. No kidding!

Let me introduce you to The Pomodoro.

If you do much cooking or travelling, then you know that the word Pomodoro means tomato in Italian. The creator, Francesco Cirillo, was a student at a university in Italy. He finished his first round of exams and took a good look at how he studied and organized himself. He was not happy with his discovery. Could he study, really study for a full 10 minutes? No distractions of any kind? He used the closest thing he had on hand to time himself- a tomato shaped kitchen timer. (Ahhh. The Pomodoro!) Unfortunately, he failed miserably.

With practice he trained himself until he could handle those 10 minutes and more. To make time an ally instead of the enemy takes practice. Francesco perfected his technique until we now have The Pomodoro Method used worldwide. The application to serious writers is wonderful!

He wanted to keep the process simple and not require any extra time dealing with a complex procedure or technology. (Thank you, Mr Cirillo!) For a period of 25 minutes, you are to work without distractions and then you take a 5 minute break. Congratulations! You’ve just completed one Pomodoro. You repeat this for four times and then you earn yourself a half hour break. This is the basic building block of this method. Sounds simple, right?

I tried it out today while I was writing and it is anything but simple. I finally read the accompanying free book that takes a more in depth look of the process. (When in doubt, read the directions!!)

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

There are forces of evil at work making your ripe, firm Pomodoro into greasy spaghetti sauce. These forces are called internal and external distractions. Internal distractions are the most difficult to overcome because we make them up as we go along. For instance, we start our timer and then BAM! We need to stand up, go to the bathroom, call a dear friend, or mend the back fence. For me, I needed to immediately research what it felt like to be on a boat near an island that experienced an earthquake…..no kidding. I re-started my Pomodoro three times before I made it through the whole 25 minutes. It did get easier and I did get more productive.

The other force of evil is the external distraction devil. The telephone is my number one offender. I get into a scene, the words start to flow and invariably the phone rings. Poof. There went Pomodoro number four. My phone also dings when I receive tweets or texts or voice mails. There went trials five, six and seven. Sigh. Finally, I went outside with no phone of any kind and twenty five minutes flew by and I had words written all across my screen!

Francesco Cirillo has developed a method I think all writers should try. It takes practice and an understanding of all the things waiting to de-rail you. He outlines his method in a free booklet offered on his web site, along with worksheets and guides. My goal tomorrow is to write Chapter Eight and critique my friend’s pages as well. I will do all the preliminary steps and discipline myself against those evils coming at me. Wish me luck…..

What do you think about his method? Do you do something different? Share some of your techniques for staying focused and productive.

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.  ~Author Unknown

 

By: Stacey Purcell

I wish I could say that I wrote those two sentences in the title of my blog, but I didn’t. They were written by the amazingly talented Joss Whedon who also wrote Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and Firefly. This is a wonderful example of a short story. A really, really short story.  It is said that Ernest Hemingway wrote one using only six words. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” He also claimed that it was his best piece in a very large body of work.

Short stories are on the rise in popularity. So much so, Amazon is attributing this burgeoning market to pushing their stock up to above $200 a share.

Hmmmm.

That’s a pretty good statistic. If that didn’t get your attention, try this. David Baldacci recently wrote a short story called No Time Left. It sold 50,000 copies in its first week! Times are changing and we need to be flexible enough to change with it. It wasn’t so long ago that the only way to sell short stories was to bundle them together and sell them in an anthology or to sell them to a magazine. It was a slowly dying breed. Things are different now!

Short stories have caught on everywhere and I want to be a part of that market. Last week, I shared with you about my “mash up” experience. Three of my friends and I have taken turns putting together a story. No plans. No talking about it. Just write and see where it goes.

Now, we’re trying to figure out the best way to edit and re-write the parts that need help. This is proving to be a bit difficult. Finding common free-time in four very active adults’ schedules is next to impossible. Plan No. 2- We’re going to edit in the same round table fashion as we wrote it. I’ll keep you posted with our success…or maybe there will be Plan No. 3. Regardless of the plan chosen to do the painful edits, it’s been a fun and very creative moment for our group, The Usual Suspects. We’re hoping to put it up for sale as soon as it’s polished.

So what is a short story? It’s a story that can, obviously, have very few words. That being said, the six word tale won’t be a hot selling commodity any time soon. The typical short story can be found to have anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 ish words. They represent all genres and seem to sell really well for $0.99.

An author friend of mine has an e-publisher that only handles her short stories and she produces one every other month. Over time, she will have quite an inventory of product out there! She was also smart enough to write groups of stories around different themes so she could easily compile them into anthologies. That’s good writing and good marketing! Those stories will be a source of solid income over the next several years as the desire to have well written stories people can easily read on their phone or e-reader increases. The Director, Hamish Hamilton, at Simon Prosser Publishing stated, “The short story form is better suited to the demands of modern life than the novel.”

This phenomenon is not just happening in the U.S., it’s very popular in the U.K. A British newspaper called The Sunday Times has begun the EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

The prize?

30,000 pounds. (That’s over $65,000)

Hmmmm.

That’s a pretty good prize. And if that didn’t get your attention, then I give up!

 

One last really short story: Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.-William Shatner

Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush

I do not like to write – I like to have written.  ~Gloria Steinem

By: Stacey Purcell

Monday 6:30 am- Wake up, dress, eat cereal, drive to train station, wait on platform, and sit on train for an hour.

Monday 5:30 pm- Leave office, walk to train station, wait on platform, and sit on train for an hour.

Rest of Week- Repeat above steps over and over and over…

This doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Unfortunately, this scenario is practiced by countless millions, maybe even billions, of people around the world. So what does this have to do with writing?

Before I answer that question, I have a story to tell you about what a group of my friends and I have been doing. We meet every Friday at the best coffee shop ever (Drew’s Pastry and Coffee). It’s an open group, but there’s a core of four. Writers will stop in to visit, share their latest victory or defeat, brain storm or sit and stare blankly while the rest of us chat. It’s a wonderful time and every Friday is different.

The core of four consists of Melissa Ohnoutka, Jennifer Bray Weber, William Simon (Will Graham) and me. We call ourselves The Usual Suspects and have supported each other’s writing and careers for over 3 years. One Friday, Will had an unusual idea.

“Let’s write a mash-up.” He received silence as none of us knew what he was talking about. The accepted use of the word “mash-up” has to do with blending different genres of books into one.

That’s not what he was talking about!

He wanted us to try writing a collaborative piece. We’d mash up all of our entries into a cohesive story. The ground rules were easy. He’d start it off and we’d each take a successive turn, adding to the characters and plot. Once we’d been around the group twice, he’d finish it up. We were not allowed to talk about it with each other and there was no general direction the story had to go in. Who knew whether it would turn out to be romance, mystery or even steam punk!

Hmmmmm. Sounded fun. Sounded easy. Sounded creative and quick. My kind of project. I was in, as were the others. The merry-go-round of writing began.

We’ve just finished the story and it was a blast to be a part of something so creative. Just when you thought you knew where the story was going, BAM! It took a hard left and you were running down a different rabbit hole. The experience forced you to keep on your toes and get the character out of situations you had never thought of happening. Whew, what a workout for those writing muscles. Now what?

The story is very rough. Great ideas and great writing flow through the thing, but we have some plot holes you could drive a bus through! Since, we’ve never done this before, we’re making up the steps as we go along. Emails are flying between our group members. It looks like we’ll put together a list of items that needs to be corrected or tweaked before we meet to seriously edit. Sounds reasonable. After that we’ll get together with laptops and spread out across my dining room table for a “rip it apart” party.

So what does this have to do with the poor person sitting on the train for two hours every day?

Once again, the digital world has opened another avenue for writers. Almost all of those commuters, or anyone else who must wait around, have cell phones. Those cell phones have the capability of downloading stories. Traditional novels can be read, but it might be overwhelming to open up War and Peace on a tiny screen. Voila, the short story.

We’re all running around the mulberry bush in some form or another. Moms wait for their kids in carpool, waiters have 30 min. breaks, kids wait for the school bus and on and on. Why not make that time a bit more delicious? There’s a burgeoning market out there for stories that are short and well written, perfect for the phone. We’re creating our version of a mash-up and will sell it soon.

Stay tuned for next week. I’ll share an update on how we’re doing with our project and I’ll discuss the business side of stories for phones and other venues.

What about you? Have you done anything new lately? Tried a new genre? A new writing ritual? Come on now, you know you want to share!

Can’t Never Did Anything

The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

By: Stacey Purcell

My apologies to all of our readers- This article was to be published while I was attending the RWA National Conference in New York. I discovered free internet wasn’t offered anywhere in the hotel! I’m far too cheap to pay so poor William has had to wait an extra week for his article. Without further ado, I give you William Simon who writes under Will Graham.

One of the most frustrating things about writing is facing the fact the project you believe in, the project you’re over the moon about, the one you just know is going to blow the socks off everyone who reads it…. just…. isn’t….working….

Short version:  Many years ago, I wrote a spec script for a TV series.  It was a piece I was particularly proud of, but could not get in the front door.  Or the back door.  Or any door.  A few years later, it was heavily revised and submitted to another series, with slightly better results.  Ultimately rejected, the feedback and comments were invaluable, and it remains the nicest most constructive rejection I’ve ever received.

Last year, I heard about a new anthology looking for mysteries with a Christmas theme.  Kicking around some ideas, the brain flash came; this could easily be adapted into a novella set on Christmas Eve.  The starters  gun went off in my brain, and we were off to the races.

After six weeks of intense daily work, changing this and editing that, revising here, creating there, it hit me like a ton of bricks I’d left out a third character who, while on the fringes of the action, plays a very important part in the last third of the story.  Without this character, the heroes cannot do what they need to do to uncover the mystery.

I spent one entire day trying to re-work, re-write, streamline, edit, and make this happen.  The frustration level was mounting, so I stepped back for the night and thought it through.  Spent the evening with the Macbook Air in my lap, working Scrivener to death, arranging and re-arranging, making notes, revising dialogue.

One day, I realized it just wasn’t going to work.

Not in this incarnation.  The final nail that sealed its doom is that the Big Mystery, the Solution, the ‘snap’ in the tale, the Lost Ark, the MacGuffin, the Major Shock…. well, it was horrifying ten years ago, but today wouldn’t get more than a ‘ho-hum, this old chestnut again?’

Okay.  There is no shame in graceful surrender.  Not everything works the way we plan it.  Sent a private email venting to certain people, all of whom came back with “Don’t throw it away!” and some terrific words of encouragement (this is why we have friends, and if they are writers too, they understand the frustration of it all.)  This one isn’t working, archive it, move on, think of something else.

About two weeks after I’d surrendered on this one, Jenn (aka J-Bray, or The Pirate Lady) was listening to me vent about it.  I was frustrated beyond words, because this project was special, it was important, it was something I was personally proud of, and I couldn’t make it work.

Jenn and I tease each other without mercy, can argue for hours on end, but she is one of the smartest people I’ve ever known.  (Don’t tell her I said that, her ego’s big enough as it is.)

Jenn listened politely, then nailed me dead square between the eyes.  “You’re thinking like a thriller writer,” she said.  “This audience is not thriller readers.  They will be shocked, they will be horrified, they will come out of their chairs over this.”

And the light dawned.

That very afternoon when I got back to my office, I opened it up again and looked at it not as a thriller writer, but as a writer.  I read it not as someone who grew up on Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean and Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, but as a regular, everyday, ‘hey this might be interesting’ reader.

I saw the flaws almost instantly.  Another two weeks of effort, and it was done.  I was happy with it.  And now, at last, SOMETIMES, THERE REALLY ARE MONSTERS UNDER THE BED is available for Kindle and Nook.

Frustrating business, this Writing Stuff.  There are times I tell myself I’m still a young man, I could get into something decent and reasonable, like selling used cars, or condo time-shares to retirees, or maybe television evangelism.

But then, the words flow, the plot holds, it all comes together, and, to quote Freddy Shoop in SUMMER SCHOOL, “This sh** works!”