For Want of a Pen

So how’s everyone’s birdie story coming? I’ve got a couple of ideas so far, but nothing I’m ready to commit to paper yet.

One thing I’ve learned the Neo is not good for is writing poetry. I did some extra babysitting yesterday and part of it was during the grandbaby’s nap time, so I took a couple of notebooks with me that I’ve been using as workbooks for poetry, thinking to finish a couple of poems I started a while back. And it would have been a great idea...if I’d also remembered to take a pen or pencil with me. LOL

Ironically, I had pens and pencils with me the day before, even though I’d planned on working on my Neo, and a poem came to me. I wrote it out from start to finish at one go - sometimes poems come to me that way. All it needs is a little tweeking.

At any rate, seeing as poetry was out of the question, I figured I’d work on one of my WIPs on the Neo. I know I’ve only got one big scene left to go on my NaNo novel, but I couldn’t remember where I left off. Guess I'm already blocking it from my mind. LOL

So then I decided to work on Wandering Wizards. When I left them, my characters were getting ready to break out of the sanctuary they’d been hiding out in in one of the elven realms. But as I was typing, I got this feeling of deja vu. It was so strong that I stopped writing, and when I got home I checked and sure enough, I’d already written them out of the sanctuary and through the barrier.*sigh*

The lesson here is to keep the writing bag ready at all times. Right now I’m using a canvas bag, but I have a small leather backpack I’d like to start using instead. If I can find it. And get it cleaned up.

At any rate, for today’s Fiction Friday excerpt I’m going with another one from Lost and Found, my NaNo novel. This scene takes place shortly after the last one I posted. Nathan and Sara contracted some sort of illness during their stay in the tropical paradise, and ended up being nursed back to health by the Children of Lavan, a religious community.


Excerpt: Lost and Found

Though the women were kind, and she was grateful for the care they’d given her, there was something off-putting about being here. Maybe it was all that white - white walls, white bedding, white clothes - she’d been given a white robe like the others to wear and while it was comfortable enough it wouldn’t have been her first choice. Or maybe it was all the religious talk and they way they deferred all their decisions to the men in charge. All except the skinny old bat who’d lectured her about it being unseemly to keep asking after a man. To which Sara had replied if they’d just tell her what was happening to Nathan then she wouldn’t have to keep asking after him.

All they’d tell her is that he was recovering as well and soon they’d both be well enough to contribute to the good of the community in the name of Lavan, praise be his name. She didn’t like the sound of that one bit. She had the sinking feeling they’d stumbled across some kind of cult or religious commune. Either one of them spelled trouble for getting away.

Feeling particularly sullen, she was in no mood to return Constance’s cheerful greeting when the woman turned up unexpectedly. Constance had been assigned to watch over her while she was recuperating, and as soon as she was able to sit up for longer periods of time, began to instruct her on the Way of Lavan. Lavan had some pretty outdated ideas on what was proper behavior for men and women and Sara wanted nothing to do with it. But they were trapped here for now and all she could do was to try and make the best of it.

Constance surprised her by bringing her a bowl of warm, fragrant water and a towel and washcloth.

“What’s the occasion?” Sara asked, just the tiniest bit afraid of the answer.

“The Staff and Chalice have given permission for you to have visitations with your pledge-mate.”

“My what?”

“The one to whom you are pledged to complete your journey to Lavan with as one.”

Sara felt a chill of fear. This didn’t sound good at all. “I don’t--“

“No, that is not the term I was told he used,” Constance said. “Now what was it he called it?” She paused in the act of brushing Sara’s hair. “Betrothed. That was what he called it.”

“Betr-Nathan? I’m going to be allowed to see Nathan?”

“This betrothal is similar in nature to our claim-pledge. So yes, you will be permitted to spend one hour every second day in each other’s company. Supervised of course.”

“Of course,” Sara echoed.

“You will wish to freshen up first, of course. There is no call to be frightening him away before you are duly wed.”

Impatiently Sara let Constance fuss over her, then she was led down the hall to a small sitting room. There was a table with two chairs and a window overlooking a walled garden. Constance took a position just inside the room to the right of the doorway.

After a few interminable minutes, Sara heard footsteps approaching. A young man dressed in unbleached cotton trousers and a pullover shirt entered first. He darted a glance at Constance and quickly looked away, moving to take a position on the left side of the doorway.

Right behind him was, “Nathan!”

Sara practically threw herself into his arms.”I’ve never been so glad to see someone in all my life!” she said against his chest. His arms around her, holding her tightly, was the best feeling in the world.

“No physical contact,” the man admonished.

Sara looked over at him, about to tell him off and good, but a slight shake of Nathan’s head stopped her.

“Sorry,” Nathan said. “We are not used to being parted.”

“It is Lavan’s will,” Constance said gently. “It is something you will have to get used to.”

Not if she could help it, Sara vowed.

Blackout Poetry

I’ve known about blackout poetry for a few years, but for some reason I never got around to trying it.

When I first considered it for the form of the month I thought it would be really easy, maybe even a little fun. Basically, to do a blackout poem you take a page of prose, pick out a few key words, and then black everything else out.

With the holiday season closing in fast, I decided to use a page from one of my favourite Christmas stories, the Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry. I actually started out with two pages. The first page I used a yellow highlighter to highlight words that caught my eye. Then I reversed it on the second page, blacking out everything but the words I highlighted on the first page. And this is what I came up with:

It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, especially the blacking out part. I went through seven copies before I got it right. LOL

Meanwhile, here’s another couple of examples of what you can do with blackout poetry:

Smore - Blackout Poetry Challenge

Scholastic Blackout Poetry

For more examples and a better explanation, check these links:

Power Poetry  - 5 Tips For Creating Blackout Poetry
Medium - Creative Deconstruction For Writers: How to Write a Blackout Poem

Aftermath

Short Fiction - 0
Long Fiction - 17,000 +
Poetry - 0
Total Words -
Paragraphs of Notes - 7

Well, NaNo is well and truly over and things should be getting back to normal right? Ha! That’s what you think. Christmas is coming and that’s a whole other kind of stress.

Normal would be keeping up the good writing habits I was starting to develop: an hour before babysitting, an hour during, and an hour after. Wednesdays and Fridays I don’t get the free hour before babysitting, but Fridays I get extra time during. And I was also writing up at storm in the evenings.

Normal would also include the good habit of doing more writing on my Neo. I’m not kidding when I say I write better and faster on it. I never realized how easily I was getting distracted when using my lap top. But think about it, the Neo can only be used for writing. The lap top can be used for all kinds of things, including socializing, game playing, and surfing.

However, as good as that sounds on paper, the proof, as they say, will be in the pudding. It’s one thing to keep to that kind of strict schedule when I’ve got the deadline of NaNoWriMo looming over me, it’s a whole other story now that the pressure is off.

Take this morning, for instance. Here I am getting this blog post finished instead of working on a WIP. And I’m doing it on my laptop. And before I buckled down to work I checked not only my email, but Facebook as well. And started playing Letter Garden before stopping myself. Yup, off to a good start.

While I’d like to promise I’ll do better, realistically, as I sit here all tired and headachy looking out at another overcast day, all I can promise is that I’ll try. And who am I promising anyway? Myself, that’s who.

I can promise that the blog posting will be returning to something near normal. I got this month’s picture prompt posted on the weekend and the results will be posted at the end of the month. And this being the first Wednesday coming up, I’ll not only be posting a poem on Wednesday, I’ll be sharing a form.

At some point I’ll start to post Christmas music videos - I’m kind of thinking starting next weekend and replacing the poems with them for the holiday season. Or maybe I’ll pick a different day and then after the holidays I’ll replace the Christmas music with just regular music videos.

Meanwhile, I have Christmas crafts to make, cookies to bake, and decorating to do. This is also the time of year I start thinking about the year ahead and changes I want to make.

How about you? All set for the holidays? Santa Claus is coming you know. ;-)

Prompt Me - Birdies

As promised, I’m here with my picture prompt for the month of December.

Is that happy enough for you Catherine? Little birdies sitting on a string of Christmas balls. Are they someone’s pets, trained to sit there? Did they sneak in from outdoors to get in from the cold? Inquiring minds want to know.

The challenge is to come up with something creative inspired by the above picture - a story, a poem, or even a non-fiction article. I'd love to see what you come up with, and if you send it to me at carolrward(at)gmail(dot)com by Thursday, December 28, I'll post it here on the 29th. Please try to keep it to 1,000 words or less and if I get more pieces than will fit comfortably in a single blog post, I'll post them over a couple of days.

Even with the holidays coming up I’m sure you’ll be able to find the time to come up with something. Can’t wait to see it!

NaNo For the Win!

I know that this is the first Friday of the month and normally it’s the day I post a picture prompt for you to work on, but seeing as it’s the day after NaNo ended I thought I’d do my recap for it today along with a final excerpt. I promise to post the prompt picture tomorrow.

On Monday I was 14,000 words behind in my NaNo novel. So I tell you true, no one is more surprised than me that I won NaNo. And with 3,000 words to spare.

To further boggle the mind, that means I wrote 17,000 words in four days. SEVENTEEN THOUSAND!

So how did I do it?

Well, first of all, the weather turned sunny. I’ve always said I was solar powered, and the week before was insanely gloomy. Monday dawned bright and sunny and it’s crazy what kind of difference it made to my energy level.

The second thing was, I stopped fighting my imagination. I stopped following the notes I’d made when I first came up with the story idea and gave my imagination free reign. This landed my characters in a few unexpected situations, like getting sick at the same time and being nursed back to health by a religious cult they then had to escape from. That alone spanned several chapters.

And the third thing was the one I mentioned in my Monday post - I wrote exclusively on my Neo. No bells, no whistles, just words. For some reason I tend to type faster on my Neo - maybe because writing is all it’s good for. I don’t really care. I just care that I pulled off a writing miracle.

So...what’s next? Well, I’m going to continue using my Neo and finish the novel. My characters are about to have a run-in with a group of Amazons, and once that’s over all that’s left is getting them home. I have no idea how many words that’s going to take - I thought the religious cult thing was only going to be a few thousand words and it was over ten. The Amazon encounter is even more intense.

After Lost and Found is finished, it’s nose to the grind stone until Wandering Wizards is done. Maybe I can pretend it’s another NaNo. :-D

In the meantime, here’s the final excerpt from my NaNo novel. The dream Sara is referring to is a recurring one she had near the beginning when she dozes off waiting for her friend Hannah to phone her to let her know she made it home safely. And it’s just after this scene that Sara and Nathan become ill and end up in the hands of the above-mentioned cult.


Excerpt, Lost and Found:

They finished eating and were just making up their bed over the mound of palm fronds when Sara happened to glance towards the shore. Letting out a gasp, she straightened up.

“What is it?” Nathan asked.

But Sara ignored him, and walked towards the shore. She stood mesmerized on the sand, the light breeze caressing her bare shoulders. As she felt him come up behind her, she spoke. “I know this place. I’ve dreamed of this place.” She turned to face him. “I’ve dreamed of you in this place.”

“How is this possible?”

“I don’t know. But I dreamed that I stood watching a sunset, just like this one, on a beach of white sand, like this one. I could feel the same perfumed breeze on my skin. And...and I realized I wasn’t alone, you were with me. I mean, it was you, but I didn’t know it was you.”

“And then what happened?”

“And that’s when I usually woke up,” she said, turning away to stare at the sun as it dropped below the cliff until only a brilliant glow remained.

He wrapped his arms around her from behind, pulling her close. “It sounds like a wonderful dream.”

They stood for a while, watching the glow disappear from behind the curve of the bay. The only sounds were the waves lapping gently on the shore and the slight breeze rattling the palm fronds.

“Look, there’s two moons,” she whispered.

One was the color of butter, the other a pale blue. They both hung low in the sky, overlapping each other.

“Can’t get much more romantic than that,” he whispered back, his breath hot on her neck.

She turned in his arms and he kissed her softly. It wasn’t nearly enough. Fueled by her memories of the dream, she pressed herself closer. Without breaking the kiss, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her back towards their nest. Halfway there, Sara jerked in his arms.

“Ow!” she said, slapping her arm.

“What--ow!” He let her slide to her feet so he could slap at his upper thigh. “Damn!”

For the next few minutes all they could do was curse and slap as they were stung over and over again.

“The water!” Sara gasped, sprinting for the shore, Nathan hot on her heels.

They waved their arms over their heads as the swarms followed and regardless of how dark it was they dove right in. Several yards from shore they were forced to come up for air, but the insects didn’t seem to have followed.

“What the hell was that?” Nathan asked, bewildered.

“They certainly weren’t in my dream,” Sara said, treading water beside him.

Back in the jungle they could hear the birds come to life, screeching and squawking.

“Well at least we know what the rest of the birds live on.”

The light from the moons was bright enough they could see the swarms of insects cutting great swaths of black along the shore. Then the birds descended on them, feasting on the wing.

“Please tell me we won’t have to stay in the water all night,” she said after they’d been watching for a while.

They moved closer to the shore until they were able to stand, neck deep in the water, ready to duck down any second.

“I hope not,” Nathan said. “This water doesn’t feel nearly as warm as it did earlier. I don’t suppose your survival training included how to ward off attacks by flying insects that bite?”

“I’ve had to deal with swarms of mosquitoes before,” Sara told him. “They’re kind of like these but not quite as vicious. But normally they’re most active during dusk or dawn, sometimes during the day, not in full dark.”

“So what do you do to repel them?”

She gave a short laugh. “Insect repellent. Lavender, garlic, apple cider vinegar, citronella candles - none of which we have. One of the counselors at a summer camp Hannah and I went to swore by smoky fires. Of course that would mean one of us would have to leave this rapidly chilling water, go up onto the beach, start a fire, and then find some greenery to throw on it to make it smoky. All without getting stung to death.”

“I think I’d rather take my chances in the water,” Nathan said.

Down to the Wire

Short Fiction - 0
Long Fiction - a lot
Poetry - 0
Total Words -
Paragraphs of Notes - 0

I have really, really been struggling with this NaNo. As you might have guessed by the lack of posting last Monday. Had I a lick of sense I would have quit while I was ahead and moved on to something else. I did that one year, seven days and 10,000 words in and I went with a totally different story and still won.

It’s not that I don’t like my story, I just have zero interest in working on it. Last Monday I was a mere 6,000 words behind, today I’m...uh... something like 13,700 behind. Which was better than it was going into the weekend when I was close to 20,000 behind.

I have to admit, when I decided to do NaNo this year I did not anticipate the toll babysitting has been taking on me. It’s not just the time spent babysitting, it’s the fact that the grandbaby is an energy vampire. A few hours with her and I’m exhausted. Plus there’s been some extra babysitting thrown in for good measure.

So between the lack of interest and the babysitting, there’s a very good chance I won’t finish NaNo on time this year. First year since my first time that I’ll be participating and not finishing.

If I do finish on time, it’ll be thanks to the writer’s best friend, my Alphasmart Neo. Saturday I sat in my office for about seven hours working on my lap top and only managed a measly 888 words. Then I switched to my Neo and did close to 600 more in just a couple of hours.

Yesterday I sat in the living room for a couple hours here, a couple hours there, and wrote just over 4,000 words. Kinda wished I’d been working on the Neo exclusively Saturday too.

The reason I write faster on the Neo is there are no distractions, no bells and whistles, just words. At the end of the day I just sit back, plug my Neo into my lap top, and watch the words appear in a Word document file. Can’t get much simpler than that, and when it comes to writing, simple is better.

So keep your eye on the little widget on the right. 3500 words a day to finish isn’t too much to ask, is it?

And do yourself a favour, go to ebay and buy yourself a Neo - they stopped making them a few years ago so the only way you can get one is used.

Alphasmart Neo. Don’t do NaNo without one.

Oh, No, What Happened to My NaNo?

I’m gonna be honest here, it’s not looking good for me to finish NaNoWriMo on time. I have seven days to write 20,000 words. And given that all I’ve been able to manage during the week is 500 a day.... Well, I still have the weekend ahead, and I’ve been known to pull a few miracles off in the name of NaNo in the past, so I guess we’ll just have to see.

The thing is, I’m just not feeling it with this novel. I like the characters and it’s not a bad story, I just don’t feel like writing it. At some point, when I feel ready to move forward with this series, I’ll have to sit down and create a guide to the Myste, which plays a major part in the whole story line. But for now all I can do is make it up as I go along.

So for this week’s excerpt, I give you Nathan trying to explain to Sara about the Myste that’s surrounding them:

Excerpt

“Time doesn’t work the same when you pass through the Myste.”

Sara finally reached her limit. “All right, you’ve pussy-footed around the subject long enough. Tell my about this...Myste.”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “There’s been debate for centuries over whether the Myste is naturally occurring or it was somehow created. It spans both time and space. Some worlds it only touches temporarily, some worlds have permanent access points to it. As near as I can figure, you and your friend Hannah entered the Myste through a temporary access point and it was only through sheer luck that you entered at different times but ended up in the same place.”

As she tried to process this, he tried a different tact. “When Madalyn was explaining the Myste to Hannah she asked if there were any stories where you come from of people who have been lost in the fog and when they’re found only hours or days have passed for them but years have passed for those left behind?”

“Sure, Irish folklore is filled with stories of people who’ve stepped into the land of fairy.”

“Only it’s not a fairy tale, it’s real.”

She stared at him, eyes narrowed, and he continued. “Islands like this can be found in the Myste, but are not part of the Myste itself. They’re like sanctuaries. One of the reasons for the expedition was to try and map the islands - I have no idea why, unless it’s to make it easier to travel from world to world. Right now it takes special equipment to make this possible, and even then it’s chancy at best.”

“Why would it be chancy?” Sara asked, in spite of herself. “I mean, other than the generally poor visibility. If this Myste spans worlds, like you say, I’d think people would be lining up to go world hopping.”

“Just being in the Myste is dangerous - breathing it in can cause lung damage, and if it changes colour even a breather won’t help you. *this would be a really good place for the Myste poem that I will have to re-write*

“We were breathing the Myste in,” Sara pointed out. “But we seem to be okay.”

He sighed heavily. “Look, I know you have no reason to believe me but I have no reason to lie to you.”

They stared at each other for a few moments and then turned away to watch the Myste.

“I probably wouldn’t believe me either,” Nathan admitted.

“Are we safe here?” she asked with a shiver.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

“No, but at least it’s honest.” He hesitated, then said, “We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“Do? Isn’t that obvious?” Sara asked, a little surprised. “We need to go back the way we came. Or better yet, we go to wherever the others went and then Hannah and I can go home together.”

Nathan drew back and looked at her askance. “You can’t seriously think it’s that simple! Haven’t you been listening to me?” He got up and began to pace. “Getting back to your world is impossible - the access point you passed through was temporary.”

Sara felt her first real chill of fear. “Then I guess we go back to where you came from. Surely there’s someone there who can–”

He was already shaking his head. “That’s really a long shot at best. We–”

“Then we just wait here to be rescued,” she said a little desperately. “Someone will have to come back for the equipment at least right?”

“Sara.” Nathan stopped pacing and came back over to the bench. Sitting down again he took her hands in his. “I’m not going to sugar coat this. The chances of anyone coming back here before we run out of food and water are pretty slim. We’re going to have to take our chances out there.” He waved a hand towards the Myste.