I’m very proud to have my short story Dancing On The Bus as part of the newHot Apple Ciderbook,Hot Apple Cider with Cinnamon! The book contains 67 true stories, short fiction, and poems from 61 writers from across Canada.
The men, women, and children in these stories experienced love in ways they’d never have thought of, from people they might not normally have noticed, and in surprising places…
My story comes from a time in mid-century England, where I grew up before coming to Canada. Each story and poem is just long enough to enjoy with a cup of hot apple cider 🙂
Day 7 This is Saturday – I got off to a late start. We had errands to run and housework to do. As I got to typing late this afternoon, I realized that the flow of my story was way off track. I didn’t know how to fix it, or ask for NaNo help in the forum – how do you describe something that’s not yet complete because you need help completing it? (my ‘?’ still works!) I decided to ask an expert who lives nearby – my son, the fantasy/sci-fi author. We hashed it out for about an hour and I do believe I’ve finally got the hang of it. I took notes, so I hope tomorrow I still understand what I wrote. The plot has a definite outline now and it seems to make sense. (In order to keep my cat from messing up my keyboard again, I’m presently typing with one hand and holding her in the other. Dogs have masters – Cats have staff). I think I’m almost at the end of Act II, depending on which plotting strategy you’re using, if any. I’m enjoying watching my hero come to life and seeing what she’ll do in the next scene because, although I now have a defined outline that flows, I still don’t know all the details until I start typing. Do you write your novels that way? My word count is way down below where I wanted it to be by now – 8735. Tomorrow I’ll be taking the day off to go to church and spend time with family. We’re going to a craft show to fundraise for our local – wait for it ….. cat rescue shelter! My Smokey is a rescue cat. My brother found her at the side of their very busy road but couldn’t keep her because my sister-in-law and nephew are severely allergic to cats. So guess who got the phone call to go pick her up. NightNight and enjoy your Sunday.
*Now that I’m one week into this NaNoWriMo month I’d like to be able to share with you what you’d like to know instead of me just rambling on at 2am. So what can I tell you that would be helpful or informative? I’ll try to answer any suggestions in upcoming posts.
Day 6 Greetings! Day 6 and I’m surviving. I’m drinking a lot of green tea and herbal tea. (I only drink coffee when I go out somewhere). That means I’m reminded every hour or so that I need to get up and stretch my legs. I’ve gone back over some of my earlier chapters and added descriptions to fit better with how the story’s evolving, but I’ve realized that means my word count slows down. I think I have a better idea of who’s who now, though, and why they do the things they do. I think that, although I’m basically a pantser, I need more plotter qualities to start out with. My character personalities weren’t as defined as I need them to be, and I’m not as in touch with their quirks as I will need to be in the next couple of chapters. I’m learning so much from doing this exercise in such a short amount of time. I’m so glad I signed up for it. I’m enjoying writing fiction more than I thought I would. (I’ve been a non-fiction writer to this point). But I guess it all comes down to the finished product, right? Now, for those of you who’ve been following the saga of the missing question mark – it came back this morning! How, you ask? I don’t have a logical explanation; therefore I’m going with divine intervention. God knows my limits 🙂 I hope you have a good night’s sleep and happy dreams. Word count up to 8,000. Till tomorrow…
Day 5 My keyboard is still not fixed. My friend, the social media expert for my writing group, showed me on her keyboard what to change. The problem is, my keyboard doesn‘t look at all like hers. Hers is probably newer. We‘re great believers here that if something is broken you only replace it if it can‘t be fixed. Well, knickers to that! I may just buy a new keyboard to save my frayed nerves. However, my son did figure out somehow that if I press shift and 6 I get a ? Ta-da! So I‘m getting a badge at least from all this (insert expressive word here) bother – Thank you, Ben, for helping me with my noveling 🙂 Now how do I fix the need to press Ctrl plus the quotation key and press it twice to get a ‘ ? Forget it -I‘m buying a new keyboard! And my novel is taking on a life of its own. It keeps changing what I wrote in the outline. I‘m not sure it‘s flowing right and I‘m highlighting things that may need revision later. I‘ve come to realize I need to observe life more. Plodding on. Total word count with all this messing around – only 6152 – way behind. Looks like I‘ll be working late nights and most of Saturday. Plod on beautiful Plotters and Pantsers! 🙂
Day 4 Still haven`t figured out how to change my É to a question mark! I looked it up in `help` and also online. Other people said it helped them – not me. I`m going to have a lot of editing to do when I`m finished! I took a lovely walk outside when I had my break today. I was in a t-shirt on November 4th – bliss. We have huge fish swimming upstream! Not an easy task. We have sections where the river is about six feet deep and has a fast current. Other parts are shallow with rapids. The poor fish. I`m not sure what they are. We used to think they were trout, but these guys are huge. I took videos of them to send out a query, but uploading them to Facebook was taking too much time away from my novel. Hey, do I get a badge for procrastinating by fish (insert your own question mark here, please). Still need to catch up a bit with word count, but I got my 5,000 word badge today – wahoo! Have a good sleep everyone 🙂
Lynne Collier 