The Hills are Alive...

First of all, thank you so much to DL Hammons and everyone who participated in Wednesdays Blitz Bombardment. Even though I joined the Blitz team months ago, and try to participate now and then, I never realized just how much being Blitzed could completely change the course of someone’s day; how something so simple as leaving a blog comment could have such an impact, until it happened to me. I’m so glad DL came up with this, and thankful for the hundreds of you who take the time to comment and brighten up your fellow bloggers’ day. It’s just amazing. For those of you who want to know more about what it means to be ‘blitzed’ and would like participate, click here.

In other news, I finally broke 20k on my wip! And it only took me two and a half months! *sigh* It hasn’t helped matters that my one-year-old is cutting her back molars and thought she and I should celebrate by pulling a couple all-nighters last week, from which I’d only barely recovered before France ‘sprang forward’ with the rest of the world and I was forced to get up an hour earlier.

Chronic fatigue aside, I absolutely love this time of year. You know that bone-deep sensation before a big storm when the air feels alive and you can smell change on the horizon? That’s kind of like what Spring is for me, but on a larger, yet less dramatic scale. That smell of change in the air, the warmth, and all the deepening and brightening of landscape colors makes me want to twirl around like Julie Andrews and sing the ‘hills are alive, with the sound of music!’. Hopefully nature’s vibrance will give my muse the boost she needs to finish this damn manuscript before summer vacation.

Do you guys find you’re more or less productive during different seasons? 

If Your Characters Were Real..

It’s one thing to imagine my characters as real people, arguing with me over which way a manuscript should go. It’s another thing to see my characters living and breathing before my very eyes. Because I don’t usually base their appearance on actors or people in my life, so seeing someone who looks exactly like the person I’ve been writing about would freak me out.

It has kind of happened before, on some level—that I’ve crossed paths with people who held a striking resemblance to my imaginary creations. And in those cases, I’d stop, stare, maybe even take mental notes, and then, after further observation, realize they don’t look that much like my character after all.

But what if they not only looked the part, but acted the part? What would you do then? I suppose for some writers it might go a little something like this:

Do you guys tend to base characters on the real people around you? If so, is it weird watching those people live real life, all while orchestrating their fictional lives with a click of the keys?  Have you ever come face to face with someone who seemed to pop straight out of your imagination?

PS- posting next clip just for fun. Love these guys!

Scene Sudoku

I think many of us can agree that when writing a first draft, there are some scenes we’re more excited about than others: The scenes that inspired the story to begin with – The ones that hold a lot of tension or introduce our favorite character, have a shocking revelation or relationship game-changer. Scenes that are funny and full of life or have a setting you just want to wade around in and soak up for awhile.

Sometimes the perfect scene will just fall neatly into your lap; one that combines everything you love about the book, and preforms its allotted task. And other times you have to go at it from different angles before it fits into the fold like a missing piece of a puzzle.

My two least favorites scene situations are:

The ‘you know what needs to happen. You’re just not sure how it should happen’. These are the scenes you really have to think about. Brainstorm about. Because not only do they need to be functional but they also have to function; i.e.- they need to work with the story and not feel like they’re there mainly to get us where we need to go. It’s a complicated balance.

Then there’s the ‘you know how things need to happen, but you’re not sure how to make them important.’ These are the scenes that are in the consequential order of things, but lack function. They are there because they make sense and yet they don’t really add anything to the plot. So now you have to try and give them a purpose.

*sigh*

I’m currently about to enter one of the natural-order-of-things scenes and I think I’ve found a way to give it purpose by bumping up the introduction to a very important character. 

Needless to say, my brain hurts.

What are your Scene Sudoku methods? Do you write a ‘place holder’ so you can keep going until you come up with the perfect situation? Or does your word count come to a grinding halt until you’ve found ‘the scene’? Any other difficult scene situations you can think of?

When the Snow Won't Come to You...

You go to the snow! Or at least, that’s what I told myself when the family and I began our trek out to the Vosges Mountains, in eastern France last week. While the United States has gotten their fair share of snowfall this season, we poor folk over here in middle Europe haven’t had diddlysquat. Not a single flake!

So we decided to take a ski *ahem* vacation.

To be honest, very little skiing was actually done. Besides my husband, none of us have ever skied. The girls, however, had their first lesson with a professional instructor and we had a great time sledding and snowshoe hiking for the most part.

And yet, after all the non-skiing, my six-year-old Lucy still managed to come home with a cast when she twisted/broke her ankle walking (running) on the cobblestone streets (after the pigeons).

Our visit to Strasbourg was otherwise the highlight of our vacation- what a beautiful, peaceful, pleasant city! I officially want to live there.

And I suppose, in her own way, Lucy enjoyed it, too. She had been pretty high on life all day- running, skipping, and walking into things just for the hell of it (as featured in the photo below). 

And after she snapped her ankle, not only did she continue to walk around as though nothing was wrong, but she also tried to convince her father to climb the 330 steps up to the top of Strasbourg’s Notre Dame Cathedral! (he refused, thank goodness) 

It wasn’t until we were all seated in the car that I saw her ankle had swollen to twice its normal size. #parentfail

So here I am, back after a not-so-bad vacation, but also thankful that school is in session again and I’ll have a routine that involves a little more time to relax and work on my writing. It’s been slow going, with all of the interruptions but I’m hoping to hit the gas pedal and still finish this thing before summer vacation!

Have any of you ever broken a bone? Or had the trying task of keeping a crazy kid from hurting themselves?