In the spirit of positivity, I will try (and sometimes fail) to post something positive and true on Mondays. Because Monday is the day you need positive thinking the most.
I have insomnia. This post is coming to you at 5:26am, because I haven't slept a wink. So I'm a little cranky.Now on to the mother effin' positivity.
Writing Life...
Last month I reached an absolute impasse with my novel at chapter nine, because I forgot something that I learned from my writerly hero, Jennifer Crusie:
Internal conflict can help describe character arc but it can’t move story. External conflict moves story. Internal conflict is just a character staring into space, thinking hard.From chapter nine on, everything I wrote ended up being for a later point in the book. My characters had chemistry and history but they also had nothing to fight for. Which gives them nothing to lose. Also my hero is too nice.
So I started weaving in a plot point that's been debated in my writing group. My characters were BFFs since childhood. Then at sixteen, Adelia hit it and quit it, for lack of a better phrase. So it's fourteen years later and I think my hero is still a bit angry. Not roaring, alpha male angry. But still holding onto that pain and resentful of her suddenly appearing. My group felt like this wasn't believable or empathetic. Usually I bow to the wisdom of the ladies, but in this case, I'm disagreeing. So rewrote the initial confrontation between the hero and heroine and upped the ante by having him not be Prince Charming. He's conflicted. Which still isn't plot, but it's getting somewhere. So yay! I'm calling it a win.
The Rest of Life...
- My coworker bought me a flying pig from the greeting card store that dances to the Cupid Shuffle because I she knows I collect flying pigs.I cradled it like a baby and made everyone watch it dance.
- Re-watched season six of Supernatural and discovered that its not as awful as I remembered, provided you fast forward through everything except Soulless Sam being an oversexed sociopath. Which is fun to type and even more fun to watch.
- In February, we paid off our credit cards and started saving for the down payment on a house!
- It's March now so winter has to be at least half over. I'll take it.
Shit I love
Kelly Clarkson's song, Chivas. It's a love letter to whiskey and a hate letter to an ex-boyfriend. Magical.
Ben & Jerry's Karamel Sutra Ice Cream
The books that kept me company the past couple weeks.
Soulless Sammy
What makes you joyful on this fine Monday?
1. YAY for paying off your credit cards! That's HUGE! And so exciting that you can start saving for a house now! I'm proud of you two crazy kids :)
ReplyDelete2. That episode of Supernatural has been my favorite of Season Six thus far -- I LOL'd so hard when Sam said the butt thing line.
3. I'm jealous of all the reading you've gotten done. I'm still halfway through the same book I was reading at the beginning of the year... And anytime you get to read Welcome to Temptation is a win.
4. Thanks for the link to the Crusie article! It's super helpful.
It is a huge relief! Thanks for bein' proud of us. It took a really long time to get everything paid off when we were living on just my income. It's so good now. If I can stop buying makeup and nail polish we can have a house in a year. I'm not gonna... but we could :) Though we may have to dip into our savings to buy a new desktop as mine is about to take a complete dump. Its six years old and it wasn't top of the line when I bought it new. Time for an upgrade me thinks.
DeleteI liked the conversation between Sam and Dean where he was trying to understand why it wasn't okay to bang the hippie chick while Dean was missing.
I actually re-read The Perfect Match. Try re-reading that book with an eye for how Kristan Higgans handles character movment. I noticed she rarely stage directs her characters. She also doesn't use he said/she said much either. Its different when you read with an eye for how authors mold the language. I think I need to consider how many turns, grimaces, eyebrows raises and laughs my characters actually need.
Yeah, that article is helpful but what she says in the comments are even more helpful. She might be writing a book on writing. She mentions it as something that has come up for her. I would buy it in a heartbeat.