New (Untitled) Piece…and What I’m Working On…

There’s a new piece up on my (Untitled) page that’s really personal…it’s about my relationship with my dad from way back. Thankfully, we’re beyond that stage now, but it was a good piece and I wanted to air it out somewhere.

Lately, I’ve been going through my various journals and highlighting things I want to use and ideas I want to play with for my two non-fiction works, Some College and the Marriage Kit book. It seems I’ve written short excerpts and stream of consciousness thoughts for both works everywhere; now that I have the command center set up, I’m putting it all together. I’m also slowly but surely working my way through the Camp NaNoWriMo manuscript, and living life experiences that will go well with the NaNoWriMo 2010 manuscript. All in all, it’s been a pretty productive month for being creative.

I’ve been going through some of my floppy disks, the ones that I used with my Brother Word processor. That’s been an experience. I found some things from when I turned 15 and on that I may share on this or another blog. I still have plenty of disks to go through from my computer disk days in middle and high school, but so far I’m estatic about all the pieces I’m rediscovering, some of which have some real merit. Now to get my hands on the other notebooks I wasn’t able to bring, and to have my entire body of work here to mull over and continue.

Nothing much else never in 2blu2btruLand. How are your writing lives going?

2blu2btru

Advertisement

Let’s Talk Books

I’ve been spending so much time lately going over my current projects that I haven’t said a word about books or reading in quite some time. Reading is an essential part of my day, no matter what it is that I’m reading. I read several times a day. In the last few days, three Harlequins have met their match (all very good, by the way ;-)). But I have also been reading other books.

During my lunch break, I’ve been reading One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead (I think; going off memory). This book is all about consumerism and the wedding industry. I still have a little bit of book left, so I can’t give a full review, but I will say that Mead’s reasearch is thorough, and some of her findings are startling, to say the least. She also raises some big questions about why weddings are now so expensive, what we’ve been trained to think about them, and what big, expensive weddings are supposed to replace. I can’t wait to finish and review.

Also sitting on my shelf at the moment: Pledged: another nonfiction, investigative reporting style book investigating sororities. From the cover and introduction, it seems she focused on white sororities (that, and most non-white sororities are less likely to talk to her about their rituals and ways, seeing as though she is Caucasian, a non-member, and a member of the media); a book about a woman’s 40 day & night solo sojourn into the desert after a divorce (this is non-fiction as well); What Frenchwomen Know About Love, Sex and Men–pretty self explanatory, I should think; Faith Evans’ memoir, and; Heather Hunter’s attempt at fiction.

As you can see, their isn’t a lot of fiction; in fact, it leans heavily to investigative reporting style exposés and memoirs. While this is easier to jump back into (I usually read at lunch, while waiting, and in the evenings at home when I can), I can only guess the reason why I focused so heavily on these is because I’m going to be working on an investigative reporting style similar to Mead and others for the Marriage Kit book, and I’m going to be working on  a memoir of my college years. I’m taking a look at what works and doesn’t work in the genres, I guess you could say.

Does what you’re looking to write ever change what you are primarily reading? Are you a writer who stays away from all romance novels while you’re writing romance, or does your readership in the genre you are attempting to write in increase? How do you work reading into your day and not end up crowding out writing?

Related Articles

• Jermaine Jackson to Write Memoir of His Brother Michael (readersread.com)
• Southern Girl Academy: Sororities (southerngirlacademy.wordpress.com)
• Re-reading Favorite Books (sugarbookclub.wordpress.com)

This Never Happened to Me Before

I am in deep thought, too...but with clothes on...Image via Wikipedia

I wanted to write a simple post today about something that I did in high school and intersperse some observations about the writing life and the writing craft in it. You may have noticed I sometimes “set the scene” with a little vignette that’s meant to set up the “meat” of the post.

Well, as I was setting up my little vignette, something strange happened. It started to spin out into this who non-fiction piece. I started to say profound things without trying. My mind unfolded to similies and metaphors without effort. All of a sudden, instead of introducing a blog post, I was writing a creative non-fiction piece.

I’ve sat down to write and not been able to come up with anything. I’ve started writing and had a piece go pear-shaped. I’ve even started writing and have a character (or an entire piece) take a sharp left turn. But I’ve never had a blog post go all “real writing” on me.

The thing is, I was thinking about sharing some of my writing here–not a lot, I still have trust issues, you understand–but I didn’t think it would be non-fiction or, well, on this topic. When I envisioned myself sharing a piece with you, I envisioned it being a little poetry, or a mini-scene. I was going to do some flash fiction exercises or something on here, you know, nothing fancy that may possibly get published later (I mean, don’t magazines want first publication rights? Would posting something on my blog count as publication? Help!).

I was so blindsided with an attack of the green-eyed monster and my problems building a big blog following that I almost missed the fact that I’ve had several ideas that could further stories this week. For example, the very non-fiction piece I’m speaking of brought to mind an area in the dorms where residents practiced music that would be perfect for A Blues for Zora (somewhere–I’m thinking Hershey’s place? Hmm…). I was also thinking that it’s perfectly normal for someone approaching their class reunion age to have a quarter life crisis, as per the wikipedia definition that came up on a post I was writing. I even thought how much better my chick lit is going to be than something I’m reading right now, because I am not doing something that’s standard chick but am going to do something that’s so Bildungsroman. And it will all be EPIC.

To what unexpected places has a blog post draft led you? Maybe for you, through the act of typing up a post, some miraculous insight into writing, your works in progress, or life, has hit you. Maybe you were struck with the idea of making the post a series of post. Whatever it was, feel free to share!

Related Articles

• I Love Outlines, But I Can’t Write Them For Peanuts (insertliteraryblognamehere.com)
• Writer Aims To Redefine “Chick-on-Chick” Lit (lezgetreal.com)
• What if You Think Your Fiction is Crap? (advancedfictionwriting.com)
• The Danger of Writing Flash Fiction (writinghood.com)
• Announcement: I’m Writing a Column For Write Anything (worddreams.wordpress.com)
• Questions I Should Have Posed Before Agreeing to This Present Madness (planejaner.wordpress.com)
• Revising That Fight, Part 2 (lilithsaintcrow.com)
• Is there a book in everyone? (tdhurst.com)