Happy Poetry Month

Alright! We are now over halfway through the month, and… I have not yet begun to write. 😦 Don’t worry. I think this is still possible. Probably. If I get through enough homework tonight, I’ve promised myself that I’m allowed to blow off the rest and actually get started on the NaNo project for the month. I’m in the last two weeks of my class and the last four weeks of work, so I’m really feeling the heat, but I still think I can pull this off.

In the meantime, here’s some poetry I’ve made with students over the last couple of weeks! The first one is a color poem that I made to demonstrate drafting and revising for word choice while introducing color poems to the students, the first of their month-long poetry unit. (Don’t judge me on my color choice, haha. I needed to pick something none of the students possibly would.) It has endured light editing. The second one is a poem I wrote based on a question from a student that, later and in conjunction with the eclipse, inspired a space science perspective painting lesson. This poem has endured no editing at all, haha. It’s been a fun couple of weeks at school!

I hope you’ve had a chance to write or at least enjoy some poetry this month. If not, there’s still time! So until next week, happy writing!

Puce

Puce is a planter’s dawn in hazy twilight

Puce is a French queen’s silk gown

Puce is running down a dustry trail of wild rose

Puce tastes like lavender macrons, crisp and chewy

Puce smells like blueberry muffins browning in the oven

Puce sounds like earthen beads clacking on my wrist

Puce feels like a great-grandma’s velvet wedding dress

Puce looks like smoky rose quartz set in gold

Puce makes me skin-crawly with fleas and history

Pluto

A student asked me today

Which planet was my favorite

And I thought of ringed Saturn

And bejeweled Neptune

And sprinting, fiery Mercury.

But mostly I thought of Pluto,

Demoted, disregarded,

Cold, and dark, and alone,

Hades without his springtime Persephone

No Cerberus to lick his hands,

No Elysian Fields to lie in,

Just a lonely rock,

Orbiting with hardly a

Kiss of sunlight on his cheek

And even though the student said

It was not correct,

I chose Pluto.

Reblog: 6 Tips for Jumpstarting

Well, I’ve done absolutely no reading, note taking, plan making, or editing of fiction of any kind so far this month. And so, because I am discouraged and everything is hard, I am leaning into this reblog: A.D. Nauman’s 6 Tips for Jumpstarting a Stalled Writing Career. Here’s to hoping that some day I’ll get far enough into a writing career for it to even be at risk of stalling out.

6 Tips for Jumpstarting a Stalled Writing Career

A.D. NAUMAN

OCT 11, 2023

When I was in my 30s, literary success felt close. My stories were appearing regularly in literary journals and winning awards. One story was produced by Stories on Stage and broadcast on NPR. I had an agent I adored. My first novel had been accepted for publication by a hot indie New York press, and of course it would be a world-changer, destined for both the bestseller list and the literary canon. I was soaring down the highway to literary triumph.

Then, everything drifted to a stop. My novel Scorch, released in 2001, did not change the world. My agent left agenting. And over the next 10 years, I managed to place only two stories. I wrote a rockin’ middle-grade novel and secured another agent, but she couldn’t sell it. I wrote a cool, creepy YA novel, but the agent didn’t like it, and she dumped me. I have a vivid memory of sitting at my dining room table in late summer of 2010, sobbing, knowing I’d missed it: I wasn’t going to have the life of a writer after all. It was all I’d ever wanted. I’d made so many sacrifices for it.

Now, in 2023, I am finally launching a second novel, Down the Steep, published by Regal House. Once again I’m regularly placing stories in literary journals, including TriQuarterly, Willow Springs, Chicago Quarterly Review, and many others. One of my stories recently received a special mention in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. I don’t have an agent, but I’m succeeding without one. Granted, I’m no longer racing down any highways to literary stardom, but I have successfully restarted my stalled career, and I’m happy again—in fact, I’m happier than before, because now my expectations are reasonable.

Ready to read on? Head over to Writer’s Digest for the rest of the article! And until next week, wish me luck that I’ll actually find the time to do anything fun with my life ever again. I need it. Happy writing!

Camp NaNoEDMo: Weenie Edition!

Image credit: Hermann Vogel

Gosh, I’m so sorry I’ve just disappeared for the last few weeks. I think I’ve just completely lost my brain somewhere along the way at this point. I don’t even know how I’m functioning anymore. I also have completely forgotten for the last four days that April is a Camp NaNoWriMo session. So, yikes! Here we are.

I decided a few weeks ago that I did in fact hate myself and wanted to throw more fuel on the fire by committing to another month of NaNo in the middle of a semester. But I also deferred to sanity somehow by deciding that I would do a much lighter NaNo than I usually attempt. Here’s the plan.

April 1-7 Read meticulously through the first draft of Sweets—my Hansel and Gretel retelling—and take notes on what work needs doing. (Hopefully not a ton. I picked this project because I think it’s already somewhat decent.)

April 8-30 A half hour of focused editing daily. That’s it. No page requirements, no word counts, just a manageable pocket of time each day. And as a little concession to class nights, deadlines, and inevitable hand injuries, if I miss a day, I am allowed to make it up at another time.

There you have it. Nothing too impressive, I admit, but I think this is about the edge of possibility. Between my classes ending in the first few days of May, the dead sprint to the school year, and gearing up for big summer plans, if I tried to go any harder, something would get terribly botched and I’m not mentally equipped to botch anything right now, haha. I really appreciate you all bearing with me. I’ve got about one more year to go before I’m certified to teach, and then another semester to complete my master’s degree. It’s exciting now that I’m starting to get closer!

So I guess I should probably get cracking on that reading now that the week is half over. Well, let’s be honest, I’m going to do my homework, get some sleep, and try to get cracking on that reading tomorrow after work. But there’s a plan in place! And I am now aware of what month it is.

It’s gonna be great, I can feel it.

How about you folks? Anyone out there attempting Camp NaNo (especially if you probably shouldn’t be?) Let me know in the comments below! And until next week, when I’ll get to tell you how badly I did at keeping to the schedule, happy writing!

I’m Totally Judging You Some More

So, like six years ago, I wrote this post. You read the post and implemented its teachings. You used a spell checker and read the submission guidelines carefully. You really fine-tuned those first few paragraphs and made sure your full narrative arc was there. You inserted vivid sensory details and then checked your submission guidelines again. Good work!

Now let’s dig a little deeper.

Try to submit early. Now, to be honest, this doesn’t really apply to the competitions that I judge for, where a contest coordinator holds all the entries and releases them to judges in batches after the dates close. But for a lot of competitions, judges start reading entries as they come in. So if yours comes in the early trickle, you can expect it to get a little more attention and thought than the one coming in with the flood at the last minute.

Build the story to the theme. If your competition has a theme, the theme merits more than a small, inconsequential mention. The story should be written with the theme baked in, not sprinkled on top. On the other hand, make sure you’re not just taking the obvious route. A unique application of the theme is more likely to stand out in a judge’s mind.

Double check for conflict. Please. Pretty please. I can’t tell you how many beautifully written chunks of text I’ve had to mark poorly because there was no conflict, and therefore no tension. Conflict doesn’t have to be big or physical, but it does need to be present, or your story isn’t going to make an impression on readers (including judges).

Make sure goals and motivations are clear. Like conflict, characters’ goals and motivations are often missing in otherwise strong entries. Clarifying this doesn’t have to take a ton of space (which is great if your competition comes with a word limit), but it can really make characters’ choices make sense. Plus, goals and motivations make excellent conflict generators and drive the plot forward.

Look beyond the trope. This next one is specific to memoirs and autobiographies. Now I mean this in the kindest, gentlest way possible, but your life story should not be a cliché. If you are a woman, finding yourself on an international trip following your divorce is going to bore the judges silly. If you are a man, the drug-fueled sexcapades of your youth aren’t impressing anyone. If you find that your life does fit into some kind of trope, that’s okay! But really zero in and focus on what makes your story unique. You are special and amazing, so don’t write yourself like you aren’t.

Play with dialog. This is also a fairly specific tip, but I see quite a few competition entries that have no dialog whatsoever, or a line or two at most. That has worked well for maybe two of them. For most stories, well written dialog is waaaay better than the narrator describing what the character is thinking and doing for the entire story. It breaks up the monotony, shows readers things about your character, and tells us about character interactions. You don’t have to have dialog, but really be sure that’s the best route for your story.

Use beta readers. I know I harp on this a lot, but getting another set of eyes on your story is super helpful. Beta readers can point out confusing spots that make perfect sense to you and help you find the nitpicks your brain is too tired from drafting to see anymore. They can pick out the spots that maybe moved a little too quickly or slowly, and give you an early warning system for what contest judges might think, back when you still have time to do something about it.

Choose excerpts carefully. If your competition entry is a portion of a larger work, you’re going to have to be very thoughtful in choosing what chunk to send in. A natural choice would be the beginning of the larger work, but consider other passages as well. Choose something that has an entire story arc within the excerpt alone. If the beginning takes a long while to get going, that might not be your best choice for a short story competition. The best entries have a beginning, middle, and end, and that goes for excerpts as well.

So there we have it! My even-more-nitpicky tips for competition submissions! Not all of these tips will apply to all stories out there, so find what makes the most sense for your story and apply as needed. (Except the beta one. That applies to all stories everywhere.) Good luck in your submissions!

And until next week, happy writing!

Speech to Text Experiment

An artist’s depiction of life, crushing my hands.

Well, my friends, it seems we are there. I am drafting this blog post using speech to text after badly dislocating a finger while goofing around in a bin of kinetic sand with a bunch of 4-year-olds in the Pre-K room at work. So we’ll see how this goes. My fervent hope is that, since this is not fiction, hopefully my tongue will remain unpossessed. We shall see.

The first thing that I notice (infuriatingly) is that this does not punctuate unless I specifically tell it to. It also does not capitalize. I think editing might be a little beastly, but at least I can do that all with my right hand. I am also belatedly realizing that I probably should have done some kind of timing exercise to see what the difference was between a post that is typed up directly and a post that is “spoken up”, if you will. Oh, well.

However, the recorder does keep up pretty well with my speaking speed. I am talking a little slower and more clearly than I would in a conversation, but I made sure nobody in the house could possibly hear me so I can live with this. I also am pleasantly surprised with the general lack of spelling errors, homophone mix ups, things like that. I see a lot of students using this at school– particularly students who struggle with writing fluently and need a little bit of help to get their ideas down on paper when their fingers can’t quite keep up– and I generally see few mistakes of this nature. Most of the mistakes are, as noted in the previous paragraph, punctuation and capitalization mistakes. So I probably should have seen this coming. but I am nonetheless pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of the speech to text.

(Future Jill here, butting in to Past Jill’s work to let you know that editing was kind of a pain—literally and figuratively—but since the mistakes are all of the same nature and fall in the same patterns, it was relatively easy to find them all. Assuming I found them all. There are probably a bunch that I did not and I will now spend the next half hour obsessively rereading this post to try to find them.)

(Future Jill here, again. In hindsight, this post is actually quite a bit shorter than average. I feel like I have an easier time building more complex thoughts and arguments when typing silently than when dictating. I’d have to delve into this a little more to be sure. Maybe I’ll experiment with this later, when my hand is in one piece again. I think my spoken language is just a little simpler. I also think that this is all happening kind of on the fly, which is probably also impacting my ability to be clever and profound, too.)

Honestly, this exercise has been more successful than I anticipated. You’ll have to judge for yourself whether this post more rambly than usual, but I think if I had bothered to do some kind of outline beforehand, that wouldn’t be an issue either. (This would have helped with the length of the post as well, I think.) I think this might be a method that I will personally be more open to using in the future. I do seem to injure my hands a lot and I think this might help me to be a little more reliable with the blog post that I might otherwise end up being.

In a related side note, my husband and I have started looking at the EDS splint rings that I was talking about in this post. I had hoped to last a little longer than this before they were needed, but at least now I will get to look like a sexy lich queen cosplayer. Dreams really do come true.

So until next week, take care of your fingers and happy writing!

Trope Fail: Love Isosceles

His poor friend there is just so tired of all this nonsense.

MadLoves

I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this by now, but I’m not much a romance writer. Like, if my readers get one smooch by book’s end, they should really consider themselves lucky. Things tend to get about as steamy as a banana split.

But still, I like to do something for Valentine’s day around here, even if it’s just to make fun of myself. So because I have the maturity of an emotionally-stunted middle schooler, here are some MadLibs to pass the time. Or, as I like to call them, MadLoves.

Seriously, these are so dumb, but my kids had fun with them, so enjoy! And until next week, happy writing!

A Day on the Beach

Kelly wasn’t much of a beach girl. It was too hot. It was too (adjective). Everything smelled of dead (animal) and sunscreen. Things always seemed to go wrong. And she found herself picking sand out of her scalp for (plural unit of time) afterward. But she really liked this guy she met at the (location), so when he invited her to go to the beach, she agreed.

George was already there when Kelly arrived. He’d set up a large picnic (noun) and an umbrella, with a bright (color) cooler. Kelly (past tense verb) and waved at him, starting toward him. Suddenly, a volleyball hit her on the (body part) and she fell with a cry.

George ran to help her. “Are you okay?”

He helped her to the umbrella’s shade and she (past tense verb) down on the cooler. Suddenly, the sand shifted under the cooler and Kelly fell over, ice and cans of (beverage) dumping on her legs. She yelped, jumping back to her (body part).

Kelly and George looked at each other. Kelly asked, “Do you want to go to the (location)?”

The Blind Date

Dating was tough in (city name). Finally, Anna signed up for a (noun) that arranged blind dates. She got her first meeting a (unit of time) later. Anna got ready, making sure she had a nice (noun) and her hair was (adjective). She was determined to make a good (noun). She rode a (noun) to the restaurant and went inside. She (past tense verb when she got to her table. She couldn’t her (body part). It was her (kind of relative)!

Apple of My Eye

Ben had never picked his own food before, but it seemed (adjective). Why not? He picked up Alex and soon they were driving to the (type of food) orchard. He and Alex each got a (noun) and started picking, reaching up into the tall (plural plant). They (past tense verb) as they worked and soon the (noun) was setting. A man drove a (vehicle) up to them and put their baskets in the back. “Good work. Go (present tense verb) your pay at the (noun).” Ben and Alex looked at each other. Alex frowned. “Was this a date or a job?” Ben wasn’t sure.

Taking the Week Off

Typing Without the Typing Part

I was chatting with a sibling-in-law a few weeks ago and realized, rather abruptly, that someday, maybe a lot sooner than I had previously thought, I might not be able to type anymore. That the mounting pain in my fingers and the ever-more-frequent hand injuries could eventually build up to the point that I wouldn’t be physically able to write or make art anymore. So I sat on the floor and cried for a little bit. As one does.

After attempting such internet queries as “How to type without hands” (which was bizarrely unhelpful—why would I need typing lessons if I didn’t have hands?), I had to reeeally get into the Reddit and YouTube weeds to find anything even remotely helpful. In the end, I mostly just had to come up with these things off the top of my head, so if you have any other tips or tricks in your toolbag, drop them in the comments below! (Seriously, please drop them in the comments, I am begging you.)

I divided my list of ideas into a favorite childhood candy, Now and Later. Some of this stuff I am kind of already needing to implement just to get through particularly writing heavy weeks at school. (I’m looking at you, two-weeks-ago.) I already really feel it in the phalanges when I have to type a lot, and especially when I hand write things with pens and pencils, which are just getting harder and harder to hold firmly. But there are other things that I hopefully won’t have to start using until a little further down the line.

Things I Can Do Now:

Go slowly. Seriously. Sometimes I have to take it one paragraph at a time. Just a few sentences, and then go take a break. It sucks and I hate it, and it makes it hard to really build complex and coherent thoughts in one go, but it’s better than the alternative. Fun fact: this blog took me three weeks to write. ☹

Type deliberately. I started thinking a little more closely about the words I wrote when each word started to make my hands ache just a little more.

Write less. The wordcounts of these posts have started to shrink a bit. I have started skipping weeks when my hands feel like trash and writing a longer post on top of the schoolwork just isn’t in the cards. I am not necessarily okay with this. But I think I’m gonna have to learn to be.

Stab tennis balls. Haha, you read that right. Since gripping pencils/pens/brushes/etc. is becoming more difficult (aka art is becoming more difficult), some very helpful internet person suggested drilling a hole through a tennis ball (or whatever size ball is comfortable to grip) and then stabbing the writing utensil into it, thus making a cheap, gigantic DIY pencil grip. (And I know this one doesn’t have to do with typing, but I’m counting it under the blogging umbrella.) I haven’t tried it yet, but this one is looming near on the horizon. Which leads us to…

Things for the Future:

Use speech to text. I’m pretty sure that my tongue gets possessed by demons every time I attempt this, but maybe you’re a person who is capable of speaking a story and having it come out with any degree of grace or coherence. If so, speech to text is a great option with zero strain on the digits! I hate it but might have to get over that.

Use finger splints. Also known as hypermobility/arthritis/ring splints. Some of these are pretty bleh, but a lot are super cool looking, like intense metal jewelry that you might find on the fingers of a sexy lich queen cosplayer in downtown Seattle. These are the one thing on the list that I’m actually kind of looking forward to, haha.

Create video posts. On weeks when I’m just really not feeling it, I can try video posts until I feel a little more functional. Full scripts can get pared down to talking points to minimize necessary text and hand strain, and I’m sure you’ll all forgive my incoherent babbling. I’m sure.

So I might find myself employing more of these little workarounds in the future, especially in times when I have to reserve more of my finger capacity for other stuff—or when there just isn’t any finger capacity to be had. All this being said, I’m still going to try really hard to maintain the weekly blog schedule as much as possible. I don’t want to just give up on all the things I like (because, tragically, most of my hobbies—writing, drawing, painting, piano, bass, archery, the-making-and-eating-of-insane-amounts-of-bread, etc.—are pretty finger intensive), but I’m going to have to at the very least rethink how I do them.

So seriously, tips and tricks in the comments, please and thank you.

And until next week! Love you all to bits, and happy writing!

Trash Panda Rummages for Time

Poor Trash Panda. She just wants a nap and to finish her homework.