Fact: I love autumn.
I love the crisp mornings, the sky a fresh-scrubbed blue, bright but not HOT. I love watching the leaves burst into flaming colors, performing the most exquisite and happy dance of death as they spin to the ground in a brilliant mosaic of yellows, reds, oranges and golds. I love how sensory a season it is: kicking and crunching through those leaves, picking smooth, cool apples, carving pumpkins--so sturdy and waxy on the outside, yet fluid and slimy on the inside--and the smells. THE SMELLS, PEOPLE. Wood smoke, apple cider, cinnamon and cloves, hearty vegetable chowder, the sharp and sweet "autumn" smell in the air that gives just the barest, tiniest promise of "snow" "eventually" (although 'eventually' could be next week, given the Midwest's infamous penchant for schizophrenic season changes).
I love autumn. And this week has been very good to me with autumnal weather--cool breezy days, chill nights perfect for snuggling under the afghan my best friend made as a wedding present, drinking hot chocolate and reading. I've been enjoying it thoroughly.
In fact, there is only one tiny damper on this entire fall-related joy and rapture: school.
I start my quarter next Monday. (Read: THREE DAYS FROM NOW)
I have all my textbooks. I have almost all of my materials. I don't feel particularly panicked about the quarter the way I do sometimes. I just feel resigned, and a little annoyed. Because I know once the quarter starts, I will be writing all. the. time.
It just won't be the type of writing I WANT to do.
I put out two articles in the span of 2 days earlier this week for our annual "back to school" issue of the paper. It happens to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 so my editor asked me to do a piece on a commemorative exhibit the Field Museum has created. I really enjoyed writing my articles. I think they are good. I am proud of them. I hope people enjoy reading them.
But it's really not what I want to spend my hours doing for the next ten weeks.
I am literally within spitting distance of the end of my WIP. It is sitting perkily at 65,000 words, and I can see it easily being finished in another 5-10k or so.
I want to be finished with this draft before Monday. I want it the way an Olympic contender wants that medal. I almost want it more than I want my next breath.
I have 3.5 hours before I have to leave for work this evening. And I have tomorrow off.
Think I'll make it?
I hope I do. And then I shall go celebrate with a pumpkin latte.
Wish me luck!
~Katherine
Friday, September 9, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Find a Happy Place! (or "Writing Spaces or Lack Thereof")
Something pretty impressive has happened over the last few weeks, everyone.
I have not only made significant progress in my WIP, I think I am actually close to a conclusion.
This will be the first proper book-length piece of work I have finished siiiiiiince 2007? I think? Yes, 2007.
This has partly been thanks to the presence of a writing buddy, and deadlines, however ephemeral they may have been. I've pounded away at significant chunks of this story, and I hope to have it rounded it out in the next week or so.
This has also been thanks to a highly adaptable work space, hence the subject of today's post.
I think writers, as a rule, have some rituals or talismans they hold to in their writing process. Some people will only write with a certain type of pen, others can only write in the wee hours of the morning, basking in the blue glow of their computers. Still others have a favorite cafe they go to to get the creative juices flowing. We're creatures of habit after all.
I used to be a wee-hours-computer writer. I would get up insanely early (in the old days, before I had to be up for school) or I would just not sleep, taktaktak-ing away on my laptop. Then, early this year, my laptop died in a wash of spilled red wine. This left me with a bit of a dilemma. My father very kindly gave me an old IBM notebook from his office, but the machine, while lovely, is unfortunately quite slow, and very clunky. Writing on it made my neck and hands hurt. The story is much the same with the desktop my husband and I own now. It's a great machine (and it works at the speed of light. Hey, Windows 7, where have you been all my life?) BUT the keyboard is at a funny angle on our desk, and no matter what I do, I can't make it comfortable for long stretches of time.
Then there is the problem of the location of our desktop. With a laptop, you have a level of mobility--I would meet my writing buddies at cafes or at each others houses, or I would simply take my laptop to my bedroom for a change of scenery and a bit of peace and quiet. Now, sans laptop, I am chained to my living room, facing a wall, with the television and bookshelves right next to me, and basically a whole host of noise and distraction (like right now, we have Escala's "Requiem for a Tower" playing on the tv speakers and my husband is whistling in the background playing sudoku on the couch and the cat is under my feet chewing on the hem of my jeans). This doesn't exactly make for easy writing.
So I unplugged, and started writing longhand again.
Now, this, from someone who wrote longhand until she was thirteen and discovered she could type almost 150wpm and that was SO MUCH EASIER OHMYGOD, is a rather big deal. I am not the fastest longhand writer in the world, and sometimes it was unbelievably frustrating to have my thoughts several paragraphs ahead of my pen. BUT, it was SO. EASY. to take a notebook anywhere. I wrote on the train to and from work, I wrote at work, I wrote in the cafe around the corner, I wrote in my bedroom, I wrote on the roof deck in our apartment, I even attempted to write while working out on the elliptical (do not recommend). I would write as much as I wanted, and then transcribe onto my computer so I could track word count and page count. If I fell short of my word count goal for the day, I would go back to writing in my notebook until I got where I wanted to be.
So, the lesson of today boys and girls, is that rituals are great when you are a writer, but adaptability also helps, and you can, really, write even without your favorite tools/time of day/location.
And now, if you'll excuse me, it's a lovely day, and the roof deck is calling my name, and I have another few thousand words to write before the day is over.
~Katherine
I have not only made significant progress in my WIP, I think I am actually close to a conclusion.
This will be the first proper book-length piece of work I have finished siiiiiiince 2007? I think? Yes, 2007.
This has partly been thanks to the presence of a writing buddy, and deadlines, however ephemeral they may have been. I've pounded away at significant chunks of this story, and I hope to have it rounded it out in the next week or so.
This has also been thanks to a highly adaptable work space, hence the subject of today's post.
I think writers, as a rule, have some rituals or talismans they hold to in their writing process. Some people will only write with a certain type of pen, others can only write in the wee hours of the morning, basking in the blue glow of their computers. Still others have a favorite cafe they go to to get the creative juices flowing. We're creatures of habit after all.
I used to be a wee-hours-computer writer. I would get up insanely early (in the old days, before I had to be up for school) or I would just not sleep, taktaktak-ing away on my laptop. Then, early this year, my laptop died in a wash of spilled red wine. This left me with a bit of a dilemma. My father very kindly gave me an old IBM notebook from his office, but the machine, while lovely, is unfortunately quite slow, and very clunky. Writing on it made my neck and hands hurt. The story is much the same with the desktop my husband and I own now. It's a great machine (and it works at the speed of light. Hey, Windows 7, where have you been all my life?) BUT the keyboard is at a funny angle on our desk, and no matter what I do, I can't make it comfortable for long stretches of time.
Then there is the problem of the location of our desktop. With a laptop, you have a level of mobility--I would meet my writing buddies at cafes or at each others houses, or I would simply take my laptop to my bedroom for a change of scenery and a bit of peace and quiet. Now, sans laptop, I am chained to my living room, facing a wall, with the television and bookshelves right next to me, and basically a whole host of noise and distraction (like right now, we have Escala's "Requiem for a Tower" playing on the tv speakers and my husband is whistling in the background playing sudoku on the couch and the cat is under my feet chewing on the hem of my jeans). This doesn't exactly make for easy writing.
So I unplugged, and started writing longhand again.
Now, this, from someone who wrote longhand until she was thirteen and discovered she could type almost 150wpm and that was SO MUCH EASIER OHMYGOD, is a rather big deal. I am not the fastest longhand writer in the world, and sometimes it was unbelievably frustrating to have my thoughts several paragraphs ahead of my pen. BUT, it was SO. EASY. to take a notebook anywhere. I wrote on the train to and from work, I wrote at work, I wrote in the cafe around the corner, I wrote in my bedroom, I wrote on the roof deck in our apartment, I even attempted to write while working out on the elliptical (do not recommend). I would write as much as I wanted, and then transcribe onto my computer so I could track word count and page count. If I fell short of my word count goal for the day, I would go back to writing in my notebook until I got where I wanted to be.
So, the lesson of today boys and girls, is that rituals are great when you are a writer, but adaptability also helps, and you can, really, write even without your favorite tools/time of day/location.
And now, if you'll excuse me, it's a lovely day, and the roof deck is calling my name, and I have another few thousand words to write before the day is over.
~Katherine
Friday, August 19, 2011
Look! An Update of the Positive Variety!
It's been more than two weeks since my dog passed away. I am rather astonished that the time went by so fast. I went home a few days after she passed, and saw all of her things--her kennel, her food dishes, those puppy pads we were using for the last year or so because she kept having accidents in the house--in a neat stack by the mailbox at the end of our driveway. "FREE PUPPY STARTER KIT" said the sign stuck to the old kennel. When I asked my mom why, she said she couldn't bear to see Minnie's things unused in her corner of the coatroom, and that what with the economy making it hard for people to keep their pets, maybe someone could use a free crate/box of quality wet food/box of puppy training pads. Her collar is still in the coat room, though. Her "bling" collar, the one my sister and I picked out of her last summer (light pink with rhinestones. My dog was fashionable, people).
So I went home. No dog. It sucked. I miss her.
But you know what? Something good came out of the past two weeks: I have been writing again.
Part of it is just the therapy in the act of writing. It's a shame, because it's often angst-ridden and melodramatic, but some of us simply tend to write more prolifically when we're suffering emotionally. But another part was simply the fact that I got fed up with myself. REALLY fed up.
When I was living at home, if I got exasperated with a story, or got writer's block, I would take Minnie for a walk. I would rant to the general air, trying out character conversations with the trees, and generally made a fool of myself. I'm certain several neighbors still wonder if I'm completely right in the head. Usually, about halfway through the walk, I would sit down on someone's lawn so Minnie could catch her breath (remember, old) and maybe chase a squirrel. One time, I sat there, bemoaning my stuck story, my inability to write, my general failure at life in general (sound familiar???) when Minnie trotted over to me, climbed clumsily into my lap, and quite literally headbutted me in the face. Bonked me in the chin, to be exact, so that I bit the tip of my tongue.
"Hey!" I yelped, leaning back. Minnie sat back, tail fluttering, and gave me a reproachful look.
oh shut it, she seemed to be saying. Quit talking about it and just do something about it, eh?
Thoroughly chastened, I took her home, sat back down to my computer, and picked my story up again.
So was her passing away another headbutt? Well, no, but it reminded me of that time, and I realized I am basically doing now what I was doing then. And that's quite enough of that, thankyouverymuch.
So I have restarted a project I was doing with my friend Gia earlier in the summer, wherein we gave each other word counts that had to be achieved by a certain date, and to hold each other and ourselves to those word counts, we had to send each other our drafts to be counted.
This actually works remarkably well, because it combines the two things I enjoy most about writing with a peer: feedback and DEADLINES. There is nothing like a ticking clock to make you lock the inner editor in a closet for a few hours and just let the ideas run wild. Because I have to have 5k written by tomorrow, goddammit, this is no time to debate between "the sky was blue" and "the sky was periwinkle."
So in the last two weeks, I've written something like twenty thousand words. Possibly more. My story, which was limping at about 25k and starting to go in circles, is now almost 50k words strong, the plot is moving in a direction I like, my characters are developing nicely (though one remains a bit hysterical for my liking. But that's for the rewrites). But I am writing, people. Writing on a consistent almost-daily basis. It's a good feeling.
~Katherine
So I went home. No dog. It sucked. I miss her.
But you know what? Something good came out of the past two weeks: I have been writing again.
Part of it is just the therapy in the act of writing. It's a shame, because it's often angst-ridden and melodramatic, but some of us simply tend to write more prolifically when we're suffering emotionally. But another part was simply the fact that I got fed up with myself. REALLY fed up.
When I was living at home, if I got exasperated with a story, or got writer's block, I would take Minnie for a walk. I would rant to the general air, trying out character conversations with the trees, and generally made a fool of myself. I'm certain several neighbors still wonder if I'm completely right in the head. Usually, about halfway through the walk, I would sit down on someone's lawn so Minnie could catch her breath (remember, old) and maybe chase a squirrel. One time, I sat there, bemoaning my stuck story, my inability to write, my general failure at life in general (sound familiar???) when Minnie trotted over to me, climbed clumsily into my lap, and quite literally headbutted me in the face. Bonked me in the chin, to be exact, so that I bit the tip of my tongue.
"Hey!" I yelped, leaning back. Minnie sat back, tail fluttering, and gave me a reproachful look.
oh shut it, she seemed to be saying. Quit talking about it and just do something about it, eh?
Thoroughly chastened, I took her home, sat back down to my computer, and picked my story up again.
So was her passing away another headbutt? Well, no, but it reminded me of that time, and I realized I am basically doing now what I was doing then. And that's quite enough of that, thankyouverymuch.
So I have restarted a project I was doing with my friend Gia earlier in the summer, wherein we gave each other word counts that had to be achieved by a certain date, and to hold each other and ourselves to those word counts, we had to send each other our drafts to be counted.
This actually works remarkably well, because it combines the two things I enjoy most about writing with a peer: feedback and DEADLINES. There is nothing like a ticking clock to make you lock the inner editor in a closet for a few hours and just let the ideas run wild. Because I have to have 5k written by tomorrow, goddammit, this is no time to debate between "the sky was blue" and "the sky was periwinkle."
So in the last two weeks, I've written something like twenty thousand words. Possibly more. My story, which was limping at about 25k and starting to go in circles, is now almost 50k words strong, the plot is moving in a direction I like, my characters are developing nicely (though one remains a bit hysterical for my liking. But that's for the rewrites). But I am writing, people. Writing on a consistent almost-daily basis. It's a good feeling.
~Katherine
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
The furry white muse
I could say something clever about my absence after my last post, but quite frankly I have no clever words.
We all have the things and people in our lives that inspire us, or provide us with great companionship as we go through life. One of my longtime companions, and indeed my first writing buddy, was a feisty little white dog, who fetched stuffed caterpillars, loved to chase falling leaves, and was my walking companion during those many evenings when I restlessly circled my neighborhood, searching for inspiration.
Minnie was 17 years old in June. She passed away today after a long, well-traveled, and happy life.
I am heartbroken.
We all have the things and people in our lives that inspire us, or provide us with great companionship as we go through life. One of my longtime companions, and indeed my first writing buddy, was a feisty little white dog, who fetched stuffed caterpillars, loved to chase falling leaves, and was my walking companion during those many evenings when I restlessly circled my neighborhood, searching for inspiration.
Minnie was 17 years old in June. She passed away today after a long, well-traveled, and happy life.
I am heartbroken.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
7/19/2011 1 hour exercise: portion of WIP
This is my progress for my 1 hour stint on 7/19. It was just shy of a full hour, as I got derailed towards the end. Disappointing, but better than nothing.
The Wrecker was crouched below her on a piece of asphalt jutting out of the ice. It was soaked through, its ragged garment clinging to its gaunt frame, blue-white with cold, like a second skin. It was trembling violently, and Amy could faintly hear it talking to itself, its voice surprisingly steady and hard despite its convulsions.
"--and you will shut up shut up shut UP or I will kill them, yes, kill every last one of them and paint our hands in their blood, yes, unless you SHUT UP." To make its point, the Wrecker dunked its head in the freezing water, holding it there until Amy was sure it would drown, only to jerk up again like it had been dragged, gasping and vomiting up lake water. It looked down at its hands as if seeing them for the first time, and to Amy’s astonishment, its lip curled in a decidedly human gesture of disgust. Then it looked up sharply, meeting Amy’s eyes, and the eerie smile slid back across its pallid features. Amy gaped at it for a moment, and then finally shook her head. Iris would have made some comment, some remark to the effect of you are weird and more than a little creepy. But Amy wasn’t Iris and, if she was perfectly honest with herself, the Wrecker looked enough like Iris to completely unnerve Amy every time she looked at it.
“So,” she called down instead. “The Weaver. Are we going to find her, or are you just going to bide your time on this giant ice cube?” That was not much better, you idiot, she thought wearily. Her mouth was going to get her killed.
The Wrecker scuttled up the ice like a squirrel, toes and fingers digging into crevices Amy could not see as it propelled itself over the lip of the ice. It straightened slowly--it looked even taller out in the open, Amy mused--and looked out over the vast expanse of lake between them and the shoreline.
"Weaver," it murmured thoughtfully, before turning to look at Amy again. It's face contorted, and a low moan escaped it. It doubled over, clutching its head, clawing at the long stringy hair that was quickly freezing into stalks from its dunk in the water. Amy backed up a few steps and crouched down to observe. The Wrecker was whimpering now, like a whipped puppy, its bony palms pressed hard against its eyes. It rocked back and forth, keening as if it were in pain.
Amy sat back on her heels, her mind spinning. She tried to recall anything Iris had told her about her dratted story, anything that could give her a clue to this bizarre creature in front of her. The Wrecker had no form, Iris had told her on more than one occasion, and that was her biggest problem with it--she had no idea what it looked like, how it operated, what its weaknesses were. All she knew was that it was wantonly destructive, and had something to do with the disappearance of her protagonist's sister. Maralee, her memory supplied. Maralee was the protagonist.
"Is Maralee here?" She asked tentatively. The Wrecker abruptly stopped rocking, but did not lift its head. Amy pressed on.
"Did Maralee come here when you did? Maybe she's the Weaver you're looking for?"
Too late, she realized the Wrecker was hissing.
It leaped at her, all limbs and teeth, and the force of it hitting Amy was enough to knock the air out of her. They tumbled to the ice, the Wrecker clawing furiously at Amy's face and throat, mercifully protected by her coat's high collar, and Amy shoved back as hard as she could, catching one of the Wrecker's wrists and desperately trying to yank it away. It snapped its teeth at her, missing her ear by mere centimeters, and Amy rolled back over her shoulder, flipping them so that she pinned the Wrecker against the snow with her forearm pressed against its throat. Still it tried to fight back, yanking Amy's hair as hard as it could, and clawing red ribbons into her arms. Amy pressed down on the creature's windpipe.
"Stop it!" She shouted furiously, pinning one of its flailing hands with her free one. It twisted under her like an enraged animal, its eyes flashing blue-black-blue-black, its teeth bared at her even as its lips started to turn an even uglier shade of blue.
"Stop it, or I'll kill you! Do you understand me? I'LL KILL YOU!"
It swung at her again with its free hand, and very clearly, Amy heard it grate back, "do it."
What? Amy started, the pressure on the Wrecker's throat wavered, and it wrestled one long leg between them and kicked Amy straight back. She landed on her back and sat up quickly. The Wrecker was still lying on the ice, staring up at the gray sky. Slowly, it sat up, its face blank. For a moment, they simply stared at one another.
It told me to kill it, Amy thought, bewildered. It was talking to itself, and now it wants me to kill it? She watched the Wrecker, completely still except for the occasional, violent tremor that wracked its skinny frame. If it's human, or anything remotely close to one, it should be shaking uncontrollably with cold. It should be doing something, anything but sit there.
But it did do something, she realized slowly, watching the Wrecker watch her. It had been doing something since Amy first woke up. It was talking to itself, fighting with itself.
"What's your name?" She asked it for what felt like the millionth time. The Wrecker gazed at her stonily, but its eyes continued to flicker black, blue, black, blue, back to black again. Then, wordlessly, it rose and, grabbing Amy by the elbow, returned to the Tower. The ground beneath Amy's feet shifted and the ice groaned, the sound almost swallowed by a swell of chattering and clicking--the little beasts were moving again. She felt rather than saw the island begin to change course, kicking up great plumes of crystalline snow and shards of ice as it rotated in the water and began to float back towards the shore. Amy glanced at the Wrecker out of the corner of her eye. Was it just her, or did something like satisfaction flicker across its blank face?
Amy wracked her memory as she watched the frightening creature, trying to hold onto the bits and pieces of the story her sister had let slip over the years. There was a clue to this whole mess standing in front of her, embodied in the monster with Iris's face and the changing eyes. If only I knew what that clue actually was.
Matters of Motivation and other things
I have not written a word in more than a month.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I've written a couple of articles for the university paper. I've been writing in my journal with a bit more regularity, though not as much as I would like, and I wrote many, many thank-you notes. I've even written a paragraph or two for one of my WIP's.
But actually WRITE? As in, sit down for a segment of time devoted solely to furthering one of my stories? Nope. Not even a little bit.
To say I am frustrated is kind of like saying Hurricane Katrina was a nasty storm--vast, enormous understatement. I've tried a number of times to sit down and get to work, but something--sometimes incredibly stupid somethings--always gets in the way. Or I am out of energy. Or the cat is annoying. Or, most worryingly, I simply can't think of anything.
I asked my husband yesterday if he thought it was possible for someone's imagination to die from lack of use. I certainly feel that way lately--my brain doesn't seem to generate stories anymore. I don't dream anymore ,except when I have nightmares and those, to be honest, are very boring and repetitive. I can't even create original nightmares anymore! What is happening to my brain?!
He said, very simply, "no, but it's like playing soccer--the longer you let it go un-practiced, the harder it is to get back into it."
This both makes me feel better and more concerned. I've bemoaned several times with writer friends about how much EASIER it was for me to write when I was younger, and how the ideas flowed faster and more freely back then. What I seem to have forgotten til now is that when I was writing back then, I was not only writing faster and more freely, but I was writing All. The. Time. And I do mean all: at night after I had been told to go to sleep, in class when I should have been taking notes, on family vacations, in the dentist's office, literally every-bleeding-where. And that is probably the biggest difference between my writing then and my writing now. I am not writing nearly as much quantity as I did then. And it's starving my imagination.
This time last year, I had just started my job at Borders, and I was trying to galvanize my foundering imagination. I brought a notebook with me everywhere so that I could write at any time. And I made progress. Not the same speed-of-light-and-excellence progress I made when I was younger, but progress all the same. Now? The notebook is still in my bag, but that's all it is doing, is just sitting there. I need to find a way to get out of this slump, to start writing again, either on the computer or in my notebooks, anything to just get WORDS MOVING AGAIN GAH.
okay, end the complaining portion of this post. Moving on to the strategy part.
When we were on our honeymoon, Dennis suggested that I devote at least 1 hour each day to writing, absolutely no excuses. I thought this was a fabulous idea but (naturally) once we got back to the real world, with our real jobs and our real responsibilities, that ephemeral piece of an idea was immediately relegated to the bottom of the heap. It is time to bring it back up and see what can be done with it. 1 hour a day of writing--any kind of writing, be it blogging here, free-writing something on the computer or in my notebook, working on any sort of story, or hell even writing "I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm stuck" ten billion times. And to hold me to this strategy, I am going to post my hour's worth of writing on here, starting today.
Fingers crossed that this works.
~Katherine
Actually, that's not entirely true. I've written a couple of articles for the university paper. I've been writing in my journal with a bit more regularity, though not as much as I would like, and I wrote many, many thank-you notes. I've even written a paragraph or two for one of my WIP's.
But actually WRITE? As in, sit down for a segment of time devoted solely to furthering one of my stories? Nope. Not even a little bit.
To say I am frustrated is kind of like saying Hurricane Katrina was a nasty storm--vast, enormous understatement. I've tried a number of times to sit down and get to work, but something--sometimes incredibly stupid somethings--always gets in the way. Or I am out of energy. Or the cat is annoying. Or, most worryingly, I simply can't think of anything.
I asked my husband yesterday if he thought it was possible for someone's imagination to die from lack of use. I certainly feel that way lately--my brain doesn't seem to generate stories anymore. I don't dream anymore ,except when I have nightmares and those, to be honest, are very boring and repetitive. I can't even create original nightmares anymore! What is happening to my brain?!
He said, very simply, "no, but it's like playing soccer--the longer you let it go un-practiced, the harder it is to get back into it."
This both makes me feel better and more concerned. I've bemoaned several times with writer friends about how much EASIER it was for me to write when I was younger, and how the ideas flowed faster and more freely back then. What I seem to have forgotten til now is that when I was writing back then, I was not only writing faster and more freely, but I was writing All. The. Time. And I do mean all: at night after I had been told to go to sleep, in class when I should have been taking notes, on family vacations, in the dentist's office, literally every-bleeding-where. And that is probably the biggest difference between my writing then and my writing now. I am not writing nearly as much quantity as I did then. And it's starving my imagination.
This time last year, I had just started my job at Borders, and I was trying to galvanize my foundering imagination. I brought a notebook with me everywhere so that I could write at any time. And I made progress. Not the same speed-of-light-and-excellence progress I made when I was younger, but progress all the same. Now? The notebook is still in my bag, but that's all it is doing, is just sitting there. I need to find a way to get out of this slump, to start writing again, either on the computer or in my notebooks, anything to just get WORDS MOVING AGAIN GAH.
okay, end the complaining portion of this post. Moving on to the strategy part.
When we were on our honeymoon, Dennis suggested that I devote at least 1 hour each day to writing, absolutely no excuses. I thought this was a fabulous idea but (naturally) once we got back to the real world, with our real jobs and our real responsibilities, that ephemeral piece of an idea was immediately relegated to the bottom of the heap. It is time to bring it back up and see what can be done with it. 1 hour a day of writing--any kind of writing, be it blogging here, free-writing something on the computer or in my notebook, working on any sort of story, or hell even writing "I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm stuck" ten billion times. And to hold me to this strategy, I am going to post my hour's worth of writing on here, starting today.
Fingers crossed that this works.
~Katherine
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
DePaul 2011 Summer Writing Conference
This is not my usual type of post and I generally do not like to plug, but as I am a volunteer for this event and I'm in charge of contacting other bloggers, I feel its only appropriate that I use my own blog for the same purpose.
So, without further ado, the DePaul 2011 Summer Writing Conference!
So, without further ado, the DePaul 2011 Summer Writing Conference!
Polish your prose or poetry at DePaul’s third annual Summer Writing Conference, July 15-17
DePaul’s third annual Summer Writing Conference begins July 15 with a keynote address by journalist and best-selling author Alex Kotlowitz.
Kotlowitz, author of the best-seller There Are No Children Here and other books, will describe his experiences as a non-fiction storyteller during his address from noon to 1 p.m. in the Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St.
The three-day conference’s closing speaker will be Miles Harvey, an assistant professor of English at DePaul and an award-winning fiction writer. His presentation will also take place in the Pritzker Auditorium, July 17. Classes and panel discussions will be in the DePaul Center, and readings will take place at Blackie’s restaurant, 755 S. Clark St.
The conference will feature other DePaul faculty and nationally distinguished writers of poetry, non-fiction and fiction. Experts on writing for children and teens and those with expertise in publishing and mixed media will also be featured at the conference that is designed for writers of all experience levels.
DePaul’s Continuing and Professional Education , the Department of English and The Chicago Public Library are the sponsors.
Tuition is $300 or $125 for any single day. Please email Chris Green cgreen1@depaul.edu with any questions.
Registration is required. For more information and to register visit cpe.depaul.edu/writingconference
Tell your friends, your enemies, your pets. Feel free to re-post this to your own blog (I'm looking at you, Gia ) Tweet it, Facebook it, whatever. Just get the word out--it's going to be a blast!
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