My thoughts are with you, Sionnach. I can’t think of anything worse than this. Not knowing where your child is, or being able to help, to connect, to have the magic to fix and heal. I’m hoping this message gets through to him and he contacts you. I’m hoping he’s safe somewhere warm and sunny and can feel your love.
A beautifully written piece by Maria Popova on “stepping out of the present existence” to gain some perspective.
via A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times – Brain Pickings
I have not been posting this month. That’s because my mind is crammed with other things. Like writing–which is what we authors live for. When the characters are talking, the settings appearing, and the words flowing, we are in love. And that euphoria fuels us. If we don’t let ourselves get distracted by ordinary life.
At the end of October, I came home from the SiWC inspired, as always. It was almost NaNoWriMo ,which is a fancy short for National Novel Writing Month; the object of which is to focus on churning out 50,000 words in draft form over the grey rainy month of November. I decided to sign-up and give myself some focus, and at the same time, experiment with a free trial version of Scrivener. If you haven’t heard of Scrivener, it’s writing software with an organizational focus. I’d heard about it on my FB group site and also at the SiWC, so I thought, why not? Give it a try.
I had already drafted 45,000 words of To Render a Raven–Book 3 in the Hollystone Mysteries series–last spring. I left off writing at the end of June, then travelled in Ireland. The rest of summer and fall got away from me, and I decided it was time to get back to my first love: Estrada.
If you don’t know Estrada, a wonderful review of Book 2, To Sleep with Stones, just came out in this Toronto magazine: Blank Spaces Review
To Render a Raven picks up a year after To Sleep with Stones, and brings our flawed hero, Estrada, face-to-face with his worst nightmare: losing the people he loves. I can’t tell you much more than that, but if you’ve read Stones, you’ll know that at the end of the book, Estrada is shocked by some news.
So, here we are with one week left in November.
Have I written 50,000 words? No.
Do I think I will finish this draft in one week? No.
Have I decided to buy Scrivener? No.
It looks like smart software, but I found it was distracting me from the heart of what I wanted to do. Tell the story.
So, I exported the file to Word and deleted all the Scrivener files from my computers. I no longer have individual scenes tacked up on a virtual corkboard or a neat list of character templates, but that’s just fine.
What I do have, at this moment, is almost 58,000 words in my draft, and a running outline with photos and scene titles, a lot of editing and revising completed, and a movie playing in my head. I know where I’m going.
The next time you hear the garbled cries of trickster ravens, ask yourself this: how do you render a raven?
An homage to one of my loves, WB Yeats by Jane Dougherty.