IWSG - November

It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group.

The awesome co-hosts for the  November 6 posting of the IWSG are Diedre Knight, Lisa Buie Collard,  Kim Lajevardi, and JQ Rose!

This month's question is a goodie!

What creative activity do you engage in when you're not writing?

I have a bunch of things I do when I'm not writing. I'm a creative person and writing isn't my only creative pursuit, although it is probably the one I consider my main creative outlet.

I enjoy cooking and find that very creative when I have a decent amount of time to put into it. Day-to-day cooking for the family isn't really creative - it's more of a grind, especially when one of more family embers is likely to turn their nose up at whatever is put in front of them. But experimenting with flavours and textures and throwing different combinations of ingredients together to see what works and what doesn't can be very creative.

I like making bread too, and again, playing with the flavours and hte shapes and the textures. Cakes can also be fun and creative, especially if you ice them and take your time with the decorations. I love a cake that is both beautiful and delicious.

I also paint. A few years back I discovered pouring as a painting technique and have had a lot of fun playing with different techinques to get designs I like. I'm still not that great with the blow-dryer - I see people in videos making beautiful painting using the blow dryer, but I have never been that successful with this one. I think I may not thin my paints enough to get them to move smoothly. Something to work on over the summer, maybe!

I do other crafty things too sometimes. Usually around Christmas when I try to always make presents rather than buying things. I also often make my own wrapping paper to wrap the gifts.

I also love clothes, especially second-hand or vintage clothes. Some people would call my dress sense eccentric, but I prefer to call it creative...

I'm fascinated to hear what other people do to keep themselves creatively charged when they're not writing, so let me know in the comments.

Weekly goals 4-11-24

 I had a pretty good writing weekend and filled in a bunch of scenes that I'd left unfinished or places I felt needed a little more filling out.  There is still a way to go, but I'm still feeling positive about it.  The book's at just over 55K now, so I have plenty of space for the extra stuff I need to write in the middle as well as the ending and epilogue that I still need to write.

I've made another 10 chapters available for my critique group, so I will be interested to get their thoughts on things as they progress.

So my goal this week is to just keep going.  I need to think of some cruel prank for some of the characters to play and I'm a little stumped on that one, but I'm sure I'll think of something, even if it is just a temporary solution until I come up with something better.

I'm teaching my first full spin class on my own tomorrow morning and have a permanent place on the roster now.  Tuesday mornings are mine for the foreseeable future.  I need to spend a little time this week making sure I really know the new release before we debut it in a couple of weeks.  Then I need to make sure I learn another class to teach once the new release period is over.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 1-11-24

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's been quite a week.  My younger son finished high school and interviewed to go to drama school next year to study stage management and my older son moved out.  So big changes around here!  I suddenly have a spare room I can turn into an office so I have an actual writing space.  But have I moved my stuff in there?  No, of course not.  I'm far too used to working here, in the kitchen.  I will try it out over the weekend though. 

I'm very close to hitting the end of my book, so I hope to get through that over the weekend.  Then I can go and fill in all the places I've left gaps so I could jump forward and write the stuff I knew needed to happen.  I'm confident I can get this finished by the end of November.  Then I'll take a break for a few weeks and come back to it with fresh eyes in the New Year.

It feels good to be in this place.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've read: On the Bright Side

 

When I write at the library, I tend to sit in the YA section in the hopes all those published words will have an effect on my own writing (yeah, it's cheap magic) and last week I happened to be sitting by the new release rack and saw this book with a Deaf protagonist.  Given my book has a mute protagonist, it felt like I needed to read this.

It was a cute book and I enjoyed it.  It was refreshing to read something with a real understanding of disability and how some people with disabilities don't really see them that way.

Ellie is Deaf and has been at a special boarding school for the Deaf for several years.  When the school closes down, she's forced to go home to her hearing family and to try and figure out how to fit in there and at a mainstream school. Her first day is kind of a disaster and to try and help her find her way, she's assigned a guide.

Jackson is one of the school's soccer stars, but has been ostracized since he fumbled a pass when his legs went numb and lost the team an important game.  He is eager to help Ellie, but somehow manages to say all the wrong things all the time.  And then just as things are beginning to improve between them, he's blindsided by a life-changing medical diagnosis.

I really liked the relationship between this pair, especially when it was so fraught with miscommunication.  I also liked Ellie's attitude toward her disability and how she never sees it as an impairment.  It really highlighted how important having a community of like-minded people around you is - Ellie only really thrives once she finds a group of other Deaf people to hang out with.  It also underlines the fact sign language is in fact a language in the same way French or Russian is.

Jackson also discovers the importance of community when he joins a support group for people who share his diagnosis and can speak to their own experiences and ways to overcome challenges brought on by having this condition.

But despite each having their own group, Ellie and Jackson's relationship is the centre of this book and the way they come together and fall in love is super cute.  It would be easy to say their relationship is inevitable because they are two people with differences and would naturally gravitate toward each other, but this is not the case here.

I especially enjoyed reading about the struggles Ellie has with her parents who seem unable to understand that Ellie has a world of her own and doesn't necessarily want to conform to the hearing world the way they want her to.

So I'd recommend this one.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

A hopeful novel about love, disability, and the inevitability of change by the author of Give Me a Sign.

Ellie’s Deaf boarding school just shut down, forcing her to leave the place she considered home and return to her hearing family. Back in a mainstream school, Ellie quickly becomes the subject of hateful rumors. That’s when her guidance counselor pairs her with Jackson, a student who’s supposed to help her adjust. Can the boy who tries to say the right things, and gets it all wrong, be the lifeline Ellie needs?

Jackson has been avoiding his teammates ever since some numbness in his legs cost them an important soccer match. With his senior year off to a lonely start, he’s intrigued when he’s asked to help the new girl, initially thinking it will be a commendable move on his part. Little does he know Ellie will soon be the person he wants most by his side when the strange symptoms he’s experiencing amount to a life-changing diagnosis.

Exploring what it means to build community, Anna Sortino pens a story about the fear of the unknown and the beauty of the unexpected, all wrapped up in a poignant romance that will break your heart and put it back together again.

Weekly Goals 28-10-24

 I've had a pretty good writing weekend and still have a day to go since today is a holiday and I plan to spend the afternoon writing.  I think I might hit the ending today,  if I'm lucky.  Probably not the epilogue - I'm still thinking about that - but the actual ending of the story.

I have a lot of stuff to fill in further back though.  And things keep occurring to me that I need to add to earlier chapters.  But I'm feeling on track to meet my goal of finishing this before the end of the year.

So my goal this week is to keep up the momentum and keep working on it.  I also want to send out a few more queries for Guide Us.  It's starting to feel 100% fruitless, but you have to keep trying, right?

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 25-10-24

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!  And it's a long weekend!

And I've made it an extra-long weekend by taking Friday off too so I have a day dedicated to writing.  After working all those nights and all of last weekend, I have a bit of time off owing to me.

I had an okay writing day on Friday.  I was hoping for it to be better, but the scenes I'm working on are a little tricky and I'm not sure I got the events in the right order.  I'm going to go back through and see if my instinct is right and that I need to move a few things around.

On the plus side, my critique group are still enjoying the story.  I'm going to need to go back soon and fill in some bits I skipped over because my crib group are almost those chapters.

I had a few rejections this week - from agents and publishers for Guide Us and a couple of pieces of short fiction I'd sent out also got turned down.  'Tis the season, it appears....  I will send out a new batch of queries for Guide Us this week.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've read: 2000ft Above Worry Level

 

I picked this one up at the library the other day because it was on a display of local authors and I recognised the author's name as being someone who used to work for me at a cinema many, many moons ago.

And as soon as I read the first page I recognised the guy who came in to his job interview shaking and sweating and barely able to stutter out his name.  You wouldn't have thought that would have given me a great first impression, but I saw something in Eamonn that I don't think he could see in himself at the time and I wanted to encourage that.  So I hired him.

Since then, he's gone on to be a comedian and now an author.

Structured as a novel of sorts, the book is more a series of loosely related vignettes or short stories, some taking place in the present, and some harking back to the protagonist's childhood - one of my favourite chapters was about a childhood camping trip to a town dealing with a plague of wasps.

The main character is depressed, a little lost in the world, perpetually broke and probably a real worry to his long-suffering flatmates.  Some of the stories about what he's going through are incredibly tragic, yet also incredibly funny.  I guess those situations that you find embarassing at the time can be hilarious in retrospect, even if they are still tinged with a hint of shame.

I think what makes the protagonist here so endearing is that he is genuinely trying to be a better human.  He's just not great at it, and he manages to somehow undermine every step he takes in the right direction.  Some of this is circumstance, some of it is poor mental health and some of it is just the stupid stuff we do as we grow up, the stuff we (hopefully) learn from.

I'd definitely recommend this one.  It's tragic and funny and will make you squirm in places, but it's also undeniably human.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Everything is sad and funny and nothing is anything else

2000ft Above Worry Level begins on the sad part of the internet and ends at the top of a cliff face. This episodic novel is piloted by a young, anhedonic, gentle, slightly disassociated man. He has no money. He has a supportive but disintegrating family. He is trying hard to be better. He is painting a never-ending fence.

Eamonn Marra’s debut novel occupies the precarious spaces in which many twenty-somethings find themselves, forced as they are to live in the present moment as late capitalism presses in from all sides. Mortifying subjects – loserdom, depression, unemployment, cam sex – are surveyed with dignity and stoicism. Beneath Marra’s precise, unemotive language and his character’s steadfast grip on the surface of things, something is stirring.