Tag: writer

Blogme MAYbe, Observations, personal, writing

Your significant other is a writer? Don´t panic! 10 rules to follow…

Elodie

This month (well until my honeymoon :D), I will be participating in Blogme MAYbe. This wonderful idea is the brainchild of SaraMcClung and is a weekly blog format with an easy schedule to follow. For more information and join the fun (you can at any time!), simply click on the banner created by the super-duper-talented Tracey. On Thursdays (yes it is already Thursday on my side of the world), the prompt is: May I tell you something about someone else...

Enter my husband aka The Chemical Engineering. He already wrote a guest post with his review of The Hunger Games and he´s back with wonderful advice 😀

Your significant other is a writer?



Don´t panic! 10 rules to follow…

First I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who commented on my last guest post. I meant to answer to everyone, but I am just a very lazy and inexperienced blogger. So please accept my apologies. Despite my bad blog etiquette my wife let me do another guest blog entry. Thank you!

Today I would like to share the ten ground rules that should not be broken when your significant other is a writer:

1. Don’t criticize the Twitter usage

Even though it might seem like Twitter is taking over all aspects of life, for some reason it seems to be an important tool for all of the writers who like to share short messages about everyday tasks and events.

2. Make sure to read new blog entries

You might not care about monthly book reviews, but you better know if he/she mentioned you in a blog post. I suggest to quickly fly over the post and look for some key words (Ctrl+F). I look for “Hubby” and “Chemical Engineer”.

3. Make educated comments about their WIP

First you needed to figure out what WIP stands for, but that is not the end of it. When reading two (very similar) versions of the same paragraph you better decide which one sounds better. Comments like “They are good” will not be accepted. A literary analysis (like back in the school days) is the least a writer would expect from their significant other.

4. Blogging takes time so just accept it

Blogging entries have to be done at a particular time. Wether it is Road Trip Wednesday or Happy Friday Posts. They are all important and have to be done at the planned time no matter what happens (yes, this article had to be writtenon a Sunday). All comments have to be addressed as well. The 24 hours in a day should be enough time for this.

5. Buying more books is essential

A writer can never have enough books after all they are “research” and will help in refine the writing style. Room for storing the books can be found anywhere even if it means double stacking the books in the book shelf. Next apartment/house will have to have a room just for books.

6. Don’t make fun of the way he/she talks to other writers

It doesn’t matter if it sounds silly and is absolutely not how grown-ups are meant to interact, this is how they tick. After all they are writers and should know much more about communication than anyone else.

7. Learn how to spell correctly

I don’t know how to spell in any of the three languages that I know. I am so happy that some programmer came out with spell check. I don’t know how I would do without it. When I write an e-mail to my wife I really don’t even run spell check. She takes my misspelling almost as an insult and does makes fun of my spelling at any opportunity that she gets (and there are many opportunities).

8. Don’t bore a writer with technical things (at least not my writer)

As a good wife, mine of course asks me about my work day. I know that if I want to keep her attention I only have about 15 seconds to explain anything technical about my work and most importantly I need to keep it simple. That is also true if we talk about anything else technology related. I guess fictional writers (maybe except science-fiction writers and again this only applies to my writer) are just more into interpersonal relationships and stories and can’t be bothered with the little things like science.

9. Try not to argue that characters in a book/film are fictional

In the mind of a writer characters become almost as alive as any other real person. There is no point in explaining that a character that died, didn’t really die, but just acted out a role. It’s like explaining a child that Bambi’s mother wasn’t shot by hunters.

10. Don’t think that your guest entries in the blog are just as good and/or funny as his/hers

This one is pretty straight forward. You are the engineer (or non-writer) and she is the writer; deal with it.

I was able to come up with these rules only because I have broken them many times. I hope you can agree with some of them. I am going to continue and break them from time to time. It is good to remember them in certain situations, like when you annoyed her and can turn to her with a smile “thanks for the mention on the blog today”, but following them all of the time would just be a bit boring and practically impossible.

personal, writing

We all deserve a pat on the back…

Elodie

Writing is fun, writing is difficult, writing is challenging, writing is amazing…

Yes, writing is all of this but sometimes we have those moments where we think:

  • “Is it good enough?”
  • “Why don´t I write more?”
  • “I´m never going to find an agent”
  • “my agent will not like this idea”
  • “I´m never going to get published”
  • “Ì´m never going to get published again”
  • “People hate my book”
  • “It sucks” “I suck” “The plot sucks”…
  • “It may be great but my query will suck”

                                                                                                                                     Source: happythings.tumblr.com via Lori on Pinterest

We´re all hard on ourselves. We´re much harder on ourselves than on others.

If one of your friends came over and told you: “I´m writing a book, I finished the first draft but I have the feeling that I can´t do it all, that I don´t spend enough time with other things. Plus, some of the subplot is just not where it´s supposed to be and my characters don´t make sense. I feel so tired.”

Your friend would reply: “You wrote a book! It´s amazing! I don´t know how you do it all.”

Yes. most people would turn to any of us, impressed by our creativity, impressed by our dedication…Not everybody but most people.

Some may even tell us we´re a tad insane to write when we have so much uncertainty about being published for us, writing is just a thing we have to do because, most of the times, it makes us happy.

However, we do need to take a moment to sit back, to realize how much we´ve accomplished and to give ourselves a pat on the back.

Feel yourself hugged!

Road Trip Wednesday, writing

I didn´t go to prom but I still got lucky.

Elodie

Today is Road Trip Wednesday 🙂 RTW is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway’s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic. This week´s topic: It’s almost prom season, and since we love to read and write about teenagers, we want to hear your prom stories!

Well, in France, we didn´t have proms so I cannot tell you my prom experience from High school. I promise to tell you more about High school in France soon though 😀 I dreamed about the experience though as a teenager.

I could have talked about the prom I didn´t go to while I was an au pair in the USA and my then-boyfriend (kinda – complicated story) took his ex-girlfriend with him, well you know, he promised her…but let´s face it, not the greatest memory to revisit.

I did go to a wonderful dance: The Navy Ball in Annapolis where all au pairs of the area were invited to attend. I had a beautiful dress on and had a blast shopping with my girlfriends for cheap out of season prom dresses. We got very lucky.  I also did go to a so-called prom at the university but it didn´t feel like a real prom…You know, the one I will be able to read about in your posts or in your comments 😀

Even though I didn´t go to prom, I still got lucky…well I got the lucky meme (did you like the transition :D). The lovely and talened Tracey tagged me in the Lucky Seven (really you should totally check out her excerpt here). The rules are as follow:

  • Go to page 77 of your current MS.
  • Go to line 7.
  • Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences, and post the as they’re written. No cheating.
  • Tag 7 other writers.

I wanted to share something from my new WiP, the one which doesn´t have a lot of pages yet, so I thought I´ll go to page 7 of my new WiP and share the 7 lines:

If I´m not shedding tears in front of you, please don´t cry for me. 

Cry for him and away from my gaze.

My chest tightens. My mother and I didn´t let tears out at his funeral. She didn´t hold my hand, I didn´t go into her embrace like when I was little and had a nightmare.

My mother and I had become strangers before my dad decided he didn´t want to live with us anymore. Not only he didn´t want to live with us, I remind myself. He didn´t want to live at all.

Natalja is going through quite a lot. She failed as ballerina, she lost her dad and she went back to her hometown after a stint in NYC. She has the attitude and hides away her pain…

If you want to join in and share an excerpt of your WiP, YOU are tagged! 😀

Observations, reading, writing

The Balancing Act

Elodie

We all juggle. We all have responsibilities. No matter what they are and while sometimes I wonder why I didn´t decide I wanted to take writing seriously when I had less on my plate, I do find time to write now. We all do. More or less but we still do. We also find the time to read. We go through the balancing act.

My time is my commute. However, my commute does take a toll on me. The train gets late, cancelled. I also have to take the bus to the to the train so I rush between the bus and the train. I run. I curse. I get annoyed. I don´t always find the silver lining. So this week I am renting a car to see how long it would actually take me to drive to work instead of taking public transportation, to see if I can gain time. According to my friend Google Map which includes Traffic estimation, I could gain 30 to 45 minutes each way. Crazy.

My day currently looks like this:

  • 5am: Wake up
  • 5am-5.30am: work out in front of Friends (this gets me going and makes me laugh – always a plus)
  • 5.30-6.42: get ready (breakfast, shower, coffee, get snacks, kindle, ipod, netbook ready) and leave the house
  • 6.42am: walk to bus station (or be driven by hubby – if he´s not already gone working out)
  • 6.52am: Bus
  • 7.06am: Train (aka writing + reading time)
  • 7.47am: Metro
  • 8.00am: At my desk at work
  • 5.30pm or 6pm (sometimes later): leave office – train – bus (writing and reading in the train again)
  • Get home between 6.45pm and 7.45pm and then dinner, time with hubby and sleep…

Yes, it is busy but on most days, the train time gets me about 1 hour of writing/revising or undivided reading time. Soon, I may decide that driving does get me more time at home, aka more time with the hubby…I can rearrange my schedule to write more in the morning before leaving, or during my lunch break or I could write in bed.

But I know that I will find the time to write because, really, I just don´t see myself not writing or revising…Writing/Revising/Reading is part of my balancing act. It´s part of who I am.

How do you balance everything? Anybody else tried to write in bed?

Books, Happy Friday, reading, SCBWI

Happy Friday #12: A magical number and other stories…

Elodie

Yay! It´s time again for Happy Friday!

Looking forward to knowing what made YOU smile this week!

100 blog followers: WOW! 😀 Thank YOU all so much for following my blog, your comments and your support. You, ladies and gentlemen, are WONDERFUL! I’d like to throw a proper party, you know one where we can chit chat about books, YA lit crushes, Stephen King’s ON WRITING  around a glas of red wine but I’m already really thankful for the fact that we can share those moments in the virtual world!

A little something something:  I’ve received a small package  from the Society of Children´s Book Writers and Illustrators. And before continuing, please tell me I´m not the only one who just thought about this movie/scene when reading (or in my case writing) the word “package”.


GIFSoup (Legally Blonde, Bend and Snap)

I´m really the only one? ok then 😀 moving on….I joined SCBWI last month and already had a fantastic lunch with other writers in the area and yesterday, I received my official membership card and some other goodies.

I am so excited about being part of this and I promise myself that I will go to the next SCBWI conference in NYC – anybody already thinking about it for 2013?

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE: I finished this book this week and luckily I could dive right away into A MILLION SUNS because I just could not wait to know more about Elder and Amy. I love the story, the concept and I can´t believe I´m saying this but the way Beth Revis can make me feel claustrophobic as if I was on the ship with them is incredible!

Blog comments: I am trying a new way to respond to comments on my blog – by replying directly to the email notification I receive when somebody adds their thoughts to one of my posts and I add the email of that person if he/she doesn´t have a wordpress blog since if she/he does have one, he/she gets a little notification when coming onto wordpress.com. If you´ve been receiving these emails from me, hope it´s ok 😀 I just enjoy being able to answer and knowing the person actually can see what I wrote back to them

A to Z challenge: I am not doing it this round but can I just say I am loving the fact that a lot of you are? Lots of great posts to read!

Rock the drop: I haven´t done it either…but I really think it’s an AMAZING way to spread “book love” and your stories are very funny/inspiring! YA Confidential will feature some of them on Saturday… Can’t wait to see the pictures 😀

So tell me, what made YOU smile this week?

Road Trip Wednesday, writing

Say Hello to Balzac…

Elodie

Today is Road Trip Wednesday 🙂 RTW is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway’s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic.

This week’s topic:   What images inspire/ represent your WIP or favorite book?

Pinterest is great for creating visual boards of novels, shiny new ideas, WiPs. It´s not just another way to spend time on the internet, I promise 😀

I´ve already shared some of my inspiration before, including some pictures (moonlight, my male MC…) but today I want to introduce you to somebody who came into my WiP PLAYING WITH FIRE late in the game: Say hello to Balzac!

 
 
 

Balzac can be annoying. He´s always hanging around Erin and she trips on him from times to times. But he´s cuddly. He´s always there when Erin needs him and while he may be a tad afraid of those spirits hanging out around her, he really does want to protect her. He wasn´t part of the WiP at the beginning but the more I wrote, the more I thought that Erin not only liked dogs but that she needed one…And have you seen those eyes?

And here is a little snippet of my WiP which shows you a tad more of Balzac:

I smile as I hear the familiar barking of Balzac. His welcoming bark. Not that I ever heard a difference between any of his barks. That dog would lick an intruder if he thought he could get some food out of him. His tail whips my legs as I enter and I mentally give him treats. I kneel and put my head on his.

Do you enjoy stories where pets play a role?

Or any favorite pictures which represent a book you love or your WiP?

Books, Editing, revising, writing

A “Tada” moment or saying goodbye to my darlings…

Elodie

My first round of revisions mainly consisted of changing:

  • the tense (I only figured out in Chapter 22 that I needed to write this in present tense – my novel has 25 chapters, oupsie)
  • the first name of my main character (how did I even think of calling her Laura? She´s an Erin through and through!)
  • one subplot of my story…

It was tedious but necessary. However, it wasn´t painful and when I was done, I thought: I´ve done it! I may have some more changes but nothing too too major. Yep, I had not yet realize what revising could really entail.

 
 

William Faulkner said: “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” and Stephen King added: “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings“.

While I accepted this at face value, I didn´t realize what it really meant. I spent two years with that novel already. Scary. While I tried my hand at other stories, it´s the one I always came back to. I rewrote it, I changed some of the subplots along the way but the more I worked on certain parts, the more they became engraved in my heart. Some dialogues, some images, some parts of the story just needed to stay…until I came to a “Tada” realization: my story sucks.

Ok that was dramatic. It doesn´t suck. At all. Actually, it´s pretty great. But the way I was tiptoeing around it, afraid to hurt it had more to do with the fact that I was afraid of hurting my own self-esteem. What I finally saw was how much better my story could become if I actually dared to change it a bit. I am not rewriting the entire thing but I am deleting the first chapter (Tarah´s feedback on it helped with that…I finally saw my story more as a reader than as a writer…), I am changing the curse a bit to make it 1) more dramatic and 2) more coherent. I am adding one or two layers to some of the characters and I am taking the story to another emotional level. It will be a lot of work and it will not be the end of it (since I know more changes will probably come once it´s going through the beta-reading). but it will be worth it.

So, basically, my story with revising has been a bit like this:

 

Source: pinterest.com via Elodie on Pinterest

And even though, I fell on my butt the first time around, the important thing is that I still managed to go back up and transform it into a “Tada” moment 😀

How about you, did you have any “Tada” or “Aha” moments in your writing/revising recently?

Happy Friday, reading, revising

Happy Friday #11 – Little things and big smiles

Elodie

Yay! It´s time again for Happy Friday!

Looking forward to knowing what made YOU smile this week!

Revising: I am going through another round of revising. Every morning and every evening in the train, I take out my beloved netbook and correct a lot of my previous silliness. I´ll post more about this on Monday but I think I´ve reached a “Tada” moment in this process and that brings a BIG smile to my face.

Reading: For Tracey´s YA Book club, I´ve read WANDERLOVE last weekend and I cannot talk about it yet but it did make it to my happy friday so it should give you a hint 😀 I´m also reading Stephen King´s ON WRITING and I´m falling in love with this book. I´ll explain the reasons soon and thank you Sara for giving me the slight push to actually dive into this book. If you´ve read those books, don´t hesitate to click on those wonderful bloggies´ links to join the fun!

ChangeWriteNow: A big wave to my team and to all participating. I´m really enjoying the support. We´re scattered all around the world but encouragement is one computer screen away 😀

Pinterest: It had been awhile since I worked (well ok played) with the shiny things on Pinterest….and yesterday I let my fingers run free and  found (among many other things) this quote –

Source: etsy.com via Elodie on Pinterest

The beauty of Twitter: I´ve raved before about how much I like connecting with other writers on Twitter. Really, it´s fun! And thanks to Twitter (and Katy), I came across this video…

“Sh*t Writers say…”

So, tell me, what made YOU smile this week?

revising, writing

What Desperate Housewives taught me about my novel…

Elodie

In case you’re not a Desperate Housewives fan, you do not know that they killed off Mike Delfino. You may be going “Say who?” so here is a little recap: Mike Delfino has been Susan’s love interest since season 1 – they had their ups and downs (a lot of downs) but they found each other (several times) and were finally on a somewhat stable and happy spot.

Mike held a special part in my “Desperate Housewives” fan heart. Not only does he have these rugged good looks which I totally see on my husband, he was supportive, nice, could be funny at times and he protected people.

And then pfff, Mike is shot dead. 5 episodes until the finale and he’s gone, protecting Susan of course. This didn’t make me happy at all (understatement of the week :D) even though my hubby did remind me: “you know the actor is still alive, right?”.


 So what did this little episode teach me about my work-in-progress:

  • It’s ok to be even meaner to my characters while I revise.
  • Even if I get attached to my characters, the unexpected can happen (especially if they put themselves in a dangerous situation)… I cannot hold it off because it may make me sad.

And it reminded me something important:

  • Include a bang, one which will make the readers go: “oh no he/she didn’t”.  Characters may die or survive, they may lose someone close to them or get their heart broken  but they will go through something. When they do, I’d like my readers to dab their eyes, to scream at me for putting them through it, to cry (if they cry). It sounds a bit Cruella Devil to say that but let’s face it, if the readers do go through this while reading one of my novels, I’ve done my job as an author.

Have you ever watched something which reminded me of what you need to do in your novel?

Beta, Giveaway, Happy Friday, reading, SCBWI

Happy Friday #10 – Connecting, Reading and Yoga-ing

Elodie

Yay! It´s time again for Happy Friday!  Looking forward to knowing what made YOU smile this week!

Giveaways: Today is the last day to enter my “I love reading” giveaway (more details here ). And in case you haven’t seen: Sarah is having a “Moving Giveaway“, Colin a “Birthday Giveaway” and Rebecca a “Spring Break Giveaway“…

Lunch with other SCBWI members:  On Wednesday, I had lunch with three other SCBWI members and it was great! I am very happy I got to meet them. Talking about books, the craft of writing, writing in general or just about our life experiences was fun and enlightening. I am thinking of organizing this type of small get-togethers regularly and look forward to seeing them soon again!

Beta-reading:  I started beta-reading this week  and feel very lucky for two reasons: 1) I really enjoyed the book and 2) I realized that by helping her, I’m also helping me…Reading somebody else’s draft while keeping an open mind enabled me to go back to my own draft and know where I could improve. Her strengths showed me where I could better my own writing, some questions I had hinted at some I have on my own novel.

Yoga: I started up yoga again this week. None of the complicated poses yet, I am concentrating for now on the breathing exercises and the restorative poses since I have been having some pains otherwise. It helps me get more grounded, more “in the moment”. As I mentioned before, while my imagination helps a lot when it comes to writing, it can be a little frustrating when it turns into stress or anxiety…Yoga, cardio and more exercising in general help a lot.

ChangeWriteNow: I cannot believe the first week of ChangeWriteNow has already gone by. Once more, my teammates are encouraging and I set myself more realistic goals this time. While I am super organized at work, at home…I’m a tad more…hmm…messy and hubby is very happy I’m tackling this issue one way or another 😀

Now tell me: what made YOU smile this week?