Dear Alison, You talked about character on Monday in your post, Character Development and Food...YUM! I think about character and food a lot. In fact, since the new year, I've been getting up at 5 (closer to 5:15--love that snooze button) to write. I rejoined the #5amwritersclub. (It's open to anyone who wants to write early. READ: Insane and Driven.) This group is an amazing community of writers. They are happy, they are friendly, and they've got a load of character. We often talk about donuts. We always talk about coffee. These people have become my Twitterverse friends. We chat throughout the day or continue conversations from the day before or promise to send virtual donuts the next day. In fact, I started this blog post during the #5amwritersclub, but the GIFs didn't want to load quickly, and we know my penchant for GIFs. The past few years I've spent many of my days substitute teaching. During my preps and lunch, I edit or read. The rest of ...
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Dear Kim, On a fact finding mission I went digging through our old posts. See, I'm writing about food in my new novel and it got me thinking about how much food connects us . You and I must seriously want to be connected at Ink Sisters Write because over 50% of our posts mention food in one way or another. That's a pretty high statistic considering our mission is to " talk about books, writing, the writing-craft, and spreading the writer-love, one letter at a time ." Such a delicious mission! CHEERS! I wrote about character development over at The Highlights Foundation earlier today. The focus there was about how music influences character. Examples of music as a device abound in young adult literature but I couldn't find the same number of examples about food. Sure, there are about twenty YA novels about cupcakes, but what about stepping out of the bakery and into every day life? Not as many. Is it because food isn't as universal as music? I don...
Spring Fever struck our household hard this week. Bicycles, t-shirts, and 3 feet of snow left. Not everyone's idea of spring, but in the Northeast, we take what we can get. As I clear away the Irish lace and the hibernating dust bunnies and my NA WIP draws to a close, I can’t decide what I want to work on next. What does WIP mean anyway? Writers throw around acronyms like everyone knows what we’re talking about. Sorry, it’s our ‘thing.’ (but FYI, writers tend to have lots of ‘things.’ ) WIP stands for Work In Progress. And to review, NA : New Adult YA: Young Adult MG : Middle Grade PB: Picture Book SCBWI : Society of Children Book Writers & Illustrators As I keep adding to my list, I realize I should add an Acronym Code Page. Hmm, another day. Spring is about clearing out the cobwebs. I house clean for a day, maybe two. Then the urge disappears until next year. But Writing, well, I could write all day, every...
I am an artist at heart. I beat to my own drummer and find it very difficult to follow the same routine everyday. After high school, I didn't have a 7am-5pm day like most people. Between college, grad school, and my life as a surveyor, I had a pretty flexible schedule. If it was sunny, I went outside. If it rained, I stayed in, but when I became a teacher, that all changed. Following my second week of teaching, I asked my mentor how she dealt with being at the same place every day at the same time. Her answer, "You get used to it." Three years later, I got used to it, more or less, but my creative process lacked. I spent so much time grading papers and developing lesson plans, I didn't read or write anything on my own. Sure, I read Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Into the Wild, The Outsiders, Julius Caesar, and a handful of others, dozens of times, but I didn't read much on my own. By the end of the day, my bra...