Wednesday Writer’s Cafe – 1/20

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 4 Comments

Good evening from North Bend. It’s cold , wet, and raining – in other words situation completely normal. I love it here. I really do.

Oh mi god, so tonight we were talking about Powells and how heinous their parking garage is and my friend S tell this story about the time she put a ding in her car. She was not at Powells but in Vancouver in a super tight parking garage and she accidentally bumped a pillar. Somehow it manage to put a little dent right where the door close sensor was so her car started dinging that her door was ajar. She put a “ding” in her car. ROFL. We were all dying laughing.

They were all trying to convince me to start the Downton Abbey train. I’ve been resisting. Mainly because everyone thinks I should watch it. I am so mulish that way. LOL

I’ve decided to report on my stated 2016 goals each Wednesday at cafe for a little prod of accountability.

– Research marketing locations for the next free giveaway for Scripting the Truth. Figure out the Reddit problem. Fine tune my categorization on amazon.

√ Still reading every marketing bit I can get my hands on. I have a long list of things to try when I get to ten reviews on Amazon, most things make that threshold. I am considering strongly running a little promo to help with that. Stay tuned.

– Write 2500 plus words per week on my 2015 Nano novel til completion. (Only another 5-6 weeks to go on that, I think.)

√ This is done more or less. I am well into my first pass of editing.

– Participate in one flash fiction challenge per month.

√ January is done. February still to come.

– Prepare and teach “Nano to Publish”.

√ Taught the first workshop and it went so much better than expected. Tune in Saturday for a recap.

– Edit my 2015 Nano Novel for 2016 publication.

√ It’s on like Donkey Kong. I edited I edited 15 chapters this week. I’m finding some funny parts. I’m liking it better and better. I have my first first pass critique partner assigned and we’ll see what he has to say in the upcoming weeks.

– Any time I am not actively working on my 2015 Nano Novel, write 2500 words per week on my spy novel until it is done. (After four years, it’s time to put this mess to bed.)

-Non Applicable at this time.

Non writing goals

– Prepare and teach two classes at the coop for the 2016-2017 school year.

√ Both done and working on it at the same time. LOL. My proposal is in. I won’t know if they want the class until later this year. But I am still picking and choosing youth appropriate literature for the class anyway.

– Take better care of my body, ie. stop compulsively painting, crocheting, and writing until my back or shoulder is so tore I can barely use either. Which leads me to …

√ Excellent week for listening to my body.

– yoga daily.

√ Every other day. Sigh. I need to really look at my schedule closer and see what I can do to rearrange things. On the plus side I’ve been getting so into my writing I run out of time to yoga some days. So that’s good-ish. LOL

Book Review: Scripting the Truth by T.A. Henry

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My first blog review…I might just cry…

rachelauthorbarnard's avatarRachel Author Barnard

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Scripting the Truth by T.A. Henry

An Historical Fiction Novel published through Amazon Digital Services (10/09/2015)

Summary:

“Sometimes I wonder why you put yourself through all this when clearly you knew nothing about the business.” (p. 152).

Lady Margaret Leighton aka Molly doesn’t want to marry whomever her mother approves because she already had her heart broken when the soldier she nursed during World War II vanished. Then she spots his face on a movie poster and she decides right then and there that she’ll do whatever it takes to find him and reconnect. But he’s a famous actor and she can’t even get into the studio without a reason. After failing at pretending to be an actress she finds out that the director’s looking for scripts. Margaret spends a feverish few days learning how to write a script and writing up the proceedings of her time as a QA in…

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Monday Book Review: Angel Face

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Part of me feels totally ridiculous that I am fascinated with the whole Amanda Knox case. But I keep reading books on the subject when I come across them at the library. The latest find was Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox by Barbie Latza Nadeau. As an aside I find it really interesting that every book on the case says it’s the true story. Snort. As if we are ever likely to know the truth in that case.

This particular book is short, like less than 200 pages, and it stops with the first conviction. The author is a journalist who was present for almost all of the first trial, not a small feat given it went on for 11 months and was actually three cases at once.

The book was well written and the topic interested me obviously, but I found it thin. The author presents such a small portion of the evidence or testimony covered that I have to wonder about her selection bias. I could have used less passages about how badly journalists who weren’t convinced of Amanda’s innocence were treated and more information about what she saw happen in court. It felt like a chatty conversation held over tea not a hard hitting investigative journalism piece.

℘℘℘ – Three pages. It was good. Nothing more, nothing less. I read it quickly but at 200 pages how could I not. I enjoyed her style and prose but kept falling through the swiss cheese sized holes in the facts she presented. Too much was missing for this to feel like the nonfiction work it is supposed to be.

Craft Workshop

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 2 Comments

One of the choices I made for 2016 was to post four times a week on the blog: Monday Book Reviews, Wednesday Writer’s Cafe and goals, Fiendish Friday (a catch all where I make fun of myself on some level), and the other. In the other category is Flash Fiction or Craft Workshops.

Craft Workshops will contain either a distillation of an entire “craft” book, a segment of a craft book, or notes from my workshop series at the North Bend library. Clearly if I am boiling an entire book down into one post, I found it less useful.

Your First Bestseller, How to Self-Publish a Successul Book on Amazon, by Mike Fishbein is the first whack at this new series.

It was a free book. Broken into three sections, section one advises you with a lot of words to write a book readers want to read and edit it carefully. Wow. Totally out of the box ideas.

Section Three on marketing…basically do a free giveaway right away to get a lot of downloads and get Amazon’s attention by utilizing your mailing list, friends, and family to get the word out there. Guest blog to increase your presence. Run ads on Amazon.

Section Two is where the money is. Step by Step Guide leading you through creating your book on Create Space and on Kindle. He also includes information on ACX – audio book creation. The step by step guides are handy. It’s not a difficult process but it could be complicated if you’ve never done it before.

All in all a fast read, not terribly long, not terribly content heavy with the exception of the how to in Part 2.

Fiendish Friday : Nero Wolfe

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I suppose it was an eon ago now that I was talking to my step mother who suggested my Dad was very much obsessed with Nero Wolfe and that it would make a great Christmas present for him. I popped over to A&E and due to a random unexplainable mistake, I ended up with two copies of Season One of Nero Wolfe.

Eventually I got around to watching the copy I kept for myself.

Love, love, love the music. Amazing big band sound.

The actors and actresses actually know how to act. They do. And here’s how I explain that. I watched the entire first season. And I didn’t catch it. It wasn’t until part way through the second season that I realized there are only maybe a dozen actors total. They play a variety of roles. Some playing more than one role per episode. And yet, I didn’t catch on for hours and hours of viewing because they could actually ACT. That is hard to come by these days.

I keep meaning to read the books the series was based on. But part of me is shying away from the books. What if they ruin the beauty of this show? What if the books aren’t very good? Or what if they are amazing and I can’t watch the show anymore because it doesn’t live up to the books?

sigh. And really, don’t let me get started on Timothy Hutton…

Wednesday Writer’s Cafe 1/13 – late

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 4 Comments

Last night’s cafe was preempted by an emergency meeting at my son’s coop. Why does everything have to happen on Wednesday? Serious? There isn’t another night in the week that people could make things happen?

So there were some issues with the financial future of the coop which the board is now  handling in an appropriate manner in my opinion. And there are a lot of open positions at the coop that need filling. But all in all it will survive for another year. LOL.

I’m on the scheduling committee, which I love. I love to put everything in it’s place. It’s that OCD part of me that would have allowed Napoleon to take Russian, even in winter. LOL. Went out with the other ladies on the committee last night after the general assembly which is why I didn’t get about to posting til I slept that off.

 

I’ve decided to report on my stated 2016 goals each Wednesday at cafe for a little prod of accountability.

– Research marketing locations for the next free giveaway for Scripting the Truth. Figure out the Reddit problem. Fine tune my categorization on amazon.

√ Finished “How to publish a best seller” This week. A post on it will be up this weekend. I’ve also been following a number of blogs where bloggers detail marketing options and sites they tried and their response to formulate a list for myself to try out as soon as I get to ten reviews on Amazon.

– Write 2500 plus words per week on my 2015 Nano novel til completion. (Only another 5-6 weeks to go on that, I think.)

√ I think I finished writing my first pass this week, I’m not really sure though. There is so much clean up work to be done but since I am kicking off the Nano to Publish year long workshop series this Saturday, I will allow it to be done. As a humorous side note, I apparently gave my main character a dog in a throw away line at the start of the novel and never again mentioned him. As I sat on my couch one morning I actually said “I have a dog?” when I read the line and my dog lifted his head and looked at me. Never a good sign when your own dog thinks you’re an idiot. LOL Words: 1534 written and 2 chapters edited with about an even trade: words removed = words added.

– Participate in one flash fiction challenge per month.

√ Finished my flash fiction for January and just on time. LOL Posted last Friday. You can find it here if you missed it.

– Prepare and teach “Nano to Publish”.

√ Preparation underway. Outline and handouts for the class are done and waiting for Saturday.

– Edit my 2015 Nano Novel for 2016 publication.

√ Just started first pass editing, 2 chapters done this week.

– Any time I am not actively working on my 2015 Nano Novel, write 2500 words per week on my spy novel until it is done. (After four years, it’s time to put this mess to bed.)

-Non Applicable at this time.

Non writing goals

– Prepare and teach two classes at the coop for the 2016-2017 school year.

√ I actually wrote my proposal last weekend. I submitted Nano to Publish. I was thinking that was going to be it but after talking to the scheduling committee last night, I will be writing a proposal for a cooking class today for submission as well.

– Take better care of my body, ie. stop compulsively painting, crocheting, and writing until my back or shoulder is so tore I can barely use either. Which leads me to …

√ One incident of excruciating shoulder pain because I painted too long. sigh.

– yoga daily.

√ 3 out of 7. Ouch. This week was rough.

Monday Book Review: Green River, Running Red

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bleh. I am some what disappointed with my second venture into the world of Ann Rule. I read her book on Ted Bundy with a lot of enjoyment and despite it’s long length was sad to see it end, it was so beautifully written. I put Green River, Running Red onto my list at the library because I am fascinated by so many crimes committed in my back yard.

I found this book not nearly as well written. It was repetitive and convoluted. It talked too often in my taste of the writer and her own notoriety, as though she got into the habit of inserting herself into the story with the Bundy book and couldn’t get out of it with this one even though she did not know this killer.

I don’t know. I guess I feel like the victims got so little airtime in this book. 650 plus pages and each victim got 2 paragraphs to 2 pages each.

Maybe I’m just cranky. And then I caught her in a mistake. Did you know Scott Peterson is on death row at Alcatraz? He is according to Ann Rule. Oops.

℘℘℘ – Three pages. I read it. It was not fabulous. I was happy when it was done. I will not be checking out additional books by this author. ‘nough said.

Flash Fiction Challenge

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I know a double post on a Friday is not usual for me however I couldn’t get it together to finish this up yesterday and if I wait and post it tomorrow, I’ll miss the deadline. LOL

Dan Alattore , fellow writer and fountain of writing advice (seriously people I bookmark at least half his posts for future reference), puts out a weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. Two weeks ago I said I would participate in a 1000 word random number generator/random plot generator chosen bit of flash. I got Adventure and writing an obituary. Sadly that was the week my hubby was on call and I just never got it done. Eh, being honest, I never even got it started. But my goal for this year it to do a flash a month and January is only going to get crazier so it was on for this week.

This time the word limit was 500. A character generator gave a description,  I got : a courageous 39 year-old woman, who comes from a wealthy background, lives in a fisherman’s cottage and tends to be a bit forgetful. And a number generator gave an emotion (more or less, let’s not get technical). I got guilt.

So in my infinite wisdom I said I would merge the two challenges into an adventure tale with a courageous 39 year-old woman, who comes from a wealthy background, lives in a fisherman’s cottage and tends to be a bit forgetful, who feels guilty, in the adventure genre, and is writing an obituary.

Slaps own head. I wasn’t thinking. I’m not sure it worked at all but this is what happened…

 

“Causing death and destruction at every turn of her life, death has lately come to the 39 year old daughter of Roland Grantham, the billionaire bio-tech entrepreneur. If ever one deserved to die penniless and alone in a smelly fisherman’s cottage, this woman does.”

Damn, I couldn’t use present tense in an obituary, even if I was writing my own. I crossed the room to box of random garbage I brought with me when I came, god knows why I thought I would use anything in here. I suppose I had been right in just this one instance as I dug for a liquid correction pen. I gave the pen a quick shake and in one smooth swipe I erased the word does and replaced it with did.

But the error broke the flow, and I had to take a moment to regroup and think about what should really be said. I removed my hand from where it had subconsciously traveled to cover my mouth so I could take a long sip of tea with honey. There was little comfort to be had these days, but tea with honey warmed my bones. Why I was bothering to warm them when they would soon be eternally cold I didn’t know.

Time was growing short, how much I had I was uncertain but I needed to finish this obit. It took effort to force myself to stop delaying, but I put pen back to paper.

“At the end of the world on the Cornwall coast, Sonia Grantham faced the horror of what she had done at the behest of her father and in the chase of the almighty Euro. It was her research, her medical trials, her dangerous and deadly work that has brought the world to the brink of destruction.”

I was such a liar, even on the precipice of death. Brink of destruction my ass. The world was beyond destruction. It was a hopeless case or I would never have abandoned my search for a cure. And we needed a cure. I was just not as bright as I thought.

“Sonia Grantham deserves to die the gruesome painful death she has caused others but as a coward she takes the easy way out.”

Damn, I’d used present tense again. My eyes flitted to the correction pen. Instead I chose tea. I couldn’t really be bothered. What was the chance that whatever found it would read the Queens English anyway? I drained my cup, rinsed it and placed it on the drying rack next to the sink. Using a large decorative safety pin that used to hold my wool pashmina closed back in the days of Bergdorfs, I attached the letter to the front of my shirt.
I picked up the 38 special my father had bought me when things began to go pear shaped and loaded one single bullet into the chamber round. I gave it a little spin into alignment and placed the barrel under my chin.

Fiendish Friday – Star Wars

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I just saw Star Wars VII with the kiddo. Warning this post will have tons of spoilers so stop reading now and come back after you see the movie if you haven’t already seen it.

I grew up with Star Wars. I remember being a little girl, three, maybe four and playing Star Wars with my two older male cousins. One was always Han Solo and the other Luke Skywalker. I played all the other roles from IV in turn. I do a mad wookie voice. Good times.

So you can understand when I, II, and III came out when I was in my twenties I was mildly horrified. But I lived with it. I just sort of disassociated the movies from IV, V, and VI in my mind. I incorporated the lore that made sense and jettisoned the rest.  Like I get why ObiWan would take Luke to his Step Uncle, kind of, but why did Leia go to a complete stranger? And why split them up? That’s the sort of thing I ignore otherwise I get way irritated. Logic Flaws slay me, every time.

So VII, felt like I was watching IV with overtones of V and VI. Similar plot devices, similar action sequences, similar lines said in similar situations. Examples: Rey suggests taking one ship, Finn says what about that one, she says it’s trash but they don’t show it and then when the first ship is blown up and the camera pans over to the Millennium Falcon…Just tired and worn out. Later they refer to the whole Kessel Run in 12 parsecs thing. Finn says the same crap as Luke when using a gunner turret for the first time. As they were running the gorge to  destroy the death star, I mean death star planet, the conversation was so similar I kept waiting for Poe to say it was just like beggars canyon back home.

It was visually stunning. I loved the action playing out against the background of the old Empire’s half destroyed toys. And really, Rey is a flipping heart breaker. It is no chore to watch her run, jump, and climb like she is in fabulous shape from using her body rather than the gym. (I can appreciate an attractive woman.)

So we all knew one of the new people was going to be the off spring of Han Solo and Leia. He turns out to be the bad guy. Ok I can accept that. Given his grandpa, he could be prone to the dark side. But then he takes off his mask.  Who are they kidding? He looks like the offspring of Snape and McGonagall.

As a side note the cutest part was when one of the kids we were with gasps out “Chewbacca” it this uber pained voice when it appears he has blown himself up. I feel you kiddo, my favorite character too.

So here’s the silly me part. I got into a huge arguement about who Rey’s parents were. Everyone argued that she must be Luke Skywalker’s offspring. But here’s my arguement against that. There are a only a few ways this breaks down.

A) Luke is the kind of guy to knock up some random girl and never even know she’s pregnant. And the chick is the type to abandon her daughter/sell her when the going gets tough. Unlikely.

B) Luke is involved with said woman and still in the child’s life. He takes off after Ren kills all his apprentices. The woman leaves the rebellion base and sells her child. Like Leia would allow that after losing her child. I don’t think so either.

So who are her parents? Come on someone must have an opinion. Let me hear them.

 

 

Wednesday Writers Cafe 1/6

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I met with my good friend S tonight before Cafe to hash out the outline for the class I am teaching next Saturday, with her assistance. We keep joking it’s my baby but she’s playing Doctor Spock. Ha-ha. So the class is actually a year long seminar/workshop series called Nano to Publish. Basically we are taking anyone who shows up through the process of turning their raw Nano novel into a published quality novel by Nano later this year. So that’s been a lot of this week.

I also came to the shocking realization that I am almost out of book reviews. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I did very little reading during Nano and since then I’ve been reading my way through the Flavia de Luce series, but I already reviewed the first one in the series. I need to read some other stuff pronto. Except I’m already reading a homeschooling guide, a marketing guide, and a craft book right now. Ahh what I wouldn’t give for five more hours in the day.

We all actually worked at cafe tonight. I was sitting next to R, who was all about her laptop which made it easy for me to be all about mine. Some nights I love that and this was one of them. I needed to get work done. And I got it. Thanks, R, come sit next to me every Wednesday. LOL

So tell me, when you want beta feedback from someone, what are the three most helpful things they can do?

 

I’ve decided to report on my stated 2016 goals each Wednesday at cafe for a little prod of accountability.

– Research marketing locations for the next free giveaway for Scripting the Truth. Figure out the Reddit problem. Fine tune my categorization on amazon.

√ Reading “how to publish a best seller” right now. 2/3 done.

– Write 2500 plus words per week on my 2015 Nano novel til completion. (Only another 5-6 weeks to go on that, I think.)

√ A little low this week as I got a cold right after New Year’s and needed some extra rest to kick that down to livable. ~1500 words. I will have an exact count going forward

– Participate in one flash fiction challenge per month.

√ Need to write the one I promised to Dan Alatorre this week. 500 word story in the adventure genre, containing my obituary, staring “a courageous 39 year-old woman, who comes from a wealthy background, lives in a fisherman’s cottage and tends to be a bit forgetful” invoking the emotion guilt. Oof. I’ll post when it’s done so you can laugh. This was put together using some random generators. Not my choice.

– Prepare and teach “Nano to Publish”.

√ Preparation underway. Lots of new research. Outline for the first class half done.

– Edit my 2015 Nano Novel for 2016 publication.

– Non applicable at this time.

– Any time I am not actively working on my 2015 Nano Novel, write 2500 words per week on my spy novel until it is done. (After four years, it’s time to put this mess to bed.)

-Non Applicable at this time.

Non writing goals

– Prepare and teach two classes at the coop for the 2016-2017 school year.

√ well, since one of them is Nano to Publish, I am kind of working on this as I go.

– Take better care of my body, ie. stop compulsively painting, crocheting, and writing until my back or shoulder is so tore I can barely use either. Which leads me to …

√ I’m doing ok more or less on this, this week anyway.

– yoga daily.

√ Not to channel Meatloaf but four out of five ain’t bad. LOL