Category: craft

MORE GOOD NEWS!

I found out this week that Hurricane Baby: Stories has been nominated for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2025 Fiction Award! I had heard of this award but didn’t know much about it; you can look up more information about it here.

I asked who the other nominees in my category were, and I was blown away. Only a few small press books were on the list–the rest were all with the big New York presses. Almost all of them I had heard of except two that were debut authors like me. To be included in such company with my first fiction work was astounding to me. It’s still blowing my mind.

So that was that.

In other news, I have podcasts, interviews, talks, and conferences to get going on in the rest of the month and in February. I need to write out my talks to present them, and that’s going to be interesting. One is a talk on how to go after your goals and dreams, and the other is how I figured out why I write and what I write. I have the basics of that one already typed out–it will just need a good bit of tweaking.

Aaaand I finished revising the first section of my work-in-progress, aaaand I realized I had too many fight scenes in it. Four one right after the other and one in the next to the last chapter. %$#@#$%. I don’t want the character in that many fights. So I’m definitely going to cut one scene and rearrange the others so it’s not one right after the other. I still can’t believe I did that.

So a really really high high, a middling low, and the rest business as usual. Except a year ago I could not imagine such a life for myself. Praise be!

Book Club Meeting

I went to Ridgeland to a meeting for the What Would Cathy Read? Book Club at a nice restaurant in a mixed-use development, featuring shopping, hotels, offices, townhomes, and restaurants. My very good writing friend Marlo was a member of this club and host for the night, so everyone read Hurricane Baby, and I came to discuss it with them–eighteen people including me and Marlo.

I talked about how I wrote the book, then Marlo asked me to share how I got it published. Another lady asked if the stories were based off of real people I knew or read about. I get that question a lot, and I think it’s because I’ve tried to hew to the humanity of the characters and so readers feel like they have to be real people. I took another craft question, then since I had talked about my experience of Hurricane Katrina, everyone else felt safe to share theirs.

Then Marlo asked what I was working on now, and I talked a bit about Looking For Home, the book I’m still revising on. I didn’t give away many details about it, so that was good.

I think for my next book club event, I’m going to have people write questions and put them in a container, and I’ll draw from it and answer. I possibly do have another upcoming one that a childhood friend is a member of–they put all in titles in a hat and whichever one they draw is what they read. I look forward to possibly going to that one if it happens.

Really looking forward to the writing life this week–more podcasts, interviews, events, and writing. We will see how it all goes! Until next time!

Tracking Progress

When New Years Day 2024 rolled around, I was about half-way through revising Cassie Beck’s story that ends Looking For Home–it was the most developed, so I began with it in November 2023. I decided to track my progress by writing my down what scene I had worked on and my word count for each day I wrote on it. I started on 1/3/24 with 1160 words. Very auspicious.

In February I hit a writing slump. All I could do was sit and stare at the computer. I was stuck on how to begin Carlton Dixon’s story and how to fill in the scenes I already had. Once the slump started in mid-February, I wrote one day from then to April–335 words on March 22. But I finally got my voice back on April 1 and wrote steadily from then until Thanksgiving 2024, when I finished Merrilyn Beck’s portion of the book.

So how am I going to track my progress with the revisions I already know need to be made?

Same notebook–I tallied up how many areas needed work in this revision. I came up with 22 spots. I highlighted the areas in yellow on the screen inside the document. So then I wrote down what needed to be done in each scene in a list in my notebook in list format. This January, I plan to go through the list, make the needed revision, then check it off my list in my notebook as I complete them.

Why am I doing this?

Because it helps me counter the lies that my critical mind tells itself of how I don’t know what I’m doing, how I’m not accomplishing anything, how there’s no point in even going on with the work. Each line of accomplishment in my notebook represents a promise I kept to myself to bring this story out and share it. Seeing the accumulation of progress spurs me on to continue. A simple system–but enough of a one for me.

How do you keep track of what you’re doing and how you are progressing? Drop a note in the comments!

Writing Differently

I have been doing something very interesting. I am writing differently than usual.

I started off writing Looking for Home in the same style I did Hurricane Baby. A lot of immediate action, twists, and turns. And it was working for me because I was writing the end of the story, and it needed a rush to the climactic moment, and it was told by an impetuous sixteen-year-old girl, Cassie Beck.

When I began writing the beginning of the book, incidents that had happened eighteen years earlier, I still avoided much narrative–Carlton Dixon was also sixteen years old, learning how to grow into being a man in Tennessee in the late 1960s. A lot of his story was pretty action-packed as well because he rarely had room to think before he had to handle a situation. But towards the end, it turned somewhat more contemplative–more narration, more time in Carlton’s head with his thoughts about what was happening to him.

Then to bridge the two stories together, I worked on telling Merrilyn Beck’s story. Right away I encountered trouble==she was a well-brought-up girl, trained to make some up-and-coming young businessman, lawyer, or planter a fine wife. Instead she had fallen for Carlton Dixon, was pregnant with his child, and Carlton had been drafted into the Army. Merrilyn had also been molested at the hands of her father–an open secret in the family.

Merrilyn turned my tendency towards action on its head; she was a planner and a thinker. She considered her words and chose them carefully before she said them, even as young as she was at sixteen. The abuse had made it where she didn’t live in her body but in her mind, so that’s where most of the action was in her story.

I fought this. I wanted the story to be the same as the others. But once I finally figured all this out about Merrilyn, writing her story became much easier. So today’s lesson is to listen to your characters when they tell you who they are. Sometimes there are surprises.

Next Saturday I will be in Hattiesburg, MS at the Author Shoppe in the downtown area from 2:00-3:30 pm. Wish me well!

Progress!

I finally feel like I have a handle on Merrilyn Beck, one of the two female main characters in Looking for Home. I’ve been writing steadily for about a week now. I usually don’t write over 500 words at a time, so progress is a little slower than I like. But it’s finally become fun again! How did this happen?

First I had to do some serious mental gymnastics to convince myself that choices I made that turned out to be wrong for the manuscript were not a crisis now and wouldn’t be a crisis in the future. I have to get words on the page before I can decide if they’re the correct words or not. I can’t fix what’s not there.

Then I really let myself live in Merrilyn’s head for a while. How would she react to the events I had planned for her in the book? What could her possible reactions be? What did those reactions and feelings say about her character?

Finally I convinced myself that ultimately, I was in control of what happened in the book right now, and I know what I’m doing. I know how to write; I know how to tell stories; I know how to craft a narrative. (It’s not always true; the characters often surprise me and carry the action in another direction!) But I told myself I know these characters now and could follow the path I had envisioned.

So that’s what’s been working for me this week. Tune in next week and see how my Natchez event goes next Thursday!

Perfectionism

Anne Lamott says that perfectionism is the voice of the oppresssor. As long as you have tied yourself up in knots over the perfect choice, what happens? No choice gets made, nothing happens, and no actions are taken.

I’m close to the end of my work in progress. I’ve done about 220 pages since the end of November last year. but these last 80 are proving to be the very devil. Because I want to get it Right when I should be concerned with getting it DOWN. Plenty of time to go back and fix what might be wrong. But right now is the time to get it done.

So wish me well as I try to break the vise that perfectionism has had on my writing. Happy reading!

What to Do When You Don’t Have Anything to Say

Just start typing. “I don’t have anything to say today. I wish I did but I don’t, I don’t understand why but the words just aren’t coming. Mabye I’m tired. Maybe I’m burnt out. Maybe I’m still thinking about the things where what my husband said made me feel some kind of way.”

Do you see what’s happening here? I’m problem-solving as I go. I’m sorting out solutions or answers or suggestions for what might be the root cause of the situation of not having anything to say.

Or you could get more specific–“Why am I having so much trouble writing from Merrilyn’s point of view. Is it that I don’t know her very well yet? Is it that I’m unclear on what needs to happen in this section to get from point A to B to C, etc.? is it because she’s never had a voice before, and she needs to assert herself–and that’s something you’ve always had trouble doing in your own life? Do you feel like she can’t assert herself because you have always had the same problem?”

Now I’m getting somewhere. Maybe if I just sit down and just write out what all happens to her in a rush, covering incidents from the next eight years of her life. Then I can fill in the details on another rewrite.

Just start typing and see what you have to say.

Progress!

If you remember, my current work-in-progress is a set of three novellas that tell a story of a young couple giving up a baby for adoption in the 1970s and the child finding them in the mid-80s. The final novella from the point of view of the adopted child, had been published in a novella collection, and the rights have reverted back to me, and I’ve been developing into a longer work. I started with revising the section that had already been published into something with more weight to it.

After i completed that section, I started on the first section, narrated by the birth father of his moving to Counce, Tennessee and meeting his girlfriend and how their relationship developed. I still had the original novel written in 2006 that I chopped down into the novella in 2017. I pulled flashback scenes from the novel to set up this first section and wrote more material about his life and . . .

Last night I finished the first draft of that section!

So tomorrow I will start on the middle section from the birth mom’s point of view about the years after giving up her daughter. And I have only a handful of half-bakes ideas for this part–I’ll be drafting almost from scratch. So that’s going to be. . . interesting. Definitely stretching my storytelling chops. I hope to finish it before Hurricane Baby publishes in late August this year.

So that’s my new goal. Wish me well!

In the Writing Trenches

I have been letting my work-in-progress, Looking for Home, absolutely kick my fanny the past two months. I started off with a good bit of material that I had pulled out of the older manuscript, and I had one chapter where I could see it absolutely play out like a movie with some filling in.

Then I decided to write the opening chapter and I froze up solid for the better part of a month and a half. I couldn’t figure out how to start it and get in the backstory needed and get into the action, too. I wrote five pages that I knew shouldn’t be the beginning, but I couldn’t think of how else to do it. It had Carlton with his family making the road trip moving from Pass Christian, Mississippi to Counce, Tennesse. After I finished the trip, I cut those first pages and started with the ending scene and wrote 13 new pages to get to an existing three-page scene I already had.

I think those were the hardest 16 pages of my life to date. I was working in the consciousness of a sixteen-year-old boy who’d lost his mama a few months before, and that was foreign territory, to say the least. Trying to get him settled into the world he’d been thrown into and him not doing such a very good job with it. I’m doing one thing a little differently; I’ll have scenes that come in my head, and I know they need to be in the story. But I have no idea where they’ll go. That’s the fun part of it all I suppose.

So that’s why you haven’t been hearing much about the work-in-progress–It’s been absoluely refusing to cooperate. Until now. Maybe I can get the next chapter wrestled to the ground. Until next time . . .

Juggling The Work

Well, since I don’t have the final proofs for Hurricane Baby yet, I am working on my three-novella project Looking for Home. I only have two more scenes to write for this POV before I’m finished and can go back further into the past and write the first POV character, Carlton Dixon. Right now I’m working on the POV of Cassie Beck, the adopted teenager that comes to find Carlton, claiming to be his daughter by his teenage girlfriend, Merrilyn Beck. (Cassie’s POV is the part that sold for the novella anthology.) I’ve already outlined what I want to do for Carlton’s POV and Merrilyn’s POV, so that changed a few things that happened in Cassie’s POV. And I’m sure that when I’m finished with the first two parts, I will need to revise Cassie’s part again. But that’s OK.

I want to finish the new draft for this project before Hurricane Baby comes out in August. And I am chipping away, bit by bit, paragraph by paragraph. I am keeping up with my daily word count in a notebook so I can see when I write best and have the best production and figure out what goes well on those days. Is the outlining helping or hurting? Is it better to plan out what I’m writing beforehand or write without a net to catch me if it goes awry? That sort of thing. We will see.

Kicking around ideas of who to pitch publicity opportunities to for Hurricane Baby. I’m looking at book podcasts, regional magazines, radio shows, newspapers, festivals. Once I get to pre-orders, I’ll start sharing that link around. Just getting together my ideas and what all I want to do. I hope I can start getting the word out seriously by then. Wish me well!