Back On Track...Finally!

Greetings from the mountains!

So today was our first day of school...YAY! I cannot rejoice enough to be on a schedule once again. Normally our summers are completely crazy with camping, family trips, visits and the like. What with my husband home (he's a school teacher) and putting our routine in a blender...I don't get a whole lot of writing done.

To top it off, my poor critique partner, Erin Spock over at Spock Writes Romance, managed to mangle herself at the gym to the point of needing surgery! She is totally in a bad way and if you have a moment pop on over to her blog and show her some love.

She keeps me on schedule. I know I have to deliver chapters to her every two weeks and I never want to disappoint. But...with my poor friend in a bad way...I have totally flaked.

Battling Distraction

But...school is ON!  Many of you know that I home school all 6 of my children.  
This year might be a little tough to balance. Although it is my 13th year and and I have tons of experience. I have a senior and two kindergartners...I KNOW...I'm insane.

All this has only served to tighten my routine. I will definitely be guarding my writing time with a vengeance! So hopefully I will be working more consistently from now on.

With writing comes blogging as I often feel more in the 'Writing Zone' after posting and touching base with other writer buddies. So here's to a new year and new direction!

Until Next time...Go Write!  

And Other Cool Tricks...

Photography by Lucy Boynton

I love to do useless things on my computer...I usually subconsciously couch it under the whole, "Research" title to make myself feel less guilty about messing around when I should be writing.

One of the fun things I discovered today was Wordle.  Its a word cloud generator where you paste in text and it creates an artistic representation of the most common words in that excerpt.  I put in what I've written so far in my novel, Bayou Blue and this is what I got...Jake and Riley.


Cool Beans, huh?

Well, it's not only fun, but it gives me a visual picture of words I use a lot of. If I have mostly, "saids" and "shrugged", I need to take another look at my dialogue.


A really great site for getting into that writing groove is 8tracks. Free hand-crafted internet radio mixes designed around your task at hand. From jazz to techno, users pick and organize tracks to share. One of the offerings, I See You Are Writing a Paper, is a great blend to get your fingers flying over those keys.

Finally, Writing Fix is a website that creates custom prompts to help you launch your writing. From right-brained to left-brained, there's a story starter made just for you.

I know most of you are in the throes of NaNo and my hat is off to you who rose to the challenge.  Hope to catch your work in future blogfests!

Until next time...Go Write!

Tuesday Time Wasters

A great deal of my research for my books is done online. As a result, I often come across some really interesting sites that serve absolutely no other purpose than to waste time. I love them...but they throw me off my schedule so I decided to give myself permission to tool around on them for the purpose of blogging. Pretty slick, huh?

One that may be of interest to writers out there is called, I Write Like. I ran into it from someone tweeting about it earlier in the week and thought it looked fun. You paste a section of your tweets, blogs entries, or facebook posts onto their site and a statistical analysis tool tells you what famous writer your style resembles. I'm apparently a Stephen King clone which doesn't bode well for me since I write Romance. Yikes!

For those of you not into web time wasting...here is a fun project you can do at your desk with minimal supplies! I personally like the idea of being useful when I'm procrastinating. It makes me feel like I have an actual goal other than avoidance. --->

This guy does the most amazing paper crafts ever! He made a self portrait and used computer engineering to make a fold and paste, 360 degree mask of his own head. Its amazing! This next site may actually be helpful to writers using daylight as a plot device...so vampire and werewolf authors, take note. 

Finally, I leave you with a site that is both beautiful and useful. The New York Public Library has digital images of vintage maps you can use to enhance your story accuracy. Find out where stuff was back when. Cool, huh?

So now you're equipped with some fun and maybe helpful links...Go Write!