writing process

Typing With Wet Paws: Let’s Get Moving Edition

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Tails up, Storm Troopers! I’m Storm, you’re awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. This past week was better for Aunt Anna, anxiety-wise, but there has been a lot of adulting, a very warm hotel room that would be quite cozy in winter, but it’s not winter (don’t worry, the owner/manager is on the case, and it will be back to normal soon; he is only making sure the place will be warm in winter.) and the newest thing: we may be able to get into New Apartment *sooner* than we had expected. Not official yet, but a strong possibility.

Coming back from bad anxiety can take a while, and it’s more a bunch of baby steps in the right direction until, oh hey there, she’s writing again. A lot of it was playing Sims while listening to You Tube videos. For this past week, a lot of it was from the channel Heart Breathings, which is where author Sarra Cannon shares how she does what she does. One of the things Ms. Sarra said was that having beautiful stationery makes her want to look at the pages more, which is exactly how Aunt Anna feels.

so we’re doing this now…

I should mention that the pages you see here are not from Heart Breathings, but from Aunt Anna’s Writing Helps Pinterest board. She did print out a bunch of stuff from M. Sarra’s board, though, and will talk about that more later. Big life changes affect writing a lot more than a human might like, so trying new things may be a good way to get back into a routine that works best for the writer a person is, now.

I should also mention that, at this time last year, besides not knowing me yet (we call that the Dark Ages) Aunt Anna thought the Happy Planner line was silly and ew, plastic discs. Then she got two for her birthday, and now she loves it, especially the notebooks,. and has found a use for every size they offer, from big to micro. She likes metal discs better than plastic, which is fine by me, because I think the plastic ones will be perfect for playing with in the new apartment. We all know that’s going to happen.

Anyway, there is a questionnaire she printed about how to reconnect with a story after time away, and boy does she ever need that one. Some of those questions are hard, but also look like they can pinpoint what went wrong and how to fix it. For Aunt Anna, a lot of the time, the big stumbling block is “I don’t know.” We are working on that and while it’s kind of scary, nothing can be as scary as the year just past, so she’s up for the challenge. NaNoWriMo is not a go but it’s not off the table, especially in an unofficial capacity. Right now, she’s counting progress in “units” which she will explain later, and seems to work pretty well so far, and, most importantly, does not need to be perfect. She is also kind of salty that she thinks she might like to try a writing group again, but NY is still taking precautions, so maybe online groups might be a good idea.

As you can imagine, this is one of those drive-by posts but Aunt Anna wanted to show signs of life, and it is Feline Friday, after all. More details to come as she has them, including a review of how these new tools work for her and the way she writes now.

Headbonks!

Back at It

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For the first time in over an entire year, the other two adults in my family are both at work at the same time, so that means that I am, too. It’s great and it’s strange. Right now, as I write this, I am also in an informal meeting with Lisa from Buried Under Romance, because I was around and she was around, and “yeah, let’s do this right now” hit, and that’s pretty much how I feel about writing in general at the moment.

When I lay out my weekly plan in my household planner, the truth of our now finally hit – with that swatch of pastel orange highlighter, and the new swatch of blue highlighter, both Housemate and Real Life Romance Hero will be at work at the same time, for a several hour stretch. I stared at the colors for a while and then it hit. When I see both those colors at once, that is my prime writing time. How to make sure I’m inspired when that time hits? I am inspired. I like money. I like living indoors. I like eating food, and maybe most importantly, I have a pen and paper habit that cannot be tamed, so I better darned well have a stream of income open.

our one-year-old

For me, that means writing books. Since Melva and I have already passed the first anniversary of Chasing Prince Charming, it is high time that we get up to date on Drama King. Since the general suckiness :salute: of real life has been a factor in knocking me off track with my share of the work, it stands to reason that things straightening out will provide me with new opportunities to make up for lost time. At least that’s the plan. There will probably be some setbacks and side quests, but, for today, I am here at the keyboard, I have a concrete goal to meet, and I know Melva will provide the feedback I run on, so things are looking good.

As for historical romance, watch this space, as there will be an update soon. Trying a couple of new things, and pretty excited about them. Also kind of daunted because this will mean putting some pressure on myself, but I think it’s going to be the good kind of pressure, and never try, never know. All I’m going to say for right now. but historical romance fans, I will have something for you in the not too distant future.

Vagueposting, I know, but it’s fun to slip one of those in there after more than a year of the world being on fire. Today means that I am up to and able to interweave writing and planning and I like that combination. Right now, I’m looking at my temporary command center, at the blush aesthetic I have going on here, and the dark red Pilot Precise V5 (clicky!) I picked up not too long ago means that my autumn aesthetic is going to start organically finding its way into my day to day. I’m looking forward to that.

For right now, the new header will be the ‘face” of this blog for the rest of summer (to be measured by however long it feels right) and I will autumn-ify it as needed. I like that comfortable evolution of things slipping into place, rather than me trying to shove a ten pound cat into a two pound bag, which I am wont to do more times than I would care to admit. There will be a few new graphics, and I may move around the way things look in general, but it’s not o much becoming different as it is becoming right. I don’t know of a better way to put that, and I don’t think any better way is needed. What I do know is that this feels right, doesn’t need pushing, and is headed in the right direction.

Anna

Things They Don’t Tell You About Writing While Homeless

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In a word: everything. I went into this knowing nothing about how being between permanent addresses would affect my writing. Since we are getting ever closer to getting to the next permanent address, hopefully in the near future, here are a few things I’ve learned from this experience.

  1. It’s hard. Writing rituals, routines, or schedules? Buh-bye. Gone. Not there anymore. It’s uncomfortable and disorienting, and feels like adding insult to injury, when the questions of the day include things like “where are we sleeping tonight?” and “are we eating?” Writing fiction doesn’t seem like an important thing when basic needs are on a case by case basis,k especialy in the not-wanting-people-to-know stage.
  2. Writing groups/dates and memberships in professional organizsations may lapse. Conferences may be off the table, especially in this time of social isolation, because getting food on the talbe and a table upon which on can place that food, is top priority. There will be days when a write can’t. This does not, by the way, indicate failure.

2) It’s necessary. I have stories inside me, and they want to get out. They need to get out. For a long time, when our vagabond days just started, the only writing I had brain for was journaling. Oh so much journaling. I depleted the stash of notebooks I had on hand and went back into storage for more. Brain dumps, no filter, whatever was in my brain went on the page. I still do that, but I did that before, and I don’t see it going away any time soon. It primes the pump and clears the brain space for actual writing-writing things. (Fiction counts as writing-writing, for me.) Some screaming into the void, bits and pieces of my much-beloved, much-neglected historical and contemporary romances, sometimes all of the above at the same time. It happens.

Besides fiction, my own blog, and my still-feels-new position as head gal in charge of Buried Under Romance all suffered greatly, adn I am not okay with that, but I would also be the first person to tell somebody else not to feel guilty, so something to think about there. That’s the worst of it, really, the wanting desperately to connect with the works in progress, and not…quite…reaching. Sometimes it was because getting to pen and paper was an issue, or because I didn’t have enough me left in me to do that kind of thinking. Some times, the closest I could come to productivity was to remember. Remember that scene? Remember when that character did that thing? Or what I intended to write when they would do that thing? sometimes that’s enough.

3) It’s essential, which is not the same as necessary. I say this for me. I am not saying that any writer going through any kind of big life change absolutely must write, because that is not the case. If putting a thing aside is what yo need to do to be okay, absolutely do that. For me, writing in general, and writing romance in particular, has been a lifeline. Not only does the romance genre remind me that every story in this genre has a happy ending, no matter how dark the black moment may be, and that love (platonic and family as well as romantic; pick the ones you like and leave the rest) it’s that immersing myself in a good story, whether I am the one reading it or the one writing it, allows me to not escape, but gain respite.

Reading or writing fiction is a place I can go when I don’t want to be where I am. Yes, I did just quote my own character, Dominic, in Chasing Prince Charming, and when I do have to put down book or tablet or pen and paper and deal with things in the everyday world, I’m stronger.

There’s more to it, of course. This isn’t a one and done sort of topic, and I don’t want to be a downer here, but, in the words of Sir Elton John, I’m still Standing, and those of Ms. Gloria Gaynor, I will survive. I shall close out with the wise words from Mr. Elvis Costello…every day, every day, every day, every day, I write the book.

Typing With Wet Paws: Summer’s On Edition

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Tails up, Storm Troopers! I’m Storm, you’re awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. Even though the calendar says summer does not officially start until later in the month (I am only two, so I don’t know a lot about calendars) for Aunt Anna and the other humans in my family, this counts as summer. It is Aunt Anna’s least favorite season, but our basecamp, as Aunt Anna calls it, has air conditioning, so the summer really doesn’t bother her or Uncle Rheuben at all. They have also found that they share a desk really, really well. If I am feeling especially sproingy, we can all three share the same workspace. That’s what I call efficient use of space.

Even though summer is usually Aunt Anna’s worst time when it comes to productivity, she had a super good writing day yesterday. It all started with hauling herself over to the computer with the promise that if she could write some notes on the stinkybad movie in Drama King, and then send it to Aunt Melva, then she could play Sims. Aunt Anna is super easy to bribe with Sims, especially since she had to reinstall stuff when the latest patch broke pretty much everything (whoops) and she had to start fresh. Surprisingly, she did not mind that at all.

Aunt Anna says making this stuff helps her think

Starting from scratch was actually kind of fun, and she got to use one of the premade families to test out some new gameplay features, fiddle with custom content, and maybe a mod or two. If you think that sounds kind of like writing fan fiction, you are not wrong. Aunt Anna sees that, too. As a matter of fact, Aunt Anna had Sims stuff open in the background while she read a lot of Wikipedia articles about movies (stinkybad or otherwise) to know what kind of information goes into such a thing, laughed a lot while using name generators to get over herself already, slap down a placeholder and move forward, and refresh herself on the recipe for a romantic comedy movie, plus all the ways one could go wrong.

In the middle of doing all that, she also had Scapple open. It is kind of like a whiteboard on the computer. If you don’t know what Scapple is, click here to read about it on Ginny Frost‘s Apps For Writers blog. (Miss Ginny also writes contemporary romance for The Wild Rose Press, so check out her books while you’re over there.) While Aunt Anna had the seeds of a scene on her mind, she might as well get a few things down where she would be able to easily access them.

That’s when something clicked open, and a whole bunch of stuff came out of her head and onto the screen. It’s kind of messy, mixing tenses and Aunt Melva (who has a PhD in English) may have a headache from switching from script form (many of Aunt Anna’s first-first drafts of dialogue are in script form when they fall out of her head) to dialogue and narration but then again she knows how Aunt Anna works and still wants to write books with her anyway, so there’s that.

That stuff is now in Aunt Melva’s hands, so Aunt Anna is now turning her hand to writing a faux Wikipedia article for a different fictional movie, and getting ready to do the same thing with Her Last First Kiss, but there won’t be any movie stuff in there, because there were no movies in 1784. Probably no YouTube mouse videos, either. It was the dark ages.

Speaking of mice, Aunt Anna and Aunt Linda got me some! Uncle Rheuben stayed behind to give me pets while the other humans went for groceries, and they found themselves in the cat toy section. Ever since my red dot died, I have taken to going to the corner near the door and giving big kitty eyes, to indicate that I really need a new red dot. Well, the store didn’t have any (the nerve!) but they did have a package of three catnip mice. Aunt Anna figured they’d see how I liked them, so she threw me one as soon as she got back, and I LOVE IT. I call them all “Prey.” When I bring Prey to a human, the human is to throw Prey, which I will then chase and CATCH, and then I have no idea what comes next, but a nap comes after that, and the whole thing starts over again.

Before I fur-get (hah, see what I did there?) Aunt Anna was at Buried Under Romance this past Saturday, with a topic that comes to a lot of readers’ minds this time of year (or so I have heard. Again, I’m two.) and that’s weddings. Are they really needed in cotemporary romance? If that is a topic that interests you, read about it here, and pull up a chair in the comments to chime in with your opinion. Aunt Anna already talks to herself enough. Trust me on this one. Part two will be about historical romance, and probably will go up Saturday but might be Sunday because she just got done being sick and is running a little behind.

Okay, I think that’s it for now. No Goodreads update, because mostly Aunt Anna read a little bit of stuff and fell asleep and then her loans expired, so she is starting new books now. Maybe I will start telling you when she starts reading a book and then what happened to it. First, though, this Prey isn’t going to chase itself.

Headbonks!

Meat Loaf, Muscle Memory, and Writing Romance (Also Sims)

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Most importantly, the Meat Loaf of which I speak is the singer, not the food. I did get to meet Meat for about five seconds, at an autograph signing. I blurted out that he broke my creative block. He immediately lit up like a Golden Retriever at hearing “who’s a good boy?” and asked which song, and how, and what genre did I write, which was when his handler gently apologized to both of us and said he had to move the line along. That stuck with me, though, and cemented my love of the Loaf. Which brings me to last night.

I was not listening to Meat Loaf last night. I was listening to a Sims 4 Let’s Play video, which is probably my current favorite viewing material. Even so, I had no intention of writing-writing (cue amused chuckles) as I listened, and managed custom content, and fiddled with my Sims journal, shown here in the charge of my co-worker:

That thing is packed full of altered index cards, because a) they are sturdier, and b) with my vision, dot grid only works if it’s about an inch from my face, and crooked writing is a big no. Every card is a Sim, their aspirations, goals, traits, spouses, children, and ultimately, when they move to the “graveyard” section, causes of death. No overthinking on this stuff, because it’s a game. So, there I am, thinking that I’m going to have to cut down and punch more cards, because we’re moving into the next generation, and then I’m grabbing one of those discarded dot grid pages, to make notes for the cards I’m going to want to make for the Sims 2 and 5 versions of what I’m doing.

Still no Meat Loaf. There was, though, at some point, a frantic pat through the dark (ah, the joys of motel writing when Real Life Romance Hero is asleep) for my writing-writing notebook. After that, a lot of ink came out of the pen in my hand, as notes on a long-overdue scene from Drama King filled the formerly empty pages. Pages. Plural. When I am done with this post, I will transcribe and send the scene off to my long-suffering contemporary writing partner, Melva.

Still not listening to Meat Loaf while I wrote that, but as soon as I set down notebook and pen to try and get some sleep (my brain throws slumberless parties on a regular basis) the first notes of this song trickled into my subconscious:

this song is relevant to my interstes

One thing that has stuck with me was a tidbit from an interview, where Meat talked about his songwriter, Jim Steinman. He said that what audiences need to remember is that everything Jim writes is part of a universe in his head, that is basically an epic vampire opera. I believe some of it was produced as an opera, in Germany. Possibly in German, which does not sound out of the realm of possibility.

What does this all have to do with muscle memory or romance writing? Actually, a lot. In the midst of custom content and screenshots and Let’s Plays and other things that are still creative but not focused on producing pages, my brain gets to free-float and do its story stuff wihout me getting in its way. Ad the facilitator of a long-ago writer’s group often said, once we put pen or pencil to paper, we were not allowed to stop it moving. The process would beget the product.

With things like this, my brain goes “storystorystorystorystory” and “atttttmosssspheeeeeeereeeee” until I am darned near besotted with it. When that happens, oh look, how did all that writing get on the page? I better get more paper. Not just for one book, because while I was furiously scratching out dialogue for Drama King, Bern and Ruby, from Her Last First Kiss were at the edge of my vision, tapping their feet, and next to them, Cornelis and Lydia from Plunder. All of them with lists grievances….uh, adjustments I need to make so that they look the say they do on the page as they do in my head. Not only physically, but you get the drift.

One of my Sims notes is to set aside time (after writing) to learn Reshade (lighting editor…ish?) and fine tuning presets I didn’t even know could be fine-tuned but make all the difference from bright and cartoony (which is fun, too, when I have the taste for it) to…my people. It is like that with reading and writing, too, as recent conversations with bookish friends have confirmed. Keep at it, when it’s possible. Put the pen on the paper. Keep it there. Sooner or later the muscle memory will kick in, and therein likes the tale. Literally.

Anna

Intravenous Baby Steps

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Writing during a pandemic is something most of us do not have a lot of experience in doing. Keeping a productive writing schedule during a pendemic, when between permanent addresses, with one’s entire family in close quarters, with a high energy cat, making frequent 200 mile jaunts across state lines, dealing with spotty interwebs, two depressions and an anxiety, insomnia, a spouse whose job doesn’t exist during lockdown, is, well…something. Can’t make this stuff up, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to, even though making stuff up is kind of the whole point of this fiction writing thing.


On the one hand, I can defintely relate to feeling behind pretty much everything, as there are days when writing is just…no. On the other hand, I am already more than sixty percent of the way to my goal of ninety books on my Goodreads challenge, I am getting my bearings on Buried Under Romance, and the micro size Happy Notes I set up as my Sims journal for my current gameplay is getting, for lack of a better word, chonky.

I have gone hardcore into this play style, having downloaded a save file of the base game neighborhood of Simsd 2 reinterpreted for Sims 3, with a rotational play system, free will on high, story progression (aka Sims I am not controlling doing their own thing) and an ever growing cache of custom content. Plus mods. Oh the mods. Basically, it’s writing, only with pixels. Also a dystopian lighting mod, but that’s another story.

I am writing this post with a full “house” -aka hubster and bff home, cat reminding me that we did promise to get her a new red dot. I am in my pajamas, still, because insomnia turned into “may as well turn on the computer,” which turned into “eh, boot Sims,” which turned into “listen to Journeys of Romance podcast while playing,” which turned into catching the love of writing, which led to opening this Word Pad document while doing all of the above, and here we are.


Breakfast/lunch is a bag of microwave popcorn, positioned to the left of the keyboard, beverage of choice positioned to the right, notebook on top of the CPU, under the monitor, color coded getl pens at hand, to catch the its of story and “real” writing that trickle in as I do all of the rest. There are a bunch of notes for the Drama King scenes I owe my co-writer and I am going to have to do some reconstructing on Her Last First Kiss, but, with these intravenous baby steps, one thing at a time, it feels…doable.

Rainy Days and Mondays

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When I was but a wee princess, back in the days when I only needed one digit to state my age, and, I believe, in the grade that comes after K, my parents (or perhaps the NY educational system) put me into one of those newfangled open classrooms. Basically a mishmash of traditional education with a dash of Montessori is a decent description, and we kiddos were often allowed to pick our own activities for part of the day (as long as work was done.) This allowed the teacher (whom I saw as Grown Up, but was likely in her midtwenties at best) to observe young humans in their natural state (um, that came out wrong. I did not mean naked.) and note what activities and/or behaviors affected their traditional learning, for good or for ill.

Surprising nobody, I did better when I spent time in the book corner (spot the baby writer for one hundred, Alex) and the art area (artist’s kid, no-brainer) but where I showed the most marked improvement in my worksheets and cuisinaire rods learning was on the days when we were allowed to bring our own toys, and I pretty much always brought fashion dolls. I won’t mention the brand, but my preferred dolls stood eleven and one half inches tall (when my friend, V and I did not remove their legs to make them stand in for kid dolls, usually their own kids, or kid-selves. Yes, we knew how to get legs off and on safely. That’s not at all creepy. We could do heads, too.) could swap clothes like nobody’s business, and took on more roles in one afternoon than Meryl Streep in a good year.

Once again, Spot The Baby Writer gets another point. Unfortunately, subsequent classrooms did not hew to this model, and my plastic repertory company was relegated to my room at home, and occasional play dates. I did try collecting as an adult, but not being made of money, or having limitless space, and needing to do adult things, as well as discovering actual writing, that chapter, alas, needed to close. Merely having the items in question wasn’t the same as actually having hands on and acting out the stories in my head with reasonable facsimilies of human beings.

But then — because there is always a But Then- I discovered a few things. Fandom, especially fanfic (ah, so that’s what I had been doing all by myself with Wonder Woman, The Bay City Rollers, and reruns of Family Affair, all along. Not at the same time, mind you.) Finding the plot holes (did you know that the fate of the father in The Partridge Family was never addressed? He doesn’t even get a first name or cause of death. It’s established that he’s dead, but that’s it. When? How? Were he and Shirley happy? Was he musical, too? Did they want a big family from the get go, or did it just kind of happen, because Shirley and Whatshisname loved each other very very much? Come to think of it, what did Mr. Partridge do, to be able to afford that big house and still allow Shirley to be a stay at home mom to five? I still want to know these things.)

Fanfiction was a huge discovery, though I never wrote for any of the above fandoms. I did hunt down licensed Partridge Family novels and comics in used bookstores and flea markets, and Wonder Woman does count as my first fandom, as I collected anything I could about the comic and TV series, and blew through two of the fashion dolls. Yep, I fanned that hard. The first fandom in which I wrote was Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even then I had to do it my way, creating an original love interst for a canon character, and I never budged from that. They are canon to me. They were also some of, if not the very first characters I made when I ventured into my next discovery: The Sims.

Sim versions of a (non-Trek) OTP

Since I am getting chatty on this one, I will stop here for now and pick up again on Wednesday. Need to get some novel work under my belt before I can play (and by play, I mean my current save of the Sims 2 adapted to Sims 3, which is far more fun that should be allowed, but more on that later.)

That Time of Year Again

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Even though the calendar has said it’s been spring for a while, and even though this is probably March the Blur-ty Second, my sure shift occasions happened a couple of days ago. I was getting into Housemate’s car for a grocery run, and that’s when it hit. Time to switch out my everyday carry (EDC) planner. Can’t force these things. They happen on their own.

Since fall, I have been using and loving my black Pen + Gear B6 travelers notebook cover, with a mini Happy Planner for guts. Still looking for my B6 mojo, insertwise, but that’s another story. For planning, this works. I’ve been carrying it in my burgundy tote bag, the fall and winter version of my beloved blush tote, which I will be busting out of stuff jail as early as the end of this week. Carry burgundy faux-suede in May? Perish the thought.

current EDC

First world problems, definitely so. Not saying that having anxiety and depression and being in between permanent addresses during a pandemic is a picnic, but the fact that I am having strong opinions on stationery and stationery accessories, well, I am going to file that under signs of life. The more chaotic life becomes, the more I want to organize it.

For my EDC, this will probably mean slipping my HP mini out of the black cover, sliding it into the blush one, and moving over decorative ephemera. My current planner, last year’s eighteen months version, ends in June. I will replace it with a new 2020 mini, with different layoyt, and th current cover (and some dividers) will find their way back into the black cover, with filler paper in place of planner pages. Et voila, notebook.

Feeling spring-y

These things work best for me when they happen organically (odd for planning, but it works.) Forcing them generally does not work at all. Funny enough, there are similarities to writing. I would like for there to be more writing, and there will be, and one day I will look up at the screen or down at the page, and the most recent line will read “the end.” Huh. How’d that happen ? I

Bit by bit, usually. One step at a time. Days when scrolling blankly through Facebook or Overdrive are the pinnacles of productivity, and says when writing hits a roll. Neither, in my experience, is anything I can force, but things like “time to switch covers” or indie pubbing book x makes sense, ” those show up when they will, and give a solid foundation for the next phase.

Springing Forward

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Spring is not usually my favorite season. It still isn’t, but a new season is a good time for a new start, and, after seven of the craziest, weirdest, hardest months I have ever had, it looks like the light at the end of the tunnel may not be a train. Not that there aren’t still question marks, because there certainly are, but fewer ellipses (… -= those things) so I am going to count that as good. I have every faith that we may soon be nearing the end of our vagabond days, and I am very much ready for it.

On the fifth of March, we have been officially between apartments for seven months. Longer than I had thought or expected, but also, we are, as Skye would have said, badbutts, because we are still standing (cue Elton John) and, as Mr. Rogers’ mother said, looking for the helpers is always good advice. Storm is a travel kitty extraordinaire, and I have become far more adept than I ever thought in breaking down a desktop computer and reassembling it in another location, and knowing for sure and certain that longhand really is the best way for me to compose.

Writing, yes, can be done anywhere (seriously, anywhere) but the part that goes beyond composing, the transcribing, the editing, the polishing and submitting and/or planning out an indie pub (independent publishing, where the author is also the publisher) strategy, those things need a home base. It’s getting there. Before too long, there will be a new location for Stately Bowling Manor, a new office to move into, books to bust out of stuff jail (aka storage) and set into place. Time to know and declare that the new normal is now within reach. Not here yet, but within reach.

Which comes to the often sticky part of writing, finishing. When I first started writing romance, a starry-eyed seventeen-year-old with an electronic typewriter and a dream, of course I could finish a book. A lot of books. Now, I could be the parent of a seventeen-year-old, with some wiggle room. (I am not. Real Life Romance Hero and I decided early on that all of our kids will have four legs and fur.) Life and writing are not always that easy. That girl with the stars in her eyes and correction ribbon on her fingers had read once that Valerie Sherwood wrote twenty pages at a session, so okay, that’s a normal pace. The more seasoned writer now also remembers that Valerie Sherwood also said that any writer who says they write thus and so every day is lying.

There are days when the words, when the story, don’t come, and life has proven that, in heaps. There are also days when they do, and those are the days that I want to nourish. This past weekend, spent at Chez Grandmere, I took an outdated planner I inherited from Housemate, and ripped out the guts but for the monthly dividers (setting aside the unused guts to repurpose as plotting charts) and cutting down plain white office labels to cover the names of the months, and now it’s my general writing :salute: notebook/planner.

Writing each area of focus on each label – historical romance, contemporary romance, blogging, Buried Under Romance, Patreon, even “paper” (one can never have enough filler paper) — felt…good. Right. A few weeks ago, I posted on Facebook that I had a finger hovering over a stock image on a cover art website, because the couple in it? Could very well portray John and Aline from A Heart Most Errant. My first thought when I figured out what I was thinking was, “Anna, what are you thinking?” because, well, vagabond days. Vagabond months. Independent publishing isn’t cheap. I have never done it before.

Hm, though, but have I? In the intro to my “Play In Your Own Sandbox, Keep All the Toys” workshop, I mention that I spent well over a decade amongst Klingons, Newcomers, Immortals and others, not only writing for fanzines, but also, in time, publishing my own. I didn’t know what I was doing back then, either, when I started on that (huge props to my friend, the awesomely talented E. Catherine Tobler, who did a lot of very patient hand holding and talking me down from ledges of various heights) journey, so, maybe…cannonball? I don’t know.

What I do know is a page a day is a book in a year. I know I don’t have to reach every reader (and can’t, and shouldn’t) but only my readers, who are going to respond with, “please, miss, may we have some more?” The answer I want to give is “yes, of course, here you go.” I know I am too fond of italics and need to brush up on my comma use (thankfully, my contemporary cohort, Melva Michealian, has a PhD in English, so odds are I am going to catch on sooner rather than later.) There comes a time, and I think this is it, as my finger hovers over cover stock, and I have sussed out to get myself as bottom of the line webcam, because starting somewhere is better than not starting at all.

Which all feels pretty on-brand for spring. New life. Things blooming. Baby ducks. Baby ducks make everything better, and if we end up somewhere near Washington Park once more, there will be baby duck pictures aplenty. Even if not, there will be stories. That’s what I do. That’s who I am.

see you next time

Cautiously Optimistic

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Today is a very Monday-y Tuesday, but that has ceased to phase me. Internet may be spotty this week, but blogging feels normal, so I want to get an entry up on as regular a schedule as possible. The offline times are good for writing longhand, so I am not complaining at all. As much as I love winter, this has been a tough one, and I will not be that sorry to see it go. I am ready for a new season.

The title of today’s post comes from a discussion Real Life Romance Hero and I had earlier this week. We are pretty sure that the light at the end of the tunnel is not, this time, a train, so we are moving in that direction. That also means that the Patreon will indeed be a go, and, for the first time, setting up tiers doesn’t seem as scary as it once did.

This past weekend, I presented Play In Your Own Sandbox, Keep All the Toys, at Capitol Region Romance writers. I learned a couple of things. First, I really do need to use visual aids, for myself as well as the people taking the workshop. A dry erase board usually does the trick, and I probably should learn PowerPoint. I will add that to my list. The second thing I learned is that, when visually impaired, and knowing darned well one needs high contrast, do not attempt to work, in front of a group, from handwritten notes, if the only inks available are pink and turquoise.

Even so, I crazy love this workshop, and the CRRWA chapter, and I came away from the experience remembering how much I really do love writing romance. When I got home, a chapter was waiting for me from my contemporary collaborator, Melva, which has me excited to work on Drama King. I also need kick in the behind to get Her Last First Kiss back in action, because those pirate books are chomping at the bit. That’s part of what I’m taking care of this week.

I know how to do this. I know how to write books. I know how to write good books. This is the thing I wanted to do more than anything else in the world for as long as I can remember. It’s easy, though, to lose sight of that when life gets crazy, and boy howdy, has it ever this past year and change. I am hanging onto the “change” part. I have mad, mad, mad respect for the productivity of authors like Sandra Sookoo and Kathryn LeVeque, the staying power of Cynthia Wright and Kimberly Cates, and yes, there is most certainly a seat at that table for me. It comes by putting butt in chair (or passenger seat) and pen to paper and telling those stores. Dump from brain to page, rough and raw, and make it pretty later.

Right now, I am tired and stressed and hopeful, and very much in love with my chosen genre. I have added an ebook edition of the material for PIYOSKATT (pee-yose-cat? Pie-yose-cat?) as a Patreon perk for a middle tier, because now, it feels like a reachable goal, and actually kind of fun. Small online class offerings may also be in the offing, because I also crazy love teaching workshops, both on my own and with other talented author type people. It’s a good place to be.

see you next time