Valeria Kendall's Blog (7)

We were all semi-sick at our house. For a week. But I'm still not giving up on my goal of completing some kind of workable crap draft by next week. I don't care if it seems more and more unrealistic to think this. I'm going to go for it anyway. Life is all about having goals and being flexible about reaching them. The person with the most flexibility wins! It was strange, though, this illness. It was more of a malaise than anything else. At my daughter's middle school, nearly one-third of t… Continue

Wow. That was cathartic. I got some great writing done tonight. Still not enough, only one page. But I've learned something about the way I write. I don't do character sketches. I start out with dialogue. Dialogue comes pretty easily for me. I think that's because I learned to speak German and French as an adult, so I had to be quite conscious of how people speak. I had to train myself to listen carefully. So for me, it seems...so far anyway...that it's through dialogue that my characters rev… Continue

Today is the day I allow myself to freak out. Yep, I've earned a good freak-out -- and I'm going to enjoy it! I'm going to enjoy every second of wondering why the hell I haven't gotten further along in my WIP and why my outline still isn't done. I'm going to shake my head, pace back and forth, and talk to myself. Loudly. I'm going to beat myself up with guilt. And then I'm going to ply myself with coffee. Then... guess what I'm going to do? If you said, sit down and write, you're wrong!!!… Continue

While shopping with my daughter at the mall today, I noticed the hemlines weren't just inching down, they were tumbling down. As far to the ground as they can get. I recalled somewhere talk about women's hemlines being an economic indicator. It seems that the longer the skirt, the more dour the economic outlook. There are various explanations for it. My son and I had a talk-- he thought it might have to do with people expressing a type of mourning when they are feeling depressed about the econ… Continue

Thought I wouldn't start until today, but found myself putting scenes on paper over the weekend. I'm deviating from my usual procedure; I'm trying to get the outline complete before I write scenes. Yet sometimes you'll just get a flash of a conversation or a conflict between two people and you have to write it down. It won't wait. So I've created a folder I titled "random scenes" to put scenes that look as if they must go in the story but I don't know where yet. So I'm thinking that as I go, t… Continue

The goal is to get the novel finished, more or less, by June 17. As I mentioned previously, I don't expect to have anything readable by then, but I do plan to have something I can work with. The term "crap draft" seems to fit. After all, Hemingway has been famously quoted as having said, "The first draft of anything is always shit." (If anyone has an exact reference for that quote from his published work, I'd appreciate it.) Well, if Hemingway's first drafts were shit, then my first drafts w… Continue

Hello, folks! I just signed up for this group today and I'd like to introduce myself. I'm a professional writer looking to write more fiction. Actually, I'm doing a complete life makeover...returning myself to the person I was before I was married. Sad, yes, but on the other hand, makes for great fodder for writing. Out of my bad marriage, I think I can get several nonfiction books and an endless supply of villains for my novels. Just kidding. (Or am I?) Actually, I am kind of serious. I am… Continue