Results Not Typical, Catherine Ryan Howard

I found this by accident, after someone linked to one of her posts about publishing. It’s a self-published book that could have benefitted in places from a professional editor, but was still a fun read.

It’s a corporate satire that spoofs every diet plan company out there, veering from hilarious to completely over the top on the way. She has five free chapters on her website.

Before I Fall, Lauren Oliver

This was on my want-to-read list for ages, and I finally got to it on Friday, reading through it in one evening. It’s a Groundhog Day story. Sam dies in a car accident and relives the last day of her life several times, trying to figure out what she can do differently to make things turn out better.

Sam and her friends are the popular girls at their high school, which is a generic school that actually has popular kids who know who the unpopular kids are. (Maybe it’s because my high school was huge, but there were so many different cliques it was impossible to say who was the “most popular”.) At times it’s hard to sympathize with Sam because she doesn’t always see anything wrong with the bullying her gang perpetrates. Though she does eventually try to do better, mainly because she thinks that will let her stop repeating her last day.

I loved the book, spent the last section in tears, and then sat around after I’d finished it starting to think “but that doesn’t actually make any sense…” At which point I decided I’d better stop thinking about it because that wasn’t the point. It was still fantastic.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

A few recent posts got me thinking about lunchtime writing again. It’s been a while since I took a step back and thought about how it’s working for me.

Since the last time I posted about it, the breakroom I write in has become less crowded, so I feel less antisocial since I’m not sharing a table with people I’m ignoring. That also makes it quieter and less distracting. (People who work here have very interesting things to talk about. That sometimes has its downside.)

Since on Thursdays I go to Toastmasters, I only do this four days a week, and I miss it on Thursdays. Toastmasters obviously still gives me a break from work, but it doesn’t give me the alone-with-my-stories time.

The main thing I need to change is to take an actual lunch *hour*. Or at least 45 minutes. My lunch is often only half an hour. If I have to go buy my lunch that shortens things (there’s an obvious solution there). Plus, it’s too easy, if I feel stuck or I don’t feel like working on something, to tell myself I should get back to job-work.

Let me close with two points:

1) A tip–I have to make sure that when I leave the house in the morning I have everything I need. This seems obvious, but even after doing this for years I still packed up all my stuff today before remembering to sync my iPad, and then had to unpack it all again. It was simpler when I was just scribbling first drafts in a spiral notebook. (On the other hand, if I forget one project I usually have enough things going on to just work on something different.)

2) I just want to say for probably the dozenth time on this blog how much I love my iPad. I bought it specifically so I could write at lunch more easily (than on an iPod Touch), and it’s been fantastic. Once Scrivener for iPad is out, it’ll be even better.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

Tomatoes

I didn’t put cages around these when I planted them. I kept thinking “next weekend”. Now they’re on the big side to be adding cages…this will be interesting.

Three of them are flowering already. All four of these are ones I got from someone at work who started seeds. I have a Japanese Black Trifle, Lemon Drop, Super Snow White, and something red (Austin’s red pear, I think). I hope they do well and the squirrels don’t eat them.

Mint

Mint…and a lot of weeds (I was going to do a bunch of gardening this weekend, and then realized next weekend is a 4-day weekend and would be a much better time).

The shorter mint on the left is lemon mint. The tall stuff in the middle and spreading to the right is apple mint (in front of the tall green thing (pokeweed)). The lime mint is barely visible in front of the apple mint to the right.

You can just see a few purple chive flowers on the right. I wanted to see which would win, the chives or the mint. Clearly it’s the apple mint.

Behind the apple mint are leaves from the day lilies.

What you see very few of are other weeds in the mint patch. Success! I still want to add spearmint and/or peppermint to this area as well.

Front garden

So the first thing you notice is more of the weeds I have put off until this weekend…

In the front right we have more chives in a pot. Behind the chives, on the right, that’s mesclun, wilting in today’s 89-degree heat. I am going to have watered everything by the time you read this. To the left of the mesclun, chard, doing better than any chard I have planted before.

The two tall green feathery things are the self-seeded fennel; you can’t see the fennel I planted very well in this photo.

The really tall green thing is a purple coneflower. Behind it is…a yellow flower. Both are native plants that I got last summer. Neither bloomed last year, but the coneflower is budding now. The yellow flower still only has about four leaves, but last year it only grew two, so that’s an improvement.

Back garden

Front left is my rhubarb, which still doesn’t seem big enough to eat.

In the back, the row goes radishes, lettuce, more radishes. On the right, from back to front is more lettuce and more radishes, with shallots along the edge.

In the middle is a clump of spinach.

The chard in this garden didn’t come up, and very few of the beets came up, which is why there are big bare patches.

To the right, out of view, are the potatoes. Apparently I missed a few when I dug them up last fall.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

This weekend Patricia Wrede briefly discussed writing exercises in the context of how writers can try to improve.

In the comments, I said

I used to see little point to exercises. But after becoming a plotter rather than a pantser, I get much more out of them. Whenever I do exercises, I pick a story or book that’s in the planning stages, and do them with those characters/setting. It helps me generate ideas for that story, so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time.

I should be doing this now, actually, for the next novel I’m going to work on, so that when I really sit down to plan it out this fall I have a better idea of what the characters are like and what I want to have happen.

So far this year I’ve been doing a fair number of exercises: I’ve been taking a bunch of online workshops from various RWA chapters on characters and feelings and related topics. Right now I’m taking a class on revising for emotional impact, and the exercises have been to revise passages from our current project, keeping the current lesson’s topic in mind. Which is a useful kind of exercise, since I’d be revising those chapters anyway.

Do you guys find exercises useful?

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

A few weeks ago I raced my first 10k. I didn’t finish nearly as fast as I wanted–my time was 1:19:16–but I finished. I’d never run that distance before and lost a month of training to a foot injury. That’s actually a faster pace than most of the 5k’s I’ve done. At least I didn’t get passed by any of the marathoners, whose course joined ours at their 14th mile.

For the next few months, I’ll continue my run/swim/bike/tennis schedule. I’ve been running and swimming three days a week each. The bike club has started up again, and I plan to do the Saturday morning rides most weeks. Tennis classes start up again in June, twice a week.

To get my stamina and my speed up, I’m doing longer weekend runs–an hour for now, in intervals of 10-min runs and 2-min walks, planning on going up to 1.5 hours later. I’ve also shortened the first run of the week to do speed intervals, which makes a rather hellish start to Tuesdays.

In the fall I’m going to do the same triathlon I did last year plus a 5k or two. Next spring I’ll do the 10k again and strive to be faster.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

A while back I mentioned playing the “if I went back to school, what would I study” game.

Which I also mentioned isn’t going to happen. It gets tempting, though–there are a lot of things I’d like to learn, partly for writing and partly just for fun. Taking a class would make me focus on learning (part of) a subject in a reasonable amount of time. But I’m not going to spend money or a lot of time on it, or I’d never get any writing done.

Enter the wonder of the Internet and the future that we live in. A couple weeks ago I ran across a mention of Coursera, and last week, EdX made big news. If you haven’t heard about these, here’s the deal:

They’re both websites that offer free online courses–with lectures, homework, exams, and interaction with professors and other students. But, probably no grades, maybe a certificate of completion, definitely no real credit.

EdX is a team effort of Harvard and MIT (warning: the site auto-plays a video). Coursera has courses from Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Coursera has started offering some courses, and EdX will begin in the fall, though MIT is currently running a course in electrical circuits.

I resisted the circuits class, but have signed up for three classes through Coursera (in series, not parallel–ok, I’ll stop with the puns now). I’ll be starting Intro to Sociology in June, a literature class on fantasy and science fiction in July, and a history class in September.

Unlike reading by myself, I can’t pick the exact topic and I can’t necessarily go at my own snail’s pace, but I think being able to interact with other people doing the same readings/hearing the same lectures will be a big benefit. And as I busy person, I have to admit that it being free and online makes it more tempting because missing a week for whatever reason won’t really matter.

I’m also just curious to see what these kinds of classes are like. Are these huge, free courses the new future of education, or a fad? Will I learn anything or are they just a marketing tool?

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

Last year I planted three kinds of mint–apple, lemon, and lime–in the hopes that it would spread and keep weeds down. It’s doing quite well, especially the apple mint, which is now beginning a war with the day lilies. (Sometime this year I’ll add peppermint and/or spearmint to the collection.)

So we have a lot of mint available. Some of it got used in a mint chutney from the Joy of Cooking, which I used on leg of lamb. A bit got turned into mint juleps Saturday for the Derby, which I won’t bother with again next year (not a bourbon fan to begin with).

This weekend I made mint ice cream, which seems to be the best use for the mint so far (though I’ll probably have tea far more often). All the recipes I found online required egg yolks, so I just adapted the standard vanilla recipe into…

Fresh Mint Ice Cream

2 large handfuls fresh mint leaves
2 cups milk
.5 cups sugar
2 cups heavy cream

Put the mint, milk, and sugar in a sauce pan. Heat it over medium until warm but not simmering. Let it steep for several minutes, stirring often, until the sugar’s dissolved and the milk tastes minty.

Pour into a bowl through a strainer. Press all the liquid out of the mint leaves and discard. Refrigerate the milk overnight.

The next day, add the cream and pour the mixture into the ice cream maker. Let the magic happen.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

For the novel workshop I’m going to this summer (er, next month, yikes), I need to send people an outline. I had an outline already: a bunch of index cards stuck to my white board, color coded by point of view. Since taking a photo of it probably wouldn’t be helpful, I typed everything into Scrivener. (And forgot to take a photo of my white board before I took them all down.)

Back in March, I wrote up a post about the various sorts of notes in Scrivener and how I use them. When I started thinking about turning my Scrivener file into an outline other people could read, but that I could also use as I write the novel, I realized I have to make some changes to my usual workflow.

The problem was that when I compiled the file (turned the Scrivener file into a Word document), I’d get something that looked really messy. I really don’t need to share the stuff under “Notes” with people because it’s all notes that I’m using to write (or revise) the book. Stuff like “delete Susan?” or “make T angrier here”. And the synopsis fields were all blank, so someone reading this can’t follow the plot anyway. Plus I’m already running into my usual problem, that the Notes field has both my to-dos for the scene, and things like “the moon is 1/4 full” and “3 days later”.

Since I was using the synopsis at work, I’d gotten to like how easy it is to view in outline mode, and how the synopsis finder toolbar button makes it easy to…find things that are in synopses.

So (obviously) I’m adding summaries of each scene into the synopsis field. I’m also adding my to-dos there, prefaced with an exclamation mark. The exclamation mark means I can easily use the synopsis finder to find scenes that I need to do something to.

And I can keep using document notes for messy stuff I don’t want the people at the workshop to see. (In theory, everything with an exclamation mark in front should be taken care of before I send them the outline…)

Much nicer.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

Almost everything I planted has come up. (Amazing.)

My spinach and lettuce are starting to look like baby spinach and lettuce, adorable. The spinach didn’t do well enough to need thinning, but the lettuce will, maybe this weekend.

I planted more beets and chard in the back where they hadn’t come up. The chard in the front garden seems to be doing better than the chard in the back. I’m not sure if that’s a function of more sunlight or of different temperatures when I planted it. Or maybe of squirrel digging patterns…

I filled in the last empty area of dirt with a different kind of radish a couple weeks ago and have seen no sign of the sprouts so far, but radishes seem to take a while.

The tomatoes seem happy, even the one I originally didn’t plant because I thought it was dying. I guess being in a pot with more dirt means more water to keep it happy.

Soon I should pick a couple stalks of rhubarb and see what I can make with such a small amount. I’m envisioning a tiny cobbler.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.

The blog is taking today off, because after a long and busy workday, I have the brain to either write or to blog, not both.

Instead, have this post from last April, in which I wonder about outlining endings. Having recently finished outlining another novel, in which I did manage to outline the ending…I’m now wondering what made this most recent book different. Worked backwards from the end, maybe? It still has holes, but not nearly as many as usual.

Maybe I’m just getting better at filling in the holes.

Mirrored from Elizabeth Shack.