Month: August 2007

A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban

/ Tracy Abell / 23 Comments

I’ve got no cute socks
but I’ve got a dryer that eats socks
which leaves me with all sorts of mismatches
such as these which don’t even belong to anyone in my family
and must have been left in our house by one of the neighbor kids
even though they sorta look like our kind of sock since they’re dingy gray.

But I’m willing to reveal
my family’s sad sock reality
for a really good cause like promoting
Linda Urban’s A CROOKED KIND OF PERFECT
a middle-grade novel I’ve been longing to read
and so am sharing my own version of a crooked kind of sock-related perfect.

Please share your own sock secrets
by September 1 (official release day)
and help spread the word on A CROOKED KIND OF PERFECT!

Dylan Does Dylan

/ Tracy Abell / 4 Comments

I couldn’t figure out how to post two videos in one post so apologize for multiple posts. This is the companion piece to the Russ Feingold video….

For those who might never have seen (gasp!) this segment from D. A. Pennebaker’s film, “Don’t Look Back” (a documentary on Bob Dylan’s tour of England in 1965) in which Bob holds cue cards while “Subterranean Homesick Blues” plays:

Russ Feingold Does Dylan

/ Tracy Abell / 9 Comments

If only Russ Feingold would run for president. And I ain’t just saying that ’cause I’m a former Cheesehead, either! Here’s Russ doing “My President Will Be . . .”

I highly recommend checking out the Progressive Patriots Fund.

Slowly I Creep . . .

/ Tracy Abell / 15 Comments
Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
9,789 / 38,000
(25.8%)

Not much progress since I last posted but I did go back and polish what I had thus far. So while it doesn’t look like much, what I’ve got is solid.

Plus last night I finally figured out something my brain has been struggling to sort out for the past month or so. Something to do with a secondary character and the main plot line. Anyway, I knew there was a reason why my narrator kept referring to that other character but wasn’t sure what it was. Now I know. At least for today I know.

Isn’t it a weird sensation when you can literally feel your brain tripping on something over and over, and then there’s a shift and suddenly the answer is just waiting for you to pluck it off the shelf and plunk it down on the page?!

A Finished Project

/ Tracy Abell / 20 Comments

Look at me!  Posting for the fourth day in a row!

Didn’t work on my WIP at all today.  But that’s okay because I did write today.

Inspired by

[info]katibgirl

 who yesterday finished a non-fiction article that had been hanging over her head, I decided to tackle an article for the SCBWI Bulletin.  I’d submitted one last spring which Stephen Mooser rejected with the suggestion of reworking from another angle.  So that’s what I did today.  The article isn’t lengthy or all that literary, in fact it’s probably more closely related to a blurb than anything else, but it is a finished project.  And that makes me happy.  After Zippy gives it a read, I’ll send it off.

Tomorrow I’m doing some magazine research at the library for something else I’m considering writing.  I think it will improve my mental state to finish another project or two and have them out in the world so that my focus/obsessiveness is more evenly distributed across the landscape.

Or something like that.

  

What Book Are You?

/ Tracy Abell / 20 Comments

Okay, I usually avoid these quizzes but this one appealed to me and not just because I ended up with this:


You’re Watership Down!

by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You’d
be recognized as such if you weren’t always talking about talking rabbits.

When I was fifteen, my parents let me skip school one day to wait in line for Bob Dylan tickets.  He was touring for the first time in years and it was a huge deal.  I’d requested permission to camp out but the best they could do (which was still pretty cool) was let me get in line at 5:30 in the morning.  My best friend, S., and I got to the Dane County Coliseum and were amazed by the many tents and the many, many bedraggled people who’d been waiting in line for several days.  Bottles, cans, paper bags, and sleeping bodies were scattered about.  Among all that general debris was a copy of WATERSHIP DOWN.  It didn’t seem to belong to anyone so I picked it up. 

After hours of anxiously waiting and hoping, S. and I got tickets just minutes before they sold out (we felt bad for but were also grateful to the “disoriented” folks who hadn’t made it back into line).  Our excitement was temporarily dampened because our tickets were stamped “Limited Vision” and were for seats behind the stage but then we decided to just be ECSTATIC.  And when the time came, Mr. Zimmerman didn’t let us down.  He turned and played much of the night to his fans seated behind him, giving us nearly front-row seats.  The show was phenomenal.

Well, somewhere in that timeline I read and fell in love with my newly adopted copy of WATERSHIP DOWN.  And I guess after that maybe I did a lot of talking about talking rabbits because S. and other friends started calling me Bigwig (which they continued doing throughout high school).

My ticket stub is in my scrapbook.

That copy of WATERSHIP DOWN is on my bookshelf.

And S.?  He’s in my heart.

  

Seeking out the joy

/ Tracy Abell / 33 Comments
Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
9,247 / 38,000
(24.3%)

So I’m having a tough time getting my butt in the chair so I can work on this project and I don’t know why that is. It’s actually a pretty lighthearted story with a fun voice. I guess it’s that I’m feeling a little demoralized because I’m basically writing another first draft. I finished one last November and then let it sit but when I got back to the book in May, it felt off. Not all the way off but enough off that I felt the need to tweak the perspective a bit. Not a huge amount but a little. And for some reason that little tweak makes it feel as if I’m tackling a whole new project.

Ah well. The writing life.

My point is, it’s hard getting motivated on this project. So I went back to the beginning and read what I have so far, and liked it enough to keep forging ahead a tiny bit.

Today, at least, I was able to unearth the joy that keeps me going.

It’s baack!

/ Tracy Abell / 54 Comments
Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
8,760 / 38,000
(23.1%)

I haven’t worked on my WIP since last Friday.

I’m also doing that withdraw-from-the-world-thing which is what I do when feeling glum.

So, I’m going to start posting my word count again in hopes of re-energizing my writing PLUS keep connected with my LJ community.

Hopefully it won’t all be blue meters on my part. Maybe I can sprinkle in posts of interest. And maybe I can finish the draft of this project. Again.

Going away

/ Tracy Abell / 8 Comments

We’re loading up the car and heading south to Westcliffe where my parents spend their summers.  One sister and family plus one brother will be there, as well as other friends.  These annual mini-reunions always make for a crazy weekend but I’m good about getting away for some quiet time so I can regroup.

Wishing all of you a lovely weekend.

Be back late Sunday.

      

Writing slowly

/ Tracy Abell / 40 Comments

Sometimes it’s easy getting caught up in envy for other writers’ processes, especially the Stephen King-esque writers who hammer out manuscripts at an astonishing rate.  

Last night I found out (again) why I’m not that kind of writer.  I was feeling frustrated and anxious about the scene I was writing (or as [info]idaho_laurie so aptly put it, I felt twitchy) until I went back a few pages to where the writing felt good and then, with a running start, read to what I’d just written. 

It took a couple reads but then the problem was suddenly so obvious.  And the fix was very easy.

Now, if I’d caved into those demon voices that ridicule me for producing just hundreds of words per day, that taunt me because I’m nearing forty-five and still haven’t sold a book, that admonish me to get the lead out and produce something marketable, well, I’d either have curled up in the fetal position or started pounding the keyboard in a panicked attempt to write pages and pages just to prove I was a real writer writing a real book in a take that, demon voices! kind of way.

I’m so glad I didn’t.  I know from past experiences that it’s so much harder for me to rescue a book from tangents and mis-placed emphasis than it is to write at a slow but solid pace.

I need to remember that this fall when I participate in JoNoWriMo+1.5; a couple hundred solid words per day, every day, is a perfectly fine way to draft a book.