writing

Friday Haiku + surprise

/ Tracy Abell / 5 Comments

As I often do on Fridays, I went in search of a photo to use as a haiku prompt and landed on one from a visit to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in August of 2021.  This image reminded me of childhood when our mother tried to wrangle the five kids for a decent photo that was inevitably ruined by someone flashing bunny ears behind a sibling or making a face or turning away from the camera. Clearly, these cormorants couldn’t care less about me getting a good shot.

And so I wrote this haiku:

many cormorants
but majority headless
group photo challenge

Before posting it I took a closer look, zooming in on the birds nearest the center of the photo, and decided to crop the image to only show those four cormorants. And that’s when I discovered something I’d missed. Do you see it?

A skull!

Holy guacamole. This calls for a whole new haiku:

glossy birds sunbathe
pronghorn antelope keeps watch
sprinting days over

Please join in the fun and comment with your own haiku for this photo!

Standing at the edge

/ Tracy Abell / 6 Comments

Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there’s got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you’re at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together. ~ Yo-Yo Ma

Okay, mourning dove.
It’s just you and me.
One . . . two . . .  three . . . JUMP!

No more mourning

/ Tracy Abell / 2 Comments

For the past couple months, I’ve been struggling with my new middle grade project idea, trying to land on the “correct” tone and approach. I’ve written a bunch of scenes, but knew I was missing the mark. Today in desperation, I turned to the google and asked a convoluted question about how to write a first draft when wandering around in the dark inside your head, clueless about how to find the right approach to the story. And this came up!

None of this approach is new to me, but the way J. Elle framed the info resonated, plus the timing was just right. This afternoon, I was in the right head space to take in the info and think about my project in these terms. I now have a short pitch and tent pole moments, although those may still change. I’m mostly just excited to have a solid-ish foundation upon which to build. No matter what happens next, I feel as if I’m moving in the right direction.

Mourning Dove. July 20, 2022

No more sad, mopey mourning for me. This project is finally on its way and for that, I am grateful.

The face of a dog

/ Tracy Abell / 11 Comments

I’m tiptoeing into a new project. And because I haven’t added anything to the draft in two days, I’m experiencing that panicked sensation of “what if the words don’t come today?”

What if I fail? What if today’s the day I’m exposed as the imposter I am?

Well, those feelings are exactly why I must get to work in order to disrupt that fear and show it to the door. To quote (in translation) Gabriel García Márquez:

“Necessity has the face of a dog.”

I must do what needs to be done. But, don’t worry, Emma. I’m fairly confident neither of us will be harmed during the writing of those words.

Sunday Confessional: I, too, dislike the synopsis

/ Tracy Abell / 4 Comments

I find myself without literary representation after nearly five years working with my former agent. We parted ways in August because her list has changed and she no longer feels well-connected with children’s lit editors and publishers. She worked very hard on behalf of me and my stories, but now I’m agentless. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I have a brand-new, shiny middle grade manuscript ready to query other agents. Unfortunately, the querying process often requires the inclusion of a one-page synopsis of the entire work.

Have you ever tried distilling a 48,000-word novel down to 500 words? It ain’t easy.

However, a writer friend reminded me of Susan Dennard’s 2012 post on the Pub(lishing) Crawl site: How to Write a 1-Page Synopsis so I’m using that format. Still, it’s not fun and I keep finding other stuff to do instead. Such as writing this blog post which is basically me complaining about how I’d really rather not have to write a synopsis! And searching for a fun goat photo to make me smile!

So, aside from announcing I share the near-universal dislike for writing a synopsis,  what’s my confession here? Well, it’s that I keep learning and relearning how different my writing brain is from many other writers. I don’t think in Three Acts or even Beginning, Middle, and End. I write more on an instinctual level. That’s fine, but it also means it takes me longer to pinpoint my novel’s Plot Points and the story’s Midpoint (which doesn’t refer to whatever happens on the exact middle page of the manuscript). No doubt I’ll figure it out as soon as I stop procrastinating. After all, I’ve written synopses before and can do it again.  Still, it’s kinda a bummer to realize after all this time that it’s still a struggle to write the darn things.