Evil Plot Revealed
by Lynn Daniels on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 1:56 pm
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NaNoWriMo Day Twelve
Didn’t make much progress over the weekend, but I didn’t expect to. The good news is MiniMe’s soccer team finished the season in second place after a lovely end of season party on Saturday. Soccer games and parties don’t leave much time for writing, though, so although I didn’t produce a big ol’ goose egg number of words, my weekend total was pathetic.
More good news, yesterday was a great writing day between LittleDude’s TKD lesson and MiniMe’s soccer practice (she’s playing a tournament this weekend and then we’re done!). I anticipate another good writing day today — LittleDude’s got a doctor appointment so he won’t make it to TKD, but MiniMe will be going to her lesson. And Wednesday’s usually a light day, so chances are LittleDude will get to take the lesson with her. So tonight, Chester and Rube will finally make it to Cranky Canyon on their way to the Land of the Joes. I’m thinking that while in Cranky Canyon, they’ll learn of the evil Centipig’s plot to take over Feckerson Forest.
This story has been fun to write and fun to plot, and MiniMe’s been a tremendous help with it. Bouncing plot ideas off her has been enlightening; she’s got a great mind for fiction.
And now it’s time to prepare for LittleDude’s arrival, after which I’ll whisk him away to the doctor.
Have a great day!
Dinosaur Respect
by Lynn Daniels on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 8:20 am
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NaNoWriMO Day Six
I knew writing during the kids TKD lessons would help. Just look at that word count! And they’ve got TKD again today.
I’m so looking forward to it. One problem I’m having, though. Rube was supposed to be a pompous dinosaur. He was supposed to have a major superiority complex and really look down on my little Chester the duck with the smart blue felt fedora.He hasn’t come out that way.
I don’t know why, but I’m just having a hard time writing a character who’s mean to Chester for no reason. I’m sure that won’t be an issue once I reach the portion where he interacts with the evil Centipig, but the evil Centipig will be just that. Evil. Rube is to be Chester’s friend. He was a little standoffish at first, and he kind of thought Chester was a little–well–stupid, but he couldn’t be mean because of Chester’s childlike innocence and sweetness. And he actually ended up with an inferiority complex instead. He didn’t like to make friends with forest creatures because they all took advantage of his size. They used him to bully those who upset him, and Chester has refused to do that.
Chester the duck with the smart blue felt fedora earned the respect of Rube the dinosaur much sooner than I’d anticipated.
I keep thinking that one of these days I’ll post an excerpt. And I still might. But what stops me is the fact that there’s been so much free writing with the story, and it’s probably not very good writing. And although I called it fantasy, it’s more like a children’s story for adult-aged children. Does that make sense?
And now, as promised, our first front yard photos.
Here’s my front yard. You can see a little piece of my driveway in the foreground and that’s my street on the right side of the photo. I’ve very helpfully labled our three trees: Huey, Dewey & Louie. Of course, SoundGuy simply refers to them as dadgumm trees, although he often substitutes a strong word for dadgumm. I took this photo on Halloween day; the leaves color hasn’t even started to change yet. Four days later, it was a different story. But we’re not talking about four days later, we’re talking about October 31st.
Here’s the yard again from a slightly different angle. The tree right there in the foreground is Huey, with Dewey behind him and to the right. It’s a bit harder to make out Louie in this shot, but if you look close, you can see his trunk. He’s kind of hard to see because our side yard behind him is all woods.
So there you have it. Our first month check-in with Huey, Dewey and Louie. My initial plan was to have the next photos the first week of December, but now I’m starting to wonder if there shouldn’t be a supplemental episode in mid-November.
Have a great day — I’ll be spending a little time pondering this one.
Break Me
by Lynn Daniels on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 10:35 am
Lately, I’ve found it much easier to go about my life without turning on a computer. Sure, our desktop upstairs is running, and I use it to check the weather every morning, but beyond that — nothing. Nada. No forum visits. No blog posts. No tweets (except that one essentially saying in 45 words or less what I’m saying right now). I haven’t even been syncing my iPod.
It’s almost comical. Frankie sits right next to my spot on the couch, but he sits closed. With my label maker on top of him.
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Can They Say That?
by Lynn Daniels on Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 8:57 pm
MiniMe had a game today against a team her coach kept saying was a really good team. The game ended in a tie, 4-4. So after we got home, we were talking about red cards and yellow cards — our opponents were yellow carded today — and I decided to check the red card status on our state soccer association website.
I got to the site, clicked to check the red cards, and nearly fell out of my seat laughing when I saw this unfortunate abbreviation for Arsenal:
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Happy Punctuation Day!
by Lynn Daniels on Friday, September 26, 2008 at 8:32 am
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The newspaper also contained the address of a blog, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks misinterpreting bad punctuation since 2005. If you’ve got some spare time, drop by and give it a read. I’m more irritated by misused apostrophes (or apostrophe’s, as it were *snork*), but the unnecessary quotation marks make for great entertainment.
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Edited to add: Ahhh…here you go. Stuff about my big pet peeve. Apostrophe Abuse blog and Grocer’s Apostrophe on Flickr. Tons of fun!
I’m Thinking of a Word
by Lynn Daniels on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I’m happy to report George has been amazing for my muse. Before this week, she hadn’t been working a whole lot. She’d grown a bit lazy of late, reclining on a duvet in my mind, eating donuts and chocolate cream pie. 
Looks to me like she’s gained a good fifteen pounds, but don’t tell her I said that. She might just stop that little bit of output she’s been giving me 
since George joined the family.
I will hug him and squeeze him…
by Lynn Daniels on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 8:19 am
… and call him George!
The AlphaSmart 3000 I purchased off eBay arrived yesterday (that’s the auction picture, btw) — much earlier than I expected, which made me doubly excited.
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Relief! Ahhh….
by Lynn Daniels on Friday, August 22, 2008 at 2:28 pm
You have no idea how nice it is for me to have all my stuff back! I can go upstairs and find my processed pictures, my writing, crochet patterns… It really is a relief. After a morning of running errands with SoundGuy, I’ve spent this afternoon moving Photoshop and running my hand across the hard drive with my recovered pictures. My pretty…
Tsk, Tsk.
by Lynn Daniels on Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 3:29 pm
I’ve been lazy today.
Laid in bed all morning (after the kids went to school and SoundGuy went to work, of course) sleeping and reading on and off. Didn’t shower until noon. And you know what?
It was AWESOME! 
tuh-MAY-toh — tuh-MAH-toh
by Lynn Daniels on Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 8:53 pm
How do you research settings?
In the past, my stories have been set in fictitious places, usually in an area of the country I’m familiar with. It’s easy to make up your own cities and towns; nobody can point at your story and say, “That would never happen in [insert city name here]!”
In my current as-yet-unnamed WIP, I wanted to set a portion of it in a city I’ve never been to, but many people would be familiar with. Problem is I’m stuck on the research. I can ferret out business names and types, I can order literature from their Chamber of Commerce, I can even interview people who live or have visited there. But how do I get the feel of a place? The atmosphere? The nuances of an area you might not consciously notice but always subconsciously recognize?
A great non-writing example occurred for me during an episode of “The West Wing”. One of the main characters was supposed to be flying into Atlanta for a quick airport meeting. The fact that the airport in the episode clearly wasn’t Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport didn’t bother me a bit; I didn’t figure they’d actually come down here to film. But what did bother me was the character’s repeated mispronunciation of one of metro Atlanta’s counties. He was supposed to be talking to somebody from DeKalb County, but he kept pronouncing the “L”, like they do in Illinois (dee-KALB). Here in Atlanta, the “L” is silent, and the county is pronounced dee-KAB. And the character he was meeting with never batted an eye.
If I were interviewing somebody from here, I wouldn’t think to ask about that specific pronunciation, but as an area resident, I immediately registered the error. So my question is how do I avoid those errors? How do you avoid them?
Random Photo
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NaNoWriMo
