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artistqhad shared with me and I saw a name and I thought, yes, maybe. And this morning I got up and said yes, that's it. So Plant Kid's name is Boone. Yes, as in Daniel. And no, I don't know why except maybe it sounds close enough to Bloom that it works for me. 2 - I contemplated doing a Poetry Friday post today. I mean, I'm off on Fridays now and supposedly I'm a poet and one would think I'd want to do a Poetry Friday post but then I realized I was putting too much pressure on myself which made me feel guilty which made me not want to do anything about poetry. But then I thought about a book I'm reading right now and in it the author mentions the poem HOWL by Allen Ginsberg which I guess had a major impact at the time of being published as well as for some time after. So I went to look up the poem and read it and realized I had absolutely nothing to say about it except it must have scared a lot of people of the times.
3 - I am currently writing three books at once. (Which according to people who know me pretty well, explains a lot about me because I bounce around all the time from thought to thought.) VZ, which is Flyboy's story, Max which is Max and Frankie's story, and the book that still has no name but is Plant Kid's story. (And it is killing me to not have a title for it but, oh well.) Ahem. Anyway, I was thinking about poetry and I was thinking about Hugging the Rock and how I didn't start off thinking it was going to be a verse novel. I started off with it in prose and it evolved to a verse novel after a whole bunch of things including a suggestion from Janet Wong. So that got me thinking about my various other WIP that I am not actively working on at the moment. (Sidebar - one thing when I am stuck some place where I have I have to sit still but have nothing to say is to make a list of every book I can remember I ever started to write. Sometimes it is just the title because, well, I am good at titles, except when it comes to Plant Kid.) Anyway, I did this the other day and I wrote down this title that I know is perfect for this YA I want to write someday but am too afraid to write at the moment and for the first time ever I thought, hey, what if I did that one as a verse novel? The subject matter lends itself to it. The MC is so much of me that it fits. And I got that wonderful little chill that told me it was a good idea. But I am NOT writing it now. No, really I am NOT.
4 - Money motivates me to write. Not the lack of money which tends to motivate lots of people to write in order to feed their obsession with things like food to eat and gas for the car and power to run the computer. No, money in the bank. Just sitting there. The more money that sits in the savings account, the more I am motivated to write. I don't know what that says about me except I am very weird.
5 - My favorite pens are no longer my favorite pens. Most of my writing starts in longhand, especially the poems. For more years than I can remember I have used a fat medium point Bic ballpoint pen. I used to love the freebie ones that businesses gave away. They were perfect. No pressure to write exquisite words with such ordinary and functional pens. But I am older now with an always messed up shoulder and writing by hand for any length of time is harder than it used to be. I worried for a while until one day at work I needed a new pen and I went to the office supply drawer and just grabbed one. They are always different depending on what brand the admin can get a good deal on when she orders. This time it was a kind I hadn't seen before -Sanford Uni-Ball Signo Gel 207. I used it for a few days at work and fell in love. Off to the office supply store to buy a stash of my very own. And lo and behold, they don't come in just black or blue but a total of 8 different colors. So now I have a new favorite pen.
This writing edition of the Friday Five may soon be followed by the home improvement edition. Or not if I am getting a lot of writing done.
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Things to Do
Quotes
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing...the rest will follow."Jane Yolen
"The whole thing is, you’ve got to make them care about somebody." Frank Capra
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home." Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours!" Richard Bach
"Yet somehow, we write; and most of the time, we like what we write. The dark place seems less dark when we get there. It was only the journey that was fearful." Susan Shaughnessy
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A. Whitney
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Anne Rice
"I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable." Cynthia Ozick
"There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin
"Your first job is to get your own story straight." Natalie Goldberg
"Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking." Naomi Wolf
"Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; someone has to show them the way." Orville Prescott
"A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults." Ursula K. LeGuin
"I'd always thought you had to be a special person to write. And then I realized you just have to start." Abigail Thomas
"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need." Jerry Gillies
"But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." Doris Lessing
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."Yevgeny Yentushenko
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't
believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
"I compose sometimes with a pen and notebook, sometimes on the computer; it makes no difference. If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock." Ursula Le Guin
"If you want to write from a place of emotional integrity, it is important to learn everything you can about all kinds of emotions, including those that exist in you, that you wish didn't." Elizabeth Berg
"And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born." Jack Kerouac
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
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carriep63
Comments
...#4 me too! the more money I have in my art account the better I work!
The money thing is weird. I spend half the year freaking out that we don't have enough money, even though we're doing things to the house and helping out the kids and buying nice gifts and stuff and then I redo the budget and look at the money in the bank and go WOW, we're okay. And then I can write.
So for me it's not the writing account (though perhaps if I added to it more often it might be) it's the household one.
I'm still on the fence about this afternoon but I'm going to go take a shower, just in case. :-)
:-)