Tuesday, May 22, 2012

My Little Town Tuesday: Nip and Tuck



Over the weekend, we passed this billboard and Old Dog shuddered. "That sign really creeps me out."

"Really?" I said, twisting around in my seat to catch another look. Other than the "you're so not okay the way you are you should pay us to suction out your gut fat with a vacuum hose" message, it looked okay to me.

"Why?" I asked.

"Have you ever noticed how the face is covered up?"

I had noticed that.

"They probably don't want the girl's face distracting from her nice, flat belly," I suggested.

"If it is a girl," he said.

Huh?

The next time we drove past the sign, I saw what he meant. From certain angles the bikini bottoms on this model appear--how should I put this? to bulge.

Here's the thing: women have this procedure done to make themselves sexier. But once you've sucked out so much body fat that your pubic bone sticks out like testicles, I think you've crossed a line.





Saturday, May 12, 2012

And the Winner Is....

The amount of food I had for the Postal Service's Feed the Hungry campaign this morning...




was exceeded only by the amount of expired food I found in the cupboards....


Old Dog actually got a mild case of food poisoning last week from a tiny can of veggies, so thank you! Post Office, for motivating me to review my stocks and weed out the expired and give away anything that was likely to expire before we'd be able to finish it.

The winner, by the way, was the box of chocolate pudding, which expired in December of 2007. God only knows how old the Dog's veggies were.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Fiction Friday: What I Learned at the Plotting Through Character Workshop

This was, without question, the best writing workshop I've ever attended. (And I've been to a few.)

It was drawn from Break Into Fiction, a book co-written by Mary and Dianna Love. It contains 11 templates to help you think through who your characters are, what decsisions they make, and the outcomes of those decisions. The templates are designed to really drive home the linkage between the character's choices and where she (or he) winds up. (A linkage sometimes missing in my own work.)

The format of the workshop was for Mary to give a short lecture on each template, then allow participants to fill out that template for our protagonists (with the expectation that, once we returned home, we'd go back through and fill them out for our antagonist/love interest/villain/all of the above). While we were working away at a big conference table, Mary was available in another room for individual consultation. I met with her several times and each time she'd gently guide me away from stuffing my plot full of random, unconnected events and toward creating causal links between my character, her choices and the outcomes of those choices, which in turn drove the next  round of choices and outcomes. 

Mary didn't try to replot my novel or redesign my characters, but she did point out when I was heading for trouble:
o The places where my character seemed too passive
o My attempt to create a four-act structure, rather than the three-act structure U.S.readers expect.
o The importance of driving the character's decisions through motivations that would resonate with the reader emotionally. 

One of my biggest takeaways was a much better understanding of subplots. Mary differentiates between subplots, which are integral to the main plot and cannot be removed without destroying the central  story, and secondary plot lines, which mirror the main plot and deepen the thematic statement of the novel, but would not impact our ability to understand the main story if removed. That seems really simple now, but I have read a ton of stuff on this topic and never come across a clear-cut definition that I could understand before.

If you're interested in writing a tightly-plotted, character-driven novel (and these are not mutually exclusive), I recommend this book.






Thursday, May 3, 2012

Travelogue Thursday: April in Washington (State)


Over the weekend, I went to Port Townsend, WA, for a Power Plotting Weekend with the amazing Mary Buckham. (If you're interested, I'll share some of what I learned on Fiction Friday.) I flew out early and stayed over another day so I'd have time to sightsee.


Took the Light Link Rail from SeaTac into Seattle. Houses in Seattle are much more brightly painted than is typical here in the Midwest. I think they're trying to offset the frequent gray skies.








In Seattle, I saw the Pike Place Market and visited the Gauguin exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.







Then I headed to Port Townsend, wooden ship capital of the world.






I didn't go clamming, but someone did:.










The thing that fascinated me the most was how different the flora is in the Pacific Northwest than here in the Midwest. Here, rhododendron are pretty much lavender. There, they can be pink,






or cream













or even bright red.












This is a monkey-tail tree. It's not native to the Pacific Northwest, but it is common there. Notice the long, ropy branches that look like monkey tails?

Then, on Monday, Mary generously offered to take me on a tour. We visited Neah Bay, the furthest westernmost point of the contiguous U.S.







We saw HUGE trees.










Then we visited the area surrounding Forks (because you know I wasn't leaving without seeing Twilight-world).

Everything was covered with moss. It was so damp there I felt like if I stood still too long, it would creep over my shoes and I'd be covered, too.




Tomorrow: For Fiction Friday, I'll share a little of what I learned from Mary Buckham, who is the best teacher of the craft of plotting that I've ever met.

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