Saturday So What: Marinate

     I love  to watch the Food channel.  Ironic, I know. I can't cook and I have a weight loss book coming out. Go figure.
     Anyway, I was watching Chopped, and they kicked a chef off the show because her pork didn't have enough flavor. She didn't let it marinate long enough, and so the meat was bland.
     Recently, I got some feedback from a beta reader/ editor type person. My story didn't have enough flavor. I needed another ingredient. He suggested that I move a character that was introduced in the second half of the book, all the way up to the second chapter. = Major rewrites.
     I kicked, I screamed. I may have cried and cursed a little. I hated the idea. It was horrible and I rejected it out of hand. Then I went to sleep. And the idea marinated in my brain with the story. The next day it begrudgingly marinated a little more. By the third day I had rewritten the first three chapters to reflect the change.
     My friend was right. The extra character got me out of the 1st person POV trap (post coming next week). I needed that character to draw my heroine out and advance the story. She added just the right amount of bite and flavor. Sometimes ideas need that time to marinate. To really sink into your brain.
     My advice, when you get a critique from a friend, or a reader, or your group -- don't dismiss it out of hand. I know, the instinct is defense mode and protecting the integrity of your vision. Just hear it, and let it stew for a while. Let it marinate and then decide if it adds the right amount of flavor to your story.

Saturday So What: Busting Up The Writer's Block

As I prepared for this week's So What, I literally said to myself, Eh... I got nothing.
Ugh. How do you get past Writer's Block?
Bing! Lightbulb. The absence of inspiration was an inspiration in itself. So today's post is dedicated to breaking up the giant brick the stops the flow of ideas.

First thing to know is that it's not just you. Don't panic. It's normal and it happens to everyone.
Second thing to know is that it's not permanent. Your brain has not been erased. Think instead of it like a kink in the hose, something stopping all your brilliant ideas that are just waiting to flow into your brain.

These are the things I do to unkink the hose. First I try to remove myself from all the stressors in my life. This usually means going for a run or locking myself in my writing cave and throwing a box of cereal at the children. If that's not enough, I will write down on a pad of paper all the things that are occupying my brain, taking up valuable creative space.

Next step would be to just write. Anything. Blog posts. Journal entries. Letters to missionaries. I actually like to write useless unimportant things. Something I can truly be creative with. This weeks exercise was writing a grocery list... if I was an alien on a planet of fish people.

Sometimes to the only way to find something is to stop looking. Like when you lose your keys and you search frantically for hours. When you give up and do something else, like laundry- voila it was in your jeans. Stop looking for your own inspiration and enjoy someone else's. This is my absolutely-works-ever-time method. Reading a favorite book or watching my favorite movie. It gets the juices flowing when nothing else does. Being immersed in someone else's creativity tickles my own I guess.

What do you have to add my list. I wanna know. I would also love any suggestions for topics for future So Whats.

You can read more of moi and my balancing act of life, and my awesome ideas for portion control.

I've Been Hijacked

Not the blog, not even this post. Me. Myself. I. Have. Been. Hijacked.

I don't even know what happened. One minute I'm lamenting my progress on my latest, awesome full-fledged fantasy novel, and the next I'm writing crime drama. With nary a unicorn or flash of unexplained light in sight.

Please tell me I'm not alone. Please say that yes, you too have been taken over by a story idea so compelling, so complete, that you have to stop everything else and write it. Over 5k words yesterday, another today--at this rate I'll be done by the end of next week. It's insane. When I'm not writing it I'm thinking about writing it. And I've dreamed about it twice.

And I don't even know if I'm going to ever want to PUBLISH IT. The story is such a sharp departure from anything else I've ever done, I don't know what my readers would think. Maybe I'll do what other writers have done before me and use a different form of my name to publish under. You know, Cheri Chesley for YA fantasy but C.L. Chesley for crime drama. I dunno.

I just wish I knew why now, and why this story? It's dark, with some chapters from the POV of the victim. It's scary--the kind of thing that makes me want to hold my kids tighter at night. I'm looking for the redeeming quality and not finding much. Why share that kind of story with the world? What is the purpose behind it?

So maybe I won't publish it. Maybe it's a writing exercise meant to make my publishable works better.

Or maybe I'm over-thinking the whole thing. Cause that's never happened before.

Finally!

He's coming home! After six weeks without him, my husband is finally going to be able to move out and join us. This separation has been so hard--being the only parent for 5 children all the time, forgetting important things like dr's appointments because my brain is so full of the day to day stuff. Stressing over their grades and progress and behavior in school. Not having someone here who can physically help out, or to bounce ideas off of.

But Wednesday, all that will end. Hopefully for good this time. We've endured separations in our marriage because of his various jobs, and it's never been fun. A year ago August he was in LA for a month, and one of the first things that happened at home was someone shattered our minivan's back window. It pretty much went downhill from there. Ugh.

**But don't tell the kids. He's going to surprise them.**

When I went back to bed this morning (because it's impossible to sleep with a cuddly 7 yr old taking up the entire space), I started thinking about my dad. Whenever Bryan is gone for an extended time, I'm reminded of the importance of a father in a child's life. It's something I've known since my childhood because of the lack I experienced. My parents divorced when I was 4, my mother never remarried, and my father died when I was 7. He wasn't there to baptize me, which was just the beginning of the milestones he missed. I grew up measuring every father I encountered to a set standard, and the only one who ever measured up to it became my father in law.

As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about the possibility of writing a book celebrating fathers from the perspective of someone who had lived without hers. Society is really big on making it okay for parents to raise their kids alone. There are some people who have to do it that way, and others who choose it. But it affects the child in a number of different ways. I just wonder if it would be worth putting out there. Fatherhood is not for sissies. But, for the man willing to put the effort into it, the rewards are eternal.