Tag Archives: blogging

The First Sentence in Your Memoir is the Monday Meme

Posted on by Ann

I am slogging away this week and until the 30th on my memoir which I am going to try to get published, but I can’t promise will ever see the light of day in the wider world. Immersed as I am, I will try to update you dear readers once a week as to my word count and progress.

Today, I would like to know how the first sentence (or paragraph, but please not the whole chapter) of your own memoir might read. Remember that your life has high and low points and has periods that are too boring for most people to be interested in, so it’s best to focus on time periods rather than whole lives. A life from beginning to present/end point are called “biographies” and as my husband reminded me – they are reserved for people who actually count in the historical record of the planet.

Therefore, pick a time period and begin. Here or at home with a link back.

Best Laid Plans

Posted on by Ann

Over the summer I got the bright idea to use one of those white-board calendars to plot my writing course over a three month span of time. I think I made it to week six before illness and deck construction ran me off the rails. But I haven’t abandoned the idea because it helped me complete a revision of a novella I first wrote about 12 years ago and is now sitting, waiting again for a final polish before being shipped off to the wide world of publishing.

I have so much to do despite the fact that in the last week plus I have written two pieces for 50 Something Moms, finished/submitted my flash fic election horror piece for the Apex contest, and created two Facebook groups for my writing groups while helping plan the joint anthology for next spring. 

I am not at all certain why I thought the anthology was such a great project to take on. It’s not like I don’t have a memoir to write for NaNoWriMo in November or another website to administer since I also let myself be talked into serving on the Strathcona writing groups board as the website manager.

I don’t think I was this busy when I had a job.

So, I need my calendar thingy again. Today one of my “to do’s” is the calendar. Another task on deck is getting my blogging obligations outlined and hopefully drafting a few. 

I am up to three blogs that I actively contribute to in addition to this site and not counting the website managing gig or the blog I need to create to go along with that. One would think there should be money in this somewhere, but still I toil in relative obscurity. I guess that is where everyone starts, who isn’t the child or spouse of someone famous.

Sixteen days until I disappear into memoir writing. I am kind of looking forward to writing it. Mostly looking forward to being done with it. Another widow – a 9/11 casualty – whose novel I will be reading and reviewing in December, wrote on her blog yesterday that she was uncertain how to follow the book up. Talk about her search for “happy ever after” or her journey from New York to the West Coast. It got me thinking about the focus of my memoir. I had thought to concentrate mostly on the after. After Will was diagnosed. After he went into the nursing home. After hospice. After death. After the first months of widowhood. There are so many things now that I simply can’t recall with a high degree of accuracy or that are just not share-able. Is that a word? But I am guessing most people know what I mean. Even a die-hard blogger like me doesn’t share everything. Some events are mine or mine and my late husband’s or mine and Rob. I don’t write about those.

Which brings me to the reason I need to organize the memoir’s direction beforehand. I don’t want to spend too much time wandering in the desert. I have only 30 days and hopefully I will surpass the 50,000 words. It needs to really be twice that length which means writing about 3,000 plus words a day. Not out of the realm of possibility. I can easily crank about 2,000 a day if I am focused and have an idea of where I am going.

NaNoWriMo means getting my blogging house in order. I need two pieces a month for both my other blogging obligations, and I have ideas so the thing is to draft/revise before the end of this month and get them slotted. I also need to get a bit of blogging ahead done here. I am woefully neglecting my dear readers and readers, however dear, are fickle and go where there is reading to be done.

I have what feels like a ton of urban fantasy to finish (I discovered during the month I spent at the workshopping site that I am not writing pure sci-fi but in a genre called urban fantasy – who knew?). I am pushing it back to December. One of the things they recommend doing after a NaNoWriMo is putting your manuscript aside for a month and then coming back with fresh eyes to read and revise in January. And that is what I am going to do, therefore December will be urban fantasy month for me.

In between all of this I have writing group business including: monthly meetings, board meetings, anthology preparation, and a publishing workshop. And also the daily life stuff of husband, children, house, dying father, grieving mother, yoga class, and reading.

Man, do I have reading to do. My Bloglines is so backed up it is groaning. I do apologize if I am not commenting much. I just have so much to read that I don’t often get to it all in one sitting and sometimes my mind is too empty to find words. Would a “hi, I was here” be acceptable? Somehow that seems very trite.

A few things before I leave off for today:

  • I am still interested in trading links. Leave a comment if you are too.
  • Please vote for me over at FuelMyBlog if you get the chance.
  • If we are not friends on Facebook, perhaps we should be. Let me know.
And so I am off to organize the writing machine which is me.

A Week in Review: August 18th thru the 22nd

Posted on by Ann

Globe and Mail writer, Christie Blatchford, was moaning about blogging and bloggers in Thursday’s paper, so in her honor I have decided to write the most banal of all blogging pieces – the update on my life.

I find “real” writers’ abhorence of blogs and their laments about the decline of “real” writing and journalism amusing. Newspapers long ago succumbed to the tabloidy tricks that placed selling above content. Print will never be able to compete with cable news channels and the Internet for timeliness of delivery, and when it comes to depth of topic, the political blogs have the edge and the freedom. Everything evolves. Just ask Darwin.

Besides journalists with blue-blooded leanings make lousy bloggers anyway.

So read along as I squander my finite word bank* by committing to the blogosphere my “most idle thoughts and mundane obeservations”**

My funked up mood from earlier in the week has cleared up thanks to a near complete abandonment of my schedule. No gym. Late lunches. Later suppers. No manuscript.

I just did as I pleased, and oddly it pleased me to reorganize the bathroom closet and search out the source of the fouler by the day odor in the cabinet where the dry goods are kept. The former is still awaiting final purge approval from the husband and the latter turned out to be a sack of something that had reached the gelatinous stage of decomposition therefore defying labeling attempts by both Rob and I.

I attended writing group on Tuesday evening and managed to be racially offensive to a potential new member of Cree descent. I didn’t do it on purpose but as I was explaining more of my novel to the group after reading the first several pages, I mentioned that one of the stories my main character tells is based on a family story. My grandmother’s great- uncle was the source of much concern when he was a toddler because a local native woman took quite the shine to him and hovered about whenever they ventured into town. The family, like most white immigrant settlers of the time, mistakenly thought she might snatch him. I could see the new member tightening as I told the story – even though I explained its origins and how it fit within my novel. I hate having to weigh words. I hate more that when people are offended they often fume instead of speaking up.

I finalized my writing course picks for the fall. Made out my yoga class schedule.

I prepared a new dish for supper.***

BabyD and I shopped. For her. She is quite the opinionated little clothes pony. While trying on a variety of pants, she jumped, pranced and wiggled – admiring herself in the full-length mirror as she did so. One pair of leggings left her standing completely still and not smiling. When I inquired about this, I was told,

“This pants don’t make me dance, Mom.”

A girl with her priorities straight.

While at the cute children’s clothes boutique, which is actually in The Fort, I overheard the owner mention she was looking for part-time help and I inquired. I nearly danced myself when she asked me to bring in a resume. Until I remembered that I don’t want to work for someone and that I dislike “service” work. Oh, and I am none to fond of the constant flow of humanity in the real world and that I find most things SAHM-ish incomprehensibly dull.

In fact now that I am sounding a bit more mommy-bloggish than I am comfortable with- let’s get back to me, shall we?

All deck work stopped this week. Rob and I are slightly fried around the edges and have just taken a step back from all the reno for this week. Sometimes one needs to surf the web and watch pointless movies in bed.

I got back to contributing at Moms Speak Up. Wrote a piece on Texas teachers being allowed to carry concealed weapons on the job. I won’t go into why this is the worst idea ever but if you knew some of the people I have worked with over the course of two decades, you would just take me at my word. I have yet to meet the educator who hasn’t uttered the phrase “It’s a good thing I wasn’t carrying a gun” at least once in their career – out loud and in the presence of witnesses.

Oh, and I have been reading. A novel.

Finally, I finished tagging my earliest blog posts from mid 2006 until about the time Rob and I started dating. Mostly very depressing widow stuff, but if that kind of thing interests you or you would like to know where I started my blogging journey, I am now easy to search under widowhood or grief. They can also be found under remarriage or long distance relationships or YWBB. Enjoy.

* Michael Farber of Sports Illustrated believes that writers have but a finite number of printable word combinations in them and to blog is to basically piss them to the wind.

** To quote Ms. Blatchford

*** That deserves its own paragraph. I am sure my husband can attest to the wonder of my attempting to expand my meager repertoire.