Time Management Tuesday: How This Year's Purge Is Different From Last Year's

As you can see, we've started pulling out the big stuff now. My cellar TV room is beginning to look as if we're getting ready for a tag sale. I'm talking about the October Purge at Chez Gauthier, in case someone just surfing by is wondering what this picture is about.

During last year's purge I started focusing on one spot or another in the house.

"I realized that just getting rid of thirty random items out of an entire house wasn't going to do much to help me organize my environment, improve my impulse control, and manage my time. But focusing on specific areas, like that kitchen counter, could. Thus I got rid of table cloths from the china cabinet in the dining room so that I won't have to spend time on my knees in front of it looking for linens when I'm expecting guests. I worked on the pantry so I, well, could walk through it, to be honest.

I got rid of some random things, too. But, really, the way to get a usable result from a possession purge is to apply a little logic, do a little planning. I may do an annual purge."

Weeeeellll, that's not how things have been going this year. I definitely have just been scooping things up, and I think that's what my husband has been doing as well. Me, I've been picking up what I'm going to call "floaters"--things that were just lying around here and there through the house. If I was in the attic putting away suitcases, I would see something that hadn't been used in years and didn't work very well, anyway. An item that had been moved into the pantry months (a year?) ago to get it out of the way is now on the purge table. It's really going to be out of my way soon. Picking up one item to get out of here sometimes led to finding more.

It's been more random than last year. This probably says something about the state of my house and my mind recently.

Next week: The 2015 Purge Finale with a complete set of pictures.

Happy Kids Here, Happy Kids There

A few years back, G. P. Putnam's Sons published my book, Happy Kid!, about a boy who is reading a book called Happy Kid!: A Young Person's Guide to Satisfying Relationships and a Happy and Meaning-Filled Life! I'm sure you've all read and enjoyed it.

Last night I learned that PenguinRandom House has published The Happy Kid Handbook: How To Raise Joyful Children In A Stressful World.

The only connection is in my mind.

The Weekend Writer: What Do You Write?

I'm a big believer in writers knowing what they're doing. Early on, you really need to decide what you're writing. It's fine to "transcend" genres, break out of a genre, mash-up a couple of genres, or doing any number of things with a genre. But you need to know your genre in order to do any of those things.

Try to find what you're doing for work at Is It a Genre That Starts With F? Breaking Down Genres at Janice Hardy's Fiction University.

What Have You Been Doing This Week, Gail? Oct. 23rd Edition

Goal 1. Mummy Book. Okay. The first three chapters have been revised...again. I've even started Chapter Four. I'm hopeful that I have a new spin for the two main characters that will make the going faster now. Yeah. We'll see about that next Friday.

Goal 5. Community Building. I created a hashtag, #CTchildlit, and promoted it. And I got started on next month's Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar. 

Goal 5/7. Community Building/General Marketing. I spent 2 hours prepping just to do some preliminary "administrative" type work for a program I'm taking part in next month. I also worked on some light revising of my NaNoWriMo program, which I'll be presenting next Friday at an elementary school. On Monday I did some Twitter and Google+ responses.

#CTchildlit--Using Community To Promote

As part of my continuing community building obses--commitment, I have created and started using a hashtag--#CTchildlit. #CTchildlit is for discussing children's and YA author/illustrator appearances in Connecticut and publishing news for Connecticut children's and YA authors and illustrators.

Authors, illustrators, booksellers, librarians, bloggers, readers, and other people I haven't thought of can use this hashtag to help promote Connecticut children's/YA authors.

#CTchildlit could also make it possible for people in the Connecticut Children's literature community to become more aware of one another or even to get to know one another.

Time Management Tuesday: Prepping For National Novel Writing Month When You Write All Year Long

I took part in National Novel Writing Month back in, I believe, 2004. I had an exciting time and began an adult book that I think about and make notes for now and then. But then I thought, Hey, Gail. You are a so-called pro fessional writer, published and all that. You should be writing like this all the time, not just in November. So I didn't do it again.

Not that pro fessional, published writers can't take part in NaNoWriMo. A couple of well known children's lit writers of my acquaintance have announced on Facebook that they're taking part this year. And NaNoWriMo has such a pull. All the other kids are doing it. And a rough draft in 30 days!

But it isn't always convenient to do a traditional NaNoWriMo project, if you've been writing all year. I know, myself, I just finished a rough draft in August. That's not an ordeal I want to repeat so soon, when I have a second draft to do and a November event I'm attending that I need to psyche myself up for.

What if you're like me, but you feel bad about not being able to partake of the National Novel Writing Month fun?

Writer Jennifer Derrick can offer you options. In her blog post NaNoWriMo for Professional Writers she describes ways to turn National Novel Writing Month "into an event that benefits your writing career." They all involve using November for what I call a "set aside time" to do some kind of intense task.

It turns out, there are many things writers can do in a month-long binge that don't involve writing a book-length rough draft.

The October Purge

If you have been following the October Purge Chez Gauthier, here is your visual on where we stand as of today. We've got about a week and a half to go.

If You HAVE To Read A Truck Book

We recently had a weekend guest, one who is very fond of truck books. Trucks are not my favorite subject to read about. That's mainly because the truck books I've seen are usually about trucks as a subject. "Here's this kind of truck, that kind of truck. Oh, and look at the big tire!"

A trip to the library provided us with a couple of truck books more to my taste.

Five Trucks by Brian Floca involves, yeah, five trucks. "The first truck is large and heavy." There's your sentence for the first two-page spread. "The second truck is small and quick" is on the second. This appears to be a traditional truck book that just lists things about...trucks. However, all these trucks can be found at the same place--airports. The point, and the book does have one, is that all these trucks are necessary to support airplanes. The text doesn't come right out and tell us that, though. We have to work it out. That makes a truck book a lot less mind-nu--I mean, a lot more interesting.


My Truck is Stuck! by Kevin Lewis with illustrations by Daniel Kirk is a rhyming tale of a dog driver whose truck does, indeed, get stuck. He gets plenty of help from various other vehicles and their drivers. Nothing seems to work.

The beauty of this story is that it is a story in which a truck driver (even though he is a dog) has a goal and an experience. Before I got to the end, I was wondering, How will he get his truck unstuck?

The Weekend Writer: Why You Should Consider Writing Short Stories

How often do you hear people talk about wanting to write books? How often do you hear people talk about wanting to write short stories?  Suzannah Windsor Freeman explains why writers should be thinking about working in that shorter form in How to Get Your Short Stories Published in Lit Mags at Writer Unboxed.  The big point to consider: published short stories help to establish you as a writer.

A Few Added Thoughts About Writing Short Stories

• Don't think of short stories as short novels. They are a specific form of writing. Do yourself a favor and do some research.

• Don't expect short stories to be easier to write than novels. They are faster to write because they're shorter, but not easier.

• Don't 't expect short stories to be easy to sell.

 

Renewed Interest In Short Stories?

Now that I've covered the Debbie Downer stuff, here's something a little more promising: Short stories are supposed to be experiencing a resurgence. In the eighties and nineties we were seeing fewer of them being published in mainstream, nonliterary magazines, which meant fewer markets. That's probably still the case. However, there are enormous numbers of on-line publications now, some of them quite well-regarded, that are easily accessible to readers. Some of them even pay writers for their work. (Not all on-line publications do.) Additionally, I've read that readership for short stories is growing, possibly because readers feel pressed for time. Short stories are what they have time for.

What Did You Do Last Week, Gail? Oct. 16 Edition

Goal 1. Mummy Book. Why, I spent the week revising the first three pages of Chapter One, which I'd also revised last week. Thank you for asking. Yeah, you're right. I've got to get this one under control.

Goal 5. Community Building. I visited Sandra Horning at a public appearance. I also met with my writers' group this week. Some very good feedback led to the work I mentioned for Goal 1.

Goal 5/Goal 6. Community Building/General Marketing. That's what we'll call this. I do a read through for the NaNoWriMo presentations I'm doing at the end of the month. I want to do some tinkering with the text and replace one slide.

A Vacation Zombie Story

I had a little trouble sticking to A Girl of the Limberlost while I was on vacation, because I was also reading Dust & Decay by Jonathan Maberry. It's the second book in his Rot & Ruin series. I liked the first book, Rot & Ruin, for its western genre overtones and because it's one of the few apocalyptic novels I've read in which a second generation is fed up with the status quo and wants to move on.

While Rot & Ruin was a Wild West story with a lone lawman character, Dust & Decay is more of a lost in the Badlands tale. And, once again, the zombies are not the worst things main character Benny and his crowd have to contend with.

Thoughts on structure: Lots of point-of-view switches. As I've said before, I'm often bothered by point-of-view switches. They slow down narrative drive for me. That was not the case here. I noticed that many chapters were short, only a scene. I thought, Gee. Is this something I should try?

I got so into this book that while we were walking across the desert-like terrain of Dune National Lakeshore in Michigan, I kept wondering how the ol' zoms would fare there. Would that be a relatively safe place for humans? If the humans could stand it?

I was quite unhappy with how things turned out for one particular character who shall remain nameless. Yet, as a writer, a writer of books for young people, I think it was a very wise thing to have done.

So that was some good vacation reading. Good enough that when I got home, I picked up Flesh & Bone, Book 3. Now, Flesh & Bone would probably be considered a journey story, except that Benny and his guys are stopped dead in their tracks by post-apocalyptic religious creepies who are fighting among themselves. Our heroes are facing one disaster after another, all in the course of a day.

Interesting points: Fascinating thing the author did with that situation I was unhappy about in Book 2. Plus, Mayberry does a very good job with creating characters who are different from one another. Lilah and Riot, for instance. They could easily have ended up being mirror images. I realized while reading that Chong is truly different from Benny. All this is probably important to me because I just read a recent adult novel with a lot of buzz in which the three narrators sounded so much alike that I thought I was going to find out that they were all the same person.

Rot & Ruin is an excellent series for older, sophisticated teen readers. I say that not just because the books are grim, though they are, and I mean that in a positive way. They also don't deal with black-and-white situations. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the zombies are often not the worst things that have to be dealt with in this world. They're deadly, but in a benign way. The relationships between male and female characters aren't your traditional teen boy meets teen girl romances, either. These are people who are badly scarred by their experiences and have life-and-death issues they care about beyond who is going to end up with whom.

There appears to be only one more book in this series. I will, of course, be reading it.