~Keep Going!

by Rebekah // March 30, 2012 // 4 Comments

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I’ve been working on Grandmother’s Letters a lot this month. Not as much as I planned, but I have been writing.

In the past month I have written about a hundred pages of my book, not counting the countless sheets I wrote and then promptly tore up. The problem is, at the beginning of this month, I probably thought that I had about 100, maybe 125 pages left until completion. Grandmother’s Letters would be easy to finish once I got myself to focus. I was wrong.

Now that I’ve written all these pages, I’ve discovered that I have at least that many to go, in order to finish this off properly! That’s what I’m thinking at least. I was wrong last time, so we’ll see. I have so many threads that need to be tied up and I’m still in the heart of parts of the story. Needless to say, this book is not likely to be finished by the end of tomorrow. Soon I hope, but not that soon.

In other news, I really need to start coming up with a few chapter titles. The last few that I’ve written are blank.

Better get back to my book… Hopefully I’ll have a longer, more interesting post on Monday. Do you title your individual chapters? Do you find it easy or difficult?

To the KING be all the glory!

~Pens, Paper and Computers

by Rebekah // March 21, 2012 // 4 Comments

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I know that it’s Wednesday, which means I should be posting a book review. Since, however, my last post was a book review, I think I’ll wait until next week.

Blogging. I used to be able to blog very easily. I had more post ideas than I could ever keep up with. If I had stuck to it, I could have posted every day, probably more than once a day. Now, I get ideas, but when I sit down to type them up, I freeze and go blank. I can’t think of anything to write. One word may pop up, then I have nothing to follow up with.

It took me awhile, but I finally figured out what I changed, and why things got a bit difficult. (Because I really do enjoy blogging!) It has to do with one little word I wrote in the last paragraph; “type”.

When I write my books, poems, etc. I almost always do them by hand. When I participated in Perry’s scribble fest, I actually typed for ten minutes, but when I went to finish the story that I began, I printed it out and wrote it in my notebook. I’ve tried working on my books in a Word document, but I almost never get very far. It’s not because I don’t type fast enough either – I can type very fast! Something about looking at the screen though, just seems to send my brain into the desert!

When I’m writing often, I go through tons of paper! In fact, I probably use twice as much lined paper, as all of my family combined. That and pens. I love pens. Pencils are good for journaling and timelines (that way I can erase, instead of start over!) but pens are my favorite to write with! I like the look of the ink on the paper, the smooth glide of the pen as I form my letters, the smell of the paper and the ink combined, as well as the feel as my hand slides across the sheet.

All of this is lacking when I type, so maybe it has something to do with it. I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with the bright light in my face whenever I’m looking at the computer screen. Maybe it’s the little blinking line at the end of every sentence or word, that seems to be saying, “Come on, come on! Hurry up and finish! Do something! I don’t like waiting around!” I’m fine when it comes to editing as I type out my first draft. I can add or remove as I go, with no problems. It’s the first draft that I have problems with, unless I write it by hand.

What does all of this have to do with blogging? I realized that I used to treat my posts like all of my other writing. I wrote them by hand a day or two ahead of time, then I typed them out and posted them. I don’t know exactly when I stopped, but now, I tend to try typing them up on the day of the post, with no handwritten draft. So, with the exception of my book reviews, I’m going to get out my notebook and try handwriting my posts again. I think this will be fun…

To the KING be all the glory!

~ A Random Post of Paragraphs…

by Rebekah // March 9, 2012 // 1 Comment

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I’ve been particularly uninspired in the posting department this morning. I can’t seem to think up a good and coherent post for the day.

I was busy this week, so I didn’t get a chance to write Wednesday’s book review. I’m planning one of For Keeps, the second in the Aggie series, next week. I already have the picture for the post, I just need to write the post. I even know what the next weeks review is supposed to be. LORD willing, I’ll have both of those written in time.

I really need to re-design my blog. Hearts were fine for February, but I’m ready to change it. This time though, I think I want to stick to it for a few months. Maybe I’ll try to come up with something that looks good for Spring, that could go into Summer if I want it too. That or something that looks very literary. I haven’t decided yet, but hopefully it will be done in the next week or two.

Grandmother’s Letters is coming along well, if a little slowly. My sisters seem to be enjoying the story though, and that’s a good thing. I have no idea how many words I have written, since I handwrite every thing, and I haven’t gotten around to typing it out yet, but I know that it’s at least 20 pages. Which means, it will probably be 10 when I type it out, because of the paper I’m using right now.

I just finished reading The Heavens Declare by Perry Elizabeth and I think I’m going to read Emma by Jane Austen next. I had started it last year, but I got interrupted part way through, and now I think I’ll just start it over. It’s been a long time since I read a complete Austen novel. I’m not sure what else I’m reading, besides my Bible right now… I probably ought to change that.

I’ve got a couple of other writing related projects in the works, but we’ll see how they go, before I really post about them. Hopefully one of them will be completed this month though. I also need to finish the editing of A Year with the Potters. A few more hours should suffice on that.

That’s all for now, I suppose!

To the KING be all the glory!

~Date and Time

by Rebekah // March 5, 2012 // 6 Comments

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I haven’t ever used timelines in my writing, besides what I had in my head. I completely relied on my memory to make sure that I put everything in its proper place, without even bothering to remember what year some of my books were set in! Not smart.

Several of my books are interconnected. Though not a series, the characters from several books live in the same area of the United States. Occasionally too, a main character from one book, will have a small part in another tale, as long as I can justify why they are there. I have been working on these books since I was about 16, maybe 17, (I did plenty of writing before that time, most of it isn’t worth reading though!) but only recently did I begin to do any written timeline work. That’s when I began to see some problems…

Grandmother’s Letters is my current most active project. I have set a deadline to complete a draft of it by the end of this month. During all of my re-reading and partial reworking of the first half of the book, I started noticing a few mistakes… The first was in a scene where Louise, one of my main characters, finds an old wedding dress. In that scene I marked the wedding dress to be at least 175 years old. There’s nothing wrong with that… until I double checked my math and figured out the year that the dress would have been made. Somehow I managed to be more than 25 years off track! The dress wasn’t quite 150 years old!

That was only the beginning. I have a scene where a character from one of my other books, Christine, makes a short, but needed appearance. When the young man comes on the scene, he is between the ages of 21-22 years old. The problem? When I compared dates with his book, I realized that I was 3 years off! However, if I simply changed the age of the young man, it completely ruined the scene, since certain events in his life had to be passed, before he could do what he did in Grandmother’s Letters. Now, Christine does need a major amount of editing and possibly a re-write in several areas, so I considered simply pushing back the date, but I couldn’t push back the date, unless I did the same thing to yet another book, because then, I would have a death in the wrong place. After looking at the books though, rearranging a few things and changing a birthday of one of my characters, I think I have it figured out. A Year with the Potters and Christine have been pushed back by about three years, and though it will take some re-writing, especially on the part of Christine, it will be much easier than altering Grandmother’s Letters and everything should flow in harmony again.

What’s more, I learned my lesson that timelines are important, at least for me. I have a written timeline for Grandmother’s Letters in good and working order now. I’m also working on one for my books as a whole, that way I can keep from mixing up the dates of my character’s major life events.

So, my question for my readers: do you use timelines? Do you write them down, or do you just go off your memory?

To the KING be all the glory!

~ Treasure Hunts and Maps

by Rebekah // February 24, 2012 // 3 Comments

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For the last couple of weeks now, I have been faithfully working to finish the rewrite of Grandmother’s Letters and get myself sufficiently reacquainted with the story to finish it. The book is only about half way done. I thought I was a little closer to the ending than I really am.

Part of the story focuses around a treasure hunt. Right now I have at least three people on the search, two of which are working together. Unlike most treasure hunts though, there isn’t really anywhere to start. The two girls who have begun to search, keep trying to chase down leads, mostly to no avail. They know who the treasure belonged to, they know what it is supposed to consist of, they simply aren’t sure why it disappeared or where it went!

As Louise and Priscilla search around the town of Halcer, I suddenly realized that though I have several books set in the same area, featuring the same town, I really haven’t explored much of it. I mean I “know” what Halcer looks like; but I’m not really acquainted with it enough to keep myself from making terrible mistakes. Like where I put two different families on the same side of town and then mentioned, more than once, how long the drive between them was. That was a problem. So, I started mapping. I mapped out nearly the entire town of Evergreen for 24 Days Before Christmas, but since Halcer is much bigger than Evergreen, I’m only doing sections of it. At least at this point. Most of my characters don’t actually live in Halcer in this book, they’re just visiting a lot and mostly in one section of town.

My maps are nothing fancy at all. In fact, they probably look kind of silly, but they are helping me to keep things straight and I’m really enjoying the experience of drawing them out! Naming streets is perhaps the most difficult… well naming anything is pretty difficult for me, unless it’s a characters first name. I do like the names I’ve managed to come up with! The “houses” look completely fake and the patch of palm trees is just a section of circles, but at least I have a better idea of the area now!

Now, if I could just figure out the street names for Arborville, I would actually know exactly where the rest of my characters live! Oh! and many thanks to Aubrey and Mrs. Havig for inspiring me by their posts, to get to know the “world” around my characters better! :)

To the KING be all the glory!