Even better than sneaking some of the ice cream?

Blaming it on the dark side.

He’s currently back in the freezer (the nights on Hoth are terrible cold – hopefully he can cozy up to a Tauntaun — for example, the one in the popsicles (cough cough)). Laura doesn’t know yet – So don’t tell!

Sylvie, in her infinite 3-year-old wisdom, found this at a rummage sale.

Ever since, it’s taunted me, calling out in its helium voice: “Are you ready to become a smart writer?” Apparently my plodderly, non-smart-writer-footfalls shakes it into sudden, optimistic action. It wants to save me. It wants to pump me up.

Link to file if it doesn’t play
Go head, play it a couple of times. Now a couple of more. Now imagine you’re up in the dark of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell to resolve the inverted convolution that is your plot. That snarled, brambly, thorny patch of chaos? Yes, that one. The cat wants out, the cat wants in, the coffee maker is slowly leaking, and this guy, this guy is asking you if you’re ready to become a smart writer. Well, are you?

Here’s a close-up of his face.

You can tell by his coked-up eyes, he’s quite confident in his own writing ability. He just wants to help you with yours. On the bright side, there’s a button on the gizmo that I’ll be using to write my next book, or possibly I’ll use one of the others to create a smart doodle or a smart shape. The future is mine!

That’s all.

Laura and I are both working on new books and last weekend we put all our our scenes onto post-it notes and stuck them to the wall.

I saw Diana Rowland do this at the Rio Hondo Writer’s Workshop. While hers had way more zombies in it than both our novels put together, it was a very fun exercise. Though made significantly less fun by the fact that no one was eating anyone else’s brain.

Laura’s (and Laura) is on the right. Orange bits represent unwritten scenes — she’s pointing out her strategery here. (you can click the picture to see it larger, but not really large enough to read the text.)

Mine is all in rows on the left, with just those last four pink squares at the end signifying unwritten scenes. Quite by chance our books are at about the same place — just a few short steps away from completed first draft. At one hopeful, innocent moment long ago I thought perhaps that I’d only need a few edit-passes through before completion. Since then, and mid-way through the book, I radically changed what the book was about, so, well, I suppose you could say I’m a lot less innocent now.

I’m not yet sure what I’ve learned from the exercise yet except that Post-it notes make terribly garish wallpaper, and that whenever I enter the room I feel how my book looms there brightly-colored and ominous. Though I do revisit the wall now and then and move the papers around, and then move them back. So I got that going for me.