A to Z: Zip Zap

Yes, with it being the end of the challenge I've run out of good ideas to post about. Then again this whole last week has been random. I was playing with the auto complete on my phone typing in letter combinations starting with z and seeing what it suggested. It did Zip which made me think of Zap. Now I have comic book images in my head, with all those great sound words. And pow, which also has an action element to it.

Not just comics, but sound descriptive words are fun in various other types of writing. Maybe a character has favorite ones, or maybe it helps emphasize a certain component within a scene.

Do you have any favorite sounding words? What about your characters? Have fun with the A to Z challenge? Hard to believe today is the last day. It feels like only yesterday when I was blogging about altruism, books, and culture.

Story a Day in May

I still have yet to write my Z post, but I wanted to take the time to let anyone know who may be interested about the Story a Day challenge over at Forward Motion for Writers. I decided this morning to join the challenge and while I'm going to try to write a story a day I'll probably end up writing 10 stories.

10 stories? The challenge originally started out as a story each day, but for the past few years (I'm not sure how long ago) different levels were added for people to aim for. There is the 10 story level, the 15 level, the 20 level, and the 31 stories level. The 31 level is there for those who do want to try for a story a day. Stories for the challenge need to have a minimum of 500 words and have a beginning/middle/end. A group of 5 drabbles can also count as a story. A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

The challenge also involves using various story/idea generators for most of the stories. There are a variety of generators linked in the challenge thread, and participants can keep playing with a generator until it sparks the muse. I have fun with the generators, it adds a nice little challenge to writing a story and it is a good push to write something different then I might have otherwise.

The challenge is only open to members of FM Writers, but anyone can join the forum. I've mentioned the forum in my R for resources post, there is plenty there for writers. Here is the thread with all the details about the challenge. This link will only work for people logged into the forum.

There, now off to write my Z post, visit back people who have stopped by here, and check out some more A to Z bloggers.

A to Z: Yoga

Short post for today, and a bit of a revisit topic wise. Yoga. Exercise with focus on controlling the mind and body. I also like to think about the stretching and balancing aspects of it. For me my favorite part of yoga is striking a pose and feeling myself balance and my muscles stretching.

What do your characters do for fitness and to unwind? What about your favorite exercises?

A to Z: X =10

Yes, I had no idea what to write for today's letter. X is very tricky like that. And it doesn't help that everything that first came to mind was only X sounding, not actually starting with the letter (exciting). I even pulled out a dictionary, which had only one page for the letter X.

Nothing really struck me for a post topic until I read through the X definition. Webster's 2 mentions that X is the Roman numeral for 10. I like numbers and all, plus 10 has a nice metric vibe to it so I figured what the heck.

Which of course got me thinking about years. Awhile back I put together a 10 year plan for myself in MS Project. The main goal being to have several finished novels. I set a specific length of time for first drafts and revisions, and research, having one task lead into the next. Unfortunately I got behind in my writing which threw the whole thing off. For now I'm going to concentrate on revising one of my current drafts and seeing how long a revision pass takes me. Then maybe I'll revise my 10 year plan.

If you asked them, where would your characters see themselves in 10 years time? What do you have in mind for them in said time. And what about you? Any hopes, dreams, goals, of where you would like to be in the next 10 years? For me I'd love to be a published novelist, with several novels out. I'm not sure what else right now.

A to Z: Wii

Today's post is about the Wii, from Nintendo. My husband and I bought one used from a friend about a year ago and I love it. One of the games we got is the Wii Fit plus which I've been using on and off since last Memorial day (end of May for the non US folks). I particularly enjoy doing the yoga poses along with some of the strength training, balance games, and aerobics. They also have a Fit Plus category which has rhythm Kung fu. After a day in the office it is nice to come home and get in a half hour of exercise.

Mario cart for the Wii is also fun. I'll admit I get the music from the various race tracks stuck in my head. I usually race as Peach with her wild wing car.

What kinds of games (electronic or otherwise) do your characters enjoy? What sorts of games do you like. Heck, I have favorite board games I could blog about sometime.

A to Z: Victory!

Now that we are in the home stretch of the challenge I thought victory would be a fun post topic.

Victory can be seen in multiple ways. It can be winning the big game, or it can be a more personal victory like a newly achieved goal. And there are even victory dances.

What have your characters done that they would consider a victory? Would other characters see it as such?

And with the challenge what victories have you had? For me I've met some great people and I've also been blogging regularly for a few weeks now.

A to Z: Utopia

This is going to be more of a random week for post topics. While I have been coming up with some topics on they go here I've at least had some ideas ahead of time for possible topics. Though for this week all the letters in my notebook are blank. And I don't have as much time as I'd like to research topics.

So I'm going with whatever pops into my head, and today's U post is for utopia. Basically utopia is an ideal community or society, but if you think about it that can mean different things for different people. In fiction we tend to steer away from a utopian society because there needs to be conflict to help drive the story forward. Sure, sometimes a world might look utopian at first glance, but as you get into the story more you can see the little negatives piling up and realize what the characters are up against.

I was out at my mom's house for Easter yesterday, and my husband and I drove along Lake Erie on the way out (and back) to see her. Since husband was driving I got to take my time and gaze across the lake. Looking directly across the water there is a little ribbon of land where water meets sky; Canada. And looking diagonally the city of Buffalo is visible. Buffalo was cool in the day, but when we drove home at night It was all lights against the inky black sky and lake. I had some fun letting my imagination ponder over the scene and how it could fit into various world setups. Without much of the landscape to frame the buildings those lights could have been of any future/past city in any sort of world.

So what types of things would your character want to see in a utopia? What 'tweaks' on utopia do you like to write into your books or read in other books?

A to Z: Trixie Toby and Maya

T is for cat? I wanted to do something random today and I remembered how Julie had done her pets' names to match the letter of the day. Seeing as how I have two T-kitties I figured I could post about my cats today. Plus Maya is a tabby cat so I can sneak her into the post.

This is Trixie, my husband and I brought her home from the local shelter shortly after we got married. She's been my pal ever since. This is my lap cat, the cat who loves to get attention all the time, and who still likes to chase the string. She's 9 years old and still fairly active.

She likes to greet us on weekend mornings. She'll wander into the bedroom and crawl all over us, then she'll nudge my face to get me to pet her. 

Toby came to us from family and he's quite happy here with us. He loves my husband and I though he's not to fond of Trixie. The two of them are still vying for top cat position.

He does have a bad habit of stealing spots. He waits until one of us gets up of the sofa then will jump right into the recently vacated spot and make himself comfortable. In this picture he's in my spot on the sofa, that's my lap blanket he's up against.

And Maya, the tabby cat. She's not just a tabby, but she's a ticked-tabby. Basically her individual hairs have bands of color on them. She also has ghost stripes on her torso. Depending on the light her stripes down her torso are easier or harder to see. Her leg and tail stripes are always visible. And her fur is incredibly soft, it feels like silk. Her fur also has a downy quality to it, when I give her a bath the water beads up on her and rolls off. It takes awhile to work water into her fur so I can then lather her up.

This is our plays with water cat. She loves to drop toys in the water dish, sometimes getting water on the floor in the process. I had to take away their knit toy because it would wick all the water out of the dish.

A to Z: Senses

Senses. How the stimuli in the environment around us are perceived. Our internal connection with the outside world. The usual five come easily to mind; sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. These are common place enough that people sometimes talk about the sixth sense as that beyond normal human perception.

But there are more then five senses that us humans have, even if we are not aware of them at the same level as the traditional five. These other senses include proprioception, pain, and balance amongst others.

Proprioception is our body's way of determining location of our body parts relative to other parts and objects around us. This is what tells us that our arm is resting against a surface, perhaps the arm rest of an easy chair. This is something that we can notice the absence of. When I was younger I used to toss and turn at night, and there were a few times I had pinched a nerve in my arm. With me having been asleep it was past the point of simple tingling that usually happens. I couldn't feel my arm at all, and I didn't know where it was because the nerves in said arm weren't communicating that information back. I had to find that arm with my other arm, and once I massaged the feeling back in it was fine. But it was the weirdest sensation to not know where a limb was.

Balance is something else that we normally aren't aware of but can be. Most of the time our body simply uses that information to make adjustments to our movements/position without us having to think about it. For me I became more aware of balance when I took ballet lessons. When we would be doing various dance steps we had to find our center of balance, the point at which we wouldn't fall over one way or the other. With making a point of concentrating on that I could feel the point at which I was centered. I have that same feeling now when I do yoga on the Wii. With the different poses I have to make different adjustments to find that center of balance. (Yes, I love doing yoga)

I could talk about pain, but I'm sure people are more familiar with that then the other two I discussed. Plus to I don't want to make this post to long. I think senses are interesting when applied to characters. How would your character react to the sudden loss or impairment of a sense? Or what if one of their senses is stronger than normal? Which senses provide information they are more likely to remember? Do they picture that scene from the trip to the mountains, or do they have an auditory memory of the birds singing in the woods? Or perhaps they can still taste that stew they had the other night.

A to Z: Resources

I thought that I would take a brief break from the psychology topics to have a more writing related post. This is a listing of some handy resources I've picked up along the way.

Forward Motion for Writers - This is a community site for writers aiming for publication. I've been a member for a few years now and I adore the community of the site. There are a variety of areas to participate in, from weekend challenges, yearly word count/edit marathons, writing related dares, daily/yearly writing goals, and more.

Holly Lisle's Shop - She has some very useful e-books for writers, at reasonable prices. I've bought different titles from here over the years, some of which I've read on my PC, others I had put on my Palm. My favorites are the clinic series (Create a Character Clinic), the 33 mistakes series, and Lazette Gifford's 2 year novel series (I have book 1).

Unrestricted Stock Photography/art - This is a listing of stock art accounts on DeviantArt that allow unrestricted use of their stock (see the rules on the page). They can be handy for sprucing up a blog, making a scene from a novel, visualizing your characters. They are commonly used for photo manipulation, and other visual art references.

Database Stuff: I've been working on an Access database over the years for my writing, and I have an empty version of the file that I might share out at some point if anyone is interested. I does require having the MS Access program. I started the database before I had Access 2007, so some of the forms and report formatting is a bit off. I'd want to clean it out before sharing.

I'm also open to discussing database design, so maybe some of the ideas I've had might help others in organizing their writing stuff. My current database is for top level data on a variety of areas. For example I can enter in all my characters names, personality type, goal (in 255 characters or less), who they are related to, ect. But for more extensive notes I still use Word.

With databases the actual data is stored in tables. Access is a relational database, so data in one table can be used along with data in other tables. These are the tables in my database:
Agents, Characters, Goals (my writing goals), Markets, Progress, Series, Submissions (what work was sent to which agent when), and Works.