Tag Archives: paranormal romance

Set a Goal You Can’t Miss

Once again for my ROW80 update, I have to report that I fell short of my goals. I’ve seen a lot of this with NaNoWriMo, too. And of course, we hear other people besides writers, having to-do lists and goals they can’t possibly accomplish in the time allotted.

I didn’t think my goals were unreasonable when I initially set them, yet I feel like I worked the past three days on this revision, and I still didn’t quite get through as much as I wanted. I got through Chapters 15 and 16, and almost got Chapter 17 revised – then I found one more scene, one that had been moved from earlier in the chapter. I also ran into a plot point that won’t work the way I wrote it, so I need to come up with something else. And the type-in? Stop laughing.

So this week, I want to set goals the Writers’ Boot Camp way. But the principle doesn’t just apply to writing, we can apply it to any big task. Writers’ Boot Camp is a workshop taught by author and former Army Ranger Todd Stone, and if you’re a writer and have the chance to take it, do it! He may even show up to teach the workshop in a camouflage kilt. 😀

Anyway, he started out the workshop talking about goals. Usually, we’re encouraged to set goals that are attainable, but not necessarily easily. Stone takes the opposite approach: he suggests setting a goal so low, you can’t help but make it! Here were the examples he gave:

Can you write a page a day? If you’re not sure, how about a paragraph? Or even a sentence???

Yes, that small. The thing is, we usually are able to go much further – so we get more done, AND we have that sense of accomplishment in saying Yes! I met my goal!

This could easily be applied to decluttering, getting your house in order, or working on a big project of another sort.

So I am going to set a small goal this week. I just can’t bring myself to say I’ll only revise one page, so I’ll go for that last remaining scene of Chapter 17, and the type-in of Chapter One.

How are you doing on your goals, whatever they may be? Have you ever tried this tactic? How did it work for you?

My Town Monday: Dayton’s Feast of Giving

EDITED Monday, October 22, 2012: This blog post is now nearly a year old. I have nothing to do with this event; this post is just an informational article sharing about something cool that happens in Dayton. If you want to volunteer for the Feast, or otherwise want more information, do not email me – I don’t have the answers you’re looking for. I’m guessing you found this blog post through a Google search, so I suggest you try some of the other links that you found while searching. Thank you!

Sometimes, things happen in Dayton that restore our faith in the human race.

One of those is the Feast of Giving.

Now in its third year, the Feast of Giving is a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner – turkey with all the trimmings – held at the Dayton Convention Center, for FREE. Although some people emphasize those who have financial need, or those who have no one to spend the holiday with, all are welcome. The event’s sponsors stress that they want  “people from all walks of life to attend.” The primary sponsors are area businesses, including ABC 22 & Fox 45 Dayton’s News Source, Dermatologists of Southwest Ohio and Lastar Inc., manufacturer of low-voltage cabling and the parent company of Cables to Go.

Volunteers at last year’s Feast of Giving

Donations are accepted from others as well; click on the Dayton’s News Source link for donation information. Over 3,500 people attend the event each year, and many people volunteer to help. Volunteers are capped at 500, and every year, several times that offer to volunteer. As many as 2,000 would-be volunteers have been turned away in the past, by the Feast and its predecessor.

While the Feast of Giving is only in its third year, it follows a long tradition started in 1969 by Arthur Beerman, founder of Elder-Beerman stores. Mr. Beerman had suffered a heart attack earlier that year. While hospitalized, he received hundreds of get-well cards. After he returned home, he started the dinner  “to thank the good Lord for letting me get home for Thanksgiving,” and also to give back to the community that had been so good to him. He died the following year, but his family and the Beerman Foundation continued to host the event every year until 2009. According to the Dayton Daily News, “The annual Thanksgiving dinner was believed to be the largest of its kind in the nation having served an average of 4,000 turkey dinners per year.” In 2009, the Foundation’s board announced that they would not be hosting the Thanksgiving Dinner, as they had determined that its funds would be more effectively spent on charities and programs with a broader scope.  That year, the above sponsors combined their funds and efforts to keep the tradition alive with the first Feast of Giving.

The Feast of Giving will be held from 11 – 2, and tickets are not required. The convention center is offering free parking, and Dayton RTA offers free bus service to and from the event.

The 2010 Feast of Giving

I’m blessed to have family in the area, and someone has always been able to host (this year, me), so I have never attended the Feast of Giving or the Beerman Thanksgiving Dinner. But it’s cool to think that the biggest event of its kind is right here, every year, for anyone who wants to go. If you live in the area, have you ever attended? If you don’t live around here, does your community offer anything like it?

Photos via the Feast of Giving page on Facebook

More at the My Town Monday blog

ROW80: But it’s Hard!

I’ve noticed something with my high-school-age daughter, that she’s done for a long time. When she has a tough assignment, whether it’s homework, or a big chore (like clean up her room), she tends to goof off even more. The homework doesn’t get done, and the room never gets cleaned. She’s a super-smart kid. Homework usually comes easily to her. Keeping her room clean should be easy, but instead of picking up and putting away as she goes, she lets stuff pile up until it becomes overwhelming.

And by that point, she doesn’t want to do it. Because it’s hard!

Revisions continue to go slowly. In trying to figure out why, it’s pretty obvious: I keep running up against big plot holes that don’t have an obvious solution, and instead of just doing something about it, I go do something else, like play computer games.

Because it’s hard!

I do the same thing with a sticky revision as my daughter does with homework or a chore that’s not easy.

So that’s my reason, not excuse, for not meeting my ROW80 goals for Yet. Another. Week. I realize I probably have to just power through this stuff and I tried a couple times this week, but the powering-through doesn’t happen quickly. My muses take their good ol’ time handing me solutions to this type of problem and in the meantime, I go play another round of My Farm Life. Sigh. Or this week, I go work on a website I volunteered to do for a promo group I’m in. Either way, the revisions are not coming along as quickly as I’d like.

Sometimes I ask myself Twenty Questions, or rather, Twenty Answers, to the question, “what could happen here?” I get all the mundane, overused, and just plain stupid ones out of the way, and by the time I’ve come up with twenty things, I’ve usually come up with something good.

Other times, it’s just resistance to making a Big Change that’s going to take a lot of work. That’s where I’m at now, in Chapter 15. What’s funny is I checked my spam queue right before I started this post, and found my first, legitimate, not-spam comment in it, from a fellow Row80-er who was having this very problem! So it’s time to take her advice and just make the big change. It’s not even as big as the one she’s been dealing with.

As for my specific goals, I did get Chapter 13 and 14 revised, and there were plenty of those PITA issues in them as well.

For this week, I want to get 15-17 revised. Ideally, I’d also like to get the type-in done for the book so far, and get it out to the beta readers. I’m hosting Thanksgiving, so that’s a day I won’t get any writing done, but I’m blessed to have all my family nearby (which means no overnight houseguests or travel), and my husband also helps. I also have Wednesday and Friday off work, so that should make up for it.

Do you have any suggestions on tackling a Big, PITA Change? Or for figuring out a show-stopper plot hole? How did you do on your goals this week?

Time Management Tip: Make a big task fit your life, rather than the other way around

NaNoWriMo Winner 2009We’re over halfway through this year’s NaNoWriMo, so if you’re hoping to pound out a 50,000-word novel this month, you should have over 25,000 words written. I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo this year, because I’m knee-deep in revisions for my upcoming time travel romance, Time’s Fugitive, which is due for release in late December. NaNo is for writing new pages, and requires a new project, and only once have I been at the right stage in my writing to attempt it. That was in 2009, and I won!

I have a couple of tips that greatly helped me to win NaNo in 2009. I even finished a day early! And this isn’t just for writers participating in the craziness that is writing an entire, 50,000-word novel in a month; this can apply to any big task that could take a month or more, like decluttering a room.

The thing to remember is that you should plan your NaNo writing time to fit into the rest of your life, if at all possible, rather than trying to make the rest of your life fit NaNoWriMo. This is even more important if you have a full time job and a family who is unwilling to be pushed aside for a month while you write. But with these two simple tricks, you won’t need to do that, and your family hopefully won’t grow to resent your writing by November 30. Here they are:

  1. Whoever left these probably got caught in the rain!

    Divide up the task by the time you have to accomplish it. For NaNoWriMo, dividing 50,000 words into thirty days means write 1,667 words a day. But wait! Do you really have the same amount of time to devote to writing every day of the week? I think most of us have certain commitments – kids’ sporting events, household chores, social obligations – that greatly reduce, or even eliminate, time to write at least one evening a week. On the other hand, you probably have other days where you have more time. For many of us, that’s the weekend. So set daily goals in accordance with those other obligations – a higher word count on the days where there’s more time to write, and a lower word count on the days we know will be full.

  2. I alluded to the other tip in my Not Enough Time post: Give yourself one day off per week. Even if you don’t have any days you think are crammed full, this allows for the unexpected. Our best-laid plans often fall by the wayside thanks to the Unexpectedness Monster – surprise visitors one evening, the kitchen sink develops a leak the next, the project you thought would be easy takes ten times as much time as you estimated. So reduce your stress and plan for the unexpected! If you’re lucky, this will work like taking an umbrella somewhere: if you take it, it doesn’t rain; forget the umbrella, and get caught in a downpour.

So with the above in mind, re-divvy up your daily and weekly goals. I wrote 12,000 words/week for NaNoWriMo 2009: 1,500 words a day, four days a week, and 3,000 words each on Saturday and Sunday. My day off was usually Monday, an evening I typically have a lot of household chores. Sometimes I managed to fit 500 words or so in on Monday, which made it a little easier if I had another busy day later that week. November 29th was a Sunday that year, so I wrote my last 2,000 words and put myself down for a Win a day early!

Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? If so, how are you coming along? Either way, got any tips to get this big task – or any other – done and still be sane at the end of the month?

Umbrella photo via Wikipedia, public domain

ROW80: Need Headphones

On Sunday, I got the troublesome scene that needed to be inserted, written. Monday is paperwork day, so no writing then, but that was expected. Today I got a little done on the rewrite on the following scene, but had to stop before I finished it.

It’s the husband’s TV night, and the only way I get writing done then is with headphones. Only problem is, my headphones are wireless – and they needed to be charged. They can’t be used while charging, so…. no headphones. I could have taken my netbook and gotten the writing done elsewhere; instead, I got caught up on other related activities, including one I’d put off for a long time.

I just uploaded the files for Time’s Enemy to Lightning Source for additional ebook distribution. They distribute to over two dozen outlets, including Kobo and Powell’s. So, more places to buy the book = better. I may not sell anything through those outlets. But who knows, maybe I will. And hey, it’s free, since I use Lightning Source for my print books.

So I may not be where I wanted to be with the writing, but I got other stuff done. Lesson Learned: charge the headphones before the battery runs out.

How are you doing on your goals this week?

My Town Monday: Castles in Ohio? Why, Yes!

Or, Caves, Castles and Camaros, Part Two

Camaros grace the lawn at Mac-o-cheek Castle

For the second leg of last month’s Fall Foliage Cruise, sixteen Camaros (and one Saturn Sky) stopped at Mac-o-cheek Castle in Logan County.

I had no idea this place existed.

To be sure, it’s not a “castle” like we associate with in Europe and the UK. Mac-o-cheek (and its neighbor, Mac-o-chee) are more like large estate homes, more in the vein of Casa Loma in Toronto. Neither of these is as big as Casa Loma, but they are older.

Mac-o-cheek Castle

The two castles were built by brothers Abram and Donn Piatt, in the 1860s-70s. Mac-o-cheek Castle was Abram’s, and is the smaller of the two. It was also completed first, and its ownership has stayed in the family since.

What’s really impressive about Mac-o-cheek Castle is the interior. The walls are covered in beautiful wood paneling from native trees, and trimmed by artful scrollwork. All of the furniture inside was actually used by the Piatt family.

Neither of the Piatt brothers had the intention of opening his home to the public, but people were continually stopping by and asking to see. Unwilling to be rude, the family admitted the tourists. This went on beyond the turn of the century, until weary of the intrusions, the families decided to charge admission, thinking it would discourage would-be visitors. Instead, it had the opposite effect.

Elaborate woodwork graces the interior of Mac-o-cheek Castle

Still offering tours, the Piatt family occupied Mac-o-cheek until 1989, moving first into the back rooms of the house, and later into the servants’ quarters. After that, the tours continued, along with ongoing restoration work.

Mac-o-chee Castle sits a little less than a mile away, and was built by Donn Piatt, the elder of the brothers. Mac-o-chee is the larger and more elaborate of the two homes, but is not as well-preserved. Unlike its neighbor, Mac-o-chee was sold out of the family around the turn of the century. Three owners and six decades later, Piatt descendants regained ownership of the home, but it had suffered a good deal of damage in the interim.

Sixteen Camaros parked outside Mac-o-chee Castle enhance the property's beauty

Like Mac-o-cheek, Mac-o-chee is filled with beautifully-crafted woodwork. It also boasts painted ceilings reminiscent of those found in the great castles of Europe. Sadly, the majority are not in good condition, and due to the sales, the antique furniture inside is also not original to the property.

Both properties are well worth the price of admission, which is $12 per castle, or $20 for both. Children get an additional discount, as do groups of 20 or more with reservations. So if you’re in the area and are looking for a day trip, consider the castles! As for the sixteen Camaros and their occupants, a good time was had by all.

Did you know there was anything like this in Ohio? What about where you live?

ROW80: Making it a Book You Want to Read

I am late posting today’s ROW80 update because, well, there isn’t much to update. After the early part of the week’s quick success getting Chapter 12 marked up, things slowed down. A lot. In revising Chapter 13, I ran into a bottleneck. One new scene needed to be added, but before I could write it, I needed to firm up the characters’ motivations for doing the (otherwise stupid) things they were doing. That took a while. I also forgot to take into account that yesterday was RWA chapter meeting day, and for me, that’s a good 6-7 hour chunk of time, including the drive to and from which is an hour each way.

I got about half of the new scene written yesterday, and finished it up today. I still need to write a new beginning to the following scene, needed due to the prior new scene, and the aforementioned character motivations.

So, less progress than I would have liked. I’m not making excuses, but here are the reasons:

  • Failure to take other time commitments into account
  • Failure to gauge the difficulty (and time requirements) of the task
  • Time spent playing video games when the plot solutions weren’t forthcoming

The reason for all this? As I told one reader who didn’t want to wait until December for Time’s Fugitive: “Believe me, you don’t want to read this book now. It’s full of plot holes, confusion, and characters doing stupid things. I’m making it into a book you will want to read.” Hopefully!

For this week, I’d like to get revised through Chapter 15. I’m hesitant to commit to that, as both 14 and 15 are going to require a lot of work. But I’m through the block on 13, and think the rest of it won’t be too bad. So just that and 14 doesn’t seem like quite enough. Also, I don’t have a ton of other stuff going on this week, so… maybe!

Do you find yourself setting goals without taking other commitments and the difficult of the task into account? How does it work out for you?

With Honor and Appreciation

Col. Wilcox with his wife and daughter, following the end of WWII

Tomorrow is Veterans Day in the U.S. Originally called Armistice Day to celebrate victory in WWI, the holiday was declared by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, in remembrance of those who made the ultimate sacrifice during that war. It was later expanded to include all veterans, including those who served and survived.

I’d like to honor one of the latter, the late Colonel Robert E. Wilcox, my husband’s grandfather. Col. Wilcox was the highly decorated pilot of a B-29 bomber, and served in Army Air Corps during WWII, and later in the U.S. Air Force in the Korean conflict.

He was a two-time POW. The first time, he was held in northern Japan in a concentration camp, and wasn’t released until Japan’s defeat. He’d been presumed dead for nearly a year by then – the military already had a headstone made for him and planned for placement in Arlington Cemetery. It was due to the efforts of the Red Cross that he was rescued at the war’s end, and this was something he never forgot. One of his hands was broken in multiple places, and he also credited the Red Cross for getting him prompt medical attention and for arranging multiple, complex (for the time) surgeries that restored to him the full use of his hand.

Despite his harrowing experience, he went on to serve in Korea a few years later, and again was taken prisoner.

Colonel Wilcox’s accomplishments were many. The medals shown here recognize some of the missions and campaigns he served in during both wars. The Purple Heart was, of course, for the wounds he suffered while a prisoner of war. The medal on the upper right states was “Awarded for Honorable Service while a Prisoner of War, for the United States of America.” He also was recognized for completing 25 missions as a bomber pilot, denoted by the medal in the center on the top row. The lower center medal is for “Service in Defense of the Principles of the Charter of the United Nations” during his service in Korea.

He also was awarded the Bronze Star and Silver Star.

Grandpa never talked about these awards, or his time in the military. Despite his achievements and service, he always seemed to regard it as a duty, simply something one did.

He always kept busy. After he retired from the Air Force after 20 years of service, he went to work as an electrical engineer for NCR, until his retirement from there 25 years later. Throughout his life, Grandpa Wilcox was always committed to serving others, and never forgot what others had done for him. He flew for the Civil Air Patrol during the 70s, and later, volunteered for the Red Cross along with his wife, my husband’s grandma Mary. When I met my husband in the early 90s, they volunteered a couple days a week, taking elderly people who were unable to drive, to doctors’ appointments, the grocery store or other necessary errands. They were also active in their church, and participated in activities to help others. They served in this capacity into their late seventies, until forced to stop by their own health issues.

Grandpa passed away in 2002, at the age of 84, two years after Grandma’s passing. Although I only knew him for the last ten years of his life, I consider that a privilege. It’s because of him and others like him, that we continue to enjoy the freedoms we have today.

I’m also privileged to have several friends, neighbors and coworkers who served, and to all of them I’m grateful.

Who will you thank tomorrow?

ROW80: So Far, So Good

When you have a big task, it helps to break it down into smaller tasks, which eventually add up to getting it all done. This week, my ROW80 goal was to get Chapters 12-14 of Time’s Fugitive revised. Three days into the week, I have already accomplished 1/3 of my goal! (I typically don’t write on Monday – that’s paperwork day.)

If you’re a ROW80’er, how are you doing? Any tips for getting at that big task?