OPEN DRAWING this Wednesday 8/1 from 1-2pm

OPEN DRAWING 

or Everyone Gets to Draw this Summer

1-2pm Wednesdays from 8/1 - 8/22 

OPEN DRAWING this Wednesday 7/25 from 1-2pm

OPEN DRAWING 

or Everyone Gets to Draw this Summer

1-2pm Wednesdays from 7/25 - 8/22

OPEN DRAWING this Wednesday 7/18 from 1-2pm

OPEN DRAWING 

or Everyone Gets to Draw this Summer

1-2pm Wednesdays from 7/18 - 8/22 

OPEN DRAWING July 11th from 1-2pm

OPEN DRAWING 

or Everyone Gets to Draw this Summer

1-2pm Wednesdays from 7/11 - 8/22 

Take a holiday

No OPEN DRAWING tomorrow (July 4th)

 Enjoy the day, draw some fireworks and we hope to see you the next Wednesday 7/11!

OPEN DRAWING 

or Everyone Gets to Draw this Summer

1-2pm Wednesdays from 7/11 - 8/22 

Open Drawing or Everyone Gets to Draw this Summer

“All humans are storytellers with their own unique point of view. 

When we understand this, we no longer feel the need 

to impose our story on others or to defend what we believe. 

Instead, we see all of us as artists with the right to create our own art."

 -Don Miguel Ruiz via Keri Smith

To join the Open Drawing list for reminders and cancellations, please email me.

all kinds of shoes

the wind brought them to our yard

all or nothing

"A lot of people have the notion that all contests must be zero-sum games; if one wins, the other must lose.  A satisfactory romance is the very opposite of a zero-sum game; unless both win, both lose.  I sometimes wonder if the root of the more vociferous discomfort and negative response to romance by these readers is in the mistaken notion that if the woman has won, the man must have lost."

::Lois McMaster Bujold (entire essay here)

and now for you

Our Friendship Rules is now available in paperback.

I got copies of this edition from the publisher this week 

and would like to share with you.

Leave your name in comments by January 31st, 2012 to to enter 

and I will post names of the 3 randomly chosen winners on February 1st. 

Each book will be personalized, signed and mailed to you (or whomever you wish.)

chose seventeen

first the cleaning them all up off the floor, 

then the sorting 

and the editing 

because when there are too many choices it just ends in a mess

windfall: collecting names

 hackberry, maple, sycamore, maple

reminding myself that I don't have to draw every leaf to show a forest

I have been drawing maps as a form of outlining, as a form of checking up on the movements of characters, to check myself, to answer: Could they meet in time? How far would it be there and back? Where was he went he wasn't with them? Several modes of travel are involved. This page on travel in Jane Austen's time has been so helpful.

Seeing the maps makes me see everyone's movements all at once. I can see where there are breaks, even when scene after scene tumble along just fine in the MS, with characters popping in and out like actors on a stage, who were just waiting in the wings.

It is fun to draw maps--the composition of oceans and continents, finding this wiggly hand-movement that makes shorthand "coastline."  I look at maps-- from google earth to an historical atlas. I love novels with maps. (This one of Chalion helped me keep all the countries straight.)  I love the way they are drawn. (Earthsea like a medieval woodcut, Middle-earth hand drawn with pen and black (and red!) ink, the Wood in Carson Ellis's folk art style.)

For me, the geography comes out of the story. There is an ocean because a character is to be shipwrecked. The strange place where she lands, where she came from and where she was suppose to go all come into existence at the same time. (I have been making family trees in the same way. These two characters are cousins, but have different last names, how?)

I have these empty continents, which make me think of the empty map in the Name of the Wind and  I wonder if Rothfuss has his own filled in version for reference. Sure maps can be spoilers. There are two maps that appear as props in the MS. I think about drawing them, how I might draw one for myself and then make an edited version for the illustration.

Of course, there are maps that can't really be drawn, though a prop master can try. But it is a sort of testing, that I do with my map drawing, a questioning, a prompting that make me look at the story

mirror

from the new yorker

February cracks and thaws

"And this is why
Why we fight
Why we lie awake"

the decemberists

In which, I ask how to write without a paper trail and I let the birds do the drawing for me

I keep my current manuscript in two pink binders. I have a third binder, in which, under tab 5, is all the pages that have been revised out of the current manuscript. 

I write like I draw.

I write once, then again, cross out and again. I  recopy sentences--pages, so it is clear for all the cross outs because I don't erase, I strike through. I pick the best for the pink binders. All this rearranging--this literal rewriting--is a fruitful process, so much comes out when I put words together outside of my head and then read them back.  

And this is all well and good, the romance of ink and paper and red date stamps. When writing by hand, I have a fluency that I do not have as a typist. 

But first readers hundreds or thousands of miles away (and manuscript guidelines) preclude the pink binder format. And there is so much to be gained with a word processing program (spell check, copy and paste, find and replace for character names, searchable text.)

As I type my first draft into the computer, revising as I go, I find that I think more, write less and delete my failed attempts. There is no paper trail to look back at. The pages behind tab 5 are about as organized as a pile of leaves. I have spent hours searching for one sentence I thought I remembered writing down, but it was there to be found. This makes me wary of delete. 

I've thought about saving copies with each change, like photographing the bird tracks before the wind blown snow covers them. I've thought about having a tab 5 file.

But I wonder, how do you manage your electronic manuscript? Especially those of you, who write exclusively on the computer? 

still typing up that handwritten manuscript

I am sort of editing as I go, which can feel like making a pattern from random colors.
For me, a poor typist, it is slow repetitive work like hanging out laundry,but I love rediscovering details.

before the last leaf falls, the first draft is done

376 handwritten pages.
oh, how i love loose leaf paper.
the fifth grader in me is wowed by that many pages FULL.
she is also pretty sure my handwriting is still at C level.

this was decided long ago

While I plan to read all the stories in the forthcoming Zombies Verses Unicorns, I think my team affiliation was decided long ago.i