Yesterday, I celebrated my birthday. It was simple and beautiful. I celebrated it with my husband and son. Just the three of us appreciating quality time especially since my son is returning to university. Today, I still celebrated my birthday with the people I have met through Facebook. The greetings have kept pouring in.
My point is, it doesn’t have to be extravagant to have such a wonderful birthday. I will remember the number 54 for a very long time.
Midnight’s Reckoning is done and is with the editor. I’m in the middle of writing Aiden Kane’s story for the Second Chances Series. My husband helped me thresh out the background of my female main character then I realised how varied the advice on writing has been.
As much as possible, I try not to use adverbs or adjectives. I show more than tell, though this can be difficult too. As it so happens, I was going through my creative writing notes when I saw this wheel.
It is so easy to use these words as part of dialogue tags. But what does it mean to despair? How does that look? How about anxious? How does that look? Feel?
One of the responsibilities of a writer is to make the reader feel that they are inside the story that they completely forget about the tags so they can see and feel everything the character is going through. The way to do that is to describe…to show than leaving it to a word to encapsulate what a character is going through. Not that a little bit of telling is bad, but that’s for another time.
Ironic, isn’t it that these words are no longer enough when this was how some stories were written in the past. At least some of those I’ve read.
I’m not saying that all writers completely depend on this wheel. I’m speaking from my own experience. The Writer’s Wheel is a guide when you need another word for ‘happy’. Just not an end all or be all of writing.
I gotta get back to Aiden and Raine before my mojo goes on a retreat.
One of the things authors do on their FB page is to greet visitors a good day – mostly in the morning and at night. Even before this crisis began, my administrator and I uploaded happy and uplifting posts. Why? Because we cannot stop hoping that this crisis will end. There are so many people who need an uplift even if it is just a greeting.
I will not stop posting kind and positive greetings on my page because there are people who might need that kind of kindness in a world that is now harsh with anger, hate, and politicians who do not seem to know what they are doing.
I am not immune to the ravages happening around me. I worry, too, about family, about work, about whether I will catch the virus and spread it to the people I love. Everything is uncertain. Within this uncertainty, we cannot lose hope that things will get better. I don’t know when, but I hope it is soon.
In the meantime, I wish you well and have a great Saturday!
#BeKind
Photo by Samuel Silitonga from Pexels
I will be the first to admit that I’m not a computer genius or even savvy when setting up a website. I would rather leave that to the experts. But when you have no one other than yourself to depend on, you just have to bite the bullet and learn. It doesn’t matter how frustrating and difficult it may be in the beginning. You’ll get ther in the end.
<p style="font-size:16px" value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">So here I am! This is another part of the journey in my writing career where I've come to realize that I cannot rely on anyone any longer other than myself. Why? Because I only get disappointed when people offer help and they don't follow through. It has come to a point when I have stopped trusting people who say they will help. It's better not giving a fuck about them and just blaze your own trail. You learn more in the end.This website is as basic as it can be. I still need to add more pages and remember to connect them with links. But I have a slow computer and it can be frustrating loading pages that a slow computer and wordpress makes a turtle look like the Flash! 🙂
So I will be making mistakes along the way. I will wrack my brains asking myself how I did something really good and not be able to do it again. lol. I’m likely to create menus that don’t have pages, and pages that don’t link to each other. But what the heck…it’s a work in progress just like everything nowadays.
Okay, I’m rambling now. Gotta go.
Isobelle Cate