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I think of the part of my brain responsible for writing like a muscle. When I don’t use it for awhile, it starts to atrophy and it is then a lot harder for it to do its job with any degree of adequacy. If I want to strengthen it, the only way to do that is to start regularly using it.

　
Just like starting a new workout regime after a period of inactivity, you can’t really expect that things are going to jump from bad to excellent right away. You need to be patient, and you need to be kind to yourself, but you also need willpower.

　
In May, I decided to start “working out” with this rather atrophied muscle of mine. I hadn’t been writing regularly for far, far too long. I set myself a goal of writing something every day. If I had the time, it could be a lot. If I didn’t, it was okay to simply write a paragraph or two. The important thing was that I stuck to that plan. To help keep myself accountable, I told other people.

　
My sister started trying to tell me that I should do some sort of writing challenge. I’m guessing that she wasn’t particularly convinced by my vague answers, so she pointed me at one in particular, one in which she’d participated herself. She even gifted me the entry cost. She is kind. Or possibly mean.

　
What I signed up for is called The Literal Challenge. This is a UK-based writing challenge that started out doing plays, but has now branched out into short stories. Though it is organised by UK folks, it is open internationally.

　
The specific challenge I participated in is called “Like The Prose”, because they like a good pun. This one was 30 days long. Every evening at 10pm GMT, or 6pm for me, a challenge would be delivered into my inbox. I had 36 hours to complete and submit this challenge, but there would be another coming along in 24 hours, so it seemed best not to wait until hour 34.

　
The challenges were pretty wide-ranging. Sometimes, they gave us a theme to write about. Such as “write about birth”, or “do a gothic type story, complete with moral”. Sometimes, they didn’t give us a subject, but rather a style. Such as first person, third person omniscient and the like. I learned what a haibun was because of this – essentially, it is a Japanese form that combines prose and haiku, with the prose following the same spare elegance and nature themes as haiku. It is beautiful.

　
Some of these were easy. Some were exceedingly difficult. Some left me feeling vulnerable and pushed my comfort level. The hardest to write was a Choose Your Own Adventure style story written in second person. Trying to keep track of all the different lines the story could take and tracking which section to put them into? Holy cow. I had to have a timeline and a list of which section was which all in separate open documents.

　
There was incentive not to slack, though, and that incentive is money. It cost about twenty pounds to enter the Timed Route. If you submitted every single challenge within the allotted time given, you got an even share of the pot. If you failed, you lost your share and yours got split between everyone who did manage to complete everything. Also, if you were interested in the challenges but didn’t want to have to stress about completing everything, they do have a Creative Route where you just do as much or as little as you want. Same entry fee, but you don’t get any of it back.

　
Personally, I think the fact that someone else was paying for it was even more incentive than if I had. After all, it wasn’t my money I’d be wasting if I failed, it was someone else’s, and the guilt would have eaten at me.

　
No worries, though. I succeeded. In the middle of health problems, and including one day where I had to fly to Montreal and back to Halifax in the same day for an appointment, thank-you-so-very-much. Yes, I am smug. No, I have no shame in showing that smugness.

　
This was a lot of work, yes. I’m not going to sugar-coat that bit. If you do this, or something like it, go in prepared that it is going to be a lot of work. But it is a lot of fun, too. It helps that they don’t impose any sort of length requirements. Aside from the one where we were literally challenged (I like puns, too) to write the shortest story we possibly could, these could be as short or as long as we wanted, so long as it was a complete, original story written by ourselves. For the most part, I took anywhere between one and three hours per story, save the CYOA one, which took me eight and is larger by a degree of magnitude than the rest.

　
I’m glad that I did this. So, so very glad. Not only did it put me into fighting trim, as it were, but I came out of it with a number of stories good enough for me to work on polishing and submitting somewhere for publication. Being published is a goal of mine, now. Others… not so much, but I still had fun writing them. Then there was the “write a Young Adult story” one where, partway through, I realized that what I was writing was not, in fact, the simple stand-alone story I thought it was, but more of a short-story prequel for a whole YA fantasy series. Problem: I’m still working on my first novel, a fantasy novel for adults. Whoopsie.

　
I will post one or two on here. Not any of the ones I think are good enough for potential publication, mind you, so you won’t see my best work with one possible exception. The haibun. I think it is very, very good but it isn’t in my genre of choice. Besides. I want to share the beauty of haibun with you all, so look out for that as an “extra” post.

　
The Literal Challenge does another one for plays, as I said, in February, called “28 Plays Later”. They are looking at running one for non-fiction in October which would, yes, be 31 days long. It has no punny title yet, but I have no doubt that they’ll come up with one.

　
If any of this interests you, here is where you can find out about this wonderful challenge-creating team:

　
Website: http://www.theliteralchallenge.com
Twitter: @thelitchallenge

　
Check them out, and do sign up if any of those three challenge series sounds interesting. Next June will likely see me repeating the insanity.

I think of the part of my brain responsible for writing like a muscle. When I don’t use it for awhile, it starts to atrophy and it is then a lot harder for it to do its job with any degree of adequacy. If I want to strengthen it, the only way to do that is to start regularly using it.

　
Just like starting a new workout regime after a period of inactivity, you can’t really expect that things are going to jump from bad to excellent right away. You need to be patient, and you need to be kind to yourself, but you also need willpower.

　
In May, I decided to start “working out” with this rather atrophied muscle of mine. I hadn’t been writing regularly for far, far too long. I set myself a goal of writing something every day. If I had the time, it could be a lot. If I didn’t, it was okay to simply write a paragraph or two. The important thing was that I stuck to that plan. To help keep myself accountable, I told other people.

　
My sister started trying to tell me that I should do some sort of writing challenge. Not particularly convinced by my vague answers, she pointed me at one in particular, one in which she’d participated herself. She even gifted me the entry cost. She is kind. Or possibly mean.

　
What I signed up for is called The Literal Challenge. This is a UK-based writing challenge that started out doing plays, but has now branched out into short stories.

　
The specific challenge I participated in is called “Like The Prose”, because they like a good pun. This one was 30 days long. Every evening at 10pm GMT, or 6pm for me, a challenge would be delivered into my inbox. I had 36 hours to complete and submit this challenge, but there would be another coming along in 24 hours, so it seemed best not to wait until hour 34.

　
The challenges were pretty wide-ranging. Sometimes, they gave us a theme to write about. Such as “write about birth”, or “do a gothic type story, complete with moral”. Sometimes, they didn’t give us a subject, but rather a style. Such as first person, third person omniscient and the like. I learned what a haibun was because of this – essentially, it is a Japanese form that combines prose and haiku, with the prose following the same spare elegance and nature themes as haiku. It is beautiful.

　
Some of these were easy. Some were exceedingly difficult. Some left me feeling vulnerable and pushed my comfort level. The hardest to write was a Choose Your Own Adventure style story written in second person. Trying to keep track of all the different lines the story could take and tracking which section to put them into? Holy cow. I had to have a timeline and a list of which section was which all in separate open documents.

　
There was incentive not to slack, though, and that incentive is money. It cost about twenty pounds to enter the Timed Route. If you submitted every single challenge within the allotted time given, you got an even share of the pot. If you failed, you lost your share and yours got split between everyone who did manage to complete everything. Also, if you were interested in the challenges but didn’t want to have to stress about completing everything, they do have a Creative Route where you just do as much or as little as you want. Same entry fee, but you don’t get any of it back.

　
Personally, I think the fact that someone else was paying for it was even more incentive than if I had. After all, it wasn’t my money I’d be wasting if I failed, it was someone else’s, and the guilt would have eaten at me.

　
No worries, though. I succeeded. In the middle of health problems, and including one day where I had to fly to Montreal and back to Halifax in the same day for an appointment, thank-you-so-very-much. Yes, I am smug. No, I have no shame in showing that smugness.

　
This was a lot of work, yes. I’m not going to sugar-coat that bit. If you do this, or something like it, go in prepared that it is going to be a lot of work. But it is a lot of fun, too. It helps that they don’t impose any sort of length requirements. Aside from the one where we were literally challenged (I like puns, too) to write the shortest story we possibly could, these could be as short or as long as we wanted, so long as it was a complete, original story written by ourselves. For the most part, I took anywhere between one and three hours per story, save the CYOA one, which took me eight and is larger by a degree of magnitude than the rest.

　
I’m glad that I did this. So, so very glad. Not only did it put me into fighting trim, as it were, but I came out of it with a number of stories good enough for me to work on polishing and submitting somewhere for publication. Being published is a goal of mine, now. Others… not so much, but I still had fun writing them.

　
I will post one or two on here. Not any of the ones I think are good enough for potential publication, mind you, so you won’t see my best work with one possible exception. The haibun. I think it is very, very good but it isn’t in my genre of choice. Besides. I want to share the beauty of haibun with you all, so look out for that as an “extra” post.

　
The Literal Challenge does another one for plays, as I said, in February, called “28 Plays Later”. They are looking at running one for non-fiction in October which would, yes, be 31 days long. It has no punny title yet, but I have no doubt that they’ll come up with one.

　
If any of this interests you, here is where you can find out about this wonderful challenge-creating team:

　
Website: http://www.theliteralchallenge.com
Twitter: @thelitchallenge

As I am writing this, a completed second draft of the prelude and first chapter of my novel is sitting, completed, on my hard drive. I didn’t do a comparison on the prelude, but I will say that Chapter 1 grew by over 1000 words. I am fairly pleased with it, actually.

This is by no means even close to meaning novel completion, but I have decided that I should start thinking about beta readers now, rather than later. It’s going to take some time to get a workable batch together, and besides, they may find big problems that I have overlooked that should be corrected for ASAP.

What, I hear some of you asking, is a beta reader? Essentially, a beta reader is a test reader. A volunteer who willingly subjects themselves to my writing and commits to offering their feedback.

But what am I looking for? So glad you asked.

1. General readers. I do need some of you to just be plain old reading folk. Preferrably ones who enjoy fantasy, as this is a fantasy novel, and if you hate fantasy, you’re not going to like this. That would sort of skew your feedback.

2. Sensitivity readers. I’m going to need some of these. A sensitivity reader is a reader from a group that might have issues with this book due to poor or hurtful portrayals of that group in the past. I would love sensitivity readers that can cover LGBTQ issues, mental illness, people of size and people of colour. Now, not all of these issues are central themes, but they all pop up at some point. I qualify, myself, for at least one of these, but I can’t be my own sensitivity reader.

3. Readers who loved the whole “magic child goes to another world and has adventures” style of books. This is not a children’s or YA book, but it does deal with that theme. I’m thinking of Narnia, Oz, Neverland, Wonderland and that ilk. Did you love those? I’d love to get feedback from you.

You do not need to fall into all of these categories. I mean, you can, and that is cool, but you don’t need to.

What am I really, really, REALLY not looking for? Also glad you asked.

1. Proof readers. This is not a finished manuscript. You are going to notice some errors. Please do not point them out. Yes, I’ve done my best to self-edit, but that is not my number one priority at this stage of writing, and that is not what I need from you.

2. People who love me too much. Mom and Dad, I’m looking at you here. If you are emotionally inclined to automatically think anything I do is brilliant, you are probably not right for this. I love you and appreciate your continued, unconditional support. That is a very important part of my foundation as a writer. But it isn’t what I need for this.

3. Inability to criticise. This is akin to the prior point, but also a little different. If you love what you are reading, please do tell me. But also tell me why. Tell me what you loved. But if something isn’t working for you, I really need you to be able to convey that, too, and hopefully why it isn’t working. Sometimes, that isn’t possible. Sometimes, you just plain don’t like a thing, period, but if you can articulate it, please do.

4. Brutal honesty. This is the flip side of the above. I do want honesty, but if you are the sort of person who struggles to couch honest critique in kind terms, you are not for me. Not for this. I respect you, I applaud your honesty, I hope you will one day read a finished version of this brain child of mine, but at this stage of my writing? I know myself well enough to know that this is not a good mix. If you don’t like a thing, as I mentionned above, do tell me. But please be kind. This is my first novel.

So. What will you be signing up for if you agree to this? It’s a fair question. I will ask you to read one to two chapters per week. Most weeks, it will be one, but if it is a super short chapter, I may send out two, such as with the prologue and Chapter 1. That prologue is terribly short. I’ll send some questions for you to answer along with the chapter. Some will be the same from week to week, and sometimes I may have a specific question. Think along the lines of “What did you like most?” “What did you dislike most?” “Did something confuse you?” I’m sure I’ll also toss in a general comment invitation too. Yes/no answers aren’t as helpful as detailed ones, but I understand that sometimes that’s all you’ve got.

What do you get out of this? My undying gratitude. Plus, I suppose, a chance to read a thing before other people… not so exciting when it is for an unpublished author, I suppose. The chance to help shape a work of fiction. That may mean a lot more for sensitivity readers. Honestly, I’m the one reaping the reward here, so mostly it is a bunch of gratitude from me.
Interested? Let me know. Comments on here are a bit funky, so you can always head over to http://www.facebook.com/jennifermorashblog and send me a DM. I will need your email for this to work, and why you want to be a beta reader. If you’re one of the sensitivity readers, this is a good time to let me know that, and which group(s) you fall into.

And if this seems like too much of a time commitment for you, that is entirely cool and I quite understand.

As a final note, the opinions of all beta readers will be taken into consideration, but I may not follow every piece of advice that I am given. After all, if I have ten readers, and nine of them absolutely love one aspect but one person hates it, I’m likely not going to take in the advice to change that thing. Occasionally, I may even ignore a majority of people arguing against a thing if I feel that thing is important to the overall work, so if you sign up for this, please be understanding if your advice isn’t taken.

Last week, I wrote about the reasons why I write. Further along that theme is the question of how I write.

The pedantic answer is with a laptop, a wireless keyboard, text to speech software and Wordpad, because I like barebones in my word processing. But that’s not what most people mean when this question comes up.

This is how I do it, and I honestly have no idea if it’s orthodox or not. It’s just what works for me. I start off with an idea, and more often than not this idea is not a plot, but the basis for the plot. Or at least, the problem the plot needs to resolve. Sometimes, it isn’t always even that much, but is just a situation. See, with me, I usually have to write the story if I want to find out how it ends. Which might explain why, as discussed last time, these ideas keep haunting me until I write them out.

So, with idea firmly in hand – or brain – I sit down at my computer, open up a document, and start typing. I don’t edit as I go. Typos, spelling mistakes, missing words and all that get kept, I just typetypetype until the idea is fully out, right there in digital form. Supremely messy digital form.

My first drafts tend to be short. I’m not trying to be wordy, I’m just trying to tell the story. Also, and importantly, a lot of things I write don’t make it past this particular phase. I’ve gotten them out, I know how it all ends, and am satisfied. If I’m just writing for my own entertainment (or ability to sleep), that is all I need.

But if it is something I want to share, or just something I want to play with, one of two things happen here. Sometimes, if what I’ve written isn’t too messy, I’ll edit it right there in the document it was created in. That is what I do with these blogs, in fact. Sometimes, though, I’ll open up a new document and literally retype the whole thing. This is where polishing starts. Sentances get restructured, details get added, the story is more fleshed out here. Then, I go back up to the top and scour for spelling mistakes and missing words. I find most spell checkers difficlt to use with text to speech software, so often I don’t use one at all. Luckily, misspelled words get pronounced wrong, so I know a mistake is there by hearing it. Sometimes, the misspelling still sounds right. So any you notice in these missives have that to blame.

That is usually enough. I will save it, or send it to someone. I would say that 99% of things I’ve written in the past have never been read by anyone and were eventually deleted off of harddrives. I’m trying to change that. If I decide to share it, I’ll give it one last read-through and then post it somewhere or other.

Incidentally, full rewrites seem to roughly double the length of a thing I have written. This is just as well given that my first attempt at a novel, currently in rough draft form, is 30,000 to 40,000 words, which I think I mentionned last week. Standard length of a first novel seems to be 80,000 words. I don’t plan to rewrite for length, but length will happen given my particular method.

Will this method work for you? I haven’t got a clue. It’s what works for me, though.

I don’t remember a time in my life that I was capable of writing, but didn’t. Clearly, there was a time I both couldn’t and didn’t, I wasn’t precisely born with a pencil in my hand and knowledge of the language in my head, but I have memories of writing things going back pretty far. Silly things, mostly, but I wasn’t trying to impress anyone.

During my life,I’ve had periods where I didn’t, that’s true, though with one exception, never very long ones. I’ve had much, much longer ones where no one ever saw a word that I wrote, but that’s entirely different. I still was writing.

But why? What drives me to have once upon a time picked up a pen, and these days pick up my keyboard? Particularly since a lot of the time, no one saw it or was intended to? By that token, I can’t be doing it for attention.

The answer is this. I get ideas in my head that just won’t go away until I write them down. If I’m lucky, this happens during the day, or is an idea that is patient enough to wait for me to have time. Sometimes, I’m not so lucky, and the idea is so loud that it keeps me awake until I grudgingly crawl out of bed, stagger to the computer and write it out. That is generally enough for my brain. It doesn’t drive me to publish and show the world, just to get those ideas out there.

I’ve tended more towards story ideas than I have towards essay type things. Actually, this blog thing is new for me. These aren’t story ideas, but thoughts. But now that I’ve started, I find I have more ideas of what to write than seems sensible to post all in one go.

My brain can sometimes be a very busy place. I think that’s true for most of us. Ideas crop up at the oddest times. Not just when I’m trying to sleep, but when I’m at work, trying to listen to an audiobook, watch a movie, eat my dinner, enjoy some time with extended family. To those who know me off the internet, if you’ve ever seen my expression get a bit distant, chances are that’s what was happening. I’m just polite enough not to leap up and flee to a place I can write it out.

Putting my runaway thoughts into actual words, even if these days those words aren’t in a physical form, has always been enough to quell them.
They’ve tended to be manageable. Right up until I got this one idea that wasn’t short. It happened over last Thanksgiving weekend, when I was away in Cape Breton with my mother and her side of the family. I kept thinking about this book that I wished someone would write. On the drive home, I realized that I did have the ability to make that happen, so long as that person was myself.

But I’d never written a book. Sure, I’d dreamt of it. If I did, it would be awesome, I told myself. People would love it. It would be a bestseller. That’s easy to tell yourself when you haven’t actually written the book. But writing a whole book? Oddly, that’s where my confidence fell apart. If I but could, I told myself, I would be awesome, but I couldn’t.
So I didn’t. But this turned out to be one of those persistent but patient ideas. Christmas came and went. The idea remained. I went off to Disney World. The idea persisted. No matter what I did, the idea would come back.

Then, came May. The choice was sudden. Write the darned book, and to make it less scary, you don’t have to write it all until done. You just have to write something every day. It is allowed to be short, especially if you’ve worked that day. But just one paragraph. One snippet of dialogue between characters. More, if you want to.

I wrote out a short, rough draft in about two weeks. Don’t be too impressed, it’s only 30,000 to 40,000 words. But the story got written.

It hasn’t left me alone yet, though. It’s already gently informing me of things I need to add. Lengthen the beginning. Develop this person or place more. That final chapter ends too soon. Sheesh, brain. I haven’t gone back to it yet, though, though I have made notes on what my brain is trying to tell me in order to add it into the next draft.

I’m still writing. As you read this, I am hip-deep in a 30 day writing challenge where I need to write one short story a day for 30 days, in response to writing prompts. Don’t be too impressed that I’m still posting blog entries, though. I will have written this one shortly before the challenge started, so hello from the past.

Now. Do I think I will publish this book of mine? I think I will try to, yes, if I get it lengthened to a publishable length. Do I think it is an automatic bestseller? No, I don’t. I think it has the potential to be a good book that some will enjoy, with a lot of hard work on my part. The more I work on this thing, the more my hubris in my imaginary book has gone away. I’m dealing with a real book, and I am proud of it.

Next week, I plan to delve into how I write. I’m not sure if it’s normal or not. It probably is, but perhaps not.

My heart isn’t formed as one would really expect a heart to be formed.
　

In fact, it probably closely resembles what a heart looks like when I, without sight, try to draw it.
　

But I love this thing. It is a piece of rose quartz, so in my mind’s eye, it has a soft pink hue to it, though I’ve never actually asked anyone what colour it truly is, for I might be disappointed if it isn’t the colour inside my mind.
　

My malformed heart is cold to the touch when you pick it up, but it warms very quickly. It has a smooth surface, almost to the point of feeling silky. Small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, but large enough to serve its purpose in life.
　

I call it misshapen, because it more or less is. One of the two humps at the top comes up further than the other, though there is a dip between them that is pleasant to run my finger back and forth over. One of the downward sloping edges that leads towards the nadir is convex, the opposite side is concave, so that my poor little heart looks as though it had gotten all squidged to one side.

　
The bottom isn’t the classic, sharp V, either, but is more gently, softly rounded.

　
So, yes. It is very much a misshapen heart, and it is utterly perfect. This is the sort of heart that can help to heal another person. It can bring soothing peace to the agitated. It can ease away a headache, help to erase pains of the body, and even stimulate a lugubrious circulatory system or enliven some insensitive nerves.

　
This is my guasha stone. Guasha is a traditional Chinese practice, often used by acupuncturists during a treatment, but can also be used in massage therapy. It is usually used in hard, rapid strokes over tense muscle, save on the face and head where it is slow and gentle.

　
And the funny thing about my little misshapen heart? It helps me as much as it does my clients. It saves my thumbs for one thing, but I also use it on myself to ease away the knots that form in my forearms after a day of deep tissue massage. I bring it home with me at night for this purpose, but I admit that I also take it with me rather than storing it in my locker because I like to just hold it sometimes.

　
Finally? This stone which I have come to have an actual emotional attachment too seems to be a perfect metaphor for my own heart. Life has pushed and pulled it somewhat askew. It goes in where it should go out and out where it should go in. It doesn’t look as if it is quite in balance, but it is shaped exactly as it ought to be. It was made to help. To heal. To soothe sometimes and energize at others. It warms quickly despite seeming a bit cool at first. It surprises people, and it is beautiful.

(The above is a sample piece from a 30-day writing challenge. Specifically, it was today’s post. The challenge was to choose an object in the room with you, and describe it. Easy for most people, a little more difficult for me since I can’t rely on describing appearance. I chose to describe my guasha stone. Now, generally we write actual stories, but they wanted to go easy on us today.)