Mirror Twin Distractions by Bonnie Le Hamilton

Living with ADD isn’t easy and being a writer and living with ADD can be the pits. I think my life would be a whole lot easier if I didn’t have to deal with ADD.

More than once this last week I caught myself getting distracted from what I was doing each time I took a break to use the facilities or get more water. At some point or other I would notice something that needed done, or remember something I was going to do, and, instead of a couple minutes away from my computer I’d be more like twenty or longer, i.e. long enough the thing went to sleep.

But if that weren’t bad enough, I couldn’t concentrate on one manuscript! I’d get thinking about changes I needed to make on my science fiction series and open it up only to have my brain switch gears to one of two other incomplete novels I have and some changes or additions I need to make to them. Except if I opened either of those, my brain would switch back to the sci-fi.

In other words, I never got much of anything done even though my brain was actively working on my various stories – I doubt anyone could write about A and B when their brain was thinking about X and Y. I personally found it disconcerting when I had the story about A and B open, and suddenly my brain had the story about X and Y running through my thoughts and I very nearly inserted the new details for X and Y’s story into A and B’s story, which would have been more than a little weird since one is sci-fi and the other a contemporary romance. 

  

And adding to my problems with concentrating on just one story was my problems with sticking to just one task until I was done. More than once I caught myself stopping in the middle of the room, on my way back from the bathroom, trying to remember what I was going to do next, and when I did remember something to do, I’d start doing it and suddenly remember what I’d been doing before I got up, either that or I’d go back to what I’d been doing and I'd suddenly remember that I had something else I was going to do before I got back to it.

More than once it was my empty stomach or water bottle which finally reminded what I was going to do before returning to my computer.

None of which helped me because while I realized all sorts of tweaks that needed done to three different manuscripts this past week, I didn’t get a whole lot done toward actually executing any of those changes.

On the other hand, Konnie actually managed to get some writing done this last week either, more than I did anyway, which for her is an improvement, but let’s face it, her life is so much busier than mine, which is why she’s usually the one who doesn’t get a lot of writing done in a week.

Time zone wise I’m an hour earlier than Konnie is, but she beats me up every morning, because she’s up before the crack of dawn, whereas I sleep in. Typically, when most people are heading out the door for the day, I’m just crawling out of bed, while Konnie was heading out the door around the time most people are getting up in the morning, and she’s constantly busy from the moment she gets up in the morning until she finally shuts off her computer and goes to sleep each night.

I spend the majority of my time around the house, with the only noise being when I turn on the TV or the stereo. At Konnie’s house, noise erupts anytime someone so much as walks past the house. With, I think the current count is five, dogs I have a tendency to cut phone calls with my sister short because that pack started barking again.

Konnie on the other hand lives in that racket, and lives with her family, so there is always something going on, and always people talking or doing something, and it only gets quiet around there after like eleven o’clock at night, but their mornings start around four-thirty or five. And she not only works in all that chaos, she’s in charge of it!

So, while I don’t get a lot of writing done because my brain won’t focus on one project she doesn’t get a lot of writing done because her family requires so much of her attention.

As kids, living together, our lives were very similar, but things changed because we now live such different lives as adults.

Happy writing everyone. 😊

Momma Bear Got to Roar by Konnie Enos

I’m sure any good mother would be protective of their children when the need arises. When you have children who are disabled in any way that protectiveness goes into overdrive. I should know. I’m the mother of five wonderful children and they all have their individual trials, including one on the Autism spectrum (high functioning) and two with health challenges, one of those major ones.

With her long list of diseases and conditions she has faulty collagen, loose joints, and issues with her heart, and her digestive track not functioning as it should. All thanks to EDS, Mast cell disease, Lupus and Gastroparesis. And those are just the major highlights of her list.

Over the last eight months she’s been in and out of hospitals and going from one doctor to another. Sometimes as much as four in one week.

This last month has been more of a nightmare. She’s been to the ER every single week, as much as a couple of times. Then the week before Spring Break she went back to the ER and they admitted her.

Things went well the first couple of days. They seemed to listen to her about her reactions to medicines and then they determined her issues seemed to require surgery.

Things went downhill from there.

The surgery was on Sunday. By Wednesday they had not given her any nourishment of any kind and were concerned that her blood sugar was so low.

NO DUH! You aren’t feeding her!

Then four, yes FOUR doctors invaded her room and made every effort to brow beat her into submitting to their treatment plan and when that wasn’t working one of them took me out of the room and suggested she needed a psychiatric evaluation.

I not only told him in no uncertain terms my daughter was of sound mind, but I also told him he was NOT paying any attention to the fact she had Mast cell disease. She AMA’d (she signed out of the hospital Against Medical Advise) shortly after that.

As she left one of the doctor’s, expressing that he thought she was making the wrong choice said, “I hope we don’t see you back here anytime soon.”

By Friday it became clear, from the pain she would have to return to a hospital, but she refused to go back to the one she’d just left. So we found another one. (Thankfully this is big city and it was easy to do.)

I can say this much for the staff at this hospital. They were very thorough in running tests to figure out what the problem was and seemed to listen to her about her reactions. One of those tests required her to go under anesthesia again. Thankfully it also helped them find and fix the problem.

The problems arose after that.

As they were preparing her for that test, she said she was feeling nauseous. After the procedure she started throwing up.

Every doctor and nurse we came into contact with the rest of that day insisted it was because she’d been under anesthesia totally ignoring the fact the nausea started BEFORE they took her in to do the procedure.

I had gone home to get some sleep but my dear daughter called me back with a text. She was still throwing up.

I had to find the nurse and tell her to disconnect the medicines being pumped into her by IV.

She hasn’t thrown up since.

She spent the next day refusing all treatment.

The doctors and nurses repeatedly told her it was her choice while also stressing she would die if she didn’t continue treatment.

While my husband and I were visiting with her one of the doctors came in and tried to get her to submit to their treatment plan.  

According to my husband I was rather thorough in chewing him out when I told him the failings of his plan.

I know I told him she couldn’t move and was throwing up while they were pumping all that medicine into her and she only started getting better when she stopped all of it. I also again, reminded him, she has Mast cell disease.
All I could think was that when the patient it reduced to a nearly vegetative state and is lying there repeatedly throwing up when they have had zero nourishment in over twenty-four hours THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG! When all of that slowly subsides when the patient STOPS ALL medicines, THEN one can conclude continuing treatment IS NOT the best plan for the patient.

Yes, I went a little Mamma Bear on him.

And yes, I helped her AMA right out of there.

Yes, she has been improving daily since then.

Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

Also Posted on my daughter's, May Enos' blog, Price of Genetics (it will be up at 9 a.m. April 18th).

Critiquing is Hardest by Bonnie Le Hamilton

Writing is hard. Editing is harder. Critiquing is hardest.

I once told a guy who asked me to critique his “chapter” that it read more like a synopsis of a novel then a chapter of book. He refused to talk to me again. And I thought I was being gentle. I did tell him he had a good concept, but that he needed more practice with showing the story.

Now I’m faced with the dilemma of an excellent novel with too much detail in the fight scenes. I’m talking literal blow by blows, but I have very few fight scenes in my stories, and certainly no battle scenes, I’m not exactly sure I’m the right person to tell this author to pare it down a little. There were spots so detailed it’s boring.

Yeah, I’ve done that (not in a fight scene), back before I learned better. I just never realized until reading this unpublished novel what all my friends, and Konnie, had been talking about. I’d never had to read someone else’s far too detailed scene, and there is an enormous difference between writing such a scene and reading it.

Back when I made this mistake, I thought the more detailed it was, the easier it would be for the reader to “see” the scene. I couldn’t be more wrong! The more a story is bogged down in details the harder it is for the reader to “see” the scene in their head. I found myself skimming over such sections in the novel I'm critiquing, I just couldn’t handle it, which also meant I wasn’t helping the author fix the issue.

It also made me eternally grateful to a friend who once helped me edit two pages of description down two paragraphs. Konnie knows the scene. I was trying to show the reader one hideous room, in detail. Konnie even said it was boring and that it took too long. In writing, general descriptions go a long way, but you also must have descriptions.

Anton Chekov has a famous quote about not telling the reader the moon was shining but rather show the glint of moonlight on broken glass. Or something like that. Description does take more words than simply telling, but it doesn’t have to take up a whole page or more. Limit it!

The trick is give the reader enough detail that they can fill in the rest on their own. The reader doesn’t need minute descriptions of a scene or the actions of the characters, just general descriptions. And the reader certainly doesn’t need a blow by blow of a fight scene.

I have one where the hero’s dogs come to the rescue of the heroine, and about all I have is them jumping on the bad guy and clamping their teeth into him, then the hero comes running and the bad guy gets slammed into the wall and the hero gets in his face and tells him he’s fired and to get out.

And I think that’s the longest fight scene I have in any of my stories. Earlier in that same story the hero was in altercation with his brother, and all the hero did was slug the idiot and walk away.

I do have a couple altercations in the novel I’ve been editing the last few months, but while in one I mention one of the secondary characters “throwing punches” I do not mention in detail every punch, and the only mention I have of who he is fighting is calling them “the miscreants.” We’re talking about one paragraph in a scene that starts with the victim screaming in terror and the good guys running into the fray and ends with the miscreants being carted off by the police.

I could have gotten a lot more detailed, but what more was needed? The heroine’s cousin was fighting hard and connecting only with the miscreants and not with the hero or his family, who also entered the fray. Enough said, beyond later mentioning the black eyes a few of the miscreants ended up with.

In the other fight scene, the fight itself is a couple small paragraphs, leading into it, and the aftermath takes longer. Its not that I don’t have details in the fight scenes, I just don’t have minute detail.

I didn’t need to give a blow by blow, because a blow by blow would have been too tedious to read. And tedious detracts from the story. None of us want that, especially the readers.

The problem is how do you tell a talented aspiring author they need to cut the detail without discouraging them from writing? Anyone?

Happy Writing everyone. 😊

Finding the Writing Motivation By C. Hope Clark

Motivation means different things to people, but for many it is so elusive that they give up on it. Some are afraid they don’t have it. Others are afraid they’ll mistake a quick nice feeling for motivation. Some worry they don’t understand how to maintain it.

            Many of my readers ask where I get my motivation from. It’s not magic, and it’s not science. For a writer, motivation comes about through the culmination of its several parts.

1)      Having an original idea.

In reality, most of us fear of being too original. Sure, we talk about having that grandiose idea or remarkable brand, but seriously, are we willing to be SO original that we are unlike anything else out there? Isn’t that scary? What if we are so different that nobody gets us?

Experts and celebrities bank on their originality, making money because of their talent and the fact so many people want to be like them. However, we have to avoid emulating someone else’s success so much that we lose our originality. Following someone else’s path means we often take the safe route and latch ahold of someone else’s wagon. We call that copycatting. The trouble is, there’s nothing motivational in being a copycat. We don’t totally scratch that itch.

On the other hand, when we snare a grand idea, and are daring enough to strike out with it, we can become flooded with a deep motivation that carries us so much further than an idea similar to someone else’s. There isn’t any energy in playing someone else’s game.

2)      Being organized.

We can be busy or we can be organized. And if the busyness feels frantic, stressful and out of control, then we’ve indeed lost control of our direction . . . our motivation. We are answering to all sorts of stimuli instead of focusing on a plan making us ineffective. Disorganization quickly dilutes motivation.

So the point is to establish your goals for each year. Complete the novel? Publish the novel? Submit to 25 magazines? Attend three conferences and take a class. Identify your writing strengths and weaknesses, then make concerted plans to fix the weaknesses. Wake up in the morning knowing what you will do that day toward your annual goals. Keep a calendar and stick to it, helping (enforcing) family and friends to better understand the seriousness of your mission.

You cannot get anywhere without knowing specifically where you need to go. Don’t say you’ll write more. List the word count, number of chapters, and period of time to complete them. Define your tasks in measurements you can be accountable for.

3)      Being focused.

The world today is about instant gratification, easy wins, and keeping a tally while watching our neighbor. It’s about writing a paragraph then checking email. Writing another then reading Facebook. Attempting one more paragraph then reading a new blog post.

Being focused means just that. . . working uninterrupted. And don’t blame others for interrupting you. They can’t without your permission. Leave the phone out of the room and don’t open social media. Mute the sound so you don’t hear incoming messages or updated headlines.

Then fall into your work. Become engulfed in it. That’s where you find magic. That’s where you tap that stupid mythical muse so many talk about. It comes from you being proactively focused, not from some invisible feeling randomly striking you. There’s almost nothing as satisfying as coming out of a straight, multi-hour writing afternoon with a couple thousand words under your belt. That doesn’t happen with a muse. It happens with purpose and sweat.

What is motivation?

Motivation is having an idea, planning how you’ll achieve it, then diving in deeply to create it. And the amazing thing about it is that the more you’re able to achieve using this formula, the more empowered you become. In other words, the more motivated.

I simplify. I say no to things. When I feel out or sorts or too busy to get everything done, I start culling the obstacles in my path that are inhibiting my motivation. If writing is your goal, then whenever you’re doing something that’s NOT writing, ask yourself if it’s necessary or did it just slip in the way. Then discard it. Decide what really isn’t needed in your writing plan, and what’s in your way of doing something meaningful.

Learn to feel excited about your writing again. Feel excited about the direction you’ve decided for yourself. With a mission, and a plan to achieve it, you once again love reporting to work, even accepting the parts of your work that aren’t your favorite. Make your work become play again.

BIO: C. Hope Clark’s latest release, Newberry Sin, comes out late April 2018. It’s the fourth in the Carolina Slade Mysteries, and Hope’s eighth mystery. Hope is also founder of FundsforWriters.com where her newsletter reaches 35,000 readers. The site was selected for Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites for Writers . . . for the past 17 years. www.chopeclark.com