Virtues

Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo: What are your pre-writing rituals?
by

Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo: What are your pre-writing rituals?

The Value of Rituals

This is a great article, and also I love this guy so I recommend subscribing.

This Is The #1 Ritual You Need To Do Every Day

Anticipating NaNoWriMo Daily Writing

As the participants of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) anticipate our start tomorrow, I’m thinking about the little rituals we all have, conscious or not, as we prepare to sit down and write.

crest-bda7b7a6e1b57bb9fb8ce9772b8faafb

For our purposes here, let’s have a little fun. What are your personal “ok I’m going to sit down and write now” preparation or psych-up rituals? Let’s share and maybe have a laugh.

 

Aahhhh, My Morning Latte

When Barker mentioned the ritual of preparing your special morning coffee, that really resonated with me. I make my own half decaf latte’s at home and I love them so much, but the preparation gives me as much joy as the drinking of them. Something about the anticipation, the way I lay out all the bits and pieces, the sensuality of it, the noise of the steamer, even. Damn those coffees taste good. And then I feel I’m ready for anything.

As for daily writing, I think I probably do a few non-essential household puttering things. Put a wash on, let the vacuum go (it’s a robot), tidy a few piles of papers. Maybe sit and stare out the window doing deep breathing for a while, gathering my thoughts, immersing myself in my imaginary world. And once I get going, I would also read over the past day’s words as a way to sink into the story world before I begin.

 

Good Luck Charms Actually Work!

Oh, and as for good luck charms, there’s this guy:

Little wooden jester doll

I’m not sure why but he has to be with me when I’m writing new content. My B-I-L thinks it’s weird that my mascot is a jester, but… well maybe it is. But he chose me so I can’t help it. (It doesn’t mean I don’t take my writing seriously.)

I’m sure as I get going, if I pay attention, I’ll notice a few other weird things that I do.

How about you?

by

Are You An Over-Educated Word Snob?

Long Complex Words Make Readers Think You Are A Snob or A Fake

 

education for bloggers

 

Today I listened to the ProBlogger podcast PB052: 10 Writing Tips to Help You Sound More Human, here. You can go there later to listen to the whole thing, but stay with me for a bit to think about this one idea.

 

Banner Logo/Picture of Darren Rouse, ProBlogger

ProBlogger Darren Rouse

 

It’s full of great advice from “Beth Dunn, Product Editor-in-Chief at HubSpot. In [this] podcast episode, Beth shares really practical tips and strategies you can use for helping you sound more human in the way you write your blog content.”

 

Overall I found this very helpful for someone like me that’s still (perpetually – um, I mean always) struggling to figure out how to blog, and blog well. All of these tips are intended to build your brand through managing how your readers perceive (see) you.

 

use simpler, shorter words

 

But there was one tip that I really related to, and that was #2: Convey that you’re honest. How? Beth suggests that the way to do this is to use simpler, shorter words, which go a long way to making you sound more trustworthy. Moreover, using long, complex words takes more brain power both to read and to understand. This “cognitive burden” as ProBlogger host Darren Rouse suggests, takes more time and energy, neither of which your readers – that is my readers – you – have to spare.

 

Let me tell you a story

 

But first I have to confess that, as a child, I was a really annoying little prig. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. But with my blue eyes, and blonde ringlets, my Pollyanna notions and goody-two-shoes righteousness, I must have been obnoxious. I was one of those kids who didn’t like dirt, noise, old people, other kids—especially boys, sharing my things, not getting my own way, or my food touching. Yeah, like that.

 

blond schoolgirl in uniform

Not me – but you get the idea

 

 

I can remember a time, about grade four maybe, when some kid in the back of class pitched a rubber eraser at some girl’s head and made her cry, and no one would fess up. Classic scenario. The poor beleaguered (er, I mean long-suffering) nuns (yes, I know, Catholic school *eye roll*) decided to haul each and every kid in the class down to the principal’s office, one at a time, trying to intimidate (scare?) a confession out of someone, anyone, by threatening the strap.

 

By the time my turn came, my stiff little back was up and those nuns didn’t stand a chance. I strode in there and announced (in my undoubtedly squeaky, righteous little girl voice): “I didn’t do anything wrong and you have NO RIGHT to strap me!” They smiled and thanked me (probably laughing into their wimples) and sent me back to class. Presumably that’s what happened to everyone else too, but in my arrogant little mind, it was the way I’d handled it. I’d told them!

 

 

I was a word-nerd from the start, and because I loved words, ideas, books and learning, of course I loved school. That right there was enough to make me unpopular.

 

 

I wasn’t unpopular, though. Not really. I wasn’t Miss Congeniality, but I always had friends. And I didn’t mind be the teacher’s pet. I wasn’t mean or rude or a snob. I was polite to everyone and never stepped out of bounds, so my nose was squeaky clean.

 

 

How to win friends and influence people:

act dumb[er]?

 

 

When I was nine years old, we moved to a new, faraway neighborhood. For about a year and a half, I bussed into town to the same school. But after a while, I got to know some local kids and decided I wanted to go to the local elementary school. Now picture grade six.

 

Grade six group photo 1970's

NOT my Grade 6 class photo, but gosh it could be! Right down to the teacher Mr. Now.

 

 

It was a pretty hip school, with open areas and blended grades and other new-agey ideas from the 1970’s that probably had merit, but didn’t amount to much teaching and learning. Coming from my strict Catholic school culture, I was light years ahead academically.

 

 

apparently, I used really big words

 

the intellectual snob

 

 

And, apparently, I used really big words. My new classmates were quick to point this out, and to ridicule me relentlessly (um, non-stop) for it. It hurt. After all, I was just being my genuinely priggish little self. I wasn’t a snob or trying to lord it over them. Just using my “god-given” talents.

 

 

Think about it for a sec. If you ask someone like Malcolm Gladwell or educator and author of The Element Ken Robinson they’ll tell you that it’s the combination of a spark of talent, a lot of passion and a thousand hours of practice that create success. So if you take someone like, I don’t know, Keith Richards say, who’s spent his long, long, long life playing the guitar and singing, you’d expect him to be pretty good at it. You wouldn’t say to him that he should pull his punches so he doesn’t look like a snob, or like he’s trying too hard. Would you?

 

 Keith Richards performing

 

 

Back to my story. Wishing to be at least somewhat popular, I quickly adapted to this new hostile environment by dumbing down my language. I used simpler, shorter words, learned to speak some kind of regular kid vernacular (slang?), and spiced things up with vulgar swear words to be safe. I still speak a little like this, though I do know how to write “proper English.”

 

 

Later on in life, I thought I’d probably short-changed myself. With more support, maybe I could have taken that edge and turned it into future opportunities: scholarships, better jobs, an earlier start to my writing career, maybe. Who knows?

 

 

I’m not saying you can’t communicate intelligent ideas with simple words. But the English language has so many. It just seems like such a waste. What do you think? If this is true, and apparently it is, where can a person put a good education use?

 

 

I promised myself that I would never again be untrue to myself. I would never pretend to be something that I was not. And I would never sell my own strengths and talents short. And if people didn’t like it, well, too bad for them. That was who I was.

 

 

And now they’re telling me I have to exchange my hard-earned vocabulary for a simpler, more reader-friendly one in order to appear honest and trustworthy. My inner prig is pouting.
pink flamingo flock acting snobby

 

 

I want to throw a party for other disadvantaged over-educated intellectual snobs so everyone can show off their language mastery and toss as many big words around as they like. It would be very exclusive. No wait, that sounds like a university faculty party full of boring and pretentious boors. Bad idea.

 

 

Tell me what you think. Were you every ridiculed for being too good at something? Do you prefer to read blog posts and articles that use simple shorter words rather than stretching your knowledge of the English language and keeping the bar high? I look forward to hearing your opinion.

 

 

 

 

 

by

Digital Age Workers and Jobs of the Future – Part 1

file000898499863Digital Age Workers and Jobs of the Future

 

As a mother and aunt of a few young digital-age millennials, I often ponder the particular challenges these emerging adults face in our overwhelming and rapidly changing world, and how they will fare in the future.

 

In the last century, post-war changes to society, including wider access to education, industrialization, a growth economy, the sexual revolution, and changing social values tended to have a flattening effect on social hierarchies and increase opportunities for advancement and success. The world we now live in is very different.

 

“Canada’s economy is built on a simple but deeply entrenched belief: that every new generation will do better than the one before it.” MacLeans Magazine

 

Personal observations lead me to agree with Jason Kirby’s opinion back in 2009 that the above may no longer be true. The reality for today’s youth is increasingly the opposite. Costs of living are higher, incomes lower and debt even greater than they have been in previous decades.

 

Young graduates have a much harder time getting established than did previous generations.

 

Economic recessions combined with competition for jobs with established and as-ever numerically advantaged baby boomers, as well as a rapidly evolving, technologically changing job market, mean that young graduates have a much harder time getting established than did previous generations.

 

Evidence that today’s young adults suffer from anxiety and depression in unprecedented numbers, as well as often cited statistics about late launchers and boomerang kids, support this notion.

 

The January 24th issue of The Economist included a pair of articles pointing to “America’s New Aristocracy” and “An Hereditary Meritocracy”  which reveal that America’s founding principal of equal opportunity for advancement and success is being undermined by systemic filtering.

 

Wealthy, educated and powerful couples tend to beget more of the same, and both educational and career advantages, from cradle to college, accrue to the children of the existing elite, meaning that opportunities for success are slipping away from the rest.

 

The amount of recent political dialogue about the fate of the “middle class” and ensuing debates about how to define this term shine a light on the growing struggle average Canadians have to survive and thrive.

 

There seems to be general consensus that the “middle class” is growing, and the gap between the middle class and the privileged elite is widening.

 

While it’s no surprise that politicians are free with this term, even economists who insist on statistical definitions do not agree. Despite this, there seems to be general consensus that the “middle class” is growing, and the gap between the middle class and the privileged elite is widening.

 

This phenomenon in part explains the widespread growth in income disparity. “[An] OECD report shows Canada is near the top of the heap in terms of both growth in income disparity over the past three decades and in absolute terms.” http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/canadian-income-disparity-growing/

 

Add another ingredient to the mix: the changing nature of our economy in terms of both the types of jobs that are emerging (and disappearing) and the emergent alternate economy that social media and the internet have spawned.

 

Jeremy Rifkin, American economic and social theorist, presents the argument that an emerging zero-marginal-cost sharing economy will make itself felt most strongly in the labour market, where “new employment opportunities lie in the collaborative commons in fields that tend to be nonprofit and strengthen social infrastructure — education, health care, aiding the poor, environmental restoration, child care and care for the elderly, the promotion of the arts and recreation.” (The Sunday Review, March 15, 2014 and on CBC Ideas.

To be continued July 1, 2015…

Mary Ann Clark Scott, formerly an architect and environmental gerontologist, currently works as an education savings advisor, a novelist, corporate storyteller and freelance writer.
by

Too Funny and True NOT to Share

Febreeze my house by Kristen Lamb

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have a few as-yet unwritten blogposts to start the year off, but I couldn’t resist reblogging this latest post from Kristen Lamb, who knows us (writers) too well. So many of the comments just add to the hilarity.

Enjoy!

You Know You’re a Writer When…

 

 

by

Remembering Thanksgivings Past

apples

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOUNTIFUL BEGINNINGS

I was the child of parents who grew to adulthood on a pioneer homestead in Manitoba. Throughout my life, I took it pretty much for granted that the major holidays would signal a large family gathering, accompanied by some significant feasting, with food that my parents had more or less produced themselves from the land.

Although we reaped the rewards at these special times, our everyday lives benefited from the work my parents did every other day of the year, too. It may have seemed to me as a child that they simply waved their arm and all that bounty magically appeared on the table, whereas now I understand how much it was the product of their bent backs and a not insignificant amount of wisdom passed down through the generations.

A NEW TRADITION OF GRATITUDE

I had to leave home, to go to university here and there (actually the further I went the more I discovered), before I came to appreciate what we had at home.

In particular, I remember two Thanksgivings.

The first was during my undergraduate years. One year when I clearly had decided I couldn’t afford the time or money to go home for the holiday, I was invited, along with my roommates, to join a large group of likewise “homeless” singles for a Thanksgiving feast. This was my first encounter with someone else’s traditions. Looking back, I can clearly see how insular I was, how little exposure I had to cultural groups outside my own. I still find it difficult to understand why someone would want cornbread, mushrooms, apples or oysters inside their roast turkey, or curry spices on the outside. 8^* But never mind.

On this particular occasion I was astonished, enlightened and delighted with the sheer variety of dishes that were brought to the pot-luck Thanksgiving feast I attended. All the familiar items were there (well maybe not pyrogies, I can’t recall now.) But certainly there was roast turkey and stuffing and myriad root vegetables and squashes. There were also things I had never had, that others deemed de rigeur: brussels sprouts, for example. (imagine that!).

And as many kinds of pie as one could dream of: not only pumpkin but apple and pecan as well.

But despite the disorientation and titillation of learning new things, there was one thing that was familiar, and perhaps even more accentuated in that strange setting: gratitude.

Somehow, I suppose because we were all displaced, the sense of appreciation, not only for the bountiful feast, but for the warm and generous companionship, was uppermost in my mind. Perhaps it was simply that none of us took it for granted. In my memory, it was one of the warmest, richest, most emotionally fulfilling holidays of  my life.

the last tomatoes in the gardenRECONNECTING WITH THE BOUNTIFUL EARTH

A few years later, when I was further from home in the middle of grad school, I was taken in hand by a new friend and co-worker, along with my own room-mate at the time, and swept away to a rural area outside of Montreal for the Thanksgiving weekend. This was a part of the country with which I had no familiarity.

Not only the customs, but the very geography, were new and strange.

Our hosts ran a small pig farm. They were gracious and welcoming, immigrants themselves to Canada. Highlights I can remember include accompanying our hosts in borrowed galoshes as they fed their livestock and harvested from their fall garden most of what we would be eating that evening, including late tomatoes, squashes, greens and brussels sprouts. We were sent on a long country stroll down a grassy allee of trees under the rainbow canopy of colourful Eastern leaves, armed with a bag of wrinkled apples to feed the horses who met us at the bounding fence, anticipating the sweet treats we brought.

fall leaves, country walkGRATITUDE TRULY FELT

Later, we warmed ourselves by a wood fire inside the cozy farmhouse and sipped wine while our hostess prepared the meal. My senses were alive. It was as if I had never experienced hospitality before, never seen food pulled from the dark soil and lovingly transformed into beautiful and delicious dishes, never tasted such a sumptuous meal, never felt such warm companionship, never felt such gratitude.

How odd, when in fact that is exactly what I had grown up with.

But perhaps without experiencing it out of my familiar context I would never have come fully awake to the wonders of a country harvest, and food lovingly harvested, prepared and shared with loved ones. Nor of the delights of opening ones home and ones arms to strangers.

It is a Thanksgiving weekend that I will always remember, and consequently why I prefer to be in the country at this time of year. Also perhaps why I feel a special urge to open the door and  include those outside my immediate family at the table. I certainly never again took for granted the skills, traditions and loving generosity of my own family.

So this weekend I’d like to say thank you. Thanks to my parents and family for all that they gave me and all that they taught me. Thank you to all those friends and strangers who opened their homes, tables and hearts to me over the years. And thank you to the earth that provides us all we need and more. If only we are able to pause and remember to appreciate it.

How about you? Do you have a special memory that you cherish – a moment in your past when you woke up and really felt gratitude for everything you were given?

by

Dare I Do NaNoWriMo?

COMMITMENT PHOBIA

crest-bda7b7a6e1b57bb9fb8ce9772b8faafbRight off the top, National Novel Writing Month sounds like a really bad idea for a person as commitment phobic as me.

For readers who aren’t familiar, NaNoWriMo is “National Novel Writing Month, shortened as NaNoWriMo (na-noh-ry-moh), … “an annual internet-based creative writing project that takes place every November. NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel between November 1 and 30.” For more information read the rest of the Wikipedia definition here, or go to the NaNoWriMo site.

But since my writing’s been totally off the rails for quite awhile now, what with dealing with getting my house ready for the market, suffering from unexpected chronic pain and disability, dealing with the consequenses of menopause-induced brain fog (more on that in a later post,) shooting off exploring screenwriting, film-making and other, largely unrelated employment opportunities over the last couple of years, I’m thinking this might, in a counterintuitive sort of way, be A GOOD THING, as Martha says.

writing, handwriting

 

 

 

 

 

A bit of focus, you know?

NOTHING TO LOSE

Well before anyone starts shouting, ‘Hell Yeah, go for it!!’ I’ll just say I’ve already registered. I’ve never had trouble cranking out words before, but then again I’ve never committed to writing 50,000 new words in a month. But since my buddies at the RWA-GVC are doing it en masse, I figure I’ll jump on the coffee-trolley and see what happens. The worst case scenario is that I write no more than I’ve been writing lately, which is a big fat ZERO. Absolutely nothing to lose, right? My situation can’t get any worse, and the beauty of NaNoWriMo is, there really aren’t any consequences. (Except shame.)

PLANNING THE NOVEL BEFORE I BEGIN

The problem now is, I’m definitely NOT a “pantser” as we say in the biz. In other words I’m not one of those writers who can just sit down at the computer and start banging out words without any concern for what the novel is about or where it’s going. (The very thought of it makes me catatonic!). Which means that I have to decide WHAT I’m going to spend the month of November writing and do a little preparation. And since everything I’m working on (in a figurative, if not a literal sense) is either in revision, nearly complete, or a screenplay, I’m not sure what to choose.

f1d33654a95bb8b75bb0de7aa35c554f

Option A: To take my rough, incomplete outline for an interactive STEAMPUNK novel about a time-travelling jeweller and write through just one storyline. (Basically the interactive novel requires three “forks” in the story, something like gaming narrative, or “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories, where the reader makes a decision for the protagonist about where the story goes next, requiring a total of 12 different endings for the same storym, making it rather complicated.) But since I’m somewhat stuck on that, it makes me nervous. On the other hand…

 

Option B: To take the seed of an idea for one of my future novels and just go for it. Some of these are a bit better thought through than others. Whichever one I choose would fit into a potential “series” with one of my already completed novels. The possibilities include:

downtown eastside lane, b&w imagea) a story about an ambitious and uptight lawyer trying to rise above her family’s shame and a passionately dedicated social worker dealing with kids on the street, and greedy developers and corrupt city officials interfering with approvals for construction of a youth shelter, who teaches her to take risks, let down her hair and believe in causes again.

red car, crashedb) a story about a vain, hardened lawyer with a secret past whose glamourous life is shattered along with her face and her pelvis in a serious car accident, and who must rebuild herself inside and out while working through physiotherapy, with the help of a selfless contractor whose estranged wife’s street life as an addict doesn’t make his job as a father any easier.

Italian villa on a lakec) a story about an Art History doctoral student doing thesis research in Florence who meets an Italian architect and gets drawn into his shabby-chic aristocratic family’s troubles, deciding to help them keep their run-down ancestral villa out of the clutches of a crazy-rich egomaniacal American rock star who wants to renovate it beyond recognition and destroy centuries of cultural history in the process.

Okay so that’s it. Tough choice, eh?

If you read this and want to vote, leave a comment and tell me which story you think I should write for NaNoWriMo and give me a couple of reasons why (or not). Depending on public opinion, it might make it easier for me to choose. And wish me luck. Thanks!