Action is the antidote to despair. - Joan Baez

Joan Baez is certaintly not part of my starlet quote series. Ms. Baez belongs more in 'Cool Chick' quotes.

Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers. Joan Baez

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. Joan Baez

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one. Joan Baez

And from one of her songs that like alot of songwriters read like poetry...

Happiness is temporary
Believe me, I know
It can arrive as a shining crystal
And leave as the melting snow
Come all you lads and lasses
The Kingdom of Childhood passes

Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read an article in the September issue of the Smithsonian called Ghost Writer by Gioia Diliberto and I've figured out where I'm going wrong with my writing - I should be channeling spirits!!! LOL!

The article is about a woman, Pearl Curran, who channeled at 17th century spirit (Patience Worth) using an Ouija board and dictated her poems and stories - nearly 4 million words between 1913 and 1937. That's not all - her first novel was hailed by the NY Times as a "feat of literary composition" and went on to publish 7 novels, poems, short stories, and plays.

gosh - a dead spirit can get published and I'm still waiting - patiently (ha, ha get it Patience Worth - ha, ha - okay lame I know)

Anyway, no one was able to prove her false though various theories abounded - like "the automatic activities of the unconscious" or "result of inherited 'nerves cells' or the more popular mulitple personalities. And of course spirtualism was enjoying a resurgence during this time making her popular.

There are times - the very rare times - that I do, as the article points out 'live as fully in their writing as in their own lives.' - where characters , plots, scenes, dialogue become as 'real to me as personal experience'

But to channel a dead spirit? Creepy - and besides the Bible says" 'Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the LORD your God.
--Leviticus 19:31

So channeling dead spirits is out. But how about channeling an alien from Planet X? Oh yeah I'm all over THAT.

“Lipstick is not just for looking glamorous; it can be used to signal for help on windows and other surfaces.” Nancy Drew

Get A Clue - Life Wisdom from Nancy Drew
Everything You Ever Needed to Know about Life, You Can Learn From a Teenage Sleuth - By Amy Helmes

Raise a cyber hand if you are/were a fan of Nancy Drew. I was fan - that is until Nancy Drew (Pamela Sue Martin) kissed Frank Hardy (Parker Stevenson) in the television series. But I’m mostly over that - I mean it’s not like she kissed Joe Hardy (Shaun Cassidy - sigh, sigh, sigh) - if that were the case The Hardy Boys would have been investigating the murder of Nancy Drew - LOL.



Anyway - so I am a fan and I picked up the book below that included magnets of Nancy Drew book covers like The Hidden Staircase.



I took the quiz at the end of the book and scored 21 out of 25 making me an ace detective.

Chapter 4 is titles - Hot Dates, Heartaches, and other Courtship Capers
The author makes a good point that “bad boys aren’t Nancy’s cup of tea - having helped to apprehend too many to ever date one”
Her boyfriend Ned - which she meets after he helped her reattach the bumper to her car after an accident - is “not needy for her attention nor threatened by her intelligence - and she does not set aside her own ambitions or sacrifice her independence”

She is a fine role model for teenage girls… unlike the girl from Jeepers Creepers who decides to investigate a well where she saw a man shoving what looks like body bags down it - that girl is what we call in the writing world as Too Stupid To Live.

One more quote from our girl Nancy If worry were an effective weight-loss program, women would be invisible.” Nancy Drew'

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Had a fabulous day back on July 10. Eileen Charbonneau held a one-day Novel Writing workshop at the Merritt Bookstore in Millbrook, NY. It was a nice change of pace to meet with writers in other genres.

The first part of the workshop was on the importance of beginnings and the first 16 lines of your story in capturing an editors attention.

We previously submitted the first 15 pages to Eileen for critique and I received a huge ego boost when Eileen read the first 16 lines of Love By Design (she read from 2 other writers in the group as well).

Everyone enjoyed Love Design - but the biggest thrill was when they laughed when they were supposed to laugh. I think I’m hysterically funny but well that’s in my head. During lunch 3 of the other writers came up to me separately and told me how much they loved it.

During the day we wrote little assignments. I normally freeze in such an atmosphere and would never ever read my work, but after the conference in William Paterson University where I read my work (and again they laughed when they were supposed to ) I felt able to do so. I feel like I’ve really grown as a writer this past year. Anyway - here are the two assignments:

1)We learned a scene should do multiple things - So choose a setting and tell it through the eyes of the character that will show the reader who they are and what matters to them.
I wrote from Victoria’s POV (NYC interior designer from a wealthy family)

The walls painted in a stark white made the large abstract painting colored in dark red hues pop. The designer who selected the patterned fabric for the upholstered seating did so without a thought to how it would clash with 5th Avenue fashions.

2) Ask your character questions like how do they learn? (audio? visual? touch?)
- are they a problem solver? - competitive ? - are they open to new ideas? The list went on but you get the idea. The answers will determine how your character deals with the world. So my character Victoria does not like change - at all. We had to pick one apparently - but I was at the bathroom - but I got back in time to write this:

Victoria goes along with change like a cat goes along with a bath; scratching and clawing.

We all learned a lot that day and kudos to Eileen for a fab day!