A List of Random Things
Story Structure! Animals! Books!
For the life of me, I have not been able to figure out what to do with this account. Newsletters feel as though they need to be more essay/blog style or updates/news style. It takes me forever to get an essay together. I rarely have news or updates that warrant sharing.
And then I was listening to an interview with Austin Kleon on the Accidental Creative podcast while grocery shopping and realized a variation on Kleon’s list of things is something I might be able to do.
So, here goes:
1) The Thing in the Walls.
There’s something living in the walls.
I roll my eyes at it. It makes my husband laugh.
From what I’ve gathered from various media, these are not normal responses to creatures stirring in the walls.
I recently finished reading This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno and the horror in that story begins with some scratching in the walls. The thing in Thiago and Vera’s walls isn’t a rat, opossum, or squirrel. Since I already found a mouse and an opossum in the cabinet over the stove this month, these seem more likely suspects than an entity that wants to be pulled out of the wall.
2) “You can’t fight crazy with sane.”
I used to say that all the time, especially when I worked in education. I’ve been told “crazy” is ableist language, but as a lifelong “crazy” person with a family full of “crazy” people, it has always been good shorthand for the collection of undiagnosed problems found in so many Southern families like mine that spent too many generations avoiding therapy and medication for the myriad of mental health challenges that have infect both branches of my family tree.
When I worked in education, I spent almost a decade working with the kind of kids who might suddenly decide to climb across desks and roost on the file cabinet, eat the screws out of the light switch, or throw a desk. Needless to say, these were not states they could be reasoned out of. Similarly, when administrators told teachers to do two things that were clearly incompatible (like using the new books in two different rooms without moving the books from one room to another), they were not accepting of feedback.
I started reading In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida by Kent Russell back when we went camping at Oscar Scherer State Park in November. I underlined a sentence that captures my sentiment with a bit more eloquence: “I understand that you cannot reason a man out of a position he was not reasoned into in the first place.”
Russell was talking about the “Cold Civil War” and the, at the time, looming 2016 election. If anything, it’s gotten far worse. I mean, those same people have been eating horse dewormer and fighting imaginary pedophiles.
The trouble is, feels like too many Democrats are unaware of this notion and still believe the right turn of phrase will suddenly snap these people back to reality. It’s not going to happen. And thinking it will is giving them more power.
3) Acts or Beats?
I’ve been reading Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need by Jessica Brody. It’s been helping structure a teenage Davis Groves book I’ve had part of a draft for in my computer for years. I set up a whole Scrivener template with the beats.
I also watched too many YouTube videos on the 3-Act Story structure and decided to use K.M. Weiland’s Scrivener template and fuse the Save the Cat beats into the acts.
Why? Why on earth would I spend four hours doing that? Well, because the three manuscripts I’ve been struggling with, form-wise, suddenly make more sense when I merge the two. One has two corresponding points of view (from the two older sisters) and some sections work better to follow the breakdown of the acts and other sections work better to follow the beats.
What’s working for you? You plotting? Pantsing? Somewhere in between?
4) Speaking of Story Structure…
I’ve also been working my way through Story Engineering: Mastering the 6 Core Competencies of Successful Writing by Larry Brooks. All this started as a way to better explain story to my writing students and morphed into “This will finally fix my own story problems!” Brooks suggests that successful pantsers just “get it” and magically apply the core elements of story subconsciously. Maybe. I find it difficult to envision these different elements in such wildly different books, some that have been hugely popular, but I was “meh” on or others that I adored but haven’t seen commercial success.
Feels like maybe there’s something else at work besides just story engineering. Might be a little marketing engineering at play, too.
5) Bird Season!
Florida politics are a mess, to put it mildly. (That’s a whole boatload of rants, a flotilla of rants, an armada of rants, even.)
Florida wildlife isn’t doing as badly as the schools, but there are a few issues.
Panthers are adorable and majestic and keep getting hit by vehicles despite the corridors and fencing. If you find yourself driving across Big Cypress and the Everglades (I-75 or Tamiami Trail), please keep an eye out for wildlife. And if you happen to be on Hwy 29 near Everglades City, please slow the hell down.
Speaking of wildlife having unfortunate interactions with cars, we came across a young anhinga a couple of weeks ago as it struggled to get back in the air. You can read the rest of that story over on Instagram, but the TLDR is that it ended up flying away after it got some time to gather itself. Hopefully, it’s thriving and avoiding cars.
Agricultural and lawn runoff has been affecting vegetation in the springs, which has been limiting food for manatees. Manatees also struggle every year with sharing the ocean and canals with boats. So sad.
On the other hand, we saw so many young birds (go ibis!), baby alligators, and a young softshell turtle when we were out camping the end of March.
Hopefully, some of that was interesting or useful. Keep writing. Keep reading. Keep rocking on.
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