Its The Job That Never Gets Started As Takes Longest To Finish

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Ileandra Young

One of my favourite quotes from The Lord Of The Rings. Not earth shattering, or deeply moving, just plain, sensible advice. And from one of my favourite characters; Sam Gamgee. He’s quoting his dad of course – the Old Gaffer – but its none the less something he says to Frodo when they are starting to feel the pain of the day to day trudge towards Mount Doom.

So why am I starting with this quote?

Silk Over Razor Blades (SORB) has had a good rest period. I’ve written lots (LOTS) of flash, a couple of short stories and a novella since looking at it last. Its time I went back to it and gave it a bashing like it will never forget. I need to finish it. It needs to be done.

I downloaded a trail version of Scrivenor and separated the whole manuscript into chapters (I really like Scrivenor and have decided that I’m going to buy it at some point, but that’s a separate post). Then I started picking at the first chapter which, in truth, is the worst of the lot and needs some really rough treatment to be the way I want it to be.

Then I stopped. I stopped dead and haven’t looked at it since.

That was over a fortnight ago.

I feel so… I can’t even think of the right word for how I feel. I’m going to rest with ‘scared’ because that’s the closest approximation I can make.

I think back to 2010, when I started querying and I know now that I wasn’t ready. Since then, the piece has had a savage rewrite and lost about 30,000 words that were just dead weight. Now I’m looking at it again, desperate to query it but terrified to take the last steps which will enable me to do so. I have a plethora of excuses (hehee, thanks Char! I was desperate to get it into a blog post!) and though valid (some of them) they shouldn’t stop me working. Not when this is what I want (what I really, really want).

(yes, even now I can’t take myself seriously)

When I think of how much this story means to me, and how long I’ve spent on it, my chest constricts and its hard to breathe. I can feel my mouth drying out even as I write this and there’s an annoying little tic in my left eye (though that may be more to do with the fly that just took a kamikaze dive at my face). Clearly this novel is the source of an emotional roller coaster for me, such that the mere thought of giving it the last edit it needs to really shine, fills me with dread.

What if I can’t do it?
What if I don’t like it?
What if, when its all done and there really is no more I can do, its still not good enough?!
Crying face from OpenClipArt

I sit in front of the computer and do every other job in the world except the one that needs doing most. And ‘needs’ is certainly the right word. I need to do this. If only for the closure and the ability to move on afterwards I need to do this.

But if I don’t start, I’ll never finish.
*sigh*

Thanks Sam Gamgee. I think the time has come. I think SORB is finally going to get the editing work it needs to go out into the big wide world. I have to let my baby go….

Posted in Ileandra's Posts, Silk Over Razor Blades | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

80 Post Challenge – Post 79

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Ileandra Young

You just acquired a magic wand. What will you use it for?

gasping/shocked/surprised face OpenClipArtThe penultimate 80 Post Challenge post! Goodness, I never thought I’d make it this far. ^_^ Next week I’ll talk more about what the challenge has meant to me, but I just wanted to acknowledge… wow! Almost there…!

Anyway… a magic wand? Really?!

Thank you. Yes, I think that would be rather a lot of fun! ^_^

Would you like my serious answer, or my not-so-serious answer, because I can do both. Yeah, of course I’m going to give you both.

serious face from OpenClipArtSerious
With a magic wand I would try to fix some of my family up in ways they deserved to be fixed. And I’m not just talking about blood family here, I’m talking about friends who are close enough to me that they are called my family. They need houses, or help with bills. Or a good, long holiday. Or maybe a cleaner to take care of their houses. I would do these things for them with one sweep of my wand (in my mind called a lottery win – oooh, I’d better check my ticket!) to look after them. I want to look after them they way they have looked after me.
I would also ensure that my boys never want for anything.
Then, after rather selfishly taking care of all my wants, maybe I could look into a sure fire cure for cancer, the common cold and poverty.

goofy clown face from OpenClipArtNot So Serious
First… banish all politicians to a single desert island. They can rule themselves there in whatever manner they choose and will have regular drops of food, clothing and media. They will no longer be allowed to have any sort of influence on how we run our lives.
Give myself a new mode of transportation, probably a purple unicorn.
Finally, I would give myself the ability to understand everybody. Every language in any form, including baby babble. I would couple that with the ability to talk right back, in any language I chose and then proceed to have buckets of fun!

And I would!

My 80 Post Challenge is brought to you with help from Tom Slatin’s 80 Journal Writing Prompts.
Also… note… that some of the questions in the original list are duplicated, so these later entries include questions from Tom’s second list.

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Six Sentence Sunday 02/09 #30

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Ileandra Young

Gooooooooooood morning everyone!

Got more for you this week and even though I’m still giving you samples from my A-Z of Flash Fiction, this one is a bit of an odd piece. We’re on ‘U’ today and the trigger word is ‘ukelele.’

How many of you have seen the advert for match.com? It may be different if you live outside the UK, but for a long while the advert featured a man singing across a train station platform to a girl on the other side. He played a little ukelele and it was just the cutest little piece of advertising I’d ever seen.

If you’ve not seen it before, this is the advert in full:

I remember singing the stupid little song when I woke up in the morning because it was just so thoroughly stuck in my head. It was so stuck there that I wrote this little piece of flash, first person, just to get it out of my system. So… I hope you enjoy these six sentences.

~Gemma espies a not so secret admirer….

“Its the best smile I’ve seen for a while.”

Its too difficult not to look up. So I do.

Across from me – directly across, in fact! – on the opposite platform is a man. He’s plucking lazily on a tiny ukulele and gazing across towards my side. Towards me!

This week, as ever, there is a selection of other authors to sample by visiting the main site. You can do that by clicking on the banner link below. Catch you next time!

Six Sentence Sunday

Posted in A-Z Challenge, Flash Fiction, Ileandra's Posts, Other Writings, Sample Sunday | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Talk To Me, Don’t Spam Me

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Ileandra Young

Aaah Spam. Spam with cans That horrible, thick, greasy, lump stuff that apparently serves as an edible substance.

Ick.

Fortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about internet spam. In emails, on blogs, on Facebook and on Twitter. I’m talking about this sort of spam because recently I have been seeing an awful lot of it on Twitter especially and its driving me crazy.

I looked at my feed the other day and the whole thing was rammed with ‘buy my book’ tweets. Now I understand how social media can, is and should be used as a promotional tool, but there is such a thing as going too far. When every tweet you post is trying to coax people to buy your work, well, I just switch off. Similarly, if I decide to follow somebody on Twitter and, no matter what time of the day or night, I get a direct message (DM) saying ‘thanks for following me, check out my book’ then I’m likely to unfollow you just as fast.

I wish people would understand just how annoying automated messages and spam really is.

I’ve picked up a new blog to follow recently, by Kristen Lamb. You may have seen a selection of her posts earmarked here and that list will continue to grow because her words are extremely helpful. So too are her initiatives. My favourite is the ‘love revolution‘ #MyWANA, known more formally as We Are Not Alone. I won’t go into huge detail here, but I do recommend that you check out her blog and her posts about WANA because the whole idea of paying it forward, community, mutual understanding, help and care is a huge part of what she is trying to achieve. Personally, I love it and have been using the #MyWANA hashtag on Twitter to have conversations with people.

I mention Kristen and her blog in the context of this post because she talks about how the #MyWANA tag has recently been rammed with spam. And how that defeats the purpose of what the tag was created for and, worse yet, stops people using it. She has reclaimed the tag and since doing so, conversations there have taken place which put writers in contact with each other to form relationships. Far more effective that hurling repeated spam messages, wouldn’t you say?

From a personal point of view, the #MyWANA tag has put me in contact with people I might never have spoken to (similar to the #amwriting and #amediting tags). It allows me to have conversations no matter what time of the day or night and makes me feel part of a community of people who genuinely care and want to help. That is so, very, very valuable. Therefore I’m saddened to see people take advantage of it and fill it with spam.

I’m not going to wax lyrical about how one should promote their music/book/artwork but I will use this post to give you my personal stand on the matter. Hammering my Twitter feed with ‘check out my *fill in the blank*’ messages won’t encourage me to do so. It will make me think you are an automatic robot who doesn’t care about anything other than making sales. It will make your tweets fall into the background to be ignored because they are also the same thing. What it will also do, in extreme cases, is make me click ‘unfollow.’

Do yourself a favour… if you want me to buy into something you’re selling, tell me about it. Properly. Be available to answer my questions and interact with me. Show me you are a real person out there who is in a similar boat to me. Do that and I connect with you and not only will I talk back, but I’ll tell others about you too. The Posts I Like page is there for a reason… its because that’s stuff I want to share from people I have connected with over my blogging life. No one wants to talk to a machine.

What do you think, guys? Are these thoughts too harsh? Too critical? How do you feel about the constant barrage of selling spam on social media these days?

Posted in Ileandra's Posts, Procrastination, Real Life Chatter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

80 Post Challenge – Post 78

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Ileandra Young

Are there any skills you’ve picked up in the last year?

Yeah, there are a couple of things all most centred around my kids.

 

I’ve learned

  1. How to distinguish an ‘I’m hungry’ cry from other cries such as ‘I’m bored!’ ‘I’m scared!’ ‘Hold me!’ ‘Okay, enough is enough, feed me now and ignore the other screaming brat who shares my face; I’mthe important one!’
  2. How to change two nappies in 60 seconds without getting poo on my fingers.
  3. How to feed two babies at the same time.
  4. How to push a pushchair, hold a baby and an umbrella and a sandwich all at the same time.
  5. That cold tea isn’t all that bad and that if you add just the right amounts of lemon, it tastes really good!
  6. How to type/run a radio show/eat/drink with one hand.

Animated juggler from Wikimedia CommonsHeh, yeah, you may not think these are skills in the traditional sense, but believe me, juggling all the things I want to do and my two boys is a skill that I never thought I’d learn.

My days really have started to look like this:
I have no idea how my mum did it, or how my grandmother did it with six kids. They are crazy superwomen with more respect from me now than they’ve ever had before. Funnily enough though, I seem to get the same sort of reaction from strangers; ‘how do you do it?’ ‘Oh, you’ve got your hands full.’ ‘Well I know I couldn’t do it.’ And so on.

Well… to be honest, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Bring on the next set of skills required for when these little treasures begin walking! ^_^

My 80 Post Challenge is brought to you with help from Tom Slatin’s 80 Journal Writing Prompts.
Also… note… that some of the questions in the original list are duplicated, so these later entries include questions from Tom’s second list.

Posted in 80 Post Challenge, Ileandra's Posts, Real Life Chatter | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments