George Saunders is coming to Denver!

July 31, 2014

Been in a writing dry-spell the last couple of days. Steven and I spent the time uber-shopping for kitchen and bathroom stuff to supply our new vacation/retirement/rental Teton Valley house. Yesterday we took an afternoon break. We went to the famous Jackson Hole "Million Dollar Cowboy Bar," then on to the "Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum," which was actually very good. There is so much to see and do in Jackson Hole...so glad we bought in the Teton Valley!

Anyway, my short-story writing hero, George Saunders, is coming to Denver in September. Tickets go on sale tomorrow morning. I plan to dial-in first thing,right after my coffee. Can't miss coffee.

Check-out the video. Saunders talks about spending his childhood mimicing voices. In his latest book, Tenth of December, he returned to his childhood practice and created unforgettable voices. I have the book on Kindle, but must remember to buy a hard copy for signature!

Clean desk; clean schedule

July 22, 2014

First day back to my writing schedule since the Lighthouse Writers Workshop retreat. Back at home, this desk is my very own retreat!

I spent the first half hour revising a poem I wrote in Grand Lake. The rest of the hour was for going through all the paperwork from the retreat and organizing it into three piles: writing advice, interesting books to read, and, finally, all of my little paper scrap notes. These notes may, or may not, have a place in my current writing. I keep every note, character sketch, scene, and phone writing. I never know when the notes will come in handy, so I keep them all. I also learned about Evernote from a fellow writing camper. It easily synced across all my devices and has it's very own dropbox. Love it! Wonder if my paper scraps will go away now. It's a dream because it probably won't happen. I'm too used to scratching on whatever piece of paper is handy. However, it will be nice to write on my phone again. The Compositions phone app is gone now because it doesn't sync at all.

For the next two hours, I transcribed all retreat scene revisions. I also took out unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. My sentences pop without the useless repetition of these modifiers. Just for fun, try taking out some of these ubiquitous modifiers in revision. I'm sure you will be quite surprised at the result. Thanks to Karen Palmer for the idea.

The writing life yielded three very productive hours today.

#Grand Lake Retreat Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Besides reading and revising my own work, I spent the yearly retreat writing character sketches and reading
poetry. I also paid particular attention to campers dialogue, including my own. My old Denver writing group told me that "I need to write dialogue the way people speak."  For a week before the retreat, I wrote down much of what I said. Turns out that I speak in monologues, which is so sad for the people who have to listen to me. I still believe that the family in my newest novel, "Funny is Not Enough," do not interrupt each other often because the mother character hates anyone interrupting her, though she is the queen of interrupting others. My novel turns around control, which brings out all of the character's idiosyncratic and inconsistent behavior. It's fun to see what these characters will do next.

Here's the rough synopsis:

Funny is not Enough 

Violet moves back home with her parents as she waits for her Peace Corps assignment.  She expected to go immediately in to the Peace Corps after graduation, but life had other plans.  During Violet’s year long stay back at home, she comes across scrapbooks, diaries, and other mementoes of her mother’s past.  Violet knows that her mother, Jennifer's, life must have been an extremely unusual life, or else her mother's past was a fabrication Jennifer needed to reinvent herself. Violet had always challenged her mom to write a memoir, but every time Jennifer started to write her feelings would overwhelm her and she simply could not write her story. So Violet takes it upon herself to clandestinely research and write her mother’s story in one year, having no idea that this plan would take both her, and her mother, on another path altogether.

Read this blog about the writers retreat:

http://lighthouseblog.org/2014/07/21/what-happens-in-grand-lake/