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That’s a neat assessment. I must remember to pass that on to a couple friends. I got a 67. 🙂
https://rolenahatfield.com/
@winter-rose, one good question deserves another. My platform, such as it is at the moment, is my blog: Of Dreams and Swords. I’m hoping to get my historical fiction stories traditionally published — someday. I know it’s dangerous to just say “someday” because it makes it easier to believe that if you wait long enough you’ll wake up eventually to find that it’s happened, and harder to start work right now. But honestly, hardly any of my work is ready for publication yet. Sending Wind Age out for beta-reading, which should happen soon, is the first step toward that. I’ve had things beta-read before, but this time it’s with a much clearer idea of where I want to go.
As for getting my parents involved, I really have no idea. It’s been a long time since either of them have read any of my stuff, except what I post on my blog or on a blog some friends of mine have for sharing stuff to critique (a semi-private thing, but my father follows it). And I’m actually not sure either of them have read the blog stuff, because they never mention it. Also, my father has been in school my entire life, either working on Masters degrees (yes, plural) or a PhD., which means he’s been busy. In addition to teaching me and my sister, he’s always had his own schoolwork to do, besides a job that sometimes requires him travelling all over the state. My mother doesn’t seem terribly interested, although it’s been so long since I’ve offered her my work that she might be thinking “If you don’t want to share, I won’t ask”, which makes it hard to tell.
But my father’s finishing his dissertation — actually finishing for real this time through — so as of May he’ll be done with school for the rest of my mother’s life, at least (she’s joked that he can get another degree with his next wife). After that he might have time. What’s harder is that people have expectations about what people write, if they know the writers, are based on what they know of the writer. So, for instance, my family knows me to be quiet and sarcastic and that I love quoting and medieval anything, that my hobbies include philosophy, and that once I did a lot of research on the American Civil War. That will not prepare them for, say, a story about early England, involving the conversion of the English as a main theme, with quite a lot of spiritual darkness. Also the main character gets married and a plot point has to do with her not being able to have kids — two things of which I have no experience. A stranger stumbling across my blog would be introduced to the part of me that’s consistent with a lot of things in that story; my family might be shocked. It’s okay if you shock or even upset a stranger (most of the time); not so much your own family. Those are the main reasons I haven’t been sharing. How to get around that would probably involve, sometime after my father’s graduation, plunking down a copy of my best (so far) work on the table and saying they can read it, and telling myself I’ll survive.
- Rank: Eccentric Mentor
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@northerner Blogs are fun, though I always have a hard time keeping up with them and regularly posting.
I know what you mean about the ‘someday’ part of it. None of my large projects are ready for publication either. The day when they might actually be published seems so far away, almost something that might or might not happen. I’ve focused more on it lately however, thanks to the Rebelution videos on writing and a short publishing course from Chandler Bolt. I’ve never had a major project read all the way through by Beta readers, so that will be a painful but fun experience.Yeah your dad not having time would defiantly be a problem. I’m glad he’s almost done though! He teaches you school as well? That’s amazing. I get the part about your mom not seeming interested. Mine’s sort of the same. She just seems concentrated on other things. But I’ve been talking about my story more often and have given her an estimated time that she’ll be able to read it. I’ve been trying to warm her up to my writing, since I don’t usually tell her about it, like ever. It’s hard, especially when she doesn’t put as much emphasis or attention on it as I do. Your putting a part of yourself out there when you write and talk about your writing. It’s hard when someone else doesn’t get it. But I suppose no one will ever get our writing as much as we ourselves do.
What your saying about shocking your parents totally makes sense. It’s hard letting someone inside the writer part of your mind, especially if very few people have been let in. Writing about marriage and stuff would be insanely hard as well, since as you’ve said, its not something you’ve experienced.
But hey, we don’t write because its easy.@winter-rose, I suppose it’s not strictly true that my father teaches both of us. It’s been two years since I was home-schooled, but I guess I’m still not used to the thought. For several years he did have to teach both me and my sister, not all the subjects (my mother had almost everything related to English and History, up until we get into high school, when my father takes over the history side), in the evenings after work. Mom would teach us during the day, he’d come home and we’d have supper, then lessons with him, then after that he’d descend to the basement and work on his own school. These days I’m usually at college, so it’s just my sister, and Mom has hardly any lessons to do anymore.
Beta-reading is, if you get good beta-readers I should add, not that painful. It can be really fun, seeing your readers get attached to your characters, and cackling over their innocence when a devastating plot twist is right around the corner and they don’t know it yet. If you’re not too good with grammatical things, it’s also nice, because you’re having people read it to focus on the big things, and rewarding when they fall in love even despite the fact that you can’t figure out which “their” to use. It can give you motivation to keep going.
It’s true that we don’t write because it’s fun.
- Rank: Eccentric Mentor
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@northerner So you are in collage now? Is it hard to find time to write?
My dad was the one we always went to for math questions. My mom was my teacher up until the last two or three years of high school when we either did our school on our own or did collage courses. It’s been a while since I was actually homeschooled as well, but once a homeschooler always a homeschooler. 🙂
I’m looking forward to beta reading for the most part. I’ll just have to deal with having all of my mistakes being seen by others. It will be fun to see how they react to my characters and plot twists though.@Winter-rose, I’m majoring in Creative Writing, so sometimes I have the opposite problem: too much to write. For example, I’m in my third year, so I’ve gotten past all the general classes and am starting to get into the ones that are important for my major. Which means this semester I have a creative nonfiction workshop, a writing workshop that so far has been entirely poetry, the second half of a course on British Literature, an Aesthetics class, and a Philosophy of Religion class. The first workshop has a lot of reading, but other than that, only two writing projects, a long one and a short one. I’m working on the long one already, though it isn’t due till the ides of March (an ominous due date if there ever was one). The other workshop so far has assigned a poem a week, and poetry is emphatically not my thing, unless it’s Anglo-Saxon verse style, which is fun, but the modern eye and ear are not accustomed to it. So for a single villanelle, it takes as much time as I can get to come up with anything halfway decent. British Literature has two papers and two essay exams. Aesthetics has a lot of in-class writing exercises, because the teacher is a good one and believes that writing down what you think will help you think through your position and refine it. And finally Philosophy of Religion only has one paper, in lieu of a final exam, but already I’ve got so many possible topics in mind I may end up writing more than one just because I have so much I need to say. (It’s your typical politically-correct liberal university, but the Philosophy department isn’t all bad, and Philosophy of Religion so far has been fun.) So the question is hardly “Do you have time to write?”, it’s more like “Do you have time to do anything else?” Besides which I live an hour away from school and commute every day five days a week. And unfortunately, now that I’m driving, writing in the car isn’t an option.
- Rank: Eccentric Mentor
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@northerner Wow. How do you have any words left in your brain after all that?
@winter-rose That’s a very good question :). Add to that that I have a blog to keep up, and I’m line editing Song of the Sword for @Hope, and trying once in a while to assure my current characters that I’m not giving up on them. Oh, and sleep. Because, you know, after a long day where you’ve been pushing them off to the side, right when you go to bed is when they all start attacking you. And I happen to need sleep (I don’t do caffeine). So, yeah, this semester I am getting an awful lot of writing done, some of it quite good. However, progress on my novels and things is about as fast as a snail stuck in peanut butter.
- Rank: Eccentric Mentor
- Total Posts: 1486
@northerner Your life makes mine look so pitiful 😆 .
Nice! I got a 65.
@audrey-caylin, I got a 78. @bluejay and @sarah-h did you do it? If so, what did you get?
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You guys all got good scores! I got a 60 the second time round, which honestly surprised me.
Good luck with your blog, @Gabrielle, it sounds neat! I have had one for a while, it isn’t the biggest or prettiest thing in the interweb, but it is fun, and I think I have grown as a writer because of it. (and gotten better with deadlines. 🙂 )The Scattered Writer
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