writer / artist / shameless goof
Posts in response to The Daily Post, which put out a daily prompt in the form of a dictionary word in order to challenge bloggers with something to write about. I miss those daily prompts! They are now retired. They were a good way to connect to other bloggers.
In 2013 I went on a long, circuitous road trip of 6000 miles from San Francisco to Boston in my trusty Honda CRV. I meandered quite a bit, stopping by the side of the road to take photos whenever I felt like it, and generally taking the long way around. I stopped at many national parks along the way and took a gazillion photos. I had no real schedule or agenda. It was glorious.
Posted in response to daily prompt Meander.
This photo of Big Sur posted in response to today’s daily prompt, Horizon. I took a series of photos left-to-right and then pasted them together in Photoshop to make a panorama. I was fairly outdoorsy when I lived in California and always had my camera (Nikon D200) with me. Nowadays my biggest hobby is writing. Still, my trusty camera and lenses sit on the shelf, waiting for the day when I feel like taking a picture again. Odds are higher that I’ll take photos with my iPhone, and not lug around the heavy Nikon.
And another Big Sur coastline horizon:
I started this blog in order to write about my novel & the novel-writing process, and maybe to even get a little feedback, but when I sit down to put together a post I feel very exposed. I don’t like working in a vacuum, but I’m also frequently averse to sharing my work outside a select subset of people. So much of my identity is wrapped up in my creative projects that I fear criticism of the project as though it were criticism of me. I know in my head this is not the case, but emotion is ruled by the heart and the stomach.
My novel is deep in the revisions stage. I work on it in fits and starts. When I get feedback from friends or editor-types I tend to go on a rampage of editing. When I feel good about the writing, I go on a rampage of editing. When I feel like my writing is dumb, I avoid it. Right now I’m avoiding it.
It’s a bit of a a vicious circle, either in the positive or negative sense.
Do you have a source of feedback for your writing? How do you avoid that scary exposed feeling? What do you do when you feel like your writing is dumb? How long do you spend on a post before hitting that publish button? Do you revise posts after you publish them?
It makes little paragraphs like this:
I wrote it in JavaScript:
https://ankiewicz.com/technology/random-language-generator/
Feel free to use those sentences in your own writing projects.
I am a little obsessed with it. I strive to make it better and better. I want the output to be as natural-sounding as possible. It is satisfying when it spits out realistic-sounding sentences. It’s extremely satisfying when the grammar is correct. I spent hours getting the plurals of the nouns to match the verbs. I spent forever deciding whether or not a sentence needs an adjective, an adverb, or a prepositional phrase.
It will never produce a novel. If I spend half as much energy on my novel as I do on this thing, I’d be done by now. Yet, I am fascinated by the process of creating machine-generated sentences. I am drawn to it. Occasionally, from an unexpected and surprising turn of phrase, I get inspiration.
I find myself getting lost in sites like this, imagining how I would emulate such rules in my own language generator: http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
What’s your form of procrastination?
My novel features an artist. As such there are many descriptions of colors, paintings, and art. Here is my multi-purpose list of colors, gleaned from HTML color names, stones, jewels, flowers, foods, and pigments/paints. See the expanded list with hexadecimal swatches here.
In response to daily prompt Opaque.
I’ve read that to be a good writer you should read, read, read. I have lots of books on Kindle and in paper format but I have a habit of starting them and not finishing them. I’m the queen of half-finished books.
Some of the half-finished books on my Kindle or nightstand:
Maybe I haven’t found the right novels to capture my interest. Many years ago (almost twenty-five years ago!) my favorite novel was Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. I read it so long ago that it feels as though I’m reading it for the first time. The last book I really loved and read all the way through in recent history was Stiff by Mary Roach, but even that was a few years back. I read a few others by Mary Roach. Packing for Mars was quite good.
Does anyone else have this problem? Do you even consider it a problem? Are you an avid reader? Tell me what books you like best.
This is a storm gathering down the road on the way to Devil’s Racetrack in Death Valley, California. It was probably a three-hour ride down unpaved road but it took us six because we kept stopping to take photos, such as this one. The sun was setting in the background and we never got rained on.
This is for the daily prompt Storm
I love abandoned bits of urbanity. This car, for instance. What’s going on with those cobwebs? Were those really produced by a spider? It must have been some sort of hyper active mega giant spider. Or perhaps dust gathered on an existing web.
Either way, cool.
This post is for the daily prompt: Abandoned
I used to be really into painting. I made a large number of small acrylic color studies, including this one. It is 8×8 inches. Some of them are for sale, so contact me! I am more into writing nowadays. Ask me about my novels.
Posted in response to daily prompt: Paint
Kristen Ankiewicz 