Monday, February 2, 2009

Way Back When

I start this blog by saying that I just got home from my soccer game and we won 1-0, it was an ugly win, but still a win.

Song from the past Erasure - Break These Chains -
Yes I was a teenager of the 80's.

Anyway, way back when, before there was the internet and computers were in every home, I used to write everything down in coil notebooks. They were my constant companion. Just the other day I was going through some of my old ones and found a couple of promising stories. Of course I had band names written all over them. One story I wrote was when I was 14 and was babysitting my niece and nephew in Utah for the summer and they didn't have a TV and I had no friends so I wrote a lot. The story was a love triangle or should say a love hexagon with names like (Nik, Natasha, and Tim). It had everything a teen book should have, clothes, hair and shopping but by the end I had turned it into a mystery, where one character finds out that her mother isn't really her mother after all. Unfortunately the summer ended, I returned to Calgary and never finished the story. Maybe one day.

I recently read a blog about choosing names and whether there are any names you'd never use. I have to say I'd be less inclined to use the name of someone I know or was related to and I would never use Jason because I just knew too many Jason's that weren't very nice people, sorry to the Jason's that are. Another hobby of mine growing up was reading through phone books and collecting odd and interesting names. Thank heavens for the internet because my fingers always got really black.

On the book front: I began reading The Complete Guide to Editing your Fiction by Michael Seidman and almost feel like I need to start over even though I'm almost half way through. He had an interesting piece of advice: "Reread your book concentrating only on one character at a time." I think I'll take that little tidbit and start at page one, again.

Bye for now.

3 comments:

Jessie Oliveros said...

I remember writing stories on notebook paper when I was younger, only mine were not quite so involved and high-minded because they were usually plotless daydreams about me and a boy I liked.

I have a lot of trouble with names. I spend a lot of time on thinkbabynames.com looking for first names and surnames of my characters. But it is really the first name and surname combination that I find the hardest.

Anonymous said...

We didn't have a computer in the house until I was around 13 or 14, so all writing before that was on typing paper. Not as neat as keeping in notebooks, but I did keep everything in separate colored folders.

My first "novel" (80 pages or so) was written on typing paper, front and back. I think I was around 11 or 12 when I finished it. I still have it, though it's hard to read because a lot of it was written in pencil, and then in attempts to edit, I would cross out things and have arrows all over the page :P

Anonymous said...

Thank heavens for technology. Although I still do a lot of edits by hand.