Irene Smith

I’ve been trying to write fiction for years now. Since 2003, I’ve been “serious” about it. In other words, I’ve written things that I’ve submitted for possible publication. Success? Not much, but thanks for asking. I haven’t figure out why yet, but I have noticed something funny. The more I read about writing, the more I do exercises, the less I feel capable to write. It’s almost as though thinking about it too much makes it impossible. Sort of the same thing as when you stop to think about driving a car. Think too much about the mechanics of driving and the next thing you know, you’re in a ditch.

On the other hand, once you have thought about it, not thinking about it is like telling yourself “I won’t think about pink elephants.” The next thing you know the ballet from Dumbo is going on in your head. I’m in a weird place. On the one hand, I have stories that are just begging to be told; at the same time I can’t seem to get out word one. I am doing great at making mind maps and coming up with a basic statement of the story (the protagonist, the antagonist, the situation and a twist) but I can’t go beyond that.

I’ve been taking a writing class online and it seems as though the tools I am getting from the course would solve all of my problems, but in some ways I’m more verbally constipated than ever. I have gotten pretty good at writing flash fiction but I can’t seem to go beyond the 1k or so that I need to write for a piece of flash. Why? I am not sure but if you are reading this at irenesmith.com, you can go to my Live Journal and read some samples. If you are reading this on Live Journal, scroll up and down and take a look. If something occurs to you, feel free to tell me about it. Just, please, criticize the writing, not the writer.

In the meantime, I’ve got to go finish my story for this week. Check out the Live Journal account for this week’s entry in the Brigit’s Flame writing competition.

On Sunday, May 10, 2009 my father died. He was 85 years old.

How do you summarize a person’s life? My Dad was on this planet for 85 years. He was a drummer, a photographer, and a business owner. He has held all those jobs and more as well, but to me he was just Daddy and, like most little girls, I thought that my Daddy was the strongest, the handsomest, and the smartest man alive.

In many of my earliest memories of my father, he had a camera in his hands. Mom and I were his favorite subjects. When I was a little girl, I loved having my picture taken. As soon as the camera came out, I began to pose and he was happy to snap shot after shot.

Not only did her take the pictures, he developed them in his home dark room. I will never forget the excitement of watching the image appear on a print that we had exposed and then bathed in chemicals. I remember dancing from one foot to the other as the picture gradually darkened on the paper, holding my breath, hoping that Dad would let me take the picture and plunge it into fresh water before turning on the light to examine the results.

For much of my childhood, Dad worked a long distance from home, first at West Point and then in New York City.

He left the house early in the morning and didn’t get home until late at night, often after I was in bed. When he was home, however, he always made the time we spent together special. Whether I needed help with a diorama for the Science Fair or a presentation for a Video course I was taking on how to produce a training video, Dad was there.
Dad had advice for every aspect of my life. I still remember the day he told me “If a man takes you out for dinner at a restaurant and there’s not a mushroom cap on the filet mignon, dump the guy.” Ok, so I didn’t always follow Dad’s advice but I always listened.

My father had so many wonderful qualities. He was a kind, generous, and caring man. When I had the measles and didn’t feel like eating, he found at least six different ways to serve up oranges in an attempt to get me to eat something. He was strong. When I foolishly stepped on a sewing needle and only the tiniest bit of the tip was left sticking out, he was strong enough to grab it and pull it from my foot with his bare hands. Yet this same tower of strength broke down and cried over the death of our family dog.

I think perhaps the most important lesson I learned from my father is that you have to find something to do that makes you happy and then go for it. At an age when most people are thinking of retiring, he went out on his own and started Graphics and then took over ownership of The Little Paper.

Together he and my mother built a business that has withstood the test of time, a business that is strong enough to continue without him.

When I was about six or seven, Dad brought home a bright red bicycle. Over the course of a long afternoon, he taught me to ride it. At first, he ran alongside me, holding the bike upright so that I wouldn’t fall. Once I began to have some confidence, he moved to a position behind the bicycle, still running along behind, holding me upright until he sensed (I’m not sure exactly how) that I was ready and then, quietly, without saying a word, he allowed me to ride off on my own.

Just as he did on that day, we now have to let go and allow him to leave us here as he moves off into the distance on his own. We will always miss him but he will never be completely gone as long as we hold these wonderful memories of him in our hearts.

MindVisualizer^TM

Web Site: http://www.innovationgear.com/

License: Commercial, $79

(Demo version available. See the web site for details.)

There is a wide variety of software available to create mind maps and some of it is even free. So why am I telling you about a product that isn’t free? I usually use free software when it is available. Unfortunately, sometimes you get what you pay for. I discovered MindVisualizer^TM the other day when I was looking for a replacement for a freeware mind mapping application that suddenly stopped working. I downloaded the demo and fell in love.

Mind Mapping is a cool thing. It is a way of brainstorming with yourself. The act of creating the map can help you shut up the critic within and concentrate on creating. Whether what you are trying to create is a short story, a novel, a business plan, or a shopping list, mind mapping can help.

MindVisualizer^TM is easy to use because it has a user interface similar to Microsoft Office. The commands and shortcut keys you are used to using in Office are available to you. I found myself using the program almost immediately without having to refer to the manuals. The program does its job unobtrusively. Freed of having to think about the mechanics of the application, your mind has free rein to focus on the task.

The image in Figure 1 shows a sample mind map that was created using MindVisualizer^TM. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it, in fact, it only took me about five minutes to create it. Just the same, it looks good. I accepted the defaults as I created the nodes and inserted child nodes. The best part of using the program as opposed to creating a mind map on paper is that you can move nodes around, edit nodes, and generally play with the concepts in you map until you are satisfied. For perfectionists (that would be me!) it provides the perfect opportunity to “let go” and be creative without being stuck with something less than pleasing afterwards.

There is much more to this program than the ability to create extremely simple mind maps like the one shone above. You have a great deal of control over the look of your map too, from the shape of the nodes, to fonts and colors. You can also add images to the mind map in the form of small icons or larger images. The demo version of the program provides a nice selection that you can play with. Map nodes can include hyperlinks and links to files on your computer system as well as simple text, making it easy to use the program to organize your life too.

One feature I found particularly useful is the ability to create linked maps. Right click on any node and select “Create Linked Map From Here,” and a new map file opens with the main node containing the text of the node you selected when creating the linked map. The original node has a hyperlink that you can click to load the linked map and the linked map includes a link back to the parent map too, so you can easily move from one to the other.

Completed maps can be exported in a variety of formats including PDF, Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel,) Open Office, and various graphic formats including JPG and PNG.

The creators of this program have managed to load it with useful features without making it cumbersome and complicated to use. I downloaded the demo version of the program from the MindVisualizer^TM web site last weekend and I have fallen in love with it. I heartily recommend it.

If you haven’t seen Nights in Rodanthe, The Notebook or Message in a Bottle and you intend to do so, don’t read this post. There are definite spoilers here.

Let me start by telling you what I mean by “Writers who Cheat.” There is an implicit contract between writer and reader. At the beginning of the story, the writer sets up what kind of story he is telling. It might be a romance, a tragedy, or an adventure story. This set up is an implicit contract between the writer and reader. Some writers cheat. They trick you into believing that they are telling you one type of story, a romance for example, and then when you are totally involved in the romance, they break the contract by revealing that the story is actually a tragedy.

Warning! Here come the real spoilers. Stop now if you don’t want to know about the movies. If you continue, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I have written off movies made from the books of Nicholas Sparks for that very reason. More than once I have become totally involved in a Nicholas Sparks movie only to find out that what I thought was a beautiful romance is, in fact, a tragedy.

The 1999 movie Message in a Bottle seems like a perfect romance until Garret Blake is lost at sea. A few years later, in 2004, the movie version of The Notebook came along. This movie was more honest. You can tell from the beginning that this is not one of those “happily ever after” romances. When the movie comes to a bittersweet ending, it is not a surprise.

When Nights in Rodanthe came out last September, I couldn’t wait to see it. Every commercial I saw called it a romance.

From the beginning there are no hints that Nights in Rodanthe is not a romance. There is obvious attraction between Adrienne and Paul from the beginning. They each have their own problems but they complete each other. Adrienne makes it possible for Paul to stop trying to prove that it wasn’t his fault that the woman died on the operating table and to just say, “I’m sorry.” She makes it possible for him ro reconcile with his son and go back to being a doctor. Paul makes it possible for Adrienne to make a decision. Because of her love for him, she is able to stop drifting along and end her marriage once and for all.

At this point in the movie, I thought, “Wow, they’ve both banished their demons, he can reconcile with his son, she can get her divorce and they can live happily ever after.

You’d think so and, in a true romance, that would be the case. In the last ten minutes of the movie, you find out that, rather than coming home to Adrienne like he said he was going to, he was lost in a terrible storm. The supposed pay-off for all of this pain is that she gets to see the wild horses on the beach farther south than they have ever been before. Is this foreshadowed? Yes. Is there any clue that he won’t be there to see it with her? Not a one.

I am not so naive as to believe that every story must have a happy ending even though the romantic in me would like to have it that way. I do believe that there is a difference between a story that focuses on romance and a story that coincidentally has a romance in it. I further believe that the author should let you know in the beginning what type of story is being told and not cheat the audience of the foreshadowed ending just to get one last good tug on their heartstrings.

Believe it or not, this July irenesmith.com will celebrate its tenth anniversary. According to whois, I purchased this domain in July of 1999. The site has been more active at some times than it has at others, but there has been something created by me, Irene Smith, at this domain continuously since 1999.

I first created my won web site in 1997 when I created a web site at GeoCities. Since then I have had many free and paid web sites in various locations but this site has been a constant since its creation back in ‘99.

My goal for the rest of this year is to post something new and (hopefully!) interesting to this site every week. We’ll see how I do.

Did I finish my NaNoWriMo novel?

A glance at the widget on the right will tell you that yes, I did. The amazing thing is that I wrote 14 thousand words between the end of the day on Saturday and five o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Over the course of the entire weekend, I wrote close to 20 thousand words. There were times when I wasn’t sure I would make it, but I did it and I’m glad.

Did I make the goal I set for myself of having the best novel so far? Not that you can tell right now, but the seeds are there. Next month (January) when I sit down to edit, I don’t expect to have a bad time of it. Actually, I’m sort of looking forward to editing. I’m also looking forward to my next project although I don’t know what it will be as yet.

Life is good sometimes. But now I’m tired. I need, no my body demands, more sleep.

My novel is coming along. I am progressing but not as quickly as I should. On the other hand, the weekend is nearly here and I expect to get caught up and maybe even get ahead then. In 2004 I was nearly 20k behind on Thanksgiving and I ended up finishing on the 29th. I plan on finishing by next Wednesday. Maybe I will finish this weekend. Who knows?

I always seem to go through a period with every novel where I absolutely hate it. Now that has passed and I will start churning out words again. I know that, I’ve seen it happen three times already and yet every time it happens I panic and twice I gave up altogether.

The truth is that this year’s novel is the best I’ve done so far. This year’s novel will be published if I have to submit it to 50 publishers to do so. Somebody is going to publish this novel.

I think the most exciting thing for me this year though has nothing to do with my NaNoWriMo novel, it has to do with the fact that my 12-year old son is also writing a novel this year. We gave him a 5,000 word limit this time, but he is doing it. Best of all, the story he is writing is extremely creative. I’m having fun watching it grow. Maybe he won’t have to wait until he’s almost 50 (or older!) to have a book published. Here’s hoping.

Something sure went wrong with the latest version of the Twitter Updates plugin. The new version offered me the option to post the Twitter Updates to my blog on a weekly basis. It sounded like a nicer option than publishing daily so I selected it. What did I get? About fifty posts entitled Twitter Weekly Update with the same half dozen Tweets in them. I was not happy.

When I went to the plugin’s web site to report the error, I see that the plugin is unsupported and I should report the problem in the forums or if I want to pay them for Word Press support… Needless to say the plugin has been disabled.

• Published a new post: Twitter Updates for 2008-11-11 http://ping.fm/YFARO #
• Getting ready to start the day. I’m actually headed for work although I’d rather go back to bed. #

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• Good night world. It’s been a productive day but I’m crashing. #
• Published a new post: Twitter Updates for 2008-11-09 http://ping.fm/0cZ2R #
• Updated an old post: Twitter Updates for 2008-11-09 http://ping.fm/0cZ2R #
• Updated an old post: Twitter Updates for 2008-11-07 http://ping.fm/6ONiU #
• Updated an old post: Yes, I’m Raising Money Again http://ping.fm/V8eAb #
• Updated an old post: NaNoWriMo Progress Report http://ping.fm/RVMAX #
• Updated an old post: Twitter Updates for 2008-11-03 http://ping.fm/dCVIc #
• Wow I’ve been talking about word count a LOT lately. You’d think it was NaNoWriMo or something. Oh… it is. #

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