Day 21 - A Writing Contest Diversion

Today I took a writing diversion. I did write a few paragraphs in The Militia, but decided to also try my hand at something short and different. So, over on Betsy Love's website Ramblings of a Random Writer, Betsy is sponsoring a short story contest, 1,000 words in length, in honor of Short Story Month. It's also conveniently the time she teaches her high school English class about short stories. At the last moment I decided to enter, so spent  an hour heavily modifying a shelved work in progress, and sent it off. Is it top quality? No, but for a YA market, it's fun and I think has a great surprise twist that is sure to amuse them. Most importantly, I helped a fellow writer, contributed to helping others love story writing (or at least feel better about themselves by comparing their...

Day 20 - Memorial Day

I pondered writing Part IV of The Role of Morals in Writing today. Instead though I feel it most appropriate to take a moment to remember those who have served the United States and all countries in defense of freedom. I do not agree with every war we fight, ever mission our soldiers are sent on, or the behavior of every soldier. I cannot agree though with those who choose to maliciously malign them, insult them, and categorize them as being immoral, murderers, baby-killers, and more. The reality is the vast majority of soldiers fight for honor, freedom, and the defense of the helpless. My father, William D. Tandy Sr, joined the Air Force during Vietnam as an enlisted personnel. Later, he would go through Officer Training School after college and achieve the rank of Lieutenant Colonel....

Day 19 - The Role of Morals in Writing - Part III: Graphic Realism

Graphic Realism Graphic Realism is the term I apply to descriptions of people, places, events, or objects that goes beyond standard realism in writing. Often, too much graphic realism is found in loose, unpolished, writing wherein the author feels the need to describe everything in minute detail, usually all up front. Nothing is implied, no holes are left to be filled. It would be wrong to believe that graphic realism is actually the same thing as a higher level of realism. In real life, we do not stop and study every minutia of a vase, we would not observe every detail of a body we just happened upon, etc. Certainly some characters might observe more than others, such as the person performing an autopsy on the aforementioned body, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. So what are...

Day 18 - Just popping in

Today has been busy with gardening and family. I have written a few sentences today in the Militia. NO other updates, going to spend time with family rather than write the next part of th eseries. Check in tomorr...

Day 17 - The Role of Morals in Writing - Part II: Realism

Yesterday, we discussed the concerning trend in YA Fiction, specifically that an erotic first chapter won a QuerryTracker.com second place. I pointed out the inconsistency with being okay letting kids read vivid sexual scenes (and sex scenes themselves) when most parents in their right mind would not allow a 15 year old to watch porn in the house. Marketing such literature and awarding it prizes for being groundbreaking is not only immoral, it's not even groundbreaking. Sex has been around since man (hence mankind continues to exist...). Selling it cheaply has existed for pretty much forever too. Today I will begin to discuss a few different ways a scene can be described: Realism, Graphic Realism, and Hyper-Fantasy. Also I will be covering how the method pertains to your target...

Day 16 - The Role of Morals in Writing - Part I: Disturbing Trends IN YA Fiction

In a blog post on the QueryTracker.net blog, the May 2011 YA Contest Winners were announced. First and third place seem fine. Second, while well written, can only be classified as Erotica, ie, literary porn. Essentially, a teenage boy finds a mysterious, fully naked woman in his room. She is described in a sexual manner, as is the boy's sexual reactions to her. The F- word is used in the very first sentence. Now this might be suitable for an adult book. I wouldn't read it, but I don't hold it against others. What I find disturbing is that it is not just sensual, it is sexualized and is targeted for the Young Adult crowd, which is the 14-21 age range. So, essentially, they awarded a 2nd prize to porn targeted at 14 year old boys and girls. It doesn't help that at the end of the first page...

Day 15 - Katherine Farmer on How to Crack the Story Code

Tonight was my first meeting with the League of Utah Writers, Provo Chapter. I wasn't sure if I would go, as I have started coming down with a sinus infection. It was tough making it through, but the effort was worth it. Tonight they had a presenter, Katherine Farmer. She doesn't have a website or blog, but you can find a brief bio of her on the UVU website, as she is currently the Interim Director of the Noorda Regional Theatre Center for Children and Youth at Utah Valley University. Basically, she has spent her last 30 years running high level analysis of successful stories. Let me say here it was both awesome and slightly frustrating. Awesome because she has some incredible knowledge, analysis, and direction for writers. Slightly frustrating because she is so deep in her field and...

Day 14 - A Shout Out and Learning to Network

I have three goals with writing it seems. I only knew until late last night about two of them. The first is of course to write at least one sentence a day. Doing great! The second is to write a blog post a day. So far so good. The third I did not even realize I was doing until last night. It's that I always aim to do one extra thing a day that moves my writing career forward, be that improving at least one feature on my blog, networking, making concrete plans for steps I need to take, or researching an aspect of writing, marketing, or publishing. I think it's a good thing, and now that it is defined, I will ensure to the best of my ability it happens. Some days are more ax sharpening than others, but every day should have a little bit of time at the grindstone. Today, I decided to take...

Day 13 - Massive Overhaul, Blog Under Construction

Today has been a massive overhaul of my blog. I am, for the record, using the term "today" loosely. I started work on it at around 9:00 PM. It is now 3:50 AM. I stopped once about 15 minutes before midnight to write a few sentences on The Militia, ensuring I kept to the most critical task at hand, being the novel itself. I am not finished with the overhaul, but I think you will be able to see the direction this blog is headed. Slowly but surely, the ax is becoming razor sharp. A few items of note: There is now a photo of me. I am sorry to scare you like this, but what's done is done.  There are now (uncompleted) tabs at the top, with sub-tabs available in the future. There are a few placeholders for the moment, so don't be concerned if they don't make sense or don't actually have...

Day 12 - Model Websites

Before I jump into the post itself, I want to report that I did write yesterday. I told my wife I would be to bed with her in just a minute, and ended up closing the computer 20 minutes later. I ended up writing a page and a half rather than a sentence. This morning I also wrote before church. I know some don't write on Sunday, and I respect that. But writing is therapeutic for me. I feel better having done it, having placed some the thoughts swimming in my head down onto the (electronic) paper. I wrote another full page, or 294 words. And I referenced the classic "mamby-pamby land" Geico commercial. It was too perfect not to! Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhlWddAXSRA to check it out if you haven't seen it. Something that has been on my mind today has been my need...

Day 11 - Sunshine

It was stunningly beautiful for the vast majority of the day. So much so that I couldn't wait to get outside, leaving work and writing far behind. Writing wasn't really that far though. Certain events in the day, visuals that caught my eye and conversations I had made me think "You know, that may work in my novel!" I'm not becoming obsessed. These moments were a handful lasting just seconds, flitting through the mind and departing as a memory. Like my sentence a day, it's the small things that help move the story forward. It has been a busy day: shopping with my wife and son, playing in the grass, going to the birthday party of a best friend’s daughter who just turned two, my in laws coming into town for the weekend (and staying with us), going out for dinner (Sean's Smokehouse in...

Day 10 - 10 days, 16 followers, 1,312 words

Step by step I progress. At the end of 10 days, I thought I would take a moment and look back at how much of a difference 10 days has made. My first two days had minimal writing and was mostly setting up the blog and orienting myself with Author's Incognito, writing tools, and more. It was sharpening the ax time. Then my blog went down because Blogger accidentally deleted it. Looking back, it was like dropping my nearly sharpened ax on my foot. All my effort had served to make me feel not only had I wasted my time, but I was less motivated/capable than before. It took several days of no help from Blogger before I gritted my teeth and started again. The effort of pushing past the resistance was another turning point for me. I could have given up, like I had before with writing when problems...

Day 9 - Sprinting, Falling, and Sprinting Again

Karen Hoover (http://karen-hoover.blogspot.com/) from Author's Incognito recently set up a writer's "Sprinting" website. For those as ignorant of what this means as I was, the premise is simple: It's writing in set segments of time (the sprint)with other people doing it at the same time. There's a chat system for checking in, comments, etc, and someone keeps the time. Doing it as a group, even though you are working on your own thing, adds encouragement to make it through a session just as a workout partner does. Tonight I decided to give it a go. I started off with my fingers flying across the keyboard, then suddenly stopped dead. It suddenly hit me. I needed to rewrite nearly an entire chapter. What happened? Dialog, or lack thereof. Let it be known, that dialog is my Achilles' Heel....

Day 8 - Little Changes

Today I added a tracker for my novel progress to the top right hand side of the blog. I based it off 80,000 words being about standard that editors and publishers look for in a debut novel. I was at 3,653 words when I put it up, or 4.57% of the way there. While it seems insignificant, it's not bad considering two weeks ago I was at less than 1%. That 1% had taken a year of research and aborted writing attempts Yesterday I set out to write at least one sentence, as always. I wrote nine, which came out to 205 words or a little over a paragraph. I could have written more, but I needed to get to bed for an early day at work. A few minutes ago I wrote six sentences, or 92 words. Heading to bed, but pleased I have made more progress. This time I even got to it earlier than my blog post. It's getting...

Day 7 - And So It Was Written

Life is busy for me, as you have seen. My goal however of writing at least one sentence a day stands, and more when possible. My post yesterday had me at 11:30 PM and nothing written. I was, to be quite honest, out of my mind tired, more than I had been in a long time. It had been a very long, very hard day not just work wise, but emotionally for various reasons. The room was literally spinning and I felt like I was fighting a rapid current threatening to pull me under. I actually found myself lying on the couch at an odd angle and having lost five minutes at one point! Nonetheless, I persevered and wrote not just one, but the following two sentences just before the clock struck midnight: Eventually, it was purely by imposing on their friendship and Levi’s respect for him that...

Day 6 - New Beginnings

Today, Blogger won. After having no answers about what they were doing, if anything about those of us whose blogs were semi-deleted in the outage, getting only one note days ago saying "We are aware of the problem", I decided to attempt to re-register my original blogger account, unsure of how it would work out seeing as how the blog still existed in Blogger Dashboard. As it turns out, it worked fine on the registering. Except now I have two different blogs in my dashboard, the new and the original, with the same URL but different content, one existing one not. It's a rather confusing state to be in honestly. On top of that, they could suddenly roll back the old one on top of this. No idea, but I am forging ahead. It is a new beginning. They did this morning restore my second post. This is...

Day 5 - Blogger Service Hates Me, Plus Day 3-4 Summary

No one will initially see this or possibly other posts for a few days (or longer). After triumphantly posting two days in a row, I logged on a third day to do another post, which is a record for me! However, instead of being able to work on my blog, I was greeted with the following message: --------------------Blog not foundSorry, the blog you were looking for does not exist. However, the name matthewtandy is available to register! -------------------- Apparently, Blogger (a part of Google Services) went down sometime Thursday. They rolled everything back a couple of days, but a small percentage of people lost years of posts, and most lost their comments and post labels. An even smaller percentage, of which I magically am a part of, had their blog entirely removed... sort of. I...

Day 2 - Motivators and Writing Time

Note: This blog post was originally posted Thursday, May 12. See Day 5 to read about my travails with Blogger and their accidentally deleting my blog... Day 2 has come, and in an amazing, even historical moment, I am writing on a blog for a second day. But this blog is going to be one of my main motivators to greater writings and consistency, so I plan to keep up with it. There were two key motivators for me to become serious about my writing. The first is my father. About two years ago he started to become serious about his writing. Last year he became even more dedicated as he was officially retired. He had always spoken about writing and his love for it, a passion he passed on to me. He had even completed a manuscript in the mid 1990's for the LDS Fiction Market called "The Traitor's...

Day 1 - In the Beginning...

Note: This blog post was originally posted Wednesday, May 11. See Day 5 to read about my travails with Blogger and their accidentally deleting my blog... In the Beginning, there was Matt. And he beheld his years of unfinished writing projects, and... Okay, just kidding. This blog will be readable without *too much* eye rolling! For now, let's just outline the nature of the blog, a syllabus or mission statement if you will: 1) I have in the past four years begun four different large-scale writing projects for eventual publication. None have made it further than a few chapters or sections, let alone brought to the level of a completed first draft. I intend to change that, beginning today. 2) Today is the day I get serious about my writing. Will I become a successful, published,...