Kimberly's Write Life

The easy answer is that I can't NOT write. I blame it on my parents.  For as long as I can remember regular trips to the library were a part of our routine as a family.  My parents were always reading; reading on their own, reading with us as a family or reading one on one with each of us.  Books were everywhere in our house.  Sitting around the table after dinner as a family my father reading to us The Holy War and Treasures In the Snow , none of us balking at the time without the TV, are two specific times I still vividly remember. But not everyone who reads a lot becomes an author.  True.  I think the next step was my mother taking us to McDonald's or later to mall food courts and watching the people there.  She would tell us what she imagined each person's story was.  Later she invited us to do the same. My father was a published author.  They were small pieces in Sunday School magazines, but he was paid for his work and maybe because of the smallness of his effo

I remember reading once that most of Stephen King's ideas for his stories came from his dreams.  My first thought was, if I had his dreams I would never want to sleep.  That got me wondering where other authors came up with their ideas for their stories.  And if I wondered that about other authors, some day someone might want to know the same about me. So I'll tell you. With The Day the Ivy Fell, it began with the title.  I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I was talking with my sister (she's been the catalyst for several of my stories).  Somehow the words the day the ivy fell came up and I built the story around that. Secondhand Keys was nearly identical.  We were sitting at Culver's for our Sunday lunch with our father and again Karen was talking about secondhand keys.  While she was talking about keys that open doors, the first image that came to my head was a used piano, and a door was opened to a new story built around the concept of a beautiful

As I mentioned in my last post, most of my preliminary work is done while lying in bed at night.  This can be a blessing and a curse. On the blessing side it usually helps me get to sleep relatively easily. On the curse side, there are a couple.  One; I often 'write' the same passage over and over again because I don't remember exactly where I was when I fell asleep.  This does help me work out kinks.  Two; some nights I get going on the story and can't stop, therefore making it difficult to get to sleep.  However, this helps me know that I'm on the right track. While this is preliminary work, it is essential.  To me, this is the building of the framework, creating a fleshed out outline. What may be surprising is that I am able to keep it all in my head, despite the forgetting exactly where I left off the night before, so that when I actually sit down at the computer, it flows relatively quickly. The other aspect is that I don't get bogged down by wri

Up to this point my write life, for the most part, has consisted of laying in bed waiting to fall asleep telling myself stories in my head.  I have many stories percolating in my brain right now, some of them "finished" and just waiting to be put down on paper, well typed into a computer anyway. Most of them are only partially written and will probably never be finished because they just aren't any good.  That's where I begin. My first real story started over 30 years ago when I had a job that had some down time, so I used that time to begin to get it out of my head and into the computer.  My problem was that I would work on it sporadically, so I would have to go back and reread what I'd written to know where I was.  I would end up "editing" it and never getting any further.  That happened over the next twenty years.  I was stuck. Eight years ago my dear friend Carol Becwar told me about NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - a motivational webs

March 13th, 2019 - I begin my public footprints in the writing life, sort of.  I've been on Facebook for years, but only have 56 followers there, and I haven't posted a lot there except during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which is in November every year.  I've done that for 7 of the last 8 years. I hope, as I walk through this journey of hobby novelist to professional published writer and eventually to successful known author, I will bring you along to enjoy my successes, learn from my failures, and maybe even root me on in my slumps. So I start by crawling into the blogisphere.