http://shadowhunters.wikia.com/wiki/Runes

This is an awesome book and you’ll not regret reading every single word.

I did it! I finished another manuscript, all the 75k words of it. The adrenaline and rush of finishing a new dtraft making me feel in heaven!

A heaven were he's celebrating with me, see how happy he is:






See you soon!


PS: Stacey I had to post Ian Somerhalder today. I know you understand ;)

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things about all others:  read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. ~Stephen King

Photo Credit: Dia™ via Compfight cc A few days ago I was watching a program about sewing your own clothes. Up until that moment I always thought it was easy. Why? I don’t know. My mom almost never sews and I don’t know how to do it but I had always thought that it was an easy task to learn. HA! As I saw it if I depended of sewing my clothes I’ll be naked till the end of time. So this made me think how we usually tag things we never did as easy or simple until we face the day of actually doing them. One example is cooking. When you’re a child you see your mom cook and you think that really looks easy. I could cook anything I want if only they would let me. But the day comes when your mom is not home, you’re old enough and hungry and you can’t even boil an egg. It proves to be harder than you thought. Don’t make me start with ironing too. You think it’s so easy and relaxing and it’s the road to hell. Yes, I hate ironing and take me ages so my opinion is biased.

I know I have set lots of goals before and also I know I tend to set too high goals for me to achieve. What can I do, I’m a dreamer.
Goals are good for getting your purpose on doing something and not falter (even when I do it often) because you want to achieve it and will stick to it.
The problem is when there is no punishment or reward at the end of it, then you may think that it doesn’t matter that you can get a longer deadline. Now my Bestie Stacey and I have this goal/punishment/reward monthly. We set our goals and share it with the other and we have to stick to it.
When you have a friend at the other side also wanting to achieve her goals it’s easier to work harder. Also if what you put on the other side is a punishment that will be hard and a reward you really want to have. For us a day of only reading and not working on anything else, a great reward.
My goals for this month were:
· Read four books (only read 1)
· Catch up in my critiques (this I did)
· Finish drafting my contemporary novel and be halfway revising ( I think I’ll finish drafting on Friday L)
· Revise the first chapters of my previous WIP according with some feedback ( I haven’t got to it)
I have to say that it was a busy month; I’m taking a deep editing course that has lots to learn and work on. But these are the goals I set and I have to face the consequences. I have to go through my punishment of being a good girl and figure what to blog about every day of this week.
I hope this time I set more realistic goals for myself.
I’d love to know about your goals!

Since the kids went back to school I set a deadline for me to end this rewrite of my current MS, the end of September or the beginning o October.

But that wasn't very good of me. I set a goal that will put a lot of pressure on myself because I haven’t thought about all the things that come with the beginning of a new school year. All the lists of things the teacher’s want you to make or send and also to make Carlos (my ADHD son) go back to the school routine. I thought this wasn’t going to be hard for him since he was doing so well by the end of the last school year. But vacations altered everything and now is very hard to go back. It’s hard for him to pay attention and to copy what the teacher writes in the board, he is getting very distracted with everything and he doesn’t wants to do homework. So you can imagine how frustrated he is when he has to work all weekend in all the notebooks he got behind.

So it’s been a lot of hours focused on that, on school meetings, doctor appointments, etc. It just isn’t real anymore to set that goal because that wouldn’t let me breathe. For sure I want to end soon but I need to slow down a bit. Also I only have a few chapters of comments from my critique friends ( no pressure on you girls ).

So I think I should focus on a few chapter at a time, for example I would like to finish the chapters I have all comments of ( the first four) this week. That way I will do everything I can to make them perfect without pressure, if I went for the end of the month goal I’d need to do many more chapters.

Realistic goals are so hard to set, we always want to achieve everything soon. At least that’s my case.

How do you settle realistic goals?

Have a good day!

It is published in the Forbes.com webpage and it’s very interesting.

 

The title: “ Drowning In Indie Books - And That's A Good Thing”

Only a little extract of it:

“Since then I read more ebooks than physical books. I buy a lot more books, too. Last year I noticed that books were getting cheaper, but the writing was getting worse. It started to get harder and harder to shop the Kindle store because I was either upset by the price of a book or the quality of its writing. Accidentally, I had stumbled upon the new face of self-publishing.

My experience reflects a profound and wrenching transformation of publishing that is shaking the industry to its roots. The beneficiaries of the existing order – major publishers and their most successful authors have become the most visible opponents of the turmoil that these “Indie” authors have introduced.”

I’m still undecided of what is better or if both are better, but this article really made me think.

I highly encourage to read the rest here

 

What do you think?

Hello, everyone. I missed you all!

It has been a long and summer. But the vacations are over and kids are back in school and mommy has to work full schedule of writing again.

I spent the whole summer with the kids playing and going around. Also we had for 20 days the visit from my husband’s best friend and his family so we toured all the city.

Oh and I decided since kids didn’t wanted me to be closed in my study writing that I’ll take advantage of that and tidy up all the house so I wouldn’t feel bad if I neglected it more once they got back to school. Everything is organized, every single space, drawer, closet, etc. I got the chance to give up to Church eleven bags of things almost new that we were not using and I feel great about it.

Oh! I’m planning to make some post about what I saw this time in my tours around the city. We went with a friend that is an archeologist and explained us a lot of things we didn’t knew and also showed us places we never visited.

This is just an example:

This is the Sun pyramid in Teotihuacan. I went all the way up, but I’ll tell you that story in  the post about it!

Now I’m going to delve deep in revisions. I really want to end this revisions by the end or September or if my head doesn’t help by the middle of October. So back to work I go!

How was your summer?

Have a great day!

Well, or at least for a few days. Now it’s on the hands of a great friend that will give me her opinion and in June another great friend will read it. I have amazing friends.

I still can’t believe that I translated this whole novel by myself and that I revised it 10 times. It’s been forever!

I want to thank all of you who encouraged me to do this by myself, to try and cheered me up all the way. Even if this novel never gets an agent or gets published I will be proud because it was my first in English.

Really I can’t thank you enough!

Now it comes time to plan and think, the YA market is very competitive and I already wrote a paranormal romance that has very few chances to get picked since there’s a lot out there. Summer is coming with kids at home for a month and a half so I want to outline three novels so I can draft them during he school year. I’m thinking about two contemporary and one sci-fi,fantasy, romance novel (if that genre even exists).

For one of them I have to research a lot about medical care in the US because I know nothing but I think all this time will help.

Also I plan to memorize the elements of style in the summer and read whatever good book about writing I kind find. I’m open to suggestions…

Glowing shadow will not go to submissions until my friends read it and I revise it again, then I will make a tea and wait.

For now I will take the morning off and go shopping!

 

Again thank you to all of you!

I lately have been thinking about characters and places of origin. You see, my husband for example says I have special ways of thinking and responses that every Galician(from Galicia, Spain) has,  for example when you give me something or ask for something I usually say why, I always say No before thinking. That comes to me not because I was born in Galicia but because every single drop of my blood comes from there.

I also believe that you think and make some things because we learn them in the place we grow up. The way of thinking, the way of doing things, the way of speaking and eating.

All of this made me thought about characters and if in books we show all these things that influence the way a character is, usually characters in books are some way because of actions of the family, because a futuristic world, because of their actions, etc

Do characters will be more real or are more real when we consider not only the psychological aspects , but also genetics and places where they grew up?

Have you read a character that showed all these things?

I think that exploring characters that way will be interesting.

Have a great Monday!!

These last days, I didn't post anything and only comment on your posts because I have been a little down. We have been sick for almost 3 weeks, of cold, of stomach and now again we have a cold. Grrr I hate to be sick.

But I managed to do my assingnments and finally I'm up to date in my writing class. Although I'm still fighting with the query letter! I outlined the first changes I'm going to do to Glowing Shadow and finally I can continue translating.

This weekend was my son Carlos birthday. I don't know when the time passed away but now he is six and I wonder were is my first little baby! Anyway we spend a great day , we brought Mc Donald's ( his favorite food) the grandpas and his godmother came to have lunch and we all played with him kinect and wii! He was very happy!

Here is a photo of me with my two babies, as you can se we had chocolate cake Yommi! Please don't see the black circles under my eyes (I used corrector if not believe I'm a raccoon)



I love Mafalda I know it is in Spanish but I found this one with translation and thought that it was perfect for what we are living all around the world.

#???, Mafalda 10 (1974)

Man: "Changing the world! Ha! Kids' stuff!" Man: "I, too, had such ideas when I was young, and now you see..." Mafalda: "We're doomed, guys! It turns out, if we don't hurry up and change the world, the world changes us!"

As Mafalda says we can only hope to change the world before it change us.

Have a wonderful day!

1. I have been working hard this week. I'm still working in my query letter for my class. Right now we are doing different types of them.

2. Also I realized that I will have to change some big things on the plot of GS. I'm working again in the outline so I can see where to apply the changes. I'm making it in english and spanish.

3.Also I'm working in the three dimensions of my characters to have a better perspective of them.

4.I finally have done some translation as you can see in the bar on the left, although I haven't revised that part. I will do it next.

5.Well those are all the updates from  my writing. How are you doing?

Have a wonderful weekend!

And I don't like it! For the last two years I had this little baby by my side everywhere I went. Now I am alone and I miss him terribly

Let me explain to you. Alex today started day care. He is going there 3 hours a day. I didn't want to but my husband talk to me about he was going to start the official preschool next autumn and that he was going to be there almost six hours, that he needed to have a little time away from me, be with other children ( beside his brother) and be independent. I know he is right and I could certainly use the time to write. But I don't work and I could take care of him (that's what my guilty mind says).

Uff I hope with the days he likes the day care and I feel a little less guilty, although I know we both will be more happy having time apart. He doesn't sleep very well so we were together 24 hours a day.

Talking about other things i had to change the name of my book, between light and shadow existed already for many books, so I choose glowing shadow. I thought the meaning of glowing was perfect for this story and no one has used it.

Well, since I am very nervous looking to the clock for the time I have to go to pick him up I know I wont be able to revise or translate so I am going to order my office. Right now the papers, bills, etc are everywhere and I feel like even my ideas can't flow with such a mess.

Have a beautiful day!

I was considering whether to upload this post or not. But then I thought you would understand me better than anyone. You are also writers.

I'm in the process of translating my book while I'm revising. I know what are the things I have to change, the things I should avoid, but I am not able to do it.

It's so hard to accept that you know what you have to do but can’t do it! Sometimes I can’t find a stronger verb to replace an adverb. It sometimes seems impossible to me to know if I am showing or telling, I know the things that identify it but it is difficult to know when it’s appropriate to use each one of them. I know all writers battle with this.

There is also the dialogue, I know I should not explain much in dialogue but what if the narrator is a person who thinks and analyzes everything? I don’t want to bore the reader but my narrator is a person who feels what other people feel, so she constantly perceives things in the midst of situations and conversations, and she gets conclusions in the middle of them about what is happening. I avoid her to think or talk to herself through the dialogues?

Surely at some point I'll find the solution and is only a process but now I feel useless as a writer. I know that most likely this is also a problem of English not being my native language and it’s harder for me to find new words. That I must continue trying and that eventually it will be easier but right now I’m in a hole.

Really it has been a very difficult day with my writing, so much so that my SIL called from Spain and as soon as she heard me she knew I was depressed. She argued with me for half an hour for not having the Messenger of AOL which is what connects to the internal messengers of many companies and that way I could have talked to her about it when it was happening. Yes, i am a stubborn I have MSN, yahoo and Skype so I could have AIM. So I’m installing it also, another messenger to the pile ( is what you need when everybody is far away) I would love to talk more with my SIL and my phone service only gives free calls to Mexico, United States and Canada, so this is the solution.

Well finally talking about what matters I'm depressed and I do not know what to do with it but deep down I know I'll go out of this hole, that this is something I must do if I want to write in English. Probably tomorrow I will get up with a better attitude.

For now I feel relieved to have taken it out of me, to express what I really feel. I told my SIL, but she doesn’t understand because she isn’t a writer, so sometimes I can imagine her face of: are you really depressed about that?

I hope you understand me and not get bored with this post; I assure you that tomorrow I will return again to be me...

This weekend I was making a summary of all the tips Tracy gave me and all the ones I have read on internet for revisions. I thought I should share it here so anyone can print as I will do and have it near.

Also please if you know or think of another thing important when revising please comment and I will go adding to this post.

Things to look for or change when revising:

1. Show, don’t tell:

“Show, Don't Tell invites understanding; I cannot find a better way to say this”

“If you are as captivated by what you read the tenth time you read it as you were the first time, then the author has succeeded in Show, Don't Tell”.

“When "showing" would prove to be more information than anyone wants or needs, then telling is perfectly acceptable. A good rule to keep in mind is that if it isn't important to the story, it's okay to keep it to the realm of telling”.

"In the case of "acceptable tell" always keep in mind that IF you can change it without it becoming more than you want it to be, do so. This leaves room for those necessary tells. Too much tell, even if it seems acceptable, drags a story down."

            “In resume if you want to build a character, shape a mood, you must show. But I you want to move the story maybe tell is correct. I guess it is the balance of them what makes the prefect story.”

-          The words: I heard, I saw, I felt, I was, usually are signs of telling.

 

2. Try as must as you can to substitute adverbs for strong verbs.

3. Avoid using as much as possible “which” “who” and “ that”.

4. Describe, you want the reader to experience the story.

5. Always check grammar.

6. Very and so are filler words. Find other words.

7. If there’s no dialogue in a while we must evaluate our technique.

8. Characters have to be in movement, living, making things.

9. Little or no ambiance and presence. If we gloss over important events, giving the rundown on who said what, when, where and how, and then slip out of the event without so much as a drink, it may be time to ponder. Why did we feel the need to include this important event in the first place?

10. Give the reader a reason to care for the character

11. Use dialogue effectively. Let the character speak, make the reader eavesdrop the conversation, not only hear it from you.

12. Use gestures and movements. . Act out the scene, if necessary to capture details.

13. Make every word count. Make every word mean something, be important for the history.

 

**One of the Links were I found this, I don’t remember the other ones ( I had the tips in post its all around my desk) And   of course. I added the great advice of    also

1. Yesterday my best friend and auntie by heart of my sons went to Carlos school to pick him up, because we can't. She does that many times but yesterday Carlos started to shout and cry in the middle of the school that he will not go with her. He shouted so much that the director nun came to see what happened and calmed him down. When they arrived home my best friend was crying, I felt so bad. She truly loves my sons, shes been there since minute one. I know how much it hurts when carlos does that because he makes it a lot with me, he always wants his dad. Anyway we had to punish him and make him talked with her. Now they are ok.

2. I got  a flu. I hate flu! My nose is red as rudolph , I can't speak ( well my husband will be happy for that) and I feel like crap. The worst is that the kids also have it.

3. I finished the translation of the first chapter of BTLAS and I hope to end this revision ( i know there will be many others) today or tomorrow. So I'm moving forward.

4. I hope this weekend I can sleep a lot!!

5. I am trying a new recipe for " tarta de santiago" is a very popular cake that is done in Galicia , Spain. And its made with almonds , sugar , etc. My father loves it so I'm trying recipes for this christmas dinner make it for him. When I get a good one I will post it here.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!