The Blog Hop – My Entry

The Writing Process Blog Hop

 

Writing? So you want to know about writing? My writing? Well, you have come to the right place!

Writing is an individual thing. Some people write for fun; others write for money; some get to do both.

Some people write the first thing that pops into their heads and it works. There are those who sweat over the small writing things.

I write for three writing prompts per week. One is 100 words (exactly if you can). One is 5 sentences (semi-colons are lovely parts of speech).

The third one is 150 words (+/- 10). All three of these exercises do not take me a long time; writing comes pretty natural for me.

Not so for others.

Regardless, a couple of weeks ago, Arianna from http://ariannasrandomthoughts.wordpress.com wrote to ask me to join her in a blog hop.

After reading her explanation and then reading her blog post that was for the blog hop, I understand it.

So, in the next section I will talk about Arianna. Then I will answer a set of questions about my writing.

Right now I am going to do what Arianna did: if you have not participated in the blog hop, I invite you now to do so.

Simply, write a brief introduction like the one above. Then talk about me for a paragraph or so as below. Then answer the questions and invite at least 3 people who haven’t been in on this one to become a part. You should ask them to respond if you only ask three. I decided to invite all of you because I would enjoy reading about your writing. Good luck! Have fun!

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Source: http://ariannasrandomthoughts.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/the-writing-process-blog-hop/

Arianna Merritt, M.Ed., is a Canadian Psychotherapist who has a strong desire to help people and to write. Her blog (above) takes a very positive position on empowering you to accomplish whatever you set as your goals in life. She is a wonderful person and I feel so lucky just to know her. That joy is accentuated by having received emails from her and being able to call her a friend. I have read her book “Stand Tall and Speak from the Heart” (http://ariannasrandomthoughts.wordpress.com/book/) and enjoyed it immensely. She is very full of good, common sense and a vast personal knowledge of overcoming problems and achieving your goals. Read her book, read her blog, get to know her. She is a wonderful, caring individual who I am so proud to know. I have decided that, should I ever visit Canada and am anywhere near where she is, I will try my darndest to visit her.

Read her answers to the questions here: http://ariannasrandomthoughts.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/the-writing-process-blog-hop/

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Q: What are you working on?

My life has been taking some turns lately and I find myself working on a lot of different things. My blog is still important to me; however, my writing has picked up. I just finished about 3 months of work on my longest short story “Keeping Watch” about Carolyn, a woman in her early 30s who is trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. It started out as a horror story and developed more into a character-based story of learning about Carolyn and how she struggles and how her mind changes and remains the same in this horrific environment. It is one of the first stories in which I have allowed the character to “write” the story. It is from her viewpoint and I really did not know how it was going to end until it did. I wrote from Carolyn’s perspective and put myself deeply into her character. I think it is my best work. I started out by writing it as bits and pieces to fit my blog prompts, then I would take a week’s worth of those and create a section of the story. Finally, I have put all those together and edited and modified them into a story of about 14,500 words.  The online part version can be found at: https://kindredspirit23.wordpress.com/carolyn-keeping-watch-an-apocalyptic-thriller-in-parts/ . The prompt sections are first. The weekly sections are at the bottom of the list. I have changed the story for its final state.

Q: How does your work differ from others of its genre?

            This story differs from others of its genre in that it gets so deeply involved in the main character’s life. All this action going on around her, so many catastrophic events, and yet, you are learning more about her than anything else. I believe that you become enough a part of her mind and thoughts that you start to feel as she does. I have read it multiple times and each time I find myself happy, sad, excited, depressed, based on how Carolyn was feeling or was going through the event.

 Q: Why do you write what you do?

            I have a deep feeling in my soul when I write something like this. There is a need to get it out, to show it to others, to find satisfaction in having someone tell me that what I wrote was good, that it accomplished what I set out for it to. It doesn’t matter if it’s a poem or a grand piece like “Keeping Watch”. All of my writing has a goal and I write to do those goals and to fill those needs. I believe this makes my writing come more from my heart and soul, so it is better. If you go to my other pages (listed to the left of this post) you can see the other types of writing I have done. I write short stories, longer stories, stories in sections, poems, haiku, and posts. I write on all types of topics. I enjoy many many things and enjoy writing about them. My biggest hope is simply that you will like what I have written and will let me know. I can handle criticism (constructive), so I am not looking for mere applause. I just have a need to try and write so that people will get lost for a bit and enjoy, whether it is being scared from horror, shocked from truth, or feeling great from a poem.

 Q: How does your writing process work?

          My process all depends on what I am writing. I have to be in a specific mood for a poem or haiku. I have to feel the emotions tied in with those for them to turn out any good. Short story writing stems from an idea, a very basic plot. “Keeping Watch”, for instance, stemmed from my desire to write something a bit different from the regular “zombie” story. While doing that, I got caught up in the emotions and the trying to show people how the main character felt, why she did what she did, what made it go from A to B to C and then, sometimes, to H before going back to D. I tend to think out of the box, so my ideas are often strange. If you were to read my story,”The Way It is” in the online magazine “Atomic Avarice” you would see a satirical work on what happens when there is a Union to spooks. The site closed down so the best way to read it would be in my soon-to-be-published book on Amazon. I will be putting together a collection of 10 short stories (loosely labeled horror) and will include “Keeping Watch” and “The Way It is”.

Check out this blog to keep informed.

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 Thanks to all for reading and make sure you seriously consider becoming a part of this blog hop and post next Monday.

Namaste,

Scott