Reflections on the A-Z Challenge

I did the A-Z challenge on my personal blog this year. For those of you who don't know, the A-Z Challenge runs every April. Bloggers write a blog post for each letter of the alphabet, one a day except for Sundays. Then you hop from blog to blog, reading other blogger's entries. It is a lot of fun, and it has helped me form my own network of writers, and has even helped me make new friends. This year was no exception: I found several awesome blogs, and possibly formed one real friendship. I guess time will tell.  However, I quit after the letter T, which is why I am doing my reflection on the challenge early.

There were a huge number of participants this year--2034 remain on the linky list, though many of those didn't really participate. It was a bit cumbersome. But my problem had nothing to do with the Challenge itself. It was still incredibly awesome. The real problem was that I didn't have the time to make my posts as cute as I wanted them to be. However, I liked some of my posts, and this one was my favorite:

Writers are obsessive people. Steven Saylor said, "Writing a first novel takes so much effort with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labor of love bordering on madness." I would add that writing a second novel, with the full knowledge that writing the first one was even harder than you'd feared is probably a sign of a completely deranged mind. By the third novel though, I imagine most people are starting to feel more at home obsessing about their novel than not. 

I know I am. Yesterday I finished Ana's rough draft of Pyromancy...

(Long pause for applause. Oh, please, please...no standing Ovations. Not yet. Well. If you must...) This reminds me that O is also for Oreo milkshakes, which I promised myself once I finished. 

As I was saying, yesterday I finished Ana's part of Pyromancy--and I'll tell you, I spent the rest of the day having no idea what to think about. In the past few months I have begun dreaming Ana's dreams, thinking Ana's thoughts. Sometimes I even forget I could not run a marathon on a beach and then hurry off to my boxing class. (Snort.) It's obsession, pure and simple, and I don't know how to write a novel any other way. I wish I did. I'm a big believer in balance. But somehow balance and novel writing have never gone hand in hand in my life.

And I'm not alone. youknowyoureawriter.tumblr.com is a website devoted to this kind of obsession. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

You know you're a writer when...

• your mood depends on what's going on in your story.

• you forget your real life for your fictional world.

• you know your characters better than yourself.

• you sit down to write for half an hour and before you know it 5 hours have gone by.

• you shut down your computer and get into bed, only to think of something that you have to write down, so you get out of bed and start your computer up again.

Which reminds me of one of my own. You know you're a writer when...

• you're trying to write a grocery list, but every scrap of paper you can find is filled with random snippets of dialogue or beautifully worded phrases that make no sense at all out of context.

Reflections on the A-Z Challenge

Melanie's Thoughts

First of all, whoever noticed that April could be divided into 26 days if you skipped Sundays was a genius. I love perfect coincidences like that. 

Second, I found a few really good blogs that I look forward to following for a long time. Our blog got quite a few new followers, some of whom leave really lovely comments. That makes me happy.

But the list of participants was crazy-long, and despite my best efforts, I didn't get to many of them. In the beginning, I tried, going to as many as I could, but that was no fun. And then I started getting comments on my personal blog (I don't think it happened on this one...) that proved that people were reading the title of my post, not the actual post. That was disheartening. I didn't want to be one of those people, so I slowed down--only commenting on the posts that I really wanted to comment on. That was better, but less people came to see my blog, so it was a trade off. 

I loved the out-of-the-box thinking it required to come up with blog posts. Especially because I was only responsible for 4 letters, it stayed fun, and I really love the posts we came up with. I having those extra parameters set gave our writing some sparkle.

My favorite Proser posts:
MaryAnn: T is for Toothless
Susan: O is for Out of Print
Sheena: G is for Growth
Trisha: L is for Lois Lowry
Sabrina: P is for Present Tense
and Me: K is for Kissing

Trisha's Thoughts

This was one of the coolest things I've done this year.  It was so much fun to see all the ways people used the letters of the alphabet.  On one blog, each letter inspired a poem.  Another featured a new comic book every day.  There were so many different themes, and I got a kick out of each of them.

As a Proser, I feel like we got off a little easy.  We split our month into six contributors, so to all those that tackled the whole thing themselves, bravo.  I don't know how you did it, because I'm pretty sure I'd have given up before we hit C.  Congrats everyone!

The only thing I'd like to see next year is a list of blogs organized by category.  I tried to stay focused on blogs that featured writing as their main theme, but it was hard to dig them out from the endless list.  (That might not have been a bad thing, though, since I uncovered a lot of cool pages just randomly clicking links.)

It was a lot of fun participating this year. I'm really glad we decided to do it, and I hope we give it a shot again next year.

MaryAnn's Thoughts

I was going to comment, but I decided to add my thoughts to the post instead (I hope that is okay Melanie).

I really enjoyed this challenge.  It was fun being involved in the blogging community.  I didn't read as many blogs that I wanted to, but I did find some real gems out there.  My favorite blogs were those that had a theme.  I found myself going back to them everyday, curious about what they would do for the next letter.

A few of my favorites were:  

Multicolored Diary which did a princess theme.  I never knew how many different princess fairy tales there are.

My Baffling Brain which did a mythology theme.  Got to love Greek mythology and all that tragedy. 

Jay Noel's blog who did the 80's theme.  Who doesn't love the eighties?

And Strands of Pattern which gave reasons to love Fantasy and Sci fi.  Which of course, I do.  :)

And of course I loved all the posts by my fellow Prosers. There is no one else I'd rather blog with.  You ladies rock!

W Is For...Walking

Friedrich Nietzsche and I disagree on a lot of issues. However, as my friend Susan (not the Proser) says, that doesn't mean he was a complete waste of space. And he may have been a trifle hyperbolic, but I still agree with him when he said:

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

When I was in high school, walking is what my friend Kara and I did. We wandered through the neighborhoods, at a not particularly fast pace, chatting with people, and stopping wherever the action was, but still managing to log miles and miles most days.  

I walked quite a bit in college too. Who doesn't?

But it wasn't until I lived on a lonely rural road that I discovered the joy of solitary walking. I will go so far as to say that if I hadn't started walking by myself, I would never have become a writer.  I wandered up and down the corridors of my mind as my feet wandered up and down roads and deserted tracks. I discovered patterns, interesting twists and out of the box answers to problems in real life and in my novel. I talked to God, and felt him answer.

But somewhere along the line, something happened. My kids started growing up and getting busier. I started blogging. My desire to publish a book became more demanding. I started teaching preschool. We got Netflix Instant. I needed to lose weight, so I gave up walking in favor of more intense, less contemplative exercise (and, in an interesting twist, didn't lose any weight.)  We moved to a suburb. For a myriad of reasons, I stopped walking.

Getting back into it has been so hard. Not the actual walking. That's as easy as putting one foot in front of the other, but settling into that meditative state is hard. I find myself timing my walks, thinking about what else I could be doing. What happened to the woman who drove 3 hours to walk by herself on a gorgeous trail for 9 miles? That day, I was so deep in thoughts of a new novel that I couldn't believe it when I got to the trail's end. Only when I thought about it did I realize how jelly-like my legs were. 

Haruki Murakami said:

No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative...act.

I've been swimming twice a week all year long. Now that I can keep up the breaststroke for a long, long time, my mind is starting to roam as I swim. It's such a freeing feeling. (And suddenly, all my heroines can be found at their local pool.)  Doing something over and over and over again seems to be the key.

Other activities that have helped with my writing:

Washing dishes

Snowshoeing

Cross country skiing

Hiking

Kayaking

Cutting vegetables (lots and lots of vegetables)

How about you? What actions do you do often enough (and mindlessly enough) that they have become contemplative?

K Is For...Kissing

Any Proser worth their salt should have been able to guess what "K" word I would choose if given half a chance. I think I've made my opinion about kissing abundantly clear: it's a good thing, practically a necessity, and yet easily overdone.

By far, my favorite kind of kiss is the Kiss=Redemption kiss. This kiss is easily confused with the "I like bad boys" kiss, and yet they couldn't really be more different. For example, I'm as repulsed as a couple of jazzy songs and a carnival will let me be by the kiss (or its substitute) at the end of Grease.

But take Logan Echolls and Veronica Mars. At first, Logan's sole purpose in life seemed to be humiliating Veronica and forcing her into isolation and misery. I hated Logan. But there were glimmers of another side to Logan: a tortured, lonely soul hiding in there, somewhere. And then this:

There--do you see it? She is kissing the good part of Logan, not the bad, and he is shocked to feel that good part of himself reaching back to kiss her too. From that moment on, any writer with any brains at all would make sure that all he does for the rest of his life is to live worthy of this moment. Of course he'll do it clumsily, and of course he'll have moments where he's torn by two opposing forces, and hurts her. I'm not saying the writers at Veronica Mars nailed it. Eventually, I think they fail. But this kiss does change both Veronica and Logan forever. And that's my favorite kind.

How about you?