Category: Mood

Make Nice With Your Muse

by Lindsey Loucks, posted in Critique Partners, First Drafts, Ideas, Mood, NaNoWriMo, Sequels, Story Ideas, The Grave Winner, What Gifts She Carried, Word Count, Writing
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

No no NaNoWriMo. I won’t participate in you this year or next year or never but I will cheer for participants from the sidelines.

 

Why? I’m a slow writer, like 1000 words in three hours slow. I try not to stress about making things look pretty in a first draft, but I do anyway. Plus, I have to stop and picture what’s happening in my head. It’s like watching a movie in painfully slow motion.

 

But I’m using NaNoWriMo as inspiration to learn how to not worry so much and speed up the pictures. I’m also using it to get inspired to write after I get home from school. I used to think a sleepy brain tells sleepy stories, but a sleepy brain is the norm now, and sleepy brains still have stories to tell.

 

The story I should be telling is the sequel to The Grave Winner, but it’s still coming together in my head. So my muse has hammered another story into my brain (ow!) while I let the sequel percolate. That’s the story I’m working on now, and I feel like I should make nice with my muse in case it flips me the bird and abandons me.

 

This new story has ghosts in space, in case you’re wondering. It also has some sexy times in it because it’s not YA. The title is A Boy and Her Scratch.

 

The sequel to The Grave Winner is coming, I promise! Please don’t hate me, Fabulous Editor Melissa and my Must Have Critique Partners and my Totally Tubular beta reader and everyone else who has made it this far through my ramblings!

 

Anyone else have a muse? Anyone else pet it and feed it cookies so it won’t flip you the bird?

 

P.S. I voted today!

Setting the Mood With Weather

by Lindsey Loucks, posted in Mood, Writing

The weather in Kansas can change dramatically in ten minutes. I timed it once. My moods reflect the weather, which means I have bipolar disorder. Not really, I’m just making a point.

I was thinking about the weather in my current work in progress the other day. The story takes place in Kansas. It’s spring time (almost in real life too. Yay!), which means the weather is even stranger than normal. Since I’m the author, aka Mother Nature, I can call up a hurricane to blow through Krapper, Kansas if I wanted to. But a hurricane doesn’t fit the story. And no, a tornado doesn’t either. My characters already have too much to worry about. But weather can really add to the mood of the story. During a particular dramatic moment, it’s pouring rain, flashes of lightning are parting the sky, and thunder is shaking the ground. To switch it up a bit, I have another panicked moment later in the story where the sun is too bright, the air is too still, and my main character sees death surrounding her.

Weather sets a certain mood. If you’re going for intensity and creepy, rain could work in the scene. If you want contrast, scary events on a perfect day could work too. Look out the window of your imagination and see what it’s doing outside.

So what’s your weather like, real or imagined?